Wednesday 25 July 2012

The Great Ones - The Stone Roses

IT’S ALL IN THE MIND Y’KNOW

The Stone Roses reunion hoopla is pretty much over, for the time being at least. A handful of festival dates remain to be played and then we wait to see if the beast still lives thereafter.

The gigs they’ve played have left a legacy that pretty much explains just why there is nothing quite like music to touch the soul and either ignite it or leave it stone cold. Those that went offer war stories of blessed out evenings, wandering down memory lane while simultaneously being thrilled by a band supposedly on fine form. Those who have only caught clips on youtube can only marvel at the never ending capacity of Ian Brown to fail to find a tune, even with the help of a SatNav.

I passed on the Roses this time, partly because the open air gig does nothing for me at my rapidly advancing age, mainly because I wanted to leave my memories of them intact.

I was one of the lucky ones you see. On May 12, 1989, I saw them before the hype took over, in a tiny club, standing about twice as far from John Squire as you are from the screen you’re reading this on. The debut album was a couple of weeks old, “She Bangs The Drums” was still awaiting release as a single. They were getting attention, people were talking about them, but they were still a phenomenon waiting to happen.

There are plenty of bands who I listen to more often than them, bands who I’ve seen in the flesh more often, but even now, 23 years now, that gig remains one of my cornerstone musical moments. I doubt that Brown sang any better then than he does now, as a band they were possibly less accomplished than they are today after 20 years at their craft, but in that spit and vomit club with sweat dripping off the ceiling, there was no doubting that this was something incredibly special, that it was about to go over ground, that nothing could stop the Stone Roses. Except, perhaps, themselves.

The following day, I got up early and went and bought the album on cassette. I rarely did that, but I was driving somewhere and I wanted – needed - to hear that record and hear it immediately, an emotion that has only rarely been repeated since then. It didn’t disappoint then, and it hasn’t since. It is a genuinely extraordinary piece of work, not necessarily in songwriting terms although some of it is sublime, but in the creation of a sound, an atmosphere. Like all great bands, they created a place where they and their music existed, separate from the competition, however good their contemporaries like the Mondays might have been. Madchester might have embraced them both, and plenty of others, but the Roses were always apart from it, because they were the special ones.

Not only were they good, very good, they had an inherent understanding of how important it is to create an aura, a mystique, a magic. They were ubiquitous for a spell in 1990, but even then, they kept a lid on it. We didn't know everything therewas to know about them in mind numbing social media styled detail. We got fed fascinating snippets that left us wanting more, then the BBC Late SAhow fiasco and the paint job at Revolver which followed the bad boy blueprint of the likes of the Stones, upped the ante still further. But they were more than that.

They penned songs with titles like “What The World Is Waiting For” and “I Am The Resurrection”, when Brown spoke to the press on increasingly rare occasions,  it was to tell them that his band was the most important in the world, and they moved from clubs to events, Blackpool, Ally Pally, Spike Island, Glasgow Green. Above all, they had the music to back it up, but only together. There was something about that foursome, like Morrisssey, Marr, Joyce and Rourke, that just worked to perfection, a blessing that they later took for granted as the band fragmented.

But for those 12 months, they were the greatest game in town and, had they called it quits before the trials and tribulations of “The Second Coming”, they would be in the pantheon, but the gradual unravelling tarnished the golden days.

And that’s why I didn’t go this time and haven’t experienced a single pang of regret. In my mind, they are still that group from 1989, and that puts them up there with the very, very best. That’s the way I’m keeping it.

Friday 13 July 2012

Tax & spend - football's deadly addiction

Portsmouth will begin the new season with a deduction of 10 points. Rangers will begin it in the fourth tier of Scottish football. Other clubs are, you can be certain, saying a silent prayer and admitting, if only to themselves, that “there but for the grace of God go we”.


This is not an attack on those two clubs in particular, nor on the others that could, and surely will, follow in their wake. But it is an attack on the way football is run, the ludicrous “fit and proper person tests”, the way in which it has been allowed to run up a bar tab that would shame a brewery, and on those that have presided over a period of unprecedented wealth in the game that has left it with nothing but monumental debt that can never be repaid.


And that is the real crux – those debts never will have to be repaid, at least not the non-footballing ones. If you are owed money for supplying the grass seed, for selling the milk that goes in the players’ tea, for providing Lucozade (other sports drinks are available), bandages, newspapers, electricity, even if you are the HMRC who are owed millions in back taxes, you will see only a fraction of the money you are owed.


I’ve spent the last 30 years paying taxes and national insurance, for services that I was promised and which, it seems clear, I will never get – public health, proper pension, dignity in retirement (which was supposed to come at 65 when I started work by the way). All that money I’ve paid is but a drop in the ocean compared with the tax that’s getting written off against the names of Portsmouth and Rangers – and plenty others before them.  


I’m pretty pissed off with that. I’d quite like to never bother paying any tax and yet be allowed to carry on my business as normal. Does it not seem weird to anybody else that a company that owes millions can continue to trade simply by popping up as a “newco”? Isn’t there something obscene in these straitened economic times that such huge tranches of cash can be written off by the Exchequer while this newco can carry on utilising a nice piece of real estate such as Ibrox Park, a site on which you could, for example, build a new retail park or umpteen houses, bringing in a very hefty wodge of cash that would help pay those creditors?


While I’m happy to see Rangers and Portsmouth continue, if they are indeed new companies, shouldn’t we have all their old assets off them first?

Wednesday 11 July 2012

The Book of Sharpened Crucifixes

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Patti Smith, the opening of “Horses”, what else?

Thirty years ago, it was a prelude to a way of life, a new way of life, an enthralling way of thinking.

And now, the speaker, the seer, the sage, the American artist, the provocateur, the lighter of the dynamite, they’re trying to enrol her in the Establishment.
Which I guess is where we all go if we live long enough, whether we like it or not, whether we’re still saying the same things or not.

Look at what happened to Jesus. Not at the time, not when they nailed him down, that’s not a great way to go. But for a guy who was a revolutionary socialist long before you could spray Che on the walls, for him to become the article of idolatry in the world’s big religion, for him to be a bigger brand name than Coca-Cola, how much more Establishment do you want to get? If only some of the militant, military fundamentalist Bible bashers would actually pay attention to what he said.
But why would they when there’s money to be made by ignoring it?

The Establishment got smarter while we just got older. They put us to sleep in our comfort. They turned us off by letting us turn on.

They ate up the visionaries, swallowed them whole, smiled benevolently on the voices of reason but still paid them scant attention beyond patronising them.

And yet still Patti and her kind rattle the cage, still pokes and scratches, and is still sexy as all hell. The mind razor sharp, ready to dissect the fools and cosset the seekers. The eyes that have seen plenty and told us more. The androgyny that the stupid misread but which fascinates ever more with every passing year, as the hair gets greyer and the meaning grows deeper. As the poet gets caricatured as witch and the sneers grow audible. No, Patti Smith is not part of the Establishment because whatever they do, they can’t box her in.

A little more housekeeping: Obit: Richard Wright

The death of Pink Floyd founder member Richard Wright sounded the final note in the saga of one of the world’s most influential bands and ended forever any fleeting, and probably unrealistic, hopes that the four piece that produced such seminal recordings as “Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Wall” and “Wish You Were Here” would once again reunite onstage.

As it is, the final legacy that Floyd leave us is the brief reunion in aid of Live 8 in 2005. Perhaps it was better left at that one, one last emotional blowout rather than the inevitable enmities that would have surfaced had Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour had to spend any length of time in one another’s company.

Wright’s contribution to the Floyd has long been overlooked as he and drummer Nick Mason faded into the background, dwarfed by the more obvious gifts – and the more voracious egos – of their two colleagues in the post-Syd Floyd. But Wright was a cornerstone of the band in that golden period through the 1970s when Floyd established themselves at the toppermost of the poppermost as John Lennon once described it, a band second in influence only to The Beatles themselves, a band that sold records and tickets at the same alarming rate as Led Zeppelin.

The myth and the mystery of Floyd – the most faceless megastars in musical history – is such that it’s hard to discern just what contributions each individual made. And in the end, does it matter? The love you take is equal to the love you make, and it’s clear that whatever we might make of them as individuals, Floyd as a unit were loved.

And perhaps Wright most of all. Gilmour and Waters, abrasive and aggressive, are creatures we admire, we revere. But loved? Maybe not. For all that the songs they wrote were often about fragility, vulnerability, collapse, neither man seemed to embody those characteristics as individuals.

Yet Wright did. Quiet, diffident, seemingly out of place in the rock world, the self taught keyboard player appeared to lack confidence in spite of being a consummate musician. A devotee of jazz, hugely influenced by Miles Davis, Wright was of that generation that looked to produce sounds as much as what had been thought of as “music”.

The single note that provided the launch pad for “Echoes”, the piece that really set the tone for ‘70s Floyd is a perfect case in point. There’s nothing there, it hangs and reverberates in the breeze, yet it evokes such a powerful mood and emotion that it became the basis for 20 minutes of music that changed people’s perceptions of what rock bands could do.

Minimalism was certainly a big part of Wright’s musical style, perhaps most famously crystallised in that piano piece that opens “The Great Gig In The Sky”, but he was a beautifully lyrical player too, a writer of the most gorgeous melodies such as “Us And Them”, also from “Dark Side Of The Moon”, perhaps the single most beautiful song that Floyd ever released, their signature song in so many ways.

As Floyd gradually imploded under the weight of the success they’d craved, Wright’s role became increasingly marginalised beneath Waters’ driving ambition, but still Floyd were a better band for his contribution, most tellingly on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.

Thereafter, internal politics saw Wright ousted from the group during the making of “The Wall”, yet he asked to play the shows that followed, an oddly telling story about the nature of the band, so personal, so introspective, so fractious, yet so businesslike. Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.

Wright returned for the post-Waters Floyd and toured with Gilmour as recently as 2006, earning standing ovations after every show, due recognition of a fine musician and songwriter who played his full part in the story of a band who you still hear everywhere today, from trip-hop through ambient, from Scissor Sisters to Elbow.

There has always been this aching void at the heart of Pink Floyd, its members all stretching out to find that missing piece of their souls. Their genius was to capture that on record in such a way that, if it didn’t locate the grail, at least it helped those of us who shared that loneliness feel a little less isolated.

An epitaph for Richard Wright? That note from “Echoes”. Hanging and reverberating in the breeze.

A Spot Of Housekeeping

Just gathering together a few old reviews from the last few years into one place. Move on, nothing to see here...

BILL BRUFORD - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In his many guises, Bruford has been a part of at least three records which would go onto the proverbial desert island with me – “Discipline” by King Crimson, “If Summer Had Its Ghosts” with Ralph Towner and Eddie Gomez which might just be the best Sunday morning record there is, and “Bruford Levin Upper Extremities”, with an honourable mention for the live album that followed, BLUE Nights.

And that’s not to mention the fact that it would take plenty to tear me away from at least a couple of Earthworks efforts such as “A Part And Yet Apart” and “Footloose And Fancy Free”.

He’s also the reason why it’s worth hunting for as many bootlegs of Genesis’ 1976 tour as you can find, just to hear him play “Supper’s Ready”, “Los Endos” and “The Cinema Show” never the same way twice.

I’m a fan, get it?

But even I was surprised by just what a good read this is, I’m hard pushed to think of a rock book of recent times to rival it. It genuinely is that good, both for the zealot, but also for the more casual observer who wants to know just what it’s like on the inside of the music business as a gigging, recording musician.

Over the years Bruford has proved a wry, witty interviewee, even amidst his unconcealed dislike of the form, as he makes clear here. That dry, cynical turn of mind informs the pages here but while there’s a healthy scepticism for the business he’s in and the characters who inhabit it, there’s none of the sourness of tone that you get from his erstwhile bandleader Robert Fripp.

Bruford accepts that, if you want to play music, and you want to make it your living, there will be compromises, you will have to play the industry game at times and that it makes sense to embrace your audience rather than wish they were somewhere else.

There are stories and anecdotes aplenty about his days in an assortment of bands, from Yes to Crimson, Uk to Earthworks, Genesis to ABWH.

There’s a playful edge to some of them, while keen observations on the likes of Fripp, Chris Squire of Yes or Phil Collins are enlightening.

The catastrophe that was Yes’ “Union” project is a glorious morality tale on just what can happen when management and money come before the music.

But always, it comes back to the music and his desire to explore just where those sticks lead, to stretch his ability to the nth degree, to seek out different ways and different settings for the drums that clearly fascinate him.

The sharp difference between the world of rock – sloppy, disorganised, uncertain yet bloated by huge amounts of money that you may never see again – and that of jazz – professional, organised, run on a shoestring – is neatly illustrated, as is the difficulty of maintaining a band, even a career, in an age when your recorded work is swiftly translated into zeroes and ones then disseminated for free by torrents and downloads.

The sheer grind of being a working musician is well captured here without being self pitying – it’s clear that Bruford still rates a career in music as being better than working for a living – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t tough, with long hours and emotional hardships that few of the rest of us would sign up for.

The balance of the opportunities it offers and the toll it takes is a fine one, and clear as he has got older, the balance has shifted.

There’s a sense that Bruford realises he might just have got his timing absolutely right, living in an era when he could flit from one group to another and make a reasonable living from it, and that this might be an opportunity to get out while the getting is good.

In the final section of the book, he muses on the issue of self confidence, belief in your ability. In few other fields – sport is another – must you shore up your ego to the same extent before you go to work, in the full knowledge that you are in the spotlight with nowhere to hide if it all goes wrong.

I think he underestimates the forgiving nature of the audience on those occasions when it might be off kilter, along with our inability to spot it anyway in most cases, but that’s more a function of perfectionism / professionalism.

It’s a poignant end to the tale, an acceptance of the passing of time and a reluctance to fight it, at least on stage, and it’s a downbeat note on which to end. But it’s a true one and that’s the strength of this autobiography. It rings true on every page.

Bill Bruford has added to the sum of human happiness as PG Wodehouse would describe it. What better achievement is there than that?

May he enjoy the future in good health and heart for a long, long time to come, continuing to curate and care for a rich, rewarding back catalogue. And may he find time to pen a volume two…

THE FIREMAN - ELECTRIC ARGUMENTS
After a couple of ambient projects, The Fireman – Paul McCartney and Youth – are answering the call of a different conflagration this time. While it’s not wholly accurate to call this an album of songs, it stakes out more traditional territory, albeit with a nicely idiosyncratic approach.

Clearly these were not songs painstakingly mapped out in demo and rehearsal sessions, but instead it’s music made up on the spot in the here and now, 13 tracks cut in 13 days. That raggedy edge and spontaneous feel is something that McCartney has rarely exposed over the years where too much polish has too often been applied to his output.

Let’s not be coy. Since rock’n’roll came into being in the 1950s, there has been no greater songwriter than Macca. As a Beatle, for all the post-70, and especially post-80, revisionism, McCartney was every bit the equal of his partner John Lennon and while his solo work has never scaled the heights of the Fabs years – what has? – he has continued to turn out some of the great standards of the time.

But McCartney was a great experimenter too, though he rarely showcased his penchant for the avant garde until it had gone through the filter of his immaculate pop sensibility, while Lennon got greater credit for being “out there” simply because he never used an editor and was hooked on audio verite which, depending on your viewpoint, is a beautiful expression of the truth or an all too painful look at the navel of a lazy arist.

To call “Electric Arguments” avant garde would be pushing it too far, but certainly this is a more naked view of McCartney as writer, performer and singer than we’re used to, and all power to him for giving it us at the age of 66 and to Youth for drawing it out of him.

In terms of it’s ambition, its sprawl and it’s willingness to go warts and all, this is in the mould of “The White Album”. And no, before anybody thinks that’s a direct comparison in terms of quality or its enduring nature, it isn’t. “The White Album” is the greatest record of all time. Fact. But McCartney was a prime mover on that record and some of its spirit permeates the grooves on this one, if CDs had grooves.

From the opening bark of the raucous Captain Beefheart – yes, really – influenced psych-blues of “Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight” through to the moody, impressionist inflections of the closer, “Don’t Stop Running” where Macca’s famous larynx is used as instrument rather than storyteller, this is an album happy to meander, ready to go where the music leads. There’s not as much of the friction as the title infers, but it still covers plenty of bases.

It’s also an album that becomes less and less obvious as it travels. After the opener, “Two Magpies” is a classic bit of airy pop whimsy, though it also age withering a little of the higher register of his voice. But it hasn’t take any of his effortless way with a tune. Nobody writes a pop song lie Paul McCartney as the joyous “Sing The Changes” shows, Youth proving himself the perfect collaborator with a production job that keeps it from the sickly sweetness Macca is sometimes prey to. And who plays pop bass better than him? On the evidence of the effervescent “Highway”, or “Sun Is Shining”, there ain’t nobody.

Yet it’s in the mists and murks of the last few tracks that these electric arguments really provoke. “Lifelong Passion” is in trance territory, while “Is This Love?” has Eno style soundscape textures to enliven it. “Lovers In A Dream” is The Doors gone dub, before the album crests on its stand out track, “Universal Here, Everlasting Now”. Heavier, here’s evidence that McCartney still has his ear to the ground for this draws on the post-rock music coming out of Montreal via the Constellation roster, notably God Speed You Black Emperor!

With two records in a year – “Memory Almost Full” was more traditional fare, if showcasing some of his sharpest songwriting in a while – McCartney is on a roll. Mortality is on his shoulder, and once again, he’s an artist in a hurry, just as he was as a Beatle, for very different reasons, all those years ago. Nothing concentrates the mind better than a deadline.

COWBOY JUNKIES - AT THE END OF PATHS TAKEN
More than twenty years in to a career, there aren’t many artists that are going anyplace. You are what you are what you are. You buy a book, watch a movie, hear a record by somebody who’s been at that that long, you’re putting on familiar shoes. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that either, a little security in a fast changing world.

And yet and yet.

Creation is all about change. You want to keep creating, you gotta keep changing, that was Miles’ philosophy, and pretty well every time you got a new Davis disc, you got a charge of electricity that raced up the spine and knocked your wig off, for good or bad. Not many of those guys about.
You find another one, you better relish that, better cherish it, because those are the artists that are worth having around your house, in your ears, taking space in your head. They’re the ones that are going to wake you up, challenge you, maybe tell you something instead of reinforcing what you already think you know, better yet, make you ask yourself some questions, or help you strip away some dirt from the answers that were there all the time.

You probably think you know what the new Cowboy Junkies record sounds like. You don’t. Yes, the trademarks are there. How could it be otherwise after two decades? But they’re all twisted, re-evaluated, renewed. Songs no longer draw life from the understated, almost unheard pulse of Alan Anton’s bassline, a sound that now propels undulating melodies on “Mountain” or “My Little Basquiat”. Anton almost switches places with Margo Timmins, still the most arresting voice in the game, yet buried deeper inside these songs, songs which create a surround sound universe of their own, be it from plaintive acoustics like “Someday Soon” or the kitchen sink overload of “Mountain”, where all hell breaks loose. Tomorrow never knew.

There are changes here that Junkies purists may baulk at. Drummer Pete Timmins is no longer the easygoing engine. Instead he’s embraced edgy percussion, thoughtful rhythms that knock you off kilter, make you listen more carefully. There’s nothing obvious, or easy going on here. Outside studiophile / musician Joby Baker has added a mesh of instrumentation and sounds that take this record a long way from the skeletal nature of “Whites Off Earth Now!!” Strings play a heavy, dramatic role on several songs. And drama is the keynote in a record which you could loosely call a concept album if the term didn’t bring to mind visions of hobbits, pinball players and wizards on ice.

Yet this is a concept record of sorts. A concept record for grown ups. Like his colleagues, songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmins has dispensed with standbys and certainties, thrown everything in the air, and begun to rework his craft. Echoing the pacifist sentiment that was the core of their last effort, the quickly recorded “Early 21st Century Blues”, “At The End Of Paths Taken” muses on a particular theme, that of family, the way patterns are repeated from father to son to son and back again, the way the greatest joys bring with them the heaviest burdens, the way the outside world can devastate the closest familial relationship, and the way in which we are all helpless to do anything about it. It’s a record that continues to work through themes of war and peace, a hangover from “Early 21st Century Blues”, looking at how the macro can militate against the micro. It’s a record that looks at the biggest betrayal, the one none of us can avoid, the betrayal of mortality. It’s a record that’s simultaneously about surrender, about giving oneself up to the journey while raging against the pain that creates.

That duality, that life is hard, confusing, painful, but still the best thing we’ve managed to come up with so far has long been a core Junkies theme, but on this record, it’s been honed to perfection.
Where Michael Timmins was a short-story writer in song, on this album, he’s a spare, sparse poet, betraying a distinct e.e.cummings influence in lyrics that are impressionistic yet cutting, forensic but embracing, emotional but without a trace of sentimentality. The first track, “Brand New World”, sets the tone, Margo Timmins intoning the list of cares that 40somethings carry about their neck, day after day, “Mouths to feed, Shoes to buy, Rent to pay, Tears to dry”.

The first half of the record covers the darkest fears, that we won’t be up to the job as parents, that we will fail our children or that someone, somewhere will fail all our children, that a madman in the White House could blow us all apart, that a nutcase with a suitcase could take everything down with him. There’s the wonder of fatherhood on the loping, grooving, vaguely sinister “My Little Basquiat”, counterbalanced by the fear of what the world is going to do to those kids when you’re not around to stop it.

Having introduced listeners to new soundscapes, dissonant sounds, powerful emotional terrain, the second half of the record builds and builds, increasingly personal, intimate but wholly identifiable. “Follower2” is a centrepiece, tracing the evolution from father to son, to son becoming father, scraps from Michael’s childhood, inklings from his future, one relationship becoming the other. “I can’t bear to hear his breathing, simply knowing what’s to come”. Is that the breath of a dying father, or a sleeping son, a life full of trials behind or before him? The closing, “Here you will always be, behind me, and you will not go away. Here I will always be, behind you, and I will never go away” is a perfect summation of the handing down of the generations, something picked up on again in “Mountain”, something they used to call a sound collage, mixing the Timmins’ father reading from his memoirs, all kinds of studio samples and sounds, wrenching strings, Margo Timmins wailing “How’d this mountain get so high?” into the abyss. If they hadn’t already come up with the phrase “sensory overload”, you’d have to invent it for this.

But there’s still a peak to come, “My Only Guarantee”. It’s the final twist of the knife, but to say more would be like telling you whodunnit before you started reading a mystery novel. Get the record, set an hour aside, put the headphones on and listen. Really listen. Because the only reference point I can give you to a record this complex, this intriguing, this overloaded with sounds, yet so simple, is one that came out 34 years ago. The effects, the sounds, the overwhelming scale are obvious comparisons, but that’s too facile.

The common ground is that “At The End Of Paths Taken” is a record that somebody needed to make, one that you have to live with from start to finish, one that unfolds, washes over you. It’s a statement of humanity in a dehumanising time, in a time where you’re only supposed to feel what Oprah tells you to feel.

“At The End Of Paths Taken” is a record for those of us who know we don’t know. Take the journey. We’ll meet you on the dark side of the moon.