Jesse’s Playlists – Week 29
August 2, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Tears For Fears – Songs From The Big Chair
Juliet Turner – Live
Travis – Good Feeling
James Taylor Quartet – Blow Up! A JTQ Collection
Juliet Turner – Burn The Black Suit
Juliet Turner – Seasons of the Hurricane
Shania Twain – Come On Over
Bonnie Tyler – The Best
Travis – The Boy With No Name
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 30
August 3, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich – The Best Of
John Denver – The Very Best Of John Denver
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
The Divine Comedy – A Short Album About Love
Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
The Divine Comedy – Casanova
The Divine Comedy – Fin de Siècle
Dire Straits – On Every Street
The Divine Comedy – Liberation
Jason Donovan – Ten Good Reasons
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 31
August 9, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Queen – A Kind Of Magic
Queen – The Miracle
Queen – Sheer Heart Attack
Queen – News of the World
Queen – Queen
Queen – A Day At The Races
Queen – A Night At The Opera
Queen – Queen II
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 32
August 16, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Isaach Hayes – The Best Of
Gustav Holst – The Planets
Soundtrack – Buddy’s Song
Rolf Harris – The Definitive Rolf Harris
The Housemartins – Now That’s What I Call Quite Good
Rolf Harris – Can You Tell What It Is Yet?
Brian Houston – Jesus and Justice
Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
Jools Holland – Small World Big Band Vol. II: More Friends
Hymn to the Fallen
August 21, 2009
———
“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?”
I first met Ali in 1998, at a church youth group. She was giving a testimony that ran on for the best part of an hour; I was still (more or less) a member. Ali’s story was one of wilderness and redemption, much like my own, although these days I seem to be once more out in the wilderness. I don’t remember the details; just a stint with British Rail. I remember her hair, or lack thereof. About halfway through she mentioned a boyfriend, and I suspect I didn’t fully concentrate after that. It was a proximity infatuation, the desire to connect with the girl who was available. Once she became unavailable, I was less interested.
Two months after this, Ali was heading the youth group, along with her then-partner, who had also recently come to God. Some of us were uneasy. We felt it was too soon. Of course, no one said anything. It’s easier to keep your mouth shut, except in closed quarters with people who you trust and to whom you can complain. It’s the way that the church has worked for years; why change it now?
“In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles
In laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?”
My friendship with Ali, and the way in which I related to her, was based predominantly around the stage. We bonded in the spring of 2000, when we were both doing Godspell. She had taken the lead in the previous year’s production of Roger Jones’ Mary Magdelene, an atrocious musical with poor dialogue and dreadful songs. The church had cast non-singing actors and then asked the singers to supply the voices for musical numbers, with appropriate miming / interpretive dance from the actors. My own reservations aside, what was special about that night was how much Ali threw herself into the role – a role which I know resonated with her on an emotional level. I was willing to forgive the fact that I was watching one hackneyed cliché after another on the grounds that I was in the presence of a clearly quite talented actress, even if all she was doing that night was polishing a turd.
Godspell was different. Godspell was unique. It brought me back to the church and helped me channel music into a form of worship. Godspell took a rag-tag bunch of middle class Christians on various different stages of their chosen path, and gave them a focus and a common bond. It welded us together into a coherent whole that became far greater than the sum of its parts, and with some help from the man upstairs, we did strange and wondrous things. Godspell became an event, an act of worship, a way of life, for almost a year. Most of those who walked that road were never the same again.
Some time after Godspell Ali decided to be an actress. She’d shown she was good at it. With a little help from the rep theatre, she would become better still. By this time she had a new partner, Ged, a guitarist who was frankly better for her and who became a good friend of mine. We discussed things at an evening soiree she held to celebrate her journey into the theatre. Ever the nostalgic (what do you think I’m doing now?) I thought back to our first meeting.
“I remember when I first met you,” I said, “Two and a half years ago. You seemed so unsure, so – well, so new. Now look at you.” I hesitated and decided not to add ‘You’re further on than I am’.
“The great thing is that everyone was there for me, and will still be there even if it doesn’t work out.”
“You’ve made that leap. I don’t – I don’t like to plan too far ahead, Ali…every once in a while I have to stop and rethink my priorities to see if everything is making sense. Back in February I was lower than I’ve been for a long time, and it was like everything I’d ever worked for, everything I’d ever done, every goal I’d ever had was a lie. And I had to stop, and start over with a clean sheet. And that’s kind of what you’ve done. And no matter what happens everyone here will always be here for you.”
Sentimentality over with, I went through into the dining room to pick up some food before it all went.
“How about love?
How about love?
How about love?
Measure in love
Seasons of love.”
I remember being in a car, en route to Somerset, discussing the second coming, although – unlike the journey to Somerset – I have no idea how we got there.
Ali said, “We were talking about this the other night. If someone like Richard Lownsborough came into church one morning and said ‘Everyone, I’ve had a dream, and Jesus spoke to me and told me to tell you to get ready, he’s coming soon!’ how would we react?”
“We’d think he was crazy,” I replied.
“Exactly,” offered Ged. “Away with the fairies.”
“We wouldn’t believe him. More than that,” I said, leaning forward in my seat before continuing, “We wouldn’t want to believe him even if we had good reason to suspect that what he said was true. It’s all part of this deep-rooted fear we have that no-one wants the Second Coming in our lifetime.”
“That’s so true!” said Ali. “We all say we do but we don’t at all. Not when you’re just starting to enjoy yourself and do something useful. You don’t want that interrupted.”
“We all know it’ll happen eventually,” I said, trying very hard to sound like a grown-up Christian, “but at the same time no one can deal with it. It’s something that you don’t talk about. Ignore it. Let the grandchildren deal with it.”
Twelve hours later: “By the way, James, that Bacardi Breezer you’re drinking? Girly alcopop.”
I wrote her a play. She was my Sarah Brightman, minus the generation-gap marriage and divorce. The Witch of Algiers was a prequel to The Tempest, concentrating on the “one thing” that spared Sycorax, the mother of Caliban, from the death sentence and instead got her excommunicated. My take on things was about miscarriages of justice, mob rule and how far you go to get the result you want. Ali was going to be the titular witch, and when I produced those long and tedious monologues, I always had her intonations running through my head. The play was never produced, although her rep director expressed a brief interest, but it remains amongst my better work, although it needs a substantial overhaul. Reading it, she described the end of the first act as “tremendous” (it was good) and “in exactly the right place” (it couldn’t really have gone anywhere else).
Part of the problem was that she had this infectious enthusiasm which meant that her standards seemed to be lower than mine. She said nice things, and as I needed an ego massage I was inclined to believe her, but she also thought that Hayley Sandford was ‘getting better’, when in fact she was the most diabolical performer in the rep. But that was Ali, down to a tee: generous to a fault. The first draft of Witch had potential, but – and this is not just me being my own worst critic – there’s some tawdry crap in there, and it didn’t take me long after my first draft to figure that out.
But Ali’s generosity went far beyond simple lip service. She was always willing to give her time and resources. I recall a benefit concert where she read one of my father’s poems, I teamed up with Jon to perform Flanders and Swann, and two folk singers led the audience in a memorable performance of ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’. In the interval my mother and her band of helpers sold cakes, again for charity. Ali bought two, and gave my mother ten pounds.
“Are you sure that you don’t want more cakes for that?” my mother asked her.
“No, no, that’s fine….”
“Let me at least give you some change.”
“Oh, no, don’t worry about that,” said Ali. “It’s Ged’s money.”
“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand journeys to plan
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life of a woman or a man?”
Ali and Ged split in the summer of 2001. A year later, Ali was establishing herself as an actress. Ged had travelled the world, and was back in the UK on a break. I was DJ at a summer party following the vow renewals of some mutual friends. Afterwards, Ged and I were sitting in the kitchen when Ali showed up. She and Ged seemed to be on good terms, the precursor perhaps to the rekindling of their relationship. They both seemed happy, with each other as well as with themselves.
I never saw her again.
“In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned
Or the way that she died?”
Ali and Ged moved up to Manchester not long afterwards. I didn’t attend their wedding, and they didn’t attend ours. Falling out of touch with friends is common, particularly where I’m concerned. “Life,” says Bob Cratchit, “is made up of meetings and partings; that is the way of it.”
The cancer that took her delivered its final blow a few months back. No one told me at the time: everyone I later spoke to assumed that I’d been informed by someone else, which is the price you pay for keeping yourself out of the loop. I found out in early summer, thanks to a friend’s Facebook update. It was not unlike the moment in Red Dwarf where Rimmer receives a belated letter from his mother, some three million years after it was originally sent: when comforted by Lister he says “I knew he was dead. I mean, they’re all dead, aren’t they? Just getting that letter makes it seem like it happened yesterday”.
When Ali and Ged first moved to Manchester, I put off contacting them because I was preoccupied with Emily. When we had children, I was preoccupied with them. When I was told Ali had been ill, I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at phoning, using old numbers that I wasn’t sure even worked, and then told myself that it wasn’t meant to be. When we visited Manchester at the beginning of 2007, I told myself that we were going to see my sister-in-law and would not have time to catch up with other people. When Ali was terminally diagnosed, and I discovered that she had less than a year to live, I told myself that they would have enough on their plate without old friends dropping into their laps getting in the way. Besides, a year was a long time. I’d manage somehow.
I put off contacting Ali, and I put off grieving for her, despite the awareness that she was probably dead by now, despite the updates from mutual friends. One night two weeks ago, I got in touch with her husband on Facebook and within hours was looking at a gallery of old photos. It was both wonderful to see the parts of her life that I’d never witnessed, as the pretty girl slowly grew up into the woman whom I would call my good friend. It was also very painful to see those final pictures – pictures that, tellingly, stopped a few months before she died, simply out of dignity.
It was at this moment I had the urge to play ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’, Freddie Mercury’s last video, shot in black and white to disguise his rapidly failing health, and not totally succeeding. There is an air of sobriety prominent throughout: May’s delicately constructed solo; the simple, elegiac backing (layered in a not dissimilar manner to the way that Springsteen layered ‘Streets of Philadelphia’); and the rhythmic tom-toms, that fade to nothing as the song reaches its climax, nearly resembling a decaying heartbeat.
The words to this posthumous single were trite, hesitant and banal, but Mercury gives the performance his all, with beautiful understatement. And it’s the end of the video that provides the song’s punchline, as Mercury sings “Those days are all gone now, but one thing is true / When I look and I find I still love you”. Mercury pauses, then looks directly into camera, and adds “I still love you,” before walking out of shot for what would be the last time. We should all have so fitting an epitaph.
“For whatever reason, and however you justified it, you made your choice,” said Emily, when we spoke about this sometime later. “And now you’re going to have to live with it. Because what else can you do?”
This week: listening to Rent, in its entirety. I have tended, in the past, to concentrate on my personal highlights from the show, neglecting some of the more obscure moments (and those wretched answering machine messages). I don’t know why I wanted to experience the whole thing again, but in doing so I realised two things: firstly that Rent, like the church dramatics group, forms a coherent whole that far outweighs the sum of its parts. There are standout moments, and some wonderful songs that can be listened to in their own right, but like most musicals it is essential that you experience the whole thing to really appreciate it.
This is one reason why I always advise against the inclusion of ‘Memory’ or ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ in any revue show: they were never designed for use outside the context of the shows that contained them, and to rip them from their original context is to cheapen them. Similarly, ‘Send In The Clowns’ is a bitter, evocative love song that forms the emotional climax of A Little Night Music: it is a not a gentle piece to be performed in cabaret. Similarly, it is impossible to truly appreciate ‘No Day But Today’ without hearing the initial flirtations between Mimi and Roger, and viewing it within the context of their mutual struggle with HIV, and the song’s reprisal at the finale.
The second thing I realised was that I waste an awful lot of my time doing things that aren’t important and arguing about things that don’t matter. And I suppose it’s simple human nature. No matter how much we preach about the brevity of life, and our place as dust in the wind, we’re still naturally inclined to put things off, simply because we take our ongoing existence for granted. I may never fully forgive myself for failing to salvage this friendship before it was too late. I daresay that Jonathan Larson, Rent’s composer, left behind a score of unresolved arguments with people before his untimely death. Mimi Marquez intones “I live this moment as my last”, and we envy her, but in many respects we pity her, because this is not responsible; this is not how we’re supposed to do things.
It would be relatively easy for me to become very preachy here, and drop in a paragraph about seizing the day that would have made Max Ehrmann feel proud. But I’d be a hypocrite and I’d be deluding myself, and you. Because procrastination is part of human nature. More than this, putting things off can be healthy: a fresh perspective granted after a voluntary withdrawal can make your reaction far more constructive and positive than it would have been if you’d just blundered in. I had my reasons for keeping out of Manchester, and I have paid the price for my transgressions, but I will not delude myself into thinking that this will lead to a radical change of character, the Hollywood moment of truth that causes the flawed protagonist to change his ways. That would be an insult to the memory of my dead friend, my dear friend, whom I will mourn, now, finally, but always remember as a woman of sense, as well as sensibility. But still. In her day…
Sleep well, Ali. I miss you.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 33
August 23, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Radiohead – The Bends
Mark Ronson – Version
Original Cast – Rent
R.E.M. – Accelerate
R.E.M. – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Tom Robinson – The Collection: 1977-’87
Kate Rusby – Little Lights
Kate Rusby – 10
R.E.M. – Automatic for the People
R.E.M. – Around the Sun
R.E.M. – Up
Eddie Reader – Mirmama
Chris Rea – The Very Best Of
Cliff Richard – The Whole Story
Rainer – Live At The Performance Center
Mama Mia, Let Me Go
August 25, 2009
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It’s hardly hot off the press, but apparently Leonard Cohen is sick of ‘Hallelujah’.
According to an article in NME, Cohen reportedly told the Canadian Broadcasting Service that “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it”. He also says that he “was reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said ‘Can we please have a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows?’ and I kind of feel the same way.”
The article’s one comment (seriously, does no one read NME anymore?) describes him as a “miserable old fart” – a pithy, if hardly earth-shattering discovery – and suggests that he would have undoubtedly been happy with the royalties he received from the abundance of covers. This is almost certainly true, and suggests a certain double standard on the part of everyone’s favourite Canadian, but it’s hardly fair. Leonard’s recent spate of touring and recording has been fuelled by his dire financial situation as much as anything else, and while he may be biting the hand that feeds him, it’s not like he doesn’t need the money since the unfortunate business with Kelley Lynch.
To be honest, I can see his point. ‘Hallelujah’ is fast becoming this generation’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (or ‘Yesterday’, or, um, ‘Streets of London’) given its incessant popularity. Rufus Wainwright describes it as “an easy song to sing…the music never pummels the words”. This explains the multitude of covers: everyone from John Cale to Katherine Jenkins, Jon Bon Jovi to Allison Crowe to Wainwright himself has tackled the song. Even before The X-Factor got hold of it, Cohen’s masterwork had more or less earned its stripes in the 21st century canon. It’s hard to sing it well, but it’s still easy to sing, and if you’re not at a sponsored fundraiser organised by Richard Dawkins, it’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
Then there’s the Jeff Buckley version. Sparse, sparing and quite extraordinary, it’s the voice of a fallen angel singing from the depths of despair. It’s quite simply six minutes of the most spine-tingling music ever recorded, even if it’s actually an amalgamation of over twenty takes mixed into a master version, and it’s quite extraordinary. It’s also been implemented in every television programme in the history of TV, or at least since 1994. (Its use in The West Wing was beautiful, but Big Cook, Little Cook was pushing it a bit.)
‘Hallelujah’ is a song the public have taken very much to their hearts. Its themes of redemption and loss are vague enough for everyone to think that Cohen / Buckley / Wainwright et al. are singing about them, and to them. Over the course of three / four / five / six verses, depending on which version you’re listening to, Cohen takes in Old Testament theology by way of the orgasm. It’s blatantly sexual and its enduring appeal is therefore a little puzzling, given that the great British public still seem to be a little prudish about these things, but whatever the reason, it is quoted verbatim in blog entries and cards and played on iPods all over the world with alarming regularity. The very real danger here is that this is happening at the expense of other, equally good songs that are getting ignored simply because they’re not as instantly accessible, requiring as they do a little more time and effort on behalf of the listener.
It doesn’t just apply in the commercial sector. I can still remember when the church I attended for about half my life suddenly discovered Graham Kendrick. For years, it was ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ every week. Or ‘The Servant King’. Or ‘Rejoice’. If you have attended a service in the last twenty years that wasn’t purely the stomping ground of elderly ladies in crocheted bobble hats, the chances are you’ll know at least one of these. If not, suffice to say that they were three catchy, spiritually profound and thoroughly uplifting songs by a charismatic worship leader. You couldn’t move for them. Eventually Kendrick’s popularity waned somewhat, and he was replaced by Stuart Townend, who – like Graham before him – has a knack of writing songs that are instantly accessible to people who don’t attend church services regularly, and that even atheists don’t really mind singing.
I have a friend who’s a local preacher, and when he’d witnessed ‘In Christ Alone’ (one of Townend’s most popular songs, and one that we had at our wedding) for what must have been the thousandth time that year, he posted this on his faith blog:
“For several years, if a preacher in the Methodist church who really didn’t know much about modern hymns wanted to look contemporary, they’d pick ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ as one of their hymns. These days, ‘In Christ Alone’ is the traditionalist’s favourite modern hymn.
“Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying everyone who picks it is ignorant of other modern hymns (and I know plenty of people who pick it despite having a much wider repertoire of modern hymns than mine). I’m also not picking on the hymn – it’s my favourite modern hymn too, and pretty high up my “all time” list too. It expounds so much theology in such a small space, and does so in such a fine way – it would be hard to object, really. (I like ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ too, by the way.)
“I just get worried about familiarity breeding contempt. It would be a shame if anyone was turned off such a fine hymn because preachers choose it too often.”
When Stuart Maconie mentioned the Cohen / ‘Hallelujah’ story a few weeks back, he concluded the piece with an open question: what songs, given the choice, could you happily never hear again? Before we go any further, we really ought to define our terms, so concentrate for a moment: I’m not talking about one-hit-wonders, or novelty records that inexplicably assailed the heights of the top forty and then vanished into obscurity, only to turn up on compilation albums, Channel 4 Top 100 lists and, occasionally, the Chris Evans show. That was the sort of response I got from my team when I asked them – Mr Blobby, for example, was a clear favourite for a public hanging, as was Bob the Builder. Coincidentally, both records featured in a recent list of Bad No. 1s (actually, they both seem to feature in every single list of bad no. 1s in every single poll).
I’m also not talking about songs that you hate, or songs in a genre that doesn’t appeal. I could quite happily go the rest of my life, for example, without re-hearing Lady GaGa’s ‘Poker Face’, Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Women’, or anything by Craig David. Conversely, I’m sure there are a bunch of people out there who despise James Blunt, Miles Davis and Goldfrapp. While I’d be the first to advocate for a definition of standards, and the fact that despite obvious musical differences there are some bands who are simply better than others (example: The Beatles are better than Oasis. End of), musical preference is so subjective that there are always going to be varying tastes. One man’s meat.
No, instead I’m talking about the songs you used to love, but which you can no longer stand simply because they’ve been over-played. The ones that make every Mothering Sunday compilation, every Radio 2 playlist, and that saturate every shopping centre and restaurant down the country. (I’m sure that there’s a market for pre-loaded iPods for cafes, full of bland easy listening and classic pop, all ripped and encoded for you so that you don’t have to do it yourself in between totting up this week’s accounts and procrastinating about cleaning the cappuccino machine.) Instead of songs that you simply don’t like, I’m talking about overexposure: songs that you used to love, but that eventually – and almost inexplicably – wore out their welcome because they were played too much, everywhere.
When I posed the question for a group of friends, the answers I got were, I felt, rather safe and conventional. I shouldn’t have been surprised at this: the songs themselves must, by their very nature, be sufficiently conventional to warrant mass exposure on national radio and every other form of public music transmission. All the old favourites were there: ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (a song I had on in the car this morning, and one which I fear is getting to be rather old hat these days), ‘Stairway To Heaven’ (presumably the Led Zeppelin original, as opposed to Rolf Harris’ hilarious cover), ‘Sweet Child of Mine’, ‘Lady Marmalade’, and even ‘Under The Bridge’. Someone suggested we make this into a playlist, although that might be counterproductive, and someone else replied that if all these songs were gathered into one place we would, at least, know to avoid them.
I remember feeling utterly despondent at this point, because the first record that jumped into my head when Maconie posed his open question was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. This is miserable news because I am, by my own admission, a huge Queen fan. I first discovered them thanks to ‘Friends Will Be Friends’, followed them with vague interest through The Miracle (which is fit to be counted, some ten years later, amongst their best work) and then initially scoffed at Innuendo, before Freddie died and I realised what we’d lost. It took some years to discover the band properly, but when I did it was by way of the earlier 1970s albums: Sheer Heart Attack by way of News of the World by way of Jazz, and so on.
But it was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was Queen at their most wondrous and strange, or at least that’s how it seemed to a bespectacled, overweight fifteen-year-old kid who worshipped his best friend and who was hooked on Wayne’s World. They’ve written better songs, and they’ve certainly produced more memorable videos (I don’t care that it’s innovative, it’s still boring), but at the time we couldn’t get enough of it. Learning the words, producing elaborate interpretative dance routines to the operatic section in the middle, seething when the song was edited on the Live Magic LP…all these were small, perfectly formed rites of passage that just became something we did. As for the Wayne’s World sequence (itself part of cinematic legend and, I suspect, almost old enough to be authentically classed as iconic), I have lost count of the number of times we sang along to ‘Bo Rap’ (as it came to be known) in the car. Who cared that no one knew what the hell it was about?
Learning how to play the song properly was a pain in the neck, particularly for someone who is not a trained pianist (at least not beyond grade four or five), but it comes in very useful at parties. It’s difficult to sing, but everybody is always willing to have a try: the best thing to do is down half a bottle of vodka and just go for it. You will lose the audience in the opera segment because no one knows where they are or when they’re coming in, but a crowd who’s had enough to drink will always drown out your mistakes, and it brings the house down.
For years I struggled with the multitude of changes as the song jumps from Bb to Eb to Ab and so on, and it’s ironic that now that I’ve finally become reasonably proficient at emulating Brian’s scale-based interlude, I no longer want to play the damned thing. Not even at parties, although I would if I were asked. Because the simple truth is that the song bores me. It’s gone from being a subversive, daring and highly innovative song, one that in many ways defined the genre, to one that’s been aped and imitated so often that it no longer holds any appeal. It’s ironic that the song they feared no DJ would play has been one that features on all manner of radio stations all over the world, and always played in its entirety. What was once edgy and different has, through no real fault of its own, become the status quo. Here’s a surefire way of courting controversy – instead of playing the whole thing, why not construct a radio edit? It would piss off the puritans (myself included, but more of that another time) no end, but hey, at least it would be different.
Perhaps it was G4 that killed the thing off. Having listened to their disastrous cover, during a 2005 Queen tribute evening that will, I think, drag out as an exercise in nostalgia for my next entry, I found myself experiencing a brief, almost overwhelming urge to fish out the original, before realising that I simply didn’t want to. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s just that like most people I’ve played it so often I can hear it in my head in almost note-for-note detail. So why bother fetching the CD? Rolf Harris’ cover, on the other hand, remains refreshingly unfamiliar, so I still enjoy giving it a spin. Oh, and it features a didgeridoo.
You see the problem? It’s not that it isn’t in itself a great record; it’s just that the song’s sense of innovation has always been its greatest asset. It isn’t the actual content, which remains above average, but the fact that it’s strung together the way it is. It’s not the individual components, but the fact that they’re assembled to form a coherent whole. And thus, the more you hear it, the less interesting it becomes. Compare and contrast this to a song like, for example, ‘Summer of ‘69’, which does not pretend to be anything but a short, snappy, uncomplicated rock song, and thus one which will always be guaranteed a place on my stereo.
Not to overdramatize any more than is strictly necessary, but coming to this conclusion does feel to an extent like putting away the childish things of youth. I think the fact that Chris Evans is willing to play it on a regular basis, typically accompanied by the words “You can never get sick of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’”, speaks volumes. In many ways, Chris Evans personifies the overexposed records culture: a selection of no more than about a hundred songs which get cycled according to his current mood, accompanied all too often by appalling karaoke. A celebration of the bland, banal and safe. Admittedly, I have recently decided that my hatred of his weekday radio show is somewhat misplaced: to all intents and purposes it’s a programme that’s aimed at children, presented by someone with the mentality of a child and the ego of a toddler, and perhaps I should be treating it as such. But I still reject wholeheartedly his crowd-pleasing list of classic rock standards on the grounds that it’s “what the people want”. I’m the people, and it’s not what I want. Give me something unexpected, something I wouldn’t have chosen myself. Challenge me, even on the journey home. If nothing else it will keep me awake, thus preventing me from becoming another road casualty statistic. And if I want the Final Bloody Countdown, I’ll stick it in the CD player.
It’s funny that while I myself remain heartily sick of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Thomas appears to rather like it. Emily tells me that when she’s played A Night at the Opera he has grinned at the operatic interlude, and then laughed at May’s guitar solo (for the right reasons, I’m sure). It has led to more than one family singalong, with Mummy and Daddy bellowing out the counterpoint while Joshua sits in the back, bemused but thankfully still too young to be embarrassed. While we sometimes resort to this technique to get Daniel (who does not travel well) to stop screaming, it does provide sufficient enjoyment for me to almost start liking the song again, on a superficial level that is connected purely with live performance – albeit of a sort – rather than any admiration of the studio recording, and one which is thus relatively close to the ethos of The 17. Nonetheless, when I’m playing A Night At The Opera, I still finding myself jumping straight from track 10 to track 12. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.
Positively 4th Street, if you turn left in 100 yards
August 27, 2009
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In other news: Bob Dylan, of all people, is in talks to be the next voice of Sat Nav.
An article on the BBC website states that Dylan first publicly mentioned the prospect of discussing on his Theme Time Radio Hour. It’s apparently serious: rather than just one of these generic ‘ideas’ that form the basis of so-called stories during silly season, as in (for example) Russell T Davies’ joke about Amy Winehouse becoming the next Doctor Who, which of course got manipulated by the press and completely misunderstood by a moronic public, it would appear that Dylan is actually “talking to a couple of car companies”.
This has, of course, produced the usual flurry of comments about what he might say: “Look out kids!”, and also “Watch the parkin’ meters”, on the bottom of the NME’s report, were particularly amusing. The Guardian suggested that “the move would finally solve the existential doubts that Dylan himself identified in his song Like A Rolling Stone: ‘How does it feel. To be on your own. With no direction home.’ Answer: it feels fine, you just switch on the gadget.”
But if I’m honest, the prospect of Bob doing GPS voiceovers is one that fills me with dread, largely because he seems a frankly rather strange choice. Dylan’s so renowned for his mumbling and drawling that most of the time I have absolutely no idea what he’s saying. I do enjoy his Radio 2 slot, but sometimes wish it came with subtitles; anyone who recalls his performance in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid will remember that it’s more or less unintelligible babble; Ralph C Nesbitt with a western drawl. The guy has written and recorded some fantastic songs that have enriched my life no end, but Laurence Olivier he is not.
If you’re really going to go down that road, if you will excuse the pun, why not get someone who is not only instantly recognisable (sorry, Dylan just isn’t) or who at least is able to speak clearly and coherently? Derek Jacobi, who is renowned for having perhaps the best diction of any actor alive today, would be an obvious example. So would Judi Dench, although it would be advisable if she didn’t swear, so that the BBFC didn’t receive complaints. Tom Baker would have been an inspired choice, although that bandwagon has to a certain extent been missed due to his usage on the BT spoken text message service. (When Baker was the voice of choice, I actually went through a period of sending text messages from my mobile to the landline, so I could hear Uncle Tom saying “I am the Doctor. Would you like a jelly baby?”)
But no. They had to ask Bob. Presumably on the grounds of having a huge body of work from which to choose. Back to the Guardian:
“Which way should we turn off from Highway 61, Bob? ‘Ol’ Howard just pointed his gun and said ‘that way down on Highway 61.’ So left or right then … damn, we’ve missed it. We’re on Highway 51 now, where does that take us, Bob? ‘From up Wisconsin way down to no man’s land’. Right, is that No Man’s Land near Guilford? How far should we go down this dirt road, Bob? ‘Gonna walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed.’ Crikey, that’s a long way, but we’ve got this Mitsubishi Shogun y’see, so if you could narrow it down to an exact number of miles then … oh nevermind.”
“Just imagine it,” said Emma, when I mentioned it to her. “You’d be all over the place, quite literally. You wouldn’t understand a word he said. He’d make you drive off a cliff.”
“Actually, I have the same inclination when I listen to Self Portrait.”
Most likely, we’ll go our way and he’ll tell us to go his. Oh, look, it’s Highway 61 Revisited. Because WE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND YOUR BLOODY DIRECTIONS!
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 34
September 1, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Nirvana – Nevermind
Randy Newman – Lonely At The Top: The Best Of Randy Newman
Larry Norman – The Very Best Of (Vol. 1)
From Here To Paternity
September 3, 2009
———
Yesterday, Josh started full-time at nursery. He’s been going for years, of course, on a gradually increasing basis, the initial water-testing visits giving way to week-long sessions, albeit only before lunch. We had a few discussions with the learning support people when it became apparent that there were some difficulties, but time and a little passive intervention seems to have improved things. Now he’s going every day, and Thomas is starting in the mornings, three days a week. It is perhaps appropriate that the song that was playing in my head all day yesterday was Abba’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’.
You’re not supposed to have favourites, and I don’t. I truly don’t. There are things, unspoken secrets, that you never tell your children because it would psychologically scar them for life. But even without that, I don’t prioritise them, because it would lead to implosion. I have often wondered in the past if I would have enough love to spare for each of them, and Emily as well, but these days I have come to the realisation that the love you offer is not a lake but a river, and that the further along the path of life you travel, the wider the river becomes.
All the same, my relationship with each of them is different, and it’s most complicated when it comes to Josh. This is simply because of his age: at the oldest, I have the most direct interaction with him, and the two of us can speak in something resembling a normal conversation, although half the time the conversation is actually a list of requests from one of us that are simply ignored by the other. With him it’s requests for drinks and foods that I’ve forbidden, typically because it’s bedtime, and when the shoe is on the other foot I’m usually trying to get him dressed, or undressed, or ready to go out, or ready for bed.
There are a thousand blog entries that I could write when it comes to Josh. I’ve always tried – and not always successfully – to avoid talking down to him, and told him whatever he wants to know in the most direct terms. Josh is different. He is in a great many respects both his father’s and his mother’s son: both his parents were quiet children who sometimes had difficulty interacting, so he didn’t really stand a chance. Things are better these days – much better – but even now, Josh is at his best when he is receiving quality one-on-one time with another adult, or an older child. Some children respond to being smacked, or time out. With Josh, the best thing you can do is simply take him out of the loop and give him the attention he needs.
It’s a question of filling his head up with the knowledge that he seeks, but giving him the enthusiasm to look for himself. That’s what makes our conversations so fascinating: he wants answers, and where I can I give them, and he’s interested in everything, and his imagination knows no bounds. Any parent will tell you that the most frequently used word in the vocabulary of any small child is “Why?”, and getting used to saying “I don’t know” is one of the most difficult things you have to do. But it’s worth the battle, because when the two of you have ironed out the communication issues and worked out how to talk to one another – and you never do this completely, but you can have a reasonable attempt – the benefits you reap are tremendous.
So I think perhaps I’m a little hard on him, because the level of interaction we have when things are going well is one that I have come to expect more often than he’s prepared to give it. Because he is on some levels wise beyond his years, I’m inclined to have high standards – too high. So the fault is entirely mine, but of course you know that. And so we stumble along, with him simultaneously in awe of me and probably afraid of me, at least when I shout. Perhaps the most frustrating part of all this is that he may never truly know just how much I love him.
It was Sunday evening, and we were gathered by the main stage at the Greenbelt festival. Greenbelt is a regular staple of our summer – it was my eighth, and Emily’s twenty-fifth – and I was reflecting upon the fact that I’d not actually seen very much that weekend. This was largely because we’ve spent the past four years working in Contributor’s Hospitality, serving complimentary tea and coffee to the artists and speakers (including, some four years ago, Bill himself) – five hours per day in exchange for free tickets, which is a more than fair exchange. This year, we had a more active involvement in running and organising the venue, which restricted the amount of time we had to look around the festival. I didn’t mind. The time I spend behind the counter is, to be honest, the most fun I have all weekend. This has nothing to do with the content of Greenbelt, and more to do with the fact that I seen to have found my niche within it.
Greenbelt involves long days, and occasionally ratty children. They tend to sleep less when we’re camping, simply because it is a change of scenery and a break from routine and therefore something to be celebrated with a burst of hyperactivity. I tried to keep my temper, and failed miserably. I was being a bad father. I was too harsh with him, and that brings its own set of challenges: admonition from Emily, and a bad situation that I’ve just made worse.
The band we were listening to was Shlomo and the Vocal Orchestra, who had come out to a volley of cheers and whistles, and then proceeded to captivate their audience with a dazzling display of crowd-pleasing segues: ‘Billie Jean’ gave way to ‘I Want You Back’ and then ‘The Magic Number’. The festival-goers were loving it: my enjoyment was diminished by the fact that Joshua was over-tired and over-excited, and jumping all over his cousin. By the time the group were in the middle of ‘Hear The Drummer Get Wicked’, he was insufferable. I could feel eyes upon me to do something constructive and control my son; to take charge, but without resorting to anything corporal.
Eventually, I strapped him into the buggy, amidst whining and protesting. There is no easy way to pin down a child into a pushchair when they don’t want to go: if you push too hard, the buggy will topple over onto its back, leaving you with the unenviable task of picking it up with one hand whilst preventing the screaming child from running with the other, all the while trying not to think about whether the fruit cake you had in the back pouch is now squashed beyond recovery. To avoid such mishaps, I tend to take one deep breath, place one foot on the wheel of the buggy to steady it, pick up the child and push their stomach down into the seat, firmly but not so much as to cause pain, and then hold it in place while I do up the straps. There will be flailing of limbs and gnashing of teeth, but they won’t be going anywhere.
Josh was protesting, but not screaming, and I managed to subdue him with minimal effort. The two of us set off across the grass, just as Schlomo and friends were in the middle of an unorthodox cover of The Prodigy’s ‘Out Of Space’. Grass became concrete as we strolled up the path, away from the bright lights of mainstage.
“Dark,” said Josh.
It was. The revellers were thinner here, and less enthused by the antics of the a capella choir, more inclined to chat amongst themselves than watch what was happening. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea where I was going to go. We strolled past the queue for the Portaloos, across the main concourse and in the direction of the bright lights of the Village, with its array of food stands and fairly traded craft stalls, selling wooden sculptures and beads and artwork and multicoloured festival jumpers.
Partly on a whim, I bypassed the Village and headed instead for the G-Music store, not with the intention of buying anything, but purely to browse. The store is expensive, largely out of necessity, and I have long since abandoned my principle of buying CDs there for the sake of not only having them there and then, but also having obtained them at Greenbelt. Financial necessity has forced me to forego any sense of sentimentality when it comes to obtaining music – I’ll still favour physical CDs over downloaded MP3s and torrents, but I’ll no longer go out of my way to patronise local music shops to the extent that I once did. (At least you now know why half of them are closed.)
All the same, it’s still fun to look around – or it would have been, if I’d been able to get near the place. It became apparent from the silent throng gathered near the tent flaps that an event was going on, and that there was no space for another human being, let alone a buggy. I tried not to think about how many fire regulations they were breaking and prepared to retrace my steps, when I noticed that the voice that drifted over the microphone belonged to Martyn Joseph.
Martyn and I go back some six years, to another Greenbelt, and an introduction in another live session. He fascinates, and occasionally frustrates me: his music is compelling, challenging and entrancing. The world-weary sentiment contained in his live shows means that I have more than once left the building wanting to slash my wrists, although the last time we saw him, in Reading last autumn, he seemed to have cheered up quite a bit. For all the apparent despair, there’s a great deal of hope in his music, if you know where to look for it. I’ve met him a handful of times, in various contexts, and while I daresay he doesn’t remember me from one encounter to the next he’s never been anything less than charming.
This evening, when I approached the marquee, Martyn was singing ‘Cardiff Bay’. A live favourite, it’s a (presumably autobiographical) tale of a walk down by the sea with a restless child who, for reasons unknown, has been playing up in a church service – which I can relate to. Having “left his mother with the other” (which for years made a friend of mine believe that it was actually a song about weekend child access, with “the other” alluding to a new partner, until the passage of time and the arrival of a third child caused Martyn to change it to “the others”), the two of them travel down to “the place where the seagulls and the cranes play”.
“And the old man in the side street, he made you smile
Waved at us both so we both waved back
Down on through Bute Street to the mud of the low tide
They tear the old things down my son, but some things stay the same
On a Sunday over Cardiff Bay
This is one day of our lives
And on a Sunday over Cardiff Bay
Know that I love you
All of my life.”
There are, I suspect, two reasons why Martyn plays this song live so much. In the first instance, the fans adore it. There’s a resonance there, a sense of identification. It has been known to make grown men tremble: even the hardiest of souls has been known to approach him after a gig, sniff once, take in one deep, long breath and mutter “Thanks for ‘Cardiff Bay’, mate”.
But perhaps singer-songwriters often have a closer personal connection with their material, as songs evolve and change over the years, and I suspect that the song would not be dragged out of the cupboard with quite such alarming frequency if Martyn didn’t love it himself. Describing it in concert as “a song about being a dad”, he puts his heart and soul into every performance, even on occasions when his other material has been phoned in – and to be fair, I’ve only ever seen that once.
As for me, it’s a song that I initially loved, then grew tired of when it became a staple of every live show I attended (and in those days, there were a few of them). My interest has resurfaced since the birth of my children, but it had nonetheless become one of those songs that was in danger of wearing out its welcome. I feared I’d over-played it. I was bored.
This evening, outside G-music, the noise of the choir’s rendition of ‘Teardrop’ faded away, and I noticed that Josh had gone quiet, apart from the snoring. The boy would sleep through a hurricane if he was tired enough – I’ll still tell anyone who’ll listen that at the age of two months, at yet another Greenbelt, he snoozed right through The Proclaimers. I thought back at his own curious relationship with Martyn’s music: We used the calming tones of 2004’s Whoever It Was That Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home to get Josh to sleep until he became old enough to choose his own music. His younger brother, on the other hand, was ushered from the womb into the delivery suite to the sounds of ‘I Would Never Do Anything In This World To Hurt You’, which was ironic considering what he was doing to Emily’s uterus at the time.
I stood there for a moment.
“Saw Captain Scott on the Terra Nova
Setting sail for open sea
And maybe one day when you’re older
You’ll come down this way and think of me
It’ll be a Sunday over Cardiff Bay
Just one day of your life
And on that Sunday over Cardiff bay
Know that I loved you
I hope that’s all right.”
I looked at Martyn, obscured through the flaps of the tent. I looked at Josh, still asleep in his buggy, dead to the world. I kissed his forehead. I thought about everything we’d done that day, the times I’d shouted, the shortness of temper, the frustration and futile attempts to connect, and the slim and delicate and almost invisible tightrope that we walk between trying too hard and not trying hard enough. I realised I was crying. And I realised that, at long last, I finally understood the song.
God Save The Queen
September 4, 2009
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Thinking back to my comments about Queen last week, I’m struck by how willing I was, even four years ago, to defend ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The diary entry I wrote in 2005, having witnessed a particularly ghastly piece of television, and which will follow below, resonates with self-righteous anger and sneering cynicism at the evils of the corporate monopoly and the dumbing down of Saturday night entertainment. It still reads rather well, which is why I’ve decided to post it here, but towards the end I do get rather precious.
At first I wondered whether this was indicative of some sort of double standard on my part. Then I reasoned that four years was a long time, particularly musically, and that standards change and tastes move on. The music press performs re-evaluations and re-assessments of albums as little as six months after they’ve been reviewed, and frequently finds them wanting, so why should we hold the same views now as we did then?
But I can’t help thinking that the rot set in with the Rhapsody long before 2005, and that my staunch defence of it in the aftermath of Queen Mania was largely attributed to the fact that it had been hijacked by a bunch of suited wannabes. I’m not against covers of records I love. I laughed at the furore surrounding Alex Burke’s Christmas release of ‘Hallelujah’ – yes, it was vacuous and insipid, but it’s hardly sacrilege, and if the source material is so good how can you resent Simon Cowell for choosing it? Long before I grew bored with Queen’s magnum opus I was lapping up the alternative takes by Rolf Harris and Bad News. Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold’ may be one of the most perfect songs ever written, and the original recording is beautifully understated, but that doesn’t mean I resent Eva Cassidy for producing a lacklustre cover.
I think my problem with the G4 take on the Rhapsody – as will be explained below – is that it entirely ruined the song. Alex’s ‘Hallelujah’ is cheesy and dull, but it remains reasonably authentic (even though it removes all traces of sex). G4, however, transformed the Rhapsody from an eclectic rock song into something that was insufferably tedious. So perhaps I just have particular standards: a song must be reasonably true to the original, or if it is changed, it must be changed for the better, and that means ‘the better’ as I alone see it. Hence it’s fine for Harry Connick Jr. to turn ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ into a wistful, almost forlorn ballad where once existed a blistering showstopper, but it’s not fine for Puff Daddy to completely miss the point with ‘Every Breath You Take’ – another Sting song, and another contender for Best Pop Record In Living History – by removing all sense of menace and malice and obsession and turning it into a dreary lament for a dead gangster.
Perhaps a part of it is that I’m rather particular about Queen. I seethed with rage when I heard about Paul Rodgers’ tour, because I considered that Mercury was so intrinsically linked with the band that anything else simply wouldn’t be Queen. As I have argued before, if Paul and Ringo were to perform onstage you would be hard pressed to call it a Beatles reunion, so why should we consider Brian and Roger’s live shows to be the Queen we know and love? I had the same reaction to Party at the Palace, the 2002 Golden Jubilee concert that featured Ben Elton making an arse of himself, Ruby Wax construct a compelling argument for her extradition or even ritual execution, and Brian and Roger perform with a string of guest vocalists who weren’t Freddie Mercury. The worst part of that segment was, almost undoubtedly, the appearance of the cast of We Will Rock You, a musical so gut-wrenchingly awful (no, I’ve not seen it, but I have read the script) in its execution that you wonder how it could have possibly come from the pen of the man who gave us Black Adder Goes Forth.
And yet it’s funny that as time goes on I’m less bothered by the presence of We Will Rock You, or The X-Factor, or even the insipid R&B that I find particularly nauseating. Perhaps it’s a musical form of fatalism: the realisation that you can’t change the attitudes and listening preferences of the public at large, and that it would be a bad thing to try – because then they’d all be listening to what you want, and that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I’m not saying that the music industry isn’t in a mess, and that it needs a shakeup, but I am less and less convinced that I’m the one to do it. I will leave that to people like Bill, who suggests a new way of thinking about music, and who is even prepared to admit himself that he might be wrong.
Or perhaps I’m just getting older and starting to care about these things less. I still have standards, and still have plenty of occasions to feel the bile rising in my mouth – if I didn’t there would probably be little need for this blog – but I’m less angry about it than I used to be, simply because there’s no point. It’s best to try and influence people quietly, indirectly, and persuade them to really think for themselves rather than just fall in line with your own way of thinking, because ultimately that’s what much angry ranting is about: it’s not a ‘have your own ideas’ ethos, it’s a ‘share my ideas’ one. Many bloggers who complain about restrictions and the nanny state and artistic freedom don’t really want freedom of any sort – they instead want everyone else to think like them. When I eventually realised this I backed off from the ranting, because it threatened to consume me. I see other people heading down the same path and I try to warn them, but they don’t listen. Why should they? Had I been them, I wouldn’t have listened to me.
Anyway, Memory Lane beckons, along with Angry Young Man. Flashback to the spring of 2005….
———
Tuesday, 11 April 2005
This evening, I’m going to reveal myself as an enormous hypocrite. After whinging in a movie chat forum about what I think I described as “a single minded obsession with running down [book-to-screen] adaptations purely because they’re different”, I now want to talk about the ghastly nightmare that was Saturday night’s Queen Mania.
It was Emily who described it best. As we lay on the queen-size double bed in the converted barn that was that evening’s rest stop, I asked – for the umpteenth time – why on earth I’d found myself so compelled to watch something that I was obviously going to hate. It has nothing to do with a wish to criticise it, which is my justification for reading The Sun on a daily basis. I’ve seen enough bad karaoke to build up reasonable grounds to give it a critical mauling. I love Queen and have done for years, and one look at the line-up told me that it was going to be an absolute disaster, so why sit through it?
She responded, quite sensibly, by telling me that it was like driving past the scene of a car wreck. You don’t want to look, because you know that the carnage will be horrific, and haunt your sleep for weeks. And then at the last moment, you turn your head and greet the ensuing tragedy head on. And as unpleasant as it is, something calls to you from the depths of the soul, something base, that demands that you keep looking – and try as you might, you can’t tear your eyes away from the whole sorry scene.
So it was last weekend. I should have seen it coming, really: earlier in the year I’d had the misfortune of seeing the second Abba Mania programme, which featured a set of soap stars and C-list celebrities crashing their way through some of Benny and Bjorn’s finest. The lengthy gaps between songs were filled with superficial niceties about how wonderful they were, along with the same archive footage they use in every documentary and a ridiculous “My favourite Abba song” vignette that would have been right at home in Just Seventeen. The audience was full of screaming twenty-somethings in clothes that barely fit them: a hundred hen parties out for a riotous evening’s entertainment. My worst nightmare come true.
This time around: roll credits, and bring out Zoe Ball (who’s never been particularly inspiring – she always looks half asleep, lacking the watchable enthusiasm of her father and the insight and dry humour of someone like Paula Yates – but at least, thank God, it wasn’t Cat Deeley). “We are here to pay tribute to one of the finest rock bands ever – to QUEEEEEENNNN!” Thunderous cheers from the crowd, as if they were hearing it for the first time. I suppose I ought to give the show’s creators some credit for filling the bill with actual musicians instead of Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes rejects, and it’s plausible that this shift in personnel might signify the beginnings of a new way forward – a return to traditional roots, decent sets, as opposed to actors who think they can sing or models who think they can sing and act.
Any sense of kudos that the producers might have gained, however, was instantly dissolved once the music started properly. It would have been nice to have been met with a group of fresh interpretations of Queen classics, delivered with thoughtfulness and originality, showcasing the talents of the artists singing them as well as emphasising the lasting impact of the band’s extraordinary songwriting. That would have been a fitting tribute. What we actually got was Melanie C drawling her way through ‘One Vision’ with an emptiness that once more caused me to question the reasons for her inexplicable and enduring popularity. She was trying, I’m sure – but in the process of attempting to sound like herself she actually merely came across as a third-rate Freddie Mercury, without the looks. A sharp black suit and a new haircut don’t convince: she may no longer be a Spice Girl, but Melanie C will always resemble an Eastenders cast-off.
In fairness to the woman, the sense of mediocrity wasn’t limited to her performance – the backing band stumbled along with appropriate clumsiness, losing beats here and there, while the lead guitarist stumbled over May’s powerhouse riff with the dexterity of an eleven year old learning ‘Streets of Laredo’. If nothing else, Queen Mania did at least make you realise what good musicians the original band were, purely because their songs are evidently difficult to master. Freddie’s death left an enormous hole – as the Independent put it, “when you see Annie Lennox, in a shocking dress and plastered in make-up, warbling her way through Under Pressure, just you try not missing him”. But if the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert emphasised the deceased icon’s tremendous abilities by using a string of artists who just couldn’t reach those high notes, at least the rest of the band were there in force to back them up come the second half of the evening.
Mel takes her bow to rapturous applause, before flouncing off, and this more or less set the theme for the entire evening. As well as everyone’s favourite Northern Star, we also had Russell Watson in an admittedly not-too-bad rendition of ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, followed later by Myleene Klass (Hear’say, gone tomorrow) massacring Too Much Love Will Kill You: a tinny, musical box version with about as much soul as a box of spent fireworks. Admittedly it was never one of Freddie’s finest performances, but this is excused on the grounds that it was one of the last recordings he made – and in any case, at least May sang it with the emotional intensity and gravity that the song deserved. The young Ms Klass cut it to ribbons, rendering the verses almost nonsensical and losing the flow completely, while she picked nervously at the keys like a grade one piano student, refusing to use any more than two octaves. Cue rapturous applause and whistles, and me wondering if we were watching the same thing.
Elsewhere: Toyah Wilcox, who screamed kitten-like sexiness in a well-meant but thoroughly misguided performance of ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. Oh, and Tony Christie, who wouldn’t have even been there were it not for the widespread success of the irritatingly catchy ‘Is This a Jaded Armadillo?’, but bonus points are awarded for at least trying to do something different with ‘You’re My Best Friend’ – the lounge-jazz arrangement brought back memories of Will Young’s vacuous rendition of ‘Light My Fire’, and some of the substitutions were tenuous to say the least, but at least it was different, as opposed to another soulless copy. The same cannot be said for Heather Small, who sleepwalked through ‘Somebody To Love’ – although to give the former M-person her due, it was really only a shambles because of the backing choir, who seemed to have very little to do. Backing vocals are an integral part of ‘Somebody To Love’, acting as a crucial counterpoint and complementing the lead vocal with ferocious, gospel-like intensity, but in this arrangement they only seemed to feature in about half the song, and rarely when they were desperately needed. Cue an abundance of uncomfortable silences between phrases, while the black-clad session singers glanced around at each other, as if waiting for their next cue, plastered with awkward stage smiles.
Full marks to the Coronation Street lads for trying their best – what their rendition of ‘I Want To Break Free’ lacked in vocal ability was more than compensated for by the unforgettable sight of Les Battersby in drag. It may have been dreadful, but at least it was sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to be wholly enjoyable. Even this segment, however, didn’t seem to work – perhaps the whole idea was better suited to Children in Need or Comic Relief than a third-rate ITV karaoke party, or perhaps it was the fact that the video was built up to such an immense extent that disappointment was inevitable. Any element of surprise was lost, largely as a result of the relentless plugging that took place before and during the show. The supposedly spontaneous interview with the lads before and after the performance had the air of a previously videotaped conversation with appropriate gaps left for Zoe’s schoolgirl questions, delivered with all the girlish enthusiasm of a Live and Kicking presenter.
Such mind-numbing signposting is sadly typical of our culture these days. In itself, the Coronation Street video was quite funny, but when someone sits you down and gives you a five minute introduction to the joke that they’re about to tell you, full of constant reassurances that it’s absolutely hilarious, you’re liable to lose interest. This is particularly notable in the emails that I seem to constantly receive (and always from the same well-meaning colleague), urging you with telethon-like eagerness to “scroll down….keep going….it’s worth it, it really is…”. And, of course, it never is. The relentless build-up towards the evening’s supposed high spot reminded me an awful lot of Martine McCutcheon’s one-hour TV special a few years back, in which the artist formerly known as Tiffany proved that she was a much better singer than she was a compere. Not content with harping on to the point of tedium about “the wonders of modern technology”, implemented in this instance in order to lay down her vocals on top of Judy Garland’s on ‘The Man That Got Away, Ms. McCutcheon then proceeded to take a couple of minutes between each and every well-staged musical number to remind us yet again about what was going to happen later in the show. After gushing about her impending duet with “the wonderful tenor Andrea Bocelli, innit” on no less than six occasions, she finally brought him out – and, of course, by this point, I was bored stiff. Similarly, Queen Mania’s omnipresent Peter Dickson (or someone who sounded a lot like him) chipped in every five minutes or so to tell us what was coming next – presumably part of a desperate plea for us to keep the TV on.
But it was G4 who created the evening’s biggest upset. After an early duet with Lesley Garrett in which they more or less reduced ‘Barcelona’ to a smoking ruin, the fab foursome returned for the evening’s final number, a let’s-plug-the-album-boys phoned-in rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I have to admit to dreading this moment, after hearing bits of the song on commercials for their debut album – and once more the producers see fit to introduce the song with a lot of inane rambling by Wilcox and Small about the song’s meaning (which, let’s face it, no one knows). Most insulting of all, we’re informed by Zoe that “G4 have brought this song to a whole new generation” – a generation who, no doubt, is wondering what on earth all the fuss was about.
Here’s the thing – the popera machine has been going with great gusto over the past few months, and in a way represents the epitome of musical marriages. If Pavarotti was a classical artist who could reach the singles chart, and Vanessa Mae was a classical artist who managed to fuse house and Bach into a radio-friendly combination, and the Medieval Babes were – well, just a complete waste of time, then it seems apparent that G4 are a bunch of chubby lads in ill-fitting suits who are basically pop stars dressed as classical artists. Their immaculate appearance carries echoes of Brian Epstein’s early insistence on smart turnouts for his newly-signed Beatles – as with so many pop groups, you get the feeling that they’ve been groomed, like polished wooden puppets, or dogs waiting for their fifteen seconds of fame at Crufts.
So far, so good. Manufactured opera stars, then. And they come through the smoke and sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, one of the finest songs of the last forty years, as a fully-fledged aria, where the strings and horns reign supreme. And it’s not even fun. The whole point behind the song, as my wife pointed out, is its diversity – it jumps from barbershop to epic piano-driven ballad to opera to heavy rock and then back to ballad in the space of just under six minutes. To play the whole thing in the same style is to ruin it completely: it has the (previously considered impossible) effect of making ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ dull. Worse still, they’ve cut the thing to shreds: presumably uncomfortable with singing certain passages, or perhaps merely living with a tight time limit and a desire to finish the show so that Parkinson can get on, they jump and skip around so that seasoned veterans of the song (like me) get lost with alarming regularity. I don’t want to sound all grouchy (although I think it’s too late for that) but you have to play the whole thing from beginning to end if you’re going to keep your audience, because that’s the way we like it and we will take no substitutions. If you’re going to ruin one of our favourite numbers, at least leave it reasonably intact so that we can sing along without wondering where on earth bars 32-36 went. Will You Do The Fandango? Not tonight, it seems: we don’t have the time.
“Who are this lot, anyway?” said Emily, nuzzling into my back and draping an arm over the side of the bed. “They’re Il Divo, right? Only uglier?”
“I think that’s the idea, yes,” I replied. “I don’t know whether they’re another of Mr Cowell’s bright ideas, or whether they’re a rival group established to jump on the bandwagon. But the ugliness is apparent. Look, they’re all complete mingers.”
“But they’re nowhere near as oily as Il Divo, are they?” she said. “Or as smarmy, come to that.”
“I suppose not. It’s just that I know who I’d rather wake up with.”
And when all else fails, bring on the pyrotechnics. What am I to make of this confusing spectacle? The next audience shot featured a whole host of people jumping out of their seats, yelling and screaming with delight, apparently genuinely enjoying it. For a moment or two I wondered if they had been pasted in from archive footage of another show – Jerry Springer, perhaps – but a closer inspection revealed an abundance of leather, white t-shirts, male pattern baldness and moustaches. These were Queen fans, all right – in fact, I’m convinced I saw Barry Tingley, the unfortunate owner of the Golf that I drove into a few weeks ago. Yet these fans seemed to be completely caught up in the moment – there was no clever editing to hide the faces of the bored or disgusted, but instead the whole studio seemed to be alight with wonder and ecstasy. I ruminated on what on earth the world was coming to, when such drivel could amply pass for prime-time entertainment; the sort of ratings winner that ITV considers to be the top of its pile of talent.
Or perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps I am getting cynical in my old age, or perhaps my puritanical nature is never as strong as it is where music is concerned. The simple fact of the matter is that if this had been a group of performances at an amateur talent night I probably would have loved it. But these are supposed to be professionals. Maybe I’m too hard to please, and a lowering of my standards is in order if I’m to survive without sounding like a permanently grumpy old man, but I can’t see what this is going to do to enhance the Queen legacy: if anything, it’s merely going to put people off. I suppose it’s plausible that this is the whole point: perhaps the programme was a self-conscious display of irony, a string of mediocrity designed to enhance your appreciation of the original.
Somehow, I doubt that ITV are capable of such cleverness. If the programme made me want to dig out my copy of News of the World and play it at full volume to rinse out the unpleasant taste of saccharine, it has obviously done its job, albeit not in the way that it intended. And yet herein lies the final irony, because the length of this diary entry has betrayed an obvious sense of fascination, even when it’s coupled with revulsion. After the credits, Peter Dickson announced that the following Saturday night’s fare would be Madonna Mania, with another third-rate line-up and a musical selection that looked equally dreadful. I have a feeling I’ll be watching it.
You do talk a load of crap sometimes, Charlie Brown
September 5, 2009
———
Wednesday evening, the kitchen. I am fixing a shelf; Emily is making jam.
“So were you listening to Petra Zieger in the car, then?”
“No, I was listening to Frank Zappa. I swapped it with Zieger because I didn’t think Frank Zappa was to your taste. That was why you found it in there. I really don’t know what you’d have thought about
‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’.”
“OK.”
“I was a little uncertain about this week, but what’s surprised me is just how many artists we actually have that begin with ‘Z’. I discovered yesterday that I have two jazz albums. I can’t believe I forgot about Aziza Mustafa Zadeh.”
Emily looked up from her marrow. “Was that the one you were listening to last night?”
“Yes, that was it. It didn’t disturb you, did it? I did shut the door.”
“I heard bits. She was going biddle-beedle-bi-bi-beedle-iddle-beep.”
“She does that a lot.”
“Why?”
“It’s a derivative of scat.”
“Yeah, but it still sounded like biddle-beedle-bi-bi-beedle-iddle-beep.”
“It’s scat singing! A staple of jazz!”
This doesn’t help my case; Emily’s not the world’s biggest jazz aficionado. The raised eyebrow confirmed it.
“Look, she’s extremely talented, OK? I mean, her piano playing is enough, but when she sings….it’s like, Oh My God.”
This isn’t the most eloquent description of Zadeh’s work, but it’s the best I can do at half past nine. I saw her once in Leeds and feel sorely obliged to defend her. She was warm, sweet, funny and sincere. Her programme was eclectic, and she did three encores and left us wanting.
“She was still going biddle-beedle-bi-bi-beedle-iddle-beep.”
“Scat!”
“That’s another word for shit, isn’t it?”
“Where do you get that from?”
“Scatological? Isn’t that the study of shit?”
I hesitate. “Maybe…”
“Right, so scat is shit.”
“Humph. Tell that to Ella Fitzgerald.”
“Isn’t she dead?”
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 35
September 7, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Aziza Mustafa Zadeh – Jazziza
Frank Zappa – Have I Offended Someone?
Petra Zieger – Alles Drin
Denny Zeitlin and Charlie Haden – Time Remembers One Time Once
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