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.
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Thursday, 12 May 2011
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?
“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?
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
The resurrection shuffle
Rock’n’roll is not a business that forgives old age. Most of its icons lived fast, died young, or simply got out while they were still ahead.
We venerate Lennon and we scorn McCartney. Barrett is the genius of Pink Floyd, Waters and Gilmour are dismissed as bickering pensioners. Cobain remains a touchstone, Vedder becomes an irrelevance simply by continuing to breathe and refusing to have his youthful legacy set in amber.
Would Pete Townshend’s reputation have been better served by following Keith Moon and dying before he got old? In our present culture, yes. The experience of a 62 year old is considered musically worthless in a medium that becomes increasingly pre-pubescent – coming soon, the first embryonic pop star: keep on rocking in the womb world.
Worse, because the likes of Townshend, McCartney and Dylan continue to write and record what the tastemakers instantly dismiss as sub-senile geriatrica, their back catalogue is similarly trashed.
Had Mick Jagger been killed by the Hells Angels back in 1969 in the wake of Altamont as has been suggested recently by an FBI agent, he would be the ultimate holy man of rock’n’roll. Instead, he’s treated as a running joke. The man who was once the Lord of Misrule, the demonic ringmaster of all that was dark and seductive about rock’n’roll, he has been rendered impotent by caricature. It must be all the more galling for him because of the fact that he shares a stage with one of the few rockers whose legend simply grows larger as he grows older, Keith Richards.
Keef is the indestructible skeleton of the music that tore up the latter half of the 20th century, the Don, the overseer for whom the world only has more affection and more respect as the days roll by, as the wrinkles turn into cracks and the global reservoir of Jack Daniel’s diminishes.
Alongside him, Jagger is dismissed as a phoney. Keef is the real deal, Mick the chancer. Mick says he never reads the papers, and if he’s telling the truth, it’s probably a sound self defence mechanism. All superstars are painted with a few broad strokes, but while Keith’s enhance him, Jagger’s shred him. Nowadays, he’s this hipless, post-anorexic frame, topped by a leer of lips, once sexual, now dribbling.
Then there’s the viper’s tongue that lashes out and wraps itself around the throat of your daughter, maybe your granddaughter – it used to be your sister but all of us have got a little older since then. All except Mick, who never allows himself, or at least his persona, to age. And even that’s somehow sad.
Time then to challenge the conventional wisdom for Mick, in his prime, should be revered not reviled. Jagger invented the rock’n’roll star. He was its poster-child, the real deal. He was the pose, the swagger, the arrogance. Boys wanted to be him, girls just wanted him. In popular music, that’s ten-tenths of the law. Jagger is an archetype, he’s an original and his reputation demands rehabilitation.
More than anything, he is one of the great singers of the rock’n’roll era. Keith Richards might be the human riff, the lickmeister who just churns out those memorable Stones breaks, but without Mick’s voice, Keef’s dark, demonic music just would not be the same.
Imagine any other singer who could have voiced “Sympathy For The Devil” or “Gimme Shelter” on those records at that time. You can’t. Those songs are his, they belong to him, imbued with his personality, Jagger living inside them as they rise and fall on his extraordinary technique. That hasn’t changed since the day they were recorded. Forty years on, that’s a Sinatraesque achievement.
Whenever you think of the Stones, you have to think of The Beatles too, so symbiotic was their 1960s relationship. But they were very different animals, not least because the Stones had a front man, a singer who defined the job. John and Paul were never out front in the way as Mick, who would prowl the stage, a predator, caged for a moment, but always like to leap the chasm between band and audience, always ready to electrify the crowd, always capable of moving the experience from theatre to music hall to bear pit to boxing ring and back again, all with the arch of an eyebrow, the thrust of an arm.
In the end though, it’s as a singer that Jagger’s genius will longest endure. If you want proof, take a listen to “Under My Thumb”, one of the finest vocal performances of the rock era. It’s misogynistic lyric means the song is long since discredited, but so perfect is the phrasing, the timing, Jagger need never have recorded another thing and would still be seen as a giant. The contempt that drips from that mouth with the simple “uhmm” he inserts as he licks those lips and dismisses his girl as the “sweetest pet” is masterly. It’s a cornerstone achievement.
No, it’s not pleasant, but it’s a slice of real life, as it was and so, probably, shall it ever be. How often does music give you that these days?
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?
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 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.
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