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