Wednesday 15 September 2010

The resurrection shuffle

Rock’n’roll is not a business that forgives old age. Most of its icons lived fast, died young, or simply got out while they were still ahead.

We venerate Lennon and we scorn McCartney. Barrett is the genius of Pink Floyd, Waters and Gilmour are dismissed as bickering pensioners. Cobain remains a touchstone, Vedder becomes an irrelevance simply by continuing to breathe and refusing to have his youthful legacy set in amber.

Would Pete Townshend’s reputation have been better served by following Keith Moon and dying before he got old? In our present culture, yes. The experience of a 62 year old is considered musically worthless in a medium that becomes increasingly pre-pubescent – coming soon, the first embryonic pop star: keep on rocking in the womb world.

Worse, because the likes of Townshend, McCartney and Dylan continue to write and record what the tastemakers instantly dismiss as sub-senile geriatrica, their back catalogue is similarly trashed.

Had Mick Jagger been killed by the Hells Angels back in 1969 in the wake of Altamont as has been suggested recently by an FBI agent, he would be the ultimate holy man of rock’n’roll. Instead, he’s treated as a running joke. The man who was once the Lord of Misrule, the demonic ringmaster of all that was dark and seductive about rock’n’roll, he has been rendered impotent by caricature. It must be all the more galling for him because of the fact that he shares a stage with one of the few rockers whose legend simply grows larger as he grows older, Keith Richards.

Keef is the indestructible skeleton of the music that tore up the latter half of the 20th century, the Don, the overseer for whom the world only has more affection and more respect as the days roll by, as the wrinkles turn into cracks and the global reservoir of Jack Daniel’s diminishes.

Alongside him, Jagger is dismissed as a phoney. Keef is the real deal, Mick the chancer. Mick says he never reads the papers, and if he’s telling the truth, it’s probably a sound self defence mechanism. All superstars are painted with a few broad strokes, but while Keith’s enhance him, Jagger’s shred him. Nowadays, he’s this hipless, post-anorexic frame, topped by a leer of lips, once sexual, now dribbling.

Then there’s the viper’s tongue that lashes out and wraps itself around the throat of your daughter, maybe your granddaughter – it used to be your sister but all of us have got a little older since then. All except Mick, who never allows himself, or at least his persona, to age. And even that’s somehow sad.

Time then to challenge the conventional wisdom for Mick, in his prime, should be revered not reviled. Jagger invented the rock’n’roll star. He was its poster-child, the real deal. He was the pose, the swagger, the arrogance. Boys wanted to be him, girls just wanted him. In popular music, that’s ten-tenths of the law. Jagger is an archetype, he’s an original and his reputation demands rehabilitation.

More than anything, he is one of the great singers of the rock’n’roll era. Keith Richards might be the human riff, the lickmeister who just churns out those memorable Stones breaks, but without Mick’s voice, Keef’s dark, demonic music just would not be the same.

Imagine any other singer who could have voiced “Sympathy For The Devil” or “Gimme Shelter” on those records at that time. You can’t. Those songs are his, they belong to him, imbued with his personality, Jagger living inside them as they rise and fall on his extraordinary technique. That hasn’t changed since the day they were recorded. Forty years on, that’s a Sinatraesque achievement.

Whenever you think of the Stones, you have to think of The Beatles too, so symbiotic was their 1960s relationship. But they were very different animals, not least because the Stones had a front man, a singer who defined the job. John and Paul were never out front in the way as Mick, who would prowl the stage, a predator, caged for a moment, but always like to leap the chasm between band and audience, always ready to electrify the crowd, always capable of moving the experience from theatre to music hall to bear pit to boxing ring and back again, all with the arch of an eyebrow, the thrust of an arm.

In the end though, it’s as a singer that Jagger’s genius will longest endure. If you want proof, take a listen to “Under My Thumb”, one of the finest vocal performances of the rock era. It’s misogynistic lyric means the song is long since discredited, but so perfect is the phrasing, the timing, Jagger need never have recorded another thing and would still be seen as a giant. The contempt that drips from that mouth with the simple “uhmm” he inserts as he licks those lips and dismisses his girl as the “sweetest pet” is masterly. It’s a cornerstone achievement.



No, it’s not pleasant, but it’s a slice of real life, as it was and so, probably, shall it ever be. How often does music give you that these days?

Patti Smith & Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea

So here’s the thing. Patti Smith became the “voice of her generation”. Back in the 1970s, she was the Queen of CBGBs, the rider of the new wave, punk priestess, you know all the labels. Yet she did it by taking voices of previous generations, the romantic poets, the beats, then strapping on a backbeat and being urgent. Most of all being urgent, being the seer, the sayer. “I got something to say, you gotta hear this, I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, but I gotta get this out of me”.

She didn’t have the classically beautiful voice, she wasn’t a schooled musician, but what she had to say had to be said. She had to communicate, she had to let her consciousness flow into the mainstream, polluting it to cleanse it. But the mainstream was, is, always shall be, happy enough to stay fouled up. And so Patti’s career has been one of preaching largely to the converted. “The Coral Sea” is not going to change any of that.

Even for Patti Smith, this two disc set is one that challenges, confronts, confounds. After making perhaps the most commercial record of her career in the covers set “Twelve”, this is her mining deep from the well, going back to the source and howling into the teeth of the gale.

It’s not a record in the conventional sense. Patti doesn’t sing on it, bar a few brief snatches. This is a reading of her love letter to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her bloody valentine as she describes him, who she saw torn from the planet by the ravages of AIDS, forced to sit and watch him suffer in the helplessness that diminishes us all when all we can do is sit and wait for the inevitable, a despair which never truly heals. As Mapplethorpe intimated through his words in her poetry, even in suffering, dying is easy. It’s those of us who carry on living that dwell in purgatory, tortured by our impotence.

Smith’s performance is beyond compelling. It’s not easy to listen to, and it must have been harder to perform. She credits Kevin Shields, her musical collaborator on this, as giving her the environment in which she could separate herself sufficiently from the material to endure the pain of the reading. Shields’ music is respectful, appropriate, Lou Reed like in its textures, wholly in context.

But it’s Smith who captures the attention. I’ve always enjoyed her readings every bit as much as her music, an Old Testament prophet intoning from the hills, bringing truths and maybes and lies and life, making them whole, making them real. If musically she is the next link in the chain after Dylan, as a reader, a beat poet, she’s carrying on the tradition of Ginsberg.



In front of an audience, there is always a responsibility to deliver what you promised on the ticket, and she’s professional enough to do that and do it magnificently. Inevitably, there is the twang of theatrics in there, it could not be any other way, she has to wear some form of mask to enable her to get through material as exposing, as agonising as this must be. But on each disc, there are moments where that mask slips and she’s clearly back in the moment, the moment of suffering, the moment of writing, thrilling bursts of humanity. There won’t be a more compelling record in anyone's collection. It’s not easy listening, it’s not background music, but if you want a slice of truth, get it.

This is reality art, not the garbage that masquerades as “reality” on television. This is life, love, loss. And in the end, what else have we got?

Some People Are Crazy

An outpouring of grief for somebody not a relative nor a close friend, it has a horrible ring of falseness about it, the Diana effect. But the death of John Martyn on 29 January 2009 cut deep. Why wouldn’t it?

The music had been doing just that for 40 years, and whatever the stylistic shifts over those decades, the kernel was the same. A giant, raging bear of a man, a wee, delicate folkie, and every compass point in between. Martyn peeled back his hide and let us peer inside at the good, the bad, the ugly.





Let’s not canonise the man in death, not least because you’d hear him bellowing at you from the other side at such ludicrous caricature. Martyn was a consumer of life, a voracious drinker of its delights and its despairs, a man of short temper and genuine gentleness, who recognised his faults and threw them as wide open for discussion as he did his merits – more so, actually. Big John was a flawed man, and all the more interesting for that, holding up the mirror for us to better see ourselves did we dare to look.

Martyn referred to his recordings as his diaries, and in that sense, the man’s life, his autobiography lies out there for us all to enjoy and endure, for at times, not least on the magnificent “Grace And Danger”, it’s harrowing stuff. He pulled no punches be he in the first flush of love or ripping his fingers to shreds amid the shards of its disintegration.




The big, bluff showman was part of who and what he was, but it was also a screen door, keeping people at a distance from a man whose skin was translucent. His emotional thermostat was irreparably damaged but the music circulated whether the temperature was raging hot or ice cold, all moods and means, ends and beginnings.

An evening in his company was a rare delight, from the surreal between song banter, often trapped in some ongoing conversation with his inner self that we were eavesdropping upon, occasionally doling out an end of the pier joke, always grabbing another belt of beer. Then picking up that Gibson and making it soar, laugh, weep, tease, taunt. Or picking at an acoustic, lilting, haunting, beguiling, chilling, naked.

Then there was that voice, silken nails, words often inaudible yet always subconsciously seeping, sweet soul music, consolation and conversation. A jazzer, a rocker, a folkie. Above all, a great old blues man, a voice from a different past and a troubadour for a future that will perhaps forget him. It will be the future’s loss.

Up there, or down below, he’ll be looking at these tributes and giving them the narrow stare, the mocking glance, because emotion was for songs, not for conversation. But John, don’t laugh at it you swine. We miss you. You should have stayed longer.

Some people talk wouldness and couldness. Some people are just plain good.

Wednesday 1 September 2010

From Here To Eternity

Help for Heroes is a charity that football has done a great deal to support in the last year or so, with the Football League in particular adopting it as an official charity and offering plenty of assistance and fundraising opportunities for a cause that raises funds for those who have been wounded while serving in the armed forces, notably in recent conflicts such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the link between football and the services is one which dates back many, many years, inevitably so given that footballers and soldiers tend to come from the same place – the expendable factory fodder and cannon fodder that the working people of the nation were once dismissed as. Football, like boxing, was the great escape from the trials and tribulations of that life, but in time of need, whether they had escaped the factory or not, footballers like their peers, could be relied upon to rally to the flag.

Never was that more apparent than in the 1914-18 conflict, the Great War, the war to end all wars as it was billed at the time. Football actually carried on through the 1914/15 season after the war had broken out early on in that campaign and everyone was busy insisting that the war would be over by Christmas which, was as big a lie as “the war to end all wars”.

By December 1914, it was becoming increasingly clear that not only would the war not be over by that Christmas, still others might come and go before peace broke out. So it was that Fred “Spider” Parker, the captain and inspirational leader of Clapton Orient – now Leyton Orient – took his men over the top, away from the safety and security of organised football and into the Army.

Parker became the first footballer to enlist with the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment at a special meeting in Fulham. A further nine of his team mates took their captain’s lead and took the King’s shilling that day, joining what became known as the Footballers’ Regiment, the first football team in this country to join up in such concentrated fashion. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, some 41 players and officials had left Clapton Orient to sign up for their country, blazing a trail that the rest of the country followed.

The wholesale slaughter that characterised the First World War means that it was inevitable that some of that early band of brothers would pay the ultimate price of serving their country and, on the Somme in 1916, Richard McFadden, William Jonas and George Scott were killed. Given the horrifically iconic nature of that battle and the way its name rings down the ages even a century on, those three have become symbolic of the way in which football sacrificed a generation to the war, a truly golden generation of men for whom service and sacrifice was an ingrained virtue.

In recent times, those three in particular have become the focal point for a campaign by supporters of Leyton Orient, led by Steve Jenkins, to ensure that they and the club’s contribution to the Great War should never be forgotten. As a consequence, the O’s Somme Memorial Fund was launched in August 2009 in order to raise some £15,000 in order to produce and erect a permanent memorial to them on the Somme.

Badges are being sold in aid of the fund, donations are being taken and funds are desperately needed ahead of the planned dedication of the memorial in the summer of 2011. The fund is around half way to its target and, in a game where money is a deeply debased currency these days, perhaps it’s time that we helped it recapture its soul.

Just £15,000 for a monument not only to fallen heroes, but to working people who have always banded together when their country has called upon them, is a pittance. The memorial will speak not only to the fallen of Clapton Orient but to those who across football, and across football fans, who willingly gave up their lives in the service of the country. If football fails to raise such a trivial sum for such a powerfully compellingly cause, what will that say of us, of the current generation who revel in the freedoms those deaths won for us? How will we answer the charge that we have forgotten them, that we have fallen asleep in our comforts? We can do nothing but give anything we can , however little, to prove that football was a noble calling followed by noble people, and that it still can be, that it can still answer the call.

For further details on the appeal, and for information on how to contribute, go to: http://www.orientsupporters.webeden.co.uk/#/somme-memorial-fund/4535333173

Wednesday 28 July 2010

War is stupid

The shrewd, insightful words of Mr Boy George esq, shortly before he won his first Nobel Peace Prize, opining, through the medium of the pop charts, that war is, indeed, stupid.

It seems that Mr George was indeed correct in his prognostication for no less an authority than the former chief of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, agrees with him. Speaking at the current inquiry into the Iraq war, she said, “"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine. It is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.” A unit to make the facts fit the story Dubya wanted to tell.

More compelling yet though was her insistence that "Our involvement in Iraq radicalized, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam”, adding that Britain and the west are more, not less at risk from terrorism than we were before this all began.

Given that we remain in Afghanistan, this opinion is of far more urgent importance than deliberations of just how we got into Iraq in the first place. That cannot be undone. The current catastrophic loss of life among British and American troops in Afghanistan can be halted.

It’s sad that we seem to learn so few of the lessons of history, particularly when they should be so recent and fresh in our minds. Sadly, truths do not always fit into the narratives the ruling classes want to hand down. They would have us believe that the Cold War was won by Ronald Reagan rounding up a posse, saddling up his horse and winning a shootout with that varmint Gorbachev. That it was all down to the west winning the arms race, that the threat of Star Wars eventually toppled the Kremlin.

In the end though, it was all rather more banal than that. The eastern bloc was beaten from within, by its own citizens, who tired of their own oppression, who railed against the grey, drab conformity. It was MTV, Levis and Coca-Cola that won the Cold War, the urge of those in the east to sample the same kind of consumer lifestyle that we had long since taken for granted. And in the end, it is the same kind of things that will be more effective in bringing some kind of peace again. Provide aid, hope, eventual wealth to those who are currently living in poverty and the motivation for them to take up arms will melt away. If the lives of you and your people are comfortable rather than constant struggle, the imperative to strap explosives to yourself is no longer there.

Not that that will rid the world of the problem of religious extremists, but nor should we pretend that the only such extremists are Islamic, not when anti-abortionists still firebomb and intimidate those who work in abortion clinics in the USA for instance. By their very nature, religious nuts are just that – nuts. If they are motivated by a religious hatred of the infidel, how are you going to stop it?

You can’t wipe out vast swathes of population in nations that might just harbour such extremists. All you can do is create social and political conditions that make it harder for them to radicalise and recruit others to the cause. Invading a nation and stamping all over it is not the way to go.

Which, in roundabout fashion, brings us to Trident and the innate lunacy of replacing it in the years to come at ruinous cost, some £100billion over 25 years – wouldn’t that make a hole in the bank created deficit? This is a very different world to the one of the post-war settlement some 60 years ago, when there was a genuine arms race and the threat of mutually assured destruction. That threat is broadly gone, there appears to be no realistic possibility that any nation state, not even Iran, has any desire or intention of unleashing nuclear weapons upon other nations. It may be that Britain should keep an independent deterrent, though frankly, its hard to see why, but if that is the case, the infinitely cheaper Astute system should certainly be considered.

That was certainly the view of the supine Liberal Democrats in the days when they had principles, ie when they were in opposition and could say anything because it didn’t matter. Nowadays of course, they think that being allowed to disagree with nuclear power policy is ok as long as they don’t vote against it, a little like saying you don’t believe in burning down houses as you pass an arsonist a box of matches and a tin of petrol.

Once upon a time, when Labour needed the votes of the Conservatives to get their last vote on Trident through, the then Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell – who’d be turning in his grave at the current fiasco if only he were dead – said, “The government's got its way, but it's a humiliation for the prime minister that on a policy to which he has attached his own personal reputation he is unable to carry the House of Commons without the votes of the Conservative Party. It's a bit like the Iraq vote once again."

Although the coalition agreement allows the Liberal Democrats to argue for alternatives to Trident, it’s pretty obvious that will amount to nothing, which is why Cameron let them have it. But what is it for? The nation threat has gone. The threat of nuclear destruction lies elsewhere, inside the briefcase of a fanatic who, one day, will wander into Times Square or Trafalgar Square, and open Pandora’s Box. And what good will Trident be then?

It used to be true that, as various Presidents were quoted as saying, if you had them by the balls, their hearts and minds would follow. Those days are gone, blind servitude to the man with the money is over, and politicians need to wake up to that fact and the danger it presents. Hearts and minds are suddenly much more important.

Send that £100billion to aid the developing world and that briefcase might just remain closed.

Monday 26 July 2010

Jackie's still sad about it

Wrong time, wrong place. Gordon Brown knows all about that, though history will ultimately be rather kinder to him than the media and the ballot box was. The same will be true of one of the finest bands you’ve probably never heard of, Diesel Park West.

A glorious guitar band just at the point when indie was on the wane in the late ‘80s, when baggy was in and every band had to pretend “there’s always been a dance element to our music”, the Diesels stuck to what they believed in and sold only a fraction of the number of albums they should have before heading back to obscurity.

Diesel Park West were the band that should have been Oasis. More technically accomplished, a better songwriter in frontman John Butler, a sound with more heart and greater depth, with a truly political edge, the Diesels were highbrow to Liam’s unibrow. But they ran straight into a music press that only had ears for the, admittedly magnificent, Stone Roses.

Ironic then that the Roses and the Diesels were different heads of the same coin, both drawing on jangly, psychedelic ‘60s roots, both built around a guitar sound that owed much to the Byrds and The Beatles, yet only the Roses prospered. They played the game more cleverly perhaps, courted controversy superbly and created a commotion where the Diesels simply plugged in and played anywhere that would have them, building a loyal audience but not commandeering the necessary column inches.

Those that failed to listen closely enough simply cast them aside as ‘60s retreads, though that never stopped Oasis once the tide of trends had turned again and guitar groups were back in vogue. But where the Gallaghers crafted an entire career from “I Am The Walrus”, the music of Lennon, McCartney, Stills, Young and other acid drenched creators of rock music’s handbook, Diesel Park West used it as a starting point and took the music elsewhere.

Never afraid to engage with the grotesque realities of Thatcherite destruction of the country, nor the hypocrisy of the press or religious leaders, Diesel Park West had a relevance and a bite that music needed but the arbiters of taste looked instead to the Soup Dragons and the Mock Turtles for guidance. With an aggressive musical edge that you’d expect from three front line guitarists, their souped-up take on acid rock pointed the way towards BritPop, the denizens of which mopped up the money after dance music had crashed and burned and indie kids returned their roots.

Wrong time, wrong place. But records were made and they will endure, and people will return to them again. No effort in life is ever wasted. Mistimed, temporarily misplaced perhaps, but never wasted. Diesel Park West left their mark, most notably with “Shakespeare Alabama”, and continue to do so. Maybe their time might come, they might be rediscovered the way Big Star were. In the meantime, Liam and Noel owe them as big a chunk of their royalties as they ever owed John, Paul, George and Ringo.

www.dieselparkwest.com

All the myths on Sunday

Sunday 25 July 2010

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

It was the slogan of the election if you recall. “I agree with Nick”. After last week’s shambles at Prime Minister’s Questions, you can’t find anybody who’s going to go with that one.

The level of the tea boy’s reputation is going down quicker than a Cumbrian reservoir for, after two months of hanging around with his mate, trying not to look bewildered, the truth is out. He really is bewildered. And dangerously so.

Question time in the Commons may look as if it’s just a bit of pointless knockabout theatre, but it’s one of the very few forums where the government of the day is held accountable, and where its views go on the record. It’s not like making an off the cuff comment on television that you retract in a press release later, it’s an arena where what you say, goes. Never more is that true than in matters of warfare.

So, after around a quarter of an hour of general humiliation for Clegg, who clearly hadn’t got the foggiest – no wonder they’re finishing “Last of the Sumer Wine” – he finally lost his rag and accused the previous government of waging “an illegal war” in Iraq. Nice that Clegg has decided to become judge, jury and executioner on a decision that has to be made elsewhere and by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Sadly though, that isn’t the end of it, for as Deputy PM – God help us, how did we get into that kind of mess? – his allegations have weight. Some are suggesting that they use his words as the basis for some kind of legal action given the government of the day has declared the war to be illegal, an apparent admission of guilt for many. Which means that an out of his depth politician throwing a tantrum could end up putting former ministers, forces personnel and ordinary servicemen up on trial for war crimes.

The government issued strenuous denials that Clegg’s declarations were actually the views of the coalition, but his performance thus far makes John Prescott look like Gladstone. The tea boy has been promoted about 250 levels above his appropriate pay grade, somewhere below minimum wage, and needs removing from office. Except they can’t can they, because the Tories are currently hiding behind him and Cable who offer some vestige of cover for their version of slash and burn economics that are designed to destroy the welfare state even more ruthlessly than Thatcher massacred the unions.

But we won’t forget the guilty men on an ego trip in government cars when the chance comes round to vote them out. And let’s not be too harsh on Clegg for in the longer term, he may have done us all a great service, for he might finally awaken us from the mistaken belief that voting in a general election is exactly the same as voting for an X-factor winner. That, after all, was the criteria on which he managed to shore up the Liberal voter, that he was the new, young, clean cut, exciting pretender on the stage with a winning smile and a way with a one liner put down. And yes, if he were voting for somebody to read the weather forecast on Orkney TV, I’m sure he’s have been a fine choice.

Sadly, we were actually voting for somebody with the intelligence, vision and gravitas to lead the country through tough times. Instead, we got the government that nobody wanted which is, day after day, making it perfectly clear that we really ought to invest a bit more thought in choosing our leader next time. And if Clegg gets us to do that, then he hasn’t been all bad. Which will represent some achievement considering what he’s done so far.

Sunday 18 July 2010

Hunt saboteur

I’d long imagined that the Culture Secretary merely organised yoghurt, but no. It appears that Jeremy Slang-Rhyming has decided to meddle in the affairs of the BBC.

Doubtless the former Charterhouse and Oxford University management consultant – he must be from the good kind of management rather than the public sector kind, a critical condem distinction – has conducted a line by line analysis of the corporation’s expenditure over the last five years, giving him a full grasp of its affairs, thus enabling him to make the definitive statement that there is “extraordinary and outrageous” waste at the BBC. Or perhaps he just read it in the Daily Fail.

It appears, for instance, that 85 execs at the BBC are paid more than £142,500pa, or more than the Prime Minister’s salary. You might take from that the fact that the PM – not the current moon faced one, but a theoretically good one – should be paid more in a year than John Terry gets in a week, but let’s not digress. For Mr Slang-Rhyming is on a roll, fully embracing the politics of envy that he and his ilk so derided when Labour were in power.

Basically, it’s all the fault of Jonathan Ross for getting so much money. Never mind that the Tories have spent years telling us that the best should get rewarded and, as it goes, Ross is as good as it gets at his job, adding considerably more to the sum of human happiness across the spectrum than, for example, the aforementioned Mr Terry, who earns considerably more.

And lest we forget, as the head of a production company, Ross is also an employer, precisely the kind of private sector entrepreneurial spirit that is going to fill the gaping hole in the economy that Slang-Rhyming and his colleagues are currently digging. Incidentally, why hasn’t Jeremy Clarkson been similarly scapegoated for his big BBC pay packet? Because he’s a Sun columnist, of which more later.

So the answer? Well, amid the current self imposed austerity – the one that the majority of the world economists seem to think is reckless at best – the BBC needs to cut its cloth, and the best way to do that is reduce its funding. Which of course makes no sense. The BBC gets its revenue from the licence fee. It does not take any other tax revenues, and therefore, there’s no way it can be part of deficit reduction, unless the government wants to nick some of the BBC’s money for something else. So that justification is, plain and simple, garbage.

What is going on is something rather more cunning. A cut in licence fee is shamelessly populist at a time when Slang-Rhyming and his mates are busy shredding the economy and charging us more and more tax for the privilege. They think that by knocking £20 off the fee, we’ll all be enthralled. This is because you notice you’re paying tax when the licence fee demand comes, but you don’t really think about it when you buy things in a shop and the VAT is largely hidden from view.

So, if you buy a £600 TV for example, after January you won’t necessarily notice that you’ve already paid £12.50 more tax than if you’d bought it today, thanks to the VAT increase. That’s why the Tories, the party who introduced VAT and the only party that has ever increased it, love it so much. People don’t really think they’re paying it – they blame the shop for charging them too much rather than the government for having money out of their pockets.

Oddly, at a time when we are looking to exports to boost the economy, Slang-Rhyming does not note the value of the BBC’s exports, the fact that it sells its programmes to broadcasters all over the world thus helping our balance of payments. It’s ability to sell its programmes on DVD also indicates the quality of its output. People might queue for a copy of “The Office” but they’re rarely camping out overnight to get their hands on “Come Dine With Me” are they?

Culturally, the BBC is the real crown jewels in this country, giving us a standing in the world that any other country would love to have. When you go online, do you ever consult any foreign news agencies for information? Few Brits do. But people all over the world turn to the BBC for their information because they trust it. They do not turn to Sky or to Fox. And there’s the nub of it all. Payback time.

Because after throwing the weight of his newspapers behind the neo-Conservatives, Mr Murdoch wants his pound of flesh. He wants the BBC brought to its knees, he wants them to have less and less money for programming, less to spend on sports. He wants the list of protected free to air sports events to disappear so that he can own Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, the lot.

As Sky subscriber numbers stubbornly refuse to go up, as the market has been opened up to other competitors to carry his products – another reason for turning on the previous government – Murdoch needs another magic bullet like the Premier League, the institution that saved him from bankruptcy. More sport is it, coupled with a collapse in the BBC’s other core programming so that whatever Godawful garbage he shovels out on his countless channels, there will be no alternative.

More important, if the BBC’s ability to scrutinise the news is compromised, how much easier it will be for him and his lackeys in Downing Street to do whatever they like without being questioned? They’re already trying to decide who is allowed to go on “Question Time”, next they’ll be vetting the questioners, and presumably only going on Sky. A win-win for Murdoch and the government.

So, the Murdoch empire or the BBC, the choice is yours. The BBC costs you just under 40p a day, for which you get four TV channels, the BBC online network, the national and local radio stations, and a rare reason to be proud of this country.

Or you can get The Times, a shadow of its once impressive self, online, at an annual cost of just under 29p a day. How many radio stations and TV channels does it also provide for that subscription? That’ll be none. Precisely the amount of intelligent comment we’ll have left in this country if Slang-Rhyming is allowed to emasculate the BBC.

He should have stuck to yoghurt.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Follow the money

This deficit business. Don’t you think it’s weird that we have one, yet so do the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Americans, the Italians, the Irish, the Greeks, and most of the rest of the western world, in spite of the fact that we’ve all had governments of differing philosophies, in power for different lengths of time and with differing attitudes towards public spending and taxation?

Given Cameroon and the tea boy keep insisting upon the fact that the reason we’re in the mess we are was because of Labour’s profligate spending, surely those nations that didn’t have Labour in charge and had specifically right wing governments – eight years of Bush the baboon for instance – and hardly any public sector on which to lavish fortunes should be in infinitely better shape?

And yet they’re not. As I say, odd.

Yet not. Because the reason we’re all in the mess together was because of the banks. Remember a couple of years back when they went into meltdown and then held a gun to the head of the world’s economies, saying that if you let us die, we take you down as well? That’s where the deficit came from, because of the money that had to be pumped into failed institutions, that had to be injected into otherwise crippled economies, that had to be made available to ensure liquidity.

Remember in this country the way we had to give the kiss of life to Northern Rock and the rest, a process that was repeated around the globe? That’s where our deficit came from, and where the rest of it came from.

So why then are we getting rid it of by slashing public spending, by following a policy that will see children going to schools that are falling down around them, that has pensioners having to find £8billion over the coming years thanks to the VAT increase, that will see the NHS privatised?

Why aren’t we taking back the money – our money – from the banks? Banking is bizarrely, embarrassingly, one of the few growth sectors in this economy. Bonuses are beginning to come back for those at the top end – not the normal workers of course - profits are being made, and it’s like nothing ever happened.

What about taxing all bank profits and bank bonuses at 100% until the deficit is recouped? After all, Barclays, for instance, made profits of £1.8bn in the first quarter of 2010. At that rate, wouldn’t take us that long to get the bulk of it back would it? Never mind the NatWest sending volunteers out to paint cricket pitches green or whatever those idiots are doing in the adverts, give us our bloody money back. And then we might be able to keep hospitals open, rather than selling them off.

It’s pretty obvious really, I can’t think why it is that Saint Vince Cableanduseless hasn’t thought of it. Unless the government has a specific agenda that it wants to push under cover of the “crisis”. And they’re doing it well, because the public appears to be feeling virtuous that they’re helping to get the nation’s finances back in order. As Goebbels demonstrated, there is nothing so successful in propaganda terms as the big lie, and as a former - and current - PR man, Cameroon knows that better than anyone.

The biggest lie sits beneath the surface, the idea that the cuts are for the greater good. They’re not. They’re to change the face of this country, to smash the state’s role in the economy and in so doing ultimately create a situation where the need for tax revenues will be massively reduced.

The end game here is to bring the top rate down, perhaps as far as 30%, and who gives a damn if the schools and the hospitals are crap. Those at the top end can simply opt out and use their hugely increased pay packets to go private. Won’t we all feel virtuous then, when we’ve washed away a century of moving towards greater equality, an equality which is easy to give away, but much harder to recapture.

Thursday 8 July 2010

I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky

There are few more beautiful – did I say beautiful? Sorry, I meant rancid – sights than that of The Daily Excess getting itself into a moral uproar in the hope of taking middle England along with it. Today, it was in its element – “Now Asylum If You’re Gay” it fulminated, alerting us to the danger that the nation is about to be overrun by invading hoards of homosexuals, racing away from persecution, darting through the Channel Tunnel as an act of situationist symbolism and drowning the nation beneath a tide of pink chiffon.

The reason for this? Because those bloody stupid Judges in the Supreme Court have only been upholding the law again. Two gay men, one from Cameroon and another from Iran, both faced deportation after their appeals for asylum were rejected, in spite of the fact that both would have faced persecution on their return home.

In a rare piece of evidence that this might just still be a country that tries to do the right thing even if it might be expensive – see those taxpaying veins popping on the heads of Excess journalists as they read that? – Home Secretary Theresa May welcomed the decision and said that the government would not deport any asylum seekers who had fled their countries because their sexuality put them at “proven risk” of jail, torture or execution.

But that’s not good enough for The Excess who dug out a prehistoric Tory, Philip Davies MP, who tells us, “It’s a dangerous game to play to go down this line because it’s quite feasible that this could offer an ideal line of defence for someone who wants to try to avoid being kicked out of the country, whether it is true or not that they are gay. By its very nature, it’s very difficult to prove one way or another. My concern would be that this may well be exploited by some people as a way of avoiding deportation.”

Now some might think that anybody who treks away from their homeland and is desperate enough to seek asylum in the UK – whatever the cause – is somebody we should look on with humanity and tolerance. What would drive you to leave everyone and everything you have and know behind and try to set up a new life thousands of miles away with no guarantee you’ll be allowed to stay? Take something pretty drastic wouldn’t it? Anyeway, if therehave to be asylum seekers, from a Tory point of view, gay ones are the best kind – at least they won’t be spawning a lot of brats and demanding child benefit, so no financial issues there. And as the lawlord who summed up yesterday, Lord Rodger – you couldn’t make this up could you – noted, the pink economy will be suitably boosted.

But if, as Phillip Davies insists, we should be 100% certain that such asylum seekers genuinely are gay, think of the job creation possibilities. A crack squadron of, not to put too fine a point on it, crack investigators will be on perpetual standby. Asylum seekers will be quizzed on the minutiae of Dale Winton, they will be required to show complete knowledge of a full range of show tunes, asked for interior decorating tips and, should any doubt remain, they will be given an intimate audience with Mr Davies himself, since he’s so keen on weeding out the non gays amongst asylumists.

Of course, you’d think such stereotyping would be something I’ve done for comic effect, something from the distant past, but not quite so. Even in doing the right thing, Lord Rodger couldn’t help but make a pillock of himself. “Just as male hetero¬sexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically-coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates” was his reasoning behind the fact that the two men in question should not be forced back to their respective countries and simply deny their sexuality.

I’m not entirely certain that having the freedom to buy Kylie’s latest waxing – her new record, not the contents of her Brazilian you understand – is more important than the freedom not to have your nuts blown off by bigots and religious fanatics, and in reinforcing age old stereotypes he’s perhaps done more harm than good, though fortunately not to the two men in question.

What he has certainly done is give two people the chance of better lives, lives free from the kind of persecution they would have otherwise endured. Certainly a better solution than that of the Abcess, which was that they should simply pop back home and deny their sexuality and pretend to be straight and try to get away with it. So let’s make a deal. They can do that if – and only if - the editorial team on that newspaper deny the fact that they’re a bunch of loathsome, fascist bastards and pretend to be decent human beings. No, don’t get holding your breath eh?

And finally, just because Lord Rodger’s summing up reminded me of it, a link to the genius of Peter Cook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUrnTTJQQYg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyos-M48B8U&feature=related

Sunday 4 July 2010

All we are saying

This was originally written five years ago. Nothing's changed. It's getting worse. Time for a reminder. You can stream and, more important, buy this record at http://latentrecordings.com/cowboyjunkies/music/

EARLY 21st CENTURY BLUES - COWBOY JUNKIES

"Time to kill our children and sing about it". It's a lyric that shocked some American record buyers, made concert audiences distinctly uncomfortable and has even provoked heated arguments among the group’s hardcore following. But it's a line that songwriter Michael Timmins, of Cowboy Junkies, is rightly proud of. It comes from "December Skies", one of two originals on the band's new record, "Early 21st Century Blues", an album that is as passionately, intelligently and eloquently anti-war in its intent as anything rock music has come up with in 50 years of trying.

It's also a timely reminder that music really can make a difference a belief which, shockingly, disappeared almost immediately after its high water mark, Live Aid. There's been little protest in the last 20 years as musicians, like the rest of us, have stopped paying attention, offering little rebuke to a world where wars continue to be fought, often in our name, the multinational conglomerates that simultaneously bankroll rock stars while producing weapons preferring that conspiracy of silence.

Reflecting on a song inspired in part by Timothy Findley's novel "The Wars", Michael explains, "It's really about our attitude to war, the way we glorify it, make it seem a noble calling in some way. We celebrate the fighting, the glorious dead and we make it seem that death on the battlefield is something to aspire to. If we concentrated on the human cost of those deaths, the lives that are broken by it, maybe we wouldn't rush to war so easily."

Bassist Alan Anton is blunter about a song that opens with bodies falling from September Skies. "The day after 9/11, in Washington you had Congressmen standing outside the Capitol Building singing the national anthem and "God Bless America", then sending those kids off to war just a few weeks later – for me, that’s killing their own children and singing about it."

"December Skies" has all the trademarks that have made Cowboy Junkies the most subtle yet most emotionally arresting band of the last 20 years, a group that uses nuance not bombast to make its point and which has a more provocative and lasting impact for it, asking questions not declaiming answers from on high. Stately in pace - "It's not depressing, it's just slow" laughs Michael - his piercing lyric is given its full weight by the gorgeous, langorous delivery of sister Margo, one of three Timmins siblings in the core line-up, younger brother Pete completing the band on drums.

Fully behind the sentiments expressed by her brother, Margo admits it was still a hard lyric to sing. "I have a two year old son and as a mom, whatever the context, it's still a very shocking line. I struggled with it for a time before I found a way into it, but that's ok, that's my job! It was important that I did sing it because I'm very supportive of what Michael is writing about. He's expressing the way that we all feel in the band, that there have to be alternatives to war and that we should all do more to make our voices heard."

The apathy that surrounds the political process is a source of real frustration for Michael for whom it is becoming a recurring lyrical theme. "The title track from our last album, "One Soul Now", was very much about the fact that I feel these are among the worst times of recent history, that things are falling apart around us yet people aren't taking any notice - we felt that as we toured the US last year before the election, so many people were just paying no attention. We need to come together as people, we need to work for change together. That was why we had "One" as the last song on the new album and why we end our live show with it at the moment. I'm not a huge U2 fan but the line "We've got to carry each other, One" pretty much summed up the record."

It’s not hard to see why supporters of the Bush administration might find “December Skies” so unpalatable given the hysterical level that their “my country right or wrong” jingoism reached in the run-up to the Presidential election last November, but it seems that elements of the Junkies core audience is having trouble with it, misreading it just as US audiences missed the point of Springsteen's "Born In The USA" 20 years ago. On the Junkies' June tour of north-east America - pointedly dubbed the United States of Canada Blue States Tour within the band - crowds often shuffled uneasily as Margo Timmins’ rich, gentle vocal unleashed the harshest of lyrics. That wasn't lost on Michael, whose reaction was simple. "Great! If they're uncomfortable with it, they're being forced to think and people don't do that enough. We let things go too easily."

"Early 21st Century Blues" puts Michael's two original compositions amid the greats in the pantheon of protest songwriters - Dylan, Havens, Springsteen, Lennon - and it underlines his maturity as a writer that neither song suffers by comparison. It also illustrates his willingness to let the Junkies look outward when the need arises, a departure from the past where he was largely focused on the politics of relationships. Yet the new album does see a partial return to the almost mythical sound of "the Trinity Session", their breathtaking breakthrough from 1988 that catapulted them to international success, recapturing those textures and tensions through beautifully understated playing, the glorious arrival of Margo's voice on "Handouts In The Rain" as beautiful a moment as anything you'll hear this year.

In hindsight, the "live to two track" recording of nearly two decades ago could not have been made in better surroundings than the Church of the Holy Trinity. Today, it's almost completely enclosed by towering shopping malls, much like Cowboy Junkies themselves, a band producing heartfelt music of the spirit in a marketplace that would rather pedal fear than sell hope. The Church is home to projects helping Toronto's homeless and is festooned with banners demanding "Social Justice Now!" It's a call that the Junkies back wholeheartedly, not least with this record.

Michael cites Dylan as his greatest songwriting influence, but "Early 21st Century Blues" treads more in Lennon's footsteps, an urgent reaction to the US election and the continuing slaughter in the Middle East, reminiscent of the "Some Time In New York City" concept. But unlike Lennon, Cowboy Junkies haven't sacrificed quality for speed and the insidious nature of their nuanced music could have greater lasting significance than the sledgehammer approach the former Beatle often employed.

Often misunderstood or written off as purveyors of melancholy, Cowboy Junkies have long offered the most hopeful music around, music that accepts the trials and tribulations of life but which gets you through to the next day with its warmth, its humanity. It's a music that takes its responsibilities seriously and which offers solace to those most in need including, ironically, US soldiers fighting in Iraq who have written to the band in numbers to thank them for the music they listen to at the toughest of times.

Those soldiers have become the forgotten men in the political elite's determination to desensitise us to their machinations, a project that seems to be working. It's as if we think all the battles were won after the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam, Rock Against Racism and the like. We've fallen asleep in our post Cold War material comforts. But racism? Still there. Civil rights issues? Still there. Vietnam? Moved to Afghanistan, but it's still there. The need for dissent? Still there, more than ever.

Cowboy Junkies are not singing about killing our children, they're singing about saving them and thousands like them.

War is over. If you want it...

Saturday 3 July 2010

It's a wag, wag, wag, wag world

By Beryl Cole

Ho’way pet, you ok? I’m glad to see the back of that World Cup aren’t you? Having to see wor Ashley all the time, and him being the best performer as well. That never happened when we were married, I can promise you that! Even if he did always finish first, if you know what I’m saying.

“Ghastly Ashley” wor mam called him. Mind, she never likes my men - she said Simon’s eyes were too close set. To his waistband. And wor Bill.He.Is, she says he makes her bilious. She’s a wag!

Well, course, she’s not a wag, cos wor dad worked in the shipyards when we still had any, but you know worrimean. Still, now wor Ant and Dec are running the country, they’ll bring them back. That and Byker Grove. And the Jarrow March.

I had a bit of a tear watching wor Ash though. Well you cannot see yourselves in the papers every day and not feel something can you? I feel a bit the same about Garfield like. I should have married the cat pet.

I couldn’t help thinking we could have saved things, even at the end, but once wor Ash demanded custody of the mirror and the bathroom cabinet, my heart wasn’t in it any more.

Then when he said we should gan round John Terry’s for some therapy, that was the final camel that broke the bridge’s back. Something like that anyways – I was never the brightest.

Friday 2 July 2010

Don't trust the government

The year has barely staggered beyond the midway point, but it’s never too early to hand out the much coveted “Most Cretinous Analysis of the Year” award to the Daily Fail.

It reports that “The National Audit Office said spending on people in the poorer areas is £230 a year higher than those in better off areas”. Or roughly the annual spending on asparagus in your typical Hampstead household, so really not a lot.

The Fail continues, “That means an extra £3billion a year is currently going into the target zones”, or much less than the coming VAT hike will raise.

“But, largely because of bad diet, inadequate health education and a failure to prescribe enough basic drugs to combat high blood pressure and cholesterol, the health of poor people has worsened in relation to the rest of society.”

Now most of us would conclude that that failure to prescribe proper drugs, give health education and the fact that poor families have to eat crap because it’s all they can afford might point to a need for more and better spending.

What fools we are. The Fail points us towards the light and the truth saying that the statistics, which point out that the life expectancy between rich and poor has widened are, in fact, "Yet more proof that there is little connection between increased NHS spending and better results for patients".

Perfect justification then for huge cuts in the NHS budget. In fact, by the Fail’s peerless logic, if we reach a point where we don’t spend anything at all in poorer areas, they would all become immortal, a bit like the Highlander.

For all that Dick Clameron and their squadron of lumberjacks are catastrophically wrong in their analysis of the current situation – if analysis it truly be rather than a simple piece of ideological opportunism, taking advantage of a perceived crisis to destroy the welfare state – we’ve reached the logical conclusion of the failure of the Blair government of 1997.

Not a failure in any way that the savages of the Fail or the Excess would recognise, but a failure of those whose only hope is the Labour Party, the only vague hope the ordinary masses have. A landslide victory, a once in a generation opportunity to shift the nation in a positive direction, away from the evils of the Thatcherite "no such thing as society" years when if you didn’t have the money to buy refuge, you were done for.

After almost 20 years of the rape of our industry, of the transfer of wealth from the poor to the ever richer, Blair’s huge majority was the opportunity to redress the balance, not least via the tax system, by restoring the top rate of tax for earnings over £100k to something rather fairer. But he did none of that. In spite of the fact that victory was inevitable, in the run up to the election Blair promised no increases in income tax – remember the posters?

Labour have done some pretty dumb things down the years, but that was the clincher, denying the Exchequer huge amounts of cash which would ultimately have helped the public finances at this point, but would also have proved to the vast majority, once and for all, that a fair income tax system actually does not cost the huge bulk of the population anything.

Instead, the better off, a comparatively small elite, would have paid their share after 18 years of getting tax breaks left, right and centre. Mainly right...

But that historic opportunity was blown, Blair lacking the guts to bite the bullet, a problem that hadn’t afflicted the Milk Snatcher when she won power, slashing income taxes for the rich and paying for it by the regressive increase of VAT, not once, but twice, establishing a tradition which Osborne continued last month, ensuring the Tories re still the only party to increase this most pernicious of taxes, although the Lib Dumbs have blood on their hands this time around, having campaigned against an increase more furiously than Labour.

No wonder we don’t trust any of the bastards, even the ones ostensibly on “our side”.

Thursday 1 July 2010

The military two-step

Little Billy Vague, schoolboy foreign secretary and part-time Gollum-a-like, has been talking this week about his favourite dance moves.

He told the Daily Hellegraph, “I’ve always loved the hokey cokey, and, whenever one of my chums has a party, I can’t wait for the dancing to start. After 15 pints, I’m mad for it”.

When the Hagiograph’s journalist questioned him further on this preference with a forensic intensity, suggesting that perhaps the hokey cokey was a little juvenile, Vague reacted swiftly, expressing himself with the kind of eloquence that has secured his place as this administration’s finest Foreign Secretary so far.

“Au contraire! It’s really an allegory for political thought. Take the current government. We put the right boot in, and we let the Lib Dumbs leave their left side out.”

Furthermore, according to the Hellebore, the hokey cokey informs current government policy on Afghanistan too.

“Last week, David Cameroon took the whole troops out by 2015, and then the put the whole force back because there’s no guaranteed timetable. Today, I’m taking the whole military out again by 2014. There’s an election in 2015 after all – and that’s what it’s all about”.

Wednesday 30 June 2010

Where does that highway go to?

I was interested to hear Dick Clameron calling for the public to offer solutions to reducing the deficit on Thursday during his visit to a children’s hospital – presumably he was there because they’re the next generation whose vote he has any hope of getting in the distant future, since they’ll be the only group with no memory of the Pinnochic tendencies revealed since the election.


While this might be the shortest time within which any government has ever run out of ideas, and certainly the first time one has admitted it, let’s welcome this once in a lifetime – this is not my beautiful government – opportunity to help shape the future. They’re especially keen on telling us what we can do to help, so in a spirit of mutual scales from the eyes spring cleaning, let us the people turn our eyes towards what they can do for us.


So let us drag the Westminster gang away from London. Let’s establish a parliament in a disused factory in Birmingham – there’s going to be plenty of them in the next few months. After all, if a change of use for business premises is good enough for a free school, it’s good enough for the government. With plenty of office space going spare in the area too, it’ll be far cheaper than paying for prime plots of land in Westminster.


With the MPs congregated in the midlands, more will be in closer proximity to their constituencies, getting rid of the need for a second home. Expenses for second homes will of course be abolished anyway – after all, it’s only housing benefit by another name, and we all know how disgusting housing benefit is don’t we? In addition, we’ll abolish all MP expenses, because the public finances can’t afford to pay them.
In the same vein, both Downing Street and Chequers will be sold off, or used as tourist attractions, because we all know how the Prime Minister loves to don a hairshirt in the hothouse glare of publicity. It’s a public school thing. He’ll move into a maisonette in Chelmsley Wood.


Those MPs who do need to rent accommodation in Birmingham at their own expense will find plenty of opportunities to move into sink estates, paying low rents as they live six or eight to a house, as those living high on the hog of welfare benefits so often do. A few of them might even be encouraged to indulge in local community activities such as instigating teenage pregnancies in order to secure the one remaining universal benefit in order to help make ends meet.


Radically, MPs will also only be allowed to take one public sector salary, and that will be the salary for being an MP. No ministerial salaries. All MPs will get the same salary because we are all in it together. We know public sector pay is destroying the country, so they will be only too glad to help in this fashion.


With Westminster empty, we will open up the Lords and the Commons as a museum – no great change with the Lords of course. Tourists will flock to the historic site, thus bring in loads of money to the country’s battered economy. Alternatively, we can use them as a hostel for some of the thousands who will be made homeless under the new housing benefit system. After all, we’re all in it together.