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Lennon Alone

Sun, 2 Jun 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

A basic guide to John Lennon's work after The Beatles, commissioned by the American magazine Blender, November 2002.

Being in the world’s biggest band was never enough for John Lennon. Even before The Beatles’ break-up in 1970 he was trying mad experiments in sound with Yoko Ono, or writing songs that aimed to stop war and change world history. And then he just got drunk. In Lennon’s solo years, his restless creativity explored nearly every extreme of the human condition. From druggy despair to paternal pride, he made a disc to document every milestone in his extraordinary life.

1. BLENDER APPROVED

JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND
CAPITOL 1970
Brutally truthful exploration of the inner self was Lennon’s game, and he perfected the trick on this, his first post-Beatles album. Freed of the need to make pretty Beatle music, his new style was stark. But he was also driven by the urge to communicate, so he dropped the avant garde dabbling that Yoko Ono had encouraged. The resulting songs were raw and bloody. Lennon confronted his past and present with unflinching honesty and passionate eloquence.
Standout tracks: “Mother”, “Working Class Hero”, “God”

IMAGINE
CAPITOL 1971
Candour was all very well, but Lennon never stopped craving success. Imagine was more commercial than anything he’d done outside of The Beatles, and self-laceration gave way to romantic string arrangements (courtesy of Phil Spector), hearty rock’n’roll and a title track that touched some universal chord of non-specific yearning. With a final hymn of hate to Paul McCartney (“How Do You Sleep?”) Lennon now closed down his English mansion house and sailed to New York. He would never go home again.
Standout tracks: “Imagine”, “How Do You Sleep?”, “Jealous Guy”

2. GREAT

WALLS AND BRIDGES
CAPITOL 1974
Alias the album of Lennon’s “Lost Weekend”. Temporarily estranged from Yoko he pined for her, drank himself into a stupor and revelled in self-pity. But his misery paid dividends, for the desolation which informs Walls And Bridges is more compelling than anything he made when he was happy. It also gifted him with a career-reviving Number 1 single in “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night”.
Standout tracks: “#9 Dream”, “Steel And Glass”, “Scared”

THE JOHN LENNON COLLECTION
CAPITOL 1989
Presently the best American collection of Lennon’s solo standouts, from Plastic Ono Band to the final sessions. It’s only marred by the omission of his anguished heroin-withdrawal diary “Cold Turkey”.
Standout Tracks: “Instant Karma!”, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”

WONSAPONATIME
CAPITOL 1998
Single disc digest of the four-CD Anthology (see below) comprising outtakes and rarities from John’s last years. Highlights include George Martin’s sumptuous re-arrangement of the Milk And Honey track “Grow Old With Me”, a wickedly funny Dylan pastiche, “Serve Yourself”, and the original draft of “Real Love”.
Standout tracks: “Serve Yourself”, “Grow Old With Me”

3. CHECK IT OUT

ROCK’N’ROLL
APPLE 1975
Golden oldie cover versions, forced upon him in settlement of a copyright dispute with Chuck Berry’s publisher. But Lennon loved the 1950s anyway, and he updates the numbers with good grace.
Standout tracks: “Stand By Me”, “Just Because”

SHAVED FISH
CAPITOL 1975
For years this was the standard Lennon Best-of, and still serves that purpose if you don’t mind missing his 1980 come-back stuff. On its release in 1975 he retired to the Dakota with Yoko and newly-born Sean.
Standout tracks: “Cold Turkey”, “Instant Karma!”

(John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
DOUBLE FANTASY
CAPITOL 1980
On his return from five years’ seclusion John promised “an exploration of sexual fantasies between men and women”. When everyone realised this meant half the songs were Yoko’s there were groans all round. But John’s half has some tender expressions of family devotion. Sales received a gruesome boost a few weeks later, thanks to five bullets from Mark Chapman’s gun.
Standout tracks: “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, “Woman”

MENLOVE AVENUE
CAPITOL 1986
Under-rated rummage in the archives, named after his boyhood home in Liverpool. Yoko unearths some unreleased material and the early, unadorned versions of Walls And Bridges songs, which sound as scary as anything he ever did.
Standout track: “Here We Go Again”

ANTHOLOGY
CAPITOL 1998
Yoko’s sequel to The Beatles’ Anthology was this boxed set of unreleased material whose four CDs cover John’s last years in London, his New York radical phase, the “Lost Weekend” and final Dakota demo’s. It’s fragmented, for sure, but the man’s humor and humanity shine through.
Standout track: “Long Lost John”

4. BE CAREFUL

(The Plastic Ono Band)
LIVE PEACE IN TORONTO
CAPITOL 1969
The band (with Eric Clapton on guitar) was put together in hours to headline a Canadian rock revival show; they rehearsed on the flight from London. Lennon was sick with nerves and heroin, but the first half rocks. Then Yoko takes over…
Standout track: “Yer Blues”

(John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band)
SOME TIME IN NEW YORK CITY
CAPITOL 1972
Newly arrived in Greenwich Village, John found a bar-band to amplify his political radicalism. Ireland, black power and feminism get the sloganeering treatment but Lennon’s haste and shallow research hold him back. Disc two is of Yoko-dominated live recordings, defiantly tuneless.
Standout track: “Woman is The Nigger of The World”

MIND GAMES
CAPITOL 1973
Depressed by the failure of Some Time In NYC, bored and listless, he turned out a set he could only call “rock’n’roll at different speeds”. Pity it coincided with McCartney’s triumph Band On The Run. In 1973, even Ringo was doing better.
Standout track: “Mind Games”

(John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
MILK AND HONEY
POLYDOR 1984
Four years after the murder, Yoko assembled a second his’n’hers dialogue of alternate songs, with John’s being rescued from Double Fantasy session leftovers. Some potential is evident but the master’s absence is telling.
Standout track: “Grow Old With Me”

LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY
CAPITOL 1986
A rare return to the live stage, for a 1972 charity bash at Madison Square Garden. The band is basic but powerful and John’s on vocal form; the pity is that his set avoids The Beatles and his own best work in favour of sub-standard numbers from Some Time In NYC.
Standout track: “Cold Turkey”

5. FOR FANS ONLY

(John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
UNFINISHED MUSIC NO 1 TWO VIRGINS
RYKODISC 1968
An acid-tripping 28-minute sound collage to celebrate the consummation of John and Yoko’s love affair, Two Virgins’ style was reprised a few weeks later on The Beatles’ track “Revolution 9”. But even its unlistenable nature was eclipsed in controversy by the nude cover shot.
Standout track: “Remember Love”

(John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
UNFINISHED MUSIC NO 2 LIFE WITH THE LIONS
RYKODISC 1969
Bored of Beatlehood, Lennon was open to Yoko’s avant garde proposals: skill is irrelevant, concept is everything. Ono shrieks and warbles, random sounds are looped and scrambled. Only a two-minute blank track is bearable.
Standout track: “Two Minutes Silence”

(John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
WEDDING ALBUM
RYKODISC 1969
John cries “Yoko!”; Yoko cries “John!”. Repeat for 22 minutes. Even Lennon began to tire of this caper now. Second track contains sweetly earnest ant-war interviews from their Bed-In for Peace.
Standout track: “Amsterdam”

FURTHER LISTENING
DAVID BOWIE
YOUNG AMERICANS
VIRGIN 1975
Lennon bowed out of the rock’n’roll circus 1975 through his collaboration with the young contender Bowie. Apart from a version of “Across The Universe” there was “Fame”, a savage indictment of celebrity by one man who’d had enough of it and one who was hungry for more.
Standout track: “Fame”

FURTHER VIEWING
IMAGINE JOHN LENNON, 1988
The video/DVD Life of Lennon as authorised by Yoko: it’s hard for any one account to do justice to this complex, contradictory man but the footage at least is unrivalled.

FURTHER READING
LENNON: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY
By Ray Coleman
HARPER PERENNIAL 1992
Pretty much the full story of a flawed but fascinating genius. Low on controversy compared with Albert Goldman’s effort but way superior in accuracy and empathy.

Meeting Bono

Wed, 22 May 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Meeting Bono... Part of The Word's occasional series, written for their issue of July 2009.

“What was he like?” It’s what you’re always asked after interviewing someone famous. (Only editors ask the more important question, “What did you get?”) What was Bono like? Everybody wanted to know. Many seem to think he’s a prat with Messianic delusions. In a way, I can understand why. But on the few occasions I’ve spent time with him, he’s been charm itself. I’ve just glanced at my notebook from the first time, back in 1992, when I covered a U2 tour in America. I see that I’ve scribbled, “He greets you with a warmth you could dry damp clothes against.”

He charmed everyone on the tour. “To know him is to love him,” another journalist told me – but with a certain mistrust, as if the Bono charm was something you would resist, if only science could find the antidote. I accompanied him in the tour bus, at the sound-check, at a few meetings, etc, and was struck by his mental energy. His fund of ideas seemed limitless. Talking to stage designers about some future gigs he babbled on about hiring a disused steel mill and blowing it up, or playing from an aircraft carrier in New York Harbour, with “Pussy” painted on the side. He’d done the equivalent of two days’ work before he even went on stage.

This was the Zoo TV tour, promoting the album Achtung Baby; it was all a reaction against the solemnity and pomposity of U2’s image in the 1980s. Now they wanted to look trashy, glam and mischievous. (I scribbled again: “This seems to be The Importance Of Not Being Earnest Tour.”) Bono invented a stage character called The Fly, who would be the flashy cartoon entertainer that the sensible, crusading Bono could not be. But off duty, I found him just as idealistic as ever. Despite his best intentions, for instance, he couldn’t help getting involved in Bill Clinton’s campaign to defeat the first President Bush.

Six months later I was back on the road with U2 and this time did a formal interview in Bono’s hotel room. He dislikes interviews and was slightly less friendly. Still, the mental energy was undiminished, and he showed me the notes that he was scribbling that day: a new song for Frank Sinatra (Two Shots Of Happy, One Of Sad) and fresh Zoo TV slogans: “I believe in shampoo and fruit juice… I believe in James Brown’s hair-do.”

But I really don’t know what Bono is like. It’s only cod-psychology to pretend otherwise. We had some late night drinks somewhere; when he had left, my US photographer marvelled at his “amazing optimism, his belief in himself.” To which a very old Dublin friend of Bono’s replied: “In a way, it’s not surprising. He’s someone who’s been proved right all his life.”

Lennon Quiz: 99 per cent true

Thu, 9 May 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Of the following 17 statements – most of them extraordinary – only one is an actual lie. This was a quiz for The Word magazine’s “99 Per Cent True” series, published in December 2010.
(The answer is at the bottom.)

1 Paying a surprise visit last year to Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool, Bob Dylan was amazed by its similarity to the house he grew up in, in Hibbing Minnesota. He was also intrigued by John’s old books: “Just William? Who’s he?”

2 On publishing his 1964 book of gobbledygook, In His Own Write, John tried to interest Laurence Olivier in directing a National Theatre stage version. When they met, however, John was tripping on LSD and Sir Larry was unable to understand a single word. He declined the invitation.

3 On passing his driving test in 1965, John celebrated by challenging his fellow Beatles to 150mph car races around the Surrey stockbroker belt. The frolics only stopped after Ringo was nearly killed in his Facel Vega.

4 On tour with The Beatles John carried a portable juke-box containing 40 vinyl singles. Selections leaned to vintage rock’n’roll and Motown soul. And Donovan.

5 When the journalist Stephen Bayley was a pupil at John’s old school in Liverpool, he wrote to Lennon saying the English masters were analysing his lyrics. Cynically amused, the Beatle responded by writing the most deliberate pile of nonsense he could. He called it I Am The Walrus.

6 In the late 1960s John wanted to try “trepanning”, the boring of holes into the skull to expand consciousness. Over dinner he urged Paul McCartney to join him in the experiment. His writing partner suggested that John try it first and then report back.

7 Meditating in India, Lennon resolved to make a Beatle movie of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, starring himself as Gandalf. But their chosen director, Stanley Kubrick, persuaded John and Paul that while it was great book, Lord Of The Rings could never be made into a film…

8 John planned a three-day Peace Festival to be held in Toronto in July 1970, headlined by The Beatles. The organisers then announced that flying saucers would be landing, and that John and Yoko would arrive in a newly-invented “Air Car”, fuelled only by psychic power. The festival was called off.

9 One Abbey Road out-take that escaped the Anthology compilers was a 90-second snippet of Lennon performing Knees Up Mother Brown, in Japanese. Yoko can be heard giggling in the background.

10 To celebrate his 30th birthday John had a reunion with his long-lost father Alfred. Unaware his son now wore a beard, Alf brought after-shave as a present. It got worse. Terrified by John’s threats, the old man left a letter with his solicitor “to be opened only if I disappear or die an unnatural death.”

11 The radical album Some Time In New York City received the worst reviews of John’s career, not least from the FBI, whose secret assessment was that key track John Sinclair was “lacking in John’s usual standards,” while his wife Yoko “can’t even remain on key.”

12 The artwork of 1974 solo album Walls And Bridges carried a crayon drawing of two people on horseback, made by John when he was 11. John and Yoko were struck by its eerie similarity to themselves and by its date, 18 February: it is Yoko’s birthday.

13 The last song John Lennon performed on a public stage was Paul McCartney’s I Saw Her Standing There. He described it as being by “an old estranged fiancé of mine.”

14 No model of Spartan austerity himself, even Elton was struck by John and Yoko’s lavish lifestyle at the Dakota: “Imagine two apartments,” he sang, “It isn’t hard to do. One is full of fur coats, the other’s full of shoes.”

15 Lennon’s favourite book of 1975 was David Niven’s Hollywood memoir Bring On The Empty Horses. Coming off his “Lost Weekend”, John saw himself as a man like Niven, who survived the drunken parties and in his old age could write the story.

16 Born on 9 October, John believed the Number 9 had recurring significance in his life. Though he died in New York on the night of 8 December, the trans-Atlantic time difference meant that in his homeland it was already early morning… of the 9th.

17 Not all his obituaries were moist-eyed. On 12 December 1980 the Soviet paper Sotsialisticheskaya Industria noted: “For the US, the fact of Lennon’s murder is not at all remarkable but commonplace. He is merely the 701st victim of an armed assault in New York this year.” The piece concluded with a prediction that Lennon would be forgotten in three years.

[ANSWER]
Number 9… Number 9… Say sayonara to this Nipponese nonsense, a bootleg-baffler of the highest order.

Loving London Music

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

This was written for nme.com, the website of my old paper, at the time of In The City, 7 Sept 2009. See the original here.

London has always been an irresistible subject for writers of books – and for writers of songs. This seething metropolis throws up a million human dramas every day. Growing up in The Beatles’ Liverpool, in the 1960s, I was hardly starved of classic pop music. But even as a kid – and this is Scouse blasphemy – I was drawn to bands from down south.

In particular there were The Kinks and The Small Faces. Think of Waterloo Sunset’s young lovers, Terry and Julie, amid the commuter mayhem. Or The Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park, a psychedelic Cockney fantasia in the unlikely location of Ilford. I’d never heard of Waterloo, and I still haven’t been to Ilford, but somehow they’re as reassuringly familiar as my home town.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, they were the soul of the old London music hall translated into rock’n’roll. They were in direct descent from the story tellers of old. And story tellers are, as I’ve discovered, the archetypal London troubadour.

The original “London acts” were vagabond minstrels, bawling of scandals, sleaze and public executions. The lyric sheets they flogged became the basis of the British music industry, nicknamed Tin Pan Alley. Its get-rich-quick mentality has never really died. Guttersnipe shrewdness, a relish of the social cut-and-thrust, are London specialties. Here was a place where commoners and aristocracy lived cheek-by-jowl, and an uppity barrow boy might dress like a dandy to assert his dignity. (His spiritual grandchildren were called the mods.)

The I came to live in London, and landed a job on the NME. I embraced the bands whose music chimed with my romantic daydream. Ian Dury, Squeeze and Madness wrote songs that mapped this shapeless city for me (the latest Madness album, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, still revels in all that scuzzy history). I grew to understand how these acts were raised on music hall. The Sex Pistols were self-consciously modelled on Dickensian urchins; The Clash recalled the insurrections of the notorious London Mob.

Paul Weller in his Jam days, Brett Anderson in Suede and Damon Albarn in Blur were each of them, somehow, more London than the real Londoners. They were boys from the south east satellite towns who’d grown up in London’s gravitational pull but couldn’t take their own identity for granted. That’s OK. London accepts its music from everywhere, from the post-war calypsos of Commonwealth newcomers like Lord Kitchener, to the 21st century global fusions of MIA.

It’s not easy. London is famously indifferent to the strangers who wash up daily on its concrete shores. As an outsider, the city’s music gave me a way of relating to an alien place, and in gratitude I wrote a book to celebrate that music. The great thing was, I realised it could be a history but thoroughly contemporary, too.

I’m thrilled by the unexpected continuities. There was a rash in recent years of glottally-stopped minstrels like Adele, Jack Penate, Jamie T and Kate Nash, spinning their own tales of London’s passing parade, often inspired by that fine adopted Londoner Mike Skinner of The Streets. They are in their own ways inheritors of an observational style that stretches back for centuries. The grime school of East London has an excellent way of reporting on the realities of districts that some of us would only enter by mistake.

In fact when I look at the names of current hip hop stars I’m reminded of a yellowing poster from a ghostly Edwardian music hall. Tynchy Stryder, Dizzee Rascal, Lady Sovereign, Crazy Titch … they could almost be the bill of a 1903 performance at Wilton’s, the great old East End theatre that survives to this day.

But stay too long and London eats you up. Amy Winehouse was once a wickedly perceptive chronicler of her world. Now she’s become the news story herself, and seldom in a welcome way. Pete Doherty made the same shambling journey. And Lily Allen, born and brought up in the bosom of London showbiz, likewise looks caught in that awkward transition from the observer to the observed. But, for now, their existence adds to the fabulous, unruly spectacle of London, an inspiring place for any musical student of human life.

In The City: A Celebration of London Music is published by Virgin Books

A Julian Cope Interview

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with Julian Cope, formerly of The Teardrop Explodes, printed in The Independent of 22 July 1995. Parts of our conversation were adapted for my later book Liverpool: Wondrous Place.

“I’ve really far out things to tell you. Since 22 December 1989. I have been in a different spiritual state. I now term everything before that date, ‘pre-vision’.”

When somebody opens their conversation with a statement of that sort, your instinct says: keep them talking and scan the room for the quickest way out. When that somebody is a lean, fire-eyed ragamuffin of a man with half his head shaved, your instinct adds: On second thoughts, just run for it right away.

But calmer thoughts prevail. It’s only old Copey, after all. Julian Cope. The former star of pop band The Teardrop Explodes, a fully licensed gentle loon and practising Holy Fool since 1978… Julian Cope who pranced before the cameras of Top Of The Pops, brightly declaiming “Bless my cotton socks I’m in the news” when his Liverpool band was clocking up hits like Reward and Treason and Passionate Friend in the early 1980s. That was then. And now, in 1995, Copey has become a New Age Mystic. In a way, it was always on the cards.

Take ley-lines, a very Cope thing now. The only thing we all know for sure about ley-lines is that they’re meant to be straight. Yet the bugger that Julian Cope has followed these past 17 years has more curls and twists in it than a very curly, twisty thing indeed. He was raised a polite, middle class boy in the Midlands town of Tamworth. He went to a teacher training college in Liverpool as his parents wished, and became a punk rocker, which they did not. He was sucked in to Liverpool’s hothouse new wave music scene, and with The Teardrop Explodes became a pin-up and international pop celebrity.

He was famed for taking enough hallucinogenic drugs to keep the population of China happy until Christmas. Yet he grew unhappy and split the band up in 1982. They were commemorated in a posthumous album, Everyone Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes. By his second solo LP, Fried, he was seen on its front cover squatting naked, a sizeable turtle shell on his back. He was dropped by two record companies. We saw little of him until 1990 when he turned up at anti-poll tax demonstrations dressed as a seven-foot space alien called “Sqwubbsy” and wondering whether to assassinate Margaret Thatcher.

Today Cope has a new record deal and a forthcoming album, 20 Mothers, that finds him back on track commercially. We may yet see him on Top Of The Pops once more. However, his mind is on much weightier matters than chart placings. There are, for example, the “visions” he has been seeing since 1989, first announced on his 1991 record Peggy Suicide, dedicated to his pagan goddess, the much put-upon Mother Earth.

Feeling the pull of England’s magical south-west – Glastonbury, neolithic mounds, stone circles – he moved in 1993 to a village in Wiltshire where he lives today with his American wife Dorian and their daughters Albion and Albany. The Cope household is a pleasant domestic jumble of Frank Zappa tapes and Thomas The Tank Engine toys. Proudly, he says the house stands within 20 miles of nearly all the 15 prehistoric white horses known to be etched into Britain’s chalk hills. One of his newest songs has the title “Wessexy”. Another is called By The Light Of The Silbury Moon.

Nursing a mug of tea he recounts some of his visions. Once he was “astrally projected” from a hotel room in Liverpool. He describes the experience as looking somewhat like the cover of Deep Purple’s 1971 LP Fireball. A spinning diamond entered his skull, filling him with light, “like a cosmic petrol pump attendant.” Sometimes there are voices, too, with messages such as “to penetrate the diamond, the pituitary gland gets torn on its axis and frees.”

A propos of nothing in particular, I ask him if he still takes drugs. “They were important to me. But in 1985 I stopped taking psychedelic drugs. I was off them until December 1993, and then I took three mushroom trips. But that was more because of The Modern Antiquarian.”

The modern what? The Modern Antiquarian turns out to be Julian’s great project now. It is a book he’s writing on archaeology, describing the hundreds of ancient sites he has visited around the British Isles. “I thought, What can I bring to the party that no-one else has? A-ha! LSD and mushrooms. But all I do now is walk every day.”

Indeed, he walks the Wessex hills and trackways with obsessive energy, managing up to 100 miles a week. “The reason I started doing The Modern Antiquarian was, I came out of punk, when Stonehenge was the ultimate symbol of bollocks. Then I had a spiritual awakening which led me down the path to the stones. You can imagine how I felt – like King Plank, basically… I was fucked up on drugs. It took me a long time to realise I had anything going in the psychic areas. I just thought, Oh, I’d be perfectly normal if it wasn’t for the fact that I was on drugs. I realised that a lot of the voices were saying, ‘You’ve got to work like a bastard.’ So I’ve worked constantly and the vision state has never left me."

Sometimes it drives Dorian crazy, but Dorian is in quite a vision state as well, which is probably the reason she can bear to be around me. I have to speak out: the voices have told me I have to stop fucking around. I’m here to build up a trust in the far-out, the unknown. People may not need God, but they need something.”

On a walk last week he noticed a neolithic holed stone, probably of a sacred nature. “I’ve discovered so many things. I’m not trying to beat the orthodox scholars, but I’m writing the book as someone who’s been to all the places he writes about. Basically I’m a pagan. I’m a New Age Pol Pot: it’s the Land! The Land! The Land!”

Cope may look the part of the new age mystic, but he’s odder in the context of his library, full of geological specimens and musty old tomes by tweedy antiquarians. His own apparel is made for him by a friend called Psychedelic Paul. Their current taste runs to fluorescent jackets of the sort you might wear if your hobby were, say, collecting motorway cones after dark.

“It’s very safe, very bright, fluorescent gear. I am emitting light! I am supposed to be this glorious being, so it’s a pop art metaphor. And the police take you seriously. We went to Glastonbury, they just waved us through! It’s Pavlovian. Now when I see a crossing lady, I feel a kindred spirit.”

Julian’s new music, he’s pleased to admit, is catchier than anything he has done for years. But as one of his closest associates says, “For Julian, success does not breed success. It breeds confusion.” The mercenary world of Tin Pan Alley seems a million miles from this enthusiastic dreamer and his peaceful Wiltshire hamlet. Could he ever get back in the swim?

“No. I can’t do that. I can’t bear the city. My American label thinks I’ve given them a hit, so they want me to go over there, and I’m trying to wriggle out of it. I can’t bear to be in a culture where there’s no place to walk. I’ve become so mystical now. The idea of America is murderous to me because those people are the same lunatics we have here, only with guns. I’m like an artist in the hills. The day that I go down to Sodom will be the day that it all goes off.”

In October (1995) he will publish yet another book, Krautrocksampler. It’s all about the gruelling underground sounds made by German hippy bands such as Faust, Ash Ra Temple and Tangerine Dream. He talks of it with evangelical fervour. “It’s the most revolutionary art form of the 20th century, made by young people whose parents were directly or indirectly involved in causing the Holocaust.” He quotes the book’s introduction: “Kraut Rock was what punk would have been if Johnny Rotten alone had been in charge – a kind of pagan freak-out LSD ‘Explore the God in you by working the animal in you’ gnostic oddyssey’.”

So that’s where Julian Cope has been. On a gnostic oddyssey. He cites with approval his fellow author Joseph Campbell’s distinction between hero and celebrity. “He said something like: The celebrity loves his audience and will do everything for them, balance on high buildings, dance with dangerous animals. The hero will do it even when there’s no audience.

“I think I’ve got a job. I’m invested with this thing that Gurdjieff calls ‘Being Duty’. Everything that I do can be nourishing in some way. I have a lot to do before I’m 60 – nothing unbelievable, but the most important thing is that I stated I was in a visionary state. I don’t want to piss people off. I hate being David Icke about it, but I’ve waited a long while to speak out. And it’s an utterly practical trip. If I was so far out I wouldn’t have been able to put out double albums and write books, because people who are that far out can’t do anything. And none of my dreams is impossible.”

The key, declares Cope, is persistence. Another writer, Israel Regardie, is hauled off the shelf: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Not talent or genius or education. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” Julian remembers the second Teardrops single Bouncing Babies. “Even after that they were still talking about getting another singer in. That was persistence on my part. And Will Sergeant (Bunnymen) became good-looking! He was actually known as Baked Beans On Toast Face. You can do it. I will persist!

“I feel I’ve got more time now. Everything was a hurry before, because I felt I was getting older. But now, I think, by the time I’m 50 I could do all this. I look at my mother-in-law and I fancy her second in the world after my wife. If she can be that gorgeous in her mid-60s then I don’t fear getting old because my wife will look amazing.”

At 37, Cope’s soul seems as boyish as it ever was. There is not a shred of reserve or calculation in his words. His singing voice has always been attractive, if not technically exceptional. Its transcendent virtue was that it was incapable of sounding insincere, even when the lyrics baffled you. So it is with his conversation. In the end, I am rather sorry to leave.

Going downstairs, he cocks a leg over the Mothercare safety gate. “I’ve just got to pursue it until I’m so insane that they put me away. I have back-up. My wife and mother-in-law are not saying, ‘You’re a fucking kook, Julian.’ They’re saying, ‘You’re a vibe, Julian. Keep it together.’”

Bickershaw, the Wigan Woodstock

Sun, 7 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Bickershaw Festival 40th Anniversary Boxed Set. From The Word, June 2012.

It was the festival that dreamed of bringing California-style sunshine, good vibes and hippie heaven to the flat, damp fields of south Lancashire. Held in a former mining village near Wigan, 1972’s Bickershaw Festival would instead go down in folklore as “Mudstock” – or, if you wanted to be really negative, as “the Somme with bongos”.

Three days and nights of cold and rain were tough on the morale of 60,000 groovers who came for The Grateful Dead, Donovan and other minstrels of the alternative society. Bickershaw survivors returned to civilian life in their sodden loons and bush hats, with heavy colds and a thousand-yard stare. And yet they mostly said they wouldn’t have missed it for the world. On the other hand, it’s thought that maybe 20,000 of them got in without paying, which was tough on the morale of the organisers. They lost a packet.

Ah yes, the organisers. Nobody in 1972 really knew who Jeremy Beadle was. In fact he was an ambitious young hippie businessman, slightly in the Richard Branson mould. His days as a goateed TV japester were yet to come. In later years it was widely noted that Beadle had been about, and Bickershaw’s reputation acquired a posthumous tinge of farce. So it’s only fair that some friends of the festival should now remind us, via this superlative boxed set, that Bickershaw was arguably a great artistic success.

Six CDs, two DVDs, a 208-page book, some postcards and a pack of incense are presented here: full of nostalgic value for Bickershaw veterans, no doubt, and a fascinating document for the rest of us. The Grateful Dead’s four-hour set takes up the lion’s share, which may please Elvis Costello – as a teenager he attended and was blown away by Garcia’s men, who were then little-known in Europe but soaring on the back of their finest run of albums. The night before saw a classic appearance by Captain Beefheart, which moved another young hairy, one Joe Strummer, to call it the best gig he ever saw. Though some of the music is not well-recorded, tracks by Family, The Kinks, The Incredible String Band and many others, are richly atmospheric.

The cultural dissonance of an Aquarian love-in, under slate-grey Wigan skies, is nearly as funny now as it was back then. But you have to admire the knowing cheek of a track-list that puts the Haydock Brass Band on next to stoner comedians Cheech & Chong. Radical theatre groups and goose-pimpled stunt acts rounded out a huge and diverse bill, though it’s a shame the high-divers’ tub sprang a leak and discharged many more gallons on to the already waterlogged field. Outside the ill-guarded compound, video evidence suggests the cloth-capped locals looked on with more bewilderment than hostility, and the man selling hot pies probably retired on the proceeds.

Interviewed at the festival’s end, short of sleep and showing the start of that infamous satanic beard, Jeremy Beadle admits it has been a financial disaster. He correctly predicts that the future of outdoor music will belong to smaller and better-fenced events. (He died in 2008, and never saw this reissue completed.) Bickershaw had in fact been peaceful, if unhygienic, but hippie herbivores were uneasily herded by carnivorous Hell’s Angels. And who could frolic naked in a lake where signs said “Crap In Water”? (And was that a warning or an instruction?) Love-ins were supposed to be like the nice bits of Lord Of The Rings, but more often resembled Lord Of The Flies.

The lesson of Bickershaw seemed to be that shivering under a polythene sheet, while waiting three hours for the New Riders Of The Purple Sage, was not the way to a consumer’s heart. Like so many 1970s phenomena, Bickershaw exposed the three-way tension between those who wanted to build upon the idealistic advances of the 1960s, those who sought to make a profit from them, and those who simply wanted to stop them altogether. (Politicians of the time were framing a Night Assembles Bill to that very end.) It foreshadows the various positions that people still adopt today.

So, not really the Somme with bongos, after all. In its own damp and shambolic way, Bickershaw was an admirable kind of dream. The dream, to quote a song by Nick Lowe (who himself was somewhere on that gargantuan bill) got “nutted by reality.” But, as Strummer and Costello would presumably agree, it was a dream worth dreaming. And now your loons are dry, a dream worth re-living.

Phil Spector: Napoleon Dynamite

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Three reviews of the great producer’s life and works, all from The Word magazine: Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound, a book by Mick Brown (May 2007); Phil Spector Early Productions, a compilation on Ace (May 2010); and Little Symphonies, A Phil Spector Reader, edited by Kingsley Abbott (October 2011).

Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound: The Rise And Fall Of Phil Spector
By Mick Brown
(Bloomsbury)

Bang! Like any good thriller, this book begins with gunfire in the darkness. A statuesque blonde lies dead. And a small man in a wig is looking very confused. When the LA police arrived at Phil Spector’s house at 5am on 3 February, 2003, they found the legendary producer claiming he could explain everything, but he was apparently drunk, and asking whether he could just have a little sleep. His companion of the evening, an actress called Lana Clarkson, had a revolver by her chair and a bullet through the back of her mouth.

Murder or suicide? That’s the decision an LA court must now arrive at, though the verdict will come too late for this edition of Mick Brown’s book. An esteemed English journalist, Brown took a close interest in the Clarkson case: just a few weeks earlier, he’d been in that very room as Spector’s guest, where the producer gave him a rare and far-ranging interview. Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound – aptly, given the title, it’s brick-sized – delves back into the life of rock music’s most gifted sonic visionary. His achievements are dazzling, and they’re well-described here, but the question we can’t avoid is, How the hell did Phil Spector get into this mess?

The fascinating implication of Mick Brown’s research is that Spector’s personal disaster stems from the same source as his musical brilliance. That is, they’re both the result of a deeply disturbed personality. From the suicide of his father, in Spector’s childhood, through a career of gargantuan success and crushing rejection, the insecure New Yorker has never established a sure sense of his place in the world or an easy manner with the people around him. In the recording studios he transcended his problems with Napoleonic displays of ego, expressed through those monumental, quasi-classical arrangements of bubblegum pop. In private, he lurched from extraordinary acts of kindness to the meanest exhibitions of bullying and spite.

Spector was of the post-War generation who turned to black music for re-invigoration of the American popular song. At the same time he was in that lineage of Jewish immigrants (as were Kern, Gershwin and Berlin) who brought their own particular genius. His early co-writers (Leiber/Stoller, Mann/Weill, Goffin/King) shared the same ethnicity, with a taste for what Doc Pomus called “Jewish latin” – a mix of black and Hispanic forms with streetwise topicality. With his great ally and arranger Jack Nitzsche, he cooked up his “little symphonies for the kids” by cramming the tiny studio with massed instruments and voices, defying the limitations of 1960s technology. These “wall of sound” hits, such as The Ronettes’ *Be My Baby*, will likely endure as long as any music in history. And it’s touching to read how The Crystals’ 15-year-old vocalist, LaLa Brooks, sang *Then He Kissed Me* before she’d even had a boyfriend.

Fame and wealth did nothing to smooth Spector’s troubled passage through life. He gifted The Righteous Brothers with their sublime You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, yet they hated him ever after. When the US market ignored Ike & Tina Turner’s Wagnerian River Deep Mountain High, the hurt took root in Spector’s soul. He was drafted in to salvage The Beatles’ swan song Let It Be, but he only made the Lennon-McCartney battle more bitter than ever. It’s true he helped John make his most successful solo music, including Instant Karma! and Imagine; but he was there, too, for the nightmare excesses of Lennon’s near-fatal “lost weekend”. In short, if Spector’s tale is shaping up to have a messy end, well, it had a messy start and messy middle too.

To his first wife, Spector was “not a dark soul. I came to see him as a sick soul.” Talking to Mick Brown, Spector himself surveyed his life with a bleak eye and sighed: “A memory is a curse. Good health, bad memory, that’s about as happy as you’re going to fucking get.” Amid the tantrums and toupees, the drunken lunges and the sinister interest in firearms, a fleetingly endearing human being emerges. Lest we forget, though, the real casualty here is Lana Clarkson, whose story is also told by Brown, and sympathetically. As for Spector, his place in musical history is assured. Unfortunately for him, in early 2007, that’s not the verdict under discussion.

Phil Spector Early Productions
(Ace)

It’s seven years since LA police entered the 33-room mansion of pop’s greatest producer, Phil Spector, to discover the dead body of an actress named Lana Clarkson. There they also found the small, bewigged legend himself, in a state of some confusion. Despite his subsequent claim that Ms Clarkson had unwisely “kissed the gun”, Spector was convicted of her murder and barring a successful appeal, he will not re-emerge into the Californian sunlight until 2028. He will be 88 years of age.

Leaving aside the unhappy fact that this supremely talented man now shares the same correctional facility – Corcoran State Prison – as Charles Manson, it’s highly unlikely we shall ever hear another new Spector record. Not an inappropriate time, then, to re-visit the very first recordings of his career, newly compiled for us by the ever-estimable Ace label. (We’ll return to Charles Manson in a moment.)

The 28 tracks here date from 1958 to 1963, that strange interregnum that music historians tend to dismiss (Nik Cohn called it Rue Morgue) because it fell between the primal blast of early rock’n’roll and the all-conquering power-pop of The Beatles, Stones and Dylan (as well as Spector’s own epic hits). Thrilling work was done, though, and some of it by Spector in the days of his young apprenticeship.

Spector was the nervy New York boy whose mother took him out west to Hollywood when he was 13, after the suicide of his father. While he was still in his teens he briefly became a pop star as part of The Teddy Bears, whose hit, To Know Him Is To Love Him, was supposedly based on his father’s gravestone. Although that song isn’t here, the compilation does feature the other big stepping stones of Spector’s early career. There is The Teddy Bears’ debut, the cute Don’t You Worry My Little Pet. Then there is the amazing number that Spector concocted with Jerry Leiber (of the Leiber & Stoller writing team) and gave to Ben E. King to sing: Spanish Harlem. In all its spiralling, hopeful beauty, it’s a classic of love’s young dream amid the urban grit. Few could have guessed that Spector would elevate this vision to an art-form.

The New York sharpies saw, however, that the kid had talent. He was hired by the R&B sage Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic; with a band called The Top Notes he made the original version of Twist And Shout. (It’s not very powerful, and the song’s co-writer Bert Berns would soon produce it himself for The Isley Brothers, inspiring John Lennon to cap The Beatles’ first LP with it.) As well as Leiber & Stoller, Spector connected with the three great husband-and-wife writing teams of Brill Building: Goffin & King, Mann & Weill, Barry & Greenwich.

On a visit back to the West Coast he scored his next big hit, a whispery confection for The Paris Sisters called I Love How You Love Me. He was learning all the time: given a storming voice to harness, he could bottle lightning, as happens in Curtis Lee’s Under The Moon Of Love. In next to no time he had his own record label, Philles, and would be ready to leave this journeyman period behind. He would become, in Tom Wolfe’s phrase, “the First Tycoon of Teen”.

Then we’d finally hear the famous Wall of Sound, the pocket symphonies he crafted for The Crystals, Ronettes, Righteous Brothers and the rest. But all that’s for another day.

You do hear the beginnings of that grandeur in the later tracks here, as Spector is settling into Gold Star Studios, LA, with his arranger Jack Nitzsche. In particular there are two obscurities done for the singer Terry Day, son of the film star Doris Day. Later known as Terry Melcher, he’d do better work as a writer and producer in his own right, for The Byrds, Beach Boys and others. But he’s remembered mostly as the man who fell out with a struggling musician called Charles Manson, whose followers broke into Melcher’s old house and slaughtered its current occupants – allegedly as a warning to him.

Trouble and Phil Spector were never far apart. He became the PRODUCER, in capital letters, whose own fame dwarfed his artists. So, when he got to work with The Beatles, the fall-out was so awful it blew the band apart. It’s an irony which Paul McCartney, and Paul’s old fan Charles Manson, can now ponder at their leisure until 2028.

LITTLE SYMPHONIES: A PHIL SPECTOR READER
Edited by Kingsley Abbott
(Helter Skelter)

Megalomaniacs are not the best company – and in Phil Spector’s case they can be murder – but colossal egos may also generate great art. This erudite collection of essays avoids the seamier side of Spector’s story (he’s still banged up in that California jail) offering, instead, sober commentary on his phenomenal work. That especially means the run of explosive “little symphonies” in the 1960s, for The Crystals, Ronettes, Righteous Brothers and so on. How did he get that sound? The records seem as huge as old cathedrals, yet they were made in shoeboxes. Someone suggests the lead-based paint at Gold Star Studios had something to do with it. Fine reportage by Nik Cohn and Richard Williams brings the shadowy svengali to life, while others dissect the Spector catalogue with forensic patience. “I wanted to be in the background,” the man himself once said. “But I wanted to be important in the background.”

When Fame Is No Game

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

A craving for fame – and not the simple need to create, or the wish to have fun performing – drives the ambitions of many who enter the entertainment industries. This piece was written as an opinion column for The Word in September 2011.

The last record shop in my High Street closed down yesterday. There used to be three of them. It’s one more token of the digital meltdown afflicting areas of the music industry. But I predict that one big statistic will not show any decline at all. Technology changes everything except human nature. So I foresee no falling-off in the number of young people who are desperate to be stars.

Who doesn’t want to be famous? Actually, I don’t, because I know that I couldn’t hack it for five minutes. But in that respect I am unusual: for every rock star that drops off the perch there are hundreds scrambling to take his place. The singer-songwriter David Ford used to be among them, until he got older, wiser, and open to a different view of the whole game. “There was a time,” Ford writes in his new book, “when people swore I would be the next big thing. It took ten years of hard work and dedication, but I finally proved them wrong.”

Ford’s memoir, called I Chose This, deserves to be picked up by a major publisher and then issued to every Fame School student across the land. It’s a tale of hard work and heartbreak, packed with piquant details. There is the moment Mark Lamarr appears to recognise you across the restaurant, then strides straight up to the person right behind you. There is the awful, dawning lesson that each new level you attain is only like some nightmare ascent of Everest. Beyond every hard-won peak another looms above.

If someone has a true vocation then the book is not intended to put them off. But it’s a wonderful cautionary warning. Then again, how many wannabe rock bands were ever dissuaded by watching This Is Spinal Tap? Probably none.

The urge to create is doubtless fine and noble, but many are driven by a perversion of that urge. Instead of wanting to DO something, they really want to BE someone. And their definition of “someone” is someone famous. I used to interview young bands all the while, hundreds of them. It always struck me how few were doing it for the simple joy of making music. Instead they were shackled together in some grim pact of mutual ambition. What fun to make a noise with your mates, you might have thought. To show off in front of girls and stagger home drunk. But no, these boys wanted stardom and they had no Plan B.

Result: misery. Practically nobody gets rich or famous through playing music. But these bands began with the view that ordinary life offers nothing for the soul. Thus their inevitable destinies in civilian employment are sipped as a bitter daily draught of disappointment. I’ve learned to dread the social occasions where a middle-aged stranger announces that I once slagged off his single in the NME. He may be a plumply successful IT consultant on 20 times a writer’s pay, but his heart still seethes with all the hatred of a galley slave for the judge who sent him to Devil’s Island.

Fame ought to be a by-product of your art and not the central purpose. Personally I’ve always fancied a life of prosperous obscurity – indeed I’ve achieved the second part with impressive ease.

My local record shop has gone, but at least my local pub still puts on music. Sometimes it stages earnest gangs of young indie hopefuls; on other nights there might be a washed-up combo of grizzled has-beens. Funny thing is, it’s the wrinkly old goats who seem to be having all the fun. For them it’s about the pleasure of playing, not the anxious scanning of miniscule crowds for an A&R man. David Ford, who has seen all this and is still writing damned good songs, writes well of the real-world musician’s life: “The journey is the destination,” he says, “and the work is the pay-cheque.”

(I Chose This can be bought from davidfordmusic.com)

Elvis The Movie

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

John Carpenter’s bio-pic of Elvis Presley, reviewed in The Word, September 2010.

ELVIS
Starring Kurt Russell, Season Hubley, Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle. Directed by John Carpenter (1979)

“Say, what’s that crazy sound those kids are playing?”

“Well, it seems they call it ‘rock and roll’…”.

Was there really an age when all rock movies had lines like those? Actually, there was. In the 1950s, films like The Girl Can’t Help It and Rock Around The Clock were calculating how to exploit pubescent fans of this seemingly un-musical nonsense, while serving an audience still stiff with baffled grown-ups. Rather surprisingly, a movie of this sort could still be made in 1979, two years after Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols.

Even more surprisingly, it could be made by John Carpenter. He is, surely, a director best known for horror, the urban nightmare and all the nastier things in life. But somewhere in between the slash-tastic Halloween (1978) and the paranoid sci-fi of Escape From New York (1981), he found time to make this genial TV bio-pic, which has occasionally re-surfaced on VHS as Elvis The Movie. Well OK, but John Carpenter? It goes against type. It would be a bit like learning that Leonard Cohen used to moonlight in a Queen tribute band – as Freddie, at that.

Of course, there really was a heart of darkness in Elvis Presley’s life, but it’s not revealed here. In part that’s because of Carpenter’s chosen time frame. A genuine fan, he confines himself to the sunnier side of Presley’s narrative arc: from picturesque Southern poverty to rock’n’roll stardom, cutting off at 1969’s triumphant taking of Las Vegas. Which means we miss the cholesterol-punishing final years to 1977: no fat Elvis, therefore, no horrifying rhinestone suits, no mumbled performances of half-forgotten lyrics or the ultimate, inglorious finale upon a toilet seat in Graceland, assisted by a polypharmacy of prescription drugs.

Despite that limitation the film deserves its cult-ish popularity, because of its star Kurt Russell and also its fidelity to the music, which runs abundantly throughout. Russell, who became a regular choice of Carpenter’s after this, has a tremendous similarity to young Elvis, whether rocking the Louisiana Hayride or hamming it up for those notorious Hollywood jobs he did in the 1960s. (Curiously, Russell’s own debut came as an uncredited child actor in Elvis’s 1963 confection It Happened At The World’s Fair.) The King’s singing voice, meanwhile, which sounds as wonderfully real as Russell looks, is supplied by the country singer Ronnie McDowell. Whether it’s the raw rockabilly panic of Mystery Train, or the lugubrious crooning of Crying In The Chapel, the tracks are practically twins to the originals.

Carpenter tackles this job as an honest artisan. Elvis doesn’t strain to transcend the bio-pic genre. Each way-station of the story is methodically logged: from the audition at Sun Studios to the Army haircut to married life (“I’ve just come from the doc. We’re going to have a baby!”). The dialogue is, shall we say, unambitious: filming The Ed Sullivan Show, one TV type turns around and says, “He seems pretty good, this kid!” The veteran actor Pat Hingle excels as rascally manager Colonel Tom Parker, the huckster who could “paint sparrows yellow and sell ’em as canaries”. Shelley Winters, too, is great as Presley’s smothering mother Gladys.

Though a little too long, too literal and too linear, Elvis works as entertainment because it looks and sounds so fabulous. It’s solidly educational, as well, provided we understand there was more to this story than we are told. It’s hard to know, in any case, what more Kurt Russell could bring to the part. There remained something profoundly unknowable about Elvis Presley. A decent man laid low by more temptation than human beings were ever designed to withstand? Maybe. A beautiful, dignified hillbilly prince? Yes, certainly, and that is the Elvis the fans recognised and clever-clever Albert Goldman missed entirely. But in the end, his true personality was as enigmatic as Michael Jackson’s.

Two years after Elvis’s death was probably too soon to start subverting or de-constructing the life of such a beloved entertainer. Besides which, apart from Elvis and Gladys, every main player was still alive and within reach of a lawyer, including the widow Priscilla and the vastly wide (in several senses) Colonel Tom. One would tread carefully, under the circumstances. I wonder if Parker really did receive news of Presley’s death by saying, “This changes nothing”? I’d like to think so.

(More about Elvis, early and late in his career, here.)

The Prisoner: "I am not a Number, I am a Free Man!"

Wed, 6 Mar 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

From The Word, June 2010, reviews of the original TV series The Prisoner (made by Patrick McGoohan back in 1967) and its US adaptation of 2009, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen.

Thirty years before Big Brother began stamping its boot into the face of British TV, another big series had taken its cue from George Orwell’s nightmare novel of total surveillance. In 1967, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner set a new standard for prime time strangeness. The show’s catch-phrase, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” was bellowed in pubs by people of a humorous disposition. More thoughtful viewers, meanwhile, sensed there was something terribly dark and tangled in all this.

The Prisoner’s opening credits suggest an orthodox spy thriller of the day – urgently percussive theme music, a cute sports car tooling around Swinging London – but we are swiftly dislocated. The McGoohan character is a secret agent who has resigned from the Service, been abducted and taken to a mystery village. (It’s really Portmeirion in Wales, of course, the Italianate fantasia that effectively became McGoohan’s only co-star). He is told he is now Number 6, though the identity of Number 1 is not revealed. The village is a sort of toy town where nobody questions anything – nobody, that is, except the rebellious Number 6.

From this basic Cold War set-up – how do you control former agents whose heads are full of secrets? – the story lurched off on wildly surreal tangents. In TV land they began to despair of it all. McGoohan was a serious-minded fellow, and as the show’s lynch-pin it seems he felt the pressure terribly. The shows were on one level wacky, full of fancy dress capers, but also claustrophobic. The puritanical McGoohan ruled out sex scenes, because he loathed what he saw as the glib, amoral glamour of James Bond. He banned handguns for the same reason, though his own performance was already a form of mental warfare. McGoohan’s eyebrows alone are more violent than the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

He only got to make such a challenging show because he had just resigned from Danger Man, a hugely popular black-and-white spy series of the early Sixties. His restless mind had grown bored with conventional stories, rather as the beat groups of that time had ditched their dark suits and middle-eights for psychedelia. The Prisoner was like a paranoid twin to The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. It’s reported the two sides admired one another. McGoohan got their permission to use All You Need Is Love in his climactic final episode, though nobody was much the wiser at the end. Thus The Prisoner – brave, barmy and imperishably odd – slipped into cult TV history.

A recent re-make of The Prisoner is much tighter, at six episodes instead of 17. This 2009 version is a big-budget number for American TV, with high production values that make McGoohan’s show look as quaint as a Portmeirion tea-shop. In the 21st century, the influence of Orwell’s 1984 is perhaps secondary to things like The Truman Show, The Matrix and Lost. And yet the new Prisoner is surprisingly true to McGoohan’s vision. While the shadowy government is replaced with a shadowy corporation, and the rainy Welsh location with an identikit US town surrounded by scorching desert (this one was apparently filmed in Africa), there is the same stubborn refusal to spell things out.

Amid the existentialist sudoku, Jim Caviezel, as Number 6, plays the title part with a hunky bravado and gets the sort of love action that McGoohan forbade himself. But this time around there is a prominent Number 2: it’s played by Ian McKellen with the silky British villainy that America requires of our Shakespearean thesps. And, between his immaculate enunciation and stone-cold heart, McKellen’s is the role that really strikes a chilly contemporary chord.

When the first Prisoner was filmed it made some play on the creepiness of credit cards, which were new to Britain in 1967. But nowadays we watch The Prisoner with more awareness of so many things that de-personalise our existence and subvert our independence: CCTV, databases, Tannoys that bark of “safety and security”, supposed anti-terrorist legislation and the popular idea that “only the guilty have anything to fear.” And once more, Number 6 finds himself short of fellow malcontents.

Like A Clockwork Orange, the story of The Prisoner is less about some dystopian future than about the nature of free will. Are we actually “good”, if we’ve surrendered our capacity for moral choice? I won’t give away the ending. Suffice it to say, though, that McKellen’s brand of totalitarian mind-control looks infinitely more evil than anything McGoohan’s bumbling rulers ever managed. They could only chase him around the beach with a bouncy white blob. Their successors can persuade us we are already in Heaven.

Karen Carpenter: Little Girl Blue

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

LITTLE GIRL BLUE: THE LIFE OF KAREN CARPENTER
By Randy L. Schmidt

This book review first appeared in The Word's edition of January 2011.

“Mmmm. This cake is delicious! Why don’t you try some of mine?” That was how Karen Carpenter used to work a room. By the time she had treated everyone, there was nothing left on her own plate. Which was, of course, precisely the plan.

Just a couple of weeks after Keith Richards explains how he has survived 67 years of being Keith Richards, comes this account of pop music’s least likely fatality. Karen Carpenter, one half of the famously wholesome Carpenters, died in 1983 at the age of 32. The cause of death was a heart attack, brought about by her years of anorexia nervosa, made worse by the drugs (laxative and emetic) that she used to rid herself of food. A rather more rock’n’roll and outsized figure, Mama Cass, had died some years before, supposedly after choking on a ham sandwich. That was a myth, but it didn’t deter a music business joke: if only Cass had given Karen that sandwich, they would both be alive today.

Of course the joke was tasteless, but when Karen died The Carpenters’ hits were slipping from memory. And the duo had never been fashionable to begin with. They had broken through in 1970 with their second single, (They Long To Be) Close To You, a Bacharach & David song rendered celestial by Karen’s angelic vocals. The Carpenters took the harmonies of West Coast folk, blended them with emerging 1970s soft-rock and created a pristine style that the radio loved. But hipsters scorned their conservative aura. That the follow-up, We’ve Only Just Begun, had begun life as a bank jingle seemed somehow apt. Karen, sniped Bette Midler, was so white she was invisible.

Another hit, Superstar, was the strangest choice of all. Leon Russell had written Groupie Superstar with Bonnie Bramlett, reportedly inspired by Rita Coolidge and Eric Clapton. To smooth the programmers’ objections, Delaney & Bonnie dropped the “groupie” part; then The Carpenters altered “I can hardly wait to sleep with you again” to “be with you again.” The odd thing is that Karen’s close-miked performance, despite her virginal, Young Republican image, made this song more smokily sensual than ever.

The deeper end of Carpenter’s range was as sexy as the higher end was pure. Her elder brother Richard was considered the musical brains, who not only played piano but chose the material, co-wrote much of it and crafted that phenomenal studio shimmer with obsessive dedication. Even when they covered a song as obvious as The Beatles' Day Tripper, the resulting sound was uniquely their own. Yet, to the rest of the world, his sister’s voice was the defining fact of The Carpenters. That’s why she was coaxed out from behind her drum-kit and placed centre-stage. Though she was a good drummer, it clearly made sense to put her in the spotlight. But Karen hated the change: she not only missed her drums, she thought her slim figure too “chubby”.

And at this point Karen’s “body image issues” become the focus of Randy Schmidt’s carefully factual, sensitively-pitched book. It seems that anorexia nervosa was much less understood in the 1970s. Karen’s treatment veered from ineffectual therapy to invasive force-feeding. It didn’t help. We inevitably speculate about her private unhappiness. The record company’s rejection of her solo album was definitely a blow. There seems a consensus among the interviewees that her mother, Agnes, was a domineering and unsympathetic character, who lavished all her love upon Richard. Well, Agnes is no longer alive and Richard declined to be interviewed. There was Karen’s brief and disastrous marriage to someone else the author cannot interview, as the man is subject to a gagging order.

So, in the end, we don’t really know for sure. Schmidt cannot be faulted for he’s explored the avenues that were open. The pressures of success and the claustrophobia of that close-knit family also got to golden-boy Richard. Even so, Karen’s background was hardly the horror story we associate with Brian Wilson or Michael Jackson. It’s true The Carpenters’ career dipped, but so does everyone’s. The weight fixation is the whole mystery and final tragedy of this tale. And though she did not want for willing friends, nobody could turn Karen Carpenter’s life around.

Midler’s quip was coming true: Carpenter really was turning invisible. On promotional TV duty in London in 1981, she wearily evades Sue Lawley’s questions: “I have no idea what ‘six stone in weight’ is,” she says. It’s about 84 pounds, says Lawley. In fact the singer would soon weigh even less than that. When Karen had given away her last slice of cake, she could find no other purpose in life and the angelic sound was silenced.

Booker T's Road From Memphis

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of Booker T. Jones's album, The Road From Memphis. It first appeared in The Word, May 2011.

Booker T. & The MGs, whose mainman Mr Jones returns with this new album, were the ultimate engine room of soul. As the house band at Stax Records in Memphis they defined the Southern groove; other musicians revere their very name. The Velvet Underground used to warm up with a long jam they called Booker T. And John Lennon, who had no time for instrumentals, made a funky exception (Beef Jerky, in 1974) on which he called himself “Booker Table & The Maitre D’s”.

In the 1960s their hit singles tripped from transistor radios in thrilling displays of cool virtuosity. Bossed by Jones’s Hammond organ, the MGs’ sound broke big with a jazzy, after-hours improv called Green Onions, a tune so imprinted in pop’s collective memory that we can scarcely imagine a time when it did not exist. They nearly matched it with the suavely urgent Time Is Tight, and the dizzily upbeat Soul Limbo (you know, Test Match on TV; that one). Back at Stax, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and the rest knew Booker’s boys would send their tracks stratospheric.

So who is Booker T. Jones? At 66, he’s younger than we might think. That’s because, like his English white boy counterpart Steve Winwood, he was already a veteran before he was 20. He was named after the African-American leader Booker T. Washington, except that in Jones’s case, the “T” doesn’t stand for anything. The MGs, of course, made you think of sports cars, which was hip and exciting, until Stax announced it simply meant ‘the Memphis Group” which was accurate but dull. Then, quite recently, it was claimed the MGs were about sports cars after all – but Stax had been afraid of a copyright suit.

Whatever, they were racially mixed, when that was highly unusual; they went on to back Bob Dylan and Neil Young and some of them put spine into The Blues Brothers. If there was a flaw in Booker T.’s formula, it was the slight sameyness of whole LPs of keyboard-driven instrumentals. In later years, with or without the MGs, Jones’s music took on a sort of lounge-core aspect, tasteful and expert, but low on surprises. He’d written mighty songs, like Born Under A Bad Sign (covered by Cream), and got away with a single called Mo’ Onions, but nobody’s hot streak lasts forever.

But this new record really deserves to be heard. We're told The Road From Memphis is about the journey of soul, and Jones, from earliest stirrings in that city and down the decades to now. Aptly, therefore, there’s plenty of variety and quite contemporary touches – including an instrumental cover of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy. And while Booker’s organ is always a vivid, expressive voice in its own right, the addition of guest singers to the album is a definite benefit.

Even Lou Reed is on hand, paying more homage to The Velvet Underground’s old hero: here he collaborates on a track called The Bronx, an atmospheric job with a hint of jazz-meets-poetry nights in beatnik cellars of long ago. From a younger demographic comes the track with Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket. And Matt Berninger, of The National, contributes his own low rumble to a duet with the R&B singer Sharon Jones (no relation to Booker, as far as I know) called Representing Memphis. That such a cross-genre pairing will raise no eyebrows nowadays can, in part, be traced back to the vast influence of Booker T.’s original band.

Mr Jones himself puts in a rare vocal appearance, on the autobiographical Down In Memphis. (It’s somehow a surprise to remember this celebrated but non-celebrity musician actually has a voice.) Compared with the springier records of his early years, a few of his instrumental numbers on this album have a slower tempo and a darker tone, possibly the result of a man of advancing years, surveying the progress of a lifetime. The America that Booker T. knew as a teenage session player, in the era of Martin Luther King, must look a whole lot different to him now. For the best and most encouraging of those changes we can pay some thanks to soul music. And soul, for its own part, will surely thank one Booker T. Jones.

The Hour TV series

Wed, 6 Feb 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

The first series of THE HOUR, a drama set in the world of TV news in the 1950s, went out in 2011. This DVD review was done for The Word in October of that year.

It’s 1956 and two immense stories are unfolding. One is Suez, where Britain’s botched show of force will spell the end of its superpower pretensions. The other is Hungary, where a popular uprising is crudely smashed by the Soviets. It’s the perfect time, in fact, to be launching The Hour, a BBC news programme that vows to ditch the stale, bow-tied politeness of yesteryear and cut bloodily to the heart of events.

At least, it should be the perfect time, except The Hour has too many dramas of its own. There is for example some huge conspiracy afoot, involving shadowy men from the government (or are they?) who wear dark hats and snoop and triple-bluff. Will they close The Hour down? And then there is a cauldron of inter-studio sexual tension to complicate it further. These thrusting pioneers of early TV interpret “current affairs” rather too literally.

While the series’ period setting invites comparisons to Mad Men, here the cigarettes and frocks and vintage cars are only window dressing in what’s essentially a John Le Carré-style Cold War spy drama, with rather more sex than George Smiley seemed to have. The six-part series takes an age to warm up, but it does become addictive. And it’s terrifically watchable, both for the costumes and scenery and the contrasting glamour of its three main players.

These are Dominic West (of The Wire fame) as the show’s suave but reactionary presenter; Romola Garai as its female producer, who must re-shape TV news in a hostile environment; and Ben Whishaw as the crusading young reporter who never lets a lying dog sleep. Buried within their strange romantic triangle are the tensions of mid-’50s Britain. Career women, class privilege and media censorship are all among the hot-button topics here.

Which is perhaps The Hour’s only serious weakness. Visually it’s a great portrait of London before it learned to be modern: it’s not sleek and celebratory like Mad Men, but rather a world of shabby raincoats and lino floors. Unfortunately the characters are not really allowed to live in that time: they must all serve the script’s fondness for sneering at the culturally unenlightened 1950s. Anything posh is likely to signal villainy. Females endure male condescension with looks that say, “This is, like, so out of order. I can’t wait for 2011.” A stiff old Lord suddenly voices the feeling that he ought to, you know, have really communicated more with his daughter. But then, she’s a debutante who speaks in the slurred Mockney of a modern Trustafarian, not the clipped tones of old Belgravia. You might as well have Winston Churchill wearing an iPod.

As social history, it’s bunk. But as a thriller with extra eye-candy, The Hour is a treat.

London Music

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

A piece about London livemusic, done for the 2010 iTunes Festival magazine and promoting my book In The City.

Its streets were never paved with gold, unfortunately. And as the Jam’s angry young Paul Weller once sang in “Strange Town”, it’s no joke trying to make friends in Oxford Street. But generations of newcomers have discovered an eternal truth about London. This town rocks. It always has. When it comes to live entertainment, the capital city is the only place to be.

It’s not just size that makes London special. It’s the noise. Even in medieval times the decibel levels would terrify a country bumpkin. Singing street traders howled over the din of church bells, livestock and wagon wheels on cobblestones. Leather-lunged balladeers versified the latest scandals, murders and executions. Visitors were so traumatised by the cacophony that they could not compete against the silver tongues – and light fingers – of a mighty metropolis aware of its own importance.

London songs still have a sly wit and story-telling edge that marks them apart. The first to exploit that vitality were tavern landlords. They built extensions for the minstrels who entertained the drinkers, and those rooms grew into the music halls – great, working-class palaces of fun that bred legendary figures like Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion. These Cockney superstars of a hundred years ago were as fast and brash as their street-smart East End audiences. And the link between music and drink in London has never been broken. We all know a favourite live local. In the 1970s there was even a movement called pub-rock: in venues like the Half Moon in Putney and the Hope & Anchor in Islington, it created stars including Ian Dury, Madness and Elvis Costello. Just like the Victorian music hall artists, they learned the art of facing down a raucous roomful of boozers.

When Londoners weren’t drinking to music, it seems, they were dancing to it (or even attempting both). This tradition too remains intact. Before the Second World War the sleek hotels of Mayfair boasted sensational ballrooms with resident orchestras, as did the grand restaurants. Here and in glamorous dancehalls like the Hammersmith Palais, London couples might glide to the smooth sounds of bandleaders such as Mantovani, or get frantic to the newly imported sounds of jazz. It was the musicians of these formal orchestras who broke loose after hours to mess with harder, modern styles; players such as Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott opened jazz clubs that revolutionised Soho’s post-War nightlife. Cavernous cathedrals of the rave era, like Shoom and Ministry of Sound, dramatically re-defined dance culture for a new era.

Not even the British weather could dampen London’s appetite for music. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the sprawling “pleasure gardens” of Vauxhall and Chelsea, where opera singers and string quartets beguiled fashionable strollers by moonlight. By 1969 the focus had switched to Hyde Park, as thousands of hairies gathered for landmark shows by Pink Floyd, Blind Faith and, most famously, the Rolling Stones. Meanwhile, indoors, the music halls had given way to ornate variety theatres, some of which (including the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the Clapham Grand) thankfully survive. Wembley Arena and its Stadium neighbour hosted the biggest shows of the last century, notably 1985’s Live Aid, as does their modern counterpart the O2 Arena.

It takes the intimacy of a club, however, to nurture a true musical scene. Punks and new romantics had the 100 Club and Blitz. Back in the Swinging Sixties, mods and soul boys loved the Marquee and Flamingo, both in Soho, and folkies had Les Cousins in Greek Street. The flower children, though, preferred the Middle Earth in Covent Garden’s piazza or the UFO in Tottenham Court Road, where they swayed dreamily to Marc Bolan’s voice and grooved to the DJ John Peel. For the biggest hippie happenings there was a huge converted railway shed, the Roundhouse in Camden Town – a unique venue that has successfully reinvented itself for a modern generation of music fans.

From Britpop to hip hop, from acoustic open-mic nights to grime, dubstep and beyond, the London circuit has offered a home to every taste. Probably no nationality on earth goes unrepresented in the musical life of this world city: calypso, Celtic, reggae and bhangra have each fed into the mainstream. Uncharted territories, like Shoreditch, rise suddenly from obscurity. London’s musical ambassadors today range from Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse to Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder. You heard them here first, and here is where you’ll discover their successors. Because, when London’s calling, music always answers.

“In the City: A Celebration of London Music” by Paul Du Noyer. Published by Virgin Books.

27 Minutes With Malcolm McLaren

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

This encounter with Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols, was commissioned as part of The Word magazine’s “27 Minutes With” series and appeared in the issue of July 2012.

I am staring, with deep unease, at a double bed in the Barclay Hotel, New York City. It’s a perfectly nice bed. The problem is that I have to share it with Malcolm McLaren. I’ll go to great lengths for my employers the NME, but there are surely limits. Aren’t there?

The ginger pop Svengali looked relaxed. “You ’ave that side,” he twinkled merrily. “It must be a mix-up. I’ll go down and sort it.” And with that he disappeared. I undressed cautiously and slept fitfully, but McLaren never returned that night. Disappearing was a speciality of his. “Where’s that fucker Malcolm?” I once heard Johnny Rotten snarl from the Sex Pistols’ stage. “Where’s that fucker Malcolm?” his new clients Bow Wow Wow would ask regularly over the next two days.

So now I had only one thing left to worry about. The race riot Malcolm was planning for tomorrow evening...

The whole wheeze had started with a phone call 12 hours ago: “Malcolm ’ere. Got a US visa?” Bow Wow Wow were making their American debut that night. I had an hour to dash home for my passport and meet him at Heathrow. In the end McLaren himself was terrifyingly late, but supremely calm. Chaos, to him, was not so much a theory as a daily regime (hence the botched hotel booking). At the other end we were detained by US customs on account of some pornography he happened to be importing.

Malcolm McLaren wasn’t really a singer or a musician, although he made some terrific records. But he was certainly an artist in ideas, and a performer in conversation. Our flight to Kennedy was about six hours long, but it seemed no more than 27 minutes. Malcolm held forth in a mad, unstoppable monologue that held me spellbound. It was unforgettable. I don’t think he paused for breath.

What did he talk about? Well, ominously for Bow Wow Wow, he scarcely mentioned them. This was the band he’d prised away from Adam Ant, having steered the struggling punk towards stardom with an image overhaul and a big Burundi beat. Now he’d teamed them with a 15-year-old girl called Annabella Lwin. In a strange foreshadowing of the download age, their shtick involved a rebellious celebration of mix-tapes and the newly-invented Walkman. (“Home taping,” announced the record industry, “is killing music”). To ram the point home there were pirate costumes for the band, designed by Malcolm and his partner Vivienne Westwood.

Then he embroiled poor under-age Annabella in a fresh controversy. He persuaded her to pose naked on Bow Wow Wow’s LP cover. It became the major outrage of 1981, rivalling The Sex Pistols at their worst. And yet I sensed that Malcolm had already lost interest.

Instead, clutching my arm like the Ancient Mariner, he gabbled about the future of music, as revealed to him on a previous trip to New York. Forget rock’n’roll, man. That was over. Tomorrow belonged to hip hop, and to sampling. He’d been to the South Bronx: “Unbelievable! It’s a total no-go area down there! No police, literally no money in the whole area. Unbelievably heavy ... I was the only white face.” He spoke in awed tones of the block parties, and kids who span on their heads.

“And the DJs! They rap over things you won’t believe. It’s funk, sure, but it’s riffs by The Shadows. Or Gary Numan. They’ve never even heard of Gary Numan, but they just like that abrasive electronic noise and old jangly guitars. They’ve taken it beyond funk.”

I began to catch his drift. People like me, who bore on about the organic roots of music, are obsolete. Tomorrow will steal its music like lead from a church roof, in fragments, caring only for sound and nothing for context. Like a situationist salesman he sold a vision of the future in five seconds flat. He swept you along with his pop-eyed stare, astonished by his own cheek. It might work, man! OK, it might be disastrous. But won’t it be fun?

What I realised was that Malcolm didn’t care if any of this was true. It was ideas that got him high. As I say, this was 1981. And looking back, I think he saw the future more clearly than anyone else I knew.

One last prediction caused me concern, however. Tomorrow night, for Bow Wow Wow’s show, he’d invited “hundreds of black kids from the Bronx”. A lot of them had never even been to Manhattan. To suddenly see all that privilege, that rock biz decadence, those luxury shops! To Malcolm’s hyper-powered imagination, this meant one thing: “There’ll be a riot, man!” Anarchy in the USA. It was a re-run of the fantasy he’d nurtured three years earlier, touring the Sex Pistols through the redneck towns of the Deep South.

The “black kids” duly turned up. They were in fact the DJ Afrika Bambaataa and his Zulu Nation. They revealed the hip hop arts – breakdancing, scratching, rapping – to the white hipsters of Manhattan, who were properly amazed. The Zulu Nation wore T-shirts showing a massive outline map of Africa, with a tiny USA inside. But they were peaceful, polite and happy to be there. We were even invited to a block party. Was Malcolm disappointed by all this? I never found out. He’d disappeared. The revolution was once again cancelled.

Malcolm McLaren, the arch-manipulator, could not control events from one moment to the next. He was a dreamer, not a schemer. He never came back to my bed and I never met him again in my whole life.

The Leaving of Liverpool. And the Coming Back.

Tue, 1 Jan 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

The Leaving Of Liverpool… And The Coming Back
A piece written for Liverpool.com magazine, July 2008.

Should I stay or should I go? The question raised by that classic Clash track never entered my mind when I was a teenager in Liverpool. For one thing, the song hadn’t been written yet (this was the 1970s). And for another, I was desperate to get away.

It’s not that I had anything against the place. Liverpool and its suburbs were all I’d ever known. But there is a healthy impulse in most young people to see the wider world. Hadn’t my own father – like generations of Liverpool men – run away to sea? So I took the first opportunity to leave and went to study in London. Lots of people do something similar. Then you begin a career, maybe start a family, put down roots. Piece by piece, you’re assembling the jig-saw of your life – and there are no Liver Birds in the picture. Before you really know what’s happened, it looks impossible to go back. To make matters worse in my case, it was now the 1980s, when prospects of a decent life in Liverpool seemed more remote than ever.

Has all that finally changed? Is 2008 the time for exiles to return? Can the city attract outsiders to live and work here? And is it time for home-grown talent to stay and make its future in Liverpool – instead of London or, God forbid, the emerging media hub of Manchester?

Britain has always had a London problem. We’re economically imbalanced in favour of the capital and that divide is growing. In the old days money was made up North and spent down South. When London was the front parlour of the British Empire, Manchester was its sweat shop and Liverpool the tradesman’s entrance. Nowadays the South-east doesn’t need anyone: it’s a global economy all of its own. Liverpool can never be the Land of Opportunity that London is, but it still has plenty going for it. And as for our North-west neighbour, I see Liverpool as playing San Francisco to Manchester’s Los Angeles – smaller, maybe, but better-looking, with bags more character. Where would you rather be?

Well, we know of course that Ringo Starr was “that” close to moving back, and even Cilla Black has lately been pining for the old place: "I think about moving back,” she told the Daily Post. “My friends say ‘you wouldn't last two minutes’ but I know I'd love it.” For those of us who are merely mortal, however, there is always a more urgent consideration: Can we make a living here?

London has a near-monopoly on the media as well as being a financial power-house; meanwhile Manchester is better-placed to be a regional centre than Liverpool. But the 21st century will not be like any previous era. I’m a writer and with the internet I can work anywhere. Improved technology – tele-conferencing, and the rest of it – is making that decision easier for all sorts of people. The time of centralisation is passing.

And Liverpool’s attractions are vast: the natural setting and the built environment are fantastic; the cultural amenities are world-class; shopping and dining have come a long way, not forgetting the older allure of pubs and football. And however dubious the city centre’s much-hyped property boom, Merseyside prices are certainly more affordable than most. Above all there are the people, who I claim without sentimentality to be the best in the world. Myself, I can’t escape London completely, and would not want to, but I spend about half my time in Liverpool now and cherish every day.

So I asked various people why they left Liverpool, or stayed, or returned, or came here from somewhere else. You can see from their replies that a curious pattern emerges. What the residents love and the exiles miss is something in the nature of Liverpool itself. You can leave the city but it never leaves you – not even in your dreams. Of course we need the economic regeneration that makes a career possible, but it’s more than that. When I was a student at the London School of Economics, the Liverpool Echo had an office nearby in Fleet Street. Each day in the display window was a copy of last night’s paper. It became my morning fix. I suppose I knew already that I’d come home eventually.

Stay or go? Should we be Steven Gerrards – or Wayne Rooneys? The fact is that Liverpool has always been a town of immigrants and emigrants, a place of exile and a place to feel exiled from. In my day there was only one choice: Liverpool for the people or London for the money. In the 21st century, I hope, we can find all we need right here.

Paul Du Noyer is the author of Liverpool: Wondrous Place (Virgin Books)

INTERVIEWS

Mark Davies Markham, author of Liverpool Nativity and the forthcoming Eric’s The Musical:-
“I have a flat in city and feel like I've never left. I think Scouse is a state of mind, no matter where you are in the world. What stopped me from leaving Liverpool completely was that I love it. Nowhere else feels like Liverpool. It’s that sense of belonging you can never get anywhere else.
“Staying or returning is more about the individual's mind-set and circumstances than about the city. The types that leave and make a conscious decision to lose their accents and adopt the cultural ways of other parts of the country are never going to return: chances are they never fitted in and left to find a place where they did. No harm in that. I doubt that building more shops or leisure facilities would bring them back. I know one thing for sure… I feel most at home in my home town.”

Gayna, Liverpool-based musician and broadcaster:-
"Returning to Liverpool after living away for some years is like re-entering an alien gene pool you didn't realise you belonged to until you left."

Ian Prowse, singer with Liverpool band Amsterdam and city centre resident:-
“Liverpool exerts a pull on you, wherever you are in the world. So in one sense nobody ever really leaves. You bump into Scousers in all four corners of the globe. They gravitate towards each other. Very few sell the city out, so I have no objection at all to ex-pats or those that feel stifled. It is bloody tiny, after all!
“The river is the key, the endless flow of it all. I implore everyone to take the 34-floor trip up to Panoramic Bar in that huge building next to the Echo. When you get up there and see the city in a way you've never seen it before, when you view from above the entire mouth of the mighty Mersey and imagine the millions of people arriving at the docks, when you can almost see Ireland – our spiritual home – I challenge you not to be moved to tears.”

Liz Lacey, Liverpool.com’s Theatre editor, returned after 13 years away:-
“Without being sentimental, I missed the people. Not all of them, of course, we have our share of the aggressive, the bigoted and the just plain dull. But we also have a great number of charmers of all ages. Liverpool is a nosey place. London couldn’t give a toss. We think Liverpool has become overpriced and gentrified. But not in comparison, nor is it likely to be. I also think this is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it is just the right size .You can walk in it; it’s full of space and light and water. You appreciate these things more when you’ve lived in, say, Leeds, where I always felt landlocked, or Manchester, where there is always some massive, solid presence keeping the sky out (insert favourite Mick Hucknall joke…).”

Stephen Bayley, London-based design guru and Observer writer, ex-Quarry Bank pupil:-
“What a curious hold Liverpool exerts. I rarely re-visit, but it often revisits me. I was born in Wales, have spent most of my life in London, merely went to school in Liverpool, but still regard it as home. Certainly, memories of Liverpool are disproportionately large in my mental landscape, in my dreams. I have no family there and my friends remain only as ghosts, but I nonetheless often toy with the idea of going back. I left, restless, at 17; it was only later that I realised Liverpool’s vast presence had made me interested in architecture. What a fine thing it would be, I sometimes muse, to live in a leafy villa in Fulwood Park with sunshine and the smell of the river and books and elegant neighbours. That last sentence proves it: for all its faults, Liverpool is one of the most romantic places in the world.”

Debra Geddes, Huyton exile, now at EMI in London:-
“I left to study in London then wanted to work in music so didn't really have much choice but to stay down there. I would dearly love to come home one day – in my dark moments I get quite teary about it (much to everyone’s amusement). I don't know now though that I ever will, really – I've been corrupted by London so that I love and hate being here. For me to realistically go home I'd need to be able to get a job and they don't exist up there in any numbers for people like me. And I would NEVER move to Manchester, I couldn't stand that. With good PR I don't see why Liverpool can't rival certainly Manchester as a media base ... It needs to think big to make it happen. Sometimes I think it holds itself back.”

Gary Millar, city councillor, co-owner of Parr Street Studios:-
“In my third life as an adopted Scouser (the first was in Scotland for 19 years and the second was in London for almost four years). I have now lived in Liverpool, my home for 25 years and don't want to live anywhere else. Although I'm from Edinburgh (a place like Manchester but with better football and a nicer accent) this great city instead reminds me of Glasgow for its honesty, humour and down to earth passion. Liverpool is amazing people, stunning architecture and a true home-grown culture. In fact, surely the legacy commenced 800 years ago! The second renaissance has arrived and I'm glad to be living and breathing it.”

Jeff Beck: Hot-Wired Guitar

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Jeff Beck's personal profile is low in comparison to starrier contemporaries like Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart. But his prestige among guitar players is perhaps higher than ever. This review of a new biography appeared in The Word, January 2012.

HOT WIRED GUITAR: THE LIFE OF JEFF BECK
Martin Power
OMNIBUS PRESS

The Jeff Beck “brand” is not fantastically well-known these days. Yet he is quietly putting out fine albums, as good as anything he’s done since the 1960s. To some people he is just the bloke who looks like (and was probably the model for) Nigel Tufnell in This Is Spinal Tap. I’d rather compare him to one of those wonderful pubs you sometimes find away from main roads; the locals know and love it, while the wider world steams past, oblivious.

Once he was the hippest young guitar-slinger in the London blues boom. From the same scene that nurtured The Rolling Stones, he was Eric Clapton’s replacement in The Yardbirds and was soon joined by his friend Jimmy Page. All three men come from the same small corner of Surrey, never a county noted for its shotgun shacks and cottonfields. Even so, they remain the holy trinity of British rock guitar. Many insist that Beck is the best of them.

This new biography is a hefty thing that omits no detail of Beck’s career (though it’s reticent about his private life). Our rock god’s middle name is Arnold, which instantly places him back in 1940s suburbia. Indeed the book follows a classic template for the pop lives of that generation’s stars: the Luftwaffe on page 1, followed by home-made guitars, art school, skiffle bands, Ready Steady Go!, rip-offs and flounce-outs, a supermodel missus and the eventual Tudor manor in the Home Counties. No rehab or scandal, though: Beck’s preference is for tinkering with hot-rod cars.

In the 1960s he was a sonic hoodlum. He described his fiercely stinging Yardbirds style as “Go get ’em, kill ’em.” After binning that band he formed The Jeff Beck Group with an unknown singer called Rod Stewart. They made superb albums, but the only famous hit was a travesty: despite not being a vocalist (and Rod clearly was a vocalist) Beck was induced by his producer Mickie Most to warble a pop ditty Hi Ho Silver Lining. Annoyingly memorable, the song still evokes ghastly memories of Student Union discos. It defined Beck in the wrong way altogether. He’s likened it to having a pink toilet seat placed around your neck. For ever.

He never stayed in one place very long. Perhaps he was too wilful to be a sideman but too moody and insecure to be a band-leader. He fell out with Rod, big time. Like Clapton’s, his confidence took a knock with the arrival in London of a rangy African-American named Jimi Hendrix. (“Oh Christ, all right,” Beck thought. “I’ll become a postman.”) Unlike Jimmy Page – whose “New Yardbirds” turned into Led Zeppelin – he never found the magic gang of simpatico talents. Instead of clocking up more hits in his own name, he’d turn up on other people’s records, adding piss and vinegar to Donovan’s Goo Goo Barabajagal, or liquid lyricism to Kate Bush’s You’re The One.

Being neither a singer nor a songwriter has kept Beck more anonymous than his peers. But among the cognoscenti he is always “the guitarist’s guitarist”. Martin Power’s book is very strong on this aspect. If your eyes widen at the mention of humbuckers and single-coil pick-ups, if you whistle appreciatively at the notion of “a Marshall 1987X with 50 watt head”, then you and the author are twanging from the same lead-sheet. Beck was among the first pop players to grasp that electric guitars are not just plugged-in versions of their acoustic ancestors. They’re part of an arsenal of amps, pedals and boxes that can be ingeniously tweaked in a thousand different ways. And then smashed to pieces.

There is a touch of the Nearly Man about Beck’s story. He split his band three weeks before they were due to play Woodstock; his name was actually on the posters. Stevie Wonder wrote Superstition for him, then wisely decided to keep it for himself. He almost joined The Rolling Stones after Mick Taylor left, but changed his mind and left the way open for another Jeff Beck Group veteran, Ronnie Wood.

But none of that has really harmed him. In his late 60s he makes thoughtful and sometimes thrilling music, with collaborators from Carlos Santana to Joss Stone. He has buried old feuds with Eric, Jimmy and Rod; they smile, hug and banter their twinkle-eyed way around the magazine award parties and royal charity shows. And teen guitarists may wear Ramones T-shirts, but it’s the mysteries of Jeff Beck’s riffs that they still long to unlock.

Deaf School: Lost Legends of Liverpool art Rock

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of Deaf School’s first new recordings in over 30 years. It appeared in The Word, April 2011. I was so struck by the quality of this mini-album, and by live shows the band played around the same time, that I decided to write their biography.

DEAF SCHOOL
Enrico & Bette xx

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever, declared an old album title, and here is new evidence. Deaf School were pure art college, somewhere in the lineage of the Bonzo Dog Band and Ian Dury’s Kilburn & The High Roads. They last made a record in 1978, but jubilant reunion shows have indicated something indestructible about the band. So now, 33 years later, they’ve made a mini-album of new material that picks up exactly where they left off.

Wonderfully, it sounds as fresh and gutsy as the original model. Deaf School are the stopped clock that is right twice a lifetime.

It began like this. Back in the mid-1970s, mere months before punk rock changed the game, Deaf School were a cheerful gang of rock-cabaret chancers, mixing cheap glamour and showbiz pastiche. They brightened up the dead years of a Liverpool music scene still pole-axed by The Beatles’ desertion. They were such a blast that a whole new local scene sprang up around them, spawning Eric’s Club and a dozen future legends, from Echo & The Bunnymen to Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Deaf School’s sprawling, uncertain line-up was eventually honed to about eight people and they were briefly poised, as Warner Brothers’ much-hyped signings, to become the new Roxy Music.

Well, that never happened, not least because punk rock was a puritanical movement, hard on cavalier romantics. Warners wondered where the hits were, and soon Deaf School’s disappointed members scattered. A few, sad to say, have since passed on, but in 2011 we still have the two main singers Enrico Cadillac and Bette Bright, as well as guitarist Clive Langer (a renowned producer in the intervening years) and other survivors including the accordion-playing vicar they called The Reverend Max Ripple. Admittedly the vibe might strike you as larky and twee, but this band really do have wit, grit and great big tunes.

Part of their supposed problem in the punk days was that Deaf School wanted to be entertainers. Even so, right now I enjoy their wildly contrived 1976 debut, 2nd Honeymoon, more than nearly anything by the more “honest” acts of that time. At live shows they are sometimes joined on stage by Kevin Rowland of Dexys or by Suggs, who both know the value of showmanship. (The young Madness were such disciples of Deaf School that Suggs actually married Bette Bright.) There are only five songs on this new collection, but every one of them has a vivid story to tell you. Then the melodies clutch your arm like a madman’s bony hand.

Clive Langer, who co-wrote Shipbuilding with Elvis Costello, is once again composing with Enrico (alias Steve Allen) his writing partner. Their bassist Mr Average (alias Steve Lindsay) also contributes, shoring up the classic teen-pop tendencies that Deaf School always showed when they were not playing at Noël Coward or Marlene Dietrich. There is adolescent nostalgia, perhaps, in the album’s title, Enrico & Bette xx. And a track that deals directly with that subject, The Enrico Song, offers a genuinely touching memoir of one boy’s first forays into town at night (“Mum… Mum… Where’s me shirt?”). The School’s saxophonist Ian Ritchie is a stirring presence here, just as he was the first time round.

Bette Bright, whose career after Deaf School also produced some real delights, shines in I Know, I Know, a chance to re-visit her affinity for vintage soul-girls like The Marvelettes or Sugar Pie DeSanto. (God, I hope I still have my vinyl copy of her performing The Angels’ My Boyfriend’s Back. It’s fantastic.) The Suggs connection is brought to mind by another track, Scary Girlfriend, with its very Madness-like combination of bittersweet comedy, pub piano and music hall chorus. “You’re lovely, lovely you are… But you smashed all the windows in my car.”

So where are we now? The young Deaf School were signed to Warners by The Beatles’ pressman Derek Taylor, who honestly believed they were the greatest thing since his other famous clients The Byrds. That, with hindsight, was a fond excess of zeal. And the economics of the music industry have changed drastically since those champagne days. But who knows? This is a fine record. With a puff of breath from some celestial cherubs’ cheeks, there may yet be a following wind for Deaf School. And the Art School Dance might yet go on to delight us a little longer.

The Cilla Black Interview

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

From the August 2012 issue of The Word.

Trim, chipper and chatty, Cilla Black shimmies around her kitchen deciding between tea, coffee and champagne. She plumps for the fizz, then curls up on a sofa in the living room. But over the next 90 minutes she scarcely takes a sip. Maybe it’s a prop. Or perhaps she just talks too much.

She gabs and laughs, and laughs some more. She’s back, she says, from two weeks in Barbados. It was her 69th birthday. Last night she was on the town with “Savage”, which is what she calls her friend Paul O’Grady (the alter ego of Lily). Cilla’s small talk is like that. It’s a world where Ringo is “Ritchie” and The Beatles are “the Boys”. Even Lulu is “Lu”.

We’re in a flat in central London. She used to share it with her husband of 30 years, Bobby Willis, until his death in 1999. Now she’s a grandmother and looking, you would have to say, every inch on top of her game.

Cilla swam into the nation’s consciousness nearly 50 years ago. She sang smart pop hits that were crafted for her by Lennon and McCartney. She seemed in effect to be The Beatles’ Little Sister. Her set took in some very hip material by Burt Bacharach and Randy Newman, who both remain admirers. (So were the Elvises Presley and Costello.) But in the later 1960s, as pop turned psychedelic and hard rock ruled, Cilla stuck with showbiz. And the telly transformed her into Scousewife Superstar.

Her first manager Brian Epstein doted on her. Almost the last act of his life was to negotiate a BBC TV series (Macca wrote its theme song). But now she maintains she is prouder of her music – most of it made with George Martin at Abbey Road – than of lightweight stuff like Blind Date or Surprise, Surprise. Hence we’re invited round to discuss a recent compilation of those golden years, Completely Cilla:1963-1973, with its triumphant anthems such as Alfie and Anyone Who Had A Heart. In those songs her voice soared from girlish whisper to crockery-rattling roar.

Priscilla White, docker’s daughter from Liverpool’s toughest arrondissement, became Cilla Black thanks to a misprint in music paper Mersey Beat. But like Kylie, she’s on first-name terms with her public anyway. In her Cavern days she was known as Swinging Cilla, and to The Beatles as “Swinging Cyril”. Nobody even knew her second name. All this she tells me as she gabs and laughs. Cyril’s a born storyteller and 90 minutes flew. I barely covered a tenth of the subjects I’d intended.

********

I have an awful lot of questions. Is your memory good?

Well, if you remember the 60s, they say you weren’t there. But I was too busy. I was working hard to make the 60s great for everybody else.

And you weren’t off your head?

No. I was a good girl. And I remember my very first drink, in a club in Piccadilly. It was Mateus Rosé. I saw Mick Jagger having it and I literally said, “I’ll have what he’s having.” And you could put a candle in afterwards, cos it was a nice-shaped bottle.

Are you telling me you never took a drink in Liverpool?

No. We weren’t brought up that way. Your dad went to the pub and your mother stayed at home. But I do remember the cabinet being full at Christmas time and me and a girlfriend, aged 11, drinking a bottle of gin. I can’t stand the smell of gin to this day.

It’s amazing to think that clubs like the Cavern, or the Marquee in London, weren’t licensed for alcohol in those days.

They were coffee clubs! We were all kids, and we enjoyed the music. And I didn’t smoke. I smoked on Juke Box Jury because I saw John Lennon smoke the week before and I thought, It’s gotta be cool if John is smoking. So I lit up. And Brian Epstein told me off for that.

I worked in the Zodiac club and I did my first gig there, with The Big Three. I was listed in the Liverpool Echo as Swinging Priscilla. And The Big Three were the best band in Liverpool at the time. I mean, “The Beatles? Who?” Gerry & The Pacemakers were much bigger. It wasn’t until The Beatles went to Germany and came back a year later, that we kids really noticed them.

Then I had four jobs. I used to work on Saturday in a fashion store. I used to work in my lunch hour at the Cavern, hanging the coats up, sing at night, and work in an office round the corner. I’d work every hour God sent me to earn more money for clothes.

What were the girls wearing? We know about the beat group boys.

Well I was very different. I would buy a dress and wear it back to front, ignoring the darts at the front for ladies’ boobs. I just wanted to be different, even when I was 13. I was mousey-blonde and I bought a Camilatone rinse from Woolie’s, and I turned up bright red the next day. My headmistress sat me by a window with the sun blazing, to make an example of me. Well, I thought this was my spotlight! She could not have a done a worse thing, and I’ve kept it ever since.

In the early days on stage you were just doing guest spots?

Oh I’d sing with anybody. When I was 15 The Beatles were playing the Iron Door club. And my friends said, “Give Cilla a go,” to The Beatles. Who, I have to stress, weren’t the greatest band in Liverpool at the time. So John said, “OK, Cyril, gerrup and sing.” I’d heard them before doing Sam Cooke’s version of Summertime and I sang that, and from there it was word of mouth. I’m sure the groups asked me to get up because they wanted a break.

Were there many other girls? I know of Beryl Marsden, who was great. But did any girls form groups and play instruments?

Not that I know of. Brian asked the same question, “Are there any girl groups or singers?” John remembered me from the Iron Door and recommended me. But Beryl Marsden had a great voice, very much like Brenda Lee.

Why did girls not take up instruments?

It was a manly thing, wasn’t it? I mean, the only girl band I knew was the Ivy Benson Band, and it just seemed too masculine. Apart from Cherry Wainer and her organ, on Oh Boy! shows, you never really saw women play instruments, except the violin. In fact I don’t think it was until Chrissie Hynde, I think she made playing an instrument really cool.

How did you meet Brian Epstein? Did The Beatles set up an audition for you?

The Majestic Ballroom. That was a terrible thing. I was very nervous, and they were playing over the water, in Birkenhead. John had told Brian about me, and Brian asked would I go up and sing a song, and I was a total disaster. Girls did not sing in fellas’ keys and I just sounded like Yma Sumac on heat. I literally walked off the stage and got the next ferry home. I didn’t even see Brian after that. I knew I was dreadful.

Almost a year later I was in the Blue Angel club with a modern jazz band. I’d always loved Della Reese and I sang Bye Bye Blackbird. I didn’t know Brian was in the audience and after my performance he came up and said, “Why didn’t you sing like that at the Majestic Ballroom?” I said, “Well I was singing with proper musicians tonight, and I was singing in my key.” And then he signed me up.

When The Beatles broke big, we had all kinds of people coming up from London to manage everyone. And my father would say, “Oh, bloody Cockneys.” When Brian came, my father had to sign my contract because I wasn’t 21, and he said, “Yeah, I will sign the contract because I bought a piano at your Dad’s store [NEMS] and it’s still going strong.” And that was the only reason why he signed with Brian Epstein.

The only thing was my name. My real name is White and my father said to Brian, “You’ll have to change the name back to White. Otherwise my friends down at the docks won’t believe she’s my daughter.” And Brian said, “Well I rather quite like the name of Black.” And he quietly got his own way. I couldn’t care less what colour. I could have been Cilla Green today.

You know how they always nicknamed dockers? Well, my father’s original nickname was Shiner, because he was immaculate, with his boots shined, spit and polish. But after I became famous, he was nicknamed The Frustrated Minstrel – “because he didn’t know if he was Black or White.”

And George Martin launched you with a Lennon & McCartney original?

Paul had a song that he used to sing at the lunchtime sessions, Love Of The Loved, and it was great when he gave me that. Then I get to the studio and I’m surrounded by proper musicians. And I hated it. I just didn’t see it at all. You’ve got to remember, I’m a kid who’s buying hit records every week, so I knew what was gonna be a hit. I said to Brian, “This is so not a hit, Brian, why do you put me with professional musos? I’ve gotta be with a rock band, and let it sound like Paul does it with The Beatles in the Cavern.”

Anyway, I was overruled and it wasn’t a big hit, but it was enough. And I had a bit of chatter and the Liverpool cheek, so I made a name that way. I remember it being played on Juke Box Jury and it was voted a miss, and I totally agreed with them.

You mentioned you were also a panellist on Juke Box Jury?

Yeah. Billy Fury had a record out, I voted that a miss. Heinz was on, and I told the truth. I remember David Jacobs saying to me, “Isn’t there anything you like about this record?” and I said “Yeah, the hole in the middle.” But like an idiot, I was not a pro, and if the camera’s going to left, you just know there’s somebody in the hot seat. [Each week one act would suddenly emerge from behind a screen to meet the panel.] But thicko didn’t, and then this poor Heinz person came out and shook my hand. I was mortified. Luckily I know a bit more about television today than I did then.

How did you find the songs that really made your name?

Brian had gone to America with the Boys, and I was still buying records. I just had a thirst for rock’n’roll music. I used to look in Billboard magazine for anyone with a girl-sounding name in the Top 100, and I spotted Dionne Warwick, at 77 or something. And I went into NEMS and asked for this record to listen to, and I really was blown away. I couldn’t wait for Brian to come back from America. He said “I’ve got a Number 1 hit record for you!” I said, “No, I’ve got the next hit record for me.” In fact we both had Dionne Warwick singing Anyone Who Had A Heart. We went to see George and Brian said, “I’ve got a Number 1 for my Cilla.” Then George played it and he said, “D’you know what? That would be ideal for Bassey.” Cos he also produced her. Brian said, “I don’t think so…”

And You’re My World, I owe to Brian. He found that and said, “This is going to be your second Number 1.” I loved Anyone Who Had A Heart because it was so different, but You’re My World was an out-and-out ballad and I’m a rock’n’roll singer at heart. I didn’t think I could do this song any justice at all. I thought, “Is this song me? Isn’t it more like that lady who used to sing and cry every time?”

Vikki Carr?

I thought, “I’m turning into Vikki Carr, and I’m a rock’n’roll singer.” But I put my faith in Brian and he was right. It was my second Number 1. Unbelievable.

Had you met your future husband (and eventual manager) Bobby Willis by this stage?

Oh yes. Bobby was writing songs for me as well. And I was his tape recorder. You’ve got to remember it was reel-to-reel in those days, not even cassettes, and I’d be standing at the bus-stop when he’d get an idea, and woe betide me if I forgot the tune.

Before Brian’s death, was Bobby a sort of personal manager to you?

It was a hard life for girl singers in those days. You couldn’t come back from a gig and go into a bar, because you’d be regarded as a “lady of the night”. Television finished at 11.30, restaurants weren’t open, so you had to have some cold salad left in the room. And if you’ve done a show, you’re hyper on adrenalin. You’ve got to come down from that. So Bobby was ideal in every way. He’d fight people off if they got in the way. I could go into a bar just to have a chat after a show, because I was up there and I had no way of coming down.

Did you mix much with the other girl singers of the time? Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Sandie Shaw and so on?

Well we were all working. In a word, no, we didn’t mix together. Actually I hung out with Dusty more, because I was a goody-goody two-shoes and she would invite me to parties with her Mum and Dad. I later found out why she was inviting me. She told me, “Well, my Mum and Dad are in town and you make it respectable!” So I was closest to Dusty. I was friends with Sandie and I was friends with Lu, and Pet Clark. And if they were to walk in here today it would be great.

How did you find the transition to London?

I hated London with a passion. Because the West End isn’t the real London. I lived in a hotel for nine months, which put me off. Brian had got me a run at the London Palladium, and I said to him, “Couldn’t you have got me the Liverpool Empire?” He said, “It won’t run that long, the last two shows have only run for four weeks.” Well, nine months later I was still there, wasn’t I?

That was two shows a night and three on a Saturday, and I would go through the night just to get home to Liverpool and have Sunday lunch. But my parents had not changed. My mother went to bingo in the evening and my father went to the pub. And I remember thinking, I’ve driven all the way up to have me Sunday lunch, and now I’m here on my own watching Sunday Night At The London Palladium with our Lassie, the dog.

Did you encounter Swinging London?

It wasn’t that swinging until The Beatles and I and everybody else came to London. Like I said earlier, I was busy making it swing for other people.

But I remember Brian taking me to the Ad Lib. He said, “I know I’m going to regret this, because you’ll never be out of the place.” And he was so right. The Ad Lib was the place to go when you’d finished working. So it was great to see the Stones there, the Beatles there, you could have a steak sarnie, great music, very loud, what was there not to like about it?

Then TV seemed to take you away from music.

Well, once I got married and had the children, I found television so easy. Money for old rope, though I shouldn’t say that. It just fitted in. I couldn’t go back to travelling all over the country, singing, and have babies at the same time. So television was great for me, cos it meant one day a week I’d rehearse, do the show, then I was back at home. And something that I loved. I was like a duck to water doing TV.

The biggest thing was when Paul rang me, I was literally on the floor playing album tracks the BBC had sent me for an opening, it had to be all razzamatazz, a big opening, and Paul said, “You don’t have that personality. You should be inviting people into your home rather than you going into theirs.” And he was so right, and hence Step Inside Love.

Next year will be your 50th anniversary in the business. Any plans?

Well, if God spares me…. Both ITV and BBC are in talks. But I don’t sing any more. I went to a 60s party last night, with Savage. There was a tribute band, and the singer came over and asked would I like to go up, they know all my stuff. I said No, I don’t do it any more. I don’t even sing in the shower these days…

Ian Dury: Ambivalent Recollections

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

A piece about the late Ian Dury, written for The Word, February 2010.

I.
The chances were slender. The beauties were brief… Two lines from one of his greatest songs, Sweet Gene Vincent, seem to sum up Ian Dury. He changed a lot of people’s lives. He left his paw-prints all over our pop heritage. Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll? His phrase became a proverb. Reasons to be cheerful? He gave hard-pressed sub-editors a quick solution to the daily scramble for a headline. He was the unofficial Poet Laureate of Pop, the last shout of music hall and a link to the language of a vanished London.

He was also a bit of a phoney, and a lot of a bully. And that’s just what his loved ones say. So what shall we make of him? This year it is ten years since he died. But his biggest achievements date back to the late 1970s when he was, for a short while, Britain’s unlikeliest pop star. Look at his YouTube clips, and contemplate the limping, middle-aged man with the ribald rhymes, the self-invented look of a cut-throat charity-shop dandy, his feeling for the pulse of a city’s life from Geoffrey Chaucer to Noël Coward… and you can only marvel. Could anything like Ian Dury ever happen again?

In 2010 there is a new film, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, and a new book, Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography by Will Birch. The film and the book are different but complementary: one is a kind of fantasia, based on Dury’s personal life and deploying his songs like a Greek chorus; the biography is a more detailed music-biz saga. Consult the latter for tales of his early struggle in Kilburn & The High Roads, and the rise, fall and resurgence of Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Look to the movie for a parable of fathers and sons, wives and lovers, roadies, toadies and diamond geezers. They’re both quite critical of his difficult behaviour, yet they’re ultimately affectionate.

Personally I did not know Dury well and perhaps it was better that way. For this article I spoke to people who have lived with him inside their heads. Paul Viragh wrote Sex & Drugs & Roll; Mat Whitecross directed it; Andy Serkis played the wide-boy rhymester himself. Chaz Jankel was in real life Ian Dury’s key collaborator; he scored the movie and led the re-assembled Blockheads through their stomping re-creation of those long-gone times. There is also Will Birch, a renowned musician (The Records, The Kursaal Flyers) turned author. And finally Baxter Dury, Ian’s son: now a performer in his own right, he was the little boy on the sleeve of New Boot And Panties, standing next to his crop-haired dad.

That album, made in 1977, remains the ultimate Ian Dury artefact. When he isn’t singing of Gene Vincent’s slender chances and brief beauty, there are violent, snarling tales of the Essex under-class or frank accounts of amorous dawns. More touching is an elegy to his late father, My Old Man, that speaks of working-class dignity, of a man who served his boss but kept his self-respect – but a man, alas, who could not stick around to raise his children. His name was Bill Dury, and in the film he is played by Ray Winstone. Three generations of Dury men-folk, then – with one perplexing, sweary, lop-sided pop star in the middle.

II.

When you’re an actor best-known for playing Gollum in Lord Of The Rings, even Ian Dury must seem like a glamour role. Andy Serkis has a certain resemblance to Dury and shares that Estuarial growl. On the screen he looks the spitting image and, in fact, does all the singing too. “It’s part of the man,” he says. “It would have been weird not to. I’ve got a similar timbre to Ian. And he was never a great vocalist, was he?” Dury’s closest collaborator, Chaz Jankel, was amazed by the similarity; the Blockheads’ saxophonist, Davey Payne, pronounced a performance with Serkis as being “like a séance”.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll took shape over drinks in the Blue Posts pub in Soho. Serkis and his friend, the film’s writer Paul Viragh, began by rejecting a straight bio-pic. “We wanted the essence of the man, his energy on stage and his chaotic energy as a human being.” The actor had actually met Dury one evening in the early 1990s: “It happened to be one of the nights when he was not on good form: we were in a Chinese restaurant, he got quite drunk, and the whole night turned bad. So my meeting with Ian was not a particularly rosy one.”

Researching his role, Serkis discovered that Dury’s family also had mixed memories: “They were closely involved and when they read the first draft they went: ‘Nah, he was much worse than that.’ He could be a right bastard, and they didn’t shy away from it. We had a screening for the family and it was wonderful. We wanted to get it right for them, and honour Ian, but at the same time tell a truthful story.”

Paul Viragh did his homework too: “I spent a lot of time talking to family and friends to try and work out what he was,” says the writer. “And once I’d locked onto the front of New Boots And Panties, the fact that it’s Baxter and Ian together, and the similarities between their relationship and Ian’s relationship with his own father, it became a story about father figures, and what you take on board from your parents. Much of the personality that we later knew as Ian Dury, the rough lad-about-town, came from his father, though his mother was the one who was around the most. You can see what she put into him by the fact he’s so clever, so well-read and rounded. You’re always working out the balance between this really clever guy and the one who’s pretending to be a bit of a thug.”

Baxter Dury, whose childhood is central to the movie, confers his seal of approval. “I think I really like it. Trying to stay objective is hard but I’ve seen it five times and I’ve loved it. But it’s very powerful. The first time I saw it, it made me bleed internally.”

Baxter observes that the film is a “patriarchal” affair. “Yeah. All that stuff about his own dad comes into play, and then I’m on an album cover. Bish-bosh, it fits within the format and you have to respect that, for delivering information with a rhythm.” But Ian’s mother is rather absent from the narrative, isn’t she? “You haven’t got both ends of the story in there,” he agrees. “But it’s a view on it. Before truth comes story-telling and that’s really important. My older sister Jemima was involved in the story at least as much as I was, yet she knew all along that she wasn’t going to be in it. But I’m a device, an embodiment of children. Jemima and I both suffered those things, in a good and bad way.”

Was it like his actual upbringing, as he remembers it? The absent father who would periodically gatecrash into his life, take him on the road, expose him to drug-taking reprobates? And put him in the care of a roadie-cum-babysitter called The Sulphate Strangler?

“It’s not right in minute detail,” Baxter allows. “But it all kind of existed. It was extreme, it got happier and it got sadder and it got crazier. The film seems almost cosy, but when things got ugly they definitely got ugly. When things were funny they were definitely funny. It was all more extreme. And it was enormous fun.”

Dury’s background is also a story of social class – a complicated one. His father was a cockney bus driver and his mother a well-educated middle-class lady. But Dury Snr was also an aspirational man of the 1950s, who wished his boy to speak correctly; he left the buses to become a chauffeur, mixing with the rich and valuing formality. Ian’s mother, on the other hand, was of the bohemian sort, happy to live among book-lined untidiness and tolerant of the strange.

The ideal outlet for a boy of such upbringing was art school. Dury, who was only two years younger than John Lennon, made the same escape into this post-War, state-subsidised underground, where creativity was being defined in ever-looser terms. Like his teacher Peter Blake, Dury combined artistic vocation with a love of pop culture. Like Lennon, he was infatuated by the Teddy Boy cult, blending its proletarian swagger with the beatnik leanings of college life. His semi-autobiographical Upminster Kid pays homage to the late 1950s, hymning the rockers with a mod’s eye for style.

Pulled in different directions by the cultural currents of that moment, Dury was an awkward fit whichever way you looked at it. He could never be an Essex gang-leader, nor a dutiful white-collar trainee. On top of which there was the largest obstacle of all. Dury was, in his beloved East End rhyming slang, “a fucking raspberry ripple”…

III.

At the age of seven, Ian Dury contracted polio from an infected swimming pool. The resultant disability – a weakened left arm and a left leg that he would daily cage in metal callipers for the rest of his life – meant he was wrenched away from conventional education and sent to a grim institution for other afflicted children. When he returned to the regular school system he was a conspicuous misfit.

Researching the role, Andy Serkis discovered how Dury’s condition would manifest itself psychologically, as much as physically: “He never considered himself as a disabled person. He’d had it thrust upon him at the age of seven, so it wasn’t like he’d never known anything else. He played the disability card all over the place. He was famed for starting fights and then going ‘No, don’t! I’m a cripple!’ and having someone else carry on the fight for him.”

Baxter Dury confirms this: “Somewhere along the line he decided that his disability should be ignored on one level and used to his advantage on another. Prior to getting ill he’d been encouraged by his mother and became very precocious, spoiled almost, and when that happened, he had to try and regain the position he’d had before. But it was difficult when he went to that school, given the horrible reality of those places in the 1950s.”

After art college, Dury went into teaching, and in 1967 married his fellow artist Elizabeth Rathmell, with whom he had his daughter Jemima, followed by Baxter. He did not form his first band, Kilburn & The High Roads, until London’s pub-rock boom of the early 1970s. The Kikburns were ramshackle, given to musical pastiche and jumble-sale chic, but he was a commanding front-man. Abrasive and tender by turns, he’d spout his gruff couplets, gripping the mike-stand for support (like his idol Gene Vincent, whose own left leg had been smashed in a motor-cycle accident). The band made one album, Handsome, and were undeniably an influence on everyone from the Sex Pistols to Madness, but they were a commercial flop.

The other problem – and you would hear this from many people, at every stage of Dury's life – was that he was absolute bloody murder. His first marriage collapsed, he ran the Kilburns with a dictatorial, manipulative streak and he drove managers to distraction. His great good fortune was to find a supportive girlfriend, called Denise Roudette, and then a musical director named Chaz Jankel. The latter meeting set him on course for stardom, via the newly-founded Stiff label and a fabulously tight band that they christened The Blockheads.

So what was Ian Dury like? Could he really have been so awful?

This was a question that the film’s director, Mat Whitecross, had to address: “It was so hard to gauge who he was. He was like a hundred different people trapped in one body. In the same way that I couldn’t get a handle on the music – it was music hall, it was proto-punk and it was funk and cockney, I couldn’t pin it down – it was the same with his personality. He was this creative, galvanising force. Everyone connected with him at an important part of their lives, which was no coincidence because he brought out the best in them.

“He could be destructive and cruel, yet somehow he’s left all these people behind who have an Ian-shaped hole in their lives… So how do you frame it? You can’t make it too naturalistic, because he wasn’t a naturalistic person. He was the centre of any room he walked into. Despite everything that happened to him he had this amazing zest for life; you see the gigs and they’re incredibly joyful. You get other performers who are cool and machine-like, but he would do anything to engage with an audience.”

Andy Serkis: “The challenge of the thing was to keep people guessing the whole time, which is what Ian did. He could play the cockney geezer with this larger-than-life onstage persona, then switch to this sensitive man who would burst into tears when something moved him. What makes him attractive is that there is an honesty. He couldn’t suffer fools. I remember people reading early drafts and saying he was too unsympathetic. Why would we care about this man? But I think we do, because of this core of honesty.”

Baxter Dury: “Even when he was acting crazy, it was humorous as well. You would have to suffer all kinds of indignities, but you kind of miss it now. No-one’s upsetting people any more. There were some hilarious times, even if it took you a year to accept that it was funny. Like the way we got banned from every hotel in Hamburg, after he’d called everyone an SS soldier. It seems brilliant now but at the time... He was confrontational. He was very good at weeding out the people who needed a bit of that. He wasn’t always right and he was definitely angry. But there was something great about it all.”

Dury’s biographer Will Birch, a fellow pub-rocker, often watched him at close range: “He had a charm and an ability to seduce both men and women. He was a good one with the girls but he also seduced the band members, in the sense that he mentored them, he brought them into his world, and the ones that got it, got it big time. The rest were kicked out.”

IV.

Stardom came to Dury rather late in life. He was 36 when he first appeared on Top Of The Pops. His relative maturity should have helped him cope with sudden fame, but in fact he reacted as badly as any adolescent.

“In some ways,” thinks Mat Whitecross, “I suppose it’s even more tempting when you’ve been striving for it all your life. You’ve had these setbacks and people have said ‘You’re never going to make it.’ On the face of it, he couldn’t really sing, he was too old to be a pop star, he didn’t have classic good looks, was disabled, had all these things counting against him. Yet somehow he made it.”

In 1978, the single What A Waste and album New Boots And Panties made him a star. His insecurity was evident right up until the breakthrough. On the verge of the Blockheads’ success he’d applied to be a lift attendant in Harrods. Though wary of hard drugs, he was a drinker who did not cope well with alcohol. The environment of fame, especially in the music business, puts every temptation within easy reach, and Dury did not stint himself. If the struggle had been hard, the effect of success was to make him fractious, then even more anxious.

Paul Viragh: “What does the fighter do when the war is over? The journey of getting there was what drove him. But then it was: Right, you can do anything you want now. And in the ‘doing what you want’ the work wasn’t quite as good. He had no time for people feeling sorry for themselves, whether they had a disability or not. Using what you’ve got, striving and pushing forwards, was in his personality. And when he didn’t have to struggle any more, when he didn’t know what to push against – he fell over.”

There were now the newly-minted Dury classics, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3). Yet the next album, Do It Yourself, had an air of energies spent. For all the reviewers’ enthusiasm, it was an anti-climax. The Blockheads’ peak had already passed, and Chaz Jankel departed: “Ian was very dominating, very persuasive, and I needed time to explore other music which I felt was not suited to Ian’s voice. And we’d reached a financial position where we didn’t have to rely on each other. So I sauntered off to America.”

Jankel’s solo career got off to a flying start with the worldwide 1981 hit, Ai No Corrida, that he wrote for Quincy Jones. Meanwhile The Blockheads, despite the addition of former Dr Feelgood firebrand Wilko Johnson, seemed to flounder. Jankel defends his old comrade, asserting that the charts were just too narrow a stage for Ian Dury: “I’m sure a lot of artists go through that. They’re brought back to earth when their next record doesn’t sell very well. And the wife asks them to change the baby’s nappies. Success is fleeting. Ian never wanted to be a pop star. He was more the left-wing art student, the punk movement happened to happen at the same time as Ian but he never called himself a punk. His musical influences were very broad. He loved great literature too, and music hall.”

But Will Birch is more sceptical: “Ian used to say that he felt under pressure to deliver a follow-up and it shouldn’t be about follow-ups. But that’s a bit convenient, because he certainly enjoyed the stardom in 1979. When it slipped away in 1980 that’s the point where he started drinking and feeling very bitter. He said he couldn’t cope with fame because he felt cornered in public, he couldn’t run away in case he fell over, and it was embarrassing. But I think he loved it. It was a convenient way of explaining the relative obscurity he now found himself in, to claim he preferred it to fame.”

Fortunately, the writing team of Jankel and Dury did not implode entirely. “There were periods when we wouldn’t speak to each other for nine months or so,” he recalls. “But inevitably I’d get drawn into thinking, Oh, he’s not such a bad bloke after all. I’d make that call and he’d go ‘Come on over, have a cup of tea!’ And that was it. I was back.” Among their next numbers was the rollicking Spasticus Autisticus, made in 1981 for the United Nations’ Year Of The Disabled. It was a worthy cause, no doubt, but Dury was not cut out for pieties, and the song was simply too fierce to get official backing: “I wibble when I piddle, cos my middle is a riddle.”

Observation and word-play were the great strengths of Dury’s writing. He might be selfish, but he was never so inward-looking that he stopped observing others. The rogues’ gallery of characters in his earlier work – the “blotched and lagered” blockhead boys, Clevor Trever and the rest – recurs in the best of his final songs, Mash It Up Harry, whose sorry protagonist is like an older version of those same blockheads, a little more settled and tamed, perhaps a bit defeated by life.

“I remember watching the lyrical journey for that,” says Chaz Jankel. “Ian was originally having a pop at Harry and his little ways, but in the writing he warmed to him. Which is why he sends him off to Wembley to see the Cup Final. Ian was going, ‘You know what? In the end, Harry’s going to have a result.’ Ian was observing people having to deal with life with their unique circumstances, from Plaistow Patricia, a heroin addict, to Billericay Dickie to Harry.”

Paul Viragh: “He understood the frailty of it all. As a screenwriter you couldn’t ask for a better character, a storyteller who is drawing people as they really are, but in a sympathetic way. He could in himself be an unsympathetic man, but people really loved him, his son loved him and he loved his father. He wasn’t some dark and distant Jim Morrison figure. He was a people person, who got under their skin. Not always when they wanted him to, either.”

Ian Dury was diagnosed as having colorectal cancer in 1996. With his new partner Sophy Tilson (whom he would marry in 1999), he had two more sons, Bill and Albert. He continued to record and perform, so far as he was able, right up until his death.

I met him for a short interview, at an awards ceremony, just before the end. Awfully frail, he sat with Chaz Jankel and his minder Derek “The Draw” Hussey (who is now Ian’s replacement in the re-formed Blockheads) and talked with a benevolent air. He had a kind word for the other rock stars in the room and a glad eye for the pretty girls, who were persistently interrupting us for a photo with the great man. I’d been a fan for 25 years, since my first Kilburns gig, and Handsome is almost my favourite LP. So I burbled all this to him, the way one does. I knew there would never be another opportunity.

Dury had definitely mellowed, says his son Baxter. “He slowed down, but he’d become very ill. He stopped fighting as much. He was always really cuddly, Dad. And warm. He was never cold. But he definitely became more that way towards the end. He was really relaxed, and in the last year he was very, very charming.”

“He became more reflective on life,” says Chaz Jankel today. “He was less the angry young man and more the contemplative. Knowing the man, I’d say he found contentment.”

Did Jankel find the movie hard to deal with, emotionally?

A pause: “I’ve had a long time now to reconcile my emotions. Ian passed away in 2000 and in a way I dealt with a big part of the emotions back then. That’s it, physically, he’s gone. Spiritually, he’s around whenever I need him, we were very close. When we play gigs now, he’s there. The whole spirit of Blockheadism was initiated by Ian, this huge group of friends. People were drawn to it because they loved Ian’s energy and they were happy to shelter in it.

“At the end of the day, he loved to have a laugh. He never bemoaned his own physical problems. Ian was stoic. Grind your teeth and get on with it. In fact the rhythm of that song Spasticus Autisticus is a rhythm of defiance. It’s that stomp, four-to-the-floor, it’s the sound of the Zulu tribe about to come over the hill and massacre Michael Caine and the other Brits. And that was Ian’s favourite rhythm, it was defiance. It was Ian with a cane, trying to walk up Primrose Hill.”

Andy Serkis spoke at length to Ian’s widow Sophy: “She told me, ‘If you made a cup of tea for Ian it had to be the best cup of tea ever.’ He was exacting, and therefore not easy to live with, whether you were his child or his lover. He was capable of great selfishness, and he would admit that. It’s that balance of creative drive and thinking, Look, I’ve only got a few short minutes, relatively, on this planet and I am going to be magnificent. Don’t squander that.”

The singer’s last days are movingly described in Will Birch’s book. Dury acquired an Apple Mac and tried to write his autobiography, but the task was physically beyond him now: the only two words he managed to type were “Hallo sausages.” He died at home, with his family around him. At his funeral, mourners included Robbie Williams; the coffin was carried by members of The Blockheads and Madness. Oh, and Baxter Dury, the little boy on the front of New Boots And Panties, got up to sing that album’s sweetest song, My Old Man.

Jackie Leven: Heroes Can Be Any Size

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

This was written in tribute to Jackie Leven, shortly after his death. It appeared in The Word, March 2012, along with a CD that I compiled entitled Heroes Can Be Any Size. The track list is here.
You can find various interviews I did with Jackie here and here.

Who was Jackie Leven? It’s hard to say. Of course he was the burly Scottish singer/songwriter who passed away late last year. But if he was a big man that’s hardly surprising: he had to fit three or four different personalities in there. A couple of years ago, he told me about a meeting with his former record company. Planning the next publicity photos, a female executive suggested he should think about losing some weight. “I’m a hero,” he told her, in that softly ominous burr. “Heroes can be any size.”

You wouldn’t argue with that particular Jackie Leven. Nor with the man who quietly but firmly reminded people it was “Lee-ven”.

Little about the big man is straightforward. He was a born raconteur and the tales could be as tall as he was. Perhaps he built the character of “Jackie Leven” like a house, and then decided to move in. He was actually born Alan Moffatt, in Scotland in 1950. He grew up in the Pictish region that he called “the Kingdom of Fife” – the river of Leven was never far away – but his parents were English, with Romany and Irish ancestry. He claimed to be the first child ever expelled in Scotland over drugs. For a while, in Kirkcaldy, he was a schoolmate of the future Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Leven was sometimes aggressive, yet very literate. In his school library he’d devour every poet from John Clare to the early 20th century Russians. Then he’d bunk off, a solitary romantic rebel, to sit on the hillsides of Fife and write his own. He loved soul music and blues too, and taught himself to sing by mimicking the 1965 Fontella Bass hit Rescue Me. Leven took up his trade in the folk clubs of Scotland and travelled to Europe, sometimes sleeping rough; he played and recorded as “John St Field”, one of several pseudonyms. As he tells it, the early years were a dire succession of razor gangs, acid trips, hasty marriages and nights in jail. There was even some trainee journalism. He fathered a child but was never the settling-down sort.

By the mid-1970s, when he materialised in the squats of North London, Leven carried a formidably troubled aura. Broodingly charismatic, possessed of a steady gaze and hair-trigger unpredictability, this was one heavy dude. I met him in 1979 and like many others, was hooked for life. He took me to terrifying pubs full of angry Scotsmen; back at the flat he swallowed more drugs than I ever knew existed and told stories deep into the night. He was given to conspiracy theories: I recall one that involved the Vatican, Warner Brothers and Van Morrison. Another night he decided he would commit suicide on stage.

From the roiling, psychedelic riptides of his imagination he had dreamt up a rock band called Doll By Doll.

Their name came from an e.e. cummings poem: “two tiny selves sleep (doll by doll) motionless under magical foreverfully falling snow.” There were four of them, too old to be punks but more authentically savage than any band in town. Their records were replete with dread, stinging and deranged, or else hauntingly beautiful. Leven had a powerful voice, tender and expressive, while his lyrics overflowed in imagery and Celtic mysticism. The band fell out with record companies and were always thrown off tours by the headliners. But looking around their gigs, they did attract a lot of nutcases and fascinating women.

“We really liked all the exotic women coming and going,” Jackie told me a while ago. “I think we all knew that this was probably our one and only chance to have massive sexual availability. We all had far too many girlfriends going on. And swapping them didn’t assuage the situation.”

II.

Despite four extraordinary albums, Doll By Doll never clicked with a wider public. Leven turned his failure into art: the band’s most golden moment, Main Travelled Roads, ends with the line “Eternal is the warrior who finds beauty in his wounds” – words so freighted with meaning for Jackie that he once broke down and sobbed when I asked him to explain. On stage at an outdoor festival in 1981, he observed the young singer of a new Irish act, U2, walking among the crowd and getting more attention than Doll By Doll. The 1980s were not looking auspicious.

In fact the whole decade was a horror show. The band imploded and Leven went solo. But his new career was kyboshed from the start, when he received a brutal kicking from unknown assailants in a London street. Even his larynx was damaged. In despair, the singer lapsed into heroin addiction.

Eventually, by sheer will-power, Leven cleaned himself up and co-founded a charity to help fellow addicts. Called CORE (Courage to stop, Order in life, Release from addiction, Entry into new life) it thrives to this day. CORE’s most prominent patron was Diana, Princess of Wales, whom Leven was to meet on several occasions. It was a mind-boggling combination, but Leven told me that Lady Di took a shine to him. She’d shoot him a sideways glance and say, “What are you doing after?” She once asked him to sing for her, so he obliged with an old Scottish air The Bonnie Prince O’ Moray (it’s the tune he borrowed for Main Travelled Roads). Reconnecting with his Gaelic folk roots, Leven felt the call of music once again.

Enormous credit goes to the Cooking Vinyl label, who signed Jackie in 1994 and supported him staunchly for the rest of his life. He forsook the psycho-rock of Doll By Doll for plangent balladeering, and hit his stride with gorgeously titled albums such as The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death. Gaining in weight now, he would stride about London with leonine hair, wearing an 18th century shirt and knee-breeches, like an undefeated Jacobite laird. He announced plans for his own blend of Scotch whisky, called Leven’s Lament (“the Lonely Spirit of the Glens”). For all I know it could have been a scam, but Jackie’s tales were too charming to scrutinise.

Naturally there was still trouble in his life. A girlfriend left him, running off with the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard. (We’ve all been there, haven’t we?) In recompense the bodyguard gave Jackie a tape of the American poet Robert Bly, known for his leadership of “the Men’s Movement”. After that, Leven was in demand as a spokesman for the UK wing of this movement, urging a return to men’s primal natures. One had visions of white-collar bongo-botherers, parking their Volvos just outside the woods. But, as usual in Levenland, what ought to seem nonsensical sounded entirely convincing when he sat you in a bar.

Levenland really exists. One of his final songs is called To Live And Die In Levenland; he himself coined the adjective Levenesque. The glorious records of his 17-year solo career comprise a whole world unto itself. Men, Women, Love and Trouble are its compass points and alcohol its oceans. “Everyone’s got a story,” he told me. “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.” Sure enough there were songs of waking up with unexplained scars on his right hand, the fell stigmata of the fighting drunk.

Though Leven was fond of a sherbert, his real love was bars, and he used to list his favourites on every album sleeve. A special interest were the haunts of old working men whose lives had lost meaning since the closure of mines, mills and factories. (Poortoun, a 1997 song, draws on images of Fife.) The young men of such places were even harder hit, neither workers nor warriors. The crime novelist and fellow-Fifer Ian Rankin was drawn to this dimension of Leven’s work. He pictured his great creation, the Edinburgh detective John Rebus, consoling himself at night with these songs. “Not only did I like, it,” he told me when I interviewed both men for The Word in 2004, “but I thought Rebus would like it too: 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.”

Rankin name-checked Leven in his fiction, and the singer responded with songs like The Haunting Of John Rebus. The pair made an album together, Jackie Leven Said. Rankin added, “He’s one of the most poetic songwriters I know… He’s an undiscovered treasure.”

Leven once told me that bars were “important places, where I’ve had splendid moments of reverie. 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.”

Deborah Greenwood, Jackie’s partner for the last 15 years of his life, offers a valuable insight here: “He told me that when he was younger, he used to wait for his Dad outside the bars; that’s what men did in Scotland in the 1950s, they went to the pub. And there was a real yearning there for something. The idea that that’s where the men were, that’s where the big thing happened, you were going to get this big mystery revealed to you, in a bar. It was about this Congregation of Men.”

A fine singer herself, who often performed and recorded with Jackie, Deborah Greenwood helped Leven find stability he had never known before. He was still the wandering minstrel, suitcase and guitar in hand, forever taking trains across Northern Europe to play to his scattered tribes of disciples, or even disappearing for days, literally to sleep under hedges. But during his life with Greenwood, in a cottage in Hampshire, he “finally discovered the gods of the hearth.” A gifted guitarist, he’d practise for three hours every day (his tuning, from the bottom, was E Ab B E Ab B). He was absurdly fond of sentimental nick-nacks, and collected little pictures of dogs and owls.

“He felt he was covered in ‘electric fur’,” she continues, “which is a really strange thing to say, but it always stuck with me. He was prickly and he couldn’t do some of the things that we take for granted. I used to laugh and say, Well that’s a very good excuse for not doing the shopping. If you were busy you’d come home and think, I can’t believe this, I asked if you could possibly mend the fence that has blown down. And he’d have written you an amazing song about mending the fence, possibly taken Rilke’s view on wood-turning, and a few other things, which is phenomenal, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But at that very moment you needed your fence mended. He saw life very differently.

“He was a scary man when he was younger, and he could be scary when he was older as well. He was quite a presence.”

Leven gave up drinking in February last year, after the death of his younger brother. He wasn’t yet aware that he himself was ill. He stopped, just as he had with heroin, simply by deciding it was time.

III.

“He had to feel very safe before he’d calm down,” says Deborah. “And it took a long time. I think living in a little village, eventually, with horses and dogs and all that, got Jackie as close as he was going to get to being a peaceful person. But as a friend said, he’d go the most difficult places and report back. He kept doing that.”

There was always this sense of Jackie Leven exploring the wilder shores, on our behalf, wasn’t there?

“Absolutely. And that’s the hard thing, if you love someone very much. Believe me, he was no saint, but it’s hard to see something that does a huge amount for everyone else in the world, that doesn’t do a huge amount for the person that you love. There was this view from fans that they almost wanted to see him suffering. They wanted to see him getting wildly drunk, getting through a pint of vodka-and-Windolene, because that was their image of who they wanted. They felt that he was doing something for them.

“All of which is wonderful and I’m incredibly pleased for them – says she, trying not to sound bitter – but on an individual basis it maybe didn’t make for as happy and contented a life as he could have had if he didn’t take that on.”

Among the many notebooks that Leven has left behind, Deborah found this:-

And my job is to listen
then I hear
then I write
then I sing
and I sing to those I heard
when I was listening
because those are your songs
not mine

I know you have to buy the songs
Just remember one thing
I too have paid the price
And it was worth it

Leven was always the most of everything. The gravest man, yet the funniest. The kindest, but the most unsettling. We never knew which was in the room. “What do you call a man,” he once asked me, “who sings and yet sleeps forever?” It sounded worrying. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Perry Coma,” he replied.

Last spring he began to complain of tiredness. Friends begged him to see a doctor. In September his cancer was diagnosed. The final months were predictably awful. On 14th November, 2011, Jackie Leven at last “stepped out of his body and into blossom”

That quote is from a favourite poem of his, A Blessing by James Wright. Combined with Jackie’s own song, Working Alone, it forms the last track of this compilation, and was played at Leven’s funeral in Hampshire. “I had a beautiful letter from a long time fan who came to the funeral,” says Deborah. “It said, ‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist but hearing Working Alone/A Blessing rolling through that country church, as Jackie was carried in, was the nearest thing to a spiritual experience I’ve ever had.’”

A few months ago, in what may have been the final message he ever posted online, Leven wrote: “I have been a troubled soul most of my life although I have learned to be at peace with much of the troubles – a sort of Belfast Of The Mind in which the old conflicts remain raw in the imagination, but there is no real appetite for returning to the death ground.”

A Belfast of the Mind… It’s a Levenesque irony that his spirit was finding peace, just when his body decided to go to war. No musician I ever met has left so deep an impression as Jackie Leven. He was a man who looked into his own soul and found there all the things that everyone shares in common. And he made them sound beautiful. Leven was a singer and player of rare distinction, a world-class story-teller, and one of those elite songwriters who merits the name of poet. He was my friend for 32 years and I’ll never forget him.

HEROES CAN BE ANY SIZE
An Introduction To Jackie Leven

Night Lilies
From the album Night Lilies, 1998

Irresistible Romance
From the album Shining Brother Shining Sister, 2003

Heartsick Land
From the album The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death, 1994

Another Man’s Rain
From the album Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me!, 2007

Poortoun
From the album Fairy Tales For Hard Men, 1997

Universal Blue
From the album Night Lilies, 1998

Friendship Between Men And Women
From the album Creatures Of Light And Dark, 2001

Men In Prison
From the album Forbidden Songs Of The Dying West, 1995

The Haunting Of John Rebus
From the album Jackie Leven Said by Jackie Leven and Ian Rankin, 2005

King Of The Barley
From the album Elegy For Johnny Cash, 2005

Tied-up House
From the album Shining Brother Shining Sister, 2003

Olivier Blues
From the album Lovers At The Gun Club, 2008

To Live And Die In Levenland
From the album Wayside Shrines And The Code Of The Travelling Man by Jackie Leven and Michael Cosgrave, 2011

Working Alone / A Blessing
From the album Forbidden Songs Of The Dying West, 1995

The Life Of Roger Eagle

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Roger Eagle was one of the three creators of Eric’s Club in Liverpool. Bill Sykes’ biography is a testament to the profound effect that Roger had on all who knew him. This review appeared in The Word, July 2012.

SIT DOWN! LISTEN TO THIS! THE ROGER EAGLE STORY
By Bill Sykes (EMPIRE)

In a pamphlet he wrote a few years ago, Bill Drummond of the KLF described his late friend Roger Eagle. Promoting a Dr Feelgood gig in Liverpool, Eagle was putting the evil eye on troublemakers in the queue: “A large man with bright red shirt and black trousers… He must have been six foot four and in his mid-thirties. He was a figure of natural authority. His mere appearance quelled whatever punch-ups were erupting.”

Drummond asked someone who this man was: “You don’t know? That man is Roger Eagle, the greatest man on Merseyside after Bill Shankly.”

The pamphlet, incidentally, was called Brutality, Religion And A Dance Beat – the three qualities Eagle believed you would find in all the greatest pop music. Drummond suggests that the archetypal Roger Eagle record would be Bo Diddley Meets Beefheart At The Black Ark, produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry. Such a record doesn’t exist, of course, but Roger Eagle’s entire life was a sort of mythic quest to find some equivalent Holy Grail.

As a club DJ, promoter and all-round musical evangelist, the tall man with a guardsman’s moustache was literally a life-changing force in many people’s lives. When I first knew him he was running Eric’s, the Liverpool club that would spawn pop stars from Simply Red to Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Just as profound was the effect he had on hundreds of ordinary punters, whose tastes dramatically expanded under his tutelage. But I was only dimly aware, at that point, that Roger was already the veteran of another musical revolution.

That was Northern Soul, the dancefloor phenomenon he had pioneered in his early DJ days at Manchester clubs like the Twisted Wheel. If we lay aside the Scouse-Manc rivalry we can acknowledge the North-west of England as one of the world’s musical hot-spots. A staggering proportion of its achievements can be traced back this one man, whose name remains pretty well unknown. Sit Down! Listen To This! – the title itself captures Roger Eagle’s crusading zeal whenever he had a prized piece of vinyl and a willing victim – is the first book to place him centre-stage. It’s not a vividly-written book, but it gets the job done via straight, transcribed interviews with those who knew him best.

Roger was a rather posh Oxford boy who drifted North and found the grittier atmosphere suited him. He put on gigs by his beloved blues and soul stars wherever he could, and bullied local kids into forming their own bands. Mick Hucknall was probably his most successful pupil, but there were far stranger instances like Drummond’s own Big In Japan. Eagle lived a semi-vagrant life with only his records for company: he never made money, nor found a long-term lover. He could disappear sometimes, when the debt-collectors got too near. When he died in 1999, popular music lost a champion it never knew it had.

Vinyl Culture 3: B-sides

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The last in a trilogy of “Vinyl Culture” articles, this appeared in The Word’s issue of July 2012.
You can see Part 1, on the Art of the Album Sleeve, here.
And Part 2, on Vinyl Record Labels, is here.

I.
The vinyl single is pop at its purest. It’s no more “real” than any other medium of delivery, but it’s fundamentally different. If you’ve ever used a turntable you’ll know the frisson that comes with shifting up from 33 to 45: here is where things will really start moving. (Long before Jeremy Clarkson, the BBC’s pop radio show was called Top Gear.)

Why are singles so exciting? Partly it’s to do with process. Ever since the first cassette Walkman, we’ve been progressively trained by new technology to treat music as background. It plays continuously without our intervention, and normally it happens while we’re doing something else. But the vinyl 45 won’t stand for that. To play at all, vinyl requires some investment of labour. And singles need tending every couple of minutes. Listening to vinyl is immersive, and that’s unique today. It makes us concentrate. And then, for a thrill that’s practically illicit, you turn the record over and take a trip to the Dark Side.

B-sides are the purest expression of vinyl devotion. B-sides separate the men from the boys (and often, alas, from women). They are not for plastic punks or weekend hippies. In a way that’s practically subversive, the very word “single” seems to deny the B-side’s existence. Singles are actually doubles, but to many people the “flipside” is invisible: it’s the mad relative locked in the attic, or the royal consort marching five steps behind. That’s why proper vinyl obsessives are so fiercely protective of them.

And it’s why, to their minds, every A-side implicitly ends with the same words as ELO’s Mr Blue Sky. Do you know that line? The happiest single ever written, it’s the song that never wants to end. But when it finally does, listen closely and a sleepy vocoder croaks, “Please turn me over…”

II.
Double-sided discs were technically possible from the earliest days of the shellac 78, but they weren’t standard until the 1920s. It’s likely that gramophone companies could not see the point of giving away more than necessary (though one marketing wheeze involved pasting lyrics on to the blank side). More profoundly, though, there was the existential question of what to put on a double-sided disc. “There has never been consensus regarding how the two sides of a record should relate to each other,” says Dr Richard Osborne of Middlesex University. B-sides receive a whole chapter in his forthcoming book, Vinyl: A History Of The Analogue Record (to be published by Ashgate later this year).

For years, he writes, it was common to stick unrelated artists on each side, even performing in unrelated genres. The idea, presumably, was to expand the record’s appeal by addressing different markets. Eventually that practice died out and one-act-per-disc became the norm. But there was, as yet, no distinction between “A” and “B” tracks, let alone a hierarchy of importance. Reviewers in the early music press used the neutral term “sides” to describe any recorded work.

In America, things began to change with the spread of jukeboxes and the rise of radio play. It finally became clear that most records had a more popular side. US charts were based on jukebox plays and radio exposure, and while the two sides of a disc might show up independently, it made sense to put your marketing muscle into the track that DJs and punters were getting behind. The reviewers were suddenly talking about “flipsides” and advertising budgets went to the main track. The B-side was born, and its fate was to be ignored.

Which is precisely the point at which, for connoisseurs, B-sides start to acquire mystique. There are famously two sides to every story, and through the vinyl underbelly of pop hits we trace an entire alternative history. The first five Elvis Presley singles, writes Richard Osborne, were “stellar examples: each of these backs a countrified blues song with a blues-drenched country tune. They represent the world turned upside down and inside out.” Sun Records, therefore, used the B-side with far more imagination than the average label: “The B-side is both mirror and inversion, and the greatest couplings have taken advantage of this fact.”

B-sides can pull off astonishing surprises. The epoch-defining song of early rock’n’roll, Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock, originally languished as second-choice to a lame thing called Thirteen Women (And Only One Man In Town). The same goes for those twin classics of infant British rock, Cliff Richard’s Move It and Johnny Kidd’s Shakin’ All Over (the latter was intended as support act to the cornball Yes Sir That’s My Baby).

It’s striking how, in all three cases, the better track was deemed too raw for mass exposure – B-sides are a traditional site for experiment and freedom – and we often have radio DJs to thank for their belated rescue. Similar stories lie behind Louie Louie by Richard Berry, Gloria by Van Morrison’s Them, Green Onions by Booker T. & The MGs, Maggie May by Rod Stewart and I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. Left to their own devices, B-sides are the keepers of great secrets.

Despite their lack of prestige, B-sides claim financial parity at least. Publishing royalties make no distinction between the different sides of a single, a fact not lost on Phil Spector, who liked to back his pop symphonies for The Crystals and Ronettes with session-man freak-outs that earned just as much money. (The ruse never quite disappeared: see for example Swinging London on the B-side of The Pretenders’ Brass In Pocket.) Spector’s ploy is forgivable. It now seems greedy to expect a masterpiece like Baby I Love You to oblige with second helpings. Less attractive were the manoeuvres of certain pirate radio stations who would offer airplay to a track in return for a publishing interest in its mediocre flip.

If it happens to back a mega-hit, the adventurous B-side can be smuggled into millions of homes. Roger Taylor of Queen has seldom done a better or more profitable day’s work than writing I’m In Love With My Car for the B-side of Bohemian Rhapsody. And yet the public can reject a song as well. It’s bizarre to think that Wings’ inescapable Mull Of Kintyre was conceived as a double A-side with the widely-ignored rocker Girls’ School.

The Monkees were not a “proper” band in some ways, but they knew the value of a great B-side and therefore deserve respect. So did T. Rex, The Jam and The Smiths. Richard Osborne quotes Johnny Marr as saying, “It wasn’t actually the number next to the chart placing [that mattered]… I was more concerned with what my mates thought of the B-sides.” He’s quite right: a world without Half A Person or How Soon Is Now would be a barren place indeed. Reggae reinvented the B-side as an instrumental “version” to reflect dub culture. Twelve-inch dance singles took advantage of wider groove spacing to deliver added oomph for the re-mix.

III.
But what’s a B-side nowadays? Our modern digital landscape finds no room for them. As long ago as the 1980s the CD single made flipsides redundant. Oasis, for instance, saved some of their best work for CD “B-sides”, but tracks that play automatically after their nominal A-side lack the chic obscurity of real vinyl. LPs, in any case, had long accustomed us to expect a climax somewhere towards the end of a disc.

We must probably accept that as a living art-form B-sides are gone. But they are still around to be rediscovered. I nowadays trawl my vinyl with especial reverence for them. Most famous A-sides have been digitised, anthologised and generally i-Tuned to death. But with each passing month – CRASH! – another chunk of masonry falls from the edifice of memory. The half-forgotten B-side is all the more magical for being found again.

And what’s this, playing now? Why, it’s Gilbert O’Sullivan’s wry 1971 heartbreaker If I Don’t Get You (Back Again), partner-song to its much more famous A-side No Matter How I Try: “Now that you’ve turned me over,” it begins, “… the title of which you’ll see, they’ve written in capital letters, just below the hole in me.” That’s the genius of the B-side in one inspired couplet. Mr Blue Sky would surely smile his approval.

Vinyl Culture 2: Labels

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

From The Word magazine, June 2012, this was the second in a series on Vinyl Culture.
You can see the first part, on the Art of the Album Sleeve, here.

And the final part, on B-sides, is here.

Why do we still call music companies “record labels”? Actual records, vinyl ones, are now a tiny aspect of what they do. And the physical label – that circle of paper they glued on to a plastic disc – is correspondingly rare. Vinyl may never die but its time as pop’s definitive medium is obviously over. And just as I miss the album sleeves, those big cardboard squares that I cherished for years, so I believe those round paper labels are worth a pang of our regret as well.

Labels used to matter. Sometimes they were beautiful, sometimes not. Usually they were informative. But those magic circles shaped the mythology of music. That’s why we can’t stop saying record labels. Without that mental picture, music companies are just... music companies.

So let’s hear it for record labels. I mean the paper ones, not the businesses. A label was the livery that vinyl wore, with its own heraldic traditions. Selecting a record, coaxing the needle, you saw the label spinning – in full sight – for as long as the music lasted. Only vinyl had that kind of presence, a pleasure for the eye as well as the ear. Compact discs are occasionally decorative, but they disappear inside the machines that play them; cassettes had the same problem; and digital music is a world of invisible things. Move along. Nothing to see here.

There are record collectors who specialise, not in particular artists or genres, but in niche imprints like Piccadilly, or Dawn or Regal Zonophone. The names alone can flood you with romantic associations. And labels were statements. If 2-Tone really stood for something, it’s because of the acts it signed and the records they made. But that something was powerfully reinforced by the little black-and-white man (“Walt Jabsco”, if memory serves,) languidly turning somersaults on the record deck as The Specials sang Ghost Town.

The paper label was more than branding. Part of the fabric of the record, it became part of the music. More visible on singles in bags than on LPs in sleeves, labels gave identity to the musicians who made the music and to the company that financed it. They conferred authenticity. Somebody said to me: “I don’t know about you but I couldn’t listen to a Beatles single if it were on some nasty reissue label – or even on Decca.” How many book publishers or film companies could ever claim the same levels of recognition and loyalty that record labels did?

From Sun, Stax, Motown and Blue Note, to 4AD, Creation, Rough Trade and Postcard, the legendary labels became virtual genres in their own right. But I doubt if that’s been quite as possible since the demise of vinyl. The disappearance of paper labels has undermined our awareness of record companies themselves.

Colours were a big thing: Polydor red, RCA orange, Warner green… The logos and images ranged from little dogs with big gramophones to Roger Dean’s design for Virgin Records (a trippy, twin-hippy effect that lingered, incongruously, as late as The Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen). Butterflies fluttered across Elektra records and Chrysalis too. John Peel chose fairy-folk horticulture for his Dandelion venture. A&M had Herb Alpert’s trumpet. The Vertigo label presented a swirling pattern that hinted at derangement, suitable for the home of Black Sabbath, Juicy Lucy and maximum heaviosity.

Some designs were more functional. Decca Records played the science card, in a time when hi-fi equipment was still new to most living rooms. Their labels liked to proclaim “ffrr”, or Full Frequency Range Recording. To drive the point home, even such fabled records as The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet had to carry a not-very-nice drawing of a human ear, just above the track listing. In this regard the Stones were lagging behind The Beatles, who had by now launched their very own Apple label: the records’ playfully conceptual style (crunchy green on one side, crisply white on the other) dealt a blow to staid formality.

Apple aside, one of the classic pictorial labels bore the slogan “Burbank: Home Of Warner Bros Recordings” and its West Coast chic was conveyed by an avenue of sunlit trees. We were already a long way from human ears and “ffrr”. Back in England the producer Mickie Most invented RAK Records and illustrated them with a photo of his sailing boat. If you didn’t know the story, you could only wonder why Suzi Quatro or The Vibrators were revolving around the image of a rich man’s plaything on an azure sea. More worrying still, Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label carried a winged figure apparently plunging from the sky. Rumours arose that this was a satanic depiction of Lucifer, the fallen angel.

Music was always the soul of any record, but a label was its face, name, rank and serial number. The very idea of a “white label” was excitingly perverse. It’s practically an oxymoron. As soon as I knew they existed, with their implicit promise of the illicit or elite, I couldn’t wait to own one.

II.

Some labels, like Island, were genuine entities. Others were only sub-divisions of something bigger. And some were only sub-cultural fig-leaves for something so evil it probably wore a suit.

To take one example, EMI was the flagship of British music for 80 years. Sadly, it’s sailing to the breakers’ yard. Like the conglomerates who will inspect it for scrap value, EMI too was a product of mergers and acquisitions, formed from older firms like Columbia and His Master’s Voice. In fact for much of its history a typical EMI disc was not branded that way. Nobody in the 1960s spoke of The Beach Boys or The Beatles as being “on EMI”: so far as fans were concerned, the acts they loved were on Capitol or Parlophone, or some other imprint of Electrical & Musical Industries.

Pink Floyd were initially on EMI’s Columbia (like Cliff Richard, no less) and then transferred to Harvest. This was a classic manoeuvre of the times, circa 1970. Harvest had a slightly psychedelic green-and-yellow logo, unlike most of EMI’s soberly traditional styles, and was used to house the wilder and hairier types, like Deep Purple and the Edgar Broughton Band. In other words, Harvest was a flag of convenience, a marketing ploy to conceal The Man, who still controlled The Kids’ music. (Decca’s Deram, Pye’s Dawn and Philips’ Vertigo were similar acts of corporate camouflage.) Not until later in the 1970s were new signings such as Queen and Kate Bush openly branded as EMI.

That’s not to say that EMI’s involvement was ever a secret. Their name was prominent on the sleeves, whatever the actual label. Their factory address at Hayes, Middlesex, became more familiar than your mother’s maiden name. And a routine feature of EMI packaging, from A Hard Day’s Night (Parlophone) to the LPs of Tyrannosaurus Rex (Regal Zonophone) was an advert for EMITEX, a mysterious sort of cloth that promised “an effective means of ensuring groove cleanliness.” There were always vinyl owners with a fetish for groove cleanliness. Oddly they often chose to live in unimaginable squalor.

If EMI loomed as a vague corporate presence behind the actual labels, Island Records was a company that came for a time to represent a whole way of life. Its paper label of the late 1960s/early 1970s was itself a revelation, a sort of pink moon, shining in a sky of black plastic. By the time of Nick Drake’s real Pink Moon, the label had gone for a literal “island” design, though it retained a pink surrounding circle. But the very boldness of Island vinyl played to the company’s strength: here was a label that drew attention to itself because it was its own best selling point.

Those were the years when Island could make its name as the natural home of gruff organic rockers like Free, Jethro Tull and Traffic; then smoothly introduce us to the camp artifice of Sparks and Roxy Music. Greater yet was their achievement in bringing Bob Marley & The Wailers to a white rock market that knew little and cared less for reggae. The power of Island’s reputation, I am sure, persuaded many a denim-clad sceptic to overlook his disdain for novelty singles by Jonathan King and give this new Jamaican bloke a spin. I mean, he even had long hair, like a real musician.

III.

And where is Island now? The answer, boringly, is that it’s part of Universal, who bought its previous owners Polygram. The label Chris Blackwell founded in Jamaica in 1959 (his Marley signing was really a return to roots, not a mad departure), ceased to be a real independent many years ago. Its name pops up on modern records here and there but I’d be hard-pressed to say what Island stood for any more. Paul Weller is an Island act and I’m sure he likes the heritage its name still implies. In the same way, Morrissey, one of pop’s great curators, must have enjoyed reviving His Master’s Voice.

But there is a difference between a registered trademark and a living company, one with a recognisable owner, dedicated staff and its own building. What technology has done to wipe out physical labels, economics has done to labels as businesses. The smallest go the wall; the promising ones get bought up; the biggest are so sprawling they lack anything you might call an artistic vision. Labels and businesses are both about a human relationship, of the listener to the object, and the artist to the company.

Labels were de-mythologised by The Sex Pistols. For six months between 1976 and ’77, the central question in the band’s drama was who would sign them next. EMI ran away, A&M took over, and after more upheaval the band went to Virgin. The workings of the record business had never looked more exposed. It was as if a pantomime backdrop had collapsed to reveal the ropes, pulleys and stagehands behind. Today, the bidding would be less frantic. In the 21st century A&M belongs to Universal while Virgin belongs to EMI. And most of EMI is now headed for Universal.

Thankfully there are still plenty of great labels in the world, usually small, whose name alone is a recommendation to the faithful. Whether or not their music is your tipple, words like Warp, Domino and Fierce Panda promise a better time than something called “Warner Strategic Marketing” who handled the last Madonna album I saw.

Album sleeves are the stuff of coffee table books now, but don’t overlook the humble 45. The painter Morgan Howell likes to fill vast canvases with favourite singles. You can commission your own (supersizeart.com) or buy a print for £500. He understands the potency of those seven-inch squares – all the more powerful at 27 inches – and the scruffier the better: “It’s not just a flat image for me, it’s the wrinkles and the disc inside the bag and the label on the disc. I celebrate the wrinkles, it shows it’s had a life.”

Customers ask him for anything from Buddy Holly on Coral to Marc Bolan’s Metal Guru. “They become more than a single. They’re absorbed into your history. I’m fascinated by the personal journeys people have taken with their singles, from bedroom to bedroom, off to some party then finally to a box in the loft.”

Downloads don’t have labels, of course; there’s nothing to glue paper on any more. But Spotify streams don’t even mention record companies. Tracks now exist in the isolation of the ether. Alias the sound cloud. Or the “celestial jukebox”. Nothing is inherently bad about that, it’s just different. But I wish I could see who the songwriters were and what year the music was made. The record executive Jimmy Iovine, who’s smarter than most, told the San Francisco Chronicle recently: “Right now, subscription music online is culturally inadequate. It needs feel. It needs culture… Subscription has an enormous hole in it, and it’s not satisfying.”

Twelve-inch cardboard squares and pretty paper circles, the paraphernalia of vinyl, aren’t the answer. But they were always more important than they seemed. They added feel. They added culture. They satisfied. “Happy To Be A Part Of The Industry Of Human Happiness” as the Immediate label always said. Asylum, Charisma, Korova… Stiff, Chiswick and Trojan…. Marble Arch, Cherry Red and Chess… “Add These Outstanding LPs To Your Collection”… The butterflies and the dandelions, the twin-headed hippies, the little dog and his master’s big gramophone, the pink moon and Mickie Most’s boat. I wouldn’t have missed them for the world

Vinyl Culture 1: Album Covers

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The Word magazine commissioned me to write a three-part series on Vinyl Culture. The first instalment, for their May 2012 issue, looks at the art of the album cover.

(You can see the second part, on vinyl record labels, here. And the final part, on B-sides, is here.)

Vinyl survives, and here and there it even thrives, but its Imperial Phase is over and it won’t be coming back. A lot of us mourn the decline of vinyl for nostalgic reasons. And some will swear it always sounded better than what came afterwards. Personally, however, I’ve come to realise that what I really miss is cardboard.

Cardboard and vinyl were a hell of a team. Between them they were more than a sound carrier and protective wrapper. They were the sacramental accessories of a culture. If you came of age before the rise of music videos, then record sleeves were often the way you “saw” music. There were few alternatives. And I’m inclined to think that in some mysterious manner they altered the music itself, as if an alchemical magic seeped through that inner bag between the square and the circle.

In its pomp the 12-inch album cover was a great popular art-form. To think of Thriller, Nevermind, Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side Of The Moon is to hit upon the best-known images in our collective memory. There is still good design around, but the context has been irrevocably changed by technology. From the mid-1980s, when CDs starting taking over, the canvas was dramatically shrunk. And today, whether you’re listening to iTunes on a desktop or streaming Spotify through a smartphone, you won’t be spending much time gazing at a thumbnail’s worth of pixels.

Record sleeves were like blue denim. They aged attractively and, over time, conformed themselves to the contents within. An old album cover has the “materiality” of ownership, its edges softened and bearing the faint palimpsest of the vinyl, visible like the outlines of an ancient settlement in an aerial photograph. If you had to buy “pre-loved”, and most of us did, you might have had strangers’ names in felt-tip on the back, and perhaps they ticked their favourite tracks. I don’t know why they’d do that, but it never seemed to bother me. Like cash, a record could have passed through hundreds of hands but once it’s yours, it feels like yours.

I’ve nothing against compact discs and took them up as avidly as anyone. But I find I can part with them without a backward glance. They weren’t that pleasing to buy in the first place, not when you contrast the softly fluttering breeze and muted “pffft” sound that came with vinyl browsing, against the pedestrian plastic clatter of CDs in a megastore.

Vinyl sleeves conferred prestige and mystique upon the artists: would The Doors would have been so convincing without the enigmatic images on Strange Days or Morrison Hotel? And when you carried them about, albums were proud badges of young identity: they were the Facebook of their day.

How did they come into being, these marvellous things? And will the world crash to its doom without them?

II.
Music is of course abstract. It doesn’t physically look like anything. Until the age of digital downloads and streaming, however, we always needed to package music; we had to give it something to live in and to make it look good while it lounged around our living spaces. Before recorded sound there were song-words sold on ballad sheets, hawked about the city streets, and the slickest of these would carry a woodcut illustration. The diarist Samuel Pepys, a fan of cultural ephemera, assembled such songs into bound volumes and thereby, perhaps, invented the compilation album.

The direct ancestor of sleeve art is sheet music. It flourished in the 19th century when every pub and parlour had its own piano, and spawned the music business as we know it. It took a while before the gramophone trade would match the energetic self-hype of sheet music, and for decades the 78 rpm disc came in dowdy wrappers that advertised the shop or the record company. Not until the 1940s, when some 78s were bundled together in what were literally “albums” did the designers get to work. The next innovation, vinyl, was far more portable and durable and by the 1950s, Frank Sinatra’s “long-players” afforded a fine foot-square billboard for crisply modern graphic art.

To the sleeve-art cognoscenti the 1950s and beyond were a time of giants: designers like Burt Goldblatt, Alex Steinweiss and Jim Flora, as well as more anonymous toilers in record company back rooms, turned out minor marvels of consumerist chic. Perhaps because of its artier demographic, the jazz genre was especially well-served; Andy Warhol drew for the Blue Note label a decade before he launched the Velvet Underground with a silkscreen banana. Right from the start, LP covers were more than utilitarian. They were a means of seduction.

For next to no money at all you can pick up the kitsch and the classic of early vinyl art in nearly any charity shop. When they were young, these records were talismans of new suburban affluence, spread upon carpets around the sleek new stereogram that had banished the wind-up gramophone. The teenager, grooving upstairs to a small Dansette, would have been confined to seven-inch singles until well into the 1960s. The LP was mass market but it wasn’t cheap.

In Britain the four-song EP (extended play) was the only affordable step-up from the basic 45. There was for most people a sense of achievement in simply owning LPs at all. Often it scarcely mattered who made them: they were lifestyle trophies, mood music for the first British dinner parties to be given without servants.

III.

It took pop a while to change the game. The best quality vinyl was reserved for classical releases, and rock’n’roll artwork was a branch of marketing more than a creative statement. Sales orthodoxy dictated that the early Beatle LPs carry the band name and title in a strip at the top, for ease of in-store browsing. Bob Dylan’s first LPs obeyed another convention by listing song titles on the front. On the reverse there were often sleeve-notes (“The platter you’re now holding in your hands…”) to woo the undecided shopper. Both acts, of course, would soon reassert the haughty artistic cool you might have got from a Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis release. After the Beatles’ debut LP Please Please Me, from which they grin with obliging youthful eagerness, they scarcely ever smiled for an album cover again.

Some time in the middle 1960s, when “groups” became “bands”, the album word came back into vogue. It’s never really been displaced. The economy of rock undertook a gigantic shift from singles towards long-players. Where the 45 had been the standard measure of pop success, the rock album would steadily become the central artistic enterprise. (Led Zeppelin, of course, didn’t do 45s at all. To the snobbish, soul and reggae were “only” about singles.)

In the infancy of pop media, an album cover was often your only window on to the artist’s world. Outside of the hit parade there was amazingly little data, and certainly no YouTube. As a child I went to my first gig with no idea of what The Beach Boys looked like. I had pictured a line of big-toothed men with black Brylcreemed hair, only to find some awkward chubsters in stripy shirts and Mike Love dressed as Jesus Christ. My next obsession was Tyrannosaurus Rex, having heard Marc Bolan’s bleat on John Peel, and I couldn’t even imagine a sight to match that noise until I found a second-hand album sleeve, in a shop that sold old prams and dead men’s false teeth.

Therefore, when you finally possessed an album sleeve, you read it like a book. Cream’s Disraeli Gears, designed in 1967 by Eric Clapton’s flatmate Martin Sharp, shows how really hip covers were no longer just a marketing trigger, but the gift that goes on giving. Here was art expected to yield its secrets slowly, over the course of long hours by the hi-fi. Sgt. Pepper and Disraeli Gears, in all their baroque, psychedelic complexity, were like the stained glass windows of a medieval church, full of picture-stories to enlighten a pre-literate age.

Even if you knew what pop stars looked like, through Top Of The Pops or breathlessly uncritical snippets in the New Musical Express, there was little sense of what they “stood for”. In the absence of a 5000-word profile in Rolling Stone magazine, clever acts perfected the “manifesto” cover, like Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, a carefully random collection of visual cues designed to inform or confuse according to the artist’s intention. Bands were no longer content to say “This is what we look like.” Now they wanted to take you inside their heads.

So the album sleeve assumed solemn significance. The new rock audience, often college-educated, placed enormous store by its cardboard. That cardboard was a portable statement of your essential being. Ten years earlier the teenage Jagger and Richards had met as near-strangers on a train, bonding over the R&B obscurities that Mick was carrying. And now the whole tribe was doing it. Everywhere you looked there would be someone, perhaps in loons and RAF greatcoat, not so much walking as loping, stooped, peering between centre-parted curtains of hair, but above all carrying these ostentatious objects under their arm. Those objects said something more specific about you than patchouli oil ever could.

Album sleeves spoke all the more powerfully when they said nothing at all. Mystery was their currency. It’s not a coincidence that sleeve-notes were largely abandoned at this point. The designs of the Hipgnosis agency for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin screamed inscrutability. In the land of prog rock, Roger Dean’s sleeves for Yes, Budgie and so on suggested a frigid beauty that often flattered the musical contents. A huge amount of what we now call Classic Rock depends upon the mystique of its original packaging. I recall the covers of In The Court Of The Crimson King and Deep Purple In Rock long after I’ve filtered out the majority of the music.

Bigger still, for me, was the impact of Roxy Music albums. I resolved to live my whole life inside the world of Roxy Music album covers. I never quite succeeded.

IV.

And this where the album sleeve has ended up. Like old steam trains and stately homes, it pays its way in the new world through heritage status. A company called Hypergallery, backed by Peter Gabriel, has made a business from fine art prints of album covers, usually signed by the graphic artists, photographers or musicians. You could have, for example, Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust, each signed by Bowie and the sleeves’ designer Terry Pastor. They go for £1,450 apiece. Other works include Michael Spencer Jones’s shots for Oasis and plenty by the Hipgnosis partners Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson.

“I’m not a fan of blokes in beards and loincloths painted on my walls,” says Andy Wood of the gallery. “I might have been told that it’s what I’m meant to like. But, to me, if it’s on the wall, it’s art.”

He’s a true music lover who has capitalised on the special quality of album covers, namely that their imprint on our minds is well-nigh indestructible: “We could never get that image of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon out of our heads even if we tried… I don’t know how people will look back at this era in 300 years. Maybe in the way we look at the Sistine Chapel, I don’t know.”

Underpinning these sales, no doubt, is the purchasing power of the grey pound. But Hypergallery keep an eye on tomorrow’s investments and praise, among others, Nick Cave’s Grinderman series, anything by Bjork, PJ Harvey’s latest and Gregory Euclide’s delicate cover for Bon Iver. The last-named fights heroically against the reduced dimensions of our digital age: it’s so detailed it could have been done for the side of a house. Many new designs – think Adele –opt for the safer “small space / big face” approach.

With good luck and judgement an album sleeve used to define the act for all time, from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Horses portrait of Patti Smith to the nutty locomotive of Madness’s One Step Beyond (a pose made possible, apparently, by a concealed handrail). Springsteen’s Born To Run transformed him from one more contender into The Boss. Like Bowie before him and Madonna after, he showed how the smartest stars know by instinct what image gurus could never fabricate.

The artists have other means available to them now. The world will not crash to its doom without the LP cover, which will now spend an honoured retirement, surrounded by its affectionate offspring the CD sleeve and dandling a few little jpegs on its knee.

Alan Lomax And His Legacy

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The Lomax family were, and remain, great protectors and promoters of American music. This article was written for The Word’s issue of March 2011. My thanks to John Lomax III for his help in its preparation.

Looking back on the Jazz Age of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald traced that musical upheaval to the decade before, when Europe was embroiled in World War I. This, he reckoned, was when America freed itself from cultural subservience to the Old World and awakened to its own heritage – especially to African-American music. That tradition has now given us jazz, blues, gospel, soul, hip hop and nearly everything we understand by rock’n’roll.

Without black America, you have to wonder what the hell we’d all be listening to these days.

The Lomax family wondered a lot about music, whether black or white, and they took their curiosity on the road. Between them, John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax were the musicologists and song-collectors who defined the authentic “people’s music” of 20th century America. Hauling huge, unwieldy and primitive recording machines, they took the paths less travelled, to backwoods liquor parties and state penitentiaries, to barber-shops and Baptist churches, and they captured for all time the richness of a continent in song. They ignored the tunes cooked up in the urban dream factories of New York and Los Angeles. What they looked for was folk music made by actual folks. And their discoveries transformed popular music.

Without the Lomaxes, indeed, you have to wonder what the hell we’d all be listening to these days.

Who were they, the family team who practically invented the idea of American roots music? John Lomax was a Southern gentleman, born just after the Civil War, whose definition of literature extended to the cowboy songs of the old West, still sung in his time but fast disappearing under the onslaught of modern life. Later, with his sons John Jr and Alan, he travelled the Deep South, finding nuggets in the dirt. For Alan in particular it became the quest of a lifetime. He never stopped, and by the end of his life he’d collected songs from Haiti to Russia, from Senegal to Suffolk. Above all, he turned people on to the blues of the Mississippi Delta – without which there would be no John Lennon, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or much of anything else.

John’s grandson, John Lomax III, himself a well-known music writer and Nashville-based manager, puts it like this: “What do Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, The Kingston Trio, Townes Van Zandt, Leadbelly, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lightning Hopkins, Steve Earle, Blind Willie McTell, Guy Clark, Ewan MacColl, Jelly Roll Morton, Kasey Chambers, Pete Seeger and Doug Supernaw have in common? A Lomax.” The real list of Lomax protégés is even longer, but it clearly straddles the racial divide: the Lomaxes, says John III, are about “giving a voice to the voiceless. We have always been colour blind.”

II.

When Alan Lomax was born, in 1915, his father John was almost 50. The wide generation gap would deepen tensions between them, but in the years before World War II they travelled as a two-man expeditionary force. The younger Lomax sometimes fretted he was in his father’s shadow; eventually, though, his own work was more wide-ranging and posterity tends to give him the headline billing. A new biography of Alan Lomax, The Man Who Recorded The World (by John Szwed, published by William Heinemann) portrays a prickly, idealistic man who went his own way and saw scant reward for his colossal labours.

When Lomax Sr began collecting folk music he had to fight the sceptics who saw no value in the everyday songs of American life. As a student in Texas he once burned his cowboy lyrics in despair, after his professor called them “tawdry, cheap and unworthy.” Perhaps it’s always easier to revere material from antiquity, or from far away, than to recognise what is all around. Later, when Alan joined him on field trips their enemies might extend to the racist cops and town mayors who couldn’t see what two white men were doing on the wrong side of the tracks. Stirring up trouble? In fact, if their mission had an agenda it was to claim respect – “cultural equity” as we now call it – for the art of the working people.

They also hoped to squash some racial stereotypes, for this was an era when “Negro music”, to many, meant minstrel shows. Through the Library of Congress there was even some government support for their work: America craved a new sense of itself as a cultural force. Enlightened elements in Washington saw the value in building a national archive.

So the Lomaxes toiled on, through the shotgun shacks and secretive hills, finding white farmers who sang the Anglo-Celtic ballads of their ancestors, and black labourers whose songs preserved the flavour of slavery days and something even older. They would set up a wax cylinder machine and coax performances from people who had never heard recorded sound (“Stop that ghost!” cried one.) From wax they progressed to aluminium, to acetate and eventually tape. But in the early years it was still the strangest technology that country folks had ever seen. Sometimes, said Lomax they “spoke into the microphone as if the machine were a telephone, connected directly to the centres of power. One black sharecropper began, ‘Now listen here, Mr President, I want you to know they’re not treatin’ us right down here.’”

Their adventures in blues country, especially the extraordinarily productive area around Clarksdale, Mississippi, inspired the younger Lomax to make several return journeys, summarised in his masterly book The Land Where The Blues Began. On their travels the father and his sons came across a powerful convict singer named Leadbelly, whom they would make into a kind of star. Later on, in 1941, Alan met a young tractor driver called Muddy Waters, with whom he recorded the song that gave The Rolling Stones their name. Whilst the Lomaxes weren’t alone in such discoveries, for there were plenty of record companies already combing the South for material, they were evangelists for this music, took it to new levels of scholarship and introduced it to a wider world.

Alan especially grew fascinated by the roots of the blues. The term “African-American” has been standard for only a few decades, but through the story of the blues we glimpse how deeply that connections lies. Late at night in out-of-the-way places, in a land where segregation was still the norm, he found African-American parties that preserved an ancient culture, not as a “heritage” but as a living presence. From the core-of-body dance movements to the percussive and slide effects of a Mississippi guitarist, Lomax discerned a culture informed by distant centuries and a different continent. Explaining those connections now became the focus of his life.

Not everything in the blues, or jazz, came from Africa. Apart from the English language and the Christian religion, slaves taken to North America would absorb a vast amount of new data and adapt it to their needs. I was once amazed to hear the crotchety bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson (alias Rice Miller, of Helena, Arkansas) sing a number I only knew as The Seven Drunken Nights by The Dubliners: its age-old comic tale of adultery and deceit has leapt all boundaries of time and space. Black musicians of the old South formed “fife and drum” acts, after the flute-and-percussion marching bands of colonial times. (Even “band” itself originates in military formations: a ribbon of musicians would line the main body of troops. “Band” as a term was archaic until the mid-1960s, when psychedelic pop groups began to borrow it in a tongue-in-cheek way that has stuck ever since.)

Along the way the Lomaxes heard songs that were sometimes unique to the situation of Delta people and sometimes not – but their deepest appeal is always universal. There were story songs of lynch mobs and jealous lovers, heroic feats of physical labour and the disastrous, crop-eating boll weevil. It was an oral culture that relied on songs to a high degree; people led constrained daily lives with few other ways to transmit tales and cultural information: “Well I don’t know but I’ve been told…” There was a whole genre of Negro super-hero songs, drawn from folklore, of “the Travellin’ Man”, of John Henry, Po’ Shine or Stagolee; semi-magical characters who could out-run, out-work, out-fight or out-wit any rival or white master.

III.

Sex was at the core of much blues music, in constant tension with the spiritual songs of any respectable black community. Yet, before there was sex, there was work.

Work was what slaves were intended for, and working for survival is about as basic as human existence gets. The most eye-opening facet of Alan Lomax’s research is the role played by sheer toil in shaping black music – and, by extension, our own lazily hedonistic pop. At one point he suggests that “rock” itself comes not from dancing or copulation, but from the rhythmic swaying of riverboat labourers, lightening their inhuman loads.
Their movements were both graceful and practical, and descended from the everyday necessities of transport on the vast African continent. They gave rise to particular dance forms, feet apart, rooted to the floor…

Now regard the earliest on-stage film of Elvis Presley, a white boy from Mississippi who had done his cultural homework, shuffling from the hips downward.

In the 19th century riverboats were everything to the Delta, carrying passengers and cargo through the cotton-fields that enforced labour had won from swamplands. Their romance endures through film and literature and, not least, the songs of Credence Clearwater Revival. But the boats were eventually surpassed by railroads, which now became the great commercial arteries of the Deep South and a potent source of musical mythology in their own right. In the lurching clang of Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy we hear steel spikes being pounded into the ground. In Chuck Berry’s Let It Rock, a track that is the whole compressed essence of rock’n’roll in less than two minutes, the perilous purgatory of the railroad building gang is brilliantly immortalised.

After railroads came the highways, and between them they carried countless southern blacks to industrial northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, where country blues turned electric and became something else entirely. Factory life was no picnic, but there was a relative freedom after the South, where rural slavery had been replaced by a share-cropping system that was scarcely better. On the other hand, as Lomax noted, even the bad old plantation days had some consolations of family and community: now the worker was an up-rooted figure, drifting in search of his pay-packet and brief, cheap pleasures. The blues, however, was still at hand to capture that lonesome labourer’s feelings.

Work songs, from sea shanties to soldiers’ drill chants (and Lomax played a part in spreading the latter, from black soldiers to white, during World War II), were not just morale builders; they also evolved to co-ordinate complex group activities. A lot of them came from that gargantuan construction, the Mississippi levee. Led Zeppelin’s thundering juggernaut, When The Levee Breaks, goes back to Memphis Minnie’s song of 1929, itself based on a 1927 catastrophe. The fragile eco-structure of reclaimed swamps depended upon the massive earthworks built by men and mules along the river’s banks. The lawless levee camps had their own music, naturally, and Lomax captured it before it disappeared in our age of mechanisation.

Penitentiary labour was usually the toughest of all, Prison farms, like the infamous Parchman, preserved conditions of slavery and were often located on the old plantations themselves. By the same token, such places offered evidence of the older ways of communal singing, their inmates being cut off from developments outside. (Lomax material provided the core soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ jail-break romp O Brother, Where Art Thou?) At Louisiana’s Angola prison, whose very name bears witness to its origins in the African trade, they recorded Leadbelly, among whose best-known songs was Midnight Special.

It was poignant number, this one, because the Southern railroads stood for a notion of freedom, of escape from servitude, and to a cell-bound man the sound of passing trains was cruelly evocative. “For the blues poets of the Delta,” wrote Alan, “the railroad ranked next to women as a subject.” In the same vein was a prison favourite Rock Island Line, once described as “a celebration of speed. . . by men who could go nowhere.” Among the young white disciples who would seize upon such Lomax revelations was Britain’s Lonnie Donegan, whose skiffle version of Rock Island Line kick-started rock’n’roll outside of America. Kids like Lennon and McCartney might have dreamed of being Elvis Presley, but their first practical step as musicians was to imitate Donegan imitating Leadbelly.

IV.

Where the elder Lomax was born just after Abolition (indeed his own father had once owned slaves), his son Alan was the product of a radicalised age; his political leanings were left-wing and, after World War II, towards a more assertive brand of Civil Rights, which chimed with other folk activists like Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Though it seems he never joined the Communist Party, as many folkies did, the FBI kept tabs on him for decades. In a flash of biographical insight, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s agents reported to his superiors:-

“Neighbourhood investigation shows him [Alan] to be a very peculiar individual in that he is only interested in folk lore music, being very temperamental and ornery…. He has no sense of money values, handling his own and Government property in a neglectful manner, and paying practically no attention to his personal appearance… He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results.”

John’s old–fashioned white paternalism was anathema to Alan’s generation, and the older man’s reputation has suffered from a short film, made in 1935, in which he and Leadbelly re-enact their time together, following the singer’s release from prison and stint as a Lomax assistant. As the latest Lomax biographer John Szwed puts it: “There was something in the film to upset everyone.” It seemed to romanticise the tale of the outlaw singer who charmed his way to freedom by playing for the authorities and cast Lomax, unfairly, as patronising and opportunist.

But it raised some awkward questions that never quite disappear, such as the borderline between folk authenticity and show business. Left to himself, Leadbelly would wear a good suit when he could afford it. But his urban white public preferred to see him perform in Hollywood prison clothes.

The Lomaxes saw how easily an image can be contrived – they saw a similar process at work with Leadbelly’s white but not-quite proletarian counterpart Woody Guthrie – and it worried them. Between the moral purity of penniless obscurity, and the slow corruptions of celebrity, there lay a world of doubt that countless folk entertainers have had to negotiate. Other artists faced a different difficulty: in a 1940 interview with the singer Blind Willie McTell, John Lomax repeatedly asks the bluesman if he knows of any “complaining songs”, meaning protests at racial injustice. Warily, McTell denies it, as did other black performers they interviewed. The time had not yet arrived when those subjects could be aired openly in American life.

John Lomax died in 1948, but Alan’s fame and influence kept growing, assisted by an avalanche of radio shows, compilation LPs and high-profile concerts. He promoted his records for the Library of Congress, saying these tracks were “plain and unadulterated folk song, usually about death, sweat, hard work, love… Miserable people make the most exciting music I ever heard.”

His underdog sympathies now look quite harmless and even noble. But in the suspicious atmosphere of Cold War America it was hard to be Alan Lomax. In 1950 he moved to Britain (it’s thought the Lomax family were originally from Bury, in Lancashire) where in spite of some MI5 attention, he found support from the BBC and the emerging folk scene. Taking his tape machine to country pubs he heard cloth-capped men with foaming tankards, singing material that settlers had taken to the New World some centuries before. You can sense the impact he was having from a 1957 cartoon in Punch, where a yokel is lamenting, “I’ve got those Alan-Lomax-ain’t-been-round-to-record-me blues.”

He played in the earliest British skiffle bands, hearing it as a revival of Anglo-Celtic traditions, enriched with African-American vitality. Again, his importance is hard to overstate. As his nephew John Lomax III puts it, “Alan’s McCarthy-era years in England helped in the incubation of the English rock scene which ultimately let to the ‘British Invasion’, in which a few Brit musos took root forms of American music, put hair on it and sent it back here as a ‘new’ genre!”

He took a tour of Europe, from where his field recordings of Spanish folk music filtered back to New York and caught the ears of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, who were about to make Sketches Of Spain. He thought nothing of a drive from, say, Tuscany to Naples: “To a Texan, used to driving 500 miles a day, always with the same landscape, Italy seemed quite small,” he shrugged. On his return to America in 1959 he was joined by his lover at that time, the young English folk singer Shirley Collins; soon, she too was travelling with him and capturing on tape the last refrains of the old slave states.

Lomax was a one-man search engine. He gathered data from everywhere he could, anticipating “world music” by several decades. Ultimately, he dreamed, he would map and classify every sort of song and dance that humans have invented, uncover their connections and persuade us that every culture possessed treasures worth cherishing. Brian Eno is among his most fervent admirers: “Alan Lomax is a completely central character in 20th century culture. Almost any line you could draw through the whole field of popular musical culture would have him somewhere on it – probably in several places.”

In the 1960s Alan befriended Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene. But he was at best indifferent to the white boy rock generation, no matter how much it might revere the Delta. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he had a punch-up with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, who had taken exception to Alan’s supposed dig at his other clients, the highly-amplified Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Lomax did not dislike rock’n’roll on principle, recognising it as the furthest inroad yet made by Negro art into the heart of white America. But, for him, the old songs were always the best, and the closest to Africa’s religious resonance.

VI.

In 1978 Lomax was a consultant on the NASA Voyager launches that would carry 90 minutes of human music into the depths of outer space. Thanks to his input, alongside Mozart and Beethoven were many more surprising choices, from Chuck Berry to folk music from Bulgaria. He had pushed the idea of “cultural equity” from the fringes to the mainstream. By 1986, despite a medal from President Reagan, Lomax himself was struggling to impose coherence on his vast, trans-global archives. He never quite achieved the grand synthesis of theory that he wanted, but his legacy is evident enough when you look for it. The Association for Cultural Equity (www.culturalequity.org) offers a tremendous archive of multi-media Lomax materials. Be aware that might find yourself wanting to spend weeks in there.

Alan Lomax died in 2002, after a long period of poor health and financial anxiety. He might, in his final years, have heard the sampled fragments of his own Mississippi field recordings that drift like ghosts through Moby’s Play album: “Oh Lordy, troubles so hard…” “Why does my heart feel so bad?” He had kept on working as long as he could. After all, if your ambition is to document all the known music of the planet, then the day never comes when you will say “My work here is done.”

It’s now 100 years since John Lomax published his pioneering collection of cowboy songs, and the family remains active. Alan’s brother, John Jr, helped in the careers of Guy Clark and Lightning Hopkins as well as organising those epoch-making field trips. His son, John Lomax III (whose own son, John Nova Lomax is an active music writer) has managed Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle. But could the age of folk collecting now be over? Electronic media smothers the earth like a blanket. Folklorists must forever feel they are trying to bottle the morning mist, chasing a thing that is on the verge of extinction.

Alan Lomax once wrote: “The entertainment industry, operating a one way communication system, now threatens to obliterate national cultures… Unless we take action now, what remains of human cultural variety will vanish.”

I asked John Lomax III if he felt that way. Is the age of the great investigators, like his grandfather and uncle, really over? “Insofar as finding songs and music made by people completely untouched by outside cultural influences,” he says, “that began to end in 1920 with the beginning of radio. There are still discoveries to be made and extraordinarily talented and unique artists are out there. The trick now is not so much to find and record these people but to break through the barriers built by the huge broadcasting and publishing empires who wish to limit expression to what they alone deem important, and from which they benefit financially.”

Of the USA, he says: “The main radio outlets are now almost all owned by one of the five big conglomerates and playlists have never been tighter. These days it’s even hard for the major labels, who buy the exposure, to crack a new artist through to any kind of mass audience. It’s harder than it ever has been to get the voices of the voiceless heard.”

The Tony Visconti Interview

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Among my most enjoyable interviews was this one, with the producer Tony Visconti. It took place in Soho, London, for the The Word’s editon of April 2010.
Not only was he responsible for records by my favourite artists, including Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Morrissey, here he explains the role of a producer with clarity, tact and humour.

There’s an excellent chance that Tony Visconti produced one of your all-time favourite albums. I know that his fingerprints are all over my record collection. To pick three at random: T.Rex’s Electric Warrior, Sparks’ Indiscreet and David Bowie’s Low. For these alone he ought to be made a Freeman of Rock’n’Roll.

Production is the marriage of art and science. We’re typically good at one or the other, but seldom at both. Yet Visconti is the classically-trained musician who coaxes players to career heights of creativity; at the same time, he’s capturing their art to the best effect technology offers. You needn’t be a geek to love the familiar story of the three microphones he used on Bowie’s “Heroes”, in the huge and gloomy Berlin studio. The mics were set up far apart from one another, the second two “gated” so they opened only as Bowie’s voice hit certain levels. The track’s extraordinary crescendo quality was thus perfected. Artistic intuition meets scientific ingenuity.

Visconti is a New Yorker, born in 1944, who spent his High School years studying double bass and musical theory; as he recounts in his Autobiography: Bolan, Bowie And The Brooklyn Boy, his teens were divided between youth orchestras, formal tuition and rock’n’roll bands, leading to early production work. Between 1967 and 1989, he lived in London, where he met the artists with whom he’ll be forever linked. Visconti’s back in New York nowadays, but still speaks in a mellow, London-American accent. High in a hotel room in Soho, we’re yards away from the old Trident Studios where he oversaw the amazing ascent of Marc Bolan, from lisping pixie cult to the crunching boogie monster of Ride A White Swan, Hot Love and Get It On. In Trident, too, he steered Bowie away from chirping Cockney novelties to the churning psycho-dramas of The Man Who Sold The World.

He’s flown in briefly to promote his newest protégé, the Australian singer Danielle Spencer, wife of Russell Crowe. He’s a little dulled by jet-lag, but always willing to answer questions that must be wearyingly familiar to him. He has a Beethoven ring-tone on his mobile, and a book of Buddhism by his bed. When he suggests the best position for me to place my recording device, I naturally pay attention. Later on, the sonic maestro will offer us tips on how to pimp our iPods; he’ll caution against the blind worship of vinyl, and explain why these are the “Dark Ages” of audio.

His career has taken in everyone from Thin Lizzy to The Moody Blues to Morrissey. In many cases the Visconti work is their very best. As an arranger, engineer and all-purpose session musician, he served an early London apprenticeship to Denny Cordell, the producer of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale; with Cordell he played a part in such classic ’60s singles as The Move’s Flowers In The Rain and Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends. The list looks uniformly prestigious. But a jobbing producer takes on all sorts and Visconti’s CV defies pigeon-holing. As he will note, wryly, a cancelled Bowie project led to a stop-gap job with Modern Romance, assisting the Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey hitmakers with their 1985 LP Burn It!. Other clients have included Elaine Paige, Gentle Giant and Gay Dad.

He was for a while the producer – and husband – of Paul McCartney’s great discovery Mary Hopkin. In fact he and Mary, with two of their children, are now working together again, with a young Welsh artist called Debbie Clarke. “She’s a great singer,” he says. “I was inspired by Susan Boyle winning that contest. Gosh, the world really needs a few great singers again. I love a big voice.”

**********

Where did all this begin for you?

I’d produced for a very small period in New York and realised how inadequate I was. My equipment consisted of two tape recorders and two microphones. I was getting nowhere. Then I met Denny Cordell, quite fortuitously, at the water cooler. I think I’d only met one other Englishman before, so I was impressed. He was in New York making a record for Georgie Fame. I asked to see the musical arrangements and he said, ‘In London we don’t have any, we just light a spliff and eventually get it done.’ But New York is incredibly unionised, you will be crucified if you do that here, they will charge you triple. So he said ‘Help me out here!’ And I did. I was good with the music but not yet with the production.
I thought that was the end of seeing Denny but two weeks later I got a call from him in England, probably in the middle of the night for me. He wanted me to come over to London as soon as possible. So in April ’67 I found myself on a plane to London with everything I owned. Two suitcases of clothes and four guitars.

You effectively served your apprenticeship with Denny Cordell?

Yes. An apprenticeship as far as producing was concerned, but I was also his arranger. Within days he had put me with Denny Laine, the ex-singer of the Moody Blues, who had a string quartet, and the next thing I’m asked to take a bow at his concert in Shaftesbury Avenue with Hendrix and The Who on the bill, and The Beatles in the audience. I was exposed to such rock royalty it was a pinch-me situation. Next I wrote arrangements for The Move, who were now using strings as The Beatles had done on Eleanor Rigby.
I think Denny [Cordell] was, if not the first, then the second to have his own production company, Mickie Most had one too. He had a licensing deal with Decca Records, the Deram label, and then switched to EMI, to Regal Zonophone. It was exciting to be part of that.

And as part of your work for Cordell you discovered Marc Bolan?

Denny said ‘Go out and find a group of your own,’ so I opened up the International Times and there was an advert for the UFO Club and Tyrannosaurus Rex. I’d seen their name before and heard a mention by John Peel but that was about it. So I went around the corner to Tottenham Court Road and I fell in love with Marc Bolan. I could not believe what I heard and saw, it was quiet but over a hundred people were sitting on the floor cross-legged. Having just arrived in England I was expecting something like Beatlemania, a rock group, girls screaming. I was not prepared for this and it made me re-examine the reasons I came to this country. I was looking for the next big thing. If I was to be a record producer I had to discover nothing less than the next Beatles. But this little folk duo were having an effect more powerful than just fan mania. I approached Marc after the set and within a week he was making demos in my flat.

In a sense you did discover the next big thing, but there was a long wait, making those acoustic Bolan albums before he went electric, as T.Rex.

He’d always wanted to make a rock record but his guitar had been taken from him when he left John’s Children. We’d analyse Beatles and Beach Boys records, break them down, then go into the studio and try to make our own version of those sounds. We were limited by cheap instruments and a Pixiephone from Woolworth’s, and Steve [Took, the percussionist] played these little Moroccan bongos, but ingenuity was high. The first Tyrannosaurus Rex album, My People Were Fair, cost £400 for four days in the studio, but it’s unlistenable to me now. By Unicorn we’d proved ourselves, Denny was making a profit from the group, so now we had a whole month. We figured out how to do Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound with just two musicians. I listen to that album all the time, especially She Was Born To Be My Unicorn. It haunts me. But yes, T.Rex were so big. That was probably my crowning achievement. If I die now, I’m very happy with that era. It was hard to start a group from the ground up, and your chances are one in a million anyway, but to succeed is simply amazing.

Did you meet David Bowie through Marc?

No. I met David about a month after Marc and I remember the weather. It was a nice day, I was in [Cordell’s partner] David Platz’s office at 68 Oxford Street and he played me Bowie’s first Deram album, saying, What do you think of this kid? I said he’s all over the map. You know that album, Uncle Arthur, Mr Gravedigger and so on, crazy songs, Laughing Gnome? I said he’s great but so unfocused. And he said, Come and meet him, he’s in the next room. David was about 19 at the time, very nervous sitting there. He knew he was going to meet me, it had all been set up, and David Platz left us after five minutes.
We got on very well, we shared a love of Andy Warhol, underground music, a group called The Fugs, which few British people were aware of. He was obviously in love with American music and I loved him, he was a singer songwriter, had this great English accent and now we were going to work together.
So we took a long walk down Oxford Street, on this nice day, we continued to talk the whole day and about three hours later ended up on King’s Road near a film theatre where Roman Polanski’s Knife In The Water was playing. We’d been talking about foreign films and Truffaut, specifically black and white and scratchy films, so we went in there and we said goodbye at about 7 in the evening. We’d struck up a great friendship.

Again it would be a few years before your protégé hit big. You did some great early albums together, but famously not the one track that was a hit single, Space Oddity.

I turned it down. I thought it was a novelty song. I respected him for the folk rock songs he gave me, with great depth in the lyrics, a real underground writer. But then he hands me this Space Oddity song, which was topical to the point of novelty. To this day I regret not doing it, it’s a great song, people remember it more than Young Americans or Let’s Dance. I offered it to Gus Dudgeon in the next office, he said, You don’t want to record this? You’re crazy! And he did a great job. Then David came back to me. His record company would not let him make the album unless he recorded Space Oddity. ‘Now that we’ve got that out of the way,’ these were his exact words, ‘let’s get on with the album.’
It took a long time for that record to chart. He never did write a follow-up to Space Oddity. His next single was The Prettiest Star, which I got Marc Bolan to play on. But really nothing happened until he conceived of Ziggy Stardust a couple of years later.

Is it hurtful when artists don’t use you for the next album? Though you would work together again later, Bowie went elsewhere for Hunky Dory. Is there a natural expectation that you will get the call?

It’s rarely hurt me. With David it only happened once. Hunky Dory I didn’t mind, because we’d called it quits after The Man Who Sold The World. Nobody was buying those records, and much as I loved him artistically, we’re in the business of selling records. You don’t get invited back to the studio unless you show some returns for it. And when he got Tony DeFries in as manager, that was a falling out. I just didn’t like Tony DeFries. We parted company and I didn’t speak to David for another two years. So I knew I was giving Hunky Dory away but I was really pleased for him when I heard it, it’s got to be one of my favourite Bowie albums. It’s intimate, it wasn’t bombastic, it wasn’t the Ziggy thing yet; Man Who Sold The World had been a great album but it wasn’t quite him, it was him and Mick Ronson and me going crazy in the studio – we loved Cream – and it wasn’t that focused.
I was booked to do Let’s Dance and at the last minute he pulled that from me; he’d met Nile Rodgers. It wasn’t so much a hurt as an inconvenience, because I was very busy and getting lots of offers. Of course I wanted to work with David, and suddenly there was a three-month gap in my life – that I filled up with Modern Romance! So it was confusing and a bit hurtful. But it was water under the bridge, we remained friends and I’ve done his last two albums [Heathen and Reality]. If he goes into the studio again I’ll be a likely candidate, although he might choose someone else.

Have you been in contact lately?

All the time. We email a lot. I don’t see him physically, but we share the same sense of humour, we maybe send each other snippets of The Fast Show or stupid things, it’s a friendly relationship. But he hasn’t worked much in the past few years. He’s probably in a reflective stage of his life, but I wouldn’t write him off. I think he’s got a couple of great albums left to do.

You must have had some extraordinary conversations when you’ve re-convened to plan a new album. Records like Young Americans and Low were hardly business-as-usual for Bowie were they?

Well, he’s always been very trusting of me and we don’t have to have a great conversation before we do each album; he states what he’d like to do, and because we share a wide range of interests, he only has to say ‘I’d like to go to Philadelphia and make an R&B album’ and I say ‘I’m right there, buddy, just let me pack my case.’ Marc Bolan liked to think he was that flexible but he limited himself by his own musical education. When I told Phil Lynott that David wrote his lyrics at the microphone while he was doing his vocal, Phil thought that was amazing but he couldn’t do it. David’s the most mercurial and versatile musician, so if he rang me tomorrow and said ‘We’re gonna go to Tibet and make an album with Tibetan musicians,’ I’d pack my case and start boning up on Tibetan music.
Then again, he’d probably bring musicians over from the Bronx. When we did Young Americans we didn’t use any Philly guys, but it was the backdrop and the influence and the vibes. We went to Berlin to record and there were no German musicians on the record. So our brief conversations would lead to something fresh, which we call ‘hybridism’. Bowie is always best when he’s a rule breaker. He’ll admit he got a little lost in the ’80s when he was trying to do what was commercial.

Technical aspects aside, do you find different studios have a distinct atmosphere?

Yes. Certain studios did lend more mystique and inspiration. The Château D’Hérouville in France, the ‘Honky Chateau’, was strange but magical, it drew great performances from Marc Bolan and David Bowie. It was residential, reputedly haunted by George Sand [French female novelist], and I think it was. I mean, someone kept tapping Brian Eno on the shoulder at 5am every morning, he’d wake up and nobody was there. You have to make a great record in a place like that.
And the studio in Philadelphia, Sigma, was so dirty and dingy, which for some reason is conducive to making a great record. These new studios that look like saunas, they’re so sterile. The trend is now for bare wood and chrome, well-lit, but like a health spa. I like dim lighting and a reasonable selection of gear. You have to feel warm and cocooned in a studio, not cold and alienated.

A lot of your early work was in Trident Studios, here in Soho, wasn’t it?

I took Marc down there, it was so convenient for my office at 68 Oxford Street, but also the Sheffield brothers [Trident owners Norman and Barry] were tech-heads, the first independent studios with an eight-track machine, whereas at EMI they had an eight-track but were having their technicians go over it for three months. The Sheffield brothers just bought theirs and put it in. I liked their attitude, they were like Wild West guys, they wanted the newest and the best and they spent a lot of money.

Trident had a famous Bechstein piano, didn’t it? The one Paul used on Hey Jude, then it’s on the Bolan and Bowie records, Elton John, Queen…

It was a great piano, those were the days when you had to have a great piano in the studio and it had to be tuned all the time. If you go to a studio nowadays where they do have a grand piano, it’s usually out of tune and not maintained. The piano is an archaic instrument, it’s not just the strings, it’s like an old car that has to be tuned constantly. Trident was one of the last great studios to keep a piano tuned and cleaned regularly. That piano was probably on more recordings than any individual artist that used it. Nowadays if you hire a studio you will have to pay for the piano to be tuned; it used to be part of the studio’s own costs. People aren’t maintaining pianos like they used to. The classical world still benefits from that but in the pop world half the pianos are in a state of disrepair.

Is the golden age of the studio receding into history? And the golden age of producers like yourself? Can’t a young band go and buy software off the shelf that will do so much of that?

It’s double-edged. The equipment is now very affordable. You walk in with a credit card and you walk out with Pro Tools under your arm. But if it was all about the gear, you’d have a million geniuses making records. But it’s not all about the gear. Nobody buys a record because the kick-drum has a D12 microphone on it. Making records is still a creative process, you have to use your ingenuity. So people like me are working all the time. After people have bought all the gear and tried doing it themselves… I know a certain legendary American singer and guitarist who bought everything from Abbey Road, all the equipment The Beatles had, and he was surprised after a year that he couldn’t make a record as good as The Beatles.
So it’s not that studios or people like me aren’t needed any more, it’s that there’s more stuff out there than ever before and it’s a transitional period. Some of the classic studios like Trident have been gone for many years, that happens all the time. Shops close down and something new will re-open on the same premises. In New York some big studios have closed down. The Power Station where we recorded Scary Monsters has been crarved up into smaller rooms. Studios are now opening up in Brooklyn, where you’d never have dreamed of even living, now you have to live in Williamsburg or Park Slope. And they’re thriving, much of the Amy Winehouse album was made there.
Old-timers like me better not get nostalgic, it’s all about making music. I don’t care about keeping a studio open, I’ve owned about eight studios in my life and when they stop working for me I would get rid of them. I had a great place on Dean Street [Good Earth] for about 13 years, we did loads of Thin Lizzy work there, and half of Scary Monsters, but then a day came when I was just the owner of this legacy that was going down the drain. This was ’89, people were buying samplers and making dance music at home and the labels were thrilled they didn’t have to spend a thousand quid a day on my studio.
So I said, Fine, I’m not attached to it, it’s just equipment and it’s not needed any more. Of course I was sad but I have to think of my original intent, which was to make great records.

Wasn’t it George Martin who first inspired you?

He was the first producer I became aware of, after Phil Spector. I started hearing albums like Rubber Soul. Before that, I thought The Beatles just went in the studio and recorded, which is pretty much what it sounds like. But then on Rubber Soul there was the sitar, the harpsichord on In My Life, and I was really aware that there was a fifth brain involved. I read a lot about George Martin and learned that he was trained as a classical musician, that he wrote the strings for Eleanor Rigby. I considered myself very square sometimes, because I studied the double bass, I studied orchestration, and these were things I wouldn’t even admit to in the rock world. All my friends were just dumb-ass guitar players. And this is how I survived for 40 years, because I really understand music, I specialise in this. And George Martin was the person who opened that door for me.
He could have tried to look cool, in a leather jacket, but he never did that, he remained the same, he wore his EMI suit and tie and kept his hair short when everyone was going crazy. Yet he’s cranking out these great rock’n’roll records with style and flair, I just had to emulate him. He was my shining example of what a record producer is.

George called his book All You Need Is Ears. Musical and technical expertise are obviously vital, but are there more personal skills, also? You’re dealing with talented but difficult people – egocentric, temperamental, fragile…

You’re absolutely right. And I think George Martin underplays how good he was at handling The Beatles, who were four very unique individuals. He does talk about the arguments he had with John and Paul about certain things, and he gave me a little secret: if he felt very strongly about something, he had a way of convincing John Lennon that it was his idea. It was George Martin’s idea but John Lennon was convinced an hour later that he thought it up.
I was working with people like Bolan because I respected him and I thought he was a genius, and me having George Martin as my role model I found ways to convince Marc… Most artists are very precious about what they present to the producer. They want the producer to change it, make it better, but once you start doing that they resist you. They feel they’re gonna lose what they thought of. So I’m acutely aware of this and I try my best not to put my personality in there. It’s their album, I realised this from the beginning. Their name is gonna be way bigger than mine. But I’m there to be a helping hand and any time I can make it better…
Most of my artists are very good to me, they welcome my ideas. But it’s a juggling act of personalities, especially in a group. The bass-player’s gonna want more bass, the drummer wants more snare, the singer wants more vocal. Usually I’ll find out who is the alpha person in that group, and it’s gonna go that person’s way. Democracy does not work in a rock’n’roll band.

You were roughly a contemporary of Bolan and Bowie, all young men starting out. But now you must get hired by younger artists who’ve grown up with your work, such as Morrissey [Ringleader Of The Tormentors]. Does that alter the relationship, when you’re brought in as a big name?

Morrissey happened to like a lot of records I made, he’s a big T.Rex fan, and he loved Sparks and he’s very fond of Mary Hopkin. First of all, he’s very fussy and he often sacks people at a moment’s notice, and it’s hard to figure him out. But I had this great legacy behind me, which he respected. He respected my earlier Bowie work rather than the later. So it was an open door for me. My previous work opens loads of doors for me, I don’t have to sell myself like I did when I was an unknown. But sometimes it backfires. Sometimes a young group wants to work with me and they find me too intimidating. I’ve been in several meetings with younger groups and I’ve seen members visibly shaking. And I don’t want to have that effect on people. I’m not big time, I feel for others. I know how vulnerable they are, and I go out of my way to make an artist comfortable in the studio.

What’s your selection process with new artists? Like your current project, Danielle Spencer.

Again it’s the Bowie connection, she was a big Bowie fan who heard my records when she was growing up in the UK; her father was a presenter on Play School, Don Spencer. This is her second album but even before that she had a successful career as an Australian actress. The album before this one was highly programmed by the producer and, for me, it was a little too clean. We had two friends in common who suggested we work together, one being Neil Finn, who I worked with about six years ago with his brother Tim. They recommended me, and in the 2000s I haven’t met a lot of people I want to work with… That film Juno, all the music in that film is so weak and bland, people just picking up an acoustic guitar and strumming, it’s like a lot of young people have reverted to nursery rhyme.
I worked with Bowie and Morrissey, who write such great lyrics, whose songs go off on musical tangents, then I heard Danielle’s writing and it rivalled something Kate Bush would write. And her voice is unique, I work with people who have unique voices. So she passed the first two tests. The very first song I heard from her, Just A Thought, the backing vocals were as complex as the lead, the song could not exist without them. And she plays the keyboards. I thought, she’s making these mini-operettas like The Beach Boys, it’s stunning. Killer album, I love it.

At the other end of the process, of course, we have the listener. Likely as not, we’ll settle for an MP3 file. It’s not the future we once expected, of ever-rising audio standards. Ease of use, convenience, seem to have won out. How does that sit with you?

I know. It’s tragic what’s happened in the audio world as regards MP3s. I’ve found ways around it and I actually enjoy listening on my iPod and iPhone now. Headphones that boost the treble too much really bring out the worst in MP3s. So I’ve covered my headphones with little buds. I’ve spent up to $400 on headphones for travelling but I’ve gone back to the original Apple headphones, covered to cut down the high frequency, and it sounds more mellow. Almost as good as a well-recorded cassette! MP3s are horrible, I actually prefer a cassette to that sound.
But I’ve learned ways. I use the EQ inside the iPod. The convenience of being able to carry round 20,000 tracks is amazing, that’s the trade-off. But I think now with this Lossless file that Apple are putting out the sound is much better, and we’ll slowly creep up to at least CD quality. When I started mixing in surround sound, I thought surely everyone’s gonna go out and buy six speakers and listen at 96 kilohertz, the quality you get on a DVD… People who wax lyrical about vinyl, they never sat in a control room with me and heard those masters off tape. High-speed tape is the best audio quality you can get, but no consumer ever heard that.

Speaking of vinyl, you recommend a limit of 18 minutes per side?

Yes. There are so many limitations to vinyl. You’re limited as to how much low or high frequency you can put on. And you can’t go too long. I used to come away almost in tears from a mastering session. I’d have a Bowie album or a T.Rex album with all this bass on the bottom and the disc cutter would say, Oh, I’m gonna have to filter that out, we can’t get that on vinyl. At least when CDs came out, if they were properly mastered you could actually hear something very close to the original master tape I had produced.
People didn’t know how to master CDs in the first decade. They sounded awful. We had this convenient means of storage but it was brittle. In actual fact, people were afraid to use the headroom of CD, to get that loud sound. Now of course they over-do that, you get a CD that’s so loud, if you put it in a computer you’d see it was a block of sound, it doesn’t even have peaks and troughs.
So, audio’s in a transition and it can only get better. We will soon have MP3 players of much higher quality. Music will cease to exist physically, I know that’s going, you won’t get a disc any more. Everything will be downloaded: I pray that you’ll be able to download the credits a lot easier. They’re starting to do that, but when iTunes came out you had no idea who the producer was, where it was recorded, all the great information you got from a CD booklet or a vinyl insert. So we’re living in Dark Ages but I have great hopes for the future of audio. It’s gotta get better.

The Rolling Stones: An Eye Witness to the Madness

Tue, 5 Jun 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

In-flight orgies and TV sets from hotel windows? It's mostly a myth but the reality was no less strange. An interview with Robert Greenfield, author of the book Stones Touring Party; this appeared in The Word, June 2010.

The Rolling Stones’ American tour of 1969 is held up as the symbolic end of the Sixties’ dream, capped as it was by a disastrously nasty show at the Altamont Free Festival. But their next US romp, in 1972, was in a way the Shape of Rock to Come. It sealed the band’s reputation as a live act – but also as the louche gods of Seventies decadence, swaggering across the land in an orgiastic riot of groupies, drugs and stadium-sized delusions of Divine Right.

One document of the tour is Robert Frank’s film Cocksucker Blues, withheld from public viewing at the Stones’ command. Thankfully, for a thrilling account 1972’s shenanigans, we do have a classic book called Stones Touring Party, written by a then-26-year-old journalist, Robert Greenfield, and now re-issued for all to see (Aurum Press, £9.99).

“I stayed in the hotels with them,” says Greenfield today, recalling the enviable access he was allowed. “If you were on the tour they treated you as though you were working with the band. In terms of access, though, there were rooms within rooms. There were rooms into which I didn’t go because people were using heroin and I wasn’t part of that inner circle. But there were no other pre-conditions. I still have my notebooks. But there was no reason to keep anything out.”

He’d come to know the band through working for Rolling Stone, at that time an important conduit for Jagger and co: “They were still playing to the counter-culture. Rolling Stone was the counter-culture magazine so they would communicate to their audience through that. I understood that we were living in the same world. Life magazine was quote-unquote the straight media, and would be held slightly at arm’s length.”

With a discreet manner and a keen observer’s eye, Greenfield used his vantage point to masterly effect. He confirms, however, that a few of the tour’s legendary events were not quite real. In Denver a TV set was indeed thrown from a hotel window by Keith Richards and sax-player Bobby Keys, but it was all staged for the camera of Robert Frank. Similarly set up for Cocksucker Blues was an orgy aboard the Stones’ private DC-10: “It was complete fiction, there was never sex on the plane. There were never groupies on that plane. The only people on that plane were the ones who were on the road with us. So those segments are completely – well, you can say they were false. But they may be artistic… It speaks to Jagger’s taste, because Frank is recognized as one of the greatest photographers who ever lived.”

Jagger, like some Roman emperor, surveys the debauches of the tour with cynical amusement, but also carries the band’s responsibilities in a way that Greenfield came to respect: “Based on what happened to Keith and how out of it he was, the reason that band survived is not only because of the music, it’s because Mick became the businessman, because he ran everything. The Stones had such terrible business experiences, they’d made such awful mistakes, that Jagger had to learn how to do this. He saw to it that the Stones didn’t go down.”

The book is packed with great character sketches. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts are impressively self-contained, each with their own strategies for surviving the madness around them. Mick Taylor, the young guitarist drafted in to replace Brian Jones, is clearly not a Rolling Stone at heart: “Really a lovely guy and a brilliant blues player, but I think he realised he did not want to get caught up in that maelstrom. The proof of the pudding is the way that Ronnie Wood [his successor] does fit in. It’s a difference in sensibility.”

The 1972 tour ends with a huge, high society party in New York that somehow spells the end of the counter-culture, and the triumph of show business. Amid the dead-eyed revellers, you sense a Great Gatsby-like absence – rock’n’roll itself, still paid lip-service but by now subservient to the unimaginable wealth it has learned how to generate.

Greenfield at least emerged with his sanity intact. “The worst thing that can happen to you,” he reflects, “is having to leave the world of the Stones. The withdrawal was like having the bends; your life was so bad compared to the way you’d been living with them. But I didn’t want them to change my life, because what I wanted to do was write. I survived because I was working; you can’t be at the centre of the action and write about it, you have to be outside watching. I had a hell of a great time but I didn’t get crazy. I wasn’t there to get rich, get famous, get high, which so many people were.

“It rarely improved your life. It’s not like people came into the Stones’ world and left it in better shape. Most of them left on their knees, they’d got so fucked up… At that time, all rock’n’roll credentials were personal. If you didn’t hang out, you weren’t going to be around for long. And why I was allowed to hang out, I have no idea. I was just kid from Brooklyn. I was fortunate. I look back now and I was in the right place at the right time.”

Skit-and-run: The End fanzine

Sun, 20 May 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The End was a Liverpool fanzine, devoted to music football and the newly-christened “scally” tribe of that city. Its 20 issues were compiled into a book, for which I wrote a Foreword. And this piece appeared in The Word, December 2011.

“My favourite magazine,” declared John Peel in 1982, “is The End from Liverpool. It concerns itself with music, beer and football. The very stuff of life itself.”

In its brief life it united terrace hooligans with devotees of indie rock, and it gave the national media that now-ubiquitous device the “Ins & Outs” column. Now there is a 400-page book containing all 20 issues. It’s being published by the online magazine Sabotage Times, whose editor James Brown was the inventor of lad-mag Loaded.

One of The End’s two founding editors was Peter Hooton, who later found fame as singer in 1990s hit-makers The Farm (Groovy Train, All Together Now). With his friend Phil Jones, he set about devising a mouthpiece for the youths he knew. In The End’s native Liverpool such youths were known as scallies, a regional precursor of the 1980s “casual” cult. Scallies wore expensive leisure wear “liberated” on trips to continental cup games. They were a tribe unknown to music papers more attuned to goths and new romantics.

“I always enjoyed reading the Private Eye,” says Hooton today, “the way it used to attack everything. We wanted that style of caustic humour. It wasn’t fashionable to link football and music but the concerts I was going to, The Clash, The Jam and The Specials, they were massive football crowds too, and I thought that wasn’t being captured.”

Early marketing involved standing outside football grounds badgering sceptical supporters: “I remember trying to explain to people at Anfield and Goodison what it was about, but they presumed it was a student rag mag. As soon as they started reading it and saw it was talking about their lives, they could relate to it. Then it spread like wildfire.”

A typical issue of The End might carry an interview with Billy Bragg or The Clash, and letters from outraged fans of other football teams: the “Fashion Crazy Yorkshireman” in direly dated togs was a favourite object for Scouse merriment. There would be cartoons and mocking stories of characters called Joe Wagg or Billy Bull, symbols of the pub bore or club poser. Design values were minimal, but the DIY ethos looked perfect for The End’s skit-and-run philosophy.

As circulation neared 5,000, the magazine’s most-imitated feature became its “Ins & Outs” lists. (Like John Peel, I had the honour of appearing in both.) Random examples might include “Growing strange plants in your Granda’s allotment” (IN) or “Pullovers tucked in trousers’ (OUT). Issue 8 endorsed “Yellow sick (with no carrots)” while disapproving of “Hiding nudie books in your wardrobe”. It was a challenging code to live by. “But my idea,” says Hooton, “was just to attack the ridiculousness of fashion magazines saying what was going to be fashionable next year. Really it didn’t matter if you were in the Ins or Outs.”

As the NME’s Liverpool writer I gave The End its first national coverage, but there was no more powerful champion than John Peel. He became smitten. “He used to come up on social visits and say, ‘Come on lads, what should I be wearing?’ We’d say, No you’re all right John, just carry on as you are. He liked the idea of the tweed jackets and M&S jumpers we were getting from a second-hand shop.”

Like most of his contributors Hooton was a first-time writer. He’d been put off at school, after attempting a poem that a teacher then read out for the amusement of the class. (I can believe it. I went to the same school and had the same teacher. Poetry was not really the rage in 1970s Bootle.)

“I’d become a youth worker in Cantril Farm [a Merseyside overspill estate], so I could do The End as part of encouraging people to write. And I think that’s what it did. ‘Well, if they can do it, I can have a go.’ We used to get letters from people who were in prison, writing poetry, short stories and expressing themselves. So it certainly touched a nerve with a certain type of person who thought, That’s the kind of magazine that won’t ridicule me for writing.”

After 20 issues The End team felt their work here was done, besides which, Hooton’s new band The Farm were beginning to get busy. Unlike its Geordie contemporary Viz, the mag was probably too niche for a mainstream publisher to pick up. But The End’s style inspired many others, like the future DJ Terry Farley at Boy’s Own, the budding novelist Kevin Sampson and The Word’s own Andrew Harrison. Its obsession with terrace fashion seeped into style titles like The Face, while James Brown candidly admits, “I shamelessly stole the spirit of The End for Loaded.”

I was asked to write a Foreword for the End book and it finishes like this: “Maybe The End was not destined to last. Maybe it could have gone glossy and built bridges with the ‘casuals’ emerging across the country, like a proto lad’s mag. But it would have had to sacrifice a lot of good things, like the lunatic insularity of its world-view, the crazily inverted snobbery, and all the badly-spelt zest of an amateur magazine that’s produced out of love and spite. I’ve kept every issue.”

The End is available through the SabotageTimes.com website, price £20 plus £7.50pp.

Foreword

I worked in the NME’s office in Carnaby Street but regularly travelled home to Liverpool to cover the new bands pouring out of the city. Along the way I became aware of this new thing called The End, which was a world away from most other fanzines, and so I scrounged some NME space to feature it. Writing under my occasional Scouse nom-de-plume of “E.I. Adenoids” I introduced a wider world to the concept of scallies – the term was still unknown outside of Liverpool.

What was new about The End was its direct relationship to the real-life “kids” that punk rock had romanticised but really did not reflect. The End came from the football terraces and the pubs, not from the elite niteries of the New Romantics or the sub-cultural lairs of goths and art students. In the same way, scally fashions were their own creation and largely unknown to style magazines. So The End was a voice for the voiceless, and I was attracted to anything I could not find in the London media. The writing was sharp and fresh; it had the cockiness of people who knew their turf, as opposed to pundits who were second-guessing.

The Ins and Outs page was such an obvious idea that I can’t believe it wasn’t done before. Maybe cavemen carved it on their walls, or monks inscribed it on parchment. But it was certainly The End who popularised the idea in 1982, and it quickly spread in various forms. I seem to recall appearing on both sides of the page and I can’t say which gave me the greater pleasure. The End was rooted in a very Liverpool habit called “skitting”, which means the indiscriminate mockery of anything and everyone. If you’re not being skitted, you don’t really exist.

Maybe The End was not destined to last. Maybe it could have gone glossy and built bridges with the “casuals” emerging across the country, like a proto lad’s mag. But it would have had to sacrifice a lot of good things, like the lunatic insularity of its world-view, the crazily inverted snobbery, and all the badly-spelt zest of an amateur magazine that’s produced out of love and spite. I’ve kept every issue.

Irish, Catholic And Scouse

Thu, 17 May 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

A book review for Liverpool’s Culture Campus magazine, 2007.

IRISH, CATHOLIC AND SCOUSE
By John Belchem
Liverpool University Press

Early one morning in Liverpool in 1862, an Irishman called John Sheridan was arrested for being drunk. Hauled before the magistrates he pulled himself up to his full dignity and declared the arresting officer was “a gigantic uncultivated barbarian, an unscrupulous falsifier of fact, and had assaulted him in the most unconstitutional way, as he was proceeding along the street, in a decent, orderly manner.”

In other words, it just another day dawning in what Professor Belchem calls “the central hub of the Irish diaspora”. Throughout the 19th century Liverpool’s waterfront swarmed with ragged immigrants seeking “the nearest place that wasn’t Ireland”. They were fleeing poverty but often found more of the same, with the added hazard of prejudice. I don’t know what effect John Sheridan’s eloquence had upon the magistrate, but I doubt it did the trick – officialdom and the Liverpool-Irish seldom could agree to differ.

Two things make this superb book acutely resonant today. One is the way in which the Irish influx shaped the modern character of Liverpool – whenever the rest of Britain speaks loftily of feckless, thieving scallies, rioting at will and squandering their dole money on smack, you are hearing echoes of Victorian attitudes to Irish Liverpool. The other is the way that everything said about the Liverpool Irish anticipates the immigration debates of our time.

Apart from a reputation for squalid living, drunkenness and crime, the Irish were barred from assimilation by virtue of their religion: they were Catholics in a staunchly Protestant society. They faced the hostility of organised labour as well, accused of under-cutting local wage-rates. Then there was the taint of treachery. As Ireland struggled to shake off British rule, its exiles were suspected of what we’d now call terrorist sympathies. At the extreme, Fenians plotted to set the Mersey warehouses ablaze; when it came to smuggling, sabotage and safe-houses, the IRA could count on friends in Liverpool. Meanwhile at the ballot box, North End areas of Liverpool (along Scotland Road) returned Irish Nationalist councillors and even, for decades, an MP to Westminster.

Over time, Liverpool’s Irish dimension has become less visible. Crass demolition of the North End broke up local loyalties; sectarian passions cooled, Irish Home Rule removed the biggest source of political dissent. Above all, second and-third generation Irish began blending in – the charms of Irish country dancing and Gaelic hurling could not compete with nights at the picture palaces or Saturdays at Anfield and Goodison. Was it cultural suicide, as the separatists feared? Or a hopeful lesson in assimilation? Not for the first time, nor the last, Liverpool was a vast laboratory of social experiment.

The Liverpool-Irish did not so much disappear into history as transform the city’s cultural future. They made Liverpool into something more like themselves. They gave to their adopted city a strange and unique personality – with a hybrid accent to match. Had those crowded boats of fearful, seasick human cargo been turned back at the Mersey, our city would be a very different place today. And I suggest it would be very dull indeed.

Madonna's Celebration

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of Madonna's career retrospective, "Celebration", for The Word, November 2009

There's an idea that we are trained by evolution to connect the nearness of a face with loved ones. Before the invention of photography and cinema, humans seldom saw another face loom large – that was reserved for babies and their parents, or pairs of lovers. Then suddenly we were surrounded by posters of glamorous strangers, on billboards taller than houses, fixing us with come-hither eye contact. Our subconscious minds mistook these media fabrications for loved ones. But we didn’t really know them and they weren’t actually looking at us. We started forming deep attachments to people who don’t realise we exist.
If anyone knows the grotesque illusions of stardom it is Madonna. But hardly ever has it thrown her off course. She’s managed its challenges in a way that, say, Michael Jackson – her exact contemporary, born a fortnight later in 1958 – sadly could not. This far into her career, after 26 years of sustained fame and attention, we can safely say that Madonna is a lifer. In the early hours of 31 August 1997, two things happened. Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash and Madonna became the most famous living woman on earth. There is nothing she could ever do that would make her obscure again.
But do we know her, in any meaningful way? Within her own sub-set of celebrity – female pop musicians – she enjoys a position as unassailable as The Beatles. Commercially speaking it’s hard to imagine any rival who might surpass her. Aside from record sales and tour grosses, she has lived in the eye of the cultural hurricane, where pundits and professors gather to flap their lips about religion, fame, feminism and sexuality. She’s displayed such a cool aptitude for the job that you have to wonder what she would have become if denied that planetary stage to romp upon.
It’s almost a relief to turn away from all that and listen to her music. Madonna has spent so long in the world’s uncomprehending gaze that we forget how hard she works at her records. They are not an afterthought for her. It’s a sign of her shrewdness that she never takes the day-job for granted. This new compilation (a single or double CD) is a re-mastered summary of her decades with Warner Music, whom she recently left in favour of a “360-degree” deal with a company who will handle merchandise and live shows. It’s a very modern arrangement, by one who has been central to nearly three decades of upheaval in her industry.
The dancefloor is where Madonna began, or rather it’s where she first struck gold. Actually, the young Ms Ciccone’s ambitions were as catholic as her upbringing – arriving in New York she hedged her bets between acting, dancing, nude modelling and drumming in a rock band. It was a post-disco brand of dance-pop that eventually did the trick, massively assisted by the early-1980s rise of video. For better or worse, that MTV-powered medium transformed popular music from an aural to a visual game. And the comely young Madonna was its greatest beneficiary.
Few would claim she is an exceptional singer, and early hits like Holiday are not for devotees of pure vocal prowess. By the time of her second album, though, she was already transcending the brief career arc expected in her genre. The production touch of Chic’s Nile Rodgers put an almighty kick behind Like A Virgin. Her voice grew fuller and rounder. And her taste in collaborators has stayed consistently sure. Only a snob would argue that Madonna is not a “real” artist. It’s true that she has always relied on co-writers, but she’s had so many of them now – Patrick Leonard, Stuart Price, Mirwais Ahmadazi, to name a few – that it’s surely her own musical judgement which has ensured longevity.
The dancefloor was Madonna’s spiritual home but it was not large enough to contain her. By 1989 she was ranging out in style and subject matter and, in a number such as Like A Prayer, showing her first unfortunate tendencies to pomposity. I’ve interviewed Madonna, and Sting and Bono, and have to say she is the most earnest of the three, the most bereft of self-mocking humour. Her records began arriving with press releases that said “She stands at the forefront of socially conscious artists worldwide.” To which she added, “Hopefully, I have taken the personal and made it universal.” In one sense, great as Madonna compilations are, I’d rather relax with an hour or so of Kylie Minogue. At least Kylie understands she is basically here to cheer us up, not to save us.
Matters got worse in 1992 when she published her Sex book, a silly project whose self-importance recalled the pretentious old pornographer Hugh Hefner. Its musical partner on the current CD is Erotica, a breathy piece of nothing much. (Its chorus, of course, is often mis-heard as “Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie. Put your hands all over Bill Oddie.”) It was a rare lapse of concentration on Madonna’s part. In her espousal of “self-expression” and “confronting taboos” she can fall prey to psycho-babbling seriousness, whereas her real intelligence lies elsewhere. Maybe the word “reinvention” is over-used nowadays – earlier generations of performers would simply have called them costume changes – but it requires talent to orchestrate the great make-overs of Madonna’s career. And, again, those overhauls owe little to anyone except herself.
Nor, for all her wealth and advancing age, has she lost touch with the hipper fringes of pop culture. Just as Michael Jackson always did, she can buy in help from anywhere and impose her presence in every market. There is a newly-recorded track here, called Revolver, that features the rapper Lil Wayne. And the album artwork is by the currently feted street artist Dr Brainwash, who seems to share his employer’s Marilyn Monroe fixation, by way of Andy Warhol, Banksy and the artist behind The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, Peter Corriston. Commencing her second half-century on earth, Madonna’s eye for a happening look is unwavering.
Probably the best tribute one can pay to these musical highlights of hers is that the newer ones are the best. She’s nearly unique in pop for improving with age. Listen to one of the early attempts at a torch ballad, 1985’s Crazy For You, and her limitations are gratingly apparent. But when she re-visits that emotional terrain on 1998’s Frozen, the maturing of her voice brings dividends. Take A Bow, from the under-rated 1994 album Bedtime Stories, has a considered depth she could not have attempted back in her Boy-Toy days. Perhaps the best track here, and the one they’ve confidently picked to start the collection, is Hung Up, the metronomic confection from one of her most recent (and outstanding) albums, Confessions On A Dancefloor.
Hung Up, you might recall, is based around a zinging Abba sequence, taken from Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight), which prompts a comparison with one of the other great pop catalogues. It does suggest a lack of innocence in Madonna’s work. Where the Swedes can veer from simple exuberance to minor-key melancholia, her art is colder and sounds more calculated. It’s gloriously catchy, for the most part, but almost heartless at the same time. If Abba songs are puppies, Madonna’s are lizards.
Above all these tracks are a testament to hard work. God loves a trier, they say, and Madonna is certainly that. She took the raw materials of the dancefloor underground and fashioned a global pop for the jogger’s iPod, the salesman’s car and the cake shop radio. She was not handed a superlative talent. Quite unlike Michael Jackson, there were never moments when you watched her perform and felt a sense of awe, an awareness of other-worldly gifts. But she set herself a job of work and willed herself into the towering, lasting presence she became.
She can play at Cabaret but, in truth, has not a decadent bone in her body. She lacks the European talent for sophisticated indolence. Beneath the potty-mouthed showbiz act there hides a Puritan work ethic. Madonna’s determination is in fact a triumph of the American spirit.

Read my Madonna interview here.

Also on the site: Madonna's Evita CD.

Hugh Cornwell: The Stranglers And Beyond

Wed, 7 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with Hugh Cornwell, formerly of The Stranglers, done for The Word issue of June 2008.

Why don’t you get back with The Stranglers?
“Various people have tried to put it back together, but I couldn’t be bothered. Creatively it’s the last thing I would want to do. Move on.”
But what about the money?
“I’ve been offered loads of money to do it but I don’t need that kind of money. It’s in the make-up of the human genome to look back and think of the nice things, through rose-tinted glasses, but you mustn’t get fooled. There were reasons why one moved on. It would be like getting back into bed with an old girlfriend. When they asked Dave Gilmour what it was like going on stage with Roger Waters he said it was like shagging your ex-wife.
“What am I going to get out of it? What’s in it for me to get back on stage with the rest of The Stranglers? What do I get? A cheque? I need something else. What do I need a cheque for?”
Then what about the fans?
“Don’t give me the ‘Oh but the fans will get something out of it.’ Fuck the fans. They got 17 years of us together. Wasn’t that enough? What do you want, blood?”
Ah, the vexed question of Humpty Dumpty bands – the ones who crack and split in an eggy mess of yokey recriminations. That’s the last we’ll see of that, we think… Until, sooner or later, somebody wonders if it could all be put together again. It might be management or concert promoters – or it might be elements in the original line-up who have found the post-split life a little harder than hoped.
Hugh Cornwell’s 58 years have fallen into three roughly equal stages: his early life, his time in The Stranglers and the solo era. But of course it’s the middle bit that still defines him. He toured a while back as the guest of Blondie, a band who resolved their Humpty Dumpty problem with some success. More recently he travelled the USA on a double-bill with a band called From The Jam, led by Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler. They of course work with a Weller-shaped hole in their heart, whilst Hugh performs with the ghosts of lost comrades behind him.
As a solo artist he’s self-sufficient, but the crowd will always call for songs he sang in a previous life. He plays a proportion of old material in his set: the shows are sometimes billed as “Hugh Cornwell – The Stranglers And Beyond”. His three ex-colleagues, meanwhile, still ply their trade as The Stranglers and employ a different lead singer/guitarist. There is little love between the two camps. “We’re all tribute bands now,” Hugh reflects. “If you play the old catalogue you’re a tribute band. I would include myself in that.”
That said, he doesn’t look much different: the hairline has inched northwards and the jowls a fraction south, but he’s essentially the wiry and restless man who once stalked punk rock stages in a “Fuck” T-shirt – and couldn’t move, or so it seemed, without getting arrested. “You gotta stay fit,” he declares. “Today I’ve already been for a four-mile bike ride and I’ve done 30 lengths in the pool. You gotta watch your diet too, and how much partying you do. I can’t party like I used to.” He shakes his head incredulously: “I hear Mick Jagger’s given up alcohol on tour.”
There is something orderly about Hugh Cornwell. He is the only man I’ve met who became a rock star because he felt he was a failure at bio-chemistry. He makes me some coffee, but darts back into the kitchen for a place-mat before I put the cup down. At one point in our conversation, I ask him what he learned from his five-week prison stretch in 1980. He thinks for a while and says: “You know they say prisons are overcrowded now? Well I’ve got a great solution. You’re in there all day long and it’s so bloody boring. So… Form chain gangs, get them all out picking up the litter around the country.”
His eyes take on a new intensity. “There’s so much litter. It’s not Great Britain, it’s Litter Britain! It’s filthy, it’s disgusting. When I take a walk in the country I take a plastic bag with me to put all the shit in that people leave: fag packets, sweet wrappers, plastic bottles, packaging that doesn’t bio-degrade. Get all the prisoners out in chain gangs, picking up litter.”
Blimey, I thought… I came to interview Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers. What I got was Uncle Bulgaria of The Wombles.

II.

A draughtsman’s son, Cornwell grew up in suburban North London, not far from Hampstead Heath. He never felt he was quite top-drawer, however. “Britain is still class-ridden... My parents were lower middle-class; my father worked hard all his life to bring up four kids and never really had the fruits of it. Even in retirement I think he thought, Is that it? You work so hard to get a place big enough to bring up four kids, and then they all leave home and you’re left with an empty house. What’s all that about? I don’t want to be in that situation. Is that what life’s all about? Just bringing up your spawn? I don’t know.”
Did he look to music for escape?
“Yeah. I had two elder brothers and an older sister, so I was totally formed by them. And the first gig I went to I was taken along by Richard Thompson, because we had a band together in school [Emil & The Detectives]. We went to see Chuck Berry live at the Finsbury Park Astoria: first on were The Nashville Teens, second The Moody Blues, next The Animals, then The Swinging Blue Jeans and then Chuck Berry. And that was the first gig! I thought, Fuck me, this is amazing. If every gig’s going to be like this… And Richard says, See what I mean? I told you it was going to be good!
“Richard taught me how to play the bass. I bought a home-made bass and he said ‘You gotta get yourself a proper one’ so I got a Paul McCartney violin bass and suddenly the neck was tiny and I could play better. Then Richard left school while I stayed to do A-levels; then Fairport Convention happened and I put music on the back burner.”
Unusually for a musician, Cornwell’s background is in science, which he took to Ph.D level (before dropping out, in Sweden, to join a local rock band). “I liked science,” he says. “It was a challenge. Music itself is a science, it’s got laws, certain progressions. It’s a form of mathematics, or at least has a lot in common with mathematics. But I dropped science because I realised I wasn’t as good as I needed to be.”
The Stranglers took shape in 1974, when Hugh hooked up with drummer Jet Black, bassist Jean Jacques Burnel and keyboardist Dave Greenfield. Though they were mostly older than the emerging punk crowd, with a wider musical palette, The Stranglers had a fast, stroppy style that most punters happily accepted as punk rock. They were never quite from Central Casting, all the same: “The writer Chas de Whalley used to call us Punk Floyd. He’d say, It’s a much better name than The Stranglers and it really describes what you do.
“Our songs were better, too,” says Cornwell. “There was The Jam, The Police, Blondie, none of them were really punk bands, but nobody was complaining. It was just a case of go with the flow. Elvis Costello wasn’t a punk. But none of us were going to go, Oh sorry, we shouldn’t be here cos we’re not really punks. It was, Yeah, get us on here! It was an audience, a way to get noticed, to get a record contract. Everyone used the tag for their own ends.”
Their trademark sound was really defined by Burnel’s bass, hawking up like a consumptive’s cough, decorated by the psychedelic filigrees of Greenfield’s keyboards. Having followed The Stranglers in clubs since 1975 I can vouch for their pre-punk scowliness – they were not peace-loving hippies in disguise, as enemies claimed. I vividly remember, also, their take-no-prisoners way with hecklers.
“Yes,” nods Hugh, “but my aggression was always in the music. I’m not an aggressive person in real life. People are scared of me but I’m very laid back. John [Jean Jacques Burnel] was more aggressive. I preferred to talk the hecklers down but he was more confrontational. We nurtured that aggression because we knew that was the side that helped us.”
They sold more records than all the proper punk bands and amassed a Greatest Hits catalogue of lasting saleability: Peaches, No More Heroes, Golden Brown and so on. At the time, though, The Stranglers were mainly known for being horrible. Dissenting journalists were variously kidnapped, abandoned in the wild, thumped in pubs or, perhaps most memorably, gaffer-taped to the Eiffel Tower. There were regular run-ins with the GLC, the Australian police, the Swedish Hell’s Angels. They failed to charm the burgeoning Rock Against Sexism lobby – perhaps hiring strippers did not help. A lot of this, as Cornwell cheerfully concedes, was artful PR hype. But the biggest and worst stories were all too real…
Returning from a gig one night Cornwell’s car was stopped by the police. He was searched and found to be carrying various drugs including heroin. The next stop was Pentonville Prison.
“I could have got done for a lot worse in those days,” he says now, “cos I used to think I was immune from prosecution. I thought I could never get busted but suddenly the truth caught up with me. The funny thing is that I hadn’t actually tried heroin at that point. Somebody had given it to me after a show and I put it into my bag, being diligent and thinking, ‘I won’t take this until after the tour’s over, cos it could make me sick and fuck up the gigs.’ Then I got busted for it. But I’d never even tried it, it was a gift from a fan.
“So when I got sent down I felt a bit hard done by. And when I came out I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been done for it. I’ve served time, I might as well try it now!’ So then I started on heroin. Ridiculous. And for about 18 months or two years I smoked and snorted it. Until I got bored.”
Soon afterwards the entire band was incarcerated in Nice for supposedly inciting a student riot at a campus gig. A legend arose of a curse that hung upon The Stranglers. It was a time of hard drugs, financial disasters, inter-band paranoia and several deaths within their circle. As if to gain some distance, Cornwell tried a few solo records, dabbled in acting and in modelling, and grew estranged from the other three Stranglers. He walked out in 1990 and has never walked back.
It was an acrimonious split, wasn’t it?
“I think it’s been perpetuated unnecessarily. When I left, I just wanted to leave, but a few things left a sour taste in my mouth. One was that I couldn’t get I couldn’t get my amplifiers back for a year afterwards. I don’t know, there’s always been a lot of sniping at me from them and I don’t think it’s necessary. I wish them all the best, so I don’t see any reason to snipe but they take every opportunity to denigrate me.”
Is it a continuation of whatever was dividing you when still together?
“Exactly. I just got bored with the whole situation. I felt my creative juices were being stifled by too many rules and regulations. If we were making a new record and I spent a day in the studio building up harmonies when the others weren’t there, I was accused of turning it into a solo album or being manipulative. But I thought it was for the band, you know? You can’t work with people who are going to fire those sorts of accusations at you.”
Aren’t all bands a bit like teenage gangs?
“Exactly, and I got to the stage where I thought, Do I still want to be in The Stranglers when I’m 50? I just want to be myself. When you’re in a band with a strong image you tend to put on that jacket, that’s the part you buy into. But when it doesn’t fit you any more you take it off. I’ve now been out of it longer than I was in it and I can see it more clearly. And I’m so glad I did it.”

III.

Hugh Cornwell’s new album, Hoover Dam, arrives in a variety of formats, reflecting new realities in the music business he joined over 30 years ago. It’s downloadable for free from his website (hughcornwell.com); or it’s a physical CD plus a live version on DVD. Meanwhile he tours and tours, often as a solo acoustic act.
“It’s completely changed,” he accepts. “Ten years ago an artist would go on tour accepting it would make a loss but would promote a new release. But now an artist should think of a record release as a loss intended to promote a tour, which is the only way to make money. You have to cut the fat. Leaner is better.”
Among the new songs is one about an emotional break-up… not from a band, or a lover, but from his accountants. Another, entitled Slow Boat To Trowbridge, vents displeasure at the one-way system in that seldom-celebrated West Country town. It’s a tough and hearty guitar-based album, full of the old melodic bite he excelled in. But is it ground-breaking? Perhaps the answer is in the song called Banging On At The Same Old Beat.
“Everyone’s doing the same old thing. Nobody’s retiring and most of them are banging on at the same old beat. And one half of me is applauding it and one half is admonishing it. Half of me thinks, ‘Come up with something new’ and the other says, ‘Well, if that’s what people want and it still works, then why not?’ So it’s the conundrum of modern music. That’s my inner torment! I’ve got this new material I want to do but I have to reconcile that with the fact that people know me for something else.”
What advice would you give to an aspiring musician?
“Get another job. I can’t imagine what it’s like being a young person trying to get a start in the music business, it must be a nightmare. Because none of the old fuckers like myself are giving up, there’s more people on the bandwagon. It’s crazy.”

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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

Scott Walker

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

A profile of the fabulous Scott Walker, written for GQ magazine, July 2000.

I
There are medieval hermits whose lives are better documented than Scott Walker’s. But once upon a time he led Britain’s biggest boy band, was the sexiest, most charismatic star of his generation, and arguably the greatest white vocalist in pop history. Not only that, he was so moody and strange a whole mythology grew up around him. He walked away from fame when he could have become the new Sinatra. He was weirder than David Bowie, and too avant garde for Brian Eno. He’s still alive today, but that’s as much as anyone knows for sure. It’s rumoured he likes to ride a bicycle to his local pub and play a game of darts. He’s so mysterious that he makes Greta Garbo look like Denise Van Outen.

All musicians like to think they’re misfits, but Scott Walker really is. There was a deep divide in pop music in the 1960s, and Scott fell right down the middle of it. Where did he belong, exactly? Was it on TV, with all those squires of squaredom like Lovelace Watkins and Peter Gordeno? Should he wear a frilly shirt and a velvet bow tie and serenade the straights? Or was he a rock’n’roll renegade, whose music prowled the darkest reaches of the psyche and scared the crap out of people? Nobody was sure. You’d have to imagine Dean Martin singing Joy Division. And you’d still be baffled.

For a while though it all worked perfectly, and in 1965 Scott Walker was simply magnificent. Here’s how Nik Cohn described him in his prime: “He was a light golden colour and he had all the equipment, the tragic mouth and misted eyes and fluttery lashes, the thin hands and soft hair, and he never managed more than a small sad smile. When he sang, his hands went up in front of his grieving face and, delicately, his body curled up like a lettuce leaf.” This was brilliant pop theatre and a million women longed to mother him. You really have to wonder where it all went wrong.

That’s hard to say. But it certainly began with a pop group called The Walker Brothers.

The Walker Brothers weren’t brothers and they weren’t named Walker. The one we know as Scott Walker was actually Noel Scott Engel, a tall, good-looking boy from Ohio; he was a trained musician and nearly became a teenybop singing star called Scotty Engel. But he wound up in a trio with singer John Maus and drummer Gary Leeds, and in 1964 they became The Walker Brothers. They played the beatnik clubs on Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, where they were daringly shaggy when the white boy look was still clean-cut like The Beach Boys. The hottest producer in LA was Phil Spector, and the Walkers got his arranger Jack Nitzsche to record them in the maestro’s resounding style. Drums, guitars, pianos: there were three of everything, overdubbed and echoed, with a 38-piece orchestra on top. Officially John was the lead singer, but Nitzsche realised that Scott’s rich baritone was the stronger instrument, and put him at the front. (Gary didn’t do much of anything.) The result was a huge, trembling ballad called Love Her, and Scott sang it in the manner of a man with a very deep voice on his way to the scaffold. It was like this: another man has won your girl’s heart; “Love her,” you tell him, noble and brave in the depths of your desolation. “Love her for me.” And it went out to radio stations and it died a lousy death.

But who cared? The Brothers were already packing their suitcases for another place. Gary might not sing so well, but he was full of talk about England, the home of The Beatles. He’d toured there as the drummer in P.J. Proby’s band and suggested the Walkers should grab a piece of the action. It was a truly inspired idea. Not only was Swinging London the world’s most happening town, it was far away from the Vietnam conscription board. So the boys left golden California for a dingy flat in Kensington in the middle of a British winter. Though miserable at first, they quickly clicked with Harold Wilson’s Britain. Supposedly sporting the longest hair in London, they were the first American group to look right, which in 1965 meant looking British. That first single Love Her became a spring hit over here. They met a gifted English producer called Johnny Franz, who had made great, heart-stopping epics with Dusty Springfield. Now he’d do the same for them.

Next thing you knew The Walker Brothers were at Number 1, with a song called Make It Easy On Yourself, and after that the hits just kept on coming. Minor-key, symphonic melodramas were their thing; Scott’s voice was a marvel of haunted gothic grandeur. Franz had copped the format of Spector’s work for The Righteous Brothers, especially You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, and he employed a brilliant British arranger Ivor Raymonde and class songwriters like Burt Bacharach. Scott would stand by John, his skinny arms outstretched like Jesus. The light brown tousled hair enlarged his head and made his body look all the more frail. He wore beatnik casual clothes that seemed half careless and half exquisitely chosen: Wrangler jackets and needlecords, open collared shirts and dangling medallions, suede shoes. Usually some sunglass action. And his pretty boy face was marked by a frown that claimed a private universe of melancholy.

Next there was another humdinger, My Ship Is Coming In, and then the biggest biggie of them all, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More. This song was the definitive tragic masterpiece of its era: “Loneliness,” it rumbled, “is the cloak you wear…” It was on the jukebox of the Blind Beggar pub when Reggie Kray shot one of his enemies dead. “The sun wasn’t gonna shine for him any more,” joked Reg afterwards.

And Scott realised he had escaped the VietCong for something almost as terrifying: an army of young females who wanted him very, very badly. All over Britain there was Walkermania, and scenes of real hysteria. At the provincial Gaumonts they were bombarded with teddy bears, because one Brother was said to like them. Burly men with peaked caps and moustaches joined battle with palpitating, lust-maddened teenagers – and lost. There is the touching story of a 14-year-old girl in Portsmouth who was knocked down by the group’s getaway car. Regaining consciousness she asked the ambulance men, anxiously, if Scott was OK. In northern Odeons schoolgirls fainted. In West Country ballrooms the chicks were possessed. Apparently John and Gary revelled in the whole Bacchanalian orgy. (Gary had particular reason to be pleased: he didn’t even play on the records.)

But as for Scott – well, there were already signs that Scott was going off-message. He just wasn’t acting like a 1965 pop star. For a start his vocal heroes were of the Sinatra generation, and he was suss enough to understand that cabaret had truly heavy origins in European culture. Whatever world Freddie & The Dreamers inhabited, he was strictly elsewhere. Nor was he in sync with his brother Walkers: when John got a Lamborghini, Scott acquired a cheap army surplus jeep. Now there were whispered tales of chronic stage fright, of missed gigs and whole long days of brooding silence. He favoured gloomy films like The Seventh Seal, and weird European authors like Jean Genet. He shunned the groupies for brainier broads with paperbacks of Sartre. He kept his curtains drawn and was rumoured to play Mozart on the stereogram. He liked a Scotch-and-Coke, but loved a dozen of them even more, and he went on lonely pub crawls down the Kings Road. He got locked up one night for drunkenness. Basically Scott was adrift, and often wore disguise. Every few weeks he’d move flats to escape the fans.

The fans were not only screamers, though. There was another streak to Scott’s appeal: a kind of student chic that was big among sensitive sixth-formers. They’d read his Record Mirror interviews and rush to look up “existentialist”. The writer Peter York has dubbed Scott the ultimate Neurotic Boy Outsider. He was, said York, “someone who got the style exactly right… He wore his shades perpetually and he was very thin. It goes without saying that he was often found in extremely low moods wandering around and worrying about something too big to explain.” Suburban girls found this to be irresistible. Suburban boys made lame attempts to copy it, with horrible results.

By the end of 1965 Scott Walker was looking exhausted. He’d done it all. In only six months he’d become a household name. For better or worse, the experience would shape the rest of his life. He seemed weighed down by the sorrows of a hundred lifetimes. And he was just 22 years old.

In August 1966 came news of a suicide attempt: dragged from a gas-filled flat near Regents Park, Scott was rushed to hospital. Soon afterwards he was safely recovered and paid a visit to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. A member of The Hollies leaned over and – just for a laugh – offered him a shilling for the meter.

The saddest thing is that he probably needed it.

III

Scott Walker recoiled from stardom like a vampire in the sunlight. He felt surrounded by bad men who stole his money and silly young girls who stole his soul. In late ’66 he went to stay in a monastery in the Isle of Wight, but he had to bale out when the teenyboppers turned up outside. Yet a kindly monk gave him a key to the monastery, and in old pin-up shots you can see him wearing it around his neck. The music biz, he announced, “is a big, phoney mess.” It was the point when everyone else was turning psychedelic, but Scott despised that trip as well. Used to peering into the soul’s black abyss, he had no time for blissed-out hippy gigglers. (Even today, it’s reported, he still “sees red” when you mention Glastonbury.)

The Walkers’ time was almost over. When they toured with Jimi Hendrix they watched him from the wings and knew that their style was already obsolete. Scott and John were getting on each other’s nerves as well. The hits got smaller until you could hardly see them and, in May 1967 at the Tooting Granada, the group announced they were splitting up. In Baker Street some girls staged a “protest march”, which was a very 1967 thing to do, but the world was already forgetting The Walker Brothers. And the money? Well, said Scott, “there were the bills for suits that got torn every night we played, hotel bills, big drinks bills and entertainment bills. We came out with no money.”

When they went their solo ways Scott’s career was the only one worth watching. He thought of dropping the Walker tag and becoming Scott Engel again, but the name was just too close to Engelbert for comfort. His live debut was typically odd. Out there was a new Love Generation that was about to swell into the Woodstock Nation and turn its heroes into demigods. But Scott in his stubbornness, or fear, opted instead to play the Stockton Fiesta Club. And then? Well, perverse to the end, he now made a suite of profoundly gorgeous albums that were like nothing else on earth.

The fame of his name ensured the solo records sold well at first. He also agreed to make some hit singles in the classic Walker style – Joanna and Lights Of Cincinnatti – which he scorned as sell-outs, although they kept him above the breadline. But in the end, the sheer strangeness of these albums would turn the public off. On the plus side he still surrounded himself with old school craftsmen such as Johnny Franz and the arranger Wally Stott, who gave Scott’s voice the sumptuous settings it deserved. Unsung heroes of British pop, these characters. Even at the height of hippy they’d turn up for work in white shirts with dark ties, wear horn-rimmed spectacles, chain-smoke Kensitas and drink PG Tips. But they could spot a duff note from the oboe without looking up from their copy of Practical Electronics.

Scott was at least in safe hands. The trouble was that Scott lived in a world of his own. He was impossible to market. The rock crowd had its hairy-faced heroes and the last thing they wanted was a crooner who modelled himself on Tony Bennett and Jack Jones. But the easy-listening audience, the mums and dads, were simply repelled and confused by Scott’s songs. It’s a poignant symbol of his predicament that he’d appear on cheesy TV variety shows to sing grim stuff like Jacques Brel’s My Death.

Incidentally it’s worth remembering the name of Jacques Brel, if only because he comes in useful when you play that game about counting famous Belgians. Like all famous Belgians, Brel was often thought to be French and did indeed work the Paris jazz caves of the Left Bank, where his tormented warbles came to epitomise our image of stripey-jerseyed Gallic angst. Like Bowie later, Walker was infatuated by Brel, and covered the mordant songs Jackie, My Death, Amsterdam and Next. A critic wrote of these versions: “When Scott discovered Jacques Brel the effect was devastating…. Nobody in pop music has ever made more nihilistic, grandiose, debauched, schizophrenic, souls-in-torment, night-riding, heart-rending music…”

And Walker ploughed his lonely furrow. There were songs of night and rain, of plagues and wars, of playing chess with Death, of whores and sad transvestites. By the time of Scott 4, the 1969 LP that serious Scottologists consider his masterpiece, the sales had tailed off disastrously. Scott’s managers wondered if they should launch him as a rival to Tom Jones. It wasn’t such a daft idea: a James Bond theme song or a Vegas residency and he could have been made for life. Scott himself had thought about joining Eric Clapton’s new supergroup Blind Faith – which might have won him the other half of the entertainment audience. But in the end he went for neither, and the truth was that nobody knew what to do with Scott Walker. He was a lost boy once again. There were the usual rumours: he’s become a cab-driver; he’s gone to work in a beer factory in Copenhagen. In fact he had gone to Amsterdam with his girlfriend Mette Teglbjaerg. But he might as well have gone to the moon.

He came back and tried to compromise by making less forbidding albums: movie themes, country songs, prettier ballads. Now married to Mette, they had a baby daughter to support. But his heart wasn’t in the new music and the public was indifferent. He played northern cabaret clubs and drank bourbon. It was all a bit of a mess. Even so, The Walker Brothers’ reunion of 1975 was a big surprise. Even more surprisingly they had a big hit, No Regrets, and made three new albums. These were mostly rather ropey, but the final one, Nite Flights, was really impressive in a chilled, alienated kind of way, and one of its biggest admirers was David Bowie. Soon the reunion petered out, however, in a string of dead-end gigs where Scott would sullenly ignore the requests for old favourites: “Ey up our Scott, sing us The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More!” His poet’s soul shrivelled in despair. Meanwhile his brief marriage to Mette had ended in divorce; she left for Denmark with their child.

Where was he now? In a London restaurant washing dishes, said someone. Actually, he’s become a Tibetan monk, said another. Was he ever on drugs? His only known habit has been a prodigious intake of vitamin pills. What’s certain is that by 1980, penniless again, Scott Walker was pretty well off the radar. He took a short course at art college. A golden moment of opportunity arrived when David Bowie asked to produce him. Typically, Scott wasn’t interested. He was offered new songs by Squeeze, Boy George and others but turned them down. One record company put him in a studio with Brian Eno, but Scott walked out of the sessions. In the meantime his legend was taking shape. The cult of Scott was confirmed in 1981 when Julian Cope, another great rock eccentric, released a compilation of Walker’s early solo works, Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker. His old record company followed up with a collection of those Jacques Brel cover versions. A new generation, including Marc Almond, started falling for Scott’s mystique. In this world he was no longer a loser, a wayward, awkward sod. He was a glorious enigma, a human question mark with secret music that only the deeply hip could ever understand.

The great comeback occurred in 1984, with a new solo album called Climate Of Hunter. Scott emerged from seclusion for a rare interview: “Well, time flies when you’re not working...” he shrugged. “I’ve been sitting in pubs watching people throw darts. I only make records when I’m ready. Unless I’m ready it would take a bear to drag me out.” Naturally the music was strange, and reviewers fell back on the shiftiest word in their vocabulary, namely “interesting”. The album sold to fewer people than you’d see in a Second Division football ground. Scott disappeared from sight again, with the bizarre exception of a fleeting, overdraft-paying appearance in a Britvic orange juice ad. He looked a little older, and just a fraction thinner on top. But his mystique remained impregnable.

More years dawdled by. Scott’s manager once asked him what he was up to. “Painting,” he replied. “Oh really? Oils or watercolours?” Scott frowned in puzzlement. “No. Painting and decorating.”

Eleven years after Climate Of Hunter came its follow-up, Tilt. It’s an austere, echoing mausoleum of a record. Its roots are in the Gregorian chants he learned at that Isle of Wight monastery and in black-and-white art movies with subtitles. “I would like you to feel like you’re in the middle of a heavy flu when you put it on,” he explained, helpfully. Again the reviewers found it “interesting” and again the sales were microscopic. And Scott Walker was once more off the radar. The Sunday People even offered a reward for any sightings.

By the way, whatever happened to The Walker Brothers? John Maus/Walker went back to America and got a job in computers. After some ducking and diving, Gary Leeds/Walker became a motorcycle courier in Essex. And today Scott Engel/Walker lives alone in West London. He listens to some modern music including PJ Harvey and Portishead. It’s said that he keeps his phone on for only one hour a day. Occasionally his bank balance gets a boost through some CD reissue or other, but according to one ex-manager he has “the least interest in money of anyone I have ever met on this earth.” In his last known public utterance he said, “It’s true that I live by myself and spend most of my time painting, reading or biking around to my favourite pub for a game of darts. But I also have a lot of friends and do not see myself as particularly weird.”

What’s more he is absolutely right. He is not “particularly weird” at all. There’s really nothing wrong with doing nothing. Scott Walker should be sanctified as The Idler’s Icon. He’s “more driven by curiosity than achievement,” says one old friend. Too proud to produce anything second-rate, he shows a rare and welcome self-restraint. It’s better to spend your life reading good books, watching good movies, listening to good music, than burdening the world with yet more bad art in the name of “expressing” yourself. Walker’s withdrawal from the celebrity circus may be the sanest and most dignified act of any major figure from his era. He’s the ultimate in anti-celebrity. Many famous people don’t do anything in particular, except go about behaving in a generally famous way, while their work is secondary or even non-existent. But Scott is the opposite: outside of his work, the boy from Ohio is scarcely with us at all.

So, if you’re ever in a pub in West London and you meet a quiet, handsome man wearing bicycle clips… buy him a drink on us.

A T. Rex Miscellany

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

Assorted reviews of T. Rex reissues, including:
A T. Rex Top 10
Unicorn, etc
Electric Warrior
Telegram Sam
Electric Boogie, etc
Dazzling Raiment, etc

A T. Rex Top Ten

Desdemona
A 1967 single from Bolan’s brief stint in freakbeat combo John’s Children; earned its predictable BBC ban for lines like “lift up your skirt and fly”. Lead vocalist Andy Ellison (later of Radio Stars) is rather upstaged by Marc’s back-up bleat.
(From The Complete John’s Children)

One Inch Rock
Wherein the narrator is magically miniaturised by a “liquid poetess”. An early Tyrannosaurus Rex single, happy, nonsensical and literally impossible to dislike.
(From Prophets Seers And Sages… Expanded Edition)

She Was Born To Be My Unicorn
Made by Marc with Steve Took and Tony Visconti on a budget of pennies, yet cleverly evokes the Phil Spector Wall of Sound and predicts the style of T. Rex hits to come.
(From Unicorn)

Jewel
A juddering 12-bar blues that captures Bolan midway between toadstool-dwelling dreamer and crunching rock juggernaut. Features cat-strangling guitar solo.
(From T. Rex)

Hot Love
Another simple blues pattern, borne aloft on tasteful strings, thus refining the formula discovered on Ride A White Swan. Bolan’s first Number 1 and the official beginning of T. Rextasy.
(From The Essential Collection)

Cosmic Dancer
From the best Rex album, an introspective ballad with a touch of the vulnerability that Bolan deployed to balance the flash and swagger of his bigger numbers. Indicates the sort of depth he might have achieved in maturity, had he ventured beyond the T. Rex comfort zone.
(From Electric Warrior)

Get It On
The heavy, heavy monster sound of 1971 and Bolan’s biggest international hit; honking rock’n’roll saxophones and sweeping piano (by Rick Wakeman!) jostle amid the metallic riffage and witchy neon imagery.
(From Electric Warrior)

Telegram Sam
“Golden Nose Slim”, “Purple Pie Pete” and “Jungleface Jake” form an orderly queue behind the eponymous Sam in the biggest hit of Bolan’s *annus mirabilis*, 1972.
(From The Slider)

Teenage Dream
Slow and elegiac, only with hindsight does it become an ode to Bolan’s imminent decline (“Whatever happened to the Teenage Dream?”) but who can doubt the wisdom of lines like “Believe me, Pope Paul, my toes are clean”? Perhaps the most peculiar T. Rex single of them all.
(From The Essential Collection)

New York City
Bolan used the same bass riffs and chord progressions at every stage of his career. But the fertility of his gift for new gobbledygook remained right to the end. Well, did *you* ever see “a woman coming out of New York City with a frog in her hand”?
(From The Essential Collection)

(The Word, June 2005)

Tyrannosaurus Rex
Unicorn takes the biscuit in this luxuriant batch of Bolan reissues
They just don’t make pop stars as beautiful and wayward as Marc Bolan any more. It took him a while to get the formula right, but even when he finally cracked the code of chart success he looked, wrote and sang like a precocious elfin princeling.
The first five T Rex albums are now repackaged with abundant bonus tracks. The first two have titles too long to fit this review, a couple contain John Peel reading children’s stories. By the fifth, 1970’s T. Rex, the band name was shorter, the style more rocky and terse and early member Steve Peregrine Took replaced by the handsome bongo-ist Mickey Finn. Essentially these albums follow Bolan’s pilgrimage from hippy fringe poet to the brink of glam rock stardom.
Lyrically and melodically, 1969’s Unicorn is the best. It’s still a pitter-pattery acoustic record but you can hear Marc’s pop ambitions in miniature: bedroom homages to the Phil Spector symphonies he grew up on. If nobody guessed what he was driving at, they were probably distracted by the pixified feyness of couplets such as “The elements and oceans congregate on his brow / And he stalks in style like a royal crocodile”. Here was a man who saw fairies at the bottom of the garden, but imagined whole stadia of girls screaming his name.
(The Word, November 2004)

T. REX
ELECTRIC WARRIOR: EXPANDED AND REMASTERED
RHINO
Marc Bolan was a little guy with large dreams. He named his band Tyrannosaurus Rex, after the biggest and baddest of beasts – yet the “band” was only two hippies with a pair of bongos. In 1968 they were playing the humble clubs of flower-power London, but already the lisping singer was scheming to become the next decade’s most outrageous star. And this album, Electric Warrior, is a glorious reminder of just how close he came.
Though he’d cultivated a fey, other-worldly manner in hippy circles, Bolan was a tough-minded careerist who seized his moment when it arrived. Now that the pop stars of the 1960s had grown bearded and serious, he sensed a new generation’s need for flash and glamour. The group’s name was truncated to T. Rex while the line-up was expanded to an electric four-piece. His simple semi-folk tunes were beefed up into crunching glam-rock anthems (he practically invented the genre) while the lyrics became a fantastical blend of Lord Of The Rings and Chuck Berry. In Britain, by 1971, he whipped up fan hysteria so extreme it was called “T. Rextasy”.
Electric Warrior catches Bolan in the first flush of stardom. It’s a wonderfully confident record. With Tony Visconti, the producer he shared with his friend and arch-rival David Bowie, he switched between two basic modes: cross-legged pixie minstrel (“Cosmic Dancer”, “Life’s A Gas”) and super-charged rock god (“Jeepster”, “Mambo Sun”). Chugging, sexed-up boogie meets wide-eyed cosmic poetry. And, now, Rhino’s reissue fleshes out the story with a radio interview and some extra tracks from the height of T.Rextasy, including Bolan’s first British chart-topper “Hot Love”.
Bolan’s appeal was always precarious – and in the US he broke through only briefly (represented here by his 1971 hit “Bang A Gong (Get It On)”). Serious rock fans scorned his pop ambitions and the teenyboppers were soon seduced away by less complicated pretty boys. He remained a cult hero for the remaining six years of his life, however, and in this deluxe version of Electric Warrior we have a great souvenir of Bolan in excelsis.
(Blender, March 2003)

T. Rex
Telegram Sam
“Total fun to record,” says Tony Visconti of the session he produced at Copenhagen’s Rosenberg Studio. It was late 1971, “T.Rextasy” raged in Britain, and Marc Bolan (who said that writing hits was like perfecting a magic spell) was about to make his third Number 1, following Hot Love and Get It On. “By the time we recorded Telegram Sam,” says Visconti, “we were in our ‘formula’ phase. Some T. Rex tracks suffered as a result, but TS was the last of the real big hits, still maintaining its fresh innocence – that charming quality that ran through all the T. Rex hits. Marc was still sharp on this one with his surreal, but semi-autobiographical lyrics; his guitar playing was classic and the rest of the band chugged away like nobody’s business.” The band, in fact, were at their peak – the session preceded a disappointing US tour, and the upcoming album title, The Slider, proved prophetic. No problems here, though: Visconti built a wall of sound around Marc, Mickey Finn, Bill Legend and Steve Currie, in a mad rampage of rock’n’roll pillage and cheerful gobbledygook. It even fades on a joyful homage to the blues classic Smokestack Lightning: “I’m a Howlin’ Wolf! Bow-a-hoo-hoo!”.
Composer: Marc Bolan
Producer: Tony Visconti
Released: January 1972
Chart peak: 1 (UK), 67 (US)
Available on: The Slider
(Mojo’s 100 Greatest Singles, August 1997)

T. Rex
Electric Boogie
Marc Bolan & T. Rex
Spaceball
* Bolan in his prime, recorded on the road in Britain and for US radio sessions in the headiest days of T. Rextasy.
Confusingly packaged as a product of the 1971 Weeley Festival, Electric Boogie is in fact culled from indoor dates in that same year, which was Bolan's most miraculous. Bopping to the top with Ride A White Swan, Hot Love and Get It On around that time, he was the screamers' delight. Yet he led a band who were still rooted in the gruff old underground ways: show them a heavy blues riff and they'd gnaw away at it for weeks on end. Thus there are some cuts on here that try the patience. You know the audience was getting entranced by the Marc charm on full-beam, but that's an experience that no CD is ever likely to capture. There's a more intimate encounter to be had on Spaceball, drawn from US radio sessions in 1971 and '72, when Bolan was trying to seduce America with material from his Electric Warrior and Slider albums, all to frustratingly limited effect. Mostly "unplugged", these performances were clearly no strain for a man who'd long been used to semi-solo acoustic work, and he's often delightfully loose here, with and without the band. Best is Get It On Blues, an early stab at the famous hit, complete with such discarded couplets as, "There's a man in a hat, he's got ears that are four feet long."
(Mojo, December 1997)

Marc Bolan & T. Rex
Dazzling Raiment: The Alternative Futuristic Dragon
Unchained: Unreleased Recordings Vol 7
Live 1977
Electric Boogie
It’s the 20th anniversary of Marc Bolan’s last car ride and time to re-assess the little fellow’s contribution. Bolan, who was in his pomp the darling of the boppers, has become the preserve of scholars. The Edsel series of reissues and rarities, nearing completion now, continues with an expanded version of his penultimate album, Futuristic Dragon, and Volume 7 of the Unchained archive recordings, each compiled with scrupulous care. He was past his peak by this time, but there are tantalising signs of a revival in Dragon’s New York City, and Unchained’s trilogy of London songs.
A year later, in 1977, came the Live record of T. Rex’s final tour, when they were supported by The Damned, billed to represent the punk generation of which Bolan claimed spiritual paternity. But he rocks harder on Electric Boogie, an earlier live document from 1971; the CD is annotated by surviving colleagues Mickey Finn and Bill Legend. Gems like Ride A White Swan lost lustre over nine-minute work-outs, but you do wish he were here to play them again today.
(Q, October 1997)

The Beatles' Anthology DVD

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

A review of The Beatles’ Anthology DVD, written for Word, May 2003.

Summer in an English garden, and shadows are lengthening across the lawn. Mugs of tea to hand, a trio of crinkly-eyed codgers shoot the breeze, chuckling with the gentle intimacy of men who have known each other for most of their lives. Every so often they pick up ukeleles and softly strum old Elvis tunes. They reminisce and fill the gaps in one another’s memories. Occasionally they can’t agree, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all done and dusted now.

This is the Last of the Summer Wine, as played out by The Beatles. We are watching what are almost their final hours together. A few years afterwards, one of the three lay dying, with the others at his bedside. The banter may not be rich in revelations but the scene is poignant for anyone whose life was entwined with theirs, or who has felt themselves enriched by the music they made. It’s therefore one more reason to love The Beatles’ last collective enterprise. Along with the book and three CDs that share its name, the Anthology series was already the best document we will ever have of that epochal career. Now in its DVD form – five discs, over 11 hours of material – it’s become the Beatle release you can’t be without.

What is remarkable about The Beatles’ story is that it really is a story. And that’s the Anthology’s secret. We’re enchanted by their music, but also by the unfolding drama of their career. There must be something to this tale that works, on a structural or psychological level, like formal drama.

The Anthology project received its green light in 1989, when there was at last sufficient peace among the four main players (Yoko representing her late husband) to consider co-operation. Paul and George discussed the idea of collaborating on background music for a documentary film of footage collected by their assistant Neil Aspinall. Plans advanced to the point at which, in 1995, the Anthology would take in all the ventures mentioned above, and also “new” recordings, based on solo Lennon recordings, of Free As A Bird and Real Love. The DVD updates the video version by covering these sequels, though the core of the story is still the career of The Beatles proper, from the dancehalls of Liverpool to the Law Courts of London.

The documentary’s style is neither chirpy nor pompous. There is no authorial voice-over, just a dazzling mass of footage and imagery – blurry backyard snapshots, Technicolor chronicles of world conquest, abundant interviews. Like the Anthology book, whose pages it fleshes out and brings alive with sound and movement, this film is essentially an autobiography, with all the benefits and the limitations that implies. There are no outsiders represented, just the four musicians with occasional contributions from their closest surviving consiglieres – producer George Martin, press man Derek Taylor and the terse, black-hatted character who began as their roadie and became the head of Apple, Neil Aspinall.

Sex, drugs and scandal are spoken of, and sometimes quite openly, though it will never be enough to satisfy those who are more attached to what is sordid than what is beautiful. Overall the sheer volume of visual and spoken material, most of it new to the public domain, is enough to justify the Anthology’s claim to historic value. (Better than that, of course, it’s stuffed with Beatle music, which is enough to make it supreme entertainment.) A bigger difficulty than self-censorship is the participants’ simple inability to remember all that happened in those amazingly eventful times. I’m not the only interviewer to have found his own grasp of Beatle history far stronger than the group themselves. On Disc Five, reunited in middle age, Paul and George sit in Abbey Road and play an original mix of Golden Slumbers: “Which album was that on?” asks George, in all sincerity. But as Paul would always say to people like me, it was our job to remember the story – it was The Beatles’ job to have lived it.

Characteristically they have two different versions of the origin of the Beatle haircut. George recalls how in Hamburg he’d grease back his Teddy Boy quiff with Vaseline; one day he came back from the swimming baths with it flopping forward, and was urged by his German beatnik friend to keep the clean new look. Yet Paul remembers hitching to Paris with John and meeting one of those same German friends who encouraged them to adopt the emerging local style. Ringo is in no doubts, though – he just changed to go along with the other three.

There are other loose ends that the series is content to leave untied. We’re served with two separate explanations for The Beatles’ name: in a clip from Marlon Brando’s movie The Wild Ones it’s the name of a motor-cycle gang, whereas in Lennon’s own recollection it was a take on Buddy Holly’s group The Crickets. Then again, he also said it was vouchsafed to him in a vision, by “a man on a flaming pie,” so who knows? In fact the invention is also claimed for Stuart Sutcliffe, the early Beatle who died in Hamburg. What the Anthology can certainly prove is Sutcliffe’s gift to the group’s style. The doomed youth looked quite fabulous; in the scrum of proletarian British beat groups, he brought an arty cool and cultural aspiration to The Beatles that would set them apart.

It goes without saying that the Anthology’s deepest flaw is John Lennon’s absence. The one Beatle who was not around for its making was the one who might have brought the most in wit, subversion and bracing candour. Like the other missing protagonist Brian Epstein (who died in 1967), Lennon is represented as fully as the archive clips will allow. Interview snippets reveal him as whip-smart and funny, and it’s frustrating to wonder how much his missing perspective might have shaped our latterday sense of what The Beatles were about. At least George Harrison was around to contribute, even if he is the most ambivalent of the remaining three. It’s striking how often in conversation he speaks of The Beatles as “they”. Such detachment of your inner being from outer circumstance would become a central theme of his spiritual outlook, yet it seems to have been with him from the start. As early as 1963, in the first flush of publicity, he tells an interviewer, “You don’t think, ‘Oh, there I am in the papers.’ It’s funny, it’s just as though it’s a different person.”

Paul, being Paul, is almost wholly upbeat about the experience and loyally supportive of The Beatles’ achievements. It’s clear that he resents the other three taking sides against him in the final disputes over management, and he cannot conceal the exasperation he felt when John brought Yoko inside the group’s last sanctuary, namely the studio floor. (Yoko herself, although involved with Anthology, does not take part in the interviews.) McCartney is at pains, however, to make amends to George: he admits talking down to the guitarist on occasions, suggesting he’d lapsed back into his Liverpool role of older schoolboy on the bus.

Ringo is more perceptive than many might expect. Often the least involved on a creative level (he recalls the lengthy Sgt. Pepper sessions as an opportunity to learn chess), he was the most immune to the group’s corrosive internal rivalries. He offers some moments of exceptional observation, like his first memory of fame becoming a barrier to normal life. Just after The Beatles broke big, he was taking tea at the family home in Liverpool, when his cup was knocked and slopped into the saucer. “Oh, he can’t have that!” said somebody, rushing to replace the offending article. That would have been inconceivable a few months earlier. “That was the first time I knew things were changing,” he says, in his deep, lugubrious drawl. “It was an absolute arrow in the brain.”

In the same way, Ringo is least reserved in his affection for the band, and in the end becomes quite touchingly emotional. “A hotel room here and there…” he ponders, “a really amazing closeness…” His sad clown eyes look close to filling up. “Four guys who really loved each other. It was pretty sensational.”

DVD Extras
Fifth disc offering 81 minutes of material not available on video, including:-
Previously unseen interviews with Paul, George and Ringo
George Martin on The Beatles’ recordings
Featurettes on the making of Free As A Bird and Real Love, plus their videos. Jeff Lynne interview.
Documentary on the making of the Anthology series, with director Geoff Wonfor, interviewer Jools Holland and production team.

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

Van Morrison: a Buyer's Guide

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

I wrote the Q Buyer’s Guide to Van Morrison for that magazine’s issue of July 2002.

What is it that people love about Van Morrison? His twinkling eye? His smouldering good looks? His irrepressible sense of fun? Er… None of the above. This obstinate Ulsterman has carried a 40-year career without the help of stardom’s conventional props, such as hype, glamour and extrovert pizzazz. What has enchanted listeners, instead, is the soulful growl of his singing voice and the trance-like intensity of his albums. There is almost no singer-songwriter in the rock tradition – from Springsteen to Costello to David Gray – who does not revere him. Heavyweights from Dylan to John Lee Hooker have accorded him respect. For others, such as U2, Kevin Rowland and Shane MacGowan, he’s been the living symbol of Celtic roots and rugged integrity. Despite the acclaim he remains a stubborn, reclusive figure: his aversion to the music industry is legendary. Musically, Morrison ploughs a lonely and often eccentric furrow. But it’s well worth following, so let us be your guide. Just one thing: do remember to bring a packed lunch. He would.

1. Indispensable

Astral Weeks
WARNER BROS 1968
The collapse of his Belfast blues band, Them, set the 22-year-old Morrison on the solo trail and this, his debut album, is still the pinnacle of his art. Recorded with session musicians in New York, Astral Weeks captured hippy imaginations everywhere. A world away from the terse style of his earlier songs Gloria and Brown Eyed Girl, these elongated pieces are free-flowing and dream-like, veering in style from jazz to folk to soul. The lyrics unfold with enigmatic eloquence and are superbly rendered by Van, who performs like a man possessed by some other-worldly rapture.
Standout Tracks: Sweet Thing, Madame George, Beside You

Moondance
WARNER BROS 1970
Thanks to Astral Weeks the introverted young Irishman had become a darling of the American counter culture and he deployed his new-found status well. Re-locating to the musicians’ community of Woodstock he steeped himself in the funky, rustic style pioneered by The Band to produce a robustly upbeat album. Stuffed with concert favourites, Moondance is more accessible than its fabled predecessor, though its brooding centrepiece, Into The Mystic, is still the work of man who follows his own star.
Key Tracks: Into The Mystic, And It Stoned Me, Moondance

Also…
Though he remained based in the States, a visit to Ireland inspired the pastoral lushness of Veedon Fleece (POLYDOR 1974) and seemed to re-connect the reluctant figurehead with his homeland. Gorgeously orchestrated, dew-drenched reveries such Streets Of Arklow and Country Fair sound as old as the landscape they celebrate.

2. Excellent

Saint Dominic's Preview
POLYDOR 1972
His spell of domestic contentment apparently over, Morrison’s muse was once again restless and he made a decisive break with the romantic serenity of previous albums. Thoughtful admirers of this beautiful but strangely troubled record point to its two most epic compositions (Almost Independence Day and Listen To The Lion) as the pronouncements of a maturing mystic. Fans of a less elevated disposition like to mention the record sleeve, specifically the peek-a-boo hole in the crotch of Van’s jeans.
Standout tracks: Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile), Almost Independence Day, Listen To The Lion

Irish Heartbeat
POLYDOR 1988
A collaboration with Ireland’s traditional music champs The Chieftains, this album prompted a new surge in Van’s popularity. Gone for the moment were knotty-browed meditations on philosophy. In their place came childhood skipping songs, fragrant folk ballads and a general delight in marrying the Irish heritage to Van’s bluesier influences. He was by now a London resident again, and British audiences flocked to watch our minstrel in merrier form than anyone could remember.
Standout tracks: Raglan Road, Irish Heartbeat, Marie’s Wedding

Avalon Sunset
POLYDOR 1989
A rejuvenated Morrison sealed his comeback by scoring a Christian hit duet with Cliff Richard (Whenever God Shines His Light) and writing a song that would later become a hit for Rod Stewart (Have I Told You Lately). But elsewhere on this richly varied album are the uniquely peculiar musings – Belfast memories, rambles through the Ulster countryside with plentiful stops for lunch – that could only ever be sung by Van Morrison.
Standout tracks: Whenever God Shines His Light, Have I Told You Lately, Coney Island

Also…

His earliest live album, the double-CD It's Too Late To Stop Now (POLYDOR 1974) captures Van at the peak of his rock star phase in California and London and makes a decent Greatest Hits set into the bargain. On Wavelength (POLYDOR 1978), the soul-searching is put on hold in favour of pure, joyous blasting, while No Guru No Method No Teacher (POLYDOR 1986) is steeped in images of spiritual contemplation – until A Town Called Paradise when the red mist descends and “copycat” acts are roundly denounced.

3. Good

Tupelo Honey
POLYDOR 1971
The memorable album artwork depicts our man as every inch the rock’n’roll aristocrat, relaxing in the rural splendour of Woodstock with his soulmate of those years, one Janet Planet. The music, too, is a warmly romantic rootle around the more organic strains of authentic Americana: the classic title track typifies this peaceful interlude in Morrison’s prickly pilgrimage through the world. He also hymns the praises of Moonshine Whiskey. Meanwhile a traditional Scots ballad, I Wanna Roo You, keeps the Celtic connection alive.
Standout tracks: Tupelo Honey, Moonshine Whiskey, (Straight To Your Heart) Like A Cannonball

Beautiful Vision
POLYDOR 1982
It was a time of synthesisers, New Romantics and high-maintenance hairstyles: not, on the face of it, the ideal context for Van Morrison. Yet he made a credible stab at updating his sound on this unusually sleek production, which combines some bulletins from his continuing spiritual quest (She Gives Me Religion, Dweller On The Threshold) with the jolliest slice of autobiography (Cleaning Windows) and tender expressions of love (Across The Bridge Where Angels Dwell).
Standout tracks: Cleaning Windows, She Gives Me Religion, Across The Bridge Where Angels Dwell

Also…

He was predictably quick to disown the whole idea, but the period of His Band & Street Choir (WARNERS 1970) found Van playing the hippy patriarch. On its sleeve he sports a floor-length robe and gathers about him a rural community of long-hairs, their “ladies” and children. The tracks are correspondingly relaxed and groovesome, if lacking in outright classics. Morrison had fully recovered his grump for Hard Nose The Highway (POLYDOR 1973), which is reassuringly irritable, especially on the scathing Great Deception: amongst those left for dead are the “plastic revolutionaries” of rock stardom and “the so-called hippies” or Love Generation hustlers. Into The Music (POLYDOR 1979) marked his emergence from a creative slump with fine rousing sounds like Bright Side Of The Road.

4. Approach with Caution

The New York Sessions 1967
LOST GOLD 1967
There have been countless compilations of the material Van recorded in between Them and Astral Weeks, but this is reasonably complete. Brown Eyed Girl is always welcome, the early draft of Madame George is interesting and the macabre scenario of TB Sheets is harrowing, but the bulk of these tracks are no more than a warm-up for the greatness to follow. Several tracks are deliberately wretched, done to fulfil a publishing contact that Morrison was determined to escape.
Standout tracks: Brown Eyed Girl, TB Sheets, Madame George

Hymns To The Silence
POLYDOR 1991
Somewhere along the line, nearly every act records a double album that should have been a single, and here is Van’s submission. In among the plodding hymns (Be Thou My Vision) and standard Van complaints (Why Must I Always Explain?), however, there is a remarkable core of nostalgic numbers, such as On Hyndford Street and Take Me Back, wherein the singer revisits his Irish childhood in a hauntingly contemplative fashion.
Standout tracks: Take Me Back, Hymns To the Silence, I Need Your Kind Of Loving

Also…

Van’s appearance on The Band’s all-star farewell The Last Waltz confirmed his place in rock’s senior division, but his prevailing attitude had become one of detachment. He left America, but took no interest in Britain’s punk kerfuffle either. There’s an aimless feel to A Period Of Transition (POLYDOR 1977); its apathy is infectious. The West Country ramblings of Common One (POLYDOR 1980) find Morrison on the scent of ancient, Avalonian Britain; the American years seemed suddenly from a different lifetime. For the rest of the decade he would explore belief systems of every sort, and Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart (POLYDOR 1983) reflects his fling with Scientology. Disciples of Vannology, however, still fret about the Zorro hat he modelled for the cover of A Sense Of Wonder (POLYDOR 1984), while the scowl that graces Poetic Champions Compose (POLYDOR 1987) is the least inviting look of all. Neither album is consistent enough to impress the unconverted. Enlightenment (POLYDOR 1990) is redeemed only by one truly weird track In The Days Before Rock’n’Roll (“Let the goldfish go!”). The Healing Game (POLYDOR 1997) has its moments, not least a song called The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, intended for Terry Jones’ film of Wind In The Willows but not used. Hard core Morrisonians welcomed the double CD The Philosopher's Stone (POLYDOR 1998) which collects assorted rarities and unreleased tracks from the previous decades, the best being his original version of Wonderful Remark as featured on the King Of Comedy soundtrack.

5. Poor

Too Long In Exile
POLYDOR 1993
Morrison nears his 60th year with no apparent let-up in his schedule. But in its preference for quantity over quality, this release set an ominous precedent for the work that has followed. Finding a musical foil in Georgie Fame, and a romantic partner in the Irish model Michelle Rocca, appeared to put a spring in Van’s step. But the repetition of too-familiar themes (Til We Get The Healing Done) and paranoid rants about villainy of the music industry (Bigtime Operators) are far below the inspiring standard of his greatest work.
Standout tracks: Ball & Chain, Gloria (with John Lee Hooker)

Also…

Van’s live albums seem to appear in 10-year instalments but neither Live At The Grand Opera House Belfast (POLYDOR 1984) nor A Night In San Francisco (POLYDOR 1994) recaptures the energy of It’s Too Late To Stop Now. How Long Has This Been Going On (POLYDOR 1995) is an excursion into jazz with Georgie Fame, that indulges Van’s tastes without playing to his strengths. Even less likeable is You Win Again (VIRGIN 2000) made with Linda Gail Lewis, the sister of rock’n’roll nutjob Jerry Lee Lewis: that rattling of chains must be the ghost of Pub Rock Past. Sadly typical albums of Van’s recent years have been Days Like This (POLYDOR 1995), Back On Top (VIRGIN 1999) and Down The Road (POLYDOR 2002): he tours constantly and doggedly, but the writing or recording are so perfunctory they suggest a man struggling to stay interested in his own music.

The Classic Compilation

The Best Of Van Morrison
POLYDOR 1990
Issued to capitalise on Morrison’s revived fortunes after the Chieftains and Cliff Richard escapades, the real value of this set is in its broad sweep of his career to that date. His early years in the snarling, proto-punkish Them are well represented (thrill to Van’s brattish yelp on garage-band classic Gloria) as well as the bristling Brown Eyed Girl and the mellower styles of Astral Weeks and after. Another connection is made by the original version of Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile) as popularised by Dexys Midnight Runners.
And if the appetite has been sufficiently aroused by all this, then you’ll find second helpings in its companion set The Best Of Van Morrison Vol 2 (POLYDOR 1993) where the emphasis is upon more recent Morrisonia.
Standout tracks: Gloria, Brown Eyed Girl, Sweet Thing

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 Miscellany

Deep Van: The Mojo Profile

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

A Van Morrison Miscellany

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Being a rag-bag of shorter pieces and reviews I’ve written about Van Morrison, for various journals.
They are:-

Morrison the singer

The Angry Young Them and Them Again

Sweet Thing

Poetic Champions Compose

The Healing Game

Back On Top

You Win Again

Down The Road

Can You Feel The Silence?

Magic Time

Still On Top: The Greatest Hits

Extracted from MOJO Magazine’s 100 Singers feature, October 1998:
Van Morrison
Born August 31 1945
Jaw-dropping moment: Van locates the Eternal Now, in Belfast circa 1955, at 7.44 of Take Me Back (on “Hymns To The Silence” 1991)
Recommended album: “Astral Weeks” (1968)
He grunts, he growls, he snorts, he mutters – and still it sounds like a sacrament. Not everyone is enchanted by the voice of Van Morrison, but to those who are, there is no other voice that seems so spiritual. The best description is probably his own: The Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart.
Uniquely for a white singer of his generation, Van was already steeped in blues before he heard Elvis Presley. Unlike Lennon and the rest, he was not smitten by the arrival of rock, and never fixated upon the flash or the glamour. “Pop has just never been my music,” he says. “Because I’ve always heard the real stuff, y’know? I grew up in a household where I heard all the real music, so when I heard pop I didn’t have to rush out. I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but I had the background of hearing this other music since I was three. So it wasn’t such a big injection, like with rebellious teenagers when they heard rock’n’roll. I’d already heard similar music that was called rhythm’n’blues, which was where rock’n’roll came from. So it wasn’t any big diversion.”
As a consequence he never developed along the same lines as other rock singers. From the yappy snarl of his first recordings with Them, to the rumbling meditations of his later work, Morrison grew ever less interested in making a show. He doesn’t project, or express, for the benefit of his audience: we are merely allowed to eavesdrop on some obsessive, private dialogue. On the pivotal “Astral Weeks” LP we can hear his voice mid-way between the edginess of his youth and the deeper, more measured resonance of his maturity. But he’s already begun to sing in tongues: “And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry/Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why” (Sweet Thing).
He’s the least precise of vocalists, and maybe the most eccentric, but Van can genuinely seem in a trance when he performs – like he’s forgotten who, what or where he is. “When he was on stage he would look like a space cadet,” recalled one of his musicians. “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.”

Two reissued early albums reviewed for Q in September 1998:
Them
The Angry Young Them
Them Again
“Defiant! Angry! Sad!” Penned in 1965, the breathless sleevenotes do not lie. Van Morrison’s Them were Belfast’s hottest R&B group, newly arrived in London and full of pent-up rage. The Angry Young Them and 1966’s Them Again were the only LPs they made: their line-up changed almost every day, and Morrison’s muse was already too turbulent to be contained. Alas, the albums were too rushed to capture the band’s raw talent, and there are better Them tracks on singles and EPs. But the first LP has its highlight in Gloria, that truculent slab of proto-garage rock; while the second has a track, Hey Girl, that opens like a window on to Van’s future, anticipating the mystic jazz of his solo debut Astral Weeks. His voice, in Them, was a brattish yelp, and his songwriting suggests he was bursting to move beyond the confines of early ’60s beat music. And yet, while there are glimpses here of the greatness to come, Them’s LPs are essentially works of a genius in rehearsal.

Sweet Thing: a piece for Arena magazine.
It took me a couple of teenage years to distinguish Jim Morrison from Van Morrison. When I first heard Van the Man’s Astral Weeks album I thought it was by a smouldering, leather-trousered lovegod from LA. Only later did I learn the LP was made by a dumpy, grumpy Ulsterman who looked like Mick Hucknall’s uncle even when he was 19.
   Actually I came to realise that Van Morrison is Jim Morrison’s exact opposite. The Doors’ pouting poseur is only style without substance. Our bloody-minded Belfast troubadour is all substance and no style. And that is why we love him.
   One song spooked me straight away on that record. It’s called Sweet Thing and it’s affected me ever since. I’ve played it a million times, never tiring of the extraordinary movie it plays in my head. I’ve heard it drift towards me at random pubs on the Liverpool Dock Road and Belgravian cocktail bars, and the damn thing fills me up each time. Professionally I’ve met Van Morrison quite often, and it’s never been easy. Yet, despite the abuse, the recrimination and the litigation, I return to this song for consolation and – I don’t know – something more besides.
   Van always says that he doesn’t “write” his songs, he just transmits them. They come from somewhere else. I’ve come to believe that this is true. You can never quite reconcile the man with his music until you accept – as he does – that the best music is something magical, and the musician just a messenger.
   He made Astral Weeks in 1968 with a clutch of puzzled jazz players who couldn’t grasp what he wanted, but who helped create the 20th century’s most accidental masterpiece. If there’s any precedent for Sweet Thing, then it’s in one of Van’s inspirations, the poet William Blake. These men chant their visions of another world that we can’t see. Sweet Thing puts the singer in a hazy, pastoral paradise where he wanders in “gardens wet with rain”, or counts the stars in his lover’s eyes, and vows to “never grow so old again” or “read between the lines”. He pleads with his mind to keep quiet, so his heart can hear itself think. He yearns to obliterate experience and rediscover innocence.
   And then, at the crescendo, he yells of his intention to “drive my chariot down your street and cry, Hey! It’s me I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.” Well! What’s the hell’s that about? It’s about heaven, the way I hear it. As Van says in another song, “It ain’t why, it just is.” There’s stuff that simply lies beyond the intellectual process. Sweet Thing, for me, is a trip through some celestial place of the soul’s imagining.

Reviewed for Q Magazine, October 1987:

VAN MORRISON

Poetic Champions Compose

There may be those who will pick up this LP and demand to know why Von Morrison is still producing music with titles like Did Ye Get Healed, Celtic Excavation, The Mystery and Give Me My Rapture. And there is no denying the music, too, wears a familiar aspect: soaked in sax, strings that hover as if by mental levitation, measured with splashes of jazz and coloured by magisterial gospel-blues that illuminate like rays through stained glass windows. It is, in short, the same old magnificent thing.

Poetic Champions Compose – a pretentious name, perhaps, but Van was never a man to worry his head about such footling objections – is not so much a "new" Morrison album as merely this year's instalment. It falls quite easily into the trance-like stream of words and sound that has characterised his past three or four LPs, none of which has been either a surprise or a disappointment. He still sings as if in residence of some higher state of consciousness. One imagines his people having to shake him awake at the end of each day's recording session, telling him it's over, time to go home. The Morrison growl addresses itself to some metaphysical speculations (Socrates and Plato figure in I Forgot That Love Existed) in the style of somebody who sees angels in the mixing desk.

Much of his music has the atmospheric closeness of an impending thunderstorm; nor has he slackened the clenched, religious intensity of his lyrics. But there is beat and buoyancy, too – this scowling sage is, after all, the same man who wrote Brown Eyed Girl – and a good two thirds of the record is wonderfully uplifting. The point about Van Morrison is that he continues to do what he does with sublime indifference to anything else that’s happening in music, and his vision is undimmed. I hope we will hear much more.

From the “Best Albums of 1997”, in Q, January 1998:
VAN MORRISON
The Healing Game
It’s the grit that irritates the oyster that makes the pearl. A lot of Van Morrison's songs seem to come about that way as well. Reassuringly for fans of the Godfather Of Grump, there is still plenty that is pissing Van off, and he complains about it beautifully. The Healing Game begins with a meditation on vengeance, Rough God Goes Riding, and finds its stride with This Weight, a bitter lament for his lost anonymity. Elsewhere it’s an equally familiar, and welcome, mix of Morrisonian romance (If You Love Me), Belfast nostalgia (The Healing Game) and pastoral contemplation (Piper At The Gates Of Dawn). The work of an unsold soul.

A review for Mojo, March 1999:
VAN MORRISON
Back On Top
Point Blank

* New year, new label. But a whole load of existential discontent. No change there, then.

To the younger end of the market Van Morrison must resemble one of those rugged, ancient stones that still dot the landscape of his beloved Celtic West. An object of reverence, to some; obviously with a distant history of mystic significance. But what the hell does he stand for now? Despite a new record label (Virgin imprint Point Blank) and its triumphant title, Back On Top is not designed to win a new generation. It will satisfy fans who’ve stuck with Van’s low-key products of recent years. But assuming that nothing here gets covered by Robbie Williams or B*Witched, then it’s unlikely to dazzle the unconverted. The longer term disciples, meanwhile, will bask in its pleasurable echoes of old songs: the mansions on the hillsides, the obscure allusions to Geneva, William Blake and “backstreet jelly roll.”
   Even so there are developments in evidence. And they’re not jolly. The record has just two tracks with an upbeat feel, and they’re both profoundly bleak at heart. The opener, Goin’ Down Geneva, is a rollicking pub-rock boogie; but it describes a travelling musician (“my heart was filled with pain”) playing dead-end gigs in Europe and making desolate enquiries after Vince Taylor, the lost British rocker. Then there is Precious Time: wonderfully jaunty, with a sort of Jamaican bluebeat bounce, but veined with pessimism – even beautiful girls must die, man is but King for a Day. The loneliness of the long-distance artist is this album’s recurring theme. Its title track is a bitter rant about the “isolation at the top of the hill,” assailed by fools and deadbeats, and “the so-called trappings of success.” In The Philosopher’s Stone (also used as title of his recent rarities compilation), he dwells on his friendless existence: “My job,” he broods, “is turning lead into gold.” But nobody understands. And so he tours, constantly, as if to escape the heartache of staying in one place.
   Other complaints are less poignant. New Biography is a routine swipe at writers who presume to know him, and the fans who run web-sites in his honour. That’s Van: one minute he sings like an angel in excelsis; the next he’s moaning about queues at the Post Office. But there is also romance, in the beautiful utterances of In The Midnight and When The Leaves Come Falling Down. And there is downright strangeness: High Summer sounds like an aborted screenplay, involving a sports car, a garden and Lucifer; and Golden Autumn Day tells of a man attacked by two muggers, trying to overcome his depression and fantasising about flogging his assailants in revenge. How many songs have Robbie Williams or B*Witched ever sung on *that* subject?
   But most of all there is gloom. Reminds Me Of You is the great love song of this CD, and it’s a song of love lost. “Sometimes it seems I’m goin’ to Hell,” is Van’s dispirited conclusion. Restless, disappointed, heartbroken. We can only hope the real-life Van is not in the place he’s singing about. For Back On Top sounds anything but.

A review for Heat magazine, September 2000:
Van Morrison & Linda Gail Lewis
You Win Again
In a nutshell: Van “The Man”, alias the Belfast Cowboy, alias the grumpiest rock legend of them all, teams with the sister of 1950s piano-hammering wildman Jerry Lee Lewis. Lots of grizzly blues growling and honky tonk country music ensues.
What’s it like? As near as a studio album gets to the feel of a Tennessee backwoods live gig, attended by bear-like men in overalls and petite women with big, big hair.
How many good tracks? From where the man or woman in the contemporary street is standing, probably none.
Best track: Why Don’t You Love Me, one of several songs by deceased country giant Hank Williams.
Worst track: Unfortunately it’s No Way Pedro, the only new song Van has contributed.
Verdict: This is the way Van sounds when he can’t be bothered – not in overdrive, just on overtime.

A review for Mojo, June 2002:
Van Morrison
Down The Road

* After a brief, inglorious stint on Virgin, Van returns to Polydor but not, alas, to form.
Well, let’s look on the bright side. It’s not the worst album Van Morrison has ever made. That honour would fall to a series of deliberately useless tracks he recorded in 1968 after a feud with his old record company, Bang, with a view to rendering their publishing rights worthless. The songs, such as they were, were tuneless snippets of sneering doggerel. But the session was eventually released all the same, and it’s so rotten it’s fascinating.
   Van’s latest effort, however, is neither rotten nor fascinating. Instead, Down The Road finds him patrolling his own comfort zone, revisiting familiar licks and topics, steering clear of the bigger ideas that used to elevate his work to celestial levels. No bow of burning gold here, no arrows of desire: just a piece of business, with a whiff of reluctant drudgery that’s ominously signalled in the resigned attitude of tracks such as Choppin’ Wood and Man Has To Struggle.
   The new millennium has not, so far, been a sparkling period for devotees of Morrison’s music. His last album, a collaboration two years ago with Jerry Lee’s sister Linda Gail Lewis, was a mundane set of mostly vintage cover versions. It’s a pity therefore to find Van stuck in the same fallow field that gave us that sad collection of left-over turnips. The controls are once again set to pub rock or thereabouts; but even elite players including Mick Green and Geraint Watkins cannot breathe fire into music whose Muse has taken a long vacation.
   There is a delightful contribution from one guest, the chart veteran Acker Bilk, who plays a clarinet solo on his own composition Evening Shadows. Another oldster, meanwhile, is at least name-checked in the title Whatever Happened To PJ Proby?, a standard Morrisonian moan about the music industry. But Van’s several complaining songs are subdued here, as if he’s losing even the will to be pissed off. His other traditional inspirations, philosophy and spirituality, are pretty well skipped this time around, though his penchant for mystical nostalgia gets a very effective airing on a staunchly old-fashioned ballad called The Beauty Of The Days Gone By.
   Elsewhere the emotions are thin, the words verging on slackness. It’s not only in comparison with Van’s acknowledged masterworks – Astral Weeks, Moondance and so on – that Down The Road suffers. Even his less celebrated albums, from Sense Of Wonder to Hymns To The Silence, were always suffused with a spirit to nourish the soul. But it’s hard to hear the fluttering of angels’ wings on this record. Van has long resisted his fans’ attempts at idolatry, testily insisting that what he does is “just a job”. Sad to say, it’s finally becoming possible to believe him.

A book review for Blender magazine in America, September 2003.
CAN YOU FEEL THE SILENCE?
VAN MORRISON: A NEW BIOGRAPHY
By Clinton Heylin

If, as he claims, the author really is “a self-confessed curmudgeon and part-time misanthrope” then he’s surely the guy to profile Van Morrison. There are two things every acquaintance of “Van the Man” agrees upon. Firstly, when the inspiration strikes him, Morrison can be the most spell-binding performer on earth. And secondly, he’s a miserable, cantankerous grouch. Inevitably, Van has not co-operated in this book and Heylin is realistic enough to know that he won’t be thanked for his trouble.
That’s a pity. Van Morrison roared out of Belfast, Northern Ireland, 40 years ago with the garage band standard, “Gloria” and the timeless radio favourite “Brown Eyed Girl”. He followed with a slew of albums, some of which – like *Astral Weeks* and *Moondance* –are ranked among the best of all time. Since then he’s blended soul, jazz and Irish folk music in a restless quest for spiritual insight. The results have been uneven, and lately they’ve been dire. But his story cries out to be told.
Clinton Heylin is an experienced researcher who has spoken to many ex-associates of the singer, and analysed his every lyric, studio out-take and live performance tape. Nobody can doubt his knowledge of the music. We also learn of the searching that’s taken Morrison through mysticism to Scientology and now, reportedly, nihilism. There are stories of his stormy marriage to a hippy model called Janet Planet and his latterday romance with an Irish beauty queen. But there is a big empty space at the heart of this book where Van Morrison should be. He is legendarily tight-lipped, and nobody quoted here can do more than guess at his motivations. Ultimately it’s as distant and speculative as a back-packer’s guide to the Moon.

A review for The Word, June 2005:

Van Morrison
Magic Time
One evening last summer the ghost of Henry VIII played host to Van Morrison and his band in Hampton Court Palace. The tickets cost a king’s ransom, but for this you were given dinner in the Queen’s Banqueting Hall, and encounters with sundry Equity members in full Tudor fig. One told me: “Pray keep thy lady close, sir! The King has an eye for a pretty wench.” Supping our mead we trooped with many pin-striped recipients of corporate hospitality to watch “the renown-ed minstrel” himself.
   Van of course played Gloria and Brown Eyed Girl and tiddly loons from merchant banks cried “Van the Man!. Then the Man played something dull off his new album and the bankers slumped back in their seats. I took away two positive thoughts: Van Morrison remains the greatest singer I have ever heard, and he is a superb bandleader. I took away two negative thoughts: whatever Muse once supervised his formerly inspired songwriting has plainly given up her job; and Morrison’s rapport with an audience – up there in his shades, coat buttoned up and hat clamped down – is almost non-existent.
   This year’s album, Magic Time, finds him even deeper inside his shell. The young man who made the wonderful Astral Weeks would sing “I’m nothin’ but a stranger in this world” and yet sound spell-bound by his vision of some other sphere: “I got a home on high”. The Van of 2005 is still withdrawn, but nowadays sounding only depressed. His songs used to be like stages on some private pilgrimage, whereas now they’re mostly just complaints. They Sold Me Out, goes one of them: betrayed by his own people, he sulks, “for a few shekels more.,,, just ’cos they could.” He wastes the skills of his band on some unworthily small ideas: Carry On Regardless he ho-hums, Keep Mediocrity At Bay goes another. When he’s not indulging glum resentment he’s re-cycling himself: Celtic New Year, which sounds awfully like 1982’s Vanlose Stairway, is one of those identikit Van Morrison song titles.
   There is plenty of likeable material on Magic Time, more so than on the previous three or four albums. There is the exuberantly swinging take on Sinatra’s This Love Of Mine, or the softly melodic The Lion This Time (which echoes his early masterpiece, Listen To The Lion). I am almost addicted to Morrison and the sheer loneliness of songs like Stranded is, to me, quite moving. But I cannot see why anyone else ought to bother. Van seemed to stop searching a long while ago. There is nothing to be done but re-write old glories and knock off desultory gigs for merchant bankers.
   Then again, Van has at least given me a lifetime of the most spiritually nourishing music I will ever know. I begrudge him nothing.

A review for The Word, January 2008:
VAN MORRISON
Still On Top: The Greatest Hits

Unambitious Xmas marketing exercise does scant justice to the mystic visionary

Rather like his standard live show of recent years, this compilation plays to some of Van the Man’s strengths – chiefly as an ace bandleader with a jukebox worth of golden oldies – yet fails to convey what many have found literally spell-binding in his work. Nobody could complain about what is here, and 37 tracks over two CDs is hardly skimping. Thus there are a few old Them favourites such as Gloria, plenty from Moondance and the latterday peaks such as Have I Told You Lately? The fact they’re not run chronologically is perhaps a kindness to the tailing-off in quality his recent records show. The trouble is, to omit the dew-soaked reveries of albums like Veedon Fleece, and worst of all, to entirely ignore Astral Weeks (the work on which his reputation will ultimately rest) is plain weird. Here is an artist who once made time itself stand still. To reduce him to a “greatest hits” routine is to make something merely fine of what could really be sublime.

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

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Pub Rock: What Are You Havin'?

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Pub rock became a phenomenon in London in the early 1970s. An excellent document of the scene is the compilation Goodbye Nashville Hello Camden Town, which I wrote about for The Word, June 2007.

“Would You Ask A Man To Drink And Jive?” Or even: “Are You Ready For Rhythm & Booze?” Under such punsome headlines, the 1970s music papers hailed the newest new thing in London, and they called it pub rock. It was rock, and it was played in pubs. Who could possibly object? While it was never a screamingly fashionable genre, pub rock was benignly viewed as a Very Good Thing, and when punk rock happened, people gave pub rock the credit for blazing a trail of back-to-basics sweaty intensity .

Some of the major new wave stars, like Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer and Ian Dury, had their roots in pub rock. The most dynamic pub rock act, Canvey Island’s Dr Feelgood, inspired everyone from The Ramones to Paul Weller. And the prince of all pub rockers, Nick Lowe from Brinsley Schwarz, would produce the glorious 45 that detonated English punk, namely The Damned’s New Rose. Any way you look at it, pub rock merits some sort of Rock Heritage Preservation Order. So why is it so seldom celebrated?

Pub rock had no single style, except a common fondness for rootsy Americana, from country twang to 12-bar blues to southern funk. It’s really defined by what it wasn’t – not pretty and arch, like glam rock; not obscure and technical, like prog-rock; nor insular and sensitive, like the era’s singer-songwriters. It was your basic, unpretentious, rowdily good night out. The scene was centred on a handful of London venues, most famously the Hope & Anchor in Islington. The drummer Will Birch, of Southend’s Kursaal Flyers, wrote a great history of it all, called No Sleep Till Canvey Island, in which he notes: “Even at its height, pub rock attracted a relatively small audience… One would often see familiar faces at key gigs, creating the impression that the core audience was the same 20 or 30 people, moving very quickly from pub to pub.”

It’s the Golden Age of Pub Rock, basically the 1970s, that dominates this extensive new compilation, Goodbye Nashville Hello Camden Town. The double CD takes its name from the opening song, by scene stalwarts Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers, and romps across another 47 tracks. In among them are some long-buried gems we ought to re-claim with joy, like Mick Farren’s punk-parodic I Want A Drink, or The Count Bishops’ moody western masterpiece Train Train. There is a generous selection of three cuts by Ian Dury’s Kilburn & The High Roads, including his eternally touching Crippled With Nerves and his epic Cockney odyssey Billy Bentley (Promenades Himself In London).

But some of the crucial figures are under-represented, to my mind, or simply missing altogether: of Nick Lowe’s stylish wit and melodicism, there is only the Brinsleys’ Country Girl, and just one apiece from Dr Feelgood and Eddie & The Hot Rods. Though the compilers can’t have access to everything, it’s a shame that Elvis Costello is nowhere to be heard, likewise Strummer’s 101ers, or Ducks Deluxe or Graham Parker. Absent as well is one of pub rock’s rare pop hits, How Long? by Ace. For any of these I’d gladly surrender Chas & Dave’s I Am A Rocker, to which the passing years have lent no allure at all.

To be fair, David Wells’ detailed sleevenotes do supply a wider narrative than the tracks can offer. He also makes the following bold assertion: “In terms of pub rock, received opinion is that, like some blowsy barmaid, it was pretty appealing after a few pints, but didn’t seem quite such an attractive option in the cold light of day. Absolute drivel.” But is it absolute drivel? I wonder if received opinion was at least partly correct: pub rock does have a certain “You had to be there” aspect to it. Those pub rock nights of the 1970s were often incandescently exciting, but disappointingly few acts made essential records. (There are several dull examples on this compilation.) It’s surely telling that the greatest LP that ever came out of pub rock was a live album – Dr Feelgood’s Stupidity.

What’s for sure is that, somewhere along the way, pub rock fell out of favour. By the 1980s, when all in pop was sleek, synthetic and glossy, “pub rock” signified something grubby, unambitious and tired. And in truth its great days were over. Its best and brightest had heard the landlord call for Last Orders, supped up their beer and collected their fags. Groups have never stopped playing rock music in pubs, obviously; but as a movement, pub rock rather faded from media notice in the bright new age of cocktail bars, MTV stars and style magazines. It survives today and hopefully it will never entirely die. But at my own London local, a former shrine of this pub rock, the baton has passed to tribute acts. Often, they’re paying tribute to the very acts, like Queen and Pink Floyd, that pub rock was designed to subvert.

Never mind. Goodbye Nashville Hello Camden Town performs a valuable service in commemorating a scene that’s too often remembered for what it led to – namely punk – and insufficiently celebrated in its own right. Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, who are two of British rock’s smartest operators, still speak up for the movement to anyone who cares to listen. More importantly, as the late Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood would invariably say, whenever the talk took an unduly ponderous turn: “Bollocks to all that. Now, what are you havin’?”

Woody Guthrie's Dusty Road

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of the Woody Guthrie CD set, My Dusty Road, written for The Word, November 2009.

With his weather-beaten face and working man’s cap, a cigarette clamped to his jaw, Woody Guthrie will forever be the prototypical protest singer. He doubtless knew exactly how to package himself for the admiring circle of New York radicals who saved him from obscurity. The man who inscribed his guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” was, probably unwittingly, a true pioneer of rebel chic. But, for all that, Guthrie was the genuine article, a passionate, articulate champion of people who had no voice of their own.
   When the young Bob Dylan first hit town, he came to pay homage at Guthrie’s bedside, where the tired old fighter was slowly dying of an hereditary disease. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Dylan proved his love by copying Guthrie’s sound and style in every detail. His early albums are Guthrie tributes, full of flinty talking blues, harmonica wails and noble blasts against the arrogance of power. Dylan’s Guthrie period was not to last, but the Poet of the Dustbowl has influenced many more since then. In our own day Billy Bragg is Guthrie’s most recognisable descendant, and Bruce Springsteen his most stellar disciple.
   But he’s really one of those figures so inspirational that there is a trace of him almost everywhere. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that there would ever have been a Joe Strummer without him.
It isn’t only folk music antiquarians, then, who should find this new release significant. The four CDs of My Dusty Road have a curious story. They are cut from metal master discs which were discovered, in 2003, buried in a Brooklyn basement, abandoned decades earlier by a defunct record label. Thanks to some modern technology these tracks now have a freshness and clarity they were never given on first issue. And some of the songs discovered in this cache were never put out at all. We are the first to hear them since Guthrie left that New York Studio after a handful of marathon sessions in 1944.
   He was at home on shore-leave then, between his voyages as a merchant sailor in World War 2. He had an eventful war, being torpedoed once, and nearly getting killed on a trip delivering US soldiers to the Normandy beaches of D-Day. His enthusiasm for the war-effort, in fact, differentiates him from any later protest singer, for Guthrie was no pacifist. His left-wing sympathies drew him close to the American Communist Party, who rather belatedly came to support the war, after Stalin’s pact with Hitler had collapsed. From there on it became an anti-fascist crusade – morally, a less ambiguous war than almost any we’ve seen since. In Guthrie’s songs of 1944 he lavishes praise on tanks, bombs and warships. There were no bed-ins for peace, back then.
   Accompanied by two of his shipmates, the bluesman Sonny Terry on harmonica and the folk singer Cisco Houston on guitar, Guthrie’s repertoire ranged from ancient Appalachian ballads to sentimental parlour songs. (One of the latter, Put My Little Shoes Away, has a dying child murmuring “give my toys to all my playmates”.) But it’s the rousing anthems of political defiance that define Guthrie’s work. He’d travelled across the land in the Depression of the 1930s, helping to organise labour unions and witnessing the poverty of migrant farm-workers. It stung him into the eloquent indignation that gave us This Land Is Your Land, the opening number here.
   He was a folk singer in the most literal sense, plucking his tunes from the vast traditional catalogue of American music, adding his own topical lyrics. Pretty Boy Floyd maintains the outlaw is no worse than the banker (“some rob you with a six-gun, some rob you with a fountain-pen”). His pro-union songs were usually re-purposed spirituals from his youth. Cowboy campfire favourites become sharp political satires. That ever-prolific composer, Trad Arr, gets plenty of exposure here.
   Ironically, for such a dedicated agitator, Guthrie did some of his greatest work with direct state support. He was approached to write songs for a PR film that would celebrate a hydroelectric construction scheme on the Columbia River. From that commission came Pastures Of Plenty (not on these sessions, alas) and the lyrically exquisite Grand Coulee Dam, hymning the Department of the Interior’s mastery of nature: “In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray.”
   Guthrie lived until 1967, though illness had pretty much silenced him for decades. It’s a rare thrill to catch this unexpected glimpse of him in 1944, right at the height of his powers.

Van Morrison Meets Spike Milligan

Sun, 6 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Easily one of the stranger assignments of my life. The meeting was set up by Q’s editor Mark Ellen, responding to Van’s request for a different kind of interview. I joined Van in London and, after a long and difficult car-ride (which I don’t describe in this article) we arrived to find Spike a most hospitable man. He did everything to make Van relax, and virtually tricked him into doing photos. Alas it was not the start of a beautiful friendship: the veteran Goon was later scathing about meeting Morrison.
   It was a tricky encounter for me, too. Revisiting this I am struck by how inventive and funny Milligan was, which I did not completely appreciate on the day, being caught up in taping and observing the event, steering and reviving the conversation, hinting desperately about the all-important photos and our photographer’s timetable, and dealing all the while with Van’s unconcealed hostility for “the journalist”.
   Nothing dims my love for Morrison’s music, and I came to regard Spike with great respect. But I would hate to be back in that rural living room now.
   The piece appeared in Q Magazine’s issue of August 1989.

Sadly, some years later I had to write Spike’s obituary, added here. It contains more information on the comedian, including his influence on The Beatles. It appeared in Q’s issue of April 2002.

Anyway, the original Q piece...

The time has come, the jester said, to talk of many things. Of life and art and 12-man-a-side porridge, of ice cream cones and jazz. Chuckling quietly the grave minstrel nodded assent and together they stepped into the sunlit garden. Later, there would be tea and cucumber sandwiches…
Paul Du Noyer describes the day that Spike Milligan met Van Morrison…

Across and around the sunlit lawn of an English country garden, there romps a spry old gent of 71 years, dressed for the occasion in a floppy black hat. He also sports, we note with some curiosity, a large, pink, penis-shaped false nose, affixed to his face with elastic.

To complete this singular scene, there is another figure, a man of stockier build, who frowns in concentration while talking into a portable telephone. Within a moment, though, he’s spied the spry old gent, loping towards him with a speed that many might think alarming, and abandons his conversation, shaking with mirth.

And that was how Spike Milligan got to have his picture taken with Van Morrison:-

“He was always just there,” is how the singer recalls the comic’s influence on him down the years. “Sunday mornings, if I remember, was The Goons, then Round The Horne, Jimmy Clitheroe, they all seemed to be on Sunday. The Goons were huge in Ireland: kids I grew up with talked like that all the time.”

To which Milligan responds in that foggy, moronic voice that Goons specialists will recognise as belonging to Eccles: “My brain hurts!”

The meeting had been Van’s idea. A most reluctant customer when it comes to promoting himself and his music through the media, Morrison had made it known he’d find an interview to be a more congenial experience if it was conducted by a fellow artist. He suggested Spike Milligan.

Ever since he tuned into The Goons on the wireless, back in Belfast childhood, Van has revered the other man’s work – an aspect of Morrison's passions that few might expect, given the brooding, spiritual intensity that seems to inform so much of his singing. Indeed, the two men have met before (backstage at one of Spike’s shows, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin), while Milligan himself has been impressed by Van's music, especially his collaborations with The Chieftains.

Spike has already featured, unknowingly, in Morrison's work, being the character named in Boffyflow And Spike, a whimsical short story that Van wrote for the sleeve of his Sense Of Wonder album (“Boffy is covered with leaves completely the buckijit and Spike is in hysterics”); there's an instrumental track, of the same title, on the record itself. The night after this meeting, at a gig in Newport, Wales, Van will again invoke the Milligan name, during a bizarre boogie work called Max Wall, in honour of another venerable character in British comedy.

That aside, their two careers have followed long but separate paths, the only apparent connections being Milligan’s early flirtations with jazz bands, and his taste for all things Irish (he’s Indian-born, but of Irish Catholic upbringing) typified by his 1963 novel Puckoon, set in a slightly surreal Sligo village (“Many people die of thirst but the Irish are born with one.”)

Nowadays more active as a writer than as a performer, Spike has just completed a new book, a kind of Milligan family history. It follows his much-loved run of war memoirs, now in six volumes, which began with Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall.

Morrison, meanwhile, is to be the subject of a BBC Arena film, for broadcast late in ’89, that celebrates his 25 years in the music business (though it’s to be doubted if Morrison himself sees his involvement on the “business” as anything else but a painful by-product of what he does). He marks this year with the release of his latest album Avalon Sunset, another instalment in the musical odyssey that started in local Belfast bands, came to wider prominence with the mid-’60s R&B group Them, and subsequently settled into a stream of albums from Astral Weeks (in 1968) and Moondance through to more recent offerings such as No Guru, No Method, No Teacher and 1988’s teaming with The Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat.

And so the arrangements were arranged, and Morrison has made the two-and-a-half hour car
trip down to Milligan's home in this secluded corner of Sussex. The veteran japester arises from his sofa to greet his guest, and they settle in for an hour and a half of conversation which Milligan, inevitably, tends to dominate. Indeed, for much of the time, Morrison is unable to speak even if he feels so inclined, as Milligan’s reminiscences have the Belfast man doubled up with laughter.

Spike: Van, I must ask you something. Dutch descent. You must be.

Van: No.

S: No? You're an Irishman?

V: Ivan is my name.

S: I see. A Russian! I'm baffled now.

V: No, in Ireland they call me Van. It’s East Belfast slang for Ivan, that's all it is.

S: The last time I saw you, you came in the dressing room, you had an ice cream!

V: I can't remember.

S: Yes, I'd had a few, too. It was vanilla. I asked if you could get me one, too. I didn’t think there was an ice cream bar for miles. you must have come in with it from another county! Do you find that Irish audiences are more professional? I came on stage with this iron hat on, and straight away from the gallery: “Jaysus, take yer hat off, we can’t hear you!” They said, “Give us Danny Boy.” I said, I can’t, he’s in the loo.

My father was born in Sligo, Van, very Irish working class family, very poor. He used to live in a romantic world. He loved a drink, he was full of stories. He came to me one day and said, I’ve never killed a tiger. I said, Why are you telling me? Well I’ve got to tell somebody! I thought all fathers were like this lunatic. He used to tell the kids all these stories, about shooting elephants, strangling giraffes by hand. I said, What’s all this, Dad? It’s all lies isn't it? He said, Oh yes, all lies. But what would you rather have: a boring truth, or an exciting lie?

Have you seen Paddy Moloney recently?

V: No, d’you know him?

S: Oh yes, he's a rugger fan like me. Are you into rugby, Van? No? Porridge?

V: Oh yes, porridge.

S: Porridge. It's a better game. Twelve-man-a-side porridge! Did you hear about the Tipperary hurling team? They had to leave at half-time to catch their train home. So the other side went on scoring and won the game! Marvellous! Only in Ireland.

V: I played rugby in school, but after I left I forgot all about it.

S: D’you go into pubs at all, in Ireland?

V: Not really, no.

S: I used to go in there just to hear the talking. That's why they produce such good writers, the conversation is so good. I hope television doesn’t change that. You come from East Belfast, Van? Was it tough?

V: Not really. How long have you lived down here?

S: Only a year. As you get older you earn less money, and I couldn't afford to keep the house on in London. So I put it up for sale, and they said, We’ve got this Japanese bloke to buy it, you don’t mind him buying the place? I said, It’s OK, I’ll wire it up to explode on the anniversary of Pearl Harbour.

I listened to your record with The Chieftains. Lovely. I tried to analyse you as a singer. You really are a jazz singer, aren’t you?

V: That’s right.

S: You must be one of the most adventurous singers, you move through such a spectrum. I’m not grovelling to you, it’s just the truth. Thank you, that’s a pound! I don’t really know much about your family life and all that.

V: When we do these things I don’t usually talk about anything but the music.

S: Were you ever into jazz? You’re such a blues singer.

V: I listened to jazz since I was two years old or something. Who impressed me? Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson. That’s my background. They’ve been saying for years I’m rock this, rock that, but that’s all…

S: I listened to the first track on the new record, I thought for a moment, if I hadn’t have known you, this guy might be coloured, the way he sings.

V: I just got into it by accident, started off in skiffle groups when that was happening, went through showbands, whatever was happening. I was just a professional musician. I joined the union, and they’d knock on your door, Can you play in County Mayo on Saturday night for 40 quid? My peer group that I came from, they were into playing, they weren’t into making records. Pop music wasn’t even reality to me. I had this R&B club going, doing in Belfast what Ken Collier was doing here. And then this bloke came over from Decca Records and the whole thing got wound up from there, and we went into the studio, and got involved in the music business. It became like pop. People were telling you, You must do this, or that. All manipulation.

You played trumpet, didn’t you?

S: I played trumpet and jazz guitar and piano. In about 1933 through to about 1947. We did shows in the Army, ENSA saw us and offered us 20 pounds a week when we got demobbed. So we became the rage of Italy, went round for two years. Then we came back here and fuck all happened, so I just dropped it, worked in a bar and became a scriptwriter.

V: How long was that before The Goons?

S: Oh, a long time. The Goons didn't start until about 1949. I was telling jokes in the bar, and started writing scripts for the BBC, met Peter Sellers, and the chemistry was there.

V: Did you play on any of the singles, like I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas?

S: I played guitar on the Ying Tong Song, in the middle eight. My total record as a musician! With the pop scene as it was, I thought, I bet I can write a hit record, I'll write the worst song in the world, with three chords and no words. And I did it. I sent it to my mother, and wrote, By the way, that's me playing guitar in the middle. So she invited all her cronies in. "Listen to this now." And she'd marked it with a chalk, where the guitar started and where it finished. "Oh he's a powerful good player!"

Did you follow any jazz guitarists?

V: I heard Django. My father had a lot of jazz records. Rosetta Tharpe played guitar. The Carter Family, the country stuff , that's what I liked.

S: D’you still enjoy the music, Van, when you're doing it? You sound like you do.

V: Occasionally. I don’t do many gigs now, that’s why I enjoy it.

S: It’s like people, isn’t it? Meet them once a month, it’s very nice. Meet them every day you start to hate them. Of all the groups I’ve listened to, you are the most experimental. You keep moving. Where will it stop? Will you go into raga? Or Spanish flamenco? They've never married that into pop.

V: Well, The Gypsy Kings do.

S: Are you still throbbing about music? Do you lie in bed at night and think, I like that sound in my head?

V: Not really. I think you just have to find different angles if you've been doing music for so long. Georgie Fame's working with me now, and Cliff's on one track on the new album. When did you see The Chieftains last?

S: They came here to Tunbridge Wells about nine months ago. Moloney's a delightful man, such a musician. A wonderful feeling of happiness they can convey. Of course they all go to blind tailors, don't they? Listening to your singing, Van, you have a sense of excitement. Not many singers have this. That's what you convey.

V: It's drama, isn't it? The blues are drama, that's what I picked up from it. You make things more than they really are, to get it across, I find. It's fantasy, illusion.

S: This is deep stuff, you see. Pop stars don't talk like this. “Yeah, we done a gig. My brain hurts.” You have a very strange charisma. I don’t feel quite comfortable in your presence. (Morrison laughs) A sense of menace. There’s a sense of abandonment in your singing, I thought, He doesn’t think, he just does it.

V: I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it. You're more interesting to me than I am talking about my music.

S: Too bloody modest by far! Your name is worldwide. Go to Alaska and somebody will say, Have you heard Van Morrison? Colossal fame. I'm famous to a certain degree, but I haven't got a showbiz ego. I'm more interested like you are in the actual meaning of things.

V: Why do you think there were so many comedians about in that Goons time, the ’50s?

S: Well just after the war, suddenly they were being loosed out of the forces, Jimmy Edwards, Max Bygraves, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, and they were all dying to break out.

V: Did you know Hancock?

S: Very difficult man to get on with. He used to drink excessively. You felt sorry for him. He ended up on his own. I thought, he's got rid of everybody else, he's going to get rid of himself. And he did. He phoned me up from Australia the night before he died. He said, It's wonderful here. I could hear he was smashed out of his mind. He said, I've got a great series coming up, you must see it. The next morning he was dead.

V: Do you know Max Wall? He's doing Beckett isn't he?

S: That's right, bloody hard plays to appear in… I've listened to music right up to Schoenberg, but I'm baffled by him and this tonal music. I suppose it's technically very clever but it doesn't give me any emotion. I like Mahler. Do you listen to any classical music?

V: Debussy.

S: Marvellous. Sensuous, descriptive music.

(There is a break while Spike's wife serves coffee and sandwiches.)

V: lt’s not unleaded coffee.

S: Unleaded coffee! Ha ha! (Munching) Thank Christ you came, I'd have starved otherwise… The only other Van I know is Van Driver.

V: Yeah, he's very popular!

S: Does the touring get you down'?

V: I don't tour much any more. I used to when I was about 15. Slept on a bus for a couple of years. Are you ever serious?

S: Yes. I'm being semi-serious with you, because I think you're basically a very serious person, Van, I really do. I'm serious about the environment, about kids, about what goes on, a better world. If you're ever stuck for lyrics, I won a song lyric contest once. I'm an environmentalist, I'm a romantic. I'm not trying to make money out of you, I've got enough money. I like experimenting. If you've got a strange song. That nobody can put words to, throw it at me. I don't want any money for it, I’ll just do it for kicks.

D'you know, I write a joke every day. I make them up, I don't know how, like you get songs.

Little man owns a jeweller's shop in London. And he gets a pretty girl to work behind the counter. She’s very attractive, very sexy, he's about 75. He suddenly starts missing money from the till. And he finally catches her with her hand in the till. And he says, Miss Mollison, I'll have to call the police! She says, No, don't do that! I'm from a very good family. I'm sorry Miss Mollison, I caught you, I'll have to call the police. She says, No, you can take me upstairs and you can screw me. He says, Well, as you put it that way. So he takes her upstairs and he's banging away for two hours but he couldn't make anything happen. So he says, It’s no good. I'll have to call the police.

Are you a Proddy, Van? Don't come near me, I don't want to catch it.

V: Basically I'm not really anything.

S: Aren't you? So when I introduce you to people I say, Here is Not Anything. This is Van Not Anything Morrison. A singer and Not Anything. You must be something.

V: Well theoretically I'm Church Of lreland.

S: Proddy? Oh Jaysus I won't mention this to my mother. Dear Mother, I spoke to a Protestant today. Oh God forgive you, son. Go and confess it. Father I have sinned. Amazing the power of the Catholic Church. My father went bald very early, and he was so incensed by it that he went to church and prayed for it to come back. I'm certain he went to a priest and confessed, Dear Father, forgive me, I have gone bald. “Go away, my son, buy three wigs and say one Hail Mary.”

V: How many characters were in The Goons?

S: About six.

V: Neddy Seagoon?

S: An idiot! We used to give him a little megaphone to speak into. "Hello the world! It's Neddy Seagoon calling the world!" Great stuff. The best joke I did with Eccles, though, was he was in class, they were trying to teach the Theory of Relativity to this idiot. “Now look, Eccles, jump up in the air. You see what happened then? You had to come back down to earth again.” “Yeah. I had to come back down to earth.” “Yes, why?” “Well. I live there!”

(There’s another break, while Van goes out to make a phone call, at which point Spike joins him in the garden for some photographs. Returning to the house, Van describes his dislike for promotional duties such as having his picture taken. The cliché about him, he remarks, is that he's “difficult”. )

V: You’re “difficult” if you know exactly what you want, and what your parameters are, and your own limitations. If you don't have your act together, then you're not “difficult”. Then you’re just ordinary Joe Blow. You'll take anything, there's no discernment about what you do.

S: But you are different Van, you're a very strange man.

V: Well I've heard it said that Spike Milligan is an eccentric. I don't know what that means.

S: Well I sleep with my underpants on back to front, because you never know what could happen. I'm not eccentric. I love talking to people, as a writer. You're leaving an indelible mark on me, because of your personality. I've stuck you in my head and one day you'll come out in a book.

I love it so much here I don't need to go out doing gigs now, I've got enough money. I love writing books. I do odd gigs on television, interviews and chat, and all these shows like Guess My, Arsehole, and Whose Legs Are These? – all that shit. They're grim, aren't they? Of course when I go on I clown it up and fuck up the show and they never ask me again. I love breaking clichés. People hang on to clichés. The cliché is the handrail of the crippled mind.

Van, do you relax? Do you go out to restaurants? Got a wife? A girlfriend? Or a bloke? Got a good pad in London?

V: Y'see I'm not used to this just talking about anything. I talk about specific things. I’m not into talking about myself with journalists. I talk about my music. The fact is that I do this for a living, and then I have my own life which is separate from that. So Van Morrison makes records, and I’m separate from that. That's what I do for a job. That's the only way I can do it. I can’t mix my personal stuff with the job, so I just talk about my job. I'm not interested in selling myself, I just sell my records, my music. So I have to censor everything I say, 'cos if I don't, they just use it against me .

S: Anyhow. When you were very young, Van, I was keeping the pop scene going, I was playing the music of my day. Jazz was looked on as barbaric. My father would say, Why do you play that nigger music? But I kept playing it, and now they have jazz critics in The Times, in The Guardian. I was blowing that music real good, man. One of the greatest feelings in the world is to play music, it's total freedom. When I was playing that trumpet I couldn't think about think about the rates, the rent. It was liberation, self-therapy. And you can induce that therapy in other people.

That's why people sometimes cling on to one kind of music, they love it because it has affected them psychologically, it has transmitted 100 per cent to them... (There follows a long and rather thoughtful pause.) This silence comes to you courtesy of What The Fuck Is He Going To Say Next?

V: No, that was a good piece, that you just said. That would fit in.

AN OBITUARY
Spike Milligan
1918-2002

Before pop musicians discovered drugs, they made do with Spike Milligan. The anarchic comedy veteran inspired a generation of British rock’n’roll artists, including The Beatles, who spent their formative years tuned into the BBC radio’s hugely influential Goon Show. Here they heard Milligan and co revolutionise mainstream humour: the Goons’ legacy was seen not only in the school of comic surrealism that gave us Monty Python; it was apparent, as well, in a certain absurdist mind-set that prefigured psychedelia.

John Lennon in particular was a disciple of the Goon humour that Milligan perfected with his partners Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. In 1962, in The Beatles’ eyes, the chief appeal of their new producer George Martin was that he had previously worked on comedy records by the gang. Though the Goons’ subversive allure might be lost on later generations, its impact on teenagers raised in post-War cultural conformity was massive “We were the sons of The Goon Show,” said Lennon. “We were the extension of that rebellion.”

Milligan crossed paths with this magazine on two very memorable occasions. The first occurred in July 1989 when Q accompanied Van Morrison to Spike’s home in Sussex – the media-phobic Ulsterman having asked to be interviewed by his childhood hero. An afternoon of rambling conversation ensued; Milligan coaxed his guest into posing for the Q photographer by prancing around the garden wearing a plastic penis strapped to his nose. And in 1997, Spike attended the Q Awards to present the Best Songwriter prize to his Sussex neighbour Paul McCartney. His mood that day was variable: “spectacularly grumpy” was one assessment; he took pleasure, however, in proclaiming his fellow attendee Chris Evans “a cunt”.

After the Goons Milligan channelled his talents into TV work and books such as Puckoon and Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall. Eight years before his death he reflected, “When I look back, the fondest memory I have is not really of the Goons. It is of a girl called Julia with enormous breasts.”

See some other Van Morrison pages on this site:

Van Morrison Interview 1997

Van Morrison at Glastonbury

A Van Morrison Miscellany

A Van Morrison Buyer's Guide

Deep Van: The Mojo Profile

Van In The 1980s

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Mad Men Series 1: the shock of the old

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

An account of Mad Men’s first series, written for The Word, August 2008.

MAD MEN SERIES 1
Starring Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones

“The past is a foreign country,” as somebody said. “They do things differently there.” Among the appealing things about this year’s hottest US import is the way we keep getting reminded. It isn’t set in some distant epoch of pre-history, but in 1960, when much of its audience was already born. Nor are the locations, mostly New York advertising offices, especially exotic. Yet the tale of Madison Avenue's executives (the self-styled "Mad Men") is stranger and more alien than an episode of Star Trek. Was this the world that existed just a couple of heartbeats before our own? By and large, it really was. But so much has changed! Nothing shocks like the Shock of the Old.

Fans of the series always mention the cigarettes. Almost nothing happens to any character, almost nothing is said, or thought, without those trademark curlicues of grey smoke. They frame each shot with sinuous grace, the punctuation marks to every conversation, the drag that signifies reflection, the fast stubbing-out that calls to action. Surgeons puff in mid-examination. Tobacco barons scoff at rumoured health campaigns. Lovers light each other’s fire. If it were nothing else, Mad Men could be sold as Prime Nicotine Pornography.

Not only do the Mad Men smoke from packets that are free of prissy government warnings, they keep their watches set to Martini Time all day long. They survey their female secretaries (and females are seldom anything higher) with lordly amusement and the assumption of sexual entitlement. If they bother going home to their wives they will drive, entirely drunk, in cars without seat-belts. All is sleek, coolly modern and “space age”. In some ways, a certain kind of man could look back at 1960 with a wistful pang.

The period details are more than merely cute. There is, on one level, a real enjoyment in Mad Men of retro style. All in all it’s a wickedly good-looking programme. But I don’t know anyone who’d really want to go back there. While it’s true that everyone was better-dressed before psychedelia, the attitudes were more stifling than the shirt-collars. Casual anti-Semitism rivals the routine sexism. Out in big-lawned suburbia, wives try to shop away their ennui. The few black figures visible work as lift attendants, not as account managers. A camp executive plays the hearty hetero in self-protection. And the cleverest girl in the building is the one who sleeps with the boss.

It can’t last. The top dogs must learn to share their kennel. In one particular way, though, these primitive spin doctors seem very contemporary. They were the forerunners of a world where there is no truth, only the “narrative”. They all lie to each other all the time, at home and at work, and in bed. “Perceptions” are replacing facts. On tiny black-and-white sets the Mad Men watch the clash of Kennedy with Nixon. All they see is a liar with charm against a liar without. “Reality,” one declares, “is what we say it is.”

No surprise to learn that Mad Men was created by a Sopranos writer, Matthew Weiner, who looks set to emulate that TV milestone with another epic. Just one series old, Mad Men can’t yet match the mob saga in novelistic density. But it grows emotionally richer with each episode. In its central character, the ad king Don Draper (played with strong, silent charisma by Jon Hamm), we see the ambiguities of the story etched into his handsome frown. Because, of course, Mad Men is far too smart to take the ring-a-ding Rat Pack arrogance at face value. These are worried men, beneath the sharp suits. When a high-living rogue is laid low by a hard-earned coronary, he groans, “I’ve been living the last 20 years like I was on shore leave.” For these men, shore leave is nearly over.

Over time, the series’ vintage setting grows less important. The knowing meditation on changing fashions and values is only a starting point. Next we enter more fully into the lives of these people. The plot-lines take some hair-pin bends. Draper’s life turns out to be a whole Russian Doll of deceits. And what emerges is a top-class piece of old-fashioned storytelling. The hot-shot “creative”, his mousey PA, the hip-swaying siren of the typing pool, the ageing Senior Partner, all become players in a human drama we recognise, regardless of whether it’s in 1960 or 2008, in New York or New Brighton. Give or take the tap of a filter-tip on a silver cigarette case, Mad Men is not such a foreign country after all.

The Jon Bon Jovi Interview

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A relaxed hour or two in Camden Town with Jon Bon Jovi. Written for Q Magazine, October 1997.

I
“I have to tell ’em, this Superman thing is only a tattoo!”

When a man walks into a restaurant wearing a skimpy black shirt and rock star shades you might think, “He looks like Jon Bon Jovi.” When the restaurant manager greets him like a long-lost son – crying “Ah, Jon! You see, I have everything ready” and points to a table, already laden with every delicacy this distinguished visitor is known to favour – you start to get the feeling it probably is Jon Bon Jovi. And then you notice he’s being followed by two young women. He throws up his hands in despair and says: “I’m not even sleepin’ with these bitches! And they still give me shit!” That’s when you think, “That settles it, then. This must be Jon Bon Jovi…”
   Strangely enough, however, the words, “I’m not even sleepin’ with these bitches!” are almost the only ones he will utter “in character” all evening. He slaps a well-defined upper-arm, the home to a small Superman logo. “I have to tell ’em, this Superman thing is only a tattoo!” He pulls up a chair and takes off his shades, and gives you a hey-just-kidding grin. His manner becomes quite different. He is now earnest, and almost shy. The two young women, one rapidly learns, are Jon Bon Jovi’s publicity team, responsible for the punishing string of interviews he has had to undergo today, from a Radio One Roadshow in Bournemouth to this evening’s rendezvous with Q, in his favourite restaurant in the world, Sheng-Du in Camden Town (“This is the only interview I’ve looked forward to. I love this place. I musta been here 35 times.”) The publicity women are teased for their pitiless brutality. He whimpers and pleads exhaustion. But later they will say: “He is a workaholic. He loves to have things to do.”
   What we have, in fact, is not the Jon Bon Jovi of legend. He is no longer the hairy-chested, turbo-trousered Love Overlord of stadium-rogering magnitude, but rather a calm, reflective cove, as sensible as a 35-year-old is supposed to be. Married, with two children, he has taken a two-year sabbatical from the band Bon Jovi, to pursue his two professional dreams. One is to make some introspective, unpredictable solo music such as we find on his new album Destination Anywhere – quite a subtle and atmospheric piece of work that has scant resemblance to the Jovi’s monumental moments: Bad Medicine, Lay Your Hands On Me, Livin’ On A Prayer and so on. The other thing is acting: his second major movie role appears on screens this month with the release of The Leading Man, in which he stars as a manipulative American thespian infiltrating the British theatre. He made the film in London last year, living for three months in a house by Wandsworth Common in London (“I never understood why people here thought that was funny. I coulda lived in Holland Park. But I liked Wandsworth.”)
   It’s as if he now looks back on his old Bon Jovi character like that, too, as an acting job. He slips into a line like the one about the “bitches” with an easy irony. It’s an echo of the ’80s, when he was Jon Bon Jovi, fully-licensed rock god, and saying stuff like that was simply part of his job description. It’s just not where he is at any more. The revolving restaurant table takes a spin, and he wields his chopsticks – with a finesse that might draw admiring glances in Shanghai itself – in the general direction of some crispy seaweed. “Hey, George!” he calls out to the manager. “When are you gonna open a branch in New Jersey? Then I could eat this all the time.”
   “Ah, no good, Jon. You travel all the time. We would never see you.”
   The resting rock god munches somewhat on his seaweed.
   “Nah, man. If I could eat like this at home I’d never leave New Jersey.”

II
“Jon Bon Jovi was the only heavy metal singer of the last decade to look like he’d been designed by girls.”

How is life treating you in general, Jon?
   “With the exception of this schedule,” he shoots a disapproving glance at his publicity people, on a nearby table, “I have nothing to bitch about.”
   On the streets of Camden Town, outside, are red-faced madmen, gripping carrier bags and shouting at the traffic. Behind them are two separate sets of posters: the cheaper ones advertise some old music by “John Bongiovi” (his Italian family name) and the expensive ones have him modelling Versace jeans, displaying his sculpted torso to full advantage. Jon Bon Jovi was the only heavy metal singer of the last decade to look like he’d been designed by girls.
   Negotiating an unidentified meat, he describes the origins of his new solo music, attributing its quirkiness to the atmosphere of London. He began writing the songs while filming. “As you might know, on a movie set you sit around with your thumb in your butt. Nowhere to go, no TV. So I brought my guitar and started writing. It was a very exciting time. The Britpop thing having just started, I was listening to the radio in my trailer –the Manics, Black Grape, Blur, Pulp – I went, ‘Woah! What the fuck is this?’ Those songs! Common People. Design For Life. Beautiful, and great lyrics, I thought this was cool.”
   Among the London numbers was Midnight In Chelsea, replete with references to goths, Sloane Rangers and Britpop boys. As with his new material in general, soaring guts-or-glory choruses are not a feature, whereas there is subdued moodiness aplenty. What do the old Bon Jovi fans think of his new direction? The singer frowns, and stabs a prawn toast thoughtfully.
   “Well, I’m not touring, so I don’t know how ticket sales would go if I did. To be completely honest with you, Midnight In Chelsea stiffed in America. Nobody knew what the word Chelsea meant. I tried to explain to them it was a part of London, they didn’t give a fuck. It stiffed. But Europe, Asia, rest of the world, the single did really well. America, they didn’t want to hear the single.”
   The next UK single, he elaborates, is Queen Of New Orleans, but the US will get a more conventional track, Janie, Don’t Take Your Love To Town: “Queen Of New Orleans would go on the heavier rock stations, but they won’t play me now. It’s a crazy time in America. We played the single for what they call Modern Rock stations in the States. They go, ‘Man, we love this! Who is it?’ You tell them. (Pulls face.) ‘Can’t play it.’ Why not? ‘He has too many hits. Can’t play a guy who has hit records.’ Where the fuck is that?”
   Is there an inverted snobbery at work?
   “In a weird way, yeah. You get too successful, you’re not cool any more. I’ve sold too many records to be new. Like, people may slag U2 this week because they’re not the newest thing any more. Doesn’t mean that Bono’s not a great singer, cos he is. But they’re on top of the world. You just deal with it, it’s par for the course, I can’t stress myself over it.”
   Like yourself, in a way, U2 took a chance in moving away from the stadium anthems, like The Joshua Tree.
   “Absolutely. I got an advance copy of the U2 record by begging and pleading. And I got an advance copy of the Aerosmith record the same way. My record was done and I’d just listened to it for the first time. To tell you the truth I got nervous. Holy fuck, maybe I’ve really made a mistake here. Should I stay safe and do the Aerosmith route? Or should I be adventurous and go the U2 route? I thought I made a pretty good record. I said, ‘You know what? Fuck it, I’m gonna go the route that’s creative and inventive and movin’ on and not pretending to sing to 18-year-olds when you’re 35 and talkin’ about how I like pussy. I like pussy as much as the next guy, but I don’t wanna hang around high school parking lots to get it. It’s just not what life’s about. You move up and move on, you wanna say different things.”
   When you were 25 you made some great, young man’s music.
   “You bet! I stood tall and said, I am 25, Allelujah! You give love a bad name. Bring it on! And we lived it. Man, I love playin’ Wembley Stadium and I love bein’ in a rock’n’roll band. But what I won’t do for ya is be 35 pretending to be 25 writing about 18-year-olds. When I was 25 I wrote Never Say Goodbye about the high school prom. Can’t do that. Move on, man. So what will I do if it’s not successful commercially? I don’t think I’ll lose my record deal.”

III
“Nobody’s asking me for favours, no-one’s looking for a saviour.”

A theme of Midnight In Chelsea is Jon Bon Jovi’s pleasure in becoming anonymous, melting into the city. He says he meant it. “Last year, when the Bon Jovi tour ended, I walked away and for the first time in the ’90s I didn’t have 100 people on the payroll. Didn’t have to worry about getting a record out to keep the company happy. It was absolutely from the bottom of my belly. Nobody’s asking me for favours, no-one’s looking for a saviour. America didn’t get that lyric. But I’d rather paint it on my chest than take it back.”
   Did you reach a low-point with the band?
   “1990 to ’92 was seriously low. I was as low as I could ever imagine myself being. I call it the Grey Summer. I just spent my time out in California, drinkin’, being miserable, seriously wanted to seek help, jump out of my car when I was driving. I was a mess, it took everything out of it that I loved. Until I took control of it, it sucked.” (He “took control”, in fact, by firing the band’s manager. “Now, because I’m further away from it, our old manager was really doing his job. But in the big picture, he and everyone else involved – agents, lawyers, everyone – should have said, ‘You know what? We believe in you. We think you’ll be here in 10 years. Get off the road, go home and have a rest.’ Not doing things behind your back to keep you on the road.”
   He insists the band will get back together. “Definitely. My intention is absolutely to keep the band together and address songs to the venues we appear in, which typically are the big ones. But not to re-write You Give Love a Bad Name, because I couldn’t do that. I love the song and the period but I can’t do it again.” He thinks of his New Jersey homeboy Bruce Springsteen ¬– another man who knows what it’s like to walk away from stadiums and follow your own peculiar muse. “Yeah… We all had dinner at my house, and he looked right through me and said, ‘I tell you, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life.’ He’s playin’ an acoustic guitar by himself, pretending to be Woody Guthrie. And I went, ‘OK, for the first time I’m not gonna tell you to put the band back together. I finally get it!’ I’d been relentless: Put the fuckin’ band back together! He wouldn’t have a word of it. He don’t wanna be the Boss all the time, either…
   “And now,” he looks out to the streets. “It’s time to get my sweaty ass outta my favourite restaurant.”

Van Morrison Glastonbury Profile

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

An introduction to Van Morrison, written for the Glastonbury Festival programme, 1997.

If words could say all the things that music does, then we’d have no need for music. But they can’t, and we do. That’s why the worst word you’ll ever hear applied to Van Morrison is “uncommunicative”. Wrong. He’s never been one to gush on stage, to gab and to gas and tell us what a wonderful audience we’ve been. But that doesn’t matter. When Van Morrison sings – when he’s giving tongue to all those indefinable things that he’s called “the inarticulate speech of the heart” – the man communicates like an angel. He sings, and he shares more than most of us can hope to express in a lifetime. As he puts it in another, hypnotic song of his, Summertime In England: “It ain’t why… It just is.”
   Van’s been channelling the spirit for three decades and more, with a power that’s undiminished. The best of his lyrics deserve the name of poetry; in Sweet Thing he declaims, “And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry, Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t why.” But it’s through the mesmeric force of his voice, and the compelling beauty of compositions, that Van Morrison’s songs can tune us into a different dimension, a place that’s somewhere outside the narrower realms of rational understanding. He can’t tell you what’s going on – or, at least, he’s disinclined to try. Van believes that music is a form of magic. The wiser option is to take him at his word.
   Van was born with the most valuable ability a musician can possess, namely the gift of getting to music’s innermost essence – that, and a total inability to recognise musical boundaries. Thus he grew up grooving to the blues, jazz and country and gospel sounds of his father’s eclectic record collection. When the wireless set of his Belfast home received the earliest transmissions of American rock’n’roll, Van was again all ears; through the electrical static of faraway stations he heard his future loud and clear. As a young professional player, in Northern Irish showbands and the Sixties R&B group Them, he learned the disciplines of giving the people what they wanted. But it became his ultimate vocation to transcend the marketplace. By the time of his true debut album, the 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks, he was reaching deep inside himself, recovering all the important influences he’d absorbed, alchemising them into something uniquely of himself. He’s been pushing forward ever since.
   Nowadays the Van Morrison live set is liable to revisit any stage of his long journey – whether it’s a homage to idols such as Ray Charles or James Brown, a blast of his teenage rampage Gloria, or some of the Celtic explorations that he so wonderfully undertook with his friends The Chieftains in the landmark 1988 album Irish Heartbeat. Maybe it’s the latter style that has fixed Van Morrison in so many minds in recent years – the Celtic soul poet, the mystic Irish rover. But beware the glib descriptions. This son of Ulster has also penned the most moving depictions of England too. The West Country setting of Glastonbury – especially in its timeless, mythic guise of ancient Avalon – has inspired his most potent evocations of landscape, history and religion. He walked these same green hills in Summertime In England, “…and the gospel music, the voice of Mahalia Jackson came through the ether…”
   Today it’s Summertime in England once again, and the voice we’ll hear is Van Morrison’s. It’ll be framed for our further delight by one of the hardest-working bands in show-business (Van the band-leader is one more talent we must not overlook). Surrender to it, and let the magic work its spell. “It ain’t why… It just is.”

See some other Van Morrison pages on this site:

Van Morrison meets Spike Milligan

Van Morrison Interview 1997

A Van Morrison Miscellany

A Van Morrison Buyer's Guide

Deep Van: The Mojo Profile

Van In The 1980s
Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

The La's Interview

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

I met The La’s for an interview that appeared in Q in December 1990. It wasn’t a very happy encounter. As events would prove, their pessimism was justified – though the music itself has endured magnificently.
I would use some of this piece in my eventual book about Liverpool music, Wondrous Place.

Common sense suggests it. Rock’n’roll etiquette practically demands it. But greet The La’s with a cheery remark of the “really enjoyed your album, guys” variety and you’ll quickly sense that, somehow, this normally fail-safe opening pleasantry is not working out.

“We hate it,” mutters their leader Lee Mavers, in a manner that’s somewhere between bitter and grim. The other three La’s look even less impressed. One of them offers a cynical shrug. Another responds with a baffled stare. And a fourth member belches, very loudly.

Given the facts of the case – that The La’s are sitting in a London hotel, down from Liverpool to meet the press and (presumably) promote their first LP – this sullen disinclination to “endorse the product” might seem a shade unusual, even perverse.

“Don’t ask us about it, then,” says Lee, reasonably enough. “We walked out on it when we were doing it. We hated it because we weren’t getting our sound across, so we turned our back on it. So the record company done it themselves. They got it together from a load of backing tapes and mixed it up themselves and put it out. There was no choice as to what single we wanted or anything, even lobbing tracks off the album, changing the whole thing, and putting out a different cover, which…” (And by now you’re beginning to catch his drift) “… we hated.”

It seemed to take a very long time to come out.

“It didn’t take us years to make, it took Go! Discs (their record label) years to make it. We walked out on it, la’. We’re not behind it whatsoever. We’re doing interviews because we’re just telling our side of the story, otherwise it’d never get out.”

And somebody belches again…

How, then, have matters arrived at this curiously unhappy pass? A year or so ago the story of The La’s seemed a heart-warming thing. They’d got together in ’86, when the guitarist Lee Mavers met up with the bass-player John Power. (“There was a spirit about it, a vibe.”) Being from Liverpool, they called everybody “La’”, so they called themselves that as well. They found a drummer and another guitarist, and played parties, cabarets or anything at all. They drew a “scally” crowd: “They could get it on with us because we were more like them,” considers Lee. “I’d rather go and see someone who looks like us that someone dressed in fucking silk clobber and stackies,” states John.

They sent demo tapes to London, and got signed by independent record company Go! Discs. (Run by Andy McDonald, this was the fast-expanding outfit that made its name with Billy Bragg, and found Top 10 success with The Housemartins, followed by that band’s offshoots The Beautiful South and Beats International.) The La’s released a jangly pop single Way Out – it wasn’t a hit but it sounded like a good start. In 1988 they followed it up with There She Goes, another gem of chiming beat combo catchiness, and almost everyone who heard it thought it was a classic. (For a songwriter in his early 20s, Lee Mavers is no stranger to the tuneful virtues of mid-1960s pop.) It still wasn’t a hit, but not to worry: predictions of Next Big Thingery were heaping up around the band’s tousled heads.

Already, though, there were problems. Lee and John aside, the group’s line-up appeared to change every week. (Currently in the drummer’s seat is Lee’s brother Neil; like the guitarist Cammy he used to be a La’s roadie. Once, at a soundcheck, their predecessors “went to the bog. We jumped on and proved to Lee and John that we were brilliant. Exit two more La’s.”) The debut LP was due in late ’89 or early 1990, but it never showed up. Producers kept getting hired, then walking out or getting fired.

Another single, Timeless Melody, was pressed up; again, those who heard it were calling it a masterpiece, but it was withdrawn without ever getting released. A rash of new bands was coming through, led by The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, and The La’s were nowhere to be seen. They re-emerged this August for a showcase gig at London’s Marquee Club, sounding jaded and looking as if they’d rather be somewhere else. The “missing” third single, Timeless Melody, came out in a re-recorded form. It wasn’t a hit.

Finally, last month, the “hated” debut album hits the shops. Produced in its finished form by Steve Lillywhite (famed, especially, for his work with U2 and Simple Minds), the record appeared to universally warm reviews. But Lee is pessimistic: “At the end of the day the people have got to give their review by buying the record – and I can’t see that happening.”

A UK tour in November might boost the record’s fortunes, though the group show no relish for playing a set they’ve grown stale with. (“We’ve been doing those songs for four years. It’s like a history lesson every night.”) A scheduled re-release of There She Goes provokes a similarly downbeat response.

But surely, you chirp consolingly, it’s a good song, isn’t it?

“They’re all good songs, la’. But who would know, when it’s done badly? You’ve only got it on the record and if the record don’t sound good you’re not going to play it. That’s what people like about records: the sound, the nature of it, the buzz, the vibe.”

Disappointment, it turns out, has been this group’s lot ever since they climbed aboard the London music business. Had they been desperate to get signed?

“As desperate as anyone is,” Lee confirms. And John: “You wanna get signed up because that’s the first step, if you wanna break out of the cabaret scene. It was never the idea to just be big in Birkenhead, or something.”

The group was installed in a house in Hammersmith, near the West London HQ of Go! Discs. “We come down when we got signed up, we thought it’d be better to be down here so we could move quick, but after about two and a half months we all done each other’s heads in and we moved back home.”

Lee: “It was because the record business had nothing to offer us except sitting in that fucking house on top of each other, where we couldn’t even pick up a guitar because the neighbours complained. There were police around all the time.”

And disappointment ripened into full-time disillusionment. “We took a small advance thinking that we’d go in and record an album in a week, dead quick. But it didn’t turn out like that, did it? I don’t know why we didn’t get our sound; seven times in and out of different studios at about £1,000 a day. I don’t know why the producer wasn’t capturing our sound, I only know where we can get it, which is more home-based recording, four-track, eight-track, very simple, on a Walkman even.

“It’s our problem, but it’s not our fault; it’s up to the sound engineers to capture it, the so-called producers who are entrusted to capture it. But at the end of the day it’s only our name that goes on the record, people don’t think it’s the producer’s record, or the record company’s record.”

Why has the group undergone so many line-up changes?

“Well, as time goes on people lose faith or just start wasting time, so it just wastes your time.”

Yet Lee insists the revolving-door policy that he applies to personnel and producers is not the result of undue fussiness. “We’re not perfectionists; it’s a more organic, mono kind of sound: something like Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones or Substitute by The Who, even ’50s early Elvis, an acoustic/electric combo.”

Both Lee and John cite the benevolent influence of parents and elder brothers, who all enriched the fledgling band’s musical resources by introducing them to the greats of yesteryear, from Louis Armstrong, through Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry to The Rolling Stones. And throughout the 1980s their home city was marked by an odd ¬ and not infrequently stoned – affection among Scouse youths (sometimes called retro-scallies by the pundits) for music of the previous two decades, from Simon & Garfunkel to Free and Frank Zappa.

John: “It’s all your mates, you get into a bit of pot, and Floyd and Zep, and Hendrix and all that. That used to be what everyone I knew listened to. We weren’t into punk, it was the arse-end of it before I was old enough to get into anything.”

The La’s are apt to hanker romantically after the “real” sounds they detect in vintage records: “It was more basic in the old days. It was like people were given blocks to carve statues out of, and these days they give them buttons to press. They don’t know how or why it works, they’re just pissing around with toys.”

The more recent trend for UK “indie” groups to re-vamp their style with house-inspired dance rhythms seems to have passed them by, but Lee protests The La’s aren’t out on a limb by choice: “Well, it’s like I say, la’, most of our songs have got dance beats, fucking well-danceable, well-levitating dance beats, but who knows it when it’s such a bad recording? Who even knows if it’s a good song, unless they’re told, when it’s a bad recording? Dancing’s fucking brilliant.”

John: “I’d rather have the lads who are doing dance records getting in the charts than some puffy tit-head from Switzerland or something. I’d rather have people like The Farm and that.”

“Well levitating” or not, most of the lyrics on the LP (There She Goes and Timeless Melody excepted) wear a vaguely troubled air. Lee: “I’m just troubled by all the pretentiousness around, know what I mean? Cos that’s the dangerous thing there is in the world. All this power shit, and greed. You can’t be greedy without stepping on people… I’d rather be skint and doing what I wanted than skint and not able to do what I wanted…”

Over at the office of Go!Discs Records (company slogan: “When other labels just won’t do”). Andy MacDonald notes The La’s complaints with a blend of sorrow and scepticism. He’s reluctant, he says, to have a public tit-for-tat with his artists, but he’d like to state that he’s supported the group through a “difficult” three-and-a-half years. The tracks that appear on the finished album are, in his opinion, “the best so far. We think it’s a great record, the reviews have been wildly enthusiastic. Lee is very talented, but he can’t recognise how good the record really is.” He readily agrees that his relationship with the band is “not all that it needs to be,” but says he’s confident they can settle their differences and work together. Steve Lillywhite, he adds, “did a brilliant job in difficult circumstances – if he hadn’t been as patient as he was it’s doubtful the record would ever have appeared… I hate to quote another Scouse band, but John Lennon hated Strawberry Fields Forever until the day he died. He hated George Martin for putting it out.”

Back at their London hotel, The La’s stare glumly at the overflowing ashtrays. How optimistic do they feel?

John: “You’ve got to look to the future, there’s fucking nowhere else to look.”

Lee: “As far as I’m concerned it hasn’t even begun. There’s just a little bit of business to be taken care of first… Music should be left to the artists. It’s not about money, is it? It’s about music at the end of the day, and through the day. It’s a big let-down for people who’ve waited for that album. And even more of a let-down to me, mate.”