Colin Irwin
Mojo scribe. Mercury Prize judge. All-round good bloke.
Fairytale of West Cork
Let me tell you about my day.
See, I’m staying in West Cork, which even the rest of Ireland regards as an unfathomable alien territory. Beautiful but ever so slightly unhinged.
Tom Rush: "Moi, je ne regrette rien"
Today I phoned Tom Rush, the veteran folk and blues singer who wrote No Regrets (the one Edith Piaf didn’t sing) which was a hit for the Walker Brothers, has been covered by U2 and – Tom tells me later – put his kids through college. It was for an interview to run in Mojo, but we had to whisper because Tom was holidaying in Cape Cod and was under strict orders from his wife not to conduct any business while they were away and had to get up at the crack of dawn and hide out on the fire escape to take my call. Something like that anyway.
So while I gazed out at the Fastnet Lighthouse. Tom Rush was perched somewhere in Cape Cod sharing anecdotes about his upbringing in New Hampshire, his love of early rock’n’rollers like Chuck Berry and The Coasters and his Road To Damascus conversion to folk and blues courtesy of Josh White. He went to see White in a club and was enthralled when, halfway through Summertime, the great man broke a guitar string, Totally unfazed, he carried on singing, calmly replacing the string and re-tuning it just in time to play the final chorus of Summertime. So impressed was Tom that he booked to see White for the next two nights. Chance would have it, that on both occasions at the very same point in Summertime, the exact same string accidentally broke, only for Josh to continue unfalteringly and have a new string in good working order to rejoin the song by the last chorus inspiring a standing ovation on each occasion. “The man had class,” said Tom Rush, taking cover as his wife awoke to wonder who he was talking to.
Shane's world
I later decided to celebrate the baffling genius of modern technology that allowed this story to be related from one remote coastal outpost to another with a visit to O’Sullivan’s bar for a pint of Murphys (you risk life and limb in Cork if you dare ask for a pint of Gui***ss – I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it). An elderly guitarist chappie who seemed to think he was Jack White was inside decimating Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton songs but no sooner had the second pint miraculously appeared with my name on it when the guy sang…yep…Summertime. But the fish weren’t jumping and it wasn’t going well. “Break a string, break a string” I hissed at him, but people started glaring in an intimidating West Cork fashion and I left in a hurry to catch some late night Irish telly.
The title credits for a programme called “Shane and Victoria Grow Their Own” appeared and there, cackling on the screen, was HRH Shane MacGowan and his long-term partner Victoria surrounded by vegetables. I fell off my chair several times as the programme developed – cameras following the happy couple around for weeks on end as they attempted to become self-sufficient and live off the land. Not easy when you live in Dublin with a concrete garden.
The show features some soaked old vegetables, and Shane MacGowan
Christ that Murphy’s is good stuff, I thought, as I watched Shane – who was brought up on a farm in Tipperary – rubbishing Victoria’s inept attempts at filling an allotment with lettuce, turnips, radishes, carrots and potatoes, mention of which triggered Shane into an entertaining, if largely incomprehensible history of the Irish famine. With Victoria sprinkling ash around her veg in a vain attempt to frighten off hungry slugs and Shane wisely abandoning the project to go off on tour with The Pogues, Victoria’s only consolation was that Frames singer (and star of the movie Once) Glen Hansard’s vegetable patch in the next allotment was in an even sorrier state.
But the finest moment came as Victoria deposited a sadly undernourished tomato in a pot outside the MacGowan back door and instructed Shane to sing to it to make it grow. Shane grinned lopsidedly, hissed a bit, grabbed a guitar which he started thrashing mercilessly and started howling in a horrendous fashion that bore no relation to any known piece of music, including Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Motorhead and the Nipple Erectors. The tomato committed suicide instantly.
God, I love West Cork.
posted 29 August, 2010
previous posts
A legend returns
So there I was in the Devon seaside town of Sidmouth, passing the time of day with a genial silver-haired man who was leaning on a cane watching the queue in front of us with amusement. “Who do they think they’ve come to see? Radiohead?” he said, his eyes twinkling.
Did someone say ‘icon’? Nic cheerfully dismisses the ‘hero’ tag
In fact they’d come to see a tribute concert by a bunch of mainly young folkies performing the greatest hits of one Nic Jones, sorry the GREAT Nic Jones, one of Brit folk’s most influential figures whose career was ended by a terrible car crash in 1982. Nic Jones – master joker, expert chess player, Bob Marley fan, innovative guitarist, creator of the seminal Penguin Eggs album and a hero to a new generation – stood there cracking jokes, though few in the fast-swelling queue around Sidmouth’s Ham Marquee recognized him.
Once inside the Ham, MC Derek Schofield’s voice choked with emotion as he introduced Nic Jones and on came the genial, silver-haired man with the cane, still grinning, milking the reverential standing reception. Other folk luminaries, Martin Simpson, Chris Wood, Jim Moray and Jon Boden among them, joined him on stage, where he remained, beaming throughout as they played a selection of his greatest hits. And then, the tears flowed, as Jones got up to sing on stage for the first time in 28 years with Pete and Chris Coe, Jon Loomes and Paul Sartin in a recreation of his 1970s band Bandoggs, a short set that included a joyous version of Loudon Wainwright’s Swimming Song. It was something of a bonus that they sounded great too and the powerful harmonies we could clearly hear from Jones as the mic was surreptitiously moved directly in front of him when we hit the ensemble finale even raised suggestions that he may yet be persuaded back into the studio to record something anew.
Harry and Bob
Tribute concerts of this type are usually reserved for the dead, so this was a particularly gratifying as well as deeply moving occasion. Always effusively self-denigrating, Nic’s few interviews since his enforced retirement after the accident have largely involved trashing his own back catalogue – including the fabled Penguin Eggs – and effusively entertaining his interrogators with interesting theories about atoms, the after-life, his dog Harry, Bob Marley and Radiohead. Yes, he’d patiently tell them, he still played guitar in the privacy of his own home but could never hope to recreate his former self due to the restrictive injuries on one side of his body. He was usually quite happy, though, to launch into a chorus of something by Buddy Holly, Elton John or Bob Marley and on occasion would even offer a taster of his new songwriting techniques.
He never played or sang a note in public in the intervening years after the accident and made only fleeting public appearances, with the predictable emotional response. I was at Sidmouth Festival one year listening to a Shirley Collins lecture about her collecting travels in the southern states of America with Alan Lomax when a familiar face suddenly put his head through the window to say hello. Shirley Collins saw Nic at the window, whooped and flung her notes in the air in her rush to hug him, her talk abruptly at an end. And again at Sidmouth a few years later, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when he appeared on stage to lend moral support to another of the folk revival’s wounded soldiers, his former Bandoggs colleague, Tony Rose. Nic was also greeted with a tumultuous reception when presented with a Good Tradition gong at the 2007 BBC Folk Awards. And all the while, the reputation of Penguin Eggs grew as a new generation became inspired by Nic’s trailblazing technique, which essentially attached a rock attitude to solo voice, guitar and traditional song.
Jones at the height of his powers was a force to be reckoned with
That’s why they all fell over themselves to offer their services to the Nic Jones tribute. And that’s why the silver-haired gent with the cane spotted Jim Moray wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and bounded up to him to sing No Woman No Cry to him. And it’s why we blubbed like babies when he arrived on stage at Sidmouth’s Ham Marquee.
It’s also why every home should have a copy of Penguin Eggs (or indeed the In Search of Nic Jones or Unearthed) collections his wife Julia assembled post-crash. In fact you should invest in the magnificent deluxe vinyl version of Penguin Eggs – including a brand new interview and up-to-date photographs of the man himself - released only last year by those splendid people at Three Black Feathers, which you can purchase not a million miles from this site.
Go on, that’s an order.
Editor’s footnote: Colin’s plug is both shameless and apposite: if you want to treat yourself to one audiophile gem this year, make it our very own pressing of Penguin Eggs – available at a special price to Classic LPs customers for a limited period
posted 13 August, 2010
Giggling the blues away
Hi, Carsick Colin here.
See, I’ve just been on stage at the Cambridge Folk Festival. And not just sweeping the floor before the acts either, oh no!
"I never worked with no Son House"... Steve tells it like it is
Every year, Mojo magazine gets one of its writers to conduct an on-stage interview with one of the festival’s leading acts and this year I was the appointed soldier. My prey? That lovable blues scampster Seasick Steve.
Now, I’ve been spat out by Peter Tosh, ridiculed by Country Joe McDonald and 10cc and sworn at by Sir Paul McCartney, but the prospect of my interview technique (mainly amounting to an uneasy mix of hysterical giggles, embarrassed coughing and intense pregnant pauses) being examined by a marquee full of boozed-up festival frolickers was a daunting one.
The anticipation didn’t get any more enticing when Seasick Steve duly arrived backstage at the appointed hour wielding a bottle of vino, guffawing loudly. We shook hands warmly and I asked if there was anything he’d prefer NOT to talk about. “Weeeelll,” he said endearingly, “I’m pretty sick of talking about the past. I’m kinda all talked out about that."
I looked at my meticulously prepared crib sheet, noted that a good 90% of the planned questions dealt with his early days and ceremonially tore it up.
The audience watched quizzically as I finally found the courage to crawl on and face them. I stared at them. They glared back, silently urging me to get on with it. Then rapturous applause as I introduced Steve, still clutching his bottle of wine, and I started to detail his achievements. “This is a man,” I said with the confidence of someone armed with a belly full of detailed research on his subject (and not just Wikipedia either). “This is a man who has worked with some of the blues greats… like Freddie King and Son House.” I heard a snort from the side of me. “I never worked with no Son House..."
Minor player
I coughed a bit, introduced my hysterical giggle ploy and tried to divert him by mentioning that the last time I’d seen him at London’s Royal Festival Hall he’d spent the first 20 minutes buried among the audience shaking hands, and I was quite relieved that he hadn’t done the same thing here. In one bound he was off the stage, shaking hands with the entire audience.
Steve - the only Top Gear guest to make Clarkson look sartorially elegant
He was grinning from ear to ear by the time he returned. “You gotta be careful what you say,” he said and we both laughed and – I like to think – bonded a bit. He was then off on anecdote mode and I sat back to enjoy the show with everyone else. There was the story of him earning £16.70p busking on the street immediately before the Brit Awards and then being thrown off the red carpet by security in the belief he was just an old wino. The tale of missing dinner at the Mojo Awards where he received a gong for Best Breakthrough Act (at the age of 66!) but drank copious amounts of the free booze helpfully supplied at the table, making his procession to the stage and subsequent acceptance speech somewhat tortuous. How he acquired his beaten-up three-string guitar and his appearance on Top Gear which resulted in a new instrument built out of the hub caps of a Morris Minor (leading Jeremy Clarkson to comment it was the best use of a Morris Minor he’d ever seen). His friendships with Janis Joplin in San Francisco and his time in Seattle with Kurt Cobain at the birth of grunge.
Emboldened, I mentioned a quote I’d read attributed to him along the lines that the blues had been destroyed by too many white musicians. “I said that? Hell, I talk a lot of shit..."
Suddenly there was a barrage of questions from the floor, batted vigorously away with a series of smart one-liners and even smarter 158-liners by Steve, now in full flow. A motley bunch at the front threatened to hijack the whole event, engaging him in debate about the pleasures of busking and announced themselves as Street Voices, formed out of the homeless community to play on the street.
And after it was all over and Seasick Steve had officially become my best mate, I went to find him thinking we could, you know, hang out and do best mate things before he made his appearance on the main stage. I located him, sat among the aforementioned Street Voices group, playing Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee songs.
The man is a star.
posted 04 August, 2010
Tell Laura I love her
You always know summer’s nearly over when Big Brother gets really boring and the Mercury Music Prize shortlist is announced.
Music journalists have, of course, all signed a solemn oath to savage the Mercury list and declare the judges to be out-of-touch imbeciles devoid of taste, knowledge or understanding. They didn’t ask me to be on the Mercury selection panel this year, the misguided pultroons, so I have full licence to join the ritual kicking of the choices.
Just one small problemette here, though… it looks like a pretty good list. I mean, I’d love to be charging in here demanding the whereabouts of MIA, Big Pink, These New Puritans, The Fall, Marina & the Diamonds, Trembling Bells, Giggs, The Wurzels or Stanley Accrington & the Third Division North, but it’s a solid selection.
Marling is Irwin's preferred artiste, but The xx are a shoo-in
I mean, The xx will win the thing – OBVIOUSLY – but there’s plenty to love, admire and explore on the rest of the list. My choice would be Laura Marling, who might have won it in 2008 with the breathtakingly good Alas, I Cannot Swim – an album I still play constantly – while I Speak Because I Can is equally wonderful and underlines her emergence as the best British songwriter for oodles of years. Saw her at London Palladium a few weeks ago and she’s nailed the live thing too.
Not quite so wild about her boyfriend’s band, Mumford & Sons – Coldplay with banjos (and would have much preferred her EX-boyfriend in Noah & the Whales – but the proliferation of music with its roots showing is an encouraging sign. It’s good to see the old boy Paul Weller on the list in the national institution slot with Wake Up The Nation, Villagers’ Becoming A Jackal is a proper album of depth and Radiohead intensity and Wild Beasts’ Two Dancers has an edgy richness that is far more deserving of our attention than the usual queue of derivative guitar bands who normally populate the list. I’ll even stand up and applaud Corinne Bailey Rae, Biffy Clyro, Kit Downes Trio and yes, Dizzee Rascal too, even if he ought to be strung up for that awful World Cup thing with James Corden.
Woman wrestling
Like I say, The xx will win. In my 150 years service on the Mercury panel, there were three albums that thumped me in the doggie bits and shrieked “Winner! Winner!” the first time I played them. One was Dizzee Rascal’s still astonishing Boy In Da Corner in 2003, the second was Antony & The Johnsons’ equally durable I Am A Bird Now in 2005 and the third was Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which announced the arrival of the all-conquering Arctic Monkeys in 2006. They were all obvious runaway winners though, several glasses of red wine into the final discussions in 2005, I had to shriek like a baby and arm-wrestle with some woman from The Independent before Antony & the Johnsons got a narrow verdict over Hard-Fi. I mean, HARD-FI!! I wouldn’t have argued so much had my opponents been fighting for the other band in the frame, the Kaiser Chiefs, but not bloody Hard-Fi.
The xx: Anyone know the way to sixth form common room?
In 2006 we all sat down at the final judging meeting (and yes, it really IS decided on the night of the awards – with lots of dramatic last minute voting to get a verdict in time for the scheduled television coverage) and prepared for the long haul. Lauren Laverne looked round at the furrowed brows as we psyched ourselves for a long, hard night of heated debate and said: “Look, we all know Arctic Monkeys have made the best album, let’s save ourselves a lot of time and give it to them now.” And she was right. Everybody around the table had already decided in their own minds that Arctic Monkeys must win and we spent the next couple of hours gossiping about pop stars behaving badly. Well, everyone except the woman I’d argued with the year before about Hard-Fi who droned on and on about Muse.
Lauren’s not on the panel this time but the principle is the same. Someone will just say: “Look, there’s no point in faffing around, The xx is the winner…all agreed?” And they’ll all agree.
Unless... I can somehow break into the inner sanctum of the Grosvenor House Hotel slip and arm-wrestle the case for Laura Marling...
posted 21 July, 2010
It's not unusual (to be such a dickhead)
Don’t you love record company executives? (just in case you were wondering the answer I’m looking for here is “No sir, they are all ludicrous buffoons and tosspots of the first order without an artistic brain cell or an ounce of vision among them…”) And that’s just Simon Cowell.
I refer you to the case of Island Records’ vice president David Sharpe. “I wanted a Mercedes and I ended up with a hearse” was his withering assessment of his new signing, the venerable Sir Tom Jones’ (he must have been knighted by now – every other soddin’ ‘60s rock star has) new album Praise & Blame.
"I'm not dead": Jones puts the 'hearse' on hold for now
In a leaked email to his quivering serfs, Mr Sharpe described the album as “a sick joke”, berating the choice of a “folk” producer (he’s talking about Ethan Johns, famed for working with well-known “folk” acts like Kings Of Leon, Crowded House, Ray LaMontagne and Ryan Adams) and demanding HIS £1.5m contract back (I somehow doubt the money came out of his own pocket).
“Please don’t give me the art over commerce argument,” said Mr Sharpe, “it’s run its course. What are you thinking about when he went all spiritual?”
Interviewed the other night by Jonathan Ross – who in a tediously anodyne exchange conspicuously failed to ask him about Mr Sharpe’s views – Jones described Praise & Blame as his “gospel” album though, by any stretch of the imagination, the performance of John Lee Hooker’s Burning Hell that followed praised the lord.
More pertinent, however, may be Jones’ other reference to Praise & Blame as his Johnny Cash moment, referring presumably to the series of American Recordings which not only completely reconstructed the Cash legend and myth right at the end of his life, but resulted in some of his best-selling releases. Imagine David Sharpe confronted by the sound of a croaky Cash seemingly disintegrating before his very ears agonisingly delivering Trent Reznor’s Hurt. “I wanted Concorde and I get a beat-up old Spitfire with smoke coming out of the engine about to crash into the desert…give me Ring Of Fire and A Boy Called Sue, not this maudlin’ shit.”
Cash from chaos
And how would he have reacted if The Beatles had presented him with Revolver? “What happened to the moptops? I want I Want To Hold Your Hand? I want jangly, singalong choruses, not this discordant, druggy, hippy dippy Tomorrow Never Knows mumbo jumbo. Sack George Martin. Get Espstein on the phone and cancel the contract..."
The septugenarian Cash mined a rich seam of creativity
Thankfully, Rick Rubin understood that the public aren’t as stupid as most record company executives seem to believe and that to try and exploit an image or myth forged years earlier invites ridicule, swiftly transforming a respected artist into caricature. Let’s face it, Johnny Cash was all washed up commercially when Rubin took him on, recogniing that the public would scorn any attempt by Cash to recreate his old self, but would respond positively if he sounded as old, natural, wounded and honest as he felt facing up to his own mortality.
Sharpe apparently wanted from Jones an album of booming hip-shakers like Kiss and Sex Bomb. Tom has weathered well enough, but he’s 70 years old, for godsake. He was pushing it when he recorded those tracks in the first place and it may not have occurred to Mr Sharpe while he was celebrating “luring” Sir Tom from the clutches of EMI, but his last album 24 Hours two years ago – on which he covered U2 and Bruce Springsteen and which teemed with the raunchy hip-shakers Mr Sharpe apparently coveted for Island – was a miserable flop, reaching the dizzy heights of No 32 in the UK album charts and not even breaching the Top 100 in the US. Maybe, just maybe, the EMI execs were guffawing into their indoor plants when they heard of Island’s £1.5m “luring”.
Of course, it has been suggested that the leaking of the email, the harsh words, the bandying around of Mercedes and hearses is all an ingenious publicity stunt devised by Island and David Sharpe to focus maximum publicity on the new album.
Nah, he’s not that clever...
posted 12 July, 2010
Lager and redemption in St Johns Wood
“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…here I am at…Camp Granada..."
Anyone remember that? Allan Sherman. According to my bedraggled but still trusty old copy of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, it reached the dizzy heights of No 14 in 1963. Funny song about a kid writing to his parents pleading to be rescued from the horrors of a summer camp…only to follow it up with another letter declaring the sun was out, everything was fab and the previous letter should be disregarded.
Obviously, we all knew everything was going to be fine all along...
I know how he feels. Defoe smashes in a single goal against mighty Slovenia and suddenly England are all-conquering supergods and the World Cup is back on track again, the misery of the goalless draw against Algeria a distant blip. Forget everything I said about Capello the other day, the man’s a tactical genius. Until, of course, the next round when Germany defeat England on penalties, as they inevitably will.
Still, we’ll always have Slovenia. It was a curious day which began at 6am as my son and his mates noisily gathered for the annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury. Eighteen cups of coffee later I was interviewing Dave Rotheray, once of The Beautiful South, who is about to release an intriguing album of his own songs called The Life of Birds in collaboration with an assortment of folkie-type people, including Eliza Carthy, Bella Hardy, Jim Causley, the wondrous Camille O’Sullivan and His Royal Greatness Alasdair Roberts. A bit of chit-chat about the album and then we got on to the serious matter of the day – the World Cup. "Yes, I’ll be watching it but I’m not supporting England," he tells me. I assume he must have Slovenian grandparents or something, but nothing so logical. "No, me and my mate Paul Heaton just decided we’d be supporting Uruguay this year.” Any particular reason? “Nope. We just decided..."
Untiny Tim
I couldn’t quiz him much longer in order to meet a carefully pre-planned timetable. Train to Waterloo; fall into the nearest pub rammed pub full of shaven-headed tattooed plasterers yelling “Ingerland” in my ear while splashing warm lager over my shoulders; watch JT, Stevie G, Lamps and the boys dismantle Slovenia; dance to the tube for the dash up the Jubileee Line to St Johns Wood for an assignation with Tim Robbins. Yep, Tim Robbins, Hollywood superstar. Shawshank Redemption Tim Robbins. Unspeakably tall Tim Robbins. Charismatic, piercing eyes, highly politicised, fielded-a-lot-of-flak-for-speaking-out-against-the-Iraq-war Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins, whose face nobly betrays no trace of distaste about the dishevelled late arrival of a sweaty, lager-sodden hack trying to shake his hand.
“Sorry Mr Robbins, er Tim, been in a pub watching the England game...” He smiles benignly and looks at his watch.
The Player: Robbins kept poker-faced as he greeted a dishevelled Irwin this week
When it emerges that he named his son after Woody Guthrie we get on famously. His dad was in a Greenwich Village folk group called the Highwaymen (No 1 in September, 1961 with Michael – as in Michael Row The Boat Ashore - according to my even more battered Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles) and nearly half a century later Tim – Mr Robbins - is releasing his debut album. It’s pretty good, too, in a lovechild of Lenny Cohen and Bruce Springsteen sort of way, though it might not have sounded as good without Defoe’s goal.
So, that’s my story of the day we smashed Slovenia. Bring on the plucky penalty shoot-out defeat by Germany. When that happens I’ll join Dave Rotheray and Paul Heaton in Uruguay’s corner.
Wonder how they’re getting on in Glastonbury...
posted 24 June, 2010
Do I not like that, Don Fabio
The other night I sat in a pub surrounded by strangers wearing silly hats and booed at a television. That’s something I haven’t done that since Nasty Nick tried to fix the vote in Big Brother 1. Well, apart from when Alexandra Burke launched into her mutilation of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on The X Factor, of course.
Either score a goal or shut your trap, you ungracious twerp
I mean, I’d sunk a few pints of Doom Bar and had to do something to combat the excruciating tedium of watching England’s lethargic attempts to outwit Algeria in the World Cup. Rooney looked at the ball like it was some priceless long-lost Sex Pistols vinyl, Lampard curled up in the centre circle with a Joanna Newsome album and Heskey seemed to be auditioning to replace Larry Blackmon in a Cameo comeback. We just needed James to do his impression of Bono diving into the mosh pit and the abject surrender would have been complete.
See, that’s what non-believers (and I don’t know whether to pity or envy them) don’t understand: the highest highs and the lowest lows in life are the inevitable consequence of being a committed football fan. Music can get close to the highs but the involvement is rarely so personal that it ever drags you right into the gutter…not even listening to a James Blunt album. If a gig is THAT bad you just walk out, right? Not that I often walk out of gigs. Not since seeing the Andy Fraser Band at the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park in about 1923 when my ears started bleeding when Andy yanked up the bass to a level that obliterated several small planets. But no true football fan EVER walks out of a match, no matter how appalling it is. You have to suffer the horrors to appreciate the highs, that’s the way it works. But it doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind, which is why I booed at the telly and at one point, in the throes of extreme anger at England’s ineptitude, I even clenched a fist.
Prawn paninis
This World Cup should be about fun. It’s our release from those messages of doom flooding out from the well-scrubbed fresh-faced Oxbridge clones who appear to have taken up residence in Westminster and tell us every day that even though we’re broke, we’re going to get a whole lot broker and on the whole it would probably be better if we all slit our wrists now.
Football and music… the two classic working class escape routes. They always went hand in hand… well, they did until the poshos got involved. As a result rock music suddenly became art while football grounds started building corporate boxes and stopped selling Bovril and Wagon Wheels. Football was never the same after they gave chubby Tory MP David Mellor a radio phone-in show talking about football.
Should have gone to SpecSavers (Lake Como branch)
Don Fabio Capello doesn’t understand any of this. That’s why he banned the England team from recording a World Cup song. Clearly the man has no sense of tradition and Lonnie Donegan’s World Cup Willie must be turning in his toy cupboard. Frank Skinner selected Back Home by the 1970 England World Cup Squad as one of his Desert Island Discs the other day and soared in my estimation. The super-fit, super-coached, super-coddled 2010 England squad have no song. No dentist chair. Nobody breaking curfew and climbing in windows at 3am after some South African fizz. No Wags to keep the paparazzi on their toes. No players slipping in obscure song titles to relieve the banality of pre-match interviews. No joy on the faces of the players on the pitch. No recognition of their privilege in competing in the world’s greatest football tournament. Just Rooney spitting obscenities because the crowd booed.
Capello was meant to be the man. We could have taken the unsmiling discipline, the stifling football, even the Steven Gerrard platitudes had he produced a team capable of beating the USA and Algeria. But no, he’s committed folly after folly. Coaxing the woefully slow Carragher out of retirement. Taking Ledley King in the belief that with some cotton wool and Sellotape, his dodgy knees would take the strain. Not taking Theo Walcott, the one player whose pace might actually have unsettled and unlocked defences and won us matches. And those glasses Fabio wears are an absolute disgrace.
Of course, it will only take a freak deflection off the back of Heskey’s neck, the kindly intervention of a Russian linesman or a dodgy penalty to put everything back on track and make Fabio a hero again. That’s the agonising, frustrating, glorious beauty of the game.
posted 21 June, 2010
Savaged by an invisible nonentity
The other day someone called me a “wanker”. And, worse, a “plonker”. No change there, of course, but it usually tends to be members of my own family rather than complete strangers on a computer screen.
Message boards, see. That weird parallel universe where people invited to partake in meaningful discussions about music are demonically transformed into spitting serpents, frenziedly lashing their keyboards which envelop their screens in frantic bile as private squabbles briskly escalate into full-scale wars over whether Blodwyn Pig’s Ahead Rings Out knocked Gentle Giant’s Octopussy into a cocked hat or whether or not Phil Collins played triangle on Rick Wakeman’s Journey To The Centre of the Earth.
Irwin: "I've been insulted to my face by more famous people"
I’ve tended to watch from afar with a mixture of amusement, bewilderment and horror as these virtual enmities explode, musing on the message board’s role as a modern version of care in the community and vowing never ever EVER to be drawn into their strange and poisonous world. And then somebody started a thread slagging off a book I’d written about Irish music – In Search Of The Craic - seven years ago.
He’d clearly completely misunderstood the book’s intended humour and I’d have thought nothing more of it, except that his comments galvanised others to join in the bun fight, including the bloke who called me a wanker because of something he thought I’d written a million years ago. Others weighed in to register their scorn, irrespective of whether or not they’d actually read the book – or anything else I’d written – and somebody else who hadn’t actually read the book suggested my “elevator doesn’t go right to the top” because it referred to my wife as “Mrs Colin”, therefore making me a sexist bastard.
Beware Mrs Colin!
Alerted to this debate, an enraged Mrs Colin – an enthusiastic accomplice in the book’s comedic context and a far, far cry from the shrinking violet they must have imagined and who is rather fond of her ironic soubriquet – was all for going round to their houses and poking their eyes out and I had to wrestle her off the keyboard as she attempted to give them both barrels. Instead I took a deep breath, broke my vow of silence and with a jokey reference to my fragile ego, attempted to answer the criticisms in a reasoned manner with a detailed explanation for the “Mrs Colin” jokes. That, I foolishly thought, would be an end to it. All friends again. All good pals and jolly good company.
No chance. Instantly they were back. More people who hadn’t read my book announced they would NEVER read it because I couldn’t take criticism and the throwaway “fragile ego” remark was apparently evidence of my all-round hopelessness while others who leapt to my defence were rounded up and shot behind the bicycle sheds. Without further ado I fled to a Tibetan monastery to renew my vow of silence.
This would be funny – well, it IS funny – but that peculiar world they inhabit has broader consequences on the people reading it. It’s fine when they’re insulting each other or indeed wankers like me – lucky I don’t have a fragile ego, huh? – but it takes on a more sinister edge when they turn their vitriol on musicians. I mean, we all like to give James Blunt a good kicking from time to time (I mean, he deserves it, right?) but I know a couple of fine bands and artists (who do have fragile egos) who’ve been deeply wounded and driven to the brink of abandoning their musical careers entirely after a few message board terrorists, who substitute keyboards for real lives, started making personal remarks about the way they look, the clothes they wear and the sex lives they do or don’t have while making wild assumptions about their motives for playing and repeating libellous rumours they’d heard in the pub.
Hey Rude: Macca got upfront and personal with our Col
Yeah, yeah, I know, critics do the same thing and some of us remember how Ian Anderson suddenly his announced his retirement in response to negative reviews of a Jethro Tull album. Why, Paul McCartney once even called me a “bastard” in the mistaken belief that I was the culprit after he’d read a bad review of one of his albums. But critics, on the whole, base their attacks on the music presented in front of them. And quite often, they even listen to it first before venting their spleen. One or two might even attempt to offer CONSTRUCTIVE criticism.
And all things considered I’d rather be called a “bastard” to my face by Paul McCartney than a “wanker” by some no-mark on an internet message board.
posted 02 June, 2010
Bigots, Barlow and Benny bloody Hill
So The Toff challenges The Old Bruiser to a game of football in the park. The Toff struts around looking haughty, careful not to get mud on his shorts, while the huffing, puffing Old Bruiser keeps falling on his face only to get up, bruised and bleeding, insisting he wants to carry on. Suddenly a New Boy turns up and asks if he can join in. He looks wet behind the ears so The Toff and the Bruiser shrug their shoulders, smirk when they see his pristine yellow shirt and beckon him to join them. Suddenly the crowd is roaring. They LOVE the New Boy. The Toff frowns and signals his bully boys to come on and rough him up, but they are all distracted as The Bruiser gets involved in an argument with one of his own supporters as he attempts a flying kick and slices the ball into his own net for a spectacular own goal. The Toff and the New Boy roar with laughter...
Brown's anguish is clear as he is replayed that Arctic Monkeys soundbite
I love General Elections, me, and thoroughly approve of the new glorified X Factor style of selection introduced by the TV leadership debates. In fact, they should go the whole hog and put them all in the Big Brother house so we can vote them off. Call them into the Diary Room every now and again for a grilling from Paxman, check out their ability to handle a Basic Rations shopping budget and get them to do tasks, like end the war in Afghanistan and see how many bankers and civil servants they can squash into a dustbin.
And while they’re in the BB House, the general public should be invited to view their record collections. Admit it. First thing you do when you enter someone’s house for the first time is peruse the albums so you know what sort of a person you’re dealing with here. Gordon Brown, of course, claims he has an iPod and knows how to use it, happily listening to tracks by U2, Leona Lewis, The Beatles, Sinatra and Coldplay. Then again he once ludicrously claimed there’s nothing he likes better in the mornings than a short, sharp, shock blast of Arctic Monkeys and nobody believed THAT for a second. Disappointingly, however, Brown’s Desert Island Discs choices stuck to tried and trusted classical music choices, the most interesting of which was the 23rd Psalm in GAELIC.
Electile dysfunction
Somewhere along the campaign trail David Cameron proudly unveiled Gary Barlow -aka the Fat One from Take That - as a Tory, a momentous development made most memorable for the unwitting comedy it introduced to the interminable political analysis shows when Andrew Neil thought the bloke playing piano and singing his heart out for the Cameron cause was not Gary but KEN Barlow, prompting Neil to attempt to launch an earnest debate the influence of the Coronation Street vote on the election. Cameron’s own Desert Island Discs choices include Radiohead, The Smiths, REM, The Killers, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and, most excitingly of all, Benny Hill’s Ernie, suggesting that while Brown rants about bigots behind closed doors, Cameron likes nothing better than saucy double entendres and big-breasted ladies in their undies. A serious vote-winner obviously.
That nice Nick Clegg hasn’t been on Desert Island Discs yet but he is on record as saying he’s a lover of Rachmaninov and Johnny Cash, bought the Florence & The Machine album, prefers The Beatles to the Stones, used to be obsessed with Prince (“but I’ve got over it now”) and is partial to “depressing ‘80s music” like Radiohead, The Smiths and Blur. So at least we know he used to be a student then...
Smiths fan 'nice' Nick Clegg - heaven knows we're lib-er-als now
The electoral system is mad anyway. See, I have a mate who reckons there should be a box on the voting form where you can tick “none of the above” and if “none of the above” became overall winners we’d have a peaceful revolution on our hands. Politics is so disreputable now I’d go a step further and abandon the party system altogether. No more Tories. No more Labour. No more Lib Dems. And definitely no more BNP. Come the revolution all candidates would have to stand for parliament as independents, answerable only to their own constituencies and personal conscience without recourse to any party policy or government whip. No TV debates, no party broadcasts, no POLITICS…we’d just go along to the polling station, where we’d be furnished with cups of tea, material to read about the candidates and their videos to watch with iPods on which we can hear their favourite music. Election Day could become a real social occasion for communities, which – if they picked the right person - would feel genuinely involved again in the process of government.
The winning candidates would then go off to Westminster and vote among themselves to elect a Prime Minister, Pope-stylee, with governmental positions determined by an application and interview process. It’s called democracy. We should try it some time.
posted 29 April, 2010
The Great rock'n'roll swindler
So this, finally, was the day when punk really did die...
Perhaps predictably, the obits on Malcolm McLaren have generally been less than fulsome. Anyone who makes a career out of getting up people ' s noses and gouging their nostrils out while systematically employing obnoxiousness as a preconceived marketing tools is never going to win any popularity contests, even in death. He wasn’t an especially lovable rogue and those he worked with haven’t exactly been gushing in their tributes. “Above all he was an entertainer and I will miss him and so should you…” was John Lydon’s rather less than heartfelt statement on the matter, significantly using the name “Johnny Rotten” as a sign-off. Then again Lydon once described him as “the most evil man on earth” and, like several others who’d worked with him, he tended to communicate through lawyers after their antagonistic split.
John is right, though. McLaren certainly was an entertainer – even if some of us never forgave him for ducking out of appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Outta Here for unexplained reasons at the 11th hour. He was essentially a scamster, but an extravagantly brilliant one, whose japes had a profound influence on the music industry. None since Andrew Oldham had as much fun nor made such a long-lasting impact at the expense of the music establishment and of these two great outlaw entrepreneurs, McLaren was far the more savvy, inventive and, yes, ruthless.
Never mind the bollocks, McLaren was the real deal
He shaped punk both as a fashion and political statement and while hardly the cunning svengali visionary and master plotter he later painted himself in the film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (still worth seeing for Ed Tudorpole’s startling cameo, by the way), he spat in the face of the industry behemoths just when they needed it most. The TV swear-fest with Bill Grundy that initially catapulted the Sex Pistols on to the front pages, the infamous Pistols Thames boat trip raided by the police (I have a mate who still dines out after drunkenly falling overboard on that trip), gate-crashing the Queen’s Silver Jubilee party celebrations when he signed the band to A&M outside Buckingham Palace, while orchestrating bans and engineering the lurid headlines that established their legend as enemies of right-thinking society. This was classic Malcolm McLaren - crazed, grabbing, extravagant fearless and out-of-control - and it was pure genius.
He was so good at outraging people that his own compelling musical contributions have largely been overlooked. Yes, he was a scavenger and a magpie, but what he brought to the party was exceptional. He recognized the possibilities of Dave Barbarossa’s Burundi beat, stole Adam Ant’s backing band, stuck them behind Anglo-Burmese teenager Annabella Lwin and invented Bow Wow Wow. Their Go Wild In The Country remains one of my favourite singles of all time and, though cynically exploited by McLaren in the infamous naked photo used in the Manet pastiche cover art, Annabella Lwin turned out to be one of the most delightful and intelligent people I’ve ever interviewed.
'Gloriously bonkers'
Then there was his not insignificant contribution in bringing hip-hop to the mainstream with his scratch-tastic single Buffalo Gals and his inspirational plundering of African music as he re-designated skipping as a new dance form on the magnificent Double Dutch single. McLaren’s whole Duck Rock album with Trevor Horn would surely now be much more widely respected as a bold, joyous and innovative breakthrough for world music were it not for the baggage McLaren carried with him (and his unforgivable reticence in crediting many of the South African musicians used in its making).
Nothing was quite as gloriously bonkers, though, as Fans, his heroic 1984 album which attempted to reinvent opera as an R&B concept album. It was a crackpot notion made even more ludicrous by McLaren’s cod hard-man vocals and yet…the tunes were magnificent, the stories terrific and the operatic interludes so shockingly evocative I’ve been in awe of Puccini ever since.
He changed the world - but enough about Buffalo Gals
It was around then I had my own audience with Malcolm. As Features Editor of Melody Maker I’d been badgering his PR for an interview on an almost daily basis, fully aware that my opposite number at the NME was doing exactly the same thing. Fuelled by champagne that thoughtful record companies habitually furnished us with to help us make it through the week, I was halfway through writing the gossip column In the middle of a frenetic Friday afternoon when the PR came on the phone. “Are you busy?” “Well yes…” “Malcolm McLaren is drinking cappuccino in Soho and if you want to join him there, he may talk to you.”
He was and he did. Looking like he’d just been auditioning for Dr Who, McLaren was indeed drinking cappuccino with a couple of associates he failed to introduce and greeted me expansively. “You don’t smoke, do you?” “No.” “I was going to do an interview with the NME but they sent some disgusting character who smelt of tobacco and beer…I can’t talk to people like that. I had to send him back.”
I tried not to shower him with champagne fumes, ordered cappuccino and switched on the tape recorder. The next two hours were wonderful as he held court on anything and everything. The appalling state of pop music, the appalling state of British fashion, the appalling state of world politics, the appalling movies that were being released, the appalling bars in London, the appalling journalists they employed on NME… and why opera was going to be the next big thing. He mostly ignored my questions, making libellous remarks on anyone and everyone from the Prime Minister to a passing would-be model. He had, he said, just one regret about the Sex Pistols – he could and should have done more to help Sid Vicious.
I left in a daze, a mess of champagne, cappuccino and heady thoughts of, ‘why can’t all interviews be like this?’ He wasn’t the most moral man on the planet but the planet would have been a lot less colourful without him.
posted 12 April, 2010
Wee Clerkie and a vanished world
It was a different world back in the 1970s. Especially on the music mags. The tabloids hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that people who listened to the radio, watched Top Of The Pops and bought records were also keen to read all about them and rock fell far below the radar of the posh broadsheets.
So, for a while there, the music papers had a free hand and boy, did they use it! I was on Melody Maker at the time and it was like bandit country. We did exactly what we wanted and we wanted plenty. Full-scale football and cricket matches were held in the office between heavy bouts of drinking and worse, while record companies wined and dined us and flew us all over the world to write about their acts. They were appalling, glorious, hedonistic, maverick times and I loved every minute of it. The Maker’s owners IPC left us alone to create our own merry hell and turned a blind eye to our indiscretions because we made them a fortune. And that freedom and anarchy was the fertile launching ground for some brilliant writers.
Clerk was at the heat of the action during the freewheeling days of the old music press
It was also unremittingly macho. There were no female writers on the staff at that time. Never had been. Never looked like there would be. And then came Carol Clerk...
Tiny, red-haired and feisty, Carol – ‘Wee Clerkie’ as she was quickly known – had fled to London from Belfast, furious about The Troubles. Not because she cared a jot about sectarian politics but because bands were frightened to play in Belfast as a result. Music was her driving passion. It was in her soul and she came to London to be close to its heartbeat. And to get a job on Melody Maker.
She joined the staff in 1980, smoking like a chimney and immediately filling the air with a pungent barrage of F and C-words, usually followed by peels of raucous, throaty laughter before dragging us off to the pub where she proceeded to drink us all under the table. Every night. She walked with a heavy limp – sometimes using a stick – resulting from a hip defect at birth, but it was never an issue and few ever thought to ask her why. Equally, it never occurred to her that she was a trailblazing pioneer breaking barriers for women in a man’s world. It never occurred to the rest of us either. She was just Carol. And she was unique.
Yet she was also wonderfully kind, drawn to outsiders, misfits and underdogs. She took cowering young freelances under her wing and championed the punk, glam rock and heavy metal bands deemed outdated and uncool by the rest of the staff. Through the 1980s she held court on a nightly basis in the Maker’s unofficial office – the Oporto pub – on what became dubbed as the rock’n’roll table. Carol would sit in the middle regaling stories of her adventures surrounded by various Hanoi Rocks, Damned and Exploited band members while Len the landlord warmly welcomed the colourful parade of clothes, hair, make-up and androgynous beings coming into his bar.
Complete control
On one occasion she even persuaded the venerable Rolf Harris to join her at the rock’n’roll table, where he spent an enjoyable evening doodling pictures of Carol and her chums. One time she was serenaded by Little Richard, built up close friendships with a bizarre range of people from Yoko Ono to Jon Bon Jovi’s mum, won an award as journalist of the year for her coverage of Live Aid, was treated like a queen by the gangster fraternity after ghost-writing Reggie Kray’s autobiography and on one famous occasion was told never to set foot in Israel again after an almighty bender on the road with Hanoi Rocks. She was news editor on the Maker until its final, sad demise in 2000, going on to write characteristically colourful pieces for Uncut and Classic Rock magazines, in addition to superb biographies of Hawkwind and The Pogues.
Clerk represented a golden age of rock journalism before the suits came in and spoiled the party
She hated that the music business had become….well, a BUSINESS. She despised the corporate mentality and the modern control exerted by record companies deliberately driving a wedge between journalist and artist to use the press purely as a marketing tool. And, while I never heard her say it, I’m sure she detested the anodyne music writing and the suffocatingly sensible characters and their bland reviews and features that have resulted. And she remained true to herself, vehemently anti-drugs but drinking Fosters like it was going out of fashion.
Last Saturday while dozing off watching a particularly grim Conference South football encounter between Woking and Staines Town, I received a text message from a friend. It said simply “Carol Clerk has died.”
I still can’t quite believe it. She’d been suffering from breast cancer for a year but, typically defiant, she didn’t mention to anybody beyond her close circle of family and friends. She was a mighty writer and an incorrigible, outrageous, warm, funny, wonderful, unique character.
I’ll see you in the bar up there a bit later, Wee Clerkie...
posted 20 March, 2010
A man out of time
I was saddened by the death of the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot…and not a little outraged by some of the ‘tributes’ and obituaries. Here was that rare beast, an honest, honourable and principled politician, who condemned the appeasement of Hitler before the Second World War, played a key role alongside Nye Bevan in setting up the National Health Service and campaigned passionately against nuclear power at every turn. Even nearly into his 90s he was prepared to lead the protest marches against the Iraq war.
But what is he chiefly remembered for, according to the Tory press? Wearing a bloody donkey jacket at the cenotaph on Remembrance Day! Type “Michael Foot donkey jacket” into Google and over 17,000 entries appear. How absurd is that?
Foot was one of parliament’s most brilliant orators whose only mistake was to gain his position of power just at the point that TV began its evil reign on our senses, promoting superficiality and glib instant appeal above sincerity and impassioned debate. Suddenly confronted by the onset of the focus groups, image consultants and the whole soundbite generation, Foot must have felt like an alien yet, long after he’d left high office, he was still campaigning for the causes close to his heart.
Foot's brain was bigger even than the egos of some of the journalists who pilloried him
I met him once when he was Labour leader sitting on a tube on the Northern Line quietly reading a book at the end of the train. I stared at him long and hard, scarcely believing that such an eminent figure was travelling by public transport, and he eventually looked up and smiled. “Mr Foot?” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Good to meet you,” I said. There followed a slightly embarrassed pause, so I shook his hand vigorously and got off at Belsize Park. It wasn’t one of history’s most memorable encounters but it made me feel good at the time.
And what’s all this got to do with music? Not a lot, although Michael Foot, a big brass band fan, did play an incidental role in the genesis of the British folk music revival. A leading figure in the newly formed CND movement, Foot was at the front roaring encouragement when the protest marches from Trafalgar Square to the Aldermaston nuclear base in Berkshire began in 1958. They were entertained en route by brass bands, jazz bands, church choirs and skiffle groups but, of more lasting significance, that march unleashed a generation of guitar-wielding topical songwriters – Ewan MacColl, Leon Rosselson and Karl Dallas included – singing and making up songs along the way. Galvanised by a just cause and the sheer, primal excitement of the adventure, many of them returned to their constituencies afterwards to launch their own folk clubs and spread the protest song doctrine.
Writing a piece for The Observer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Aldermaston march in 2008, I contacted Michael Foot, for his own reminiscences of the event. He was 94 then and in failing health so I was advised to put my questions in writing and he would answer them as best he could. I didn’t expect to hear any more, to be honest, but two days later, back came his robust, eloquent and detailed response. “The music was crucial in rallying support along the way and the songs kept up the spirit of the marchers – I feel very proud to have been a part of it,” he said. But it wasn’t just nostalgia. His message went on to include a fervent diatribe aimed a rousing the modern generation to continue the struggle. “Today, far from slowing down, the pace of the arms race is accelerating and its dangers are as great as ever. Why are we still spending billions of pounds on weapons that could destroy the world? We must continue to campaign against them.”
I always think about this when people claim there is no place for politics in music. I’ll certainly remember him more for this than that sodding donkey jacket...
posted 06 March, 2010
We're singing for England
So Cheryl Cole, why DID you dump the despicable, greedy, irresponsible, lying, philandering, no-good, overpaid, cheating toe-rag Ashley Cole? It’s a mystery.
See, pop stars and footballers…it’s a fragile union, but one that, ever since the halcyon days of the first-ever celebrity soccer star-pop singer partnership, the godlike Billy Wright and the fragrant Joy Beverley – ask your great granddad – it’s a valuable root of British culture. It’s something foreign managers don’t understand and it’s why Fabio Capello has got it all wrong. First he banned Wags from attending the World Cup and then he announced there wouldn’t be an official England World Cup song this year. Whaaat? What’s that all about, Fabio – it’s part of our heritage. Where would we be now without the glorious memories of the 1970 England squad belting out Back Home? What will Keith Allen do with himself this summer without a Vindaloo to cook up? World Cup Willie will be turning in his grave.
You can be slow or fast but you must get to la ligne
The thing is Fabio, old chap, you have to express yourself. It’s one on one. Express yourself, you can’t be wrong. When something’s good, it’s never wrong.
Frankly, I don’t think we want less fraternisation between the England football team and singers – we want MORE! Would John Terry have shafted Wayne Bridge’s ex if he’d had Lady Gaga to deal with? Poor old Wayne deserved better, him being ex-Southampton and all. Wayne should get it on with the ginger one from Girls Aloud. No, don’t laugh. She’s a nice, homely lass - she’d be there for him when he comes home exhausted after a tough morning juggling balls with that nice Mr Mancini, man of the scarf.
The problem with football today is that too many players get involved with big-breasted blonde models when what they really need to get their feet twinkling in the morning is the sound of song from the shower. I mean, Beckham’s career went sky high after he’d hooked up with Posh. Would he have survived the humiliation of costing England the World Cup after being sent off against Argentina in 1998 if the nation didn’t have a new Spice Girls single to look forward to? I don’t think so.
So I’m planning to set up an exclusive dating agency put members of the England soccer team together with pop stars.
John Terry and Lady Gaga is a no-brainer. Tough guy? A natural leader? The bulldog spirit? He won’t know what’s hit him when Lady Gaga enters the boudoir. He’ll be having so many nightmares about what he sees in the wardrobe, he wouldn’t dream of stepping out of line.
I’d set Rio Ferdinand up with Lily Allen. She can kick harder than him for one thing and there wouldn’t be any possibility of Rio missing a drugs test with Lily’s hands round his neck. He’ll get The Fear alright.
Joe Cole’s partner has to be Shakira. With her body swerves, she can teach him a few tricks off the ball because the hips don’t lie and there are great advantages in getting a South American in our camp.
Bridge too far
Frank Lampard? How about Mariah Carey. He’ll be hitting 40-yard thunderbolts all day with her screeching in his ear. Steven Gerrard is a worry. He’s lucky he’s not in prison and missing the World Cup completely. No, not for that unsavoury incident in a Southport night club, but for throwing a wobbler because the DJ refused to play Phil Collins. I mean, Phil Collins?!? Gerrard wants a good slap. And I know just the woman to give him one. Steve, meet Courtney Love.
Who else? Ah the dodgy keepers. Who to match up with David James? Somebody with a bit of style sense who can sort out his ridiculous haircuts for one thing. And Jamesy’s so old I don’t think any of the new starlets would be interested. So I’m thinking…Sade. Then again Joe Hart may replace Jamesy between the sticks. Harty seems like a nice boy, so before he becomes corrupted in the ways of the old football pro, let’s team him up with a nice new girl on the block. Joe Hart, this is Ellie Goulding.
Gareth Barry seems a nice, clean-cut young man and having come from Aston Villa he needs a bit of sophistication. Somebody to bring class and grace to those tigerish tackles. Alicia Keys. Little Shaun Wright-Phillips could do with some Florence trickery with or without her machine and who better to make a man of pasty-faced James Milner than Leona Lewis?
Do your robot: For a big lad, he can hit all the right notes
Wayne Rooney seems quite settled with his brainbox wife Coleen so we’ll leave him be for now, but she’d better make a record soon or she’ll have to go. Big Crouchy up front is shacked up with Abi Clancy, who HAS made a record in the past with some girl group or other, but he should probably think of trading her in for a more updated version – someone like Nessa from the Saturdays. She’s good up front too. As for Jermain Defoe I might try a left field match with Morrissey. Yes, I know he’s not gay but he needs to think outside the box.
After the recent travails with Ashley Cole and Wayne Bridge, England’s left back spot at the World Cup is likely to be taken by Stephen Warnock. In which case, he needs toughening up. And fast. Somebody powerful and quick on her feet with thighs like tree-trunks to help in that all-important morning training. I give you Beyonce.
These are my first thoughts anyway, though I did have a nightmare the other day. What if those tedious Neville brothers get recalled to the England squad? And then I suddenly had the perfect solution. Yep, it’s time for t.A.T.u...
There you go Fabio, I’ve just won the World Cup for you.
posted 02 March, 2010
First an earthquake - now this
Everybody hurts. Well, they will when they hear that goddawful Haiti fund-raising single. I mean, those poor buggers over there have got enough problems without Simon Cowell doing his Saint Bob act in phase one of his bid for a knighthood.
Sorry, is that too cynical? Anything that raises money to try and alleviate the appalling suffering and rebuild Haiti has to be a good thing, right? Don’t the ends justify the means? And maybe, just maybe, Cowell’s motives in summoning the army of nonenities who’ve risen without trace since his serial suffocation of pop music under an eiderdown of blandness is a purely philanthropic gesture without thought of his own profile or Geldofian legacy. Hmmm.
Haiti deserves better than Cowell's eiderdown of blandness
If it helps Haiti then great, Cowell can almost be forgiven some of his sins against music, but the whole make-up of the track – and indeed, the choice of song itself – is indicative of the man’s woeful lack of imagination or originality. There’s an assumption that the phrase ‘charity record’ is an unconditional license to churn out complete tat that’s somehow beyond criticism, its perpetrators cosily luxuriating in the knowledge that a few desperate scenes of devastation on a video showing grave-faced cherubs like Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis, Susan Boyle and, er, Rod Stewart will flog it to guilt-ridden viewers however dismal the music just so everyone can feel good about themselves.
Recession, online pirating and the collapse of record shops notwithstanding, the mainstream music industry still manages to wallow in bloated excess so of course it should rally to the aid of disasters like Haiti. Whether it admits it or not, music has always had a role to play in world events, be it Billie Holiday heartbreakingly reflecting on the lynching of blacks in Strange Fruit, Country Joe singing Fixin’ To Die Rag to mobilise support against the Vietnam War, Bob Dylan performing Only A Pawn In Their Game alongside Martin Luther King in the civil rights protests and The Specials shaming the South African apartheid regime with Free Nelson Mandela. And, of course, there was Cowell’s template of mercy, Geldof/Ure’s Ethiopian famine relief song, Do They Know It’s Christmas? They all made a difference.
Charity nostalgia
But Haiti deserves better than Cowell rounding up the likes of Alexandra Burke and Joe McElderry (forgotten him already, haven’t you?) to regurgitate every cliché in the book on Everybody Hurts. It was, after all, once a good song. But surely it can’t be beyond even Cowell’s limited imagination to come up with something different. Stick Robbie Williams, George Michael, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello or Thom Yorke or somebody in a room for a day and tell them to come up with a deserving new song for the occasion. Cowell doesn’t seem to have any problem persuading these people to tout their wares on X Factor on a Saturday night.
The American model is just as bad. Oh it’s a disaster, we must do something. Who we gonna call? Quincy Jones, yay! Lionel Richie, yay! We Are The World, yay! Can there be such a thing as charity nostalgia? It sure looks like it.
Maybe there should be an alternative Haiti single which, in the spirit of the internet Rage Against The Machine campaign to stop Joe McElderry (you still don’t remember him, do you?) getting to No 1 at Christmas, we can all back to create a proper people’s response to the tragedy. Get a suitable lovable rogue character to front a cast of reprobates to show them what it’s all about. Someone like…I dunno…Shane MacGowan? Get a bunch of others to help him. Say, Nick Cave. Mick Jones. Chrissie Hynde. Glen Matlock. Bobby Gillespie. And what could they sing? Something classic, yet somehow edgy and alternative. Something that may have ruffled a few feathers back in the day associated with the type of artist Shane, Nick, Bobby, Mick and Chrissie might have identified with.
Let's all put a voodoo spell on Cowell
I’ve got it. Screaming Jay Hawkins. Outrageous. Dangerous. Theatrical. Exciting. Macabre. Controversial. Risque. Slightly scary. A man who provided the perfect template for later shock rockers like Screaming Lord Sutch, Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, George Clinton, The Cramps, Marilyn Manson and The Horrors. A darkly humorous man who once released an album called Black Music for White People. A man who in 1956 rose leering out of a coffin wearing a long cape, with tusks through his nose waving a skeleton head, manically growling his way through I Put A Spell On You with such lascivious intensity it was banned by many radio stations.
So yes, Shane MacGowan and his chums performing I Put A Spell On You…now wouldn’t that be something fine to bugger up Cowell’s latest vacuous vanity trip? A record with real guts and spirit and defiance. It couldn’t happen, could it? Oh hang on, it just did!
It’s the least those unfortunate, beleaguered, yet amazingly resilient souls in Haiti deserve.
posted 09 February, 2010
Not dark yet (but it’s getting there)
To be brutally honest about this – and let’s face it, we always should - I don’t think much of 2010 so far. In fact it’s been downright ropey.
I mean, we’ve already lost Bobby Charles, the man who wrote the wonderful Walking To New Orleans and the iconic See You Later, Alligator for Fats Domino and Bill Haley and recorded the odd gem himself, even though he couldn’t play an instrument or read a note of music.
Don’t hear the reaper: JD Salinger outlived John Lennon (but sadly not Mark Chapman)
We also bade farewell to Teddy Pendergrass, the sainted voice of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes; Johnny Kidd’s guitarist Mick Green; rapper Apache; Catcher In The Rye author JD Salinger; and the passionate left wing Scottish singer songwriter Alistair Hulett, whose stirring song He Fades Away - about the death of a miner – is a little-known modern folk classic. Amble on down to YouTube to check it out and, while you’re there, admire his version of the daddy of socialist anthems, The Internationale.
The passing of Kate McGarrigle is something else again. An evocatively poetic songwriter whose elegaic delivery could conjure such an unusually fragile sense of longing, she was sorely misrepresented by the newspaper obits which insultingly intimated that her greatest claim to fame came from mothering Rufus and Martha Wainwright. As admirable as both Rufus and Martha are in their own distinctively individual and idiosyncratic ways, neither has yet written a song to match the heartbreaking beauty and yearning of (Talk To Me Of) Mendocino, Go Leave, I Eat Dinner, Matapedia or indeed almost anything else she wrote. As funny as it was at the time, her ex-husband Loudon Wainwright’s song Rufus Is A Tit Man is not the best song about the infant Rufus – that honour irrefutably belongs to Kate’s First Born.
Just a few short weeks ago it was my very great honour to be in attendance at London’s Royal Albert Hall for a celebratory McGarrigle family Christmas show – a charity event raising funds to research the cancer she knew was killing her - which turned out to be Kate’s last ever stage performance. She looked and sounded as serene as ever, even delivering – perfectly - one characteristically melancholy new song Proserpina, proving that the years of illness and playing second fiddle (or, to be more precise, piano) to her celebrated offspring hadn’t dulled her unique genius for writing songs to break your heart and paralyse your soul.
It also exposed the other myth suggested in so many of the official obits that her artistic peak started and ended in 1976 with that wonderful self-titled Kate & Anna McGarrigle. Sure, it was downhill all the way from that point on a purely COMMERCIAL level, but that was because neither Kate nor Anna gave a toss about fame; they flatly refused to jump through any of the hoops their record company waved in front of them in the name of promotion and marketing and, both with young families, resolved only to play live if and when it suited them. And, even then, only on their terms with the musicians they chose to use. And yes, they’d sing in French if they wanted to too.
Celebrity Death List
In consequence they hardly ever toured and when they did play live their shows were a glorious shambles, as they stopped and started songs, argued genially among themselves and went off at complete tangents. An exasperated record industry swiftly washed their hands of them… and their fans adored them all the more. It’s ironic that, at a time when punk bands were kicking and spitting for all their worth in a supposed attempt to overturn the leaden music industry, a couple of seemingly genteel Canadian sisters singing sad folk songs were effectively far more revolutionary than any of them.
Kate wouldn’t have seen it like that, of course. She just did things the way that seemed right and suited her and Anna and the business would have to like it or lump it. It didn’t matter to her either way. Nor was she the passive victim of her errant ex-husband Loudon Wainwright. She was undoubtedly wounded and, for a while at least, deeply embittered by his famously reprobate behaviour but she was also admirably wilful, stubborn, strong-minded, free-thinking, mildly eccentric and thoroughly independent. Unequivocally, she was also brilliant.
Wilful, eccentric, shambling, brilliant: the irreplaceable Kate McGarrigle
I was so disturbed by the shocking reminder of musical mortality provoked by the death of Kate McGarrigle, Teddy Pendergrass and Bobby Charles, I consulted the Celebrity Death List – that tasteless yet morbidly fascinating predictive list of potential bucket-kickers - to brace myself for further upsets that may be on the horizon. I found Peter Tork and Fats Domino are high on the list, along with Captain Beefheart and more usual suspects such as Shane MacGowan, Amy Winehouse, Courtney Love and various Rolling Stones. It all evokes another Kate McGarrigle lyric…”We are human, we are angel/We have feet and wish for wings/We are carbon, we are ether/We are saints, we are kings…why must we die?” (Why Must We Die? from Heartbeats Accelerating).
So no, I’m not thrilled at all by 2010 so far. All these deaths and a chart dominated by Lady Gaga, Lyaz and some ridiculous electro synth-pop character calling himself Owl City, but whose real name is Adam.
We all need cheering up. Only one thing can save us. Bring on the t.A.T.u reunion...
posted 31 January, 2010
Hallelujah as festive Rage boils over
Yes. Yes. YES. And a trillion times yes!
This is indeed a red letter day… a triumph for people power… a victory for David over Goliath… a blow for reality against the reality show… glorious revenge for the common man and woman… and indeed the ultimate proof that the internet is more powerful than television.
Yep, for the first time since 2004 when Band Aid 20 were No 1 with their remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas, this year’s festive chart-topper is not the winner of the latest series of X Factor. Or any other reality TV show.
Zack at the top: Eggnog all round as Rage dump on X-Facor's Joe
Since that Band Aid single, the UK’s Christmas No 1 has been by something called Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and, last year, that disgraceful Alexandra Burke version of Hallelujah. But in the Year Of Our Lord 2009AD, the madness has finally been stopped by Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name after Jon Morter, a part-time DJ and Essex rock fan, decided enough was enough and it was time to break the X Factor stranglehold and give Simon Cowell a bloody nose.
Many of us might question his choice of track but not the sentiment that inspired him to set up a Facebook page to orchestrate a Rage In The Machine protest vote and deny the latest identikit X Factor poppet (in this case an ickle lickle teenager from South Shields called Joe McElderry) what puppet master Cowell assumed to be his natural right to that once fiercely competitive No 1 slot. In all honesty I didn’t imagine for a second that the campaign would ever have the muscle to derail the Cowell juggernaut and reclaim the chart.
Spirit of punk
He had, after all, attempted a similar plunder last year when his choice of stalking horse – Rick Astley, bizarrely – had been soundly trounced by Alexandra Burke. But the depth of hatred real music lovers have for the manufactured manikins foisted on us every year is greater than I thought and the idea of a television-generated marionette being kicked off the precious top spot by a record so wilfully ugly it would send most X Factor viewers fleeing for the hills began to capture people’s imaginations.
As McElderry squeaked and buried his head into Cheryl Cole’s bosom (the bastard!) after beating that other funny little chap in the X Factor final, the red carpet was already being rolled out for his turgid assault on a Miley Cyrus hit called The Climb to ascend to the Christmas throne. But our friend the Essex DJ was suddenly getting real momentum as it dawned on people that the blistering onslaught of Zack de la Rocha’s angry howl was particularly symbolic and downloads escalated.
Here's one turkey that got a right good stuffing - yo, ho and indeed ho!
The word was that McElderry and Rage were neck and neck as sales were being counted, but the crowning glory for the Killing In The Name campaign was a live broadcast on prime time Radio 5 Live, simultaneously shown online. Rage spoke humbly and eloquently to Nicky Campbell before launching into their brutal track and, in true Sex Pistols/Bill Grundy style, climaxed with a spurt of swearing, causing momentary panic in the studio, the plug being pulled and more headlines the next day. The spirit of punk was in the air and the whiff of rebellion was intoxicating.
I know, I know… it’s daft. It’s just the charts, after all, and in his own way Jon Morter has manipulated the Christmas chart every bit as much as Simon Cowell. God help us if Jon Morter gets a taste for this sort of thing and decides to put up a joke candidate for the Christmas No 1 next year and the one after. But for now, salute Jon Morter, salute Rage Against The Machine and salute the return of our Christmas chart. And, while we’re at it, let’s all laugh at Simon Cowell.
posted 21 December, 2009
All change please: the DIY decade
It seems only yesterday I was lurching unsteadily across Waterloo Bridge waving an empty bottle of bubbly watching Uncle Ken Livingstone’s firework display singing Auld Lang Syne with a group of scaffolders from Bermondsey to welcome the brave new world of the noughties. Well, strike me down with a pair of Lady Gaga’s undies, but apparently it’s nearly over already.
Anyone know what happened? If the ‘60s was the Beatles and flower power; the ‘70s was punk, prog-rock and Abba; the ‘80s was new romantics, metal and disco; and the ‘90s was rave, Brit-pop and hip-hop…how will culture define the last decade?
Given that history is always systematically re-written at the first opportunity anyway, I should share the sobering discovery that – according to Billboard magazine at least - the best-selling album of the 2000s was No Strings Attached by N Sync, released right at the dawn of the decade with over 10m sales, bequeathing us Justin Timberlake in the process. Yippee.
Eminem: one of the decade's true originals
The same source informs us that the biggest-selling artists of the decade were – in order – Eminem, Usher, Nelly, Beyonce and Alicia Keys. Not so bad. Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, which was second to No Strings Attached in the best-selling list, was genuinely groundbreaking as well as edgy, funny and exhilaratingly dangerous to know.
A better option, certainly, than the horrors we find in the corresponding UK list. I can’t bring myself to tell you what is No 1 – let’s just say the words “James” and “Blunt” are involved. David Gray is at three with White Ladder with Dido records at both No 2 and No 4 before we get to the The Beatles’ 1 collection and the likes of Scissor Sisters, Coldplay, Keane, Amy Winehouse, Robbie Williams and Snow Patrol. Did we all go completely soppy over the last 10 years or what?
But, discounting for a second those largely stultifying names, the noughties may yet prove to have had a momentous effect in the seismic power shifts of a crumbling music industry. Insufferably arrogant, the industry stuck its head firmly in the sand as the internet defecated on its turf, creating a generation unconditioned to paying for music; an audience so liberated by choice it can discover the music for itself and make its decisions without the brainwashing tyranny of radio playlists driven by focus groups and huge marketing budgets telling people what they like.
The future's bright
This, frankly, is A Good Thing and while the odious Simon Cowell maintains his fixed grin on people who don’t like music to push ever-deadening degrees of re-cycled banality in their faces, the sub-plot resulting from it is healthy. Using a template that has been necessarily de rigeur in alternative genres such as folk, world, alternative and indie music for years, there has been a discernible shift back to real musicians, playing proper music in honest ways, building their own cottage industries to sell at gigs, out of the backs of cars and on their websites.
This inevitably invites all manner of dross to clutter the market – no change there then – but the beauty is that it’s THEIR dross, take it or leave it. We all know the stories of two of the most vital and refreshing artists of the decade, Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen, emerging as major forces through posting tracks on MySpace long before getting a record deal and while record companies weren’t slow in trying to gobble them up, we do now have an organic climate where power is back in the hands of the people – and don’t have to pay 35p a minute to call X Factor to exert it.
Cowell and his cronies may well be able to fool some of the people most of the time, but the peasants are revolting and the days of identikit power ballad singers rocketed to superstardom on the back of lip gloss, voice tuners, overblown productions and mass marketing are becoming a complete irrelevance and will gradually acquire the diversionary joke status of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Jack and Meg are Irwin's toast of the decade
From Eminem’s bloody tales of bodies in car boots to Radiohead’s free online downloading of In Rainbows to the White Stripes’ jagged blues modernism, the Strokes’ bounding rock authenticity; from Dizzee Rascal to Arcade Fire, Elbow to Outkast, The Streets to Black Eyed Peas, Martha Wainwright to the Libertines, Fleet Foxes to Bon Iver, Nick Cave to Bjork, Ryan Adams to Bright Eyes and PJ Harvey to Gillian Welch, M.I.A, Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse and Jim Moray, there has been plenty to get excited about over the last 10 years and give us hope for the future.
Of course, the worst thing about decades ending is that it gives a licence to lazy journalists to bang out tedious Best of Year lists. Best get on with it then.
These choices aren’t intended to define a decade or anything like that. They’re not even necessarily important in the grand scheme of things. But none of them have been on X Factor…
1. Elephant - White Stripes
2. I Am A Bird Now - Antony & The Johnsons
3. Always Lift Him Up: A Tribute To Blind Alfred Reed - Various Artists
4. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not - Arctic Monkeys
5. Coles Corner - Richard Hawley
6. American III: Solitary Man - Johnny Cash
7. Boy In Da Corner - Dizzee Rascal
8. The Marshall Mathers LP - Eminem
9. Van Lear Rose - Loretta Lynn
10. Hotwalker - Tom Russell
11. The Lark Descending - Chris Wood
12. Raising Sand - Alison Krauss & Robert Plant
13. Low Culture - Jim Moray
14. Up The Bracket - The Libertines
15. The Bairns - Rachel Unthank & the Winterset
16. Original Pirate Material - The Streets
17. Alas, I Cannot Swim - Laura Marling
18. You Are The Quarry - Morrissey
19. Stankonia - Outkast
20. Time (The Revelator) - Gillian Welch
21. Out Of Season - Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
22. Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
23. No Earthly Man - Alasdair Roberts
24. Miss E – So Addictive - Missy Elliott
25. Anglicana - Eliza Carthy
26. Love and Theft - Bob Dylan
27. Panic Prevention - Jamie T
28. Back To Black - Amy Winehouse
29. Chavez Ravine - Ry Cooder
30. Fado Curvo - Mariza
posted 14 December, 2009
Winning the battle for hearts and minds
Hi-fi manufacturer Linn, that grand old daddy of audio transcription, has announced it is ceasing manufacture of CD players.
Linn says it will give up on CDs from the start of next year in favour of producing digital streaming equipment.
Gilad Tiefenbrun, managing director of Linn Products, told the BBC: "Our customers have fast recognised the limitations of CD players and in the age of home networking, people now want better control of their music and the ability to enjoy it in any room of their home. CD players no longer belong in the specialist domain."
Survival of the fittest - LP 1, CD 0
The symbolism of such a famous name turning its back on what has been the standard audio format for more than 20 years cannot be overstated - cue the predictable "another nail in the coffin" obituaries for our beleaguered industry.
Except… except. The company will continue to produce its legendary turntables - because it says there remains a healthy demand for the quality of sound compression offered by analogue technology.
In its own way, that declaration is every bit as significant as the inevitable, inexorable move by manufacturers away from the compact disc. It underlines our firm belief that vinyl, especially at the higher end, has the continuing power to thrill and excite the discerning listener in a way that no other medium can rival - in terms of both reproduction of sound and emotional resonance.
Deck the halls
Linn is a bold and visionary company whose decision to concentrate on the "superior quality" of streaming may turn out to be a pioneering and trendsetting move, demonstrating its corporate courage and business acumen. Where it leads, lesser lights will follow.
Like all great risk-takers, it is making a principled gamble in front of the competition, trusting its instincts and relying on its executives' reading of the runes to stay a step ahead of the game. It is in tune with the times and has digested the technological and cultural milieu in which we find ourselves at the end of this decade.
It nourishes our minds and pleases our hearts to know that at such a watershed time for audio reproduction, there lies not the slightest of conflict in Linn's continuing desire to craft its world-class Sondek LP12 decks - nearly 40 years after the earliest plinths were taken gingerly off the production line.
The CD, it seems, has pretty much come and gone, but like an ageing goalkeeper still at the top of his game, the well-made long-playing record steadfastly refuses to quit. And why the hell should it?
Linn, we salute your good sense and good taste, and may you continue to innovate and bring aesthetic and aural harmony to our world.
posted 21 November, 2009
Bring me the head of Simon Cowell
Apparently there’s a popular show on television at the moment called The X Factor. I know this because I read newspapers sometimes and they keep going on about it. As does the bloke in the shop where I get the paper. The same shop which has a radio on in the background featuring presenters wittering inanely on and on about the same thing.
Vote now for the tuneless twins and subvert this farce!
For mental health reasons I try to avoid watching The X Factor. I mean, it’s not as if you need to see the wretched thing, is it? Not when it’s the prime subject of national debate and you can revel in a heated debate without the irritation of knowing what you’re talking about – always a bonus, I find. Apparently teenage Irish twins, collectively known as Jedward, have reached the final stages of the competition, despite having no discernible talent whatsoever. No change there then. However, they do have interesting haircuts which, let’s face it, is always the crucial ingredient of a pop act of negligible ability: just think Flock of Seagulls. Plus, there’s another major point to Jedward’s appeal – Simon Cowell hates them. Why, he once described them as ‘vile creatures’ and promised to leave the country if they won The X Factor. And if that’s not a magnificent reason for them to win the show, I don’t know what is.
The idea of Cowell taking the moral high ground supposedly for reasons of taste and musical talent is ludicrous. Surely nobody has done more to destroy the credibility of the music industry than this self-serving egotist. When the whole TV reality talent thing surfaced with Popstars in 2000, it was a real opportunity to democratise pop music, making the industry transparent and giving the public a genuine say in the talent it buys into. But instead of a judging panel built from real consumers with real lives and real emotions we got instead an ugly insight into the record industry’s suffocating insularity and appalling lack of imagination as it recycled age-old marketing formulas to ensure the public get what they’re told they want.
No joke
The tired, uninspiring characters chosen to represent the industry spurned the opportunity to break the mould, lazily adhering to the same old pop stereotypes as they strove to manufacture new pop idols exactly the same as the old ones. (To be fair, at least we got Myleene Klass out of it. Not to mention Girls Aloud).
Once Simon Cowell had railroaded the concept for his own ends and assumed control of the whole thing, pop music was doomed. I mean, we can’t even have a proper Christmas No 1 now without it being blueprinted by Cowell and the Irish feller and I still have raging nightmares about being gobbled alive by Cowell’s sickening smirk as Alexandra Burke decimates Leonard Cohen’s fragile masterpiece Hallelujah. No Simon, you don’t really like music, DO YA?
Sinful Simon's power and influence has impoverished music
Now it seems The X Factor plot has thickened even more. Given the opportunity to get rid of his nemesis Jedward, Cowell went uncharacteristically coy and instead of putting the knife into the act that supposedly offended his tender standards so much, he decided to sit on the fence and the young Welsh singer Lucie Jones was given the boot instead. Jedward live to warble erratically another day and meanwhile the controversy rages. Was Simon simply being perverse? Is it all to do with ratings? Is he thinking headlines? His own infamy? In the end was it all about stoking up his own obscenely spiralling personal fortune? Surely not.
Whatever the reason he gave the hopeless Irish twins a lifeline, it wasn’t musical. It never is with Simon Cowell. In his eyes 16 million viewers justifies everything. In my eyes it makes his crimes against music ever more unforgivable. Cowell is a poisonous joke and The X Factor is a travesty as a result. So let’s make it official. Vote Jedward.
posted 13 November, 2009
I saw the Wall come tumbling down
It was late into the night on 9 November 1989 when from the corner of my eye I caught a Ceefax headline on the TV.
Chaos and confusion reigned in the early hours of the announcement
I was sitting in a West Berlin apartment playing Trivial Pursuit with some British friends when I saw the news that travel restrictions had been eased for East German citizens.
We were just a few kilometres from the border, yet blissfully unaware of the momentous events unfolding nearby.
While Brian Hanrahan was busy broadcasting to the world, I was halfway through a board game, drinking Berliner Kindl lager in a nondescript third-floor flat in Theodor Heuss Platz.
I had been relaxing with friends who were working as civilians for the British army. The BBC was available via forces television, and its trusty breaking news service starkly announced this sensational moment in world history.
Something extraordinary
It had been brewing for weeks, all rumour and whispers under the radar, but here finally was the official confirmation.
Confusion and suspicion greeted the first reports, but it soon became clear that something extraordinary was happening. <br /><br /> Early in the morning we raced outside and jumped on the underground train, at the site of West Berlin's eternal flame commemorating the defeat of Nazism, to make our way towards the Wall.
Normally this was a 20-minute jaunt, but the news was spreading quickly and our efforts to get there were hampered by the sheer numbers of excited Berliners who had clambered onto Tube platforms or climbed into their cars.
Eventually, after more than an hour, we made our way through the thronging crowds and edged towards Checkpoint Charlie. There was chaos and confusion as several hundred people milled around the border crossing amid uniformed guards and West BerlinPolizei.
Then the amazing truth dawned on me: The barrier at this heavily fortified checkpoint had been raised, and East Berliners were simply walking through - streaming through - in their hundreds; smiling, cheering, waving and laughing as the air crackled with the shocking electricity of the moment.
Pick axes
I saw a stunned-looking teenage girl walk across from the East, holding her hand to her mouth as she sobbed, unable to contain her raw emotion. All around her groups of people hugged - some with loved ones, some with strangers - as the horns of the emerging Trabant cars sounded, the air thick with the smell of their two-stroke engines.
Later I crossed the border into East Berlin, greeted by the incongruous sight of East German border guards standing on top of the wall, while ordinary Berliners, souvenir hunters and black-clad anarchists hacked away with pick axes at the concrete below.
I had come to West Berlin two years earlier as a wide-eyed 21-year-old with a one-way ticket and £50 in my pocket, drawn by the romance and danger of a divided, claustrophobic city in which art, culture and politics collided in a heady and explosive mix.
Former West Berlin resident David Bowie was an inspiration
I was in thrall to the city's famous former residents, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and in search of the spirit of Bowie's anthem Heroes, recorded in a studio by the Wall. I found it in abundance, in the coffee shops of the Turkish quarter Kreuzberg, among the industrial wastelands of Neukoeln, and on the overground trains that rattled across the divide to East Berlin.
A week after watching the fall of the Wall, I was lucky enough to find myself in Prague at the dawn of its own Velvet Revolution, dancing away the last few hours of Soviet austerity in the company of some beautiful girls in a club in Wenceslas Square. But that's another story.
posted 09 November, 2009
Leave him alone
So this is…IT? Seems more like they wanna be starting something…
Good taste was never something readily identified with Michael Jackson or the crazy circus that inevitably surrounded him. He was a genius, sure, but he took tack to a different planet. We shouldn’t then be overly surprised that no sooner has his corpse turned cold – and for all I know still probably being paraded around Santa Monica or some place – that the exploitation death industry unblinkingly explodes into full, garish, distasteful overload.
For someone who lived virtually his entire life as a cartoon figure completely divorced from reality, it was always going to be thus, yet I’m still shocked by the unashamed callousness of the selling of Michael Jackson’s death.
All this Jacksploitation, it’s more ghoulish than the Thriller video
The industry would have felt robbed and out of pocket, of course, when Michael inconsiderately checked out before fulfilling his contracted comeback shows in London, but the savage speed with which the commercialisation of Jacko’s live return switched to the even more lucrative commercialisation of Jacko’s death march is breathtaking. And thoroughly revolting.
Already Jackson is said to have earned $90m from the other side, dwarfing the posthumous earnings of Elvis, Lennon and Hendrix, putting him right up there among the elite of the most profitable celebrity corpses. He’s still got some ground to make up on Yves Saint Laurent and Rodgers & Hammerstein but when those looking after your estate aren’t hampered by any of those awkward niceties, like conscience, sensitivity or human dignity, then even these will surely soon be overhauled and Jacko will attain his rightful place at No 1 in the only chart that matters to these people - profit.
Taking the Michael
Sony paid $60m for the rights to the rehearsal footage for the London shows that has just been simultaneously premiered in 18 countries via the movie This Is It while the Jackson memorabilia show – star exhibit The White Glove! – that’s been luring fans to London’s O2 lately is the tip of a terrifyingly gargantuan iceberg.
Jackson’s home town of Gary, Indiana is already in the advanced planning stages a Michael museum, exhibition and performance centre (it’s only a matter of time before Gary itself is re-named ‘Michael’) and the amount of rehearsal tapes and unreleased material currently being sifted into potential box sets, DVDs and souvenir albums by those with dollar signs in their eyes will make Tupac’s posthumous recording career seem like an insignificant dribble.
The conspiracy theories are bubbling up nicely while we breathlessly await the first “sighting” that will trigger the JACKO LIVES theories. I know two authors who went three days without sleep knocking out biographies within days of his death but when it comes to exploitative literature, the publishers haven’t even started yet. Who will win the rights to the doctor’s story? Who will play Jacko in the movie of his life? When will the kids make their first record? When will Neverland theme park open to the public? When will it ever end?
In 1979 Michael Jackson effectively launched his solo career with Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough. Brace yourselves because that ain’t happening any time soon.
posted 30 October, 2009
We don't need this fascist groove thing
I was on telly t’other day. Whooooo, lucky me! Channel 4 sat me in a studio and pointed a camera at me while I waffled for hours on end to provide plenty of fresh carpeting for the cutting room floor. The subject was a news item about the discovery – in a Brooklyn basement – of mint condition long-lost metal masters of some recordings Woody Guthrie made in 1944, including six previously unknown tracks, which Rounder has just issued in a rather beautiful 4-CD box set under the title My Dusty Road (though you, of course, will doubtless prefer to wait for the vinyl version due early next year.
Odious, stupid - and a beached buffoon to (jack)boot
As I watched the subsequent programme and the emotional footage of Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing Woody’s This Land Is Your Land at Barry Obama’s inauguration, the most hypnotic image of all was the iconic shot of Woody Guthrie – a sign-writer in his younger days - staring at the camera with his painted words “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” dancing across his guitar. Its subliminal message that music does have the power to shape opinion, if not actively change the world was brought sharply into focus when the ridiculous Nick Griffin waddled on to the Question Time set as the odious British National Party accepted the BBC’s hugely contentious invitation to assume its place in the supposedly legitimate political arena.
For a man who went to Cambridge University, Griffin appeared not merely misguided, but breathtakingly stupid…in one breath he denied being a Nazi and in another he spoke warmly of the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, revealed a laughable ignorance of British history and, having battled through an army of protesters outside, flailed at his critics while the audience openly ridiculed him.
This was a beached buffoon, a cartoon right-wing extremist wrested from the pages of Viz magazine and maybe those who elected Griffin as a Member of the European Parliament along with fellow BNP member Andrew Brons earlier this year will now reflect on their own folly. Yet the intense furore surrounding Griffin’s appearance on Question Time will surely also have back-handed benefits for the BNP, which has already adopted the stance that Griffin was so demonised on the show he was denied the opportunity to speak about the real political issues of the day.
Skrew you
But while I think of Woody Guthrie’s guitar, I also think of fascists themselves using music as a political weapon. To this day perfectly good German folk music remains the aural equivalent of the mad granny locked away in the attic and never spoken about after being hijacked by Hitler and, among the many repellent objectives of the BNP is to identify itself with English traditional music.
Steve Knightley of the band Show of Hands was appalled to discover his song Roots was being used on the BNP website but, while he managed to get them to remove it, folk compilations are still being sold on the website without the permission of the artists featured on them. Griffin, who once promoted white supremacist skinhead band Skrewdriver, has blogged about his love of English folk and has apparently even been known to sing a few ditties at cosy BNP social gatherings.
What he and his cronies can’t grasp is that multi-culturalism isn’t a scourge, it’s one of the best things about Britain at the moment. British folk music is currently enjoying a rare boom, both in terms of growing audiences and the musicians who play it – and I include the mixed race band Edward 2, the Zimbabwean roots that shape singer songwriter Netsayi and the trad songs set in reggae/dub style by Ian King - and the BNP’s attempt to appropriate it must clearly be buried before it gains any credibility or momentum. Supported almost unilaterally by those directly involved in the industry, Folk Against Fascism has swiftly arisen to do just that and we must all hope it succeeds and prove that accordions, fiddles, mandolins, Northumbrian pipes, dulcimers, bagpipes, sitars, ouds, djembes and vocal cords can kill fascists too.
posted 24 October, 2009
I'm so tired
I am now going to say something I never thought I’d say. Not in a million years. Not ever. Not in my life. Or even after it. Ok, deep breath, here goes…I’m BORED BY THE BEATLES… Phew…still here. No bolts from the blue just yet.
Now don’t get me wrong. I adored virtually everything they ever did in a studio – yep, even Octopus’s Garden, Blue Jay Way and All Together Now – and a few pints down the road and I’ll bore for hours with Beatle-themed lists (favourite Beatle: John; favourite album: Beatles For Sale; favourite single: The Ballad of John and Yoko; favourite album track: Why Don’t We Do It In The Road; favourite movie: A Hard Day’s Night).
Not bad, decent tunes, bright future
I still have my original copy of Sgt Pepper, though with a sad lack of foresight for market forces 40 years later I cut up the accompanying cut-outs of the good Sergeant and stuck it on the wall, thus rendering it relatively worthless, though I do have all the vinyl LPs in a rather gorgeous black box that EMI put out in the late 1980s when the reissue industry really started to take root. Like most people of my vintage (ie , old) The Beatles thrilled, inspired and energised me and changed everything.
It’s healthy and proper, too, that new generations are constantly discovering them. Any young person developing a serious interest in music will at some stage have to trawl back through the Beatles catalogue and I envy their voyage of discovery, I really do.
Good night
But…enough’s enough. I tried to count up the number of books written about the Beatles and gave up at 500 – can there possibly be a single fact anyone needs to know about the Fab Four not covered by 500 books? And then there’s the constant reissues, the endless re-mastering, re-packaging, out-takes, demos, interviews, orchestral adaptations, re-arrangements and new productions.
We’ve had the de-Spectorisation of Let It Be Naked, we’ve had George Martin’s son splurging classic Beatles bit S together in the Cirque du Soleil show Love and we’ve had the No 1 package, umpteen volumes of Beatles at the Beeb and now the gob-smacking barrage of re-masters of all the original LPs and the inevitable accompanying drone of pontificating music hacks. Surely someone somewhere has got an album’s worth of recordings of John on the loo or George picking his nose. George Martin must be able to conjure up an original score miraculously found hidden under the floorboards at Abbey Road that he can stick around for us all to analyse and unravel and write yards of pretentious prose about?
I am, of course, the only person in the western world who hasn’t actually heard the latest Beatles box am therefore unable to join in the doubtlessly fascinating debate about the relative merits of the mono and stereo versions. Worse still, I honestly don’t care. Is modern music so barren that we all feel compelled to rake over the bones of a band who disappeared nearly four decades ago? No, don’t answer that.
Bloody hell lads, we're slipping, we only made two brilliant albums this year
Yes, The Beatles were great. Yes, they were the most important band ever. And yes, I still scream with delight whenever I hear Eight Days A Week, howl at the moon at the merest mention of Why Don’t We Do It In The Road, listen as intently as if I’m hearing it for the first time when A Day In The Life comes on, marvel at Penny Lane, sit rooted in wonder to Strawberry Fields Forever and I’ll even shake a tail feather to Paperback Writer and We Can Work It Out.
But the more EMI plunder the treasure and dress up the carcass in ever more glorious and inventive ways, the more tarnished the golden memory becomes.
Please (please me) let’s just let it be.
Editor's footnote: Irwin has a point - but what do you think? Let us know your views.
We will, of course, be stocking the vinyl remasters when our dear friends at Abbey Road get round to the LP versions (rumoured to be next year).
posted 11 October, 2009
Speech! Hip-hop triumphs at the Mercurys
So – I’m assuming you’re all wealthy now after putting your houses on Speech Debelle to win the Mercury Prize as I suggested a couple of months back…
Speech's victory silenced the dull white boys with guitars
The snipers have already been out in force, of course, suggesting the triumph of Debelle’s Speech Therapy album is mainly due to predominantly white judges patronisingly exorcising their middle-class guilt after being moved by her painful back story about living on the streets in South London, a panel desperately trying to appear young and relevant by choosing something apparently edgy. Then again, when they chose Franz Ferdinand and The Klaxons they were accused of being a boys club and when the prize went to Talvin Singh and Roni Size they were charged with being deliberately contrary.
Speech Therapy certainly doesn’t have the raw intensity or edgy innovation of some of the previous nominations that fell loosely under the hip hop umbrella, notably M.I.A, Roots Manuva, Sway, Soweto Kinch or, most compellingly, the 2003 winner Dizzee Rascal. It’s certainly not as striking as her most obvious reference point, 2002 winner Ms Dynamite, who Speech herself was at pains to acknowledge as an inspiration after getting her winner’s cheque.
But in an undeniably limp year, the limitations of Debelle’s vocal presence are more than compensated by her arresting lyrics and intelligent backings that meander far beyond the normal rap horizons. There’s nowt scary about Speech Debelle – in fact there’s something almost touching about the self-portraits she paints which may even provide the inspiration required to take hip hop out of the blind alley which has been strangling it in the UK in recent years. A genre as young and vital and powerful as hip hop surely has a long way to go before its possibilities are exhausted but there hasn’t been much evidence of anyone imaginatively taking it forward lately. Can Speech Debelle change that? She might. Certainly with her profile suddenly going through the roof she might now be given the chance to.
Charming arrogance
Striking a blow for indie labels, Speech Therapy had sold less than 3,000 copies prior to the Mercury win which, given its potential appeal, is surely yet another indictment on the small-mindedness of mainstream radio, which hadn’t previously given her the time of day. This is something the remarkably cool and self-assured Debelle herself alluded to in her confident post-match interviews. “Hopefully people will hear this album and realize they don’t have to make music that all sounds the same - they can make music that sounds good,” she told the throng of hacks hanging on her every word. Amen to that.
Even her arrogance is charming. Smiling sweetly she said before the ceremony started she thought she deserved to win and when asked if she’d ever imagined when she was recording Speech Therapy that she ended up clutching a Mercury prize, she simply said “Yes I did.”
She’s not an innovator and she’s certainly no Dizzee Rascal but she’s got an abundance of talent and a very sure head on her shoulders to make the most of it. Far better she win it at least than another recycled white boy guitar band yelling their heads off pretending to be angry or the hailstorm of hype that accompanied the albums by Florence & the Machine and La Roux.
M People: Not the Mercury Prize's finest hour
There have been some dodgy, unfathomable winners of this award in the past – Gomez, Klaxons, M People and Roni Size among them – but Speech Debelle isn’t one of those. And how can you not love someone who takes her gran along to the awards just so she can have a slap-up night on the town…?
posted 09 September, 2009
Battle for rock’s glittering prize
They didn’t invite me to be a Mercury Music Prize judge this year.
Can’t imagine why. Maybe it was something to do with that year I danced on the table and threatened to pour wine down the frock of that posh bint from the Independent who kept insisting Hard-Fi should win instead of Antony & the Johnsons. Kaiser Chiefs, I could have accepted. I like the Kaiser Chiefs. I’ve liked them since attending a Leeds United match at Elland Road when the fans spotted a lardy opposition fan and started singing “I Predict A Diet.” But bloody Hard-Fi? You don’t hear their songs at football matches, do you? Not that I’ve seen much of Staines Town lately.
I kinda missed being a Mercury judge this year. The moment that huge box of CDs arrives and you tunnel into it, trawling for the undiscovered gems, the left field oddities and the brown envelope in the secret panel at the bottom containing the bribe from a major label. Sadly, I never did manage to find it.
Antony was a Mercury critics’ darling
Then again, it does mean I can join the tedious ranks of hacks who annually declare the judges don’t know their Arsene Wenger from their Elbow, writing patronising drivel about the inexcusable snub to Coldplay or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and bleat endlessly on about the token folk/jazz/classical/Asian/ rap/female/indie/metal/Buddhist/circus clown album on the list. The thing is…the Mercury Music Prize nominations usually wind up being as frustrating to individual judges as they are to everyone else, particularly the dull commentators who think they should be on the judging panel. When a dozen judges are involved you are never going to get all your own favourites on the list, however hard you kick the table and snarl at the posh bint from the Independent, though my greatest triumph was managing to thwart a pincer movement from the soppy end of the table to get James Blunt on the list. Accepting the prize I’d risked my dignity and any chance I had of writing for the Independent for him to win with the peerless I Am A Bird Now, Antony Hegarty famously compared the Mercury to a contest between “an orange, a spaceship and a spoon.”
Mercury poisoning
Which is precisely the point. Music is music is music and it has no place for tokens. I knew I Am A Bird Now was the natural winner the first time I heard it. The same with Dizzee Rascal’s Boy In Da Corner. Same with the Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the easiest runaway winner in the history of the prize. You don’t need a huge promotional budget or a long dissertation from a poncey writer to tell you these things. You just know when something’s that good and it transcends category, context and popular appeal.
I’ve no idea what will win the Mercury Music Prize this year, though I hope it won’t be one of the super-hyped packages like Florence & the Machine and La Roux. It should certainly go to something more inventive than Kasabian, The Horrors or The Invisible. Glasvegas would be a worthy winner but familiarity may have bred contempt; Two Suns isn’t as good as Bat for Lashes’ last album Fur and Gold and that didn’t win; Lisa Hannigan’s Sea Sew is plesant enough but there are dozens like it; Led Bib’s Sensible Shoes has a shout but may scare the goldfish; Friendly Fires have undeniable quality but may just be too honed and glossy for their own good. I wouldn’t be too dismayed to see Sweet Billy Pilgrim win. There’s something pleasingly oddball about them and their melancholic Twice Born Men is what dear old Fluff Freeman used to call a ‘grower’, but it’s still hard to see a band listing Wu Tang-Clan as seminal influences alongside Robert Wyatt, Vaughan Williams and Joni Mitchell as anything other than a long shot.
Which leaves us with…right, a tenner on Speech Debelle it is then. Or Miss Dynamite with her tail on fire. It’s vital, it’s now and it’s very exciting. “I know I shouldn’t say this but…I ****** deserve this!” she said emerging from the shortlist shindig and the hacks jumped for joy.
Race you to the bookies…
posted 25 July, 2009
Books, like records, are here to stay
It's 3.11 in the morning at the kitchen table and, like the BBC Radio 5 Live show I'm listening to, I am, it seems, Up All Night.
This is down in part to two factors: 1/An apparent mild bout of swine flu I am harbouring (don't worry, it doesn't carry via LP mailers), and 2/My bloody digital radio won't switch off. I mean, it really won't. The on-off button, like the volume control and the band selector and all of the other functions, is frozen and I have been compelled to creep downstairs and place it facedown in the kitchen, beneath a towel-based "muffler", lest I wake my sleeping brood above.
The radio is describing how the US bookseller Barnes & Noble is poised to market some 300,000 e-books to make it the world's largest supplier of digital literature, ahead of Amazon. Cue the inevitable forecasts of "the end of the novel", "the deathknell for books and the traditional retailer", etc - a well-trod path, enough already. The consensus is that once "early adopters" (blokey tech geeks) have had their fill, the market will then begin to attract other demographics (ie, women, non-nerds, you and me), and the bound, printed book will meet its final guillotine.
The parallels with recorded music here are all too obvious, so I won't miss the opportunity to place my bet. I'm convinced that as digital consumption becomes an ever-more natural medium for readers - not least in playgrounds and classrooms, on trains and planes and on faraway beaches - the call for printed words on bits of paper stuck together between a cover will be shaken up a little, then settle and find its revised place in the world: both as the centuries-established preferred vehicle for absorbing information (in much the same way as the wheel is the unimproved model of rapid human movement), and because a globally significant proportion of consumers - or people, if you prefer - will find the idea of not owning and having books in their homes culturally impoverishing.
I mean, come on, books - they're just not going anywhere, are they?
In a similar way, technology has polarised the market for music consumers, but the established formats are adapting to survive. You could be forgiven for thinking that downloads have taken over the world, and yet according to a new survey in Music Week more than 70% of people still want their albums on CD (the figure for vinyl is not disclosed but is, as we all well know, an appreciative and discerning minority).
The point is that as download culture has paradoxically revived the new and second-hand collectors' market for records (in a subtle yet significant global phenomena), so the onslaught of e-books will do the same for the "physical" word. That Hockney coffee table book is a desirable item. The first edition of On The Road - it will only increase in value.
The Waterstones board and the good antiquarian booksellers of the Charing Cross Road can sleep easy for a little longer. Or at least easier than me - it's 3.50am and my bloody radio still won't turn off. Now where did I put that hammer..?
posted 22 July, 2009
And what do you do..?
So Percy Plant’s got the CBE then. He strolled up to Buck House in his best frock, hair in a ponytail to get gonged up by Prince Charlie. Which begged the question – what the hell did the heir to the throne and the former Led Zeppelin hell-raiser find to say to each other?
As it happens, I can help there, pop-pickers. Due to the latest tip-top surveillance devices smuggled out of the offices of a well-known Sunday newspaper, I can exclusively reveal the nature of the conversation.
CHARLIE: Hello, who are you then?
PERCY: Robert Plant, your honour.
CHARLIE: How fascinating! I like Plants. I’ve talked to quite a few in my time.
PERCY: So I hear.
CHARLIE: And what are you, a hairdresser?
PERCY: Me? Oh, I’m a singer, sir.
CHARLIE: Oh, not another bloody singer. I spend half my life dishing out gongs to singers these days. Had that Mick Jagger up here for a knighthood the other day. Odious little man. Know him?
"You know f*** all about modern architecture, your Highness"
PERCY: We’ve met a few times.
CHARLIE: And Cliff Richard. He’s an odd cove. Even Elton John’s a knight now. My ex-wife was a big fan of his, you know. Don’t remember you though. Did you ever appear on Tiswas?
PERCY: No, Your Majesty.
CHARLIE: Why the devil not?
PERCY: My group weren’t invited. We were too anti-establishment.
CHARLIE: Why are you accepting a gong then? Shouldn’t you be leading the revolution, pinning me against the wall shouting “Vive Le Republic”?
PERCY: I’ve sold out.
CHARLIE: Oh, just like that Jagger character then. Before you know it. It’ll be Sir Johnny Rotten and Dame Amy Winehouse. Okay, so what is it for you, Plant? A knighthood?
PERCY: No, your lordship, I believe it’s a CBE.
CHARLIE: A CBE? Crikey. Thought they went out with the farthing. You sure it’s a CBE?
PERCY (fishing in his pocket for the official letter): Yes. Definitely says CBE here. Look.
CHARLIE: Heavens to Betsy, so it does. Are you not a very good singer? What do you sing anyway? Opera?
PERCY: No your Lordship. I was in a famous rock band for many years. I’ve done a bit of world music and I recently made a successful record with an American bluegrass singer.
CHARLIE: Oh so we’re giving you a gong for your charity work, are we? That explains it.
PERCY: Can I have it then?
CHARLIE: Can you have what?
"One is the third Plant I've talked to this morning"
PERCY: The CBE thingey.
CHARLIE: Not sure I’ve got one on me, old boy. Not much call for CBEs these days, I’m afraid. I’ll phone me mum. She might have a spare one in the draw.
(he dials on his mobile)
CHARLIE: Mummy? Hi, it’s me. Charlie. Charles. Prince Charles. Your son. And heir. Yes, that Charlie. Thing is, mummy, I’ve got this chappie here, who’s been told he’s getting a CBE. I’m completely out of the little blighters. Thought only retired colonels got them. Just wondered if you had an old one lying about he could have. No, he’s a bit odd. He’s some sort of rock singer I think. What’s that, mummy? How should I know? Okay, I’ll ask him.
(to Percy)
She wants to know if you’ve come far.
PERCY: Wolverhampton.
CHARLIE: Wolverhampton? Is that one of the colonies? That could explain why it’s a CBE. Hang on mummy, what’s that? Right, she wants to know the name of the band you were in?
PERCY: Led Zeppelin.
CHARLIE: Led Zeppelin. I’ve heard of them. Hang on. Didn’t we already give one of your chaps a gong?
PERCY: Yes, a couple of years ago. Jimmy Page, the guitarist.
CHARLIE: Oh really? Not sure we can give another gong to somebody in the same group. What did he get?
PERCY: An OBE, Your Highness.
CHARLIE: Ah, an OBE. A good solid award, that is. Nothing pretentious about the OBE. I love giving out OBEs. He’s the real talent in the group, is he?
PERCY: No…we…we contributed equally to the success of the band.
CHARLIE: Hmmm….don’t think so Bobby, my boy. If you were equal members you’d have got an OBE too, instead of a rather sad old CBE. To be honest with you, the CBE is for losers. You know…the ones we forgot about when we were dished out the real gongs. The CBE is an afterthought really. Just a little gesture, a token to keep them sweet.
PERCY: In that case I don’t want it. I’ve no wish to play any further part in this ridiculous charade. The monarchy’s a sham. Come the revolution you’re the first against the wall, squire. Vive le republic!
(he flounces out)
CHARLIE: Bye then. Throw some TVs out of a hotel window. That’ll make you feel better.
CHARLIE (on phone): Yes mummy, he’s gone. No, I agree. They were rubbish after Led Zeppelin 111. And as for Stairway To Heaven…what an overblown load of old tosh! Me too. John Bonham was always my favourite in Zep. What a drummer he was! Great wind-up though. Yes must try that with Phil Collins next time…okay, toodle-pip. Right. Who’s next?
posted 13 July, 2009
Oldies and goldies at Glasto
Is it just me or is Glastonbury beginning to cater for a more, erm, mature audience?
Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Tom Jones, Tony Christie, Status bloody Quo… I've worked it out and these artists represent a combined age of 522. Or one and a half Rolling Stones if you prefer. Crosby, Stills and Nash alone have a lifelong carbon footprint the size of Glasto's healing field.
And it isn't just the post-baby boomer generation enjoying Michael Eavis's hospitality (and the inevitable leap in record sales that goes with the gig). Glastonbury is also becoming open house for the 1980s/90s reunion bandwagon, it seems.
Who ate all the pies?
How else do you explain the procession of familiar faces churning out their classic-singalong-yet-previously- well-aired pop: The Specials, Madness, Blur... who needs dodgy tribute bands when you can enjoy the real thing, either in the live splendour of Somerset or - as I prefer it, frankly - slumped on a sofa watching BBC Four nursing a cold Carlsberg Export.
Don't get me wrong. I love a bit of classic rock and Neil Young was on blistering form, despite having apparently eaten all the cow pies. Bruce was great once he'd warmed up a bit (the second half of his set was messianic); and those timeless CSN three-part harmonies still send a shiver down the spine. The Specials and Madness, too, were every bit as engaging as when I caught them on the Two Tone tour 30 years ago (£2.50 on the door, plus The Selecter, since you ask).
It might have been a conscious effort on Eavis's part to lift people out of the economic gloom and emphasise the feelgood factor. But let's not make Glasto too safe. Heaven forbid that it should ever change direction away from its seminal origins and groundbreaking recent past in favour of a retro nostalgia trip-cum-cheesefest. I mean, whatever happened to all the new blood that turned Glasto into the world-beater it is today?
Leicester Cheese
Kasabian? Nah…don't buy it. I'm from Leicester and, trust me, there's nothing that justifies all that faux swagger and "Northern" cool (it's in the east Midlands, remember...)
White Lies? Enjoyed the early Teardrop Explodes references but ultimately another just-so guitar outfit - the curse of our age.
Thank goodness then for Pete Doherty and Florence & The Machine, who double-handedly restored my faith in the future of rock 'n' roll. Doherty is the most criminally underrated doomed-romantic-troubadour type since Shane Magowan, and as for Florence… she is the thinking middle-aged man's Lady Gaga, a curiously watchable mix of Kate Bush, Alison Goldfrapp, Nico and, er, Bertrand Russell. We liked her debut LP before Glasto and we just doubled our stocks in expectation of a big demand among our savvy and discerning customers.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to re-run my Glasto highlights on the iPlayer so I can sing along to Whatever You Want, by the redoubtable Quo - or was that Spinal Tap? It's so hard to tell the difference...
posted 02 July, 2009
Death of a superstar
It’s just gone midnight. There are three excitable radios and one shell-shocked television filling my head with a blur of words that don’t compute. They seem to be trying to tell me that Michael Jackson is dead, but that can’t be right, can it?
The moondance. Bubbles. Neverland. Ghouls. Masks. The Jackson 5. Plastic surgery. Military jackets. Crotch clutching. Motown. Lisa-Marie Presley. Court cases. Martin Bashir. The King of Pop. A superstar at five. Jacko dead? Don’t be daft.
They’re playing I Just Can’t Stop Loving You now. Great record. And they’re saying it again. Michael Jackson has died in Los Angeles. It’s not true, is it? I mean, he’s been a legend for over 40 years. Michael Jackson, whose show at Wembley on the Bad tour in 1988 remains the greatest live concert I’ve ever seen.
Icon, legend, genius, sad and gone
The radio presenter is trying to hold it together, dragging people out of bed to talk to him. Uri Geller has been on, his voice shaking with emotion. Tony Blackburn’s waffling. Even Paul Gambaccini is spouting platitudes and clichés. The words “icon” and “legend” rebound around the walls.
The era of downloads means that Thriller will never be toppled as the greatest selling LP of all time. And nor should it. Wanna Be Startin’ Something. Beat It. Billie Jean. The Girl Is Mine. PYT. Classic tracks all. Songs that made the world turn.
They’re playing Human Nature now, the only Thriller track that was never released as a single. It’s beautiful. And now they’ve got hysterical fans phoning in. Some bloke tells the story of going to Jacko’s hotel during a UK tour. He located his room, knocked on the door and Michael invited him in for tea and cakes and a pleasant chat. They stayed in touch for the next seven years. Another guy from the Dutch fan club rings from Amsterdam to tell us Michael was the most misunderstood person since Jesus.
Jacko enriched us
I start remembering incidents. The face-to-face interview Melody Maker once had with the great man, who didn’t look his inquisitor in the eye once and insisted that all questions be addressed through his little sister. On another occasion he suddenly appeared at a reception prior to a Wembley concert and cleared the room so he could be left alone with Danny Baker, who’d interviewed him for NME several years earlier, and proceeded to berate Danny for not staying in touch with him. “I thought you were my friend,” he told Danny. I would have been his friend but my own attempt at gaining a personal audience during a London banquet was foiled by an army of minders.
They’re playing Man in the Mirror now. Quincy Jones has issued a tribute, a former publicist is going on about the stress he was under trying to prepare for his London shows and they keep phoning in, calling him a genius. “He was Elvis, Sinatra, Sammy Davis, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Madonna, all wrapped into one…” says a taxi driver from Harlesden.
Why are they saying these things? Off The Wall. Thriller. Bad. Dangerous. These have touched and enriched all our lives. Michael Jackson’s always been with us. In the papers. In our faces. On our record players. Blaring out of our radios. This night will haunt us forever. Michael Jackson dead? Nah. It can’t be true.
They’re playing Gone Too Soon now…
posted 26 June, 2009
Yoko storms the Mojos!
Music awards…don’t you just ADORE them? ‘Course you do. I know I do.
They’re all nonsense, of course, but what is the music industry if not a vehicle for egomaniacs to preen and crow, address the nation, slap one other on the back, get trollied and throw bread rolls at the next table? I was at the Brit Awards when Jarvis Cocker stage invaded Michael Jackson’s impersonation of Christ in 1996 and Chumbawamba drenched John Prescott two years later… and who can forget Robbie Williams offering to take out Liam Gallagher or Ronnie Wood turning into Mike Tyson as a stumbling DJ Brandon Block lurched erratically towards him, drunk in charge of a pair of chopsticks? The deal is you feed their egos, ply them with booze, give them a nice new doorstop and sit back to watch them make complete arses of themselves… it’s a grand sport.
“Oi Yusuf, same again, and whatever William Bell wants…”
I only mention this having just spent a splendid evening at the Mojo Awards – sorry Mojo Honours List. Sadly, nobody behaved outrageously – a bit of spilt cocoa is about the worst you can expect when the average age of the recipients is around 109 – nevertheless it still provided some glorious vignettes. I mean, I saw Paul Weller smiling broadly giving Martin Carthy a bearhug and Yusuf Islam waved graciously at me when I shouted ‘Hi Yusuf’ across a crowded room. Manic Street Preachers were remarkably affable, too, though Duff McKagan was a tad disgruntled when I trod on his toe and Corinne Bailey Rae smiled sweetly but moved on fast when I attempted to engage her in friendly banter about the London underground.
Still, there was lots of cheeky chappiness from Joe Brown, who was more like a stand-up comedian than rock legend as he held court relating old school music business stories and I did have a very interesting conversation in the toilet with His Royal Greatness William Bell about the weather – and no, I didn’t ask for his private number.
I also shook hands vigorously with a grinning bearded bloke from Fleet Foxes. But not in the toilet. He seemed to spend the entire evening shaking hands vigorously with complete strangers as he bounded round the room fleet as a…ahem…fox. I suppose that’s what you do when your album wins every award known to mankind. His Mojo gong, though, was for best live act, which seemed to confuse him greatly. “We’ve never really considered ourselves too much of a live act before,” he said, momentarily puzzled, before dashing off for another handshaking lap of honour.
This is the great thing about the Mojo Honours List – the faintly surreal mixture of personalities and musical spheres swimming around you. I’m chatting to the great acoustic guitarist Martin Simpson about the frankly scary number of beards in the room when Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top wafts by and Martin’s gone like the wind in his slipsteam. I think he still has Mr Gibbons in a corner interrogating him about, you know, guitar things. Or maybe beards. I imagine Martin Simpson is growing a nice straggly job as we speak.
Zombie undertakers
That Guy geezer from Elbow has a beard, too, and he sure knows how to use it. Elbow have won a deluge of awards in the last year and I’ve warmed to them more and more with each acceptance speech. The songs stand up, they’ve turned down a squillion quid to promote a breakfast cereal and at the Mojo thingy they were drooling too much over an absurdly youthful looking John Cale to indulge in the usual ‘let’s hear it for me ‘cos I’m great’ shenanigans you usually get at these events.
Awards should never be left in the hands of the public (who have no taste obviously) but, perhaps dictated by pragmatism more than idealism, we saw some highly bizarre awards dished out. You can’t argue with the praise heaped on Chris Blackwell for his work with Island Records or, for that matter, the world’s oldest indie label, Topic Records.
And I certainly wouldn’t argue with the classic album award going to one of my favourite LPs of all time – ‘Odessey and Oracle’ by the Zombies, even if my teenage image of their urgent, vital pop classicism was tarnished slightly by them trooping on stage looking like a minibus of undertakers on a works outing.
Thanks for coming, love – just promise you won’t sing…
But things began to get a little odd when Johnny Marr got a gong for his songwriting – okay, fair enough, but wasn’t there some other guy involved in his best stuff? Mott the Hoople, who had a big hit a million years ago with quite a good cover of a David Bowie song, were welcomed into the Mojo Hall of Fame. Purely coincidentally they are reuniting this year for concerts, though looking at the doddery state of a couple of them you do wonder if this is a wise plan.
And then it got very odd when they came to the big one. The final climactic award of the night – the Mojo Lifetime Achievement Award. The hot rumour that had kept our table in throbbing anticipation all night was that Tina Turner was in the house to receive it and there was undisguised dismay, nay contempt, when up stepped, not Tina Turner, but Yoko Ono. “What’s that – the ‘I broke up the Beatles?’ award,” said the nameless cynic next to me ungallantly. Laugh? I nearly choked on my petit fours.
And suddenly it was all over, Yoko Ono retreated to a quiet room with Corinne Bailey Rae, John Cale, Paul Weller, Yusuf Islam, Billy Gibbons, yer man from Elbow and the beardy, shaky handy one from Fleet Foxes and they formed an impromptu band and recorded some groundbreaking beard-baiting shrieks over loud guitars and howling harmonies. It sounds fab and it’ll be released shortly on vinyl only by Classic LPs with a cover designed by Sir Peter Blake.
Or did I imagine that bit? It’s so hard to tell…
posted 23 June, 2009
The right hon. member for rock 'n' roll
Guess what? Our politicians are corrupt.
Didn’t see that one coming. Apparently, they fiddle their expenses, charge for houses they don’t have and the greedy, money-grabbing, deluded, thieving bastids get the taxpayers to pay for the moats in their castles, the cutlery in their kitchen and the porn on their TVs. It’s a good day, then, to start the revolution…
So let’s get rid of the lot of them. It doesn’t matter from which end of the political rainbow you surface – from the Billy Bragg school of socialism, the Spice Girls’ twist on Thatcherism or Blairite Cool Britannia - the whole political system stinks and needs a total overhaul. We need a new post-politics cross-cultural, multi-national government made up of people the public can identify with; people of talent and integrity with a gift for communication shaped by experiences of the real world.
We need a government of…MUSICIANS.
So. Step aside Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and that boy racer from the Lib Dems nobody recognises, here’s a cabinet that ROCKS...
PM Bono
PRIME MINISTER
Bono
A gobby egomaniac who wants to save the world? It has to be Bono. I mean, he practically runs the world already and other leaders will raise the white flag and agree to his demands whenever they see him coming. His speeches in the House will be epic tour de forces designed to grind everyone else into submission and you never know, he may be too busy running the country he won’t have time to make any more dodgy U2 records.
DEPUTY LEADER
Noel Gallagher
In the grand tradition of John Prescott, we’re looking for someone who talks a load of nonsense but is hugely entertaining with it. A rascally bit of rough who’s not afraid to speak his mind and won’t be offended – or even notice – when everyone ignores him. An old school character whose last good idea was over a decade ago - and even that recycled somebody else’s idea – but is still regarded with affection. He’s already been for drinks at No 10 so it has to be the mouth of Manchester, Mr Noel Gallagher.
CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER
Sir Elton John
Sir Elton has more money than the Treasury anyway and there’ll be no recession when he’s in charge of the budget. Free flowers for all, open house raves at No 11 and Saturday night’s all right for fighting. And if the national debt looks a bit iffy, he’ll just release another Greatest Hits box set and play a couple of giant stadiums in the Far East and the money will flow again. Loved by housewives, respected by his peers, adored by the gay community…what can possibly go wrong?
FOREIGN SECRETARY
Lily Allen
For this key position, we need a diplomat with the common touch - tough enough to speak their mind and put mad foreigners in their place but sharp-witted enough to persuade the world to make love not war. Oh, and the seductiveness to charm the pants off President Obama would be bonus too. Lily Allen will be the new Evita...
HOME SECRETARY
Dizzee Rascal
Who’s that boy in da corner then? Why it’s the Rt.Hon member for Bow rapping up the Commons with his home boyz…”I’ve heard the gossip from the street to the slammer/They’re trying to see if Dizzee stays true to his grammar/Being a minister don’t mean shit to me/I’m gonna sack da police and set the prisons free…”
JUSTICE SECRETARY
Pete Doherty
Horses for courses that’s what it’s about and few understand the judicial system better than the Rt. Hon Doherty, who’s made a close personal study of the courts in preparation for this important post. He has extensive experience of magistrates and judges and has gone inside to discover the true state of prisons, while few have more insight of the pernicious drug culture threatening our society. Once a Libertine, always a Libertine.
HEALTH SECRETARY
Amy Winehouse
They wanted her to go to rehab but she said no, no, no. Having completely mastered the tricky business of behaving like a mature adult, I reckon Amy could do with a new challenge and who better to set the country an example about the perils of sex’n’drugs’rock’n’roll and the benefits of keeping yourself in shape than Amy? Imagine her lurching into the House pursued by rancid paparazzi to deliver her first speech…free prescription drugs and beehives for all. Aneurin Bevan would have nothing on the Winehouse effect.
CHILDREN & SCHOOLS SECRETARY
Roger Waters
Can’t wait for Mr Waters’ radical first speech in the House. “We don’t need no education…” it will be the biggest shake-up in schools in this country since they abolished the 11-plus. Imagine: laser shows during maths, geography field trips to the dark side of the moon, debates about the pros and cons of hitch hiking, rock operas in Latin, statues of Syd Barrett outside every school and Shine On You Crazy Diamond sung at assembly.
WORK & PENSIONS SECRETARY
Arctic Monkeys
A tricky job in these economically challenged times requires a bit of dynamism. Some fresh blood to shake up the old guard and get the country out on their bikes looking for work. Gordon Brown once said something about the Monkeys waking him up in the mornings so they clearly have the credentials for high office and they certainly look good on the House floor. A bit young maybe so, remembering his fine song Help The Aged, I’m planning on putting their Sheffield mate Jarvis Cocker into the department as a junior minister in charge of pensions.
Sting, saviour of the universe
ENVIRONMENT SECRETARY
Sting
He’ll be a bit miffed I haven’t given him the PM job but ol’ Stingo can still save the world – or at least several rain forests – as Environment Minister filling the House with dreams of blue turtles and planting fields of gold round the back to help the economy. And when he’s finished that he can sort out the Police…
NORTHERN IRELAND SECRETARY
Morrissey
Morrissey is no stranger to conflict and when Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams start scrapping in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Morrissey will just toss his head, stop them in their tracks with a disdainful glower and sing ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’. He’ll tell the Unionists ‘You are the Quarry’ and say to the Republicans ‘Your Arsenal’ and they’ll be so dumbfounded and dazzled by his mysterious charisma they’ll sign anything.
TRANSPORT SECRETARY
Thom Yorke
Who’s gonna get Britain’s roads moving again? Not a problem. Thom Yorke already walks on water and he’ll teach us all to do the same. And if not, he’s so clever and innovative and visionary and stuff like that he’ll just invent a totally new mode of transport nobody had ever thought of before which will be clean and efficient and we’ll be able to download it off the internet. Then he’ll arrange for us all to go living in rainbows. It’ll be great.
LEADER OF THE HOUSE
Chris Martin
A job for someone of self-importance which sounds good, though it doesn’t actually mean anything at all. We need a Minister with a big reputation who can strut around looking cool with his glamorous wife making anodyne noises while the rest of the House nods sagely and sniggers behind his back. Arise, Chris Martin…
CHIEF WHIP
Johnny Borrell
You’ve got to be gobby to be chief whip, racing around at dead of night persuading those dodgy doubters that the PM is ALWAYS right and, by the way, if you don’t vote with the government your head will be served on a spit roast at Sir Elton’s next garden party. Sharp as a razorlight, Bono wannabe Johnny Borrell is the perfect choice. On the other hand Lady GaGa looks good with a whip.
THE SPEAKER
Sir Paul McCartney
Traditionally a job for an elder statesmen, widely respected by all parties and someone who can still yell “Order Order” at a decent pitch, wave a mace and bang a gavel. Sir Paul will bring his own unique character to this prestigious position (“Those in the cheaper seats clap your hands – the rest just rattle your jewellery”) giving a jolly thumbs-up when the honourable member for Bootle starts quoting Wings lyrics.
posted 31 May, 2009
I love the smell of vinyl in the morning
More vinyl, vicar?
"Daddy, what's a record?" is a refrain familiar to us here at Classic LPs as we move around the country purveying our fine vinyl wares at fairs and festivals.
The speaker's quiet voice tends to be that of an eight or nine-year-old boy, alongside his dad - let's face it, it's always dad; a mum (or for that matter a female of any description) is a sadly all-too-rare sight at our public outings. Dad (typically 35+) then proceeds valiantly to try describing the joys of the long-playing record to his rapidly-tiring offspring while all around, skinny-jeaned teens mooch past uninterested, shrill mobile ringtones sounding in the summer air.
Welcome to world of vinyl records in 2009.
Gone are the days when the teenage tribes clambered over one another to get their hands on the latest limited Smiths 7" or that new Nirvana picture disc. For those tribes have now disappeared, seduced instead by the stay-at-home thrills of computer games, the quick-fix of audio or video downloads, or more likely seeking vicarious salvation in the pages of a vacuous celebrity magazine - goodbye NME, hello Grazia!
This may sound something of a stereotyped scenario but as a snapshot I think it fairly illustrates how dramatically youth culture has changed in the last generation - as a 43-year-old graduate of the post-punk school I am only now beginning to realise how, without me knowing it, I belonged to one of the last of these tribal groups, before a host of 21st Century social forces driven largely by technology altered the musical landscape forever.
Eternally cool
Just for the record (analogue, of course), we are not technophobes or Luddites. To put it another way - with apologies to Daily Mail racists the world over - "some of my best friends are CDs". I love my i-Pod, and if the urge to hear a tune overcomes me without being able to locate it in a hurry on my groaning LP shelves, I turn speedily to i-Tunes to get the song.
We deal in vinyl records, including the higher end audiophile recordings, because we genuinely love the format above all others and we passionately believe that in most cases there is no finer way of enjoying the experience of listening to recorded music.
Would you let your six-year-old son purchase this record?
A point that seems to have been missed in the debate about our changed musical landscape is that vinyl is not "dead", or at least as dead as it was in the mid-1980s when the CD revolution took hold. Instead it has become, in the post-download world, rather something of a niche product. Record buying in 2009 is also an active lifestyle choice - to download and store invisibly, or to acquire, display and treasure? Never underestimate the innate human male need to collect and file in order!
In the bigger picture, then, it's by no means bad news for the LP record in its 60th year of mass production. We are not overly naive/optimistic, and we realise that the format battle has long been lost. But vinyl retains its eternal cool, and the hipper denizens from Bermondsey to Balamory will always seek out rare and interesting works in their original guise. A sizeable constituent of the audiophile community, too, is wise to the black arts of historical recorded sound and stands defiant, vowing never to cross the digital divide.
We are cheered whenever one of our blokey customers steps aside as his nine-year-old ploughs through the Dylan box, pulls out a decent £6 second-hand copy of Blonde on Blonde and hands over his pocket money (before you ask, we are normally moved to offer a discount).
So come on dads, come on kids, make that educated choice. It will enrich your hearts and your lives forever.
posted 23rd May, 2009
Ey up, Chuck
Ever had one of those days when it feels like you’ve entered some weird parallel universe? You know, one where newspaper taxis appear on the shore waiting to take you away?
Swarb: “I’m not dead!”
I’ve just spent an enjoyable, but slightly surreal, hour on the phone with the great fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, once of Fairport Convention, who was in a hotel room in Canada guffawing loudly as he congratulated me on the obituary I wrote about him in a national newspaper 10 years ago. “It was lovely,” he said. “You didn’t get anything wrong in it at all. Well… apart from the fact that I wasn’t actually dead…
“I was going to sue, but the solicitor said you couldn’t buy that sort of publicity.”
Not least it gave him the opportunity to come up with one of his best lines: “It’s not the first time I’ve died in Coventry…”
Putting the phone down in a daze I’m confronted by the news that Mike Tyson has proposed to Aisleyne from Big Brother; Chris Moyles’ listening figures have hit an all-time high on Radio 1 despite the irrefutable evidence that the man is a complete arse; and the Elvis lookalike in the fish shop up the road decides to engage me in an in-depth analysis of Bob Dylan’s shortcomings as a singer and why he’ll never be as great as Kris Kristofferson. I tell him Kris Kristofferson and his then wife Rita Coolidge once bought me a cocktail in a swanky hotel and regaled me with sordid tales of sex on the rocks, but he thinks I’m a nutter and drowns my cod in vinegar. God, I hate vinegar.
In the face of a world clearly out of control the only possible escape route is the random track game. Pick a track, any track. You put on a blindfold, approach the global jukebox, press away and hope you will be transported somewhere nice.
Baseball card
Hey presto, it works. Suddenly, there’s Chuck Brodsky singing about Richie Allen. You may not know Chuck Brodsky. Not many people do. And you may not know Richie Allen. He was a baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1960s, renowned for his home run hitting and his loud personality. Also one of the first black Major League stars, he became a figure of hate in Philadelphia after getting into a fight with one of the local heroes, who was sacked from the team as a result, while Richie Allen continued to shoot his mouth off and upset the authorities. Even his home fans booed him and Richie Allen took to scraping suitably rude messages into the dirt with his boot in response to them.
Chuck Brodsky: He told a good yarn
Chuck Brodsky has loads of these stories. My favourite is the one about Moe Berg, the “brainiest guy in baseball,” a Jewish White Sox pitcher who spoke seven languages, went to law school, studied maths and used the opportunity of baseball tours to Japan to spy for the US government. Then there’s Eddie Klepp, the first white man to play in the black baseball leagues; the drunken triumphs of Dock Ellis; the vilification of poor Bonehead Merkle, who cost the New York Giants the 1908 National League pennant with his catastrophic failure to touch second base during a Home Run; and Eddie Waitkus, shot by an obsessed female fan who became demented when he left Chicago Cubs for Philadelphia Phillies; and oooh, there’s loads of these stories delivered by Chuck Brodksy with the charm, simplicity and guile of a classic troubadour. Songs that send you digging into the reference books for further information because they fire the imagination and bring real lives and insightful, oddball stories to your attention in the way great narrative songwriters can.
Except they seldom do any more. The great narrative song has become an unfashionable art that’s sadly fallen into decline under siege from a generation who either want to bury their wit and drama within stomping bands or write fey, meaningless twaddle like James Blunt, James Morrison and anyone else called James. It’s all Bob Dylan’s fault, of course. All that stuff in the ‘60s inspired a generation of droopy copyists writing gormless nonsense because they thought they could be spokesmen for a generation, too, and everyone else went ‘He’s not the Messiah he’s a very naughty boy!’
But hey, Bob Dylan’s top of the British album charts. And he’s writing story songs. Just like Chuck Brodsky. The great, totally unknown Chuck Brodsky. Writing about him now I go off in search of his wonderful The Baseball Ballads album, but it’s missing. Completely disappeared. I think it’s been stolen. I suspect the guy who works in the chip shop (who swears he’s Elvis). Either him or Mike Tyson. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Aisleyne from Big Brother was involved too.
posted 13 May, 2009
It's all good
He's been called a poet, he's been called spokesman for a generation, he's been called a Godlike genius, he's been called Judas, he’s been called a bad husband, he's been called pretty much everything under the sun. And STILL we're obsessed with a man who celebrates his 68th birthday in a couple of weeks. Why's that then?
“Is it still rolling, Bob?" Dylan contemplates studio long-player no. 34...
Was it because his songs and indeed Bob Dylan himself was always shrouded in such mystery? Those acerbic, sneering press conferences in the early days…they made him interesting. But not as interesting as all those years when he didn’t say a word to anybody. Which, of course, made it even more interesting when he did start engaging with the media again.
And then suddenly there was a Martin Scorsese documentary, an autobiography and, hey, a radio show too! He was just a regular guy all the time… And the key to it all, which people invariably refused to believe, was that for Dylan it was just about the music. Always just the music.
One of the most insightful parts of Chronicles, Dylan's excellent autobiography, was when he wrote of shedding his disillusion with himself by adopting a rhythm guitar technique learned long before from the bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
This was the point he instructed his people to book him on an eternal tour that took him back to the same venues in the same towns in the same countries year after year to enable him to discard the shackles of his past and build an entirely new audience whose perceptions wouldn’t be tainted by his back catalogue.
He played some old songs, sure, but they were reinvented so radically as to be almost unrecognisable and with his musical passion suddenly fully restored, Dylan’s renaissance of the 1990s was under way. In fact, it unleashed such a fervour of creativity, he’s barely been off the road since, pausing only for an inconvenient stop at the hospital for a wee while to treat a rare heart ailment.
Oh mercy
It’s rare for anybody over the age of 65 to come up with anything new or original. In fact, it’s rare for anyone over the age of 40 to come up with anything new or original and as soon as the imagination or energy falters, you become a boring has-been of no use to audience or record company.
It’s only when you hit your late sixties that you officially become a legend. Some new young gun covers one of your songs, your work is rediscovered and reassessed, you can dine out on your past achievements and everyone will flock to see and hear you in case you don’t make it back next time.
As Dylan enters his 69th year, the muse has yet to desert him
It was never that way with Dylan. Almost uniquely, he’s driven himself forward at every twist in the road like a man obsessed, as if the past is forever on his tail threatening to devour him. Sometimes he’s blundered around a bit in the process and his catalogue includes his fair share of turkeys, but certainly in recent years his music has had the confident feel of an artist still growing and developing, honing a highly individual style with hefty roots in blues and rockabilly, but which hasn’t ever felt retro or nostalgic.
Like his old friend Johnny Cash before him, the ravages of age have given his voice a new dimension and an extra depth to his songs. This is someone who has clearly walked the walk…and a hell of a walk it’s been, too. And, like Cash again, Dylan is using his advancing years to powerful effect.
Together Through Life, his 33rd studio LP, is out this week and it will surely come to be regarded as one of his greatest. The old boy rouses up some growly lust on Jolene, some spirited authentic old rocking on Shake Shake Mama, the forlorn penitence of a hopeless drunk on If You Ever Go To Houston and the wry musing of a mischievous old rascal on It’s All Good; while all the while there’s the brilliant David Hidalgo of Los Lobos giving it that evocatively upbeat Tex-Mex accordion feel that makes it almost irresistible.
At times it sounds like a classic undiscovered old Chess or Sun record from 50 years ago, yet it sounds utterly timeless as well. Exactly the sort of record you’d want to hear him playing on his own radio show. Long may there be no direction home.
posted 1 May, 09
Crazy horse
This week a 68-year-old former record producer was convicted of second degree murder in Los Angeles after firing a gun into the mouth of a fading wannabe actress as he apparently indulged a macabre taste for Russian roulette.
He's a rebel: Spector was the enfant terrible of pre-Beatle pop
Rightly enough, he’ll probably spend the rest of his life in prison and, with no shortage of evidence suggesting many years of misogyny, bullying, drunkenness and threats with firearms, nobody need waste any sympathy on him.
And yet…this was the man whose first No 1 at the age of 18 was the Teddy Bears’ classic To Know Him Is To Love Him in 1958. The man who wrote Spanish Harlem. The man who set up his own record label at 21 and gave us Da Doo Ron Ron and He’s A Rebel by the Crystals. And Be My Baby and Baby I Love You by the Ronettes. And You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers. And River Deep Mountain High by Ike & Tina Turner. The man who invented the fabled Wall of Sound, which re-defined the role of record production and elevated the mono 45 into an art form. The man who made the greatest Christmas LP ever, released on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. The man who later went on to work with the Ramones, Leonard Cohen and the Beatles, forging a close relationship with John Lennon which erupted into an epic studio conflict that reputedly led to him absconding with the tapes of Lennon’s Rock’n’Roll album.
There's no getting away from it. Phil Spector was blessed with genius. There are those who will always dispute this, claiming his trademark atmospheric barrage built on massed instrumental layers had all been done before by Stan Kenton and in any case the credit should go more to arranger Jack Nitzsche than Spector himself. But the records detailed above are all unequivocally magnificent and Spector's influence on the evolution of pop music is both profound and indelible.
Mad, bad, dangerous
Guns 'n' poses - Phil wigs out in court
So watching him, so bewildered, frail and ridiculous in his smart black suit with the bright red tie and preposterous wig, listening to the guilty verdict in that LA court room was deeply sad and affecting. We don’t require our heroes to be saints and the hint of a dark side may even be regarded as additional cache in the murky glamour that accumulated around Spector’s eccentric, reclusive, mysterious persona down the years. The line between genius and madness is notoriously fine and we don’t want, need or expect someone as radically innovative as Spector to be a regular guy next door - life on the edge is something of a requisite in this territory and would Phil Spector have been such a creative force without the demons driving him? Plenty of icons have dubious personal lives, but ticket sales for Sinatra’s numerous farewell tours were never afflicted by his reputed Mafia connections and Michael Jackson will break box office records on his endless run of concerts at London’s O2 this summer without anyone worrying unduly about what really went on at Neverland.
Yet my copy of Gary Glitter’s Greatest Hits hasn’t had much of an airing lately and I find it difficult listening to Ike Turner without thinking of him beating up Tina. And second degree murder? That’s pretty hard core bad behaviour, so will the madness of Phil Spector and the image of Lana Clarkson’s dead body destroy the legacy of one of the most important figures in modern music?
It makes him a desperately tragic and pathetic figure, but I've just listened to To Know Him Is To Love Him by the Teddy Bears and it's still one of the greatest records of all time.
posted 17 April, 08
Boris flies the flag
Starting to feel the pinch and in need of a good wheeze last May, the good people of London played a surreal joke and voted a cartoon toff called Boris Johnson as the city’s Mayor.
Wiff waff's coming home... Boris 'down' in Albion
To be honest, Boris has been a bit of a disappointment so far. He doesn’t yet seem to have had a tipple too many and burped in public, or laughed at foreigners’ funny accents and threatened to invade Luxembourg and he hasn’t insulted Liverpool lately. Why, he didn’t even ride around London in a red nose and an exploding bicycle for Comic Relief, although to be fair, he did wear a comedy wig. Oh sorry, that was his real hair…
The army of ‘advisors’ shadowing his every move have obviously sensed that while their careful nurse-maiding has prevented the deluge of hilarious gaffes we were all so gleefully anticipating, Tory think-tanks and focus groups went into overload to come up with something to put the fun back into Boris. And what was their genius idea? They discovered that Britain has a patron saint called George. He was a Roman soldier, born in Turkey, beheaded in Palestine, who never set foot on English soil in his life and concocted some ridiculous story about killing a dragon to make himself popular. We even have to share him with Greece, Ethiopia, Georgia, Lithuania, Russia and Portugal, but hey ho, George has his own special day and while they work out how they can change its name to St Boris Day, the Mayor’s office have decided to entertain the peasants by going big on St George.
So on April 25, the cream of the vibrant new English folk scene – Eliza Carthy, Seth Lakeman, Demon Barbers, Jim Moray and Kathryn Tickell among them – will gather at Trafalgar Square to play a free concert for the good people of London…or at least the bemused throng of winos, Japanese tourists and invading football fans who can normally be found in the Square on a Saturday afternoon. They neglected to tell him yer actual St George’s Day is really two days earlier on April 23, but no matter, the court of King Boris is more than capable of re-writing history.
Being partial to the drama and intensity of English folk song and having withstood several decades of ridicule singing its praises while the more groovy kids sniggered and tossed their heads pityingly the way you do with an incontinent granny at Christmas, I am thrilled by this sudden elevation of English folk music to its unexpected new status as official morale booster to the capital. But the pride is tempered by another, more humble but somehow more substantial event, already long planned to take place a few miles further north in Kings Cross – commemorating the 175th anniversary of the demonstration by 100,000 people at Copenhagen Fields (now the Caledonian Rd) demanding a free pardon for the six Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported to Australia for the mortal sin of secretly forming a trade union. The event proved to be a watershed in British labour history, striking a blow for free speech, which Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy, Leon Rosselson and other musicians with leanings to the left feel deserves their support and patronage two days after St George’s Day.
Little Englanders
It doesn’t mean those appearing at Trafalgar Square aren’t empathetic to the cause being espoused in Kings Cross – even the briefest conversation with Eliza Carthy will disabuse anyone of the notion that she has any fondness for Boris Johnson or any other politicians of a blue persuasion – but it offers a genuine dilemma both for artists and their audience who won’t wish their colours to be nailed to any particular mast. Indeed, the promoters of the Boris bash have gone out of their way to present a very modern, forward-thinking, multi-cultural view of English folk in their choice of bill, which includes the UK-born Bengali singer, sitar player and DJ Bishi. Ghanaian rapper Bubbz will also be on stage delivering his spectacular interpretation of the ancient incest ballad Lucy Wan with Jim Moray while the others on the bill have all shown an enlightened attitude in reflecting the English tradition in a modern, multi-faceted fashion. The event should be great for them and good for the music in general, perhaps even disabusing the floating voter of all the hoary old clichés that still cling to the music.
England's dreaming... of a BNP-free land
The motives of all the participants are undoubtedly honourable and the results potentially hugely positive. And yet…the figurehead at the helm is still Boris the Buffoon and after painstakingly disrobing so much of its stuffy image in recent years, the last thing it needs is to litter about stray ammunition for some knobhead tabloid or right wing opportunist to equate an indirect affiliation to a Tory Mayor with odious little Englander flag-waving values of jingoism and worse. Poor Steve Knightley of Show of Hands has already had to wrestle the lyrics of his song Roots down from the BNP website after they appeared there without his consent and wilful misinterpretation is a real danger for any vaguely political song, especially one that debates Englishness.
So here’s to a good day out for everyone at Trafalgar Square on April 25. But for a glimpse at the true heart of the folk revival, it’s probably worth a trip up the road to join Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy and the others paying homage to the Tolpuddle Martyrs at Kings Cross.
posted 30 March, 2009
Big boots, silly hats and the U2 conundrum
I may have got this wrong, but I hear a vague rumour that U2 have a new album out. Something about lines on the horizon?
Hurray! (boo!) Another U2 album - fantastic! (Oh Gawd...)
It’s not like there's been a big marketing campaign or anything - those boys really shouldn't keep hiding their lights under all those pesky bushels. Go on U2 - don't be so shy. Whack some posters on London buses, do interviews on the radio and TV, get the BBC to reschedule their programming so we hear wall to wall plays of the new record, persuade the record company to invest the national debt in promotion, talk every entertainment magazine and colour supplement in the living universe into putting you on the cover.
The perfectly natural reaction is to despise the whole U2 hoop-la. I mean, Bono undeniably has an ego the size of a banker’s annual bonus and anyone who cosies up to world leaders, religious icons and Piers Morgan with such alacrity earns our deepest suspicion, if not our most damning scorn. U2 – okay, Bono – has perfected the illusion of a rebellious rock entity that has somehow infiltrated and double-crossed the system, posing as traditional rock monsters while perverting the course of rockdom in some larkish modern form of antidisestablishmentarianism (which is reputedly the longest word in the English language and I am now officially fulfilling a lifetime ambition to include it in a written piece, even though I don't really have a clue what it means - so well done, me.)*
In fact U2 play the game as much as any other superstar band who wear big boots and silly hats – probably more so, given the carefully considered slyness of their strategy. Extreme fame was always the name of the game and they’re still achieving it in spades while somehow maintaining a degree of cool, critical respect, relevance and timelessness. That’s quite a trick to pull off in the first place – and quite another to sustain for so long. You never quite know if they’re part of the problem or the solution; are they subverting the system or reinforcing the myth of invincibility, even as the rock industry crumbles around them?
Royally pissed
This disingenuousness is entirely deliberate. The laudable causes Bono so publicly and vociferously espouses outweigh the utter hilarity of watching his ubiquitous appearances in the company of rulers and ruffians, even while back in Dublin they still grumble under their breaths about some of their business practices and the perceived pettiness of them sueing former stylist Lola Cashman over ownership of the stetson hat Bono wore on the Joshua Tree tour.
Showman, shaman, drinking buddy - that's our Paul
They are a mass of self-created contradictions, but still I can’t think unkindly of U2. Parachuted into Dublin to interview them prior to the release of The Joshua Tree, I found them in a rehearsal studio belting out an old Peggy Seeger song relating the real life tragedy of the Springhill Mining Disaster. There was only me watching them but Bono was in full performance mode, prancing and grimacing and emoting in front of me like it was Live Aid all over again. Afterwards I interviewed them all individually – and found Larry Mullen particularly engaging – and then Bono took me to the pub, where he embarked on some lively banter with the locals and got me royally pissed, phoning me later to make sure I'd made it through the night. It was an encounter that left an indelible mark – but that's what Bono does. He goes around leaving indelible marks wherever he goes, and his charisma shines on.
He also remains an ultimate showman, and the excitement that envelops U2 is roughly equatable to the risks they routinely undertake with such dangerous relish. That Zooropa tour – lavishly coloured Trabant cars decorating the stage and all – was one of the most extraordinary live shows I’ve ever seen and even when they’ve been tosh – anyone remember The Fly? – they’ve pushed the boundaries in daring ways. Would Coldplay or Keane ever release an album called How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb? Somehow I doubt it, brothers and sisters.
So U2 have a new album out. It's called No Line on the Horizon. It's full of Edge’s fat guitar hooks, big swooping songs and other dark mysterious ones with grungey bits and odd rhythms, while Bono adopts the pose and plays Bono in all his frustrating, thrilling glory. Yet the new album still somehow has a notably individual and markedly different spirit because no U2 album sounds like any of the others. What other band can honestly say that? I like the new album. You may do too. Or you may not. Life around U2 is nothing if not a conundrum.
But Bono's not that great. I've studied the lyrics and nowhere, NOWHERE, does he manage to slip in the word antidisestablishmentarianism… **
* Editor's note: I am indulging Colin this once, but I vow that never again will this word appear on our website.
** Damn... that's the last time!
posted 19 March, 2009
My Hi Fidelity moment
Towards the end of last year I turned 33. I didn't consider it a landmark birthday and frankly it's the sort of age where one year melts into all the others. I didn't really celebrate - I spent the day at work.
But it struck me that day (shortly after someone asked how it felt to be 33 and I grunted "same as 32" in reply) that I was four months short of being 33 and a third. And that did seem special. After all, it's a third of the way towards the 100th birthday I fully expect to not get to. And, well, it's the speed an LP plays at.
So, four months on, now I've reached 33-and-a-third, what better point to look back at my favourite LPs? (Though due to my age I don't think I own a single one on vinyl. Let's pretend CDs play at 33-and-a-third RPM too...)
I'm not claiming these are the 10 best albums ever, just my favourites. I've limited myself to one per artist and have ended up excluding some of my favourite singers and bands simply because there isn't one album by them I always turn to. No Elvis, no Stones, no Bowie. But that's just the way it goes with lists like these, isn't it?
10) Deacon Blue -Raintown
Deacon Blue - Raintown
One of my friends recently referred to Deacon Blue as being a "guilty pleasure". And I know what he means. In a list in which I'm not celebrating anything by Sinatra, Wonder or The Smiths, can I really flag up the brilliance of Deacon Blue?
Well, yes I can. Raintown, their debut, is a great album.
There are decent songs throughout but it's tracks five to eight that define Raintown. Loaded, When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring), Chocolate Girl, Dignity. Four pieces of great, soulful, understated late 80s pop. Masterpieces for those in the know in an era when most people were listening to Stock, Aitken and Waterman creations or Bon Jovi.
When Chocolate Girl or When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring) come on my iPod if I've got it on shuffle, I'll almost always click back and play them again when they've finished. That's some sort of unofficial recognition of a good song.
There were a handful of good Scottish bands around in the late 80s. Nowadays they have more good tennis players. And that just can't be right.
9) Macy Gray - The Trouble With Being Myself
Macy Gray - The Trouble With Being Myself
This is not really my sort of music. I'm not a fan of R&B, well not post-60s or 70s R&B anyway. But this is an album I love. Like most people I first heard of Macy Gray when the glorious single I Try came out in 1999. I bought On How Life Is, the album that was on, and enjoyed it. In 2001 I bought the follow-up, The Id, and thought it was rubbish.
But when I heard the 2003 single She Ain't Right For You, a fantastic string-laden ballad similar in many ways to I Try, I detected a return to form and shelled out for the album. And I played it for death for months.
Track two is appalling, but there are some absolute gems on here. I like When I See You and She Don't Write Songs About You but perhaps the highlight is My Fondest Childhood Memories.
Tell me, what is there not to like about a song about your house being flooded as a child, being grateful to the plumber for fixing it but subsequently murdering him because he was "plunging" your mother?
Genius.
8) Belle and Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Belle and Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress
This was the other album I played to death in 2003. I'd always quite liked Belle and Sebastian but this album was different. Better different. And there was one main reason for that - the production of Trevor Horn.
Dear Catastrophe Waitress has the same quirky, imaginative, funny, gentle and melodic songs that Belle and Sebastian have been producing all their careers, but it sounds so different as an album. Polished, tight, slick and more pop-like than ever before, the main focus is the catchy tunes even though the whimsical humour still drips audibly from so many of the lyrics (how it could not when there's a track called Roy Walker?).
Some Belle and Sebastian fans didn't like this album, I liked it all the more for the same reasons they veered away from it. It had all the strengths of the band plus a veneer of class and excellence that had seemed absent before. I love it.
7) Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
I used to be a closet Elton John fan. But I don't bother hiding any more. My name is James and I like the music of Elton John.
Well, some of it anyway. True, I wouldn't care if I never heard anything he's made in the past 25 years ever again. And I'd rather hammer nails into my own eyes than even think about that whole Diana Candle in the Wind episode.
But when Elton John was at his peak he was fantastic. And when he was at his peak, he made this fantastic album.
Ok, so it includes Candle in the Wind. But in its original, untainted-by-royalty version that song is almost acceptable. And Funeral for a Friend (oh the irony) is an 11-minute opening epic, Bennie and the Jets is great, the title song is a Reg and Bernie classic, Grey Seal is a largely-unknown gem and Jamaica Jerk-Off is a bizarrely likeable slice of cod reggae with a ludicrous title.
And as for Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, well, come on. If that was by someone like, I don't know? The Who, it would be considered one of the great rock songs of the 70s.
Forget that he went on to record Circle of Life and sang a duet with Blue. In 1973 Elton produced an album of utter brilliance. He's a national treasure.
6) Paul Weller - Stanley Road
Paul Weller - Stanley Road
I love The Jam but they were at their peak when I was about four. And while their music is many things, aimed-at-pre-school-children isn't one of them.
Hence I first became aware of Paul Weller when he was frontman of the Style Council and it was only several years later that I came to appreciate The Jam. And as a result, and at the risk of sounding a bit like Alan Partridge revealing that his favourite Beatles album is "The Best of The Beatles", I tended to listen to the well-known singles and to compilations rather than studio albums, which I've only dipped into more recently. So there's no Jam album on this list, although Sound Affects came close.
Weller's solo success after a few years in the doldrums was effectively a third career for him. Stanley Road was his third solo album, following on from Wildwood, which brought him back to the world's attention. And, while I wouldn't claim 1995 saw Weller at his peak, because his peak probably revolved around him standing on a stage with Rick Buckler and Bruce Foxton playing something like Going Underground, Stanley Road is an album that smacks of a man knowing he was at the height of his powers.
Wildwood's success had made him realise - if indeed he ever doubted it - that he was still great and was loved by both his old fans and a new younger audience. And so launching into the glorious The Changingman, track one of Stanley Road, Weller might as well have been saying "You've heard me before and you liked it, well just wait till you hear this album". It's an album of sheer brilliance, total confidence and utter class. He's surrounded by great musicians and they produce a mix of crashing rock numbers, like The Changingman and the similarly fantastic Out of the Sinking, and beautiful slower tracks such as Broken Stones. There's soul, funk and ballads - the exquisite You Do Something To Me was one of the great love songs of the 1990s.
Weller is still knocking out good albums and he won the Brit Award for best male solo artist this month, for goodness sake. But he's never topped Stanley Road. He shouldn't worry though, because not many other people have either.
5) Oasis - (What's The Story) Morning Glory
Oasis - (What's The Story) Morning Glory
That's right. The second album. Not the first one. The second one.
Don't get me wrong, Definitely Maybe is a brilliant album. I just prefer Morning Glory.
It might be because it came out a few weeks into my first year at university and always reminds me of that wonderful time. Along with a handful of others from the likes of Pulp, Blur and Weller, it was like a soundtrack to that year of stepping out into the adult world. But it's not that memory alone that made me include this on the list. It really is a good album.
It features the epic Champagne Supernova, the jaunty She's Electric and my favourite Oasis song, Don't Look Back in Anger. At the time it used to annoy me that more people seemed to rate Wonderwall, which was still great but not in the same class.
I've heard Noel Gallagher say he can't remember a thing about recording this album. And for that I feel genuinely sorry for him. Because if I couldn't remember just listening to it, I'd be gutted. So imagine what it must be like to have been the mastermind behind a work of art like this and to not be able to recall a single moment of writing it, recording it and unleashing it upon a grateful world. The millions in the bank probably make up for it, but even so?
4) The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
What can I say about this album that hasn't been said already? Everyone knows it's a masterpiece - and they are right. The Beach Boys were clearly the closest thing America had to the Beatles - the progression from early boy-band pop classics to late-60s experimental brilliance, they even developed matching late-60s big beards.
Just listen to it. From the opening notes of Wouldn't It Be Nice it's a fantastic album. Great melodies, glorious harmonies, intelligent meaningful lyrics, brilliant instrumentals such as the title track and a couple of all time great songs in Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows.
But it's the sound above all else that makes this album stand out. There is just so much going on. Brian Wilson's production is akin to Phil Spector's wall of sound and he's clearly influenced by him. It's the work of a genius at the top of his game, which makes it all the more of a tragedy that it drove him a bit mad.
3) The Kinks - The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
The Kinks - The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
The Kinks are my favourite band and this is their magnum opus, so how could it not be on my list?
What an album. Brilliance from start to finish.
I once claimed, while drunkenly hosting a pub quiz night, that the opening track - The Village Green Preservation Society - should be England's national anthem. And, unlike with many things I've said while drunk, I was so right. The Kinks are that most English of English bands and Ray Davies' songwriting is at its best and its most parochial on this gloriously English album.
"God save little shops, china cups and virginity." "God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards." "God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties." How much better would life be if this was what we played every time we took part in an international sporting event, instead of that dirge we use at the moment? What better message to send out to the world about who we are?
Of course there's more to the album than that one song. Picture Book, Village Green and All of my Friends Were There are among the other gems, as is People Take Pictures of Each Other. More lyrical genius - "People take pictures of the summer, Just in case someone thought they had missed it, And to proved that it really existed."
The tragedy behind this sad, reflective and wistful album is that hardly anyone bought it. Of course, those of us who love the album love it anyway. But it should be one of the 1960s' most fondly remembered albums, The Kinks' Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds. And it's a great shame that it isn't.
2) The Beatles - Abbey Road
The Beatles - Abbey Road
Abbey Road is my favourite Beatles album, just edging out Rubber Soul. The first "half" of the album is great on its own - Come Together opening it, George Harrison's two finest hours in Something and Here Comes The Sun (yes I know this opened side two in pre-CD days) and even Ringo's moment in the spotlight on Octopus's Garden.
But most Beatles albums have a string of great songs like this. What sets Abbey Road apart for me is what follows - the beautiful eight-song 16-minute medley. Each composition flows seamlessly into the next despite the fact they were separately written by John, Paul and George at a time when the band were hardly still functioning as a unit. The combination of Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End ought to be regarded as one of the highlights of the Beatles entire catalogue rather than just three fairly obscure album tracks never played on the radio.
As if all of that wasn't enough, Abbey Road's also got the coolest album cover ever.
The last music the Beatles recorded together - not a bad way to go out was it?
1) Blur - Parklife
Blur - Parklife
The album that heralded the arrival of the Britpop era is my favourite album, for many reasons. Firstly, it's a collection of great songs. Secondly, it's another that reminds me of good times in my youth. And thirdly it marked a return of decent music to the charts and the radio in 1994.
I was combining my A levels with working part-time on the music counter in Woolworths. The shelves were awash with utter tripe from the charts at the time - Chaka Demus and Pliers, Bitty McLean, Pato Banton, Cotton Eye Joe, Bon Jovi's best of collection, UB40 covering Elvis, the second coming of Meatloaf, Wet Wet Wet at number one for four months with Love is all Around. What shocking times.
Then along came Parklife. I have to admit Blur's first couple of albums had pretty much passed me by at the time but Parklife didn't. Fine musicianship, humour, excellent production and a clutch of great songs, how could it? Hand-in-hand with Pulp's His'n'Hers and supported by Suede, it ushered in a classic era for British indie music, paving the way for the likes of Oasis and Supergrass with their fine debuts. Elastica, Sleeper and others followed however brief their brilliance might have been. It helped Paul Weller's resurgence be as successful as it was.
It was a good time to be young. I was 18 when Parklife, His'n'Hers and Definitely Maybe came out. Stanley Road was released when I was 19. Blur, Oasis and Pulp's follow up albums came out in a two-month period that straddled my 20th birthday. I was still 20 when England hosted Euro ?96 and 21 when Labour unseated the Tories in 1997. A fantastic era in which to be young and English. People who sneer at Britpop sneer at my youth and I'm not having that.
As for this album itself - what an album. Sixteen great and varied songs over 52 minutes. Girls and Boys is a glorious, vibrant opener which, as a single, warned us what a fine album this was going to be. But there's not a bad track on here. The other singles are all great - To the End, Parklife and End of a Century. And the rest of the album is awash with classic songs too, the likes of Tracy Jacks, Badhead, Bank Holiday, Trouble in the Message Centre and This is a Low.
It's said that Blur came to dislike this album when they moved on to more sophisticated stuff a few years later. If so that's a great shame. Because it's a masterpiece.
posted 15 March, 2008
Dinner with Jacko
So. Capitalism is crashing, the planet's melting and we’re all doomed. Never mind, eh, 'cos Michael Jackson’s back! "This is it," he told us several dozen times, announcing that he'd return in July for his first farewell tour. "This is it." Exciting stuff.
Alistair McGowan or Lenny Henry? Hard to tell...
My first thought watching him stride confidently on stage to embrace Dermot O'Leary (Dermot O'Leary?!?) at that weird O2 place in Legoland, sorry Docklands, was… IS IT REALLY HIM? I mean, who could really tell? It's not like he's been visible in recent years and our perception is so shaped by impersonators and, with a new macho chin and everything, it could have been anyone from Lenny Henry to Alistair McGowan up there saying 'This is it' in a voice sounding suspiciously less squeaky than of popular legend.
Jacko seemingly can get away with anything – and so can whoever it was impersonating him. That court case? Oh, never mind that now, the king of pop is back! He’s broke, he's a freak, he's not of this planet, don't care, not listening. All that murky innuendo about his private life and dodgy personal habits…yeah, yeah, yeah…best not think about that, he's the king of pop and this is it, the final curtain. Regrets? We've had a few, but too few to mention to Martin Bashir.
The point is, Michael Jackson is unreal… in more ways than one. This gives him the sort of iconography of someone long dead, like Elvis or Evita or James Dean, where the IDEA overwhelms all remnants of the artist, let alone the person within. He doesn't merely have an alter-ego, he IS the alter-ego. There is no primoris ego. He’s been a performing seal, leading the fantasy existence of a superstar since the age of six and there is virtually no reality to grasp. There never really has been.
Sing Michael, sing
There is nothing about Michael Jackson for mortal souls to recognise in themselves and this is always irresistible. It's why they flocked to East London the other day going ga-ga for hours on end every time a red curtain twitched and they thought they were going to glimpse the great pop deity. It's why watching Michael/Lenny saying 'This is it!' for five minutes was such a thriller. And it's why, recession or no, Jacko's concerts will sell out in seconds.
I had dinner with Michael once. Well, me and a couple of hundred others. It was around the time of Bad and Jacko was being presented with some daft honorary award by the Lord Mayor of London. As editor of the pop mag No 1, I was one of the guests at the celebration dinner that went with it, finding myself at the back of a long hall with Michael a speck in the distance. Fortified by a several glasses of Lord Mayor wine, the editor of Smash Hits and I decided that as proud representatives of Her Majesty's press, it was our duty to introduce ourselves to the great man.
It's hard to remember now, but he used to be really good you know...
We got within ten yards of him when two bow ties – one looked like Mike Tyson and the other Giant Haystacks – suddenly barred our path. “Can we help you?” they said. I told them I wanted to shake Michael Jackson’s hand. My Smash Hits chum said we’d come bearing gifts for him. A cunning plan, but it faltered when Mr Haystacks enquired what these gifts may be.
Ah. The only thing we had in our pockets were crumpled up doodle-ridden copies of our respective magazines, which we proffered in true frankincense and myrrh stylie. With barely disguised contempt, they examined our offerings, politely promised to ensure they would duly be delivered and dispatched us back to the rear of the hall.
The next time I saw Michael he was performing the most inventive, polished, dramatic and exciting pop concert I’ve ever seen in my life (though, let me tell you, Destiny’s Child ran him close a few years later.) And let’s not forget that Thriller is not only the best-selling album of all time, it’s still one of the best.
So welcome back oh king of pop. I look forward to the farewell shows.
And the comeback ones too.
posted 7th March, 09
Do you really want to Hurt me?
Cash's tearjerker is the new I Will Survive in Karaoke land
Now here’s the thing. I’ve just been to the pub. Just for a quick one, like. Inside there was music. And squeals of laughter. A hen night in full cry. Some fat bloke on the stage belting out a scarily loose approximation of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, reading the words off a big screen in front of him.
Aha, I thought, it’s karaoke night. Nowt wrong with that. A couple of pints later, with a couple of the hen nighters bumping’n’grinding their way through Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and the oily guy in the bobble hat lasciviously dancing in front of them threatening to be next up with My Way, I’m seriously thinking of giving Me And Bobby McGhee a go.
And then it happens. The hens collapse in a flurry of giggles to be replaced by a square-jawed bloke with silver hair and the jowelly look of one who’s halfway through a bender with Shaun Ryder and Shane MacGowan. I’m betting he’ll either go for Elvis or Van Morrison, but no, I lost that bet and he slurrily announces that tonight, Matthew, he’s going to be Johnny Cash. The pub approves, the guy cackles and for a moment I think he is Shaun Ryder. We brace ourselves. You can’t go wrong with Johnny Cash and. What’s it to be then, matey? Folsom Prison? I Walk The Line? Ring Of Fire?
Oh dear God, no, I don’t believe it, he’s gone for Hurt. Hurt. A Nine Inch Nails song which, as his extraordinary life ebbed away, Johnny Cash transformed with agonising minimalism into his own tragic death mask. And now this overwrought git in a suit stained with God knows what is yelling those desperate, heartbreaking lyrics like a leering sailor in front of a table full of drunken teenagers taking photos of each other on their mobile phones. Look, I’m not a killjoy but this whole horrible scenario needs to be terminally eradicated.
Mad men
I thought Simon Cowell and Alexandra Burke had committed the ultimate sin against music with that unspeakable X-Factor cover of the sainted Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but Hurt as a karaoke classic? Heads must roll. Maybe some sort of protection order needs to be placed on our classics. All this immediately after Bob Dylan’s unfathomable decision to allow Blowin’ In The Wind to be used in a TV ad for the Co-Op.
Je ne regrette rien, apart from this lousy ad
That’ll be the same Blowin’ In The Wind which inspired and became the soundtrack to civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam war protests then. People’s life paths were dictated by that song. Ideals were forged and a generation of rebellion was driven by that song. Is nothing sacred any more? Dylan was pretty much the last thing we could rely on as the corporate monster devours our musical heritage, gobbling it up and churning it out into a marketing tool. The world has indeed turned upside down.
It seemed like a good wheeze all those years ago when they had Ladysmith Black Mambazo flogging beans and the standard of television itself seemed to go up a notch when John Lee Hooker’s magnificent Boom Boom unexpectedly floated out of our screens selling Carlsberg lager. I can even raise a smile every time Woody Guthrie’s Car Song comes on selling Audis and Duffy’s Diet Coke ads are acceptable enough. But Nina Simone selling yoghurt, Nick Drake marketing Volkswagens and one of the best Beatles tracks (Revolution) flogging Nike? Well, it’s just plain wrong.
And whoever came up with the idea of putting those ridiculous and insulting sub-titles telling us to go to Specsavers under footage of Edith Piaf singing Je Ne Regrette Rien should be put on a rocket and sent to Planet Tacky with Simon Cowell and that bloke in the pub tonight desecrating the memory of Johnny Cash. There they might understand the real meaning of Hurt.
posted 24 February, 2009
Gilding the Lily
Damn, damn and thrice damn the curse of celebrity.
Pictures of Lily - they're everywhere!
So programmed are we to entertain the tabloid/Heat culture notion of fame as a cartoon parade of performing seals falling out of night clubs, spitting at the paparazzi, making fools of themselves on reality TV and generally behaving badly purely for our amusement and titillation, it’s small wonder we take their vacuousness for granted.
In such a climate it came as quite a shock to discover that Lily Allen was releasing a new album, It’s Not Me It’s You. I mean, with all those spats with Peaches Geldof, an infamous blog, her own gaudy TV chat show, daily news updates on the state of her health and love life and a series of choice soundbites about sex, drugs and religion, I’d quite forgotten she was also a singer. Maybe she had too. “I’d like to be known for something other than having my photo taken,” she told NME tellingly t’other day. After all, it is three years now since she flounced among us with her cheeky chappess debut album Alright, Still.
With mischievous lyrics, bouncy tunes and her rather endearing trademark ‘mockney’ vocal style, it was a seductive, captivating and refreshing LP that rightfully galloped away with our hearts and established her as one of the freshest talents of the new era. We are now flooded with a spate of matey female singers telling it like it is, but from Kate Nash to current media darling Florence Welch of Florence & the Machine, none of them would exist without Lily’s fearless original pouts with attitude. Even the Ting Tings and Laura Marling would still be singing in front of the bedroom mirror were it not for the Allen effect. Yet even when Alright, Still came out in 2006 they were already trying to stick her in boxes.
Lily, oh Lily
I was on the Mercury Music Prize panel that year and Lily’s inclusion on the short list seemed a no-brainer. Indeed, such was the warmth and strength of character conveyed by her record, she looked short odds to win the whole thing outright. At the crucial panel meeting everyone seemed to love her, until a dissenting voice spoke up to enquire why a posh girl like Lily was singing in such a clearly contrived faux street manner. Suddenly we were talking about her famous dad, her big house, her privileged background and the morality of affectation; and when the final votes were counted, Scritti Politti, Guillemots, Lou Rhodes, Editors and Sway were on the list, but Lily Allen was not.
From Dusty to Kirsty, Ms Allen follows a fine pop lineage
Yet listening to her bold, witty, arresting, rude, provocative, impossibly catchy, thoroughly entertaining new LP It’s Not Me, It’s You the thrilling magic of hearing her first time round returns and none of the rest of it matters. In fact, the contradictions that so eagerly congregate round her also contribute to her right to be acclaimed Britain’s best pop star. She’s 23, mixed up, loves and hates her fame in equal measures, thrives on and despises celebrity and shamelessly utilises pop culture while kicking and screaming and gobbing in its face. She comes from a direct lineage of magnificent British pop singers from Dusty Springfield to Kirsty MacColl, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth expression, a gorgeous voice and a sharp kick in the groin to follow. Lily is indiscreet and fun and sassy and controversial and…well, everything pop stars should be but seldom are. Why, her new album even has a song about George Bush and everything. And, Lily being Lily, it’s called Fuck You.
And you gotta love somebody with a third nipple and a Homer Simpson tattoo on her arm…
10 GREAT LILYS
- Lily Allen.
- Lily Marlene, wartime classic.
- Pictures of Lily, The Who.
- Lilly Langtree, actress and royal paramour.
- Evangeline Lilly (Kate in Lost!)
- Dennis Lillee, Oz cricketer.
- Lily Tomlin, acting royalty.
- Lilly Drumeva, bluegrass singer and musician.
- Tiger Lily, 80s female rock band.
- Lilli the German doll, inspiration of Barbie.
posted 9 February, 2009
May You Never be forgotten
It’s been a grim year so far for immortality.
Martyn was difficult, cantankerous - and inspirational to his legions of admirers
Dave Dee, Ron Asheton of the Stooges, Billy Powell of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones and now John Martyn. None of them made it through the night and, with each passing, it feels like the backdrop to my world and the soundtrack in my head is being slowly and systematically dismantled. The "What I Want Played At My Funeral" list is now being re-written daily. Now that the anti-Christ Simon Cowell has catapulted Hallelujah out of bounds, Kate & Anna McGarrigle’s pertinent Why Must We Die? comes ever more firmly into focus. ("We are human, we are angel/We have feet and wish for wings/We are carbon, we are ether/We are saints, we are kings…Why must we die?")
So soon after the passing of his great contemporary and early inspiration Davy Graham, the loss of John Martyn is particularly distressing. I last saw him a year ago receiving a BBC Lifetime Achievement Award from Phil Collins who bore a message from Eric Clapton saying something along the lines that John was "so far ahead of everything, it’s almost inconceivable". Backed by, among others, Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones playing mandolin, he sang Over The Hill and then his classic love song May You Never. "I’m a celebrity at last," he cackled.
His weight had ballooned shockingly and, in a wheelchair since his leg amputation, he was like a rampaging galleon erratically ploughing through the waves, still evidently unpredictable and dangerous to know. "And I said I wouldn't get legless before the gig," was his comment on receiving a Mojo award later in the year.
Nobody could deny John Martyn was difficult. Tales of his cantankerous behaviour, bad manners and uncontrollable excesses are legion. He was once so drunk he fell offstage in Spain ("but I still got three encores") and he and his regular touring partner and close friend Danny Thompson notoriously terrified any hapless hack unfortunate enough to cross their path. Even Phil Collins described him as "infuriating."
Untamed lust
But since when did we want our rock heroes to be saints? Bad behaviour is surely the POINT – well, it was, for John Martyn. Here was a man whose mastery of the acoustic guitar and singer-songwriter idiom would have surely given him a comfy career for life, but John wanted to do more, so much more. He distorted his guitar technique with pioneering use of the Echoplex delay device, experimented with electronics and dived headlong in a free-form jazz direction, comprehensively blowing the opportunity of a mainstream breakthrough set up by the yearningly beautiful and spacious Solid Air album. Now you wouldn’t do that if you wanted to go to heaven. Then there was the 1980 album Grace & Danger, which so graphically documented his marriage break-up and his descent into a desperate drug and drink hell that Chris Blackwell at Island Records initially thought too painfully personal to be shared with the public.
"I said I wouldn’t get legless before the gig..."
There were also his adventures in reggae with Lee Perry (the One World album) and other sparks of genius along the way (Glasgow Walker from 2000 is excellent) and he continued to blitz away at musical boundaries wherever he encountered them, even involving himself in dance music and making a rare chart appearance collaborating on Deliver Me with Sister Bliss in 2001.
The indiscipline, irreverence and untamed lust for adventure that embarrassed, upset and infuriated his friends and foes alike were the same characteristics that made him one of the most brilliant, inspirational and groundbreaking artists of our time.
John Martyn, we salute you. Shine on you crazy diamond.
posted 30 January, 2009
Obama saves music biz - exclusive!
Brothers and sisters, I have a dream.
Coolest of dudes: Did you see how he danced to Stevie Wonder?!?
Saint Barry’s in the White House watched adoringly by his personal handmaidens, the Angel Beyonce and the Angel Aretha, proud bearer of the world’s greatest hat; and 89-year-old Pete Seeger is on the steps of Capitol Hill with Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land - including the verse that most folks miss out: ("As I was walking, I saw a sign there and that sign said No trespassing/But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing/That side was made for you and me").
Saint Barry says to Pete Seeger: 'Is this how it was when you marched arm in arm with Dr King singing We Shall Overcome, and Bobby Dylan played Only A Pawn In Their Game and then went straight home and crucified William Zantzinger?'
And Pete smiles and says: “No Mr President, it’s better.” And Saint Barry ruffles Bruce’s hair, puts a concerned arm round Pete, tells him to wrap up warm and says: “Is there anything I can do for you boys? You know, once I’ve sorted out the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, global warming and the world economy?”
They scratch their heads for a while and then Pete and Bruce come up with the answer. "We want to be part of the future, Mr President," says Bruce, "and the future is hip hop. Can you give us the gift of hip hop?" Saint Barry looks at them doubtfully for a second, then catches the eye of the fragrant Michelle, remembers he’s the coolest dude on the planet and says: "Yes, we can!"
Bay of gigs
So Bruce hitches up his pants the way he remembers the great MC Hammer did back in the day, and Pete gets his grandson to teach him the words to NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (arranged in three-part harmony on the banjo so the audience can sing along), and they return to Capitol Hill the next day to collect the gift of hip hop. Saint Barry jogs into view looking a bit tired, having spent the previous night walking across the Hudson River blessing His People and winning Strictly Come Dancing, but the swooning crowds are forced apart by the strength of his charisma. "Follow me boys," he says, leading them to Air Force One.
Grandfather of soul MLK made it all possible brothers and sisters
They clamber aboard the plane to be greeted warmly by Timbaland, will.i.am and Chuck D "Hold on tight fellas," says Saint Barry as he sits in the pilot's seat and starts the plane. “Where we going boss?" says Bruce. "No," replies Saint Barry, with a twinkle in his eye. "YOU'RE the Boss. I’m just the President and I’m taking this plane to Cuba."
They land at Guantanamo Bay. Pete and Bruce look worried and Chuck D is panicking. "Look I don’t care if you is the motherfreakin’ president, dude, I ain’t wearing no orange boiler suit for NOBODY!" Saint Barry smiles and ushers them off the plane.
There are no orange boiler suits. No barbed wire. No prisoners. Just Ry Cooder leading the Buena Vista Social Club into a joyous carnival parade. Fidel Castro dances with Gloria Estefan; Shakira raps with the Rev. Al Green; Lenny Cohen and Eminem lead the conga; and Chuck Berry and Little Richard are singing "Wapbamabama Obamarama…"
"So Guantanamo Bay is no longer a detention camp?" says Bruce. "Well," says Saint Barry, "we do have a small wing at the back for extreme enemies of the state. You know, Simon Cowell, James Blunt, the Pussycat Dolls, George Bush …" "Fair enough," says Bruce.
Gaza Trip
Pete is thrilled. He feels young again. "Shucks, we DID overcome!" he shouts and, just for a moment through the throng, he swears he glimpses Woody and Cisco Houston and Utah Phillips with Dr King and Rosa Parks waving and smiling at him. "This truly must be the gift of hip hop," he whispers.
"No, you don’t understand," says Saint Barry. "There is no hip hop. There is no folk music. There is no jazz. There is no rock’n’roll. It is all one music. Just as we are all one people. We are the world."
"Where to now, Mr President?" says Bruce. "The Gaza Strip I think" says Saint Barry. "Do you think we can heal that?"
Bruce and Pete and Chuck look at each other. "Yes we can," they proclaim in perfect harmony. "Yes we can!"
posted 23 January, 2009
All we hear is... Lady Gaga
January, eh? Who needs it?
Cover up pet, you'll catch your death...
Come the revolution January will be abolished and we’ll hurtle straight into February. Except Feb is pretty crap, too, so we’ll just do away with winter completely and launch into the year with the first frolicking lamb.
See, just as the worst thing about December is all those ridiculous end-of-year polls, the worst thing about January is all those start-of-year predictions. How it works is that the music hacks all get tanked up at a super secret convention in Skegness on New Year’s Eve and thrash out who they’ll be bestowing greatness on in the coming year. And even more than in economics, prophesies in the pop industry are self-fulfilling. Well, they are if enough mags and papers bleat from the same hymn sheet. There’s got to be some explanation for Adele.
This year’s chosen ones are Lady Gaga and Florence & the Machine. How do we know? Because a bunch of hacks with turnips for brains and an unhealthy obsession with their column inches tell us so. They all want to successfully predict the next big thing and New Year is traditionally the time to do it, so there’s a massive collusion in which writers find out where the big marketing budgets are going and all pick the same things. That way nobody gets caught out and the rest of us plebs will think they’re really clever and prophetic. Then, with the excited anticipation and the full weight of Her Majesty’s Press riding on their ability to brainwash the public into believing they’ve chanced on something blindingly hot and new, the marketing departments up their game, and bingo – dreams are made and prophesies fulfilled.
Porn-again cretin
So. It has been decreed by Those Who Know that 2009 is the year of Lady Gaga and Florence whatever her name is. The future, apparently, is female attitude. The future is sexy beats and menacing lyrics. The future is rhythm’n’bangles. The future is electro-synth-pop-disco-beats. With pouts and face paint. Oh joy. Lady fricking Gaga with her blonde wig, oh so daring garish make-up, threatening sexuality, clothes horse mentality and hi-energy dance pop. CONTRIVED? Surely not. What do you mean Christina Aguilera’s been doing this for years?
The future is in the past, reckons bluesman Steve
Britain’s great white hope for 2009 is Florence & the Thingy. Flo Wotsername at least has a sense of humour and can knock out the odd clever couplet, but it’s still only Lily Allen and Kate Nash with glitter and a bit of a simper. And who else are their lordships the critics telling us we must worship this year? More beats and bleeps and shiny pop from yet another female with attitude – this time carved in Blackpool rock - in the shape of Victoria Hesketh. Or Little Boots, as she’s being marketed in the best traditions of focus groups and Jane Horrocks. Leave it out, chaps, we all know it’s Kate Bush with a Stylophone. Or, to put it another way, Goldfrapp
But hey, recycling’s good and Lady Gaga, Florence Nightingale and Little Boots (are made for walking) are all surely worthy recipients of the mighty critics’ approval and the 15 seconds of fame that comes with it. Crisis in the music industry? Not with these razor sharp A&R departments around
See, my very close friend Seasick Steve, who I met for the first time last week, reckons rock music is effectively dead because everything’s been done a million times and the only way young audiences can discover new music is by going back to the future, and their thirst for freshness and originality leads them to pre-war blues, jazz, folk and country. Audi are currently flogging cars on a TV commercial featuring Woody Guthrie’s children’s song, Riding In My Car. Laugh? I nearly fell off the sofa when that came on. So Seasick Steve could be right. What am I talking about? Seasick Steve was a hobo who lived on the streets, jumped freight trains and has a magnificent beard. Of COURSE he’s right.
posted 16 January, 2008
The lonesome death of protest songs
You who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears, take the rag away from your face. Now ain’t the time for your tears…
Dylan's artistic wrath sentenced Zantzinger to life
William Zantzinger died this week, overnight becoming the least mourned person to star in song since Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler? Well, either that or Tramp The Dirt Down, Elvis Costello’s deliciously vicious celebration of the death of Margaret Thatcher. Oh no, that was just a dream – she’s still alive.
Bob Dylan was on his way home after singing at a civil rights march with Martin Luther King in 1963 when he read about the drunken son of a wealthy tobacco farm owner who attacked a black maid with a wooden cane because she didn’t serve his bourbon fast enough at a society ball in Baltimore. The maid, 51-year-old Hattie Carroll, died eight hours after the assault and her killer, William Zantzinger, was sentenced to just six months for manslaughter by a Maryland justice system which had barely acknowledged the end of slavery, let alone segregation. With the moral outrage of Dr King ringing in his ears, Dylan wrote one of his most iconic songs, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, in response to the case. It appeared on The Times They Are a-Changin’ album later that year and while Zantzinger received a short incarceration from the judiciary, he got a life sentence from Dylan.
It’s one of the few early Dylan songs the great man still occasionally performs in public (albeit almost unrecognisably) and there’s been no shortage of cover versions to keep fanning the flames. Martin Carthy and Christy Moore have both recorded it in recent years, though my favourite cover remains that of one Susan Gottlieb, a Californian singer songwriter who reinvented herself as Phranc in the 1980s and went on to form one of the more intriguing sub-genres of music known as “queercore”. I interviewed Phranc once and was almost buried alive by the lesbian massive who followed her everywhere, insisted on sitting in on the interview, cheered her every utterance and gave me a running commentary on my questioning technique.
Days like these
As for William Devereux Zantzinger, he tried to paint himself as the victim of circumstance who DID deserve our tears, claiming he merely “tapped” Hattie Carroll, who was already a sick woman, and threatened to sue Dylan – who he described as a “no account sonovabitch” and, even better, “the scum of a scumbag” – claiming he had wilfully twisted the facts for artistic gain (an argument that won unexpected support from one of Dylan’s leading biographers, Clinton Heylin). He’d have had more of a case if he’d spent the rest of his life trying to make amends, but Zantzinger’s infamy pursued him when he came out of prison, moved into real estate, fell foul of the IRS and was found guilty of charging exorbitant rents to poor black families living in squalid properties he didn’t even own.
Send no flowers...
Was there ever a person more vilified by a song than Billy Zantzinger? No – but there bloody well SHOULD be. From Bruce Springsteen to the Manic Street Preachers, Steve Earle to U2, plenty preach a good sermon and portray their sincere yet non-specific ideologies. Be gone with the bland politics and the reasoned social conscience! Jeez, the world’s in bits, ravished by mad wars, mad bankers or just…madness.
Musicians and songwriters have the power to do something about it, to focus attention and shape opinion. Get angry! Now, more than ever, there are many who more than deserve whatever the wrath of popular culture can throw at them. We’re all broke anyway so let’s name names. Put the boot in. Now is the time for our jeers.
And may William Zantzinger not rest in peace...
posted 09 January, 2009
Whole lotta hypocrites
So here I am in the west of Ireland kicking the old year into touch and putting the world to rights in traditional manner with the new best mate I met somewhere between the fourth and fifth pint.
Brown-nosing a stairway to Buck House?
I’d only gone to the pub for a quiet read (since you ask, it’s a terrific book called Songs From A Dutch Tour by Chip Taylor, the man who combined writing Wild Thing and Angel of the Morning with being a professional gambler) but you don’t drink alone for long in Ireland and soon we were clapping one another on the back as we debated the greats of Irish music…Sean O’Riada, Seamus Ennis, Andy Irvine, Christy Moore, Sinead O’Connor, Paul Brady, Ronnie Drew and the godlike Shane MacGowan.
We’re decreeing sainthood on Shane when my companion says to me: “You know yer man, Bobby Plant? That Zeppelin feller with the angry tonsils?” I nod sagely. “He’s only gone and got himself a gong…” I look baffled so he continues. “It’s ferkin barmy if you ask me. I mean, yer man Geldof’s one thing – his records may have been god-awful shite, but he did save the world so fair play to him, but you shouldn’t get a gong for Stairway to Heaven, it’s not right, is it? I mean, Rolf Harris sang it better than him.”
Further research reveals that Robert Plant hasn’t got a knighthood so we don’t actually have to bow and scrape and call him “sir” whenever Zep or one of Plant’s dodgy world music solo records gets an outing on the player, but he has been awarded the CBE. No, I’ve no idea what that means either, but it probably involves wearing a top hat, an audience with Her Maj, an inflated ego and the chance to throw his toys out of the pram and send his medal back in protest if the government displeases him.
Return to sender
That surely is the one justification for any rock star to accept one of these ludicrous awards. John Lennon got it right, returning his MBE in 1969 in protest at the wars in Biafra and Vietnam and “Cold Turkey going down the charts”. A whole raft of doddery old colonels and retired headmasters from Tunbridge Wells who’d returned their own medals four years earlier in protest at The Beatles getting MBEs in the first place were suddenly on the phone to Buck House trying to get their medals back.
More recently the mighty English folk singer Roy Bailey wanted to return his MBE medal in protest against the Iraq War…but although he hunted the house down, he couldn’t find the bloody thing (he did eventually locate it at the bottom of a drawer and soon found another excuse to return it over British foreign policy in Lebanon).
John Martyn, ready to raise some hell around the palace
It would be churlish to deny aged lollipop ladies and saintly charity workers their moment in the regal sun and there’s something quaintly perverse about referring to a sweaty Olympian athlete as DAME Kelly Holmes (‘cos there ain’t nothin’ like a dame) but any self-respecting rock musician should have no truck with the New Year Honours. Not Sir Paul McCartney, not Sir Mick Jagger, not Sir Bono (jeez, how they howl at THAT honorary award here in Ireland), not any of these egotistical recipients.
Rock was the music of outrage and rebellion and people like Jagger and Robert Plant were the anti-christs. That was the whole POINT! To see them now pumping out their chests in pride as the medals are pinned on is to denigrate not only their own musical histories, but the whole ethos of rock as the instinctive knee-jerk music of soul, integrity and conscience. And why are the lead singers always singled out anyway? For good reason “Sir” Keef was the people’s knight long before Queenie ever got her sword near Mick’s puny shoulders and if Plant gets an MBE, why not Jimmy Page? You’d be hard pushed to make a claim for Plant being the most creative in that partnership. When the Palace came knocking, Benjamin Zephaniah told them where to stuff their British Empire and Robert Plant – and Courtney Pine come to that – should have done too.
Yet…one gong being awarded at this year’s New Year Honours provides such potential for carnage that you can’t help but shriek with joy and relish the prospect. An OBE for John Martyn!! Are you SURE Mrs Windsor? Have you not heard the legendary stories of John on the lash? Do you not KNOW of this man’s fabulous reputation for bad behaviour? John Martyn with an OBE in his hand terrorising the corgis and making the page boys cry doing wheelies racing around the Palace in his wheelchair at 90mph…it almost makes the Honours system worthwhile.
posted 31 December, 2008
I'm dreaming of an alt. Christmas
I believe in Father Christmas. No, really, I do.
Official: The greatest Christmas song of all time
I mean, Greg Lake has committed quite a few crimes against good taste, but I Believe in Father Christmas had Lake – with a bit of help from some geezer called Prokofiev – offer a rare voice of dissent in the annual barrage of seasonal triteness.
Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Christmas trifle, of course. Festive hits are meant to be naff – that’s the whole point and one grasped so determinedly by everyone from Bing Crosby to Slade. But respect to the alternative festive song, too, whose patron saint is obviously Fairytale of New York (and well done to Gordon Brown’s government for officially renaming it “The Greatest Christmas Song Ever”). I’m happy to report that Shane and the rest of the Pogues are alive and still rattling the floorboards on their now annual jaunt around the principality. “I still think we’re one of the best bands in the world,” Spider Stacey told me only t’other day, and I’d never argue with Spider.
Back in another century the sainted Ray Davies also had a good stab at pricking the ho-ho-ho mentality with the cynical Father Christmas, describing the mugging of a department store Santa, while Randy Newman struck a discordant note with Christmas in Cape Town. But nobody played the yule better than Snoop Dogg with his enticing opening line, “It’s 12.30am Christmas Eve, I’m out with the gangstas and the thieves…” on Santa Claus Goes Straight to the Ghetto.
Get stuffed
Sufjan Stevens has made something of an art form out of scowling while all around him don party hats – check out his Worst Christmas Ever if you feel in danger of becoming too cheery. But Tom Waits is probably the king of the anti-Christmas song, duetting with Peter Murphy on the magnificently evil Christmas Sucks (“This time of the year makes me sick to my guts/All this good cheer is a pain in the nuts”), and subverting Silent Night into the brilliant grimey and graphic Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.
Mark E. Smith - he's snarling angels instead
For more quality Christmas miserablism try Bert Jansch’s moody In The Bleak Midwinter, the Long Blondes’ little-known break-up classic Christmas is Cancelled and the sardonic Christmas Morning by Rufus and Martha Wainwright’s irrepressible dad Loudon (“And the prince of peace was born on a Christmas Day/In the little town of Bethlehem not so far away/From where a multitude has gathered in a warlike way/On Christmas morning…”) And just for a laugh as you sit down for dinner, whack on Robin Laing’s I’m the Man Who Cuts the Turkey’s Throats at Christmas. That should knock the stuffing out of lunch.
But if you really want to put the boot into Christmas, try The Fall’s entertainingly snarling Hark the Herald Angels Sing! Don’t throttle granny, kick the cat or spew over the Queen’s speech. Let Mark E. Smith do it for you. Happy holiday, party people…
posted 20 December, 2008
And the winner is...
So this is Christmas. And we’ve just begun. We know this ‘cos everyone’s Poll Dancing…
This season's must have, dahling?
Yep, ‘tis the season to be jolly - not to mention outraged/thrilled/shocked/delirious and thoroughly confused - as every magazine in Christendom expects us to empty our wallets in pursuit of the fabtastic releases they decree the best of the year. The end of year poll is the critics’ ultimate vanity, falling over their own egos in their desperation to define themselves by their selections and confirm to their adoring public the vital role they play as cutting edge arbiters of taste.
I well remember one high profile critic uttering the immortal words “Stop the press” as he attempted to amend his selection to accommodate an 11th hour inclusion of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns after a particularly sordid all night encounter with a bottle of brandy and the playful wife of a prominent Brit rock band bass player.
Anyone foolish enough to be guided by these polls will end up a (very broke) gibbering wreck. Hype is self-perpetuating and the experts are ludicrously occupied by the opinions of their peers. The result: get your credit cards out for this year’s must-have LPs by Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and Santogold and Elbow and TV On The Radio Kings Of Leon and, well, all the others currently being recommended as 2008-defining treasures by Those Who Know. The accompanying blurbs also bring us additional awards for excessive use of the word “sonorous” (which appears so often you’d be forgiven for thinking the band’s full name is Sonorous Fleet Foxes) while it’s only a matter of time before the story of Bon Iver and the log cabin is turned into a musical.
Polls apart
One entertaining by-product of these wretched polls is the spats they cause. On Melody Maker years ago the painfully earnest champions of indie music threw their toys in the air and threatened a mass walk-out when the editor of the day – a curious character called Mike Oldfield (but not that one) - decided to wind them up by sending out a memo informing them he was overruling their democratically elected choice (probably Comsat Angels, they were all obsessed with Comsat Angels) and MM’s album of the year would be…Aerosmith. They stormed into his office as one yelping “You’re joking, right?” totally ignoring his quiet reply of “yes” to carry on ranting for several hours.
A critic, yesterday
Things are even more sensitive in the specialist genres, where this year’s fRoots magazine critics poll result has caused an hilarious civil war. The result of the poll – which doubles as World Music album of the year – was announced on Radio 3 last week by a very terse and quietly seething Charlie Gillett.
Always vocal in his denunciation of British folk music, he was nonplussed to discover that the traditional domination of West African records in this award had been broken by a young Englishman, Jim Moray with his rather fine Low Culture LP. Which later provoked Gillett into insulting not only Moray and everyone who’d bought his record, but triggered an hilariously ill-tempered argument about whether England should be considered part of the world amid tetchy cries of “musical apartheid” and “cultural racism”.
So…end-of-year polls are rubbish really. Have nowt to do with ‘em. With musical self-discovery so easy, we just don’t need them. Critics are just fans with a soapbox. Ignore the lot of them and make your own choices. The only list that matters is the one in our own heads.
And now if you’ll excuse me I’m just off to compile next week’s definitive Classic LPs album of the year poll…
BUT JUST IN CASE YOU ARE INTERESTED HERE’S AN ASSORTMENT OF ALBUMS OF THE YEAR…
THE TIMES
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
THE GUARDIAN
Dear Science - TV on The Radio
SPIN
Dear Science - TV on The Radio
BILLBOARD
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Q
Only By The Night - Kings of Leon
AMAZON
For Emma Forever Ago - Bon Iver
MOJO
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
YAHOO!
Kensington Heights - Constantines
UNCUT
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
ROLLING STONE
Dear Science - TV on The Radio
OBSERVER MUSIC MAGAZINE
For Emma Forever Ago - Bon Iver
MTV
Stay Positive - The Hold Steady
NME
Oracular Spectacular - MGMT
E-MUSIC
The 59 Sound - Gaslight Anthem
*Editor's footnote: Stop the press... Poll latest... Our album of the year (for we know how you care about these things) is... Nick Cave's Dig Lazarus Dig. Buy it now! Or don't! The choice is yours!!
posted 14 December, 2008
Making the unmissable missable
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Laughing Len: Too precious for a BBC ad
The BBC. That once fine arbiter of moral values and good taste, a byword for quality, integrity and professionalism, has really gone and done it this time. Go and hang your head in shame, auntie.
No, nowt to do with Russell “lewd phone calls” Brand turning the airwaves red hot with tales of getting jiggy with Manuel’s granddaughter, I am talking of the fourth, the fifth and the minor fall. I am talking of Mr Leonard Cohen, Mr Jeff Buckley, and very possibly the greatest song of all time (excluding Be-Bop-A-Lula obviously). Look, BBC, you did good getting that band Various Artists to cover Perfect Day in aid of the Children in Need appeal and, let’s not be churlish, your complicit role in that historic unification of Girls Aloud and the Sugababes on the 2007 Comic Relief record Walk This Way was a touch of genius.
But…but…Hallelujah? It’s such a fragile, mysterious, spiritual song that using it to promote the BBC iPlayer – as admirable a service as this undoubtedly is – is just plain WRONG. I feel somehow dirty and sullied every time that ad blights the screen, peppering Lenny Cohen’s spiritual vision with shots of wacky personalities, who at least have the decency to look ashamed by the slaughter of a classic song into which they’ve been lured. Hallelujah shouldn’t be used in a telly ad. It just shouldn’t. In fact, it shouldn’t ever be allowed on television at all. It’s too precious.
Mystery intact
Legend has it that Noel Coward had a line written into his will insisting that his masterpiece Mad About the Boy should only ever be sung by a man. Of course, few men have ever sung it and such a dictum would mean we’d now be deprived of one of the most evocative vocal performances of them all from Dinah Washington (though he was still alive when she recorded it). Yet the song clearly held a meaning so much deeper than the sum of its parts, you kinda wish ol’ Noel’s wishes had been respected – all the more so in view of its use to flog jeans on telly in 1992 and its subsequent descent into a karaoke classic.
This is what I fear now for Hallelujah. It’s a song that seems to carry a different resonance, another meaning with each telling. And, with its allegories about sex, religion and music, you get the feeling the blessed Lenny Cohen lay in a shattered, exhausted heap after carving out every line, every word, in the two years he reputedly took to write it. Theologians and musicologists animatedly analyse a narrative that alludes to the story of King David and makes tantalising references to “the secret chord” while Lenny himself has described it as “the affirmation there is a will we can’t control.” Glad that’s cleared up then.
No more hallelujahs
There have been over 200 cover versions of Hallelujah and, apart from the odd execrable demolition job by the likes of Katherine Jenkins and – sorry – kd Lang, the ones that have risen to the surface are those which consume themselves in the lyric and get lost in its sense of wonder. Jeff Buckley (the one currently being used by the BBC), John Cale, even an overly operatic Rufus Wainwright and – my favourite obscure version – by Simon Ritchie (no, not Sid Vicious) have all done Lenny proud by protecting its mystery.
But now…and I am so distraught I can barely type…I hear an ugly rumour that the X-Factor winner’s Christmas single is to be…Hallelujah. Bring me the head of Simon Cowell. NOW.
posted 05 December, 2008
This blog kills fascists
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
We can be stupid, just for one day
What else would have inspired the feeding frenzy as word spread that the identity of the entire British National Party membership could be revealed at the click of a mouse, postcodes and all? Don’t pretend that you weren’t one of those who spent four and a half hours trying to discover if the dodgy bloke next door with the Adolf haircut was a BNP fiend or if the geezer in the tyre shop who swore under his breath at you because you couldn’t get your car on the ramp was hiding a dastardly secret behind swastika eyes.
And we all waited with baited breath to discover if, among the shameful parade of judges, teachers, vicars and Millwall supporters, one of our rock heroes would be unmasked as a right wing bigot. Happily, none were, but it raises the thorny question…what if they had been? Would the revelation that your favourite artist harboured odious private convictions impinge on his or her musical credibility? Would you immediately go out and have a ceremonial burning of the previously revered vinyl in the manner of America’s great holier-than-thou moral majority when Lennon made his ‘Beatles are bigger than Jesus’ crack? I mean, you don’t hear too many Gary Glitter records played on the radio these days.
Then again, Eric Clapton survived the shame of his infamous drunken stage rant supporting mad right winger Enoch Powell; David Bowie recovered from the nasty Nazi salute incident at Victoria Station in 1976; and Elvis Costello’s career managed to remain intact after apologising for his appalling racist slur on the great Ray Charles during an unseemly bar room row in Columbus, Ohio in 1979 (worse still, though he’s never apologised for his despicable recording of Charles Aznavour’s She.)
Otis blue
Rock is an unashamedly capitalist industry and its most successful inhabitants have houses all over the world, fast cars, raging egos, Filipino hand maidens and beautiful models who get credited with “handclaps” on their albums. Yet when we tried to find a rock star to stand up and be counted as a Tory party supporter to argue the toss against Billy Bragg and Paul Weller in a rock in politics debate inspired by Red Wedge a million years ago, it was well nigh impossible. We ended up with David Mellor and Stewart Copeland of the Police. There was blood on the carpet after that one.
This man was never knowingly a paid-up member of Rock Against Racism
They like to be seen to do the right thing. Support the right causes. Champion the correct issues. But our heroes often let us down. It’s the nature of the beast. They get drunk, they take drugs, they talk bollocks, it’s what being a rock star is all about. The truth is they’re vulnerable to far more ridicule for being nice to night porters and keeping their noses clean than for punching out photographers. Just ask Amy Winehouse. There lies the slippery slope to Katie Melua and James Blunt. Personally I’ve never quite recovered from going on the road in North America with metal band Saxon anticipating epic nights of rock’n’roll madness and wanton excess only to discover the most excitement was a visit to Jimi Hendrix’s grave where they became almost orgasmic over the beauty of the rhododendrons. The only thing Saxon wanted to do after gigs was to have a nice cup of tea and an early night. It made their cock-thrusting black leather look a bit pathetic frankly.
But is the knowledge that someone is a complete asshole sufficient to devalue their role in rock history? Do we still boogie to River Deep Mountain High knowing Ike Turner beat up Tina? Can we still climb the Wall of Sound with Phil Spector knowing what we know now? And is it okay to dance to the apparently homophobic records of Bounty Killer and Buju Banton? Personally I find it difficult to listen to Bryan Ferry without a hefty desire to vomit since I encountered him at a Mojo award ceremony speaking proudly of his son Otis’s parliamentary invasion in support of fox hunting. He should have been incarcerated instantly for bringing the iconic name of Otis into disrepute and made to call himself Cecil. Or Enoch. Or Eric.
As the Manic Street Preachers so rightly said: If you tolerate this your children will be next. Now let’s go firebomb the BNP.
posted 25 November, 2008
Prog: It’s time to forgive, absurd beards and all
Ever wanted to throttle a record reviewer? Of COURSE you have! It’s only natural.
Can you find it in your heart to overlook this man's excesses?
You’re not a real music fan unless you want to wreak painful torture on somebody who’s given free records and fistfuls of silver to write about them… and swiftly dismisses your favourite as exciting as a stale steak and kidney pie when the merest cursory blast of the opening chords will instantly convince anyone with a brain that it’s a life-changing experience.
Take pity on the poor reviewer. He/she/it was probably drunk, ingesting something unspeakably narcotic or undergoing a painful sexual initiation involving garden gnomes and grannies from Essex while burrowing around for the usual clichés. Trust me, it happened all the time in the 1970s. Why else would I have predicted Rod Stewart’s Sailing single would sink without trace and suggested The Eagles’ Hotel California was the bland leading the bland?
Still, even that’s not as bad as one esteemed former Melody Maker writer who shall remain nameless (called Richard Williams) reviewing the empty sides of the two pre-release disc acetates of John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, assuming it was a double LP. He took the erratic crackles, scratches and engineers’ test signals occupying sides two and four to be one of John’s more outlandish experiments and – much to Lennon’s delight – gave them an enthusiastic review. Well, it WAS 1969. You have to wonder if Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music had a similar genesis.
Bum note
They’re a peculiar breed, but reviewers are expected to make instant judgements on music that can only truly be evaluated months or even years later. And even then history has an uncanny habit of re-writing itself as times and fashions change. Take Abba. Ridiculed by Eurovision, reconstituted by chart success (and Agnetha’s bum), reviled for having too much success, consigned to history as vacuous pop, resurrected by the gay vote, immortalised by screen, stage and screen again, and now loved by all. Until someone comes along to debunk them.
When Abba were in the full flush of their initial fame, the groovy kids thought the only bands making truly important music were the ones with absurdly long beards, extreme costumes and grandiose ideas. King Crimson. Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Yes. Quintessence and Gentle Giant, bless ‘em, who cited one of their primary influences as the avant-garde 15th/16th Century French Renaissance writer/humanist François Rabelais. Can’t imagine why the Clash and Sex Pistols felt the need to come along and blow them out of the water.
John’s Wedding Album: Avant-garde noodlings and emptiness
But with the traditional record industry now in pieces, Johnny Rotten a lovable pantomime dame and the punk wars a dim and distant memory, maybe, just maybe it’s time to forgive and forget. Let’s CELEBRATE Rick Wakeman’s stupid hair and mountainous keyboards. Let’s hire Wembley and re-construct his finest hour – Myths & Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on ice. Fripp out to Robert Fripp! Dress as a pixie and hop on one leg to Jethro Tull.
And most of all, let’s make chums with Genesis again. Take a deep breath, bite your tongue and admit that The Lamb Lies Down In Broadway – their 1974 concept album about mythology, juvenile delinquency and sex – is pure genius. As Greg Lake once so succinctly put it, I believe in Father Chistmas…
Editor's footnote: Genesis 1970-75 is a five-LP box set featuring the best of the Gabriel era. Lovingly remastered on high-performance 180 grams vinyl, it is released in January.
posted 17 November, 2008
President of cool
In the glory glory words of the sainted Leonard Cohen – hallelujah.
"Barry O'Bama" - a big hit with the Irish voters
There’s going to be a black man in the White House (and a white man in Hammersmith Palais) so let’s celebrate…before he has a chance to screw up.
Never mind the politics, here’s Barry O’Bama (as he’s affectionately known in Ireland, where they claim him as one of their own due to his great grandfather being a shoemaker from Moneygall, Co. Offaly). Barry’s destined to be a fabulous president. How do we know this? Because the music doesn’t lie.
There are currently about 1,000 different songs online lauding the qualities of the US President Elect and while it will take you two days solid and probably send you doolally trying to watch/hear them all, the range is impressive. Everything from will.i.am’s rather fine Yes We Can to songs in Swahili, Japanese and Spanish. While the hapless John McCain – widely ridiculed for naming his favourite record of all time as Abba’s Dancing Queen - was sued by Jackson Browne for using his Running On Empty in a TV ad, and upset Chuck Berry for trying to adopt Johnny B. Goode as a campaign anthem, Obama had U2’s Beautiful Day proudly blaring out at his rallies. So yet again, Bono saves the world…
Fatal blow
Musical taste is clearly important to the credibility of any leader (why else would Gordon Brown have ludicrously claimed to be a big Arctic Monkeys fan?) Jack Kennedy (who romped to office in 1960 to the strains of Frank Sinatra’s High Hopes) famously enjoyed Marilyn Monroe crooning to him; Tricky Dicky Nixon had a collection of 2,000 LPs delivered to the Oval office where he also dished out badges to Elvis; Jimmy Carter ruled America by soothing his nerves to the sounds of Dylan, the Allman Brothers and various operatic LPs; Ronald Reagan was nearly laughed out of office when he announced he was a big Springsteen fan (Bruce was furious when Reagan used Born In The USA to try and get himself re-elected in 1984); the original George Bush adopted and completely misunderstood the message of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , while his son George W’s terrified iPod apparently houses Van Morrison, John Fogerty and Eric Clapton amid a blitz of bland country music. Oh, and Bill Clinton was constantly whipping out his sax for a blow (no, that was my job – M. Lewinsky).
Reaganomics was far from The Boss' mind in '84
So there isn't much competition, but with Obama effortlessly namechecking Howlin’ Wolf, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Yo Yo Ma, Bob Dylan and Earth, Wind & Fire among his favoured music and using the likes of Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up and Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered on the campaign trail, he is already the coolest president of them all. Asked to recommend one record above all others, he came up with the 1999 album Kulanjan, the beautiful trailblazing mix of traditional blues and Malian kora music by Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabate. I mean, with taste like that the man CANNOT fail.
posted 10 November, 2008
Forget global meltdown - let's dance!
In the immortal words of Supertramp – Crisis? What crisis?
With each news bulletin predicting ever more global financial catastrophe and impending personal hardship, it’s tempting to shrivel up in a corner and wait to be eaten by mice. Or indeed, Boomtown Rats. On the other hand we could just ignore it all, lose ourselves in a vinyl orgy and…PARTY. So I’m just off to the computer to buy some records – I may be some time.
Waits sang about Skid Row with authenticity
What SHOULD we be listening to in these troubled times? I mean, during a previous recession in the early 1980s, we were all drinking ridiculous cocktails and dancing round our handbags to the most vacuous music we could find, ie. Spandau Ballet and Haircut 100.
Then again, in the States back in the 1930s, when they really did have it tough, the Great Depression produced some truly great music which not only spoke for the times, it has stood the test of time. The best recession song EVER is Yip Harburg/Jay Gorney’s Brother Can You Spare A Dime? originally included in the musical New Americana. There are brilliant versions (Tom Waits, Ronnie Lane, Chris Foster and yes, Bing Crosby) and excruciating ones (George Michael, Barbra Streisand, Peter, Paul & Mary) but the song itself is peerless.
But maybe we should take our lead from another song inspired by the Great Depression – Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherries by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson. “Life is just a bowl of cherries/Don't take it serious, it's too mysterious/You work, you save, you worry so/But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.”
That sounds about right. Let’s party like it’s 1929…
Top 10 recession songs...
- Brother Can You Spare A Dime?, Tom Waits
- Bank Robber, The Clash
- Do Re Mi, Woody Guthrie
- No Depression In Heaven, Carter Family
- How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, Blind Alfred Reed/Ry Cooder
- Hard Times of Old England, Billy Bragg/Imagined Village
- Wall Street Shuffle, 10cc
- Shake Your Money Maker, Ludacris
- Money Money Money, Abba
- Mr President (Have Pity on the Working Man), Randy Newman
Or alternatively...
- Young, Gifted and Broke, Nina Simone
- Rock the Cash Point, The Clash
- The Dimes They Are A’Changing, Bob Dylan
- Uptown Rot Banking, Althea and Donna
- Can’t Buy Me Love (Or Anything Else!), The Beatles
- A Little Less Liquidation, Elvis Presley
- I Who Have Nothing – Literally, Shirley Bassey
- Hey You Get Off My Pound, Rolling Stones
- Shake, Rattle and Bank Roll, Bill Haley
- Ain’t Nothing Going On…Specially not the Rent, Gwen Guthrie
Don't agree with these? Send in your suggestions for the 10 best recession songs of all time
posted 27 October, 2008
