Monday, November 24, 2003
This week:
Lambchop join yet more dots on their new epic
Joss Stone proves it hasn’t quite all been said yet
Pluramon with the album for which some of us have been waiting for a dozen years
LAMBCHOP
“When it began to be light outside she got up. She walked to the window. The cloudless sky over the hills was beginning to turn white. The trees and the row of two-story apartment houses across the street were beginning to take shape as she watched. The sky grew whiter, the light expanding rapidly up from behind the hills. Except for the times she had been up with one or another of the children (which she did not count because she had never looked outside, only hurried back to bed or to the kitchen), she had seen few sunrises in her life and those when she was little. She knew that none of them had been like this. Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read had she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.”
(Raymond Carver, “The Student’s Wife,” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Alfred A Knopf Inc: 1976)
Friedrich Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise is about how far optimism can be tempered by fear of the unknown. It is about the reluctance to cross the threshold from a cosy, rural past to an edgy, urban future. It is about to what extent ambition has to suppress or even sacrifice itself when faced with duty and obligations. It is probably the first major film to bring women into an aesthetic space which is unequivocally theirs. And, as with all great films, it seeks to endeavour how many fictions, how much imagination, can come into being as a result of photographing reality.
I speak of Murnau’s Sunrise because Lambchop were approached by the San Francisco International Film Festival and commissioned to perform a live score as a soundtrack to their screening of the film during their 2003 festival. As it happened, Kurt Wagner had already engaged on an extended exercise, sustained over varying periods of time from summer 2002 to the winter of now, in which he aimed to write a song a day. Some of the songs with which he had come up he found worked aptly in the context of Sunrise, but ultimately he ended up with so many songs that there are due for release in February 2004 two new Lambchop albums, each containing twelve songs – AW CMON and NO YOU CMON. It is stressed that, although “bound” and sold together for the price of a single album, these are not to be considered as a double album but as two separate albums packaged together for the sake of convenience – the alt. country Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, though, unlike the latter, this is not the work of two separate artists grouped together under a b(r)and name. But is this yet another exhausting example of the aesthetic incontinence to which the CD revolution has provided an inadvertent conduit, as opposed to a pithy, 40-minute single album which would tell the same story with half the effort and twice the strength? And, moreover and more importantly, does this make Lambchop’s seventh and eighth albums better than their previous six?
The latter question is only answerable if you believe that every new record by an artist has to break seemingly unbreakable new ground, as opposed to the less glamorous but more rewarding task of an artist to develop their art slowly, patiently and methodically. Thus it could be said that the new Lambchop albums see a return to the string-driven alt. soul of Nixon tempered by extensions of the reluctant intimacy offered to us in Is A Woman. There is nothing on either album which recaptures the generous exuberance of “Up With People,” but that does not mean that emotional generosity is nowhere to be found. On an album-by-album analysis, it could be said that AW CMON is the “darker” record and NO YOU CMON the “lighter” one. But the boundaries are, at best, blurred, and each record cannot help but bleed into the other.
Noticeably, there are several instrumentals dotted throughout each album, and the “opening credits” of AW CMON give us a benign, widescreen orchestral canter over which one expects to hear Van Morrison musing about driving to Coney Island or twiddling the wireless knobs. MoR? Well, there is still an element of regret to the not-quite-straightforward melodic and harmonic lines, and it is worth remembering that this opening track is entitled “Being Tyler” in tribute to guitarist William Tyler who is unquestionably the central instrumental voice on both albums, just as Tony Crow’s piano was to Is A Woman or Lloyd Barry’s string arrangements were to Nixon, though both of the latter remain much in evidence here.
In a way AW CMON begins very much as The Love Below began, with orchestral lustre quickly succeeded by distant Sonic Youth-style guitar shrieks and then intimate, some say cocktail, balladry. Such is the case with the brief “Four Pounds In Two Days” where, against Tyler’s guitar and Crow’s piano, Wagner’s baritone muses, mumbles perhaps, over what? “They say you walk around as if a ghost had crossed your path.”
“Steve McQueen” ups the emotional ante, if not the volume; against stately strings Wagner agonises over one of his pet themes, the reality of who a person is and how far that overlaps with the image that a person projects (“Is this just another way to be me – NOT Steve McQueen?”). “This is not at all what it seems,” warns Wagner, and at 2:48 he raises his voice for one of the very few times on either album (there is no sign, regrettably, of his “You Masculine You” falsetto) as he pleads “Take me seriously!” Will anyone dare to? The diminishing repeat of “you, you, you” which intertwines with the minor key cyclical piano and progressively polytonal strings and guitar which bring the song to an end suggest that the question is, for now, unresolved.
As if to pause for breath, “The Lone Official” is a guitar-led instrumental interlude with lots of poignant spaces and chord changes like prolonged sighs – early Johnny Marr meets the Meat Puppets of “Two Rivers.” Then, the near-soul of “Something’s Going On” which seems mostly to consist of itemised lists of things in an undisclosed location – “the glass, the clock on the wall…the picture of Michael and Bubbles” – with discreet electronic burbling subverting the song’s musical undertow. “Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train” is slower but similarly constructed, with its introductory imagery of “Wearing a halo of mist,” two people (once lovers?) survey the scenery of a past memory to which they can barely hold on (“The picturesque old quay house, the car park”). Eventually Barry’s string section is left alone to play a slow, four-chord cycle. Even more eventually do you realise the section’s similarity to the closing moments of Psychic TV’s “Message From The Temple.”
With the exception of the aforementioned “The Lone Official,” the tempo of AW CMON is generally one of funereal slowness – in terms of the nocturnal arrangements and Wagner’s voice, one is reminded of a Nashville Tindersticks sans the Ladbroke Grove doom fetish. Another example of this approach is the brooding “Each Time I Bring It Up It Seems To Bring You Down,” which Wagner opens with the observation “Hobbled by the fact that there must be a problem…” and which seems again to be about the gap between image and reality which seems likely to jeopardise any relationship. Lyrically indicative of this album’s increasing bitterness, there are plenty of classic Wagner splenetic soundbites such as “Take the best of me and throw it to the dogs” and “You can call me bastard/You can call me friend/But don’t forget to call me/Before the story ends.” The song’s steady progress is punctuated by a deceptively jaunty four-step staircase strings/guitar motif which sounds like a musical question mark – Wagner daring the Other to deny his truth.
Another, more conventional and slightly more upbeat instrumental “Timothy B Schmidt” leads us into the bizarre interlude “Women Help To Create The Kind Of Men They Despise.” This is the closest audible aesthetic link to the lounge balladry of Is A Woman; over Crow’s cocktail piano, Wagner considers the title’s implied question – sex as hatred – citing Stanley Wilson’s Distractions and even briefly throwing in a strange staccato harmony interlude, like barbershop Steve Reich.
“I Hate Candy” is a comparably straightforward ballad with the nearest thing on the album to a chorus (“Where’s my little trouble girl?” – the comma between “trouble” and “girl” presumably optional) but the album then proceeds to reach its emotional peak, firstly with “I Haven’t Heard A Word I’ve Said.” Following an almost dublike intro for spaced-out piano and bass, we are led into an out-of-tempo peroration, punctuated by Tyler’s wah-wah, wherein Wagner considers whether the faults are not all within his own sense of cliché. “A dialogue is half-created out of our own words/We like the texture and pretend that this we haven’t heard…but somehow with the help of pills/I remain a pillar of corn.” Later he expands the what-are-words-worth nature of the song into a choice between life and death: “Let’s guess the number of regrets a good life will acquire/There seems to be some small discrepancy…but somehow we should work upon the better half of dead.”
This itself acts as a prelude to the album’s stunning closing track, “Action Figure” which Wagner sings beautifully, sometimes with fear, other times with barely contained fury. The lyric starts with a touch of self-mockery: “I heard a rumour that I’m sad/Or at least that I feel bad/Whoever said that doesn’t know/I’m pretty sure that I don’t know.” But the self-mockery then turns outwards into revelation – or will it? “Let’s let the cat out of the bag/Let’s let the neighbourhood go bad” (note the subtle backward guitar mixed in under the latter line) – before Wagner goes on to question what exactly constitutes A Life: “So we can put the watch away/And we can throw away the case/And we can walk through God’s own will/Because He’s crying, crying still.” He then throws in lyrical and subtle musical references to “Bugs” from Is A Woman (perhaps the most absent vocal performance ever recorded) and “The Man Who Liked Beer” (“I’ve swatted bugs all afternoon/I’ve swallowed beer like a cartoon”).
Then Wagner’s rage increases as he considers the compromise under which all life must endure: “I will learn to look away/When there are things I cannot bear/Perhaps you are seeing different too/Perhaps we’ve learned to tell the difference/And there are people that I know/Who learn to live within their limits/And we are lucky to be so/Completely interactive” – the last two lines delivered with an irony which could stab you if you’re not looking.
One way of looking at the second album, NO YOU CMON, is that it is another attempt to tell the same story, but this time choosing a different path down which to walk, in the sense of a second chance, in the sense of let’s try again, and this time let’s get it right. So the two albums might not be as inseparable as they are ostensibly intended to be. Again we start with an orchestral instrumental – and this, to emphasise the concept of a second chance, actually is entitled “Sunrise.” The music is markedly more upbeat and cheerful, and halfway through, Paul Niehaus’ pedal steel, entirely absent from AW CMON, finally makes its entry (cf. ODB waiting until the beginning of the second CD of Wu-Tang Forever before making his entry).
But is even this a decoy? Again we segue into Thurston Moore-esque disembodied guitar howling, which in turn segues into the jazzy piano vamp of “Low Ambition.” Beginning with the lyric: “Your drug of choice/Mix it with a voice/A voice that’s creepy,” this appears to be a sister song to “Four Pounds In Two Days,” depicting addiction from a different, and perhaps closer, perspective. But again Wagner refuses to wallow; in “There’s Still Time” his passion audibly rises as he instructs you to start living – “There’s still a coat/There’s still a hat…Is there any reason why we take this crap?/Cover the floor, same as before.” Hear how the strings are palpably pulsating at 2:48 and marvel at how Wagner manages to incorporate Weller into his worldview.
And then, something completely unexpected, or perhaps not, as the emotion which has been slowly simmering throughout the album(s) thus far finally boils over. Following a brief electronic lament worthy of the Aphex Twin, Lambchop drive as they have never driven before, and for the first time ever rock out on, appropriately enough, “Nothing Adventurous Please,” wherein we are aghast at the spectacle of the alt. country avatars turning into Neu! – a motorik drive which is gradually overwhelmed by noise guitar and grumpy piano commentary as Wagner gleefully chants, “You just missed us!” A cross between “Hallogallo” and Sonic Youth’s “Total Trash,” and the beating heart of both albums. The new-found playfulness continues in “The Problem” where Wagner advises us: “When the chimp on the tree/Shakes his fist at me/You know I love it.” And yet even this will scarcely prepare you for the extremely silly bubblegum of “Shang A Dang Dang” wherein Wagner’s vocals finally mutate into Reeves and Mortimer singing in the Club Style – quite possibly Lambchop’s first hit single, if they want one.
“If the telephone rings, I should throw it out,” begins Wagner on the more subdued but no less passionate “About A Lighter.” Some bitterness aimed at the Other is still in evidence (“I’ve said some things that you do ignore/But I wouldn’t let them bother you any more”) unless he happens to be singing to, or at, us.
“Under A Dream Of A Lie” (a deliberate titular echo of the Fall’s “Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul”?) is the closest either album comes to recapturing the post-Curtis Mayfield soulfulness of Nixon, a delectable ballad, even if it begins with the words “Give up like a man!” And then another unexpected side to Lambchop is revealed in the instrumental “Jan 24” which, with its staccato piano and deliberately clunky ‘70s pop-rock rhythm, sounds like Michael Nyman auditioning for Lieutenant Pigeon.
But beware of the superficial jollity, for this foreshadows what is perhaps the bleakest and most disturbing song on either of these albums, “The Gusher.” Following a brief guitar blast of the “Paranoid” intro, we again detour into cabaret time, albeit a distinctly black and malevolent cabaret. Over an MoR samba rhythm which Crow continually attempts to derail into Aladdin Sane territory, Wagner, in his lowest and scariest of voices, sings lines like “The damp stains upon your jeans…The water in the sink turns brown/And you scrape your skin with a razor.” The music’s jollity, now forced, counteracts and highlights this ode to self-mutilation in the same way as Roy Wood managed on “Music To Commit Suicide By.” Eventually a chant of “Who can turn the world on with this smile?” sardonically manifests itself, and as the “Paranoid” guitar riff storms back in, Wagner climaxes the song with the reassurance “You’re gonna make it…” then adding the frightening snarl “AFTER ALL.”
Nothing left for Wagner to do now except sum both records up with the song “Listen,” where again he agonises about the uselessness of language for This Sort Of Thing. “I will listen, especially at work,” he sings, as Niehaus’ pedal steel reappears. “So put me in a bag and bury me in rags/The lady upstairs, she makes me strong…Confused and caught up/Could you give it up for this?/I will listen to what you’ve got to say/You said it anyway/Though you’re not, not too sure/And you, you will listen/’Cos it means that much to you/You’re everything I do or see.” Singing at the lady or singing at us? “They may not work it out,” he concludes to himself, and makes his exit as the conventional country-rock instrumental “The Producer” plays over the end credits.
So are these Lambchop’s best records? I would say that existing fans will adore it and should save up for it now; neophytes should buy Nixon ahead of this, as it is still their most fully realised record. Nevertheless the new albums are continuing evidence of Wagner’s immense ability to put a microscope to the most seemingly conventional of stories or musical forms, and by sheer dint of his imagination, turn them into something which is quietly but extremely unconventional.
JOSS STONE
She is 16 years old, comes from somewhere in Devon and is clearly going to become an extremely big star; and for once I can say, justifiably so. From the opening seconds of the opening song on her opening album, The Soul Sessions - classified as a “mini-album,” although at 42 minutes it is what we creaky old tubs used to call a Proper Album, and it remains a pity that more people don’t follow this example – “The Chokin’ Kind,” as she almost weeps “I only meant to love you – didn’t you know it? Didn’t you know it?” over sombre organ and a steady bass, she provides the greatest musical shock to this writer this year; that additive-free, sample-free soulful soul music, sung straight and played straight, suddenly sounds like the freshest music around. As her confidence steadily grows in inverse proportion to her helplessness – “I gave you my heart, but you wanted my mind” – until the electrifying moment at 0:55 when Cindy Blackman’s snare drum cracks into action, it is as if Joss Stone is inventing soul music, as if she’d just thought of it. And this is a quietly stunning performance – real spite mixes with despair as she sings “So you can kill again/With a bottle of poison or a knife,” and listen to how she actually sounds as though she’s choking at 3:11 on the word “kind” in “it’s the chokin’ kind” – never bombastic, always heartfelt.
How did this happen? In 1986, Gavin Martin or similar would have raved about this without end, urging us to listen to it for an hour every morning to teach ourselves dignity – the kind of tunnel vision which drove thousands of NME readers to Q, or to Sigue Sigue Sputnik – so how is it that this music suddenly matters again? Perhaps because it does matter, as opposed to being made to matter; the ten tracks on Soul Sessions are free of glitch (though, crucially, not of modernism) and attempts at Bollywood. Nowhere on the record does Stone sound as if she’s trying to flog sex – any sensuality, as it would be, comes naturally. Given the car crashes of the recent Kylie and Britney albums, it has suddenly become desirable to listen to someone singing to you, rather than at you, or through a million varispeed modulators. Soul Sessions is a record bereft of irony, and therefore sounds fresh as only genuinely contemporary music can sound.
Interestingly, despite being 16 years old and from Devon, Stone’s debut album is currently only available in the USA, on EMI’s S-Curve subsidiary. In the UK the release has been held back until early 2004, to avoid being squashed in the Christmas rush, and on a recent routine inspection of London record shops only Rough Trade seem to have import copies in stock – as with Cody ChesnuTT, RT takes the initiative.
And what happened? Essentially, Stone was taken to the USA, and over just two days laid down most of the tracks on this album in Miami, produced and accompanied by veterans of the original ‘70s TK Records/Miami soul scene – Betty Wright very much in evidence as co-producer, arranger and backing vocalist, Benny Latimore on piano, Timmy Thomas on organ, Little Beaver on guitar. It’s clear from Stone’s endearingly cheerful sleevenotes that things went well – on the group photo in the CD booklet, she’s scribbled out herself, with the comment: “OK, I really hate this shot of me but everyone else looks wicked!” She certainly comes across as excited about the whole business, and the record itself is imbued with the irresistible mixture of awe and enthusiasm which becomes a 16-year-old singer doing this sort of thing for the first time.
Now imagine what would have happened had she gone down the Pop Idol/Fame Academy route – indeed there’s no need to imagine; look at what’s happened to poor old Alex Parks; forced to rush out a half-completed album to make her management some spare change before Christmas, full of passionless covers of pointless songs, clearly itching for a Lewis Taylor or Steve Albini to bring out what, even in these surroundings, is latent within her. Simon Cowell would have denounced Joss Stone as “too quirky for the viewers,” for not being the Alma Cogan reincarnation he desires. He wouldn’t be able to control her.
All ten songs on Soul Sessions are covers, but the choices are unpredictable and decidedly unhackneyed. Whereas Cowell would have had her doing “I Say A Little Prayer,” instead Stone goes here for Aretha’s seldom-revived “All The King’s Horses.” This is a connoisseur’s selection.
And none of the covers is more unpredictable than Stone’s brilliant reshaping of the White Stripes’ “Fell In Love With A Boy” which, along with Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” Alex Harvey’s “Delilah” and John Cale’s “Heartbreak Hotel” demonstrates the difference between covering a song and interpreting a song. Here Stone replaces Jack White’s hypermanic on-the-spot puffing and panting by slowing everything down and taking her time. She is helped with this by the fantastic production of ?uestlove from The Roots – note the subtle electro underlay throughout the track, something which could never have been achieved in 1963 or 1986 for that matter, and note how she even manages to improve the chord sequence, with Latimore’s piano chords under “I said it once before but it bears repeating” at 1:43 being of especial note.
Elsewhere Stone’s exuberance spills out joyfully all over the place. I can’t think of many, if any, contemporary singers who could inject so much unironic enthusiasm into a performance as she does on Willie Garner’s “Super Duper Love (Are You Diggin’ On Me?)” – from the opening “Yeah!” through the drawn out triplicate of “just to know” (“that you are mine”) at 1:34, the little whoop of “Ooh!” she lets out at 2:24, her aside to “Wait for me, Little Beaver!” at 2:43, to which Beaver’s guitar squeals back his agreement, we are perhaps looking at the most natural British female soul singer since Dusty Springfield (and this record TROUNCES Dusty In Memphis). What a change from the faux-inscrutability of Beyoncé and Britney!
Only 16? Well we recall how Steve Winwood joined his big brother in the Spencer Davis Group at 15, but Winwood has very reasonably commented that in his day, you could leave school at 14 and embark on an apprenticeship, and the Spencer Davis Group happened to be his. But some singers do not need to be coached or forced – they just have it, and Joss Stone seems to me to be one of these increasingly rare natural talents.
The arrangements certainly aren’t retro; their attack and bounce are completely up to the minute, proving that imagination will always triumph over technology; no machine could have come up with Timmy Thomas’ spontaneous run up the organ in response to Stone’s wailing “Don’t let her come and steal the happiness away!” at 2:46 in her reading of “Victim Of A Foolish Heart,” not to mention the fantastic call-and-response with the backing singers of “I’m not gonna let her make me/I’m not gonna let her…ooouurgh!” towards the end of the same track.
“Fell In Love With A Boy” isn’t the only radical reworking of a “standard” here; listen to her restyling of the old James Boys ‘60s testosterone hagiography “Some Kind Of Wonderful.” Here she actually converts the song into sex; if her breath-exhausted squeal of “of my mind” in the line “He almost drives me out of my mind” at 1:39 isn’t an orgasm, then I don’t know what is (note also how Jack Daley’s bass immediately responds with a satisfied sigh).
Only once does she tentatively nudge towards the neighbouring borders of Houston/Carey multinote bombast, in her reading of Carla Thomas’ “I’ve Fallen In Love With You” where she nearly, but not quite, goes over the edge. Still, her repeated emphasis on the “BEAT” of “my BEATing heart” and the quadruple descents of “you know” (cf. the love that loves to love etc. on Van Morrison’s “Madame George”) are striking.
Yet perhaps the most impressive tracks here are where the instrumentation is stripped down. “Dirty Man,” where she is accompanied by just two guitars, is a luscious fuck-off of a performance – get her subtle emphasis on “good house keeper” at 0:38, yet another “ooh!” at 0:56, and above all her spine-tingling scream of “DIRTY!” at 2:04. Xtina? Coarse varlet!
Most moving is “I Had A Dream” which she begins accappella and which she takes very slowly, painful in her grieving of a lost utopia which can never be retrieved (“I thought it would last all night”). She retreats, virtually in tears, repeating the refrain “What a lovely dream it was” as the drums tick tock behind her and Thomas holds down a funereal organ chord.
Most profound, however, is her extended closing reading of the Isley Brothers’ “For The Love Of You.” With only Angelo Morris’ Fender Rhodes for instrumental support, this tests Stone over seven-and-a-half minutes, and she comes through it brilliantly. Apart from the mischievous lyric change early on – “All we need is candlelight and a D’Angelo song – ooh, so soft and so LONG!” – she performs it straight and performs it passionately, slowly and patiently. When she sees “a slow horizon slowly coming into view,” Morris’ electric piano momentarily pauses to shimmer before resuming. It’s not a song about coming back into the world; Joss Stone turns it into a song about coming into the world for the first time. About taking what she knows and expressing it in ways which will entrance us. Don’t let Timbaland or the Neptunes near her. She needs room to breathe and develop, and I am sure that she will, for on this evidence she may well become the finest soul singer Britain has ever produced. Luxuriate in and be astonished by her closing “ooh, to love you, ooh, OOH, ooh-mmmmm” as words fail her and she unconsciously echoes the “now, now, NOW” with which Linda Perhacs closes Parallelograms. This is someone vital.
PLURAMON
And this might just be the most vital record this year, if not the most vital record in a dozen years. “Shoegazing through and through!” says (approvingly) the chap behind the counter in Shoreditch’s Smallfish Records who sold it to me; “the best avant/pop noise album since Isn’t Anything” says Rob Young at The Wire. And, you know, readers, it is actually even better than that.
What am I talking about? Dreams Top Rock, the new album by Cologne’s Marcus Schmickler, a.k.a. Pluramon. His past history is summed up in Mr Young’s Wire review, but on this album he has singlehandedly endeavoured to continue and develop the work which Kevin Shields has let stand since 1991. It is, let us make no bones about it, a pop record in the vein of Loveless. It is the record which most of us were hoping MBV would go on to produce after Loveless. It is the record which the well-meaning but hapless likes of Chapterhouse and Slowdive unsuccessfully tried to make. And…did I say “singlehandedly”? Not quite. For on Dreams Top Rock (how easily that title could read as “Dream Stop Rock”) he collaborates with, I kid you not, the long-lost muse of David Lynch – Julee Cruise. And this record therefore also serves as the record which most of us were hoping Cruise would go on to produce after Floating Into The Night (and incidentally, on the same recent round robin of London record shops, I note with some incredulity, when looking for the Julee Cruise browser marker, that there was no such thing; that Floating Into The Night has in fact been allowed to float into the world of deleted albums). So we are essentially talking about Loveless with Julee Cruise on vocals. And it has knocked this writer flat.
Right from the beginning, you realise how special this record is going to be. Following all four seconds of guitar glitch which constitutes the opening track “oo4,” Julee Cruise and Schmickler suddenly cut into your headphones, as if an old C90 tape hadn’t quite been taped over entirely, seemingly halfway through the song. But the song itself, “Time For A Lie,” is awesome, one of the few songs of 2003 to which that adjective can be fairly applied. The same ineluctable mixture of electronica and guitar, the midline between seduction and attack, and at the dead (or living) centre of this sonic labyrinth is the unchanged voice of Ms Cruise: “We’re walking in the sunshine/There’s no worries/It’s just playtime” – or as unchanged as you can distinguish from the surrounding caves of music. She stays steadfast and stable as the music winds its way around her. But this isn’t the tonight-Matthew-I’m-going-to-be-Bilinda-Butcher presentation so familiar to patrons of the Camden Underworld/Dublin Castle/Kentish Town Forum between 1989-92 – see how, at 3:36, the fuzz and guitars cut out to leave a placid string synth backdrop, accompanied by careful acoustic guitar and piano (stylistically, if momentarily, not that far removed from Lambchop). Towards the end Schmickler picks out the main tune of the song; there is a nod towards ABC’s “Be Near Me,” but I’m not sure if it was intentional. No matter – the crucial difference between Pluramon and MBV’s ideas of avant pop is that Schmickler doesn’t go for Shields’ characteristic undulating wow-and-flutter, although there’s the same spectre of the “body-less” or “player-less” guitar. Nonetheless, notice how right at the end of “Time For A Lie,” the final synth chord gradually wavers out of tonality, even though in fact it’s only been modulated by half a tone. But the unrest that causes is enough to continue engaging our interest.
“Noise Academy” (visions suddenly materialise of Richard Park tutoring the Jason Pierces of tomorrow!) continues in the same vein, Cruise’s voice still recognisable but not especially decipherable, lost in the ecstasy of Schmickler’s trellises. For those to whom it matters, it still manages to “rock like hell” – but it rocks like a vaguely unstable cradle rather than the easy (Darkness) option. In the brief “PS” (which is a PS to “Noise Academy”) is Cruise singing “be sad”?
“Flageolea,” conversely, succeeds brilliantly in updating the template which Lynch and Badalamenti constructed so perfectly for Cruise back in 1989; the track eases its way in with its ‘50s Santo and Johnny tremelo guitars (courtesy of guest guitarist Kevin Drumm), brushes and bass clarinet. Gradually, though, electronic static starts to permeate the body of the piece, and eventually – almost imperceptibly – it becomes a post-Aphex Twin lullaby, the familiar subtly turning into the alien. When Cruise’s disembodied voice enters at 2:25, intoning “I’m not gonna stay,” it really does threaten to stop one’s heart (it’s as sinister as Sarah Cracknell’s late vocal entry in Saint Etienne’s “The Way We Live Now”). As with Joss Stone, Schmickler and Cruise have pulled off the feat of reviving a corner of music which most people seemed to have ceased being bothered about, and making it new and profound again.
And anyone who isn’t in floods of tears by the end of “Have You Seen” isn’t human. “Have you seen Jill?” entreats Cruise’s vulnerable voice, as if she knows she may have met the same fate as Laura Palmer. Again, not all the words are easily caught, but there are snatches which spring out here and there – “You left too soon,” “I’m all alone, you’re never home,” “Have you flown to another galaxy?” “Are you happy now and in a better life?” Yet as Cruise realises the extent of her loss – “Do you see Jill? ‘Cos I don’t?” – Schmickler’s guitar starts to cry along with her as synths cascade and recede regretfully all around her like failed fireworks.
“Hello Shadow” again buries Cruise deep in Schmickler’s post-MBV mix (those distantly placed synths which can sound like orchestras), but words such as “I wanna hold you again” and “I don’t know why I’m here, or where I am” continue to stab the unwary listener. Her voice is much clearer, but now Hawking-processed, as she itemises the benign diktats of corporate annihilation of the individual in “Difference Machine,” a track which suggests Radiohead’s “Fitter, Healthier” with the U2 filtered out and the MBV (or maybe even Merzbow) filtered in – look how Schmickler’s wall of guitars gatecrash the song at 3:05 and wail uncontrollably.
And then, almost finally (for this is another admirably old-style album, lasting a concise 39 minutes) Schmickler and Cruise revisit “Time For A Lie” and recast it as “Time (Catharsia Mix),” and this track in itself might be one of the most remarkable tracks of the last dozen years. Here, Lynch and MBV are joined in disturbed union. There is now a clear plateau of synthesiser over which Cruise explains precisely the “lie” of the title. Even here, words and meanings are never quite clear; the song begins “We’re walking in the sunshine” but two lines later we find that “the stars are out/The moonlight shines…Everything’s lovely tonight/It’s a wonderful time in our lives.” But then the twist: “We’re peaceful, we’re restful/The people stare and wish they were us/They’ll never know that there’s no trust/And everything is all fucked up/It’s a beautiful time for a lie.” And later still: “You never know/I’ll make it so/But he’s around/I can’t let go/I’ll never leave with you/I’ll stay…He doesn’t want me anyway.” It’s as profoundly disturbed a “love” song as 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love,” and the crowning musical moment occurs at 2:15 when, of all people, AMM’s Keith Rowe nudges in with his “tabletop guitar” and proceeds to take an aural chainsaw to the song’s presumed bliss, almost obliterating it at one point (with the same unalloyed grief which he applied to the emotional midpeak of his “Cathnor” duet with John Tilbury earlier this year) before bowing out at 4:00 to leave the same gradually modulating synth coda as the original. It is perhaps the most startling intervention in pop music since Evan Parker’s multiple saxes exploded behind Scott Walker’s “And the ceilings are rising and falling” in 1983’s “Track 6.”
Schmickler then proceeds to bring the record to a close with “Log.” More guitar/electronic static is sprayed over a lugubrious piano ballad refrain which could almost be an Elton John backing track. Soon an echoing Ultravox synth line is added to give gravity to the mourning (melodically it’s the same damaged grandeur as μ-Ziq’s “London Fog”). Cruise laments in the distance. The song ends on a sustained “A Day In The Life” final chord/tonality. The only possible end to this astonishing, and I suspect potentially very important, record. It is not easy to find, but if there are mountains standing awkwardly in your path I would politely recommend that you move them to get a copy. It is that great.
(The record is released on the Karaoke label – cat. no. Kalk cd 23 – and as with so many other important records of this year, the major chains do not seem to have condescended to stock it (it’s listed on the HMV and Tower websites, but seemingly not stocked in the actual shops), but Smallfish definitely do have copies in stock at the moment, and Rough Trade should be able to order one for you – tell Judy I sent you! Otherwise visit the label’s website (www.karaokekalk.de) or email the label (kalkfee@netcologne.de). Or just try your luck with Amazon. To paraphrase the Pet Shop Boys, I normally wouldn’t do this kind of thing, but this record really has to be heard)
Lambchop join yet more dots on their new epic
Joss Stone proves it hasn’t quite all been said yet
Pluramon with the album for which some of us have been waiting for a dozen years
LAMBCHOP
“When it began to be light outside she got up. She walked to the window. The cloudless sky over the hills was beginning to turn white. The trees and the row of two-story apartment houses across the street were beginning to take shape as she watched. The sky grew whiter, the light expanding rapidly up from behind the hills. Except for the times she had been up with one or another of the children (which she did not count because she had never looked outside, only hurried back to bed or to the kitchen), she had seen few sunrises in her life and those when she was little. She knew that none of them had been like this. Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read had she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.”
(Raymond Carver, “The Student’s Wife,” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Alfred A Knopf Inc: 1976)
Friedrich Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise is about how far optimism can be tempered by fear of the unknown. It is about the reluctance to cross the threshold from a cosy, rural past to an edgy, urban future. It is about to what extent ambition has to suppress or even sacrifice itself when faced with duty and obligations. It is probably the first major film to bring women into an aesthetic space which is unequivocally theirs. And, as with all great films, it seeks to endeavour how many fictions, how much imagination, can come into being as a result of photographing reality.
I speak of Murnau’s Sunrise because Lambchop were approached by the San Francisco International Film Festival and commissioned to perform a live score as a soundtrack to their screening of the film during their 2003 festival. As it happened, Kurt Wagner had already engaged on an extended exercise, sustained over varying periods of time from summer 2002 to the winter of now, in which he aimed to write a song a day. Some of the songs with which he had come up he found worked aptly in the context of Sunrise, but ultimately he ended up with so many songs that there are due for release in February 2004 two new Lambchop albums, each containing twelve songs – AW CMON and NO YOU CMON. It is stressed that, although “bound” and sold together for the price of a single album, these are not to be considered as a double album but as two separate albums packaged together for the sake of convenience – the alt. country Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, though, unlike the latter, this is not the work of two separate artists grouped together under a b(r)and name. But is this yet another exhausting example of the aesthetic incontinence to which the CD revolution has provided an inadvertent conduit, as opposed to a pithy, 40-minute single album which would tell the same story with half the effort and twice the strength? And, moreover and more importantly, does this make Lambchop’s seventh and eighth albums better than their previous six?
The latter question is only answerable if you believe that every new record by an artist has to break seemingly unbreakable new ground, as opposed to the less glamorous but more rewarding task of an artist to develop their art slowly, patiently and methodically. Thus it could be said that the new Lambchop albums see a return to the string-driven alt. soul of Nixon tempered by extensions of the reluctant intimacy offered to us in Is A Woman. There is nothing on either album which recaptures the generous exuberance of “Up With People,” but that does not mean that emotional generosity is nowhere to be found. On an album-by-album analysis, it could be said that AW CMON is the “darker” record and NO YOU CMON the “lighter” one. But the boundaries are, at best, blurred, and each record cannot help but bleed into the other.
Noticeably, there are several instrumentals dotted throughout each album, and the “opening credits” of AW CMON give us a benign, widescreen orchestral canter over which one expects to hear Van Morrison musing about driving to Coney Island or twiddling the wireless knobs. MoR? Well, there is still an element of regret to the not-quite-straightforward melodic and harmonic lines, and it is worth remembering that this opening track is entitled “Being Tyler” in tribute to guitarist William Tyler who is unquestionably the central instrumental voice on both albums, just as Tony Crow’s piano was to Is A Woman or Lloyd Barry’s string arrangements were to Nixon, though both of the latter remain much in evidence here.
In a way AW CMON begins very much as The Love Below began, with orchestral lustre quickly succeeded by distant Sonic Youth-style guitar shrieks and then intimate, some say cocktail, balladry. Such is the case with the brief “Four Pounds In Two Days” where, against Tyler’s guitar and Crow’s piano, Wagner’s baritone muses, mumbles perhaps, over what? “They say you walk around as if a ghost had crossed your path.”
“Steve McQueen” ups the emotional ante, if not the volume; against stately strings Wagner agonises over one of his pet themes, the reality of who a person is and how far that overlaps with the image that a person projects (“Is this just another way to be me – NOT Steve McQueen?”). “This is not at all what it seems,” warns Wagner, and at 2:48 he raises his voice for one of the very few times on either album (there is no sign, regrettably, of his “You Masculine You” falsetto) as he pleads “Take me seriously!” Will anyone dare to? The diminishing repeat of “you, you, you” which intertwines with the minor key cyclical piano and progressively polytonal strings and guitar which bring the song to an end suggest that the question is, for now, unresolved.
As if to pause for breath, “The Lone Official” is a guitar-led instrumental interlude with lots of poignant spaces and chord changes like prolonged sighs – early Johnny Marr meets the Meat Puppets of “Two Rivers.” Then, the near-soul of “Something’s Going On” which seems mostly to consist of itemised lists of things in an undisclosed location – “the glass, the clock on the wall…the picture of Michael and Bubbles” – with discreet electronic burbling subverting the song’s musical undertow. “Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train” is slower but similarly constructed, with its introductory imagery of “Wearing a halo of mist,” two people (once lovers?) survey the scenery of a past memory to which they can barely hold on (“The picturesque old quay house, the car park”). Eventually Barry’s string section is left alone to play a slow, four-chord cycle. Even more eventually do you realise the section’s similarity to the closing moments of Psychic TV’s “Message From The Temple.”
With the exception of the aforementioned “The Lone Official,” the tempo of AW CMON is generally one of funereal slowness – in terms of the nocturnal arrangements and Wagner’s voice, one is reminded of a Nashville Tindersticks sans the Ladbroke Grove doom fetish. Another example of this approach is the brooding “Each Time I Bring It Up It Seems To Bring You Down,” which Wagner opens with the observation “Hobbled by the fact that there must be a problem…” and which seems again to be about the gap between image and reality which seems likely to jeopardise any relationship. Lyrically indicative of this album’s increasing bitterness, there are plenty of classic Wagner splenetic soundbites such as “Take the best of me and throw it to the dogs” and “You can call me bastard/You can call me friend/But don’t forget to call me/Before the story ends.” The song’s steady progress is punctuated by a deceptively jaunty four-step staircase strings/guitar motif which sounds like a musical question mark – Wagner daring the Other to deny his truth.
Another, more conventional and slightly more upbeat instrumental “Timothy B Schmidt” leads us into the bizarre interlude “Women Help To Create The Kind Of Men They Despise.” This is the closest audible aesthetic link to the lounge balladry of Is A Woman; over Crow’s cocktail piano, Wagner considers the title’s implied question – sex as hatred – citing Stanley Wilson’s Distractions and even briefly throwing in a strange staccato harmony interlude, like barbershop Steve Reich.
“I Hate Candy” is a comparably straightforward ballad with the nearest thing on the album to a chorus (“Where’s my little trouble girl?” – the comma between “trouble” and “girl” presumably optional) but the album then proceeds to reach its emotional peak, firstly with “I Haven’t Heard A Word I’ve Said.” Following an almost dublike intro for spaced-out piano and bass, we are led into an out-of-tempo peroration, punctuated by Tyler’s wah-wah, wherein Wagner considers whether the faults are not all within his own sense of cliché. “A dialogue is half-created out of our own words/We like the texture and pretend that this we haven’t heard…but somehow with the help of pills/I remain a pillar of corn.” Later he expands the what-are-words-worth nature of the song into a choice between life and death: “Let’s guess the number of regrets a good life will acquire/There seems to be some small discrepancy…but somehow we should work upon the better half of dead.”
This itself acts as a prelude to the album’s stunning closing track, “Action Figure” which Wagner sings beautifully, sometimes with fear, other times with barely contained fury. The lyric starts with a touch of self-mockery: “I heard a rumour that I’m sad/Or at least that I feel bad/Whoever said that doesn’t know/I’m pretty sure that I don’t know.” But the self-mockery then turns outwards into revelation – or will it? “Let’s let the cat out of the bag/Let’s let the neighbourhood go bad” (note the subtle backward guitar mixed in under the latter line) – before Wagner goes on to question what exactly constitutes A Life: “So we can put the watch away/And we can throw away the case/And we can walk through God’s own will/Because He’s crying, crying still.” He then throws in lyrical and subtle musical references to “Bugs” from Is A Woman (perhaps the most absent vocal performance ever recorded) and “The Man Who Liked Beer” (“I’ve swatted bugs all afternoon/I’ve swallowed beer like a cartoon”).
Then Wagner’s rage increases as he considers the compromise under which all life must endure: “I will learn to look away/When there are things I cannot bear/Perhaps you are seeing different too/Perhaps we’ve learned to tell the difference/And there are people that I know/Who learn to live within their limits/And we are lucky to be so/Completely interactive” – the last two lines delivered with an irony which could stab you if you’re not looking.
One way of looking at the second album, NO YOU CMON, is that it is another attempt to tell the same story, but this time choosing a different path down which to walk, in the sense of a second chance, in the sense of let’s try again, and this time let’s get it right. So the two albums might not be as inseparable as they are ostensibly intended to be. Again we start with an orchestral instrumental – and this, to emphasise the concept of a second chance, actually is entitled “Sunrise.” The music is markedly more upbeat and cheerful, and halfway through, Paul Niehaus’ pedal steel, entirely absent from AW CMON, finally makes its entry (cf. ODB waiting until the beginning of the second CD of Wu-Tang Forever before making his entry).
But is even this a decoy? Again we segue into Thurston Moore-esque disembodied guitar howling, which in turn segues into the jazzy piano vamp of “Low Ambition.” Beginning with the lyric: “Your drug of choice/Mix it with a voice/A voice that’s creepy,” this appears to be a sister song to “Four Pounds In Two Days,” depicting addiction from a different, and perhaps closer, perspective. But again Wagner refuses to wallow; in “There’s Still Time” his passion audibly rises as he instructs you to start living – “There’s still a coat/There’s still a hat…Is there any reason why we take this crap?/Cover the floor, same as before.” Hear how the strings are palpably pulsating at 2:48 and marvel at how Wagner manages to incorporate Weller into his worldview.
And then, something completely unexpected, or perhaps not, as the emotion which has been slowly simmering throughout the album(s) thus far finally boils over. Following a brief electronic lament worthy of the Aphex Twin, Lambchop drive as they have never driven before, and for the first time ever rock out on, appropriately enough, “Nothing Adventurous Please,” wherein we are aghast at the spectacle of the alt. country avatars turning into Neu! – a motorik drive which is gradually overwhelmed by noise guitar and grumpy piano commentary as Wagner gleefully chants, “You just missed us!” A cross between “Hallogallo” and Sonic Youth’s “Total Trash,” and the beating heart of both albums. The new-found playfulness continues in “The Problem” where Wagner advises us: “When the chimp on the tree/Shakes his fist at me/You know I love it.” And yet even this will scarcely prepare you for the extremely silly bubblegum of “Shang A Dang Dang” wherein Wagner’s vocals finally mutate into Reeves and Mortimer singing in the Club Style – quite possibly Lambchop’s first hit single, if they want one.
“If the telephone rings, I should throw it out,” begins Wagner on the more subdued but no less passionate “About A Lighter.” Some bitterness aimed at the Other is still in evidence (“I’ve said some things that you do ignore/But I wouldn’t let them bother you any more”) unless he happens to be singing to, or at, us.
“Under A Dream Of A Lie” (a deliberate titular echo of the Fall’s “Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul”?) is the closest either album comes to recapturing the post-Curtis Mayfield soulfulness of Nixon, a delectable ballad, even if it begins with the words “Give up like a man!” And then another unexpected side to Lambchop is revealed in the instrumental “Jan 24” which, with its staccato piano and deliberately clunky ‘70s pop-rock rhythm, sounds like Michael Nyman auditioning for Lieutenant Pigeon.
But beware of the superficial jollity, for this foreshadows what is perhaps the bleakest and most disturbing song on either of these albums, “The Gusher.” Following a brief guitar blast of the “Paranoid” intro, we again detour into cabaret time, albeit a distinctly black and malevolent cabaret. Over an MoR samba rhythm which Crow continually attempts to derail into Aladdin Sane territory, Wagner, in his lowest and scariest of voices, sings lines like “The damp stains upon your jeans…The water in the sink turns brown/And you scrape your skin with a razor.” The music’s jollity, now forced, counteracts and highlights this ode to self-mutilation in the same way as Roy Wood managed on “Music To Commit Suicide By.” Eventually a chant of “Who can turn the world on with this smile?” sardonically manifests itself, and as the “Paranoid” guitar riff storms back in, Wagner climaxes the song with the reassurance “You’re gonna make it…” then adding the frightening snarl “AFTER ALL.”
Nothing left for Wagner to do now except sum both records up with the song “Listen,” where again he agonises about the uselessness of language for This Sort Of Thing. “I will listen, especially at work,” he sings, as Niehaus’ pedal steel reappears. “So put me in a bag and bury me in rags/The lady upstairs, she makes me strong…Confused and caught up/Could you give it up for this?/I will listen to what you’ve got to say/You said it anyway/Though you’re not, not too sure/And you, you will listen/’Cos it means that much to you/You’re everything I do or see.” Singing at the lady or singing at us? “They may not work it out,” he concludes to himself, and makes his exit as the conventional country-rock instrumental “The Producer” plays over the end credits.
So are these Lambchop’s best records? I would say that existing fans will adore it and should save up for it now; neophytes should buy Nixon ahead of this, as it is still their most fully realised record. Nevertheless the new albums are continuing evidence of Wagner’s immense ability to put a microscope to the most seemingly conventional of stories or musical forms, and by sheer dint of his imagination, turn them into something which is quietly but extremely unconventional.
JOSS STONE
She is 16 years old, comes from somewhere in Devon and is clearly going to become an extremely big star; and for once I can say, justifiably so. From the opening seconds of the opening song on her opening album, The Soul Sessions - classified as a “mini-album,” although at 42 minutes it is what we creaky old tubs used to call a Proper Album, and it remains a pity that more people don’t follow this example – “The Chokin’ Kind,” as she almost weeps “I only meant to love you – didn’t you know it? Didn’t you know it?” over sombre organ and a steady bass, she provides the greatest musical shock to this writer this year; that additive-free, sample-free soulful soul music, sung straight and played straight, suddenly sounds like the freshest music around. As her confidence steadily grows in inverse proportion to her helplessness – “I gave you my heart, but you wanted my mind” – until the electrifying moment at 0:55 when Cindy Blackman’s snare drum cracks into action, it is as if Joss Stone is inventing soul music, as if she’d just thought of it. And this is a quietly stunning performance – real spite mixes with despair as she sings “So you can kill again/With a bottle of poison or a knife,” and listen to how she actually sounds as though she’s choking at 3:11 on the word “kind” in “it’s the chokin’ kind” – never bombastic, always heartfelt.
How did this happen? In 1986, Gavin Martin or similar would have raved about this without end, urging us to listen to it for an hour every morning to teach ourselves dignity – the kind of tunnel vision which drove thousands of NME readers to Q, or to Sigue Sigue Sputnik – so how is it that this music suddenly matters again? Perhaps because it does matter, as opposed to being made to matter; the ten tracks on Soul Sessions are free of glitch (though, crucially, not of modernism) and attempts at Bollywood. Nowhere on the record does Stone sound as if she’s trying to flog sex – any sensuality, as it would be, comes naturally. Given the car crashes of the recent Kylie and Britney albums, it has suddenly become desirable to listen to someone singing to you, rather than at you, or through a million varispeed modulators. Soul Sessions is a record bereft of irony, and therefore sounds fresh as only genuinely contemporary music can sound.
Interestingly, despite being 16 years old and from Devon, Stone’s debut album is currently only available in the USA, on EMI’s S-Curve subsidiary. In the UK the release has been held back until early 2004, to avoid being squashed in the Christmas rush, and on a recent routine inspection of London record shops only Rough Trade seem to have import copies in stock – as with Cody ChesnuTT, RT takes the initiative.
And what happened? Essentially, Stone was taken to the USA, and over just two days laid down most of the tracks on this album in Miami, produced and accompanied by veterans of the original ‘70s TK Records/Miami soul scene – Betty Wright very much in evidence as co-producer, arranger and backing vocalist, Benny Latimore on piano, Timmy Thomas on organ, Little Beaver on guitar. It’s clear from Stone’s endearingly cheerful sleevenotes that things went well – on the group photo in the CD booklet, she’s scribbled out herself, with the comment: “OK, I really hate this shot of me but everyone else looks wicked!” She certainly comes across as excited about the whole business, and the record itself is imbued with the irresistible mixture of awe and enthusiasm which becomes a 16-year-old singer doing this sort of thing for the first time.
Now imagine what would have happened had she gone down the Pop Idol/Fame Academy route – indeed there’s no need to imagine; look at what’s happened to poor old Alex Parks; forced to rush out a half-completed album to make her management some spare change before Christmas, full of passionless covers of pointless songs, clearly itching for a Lewis Taylor or Steve Albini to bring out what, even in these surroundings, is latent within her. Simon Cowell would have denounced Joss Stone as “too quirky for the viewers,” for not being the Alma Cogan reincarnation he desires. He wouldn’t be able to control her.
All ten songs on Soul Sessions are covers, but the choices are unpredictable and decidedly unhackneyed. Whereas Cowell would have had her doing “I Say A Little Prayer,” instead Stone goes here for Aretha’s seldom-revived “All The King’s Horses.” This is a connoisseur’s selection.
And none of the covers is more unpredictable than Stone’s brilliant reshaping of the White Stripes’ “Fell In Love With A Boy” which, along with Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” Alex Harvey’s “Delilah” and John Cale’s “Heartbreak Hotel” demonstrates the difference between covering a song and interpreting a song. Here Stone replaces Jack White’s hypermanic on-the-spot puffing and panting by slowing everything down and taking her time. She is helped with this by the fantastic production of ?uestlove from The Roots – note the subtle electro underlay throughout the track, something which could never have been achieved in 1963 or 1986 for that matter, and note how she even manages to improve the chord sequence, with Latimore’s piano chords under “I said it once before but it bears repeating” at 1:43 being of especial note.
Elsewhere Stone’s exuberance spills out joyfully all over the place. I can’t think of many, if any, contemporary singers who could inject so much unironic enthusiasm into a performance as she does on Willie Garner’s “Super Duper Love (Are You Diggin’ On Me?)” – from the opening “Yeah!” through the drawn out triplicate of “just to know” (“that you are mine”) at 1:34, the little whoop of “Ooh!” she lets out at 2:24, her aside to “Wait for me, Little Beaver!” at 2:43, to which Beaver’s guitar squeals back his agreement, we are perhaps looking at the most natural British female soul singer since Dusty Springfield (and this record TROUNCES Dusty In Memphis). What a change from the faux-inscrutability of Beyoncé and Britney!
Only 16? Well we recall how Steve Winwood joined his big brother in the Spencer Davis Group at 15, but Winwood has very reasonably commented that in his day, you could leave school at 14 and embark on an apprenticeship, and the Spencer Davis Group happened to be his. But some singers do not need to be coached or forced – they just have it, and Joss Stone seems to me to be one of these increasingly rare natural talents.
The arrangements certainly aren’t retro; their attack and bounce are completely up to the minute, proving that imagination will always triumph over technology; no machine could have come up with Timmy Thomas’ spontaneous run up the organ in response to Stone’s wailing “Don’t let her come and steal the happiness away!” at 2:46 in her reading of “Victim Of A Foolish Heart,” not to mention the fantastic call-and-response with the backing singers of “I’m not gonna let her make me/I’m not gonna let her…ooouurgh!” towards the end of the same track.
“Fell In Love With A Boy” isn’t the only radical reworking of a “standard” here; listen to her restyling of the old James Boys ‘60s testosterone hagiography “Some Kind Of Wonderful.” Here she actually converts the song into sex; if her breath-exhausted squeal of “of my mind” in the line “He almost drives me out of my mind” at 1:39 isn’t an orgasm, then I don’t know what is (note also how Jack Daley’s bass immediately responds with a satisfied sigh).
Only once does she tentatively nudge towards the neighbouring borders of Houston/Carey multinote bombast, in her reading of Carla Thomas’ “I’ve Fallen In Love With You” where she nearly, but not quite, goes over the edge. Still, her repeated emphasis on the “BEAT” of “my BEATing heart” and the quadruple descents of “you know” (cf. the love that loves to love etc. on Van Morrison’s “Madame George”) are striking.
Yet perhaps the most impressive tracks here are where the instrumentation is stripped down. “Dirty Man,” where she is accompanied by just two guitars, is a luscious fuck-off of a performance – get her subtle emphasis on “good house keeper” at 0:38, yet another “ooh!” at 0:56, and above all her spine-tingling scream of “DIRTY!” at 2:04. Xtina? Coarse varlet!
Most moving is “I Had A Dream” which she begins accappella and which she takes very slowly, painful in her grieving of a lost utopia which can never be retrieved (“I thought it would last all night”). She retreats, virtually in tears, repeating the refrain “What a lovely dream it was” as the drums tick tock behind her and Thomas holds down a funereal organ chord.
Most profound, however, is her extended closing reading of the Isley Brothers’ “For The Love Of You.” With only Angelo Morris’ Fender Rhodes for instrumental support, this tests Stone over seven-and-a-half minutes, and she comes through it brilliantly. Apart from the mischievous lyric change early on – “All we need is candlelight and a D’Angelo song – ooh, so soft and so LONG!” – she performs it straight and performs it passionately, slowly and patiently. When she sees “a slow horizon slowly coming into view,” Morris’ electric piano momentarily pauses to shimmer before resuming. It’s not a song about coming back into the world; Joss Stone turns it into a song about coming into the world for the first time. About taking what she knows and expressing it in ways which will entrance us. Don’t let Timbaland or the Neptunes near her. She needs room to breathe and develop, and I am sure that she will, for on this evidence she may well become the finest soul singer Britain has ever produced. Luxuriate in and be astonished by her closing “ooh, to love you, ooh, OOH, ooh-mmmmm” as words fail her and she unconsciously echoes the “now, now, NOW” with which Linda Perhacs closes Parallelograms. This is someone vital.
PLURAMON
And this might just be the most vital record this year, if not the most vital record in a dozen years. “Shoegazing through and through!” says (approvingly) the chap behind the counter in Shoreditch’s Smallfish Records who sold it to me; “the best avant/pop noise album since Isn’t Anything” says Rob Young at The Wire. And, you know, readers, it is actually even better than that.
What am I talking about? Dreams Top Rock, the new album by Cologne’s Marcus Schmickler, a.k.a. Pluramon. His past history is summed up in Mr Young’s Wire review, but on this album he has singlehandedly endeavoured to continue and develop the work which Kevin Shields has let stand since 1991. It is, let us make no bones about it, a pop record in the vein of Loveless. It is the record which most of us were hoping MBV would go on to produce after Loveless. It is the record which the well-meaning but hapless likes of Chapterhouse and Slowdive unsuccessfully tried to make. And…did I say “singlehandedly”? Not quite. For on Dreams Top Rock (how easily that title could read as “Dream Stop Rock”) he collaborates with, I kid you not, the long-lost muse of David Lynch – Julee Cruise. And this record therefore also serves as the record which most of us were hoping Cruise would go on to produce after Floating Into The Night (and incidentally, on the same recent round robin of London record shops, I note with some incredulity, when looking for the Julee Cruise browser marker, that there was no such thing; that Floating Into The Night has in fact been allowed to float into the world of deleted albums). So we are essentially talking about Loveless with Julee Cruise on vocals. And it has knocked this writer flat.
Right from the beginning, you realise how special this record is going to be. Following all four seconds of guitar glitch which constitutes the opening track “oo4,” Julee Cruise and Schmickler suddenly cut into your headphones, as if an old C90 tape hadn’t quite been taped over entirely, seemingly halfway through the song. But the song itself, “Time For A Lie,” is awesome, one of the few songs of 2003 to which that adjective can be fairly applied. The same ineluctable mixture of electronica and guitar, the midline between seduction and attack, and at the dead (or living) centre of this sonic labyrinth is the unchanged voice of Ms Cruise: “We’re walking in the sunshine/There’s no worries/It’s just playtime” – or as unchanged as you can distinguish from the surrounding caves of music. She stays steadfast and stable as the music winds its way around her. But this isn’t the tonight-Matthew-I’m-going-to-be-Bilinda-Butcher presentation so familiar to patrons of the Camden Underworld/Dublin Castle/Kentish Town Forum between 1989-92 – see how, at 3:36, the fuzz and guitars cut out to leave a placid string synth backdrop, accompanied by careful acoustic guitar and piano (stylistically, if momentarily, not that far removed from Lambchop). Towards the end Schmickler picks out the main tune of the song; there is a nod towards ABC’s “Be Near Me,” but I’m not sure if it was intentional. No matter – the crucial difference between Pluramon and MBV’s ideas of avant pop is that Schmickler doesn’t go for Shields’ characteristic undulating wow-and-flutter, although there’s the same spectre of the “body-less” or “player-less” guitar. Nonetheless, notice how right at the end of “Time For A Lie,” the final synth chord gradually wavers out of tonality, even though in fact it’s only been modulated by half a tone. But the unrest that causes is enough to continue engaging our interest.
“Noise Academy” (visions suddenly materialise of Richard Park tutoring the Jason Pierces of tomorrow!) continues in the same vein, Cruise’s voice still recognisable but not especially decipherable, lost in the ecstasy of Schmickler’s trellises. For those to whom it matters, it still manages to “rock like hell” – but it rocks like a vaguely unstable cradle rather than the easy (Darkness) option. In the brief “PS” (which is a PS to “Noise Academy”) is Cruise singing “be sad”?
“Flageolea,” conversely, succeeds brilliantly in updating the template which Lynch and Badalamenti constructed so perfectly for Cruise back in 1989; the track eases its way in with its ‘50s Santo and Johnny tremelo guitars (courtesy of guest guitarist Kevin Drumm), brushes and bass clarinet. Gradually, though, electronic static starts to permeate the body of the piece, and eventually – almost imperceptibly – it becomes a post-Aphex Twin lullaby, the familiar subtly turning into the alien. When Cruise’s disembodied voice enters at 2:25, intoning “I’m not gonna stay,” it really does threaten to stop one’s heart (it’s as sinister as Sarah Cracknell’s late vocal entry in Saint Etienne’s “The Way We Live Now”). As with Joss Stone, Schmickler and Cruise have pulled off the feat of reviving a corner of music which most people seemed to have ceased being bothered about, and making it new and profound again.
And anyone who isn’t in floods of tears by the end of “Have You Seen” isn’t human. “Have you seen Jill?” entreats Cruise’s vulnerable voice, as if she knows she may have met the same fate as Laura Palmer. Again, not all the words are easily caught, but there are snatches which spring out here and there – “You left too soon,” “I’m all alone, you’re never home,” “Have you flown to another galaxy?” “Are you happy now and in a better life?” Yet as Cruise realises the extent of her loss – “Do you see Jill? ‘Cos I don’t?” – Schmickler’s guitar starts to cry along with her as synths cascade and recede regretfully all around her like failed fireworks.
“Hello Shadow” again buries Cruise deep in Schmickler’s post-MBV mix (those distantly placed synths which can sound like orchestras), but words such as “I wanna hold you again” and “I don’t know why I’m here, or where I am” continue to stab the unwary listener. Her voice is much clearer, but now Hawking-processed, as she itemises the benign diktats of corporate annihilation of the individual in “Difference Machine,” a track which suggests Radiohead’s “Fitter, Healthier” with the U2 filtered out and the MBV (or maybe even Merzbow) filtered in – look how Schmickler’s wall of guitars gatecrash the song at 3:05 and wail uncontrollably.
And then, almost finally (for this is another admirably old-style album, lasting a concise 39 minutes) Schmickler and Cruise revisit “Time For A Lie” and recast it as “Time (Catharsia Mix),” and this track in itself might be one of the most remarkable tracks of the last dozen years. Here, Lynch and MBV are joined in disturbed union. There is now a clear plateau of synthesiser over which Cruise explains precisely the “lie” of the title. Even here, words and meanings are never quite clear; the song begins “We’re walking in the sunshine” but two lines later we find that “the stars are out/The moonlight shines…Everything’s lovely tonight/It’s a wonderful time in our lives.” But then the twist: “We’re peaceful, we’re restful/The people stare and wish they were us/They’ll never know that there’s no trust/And everything is all fucked up/It’s a beautiful time for a lie.” And later still: “You never know/I’ll make it so/But he’s around/I can’t let go/I’ll never leave with you/I’ll stay…He doesn’t want me anyway.” It’s as profoundly disturbed a “love” song as 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love,” and the crowning musical moment occurs at 2:15 when, of all people, AMM’s Keith Rowe nudges in with his “tabletop guitar” and proceeds to take an aural chainsaw to the song’s presumed bliss, almost obliterating it at one point (with the same unalloyed grief which he applied to the emotional midpeak of his “Cathnor” duet with John Tilbury earlier this year) before bowing out at 4:00 to leave the same gradually modulating synth coda as the original. It is perhaps the most startling intervention in pop music since Evan Parker’s multiple saxes exploded behind Scott Walker’s “And the ceilings are rising and falling” in 1983’s “Track 6.”
Schmickler then proceeds to bring the record to a close with “Log.” More guitar/electronic static is sprayed over a lugubrious piano ballad refrain which could almost be an Elton John backing track. Soon an echoing Ultravox synth line is added to give gravity to the mourning (melodically it’s the same damaged grandeur as μ-Ziq’s “London Fog”). Cruise laments in the distance. The song ends on a sustained “A Day In The Life” final chord/tonality. The only possible end to this astonishing, and I suspect potentially very important, record. It is not easy to find, but if there are mountains standing awkwardly in your path I would politely recommend that you move them to get a copy. It is that great.
(The record is released on the Karaoke label – cat. no. Kalk cd 23 – and as with so many other important records of this year, the major chains do not seem to have condescended to stock it (it’s listed on the HMV and Tower websites, but seemingly not stocked in the actual shops), but Smallfish definitely do have copies in stock at the moment, and Rough Trade should be able to order one for you – tell Judy I sent you! Otherwise visit the label’s website (www.karaokekalk.de) or email the label (kalkfee@netcologne.de). Or just try your luck with Amazon. To paraphrase the Pet Shop Boys, I normally wouldn’t do this kind of thing, but this record really has to be heard)
Monday, November 17, 2003
POP IN 2003: HIDE FROM THE HURT
The façade of pop is made to look stronger, even though its inherent flimsiness pre-empts its imminent collapse, by ensuring that no subtext whatsoever can interrupt one’s consuming (or consummation?) of a pop record other than those already programmed for your convenience, mostly masturbatory subtexts which indicate that Tin Pan Alley has located its final resting place in Berwick Street.
So it is that “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, a song and a performance which puts every other Top 40 single this year to shame – and that is a quite deliberate “retro” viewpoint – languishes intentionally at #39 in the Fun Forty, whereas it should of course have been number one from now until beyond the New Year. If only Cash had been blessed with Eva Cassidy’s cheekbones, for even necrophilia in pop demands a shapely corpse to fuck. But the single’s low chart placing, coupled with the non-appearance of any Cash record in the album charts, sends out the unmistakable signal that Cash’s message – being inextricably entwined with staring morality in the face, and worse, smiling defiantly at it – is not one the pop audience of 2003 wishes to hear, or for that matter be aware of. An untidy, unsightly grandparent who clogs up the irreducible speed of the modern home (Hanif Kureishi’s The Mother), something and someone We Could Do Without. It’s so inconvenient, so unsexy.
This rebuttal of death and depth is echoed in the piteous nothingness of the current number one single, “Slow” by Kylie Minogue, which conversely is one of the deadest, most dishonest pop records I have ever heard. There is nothing in its four or so minutes to signify that this song had to be written, that an emotion of some kind had to be expressed through this song; no, as with this week’s #10, “Sexed Up” by Robbie Williams, it exists only to allow Kylie Minogue to continue being “Kylie Minogue”™ for another six months. And, not to be underdone, or even undone, we have Britney, who has conspicuously failed to produce a Control to match Timberlake’s Off The Wall; both demanding to our faces that we have no choice but to be turned on by them.
Kylie has never been sexy, of course – that perpetually raised eyebrow of hers has always put paid to such notions, and watching her gamely attempt, or being forced, to be “sexy” is as painful and humiliating as if, say, Kristin Scott Thomas strolled on amidst those red lasers. One upward curl of the lower lip of Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect 6 betrays more genuine sexuality than the entire lives of Spears or Minogue; not to mention the delicious conurbation where the lower end of Mirren’s fringe meets her slightly regretful, slightly inviting right eyebrow, balancing delicately between post-menopausal and post-coital. Two kinds of weariness which, at a certain time in one’s life, dovetail into one kindness. And it is difficult not to think: haven’t we had enough of unsexy “sex,” of “clever” post-glitch/Timbaland dropouts and fiddles, of “respect” being directly proportional to the artist’s wardrobe or bank balance (Missy Elliott); haven’t we, in short, had enough of the whole false fucking farrago, of dead records like the new Minogue album being hailed in The Observer as a “cool retro album,” of the very notions of “cool” and “retro” and their rôles in obliterating, or at least secreting, concepts of mortality and death, of their increasingly tiresome denial of the reality of growing up? Besides which, if it were real “retro” the twats of Shoreditch were after, they would do well to reflect on the fact that the singles charts in 1969 were overflowing with morbid and apocalyptic music – I specify 1969 as this will be the next in my occasional A Year Of Singles Charted series, which is currently under preparation, with a view to examining the difference between Boards of Canada’s idyllic “1969 in the sunshine,” the equally idyllic 1969 through which this five-year-old writer lived, and the gruesome reality which actually existed in 1969.
Could a single like Emma Bunton’s “Maybe” – currently #18 - have existed, let alone charted, in 1969? It’s a tricky call to make, and a frustrating one too, for “Maybe” comes so unbearably close to being the greatest pop single ever made as of today – and of course, coming so unbearably close to being the greatest pop single ever made is the same as being 30,000 singles away from being the greatest pop single ever made – that its ultimate failure is rendered all the more tragic. I wanted to believe in this single, but the problem is I’m not sure whether the single wants to believe in itself. There’s nothing at all wrong with Bunton’s performance of the song, either on record or on TOTP, surrounded by Young Generation-style dancers. As a record, as a song, it is so close to being the smartest reclamation of 1969 or 1971 mainstream MoR pop that Saint Etienne never pulled off, simply because the Pearl and Dean “ba ba ba-ba-ba-ba” vocal refrain which masquerades as a chorus, coupled with the London Palladium chord changes which mark the second half of each verse, in truth never approaches what MoR actually was in the charts of 1969 or 1971. Fast forward through your Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw singles compilations and you will find nothing like “Maybe,” and that is the great confidence trick which this record nearly pulls off. It’s an idealised Saturday night BBC1 or Monday night Show Of The Week BBC2 approximation of pop – one of those obscure sub-Sondheim songs which you would never hear anywhere else apart from Marti Caine or Grace Kennedy, always flanked and fondled by overzealous male dancers.
So why doesn’t it work? Two reasons leading to one; the first being the label itself, which credits, not “Emma Bunton” but “Emma” in the selfsame attempt to achieve first-name-only recognised brand status (It’s Monday night! It’s ten past eight! It’s Emma!), and try as one might, the name Emma does not carry the inbuilt, unreproducable iconic status of a Cilla or even a Marti. The second reason is the use of the word “definitely” in the first half of the song’s chorus, which actually has the cumulative effect of deflating the whole song; by this Hugh Grant of an English word, the song is hoisted down from the flag of pop/showbiz immortality and repositioned as – well, just another Shoreditch smartarse, ordinary attempt to be “retro,” with that “definitely” positioned very deliberately so that “Emma” doesn’t get any high-falutin’ ideas about iconic stature, learns her place and keeps it. A pity, because Bunton’s composure while performing the song on TOTP suggests that she would be quite content with a standard, unironic family entertainment persona, and in her own undemonstrative Home Counties way (compare the same almost-sensual-but-not-quite aura of her previous “What Took You So Long?”) she’s far sexier than the luckless Minogue, tongue perpetually licking at the corners of her mouth in order to service her debts.
THE BEE GEES – “ODESSA”
As I said, the singles charts of 1969 (and, to a slightly lesser extent, those of the last quarter of 1968) were almost unique in their morbidity, and from “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” via “In The Year 2525” and “Bad Moon Rising” through to “Two Little Boys,” the smell of apocalypse – of everything ending - was unavoidable. Even the progenitor of the year’s first number one – the Scaffold’s “Lily The Pink” – has died by the song’s end. And I sincerely doubt that any “kitsch” or “retro” operatives in 2003 pop, fixated by Austin Powers rather than the Tet Offensive (without realising that the former financed the latter), could come anywhere near the exceptional and still shocking achievement that was Odessa the luxuriously packaged (though not, criminally, yet so on CD) 1969 double album by the Bee Gees. I had meant to hold off discussion on this record until it could be incorporated into a fuller article on the Gibb brothers’ work per se - and this, pending a properly remastered CD reissue of Robin Gibb’s Sing Slowly Sisters, is likewise currently in preparation – but Robin Carmody’s thoughts on it this week have prompted me to devote more time and space to the record itself.
It is difficult even to imagine any major record company today allowing the then 21-year-old Barry Gibb, and 19-year-old Maurice and Robin, to go overboard (literally) with this elaborately orchestrated quasi-concept album, perhaps about the town of Odessa, perhaps a greater allegory on the USSR, perhaps simply an extended meditation on the slowness of death – who can say, for, as was common with late ‘60s/early ‘70s concept albums (see also, very pertinently, Peter Wyngarde’s album), the “concept” seems to have been jettisoned after the fourth track. In terms of production, arrangement and performance, the record is a mess in the same way that the White Album is a mess – but that depends on your interpretation of a “mess” being a good or bad thing; in relation to this writer’s inner life – and how can music be described subjectively without relating it to the inner life of the person who is describing it? – it is a good thing, for it admits the existence of doubt, of indecision, of the freedom to change one’s mind, sometimes halfway through a song; all the freedom of which the supposedly subversive likes of Busted can only continue to dream (and incidentally, the most subversive thing about Busted is their extraordinary physical resemblance, when performing, to Haircut 100; the same body jerks, and even the lead singer/guitarist looks exactly like Nick Heyward with a 1972 haircut). The freedom to fail? The freedom not to sell records? – for Odessa was not a commercial success, yielding only one single (the top five hit “First of May”) the release of which was okayed by Robert Stigwood without the band’s consent, and indeed the question of extracting singles from Odessa was the factor which led directly to Robin Gibb temporarily quitting the group. And yet it is the Bee Gees album which is now most admired and idolised, and it unquestionably marks a point where the group’s adventure became most pronounced – everything which they did thereafter, however great in its own right, represents a decided step away from the nihilism and bereavement which permeate the core of this record.
It begins with the album’s longest track, the 7:33 title track “Odessa (City On The Black Sea).” Originally earmarked as a potential single, the band retreated from this possibility as apparently they didn’t wish to be seen to be cashing in on the then-current vogue of releasing long, multifaceted singles (“Macarthur Park,” “Hey Jude,” “Eloise”), although a likelier reason is that the song doesn’t really have a strong enough central hook to transform it into a single, and does work better as the “beat this Beatles” opening gauntlet of the album (although I always wish that the Moody Blues had had the nerve to go with the full seven-minute album version of “Nights In White Satin,” complete with choir, narration and phasing, as a single). In any case it’s one of the most astounding introductory tracks to an album which I can think of – the seafaring orchestra at the beginning quickly explodes into Varese-esque atonality as the Gibbs emerge out of the fog to declaim sinisterly “14th of February 1899 [Valentine’s Day!]/The British ship Veronica was lost without a sign/Bye bye black sheep, you haven’t any wool” before vanishing to make way for a cello and acoustic guitar (and then a piano). Barry Gibb’s voice then emerges to sing of his plight; stuck on top of an iceberg which he is trying to carve into the shape of a ship, floating helplessly in the North Atlantic, trying fruitlessly to get back home. Essentially it’s an update and expansion of “New York Mining Disaster 1941” – and wasn’t the latter one of the most morbid debut hit singles from any pop act? – with the dummy cut loose and BG free to meditate on his own at uninterrupted length. Reflecting on his lover, he muses, “You loved a vicar more than words can say/Ask him to pray that I won’t melt away/And I’ll see your face again” (which latter words are directly relevant to the next song). As with Lucas Belvaux’ escaped terrorist in the astonishing extended closing sequence of Trilogy: One, he has retreated into himself to facilitate his own icy demise. The approach of mortality is indicated by the strings’ quote from “Für Elise” which materialises at 5:38. You might think of the song as the Peter Green of “Man Of The World” mutating into the “Albatross.”
The next song, “You’ll Never See My Face Again,” is one of the bitterest songs the Gibbs ever composed, as blunt in its unmitigated hatred as the Dylan of “Positively Fourth Street” or the Costello of “Tramp The Dirt Down.” Deliberately positioned on the album to bookend the later, and stunning, “I Laugh In Your Face,” here are the tender words of love the Gibbs have to offer: “It makes me laugh you’ve got no friends/It took a thousand years for you to find out why,” but see how the spleen is balanced by the rueful upward orchestral chord modulation of the song’s title line. “I wish that everything was coloured white,” Barry continues, and he even essays the most mirthless of sung laughs at 2:08. By the song’s fade, even the strings have started to laugh at the hapless unfaithful lover, and the rhythm actually starts to speed up towards the fadeout as if the Gibbs have considered that not seeing her face again might not be such a bad idea.
“Black Diamond” is almost, but not quite, a mainstream Bee Gees ballad, and of the other songs the most thematically close to the album’s original concept – here Robin takes the lead vocal, beginning with a desolate “Where are you? I love you. Where are you to keep me warm?” as he continues to float atop his melting iceberg (“I followed a river where the dead man would play”). In fact it’s one of Robin’s finest vocal performances, effortlessly straddling three octaves, leading to a bleak fadeout of “Say goodbye to Auld Lang Syne.”
Thereafter the concept seems to vanish and the consequent detours are pleasingly unexpected. In “Marley Purt Drive,” the Bee Gees have a crack at country-rock – the influence of the Band’s then-current hit “The Weight” is particularly pronounced – and Barry dolefully muses (with a slight melodic nod to “The Mighty Quinn”) that “with 15 kids and a family on the skids/I’ve gotta go for a Sunday drive.” By the song’s end, this has inexplicably mutated into “an orphanage full of 35 kids.”
The album journeys to even stranger universes. “Edison” is a stop-start tribute to the song’s titular subject, who among other things “gave us cylinders to please.” The song seesaws between out-of-time Beach Boys harmonies (complete with “God Only Knows”-style piercing organ intro) and frustratingly brief spells of proto-motorik electropop which almost manage to invent Pulp.
Then there’s “Melody Fair,” the greatest Bee Gees single that never was, a song as musically appealing as “Massachusetts” or “Words” – but again, catch the catches in the choruses: “Remember you’re only a woman”; perhaps too slightly out of kilter to sit comfortably in the Top 40 even then. Note also little sidenotes such as the eight handclaps which succeed the line “Watching the rain falling down.”
What to make, however, of “Suddenly,” with its atonal revving-up guitar intro leading to Barry drunkenly cackling “How can you tell by looking at me?” alternating with the minor-key oboe which accompanies the line “Suddenly there’s a boy alone in the rain” (see how the themes transpose consistently from song to song on this album) before the rhythm kicks in and the Gibbs ask the question “How can you tell if humans are real?” An unlikely missing link between Syd Barrett and Blur. This is succeeded by the even more inexplicable “Whisper Whisper” with its portentous orchestral introduction which suddenly gives way to a vaguely vaudevillian knees-up queerly reminiscent of early, Decca-era Bowie (“I am illegal,” sings Barry at one point, indicating that this might somewhere along the line have started life as an anti-drug song). The band, however, sound palpably stoned, but even this does not prepare us for the sudden gearshift at 2:30 when a Pearl and Dean horn section come in, the drums kick up a breakbeat and the Gibbs start cheerily chanting “I am man and you are woman/Who needs marriage? We are humans all.” This then gives way to, of all things, a drum solo and then a final brief horn fanfare before the brothers desperately cry “No no no no NO!” and the trumpets squeal themselves into vaporisation.
We then get another of the album’s big setpieces, and another superb vocal performance from Robin, with the ballad “Lamplight.” Starting with indecipherable, echoing vocal chants (Gregorian? The Volga Boat Song?), Robin’s voice emerges, still drenched in echo, as per the whole track, as he passionately laments the loss of his true love, perhaps even the loss of youth – though with prompts such as “I gave her some money/She said she knew someone/She said she wouldn’t be long,” you begin to wonder exactly and bemusedly what sort of lover she actually was. Still, is this the same “someone” who returns to deliver the symbolic death blow at the album’s end?
After the epic orchestrations of “Lamplight,” the mourning now becomes quieter but far more intense with “Sound Of Love,” perhaps the most moving song the Bee Gees ever came up with, and a heartbreaking vocal performance from Barry Gibb, set against the quietest of pianos. “It makes me cry to see them smile [i.e. kids, in the first verse playing football, in the second verse laughing at an old man walking in pain, i.e. himself]/And there’s no one to share my life.” Note also the undulating bass halfway through which articulates the song’s title. It’s the expression of the emptiness of a life already lived – and although there are fewer incongruous transitions from this to the full-blown country rock of “Give Your Best” the theme remains the same; in the latter, Barry sings “I used to have a million friends” but is now thankful just for remaining alive. Note also the “It’s a square dance, Mr Marshall!” intro (which eerily presages the “Behold A Lady” skit on The Love Below) and the regret that the Bee Gees didn’t go further down the country-rock track, as “Give Your Best” for all its superficial silliness (and possibly because of its superficial silliness) is easily the match of anything on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo - the mind speculates, and perhaps boggles, on what would have happened if the Flying Burrito Brothers had recorded Odessa and the Bee Gees Gilded Palace Of Sin.
Following this we move into the album’s final phase, bookended by two sumptuous orchestral and choral instrumentals (kudos to arranger Bill Shepherd), the titles of which, “Seven Seas Symphony” and “The British Opera” try to return us to the original floating/sinking concept of the album. And while these two pieces, with their nods to Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence Of Arabia, directly presage some of the orchestral interludes on Rob Dougan’s Furious Angels, they also serve as a frame for perhaps the Gibbs’ most adventurous trilogy of songs, which attempt to fuse love, life, death, politics and divinity into their self-constructed iceberg.
Firstly, “I Laugh In Your Face,” which acts as simultaneously the most poignant and most splenetic Bee Gees song ever written – the sad proto-Radiohead funereal verses where “The circus is coming to see you/The elephant sees you/Everyone can hear you.” Think of the Human League’s “Circus Of Death” a decade down the line and think that they must have seen the same 1962 Guardian article. Then be stunned as the chorus aggressively and arrogantly stakes their claim to godhood. “I laugh in your face/You’re only one race/You lie like the rest/But there’s nobody best/I laugh in your face – AND I’M RIGHT!” Could Robbie Williams ever dare to cover this song? He could if he were honestly honest.
(and while we’re at it, we really need to remind ourselves how infinitely better Kylie and Robbie worked as pop stars when they weren’t trying to be “cool” or “retro” – the human, touchable Kylie of “Turn It Into Love,” the genuinely exuberant, life-loving Robbie of “Could It Be Magic?” – and then think of what we’ve lost in the effort to make the NME like us)
Then the song’s second verse ups the stakes; the singer could just be God, more likely Stalin, even likelier Scarface – “I’ll pull out your plugs so you’re small/You’ll slide down the drain/On the steps of St Peter’s/You all look the same.” The tragedy of humanity failing to be gods. The quadruple string laughs at 3:58 which terminate the song are laughing at the singer as much as the singer is laughing, or at least pretending to laugh.
Secondly, the revelation that all of this may only be happening in the singer’s disturbed head – “Never Say Never Again,” a deceptively catchy song, almost reluctant Eurovision, in which Barry Gibb accuses his ex-Other “You never tried, you put me in a tin,” and whose chorus declares “You said goodbye, I declared war on Spain.” Delusions of a dying man.
And then there is “First of May.”
In my discussion of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days” in CoM last year I mistakenly attributed Robin Carmody’s comments about an unsatisfactory shotgun wedding between “Eloise” and “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” to that song, rather than to “First Of May,” to which they should have been attributed. Easy, perhaps, to get muddled up with the 1968/9 tide of songs which dared, as so few songs now do, to admit the existence of mortality, the death of youth, the parallel demise of dreams. “Those Were The Days,” the reason why Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” wasn’t a hit in the UK, for this was the British equivalent, down to the different instrumental arrangements for each chorus, the children’s choir suddenly freezing in their ascent just before the closing verse.
And of course the number one single that never was, for it was never even a single, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes,” the single most moving vocal performance on a British record, the most affecting and natural fusion of voice and instrument between Sandy Denny’s unsentimental but devastating performance, and Richard Thompson’s guitar singing the inarticulable, beside her all the way, justifying her lack of fear of “time.”
And “First Of May” has to be heard in the context of Odessa, has to be appreciated in the context of its being the final vocal performance on the album, the Closer if you must, the “Decades” if you really get it, the “Hurt” if you really want to believe. Bear in mind that this was intended to be a concept album about a shipwrecked man slowly freezing to death. And, as death’s intuitive presence becomes as close as anything can become in life, the voice of Barry Gibb remembers everything that led him here. The apple tree (Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey”!) “that grew for you and me.” And “the moment of them all” is not when love becomes apparent, but when “I kissed your cheek, and you were gone.”
Finally the orchestra dies away, the singer, bereft of all senses other than what strength remains in his mind to express what has to be expressed, is left alone in the calmest of death throes.
“Don’t ask me why
But time has passed us by.
Someone else moved in
From far
Away.”
Nothing but the remnants of a voice. Nothing but existing. No existing.
Sans eyes
Sans teeth
Sans taste
Sans everything
No there’s no way out until our time is up.
“The British Opera.” The orchestra and choir sing as the memorial is unveiled. The organ, and finally the choir, verge on the edge of tonality, as if the ghosts of the British ship Veronica are buried within the stone, howling and screaming (compare with the finale of Westbrook’s Marching Song). As unsettling a finale as the one-two killer punch of “Revolution #9” and “Good Night.” From cradle to grave. And no wonder the Bee Gees walked away, even ran away, from this subsequently, danced as far as their Arif Mardin and John Travolta-assisted feet could carry them. No blame either; while you’re in possession of life you have to embrace it. Never forget that of the original four brothers, only two are now living. So when you hear them, rather than Celine Dion, sing “Immortality,” remember what they once were and why that song matters so much. Remember what it took to get them there.
TRILOGY: ONE (SLIGHT RETURN)
I briefly mentioned the first episode of Lucas Belvaux’ Trilogy. In France it was unimaginatively titled On The Run, but One is a far more apposite name for a film which fundamentally is about the doomed individual, specifically the individual (in this case, an unrepentant terrorist, played by Belvaux himself) for whom there is no longer any place in a world which, 20 years on, thrives on “individualism” – on the world’s own predetermined terms. As with Agent Jack Bauer, his crisis is played out within 24 hours; he escapes from prison and immediately begins to settle scores and plan new bombing outrages. He then wonders why so many of his former colleagues don’t want to get involved. He didn’t change; the world did. He didn’t ask for anti-capitalism to become unhip, even though in 2003 it is anything but, albeit only in easily digestible form; it’s indicative that on the police radio bulletins he is referred to as “looking like a student from 20 years ago” with his shoulder bag scrawled with slogans and emblems. Any bystander killed was “in the way.” It would have been easy for Belvaux to assimilate all of this into some dreary sub-Ayn Rand fascist rant (Alida Valli screaming “Man does not live for others! Man lives for himself!” etc.) but he’s sharper and subtler than that; the film is about betrayal by means of mere desertion or withdrawal of friendship by people formerly considered to be friends, simply because the progenitor refuses to "move on.” His principles, however wrongheaded they may or may not be, are at least principles; he continues to believe in the abstract of the “greater good,” dares to believe that the abstract could be turned into concrete. Ultimately, though, the film is about a shipwrecked man delaying his own death by 24 hours.
Never is this more pronounced than in the extraordinary 15-minute closing sequence. Having eluded the police barricades (and having finally been betrayed to the police by his one-time comrade) he realises that there is nowhere left to go except to the Alps (the recurring prospect of escaping to Italy is as abstract and unfulfillable a concept as the Sidcup of Pinter’s The Caretaker). Having wandered through the summer streets of Grenoble barefoot and in a T-shirt, in what seems like a matter of a couple of minutes, he takes to the mountains, knowing that he is going nowhere, that there is no real rôle for a real “individual,” he chooses to walk on towards a barren death. Sitting on a mountainside, surveying the Alps in front of him, as silent and unthreatening as the Brontë Way, he finds a strange kind of peace, and is ready to fall to his death, as he does soon afterwards, sinking into a snow-covered crevice, obliterating himself, dying as a free man in his chosen way. It is an astonishing coda seemingly out of kilter with the rest of the film, and reminds me somewhat of Dirk Bogarde’s similar odyssey as the fleeing robber in 1952’s Hunted. Along the way he is accompanied by a child – a brilliant performance from the remarkable child actor Jon Whiteley, later Dr Jon Whiteley, Senior Assistant Keeper of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and Laura’s sometime tutor and sometime boss – but he is clearly making his way towards his own death, finally expiring somewhere off the coast of Oban. Exceptionally nihilistic for 1952 (at least in terms of British cinema), it nonetheless finds such a resounding echo in Belvaux’ One that one is almost dissuaded from going to see the remaining two films which comprise the trilogy, all set within the same timescale, and in which the same events are witnessed from different perspectives. So it’s entirely possible that the final 15 minutes of One will be fully, and perhaps boringly, explained. I prefer to keep it abstract.
BRIEF THOUGHTS ON “PEEPING TOM”
Suppose that the entire story occurs in the imagination of Helen Stephens. Suppose that Mark Lewis doesn’t actually exist except as a figment of Helen’s youthful mind, desperate for some danger and sex in her drear life, or whatever life passed for “youth” in the Britain of 1960 (as late as 1960!). Her fellow lodger is such a typically dour and deadly dull representative of “manhood” (a part which Jack Hawkins, 20 years younger, could easily have played) that she demands sex, even to the point of self-immolation. Note that in the course of the film only two women are put to death by Lewis’ camera tripod sword, and in both cases, not only do we not see the actual deaths occurring, but even on the films which Lewis himself plays back on his projector, they fade out before this happens (Moira Shearer essaying a good parody of herself in The Red Shoes, Helen Stephens ten years on with just that added and fatal element of self-satisfaction). Admittedly this does of course have a lot to do with British cinema censorship in 1960, but it doesn’t explain why, at the film’s climax, Lewis is clearly and closely seen to stab himself in the throat with the tripod, the only person in the entire film on whom any actual violence is perpetrated. Helen is of course at one point at the end of the selfsame tripod, but there is never any danger that she will die, and in fact – as Anna Massey portrays her – she rather seems to be getting turned on by it. And how apt that the daughter of the IRA-citing American counsel in A Matter Of Life And Death should portray what, from Lewis’ perspective, represents his way back into life. If only he were a little more confident. If only his dad hadn’t fucked him up.
For the film can similarly be seen as a suicidal ideation of Mark Lewis – never does he actually kill someone, he simply isn’t confident with the more assertive members of the opposite sex, and it’s only when Helen bounds beaming into his life, ready to take him as he is, that he sees a way out. But it will be easier, less troublesome, for him to do away with himself. For Helen, from his perspective, is a figment of the imagination; the Ideal Other who will return him to life. But in reality she does not come, and he has no choice other than to die in his study, lined with books and films; someone who, as David Thomson said of Kubrick, knew too much about films and not enough about life.
But Kubrick could never have made Peeping Tom; only Michael Powell, who crucially appears as Lewis’ father, briefly, on film, and then half of the time out of focus, but whose sardonic, goading off-screen to his child is the clear precursor to Dennis Potter’s nameless narrator in Blackeyes - again, busily condemning another unspoilt child to death. So from the third perspective, Peeping Tom is a study of, and about, Michael Powell, by Michael Powell, trying vainly to warn himself of the dangers of living and breathing film to the exclusion of life. Its parallels between cinematic voyeurism and audience complicity may seem naïve next to the far more assured allegories which Hitchcock draws out of Rear Window and Vertigo, but – well go and see what Polanski did with Catherine Deneuve and similar agoraphobic sexuality in Repulsion five years later, above all see how Friedkin blows it all up to reveal the uninhibited sexuality of Linda Blair in The Exorcist thirteen years later – and how, by the use of Mercedes McCambridge as the voice of the Devil, the arc is traced back to the latter’s unapologetic androgynous leather hoodlum in Welles’ Touch Of Evil, eager to lead Janet Leigh towards a more, shall we say, colourful love life. And let’s not even bring Psycho or Welles’ The Trial into it, mainly because everyone else does.
FINAL THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “BROMPTON ORATORY” BY NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
The Boatman’s Call is, I think, the greatest of Nick Cave’s latter-day records, the mirror to and justification of the bloodlust of From Her To Eternity - and indeed the latter cannot really be fully appreciated without listening to how the singer came to terms with everything expressed on it, and moreover came to terms with it so placidly and so wisely.
The whole record is lovely, even though most of it was apparently inspired by his split with then partner Polly Harvey. And even though the first line of the first track “Into Your Arms” – I trust you all know it; if not I will not spoil the surprise for you – is in the running for greatest first line on an album ever, track four “Brompton Oratory” is a song so assured in its gorgeous grief that I’m sometimes convinced only Reznor-as-done-by-Cash’s “Hurt” comes close to it in the last decade in terms of emotion and organisation. The loveliest chord sequence with which the Bad Seeds ever came up – played mainly on a Casio – underlines Cave’s simultaneous awe at the service which he is attending and his grief (“Forlorn and exhausted, baby, by the absence of you,” and above all the spiritual/carnal crossover of “The smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips”). So peaceful, so destroying; and yes, I now listen to it and glean my own emotional responses to it which are different from those which I would have applied to it in 1997, because in 1997 Laura was here and now she is not. This is my inner life, and this is music and art and everything else as my inner life sees it. Even with recent developments it is neither easy nor just to deny the enormous part which Laura continues to play in my life. That doesn’t mean that I throw in the towel with regard to the music of today; sometimes when you live in a large house of the aesthetic mind, you want to wander around and spend time in different parts of the house. It strengthens you when you decide to return to some of the newer parts and are all the more astounded and delighted by the new things which you see. Whatever part of the house one is in, however, one always has to ensure that one can return to the centre of the house – to the heart, for without a heart, the house might as well be demolished.
The façade of pop is made to look stronger, even though its inherent flimsiness pre-empts its imminent collapse, by ensuring that no subtext whatsoever can interrupt one’s consuming (or consummation?) of a pop record other than those already programmed for your convenience, mostly masturbatory subtexts which indicate that Tin Pan Alley has located its final resting place in Berwick Street.
So it is that “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, a song and a performance which puts every other Top 40 single this year to shame – and that is a quite deliberate “retro” viewpoint – languishes intentionally at #39 in the Fun Forty, whereas it should of course have been number one from now until beyond the New Year. If only Cash had been blessed with Eva Cassidy’s cheekbones, for even necrophilia in pop demands a shapely corpse to fuck. But the single’s low chart placing, coupled with the non-appearance of any Cash record in the album charts, sends out the unmistakable signal that Cash’s message – being inextricably entwined with staring morality in the face, and worse, smiling defiantly at it – is not one the pop audience of 2003 wishes to hear, or for that matter be aware of. An untidy, unsightly grandparent who clogs up the irreducible speed of the modern home (Hanif Kureishi’s The Mother), something and someone We Could Do Without. It’s so inconvenient, so unsexy.
This rebuttal of death and depth is echoed in the piteous nothingness of the current number one single, “Slow” by Kylie Minogue, which conversely is one of the deadest, most dishonest pop records I have ever heard. There is nothing in its four or so minutes to signify that this song had to be written, that an emotion of some kind had to be expressed through this song; no, as with this week’s #10, “Sexed Up” by Robbie Williams, it exists only to allow Kylie Minogue to continue being “Kylie Minogue”™ for another six months. And, not to be underdone, or even undone, we have Britney, who has conspicuously failed to produce a Control to match Timberlake’s Off The Wall; both demanding to our faces that we have no choice but to be turned on by them.
Kylie has never been sexy, of course – that perpetually raised eyebrow of hers has always put paid to such notions, and watching her gamely attempt, or being forced, to be “sexy” is as painful and humiliating as if, say, Kristin Scott Thomas strolled on amidst those red lasers. One upward curl of the lower lip of Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect 6 betrays more genuine sexuality than the entire lives of Spears or Minogue; not to mention the delicious conurbation where the lower end of Mirren’s fringe meets her slightly regretful, slightly inviting right eyebrow, balancing delicately between post-menopausal and post-coital. Two kinds of weariness which, at a certain time in one’s life, dovetail into one kindness. And it is difficult not to think: haven’t we had enough of unsexy “sex,” of “clever” post-glitch/Timbaland dropouts and fiddles, of “respect” being directly proportional to the artist’s wardrobe or bank balance (Missy Elliott); haven’t we, in short, had enough of the whole false fucking farrago, of dead records like the new Minogue album being hailed in The Observer as a “cool retro album,” of the very notions of “cool” and “retro” and their rôles in obliterating, or at least secreting, concepts of mortality and death, of their increasingly tiresome denial of the reality of growing up? Besides which, if it were real “retro” the twats of Shoreditch were after, they would do well to reflect on the fact that the singles charts in 1969 were overflowing with morbid and apocalyptic music – I specify 1969 as this will be the next in my occasional A Year Of Singles Charted series, which is currently under preparation, with a view to examining the difference between Boards of Canada’s idyllic “1969 in the sunshine,” the equally idyllic 1969 through which this five-year-old writer lived, and the gruesome reality which actually existed in 1969.
Could a single like Emma Bunton’s “Maybe” – currently #18 - have existed, let alone charted, in 1969? It’s a tricky call to make, and a frustrating one too, for “Maybe” comes so unbearably close to being the greatest pop single ever made as of today – and of course, coming so unbearably close to being the greatest pop single ever made is the same as being 30,000 singles away from being the greatest pop single ever made – that its ultimate failure is rendered all the more tragic. I wanted to believe in this single, but the problem is I’m not sure whether the single wants to believe in itself. There’s nothing at all wrong with Bunton’s performance of the song, either on record or on TOTP, surrounded by Young Generation-style dancers. As a record, as a song, it is so close to being the smartest reclamation of 1969 or 1971 mainstream MoR pop that Saint Etienne never pulled off, simply because the Pearl and Dean “ba ba ba-ba-ba-ba” vocal refrain which masquerades as a chorus, coupled with the London Palladium chord changes which mark the second half of each verse, in truth never approaches what MoR actually was in the charts of 1969 or 1971. Fast forward through your Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw singles compilations and you will find nothing like “Maybe,” and that is the great confidence trick which this record nearly pulls off. It’s an idealised Saturday night BBC1 or Monday night Show Of The Week BBC2 approximation of pop – one of those obscure sub-Sondheim songs which you would never hear anywhere else apart from Marti Caine or Grace Kennedy, always flanked and fondled by overzealous male dancers.
So why doesn’t it work? Two reasons leading to one; the first being the label itself, which credits, not “Emma Bunton” but “Emma” in the selfsame attempt to achieve first-name-only recognised brand status (It’s Monday night! It’s ten past eight! It’s Emma!), and try as one might, the name Emma does not carry the inbuilt, unreproducable iconic status of a Cilla or even a Marti. The second reason is the use of the word “definitely” in the first half of the song’s chorus, which actually has the cumulative effect of deflating the whole song; by this Hugh Grant of an English word, the song is hoisted down from the flag of pop/showbiz immortality and repositioned as – well, just another Shoreditch smartarse, ordinary attempt to be “retro,” with that “definitely” positioned very deliberately so that “Emma” doesn’t get any high-falutin’ ideas about iconic stature, learns her place and keeps it. A pity, because Bunton’s composure while performing the song on TOTP suggests that she would be quite content with a standard, unironic family entertainment persona, and in her own undemonstrative Home Counties way (compare the same almost-sensual-but-not-quite aura of her previous “What Took You So Long?”) she’s far sexier than the luckless Minogue, tongue perpetually licking at the corners of her mouth in order to service her debts.
THE BEE GEES – “ODESSA”
As I said, the singles charts of 1969 (and, to a slightly lesser extent, those of the last quarter of 1968) were almost unique in their morbidity, and from “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” via “In The Year 2525” and “Bad Moon Rising” through to “Two Little Boys,” the smell of apocalypse – of everything ending - was unavoidable. Even the progenitor of the year’s first number one – the Scaffold’s “Lily The Pink” – has died by the song’s end. And I sincerely doubt that any “kitsch” or “retro” operatives in 2003 pop, fixated by Austin Powers rather than the Tet Offensive (without realising that the former financed the latter), could come anywhere near the exceptional and still shocking achievement that was Odessa the luxuriously packaged (though not, criminally, yet so on CD) 1969 double album by the Bee Gees. I had meant to hold off discussion on this record until it could be incorporated into a fuller article on the Gibb brothers’ work per se - and this, pending a properly remastered CD reissue of Robin Gibb’s Sing Slowly Sisters, is likewise currently in preparation – but Robin Carmody’s thoughts on it this week have prompted me to devote more time and space to the record itself.
It is difficult even to imagine any major record company today allowing the then 21-year-old Barry Gibb, and 19-year-old Maurice and Robin, to go overboard (literally) with this elaborately orchestrated quasi-concept album, perhaps about the town of Odessa, perhaps a greater allegory on the USSR, perhaps simply an extended meditation on the slowness of death – who can say, for, as was common with late ‘60s/early ‘70s concept albums (see also, very pertinently, Peter Wyngarde’s album), the “concept” seems to have been jettisoned after the fourth track. In terms of production, arrangement and performance, the record is a mess in the same way that the White Album is a mess – but that depends on your interpretation of a “mess” being a good or bad thing; in relation to this writer’s inner life – and how can music be described subjectively without relating it to the inner life of the person who is describing it? – it is a good thing, for it admits the existence of doubt, of indecision, of the freedom to change one’s mind, sometimes halfway through a song; all the freedom of which the supposedly subversive likes of Busted can only continue to dream (and incidentally, the most subversive thing about Busted is their extraordinary physical resemblance, when performing, to Haircut 100; the same body jerks, and even the lead singer/guitarist looks exactly like Nick Heyward with a 1972 haircut). The freedom to fail? The freedom not to sell records? – for Odessa was not a commercial success, yielding only one single (the top five hit “First of May”) the release of which was okayed by Robert Stigwood without the band’s consent, and indeed the question of extracting singles from Odessa was the factor which led directly to Robin Gibb temporarily quitting the group. And yet it is the Bee Gees album which is now most admired and idolised, and it unquestionably marks a point where the group’s adventure became most pronounced – everything which they did thereafter, however great in its own right, represents a decided step away from the nihilism and bereavement which permeate the core of this record.
It begins with the album’s longest track, the 7:33 title track “Odessa (City On The Black Sea).” Originally earmarked as a potential single, the band retreated from this possibility as apparently they didn’t wish to be seen to be cashing in on the then-current vogue of releasing long, multifaceted singles (“Macarthur Park,” “Hey Jude,” “Eloise”), although a likelier reason is that the song doesn’t really have a strong enough central hook to transform it into a single, and does work better as the “beat this Beatles” opening gauntlet of the album (although I always wish that the Moody Blues had had the nerve to go with the full seven-minute album version of “Nights In White Satin,” complete with choir, narration and phasing, as a single). In any case it’s one of the most astounding introductory tracks to an album which I can think of – the seafaring orchestra at the beginning quickly explodes into Varese-esque atonality as the Gibbs emerge out of the fog to declaim sinisterly “14th of February 1899 [Valentine’s Day!]/The British ship Veronica was lost without a sign/Bye bye black sheep, you haven’t any wool” before vanishing to make way for a cello and acoustic guitar (and then a piano). Barry Gibb’s voice then emerges to sing of his plight; stuck on top of an iceberg which he is trying to carve into the shape of a ship, floating helplessly in the North Atlantic, trying fruitlessly to get back home. Essentially it’s an update and expansion of “New York Mining Disaster 1941” – and wasn’t the latter one of the most morbid debut hit singles from any pop act? – with the dummy cut loose and BG free to meditate on his own at uninterrupted length. Reflecting on his lover, he muses, “You loved a vicar more than words can say/Ask him to pray that I won’t melt away/And I’ll see your face again” (which latter words are directly relevant to the next song). As with Lucas Belvaux’ escaped terrorist in the astonishing extended closing sequence of Trilogy: One, he has retreated into himself to facilitate his own icy demise. The approach of mortality is indicated by the strings’ quote from “Für Elise” which materialises at 5:38. You might think of the song as the Peter Green of “Man Of The World” mutating into the “Albatross.”
The next song, “You’ll Never See My Face Again,” is one of the bitterest songs the Gibbs ever composed, as blunt in its unmitigated hatred as the Dylan of “Positively Fourth Street” or the Costello of “Tramp The Dirt Down.” Deliberately positioned on the album to bookend the later, and stunning, “I Laugh In Your Face,” here are the tender words of love the Gibbs have to offer: “It makes me laugh you’ve got no friends/It took a thousand years for you to find out why,” but see how the spleen is balanced by the rueful upward orchestral chord modulation of the song’s title line. “I wish that everything was coloured white,” Barry continues, and he even essays the most mirthless of sung laughs at 2:08. By the song’s fade, even the strings have started to laugh at the hapless unfaithful lover, and the rhythm actually starts to speed up towards the fadeout as if the Gibbs have considered that not seeing her face again might not be such a bad idea.
“Black Diamond” is almost, but not quite, a mainstream Bee Gees ballad, and of the other songs the most thematically close to the album’s original concept – here Robin takes the lead vocal, beginning with a desolate “Where are you? I love you. Where are you to keep me warm?” as he continues to float atop his melting iceberg (“I followed a river where the dead man would play”). In fact it’s one of Robin’s finest vocal performances, effortlessly straddling three octaves, leading to a bleak fadeout of “Say goodbye to Auld Lang Syne.”
Thereafter the concept seems to vanish and the consequent detours are pleasingly unexpected. In “Marley Purt Drive,” the Bee Gees have a crack at country-rock – the influence of the Band’s then-current hit “The Weight” is particularly pronounced – and Barry dolefully muses (with a slight melodic nod to “The Mighty Quinn”) that “with 15 kids and a family on the skids/I’ve gotta go for a Sunday drive.” By the song’s end, this has inexplicably mutated into “an orphanage full of 35 kids.”
The album journeys to even stranger universes. “Edison” is a stop-start tribute to the song’s titular subject, who among other things “gave us cylinders to please.” The song seesaws between out-of-time Beach Boys harmonies (complete with “God Only Knows”-style piercing organ intro) and frustratingly brief spells of proto-motorik electropop which almost manage to invent Pulp.
Then there’s “Melody Fair,” the greatest Bee Gees single that never was, a song as musically appealing as “Massachusetts” or “Words” – but again, catch the catches in the choruses: “Remember you’re only a woman”; perhaps too slightly out of kilter to sit comfortably in the Top 40 even then. Note also little sidenotes such as the eight handclaps which succeed the line “Watching the rain falling down.”
What to make, however, of “Suddenly,” with its atonal revving-up guitar intro leading to Barry drunkenly cackling “How can you tell by looking at me?” alternating with the minor-key oboe which accompanies the line “Suddenly there’s a boy alone in the rain” (see how the themes transpose consistently from song to song on this album) before the rhythm kicks in and the Gibbs ask the question “How can you tell if humans are real?” An unlikely missing link between Syd Barrett and Blur. This is succeeded by the even more inexplicable “Whisper Whisper” with its portentous orchestral introduction which suddenly gives way to a vaguely vaudevillian knees-up queerly reminiscent of early, Decca-era Bowie (“I am illegal,” sings Barry at one point, indicating that this might somewhere along the line have started life as an anti-drug song). The band, however, sound palpably stoned, but even this does not prepare us for the sudden gearshift at 2:30 when a Pearl and Dean horn section come in, the drums kick up a breakbeat and the Gibbs start cheerily chanting “I am man and you are woman/Who needs marriage? We are humans all.” This then gives way to, of all things, a drum solo and then a final brief horn fanfare before the brothers desperately cry “No no no no NO!” and the trumpets squeal themselves into vaporisation.
We then get another of the album’s big setpieces, and another superb vocal performance from Robin, with the ballad “Lamplight.” Starting with indecipherable, echoing vocal chants (Gregorian? The Volga Boat Song?), Robin’s voice emerges, still drenched in echo, as per the whole track, as he passionately laments the loss of his true love, perhaps even the loss of youth – though with prompts such as “I gave her some money/She said she knew someone/She said she wouldn’t be long,” you begin to wonder exactly and bemusedly what sort of lover she actually was. Still, is this the same “someone” who returns to deliver the symbolic death blow at the album’s end?
After the epic orchestrations of “Lamplight,” the mourning now becomes quieter but far more intense with “Sound Of Love,” perhaps the most moving song the Bee Gees ever came up with, and a heartbreaking vocal performance from Barry Gibb, set against the quietest of pianos. “It makes me cry to see them smile [i.e. kids, in the first verse playing football, in the second verse laughing at an old man walking in pain, i.e. himself]/And there’s no one to share my life.” Note also the undulating bass halfway through which articulates the song’s title. It’s the expression of the emptiness of a life already lived – and although there are fewer incongruous transitions from this to the full-blown country rock of “Give Your Best” the theme remains the same; in the latter, Barry sings “I used to have a million friends” but is now thankful just for remaining alive. Note also the “It’s a square dance, Mr Marshall!” intro (which eerily presages the “Behold A Lady” skit on The Love Below) and the regret that the Bee Gees didn’t go further down the country-rock track, as “Give Your Best” for all its superficial silliness (and possibly because of its superficial silliness) is easily the match of anything on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo - the mind speculates, and perhaps boggles, on what would have happened if the Flying Burrito Brothers had recorded Odessa and the Bee Gees Gilded Palace Of Sin.
Following this we move into the album’s final phase, bookended by two sumptuous orchestral and choral instrumentals (kudos to arranger Bill Shepherd), the titles of which, “Seven Seas Symphony” and “The British Opera” try to return us to the original floating/sinking concept of the album. And while these two pieces, with their nods to Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence Of Arabia, directly presage some of the orchestral interludes on Rob Dougan’s Furious Angels, they also serve as a frame for perhaps the Gibbs’ most adventurous trilogy of songs, which attempt to fuse love, life, death, politics and divinity into their self-constructed iceberg.
Firstly, “I Laugh In Your Face,” which acts as simultaneously the most poignant and most splenetic Bee Gees song ever written – the sad proto-Radiohead funereal verses where “The circus is coming to see you/The elephant sees you/Everyone can hear you.” Think of the Human League’s “Circus Of Death” a decade down the line and think that they must have seen the same 1962 Guardian article. Then be stunned as the chorus aggressively and arrogantly stakes their claim to godhood. “I laugh in your face/You’re only one race/You lie like the rest/But there’s nobody best/I laugh in your face – AND I’M RIGHT!” Could Robbie Williams ever dare to cover this song? He could if he were honestly honest.
(and while we’re at it, we really need to remind ourselves how infinitely better Kylie and Robbie worked as pop stars when they weren’t trying to be “cool” or “retro” – the human, touchable Kylie of “Turn It Into Love,” the genuinely exuberant, life-loving Robbie of “Could It Be Magic?” – and then think of what we’ve lost in the effort to make the NME like us)
Then the song’s second verse ups the stakes; the singer could just be God, more likely Stalin, even likelier Scarface – “I’ll pull out your plugs so you’re small/You’ll slide down the drain/On the steps of St Peter’s/You all look the same.” The tragedy of humanity failing to be gods. The quadruple string laughs at 3:58 which terminate the song are laughing at the singer as much as the singer is laughing, or at least pretending to laugh.
Secondly, the revelation that all of this may only be happening in the singer’s disturbed head – “Never Say Never Again,” a deceptively catchy song, almost reluctant Eurovision, in which Barry Gibb accuses his ex-Other “You never tried, you put me in a tin,” and whose chorus declares “You said goodbye, I declared war on Spain.” Delusions of a dying man.
And then there is “First of May.”
In my discussion of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days” in CoM last year I mistakenly attributed Robin Carmody’s comments about an unsatisfactory shotgun wedding between “Eloise” and “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” to that song, rather than to “First Of May,” to which they should have been attributed. Easy, perhaps, to get muddled up with the 1968/9 tide of songs which dared, as so few songs now do, to admit the existence of mortality, the death of youth, the parallel demise of dreams. “Those Were The Days,” the reason why Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” wasn’t a hit in the UK, for this was the British equivalent, down to the different instrumental arrangements for each chorus, the children’s choir suddenly freezing in their ascent just before the closing verse.
And of course the number one single that never was, for it was never even a single, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes,” the single most moving vocal performance on a British record, the most affecting and natural fusion of voice and instrument between Sandy Denny’s unsentimental but devastating performance, and Richard Thompson’s guitar singing the inarticulable, beside her all the way, justifying her lack of fear of “time.”
And “First Of May” has to be heard in the context of Odessa, has to be appreciated in the context of its being the final vocal performance on the album, the Closer if you must, the “Decades” if you really get it, the “Hurt” if you really want to believe. Bear in mind that this was intended to be a concept album about a shipwrecked man slowly freezing to death. And, as death’s intuitive presence becomes as close as anything can become in life, the voice of Barry Gibb remembers everything that led him here. The apple tree (Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey”!) “that grew for you and me.” And “the moment of them all” is not when love becomes apparent, but when “I kissed your cheek, and you were gone.”
Finally the orchestra dies away, the singer, bereft of all senses other than what strength remains in his mind to express what has to be expressed, is left alone in the calmest of death throes.
“Don’t ask me why
But time has passed us by.
Someone else moved in
From far
Away.”
Nothing but the remnants of a voice. Nothing but existing. No existing.
Sans eyes
Sans teeth
Sans taste
Sans everything
No there’s no way out until our time is up.
“The British Opera.” The orchestra and choir sing as the memorial is unveiled. The organ, and finally the choir, verge on the edge of tonality, as if the ghosts of the British ship Veronica are buried within the stone, howling and screaming (compare with the finale of Westbrook’s Marching Song). As unsettling a finale as the one-two killer punch of “Revolution #9” and “Good Night.” From cradle to grave. And no wonder the Bee Gees walked away, even ran away, from this subsequently, danced as far as their Arif Mardin and John Travolta-assisted feet could carry them. No blame either; while you’re in possession of life you have to embrace it. Never forget that of the original four brothers, only two are now living. So when you hear them, rather than Celine Dion, sing “Immortality,” remember what they once were and why that song matters so much. Remember what it took to get them there.
TRILOGY: ONE (SLIGHT RETURN)
I briefly mentioned the first episode of Lucas Belvaux’ Trilogy. In France it was unimaginatively titled On The Run, but One is a far more apposite name for a film which fundamentally is about the doomed individual, specifically the individual (in this case, an unrepentant terrorist, played by Belvaux himself) for whom there is no longer any place in a world which, 20 years on, thrives on “individualism” – on the world’s own predetermined terms. As with Agent Jack Bauer, his crisis is played out within 24 hours; he escapes from prison and immediately begins to settle scores and plan new bombing outrages. He then wonders why so many of his former colleagues don’t want to get involved. He didn’t change; the world did. He didn’t ask for anti-capitalism to become unhip, even though in 2003 it is anything but, albeit only in easily digestible form; it’s indicative that on the police radio bulletins he is referred to as “looking like a student from 20 years ago” with his shoulder bag scrawled with slogans and emblems. Any bystander killed was “in the way.” It would have been easy for Belvaux to assimilate all of this into some dreary sub-Ayn Rand fascist rant (Alida Valli screaming “Man does not live for others! Man lives for himself!” etc.) but he’s sharper and subtler than that; the film is about betrayal by means of mere desertion or withdrawal of friendship by people formerly considered to be friends, simply because the progenitor refuses to "move on.” His principles, however wrongheaded they may or may not be, are at least principles; he continues to believe in the abstract of the “greater good,” dares to believe that the abstract could be turned into concrete. Ultimately, though, the film is about a shipwrecked man delaying his own death by 24 hours.
Never is this more pronounced than in the extraordinary 15-minute closing sequence. Having eluded the police barricades (and having finally been betrayed to the police by his one-time comrade) he realises that there is nowhere left to go except to the Alps (the recurring prospect of escaping to Italy is as abstract and unfulfillable a concept as the Sidcup of Pinter’s The Caretaker). Having wandered through the summer streets of Grenoble barefoot and in a T-shirt, in what seems like a matter of a couple of minutes, he takes to the mountains, knowing that he is going nowhere, that there is no real rôle for a real “individual,” he chooses to walk on towards a barren death. Sitting on a mountainside, surveying the Alps in front of him, as silent and unthreatening as the Brontë Way, he finds a strange kind of peace, and is ready to fall to his death, as he does soon afterwards, sinking into a snow-covered crevice, obliterating himself, dying as a free man in his chosen way. It is an astonishing coda seemingly out of kilter with the rest of the film, and reminds me somewhat of Dirk Bogarde’s similar odyssey as the fleeing robber in 1952’s Hunted. Along the way he is accompanied by a child – a brilliant performance from the remarkable child actor Jon Whiteley, later Dr Jon Whiteley, Senior Assistant Keeper of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and Laura’s sometime tutor and sometime boss – but he is clearly making his way towards his own death, finally expiring somewhere off the coast of Oban. Exceptionally nihilistic for 1952 (at least in terms of British cinema), it nonetheless finds such a resounding echo in Belvaux’ One that one is almost dissuaded from going to see the remaining two films which comprise the trilogy, all set within the same timescale, and in which the same events are witnessed from different perspectives. So it’s entirely possible that the final 15 minutes of One will be fully, and perhaps boringly, explained. I prefer to keep it abstract.
BRIEF THOUGHTS ON “PEEPING TOM”
Suppose that the entire story occurs in the imagination of Helen Stephens. Suppose that Mark Lewis doesn’t actually exist except as a figment of Helen’s youthful mind, desperate for some danger and sex in her drear life, or whatever life passed for “youth” in the Britain of 1960 (as late as 1960!). Her fellow lodger is such a typically dour and deadly dull representative of “manhood” (a part which Jack Hawkins, 20 years younger, could easily have played) that she demands sex, even to the point of self-immolation. Note that in the course of the film only two women are put to death by Lewis’ camera tripod sword, and in both cases, not only do we not see the actual deaths occurring, but even on the films which Lewis himself plays back on his projector, they fade out before this happens (Moira Shearer essaying a good parody of herself in The Red Shoes, Helen Stephens ten years on with just that added and fatal element of self-satisfaction). Admittedly this does of course have a lot to do with British cinema censorship in 1960, but it doesn’t explain why, at the film’s climax, Lewis is clearly and closely seen to stab himself in the throat with the tripod, the only person in the entire film on whom any actual violence is perpetrated. Helen is of course at one point at the end of the selfsame tripod, but there is never any danger that she will die, and in fact – as Anna Massey portrays her – she rather seems to be getting turned on by it. And how apt that the daughter of the IRA-citing American counsel in A Matter Of Life And Death should portray what, from Lewis’ perspective, represents his way back into life. If only he were a little more confident. If only his dad hadn’t fucked him up.
For the film can similarly be seen as a suicidal ideation of Mark Lewis – never does he actually kill someone, he simply isn’t confident with the more assertive members of the opposite sex, and it’s only when Helen bounds beaming into his life, ready to take him as he is, that he sees a way out. But it will be easier, less troublesome, for him to do away with himself. For Helen, from his perspective, is a figment of the imagination; the Ideal Other who will return him to life. But in reality she does not come, and he has no choice other than to die in his study, lined with books and films; someone who, as David Thomson said of Kubrick, knew too much about films and not enough about life.
But Kubrick could never have made Peeping Tom; only Michael Powell, who crucially appears as Lewis’ father, briefly, on film, and then half of the time out of focus, but whose sardonic, goading off-screen to his child is the clear precursor to Dennis Potter’s nameless narrator in Blackeyes - again, busily condemning another unspoilt child to death. So from the third perspective, Peeping Tom is a study of, and about, Michael Powell, by Michael Powell, trying vainly to warn himself of the dangers of living and breathing film to the exclusion of life. Its parallels between cinematic voyeurism and audience complicity may seem naïve next to the far more assured allegories which Hitchcock draws out of Rear Window and Vertigo, but – well go and see what Polanski did with Catherine Deneuve and similar agoraphobic sexuality in Repulsion five years later, above all see how Friedkin blows it all up to reveal the uninhibited sexuality of Linda Blair in The Exorcist thirteen years later – and how, by the use of Mercedes McCambridge as the voice of the Devil, the arc is traced back to the latter’s unapologetic androgynous leather hoodlum in Welles’ Touch Of Evil, eager to lead Janet Leigh towards a more, shall we say, colourful love life. And let’s not even bring Psycho or Welles’ The Trial into it, mainly because everyone else does.
FINAL THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “BROMPTON ORATORY” BY NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
The Boatman’s Call is, I think, the greatest of Nick Cave’s latter-day records, the mirror to and justification of the bloodlust of From Her To Eternity - and indeed the latter cannot really be fully appreciated without listening to how the singer came to terms with everything expressed on it, and moreover came to terms with it so placidly and so wisely.
The whole record is lovely, even though most of it was apparently inspired by his split with then partner Polly Harvey. And even though the first line of the first track “Into Your Arms” – I trust you all know it; if not I will not spoil the surprise for you – is in the running for greatest first line on an album ever, track four “Brompton Oratory” is a song so assured in its gorgeous grief that I’m sometimes convinced only Reznor-as-done-by-Cash’s “Hurt” comes close to it in the last decade in terms of emotion and organisation. The loveliest chord sequence with which the Bad Seeds ever came up – played mainly on a Casio – underlines Cave’s simultaneous awe at the service which he is attending and his grief (“Forlorn and exhausted, baby, by the absence of you,” and above all the spiritual/carnal crossover of “The smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips”). So peaceful, so destroying; and yes, I now listen to it and glean my own emotional responses to it which are different from those which I would have applied to it in 1997, because in 1997 Laura was here and now she is not. This is my inner life, and this is music and art and everything else as my inner life sees it. Even with recent developments it is neither easy nor just to deny the enormous part which Laura continues to play in my life. That doesn’t mean that I throw in the towel with regard to the music of today; sometimes when you live in a large house of the aesthetic mind, you want to wander around and spend time in different parts of the house. It strengthens you when you decide to return to some of the newer parts and are all the more astounded and delighted by the new things which you see. Whatever part of the house one is in, however, one always has to ensure that one can return to the centre of the house – to the heart, for without a heart, the house might as well be demolished.
Sunday, November 09, 2003
TOM JONES: WHAT IF THERE’S NO HOME TO GO TO?
Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when one has to resign from the increasingly onerous and unlovable task of “keeping up to date” with “developments”? Does such a point necessarily coexist with, and in direct proportion to, the point where the observer/participator himself becomes obsolete, out of touch, staid, conservative? What happens when such points are decided with regard to an artist – when or if an artist suddenly becomes old-fashioned, and the subsidiary question of how necessary/cost-effective it is to make the same artist new and now again?
When one gets to the point – or the self-constructed trap - of, not just saying, but feeling, that records like “Pass The Dutch” or “Ground Zero” are not exactly “Good Vibrations” or even “Valley Of The Shadows,” then one would do well to remember the rôle played by Tom Jones in the play Abigail’s Party. Demis Roussos, of course, is the musical association most strongly associated with that endeavour, but recall how, near the beginning of the play, Beverly cheerfully puts on The Very Best Of Tom Jones to get her particular party started. Observe the stock budget-price EMI cover of the album in question; the bottom half being a less-than-flattering photograph of the artist, the top half being a red diagonal slash, as if the artist’s head has just been sliced open for the fag ends of profits to be extracted. Beverly remarks on how sexy Tom Jones is (while “It’s Not Unusual” is playing), while her guests remain stiff and seated, as though on Death Row, perhaps secretly wishing to escape and gatecrash Abigail’s real, unseen and unheard party. For this is the subsidiary lesson of the play; it’s 1977, and the “kids” are demonstrably absent, listening and dancing to punk. “Life” is developing elsewhere; all we are left to look at and examine is a dead culture, something which momentarily exuded some sense of “nowness” in 1966 but which now has nothing to offer except useless – worse, unusable – memories. The unspoken sadness of the play is that Abigail and her mates will probably be just as beached a set of whales in 1988, spinning their worn copy of the Jam’s Snap while Abigail’s daughter is getting high on Acid House next door.
But this was how Tom Jones was perceived in 1977; an object of ridicule, as decrepit a Las Vegas poodle as Presley or Welles, someone shortly to be reduced to signing a US record deal which confined him to recording country tunes. What, apart from Jonathan Ross, the damnable tumour of post-punk irony and the unavoidable circularity of trends, happened to change this?
In truth, the music world has never really known what to do with Tom Jones. An unapologetic hollering chest-beater who saw himself as an apprentice to the court of King Solomon (Burke), he should have been sent to Jerry Wexler straightaway. Instead they gave him corny show tunes and lacklustre contemporary pop hits to cover. In a way they still are. Part of the problem may be that Jones was an anomaly even in 1965; of the same generation as the Beatles but somehow looking considerably older. Stylistically he came across as a not altogether satisfactory missing link between the camp beefcake of Frankie Vaughan and the camp “soul” of Eric Burdon.
And he has never really sounded happy on record, apart from a very early example; 1964’s “Chills And Fever” his only recording with Joe Meek. With his startling multiphonic screams and mischievous down-the-scale cackling, we get immediately what he really was; the natural successor to Screaming Lord Sutch (the backing is very “Jack The Ripper”). And this was a joy Jones never quite recaptured.
“Chills And Fever” now reappears, along with 92 other tracks, on the new 4CD box set The Definitive Tom Jones 1964-2002. With unintended starkness it demonstrates how Jones fell flat when attempting anything other than straightforward pop-soul or MoR schlock like “Green Green Grass Of Home,” his very own “Living Doll.” Time and time again, when required to express emotions such as vulnerability, hopelessness or compassion, he simply isn’t up to it; his sobs, sighs, gulps and asides on 1967’s “I’m Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” or 1969’s “Without Love (There Is Nothing)” are so obviously staged, so clearly acted, that one ends up not believing anything he says or sings. Perhaps he really was more comfortable with the harmless camp of things like “Help Yourself” or “Love Me Tonight,” though problems occur when he extends the campness to something like “Delilah,” effectively asking us to laugh at and conspire with stabbing a laughing woman to death – it took Alex Harvey’s 1975 remodelling of the song to reveal the sordid cheapness of its essential brutalism.
Portishead favourite “Looking Out My Window” (1968) and smart pop like 1970’s “Daughter Of Darkness” fit Jones so aptly that you regret he wasn’t given more things like these to do, rather than hack re-readings of hoary old chestnuts like “If Ever I Would Leave You” or lamentable readings of uncoverable songs like “Hey Jude” and “Wichita Lineman.” His 1967 version of Mickey Newbury’s “Detroit City” is straightforwardly good as well, although mostly because musically it is thrown askew by the strange, untuned, wavering guitar motif throughout (the young John McLaughlin, no less). And though 1966’s “A Taste Of Honey” proved that sensitivity was not his forte, it would be churlish to overlook the track’s interesting arrangement, with its multiple Gil Evans quotations.
Nevertheless, Jones struggled throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s with well-meaning trash like “The Young New Mexican Puppeteer” and “Lusty Lady.” It took another West End chestbeater – “A Boy From Nowhere,” wherein we are asked to imagine the unimaginable spectre of Tom Jones as a penniless apprentice bullfighter – to bring him back to the attention of the world at large, and his Art of Noise-assisted reading of Prince’s “Kiss” to make him “hip” again in 1988. But the problem with “Kiss” was the same old problem; Prince’s original is whispered with almost unsustainable pent-up sexual desire, the exact meeting point between vulnerability and carnality. All Jones can do is roar and leer his way through the song and divest it of sex entirely. Thereafter it was essentially business as usual; new MoR covers to replace the old ones (“Move Closer”) or attempts at rocking out (“Gimme Shelter” with New Model Army!) as unconvincing as his rendering of “Witch Queen Of New Orleans” 20 years previously. And was Jones that convincing as a “soul” singer? Witness his 1967 live version of “Land Of 1000 Dances” and his hamfisted attempts to get the audience involved (“It’s a simple song” he repeatedly reassures them). Set next to the genuinely demonic entreaties of Sam Cooke as captured on Live At The Harlem Square Club: One Night Stand, Jones sounds jejeune and whiter than white.
In the ‘90s and beyond, though, people continued to protest that he was hip, and thus he worked with Trevor Horn on 1993’s The Lead And How To Swing It. The album’s big hit single “If I Only Knew” is admittedly a brilliant sleight-of-hand from Horn, electronically elongating Jones’ holler into an unending loop which makes him sound as if he’s being strangled and even making his attempts to rap sound moderately convincing. From the same album, “A Girl Like You” starts out promisingly, with Jones’ genuinely sinister whispers against a fuzzy electro backdrop sounding like the Pulp of This Is Hardcore essaying “Transmission,” but alas the song loses heart and soon degenerates into a sub-U2 rock-out. Yet the album flopped, and thus was Jones ultimately compelled to make himself “ironic” in order not to be demoted from TOTP to TOTP2 - and has anyone else noticed the gradual onset of institutional ageism in the singles chart? – by recording duets with contemporary pop people and thereby becoming “relevant.”
By all standards – except commercially, where it cleaned up - Reload is a disaster. On a reading of Byrne’s “Burning Down The House” with the Cardigans, Jones seems not to comprehend any of the lyric, and his strangulated belching of “Fighting fire with fire!” indicates nothing more than the urgent need of a good dose of syrup of figs. “Sexbomb” is where he capitulates and reconciles himself with the fact that, if he’s going to have any sort of a career hereonin, he can only do it by laughing at himself before anyone else does.
And yet, buried deep within this farrago, and justifiably included on the boxset as a kind of coda, is Jones’ greatest vocal performance – his reading of “Motherless Child” with Adrian Utley of Portishead arranging and producing. In this song’s five minutes, set against a lush 1969 orchestration for which he would gladly have died in 1969, Jones finally gets the song and the treatment he deserves. Forced to concentrate, forced moreover to look in his own mirror, Jones summarises 40 years of compromise and substitution into a genuinely vulnerable and passionate admission of his own mortality. For maybe the only time in the five-and-a-half hours of music here, we see the real Tom Jones, a soulman who exalted and excelled in the shallow, who could make the most meretricious trash seem like the Last Trump if only he could have been bothered. But it’s not long before we are sent back to camp – the Brits duet with Robbie Williams is here, Jones treating Randy Newman’s “You give me reason to live!” as shabbily and offhandedly as any of Prince’s kisses, Williams momentarily numbed by the likelihood that he too had glimpsed his own future.
AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
The alternative is to find new meanings in old music, particularly when, as in the case of this writer, such an alternative is forced upon one by circumstance. It’s uncomfortable for me to listen to REM’s Automatic For The People more than maybe once a year, or in the future once every ten years, even though I now own four copies of the record; two CDs for domestic use, two cassettes (in that strange gold-cum-sepia hue) for Walkman use. One of which was of course, once upon a time not so long ago, owned by each of us. Songs which ten years ago injected us with a renewed love of life, even as they sang of death, now sing only of death. “Drive,” the opening track and lead single, mysteriously (or not) absent from the new REM best-of compilation, deliberately constructed as a sequel to David Essex’s “Rock On” (while incorporating the strings and terminal beach feeling of Essex’s “Stardust”), with its Please Please Me/Revolver-echoing “1-2-3-4” introductory count, with Stipe’s lonely, echoed voice asking us, almost defying us, to find meaning in the old shibboleths. “Hey. Kids! Rock and roll. Nobody tells you where to go. Baby.” “Maybe you rocked around the clock. Tick. Tock.” In other words, you have to give up. “Try Not To Breathe” (“I need something to walk over my grave again”). “Everybody Hurts,” of course, deliberately constructed as a riposte to and negation of “I Know It’s Over” (“No! No!! NO!!! You’re NOT alone!”). The unresting “New Orleans Instrumental No 1” with its droning, low-scale guitar almost threatening to drown it. The now near-unbearable “Sweetness Follows” (“Readying to bury your father and your mother…Live your lives full of joy and wonder” – sung as sweetly and snugly as Art Garfunkel should have done).
The “Losing My Religion” boil-up of “Monty Got A Raw Deal” finally exploding into “Ignoreland” where the private grief of “Everybody Hurts” spills over, as it inevitably would have done, into rage against the first Bush, against the world the USA has fashioned in its own anti-image (“I know that this is just vitriol, no solution…but I feel better having screamed, don’t you?”).
But neither “Ignoreland” nor “Everybody Hurts” is the epicentre of the album. That can be found in the still profoundly disturbing “Star Me Kitten.” It is unlike anything else REM have ever done, perhaps because – as with the Beatles – REM have rarely incorporated sexuality into their music. As with Morrissey, Stipe’s asexuality puts him at an advantage, or even perhaps a pedestal, the better for him to view everyone and everything else. As demonstrated by 1994’s Monster, REM are unsuited to raunch – hear how the uncurdled grief of “Let Me In” rips the façade of the rest of that record to shreds – but with “Star Me Kitten,” a whispered, barely decipherable litany of desire, lust and hatred, the effect is rather like catching Gandhi coming out of a porn shop. With its inhuman (or superhuman) static harmonies – directly inspired by 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” – we only catch glimpses of what Stipe is threatening or desiring (“I’ve changed the locks,” “You, me, we used to be on firrrre”) though very clearly catch the whisper “You are wild, and I’m in your possession…so fuck me kitten,” over the most poignant chord changes Peter Buck has ever mustered.
And it is possibly self-defeating to talk about Automatic For The People in any way which doesn’t relate directly to this writer’s life at the time – to understand how I feel about it, you have to understand how aptly the golden sheen of the cassette case shone against the lights leading up to the Westway on a dark Friday evening. Or how “Star Me Kitten” sounded emerging out of High Street Kensington tube station on a cold but bright Monday morning in February 1993. Or the way in which Laura pronounced “follows” when she sang along to “Sweetness Follows.”
Or what we used to get up to in the back seat of a late-night Oxford Tube to the accompaniment of “Man In The Moon”…their greatest song, a song which celebrates life as grandly as it illustrates death, Elvis via Andy Kaufman (“Here’s a truck stop instead of St Peter’s”). The absolute and crucial importance of Deborah Workman’s oboe in “Nightswimming,” especially when set against Buck’s half-remembered Floyd Cramer piano line. Or the one-sided finality of “Find The River” where Stipe closes the album by sadly musing “None of this is going my way” while reassuring us that “Everything is coming your way.” It could be life, or it could be the flood. Automatic For The People. I have to be careful how I use it.
ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE
And then there are other memories and some violent rejolting of things one might have forgotten. On one hand, continuing the above train of passage, how utterly right the uncertain clanks and hiccups of Autechre’s Tri Repeatae sounded on a cold, dark Monday teatime in November 1995 when speeding through the deserted and echoing West 12 Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush Green, getting some last-minute groceries from Safeway before scurrying back over to the other side of the Thames Water roundabout to catch the Oxford Tube back home. Or there are things, people, which I never witnessed first hand. Such was the case with Elton Dean’s Ninesense. Known only by me through the two not very satisfactory albums they made for Ogun in the mid-‘70s, they were apparently one of the most incendiary live bands going, sometimes outdoing their parent group Brotherhood of Breath in duende. They played in Glasgow only once, to my knowledge, at the Third Eye Centre in early 1978, but for whatever long-forgotten reason my dad and I weren’t able to make the gig.
Who were Ninesense? Essentially they were, in terms of both style and personnel, a cross between an expanded Keith Tippett Group and a slimline Brotherhood of Breath. In fact they were the nucleus of the Tippett Group but playing Elton Dean’s compositions, with Tippett himself at the piano, Dean on alto and saxello, Marc Charig on cornet and tenor horn, and Nick Evans on trombone. From the BoB side of things came the still unequalled rhythm section of Harry Miller and Louis Moholo, plus BoB frontline regulars Harry Beckett, Alan Skidmore and Radu Malfatti.
Why am I even talking about them? Because, although their two Ogun albums still await CD reissue, a new album comprising the two sessions they did for BBC Radio 3’s Jazz In Britain - one in 1975 and the other in 1978 – has just been released: Ninesense Live At The BBC. And because, historically, the 1975 session is crucial, as it is the only extant recording of the band with their original second trumpeter, Mongezi Feza. It can’t be underlined how heavy a blow Feza’s early and needless death in December 1975, at the age of just 30, dealt to the British jazz and improv scene of the time, and it’s a blow from which Ogun Records, in particular, never quite recovered. Throughout their ‘70s releases there is a very strong element of mourning, most obviously in the still excoriating Blue Notes For Mongezi (which demands an urgent CD upgrade), and also on side two of Ninesense’s debut album, Oh! For The Edge, which is essentially a tribute to Feza, consisting mainly of a straightforward, swinging reading of his “Friday Night Blues” bookended by passages of stately, mourning laments.
Listening to the four tracks included from the 1975 BBC sessions, it’s noticeable how much more conventional Ninesense sounded at their outset. “Dancin’” is straight-ahead trademark kwela-flavoured post-bop with a typically ebullient, if relatively conventional, trumpet solo from Feza. “Soothing” is freer and darker in construct, a direct descendent of Dean’s more neurotic compositions from his Soft Machine days (“Fletcher’s Blemish,” “Gridal Suite”) and featuring Dean’s own coruscating saxello playing as well as the more subtly probing trombone of Malfatti. Despite Tippett’s ceaseless commentary from the sidelines, however, these pale in intensity somewhat when compared with the forms they took on Oh! For The Edge (retitled “Dance” and “Forsoothe” respectively; in the latter especially, the band seem intent on going completely over the edge into the unknown).
(Then again, it has to be remembered that the Ninesense line-up on Oh! For The Edge was in fact only Eightsense, as Malfatti came down with the ‘flu and couldn’t make the 100 Club gig which was being recorded [apparently, all the possible second trombone deps – Paul Rutherford, Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Nieman – were playing a gig on the other side of Oxford Street that particular evening, in the London Palladium pit band backing Shirley Bassey! It’s called, I believe, “paying the rent”]).
The other two tracks here, “Sweet Francesca” and “Bidet Bebop,” also resurfaced under different titles within Dean’s recorded Ogun output. The former, retitled “Sweet FA,” appeared as part of Ninesense’s second (studio) album Happy Daze, while the latter, retitled “Dede Bup Bup,” turned up on EDQ’s They All Be On This Old Road. “Sweet FA” is a lovely ballad, but works better on Happy Daze; here Skidmore and Tippett’s exploratory solos seem to stop before they’ve really got started. Similarly “Bidet Bebop” is enjoyable, but Paul Nieman (depping for Nick Evans) sounds a bit reluctant to play “out,” and the piece doesn’t start to compare with the extraordinarily intense quartet reading by Dean/Tippett/Chris Laurence/Moholo, wherein Tippett seems to stop barely short of demolishing his piano completely during his thunderous solo.
The 1978 session, however, featuring the classic Ninesense line-up, is a more demonic kettle of piranha altogether. Sounding noticeably more lo-fi than the ’75 pieces, this reworks the two pieces which made up side one of Happy Daze, “Nicrotto” (here retitled “Nicra”) and “Seven For Lee” (retitled “Seven For Me”) and sends their studio incarnations flying.
“Nicra” in particular – which, as you would expect, is an extended freeish feature for the boot boys of the trombone, Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti – reaches a degree of boiling intensity which was exceptional even for those times. Here, the lo-fi recording works in the music’s favour, as Evans and Malfatti battle it out with their jockey slides while Tippett thumps and smashes away at his keyboard, seemingly with large-bore screwdrivers, with Miller and Moholo typically matching him for intensity all the way. There’s certainly an intensity to Tippett’s work of this era which seems to have subsided somewhat in recent years; in this setting he’s virtually a match for Cecil T. The intensity of the superficially more conventional “Seven For Me” is almost entirely down to Tippett as well; even on celeste, to which he sporadically switches on this track, he is unceasing in his prompting, and even mild-mannered Harry Beckett is compelled during his solo to break into free territory, just to be heard. Who’s doing this now? Why doesn’t someone get Alex Maguire’s Cat O’ Nine Tails into the studio while there’s still time?
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY (1 Of 2)
”Looking From A Hilltop (Restructure)” by Section 25 (Factory 12-inch, 1984)
I would say that this is the fourteenth song which is not included in any of Morley’s lists, as it is conspicuous by its absence and also by what it helped to cause inadvertently, in Chicago and elsewhere. An acknowledged kickstart to Acid House and Detroit Techno, simultaneously owing a certain something to Lee Perry’s “City Too Hot” (which Trojan have just reissued as a 12-inch, so you can check for yourself), and yet so frail and perilous a song; over mordant, monolithic synth chords Angela Cassidy is singing precariously of…what? Imminent rape, or murder, or death (“Don’t understand the fear/Don’t do this to me…I just want to see your face”)? Is she singing “paradise” or “powerbikes” in the “chorus”? And are those electronic whooshes which punctuate the word helicopter blades or knives? Too much of an acknowledgement of mortality, perhaps, to make any headway in the forcibly happy singles charts of the summer of 1984, over which the twin towers of “Two Tribes” and “Relax” presided as a terrible reminder of what the rest of you should be achieving but never will. Far more palatable to have Nik Kershaw cheerfully asserting that “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” than this bleak electro-throb of a single, even with Bernard Sumner remix/production input (even New Order, by 1984, were deemed insufficiently happy for the top ten and were not to return to it until 1987), this single which would have been a massive hit in 1980 or 1988. And…well, you know the rest. Larry Heard heard it, so did Marshall Jefferson, so did Derrick May. The luridly plain orange of the original 12” sleeve served as a further reminder to what the bastard children of Howard Jones were willing to neglect. And it wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of being a hit in 2003, either. Only Pink and Britney are allowed to be “unhappy” nowadays.
HOUSEWIVES’ IMPROV
“Kitty Brazelton has been a mover and shaker in the downtown scene for well over a decade; a singer, bandleader and composer of striking originality. Along with Dafna Naphtali, she performs two extended suites of twisted, powerful chamber rock blending a raucous punk aesthetic with vocal harmonies, noise and much, much more. Complex, visionary weirdness from two of the strangest minds in contemporary music.”
That’s the blurb on the sleeve wrapper of What Is It Like To Be A Bat?, the debut album by said Brazelton/Naphtali on John Zorn’s Tzadik label – the Tzadik Oracles sub-label, no less, which “celebrates the diversity and creativity of women in experimental music.” Wouldn’t it be more celebratory and deserving to put women on the Tzadik label proper, instead of shoving them into an uncalled-for ghetto? But enough of that for now – you will have observed the unapologetic use of the term “chamber rock” above and might be wondering how such a thing could coexist with any “punk aesthetic,” raucous or otherwise. Fears might be raised by the sleeve photo, two identical-looking women in hornrimmed spectacles, lying back to back or head to head, looking rather more than slightly middle-class smug.
Essentially we have two extended suites here: “She Said – She Said, ‘Can You Sing Sermonette With Me?’” and “5 Dreams: Marriage,” both of which are a gallimaufry of various noise-related input and gestures, not all of which coalesce comfortably. For instance, the first suite gets off to a fantastic start, with a Tornados guitar rev-up leading into Atari Teenage Riot pop noiseblocks, but as with all other sufferers of Zorn’s Disease they can’t seem to be able to latch onto something and keep it. They have to keep changing; thus we irritatingly jumpcut to quiescent electro to overheard conversation to screams without time for any real focus to be achieved. Noticeably, on the suite’s 16-minute closing section “Trance,” Brazelton/Naphtali have palpably more room to stretch out, breathe and develop dynamics, and the piece works towards an emotionally satisfying climax. Which emotions it represents, however, are difficult to say.
“5 Dreams: Marriage” is much more coherent a suite, based around a couple of central motifs and an actual pop song (though the latter hovers dangerously in the area of “This Wheel’s On Fire”). Again the jumpcuts just when things are getting interesting are an annoyance, leaving us just scraps to cling onto (the whispered “I told ya!” at the end of “Aria 3,” the brief dive into electropop in “Answer 3”), and I’m unsure whether Brazelton’s conservatory-trained voice is particularly appropriate for this sort of thing; in his Wire review, Ian P assesses them as a cross between the Art Bears and Le Tigre, and I’d say he was certainly right about the former; those doom-laden Michael Mantler chords which pop up during “Aria 4” and those funereal Chris Cutler drums (here played by Danny Tunick) give us back the unappetising and smug stench of Re Records circa 1985; people playing with pop music rather than trying to understand it. Again, when unleashed from the need to compress everything into one or two-minute bursts, the duo produce good results on “Answer 5” which goes some way towards developing the kind of fusion of arsequake, laptop hooligan electro and Carla Bley at which I presume they were aiming. The catharsis of the closing “Glory Chorale” is also quite touching. Too bad they had to spoil it with an awful sub-“Will and Grace” spell of studio banter to explain it all – “ree-LAY-shun-ships, was it five times?” – which leads one to think that, far from being down with the kids, they’d be sitting on tenant assessment boards to keep the kids out of their expensively manicured hands. Ultimately, it is too considered to be considered genuinely new and disturbing music; one instantly wants to turn to operatives who can achieve this sort of thing with far more nonchalance, like the Fiery Furnaces or Girls Aloud.
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY (2 OF 2)
”Nagasaki Nightmare” by Crass, Crass Records, 1981
Or indeed like Crass. “Nagasaki Nightmare” is not strictly their greatest single – 1979’s “Reality Asylum,” a record which outsold most other singles released in 1979 but excluded from the BMRB chart under a spurious “no singles retailing at less than 49p qualify for inclusion” ruling, and a single which, in its harnessing of a post-Xenakis/end of Escalator Over The Hill electronic backdrop, one of the greatest female vocal performances on any pop record and one of the bluntest and sanest lyrics ever to grace a “pop” record, remains unlike any other single ever released, is their masterpiece – but because of the same “industry” ruling which excluded it from the Top 40, you would not otherwise know that this was by all externally audited accounts the biggest-selling single in Britain for most of April 1981. Thus does it join “God Save The Queen” as a “ghost” number one.
Ghost or not, it’s certainly one of the greatest number ones, and at 8:22 also the longest in its time. The dynamics and emotions which coalesced to make this (at the time, and still now) highly relevant protest song seem to me to achieve what the likes of Brazelton/Nephtali are too conscientious about trying to achieve. And, although slow in its build up and varied in its modes of attack, it is unmistakeably pop music. Beginning with the stereo-separated voices of a Hiroshima survivor and Eve Libertine’s matchless voice reciting the statistics of the bombing, Phil Free’s guitar picks nervously at a few Oriental tonalities before Pete Wright and Penny Rimbaud enter with a “Third Stone From The Sun”-type on-the-beat jazz rhythm, Free’s guitar now sounding vaguely like Derek Bailey, before Steve Ignorant and Joy De Vivre’s impassioned vocals burst in, the musical storm receding and returning again and again until, at 4:27, Rimbaud’s snare tap ushers in a remarkably assured free section – it has to be remembered that many of Crass gave long counterculture histories, in some cases from the remnants of the ’68 Situationists, in others from the second wave of UK improv (People Band, etc. – see sometime Crass associate Terry Day’s “Ruthless” with the London Improvisers Orchestra for evidence of how strong this continuum resonates throughout the decades) – which not only outdoes dreary old Yoko Ono at her own game but reminds us that, though Crass purposely existed Outside The System, they nevertheless had musical chops aplenty. At 5:28 Rimbaud sets up a rolling double-time beat to lead the band back into the finale, accompanied by a chant of “Rain! Rain!” – and at 6:32 the punk thrash kicks in and De Vivre and Libertine’s howling, despairing vocals lead the track to a cathartic finale, leaving at the end just the sound of a repeated gong being struck – the alternative “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Shocking at the time, still stunning in our time – Crass were, almost minutely amongst everything else they achieved, one of the great singles acts. For further evidence, invest in their Best Before…1984 compilation immediately.
ENVOI OF SORTS
The Queen at this year’s Remembrance Service, looking haggard and weary of life. Aunt Julia singing “Arrayed For The Bridal.” Paul Burrell and George Smith (surely not the same George Smith who used to play tuba for Mike Westbrook?) yet again simultaneously proving and disproving Raymond Williams’ complaint in Culture And Society that the master/servant relationship endures only because the servants are “too much in awe of authority.” Yes and no. They are only in awe provided the authority proves him or herself to be worthy of it. Tell your servants they’re worthless enough times and they won’t necessarily start to believe it; they’ll just stop believing you. There’s also a difference between being in awe of authority and being in love with authority. The problem with Burrell was and is that he loved Diana, and the object of his love reacted in the only way she would be expected to; first with amusement, then with boredom-induced disdain. They would both have voted for Michael Portillo. We care about them for only as long as we continue to subsidise them.
Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when one has to resign from the increasingly onerous and unlovable task of “keeping up to date” with “developments”? Does such a point necessarily coexist with, and in direct proportion to, the point where the observer/participator himself becomes obsolete, out of touch, staid, conservative? What happens when such points are decided with regard to an artist – when or if an artist suddenly becomes old-fashioned, and the subsidiary question of how necessary/cost-effective it is to make the same artist new and now again?
When one gets to the point – or the self-constructed trap - of, not just saying, but feeling, that records like “Pass The Dutch” or “Ground Zero” are not exactly “Good Vibrations” or even “Valley Of The Shadows,” then one would do well to remember the rôle played by Tom Jones in the play Abigail’s Party. Demis Roussos, of course, is the musical association most strongly associated with that endeavour, but recall how, near the beginning of the play, Beverly cheerfully puts on The Very Best Of Tom Jones to get her particular party started. Observe the stock budget-price EMI cover of the album in question; the bottom half being a less-than-flattering photograph of the artist, the top half being a red diagonal slash, as if the artist’s head has just been sliced open for the fag ends of profits to be extracted. Beverly remarks on how sexy Tom Jones is (while “It’s Not Unusual” is playing), while her guests remain stiff and seated, as though on Death Row, perhaps secretly wishing to escape and gatecrash Abigail’s real, unseen and unheard party. For this is the subsidiary lesson of the play; it’s 1977, and the “kids” are demonstrably absent, listening and dancing to punk. “Life” is developing elsewhere; all we are left to look at and examine is a dead culture, something which momentarily exuded some sense of “nowness” in 1966 but which now has nothing to offer except useless – worse, unusable – memories. The unspoken sadness of the play is that Abigail and her mates will probably be just as beached a set of whales in 1988, spinning their worn copy of the Jam’s Snap while Abigail’s daughter is getting high on Acid House next door.
But this was how Tom Jones was perceived in 1977; an object of ridicule, as decrepit a Las Vegas poodle as Presley or Welles, someone shortly to be reduced to signing a US record deal which confined him to recording country tunes. What, apart from Jonathan Ross, the damnable tumour of post-punk irony and the unavoidable circularity of trends, happened to change this?
In truth, the music world has never really known what to do with Tom Jones. An unapologetic hollering chest-beater who saw himself as an apprentice to the court of King Solomon (Burke), he should have been sent to Jerry Wexler straightaway. Instead they gave him corny show tunes and lacklustre contemporary pop hits to cover. In a way they still are. Part of the problem may be that Jones was an anomaly even in 1965; of the same generation as the Beatles but somehow looking considerably older. Stylistically he came across as a not altogether satisfactory missing link between the camp beefcake of Frankie Vaughan and the camp “soul” of Eric Burdon.
And he has never really sounded happy on record, apart from a very early example; 1964’s “Chills And Fever” his only recording with Joe Meek. With his startling multiphonic screams and mischievous down-the-scale cackling, we get immediately what he really was; the natural successor to Screaming Lord Sutch (the backing is very “Jack The Ripper”). And this was a joy Jones never quite recaptured.
“Chills And Fever” now reappears, along with 92 other tracks, on the new 4CD box set The Definitive Tom Jones 1964-2002. With unintended starkness it demonstrates how Jones fell flat when attempting anything other than straightforward pop-soul or MoR schlock like “Green Green Grass Of Home,” his very own “Living Doll.” Time and time again, when required to express emotions such as vulnerability, hopelessness or compassion, he simply isn’t up to it; his sobs, sighs, gulps and asides on 1967’s “I’m Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” or 1969’s “Without Love (There Is Nothing)” are so obviously staged, so clearly acted, that one ends up not believing anything he says or sings. Perhaps he really was more comfortable with the harmless camp of things like “Help Yourself” or “Love Me Tonight,” though problems occur when he extends the campness to something like “Delilah,” effectively asking us to laugh at and conspire with stabbing a laughing woman to death – it took Alex Harvey’s 1975 remodelling of the song to reveal the sordid cheapness of its essential brutalism.
Portishead favourite “Looking Out My Window” (1968) and smart pop like 1970’s “Daughter Of Darkness” fit Jones so aptly that you regret he wasn’t given more things like these to do, rather than hack re-readings of hoary old chestnuts like “If Ever I Would Leave You” or lamentable readings of uncoverable songs like “Hey Jude” and “Wichita Lineman.” His 1967 version of Mickey Newbury’s “Detroit City” is straightforwardly good as well, although mostly because musically it is thrown askew by the strange, untuned, wavering guitar motif throughout (the young John McLaughlin, no less). And though 1966’s “A Taste Of Honey” proved that sensitivity was not his forte, it would be churlish to overlook the track’s interesting arrangement, with its multiple Gil Evans quotations.
Nevertheless, Jones struggled throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s with well-meaning trash like “The Young New Mexican Puppeteer” and “Lusty Lady.” It took another West End chestbeater – “A Boy From Nowhere,” wherein we are asked to imagine the unimaginable spectre of Tom Jones as a penniless apprentice bullfighter – to bring him back to the attention of the world at large, and his Art of Noise-assisted reading of Prince’s “Kiss” to make him “hip” again in 1988. But the problem with “Kiss” was the same old problem; Prince’s original is whispered with almost unsustainable pent-up sexual desire, the exact meeting point between vulnerability and carnality. All Jones can do is roar and leer his way through the song and divest it of sex entirely. Thereafter it was essentially business as usual; new MoR covers to replace the old ones (“Move Closer”) or attempts at rocking out (“Gimme Shelter” with New Model Army!) as unconvincing as his rendering of “Witch Queen Of New Orleans” 20 years previously. And was Jones that convincing as a “soul” singer? Witness his 1967 live version of “Land Of 1000 Dances” and his hamfisted attempts to get the audience involved (“It’s a simple song” he repeatedly reassures them). Set next to the genuinely demonic entreaties of Sam Cooke as captured on Live At The Harlem Square Club: One Night Stand, Jones sounds jejeune and whiter than white.
In the ‘90s and beyond, though, people continued to protest that he was hip, and thus he worked with Trevor Horn on 1993’s The Lead And How To Swing It. The album’s big hit single “If I Only Knew” is admittedly a brilliant sleight-of-hand from Horn, electronically elongating Jones’ holler into an unending loop which makes him sound as if he’s being strangled and even making his attempts to rap sound moderately convincing. From the same album, “A Girl Like You” starts out promisingly, with Jones’ genuinely sinister whispers against a fuzzy electro backdrop sounding like the Pulp of This Is Hardcore essaying “Transmission,” but alas the song loses heart and soon degenerates into a sub-U2 rock-out. Yet the album flopped, and thus was Jones ultimately compelled to make himself “ironic” in order not to be demoted from TOTP to TOTP2 - and has anyone else noticed the gradual onset of institutional ageism in the singles chart? – by recording duets with contemporary pop people and thereby becoming “relevant.”
By all standards – except commercially, where it cleaned up - Reload is a disaster. On a reading of Byrne’s “Burning Down The House” with the Cardigans, Jones seems not to comprehend any of the lyric, and his strangulated belching of “Fighting fire with fire!” indicates nothing more than the urgent need of a good dose of syrup of figs. “Sexbomb” is where he capitulates and reconciles himself with the fact that, if he’s going to have any sort of a career hereonin, he can only do it by laughing at himself before anyone else does.
And yet, buried deep within this farrago, and justifiably included on the boxset as a kind of coda, is Jones’ greatest vocal performance – his reading of “Motherless Child” with Adrian Utley of Portishead arranging and producing. In this song’s five minutes, set against a lush 1969 orchestration for which he would gladly have died in 1969, Jones finally gets the song and the treatment he deserves. Forced to concentrate, forced moreover to look in his own mirror, Jones summarises 40 years of compromise and substitution into a genuinely vulnerable and passionate admission of his own mortality. For maybe the only time in the five-and-a-half hours of music here, we see the real Tom Jones, a soulman who exalted and excelled in the shallow, who could make the most meretricious trash seem like the Last Trump if only he could have been bothered. But it’s not long before we are sent back to camp – the Brits duet with Robbie Williams is here, Jones treating Randy Newman’s “You give me reason to live!” as shabbily and offhandedly as any of Prince’s kisses, Williams momentarily numbed by the likelihood that he too had glimpsed his own future.
AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
The alternative is to find new meanings in old music, particularly when, as in the case of this writer, such an alternative is forced upon one by circumstance. It’s uncomfortable for me to listen to REM’s Automatic For The People more than maybe once a year, or in the future once every ten years, even though I now own four copies of the record; two CDs for domestic use, two cassettes (in that strange gold-cum-sepia hue) for Walkman use. One of which was of course, once upon a time not so long ago, owned by each of us. Songs which ten years ago injected us with a renewed love of life, even as they sang of death, now sing only of death. “Drive,” the opening track and lead single, mysteriously (or not) absent from the new REM best-of compilation, deliberately constructed as a sequel to David Essex’s “Rock On” (while incorporating the strings and terminal beach feeling of Essex’s “Stardust”), with its Please Please Me/Revolver-echoing “1-2-3-4” introductory count, with Stipe’s lonely, echoed voice asking us, almost defying us, to find meaning in the old shibboleths. “Hey. Kids! Rock and roll. Nobody tells you where to go. Baby.” “Maybe you rocked around the clock. Tick. Tock.” In other words, you have to give up. “Try Not To Breathe” (“I need something to walk over my grave again”). “Everybody Hurts,” of course, deliberately constructed as a riposte to and negation of “I Know It’s Over” (“No! No!! NO!!! You’re NOT alone!”). The unresting “New Orleans Instrumental No 1” with its droning, low-scale guitar almost threatening to drown it. The now near-unbearable “Sweetness Follows” (“Readying to bury your father and your mother…Live your lives full of joy and wonder” – sung as sweetly and snugly as Art Garfunkel should have done).
The “Losing My Religion” boil-up of “Monty Got A Raw Deal” finally exploding into “Ignoreland” where the private grief of “Everybody Hurts” spills over, as it inevitably would have done, into rage against the first Bush, against the world the USA has fashioned in its own anti-image (“I know that this is just vitriol, no solution…but I feel better having screamed, don’t you?”).
But neither “Ignoreland” nor “Everybody Hurts” is the epicentre of the album. That can be found in the still profoundly disturbing “Star Me Kitten.” It is unlike anything else REM have ever done, perhaps because – as with the Beatles – REM have rarely incorporated sexuality into their music. As with Morrissey, Stipe’s asexuality puts him at an advantage, or even perhaps a pedestal, the better for him to view everyone and everything else. As demonstrated by 1994’s Monster, REM are unsuited to raunch – hear how the uncurdled grief of “Let Me In” rips the façade of the rest of that record to shreds – but with “Star Me Kitten,” a whispered, barely decipherable litany of desire, lust and hatred, the effect is rather like catching Gandhi coming out of a porn shop. With its inhuman (or superhuman) static harmonies – directly inspired by 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” – we only catch glimpses of what Stipe is threatening or desiring (“I’ve changed the locks,” “You, me, we used to be on firrrre”) though very clearly catch the whisper “You are wild, and I’m in your possession…so fuck me kitten,” over the most poignant chord changes Peter Buck has ever mustered.
And it is possibly self-defeating to talk about Automatic For The People in any way which doesn’t relate directly to this writer’s life at the time – to understand how I feel about it, you have to understand how aptly the golden sheen of the cassette case shone against the lights leading up to the Westway on a dark Friday evening. Or how “Star Me Kitten” sounded emerging out of High Street Kensington tube station on a cold but bright Monday morning in February 1993. Or the way in which Laura pronounced “follows” when she sang along to “Sweetness Follows.”
Or what we used to get up to in the back seat of a late-night Oxford Tube to the accompaniment of “Man In The Moon”…their greatest song, a song which celebrates life as grandly as it illustrates death, Elvis via Andy Kaufman (“Here’s a truck stop instead of St Peter’s”). The absolute and crucial importance of Deborah Workman’s oboe in “Nightswimming,” especially when set against Buck’s half-remembered Floyd Cramer piano line. Or the one-sided finality of “Find The River” where Stipe closes the album by sadly musing “None of this is going my way” while reassuring us that “Everything is coming your way.” It could be life, or it could be the flood. Automatic For The People. I have to be careful how I use it.
ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE
And then there are other memories and some violent rejolting of things one might have forgotten. On one hand, continuing the above train of passage, how utterly right the uncertain clanks and hiccups of Autechre’s Tri Repeatae sounded on a cold, dark Monday teatime in November 1995 when speeding through the deserted and echoing West 12 Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush Green, getting some last-minute groceries from Safeway before scurrying back over to the other side of the Thames Water roundabout to catch the Oxford Tube back home. Or there are things, people, which I never witnessed first hand. Such was the case with Elton Dean’s Ninesense. Known only by me through the two not very satisfactory albums they made for Ogun in the mid-‘70s, they were apparently one of the most incendiary live bands going, sometimes outdoing their parent group Brotherhood of Breath in duende. They played in Glasgow only once, to my knowledge, at the Third Eye Centre in early 1978, but for whatever long-forgotten reason my dad and I weren’t able to make the gig.
Who were Ninesense? Essentially they were, in terms of both style and personnel, a cross between an expanded Keith Tippett Group and a slimline Brotherhood of Breath. In fact they were the nucleus of the Tippett Group but playing Elton Dean’s compositions, with Tippett himself at the piano, Dean on alto and saxello, Marc Charig on cornet and tenor horn, and Nick Evans on trombone. From the BoB side of things came the still unequalled rhythm section of Harry Miller and Louis Moholo, plus BoB frontline regulars Harry Beckett, Alan Skidmore and Radu Malfatti.
Why am I even talking about them? Because, although their two Ogun albums still await CD reissue, a new album comprising the two sessions they did for BBC Radio 3’s Jazz In Britain - one in 1975 and the other in 1978 – has just been released: Ninesense Live At The BBC. And because, historically, the 1975 session is crucial, as it is the only extant recording of the band with their original second trumpeter, Mongezi Feza. It can’t be underlined how heavy a blow Feza’s early and needless death in December 1975, at the age of just 30, dealt to the British jazz and improv scene of the time, and it’s a blow from which Ogun Records, in particular, never quite recovered. Throughout their ‘70s releases there is a very strong element of mourning, most obviously in the still excoriating Blue Notes For Mongezi (which demands an urgent CD upgrade), and also on side two of Ninesense’s debut album, Oh! For The Edge, which is essentially a tribute to Feza, consisting mainly of a straightforward, swinging reading of his “Friday Night Blues” bookended by passages of stately, mourning laments.
Listening to the four tracks included from the 1975 BBC sessions, it’s noticeable how much more conventional Ninesense sounded at their outset. “Dancin’” is straight-ahead trademark kwela-flavoured post-bop with a typically ebullient, if relatively conventional, trumpet solo from Feza. “Soothing” is freer and darker in construct, a direct descendent of Dean’s more neurotic compositions from his Soft Machine days (“Fletcher’s Blemish,” “Gridal Suite”) and featuring Dean’s own coruscating saxello playing as well as the more subtly probing trombone of Malfatti. Despite Tippett’s ceaseless commentary from the sidelines, however, these pale in intensity somewhat when compared with the forms they took on Oh! For The Edge (retitled “Dance” and “Forsoothe” respectively; in the latter especially, the band seem intent on going completely over the edge into the unknown).
(Then again, it has to be remembered that the Ninesense line-up on Oh! For The Edge was in fact only Eightsense, as Malfatti came down with the ‘flu and couldn’t make the 100 Club gig which was being recorded [apparently, all the possible second trombone deps – Paul Rutherford, Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Nieman – were playing a gig on the other side of Oxford Street that particular evening, in the London Palladium pit band backing Shirley Bassey! It’s called, I believe, “paying the rent”]).
The other two tracks here, “Sweet Francesca” and “Bidet Bebop,” also resurfaced under different titles within Dean’s recorded Ogun output. The former, retitled “Sweet FA,” appeared as part of Ninesense’s second (studio) album Happy Daze, while the latter, retitled “Dede Bup Bup,” turned up on EDQ’s They All Be On This Old Road. “Sweet FA” is a lovely ballad, but works better on Happy Daze; here Skidmore and Tippett’s exploratory solos seem to stop before they’ve really got started. Similarly “Bidet Bebop” is enjoyable, but Paul Nieman (depping for Nick Evans) sounds a bit reluctant to play “out,” and the piece doesn’t start to compare with the extraordinarily intense quartet reading by Dean/Tippett/Chris Laurence/Moholo, wherein Tippett seems to stop barely short of demolishing his piano completely during his thunderous solo.
The 1978 session, however, featuring the classic Ninesense line-up, is a more demonic kettle of piranha altogether. Sounding noticeably more lo-fi than the ’75 pieces, this reworks the two pieces which made up side one of Happy Daze, “Nicrotto” (here retitled “Nicra”) and “Seven For Lee” (retitled “Seven For Me”) and sends their studio incarnations flying.
“Nicra” in particular – which, as you would expect, is an extended freeish feature for the boot boys of the trombone, Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti – reaches a degree of boiling intensity which was exceptional even for those times. Here, the lo-fi recording works in the music’s favour, as Evans and Malfatti battle it out with their jockey slides while Tippett thumps and smashes away at his keyboard, seemingly with large-bore screwdrivers, with Miller and Moholo typically matching him for intensity all the way. There’s certainly an intensity to Tippett’s work of this era which seems to have subsided somewhat in recent years; in this setting he’s virtually a match for Cecil T. The intensity of the superficially more conventional “Seven For Me” is almost entirely down to Tippett as well; even on celeste, to which he sporadically switches on this track, he is unceasing in his prompting, and even mild-mannered Harry Beckett is compelled during his solo to break into free territory, just to be heard. Who’s doing this now? Why doesn’t someone get Alex Maguire’s Cat O’ Nine Tails into the studio while there’s still time?
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY (1 Of 2)
”Looking From A Hilltop (Restructure)” by Section 25 (Factory 12-inch, 1984)
I would say that this is the fourteenth song which is not included in any of Morley’s lists, as it is conspicuous by its absence and also by what it helped to cause inadvertently, in Chicago and elsewhere. An acknowledged kickstart to Acid House and Detroit Techno, simultaneously owing a certain something to Lee Perry’s “City Too Hot” (which Trojan have just reissued as a 12-inch, so you can check for yourself), and yet so frail and perilous a song; over mordant, monolithic synth chords Angela Cassidy is singing precariously of…what? Imminent rape, or murder, or death (“Don’t understand the fear/Don’t do this to me…I just want to see your face”)? Is she singing “paradise” or “powerbikes” in the “chorus”? And are those electronic whooshes which punctuate the word helicopter blades or knives? Too much of an acknowledgement of mortality, perhaps, to make any headway in the forcibly happy singles charts of the summer of 1984, over which the twin towers of “Two Tribes” and “Relax” presided as a terrible reminder of what the rest of you should be achieving but never will. Far more palatable to have Nik Kershaw cheerfully asserting that “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” than this bleak electro-throb of a single, even with Bernard Sumner remix/production input (even New Order, by 1984, were deemed insufficiently happy for the top ten and were not to return to it until 1987), this single which would have been a massive hit in 1980 or 1988. And…well, you know the rest. Larry Heard heard it, so did Marshall Jefferson, so did Derrick May. The luridly plain orange of the original 12” sleeve served as a further reminder to what the bastard children of Howard Jones were willing to neglect. And it wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of being a hit in 2003, either. Only Pink and Britney are allowed to be “unhappy” nowadays.
HOUSEWIVES’ IMPROV
“Kitty Brazelton has been a mover and shaker in the downtown scene for well over a decade; a singer, bandleader and composer of striking originality. Along with Dafna Naphtali, she performs two extended suites of twisted, powerful chamber rock blending a raucous punk aesthetic with vocal harmonies, noise and much, much more. Complex, visionary weirdness from two of the strangest minds in contemporary music.”
That’s the blurb on the sleeve wrapper of What Is It Like To Be A Bat?, the debut album by said Brazelton/Naphtali on John Zorn’s Tzadik label – the Tzadik Oracles sub-label, no less, which “celebrates the diversity and creativity of women in experimental music.” Wouldn’t it be more celebratory and deserving to put women on the Tzadik label proper, instead of shoving them into an uncalled-for ghetto? But enough of that for now – you will have observed the unapologetic use of the term “chamber rock” above and might be wondering how such a thing could coexist with any “punk aesthetic,” raucous or otherwise. Fears might be raised by the sleeve photo, two identical-looking women in hornrimmed spectacles, lying back to back or head to head, looking rather more than slightly middle-class smug.
Essentially we have two extended suites here: “She Said – She Said, ‘Can You Sing Sermonette With Me?’” and “5 Dreams: Marriage,” both of which are a gallimaufry of various noise-related input and gestures, not all of which coalesce comfortably. For instance, the first suite gets off to a fantastic start, with a Tornados guitar rev-up leading into Atari Teenage Riot pop noiseblocks, but as with all other sufferers of Zorn’s Disease they can’t seem to be able to latch onto something and keep it. They have to keep changing; thus we irritatingly jumpcut to quiescent electro to overheard conversation to screams without time for any real focus to be achieved. Noticeably, on the suite’s 16-minute closing section “Trance,” Brazelton/Naphtali have palpably more room to stretch out, breathe and develop dynamics, and the piece works towards an emotionally satisfying climax. Which emotions it represents, however, are difficult to say.
“5 Dreams: Marriage” is much more coherent a suite, based around a couple of central motifs and an actual pop song (though the latter hovers dangerously in the area of “This Wheel’s On Fire”). Again the jumpcuts just when things are getting interesting are an annoyance, leaving us just scraps to cling onto (the whispered “I told ya!” at the end of “Aria 3,” the brief dive into electropop in “Answer 3”), and I’m unsure whether Brazelton’s conservatory-trained voice is particularly appropriate for this sort of thing; in his Wire review, Ian P assesses them as a cross between the Art Bears and Le Tigre, and I’d say he was certainly right about the former; those doom-laden Michael Mantler chords which pop up during “Aria 4” and those funereal Chris Cutler drums (here played by Danny Tunick) give us back the unappetising and smug stench of Re Records circa 1985; people playing with pop music rather than trying to understand it. Again, when unleashed from the need to compress everything into one or two-minute bursts, the duo produce good results on “Answer 5” which goes some way towards developing the kind of fusion of arsequake, laptop hooligan electro and Carla Bley at which I presume they were aiming. The catharsis of the closing “Glory Chorale” is also quite touching. Too bad they had to spoil it with an awful sub-“Will and Grace” spell of studio banter to explain it all – “ree-LAY-shun-ships, was it five times?” – which leads one to think that, far from being down with the kids, they’d be sitting on tenant assessment boards to keep the kids out of their expensively manicured hands. Ultimately, it is too considered to be considered genuinely new and disturbing music; one instantly wants to turn to operatives who can achieve this sort of thing with far more nonchalance, like the Fiery Furnaces or Girls Aloud.
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY (2 OF 2)
”Nagasaki Nightmare” by Crass, Crass Records, 1981
Or indeed like Crass. “Nagasaki Nightmare” is not strictly their greatest single – 1979’s “Reality Asylum,” a record which outsold most other singles released in 1979 but excluded from the BMRB chart under a spurious “no singles retailing at less than 49p qualify for inclusion” ruling, and a single which, in its harnessing of a post-Xenakis/end of Escalator Over The Hill electronic backdrop, one of the greatest female vocal performances on any pop record and one of the bluntest and sanest lyrics ever to grace a “pop” record, remains unlike any other single ever released, is their masterpiece – but because of the same “industry” ruling which excluded it from the Top 40, you would not otherwise know that this was by all externally audited accounts the biggest-selling single in Britain for most of April 1981. Thus does it join “God Save The Queen” as a “ghost” number one.
Ghost or not, it’s certainly one of the greatest number ones, and at 8:22 also the longest in its time. The dynamics and emotions which coalesced to make this (at the time, and still now) highly relevant protest song seem to me to achieve what the likes of Brazelton/Nephtali are too conscientious about trying to achieve. And, although slow in its build up and varied in its modes of attack, it is unmistakeably pop music. Beginning with the stereo-separated voices of a Hiroshima survivor and Eve Libertine’s matchless voice reciting the statistics of the bombing, Phil Free’s guitar picks nervously at a few Oriental tonalities before Pete Wright and Penny Rimbaud enter with a “Third Stone From The Sun”-type on-the-beat jazz rhythm, Free’s guitar now sounding vaguely like Derek Bailey, before Steve Ignorant and Joy De Vivre’s impassioned vocals burst in, the musical storm receding and returning again and again until, at 4:27, Rimbaud’s snare tap ushers in a remarkably assured free section – it has to be remembered that many of Crass gave long counterculture histories, in some cases from the remnants of the ’68 Situationists, in others from the second wave of UK improv (People Band, etc. – see sometime Crass associate Terry Day’s “Ruthless” with the London Improvisers Orchestra for evidence of how strong this continuum resonates throughout the decades) – which not only outdoes dreary old Yoko Ono at her own game but reminds us that, though Crass purposely existed Outside The System, they nevertheless had musical chops aplenty. At 5:28 Rimbaud sets up a rolling double-time beat to lead the band back into the finale, accompanied by a chant of “Rain! Rain!” – and at 6:32 the punk thrash kicks in and De Vivre and Libertine’s howling, despairing vocals lead the track to a cathartic finale, leaving at the end just the sound of a repeated gong being struck – the alternative “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Shocking at the time, still stunning in our time – Crass were, almost minutely amongst everything else they achieved, one of the great singles acts. For further evidence, invest in their Best Before…1984 compilation immediately.
ENVOI OF SORTS
The Queen at this year’s Remembrance Service, looking haggard and weary of life. Aunt Julia singing “Arrayed For The Bridal.” Paul Burrell and George Smith (surely not the same George Smith who used to play tuba for Mike Westbrook?) yet again simultaneously proving and disproving Raymond Williams’ complaint in Culture And Society that the master/servant relationship endures only because the servants are “too much in awe of authority.” Yes and no. They are only in awe provided the authority proves him or herself to be worthy of it. Tell your servants they’re worthless enough times and they won’t necessarily start to believe it; they’ll just stop believing you. There’s also a difference between being in awe of authority and being in love with authority. The problem with Burrell was and is that he loved Diana, and the object of his love reacted in the only way she would be expected to; first with amusement, then with boredom-induced disdain. They would both have voted for Michael Portillo. We care about them for only as long as we continue to subsidise them.
Sunday, November 02, 2003
CAN’T ZIGZAG MY WAY HOME
Looking at last week’s list, it occurs to me that Brian Protheroe’s “Pinball” is a sequel of sorts of Des O’Connor’s “Dick-A-Dum-Dum.” Both ineffably London songs, compare the gleeful naivety of O’Connor’s faux-dumb delivery, the city and everything and everyone in it at his disposal. Although he has, on closer examination, nothing to offer (“Lend me a fiver, I’ll pay you in a few weeks” and the double decker bus is noticeably preferred to cars), he knows that his patter will pay for all of it and more besides. Indeed, towards the fadeout Des can hardly keep a straight face, adlibbing bewildering “whoops” and “heys,” less perhaps his disbelief at what he’s been asked to sing than articulating an idiot savant glee at the fact that This Is London and He Is In It.
Cut five years on to Protheroe’s disillusioned bedsit inhabitant/inmate who has clearly taken on London and lost. “And I’ve run out of pale ale/And I feel like I’m in jail/And my music bores me once again.” Eventually the vocal splits into a schizophrenic duo/duel, echoing and resolving on the finality of the final line “And I feel like a pinball.” So many ands, so much Beckett.
It’s appropriate that “Pinball” should kick off RPM’s new Zigzag compilation of “20 junkshop soft rock singles 1970-1974” for the 20 songs here speak of a shellshocked and bereaved generation. Most obviously in tracks such as Leo Sayer’s tortured ballad “Why Is Everybody Going Home?” the feeling of needing to return to the womb, their adulthood having failed them, is prevalent throughout, very much taking an aesthetic lead from Blind Faith’s wearily stoned “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Thus the casualties emerge into a glaring light damaged, bewildered. 20 songs of comedown. On “El Doomo” ex-Love Affair frontman Steve Ellis unconfidently sings about “this is who I really am” but doesn’t sound at all convinced. Thus does it permeate songs like Curtiss Muldoon’s “One Way Ticket,” with its uptempo defeatism, Ray Fenwick’s damaged gospel workout “Home Is Where You Find It,” and Jake (a.k.a. Murgatroyd)’s “And In The Morning” (“will I be dead?”). The music is equally subdued, even when strings and drums swell up, as in John Carter’s “One More Mile To Freedom” – “the longest mile I’ve ever known” and note how the way he sings the title line makes it sound like “one more mouth to feed.”
Love is unattainable, even when it’s visible, as on Mike Hurst’s immaculate proto-acid jazz “Lord I Don’t Have The Time” wherein the ex-Springfield and future producer of Showaddywaddy and Belle and Sebastian sounds exactly like Terry Callier (check that midway quadruple/quadrangle of “better, better, better, but I…”), or else it’s ridiculed (Peter Sarstedt’s recycled “ha ha ha”s on the Sarstedt Brothers’ “Chinese Restaurant”) or dwelled upon from a distance (Clifford T Ward’s “Wherewithall”).
In extremis, emotion does make itself overt; consider John Howard’s extraordinary “Goodbye Suzie” wherein the song’s progenitor, defeated by love, by life, chooses to drown herself. Sardonically Howard croons “Soon the town will forget you.” This latter is a particularly extraordinary piece of work, and according to the sleevenotes Howard subsequently went to Ariola Records to work with the young Trevor Horn, though on what is not specified. Howard’s sole album, Kid In A Big World, is due for imminent reissue on RPM and clearly must be caught (those red suits!). Tellingly, though, the two most pertinent commentaries on going home come from women; Laurie Styvers’ bucolic “Beat The Reaper” and the indefinable whirlpool of Lesley Duncan’s “Everything Changes.” In passing, one may note how, on “You’re Not Smiling,” Howard Werth’s voice sounds astonishingly like Axl Rose, and one may wish to pass speedily over Ewan Stephens’ two examples of bad cod-Dylan…
BOB DYLAN LIVE AT THE “ROYAL ALBERT HALL,” 17 MAY 1966
You’re capable of anything and you’re loving it. Everywhere you go they’re yelling at you to stop, but the record sales indicate that really they want you to carry on. Two different theys, and you know which one you prefer. The “they” before whom you have been playing, the “they” who have been booing and slowclapping you, “they” don’t understand. You couldn’t have been a loyal lieutenant to Seeger forever. Fucking Seeger, actually, the Tommy Dorsey of folk. Does he realise what a patronising jerk he is? No, guys, if you wanna come onstage at Newport and sing your spirituals, you gotta be chopping this here log. Fuck what David Ruffin and Coltrane are doing, I want things to be “real” and if that means treating you like plantation niggers, then so be it. “They” can’t see your pain unless I inflict it. It’s for your own good.
Miles knows. Miles told you that he digs where you’re going. Gotta evolve. Can’t survive all your life on telling the same people what they like. You dig the Beatles, you get off on ‘Trane, a little Nina Simone, a lot more Muddy. Can’t be drawing matchstick men on the cave walls all our lives.
And you know exactly how fucking cool you look in black, with the shades and the corkscrew. Up there at a distance with your guitar strapped on you look almost like that cat Hendrix who’s been playing down at Café Wha? Except you know how many balls Hendrix would bust if he had the amplification and power you have – he’ll have it soon, he’s gotta get big, they can’t miss him.
Ah, shit. Where are we tonight? Manchester. Fucking England, the world’s worst curators of music. For every John Lennon who picks up the latest Motown and Stax sides straight outta the boats in Liverpool docks, there are a hundred fucking purists. And a quick scan of the audience tonight confirms that they’re nearly all purists. You can tell straight away; the pinched, war-rationed faces, the snub noses, the fucking hornrims and pullovers, like Gavrilo Princip in the Cavern Club. All claiming that “they” understand because, hey, they feel pain and they’ve been to Greenwich Village where they bought “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” on the morning of release and maybe even got to exchange three words with Ochs, but
”More than the music of any other period jazz has become a drug for the devitalised. As with all drug habits one dare not stop, for fear of the reaction, and it is no rare experience to meet people whose lives are so surrounded, bolstered up and inflated by jazz that they can hardly get through an hour without its collaboration; with no doubt unconscious logic they make up for the threadbare quality of their own emotions by drawing on the warm capacious reservoir of group emotion so efficiently provided by the American jazz kings.
“The man who plays jazz all day is of course no more a music lover than the man who drinks ‘hooch’ all day is a connoisseur of wines.”
(Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Lambert died in 1951 at the age of 46 at least in part from extensive liver disease induced by his chronic alcoholism)
it doesn’t mean that they understand Phil, or America, or life, or you. They like to feel that they do, of course. Never underestimate the audience’s desperate need to hold onto their imagined advantage.
So you’re going out there to confront. You’ve already been out with just the acoustic, done a few songs, even if you did “Visions Of Johanna” instead of “Blowin’ In The Fucking Wind,” but they keep their mouths shut and clap their hands. It’s only you, there’s no electricity, therefore you must “know” what you’re doing. But you’re trooping back out now with the Hawks, or at least most of the Hawks. Shame Levon dropped out – I mean, you can’t blame the guy, he doesn’t want or need to be jeered at and heckled night after night. Still this Mickey Jones cat seems up to the job; he can do those judge’s gavel snare accents just as well. Wonder if he was ever called upon by Trini Lopez to do them. You still want Levon back for the next album, though. A whole album with the Hawks, that would be cool. You managed to get Robbie on Blonde On Blonde but somehow the records don’t even begin to capture the awesome power of what you guys can do onstage. Columbia keep insisting on all these session guys; I mean, nothing wrong with them, and that’s all of the problem. Even on Blonde there are all these wizened old Nashville cats, Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey, working to schedule and signing their timesheets. It’s not the same thing. But you view your records in the same way as Miles views his – not as finished artefacts, but as templates, a launching pad for where you will take these songs in live performance.
There is already much muttering and disconsolate facial expressions in the audience tonight. Fuck ‘em. I mean, Manchester – 25 miles from Liverpool and the best they can do is Herman’s fucking Hermits? That must really rankle with them. Look at all the pockmarked faces and lousy teeth; the faces of people who cannot get over the fact that, well, they’re wanking over their Joan Baez album covers, but you have actually fucked Joan Baez. Ha. Let’s show ‘em. Let’s underline the state of things to ‘em. Let’s start with “She Belongs To Me.”
Drums and guitars hammer into action. It’s a wonder the fuses don’t blow. And Garth’s organ, monotonely screeching over everything, like that Welsh guy in Warhol’s outfit. “But it didn’t work for you like your nine pound hammer did!” you scream exuberantly, soon following it up with a sardonic “You know that I know that you know that I know that you show something that’s tearing up your mind!” and more bluntly “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?” which you’re singing directly at the audience. Robbie’s guitar waxes and swoops around your voice, and Garth’s organ is almost going into feedback. “Everybody’s wondering when your friendship’s gonna end, but ‘CMON BABY I’M YOUR FRIEND!” You’ve got a hard on the size of Heathrow. Hey, let’s break it down to that Motown groove and then storm back as you are PLEADING to the audience “How long’s it gonna take you to get off the edge?”
They applaud, but very uncertainly. Straight into the bar band rave-up of “I Don’t Believe You.” Fuck, why couldn’t Blonde have sounded like this? “It used to go like that, and now it goes like this.” More deliberate choices of words with which to bait the audience – “Well, I can’t understand, she let go of my hand and left me facing the wall” and “Well it’s all new to me, like some MY-STER-EEEEEE.” Your voice and harmonic harmonics are becoming indistinguishable. That punk voice of yours. That’s what’s hooking them. Who has dared to “not sing” so boldly as you have, when they’re still struggling with Steve Lawrence for Chrissakes? Except you are singing, and swooping like one of those New Thing horn players. Your harmonica is almost beyond tonality with its multiphonics, into the realms of pure sound; how well it’s blending with Garth’s organ. Out there it must be sounding like fucking Stockhausen. Karlheinz plays the blues.
Ha ha, they don’t like it. Slow handclapping. So what? It’s a good beat. The band picks up on the beat, you and Robbie stomp your feet and blast into you doing the Animals doing you doing “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” Before these fuckers in the audience have a chance to react, go without a pause into “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” warning the suckers “You must pick one or the other, neither of them are what they claim to be.” The peak cap Seeger apprentice doesn’t exist any more. You have to keep up, you have to give up.
But no, they’re resisting. Someone yells “Sellout!” and the sheep cheer the asshole to the rafters. Amused, you exchange a few words with Robbie and launch into “Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Fuck the Beatles, even, they have NEVER played rock and roll as bloodily and as lustfully as you are RIGHT NOW. Damn, Mickey’s snare is CRACKING like a whip! Maybe you should turn it into a real whip and lash the fuckers into forcibly respectful silence. You might need it, ‘cos it’s getting hostile out there. Perhaps you could just go offstage and let them finish the set. No, you wryly and savagely go for the oldest trick in the book, start to mumble a story. Unable to hear you, but cocking their heads ever more intently, the audience finally eases up on the handclaps in time for you to aim your sneering punchline “If you only just wouldn’t CLAP so hard.” That makes them a little happier. Fools, they think they’ve won. So you lash them get again with “One Too Many Mornings.” “You’re right on your side and I’m right on mine.” Listen to what Richard’s doing on the piano; damn, he even sneaked in some Cecil Taylor freeform pummelling there!
Now it’s your turn to take over at the piano. Hit them as hard as you can. “Ballad Of A Thin Man.” “You try so hard, but you don’t UNDERSTAND.” And this is what makes you better, newer, than the Beatles or the Stones or the Byrds. Because the Beatles you can trace to Smokey Robinson’s chord changes and Buddy Holly and Little Richard, the Stones to their blues, the Byrds to jazz clubs and the New Christy Minstrels. But that demonic descending piano scale, the swooning and swooping of your goddamned fucking VOICE, not bothering to acknowledge barlines, regularly going “outside” the chord changes. With Robbie’s guitar it’s almost like ‘Trane and Pharaoh trading overblows. I mean, “Ballad Of A Thin Man” in 1965 – where the fuck did that come from? Nowhere. OK, maybe an ear cocked to Alan Price’s organ doing you doing “House Of The Rising Sun,” maybe a little residual Hooker in the vocal flights and keening guitar, but the damnation of the words. The alienness of that voice! That didn’t come from anywhere.
For most of these jerks in the audience tonight this is the last straw. Somebody yells “JUDAS!” and the sheep bleat their approval again. Then someone else howls something you can’t quite catch – “Play your latest chart topping record from this week!” He’s sneering at you. Well, you can sneer right back, and you’re getting paid for this and they’re not, so let’s play song title patience. “I don’t believe you!” you smirk at him/them. “You’re a LIAR!” you sneer in full magnificence. With hate at them and love for what’s behind and beside him, he says gleefully to Robbie, “Play fucking loud!” and dammit if Mickey’s snare couldn’t knock down Spector’s wall of sound. “Like A Rolling Stone” thrashed and blasted out from the stone tablets of a volcanic omniscient God, the politesse of the record obliterated in the splenetic attack of what this band is doing now. “You said you’d never compromise,” he answers back. Manuel’s piano is only the obliquest of relations to the song now. “KICKS FOR YOU!” and a final, agonised, atonal “PAAAAAAAWWWWWWN IT BAAAAAAAAAABE!” which seems plucked straight out of Albert Ayler. There is NO fucking answer to this, this unrepeatable performance, this unechoable group, because this is the greatest, most intense, most orgasmic rock and roll music that has ever been made, that will ever be made, and you know full well that you could go off, retire, maybe find God, after this, in the assured knowledge that this has sealed your immortality.
The audience has lost. There is stunned applause, all the more stunned by its brevity. Then a terrible abyss of silence, as they realise too late what they have witnessed and what they have let slip. The tannoy sarcastically blasts out “God Save The Queen” as they moodily troop out of the Free Trade Hall. You didn’t give them what they wanted, what the market demanded, there was no “pithy journalism” in your endless outpouring of words and the inarticulable. And you will be remembered for far, far longer than those who surrendered.
CIRCLING THE TEMPORARILY ABSENT CENTRE OF POP
And on my shelves I see new records by Kylie Minogue, the Sugababes, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rachel Stevens and Holly Valance, and I can’t think of a single interesting thing to say about any of them, largely because there is not a single interesting thing on any of them. They’ve all fallen into the same trap; that of trying too hard to be cool, of foolhardily attempting to achieve advertent cool. No one can dictate to Kylie where in the city she should drive her car, but let us say that she has driven it to a part of the city which, because of its outward appearance, she has mistaken for being a particularly interesting and adventurous area of town – let us further suggest that this area might be called “Shoreditch” – and because she is always so eager to make new friends and not make mistakes, because she has made so many of them, she tries to be cool without realising that it’s better for her if she doesn’t try, if she just allows Cathy Dennis and the permed bloke out of Mud to write her records for her. And…as with Peaches, as with Chicks On Speed…I would suggest that Kylie is better off making records for teenagers on the top deck of Streatham buses than for shaven-headed, goateed, hornrimmed fuckwits of fly-by-night art gallery curators. She will never make the racks of Smallfish, and this is no bad thing.
As for the rest of the formerly cool pop kids, if I use words like “Diane Warren,” “America,” “demographics,” “4 Non Blondes,” “stifle,” “suffocate,” “masquerade,” “industry,” “call centre” and “harpoon,” then that will tell you all you are required to know about their new records. I am particularly sorrowful about the girl Sophie – such a lovely and happy album cover, such a wretched and neutered album. I would have preferred the cover to be the cover of Camera Obscura’s new album Underachievers Please Try Harder, because the latter is truly a lovely album. I know next to nothing about them except that they are another Scottish indie outfit of indefinite size – seven musicians on this particular occasion, four of whom sing, although the sleeve doesn’t say who sings when on what – and that there is a Belle and Sebastian connection.
More important than any of this is the fact that the Spanish label on which the album has been released is called Elefant Records. And how appropriate that should be, for much more than Elephant, the 1963 You’ll Never Have It So Good record, this is a record which could squarely and askewly fit into an imagined 1963. Rather than the dead insensitivity of honouring the “Old Masters” (who they?), imagine the jaunty bonhomie of Cliff Richard and the Shadows tucked into a corner pocket of Joe Meek with some Shadow Morton dressing imminent. Don’t know, admittedly, whether the Vernons Girls or the Caravelles would have got away with singing “I should be suspended from class/I don’t know my elbow from my arse” as the girl does on “Suspended From Class.” But throughout the record there’s a real feeling of 1963 having been achieved from a 2003 perspective without wasting time and back issues of Mojo thinking about it. Despite Mike Leigh being cited on “A Sister’s Social Agony,” the record is about the very 1963 issues of love and life and where does it start and will I know when it starts and what if I miss it and I was looking in the wrong place and I’m in love and that’s all you need to know about it.
And it’s fantastic. The aforementioned “A Sister’s Social Agony” drifts along as dreamily as the more considered Shangri-Las; hear how the keyboards gently coax 1963 towards 2003, with the sustained organ underpinning “Before You Cry,” turning it into Julee Cruise, or the dublike ripples of piano which briefly submerge “Suspended From Class.” Or listen to how the trademark Joe Meek wordless soprano swims serenely into the ballad “Teenager” as if it had just occurred to them, with indisguisable naturalness.
On “Let Me Go Home” they even manage to essay some creditable Northern Soul. On “Books Written For Girls” the female vocalist sweetly undermines the concept of New Man – revealing it as the latent misogyny it always was – so sweetly (“You’re no star to guide me anyway/You only wanted me to play the fool/Play by your rule”). And finally true love is attained, on the heartbreaking “Knee Deep At the NPL (National Pop League),” which despite its Flaming Lips title is a gorgeous song of reluctant love. The closing harmonies of “I’ll keep you safe and warm tonight” are warmer than any music this year not sung by Chan Marshall. The closing “Lunar Sea” (lunacy? You see?) sums everything up, the sentiments of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song” taken even more abstractedly – “I love it, you soar and you cry rise above it.”
So, once again, an outwardly conservative-looking record succeeds in being more profound and quietly radical than outwardly radical-looking but ultimately multinational-serving…well, takeaways of records.
“Takeaways are food prepared without love or consideration, to a standard which they would not accept for themselves or their own families.”
That quote is taken from “Music 2 Fly 2,” the cinematic semi-freestyle closing track, and one of the two highlights, of Upwards, the second album by UK rapper Ty. Over strings and Jason Yarde’s horn charts, Ty pans out from the mice congregating in his living room towards the world before reluctantly returning to himself (“I just want you to buy my album/To make you think that I’m better/Whereas the truth is that I can’t see five years ahead of me”). It’s a bit like an update of Goldie’s “Inner City Life,” but more grounded in “reality.” Ty’s assured delivery, however, makes it special.
I do like pretty well everything that comes out of the Big Dada stable, and this sits quite comfortably next to the last Roots Manuva record (and isn’t it about time we had the next Roots Manuva record?), although the latter’s gleefully disjointed surrealism is only really matched by this album’s opener, the fantastic “Ha Ha” (ha ha!) which with its fuzz organ and square-on-the-beat drums sounds like the Stranglers (this is no bad thing). Elsewhere, despite occasional lapses into Gillessszzzzzz Peterson territory, the record comes across as a sort of Neptunes lite, Neptunes on a Lambeth Council budget. Check out the distended backward drawls of the backing vocals on “Look 4 Me,” the fairground organ providing the unlikely backdrop for “Oh You Want More?” and the irresistible gradual drowning of “I Want 2” (“Kill it!” is the unexpected vocal response), as well as the Joni Mitchell-sampling “Rain” which slowly submerges beneath disjointed piano commentary (cf. the ending of Cale’s “Zen”) as well as the more straightforward (but still not very) territory of “Dreams” and “Groovement” – that spacious Britfunk influence always hooks me (those Wes Montgomery single guitar lines!); see also “Wait A Minute” - not to mention the startling minimalist horns driving “Hot Spice” coming on like Trevor Watts’ Moire Music forcibly relocated in the studios of Ice FM (NB: note the bass clarinet underpinning the second half of “Music 2 Fly 2” and compare with the same commenting underneath Clifford T Ward on “Wherewithall”).
But what to make of Relaxed Muscle and their debut album A Heavy Nite With…? A supposed hardcore dirrrty electro duo from Doncaster, comprising Jason Buckle (half of Fat Truckers) on music, and one “Darren Spooner” on vocals who visually and audibly is clearly and unmistakably Jarvis Cocker, one wonders how big this record would have been had it been released as a Pulp album…perhaps this is the album which did merit the title This Is Hardcore. And I’m rather sorry that JC didn’t do that, because in its admitted daftness and unadmitted poignancy, it actually works very well as a follow-up to We Love Life; in particular tracks 4-7 (the unimpeachably silly “Billy Jack” at which JC deliberately fails to be the other JC – Johnny Cash – “Rod Of Iron” with its equally absurd chorus of “I rule my woman with a rod of iron,” “Tuff It Out” and the especially brilliant “Sexualized”) wipe the floor with the timid likes of ARE Weapons, etc., mostly I suspect because JC is old enough to remember the first time. On “Muscle Music” he even has a go at the old Adam Ant/Burundi groove, if none too successfully, but the ferocious and completely pop attack of the aforementioned four tracks are balanced unexpectedly and beautifully by the disconsolate musings of the final four tracks – “B-Real” with its refrain of “DJs, late bar, stonebaked pizza”; and then deeper down and slower to the ballad “Previous” (“In my previous life I had a previous wife/Now I just take care of myself”) which proves yet again how deeply JC can pierce when he wants to, even in this seemingly camp context; the amazing “Battered” which responds soberly to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (“When this world is making you lonely/You can always get/Battered”) by relocating its glamorous fantasy in the brutal steel toecap reality of Sheffield, a song which would have been a massive hit for Pulp at any time, and the mournful and moving closing song “Mary” which leads with the unbeatable opening line of “I just called to tell you that both our children are on drugs” (a sequel, perhaps, to the All Seeing I’s “Happy Birthday Nicola”?) and muses morbidly and mordantly on impermanence equally as movingly as “Help The Aged.” It’s one of Jarvis Cocker’s finest records. But who will notice?
ABOUT TAKE THAT
In response to reader Scott Neil: I was very nearly tempted by “Relight My Fire” but Lulu prevented it from getting into the list; not quite the amount of fire that was needed for the song to really blast off. Wonder how much better the original choice of Cilla Black would have worked?
(Incidentally, thanks to everyone who responded to last week's list; sadly not enough time currently to acknowledge all the additional choices, but thanks to Tom for reminding me that Double were Swiss, and to the mysterious and elusive JB Peevish with specific reference to "I Want To Be Your Property" by Blue Mercedes (yes! last gasp Hi-NRG! And what about the never-mentioned but massive in Scotland early '90s pop-rave act Time Frequency?) and "Friends" by Amii Stewart, the 12" of which curiously I had found and was playing last Sunday evening. Strange album as well, as I remember - written by Italians and all containing gnomic musings on love, life, etc. against "Moments In Love"-style backings. Note to Jon Dale; yes I'll take Sheryl Crow. "A Change Will Do You Good" as best Stones record never made?)
Nonetheless I bow to the grievous beauty of “Why Can’t I Wake Up With You?”, would acknowledge the magic of “Could It Be Magic” except that they should have let Robbie carry the chorus as well as the song, because with the lacklustre band harmonies in the chorus, the record loses crucial impetus. It may also be that Take That were the gloomiest and most morbid of teenpop groups since the Shangri-Las; certainly “Babe” with its bemused unknowing dad coming back from the war (or from where?) is straight out of the Shadow Morton manual, particularly with its genius stroke of putting Mark Owen’s quavering voice in the lead rôle. The uncertainty of Mark’s pitching echoes the emotional uncertainty of which he is singing pretty well.
And, while quickly passing over the dreary and overrated plod of a song that is “Back For Good” – by Gary Barlow’s own admission, half-copped from Oasis’ “Whatever” – we must stop and salute the genius that Jim Steinman brought to their threnody “Never Forget.” Bookended by a children’s choir (“We’ve come so far”), Barlow and the boys come forward one by one to take their bows. “Someday this will be someone else’s dream…Never pretend that it’s for real.” It remains a startling admission, even by the standards of 1995 pop, and musically Steinman creates an unlikely sequel to his production of the Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion,” the latter of which may represent the best use of a choir on any pop record, even, at its climax, forcing Andrew Eldritch, by dint of sheer momentum, to rise above his normal contrabass Voice of Doom.
But where’s Robbie? The single was a reworked re-recording of the album track, and we knew that Williams had just left the group, but were they intent on erasing all traces of him? Not a chance – he simply waits until 4:06 to make his entrance with a cheerful “We’re not invincible” as if he is already grinning from ear to ear with the foreknowledge of how much bigger than any of the rest of them he will end up. And indeed he ends up virtually taking over the song, before a brief blast of applause ushers in a reprise, Barlow coming back in, desperately trying to reassert control of the song – but it’s too late, the group are finished, and how much supplanted sadness there is in the closing children’s choir lament of “We’re still so young, and we hope for more.” They shouldn’t have resisted the notion of turning that “hope” into the past tense.
And so many still unmentioned – Cliff Richard’s late masterpiece “Some People,” with Alan Tarney returning to introduce Cliff into the world of introspective electro which now sounds like an outtake from Saint Etienne’s Sound Of Water; Player’s “Baby Come Back”; “Independent Love Song” by Scarlet; “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkin, which I praised on CoM last year…but here’s a closing trio to (re)consider.
JOAN ARMATRADING Love And Affection (1976)
HAZEL O’CONNOR Will You (1981)
Together because they echo and are sequels to each other. “I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion” opens Armatrading less than confidently. By the end of the increasingly disjointed and ecstatic track she is crying out “You know what I like!” The strings and sonorous percussion seem to breathe along with her. Whereas Hazel is stiff, uncertain and afraid (“You drink your coffee and I sip my tea”). Even when it’s obvious that they’re going to get it together, she squeals “This moment has been waiting for a long, long time” as if she’s being strangled. Love wins in both cases, however, as evinced by the crucial role that the alto saxophone plays in both records (Jimmy Jewell on Armatrading, Wesley Macgoogan on O’Connor) articulating the feelings which lie beyond rational expression.
THE SCISSOR SISTERS Laura (2003)
The record which has just arrived to sum all of these other records up. The opening staccato piano links Mr Bloe and Britney. ‘70s Moog and wah-wah guitar join other dots. The vocal is Robbie Williams stripped of his £80m and forced to concentrate once again. The chord sequence is unutterably sublime. The pause for breath at 2:50 may indicate the snazziest use of silence in a pop record since Ultravox at their 1981 peak. One is, as ever, reminded that, when it comes to lists of this kind, or indeed any kind, there’s always room for one more.
Looking at last week’s list, it occurs to me that Brian Protheroe’s “Pinball” is a sequel of sorts of Des O’Connor’s “Dick-A-Dum-Dum.” Both ineffably London songs, compare the gleeful naivety of O’Connor’s faux-dumb delivery, the city and everything and everyone in it at his disposal. Although he has, on closer examination, nothing to offer (“Lend me a fiver, I’ll pay you in a few weeks” and the double decker bus is noticeably preferred to cars), he knows that his patter will pay for all of it and more besides. Indeed, towards the fadeout Des can hardly keep a straight face, adlibbing bewildering “whoops” and “heys,” less perhaps his disbelief at what he’s been asked to sing than articulating an idiot savant glee at the fact that This Is London and He Is In It.
Cut five years on to Protheroe’s disillusioned bedsit inhabitant/inmate who has clearly taken on London and lost. “And I’ve run out of pale ale/And I feel like I’m in jail/And my music bores me once again.” Eventually the vocal splits into a schizophrenic duo/duel, echoing and resolving on the finality of the final line “And I feel like a pinball.” So many ands, so much Beckett.
It’s appropriate that “Pinball” should kick off RPM’s new Zigzag compilation of “20 junkshop soft rock singles 1970-1974” for the 20 songs here speak of a shellshocked and bereaved generation. Most obviously in tracks such as Leo Sayer’s tortured ballad “Why Is Everybody Going Home?” the feeling of needing to return to the womb, their adulthood having failed them, is prevalent throughout, very much taking an aesthetic lead from Blind Faith’s wearily stoned “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Thus the casualties emerge into a glaring light damaged, bewildered. 20 songs of comedown. On “El Doomo” ex-Love Affair frontman Steve Ellis unconfidently sings about “this is who I really am” but doesn’t sound at all convinced. Thus does it permeate songs like Curtiss Muldoon’s “One Way Ticket,” with its uptempo defeatism, Ray Fenwick’s damaged gospel workout “Home Is Where You Find It,” and Jake (a.k.a. Murgatroyd)’s “And In The Morning” (“will I be dead?”). The music is equally subdued, even when strings and drums swell up, as in John Carter’s “One More Mile To Freedom” – “the longest mile I’ve ever known” and note how the way he sings the title line makes it sound like “one more mouth to feed.”
Love is unattainable, even when it’s visible, as on Mike Hurst’s immaculate proto-acid jazz “Lord I Don’t Have The Time” wherein the ex-Springfield and future producer of Showaddywaddy and Belle and Sebastian sounds exactly like Terry Callier (check that midway quadruple/quadrangle of “better, better, better, but I…”), or else it’s ridiculed (Peter Sarstedt’s recycled “ha ha ha”s on the Sarstedt Brothers’ “Chinese Restaurant”) or dwelled upon from a distance (Clifford T Ward’s “Wherewithall”).
In extremis, emotion does make itself overt; consider John Howard’s extraordinary “Goodbye Suzie” wherein the song’s progenitor, defeated by love, by life, chooses to drown herself. Sardonically Howard croons “Soon the town will forget you.” This latter is a particularly extraordinary piece of work, and according to the sleevenotes Howard subsequently went to Ariola Records to work with the young Trevor Horn, though on what is not specified. Howard’s sole album, Kid In A Big World, is due for imminent reissue on RPM and clearly must be caught (those red suits!). Tellingly, though, the two most pertinent commentaries on going home come from women; Laurie Styvers’ bucolic “Beat The Reaper” and the indefinable whirlpool of Lesley Duncan’s “Everything Changes.” In passing, one may note how, on “You’re Not Smiling,” Howard Werth’s voice sounds astonishingly like Axl Rose, and one may wish to pass speedily over Ewan Stephens’ two examples of bad cod-Dylan…
BOB DYLAN LIVE AT THE “ROYAL ALBERT HALL,” 17 MAY 1966
You’re capable of anything and you’re loving it. Everywhere you go they’re yelling at you to stop, but the record sales indicate that really they want you to carry on. Two different theys, and you know which one you prefer. The “they” before whom you have been playing, the “they” who have been booing and slowclapping you, “they” don’t understand. You couldn’t have been a loyal lieutenant to Seeger forever. Fucking Seeger, actually, the Tommy Dorsey of folk. Does he realise what a patronising jerk he is? No, guys, if you wanna come onstage at Newport and sing your spirituals, you gotta be chopping this here log. Fuck what David Ruffin and Coltrane are doing, I want things to be “real” and if that means treating you like plantation niggers, then so be it. “They” can’t see your pain unless I inflict it. It’s for your own good.
Miles knows. Miles told you that he digs where you’re going. Gotta evolve. Can’t survive all your life on telling the same people what they like. You dig the Beatles, you get off on ‘Trane, a little Nina Simone, a lot more Muddy. Can’t be drawing matchstick men on the cave walls all our lives.
And you know exactly how fucking cool you look in black, with the shades and the corkscrew. Up there at a distance with your guitar strapped on you look almost like that cat Hendrix who’s been playing down at Café Wha? Except you know how many balls Hendrix would bust if he had the amplification and power you have – he’ll have it soon, he’s gotta get big, they can’t miss him.
Ah, shit. Where are we tonight? Manchester. Fucking England, the world’s worst curators of music. For every John Lennon who picks up the latest Motown and Stax sides straight outta the boats in Liverpool docks, there are a hundred fucking purists. And a quick scan of the audience tonight confirms that they’re nearly all purists. You can tell straight away; the pinched, war-rationed faces, the snub noses, the fucking hornrims and pullovers, like Gavrilo Princip in the Cavern Club. All claiming that “they” understand because, hey, they feel pain and they’ve been to Greenwich Village where they bought “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” on the morning of release and maybe even got to exchange three words with Ochs, but
”More than the music of any other period jazz has become a drug for the devitalised. As with all drug habits one dare not stop, for fear of the reaction, and it is no rare experience to meet people whose lives are so surrounded, bolstered up and inflated by jazz that they can hardly get through an hour without its collaboration; with no doubt unconscious logic they make up for the threadbare quality of their own emotions by drawing on the warm capacious reservoir of group emotion so efficiently provided by the American jazz kings.
“The man who plays jazz all day is of course no more a music lover than the man who drinks ‘hooch’ all day is a connoisseur of wines.”
(Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Lambert died in 1951 at the age of 46 at least in part from extensive liver disease induced by his chronic alcoholism)
it doesn’t mean that they understand Phil, or America, or life, or you. They like to feel that they do, of course. Never underestimate the audience’s desperate need to hold onto their imagined advantage.
So you’re going out there to confront. You’ve already been out with just the acoustic, done a few songs, even if you did “Visions Of Johanna” instead of “Blowin’ In The Fucking Wind,” but they keep their mouths shut and clap their hands. It’s only you, there’s no electricity, therefore you must “know” what you’re doing. But you’re trooping back out now with the Hawks, or at least most of the Hawks. Shame Levon dropped out – I mean, you can’t blame the guy, he doesn’t want or need to be jeered at and heckled night after night. Still this Mickey Jones cat seems up to the job; he can do those judge’s gavel snare accents just as well. Wonder if he was ever called upon by Trini Lopez to do them. You still want Levon back for the next album, though. A whole album with the Hawks, that would be cool. You managed to get Robbie on Blonde On Blonde but somehow the records don’t even begin to capture the awesome power of what you guys can do onstage. Columbia keep insisting on all these session guys; I mean, nothing wrong with them, and that’s all of the problem. Even on Blonde there are all these wizened old Nashville cats, Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey, working to schedule and signing their timesheets. It’s not the same thing. But you view your records in the same way as Miles views his – not as finished artefacts, but as templates, a launching pad for where you will take these songs in live performance.
There is already much muttering and disconsolate facial expressions in the audience tonight. Fuck ‘em. I mean, Manchester – 25 miles from Liverpool and the best they can do is Herman’s fucking Hermits? That must really rankle with them. Look at all the pockmarked faces and lousy teeth; the faces of people who cannot get over the fact that, well, they’re wanking over their Joan Baez album covers, but you have actually fucked Joan Baez. Ha. Let’s show ‘em. Let’s underline the state of things to ‘em. Let’s start with “She Belongs To Me.”
Drums and guitars hammer into action. It’s a wonder the fuses don’t blow. And Garth’s organ, monotonely screeching over everything, like that Welsh guy in Warhol’s outfit. “But it didn’t work for you like your nine pound hammer did!” you scream exuberantly, soon following it up with a sardonic “You know that I know that you know that I know that you show something that’s tearing up your mind!” and more bluntly “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?” which you’re singing directly at the audience. Robbie’s guitar waxes and swoops around your voice, and Garth’s organ is almost going into feedback. “Everybody’s wondering when your friendship’s gonna end, but ‘CMON BABY I’M YOUR FRIEND!” You’ve got a hard on the size of Heathrow. Hey, let’s break it down to that Motown groove and then storm back as you are PLEADING to the audience “How long’s it gonna take you to get off the edge?”
They applaud, but very uncertainly. Straight into the bar band rave-up of “I Don’t Believe You.” Fuck, why couldn’t Blonde have sounded like this? “It used to go like that, and now it goes like this.” More deliberate choices of words with which to bait the audience – “Well, I can’t understand, she let go of my hand and left me facing the wall” and “Well it’s all new to me, like some MY-STER-EEEEEE.” Your voice and harmonic harmonics are becoming indistinguishable. That punk voice of yours. That’s what’s hooking them. Who has dared to “not sing” so boldly as you have, when they’re still struggling with Steve Lawrence for Chrissakes? Except you are singing, and swooping like one of those New Thing horn players. Your harmonica is almost beyond tonality with its multiphonics, into the realms of pure sound; how well it’s blending with Garth’s organ. Out there it must be sounding like fucking Stockhausen. Karlheinz plays the blues.
Ha ha, they don’t like it. Slow handclapping. So what? It’s a good beat. The band picks up on the beat, you and Robbie stomp your feet and blast into you doing the Animals doing you doing “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” Before these fuckers in the audience have a chance to react, go without a pause into “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” warning the suckers “You must pick one or the other, neither of them are what they claim to be.” The peak cap Seeger apprentice doesn’t exist any more. You have to keep up, you have to give up.
But no, they’re resisting. Someone yells “Sellout!” and the sheep cheer the asshole to the rafters. Amused, you exchange a few words with Robbie and launch into “Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Fuck the Beatles, even, they have NEVER played rock and roll as bloodily and as lustfully as you are RIGHT NOW. Damn, Mickey’s snare is CRACKING like a whip! Maybe you should turn it into a real whip and lash the fuckers into forcibly respectful silence. You might need it, ‘cos it’s getting hostile out there. Perhaps you could just go offstage and let them finish the set. No, you wryly and savagely go for the oldest trick in the book, start to mumble a story. Unable to hear you, but cocking their heads ever more intently, the audience finally eases up on the handclaps in time for you to aim your sneering punchline “If you only just wouldn’t CLAP so hard.” That makes them a little happier. Fools, they think they’ve won. So you lash them get again with “One Too Many Mornings.” “You’re right on your side and I’m right on mine.” Listen to what Richard’s doing on the piano; damn, he even sneaked in some Cecil Taylor freeform pummelling there!
Now it’s your turn to take over at the piano. Hit them as hard as you can. “Ballad Of A Thin Man.” “You try so hard, but you don’t UNDERSTAND.” And this is what makes you better, newer, than the Beatles or the Stones or the Byrds. Because the Beatles you can trace to Smokey Robinson’s chord changes and Buddy Holly and Little Richard, the Stones to their blues, the Byrds to jazz clubs and the New Christy Minstrels. But that demonic descending piano scale, the swooning and swooping of your goddamned fucking VOICE, not bothering to acknowledge barlines, regularly going “outside” the chord changes. With Robbie’s guitar it’s almost like ‘Trane and Pharaoh trading overblows. I mean, “Ballad Of A Thin Man” in 1965 – where the fuck did that come from? Nowhere. OK, maybe an ear cocked to Alan Price’s organ doing you doing “House Of The Rising Sun,” maybe a little residual Hooker in the vocal flights and keening guitar, but the damnation of the words. The alienness of that voice! That didn’t come from anywhere.
For most of these jerks in the audience tonight this is the last straw. Somebody yells “JUDAS!” and the sheep bleat their approval again. Then someone else howls something you can’t quite catch – “Play your latest chart topping record from this week!” He’s sneering at you. Well, you can sneer right back, and you’re getting paid for this and they’re not, so let’s play song title patience. “I don’t believe you!” you smirk at him/them. “You’re a LIAR!” you sneer in full magnificence. With hate at them and love for what’s behind and beside him, he says gleefully to Robbie, “Play fucking loud!” and dammit if Mickey’s snare couldn’t knock down Spector’s wall of sound. “Like A Rolling Stone” thrashed and blasted out from the stone tablets of a volcanic omniscient God, the politesse of the record obliterated in the splenetic attack of what this band is doing now. “You said you’d never compromise,” he answers back. Manuel’s piano is only the obliquest of relations to the song now. “KICKS FOR YOU!” and a final, agonised, atonal “PAAAAAAAWWWWWWN IT BAAAAAAAAAABE!” which seems plucked straight out of Albert Ayler. There is NO fucking answer to this, this unrepeatable performance, this unechoable group, because this is the greatest, most intense, most orgasmic rock and roll music that has ever been made, that will ever be made, and you know full well that you could go off, retire, maybe find God, after this, in the assured knowledge that this has sealed your immortality.
The audience has lost. There is stunned applause, all the more stunned by its brevity. Then a terrible abyss of silence, as they realise too late what they have witnessed and what they have let slip. The tannoy sarcastically blasts out “God Save The Queen” as they moodily troop out of the Free Trade Hall. You didn’t give them what they wanted, what the market demanded, there was no “pithy journalism” in your endless outpouring of words and the inarticulable. And you will be remembered for far, far longer than those who surrendered.
CIRCLING THE TEMPORARILY ABSENT CENTRE OF POP
And on my shelves I see new records by Kylie Minogue, the Sugababes, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rachel Stevens and Holly Valance, and I can’t think of a single interesting thing to say about any of them, largely because there is not a single interesting thing on any of them. They’ve all fallen into the same trap; that of trying too hard to be cool, of foolhardily attempting to achieve advertent cool. No one can dictate to Kylie where in the city she should drive her car, but let us say that she has driven it to a part of the city which, because of its outward appearance, she has mistaken for being a particularly interesting and adventurous area of town – let us further suggest that this area might be called “Shoreditch” – and because she is always so eager to make new friends and not make mistakes, because she has made so many of them, she tries to be cool without realising that it’s better for her if she doesn’t try, if she just allows Cathy Dennis and the permed bloke out of Mud to write her records for her. And…as with Peaches, as with Chicks On Speed…I would suggest that Kylie is better off making records for teenagers on the top deck of Streatham buses than for shaven-headed, goateed, hornrimmed fuckwits of fly-by-night art gallery curators. She will never make the racks of Smallfish, and this is no bad thing.
As for the rest of the formerly cool pop kids, if I use words like “Diane Warren,” “America,” “demographics,” “4 Non Blondes,” “stifle,” “suffocate,” “masquerade,” “industry,” “call centre” and “harpoon,” then that will tell you all you are required to know about their new records. I am particularly sorrowful about the girl Sophie – such a lovely and happy album cover, such a wretched and neutered album. I would have preferred the cover to be the cover of Camera Obscura’s new album Underachievers Please Try Harder, because the latter is truly a lovely album. I know next to nothing about them except that they are another Scottish indie outfit of indefinite size – seven musicians on this particular occasion, four of whom sing, although the sleeve doesn’t say who sings when on what – and that there is a Belle and Sebastian connection.
More important than any of this is the fact that the Spanish label on which the album has been released is called Elefant Records. And how appropriate that should be, for much more than Elephant, the 1963 You’ll Never Have It So Good record, this is a record which could squarely and askewly fit into an imagined 1963. Rather than the dead insensitivity of honouring the “Old Masters” (who they?), imagine the jaunty bonhomie of Cliff Richard and the Shadows tucked into a corner pocket of Joe Meek with some Shadow Morton dressing imminent. Don’t know, admittedly, whether the Vernons Girls or the Caravelles would have got away with singing “I should be suspended from class/I don’t know my elbow from my arse” as the girl does on “Suspended From Class.” But throughout the record there’s a real feeling of 1963 having been achieved from a 2003 perspective without wasting time and back issues of Mojo thinking about it. Despite Mike Leigh being cited on “A Sister’s Social Agony,” the record is about the very 1963 issues of love and life and where does it start and will I know when it starts and what if I miss it and I was looking in the wrong place and I’m in love and that’s all you need to know about it.
And it’s fantastic. The aforementioned “A Sister’s Social Agony” drifts along as dreamily as the more considered Shangri-Las; hear how the keyboards gently coax 1963 towards 2003, with the sustained organ underpinning “Before You Cry,” turning it into Julee Cruise, or the dublike ripples of piano which briefly submerge “Suspended From Class.” Or listen to how the trademark Joe Meek wordless soprano swims serenely into the ballad “Teenager” as if it had just occurred to them, with indisguisable naturalness.
On “Let Me Go Home” they even manage to essay some creditable Northern Soul. On “Books Written For Girls” the female vocalist sweetly undermines the concept of New Man – revealing it as the latent misogyny it always was – so sweetly (“You’re no star to guide me anyway/You only wanted me to play the fool/Play by your rule”). And finally true love is attained, on the heartbreaking “Knee Deep At the NPL (National Pop League),” which despite its Flaming Lips title is a gorgeous song of reluctant love. The closing harmonies of “I’ll keep you safe and warm tonight” are warmer than any music this year not sung by Chan Marshall. The closing “Lunar Sea” (lunacy? You see?) sums everything up, the sentiments of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song” taken even more abstractedly – “I love it, you soar and you cry rise above it.”
So, once again, an outwardly conservative-looking record succeeds in being more profound and quietly radical than outwardly radical-looking but ultimately multinational-serving…well, takeaways of records.
“Takeaways are food prepared without love or consideration, to a standard which they would not accept for themselves or their own families.”
That quote is taken from “Music 2 Fly 2,” the cinematic semi-freestyle closing track, and one of the two highlights, of Upwards, the second album by UK rapper Ty. Over strings and Jason Yarde’s horn charts, Ty pans out from the mice congregating in his living room towards the world before reluctantly returning to himself (“I just want you to buy my album/To make you think that I’m better/Whereas the truth is that I can’t see five years ahead of me”). It’s a bit like an update of Goldie’s “Inner City Life,” but more grounded in “reality.” Ty’s assured delivery, however, makes it special.
I do like pretty well everything that comes out of the Big Dada stable, and this sits quite comfortably next to the last Roots Manuva record (and isn’t it about time we had the next Roots Manuva record?), although the latter’s gleefully disjointed surrealism is only really matched by this album’s opener, the fantastic “Ha Ha” (ha ha!) which with its fuzz organ and square-on-the-beat drums sounds like the Stranglers (this is no bad thing). Elsewhere, despite occasional lapses into Gillessszzzzzz Peterson territory, the record comes across as a sort of Neptunes lite, Neptunes on a Lambeth Council budget. Check out the distended backward drawls of the backing vocals on “Look 4 Me,” the fairground organ providing the unlikely backdrop for “Oh You Want More?” and the irresistible gradual drowning of “I Want 2” (“Kill it!” is the unexpected vocal response), as well as the Joni Mitchell-sampling “Rain” which slowly submerges beneath disjointed piano commentary (cf. the ending of Cale’s “Zen”) as well as the more straightforward (but still not very) territory of “Dreams” and “Groovement” – that spacious Britfunk influence always hooks me (those Wes Montgomery single guitar lines!); see also “Wait A Minute” - not to mention the startling minimalist horns driving “Hot Spice” coming on like Trevor Watts’ Moire Music forcibly relocated in the studios of Ice FM (NB: note the bass clarinet underpinning the second half of “Music 2 Fly 2” and compare with the same commenting underneath Clifford T Ward on “Wherewithall”).
But what to make of Relaxed Muscle and their debut album A Heavy Nite With…? A supposed hardcore dirrrty electro duo from Doncaster, comprising Jason Buckle (half of Fat Truckers) on music, and one “Darren Spooner” on vocals who visually and audibly is clearly and unmistakably Jarvis Cocker, one wonders how big this record would have been had it been released as a Pulp album…perhaps this is the album which did merit the title This Is Hardcore. And I’m rather sorry that JC didn’t do that, because in its admitted daftness and unadmitted poignancy, it actually works very well as a follow-up to We Love Life; in particular tracks 4-7 (the unimpeachably silly “Billy Jack” at which JC deliberately fails to be the other JC – Johnny Cash – “Rod Of Iron” with its equally absurd chorus of “I rule my woman with a rod of iron,” “Tuff It Out” and the especially brilliant “Sexualized”) wipe the floor with the timid likes of ARE Weapons, etc., mostly I suspect because JC is old enough to remember the first time. On “Muscle Music” he even has a go at the old Adam Ant/Burundi groove, if none too successfully, but the ferocious and completely pop attack of the aforementioned four tracks are balanced unexpectedly and beautifully by the disconsolate musings of the final four tracks – “B-Real” with its refrain of “DJs, late bar, stonebaked pizza”; and then deeper down and slower to the ballad “Previous” (“In my previous life I had a previous wife/Now I just take care of myself”) which proves yet again how deeply JC can pierce when he wants to, even in this seemingly camp context; the amazing “Battered” which responds soberly to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (“When this world is making you lonely/You can always get/Battered”) by relocating its glamorous fantasy in the brutal steel toecap reality of Sheffield, a song which would have been a massive hit for Pulp at any time, and the mournful and moving closing song “Mary” which leads with the unbeatable opening line of “I just called to tell you that both our children are on drugs” (a sequel, perhaps, to the All Seeing I’s “Happy Birthday Nicola”?) and muses morbidly and mordantly on impermanence equally as movingly as “Help The Aged.” It’s one of Jarvis Cocker’s finest records. But who will notice?
ABOUT TAKE THAT
In response to reader Scott Neil: I was very nearly tempted by “Relight My Fire” but Lulu prevented it from getting into the list; not quite the amount of fire that was needed for the song to really blast off. Wonder how much better the original choice of Cilla Black would have worked?
(Incidentally, thanks to everyone who responded to last week's list; sadly not enough time currently to acknowledge all the additional choices, but thanks to Tom for reminding me that Double were Swiss, and to the mysterious and elusive JB Peevish with specific reference to "I Want To Be Your Property" by Blue Mercedes (yes! last gasp Hi-NRG! And what about the never-mentioned but massive in Scotland early '90s pop-rave act Time Frequency?) and "Friends" by Amii Stewart, the 12" of which curiously I had found and was playing last Sunday evening. Strange album as well, as I remember - written by Italians and all containing gnomic musings on love, life, etc. against "Moments In Love"-style backings. Note to Jon Dale; yes I'll take Sheryl Crow. "A Change Will Do You Good" as best Stones record never made?)
Nonetheless I bow to the grievous beauty of “Why Can’t I Wake Up With You?”, would acknowledge the magic of “Could It Be Magic” except that they should have let Robbie carry the chorus as well as the song, because with the lacklustre band harmonies in the chorus, the record loses crucial impetus. It may also be that Take That were the gloomiest and most morbid of teenpop groups since the Shangri-Las; certainly “Babe” with its bemused unknowing dad coming back from the war (or from where?) is straight out of the Shadow Morton manual, particularly with its genius stroke of putting Mark Owen’s quavering voice in the lead rôle. The uncertainty of Mark’s pitching echoes the emotional uncertainty of which he is singing pretty well.
And, while quickly passing over the dreary and overrated plod of a song that is “Back For Good” – by Gary Barlow’s own admission, half-copped from Oasis’ “Whatever” – we must stop and salute the genius that Jim Steinman brought to their threnody “Never Forget.” Bookended by a children’s choir (“We’ve come so far”), Barlow and the boys come forward one by one to take their bows. “Someday this will be someone else’s dream…Never pretend that it’s for real.” It remains a startling admission, even by the standards of 1995 pop, and musically Steinman creates an unlikely sequel to his production of the Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion,” the latter of which may represent the best use of a choir on any pop record, even, at its climax, forcing Andrew Eldritch, by dint of sheer momentum, to rise above his normal contrabass Voice of Doom.
But where’s Robbie? The single was a reworked re-recording of the album track, and we knew that Williams had just left the group, but were they intent on erasing all traces of him? Not a chance – he simply waits until 4:06 to make his entrance with a cheerful “We’re not invincible” as if he is already grinning from ear to ear with the foreknowledge of how much bigger than any of the rest of them he will end up. And indeed he ends up virtually taking over the song, before a brief blast of applause ushers in a reprise, Barlow coming back in, desperately trying to reassert control of the song – but it’s too late, the group are finished, and how much supplanted sadness there is in the closing children’s choir lament of “We’re still so young, and we hope for more.” They shouldn’t have resisted the notion of turning that “hope” into the past tense.
And so many still unmentioned – Cliff Richard’s late masterpiece “Some People,” with Alan Tarney returning to introduce Cliff into the world of introspective electro which now sounds like an outtake from Saint Etienne’s Sound Of Water; Player’s “Baby Come Back”; “Independent Love Song” by Scarlet; “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkin, which I praised on CoM last year…but here’s a closing trio to (re)consider.
JOAN ARMATRADING Love And Affection (1976)
HAZEL O’CONNOR Will You (1981)
Together because they echo and are sequels to each other. “I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion” opens Armatrading less than confidently. By the end of the increasingly disjointed and ecstatic track she is crying out “You know what I like!” The strings and sonorous percussion seem to breathe along with her. Whereas Hazel is stiff, uncertain and afraid (“You drink your coffee and I sip my tea”). Even when it’s obvious that they’re going to get it together, she squeals “This moment has been waiting for a long, long time” as if she’s being strangled. Love wins in both cases, however, as evinced by the crucial role that the alto saxophone plays in both records (Jimmy Jewell on Armatrading, Wesley Macgoogan on O’Connor) articulating the feelings which lie beyond rational expression.
THE SCISSOR SISTERS Laura (2003)
The record which has just arrived to sum all of these other records up. The opening staccato piano links Mr Bloe and Britney. ‘70s Moog and wah-wah guitar join other dots. The vocal is Robbie Williams stripped of his £80m and forced to concentrate once again. The chord sequence is unutterably sublime. The pause for breath at 2:50 may indicate the snazziest use of silence in a pop record since Ultravox at their 1981 peak. One is, as ever, reminded that, when it comes to lists of this kind, or indeed any kind, there’s always room for one more.
