Human Writes
April 11, 2009
———
“In the beginning / when we were winning….”
“There!” said Emily. “There it is again.”
“In the beginning / when we were winning….”
“That’s the Manics, is it?” I said.
“Yes. I played the album, like, once on Monday. And Joshua just picked that up and he’s been singing it all week.”
I swung the Zafira round the curve at the bottom of Streatley Hill, as the A329 heads out of the residential area by the youth hostel, and the road opens up towards Pangbourne.
“In the beginning / when we were winning….” sang Josh, somewhat tunelessly.
“Clever that he picked that up so quickly.”
“Yes,” she said, “except he only knows the first two lines. Which is kind of annoying.”
This reminded me of a story I once read about a group of children on a train journey, and one girl in particular who was singing ‘On The Road To Mandalay’. Except she knew only the first line, which she repeated over and over endlessly, much to the annoyance of her accompanying aunt. Sitting here now some hours later as I type it up, I’m reminded of seeing Bernie Clifton at Butlins of Skegness twenty years ago this summer, and his rendition of ‘Memory’, which consisted of the words ‘Not a sound from the pavement’, repeated throughout the entire verse.
“In the beginning / when we were winning….”
“Which one is it, anyway?”
“I can’t remember. It was definitely on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, because that’s what we were listening to.”
“I don’t know it too well,” I said. “I kind of went off them then.”
“It is a bit pompous.”
“It’s not just that. The songs are badly written. “ Actually, my contempt for This is My Truth… runs deeper than bad songs. When I first heard the album ten years ago, I commented in an email that it sounded like they’d written lyrics in one room and then married them with a completely unrelated melody. This, as it turns out, is exactly how the Manics worked, and the friend who’d received the email was quick to point this out (as well as slag me off no end for stomping all over his favourite group). I might just have been able to live with this disjointed methodology if they hadn’t been so fucking preachy. As someone who knew all about writing bad, preachy songs, having written a fair few myself, I felt I had some frame of reference.
But the biggest crime on This Is My Truth… is the execrable ‘S.Y.M.M. (South Yorkshire Mass Murderer’, which – as well as being even more preachy than usual – commits the cardinal sin of talking about the songwriting process. In a song. Opening with some pleasant, distorted guitar work, in a ponderous minor key, you think you’ll be treated to a thought-provoking album closer until Bradfield starts his vocal: “The subtext of this song, I’ve thought about it for so long / But it’s really not the sort of thing that people want to hear us sing”.
Excuse me? What is this bollocks? Is this your contribution to the liner notes that somehow got dropped onto a lead sheet by mistake? Or did you have the idea of writing one of those thought-process songs? Have you pinched the idea from George Harrison, and his equally whiny and equally shit ‘Only A Northern Song’? But perhaps I’m being a little too harsh. Let’s stick with it and see if it gets any better:
“The context of this song, well I could go on and on
But it’s still unfashionable to believe in principles”.
What the hell? That barely even scans, Bradfield. And what do you mean you “could” go on and on? You do go on and on. Constantly. ‘The Everlasting’ was six minutes – it didn’t live up to its title, at least technically, but it certainly felt like it. You’ve barely shut up since Richey jumped ship. Things don’t get better: later, Bradfield admits that “the reason for this song…may be a pointless one”, before conceding that he hasn’t thought of an ending. Well, that’s just lovely. One of the most popular bands in the world, and you can’t think how to finish off your latest album, except to go out with a colossal whimper rather than a bang. Let’s just go back to the chorus, shall we? A droning repeat of “South South Yorkshire Mass Murderer / How can you sleep at night, sleep at night?”. Perhaps we should level the question at the Manics, and ask them how they could sleep at night after having written such turgid rubbish and foisted it on the general public. I don’t care if the song’s about Hillsborough, that doesn’t make it any good.
I didn’t say all this to Emily, because it would have taken the rest of the journey. Instead I said “There’s a song that closes the album that talks about writing songs. And stuff like that rarely works. Certainly not in this case. It’s the same with Elton John.”
“Which one?”
“’Your Song’.”
“I thought you liked that one.”
“I suppose I do. In a way. But it’s amateur. It was thrown together in twenty minutes, and it shows. One of the lyrics was “If I was a sculptor / but then again, no…” to which the conventional response is well, why the hell did you bring it up?”
Emily giggled.
“Not my joke, unfortunately. Thing is,” I said, “it works in the context of something like Moulin Rouge. Because in that it’s used in by a young poet who’s improvising and trying to work out what to say next, and that’s exactly how the lyrics come across. That’s probably why that sequence functions so well, because it gets to the heart of the song. But a masterpiece it ain’t. And it doesn’t rhyme.”
Emily gave me one of those you’re-stretching-the-point-with-that-one looks.
“I just think they’ve written better stuff, that’s all. ‘Tiny Dancer’, for one, or ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’.”
Both songs have a certain place in our hearts: I first sang ‘Tiny Dancer’ to Emily before the beginning of a rehearsal, seated at the piano in the hall, just the two of us, not long after we got engaged. ‘Yellow Brick Road’ was, for some time, the only song that would pacify Thomas when he was upset, to the extent that we pasted a permanent MP3 link on our desktop. I knew she was thinking about this as well, and allowed us a reflective pause.
“Or,” I added eventually, “‘Someone Shaved My Wife Tonight’.”
Another giggle. Then, from the back seat,
“In the beginning / when we were winning….”
Cue Pangbourne city limits, and comparative sanity.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 14
April 13, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Marillion – Best of Both Worlds
Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell
Madonna – Ray Of Light
Manic Street Preachers – This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours
Soundtrack – Magnolia: Songs by Aimee Mann
Thelonius Monk – Original Jazz Classics
McAlmont and Butler – The Sound Of…
Pat Metheny Group – “Quartet”
Soundrack – The Matrix: Selections
Mika – Life In Cartoon Motion
Joni Mitchell – Turbulent Indigo
Soundtrack – Magnolia (score)
Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell
Mike and the Mechanics – Hits
Supe of the Day
April 14, 2009
———
Three connected thoughts I had on Sunday night while tidying the lounge.
1. Mike and the Mechanics really are a terrific group, one that I have sorely neglected, and ‘The Living Years’ may be an emotionally manipulative sob fest but it always brings a lump to my throat.
2. Reconnecting with artists I’d forgotten or discovering new ones I never realised were great in the first place is, in many ways, the whole point of this experiment. It’s just a shame that I had to more or less force myself to do it.
3. I’m a little fuzzy on the whole notion of ‘supergroup’
Think about it. A supergroup is defined as an act that consists of musicians who have achieved notoriety outside of the context of the group. The Travelling Wilburys, for example, were a supergroup, because every member had enjoyed a distinguished career, as a solo artist or part of a group or both, before hooking up to record ‘End of the Line’. Cream were a supergroup, because Clapton had already had fun with the Yardbirds, while Ginger Baker was established in the Graham Bond Organisation. Emerson, Lake and Palmer were a supergroup, because – well, you get the idea.
Whenever I read articles about Genesis, it’s generally in the context of them being a ‘supergroup’. But is this really fair? I know that this is going to come across as overwhelmingly pedantic, but the initial inception (I am not going to say ‘Genesis’) of the group, over forty years ago, came about when Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford (and the others who we more or less forgot about) got together at Charterhouse School and formed a group. Some eight years later, Gabriel quit, and while (as Steve Coogan remarks in 24 Hour Party People) very few bands survive without their lead singer, Genesis went from strength to strength, even if they now had to put up with vocals from Phil Collins. The Collins-led Genesis disbanded in 1996, with Rutherford and Banks continuing without him, before going on hiatus in 1998 or so, and then reforming in 2006.
Given Rutherford’s involvement with Mike and the Mechanics, and Phil Collins’ phenomenally popular (if execrable) solo career, the ‘supergroup’ label is understandable – but I’d have to question its accuracy. Can you really refer to a reformed band that had provided a teeth-cutting experience for its members as a supergroup? If Paul and Ringo, for example, were to go on tour, you wouldn’t call it a supergroup. You’d be hard pressed to call it a Beatles reunion. When Paul Rodgers went out on the road with Queen, they weren’t labelled a supergroup, despite the fact that both Brian May and Roger Taylor had enjoyed considerable solo success in the years after the death of Freddie. So why should this label apply to Genesis?
Perhaps what’s at the heart of this is that I hate the word supergroup – both in simple linguistic terms and as a concept. Glorified celebrity-filled extravaganzas seldom work well on screen – look at The Greatest Story Ever Told, or the BBC’s adaptation of Gormenghast, for clear-cut examples of where the whole was far less than the sum of its parts. The chance of failure is statistically lower in the music business, as evidenced by the Wilburys, or (if you wanted to stretch the point) Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and T-Bone Burnett, but the Highwaymen provide a notable example of a supergroup that didn’t work – as did Electronic, who had produced one stonking track and then, in the words of Radcliffe and Maconie, “never quite lived up to their promise”. If you wanted to get technical, you could also include Band Aid: yes, I know it was for charity, but they still made a crap record on no less than three occasions.
Even the one-off gatherings of great musical minds at tribute concerts and special events tend to bring about an enormous influx of ego, as we saw when Sinead O’Connor misbehaved tremendously at Roger Waters’ messy 1990 staging of The Wall in Berlin (including a lacklustre Bryan Adams, a chronically awful Joni Mitchell, a misused Van Morrison and a disastrous Jerry Hall – now there’s an example of too many cooks if ever I saw one). And we all saw (or read, anyway) what happened when they put McCartney and Bono on stage together at Live8. (I can’t bear to think what would have happened if they’d added Chris Martin as well.) So perhaps I don’t like the idea of Genesis being a supergroup simply because they worked together as a group, where the egos, while nonetheless prevalent, seemed to take second place to the music. Which is more than you could say for Velvet Revolver.
In Praise of RAS Syndrome
April 19, 2009
———
All these years of listening to Michael Oldfield, I can’t believe I never noticed this until this week:
“4 a.m. in the morning
Carried away by a moonlight shadow…”
Well, duh.
This reminds me of the old Dad’s Army sketches where Lance Corporal Jones would demonstrate an even lesser understanding of the twenty-four clock than that possessed by his superior officer, Captain George Mainwaring. Whereas Mainwaring displayed a vague comprehension of the concept, but a limited knowledge of whether seven o’clock at night translated into twenty-one hundred, seventeen hundred or nineteen hundred, Jones frequently upstaged him by appearing entirely clueless. He was frequently mixing up his words and all too often he’d complete a sentence with something along the lines of “I shall return here at six o’clock….hours”.
What I’d like to know is exactly what our song’s romantic hero was doing at 4 a.m. in the morning. Using his PIN number to get cash from an ATM machine? Watching the CNN Network? Recording a DAT tape? Contracting the HIV virus?
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 15
April 19, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells
Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Soundtrack – Once Upon A Time In The West
Soundtrack – O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Mike Oldfield – Elements: The Best Of Mike Oldfield
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells II
Shall we gather at the river
April 21, 2009
———
I’m sure there’s an entire library’s worth of books that deal with “songs that remind you of certain places”. Certainly I have a few. There’s no real point in listing them here, because such memories are entirely subjective and will mean precious little to anyone reading them, unless you’re talking about some sort of mass shared experience like the euphoria of hearing a particular song that you loved at a live gig. But for the most part sharing such things is entirely pointless – dangerous, even, because the impact of the song is diminished for you personally, in the wake of the realisation that the party who was hearing the story hasn’t a hope of appreciating it the way you do. It’s far better, if you’re going to do that sort of thing, that you at least try and justify the impact and importance of the song on musicological grounds as well as personal ones. As a general rule I try and avoid too much soul-searching purely for its own sake, although I will make no apologies for the odd exceptions, such as today.
When I first heard Alison Krauss performing ‘Down To The River To Pray’ on the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, my first instinct was to turn up the heating to compensate for the shivers that were running down my spine. There was something spellbinding about the way it builds from the solo vocal, gathering texture in every stanza as Krauss journeys down to the river with her sisters, and then brothers, and then a whole congregation of believers seeking redemption and forgiveness. Quite what they did at the river (apart from praying) is anyone’s guess, but it sounded so good we didn’t feel the need to ask them.
For years, every playing of that song has conjured one of four mental pictures in my head. The first is its use in the film, as a group of believers undergo riverside baptism in one of O Brother’s standout moments. The second is Ewan’s baptism, in the spring of 2003 – this time the marriage of music and images is entirely fictitious, because although he’d expressed a preference for this particular song in the planning stage he didn’t use it, and we had to settle for ‘Awesome God’ instead, which was a great shame.
Third, I’m reminded of the chilling image of graveyard scenes in the advert for smoke alarms. As Krauss and the choir sing about the thorny crown, the camera pans forwards to a series of graves, all adorned with epitaphs like “They were too expensive” or “I thought it was my landlord’s responsibility” – the implication being that there was no excuse for not fitting a smoke alarm in your property. The chilling effectiveness of the advert (i.e. the fact that I still remember it all these years later) doesn’t make it any more pleasant, so I tend to brush that one aside and instead recall the time I sang it to a reflux-afflicted Thomas, at the age of two months, as we sat in a hospital side room. We were waiting for his brother, who’d injured his arm. Thomas was whingy (characteristically so, for his age) and this was apparently the only way of calming him down. Not a particularly pleasant day, but slightly less traumatic than the graves of dead children accompanied by the words “FIRE KILLS. GET A SMOKE ALARM”.
It’s just over the course of this last week, however, that the song has occurred in another dramatic moment of my life – one that had undeniably pleasant consequences, but which was not without mild panic. Because thanks to my in-car CD player’s programming, I will now eternally link ‘Down To The River’ with the image of my darling wife, in the initial onset of labour, post-water breakage but pre-contractions, leaning out of the Zafira at the side of the A34, at one o’clock in the afternoon, throwing up.
That was now, this is then
April 23, 2009
———
It’s appropriate, in a way, that we drew ‘P’ this week, because it takes me back to the summer of 2005. I was in a not dissimilar situation to the one that I’m in now, except that instead of being a father to three, I was just starting to get used to becoming a father to one.
Three musical things of note that week. (It was going to be two, but then I remembered a third. I now need to nip this in the bud, because if I keep thinking I will remember another, and will have to begin the sentence with ‘Among the musical things of note that week were…I’ll come in again’.) The first item was that when Emily and I set off for the hospital, where she was to be induced, the 80s MP3 CD we had on in the car shuffled to Adam and the Ants singing ‘Stand and Deliver’, which we both thought was very funny. Personally, I always have visions of Adam suffering from fits during the time he was undergoing psychiatric observations, and usually conjure the image of a wild-eyed, strait-jacketed Prince Charming bellowing “I’M THE DANDY HIGHWAYMAN!”, before one of the nurses soothingly replies “No, no, Adam, listen, you’re in a hospital”, while the other administers the morphine. Perhaps I just had medical personnel on the brain that week. The next morning, when I returned to the John Radcliffe alone after Emily’s waters had been broken, the CD shuffled to ‘I Want To Break Free’, which was also amusing even though I have no accompanying anecdotes.
The second thing of note was the number one single. By way of explanation, I’ll tell you that I placed an HMV order last week. It was for Calvin Harris’s ‘I’m Not Alone’. It’s not a song I’ve heard and indeed until last week it was a song I’d not even heard of (although retrospectively I see I mentioned it in passing a few weeks ago in my discussion about MP3s), but I am buying it for the simple reason that it was the number one record on the day that Daniel was born. Perhaps I’m old fashioned about this, but these things matter. I made a point of buying the records for both my other boys, and the fact that I had no particular attachment to this song doesn’t matter one jot. It’s true that the singles chart has absolutely no meaning these days, but it’s a tradition, and sometimes traditions are important.
I’ve always found it faintly amusing that the number one song the day my brother was born was ‘Under Pressure’, presumably because it describes the condition of our mother at the time, while Emily was ushered into the world to the sounds of Status Quo’s ‘Down Down’. It’s perhaps not quite as bad as a kid I knew at school who found out that when he was born, the Bee Gees were serenading the British populace with ‘Tragedy’. It would be unfortunate if it weren’t so funny. But connections like this aren’t the norm – it’s statistically improbable, for one thing – and for the most part I’m just happy to buy the CDs and tell my children that this was the music that people liked when they began their lives. They don’t have to like the song – what’s important is that it gives them a sense of identification. At least I hope it does. Otherwise I’m wasting my time.
The number one record when Thomas was born was Rianna’s ‘Umbrella’, and I’ve written about that elsewhere. When Josh arrived some two years earlier, it was the long-dead Tupac Shakur, with an old track, originally released posthumously, that had been recut by Marshall Mathers. For the chorus, they’d mashed together appropriate passages from Elton John’s seven-minute ‘Indian Sunset’, taken from Madman Across the Water. It almost-but-not-quite worked: fans of Shakur were critical of Eminem’s cutting-and-pasting technique (and, in particular, the omission of certain key verses from the original) and his doctoring of Shakur’s voice, while fans of Elton presumably resented having one of their idol’s better songs chopped up for the sake of second-rate hip hop.
In spite of all this, I rather like ‘Ghetto Gospel’, because it happened to hit the number one spot the day before our son was born, and the song that it replaced was rampantly hideous. For weeks prior to this, the charts had been besieged by Crazy Frog. In 2005 two records received more airplay than all the others combined: Tony Christie’s re-released ‘Amarillo’ and the remix of ‘Axel F’ with vocal interjections from the freakish, electric blue, goggle-wearing amphibian. Teenagers loved it. Those of us who remembered Beverly Hills Cop and who had grown up with Harold Faltermeyer’s musical scores never far from our tape players were rightly appalled.
It’s impossible to fully relate the impact that Crazy Frog had on British culture that year. Love him or hate him, you couldn’t escape him – thanks to a savvy bit of marketing, the bloody thing was everywhere. The pop industry had, by all accounts, invented a CG mascot who was even more annoying than Donkey in the first Shrek movie, whilst remaining strangely compelling. If you’ve heard his warbles, there is no need for me to repeat them here. If you haven’t, they are almost impossible to describe, except to say that they were reportedly based on an internal combustion engine.
‘Axel F’ took over the charts, but it didn’t end there. Sometime later the frog was back with a cover of Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’, before releasing an appropriately seasonal remix of ‘Jingle Bells’ (backed with a cover of ‘U Can’t Touch This’) in time for Christmas. In between the second and third releases came the obligatory album, the popularity of which has mystified me to this day: all right, it was an amusing novelty for about two minutes, but why the hell would you want an hour’s worth of warbling and croaking? I even had a go myself: in the hazy, slightly spaced-out aftermath that was the fortnight following Joshua’s birth, I remember getting an idea for a duet between the demonic CG creation and Sir Paul McCartney, under the guise of Rupert and the Crazy Frog Song, in a remix of the much (and unfairly) maligned ‘We All Stand Together’:
“Bom, bom-bom, bom, bom-bom,
Side by side, hand in hand
We all stand toge –
RRRRRING da ding ding ding dada ding ba ba brem bram b-b-b- weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaa!”
Thankfully the law of diminishing returns – and, presumably, the fact that the novelty had worn off – meant that the frog’s subsequent chart appearances were comparatively disappointing, even though he was regularly in the top 20. He has presumably been served up in a French restaurant by now, but his legacy (such as it is) remains intact. It was a musical 9/11, in that things were never quite the same again, and we were all a little more wary every time we opened our front doors or turned on our radios. Suffice to say that it took a long time for the impact of the frog to wear off, and such was his ubiquitous omnipresence that summer that he even made it onto the 2005 edition of my “songs of the year” CD – albeit in the form of a hidden track at the end that consisted solely of his characteristic scatting, as opposed to the full version of ‘Axel F’. When Emily asked with a wry smile why I hadn’t yet bought it, I replied that there was no way I was going to sully my music collection with such rubbish. It would be a full year before I caved in.
The third (and undeniably most important) item of note that week was that Pink Floyd reformed.
I could devote the rest of the year to writing about my obsession with Floyd. I could talk about the time I first heard ‘Comfortably Numb’, and how it made me weep buckets. About how I have always restricted my playing of the song so as to minimise the inevitable diminishment of its emotional impact. In other words, it is a song to be respected and revered and only brought out for special occasions, like really good crystal. I could tell you about the time I spent ten minutes in a Beefeater extolling the virtues of Dark Side of the Moon to three old school friends – an album, I mentioned, that was owned by a statistical average of one in four households. The others admitted that none of them owned it, whereupon I admitted that I did, which more or less proves the point. I could tell you about the time I realised Dark Side was actually heavily overrated, and how Clare Torry’s wailing tends to grate these days, but how I still love ‘Brain Damage’. I could tell you about ‘Echoes’, a track that I still believe presents something of a zenith, particularly when synched to the final act of Kubrick’s 2001.
I could mention the time the Drama instructor on my PGCE course used ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ to introduce Hamlet, and how it was at that moment that I realised how easy it was to weld contemporary media with the classics. I could tell you about the time I saw the Australian Floyd, and how they were a disappointment, because despite nigh-on perfect renditions of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘High Hopes’ – as well as the welcome inclusion of ‘Nobody Home’ – they didn’t play a single track from Dark Side. I could tell you of my inevitable sadness at the death of Richard Wright, and how it seemed to surpass that of Syd Barrett – who in a sense had already died years ago, while Wright had seemingly so much more to offer.
As I’m writing this, fallout from the YouTube / PRS debacle continues. But what I’ve found is that, contrary to my earlier fears, there are far more music videos still up there than I realised. In any event, Thomas and I have reinstated our regular sessions: this week he has had his introduction to the Pet Shop Boys, Elvis, and Pink Floyd – specifically the Live8 show. The sound quality was second rate, but I used the opportunity to sing the song to my middle son – the member of our family who has taken the delivery of another child the hardest – and to get in some much-needed bonding time. We stared at the comparatively subdued light display and watched as Roger reflected on absent friends, and it was a very solemn, and somehow touching moment. Then Gilmour began to sing along with his guitar solo, and Thomas giggled.
Floyd’s reunification had been the highlight of an otherwise dreary occasion, because Live8 itself was a fiasco. It achieved very little and any positive effects it may have had were delivered with minimal style and panache. The Coldplay incident (Chris Martin played a political video at the end of his set, causing panic in the BBC control room and a fast cut to Jonathan Ross) was only the start, and things quickly went downhill from there. Madonna was an embarrassment, Pete Docherty was positively shambolic, and the whole show was filled with an air of smugness and self-righteousness that undermined any good it might have done. It was the patronising arm of the West thinking they knew what to do in Africa, when making poverty history was really a moot point, because, in the words of Jesus himself, “You will always have the poor”. If we’re going to do any good in developing countries we need to reassess our priorities and not resort to lip service and white armbands and hopelessly misguided charity events that were more about relieving guilty consciences and plugging new albums than actually feeding the hungry. I’m a philanthropist at heart, but also a realist, and perhaps a better slogan for the G8 protests would have been ‘Make Corruption History’ – or even better, ‘Make Bono History’.
So for the most part it was just a very long and generally unsatisfying day, with comparatively little of interest besides watching Fearne Cotton embarrass herself in interviews with Nick Mason (“So, Nick, is this going to be a permanent reunion?”) or the general public (“So, are you here for the music, or are you here to make poverty history?”). Robbie Williams was spectacular (even more so when he was hitting on Cotton), but it was too little, too late, and all we could really do was look at our watches and wait for Pink Floyd. And this one-off reunion, only brought about because of Mason’s declaration that “If there were another Live Aid, we’d do it”, was really the only reason I was watching, and I was always upfront about telling people this. This may make me shallow and superficial, but at least it doesn’t make me a hypocrite.
I don’t know why I specifically picked ‘Wish You Were Here’ to watch the other day, except that it’s one of my favourite songs, and that somehow on a subconscious level I’d associated this particular version with the week that Emily delivered our first child, rendering it a hugely appropriate choice. Eldest son arrives in the midst of song that is watched with second son in the week that featured the birth of youngest son. To get the full effect of this you have to look back at what I wrote in 2005. I rather like this passage, because it sums up quite effectively how I was feeling that week – tired, slightly overcome but aware that a number of momentous things had happened – and also ties together my tightrope walk between the transitory and the lasting.
Cue dreamy flashback effects:
——
Early evening I rang my brother. “I was wondering how much of last night you remembered.”
“Ah, yeah. I rang you, didn’t I?”
“Yes you did,” I said. “You were absolutely out of your tree. You said ‘I’m so PROUD of you, man! You’ve both just done so fucking well, and you’re just AMAZING! It’s just fantastic; I’ve been showing your picture of little Joshua to fucking everyone I know, and telling them ‘that’s my little nephew!’”
“Yeah, I’d been in the pub since six o’clock.”
“You went on for about ten minutes.”
“Oh, man. Sorry.”
“Are you kidding? I laughed my friggin’ arse off,” I said. “It was just so funny. But I don’t know how much of it you can recall and how much is swiss cheese.”
“I remember calling you, but that’s about it.”
We talked of superficialities, and I asked him if he’d heard the new number one yet.
“Fuck yeah. Isn’t it great?”
“It is, actually,” I said, agreeing with him for a change. “I like it a lot. I mean, I have the original Elton John that they took it from, and they’ve actually chopped and changed it quite a lot to make it work. But I liked it, although it beats me where they keep finding these new Tupac records.”
“Apparently he made two unreleased albums before he got shot,” Mark replied. “It’s fucking ironic; he’s making much more now he’s dead than he ever did when he was alive.”
The situation with the number one – which I finally got round to buying today – does at least explain why Joshua was two weeks late. It has nothing to do with hormone deficiency or Emily’s body’s reluctance to be in any state other than late pregnancy. It’s just that our son didn’t want to spend the rest of his life saddled with a birth date that coincides with Crazy Frog. He simply wanted to hang around until it had been shifted from the top spot. I can’t say I blame him – in fact, I think it bodes well, and is a sign of his obvious fledgling musical taste, which is perhaps unsurprising considering his parents.
After all this was over, and we’d said our goodbyes, I journeyed home to watch the last couple of hours of Live 8: specifically the old Gods almost dead, as the Waters-led Pink Floyd took to the stage, reunited for what will probably be the last time. It seemed obvious that they weren’t particularly enjoying themselves, but there was something seminal about this particular flying pig, which for once wasn’t floating over Battersea Power Station. Hell froze, and all the devils were here: inner demons ranted and raged, and the sense of alienation seemed apparent. ‘Money’ was sloppy, and Waters stood apart from his band mates and rarely sang. There will be no permanency in this reunion, no tour, no comeback album.
Nevertheless, there was in the midst of this one-off something extraordinarily poetic that can’t really be framed in the context of an online diary. Regardless of any ill feeling, it was great to see the four of them back onstage again, in whatever state of relations. Certainly the third verse of ‘Wish You Were Here’ moved me to tears: it’s a song about Syd, but when Waters and Gilmour sang about “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year”, it was one of those moments that defined the song, the people singing it, the history of the band, and the whole moment. They took it further with ‘Comfortably Numb’, another piece about alienation – a miserable epic that nonetheless seldom fails to uplift me, even when the musicians look as fed up as they did tonight. As Gilmour’s solo billowed over Hyde Park, you could truly believe for a moment that in the midst of a superficial and frequently disappointing concert something important had happened – something that defines compromise and redemption in the midst of cynicism and stubbornness. They probably won’t play together again, but somehow that didn’t matter. This final jam may not have been perfect, but it was enough.
Just for the Record
April 24, 2009
———
I just finished reading Mark Radcliffe’s Thank You For The Days. Less an autobiography, more a random collection of anecdotes woven together by the common bonds of music, family and beer, it charts the course of Radcliffe’s life over his fifty years, discussing an early obsession with Motley Crue, the occasion when he did the coastal walk, the question of whether Keith Richards is more rock ‘n’ roll than Mick Jagger, and the time his mother inadvertently hit him with a golf club. It makes for compelling and occasionally hysterical reading, and Radcliffe’s exemplary command of the English language lends his narrative wit, warmth and humour. In the introduction he says that he hopes that the episodes chosen would enable people to get to know him a little better. He certainly achieves that – but that he does so while coming across as good-humoured, likeable and refreshingly modest is a definite bonus.
As good as the book is, there was one passage that unnerved me. It’s the same passage that unnerves me in every music biography I read, at least where the topic comes up. I’ve also encountered various magazine articles, web pages and radio and TV programmes dedicated to it. The subject in question is not about sexual prowess and how many girls you’d slept with by the time you were eighteen (none, in my case), or those little things you did as children that you got away with, only to feel the need to violently confess years later (I have plenty of those, but they’re not going in here). No, what brings me out in a cold sweat and gets my heart racing is the matter of The First Record I Ever Bought. Because – and here’s the truth – I simply don’t know how to answer it.
You could argue with some justification that this isn’t really a big deal. It’s not likely to come up in a job interview (unless I’m applying for a position with the music press, perhaps), I don’t anticipate being cross-examined on the subject in a magistrate’s court at any point in the foreseeable future, and I somehow doubt that, should I reach the pearly gates in order to watch my life being judged, I’ll be confronted with a glorified Saint Peter probing my thoughts for information about this particular rite of passage. By rights, it should be lower down my list of priorities, and perhaps it would be if the matter were easily resolved. Like most men, I like talking about myself, but I also know (to some extent) when to go off on a rambling tangent and when to just stop talking, and if I were able to give a concrete response I’d probably just answer the question, add a brief context if I felt it relevant and then let the subject go on to something else. As it stands, however, I appear to be stuck perpetually in limbo, forced to give the question far more attention than it actually deserves.
Perhaps what’s also at stake here is the fact that I spend a lot of my time comparing myself to other people, particularly musicians or musicologists. As someone who claims to eat, sleep and breathe all things aural (it’s not just quiet background noise, it’s a lifestyle) you would think that I’d have this down pat. Mark Radcliffe knows the identity of his first record (it was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality). Bill Drummond knows his. Even my father could give you an answer. So, too, could Robert Smith, Morissey, Katie Melua, Elvis Costello, Stuart Maconie, and Alex Turner. I’m all for the concept of individuality and personal choice but how can I claim to take music so seriously if I can’t answer tell you where the journey started?
Part of the problem is the very phrasing of the question. To understand me here you have to factor in two things: the way I was brought up, and the fact that this bringing up was done in a transitional time when the word ‘record’ could mean any one of a number of things. It’s worth bearing in mind that most of the time, the question is asked of people whose formative teenage years were accompanied by music that existed exclusively on vinyl, or else on the radio. More to the point, most of them would have been too hard up to afford albums. The issue of the ‘first record’, therefore, was fairly unambiguous: it would, in most cases, have dealt with the first single you bought, or perhaps the first long player if your family was posh and had more than one car.
Being born in 1978, and developing an interest in music as I did in the late 1980s, things were a little different. For a start, vinyl – whilst still widely available – was gradually being usurped by cassettes. Cassette albums had been available for a good while, and at the time that I started to buy music you’d usually find a space for cassette singles, snugly nestled next to the seven-inches on the racks in our local Woolworths. Cassette singles tended to be two-track affairs that were repeated both sides, therefore negating the need to constantly wind the tape back in order to hear the song again. The inevitable drawback was that you would also have to listen to the B-side before you could once more hear the main event, unless of course you chose to wind it on, thereby rendering the concept of duplicated sides fairly pointless.
I never bought vinyl. Ewan did, but it just seemed like an unnecessary faff. As years went by I learned about the superior quality of vinyl over cassette, and came to realise that in terms of high fidelity I’d been batting for the wrong team. It wasn’t something you’d have noticed on the Goodmans record player / double tape deck / FM tuner that constituted my first bedroom kit, but on something with a decent set of speakers, there was noticeably less hiss. On the other hand, vinyl was easy to damage, cumbersome to store and not terribly portable. You couldn’t easily take a record to school to lend to a mate, unless you were prepared to buy one of those sleek and reasonably stylish record bags that were beyond my budget.
More or less from the beginning, then, I relied on cassettes. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have records at home. We did, in abundance. My parents owned one of those button-controlled turntables that position the needle automatically, and even moved along the underside of the disc, thus removing the need to flip it over manually. This took some of the fun out of the experience but it also meant that our record collection survived comparatively unscratched for a great many years. We had albums by the Beatles, a Disney collection and a lavishly packaged box set of Your Hundred Best Tunes, complete with loving, sensible looking couple on the cover, relaxing in front of a roaring fire on an extravagant bearskin rug. Singles were also a staple diet, although most of them were many years old, and my parents tended to put the ones they played the most onto recorded C90s for the car. New ones were a novelty but I can well remember the day my father brought home the seven-inch version of ‘You Win Again’, a song we all loved. Who knew that it was all downhill for the Bee Gees after that?
For the most part, I’d borrow records from friends or from the library, and tape them. My sum total of owned vinyl amounted to a whopping one single, and that had been donated by Ewan. It was a recording of Mankind’s disco remix of the Doctor Who theme, all wah-wah guitars and false endings – oh, and a vocal by the Cybermen. The first time we heard it, we pissed ourselves laughing. Ewan tired of the record long before I did, but rather than simply tape it onto cassette for me before flogging it a car boot sale he very kindly insisted on passing on the original, presumably in some well-meant but ultimately misguided attempt to get me into vinyl (and not in a kinky sense; that came later). In thinking about this now, I’m reminded of the Father Ted scene where Dougal comes into the lounge of the parochial house, looking for his record collection. Ted produces a battered, paper-sleeved single and hands it over with the words “Dougal, you have to have more than one record for it to be a collection. What you have is a record.”
CDs were around when I started buying music, but they were only just becoming mainstream. Certainly we couldn’t afford them, although certain friends owned a few. I can still remember the fascination of what appeared to be a blank silver surface that apparently contained high quality music. At least you could see the groove on a record. It was years before I worked out how to tell apart the recorded portion of a CD from the non-recorded, with its subtle distinctions. This shows inclinations towards technophobia, but I was far less a luddite than Tony Mercer, my old music teacher, who – on the first occasion he played a Compact Disc – spent ten minutes trying to work out where the needle should be positioned.
So much for the format. What am I to make of the fact that my parents did most of the buying for me? If they were to bring home a record they thought I’d like, for example, and give it to me as a gift, that would hardly constitute a record that I myself had bought, and such a recollection is not really in the same league as the romanticised accounts of visits to the local Our Price to ask for the Sex Pistols or the Undertones. And yet it was in this fashion that I received my first exposure to pop music, courtesy of a double-tape compilation that my parents had bought entitled Pop Hits For Kids, which contained such delights as ‘Stand and Deliver’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Hang On Sloopy’. And these weren’t poorly rendered re-recordings knocked up by a sessions band and sold at £2.99 a cassette (or whatever the 1986 equivalent might have been). These were original versions by original artists, which is something I didn’t really appreciate at the time.
A few years later, I requested that my father buy me the soundtrack to the hottest film of the summer. It was twenty years ago, and the film in question was Batman. I’d become quietly obsessed with Tim Burton’s reimagining of the Caped Crusader; I saw Keaton’s Batman take on Nicholson’s Joker only once in the cinema but watched the rented VHS tape four times before reluctantly returning it to the local video emporium. I had the Making Of book and the novelisation, and the video game would be sitting under the Christmas tree that December, so it only made sense to complete the set. As I’m writing this a popular fashion seems to be 1989 Batman T-shirts that have been sold pre-cracked; i.e. made to look old, as if you’ve had them for years. Part of me thinks this is utterly naff, while another part of me thinks it’s brilliant marketing.
The interesting thing about the Batman soundtrack is that about a third of it doesn’t feature in the film at all. Prince’s duet with Sheena Easton, the sorely underrated ‘Arms of Orion’, doesn’t make an appearance. Nor does ‘Lemon Crush’ or the film’s big hit, ‘Batdance’, which is basically six minutes of sampling and a disjointed, mildly schizophrenic structure. The other interesting thing about the soundtrack is that each of the songs is meant to showcase the mindsets of the lead characters. You thus have Bruce Wayne lamenting the dilemma that is his double life in ‘Vicki Waiting’, Batman discussing his mission statement on ‘The Future’, and the Joker outwardly embracing his hedonistic lifestyle on ‘Partyman’. This didn’t seem like a big deal to me at the time, but it’s only twenty years later that I can realise the sense of innovation: in many respects it’s a concept album, rather than a mere soundtrack. Batman was reportedly where a lot of people started to go off Prince, which is a shame as I maintain that he released a lot of his strongest material in the early 1990s, before all the legal wrangles and contractual obligations forced him to turn out third-rate excrement for the sake of paying lip service.
But however flawed and mechanical the album may be, it was the first one that I’d actively requested, and I’d like to hope that the fact that I did not go into a shop and pick it up myself does not necessarily bar it from inclusion. It was just the way we did things in our family. Shopping excursions were comparatively rare and it was far easier to just ask my father to pop into W H Smith on his lunch break. I also hope it counts because the alternative – i.e. the first proper album that I bought with my own money, in person – was Now 18, just after Christmas 1990. It was a decent compilation, and one indeed that I saw fit to buy again on CD some years later, but it’s hardly the most original or inspiring choice. I went through a period of buying Now albums in the 1990s, from 18 through 24, but then became bored with the material and indeed with the charts in general. They’re a clever stunt – an eclectic, well-chosen selection of chart hits at a fraction of the price that it would have cost to buy forty singles – but my goodness they’re tedious to write about.
So we’ll go with Prince, then, and I would very much like to leave it there, Because if we’re going to talk about singles, then the first CD single I purchased was Dr Spin’s ‘Tetris’ in 1992. This is embarrassing enough without me also having to tell you (and I don’t really have any choice, now that I’m in this sort of mood) that in 1990, the very first cassette single that I bought was ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’. I’m not proud of this fact, but it needed to be said. I have done my best to atone for it through copious buying of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Paul Simon, the Boss and anything else that possessed what is generally considered to be artistic merit, but there is always going to be a part of me that feels I will never fully atone for this earlier sin, which may account at least partially for the guilt complex that forms a big part of my current psychological makeup. And here was me thinking that all those dark secrets were going to stay hidden.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 16
April 26, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
The Proclaimers – Sunshine on Leith
P.M. Dawn – The Bliss Album…?
Arvo Part – Collage
Prince – Diamonds and Pearls
Pulp – Different Class
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
Worlds à Pärt
April 28, 2009
———
I was twenty years old when our university choir did a concert that included the most way-out, avant garde piece I’ve ever performed.
The piece was Arvo Pärt’s Credo. I had no idea who this man was, or why he was making such a fearful racket. I was no stranger to discord. At the tender age of sixteen, Ewan introduced me to Krzysztof Penderecki (not him personally, you understand, just his music), and a recording of his ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ still sits on my classical shelf, rarely played but much admired. I’d never heard anything like it: the strings were all over the place, adhering to a structure that I would later learn was ‘total serialism’, and they seemed to be singing for the dead. The funny thing is that the emotional impact of the piece is largely what inspired its name: Penderecki had originally set out to create an abstract work until he first heard it performed, and realised that it carried a resonance he’d failed to notice when producing his notations.
Dissonance in the classical world is frequently rubbished, not altogether unfairly. The problem I have is reconciling my outer snob with what my ear can feasibly stand. I was taught at school that this stuff is good – that Stockhausen was a genius, that Berg was the Beethoven of his day and that Poulenc was one of the finest French composers in history, but that doesn’t make their music any easier to consume. A lot of it just leaves me cold. I have no time for experimental percussion-led idiocy (if I did, I’d simply go to a Genesis concert) – and you may call me a heathen, but I think I’d rather eat my own liver than have to sit through Wozzeck again.
I suspect that part of this stems from my father. I have spent years in many respects becoming him: adopting his quirky mannerisms, his small private jokes that were known to only the members of our family and then passed on to the next generation. Sometimes I find myself travelling down a similar path to him, seemingly in parallel. At other times we disagree – always cordially, but without any real attempt to compromise. We’ll just accept what the other one thinks and then change the subject. Perhaps this is, in itself, a form of compromise. The upshot is that our discussions are never particularly deep; there is too much mutual respect for the other’s beliefs. To be honest, I like it that way.
My father’s musical tastes are one such example of where the two of us differ. I wouldn’t say that he likes a lot of music that I dislike (although I draw the line at the Pan Pipes collection), but the reverse is certainly true. He views much chart music with a mixture of bewilderment and bafflement. He can’t stand Jesus Christ Superstar, and dismisses most jazz as just “noise” (although in the case of Ornette Coleman, he’s probably right). I have given up trying to educate him, because I think he has at least learned to recognise the musical qualities of material he dislikes, even though this awareness of standards is not enough in itself to endear him to it. There are certain things I just won’t play him, because there’s no real point. Having said all that, he and my mother were my most loyal attendees and came to every concert we performed at university and beyond it, in both directions (forwards and backwards). You may thus understand why I was nervous about bringing them to a performance of an obscure 1960s fusion of Bach and – well, noise.
I sometimes wonder if my recent contempt for some experimental music marks the beginning of an inevitable downslide into the garden of conventionality, and that I’ll lose my taste for edginess – but the simple truth is that some of this stuff just sounds horrible. Sometimes that’s a good thing. If you’re looking for something to instigate feelings of dread, claustrophobia and downright terror, few soundtracks work as well as the score to the first Silent Hill game. It’s a compelling mixture of white noise, clangs, air raid sirens and bleeps, and makes for extremely uncomfortable listening, which is exactly as it should be – but I wouldn’t use it as background at a dinner party. Anna Meredith’s ‘Froms’ was an innovative, gutsy cacophony of sound, with its multi-location synchronised trumpeting, but this sort of bold experiment was arguably not suited to the Last Night of the Proms, where it received its premiere.
With a university concert, things are a bit different. If the aim of college is to study and research and investigate, it stands to reason that there might be educational subtexts behind ticketed events, as if to introduce the audience to a composer with whom they might not be familiar. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed singing in the choir: we had our fair share of standards, but the musical director wasn’t afraid to tackle new work, leaving the conventionality of the standard choral set list to the likes of Classic FM. We sang Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, a couple of songs by Barber, and an obscure chorus by Aaron Copland – one that was so universally reviled that when it was announced in the middle of the concert that the choir would now perform ‘Sing Ye Praises’, the elderly scholar lurking behind me in the bass ranks was heard to mutter “Oh God, not this crap”.
I don’t know what most of us made of ‘Credo’ when we first rehearsed it. I would like to hope that the majority of us grew to love it almost as much as I eventually did. The piece is twelve minutes of strangeness, beginning with a slow, sotto voce chant of ‘Credo’ over strings and brass, which eventually jumps to a fortissimo and the introduction of an entire orchestra. Bach’s prelude in C follows – you know, the one that became ‘Ave Maria’, the one that everyone knows – played solely on piano. Eventually – hang on. Perhaps I should just hand over to Alisa Rata, who explains it better than I ever could. Here comes the science part. Concentrate…
“The piece opens with the words ‘Credo in Jesum Christum’ from the liturgical Credo, but the remainder of the text is taken from the Gospel according to St Matthew (5: 38-9). This consists of only two statements: ‘Audivistis dictum: oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente’ (‘You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’), and ‘Autem ego vobis dico: non esse resistendum injuriae’ (‘But I say unto you: do not resist evil’). The conclusion restates the word ‘Credo’ (‘I believe’). These words, set in confrontation to one another, illustrate the work’s basis – ‘that the pacifist response to violence is ultimately stronger than violence itself.’ The basic structure of the piece is provided by Bach’s Prelude in C major from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the piano piece itself is blatantly apparent in the settings of the first and third sections of text. The middle section, however, gradually introduces 12-note and aleatoric textures, distorting the purity of Christ’s teachings. On the superficial level, this work presents a battle between the forces of good and evil, but the situation is more complex than two sides simply working against one another. By basing his atonal 12-note series upon the circle of fifths (see Ex. A) – the most powerfully unifying element of tonality – Pärt sets the ‘two extremes of order and disorder, good and evil . . . not as separate blocks of energy, but as linked forces, each containing the seed of their opposite, with a continuum of gradual disintegration (and reconstitution) lying between them.’
“Throughout the Credo, this 12-note series methodically negates the tonality of the Bach, beginning with one repetition of the first note, gradually building to twelve repetitions of all twelve notes and a subsequent section of aleatoric chaos (represented by black blocks of sound on the page with directions for range, etc. See Ex. B). The chaos eventually recedes, and, in the appropriate fashion of the circle of fifths, tonality is re-established as the cycle revolves. ”
(From ‘Arvo Part: The Credo of Eternal Truth’.)
You may wake up now. Wake up! Oh, somebody get the smelling salts.
As good an analysis as this is, it means absolutely nothing unless you actually hear the damned thing. There’s absolutely no way of describing it to you in emotional terms. It took me a while to grasp it myself: this was largely because ‘Credo’ was rehearsed in segments, with the piano, and were not joined by the orchestra until a few days before the concert. When I eventually heard the piece in full, a thousand light bulbs went on at once in my head, and I was dazzled by the glare. Here, I realised, was the soundtrack to the adaptation of King Lear I’d been writing. Here was horror and discord and beauty and wonder all in the space of one work. Here was a man struggling with his inner demons and the threat of blacklisting by an oppressive Soviet Union, to the extent that after ‘Credo’ he would not write again for eight years, with the exception of his third symphony. It was like nothing I had ever heard before and nothing I have heard since, and I loved it.
As a diversionary parenthesis, a few brief notes concerning that adaptation of King Lear. It was due to star Sean Connery in the eponymous title role. Courtney Cox would play the faithful Cordelia, with Sean Young and Sigourney Weaver taking on her treacherous sisters. Ralph Fiennes would play Edgar, and Richard E. Grant his bastard brother Edmund. Tim Roth was down for Kent, and – in a particularly brilliant bit of casting if I say so myself – Rik Mayall was going to play the Fool. It was going to be a modern film noir in a Blade Runner setting. It would open with Grant blowing up a nursery, just because he could. There would be car chases, helicopter pursuits through tunnels (scored to Nirvana’s ‘Breed’), a hallucinatory sequence in which Edgar meets up with the dwarf from Twin Peaks, and a pitch battle on the streets of New York. Gloucester would have his eyes removed with a power drill. The whole thing would climax with a helicopter crashing on the roof of the Lear Corporation skyscraper, from which a mortally wounded Lear appears, clutching Cordelia’s disembodied head. I toyed with the idea of ending with a nuclear explosion, but could never quite make it work.
The night of the concert came. I had warned my mother about the programme, and she attended anticipating that my father would, at some point, screw his nose up. He’s always proud of me, but when it comes to the music itself he cannot heave his heart into his mouth. I miscounted the bars and came in too early, but I was trying to shout over an orchestra which thankfully drowned out my cries (although I’m pretty sure they appeared on the recording, which I have never heard). When we finished there was, I would like to think, appreciative applause. I caught up with my parents at the interval and asked them what they thought.
“We liked it,” said my mother. “All of it.”
I cocked my head. “Really?”
“Yes,” said my father. “That ‘Credo’ piece…very good. Very powerful.”
Honestly. You think you know someone.
Change the Record
May 1, 2009
———
Sitting in the car this afternoon, on the way back from work, listening to Tomoyasu Hotopei’s ‘Battle Without Honor or Humanity –Part One’, as featured on the soundtrack to Kill Bill. Two things spring to mind:
1. It’s still a fucking great tune.
2. It turns up absolutely everywhere. Over-exposure was so great, in fact, that it was once in danger of losing all sense of appeal to me.
I’m feeling lazy tonight, so here’s a recycled diary entry that deals with this very topic. The time-check, for anyone who is interested, is October 2005…
———
A couple of months ago, I wrote an entry that supplied new lyrics to ‘Fix You’, detailing a trip to the vet. Almost as an aside (albeit one that lasted for the best part of an entire paragraph), I predicted that the song would almost certainly be used in the next Comic Relief, as backing music for dying African children running in slow motion towards Billy Connolly. “Please give as much as you can. Together, we can make a difference.”
It’s only October, but already it seems like my worst fears are being realised. Only last week they used the song on The X-Factor (of all things), as the would-be pop stars (embodying as a collective the very essence of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame concept) made their way home after the final ‘closed’ auditions before the winners are unleashed on an all-too-suspecting public. Cue numerous slow-motion montages of each contestant making their way into the house to break the news to awaiting families that they were in or out. Each category was given a different song as backing – Simon Cowell’s groups had to make do with Mariah Carey, while Louis Walsh’s 16-24 year olds were at least graced with the presence of vintage Elton John. But it was Sharon’s group who arguably enjoyed the most successful pairing of audio with visuals: some clever editing ensured that lines like “Tears stream down your face” were used to maximum (if not a little manipulative) effect.
And despite this admittedly satisfying payoff, I can’t help feeling uneasy. It’s not enough that the song gets aired on the radio almost as much as James Blunt’s worthy-but-dull ‘You’re Beautiful’ (Steve Wright, for example, seems to add it to his Sunday morning playlist pretty much every week). We’re still a few weeks away from Children In Need and you don’t need a Masters to work out what’s going to be in the CD player when they’re fixing up soft-focus appeal videos in the editing suite. It’s a good choice, because it is an encompassing, uplifting piece that fits perfectly to a great many situations, musically and lyrically – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. At the same time, the puritan in me is worried that over-exposure is going to kill the song’s appeal.
More than this – am I the only one who holds the opinion that excessive use of Coldplay (for example), while it may have its desired effect, is at best just plain lazy and at worst a shameless piece of bandwagon jumping? Maybe I’m getting cynical in my old age, but it strikes me that using popular music like this is akin to Tony Blair namedropping Oasis and Blur in the open letter to his daughter all those years ago – or, indeed, the Labour party’s use of popular song for their campaign videos. It’s hardly a new thing, and it can have great effect when it catches a public mood (although the potential to backfire is tremendous, as we witnessed in the Reagan administration’s irony-free use of ‘Born In The USA’ – a song that criticised pretty much everything the Republicans stood for). It’s just that to use a song like ‘Fix You’ to hammer home an emotional point doesn’t make me think about giving money to charity – it makes me wonder how many times they screened the video with alternative soundtracks before deciding that was the most hip and relevant option.
Even if we give the publicists the benefit of the doubt, it doesn’t alter the fact that there is a great deal of lesser-known music out there that’s getting ignored for the sake of what sells. In the same way that the back catalogues of wonderful singer-songwriters are more or less abandoned for the sake of yet another Nick Drake compilation, there’s a wealth of material suitable for montages and publicity campaigns that can be found merely by digging a little deeper than last year’s top forty albums. I don’t care that “it’s popular and people like it” – if you use something else that works better, even if it’s obscure, doesn’t that make for a greater impact? The producers of Banzai!, for example, are to be commended for their use of the most unlikely music to accompany the on-screen sadomasochism. Likewise, Dom Joly deserves a knighthood for pairing up Gordon Lightfoot’s seldom-heard ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ with a man in a dog costume begging at the side of the road. There’s plenty of room for innovation if you do your homework.
And even if after a little research you find that ‘Fix You’ really is the best choice for the video, there’s another factor to take into account: a lot of material is just plain inappropriate on the grounds that someone else got there first. It was Tarantino who pointed this out in an interview printed in Empire magazine way back in 1995, when he suggested that certain songs called to mind certain images that were so powerful that the constant re-use of the songs did nothing to shake this first, overwhelming memory. The most obvious example of this is ‘Perfect Day’ – no matter who’s singing it, whether it’s Lou Reed himself, Kirsty MacColl, or Tom Jones in that memorable (if overplayed) BBC recording, nothing will erase my memory of Ewan MacGregor sinking into the floor halfway through Trainspotting. (Actually, Trainspotting holds a monopoly on more than one standard – but more on that in a moment.)
Occasionally, overexposure can be funny – Radiohead’s ‘Exit Music (For a Film)’ used to generate gut-wrenching pathos in Romeo and Juliet, and then to get a laugh (through the creation of misery) in Father Ted. Sadly, such occurrences are few and far between, and most of the time what you’re left with is a world-weary sense of deja-vu, and the feeling you’ve been cheated. All of this set me thinking this morning, and I started to make a list of other songs / pieces that have been used too much in the wrong contexts:
‘Lust For Life’ (Iggy Pop)
Trainspotting was blessed with arguably the finest film soundtrack of the decade (certainly in the top ten), and its influences stretch beyond that of Reed’s “Is it about heroin?” anthem. ‘Lust For Life’ may have been used before it accompanied Ewan MacGregor’s done-to-death opening monologue, but to be fair, the hold that the film exerts on the song reaches farther than the first five minutes: references to Iggy Pop saturate the film, and the song is even name-checked in the middle of a funeral. Nonetheless, it’s this powerhouse opening that we remember – an opening that’s been parodied and imitated so often that it’s no longer particularly interesting. You would think that this would deter music consultants from using it in every single episode of Wife Swap since the programme was launched (give or take), but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case. “Choose life. Choose a TV. Chose a channel. Choose anything but that fucking song again…”
‘O Fortuna’ (Carl Orff)
Two things irritate me. First of all it’s the fact that everyone gets this mixed up with The Omen when it has absolutely nothing to do with it: the music you’re looking for is Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Ave Satani’. The Orff chorus is a clear influence, but a completely different piece: it’s like saying that ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ are the same record. So that’s rant one. Rant two is the fact that this is used in everything. I’m not exaggerating. I could just about live with the Old Spice thing, and it actually works pretty well on a literary level in Excalibur if you examine the libretto. But it’s been subsequently featured in adverts for Nescafe (intense orchestration…intense flavouring? Hmmm, tenuous), and trailers for any action film that’s due to be screened on BBC1 (or at least the ones that don’t feature Verdi’s ‘Dies Irae’, but let’s not go there). Then there was the introductory video for Michael Jackson’s live show (a montage of screaming fans, heavy security and crotch-grabbing antics from the former clown prince of pop, entitled ‘Brace Yourself’). Exciting, sure, and the musical equivalent of an orgasm…but next time Lethal Weapon is on, find something new to advertise it!
‘Porcelain’ (Moby)
‘Porcelain’ was one of those songs that was already starting to wear out its welcome before it was accompanied by the sight of Leonardo Di Caprio jumping off a cliff (and sadly avoiding a grizzly death on the jagged rocks below). Actually I’m of the conviction that the use of the song in The Beach wasn’t its defining moment, but even if we leave that aside, the fact remains that it’s been grossly overused in documentaries and dramas ever since its original release. Such is the seemingly endless appeal of Moby: the truth is that the entire Play album has been used extensively in advertising everything from Galaxy chocolate to Nissan Cars, from Intel to…Maxwell House. Even some of the hippy vegan’s earlier work hasn’t escaped the work of the advertising board, with the quite wonderful ‘God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters’ making an incongruous appearance in a trailer for the BBC’s Bronte Sisters before being extensively used in a recent installment of The X-Factor, as well as finding time to advertise Rover – and all this when everyone knows that it was implemented most successfully at the end of Heat. The price you pay for making nondescript instrumental music, but Moby doesn’t seem to mind. Who can blame him, given the size of his royalty cheque?
‘Adagio For Strings’ (Barber)
And here’s another one. Yes, it was perfect in The Elephant Man, particularly over that final “Nothing ever dies…” monologue. It was even pretty good in Platoon (miserable piece of music + miserable film = Prozac manufacturer’s heaven). By the time we’d reached Red Dwarf VIII, however, things were getting a bit silly. The fact that this is the only piece of Barber you ever hear anywhere outside of Radio 3 or the occasional lunchtime recital says less about the composer’s abilities (he really was very talented with a remarkable gift for harmony) and more about the fact that people just aren’t willing to delve any further into poor Samuel’s back catalogue. So out comes Barber’s ‘Adagio’ again – nix the “for strings” part; it’ll mean we can assume a false air of familiarity. Never mind the fact that there are better, more moving pieces out there that can be uplifting as well as heart-rending – instead of just horribly depressing. And as for playing it on the Last Night of the Proms for all the September 11 victims…honestly, what the hell was that about?
‘Battle Without Honor Or Humanity – Part One’ (Tomoyasu Hotopei)
While Hotopei-San’s guitar-driven industrial jam might not have been written for Kill Bill, few could argue that it was Tarantino’s most recent work that sealed its reputation. One of those pieces that most people recognise but relatively few can actually name, ‘Battle…Part One’ provided a perfect accompaniment to Lucy Liu’s slow-motion walk through her swanky club. Here, you realised in the midst of gigantic power chords and ear-thumping drum machines, was a figure of menace – a woman who could look good as well as kick some serious butt, who moonlighted as a child prostitute to avenge her father’s killer, who thinks nothing of beheading sharp-suited executives in the middle of board meetings, and who only narrowly loses a fight to the death with Uma Thurman. The Japanese connection between setting and composer only served to intensify the relationship: it was an electrifying moment, and it’s therefore very sad to see that the piece is now used with alarming regularity in most fly-on-the-wall documentaries to announce the slow-motion arrival of…a child care specialist. Or a decorating team. Or even (hold your breath, folks) a Life Coach. Excuse me while I snigger a bit.
John – who sits diagonally opposite – says that half the problem is the BBC. He used to work there and I suspect that a lot of it is bitterness (he can’t stand Robert Winston or Jeremy Vine) but he has a point: the bulk of this does seem to be down to a simple lack of imagination or any sense of adventure. The safe, reliable option is the one that sells. It’s not exclusively a BBC problem, but I can’t help feeling it’s at its worst on Her Majesty’s network. We shouldn’t be surprised – the lack of musical imagination reflects the lack of imagination when it comes to the programming schedules, and the irony is that there is less innovation than ever (Doctor Who aside) at a time when they’re about to hike up the license fee again. It’s enough to have you weeping into your pillow at night. Well, almost.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 17
May 3, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Kraftwerk – Autobahn
Kula Shaker – K
Kinobe – Soundphiles
KLF – The White Room
Soundtrack – Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Soundtrack – Kill Bill: Vol. 1
KLF – Chill Out
Carole King – Tapestry
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 18
May 10, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
DJ Yoda – DJ Yoda’s How to Cut and Paste: The 80s Edition
Neil Young – Decade (Disc One)
Yes – Classic Yes
It’s a Mans Mans Mans World
May 13, 2009
———
Why aren’t there more female DJs?
My old history teacher once told his GCSE class that there was no job that couldn’t be performed by a woman. There were many that women chose not to do, and some in which they were sociologically disadvantaged as said occupations were viewed as being typically male (insert obligatory glass ceiling reference here). There was, however, no job that was beyond women, at least on a technical level. We tried to come up with something to prove him wrong, and we couldn’t.
Examining employment trends, it’s notable that many women choose not to enter certain professions, perhaps out of a complete disinterest. The I.T. industry is one such example. Some of the most technically-minded people I know are women (God knows I married one of them) but I can count the number of female industry professionals that I know on the fingers of one hand. It’s not that they can’t do it, they simply don’t want to. Perhaps they figure that the long hours and the extent of abuse that you get from the office technophobes just isn’t worth the hassle. Perhaps this makes them far more sensible than their male counterparts.
I ought to clarify exactly what I mean by ‘DJ’, and apply this definition exclusively to mobile discos. There are a large number of very proficient women working in commercial and national radio. Some of them probably have engineers to push the buttons, but that’s surely true of the men as well. In other areas, Emma (who sits two desks away and who frequently impresses me with her intellect) assures me that she’s been to plenty of clubs where the DJs were female. Personally I haven’t, but then I haven’t been clubbing in seven years, not since receiving a Glasgow kiss from that forty-something idiot in the local Brannigans.
No, the sort of DJs I’m thinking about are the ones who do weddings, birthday parties, school discos or any social occasion that includes vol-au-vents and copious amounts of cash-and-carry lager. You know the sort. They’re usually a walking disaster. They talk too much, between records or even during them (the sort of cardinal sin that should be punished with death, or banishment to a windowless room that has Mariah Carey’s Greatest Hits being piped through the speakers). They won’t play the requests you take to them – and I’m not talking about stupid choices (see below) but sensible, crowd-pleasing records that they simply don’t want to play because they don’t like them. More often than not these people will turn down your choices as a matter of principle, apparently forgetting that you’re the one lining their pockets.
I can remember five years ago we were organising the office summer party at a bar in Oxford. We’d written to the DJ with our requests for the sort of music we wanted him to play in the early part of the evening: sophisticated lounge / David Holmes funk, à la Ocean’s Eleven, morphing into contemporary R&B and then the likes of James Brown before the disco began properly. What we got was S Club Bloody Seven performing ‘Reach For The Stars’. And this wasn’t positioned at the end of the party when people had finished the sausage rolls and the complimentary champagne. This was at nine o’clock in the fucking evening. Unfortunately payment was in advance.
There’s a line, then, between what’s appropriate and what’s not, and to draw this line you have to really know your audience. Too many DJs don’t. They’ve been patronising where they should have been detached, and aloof when they should have interacted better. My next entry in this blog will probably be entitled ‘Lousy DJs I Have Witnessed’, because there have been plenty, but suffice to say for the moment that I’ve been to my share of cheesy parties, and while the disco elements varied in quality, not one of them has been administered by a woman.
Ewan is a mobile DJ, and an extremely good one: I’m biased, of course, but I’ve also heard him on the decks. Many people don’t realise the art involved. There are rules. You start with the warm-up music, kept at a comparatively low volume while people mingle and make small talk and remark on the tastefulness (or otherwise) of the décor and the fashion sense (or otherwise) of their fellow guests. Then at some point you drop in the floor fillers. These can vary depending on the nature of the occasion, although I’ve always found that ‘I Want You Back’ works particularly well.
Sequencing records is a nightmare, because you have to allow for changing moods as well as stylistic consistencies – you need to have like-tempo records together, but not too many of them in sequence. You have to mix slow beginnings and spoken dialogue from great tracks with the end of the previous track – I managed to do this with ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’, when I played the spoken intro of ‘Sex Machine’ over the final bars, while Ewan in turn dropped the opening of ‘One Step Beyond’ in at the end of ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’, to particularly brilliant effect. Mixing to identical beats from track to track is a skill in itself, and something I’ve never been able to manage.
You need to allow for people coming up asking for requests that you’d planned to include much later in the evening, and work out whether it’s worth using them now or sticking to your guns. You need to establish whether it’s good to play a slow song now to bring down the tempo, or play them all at the end of the evening when everyone is drunk and necking (I’ve always plumped for the latter; it’s far more fun). You need to work out whether you need to talk frequently, seldom or not at all. And here’s the big one – just occasionally, at exactly the right moment, you need to play something crap so that people have an excuse to go out for a cigarette.
Maybe that’s a part of it. What’s required, above all else, is an obsessive command of music. Plenty of women have that, but perhaps the application of this obsession – the making of lists and tagging of genres and so on, in the manner of High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming – is an inherently male thing to do. Perhaps it’s the geek factor. Geeks can be female, but (let’s be honest here) they’re usually not. Perhaps women are more balanced: Leopold Bloom’s complete man to Stephen Dedalus’s incomplete man. Perhaps in many women the space where men typically store useless trivia is taken up with the knowledge of how to be sensible and grown-up, which would explain why many men are incapable of managing their household accounts but do at least know the identity of Paul McCartney’s third session drummer.
Ego is another factor. All too often the DJ is notoriously full of himself. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the on-screen antics of Peter Kay, whose beautifully observed routines are never less than brilliant. First there’s the commercial he did for John Smiths, in which a particularly hopeless DJ plays ‘Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy’ for a newlywed bride and her father, before responding to the shocked expressions of the other guests with “I thought everybody knew”. More elaborate was his stand-up routine concerning weddings in general, with special emphasis on the DJ who takes the meaning of “love thy neighbour as thyself” into entirely fresh territory. (The DJ stuff is at 05:10 onwards, although the whole thing is amusing.)
There are plenty of egotistical women, I’m sure, but would they really want to be stuck behind a lighting rig and speaker cabinet, shuffling MP3s for hours at a time? Does the female ego exert itself in a different manner to that of the male? I know too little of the workings of the human brain to comment with any authority. Perhaps men are more comfortable showing off by demonstrating their ability to do things – mend a car, wire a plug, dazzle the opposition on the football field or systematically link a series of records in an aurally pleasing order – while women are content to be adored purely for their own sake. Perhaps the ego factor isn’t a bad thing. Perhaps having a belief in your own self-importance is necessary to surviving evenings that can be emotionally charged and occasionally dangerous, particularly when things get nasty. If you can keep your head when all about you are telling you you’re shit, you’ll be a man, my son.
Or perhaps this is just barstool psychology. The fact remains that in this business in particular, there’s a dearth of women behind the decks. So last Friday, wanting to know the answer to this question, I rang Ewan.
He said “I wonder, perhaps, if it’s because of all the gear. There’s a lot of lugging involved. I’m not saying a woman couldn’t do that, but maybe a lot of them simply wouldn’t want to.”
“There are women in the business, accompanying the blokes. Sitting in the corner, reading Bella. You know, like your wife.”
“I’ll tell her you said that.”
“I’ll deny it. Your word against mine.”
“There are female DJs on radio,” said Ewan. “Plenty of them. Annie Nightingale.”
“Annie Mac.”
“Jo Whiley.”
“Sarah Kennedy, but don’t get me started. And there are also lots in clubs, so I’m told. Just never the cheese parties. I’ve been to plenty of those in my time, and not once have I seen a woman running the decks. If they’re there, they just skulk in the corner.”
“Part of it,” he went on, “is the sheer amount of abuse you get. You do a gig like that, you get hassle from the public. Sometimes it can be tough getting your money out of the customer. I’m actually getting to the stage now where I’m starting to draw up contracts in advance.”
“Are people really that bad?”
“A lot of the time they think they know what you should play, presuming that they know the crowd better than you. I had a guy come up to me a few weeks ago. It was about half past eleven on a Saturday night at a birthday party, and the floor was full. And this half-cut twat comes up and says he wants ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”
“Ouch.”
“I know. When I refused, he said ‘Why?’, and I said ‘Because it will empty the floor. If it was two hours earlier, and no one was dancing, I’d consider it. But not now.”
“‘Yeah, but you should play it, man!’, he said. ‘It’s a fucking great song!’ And I said ‘You’ve got no argument from me, I love Queen, but it’s not going to work. You can have any other Queen song you want. You can have ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ or ‘We Are The Champions’. I’ll even play you ‘Innuendo’. But I am not playing the Rhapsody.’”
“Did he get mouthy?”
“Very. Gave me an earful and stomped off. Five minutes later I saw him lurking near the dance floor. I had a feeling he’d try it again so I called him over and showed him the Queen Greatest Hits CD that I’d got out of the bag. I said ‘Look, go out to your car, sit in it, put this on the radio, pick track one, bring it back when you’re done.’ He was seriously pissed off, but he left me alone after that.”
And…bang! The ego has landed. Am off now to look at myself in the mirror for an hour.
| Previous Part | Next Part | Back to Index | Email me |