Part One

Thoughts from a swivel chair

January 15, 2009

———

All right, it breaks down like this.

Bill Drummond has long since been a hero of mine. I was one of the millions who got swept up in the fever when ‘What Time Is Love?’ hit the charts, and although on some levels they never bettered it, we all had fun watching them try. I was bemused by the 1992 Brit Awards ceremony, in awe of the Tammy Wynette collaboration (although it was years before I found out about the fiasco that was the recording session) and even quite interested when they burned the million pounds.

Bill’s left all those days behind him now, and I don’t think he particularly likes to talk about them. He certainly doesn’t want to be remembered for them. But even though the KLF are long gone, Bill’s carried the anarchical spirit that pervaded their records through nigh-on everything else he’s done before or since. I’m not going to give you a CV here, because you could quite easily look it up on Wikipedia (although be warned, he’s said himself that half of it isn’t true). But whether it’s the much vilified No Music Day (a day that I found myself staunchly defending during a 2007 BBC forum debate) or the idea of uniting communities by making soup, he’s never been afraid to challenge us with ideas that are occasionally genius, sometimes misguided and sometimes complete hokum, but which always make us think.

The problem with all this (and this is something he talks about in one of his books) is that there is a very real danger of becoming obsessed with The Myth That Is Bill Drummond and admiring the man for his own sake, rather than what he’s actually doing. We become like the blinkered fans of singers and groups long past their prime, hanging on with breathless anticipation until the next tepid release – while the fact that it is tepid and dull is obvious to everyone but us. As someone who doesn’t believe that he’s reached that point as yet (and I hope he never will) I’d suggest that it’s here that the analogy breaks down – perhaps a better way of putting it would be to consider the fans who insist on analysing every word written by, say, the Beatles, and assume that there is meaning in everything. Sometimes there’s a meaning and sometimes there isn’t, but it’s risky to assume too much either way.

In any case, this blog came about because of one of his better ideas – better, at least, than cutting a £20,000 photo into pieces and selling them. A few years back, Bill initiated the concept of a scratch choir that made music for a world in which music itself had vanished overnight: an ever-changing collection of people who were asked to imagine that they were inventing a system of music again from scratch, having no idea of how to do it. This choir was known as The 17, and Bill spent much of 2007 travelling round the continent doing performances with adults and children alike, creating music that was purely for the moment – in that all recordings were deleted before the evening was over, often to much consternation from the participants.

An exhaustive supply of information can be found at http://www.the17.org/. I can also strongly recommend the book that Bill published in autumn 2008, which serves both as a decent summary of what The 17 is and why it’s worked (and why it hasn’t) and also a sprawling, occasionally meandering narrative about Mr Drummond’s gripes with music in general. In a nutshell, and for a multitude of reasons, Bill has become disillusioned with the music business – not so much an evil-soulless-record-company gripe as recorded music in itself. For one thing, he reasons, recorded music passed its sell-by date simply because it no longer has the novelty value that it once possessed. For another (and this may be my reasoning more than his), the concept of instant availability has degraded the value of recorded music, because there is seldom any anticipation or any importance attached to songs that you can download at the drop of a hat.

This struck something of a chord with me, because I’m assimilated into a download culture that I simultaneously embrace and despise. It worries me that people are downloading whole albums for next to nothing, listening to them once and then deleting them seems to completely devalue something that someone’s taken so long to create. I know that you can erase recorded tapes and throw records in the bin if you don’t like them, but at least they were yours to begin with – and even if they weren’t the act of erasing a tape of a CD you borrowed from your local library requires a little more effort than clicking a mouse. It’s disposable music for a disposable society. For me, there is no longer any real joy in shopping for a CD that you particularly want, and the euphoria when you find something that you’ve wanted for ages, simply because you know you could have got hold of it from Limewire. I defend to the death my right to want original copies of recorded CDs and to own them, the way that I always have, and this will always be my preferred medium of choice, but there is in recent years the nagging feeling, every time I make an Amazon purchase, that I am in fact wasting my money.

And then there’s the concept of playlists and downloading only selected tracks from an album – I’m not opposed to greatest hits compilations but it also seems to belittle the concept of an album where each track has been handpicked and ordered so as to create a specific mood, or range of moods. Yes, we’ve been able to programme different running orders on our CD players for years, but who in all honesty ever did that? Aside from the occasional geek who re-ordered Sgt. Peppers so that the songs cascaded one after the other in “the Beatles’ intended order”, most of us were happy to stick with the skip track button whenever the Stone Roses began singing in reverse.

At the same time, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that I love the concept of being able to get hold of practically any song at the drop of a hat, because it’s enabled me to listen to things that were previously out of reach. Recorded music saturates our home and we have a large amount of CDs that we’ve amassed over the years, but there have always been those few elusive tracks that stayed out of reach. I remember being filled with joy the day that someone provided a convenient MP3 of Terry Wogan singing ‘The Floral Dance’, and words cannot express my sense of elation at finding Mankind’s disco version of the Doctor Who theme on a fan webpage. Now all I need is a recording of ‘Devonshire Cream and Cider’, and my life will be complete. Instant access does create a disposable culture, but it also opens up our world to any amount of possibilities. We just have to embrace them.

The music of the 17 consists of a collection of scores. Anyone can write a score, and anyone can perform a score, provided the enthusiasm is there – that’s the beauty of it. But there’s one score in particular, not intended to create a musical performance but more an act of contemplation, that caught my eye.

320. CHOOSE.
Life is shorter.
At the age of 51
Tear up a sheet of paper into 26 pieces.
Write a different letter of the alphabet on each of them.
Screw up the pieces of paper.
Put them in a carrier bag.
Draw one out.
Over twelve months,
the music you choose to listen to
must have been written or recorded
by composers, soloists or ensembles
Whose name begins with the letter on the piece of paper
drawn from the bag.
Twelve months later,
repeat the process
minus the letter already used.
Repeat the process every 12 months
until the alphabet has been used up.

This reads like bad haiku, but if you take out the line breaks you’re left with an absolutely brilliant idea. I’m not 51, not even close. And I don’t have the self-discipline or self-control to stick with one letter a year. But it was my wife who came up with the idea of running a reduced version of this score, taking place over the next twelve months. Forgive me if I go all Deck of Cards on you, but we realised that there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which means that theoretically we could spend a fortnight on each letter. The letter X would be missed out, because we have nothing in our collection that comes close to fulfilling that criteria, which leaves two weeks spare for Christmas music.

Initially our plan was to work our way through from A to Z and then start over at the beginning of July, but we then decided that allocating letters randomly would be far more effective and interesting, if only because we’d have no way of anticipating what we’d be listening to the next week – all of which led to the hat. Each letter is pulled out on a Sunday evening and then for the following week, as far as possible, we restrict our musical choices to artists beginning with that letter. Exceptions are any compilation albums we happen to hear – although generally we’ll avoid them – and anything that gets played on the radio (as much as I’d like to telephone a radio station and ask them to restrict their choices for that day to artists that began with ‘M’, I don’t think it’s going to happen – mind you, it would be fascinating to see if any radio station could create an intelligent, flowing playlist that stuck to this criteria.

The first letter we drew, somewhat predictably, was ‘A’. This was mildly irritating as it seemed to undermine the whole concept of randomness, but then I recalled the Secret Santa draw I’d held a few weeks before Christmas, where the first person to pull a name out of the hat drew out of her own – statistically unlikely, but according to Sod’s law a dead cert. The first few days therefore consisted of Aqua, Abba, Tasmin Archer and Anthrax, roughly in that order. The idea, Emily said, was that we’d listen to the albums that we’ve had on our shelves for years but seldom played on the grounds that they tend to be ignored in lieu of our favourite in-car standards. She’s been badgering me to get rid of some of them, but with a few rare exceptions I have yet to acquiesce (although I’m getting much better at selling DVDs and books). This is in itself a double standard, because here I am going on and on about the value of recorded music when the truth is that when I had the money I would buy up all the CDs I could find for as little money as I could get away with paying, amassing hundreds of albums that I didn’t have time to enjoy, apart from a few random tracks here and there. Still, as Drummond himself suggests, “Embrace the contradictions”.

It was only after we’d been doing this for a week that I realised I really ought to be keeping a diary, because there were thoughts that were cropping up that I felt I needed to commit to paper. I’m anticipating that by making conscious choices to play less obvious music, I’m going to wind up thinking about it in a different way, and already I can see this working. Initially it was going to be a private diary, but a blog is just as easy to edit, even though I don’t believe that many people will read it besides me. Everyone hopes for a decent audience share but I am not going to delude myself into thinking that this is actually important to anyone – I am called to mind a popular t-shirt that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago, bearing the words “No one cares about your blog”.

So this first entry will almost definitely be the longest, and if you’re still reading here then I applaud your sense of dedication and perseverance (unless you’ve just skimmed to the last paragraph – yes, you know who you are). Random thoughts will go in here as and when I think of them, depending on what I’ve been listening to and how much time I have to stick in updates. This was just a convoluted way of providing background, and I promise to make the other entries shorter.
Now, back to the songs…

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 1

January 17, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Iain Archer – Playing Dead
Aqua - Aquarius
ABBA – Complete Singles Collection (Disc Two)
Tasmin Archer – Great Expectations
Air - Moon Safari
Anthrax - Attack of the Killer B’s
Air - Talkie Walkie
Ace of Base – ‘Always Have, Always Will’ (single)
Arctic Monkeys - ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor’ (single)
Ash - ‘Oh Yeah’ (single)
Atomic Kitten – ‘Right Now’ (single)
All About Eve – All About Eve
Aqua – Aquarium

Shelf Life

January 17, 2009

———

Random conversation from a few days back.

“We’ve listened to quite a lot this week, really,” said Emily. “Those long drives helped. The only thing I think I haven’t had on yet is Anthrax.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I have.”
“Yes, but I haven’t! And part of the point behind this was that it was going to help me to broaden my horizons.”
“Well, yes, but I’m not sure if Anthrax is a waypoint you particularly want to reach.”
“Why not?”
“It’s thrash metal, for one thing.”
“Well, I like One Bad Pig.”
“That’s true enough. But that at least is fairly good-natured. Attack of the Killer B’s is…well…nasty. I don’t really care for much of it myself.”
“So why do you own it?”

Emily’s too sweet-natured to resort to the smile of triumph – I don’t even think she was allowing herself to feel smug – but she was right, and we both knew it.

“Well,” I replied, “There are several songs on there I *do* like…”

I remember being thirteen, and reading a feature in Smash Hits that debated the pros and cons of singles and albums. It was one of those scientific, elegantly researched articles where they’d done their homework by securing a few soundbites from teenagers scurrying through the local Our Price on a Saturday afternoon. The opinions given were, for the most part, fairly balanced, although they leaned in favour of the album (except when it came to the fifteen year olds who were still relying on their parents’ pocket money as a sole source of income, rendering them unable to buy them). I do recall, however, one particular comment in praise of the single, from a young man who said “I tend to prefer them to albums, because you only get a few tracks on an album that are worth listening to”.

When, in the early 1990s, I was playing ‘U Can’t Touch This’ at full volume on my Goodmans Hi-Fi, my mother – in a stereotypical it’s-not-how-it-was-in-my-day fashion that is actually not her usual style – would remark that when she was younger, “you had proper songs on B-sides, not these instrumentals”. She was absolutely right, at least in the context of the pre-millennial decade, when it seemed that the instrumental was a popular choice. Certainly the single has evolved to the point where it’s no longer viable as a tangible form, but it seemed that back when Hammer was, well, untouchable, it was particularly fashionable to stick a karaoke track on the other side (literally – yes, these were the days when vinyl was still a force to be reckoned with) of your hit record. You’d get the occasional club mix, and if you forked out for the 12 inch perhaps even more than that – but the days of seven-track CD EPs were still a long way off, and it seemed that the substandard album rejects we’d been used to had, more often than not, been ditched in favour of wordless backing tracks that felt horribly wrong because just when you were expecting the lyrics to kick in, they didn’t. The situation was compounded by the fact that aesthetically there are few more pointless instrumentals than the one that graces the B-side of ‘U Can’t Touch This’.

As an early teenager I’d buy comparatively few albums. Singles were quite popular, and one of the Now! collections would typically be on my Christmas list (what better way to buy forty records you really wanted?) but for the most part I had to be content with copying stuff from the library. That’s a whole other entry in itself, and I’m not about to pretend that my behaviour was ethically sound, but it did at least enable me to listen to (and acquire) a considerable amount of music with relatively little expenditure. Besides, I lived in Reading. There was nothing else to do on a Saturday.

Broadly speaking, there were two types of albums. There were the ones that you liked more or less in their entirety – the KLF (sorry Bill, I hate to bring this up again, but The White Room was a big part of these formative years); Elton John’s Sleeping With The Past; Prince’s Diamonds And Pearls. Then there were the albums you liked in places – The Farm’s sorely overrated Spartacus, Graffiti Bridge, or Jean Michel Jarre’s Waiting For Cousteau, which consisted of a fantastic A-side and a B-side that’s actually better than I remember it, but for which I just wasn’t prepared when I was twelve years old. (There was another category, of albums that were completely awful, but I’ve blanked most of them from my memory, so let’s not go there.)

This second category, of albums that you liked in places, tended to have a pattern: it was almost invariably the singles that appealed to me the most. What’s most interesting about this is the fact that things haven’t really changed much over the years – I still have a large number of albums that I bought for the sake of one or two songs, and if I have them on in the car they’ll be the songs that I choose. I adore the Captain and Tennille’s ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, but the woeful ‘Muskrat Love’ that follows it just isn’t fit for human consumption. Ocean Drive, the Lighthouse Family’s sparkly little debut, is actually a great record, but if I’m honest I rarely listen to anything other than the two big hits.

I’ve managed to kill this habit, to a certain extent, in recent years by downloading MP3s of songs I wanted, rather than simply buying the album – thus allowing me to build a moderately respectable virtual collection of random songs that seem to have no common theme other than the fact that I particularly like them. Nonetheless, the temptation to buy albums on the strength of one song remains, and is occasionally indulged when I see something for an absolute steal. These albums sit on the shelves and do, admittedly get played – sometimes in their entirety. It’s not for lack of trying, but I find it very difficult to get rid of any of them. This is partly because I am an obsessive hoarder, at least unchecked. But the truth is that you never know when a certain song is going to come back to haunt you – or when you’re going to need it, for weddings / parties / Ashes to Ashes playlists, or just because it gets played randomly on the radio and you realise, in a moment of unexplainable clarity, that’s actually brilliant. It is often the song that you think you can do without that turns out to be the one you wind up wanting to rip the week after you sold it on Ebay.

All of this brings us back, rather neatly, to the Anthrax album we were talking about. I bought Attack of the Killer B’s for the sake of three songs: the Public Enemy collaboration, the tasteless but politically charged ‘Startin’ Up A Posse’, and the absolutely hilarious ‘N.F.B.’, which is one of the best send-ups of the overly sincere rock ballad that I’ve ever heard (although I’ve been ambushed, just this morning, by the mental image of X-Factor finalists Journey South performing it, with their token overwrought expressions of intense brotherly compassion, and without a trace of irony). Everything else, to be honest, tends to become a victim of the skip button. If I was that desperate for shelf space or money, I’d have ripped the tracks I wanted and then got rid of the thing, but it was something that I never got round to doing – largely because I think three or four fantastic tracks out of eleven or twelve isn’t a particularly bad ratio, particularly when you consider some of the other stuff I can’t bear to chuck out. Besides, a part of me always thought that perhaps, one day, I’d get seriously into thrash metal.

Or perhaps I don’t have to. Because Emily, as she said and as I’d quite forgotten, is something of a One Bad Pig fan. And whatever I said during our conversation, despite some big differences, the central concept (i.e. to make as much noise as you can, with something approximating a tune underneath) is essentially the same. And so perhaps there are more parallels than I’d care to admit. All this was rushing through my head, much of it on a subconscious level, in the two or three seconds I took to mull over Emily’s question about why I still had Attack of the Killer B’s. It was like an unplugged mind cap – a torrent of images that didn’t get properly dissected and analysed for almost a week. And I came to the realisation that in assuming that Anthrax wouldn’t be to Emily’s taste, I was giving her far less credit than she was owed.

Perhaps I’d assumed too much. And then I thought about ‘Startin’ Up A Posse’, with its irritatingly catchy refrain: “You fucking whore (You fucking whore!) / That’s all you are….”. As a tirade of abuse directed towards the PMRC it does its job beautifully, and makes some very salient points, but it’s hard to really take a political record seriously when the counter-melody in the second verse is “You’re a douche, you’re a douche…”.

“You know, perhaps you will like it,” I said, musing. “But it might be best not to listen to it while the kids are around.”

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 2

January 19, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Incredible Bongo Band – Bongo Rock: The Story of the Incredible Bongo Band
Original Cast – Into The Woods
Soundtrack – I Am Sam (Disc Two)
Chris Isaak – Wicked Game
Iggy Pop – Lust For Life

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, honey

January 19, 2009

———

Something that I found out the other morning: the Incredible Bongo Band were not, in fact, a real band.

I made this alarming discovery during my first surf of the day when I decided, on a whim, to look them up on Wikipedia. It turns out that the band were a bunch of session musicians that MGM executive Michael Viner used to record some of his favourite songs during downtime. He’d call in whoever happened to be hanging round the studio to record a few tracks – Glen Campbell is in there, Ringo Starr is rumoured to appear and John Lennon allegedly helped with the mixing. Eventually, after a couple of albums, the upper echelons of management found out how Viner was spending their money and the project was canned.

It’s a shame, really, because I’d always envisaged the Bongo Band as a real, fully functioning unit, rather like the James Taylor Quartet (only three times the size) who were still touring, and who I’d try and see live some time, if only to sing along to ‘Apache’. The discovery that they are a studio concoction in the same vein as the Archies comes as something of a disappointment. But more disturbing than this was the realisation, as I was pulling into the car park on Thursday morning, that this information is actually in the liner notes, which I now remember reading some time ago.

So why didn’t I remember? Was it a sign of deliberately suppressed knowledge, things I didn’t want to believe that I blotted out like some ghastly buried memory? Or was it information overload, and the inability of my poor head to remember yet another nugget of useless trivia? It’s a given that we use only ten per cent (or whatever) of our brains – when this figure is cited in BBC pseudoscience articles it’s delivered almost as a reprimand to the human race, indicating that we could work our minds harder if we really wanted to. But perhaps we genuinely can’t – perhaps if we know too much, we’ll go into meltdown, like the unfortunate Donna Noble at the end of the last season of Doctor Who. I’m going for media reference overload here, but sometimes, I have to admit, I feel a little like Homer Simpson, who maintained that “every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain”. Getting old, folks. Getting old.

Just when you thought things were under control

January 21, 2009

———

Last night: sitting in the lounge, in my pyjamas, sorting out piles of washing. Singing along at the top of my voice to the score from Annie.

In my defence I was drinking lager, but there are days when I fear for my masculinity.

Once more with feeling

January 21, 2009

———

True story.

Eight years ago I was sitting in a church hall at the end of a slightly dispiriting rehearsal. There were four of us gathered round the piano: I was seated, with three of my best friends standing nearby. The rehearsal itself had gone well enough, but we were five weeks away from putting on the variety show, and we had no finale. There were other problems in the camp: we had another imminent performance of Godspell, in the absence of one of its leads, and the prospect of bringing that production to a natural end against the wishes of some of its cast, many of whom would have carried on ad infinitum. There was an impending battle of pragmatism versus idealism, in a situation where many would rather keep things superficially cordial than say what they were really thinking.

So it was a gloomy party that stayed after the rest had gone home. As the ones who were organising, we knew that things were not going as well as they might. Away from the church, I was encountering problems at work and my love life was non-existent. The sky began to darken outside as we sat and talked about what we might do next, and how best to deal with the clash of politics and the gentle massaging of egos.

Almost as a joke, I said “You know, there’s a song I always like to sing at times like this. You guys wanna hear it?”

Generally this gets a couple of raised eyebrows at best, and a volley of improvised missiles if people really aren’t in the mood, but on this occasion Holly looked round and said “Sure, why not?”

So I pressed flesh to ivory, and began:

“The sun’ll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow
There’ll be sun
Just thinking about tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs –"

I’m interrupting because it’s at this point that I notice that Annie – and yes, that was her real name – is singing with me. What had begun as a purposely ridiculous lampoon of scenes from the movies (characters begin singing at a piano after awkward, clunky introduction, then song becomes ‘real’ and the strings and horns swell in the background – “Ladies and Gentleman, John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra!”) had suddenly become quite real. I recalled the scene where Roosevelt is sitting in the Oval Office with Warbucks and everyone’s favourite orphan, and suddenly felt in charge of the situation – the song, the moment, the whole production. Instantly I looked up.

“Sing along, Jon!”
“I can’t. I don’t know the words.”
“Sing!”

But his wife, normally the quiet one, was doing enough for both of them. I realise that writing about it now, years after the fact, lends the scene an unavoidable rose-tinted glow, and I’m sure that it wasn’t quite as neat as I remember it, but however ragged around the edges it really felt like something straight out of a musical. I was on cloud nine for the rest of the evening, as the sheer idiocy of the moment bound us all in something that was almost euphoria. It was a fleeting instant of triumph, dampened by the cares and pressures of the working week that would return the next day, but while it lasted it was glorious. And, almost immediately, we realised that we had our finale.

This panda walks into a bar

January 22, 2009

———

“Fewer!”
“What?” I called from the bathroom.
“They’re singing ‘Two less lonely people in the world’. It should be ‘Two fewer’!”

This would be the perfect place for another dreary commentary on the nature of bad grammar in music. I would bring up examples by the Doors (‘L.A. Woman’), Pink Floyd (‘Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2′) and Vanilla Ice (‘Ice Ice Baby’, but that’s pretty much a given, isn’t it?). I would rejoice in my mastery of the English language as well as my sparkling prose, laced with witty humour. I would probably have called it ‘I can’t get any satisfaction’ (incidentally, this has been used as an addendum to a live performance by none other Rolf Harris, rendering it musically canonical).

I am not doing this for three reasons: one, I can’t be bothered to do all the research that involves looking up song lyrics and working out whether or not they are grammatically correct. Two, I’m actually of the conviction that there is no rule book that says that lyrics have to be grammatically correct, and while it’s fun to bring up isolated examples (particularly when the error is in the title, and thus repeated ad nauseum) doing an Eats, Shoots and Leaves on songwriting in general is fundamentally stupid – you might as well be slagging off Ted Hughes for not writing coherent sentences.

Three – there isn’t anything new that I could add to the debate. I will, however, say this in defence of Paul McCartney, whose much maligned ‘Live And Let Die’ has been held up as an example of particularly excruciating lyric writing. The passage in question occurs about three lines in, when McCartney is supposedly heard to sing “If this ever changing world in which we live in”. I can’t help thinking that he actually sang “This ever changing world in which we’re livin’”, which, while not meeting the standards of Lynne Truss, does at least avoid the double use of the word ‘in’, and also avoids ending a sentence with a preposition.

As a parenthesis, I was talking about this to Emily the other night, and said “I try and avoid doing it now. I’ve been told that a preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.”

“Really?” she said. “What do you want to do that for?”

Perhaps I have no faith at all in the music business, or perhaps I have too much faith in the Beatles, but I’ve got a feeling that the McCartney lyric was just badly transcribed, as opposed to badly written. It’s a mistake that, like the mistranslation of ‘Monkey Kong’ into ‘Donkey Kong’ (which, admittedly, is something of an urban legend, rather than proven fact) would have been too costly to fix once it had been spotted. Working in publishing, I know this dilemma well: do you take the trouble to fix things, and incur extra expense, or do you just slip it through and hope no one notices? I suspect that, rather than a shining example of bad grammar, the ‘Live And Let Die’ fiasco merely illustrates why you should always hire a proofreader.

Not long before we had this conversation about the grammatical inaccuracies within ‘Two Less Lonely People In The World’, we’d been cuddled on the sofa, two recently consumed Pot Noodles on the coffee table. A light meal, Emily suggested: it would mean we could gorge out on chocolate later.

“Air Supply are shit, really, aren’t they?” I said.
“It is rather cheesy,” she replied.
“Just a lot of…saccharine.”
“Shall we get rid of it, then?” she asked.
“What?”
“You don’t like it, so we could get rid of it.”
“Well, I mean, I only just bought it and haven’t listened to the whole thing yet –”
“Yes, but you did just say you thought they were shit, didn’t you?”
“True, I did.”
“It would be different if there were, say, two or three tracks on there that you liked.”
I paused.
“There may be…”

Emily may or may not have rolled her eyes. “We must purge! We must chop out the dead wood from our CD collection, and make room for new growth!”
I’ll think about it.

Bloodless Freak

January 23, 2009

———

Tuesday: the A4130 leading out of the business park. Sweeping past the roadworks that may or may not have been the cause of various power outages over the last couple of months. This road can be a nightmare: the interchange gets clogged by the roundabout, but going out your problem tends to be slow-moving Tesco lorries. Legally they’re not supposed to top forty miles an hour, and most of them don’t. It’s a clear stretch of road, but the white lines that hog the middle forbid overtaking.

So I don’t. That doesn’t stop some of the others. I do not want to get holier-than-thou, because I still can’t parallel park, but the smash that cost me my last car has made me into a more careful driver – and one that’s more intolerant of boy racers. I will swing as close to the speed limit as I feel it’s safe to do so, and very occasionally go a little faster if the area is not built up, but I will not overtake traffic that is going at the legal limit, unless we are on a dual carriageway with a clearly marked overtaking lane, and unless I really am in a hurry.

It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon and the sky is a deep, rich blue. The traffic is moving at a mean speed of forty because there is a Tesco lorry at the head of the queue, and no one is in any position to overtake. I’m approximately fifty yards from the car in front. The vehicle behind me is a white van. It is frustrated because I am maintaining a safe and reasonable distance, choosing not to tailgate the car like the van is tailgating me. It shunts back and forth, coming closer, retreating, closer, retreating, in a predatory gesture that somehow, absurdly, mimics lovemaking.

It should come as no surprise to you that my track selection for this part of the journey home is typically something loud and up-tempo. Programming the CD player for familiar car journeys is a whole other entry in itself, waiting to be written. For the sake of brevity, I will summarise today by admitting that, on this stretch of road, Glen Frey’s ‘The Heat Is On’ has become a firm favourite, as has ‘Somewhere In My Heart’ and ‘The Whole of the Moon’. Today, however, I have let the score to American Beauty run through and it’s currently playing the title track. This is one of the famous ones. You will know it even if you think you do not, because it’s one of those pieces that has saturated popular culture in that it’s been used as the soundtrack to practically everything, much like ‘O Fortuna’ or most of Play.

There are two distinctive themes running through Thomas Newman’s score: the sparse, tentative marimbas that make up the opening, and then the mournful, elegiac piano theme that cuts in halfway through the film. I can’t remember now, but I believe it accompanies the image of the bag floating in the wind – an image that has frequently been lampooned and ridiculed, not without good reason (Mendes is an established genius, but he’s also a pretentious arsehole and he knows it) but an image that, no matter how many times I see it, never fails to make me cry.

Ordinarily I would be furious with the aggressive, unnecessarily rash behaviour of the white van driver who is endangering my life by driving so close. I do not see the logic in becoming angry because I am keeping my distance: moving a few yards closer than is safe would not in any case allow him to finish his journey any faster, because we will still have to queue when we reach the roundabout. As he pulls back for what appears for just a moment to be a mad dash into the middle of the road, I can see him shouting “Wanker” through my rear view mirror.

The van stays with me for most of the journey home, as does Thomas Newman. And what should have normally frazzled and angered me has in fact left me amused. It’s partly because I refused to yield to him, but perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this, because something loud and fast would normally have flooded me with hormones and adrenaline, and made me angry with him. Normally, I would have arrived home frustrated and wound up and I would have ranted about for a good five minutes on how white van drivers always appear to play up to the stereotypes foisted upon them by society. I should be cross. Instead, I feel extraordinarily calm.

Alphabet Soup

January 25, 2009

———

On the approach road, near the power station, listening to ‘The Passenger’ – which remains, incidentally, a work of four-chord genius. All of a sudden I’m struck by the realisation that Iggy Pop really shouldn’t be filed under ‘I’. It’s a stage name, but surely the same applies to Elton John? And if I file him under ‘J’, then surely – well, you get the idea.

Part of it is probably the connotations of the word ‘Pop’. It’s easy enough to file Elton John under ‘J’, because it’s an obvious surname. The same does not apply, however, to Meat Loaf, which – even if it’s supposedly a legal name, leaving the former Marvin Aday to forever be referred to as ‘Mr Loaf’, is always filed under ‘M’, both in music shops and in our collection. You’re never going to escape the culinary connections, and it just makes things simpler. And Iggy Pop is the same kettle of fish. It’s impossible to think of him as ‘Mr Pop’ without conjuring images of the MB classic and its exploding plastic face. We’re not even sure if ‘Pop’ is a surname or a description of his music – if the latter it’s hardly accurate, at least if you define ‘Pop’ in the conventional, bubblegum sense. If, on the other hand, you’re talking about ‘Popular Music’, which is a vast genre that encompasses everything from Sinatra to Ultravox by way of the Grateful Dead, then..well, things get a little complicated. The truth is we don’t know, and in the absence of anything concrete he will therefore remain stuck in the ‘I’ section – but to be honest, his placement there is rather too ambiguous for my taste.

All this talk of surnames, and that’s before we start thinking about genre classifications. I panicked when it came to arranging our CD collection by genre. I don’t know how you do it, because there are so many crossovers. Where, for example, do you put Martyn Joseph? He started out as Christian rock, and then became distinctly more pop-based, for the most part abandoning direct expressions of faith (which prompted much consternation and, as a retaliatory gesture, the ever-endearing ‘Liberal Backslider’). The influence of Show Of Hands’ Steve Knightley stretched far beyond their collaboration on the Faith, Folk and Anarchy album and its subsequent live companion, as is evidenced by the definitive folky twang on some of Martyn’s work in the early parts of the new millennium. But by Deep Blue (2005) he was back to the rock stuff, albeit somewhat subdued – and it was also apparent that he’d been listening to Coldplay.

I have therefore filed him under Rock and Pop – a disgracefully all-encompassing genre, I know, and one that was deservedly mocked in a 1990s commercial for I don’t know what (it say something about the effectiveness of a supposedly wonderful commercial when, for all its snappy dialogue or memorable imagery, you can’t for the life of you remember what it was advertising). In said anonymous commercial, a young man working in a branch of HMV was challenged by a music journalist who critiqued the layout of the store – “You’ve lumped rock and pop together”, he suggested, “when really it’s just a sub-strand”.

He’s quite right, but there are crossovers. A band like Queen, for example, started out as heavy rock and then moved through into disco come 1981 and Hot Space. The lines are frequently blurred and depend as much upon the choices of the ear as on any conventions – the protests that accompanied Dylan’s switch to electric at Newport may seem shallow and pointless when you consider how good some of his later albums were, but in a way you could see the point they were trying to make. Crossing genres and concocting stylistic hybrids is what keeps music fresh and innovative, but it makes for headaches when you’re trying to classify things.

So I have stuck with the music store approach, and created several sub-categories where I feel they need to be separate. Folk and Blues are grouped together in the bedroom, near Classical and Spoken Word. The spare room houses our modest collection of Dance music, while my small but reasonably worthy Hip Hop collection (early Public Enemy, the Sugarhill Gang, the Wu-Tang Clan and, I’m ashamed to admit, a couple of Will Smiths) is in the study, near the Singles rack. Jazz sits in a cabinet on the opposite wall. Film soundtracks are in a large wall unit in the lounge, along with the bulk of the Rock and Pop, which encompasses everything else. This enables me to store CDs roughly as I’d expect to find them in a Virgin Megastore which, after all, constitutes my largest frame of reference. It’s an inconsistent cataloguing system but I do at least know where everything is.

Everything is alphabetised by group / surname (except for Iggy Pop, but let’s not start that again) and then the albums are grouped chronologically within each artist. I will admit this is incredibly anal – I’d say that it’s the only way I’ve been able to keep track, but the truth is it satisfies some primal urge to put things in the right order. I confess that I’ve even done it on lunch breaks upon discovering that the music collections in my local high street stores were out of order – leading more than one person to ask me, as I’m moving Portishead so that it’s behind the Pet Shop Boys instead of in front of it, where they could find Glen Campbell. This has always led to a sheepish smile and a “Sorry, I don’t work here”, whereupon the unfortunate individual would leave me to my reorganising and slope off to bother one of the spotty schoolboys behind the counter.

What can I say in my defence, except that it’s simply a matter of instinct? When you’re a musician you find it hard to pass by an unlocked piano without wrestling with the impulse to sit down and play it – that’s a problem I have regularly and, in a similar vein, I have to fight the impulse to reorganise the CD collections in charity shops, music stores and even the homes of my friends and family. I’m guessing that the music stores are least likely to mind, so that’s the indulgence that I allow myself, and thus far I have avoided landing in hot water.

What’s more, reordering allows me the chance to examine different methods of classification that I might not have considered. I’m currently wrestling, for example, with the fact that I store Peter Gabriel’s film soundtracks for Birdy and The Last Temptation of Christ along with his other studio albums, while Shaft - consisting of music solely by Isaac Hayes – is housed up among the other film scores. Part of this is because our Peter Gabriel collection is somewhat expansive, while the Hayes collection consists purely of Shaft and Hot Buttered Soul, meaning I’m less prone to keeping it all together than I am with Gabriel’s. This may change. Or it may not. It depends on how much I think about it. A person could go crazy worrying about all this. In my case, it’s probably too late.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 3

January 25, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Soundtrack – Amelie
Soundtrack - Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery
Soundtrack – American Beauty (score)
Anthrax - Attack of the Killer B’s
All Starr United – All Starr United
The Avalanches – Since I Left You
Apollo 440 - Gettin’ High On Your Own Supply
Soundtrack – American Beauty (soundtrack)
Ryan Adams – Gold
Bryan Adams – Reckless
Soundtrack - Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
The Average White Band - Let’s Go Round Again: The Best Of The Average White Band

Can’t stop this thing we started

January 26, 2009

———

Listening to Reckless at the close of last week brought to mind three things:

1. It’s actually a great little album.

2. The above statement is thoroughly depressing when viewed in the context of Bryan Adams’ career as a whole, which largely went down the pan after the late 1980s

3. I wrote a topical diary entry on one song in particular three and a half years ago which, while naïve, shall nonetheless be reproduced below for the sake of public interest. What’s interesting is that it also references ‘N.F.B.’, which was on in the car a couple of weeks ago, as well as being namechecked here.

Cue dreamy flashback effects, and we cut to 4th May 2005….

——

Somewhere just outside of Ascot, Saturday afternoon.

“There! Did you hear that?”

Emily raised an eyebrow. “Hear what?”
“He sang ‘Me and my baby had a ‘69.’”
“Are you quite sure?”
“I’m positive. Hang on, let me rewind.”

Doing my utmost to keep both eyes on the road and grateful for the fact that the traffic was heavy and our speed was thus limited, I reached out one hand to the radio frontpiece, and pressed the ’scan’ button. I’d forgotten, of course, that it’s impossible to scan through MP3 files on our car stereo. A less anal person would have put it down to experience and left it at that, perhaps making a mental note to check it again the next time the song came up on the shuffle selection. Unfortunately, I am not that person, and I found myself irresistibly drawn towards the repeat button.

“We’re listening to it again, then?” Emily said.
“Yes. I have to know, darling. I’m positive that’s what he said.”

Bryan sang for a few minutes, the whimsical nostalgia cutting through the guitar’s triumphant power chords. When I think about it, it’s no wonder that ‘Summer of ‘69′ is one of my favourite songs. At a simple aesthetical level, it’s fantastic for eighty-mph journeys down motorways on sunny mornings – although it can admittedly be frustrating when you’re stuck in traffic, unable to obey the simple impulse to put your foot down. But if you delve deeper, it becomes obvious that the rose-tinted things-will-never-be-this-good-again approach is the way that I chose to live my life until a few years ago, when I first ran into Jon. These days, it’s more of a reminder of the person I used to be – the whiny student obsessed with old diaries and dwelling in the past, weeping over lost friendships, as opposed to the whiny twenty-something obsessed with the mediocrity of Pop Idol and the hypocrisy of The Sun. Strangely, I look back on that earlier period not with embarrassment and regret but rather with a kind of pleasant afterglow, almost as if I’m reminded that being that person was a necessary journey in order to get here. A nostalgia song that makes you nostalgic for nostalgia. How very post-modern.

At the moment, though, such overwrought analysis was far from my mind. Instead, I was listening out for the lyrics. And there it was again – as the session musicians swept through the two-chord jam that makes up the song’s closing moments, I’m sure I heard “Me and my baby had a ‘69…”

“I heard it this time,” said Emily. “But don’t you think it sounded like ‘Me and my baby in a ‘69′?”
“All right,” I replied. “I’m willing to concede that it sounds a lot more like that. But still.”
“Why would he do that?”

That’s a good question. Musical in-jokes in supposedly serious songs are pretty common. You know the sort – a line that jumps out at you from the back of nowhere, that changes the whole mood of the piece, and establishes the fact that the whole song was just a laugh, and that you’re not supposed to take it too seriously. Anthrax’s Attack of the Killer ‘B’s, for example, closes with ‘N.F.B.’, an emotional, heartfelt ballad in the ‘More Than Words’ / Bon Jovi tradition, full of love, lost love and then the rekindling of love – and even the use of the words ‘honey child’. If you didn’t know it was Anthrax (and therefore designed as a joke, given the rest of their catalogue) it’s almost possible to take it seriously, until halfway through, when the band sing “Then I played the fool / I never meant to hurt you / Or sleep with all your friends”. One guitar solo later, you’re still trying to figure this out when the song re-establishes its apparent seriousness – and just as you’re getting used to that, this happens:

“Then we fell in love again
  This time forever
  True love prevails over all
  She got hit by a truck.”

Other examples of in-jokes abound, but perhaps the most famous in recent history occurs at the end of the gloriously overstated ‘One Vision’, where Freddie Mercury – having ranted for five minutes over May’s guitar about one religion, one life, one heart, one direction etc. suddenly finishes the song with “Gimme gimme gimme fried chicken”. While this wasn’t printed in the original lyrics, a glance at the transcript of the score – not to mention a closer listen to the record – reveals that this was certainly the case. Typical of the late Mr Mercury’s unabashed sense of humour: I’ll save the world, darlings, but I must order lunch first.

What’s more likely, of course, is that the ambiguity present in ‘Summer of ‘69′ was nothing more than a simple slip of the tongue. Legend has it that Neil Armstrong’s first words upon his faked moon landing (which coincidentally took place in the same year as the events of the very song we’re discussing) were actually “That’s one small step for a man” – only to find that the ‘a’ had been lost in the less-than-perfect transmission, thus rendering one of the most famous sayings of the twentieth century nothing more than an unfortunate misquote. In this scenario, the reverse applied: our friend Bryan Adams probably said “Me and my baby in ‘69″, which of course makes more sense, and the slight ambiguity of his Canadian drawl meant that it was easy to mishear him. It makes a lot more sense than the musical in-joke theory, but nonetheless I wasn’t prepared to let this one go.

“When you think about it, the whole song is rude.”
“Do you think so?” said Em.
“It’s just the fact that he chose that particular year. It seems to be too much of a coincidence.”
“And there’s also the fact that it can’t be that autobiographical,” she said. “Because he’d only have been…what?”
“Let’s see…nine or ten,” I said, working it out. “It’s therefore more likely that if the events of the song happened to him at all, it would have been in the late seventies. Seventy-seven, or seventy-nine at the latest.”
“But Summer of ‘69 sounds much better,” she said. “Summer of ‘79 doesn’t work quite so well.”
“No, it doesn’t scan. So either he’s making it up, or it really happened and he just happened to move the year for the sake of getting a better hook, which is fair enough.”
“I agree with you there. It is pretty catchy.”
“Nonetheless, it does seem a little weird that he happens to have chosen the year that corresponds with a sexual position. And that in the song he’s just met a girl. So maybe it’s a thinly-veiled reference to that. Perhaps it ought to have been called ‘Summer of ’69s’.”

We shared a couple of knowing glances – the conversation had once more been saturated with sex and innuendo, and once more it was entirely my fault. Anxious to redeem myself somewhat, I did what any sensible person would have done – I changed the subject. And who says it’s all we think about?

——
Author’s postscript: I actually found out later that Bryan’s gone on record and admitted that the whole song was about sex, rather than a specific year. While I’ll concede that this renders much of the above discussion somewhat redundant, I stand by my earlier self. Because while there’s plenty of room for interpretation, the “slight misconception” of which he speaks is entirely understandable, given that it’s unlikely that a song of this nature would have made the charts if there had only been room for one reading. What’s more, however, turgid his music, Bryan remains a seemingly pleasant Canadian who is just perfect to take home to meet your mother. Let’s be honest, how many of us really thought that was what he meant?

To absolutes, to choice, to the Village Voice

January 27, 2009

———

The end of another good week, with much music digested and considered.

“I can’t believe how quickly we’re going through albums,” I said, on Sunday evening.
“I know,” Emily said in reply.
“The funny thing is, it’s the third week of January and I don’t feel the urge to buy anything – because I would in any case not be able to listen to it for ages. It’s made me more content with what we have on the shelves, because I have no choice but to listen to it.”
“The other thing,” she said, “is that I never used to be able to decide what I wanted to listen to. So I’d just grab something random for the sake of having something on. But working with a deadline has changed that. I now think ‘Well, I have to listen to this today because after Sunday it will be off limits.”
“Whereas before we had so much to choose from that we just wound up picking the same stuff.”
“Precisely. It avoids choice fatigue.”

Nine years ago, I was doing a PGCE. I teamed up with a colleague to deliver a presentation to the rest of the English class on how to teach creative writing. While we were brainstorming, we decided early on that the best stories arose as a result of some sort of focus: that if you asked thirty children to write a story, giving them no parameters whatsoever, you’d wind up with general anarchy. If, however, you asked thirty children to write a story that began with the words “One rainy day…”, it immediately provides them with a framework from which they can work.

The same applies here. We have so many CDs on the walls that trying to select something for my in-car listening can prove a nightmare. If I don’t have a specific idea about what I want for that day – and often I don’t – then I’ll frequently spend precious minutes browsing the shelves, searching in vain for the record that jumps out and screams “Play me! Play me!”. Another factor is how much of said album I’ll be able to listen to: will I have the car for the entire day, allowing me to listen to the bulk of a forty-five minute album? Or should I choose a greatest hits selection, and cherry pick my favourite tracks? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t an MP3 CD stuck on shuffle do the job just as well? In the meantime, the car is still iced over, Josh is whining about something the Numberjacks are doing, and Thomas has filled his nappy.

These last few weeks, this hasn’t happened. Instead I’ve just been picking things out of a small selection of discs and leaving them in the CD player until they are more or less played in their entirety. If I need emergency songs on the PC in order to pacify a wailing Thomas, I’ll find something beginning with that week’s letter, and it almost invariably works. There’s a curious irony at work in the fact that these self-imposed restrictions actually bring about a new type of liberation – and while I’d never want to advocate totalitarian dystopia, it’s funny how in thinking about this I’m reminded, somewhat bizarrely, of the passage in The Handmaid’s Tale where Aunt Lydia instructs the novice handmaidens that “There is more than one kind of freedom: freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 4

February 1, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Gomez – Bring It On
Gorillaz – Gorillaz
Peter Gabriel – One (Car)
Genesis – A Trick Of The Tail
Goldfrapp – Supernature
Goldfrapp – Seventh Tree
Goldfrapp - Black Cherry
George Gershwin – Rhapsody In Blue / An American In Paris
Peter Gabriel – Hit (disc one)
Goldfrapp – Felt Mountain
Guns ‘N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction
David Gray – White Ladder
Andrew Gold - Thank You For Being A Friend: The Best Of Andrew Gold

February made me shiver

February 2, 2009

———

Am writing this now while it’s fresh.

“You do realise,” I said as a pulled a shirt over my head, “that it’s February 3rd on Tuesday?”
“Yes…” said Emily, not quite sure where I was going.
“The day the music died. Buddy Holly’s death. Except that this year it’s fifty years.”
“It’s only Buddy Holly,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘only Buddy Holly’?”
“Well, honestly! Calling it The Day The Music Died. It sounds so final. Like there was no music afterwards. You know, ever.”

This little exchange highlights one of the fundamental differences between us: I tend to mourn deceased musicians and get swept up in the tidal wave of public grief. My response is all too conventional – and more than a bit sappy – whereas hers is far more pragmatic. When someone dies after a long, happy and productive life, she is bemused at all the messages that are left saying what a tragedy it was. “It’s not like they did nothing with their time here,” she’ll say. “It would be tragic if they’d died young and achieved nothing, but we don’t really have the right to grieve for them on their family’s behalf.”
The fact that she’s happy to vocalise this keeps my sentimental side in check, which can only be a good thing. I should emphasise that this is not her being callous or unfeeling – it’s just that she’s always been one to avoid the hype machine, and she is incredulous when it comes to the public outpouring of upset that is all too common when someone moves on, claiming empathy and identification when none exists, and the sort of behaviour that I’m afraid I exhibit all too often. When Johnny Cash died, for example, I was lying in bed with her when I said “I’ll miss him”. Her response was “What, did the two of you go out for drinks?”.

Back to Buddy. “Thing is, it wasn’t just Buddy Holly,” I said. “We lost Ritchie Valens as well. And The Big Bopper, although no one really cares about him.”
Emily said nothing, but nodded. It was one of those “You’re not really arguing your case very well” nods.

“And don’t forget that he was only twenty-one,” I went on, anxious to make my point. “He achieved a lot and his legacy is amazing, but he could have done so much more. It just seems so cruel.”
“Still…The Day The Music Died?”
“As far as Don McLean’s concerned, that was it.”
“I’m not saying that it wasn’t a big deal, particularly at the time. But it was fifty years ago. I know that’s an excuse to commemorate it, but it’s as if nothing important has happened in music since then, and that’s not true. Calling it The Day The Music Died seems a bit melodramatic, even if it is after a song.”
“I take your point. In any case, I may have to break my letter rule on Tuesday.”
She gasped, not altogether seriously. “You can’t do that!”
“Unless, of course, by divine providence we happen to draw ‘H’ tonight.”
“No, just listen to the radio all day. That doesn’t count.”

She’s right, I suspect. I don’t think you’ll be able to breathe for Buddy, at least not tomorrow. Certainly on American radio. The BBC are presenting ‘The Hour The Music Died’, which is a docu-drama of the night in question. They’ll almost certainly feature interviews with Alan Clarke and / or Graham Nash: apparently, the Hollies claim to compose and perform the music that Buddy Holly would have done if he’d survived. Hence ‘Bus Stop’, ‘Air That I Breathe’ and ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ are all natural progressions of ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘True Love Ways’. I’m still undecided as to whether this is brilliant, or just utterly pretentious.

“It’s true,” I said as Emily stepped out of the shower. “I do have a tendency to get swept up in these things. I pride myself on being unconventional but in many respects it’s just not true.”
“Did you get swept up in the Diana thing?”
“Actually, no.”
“Which was almost certainly because of Ewan.”

Ewan – one of my oldest and most sincere friends – had lost his mother in a car accident three months before Diana took that last fateful drive through Paris. The reaction of the western world to the death of their favourite icon was the sort of weeping and wailing that accompanied the death of Eva Peron, and Diana – like Eva – was remembered for more than she actually achieved. The last time I’d spoken to Carol, Ewan’s mother, I asked her how she was and she said “Fine. I like it down here”. Somehow remembering that brought more tears than I ever shed for the People’s Princess.

“It almost certainly was. I remember the day Diana was killed, we spoke on the phone, and he said ‘My mother died the same way, and no one’s giving her a state funeral’. It was mass hysteria, and the fact that I had to hold back for his sake meant that I could see that everyone was just getting incredibly worked up for no really good reason. I think the fact that I was with him on the day of the funeral helped as well, because he wouldn’t watch it, and had it not been for him I almost certainly would have done. So I could see it for the spectacle it was. I’ll tell you something, though.”
“Mm-hmm?”
“For a while there,” I said, “for about five minutes, I actually liked the Elton John song.”
“You didn’t!”
“I’m not proud of it.”
“And you couldn’t have told me this before we got married?”
“Would you have gone through with it?”

Moment of Truth

February 4, 2009

———

Flashback: October 2007. This has to go in here, because the next entry is going to follow directly on, at least as far as subject matter is concerned.

——

I remember where I was the day I first realised I liked Billy Joel. It was a Haven park cabaret performance just outside Newquay, ten years ago, and the house band were going through ‘My Life’. It was a song I’d never been fond of: I’d grown up in a world of lushly orchestrated eighties synth pop that gave way to overproduced early nineties top-heavy house and indie, and Joel’s occasionally sparse arrangements (coupled with the fact that ‘It’s Still Rock And Roll’ really is one of the most annoying pieces of music ever) generally didn’t do much for me.

But on this occasion, during a holiday that was in many respects a coming-of-age experience – first real trip without parents, along with childhood friend who had recently lost his mother – the band’s music struck (forgive me) a chord. Maybe it was the atmosphere – Haven clubs aren’t really the sorts of places to have fun but I was, at least, amongst friends – or perhaps a growing awareness of the importance of song-crafting that would explode the following year like a tropical storm in a whirlwind of writing, most of which wasn’t actually any good. Or perhaps it was the way the song’s subject matter related to my final manifestation of teenage angst as it began its long and slow descent into twenty-something angst – contempt for mediocrity, contempt for the world, and contempt most of all at yourself.

Whatever the reasons, I suddenly sat bolt upright in my beer-stained chair (a by-product of someone else’s clumsiness, not my own) and stared at the house band and declared aloud to no one in particular, “This song is fantastic!”. All the days of flicking to another station every time it appeared on Classic Gold were instantly forgotten. When I got back from Cornwall, I went out and bought Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits and went from there. The same thing happened the following year with Joni Mitchell; the following year it was Bob Dylan. The moments were less dramatic this time around but the effects were just as clear-cut: a sudden amalgamation of back catalogues and immersion in artist history.

Little musical epiphanies like that crop up with alarming frequency in my life. They can take the form of sudden realisations about the motives of particular performers (such as the moment I figured out that Johnny Cash didn’t wear black because he was in mourning for the world or the dead POWs in Vietnam – he wore black because it was cool and he knew it). Or the acute awareness of plagiarism – I was driving to Henley, I think, when I realised that the verse of ‘I’ll Stand By You’ is a note-for-note (and chord-for-chord) rip-off of ‘It’s A Heartache’. Similarly, it was only a few weeks ago when I was experiencing the bridge in Whitney Houston’s saccharine-drenched ‘The Greatest Love Of All’, and – after trying to work out where I’d heard it before – suddenly figured out that it bears an uncanny resemblance to Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘If You Could Read My Mind’. (This latter example, incidentally, sparked a fairly hefty lawsuit.)

Some of these are inevitable, and a by-product of motifs and lyrics and other stuff gathering in my subconscious, so there’s usually a sudden click of recognition, as if I’d found a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There are times, however, when these sudden epiphanies surprise the hell out of me. One such occasion occurred when I was driving back to work one afternoon singing along to a CD we’d recently inherited from my mother during one of her periodic clear-outs. Said CD – one of those cheap anthologies of Music For Contemporary Mothers – is graced with hits old and new from crowd pleasers (Westlife, Chris De Burgh) and less obvious choices (umm, Anastacia?). It makes for an eclectic, unbalanced mix, but there was some stuff on there that I wanted that we didn’t have, so when she said she wanted rid of it I snapped it up for the collection.

I tell you this because there was no other reason why I would have been listening to Will Young. I was never a fan of Will – I found his cover of ‘Light My Fire’ insipid and empty, whatever its affiliations with Jose Feliciano. He was a product of manufactured pop and at the time he got famous I despised manufactured pop with all the angst my angry young man persona could possible muster. But Will has stayed the course and my respect for him has gone up over the last couple of years – he’s quite a talented actor and has made wise career choices to enable him to survive beyond many of his contemporaries. All the same, I’d never actually buy any of his records. But ‘Evergreen’ was playing at full blast as I drove down Foxhall Road on my way back from lunch, and I was singing along at the top of my voice, and all of a sudden I had another revelation, and (in an eerie parallel with the Billy Joel encounter) I shouted out “This song is fantastic!”. This week, anyway.

My point (and I do have one) is that you can change your position as often as you change your socks if you want, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Tastes wither and die and then stuff gets re-evaluated. Over-exposure nearly killed James Blunt (and no, I’m not talking about the ridiculous snowbound striptease he did in the ‘You’re Beautiful’ video) but now that he’s been off the scene for a while before returning with a new song that hasn’t been played nearly as much, he’s actually quite fun again. Bill Drummond wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian the other week about how he reached a stage where he threw a Bob Dylan tape out of his car window and stopped listening to him. I have recently reached the conclusion that Pink Floyd, formerly my musical idols, were actually completely up their own backsides for most of the seventies, with a few notable exceptions. In a few years it will swing back. I am as fickle and shallow as many people I know and my musical tastes fluctuate year by year.

And so it was that this morning I had one of those freak-out moments. I was driving from the local pharmacy to the office and the stereo was blasting out ‘Umbrella’, a song I’d recently downloaded. I should point out here that I am not a fan of contemporary R&B – a name, by the way, that’s been shamelessly stolen by a corrupt usurper. After an evening watching the Hits channel the other night I’ve come to the conclusion that chart music is fifty per cent superficial bump-and-grind that’s impossible to dance to, forty per cent whiny indie bollocks masquerading as music with ‘depth’ when it’s mostly just sub-standard pap – oh, and ten per cent novelty records, most of whom are produced by Simon Cowell.

So I wasn’t surprised when ‘Umbrella’ hit the top spot, although I was surprised at its longevity. For any song to be at number one for more than a couple of weeks takes some doing these days. Records used to creep up the charts; some were definite slow burners that came in at number 35 and inched their way upwards on a week-by-week basis. It was musical lovemaking, hit parade style: the first, exciting point of contact with the charts, the gradual escalation and the intensity that would come from realising that your record was in the top twenty, now the top ten, top five, oh my GOD it’s going to make it, and then the wondrous, orgasmic moment when Mike Read would announce that it had reached number one. (And that’s before we talk about the occasional re-entry.) There were the odd anomalies – songs that would crash in at the top five, or even go straight to number one in the week of release, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule.

These days the situation has been entirely reversed: a song goes straight in at number one and then crashes out without trace a couple of weeks afterwards. It’s the disposable music angle – quick gratification followed by an almost immediate waning of interest as the public find something else to latch onto. Which was why I was taken aback that ‘Umbrella’ made number one about nine weeks in a row, and I realised that this record obviously had something.

So I finally listened to it, and it’s a mess. Exactly as I’d feared – the obligatory rap delivered lazily by Jay-Z (does the hyphen appear on his deed poll certificate, I wonder?), the crowded rhythm track almost devoid of any real beat, and a bunch of overused synths. It’s all over the place, and it sounds a little like they put a sixth former in a studio and told him to include as many grooves as he can in four and a half minutes. The lyric and melody both contain promise, and Rihanna doesn’t have a bad voice, but it’s the sort of song that could have worked much better if they’d stripped it down completely (as ‘manufactured’ girl group Hero did the other week in one of the X-Factor’s more interesting auditions). You can imagine ‘Umbrella’ working rather nicely as delivered by Tracy Chapman or Roberta Flack on a beaten-up acoustic in a lone spotlight, but instead the song’s potential is wrapped up in a slick and soulless production that is really little more than a showcase for an oft-played video featuring a lot of gold paint.

I’d downloaded the wretched thing, however, because it was number one on the day that Thomas was born, along with McFly’s ‘Transylvania’. We cheated: McFly were number one in the afternoon, and Rihanna in the evening, but because we initially disliked ‘Umbrella’ we bought the McFly track instead. But ‘Umbrella’ hung around like an awkward shaving rash, and despite my base instincts I really felt that I ought to give it another chance. At first it seemed that I’d made a mistake – there it was, the same disjointed groove, the same sense of a good song fighting to escape from the bondage of an ill-advised arrangement. (And what on earth possessed Rihanna to add that manually constructed echo at the end of the chorus? “Ella – ella – ella -” …it sounds like a toddler speaking down the phone.)

All of a sudden, something happened. I remembered the day that Thomas slipped down the birth canal and was ushered into this world – a day I really ought to write about some time, rather than scribbling lengthy digressions like this one – and the problems that followed; the sleepless nights, the reflux, the fact that it is a lot harder with two than it is with one, particularly when one is permanently whingy and the other has developed a tendency to whack people, Emily exhausted, me trying to help and unable to, lost and impotent.

“Now that it’s raining more than ever
Know that we’ll still have each other
You can stand under my umbrella
You can stand under my umbrella”

Things have, I think, improved, and it’s this summer that I’ve realised my true capacity to love someone. I am an imperfect beast who messes up constantly, but if getting through those first few months with Thomas and Joshua was a test then I think we passed it, and the lessons we learned are still being used on the occasional bad days, like today. And fighting the urge to burst into ‘I Made It Through The Rain’, I pushed on through roundabouts and past lorries and the giant, soaring concrete of the power station cooling tears, and it was then that I realised that I had a lump in my throat. All of a sudden I blinked, involuntarily, and realised there were tears falling, and that I couldn’t stop them.

“Damn you!” I remember shouting at the radio. “Not this one! This song is not supposed to make me cry!”

I drove onwards, and I realised two things: firstly, that despite our initial loyalty towards the McFly boys, a far more appropriate (if imperfect) song was sitting under our noises the whole summer. And secondly, that sometimes the biggest epiphanies you experience aren’t necessarily the musical ones.