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Philip Larkin's Jazz

Thu, 2 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The poet Philip Larkin was a passionate fan of jazz – or at least of certain jazz – and wrote wonderfully well on the subject. A four-CD set, called Larkin’s Jazz, collates many of his favourites. I reviewed it for The Word, August 2010.

Larkin’s Jazz
(PROPER RECORDS)

He was the balding, bespectacled man who put people in mind of a sombre Eric Morecambe. He spent his working days running a university library. His poems became a by-word for bleak, melancholy wit and bone-deep pessimism. What a treat, then, to read Philip Larkin’s jazz reviews – he wrote them for the Daily Telegraph from 1961 to 1971 – and find he was an ardent lover of the jolliest music of the 20th century.

Nothing spoke to Philip Larkin’s soul like a blast of Muggsy Spanier’s boys – I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate – or Duke Ellington’s East St Louis Toodle-oo. In late night listening sessions refreshed with pints of gin, his friends describe how a sort of ecstatic trance would lift Larkin to his feet, to shuffle and jerk across the drawing room, emitting grunts of unreflecting animal pleasure. It was the “hot” jazz of his boyhood, before the Second World War, that Larkin loved. For jazz modernists, for anything held to be progressive or challenging, he had only contempt.

In these four discs, compiled for the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death in 1985, we hear nearly a hundred of the tracks that made him happiest. The sleeve-notes quote from those brilliant newspaper pieces (which are also collected in his book All What Jazz – the best demonstration of the reviewer’s trade I can think of). We go from the first 78 he ever owned, Ray Noble’s half-hysterical 1933 track Tiger Rag, to the sounds that saw him through Oxford with his fellow buff and lifelong friend Kingsley Amis. In later years the pickings are thinner. Nothing, for Larkin, would ever match the stomping frivolity of Eddie Condon, rattling out I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll.

Though it all sounds now like a carnival of swing and innocence, even this early jazz once seemed barbaric to most music lovers. Larkin, like a lot of people, embraced the revolutionaries of his youth but turned reactionary thereafter. In his Introduction to All What Jazz, he ladles scorn upon John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, and then upon all 20th century modernism, from painting to poetry. His beef was with any art that needed “explaining”; Larkin loved whatever reached him physically. He regarded Louis Armstrong as far more important than Picasso. Of St Louis Blues (“the hottest record ever made”) he writes that “by the third chorus the whole building seems to be moving.”

His notorious attack on modern jazz became better known than all the warm reviews he had written. His one regret about All What Jazz was that “it seemed to type me as a disliker rather than a liker.” He had championed jazz when it was still looked down upon as primitive. Back in the 1930s, the enemy was snobbishness. But in the 1960s, Larkin concluded that jazz was much too respectable, guarded by a secular priesthood of academics and journalists. Larkin was of course a bit of a crank, though highly intelligent and waspishly readable. He recognised that he was, like most of us, prone to all the bias of nostalgia. But when he listened to Miles Davis he simply couldn’t hear a heartbeat. His idol Eddie Condon had said it best: “As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?”

Well, the schisms that once set jazz fans at each other’s throats – the beboppers and the tradders and the revivalists – are hardly big news nowadays. But Larkin’s fruity old favourites are still a joy to hear and do, indeed, come in the ear like honey. If you can, also seek out Larkin the record reviewer. The final paragraph of his essay in All What Jazz is perfect. He pictures, with tender respect, his Daily Telegraph readers. They are ageing, disappointed men, he supposes. In the mock-Tudor suburbs they live in dead marriages, with resentful wives and grasping hippie children. They are men “whose first coronary is coming like Christmas.” But a heartening few bars of that old-time jazz, perhaps, will briefly take them back to some brighter time and place.

All he wanted was to help them find it. Laughing clarinets from New Orleans, Kansas City shouters and bow-tied Chicago gangs with a four-square swinging beat… Jazz, for Larkin, was not a force for social progress but a respite from tedium and anxiety. He often said he could not bear to pass a day without it. Jazz reminded him that he was alive and persuaded him that life was worth the trouble. Shimmying through eternity in some marbled celestial hall, Muggsy Spanier and his famous sister Kate could seek no finer tribute.

The Beatles; Fooling With Fabbery

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Reviews of two attempts to revisit and re-interpret The Beatles’ music. The Yellow Submarine Songtrack is from Mojo, November 1999; the Love album is from The Word, January 2007.

(For an assessment of the Let It Be… Naked album, go here.)

Yellow Submarine Songtrack

Not the semi-instrumental soundtrack LP known to our forefathers, but a freshly re-mixed collection of the actual numbers heard in the movie.

If there is any corner of The Beatles' repertoire that we could reasonably call obscure – bearing in mind that even lesser-known B-sides such as Yes It Is or Old Brown Shoe tended to be on the back of million-selling singles – then it's the tracks consigned to their 1969 soundtrack to Yellow Submarine. The record was born with all sorts of difficulties: its entire side two was occupied by George Martin’s orchestral score, rather than by spanking new Lennon and McCartney songs; the group themselves were uninterested in the project; and the songs were frankly leftovers, tossed apathetically in the movie's general direction, not released until they were out of date and rendered obsolete by The Beatles' incredibly rapid progression.

Only a Fab fundamentalist, then, would object to any tinkering with the original.

While it would be a shame to lose sight of the old version – George Martin's instrumental suite was actually pretty spiffing – this new collection is clearly better, both in terms of its tracklisting and its sonic quality. On top of the songs specifically given to Yellow Submarine, such as Hey Bulldog, All Together Now and Only A Northern Song, we now get a batch of Beatle songs released elsewhere but used in the film, including Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Nowhere Man and Think For Yourself. It makes for an oddly random line-up, drawn as it is from disparate sources that range from Rubber Soul to Sgt Pepper, but a Beatle lucky dip is never less than serendipitous.

Of course a Luddite might dissent from the policy of re-mixing the music. Initially done to match the visual enhancement of the movie, the process has had Beatle blessing and loving Abbey Road attention, but still seems sacreligious. It's curious to hear Hey Bulldog, for example: the old sound was a kind of aural soup, the result of each layer getting summarised on 4-track. Your modern boffins can now separate the soup's ingredients, so to speak, and throw in added clarity – so Hey Bulldog is suddenly the sound of an actual group, with a drummer there, a singer here, and a guitarist somewhere else. It's almost de-mystifying to hear The Beatles reproduced in this way, and yet your deeper impression is of just how well they played and sang.

Not every revelation is welcome: the galumphing title track is a tiresome curtain raiser and Ringo's vocal is not a performance that begs for higher fidelity. But the Yellow Submarine tracks, throwaways or not, are individual marvels: they lift the film from its twee meanderings in Madison Avenue psychedelia, and don't disgrace themselves here in the illustrious company of Eleanor Rigby and Sgt. Pepper's overture. Best of all is George's oft-forgotten epic. It's all Too Much, the classic Summer of Love meeting between acid abandon and Eastern surrender of the self – though not of the royalties, obviously.

THE BEATLES: Love

Does anyone remember Stars On 45? They stank up the charts in 1981 with a soundalike Beatles medley, its soaring tunes all pinned to the floor by a cloddish disco beat. The science of fooling with Fabbery has come a long way since then, whether it be the official re-mix Let It Be… Naked or the highly unofficial mash-up of the White Album and Jay-Z by Danger Mouse. But if anyone has the moral authority to do this it’s George Martin, the band’s producer and sonic architect; now with his son Giles he has fused about 130 Beatle songs into 26 tracks, at the service of a Las Vegas show by the avant-circus troupe Cirque Du Soleil.

The results are reined in by the Martins’ policy of using only Beatle master tapes, with almost no additions – no chance, then, of a Revolution 9 dance mix – and by the dictates of the circus soundtrack. The show seems to have nothing of the early Beatles, no Hamburg rockers, and really only I Want To Hold Your Hand, with overdubbed screaming, to represent the mop-top times. It’s preponderantly the era between Revolver and Abbey Road that is re-worked here, sometimes from alternate takes. Love therefore captures The Beatles’ psychedelic zenith and bearded dotage, overlooking their zesty ascent from the Cavern.

Where Love works best is at its most daring: Ringo’s drumbeat for Tomorrow Never Knows galvanises Within You Without You. The fairground plod of Mr Kite is dramatically interrupted by that scything riff from I Want You (She’s So Heavy). And While My Guitar Gently Weeps receives a fine new string setting of the sort that Martin always excelled in. In fact his arrangement for Goodnight (which closed the White Album) recurs a few times on Love, most bravely as the backdrop for Ringo’s frail vocal from Octopus’s Garden. If some of the medley tracks are a bit too Stars On 45, then the subtler touches will absorb a Beatle-geek for months: I’ve just noticed the ghost of Nowhere Man inBlue Jay Way and there’s plenty more to discover.

Perhaps the weight of history hung heavily on the Martins’ shoulders; maybe the soundtrack requirements were too confining. Whatever, Love could have been 100 times more adventurous. You listen to four minutes of Here Comes The Sun and think “Very nice. But I already own it. Where’s the surprise?” A touch of tabla at the start and a sitar at the fade don’t really make for a revolution in the head. There are bound be fresh attempts in the future: commercial logic and the creative challenge conspire to make those Beatle tapes irresistible. A little less reverence next time?

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Charles Dickens: The Rigid Trousered Philanthropist

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Charles Dickens: The Rigid Trousered Philanthropist

A review of CHARLES DICKENS: A LIFE, by Claire Tomalin, written for the November 2011 issue of THE WORD (to whom I am indebted for the review’s title).

“Well she was just 17, you know what I mean.” So went the first lines of The Beatles’ first LP, in 1963. Had he not died 93 years previously, Charles Dickens would undoubtedly have pricked up his ears and understood precisely what they mean. Young girls fascinated our greatest national novelist. The untimely death of his beloved sister-in-law, aged 17, gave rise to a morbid obsession in the writer that would stalk both his fiction and his existence.
It’s not that Claire Tomalin, his latest biographer, is tacky or prurient about Dickens’s sexual life. She’s a properly serious writer, whose book on Pepys, The Unequalled Self, is a modern classic; if anything, she downplays the seamy side. But she’s also the author of The Invisible Woman, an eye-opening profile of Charlie’s young mistress Nelly Ternan (who was just 18, when he saw her standing there; he was 45). Tomalin knows better than most that our beardy literary hero was a man of guilty secrets as well as a writer of genius.
The erotic shenanigans were in part a symptom of Dickens’s extraordinary energy. Compared with him, we’re all slackers. His written output, in novels, journalism, correspondence and campaigning, was astonishing. Merely to read about his daily routine makes you fancy a little lie-down. He travelled incessantly, and could not even take a hotel room without re-arranging the furniture. He was also the patriarch of an ever-growing family: where the average Dad can hardly manage a Post-it note on the fridge, he’d write his children a full-length biography of Jesus Christ. Then he’d go for a 12-mile walk. One sleepless evening in London, he got up and marched 30 miles into Kent.
After teenage girls, whom he chastely idolised through characters like Little Nell, Dickens’s great love was London. A contemporary said, “He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.” So it’s surprising to remember that the capital’s greatest chronicler was not a native Cockney. His childhood home in Rochester still stands. Actually, it’s possible to look it up on Google Street View, where you can see the week’s recycling bags outside, and a pub on the corner with its Sky Sports banner.
Dickens’s adolescence was hard, materially and emotionally, and it scarred him: the jolly propagandist of the English family Christmas was in private a cold authoritarian. The callous treatment of Catherine, his inoffensive, permanently pregnant wife, was particularly unpleasant. A great social crusader, he seemed fonder of “the People” than of actual people. Having banished poor Catherine he led a secret life with Nelly, all the while denouncing Victorian hypocrisy in everyone else.
Apart from the Queen herself, he seldom met anyone as famous as he was, and perhaps his ego grew accordingly. Yet he was insecure, beset by scrounging relatives and frequently bad reviews. The man who moved his hotel furniture about was not simply restless: he was a control freak, who wanted everything – and everyone – re-organised his way. He could be jolly and gregarious, fond of his “fog and grog” (as he called cigars and booze), but he had to choose the party games. At the same time he was legendarily generous. Dickens was a complicated piece of work.
At least the work endures, all those amazing novels, so broad in their view of human behaviour and at the same time stuffed with vivid individuals. The stories were mostly written in monthly or even weekly instalments, requiring extraordinary feats of concentration and planning on the author’s part. The episodes were bought by an eager public, prepared to invest the time and intellectual effort required. Thanks to an emerging mass media, Dickens was one of the first “celebrities” in our sense. But he was not rich: in another modern parallel, he raged against the pirate editions that robbed him of royalties, and he was forced to tour for money. (The impassioned live readings that kept him solvent would also ruin his health.)
If you’re not familiar with Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield and so on, you could do far worse than try this book for an appetiser. For everyone else, or simply for fans of those pea-souper-and-heaving-corset TV adaptations, it’s the ideal companion piece. Tomalin coolly and engagingly sets out the world that shaped Charles Dickens, the same world that he laboured bravely to re-shape for the better. Be aware however that he’s an ambiguous national treasure. Personally, I found myself admiring the writer even more, while liking the man a little less.

Ian Rankin and Jackie Leven Interview

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

I interviewed the author Ian Rankin and the songwriter Jackie Leven for The Word, April 2004. They were appearing together at the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow.

You'll find some of my other Jackie Leven interviews here.

I.
A bitter North Britain wind garrottes the city of Glasgow and we concert-going souls are glad to be in the warm. All are wondering if the predicted blizzards will arrive this evening. And if they do, might that mean we’ll be snowed in until the morning? Up on the stage, the burly Scottish singer Jackie Leven tells us not to worry: he’s sure he’s got some vodka stashed away.

By his side, peering around the room, sits the slimmer and less flamboyant figure of crime writer Ian Rankin. He reckons a lock-in would have the makings of an excellent murder mystery. A fine case, in fact, for his most famous creation, the dogged Edinburgh cop Detective Inspector John Rebus. We slither uneasily in our seats.

Billed for this event as “Twa Twisted Fifers”, Jackie Leven and Ian Rankin are an unlikely-looking double act. The singer bestrides the stage with flowing mane and Jacobite knee-britches; the novelist is a tidy, precise man with a hint of Edinburgh reserve (the city down the road is Rankin’s adopted home). But as tonight’s experiment will prove, there are powerful affinities at work here. Not only are both men from eastern Scotland’s ancient “Kingdom of Fife”. The singer and the novelist are both fully-accredited tour guides to the darker side of the human soul.

Rankin is here to read his new short story, Jackie Leven Said, while the said Jackie Leven will sing a few numbers from his back catalogue at judicious points in the narrative. Rankin’s tale is of two brothers – Fifers, of course – whose paths in life diverge when one goes down to London to become a big-time but disenchanted pop producer. The other stays in Scotland, where he raises a family. The brothers reunite in Fife for the funeral of their mother and in the course of the week confront their vicious, embittered old Dad.

Thus the stage is set for themes of exile, masculinity, Scottish culture, violence, drink and poetry. If you had to sum it up in a word, you’d call it Levenesque.

In real life, the singer’s stormy pilgrimage goes back to his days as a psychedelic folkie who traded under the name John St Field (“I was in a little trouble with the forces of law and order”). Later he led a punk era band, Doll By Doll, who were ferocious and passionate – and desperately unfashionable. A big misfit of a man among the new wave boys, Jackie Leven drank and drugged more than anyone and when his career died he consoled himself with heroin. When he recovered he founded an addiction charity, CORE, supported by Diana, Princess of Wales.

He also commenced a series of imperious solo albums, mainly in a Celtic folk blues vein. Sung in a regal, stoical tone, the songs are poetic explorations of male mythology that have won him loyal pockets of admirers from Scandinavia to China: “I play about 130 shows a year,” he tells me. “It used to be 200 but they’re better paid now, so I don’t have to work so hard. I’ve got friends who work in Shanghai who say the records are in the big stores. China is a very imagistic society and people who liked the CD sleeves were buying them on spec and finding they liked the music too.”

He and Rankin first met up at the Edinburgh Festival, having already signalled their mutual admiration via name-checks for Jackie in the Inspector Rebus series and a credit for the novelist on an album sleevenote. “I thought Rebus would like Jackie’s music as much as I do,” explains Rankin. “They’re stories about disappointed hard men. Guys who are like stone on the outside but if you chip away for long enough you’ll get to what makes them humane. Rebus sits alone at night listening to Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, John Martyn. And Jackie is one of the most poetic songwriters I know. He’s an undiscovered treasure.”

Leven will soon repay the compliment with a song called The Haunting Of John Rebus. Of tonight’s short story he says, “It’s really heavy: seriously sombre notes of things between generations that will not be healed. I think its themes are pretty universal. I’m sure that much of it holds true in remote parts of China. But there is a very uncompromising east coast Scottish feel to these people. I know a poem about an old couple in a council house in Stirling whose old collie is dying, so the guy just takes it outside and drops the dog in the dustbin. He puts the lid on and looks up at the window where his wife is looking out. And she just nods with approval. And that’s the poem.”

Is that a Fife thing? Emotional reticence, and the male characters who battle to overcome it, seem to inform a lot of Leven’s songs.

“Yes,” he nods. “Reticent to the point that, when it bursts forth, it’s mighty in its joy and its need to conjoin. So we overdo it. That’s what the pubs are about. I really like that culture: it’s full of people having a holiday from that reticence.”

As Rankin says to me later: “Jackie Leven writes so well about Fife. About tough coal mining communities where you don’t let your feelings show because that’s a sign of weakness. I know when I was growing up there you had to at least pretend to fit in with the local gang. As a teenager I sat in my bedroom writing poetry, and sensitive song lyrics for bands that didn’t exist, and I had to hide it from my parents. I would have been less embarrassed to say ‘Yes Mum, I’m a drug addict,’ than ‘Actually, I’m a poet.’”

II.
At times you suspect “Celtic” has become no more than a new age marketing term. But tonight’s event is part of the well-regarded annual music festival Celtic Connections. And for these men it’s a real identity, still alive with magic and meaning.

“There is a Celtic idea,” says Leven, “that reality lies betwixt and between. So the space between the tree and the bark of the tree is the all-important space, and those spaces exist within us as personalities. A long time ago those spaces probably had names and were divinities, and I think that’s how the Celtic psyche works.

“There is a great saying, ‘Friendship desires structure.’ There is an affinity among people who share this Celtic feeling, a friendship which desires the structure of doing things like this Festival.”

And Ian Rankin: “There is a peculiarly Celtic way of looking at the world. You feel on the edge of things, not quite part of the bigger picture. The Scots felt for centuries their lives were being ruled from another country; the Bretons felt that Paris had nothing to do with them. But you’ve got your own culture and your own spirits – and I don’t just mean whisky.

“For the Celts there is a sense that there is another world hidden behind this one. The supernatural actually exists. Our lives are ruled by outside forces. There is a meaning to things that we can’t quite grasp. Everything connects to everything else: if we could see how all the pieces of the jigsaw fitted together then we’d have the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

“We have a dark sense of humour. We’re quite pessimistic, the best days are in the past. This is how Scots celebrate New Year: Auld Lang Syne, we look back, not forward. It can be dour. I get a sense of it in the music, the poetry, the literature that has come out of the country, Jekyll And Hyde, the Border Ballads, Burns.

“When I read Jackie’s lyrics I got a sense of that; there is a romantic heart to his music but it’s surrounded by a lot of people who’ve been pissed of by life. I think his own life would be a brilliant book – one man’s struggle against his inner demons and outside forces.”

He looks out the window of our Clydeside bar: “Glasgow is actually the more Celtic city: hot blooded, passionate and gregarious. Whereas Edinburgh, where most of my books are set, is clipped and tight-bodiced: Presbyterian rather than Celtic. Crime in Glasgow is when someone gets stabbed to death for wearing the wrong football strip – no mystery about it. But crime in Edinburgh tends to be conspiracies, things happening behind net curtains.”

This evening, as the Glasgow wind whips up along the ruler-straight streets that rise from the river, the pairing of minstrel and wordsmith works its warm enchantment. The characters in Rankin’s story are brought alive with an easy economy. There are no writerly pyrotechnics. While the singer himself does not appear in Jackie Leven Said, the fictional brothers quote their favourite lines of his in conversation: “It’s like that Jackie Leven song says, ‘It took me 50 long years just to work out / That because I was angry didn’t mean I was right.’”

With musician friend Michael Cosgrave on hand to add some textural keyboard accompaniment, Leven’s songs lend weight to the emotional nuances of Rankin’s tale. Alongside newer inclusions such as Man Bleeds In Glasgow are stirring Leven laments like Gylen Gylen from his heroically-titled album The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death.

When the performance is finished the two men engage us for another hour or so in conversation. Few would complain if we really did have to stay here all night.

But they end on a cautionary note. Apparently two punters were drinking in a Fife pub. One was doing the crossword.

“Stranded on a desert island?” he enquires.

“Marooned,” the other replies.

“Oh aye? In that case I’ll have another pint.”

“Ma roond,” you see. Like I said, these men know humanity’s darker side.

The Dusty Springfield Interview

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with Dusty Springfield for Mojo, July 1995. The meetings with one’s childhood idols are always the most satisfying, and she was the first pop star I’d ever seen. By 1995, although she was funny, warm and and sharp, she was dealing with illness. Sad to say, she died less than four years later.

Lately these have been the best of times and the worst of times to be Dusty Springfield. Her reputation has probably never been higher. The CD compilation Goin’ Back reminds everyone what a fantastic catalogue of hits she has had, and it sells like crazy. A while ago a courier turned up on her doorstep and to her surprise presented her with a platinum record for Son Of A Preacher Man, as used on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction soundtrack. “I was so thrilled,” she smiles. “I’d put it up if it matched my colour scheme.”

And she has made a new album, the first of her new deal with Columbia Records. When the company got a new MD, she says proudly, his first phone call was to her manager, asking if Dusty would sign.

On the other hand, she has been terribly ill, with cancer. “I’m all right now,” she says. “Definitely in remission.” Recording the album, she found herself getting tired quickly, and did not know why. Later last year she was diagnosed. Doing this interview she looked extremely well, and talked energetically for two hours. She only stopped when hauled away for a ‘phoner’ with America. But it’s unclear whether she’ll perform again. Perhaps she will. That would be great.

Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, London Irish, had her first hits with her brother’s trio The Springfields. He’d changed his name, Dion O’Brien, to Tom Springfield and she became Dusty. Island Of Dreams, which Tom wrote, remains a pearl of early British pop. She went solo in 1963 and commenced a brilliant succession of singles – In The Middle Of Nowhere, Some Of Your Lovin’, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me are just a few – characterised by grand arrangements and a vocal range that ran from husky softness to full-on drama queen spectacular. Her choice of songwriters, including Goffin/King, Bacharach/David and the young Randy Newman, was perfect.

Plus, beneath the hair and mascara, the famed Lady Penelope look, she was very hip. Son Of A Preacher Man came out of her soulful Dusty In Memphis sessions with Jerry Wexler. With her friend (and now manager) Vicki Wickham, who worked on Ready Steady Go!, she’d helped bring Motown to the UK audience. It was on her recommendation that Wexler signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic. There’s a wonderful black-and-white fragment of her singing Mockingbird on TV with Jimi Hendrix. Such a pedigree inspired the Pet Shop Boys to re-launch her fortunes with the 1987 smash What Have I Done To Deserve This?

But she had a parallel reputation for being Our Lady Of The Perpetual Tantrum. “Difficult’ was the verdict of many who worked with her. Her studio perfectionism is legendary, likewise the sharpness of her tongue. Her sexual ambiguity made her something of a gay icon – she has “the high class hard girl looks of Lily Savage” runs a recent write-up in Gay News – and her wayward life in LA in the 1970s and early ’80s pushed her even further away from MOR respectability.

Her new album, A Very Fine Love, may yet see her back in the mainstream. Made in Nashville, its style is ‘adult contemporary’ rather than country, and the first single Wherever I Would Be is a Diane Warren song performed with Darryl Hall. Nashville took her full circle, since she’d made a record there with The Springfields more than 30 years earlier. “But my instinct was not to stay,” she remembers. “I’d either be enormously rich or I’d have blown my brains out by now. I understood I would not be comfortable there because they don’t like women who fought their own case too hard. I was a very combative person and I couldn’t have won in there.”

Two moments of that trip were to permanently alter her course. One occurred in her Nashville hotel room when the radio played Dionne Warwick singing Don’t Make Me Over: “I had to sit down on the bed, fast, because I thought, Pop music’s never going to be the same again. I want to do that! And I knew I couldn’t do it in Nashville.” The other had happened in New York, en route to Nashville: “It was Tell Him, by The Exciters. I was standing outside the Colony Record Store on Broadway about 2 in the morning, hearing that voice, ‘I know – something – about love’ and going Wow! How do I do this? I knew it could work if I could adapt them in some way.

“And it worked because there was a space for me, and for all the early people. All of a sudden it opened up. I don’t know if the planets were lined up right or what. There was this musical void that we all fell into, without any calculation.” She and Tom dissolved The Springfields, and he helped launch The Seekers, producing them and writing hits such as I’ll Never Find Another You, Georgy Girl and A World Of Our Own. “My brother and I knew that if we were to have other careers then now was the time. He did very well. He’s far brighter than his songs would suggest. He had the wit to realise that he was writing very commercial songs. He’s capable of being cynical enough to do it and not believe in it, whereas I needed the emotional sense of believing in it.

“He doesn’t do a lot now and he’s as happy as I am, we’re both very restless souls, and there’s another motel down the road. That’s a family attitude. There’s no need in him to prove himself and, wonderfully, that’s been removed from me too,”

At 55, there’s a magnificence about Dusty, the brave, faded diva. She will not surrender yet. Except for her humour and shrewd self-awareness, she is comparable to Norma Desmond, the tragic heroine of Sunset Boulevard. She’s still big: it’s records that got smaller.

II.

Tell me about touring in the ’60s. You were the first pop star I ever saw. You were in a children’s pantomime at the Liverpool Empire.

“Ah, the good old Empire. Georgie Best asked me out at the Liverpool Empire! I would never do pantomime unless I could be a guest and not be involved, and I got away with it. I just did my act, curtain up and curtain down and good night. It was a slog to do it for 10 nights or whatever. That’s why I never did summer seasons. I have the attention span of a gnat.
“We had to do one-nighters everywhere. I have no super major nostalgia for it. We’re all nostalgic about what we listened to, but if you were actually doing it, being the singer, travelling, getting on the bus outside Madame Tussaud’s at 8 in the morning with your beehive done perfectly… And there weren’t any motorways, nothing was open after the show. It wasn’t that much fun to tell you the truth! Ha ha! I don’t mean to debunk it, but…”

When you look at the old TV clips, can you identify with the woman you see?

“A lot of my life has no real clarity. But I look at those clips and I remember the circumstances very clearly. Was I happy or not happy? If I don’t identify with the person, it’s because I invented her in the first place. She was an invention, but my own invention. I was my own Svengali.”

Is it true you produced your own records?

“Yes, in reality. The magic of my situation with Johnny Franz [her recording manager at Philips] was that he allowed me the freedom to follow my enthusiasm. He’d sit in the control room while I’d go out and scowl at the musicians. It was very difficult for them because they’d never heard this stuff before. I’m asking somebody with a stand-up bass to play Motown bass-lines, and it was a shock. The ones who thought I was a cow I didn’t work with again. The ones who wanted to learn with me, they had the greatest time. Johnny had played piano for Anne Shelton, and had perfect pitch. Bless his heart, he’d sit there and read Popular Mechanics. But he had good ears, he’d suddenly look up from Popular Mechanics and go, E flat!
“I never took the producer’s credit for two reasons. For one, he deserved it and I was grateful. And then there was the calculating part of me that that thought it looked too slick for me to produce and sing. Because women didn’t do that. And there remains in the British audience, though less so, that attitude of ‘Don’t get too slick on us. Don’t be too smart or we won’t love you.’ And I wanted to be loved.
“Men have been good to me. But I shouldn’t feel they’ve been good to me. They should have just bloody well listened. But in those days it was quite something to listen to a woman who had a musical mind. You sang the song. You sang it fast and cheaply. And they might take you out for a meal. I worked with some bastards, and some nice guys who saw that I knew what I was doing. A few of them went away and said what a cow I was, having made a great deal of money off me. And those are the people I don’t want in my life. I don’t want to sit at their dinner tables.
“That’s true to this day. I’m having my kitchen done and there’s a real idiot who fitted it, and it was two or three millimetres off. I don’t know how to put cupboards in, but I knew this was off. And the whole time there was this humouring of the little lady: There there, what does she know? I had to call a male friend and have him come down and say it was two or three millimetres off. Then it was: Oh! Course it is, guv!
“I’ve had very few fights with artists. I’ve had a few with club managers over, say, an out-of-tune piano. That ignorance, and lack of concern for the patrons of the club and the act would make me angry. I’ve had a few right old punch-ups. But the run-ins I’ve had with artists were always with groups, the pack instinct. They didn’t like the fact that I’d had a bit more applause, and they would be disparaging. Together they had that courage but if one of them passed me in the corridor he’d look down, embarrassed.”

Which groups?

“I actually don’t remember. There were so many, of various sizes, shapes and attractiveness. They all blur in my mind.”

Were you a hell raiser off the stage?

“Not in the early days. I would just sing the songs, try to find something to eat and go back to the hotel, though in those days they were probably boarding houses, or digs. I was a quiet person and still am, and a very private one. I never hung out – except there was a time in the Swinging ’60s when I was a real party animal. I don’t think that was the real me, it was just something that I thought I ought to do.”

What’s the story of your bust-up in South Africa, when you refused to play to segregated audiences?

“It was complex for me because I was also an idiot. I had convictions but I was also politically naïve. I found some people to agree with me including a promoter in South Africa, who found this loophole, which was that I could play live shows in a cinema. I didn’t know it was a loophole. At first it seemed too easy, all of a sudden I had a contract, and there was a clause that I could play to integrated audiences. It was academic anyway, black people didn’t have a clue who I was, a lot of people didn’t. By the time I got there, the South African government were waiting under the wing of the plane, thinking, A-ha, here comes a right one.
“I’d embarrassed them, and you didn’t embarrass the apartheid regime. Bit I didn’t know this, so I go floundering in, feeling quite righteous. And they tried to make me sign papers right there right under the plane wing. No! I’m not going to sign your bloody papers. There were some liberal papers and they sprang to my defence, and all this mayhem let loose. I played one concert in Johannesburg and I think there were three Asians there. What made me furious was they went around counting them. They put myself and the band under some form of hotel arrest. It was very nice, they kept sending up tomato sandwiches.
“I didn’t understand any of it, and I realised afterwards that I had made everything worse. Because that loophole had been useful. Now they closed it and I was their means to do it. So I was not a happy woman when I got back here. I’d put my foot in it.
“And then to have certain persons, who wanted to work in South Africa under any conditions, say Oh, she did it for the publicity… I was very hurt. Gordon, of Peter & Gordon, he came up with that line. That really brought it home to me how people get things wrong about me. Their understanding is so much the opposite of what happened that it never ceases to amaze me.”

You’ve always been credited with good taste in picking songs and songwriters. But you say you’re not interested in lyrics?

“If it’s not a ballad then it’s got to have enormous power, or an odd pattern. If it’s a ballad, it has to take me by the scruff of the neck. Which is how I found You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, when I heard it in Italian. My Italian is not good, but I’m deeply impressed when an audience stands up to applaud the instrumental, which they did in San Remo. That’s how I recognise songs. It’s not exactly difficult. It’s as if someone’s run a train through your stomach! It’s quite blatantly clear when something works.
“As a singer I work on my emotions anyway, which makes me very uneven, they dip and fall, dip and fall, dip and fall, which produces this nightmare. But because there is no consistency it also gives me the emotions to recognise something that’s going to work.”

In ’68 you made the Dusty In Memphis album with Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin. But Jerry Wexler describes it as a very tense experience, with your vocals eventually being added in New York. How do you remember that album?

“I hated it at first. I hated it because I couldn’t be Aretha Franklin. If only people like Jerry Wexler could realise what a deflating thing it is to say, Otis Redding stood there. Or, That’s where Aretha sang. Whatever you do, it’s not going to be good enough. Added to the natural critic in me, it was a paralysing experience. I was someone who had come from thundering drums and Phil Spector, and I didn’t understand sparseness. I wanted to fill every space. I didn’t understand that the sparseness gave it an atmosphere. When I got free of that I finally liked it, but it took me a long time. I wouldn’t play it for a year.
“Son Of A Preacher Man was just not good enough. Aretha had been offered it but didn’t record it until after I had, and to this day I listen to her phrasing and go, Goddamit! That’s the way I should have done it: ‘The only one, WHO could ever reach me’ instead of ‘the only one who could EV-er reach me’. Now, if I do it onstage I’ll cop her phrasing! It was a matter of ego, too: if I can’t be as good as Aretha then I’m not gonna do it at all.
“I wasn’t used to singing to a sparse rhythm track. To this day I prefer to sing last, after the strings have been written, because I get moved by a string line or an oboe solo and it will bring things out of me. I was the opposite of the normal thing which is to say, The singer’s the important thing, let’s surround her.”

By the 1970s you sort of fell away from the mainstream. There was heavy rock on the one side, or teeny pop and MOR on the other, and you were neither.

“I just plodded on making rather unsuccessful pop records in the States. Then I didn’t do it any more because I hated it. Every time I made a record the company got bought by another company, and there was a new budget that I wasn’t part of. I thought, If you’re going to buy this place out, giving my entire promotional budget to Yoko Ono, then I’m sorry, I don’t see the point. I’ll go and prune the roses. I’m not going to care so much that I destroy myself. I went with management that saw me as a ‘shan-toozie’ as Variety would have it and I did the nightclub circuit. I pulled it off sometimes but I was uncomfortable with it because it was… Vikki Carr. I didn’t have the stamina to do one night in Long Island, then the next you’re in Des Moines. Hats off to Engelbert if he wants to do it, fine, and he will always be well off. But I am a maverick and will probably never be terribly well off. I get bored too fast.

Is England your home again now?

“I would say so. Only Britain could produce Absolutely Fabulous. I haven’t forgotten how I missed England. For now, this is where I am, but my restlessness will take me somewhere else. I don’t know where. My life seems to take me where I’m meant to be, sometimes for disastrous episodes, but all of it is necessary. If it took me to Ireland I would be very happy.”

Because your family was Irish?

“Yes. Irishness is a state of mind rather than a geographic thing. I’m not English. My name is O’Brien and I’m glad it is. I’ve got nothing against the English and I’m glad I was born here. But I’m glad my mother came from Kerry and I’m glad my name is Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien and I can weep at Riverdance on TV, and it makes me laugh. As Ireland comes to life, there is such a vibrancy to the music, there is so much to draw on in their culture. I somehow think it’s Ireland’s time. But as my brother says, They’ll be late.”

III.

Dusty in Dublin? That might make a good album one day. There is another old black-and-white clip of Dusty, singing My Lagan Love and it’s beautiful. But for now she’ll see how the Nashville record goes. Its style is, like herself, rather mellower than before.

“All the things that have happened in my life are meant to happen. Having done the Rent-a-Diva bit, and having had some success with the Pet Shop Boys thing, there was no more mileage in it. I’m not a dance act. I felt if I was to do music again I’d have to be where I felt comfortable and I was allowed to be less of a diva. Where it wasn’t necessary for me to sound as if I was about to explode if I changed key one more time.

“If all this went terribly wrong, then bugger off, it’s no big deal. I dislike the music business because it’s about manipulation of people’s needs and hopes. Luckily I see past all that. They just don’t know that about me. I am the age I am and I’ve learned a lot. I wouldn’t make a bloody record unless I were enthusiastic, because it’s a lot of hard work, especially if you’re not feeling very well

“I’m still testing my own stamina and enthusiasm. If I get over-tired I think, Bugger it. While I’m doing it I’m thoroughly engrossed and I enjoy it. It’s when I get home and there’s nothing in the fridge I go, Bloody hell, I haven’t even been to the supermarket! What am I doing? I used to get caught up in everything, and I think I’ve grown out of that. Now I’m determined to have a good time.”

Time up, she gives me a big hug. Lastly she confides her present philosophy, directed at the music industry in particular, and probably at the world in general. “Oh, you know, it’s just… Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

Two Jackie Leven Interviews

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Here are two interviews with the late Jackie Leven, a great singer and songwriter who passed away in 2011.
The first was done for Mojo magazine’s edition of April 1994; the second appeared in The Independent on 26 April 1996. I’ve added a few quotes to the latter that we couldn’t fit in the original.
To round it off I’ve also included a short piece about Jackie Leven’s old band Doll By Doll. This was part of a piece in The Word, July 2009 (it was called “The Band Only I Like”), in which writers nominated favourite cult acts.
Finally a brief review of two albums Jackie made under his occasional aliases Jackie Balfour and Sir Vincent Lone.

Another of my Leven interviews, and with his friend Ian Rankin, can be found here.

(from Mojo)

“Dark hints of a savage past: gypsy blood and razor gangs…”

“Spring’s in the air, there’s magic everywhere / When you’re young and on drugs…” If you ever heard this lusty chorus coming from a minibus, somewhere on a British road in 1979 or so, then fret no longer. It was only Doll By Doll on their way to another gig. They’d bellow their perversion of the lovely old Marvelettes tune to lift their spirits. But sing-alongs were not, of course, the only means they deployed.

They had a lot to lift their spirits from: especially the almost total lack of recognition they got for their cruelly under-rated post-punk music. Their leader Jackie Leven is held by scattered, underground gangs of renegade Doll fans to be the legendary lost genius of British rock – a stirring Celtic soul singer (from “the Kingdom of Fife he’d always say) and a songwriter with a brutally compelling vision. Now Jackie Leven is back.

He was in those days a brooding, compelling figure: “I was unhappy, and determined to make an art out of that unhappiness,” he says. We were given dark hints of a savage past: gypsy blood, Scottish razor gangs, catastrophic marriages, trouble and drugs and, well, more trouble and drugs. He was truly heavy, yet eloquent; he’d scorn your “Babycham reality” and battle his psychic demons. He’d spout conspiracy theories and plan suicide.

By 1983 his band had fallen apart. One night he was attacked in a London street, sustaining broken ribs and a kick in the larynx. The doctor (“a top rock’n’roll throat specialist’) put him on anabolic steroids, to disastrous effect. He couldn’t use his voice, couldn’t bear music at all, nor even to be touched (“It was like I was covered in electric fur”) and in despair he turned to the next drug down the line: heroin. But he and his partner Carol cured themselves with an improvised holistic course of their own devising.

So impressed was their new doctor that he urged them to apply their methodology to help others. The pair set up an organisation called C.O.R.E. (Courage to stop. Order in life. Release from addiction. Entry into new life.) They run it to this day, and it’s very successful. Princess Diana is their most prominent supporter. Nobody who remembers the old wild-man Leven can fail to be amazed by him today; soberly dealing with council committees and the Princess of Wales’s equerry. But he’s still eloquent: “Sometimes we say that someone is a ‘a shadow of their former self.’ Well, I’m the self of my former shadow.”

Soon the music was running through Leven’s veins the way it used to. A reunion with two former Dolls and Sex Pistol Glen Matlock in a short-lived band (Concrete Bulletproof Invisible) was the first step. Then he found his writing stride on long walks through Western Scotland, whence he’d gone for rest, renewal and the company of people more real than the London music business tends to supply. Hence the new record on Cooking Vinyl, a mini-album of five “Songs From The Argyll Cycle”. It’s a Scotland-only release (“part of my thank-you to Scotland for being there, picking me up firmly and sending me on my way with a bang on the ear”) but there’ll be full UK release and live dates soon enough. The new tracks are as moving as his best work.

This year will see another Leven album, made with the American poet Robert Bly, author of Iron John and head of the “Men’s Movement”. This story is curious. In the early 60s Jackie was expelled from school over drugs (“I was the first schoolboy in Scotland to get bust”); the headmaster let him back in, but only on the barbarous condition that nobody spoke to him. Driven by solitude to the school library, Jackie picked up the books of Robert Bly; they affected him deeply, and echoes of Bly can be heard in Doll By Doll (“Eternal is the warrior who finds beauty in his wounds”). But he forgot Bly. Then a while ago his partner Carol left him, having fallen in love with the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard. The bodyguard gave Jackie some tapes to listen to as he retreated in pain to Scotland. The tapes were of Robert Bly…

Today Jackie Leven is the UK organiser of Bly’s movement (he’s even been on Gloria Hunniford’s show in that role). “It’s not for everyone. Unlike feminism it’s not for the entire gender. But it’s for men who want to change. It’s not new age, either. Everyone talks about enlightenment, but what’s wrong with endarkenment?”

That’s not quite all. While there is talk of finally reissuing Doll By Doll on CD, Jackie’s other job is to promote his own-brand single malt whisky, Leven’s Lament (“The Lonely Spirit Of The Glens”). He’s played some dates with his band, Shivering Blaze, where a nip of the drink was offered at the door. His interest in distilleries goes back to childhood, when his Dad wrote an encyclopaedia of the hard stuff. He hopes to do a music-and-tastings tour of Oddbins shops.

He also intends some work with Waterboy Mike Scott (a generous C.O.R.E. supporter – they’re naming a library after him). And there’s a poem he’d like to record with Van Morrison: “I’ll ask him. He might say no, but I think he’ll like it – it’s about jugs.”

(from The Independent)

Queen of Our Hearts or not, the Princess of Wales has loyal support in at least one corner of the kingdom – a drug-addiction centre off the Marylebone Road. Diana’s portrait hangs in reception at the CORE Trust, a charity she has endorsed enthusiastically. Beneath the painting stands CORE’s co-founder Jackie Leven, the one-tome vocalist of the “psyche-punk” band Doll By Doll. When Leven’s not helping addicts, he is a philosopher of the Men’s Movement, a whisky-seller and the purveyor of magisterial Celtic soul music.

Diana and this reformed wildman make an unlikely couple, but it’s no unlikelier than anything else in Leven’s life. A tall, barrel-chested Scot, he strides around London in Boswellian knee-britches. His early life was a litany of delinquency, disastrous relationships and doomed attempts at rock’n’roll stardom. Genuinely charismatic on stage, his tenure in Doll By Doll came to a terrible end in 1983 when he was brutally beaten up. Nursing broken ribs and a trashed larynx, he sank into heroin addiction. And yet he devised his own holistic cure, forming the methodology that he used to help others at CORE (an acronym for Courage to stop, Order in life, Release from addiction, Entry into new life).

But then Leven’s girlfriend left him, running off with the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard. Perhaps by way of apology, the bodyguard sent Jackie some tapes of the American poet Robert Bly, famous now as the author of Iron John and figurehead of the US quest for male identity. Leven remembered Bly’s writing. He’d devoured it as a boy, serving a term of solitary confinement in the school library following a drug offence (“I was the first schoolboy in Scotland to get busted.”) With typical intensity, he sought Bly out, became his friend and now, as well as running CORE and making music, he is the UK spokesman for Bly’s Men’s Movement.

“There is a lot of shit talked about it, as with anything else” says Leven in his Fife burr. “What I like is its common sense. You don’t get many New Men in this work. It’s absolutely non-guru. Bly’s thing is, ‘It takes the lover to get into a relationship, but the warrior to stay in it.’ There will always be guys that it’s not right for. It’s not like feminism where you’re trying to get every bastard to do it. If you’re happy just trying to keep your boyish charm together, then fine. But if you’re interested in moving from boyhood to manhood then it’s fascinating work.”

Fans of the old, rather menacing Leven can be reassured that he has not gone New Age: “Working in the therapy world there is a lot of emphasis on enlightenment. But what about endarkenment? Spirituality is always in the ascending direction, and there is a lack of emphasis on the soul direction, which is down. Once you forget about shadow you only make it stronger and angry. One should never underestimate the primitive energies that can get unleashed in geezers who’ve spent their whole lives being nice. People who come into this work want not to be nice for a while.”

He confirms that he is “not a herbal-tea type person.” In fact, he has yet another project, sponsoring his own brand of single-malt Scotch whisky. Called Leven’s Lament (“the Lonely Spirit of the Glens”) it’s sold well in Selfridges and Harrods, apparently: “And I’ve just had a load of Scandinavian journalists over, getting paralytic.” On a recent album sleeve he thanked, not God or his manager, but 20 different bars. “They’re important places, where I’ve had splendid moments of reverie,” he says. “You’re allowed to think about your life. When I was a boy Ted Heath came to our school and I was introduced to him. He said, What do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I’d like to be one of those wee men you see standing outside the pubs in a wee flat cap. To his credit, Ted Heath just laughed. But the headmaster didn’t.”

Such a boozer-friendly outlook is unexpected from the head of an addiction charity. But Leven says of CORE: “We’re not about abstention, like the 12-step programmes. We’re about reaching a point where you want to learn about what you’ve been doing and wanting to change. You don’t have to give stuff up unless that’s your choice. A lot of people who still take heroin are fantastically successful, more so than people who just watch TV and want to talk about Cracker.”

Now in its tenth year, CORE employs 10 staff with 30 therapists on call. Princess Diana aside, it’s had backing from public bodies and private benefactors such as John Paul Getty Jnr, Genesis, Pet Shop Boys and Eric Clapton. Funding is a recurrent headache, but Leven’s music business connections have been invaluable. The former Waterboy Mike Scott has even donated a library to the CORE HQ; he describes Leven as “an old-style gentleman, cultured and charming with a touch of the rogue. A man of passion.”

Music is still the first of Jackie Leven’s passions, however. His newest album is The Argyll Cycle Volume One, including songs that he wrote in Scottish seclusion, recuperating from the horrors that he had suffered in London. Sung in a strong, clear voice, it’s modern folk music to soothe scarred psyche. Now he plans an album entitled Fairy Tales For Hard Men, inspired by the tensions he perceives in Scottish masculinity. “I suspect we haven’t got over the whole Culloden experience, the subjugation to English will… Everyone’s got a story. You either think there’s a universal value in your story, or you don’t. People are on different trees and I’m on the tell-your-story tree, because I’m a good story-teller. And I’m always looking for trouble.”

(from The Word)

The Band Only I Like: Doll By Doll

I don’t know why so many people disliked Doll By Doll. I saw them at the old Marquee club in 1979, and thought they were a revelation. Here were four scowling bastards who played with a bitter rage you couldn’t fake. Every song was a howl of pain that somehow blossomed into supernatural beauty. Their chieftain, the physically imposing Jackie Leven, sang these wounded macho psycho-poems in the finest Celtic soul voice I had ever heard. I joined the NME staff and was nearly the only fan that Doll By Doll ever had in the music press. The much more influential critics despised them and – crucially – so did John Peel. Without the support of “Peelie” and a few NME front covers you were scuppered in those days. And Doll By Doll intimidated everyone. They were rumoured to be the musical front for a London-Scottish cult of razor-wielding alcoholics. Which, to be fair, was partly true. When I got to know them personally I learned they were basically decent people, but to post-punk’s taste-makers they were just too old, too mad, too psychedelic and too disturbing. After four unsuccessful (yet immensely listenable) albums they split up in 1982. With typical bad luck it took about 25 years to get their music on CD, during which time they dropped out of rock’s collective memory. But Jackie Leven survived his heroin phase to become a beloved solo artist, a folk mystic and glorious story-teller. It’s maybe as well the band failed. With enough spending money, Doll By Doll would probably have killed themselves.

(from The Word)

JACKIE LEVEN
(As Jackie Balfour) Chip Pan Fire
COOKING VINYL
(As Sir Vincent Lone) When The Bridegroom Comes (Songs For Women)
COOKING VINYL

Pub yarns and plangent ballads from Fife’s First Troubadour.

So prolific has Jackie Leven grown that he’s using alter-egos to avoid a glut. As Jackie Balfour, Chip Pan Fire collects a batch of those on-stage anecdotes he tells to deadly effect, plus some lightly-disguised tales of his early life on a Scottish local paper. Years of small-club stagecraft have honed his stories to perfection: farcical and poignant by turns, they show how much the spoken word becomes him. Meanwhile, as Sir Vincent Lone, he returns to music with When The Bridegroom Comes (Songs For Women). Although solo, this is full-strength Leven by another name: warmly masculine vocals and resonant, poetic songs. A great version, also, of Jackson C. Frank’s Blues Run The Game. The sleevenotes are by his Fife contemporary Gordon Brown – well, it says so here – who commends “the man’s deep appreciation of the pathos which underpins our common struggle.” So even politicians can sometimes get it right.

Amy Winehouse: A Memoir

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Following Amy Winehouse’s death on 23 July, 2011, The Word magazine asked me to revisit the piece I wrote for them in 2004, adding some reflections on her sadly-curtailed career and an assessment of her music. This piece appeared in The Word’s issue of September 2011.

It’s a cold, bright morning in Camden Town, early in 2004. Amy Winehouse walks into her neighbourhood tapas bar and lights the first of many cigarettes. She’s a brand new pop star with a talent that promises she’ll be around for decades to come. That’s what the media thinks, and the music business, and the fan-base that has begun building around her. The only person who doesn’t appear to buy into this sunny forecast of never-ending success is Amy Winehouse.
These were the last few weeks of her life in which Winehouse could still walk around London without starting a media firestorm. Her debut album, Frank, had emerged a few months before and was slowly gaining attention. But she could already turn heads. Though she was far smaller than the Amazonian figure she seemed in photos, she had the warrior-princess features, the glossy black mane, the hourglass curves. More than that, there was such intensity to the girl. We took our table just before the café received its first lunch-hour customers; I was struggling to realise this girl had only just turned 20 years of age.
I was interviewing her for The Word and researching my book on London pop, In The City. Our venue was in Parkway, opposite a big old-fashioned pet shop – in those days a Camden landmark as much as the Good Mixer or Hawley Arms pubs. Amy was a nervous interviewee, tense and self-critical rather than hostile. I’m glad we met in the days before the smoking ban. So much of her conversational drama was signalled by the desperate searching in her bag, the pause for a nicotine hit, the fierce exhalations afterward. At one point she interrupted me to rummage furiously among her keys, mobile and make-up, to produce a little notebook. Mid-sentence she had an idea for a lyric and had to write it down. If not, she told me solemnly, she would go mad.
The next hour was fascinating. There is a temptation to retro-fit interpretations, in the light of what happened after. But even without hindsight, one knew this was a headstrong young woman, very bright and often funny, torn between ambitious perfectionism and her fear of failing. Amy’s unease with life was palpable, and found an outlet in confrontation. She was under oath not to shoot her mouth off today. Attacks on her record company were starting to jangle nerves. Viperish comments about Dido were causing embarrassment. Only a few months before she had told the Evening Standard, “I couldn’t go to the Smash Hits poll winners concert without bringing a gun.”

Like Van Morrison and Elvis Costello before her, Amy Winehouse had been drilled in music history throughout childhood – and she was similarly impatient of anyone not up to speed. Raised in the North London suburbs she absorbed her jazz-loving father’s tastes and explored her older brother’s collection. Through her American mother she had connections in New York, Miami and Atlanta. Yet she denied that she had been spoon-fed: “You discover music the most when it’s music that no one tells you to listen to… I’d have told them to fuck off. I’ve always been a rebellious person.”
Steeped in classic American songcraft, she learned technique. Surrounded by modern hip hop, she acquired attitude. And those two qualities would serve her well. On Frank we heard the funky melisma of a jazz veteran meeting the glottal stops of a mouthy teenager on the Piccadilly Line. Frank, in fact, was indirectly named after Frank Sinatra (it’s a reference to his LP of heartbreak, In The Wee Small Hours), so I asked her what she loved about him. But she didn’t love him, she snorted!
And without missing a beat she reeled off a list of singers she found superior: “Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Annie Ross, Carmen McRae, Mel Tormé, Bobby Darin, Wayne Newton, Louis Jordan… Sammy and Dean were better than Frank.” Though I suspected she was being contrary for the fun of it, her knowledge and confidence were impressive. It’s likely this approach helped get her expelled from a succession of stage schools. “I’ve never been to a school that I came away happily from, ever,” she added, somewhat sadly.
Like Kate Bush, Amy Winehouse was talent-spotted in her teens and nurtured for a few years before being launched. It took a Brit nomination to really spread the word about Frank, but no-one who discovered that deep, supple voice and those mordant, observational songs would soon forget them. Here was a performer to reclaim the largely disused description “soul”, adding emotional heft to stories rich in everyday detail. I asked her if she was pleased with the album. It’s one of those rather bland questions you present to interviewees when you’re easing them in.
But her response was not bland. Her expression darkened. The whole subject seemed obscurely troubling to her. “If I’d been 100 per cent satisfied then I could have relaxed and gone on holiday for six months. But it’s a constant thing for me to better myself. I’ve got a clear ambition now, to make a record of what I hear in my head.” The trouble with Frank, she explained, was that she had to make it with people – people older and more experienced than her – who could not hear what she heard in her head.
“I know what I want to do before the other person is even in the room. Maybe in years to come I will be a good collaborator but at that point I was, like, Look, here is my music. We need brass on this, or that needs to be faster. And I don’t want strings. If you want to work with me and you love strings, then go home.
“I probably earned a reputation as a difficult person, because I wrote my own songs and I didn’t need people in the studio with me. Not to be rude, but these people would be trying to write pop songs! And I would say, Who are you writing for? What session are you on? Get out! But then I’d waste a day trying to be nice to the person. I’d waste studio time letting them do what they wanted, because I thought it would be the polite thing to do.”
She stabbed moodily at her tapas. Amy had these huge eyes that went from hearth-warm to fridge-cold in a second. “You learn as you go along.”

III

What a formidable and complicated girl. She really did learn, too. The next album was Back To Black and it was her masterpiece. Released in October 2006, it was partly produced by the new whizz-kid Mark Ronson (with remaining tracks by her existing collaborator Salaam Remi) and this time the acclaim was instant. She would even succeed where countless British acts have failed, by charming America. Perhaps they divined that Winehouse was more than just a Limey student of R&B: she was an actual living exponent.
The carnage of car-crash romance was smeared right across these new songs: “Life is inspiring,” she’d promised me, when I asked if all her ideas were used up on the first album. “I don’t want to make a second album talking about record companies and stuff. The thing that always drove me with Frank was human interaction and that will always drive me. Relationships and how fucked up they can get. I guess that’ll always inspire me.”
Fucked-up relationships. She certainly did her research. By now a tabloid property, Winehouse could not live any portion of her life in complete privacy, nor rely on the discretion of people she had known. And as a confessional singer-songwriter she threw her own fuel on the flames. If the songs on Back To Black were self-absorbed, it was because their creator had become her own raw material. Now she was stumbling through her mad, strobe-lit existence – and occasionally stopping, I would guess, to retrieve that little notebook from her handbag. Perhaps a quieter life would have left her nothing to write about.
Looking back at the second album I realise that it begins with a track called Rehab and ends with one called Addicted. Ideally you would hope to see them in the reverse order. But Amy’s life-story would not conform to our modern requirement for “a journey”. Here was no neat narrative. Here was no direction forward. Somewhere about this time her problems were no longer channelled, productively, into her art. From now on there was always another party, another dealer, another show to cancel, another album to postpone.
Rehab itself evolved from a real-life conversation she had with Mark Ronson, and it’s almost a shame how catchy the song is: Rehab will probably define, forever, a particular aspect of Amy Winehouse that is not the most glorious or important. Like a lot of British pop stars, especially Londoners, she had an instinctive gift for self-styling: the tattoos and tottering heels, the Cleopatra eyes and Spector-girl beehive were a spectacular re-invention of her look. But the dramatic loss of weight was unsettling. You didn’t have to read the tabloids to guess something was unravelling.
I found her live shows were never consistently good. The last time I saw her, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in May 2007, was in some ways typical. It was a replacement for an earlier date she’d blown out. Tonight she was late onstage and sounded confused. When she’d reach down for her drink you were unsure if she could haul herself upright. There was heckling, slow hand-clapping and a dissatisfied atmosphere.
But then the gig was actually stupendous, boosted by the theatrical and musical power of her soul band the Dap-Kings. At the party afterwards, where Paul Weller caroused with Noel Gallagher and Amy’s family held regal court, the woman herself could mingle almost unnoticed, so tiny and quiet when she chose to be. She was the only person there who wasn’t celebrating.

Could anyone have helped her? Possibly. But don’t forget that Amy had been saying “No no no” since childhood. Biddable she wasn’t. Will she be remembered? Certainly. In British female terms alone she ranks with Dusty Springfield. Adele has been the first to give her unstinting credit for her influence. Will we hear more? That depends on what is salvageable from her final sessions. There is also a duet with her idol Tony Bennett, recorded just before the end. (“I'm worried about her and I'm praying for her," he reported at the time. "She'd help everyone by sobering up and cleaning up her spirituality.")
It’s a colossal shame she never fulfilled her potential. Maybe she thought: what if I did miss a few performances? Wasn’t I giving the public a performance every time I fell out of a club and slapped a paparazzo? Amy had set herself such high standards that stoned oblivion must have seemed the easiest option. When you don’t try, you can at least pretend that you didn’t fail.
Back in the Camden tapas bar in 2004, her love for London, the city where she would die in 2011, was evidently deep and she spoke of it cheerfully. Her mood only changed when I returned to the subject of her work. She told me, with more gravity than a 20-year-old should have, that singing no longer made her happy.
“I’ve always sung. When I was growing up and having the pain and suffering that teenagers do, when you think the world hates you because you’re 15, I could sing like a little bird. I can’t sing like that no more. I’m too complacent. They gave me too much free shit…”
What do you mean, they gave you too much free shit?
“They put it all on a plate. I feel like I’ve got nothing to work for sometimes. Even though I’ve got lots to work for.”
She lights a cigarette and shrugs.
“Yeah. Anyway… Amy, chill the fuck out. I’m sorry.”
Do you feel pressurised by all the weight of expectation around you?
“A little bit. But that’s myself. No one could be a harsher critic than myself. I am feeling that pressure. There are days when I wish I could just take a break from my own head.”
She blows out hard, hot cigarette smoke. She suddenly seems 65 years old.
“There’s nothing real in it, nothing real. Which really drains me. But you know what? It’s gotta be done.”
She gave me a tired, trouper’s smile and walked out into Parkway, where the big old-fashioned pet shop advertised its parrots, monkeys and other exotic but imprisoned creatures.

POSTSCRIPT: FIVE SONGS

(There Is) No Greater Love (from the album Frank, 2003)
A 1930s jazz standard, which Amy may have heard covered by Billie Holiday or Dinah Washington. The latter is one of the immortal names she thanks in the album credits, a gesture that might smack of adolescent hubris except that her own delivery of such songs is exquisite. It’s just a whisker above two minutes long, which bespeaks the confidence of knowing your song is genetically unimprovable.

Take The Box (from the album Frank, 2003)
If she had never sung a note, Winehouse could have made it as a songwriter. This is a perfect break-up number, wherein everything from a Sinatra CD to “the Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas” gets chucked in a cardboard box when a warring couple split up.

Back To Black (from the album Back To Black, 2006)
Mark Ronson wraps the second album’s title track in a sort of Motown funeral march, while the church bell tolls in a heartbroken nightmare.

Love Is A Losing Game (from the album Back To Black, 2006)
We’re yet to hear the posthumous releases, if any, but this will surely stand as her greatest song. Almost impossible to believe it wasn’t written several decades ago, designed for anyone from Peggy Lee to Minnie Riperton. And it’s yet another of her tracks that clocks in at under three minutes. This song, not Rehab, is the real core of Back To Black.

Valerie (from Mark Ronson’s album, Version, 2007)
It wasn’t all torch song tragedy and late night melodrama. A rare post-Back To Black session finds her lighten up with Scouse indie pop by The Zutons. Maybe she occasionally needed the emotional freedom of other people’s songs, dropping off the baggage she could fly. Try also to hear her riotous take on the knockabout ska favourite Monkey Man.

A Beatle Bookshelf

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A selection of books about The Beatles, reviewed down the years for Mojo magazine. They are:
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles’ Dress Rehearsal
The Beatles And Some Other Guys, by Pete Frame
The Quarrymen, by Hunter Davies
The Beatles: The Dream Is Over, by Keith Badman
Beatles For Sale, by David Rowley

From Mojo August 1997
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles’ Dress Rehearsal, by David Magnus
Thirty years ago this summer The Beatles made a live TV appearance to more than 300 million people worldwide. The new song they played that evening – Sunday, 25 June 1967 – was All You Need Is Love, and in just four minutes it became the universal anthem of its era. But it was not The Beatles’ plan to make pop music history: they only wanted to have a party. Famous friends were invited and beautiful people were summoned from London’s most exquisite nitespots. Abbey Road’s enormous Studio One was the venue, and the BBC – broadcasting the event for a global satellite link-up called Our World – supplied the revellers with cheap red wine. This month, a new book commemorates that party with many rare pictures by a young photographer, David Magnus, and the recollections of some who attended. The BBC’s Steve Race, a well-disposed if ageing straight, was the night’s commentator: flitting about him were the social butterflies of newly-born psychedelia. He remembers that the guests “included some of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life. The most rivetingly pretty turned out to be Pattie Boyd.” The Beatles’ assistant Tony Bramwell recalls Eric Clapton arriving with a freshly-permed Afro, in fashionable homage to that season’s sensation Jimi Hendrix. Also, “everybody had bells, so there was a lot of jangling.” Mick and Keith were in attendance, too. Commissioned by NEMS to record the whole event, David Magnus photographed the two days of rehearsals; The Beatles larked with their orchestra’s gear and prepared the hand-made signs that said All You Need Is Love in various languages. Of all his photos, he is fondest of those with Brian Epstein: with a rare lack of stiffness, the manager goes tie-less, and beams happily at his boys. But two months later Brian was dead, an apparent suicide, and these are the last pictures of him with his beloved Beatles.

From Mojo August 1997
The Beatles And Some Other Guys, by Pete Frame
Everyone knows what Pete Frame’s Family Trees are like. Scarily careful, detailed beyond belief, they make the Book of Kells look slapdash. On a rational level, we shouldn’t want to know most of the information they contain. And yet, we do. Show us the shifting permutations of Spooky Tooth, or the dramatis personae of Skip Bifferty, and we’re lost to the trifling world outside. The appetite grows by what it feeds on, and we welcome another volume. Now it’s the turn of Liverpool’s Cavern bands, with updates on their 1980 counterparts in the Bunnymen generation, and McCartney’s solo bands; plus the R&B boys in London, and Van Morrison’s Them in Belfast. Step forward, Wump & His Werbles (“Wallasey based,” lasted 11 months). Stand proud, Terry McCusker of The Roadrunners (“ex-Valkyries, later a Fruit-Eating Bear”). You are not forgotten, and thanks to this book, you never will be.

From Mojo June 2001
The Quarrymen, by Hunter Davies
The biggest surprise about this book is that it really is about The Quarrymen. John, George and Paul are merely three members of an early line-up; The Beatles are treated as an offshoot from the family tree. The real stars of the story are blokes called Colin, Len, Rod, Pete and Eric, who were also early Quarrymen, but who re-formed the band in 1997 to play at Beatle conventions around the world. In the years between they led lives as ordinary as their former bandmates’ lives were extraordinary, and quietly played down their parts in the rudimentary skiffle group they’d joined for a teenage lark. The journalist Hunter Davies, whose authorised 1968 biography is the granddaddy of Beatle books, relishes this return to one of his story’s footnotes; he follows the fortunes of the “other” Quarrymen with empathy and benevolence.
So far as mainstream rock history goes, only the opening chapters are of much relevance, replenishing our stock of teenage Beatle yarns. After that the book is becalmed in provincial obscurity, as one Quarryman becomes a Civil Servant, another an upholsterer, and so on. (Only Lennon’s friend Pete retains a toehold in show business, helping to run Apple before launching a chain of restaurants called Fatty Arbuckle’s.) It’s the final chapters, however, that really entertain. Now in their 50s, Colin, Len and co are coaxed on to the mop top nostalgia circuit. Dusting off those old Lonnie Donegan licks they evolve, to their own surprise, into a real band at last, albeit a ramshackle hybrid of Dad’s Army and Spinal Tap. We leave them blinking in the flashlights of Fab-fans’ Instamatics, wondering what brought them from Penny Lane to this. Somewhere at the back of their heads, The Beatles probably feel the same.

From Mojo January 2002
The Beatles: The Dream Is Over, by Keith Badman
Badman’s last Beatle book, After The Break-Up, pulled off the difficult trick of bringing something new and useful to the genre. It was a simple idea, too – just a chronology of their activities since 1970, tracing their uneasy passage from Fab Four to Four Fabs. (And thence, of course, to Three…) His new book is by way of a companion to its predecessor, serving up the quotes from all those press cuttings he presumably used in his research. You could argue that he’s taking two bites at the same cherry, then, but the Beatle cherry is particularly fat and juicy, and their solo careers are much more interesting than conventional wisdom has it. It’s a pity that he largely limits his sources to Fleet Street periodicals, where the writing seldom conveys a real flavour of the music being made in these years. Weird, too, that Lennon’s death gets less coverage than Paul’s return to the Cavern in 1999. That apart, Badman’s earning a place alongside Lewisohn in the ranks of Fabbological Archivists.

From MOJO July 2002
Beatles For Sale, by David Rowley
Every song by the noted Northern four-piece, chronologically presented, dissected and assessed.
The Everest-sized obstacle facing any author of a track-by-track Beatle guide is that it’s already been done. Most of your audience will know and own MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head; many will have Steve Turner’s A Hard Day’s Write, or maybe Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle. What’s to be added or improved upon? As if in a bid for some elbow room, this new arrival begins by over-claiming its own intention to demolish conventional wisdom. Soon enough, however, it settles into a familiar ramble across the catalogue, faithfully tracking those earlier authors’ footprints. As a digest of existing research on each Beatle song, David Rowley’s book is a convenient read. As a basic Beatle guide it’s adequate, if a little eccentric in some of its critical opinions. But as an expose of what the cover states are “musical secrets”, and for all its introductory snarls about the “myths” surrounding the world’s most scrutinised group, Beatles For Sale is possibly not the Book of Revelations it believes itself to be.

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Harrisongs

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Some short, posthumous reviews of Harrison-related products:
A biography, All Things Must Pass: The Life Of George Harrison, by Marc Shapiro, reviewed in Mojo, April 2002.
The live CD of the Albert Hall Concert For George, reviewed in The Word, January 2004.
Some of George’s reissued solo albums, reviewed in The Word, April 2004.

All Things Must Pass: The Life Of George Harrison
By Marc Shapiro
Routine re-telling of George’s story, from Wavertree to the Ganges and back in time for tea.
Beware the biog that arrives before the corpse is cold. The haste in bringing this book to market does no justice to the author or his subject. There is a comparative lack of data on Harrison’s life – he once wrote an autobiography so slight that it doesn’t even mention John Lennon – which leaves plenty of scope for serious musicologists and scurrilous muck-rakers alike. But Shapiro belongs to neither tendency and settles instead for a tip-toe through the cuttings files. Prolonged passages of throat-clearing at the start (“to cloak the life and times of George Harrison in anything but flawed and imperfect terms would be a gross miscarriage of history and the truth”) suggest a want of much to say. What follows is awkwardly expressed (“He was burning the candle at too many ends”); or purely speculative (the innermost thoughts of people the author hasn’t met); or just plain wrong (has anyone heard of John’s “largely experimental album Primal Screams”?). As George once said, It’s all too much. What’s worse, it’s all too soon.

Concert For George
As the decades pass and further separate us from The Beatles, so it becomes easier to perceive George Harrison in his own right, not merely as Lennon & McCartney’s talented sideman. It’s unfortunate that he had to wait for the obituaries in 2001 before receiving due acknowledgement. On the other hand the 2002 Albert Hall memorial, organised by friends Eric Clapton and Jeff Lynne, made for the grandest send-off that he could possibly have wished for.
This double CD divides into one Eastern disc (including Jeff Lynne leading The Inner Light and passages conducted by Ravi Shankar’s daughter Anoushka) and the Western disc of assorted “Harrisongs” performed by Clapton, Tom Petty, Paul and Ringo and the proverbial cast of thousands.
Its sins are only those of omission. Much the better option, if you can manage it, is the DVD version. There you get to see the splendours of the Indian orchestra, the Monty Python sketches and a storming performance, sadly absent here, of Horse To Water by Sam Brown. In either format, however, her father Joe’s show-closing I’ll See You In My Dreams is an exquisitely poignant note to end upon.

Thirty Three & 1/3; George Harrison; Somewhere In England; Gone Troppo; Cloud Nine; Live In Japan
There is a reserve in the eyes, even in Harrison’s sunnier press portraits, that suggests a man uncomfortable with stardom. But he remained a musician to the core. While his solo fortunes could not recapture the post-Beatles triumph of 1971’s All Things Must Pass he carried on crafting albums of merit. Those made for his own Dark Horse label, from 1976 to 1991, have long been hard to find but now receive the deluxe CD treatment, bonus tracks and all.
These were records made in rural peace (often at home in Henley) in the company of famous friends, by a man who maintained a quizzical distance from pop culture. They share the quiet melodic flair he brought to even the briefest Beatle solos, and though his vocals can lack impact there are always signs of a sensitive heart and enquiring mind at work. Of these reissues, Thirty Three & 1/3 is the lost treasure, Cloud Nine was a Jeff Lynne-produced return to mainstream appeal and Live In Japan, from a tour with Eric Clapton, encapsulates career highlights including Something and My Sweet Lord.
The avid collector could also consider a boxed set of all these CDs, The Dark Horse Years 1976-1992, which adds a DVD of interviews, promo clips and live footage. Harrison’s innate caution kept his music inside a certain stylistic range, but also guaranteed a level of artistic consistency. In the accompanying booklet his widow Olivia speaks of a “legacy now firmly imprinted in this material world and the spiritual sky beyond.”

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Pete Best of The Beatles

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A quick guide to the Pete Best story, written for a Q Beatles Special in 1999. It draws upon an interview I did with Pete for the NME, 6 April 1985.

“I missed the bite of the cherry by that much,” says Pete Best. He was The Beatles’ drummer for only two years, from 1960 to 1962. But they were such amazingly busy years that he conceivably spent more hours onstage with them than his successor, Ringo Starr. What’s certain is that Best was a Beatle in their crucial, formative period. His sex appeal was important in building the Liverpool fan base that propelled the band to national attention. And he was instrumental, during his time in The Beatles’ Hamburg apprenticeship, in developing the style that would revolutionise popular music.
A reticent and unassuming man, Best is even now nonplussed about the reason he was sacked. While The Beatles climbed to godlike stature, their redundant drummer became a figure in folklore whose name is symbolic of cosmic misfortune. His place in pop history is that of a man who held the winning lottery ticket and left it on a bus. To be “the Pete Best” of any band is to be the one who was in the bath when opportunity knocked.
Raised in a Liverpool suburb, Best entered the 1950s rock scene when his mother, Mona, opened a club in the basement of their house. The Casbah was a magnet for teenage rock’n’rollers and even hosted the early Beatle line-up known as The Quarrymen, who were often without a regular drummer. Offered dates in Hamburg, Lennon and co turned to Mona’s boy, Pete.
During The Beatles’ gruelling stints in Germany, Best would bash away for several sets per night in front of drunken audiences who demanded a show as brutal as they were. Back home at the Cavern, the drummer’s James Dean image of smouldering mystery was, by many accounts, the single biggest ingredient in the sexual hysteria that was mounting around the band. Once they were signed to an ambitious local manager Brian Epstein, the group began to audition for London record companies, and The Beatles’ breakthrough came, of course, when EMI producer George Martin expressed an interest.
He didn’t like Best’s drumming style, however. This in itself was not a fatal factor, since many groups made use of anonymous session players on their records. But it might have decided The Beatles against him. For reasons that have never been clearly explained, Brian Epstein invited Pete Best to his NEMS record shop office on 16 August, 1962, and told him he was no longer a Beatle. He was devastated: “I felt like putting a stone around my neck and jumping off the Pier Head,” he said. “I knew that The Beatles were going places and to be kicked out on the verge of it happening upset me a great deal.”
Theories about the dismissal include: The Beatles’ jealousy at Best’s popularity; their dissatisfaction with his drumming style; his lack of personal chemistry with the others; his rejection of Epstein’s homosexual advances; his inability to grow a mop-top haircut; and, more darkly, his mother Mona’s pregnancy following a liaison with one of The Beatles’ inner circle.
Whatever the cause, The Beatles had already found their new drummer in Ringo Starr, of local rivals Rory Storm & The Hurricanes. Within four days he was a permanent Beatle, and travelled to London for the group’s first EMI recordings (though, ironically, George Martin replaced him on early sessions with a session drummer). Pete Best was left in Liverpool to pick up the pieces. He joined various Merseybeat bands and, when his old group became world famous, enjoyed some minor celebrity as leader of The Pete Best Band (actually calling one LP Best Of The Beatles). But the gulf between his predicament and their astonishing ascent was too much to bear. In 1965 he attempted suicide – rescued by his mother and brother who smelled the gas beneath his door.
Married with children, Best became a labourer in a Liverpool bakery and then spent 20 years in the Civil Service – aptly, his job was to advise the local unemployed on getting themselves re-started after redundancy. In 1993 he took early retirement, and now plays the occasional gig on Merseybeat revival nights. But his fortunes took a dramatic upturn with the 1995 release of The Beatles’ Anthology series – Volume 1 contained a number of Best performances, whose royalties have reportedly made him a multi-millionaire. “Pete will earn a decent amount of money,” confirmed The Beatles’ spokesman Derek Taylor, “which is only right. He is a good man, and he deserves it. Being sacked from the band was a great shock for him, but he has remained philosophical about it throughout.”
“Even now,” says Best, “I reflect that I’ve lost my heritage. You push it into your subconscious but something will trigger it off, like some story about Paul or the news of John’s death. But time has mellowed. I’ve had to make the best of what’s available. There’s a lot of fond memories. I saw a lot of life. I can say I did it, it was great to be part of it. And no one can take those memories away from me.”

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Three Little Apples

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Three short pieces connected to The Beatles’ Apple label. Firstly a review of the Apple label reissue series (written for The Word, November 2010); then Dennis O’Dell’s book At The Apple’s Core (for Mojo, August 2002) and finally Tony Bramwell’s book Magical Mystery Tours (for The Word, September 2005).

Come And Get It: The Best Of Apple Records
APPLE / EMI

It’s easy to caricature Apple as one almighty cock-up. In the standard Fabs story their company was chaotic, and riven with in-fighting. You think of the Rutles parody, in which freeloaders loot the building, or of Allen Klein, the pugnacious New York manager, hammering like a demon at the ampersand that once linked Lennon & McCartney.

But Apple got more things right than it got wrong. The company’s one insoluble problem was that its masters stopped loving one another and left the business to fend for itself. The Savile Row HQ was legendary for liquid lunches, gatecrashers and hare-brained schemes that went nowhere. But Apple was a more than anything else a record label, and in that light it was the most amazing success.

A new 17-CD series of reissues should bring its story into focus. It reveals that between 1968 and ’73, while the four Beatles were distracted by such trifles as Hey Jude, the White Album, Abbey Road and their own fledgling solo careers, they oversaw a record company that somehow got around to all of these:-

• The debut of an unknown hippie oddball who soon became the defining singer-songwriter of his era. That would be James Taylor.

• An uncompromising album of meditational Hindu chanting, which spawned two hit singles and made its parent sect world-famous. Light a joss stick for the Radha Krishna Temple London.

• Two sophisticated LPs of ultra-muso virtuosity: Under The Jasmin Tree and Space by the legendary Modern Jazz Quartet.

• A tough and funky set of superb British rock music by Jackie Lomax, Sour Milk Sea.

• Three classic albums of American R&B by two of the greatest soul talents: Doris Troy and Billy Preston’s That’s The Way God Planned It and Encouraging Words.

• Two startling works of avant-garde composition that became milestones in modern classical music: The Whale and Celtic Requiem by John Tavener.

• Two albums (and hit singles like Those Were The Days) by a shy Welsh teenager who went from TV’s cheesiest talent show, Opportunity Knocks, to folk music royalty: Post Card and Earth Song/Ocean Song by Mary Hopkin.

• Four albums by Badfinger (and one by their former incarnation as The Iveys), a band once hailed as The Beatles’ natural successors, and still revered by connoisseurs of power-pop. A quartet from South Wales and Liverpool, they got their break when Macca sub-contracted them to do the music for a Ringo/Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian. On 1970’s No Dice album, the main writers Pete Ham and Tom Evans concocted a haunting ballad called Without You, covered to lucrative effect by Harry Nillson and many others since. But for all Badfinger’s prestige, their melodic rock-outs and sombre craftsmanship never quite gelled with a post-60s audience. And their business affairs became a dreadful tangle. Despairing of it all, poor Pete Ham hanged himself in 1975. Eight years later Tom Evans took a rope into the garden and did the same. Magic Christian Music, No Dice, Straight Up and Ass are the Apple CDs here. Their macabre back-story will always overshadow the music, unfortunately, but this band really should be heard.

Badfinger’s first hit, the Paul McCartney-penned Come And Get It, lends its name to one final CD, the Apple “Best Of”. Here you’ll find the biggest songs by most of the acts above, plus bizarre delights like a benefit single for Oz magazine, some Northern brass band music and the early Hot Chocolate singing Give Peace A Chance. In nearly every case there was at least one Beatle on board, as sponsor, writer, producer or session player. It’s simply staggering that so much was done, so quickly and so well. And Apple still exists today, quietly steering all things Fab. For an almighty cock-up, they really didn’t do too badly.

At The Apple’s Core: The Beatles From The Inside
Denis O’Dell with Bob Neaverson
PETER OWEN

Head of the Apple Films division recollects life inside The Beatle Empire.

The strangest Beatle record of all? Not Revolution 9, but You Know My Name (Look Up The Number). A giggling collision of Goons and Bonzo Dog impressions (with Brian Jones on saxophone), Paul and John had dicked about with it since 1967. It eventually dribbled out on the B-side of their final single, in 1970, and must be among their least-played tracks. Still, it has a ramshackle charm, and thanks to some Lennon ad libs – “Let’s hear it for Denis O’Bell!” – it secured a footnote in Fab folklore for one of their long-suffering backroom boys.
Denis O’Dell was already a veteran of the British film industry when he met The Beatles as an associate producer on A Hard Day’s Night. They liked him enough to recruit him to their Apple organisation a few years later, where he oversaw movie projects from Magical Mystery Tour to Let It Be; in between, he worked with John on How I Won The War and later with Ringo on The Magic Christian. From his position inside the Beatle business machine, O’Dell observed the band in action from Savile Row to Rishikesh. His stance today is that of an eye-witness with no axe to grind. His memoirs are largely affectionate and respectful.
As the originator of the Apple film archives he laid the ground for their eventual Anthology releases; with his connivance the Beatles employed the film canisters as secret stores for their dope. Beyond that there is little to satisfy the scandal-hungry in this book. Amid the publicity material is a suggestion that he actually saw George Harrison levitate. But it turns out that he’s not really sure. So the real value of At The Apple’s Core is in its supply of background detail to those episodes of Beatle history its author was involved in, like the roof-top session for Get Back. (The inter-band bickering, he recalls, was put on hold by the arrival of Billy Preston: having an outsider in the ranks put everyone on their best behaviour.)
O’Dell participated, too, in one of rock’n’roll’s great “What if?” stories. He’d conceived the idea of The Beatles starring in a film version of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, at that time a hippy cult; approached in India, the Fabs approved, and John announced that he would play Gandalf. Alas, O’Dell’s choice of director, Stanley Kubrick, deemed the story un-filmable, and a meeting with Lennon and McCartney failed to persuade him otherwise. In the way of so many movie projects, the idea was left to die quietly in a corner.
Around the same time, of course, The Rolling Stones were sniffing around the screenplay for A Clockwork Orange, which Kubrick would indeed find filmable, though not with Jagger and co. Imagine if both projects had been consummated: droogy Stones and hobbit Beatles would have sealed forever the bad-boys versus good-guys duality in the two bands’ joint mythology.

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOURS
Tony Bramwell
ROBSON

Occasionally you find the less amazing a book turns out to be, the more reliable it feels. And Tony Bramwell’s memoir of The Beatles – the group he befriended as a schoolboy in Liverpool and served as an employee of Brian Epstein and Apple – is none the worse for its lack of eye-widening revelations. Only thing is – don’t, whatever you do, leave it lying around if you’re expecting Yoko Ono over for tea.
The recent trend has been to regard Yoko as benign if a bit dotty – an artist ahead of her time, a feminist icon, etc, as if in recompense for the rather horrid remarks she endured all those years ago. But in Tony Bramwell’s view she is everything the cynics suspected – a pseudo-artist, haughty and manipulative, who brought out the very worst in John Lennon. I suspect if Paul McCartney reads this book he’ll rather like it. Of the Two Virgins record, for instance, Bramwell states: “There wasn’t a person at Apple who didn’t think the album and cover were rubbish.”
The vicious bristling of the anti-Yoko passages contrasts with a generally amiable style – Bramwell is a popular figure who later helped to launch the late Eva Cassidy. The staggering aspects of the Beatle tale are mostly already known, and the real pleasures of this book are in Bramwell’s everyday routine. He did everything the young masters asked him, from carrying their gear into the Cavern, bringing the butties round to Abbey Road and making promo films for Penny Lane and Hey Jude. He remembers Epstein with love, while acknowledging the manager’s colossal business blunders. Bramwell remained, deep down, a wide eyed provincial boy who knew he’d stumbled into the biggest fairy tale of the times.

A Macca Miscellany

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A random collection of brief pieces on Paul McCartney, for various publications.

1. Entry in “Greatest Stars of the 20th Century” for Q’s 100th issue, August 1999.
2. Paul McCartney remembers John Lennon, Mojo, March 2002.
3. Standing Stone, reviewed in Mojo, November 1997.
4. Driving Rain, reviewed in Mojo, December 2001.
5. Driving Rain, reviewed in Blender, Dec/Jan 2001/2002
6. Back In The US: Live 2002, reviewed in Blender, January 2003.

1.
Paul McCartney
In 100 years from now they’ll find it difficult to believe, but for much of the late 20th century it was fashionable to scorn Paul McCartney. Many a hipster’s dinner party gambit involved a smiling reference to Mull Of Kintyre or The Frogs’ Chorus, possibly backed up with some knowing stupidity that included the words “shot the wrong Beatle.” Thankfully we’re emerging from that dark age, into an enlightened time when both Lennon and McCartney’s complementary talents are recognised and celebrated for what they are, namely an awesome force for mobilising human enjoyment – the most fun you can have without doing anything immoral, illegal or unhygienic.
Not that Paul has been unrewarded for his lack of cool esteem: the most successful pop musician in history is also rich beyond the powers of most pocket calculators. It’s the lad’s instinctive affinity with ordinary life that has been his saving grace. In 1967 when The Beatles had given up touring to make studio masterworks like Sgt. Pepper, he was heard to pine that he missed “singing out loud”. He missed the great unwashed – that is, all of us – because in his own head he never became the superstar he’d become in everyone else’s. Where George or John saw humans as a mass, to be spiritually or politically uplifted, Paul has only seen individuals, with sorrows to serenade or spasms of hope to be nurtured in song.
On the clever level you can say McCartney’s special gift to The Beatles was the knack he had of using the bass-line as an independent melodic engine: no rock writers had dreamt you could do so much. In fact, nor did he: by instinct alone, growing up on the BBC Light Programme and his Dad’s old 78s, he absorbed harmonic fluency. The only licks he studied were by Eddie Cochran and Scotty Moore, but by the age of 20 he was the musical equal of long-dead maestros who’d worn tights and white wigs. Into the bargain his voice was soft and rounded, but able to rage like Little Richard’s. He looked fantastic and in the 60s dressed better than anyone except Eric Clapton. He wrote Yesterday, Hey Jude, Blackbird and Penny Lane, to name but four of a hundred Beatle classics; after that came lesser-known beauties (My Love, Waterfalls, No More Lonely Nights) that will, in the end, outlive us all. McCartney’s post-Beatle material is the next undiscovered treasure trove of pop history.
Had Lennon lived he would have acquired the grace to thank Paul for the generosity of talent that the younger man never stopped showing him (listen to McCartney’s whole-hearted backing on John’s self-centred whinge The Ballad Of John And Yoko). And then, when Linda died, even the cynics were moved to mourn the century’s longest public love story. Besides which, when you get right down to it, who could resist a sneaking admiration for cartoon frogs singing “We all stand together”? Like their creator, they were smarter than anyone gave them credit for.
Recommended album: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone) Because it’s the Pauliest of all the Beatles albums, from the curtain-raising chorus to the optimistic flourish he adds to John’s Day In The Life.

2.
Heroes
Paul McCartney on John Lennon
Do I have a hero? I’ve got a few heroes, but if I really have to plump for one, well, howzabouts… John. But I have to add the reservation that it could also be the other Beatles. Or Elvis. Or Little Richard. Or Nat King Cole. It goes on down the line.
John first had an impact on me at Woolton Village Fete in the year of Our Lord Whatever. What I admire in him was massive talent, great wit, courage and humour. He influenced me, very much so. Did he ever disappoint me? Yeah, from time to time, when we were having a barney. But only infrequently. And where to start if you want to discover him? Any Beatles record.

3.
Standing Stone
Sir Paul’s first full-length symphony, composed for EMI’s 100th anniversary.
Sir George Martin recalled recently how he’d tried to introduce John Lennon to classical music. Dutifully the Beatle sat down and listened, but then complained that by the time the piece was finished, he’d forgotten how it started. Much the same snag arises with Standing Stone: it has four movements, divided into 19 “tracks”, sprawling over 75 minutes. If there is a musical or thematic unity to the thing, it’s difficult to spot. Surprisingly absent is the ripe and easy melodicism you would expect of Paul McCartney in classical mode: after all, it was songs like Eleanor Rigby, She’s Leaving Home and Yesterday that got the Fabs compared to Schubert in the first place. But no, Standing Stone is rather dour, serious stuff. The massed ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus give it grandeur, befitting its nobly windswept titles such as Meditation, Lost At Sea and Lament, but the result is more a series of sound paintings than a coherent whole. Expect some furrowed brows and numb bums if you ever see it played live.

4.
Driving Rain
Old love and new love celebrated, as Macca resumes songwriting duties after classical and rockabilly detours. Rush-recorded with a pick-up band in LA.
It was commonly held of Paul McCartney that the baby-faced bassman liked to hide inside a song instead of reveal himself through it. Hence that pleasant parade of meter maids, Desmonds and Mollies and men from the motor trade. Here were characters who lived on the surface of their creator’s imagination, carefully concealing whatever might lie in the psychic turmoil beneath.
It’s a view that John Lennon himself was happy to promote – implying, as it did, an unfavourable comparison with the brutal candour of his own work. And yet, looking back, it’s a difficult position to maintain. When he wasn’t peddling the fictions of a Honey Pie or a Rocky Racoon, McCartney would deploy his songs to chart the emotional landmarks of his life – whether it was the rise and fall of his affair with Jane Asher (I’m Looking Through You) or mourning for his mother (Yesterday, Let It Be). He simply didn’t share John’s taste for making the links explicit. Sometimes, he says, he was scarcely aware of them himself.
The subject’s significant because Driving Rain is the first new material from Paul McCartney since the death of Linda and the arrival into his life of Heather Mills. As ever, there are few specifics in his lyrics, but the presence of those women is unmistakable. The opening songs, Lonely Road and From A Lover To A Friend (the latter a classic of Macca balladry), establish a theme – the pain of loss and loneliness, gradually redeemed by romantic love. With the exception of third track She’s Given Up Talking (a slightly disruptive return to third-person story-telling) the remaining songs are entirely devoted to affectionate remembrance, hard-won optimism or giddy celebrations of grooving around with your girl.
Apparently fashioned in a pretty casual way, these are tightly-arranged numbers all the same, with Paul’s usual tunefulness in full effect. And Linda gets the best track of all, There Must Have Been Magic, wherein her husband marvels at his luck in meeting her one night in 1967, at the Bag O’Nails club in London.
There’s always a risk with new McCartney records – as with Dylan and the Stones – that we’re led by wishful thinking into hailing an historic return to form. Driving Rain may not be that, but it’s a satisfying, and often very moving, body of work. Bruised and battered, that famous thumb has returned to upright. Hard is the heart that would not feel a hint of obla-di, obla-da. Life does indeed go on.

5.
Driving Rain
Here is The Cute Beatle’s first set of all-new numbers since 1997’s Flaming Pie – the first compositions, therefore, since the death of his wife, Linda, in 1998. He’s already commemorated her with a suite of orchestral versions of old songs (Working Classical) and kept himself in fighting shape with rockabilly covers (Run Devil Run). Now we can hear McCartney respond in song to the loss of his inseparable companion.
It’s seldom been his style to make music as bleak or nakedly confessional as John Lennon did, and Driving Rain maintains that crafted reticence. Linda is nowhere mentioned by name; the only song that’s solely devoted to her is defiantly upbeat (“There Must Have Been Magic” about their first meeting, in a London nightclub). If this collection has a coherent theme, then it’s the cautious joy of a man making his emotional recovery. Between the lines, of course, it’s also Paul’s way of hymning his fiancee Heather Mills, who now fulfils the vacated role of romantic muse.
You can hear the classic McCartney resilience in the toughly optimistic opener “Lonely Road” or the self-explanatory “Back In The Sunshine Again”. Most of all it’s in the album’s absolute stand-out “From A Lover To A Friend” – a plangent ballad that carries the plea to “let me love again”. McCartney is always at his most soulful when not straining to please (think of the beautifully understated “For No One” off *Revolver*) and there is, unmistakably, the powerful air of sorrows nobly borne.
Made, apparently, with all the speed and spontaneity of early Beatle discs, *Driving Rain* is really nobody’s memorial – these are songs of gratitude for the past with a ballsy resolve to enjoy the future. Nobody could love every track on any of McCartney’s solo albums (though his strike rate here is higher than usual); it’s enough to know the guy on the bass is back in the game and in good heart.

6.
BACK IN THE U.S. – LIVE 2002
A touch of Wings and a smattering of solo stuff, but it’s the Beatle biggies that abound this time.
As live rock’n’roll experiences go, it’s hard to beat hearing the creator of “Hey Jude”, “Let It Be” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” performing those numbers before your very eyes. It’s better yet that Paul McCartney is currently playing those songs with such puppy-ish vitality. This double-CD of his recent US tour finds the former Fab in high spirits, backed by a charismatic young band who can play as if they’re unaware of all that history weighing on their shoulders. Tribute spots to John Lennon (“Here Today”), to George Harrison (a ukelele-driven “Something”) and to Linda (“My Love”) are the most emotive button-pushers in a set that has no end of heart-bursting moments.

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Commissioned by The Word for its September 2011 issue, part of a series about the making of landmark albums.

It seems to unfold with the inevitability of a dream. More than almost any other album, Astral Weeks gives the impression of being a thoughtfully constructed song-cycle, wafting on the slipstream of its own unfathomable logic. Probably no other record has inspired so much intellectual chin-stroking, so many inchoate gropings for language to nail its transcendent magic. Music critics can’t shut up about it. So we shan’t go down that road.

Let’s note, instead, that the crafting of an album may be more haphazard than we think. Astral Weeks was neither an immaculate conception, nor the seamless product of some séance-like communion of harmonious souls. It came together in random ways that not even Van Morrison anticipated. Born in chaos, knocked off in hours by clock-watching strangers, Astral Weeks is practically an accidental masterpiece.

Its origins were so messy it’s a wonder it ever got made at all. In 1968 Morrison was the unhappy ex-star of a Belfast R&B band, Them, who’d collapsed in acrimony. Despite a strangely jaunty pop hit Brown-Eyed Girl (which he naturally didn’t like) Van was finding solo life no easier. Business squabbles dogged him at every turn, intensifying the professional grievance that he’s nurtured to this day. Right now he wanted to sever relations with Bang, the label of his manager, producer and publisher Bert Berns. New York-based, Berns was an experienced operator whose credits included a co-write on Twist And Shout.

When Berns died suddenly, Morrison disposed of his contractual duties by recording dozens of malicious one-minute throwaways, with titles like Twist And Shake and Wobble And Ball. (These notorious “revenge songs” can be heard among the morass of re-releases that litter Van’s back catalogue.) But he was still legally obliged to include two Berns-era songs, Beside You and Madame George, on his next LP proper.

It’s rumoured that Van’s new label, Warner Seven Arts, had to pay off mobsters to sign him. And the sullen Ulsterman was far from looking like a flower-child superstar. So Warners told his new managers, Lewis Merenstein and Robert Schwaid, to hire reliable session men who would get the album done fast, in the minimum of studio time. At Van’s behest they went for jazz players, phoning seasoned pros such as bassist Richard Davis (he’d played with Miles Davis), guitarist Jay Berliner (a veteran of Charlie Mingus) and Connie Kay, drummer with the fabled Modern Jazz Quartet. There was a session flautist, too, but nobody kept a note of his name. That’s how mercenary Astral Weeks really was. Van’s own musicians, John Payne and Tom Kielbania, weren’t even allowed to play.

Recording was done at New York’s Century Sound, in three hasty bookings timed around the session men’s availability. The jazz guys didn’t know who Van Morrison was, and by all accounts there was zero communication in the studio. They played what they thought was wanted, added some fills, went home and forgot all about it. Lewis Merenstein produced, doing his best to interpret Van’s mumbled wishes. Astral Weeks’ title track was done in one take at the end of the first day; John Payne got lucky and was allowed to borrow the unknown flautist’s instrument, so coming aboard one of rock’s most revered albums.

Other tracks were equally casual. The supposed tale of an Irish transvestite, Madame George already existed, but it was formerly called Madame Joy, and Van has insisted he had little idea of its actual meaning. (“I haven’t got a fucking clue.”) The tender numbers, some written back at his parents’ house in Belfast, arose from his long-distance romance with a girl named Janet Planet, whom he would marry to avoid deportation from America. She is almost certainly hymned in Sweet Thing and Ballerina. Others, like the bleak finale Slim Slow Slider, are more obscure: this macabre blues ends the album like a dreamer startled awake, its brevity due to a brutal edit by Lewis Merenstein. It was another first take, and the players assumed it was only a sound-check.

In the end it was Merenstein who sequenced the tracks and christened the vinyl sides “In The Beginning” and “Afterwards”. Generations have pondered the deeper significance of those titles, but Van characteristically complains it had nothing to do with him. In fact, he asserts, the finished record was a distortion of his real intentions. (In 2008 he made a live, re-ordered version of Astral Weeks at the Hollywood Bowl.) He’s since said that he wanted a more ambitious, even operatic work, and that the vision was whittled down by the suits who controlled his career. But you really have to question if Astral Weeks would have been any better with more time and resources thrown at it. As it was, the series of ad hoc compromises, quick fixes and spur-of-the-moment decisions didn’t do it the slightest harm.

The LP was released in November 1968 to muted reviews and modest sales. That’s not entirely surprising, as it was without precedent and defies categorisation. Morrison, with some justice, declares that Astral Weeks is not even “rock music”. Still, its mystique has blossomed down the ages. Merenstein may have clipped some fine jazz improvising, but the finished album clocks in at a timely 47 minutes – short enough for its opening notes to be fresh in the memory at album’s end. It probably helps that no lyrics were printed: here were mysteries you had to lean into. And the absence of hit singles, which could have over-balanced the whole, simply adds to Astral Weeks’ inscrutable unity. While it’s not a “concept album” in narrative terms, it has a powerful feeling of completeness.

As spliffs were rolled upon its spacey sleeve design, Astral Weeks would fuel a thousand stoned discussions about the sheer cosmic rightness of it all. It was certainly no fluke: Van Morrison had been imbibing those musical influences for most of his 23 years. Also his free-form poetic flow has a touch of angelic possession to it: “And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry: Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.” (I double-checked that line with a song lyric website, where I saw that a reader had posted, “I cannot wait until a boy can feel this way about me.”)

Nobody realised, in 1968, how long this music would endure, how often it would be heard and what a weight of cultural commentary it would attract. The story of its making is interesting, and so are the post-rationalisations of its creators. But, compared with its emotional impact on millions of unknown listeners, they’re ultimately beside the point. What makes popular music special isn’t only the numbers who buy it, but the countless times they listen to it, and define its meaning for themselves. Over the decades, so many lives have been repeatedly enriched by this accidental masterpiece. It’s just a shock to consider how close Astral Weeks came to never existing at all.

See some other Van Morrison pages on this site:

Van Morrison meets Spike Milligan

Van Morrison Interview 1997

Van Morrison at Glastonbury

A Van Morrison Buyer's Guide

Deep Van: The Mojo Profile

Van In The 1980s

A Van Morrison Miscellany

How The Beatles Invented Modern Stardom

Mon, 7 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

How The Beatles created modern stardom… A piece commissioned by The Word for their August 2009 issue.

My tailor in Liverpool, Walter Smith, made The Beatles’ first suits. The dandy Brian Epstein was a regular customer, calling on Wednesday afternoons when his record shop, NEMS, had half-day closing. One day he announced he was managing a pop group, who had a Granada TV debut coming up and needed new outfits. The price for each suit was argued down from 28 guineas to 25 (“My boys are new, they’re just starting out,” Brian pleaded.) The four young men arrived on Saturday.

Walter was already dubious, because he took their name to be “the Beetles”, which sounded unpleasant. Now they were in his shop and swearing terribly. Taken aside, Brian agreed to make them tone it down. The boys, thought their tailor, probably owned only one pair of boots each, and had worn them all night on stage, because when they took them off the synthetic linings stank horrendously. After the group were gone the shop had to be de-fumigated.

That was in 1962, and within a year The Beatles were practically deities. Who would have believed their feet might smell? Who would have thought they couldn’t afford an extra few quid for a suit? By late 1963 they were being presented to the Queen Mother, while Winston Churchill sought their autographs for his grand-daughters. Soon after that they were soothing an America still traumatised by the killing of President Kennedy. Throughout the 1960s The Beatles would experience a degree of fame unknown to any previous performers.

More than that, it was a new kind of fame. To millions of besotted teenagers The Beatles were beyond the mortal realm. Yet the group themselves had a democratic and natural appeal. The Fab Four were provincial, apparently classless, informal and irreverent. They did not aspire to poshness, and did not fit the social hierarchy. In Britain they would explode that hierarchy, culturally if not economically. They were outside of showbiz tradition. Long-haired and pretty, they were a break with square-jawed masculinity. Other acts copied them slavishly or else, like The Rolling Stones, made a conspicuous point of being that little bit more extreme.

Importantly, their popularity was entirely rooted in music. Previously, even Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley had seen the ultimate seal of stardom as Hollywood. The Beatles’ British forerunners, mainly Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, were trained to become “all-round entertainers”, because their overseers believed it was the only long-term career. The Beatles did make films, but only as commercial spin-offs. For them, music alone was now enough.

They also broke with the notion that rock’n’rollers were gullible puppets. Behind Elvis Presley there was Colonel Tom Parker, and most English pop stars were the semi-fictional creations of a showbiz impresario called Larry Parnes. But poor Brian Epstein was nobody’s idea of a sinister Mister Big. (That three-guinea suit discount was almost his only business triumph.) Even before his death in 1967 he had become marginal to The Beatles’ lives, and he never had a say in their music. Thus the group were seen as thoroughly modern stars, who controlled their own destinies. Above all, of course, The Beatles wrote their own songs. This meant they were artists, not merely “artistes”.

Because of their self-sufficiency and their lack of deference The Beatles offered a new type of role model. They appealed to everyone who wanted to say “This is the Real Me. Free of all pretence. Take me as I am.” Their style of fame was adopted outside of pop music, by footballers (George Best) and ballet dancers (Rudolf Nureyev). Film people, from Terence Stamp to Roman Polanski, were all a part of Beatledom. A new breed of media person, like Simon Dee and John Peel, was raised in The Beatles’ image. Cockney photographers thrived in their wake. Anyone who fancied themselves to be outside “the system” would grow their hair, drop their aitches and hope for the best. Youth and cheek, it seemed, might overcome everything.

Aristocrats were enchanted, intellectuals were smitten. Not even poets and artists could stand aloof. Gruff old beardies like Allen Ginsberg and Adrian Henri developed big girlie crushes. In the 1960s, hardly anybody in the West was immune to The Beatles’ charm. Behind the Iron Curtain their works were circulated like talismans of forbidden freedom.

In fact The Beatles had fused two different types of fame, which had previously been quite separate: the fame of the entertainer and the fame of the artist. We study art for its objective qualities – its meaning and technique – while entertainment is simply judged by how it makes us feel. The Beatles, and of course Bob Dylan, could straddle both categories. Unlike the matinee idols of earlier times, they were admired for much more than their glamour. Unlike great painters or classical composers, they could be enjoyed by millions, without a moment of reflection or concentration. In this way, they prepared us for the concept of “rock culture”, a term that would have looked absurd before 1965. After some initial hilarity, learned appraisals of Lennon and McCartney’s writing became commonplace. Popular music changed from teen escapism to a mainstay of the academic curriculum. For better or worse, The Beatles had erased the distinction between High and Low Culture.

But they were not only artists and top-selling entertainers. They were the gurus of a generation, outriders of the New Age. This, at least, was the view in 1967. The Beatles and a handful of senior rock acts were looked to for guidance in creativity, in dress, in morals and in manners. “Stars” from now on were not merely the most popular, but the most visionary. As mariners would steer their course by actual stars, the young now set their own course by the metaphorical stars of a rock industry that declared itself above show business. The Beatles, sitting cross-legged at the pinnacle, led the trend, pronouncing on politics, religion and drugs. It was only because they were asked, and their crime was more naivety than arrogance. But Jesus and LSD were not trifling matters and the reaction shocked them. It pretty soon wore them down.

As pioneers, they were first to learn the pitfalls. Everything about the 1960s was meant to exalt the Self – self-expression meant liberation meant self-fulfilment. As if to guard against the dangers, The Beatles discovered Love, the universal force that would bring us together and ward off the chaos of untrammelled individualism. But somehow, human nature was stubbornly resistant to the message. By the time of their last photo session, in 1969, the four Fabs (who were not yet in their thirties) looked like Old Testament prophets. They had seen more than most human beings ever see, and the weariness of a hundred lifetimes was in their gaze. Their long hair and beards were no longer the symbols of youth and freedom but of hard experience and the burdens of tribal kingship.

After they disbanded in 1970, the four showed very different responses to their solo predicament. The musical movements of the next decades ¬– glam rock, punk, electronica, hip hop – owed less and less to The Beatles’ influence, and the former Fabs were no longer guaranteed a place at the top table. Mainstream music was forever in their debt, and occasional phenomena like Britpop and Robbie Williams were blatant in their homage. But the Beatles themselves faced an extraordinary problem of re-adjustment. McCartney once said he felt like an astronaut who had been into space and was now struggling to express what he had seen and relate it to life on earth. His policy for the last 39 years has been to write tirelessly, to record and tour as much as he can. Always so active, so accessible, he is mocked for sabotaging his own mystique – but in so doing he has saved his own sanity.

George and Ringo were not so lucky. Harrison was already a discontented Beatle and like many stars he cultivated a mystic detachment from the “illusions” of fame and the material world. In his solo years he was sporadically magnificent but always fought the shadows of his former life. Ringo, without the musical autonomy that George could take for granted, chose the time-worn path of well-connected, wealthy men without a goal in life – he got very drunk in very nice places by the sea. Granted a longer life than George, he now tours as hard as Paul, a testament to the redemptive power of work. Today, as CD revenues silt up, many rock veterans are hearing the call of the road and Ringo has shown them how.

All four ex-Beatles tried in their different ways to answer the classic question: how much does a star owe to his public? Typically it was John Lennon’s life that tested the answers to destruction. Abetted by Yoko Ono he came to treat his fame as a kind of performance art, and a weapon that might change history. His early solo songs were attempts to turn his psyche inside-out, to expose his innermost anxieties, to be the weather-vane of the world and play the shaman who acts out our unconscious life. Naturally that became too much for him and he withdrew to his apartment. But at least one disillusioned fan believed that stars who let us down must pay with their lives.

With Lennon dead, The Beatles’ tale really ends in 1980. And yet they had another lesson to teach. Stars who belong to a particular era must, inevitably, fade from view as time moves on. So, in the 1990s, what The Beatles did was to step outside their own chronology and abolish time itself. Through CDs, books and DVDs, their Anthology series made the past and the present into a single simultaneous entity. Others, like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, had to die before they could be assessed in terms of their whole careers. Right to the end they were competing with their younger selves, and mostly disappointing us. With Anthology, the three surviving Beatles pitched their history into the future as a perfect fairy tale, in which they stayed forever young.

David Bowie has learned to do the same: in a recent TV ad he spars with a series of Bowie personas from Ziggy Stardust to Thin White Duke. Even Van Morrison, for years declaring “That was then, this is now,” consents to reprise Astral Weeks.

The Beatles’ music may once have been the most untouchable catalogue in music, but Free As A Bird, their spectrally artificial reunion with John, was only the first in a series of tweaks, refurbishments and overhauls. Digital technology makes the old sound new and can meddle with images to uncanny effect. What was ever real? In centuries ahead, not many will know and fewer will care. We’re about to get The Beatles Rock Band, a video game that some predict will be bigger than Jesus and Lennon put together. Maybe the Fabs will live in posterity as digital animations.

For now, The Beatles’ magisterial absence from iTunes and Spotify serves to remind us of their power. But will younger generations share that view? Already The Beatles’ way of fame looks quaintly ancient. The old showbiz world of talent contests, which the fledgling skifflers entered and duly destroyed, has gradually been re-assembled. New stars are seldom “authentic” – they actually go to fame schools and train for the job. Today’s audience doesn’t mind if performers have Svengalis and stylists. After all, the notion of the “makeover” is central to modern TV. The belief The Beatles once embodied, in endless artistic progress, onwards and upwards, has collapsed. There is always novelty, but rarely innovation. In the global debates of our time, musicians are now cheerleaders and fundraisers, not prophets, seers or sages.

All this may, in a way, be more honest than the pretensions of rock culture in its pomp. But it’s less inspiring. Stardom itself is hard to find, its shiny sovereigns lost amid the loose change of cheap celebrity. What is Liam Gallagher now but a shell of obsolete Beatle mannerisms wrapped around a 21st century X-Factor void? The term “new Beatles” is used of anything from The Jonas Brothers to Twitter, meaning “not just big, but transformational”. Will many more generations understand the term at all? Our concept of stardom has undergone a few mutations since Sgt. Pepper, and the tragic farce of Michael Jackson’s later life is possibly more instructive. Perhaps we are near the time when only The Beatles’ music will survive. Irreducible, life-affirming, in some sense magical… For most of us, the songs will always be enough.

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.

Kylie Minogue: Just enough of a good thing

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of Kylie Minogue's box set, The Albums 2000-2010, done for The Word in August 2011.

Who does not like Kylie? There seems nearly universal agreement that our pert princess is A Good Thing. She’s famously a gay icon, but it’s a rare hetero male who doesn’t admire her too. Kylie’s bum, alone, has done more to promote human happiness than most schemes for global progress. Indie boys such as the Manic Street Preachers, elders of a tribe that hates “manufactured” pop on principle, want to work with her. The edgiest of DJs like to remix her. Prudent politicians would sooner call for the slaughter of first-born kittens than have a go at Kylie.

Her first name is so well-known that most of her albums drop the “Minogue” part entirely. And are there not whole housing estates where little Kylies play with little Britneys, possibly watched by the odd baby Gaga?

Well, so I thought. But the Office for National Statistics says no. British girls’ names are nowadays a riot of prim Edwardiana, all Emilies, Olivias and Amelias. (Meanwhile the boys, every Jack, Sam and Alfie, sound like roll-call on the morning of Passchendale.) Be that as it may, Kylie Minogue is surely the Nation’s Adopted Daughter. We fret if she takes up with some unsuitable young man (and that Michael Hutchence always did look like trouble, didn’t he?) or tut indulgently if she pushes the “SexKylie” thing a little too far. Kylie can be rude, but she is never beyond the bounds. A tonic for the troops and a good girl at heart.

Which is all OK but there has to be more to Kylie Minogue than that. Here’s a pop career that pre-dates The Spice Girls by seven years and looks more secure than ever. A new reissue of her last five albums – basically her 21st century catalogue – offers a sharp reminder of the smart campaign she’s fought, how she’s defied the ageing process and staved off commercial decline. In the first years of her public life she had to make the delicate transition from soap poppet and pliant protégé of Stock/Aitken/Waterman, into something more enduring. There were a few false steps, and she was even dropped by her record label.

Come 2000, however, she was on EMI and totally focussed. Since then it’s all been high-calibre dance pop, with no distracting features, helped by a kaleidoscopic cast of writers and studio magicians. In terms of quality, from the come-back hit Spinning Around to last year’s All The Lovers, the second half of Kylie’s career radically surpasses the first. How many other acts, including all the beardy rock auteurs we take much more seriously, could claim the same?

The Kylie we see on these five sleeves (that’s Light Years, Fever, Body Language, X and Aphrodite) is clothed by her celebrated stylist William Baker and generally peddling the same sauce-lite that their titles suggest. In the very many photos included, she appears in a permanent state of arousal, with back arched, lips parted and eyes hooded. After the cautious experiments of her 90s album The Impossible Princess, there is no messing now with Kylie’s core identity. She is a fun-loving girl, but romantic with it. She is notably unlike Madonna in (a) having no wish to raise our consciousness, and (b) having a sense of humour.

As an example of the latter, take Your Disco Needs You: written with Robbie Williams and his sometime collaborator Guy Chambers. It’s a Village People sort of romp and perhaps the campest song ever written. For some reason it wasn’t a single in Britain but it should have been. There is a video of it that looks like a North Korean Hell March as staged Dolce & Gabbana.

Behind the scenes, pro songwriters like Guy Chambers are key figures in Operation Kylie. It’s fascinating to scan the credits and spot people like Cathy Dennis (herself a former chart star) and Rob Davis (whom older readers once knew as the gurning guitarist in Mud, with outsized earrings). They supply the classic pop melodicism that is grafted on to the bleep and thud of dancefloor electronica, guaranteeing that a Kylie track wins friends in every direction. Dennis and Davis, for instance, co-wrote her most addictive single, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. New Order fans may know there is a harder remix of it somewhere, called Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head.

Hip collaborators are drafted in by the dozen, from Scissor Sisters to Nerina Pallot. In the Michael Jackson tradition, Kylie hits do not become hits by accident: they are planned that way and money is spent to get there. The process is soulless, maybe, but a lot of fabulous pop has been made this way, including the Brill Building conveyor belt that employed Goffin & King and Bacharach & David. My only regret about these reissues is the lack of her stupendous I Believe In You, a non-album single that you’ll need a compilation like Ultimate Kylie to find.

There’s a lot of ambitious pop in here, but no conceptual overreach. Not even her experience of breast cancer was allowed to surface in Kylie’s subsequent material: lyrically, it was straight back to business. It seems unlikely such a 20-year lucky streak could be sustained without a lot of shrewd decisions by Minogue herself. So it seems that everyone is right after all: Kylie is A Good Thing, and here is just enough of it.

Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy: RIP

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

This profile of Thin Lizzy's leader Phil Lynott was written for XL magazine, December 1997. It draws on a piece I'd written for the NME in 1980, when Phil was in his pomp. But by 1997 he'd been dead for 11 years. Thus the elements of hindsight and regret which you may detect here. I retain a great affection for Philip Lynott, RIP.

Six foot high and thin as twigs, big old Afro haircut and a pencil moustache. Not your average Dublin bloke, in many ways. “Are there any girls here tonight with a bit of Irish in them?” he used to say. (Cue the hooded eyes and the lazy, liquid grin.) “Are there any here who’d like some?”

Put it down to the rogueish brogue. You can’t say it was an original line. But the trick worked every time for Thin Lizzy singer Philip Lynott. “The name is pronounced Lie-not,” he once told me, with a sly look. But I knew that his roadies called him Philip Line-Em-Up. He even said himself: “I’m the easiest lay in town. It’s two drinks and ‘Take me home baby!’” He was also called Johnny The Fox, and The Irish Elvis. Near the end of his short life, some friends named him Philip Why-Not, because there wasn’t a powder or drink that he’d refuse. One way and another he tasted life to the full, and in the end he choked on it. Philip Lynott, in fact, enjoyed himself to death.

He’d been born in England, to an Irish girl called Philomena Lynott. The father was not a Brazilian sailor, as one colourful story went, but a black man from Birmingham, who soon disappeared. Young Philip was sent to Dublin to be raised by his grandmother, and he was almost the only black child in the city. “To me, I was normal,” he recalled. “It was everyone else who was different.” His mother ran a show business boarding house in Manchester, where he spent his holidays and developed a passion for Man United.

Phil’s band, Thin Lizzy, played heavy rock and were named after a character in The Beano. Four years of struggle paid off in 1973 when they hit the charts with ‘Whiskey In The Jar’. Lynott sang, played bass and became the most swashbuckling figure on London’s music scene. He hired a succession of blazing guitarists, including Brian Robertson, Scott Gorham and Gary Moore, and scored a run of Top 10 records: ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Waiting For An Alibi’. Lynott played his fantasy role of romantic hoodlum for all it was worth. And the image began to merge with reality: Philip Line-Em-Up came into his own. At one point on tour, Brian Robertson bought himself a floppy-eared beagle dog to distract some female attention away from the frontman. Roadies were expected to be handy in a fight, especially when every stop of the way produced a posse of jealous boyfriends and outraged husbands. There is a certain hotel in Finland that is probably bloodstained to this day.

High times were had by all. Exhausted band members walked out, declaring they couldn’t take the pace. After a bout of hepatitis even Lynott had to swear off drink for a year. Behind his carefree, vagabond exterior, the singer felt a deep responsibility to his band and its audience. He worked punishingly long hours – often fuelled by amphetamines – to keep the music tight and the money coming in. And when he relaxed he pushed his body even harder. But in 1980 the unthinkable happened: this gangster of love got married. His bride was blonde-haired Caroline Crowther, by whom he already had a baby daughter, and who was now pregnant with their second child. His father-in-law was the TV comedian Leslie Crowther (who’d once met Lynott before, when Thin Lizzy appeared on the children’s show Crackerjack). Ever the showbiz pro, Crowther won hoots of laughter for his speech at the wedding reception. Recollecting how Lynott had asked him for his daughter’s hand, he replied: “Well, you’ve had everything else. You may as well have that too.”

Back on the road the mayhem continued. His audience adored him. Headbanging boys would surge towards the stage, forming in a heaving mountain of humanity that kept collapsing and rebuilding itself. Legs apart he strafed the crowd with his machine gun guitar. They loved that as well. And when he announced a slow song, like ‘Still In Love With You’, the punters fell silent. The way they all sat down, as if by some invisible signal, it was like being at Mass. At a gig in Oxford I wondered why he was wearing a black armband with his pink Sid Vicious T-shirt. Only backstage, afterwards, did I see it was a saucy garter belt. One evening in a Glasgow bar, he drew me aside with a conspiratorial nudge. Delving into a travel bag he showed me his portable kit of advanced bondage equipment. “Fuckin’ great, eh?” grinned Philip, as he ran his hand through a tangle of harness, chains and whipcord. “Er, yeah, nice,” I said.

From Scotland we headed for Liverpool, riding at illegal speeds down the M6 in a Mercedes that Lynott had never learned to drive, but had bought on the advice of his accountant. In a motorway services he was watched by a gaggle of terrified young waitresses. After much whispering and shoving, one girl was elected to approach him, and asked if he was the singer in Thin Lizzy. “No, love,” he smiled, wolfishly. “I’m the bloke in Boney M.” She squealed with delight: “Ooh-er! Could we have yer autograph, then?”

The next day in Liverpool he called me up to his hotel room to do an interview. When I walked in there was a stunning blonde woman, hair dishevelled, collecting her belongings off an unmade bed. I sensed this wasn’t the time to ask after his wife and kids: Philip had clearly enjoyed something that was not available on standard room service. But as she left, he said not a word to her. Midway though our interview a roadie popped his head in. There were two schoolgirls downstairs, he said. They wondered if Philip could help them with a “school project” on pop stars. He smirked and gave us a helpless “Well, what can you do?” sort of look. He said he’d send for them shortly. He was all heart like that. I pressed on with my idiot questions (“Do you think the synthesiser will transform pop in the 1980s, Phil?”) but his attention seemed to be wandering.

Yet he radiated energy in the show that night. There was the usual pantomime and all the normal carnage. Just as in Glasgow there were bouncers with tuxedoes and medieval haircuts, pulverising the shit out of fans. Both sides seemed to accept the ritual as routine. Up on stage the Lizzy did its thing, loudly. Happy as Larry on his birthday, the Scouse crowd chanted “Leslie Crowther! Leslie Crowther!”.
For all his swagger, Philip was quietly aware of his shortcomings. In 1980 he sensed that he was past his peak. “You can’t just go on getting better and better,” he said to me, sadly. “I’ve realised with the pressure of the business you have to publicly make mistakes and just try to survive. I can’t be the leader of an organisation like Thin Lizzy and not take account of the audience’s tastes. We’re caught with this paradox. We don’t change quick enough for people who are reviewing us, and yet we change too quickly for the people who are paying to see the concerts.”

This was a big problem for him. In his teens he’d been the hippest kid in Dublin, but now he led an old-school rock band that the punks laughed at. For God’s sake, there were members of Thin Lizzy who wore clogs. The heavy metal audience is loyal and it despises the trendy London media, but Lynott missed the days when he could count on good reviews from the music press. He hated to be called a dinosaur, and he always took a pro-punk stance: he even played dates with a couple of Sex Pistols in a hobby band called The Greedy Bastards. But he was going out of style, and he knew it. New wave hipsters found his macho lyrics corny. In conversations I found him sheepish and defensive: “All the ham theatrics? Yeah, well, y’know… I play up to it, I can’t fool myself that I don’t. And it must appeal to me. But it’s only a part of me. I’m a lot more complicated than the paragraph where they’re summarising Philip Lynott the romantic, the lover, the hard aggressive man, the father…”

Failure to crack America was part of Thin Lizzy’s undoing. Perhaps the idea of a black man leading a white rock band was just too hard for conservative US tastes to handle. But Philip had a few more moments of glory, like the big hit ‘Out In The Fields’, made with his old corporal Gary Moore. And he had a solo success with ‘Yellow Pearl’, a slick piece of electro-pop that became the Top Of The Pops theme music. Its lyric was inspired by watching Man United go down to FA cup defeat: ‘Yellow Pearl’ is the only pop hit in history to be named in honour of Southampton’s away kit.

“Philip? He always thought he was bullet-proof.” That was an ex-manager’s summary of Lynott, and a comment on the life of reckless excess that brought Thin Lizzy to its knees. He worked and he worried more than anyone, but he also partied longer and harder. By the early Eighties he was a heroin addict. He kept a home in Kew, in London, and another in Ireland, but he could not escape temptation, especially when Dublin took its place among the world’s smack capitals. The band eventually fell apart. His marriage to Caroline did likewise: she left and took the children with her.

By 1985 he was a tragic sight. Slow and bloated, where he’d once been slim and razor-sharp, he was surrounded by low-lifes, despite the best efforts of old friends to save him. His depression was made worse by the failure of his new band, Grand Slam, to make any headway. The other musicians remember Philip backstage, struggling to fit into his old leather trousers. “He had an extremely wide bass strap,” says one, “to hide the paunch a little.” He fought the heroin habit, but stumbled through a blizzard of cocaine. His insides were awash with cognac.

His mother came to stay with him at Kew for Christmas that year. Philomena Lynott found her son unconscious on Christmas morning. When he came around he explained he was expecting “a visitor”, who was to be given a cheque that was under a garden gnome by the front door. When the stranger appeared, Philomena chased him away. (Phil’s cheque book was later found to be full of blank stubs, probably the record of illicit transactions.) On the advice of his estranged wife Caroline, Phil was then driven to a discreet private clinic in Wiltshire. But they judged his condition to be so serious that he was taken on to Salisbury Hospital, arriving in the final hours of Christmas night. His mother stayed by his bedside for the next 11 days, as Lynott drifted in and out of a coma. During his waking moments, it’s reported that he flirted with the nurses. At length he asked for a Catholic priest. And, on 4 January, 1986, Philip Lynott died.

At the time of his passing, he was on bail facing charges of possessing heroin and cocaine. The medical team found evidence of blood poisoning, and kidney, heart and liver failure. The inquest concluded that heroin infection was the most likely cause of death. But whatever finished him off, it was only the culmination of many years’ abuse. You might say it was Death By Good Times. But as well as hedonism, he was driven by a spirit that was never as carefree as he liked us to think. In almost his last interview, he said: “Looking back, I’ve done better than expected, and not as well as hoped.” A good bloke, and a bad end. Not bullet-proof after all, then.

A Springsteen Miscellany

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Here is a selection of various Springsteen pieces. First up is a Consumer Guide for the US magazine Blender, printed in their issue of November 2003. After that:-
It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City, the story of David Bowie’s cover version, The Word, February 2011.
Darkness On The Edge Of Town, reassessed for The Word, June 2005.
We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions, for The Word, June 2006
Springsteen: Acts Of The Noughties, a feature for The Word January 2010.
And for my memories of meeting Springsteen, go here.

Many rock’n’roll stars like to pretend they’re inhabitants of a fabulous, faraway planet that we can only dream of. But Bruce Springsteen’s music is grounded in the everyday world – his talent is for turning ordinary lives into poetry. New Jersey’s best-loved export since Sinatra was a scuffling Dylan-alike until the full-tilt exuberance of 1975’s Born To Run made him so famous he scored the covers of Time and Newsweek on the same day. Fans called him the Boss because he ran a mighty beast called the E Street Band, but his style has swung from stadium bombast to folk-club intimacy. Whatever its volume, his music is loved by millions who trace their own stories through the everyman eloquence of his songs. He’s “a cool rockin’ daddy in the USA,” as one song goes, but he’s much more besides.

1. BLENDER APPROVED

BORN TO RUN
COLUMBIA 1975
Pulsing with the elation of a young man whose time has arrived, this was Bruce’s breakthrough. With future manager Jon Landau now assisting in the studio, the E Street sound was suddenly Spectoresque, huge and dynamic. The lyrics were no less epic – surging celebrations of hot city streets, emotional hunger and the urge to burst free. Formerly an introverted songsmith, Springsteen learned to touch on universal chords and he played them like a champ.
Standout tracks: “Born To Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Jungleland”

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN
COLUMBIA 1978
With his career stalled by three years of legal disputes, Springsteen reassessed the youthful bravado of Born To Run, to emerge a more serious man with adult concerns and a brooding nostalgia for lost optimism. Country music influences and Biblical references creep in, while social themes confirmed his symbolic switch from leather jacket to blue collar. Brooding or not, though, he could still rock whole city blocks.
Standout tracks: “Adam Raised A Cain,” “Streets Of Fire,” “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”

NEBRASKA
COLUMBIA 1982
Tiring of the tour-and-studios routine he holed up in his bedroom with a tape recorder and cut these starkly unvarnished tracks, modelled on old blues records “that sounded so good with the lights out.” The desolate sonic landscape is matched by bleak tales of murder, lust and fate: the title track concludes, “There’s just a meanness in this world.” He took the results to the E Street Band but eventually stuck with the demo cassette he’d carried in his jeans.
Standout tracks: “Nebraska,” “Atlantic City,” “Highway Patrolman”

BORN IN THE USA
COLUMBIA 1984
The one that took the Boss from mere rock star to outright national icon, with a written-to-order hit in “Dancing In The Dark” and the much-debated title track (song of social protest or anthem of defiant pride?). Plenty of plain, goofy fun (“Darlington County”) and sexual sweatiness (“I’m On Fire”) helped round out the package. The post-Nebraska shift to big production values and red-blooded human interest stories helped make this the Springsteen album that the whole world owns.
Standout tracks: “Born In The USA,” “I’m On Fire,” “Dancing In The Dark”

2. GREAT

THE RIVER
COLUMBIA 1980
A stadium-pleasing double CD of gruff, good time rock’n’roll, with the E Street boys sounding like the biggest bar band in the universe. The rollicking “Hungry Heart” became his first big single hit. But there are many reflective moments, too, and thanks to Springsteen’s famous rambling prologues they became stage favourites as well.
Standout tracks: “Independence Day,” “Hungry Heart,” “Stolen Car”

TUNNEL OF LOVE
COLUMBIA 1987
Its theme, he said, was “the more intimate struggles of adult love” and though he denied it was autobiographical, everyone concluded there were problems with his recent marriage to model Julianne Phillips. Doubt, deception and disillusion stalk the majority of songs, which are firmly in the key of lonesome. Though the braver numbers combat cynicism, within a year he was embroiled in a divorce.
Standout tracks: “Tougher Than The Rest,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “Valentine’s Day”

3. CHECK IT OUT

LIVE 1975-1985
COLUMBIA 1986
Triple CD that celebrates the peak years of the E Street Band, when crowds went “Brooooce” and his gigs were legendary for their firepower and stamina. Partner Steve Van Zandt bows out for Nils Lofgren, and ¬– hell-oooh – here comes a red-headed backing singer named Patti Scialfa…
Standout tracks: “The River,” “Because The Night,’ “Jersey Girl”

LUCKY TOWN
COLUMBIA 1992
A last track recorded for Human Touch, “Living Proof” sent Springsteen on a fresh songwriting spree and two separate albums (released simultaneously) were the result. Recorded virtually solo, it’s the more spontaneous and tuneful of the two, though it lacked a killer song to grab the popular imagination. Neither album sold in the amounts that Springsteen records were meant to.
Standout tracks: “If I Should Fall Behind,” “Souls Of The Departed,” “My Beautiful Reward”

GREATEST HITS
COLUMBIA 1995
The AIDS-addressing “Streets Of Philadelphia,” written for Jonathan Demme’s movie, makes a first-class addition to all the familiar Bruce biggies. But the curious inclusion of four mediocre rarities rather dampens the impact you would expect this set to have.
Standout tracks: “Born To Run,” “Hungry Heart,” “Streets Of Philadelphia”

THE RISING
COLUMBIA 2002
Finally reunited with the E Street Band, the Boss was suddenly overtaken by 9/11 and the universal expectation that he would address it in song. He rose to the challenge so magnificently that the moving New York tributes, such as “Empty Sky,” made the rest of his new songs look ordinary in comparison.
Standout tracks: “Into The Fire,” “Empty Sky,” “The Fuse”

4. BE CAREFUL

GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK N.J.
COLUMBIA 1973
The debut album has an eager charm but tries too hard to fill Bob Dylan’s shoes, with self-consciously poetic fables of New Jersey street life. Promising songs trip over themselves and the production is poor, but some critics detected a fine new writer learning his craft.
Standout tracks: “Blinded By The Light,” “Spirit In The Night,” “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City”

THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE
COLUMBIA 1973
Second album finds Bruce in transition from trainee troubadour to confident bandleader. The arrangements are ballsier and more complex, and unafraid to try everything from R&B to jazz. The songs are fun, if still a little overwrought, but they’d find their full stature in later stage performance.
Standout tracks: “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”

HUMAN TOUCH
COLUMBIA 1992
The companion volume to Lucky Town finds only pianist Roy Bittan surviving an E Street purge, as Bruce adjusts to a new marriage (to Scialfa) and to fatherhood. The songs are tender but not generally among his best.
Standout tracks: “Human Touch,” “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),” “I Wish I Were Blind”

PLUGGED
SONY 1993
Perversely for an artist who’s happy playing solo, Springsteen scrapped the acoustic format of MTV’s Unplugged series to rock out with a massive band. A brash party spirit pervades, though the songs are mostly from his less favoured albums Lucky Town and Human Touch, while the transient line-up behind him makes it unrepresentative of Bruce live.
Standout tracks: “Red Headed Woman,” “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”

THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD
COLUMBIA 1995
Nearly a Nebraska Mark 2 as Springsteen opts for stripped back arrangements and dark meditations on the plight of American underdogs. Some affecting tales of migrant lives, inspired by Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath, but many find the music’s austere style to be unapproachable.
Standout tracks: “The Ghost Of Tom Joad.” “Across The Border”

TRACKS
COLUMBIA 1998
Nurturing this four-CD retrospective helped him through a period of writer’s block. The bootleg-style anthology collects various outtakes and unreleased songs, plus obscure B-sides to form a shadow history of Springsteen’s career – too much for the uncommitted but a feast for Boss completists.
Standout tracks: “Sad Eyes,” “Gave It A Name,” “Part Man, Part Monkey”

5. FOR FANS ONLY

18 TRACKS
COLUMBIA 1999
Unsatisfactory sampling of the Tracks extravaganza, yet with a few new tracks to lure collectors – commercial exploitation masquerading as generosity.
Standout tracks: “Pink Cadillac,” “Gave It A Name,” “Part Man, Part Monkey”

LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY
COLUMBIA 2001
Two-disc souvenir of The E Street Band’s 2000 reunion, captured for a TV special. Funkier and more intimate than the sprawling Live 1975-85 but minus most of his really popular songs.
Standout tracks: “The River’” “American Skin (41 Shots),” “Jungleland”

6. FURTHER LISTENING

Folkways: A Vision Shared
COLUMBIA 1988
Bruce joins U2 and Dylan in multi-artist tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, declaring allegiance to the American folk tradition that has increasingly been his inspiration.

7. FURTHER VIEWING

The Complete Video Anthology 1978-2000
SONY/COLUMBIA, 2001
Double DVD of 33 clips, mostly from live shows but also souvenirs of his 80s MTV phase – including a stage jive with the teenaged Courtney Cox in Brain De Palma’s video for “Dancing In The Dark”.

8. FURTHER READING

SONGS
By Bruce Springsteen
AVON, 1998
Sumptuous presentation of song lyrics, top photography and, best of all, Bruce’s revelatory memoirs of the songwriting process, album by album.

It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City, by Bruce Springsteen… as covered by David Bowie
From a piece in The Word, February 2011, that described notable cover versions.

Two rock legends, of similar vintage, who probably have a million fans in common. And yet… chalk and cheese. Springsteen and Bowie seem cut from different cloth, somehow. It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City marks a rare convergence between the honest blue-collar grunt they call the Boss and the flighty pan-sexual space alien we call the Dame. How did that happen?
Bruce wrote this song when he was unknown; it became the closing track of his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park N.J. Though its hoodlum street-poetry sounds over-ripe, it impressed David Bowie. He’d already seen Springsteen play a New York club. Now, in the first flush of his Ziggy fame, he recognised the Jersey kid as a contender. Perhaps Bowie liked the urban dread: “After I heard this track,” he said later, “I never rode the subway again… That really scared the living ones out of me.” I think there is an echo of it in Bowie’s apocalyptic Diamond Dogs.
Bowie attempted It’s Hard To Be A Saint in 1974, while recording Young Americans in Philadelphia. And Springsteen dropped by the studio. The pair got along OK, but they were not soul mates. Besides, Bowie at that point was fundamentally off his cake. (Keepin’ it real, Bruce wore a dirty leather jacket and arrived by public transport. Bowie, on the other hand, wore a bright red beret and yapped about UFOs.) The track was abandoned, then revived a year later when Bowie was making Station To Station. Once again it failed to make the cut and has only appeared, since then, as a bonus out-take on sundry CDs. (He also tried Springsteen’s Growin’ Up, and ditched that too.)
From that point on their styles diverged entirely: Springsteen went from Byronic grease-monkey to plain-speaking Everyman. Bowie’s next stop was austere European art-noise. They’re both rock’n’rollers, of course, and their respective versions of this fine, urgent song are not wildly different. But the Dame has other roots, in Cockney music hall, mime and cabaret, while the Boss is rock, rock and more rock. Artifice versus authenticity? Well, I’m not so sure. There is more emotional sincerity in Bowie than he is given credit for, while Springsteen’s image is a fabulous showbiz construct, and none the worse for that. Just for one day, in 1974, those two young men were brothers in the cause.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Bruce Springsteen
Sony
In 1978, two years into the punk rock guerrilla wars, the last name on British minds was Bruce Springsteen. He hadn’t been seen or heard around these parts since 1975, when he’d played some shows to support his big hit album Born To Run. Personally, if I thought of him at all, it was vaguely mixed up with the Fonz out of *Happy Days* – a cheery pseudo-hoodlum in black leathers, doing those likeably overwrought numbers involving cars, Catholic girls and endless “rumbles” between people with names like Switchblade Joey The Greek or One-Eyed Jimmy Zoot Suit.
God knows, British punk rock was not without its own share of posturing. But the years of Springsteen’s disappearance had been a watershed all the same. The mood of the times, in hipper circles, had turned against such rock’n’roll panto in favour of stern social realism. When I heard that Bruce was finally making a comeback I was not expecting anything much. But I was wrong. He came back with one of the great LPs of that era. It turned out that Darkness On The Edge Of Town was a properly grown-up album by a man who had changed almost beyond recognition. I don’t love Springsteen unconditionally, as some fans do, but thanks to this record I’ll always take him seriously.
We now know what took him so long. After ten years of scuffling obscurity, the vast American triumph of Born To Run had turned Bruce Springsteen into a star. But he was a confused star, who found himself wondering what you were supposed you do after your dreams came true. Firstly, of course, you sue your manager.
Bruce was taking advice from his friend and co-producer Jon Landau, the journalist whose quote about seeing “rock’n’roll’s future” had stoked the growing hype around him. Springsteen began litigation against his manager Mike Appel on issues of money, copyright and Landau’s role in the recordings. Appel counter-sued and won an injunction to keep Springsteen out of the studio. Thus stalled, the singer took his E Street Band out on the road, but otherwise spent his days on a farm in New Jersey – “Boss Acres”, they called it – brooding on his fate. He turned to country music for inspiration, especially the flinty wisdom of Hank Williams. And Landau introduced him to the epic movies of John Ford. to film noir and Steinbeck’s Depression-era classic The Grapes Of Wrath. All of this would influence the songs he was writing for the next album – if he was ever allowed to make it.
On Landau’s recommendation, Springsteen tried to “de-glib” his lyrics and though the tunes came quickly the words took months of labour. Now that he was a star, he said, “I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I’d grown up alongside of.” He looked to his working class family and their dead-end Jersey lives, and to those locked out of the same American Dream he was suddenly living. “I wanted my new characters to feel older, weathered, but not beaten,” he said. Against that slightly melancholic strand, there was pent-up fury at the Appel law-suit. Darkness At The Edge Of Town was born of twilight contemplations but also of towering rage.
The legal dispute was finally settled on 29 May, 1977 and the E Street Band were summoned to the studio within 48 hours. But it was still another year before the album came out. Springsteen’s perfectionism was obsessive: the pressures of following Born To Run were intense. And the backlog of songs was enormous. The guiding principle was that anything too cheerful had to be junked.
They built a lumbering beast in those 12 months. The band blasts righteously, Springsteen howls and roars. Roy Bittan’s brittle piano lines define the tunes, anchored by the colossal wallop of Max Weinberg’s drumming. Compared with Born To Run the pace seems slower, more grimly intent than breathlessly intense. But the really stunning advance is in Bruce’s song-writing. Where his earlier work was inclined to be fussy and florid, Darkness is stark and pungent. From the opening track, Badlands (its title taken from the murder movie), we’re in a world of hurt. By the father-and-son attrition of second song, Adam Raised A Cain, Springsteen is offering his emotional scars for public inspection. In Streets Of Fire he’s lost his way entirely. Something’s gone wrong in every story told on this record.
The funereal tread of Factory, maybe the bleakest number here, combines more ruminations on Bruce’s father with a compassionate take on the stultifying fall-out from lives of industrial drudgery. It’s a long way from Hotel California or anything you were hearing from Fleetwood Mac at that time. And while there is still a car in nearly every song, they’re no longer there to wow the kids on Main Street – they’re just an attempt at fleeting escape, driven down those no-hope highways. “I’m riding down Kingsley, figuring I’ll get a drink,” goes Something In The Night, “Turn the radio up loud, so I don’t have to think.”
Perhaps the whole key to Darkness is the song called Racing In The Street. Its title looks like some hot-rod yarn off Born To Run but it’s actually the opposite. Threading its way throughout the track is a mournful four-note riff recalling Then He Kissed Me, one of those wonderful pocket-symphonies Phil Spector cut for The Crystals in 1963. Here the riff has been dramatically slowed down, all its zippy teen vitality drained away. To an audience of Springsteen’s baby boomer generation, the effect was not so much nostalgic as elegiac, expressing the ache of faded dreams. The chorus also cops a lyrical lick from Martha & The Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street, just to emphasise the emotional distance Bruce and his contemporaries had travelled in those years. Inside the song, the character’s still bragging about his car and trying to pretend that nothing’s changed. “But now there’s wrinkles ’round my baby’s eyes / And she cries herself to sleep at night.”
Darkness On The Edge Of Town came out in Britain in Summer, 1978. Like David Bowie’s albums of that period, Low and "Heroes”, it was hardly punk rock but still it chimed with the times and was spared the scorn of dinosaur hunters. Partly it was the artwork, featuring Bruce, unsmiling, in some cheap-looking room in artfully distressed clothing – this was surely calculated, but shrewdly done. Sales-wise it performed less well than Born To Run – the lack of flamboyance and obvious crowd-pleasers probably lost him some ground. But I believe it deepened his appeal to those who cottoned on. It won him respect from everyone from punky cynics to one John Lennon, currently in Dakota Building hibernation and watching carefully while the Boss made hay in his absence.
Between our adolescence and our obsolescence, does rock’n’roll have anything to say to us? Darkness On The Edge Of Town was powerful evidence that it does. As Springsteen would say, years afterwards: “With the record’s final verse, ‘Tonight I’ll be on that hill…’, my characters stand unsure of their fate, but dug in and committed. By the end of Darkness I’d found my adult voice.”

Bruce Springsteen
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
COLUMBIA

When you hear that Springsteen’s “made a folk album” you anticipate, perhaps, something stark and quiet, in the chin-stroking style of Nebraska or The Ghost Of Tom Joad. What you get, though, is a big old ass-kicking thing. We Shall Overcome is acoustic music, and rooted in the centuries, yet it booms out like those stadium-rocking Boss-athons Born To Run and Born In The USA. It resembles an imaginary Phil Spector folk album, where everything – fiddles, banjos, horns, voices and stomping feet – sounds triplicated and turned up to 11.

The album’s sub-title honours Pete Seeger, one of the archivists and performers who saved whole swathes of American folk song from extinction. Springsteen played on a Seeger tribute CD some years ago and was moved to follow up with these 13 prime examples of the art, his first all-cover version LP. The sessions took place on his New Jersey farm and the results are packaged in artwork of sepia-tinted, rustic antiquity. But as if to banish that Mighty Wind image of folk music as tweedy, nerdish or worthy, Bruce bookends his set with two terrific blasts of rollicking jollity, Old Dan Tucker and Froggie Went A Courtin’. These songs were old when Charles Dickens was a boy, but they don’t sound it.

Elsewhere we’re into that Woody Guthrie kind of territory – half protest, half commentary – that first inspired Bob Dylan and which, come to that, has never been far from Springsteen’s own work. One song grafts the Robin Hood legend onto the outlaw Jesse James; Erie Canal, Pay Me My Money Down and John Henry are muscular work songs, bristling with pride; My Oklahoma Home is a fine and poignant dustbowl lament. And while I don’t quite buy the “too-ri-aa” Oirishness of Mrs McGrath, its damnation of “all foreign wars” will doubtless strike the intended contemporary chord.

Is it, then, a political record? Thanks to Seeger, Guthrie and others, the US folk world has traditionally dressed to the left. It’s been the medium of choice at picket lines, peace marches and civil rights meetings, and there are songs here reflecting all of those values – chiming, too, with the Bruce world-view that led to his campaigning for John Kerry in the last US election. But there is also a deeply religious streak in Springsteen’s choice of covers. As a songwriter he always knew the power of Biblical imagery and these folk sessions followed on from last year’s Devils & Dust album, a record that revealed his spiritual interests to be reviving.

Hence the emotional core of We Shall Overcome is to be heard in a clutch of songs – the title track included – that were Christian anthems, and especially African-American anthems, adopted by the wider social protest movement. There is O Mary Don’t You Weep, which swings and rocks with optimism (“Pharoah’s army got drownded!”); Jacob’s Ladder is a joyous toil towards something finer (“We are brothers, sisters all”); Eyes On The Prize exhorts the faithful to stay faithful to that dream of freedom: “Dungeon shook and the chains come off”. And We Shall Overcome itself, of course, is the very model of noble stoicism and quiet, unbreakable resolve.

All of which reminds you that the real power of folk music is that it can serve as a topical morale-booster when you want it to, but it’s both older and more enduring than any of our present preoccupations. All things must pass, even the Bush administration. But although presidents change the human condition remains the same. Old scoundrels go and new scoundrels arise to take their place. Folk music in its widest sense, taking in the blues and traditional songs of any land on earth, will address the permanent facts of existence. And just as great folk songs are usually rooted in some specific place on the face of the earth, they find a universal echo in hearts everywhere. The best example here is surely Shenandoah, the rolling, melancholy masterpiece of love and homesickness, already reckoned to be two centuries old and, most probably, imperishable.

These are tunes to last the ages. They aren’t always cheerful, but they are cheering. For Bruce Springsteen this sounds like it was a wonderful vacation from the responsibilities of being his country’s musical conscience – a Bossman’s holiday, if you will – and it might be just the tonic he needed. These old songs are deep wells to draw from and good things come up by the bucketful.

Bruce Springsteen: Acts Of The Noughties

He entered the century as a respected rock senior. Like the majority of respected rock seniors, it looked as though his glory days were gone. There remained only the years of quiet decline, playing to greying crowds of nodding nostalgics. Artistically, in fact, the 1990s had been a slack time by Springsteen’s standards, producing only three new albums and none of them were crowd-pleasers.
But then came September 11, 2001. It set in train the appalling events we still struggle to grasp. In Springsteen’s world the effect was to re-connect his writing with his voice. In his album The Rising, he managed what remarkably few artists seemed to attempt. He framed a coherent response to that devastating day that was not maudlin, facile or vengeful. It reminded a few of us of why this man had once seemed so important. It opened, for him, a new decade of engagement with the wider world. After this he stood as more than a rock senior. He became the living representative of a changed America.
Not all his recent music has the power of The Rising. The other albums of new material have been less directly topical, even if this year’s Working On A Dream lent inspiration to supporters of Barack Obama. The contemplative Devils & Dust, from 2005, was a record for his closer followers who don’t require regular stadium anthems. Of all his later albums, though, it’s a knockabout set of instant folk songs, We Shall Overcome, that represents the high point. Somehow, all its fiddle-and-banjo revivalism is more dynamic than anything he’s done since his first flush of stardom. It’s evidence of Springsteen’s move into the wider narrative of North American music. The man once hailed as rock’n’roll’s future was actually a skilled summation of rock’s entire past. Now he aligns himself to an even deeper tradition.
No legend of American music can stand still for three minutes without Bruce sidling up and doing a duet. Pete Seeger, John Fogerty, Roger McGuinn and Alejandro Escovedo are just a few of his recent victims. There has been a vacancy for that Grand Old Man role ever since Johnny Cash died, and in the decade ahead, my money’s on Springsteen. Nor is Hollywood immune. His song for The Wrestler, a movie that makes Mickey Rourke seem more than ever like a character from a Springsteen song, is an epic to rival his previous big-screen weepie Streets Of Philadelphia. Basically, if you need a song to put some communal heart into a modern multiplex, call the guy in New Jersey.
Not since Frank Sinatra has a New Jersey boy been so well-connected. Springsteen’s place in Barack Obama’s new Camelot is assured. It was hard-earned, too. His present friendship with the powerful is a reward for long months on the campaign trail, both for the new President and the Democratic candidate before him, John Kerry. In that 2004 election, when it wasn’t hard to find actors and musicians who loathed George Bush, Springsteen made the best stab at Jeffersonian eloquence. “It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities – “ he wrote, “respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals – that we come to life in God’s eyes.”
It took him decades to commit to one particular set of politicians, but if they’ve any sense they’ll clasp to him. More than any radical troubadour he can wear Woody Guthrie’s mantle to the White House. More than Bob Dylan or Neil Young, he has an Everyman quality that speaks to the broad mass of voters. There is nothing disturbingly strange about him, nor sneering, nor urban smart-arse. He represents a certain style of US patriotism and he has a religious sensibility – on those two counts alone, he is closer to the country’s heartland than many liberal acts. Early this year he played the hugely symbolic half-time slot at the Super Bowl, sealing his eminence in that place where working America comes together. And to us, abroad, where a sports final means very little, he’s the frank and manly face of a country we had forgotten how to trust.

XTC : The Dukes of Stratosphear

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

XTC have made so many wonderful records; yet their spin-off project, The Dukes Of Stratosphear, commands almost as much affection. I interviewed the leading protagonists for The Word, May 2009, when the Dukes’ albums were being re-issued.

“Making albums should be fun,” says Andy Partridge. “But they’re always a lot of worry and egos flaring up. Producers or band members wandering off. But this… This was pure fun.”
The project he recalls with such delight was an XTC spin-off called The Dukes Of Stratosphear. They were an imaginary “band from 1967” who made two perfectly-realised LPs of fake psychedelia in 1985 and 1987. Their albums 25 O’Clock and Psonic Psunspot, which are now being reissued in deluxe editions, are among pop music’s most sophisticated jokes. Though they were intended as a light-hearted indulgence, the Dukes were momentarily a bigger band than XTC itself.
Growing up in Swindon, Partridge felt the Beautiful People of the Swinging Sixties were an awfully long way from his street: “England in 1967 had not gone Technicolor except for a few dozen people in central London. For 99.9 per cent of the population it was still the 1950s; you could only read glimpses of it in the papers.” But Top Of The Pops would yield the occasional pearl of English psychedelia, and he was smitten for life: “As a schoolkid in 1967 I thought, Well that’s it, that’s how music is going to sound from now on. You would hear Strawberry Fields Forever or My White Bicycle, and think, When I’m older and I’m in a group, that’s what we’ll sound like.”
But it wasn’t quite like that: “Time kicks in and suddenly you find yourself on stage in Doncaster in 1977 and you think, Hang on, this is not psychedelic, I’m not wearing a paisley pattern jacket or wearing a cravat under a liquid light show. There’s no Mellotron. So I thought, Wouldn’t it be great, now we have access to making records, to do a big thank-you to the bands who made my schooldays so colourful.”
XTC rode into town on the back of punk but Partridge nursed a yearning for the mystic riffs of his youth. At a party in 1978 he confided in fellow Swindonite Dave Gregory, who shared his passion. “It might have been rubbish,” says Dave. “But it was magical rubbish.” They vowed to make a time-warped album. XTC’s bassist Colin Moulding, author of their big hit Making Plans For Nigel, was happy to co-operate. Nothing came of the idea, though, until someone else got there first.
Moulding: “It was record by Nick Nicely that really forced our hand. We were all raving about it and Andy thought, If I don’t do something about it now…” Nicely’s 1981 single was Hilly Fields (1892), a ghostly masterpiece of neo-psychedelia that evokes 1967 through a prism of Victorian nursery images and phased vocals. It was the catalyst that the unborn Dukes Of Stratosphere required. Their opportunity came in 1984 when Partridge was hired for a three-month production job on the singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara. His partner was to be XTC’s old producer John Leckie, himself a veteran psych enthusiast who had begun as a tape-op in Abbey Road for bands like Pink Floyd. But when the Partridge/Leckie team was unexpectedly fired by O’Hara’s manager, they were suddenly at a loose end.
Moulding and the guitarist Gregory (now a full-time member of XTC) were hastily summoned, with Gregory’s brother Ian on drums. Financed by £5000 from XTC’s label Virgin, they decamped to Hereford and recorded 25 O’Clock. Moulding was less of a psych-obsessive (“It was Andy’s baby, really; I took instruction from the other guys”) but he rose to the songwriting challenge. Dave Gregory was and remains a devotee of vintage equipment and strove to find the oldest, most authentic gear. Partridge and Leckie simply revelled in fashioning sun-dappled replicas of See Emily Play and Their Satanic Majesties Request. The sessions spawned a six-track LP that has now, thanks to demos and outtakes, become a 15-track CD.
Original psychedelia was supposedly pop made under hallucinogenic influence, but the Dukes were a model of discipline. “I never went near drugs,” says Partridge. “I valued my brain and I saw a lot of tossers who took drugs and how it cooked their brains. The Beatles were not on acid doing Sgt. Pepper. You can’t make great records like that off your head. You have to be in control.” Even so, the atmosphere was giddier than usual. “I tended to be a benign dictator in the studio with XTC,” he admits. “It all had to be exactly right. I was like a cross between Mary Poppins and Mussolini. And I think the others were getting pissed off. So with the Dukes we had a template: first takes, if we can; it’s all got to sound like somebody else; and if anyone makes a cock-up we’ll put a funny noise over it.”
It was briefly planned to keep the Dukes’ identity a secret, but the record company’s slogan, “When you hear this you will be in XTC,” rather spoiled that ruse. Nor were many taken in by noms-de-disc like Sir John Johns and Lord Cornelius Plum. To Virgin’s joy they actually got £1000 change from their initial £5000. (Even the LP’s artwork, an elaborate homage to Cream’s Disraeli Gears, was done by Partridge on his kitchen table.) And the record sold more than XTC’s last effort, The Big Express. Two years later, Virgin encouraged the band to don their paisley shirts and granny glasses for a second bash at the Dukes Of Stratosphear.
This time they set off for Sawmills Studio, in a remote and picturesque setting that reminded Colin Moulding of Swallows And Amazons. “It’s really out of the way,” adds Partridge, “up a tidal creek in Cornwall: we called it ‘Abbey Road for the Straw Dogs set’. It’s a great studio but you could only get to it by boat, so we were loading our Mellotron onto a tiny fishing smack, and wondering if it would tip over.” John Leckie joined them once more, and thinks the result, Psonic Psunspot, shows a broader range of influences. The first LP, for instance, had been almost entirely English.
“We were specifically thanking the English bands more than the American ones, “ Partridge explains. “Our psychedelia was naïve and Alice In Wonderland and wandering about in striped blazers. But theirs was poisonous, all about avoiding the Vietnam draft and taking horrendous drugs. No one in England had to burn their draft card. Here you just got a clip round the ear from your old man: he’d done National Service and why shouldn’t you?”
Taken together, the two Dukes albums are a masterclass in loving larceny. John Lennon’s I’m Only Sleeping is mimicked with a Rutle-esque precision by Colin Moulding’s Shiny Cage, just as Partridge’s Mole From The Ministry is I Am The Walrus, with a nod to The Moles’ We Are The Moles. (The Moles, in fact, were another “secret” band: in 1968 rumours swept Swinging London that they were really The Beatles. But they were actually a less-fabled combo, Simon Dupree & The Big Sound.) Elsewhere there are perfect simulations of The Electric Prunes, The Small Faces, The Hollies and The Beach Boys.
It’s hard to maintain the momentum of a retro project, thinks Partridge, “because you’re imposing the stink of one era across the armpit of another.” But the Dukes were a morale-booster that left a beneficial imprint on XTC’s own music. Their next album, Skylarking, lifted the band’s stalling fortunes and possibly saved their career. More than that, the phantom band are an acknowledged influence on other people, from The Shamen to Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Most dramatically, John Leckie was contacted by some Northern unknowns called The Stone Roses – Ian Brown and John Squire were major Dukes Of Stratosphear fans – and his pairing with them led to that groundbreaking debut, The Stone Roses.
Leckie’s CV extends from work with George Harrison to Muse, Magazine and Simple Minds. But the Dukes were his favourite studio experience. Not only was he happy to be invited back, he says, “I think I’d be quite pleased today if they asked me to do another one.” Sadly that looks unlikely. XTC, according to Colin Moulding, are “estranged” from each other now; Andy Partridge says they will never record again. But he shares his former colleagues’ affection for the non-existent band who gave us songs like Bike Ride To The Moon and You’re A Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel).
“I loved the mischief of it all,” he twinkles. “Doing the Dukes was like a fancy dress party. You could go and make an arse of yourself because you didn’t have to be you. ‘That’s not me, it’s somebody dressed as a chicken.’ I hope it’s as much fun to listen to as it was to record. Some of the panning is vicious, it’s like brain floss. Like pulling a purple cord through your head. But it did outsell our own album of the time by about three to one.”
Yes. Were you embarrassed by that?
Partridge pauses. “It was odd, because it was like saying they prefer you dressed as a chicken. ‘I don’t like him when he’s being him. I like him pretending to be someone else.’ So here I am sitting in my chicken outfit again.”

Eric Clapton

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A profile of Eric Clapton, timed for for his imminent reunion with Cream, published in Word magazine’s April 2005 issue. Parts of this were written for inclusion in my book of London's musical history, In The City.

At the end is a personal Top 20 of recommended Clapton tracks to that date.

Some men are born with a hellhound on their trail. The blues wizard Robert Johnson was one of them. Dead at 21, he became the classic role model for every guitar-slinging romantic. He got his brilliant gifts by selling himself to Satan, said some, in awed whispers. He died of poisoned whiskey from a jealous man who’d caught him with his girl, said others. In blues mythology he is the ultimate troubadour. The wandering genius, charismatic but cursed. The ladies want his babies but the Devil wants his soul.
Many say that Eric Clapton’s greatest record is the Cream version of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. As it happens, Eric Clapton isn’t one of them – he hates his famous guitar solo – but he rates nobody higher than Robert Johnson. The question is: Was Eric Clapton, too, was born with a hellhound on his trail? Or did he just hang around the kennel with a packet of biscuits?
Nowadays when Eric Clapton makes tribute records to Robert Johnson, they’re dismissed as pale, bourgeois copies of the real thing. Maybe they are. Yet Clapton’s own life has packed in drama to rival anybody’s. His African-American heroes, growing up in places like pre-War Mississippi, had misfortune handed to them on a plate (“If it wasn’t for bad luck,” as one song goes, “I wouldn’t have no luck at all’). The pampered white superstars of Clapton’s era had precious little to complain of. But if you had the choice, would you really want Eric Clapton’s life?
He’s had astonishing success, of course, and wealth and the attentions of beautiful women. He was so respected he nearly joined both The Beatles and the Stones. But just look at the debit column. He suffered long years of soul-destroying drug addiction. If he was the inspirational figure behind Rock Against Racism, it was certainly not in a good way. As to his family past, there are so many skeletons in the cupboard that a walk-in wardrobe would be more practical. There are the sexual intrigues, the friendships betrayed, all the unedifying tales of drunkenness and cruelty. And you shall know him by the trail of the dead… If you were superstitious you would say there was something of a curse at work in Clapton’s life. Bad things happen to those around him. Awful things.
Yet he has walked through the valley of darkness and come out the other side – with scarcely a crease in his designer suit. How did that happen?
This is the man who will take the stage at Cream’s reunion in May. The Royal Albert Hall will witness lurching monster riffs, percussive pandemonium and guitar solos of dazzling brilliance. Elderly spectators will look upon them and see the ciphers of vanished decades. Matrons will sigh. T-shirts will be sold to men who really ought not to be wearing them any more. But for all that, the nights will be glorious. And at their centre will stand the human story-board that is Eric Clapton.

************

Cream departed this vale of tears with two shows at the Royal Albert Hall on 25 and 26 November, 1968. None of the trio felt they played a blinder but they were surprised and gratified by the waves of love they felt from the audience. For a band once arrogant enough to call themselves the Cream, they had fallen prey to a corrosive insecurity.
Admittedly they still looked great. Their drummer, Ginger Baker, was for a few years the most compelling sight in British rock. He’d stride about looking like a magnificently debauched Jacobean duke, then settle down to batter hell out of his kit. All mad, panting, hollow-eyed, many-limbed ferocity, his was an artful blend of frenzy and dexterity. Jack Bruce, the bassist, was not so theatrical but no less intense – hunched up over his instrument, fingers tugging urgently at its four fat strings, face screwed up in agonies of concentration. Then he would raise his head to the mike and let forth torrents of wounded jazz poetry in a Caledonian soul bellow.
And Eric Clapton? The Cream deal was that Ginger was the group’s unofficial leader, if only through sheer force of personality. Jack, the most advanced songwriter and vocalist, was deemed leader in the studio. And Eric was the leader of Cream on stage, signalling with the merest nod or look, the impassive general of his three-man army. For Cream’s farewell at the Albert Hall, he looked more inscrutable than ever, his stance erect and stiff, his eyes hidden behind two curtains of brown hair.
For Baker and Bruce, it was the climax of the most successful time of their careers. For Clapton, it was the end of a two-year nightmare. Anything, he thought, had to be better than the sheer hell of playing in Cream. But that’s the thing about hell. Just when you think you’ve hit the bottom, another trap door opens underneath you.
It had been a short career but intense enough for a lifetime. Baker was a wiry, hyper-active jazz nut from South London, Bruce a formally trained musician from Lanarkshire. They wound up in the same band, The Graham Bond Organisation, regulars on the London R&B scene and featured briefly, you might or might not recall, in an early ’60s film called Gonks Go Beat. In a foretaste of the chaos to come, Ginger seized control of the Graham Bond Organisation when its nominal leader slid into heroin addiction. (Poor mad Bond eventually flung himself under a Piccadilly line train in 1974.) Ginger and Jack would row and fight like savages. Baker fired Bruce but he refused to go. Things came to a crisis on stage one night when Baker hurled his drumsticks at the bassman’s head. The Scot turned around and trashed Baker’s beloved drum-kit.
Eric Clapton played in bands on the same circuit. Nicknamed “Slowhand” (a pun on “slow hand clap-ton”) he’d acquired an awesome reputation. When Ginger Baker, whose professed ambition “was to be hugely successful” heard that Eric was at a loose end he proposed they join forces. Baker was aghast when Eric agreed so long as Jack Bruce could be their bass-player. But humble pie was eaten, the trio was formed and duly announced itself “the cream” of London’s musicians. Which to a large extent it was. A hot-shot manager, Robert Stigwood, took charge of the business side.
On the first day of rehearsals, at Baker’s house in Neasden, a fight broke out between Ginger and Jack. Eric looked on in terror, and realised his two new partners had a history which excluded him. “I admired these guys tremendously,” he said a while ago. “They were from the generation before me, they were on stage while I was in the audience at the Marquee. And even in the band, when it came to fruition, I was still in that place: I was in the audience for most of their shenanigans.”
Needing a lyric-writer, Baker called up a beat poet he knew, Pete Brown. But the poet really hit it off with Jack Bruce, not Ginger. When Cream’s first single appeared, Baker was incensed to find the song, Wrapping Paper, credited to Bruce and Brown only. So they had another fight. Their first LP, Fresh Cream, came out in December 1966 and showed the band finding its way with a fairly cautious mix of blues covers, a few Jack Bruce originals and something interminable by Ginger called Toad. In the Teenbeat Annual for 1967, they were hailed as “one of the most bizarre-looking outfits on the scene,” but also “top contenders for the Beat Championship”.
Cream’s real claim to greatness rests with their second album, Disraeli Gears. Its cover alone is a definitive psychedelic artefact: designed by Clapton’s flat-mate Martin Sharp, the front and back present a baroque hippy collage (the shots of Eric find him on his first LSD trip) and really need to be seen in 12-inch format, to be read as stained glass windows were read by pre-literate peasants. Disraeli Gears’ title came from a roadie’s mis-pronunciation of the cycling term derailleur gears; this arch blend of groovy argot and mock-Victoriana captures the essence of 1967 pop style.
Clapton made his writing debut, helped by Martin Sharp, with Tales Of Brave Ulysees; his guitar part employs the wah-wah pedal he’d discovered that very morning. Bruce and Brown joined Eric in creating a chug-along hard rock classic called Sunshine Of Your Love. A beautifully liquid Clapton solo adorns Strange Brew and Jack’s We’re Going Wrong is as bleakly dramatic as a Beckett play. Whether as studio craftsmen of three-minute pop nuggets or stadium blues improvisers, their range was phenomenal. They could crunch through pyrotechnic 12-bar freak-outs or croon mellifluous tunes you could picture Fred Astaire dancing to.
Under Robert Stigwood’s relentless direction the band played numberless American shows in everything from high school gyms to the Fillmore West. It made them into superstars but crushed their spirits in the process. They got druggier, too. (Their first collective LSD trip saw the trio running up and down Ben Nevis, ending up in a cake shop.) Clapton recalled one gig in San Francisco: “Every bad lick I had, every blues lick, turned the audience into devils in red coats. Then I’d play a sweet one and they’d all turn into angels.”
Many tensions were at play. Baker and Bruce were at loggerheads over songwriting shares. Eric felt the other two were too jazzy in background for his blues taste, but also too easily tempted by the lure of a pop hit. Clapton also resented curbing his ambitions as a vocalist, Bruce having by far the stronger voice. “I decided that I had a very small voice,” he recalled glumly, “a very limited range and it sounded very thin.” For a while the men had bonded in adversity: “We were so tight and loved one another so much,” Eric said. Outsiders were simply blanked. “We were talking in tongues at that point.” But by 1968 they were touring Britain and insisting on separate hotels.
The disillusion is comically evident on a TV clip of Cream on the Smothers’ Brother’s US show. Stonily, they crank out a spiritless version of Anyone For Tennis dressed up in police uniforms, loping through a cheap psychedelic stage set, affecting to play guitar solos on tennis racquets. You could see it was the end game. Their final albums, Wheels Of Fire and Goodbye carried many fine tracks, but were both constructed from scarce studio material and live recordings. Away from the discipline of the studio they could become turgid on stage. “What we were doing was starting to become a circus,” Clapton recalled in 2004, “playing places where the audience were stoned, places where we were encouraged to do silly things, play meaningless, rambling self-indulgent music. I wanted to take it seriously.” He’d been struck by The Band’s album Music From Big Pink, cut to the quick to think that this band was truly reinventing the blues – while he was just dicking about.
Amazingly, Clapton actually fainted when he read a Rolling Stone review that called him a “master of blues cliché”. The worst criticisms are always those that echo our innermost self-doubts. Management and record company conspired to keep Cream on a hamster wheel of work. And their internal strife became unbearable. For a long time Clapton had played, in the words of Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls, “the lukewarm water” between the “fire and ice” of Baker and Bruce. Now his colleagues’ arguments were literally reducing him to tears. A nervous breakdown was beckoning. The group dissolved slowly and painfully. “I just went under,” Clapton recalled. “I was full of hatred.”

*******************

The Britain that Cream grew up in was a very different place. We live amid such cultural saturation that nothing affects anyone for very long. Back then, there was cultural scarcity: when young people discovered something exciting, they re-built their whole beings around it. Thus the arrival of blues music in London had a far-reaching effect on English life – a bit like the introduction of tea in 1657.
It’s curious that African-American music born from poverty and cultural dispossession should find a ready echo among the white youths of post-war Britain, but such was the case. In fact the British blues boom proved among the most fruitful of cross-pollinations. This intensity was evident in fans as far apart as Newcastle (Eric Burdon and The Animals) and Belfast (Van Morrison and Them). But in London’s art colleges and jazz clubs the movement hit critical mass, spawning The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, The Who, The Kinks and hundreds more. From Jimmy Page to Peter Green, Jeff Beck to Rod Stewart, London boys baptised themselves in Mississippi waters and were transformed.
In that light, Eric Clapton was really a prime candidate for conversion. His own identity was fractured beyond repair. Stuck in pale suburbia, his sense of cultural isolation was deep. Here in the blues were roots and passion in abundance. The young Clapton nursed held a romantic admiration for self-destruction, whether in doomed poets of the Rimbaud and Baudelaire stamp, or the heroin-addicted music men like Charlie Parker and Ray Charles. Basically, Eric was up for it. It’s as if he listened to Robert Johnson’s ancient wails of primal despair and thought, How much is that hellhound in the window?
He was born just before the end of World War II, the illegitimate son of Surrey girl Patricia Clapton and a Canadian soldier posted to England, Edward Fryer. The boy never met his father, who disappeared before his birth. Patricia was just 16, and Eric was raised in Ripley by his grandparents Rose and Jack. Until the age of nine or ten, he believed they were his parents and that his mother was in fact his sister – not an uncommon sort of deception in those days, when the conventions of social respectability held greater sway. Discovering the truth about his origins, Clapton has always said, was a trauma that would affect him forever.
His academic progress stumbled and he failed the 11-plus, but later transferred schools through a talent for art. He found fellowship in a clique of rock’n’roll fans, discovered the acoustic guitar and blues music, and at 16 he was a beret-sporting beatnik at Kingston College of Art, on the south-western outskirts of London.
Soon enough, Eric Clapton’s head had been thoroughly turned by the eternal trinity of blues, booze and women. Still, it came as a shock to be dropped by Kingston College of Art; the bruise to his ego was soothed only his tolerant grandmother’s gift of an electric guitar.
He joined the serious minded British boys who worshipped at shrines like Dobell’s record shop in the Charing Cross Road, pouncing on imported blues rarities. Of all the 12-bar shamen who obsessed him, Robert Johnson spoke most deeply to his soul. It was characteristic of Clapton that he felt drawn to the most tormented, star-crossed blues player of them all. The challenge now was reproducing all the soul-scarred beauty of that music, when you and your fellow musicians were callow chaps from the leafier corners of the Home Counties.
One of his first bands, The Yardbirds, took over The Rolling Stones’ residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. In 1963 the band cut a session at the club backing visiting blues star Sonny Boy Williamson. This old gent was a big, mean, Delta-bred snarler, as real as real can be. His oft-quoted verdict on The Yardbirds may be apocryphal but it’s worth repeating: “Those English boys want to play the blues so bad,” he growled. “And they do.”
Next year came another priceless tutorial when The Yardbirds backed some more visiting deities, Muddy Waters and Otis Spann. Although too awed to play at his best, Clapton took in the essentials: “All I can remember,” he said, “is the closeness that existed between Muddy and Otis. The way they talked and looked at one another, it was like they were married. And they wore the same extraordinary clothes: shiny, hand-spun silk suits with very baggy trousers and jackets that came almost to the knee. They were like angels.”
The eye for the threads is quintessential Eric; by this point he’d ditched the beatnik chic of his early teens for an austere mod style, conservatively hip. But the comment on Muddy and Spann’s closeness is poignant, too. The Yardbirds’ lack of that camaraderie was painfully obvious.
“Everymody loves I Wish You Would” went the music press ads for their first single. The trouble was, “everymody” didn’t love The Yardbirds’ music and foremost among them was Eric Clapton. Appalled by the “pop” leanings of their repertoire he played the purist card and flounced after the fourth single For Your Love: “I left in a very public way,” he said recently. “I threw my toys out of the pram. They wanted a hit and I was very conscious of having a blues mission… I was arrogant, I was like the self-appointed blues ambassador to this country.” Such a puritan disposition was not exceptional in those days.
Clapton’s exit from The Yardbirds, on the brink of stardom, was hot-headed. But he was thrown a lifeline by that tribal chieftain of the London blues scene, John Mayall. To be hired by the venerated leader of The Blues Breakers was all the credibility a 20-year-old gunslinger could wish for, and Clapton was even given co-billing on the next album. Around this time the fabled “Clapton is God” graffiti started to appear on London walls – exactly how much has never been clear (a famously photographed spray-paint example looks to me like a much later PR mock-up) but the fervour of Eric’s following is beyond doubt.
London pop had shaken off its prole teen origins; in the mid-‘60s it was being colonised by middle-class students with aspirations to art. Enter the cult of the musical virtuoso, borrowed from classical and jazz, which found its first pop divinity in Eric Clapton. If anyone deserved it he probably did, for in the setting of Mayall’s band – and after that in Cream – the boy’s genius was now apparent to all. Including, it must be said, Clapton himself.
Once in Cream he started living the Swinging London dream. In Chelsea the pop glitterati met the hip young aristocracy and got along famously. Newly adorned in psychedelic finery, with a model girlfriend Charlotte Martin, Eric took up residence at the Pheasantry, a King’s Road cluster of artists’ studios (it’s now a Pizza Express). In the flat upstairs an Australian girl called Germaine Greer was writing The Female Eunuch. There were boutiques near to hand, from Granny Takes A Trip to Hung On You. An amusing new drug called LSD was making its appearance at parties.
If there was any warning sign amid such lotus-eating splendour that the young Cream star was losing his marbles, it was in his compulsive need to change looks – an old Clapton trait that was now reaching neurotic proportions. Hair long, hair short, hair straight or explosively frizzed, with moustache or impenetrable shades, there was a period of five years when nobody knew for sure what Eric Clapton actually looked like. Perhaps, after all, it’s dangerous to go around getting called God – especially when you’re a slightly fragile cove from Ripley in Surrey.
The first important challenge to Clapton’s supremacy, however, came with the arrival in London of Jimi Hendrix. Diffident characters both, they sought one another’s company and forged a shy sort of intimacy. But their rivalry as guitarists ran deep. Clapton must have watched the American’s triumph with the same inner dismay that led Bing Crosby to say of Frank Sinatra, “A singer like Sinatra comes along once in a lifetime. But why did it have to be mine?”
In fairness to Clapton he has never stinted in his praise for the other guitarist’s talent. Days before Hendrix died in 1970, Eric recorded a moving version of Jimi’s most beautiful composition Little Wing; in fact, he was heading over to present his friend with a surprise gift, a left-handed Stratocaster, when the grim news came through. The impact on Clapton’s psyche appears to have been nothing short of devastating.
But life as an idol went on. Clapton was accorded top-drawer status by his peers, evidenced by his appearances in Pete Townshend’s Tommy film as a rock’n’roll high priest and also in The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus. Indeed Jagger and Richards approached him to join them after Cream, but he declined. He guested on The Beatles’ “White Album” with a solo for George’s song While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Harrison and he had become close friends as far back as The Yardbirds. Once, after a row in the studio with Harrison, John Lennon suggested to Paul McCartney that they get Eric in to replace him.
That idea was never pursued, sparing Clapton a very difficult choice. After all, he and George were virtually neighbours now that Eric had bought himself a 20-room mansion in Surrey. George lived in nearby Esher with his lovely wife, Pattie. By common consent the prettiest of the Beatle wives, Pattie Harrison was the belle of London’s bright young things. It’s to be presumed that Eric noticed.
In 1969 came Blind Faith, the band Clapton formed with Traffic’s star Stevie Winwood. At the latter’s insistence, Ginger Baker was brought in as drummer, though Clapton worried he was in for a re-run of the Cream fiasco. As it turned out, Blind Faith’s real problem lay elsewhere – in the massive expectations built around the “supergroup” (as any new amalgam of semi-famous musicians was now routinely called). They played a huge show in Hyde Park, made a decent album – though it became better known for the nude 12-year-old girl on its cover than for any of its songs – and quietly disbanded after a US tour.
Eric’s friendship with The Beatles took another turn when he joined John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band for a festival gig in Toronto. Their performance was remarkable for two things – Yoko Ono’s wailed extravaganza Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow) and a brand new song of John’s, called Cold Turkey, that depicted his heroin addiction with harrowing candour. On stage in Toronto, Clapton was high himself, on his new favourite drug cocaine, but he developed the song’s piercing guitar part (and would perfect it in the studio a week later). He was not personally familiar with the tortures of heroin withdrawal. Not yet.
A part of Clapton always craved the anonymity of sideman status. After his guest stint with the Plastic Ono Band he went for another low profile spell with rootsy US act Delaney & Bonnie, and with Delaney’s band made his own solo debut LP, Eric Clapton. With a few refugees from that same band, he then formed Derek & The Dominos. The very name looked like a spotlight-dodging ruse on Clapton’s part (a condition we might term “Tin Machine Syndrome”). Nervous at this wilful sacrifice of brand recognition, his record company flooded London with badges saying “Derek is Eric”.
While the Dominos found their stride they helped George Harrison with his own solo LP All Things Must Pass. George had by now moved from Surrey to a new palace in Oxfordshire, where the sessions took place. But he was still married to Pattie, of course. (As Eric noticed.) Clapton himself was living with a beautiful aristocratic teenager named Alice Ormsby-Gore, the daughter of Britain’s former ambassador to the US, Lord Harlech. It might have been a very agreeable set-up, were it not for two very large flies in the ointment.
One was Eric’s growing realisation of a passionate, hopeless love for George’s wife. The other was the fact that he and Alice had become addicted to heroin.

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Paradoxically, the anguish of Clapton’s unrequited love for Pattie Harrison, his best friend’s wife, would inspire the greatest work of his entire career. With the Dominos he decamped to Miami to make an album called Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, its title derived from an old Persian love story whose plotline exactly mirrored his own romantic entanglement.
The Miami sessions were extravagantly druggy, and Eric was feeling no pain for their duration, but the material on the album left no doubt about his turmoil. Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad? implored one song. Have You Ever Loved A Woman? asked another. Bell Bottom Blues confirmed Clapton’s emergence as a writer of melodies to match the fluid grace of his guitar lines. The ache of longing pervades Layla at every turn. So does a certain streak of self-pity, epitomised by the cover of an old blues number, Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out.
The album was a commercial disaster in Britain and only a modest success in America. This seems extraordinary in hindsight and Clapton was certainly mortified at the time. Add the sudden death of his friend Hendrix and the continuing torment of his love life, and the omens looked bad. As a man so vulnerable to chemical temptations, Clapton could not have picked worse company than the Dominos. Their attempts at a second album collapsed in disarray: “drugs and women,“ said their wry keyboard player Bobby Whitlock; “too many drugs and not enough women.”
A morbid air of doom has always clung to the Dominos’ story. The guest guitarist on the first album was Duane Allman; he was killed soon after in a motorbike accident. The bassist Carl Radle died in 1980 of kidney infection brought on by alcoholism and addiction. The drummer Jim Gordon acquired his own drug habit and acute paranoid schizophrenia; complaining of “hearing voices”, particularly his mother’s, he attacked and murdered her in 1983. He’s been locked away in a prison hospital since then, but is sustained by the royalties he earns through a co-write credit on Layla’s title track. Only Whitlock and Clapton are alive and well.
Clapton has said of his “Derek” period that it was “a make-believe band, we were all hiding inside it... I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else’s wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write that song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn’t real at all.” Regardless of Alice Ormsby-Gore’s feelings, Clapton even had a fling with Pattie’s 18-year-old sister Paula.
The tangled ménage of Eric, Pattie and George is one of rock’s most remarkable sagas. It has the claustrophobic intensity of some earlier, more sexually inhibited era – rather like the Bohemian literati of the Bloomsbury set who “lived in Squares and loved in triangles”. To the average rock star of 1970 there was small reason to stop at a triangle – not when you could have a whole polygon. The situation of Clapton and the Harrisons uncannily recalls that of William Morris, his model wife Jane and their friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who enacted much the same scenario in another Oxfordshire manor house 100 years before.
“That’s the problem with drugs and drink,” Clapton reflected later. “They make these things possible. When I was involved in that triangle, drugs were giving me access to propositions which really were quite inhuman.” With Pattie resisting his advances and George either oblivious or moodily silent upon the subject, Clapton withdrew to his own mansion with Alice and lived the life of a semi-reclusive junkie. He recorded no music. He wouldn’t answer the door for days on end. Apparently he made a lot of paper aeroplanes. A rare outing was, ironically, at the behest of George who brought him to New York for the Bangla Desh benefit show. The hapless Alice spent the day running around Manhattan securing some heroin.
Lord Harlech himself tried to help his daughter and Eric; with Clapton’s friend Pete Townshend he organised a 1973 show at the Rainbow in North London to encourage Eric back into the world. Poignantly, the prodigal’s return was delayed awhile by the discovery that he’d grown too fat for his favourite white suit. Once again Alice stepped forward; with the aid of her sewing machine she let the superstar’s trousers out.
Thanks in large part to the Harley Street specialist Dr Meg Patterson, Clapton recovered from his heroin addiction in 1974. The trouble was, he became an alcoholic instead.

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At least he was functioning as a musician again, and he made a successful mainstream album, 461 Ocean Boulevard – best known for the hit version of Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff, a cover that helped propel both Marley himself and the reggae genre to wider attention. The year’s other breakthrough was the long-awaited consummation of his affair with Pattie Harrison, whose marriage to George had been becalmed by mutual apathy. George himself was not a stranger to infidelity (among his dalliances of the time was Ringo’s wife Maureen); he and Eric achieved the surprising feat of remaining friends for life. Having shared the painful process of drug recovery with Eric, Alice Ormsby-Gore was cast aside. (Sad to relate, her own story ends in 1995, when she was found dead at her home in Bournemouth.)
Drink became the dominant force in Clapton’s life at this point. He spent a year in tax exile in the Bahamas. “In that year I became a full blown alcoholic,” he told the Sunday Times. “I found, for instance, that booze was really cheap and everyone drank like a fish. There was nothing else to do and after three months I got fed up with the sunshine and I stayed inside the house with the air conditioning on and just drank all day, looking out the window.”
An awful warning of Clapton’s decrepitude came in August, 1976, when he interrupted his show at the Birmingham Odeon to offer some slurred words of praise for Enoch Powell. The word “wog” was used. It wasn’t good at all.
All hell let loose. The summer of ’76 was a time of tinderbox emotions when it came to race. Far right parties were making big gains, while art school punks were flirting with swastika chic. The party in power, Jim Callaghan’s Labour, seemed to represent a stale, exhausted liberalism. It really looked like things might turn nasty. A new organisation sprang into being, called Rock Against Racism. In an angry letter to all the music papers, its founders wrote:-

“When we read about Eric Clapton’s Birmingham concert when he urged support for Enoch Powell, we nearly puked. Come on Eric. You’ve been taking too much of that Daily Express stuff and you know you can’t handle it. Own up. Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist. You’re a good musician but where would you be without the blues and R&B? You’ve got to fight the racist poison otherwise you degenerate into the sewer with the rats and all the money men who ripped off rock culture with their cheque books and plastic crap. We want to organize a rank and file movement against the racist poison in music. We urge support for Rock Against Racism.
“PS Who shot the Sheriff Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!”

Clapton, alas, seemed blearily detached and repeated his anti-immigration theme in a Melody Maker interview. He argued vaguely that his views were rooted in concern for social cohesion rather than racial prejudice (plus an altercation he’d apparently had with some wealthy Arabs in a London hotel). But the impression lingered of a pampered star, fuzzy of brain, giving succour the vicious rather than the vulnerable. Unluckily, too, the affair coincided with that year’s new mood of punk antagonism towards the rich rock elite that Clapton epitomised. In later years, without recanting entirely, Eric ascribed his Enoch leanings to an “Alf Garnett” phase of inverted snobbery – the working class boy who wouldn’t go to fancy restaurants, play tennis or wear Italian suits.
The drunken years produced at least one great song – the almost comically maudlin Wonderful Tonight. But it was otherwise a horrible time, of “Cognac roadies”, of domestic violence, of random encounters with tramps whom he would bring back to the house, of sleek yet mediocre albums, and a man in his thirties who didn’t know how to get on aeroplanes by himself. He’d go to bed with a bottle of vodka, a guitar, a cassette machine and a loaded shotgun: “I’d put it in the position with the barrel to my mouth where you could take the top of your head off, and I thought, Yeah, but if I did this then I’d not be able to have another drink.”
He finally married Pattie in 1979, though there were already cracks appearing in the relationship. Their wedding party reunited three Beatles on stage – and Lennon later claimed he would have joined them had his invitation arrived in time. A year later Clapton was rushed to hospital in Minnesota, the result of an alcoholic collapse that almost killed him: “I didn’t give a fuck. I just thought, How soon can I get out of here and get a drink?”
The slow climb back to sobriety started in a US rehab clinic in 1982. Three years later, an appearance at the American end of Live Aid restored him to the pantheon of rock’s respected elders. There were occasional relapses, but by 1990, Eric was attending London’s celebrated Priory, not as a patient but as a mentor to other recovering addicts. These were the Armani years, of Albert Hall residencies, of benefit shows for worthy causes, of acceptable if slightly unexciting albums. He divorced Pattie in 1986; he was already involved with an Italian model named Lory Del Santo. She bore him a son, Conor, in August of that year and he christened his new album August in the boy’s honour. It was one of his biggest sellers.
Yet all was still not well. Speaking to Robert Sandall in 1990, he described himself as “an isolated, cold, rather intimidating, generally selfish person to be around. That’s what my occupation has done to me.” He had never lived with Conor or Del Santo; he painted a rueful picture of himself as a man who would drive up to London for dinner with friends and then return to his lonely mansion. “But I’ll go out and create all kinds of personal dramas to keep myself amused,” he added. “My personal life now is chaotic. It should be filmed. It’s like something out of Fellini.”
Far worse was to follow. On a US tour, Clapton and crew were travelling back from a Wisconsin show when one of their four helicopters crashed, killing four of his closest colleagues, including the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
In 1991 Eric had just celebrated an historic 20-night residency at the Albert Hall, and flew to New York for a long-anticipated reunion with Conor, now four years old. On 19 March, Clapton took him to the circus. The boy was particularly enchanted by his first sighting of elephants. Eric dropped Conor off at Lory Del Santo’s Manhattan address, a 53rd floor apartment on the East Side. It was arranged he would call again the next day, to collect the boy for a trip to the zoo.
But in the morning, as Conor awaited his father and played hide and seek in the high-rise flat, he ran through a full-length window that had been left open for cleaning. There were no safety guards and the child plunged 700 feet to his death.

********

“I tend to realise that everything I do in the light of what happened will be a tribute to him now,” said Eric in 1993. “It doesn’t have to be a specific issue or song that relates entirely to his life or his death. My existence on this planet actually is due to him today. My ability to stay sober is due to him.”
The appalling tragedy of Conor Clapton did not sway Eric’s resolve to stay straight. He delved back into his first musical love, the blues, as if to rediscover the healing power at the music’s core. A song composed from his reflections upon the terrible event, Tears In Heaven, has possibly eclipsed Layla itself as Clapton’s most universally loved work.
A bizarre twist in Clapton’s strange family history occurred in 1998, when a journalist traced the fate of Eric’s long-lost father Edward Fryer. The soldier, originally from Montreal, had returned to Canada after the war without ever seeing his newborn son. Having absconded from the army he was given a dishonourable discharge and lived an itinerant existence. He played the piano and sang in bars, clubs and strip joints. My Way was a favourite number. It seems he married several times but never settled. He made spare cash from odd jobs and sign-writing, and lived his final days on a houseboat, sailing between Lake Ontario and Florida, before dying of leukaemia in 1985.
It thus emerged that Clapton had some new relatives he had never known, the children of Fryer’s other liaisons. Far from welcoming the whole episode as an opportunity for “closure”, however, Eric maintained a certain reserve. “For all his efforts, I don’t know if that journalist came up with the right goods,” he told WORD a few months ago. “ For a while I got a lot of satisfaction from having the riddle solved but then I started to feel unsure again… I’ve put it to sleep for a while.”
A large proportion of his time has gone into The Crossroads Centre, an addiction clinic he helped to found on the Caribbean island of Antigua (the scene of several of his debauches in years gone by). He evangelises for abstinence now: apart from anything else, any relapse would damage the reputation of the clinic. He auctioned dozens of guitars to raise funds for the Centre, whereas once he had sold guitars to pay dealers for heroin. In part, this dedication to Crossroads led to a split from his manager of many years, Roger Forrester. The latter had overseen Clapton’s career when “managing Eric” was literally a question of life and death. For the star to step outside of Forrester’s legendarily protective umbrella was seen as significant. Clapton even told WORD he could not form another serious relationship with a woman until he was clear of Roger.
After the awful event of 1991, tabloid newspapers eased up on Clapton’s love life. As he drily noted, they started to say he was being “comforted” by the various beauties he escorted around town. The list is long, but takes in names such as Marie Helvin, Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell, Patsy Kensit, Davina McCall, Tatum O’Neal and Kathy Lloyd. He has come to recall his womanising in downbeat terms – one more joyless addiction, in fact, rather than a life-affirming romp.
He is today a well-preserved gent of 59. After the excesses of his Versace period, he once again dresses with taste. Like many a working class mod, he discovered an affinity with traditional aristocratic style. He used his wealth to save the threatened Cording’s clothes shop on Piccadilly, an outpost of sartorial sanity in a Britain where men have largely opted to dress like toddlers all their lives. The designer Paul Smith told me: “He has money now, of course, but he dressed well before he was wealthy, which goes to show it’s in his heart. He’s unique in the music world, because generally speaking rock stars are absolutely rotten at dressing.”
And he is now the family man he never believed he would become. A daughter, Julie, was born in 2001 to his young American wife Melia McEnery, whom he met while she worked for Armani. She bore him another daughter, Ella, in 2003. (He has a teenage daughter, Ruth, from an earlier relationship.) He describes himself as a small-c conservative nowadays, and a monarchist who was pleased, in 2002, to receive a CBE. He has for years been fond of fly-fishing and village cricket. A while ago, he even stopped smoking.
There is something solemn at his core, perhaps. His interviews are rare but earnest, typified by the unblinking honesty of someone who’s spent long years in therapy, both as patient and counsellor. In 1994 he blamed his personal instability on “dysfunctional relationships from Day One. From when I was a child with confused family issues.” Depression would stalk him even at the peak of his triumphs. “It can get even worse,” he said, “because once you discover that money and fame and success doesn’t do it, where do you go then?”
Clapton’s recent work has looped back to the blues – a collaboration with B.B. King here, a tribute to Robert Johnson there. The blues, he told Robert Sandall, “has always given me more out of life than sex, booze or any kick you can think of.”
More than sex? And booze? Or any kick at all? Well, you can’t accuse him of skimping on the research.

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Almost as soon as Cream disbanded they were logged in rock’s archives as “Eric Clapton’s band”. That’s not the way it looked back then: Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce were considered equally important to the triumverate. Come the solo years, though, the divergence grew as great as Paul Weller’s from The Jam or Sting’s from The Police. Everyone knows about Eric Clapton, but his former comrades are rather overlooked.
This is unjust, especially in the case of Jack Bruce. The bass-player, who had once trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, continued to make albums of richness and diversity. Still with the lyricist Pete Brown, he recorded albums like Songs For A Tailor and Harmony Row that are as good as anything in early ’70s British rock. His output has always ranged from hard, biting jazz to honeyed Celtic soul; his voice commands at either of those extremes. He’s rarely made the sort of commercial music he’s surely capable of, and has ploughed a pretty stubborn furrow. As one third of Cream he could have coasted for decade as a member of the rock aristocracy, jamming for charity galas and all the rest of it. But he never took his place at the high table.
In recent years you might have seen him touring with Ringo Starr’s “All Starr” group, but decades of hard living caught up with him when he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The transplant operation was eventually a success but he nearly died in the process. Like Clapton, he’s also known the pain of losing a child: his son, Jo Bruce, a musician who played with the Afro Celt Sound System, died of an asthma attack in 1997.
“Ginger and I never got on, ever,” Bruce once said. “But perhaps because of the very pain of our relationship, we were the hottest rhythm section I’ve ever played in.”
Like his sparring partner, Ginger Baker left Cream with the kind of status that brought automatic membership of the rock elite – a privilege he exercised by claiming the drum stool in Blind Faith. Thereafter, though, his career has been interesting rather than lucrative. For a man who became a sort of patron saint to heavy metal drummers, he’s preferred to explore his passions for jazz and African music, whether in the percussively-driven Ginger Baker’s Air Force, working with Fela Kuti or building Nigeria’s first modern recording studio (where Paul McCartney made some of Band On The Run).
Since then he’s lived in Italy, Colorado and South Africa, farmed, reared polo ponies, played occasional sessions (including John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd) and made albums with Bill Laswell. At one point in the 1970s, when he was feeling the pinch, he thought a Cream reunion might be just the thing. "I went down to Eric and proposed it,” he said later. “He said he didn't want to do it just because I was broke. This really hurt at the time, but it was also absolutely true. That is not a reason to do something, you know."
But the group were reunited – for one night only – at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 1993. Clapton had been the least keen, but he was persuaded by the event’s musical director Robbie Robertson of The Band (an irony, since it was The Band’s music that encoraged Clapton to ditch Cream in the first place). “I was moved," said Eric, after playing a few numbers with Bruce and Baker. “I was in some other place. It’s been so long since I've been around something from somebody else that’s inspired me. For the last 20 years, it’s been up to me to inspire me.” Indeed he was so moved that he broke into sobs during his acceptance speech.
"Immediately I went off afterwards,” said Clapton, “and started thinking, ‘What could we do? What could we do?’ without it getting into the wrong hands, without it getting out of control.”
Since the split with his manager Roger Forrester, Eric has taken sole charge of his personal and professional life; the 2005 Cream reunion could be one result. He’s been frank in the past about the waning of his powers: “I don’t think I ever topped Layla,” he told WORD’s David Hepworth. “When you’re in your 20s you’ve got something you lose. If I was a sportsman I would have retired by now. You’ve just got a certain amount of dynamism that you lose when turn 30.” He retracted that statement later, but he announced the Cream reunion with these words: “We're all getting on a bit and I wanted to do it before it was too late and while we still have the energy.”
He hardly needs the cash himself, but the concert fees and CD and DVD receipts will amount to a tidy lump-sum for Bruce and Baker as they hit retirement age. As any self-help veteran will, Clapton has talked a lot about “fixing” himself, and Cream is among the last pieces of unfinished business.
Within the symbolism of Cream’s history, the Royal Albert Hall would be the most fitting place on earth for a last act of reconciliation. The venue’s part in Clapton’s own mythology is obvious. And just a few years ago, on 29 November, 2002, it saw another richly resonant affair, the “Concert For George” that Clapton directed for his late friend. That was a supremely well-managed event, considering the emotional minefield that lay between the two men for the remainder of Harrison’s life. Another account, you felt, had finally been settled.
More than that, though, Cream were one of the greatest bands of the rock era. They were never completely recognized, and they were never fully mourned. Come the last notes of the last Cream concert, and it won’t only be Eric’s guitar that gently weeps.

20 Clapton Greats in Chronological order

1. THE YARDBIRDS Got To Hurry

A rollicking blues instrumental, this was Eric’s first recorded composition, but the manager took his writing credit. The Yardbirds’ singer, Keith Relf, was electrocuted by his guitar in 1976. (Single, B-side of For Your Love)

2. JOHN MAYALL & THE BLUES BREAKERS All Your Love

Skilful interpretation of an Otis Rush blues and a high point of the LP famously decorated with a pic of Clapton reading the Beano. (From John Mayall’s Blue Breakers With Eric Clapton)

3. CREAM I’m So Glad

Dexterous version of an old Skip James song from Cream’s tentative first album. (From Fresh Cream)

4. CREAM Strange Brew

Jack Bruce hated this slinky number, grafted on top of his bass part to a different song. Odd fact: Cream’s producer Felix Pappalardi co-wrote the track with his wife Gail Collins, who later shot him to death. (From Disraeli Gears)

5. CREAM Sunshine Of Your Love

Legendary head of Atlantic, Ahmet Ertegun, signed Cream as a blues band and disliked their lunges into experimental pop. To Bruce’s annoyance he dismissed this one as “psychedelic hogwash”. (From Disraeli Gears)

6. CREAM Crossroads

Incandescent live recording of the Robert Johnson number taken a San Francisco show on Cream’s last US tour. Two outstanding Clapton solos, though neither passes muster with the perfectionist Slowhand himself. (From Wheels Of Fire)

7. THE BEATLES While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Harrison and Clapton’s guitar styles hardly overlapped – the rockabilly picker and the sensuous blueswailer – and George was happy to offer Eric this prestigious Beatle guest spot. (From The Beatles aka “the White Album”)

8. CREAM Badge

A Clapton/Harrison co-write and a wonderfully concise pop single with lovely bass and lead riffs. Nonsensical lyrics are rendered even more vague by contributions from Ringo Starr. (From Goodbye)

9. BLIND FAITH Presence Of The Lord

The first really introspective song Clapton ever wrote, perhaps. Not for the first time, though, he was in a band with a great white soul singer, and he surrenders the vocal here to Steve Winwood (From Blind Faith)

10. JOHN LENNON Cold Turkey

The Beatles deemed this horror-show heroin confessional too extreme for their Abbey Road sessions so Lennon reserved it for his own Plastic Ono Band. Eric’s anguished guitar squalls make it one of the most brutal pop records in history. (Single)

11. DELANEY & BONNIE Comin’ Home

A Clapton co-write with Delaney Bramlett’s wife Bonnie, under the influence of The Band’s organic Americana – delightfully funky in a backwoods kind of way. (Single)

12. DEREK & THE DOMINOS Layla

Though the riff itself is blunted by familiarity, the vocal carries an impressive freight of desperation. And get the full-length version for the plaintive keyboard coda by Bobby Whitlock, entwined with Duane Allman’s slide playing. (From Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs)

13. DEREK & THE DOMINOS Little Wing

A stirring interpretation of the Jimi Hendrix song, lent additional poignancy by the fact of his death a week or so later. (From Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs)

14. DEREK & THE DOMINOS Have You Ever Loved A Woman?

A low-down, broken-hearted blues, the most moving that Clapton has ever played. A cover version, but almost unbearably autobiographical: “All the time you know, she belongs to your very best friend.” (From Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs)

15. ERIC CLAPTON Motherless Children

Galloping beats and keening guitars made this a flamboyant come-back record but note the old blues lyric at its heart, heavy with the melancholy of family fragmentation that has been Clapton’s abiding ache. (From 461 Ocean Boulevard)

16. ERIC CLAPTON Better Make It Through Today

A desolate, little known Clapton gem, seemingly sung in some dark night of the soul. A brandy chaser with that one, sir? (From There’s One In Every Crowd)

17. ERIC CLAPTON Sign Language

Dylan appears on this version of his own composition, along with Robbie Robertson. After a chilly first encounter at a John Mayall session in 1966, Eric and Bob became mutually supportive collaborators. (From No Reason To Cry)

18. ERIC CLAPTON Wonderful Tonight

Penned in a tipsy haze for Pattie Clapton as she dressed for a Paul McCartney party – and is finally prevailed upon to drive her sozzled husband home. (From Slowhand)

19. ERIC CLAPTON Cocaine

Eric’s admiration for the hangdog troubadour J.J. Cale brought two classics to the Clapton canon. One was After Midnight and the other was Cocaine. Boasts a chugging guitar riff you could chop stuff with. (From Slowhand)

20. ERIC CLAPTON Tears In Heaven

The Unplugged experiment gave Eric the biggest album of his life, and the song for Conor is of course its emotional crux. (From Unplugged)

Thin Lizzy: The Phil Lynott Interview

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with Thin Lizzy’s leader Philip Lynott, done for the NME of 5 July 1980. The piece involved my traveling with him from Glasgow to Liverpool, with his band and the photographer Jill Furmanovsky. I was becoming less of Lizzy fan at that time, but grew to admire the singer, as a man, even more.

It’s followed by live review of an Oxford gig the year before, done for the NME of 7 April 1979.

And for a retrospective piece I wrote about Phil, many years later, go here.

I
Gone are the days when NME writers used to routinely return from assignments with Philip Lynott complete with back-slapping anecdotes of casual camaraderie and amiable banter. Since those halcyon times of 'Jailbreak' in 1976, when the boys were back in triumph and Thin Lizzy reached twin peaks of popularity and prestige, measures of suspicion and disillusionment have set in on both sides.

Successive releases of recent years have met with the now familiar allegations of stagnation and decline in Lizzy's creative powers - and by implication in those of Lynott himself. A while ago, the process culminated in the comprehensive trashing handed out in these very pages to his long-awaited 'Solo In Soho' set.

In the few days I spent with Philip Lynott - travelling, drinking, seeing the band in action - it wasn't difficult to sense the reserve that typifies his relations with potential critics now. For my part, I came away with the image of a group that's far from finished, but one which works more on the principle of efficiency than on that of risk. And to spend time inside such a successful, large scale enterprise – a livelihood for far more than four people - is to wonder if it's merely naive to expect anything different.

Lynott takes his responsibilities seriously - to the Thin Lizzy organisation which depends upon him, to the unswervingly loyal following on which he ultimately depends, to his family. And the pressures are not enviable.

Out in public - on the stage, in the hotel bar, the radio talk-in - Lynott can assume the familiar roles like an old overcoat. It seems to keep everyone happy, and he seems to enjoy it. But the private Lynott is a much more complex proposition. And nearly impossible to know.

The modern Philip Lynott interview, he'll imply, is not an occasion for soul-baring. It's for publicity.

We sat in a dishevelled hotel room that overlooked the Liverpool skyline - soot-black clusters of Victorian chimney pots, landmarks, seagulls.

To begin, the talk was of Thin Lizzy's first album of the '80s. Called 'Chinatown', like the single, this might be the record, more than any previous one, to assert the band's contemporary relevance or else consign them once and for all to that plodding pantheon of heavy rock heroes - still successful but bereft of anything interesting to say. What'll it be like?

Lynott anticipates press reactions with a weary slur: "At worst it'll be the same. People will say 'Another Thin Lizzy album' like previous albums. People are just going to say 'When are the band going to do something different, blah blah blah.' I figure that's the way it'll go at worst.

"But at best I think there'll be a whole new lease of energy, because I've got a lot of the softer things that used to slip into a Lizzy album out of me system with the solo album. And all I want to do now is something really aggressive."

Lynott will speak about his commitment to change and development, but what about his audience? The core of Thin Lizzy's support lies with those celebrated headbanging types - unswervingly loyal, perhaps, but notoriously conservative in tastes. I wondered if he'd admit to taking that restriction into consideration?

"Yeah, well, sometimes. I think it's the same with every band that's successful: they're limited by their success. I'm not too ashamed of anything we did before because we did it with integrity.

"Whether it was good, bad or indifferent we thought it was the best for what we could do at the time. And so, consequently, I've always tried to change on a ratio that has been acceptable to the band on musical terms, and to the audience - because if they pay to see Thin Lizzy they're expecting to see something like the band they seen the last time around. Then we come up with a happy balance.

"We're always caught with this paradox that we don't change quick enough for the people who are reviewing us, and yet we change too quickly for the people who are paying to see the concerts - and somewhere in between is where the band's heart lies. It's the paradox of success: the reviewers are always waiting for us and we'll be trying to show the audience that there's more to us than just old hits."

Then you'd agree that some of the criticisms haven't been entirely out of order?

"Oh yeah. I do honestly think that criticism is very important for a band like Lizzy. But it must be criticism that we can relate to. It's just very hard to see people criticise the thing that you do and have the thing totally arse about tit."

And all of a sudden I got the feeling we were about to move on to 'Solo In Soho'. Sure enough . . .

"Like, I'll go on about the review in the NME of my album, because the guy reviewing it, he totally fucked up. He didn't know what he was talking about. He had it in for me, y'know?

"Because certain people had said I was the acceptable face of hard rock as far as the new wave was concerned - now, I never fucking gave myself that title. I've never been scared of the unknown. There was a time when punk was unknown and people went 'Well the guys can't play, he's not singing in tune, they're shit' and I went 'No, I like 'em’. There's nobody playing around, they've got energy which half the bands around today haven't got, they're playing short tight little numbers and they shock you into thinking.' And that appealed to me, but I wasn't jumping onto any bandwagon.

"Now this asshole for some reason seemed to think 'Right, he must think he's the fucking prophet here. I'll get him.' Now maybe I'm being totally wrong in my criticism of him, maybe I'm getting *him* arse about tit. But when he went for my album that was more on his mind than what he was listening to. 'Cos I read between the lines and the guy was a total fuckin' arse-hole.

"And if he had have said that to me face I would have stuck him out there and then. Simply because an insult is an insult, not criticism.

"Now that might be my narrow-mindedness, or a lack of seeing the other fella's point of view, but I don't see myself that way. I don't honestly think that I can be the leader of a band, an organisation like Thin Lizzy, and not take into account other people's opinions. So I honestly feel that I do listen to criticism, other people’s points of view, and bear them in mind and make a decision.”

III

This hardening of attitudes marks something of a departure for a man who hitherto enjoyed what some would call more than his fair share of sympathetic press. His conclusions about the NME review sound seriously haywire. But more than anything else, Lynott's hostility is symptomatic of how much he resents being underestimated – and perhaps of a conscience which is irritated by guilty suspicions that he's underestimated himself.

We all know, for instance, about the long-acclaimed Lynott image, now as familiar and reassuring as a pantomime character – the gangster of love, the swaggering, sly, swashbuckling street-fighting hero with a head full of Celtic legend, everyone's pet idea of the essential romantic hoodlum. As a stereotype it undoubtedly served him well – and there’s just enough of it in his real nature to support its existence – but does he grow impatient of being confined by it?

"I think it upsets me now when people say it to me all the time. Obviously it must be there – and I do play up to it. I can’t really fool meself into thinking that I don't play up to it. And it must appeal to me to a certain extent. But I think the thing that I dislike about it most is that it’s only a part of me.

"Like, if people go, ‘Oh since he’s had the kid he's written 'Sarah' and ‘A Child’s Lullaby’, the guy's going a bit soft’ . . . The thing that people don't realise is that with having the kid now I’m far more protective. So if someone slags me now - or if, for example, the Ayatollah in Iran, now I'd fucking kill that bastard if I got me hands on him, because he could start a Third World War and my kid could be living in a fucking wasteland.

"I’m far quicker to get annoyed over a bastard like that than I was before I had the kid. It bugs
me now. Before, I'd hear about a child molester, never bugged me too much... I'd say ‘Man, that's real tacky, attacking kids.' But now, the thought of someone attacking my kid fucking drives me crazy. I'd wanna hang the bastard.

"And it's making me twice as quick to go off the mark with the temper, and be angry, and protective - as well as making me very soppy and that.

"So, when they continually play up 'Oh he likes to be seen as the hard man, the romantic - there's other parts to me. I'm a lot more complicated than the paragraph you read about where they're summarising Philip Lynott the romantic, the lover, the hard aggressive man, the father. I suppose I do live up to that a certain amount, but I have noticed that now I keep, especially in interviews, very protective.

"It doesn't bug me, y'see, if you go away and write 'He's the Irish romantic lover type of rock star' because I'm so used to reading that. I think 'OK, that's the interview he wants.' But because I'm not in control of the article that you’re gonna write, I'll be protective of how much of myself I really show. Because, really, the reason for the interview is maybe to promote Thin Lizzy, or to promote the solo album.

"And you see, the national press do such a botch job on me all the time, whether it be about the drugs things, or whether it be about me private life, they really fucking go for me by the throat 'cos they're looking for another Rod Stewart type to do weekly articles on.

“I've learned how to do a bland interview, where it's all controlled what I give out. Because I don't like the scum press - the scam press – I detest it."

Right. Fine. But getting back to the immediate bone of contention, let's chew over that 'Solo In Soho' thing some more. A bewilderingly diverse collection of songs, I venture that I don't find above half of them in any way successful.

"Yeah, well, for me a little more than half. But I kinda thought I'd get that, 'cos I just went in to be self-indulgent. But time just ran out for me. I didn't really have two years to make an album - it was I had two months to make an album, and two years to talk about making it! But I think it'll prove itself in the long run. All in all it was successful in that I got more from it than anyone else - and I don't mean that financially. Ha!"

Why did you make the album in the first place?

"First of all it was an abundance of material. I
had a lot of songs which obviously didn't suit Lizzy. And I had the ego to think that I could make a solo album. And the record company, all of a sudden people were making me offers to go into the studio and be completely self-indulgent, and I thought it was about time. I have a great interest in the recording side of things, and would eventually like to do some production. The rate of improvement in electronic equipment that is going on is really phenomenonally fast, and it was a good period for me to come to terms with that.

"The reason I was pleased with the finished result was that with more than half the album I succeeded in what I was trying to do. Some of it, I thought I'd failed, but now I have a greater understanding of new instrumentation, and working with strings, and if I can use that to help Thin Lizzy in the future, it'll only make Lizzy a better band. But I'm not too keen to pursue a solo career really. In fact I think it'll be a long time before I do a solo album again. I built up a longing to do it, and now that it's out of me I’ve done it."

You're quoted as having given up "trying to be Bob Dylan". Was that an admission of defeat or do you still care about developing as a serious songwriter?

“When I first started writing songs there seemed to be this great thing, that music seemed to be peaking. The Beatles were just doing better and better albums. Van Morrison was peaking. And Dylan too, he just didn’t seem to be making any mistakes. It seemed like, fuck, man, everybody’s peaking.

"So, like, I went into the studios early on thinking I had to create this masterpiece. And then - all of a sudden - it all just stopped, y'know? Y'heard albums that weren't as good as the one before, and this great disillusionment set in - that people just didn't go on for ever writing better and better and better, that they actually dipped, or might go two steps back to go one forward.

"And it was about this time that I hit on the theory that you have to learn by mistakes, and that you can't just go on getting better and better. And that's when I knew I wasn't going to be able to write 'Desolation Row', 12 verses and every verse a killer. There was gonna be songs where I fail. I wanted to keep improving but I realised to keep improving I had to publicly make mistakes.

"I couldn't just write a pile of songs and say 'that's shit, we won't release that'. I realised with the pressure of business you do have to publicly make faux pas and just try and survive."

Much as I've liked Lynott's work in the past, a lot of his recent work has seemed below par - in particular, some of the lyrics are let down by a tendency to go for the easy rhyme, rendering them coy or facile.

"Yeah, well if that happens it probably means I've put the emphasis on another part of the song - I've concentrated on the bass or the intricacy of the arrangement, and run out of time on the lyric. Reading the book even (A Collected Works Of Philip Lynott), I can see that in recent years I have for some reason given up on the heavy love lyrics, the marathon pieces, whether it be because I've been too busy gigging, or too busy getting a new guitarist or whatever, the problems of the last year and a half .

"You brought it up, but it's one of them mental notes that’ve clicked into me head and said, like, I gotta get back and start writing good lyrics! I think the book in that respect has really showed me that ‘You gotta get back and start concentrating; this is yer third book and it doesn’t seem to be, like, there’s good piece in here but if you took it seriously you could be a good lyricist!’ Y’know? I have to sit down now and write.

"And I haven't done that lately, because of datelines or deadlines and stuff. Plus a lot has happened to me, I think, like getting married and having the kid, stuff like that. So all I can say is that I may have forgotten about it for a while but I'll be getting back into writing far more. I won't go for the quick rhyme."

As an instance, Lynott describes one of the new Lizzy songs, 'Hey You'.

"Every night I change the lyrics because I haven't got what I know I'm trying to say. It's about how when you leave your home town everybody goes 'You've got it made now man, you're off'. And when you get to London you haven't, you've just solved one set of problem for another. And I'm trying to get that 'Hey you got it made, your record's in the hit parade' and they don't realise your problem now is getting the next hit or whatever.

"The amount of kids that go ‘I wish I was you, you've done everything!' and I think 'Jesus, if you only knew the problems I fuckin' have, trying to maintain, and improve!"'

If Lynott shows a tendency to over-react when confronted with what he considers malicious or misplaced criticism, then it's at least balanced by the scrupulous honesty and cool realism he displays in his own self-assessments.

I’ve always thought him the only writer – and Thin Lizzy perhaps the only band - still working in the hard rock medium to be actually worth holding to the highest standards. We give them more than the most casual scrutiny, because the strength of so much of their past material is unquestionable. For the sheer stylishness and imaginative power they've shown themselves capable of, their failures, when they occur, are among the few in that field I could bother to be disappointed about.

Live, the new Thin Lizzy are shaping up to be as satisfying as any of the past formations. After the extended loan of Midge Ure from Ultravox (both as temporary guitarist and as supplier of additional keyboards) the line-up currently makes use of Darren Wharton, an 18-year-old newcomer from Manchester, on keyboards (albeit a fairly subdued role) and the new guitarist Snowy White, brought in after his work with Pink Floyd. In strictly visual terms White has still to integrate himself effectively, looking ill at-ease at his end of the pyrotechnic frontline he forms with the long-standing partnership of Lynott and Scott Gorham.

I wonder if the main man was attracted by the apparent quietness of the new boy's temperament, given all the well-documented traumas the band underwent at the hands of his fiery and erratic predecessors, Gary Moore and Brian Robertson?

"Yeah, well we were looking for that solidness, y'know? The thing is, we got on well with Brian Robertson, but Brian was very independent.

"Gary was a different type of character. Gary was very dependent, but in a way, because of his knowledge of the guitar he was a bit of a musical snob. He figured that because he knew more about the guitar than anyone else in the band he therefore knew how the band should be run better than anyone else in the band.

"But with Snowy, Snowy's very quiet – but then so is Brian Downey very quiet. But quiet guys are the hardest to understand, because when they say no they mean no. They say it quietly but it's as strong as somebody screaming it, like me. Snowy'll go 'No, I don't want to play the song that way', and shows the strength of character. Obviously, we've gone for a little more security - someone who wanted to be in the band, and who wanted to have his say in the band but not just use it for his own benefit, who wanted the band to *be* a band.

"I think potentially now, if we can stay together, I think we can develop stronger now than with Gary. And I'm not saying that because every time you get a new guitarist you have to say 'this is the one!' But I think it balances better now. So potentially, we're up." And away. But it would be easy for Lizzy just to coast along for years, wouldn't it?

"Er, I'm not sure really. I'd love to be able to think so, it'd pay the mortgage on the house! But I don't think so. I know we have very loyal supporters, but I think they're very loyal because they know that we're taking care of integrity. They know we're trying to give them the best programme, the best album, best T-shirt, that we can possibly do. Like, I'll spend all day, or a week, trying to get on to me management to make sure the album is sold cheaper, do a deal with Boots, do a deal with HMV, or that there's a good sleeve on it. I think because of that we've got loyal supporters.

"If we gave up on our supporters, just to coast along, then within a year the supporters would give up on us."

Thin Lizzy

Oxford

Those dreaming spires won’t get much sleep tonight ...

The second show of the Lizzy tour sees them in Oxford town delivering the kind of classic act that's won them the major-league heavyweight status for which Phil Lynott has worked so long and hard.

The snag with classics of any kind, of course, is that their perfection is preserved in aspic: magnificent, maybe, but static all the same; this act is whole and complete in itself, but it's without the inspiration of uncertainty, the possibilities and potential of the best of their more modern and fallible counterparts.

Progress is out to lunch – will simple power serve in its place?

Well, Oxford says yes. Ever wondered if there really was a market for all those ads at the back of this paper? The denim loons and Sabbath patches, Rush badges and Quo logos? Wonder no more, it's all here this evening and banging heads like they’re going out of style.

Swarming forward in kamikaze waves, crashing, crushing stage-wards they pile themselves onto collapsing mountains of humanity, thrashing and sweat-soaked, a maelstrom of clench-fisted delirium.

Mind you, they livened up once the band came on.

Indeed the rapport was total, intensified by the relative intimacy of the venue. Lynott seems to straddle the stage, filling half the hall with his grin alone. Pinned to his chest is a Sid Vicious badge and he sports a black armband which, on closer inspection (oh-ho-ho, the sly old dog), appears to be a frilly garter.

Swaggering and laughing, he comes on like a regular superstar and yet can carry the whole act off with humour and humanity that transcend the standards of the dumbo brain-crushers who can pass for heavy-metal heroes. And the best of his songs, ‘Still In Love With You’, ‘Emerald’ and ‘Rosalie’ are works of unimpeachable stylishness, flowing with life and character that shame the drip-dry romantics of his rivals.

No doubt about it, Phil Lynott is one of our finest rock'n'rollers.

Meanwhile the ever-elegant Scott Gorham and the pugnacious Gary Moore provide the perfect counterweights to their frontman; their scalding guitar-work connecting beautifully, swirling around Lynott's bass and the tough propulsion of Brian Downey’s drums. It's probably the most satisfactorily-balanced line-up that Lizzy have had to date.

‘Don’t Believe A Word’ and ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ stood out as examples of the high-grade hard-rock they invariably produce with ease and excellence.

Okay, fine. Time to wheel in the big But...

Thin Lizzy still entertain, give value for money, come up with the goods every time; but it's a long time since they came up with any surprises. ‘Waiting For An Alibi', for instance, is pure stereotype and Lynott’s most disappointing effort so far – note the staggered-chorus device lifted from his one great song, ‘The Boys Are Back In Town'.

Their career has brought them to the point where, given the HM audience’s chronic insistence on familiarity, a. little originality becomes a dangerous thing, an unnecessary risk. Lizzy really need do no more than keep on keepin’ on for success to be assured. But it would be sad to see the band petrify into just another rock’n’roll institution.

Only four new numbers were ventured tonight: ‘Get Out Of Here' and ‘Do Anything You Wanna', both standard Lizzy, no better or worse; ‘Got To Give It Up’, a tragi-comical tale of the demon alcohol; and the more interesting ‘Black Rose' – a long and rolling folk-epic that incorporates the American song ‘Shenandoah’ and some lovely electric-Celtic passages.

Such innovations were rare touches in a set that was geared to matching expectations, and doing so with complete success.

And the beat goes on, but nowhere in particular.

Willie Nelson: post-racist redneck

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A few short pieces on the country star Willie Nelson, including reviews of his biography, his Best-of set and a venture into Jamaican reggae.

From The Word May 2006
“Willie Nelson: The Outlaw” by Graeme Thomson

Willie Nelson made the news a few weeks ago by recording a song in the howdy-civil-pard’ner spirit of Brokeback Mountain entitled Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond Of Each Other). The story came too late, I guess, for this excellent biography. Its author Graeme Thomson would surely have relished its wily Willie quality: Nelson is a very careful sort of “outlaw” and would not have touched a gay Western tune (it was written back in 1981) until he deemed the time was right. By now the zeitgeist is on his side. Willie Nelson did not get to be America’s favourite country star by accident.

Nowadays Nelson is loved by all. He’s honoured by Presidents and shows up in The Simpsons. If he doesn’t quite command the respect that Johnny Cash had, nor the cred of his more austere friend Merle Haggard, it’s perhaps because Nelson prefers popularity. He tours perpetually, signs endless autographs and exudes decency. His rascally pirate image is un-threatening, his spirituality is non-denominational and everyone sees something in him to like. It’s an all-round affability that helped Nelson become the Hippie Cowboy – the reconciler of opposites who can travel with marijuana in the glove compartment and a handgun under the seat. “All things,” says one friend, “to all men.”

And yet, like many great stars, his musical story is one of artistic decline. His finest songs and recordings, like Night Life, Crazy and Hello Walls, are clustered in the early years of his career; his later work takes second place to the live shows and the job of being Willie Nelson. He’s done enough, though, to be an immortal. The hard, nasal whine of his delivery is the voice of a powerfully self-sufficient artist; he is not imploring your attention, merely allowing you to listen. And compositions such Funny How Time Slips Away transcend the country genre: he belongs, like his heroes Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Sinatra, in the wider pantheon of American Song. He’s still a slippery bugger, though – interesting that his loveliest song of all, Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground, is variously thought to be about an ex-wife, his late mother or an injured biker.

Graeme Thomson, a regular Word contributor, has enjoyed some access to Nelson himself as well as to his associates. But he is too shrewd a biographer to take the star at his own estimation. In a way the book’s very title is a misnomer, for the author makes it clear how country’s early-1970s Outlaw movement (usually meaning Nelson, Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson) was in reality quite contrived. The stubble and rebel attitude were no more than a rational marketing response to shifting demographics in the post-Woodstock audience. It’s true that Willie has famously flouted tax laws and has scant regard for anti-weed regulations. But his troubles with the IRS brought him a wave of popular support – the regular guy against an over-mighty and little-loved arm of the state – while his fondness for dope is indulged even by US lawmen themselves. In country terms he has made the symbolic switch from conservative Nashville to liberal Austin, which means he is always among friends. And his favoured campaign cause, Farm Aid, is pretty much beyond controversy in its own American heartland.

So what are we left with? Nelson is nearly 73 now, and still the friendly, froggy-faced man “who smokes to get normal”. He has an abundance of ex-wives and a small army of loyal acolytes who must wonder how they’ll survive him. But he remains inscrutable. Fans who get to spend a half a minute with Willie believe they have seen into his soul, and he into theirs. But the friends and family who have known him for decades confess he is a mystery. (Some have wondered if that remote, untouchable aspect led to the suicide of his son Billy.) It’s the Everyman quality in Willie Nelson that so effectively conceals the Individual. But it also gave him the classic country insight: “I knew pretty early in life,” he says, “that what I’m thinking is what you’re thinking… Once you realise that you’re the same as the audience then everything else is pretty simple.”

From Q, April 1991
20 Of The Best (RCA)

While modern country music continues to yield a crop of young male singers as smooth-jowled and presentable as the new school of UK snooker stars, Willie Nelson stands as a bandana-toting survivor of country’s growling and whiskery past. He’s long since paid his dues, writing songs like Patsy Cline’s resilient hit Crazy, but back in the ’70s this rugged Texan troubadour did more than anyone to prove the redneck and the longhair could be friends, looking like a ranegade Commanche. Nelson lent his lean, piercing voice to songs that carried a wealth of tenderness and regret without recourse to the sickly slickness that was blighting Nashville at the time. This collection (a CD outing for a 1982 compilation) corrals a score of downbeat and quietly potent numbers (Night Life, Family Bible and Me And Paul among the best-known), testifying to his strange knack of wrestling emotional impact from the most laid-back delivery.

From Word September 2005
Willie Nelson: Countryman (Lost Highway)

Grizzled country elder visits Jamaica, inhales deeply and turns into UB40. Not good.

I yield to nobody in my admiration for the music of Willie Nelson. A paragon of soulful and sophisticated country music, he’s the Southern Sinatra, the Hillbilly Gershwin. But when I hear he is releasing his long-rumoured reggae crossover album, the temptation is to echo that Harry Enfield character and shout “Oi! Nelson! NO!!!”
It’s not that Nelson isn’t adept at crossing boundaries. Decades ago he maintained the cowboy and the hippie could be friends, and founded country rock. Once, he publicly kissed the black country singer Charley Pride and invented what was called the “post-racist redneck”. Heck, Willie even had a hit record with Julio Iglesias, To All The Women I’ve Loved Before, a minor classic of cross-genre crumpeteering. But when he lays his nasal drone over these lilting reggae beats, the effect is curiously inorganic. It’s like a modern DJ’s mash-up of two 45s from opposite ends of the box.
Jamaican musicians have always known their island style is a good mixer. They’ve turned out reggae versions of everything at one time or another. The problem here is not the songs, which are mostly Nelson’s with a sprinkling of Jimmy Cliff (there’s a guest spot by Toots Hibbert, too). The trouble is Willie’s delivery, which never quite rides the rhythms or even seems engaged with the project. Candidly, his sleeve-note concedes that some musicians’ credits might be missing: “Either we were too blunted to remember, or it’s been lost in the smoke clouds over the years.” One imagines there was no shortage of smoke at these sessions. But where was the fire?

Bowie on Film

Mon, 2 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A few reviews of Bowie film appearances, including The Man Who Fell To Earth, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Hunger.

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)
From The Word, March 2007

The best film Bowie has made was the one that asked him to act naturally – in other words, to act like a freak beamed in from another planet. In The Man Who Fell To Earth he stars as Thomas Newton – Newton as in Sir Isaac and gravity – a space alien who visits our corner of the galaxy on a mission to save his own. Although it’s a “science fiction” story in plot, The Man Who Fell To Earth is really a parable of human nature – of humanity’s fallen nature – and of an Earth that feels like exile from a higher, happier place. Bowie does not act brilliantly, yet he’s the best choice they could possibly have made.

Filmed by Nicolas Roeg in late 1975, the story was based on a rather good book by Walter Tevis, an American Professor of English; he wrote it in 1963 and set his action in the impossibly futuristic period of 1985 to 1990. (Tevis also wrote The Hustler and The Color Of Money.) Roeg’s films are known for their psychological depth and gorgeous cinematography: to get his scenery he took a British crew to bright, dry New Mexico; and for the mind games he found Bowie, a rock star famous for spacey strangeness, who happened, at that point, to be in a paranoid cocaine craze. Told to imitate an Earthling, Bowie looked exactly like the slightly baffled alien his script required.

Bowie was also meant to supply the music but he pulled out (though he saved some ideas for the semi-instrumental Low LP of 1977). What Bowie really brought to the party was style. He and Roeg devised a non-rock’n’roll look for Newton; the conservative opposite of Ziggy Stardust’s space-boy flamboyance. In the process they invented The Thin White Duke of Bowie’s 1976 tour, the elegant skeleton with two-tone golden hair. Photos from the filming became the covers of his next two LPs, Station To Station and Low. The singer’s instinct for visuals propelled an already handsome movie onto a new aesthetic level.

The tale is that Thomas Newton crash-lands in New Mexico because his home planet (evoked quite touchingly in a few fleeting scenes of his wife and children) is distantly dying of an apocalyptic drought. They’re scientifically super-advanced, where he comes from, so he plans to amass a fortune with some hi-tech patents and build a travel link from our own water-abundant planet. All he knows of Earth he’s picked up from intercepted TV broadcasts, so he’s frankly a little odd. But with his British accent, the Yanks shrug him off as a Limey eccentric. He duly becomes a powerful tycoon and builds his spaceship. But…

Newton’s being watched, all along, by shadowy figures from the military-industrial complex. To make matters worse, his own icy sense of purpose is melting. He came to our planet in search of water but what he discovered was gin & tonic. The screenwriter of The Man Who Fell To Earth, Paul Mayersberg, calls it “an alcoholic film” and, indeed, the booze induces mission-drift in Newton; soon he becomes as lost and lonely as the random human souls that have attached themselves to him along the way. It’s this, the slow disintegration of a shy Messiah with good intentions, that is the central story of this film. And Bowie’s numb, stumbling performance is accidentally perfect. A better actor would, perhaps, have been less convincing – and surely less watchable.

Roeg was good with rock star raw materials: he’d directed Mick Jagger in Performance. And he has an artful way of scrambling time (a trick he’d recently played in Don’t Look Now); at one point, inexplicably, Newton’s limo passes a field full of 18th century settlers, who gape in astonishment. Roeg records the alien’s surroundings, whether clouds and mountains or run-down fairgrounds, with an eye for their wonderful strangeness. Car horns blare and train bells rattle with jarring unexpectedness. In the end, we’re all dislocated by watching The Man Who Fell To Earth. And Bowie himself, by now a rootless star with a fractured identity, remained in the role of Newton for two years after the cameras stopped rolling.

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983)
From The Word, March 2005

Jungle thuggery and chaps in eyeliner mark Bowie’s 1983 role as a captured WWII soldier
If you have ever dreamed of seeing David Bowie buried up to his neck in sand and left to fry in the pitiless noonday sun, then you are in luck. This and much other insensitive treatment is dealt to him as Jack Celliers, the strange but alluring new inmate of a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Another real life rock star, Ryuichi Sakamoto, plays the repressed commandant, disturbed to find this handsome newcomer causing unfamiliar stirrings in his jodhpurs.
Neither man was an actor of great depth but their New Romantic feyness strikes an interesting note in this parable of male brutality. Truly excellent are Tom Conti as the bi-lingual British prisoner Mr Lawrence, and Takeshi Kitano as an overly zealous prison guard. The film is further lifted from genre predictability by its Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, who does not conceal his compatriots’ sadism but also explains it in a cultural context the average Western effort could not match.
If Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence shows an occasional loss of purpose, it could be the problem of filming a somewhat cerebral book (The Sower And The Seed, a wartime memoir by Prince Charles’ mentor Laurens Van Der Post). Yet, by the end, when the meaning of the movie’s title is finally made plain, you are moved by an intelligent tale of human affinities that prove greater than race or nation. Sakamoto’s soundtrack is outstanding, also.

The Hunger (1983)
From The Word, February 2005

Glam-vampire posing-fest that put years on David Bowie
It’s commonly agreed that Bowie’s best film role was in The Man Who Fell To Earth, but his part in 1983’s The Hunger – playing an un-dead London aristo adrift in eternity – called for much the same stylised numbness. When his manipulative lover, the French screen goddess Catherine Deneuve, tricks him into sudden decay (he ages 300 years in a day) it’s more a triumph of prosthetics than of acting, but in Bowie’s stiff melancholia there is an effective touch of pathos.
This was a movie made by an inexperienced director (Tony Scott) in the first flush of MTV’s impact on pop aesthetics, and The Hunger has the look of an extended new romantic music video – posh gothic chic, in other words. It even begins with a cameo by Bauhaus. As such the film is a gem of early ’80s style, and though it’s at the mercy of a silly script, this was a time when pose meant everything.
The Hunger is so often distracted by its own visual riffing that it forgets to push the story line along. Deneuve and Bowie, though, are dependably charismatic, and their glacial poise gets a boost from the more emotive performance of Susan Sarandon, whose lesbian dalliances with the leading lady remain the most striking sequences. For Bowie himself, however, dandy-vampires were not a role he could really sink his teeth into.

Bowie: A Buyer's Guide

Mon, 2 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A consumer guide done for Q Magazine, December 2002.

Where would we be without this odd-eyed cove from Bromley? What a grey old place the London Borough Of Rock’n’Roll had been before he skipped into view. Beginning with Ziggy Stardust he transformed himself and then the world. From 1972 to 1980 he had only to cough to inspire a host of imitators into being. His embrace of sexual ambiguity made Freddie Mercury possible, and changed the outlook of a whole generation. It’s to Bowie that pop culture owes a certain self-awareness ¬– for that alone he is the true godfather of punk. On the personal reinvention front, his audacious love of role play was the blueprint for Madonna. In fact, of the latterday superstars, arguably only Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison have lived outside this man’s gravitational pull. (Which is a good thing, because nobody wants to think of those two in ladyboy make-up and quilted jumpsuits.) For all the guile in his music, however, there is no dearth of authentic feeling and sonic aggression. Dame David Bowie, these are your lives…

Indispensable

The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars
EMI 1972
Pop has always had a plastic heart – Will Young and his TV-fabricated breed are heirs to a long rock’n’roll tradition. But it took David Bowie to remind the Woodstock generation of this long-forgotten truth by making instant idolatry an art-form, and cutting a classic rock album into the bargain. In his neurotic sci-fi creation, Ziggy Stardust, he fashioned a vehicle for his own rise to real-life stardom. More than that, he originated a wised-up way of presenting pop that would change its nature forever.
Standout tracks: Moonage Daydream, Starman, Suffragette City

Low
EMI 1977
Ziggy robbed pop of its innocence and his creator paid the price. Five frenzied years of adulation and pressure made Bowie a candidate for the funny farm. Instead, he made this record. Low is uniquely bleak, sung in a zombie trance of emotional wipe-out over synthetic drones and crashes. By side two the songs have died away completely and we’re in some mournful, sinister soundscape where the sun hasn’t shone for a thousand years. Little did he know it, but he’d just invented Gary Numan.
Standout tracks: Sound And Vision, Always Crashing In The Same Car, Subterraneans

Also…

The first forensic evidence of Bowie’s songwriting genius appears on Hunky Dory (EMI 1971) wherein the fading one-hit wonder who’d made Space Oddity returned from the wilderness with classic compositions (Life On Mars, Bewlay Brothers, etc) and Rita Hayworth’s hairstyle. It paved the way for Ziggy Stardust, whose second act was the even nuttier Aladdin Sane (EMI 1973). For Mr Bowie, rock’n’roll stardom had gone from intellectual concept to fundamental reality.

Excellent

The Man Who Sold The World
EMI 1970
Bowie failed to follow up his novelty hit Space Oddity and no wonder. The music of his next record was heavy with dread, creepy in its strangeness and downright warped in its pleasures. By now teamed up with guitarist Mick Ronson he lunged away from pop prettiness into heavy metal lairiness. And madness – not pretend madness, but your actual strait-jacket stuff – seemed to stalk its every track. For the sleeve he posed in a frock. Mainstream? Schmainstream!
Standout tracks: All The Madmen, The Width Of A Circle, The Man Who Sold The World

Diamond Dogs
EMI 1974
As reality began to unravel in Ziggy’s head, so Bowie projected his inner disintegration on to the world at large. Beginning as a musical reading of George Orwell’s 1984, Diamond Dogs grew into a futuristic nightmare set in post-apocalypse New York, where mutants roam and guitar chords crunch. Mick Ronson and company took Bowie’s story-book rock’n’roll to stadium-conquering heights, but already the restless frontman had decided that such music had run its course. The scarlet mullet was not long for this world.
Standout tracks: Diamond Dogs, Rebel Rebel, Rock’n’Roll With Me

Station To Station
EMI 1976
Battling manfully through a blizzard of cocaine, Bowie embellished the rock star insanity of his Los Angeles life with a dash of the occult. He emerged in a crooner’s suit as a brand new character – The Thin White Duke – in schizoid partnership with his film role of the time, The Man Who Fell To Earth. It hardly mattered which was which: they were both barking mad. Station To Station weaves between brittle white boy funk and fruitily warbled melodrama. Little did he know it, but he’d just invented Spandau Ballet.
Standout tracks: Station To Station, Golden Years, Wild Is The Wind

Also…

Wrapped in those ambivalent inverted commas, “Heroes” (EMI 1978) continued in the sombre, middle-European mode of its predecessor Low, again with a second half of melancholic instrumentals. The title track may well be Bowie’s artistic zenith. The next album, Lodger (EMI 1979) was intended to complete a trilogy but it breaks rank thanks to a brighter feel and modern rock approach, best heard on Boys Keep Swinging.

Good

Tin Machine
EMI 1989
That it’s the most derided of Bowie albums says more about the pack mentality of rock opinion than the record’s true merits. Overlook the “call me Dave” conceit of his band, subtract the slightly forced “I’m really left-wing, me” tone of its lyrics, and this stands as a damned fine album. The screaming riffs and thumping drums sat oddly with the yuppie togs but the songs signalled Bowie’s emergence from years of creative decrepitude. And, largely thanks to noisy new guitarist Reeves Gabrels, it rocked big time .
Standout tracks: Heaven’s In Here, I Can’t Read, Amazing

Heathen
COLUMBIA 2002
This time around the “Bowie back on form” reviews were more than wishful thinking. A reunion with his old producer Tony Visconti was the catalyst that put our man back on speaking terms with the tune fairy. More than that, though, was the depth and variety of feelings that run through these songs. Foreboding, warmth, wistfulness and tension take their place in a queue of prime Bowie compositions. There is sex as well, panting most pronouncedly in covers of the Pixies’ Cactus and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s Gemini Spacecraft.
Standout tracks: Slow Burn, Gemini Spacecraft, Everyone Says Hi

Also…

Bowie abruptly abandoned rock’n’roll to feel the pulse of black funk on Young Americans (EMI 1975), anticipating the dawn of disco as he did so. A few years later he entered the video age and claimed his crown as Emperor of the New Romantics on Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (EMI 1980). But it was not until Let’s Dance (EMI 1983) that his record sales finally matched his massive influence: the record’s commercial sheen won millions of new (though temporary) admirers. A rather fallow spell showed signs of ending in ‘hours…’ (VIRGIN 1999) which offered welcome evidence of a writer rediscovering himself.

Approach With Caution

David Bowie
Deram 1967
Bowie’s earliest solo music is nothing like anything he made later. It’s great if you can tolerate the Swinging London whimsy of toy soldiers, pretty maids and nursery fairylands. But otherwise it’s apt to make you queasy. Even in those days it was hard to classify him – in part he was a Carnaby Street mod with hippy influences, but also a show business wannabe of the Light Entertainment school. Add a dash of Eastern philosophy and darkly existentialist brooding and what have you got? Why, The Laughing Gnome! Oh dear.
Standout tracks: When I Live My Dream, Silly Boy Blue

1. Outside
RCA 1995
Like all of Bowie’s work around this time, 1. Outside can stand close listening, being so densely packed with musical quotations and lyrical twists. And yet, just like his other records of the 1990s, it leaves no emotional trace of itself afterwards. Brian Eno collaborates and there is some semblance of a story line underpinning the tracks, but the results are over-conceptual. The record’s intelligence is all in the head rather than the heart – not what you need from an artist whose cool brain operates best at the behest of passion.
Standout tracks: Hello Spaceboy, Strangers When We Meet

Also…

Despite the success of its title track, Space Oddity (EMI 1969) failed to break Bowie into the big time: it’s actually a little too precious to be compelling. When stardom finally arrived, he took a few days off to record some tributes to his influences: Pinups (EMI 1973) pays homage to The Mojos, The Kinks and so on. For a decent live document of the Ziggy era, try Santa Monica ’72 (MAINMAN 1994). Career revived by Let’s Dance, Bowie stayed in the mainstream for Tonight (EMI 1984) but he was never destined for such normality and the results are boring. Black Tie White Noise (ARISTA 1993) is from a period of earnest, rather laboured albums, while the uneven The Buddha Of Suburbia (ARISTA 1993) arose from soundtrack work for a TV play.

Poor

Never Let Me Down
EMI 1987
Long-term Bowie-watching was not entirely without pain, but few things hurt more than this half-hearted concoction of vague concessions to big production orthodoxy. Accompanied by the grossly over-wrought “Glass Spider” tour, the whole project suggested a man with a broken compass, from the design nightmare of its artwork to a spoken-word passage from “the Zi Duang province”. Significantly – for clothes are important in Bowieworld – his dress sense went AWOL too.
Standout tracks: Time Will Crawl, Zeroes

Also…

Even those in favour of Tin Machine accept that by Tin Machine II (LONDON 1991) the experiment had outlived its usefulness. Even less desirable is Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby (VICTORY 1992) whose U2 parody of a title is sadly symptomatic. But a truly essential live album has always eluded Bowie. Neither David Live (EMI 1974) nor
Stage (EMI 1978) does justice to the theatrical impact of his shows in those days. Ziggy Stardust The Motion Picture (EMI 1983) is similarly thin. From a later period, the problem with Earthling (RCA 1996) is not so much Bowie’s dabbling in drum’n’bass as the lifeless material at hand. Frantic new dance rhythms pass voltage through the music but the corpse, alas, doesn’t so much as twitch.

The Classic Compilation

Best Of Bowie
EMI 2002
There is admittedly no Laughing Gnome but these 39 tracks cover a broader span than any previous compilation. Chronologically arranged and starting at 1969’s Space Oddity, the two discs take a lightning tour of Bowie’s output up to this year’s Slow Burn. Frankly the second CD of the pair is not a patch on the first, and some selections seem made using the blindfold-and-pin method. Yet you’ll admire Bowie’s defiant avoidance of the ordinary, even when it leads him up a blind alley. Which has not often happened – taken overall this collection is a riot of fruitful diversity.
Standout tracks: Space Oddity, Life On Mars?, “Heroes”

Bowie: A Miscellany

Mon, 2 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

An assortment of Bowie-related pieces for various magazines, including reviews of:-
Space Oddity, the single
Space Oddity, the album
Ziggy Stardust
Aladdin Sane
It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City
“Heroes”, the single
Mick Ronson Memorial Concert
Bowie Style, the book
Best Of Bowie, 74-79
Sound & Vision
Starman, the book

David Bowie: Space Oddity (Philips)
From Mojo’s 100 Greatest Singles, August 1997
“I knew Bowie from being his engineer at Decca,” reports Gus Dudgeon. “In fact on The Laughing Gnome, I was the other gnome! Tony Visconti was contracted to do the album, but he just didn’t like this track, he thought it sounded like a second hand Simon & Garfunkel song. But I loved it, so Tony said, ‘Fine, you do the A- and the B-side and I’ll do the album.’” Space Oddity was the demo that won Bowie a new contract, and in turn became his breakthrough hit single. Inspired in part by Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the departure of Bowie’s girlfriend Hermione Farthingale (“I was totally head-over-heels in love with her, and it really sort of demolished me”) there was a sales hook in the upcoming Apollo moonshot, with Neil Armstrong landing one week after release. “We only made the whole thing in a day,” says Dudgeon of the Trident Studio session, held on 20 June 1969. “But we did a lot of planning before we went in. Herbie Flowers played bass, Rick Wakeman on mellotron, Terry Cox of Pentangle on drums, guitarist was Mick Wayne of Junior’s Eyes, Paul Buckmaster the arranger. Bowie played his Stylophone – you can’t do anything with its sound, it’s nasty and cheap, but incredibly distinctive. The big plus in those days was that the charts were wide open, you could be overtaken by Matt Monro one week, or a ska record made for three-and-sixpence in Jamaica. There were no rules and you had no preconceptions as to what might make the charts.”
Composer: David Bowie
Producer: Gus Dudgeon
Released: 11 July 1969
Chart peak: 5 (UK), 15 (US) (NB became a UK Number 1 on re-release in 1975)

DAVID BOWIE: Space Oddity: 40th Anniversary Edition
From The Word, November 2009

Ground control still hanging on for Major Tom
In 1969 all eyes were on the Moon, where a man took one small step. Meanwhile David Bowie took his own giant leap with a novelty hit named Space Oddity, wherein the curly-headed folk singer from Beckenham sang of extra-terrestrial loneliness. With that, he nearly floated into the eternal silence of the cosmos, as the pop audience deemed him a one-hit wonder. And there was not much evidence on this LP that he might be bound for greater things. True, it was an advance from his earlier songs, performed as a Swinging London music hall act. But these earnest hippie essays, like Memory Of A Free Festival, were really only a warm-up for the stellar achievements of later years. The bonus disc of extras makes this a collectible item of Bowie juvenilia. But not until his next album, The Man Who Sold The World, could one sense that a terrible beauty was being born.

David Bowie: The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: 30th Anniversary Edition
From Q Magazine, July 2002
Say what you like about Ziggy Stardust. He was a bisexual extra-terrestrial egomaniac – but he was a very British bisexual extra-terrestrial egomaniac. It’s a delightful footnote of rock’n’roll history that David Bowie’s most fabulous creation should have launched the invasion of Earth from a suburban pub called the Toby Jug. That was at Tolworth, near London, in February 1972, on the first date of a tour to introduce this album. By the year’s end, Ziggy would become a monster so gigantic there was scarcely a stadium ¬that could hold him. One thing was certain: this spaceboy would never play the Tolworth Toby Jug again.
With The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s fortunes underwent an amazing transformation. He’d been a fading one-hit wonder (Space Oddity) turned interesting fringe figure. The new record was a make-or-break bid for the kind of super-stardom enjoyed by his friend and rival Marc Bolan. In its wobbly parable of an alien rock’n’roller who arrives in a decaying world and conquers its children, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Replete with images from pop history, the gay underground and the newly-released A Clockwork Orange, these songs and this persona made 1972 a watershed year. In Britain at least, nothing could ever be the same again.
On this Anniversary edition, a bonus CD offers demos, curios, outtakes and other contemporary tracks (John, I’m Only Dancing being the greatest). In all they underline Bowie’s vast energy that year: not content with reinventing himself, he did the same for Lou Reed (Transformer), Iggy Pop (Raw Power) and Mott The Hoople (All The Young Dudes). As for Ziggy Stardust itself, you could argue that Bowie made better albums: it lacks the songcraft of its predecessor Hunky Dory and the sonic drama of Aladdin Sane which followed. Yet it’s an audacious and truly historical record. Though one step left of sincerity, the Martian theatricals pack an emotional punch. While the music revels in artifice, its heart beats with real and authentically human excitement. The Toby Jug will not see Mr Stardust’s like again.

David Bowie: Aladdin Sane
From Word, July 2003
Best reissue of this month is Bowie’s follow-up to Ziggy Stardust. This one’s always been under-appreciated in comparison. Though Aladdin Sane broke no new ground, conceptually, its songs are actually more powerful beasts than those on Ziggy – including, as they do, The Jean Genie and Drive In-Saturday. There’s a second CD of rarities (such as Bowie’s demo for Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes) and an exceptionally well-conceived booklet in between.

DAVID BOWIE: ALADDIN SANE: 30th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION
From Blender, August 2003

The red mullet years revisited: deluxe edition of 1973’s follow-up to Ziggy Stardust.
The lightning-flash face-paint of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane look became a classic of rock iconography. So why is the record itself not better regarded? It’s one of the only albums from his greatest years that didn’t mark a turning-point: after the conceptual triumph of 1972’s Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s next album seemed like more of the same. He freely admits he was fatigued and disoriented by his campaign to conquer America. Yet, from Bowie’s psychic dislocation came a clutch of glam-rock masterworks, including the futurist daydream “Drive-In Saturday”, the urban nightmare “Panic In Detroit” and the camp brutality of “The Jean Genie”. This reissue is made even more essential by a second CD of rarities, such as Bowie’s demo for “All The Young Dudes”, the glam anthem he regally donated to Mott The Hoople.

It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City, by Bruce Springsteen… as covered by David Bowie
From a piece in The Word, February 2011, that described notable cover versions.
Two rock legends, of similar vintage, who probably have a million fans in common. And yet… chalk and cheese. Springsteen and Bowie seem cut from different cloth, somehow. It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City marks a rare convergence between the honest blue-collar grunt they call the Boss and the flighty pan-sexual space alien we call the Dame. How did that happen?
   Bruce wrote this song when he was unknown; it became the closing track of his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park N.J. Though its hoodlum street-poetry sounds over-ripe, it impressed David Bowie. He’d already seen Springsteen play a New York club. Now, in the first flush of his Ziggy fame, he recognised the Jersey kid as a contender. Perhaps Bowie liked the urban dread: “After I heard this track,” he said later, “I never rode the subway again… That really scared the living ones out of me.” I think there is an echo of it in Bowie’s apocalyptic Diamond Dogs.
   Bowie attempted It’s Hard To Be A Saint in 1974, while recording Young Americans in Philadelphia. And Springsteen dropped by the studio. The pair got along OK, but they were not soul mates. Besides, Bowie at that point was fundamentally off his cake. (Keepin’ it real, Bruce wore a dirty leather jacket and arrived by public transport. Bowie, on the other hand, wore a bright red beret and yapped about UFOs.) The track was abandoned, then revived a year later when Bowie was making Station To Station. Once again it failed to make the cut and has only appeared, since then, as a bonus out-take on sundry CDs. (He also tried Springsteen’s Growin’ Up, and ditched that too.)
   From that point on their styles diverged entirely: Springsteen went from Byronic grease-monkey to plain-speaking Everyman. Bowie’s next stop was austere European art-noise. They’re both rock’n’rollers, of course, and their respective versions of this fine, urgent song are not wildly different. But the Dame has other roots, in Cockney music hall, mime and cabaret, while the Boss is rock, rock and more rock. Artifice versus authenticity? Well, I’m not so sure. There is more emotional sincerity in Bowie than he is given credit for, while Springsteen’s image is a fabulous showbiz construct, and none the worse for that. Just for one day, in 1974, those two young men were brothers in the cause.

David Bowie: “Heroes” (RCA)
From Mojo’s 100 Greatest Singles, August 1997
Bowie was always known for a certain artifice, but in “Heroes” he scored a real emotional bull’s-eye. His most affecting song, it still rings out as a thrilling affirmation: the triumph of ordinary people over colossal adversity. Its producer Tony Visconti recalls: “This was the most upbeat time in years for Bowie. His personal life was just about sorted out, so anything was possible – heroes ‘just for one day.’ It was written and recorded exclusively in Berlin, where the war never really ended and people still lived on the edge. The track was not a spontaneous happening. The music was recorded weeks before any lyrics or melody were ever written. We were never clear about what was a verse or a chorus. We’d take the backing track out from time to time and add a little more to it. Finally, one sunny afternoon, the words and melody came in two hours.” Bowie and co-writer Brian Eno had invited Robert Fripp to add some “burning rock’n’roll guitar” to the team, which already included Carlos Alomar, percussionist Dennis Davis and bass-player George Murray. Recording took place over the Summer of 1977, and the result was like an extraordinary hybrid of Kraftwerk and Shirley Bassey. Bowie previewed his new single on Marc Bolan’s last TV show, on 9 September. “I hadn’t anticipated the way it would become that kind of anthemic thing,” he now says. “I’m not quite sure what it means any more, which is kind of exciting.”
Composers: David Bowie and Brian Eno
Producers: David Bowie and Tony Visconti
Released: 23 September 1977
Chart peak: 24 (UK), - (US)

The Mick Ronson Memorial Concert
From Mojo, November 1997

The April 1994 tribute show to Bowie’s late guitarist, featuring Mick Hunter, Joe Elliott, assorted former Spiders – but nobody called Dave…
Held a year on from his death, the Ronson memorial concert was a feast of music, but with one conspicuously empty place at the banquet. Despite the rumours that had enticed at least some of the crowd to the Hammersmith Apollo that April night, David Bowie did not show up. Ronson had been the Dame’s most gifted lieutenant, and of huge importance to his career, so the absence was unfortunate. But Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott made a Herculean effort to bridge the gap, singing from the Ziggy repertoire with ex-Spiders Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder (substitute guitarists included Bill Nelson and Def Leppard’s Phil Collen). The early appearance of Rolf Harris suggested some lack of focus to this event, but the presence of Glen Matlock, Mick Jones, Steve Harley and Roger Daltrey suggested the breadth of respect that Ronson once commanded. His chief collaborator of later years, Mott The Hoople’s Mick Hunter, takes the show to its climax with a custom-written tribute, Michael Picasso, and the all-star finale of All The Young Dudes. Throats were lumped.

Bowie Style, by Mark Paytress and Steve Pafford (Omnibus Books)
From Heat, 10 June 2000
It’s ironic that the ever-changing David Bowie is called a chameleon, when the point about chameleons is that they blend into their backgrounds. The point of David Bowie has always been the opposite – to stand out from your surroundings like a Venusian transvestite on the 8.15 from Orpington. He’s plied the standing-out trade for 39 years – first as an effeminate Teddy boy, then a suburban fop. (“For the last two years,” he pouted on TV in 1964, “we’ve had comments like ‘Can I carry your handbag?’ thrown at us and it has to stop.”) He became famous in 1969 as a curly-topped folksinger, and in 1972 changed the course of human history by growing an orange mullet to become Ziggy Stardust, the rock star from another galaxy. He was so uniquely strange that punks could not condemn him and in the 1980s New Romantics worshipped him as a deity. Even in middle age he cannot resist the lure of a single stiletto shoe, a pointy beard or a suit resembling pub wallpaper. He should, by rights, look a twat, but seldom does. This book dwells as much on Bowie’s role as a cultural conduit, channelling the bizarre into the mainstream, but it’s the fashion-plates that fascinate. Marvel at this man who walks the tightrope of taste and never falls to earth. OK, we’ll forget the pirate’s eyepatch.

David Bowie: The Best Of, 1974-79 EMI
From Mojo, June 1998

Selected highlights of the post-Ziggy period, from Diamond Dogs to Lodger, with a few single mixes and rarities in between.
Having taken his fans on a cosmic rocket ride to the most exotic destinations in the universe, Bowie elected in the middle 1970s to explore the inner landscapes of his mind. Remarkably, the scenery proved even weirder there than anything ever dreamt of by Aladdin Sane. The Young Americans episode saw him sucking in the energies of black American dance music, helping found the disco dynasty that ruled the remainder of the decade. But his Thin White Duke phase, giving us both Station To Station and the movie of The Man Who Fell To Earth, ushered in the darkest and most anguished music of his career. Low and “Heroes” were perplexing to many who’d just begun to get a handle on him, but today they stand among his most enduring works. These are at the heart of this second Best Of volume, with the quirky addition of his Springsteen cover, It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City (the only point at which these utterly different artists intersect), to round out the package. After this, normality was the only novelty left to him.

David Bowie: Sound & Vision
From Word, January 2004
An earlier version of this box set retrospective emerged in 1989. It’s now acquired a fourth CD to bring its contents up to 1993, ending with a few selections from the Buddha Of Suburbia album that Bowie now rates among his favourite work.
As a career overview, it’s enormous and yet incomplete. There is nothing pre-dating a 1969 demo for Space Oddity, thus omitting the young Bowie’s formative years dabbling in R&B, MOR and eccentric pop. And the cut-off point of 1993 means there are no signs of the revived form some admirers see in his last couple of albums. What’s left, admittedly, is often dazzling – covering as it does the greatest years of his career and tracks as fine as The Man Who Sold The World, Drive-In Saturday, Young Americans and Ashes To Ashes.
Yet Sound & Vision is frustrating. The German version of “Heroes” is probably not the one you want; there are too many tracks taken from his live albums, when the studio originals would have been preferable; the avant-garde Baal EP of 1982 is interesting rather than listenable, whereas Absolute Beginners is simply ignored. Bowie is best enjoyed on a proper Greatest Hits level or via the entire original albums. The Sound & Vision box remains a muddled compromise.
WORD’S VERDICT: Four generously filled CDs but the real essence of Bowie is missing.

STARMAN: David Bowie, The Definitive Biography, by Paul Trynka
(SPHERE)
From The Word, April 2011

There’s a haunting image near the end of this book, or rather, advice on where you’ll find it. Following the author’s tip I looked up “Bowie at Fashion Rocks” on YouTube: it takes you to a 2005 performance of Life On Mars, at a New York charity gala. If you’ve measured your life in Bowie albums, then this clip is actually very moving. Recovering from illness, accompanied on piano by his old comrade Mike Garson, the rather frail performer on this stage has lost the last of his boyishness. Mortality has the Starman in its sights.

The song is literally “low key”, transposed down from F to B, apparently. And Garson has described the appearance as “a spiritual experience… with factors that go beyond the laws of music.” Anyone who has grown up on Bowie’s music will be touched, I think – and made to wonder if we’ll ever hear any more.

Hopefully we shall, but the silence of recent years allows a time for taking stock. Paul Trynka, Bowie’s latest biographer, has certainly put in the hours. Previous attempts have been more sensational (the Gillmans’ Alias David Bowie) or more analytical (David Buckley’s Strange Fascination) but this is a sound and thoroughly readable work. Admittedly, it seems not to have any input from Bowie; he flits though the narrative with occasional phantom utterances (“…says Bowie, today,”) which the author has recycled from existing interviews. As several of these interviews are mine, it’s nice to note that credits are given where due.

On the other hand Trynka has interviewed nearly everyone else that’s still available, from the most obscure old Bromley acquaintance to obviously central characters like producer Tony Visconti and ex-wife Angie Bowie. The guitarist Mick Ronson, alas, can no longer be consulted, and the controversial ex-manager Tony Defries may prefer to keep his own counsel. Bowie’s close-lipped assistant, Corinne Schwab, would also have been an ideal source. But these gaps are skilfully filled. Whatever the writer has lacked in access to his subject, he’s made up for in tireless research.

The book begins well, too, with a story from a Bowie band-member who took a nostalgic drive with his boss in 1991. They passed the Brixton house where it all began and Bowie, we’re told, shed tears: “It’s a miracle,” he said. “I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how all this happened.” Thus we’re set up for the larger story, that of David Jones’s rise from those shabby streets (South London was the traditional dormitory district for music hall artists) to colossal fame. In fact Bowie would become something more than famous – an object of enduring wonder, a star who seemed inherently “other”. He could never be taken for the boy next door, even when he tried his damnedest.

The early years of Bowie’s career are covered especially well, and we’re almost half-way into the book before Ziggy Stardust even appears. Managers and mentors describe a young man of devastating charm, certain of his destiny but prepared to learn from every mistake. He made false starts and was initially outpaced by fellow mod Marc Bolan. The breakthrough hit, Space Oddity, singled him out as something special, but ultimate success took years in arriving. He could never settle in a band. As Trynka suggests, Bowie was really a 1950s-style frontman – a creature of London showbiz as much as of rock’n’roll.

After the first sweet taste of superstardom comes the cocaine hell, the financial mess and the fracturing of friendships, but also that astonishing run of albums from Station To Station to “Heroes”. Artistically he would never again prove so consistent, even if his two most recent works have been of hearteningly high quality. Heathen and Reality may not be embedded in our collective memory in that way that earlier records are, but in a hundred years from now, who knows what will have survived and be admired?

The author is a knowledgeable guide with a fundamentally pro-Bowie attitude, and fans will find plenty here to enlighten and enjoy. It’s only a pity that the 21st century Bowie is frustratingly distant. We suppose he is resting in domestic harmony, at his New York apartment, in the manner denied to his old friend John Lennon. Fatherhood seems important to him, though we do learn that he opted out of nappy-duties. But Bowie: The House-Husband Years will just have to wait for another day.

Van Morrison: the 1980s

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A survey of Van’s reissued albums from 1979 to 1988; from Q Magazine, November 1988.

Into The Music
Common One
Beautiful Vision
Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart
A Sense Of Wonder
Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast
No Guru, No Method No Teacher
Poetic Champions Compose
(with The Chieftains) Irish Heartbeat

Why should it be that Morrison, a stubby and stubbornly uncommunicative man, sometimes described as charmless and grumpy by those who've had to deal with him, has amassed a body of work whose grace and emotional potency surpasses almost anything else emerging from within the general vicinity of rock'n'roll? The music of his maturity (he’s 43 now) has settled itself into a lushly pastoral style, dew-soaked and contemplative, while his gruff and deepening voice adapts its native coarseness to lyrics of esoteric spiritual musing (with occasional eccentric forays into nostalgic Irish merriment), his every growl and murmur seeming to speak from the soul.

For as long as he lives, and no doubt for long after that, this irascible sage’s name will be afforded uncommon respect by virtue of an album he made in 1968, when he was 23 years old. Astral Weeks' otherworldly cycle of songs attained a certain plane of being whose effect is somehow different in kind from the pleasures you might derive from the best of the rest of popular music. The record's allure is elusive and timeless. But we must not let it eclipse the brilliance of a lot of what come after.

It’s in his work since 1980, most of all, that Morrison has addressed himself with obsessive consistency to recapturing the transcendental state that gave Astral Weeks its compelling aura (“I'm nothin’ but a stranger in this world,/I've got a home on high”). Nearly every one of his recent albums traces this singular man's restless attempts to fuse the sum of his musical influences – ranging from jazz to R&B, through blues and soul and rock'n'roll, not omitting gospel and country – to lace their expressive powers with the insights of poetry and literature, to connect them with the folk- culture and mystic-tinged mythology of his Celtic heritage, and place it all at the service of a personal quest for spiritual wisdom and fulfilment. There aren't many artists whose resources could match such grand ambition.

Into The Music (1979) has its admirers, and arrived in its time as a bold return to form in the wake of his erratic output since the gorgeous Gaelic reverie of Veedon Fleece (1974). Even so, its brassy swagger and punchy blue-eyed soul style mark it as part of a period he was putting behind him. With Common One, which followed, he set off for some brooding, private place that bore no resemblance to music you might have considered contemporary, or commercial. (For all his cult esteem, Morrison has never numbered among the biggest album-sellers of his day.)

Thus, on the 15-minute Summertime In England – a track that’s practically a Morrisonian manifesto ¬ he abandons the song for a crazed mumble evoking the names of poetic champions (Wordsworth, Eliot, Coleridge) and abstract fantasies of romantic love and nature, and imagery as improbable as the voice of Mahalia Jackson (revered gospel songstress) coming through the ether while he walks with his beloved through Avalon, that lost Arthurian paradise of the pre-Saxon British. None of it makes rational sense, and all of it adds up. "It ain’t why," he calls out, "it just is."

From here on in Van Morrison's albums tend lo lose distinction from one another; each becomes on episodic instalment of a single adventure. Their musical constituents are constant, with rhapsody replacing structure, exchanging metaphysics for narrative, and drawing always on the familiar elements: saxophone lines that lunge drunkenly, spiralling female voices for back-up, luscious strings to cushion the fall, piano to offer melodic embroidery, rhythms from anywhere and a voice that grunts or mutters or snaps, or simply meditates aloud.

By the early '80s he'd found himself an instrumental format so comfortable that he could, increasingly, abandon his vocal presence completely, without diminishing a track's personality. Voice-less cuts like Scandinavia (on Beautiful Vision), September Night (from Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart) and Spanish Steps (which opens Poetic Champions Compose) convey as much of Morrison's message, and glow with the same slow-burning intensity, as any of their wordier counterparts.

His live appearances are not to be missed; however his 1984 live set from the Grand Opera House, in his home town Belfast, contrives to lose that stage magic by means of the usual alchemy-in-reverse that afflicts live albums in general. The backing vocals, in particular, are shrill and obtrusive.

Much more to the point was 1986's No Guru, No Method, No Teacher – perhaps his best record of this decade. Its cover photo was token in the walled garden of Holland Park in Kensington, and portrays the artist as balding, middle-aged man beside a weather-eroded statue of some long-dead worthy. The album's title reflects Van's distancing himself from the church of Scientology, whose beliefs he'd recently identified with, in favour of a more personal route to inner understanding (the theme is abrasively underlined on the sarcastic track Thanks For The information). Elsewhere the set abounds in musical and lyrical references to Astral Weeks, as well as having a song called Here Comes The Knight, a pun on one of the best-known numbers from his mid-'60s days with the spiky R&B band Them, with whom he also made the classic garage-rock anthem Gloria.

The spiritual curiosity that informs his writing is the more unique – in white music, at least – for the space it allows to sensuality and the carnival of the senses. Whereas in black American music, carnality and religion have typically co-existed in a mutually intensifying tension, in white Christian rock they tend to cancel each other out. Not so for Van: his most extreme expression of romance is apt to come out in a phrase like She Gives Me Religion – a track on Beautiful Vision and another of the lines he likes to resurrect in other songs.

In his rare and terse press interviews he's affected a dismissive attitude to what he's doing: “It’s my job. I get paid for making records, for writing songs. I get paid for it, so I do it. It’s my job." He's given to describing himself as a passive channel for material whose ultimate origin is elsewhere, as if he were only a piece of equipment: "I’m just channelling what I get. I’m channelling music, and that’s what I get coming through me." But nowadays he'll claim the purpose of his work is to create the state of trance in which both he and the listener can reach beyond the distractions of the material world.

Morrison's most recent project has been a collaboration with The Chieftains, an engaging vacation that takes him off the track of philosophic exploration awhile. The Irish Heartbeat album contains re-worked versions of two appropriate numbers (the title track, which was first on Inarticulate Speech, and Celtic Ray from Beautiful Vision) with a number of traditional Irish songs, from the heart-rending lament of Carrickfergus to the playground jig I'll Tell Me Ma. As a homage to the roots, it stands alongside John Lennon's Rock'n'Roll.

His influence is enormous. For a man who detests the rock’n’roll circus and insists he's earned the right to be considered completely outside of it, there are traces of his style nearly everywhere, not least in U2. He's scathing, to on unreasonable extent, about singers such as Springsteen and Bob Seger who he alleges owe it all to him. "Copycats ripped off my songs” he scowls in No Guru's A Town Called Paradise.

A curmudgeonly old bugger? So they say. But for the enchanting beauty of his music, you'd forgive him anything.

See some other Van Morrison pages on this site:

Van Morrison meets Spike Milligan

Van Morrison Interview 1997

Van Morrison at Glastonbury

A Van Morrison Buyer's Guide

A Van Morrison Miscellany

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Van Morrison: Deep Van

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

This was the first piece written for Mojo’s first issue, in November 1993, and was intended to serve as a demonstration to readers and writers of what the new magazine was attempting. That includes the eccentric playlist at the end, Deep Van, which instead of an orthodox consumer guide for beginners, suggests the least approachable but most interesting parts of Morrison’s work.
I had a fairly successful interview with Van a few years later, but at this point I was confined to memories of a disastrous encounter with him while he was promoting his Chieftains collaboration Irish Heartbeat, and a summary of the day at Spike Milligan’s house (full account here). For the rest, it’s a resume of Van’s career and recorded work to the early 1990s, with reflections on his art and public persona.

I
Nobody describes him as a comfortable kind of guy to be around. In fact you sense a man in constant shadow, below some trailing cloud of private, black unhappiness. His whole self seems an uptight, clenched-in ball of bother and tension. It can be suffocating in his company – a shy man who is unembarrassable, and will therefore face any situation down. There is honest shock in people's reports of his rudeness. Fools he will not suffer gladly, but it's striking how much of humanity he puts inside that category. Practically all of it.

Yet Van Morrison inspires the deepest veneration, and a wry, cautious sort of affection. He probably doesn't want it, but he’s got it. To put it romantically, he 's a reluctant shaman – burdened with this gift he never asked for, expressing his audience's emotional life, leaving his own soul drained and empty. He calls himself a channel, or conduit, receiving and transmitting the music from some higher force. So he says don't ask him what he's doing, because he doesn't know. His conscious mind is not involved in this. It just comes out.

In his own words, Van is "a soul in wonder" and nothin' but a stranger in this world. He's a sort of spiritual ventriloquist, whose tongue gives sound to the "inarticulate speech of the heart". It ain't why, it just is, runs one of his most significant lines. He 's either afraid of rationality or he distrusts it, or he's simply looking in a different direction altogether. Actually, he has researched carefully into theories about the psychic powers of music, but where his own work is concerned, he detests explanations, and all the scribbling wretches who peddle them.

His mind is on higher things, although his songs are often celebrations of sensual pleasure and earthly experience, be it a walk in gardens wet with rain, or the old poet's "flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness", or just a feast of buns and lemonade. These elusive treats are only ever caught in shimmering glimpses. Fleeting are the minutes of tranquillity in a grinding world of perpetual disappointment. He is a pilgrim with indigestion.

There is a quote in Steve Turner's new biography of Morrison, Too Late To Stop Now: It's from John Payne, Van's flute player on Astral Weeks: "When he was on stage he would look like a space cadet, but then he'd open his mouth, and you would realise that he had channelled everything into the sound of his voice. The rest of it was just a shell that was there for the purpose of producing this voice.”

So we look at the case of George Ivan Morrison, born on August 31,1945. In a way the Belfast he grew up in has vanished as entirely as Shakespeare's London. The normal run of urban this-and-that has rubbed out pubs and clubs and shops that figure in his early life story. More importantly, Van's was a Belfast before the present troubles (which began in 1969) that have rubbled the town's central streets and certain districts. These place-names have only a clanging nightmare ring to English ears: Shankill, Falls, Crumlin, New Lodge . . . across the water it's just the drone of news bulletin brutalities, all the back alley kneecappings and betting shop assassinations.

Gayer days, though, in Van's growing-up time. It was probably a town rather poor and hard and drab, but practically a paradise of hope and openness in comparison to what it would become . A pre-war city in post-war Britain.

His own family patch was Bloomfield, to the east, mostly Nonconformist Protestant. The pylons and the Sunday six-bells, the peace and poshness of nearby Cyprus Avenue, the foghorns from the river are all familiar things if you know his songs. The house at 125 Hyndford Street was not large, but his father's records and wireless set opened spacious vistas of another mental dimension. This much we also know through Van's songs. He would listen to Sonny Boy Williamson's blues and time itself stood still. The gospel voice of Mahalia Jackson froze his soul in a moment of transcendence. He listened to Jimmie Rodgers in his lunch breaks; and Hank Williams, Fats Domino, rock'n’roll, jazz and country & western, big band swing, the Goons . . . And all of this meant much more to him than it meant to most people. And his life outside meant less.

He learned saxophone and played in showbands. He started to sing, and helped get a rhythm & blues scene going in the city. He toured Europe in beat groups, played dancehalls, and recorded songs with titles like Twingy Babv and Boozoo Hully Gully. He often cites those days, before stardom, before the corrupt pop music monsters got his number; it was a time of honest graft, straightforward labour. He always likes to describe what he does as work – just work. Just a job, like anyone else's. (He also did a teenage stint as a window cleaner, and sings about it with gnawing nostalgia.) Only when he became famous, and an object for others to think and talk and speculate about, was he off the path of a musician's simple calling. The darkness closed in, though perhaps it was really there all along.

The band that got him established in London was called Them. Members came and went, and there are much-photographed line-ups who may never have played a note together. We all know of Gloria – it must be the most famous B-side ever – and its A-side Baby Please Don't Go, and others such as Here Comes The Night, because these were hard diamonds of their time in pop music. But soon the more fashionable stance was to be loose and groovy, and Van Morrison was not right for that.

Consequently the Van of this mid-’60s scene is a misfit. He’s remembered as a difficult little git. He hangs out in New York and Los Angeles and gets very drunk and behaves wildly. But he does meet a beautiful girl in America called Janet Planet, and she will be important. Meanwhile his business deals are going from bad to worse, to something even worse than that. He blames everyone else and everyone else blames him. Who knows?

He blew up the band. He got in a lot of rows. His career really collapsed. He went home.

II
There’s a peculiar rag-bag compilation called TB Sheets that records this pause in his fortunes. It's got the bright, feisty pop single he ‘d made in 1967, Brown Eyed Girl (already the lyrics are swimming in visions of an adolescent world that's lost) and the track T.B. Sheets itself is macabre and sprawling, grim and ghoulish, actually horrific in its depiction of a friend's slow death. Also on the record are early tries at Madame George and Beside You – crude, uninspired attempts in the light of their finished forms – but they're interesting because of what they became. They became Astral Weeks.

Decades go by, but Astral Weeks's reputation has never diminished. It is the greatest album of the rock era. A century from now it will be admired an marvelled at; they’ll call it a work of primitive, intuitive genius. In its emotional symmetry and its internal logic, it is accidentally perfect, and perfectly satisfying. Its sum is more than the total of its parts.

Funny that compositions so cosmic had their origins in that tiny terraced house. For Van was back in Belfast. An ex-rock star. A local boy who'd been to the moon and fallen back down to earth. But he loved his Janet Planet, across the ocean, and this yearning churns around and through much of the music. Without her, it has been said, there might have been no Astral Weeks. He took a tape recorder into the bedroom he'd grown up in and the songs flowed out.

Back in the States and signed to Warners, he went to a New York studio and recorded these songs with a few jazz session players. It was done very quickly, almost haphazardly, and the musicians had no particular interest in the process. In other words, this immortal music was made for peanuts by a roomful of half-bored clock-watchers. There's a school of thought that holds the more time, facilities and sympathetic understanding you give to artists, the worse their work becomes.

So far as it goes, Van was now an Official Rock Star of this big new youth generation. The follow-up album Moondance is a lot of people's all-time favourite record; its songs are less abstract, its structures more solid. Like Dylan and The Band he moved to Woodstock, which was then a remote, artistic town in rural New York State. The photos on the album His Band And The Street Choir present him as a contented hippy patriarch, surrounded by loyal wife, children, band members, all cheerfully getting it together in the country.

And Janet Planet's sleeve-note here is very affecting: she writes in awed delight about how friendly and relaxed her husband suddenly looks. "l have seen Van open those parts of his secret self – his essential core of aloneness I had always feared could never be broken into... It seems so far away from the former reality of a confession of the nature of T.B. Sheets... Look at the photographs and marvel, as we do, at the good feeling that radiates from him now.”

In truth Van was getting pissed off: Woodstock had promised to be a sanctuary of isolated peace and creativity, but the recent rock festival had put paid to that. He relocated to a new though equally leafy retreat in California, and it’s in this vicinity that we see him and Janet on the cover of the next album Tupelo Honey. (If there’s one thing Van hates – though in fact there are many things – it's people who read things into his album sleeves. But true Van fans are undeterred, and bash away happily). It looks blissful. The songs are not exuberant but a certain calmness of heart prevails.

Then it all fell apart again. Janet left him, and took the baby daughter. It must have been an anguished time. On St Dominic's Preview (1972) he huffs and growls through Listen To The Lion like there's some wounded beast inside his throat. Certainly on the album sleeve there's a gaping rip in his trousers.

By the time of Hard Nose The Highway it really is back to business as usual. He'd been suspicious of love-and-drug grooviness in the late '60s; he'd briefly bought the dreams of the 'alternative culture' at the decade’s turn, but now it was hard, cold, individualistic contempt again, aimed at “the so-called hippies", "plastic revolutionaries,' and a hypocritical rock star (who we must presume to be John Lennon) in the archetypal Morrison title, The Great Deception.

III
The American phase of Van Morrison’s life was nearly over now. A sign of what would take its place was the 1974 album Veedon Fleece, whose songs drew deep from a fresh well of Celtic inspiration. He’d taken to travelling Ireland; he’d barely known it as a boy. He looked to the culture he’d never explored before, squashed as he’d been between the British curriculum of a Belfast state school and his own passion for the USA, that fabulous electric land to which young Van had high-tailed as soon as possible.

At times he has mused there is a spiritual or even historical kinship between the soul sound of black America and the ancient music of Ireland and Scotland. He’s sung enigmatically of the “Celtic Ray”, a mysteriously potent force. As ever, though, he’s loathe to elaborate.

On the cover of 1977’s album, A Period Of Transition, there are 15 semi-coloured photos of Van, sitting at a table with his most unco-operatively bored and don’t come closer head upon his shoulders, and the record’s title looks at first like it's supposed to be a joke, because the pictures are practically unchanging. Nor do you unpack the record to find a drastic alteration of creative course. But there’s a transition going on, just the same. He’d finally moved back to London (Harvey Goldsmith acts for a while as his manager; it’s not a post that many have held for long); he wears the plainest chain-store clothes. His recent showing at The Band’s extravaganza, The Last Waltz, was perhaps the last ever sighting of Van – in bizarre spangly costume but magnificent voice – as an Official Rock Star.

He was not resigning yet, however. If there’s a point where he was acting like a proper and well-behaved pop person, that would be the time of Wavelength and Into The Music, the last two Van albums of the 1970s. On the former he’s freshly scrubbed for the cover shot, in comely casual togs and not a trace of ripped trouser, your honour. To both collections he brings a batch of energetic and disciplined tunes. Thematically, there are clear and simple songs, and there is a vibe of unbridled bounciness.

But all this could and would not last. Common One, released in September of 1980, wanders the Morrisonian back catalogue like a tramp. It rambles, it grunts, it meanders. It is truly strange in its broody communion with the soil of England. It defies the unbeliever to listen to it at all. It is the very deepest of Deep Van.

In its gruff rhapsodies for English greenery, whether it's the Lake District or the ‘Avalonian’ hills of Somerset and the West Country, it points up a small puzzle in Van’s work, namely this: the most renowned Irish songwriter of his time has drawn more imagery from England than from Ireland. But the England he connects with is really ancient Britain, in olden times a Celtic land as much as Ireland was, before the Saxons drove them bloodily westwards, until the Norman yoke was dropped upon the lot of them.

He sings of the countryside constantly, but it’s almost always with a town-dweller's eye – as a place of scenery and a refuge for the scarred soul, rather than a place of agriculture or the hard life. But then it's also been observed, quite shrewdly, that for all his songs about God and religion, there is rarely a mention of any obligations on his own part, nor of repentance for anything.

IV
By the 1980s the Woodstock Generation had dissolved itself. Van's constituency was scattered. He'd go practically unnoticed in a scene dominated by Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Culture Club. He'd always protested he was part of nobody's movement, and now it was finally true. He made albums called Beautiful Vision and Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart in which the believers believed, and to which nobody else gave a second thought. He sat on damp wooden benches in Holland Park, and few passers-by ever recognised him. The most inexplicable LP sleeve would be that of his 1984 release A Sense Of Wonder; many would wonder what sense there could be in Van Morrison peeking through some foliage, wearing a black cape, a cheesy grin and a large Zorro hat. The music inside was once more dourly private, inward-searching, including an adaptation of William Blake and a strange James Joyce-ish fantasy that Van wrote about his childhood favourite, Spike Milligan.

Hints abounded, too, that his remembered Belfast world was becoming more real to him than anything in the present. “You may call my love Sophia, but I call my love Philosophy," he sings in the title track; by the final verse he’s on to Northern Irish cakes and chip shops.

Probably the best album he made in that decade was No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, its title being a signal he wasn't signing up for anyone's system, although he’d been a keen student of other organised beliefs, including Scientology for a time. Poetic Champions Compose came in 1987; its cover portrait carries perhaps the most uninviting face ever used to sell a marketed product.

V
For sheer enjoyability, nothing can beat his 'trad. arr.' album with The Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat.

I interviewed him at this time but the encounter was no merrier than most. Arriving there, my nerves were efficiently jangled by the unexpected sight of a legal document: it was a letter from Van, demanding al1 rights to the article, with bleak details of the gruesome financial punishments in store if I broke the terms. Van would not appear in my presence until the document was signed.

He joined me in the hotel restaurant with Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains. Customarily you begin with a bit of ice-breaking banter before the tape recorder goes on, and sure enough the genial Moloney served up some breezy small-talk, until abruptly cut by the otherwise silent Van, who curtly requested that we just get on with it.

This rather became the trend of our chat. I'd ask about the project, Paddy would respond, twinkling amiably with a few well-practised lines (“That's the Irish: all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad," etc) but Van would close the matter down. He told me these enquiries were irrelevant, as the record had been made, and he was not interested in talking about "the past".

This rendered the meeting void, in a sense, but I hoped for more luck if I asked instead about the future. What were his plans, I ventured mildly.

But the idea of "plans" seemed to antagonise him acutely. He replied angrily that he didn't have "plans" – he pronounced the word with enormous scorn and sarcasm, as if it were somehow ludicrous – and demanded of me if I really thought he had a crystal ball or something. I meekly acknowledged this was unlikely, but you know, surely... erm... I glanced to my left in fervent hopes of a rescue by Moloney. But no help came from that quarter: Paddy was subdued, no longer even looking up from the table-top. I was alone and abandoned, forlornly busking questions that were deemed by Van "not relevant" or would "take too long to answer". For light relief he'd break off occasionally to complain about his record company.

We talked of sweets in the end. He softened somewhat on the topic of confectionery and light snacks mentioned in his music. Alter 35 minutes I suggested we leave it there. I was miserably aware of this session's futility – given the legal document, no reputable magazine could run the piece anyway – but still, the music was wonderful and I paid both men a few honest compliments about it as I left. Van accepted this, even smiled slightly. "Well, that's the main thing. That's what it's all about."

VI
One day in 1989 or so he found himself unusually near the toppermost of the poppermost. His duet with Cliff Richard, Whenever God Shines His Light, became the surprise hit from Avalon Sunset. But it's another track here that most enchants a lot of people, namely the recitation Coney Island, recollecting a day trip in the Ulster countryside, rich in Morrisonian wistfulness and (in stopping off for "mussels and potted herrings in case we get famished before dinner") sound nutritional prudence.

And a second spoken-word piece, In The Days Before Rock'n'Roll, dominates the 1990 album Enlightenment – in part because it's a magically innocent image ("I am down on my knees, at those wireless knobs") but also because there's not much else that's first rate.

Around the Avalon Sunset time I went with Van to Spike Milligan's home in the remote Sussex countryside. Van's manager Chris O'Donnell drove us down there. Van struck me as intensely edgy during the journey forever making calls on a portable phone, generally failing to get a connection and growing even more agitated. In the pretty town of Rye the car had to stop in a traffic queue at a railway level crossing. Van was enraged. He left the car abruptly, complaining about the delay. There seemed little that could be done. The train passed, the gate opened. The car had to go forward, being in a queue. But Van had stalked off, back down the street. We had to circle the area for about 10 minutes before he could be found and picked up again. Happily the level crossing was open the second time.

At Milligan's house the ancient comedian was a kindly host, and in conversation he was funny, often obscene, and really hilariously libellous about some rock'n'roll and show business people. He let me know that these remarks must stay "off the record" and so they shall, though Van sourly warned Spike that no journalist was to be trusted. But I watched with pleasure, throughout the afternoon, as Morrison shook with mirth at his old hero's stories, wheezing with glee. It was good to see him to happy. I wished I saw it more.

VII
The recent records are not his best, but that's all right because Van's attained that plateau of status now – David Bowie climbed on to it about two years ago – where you're no longer only as good as your last LP; he's at the point where his reputation rests on his career in its totality.

Hymns To The Silence and Too Long In Exile are both a bit overweight, track-wise. They're both diminished by the trite whining of titles such as Professional Jealousy, Big Time Operators, Why Must I Always Explain? and Wasted Years.

It's a real paradox of his work that he seeks the eternal, the transcendent, the pure and the beautiful – and then blasts off and bellyaches about the most trivial irritations. But even the lyrics on spiritual themes lack some of the old poetic force, I think.

Yet, inside Hymns To The Silence are these piercing invocations of youthful experience, such as On Hyndford Street and Take Me Back, which pick apart those still, silent moments – “And it's always being now, it's always being now" – that are haunting him down the days of his 1ife. This middle-aged poet of childhood carries around with him a vivid imprint of a vanished Belfast, being perhaps the only real world he's known. Alter all, he left for 'the road' at 16 years of age, with all the rock'n'roll madness it brought down around his head.

(In this respect he's weirdly reminiscent of Paul McCartney, a man whose life turned inside out, when he was 20, to a degree that none of us can really comprehend, and whose psychic clock appears to have stopped ticking with the shock of that moment. Paul's mind is like a sealed-up Liverpool parlour room from 1958; a world run by bossy little men from the municipal corporation who wear caps and moustaches, where relatives are called Arthur and Elsie, and beer comes in brown bottles.)

More than one person has told me that meeting Van, the grief of dealing with him, has ruined their enjoyment of his music. It's happened to me, too, a few times but the effects soon passed. I return to his music almost every day. I take his genius to be a given fact. Apart from that I like the strange wav that he has no concept of oddness. He's worn some perplexing things. They don't strike him as odd. He performs the most eccentric vocal mannerisms. They don't strike him as odd. He writes titles like Rave On, John Donne. And he sings lines like "I'm gonna put my hot pants on and promenade down funky Broadway 'til the cows come home” – consider that picture for a moment – and he has no idea why others find it odd. Eventually you get the same way yourself.

And if he lacks grace in his dealings with the common herd, he's at least unstinting in his respect for the artists who have moved him. Name-checks abound in his songs. To watch the TV footage of him playing duets with Bob Dylan and, especially, John Lee Hooker, is to see a humbler and deferential Van, touchingly pleased to win their approval.

He said to me: "Modern music suffers from loss of memory, from loss of integrity. From hype." Van the man appears to suffer from many things, but from those three things, his music is righteously and gloriously free. And long may it be so. Rave on, Van Morrison.

DEEP VAN

The definitive Morrison compilation that no sane record company will ever release. Here is Van at his least accessible and yet - to the true believer - his most profoundly satisfying.

1 Let The Slave (Incorporating The Price Of Experience)
The poet Adrian Mitchell rearranges a William Blake text for Van to mutter and growl aloud, like the soldier on the battlefield "when the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead". No buns or lemonade involved.

2 The Story Of Them, Parts I & II
It's just that. The young Van, sounding 75, adopts Howlin' Wolf's death-song Goin' Down Slow, while telling of Them's adventures in their Belfast home, The Maritime Hotel.

3 Take Me Back
Utterly gorgeous reverie, buried in Hymns To The Silence. Asthmatic harmonica and scat-like gobbling capture ecstatic impression of a long-gone afternoon "in the eternal moment, in the eternal now".

4 He Ain’t Give You None
Creaky I 2-bar demo from T. B. Sheets sessions, full of dark references to receiving Van's “jelly roll” in a backstreet alley way. Could we just have the buns and lemonade?

5 Snow In San Anselmo
Ricochets from tinkling ballad to fast jazz work-out, to soaring choral epiphany, with the abrupt illogic of alien radio stations interfering with one another.

6 When Heart Is Open
Practically static, l5-minute finale of Common One. "Oh, hand me down my big boots," he calls, from deep within a seance. On release in l980, the NME's feminist critic replied he ought to fetch his own bloody boots.

7 Tir Na Nog
Slowly rolling, peaceful piece from No Guru; the title is an Irish other-world, imagined to the west. Blake's Jerusalem and the favoured "garden wet with rain" are summoned up in this dreamed encounter with a reincarnated friend. Most oddly, Van recognises this friend by the apparition's chin.

8 Listen to The Lion
Majestic centrepiece to Saint Dominic's Preview. The sound is of agony-stricken country rock collapsed inside an 11-minute exorcism while-U-wait. Among the grunting Van is sailing again into the mystic, on a phantom Viking ship from Denmark to Caledonia.

9 Streets Of Arklow
Gaelic air from Veedon Fleece. Hear a string arrangement play the sound that grass makes when it's growing . . .

l0 Slim Slow Slider
An oddly jagged end to Astral Weeks's seamless sequencing: it's said the track was crudely spliced to curtail its length. With its roots in acoustic blues, the song's another old Notting Hill nightmare. Across Ladbroke Grove Van spies his subject, and he knows she's dying, and he knows she knows it too.

See some other Van Morrison pages on this site:

Van Morrison meets Spike Milligan

Van Morrison Interview 1997

Van Morrison at Glastonbury

A Van Morrison Buyer's Guide

A Van Morrison Miscellany

Van In The 1980s

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Brian Epstein: a new profile

Wed, 6 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A profile of Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, written for The Word, December 2010.

Two nude, muscular men stared out from every bus that idled in the busy road outside Epstein’s, a north Liverpool furniture shop. Neptune and Triton, Lords of the Deep, stood above a Latin motto on the Corporation coat-of-arms, emblazoned upon those big green tins of cloth-capped humanity, windows grey with dense cigarette smoke.

Did the bored teenage assistant ever return their gaze? Day in, day out, this elder son of the Epstein dynasty – they had traded here since grandfather Isaac arrived from Lithuania – performed his family duty. There were parlour pianos to sell (a Mr McCartney bought one for himself and his little boy Paul to practise upon) and bulky radio cabinets and horsehair sofas. The teenage Brian Epstein pondered his situation. He had recently been Britain’s least successful public schoolboy. He would shortly prove disastrous both as a soldier and a trainee actor.

And yet, some bright inner flame of ambition was never extinguished. He set about re-organising the Epstein shop and its annexe the North End Music Store (NEMS), and showed some flair in the process. Next his father Harry gave him a city centre branch to manage. And then, of course, Brian took the most reckless decision of his entire life. He walked across the street and discovered a pop group called The Beatles.

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of that fateful alliance and the beginning of a fabulous and partly tragic show business parable. Epstein was the manager who transformed his boys’ careers, the only man astute enough to translate what The Beatles had, into what the whole world wanted. During his short life Epstein straddled two very different worlds: provincial post-War Liverpool and in the 1960s so-called Swinging London. From running a record shop he went directly to the top of the mountain, negotiating his way through the cut-throat American music industry and overseeing his band’s triumphal progress from one continent to the next.

And The Beatles were only the headline act in Epstein’s stable of stars. Through them and his numerous other protégées, he dominated pop on a gigantic scale. All his predecessors and successors, from Colonel Tom Parker to Simon Cowell, are minor by comparison.

Nobody knows where he found the sheer gumption. “Brian,” marvelled his US colleague Nat Weiss, “was the emotional and psychological catalyst. He had the vision to say that The Beatles would be bigger than Elvis in 1961.” Yet, beneath the dazzling veneer of Epstein’s success, lies a story of much unhappiness. He was the Man Out Of Time, who helped to create the Swinging Sixties, but was never really *of them. He became a little bit Swinging in his final year, but the experience helped to kill him. Impeccably well-spoken, invariably well-dressed, Epstein was a 1950s man, unable to live his allotted role in life and unable to escape it, either.

Perhaps he needed the social freedoms that the later 1960s ushered in. It’s just unfortunate that he did not survive to see them. He really was The Great Gatsby of that age. At the height of the amazing party he had brought about, Brian Epstein slipped away, unobtrusively. In the Summer of Love, 1967, they found him slumped across his bed in Belgravia, stone dead of an overdose.

Brian would write in his autobiography, A Cellarful Of Noise, that the older son of a Jewish family has an extra weight of expectation. He was born in Liverpool in 1934, his brother Clive two years later, and his four most famous associates in the six years after that. One of them, John, grew up in wide and leafy Menlove Avenue, adjacent to spacious Queen’s Drive, site of the Epsteins’ family home. But Brian was a misfit in his several hearty schools, a sensitive boy who spoke wistfully of becoming a dress designer. At the age of 16, he was unceremoniously placed in that out-of-town furniture shop, on a salary of five pounds per week.

The age difference between Epstein and John, Paul *et al, looks modest, but it was really a generational gulf. Deepest of their divisions was that Brian had to perform National Service, which was abolished a whisker away from Lennon’s eligibility. Private Epstein was of course not destined for glory in the British Army. Legendarily, they arrested him one night for “impersonating an officer”: he had merely returned to Regents Park barracks in his immaculately correct evening clothes. Unlike most public schoolboys he was never made an officer cadet; instead they sent him to a string of psychiatrists and, within a year, kicked him out completely.

So in 1954 he was back in that dowdy shop, staring at the buses outside the window. Evenings, however, found him in town, where he cultivated friends in theatrical circles. There was, too, the overlapping world of Liverpool’s homosexual scene – still decidedly illegal and therefore ripe for blackmail. Being a sea-port the city had various specialist bars that catered to “gay” taste, though that term was more or less unknown. One such venue was the Bonaparte, whose name made more sense in the *palare slang of sailors and homosexuals. It was Brian’s abiding difficulty that he favoured very rough boys, the sort of teddy boy “Dockyard Doris” who preyed on vulnerable men.

Like the British Army before them, the Epstein family became aware of Brian’s propensity for night-walks on the wild side, with its attendant danger of hellish legal scrapes. He was accepted by RADA, Britain’s hallowed cradle of dramatic talent. But the pattern played out once more and he was arrested in Finchley (probably due to police entrapment) and charged at Marylebone Magistrates Court. (I don’t think this was generally known during the Beatles years. We can imagine poor Epstein’s dread of it ever surfacing.) He resigned from RADA and made his way back to Lime Street Station and, yes, the family furniture store.

But there was now a shiny new branch of NEMS, and it was all Brian’s. This time in the heart of town, it occupied a modernist block thrown up to cover the vast bomb-site designed by Adolf Hitler. About 200 yards away, in a surviving warren of 18th-century warehouses, was the Cavern Club and here he found The Beatles, his own purpose in life and the future of popular culture, all within a single lunch-hour.

Nobody around Epstein seems to have understood what Brian saw in the group. Musically, he preferred classical records, so The Beatles were not his thing. Their uncouth rock’n’roll, in any case, was on the verge of becoming old-fashioned. Perhaps he felt a sexual attraction for one or more of the larky, leather-jacketed Scouse boys. But there was nothing to be gained there, and it was not a business plan. Something else, that only Brian Epstein grasped, was at work. John Lennon had a vague idea of The Beatles’ potential, though it might have been his ego and desperation talking. Paul McCartney knew that he had enough ability to make some kind of living in music. Only Brian had this absurd vision of surpassing Elvis Presley.

In the meantime, while he booked them into their parish halls and blood-stained ballrooms, he continued to live as a dapper young businessman. He wore white Peter England shirts, narrow ties and dark bespoke suits. With friends he drove to country pubs for discreet dinners: the limited options of that time would have run to tinned tomato soup, chicken-and-potatoes, gateaux, bottled Bass and copious cigarettes. He took a small flat in town, away from his parents, and probably used it to entertain unsuitable young men. When John Lennon and his girlfriend Cynthia found she was pregnant, Brian let them live there instead. That was kind of him, and most agree that he was frequently kind. But he was above all a man on a mission.

Why? What had he seen? What had he heard? As yet there was scant evidence of Lennon & McCartney’s songwriting genius. Once again, the possibilities were all inside of Brian Epstein’s head.

III

No need here to re-iterate the familiar Beatles story. Just a few glimpses are interesting, however. We know about the rejections he received from the London music industry. Trying to get his boys signed, he must have felt again the corrosive sense of failure that dogged his formative years. And then it all changed. I was filming an interview with Paul McCartney a while ago. After a few takes, he turned to me and in a picturesque phrase said, “We’ll get it right now. We’ll move majestically to the end, like the steam train bringing Mr Epstein into Lime Street Station to tell us we had a record deal.”

Epstein himself recalled that happy day in his autobiography. That book, A Cellarful Of Noise, was ghost-written by The Beatles’ brilliant Liverpudlian press officer Derek Taylor, who told the tale with an elegance befitting its suave subject. Still, both men realised there was an awful lot they could not make public in 1964. Having taken his boys for a celebratory Coca-Cola, with biscuits, at a Lime Street milk bar, Brian reports that he went on to a night club. Here, in his elation, he fell out with his girlfriend “Rita Harris”, who felt jealous of Brian’s new obsession. It’s probably all true, except that lovely Rita was, in fact, a boy.

Rita, or whatever his name was, certainly had grounds for suspicion. As neither man was ever known to speak of the matter openly, it’s impossible to know if Brian and John had a physical relationship during their brief holiday. (My own understanding, through a mutual friend of both, was that John “obliged” to a small and strictly practical extent, more from curiosity than inclination.) It’s clear that Brian was transfixed, at least on some conceptual level, by the idea of The Beatles. At their urging, and that of their new producer George Martin, he was lumped with the ugly task of sacking Pete Best. Yet, seeing their first photos with Ringo, he was enchanted by the visual harmony. It was obviously not a question of straightforward beauty, but of some elusive chemistry.

Having dodged the fists and boots of angry Pete Best supporters, Brian dedicated himself to the presentation of his band, just as he had done with NEMS’ window displays. Paul McCartney has often observed that Brian was not so much The Beatles’ manager as their director. He conceived of them as a visual and stage phenomenon – he wisely left all questions of music up to the boys – and nurtured their look. He took them to local tailors, including his own favourite Walter Smith, and gave them a crisp, modern image for the 1960s. The notion of Epstein “neutering” the group by forcing them out of leathers is erroneous. That greasy 1950s look was by now obsolete. And (see Abbey Road, for example) The Beatles favoured suits long after Brian was around to nag them.

A shrewd observer, both of the music business and the gay ciiques of Swinging London, is the rock manager Simon Napier-Bell. He believes The Beatles were, for Brian, less about money than the opportunity to dress up four life-sized dolls in his own desired image. Once in London he led them to showbiz parties and encouraged their artistic leanings. At the same time, Napier-Bell recalls being told by Epstein how he’d once stood at the back of an American Beatles concert, screaming wildly with all the girls. It was, said Brian, something he’d been dying to do for ages.

IV

“One begins to feel like a goldfish,” wrote Brian (or Derek Taylor) of the Beatlemania years, “swimming round and round simply to help other people relax.” In addition to The Beatles he had taken on a whole raft of acts including Cilla Black and Gerry & The Pacemakers. The remainder, mostly “Merseybeat” groups, are not well remembered now, but they monopolised pop music for a few years, until The Beatles, the Stones and Dylan effected a revolution that changed the game. Cilla and Gerry survived by entering mainstream show business. The others sank into supper-club obscurity. Though remorseful, Brian could not really help them: he had taken on too much, too quickly.

It’s easily shown that Brian made some major mistakes. The Beatles’ first record contract was poor, if more or less standard for the times. He under-estimated the value of their song publishing and lost a colossal source of revenue from merchandising. He recognised all this, and blamed himself severely. And yet, we look at footage of Brian in New York, handling The Beatles’ historic debut visit, and he is quite astonishing. With the aplomb of a British aristocrat, with charm and intelligence, he glides right through the global mayhem with only a secretary to help. He’d never done more than run a provincial record shop. He made some quite judicious deals, too, such as the Ed Sullivan TV season. It’s incredible, now, how much was achieved through type-written letters and primitive phone systems, without a fax or an email in sight. I’ve covered smaller tours of the USA, in recent years, where a crew of 100 is considered a tight ship.

Epstein’s was now a world without signposts. Nobody had ever faced the sort of decisions he did, because The Beatles were re-inventing the very nature of things, on a scale unimagined. In his personal life he fashioned a hybrid style of traditional British taste, to which he had always aspired, and the multi-coloured anarchy of emergent psychedelia. He acquired a handsome townhouse in Belgravia, next to Buckingham Palace. The Evening Standard took a look and admired his “coloured manservant”. There were several impressive cars, which he tended to crash, and long nights at the gaming tables of Knightsbridge. He was Jewish and homosexual, and therefore a semi-outsider in Establishment terms. But the entertainment hierarchies of London and New York were themselves largely Jewish and not infrequently homosexual. In those respects Brian was, for the first time in his life, a real insider.

But it wasn’t enough. The strain of what turned out to be The Beatles’ final tour, in 1966, was nearly unbearable. Among its several nightmares was John’s “bigger than Jesus” furore and Brian, Jewish Brian, had to calm the situation as best he could. He was mostly alone, though his younger brother Clive became a valued colleague. His confidantes were NEMS men like Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis, refined Merseysiders who once accompanied him to the country pubs. Epstein was in no sense a “Scouser”, but just like The Beatles he kept a Praetorian Guard of Liverpudlians to surround him in London. Unlike The Beatles, who at least had one another, Brian was a solo act, as lost and lonely as Elvis Presley.

His isolation was unimproved by liaisons with predatory young men. Geoffrey Ellis noted a correlation between Brian’s reckless gambling at élite casinos and his unwise sexual dalliances – but also his daring commitment to The Beatles when they were thought a hopeless folly. And Peter Brown made the point that while observers are always thinking of an act’s *last hit, the act themselves are worrying about the *next one. Brian certainly worried, in ways that John and Paul did not. Perhaps they instinctively knew they had a Revolver or Hey Jude, as yet unborn, somewhere inside them. Brian could not know. To relieve the stress he made the mistake of using drugs to help him cope, then of using new drugs to cope with the old ones. Drugs were suddenly everywhere, and considered rather smart. It was 1967.

Just to be physically busy is often our best remedy. But The Beatles had stopped touring and there were no more appearances on Sunday Night At The London Palladium to fuss about. Instead they holed up in studios for months on end, creating Sgt. Pepper, and Brian was redundant. He plunged into a range of replacement activities, opening theatres, trying to manage tight-trousered young bullfighters, but his central purpose was disappearing. The Beatles certainly needed a business manager ¬–¬ perhaps now, more than ever – but they no longer needed a “director”, who would dress them up and teach them how to bow to the Queen.

The final few months were messy. Brian’s friend, the composer Lionel Bart, reported seeing him in The Kings Road without a tie. This was a new Brian indeed. He was growing his hair a little, while watching it begin to disappear. He attempted some colourful shirts and bell-bottomed trousers. There would be nothing remotely odd about it now, but in 1967 one was middle-aged at 32. Drugs became his crutch. There were, increasingly, evenings spent in limousines that whisked him over Putney Bridge, to a discreet facility called The Priory. There was at least one suicide attempt, with notes left. The Beatles’ lawyer, David Jacobs (not to be confused with the urbane BBC DJ) was a flamboyant man, who openly wore make-up. Through Jacobs, Brian was more and more drawn into some very exclusive sets.

Like the affluent Londoner he was becoming, he bought a country pile in Sussex. One weekend he planned a party and travelled down there with Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis, the last of his Liverpool entourage. Brian, upset when other guests cancelled, drove back alone to London. He was “looking for some action”, thinks Paul McCartney. Rumours persist of rent boys, blackmail and upper class cabals. But at 3 in the morning, on 27 August 1967, Epstein was discovered dead in his bedroom. The coroner’s verdict was of an accidental overdose. A faint doubt will probably always linger. But everyone who was close to Brian seems to agree that it was not suicide. Nor was it murder. It was just Brian getting sloppy.

Hearing the news, at a retreat in Wales with their new guru the Maharishi, The Beatles were shaken. John concluded, pithily, that the group was “fucked”. Paul, in later years, dated their decline from that point. They were now vulnerable to outsiders, notably the aggressive American lawyer Allen Klein. Artistically, they were still brilliant but unfocussed. Their immediate concern was a confused TV film, Magical Mystery Tour, though it’s doubtful that Brian could have talked them out of it. What he might have done, perhaps, is kept their business differences on a civilised level. But on the night he died, John and Paul had already met Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman, who would soon become their partners and preoccupations. Brian’s influence was waning daily.

A symbolic film of 1967 was Smashing Time, which took a sardonic look at Swinging London. Brian Epstein was among those smashed by that smashing time. Brian Jones, fashion designer Ossie Clarke, playwright Joe Orton, Marianne Faithfull and gallery owner Robert Fraser were others of the circle who were also smashed, most of them fatally. A 1970 Jagger film, Performance, captures the darker side of the 1960s’ comedown, and seems a thousand years later than 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night.

We don’t know what did for Brian, in the end, except that drugs and guilt and creepy company were playing havoc with his mental equilibrium. But the world lost a talented man, and was immediately the poorer for it. We define the Epstein story by The Beatles, but in fact he knew them for less than one-fifth of his life. Unlike us, he never heard Hey Jude, the White Album or Abbey Road.

Personally I remember the Epsteins’ old shop very well. The Everton and Liverpool football grounds were to either side, and nearby was the looming hulk of a derelict music hall. As a toddler I lived up the hill behind the shop and still wince when I pass, remembering how hard it was to climb. The building has gone now and today’s Liverpool bus has neither Latin mottos nor figures from classical mythology: instead, in multi-coloured nursery lettering, it says “Cumfybus”.

But the city centre NEMS, where I bought my first LPs, had not been demolished, though its last occupant was an Ann Summers sex shop. The aged Beehive pub, down the street, still serves lunch as it did for Mr Epstein. Much as I liked The Beatles, I only ever aped their manager, especially the polka-dot silk scarves that so enchanted Cilla Black. I have my own suits made by that same Walter Smith of Liverpool. And I would erect a statue in Brian’s honour, whether it’s by the Cavern Club or the Bonaparte (“good party”) Bar.

His brother Clive once offered a very decent epitaph: “Brian Epstein changed the world but didn’t do it any harm. Isn’t that reason enough to remember him?” Aptly for such a mysterious fellow, Brian’s own view of life may have been ventriloquised by Derek Taylor. But in the last chapter of the autobiography is a convincing balance of nervous tension and blind faith: “Tomorrow,” he frowns, “is the cardinal problem and it must be tightly under my control… Tomorrow? I think the sun will shine tomorrow.”

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.