A Cautionary Tale

Plenty of football revolves around “the banter”. Liverpool Everton, Spurs Arsenal, United City, Albion Wolves, it’s all about a bit of one upmanship and what, we are forced these days, to refer to as bragging rights. In the midlands at the moment, there is plenty of opportunity to invoke said rights if you are an Albion fan given the cataclysmic demise of Wolverhampton Wanderers, a story that has unravelled since the day, just 15 months ago, that the Throstles went to Molineux and came away with a 5-1 win that could have been ten.

In the wake of that, Wolves have gone into what amounts to a nervous breakdown. There are those who now argue that Mick McCarthy should never have been sacked in the wake of that defeat but anybody who was at Molineux on that day, who encountered the febrile atmosphere, the witch hunt there was for McCarthy that day, will know only too well that the idea that he could be leading the team in Wolverhampton a fortnight later is the stuff of fantasy. After a result, and a performance of that nature, he had to go.

Wolves’ problem was that they seemed to have no succession plan in place which appears laughable now given that it was obvious to anyone that McCarthy’s time was running out. Loyalty is a highly laudable thing, and there was great support for McCarthy within the corridors of power at Wolves, but in truth, his time had come months before. Having survived by the skin of their teeth the previous season, that was the time to remove McCarthy, a manager highly adept at getting teams promoted but largely unable to take them onto another level beyond that. Having earned them a third straight Premiership season, if Wolves had truly wanted to progress, the time to move him on was the summer of 2011. They did not and from there, all bets were off.

Just as extraordinary was the decision to build a new stand. Presumably, Wolves felt they were now settled and established in the top flight and in need of more seats, a conclusion that makes the decision to persevere with McCarthy all the stranger. As past experience shows – especially from the original redevelopment of Molineux – you cannot improve your stadium without first improving your team. Wolves failed to heed the lessons of history and are paying the price as a result.

All of the 2011/12 campaign was a long fight against relegation, as it was always destined to be under McCarthy. Only too late did they jettison him, under duress, and then they compounded the error in finding a successor. A deal was done with Steve Bruce, only for the board to lose their nerve once the message boards suggested the fans didn’t want him, thinking they could get a “bigger name”. Compare and contrast, as they used to say on exam papers, the differing fortunes of Wolves and Bruce last weekend.

They then dithered about before announcing that their number one choice had been Terry Connor all along. Firstly, he clearly wasn’t, which meant that from day one, he was undermined. Secondly, he was McCarthy’s assistant. Clearly they had concluded that the McCarthy era had run its course and, if so, clearly his staff were also a part of the problem. It wasn’t as if McCarthy had gone on to bigger and better things and they were looking for continuity in his wake. They were needing a fresh start, so why not have one?

Once Connor had completed McCarthy’s work and taken Wolves down with a whimper, the club finally decided on a change of course and to bring that freshness, appointed Stale Solbakken. The Norwegian was charged with bringing a more progressive style to a team schooled in the more rudimentary approach of McCarthy and after promising early signs when a push for the top six looked possible, things took a turn for the worse. Defeat at Luton in the FA Cup was the last straw and in January, after just seven months at the helm, he was removed, that experiment seemingly over.

In came Dean Saunders, rippling with Doncaster pedigree, his way with a one liner supposedly just the charm that was needed to lift the pessimistic gloom that hung like a pall over Molineux. That went well didn’t it? And now, Saunders is in the dole queue with his P45 in his hand and Wolves look to find a manager to take them out of League One. All over the Black Country, barely suppressed laughter can be heard tumbling from blue and white mouths.

But football lives on fine margins. That day at Molineux, 12^th February 2012. Going into the game, Albion had taken four points from six games and had 26 points from 24 games. Wolves had just won at QPR, had 21 points from 24 games and were out of the bottom three. Albion murdered Wolves through the first half, but a last ditch Fletcher goal saw the sides in at 1-1. Albion’s domination continued in the second period, but the game remained tight. At 2-1 to the visitors, Foster produced a phenomenal save then, from a corner, Wolves looked to have equalised, only for Mulumbu to rise and head the ball off the line. From there, Wolves collapsed, lost 5-1 and nervous collapse followed.

Just imagine Mulumbu was two inches shorter. The ball goes in, it’s 2-2, Albion deflated, Wolves suddenly ascendant. They win the game, get a rush of confidence from it and string some points together. Albion, on the other hand, are crushed and go into decline, ending in relegation. Roy Hodgson not only doesn’t get the England job, but he leaves at season’s end with his contract at an end, leaving Albion to find a new boss to try and restore them to the Premier League. Meanwhile, a feelgood factor surrounds Molineux, season ticket sales go through the roof, the new stand is full, McCarthy leaves, they appoint a progressive manager like Steve Clarke, and suddenly they are pushing for Europe. Seems ludicrous now, but the skin on Mulumbu’s head – there’s a name for a fanzine if ever there was one – might just have been the difference between one future and another.

Back to the present, and just hold on a minute. Decline – like success – very rarely lasts forever. Let us take a look, for example, at the 1997/98 campaign, and focus up on the bottom tier. The five clubs that propped up the Football League were Swansea City, Cardiff City, Hull City, Brighton & Hove Albion and Doncaster Rovers. Manchester City and Stoke City had just been relegated to Division Two. They’ve all had quite decent seasons as it turns out.

And Wolves will rise again. Why? Because the club is too big not to, because, above all, it has history. That history pulled them out of the mire through the ‘80s and ‘90s when it was going catastrophically wrong and it will do so again. The financiers will tell you that you can’t find history on the balance sheet. Maybe not, but you can find it in the P&L account. When we all come back in August, look at the number of season tickets Wolves sell and the size of their crowd and those at Stevenage. Wolves’ numbers will be three or four times greater than theirs and why? Because of Billy Wright, Stan Cullis, John Richards, Derek Dougan, because they built the club, because supporters hope their like will come again. In the end, history will create a future for Wolves. And you can take that to the bank.

Black and white?

For something that has done more for racial integration and harmony in the United Kingdom than probably anything else, professional football is currently making an unholy mess of its position on the matter isn’t it?

First, just a little bit of historical context to underline football’s contribution. I’ll give you a bit of a timeline of a few events that have all happened in and around England’s second city, Birmingham.

1964: Smethwick, West Midlands: General election, Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths wins his Parliamentary seat by using the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”.

1968: Birmingham, West Midlands: Enoch Powell makes his “Rivers of Blood” speech.

1976: Birmingham, West Midlands: Eric Clapton makes his “Enoch was right” declaration during a concert.

1978: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Black footballers Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson play together for West Bromwich Albion.

2014: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Celebration statue to be unveiled in the town centre featuring Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson.

Now, to go from “If you want a nigger for a neighbour” to building a statue in honour of three black men just two miles down the road in 50 years, I think you would have to call that progress wouldn’t you? Much of it can be laid at the door of football, a sport which showed that integration was possible, that in the timeless phrase of Mr Paul McCartney and Mr Steven Wonder, ebony and ivory could, indeed, live together in perfect harmony, with, or without, a piano keyboard to do it on.

Football has, however, if not lost its way entirely, has an urgent need to shove fresh batteries into its SatNav. The various controversies that have involved the likes of John Terry and Luis Suarez have been well rehearsed here and elsewhere, symptomatic of what seems a disturbing complacency about the problem. Indeed, there are real concerns that we have take our eye off the ball in recent times and have forgotten just how pernicious racism can be, no least in times of economic turmoil when the idea of scapegoating on the basis of difference is at its most seductive.

We have seen the simple, explicit message of “Kick Racism Out Of Football” supplanted by the “One Game One Community” line that looks to confront all forms of discrimination under one blanket header. It is doubtless a laudable idea but by that scattergun approach, it has effectively diluted the potency of the head on war waged by the single issue campaign in the past. To many, we now seem to have a watered down approach that effectively addresses nothing.

You have to wonder if it is time for a change of gear now, not least in the wake of last Sunday’s PFA awards dinner where comedian Reginald D Hunter scandalised the watching audience by use of the word nigger. Perhaps that and some of his other material was ill judged, but the reflex responses to a black man using that word has exposed all kinds of other issues. All that has been reported is the word itself, not the context, not how it was meant. It’s unlikely that he used it with malice, with a hateful heart the way that a fascist would. Equally, as an American comedian, he uses it in a markedly different way to how it would be used – and received – in the UK.

However, he used that word and those who sit in judgement have that one at the very top of the list of words you cannot use, no way, no how. Once upon a time, that list was needed, particularly in the bleak days of the ‘70s and ‘80s when bananas rained down and monkey chants were heard at all our games.

But while we might think of racists as terminally stupid, hate is an infinitely subtle emotion, one that goes undercover only to break out in all kinds of new sly ways, one that subverts lists. Our lists of words that we must not use are now redundant because that battle has largely been won. Or, more accurately lost, because if we are going to mount a reflex attack on a black comedian for his use of that word, we truly have lost the plot.

Racism wasn’t sent into retreat simply by prohibiting words. It was won by standing up to the real thugs, by demanding that things got better, that chanting ended, that abuse ended. And now it is more insidious, I can promise you that it will not be won by well meaning white people who tie themselves in knots by trying to be PC. None of us can use the N word, I can’t type it without flinching, but what good does that do now in the fight against racism? Sod all really.

The time has come for a militant refusal to take this crap any longer, for an insistence on the imposition of the Rooney Rule – and not just in football, but in the boardrooms of the country too – and for white people to surrender their positions in these well meaning bodies to those who are on the receiving end of discrimination, who know what it is and who know what it isn’t.

What we don’t need is the PFA intoning that they will not pay a black man for the day’s work he did for them. Didn’t Abe Lincoln make that illegal?

An apology for a newspaper and a human being

In today's Sun newspaper that covers the Hillsborough report, and that Sun headline of the time, Kelvin MacKenzie wrote: "I am sorry that it was so wrong. It has taken more than two decades, 400,000 documents and a two-year inquiry to discover to my horror that it would have been far more accurate had I written the headline The Lies rather than The Truth."

Actually, rather than 23 years, it would have taken 23 minutes in the company of someone who was there, or with a grieving family. You know, doing the job that newspapers are supposed to do, like checking the facts, taking a balanced view, coming to conclusions based on reality rather than prejudices, not simply taking the word of those with an agenda. Kelvin McKenzie never was fit for purpose, never will be and his pathetic apology 23 years too late is about as worthy a gesture as his lord and master's decision to close the NOTW just to make way for The Sunday Sun.

Instead of reporting what was blatantly obvious at the time, he and his newspaper chose to persecute Liverpudlians (loathed after Toxteth and because of the Derek Hatton council) and protect the South Yorkshire Police for services rendered during the miner's strike, rather than stand up for the rights of ordinary people. Thankfully, in the end, people truly do have the power to redeem the work of fools.

I have no idea if there is a heaven or a hell, but in the case of McKenzie and his puppet masters, I truly hope there is, and that he and his kind hang down there for all eternity, eyes forced open so they can watch again and again the suffering of those people that he and his newspaper raped in their darkest hour. You worthless, worthless bastard.

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.

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?

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.

Air rage

The captain’s voice came over the tannoy.

“Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.”

As a doctor, I leapt to my feet, a grave mistake for I smacked my head on the luggage hold and was unconscious for several minutes. I came to when a doctor put smelling salts to my nose – fortunately, by an odd twist of fate, the pilot was a psychic and had realised that I was about to crack my head open on the luggage hold. By asking for medical help before the accident actually occurred, he had ensured that a doctor would be on hand to give assistance as soon as I injured myself. How very thoughtful.

Moments later, another announcement came over the tannoy. “Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.” This time, I refrained from leaping to my feet, but stepped gingerly into the aisle where a stewardess carefully upset scalding coffee down my leg.

Again, what could have been a disastrous accident was prevented by the pilot’s psychic powers for a doctor was immediately in attendance and applied soothing poultices to my cracking skin, thereby reducing the severity of the burns.

I settled back in my seat, only to hear another announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.”

This time, I stayed where I was. What a tragic error on my part. The doctor, tormented by what he saw as his failure to give adequate assistance to me was in a suicidal despair in the toilet. Because I failed to help him, he killed himself by disembowelling himself with a small plastic fish-knife. And to think, as a doctor of philosophy, I was perfectly equipped to help him. Life eh?

Power Play

Apologies if the apocalyptic nature of this blog leaves you struggling to sleep at night, pacing the bedroom floor and worrying if football in its current form can possibly survive.

Sorry, but it’s too late to turn back now.

Across the border in Scotland, the SPL might well be in the terminal stages of the disease for it’s hard to see how the lack of competition caused by the outsize Old Firm, inflated expectations for the other clubs driven by a media with no sense of responsibility, and the apparently irresistible rise in player wages driven by those expectations can ever be reversed in the current climate.

But is it so very different in England? Hardly. The issue has reached the Houses of Parliament in recent weeks, a Select Committee taking evidence on the state of the game. And the state is not good.

Perhaps the most interesting comments thus far have come from the comparatively new chief of the Football League, Greg Clarke. For all that the elite would like you to believe that the Football League is little more than an anachronism, it is actually the backbone of the English game. Without its existence, without the pyramid system, the Premier League would be nothing. The dreams, the ambitions that fire those lower league outfits are what gives the Premiership its status, makes it the pinnacle.

Without that, it becomes an hermetically sealed irrelevance. If ever a perfect case in point were required, last month provided it with the three best teams in England pitted against Crawley Town, Leyton Orient – a club about to be crucified by West Ham’s insatiable pursuit of money and the Olympic Stadium - and Notts County with results that would tease the romantic’s taste buds. If nothing else, those games underlined what it is that is special about the English – and British – game and why those links are far too precious to lose.

But according to Clarke, we are at risk of doing just that. He told the committee, “Debt is the biggest problem. If I had to list the 10 things about football that keep me awake at night, it would be debt one to 10. The level of debt is unsustainable. We are heading for the precipice and will get there quicker than people think."

In finest Soviet style, Clarke and the Football League hierarchy are working towards a five year plan that he believes the clubs must embrace, though he noted darkly, “Football can be a bit backward looking - there's a penchant not to change”.

Ironically though, the issue is that football changed too much and too quickly through the 1990s and into the new century. In particular, the advent of the Premier League created a pace of change that all too many clubs simply did not comprehend. Far too many simply spent today believing milk and honey would flow tomorrow. But there isn’t enough of the stuff to make up for the amount they’ve already squandered, not even if they put all the cows and bees on overtime from here til doomsday. Apologies to Bolton for bringing them up again, but if a team with a decade of top flight football behind it is £93million in the hole and has to carry on spending just to tread water in the top division, something is horribly wrong, and those horrors simply trickle down the food chain, unlike the wealth which remains resolutely unshifted from the top.

The issue at the heart of it all is the dysfunctional nature of football in England. The Sports Minister Hugh Robertson has described football as "the worst run sport in the country" and as a member of the coalition cabinet, he should know how to recognise a shambles when he sees one. There are three governing bodies – the FA, The Football League and the Premier League – each of whose agenda runs largely contrary to the others. The Premiership cares nothing about anything else, the Football League wants to relieve them of some of their money but can’t upset them lest they close their doors forever, while the FA sits in a corner consulting Pele over its erectile dysfunction.

How did we get here? That in itself is a constructive reminder of what happens when we forget about sport and think only of money and power. The Premier League was born out of the greed of the big six as they were then, all wanting money and none caring about anybody else. Worked out really well for Everton, did that. The Football Association saw this as an opportunity for it to wrest control of the game from the Football League whose competition had grown in strength and had gradually come to usurp the FA not least because the clubs did not always release their players for international duty. England were routinely hopeless and the FA got it in the neck for that. By running the league, went the argument, they could ensure players were always available for their country and England would go and win lots of games and tournaments. That worked out as well for the national team as the Premiership worked for Everton.

It was, lest we forget, the FA Premier League. It still is, though the Premier League is none too keen on associating itself with the Football Association which is seen as impotent, incompetent – hello World Cup 2018! – and out of touch. In its hurry to beat the Football League, the Football Association created a Frankenstein’s monster of its own and before long, the Premier League did exactly what the Football League had previously done to the Football Association. Made it irrelevant.

Which is where we sit today. A governing body that means nothing. An age old infrastructure that has been rendered so destitute that it can do little more than hold out a begging bowl. And a self perpetuating elite which exists as little more than road kill for the vultures at the top. No wonder Greg Clarke doesn’t sleep at nights. Nobody who cares about football should rest easy.

OVER THE HILL

Maybe you saw the BBC documentary about the great Formula One driver Graham Hill on television last weekend. In these days of frenetic jump cuts and similar tricks to catch the interest of those with the nano-second attention span of the genuine idiot, it was a slower moving hour, and all the better for it, letting his story unfold with good humour, a helping of uncomfortable truth and some real warmth.

But for our purposes, I draw your attention to a clip within, from the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show, 1971, itself a relic of a former age, from a time when it was enough to get a load of great sportsman together and celebrate their achievements rather than staging an overblown ceremony at some huge arena, an event which you – yes you member of the public – can truly affect with your text votes! As if we were voting for something as utterly pointless as which celebrity can dance or which slack jawed youth can murder a tune slightly less grievously than another.

We digress. The piece opens with Hill and the ineffably majestic Jackie Stewart engaged in what we are forced to term these days, “doing the banter”. It’s banter of an altogether superior nature, Hill playing the raffish cad to the full. “You’ve won six Grands Prix this year Jackie, which is hogging it slightly. Seven is the record. Where do you think you could have done it and it didn’t happen?” Stewart looks at him in exasperation, and with immaculate timing, returns with, “I don’t think that’s a fair question”, the pair as good as Morecambe & Wise. It’s much better in the flesh than on paper...



But amid the crowd of sportsmen and women behind them are a catalogue of giants. Geoffrey Boycott, Raymond Illingworth, George Best, Barry John, Henry Cooper, Mary Peters, even Her Royal Horseness, Princess Anne, who won the gong that year. Now we can all debate whether or not those people would cut it today, whether they could handle the changes in their sports or whether they would be even greater than they were. These are insoluble questions.

But what is not in question is that as charismatic characters, the men and women on that stage stand head and shoulders above the contemporary crowd. Whether you agreed with them or not, Boycott and Illingworth always had something interesting to say. Long distance hippy Bedford could attract controversy at will, and then there was George Best, who looked as if he’d come from rehearsing for “Jesus Christ Superstar”. To that litany, you could add the likes of Gareth Edwards, Peter Osgood, James Hunt, and umpteen others, sports stars who looked like what they were – the luckiest people on earth. Fit, young, healthy, doing the greatest job in the world and being adored for it.

Look now at the footballers, cricketers, racing drivers of today, too many of whom looked bowed down by the pressures, as if they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. A dreary bunch to be honest. But is it their fault? No. It’s us.

First of all, the pressures are unquestionably greater than 40 years ago, far, far greater. Defeats back then, even for national teams, were disappointing. Now they resemble great national humiliations, a bit like Suez or Isandhlwana. If your team loses on Saturday, even to a lucky last minute goal, prepare for the players, management and board of directors to be castigated on phone ins and message boards within moments of the final whistle. How do you handle victory and defeat in a pressure cooker like that, a world where you simply cannot treat those two imposters just the same?

More than that though, the world of media and PR has changed beyond all recognition in 40 years. Veteran journos will tell you that back then, they travelled with the teams they were assigned to, drank with them, saw all the stories and kept quiet because the players were their mates, and they were involved in it as well. Nowadays journalists and sportsmen are not friends. It’s the hunter and the quarry. It’s not entirely the fault of the journalist – the sports journalist that is – for while many are still fixated on the game, newspaper proprietors are not and they send the newshounds to dig up stories of what goes on off the field so that we can all click our hypocritical tongues in disgust. When George Best said that he spent all his money on “Women and booze. The rest I just squandered”, we laughed. If Wayne Rooney were to say the same, we’d want him strung up.

Then there is PR schooling. No top club would allow Best to talk to the media without being surrounded by media advisers. He’d be coached in how to fill the maximum amount of time in saying as little as possible, not because sportsmen are as dumb as popular lore has it – not all of them anyway – but because as soon as they say anything, literally anything, it will be twisted into something sensational. Given the current hysteria that comes from the apparent conclusion that nobody is grow up enough to have a sense of humour and be able to recognise a daft joke when they hear one any more – Top Gear and Glenn Hoddle apologies anyone? – banter is now off the menu. What we have in its place is a sporting environment that is ever more colourless, increasingly dour, ever more robotic.

Sport is an incredibly serious business for the participants because their lives, their families’ security depends upon it. For us, it’s what we do to enjoy ourselves in our spare time. The sooner we lighten up, grow up and remember it’s just for fun, the sooner we will have another Graham Hill to make movies about.

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.

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

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.

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

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.