The Clothed Maja

FRAGMENTS

Excellent article about returning to the music and thence to the world. The piece works because he doesn’t fall into the Hornby trap/soapbox of confusing “good music” with “my taste;” the humanity content is always more important than the content or existence of one’s record collection.

Strange how the same record helped save both of us.

Some of course cannot be saved. I’m nearly a week late in mentioning this wonderful documentary - insofar as I was out the night it was broadcast and have only just watched it on video - and hope that British readers managed to see it.

Random fragments – “That’s me in the box…I’ve just got a dodgy shell, that’s all…”

…and the sequence where he narrates his vision of a peaceful rural idyll in an attempt to transcend his bodily pain. The camera pans out from his kitchen, the man having less than a fortnight to live, outwards into the countryside, covering everything up to and beyond the horizon with its lush greenness. Something that, unrestricted capitalism notwithstanding, will last for much longer, and with infinitely more grace, than any of us. I thought of the green hills of Elsfield which Laura knew as a child and which her grave now overlooks.

The documentary cut me very deeply indeed, for reasons about which I’m still uncomfortable talking here. It wasn’t entirely clear exactly when Kennedy died, but from my viewpoint it looked as though he probably passed away on the train back home from London, his fundraising mission having been accomplished, his goodbyes already having been said, his exhausted and redundant mockery of a body seeming at complete peace in the train seat.

I thought of how, in the summer of 2001, we wanted to take Laura to see Whitby for one last time. We thought that there would be enough time left to do that. But as it turned out, there wasn’t, and in any case her decline was so steep and rapid that she probably would have died there, within sight of Anne Brontë’s grave.

I thought of the unalterable curse of being fucked up by your family’s genes.

I thought of Alan Clark on the hill in Devon, overlooking the Tiverton church spire as the Lancaster flies directly over him. This diary entry is more or less unfilmable, as it describes the journey and transference of a weary and melancholy mind; as unfilmable as the interior of James Duffy’s mind at the painful close of Joyce’s “A Painful Case.” (“Why had he sentenced her to death?”). I was surprised to see that they had attempted to film it in the BBC’s Alan Clark Diaries series, but in fact the programme’s zero budget works in its advantage, because of course everything happens in Clark’s mind, and the floridity of his thoughts are perfectly counterbalanced with the banality of the world with which he does not necessarily have to deal. So all you needed was John Hurt in his cap, hands in pockets, gazing over the hill. The transcendence of the experience can only be conjured up by his imagination and conveyed to us via his words.

I thought of “Mystery Rose/Waves” by Low Budget Soul, now available on CD courtesy of Norman Jay’s new Giant 45 compilation double album. Is this the greatest piece of Britsoul since the heyday of Loose Ends? I think so. The song’s duology is about crossing the bridge between idolising an Other and becoming as one with the Other. “I feel it’s time to know,” croon the singers uncertainly over a rippling Fender Rhodes figure, “before love fades away.” They implore the “mystery rose” not to “hold me back in the past/I want our time to last/’Cause if nighttime falls/I wonder (that “wonder” almost dragged, slurring, out of their mouths, then a pause, then another “wonder”) will I see it through/Before love fades away?”

“Don’t you want to share your world/Not just with butterflies and birds?” Elsfield, 1972, again.

And then, at 3:17, the transition. The electric piano changes to an “At Last I Am Free” descending major/minor/augmented major chord sequence, a distraughtly distant flute sounds from a different hill. Suddenly there are “palm trees in the breeze/Seagulls they come and go” and they are together – “Her beat quenches my thirst…as the waves/Wash along/To my shore/So get into my skin/Pull me out/To the sea/To float endlessly….In her dreams/And her love/Raining down/From the sky/Calling me/To the place/Where her beauty lies.” It is as if they have been pulled from the drenching waves of oblivion. “Her beat moves me inside/Where I have been asleep.” Those triple rhythmic vocal lines, a staple of Britsoul from Linx and Imagination onwards, the feeling that nothing can harm us here, that somehow we have moved beyond the banality of the world, away from…well, as the track ends, we hear a distant throbbing beat – someone’s car stereo? – my God, the real world – better CUT IT OFF QUICK

Why not, when it hurts you so much?

There are lots of good things on Giant 45, but the other track which I must mention here is D’Nell’s “Time 2 Say (Break Return Remix)” which is based on a sample I know to come from the intro to Bob James’ version of “Feel Like Makin’ Love.” But here the singer (D’Nell, I guess) sings sweetly but also moderately sternly about the continued attempts to keep women down. Listen to her chorus of “I think it’s time to say/What’s been playing on my mind” which is directly reminiscent of Sarah Cracknell’s awesome and sinister late vocal entry into Saint Etienne’s “The Way We Live Now.” I don’t know…I just love floating cumulonimbi of electric pianos and mind-alteringly gorgeous chord changes with a voice swimming on top of it, reassuring us that they are not drowning.

Oh yes, the punctum – a pause in the music and then, at 4:42, a reinforced beat with a male voice cut up: “The mind…the mind…” See? It’s all about that blasted life of the mind.

It occurs to me that Arthur Russell’s “You Can Make Me Feel Bad” is the missing link between Hildegard of Bingen and Billy Bragg, midwifed by My Bloody Valentine.

It initially occurred to me that I could not recall a single sentence from any of Alistair Cooke’s broadcasts. But then the point of his broadcasts wasn’t really to furnish us with a handy lucky dip barrel of bon mots. He was the first blogger of the modern media – Letter from America was always about him first, America second, and how the two intertwined. The observations would not have been worth anyone’s time were there no cognisance of the life of the storyteller.

But then, after I had given it some thought, there is one sentence of his I remember pretty clearly; it stemmed from the late ‘60s, when someone wrote in to complain that he was a nostalgic old fool who was painting an idealised picture of an America which was already receding into history and DIDN’T HE REALISE THAT THE WORLD WAS COLLAPSING IN FRONT OF HIS EYES? He replied with great grace and patience that he was acutely aware of everything that was happening and deteriorating in the world, but that “As these letters have always been based on the premise that their ideal audience is two people in a room, I see no reason why I shouldn’t keep a civil tongue.”

Oh, and here are four more, about the elementary mistakes people make when broadcasting: “You can’t just read out an essay you’ve written. On the radio you have to act as if you’re talking to someone, telling them a story. Every sentence has to lead into the next. If a sentence is dull or boring, it is the democratic right of the listener to switch off.”

Thus readers of The Naked Maja can expect plenty more ruminations on life as it was with Laura, and life as it has been thereafter, and perhaps not too many words on Arthur Russell or Kanye West. Also the Easter holidays are looming, so for some time there will be no words at all, except of course for those which you know I’m thinking.

GREAT PERFORMANCES OF MUSIC BY INDIVIDUALS RECORDED IN CHURCHES
(The first in an exceptionally intermittent series)

1. ABBESS HILDEGARD OF BINGEN/GOTHIC VOICES, dir CHRISTOPHER PAGE A Feather On The Breath Of God

Recorded in the Church of St-Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead (actually in Hampstead Garden Suburb) on 14 September 1981, about two weeks before I started university, this was the first recording of the Sequences from the great Abbess’ Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum – as with Walter Benjamin or Stanley Kubrick, Hildegard’s absolute vision (or, if you will, Scivias) was focused on a somewhat frantic need to encompass and understand everything within the scope of one enormous, rambling work of art. Like Benjamin, but not very like Kubrick, Hildegard’s art was nevertheless one of restraint of extreme emotions; in her music everything – sex, death – is compressed into a patient but immensely profound template (“a quiet mastery that controls ecstasy and shuns delirium” as Dr Page’s sleevenote says).

The album was one of my most played in my first year at university; if you consider that others of the period would include the Teardrop Explodes’ Wilder (compare especially the second half of side two with Hildegard) and Scott Walker’s Fire Escape In The Sky compilation, then you might have detected even then a tendency towards uncertain contemplation; the need for profundity in music to make itself gradually known to me, rather than yelling its greatness with a tacky placard.

The harmonies of the sopranos and contraltos set against the somewhat unsettling “symphony” and reed drones continue to spellbind; the gorgeously uplifting chordality, arising from timidity into something short of assertion, in “Columba aspexit,” might temporarily deter you from realising that the song is in praise of a holy sacrifice and that “You are strong/And beautiful/In rites/And in the shining of the altar/Mounting like the smoke of perfumes/To the columns of praise” relates to the involuntary immolation of some hapless goat or elephant whose inadvertent perfumes, I would hazard, would be considered rather less than praiseworthy, or even tolerable.

And the touchingly yearning soprano solo “Ave, generosa” – sung beautifully here by Margaret Philpot – is, let’s face it, about sex. “For the Heavenly potion/Was poured into you/In that the Heavenly word/Received a raiment of flesh in you.” But it treats sex as something sacred, and the closing soft cry of “Dei gentricem. Amen” is directly traceable to the “now, now, now” which closes Perhacs’ Parallelograms, and just as shattering to listen to.

Everyone knows, or at least has heard, “O Euchari,” performed here by Emily van Evera – certainly you have heard its first titular line as it was used as the key sample in the Beloved’s “The Sun Rising,” while a more substantial portion was accommodated in Orbital’s “Belfast.”

Meanwhile, the two large ensemble pieces – “O Ierusalem” (involving guest soprano, the youthful Emma Kirkby) and “O Ecclesia” – are great, slowly swelling mantras, one concerned with the burning of St Rupert’s original monastery by the Normans, the other with St Ursula, who was “martyred with eleven thousand virgins at Cologne.” And the subtle but heartbreaking minor key alignment which underscores the latter’s closing “materie verbi Dei suffocatum est” is the crossroads between death and transfiguration made manifest.

My feelings are that this superb music needs to be rescued, both from the well-meaning but ultimately ill-intentioned schools of proto-coffee table chillout music and also from the David Keenan/Psychic TV/Coil let-us-see-decay-in-everything ghetto. I can’t help feeling that, although the likes of Bridget St John and Vashti Bunyan are doubtless glad to be gigging and getting noticed again, their revival has come as a price; the post-Wicker Man/Kindertotenlieder misunderstood mongrelisation of the simple joy and innocent curiosity to be found in their greatest music. So should Hildegard of Bingen’s music be regarded, not as some kind of wacko 12th-century equivalent of Waco, but simply as beautiful and transcendent music – music which, the best part of a millennium later, continues to avoid the inconvenience of being pinned down like a hapless butterfly. As Bunyan so wisely said: “But most of all I’d like you to be unaware/Then I’d just wander away, trailing palm leaves behind me/So you don’t even know that I’ve been there.”

2. EVAN PARKER The Snake Decides

Everyone involved in the remotest of ways with music in the Oxford of the ‘80s and early ‘90s knew, or at least knew of, Michael Gerzon; certainly everyone who regularly congregated at the old Music Machine shop in Cornmarket or the later Green River shop at the St Clements end of the Cowley Road. A large but amiable and articulate man, perpetually clad in green waterproofs with several miles of tape spools and wire trailing behind him, he always had several thousand words to say in praise of…well, anyone and everyone. Like me, he divided his time equally between Oxford and London; unlike me, he recorded a huge number of concerts by everyone from REM to Anthony Braxton, and more importantly was a real pioneer in the evolution of sound production (Ambisonics, for instance). He was also not a well man, and his long-term health problems finally saw him off in the mid-‘90s, not yet 50.

Perhaps his greatest single achievement as a producer was The Snake Decides, Evan Parker’s 1986 album of solo soprano sax improvisations, recorded five days after my 22nd birthday at St Paul’s, Oxford (actually St Paul’s, Banbury). On his sleevenote to last year’s CD reissue of the album, Parker is rightly fulsome in his praise of Gerzon. Among his many musical interests, Parker notes that Gerzon was “happy to talk about the young Emma Kirkby’s voice.”

The 20-minute-or-so title track which occupied side one of the original vinyl release is without doubt the greatest performance on a saxophone ever recorded. Hear how Parker’s instant tone row of harmonics immediately howl into your cortex at 0:01 (on headphones it feels as though you’ve been given a Glasgow kiss) before he settles down and launches into an astonishing virtuoso performance which will make everyone considering taking up the saxophone to think again. A drastic evolution from the pure rhythm of 1976’s Saxophone Solos, and a slightly less drastic evolution from the initial courting of rhythm with motif in 1978’s Monoceros, Parker sounds here as though he’s finally achieved the sort of playing, the kind of vision, towards which he had been aiming for the previous 20 years.

And far from being random trills or tonguing, wise and closely positioned ears will realise just how fierce is the discipline of Parker’s methodology here, how intent is his development and systematic evolution of the thematic elements with which he is working.

Melodically, harmonically and rhythmically Parker’s playing is never less than compulsive. Indeed the initial impression on listening to the first seven or eight minutes or so of “The Snake Decides” might be the hitherto restrained passion of Hildegard’s reed drones suddenly erupting into open emotionalism; you can almost decode the piece as a pocket evolution of Western music in the early part of the last millennium; the rhythms continue to cross and multiply until the saxophone is practically playing a 14th-century estampie, its own voice (the upper registers), continuo (the middle registers) and bassline (the lower registers) all combining into one tripartite expression and distillation of music. Occasionally the double tonguing will take over and turn the music abrupt and hard-toned; at other times long uninterrupted streams of pure melody flow like ditches of Chaucer’s time didn’t. Note particularly how, at 13:36, the harmonics suddenly break off and the upper end of the soprano flies freely before plunging back into what eventually turns into a 2/4 Irish jig, with ostinatos frenetically repeated to the point of entrancement and hypnosis. This too ultimately winds down, and the piece ends graciously as the original melody emerges and is restated as the cycle of the music gradually comes to a well-earned rest. In terms of your stereo it remains about as close an experience to actually watching Parker in performance as can ever be achieved, and there is a completeness and certainty in Parker’s absolute mastery of his instrument, as well as an eluctable logic – aided of course by the impeccable acoustics of St Paul’s Church; there are moments, especially on the three shorter pieces on the original side two, when you can hear Parker reacting against and playing with the echoes he himself has generated, Alvin Lucier-style - which makes The Snake Decides still the most compelling and accessible of his solo recitals.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE TWO

Also recorded in a church in Oxford (“Oxford Church” according to the sleeve – er, which one?) in February 1996, Miracles by the Middle Ages/Renaissance music ensemble the Dufay Collective – at times still my favourite group of musicians in any genre – is a fantastic bridge between the sacred and the profane. A collection of 13th century “Cantigas de Santa Maria” – or Spanish songs in praise of the Virgin Mary – these have been arranged in such a way as to make the music and myths live again (see also Pietra Montecorvino). Ranging from the funereal ceremonials of “Beyeita es Maria” to the splendidly rampant “Eno pouco e no muito” (the latter about, of all things, a ferret who is saved from being crushed by a horse’s hooves), the percussion is mixed well upfront, and the punctum is provided by the divine vocals of Vivien Ellis, the world’s greatest living female singer. Listen to how she twists, pouts and drawls the imprecations of “Como pod’ a groriosa” (all about a girl who prays at a shrine to the Virgin Mary and then finds that her feet now face the right way and are no longer twisted); it’s fuck you sexy and alluring in a way that Middle Ages music was in fact always supposed to sound (fittingly, Ms Ellis is also active on the improv scene and is part of Keith Tippett’s titanic and as yet criminally unrecorded big band Tapestry). Anyone who likes Steeleye Span (I used to think Maddy Prior the epitome of sexuality when I was of an impressionable young age) or the Incredible String Band will love this; everyone else should as well. Actually, just go out and buy everything you can find by the Dufay Collective – especially recommended is their album with the wonderful and entirely self-explanatory title of Johnny, Cock Thy Beaver.

RHYMES OF GOODBYE
Goodbyes are due to two of my favourite people in cinema, Mercedes McCambridge and Sir Peter Ustinov. Wiser people have said more words about either elsewhere, so let us be content here by picking a definitive role for each – for Mercedes, the leather-jacketed ringmaster getting her/his kicks from watching Janet Leigh being gang-raped in Touch Of Evil, still one of the most frightening manifestations of Welles knows what in the whole of cinema; for Ustinov, the titanic, universe-spanning ringmaster around whom the whole of the rest of Ophuls’ Lola Montes rotates. Each a giant axis; each will be sorely missed.

THE GREY AREA OF DJ DANGERMOUSE

Already enough words have been expanded on DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album such that any further comment seems superfluous. Some readers may regard it as a terrible dereliction of duty that this writer has come so late to acknowledging the CD, let alone write about it, or possibly the final confirmation that this writer has indeed degenerated into a rusty old tub, fit only for the Magic FM scrapheap (have I told you about this promising new lo-fi singer/songwriter called Robert Johnson yet? Kind of M Ward meets Ol’ Dirty Bastard).

Contrary to the protestations of the NME (and can one write any sentence today containing the word “NME” without adding the word “contrary”?), The Grey Album is unlikely to “change music forever” just as the onset of sampling didn’t spell the end of the BPI, or come to that of guitars. In fact, in many ways the album serves as a reaffirmation of the superiority of music of the past over that of the present, and in particular the perceived superiority of the Beatles.

When Jay-Z’s The Black Album came out last autumn I didn’t expend any words on it, didn’t feel the need to do so; it seemed yet another skippable chapter in the interminable story (repeated album after album) of a rapper whose arrogance is not entirely, or particularly, earned. That it was his “final” album remains to be confirmed, and while not an unlistenable record, it didn’t seem to break any new ground apart from a new-found liking for ‘60s/’70s rock samples as opposed to old ‘70s soul samples. In addition, his producer Kanye West has far exceeded the Hova with his own debut album The College Dropout – and I certainly do intend to write more fully about the latter before the end of the century – which serves as a far more apposite and exciting follow-up to The Blueprint than the over-padded walls of Blueprint 2.

With The Grey Album, however, DJ Dangermouse has inadvertently (or not) produced the best Jay-Z record since The Blueprint, maybe even since Reasonable Doubt. Suddenly, given a (still) forbidden environment in which his rhymes can flourish, Jay-Z sounds reinvigorated; even though these are exactly the same vocal tracks as appeared on The Black Album, they sound much livelier and engaging when given the backing and manipulating of Beatles samples.

The Grey Album also works as a revitalisation of the Beatles. Rather than jump Pavlovian style towards legal shenanigans, EMI/Capitol/Apple Corps should be grateful, not to say jubilant, that DJ Dangermouse has also led listeners back towards the sprawling genius of the White Album and made that particular record matter again. Perhaps the exclusion of Beatles samples from the last 20 years of sampling-based music is the equivalent of unattainable godhood – let us not forget that the JAMMs more or less kicked this cycle off with the “All You Need Is Love” sample which introduces their similarly-titled song, and above all let us not forget the revisiting of “Birthday” by John Oswald (does Plunderphonics rival Art of Noise’s Daft as, de facto, the most important record of the last 20 years?) – such that, by not sampling the Beatles, contemporary music avoids confronting the possibility that the Beatles might outdo, outshine and ultimately shame it.

And not just contemporary music, either – on The Grey Album there are one or two subtle nods towards the notion that even music being produced at the same time as the White Album suffers in comparison. Consider, for instance, the opening “Public Service Announcement” (the order of The Grey Album does not correspond to the running order of The Black Album – a parallel but similar story is being told). On The Black Album, the sample backing is provided by a troubled organ groove which wouldn’t be out of place in 1994 Bristol. The sample comes from something called “Seed Of Love” by the Little Boy Blues, made in 1968. It does its job – if no more – but on The Grey Album samples are used from “Long, Long, Long,” the brilliant George Harrison meditation on metamorphosing from one form of life into another. Here the organ is woozy (its vibrato assisted by a rattling bottle of wine on top of it), and, blending with Jay-Z’s weary complaints about how no one understands him, it takes the rapper’s words into a universe at which “Seed Of Love” could only gaze enviously.

“What More Can I Say” could, if released as a single, give Jay-Z his biggest hit since “Hard Knock Life.” The brutal beats work brilliantly with the “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” accompaniment – and it’s of especial note how much emphasis on The Grey Album is given to George Harrison’s contributions to the White Album. While the Izza gives us his usual rant about how all pop culture is up to its neck in hock to him, the Harrison voice of reason murmurs in the background: “See the lover that’s sleeping.” A shame that the original track’s opening sample from Gladiator – Russell Crowe accusedly barking “Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” – is not used, but Jay-Z’s signoff of “We’ll see what happens after I don’t exist – ah, fuck it” (before he throws his mike to the floor) is made to sound like a far eerier threat.

“Encore”’s self-satisfied self-congratulation is brilliantly counterpointed by the ominous ascending string line and rhythm track from the middle of “Glass Onion,” which also corresponds musically with Eminem’s very similar soundtrack to “Moment of Clarity” – those slowly rising cellos approaching you like a ten-ton truck intent on flattening the spectator/Jay-walker (“I’m from the murder capital where we murder for capital”). On The Grey Album, however, the latter song is soundtracked by various reshaped elements of “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” a song whose multilevel structure lends itself well to sampling, as it is juggled around again for The Grey Album’s version of “Justify My Thug” (and thereby giving the blunt Madonna some much-needed new point).

The Black Album is designed partly as an autobiographical conceit, the emphasis being on “conceit,” but again Jay-Z’s self-bigging is given a startling new, and softer, and therefore more human, edge as “December 4th” is now soundtracked by the acoustic quietude of “Mother Nature’s Son.” The reminiscences of his mother are given new poignancy, and references to his giving up sports when his parents split up and his subsequent passion for rapping are actually relevant to the original premise of McCartney’s lyric (“Born a poor young country boy – Mother Nature’s son/All day long I’m sitting singing songs for everyone”).

On the Rick Rubin-produced “99 Problems” the sample used on The Black Album sounds uncannily like the final chord of “A Day In The Life,” though on closer inspection it’s actually a fusion of Mountain’s “Long Red” and Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat.” On The Grey Album, however, the song’s misogyny is set against “Helter Skelter,” which frankly wipes both Mountain and Squier out of the picture as far as heavy metal is concerned, thereby posing the question of whether heavy metal was at all necessary when you’d already had “Helter Skelter” as its apotheosis.

“Dirt Off Your Shoulder” is The Black Album’s obligatory conveyor belt Timbaland production. The original is more interesting for the new level of weariness in Jay-Z’s voice as he mutters: “Get that…dirt off your shoulder” as though he had the universe on his shoulder, weighing him down like a 16-ton safe newly fallen from a 45th floor office window. But DJ Dangermouse even makes Timbaland interesting again. The Grey Album version is musically based on “Julia” – the brilliant John Lennon meditation on metamorphosing from one form of life into another – but cuts up the acoustic guitar lines fabulously in tandem with Timbaland’s broken beats, creating a new genre of medieval glitch, coming across like John Dowland jamming with Oval.

As for the two Neptunes productions, which presage their recent and sudden descent into cliché and parody, the attempted carnality of “Change Clothes” is changed from its original benign Fender Rhodes to the curiously more sexual-sounding harpsichord of “Piggies” (Harrison again!), thereby converting the song from standard get-your-bling-off territory to the world of Noel Coward. Similarly, “Allure”’s beats are made less alluring and more jagged by the very clever manipulation of elements of “Dear Prudence.”

One White Album track deployed on three Grey Album tracks is Harrison’s “Savoy Truffles.” Usually considered a minor track on the White Album, it again shows how more focused Harrison seemed to be than his colleagues at this period of the Beatles’ existence – its jerky organ-driven rock presages skinny tie No Wave by a decade, and its allegory of drug OD as chocolates in a box is easily missable. On The Grey Album it’s used for the second half of “Encore” as well as on “Interlude (Lucifer 9)” and “My First Song.”

“Interlude (Lucifer 9)” is also where DJ Dangermouse tackles the Revolution #9 Question, and unsurprisingly it’s the track which is the furthest out. Deploying elements of two Black Album tracks – the opening “Interlude” and “Lucifer” (the latter, on The Black Album, uses the old Max Romeo “Chase The Devil” sample) – it’s The Grey Album’s shortest track and also its masterpiece, skilfully and mischievously sending Jay-Z’s words of wisdom backwards and into a loop (“Let me introduce you to the/DEVIL!”), it’s also the one track on the album where you cannot quite tell which elements are Jay-Z and which Beatles – the two are truly and miraculously fused. Backwards elements of “Revolution #9” are sent forwards – it’s startling to hear that piano line played as it was originally played – and there is also Lennon’s opening vocal from “I’m So Tired” as well as a frighteningly intense twin bass line which vacillates up and down its octave like an ambulance siren, and which incredibly seems to have been extracted from Ringo’s jolly hoedown singalong “Don’t Pass Me By.” In addition the pre-Steve Nieve organ from “Savoy Truffle” wanders in and out like a bemused visitor to a Bill Viola exhibition.

The Grey Album ends as does The Black Album, with “My First Song.” Fittingly, the principal Beatles element here is McCartney’s wistful “Can you take me back” – and EMI CD manufacturers, please note, that is the beginning of “Revolution #9,” not the end of “Cry Baby Cry” – and, again, the “Savoy Truffle” rhythm track. The Biggie cameo is retained. By the end, Jay-Z sounds mischievous again, full of life once more (I note the reference to “rap’s Grateful Dead” on “Encore”).

Assuming that Roc-A-Fella, Apple and DJ Dangermouse can all break bread at the same table, it would be a very foolish idea not to consider The Grey Album for a proper commercial issue – even on a basic commercial level, if we count downloads as sales, then The Grey Album would probably and comfortably outstrip the Meluas and Cullums in the album chart. Added to that is the fact that it will inspire you to go back to both White and Black albums and listen to them with newly-freshened ears - this being the partial point of the exercise.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Henry Scollard of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for kindly burning The Grey Album onto CD for me.

Equally special thanks are also due to Swedish reader Henrik Goransson for burning the Left Banke and Field Mice CDs, as well as to Beanos of Croydon which, despite not being as great a secondhand record shop as they would like to think, nevertheless did have a copy of The Killer Album by the Ruthless Rap Assassins on CD retailing for a fiver when I happened to visit them last week.

TODD RUNDGREN – LIARS

“All of these songs are about a paucity of truth. At first they may seem to be about other things, but that is just a reflection of how much dishonesty we have accepted in our daily lives. We are raised from birth to believe things that cannot be proven or that are plainly not true. People will often brag of their honesty, when there is so much they have simply chosen to ignore or leave unexamined.”

(Extracted from Todd Rundgren’s sleevenote to his new album, Liars)

Well, for one thing, I can’t think of a better explanation/precis for either Church of Me or Naked Maja, and it’s something which I try to extend as far into my actual life as far as possible. The problem with something like Belle du Jour, and the main reason why it’s backfired, is that it contains neither truth nor an interesting or entertaining fiction. The interest which might have been engendered by this being the diary of a real callgirl has been superseded by the superciliousness of whichever professional writer(s) put it together. Thus all that is left is a sneer, a sneer not only at other bloggers (some of whom, present company included, are professional writers anyway) but ultimately, and far more destructively, at their readers. The subtext is that we authors of Belle du Jour are ABOVE all this. It is simply another in the wearisomely familiar procession of public school slummers sniffing at pallid pathetic plebs – writers who, from the available documentation, show little evidence of any ability to get into and imagine themselves within the heads of others.

My weblog writing tends to have a naturally melancholy flavour. Often it is self-pitying and self-contradictory – but it is the recording of events in a real life from a real perspective. The Naked Maja is purposely designed to be less overtly personal than the Church of Me; nonetheless it would be foolish and false of me to deny that my personal life and feelings dictate the writing which you read here. Recent events have inevitably necessitated the re-elevation of the personal – but however it may read, however you as a reader may perceive it, this is the documentary of a real life, which, without unadulterated and sometimes painful truth, would not be worth a nanosecond of your time.

Oh stop trying to be Alistair Cooke and tell us about the new Todd Rundgren album!

For indeed I must. Liars is the new album by Todd Rundgren; “14 retro-modern pop songs” which represent his first record of all-new material in over a decade. As with Lindsey Buckingham and John Cale last year, it sets the pop standard for this year. It is without question Rundgren’s best album in any field since The Hermit Of Mink Hollow 26 years ago; a pop record in possession of enough wit, wisdom and invention to force the rest of 2004 pop to cower cowardly in Cowell’s corner with shame. Lost all patience with George Michael? Taken the “Die” option with N*E*R*D* (a record in hock up to its neck to Todd, but possessing none of the qualities which make the Runt more than a runt)? Then try Todd.

Like Patience, this is a long record (each song segues into the next, Wizard-style) with songs typically lasting for 5-6 minutes. Unlike Patience, the songs themselves do not run out of steam after two minutes, and Rundgren’s perspective on the world is therefore more interesting than Michael’s, if not as overtly personal (it is personal, but on a far more subtle level). Musically, too, it really is a case of the Runt strolling onto the ballpark and knocking the ball clean out of the field, just to prove that he can. Frighteningly and evidently aware of current trends in music, he proceeds to show us how much better he is at any of them than practically anyone else (and without any unearned arrogance either).

For instance, the album starts with the greatest Ibiza trance anthem you ever heard, “Truth.” Faint with proper awe as Rundgren’s miraculously preserved voice strides ecstatically into the song: “I’m gonna find it, I’m gonna find the truth.” Setting out his stall for the rest of the album, you hardly notice that he’s already singing about truth’s absence (“I thought I saw it somewhere in a starry sky/And if it’s there, I’m stuck down here”). Don’t we all agree that George Michael would have been far better off recording some Ibiza trance anthems?

Or even some proper blue-eyed soul, for “Sweet” is one of two diamond blue-eyed soul vocal performances on this album worthy to stand alongside anything on side two of Wizard. Vaguely reminiscent of the irresistible swing of Change’s “Searching” (“Sing and shout it, tell the world about it”) listen to Todd’s climactic/orgasmic squeal of “Sweeeeet!” at 5:01, the punctum of all puncta.

Liars is also as recklessly inventive as The Love Below – indeed, “Happy Anniversary” works as a wiser elder brother to Andre 3000’s “Valentine’s Day.” Beginning with some semi-abstract electronica – rising In A Silent Way electric piano chords accompanied by the kind of singing which makes you realise just how far the Junior Boys have yet to go in matters of marrying songs with electronica (but then they don’t have Todd as their lead singer) before the track suddenly erupts into a rockout, over which Todd chants the refrain “Men are stupid, women are evil/And that’s just the way it’s got to be” before reflecting sadly on the relative stupidity and evil of both sexes at their worst.

There’s a slight setback with “Soul Brother” which comes across too much like Jamie Cullum Sings Michael Parkinson, i.e. moaning about Music Today All Sounding The Same With No Soul, though even this is redeemed by three factors: (a) the unarguable truth of the lines “And all the brothers act like crooks/And all the kids in the suburbs write the radio hooks”; (b) the link out of “Can I get a witness?” where Todd screams on the last syllable in perfect symmetry with the opening trill of the flute solo;

- and (c) the song “Flaw” which proves that, well, if he wants to criticise R&B, it’s only because he can do R&B better – a slinkily insolent groove, the slowest jam D’Angelo never sang (note the aesthetic crossover between the refrain of “So why you gotta be such a lyinass motherfucker?” and D’Angelo’s own “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” ).

“Stood Up” is a splendid piece of nu-psychedelia – which of course, with the Nazz, he helped invent – with some fantastically droll lyrics: “And when they asked for volunteers/I must have thought they said ‘drink beers’/And I stood up too fast” or “And nobody has the slightest choice/But to put up with my droning voice.” Meanwhile, the epic “Mammon” (“Your god is Mammon/Your god is dead”) finds Todd inventing a new genre of prog-Goth. This is exactly the sort of thing which N*E*R*D have tried without success to pull off on tracks like “Drill Sergeant”; with its stentorian booming baritones and unapologetically Utopian guitar, this really is the greatest song that the Sisters of Mercy never recorded (whereas “Drill Sergeant” lumbers in a rather ungainly fashion from XTC to Rush).

Then it’s what is for me the record’s emotional centre, where Todd loses himself in a bright electronica dystopia. “Future” might be the most heartbreaking song about the failure of any future to materialise since the All Seeing I’s “1st Man In Space.” Over the kind of poignant (think Global Communications, early Aphex) electronic shimmer which, had it been issued as a blank white label 12” on Ninja Tune Records, would have been played to death by Gilles Peterson, Rundgren desolately croons: “Where’s the office buildings 2 miles high/And the ocean liners 12 blocks wide?/Where’s the supertrain that’s solar powered/Average speed 600 miles an hour?/I’m supposed to get my eyesight back/I’m supposed to gain all things I lack/I’m supposed to live devoid of fears/I’M SUPPOSED TO LIVE,” grieving in his complete bewilderment. The music itself is unutterably affecting, also indicating in its own way a musical future which never quite came to pass.

“Future” segues beautifully into “Past,” the second of Todd’s great blue-eyed soul setpieces. The musical backdrop is again subtly futuristic as Todd’s grief now becomes explicit: “I’m living in the past/Living in the past, I know/But the past is gone,” and then, transforming it into the personal, “I can’t remember when/You didn’t cross my mind and pull me back again/Into my reverie/And that’s why I’m living in the past.” And this man is…what, 55, 56 years old? What an amazing performance.

Now, subtly, into the political. “Wondering” was apparently inspired by the 2000 Presidential election, but it’s possible simply to appreciate the song as a non-specific mourning for something which has unavoidably come to pass – listen to that soul-wrenching little augmented minor chord change into the last line of the chorus “But for the wondering,” a tiny but absolutely vital touch of genius – the sort of thing which distinguishes visionaries from…well, Sting. Such a gulf of sadness underlies the placid surface of this song.

“Afterlife” finds Todd musing on death and religion, within a virtual, echoing wonderland worthy of Trevor Horn (it might almost be David Van Day’s sequel to “Videotheque,” now bereft of his “ghost”) and also perhaps the most affecting use of a vocoder this side of the My Computer album (“Kiss it all goodbye/It was just a clever lie”). The final couplet reveals his preference to live and love rather than to die and worship (“I could not repose in bliss/Never more to know your kiss”). “You” are more important to me than God.

Rundgren emphasises and expands on this declaration of love for the real, tangible Other in the uptempo “Living” which comes on like Buckingham’s “Big Love” gone Acid House before again being derailed by his metal guitar crunches. But it’s the most positive song on the album, a testimony to the value of love while everything else collapses around us. It tells us to live – “And I refuse to say that we are living a lie.” Such a divine and exultant chorus – and hear especially his second cry of “Daybreak!” at 4:08 as he prepares to re-enter the chorus.

God Himself is apparently quite content with this state of affairs, as Todd finds out when he goes to have a chat with Him on “God Said.” Beginning with some electronic ambience which could have been taken straight from the intro to 808 State’s “Pacific,” Todd’s God is slightly less cynical and a lot less nihilistic than the one who is the subject and singer of Randy Newman’s “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind),” but an equally realistic one; in response to Todd’s pleas of “Have I displeased you somehow?” He retorts: “I don’t dwell on you, I dwell on something else/And I am not really here, so get over yourself…/And I won’t give you a prize instead of someone else/’Cause I don’t play favourites, so get over yourself.”

And in a moment of absolute unparalleled punctum, at 3:18 we are introduced to the refrain “Just get over yourself” sung in the manner of the Bee Gees (cf. “I Laugh In Your Face” from Odessa)! The Gibb brothers as God – it makes sense.

Finally, the obligatory attack on someone who thinks he’s God – i.e. Dubya – on the album’s cathartic closing track “Liar” where Todd narrows his focus and now snarls with rage at Bush: “LIAR! And with every breath/You send them to their death.” Set against an appropriate muezzin wail backdrop, this anti-Gulf War anthem would have been entirely in place on Massive Attack’s 100th Window. As Cale did on “Letter From Abroad” the anger becomes focused and terrible in its intensity; it’s what the whole of the rest of the album has bene building up to, and it provides release for Rundgren’s rage – his scream of “LIAR!” is virtually dehumanised.

There will be more, much more, about Todd in these pages to come; but for now I say that Liars is within aesthetic striking distance of his 1972-4 Holy Trinity (Something/Anything, A Wizard/A True Star and Todd). It’s that good, that wise, that powerful, that indispensable. Would I lie to you?

THE STREETS – A GRAND DON’T COME FOR FREE

I know what you’re expecting me to say. You’re expecting me to say that this is garage’s Beauty Stab, a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the grimy rascals. Perhaps on an incautious first listen you may well agree that this is the case.

But, as usual, you have to keep listening. If you’re really desperate for a car crash of a second album, I refer you to N*E*R*D*’s Fly Or Die, a record for rubberneckers if ever there were one. But the second Streets album is an extraordinary thing – the first garage opera, garage’s Tommy (only much better), the missing link between Sham 69’s That’s Life and Spearmint’s A Week Away.

It is certainly a concept album insofar as there is a storyline all the way through it, a storyline which zooms in on and magnifies a particular example of the general picture of frustration and decay which Mike Skinner captured on Original Pirate Material. It is not Phil Daniels goes garage, though wouldn’t necessarily be worse if it were, and in places is also very blackly funny indeed.

It starts with a stoned moan from Skinner: “It Was Supposed To Be So Easy,” a fantastic “25 Miles”-style episodic song which sees Skinner fail to achieve anything on that day’s checklist (yes it’s a day in the life, give or take a week, so therefore this is also garage’s Ulysses), namely get his DVD back to the video shop in time before he has to pay a “big fine” (he gets to the shop but has forgotten to put the DVD back in its box), take some money out of the cash machine (“Insufficient funds,” naturally), ring his mum to tell her he won’t be back for tea (his crap mobile’s battery runs out) and then “grab my savings” - £1000 which he has rather incautiously left in a shoebox on top of his TV – which on returning home he finds have vanished without a trace. Everything seems to be against him and he mourns in utter despair (“100,000 pennies no more”). So the President of the Immortals (to borrow a Thomas Hardy meme) has decided to choose this day to have his sport with Skinner, and the rest of the album details his subsequent psychological and physical journey through hell, signposted by the Cecil B de Mille orchestral fanfare which provides the track’s main sample.

Starting with his doomed attempts to attract the opposite sex. In “Could Well Be In” he tries chatting up a girl (the chorus, over a tune which sounds like Bruce Hornsby playing “Werewolves Of London,” goes: “I saw this thing on ITV the other week/Said that if she played with her hair she was probably keen”) and seems to get on reasonably well (“She didn’t look too bored with what I had to say”). Skinner, however, is a master of microanalysis, and beautifully describes his agony as she pauses to take a call on her mobile (“Peeling the label off, spinning the ashtray”), making the seconds stretch out into years, pretending to watch the football on the TV.

Genteel poverty? Well, just poverty, brilliantly encapsulated on “Not Addicted” where Skinner watches some more football on his TV and places a bet in his head (“I couldn’t be bothered to drag myself to the shop”) on the outcome, even though “I don’t know the first thing about football.” He fantasises mournfully about how much he would have won if he’d bet on the game in reality, but as the game progresses in a different way (“The last passer passed the last pass”) he wipes his brow in relief that he didn’t bother. He concludes philosophically that “I need to rethink the techniques of my betting shit…Instead of betting on to win the football/I’ll bet to lose the cricket.”

Musically the garage elements have been subtle, though the overlay may in extremis remind some listeners of Madness stranded in a lift with the Tricky of Pre-Millenium Tension (whatever else this is, this is also fundamentally a pop record). However, one of the album’s many great setpieces now comes with “Blinded By The Light,” a considerably bleaker sequel to “Weak Become Heroes” – here, the weak just become weaker. Rarely has the act of going to a club been described so joylessly in song – “The lights are blinding my eyes/People pushing by,” says Skinner as he forlornly tries to contact his girlfriend Simone and best mate Dan on his mobile (“Where have they gone?”). The music brilliantly yanks together acid house’s stentorian bleep with the more restless (not quite grime) beats as Skinner feels never lonelier (“Brandy or beer? Water’s a good idea…No one looks like mingling”). He then takes a pill (“Oh, that’s proper rain/It tastes like hairspray”) and then, perhaps inadvisably, another one (“Belly’s tingling a bit”). Nonetheless, he becomes progressively more out of it and retreats into his particular kind of damaged bliss. Stoned, he thinks he sees Simone and Dan kissing elsewhere in the club, but by now, he purrs with a terrible blank smirk, “Now I’m fucked and I don’t care.”

From this abyss (or the edge of one) we cut swiftly to a picture of domestic bliss in “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way.” Over a vocal backing which may represent the invention of garage doo-wop, Skinner intones “I sit on the sofa at my girl’s” smoking reefers and watching “her TV” as the back of his TV is now broken (and this is of absolutely central relevance to the album’s plot as a whole) “’cos basically I love her.” Although his mind is ceaselessly tempted by the prospect of going out with his mates, he concludes (for now) that: “I love sitting on the sofa with my girl for real…I don’t want to knock my mates, but there it’s the same old drill.” Then he changes his mind, rapidly and rather brutally, but only momentarily – “There’s a whole world out there, but I don’t give a…you know what I mean.” Will this last? The soul vocalising fadeout is absolutely priceless as the singer sweetly croons, Mayfield-style: “I’ve got one packet of Rizla over there/But it’s nearly run out/I’ve got bits of cigarettes all over the place/The clipper needs a shake/The ashtray needs emptying/But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

It isn’t that simple, though. “Get Out Of My House” is a duet with Nottingham-based female rapper C-Mone which, though not up to the Cubist level of Dizzee’s “I Luv U,” transmits the impression of an EastEnders argument soundtracked by next door’s eski mix CD-R. “Go, get out of my house, please,” commands the good Lady, “And actually give me back my keys/But I’ll be proper angry if you/Don’t come back later on your knees,” while all the time Skinner is muttering his protests in the background. He pleads with her (“please, please, PLEASE”) not to be like this; he had to go and pick up pills for his “epilepsy,” and much, much worse, “I haven’t ‘phoned that bloke from the TV company” to fix the abovementioned broken TV. Eventually, however – and again sounding gradually more and more lubricated – Skinner turns the tables and snarls “I’ll get out of your house, THEN…but I’ll still be seething when you text me to make up and be friends.” His mind then goes to pot as he turns from his girl to the listener, woozily wagging his finger: “It’s bad enough remembering my opinions without remembering my reasons for them,” before issuing taunts to his Other: “And that thing about femme fatale…well and she’s fit…she’s FITTER THAN YOU ANYWAY – I like her, I’m never gonna meet her…” (and thereby linking this song to the next) before the song dissolves in muttered neurosis mirrored by the crazily paved, stoned synth behind him (“Fucking TV company”). Finally he slags off the synth – “You can turn THAT off.”

And turn on the guitar – a Chinn and Chapman guitar at that, accompanied by Joe Meek whooshes – for the record’s logistic centrepiece (and also its first single) “Fit But You Know It.” Here is Skinner’s moment of, shall we say, Madness (or should that be Splodgenessabounds?) where he abandons his spliff/sofa life jacket and ends up, sozzled (“So I reckon you’re about an 8 or a 9/Maybe even 9½ in four beer’s time”), in the queue at McDonalds, fancying the woman with a sizeable degree of chronicity, but thinking himself above the level of her attraction/attractiveness – “You’re fit/But my gosh don’t you KNOW it!” (the second line uttered as a disgusted/envious snarl). A “white-shirted guy” behind him in the queue is similarly eyeing the lady up, and ends up walking away with her as Skinner again descends towards new depths of blottohood – from “wondering what the shrapnel in my back packet could afford” to abject wretchedness (“Don’t touch me!” he yells repeatedly in the breakdown halfway through, sounding surprisingly like Chris Evans), ending up intoning “Yeah, yeah, oyeh” (and when was the last time that a town crier’s meme troubled the world of pop?) and a swooningly ecstatic sign-off of “I think I’m going to fall over.” The track, as someone says, rocks (and that’s Skinner himself thrashing away on guitar).

But then, the reckoning: in “Such a Twat” he reveals that, hot on the heels of said white-shirted man, he too has had his way/it off with the “fit” girl – “in McDonald’s car park” – and already is regretting it, with his chorus of “Why did I have to go and do a stu-pid-thing-like-that?” (deliberate vocal emphasis on the beat, mechanically, throughout the record, like a neutered Terry Hall, if such a thing is conceivable). In contrast to “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way,” Skinner now guiltily asserts that he felt that “I didn’t want to waste my youth in a girl’s house to the sound of spliffs.” He tries to ring her up, but fate decrees against it – “Oh, fucking ‘PHONES, MAN!…I have to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen or it cuts out.” Meanwhile, errant memories continue to stream out of his consciousness: “And that incident with the ice cream – I forgot, it all ended up in our vodka.”

Here is where the mood switches to melodrama and the music becomes noticeably darker in character. The menacing, RZA-ish “What Is He Thinking” is a brilliant exposition of claustrophobic living room paranoia – Aston and Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker, agonising about whether to visit Sidcup. Skinner has discovered his CP coat “draped over the edge of that dusty chair” in the living room of his mate Scott. Neither is saying anything to the other; Scott sits there watching TV – “I wish I could read what his eyes are saying/Staring straight and not blinking” says Skinner. The piece then turns into a dialogue, or rather a pair of parallel internal monologues; Scott knows that the coat had been borrowed from Simone’s house and taken to his house by another man, but doesn’t know how to break the news to him. Skinner also thinks, as the coat was nicked, so were his savings, but Scott knows nothing of the latter. Finally, Scott can stand it no further and turns round to tell Skinner that “the person who brought the coat round was…Dan.” Cue Hammer horror chords as the penultimate nail is hammered into Skinner’s coffin.

The acoustic orchestral ballad “Dry Your Eyes,” which if released as a single might give the Streets their first number one, is a lacerating piece of work. Here a stunned Skinner confronts Simone, knowing that he is as much to blame for the collapse of the relationship, if not more, than her, but unable to persuade her to take him back. Then the chorus, sung (I think) by Skinner - “Dry your eyes, mate/I know it’s hard to take/But her mind has been made up” – in the style of Bernard Sumner. It’s possibly the greatest use of the word “mate” in pop.

Frantically Skinner tries to rewind their lives back: “I can’t imagine my life without you and me,” he implores, “It wasn’t supposed to be easy (linking back to the opening song),” and then, again, the triple “please,” now genuine.

The beat stops and the strings play a Barber-esque adagio. Skinner has never sounded more alone, more wrecked, than on this passage – no rapping, no stance, so close to the microphone he is almost inside you: “And I’m just standing there. I can’t say a word. ‘Cos everything’s just gone. I’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.” This is a level of despair to which he has not previously brought us, not even in 2002’s “Stay Positive.” He continues to try to change her mind (“Trying to pull her close out of bare desperation/…Look into her eyes to make her listen again”), becomes frustrated (“I’m not gonna fuckin’ just fuckin’ leave it all now!…You’re well out of order now”), all to no avail. Like “Stay Positive,” the song ends on a locked groove. Remember how Sinatra finally loses his cool on No One Cares, on its final track “None But The Lonely Heart,” and how the final blank line “…can know my sadness” seems to be emanating from a man already dead, Werther concluding his own wretched life…well, this performance almost approaches it.

And catharsis is still to come in the album’s astonishing eight-minute coda “Empty Cans.” The song itself divides into two; or, more precisely, we are given two variations on the same song. As with the film Sliding Doors, these represent two possible paths down which the protagonist’s life could go.

Version one is the negative version, where Skinner rejects the world and turns absolutely and finally in on himself. Beginning with the album’s most brutal beats, Skinner snarls through his teeth, King Lear in the bunker: “If I want to sit in and drink Super Tennents in the day I will - no one’s gonna fucking tell me jack…But can you rely on anyone in this world? No you can’t. It’s not my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans…It’s fucked up that a man’s life can just be attacked…Watching This Morning with a beer is much better than relying on those cunts for mates I was given.”

Scott rings, offering to fix the TV for him, but Skinner shouts at him to fuck off. He then rings a TV repairman from the Yellow Pages who turns up, takes the TV away and returns the next day, trying to con Skinner into paying more money than the problem was worth. An argument ensues, they fight, Skinner’s head is slammed into the edge of his fridge and the TV repairman beats a retreat. Skinner might as well be dying as he spits out: “No one gives a shit about Mike. That’s why I’m acting nasty. You know what you can do with your life…introduce it up your jacksey!”

“Everyone’s a cunt in this life. No one’s there for me.”

He dies.

The music stops.

The music rewinds.

The song begins again. But now: “it’s all my fault that there’s wall-to-wall empty cans.” And this time, when Scott rings, extremely apologetic, Skinner is still angry but willing to forgive, so he allows Scott to come round and have a go at fixing his TV.

As Scott comes round the music suddenly turns into a major key – like a new sun rising on his life. They both roll their sleeves up and have a go at unscrewing the back of the TV, and then they find what has caused the blockage – Skinner’s grand of savings, which Scott pulls triumphantly from the back of the set, having previously fallen down there.

Skinner, now ecstatic, decides to invite some mates around; he gets on particularly well with a girl called Alison. At the end of the song, he turns round to face the screen, to face us, and delivers, not an epitaph, but a moral: “No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garrison/No one except yourself, that is.”

And then a haiku to close the story, a moral curiously in agreement with that offered by Gilbert O’Sullivan on “We Will”:

“The end of something I did not want to end
Beginning of hard times to come
But something that was not meant to be is done
And this is the start of what was.”

Thus A Grand Don’t Come For Free by the Streets, a record which goes beyond grime because it sees the light trying to shine through behind the grime, which strides out of the garage and re-engages itself, and us, with the world. It is an absolutely and completely sui generis work of genius, an essential listen for anyone interested in where music might take them. It is brilliant.

GILBERT O’SULLIVAN: THEN MIXTURE OF MACMANN AND AGONY AS LONG AS POSSIBLE

I would like to think that if Samuel Beckett had invented a pop star, it would have been Gilbert O’Sullivan. The awkward bugger, secure in his insecurity; where exactly does one put him? If Lucky had been a pop star, it might have been Gilbert O’Sullivan (except that when Lucky did become a pop star, he turned out to be Bez).

“Gilbert,” out of Saturday matinees in Waterford and comic strips in Swindon, a character who dressed himself up as a schoolboy-turned-hobo because it was much less fuss than growing his hair, then eventually Gilbert grew his hair and it has stayed grown ever since; like his vague doppleganger Leo Sayer, he will go down fighting before he’ll get rid of that afro, because it’s so much less fuss than fitting into those cap and shorts, at his age.

(“At my age? Who said it was about me?”)

It was the look which cried out its deliberate isolationism in the dying weeks of 1970, when “Nothing Rhymed” politely knocked on the door of the Top 10. “So in the late ‘60s,” says the unattributed sleevenote to his semi-smashing new Top 20 compilation album The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan (could he have written about himself in the third person? And who says that “Gilbert O’Sullivan” is the same as the Raymond O’Sullivan who created him?), “while Elton John was playing in bands, doing sessions, and David Bowie imitating Anthony Newley, he [Gilbert] was, like him or loathe him, the most original recording artist to emerge in Britain.”

Not that you would have known that from 1969’s “Mr Moody’s Garden,” a forgotten Columbia single which is attached, almost apologetically, to the album proper. A post-psych fantasy whimsy which in all probability was dated even by 1969 standards; yet that sublime major-to-minor chord change which concludes every other verse almost makes you forget the cod-Northern accent which briefly makes him sound like Danny Ross (Jimmy Clitheroe’s straight man).

But “Nothing Rhymed” has lately been sung on stage by Morrissey, and as I have previously said apropos “Alone Again (Naturally),” Gilbert O’Sullivan is the missing link between, if not Nick Drake, then certainly Bill Fay and Morrissey; the almost suicidal eagerness still to please his mother (figure – go figure), sipping his “Bonaparte shandy” while observing “people starving to death in front of me” on his TV. Yet the song is not a denial of life – “nothing stillborn or lost.” It’s a metaphorical scratching of the head, just to make sure that he’s living for something, even if not entirely sure why.

Then we remember that “Alone Again (Naturally)” may have been part of an imaginary trilogy; the other two parts being the jaunty “Matrimony” (incredibly never a single in the UK) with its subtext of poverty and desperation (“I don’t want to rush your love, but have you seen the time?”) and its ironic fade (“’Til death do them part…Olé”) and the doubt evident on the part of the Other in “Out Of The Question.” Hope, doubt and finally despair.

From despair to where? Consider that this was a man whose two biggest UK hit singles – both number ones – were, respectively, a song sung to his manager's infant niece whom he was babysitting (“Clair”) and a song sung to his recalcitrant dog (“Get Down”). Coupled with his naming Spike Milligan as his main lyrical influence, the irredeemably silly “Ooh Wakka Doo Wakka Day” and the very title of this compilation, punters have been (mis)led into thinking that, well, here’s Richard Stilgoe in a Hovis cap, here’s Victoria Wood’s funny uncle, here is someone not to be taken seriously. Which might be exactly how he wants it. How are we to guess?

But “Clair” and “Get Down” are both terrific pop songs; “Clair” is a very touching lullaby which doubtless would be misinterpreted by overzealous, underemployed minds, and therefore inadmissible, these days, but whose fault is that? Not Gilbert’s – “Alone Again (Naturally)” might be the last popular song to use the adjective “gay” in its original meaning. Couldn’t get away with that now. Note the lovely harmonica which rides side saddle with the melody – a discreet nod to Bacharach. And “Get Down” is a surprisingly funky clavinet-driven workout which, had it been produced by Ben Folds or Glenn Alexander, or for that matter Randy Newman, or for what matters Warren Zevon, would long ago have been hailed as a deathless classic, as well as an absolute model in How To Write A Number One; the four ascending bass notes which lead us ecstatically back from the middle eight into the verse/chorus, and let’s not forget the vital key change at the end.

“Get Down” is also one of surprisingly few songs on this collection which peer in the general direction of carnality. 1971’s “Underneath The Blanket Go” is not to be found on the CD, and 1973’s “Ooh Baby” is represented only in the form of a rather pallid 2002 Ibiza dance remix. The overall tenor of the album, then, remains sardonically downwards, even in such apparently jolly offerings as “No Matter How I Try” with O’Sullivan’s pleas to be released from an Other to whom he does not feel worthy (“Is there a tower somewhere that could use me as a spare? (not, I think, the same “tower” off which the progenitor of “Alone Again (Naturally)” dreams of throwing himself)/Is there a bank in town that could cash me for a pound?”) as well as more obviously bleak obituaries such as “Why Oh Why Oh Why,” a meditation on the slow death of sex in a relationship which comes across as a redbrick “Caroline No” (feel O’Sullivan’s desperation as he howls “Why in the name of GOD?!” in the final verse, as well as the climactic “It seems you’re only happy when I’m upset,” which he might be singing to his audience of the time). And yet feel the simple happiness (and the less simple undertow of desperation; two people clinging together on a raft in the middle of a 20th century cultural storm) in the song’s sequel “Happiness Is Me And You,” as in we’ll both go down together as the world around us goes mad, a subject to which O’Sullivan would subsequently return, considerably more bitterly.

But before that, there’s a desolate pearl of a song from 1978, “Miss My Love Today,” with its singer’s admitted preference to “sit in morbid company” until “you” return; a song where all the wordplay is suddenly stripped away to reveal a core of agonised grief. One is left in no doubt that she is never going to, can never, come back. A prayer for the dying worthy to rank alongside Roy Wood’s “The Rain Came Down On Everything;” a catechism almost worthy of being sung amidst the disused paper mills of Chapelizod.

Thereafter he was kept out of the recording studio by a long legal battle over owed royalties and eventually retreated to Jersey (though returning to court in America in the early ‘90s to sue over Biz Markie’s sampling of “Alone Again (Naturally)”; on both occasions he won). Unsurprisingly, in his later work he sounds slightly weary and decidedly more crotchety. Apart from the extraordinary Broadway fantasia of “Can’t Think Straight” where he duets on the other end of a ‘phone with Peggy Lee - alas, by 1992 the great lady was ill and past her best, and this turned out to be her last recording, but a bizarre Sondheim-esque thing it remains – we are treated to long bouts of moaning, about critics and ripoff managers (“So What”), about the state of the world (“Doesn’t It Make You Sick (Mortar & Brick)” whose complaints about “governments” and “have-nots” are somewhat rich coming from a resident of the tax haven that is Jersey) and, worse, about contemporary mores – “Two’s Company (Three Is Allowed)” and “What’s It All Supposed To Mean,” the latter song marrying a George Shearing-style cocktail backing track with a dubious equation which puts child murders on the same level of degeneracy as not being allowed to give your kid a clip round the ear, sound like Daily Telegraph editorials set to mid-‘80s late-night ITV theme tunes.

Yet his early work will endure, and I have purposely left until last his greatest song – 1971’s “We Will.” A song which reminisces, remonstrates and reassures, which blends selective memory of a warm past with the realisation of a limited future. Tripartite in structure, just like “Alone Again (Naturally),” it begins, firstly with an unearthly dying guitar signature, with acknowledgement of mortality (“It’s over now”) leading to acknowledgement of the morning of the progenitor’s childhood, coupled with the quiet desperation of his parents (“Turn the landing light/Off…No! Wait!/Leave it on/It might make the night/That much easier to be gone” – note the proto-Morrissey overlapping of scansions with barlines, songs as stream-of-consciousness dialogues) - “in the morning, who’ll be wide awake/And eating snowflakes…oh, as opposed to those flakes?/We will.” Then the afternoon of adolescence – the unspoken joy blended with grief of Uncle Frank and Auntie May when he comes to visit them – the grief evident in the “up to four letters” he subsequently receives from them which “all repeat the same…they say THRILLED TO BITS! CAN’T BELIEVE YOU CAME! WE RELIVED IT BOTH OVER TIME AND TIME AGAIN!” - the subtext being that they know full well that he’s unlikely ever to come their way again.

Then, Proust jousts with Derrida in the song’s core: “It’s not easy pretending that you cannot hear once you’ve suffered the affliction within. For it’s no use in an ending to proclaim from the start that the moral of the story is to begin.”

Finally, the early evening of middle age – “I bagsy being in goal…It’s just that, well, at my age, I think that standing still (O’Sullivan gives an immaculately wearily descending triple sigh…”Woah, woah, woah”…at this point) would really suit me best/Hands up those who agree/Hands up those who don’t…I see…” - the subtext here being, don’t stand still, else you will die.

In each verse the music is choreographed to reflect the rising hopes of youth and the inevitable subsequent disappointment of maturity – the string crescendo which rises but never quite arrives, always returning resignedly down to earth before the miracle can happen. Again, you cannot be God, but you can be human, says this strange link between George Formby and Eminem, this Gilbert O’Sullivan, this extraordinary berry whom you are careful about tasting, lest its inviting juices turn out to be poisons which will pass you.

“…speak of the silence before going into it…”
(Beckett, The Unnamable)

MALCOLM McLAREN’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE FUTURE!

Kids! Witness and wonder as the Pioneer of Punk, the Prince of Piracy, enchants us with more of his amazing new inventions which will Change Your World!!

Hey! What have you got for us this week, “Talcy Malcy”?

BASTARD POP
Trust me, this is gonna be the biggest revolution in pop since I stumbled across Grandmaster Flash scratching at his decks way back in 1988. This is GOING BACK TO THE ROOTS OF MUSIC! I’ve been reeling ever since I first came across this electrifying music back in August 2003! Imagine!! You play the instrumental track of one record and then you PLAY THE VOCALS FROM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT RECORD OVER THE TOP! My God, why hasn’t anyone in the decadent, Thatcherite West discovered this REVOLUTION IN MUSIC yet? This is putting music back in the hands of the kids where it belongs! Imagine!! You could have Mick Jagger singing with the Jimi Hendrix Experience! Or John Lennon singing with the Stones! This smashes up all that arcane Thatcherite copyright nonsense, just like Vivienne and I did back in 1971, except you weren’t looking AND WHOSE FAULT IS THAT? I’m putting out an album of this, except I spoke to Tom Silverman at Tommy Boyd Records and we couldn’t get copyright clearance on any of the tracks EVEN THOUGH WE ASKED POLITELY so I’ve had to abandon the idea, but nonetheless it’s REVOLUTION time!

What do you mean, Kylie sang over the top of “Blue Monday” at the Brits two years ago? Well that’s just typical isn’t it – imperialist Thatcherite capitalists ripping off THE KIDS’ culture just like they did with Elvis and Arthur “Old Mother Riley” Lord Lucan back in 1958. I mean, Kylie, Gawd bless the lovely little minx, but she’s just a pawn, a puppet of Pete Waterman, isn’t she? I mean, she’s just more bland bread for the British, just like Lisa Stansfield and Clodagh Rodgers and all the other squeaky-clean girls that kids have to put up with these days. You know? We have to RECLAIM Bastard Pop for THE STREETS! Who? Richard X? Fuck is that Richard Strange out of the Doctors of Fucking Madness trying to rip me off again like he did with the Pistols, third spot on the Nashville in September 1975? I’m going to have to have a word with the ungrateful cunt.

CHIP MUSIC
The idea, right, is this vanload of dodgy old video arcade machines came my way DON’T ASK QUESTIONS RIGHT? and they were making the weirdest psychedelic noises. So what I’ve done is jumbled these noises up and put a BEAT underneath them. Clever eh? Anyone could do it. It’s the biggest liberation of music since Iggy Pop started cutting himself up onstage at the Rainbow in 1982. You saw that and you KNEW that punk was gonna happen. So this, right, is going to upturn the smug wheelbarrow of the Thatcherite music industry upside down! They won’t know what’s hit them!

What do you mean, “Pac Jam” by the Jonzun Crew was done 20 years ago? Look, I’ve got a LIFE, I was busy at the time suing Annabella Lwin for sacking me. I mean, just because she’s a darling girl, that doesn’t mean she can sing for toffee. That’s not why I signed her up, and if she’s too stupid to realise that she can go f….anyway, who the fuck are the Jonzun Crew? Is that, like, Johnny Jonzun and the Bandwagon, that lot who did “Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache”? More of that bland shit that kids have to put up with these days, like Nik Kershaw and the Rubettes. I mean, Mud just aren’t sexy, are they? The 21st century kids deserve better!

REALITY TV
This is really going to upturn the smug wheelbarrow of the dead-from-the-neck-down fascist Thatcherite television media industry media. You know all that bland crap that kids have to put up with on TV these days, like Dixon Of Dock Green and On The Buses; well, instead of all these bland, dead-from-the-neck-up, scripted, rehearsed, bland programmes, I’m going to throw the rulebook out of the window. What about if you just put ordinary people, kids from the street like you and me, on the telly, without a script? Say put ten of them together in this house and see how they get on, and then they’ll kill each other and that will be THE BLOOD OF CAPITALISTS. No script, no blandness, no nothing except ORDINARY KIDS SAYING AND DOING WHAT THEY LIKE. Is that the spirit of Zulu punk or what, as I asked dear Trevor Horn back in 1981, bless him, I had to get him away from producing the Dooleys. Anyway, this is going to take Thatcherite fascist TV into the 21st century with a VENGEANCE!

What do you mean, “Big Brother”? Typical of the capitalist Nazi Thatcherite industry media media to rip off ideas that come from THE STREETS. And how typical they should name it after one of their own – ah, if Orwell were dead today he’d have something to say about how his vision has been abused. Like I said to my old punky mucker Tariq Ali in Grosvenor Square back in May ’68, all television at the end of the day is Big Brother.

OK, then, but instead of some crappy, bland, Thatcherite student house, what about we pick ten people and send them to the jungle? Then they’d have to fend for themselves or get gobbled up by tigers and crocodiles. Maybe they should send dear old Johnny Lydon – a lovely bloke, Gawd bless him, but the problem was he couldn’t sing for toffee. I mean, what’s he done since the Pistols, eh? What metal box? You want to get in my safe or something, you thieving bastard? Fuck off back to the scummy council estate you came from…what? WHAT?

NEW POP
The idea, right, is I get these lovely 14-year-old girls to come and sing my Situationist slogan lyrics and that’s putting REVOLUTION in the minds of THE KIDS and there will be BLOOD ON THE STREETS when those fascist Thatcherite Nazis at the major record companies, none of whom even had the courtesy to send a standard rejection letter after I took so much trouble to send them, unsolicited, my wondrous, extensive and fabulous CV, realise what’s hit them. Their smug wheelbarrow will be turned upside down, you wait and see.

What do you mean, I did this with Bow Wow Wow nearly quarter of a century ago? That’s typical lazy Thatcherite journalism. You’re probably on the fascist capitalist side of the lazy Nazi major record companies. You’re content with the bland shit they impose on kids these days, like Haircut 100 and Donald Peers, music whose subversive purpose is to KEEP THE MASSES DOCILE SO THEY WILL NEVER REVOLT. Why you should have seen me delivering my elaborately rehearsed and choreographed nine-hour pitch to Stevie Spielberg for this epic film I have planned about KIDS who overthrow the Nazi major record companies with SAMPLED SOUNDS FROM PIRATED EARLY ‘80s VIDEO GAMES before shooting them. It’s Charles Maturin meets Alexander Baron. Not forgetting darling Oscar Wilde…I mean, bless him but he couldn’t sing for toffee. Anyway I had only got some 30 seconds into my epic pitch before Spielberg made his decision. How quick was that, and consequently how charismatic was I? He even asked his two large bodyguards to lead me away from his office quickly in order to allow him time to think about how best to translate my visions into cinematic reality. That was back in 1991. I’m sure he’ll get in touch soon…he’s a busy man, you know. But underneath his “Jaws” he’s really ONE OF US.

Be sure to keep an eye out for more fantastic inventions emanating from the unfathomable mind of Malcolm McLaren and his Wonderful World of the Future!!

Next week: “I warned my old mucky punker Robin Scott when he did that song Pop Muzik that he’d never have a hit with a dodgy lyric like ‘Let’s do the milkshake, it’s selling like a hotcake.’ I tell you what, I’ll bet my house, life savings and all my worldly possessions that NO ONE will EVER have a hit with a song called ‘Milkshake’!"

TALKIE WALKIE BY AIR

On Friday 17 October 2003 I did something for the last time. I did not plan that this would be the last time, but only now do I realise, with foresight and changes in personal and emotional circumstances, that I am indeed unlikely ever to do it again.

(On Friday 6 February 2004 I did something else for the last time, but that is neither here nor there in the context of this piece)

It was a moderately breezy but otherwise extremely pleasant late summer/early autumn day and so I decided to pay a visit to Oxford, the first time I had done so in nine months. On the way in the curiously nostalgic anaesthetic haze of the Oxford Tube coach in the sunshine I read Raymond Carver’s “Tell The Women We’re Going,” a story about a dissatisfied married man who takes his best friend out for a drive, tries to pick up two female hitchhikers and ends up killing them. The emptiness of the Stokenchurch-to-Lewknor corridor emphasised the terrible vacuum in the middle of the story.

But there were no living people waiting for me in Oxford. Should I have expected there to be? The city seemed as strange and alien to me as Greenland. I could not establish any emotional connection with its streets. I scanned the Oxford Times and might as well have been reading Sanskrit.

I headed back to Headington in the early afternoon sunshine, towards the only remaining link between me and this place, towards Headington Cemetery. Headington itself seemed as cold, empty and remote as Tromso. I walked through the Old High Street, past Bury Knowle Park, left at St Andrew’s Road and past Ruskin College to begin the descent of Dunstan Road; it was as if I had detached myself from my body, was walking mechanically but had no real idea where I was or why I was there.

At the cemetery a funeral was in progress. Suits milled about in a melancholy, best-not-to-say-anything kind of way. What could one say? Best to say nothing. Best to keep to my corner of the cemetery in which I now know I will never be buried.

I stood and listened as I always did. But this time was different. This time I could not discern her voice, could not feel that she was speaking to me, nor even that she was there. She wasn’t, of course…if it is possible to sense, or even to see, a spirit flee from the body of a human being I saw it that night in Ronald Macbeth Ward. I saw her make her getaway. She is no longer here. Not in Oxford. Her spirit circles, dissolute but still coherent, in other places, in others’ words and hearts.

I returned to the Oxford Tube stop in London Road with a heavy heart. A middle-aged couple were standing there and asked if I was all right. I nodded meek assent and was hugely grateful when the near-empty coach materialised and hauled me back to London – back to what at the time was at least a facsimile of life.

I don’t expect anyone to respond to Talkie Walkie as I have done – that is, music made by and for the bereaved, disenfranchised and dislocated – but that is how I respond to it. “Venus” with its opening which sounds like a briefly resuscitated Tears For Fears, but instead of bullish ‘80s vocal bellows we get French fragility. The way the music bends as if to cry when they sing “We would be together/Lovers forever…Care for each other.” “Cherry Blossom Girl” with its disconsolate flute and additional female vocals (Jessica Banks) singing – well how would you take it? “I don’t want to be shy, can’t stand it any more…I feel sick all day long from not being with you/Tell me why can’t it be true/I never talked to you, people say that I should/Will you run away if I try to be true?” This isn’t just the subject of Joe Elliott’s photograph, this is a sick pining for something or someone who can never return, even if, by the song’s end, life is embraced as the preferred option – “There is no time to waste, we’d better take the chance.”

And that acoustic guitar with the distantly high string synthesiser which I remember from Moon Safari, from the A40, Savoy Circus, in January 1998; it returns.

And I recall a dislocated spring Monday morning in 2000, stumbling confused through Abingdon town centre, buying The Virgin Suicides soundtrack (together with the pastoral murderers on the sleeve of the Eels’ Daisies of the Galaxy) and getting that most searing of soft death sentence songs “Playground Love” with its funereal drums, mournful tenor sax and Jonathan-King-under-haloperidol vocals by Gordon Tracks.

The way in which “Run” slowly but gorgeously blossoms out into the “I’m Not In Love” chorale (“Don’t wake up/I feel strange when you go”). The accidental tourist of “Universal Traveler” – rarely has central London looked deader than under the dead eyes of William Hurt (“I know so many places in the world/I follow the sun in my silver plane/I met so may people in my life/Tomorrow is a brnad new day, let’s go somewhere else”), always fatally underlined by the unfathomable sadness of the refrain “So far away” (those warping synth lines bending like a 95-year-old pallbearer).

The way in which the instrumental “Mike Mills” again conquers its sadness by slowly adding factors; the acoustic guitar/synth interwine, then the Nyman-ish piano, and finally the strings of Michel Colombier.

The cold dead drained voice of Lisa Papineau as she blankly intones “You’ll never see me again” at the end of “Surfing On A Rocket” – note how the imagery from “Universal Traveler” is modified and now turned against the world (“Time for flying rockets/For silver jets/For surfing bones”).

The discreet desolation of “Another Day” – what McCartney only hinted at in his song of the same name (“and she finds it hard to stay alive”) – “Say Goodbye/Sunshine/Daylight/’Cause it’s just another day/You will lose it anyway…You you’re lost/In space/In time.” Oxford, 17 October 2003.

(“Another day begins for you/You do not want it” – Paul Haines, unsung lyrics from the closing “…And It’s Again” section of Escalator Over The Hill)

But we have to keep up appearances – “Alpha Beta Gaga,” the instrumental punctured by its jolly whistling and incongruous banjo (as incongruous as it was on the theme to Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy)…but the pace is sluggish and reluctant; it’s like we are forced into being happy – “Jeux Sans Frontieres” for a century that doesn’t want or need it.

And, almost finally, “Biological,” where we realise what we’ve suspected all along – this is the ghost of Kraftwerk. The same divinely, disconsolately descending minor chords, the vague cynicism borne out of love which inspires lines such as “Thousands of hairs, two eyes, only it’s you/Genetic love…I’d like to know why all these things move me…A part of me would like to travel in your veins…Your blood is red, it’s beautiful…Let’s fuse our cells to be as one tonight…I need your DNA.”

(“And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time” – “Wichita Lineman”)

(“The large mass of humanity is deeply enmeshed in these separative and assertive tendencies, and one who looks on at this spectacle is bound to feel the blackest despair. It is true that the readily observable forces of lust, hate and greed cause incalculable suffering, but even in the most passionately disruptive forces there is some form of redemptive love. Buried in the muck of human misery are seed pearls of the greatest perfection, and these precious gems of individual action and feeling are not lost, but require only threading on the strong cord of spiritual knowledge” – Meher Baba, Origins and Effects of War)

The epilogue/epitaph “Alone In Kyoto.” But wandering the temples will not give you the answer you need (as opposed to the answer you might want). He/she won’t necessarily be there. The only way to find her spirit is to get back on the bus to London and feel that spirit, palpable, smiling and waiting for you in an obscure corner of Hampstead.

Talkie Walkie talked to me again in January, a time when I needed many, many words, and none was forthcoming from Oxford - it was made silently but abundantly clear to me that those remaining threads had been cut, and not by me. It talked to me in the farthest recesses of Golden Gate Park, in the outpatient clinic waiting room, and it whispered: allow us to mourn but let us finally live.

(Dedicated to Mark E Hester and to the memory of his father)

CAPITALISM - IN TUNE WITH NOTHING

I looked up that Farren piece, not just because statistics never, ever tell the whole (hi)story, not simply because things seem to be heading that way again, but after watching this strangely unsatisfying programme on BBC2 last night. The analogy – that the protected ended up the prisoners (the film was shot on location at the “gated community” in Bow Quarter) – was over-obvious and any attempts at drama were constantly stifled by dreary “real” heads talking. Guiltily of course I was excitedly contemplating climactic carnage, with recruitment consultants and PR executives being gleefully thrown in flames through their bay windows (preferably with the windows shut – now “Ground Zero” would have been a killer soundtrack for that kind of scenario); and then I thought about George Michael, about how his main reason for wanting to become rich and famous was so that he could shut himself away from the world entirely and therefore not have to deal with idiots sneering at speccy fatso Yiorgos on the bus home to Bushey Heath. It’s a psychological condition which is enthusiastically recommended to us by capitalists – because if we’re going to be indoors all the time, we’ll spend much more money on DVDs!

“From the superstars with champagne and coke parties all the way down to your humble servant spending more time with his friends, his writing and his cat than he does cruising the street, all are cut off” (Farren).

Certainly, the apparition of crime will always have more influence on a gullible population than the reality, which compared to past times when things were REALLY rotten is actually rather sedate and manageable (even if the odd drop of blood is spilt outside one’s own workplace at knocking off time). But it is the desire of any Government that people should remain indoors, entertained, isolated – for what trouble would any budding Wat Tylers stir up were they to DO THINGS TOGETHER? – so it’s helpful to gate people away, turn middle managers into day-release convicts, because it reassures the lazy minds of the latter that they can be “safe,” and are moreover capable of postponing their own deaths. And it leaves the inconvenient proles forever outside, content to slave, slaver and starve.

Because society doesn’t want us to forget that public servants are first and foremost SERVANTS, tithed to OUR TAXES, living off OUR MONEY, and God bless these angels but dammit they should know their place – below our stairs – and KEEP it. Woe betide any firefighters politely requesting a wage high enough to be able to house, feed and clothe their families – such selfish DECADENCE is worthy of the sleazy Sixties! The logical conclusion is for all nurses, firefighters, teachers and junior doctors to be compulsorily rehoused in special tent cities – with tent fabric specially refashioned from prime Primark linen – in Silvertown, or on Hackney Marshes, be paid nothing, have their passports confiscated; better still, chain them to their workplaces with indwelling catheters, and then we genuine hard-working pulled-up-by-own-bootstraps citizens of this country can get some blessed fucking peace from their ceaseless whining!

Then this came on, and I was reminded again of the people whom this system is really built to protect and honour. And yet I can feel no contempt for Alan Clark; thrown into a job at which he was demonstrably useless for want of finding anything better for him to do, he makes the best of it and carries on decaying elegantly, the real horror of WWI, transfigured into the shadow of his imminent death, always nipping at his heels. John Hurt catches his essence brilliantly; the exquisite systematic narrowing of brow and upper lip to conceal the reddest of noses as he is handed his first bulging in-tray as Minister for Employment, and the immediate awareness of his hiding heart on the part of his Private Secretary, the latter part beautifully played by Julia Davis, who really is just about the best comedy talent around at the moment – those implicitly challenging eyes, the solidly expressionless pursing of the lips. We cannot bring it upon ourselves to condemn Clark for we recognise his fearless incompetence as being too much of a mirror to what we ourselves do in an effort to work, so that we might have the possibility of life.

AN UNEXPECTED NEW MEME?

In the February 2004 issue of Uncut (published in December 2003), I commented favourably on the “Neptunes-on-a-Lambeth-Council budget” production on Ty’s Upwards album. I see that in this week’s Time Out, John Lewis comments unfavourably on the “Timbaland-on-a-Lambeth-Council budget” production of the new Blade album. Flattering to know that my writing has, er, inspired others (well, strictly speaking that piece is IPC copyright, so I’ll leave it to them to issue the solicitors’ letters), but isn’t Blade based in New Cross (if the sleeve of The Lion Goes From Strength To Strength is anything to go by, though admittedly that latter album is now eleven years old) and therefore shouldn’t the relevant comparison be “Timbaland-on-a-Lewisham-Council budget”?

A WORLD AWAY FROM MUSIC

It’s clear that music tends to be at its most vital in periods of transition when The Industry has been shaken into flux and isn’t quite sure how to deal with what’s happening because The Rules have not yet been set. And because no Rules are set, musicians generally feel freer to explore and work with people from other areas of music as there are no bean counters watching. Therefore music was in a glorious mess between, say, 1968-71 and again between 1978-82. Rather as with Hollywood post-Easy Rider, The Industry didn’t have a clue how to deal with this new music, so musicians were happy to throw everything at the wall as they knew that the record companies would trust them – at least, until the Dun and Bradstreet reports came in.

World Music, therefore, is a rather unhappy tributary of post-punk insofar as it ended up a legitimisation of that particularly peculiar strain of post-punk mischief which began with the likes of the Pop Group and the Slits getting up on stage, singing, screaming, hitting and blowing anything that came to mind/hand, and getting bottled off by Real Punks who wanted Sham 69 binaurally for the next 50 years, and its consequent crosscut with the parallel mischievous strain arising from the second wave of Brit improv – Steve Beresford juggling with film cans and inserting strips of paper into the innards of his piano in Company Week, then appearing on TOTP with the Flying Lizards the following week DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING – and another odd Northern comedian, Adrian Sherwood, messing around with dub. On a personal level, this cumulated in the never more unlikely event of my dad accompanying me to a “post-punk” gig – the Pop Group, Prince Far-I and Don Cherry (!) triple-header – at the Glasgow Apollo (!!) in May 1979, where all three acts were cheered with equal fervour. Later that summer we noted the preponderance of Gang of Four and Wire Better Badges badge-wearers attending Ornette’s headlining gig (with Prime Time) at the Bracknell Jazz Festival.

This strain inevitably fed into what was then, albeit barely, the “mainstream,” such that in 1981/2 no one would bat an eyelid at an eight-minute piece of performance art (“O Superman”) standing at number two in the singles chart, second only to a postmodern cover version by a Canterbury avant-garde keyboardist (“It’s My Party” by the Hatfield and the North Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin), or DLT championing the Brotherhood of Breath-gone-Burundi of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag,” and even the more extreme likes of Rip Rig and Panic penetrated the fringes of the charts.

When in the pub on Monday, Matthew, Mark and I also briefly talked about the absurdly shortlived but absolutely wonderful magazine Collusion which existed in 1982-3. An offshoot from the London Musicians’ Collective late ‘70s magazine Musics, run by Sue Steward and David Toop, this magazine was instrumental in opening up awareness of what would later be termed “World Music,” but crucially didn’t limit itself as the terminology subsequently did – happy to expound at length about anything and anyone, from Connie Francis to Walter Gibbons, I know for a fact that it was a substantial influence on Monitor and Mark Sinker’s Wire; the writing in Collusion really was proto-blog, non-judgemental and non-deferential.

The mischief dovetailed rather splendidly with New Pop in Trevor Horn and Art of Noise’s work for McLaren’s Duck Rock, about which I have previously spouted at length. The unashamed plundering and ripping off of its sources works because the sources are also repositioned (the Zulus singing “I’m a Sex Pistol Man” indeed!) and because the whole damned thing is so much more FUN than the grievously over-respectful likes of Graceland, or indeed much of what ensued under the name of “World Music.”

I think that the problem started with the end-of-year summary in the Xmas 1983 NME by Charlie Gillett. He was having trouble coming to terms with Boy George and Annie Lennox – which, let’s face it, is understandable – and decided that the popular music coming out of Africa in particular was more his cup of tea; more exciting, newer, more interesting. But somewhere along the line this got translated into a Declaration of Principles, or at least a Proclamation of AUTHENTICITY, such that World Music could fairly be termed Not New Pop, or even Not Post-1982 Crap Pop. It was held up as yet another banner of shame with which the rest of music could be beaten over the head.

Thus Nick Gold and Co., thus “World Music” as a place in shops to put all this stuff – from Bulgaria, Pakistan, Senegal, it didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t, say, Wham! or Metallica – thus its elevation to a Religion, a Symbol of Middle-Class Guilt. Funny how all those revered Youssou N’Dour records like the Laswell-produced Immigres, Nelson Mandela, etc. (and note the passing reference to the end of Spandau Ballet’s “Chant No 1” at the end of the latter album’s title track) were all very WORTHY but nowhere near as EXCITING and GENUINELY NEW as those scrappy cassettes of mbalax music which I used to purchase from Stern’s from about 1983 onwards, which actually show L’Etoile de Dakar to be a rather more adventurous group of musicians – almost a pop parallel to the Arkestra.

You see the problem? World Music CLEANS UP too much, clears away any mess which might have had the impertinence to settle in its territory. And it’s a moral problem too. Because if you decry “World Music,” what are you saying? You are arguing against fundamentally nice people like Nick Gold and also, more seriously – well, are we saying that Buena Vista Social Club shouldn't have been made because it isn’t the “real thing”? Should we have just allowed Ibrahim Ferrer to go on shining shoes, for the likes of Compay Segundo and Ruben Gonzalez (the Cuban Cecil Taylor without any doubt, and historically about ten years ahead of Our Cecil come to that) to die in genteel poverty instead of dying rich, happy and loved, as they did?

(Can I also say, incidentally, that anyone wanting to slag off Buena Vista Social Club can eff right off – just because it gets played to the point of nausea in dodgy Clapham restaurants and is exhibited as a Badge of Authenticity by the Jools Hollands and Helen Baxendales of this world does not mean that it isn’t a great and beautiful record. We just need to reclaim it, that’s all)

It’s a tough call. Perhaps I could best sum it up by saying that, although I find Charlie Gillett’s BBC Radio London programmes useful and interesting, I also find listening to them rather like going to school (and you might note that whenever he has guest musicians in, he more or less treats them like recalcitrant schoolchildren – “sit nearer the microphone please,” “don’t slurp your tea” etc.) – you feel that you are being inculcated with purity rather than being enticed into a new and exciting world of music. You cannot quite escape the guilt of what Gillett steadfastly will NOT play on his programme; thus it is a programme of shame (I remember catching him playing the Pop Group’s astonishing masterpiece “3:38” – the B-side of “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” and a piece of music whose lead NO ONE has yet taken up, a quarter of a century later – three or four years back, but I think it might have been brought in by the bloke out of Alabama 3).

And now, apart from Wire-approved “fusions” (i.e. Sonic Youth/Jim O’Rourke jamming with various Z-list ‘60s/’70s free jazzers, yawwwwwnnnn), there is no crossover at all between post-punk revivalism and anything else. When you listen to Franz Ferdinand, no matter how good they might be (and at the moment they are OK with two ace singles but a long way away from GREAT), you gain the uncomfortable feeling that they might not have listened to anything other than their parents’ (or elder brothers’?) tattered Positive Noise and Scars albums. And the continued compressed compartmentalisation of music will ultimately have deleterious effects on music.

ALTHOUGH I HAVE TO RECOMMEND…

Napoli Mediterraneo, the amazing new album by Italian singer Pietra Montecorvino, whose 200-a-day cracked gargoyle of a voice gives the impression of a female Paolo Conte or a Neapolitan Marianne Faithfull. Gillett has crusaded noisily, and for once rightly, about this record, which is a collection of traditional Neapolitan songs radically rearranged by producer Eugenio Bennato and incorporating the performances of Tunisian and Moroccan musicians, thus reminding us of the debt owed by the music of Naples to the traders who used to sail to and from its port.

More than anything worthy, Pietra makes these songs LIVE again – hear the amazing opening reconstruction of “Guaglione” (the Perez Prado Guinness advert) for instance. And if you are thinking: “God, not another version of O Sole Mio” – well, Pietra’s minor key lament delivery will make you weep. These two are the best known songs on the album, but all the songs are deeply known to me (via my mum) and to hear them becoming – well, sexy and disrespectful again, as they were always intended to be in the first place, is a marvel; hear for example her sensuous cackling on “Dove sta Zaza” or her solemnity on “Senza Voce,” the latter worthy of Faithfull at her most (“Sister Morphine”) desolate and dissolute.

BUT THIS HAS ALL HAPPENED BEFORE – THEREFORE THE PEOPLE BAND

The same thing happened round about 1968-71. Through open-minded conduits such as Robert Wyatt, Keith Tippett and Joe Boyd (and later Brian Eno), music seemed able to breathe very freely in that time. On Saturday I bought a CD reissue of Smiling Men With Bad Reputations, a 1971 solo album by Incredible String Band frontman Mike Heron – and a fantastic record it is too, merrily mixing up the likes of Elton John and Steve Winwood with the venerable horn section of the mighty Brotherhood of Breath, The Greatest Band Of Musicians Who Ever Walked This Planet, as well as John Cale, Page, Townshend and even Dr Strangely Strange. Who the fuck would have the cheek to do that sort of thing now?

Smiling Men With Bad Reputations was of course produced by Joe Boyd, the visionary (at least then) who was also responsible for many masterpieces of that not-quite-dark age, including Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day (up there with Linda Perhacs without a doubt), Nick Drake passim, the first Brotherhood of Breath album (the latter definitely another one for Matthew’s “Un Ra” reserve list) and so on and so forth. I’m particularly drawn to this period and to this emotional tenor of music at the moment – its fragile voices and sounds swirling back to me like ghosts.

Perhaps the one group which ties all of the above strands together – because they were doing it a decade before post-punk, also because in a decidedly funny way they helped to invent punk – are, or were, the People Band. In fact, in terms of their philosophy and approach they probably went further than anyone else in the world of Brit improv and Brit post-punk. If one looks at their contemporaries, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble was, whatever its manifestation or line-up, essentially an improvising group directed by John Stevens, and he never usually let his musicians forget that, though they could play what they liked, it was his group, his gaff, his rules. AMM were, and are, sui generis, the most hermetic of groups; there is never any sense of “community” in their music apart from that of the musicians themselves, and they generally have a very stern view about other musicians turning up and sitting in.

In contrast, the People Band could involve anyone and everyone, regardless of whether or not they could play an instrument. This was because the PB, and their parent company the Continuous Music Ensemble, operated on the grounds that ALL sounds were music, that there was no recognisable or desirable boundary between the living of life and the playing of music. Breathing was music; the sun rising was theatre – they existed in tandem with their theatrical sister group, the People Show, who again were about happenings, spontaneous occurrences, instant installations, immediate theatre. So in a very solid way the People Band were clear precursors of the likes of the Pop Group and Slits – nothing was sacred, everything was available and open to minds that were also open.

They were probably best seen in the context of a live performance, and in the course of their existence only made one eponymously-titled album. Recorded in Olympic Studios, Barnes, on 1 October 1968, bankrolled and produced by Charlie Watts (can you imagine ANYTHING like that happening now? Jonny Greenwood financing the next Freedom of the City festival?), The People Band (1968), remastered and with 15 minutes’ worth of previously unissued material, is now about to re-enter the market on Emanem Records.

Altogether ten musicians were involved in the recording of the album (nine if you discount Lyn Dobson, who appears only on the opening track, recorded some time earlier than the rest of the session). Of these musicians, three helped form the original line-up of Kilburn and the Highroads – saxophonist George Khan, keyboardist/MD Russell Hardy and drummer Terry Day, and Ian Dury himself was sitting in the control room observing the proceedings (Davey Payne was a later People Band member, so you could argue that his sax break on “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” was the axial point at which ‘60s improv gave its blessing to post punk) – while trumpeter Mike Figgis later became a celebrated film director.

How does the ethos of the People Band translate into recorded music? In the CD’s very detailed sleevenotes, Terry Day expresses some regret that the album was to a large degree structured, and lacked the genuine anarchy of their stage performances. Well, every record has, by definition, to be structured to some degree (listening to a record not being exactly parallel with improvising in real time), and although the album’s structures are clearly signposted, it’s still an immensely involving listen.

The opening “Home Trio” was recorded at Mel Davis’ home at an unspecified time prior to the October 1968 session with a trio version of the PB comprising himself, Dobson and Day, with echoes and other studio effects added on by Davis afterwards (so again, not strictly “improvised”). It’s an eerie beginning to the record; dolorous tenor sax cadences from Dobson – a kind of abstraction of Bobby Wellins on Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood – blending with ghostly plucked piano strings, muttering percussion and a distant ‘cello; and it’s strange to listen to it in the context of a mid-‘60s London house, in the context of a vanished world, the world of Repulsion or 10 Rillington Place (either of which would have been well soundtracked by this music), death’s recognition at one’s shoulder intuitive.

However, after about four-and-a-half minutes, the music suddenly jumpcuts to “Part 1.” Driven by Eddie Edem’s congas and the double drums of Day and Tony Edwards, it’s as if light, or life, has suddenly come into the world. This track is largely a percussive workout which parallels quite spookily what was going on with the AACM in Chicago at the time – check out in particular Sound by the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, or the Art Ensemble of Chicago (as the group later became) at their non-showbiz, straight-faced best (Reese And The Smooth Ones or People In Sorrow). Against the percussion backdrop, Hardy (I think) essays some Taylorish piano runs.

The intensity deepens with “Part 2.” Opening with low strings gradually awakening and groaning into life, the music is suddenly blown open by the explosive entry, at 2:20, of the tenor sax of George Khan. A perennial of both the jazz and prog scenes of the ‘60s and ‘70s – he was a core member of most of Mike Westbrook’s various line-ups of that period, and in rock terms is probably best known for his contributions to Robert Wyatt’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard and Annette Peacock’s X-Dreams – Khan has definitely been undervalued as a musician, probably because he has spent most of his time concentrating on his acting career (until very recently he was still a member of the People Show), but frequently because of the sheer volume and physicality of his sound he very often unwittingly takes the lead in many of these improvisations. The textures become denser and everyone participates in a hectic free-form scrum before the strings take it out again.

The previously unreleased 11-minute-long “Skip To Part 3” could almost be interpreted as a musical history of mankind – beginning with initially reluctant percussive scrapings and the odd flute or harpsichord (the sleeve says “electric organ” but it sounds much more like a harpsichord) figure, the impression is one of inventing music for the first time – so in a sense this music looks forward to the what-sound-does-this-make? ethic of the more adventurous post-punk practitioners (see especially Alternative TV’s still underrated Waking Up The Senile Man) and probably even as far as the likes of Acid Mothers Temple. On the 1970 album Hush by the shortlived Australian psych-folk group Extradition (also about to be reissued and reviewed by me in Uncut), there is a long track entitled “Original Whim” which consists entirely of percussion sounds – stones being scraped, water jugs being blown, possibly even the odd leaf blowing around the studio – and which conveys a very similar effect. Then, about six minutes into the piece, Figgis strikes up some flamenco guitar chords (instruments were routinely swapped between PB musicians; everyone had a go on everything whether they could play it or not, and there is a lot of audible wandering around the studio on the parts of the musicians here) which seems to act as a signal to increase the emotional heat. Day responds with a terrible hammering on his drumkit and Davis’ piano takes over to lead the group into apocalyptic cataclysm. By the end, however, quiet has dawned again, and the percussion takes sonic precedence once more.

This leads directly (or was supposed to lead directly, I think – as Martin Davidson observes, “it doesn’t quite work”) into “Part 3” proper. What is particularly interesting about this piece is the involuntary addition of a tenth musician – session guitarist Joe Morretti. A former member of Vince Taylor and the Playboys (that’s his guitar you hear on “Brand New Cadillac”) and a prolific session player from the ‘50s onwards – it is he, for instance, rather than Jimmy Page, who plays the celebrated guitar break on Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” – he was packing up from another session in Olympic Studios, wandered past the People Band and was intrigued enough to come in and participate. Actually you can hear the point where he does this, very near the beginning of the track – as he plucks some chords, the rest of the group momentarily shuts up as though scratching its collective head and wondering “Who he?” Terry Day, however, unleashes a furious “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” flutter on his cymbals. This leads to a jagged 4/4 bop rhythm (Edwards by now on drums, Day having switched to alto sax played with a bamboo pipe reed, as you do) over which Day and Khan engage in a fairly tumultuous alto sax debate. By the piece’s end, Morretti would appear to have left the studio again.

“Part 4” is a mournful lament for massed brass, led by Khan’s quavering tenor, while Khan again seems to take the lead on “Part 5” where he blows some splendid Sam Rivers-ish tenor lines over twin basses (Frank Flowers – no relation to Herbie, at least I don’t think so – and Terry Holman) and drums, with everyone else joining in again at the end. Finally “Part 6” begins rather like the Brotherhood of Breath’s “Night Poem” – all dislocated flutes and odd rhythmic flurries – and stylistically is the closest thing on the album to Sun Ra (side two of Atlantis is of particular relevance here). Again a free storm eventually engulfs the ensemble before the album itself comes to rest on some solemn organ chords which wouldn’t have been out of place on “Voodoo Chile.”

(Throughout the album there are also dotted, like punctuation marks, three very brief “Conductions” by Mel Davis which clearly clear the way for later adventures by John Zorn, Butch Morris and the London Improvisers’ Orchestra [Day is of course still involved with the latter ensemble])

There’s nothing quite like the People Band album in ‘60s improv, albeit perhaps more things slightly like it in ‘70s post-punk (via Terry Day and Penny Rimbaud, there are also historical links between the PB and Crass), even in such a musically volatile year as 1968. The Continuous Music Ensemble, even if defunct for the last 36 years, continues to stand apart from everyone and everything else.

FIVE OTHER 1968 IMPROV CLASSICS
(is this blog turning into Uncut or what? Do please notify me if it is)

PETER BROTZMANN OCTET
Machine Gun (FMP)
Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Willem Brueker (saxes, reeds), Fred van Hove (piano), Peter Kowald, Buschi Niebergall (basses), Han Bennink, Sven-Ake Johansson (drums).

With both bassists now sadly no longer with us, this extraordinary group is now partly a historical one, but this remains the keystone backs-against-the-wall ’68 blow-it-all-up record, the one Sonic Youth fans use as their entry point into the world of improv.

SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE
Karyobin (Are The Imaginary Birds Said To Live In Paradise) (Island)
John Stevens (percussion), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn), Evan Parker (soprano sax), Derek Bailey (guitar), Dave Holland (bass)

It says something about the closeness-in-diversity of the ’68 improv scene that Evan Parker could appear on and fit into the two records which demonstrated the scene’s sonic polar opposites. Where Brotzmann maximises everything, the SME minimised everything else into pointillistic playfulness. This fairly rollicks along like the soundtrack to a Hungarian cartoon in the Norman McLean style.

MICHAEL MANTLER/THE JAZZ COMPOSER’S ORCHESTRA
Communications #8-11/Preview (JCOA)
Mantler (composer, conductor) with soloists: Don Cherry (cornet), Roswell Rudd (trombone), Gato Barbieri, Pharaoh Sanders (tenor saxes), Cecil Taylor (piano) and Larry Coryell (guitar); plus orchestra – Randy Brecker, Steve Furtado (not Nelly’s dad, at least I don’t think so), Lloyd Michels (the same one who did “The Flasher” by Mistura) (flugelhorns), Bob Northern, Julius Watkins (French horns), Jimmy Knepper (trombone), Jack Jeffers (bass trombone), Howard Johnson (tuba), Al Gibbons, Steve Lacy, Steve Marcus (soprano saxes), Bob Donovan, Gene Hull, Jimmy Lyons, Frank Wess (alto saxes), Barbieri, George Barrow, Lew Tabackin (tenor saxes), Charles Davis (baritone sax), Carla Bley (piano), Kent Carter, Ron Carter, Bob Cunningham, Richard Davis, Eddie Gomez, Charlie Haden, Reggie Johnson, Alan Silva, Steve Swallow, Reggie Workman (basses), Andrew Cyrille, Beaver Harris (drums).

Unlike the standard plonk-a-soloist-in-front-of-a-band approach, Mantler makes his orchestra (including, as you will see, a surprisingly large number of mainstream jazzers) work and improvise as well as the soloists. Building his structures around what he knows the soloists are capable of, the soloists then go on, at their best, to exceed and demolish the structures. Our Cecil is in particularly belligerent form on the two-part “Communications #11,” though Alan Silva’s bowed bass-as-horn gives him a good run for his money in Part 2. Sanders blasts out his finest three minutes over the ominous ostinatos of “Preview” and Rudd delivers some of his most passionate and moving improvising on “Communications #9.”

AMM
The Crypt, 24 June 1968 (Matchless)
Cornelius Cardew (piano, cello), Lou Gare (tenor sax, violin), Keith Rowe (guitar), Christopher Hobbs (cello, piano), Eddie Prevost (percussion), everybody (electronics and what have you).

A suffocating subterranean claustrophobic heatwave of a record, four sides of some of the most determinedly and hermetically intense improvisation ever put on record; like the characters in The Blockhouse, literally seeing it through to the death.

ANTHONY BRAXTON
For Alto (Delmark, 1968)
From sealed community to open solipsism; over four exhausting sides, the then 24-year-old Chicagoan proceeds to redefine the alto saxophone completely. On hearing this record, Lee Konitz scratched his head in genuine bewilderment, wondering “why on earth does he have me as his idol (or so Mr Konitz told me at Company Week 1987; Derek B seemed to be far more congenial company for him)?” Fantastic and, not a word commonly used with Braxton, emotional.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT ADRIAN SHERWOOD

I was never particularly captivated by On-U Sound, even the early records with Ari Up, Beresford and Toop on them, except perhaps for a few African Head Charge pieces (“Language And Mentality”). Tackhead I always had marked down as Hawkwind for guilty goths, but I recently listened to my copy of Tackhead Tape Time for the first time in years, and bless me if it hasn’t stood up surprisingly well – having Gary Clail on it helps (especially “What’s My Mission Now?” – “SAIGON! Hahahahahaaah!”).

I was rather suspicious of the Tackhead people as I couldn’t determine a meaningful relationship between their backing Mark Stewart’s Situationist proclamations one night and then going on TOTP the following night to back Mick Jagger as he barked out his Tebbit-worshipping 1987 hit single “Let’s Work.” Still, their work with Mark Stewart is their deepest and most successful – as with Stock-Aitken-Waterman did with Mel & Kim, they seemed to save their best stuff for Stewart. 1985’s As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade is a brilliant wooze of a record, but 1987’s eponymous album is the masterpiece. “Stranger Than Love” is yet another place where trip hop starts; “Survival/Survivalist” slaughters the Grandmaster Flash original (on which the Tackhead team also played), thrusting itself into and out of your consciousness; and “Fatal Attraction” sends the “I Feel Love” riff careering out of control like an incompletely-engineered helter skelter car at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach.

HAPPY POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHOR’S FLEETWOOD MAC UNCUT REVIEW

Having subsequently taken delivery of finished copies of the Fleetwood Mac redux reissues (for which, many thanks to Mick Houghton) I am pleased to report that, following my initial protestations, the full-length (6:25) version of “Sara” has been restored to CD1 of Tusk. Carlin’ll Fix It? Hmm, there’s an idea for a TV programme…

DEM GEDENKEN EINES ENGELS

However, if you buy just one CD this week I would strongly and urgently recommend that you purchase the new recording of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto as performed by soloist Daniel Hope with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the conduction of Paul Watkins. A more passionate half-hour of music is unlikely to emerge this year. It is especially urgent and key that you get this because it is the first recording of the definitive version of the Concerto as corrected from an inaccurate original manuscript by Douglas Jarman; thus it is the first opportunity to hear this work as Berg actually intended it to be heard. I will observe with some melancholy that Hope first performed this revision in 1995 and that it has taken the best part of a decade for it to be recorded – alas it is indicative of the continued rot of the classical music record industry that despite the amount of short-term money-spinning rubbish it issues, the revenue raised from the latter never seems to be expended on recording important music.

Why is this work important? Because it is one of the rawest yet most eloquent expressions of grief and bereavement ever achieved in music. Composed in 1935, its initial emotional impulse was provoked by the tragic death at eighteen, from infantile paralysis, of Manon Gropius, daughter of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler (Gustav’s widow), a family to whom Berg was emotionally very closely attached. Thus the Concerto’s subtitle Dem Gedenken eines Engels – To the Memory of an Angel. Added to this was the fact that, while the Concerto was being written, Berg himself was struck down by illness – from which he would die before the end of the year, aged just 50 – so the Concerto has subsequently been viewed as a requiem, not only for Manon’s mortality, but also for that of the composer. An equally melancholy Constant Lambert observed in his Preface to the second edition of Music Ho! (October 1936): “…Berg left behind him an elegiac Violin Concerto of astonishing mastery and haunting beauty. Let us hope that it is only a personal elegy and not the elegy of modern music.”

It wasn’t quite, of course, but an elegy is what the Concerto undoubtedly is. Part I acts as a celebration of Manon’s playful and gentle spirit, the strings and solo violin lines graceful in their intervallic leaps, the harmonic debt to Debussy clearly apparent (and that to Mahler slightly less so). However, given the work’s 12-tone structure, this section still inevitably betrays a foretaste of the tragedy to be so expressed so forcefully and passionately in Part II.

The most immediate effect of Jarman’s revision of the work is apparent from the opening bars of Part II; notably that an octave leap in the violin’s solo part which Berg had clearly intended but inadvertently neglected to put into his manuscript. Hearing it restored emphasises the explosion of emotion evident in Hope’s passionate and keening performance – the agonised purity of his playing brings to mind Miles with Gil Evans (see especially “Prayer (O Doctor Jesus)” from Porgy and Bess) or Ornette with the LSO on Skies Of America – now the violin’s cry truly becomes a “death cry.” In Berg’s manuscript there are also numerous musical codes, representing people, emotions and feelings – in particular, something drastic always happens every 10th and 23rd bar (Berg died on 23 December 1935), a code perhaps reproduced in the importance of the number seven in Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson (for it is on a Boeing 707 flight that Melody perishes). The “death cry” reaches its terrible crescendo (in his manuscript, Berg inserts at this point the word, in capital letters, “LAHMUNGSAKKORD”) at 5:49. Thereafter the music subsides again, though Hope’s violin is no less committed emotionally. It builds up again to introduce the Bach chorale (the harmonisation of “Es ist Genung”) quotation – as with George Crumb in Makrokosmos III, Bach is used to represent rationalisation of open emotionalism – and the orchestra again reaches a volumatic and emotional peak at 12:23.

Thereupon ensues one of the most sublime and devastating passages in all of music. In the work’s final two minutes, there is a kind of reconciliation with the reality of Manon’s “death and transfiguration” as the orchestra slowly fades into nothingness. I would assume some familiarity on Berg’s part with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, to which the Concerto forms a strange parallel – the point of the Tallis Fantasia is that humanity can never attain the perfection of Godhood (that unreproducable opening chord) but has to settle for however near it can get to perfection. And, as with that work, Berg’s Violin Concerto ends with a slowly ascending violin line akin to crying. But Berg’s violinist goes beyond the natural English restraint of Vaughan Williams and climaxes his line, the work, with a terrible extreme high-pitch vibrato which sounds almost inhuman – which sounds, in fact, like the musical representation of life fleeing a dying human – a lament beyond comprehension, its implications ranging almost beyond music. And behind the violin, the orchestra gradually settles for a graceful, augmented sixth chord – at the work’s death, we are given its only major chord, a chord, moreover, which is also the final chord of Mahler’s equally devastating Das Lied von der Erde (and eventually will become the final chord of the Beatles’ “She Loves You”). The troubled orchestral resolution which results in this chord is certainly a device which Gordon Jenkins, a man who knew his Mahler pretty thoroughly, employed on several Sinatra albums (notably 1957’s Where Are You?), but deployed by Berg it gives us a thread of hope to which we can cling, as if to say: her life is over, my life is almost done, but the world shall not end (remember, this was 1935, Berg already labelled a “degenerate” by Goebbels), it will continue, however painfully.

Given this week’s horrific events in Madrid, it may be unacceptably decadent of this writer to relate this only to his own circumstances, and those of his late partner; yet, when it needs to, music can speak to me, and only to me. That does not mean that Berg’s Violin Concerto cannot speak to you as well. On this CD (which is on Warner Classics and therefore should be obtainable from most decent record shops) the work is paired with Britten’s equally agonised (though in a different and more war-related way) Violin Concerto, though the most haunting factor of the latter I still find is the astonishing tuba cadenza which builds up seemingly unobtrusively all the way through, and climaxes in the Largamente section of, the Second Movement (a passage Mike Westbrook must surely have had in mind in terms of the equally violent tuba cadenza which climaxes Marching Song). After listening to this, you might not be emotionally able to listen to any other CD this week, or even this year.

CURSOR MINER PLAYS GOD

Now there’s an album title for you. Wouldn’t get an album called Robbie Williams Plays God, would we? Robbie Williams IS God, perhaps (lead single: “WAAAAAA (You Bastards Don’t Understand Me)”) but Cursor Miner’s quick and keen enough to spot the difference.

Back in the Pleistocene Age I commended to this House Explosive Piece Of Mind, Cursor Miner’s 2002 debut album, which I noted was rather like a perkier Casino Versus Japan – the best “electroclash” album of its year. With his second album, Cursor Miner not only plays God, but also plays pop. This is a 1980 record through and through – 1980 in the Look Around You sense, i.e. still a formica-ridden hangover from the ‘70s proper – and should have been produced by Martin Rushent and released on Virgin Records in a dayglo red and/or yellow sleeve with skinny ties in plenitude. It is purposely primitive post-punk electro with a wickedly mordant sense of satire throughout – think the Silicon Teens meet Neil Innes via Denim.

If it’s electro-bubblegum then it is securely in the line of records like Edwina Biglet and the Miglets’ “Thing,” originally released in RCA on 1972 and now included on the splendid new compilation Glitter From The Litter Bin (the latter also includes unearthed gems such as “Farewell,” written, produced and largely played by Roy Wood, but sung by Ayshea Brough of Lift Off fame – an eerie valkyrie ride fed through Wood’s spluttering, very Andy Mackay-esque oboe – and the astonishing “Do You Like Boys?” written by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, performed by Starbuck – not, I think, the same Starbuck who did “Moonlight Feels Right” – which is so beyond camp, up to and including the Tiller Girls-style knees-up fadeout, that it brings home to the listener just how far the Scissor Sisters have yet to travel before producing something as mindscrewing as this) – in other words, Bell Records teenpop with that new Bontempi I’ve just bought from the Co-op.

Fittingly, for such a 1980 record, Cursor Miner lyrically takes the Victor Meldrew route: moaning about plastic pop idols (“Man Made Man” – but what a GORGEOUS GORGE of a tune!) and spoiled brats (“Gizmo Kid” – “My Perfect Cousin” stripped of the knowingness: “The only way to shut his trap/Is to buy him more crap”). But there are also grand, loquacious post-Moroder instrumentals like “The Sport Of Kings” which seems to take off from whichever great city Simple Minds buried their themes, which in turn lead us into lyrically darker territory.

There’s the heartbreaking “Foetus” where Miner duets with a speeded-up/infant version of himself over a Play School singalong (“Sleeping all day and dreaming my abstract dreams”) about how he wants to remain a foetus “only a few inches tall” and not have to enter the cold and horrible world. I know how he feels – cover of Nevermind, last two-and-a-half years of writer’s life, etc. – while “Me And My Clone” (where he turns into a vocoder baritone) is also stark in its cheerful emptiness.

“Library” might be the track to give him Divine Comedy-style chart status, a lovely and UNIRONIC (THANK GOD) song about the advantages of using your local library (similar in style to, though much lighter on the sarcasm than, Hannon’s “National Express”) as, among other things, “librarians are often sexy” – a big hit at Oxford Brookes, I hope (Antony Brewerton where art thou?).

The music then becomes more aggressive, harder in its beats, and lyrically bleaker (“Hi Tek Weaponry Girl,” the dazed “Clear My Head”) until the ecstatic trance of “Metathon” – my GOD, those CHORD CHANGES! Leander exeunt! – leads us into the brief acoustic singsong “LSD” and finally into the extended, distended minimalist house workout “Grilling The Cheese,” closest in style and approach to Explosive Piece Of Mind, but also a definite advance. What an album! It should turn platinum - God forbid.

THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS DUE

Thanks to everyone who’s emailed me offering to burn CDs of the albums I mentioned last week. So far I have Disco Inferno and Dangermouse coming from London readers (thanks to Mark K-Punk and Alan Connor respectively) while it looks like the Field Mice and Left Banke comps will be coming from overseas unless any Londoners can do ‘em. No takers yet for the Ruthless Rap Assassins alas.

Astonished and exceptionally grateful thanks also to Evan Parker for his extremely kind email regarding my piece on Kenny Wheeler’s Song For Someone – thankfully I did get all the soloists and various instrumental combinations correct!

Also, of course, endless thanks to the friends who have emailed or otherwise contacted me about we-know-what – it really is appreciated. All the necessary work was done on Monday; I still feel a bit woozy (yesterday’s post was, as John Noakes never used to say, one I prepared earlier) but immensely glad to be rid of it.

NEITHER THANKS NOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS DUE

Those whom I contacted about I-know-what and couldn’t find five minutes to email or ring me back. I guess that severs the final remaining connections with Oxford for good. Nice, if in fact not nice at all, to know who one’s real friends – as opposed to one’s proxy friends – are.

NOW, ABOUT TROUT MASK REPLICA…
I first heard Trout Mask Replica in early 1970, when I had just turned six. It was played to me by my dad, and at the time I simply took it to be more weird and wonderful noise in the line of the Stockhausen and Ornette records he was similarly playing me. But the important thing is that, having been exposed to the record at so young an age, at an age, moreover, before I had heard much “pop” music, it has somehow remained an integral part of me; it also probably explains much of my subsequent development. So I naturally become very protective and defensive about the record.

Trout Mask Replica is one of the albums which I have not yet “upgraded” to CD. I don’t particularly want to do so either. As a double album – as with so many other pre-CD double albums – it actually makes more sense as four sides of vinyl, looks so much more like an adventure in its primary-coloured gatefold sleeve. The gap necessitated by changing records or changing sides also allows the listener’s emotions to recover from what they have just heard before they listen to the rest of it. And the four sides of Trout Mask Replica are very specifically designed as four sides – not as a flat 70 minutes in a charmless £4.99 WEA jewel box case. Not only that, the bright yellow labels on the records themselves (a) cheered me up and attracted me to replaying the record as a child (compare with the four primary-coloured labels on Rip, Rig & Panic’s God) and (b) correspond directly with the sentiments of the album’s opening track – “I can’t go back to your Frownland.” In other words, don’t get bogged down in analysis or context; sit down, open your ears and take in the adventure.

No real point disseminating the record at this stage in my life either; as a six-year-old it just seemed to contain everything that I felt was likely to make a difference in terms of my reaction to and appreciation of music. Thus there is no need to dwell over the inclusion of the best Holocaust song ever, “Dachau Blues,” sinister in its simplicity; Beefheart’s unschooled soprano sax reaching corners of my ears deeply enough to prepare them for Steve Lacy and Evan Parker subsequently (just bathe in the contratemporal franticity of “When Big Joan Sets Up”); the extremely forward-looking deconstruction of the record as it goes along – the snippets of studio chat, Beefheart’s wry “This one’s called ‘Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish’” comment to a couple of visiting girls (i.e. that title’s not gonna get them in bed with me, is it? Maybe it might); the fact that the album’s most conventional song, the relatively straightforward blues “China Pig,” seems to have been recorded on a tape recorder whose batteries are on the point of running out (if one wishes to talk about lo-fi before the event); the 30-years-ahead-of-you built-in gramophone crackle of “The Dust Blows Forward And The Dust Blows Back”; the architectural exactitude of “Dali’s Car”; or the immense return to sad sanity that is the record’s epilogue, “Veteran's Day Poppy.” Or the fact that nobody else in pop or rock, not even James Chance, has managed to marry Ornette harmolodics with Robert Johnson angst so thoroughly and naturally. As with Art of Noise, you get the feeling that Beefheart and the Magic Band are reinventing music from the ground up; discovering it again following an apocalypse – let’s learn it from the elemental beginnings. Discovering what it might be like to play music for the first time ever in history.

But on the wider stage of the world, Trout Mask Replica is the exact musical replica of Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America, not just in terms of its seamless marriage of futurism and tradition, not just because of the trout, but also because it is the one work of art in its field which makes a difference if you want to write or comment about music – much more so than Metal Machine Music (which does throughout its four sides retain easily recognisable harmonics, rhythm and structure), your reaction to Trout Mask Replica is the acid test of whether you are going to count or matter as a music writer, because if you show no evidence of grasping or grappling with Trout Mask Replica then you have not understood this particular story fully. Furthermore I am arrogantly afraid that unless you come to terms with Trout Mask Replica you stand no chance of being with me, connecting with me or even standing on the same side as me. For it is my belief that a belief in Trout Mask Replica indicates a belief in excitement, adventure, the unexpected, the obscene, the fuck-off affability of natural newness. A love of Trout Mask Replica confirms that you are not content with the over-obviously obvious – and bear in mind, to really get it you have to fall in love with it; it won’t do you any good to work at liking it as if it were the only husky left in the Antarctic. You have to scream joyfully, throw yourself circularly around the room, have sex to it. Even if you emerge from your grappling unconvinced, tired, hating the fucking thing, then you will still retain my respect, if not my love, because at least you’ve tried.

But what anyone who fancies themselves to be a music writer cannot afford with regard to Trout Mask Replica is studied indifference. Unfortunately if you decide that your response to Trout Mask Replica is to be in the line of: “Otherwise don't bother - it's not a record you need to hear or even know about (but then what is?). I heard it a couple of times, taped it, never listened again - I might come back to it sometime or I might not,” then you are fated never to break bread with the gods. It doesn’t matter if you can comment intelligently on Guy Mitchell or Busted; if you smugly shrug off Trout Mask Replica you are no different from and no better than David Jacobs, certainly no more valuable a cultural commentator than Nick bloody Hornby (observe the canyon which exists, gaping, between the verbs “heard” and “listened”) who I bet can’t abide Trout Mask Replica, with his matey, deadly “don’t bother wasting your time and money on all that DIFFICULT music that is so HARD to listen to” ethic; the same distortion of the work ethic which allows people to have a go at Alain de Botton for (gasp!) coming from a moneyed family, thereby having the free time to read and study in depth, travel around the world and write books while he’s at it. The bottom line of both arguments is: “don’t these people have LIVES?” Well, yes, and their lives, as she says, are better than yours, and as it turns out not dissimilar to my life as it stands currently. It’s about the worst manifestation of pseudo-socialism there is – certainly Iain Sinclair, who comes from an equally moneyed background and has plenty of financial wherewithal to spend his days trooping around dilapidated regions of London, doesn’t get any of this sort of ack-ack; nor did Derek Raymond. No doubt a lot of these brickbats will be heading my way when the book of CoM comes out, hurled by people who will never “get it”…but as usual I digress. Trout Mask Replica is an imperfect replica of pop and therefore unapologetically perfect. If you don’t get it, you can never get me, as Pitman almost said.

SHORT EPILOGUE CONCERNING JOHN MILES
The difference between “Macarthur Park” and “Music,” is that, much as I sympathise and agree with the sentiments of the latter’s, shall I say, minimalist lyric (definitely not haikuesque), “Macarthur Park” can be sung and played alone on the piano – as Jimmy Webb does on his Ten Easy Pieces album – and still flatten you emotionally. “Music” played alone on the piano just sits there, awkwardly, ungainly, itself wondering what its point is.

Still, if you want some good John Miles, I recommend that you go out and find his glorious 1972 late Northern Soul single “Yesterday (Was Just The Beginning)” (written by Vanda and Young!) on the Orange label; also its follow-up “Why Don’t You Love Me?”

ABOUT “CRAZY IN LOVE”
Gambaccini doesn’t play the Jay-Z assisted version on his show as a special edit was made specifically to be played on Radio 2, which doesn’t “do” hip hop. Must admit that, despite the awkward gaps left in the third verse by Jay-Z’s absence, I don’t think the record suffers that much from not having him burbling carelessly all over it.

PETER SELLERS’ FIRST APPEARANCE IN TWO WAY STRETCH
I mean, you can understand why Roger Lewis would fall in love with Sellers if this had been the first you’d ever seen of him. As Bernard Cribbins and David Lodge prepare their breakfast in the cell, Sellers slowly stirs from his bed, his striped pyjamas perfectly mirroring the prison environment, scratches his head, raises his eyebrows and peers intently and interested at Cribbins’ and Lodge’s antics. It is art; he looks like the exact missing link between Stan Laurel (the head-scratching and immense towers of eyebrow) and Paul Morley (the eyes narrowing in inverse proportion to the mouth, which juts out slightly and sets itself in that very familiar Newsnight Review impress-me-then repose).

FRAGMENTS OF RECOVERY
“Some friends of mine
I thought were dead
Are coming back…
SAY WHO YOU ARE”

THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
“Photograph” by Def Leppard (Vertigo, 1983)
The principal reason I can’t stand Busted isn’t because they play their own instruments or (co-)write (with Guy Chambers) their own songs but because THEY ARE NOT POP. They are a variant of the irritatingly face-licking, benign post-Cobain make-the-fear-fickle species of ROCK, in the basest Good Charlotte sense. And they make too much sense. They’re too eager to prove their COMMITMENT to AUTHENTICITY and CONVICTION. They are too tidy. Above all they are too “real” to appreciate or to make a record as gloriously unreal, artificial and punched-in-one-note-at-a-time as “Photograph” by Def Leppard.

Because “Photograph” is about using the signifier as a tool to force out the singer's infatuation with the signified – the “photograph” of the unattainable Other. And in 1983 there were few producers better equipped to translate this subtext into pop than Mutt Lange – you could view Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” as the Other’s answer record, some 15 years later, the stern injection of reality to deflate Joe Elliott’s inflated fantasy.

Architecturally the record is de Chirico Doric, one arch after another – the lead guitar entering at 0:06, Elliott’s voice “huh”ing as if he’s just excreted (0:10), the bass and rhythm guitars held back until 0:32 before they are allowed to crash this particular “wedding.” The utter grace with which the earthy middle-eight (“Look what you’ve done to this rock and roll clown!”) ascends into the ethereal wonder of the Toto (vocal harmonies)-meets-Police (rhythm) chorus. That muttered, chuckling aside which provides a delay gap before re-entering the song at its second verse.

Punctum is attained at 2:26 as Elliott holds on the final top C syllable of “You’ve gone straight to my HEAD!” Steve Clarke’s guitar bends and swoops before Richard Allen’s drums thunder back in like an Olympus volcano at 2:33. And even this is topped with the phenomenal fadeout where Elliott again fixes on a high C (3:30) and surpasses it with the “you” in “I wanna touch you” (so the record also works as a sequel to “Do You Wanna Touch Me?,” rhythmically as well as lyrically) at 4:05.

This meticulously unreal record, this pop song immaculate, was a top ten hit in the USA but peaked at a miserable #43 in a Britain which at the time was more interested in the deathless likes of JoBoxers, Tracie and F R David. Def Leppard had to wait until the near-soundalike “Animal” finally broke their UK commercial duck in 1987. This, however, was their masterpiece. If only Busted could find it in themselves to be honest enough to be unreal.

EMPIRES AND DANCE…
…might be my favourite Simple Minds record. More feral and perhaps more mischievous than the still unassailably great New Gold Dream, it proves just how astonishingly and genuinely avant-garde this band were at their quarter-century-old peak. Had “I Travel” been the new Franz Ferdinand single there might have been some justification for jumping for joy at the latter’s top three placing (because however you look at it, it isn’t, with the best of intentions, the same thing as “Sorry For Laughing” entering the singles chart at number three in February 1981, which it didn’t – even New Order’s “Ceremony” that same month only managed #34); still dynamic and unapologetic about its not-quite-brutalist futurism.

And what about those whoops on the “Rock & Roll Part 2/Discipline” crossover that is “Celebrate” (as with “I Travel,” a huge-selling single in Scotland) – the first, unobtrusive but absolutely centrally-fixed whoop at 2:03, and then as Burchell’s guitars return to swamp the track in complete ecstatic noise at the fadeout, the whoops return, shortly to turn into screams.

Meanwhile, for those lamenting well-meaning messes of cliché such as “Mandela Day,” reflect that the lyric of “Thirty Frames A Second” – the child speeding backwards to extinction – is as close to Pinter as anything in pop: “Go back to father/Father where’s my food?/Your food is on the table/But this can’t be food/IT IS DIRT.”

LONG CENTRAL MEDITATION ON IMPERMANENCE MASQUERADING AS WORDS ON ZTT INCORPORATING, OR JUSTIFYING, OTHER WORDS ON SERGE GAINSBOURG

WAYS TO KILL
Not a definite article about Art of Noise

The thing that worried me most about my 1985 piece was that I had been too hard on ZTT – blaming them for not dragging the rest of pop along with them, even though they were; it just took longer due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. And I had written these words before the new SACD issues of Art of Noise, Propaganda and ACT appeared in my mailbox, the improved mixes personally overseen by Trevor Horn. And there are too many fucking facts in this article already, and at least three definite articles too many, including the (there’s a fourth!) first fucking word.

Art of Noise are future (see how indelibly indefinite that now sounds?). Their 1987 SACD-restored album Daft is a compilation of everything on their Who’s Afraid? album and their Into Battle EP and is therefore the most important and influential pop record of the last 20 years. Everyone ended up affected by it, especially those who were vociferously determined not to be influenced by it – such that the whole of Britpop was a direct result of Art of Noise’s influence, namely the reluctance of Britpop to be influenced by Art of Noise. Such that Melua, Jones and Cullum stand there to remind us what a world not influenced by Art of Noise (and therefore profoundly influenced by Art of Noise) would look like.

I am careful to say Art of Noise for it is clear from the sleevenote to Daft by “Otto Flask” how hurt Horn and Morley were when Art of Noise opted to co-opt the definite article, flounder off to China Records as THE Art of Noise, to become A novelty group, but novelty in the Monday Night Live with Ray Cruddas sense rather than the Duchamp/Rivette sense (i.e. too much bloody sense).

And there is such sadness lurking within Art of Noise’s playfulness; the mournful ticking synth emerging from “what happens now?” in “A Time For War;” the Andrews Sisters’ dislocated songs of war in “The Army Now.” Is that really Lol Crème’s voice slowed down to 0.00000001275 rpm in “Donna”, the track which jumpstarted everything that Aphex Twin feels is worth knowing, buried everything over which Global Communications mourn? The knowledge of the fate of the owner of the voice which squeaks “hey!” in “Close To The Edit.” Anne Dudley perhaps slightly overwhelmed by all this future (“Can I say something?”) – that kiss of a piano figure emerging from the bold briefcase of “Beat Box” (and how it was on occasion so simple to mutate it into the introduction to “Video Killed The Radio Star”).

The clanging, banging war of “Bright Noise” giving way to the post-human waves and bleeps of “Comes And Goes.” As humanity does.

The kernel of sadness indispensable from the heArt of Noise; “How To Kill” (“It’s stopped”). “Memento” – an elementary exercise in heartbreak, a procession through a church, a distant organ (a memento of George Martin’s “Theme One” perhaps), and then the birds of springtime singing. Port Meadow, 1993.

And then there is “Moments In Love.” Sex in the most minor of keys, death and beauty inextricably strangling each other. “NOW, NOW, NOW” – Holly Johnson conversing with the Andrews Sisters, the harp rescuing us from the biggest of deaths and rehabilitating us in the littlest. Anyone would want to be married to its strains. “Three Fingers Of Love” – where everything is slowed down – that mesmerically canonistic Brylcreem advert it soundtracked – that SCREAM which appears near the end – could be played and has been played at a funeral.

HEAVEN GAVE THEM WORDS
…but took Propaganda’s heart away. I’ve previously said my piece on A Secret Wish. In the SACD repent, however, “Jewel” is restored to its full near-seven minute glory and “Frozen Faces” appears, murmuring its judges. However, you will still require the Outside World oddly sodden anthology as it includes the original and indestrucible 12-inch mix of “Dr Mabuse” – its tripartite structure leads us temptingly from Abba via Varese’s Hyperprism towards the theme from Brookside – and Not Just Another Cover Of “Femme Fatale” (“BEFORE YOU START YOU ALREADY BLEED”).

WAYS TO KILL
Grace Jones versus Melody Nelson

Slave To The Rhythm as in the album Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Jones as in the biography masquerading as a single masquerading as the album Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Jones as in the assassination plot masquerading as the kiss Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Jones does not appear to have been remastered on SACD and may not even be available at the moment and yet at 40 minutes it is the greatest single ever made as of any day and should have been marketed as and allowed to be a single as as a single it is singular.

Slave To The Rhythm as in The Annihilation Of Rhythm as in The Killing Of Grave Jones is an unsurpassable dissertation on the centre of the universe with such a universe being defined at its borders as Ian Recites Ian and how close to PJ Proby does Ian McShane sound on his contemporaneous cover of Drive by the Cars on his seldom-bought 1985 album Ian McShane Sings and is that why Morley hired him to read Penman on the album Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Bones?

Slave To The Rhythm as in the Annihilation Of The Universe Following The Collapse Of Its Centre Namely Miss Grace Jones and if we killed Grace Jones would we truly miss Grace Jones is a disquisition on celebrity and the dissolute calumny of pop music in 1985 without much in the way of jouissance or plaisir but she talks with Paul and Paul and laughs a lot and gives away precisely nothing including the possibility that she might not be the centre of the universe.

“And you?”

QED.

Slave To The Rhythm as in the Seduction Of Grace Jones Necessary For Entrapment is at times forceful and militant at other times haunting in its delicacy (“The Frog And The Princess”) at yet other times fucking about with Berio (“Operattack”) and for one more time the song itself.

Slave To The Rhythm as in The Song Itself ends with the previously noted indrawn breath of God but also the sharp intake of gulp from Miss Jones exactly as if she had just been shot.

Slave To The Rhythm as in the Prejudged Autopsy of Brace Jones contains words from her sometime lover Jean-Paul Goude who amongst other things muses that the best option would be to kill Miss Jones and then make the record about her in an Inspector Morse sense.

Slave To The Rhythm as in a record unimaginable without the indispensable precedent of

SERGE GAINSBOURG’S HISTOIRE DE MELODY NELSON…
…which is also the greatest single ever made as of any “ever.” Histoire de Melody Nelson lasts exactly 28 minutes and contains seven tracks, the first and last of which last for about seven minutes each, though really it is one song, one long(ish) meditation about the impermanence of love. It is the greatest of Gainsbourg records because Gainsbourg keeps quiet on it and as a result has never sounded louder. There is an extremely loud 1971 rock band backing him, but they have been buried deep in the mix such that Serge’s whispers sound louder than they ever could.

Of course Gainsbourg was the French Leonard Cohen – an arty dirty old man still humble enough to be a poet and still arrogant enough to make anyone else care – but also a musical architect of exceptional bedazzlement. I can’t think of anyone else in 1971 who could have come up with the twin-bass lead which carries the main melody heard on the opening “Melody” and the closing “Cargo Culte,” which incidentally also foreshadows Joy Division – bass taking the lead, guitar acting as bass or indeterminate centrally-placed noise/thrash.

Melody Nelson – as personified on the record’s cover and on the record itself by Jane Birkin – is a story of a doomed transitory love affair which begins when Gainsbourg’s Rolls chauffeur – who is called the “Spirit of Ecstasy” – accidentally collides with Melody on her bike (“Merde!” mutters Gainsbourg in “Melody” at 5:33). They meet. Strings are present but restrain themselves at this stage to a discreet dialogue with Gainsbourg’s muttered musings.

The remainder of the record documents the reluctant falling in love (the harmonically gorgeous “Ballade de Melody Nelson” helped immensely by Birkin’s ever uncertain pitching), the swooning brief affair (“L’Hotel Particulier,” the laughs punctuating “En Melody,” laughs provoked incidentally by Birkin being tickled by her brother Andrew) and the affair’s equally rapid and tragic end. As the opening melody returns, now played more gravely, Gainsbourg learns that Melody has been killed in a ‘plane crash (her ‘plane was flying to, of all places, Sunderland) and gradually all the joking and nudge-nudge stuff dies away to be replaced by grief – first muted (the low strings enter ominously at 3:15), and then exploding; a choir materialises over solemn organ, utilising the punctum of letting harmonies change half a bar behind the rhythm to magnify the poignancy. Finally the horror of the death of love, the death of everything, is made to bleed and weep and sob as the choir, now slightly discordant in the Ligeti style, take centre stage and build a wall of wailing. The organ drone ends the piece just as it ended Isaac Hayes’ “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.”

Yes, Jarvis Cocker probably copped all of his vocal stylings from Gainsbourg, and the choir which climaxes Pulp’s “Sunrise” surely must have been influenced by “Cargo Culte,” but this is effortlessly deeper than anything Pulp ever managed, and cuts so much deeper (because it’s less obviously obtrusive) than Slave To The Rhythm. Here, death is not a possibility – it has already happened.

The toy monkey brandished by Birkin on the cover was eventually buried with Gainsbourg himself at his funeral, at Birkin’s request.

Recommended accompanying reading: the final 50 pages of Stewart Home's Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton.

A CODA OF SORTS TO THE ZTT ELEMENTS
“Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” by the Korgis (Korova, 1980)
An early Trevor Horn production. James Warren’s is one of the most absurdly underused in pop; vulnerable but technically able to make you believe in and sympathise with his vulnerability – unlike, say, the singer with the Junior Boys, who unfortunately induces in this writer’s mind long-unused memes such as “bring back National Service.” And “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” was his commercial and artistic peak, a top five hit in the summer of 1980. Simple and sad piano chords mirror Warren’s emotional decline. One is completely punctured by his weeping second verse: “Every day/So confused inside/Every day/You know we live such lives/I feel so HELPLESS!/When will we see the light?” Then a violin comes in to do the weeping for him. The piano and synth chords, and the drumming, are elemental and unadorned, waiting for love or life to populate them.

THE BARRY SISTERS
Bought from the local Oxfam for a quid, The Barry Sisters Sing, a 12-inch album on Cadence Records, undated but I would guess dating from about 1957/8; two bosomy sisters – apparently extremely popular at the time - sing (then) new and traditional klezmer songs with orchestrations by Abrahim Ellstein, is a terrific record. It’s klezmer spiced with some then contemporary ‘50s ideas of cool easy pop, best encapsulated by “Roumania” which starts with long-held notes over a drone but soon breaks into a breathless finger-snapping gallop over which the Sisters sing very sexily indeed. Uptempo numbers like “Abi Gezunt” proceed with a fantastic gait, while the instrumental break in “Ay! Ay! Hora!” could very obscurely be predicated as a precursor to drum ‘n’ bass. As the postmodern-before-its-time (“…why continue to peruse the rest of this less than immortal prose?”) sleevenote says, it’s “as modern and as swingy as anything in the juke boxes.” And Ellstein always provides unexpected, avant-garde touches to his arrangements – check out the strange de-harmonised vibes which end “Beltz” and “Roshinkes and Mandlin” for example. Apparently there is a CD available, but I’ve never seen it; but do try to seek this marvellous record out if you find yourself looking for something to do in north-west London of a Saturday lunchtime.

M CRAFT – I CAN SEE IT ALL TONIGHT
I really am absorbing this lovely little five-track record by Australian singer/songwriter Martin Craft. Full of quiet desperation (see how the emotional level is unexpectedly jacked up in “Dragonfly” at 1:55), these are five songs about the avoidance of death, the equivalent of that slightly dilapidated branch of literate pop which in certain moods and at certain times I find instinctively spellbinding – think Eric Matthews, or Spearmint, or even the early, pre-stardom Divine Comedy, at a stretch Piano Magic. Sarah Cartwright’s harmony vocals on “Sweets” (“I take sweets from strangers/You got a car? Then let’s take a ride/I wanna see some places/Gotta make some changes/Gonna do some living tonight”) are the definition of divinity, even though it’s a song about someone who seems to want to be murdered (“Soaking wet and there’s no taxi with your name…All you want to talk about is suicide”). The gorgeous Wyatt-esque chord changes and harmonies of “Come To My Senses” (“You make me feel again”) are transcendent, as is the low-rent Tropicalia of “Out In The Sun” (“A broken tile/A loaded gun/A spider’s web/Out in the sun”). A gorgeously quiet record which I recommend most highly. As well as a bit of quiet in general, in which I am now about to luxuriate.

FRAGMENTS AFORE I GO

I really like Jonny Trunk’s album The Inside Outside for the same reasons I liked (and have recently dug out) Wagon Christ’s Throbbing Pouch – the latter is the best record Luke Vibert has ever made, and typically is the only Luke Vibert record currently out of print.

Other artists whose names draw a blank on the HMV or Tower databases: the Field Mice, dC Basehead, the Left Banke, Disco Inferno (the band not the song), the Ruthless Rap Assassins.

If any readers with a CD burner could kindly burn the following for me I would be extremely grateful:

The Field Mice 2CD compilation Where’d You Learn To Kiss
The Left Banke compilation There’s Gonna Be A Storm
DI Goes Pop by Disco Inferno as my vinyl copy is looking very weary indeed
The first (only?) Ruthless Rap Assassins album – again I have it on vinyl, but it’s 14 years old and kind of coming apart at the seams
The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse (naturally)

If you can oblige, email me at marcellocarlin@hotmail.com. London-based readers preferred for obvious reasons (i.e. you can give it/them to me in the pub) but if anyone can help I would be eternally appreciative. I couldn’t even find them in Amoeba Records (though I found most other things!). Thanks. Even if you can’t oblige, email me anyway just to chat: It’s Good To Talk, ahem.

When I eventually bestir myself to invest in a CD burner I will of course be happy to burn some stuff in return, time and health allowing.

Throbbing Pouch, as a record, is put together so simply – samples straightforwardly married to nice beats with a bit of icy punctum on the side and the kind of sadly descending jazz-funk chords I love (see also A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnite Marauders and Digable Planets’ Blowout Comb). And of course it reminds me of a different and happy era – the West London of 1995, the lovely quietude of the western end of King Street merging into the eastern end of Chiswick High Road. The tennis courts and nursing home in Stamford Brook Avenue. The row of houses painfully familiar from BBC sitcom location filming – complete with inbuilt stage school – which constitutes Bath Road, leading towards Turnham Green. Early departures for Oxford on sunny Friday afternoons in May, sometimes going down the Chiswick/William Morris route if the schools are on holiday and the M4 empty, watching the Thames converge into a millstream, observing the smug citadel of the shadow of Windsor Castle before dovetailing back into the A40.

Even if this is what ultimately killed us. The London aspect of everything. The need for daily long-distance commuting which wasn’t even a need. Only I “needed” it. Why couldn’t I just have been happy with working at the John Radcliffe, hopping on the 400 bus down to Osney Island because it doesn’t stop outside MFI, then crossing over to walk through Binsey Park – the best approach to any house in the world, seeing the smiling windows welcoming me as I cross over the little footbridge, unlock the gate and come in the back way.

WHY COULDN’T I JUST HAVE BEEN CONTENT WITH OXFORD AND THEN MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, LAURA WOULD STILL BE HERE?

The Jonny Trunk album pretty much follows the same template; elemental stuff, but somehow it works (e.g. "Deep In A Dream").

As does the Kanye West album The College Dropout, the best mainstream hip hop record since The Blueprint – mainstream as in one good tune/beat after another. Can’t make out whether he’s fundamentally pro- or anti-tertiary education (whereas the final verse of “The Message” made it clear that pro was life and anti was death) and could have done without the interminable closing monologue about his dealings with record companies – as tedious as the last track on Never Mind The Bollocks – but musically it is unquestionably a terrific record and one I want to play repeatedly, and it’s a long time since I thought that about any hip hop album.

I mean, cLOUDDEAD are just They Might Be Giants, aren’t they? That awful nasal twaaaaaang puts me off completely, as does the appalling subtext popping up in various places saying: “thank God for some intelligent WHITE people doing something adventurous with hip hop because obviously these BLACK PLEBS like 50 Cent are only interested in money…” The same arguments were forwarded vis-à-vis the Police and reggae a quarter of a century ago.

Having said that, I must admit that I’m not particularly interested in people who express little in their music apart from how much money they’re going to make out of it. As far as exposure of the corporate underbelly goes, some of So Solid’s stuff puts the B.E.F. to shame.

And that Wiley single – oh dear God, someone please put a sock in it. In the days of punk, you didn’t get the Clash putting out singles entitled “We Ain’t New Wave We Are Punk” - although they did intermittently release songs moaning about their record company, it took them nine years to sink to the level of “We Are The Clash,” and seven years for Lydon to admit “I’m going into free enterprise.” Call it Eski, call it garage, call it whatever, but if your clarion call is going to be “Work hard so you can be a buyer like me” – well, gee, thanks, another capitalist, that’s exactly what we need; just like Soul II Soul and So Solid before him, Wiley chronicles the shit state of the East End but CAN’T WAIT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE AND WHO COULD BLAME HIM – even if his ambition is to help propagate the societal system which landed Bow and Stratford in the shit to begin with (all these investment consultants who moved in and hyped all the prices up out of the affordability level of those who had the effrontery to ALREADY BE LIVING THERE ten years ago – and I bet you they all had copies of Club Classics Vol 1, which presumably they used to help bash open the heads of the Claremont Road/M11 protestors). Musically the song is much more interesting – a Radio Tip Top jingle twisted into Giacometti anorexic irregularities – so I shall resist from calling it “the new Oi!”

Maybe it is, as Matthew Ingram says, the simple fact that 8bar/eski/grime can be very imposing to listen to but it isn’t actually much fun (D Rascal’s one-liners notwithstanding). Mmm, a Happy Hardcore revival – the Smart MCs’ performance of “Sesame Street” in 1992 was arguably the most avant-garde TOTP performance ever, with kids shuffling around at the front of the stage, forgetting the words, not moving in unison (this was a direct by-product of temporary TOTP rules stating that artists could not mime to their hits, and that even samples had to be sung/performed live – remember Moby ungainly shouting “Go!” every few seconds?), genuinely teetering far less securely on the verge of anarchy than basso profundo Cobain and the kids on TOTP six months previously. Grime essentially needs its De La Soul equivalent to make themselves known.

Was the first (was there ever a second?) Ruthless Rap Assassins album the best rap album to come out of Britain? Bitter in its unforgiving, unrelenting sanity (“…And It Wasn’t A Dream”).

And wasn’t it also one of the best albums ever to come out of Manchester?

The Mum & Dad album might be another one. I have only just discovered this thanks to the inclusion of “Dawn Rider” on Richard X’s forthcoming Back To Mine compilation mix CD. A fine thing the latter is too, drawing together lots of disparate and lovely things (full marks especially for reminding us of the inordinate greatness of Animotion’s “Obsession” and also what Richard X rightly describes as Heaven 17’s finest hour – the 12” mix of “Let Me Go.” You also get Trans-X, Jona Lewie (“Kitchen At Parties”) and even the ‘80s Tomorrow’s World theme which made me feel very old indeed – ah, the days of 7:29 pm on a Thursday, awaiting TOTP when it was still, if only just, worth awaiting). Anyway, “Dawn Rider” is a demon of a song – imagine Sigue Sigue Sputnik done (im)properly (“Be bop a lula I’m the dawn rider!”) – and on tracking down the parent album I note that it was co-written by Tony Ogden, former genius of World of Twist.

Music usually finds its way to me sooner or later if it’s any good, and usually for a good reason. The date of 2001 is given on the sleeve, so I’ve no idea whether the trio are still going, but Mum & Dad is a phenomenal record, the record which Goldfrapp is mistakenly thought to have made – and so, so much more thrilling - check the opening Bond theme in hell that is “The Electric Mistress” with its refrain of “Whip you into shape, don’t you dare disobey,” and the fantastic avant-glam stomps of “Six Week Holiday” and “Kiss Of Death” (the sort of record I wish Suzi Quatro had gone on to make after her first five singles) – but also observe the piteous poignancy of songs like "Marvin” with its introduction of playground schoolchildren and Boys’ Brigade drum tattoos and its lyric of sectioned-off alienation (“Don’t talk to me,” “my special friends,” “you all leave me cold”), the ambiguous, Syd Barrett-esque glee of “Easy Peasy” (“If everyone else was as simple as you/We’d all feel better…Laughing is easy when you’re breathing with me”) and the heartbreaking “Bird With A Broken Wing” and “Butterfingers” – listening to the former, with its refrain of “Tiny thing, won’t you sing for me once again?” and “I wish I could have saved you,” reminds me that it’s probably for the better that I didn’t hear this in 2001; it might have helped finish me off. But this is a brilliant record – singer Clair Pearson both more assured and more uncertain than KoldKrapp, musicians Ian Rainford and Joe Robinson endless in their invention.

Yes, as I said music sometimes takes its time to find me, but perhaps I need to make more of an effort to get music to come to me. By the time I get around to talking about, say, Telefon Tel Aviv in November 2006, it might be too late even to do so.

Conversely there is no need for me to say anything about Arthur Russell; not at the moment. Everyone else has been talking about him (at long last) and I find that even I have written about Calling Out Of Context in the new issue of Uncut, and of course covertly reviewed The World Of Arthur Russell in my 1985 article.

But Jennifer Warnes – for so long Leonard Cohen’s musical alter ego/conscience – isn’t she just transcendent when duetting with Russell on “Keeping It Up” or “That’s Us/Wild Combination” (note also the musical overlap between the latter and the intro to “Born Slippy,” not to mention the massive debt Underworld clearly owe Russell for things like “The Platform On The Ocean” – those cut-up lyrics, the voice doubling back on itself – or the most SUBLIME and WARM use of the trombone in pop outside Cedric Im Brooks and the Light of Saba)? A tremulous and reassuring voice; you just feel as if she’s cuddling you, but at the same time are inordinately turned on by her voice. I certainly am. Why can’t record companies make better use of this bloody amazing talent?

There’s much more to write about most of the above, not to mention the near-unmentionable brilliance of Sufjan Stevens’ Welcome To Michigan, the rancorous mischief of the Trash Palace album (so many great TUNES, the NepTUNES please take note!), the heartbreaking emptiness of Air’s Talkie Walkie, the hearty ebullience of the Franz Ferdinand album (better produced though the latter could have been – Tore Johansson doesn’t quite get it; Liam Watson or Martin Rushent might have done), the inestimable joy engendered by the forthcoming reissues by the People Band and Gilbert O’Sullivan, and don’t rule out Laura Veirs…more on all of this to come, but there is some necessary (well, life-saving) work that needs to be done next week – following which latest delay of death, I will talk some more.

KENNY WHEELER’S SONG FOR SOMEONE

“Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John Le Carre’s moles – who, planted in the heart of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him, and takes him for granted.”
(Greil Marcus’ review of Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stone, October 1979)

That is certainly neither the first nor last time that Fleetwood Mac – or, to be precise, Lindsey Buckingham – will be yanked into perspectival cohabitation with British improv on this website. Kenny Wheeler himself would almost certainly deny being a mole. He has described his big band compositions as an attempt to “write soppy melodies, laced with a bit of chaos.” Frustratingly – not least, I expect, for Wheeler – in the 36 years of his big band’s intermittent existence they have only been documented thrice on record, and for the last 14 years the only one available has been the most recent, ECM’s Music For Large And Small Ensembles (1990). The mastertapes of the other two, 1968’s The Windmill Tilter – made, strictly speaking, under the aegis and with the personnel of John Dankworth’s big band – and 1974’s Song For Someone (Incus 10, as was), had long been thought lost.

Gloriously, however, the mastertapes of the latter seem to have resurfaced as Song For Someone, Wheeler’s greatest big band record and one of the key British big band jazz/improv records of the last 40 years, has now been remastered by one of its key participants, Evan Parker, together with Martin Davidson, and is imminently due for reissue on the psi label. Having waited the best part of 25 years for this music to be made available again, this author almost wept when he saw the CD in his mailbox (for that is the prerogative of the music lover) – it is the equivalent of Celine and Julie Go Boating popping up as a Sunday matinee at the Clapham Picture House – and as equally blown away by the record (Melody Maker’s 1974 Jazz Album Of The Year!) as he was when he first heard it.

Examining the list of musicians playing on Song For Someone, one is instantly drawn towards the question: “Could a record/band like this possibly be made/exist now?” As with Tippett’s Centipede or Guy’s LJCO, however, the seemingly disparate castlist represents a gathering of the musicians with whom the bandleader had worked most closely in different musical contexts. In the case of Kenny Wheeler, this meant incorporating musicians whom he knew from his hard-bop days in the ‘50s and early-mid ‘60s and with whom he had associated in the various large ensembles of Dankworth, Harry South and Tubby Hayes – for instance, Ian Hamer, Keith Christie and Alan Branscombe; on the surface some of the unlikeliest names ever to appear on an Incus record – combined with his hardcore improv associates such as Parker, Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, and those who at the time (January 1973, recorded a fortnight before my ninth birthday) had a foot in both camps (Mike Osborne, Chris Pyne, Malcolm Griffiths, Ron Mathewson, John Taylor).

In fact Wheeler admits himself in his brief sleevenote that the aim of his big band was to bring together “special musicians from and into different areas of jazz…that is, the idea of the musicians came first, then the music.” Nonetheless, the band still had to function as a big band, which meant that a cast of strong ensemble players had to be formed to work with (and sometimes against) the more flexible improvisers, but also that the ensemble players themselves were sufficiently flexible and open-minded to dip a toe into freer areas. Useful comparisons can be made with Tubby Hayes’ 1969 fusion of big band jazz and free improv, 200% Proof, in which many of these musicians, including Wheeler, were involved. In both cases the musical architecture proves both imposing and loose, ready to change mood at a second’s notice.

But with Song For Someone there is a more gradual and insidious process of radicalisation which makes itself apparent throughout the suite’s 43 minutes. The album begins with the hard-hitting big band blast of “Toot Toot”; a restlessly swinging minor key theme jacked up to the point of anxiety by the superb writing for the iron men who constitute the trumpet section (Greg Bowen on lead, Hamer, Dave Hancock and Wheeler) and its counterbalance with the brilliant use of the voice of Norma Winstone as another horn – fittingly, on the personnel listing, Winstone gets second billing below Wheeler himself, listed with the horns. Although instrumentally the personnel is reminiscent of Gil Evans – heavy on mid and lower range brass (five trombones and a tuba) and light on saxophones (just three) – musically the writing tends more towards the Bill Russo/Bob Graettinger side of things, with forceful brass (no mutes were deployed in the making of this album) and, the occasional flute notwithstanding, no woodwind doubling-up. Thus the writing has a very pronounced emotional impact.

There are also two electric pianos – played by Branscombe (who seems to be on the right channel) and Taylor (on the left), which may be an askew nod to electric Miles but are put to slightly less ambient use here. On “Toot Toot,” Branscombe (on acoustic piano) takes up the thematic lead immediately for his solo, ducking and diving with Oxley’s wonderfully insolent guess-which-accent’s-coming-next drumming (the sort of thing which makes me wish he still did more of the straight big band drumming – he is absolutely brilliant at it, as indeed he is in his better-known improvising environments. Then Wheeler takes over for one of his trademark elliptical-but-mournful solos, sprightly jumping octaves like an uncertain leveret hopping across the cornfields at dawn hoping not to get shot. Finally, Taylor muses briefly at his Fender Rhodes before the theme comes back in. Note, however, how Oxley’s drumming is already indicating to us that this album isn’t going to go the way you think it might.

“Ballad Two” begins with one of those sombre brass chorales – no wonder David Sylvian was so keen to work with Wheeler; there are certain melodic and harmonic overlaps in the former’s writing – which resolves itself into a slightly slower 4/4 saunter. There’s an elegant solo by who I assume is Dave Horler, on valve trombone (irritatingly the sleeve, as with the original, doesn’t list individual soloists – most are, of course, easily guessable, but clarification of the contributions of the trombonists in particular would have been helpful). This leads to a balletic aqueous duet by Branscombe and Taylor, then a more reflective solo from Wheeler’s flugelhorn and finally a statement from the gorgeously warm-toned tenor sax of Duncan Lamont – though hear the next warning sign as the trumpets peak with a dissonant chord, flinging Lamont, Taylor, Mathewson and Oxley into semi-free territory. Lamont, however, is unshakeable, insists on some order as he improvises intelligently on the melody (rather than the chords) and interacts very subtly indeed with the rhythm section (hear especially his deadpan responses to Mathewson’s occasional frenzied arco leaps) – in best Warne Marsh-with-Tristano style, he is left to take the piece out on his own.

Then there is the very brief and beautiful title track, almost unbearable in its air of grieving, Winstone’s voice and Taylor’s piano anchoring the brass from different angles.

More sombre electric piano rumblings lead us into the bright waltz of “Causes Are Events,” but no sooner has the first thematic statement climaxed than Parker roars out of the traps on soprano for a free skirmish with Oxley. Even with the benefit of three decades’ hindsight and familiarity with the different strands of Britjazz and Britimprov, it’s still a startling climactic change, more so to be reminded of just how feral Parker’s playing could be at this stage in his career – his soprano spluttering out gnarled curlicues, rhythmic momentum still, I think, having the upper hand over motivic development (though the latter, if you listen closely enough, is in evidence). Oxley’s response is restrained; shadow-boxing Parker’s testimony.

The band then returns, thematic statements alternating with freely improvising subdivisions – compare with the various bands-within-a-band approaches used by Westbrook on Metropolis, another project involving Wheeler – now giving way to a partly free improvisation led by what sounds like Chris Pyne on trombone (what, one wonders, did the late Keith Christie, veteran of several Humphrey Lyttleton bands and the Christie Brothers Stompers, make of all this? Quite a lot, I suppose, otherwise he wouldn’t have been there), later to a substantially more troubled conversation between the two electric pianos. It is as though the darkening clouds are slowly encroaching upon the music’s original brightness.

Even this does not prepare us, however, for the album’s centrepiece and masterpiece, the 15-minute “The Good Doctor,” on which Parker and Bailey appear in full flow. They in fact begin the piece with some low-key free duetting – a modified howlin’ wolf blues for coyotes lost on the postmodern prairie – and one of the piece’s several moments of punctum occurs as the great, ominous wall of low brass slowly ascends into view behind them, the thematic statement shared between Winstone’s voice and Bowen’s elegant lead trumpet, and improvised upon by Wheeler’s increasingly agonised flugelhorn. Bailey’s guitar at times sounds as if it is weeping.

Then the piece modifies into a 6/8 electric piano-driven groove. The second theme – part-Spanish, part-Eastern sounding – is stated successively by flute/valve trombone/voice (Lamont/Horler/Winstone), lead trumpet/alto sax/voice (Bowen/Osborne/Winstone) and finally by the whole brass section. The impact is maddeningly exciting and overwhelming, Oxley’s drumming all the time stirring up the intensity even further. Finally the clouds part briefly for another solo trombonist – unmistakably Malcolm Griffiths – to declaim as the brass and rhythm continue to build up and burn behind him.

As this section climaxes, Branscombe and Taylor take us into a more conventional, though still far more complex than it sounds, 4/4 minor theme. Oxley and Mathewson continue to stoke up the steam as Mike Osborne steps forward to solo on alto, eventually bursting into free territory as he furiously trades blows with Oxley’s forceful percussion.

(And, incidentally, while I’m here, wouldn’t it be nice if the Thom Yorkes or Damon Albarns of this world who profess an interest in leftfield music could donate some of their considerable income to Hazel Miller over at Ogun Records so that we could have a Mike Osborne box set in the style of the superb Harry Miller tribute box set issued some five years ago? No, but wouldn’t it?)

Now worlds away from “Toot Toot,” this would be enough to climax any normal post-Ornette jazz record, but the intensity now climbs to a virtually unbearable peak as, following another brass fanfare, Parker (on tenor), Bailey and Oxley thrash their way back in to blow a beyond-awesome free meltdown. It’s still an electric shock to hear it on headphones; as a ten-year-old I remember running behind the sofa when I first heard it (this having been the first I had heard of Parker, Bailey or Oxley playing) – I was actually scared of it. And when, at the piece’s end, great cliffs of brass return against which Parker howls and screams in the trusty Pharaoh-with-Mantler’s-JCOA tradition, it is as if the entire history of jazz – fuck it, the entire universe - is being pulled down with them.

Nothing for it now except the finale “Nothing Changes,” a song sung straight by Norma Winstone which could comfortably fit onto any Desmond Carrington programme – the necessary calm after the phenomenal storm. Again, a gorgeous harmonic path down which Winstone muses (the lyrics are hers) about the nature of radicalism and newness. We have experienced catharsis and overthrow and now it is time for consoildation and meditation. But what a fantastic singer Winstone is – the punctum here comes at 3:33; the way she sings and stretches out the syllable “sad” in the line “things that will sadden you” as if she could lament no more gravely.

Listen to the whole thing and you will wonder why so many kudos are given to the well-meaning-but-let’s-be-honest-Dankworth-was-doing-this-in-1960 Matthew Herbert Big Band (much as I love most other things which the good Dr Rockit does) when Song For Someone remains stunningly contemporary in outlook, construct and delivery – all the more so when you consider how close to impossible it would be for a record like this to be made in today’s comfortably sectioned-off tapestries of music. A band which by contemporary parallels might include, say, Courtney Pine, Jamie Cullum and THF Drenching…you might need someone with the diplomacy and adventure of, ooh, Lindsey Buckingham to pull that one off.