Part Two

Gershwin and Saccharine

February 7, 2009

———

A moment of realisation during a Saturday night proofreading session: the Leonard Bernstein recording of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ really is a stinking pile of rubbish.

David Schiff has actually written a study guide on ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, part of the Cambridge Music series. I no longer have it (which categorically proves the point I made some weeks ago about hoarding – it’s always the books you throw away that you eventually need) but I do remember Schiff was particularly harsh when it came to evaluating the Bernstein recording. As a student doing research on Gershwin I thought this was unfair, and at the time I felt my reasons were academic. I now realise that it’s because the Bernstein recording was, for a considerable period of time, the only one I owned. It was the one I listened to when I lived in a first floor room in my Leeds hall of residence, when I had an awful lot of free time and very little money, and the one I had on when I’d write the long, lingering letters to friends and family, and make notes and sketch character development for the dreadful screenplays I was developing.

The other thing about the Bernstein recording is that it has a seal of approval: a royal one, at that, released as it was as part of a series of one hundred recordings sold in age of the Prince’s Trust. The back sees a photo of Charles himself, arms neatly if awkwardly folded, wearing a checked grey suit and a haircut that reminds me of how my father used to wear his (back when he had hair, or at least a full head of it). The prince looks to be no more than forty years old. One of his watercolours graces the front. To be honest, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Prince Charles, who I think has had a very bad press over the years for the simple reason that he married a girl he never loved. So perhaps I was prepared to overlook any deficiencies in the Bernstein recording, on the grounds that it was acquired by the Prince’s Trust, sold at a respectable price and had therefore been vetted for quality, as opposed to the cheap session orchestras who grace the Readers’ Digest recordings.

This sense of approving ‘recognised’ music works the other way as well, because it’s just as easy to dislike something because the noted critics did. They must, after all, know what they’re talking about, because they’re paid to, and they see / hear / read enough films / recordings / novels to pick up trends and be aware of benchmarks and standards? So when Schiff, who seems to have listened to every recording of the Rhapsody under the sun, declared his sense of loathing for the Bernstein version there was a part of me that wondered if perhaps he knew what he was talking about. Then I went back through the book and saw that he tends to favour the smaller big band versions that are closer to Paul Whiteman’s original take, as opposed to the fuller, more heavily orchestrated renditions which have now become more or less standard.

In other words, perhaps Schiff was never going to like the Bernstein recording. It’s this that went through my mind the other week as I played it – for the first time in years, as it happened. But it was at that moment that I experienced a revelation: the recording is dreadful. It’s plodding, tedious and hesitant: the piano codas are all wrong, stopping and starting not for dramatic emphasis but because Bernstein himself doesn’t seem to know where to go. The orchestra is hardly together (syncopation was part of it, but I’m sure even Gershwin wouldn’t have wanted that much) and I heard, for the first time ever, several wrong notes. From one perspective this revelation came as a major disappointment, but I will admit that there was a part of me that actually felt quite pleased, because it meant I’d overcome my emotional attachment to the recording and was for the first time looking at it objectively.

All this talk of musical epiphanies, and I still don’t know if there’s a name for them. Everyone has them, although they’re perhaps more often featured in reverse, when a song you thought you hated suddenly and mysteriously acquires new meaning and appeal. That emotional attachment is important, and we’ll come back to it, because generally an attachment will help you like a song that is recognised as dire, while the removal of said attachment is equivalent to lifting the veil and finding out that for years you’ve been loved an ugly, misshapen wreck. It’s a weird thing to experience, because it forces you to re-examine your preconceptions about a song and even about an entire artist, but it can happen more often than we might think. If I wanted to be tremendously arty (and more than a little egocentric) I might call this ‘the Umbrella Effect’, after the Rihanna song that became the focus of my last entry.

If, on the other hand, I wanted to come up with an appropriately pretentious term to describe the Umbrella Effect’s doppelganger, I might call it the Bernstein Cascade – or the Gold State. This does sound rather like something out of a western, but in this instance the name is derived from bearded Californian Andrew Gold, who was crooning through the lounge speakers last Sunday while I was tidying up. It was while I was collecting up Scooby Doo figures and putting them in a Tupperware box that I realised that ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’ is a truly dreadful song.

Have you heard it lately? Go and have a listen. It’s on Amazon; I’m sure you can find a reasonable stream somewhere. I’d supply an MP3 but I think I’d be risking bad karma. The funny thing is, this used to be in my top ten: played and played and played some more, most often on my hospital radio shifts. We’d turn up the speakers in the studio and I’d be singing along at full volume before realising I hadn’t turned my microphone down. At the end of the song, I’d hug my co-host. Writing this down is a bit like therapy, actually; it’s a way of confessing the parts of my personality that I’m glad I managed to suppress, if not eradicate entirely.

If I’m frank about it, my new-found hatred of the song stems from the fact that I no longer have any friends who would form valid subject matter. I still have close friends, but they’re not the sort who would call on you with demands “any time of the day or night”. There’s a real danger that as you concentrate more on your family you alienate your peer group, and I do think that’s happened in our case. Sometimes friends just drift apart due to mutual disinterest. I don’t think that’s happened here, but I’m no longer as tight with the friends who once formed the focal point for me whenever I’d sing along with Gold’s dreadful patter. It’s partly a shift in lifestyle, the demands of parenthood, busy schedules, geographical proximity and the fact that, to be honest, none of us seem to want to make the effort. So I have to reluctantly conclude that I now loathe ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’ on the grounds that I no longer have any emotional attachment to the words.

There’s an old joke about a doctor who lives next door to an impossibly demanding patient. Said patient is forever hammering on the doctor’s wall at three in themorning, bellowing “Doctor! Have you got anything for a headache?”, or “Doctor! Have you got anything for a stomach ache?”, or “Doctor! Have you got anything for a backache?”. Eventually, the patient dies a sudden, untimely death, and the doctor quietly rejoices that he’ll once more be able to get an unbroken night’s sleep. Of course, some weeks later he experiences a fatal heart attack and is buried in the local cemetery, right next to his former neighbour. On his first night in the coffin, the doctor is woken at three in the morning by the sound of knocking, and a muffled voice bellowing “Doctor! Have you got anything for worms?”.

The concept of the obsessive hanger-on – the sort who can be, according to Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr Ripley, “a leech” – is not something we like to talk about much because we realise that it’s relatively easy to be both obsessive and obsessed about. I’ve been a leech, and been similarly leeched: it’s awkward to be leeched yourself, and at the opposite end of the spectrum it’s a horrible moment when you realise that you in turn are suffocating the person you hero-worship. There’s a moment of clarity when you realise that they care less about you than you do about them, and it’s not a nice feeling.

Personally, I think Gold (or whoever his character is supposed to be) thinks that this wonderful friendship that obviously sits at the very centre of his life is entirely mutual. I‘m not going to rule this out, but the cynic within me finds it unlikely. For one thing, he’s guilty of sycophantic fawning to the point of nausea. For another, he overstates his case. For another, he won’t shut up about it. And he seems to have no concept of personal space.

For example, he talks in the second verse about buying a Cadillac, if said friend would so desire it. Does anyone really have anyone in their lives who’d be prepared to do this, even so-called soul mates? Could you visualise yourself getting to the showroom and picking out the most expensive model there and watch your companion open up his cheque book without so much as a flinch? And if not, isn’t it something of an empty promise? It’s also irresponsible – if not downright dangerous – to make this sort of financial commitment when you’re a struggling songwriter (unless you happen to have written ‘You Raise Me Up’, anyway).

I can hear my detractors whining “it’s a metaphor!”, but I still think it’s symptomatic of someone who’s prepared to make promises he could never keep in order to keep the friendship going, and that’s unhealthy. Things don’t get better later on:

“And when we both get older
  With walking canes and hair of grey
  Have no fear, even though it’s hard to hear
  I will stand real close and say
  Thank you for being a friend…”

It reads like bad poetry, and that’s before we even start dealing with the sentiment involved. What we’re dealing with here is classic leech syndrome: you could just imagine him turning up uninvited to said friend’s bowls match, as a bunch of silver-haired pensioners gather on the green. At the moment of truth, during the final, crucial shot that will win his team the match and the championship, Bob is poised with his ball in hand and is just swinging when he’s rudely interrupted by a voice bellowing “BOB! THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND!” from three feet away. The shot goes wild, the game is lost, and everyone slumps off to the bar where they ignore Bob for the rest of the evening – everyone, of course, except for his lifelong companion who is determined, it seems, to stick firmly with him until the two of them shuffle off this mortal coil.

And of course, that’s exactly what happens when we reach the bridge:

“And when we die
  And float away
  Into the night
  The milky way
  You’ll me call
  As we ascend
  I’ll say your name
  Then once again…”

You can guess what comes next. I can visualise the two of them, trapped in eternity, one forever hassling and serenading the other. I suspect that the poor friend in question is now regretting that he ever accepted this guy’s Facebook request. Cue strings, more thumping piano, and then the song mercifully finishes. I run to get the bucket. How could such excruciating slush have come from the pen of the man who wrote ‘Lonely Boy’? Actually, more to the point, how could I have liked it so much for so long?

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 5

February 9, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Leonard Nimoy / William Shatner – Spaced Out: The Very Best of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy
Nirvana – Nevermind
The Not Very Good Interval Band – Peru: Spoonraker
Willie Nelson – The Essential Willie Nelson
The New Radicals – Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too
Soundtrack – The Ninth Gate

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 6

February 15, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Lambchop – Is A Woman
Lemon Jelly – .ky
Soundtrack – Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Gordon Lightfoot – If You Could Read My Mind
Soundtrack – Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Lambchop – Damaged
Julie Lee – Stillhouse Road
Lemon Jelly – Lost Horizons
Soundtrack – Local Hero
Julie Lee – Will There Really Be A Morning

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 7

February 23, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Jools Holland – Jools Holland’s Big Band Rhythm & Blues
Brian Houston – Jesus and Justice
The Housemartins – Now That’s What I Call Quite Good
Brian Houston – The Valley
Soundtrack – High Fidelity
Rolf Harris – The Definitive Rolf Harris
Jools Holland – Small World Big Band Volume Two

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 8

March 2, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Fatboy Slim – You’ve Come A Long Way Baby
Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
Soundtrack – Flight Of The Navigator
Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
Soundtrack – Face/Off
Fat and Frantic – Fat and Frantic Sing the Very Best of Wendy Craig
Focus – Hocus Pocus
Fatboy Slim – Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars
Soundtrack – Four Weddings and a Funeral
Soundtrack – Finding Forrester

Wii Will Rock You

March 5, 2009

———

Back from a self-imposed hiatus. There simply hasn’t been much to write about. I lie – there’s always something to write about, but in this instance nothing immediately obvious. I confess to a certain amount of procrastination: key to actually achieving any level of success is to sit down and force yourself to write. When I finally did this, even though my initial subject choice was tenuous, all sorts of lights went on and all sorts of mental connections began firing, and before you can say Albert Einstein I had ideas for about three or four blog entries, most of which will have to wait.

Actually, having a break was probably a good thing. It means you listen more. If you’re not constantly thinking about what’s going to go in your next entry, you’re more receptive to the world around you. Conversations become interesting discussion points about The Way People Are, and you feel like you’ve contributed something, even if it was only an inquisitive ear. Sometimes all people want is someone to listen, particularly when they want to rant – but listening is harder than it looks, particularly if you’re me.

Last night, Emily and I rocked out to Guitar Hero: World Tour. I’d only ever played a Guitar Hero game once, having tried out ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ on a display machine in a local Woolworths (three or four years ago, back when they were still open). I managed a so-so performance, and made a mental note to investigate further, but the price – and, to be honest, the song selection – always put me off. This year, with the recent release of the new edition (which features an impressive selection of master tracks) we just decided to go for it. It’ll be fun. And who needs running water and central heating, anyway?

So we plugged in, eventually (good grief those remotes are fiddly sometimes) and sat through the tutorials: speech sampled at a distressingly low bitrate, full of hiss. Restricted things to the easy setting, at least for the first evening – sliding and wah-wahing can wait. So too can Mii Freestyle and the Battle Mode, which allows you to acquire powerups, such as the ability to temporarily ‘break’ the strings on your opponent’s guitar. What’s particularly good about the game is the way that wrong notes sound so dreadful, while playing nothing at all only leads to a disturbing silence in the backing track where a guitar should be – leading to a sense of immense satisfaction when you actually get the opening riff to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ exactly where it’s supposed to be.

When I told Ewan I’d ordered the game, his reaction was “Yeuch! You didn’t!”
“Why on earth would you say that?”
“James, kids are playing Guitar Hero instead of forming real bands.”
“Oh, come off it. You just read that on a website somewhere. It’s a quote from Chad Kroeger.”
“So? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think it is. Guitar Hero isn’t so much aimed at teenagers, although I’m sure that more than a few of them are playing it. There’s some new stuff on there, but it goes very much down the classic rock road, straight to nostalgia city. The target audience is men in their twenties and thirties who never learned how to do it but wish they had. People like me.”
“Yes, but you already play the piano.”
“Yes, but there’s always going to be a part of me that enjoys playing air guitar. And part of me that will want to learn it – but I don’t think that’s going to happen now.”

The irony is that the Kroeger comment isn’t really a swipe at Guitar Hero – it was just an off-the-cuff remark during an interview with MTV, in which he said that it was hard to find bands out there because teenagers weren’t doing it. Given the nature of World Tour as a water cooler topic, it was the angle with which the press chose to run when publicising the interview. In many respects you can hardly blame them, but that doesn’t stop it being a distortion of the truth. It was Radcliffe and Maconie, among others, who pointed out that there are a great many people who wish that Kroeger himself had never picked up a guitar and formed a band in the first place.

I have to agree. Nickelback really are the pits. A friend of mine once played a mashup of ‘Someday’ / ‘How You Remind Me’ (called, appropriately, ‘How You Remind Me of Someday’) created by college student Mikey Smith. Nominal tweaking aside, Smith hadn’t touched either song, just channelled them through different speakers. And they sync together perfectly. Same key, similar chord structure, contrasting melodies that jar only minimally, absolutely identical tempo, structurally one and the same (guitar breaks dropped in the same place, builds and climbs all by the book and exactly where they should be). Some people would argue that this is the work of a clever band who knew the formula and stuck to it. I’d call it lazy. It’s also typical of their lacklustre, gravelly output: commercial rock that sucks even more than Bon Jovi, if that were possible. Kroeger can’t decide whether he wants to vocally resemble Kurt Cobain after fifty mg of Valium or a prepubescent James Hetfield. And don’t get me started on ‘Rockstar’.

But I digress.

“Thing is, it’s disposable, pick-up-and-play gaming. And that’s all I have time for these days. I can no longer be a serious gamer – my priorities have shifted.”
“Still crap, though.”
“Listen, one day we’ll get you over here and you will play it and enjoy it.”
“No I won’t.”
“It wasn’t an offer, it was a command. And a prediction.”
“No, I probably will enjoy it. That’s why I won’t play it. Don’t want to go down that road.”

We left it at that, although we also established that the teenagers playing Guitar Hero weren’t playing it instead of learning a musical instrument; they were playing it instead of playing something else. The substitution thing doesn’t really work here: there are too many variables at work. I still don’t see it’s a problem. If I’m honest, I’m pretty defensive of rhythm action titles because it’s the one genre at which I excel. I’ll rephrase – it’s the one genre at which I’m any good at all. By and large, I suck at video games. I can fill up a stud total on Lego Star Wars, if adaptive difficulty is turned on, and I fought my way through my fair share of first person shooters, but that was largely thanks to the quicksave button. My F6 key has never been the same since Pacific Assault.

It wasn’t always like this. I could have been a relatively competent gamer with time, patience and motivation, none of which I have, at least not these days. There are times when I nostalgically think back to the dark, three a.m. blasting sessions in my study, playing through Half Life, or glued to the final act of Metal Gear Solid 2 (not to mention intermittently drifting in and out of consciousness during the hour-long cut scenes). I’m not the gamer I was, and sometimes I regret that I’m so out of the loop. But then I remember that the by-product of having so much time to play was never having sex, and I am grateful that things have moved on. Besides, it’s easier to save money if you can justify non-purchase of GTA IV with the words “I just don’t have the time to invest in it properly and get my money’s worth”. These days I’d much rather have something I can pick up and play, and so you may understand why games that I can fathom out almost immediately are something of a godsend.

But the thing about Guitar Hero is ultimately that it pacifies my Inner Guitarist. I’m someone who got into music early – that’s a whole other blog entry – but I never learned the guitar. It didn’t stop me trying once or twice, but as with gaming, I lacked the general commitment. Eventually you reach a certain age and figure out that your level of immersion within your main instrument, however skilled or unskilled you happen to be at playing it, is always going to hamper your desire to learn something new. To put it another way, I’m not bad on the ivories, and I have trouble accepting that – at least initially – I’m going to suck at the guitar.

I was discussing this on Monday with Alison, with whom I’ve worked since 2002, and who knows me better than most people. I love her to bits, despite (or perhaps because of) the occasional clangers that she drops into conversation.

“I’m thirty years old,” I said to Alison. “And I’ve more or less accepted that I’ll never be a guitarist. I’m too established as a pianist. I have pianist’s fingers and it’s much harder to learn – you have to toughen them up, and there’s a part of me that is afraid to do that in case it affects my piano playing.”
“I get that from playing the cello”, replied Alison. “Your fingers hurt. I remember learning that and learning the piano, and it was tricky.”
“Yes, but there’s more bowing when you’re a cellist. I know that you pluck sometimes, but plucking guitar strings constantly and plucking cello strings occasionally are two completely different kettles of different kinds of fish.”
“I’d like to play the harp, but they cost – what, eight thousand pounds?”
“And you’d have nowhere to put it,” I said. “You’d have to keep it in your garage, where it would presumably get damp and warp. Actually, I played the violin for about five minutes when I was seven. I had no problem with the musical side of things – I just couldn’t hold the damned thing. I was an awkwardly clumsy child.”
“I played the cello in the service last night. Ouch! You can’t get away with a wrong note in church.”
“I know, the acoustics won’t let you. They stick out like a sore thumb.”
“I have to confess I was thinking less-than-Christian thoughts about the man sitting next to me. He wanted me to stick to the bass parts only. I do want some variety!”
“Tell me about it. I had that for years when I was singing in a choir. The tenor part: officially the only line that’s less interesting than the alto.”
“It went fine, anyway. It was a Tazer service.”
“I think you mean Taizé, don’t you?”
“What did I say?”
“Tazer. That’s what police use to stun people.”

And on that note…

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 9

March 9, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Robbie Williams – Live At Knebworth
Wilson Phillips – Wilson Phillips
Kathryn Williams – Relations
Cassandra Wilson – Blue Light ‘Til Dawn
The Who – Who’s Next
Wet Wet Wet – End of Part One: Their Greatest Hits
Brian Wilson – Smile
Jimmy Webb – Ten Easy Pieces

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 10

March 16, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Tears For Fears – Songs From The Big Chair
Juliet Turner – Seasons of the Hurricane
Soundtrack – The Truman Show

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 11

March 27, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

The Beatles – 1
Bon Jovi – Slippery When Wet
The Bee Gees – The Very Best Of
John Boswell – The Painter
James Blunt – Back To Bedlam
Original Cast – Balamory: Strike Up The Band
The Beautiful South – Carry On Up The Charts
The Beatles – Revolver

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 12

March 29, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Elton John – Sleeping With The Past
Martyn Joseph – Vegas
Martyn Joseph – Thunder and Rainbows: The Best We Could Find
Martyn Joseph – Run To Cover
Billy Joel – 52nd Street
Journey South – Journey South
Jamiroquai – Emergency On Planet Earth
Jamiroquai – The Return Of The Space Cowboy
Michael Jackson – Thriller
Michael Jackson – Bad
Martyn Joseph – Whoever It Was That Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home

Not What It Used To Be

April 2, 2009

———

It was about six forty-five, and the four of us were sitting in the lounge. The television programme of choice was not a particularly memorable episode of The Muppet Show or Thomas the Tank Engine. Nor were we being serenaded by Derek Jacobi’s soothing delivery (and god-awful singing) on In The Night Garden. Instead, we were watching footage from an old episode of The Old Grey Whistle Test, and the Edgar Winter group performing ‘Frankenstein’.

I was going to say that this footage is probably on YouTube, before realising that I can no longer state this with any real conviction (but we’ll get to that). If you’ve seen the video in question you’ll know whereof I speak – if not, and if you can’t find it, I’ll explain: Edgar Winter was (according to Wikipedia, the source for all truth and authenticity) “the first person ever to strap a keyboard instrument around his neck, giving him the on-stage mobility and audience interaction of guitar players”. This particular quote is uncited, and thus probably not true, but he was the first person I ever saw do it, and as such earns an honorary place in my Memorable Musical Moments Hall Of Fame (along with the video premiere of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’, the first time I ever heard ‘Comfortably Numb’, and the TOTP ‘Martha’s Harbour’ fiasco).

So the video in question features the albino Winter playing a seven-minute long rendition of perhaps his most famous hit, switching with great vigour from neck-mounted keyboard to sax to drums (including a lengthy duet with percussionist Chuck Ruff). I think (although I can’t be certain, nor can I be bothered to fetch the DVD to check) that he then switches back to keyboard again. They finish with a flurry and after the song’s finished we cut to a youthful, pre-bearded Bob Harris, possibly the only sight more bizarre than Winter himself. Suffice to say it all gets quite hectic, and is matched in intensity only by Focus’s wild and whacky performances of ‘Sylvia’ and ‘Hocus Pocus’ on the same DVD.

The experience made for a nice, unconventional (but no less heart-warming) Family Moment, of which we have not enough. Emily stared at the TV with a raised eyebrow and a grin and I wondered if, like me, she’d been reminded of Hurra Torpedo’s kitchen appliance-heavy rendition of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Joshua loved it, although his drumming has become both even louder and even more frequent in the last few weeks, so I’m worried now that I might have made that particular situation worse, rather than better.

Thomas stood there and grinned. Thomas has a tendency to do that when I’m showing him videos. It’s a new way that I’ve found to bond with him. Joshua and I have plenty of things we can do – visits to the Dad Sessions at the local day care centre, bizarre, hastily-constructed Scooby Doo games in the lounge, or culinary master classes in the kitchen on a Saturday morning, while Thomas is down for his nap, as the two of us attempt to make fudge. But Thomas and I have had problems finding something equally fun to do, until one day I ran out of ideas and sat him in front of Peter Gabriel’s video to ‘Sledgehammer’. He was entranced, although to be fair most people are when they’ve witnessed the Surrey-born musician’s tour de force for the first time.

So we looked at ‘Solsbury Hill’ – a bizarre live rendition that featured a now middle-aged Gabriel orbiting a large circular stage on a bicycle – and, the following week, New Order’s ‘World In Motion’, after which I found myself wondering if there’s a single football anthem that doesn’t somehow feature or involve the irritatingly omnipresent Keith Allen. We also observed the Housemartins’ videos for ‘Happy Hour’ (a three minute masterpiece) and ‘Caravan of Love’ (bloody awful, although the song itself is great) and sang along at full volume to Lemonjelly’s ‘Nice Weather For Ducks’, before discovering that the vocalist is none other than Enn Reitel, X-Factor voiceover artiste extraordinaire. (Memo to self: future entry on weird links in music industry. Highlight connection between radio-friendly, listenable-but-shallow pop hits enjoyed in particular by children, and Lemonjelly.)

I haven’t dared to look at any YouTube music videos with Thomas over the past month or so, because I have a feeling I’m going to end up dreadfully disappointed. I know too little about the situation to comment with any real authority, but as far as I can see the combined forces of Google / YouTube had paid a pittance to the David-to-Google’s-Goliath PRS, who are now demanding more cash which Google could easily afford but would rather not pay. I think that this is the part where I say something about how, as usual, it’s the users who lose out, but I’m sure that there’s nothing I could add that hasn’t been said a thousand times already in other blogs (presumably with far less attention paid to spelling and grammar). I couldn’t even say that my relationship with Thomas has suffered as a result. We just do different things now.

Bill Drummond (yes, him again) has said more than once that he hates nostalgia, or at least words to that effect. It’s noted that Bill and I don’t see eye to eye on a number of things. I’m a U2 fan, for one, although I couldn’t have been less interested when their new album was released earlier this year, nor was I even remotely impressed with the tedious ‘Get On Your Boots’. The “impromptu” rooftop concert they played on Radio 2 was an exercise in ironic kitsch – the Beatles did it forty years ago (what, you thought we wouldn’t remember?) and recreating it now is not cool or hip or even decently retro. And it was on a show fronted by the insidious Chris Evans. Case closed.

Nonetheless, I confess to a certain love of Bono and the boys’ older stuff. I even liked Rattle and Hum, presumably for the very same reasons that I despised the rooftop concert. It’s not about nostalgia, it’s about decent music, although that’s another entry for another day. However, Bill hates them, just as he hates nostalgia. I’m embracing the contradictions again, because I’m currently admitting to a love of old music both in sociological, context-dependent terms as well as for its own sake. In other words, I love the nostalgic music both because it’s nostalgic and because it’s good quality stuff. So I can listen to a record like ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, for example, and embrace it both as a timely reminder of when the sound was fuller and the drums punchier, and all those summers I spent lusting after a permed, rubber skirt-wearing Kylie, as well as celebrating it as fantastic music in its own right.

I could write paragraphs on nostalgia, but what I really wanted to know is this: does the fact that I’m using this letter-in-the-hat scheme to listen to so much old music inherently contradict the whole point of the exercise? Put another way, should I be taking the opportunity to seek out new records, rather than just playing the old ones, relieved in that I only have a few dozen albums from which to choose each day, rather than a few thousand? Is it healthy to look on the shelves, decide that Low is too much to digest that day, and opt for Slippery When Wet instead?

On the other hand, it’s also fair to say that I’ve listened to a good number of albums that have previously been unaired. Tasmin Archer’s Great Expectations, right at the beginning of the year, was a prime example. So too is the Duke Ellington compilation which is currently drifting through the speakers as I finish this entry and reflect on the fact that I really should have gone to bed half an hour ago. As I’ve approached my thirties I seem to have drifted out of extremes and settled my life into something resembling moderation – a little TV, a little film, a little writing, a little playing, a jack of all trades but master of nothing in particular, except being sort of OK at most things. Sometimes I curse myself for becoming so conventional, and then I remember that I have two children and that perhaps I ought to wait until they’re impressionable, easily-embarrassed teenagers before I start acting too outrageously. By then I should be just about due for a mid-life crisis, so the timing will be perfect.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be worried about the fact that I’ve been listening to compilations of favourite artists to ensure that all my favourite songs get played over the course of a week, rather than concentrating on one particular record. I’m still doing that where I can; it’s just that restrictive listening is a pretty bold step where I’m concerned and you really do have to take it one step at a time. Nor am I phased about watching old videos with Thomas or Josh. Because the one extreme I’m happy to entertain is an obsession for music, one that I want to pass on to my children, and which is reflected in my refusal to get rid of any CDs. Our collection is eclectic, but there are common threads in there, and given that it’s one of my few areas of relative expertise, I don’t see any harm in wanting to teach them about the connections. I’d like them to be able to join the dots between Bach and Coltrane, between Wagner and John Williams, between Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello, perhaps even between Arvo Part and The 17. By that rationale, old school music isn’t a problem. It’s a revisit for me, but it’s an education for them, and that’s what counts.

Crisis of Conscience

April 3, 2009

———

Reading an old Metro article, in which Bill discusses The 17:

“It’s dead easy to do it with blokes of a certain age; it’s not even as if they’re big fans of the KLF or Bunnymen. But those fans respect me and put me on a pedestal. I prefer people who don’t give a f**k who I am.”

I have to confess that this worries me. How much of what I’m doing is out of a genuine occupation with music, and how much of it is following Bill’s line in experimental thinking? In other words, do I think that this is a good idea because it is in fact a good idea, or because Bill thought of something similar, which therefore must be a good idea? I am lumped in with the ‘blokes of a certain age’ group but I’ve tried – really tried – to avoid the pedestal. It was clear, given my stilted listening habits and the fact that I’d grown bored with music towards the end of 2008, that something had to give. I also made a New Year’s Resolution to do more writing, and this blog – and the experiment it surrounds – has afforded me the opportunity to do that. Nonetheless, I do have to confess to a certain amount of soul-searching: is it better to have a good idea for the wrong reasons, or to do nothing because you worry that your motives are suspect?

I’m thinking that when this blog is done, at the end of the year, I will send it to him. I do not expect it to be read, but I’m anticipating it may be something of a release. Absolving responsibility. How typically bourgeois.

Shadow of the Past (I)

April 4, 2009

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Part one of three…

This week: the ‘E’s, which has provided me with an opportunity to dig out the old music that I listened to in my youth. More nostalgia. I am done apologising for it, but it does seem strange that various coming-of-age records are dumped in there.

First record of choice: Extreme’s Pornograffitti. Personally my teenage love of Extreme stems from the fact that they counted among their ranks one Nuno Bettencourt, which I’ve also thought was quite possibly the coolest name for a guitarist ever. I was introduced to them (much like I was introduced to pretty much everything else in 1991) by Ewan, who was a first-rate air guitarist. This translated particularly well to his bedroom renditions of ‘Get The Funk Out’ and ‘Decadance Dance’, both of which were early singles, before ‘More Than Words’ reached number two, and all hell broke loose. All of a sudden Pornograffitti was the record of choice, and who cared that the first album was crap?

Ewan and I considered ourselves amongst the few people who ‘got’ Extreme in a way that other people didn’t. We’d imagined a generation of forty-something housewives who’d gone out and bought Pornograffitti expecting a flurry of sappy, radio-friendly ballads in the vein of ‘More Than Words’, only to be sorely disappointed – these same housewives had sired children who presumably experienced the same not-what-it-says-on-the-tin reaction to the Arctic Monkeys’ debut, a decade and a half later. I make no apologies for this shameless display of deluded elitism, because I was thirteen years old and easily led.

I don’t know how we didn’t realise this in 1991, but it’s inconceivable that anyone could have bought something like Pornograffitti and not been aware that it was not going to be a record of drippy love songs. The cover gives the first clue, consisting as it does of a stocky, bemused-looking young man standing in the middle of what appears to be a red light district, surrounded by blinking neon signs advertising seedy hotels and topless bars. Then there’s the track listing, which promises such aural delights as ‘Li’l Jack Horny’, ‘Get The Funk Out’ and ‘He-Man Woman Hater’. Some of it is unashamedly romantic, but not much.

Listening to the album now, I’ve found it’s more eclectic than I remembered. There’s plenty of hard rock – the thumping beat that drives ‘When I’m President’ is a regular fixture throughout – but for every two foot-stompers the group have included at least one down-tempo intermezzo, to the extent that Pornograffitti feels like sixty-six per cent rock to thirty three per cent ballad. And it’s not just the decrease in BPM that’s a factor, but the very nature of the songs: ‘More Than Words’ is a soppy, overwrought cringe-fest that was ripe for lampooning, but ‘When I First Kissed You’ takes us into the questionable territory of cocktail lounge jazz, before ‘Song For Love’ drops us straight into a Bon Jovi video.

But it’s the album’s other big hit, ‘Hole Hearted’, that really stands out – not really a ballad at all, but certainly quieter than something like ‘Decadance Dance’, it’s one of those songs that sticks in your head for days afterwards, largely thanks to Bettencourt’s nimble guitar work. ‘Hole Hearted’ sounds like Davy Graham for the MTV generation, and it’s ironic that Pornograffitti’s best track doesn’t even come close to generally representing the style of the album. Because despite the eclecticism – an eclecticism that was missing on, say, Appetite for Destruction (which is by no means a bad thing, as Guns ‘n’ Roses’ ballads were traditionally second rate), Extreme’s first real magnum opus remains primarily a rock record, with just enough variety to satisfy my inner air guitarist and my outer romantic idiot. And everyone goes to bed happy.

Shadow of the Past (II)

April 5, 2009

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Second record of choice: Enigma’s The Cross of Changes vs. Enya’s The Memory of Trees. Both sound like Colin Dexter novels, both new age meditation session soundtracks, both similarly cadenced in their titles. Both accompanied me on frequent occasions looking out of my bedroom window at non-existent stars (we lived in the middle of suburbia, surrounded by street lamps and generally basking under night-time clouds), reflecting on lost love and writing dreadful poetry. (I’m pretty certain, in fact, that ‘Silent Warrior’, a Cross of Changes cut about Native Americans, inspired a particularly ghastly reflection from yours truly entitled ‘Death of the Savage’, the memory of which still makes me shudder.)

Enya was playing the night I wrote my first real love letter – it was Shepherd Moons, rather than Trees, but they’re all the same so what does it matter? No, really, they are. The early ones, in particular, are incredibly formulaic, at least up until A Day Without Rain. You open with a quiet, hesitant, piano instrumental, usually designated the title track. The next will be more uptempo and will frequently be chosen as a single (‘Caribbean Blue’, ‘Anywhere Is’, ‘Wild Child’). Track three, at least on Watermark and Moons, is quieter and synth-driven. Then you’ll get something minor and slightly thundery, usually with bells, appropriately reminiscent of Clannad. Track five or six will almost invariably be another hesitant piano instrumental. I could go on. Note that I do not include The Celts in my deconstruction, as that’s slightly anomalous (being a debut), but it’s an exception that proves the rule.

My father once said that if you took away the reverb from Enya’s voice, she would sound rather average. This is partially true, but also unfair. If you remove the distortion effects from Dummy (or just concentrate on the passages on the record where they’re not there), the vocals of Beth Gibbons are second-rate (there’s a reason she was a pub singer). Nonetheless, the fact that she sounds like she’s singing down a telephone line is crucial to the groundbreaking novelty of the album and, I’m sure, much of Portishead’s subsequent success. Similarly, the reverb effects on every…single…Enya record in existence are all part of the charm, adding to the breathy, Earth Mother, crystals-and-candles feel of albums that sound like they should be played while you’re driving past Scottish lochs, or used in Songs of Praise montage sequences. Cripes, at least the woman can sing in tune, which is more than you can say for the Spice Girls.

The Cross of Changes, on the other hand, is far less consistent but has nonetheless held up rather well. Never mind the fact that ‘Return to Innocence’ was inexplicably included on a compilation of “Greatest Instrumentals”, despite containing a full set of lyrics and a Taiwanese drinking song. (That’s another entry – Inappopriate Compilation Allocations. I mean, there must be hundreds. If only I had the time to research.) To be honest, this one is still pretty dreadful, despite having a semi-decent guitar solo halfway through: its new age themes are well-meant but irritating, urging us “If you want, then start to laugh / If you must, then start to cry”. Well, thank you. It’s nice to have your permission. My only cause to make merriment is at the fact that you actually got paid a royalty for writing such shit, and I will continue with my blubbing session when I’ve come back from wrapping my arms around that tree.

Leaving aside ‘Innocence’, and the disastrous ‘Dream of the Dolphin’, the rest of the album is generally very good: the breathy intrigue of ‘I Love You…I’ll Kill You’ still sounds good fifteen years later, and even the slightly patronising ‘Out From The Deep’ works on most levels, providing a lyrical bookend and catchy, pleasant riff. Perhaps the most notable use of any track on the album came in 1999 when the stonking ‘The Eyes of Truth’ was used to tremendous effect in the trailer for The Matrix; they really ought to have licensed it for the soundtrack. Even now I can’t hear the song without imagining slow-motion images of Thomas Anderson evading bullets in slow motion: the final cut of the lobby sequence, however great, was always going to be a let-down after the ninety seconds of preview that graced cinemas in the early part of 1999 (God almighty, was that really ten years ago?) – and to be honest, whenever I think of that scene, I always think of the trailer. This is due in no small part to the powerhouse mix of drums, choirs and orchestra, and whatever my hang-ups with Enigma’s corny sensibilities on the rest of the album, I will always owe them a debt of thanks for that particular small pleasure. After all, I can think of no other circumstances under which I’d allow Keanu Reeves to haunt my sleep at night.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 13

April 5, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Eels – Electro-shock Blues
Kathleen Edwards – Failer
Enigma – The Cross Of Changes
Enya – Watermark
Extreme – II: Pornograffitti
Eels – Beautiful Freak
Enya – The Memory of Trees
Duke Ellington – Love Songs
Eden Burning – Mirth and Matter
Erasure – Pop! The First Twenty Hits
E – A Man Called E
Eels – Daisies of the Galaxy
Eels – Shootenanny!
Enya – The Celts

Shadow of the Past (III)

April 8, 2009

———

Final record of choice for last week: Eels, and Beautiful Freak.

I discovered Eels in the early part of 1997. I was in Leeds, and miserable, for reasons that I won’t fully divulge now, although I will concede that I was partially responsible for my own situation. I remember spending hours window shopping in the town’s Virgin Megastore, looking at CDs that for the most part I couldn’t afford, and generally wanting to be anywhere else but the Grim North. When I wasn’t falling asleep in lectures, queuing for the use of the hall piano and fretting about assignments I was unable to complete, I was reading Stephen King or writing long, tortuous letters. I had no money, no motivation, no real friends to speak of, and my roommate was a perpetually naked Brummie who went through my things when I wasn’t there.

If I’d known at the time what Mark Everett had been going through in Virginia (and later California) I’d probably have put up and shut up and damned well counted my blessings. Records about misery are funny things, a little like soap operas in that you can rejoice in the misery being enjoyed by other people. No matter how screwed up your own life, it’s rarely as God-awful depressing as that of Gail Tilsley, as joyless and miserable as that of Pauline Fowler, or as flat-out exciting as Neighbours’ Helen Daniels (how the woman managed to survive alcoholism, depression, kidnap, eviction, bigamy and several almost fatal accidents without popping her clogs far sooner is beyond me).

Everett has suffered the tragically early death of a pioneering, scientist father, the slow and painful loss of his mother to cancer, and the death of his schizophrenic sister Elizabeth. And that’s just in his family. What’s particularly striking about his autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, is the almost complete lack of self-pity. You get the feeling he wallowed for a while, and then wrote music, which is one of the healthiest ways of dealing with adversity. Part of this is his writing style, which by his own admission skimps on the poetry for the sake of simply telling it like it is. With certain obvious exceptions, that’s a trait that he’s carried over into songwriting, to the extent that his material is generally accessible, even if you don’t always understand what he’s talking about.

Beautiful Freak was a watershed moment for me. I’d never heard songs like it, nor have I since: the fuzzy, distorted percussion, the juxtaposition of musical boxes and loaded, grungy guitars, Everett’s voice, by turns grating and tender….every track is different and every track is a belter. There’s the static that opens ‘Novocaine For The Soul’, the menacing social commentary that’s ‘Susan’s House’, the quirky sing-along factor of ‘My Beloved Monster’, the disjointed but somehow effective choral sampling in ‘Flower’….look, you don’t really want me to go through the whole album, do you? I could spend hours telling you how Beautiful Freak is at once familiar and innovative, but (with a couple of exceptions, for personal rather than musicological reasons) I really don’t think I need to. Just buy the thing. You’ll see what I mean.

The title track itself (you may have guessed we’re now onto the exceptions, by the way) is a warped celebration of unconventionality, a sort of you-and-me-against-the-world for people with deformities. For reasons known only to themselves, my sister-in-law and her husband chose it for their first dance, but despite the apparent incongruity it remains one of my favourite parts of a spectacular evening and one of the best weddings I’ve ever attended. Nothing on the album, however, compares with the simple, elegiac beauty of ‘Manchild’, about a miserable girl who reminds me of frequent, lengthy phone calls with an old friend of mine in the years before her life finally took a much-deserved turn for the better. That ‘Manchild’ is based around a telephone conversation that bookends the song (as well as providing spoken interludes during verses) only strengthens the association.

The sense of loss and depression that haunts the early records eventually appears to dissipate somewhat, and it’s on Daisies of the Galaxy, Eels’ third album, that it becomes apparent that Everett is finally getting his shit together. There’s still plenty of pathos – the stark finality of ‘Estate Sale’ and the high-pitched lament for a clearer recollection of the past that is ‘Selective Memory’ string immediately to mind – and the record has Dead Mother written all over it, but there’s an optimism there that sings through the upbeat ‘Grace Kelly Blues’, the quirky ‘Tiger In My Tank’ and the outright weird ‘I Like Birds’. Even laments like ‘It’s A Motherfucker’ are merely sad and regretful, as opposed to downright miserable: Everett finally seems to have externalised his emotions.

To be honest, that’s where I lost interest. I’m happy that he’s put his life back together, but the later records, while varied and fun and always immaculately produced, lack the raw emotional impact that’s present on those first two albums. I’m reminded of a scene in Spaced where Brian the artist (“Anger….pain….fear….aggression….”) finds himself unable to paint because the presence of a new girlfriend in his life has made him happy, snuffing out the flame of his tortured soul. It takes this depressing realisation to make him miserable enough to paint again, which is a beautiful paradox. I’d never want to say that I embrace misery, but I also think that I wrote my best stuff when I was despondent.

So if an Eels album adorns my CD player, it’s almost invariably Beautiful Freak, or – if I want to feel really depressed – Electro-shock Blues. Eels were never again as stark and beautiful as they were in that title track, and marrying Everett’s vocal with his account of Elizabeth’s schizophrenia in Things The Grandchildren Should Know makes for a compelling narrative. When you combine that with ‘Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor’, ‘My Descent Into Madness’ and ‘3-Speed’, you’re left with a pretty bleak outlook – one that continues right up until the last track of the album, when Everett declares, amidst a flurry of strings, that “Maybe it’s time to live”. It’s an abrupt mood switch that remains astonishingly powerful eleven years later, and its impact for me was only increased when the woman who would eventually become my wife emerged from a cathartic and unhappy period in her own life with those exact words.

And for all that, Beautiful Freak remains my favourite. It’s Everett’s most consistent offering, it’s the one I know more or less by heart, and the one I’d take to that proverbial desert island. It’s a record that makes me feel good about myself, not so much because it features other people wallowing in misery (despite what I said earlier), but simply because it contains beautiful, memorable songs. Whenever I hear it, I’m back in that hall of residence in the middle of Leeds – only this time, I know that eventually I’ll be leaving it.

I Want My MP3

April 8, 2009

———

In today’s Guardian: Amazon are intensifying their assault on iTunes with an MP3 price drop.

“In a move seen by experts as an aggressive attempt to steal custom from its rival iTunes, Amazon cut the price of more than 100 tracks – including Lily Allen’s The Fear and Lady GaGa’s Poker Face – to 29p.

“On the bargain list, which spans pop, hip-hop, rock, classical and jazz, music fans can also find older tracks such as Oasis’s Wonderwall, the Dambusters March played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World for up to 70p less than on Apple’s iTunes. Amazon, which also offers albums for as little as £3 said the reductions were being made indefinitely.”

I will skip the dull business part, and get to this:

“Paul Scaife, managing director of the music industry newsletter Record of the Day, said more competition was good news for digital music consumers, and variable pricing was welcomed by labels who have long lobbied for songs to be priced according to fans’ perceived value. But he warned: ‘Music has been pretty devalued already. If they continue to sell at a discount that becomes the de facto price and anything else seems expensive. A single track has got to be worth more than 29p.’

“Record labels are not the only ones concerned about pricing. Scottish dance artist Calvin Harris, whose single I’m Not Alone is expected to debut in the top five this weekend, posted a shocked comment on Twitter yesterday after discovering the price of his song at Tesco. He twittered: ‘Good Lord just saw you can get it at Tesco’s for 57p! 57p!!! That track took me 2 years! 57p! 2 years! 57p! No wonder music’s on it’s arse.’”

I have to admit that this left me rather depressed, and I don’t mean his apparent inability to use an apostrophe. Because Paul Scaife, it seems, is quite right: music has been devalued beyond all recognition. I’ve done all this early in the blog, and don’t particularly want to retread old grounds for the sake of being topical, but nothing hits home quite as much as Calvin Harris’s twittering. It’s a concrete example of an artist who feels exploited, and good grief, perhaps he has a right to. This is why I feel obligated to buy an original copy of a song I like, usually on CD. It’s partly about supporting the artist but it’s also because recorded music has to be worth something, whatever that something is. I have no qualms about buying second-hand CDs from my local charity shops, however little I pay, because I do so in the knowledge that someone at least has paid full price (or near enough) for that album somewhere along the line, and presumably listened to it a few times before getting bored with it. I know that the situation could quite easily be reversed, at least it would be if I ever gave any of my CDs away.

But this is a losing battle, because at the rate things are going, we will eventually have dispensed with any sort of financial transaction for recorded music: we will instead have a monthly membership, perhaps hidden in a Broadband subscription, that will entitle us to listen to any music we want, permanently streamed from a website. However, we won’t actually own any of it, not even in digital form. There will be no hard drives and no ripping, and even iPods and car stereos will hook up to this vast network. CD players will still exist but they’ll be considered as antique and cumbersome as vinyl is today (even now it depresses me that my children are going to grow up not knowing what a record player is, at least unless I tell them). This inevitability is some years off and will not be a sure thing until Microsoft’s Cloud principle (the idea of floating ‘virtual’ workstations that would enable people to access software, files and email stored on enormous networks, from any PC in the world) becomes the norm. Nonetheless, it’s on its way, looming in the distance like Bill Bailey’s killer snails (“They’re coming!……They’re still coming!”).

Maybe Bill (Drummond now, not Bailey) is right, and we need to either abandon recorded music or at the very least re-think its importance. Because whatever the aims of The 17 I’m still convinced that recorded music has its value – and not just older music that’s being rediscovered, but newer recorded music. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t have purchased Lily Allen’s ‘The Fear’, or looked forward to the next studio recording from Martyn Joseph. It’s just that the recorded version need no longer be the pinnacle of achievement – it could, instead, provide a decent (or otherwise, in the case of The Polyphonic Spree’s first album) accompaniment to the live act. But even that doesn’t really work, because it doesn’t allow for acts like Brian Wilson, who – in the 1960s, at least – became far more interested in the idea of studio work than of live performances. Wilson’s a name I drew out of my head, but I’m sure there are contemporary equivalents. The whole thing is a minefield, but whatever happens it’s apparent that we can’t continue the way we are. Something has to give.

One of the many things I like about Show of Hands, the Devonian folk artistes extraordinaire, is that they’ve recognised the inevitability of illegal downloads, and adapted accordingly. I can still recall seeing them at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms in the tail end of 2006 – halfway between ‘The Galway Farmer’ and ‘I Promise You’, Steve Knightley spoke frankly about the digital revolution:

“A lot of musicians discourage downloads and copying, because they say it hurts their sales, and that they lose out on royalties for songs that they’ve written. And that you shouldn’t copy out of consideration to the artist. Bollocks, say we. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been approached after shows by people who’ve got into our music because friends have ripped and copied CDs for them, and then they’ve liked what they heard and come to see us live. So, you know, we don’t mind piracy if the word of mouth gets people interested.”

“We’re OK with piracy in general, actually,” adds Phil Beer from behind his mandolin. “You know, the swashbuckling sort.”
“Yeah,” replies Steve. “Actually, I – well, I bought Phil a book on pirates for his birthday. He was reading it on tour and he had it in our dressing room. One evening, a friend of ours, quite a well-to-do lady, came backstage after the show and picked it up from the table. She looked at the glossy black cover and the enormous skull-and-crossbones motif, and then said ‘Ah. Pilates.’”
“Of the Caribbean,” adds Phil. And then, in an extremely convincing West Country accent (which is perhaps not surprising considering he comes from Exeter), he bellows “AAARRRGGGHHH! I’ll be plunderin’ and pillagin’ later on, but first I’ll be doin’ me breathin’ and centerin’!”

Now, where did I put my cutlass…?

Interlude

April 9, 2009

———

Rats.

In the car this morning, listening to highlights from The Matrix. Suddenly found myself unable to tolerate Rob Dougan’s ‘Clubbed To Death’ – the song which, in the film, accompanies Neo’s wander through the virtual high street in the company of Morpheus. It was reworked to a certain extent for The Matrix Reloaded, accompanying Neo’s fight in the chateau.

Only I can no longer listen to it, because when do you know what I see? The bloody X-Factor auditions. You know the bit I mean. The judges are particularly nasty to some poor hopeful who demonstrates a complete lack of talent, and who almost inevitably leaves the room sobbing or angry. Almost immediately, the drums and synths kick in, and in walk the parents, typically obese and badly dressed, to berate the multi-millionaire foursome, usually unsuccessfully. Cue lots of dirty looks, close-ups and bad language, although the effectiveness of the scene is usually undermined by the fact that they’ve shown it at least four or five times in the “coming up” segments.

There’s a whole other entry waiting to be written about excessive use of certain songs in film and TV – actually, I already wrote it some years back, and one of these days I’ll get round to putting it in here. But suffice to say that this was another great musical number ruined forever, thanks to overexposure. Damn you, Simon Cowell!

Easter Reflections

April 10, 2009

———

Good Friday seven years ago, I was fretting. I sat in a church hall, worrying about the theatre group’s impending performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. Anyone who has ever worked with me on things like this will know that I spend the last few hours before the curtain goes up in a period of virtually silent brooding. I don’t eat, I visit the toilet excessively, and I’m jumpy as a jackrabbit. Thankfully I can pull this off as meditation and preparation, even though it is not: it’s panicking.

I didn’t want to do Superstar. That’s not true. I did, but it came off the back of two other highly successful productions: Godspell, in 2000, and then Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat a year later. I’d tinkled the ivories (metaphorically; the keys on the electric piano were plastic) for Godspell and trodden the boards in the title role for Joseph. Note that I do not call this the lead, because that role must surely go to the omnipresent narrator. Godspell had bonded the church drama group in ways we’d not thought possible. Both shows had played to full houses, and I was worried that in tackling an ambitious show that I loved more than any other musical – one that I’d wanted to do since I was fifteen years old – we’d somehow be overreaching ourselves. We were a talented church, but I lived in fear of letting it go to our heads.

I remember giving a pep talk a week before our first performance – even now I hesitate to use that word, given that what we were essentially preparing was an act of worship. I told the group of our initial conversation, on a pleasant summer’s evening in August 2001, where in the latter half of a gaming session the four of us floated the concept. At the time, I’d been hesitant and said that it would be impossible to cast; that the songs were too complicated and full of syncopating rhythms, angular melodies and unconventional harmonies; even that it was too controversial in nature to really mount.

I skimped on the detail when I was recounting this story to the assembled cast, and said “It was almost a year ago that I sat in a room – ”
“Annie’s front room, actually,” Jon interjected.
“– right, and said ‘I’d love to do Superstar, but I don’t think we could,’” I continued. “And I will tell you all this: I have rarely been so glad that I was so completely wrong.”

The first night went well, despite teething problems: the band had to contend with a complete lack of sound backstage at the beginning of the second half, due to our engineer not realising until four songs in that Media Player had for some reason muted our foldback. It was a nerve-wracking few minutes, and at the time I was willing to put it down to some sort of divine test, an exercise in blind faith, as if some force were saying “You’ve done it with amplification, now let’s see if you can remember it”. These days I am less theologically sure of myself, but I’ll go with the prevailing view of the minister’s wife (and spiritual lynchpin of the whole production), who commented later that “God generally doesn’t believe in the calm method”.

What else do I remember? I remember that was one of the best Easters I’ve ever experienced, largely because for a while there I forgot how the story ends. In spending almost an entire year of my life living and breathing a show that finishes with the crucifixion, I almost became as one with the characters, and I experienced with new eyes the wonder of the resurrection on the Sunday morning. I remember doing it again a week later, on two successive nights. The first was better, because the percussive balance was healthier. The second and last night our drummer had to play a wedding, and we worked with a friend of his, who was a trained percussionist who’d done the show before. Unfortunately he played it a little like a percussionist, which meant that the beats that night somehow lacked the hard rock groove that I wanted. But you have no time to rehearse these things, so you work with what you’ve got.

I remember great and lost ideas. I remember standing at the back of the hall to watch the crucifixion on the first night, and watching the audience flinch when the first nail went in. Jon had panned them across the speakers from left to right, and we’d mixed them with a track from the Heat soundtrack. (I wanted to use The Doors, but it was vetoed.) I remember deciding not to have a retiring collection and then being faced with a crowd who were so moved by what they’d seen that they refused to leave until we’d produced a bucket for donations. I remember Beth telling me of the filthy looks she’d received when she paraded across the stage as a prostitute during the temple scene, and how I felt pleased that we’d made the right impact. I remember a twinge of regret that we hadn’t taped bags of white powder to raincoats, as per Jon’s suggestion, but it was felt that this might have been going a little too far.

I remember finding a replacement Herod with only a few months to go, and the whole thrill of casting and rehearsing, knowing from the outset who would fill some roles and fretting about the others. I remember Jon’s idea of opening the curtains after the crucifixion to show Judas and Pilate on the crosses next to Jesus, implying that on many levels the church had crucified them along with him. I remember not doing this and wishing we had. I remember having a conversation about what we’d put on the shirts that we’d arranged for apostle costumes. Jon suggested “I’m with Jesus – are you?”. I suggested “My Lord was crucified at Golgotha and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

Emily doesn’t care for Superstar, at least not on the basis of the DVD production she’s seen. She thinks Jesus is whiny and weak, which is a fair comment, because that’s exactly how he comes across in the hands of Glenn Carter, who was a much better Simon. Jerome Pradon is a sensational Judas who provided at least some inspiration for the way that Jon played him. But if you don’t like the songs, it doesn’t matter how they’re performed. I’d like to hope that she’d have liked our version.

No recordings exist, aural or visual. We’d already stretched the copyright limitations. Part of me regrets this bitterly, because it’s something I’d dearly love to see again: I have fantasised, in later years as the technology has grown, about recording a commentary session with Jon, trading stories, examining war wounds and generally talking about the show for a couple of hours. But then I think about The 17, and I realise that what we did that night was adhere to at least some of Bill’s principles: we used existing music, but we created something beautiful that does not exist in any recorded form whatsoever. It was done purely for the moment, and there’s a big part of me that will always be grateful that I’ve been spared the indignity of having to listen to the bum notes, comfortable instead with the glorious memory that rests inside my mind.

I leave you with two thoughts – one from yours truly and one from Jon. Saturday evening we gathered in the back room of the church for a warm-up, and I said “Let’s not forget why we’re doing this. It’s not about personal satisfaction, although that counts. It’s not about entertaining people, although that counts. It’s not about creating a work of art, although that counts. Ultimately, we’re doing this – I’m doing this – to impress girls.”

Actually I dragged it out for a little too long and nearly ruined the punchline – but the point was that I never needed to tell these people why we were doing it; it was our whole raison d’etre. It’s a period of my life that’s now very much over, but it was always a pleasure doing it for the simple reason that they were so good to work with.

Number two. After the last show we spent two or three hours in the Lownsbrough’s front room at the cast party: drinking, strange photos and recollections. Jon and I shared the speeches but I gave him the last word.

“I’d just like to point out,” he said, “that this was kind of like a trilogy. Godspell was spreading the message of love through fellowship and evangelism. Joseph was spreading the message of love through joy. And Superstar was spreading the message of love through suffering.”

There was a long, reflective pause.

“Sorry,” Jon added hastily, looking around. “I didn’t mean to end on a downer.”

Rapture.