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The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
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Wednesday, March 05, 2003
ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUSTY
No more shouting. No one needs it. Some get off on being shouted at; many music writers derive some kind of epiphanic self-justification at the amount of sweat they manage to theorise out of someone else’s shouting. What Dusty Springfield demonstrated is that it’s not necessary to shout; sometimes it’s not necessary to swim out of the womb, because Springfield at her most candid, and therefore at her best, sang lullabies to you about her despair, and yet while she sang about her life being a wreck (which it wasn’t particularly), she simultaneously offered an unconditional haven under which you can come and shelter, shaking off someone less pleasant – someone who might shout.
But the former Mary O’Brien was a convent girl, and she could assert herself when she needed to – hear the astonishing punctum in the folk group the Springfields’ jolly swag-along 1963 top five hit “Say I Won’t Be There” where Dusty’s voice suddenly leaps out of the muted gaiety in the second half of the chorus. The Springfields were wide-eyed, widescreen MoR-folk optimists, the exact precursor of the Seekers, who contributed to that strange New World mood which coloured the charts in 1962 – their “Island Of Dreams” next to the Shadows’ “Wonderful Land” next to Ifield’s “I Remember You”; look at how blue and bright it is out there, now that the world isn’t going to be ended because of Cuba.
However, a voice like Dusty’s couldn’t be contained for long in such an environment, so she suddenly quit the Springfields and went solo. A big mistake, everyone said; groups are in, girl singers are not unduly required – consider Helen Shapiro, her chart career lately over at 17. Except she wanted to drop a bomb on pop; specifically she wanted to do a Brit Wall of Sound, and to help her achieve this she signed to Philips and got together with house producer John Franz and arranger Ivor Raymonde.
The first fruit of this alignment was of course “I Only Want To Be With You,” a record which could have been designed to be the anti-Alma Cogan. Shadowing the Spector template surprisingly well – though with demonstrably fewer musicians and a British studio budget – her voice can hardly wait to crack open the Coke bottle of ecstasy: “I don’t know what it is that makes me love you so” – her voice descending down an orgasmic helter-skelter, comparable with Van Morrison’s “the love that loves to love the love that loves” on “Madame George”; a record which as well as acknowledging Spector, also betrayed keen study of Motown. It’s about joy and it’s about 1963 and it’s about time and just you try to leave me out of your party.
And she was more authentically sexy than either Cilla, or Lulu, or even Sandie; compared to these three, never mind latecomers like Kathy Kirby (whose cover of “Secret Love,” rushed out barely a month after “I Only Want To Be With You,” gave early notice of just how influential Dusty would prove), Dusty looked grown up; that bouffant, the subtle steeliness of those eyes in her otherwise welcoming face, an absolute assuredness. She could also tease; there’s hardly anything more subtly sexual in early Britbeat than her gleeful rendering of Bacharach and David’s “Wishin’ And Hopin’” – those staccato smiles of “holdhim…andsqueezehim…andkisshim…” were brilliantly natural in their delivery.
She could at other times make you collapse with humility and want to embrace her. “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” – Bacharach and David again – inverts the Be A Man subtext of Tommy Hunt’s reading to tell us, as Beth Gibbons would do 23 years later, that she’s breaking at the seams just like you. Here Raymonde and Franz give Dusty’s pleading the grandeur it deserves; the strings whip around her like the winds through which Lear and the blinded Duke of Gloucester struggle, the triple-drum fills sound like the Sinai stone tablets shattering into waters of guilty gold. “Like a summer rose” as Dusty’s voice rises to scream its agony; then everyone, everything, pulls together to get her to the climax. “COME ON BACK!” Dusty cries through the centre of your head. Everyone must have thought this was a number one…and had it not been for the first of the Beatles/Stones battles for the top spot (“A Hard Day’s Night” vs “It’s All Over Now” which ended in an honourable draw), it would have got there. As far as Bacharach interpreters go, Dionne Warwick remains the definitive voice – assured and reassuring – but Dusty had the power and the vulnerability to bookend Warwick; in 1964 she even had a not-at-all-bad crack at “They Long To Be Close To You” six years before Karen Carpenter.
The real proto-Carpenter delivery, though, can be found in her 1965 interpretation of Goffin and King’s “Some Of Your Lovin’.” Lyrically a precursor to the SOS Band’s “Just Be Good To Me,” Dusty offers selflessness, or else she’s a mug, but the way she sings it, it sounds nothing other than selfless and sexy; slow-burning but utterly seductive. When the flame was turned down to low heat, her uncertainty simmered all the more enticingly - though I still think that Cilla Black’s softened Scouse rasp-to-a-whimper strangely fits in better with Randy Newman’s “I’ve Been Wrong Before” than Dusty does, and a brave bilingual attempt at Brel’s “If You Go Away” suffers from staying on one emotional level, as well as a ridiculous spoken coda – it avoids the occasional camp undertones of both Nina Simone and Scott Walker’s readings, but equally the quite shattering emotional extremes to which Simone and Walker end up taking the song.
This doesn’t mean that Dusty wasn’t capable of emotional extremities, though; hear the ebullient ricochets of drums against lead vocals against Doris Troy and Madeline Bell’s backing vocals on “In The Middle Of Nowhere,” not to mention the fantastic Northern Soul backbeat of “I’ll Try Anything” (a very distant relation to Troy’s “I’ll Do Anything”) or “Am I The Same Girl.”
And what other vocalist, female or male, could be capable of unabashed melodrama and heartbreaking contemplation in two consecutive singles, as Dusty did in 1966. “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” was her only UK number one, and her biggest US hit, and it is her epiphany, the first half of her greatest moment. Now, thanks to Franz and Raymonde’s astute use of the Fairchild compressor (which put the vocals forward in the mix while keeping the orchestra in the middleground, but allowing the orchestra to suddenly surge forward when the vocals dropped out, thereby giving the illusion of a far larger orchestra), this was a record worthy of the Wall of Sound. The silence after the opening brass and screaming backing vocals fanfare – where has she gone? Did we lose her? – then she comes in quietly. She can’t get along without you. She’s not asking you to stay forever or even love her, “just be close at hand.” Her despair escalates as the orchestral swell increases; it just keeps building up, beyond melodrama, and yes you know where it’s going, where worship and fucking reach their apex (that key change leading to the final chorus!), their climax, and finally unite as she screams orgasm – “Believe me! Believe me! OH, BELIEVE ME!” – the latter high C sung as every other musician and singer plays and sings as high and as long a note as possible until the record has reached catharsis.
(And listen to how Franz and Raymonde used the exact same dynamics but in reverse on the Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”)
And what does she offer us as a sequel? A return to childhood, a contemplation of death – “Goin’ Back.” The acknowledgement of the need to move forward while not necessarily abandoning or mummifying your past. “And I can live my days instead of counting my years” Springfield says, never more quietly, with that vibrato to which you cannot refuse to cry, before the orchestra, and specifically the trumpets, sweep back in to reveal the vast plain, or garden, or sea, ready for her to travel across – they’ve said their peace, they recede; just let her say it as plainly as anyone could. “A little bit of freedom’s all we lack – so catch me if you can, I’m going back.” As if to say you’ll have to do better than that, you can’t kill me, I remember how it was, it’s all in my head, and now it’s all documented so it can never be denied.
And a coda – Bacharach and David’s “The Look Of Love.” Hear her breathe. The record wouldn’t make sense if you couldn’t hear her breathing on it, across it, through it. Peter King’s beyond-sublime alto sax, sounding like a breathing alter ego, and all he’s doing is playing the tune.
“don’t
go
away”
bury me in your bosom, just hold, stay there, whatever way you want it, PROTECT ME FROM THIS WORLD
After that emotional ekphrasis, the only way was down, but she went down slowly and elegantly. The disbelief at the existence of unconditional love – the major key lyrical ecstasy balanced against the defiantly minor key of Clive Westlake’s music – in “I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten” (the punctum here? “The music that keeps flooding my mind” as Keith Mansfield’s orchestra suddenly floods into your ears from the strings in the left channel, culminating in the low brass over on the right). The precision of their understanding of the dynamics of silence and contrast.
That was her last throw of that particular dice, though. Many suspected that with Barry Ryan’s “Eloise,” musicians were now just having a laugh at this sort of orchestral pop (but hadn’t they listened to Jimmy Webb? Did they think there was the slightest fucking bit of camp in something like “Wichita Lineman” or even “Macarthur Park”? What fools) and anyway she wanted to go and do other things anyway. One of the most vocal champions of black music in ‘60s Britpop – she personally arranged a BBC TV Motown special to coincide with the Motown Revue’s British tour in 1965, giving the Temptations and the Miracles their first exposure on British TV; Cliff Richard famously called her “the white Negress” (he meant it as a high compliment); she even more famously was deported from a South African tour after refusing to play in front of segregated audiences, for which pains she was roundly derided by old-school entertainers like Arthur Askey and Max Bygraves – she was persuaded by Ahmet Ertegun to sign to Atlantic in the USA in 1968 and recorded Dusty In Memphis, about which all I can usefully say is that, if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. Its lead single “Son Of A Preacher Man” was her last big hit; and while there’s no doubting the sensuality (even in more prosaic musical surroundings) of performances like “Breakfast In Bed,” attempts at things like “Windmills Of Your Mind” were ill-advised.
After that Dusty struggled; periodically retiring with the occasional unexceptional record release (Scott Walker, who had enjoyed a similarly fruitful production relationship with John Franz in the ‘60s, was in the same boat) – moving through pale soul facsimiles, attempts at disco. There were personal difficulties as well, both with the bottle and with relationships, and when she finally returned to the charts in 1987 under the patronage of the Pet Shop Boys she was looking her years. I’m not quite sure how successful her liaison with the PSBs was, artistically; “What Have I Done To Deserve This” is a clever deconstruction of mutual unconditional love, clever because it acknowledged the existence of decay and impermanence. “Nothing Has Been Proved” was written for the film Scandal about the Profumo affair; the poignancy here is listening to the Face of 1963 calmly intoning the litany of events which happened in 1963 – “Please Please Me’s number one” and also “Dusty goes solo.” Self-referential to a fault, her subsequent Reputation was only partially overseen by the PSBs; the clumsy House-ification of the old Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme smoocher “I Want To Stay Here” sits uncomfortably when compared with the inspired work which the PSBs coaxed out of Liza Minnelli on their collaborative Results album of 1989 – a record which some still consider to represent the Pet Shop Boys’ finest achievement. It would perhaps be better to draw your attention to her entirely unheralded but very moving performance on the song “Something In Your Eyes” from Richard Carpenter’s 1987 album Time; that same blissful compassion was present, when sympathetic writers and producers allowed it to be.
No need to go through the final decline of the ‘90s – the inelegant Dianne Warren songs, the long-distance duets with Daryl Hall, and of course the onset of the cancer which claimed her life in 1999, just a few months before what would have been her 60th birthday. Just as there is no need to shout her immense technical and artistic qualities – it’s all still there, it all remains alive, her voice remains caressing you, you remain comfortable within the same womb. At her finest, listening to her is like refuting the existence of loneliness, because it tells you that there is always someone in this world who can, and does, understand.
The voice pleads to me, hugs me:
“Don’t go away.”
So here I am, going back…back to you.
. . .
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
WHITEHOUSE
YOU CUNT YOU FUCKING CUNT WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE 40 years or are those 41 shout your rage at 41ness don’t blink what do you know 23 years at this game your entire adult life making Throbbing Gristle sound like Psychic TV waters less certain in their flow CUNT’S NOTHING is that why Peter Sotos left is he really that misogynist and why in that case although departed there were arguments does he contribute the centrepiece to the new Whitehouse album Bird Seed yell at me easier than yelling with me far simpler than yelling for me isn’t it William Bennett the Whitehouse man it’s his idea it’s his mind you’re accessing and this album is more fucking accessible than anything he’s ever done before dislocate your mind expecting outrage and by God you get outrage but this outrage it is righteous six six six tracks the ideal length put it on the other side of your C90 to Atari Teenage Riot Live At Brixton Academy fuck fuck fuck this goes beyond that but then they always did Whitehouse and now they veer suddenly towards their audience their misunderstanding assaulting audiences most recently at the Red Rose Club you think Bill Hicks had definitive word on slaughtering audiences well just have a listen to “Why You Never Became A Dancer” and what does it do it does for LIE ABOUT CHILD-MOLESTING GROPES AND AND AND VERBAL ABUSE AND BATHROOM RAPES I DON’T KNOW HOW WELL YOU CAN REMEMBER YOUR OWN POINTLESS GLUE-SNIFFING ADOLESCENCE soundtracked by Alec Empire produced by Alex Harvey or should that be Alex von Schlippenbach more overt activity and get that groove you can get that groove if you try to cut through EVERY OTHER FUCKING ADIDAS-CLICHÉD CRINGE because it’s about eggered-on liars who get off on non-existence adolescent grindstones of grief and misery and abuse AND THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME I’LL OPEN THE PACKAGE I’LL WATCH THE SHOW I’LL ENJOY PERFECTLY WELL-MADE ART and the subject ends up the abuser he cannot justify so I’LL GIVE THE YOU SOMETHING EVEN MORE INTERESTING THAN THE LAST ONE I’ll Show You Now Kevin Rowland but of fucking course and William Bennett 40 or 41 bespectacled thinning conservative shirt where’s that capital C gone could pass for a Home Counties shock jock makes Jon Gaunt sound like Desmond Carrington but this is something to which you are nailed like Dali’s Christ so smugly wasn’t “Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel” well you want self-destruction I can only but help you I DON’T KNOW WHY BOY’S PROUD OF A NICOTINE HACK WHAT’S SO FUCKING CLEVER ABOUT THAT? you wanna drown why CAN YOU DO THE CHLORING GARGOYLE and this is a far more discernible groove could be Suicide they are a Brit Suicide more so than an even more distended Throb Gris but see how the bassline Philip Best stupid not to acknowledge he wants you to reach the music see how the subtle improv touches touch and touchspin powdering rage because Bennett is screaming he screams at dumbed first-time callers Southgate or was that Southfields but you know you could dance to this even if it’s the CHICKENSKIN SWIM and you think you’re drowning or made to drown but your foot connects with a trapdoor in through to the office beneath the drains and that raging voice becomes a bitter basso profundo intonation “Philosophy” and why does he go on about the door music a door slamming again and again a drumbeat a heartbeat one precise rhythm spun out like ostinatos ripped from Fassbinder’s notebooks WHAT SORT OF EXAMPLE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE SETTING and moreover CUNT’S GONNA SAY SORRY because REMEMBER YOU’RE FAT REMEMBER YOU’RE STUPID REMEMBER YOU’RE UGLY pronounced like Valentine Dyall IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY this not that so not the fucking Blow Monkeys CUNT’S FUCKING DECORUM and then threats recede replaced by the question IF I WALKED OUT THAT FUCKING DOOR and NO MATTER WHAT YOU FUCKING DID YOU COULD NOT OPEN THE DOOR AND YOU KNEW YOU COULD NEVER LOOK INTO MY EYES AGAIN HEAR MY VOICE AGAIN FEEL MY TOUCH AGAIN you want vulgar punctum how about MY FRIEND WAS STABBED IN THE STREET BY SOME DRUNK DEAD BEFORE HE ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL oh my fucking God he’s talking to himself this Bennett is he talking to himself he couldn’t protect his friend from being killed and it’s ended ALL THAT FUN WE HAD TOGETHER he hates himself loathes himself and he will serve his own self-pronounced sentence because his life is over you fucking hear me it’s over it’s ended CUNTCANTYOUSEETHATFUCKINGDOOR and then it’s the centrepiece “Bird Seed” assembled by Sotos and wouldn’t he know it Steve Albini in Chicago trust him to get involved and for 15 minutes it’s this collage of tearful emotional women victims mothers of victims talking about child abuse about rape about child abuse rape and murder and what are we supposed to make of it and or the discreet keyboard accompaniments which wander in and out of middleground what is Sotos doing is he admonishing or documenting or attacking what does he mean by doing this why significance of these 15 minutes taking a slice out of the 43 minutes in total and you listen nail yourself to carpet or wall listen and wonder if you paddle in others’ grief you swim luxuriate but you can’t get off on it wouldn’t get off on anything after listening to 15 minutes of this fuck fuck fuck why’s he telling me all this Jesus only by a margin “Cut Hands Has The Solution” tells the subject to proceed with suicide numbed wrecked by own mediocrity yet unknowledgeable of anything to do with real pain I KNOW ABOUT SHITBAGS AND SHAME so go on and cut mutilate see if I care AND YOUR TOTALLY DISGUSTINGLY DISEASED UNKEMPT DISGUSTING EXCUSE OF A BODY it’s a luxury actually there is nothing in these Whitehouse lyrics with which the Daily Mail could not disagree but it is of course all to do with the perspective musically more cautious yet scarcely less minimal HOW WELL YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW SOON CHEAP TEARS ARE FORGOTTEN BECAUSE THERE’S NO WASTED KLEENEX OR SYMPATHY NOBODY WOULD GIVE A FUCKING TOSS FOR THE QUASI-GLAMOUR OF YOUR SYMPTOMS so I will plunge you into proper horror I’LL SHOW YOU WHAT IT’S LIKE NOT TO HAVE HANDS and I’LL SHOW YOU HOW TO PISS ON YOUR OWN BEDCLOTHES plus YOU’LL LEARN TO SWEAT WHILE UNCONSCIOUS because TRANSFERRING PEOPLE IS A FUCKING DEGRADING THING TO DO TO THEM and yet YOU’RE DOING THE RIGHT THING killing yourself because you think you know pain and these are MY CAPITALS NOW YOU ARROGANT FUCKER YOU WEREN’T THE ONE WHO HAD THE CANCER YOU SAT AND WATCHED YOU TRIED AND FAILED YOU CANNOT FUCKING KNOW AND THAT’S WHY YOU WANTED TO DESTROY YOURSELF well why do you need capitals you know all this by now and you had the sense to come back because this is what Whitehouse are trying to tell us you me them they are the most MORAL GROUP imaginable because they are telling you and what they are telling you is that you must LIVE even if you owe it to no one except yourself and sometimes it has to be shouted and screeched oh yes fuck that’s it yes as I knew all along well tell me I’ve been told peel away the protective sandpaper of these rants and it’s a plea it’s a prayer and as if to acknowledge that to confirm that the sixth and final track Bennett invents a language “Munkisi Munkondi” because the language has been exhausted you’ve been told so you have to step through the tiny but discernible gap in that door and what you are told is that life sustains beyond language and those pleasures the greatest pleasures the brightest joys are there for fuck’s sake all you need to do is take the blindfold off and there it is the world there for you because you never stopped loving it i love you i love you forever you know that i CAN be found
. . .
Monday, March 03, 2003
DAVID CASSIDY
The morality of idolatry in pop is that the idol should make it clear that he is vulnerable, that although his fans can never really touch him, the illusion has to be sustained that he can be touched. Above all, he should never be too “masculine,” or if there is maleness, it has to be balanced out by a contrapuntal degree of asexuality, or better still, femininity. To one extreme, then, if we focus on the early ‘70s, we have the spectacle of bricklayers dressing up and singing as high as they possibly could (Slade, Sweet), in the middleground genuine gender studies (Bolan, Bowie, Eno), and at the other, more approachable extreme there are those who admit to uncertainty, who will their fans to bear them away on their love and goodwill, to allow them, perhaps, to become adults – assuming that a future in adulthood still awaits them. Michael Jackson made the transition – or did he? – while Justin Timberlake has been trying to do so for the best part of two years. The Osmonds as a group were unambiguously male, though still yearning for love rather than demanding it as Ruffin’s Temptations would have done; but their biggest commercial focus was on Donny Osmond as a solo artist – on his own, still vaguely asexual, still in his teens, pleading “someone help me! Help me PLEASE!”
Which essentially leaves the case of David Cassidy – “do you think I have a case?” as he asks on the Partridge Family’s breakthrough hit “I Think I Love You.” Few others in pop – Billy Fury? Morrissey? – have based their career so securely on insecurity, so certainly on uncertainty. Cassidy at his career peak was in his early twenties; there was enough about him to suggest that he’d lived a little, but equally enough to suggest that he hadn’t lived enough. The Partridge Family, more or less based on the beyond-cleancut late ‘60s family bubblegum group the Cowsills, were intended to be reassuring in a Republican way – yes we still have long hair and bell-bottoms but we love our God and country and yes we’d be more than pleased to go over to ‘Nam if Uncle Sam wants us – a post-modern “Waltons” whose anchor was Shirley Jones, its umbilical link to the pre-rock entertainment world of MGM musicals; as with the unspoken subtext of Popstars/American Idol, namely wouldn’t it be great if that rock and roll thing had never happened?
Cassidy was Shirley Jones’ real-life stepson, and they were the only cast members to sing on Partridge Family records (other backing singers included Tom Bahler, later to write “She’s Out Of My Life” for Michael Jackson – and one wonders what a 28-year-old Cassidy would have made out of that song). “I Think I Love You” was their first and biggest hit, and though superficially wholesome in its assumed innocence, it’s a strange artefact of a teenybop record, far beyond what the likes of Bobby Sherman were doing at the time. Constructed seemingly from a Klezmer musical template, Cassidy breathlessly recounts how he wakes up from a “good dream,” “screaming out the words I dread.” For the remainder of the song he builds up the courage to tell the Other how he feels, only to recoil at the song’s climax and whimper “do you think you love me?” Producer Wes Farrell was fairly utilitarian (though using the same musicians as Spector) but there are some good devices used in the song, including the meandering harpsichord interlude and Cassidy trying to growl, “I don’t know what I’m up against, I don’t know what it’s all about” as if his voice had just broken. Indeed this song is about the sudden awareness of the existence of feelings like love and attraction – not to mention sex, because they never did, even though it seeps through every pore of the song. It was the Partridge Family’s greatest moment, though they approached its engineered genius twice again, once with “Doesn’t Somebody Want To Be Wanted” which comes on like a whitened Miracles (and Cassidy’s mid-song voiceover about being “lonely”) and emphatically so with the very bizarre “It’s One Of Those Nights (Yes Love)” (also written by the author of “I Think I Love You,“ the mysterious Tony Romeo) which appears to be a song about masturbation; Cassidy, missing what we assume is his former partner in bed at night, starts to think about her and picture her, and then exclaims “Suddenly you’re crashing through my mind like the waves upon the shore” as the strings orgasmically swell up behind him, before post-coitally concluding “Yes love, I’d welcome you back, like I’ve done a thousand times before.” Is this someone he’s actually known and been with, or are these just pictures of Lily? It’s one of the more disturbing of teenybop songs, centred as it is upon obsession rather than love.
But Cassidy is best known, and was best rewarded (at least in Britain, if not in America), as a solo artist. His first solo single, a cover of the Association’s “Cherish” is sung carefully and his voice is now much closely mixed – you can hear him breathing, and there is a new, definitely caressing and indefinitely carnal, aspect to his singing. “Could It Be Forever” was the breakthrough record, both commercially and lyrically – here, for once, Cassidy gets the girl and can’t believe his wonder (hear that purred “But” in the exact centre of the track). He’s still faintly troubled by the possibility that It Won’t Last, but for the first time on record he sounds happy.
Not that it lasts, though, since that would have brought his career to a premature end. Happiness and assertiveness didn’t suit him – witness his attempts to rock out on tracks like “Rock Me Baby” or “Friend And A Lover” which just sound daft (and significantly “Rock Me Baby” did far less well in the charts than his other singles of the period). No, tortured balladry was Cassidy’s forte; witness the promo film for his 1973 chart-topper “Daydreamer” which simply has him wandering doe-eyed through Kew Gardens and through Vaselined camera lens – and also the suggestion of something more unsettling underneath (“David Asks: What Are We Doing To Our World?” “David: Why I’m A Vegetarian” - Fab 208).
Witness also, and especially, his astonishing 1973 single “I Am A Clown” (again written by Tony Romeo – what happened to this man? Who was/is he?). Again, this might come across as a standard lament about fame in the manner of Gene Pitney’s “Backstage,” but in fact it’s something much more ominous. “I am a clown,” breathes Cassidy, as if through clenched teeth, “not funny ho ho, but funny strange…I feel like I belong in a sideshow” – all set against a dreamlike musical landscape which frequently stops to consider its position. At one key point, Cassidy almost weeps, “if you see what’s inside, you might not love me.” I say weep rather than cry because he never raises his voice above a whisper on this song, and yet it’s a pressure cooker of a record, waiting to explode. And later: “Please say you love me…please make me real.” Musically and production-wise it’s worthy of Saint Etienne; flutes and angelic choirs hoisting the singer up to the afterlife. Later still, at the very end, Cassidy adds a chilling coda: “See the funny little clown, see the puppet on a string, wind him up and he will sing, give him candy he will dance…but be certain not to feel if the funny face is real.” One thinks of the slowly declining, decaying Astaire dance routine which Alec Guinness added to the end of Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. What if the flying trapeze man never comes down? And this was a top three single in 1973, just like “Life On Mars?” – in fact a double A-side with “Some Kind Of A Summer” a warily bucolic recollection of travelling in America (“By the time we reached Denver with our truck-driving friend, we had wheels on fire”) where she and the road are pointedly “flashing” through Cassidy’s mind, in the manner of an acid trip comedown (again I think of Saint Etienne, in particular “Downey Ca.”).
His finest three minutes and seven seconds, however, came with his deserved 1972 number one, a reading of the Young Rascals’ “How Can I Be Sure?” Nick Hornby types tend to go for Dusty Springfield’s version, although I find it disappointingly prosaic and lumbered with a bombastic Wally Stott orchestration. It is pertinent that the coda “I’ll be sure with you” is nowhere to be found in Cassidy’s version, which fades frantically in a loop rather than ending. It begins with a proto-Ambient guitar (proto-Bill Frisell) to which a ‘cello and glockenspiel sympathetically respond, after which Cassidy’s never more breathy, if quietly desperate, voice enters: “How can I be sure in a world that’s constantly changing? How can I be sure where I stand with you?” Singing to his audience, or to the world, or to itself? Then the waltz rhythm comes in, and the accordion given centre-stage on other recordings of the song is only used here as an incidental colouration. Cassidy’s despair begins to become apparent - “Whenever I am away from you, I want to DIE!” – and he magnifies the sentiments of “I Think I Love You” to a near-psychotic level (“My alibi is telling people I don’t care for you,” which foreshadows 10cc’s blissful ode to stalking “I’m Not In Love”). He rides the Bacharach-esque melody and rhythm roller coaster (“u-u-upside dow-w-w-n!”) with yet another subtext (“Touch me but don’t take me down”) incorporated. By the time of the final orchestral and choral swell he is virtually screaming his passion (the heartbreaking “I love you, I LOVE YOU, FOREVER!” – a descendant of Barry Ryan’s “Eloise”?) but at the final climactic note, he immediately switches into asexual falsetto. And what is he singing in that final line? Is it “you know where I can be found” or “you know that I can’t be found”? There is no comfortable ending to the song; hear how Cassidy anticipates the change back from major to minor with the final syllable of his last “constantly changing” before he enters the loop of the fadeout, set against distended, almost childlike, backing vocals. The implications of this record go beyond teen-pop; it initiated a template of reluctant existentialism in pop which a decade later would develop into “Ghosts” by Japan (which is “How Can I Be Sure” rewritten from the perspective of experience and hindsight – “once I was so sure,” hear how that other tormented David, Sylvian, snarls the last word of that line). And how right that, a decade after “Ghosts,” both songs – and specifically those two records – should be invoked in the dying moments of that great displaced devotional lullaby, “Aftermath” by Tricky, one of the most shattering and moving records ever to come out of pop. In the end, the thread is strong enough to hold everything together; the records stored in an archive, the childhood possessions of someone who is no longer here, inspire what could still be possessed.
“I have those who belong to me on both sides. It gets to make less difference to me on which side I am.”
(Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Family And A Fortune, Gollancz, 1939)
. . .
Thursday, February 27, 2003
SAGE FRANCIS
dc Basehead might yet turn out to be more influential than anyone’s given him credit for; though he may subsequently have got religion, his extraordinary 1992 debut album Play With Toys seems to be a clear template for the activities of Anticon; determinedly lo-fi, its beats present but reluctant to press themselves forward, the subtext of rage under the placid surface, the unspoken politick – all of this has rematerialised in the activity of Anticon’s various practitioners. Different approaches have made themselves known – 1981-style entryism through irony (Majesticons), graffiti-strewn stumbles through an uncertain undergrowth (Themselves); sometimes there’s more of a touch of ‘80s SST about the whole enterprise. Sage Francis is an ally of Anticon, rather than a “member” (as though Anticon were rap’s Dogme), but his album of last year, Personal Journals is the one Anticon record most immediately replayable; highly accessible by Anticon’s standards, yet still avant-garde – and filled with exactly the same ratio of undistilled spite to articulate self-loathing as another comparable record from last year, The Eminem Show.
“Don’t make me laugh” warns Francis in the album’s introduction, before a wistful “Stairway To Heaven”-style acoustic guitar is suddenly overwhelmed by brutal quasi-drum ‘n’ bass beats as he launches into “Crack Pipes.” “I give a 21-gunshot salute with a toy rifle that you bought me – but it won’t shoot,” and that pretty much sets the pace for the album’s slow descent into a pit prior to cautious re-emergence (“Meet me at the AA meeting”). “Different” with its sardonic chorus of “I’m different, so different” is powered by Roni Size-ish double bass undulations as Francis declaims the (non-)events of his life to date. The exorcism continues in the title track, introduced by a Vaughan Williams oboe, after which he lists his facts as though completing a passport to Atlantis (“Sage Francis, 1968-2001/Devoted son, father to none…Catch him red-handed, but only if he’s bleeding”). He then turns his rage upon his father in “Inherited Scars,” his rapid-fire delivery coming on like Danny Kaye brandishing a Gatling gun while ‘60s sax and organ wheeze behind him – this album’s more sober but no less devastating equivalent to “Cleaning Out My Closet.” “Climb Trees” has him wander psychopathically through a world he has decided to populate with hate, and the music chases him all the way – the theatrical staccato of “any! sudden! movements!” – as he unleashes his spleen on some suspiciously unironic targets (to the girls he boasts, “I’ve only got 100 openings – I want to take all of you under my broken wings”).
Yet that sentiment segues neatly into, and is balanced by, the song “Broken Wings” which relies on a bichordal Brubeck piano loop. Here he is singing of a visionary who is being metaphorically caged – a gifted singer and artist forced to ply her trade in a dodgy low-rent club; someone whom he could have freed, but instead he ran away. Now wishing to make amends, he urges her to break out of her “prison,” connect with the world and find real freedom. There’s a striking moment where the piano chords are suspended in an unanchored ether as Francis whispers/urges: “We don’t even need wings to fly.” A distant female voice is heard floating above everything.
After the odd uptempo interlude of “The Strange Famous Mullet Recorder” with its jumpy soprano sax sample, there is a noticeably more placid deployment of saxophones in “Smoke And Mirrors.” With a chorus of “so sophisticated, so cool” uncertain in its bliss, Francis’ doubt wanders among more exalted mirrors (this could very nearly be ECM). But we’re brought back down to the gutter with “Message Sent” – a summary of letters he has been writing from prison, backed by an impossibly moving and sad piano refrain, representing an ideal which can never be reached, mainly because he refuses to reach it. Does he prefer wallowing?
Consider the consequent abrupt nosedive into the gruelling industrial arena of “Eviction Notice” which alternates gleeful yells of “this is a two-parter!” – deconstructing the song as it progresses, if that’s not too contradictory a contradiction – with a cold-eyed study of the death of a relationship, aided by drugs and paranoia, somehow revelling in the depths it freshly plumbs. When the title is enunciated the guitars crush in on you and you feel even more deeply buried than the pitiless climax of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral - as with the latter, the sounds here are deliberately muffled, the fresh earth being thrown on top of you as you scream with ecstasy.
The rest of the album attempts to dig itself out of the earth. “Pitchers Of Silence” alternates tabla throbs with supra-ironic Bon Jovi quotes. “Specialist” tries to bury its acoustic guitar under an avalanche of beats as Francis ponders the difference between his Other’s heavenly expectations (“The one that I’m with thinks sex is a beautiful thing”) and his perceived pre-ordained failure to live up to them; the undercurrent being that it may all end in blood, but who knows? “Hopeless” is a live acappella freestyle rap which is kind of a Lester Young to Eminem’s Coltrane; the lines more legato, the delivery still emphatic but slightly more etiolated. “Kill Ya’ Momz” is a not very successful attempt to rock out (the payoff being: mom, we love you really – as if it could be anything else; who do you think I am, Throbbing Gristle? Who of course also love their mothers). “Black Sweatshirt” is a quiet ode to a black sweatshirt. “Cup Of Tea” returns to the subject of alienation from his father, the frustration at their regular meetings with “the questions he won’t answer,” settling for the metaphorical cup of green tea.
But he has to let go eventually, and that he does on the full-band rock track “My Name Is Strange” which is the album’s most explicit connection with dc Basehead; Francis’ wavering baritone sounds like an even more displaced Jim Morrison, but the groove is full and satisfying. Finally, he delivers a very touching ode to the impossibility of total escape in “Runaways” where, over a deliberately sterile electronic backing track, he portrays himself as having the urge to return home, even though as a fugitive he will be returning to prison, even though he will be returning to a fixed image where he will still be viewed as a child, for the basic reason that However Far You Go, You Cannot Run Away From Yourself. Clichéd? Expressed in this track, it feels like a catharsis; not the easy homely eulogy with a twist ending of “Green Green Grass Of Home.” His future remains uncertain – and here the regretful yet attacking vocal is where he most resembles Marshall Mathers. Musically, though, this album generally reminds me of the benignly beautiful jazz-funk chord progressions of A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnite Marauders gone ever so slightly sour. Significantly, the whole of the inner sleeve of the CD is given over to handwritten track-by-track annotations (but not lyrics) by Francis in the mode of Cobain’s Journals, the pages almost drowning with the amount of words he crams into each of them. Can one two-chord piano riff say more than any of these words? You would do well to listen to Personal Journals and find out how passionately one needs the other.
. . .
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
ALEX HARVEY
Late starters, late bloomers; I can’t get enough of them, for obvious reasons. Hardly surprising, you might think, that one should hold a special place in one’s heart for people who slog away, seemingly hopelessly, for years, sometimes decades, and then suddenly find, just when they think life has plateaued at a drearily average grey mid-level before plunging into a disappointingly steep decline, that their time has come. On closer examination, though, it’s clear that those lucky bastards who become famous when they reach 40 do so entirely by their own hand, usually to prevent themselves from doing something else by their own hand, if you get me. But yes, let’s have more noble awkward buggers who have to wait until they’re 40 to get anywhere. Especially if they’re Glaswegian.
Alex Harvey was born in 1935, the same year as Presley (just a month younger, in fact – another contrarian Aquarian), older than everyone who came to prominence in the ‘60s, just four years my dad’s junior. So you will realise how unstintingly odd the spectacle of watching your dad become a pop star in the ‘70s would have been to this lad; and yet it has to be said, Harvey was the idol of my early childhood, a hip middle-aged man from Mungosland in a stripey jumper who eulogised Marvel Comics, who was clearly aware of Situationism and free jazz, and who loved the prospect of music being theatrical, not in a pompous sense, but in a provocative sense. Or, to put it more prosaically: Christ, if he can do it…
He grew up in the Gorbals when that was still a major achievement. His father Leslie Harvey – who from photographs in the ‘40s looks the spitting image of my dad – was a political radical and conscientious objector, as the younger Harvey similarly turned out, albeit with a very concrete passion for wargames. Open-minded, his dad turned the young Alex onto blues, folk and jazz, and encouraged his early interest in music-making. He first came to local notice when he won a contest in 1957 to find “Scotland’s answer to Tommy Steele” (and there exists a famous photo of the young Harvey, resplendent in his quiff, jamming on guitar with Steele) and thereafter launched a series of locally popular bands including the Kansas City Counts and Alex Harvey and the New Saints, though it wasn’t until the turn of the ‘60s that he formed his first noticeable group, Alex Harvey and his Soul Band. Taking Ray Charles and Bo Diddley as their initial inspirations, people in Glasgow who saw them still speak with awe about their apparently incendiary stage performances. Eventually they decamped to Hamburg, working the same gruelling treadmill as the Beatles had done before them, and while the records which came out at the time are necessarily only a shadow of what they were capable of doing, mention must be made of Harvey’s white-hot demolition of the Isleys’ “Shout” which he recorded in 1963. This almost outdoes Lennon’s assault on “Twist And Shout” in its bloody-minded rawness, and certainly towers over the far more famous cover a year later by Dennistoun’s finest, Lulu, who was inspired to record her version after hearing Harvey’s rendition, rather than directly by the Isleys. About this time the Soul Band incorporated the Leiber and Stoller/Coasters song “Framed” into their act; a number which Harvey would drastically overhaul in the ‘70s.
The Soul Band didn’t last, however, and in 1965 Harvey retreated to London, where he spent the rest of the ‘60s – much like the young David Bowie – experimenting with different styles but not really finding one that was ideal for himself. For much of this time he was a jobbing session musician, and at the same time he was also keeping a paternal eye on his younger teenage brother, Les Harvey, the straight man to Alex’s exuberant exhibitionist who preferred playing guitar to singing. Alex taught Les guitar, and Les eventually graduated to blues-rockers Stone The Crows, with Maggie Bell on vocals. Alex tried proto-Northern Soul with spirited but not especially distinguished readings of things like Edwin Starr’s “Agent 00 Soul” and Nat Adderley’s “Work Song”; he then had a go at psychedelia with the shortlived band Giant Moth, and eventually ended up as lead guitarist in the houseband for the Shaftesbury Avenue production of the musical Hair. By all accounts, Alex kept a keen eye on the staging, and made many mental notes which were later to prove advantageous with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s crucial theatrics.
He proceeded to move closer to the Harvey we recognise from his ‘70s heyday. A 1969 solo album, Roman Wall Blues, featured a title track based on Auden’s similarly-named poem and his first notable song “The Hammer Song,” later to be covered by Nick Cave. The aura was very much Incredible String Band, but in 1970 Harvey even experimented with free jazz when he participated in Ray Russell’s Rock Workshop album. Russell’s particularly bloody-minded approach to the guitar in this period has already been noted in my piece on Bill Fay, and here – with more or less the same line-up as that on Fay’s Time Of The Last Persecution - Harvey finds an especially brutal backing for his two vocal contributions: “Hole In Her Stocking,” which sounds like the Jools Holland Big Band hijacked by Alan Silva’s Celestial Communications Orchestra, and an extraordinary quasi-atonal rendition of “Wade In The Water” with Tony Roberts in a particularly and gloriously bad-tempered mood on tenor sax.
Still, none of it got Alex anywhere, and it was tragic that it took a sudden bereavement for him suddenly to grasp the reins and focus himself. In May 1972, during a Stone The Crows gig in a Swansea club, Les Harvey touched a microphone which was unearthed, was electrocuted and instantly died, aged just 23. Alex was for a short while inconsolable at his brother’s death, but not long afterwards – that particularly Glaswegian brand of bloody-minded determination again – he resolved to form a band to end all bands, with the express ambition to become big, in all senses of the word. He had lost the person he most wanted to protect, he was approaching forty with not a lot to show for 15 years of slogging away; he must have felt that the Sensational Alex Harvey Band was very concretely his last chance.
So he threw everything he knew and wanted into it. He recruited a young Glasgow band, Tear Gas, as his back-up, prominent among whom where the boggle-eyed guitarist Zal Cleminson (who would embrace the SAHB’s theatricality most enthusiastically out of all the members, eventually appearing on stage in full Pierrot make-up and costume) and keyboardist and co-songwriter Hugh McKenna. “The SAHB encompassed everything I knew in 1972,” said Harvey. Unimpressed by the lads’ devotion to the first four Zep albums, he insisted in coaching them in the art of Louis Prima and Hank Williams, teaching them some history, before emerging into the world.
The debut SAHB album Framed sounded, and still sounds, as though Harvey had unlocked the gates which had been kept forcibly locked for 15 years, to let everything he knew flood through. The title track is the same Leiber and Stoller song which was a staple of the old Soul Band’s repertoire, except here it is magnified and distorted into post-modern and apocalyptic shapes - and this was to become stunningly evident in concert, where Harvey would frequently perform the song in the guise of Hitler, and sometimes even Christ, causing much outrage in the Daily Record at the time, as I recall. In many ways Harvey was Glasgow’s Bowie, and his preferred persona of “Vambo” – a staple of Glasgow graffiti well into the ‘80s – came across as a tougher, less sentimental Ziggy. In theatrical extremis he might even be considered the British Iggy Pop; there was that same uncomfortable yet exhilarating feeling of is he going to go over the edge, is he going to commit suicide on stage? Watching him, you felt that he might. ‘60s songs like “Midnight Moses” and “Hammer Song” were dusted down and metalled up; and indeed Louis Prima was evoked, in spirit if not in musical actuality, in epics like “There’s No Lights On The Christmas Tree Mother, They’re Burning Big Louie Tonite!”
The real stride forward, though, came with their second album, Next, released in 1973. Astutely, Harvey employed the glam-rock producer Phil Wainman, who had lately worked with Chinn and Chapman on the Sweet’s classic series of apocalyptic avant-teen anthems, and thrilling stomps like “Swampsnake” almost out-glitter Glitter. The title track is a Grand Guignol reading of Jacques Brel’s mobile army whorehouse epic; far less sardonic than Scott Walker’s reading, it’s undoubtedly melodramatic and more than a little hammy, yet Harvey seems to extract real, palpable grief from the protagonist’s hopeless situation. The album’s setpiece comes with “The Last Of The Teenage Idols” where Harvey looks back at his “Scotland’s Tommy Steele” days, though the dynamics of the music build seamlessly from rock stomp to freeform ambience and back again.
They kept on getting better. 1974’s The Impossible Dream articulated Harvey’s passion for comics and ripping yarns (“Tomahawk Kid”) with a deglossed urbanism (“The Hot City Symphony” which first introduces us to the character of Vambo) which both anticipates and surpasses that of Springsteen. They were practically superstars in Scotland by this time, and unlucky not to cross over to the national charts with the great anti-war tirade masquerading as a Hurricane Smith/Peter Skellern-style ‘30s danceband pastiche, “Sergeant Fury,” which in Scotland sold heavily as a single. Perhaps its B-side, the, shall we say, somewhat literal “Gang Bang” (next to which 50 Cent sounds like the Mull Historical Society), put off the casual punter. Notice, also, how Harvey’s vocals have by this stage subtly mellowed, sounding not that far removed from Andy Fairweather-Low.
The crossover wasn’t far away, though. 1975’s Tomorrow Belongs To Me featured the coruscating avant-rock-pre-punk-metal workout that was “The Faith Healer” and the gloriously sneered torch song “Give My Compliments To The Chef,” and then a rush-released live album the same year did the trick. From it, Harvey’s deconstruction and reassemblage of the old Tom Jones camp chest-beater “Delilah” was extracted as a single and finally got him into the national Top 10 and – absolutely unforgettably to those who witnessed it - onto TOTP. It’s an astonishing performance; Harvey systematically stripping the song of all Jones’ hip-swinging mockery and real-man affectations, reducing it to what it always was; a cheap, lurid, squalid tale of jealousy and murder which needed no dressing up to cheapen it further, Harvey physically writhing as though he were already strapped into the electric chair, staring coldly yet fearfully at the camera – “forgive me Delilah, I just couldnae take any more…” You could smell the fear on Noel Edmonds’ face as the camera panned back. “Er, and now let’s brighten things up again with Mike Batt and the New Edition as we go to Summertime City…”
It’s safe to say that their Christmas season of gigs at the Glasgow Apollo in December 1975 saw the SAHB at their absolute zenith. My dad took me to one of them, and to me it was the first indication that pop, or rock, could visually, as well as aurally, change the way you thought, or even the way you walked through the world. This extraordinary post-Artaud avant-garde theatre being unfurled before us, and yet the atmosphere was practically Cup Final day at Hampden Park; the SAHB were heroes, adored and idolised.
After that, though, two follow-up singles “Gamblin’ Bar Room Blues” and “Runaway” (the Del Shannon song, taken from their speedily recorded Pin Ups-style cover versions album, The Penthouse Tapes, didn’t do much business, so they left Vertigo Records and signed up with Mountain Records, a new label formed by their manager Bill Fehilly, a close friend whom Harvey had known since the ‘50s. Their first album for the label, 1976’s SAHB Stories, was fairly routine, but did yield a second major hit single in the ominous “Boston Tea Party,” Harvey’s loaded Bicentennial tribute, which he performed on TOTP standing stock still like a cigar store Indian, letting his face, now mischievous, now threatening, do all the work. Sometimes he was more unsettling when he was quiet.
And then it all started to unravel. Fehilly died in a ‘plane crash in July 1976 (a second unexpected blow and personal loss to Harvey), the books of Mountain Management might have well been painted in red, and something in Harvey had undeniably been extinguished. His alcoholism, already considerable, escalated still further; punk was on the horizon, and though Harvey was still “on side,” the theatricals were starting to look a little contrived and grandiloquent compared to what the Pistols were generating (though Harvey was a big Pistols fan, even at one point expressing an interest in managing them). Moreover, his friend Ian Dury was quietly, if amicably, overtaking him on the outside lane; New Boots And Panties conjures up, among many other things, the sort of attitude and music of which a younger, hungrier and fitter Harvey would have been capable.
After one more SAHB album, 1977’s nondescript Rock Drill, Harvey wound the band up. One unexpected fan of the SAHB was Carla Bley, who saw them on a US tour and, impressed by Harvey’s theatrics, asked him to participate in her then husband Michael Mantler’s musical adaptation of Pinter’s Silence, with Robert Wyatt and Bley herself taking the other two main vocal parts. Harvey was likewise a big Bley fan, but less so of Mantler, and wisely turned the project down (the album was eventually recorded with Kevin Coyne taking Harvey’s place, but the record is an embarrassing, disjointed mess and was uniformly panned at the time of its original release). Instead he opted to record an audio documentary for K-Tel about the Loch Ness Monster. K-Tel promptly went bust. He undertook some shambolic semi-Broadway musical performances at the London Palladium, and recorded a couple more albums, The Mafia Stole My Guitar (1979) and The Soldier On The Wall (1982), neither of which need detain any of your time.
He was on the way out, and despite forming a new band, the less than enticingly named Electric Cowboys, he finally succumbed to a heart attack while waiting for a ferry in Zeebrugge in February 1982, one day before what would have been his 47th birthday; outliving Presley by four-and-a-half years, outliving my dad by just over six months. He didn’t live to see Nick Cave, then still frontman of the Birthday Party, taking elements of Harvey’s art to previously unimaginable extremes; but the pain was over. These days he’s something of a historical curio, unheard of and largely unheard by anyone under 40; but he deserves to be more than that. A late bloomer who nevertheless died an early death; was the latter the necessary price to pay for the former?
. . .
Monday, February 24, 2003
GOT TO BE REAL?
The irritating Achilles’ heel of the first episode of the new BBC documentary on the history of country music, Lost Highway - I do not need to comment on the attendant irony of appropriating the title of a David Lynch film – was the continuing insistence on the “realness” of the Carter Family, of Bill Monroe’s strange pre-Jimmy Scott asexual singing, of bluegrass, even though the latter was a marketing term dreamed up by Mr Monroe, who as a human being was some businessman, at least until rock (and no mention was made of the attendant irony of the main assassin being Elvis Presley) sucked the whole business under. No, its “tradition,” though younger than World War II, has been appropriated and the quality of “real” is just another marketing tool, such that poor old Alison Krauss – an intelligent and sometimes moving singer and songwriter – is lauded for all the wrong reasons, of adhering properly to Monroe’s template. It was a shame to see Emmylou Harris acting the Wynton Marsalis rôle – she, of all people, should have been the first to see the futility of applying “realness” to this music. It is exactly the over-protective psuedo-purist attitude which wards me off investigating the music further, even though the strangulated harmonies about strangled women sung by the Louvin Brothers (to whom the Everlys owe everything, and to whom Eminem may owe a distant something) substantially suggest otherwise, let alone the astonishing Ralph Stanley.
But let’s talk about “real” without necessarily being earmarked as an unthinking Derrida disciple. Specifically, there are two hip hop CDs set before me, one of which claims to be realer than real, the other a hugely non-ironic mirror on reality.
One is Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ - and the title should be enough to tell you that capitalism comes above saving anyone’s world, nothing with which Dubya would disagree – by 26-year-old Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent. This is his major label debut on Eminem’s Shady Records set-up, and it’s been co-executive produced by Mr Mathers and Dr Dre. At the time of writing it’s already sold 1.7 million in the USA, where it’s only been out for two weeks, while by the time you read this – Timberlake at the Brits notwithstanding - it will probably have entered the UK chart at number one. His electro-breakdown diss of fake gangsterism “Wanksta” is already well known through its use in Eminem’s 8 Mile film (and appears here only as a bonus track), and indeed his ironically main selling point is that he is real – in contrast to the supposed corporate cocksuckers like N*lly and N*s, there is no cosy sense of community on this record; it’s the return of unabashed, unashamed and – it must be said – unoriginal gangsta rap. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad record; as a pop record, it’s musically addictive, if not particularly innovative, but Ready To Die it isn’t. On the latter, Biggie was clearly not as hard as he painted himself; the album famously and chillingly ends with him on the other end of the ‘phone shooting himself.
Why does Jackson need to be real? He has had disagreements and fall-outs with pretty well every rapper/rap organisation going; in 2000 he was stabbed in his studio, and two months later was shot nine times in his car, thereafter driving himself to hospital. It’s said that he may have been the intended target and/or the cause of Jam Master Jay’s shooting last year. So he gives a bloody history; and boy is he going to rub our noses in it. Or does he?
The album begins with the sound of a gun being loaded; periodically throughout the album it’s used as a rhythm line. You can tell immediately though why he’s wanted (in both senses) on the dynamic thrust of “What Up Gangsta” – hear the way he turns the word “gangsta” upwards, half sneering, half threatening. He sets himself up as supremely confident and fearless, ready to gun down anyone in his path who disagrees with him, ready not to be messed with…Schwarzenegger in other words, and like Arnie there’s an undercurrent of knowing resentment which drives him on. Eminem guests on two tracks, “Patiently Waiting” and “Don’t Push Me,” and no doubt is glad to have the astuteness of signing up the rapper who otherwise would have been his main rival; here Mathers does what he needs to do.
“Many Men” (“wish death on me”) outlines his reasons for building himself up so firmly, yet it’s strange how his singing voice in its deceptive restraint is strongly reminiscent of Bill Withers. Indeed, much of his rapping is done at low volume, seemingly through clenched teeth, as though he’s biting down on his bullets.
“In Da Club” is the record’s obvious standout; produced by Dr Dre (who certainly must have the longest-running strike rate of any rap producer; 15 years and counting). Its orchestral synth stabs suggest a speeded-up revisiting of Badalamenti’s “Laura Palmer Theme” – and therefore more ominous – and the song could almost pass for an anti-“Hot In Herre.” Here he wants sex, not love (but from the opposite perspective which Neneh Cherry claimed in “Buffalo Stance” all those years ago), and rarely in contemporary pop has the pursuit of pleasure sounded so joyless, so much like a treadmill. He sings and raps as though locked in a pressure cooker. Note the melodic/rhythmic overlap of the “it’s your birthday” intro with the chorus of Eminem’s “Square Dance,” and how it’s brutally undermined by “we don’t give a fuck if it’s your birthday.” No happiness, just make the money.
No release in the drug song “High All The Time” either, which shares similar musical architecture to Styles’ “Good Times,” but the latter’s fake euphoria is completely absent here. It’s as if he has to clock in to see his dealer. After this, the spiral continues downwards. “Heat,” again produced by Dr Dre, brilliantly deploys descending psychedelic organ chords to frame Jackson’s disorientation. Towards the end of the album, the Barry White-sampling “21 Questions” suggests some vulnerability, some desire for love (lyrically and musically it’s a real-life reversal of the doomed New World utopia of Roy Ayers’ “We Live In Brooklyn, Baby”), but the bonus tracks (which, as happens so often with rap album bonus tracks, are the album’s highlights) defuses even this remote possibility. Hear the sneering, almost punkish chant of “NYPD, LAPD, NYPD” which opens “U Not Like Me,” and the unambiguous fuck-yous of “Life’s On The Line” where he comes across like rap’s Millwall (“Nobody likes me…but I don’t like y’all anyway!”). He’ll continue to make you hate him, because that’s how his bank balance will grow; all those piles of Benjamin placed strategically in the sleeve photos – there are references to the Bible, and King David in particular, so it’s clear that the only way he can survive is to become his own god.
Can Anticon provide an antidote to this outlook? Mike Ladd I find an intelligent and enterprising fellow, but also an infuriating one – for every genuinely heartfelt epic like “Feb 4 ‘99” from 2000’s superb Welcome To The Afterfuture, there have been ill-advised enterprises like the Infesticons, whose Gun Hill Road album, and the whole concept behind them/it, I found irretrievably silly (I have not been drawn to sci-fi since the late ‘70s, I have to admit, though loved it before then – don’t get me started on Bob Shaw’s Slow Glass series! – so perhaps I’m just not in sympathy with the general construction of the various ‘cons). The Antipop Consortium’s Tragic Kingdom debut was one of those records which I played and listened to once, applauded it silently for being an intelligent and provocative piece of work, and never played again. So my expectations for the new “cons” record - Beauty Party, credited to the Majesticons – were not especially high; still, many wise friends recommended it to me, and actually I’m rather glad they did, as it seems to me Ladd’s most concentrated and accessible work to date.
As with so many records these days, Beauty Party both recalls and revives the spirit of 1981, in particular the ironic studies of capitalism familiar to fans of Heaven 17’s Penthouse And Pavement, and the avant-disco aura of Ze Records (especially the first, eponymous, and by several million miles the best, Was (Not Was) album). The cover depicts a faux-luxury; a lady sits in her apartment, naked from the waist up; to her left are a glass of Cristal and a chessboard, seemingly with a game in progress. Within the sleeve the credits and titles (and I will not go through the still tedious, if extensive, history of the ‘cons referred to within the notes) are set out in Harrods colours; green background and gold lettering. Thus is the music made approachable, so that you can come close enough to receive the acid flung in your face full-on.
Well it’s not quite as extreme as that, though the second track “Piranha Party (Gentrification Party)” does propose, over a jittery d&b-ish beat, the trashing and burning of houses. The album really gets into its stride, however, with track four, “Prom Night Party,” a blissful slice of mutant disco which again underlines the importance of rediscovering Prince’s ‘80s protegés. The budget is clearly not large, but the groove is entirely surrenderable.
My favourite track, the gorgeously desolate “Brains Party” explicitly summons the spirits of the supreme ‘80s pop ironists (because their irony was so heartfelt) the Pet Shop Boys as they quote from, and reverse, the chorus of “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” – here, though, the desperation is more overt, with a need to get the money back off rich, uncaring bastards as an act of revenge rather than one of entryism. The music is fantastically moving; a choir echoes its grief into the vast plains of the chorus – in many ways it’s a “realer” (as if that mattered) vision of what Common proposes in “Come Close” – salvation through subversion.
“Luv Thief Party” sung by Sun Singleton, is superb, if opaque, R&B balladry, the sustained harmonies indicating how great the yearning for whatever they’re yearning for is. And “Platinum Blaque Party” is certainly worthy of Heaven 17 at their most acerbic, its progenitor gloating smugly over his newly-acquired empire, and how sublimely it’s undermined by the admission “I used to study Marx, now I’m studying the wine.” “Helicopter Party” is what I presume to be a jibe at Cristal capitalists (“the death of jiggy in the valley beyond the bling” indeed!) such as P Diddy, the jagged electro groove propelling Ladd’s reflections on towering over the world with its payoff chorus line “who controls the music controls the WORLD!” “Majestwest Party” loses itself in drugs, “Suburb Party” explains why.
“Game Party” seems to be the record’s one outright parody of straight-assed rap as purveyed by the likes of 50 Cent; its groove should prove sufficient to sneak onto Westwood’s show without anyone worrying about what Ladd’s saying. “Parlor Party” is the big finale; an etiolated “Good Times” verse segues into a sudden sunlit landscape as a female chorus sings in blissful harmony worthy of Prince. “San Trope Party” shows the protagonists slowly sloping away from the party, into an uncertain, and probably oblivion-filled, future with its ineffably sad synth refrain and its “sayonaras” and “goodbyes.” They are supposed to be already dead(ened), of course. There’s one PS in an unnamed extra track, wherein one of the female vocalists declaims in mock-solemnity the ancestry and family tree of the ‘cons, before she suddenly overwhelms the silliness and starts screaming through the speakers about the death of capitalism, over the same orchestral coda used on “Feb 4 ’99.” It’s a striking moment, but is it “real” – is its outrage as manufactured as 50 Cent’s manhood, even more so because 50 Cent has real reasons, even if they are ultimately excuses, to maintain at least a façade of manhood?
Ultimately “real” doesn’t enter the equation. Both records are extremely entertaining in their not so opposed ways – and, as with all art, it’s what the listener/viewer gets out of it which matters more than whatever quantity or quality of “reality” was put into it. Once the work’s done and released into the world, it has to do its own flying and is subject to everyone’s entirely different interpretations. And both these records are well worth interpreting. Just bear in mind the footage of the placid, smiling Louvin Brothers strumming their way through “Knoxville Girl” – a murder ballad which was their biggest hit – and remember how complex the intertwining of some aesthetic flight paths can become.
. . .
Friday, February 21, 2003
AUDIO BULLYS
Bullies are all talk, of course. We all know that. And we know the vulnerability and essential helplessness which lie beneath the bluster. What I’m saying is, with Ego War, the debut album by the SW London duo Audio Bullys – the originators of what is only semi-helpfully called “hooligan house” – do not expect a raved-up Oasis. Expect mumblings in the corner, drawbacks, shows of confidence. Do not expect a 21st century Bentley Rhythm Ace. If it’s an “ego war,” it’s a war between ego and selflessness.
Everyone’s going to do it, so why don’t I go first - Ego War is going to be deemed this year’s Original Pirate Material, the high-rise, low-budget word from the, er, streets. But Tom Dinsdale and Simon Franks do not float like Mike Skinner does – nor is that anywhere near their agenda, which is set out fairly unambiguously in the opening “The Snake.” In fact, if anything, Franks’ vocals recall no one so much as the Stereo MCs, forcibly abducted into the future. “Got this feeling in my head/It won’t go away, no” he muses while the music makes like early Prodigy behind him, with a Hallowe’en-type high synth line to remove any residue of comfort, and the relationship of which he sings is on the point of collapse. The rap is staccato, monotone, businesslike, neither friendly nor unfriendly – the determined stride of trainers against pavement to disguise the instability.
A sax sample is twisted crazily, backwards and forwards, to take us into “100 Million,” the most obviously Streets-like track, though only obvious in the veneer (“One two” replaces “that’s it” – the blissful expiration of the word “stoned” at 0:14). But there’s none of Skinner’s doubt or fragility; this is an ode to being on the make. They’re going to be rich and get out of the grey streets – then again, consider the ghost of Ian Dury behind the generous chorus of “if I had 100 million, then I’d probably give half to you” over a confident groove, before Franks turns into triple-mode rapping, just ahead of the beat. The wordplay is non-existent; it’s functional rather than creative, but seems to fit here, as it doesn’t overwhelm the music you’re dancing to.
“Way Too Long” is an exceptionally bleak and pitiless recitation of someone fleeing from former “buddies” (i.e. dealers) because he “took too long to pay.” None of the black comedy of “All Got Our Runnin’s” here – instead, the track is propelled by a brilliant sample of Elvis Costello’s guitar riff from “I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea” constantly stabbing at the song like Stanley knives into the back of the debtor’s neck. “Let’s-get-paid” Franks intones matter-of-fact; abrupt cutoff at 2:13.
Frequently on this album we get the sensation that the Audio Bullys have been sent back to the other, non-shiny, side of 1981. “Real Life” could easily pass for Depeche Mode had they gone over the dark side earlier, with its ominous synth riff echoing against a mutated “Just Can’t Get Enough” rhythm. “We live our lives more than worlds apart” Franks declaims again and again over a Tannoy, through a megaphone, shielded from life, locked in the symbolic bedroom.
It’s heartening that a pop record as busted (yes) as “We Don’t Care” can still make the Top 20, as this song recently did as a single. It may well be the year’s most ominous introduction: Franks’ voice singing “There’s things I haven’t told you/I go out late at night/And if I was to tell you/You’d see my different side” before being swamped by brutal, bass-heavy electronics, like Suggs sings Gary Numan, before that itself is overwhelmed by the determinedly punk thump of the chorus (“Wot da FAACK!!?”). It’s like Madness drowning in madness.
Their use of samples is so ingenious in its unexpected obviousness – hear what they do to/with Joe Cocker’s ’68 psychedelic chest-beater “Marjorine” on “Face In A Cloud” (as the samples here remind us, a direct descendent of “Say You Don’t Mind”). It’s a memory that the Audio Bullys never had, but by God for me it’s a memory trawled from the farthest, most distant recesses of my life – “Each time I go to town, I see your face in a cloud/And when I come back home, I call your name out aloud” intones Cocker over a grievous lament of a middle-eight whose bleakness is made bleaker by the relentless rhythm which the Bullys add to it. They have magnified the essential emptiness at the heart of the song – is it obsession, is it bereavement? It could be both (as with so much on Cocker’s debut album, With A Little Help From My Friends, a still unacknowledged masterpiece – could his demonic vocal on the title track, which approaches Pharaoh Sanders in its diatonic screams, be the most extreme vocal performance on a number one single?). Whatever, this is brilliant.
As is the ineffably sad “The Things” where Franks now admits to vulnerability, made all the more poignant when set against a jaunty ‘60s orchestral pop/’70s cop show theme sample – “I want to change the things that I do.” The multi-echoed rage in the brief middle-eight where he’s “walking the streets.” The fragility continues to make itself evident on “Veteran” – “For you my love, I will try to be a better man.” Is this evidence of a bully? Well, the track quickly explodes into a duality between the yearning of the chorus and the quick-march “mayday mayday” rap, all underscored by Jerry Dammers-style organ (of course – it’s a vulnerability vocally inherited from Terry Hall! The absolute same deadpan vulnerability).
But can they be happy too? You might think so if you listen to the fantastic “The Snow” (is it an ode to cocaine?) which shows that they can out-Jaxx Basement Jaxx with its irresistible carnival groove. But hear that oddly desolate voice again at its centre: “All of the people that I know/Seem to be caught up in the snow.” A fast-paced, danceable requiem to hide grief, just like Kim Appleby’s “Don’t Worry”? Hear the divide between the languid, drawn-out “You don’t know me” and the abrupt, low rasp of “but I know you,” speedily followed by Franks pleading “It could be ever so good.”
“I Go To Your House” again conjures up the spectre of the Stereo MCs, though this time locked inside Primal Scream’s “Slip Inside This House” – a good-humoured but unsentimental examination of a relationship about to assume the shape of a pear. And it’s danceable again; in contrast to the Arctic wastes of the early part of the album, the party now seems to be warming up, at least superficially. The sentiments are balanced out by those of the following song “Hit The Ceiling” - “I’m in love and I just can’t commit myself,” with Franks here sounding bizarrely like Jaz Coleman, before a post-House beat locks itself into a loop, a coaching house halfway between Marshall Jefferson and Daft Punk, as the urge to “hit the ceiling” becomes ever more pressing, as if willing the Dancing Queen to fracture their skull by flying too high.
The title track is kicked off by a very familiar-sounding ‘80s drum sample (“Let’s Hear It For The Boy”) though a sinister string sample hovers in the middleground like a swarm of bees before Franks launches into a more realistic take on “Parklife” - “Heaven, hell and drugs to sell/You get pushed off the back of the bus/It’s a suburban ego war…” Here he sounds like Suggs again, but wait for the highly sarcastic tribute/rejoinder: “I want to stay here for the rest of my days/And as long as I stay here/I want/to get PAID!” Not for love, that’s for sure. The track stops dead to let in a glissando keyboard sample every so often, as if they’re pausing to think about what they really want out of life. Perhaps all they want is to get paid…but the song remains insanely catchy, and a probable number one if released as a single; in truth, the best single Madness never made.
There’s one track left: an extra, hidden, nameless track, which may well be the eeriest thing on here, perhaps the album’s “Ghost Town” – a forlorn synth cries over a reluctant mid-tempo gallop. Winter is palpable in the air, as Franks solemnly recites “And as the years pass by and the birds fly/And the world keeps asking why…” The word “always” is sobbed out. There are some “RIPs” to whom tribute is paid. “This is music, and we’re gonna keep doing this forever andeveraneveraneveranever - ‘cos we’ve got to…makes things better, not worse.” Never has “doing” music sounded so much like a gruelling treadmill. “We just keep rolling, building, to get to a better place” – but the spectre of Sisyphus isn’t far away. Are they getting anywhere? “All you pricks…go fuck yourselves – you know who you are,” Franks growls. But you can’t hide your neediness, can’t run from yourself. “Sometimes there’s no release…but that’s the nature of the game.” The voice stumbles and fumbles. He’s thinking. He’s dreaming. Stop treating it as a game? Or start playing the game? “It’s summertime for too long” he echoes at the song’s close. “I had that dream.”
And like Gerontius, he awakens in the middle of a war.
Somebody’s crying somewhere.
It’s not too far away from the Durutti Column when you think about it, is it?
. . .
Thursday, February 20, 2003
ANOTHER RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN
One of the few touching moments in the otherwise unsatisfactory film Twenty-Four Hour Party People shows Tony Wilson visiting the Haçienda on a bleak Tuesday evening, sometime in the mid-‘80s before Acid House temporarily bankrolled the business. The place is almost entirely deserted; on stage, Vini Reilly plays his intelligent ambient guitar pieces, abstracted into himself. Never to pull a crowd or make anyone any money, but Wilson doesn’t care; he looks at him with admiration and listens rapturously to what Reilly’s playing. I will support this genius because no one else will. That’s why I’m not EMI.
I was extremely reluctant to talk about the Durutti Column (who is Vini Reilly) on The Church Of Me because their music falls into the category of “our music”: music I do not feel ready to write about yet – if ever – because of what it meant to us as a couple. After all, his first two albums for Factory, Return Of The Durutti Column (1980) and L.C. (1981), were partially responsible for Laura and I coming together. Why and how that happened isn’t for public consumption; not yet. I also have to say that after the mid-‘80s, the Durutti Column more or less drifted off our radar; we knew he continued somehow, somewhere, but didn’t feel obliged to examine his music close-up – the fact that he still existed was, in its own strange way, sufficient.
What I can’t ignore, however, is that he’s now come back with what is his best and most focused album since 1981 in Someone Else’s Party. Finally on a major label (Artful Records, via Universal) but still determinedly lo-fi (Reilly plays and does everything here except for occasional drum programming by one Laurie Laptop, who is obviously the natural successor to Eric Random; Bruce Mitchell, once a fine adversary when on drums, has retreated to managing Reilly), this record demands my attention because of the circumstances which led to its creation – the illness (unstated, but presumably cancer) and eventual death of his mother. Yes, it’s another record about death and bereavement; it’s how I feel, it’s what I need to talk about, one way or another. But here Reilly sounds rejuvenated in a way that he hasn’t, perhaps since his work on Morrissey’s 1988 debut solo album Viva Hate (and Morrissey is still paying for having got rid of Reilly’s services after that neglected record). Hear for instance the opener “Love Is A Friend” which sounds like a typical Durutti reverie, except here it’s boosted by a (still fairly primitive) breakbeat and a deliberately ludicrous “Top 40!” sample for a hook. Reilly’s voice remains back in the mix, shrouded in echo; a strange halfway house between Genesis P-Orridge and Ian Brown (on which latter Reilly surely must have been an unspoken influence).
The voice you hear on the next track, “Spanish Lament,” however, is that of Rebekah Del Rio, taken from the extraordinary climactic sequence in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in the nocturnal theatre of ghosts, wherein she appears on stage to sing a beyond-passionate Spanish language acappella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (the second great deployment/subversion of Orbison’s music in Lynch’s films) which eventually proves to be too much passion for her fragility; at the point of her climactic high note, she collapses, dies and fades from the picture. I gasped and wanted to scream when I saw that sequence in the cinema, scream and sob; but here, Reilly offers a more compassionate accompaniment, even though the pain of the voice cannot be erased or negated. It’s a magical moment of alchemy; inspired.
There are hushed, reluctant ballads like “Somewhere,” where Reilly resolves to get on a ‘plane to be with his desired Other; but set that against an unusually bitter Reilly on the fantastic post-post-Madchester groove of “No More Hurt” (again and again on this album, one is compelled to think that this is the sort of thing which the Stone Roses should have gone on to do) with its payoff “Like room service, sex will be over in two hours.”
And even that must be set against “Requiem For My Mother” – so delicately played and sung, an imagined old folk tune, simple, heartfelt, and I can’t listen to it without crying, and I’m not even crying for Vini’s mother like Vini is barely holding himself back from doing in this song. He follows it with the equally intense (but still restrained) “Remember” where he pleads “Remember me, that’s all I ask of you” – again, down to earth, without any of the melodrama of Dido’s lament, and again heartbreaking.
“American View” is rooted in an unchanging bass synth sustenato and an unclear but clearly cynical lyric (so he is in fact “relevant”), while his use of a children’s choir on “Vigil” sounds anything but cosmetic. On “Woman” he comfortably outdoes Moby in his astute deployment of samples from a naggingly familiar JA pre-release rhythm/riff and also from a 1920s gospel field recording. It never sounds gratuitous. And on the closing “Goodbye” a bucolic acoustic lullaby plays against birdsong and, finally, an answering machine message from Reilly’s mother; now the only way in which her voice can be heard.
This record attaches itself to me, because of the history for which the Durutti Column are partly, if indirectly, responsible, and because of what he’s chosen to sing about at this precise time. And I would like every one of you to go and listen to it (it is released in the UK on 24 March).
How to come to terms with music in your life when you thought that you would never be able to listen to any of it again without breaking down irretrievably? The only way is to try to find ways of listening to it differently. But music, art in general, can only ever help partially. It cannot sustain you alone. If you use it as a barrier to protect yourself from the world, then it’s not helping at all.
I don’t know. Something changed in me after Saturday; something which initially felt slight but which may in truth be major. It underlined to me the absolute life-sustaining necessity of reconnecting with the world, with humanity – the realisation that, pretend as you might, you can’t do it alone, that there are people in this world who want to ensure that you’re not alone, even if they’re a thousand miles away. When you are able to open up entirely, emotionally – as I was able to do on Tuesday evening in the company of a great and wonderful human being – the world suddenly opens itself up to you again. It wanted you back all the time, only you were too blinded by grief to realise it.
So, I am coming back. And I will stay – I’ll stay for you Nathalie, and for you Ruth, and for you Gail, and for you Jessica, for you Mark, for you Mum, for the dozens, maybe hundreds more, of you that there are – and above all for you Laura – I stay because you want me to. And I’m happy to stay.
. . .
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
BY POPULAR REQUEST – ABBA
Their refusal to die, coupled with their refusal to be reborn, has ensured Abba’s longevity beyond facile camp. With the recent deaths of Joe Strummer and Maurice Gibb, Abba are now about the only iconic pop group whose original members are all alive and sufficiently compos mentis to feasibly reform (ruling out Barrett’s Pink Floyd but not necessarily any configuration of Fleetwood Mac) but all four are astute enough to realise that if they did reform, the spell would break and “Abba” would atomise. The easy Swedish aesthetic comparison with Ingmar Bergman is usually made, specifically in relation to the extraordinarily deep self-examination which characterised their later work, and the Bergmanesque compositions of their videos (typically featuring Agnetha and Frida’s faces in full shot standing at right angles to each other), but this is of course over-simplification; the reality is that Abba probably saved pop music and were careful to inject their art with enough cunning angst to ensure that they would be talked about and listened to decades hence, whereas operatives like the Osmonds simply were what they were, with no subtext, and thus didn’t transcend the dual traps of brief idolatry followed by intolerable camp ironic adulation.
How, you ask, did Abba save pop music? When is perhaps the primary question – specifically, in April 1974, at the Eurovision Song Contest held at the Brighton Dome Pavilion. Already veterans of various locally notable pop/folk groups of the ‘60s and early ‘70s – and some were already past 30 – Bjorn and Benny knew what was needed. They’d had a near-miss at Eurovision ’73 with “Ring Ring,” which was good if not yet distinctive pop; they then retreated to consider other elements to add to their assault on the then strangulating hegemony of, on one hand unregulated prog, and on the other, increasingly stale glam. Consider: in April 1974, Tales From Topographic Oceans and Brain Salad Surgery were inescapable; Bowie was musing about becoming a canine man in 1984; Bolan was retreating into non-ironic navel-gazing (“Teenage Dream”/Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow), Slade and the Sweet were already past their career peaks (two of Slade’s three 1974 single releases were, very tellingly, ballads) and Roxy Music past their first artistic peak. Everything was mouldering away steadily; the UK singles chart more or less having turned into a “Radio 2” chart (which it was to remain, essentially, until 1978); unchallenging, polite, miserable.
Consider the other leading Eurovision entries of that year; indeed, it was something of a commercial peak for Eurovision, in that no less than four of the songs made it into the UK Top 20, and of those the only one not to make the Top 10 was the UK entry – Olivia Newton-John’s oompah salute to the Sally Army “Long Live Love,” quite possibly the most embarrassing record the poor girl ever made (one really feels for Olivia in the early years; already having a much more profitable career in the USA, yet in Blighty condemned to gingham dresses and tasteful duets with Cliff. You have to understand the starchiness of the environment in which she had to work at this time to appreciate fully just what an absolute liberation her contribution to Grease must have felt, not to mention terrific sex-pop hits like “Physical”) which stalled at #11. Then again, two of the other three hardly justified any claims of improvement; Dutch duo Mouth and MacNeal’s “I See A Star” was equally Bavarian marching band in its outdated template; while 1964’s winner, Italy’s Gigliola Cinquetti, had a melodramatic nervous breakdown to the torch song “Go!” which sounded like a lost Barry Ryan B-side.
So it’s against this background that you have to appreciate the earth tremors which Abba made with “Waterloo.” Freely influenced by Roy Wood’s work with Wizzard – which itself was a lo-fi midway point between Spector and Meek – Bjorn and Benny mixed in some standard war/sex analogies into the lyric, set it against a piano-driven riff which can only be described as knowingly joyful; and on they strode, Bjorn looking like a weekend tennis player on guitar, Benny resembling Robert Wyatt on keyboards – and Agnetha and Frida, both dressed in primary-coloured bacofoil and Donny Osmond caps and absolutely enticing in their come-on grins at the camera/you; completely dominant in their platforms and, to this ten-year-old viewer, astonishingly sexy (my other pop crushes at the time were Suzi Quatro and Lynsey de Paul). In the four minutes it took for Abba to deliver their death blow to rancid rot, you knew instinctively, even before the judges awarded their points, that this was the key moment in the 1970s when the pendulum turned back from rock to pop; a moment which may well have been much more influential in its eventual spread than, say, the Pistols on Grundy (which could only have been seen at the time if you lived in London). A fortnight later, the song was at number one, and no one could have objected.
Yet this could easily have been a singular blow, for Abba struggled for a while to follow it up. A reissue of “Ring Ring,” complete with English lyrics by Neil Sedaka, was only a minor hit; “So Long,” a dull rewrite of “Waterloo,” failed to chart at all. Bjorn and Benny were later to acknowledge that they had to stretch their art fully to avoid become just another Eurovision one-hit-wonder, and their music briefly fell into banality; 1975’s “I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do” was scarcely different from the benign piffle being served up by the likes of the New Seekers or Guys & Dolls at the time.
However, as Guys & Dolls eventually beget Dollar, so Bjorn and Benny began not to be so happy and allowed doubt to enter Abba’s pop. The first result, 1975’s “SOS,” returned them to the Top 10; a grievously wistful plea for the Other to return which alternates between staccato classical piano lamentations, bridged by a subtle synthesiser motif into an ecstatically despairing chorus, its impact doubled by the guitar which underscores the cry of “When you’re gone, how can I even try to go on?” – a daring sentiment to utter in the feel-good-or-else charts of 1975.
After that, Abba were joyful again, but with conditions attached; “Mamma Mia” displaced “Bohemian Rhapsody” in early 1976 to give them their second number one; their ecstatic vocals trying to keep up with the unstinting piano to express their dependence on sexual fulfilment: having been evidently deprived of it for so long, the rewards are so much more tangible and greater.
But they kept a hand free for the mums and dads; consider “Fernando,” another 1976 chart-topper, a seemingly sentimental ballad about a retired freedom fighter (country unspecified; Abba were always careful to avoid becoming politic-specific) and his wife which could easily have been sung by the old Seekers. But listen carefully to the sad, resigned swoop from major to minor in the second half of the chorus: “Though I never thought that we could lose/There’s no regrets” – before it quickly assumes its façade and returns to major – “If I had to do the same again, I would…” In other words, they fought and didn’t win; they lost, may well be hiding in exile in the remote mountains, may still be discovered and killed. It’s that which elevates the song and performance and makes it genuinely poignant.
But all of this could well be construed as warming up for the song, the record, in which they made the quantum leap into greatness. How many times have you heard it? Thousands, probably – usually at drunken Xmas parties or wedding receptions. And how many times have you listened to it – not just sung along with it, but listened to it as a pop record? It arguably outdoes “Anarchy In The UK” as the most radical and influential pop record of 1976; it may well be the first pop record to shake off completely any evidence of American influence (and ironically it was the only Abba record to become a really major hit in the USA), to sound wholly and indisputably European (even Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” acknowledged its considerable debt to the Beach Boys), to sound completely futuristic and warm at the same time (the two are not frequent partners in pop), to sound machine-made yet unutterably human in its ecstasy: “YOU can dance! YOU can dance! Having the time of your life!” A decade before Madonna updated the sentiment for “Into The Groove,” it differs from all other love songs in that it’s a love song to yourself; you are free to be your own idol. You want to talk about dancing about architecture? It sounds as though that’s exactly what the song’s progenitor is doing; against mammoth arches, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, or the Great Gate of Kiev. It flooded, reluctantly acknowledged, if acknowledged at all, into post-punk, and more fully acknowledged into ‘80s New Pop, electro and everything which came afterwards. Simple Minds’ “Glittering Prize” is an act of worship to the subject of this song, so instinctively known, so deeply inscribed in everyone’s bones, that I don’t even need to tell you its name.
With that, Abba were free to explore other avenues of angst. “Money Money Money” takes its obvious lead from Cabaret, yet is Frida’s desire particularly ironic? (Frida’s was always the more compassionate and the more sinister of the two lead voices – if not always the deeper) And then, just as Fleetwood Mac battled with each other and recorded the results as Rumours, so did the two married couples start to drift apart and grow up. Now a darkness comes across Abba’s music. The haikuesque monosyllables of “Knowing Me, Knowing You” which say more in their desolate minimalism than the complete works of Elvis Costello; the avant-garde strut of “The Name Of The Game” which foresees contemporary R&B (and the Fugees later acknowledged as much) – both number one singles in 1977, and in their own way just as nihilistic as “God Save The Queen.” Not to mention album tracks like “Eagle” (speed me towards death?).
The pendulum swung back somewhat in 1978; “Take A Chance On Me”’s electro-burble gives us their most innocently joyous invitation to consummation since “Mamma Mia”; a fantastic tonic, running at the same BPM as the contemporaneous “Stayin’ Alive,” with even some Sparks influence seeping through. They followed that up with what remains my personal favourite among Abba singles; the astonishing sonic multiplex that is “Summer Night City.” Dismissed at the time as a disco cash-in attempt, it’s so much more sophisticated than that – easily as sophisticated in its own way as Chic were in theirs – the production leaps and bounds ahead of most other mainstream pop of the time in its adventurousness, looking forward very fixedly to what Trevor Horn would achieve in the ‘80s (especially The Lexicon Of Love). And are they really singing “fucking in the moonlight” at the fadeout?
After that peak, the quality of their records dwindled somewhat in 1979. “Does Your Mother Know” boasted a Bjorn lead vocal, but that merely served to make them ordinary again; you could just as well be listening to Racey. “Gimme Gimme Gimme” is “Money Money Money” rewritten to accommodate sexual frustration without the allegory; “Chiquitita” is a dreary retread of “Fernando;” “Angel Eyes” suffers against the contemporaneous Roxy Music hit of the same name; “Voulez-Vous” sees them trying disco again, but at considerably greater length and lesser impact. Ironic that, momentarily reduced to the children’s choir campfire singsong of “I Have A Dream,” they were kept off the Xmas #1 spot at the close of the decade by a far less comforting deployment of a children’s choir – Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).”
As the 1980s stumbled into existence, Abba were suddenly starting to look old-fashioned, hammy, platitudinous, clichéd. Something had to give; and give it did in their astonishing 1980 “comeback”/”go away” single “The Winner Takes It All.” I’m still not sure about the mechanics behind this and their subsequent autumnal work; what I mean by that is, were Bjorn and Benny getting off on making their lately divorced wives sing songs about betrayal and the death of love/life? My feeling is that Agnetha and Frida fully knew what they were expected to sing and did not have any problems going along with it. Their relationships were over; they were, after all, professionals, impartial. Even if Agnetha’s “I don’t wanna talk” (first whimpered, then spat out later in the song) or the whole sequence beginning “But tell me, does she kiss…” sound like the razor’s poised just above the wrist, and not necessarily her own. Group therapy through music? Pop as a marriage counsellor? Hard to tell.
“Super Trouper” was another very big hit (and incidentally, their biggest-selling single in Scotland, presumably because of the mention of “Glasgow” in the first verse) but the jollity here is audibly strained. “Lay All Your Love On Me” is another hymn-as-disco which doesn’t quite convert. It was time to drop the pretence.
Thus, the astounding final testament of an album that was The Visitors. I do not propose a detailed analysis of this record here as the definitive word on it was written by Taylor Parkes in the Melody Maker’s “Unknown Pleasures” booklet (which cries out to be properly published). Suffice it to say that Parkes is painfully right to compare it with Closer; the faces in the half-light on the sleeve, situated galaxies away from each other, all staring at nothing; the loss of a future so clinically described in “Slipping Through My Fingers”; the final waiting for the world to end, for the cupboard to explode, that is “Like An Angel Passing Through My Room” – perhaps to be listened to while watching Richard Bennett’s Major Amberson dying in front of the flickering fireplace, gathering together his theories about the sun and the Earth before his candle is likewise snuffed out.
And then there’s the codicil, or envoi, “The Day Before You Came”, an isolated single released in the autumn of 1982 which few noticed and fewer still bought. The unalloyed grief here was too much for most record buyers, least of all Abba fans. Over five-and-a-half unhurried minutes, Agnetha’s barely concealed wreck of a vocal describes the trivial details of an average day, an average living death, as, the implication goes, her life was in total before “you” came. Timings, subject matters, novels by Marilyn French “or someone in that style.” Think of this song in parallel to Tom Waits’ “Soldier’s Things” or even the 253 words to describe each doomed bastard of a passenger in Geoff Ryman’s 253; think also how Bacharach and David would have approached the subject matter. Dionne Warwick would have sung it (maybe even identical lyrics) and made it sound warm, inviting, thankful; the tenor of the song would be that she is thanking her Other for bringing light into her hitherto banal and uneventful life. But there is no joy at all in Abba’s “The Day Before You Came.” The conclusion? Something has happened. “You” are no longer there, may no longer exist. And who, or what, precisely, is “you”? Which “you” came? Disease? Death? Is the singer already dead, or dying by her own hand; frantically itemising the contents of her life, desperately trying to render some last-breath meaning out of them? Self-autopsy, like Greenaway’s The Falls. It was a sombre epitaph to the New Pop which Abba had helped beget; Abba, likewise, could not physically say any more after that. How could they? Go back to being happy?
They all kind of did, in a way; Agnetha did some singles which sounded like inferior rewrites of Blondie’s “Island Of Lost Souls” and then retreated into reclusion; Frida’s debut solo single, the astounding “I Know There’s Something Going On” (released more or less simultaneously with “The Day Before You Came”), suddenly unleashes all the pent-up rage she had felt in Abba but could not express, Phil Collins’ hammering drums being put to purposeful use. Then she married rich and royal; there was still tragedy to come, but she survives. Bjorn and Benny write musicals; “I Know Him So Well” from Chess, a number one for Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson in early 1985, is an Abba record in all but name and vocals. And the Nordic melodic influence carries on: witness their most obvious aesthetic descendents, A-Ha – and, far more widespread, everything ever written and produced by Max Martin and/or Stargate; Abba writ through everything like a stick of rock (“Baby One More Time,” the cynical granddaughter of that same 1976 ode to self-love). If you want a monument to Abba, look around you.
. . .
Monday, February 17, 2003
HOW WE MIGHT LIVE
Considerations of 100th Window by Massive Attack
It is a grey and oppressively cold Sunday morning; the de-energising aura of late winter, the uncertain sort of day which compels you to go outside, just to stay warm. I – for there is no longer a “we,” simply an “I” – am coming to terms with what I saw yesterday and realise that I could not, until now, have written justly about 100th Window, the fourth studio album by what now goes under the name of Massive Attack – though it is really a solo album by Robert Del Naja, a.k.a. 3D. Then again, we remember that AMM stipulated that any minimum gathering of two members could count as “AMM” – be it Lou Gare and Eddie Prevost, swinging away like Sonny Rollins and Philly Joe Jones negotiating “Surrey With The Fringe On Top,” or Keith Rowe and John Tilbury negotiating arcane electronica, radio samples and non-discrete pitches. It was whatever they wanted it to be, as long as the music still recognisably came from the AMM camp.
Thus, even though any trace of hip hop, or even the rapproachment with guitars from their previous record Mezzanine, has been largely wiped from the music with which we are presented on 100th Window, the mindset remains recognisably a Massive Attack mindset – and it’s a mindset which has suddenly been revealed as exceptionally pertinent to the mood of the world at this specific moment.
I don’t think I could have addressed this record properly without the events of yesterday still being fresh in my mind. After a few false starts, I eventually managed (only just) to get into Hyde Park. The grass, such as it was, had been largely transformed into mudflats. It is strange to be in the company of an estimated million people and still feel utterly isolated – not in a solipsistic way, but to the extent that, accompanied by the grey sky and the cold winds, it was easy to imagine that we were standing at the last frontier on Earth, the last outpost of sane humanity standing between the world and the abyss. Behind us, Knightsbridge surreally continued with its normal Saturday afternoon business, but for all it meant to us it could have been situated in a separate and very distant galaxy. In front of me, a strange semi-silence from crowds of people, most of whom would definitely have opted for the Boat Race back in 1990. It is of course far too early to pronounce Hyde Park yesterday a Turning Point In Our History - the effects of movements like this usually take some time to become truly apparent – but betrayal and bewilderment seemed to be the key emotions expressible here. Also, despite the generally cheery nature of the gathering, a seismically deep uncertainty which is now colouring everything we listen to or see, just because we’ve seen or heard them now – the pub apocalypse of Christopher Eccleston’s Christ wannabe in The Second Coming on TV last week, and now 100th Window.
So how good is the record? As I say, I’ve only lived with it for a week, but now, and especially now, it’s a record I want to listen to again and again, it’s a record which is speaking to me – and I suggest, by extension, to “us” – more than any other record of the moment, and already I think I can say that 100th Window is emphatically Massive Attack’s second great unqualified masterpiece, after Blue Lines. Protection was in places stunning, but in others disappointingly routine; Mezzanine still seems to me an immensely brave record which, if it doesn’t quite achieve the spatial and emotional consistency of Blue Lines (but then we forget that in 1991 we had not heard such a creative use of space in British soul music – a distant legacy from both the Pop Group and Martin Hannett’s work with Joy Division - nor rarely such music which managed to be simultaneously reclining and quietly threatening), nevertheless was adventurous in its deployment of Elizabeth Frazer’s voice and the redefining of its relationship with rock – I can’t think of anyone who has properly followed up the musical and societal implications of songs like “Teardrop” or “Black Milk.” But here – and admittedly it may be a direct effect of Del Naja’s (for now) control of the music – Massive Attack may have stumbled upon something new.
The cover (perhaps the unintended reverse of the cover design of Rob Dougan’s Furious Angels) depicts a glass sculpture of a human being which is fired at by remotely triggered camera devices and which shatters. Defrosting of an Ice Age? The actual realisation of the adage “fake cool image should be over” which Mick Hucknall has unwisely applied to his forthcoming – and not very good – album? Or 3D finally coming into 3D, at last free to say his piece?
The opening track “Future Proof” certainly begins as though it’s the smarter cousin of Kid A. An Aphex-like keyboard arpeggio is joined by a rhythm which sounds like Bush drumming his fingers, waiting for war to start. Angelo Bruschini’s guitar – and this is the only track on the album which has any explicit dealings with guitars – strikes a mournful refrain, somewhere between Hank Marvin and the Bill Frisell of Power Tools. Del Naja‘s vocals are ideal for this music; not at all straining to be “soulful” but rather quiet, uncertain, patient – he sounds like a heavily anaesthetised Mike Skinner. Bruschini’s guitar solo is set well back in the mix (the ghost of rock?) as Del Naja enunciates a series of lyrical lists/conundrums which aren’t that far away from those of Thom Yorke, but somehow here are more heartfelt (because he’s not trying to be “soulful” or deal in counterfeit emotionalism): “Borderline case/Reinforced glass/Absent friends/Passport photos an elastic past.” It’s Krapp’s Last Tape meeting Gary Numan via Mikey Foucault (“Another imprint/In borrowed clothes/We can be numb/Passing through”). It’s quite stunning in its sinister understatement (and Massive Attack have always been nonpareil at understatement).
Next we have the first of three tracks featuring Sinead O’Connor, all of which seem to me to be her most focused work for some time. In “What Your Soul Sings” she asks you to love yourself, but this isn’t the crassness of “The Greatest Love Of All” – she is, after all, asking you, not instructing you, and she is compassionate in doing so. The harp and string synths recall the utopia of Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy,” but here their comfort is accompanying what in certain circumstances could sound like the last human alive on Earth. It is extraordinarily moving, as with so much of this record in general – all the more so because it never needs to raise its voice to make its point known and/or felt.
Next, on “Everywhen,” we have one of two tracks featuring the voice of Horace Andy. Or at least you eventually twig that it’s Horace Andy – never has he sounded so unlike himself, never has he sounded so much like Jimmy Scott in his asexual vibrato (of course he always did, but the way in which Del Naja has cast him here makes the connection much more apparent). He is singing more distended words which may form some kind of remote philosophy (“Everything you think you know/Blood ties – the sequence ends”). A keyboard intones like the bells of Ely Cathedral, faintly detectable in the middle of a blizzard.
“Special Cases” is the first single, and a distant cousin of the previous album’s “Rising Son” – beginning with a choral sample which could have come off OMD’s Architecture and Morality before it’s submerged beneath a never more assured bassline. Sinead sings again: “Check yourself for your own shit – and don’t be making out that it’s all his” but this isn’t “Stand By Your Man,” rather “Don’t Hate Men.” Easier preached than practised? The subtle entrance and consequent sudden ascension of the Eastern string lines remind us not to take anything for granted – a lesson which will be repeated several times during the course of this record, including the next track, “Butterfly Caught,” which begins with a dehumanised Del Naja vocal that transmogrifies into an incantation before a hissing, then punching, rhythm comes in. The vocal splits into two, one lagging half a beat behind the other in stoned abandon (“Pearly sunrise/Nearly worn/Kneeling like a supplicant/Darkened skin/Afraid to see/Radiate/Open lips/Keep smiling for me”). Ostensibly this may well be about sex, but with those Eastern string lines now making themselves more prominent, it’s hard to disagree with my fellow Uncut writer David Stubbs when he says that this album is “radioactive.” The foreboding is definitely of a post-9/11 variety; in this song it seems that the war has already happened – a lullaby for a burned, submissive skeleton.
(Incidentally, compare and contrast with “Ring-A-Ding-Ding” off the surprisingly good forthcoming debut album by the Appletons, in which sometime Massive Attack collaborator Marius De Vries is involved – it shadows this song extremely closely, and, although ostensibly about betrayal of love, it could be viewed as the “pop” flipside to what’s being proposed here)
The third Sinead song is “A Prayer For England.” Predictably (and nearly all reviewers have jumped the gun on this record) it has been dismissed and laughed at as drearily prosaic and hectoring (which usually translates as “Fuck off with your reality, stop spoiling our fun” – as though there were any fun to be had on this album). Certainly it’s the most palpable of these ten songs, the easiest for the listener to reach; an anthem against child abuse (“Let not another child be slain/Let not another search be made in vain”), and not the first one which Sinead has sung. But to me this song serves the same purpose as the equally derided “Within You, Without You” on Sgt Pepper, which, as Ian MacDonald has correctly pointed out, is the axis of reality around which the rest of the record revolves, and on which the flights of fancy of the rest of the record depend – so it is here: “A Prayer For England” is the “conscience” of 100th Window, without which the rest of the record would not be complete. And I have to say, standing in Hyde Park as I was yesterday with so many families, so many small children, so many prams, this song punctures me – it’s almost beyond punctum – in a way that it might not have done even a week ago. The message is simple; right now it’s a message which I believe a lot of people need to hear.
“Small Time Shot Away” progresses as a kind of tribute to Robert Wyatt (and there’s someone else I’d love to see working with Massive Attack); those organ(ic) keyboards, the tentative cymbals, an unbearably poignant chord sequence – but then Del Naja’s vocals are now vocoderised as he sings impassively about the slow decomposition of a loveless relationship. Eventually the music modifies into more abstract shapes, and the influence of Boards of Canada becomes extremely apparent (as is happening elsewhere). Starkly beautiful, hypnotic and absolutely terrifying in its ramifications.
“Name Taken” again features Horace Andy – another lullaby sung to the world in the expectation that it will wake up again. Generous in its compassion as in the brutality of what he’s singing about (“Fade away” sung as Noel Gallagher could never sing it – “Gunmetal sky/Peel away/Children play/Fade away”) as the strings weep behind him. Saturday afternoon in Hyde Park; it’s what everyone was thinking. What was that line about true love can conquer hate every time? Where the hell did that come from?
The last track. “Antistar.” As Oliver Hardy says at the climax of Trans-Global Underground’s Dream Of 100 Nations: “Now I see it all.” It begins with what sounds like a sampled oud, uncompromisingly Eastern in its melodic and structural approach. You realise that this was what UNKLE were unsuccessfully striving to articulate on Psycence Fiction.
“Can you lick my wounds please? Can you make it numb? Kill the pain, like cortisone?…Iconography fucks with me/You look great in bloodstains.” This is planets away from the easy exoticism of Timbaland, galaxies away from facile bleating about “lonely souls.” Hear how the harp which comforted us on “What Your Soul Sings” returns, as do elements of the rest of the album, all spinning backwards like a gigantic icepick. And, above all, hear how, at 4:20, the strings sweep back in and you are suddenly faced with the Earth; imagine you are in space, detached from your bombed tube train, flying high above everything, and for four minutes you can see everything, all the beauty, all the fucking mess which put you into space in the first place. And weirdly you do not suffocate or explode. Everything suddenly, but naturally, becomes clear.
Not yet do you suffocate or explode, anyway.
But then you realise that the world isn’t actually turning. It’s turned into a locked groove.
Which at 8:18 shuts off.
Before another, more quiescent electronic drone comes in; a blood circulation which can never end, which can never terminate. Life will go on somehow.
South-West London at Sunday lunchtime. No need to see it. You know instinctively that Hyde Park will resemble a semi-dismantled stage set…not very populated, but nothing even approaching dead. And now everything’s happening here. We might have the whole of the world at our disposal now; and there is so much we must do with it.
. . .
Thursday, February 13, 2003
HOW WE USED TO LIVE
The first in an occasional series of pieces extracted from the pre-internet archives of my old Church, reprinted here unaltered
There’s A Riot? Go On!
It was a lovely and bucolically warm Sunday morning; the re-energising aura of early spring, the blissful sort of day which dares you to stay inside. We felt good, reasonably mellow – windows wide open to let in the Chelsea morning, both London and ourselves ready for anything. Also somewhat relieved, but that’s not necessarily another story. Put on Ulmer’s now decade-old Are You Glad To Be In America? - the sort of benevolent record which comes with its own inbuilt smoke. Then a little Axis: Bold As Love; then tentatively out into the city to inspect the wreckage.
One record not played, because we had played it over and over, perhaps hypocritically, the evening before: Fear Of A Black Planet, the third, and by several leagues the greatest, album by Public Enemy. Did you think that the age of hip hop attack had ended, receded and reversed into the divine dayglo of De La Soul? Well, no one’s advanced on what 3 Feet High And Rising proposed – not yet, anyway, though keep an eye on A Tribe Called Quest – and there’s no one attacking or hustling except NWA. LL Cool J thinks he’s George fucking Michael (don’t rearrange those last three words). The question is: have NWA forced PE to raise their game? Was their game even raiseable after Nation of Millions, that most solipsistic and self-referential of rap records – a record which, as sonically blistering as it was, concerned itself entirely with how controversial the previous one was?
We found it on Saturday morning, freshly in on import, in Bluebird Records in Berwick Street. An equally sunny day, we were doing some browsing/consuming before heading out west to Putney for the Boat Race. We very rarely come into London of a weekend, but if spring’s like this it’s sometimes irresistible. Had to have it. Not sure whether we needed to have the Professor Griff solo album, which was also in on import and which we also bought – I haven’t heard it yet and am regretting the £8.99 already – but anyway, Mandela’s out, the Berlin Wall’s down, the Roses and Mondays are in the charts; things are turning to spring generally. Let’s not worry about details. Details such as the procession of smiling mothers, weekend Londoners and kids strolling down Piccadilly in the opposite direction to the 14 bus which we have just boarded – they are off to Trafalgar Square for yet another poll tax protest. Not many Daily Mail readers evident among that lot. The ejection of Thatcher remains remote. And here we are, with our Public Enemy import album, off to break bread with High Tory nitwits, or at least stand on the same bridge as them.
We have a fine afternoon, wandering aimlessly around Bishops Park and the Palace of Fulham. It’s only when we cross the bridge to the Putney hostelry when we learn of the riots via the pub TV. Everyone scratches their head in bemusement, as though this were a parallel London, one which Baudrillard just invented. There’s blood spilling, hopeful but hopeless tugging at the iron gates to Downing Street; it’s a ruck, all right – Arsenal fans fighting with Millwall fans, but in two different sets of uniforms. We are in sunny, leafy, Tory Putney as “London” doesn’t quite burn but certainly disintegrates with the aid of bathetic batons. It’s no revolution; that’s abundantly clear – the riot’s already being contained, no it isn’t, they’ve broken off to Piccadilly, up Charing Cross Road and on to Oxford Street, or up Regent Street, smashing windows, looting (but are they running away with anything, or running away from something?). We exchange anxious looks. Our stuff is in Chelsea; we will have to get back there one way or another. Have the mobs reached the King’s Road yet? It’s reachable. With great trepidation we troop onto a number 22 bus. Stopping at Hyde Park Corner – no bus is going any further, and the conductor tells us we might well stop at Sloane Square. Fine by us, we only need to get to Chelsea Town Hall. Traffic builds up steadily and uncertainly, but it’s just a supra-standard backlog; we disembark and run back inside. It’s about quarter to seven. The sun’s still high; it’s still uncommonly warm. No signs of disturbance anywhere. King’s Road does its usual Saturday teatime closing down routine. As the sun sets we watch cautiously through the windows for dim, not-so-distant red skies aflame. Easy for Piccadilly mobs to jump on a 19 or 22 – let’s go down the King’s Road, dick-a-dum-dum a few of those Sloaney cunts, teach ‘em a fuckin’ lesson, trash ‘em! But the tube has been closed down and buses aren’t going within a mile of central London. They are isolated and already too tired to run another couple of miles. So nothing’s going to happen at our end.
We put on Fear Of A Black Planet. And my God is this an album. The quantum leap which rap needed; it’s already clear that Public Enemy, even without Prof Griff, have upped the bar and done a Fosbury flop into the bargain. The brilliant shotgun marriage between The Last Poets and Pere Ubu which characterised Yo! Bum Rush The Show will surely sound as monodimensional as a Bush radiogram when set against what they have achieved here.
The sonic layers which the Bomb Squad lay on FOABP are multiplex and mutilating. For the first time (except for De La Soul at the opposite end of a spectrum which I rushed out and invented) rap sounds as though it’s emerged into 3D. PE have taken what Eric B & Rakim suggested in Follow The Leader, combined it with a rationalised and more deadly version of NWA’s rage, and given you a blitzkrieg. The opening salvo “Contract On The World Love Jam” (why doesn’t Prince come out with titles like that anymore?) refers to “terrorists” and states that “the future of the group is in doubt.” Well, if they’re disintegrating, then they are dragging us all down into heaven with them. “Brothers Gonna Work It Out”’s avant-JB assault, constructed as if from Asimovian remnants of dead Soul(s), imposes on us the subtext that things are NEVER gonna work out. Like Gil Evans’ arrangements, you can listen to each musical element singly and be fascinated by them, or submerge yourself in the bliss of the whole. “911 Is A Joke” kicks Tracy Chapman’s sad butt out of the planet (or at least, out of Wembley Stadium) – moderate when compared with “Fuck Tha Police,” perhaps, but PE know what time it could be. They continue to idolise and glorify themselves, but they are turning their faces back onto the world. “Welcome To The Terrordome” (which we saw a drunken Pete Waterman rave over on The Hit Man And Her - “This is the REAL punk rock!” He resembles Tony Wilson more and more every day) is a calamitous rave-up where we clap the hands of corpses. Best pass over the queasy “Meet The G That Killed Me” (there are better targets, chaps, as well you know) straight onto the beyond-bizarre “Pollywanacraka” which stumbles along as disturbingly as George Clinton having just lost the key to his dormitory in the rehab clinic – smiling with crooked teeth which singe your neck with its mockery of blood. “Anti Nigger Machine” spits along in contrabass – Christ, if Archie Shepp were 23 today, this is what he would be doing! Forget punk rock, this is the REAL New Thing.
By the time we get to “Burn Hollywood Burn” with its cameo from Ice Cube, we are definitively aware of just how unprecedented in its inspiration of awe this record is. “As I walk down Hollywood Boulevard” as though he’s just about to shoot the whole place down, strings smouldering behind. We gasp at the horror of the realisation that this is a record to be played in a riot. Should we have stayed in Piccadilly and bled? Well of course not – the record would long have been nicked. Hypocrisy piles upon doublethink. We haven’t understood a thing, least of all a second of this record. Still we listen. “Who Stole The Soul?” by virtue of its very existence destroys “soul.” About time too. Abort the inverted commas.
As regards side two, there’s not much to say except sit back, or lean forward, and be stunned by this unrepeatable assimilation of the ascending fissure of Miles’ On The Corner combined with the benign destruction of, yes, There’s A Riot Goin’ On. The determination – rhythmic, politic, lyric – freezes you in its avant-garde ruthlessness. I can’t think that any other record this year could harness the power of “Revolutionary Generation” – a track where, yes, PE finally learn respect for women. A divine duality of double bass lines power the piece, winding in and around each other in spinal liquidity, but never losing the essential blood flow. And after that, the assault just keeps on doubling, trebling, the intensity now blindingly white in its heat until, finally, everything comes to the boil halfway through “War At 33 1/3” where the music atomises, explodes into freeform rebirth with a closeness and courage that I’ve seldom heard anyone achieve on record before now. No one could possibly hope to emulate, let alone surpass, the feat PE have achieved with this record.
Well OK, they could have ended the album with the Do The Right Thing soundtrack version of “Fight The Power” – in that form, there are few greater singles – rather than the radio edit, but perhaps they felt we needed to be let down gently after this mindfuck of a rollercoaster of a record.
And we should have blared it out in the streets as they burned and bled. Anyone can say that the day after, when they have the luxury of not actually having to dirty their hands.
Central London at Sunday lunchtime. We had to see it. Tourists standing about uncertainly, as if still waiting for yesterday evening’s buses. Every window broken, only a couple boarded up. All the banks, Tower Records, Lillywhite’s, Liberty, even the Woollen Mill (“hey, let’s loot the Woollen Mill! Anarchy!”) – they all got hit, and more besides. It was like wandering through a semi-dismantled stage set…not very populated, but not dead. Nothing much happening here. It’ll rebuild itself; why do you think we have an insurance industry? We have the whole of the city at our disposal now; and how little we have done with it, or to it.
(March 1990)
. . .
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
SUPPOSE YOU FOUND THE PERFECT FLOWER – WOULD YOU PICK IT?
“Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws – or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence…”
(Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1, Chapter III: Alfred A Knopf Inc, 1926)
What if absolute certainty failed to disguise the nothingness which sometimes constitutes the essence of something only considered to be “pure life” by the person living it, provided that person is impelled so forcefully to impose themselves upon the world, unasked and only grudgingly loved? “Loved” defiantly but definitely tethered to its inverted commas – loved because the aim of your media is to burnish your image on the inner retina of everyone, so that they can never hope not to see you, be aware of you. Such is the case with Madonna; so brazen and bold is her hatred and contempt of the world, and more than anyone else, her fans and perhaps her lovers. And we, her spectators, are made to feel the guilty parties. Don’t we have anything better to do with “our” lives?
Hard to imagine that, although Madonna played no active part in the No Wave movement of the late ‘70s, her career couldn’t have happened without it – and more importantly, Ze Records - as a guideline. Early hits like “Holiday” and “Borderline” wouldn’t have been at all out of place on Mutant Disco, and the genuine pop and fizz of her music at this stage is comparable with the jouissance of the early Jackson 5 records; from a period when she was still on the make but didn’t let us, or even herself, into her secret agenda. And what about “Like A Virgin” – the record which finally gave Nile Rodgers a new trick card to deal with, a supremely ironic statement of unironic chasteness, deliciously derailed by her performance of the song on TOTP in a proto-Kelly Osbourne pink wig, committing fellatio on the studio floor. How could she lose? “Into The Groove” – the punctum behind her only cinematic appearance of worth, playing an airbrushed self within the airbrushed post-No New York of Desperately Seeking Susan, but which is the closest and most sublime celebration of the subjugation of her already very big Self into the non-verbal communiques of the music. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free/At night I lock the door so no one else can see.” But barely has she liberated/imprisoned herself before she expresses the deep desire to “dance with someone else.” Isolation does not equate with a monastery, at least not one which Madonna cannot run with an iron heel.
One might have expected the ego to go supernova in tandem with the career, but apart from the tacky “Material Girl” which sounded and still sounds like a Hazel O’Connor B-side, with its entirely unnecessary Monroe pastiche of a video, the standards were maintained; “Live To Tell” is as moving and affecting as any of her ballads, and “Papa Don’t Preach” is a seamless Barthesian analysis of the value and meaning of the word “baby” in popular music, a direct counterpart to Scritti Politti’s “The Word Girl” – how literal do we take the word “baby” when sung? Are we turned on by it or turned off by realism? Is it her boyfriend or her pregnancy whom she is intent on “keeping”? (And note the sublime third way in the first verse – “I’m not a baby”) Think of how moved you are by Joni on Blue until you realise that the profundity of your affection and empathy with her is directly affected by how carnal her otherwise despondent (or despondent because it’s carnally frustrated?) voice sounds (as with Rickie Lee Jones – the two most sublime and sexual singers of the word “baby” I can think of). And “Open Your Heart” with its cascading drums a crucial half-beat behind the introductory vocal of “watch out, watch out” is as persuasive an argument for unregulated capitalism as one could ever dream up, amplified sinisterly by the video which pictures 13-year-old Felix Howard trapped within a peepshow. Would anyone get away with that now?
Sadly, the myth then took precedence over any notion of “quality” and the persona became more of an issue than whatever art she could turn her hand to. The film and soundtrack Who’s That Girl? were fatally (because uninterestingly) self-referential. Shanghai Surprise typified the sort of empty vessel which any ego will ultimately be compelled to sail. And all this fed back into 1989’s grotesque and overrated Like A Prayer - Madonna’s final demand to Take Her Seriously (but we already were! Ciccone Youth’s “Into The Groove(y)” was an unalloyed tribute - No Wave’s Fifth Cavalry claiming back someone who should always have been one of their number), her attempt, more or less, to be Prince. Indeed Prince contributed to the distinctly unsexy duet “Lovesong” (never to be confused with Lovesexy) and anonymously to the title track and its closing mirror “Act of Contrition.” It is self-pitying, Sean Penning, otiose and overblown.
Madonna then drew back a little. Taking Malcolm McLaren at his word, she caught up with his ambulance to produce “Vogue”; and then corralled Lenny Kravitz into producing his only good record “Justify My Love” wherein a Public Enemy beat is ripped out of its testosterone surroundings and, to an extent, feminised. But both of these were a warm-up for 1992’s astonishing album Erotica which is still viewed by most with wariness and suspicion but which, a decade later, is more clearly than ever her one great album; the only one, dare one say, which admits the existence of doubt. Of un-happiness.
“Erotica” the song, as with Erotica the album – and its distant and misleading cousin, the Sex photobook – is of course unsexy. The “sex” is a red herring. Everything here – submission, dominance, masochism, sadism, pleasure, coming – is subdued to the unasked question “is that all there is?” (and why Madonna has not covered that song in blancmange yet I do not know). Shep Pettibone did most of the production, and alone of all Madonna’s producers, from Reggie Lucas to William Orbit, appears to have understood her and understood what to get out of here. Erotica was, along with its alter ego Automatic For The People, my most played album of 1992 (especially on Oxford Tube journeys – alas I did not overplay, or even underplay, the more ostensibly hip records of that year such as Lazer Guided Melodies or It’s A Shame About Ray). It came out in the autumn, and autumnal it certainly sounds; no more so than on the title track, which deploys the saddest and most poignant use of a Kool and the Gang sample (“Jungle Boogie”) to provide a slight atonal but wistful counterpart to Madonna’s oddly distant and asexual pleas. Every song on this album is in a minor or semi-minor key.
And speaking of “Is There All That Is,” how right it should be that Madonna should get around to covering that tormented torch song’s prequel, “Fever.” But if your yawning can barely be suppressed at the thought of yet another cover version of “Fever,” this is understated, underplayed, and crucially reharmonised – the carnality is turned into abstract philosophy revealing the true poverty of human historicism. The groove is subdued; the vibraphone warns that a heartbeat can dwell a universe away. But is the veil lifted? Not a chance. “Bye Bye Baby” manages to paraphrase both PiL (“This is not a love song”) and Dylan (“So I’ll just stop blowin’ in the wind”) to tell the boy who has dared to make her cry to fuck off. I’ll sneer so that I can’t be seen crying.
Then comes “Deeper And Deeper” which may well be Madonna’s finest and most yearning single. It sounds like, of all people, Stock, Aitken and Waterman with a dash of the Pet Shop Boys (the opening and chorus vocals are very Kylie) and some flamenco guitar towards the end. Within the song Madonna succeeds in uniting her dysfunctional parental disapprovals with the need for greater and realer sexual fulfilment. She becomes her own mother and paraphrases her own “Vogue” to climax the song. Brilliant and still underrated.
“Where Life Begins” is a far more comely invitation to/exaltation of cunnilingus than the, shall we say, somewhat over-literal Yeastie Girls on Consolidated’s “You Suck” from the same year; within it are some embers of compassion. Then comes the letdown, however; “Bad Girl” (“drunk by six” with its unambiguous use of “baby” in the chorus) is another good ballad which stops just short of sentimentality; “Waiting” is about non-tantric tension.
Side two of Erotica is a fairly bleak affair; death is evident within its grounds, and sex is only, literally, the flipside of death. “Thief Of Hearts” bounces along uncertainly, punctuated by the percussion of smashed glass and a snarled “Bitch!” “Words” reconfigures and ultimately negates Martin Fry’s idealisation of discourse above/parallel with penetration (cf. the subtle reference to “The Look Of Love” in the intro to “Papa Don’t Preach”). Then things slip into winter: “Rain” veers too far into the land of gloop; “Why’s It So Hard” (“to love one another”) is a deliberate pun and a routine pop-reggae plod whose sentiments would shame Sting; “In This Life” is the album’s intended epic ballad, and though its threnody for AIDS victims might just be discerned as heartfelt, and its piano refrain which sounds like Monk’s “Misterioso” played sideways, isn’t unmoving, it’s too literal; you’re telling us too much, running the risk of being banal. Perhaps that’s why you hide. And that is why she, at the end of the record, retreats to her “Secret Garden” – a remarkably early attempt at refined drum ‘n’ bass, and one of the most disturbing pieces of music she has ever recorded. As with none of her other records, she sounds as though she is talking, no, whispering, to herself, trying to reconstitute her existence. She is on the verge of unmasking herself as what she has always been – a blissful blank space. “You plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow” – we’ve been here very recently, haven’t we? “Where my place is – where my FACE is – I know it’s in here somewhere…a heart that will not harden/A place where I can be born.” But, as with any Second Coming, can we truly believe her? At the end – following a truly chilling moment where she switches directly from narration to singing – extremely threateningly in its assumed composure - she confides in us: “Somewhere in Fontainebleau lies my secret garden,” and almost imperceptibly, James Preston’s piano paraphrases a motif from Tadd Dameron’s 1956 tone poem “Fontainebleau.” That she says nothing about this, either on the track or on the sleeve, may well be a pleasing exemplar of how hip Madonna expects her audience to be; but then again, and more likely, it may just have passed her by.
And she never got near it again. All Madonna’s subsequent output seems to me like a desperate attempt to keep up. 1994’s Bedtime Stories wanders around in Nellee Hooper’s immense corridors to little effect, with the exception of her last great ballad, the one time when she does let the mask slip, “Take A Bow” – an extremely moving piece of self-assassination and realisation of one’s own imminent iconic redundancy; perhaps she ought to have said “goodbye” for real after the song ended. But no, there followed Ray Of Light which only shows how much better Orbit understood All Saints than he did Madonna, and the incoherent, unfathomable mess that is Music. What certainty does she have left now? Her ill-advised tenure as faux lady of the manor in Britain is coming to a very precise end; she gets back to LA just in time, before she’s snared as the star turn in the Conservative Party’s 2005 election rally. For Madonna, borderlines were never as important as deadlines.
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Monday, February 10, 2003
FILLED SPECTRE
What is it about the 3rd of February that makes it a date for pop music nemeses to call themselves in? It was on the 3rd of February 1959 that Buddy Holly took the ‘plane because he wanted his shirts laundered for his next gig. On the 3rd of February 1967 – surely not a coincidence, for Holly was his avatar, endlessly evoked in repeated seances – Joe Meek, approaching 40, out of fashion, penniless, soon-to-be homeless bankrupt, turned a shotgun on his landlady and thereafter on himself. And on the 3rd of February 2003, Phil Spector was arrested and charged with first-degree murder following the fatal shooting of a moderately well-known 40-year-old actress, Lana Clarkson, in the grounds of his immense mansion. No one else appears to have been in his home at the time of the shooting, which occurred in California, a state in which first-degree murder still carries the death penalty. Musicians with whom Spector has worked in the past, such as Leonard Cohen and the Ramones, have spoken of him as a paranoid control freak not averse to pulling a gun on the artists if they do not adhere obediently to his aesthetic template. All in all, it does not look promising for Spector, yet may be the sadly logical conclusion to a wasted and wasteful career.
I had planned to write this piece before news of the murder broke, but listening to his productions – it almost seems unreasonable to apply the term “music” to them – feel that I would have come to the same conclusion, namely that I find Spector’s records to be oppressive, meretricious, bombastic, pedantic, unfascinatingly hollow, devoid of any interest in or relation to humanity (even the most “inhuman” of music has to acknowledge, by definition, the existence of humanity) and, much worse, destructive to the artists and the music involved, and smugly sinister in its attempts to disguise the reactionary sentiments expressed within it under a coat of post-Camelot faux-liberalism. Spector’s work is about the mechanics of control, and does not necessarily presuppose the existence of something concrete to be controlled. As the controller, his work often descends into grotesque, sub-Mr Arkadin self-pity.
It may well all have been the fault of Lonnie Donegan. Legend has it that the teenage Spector was originally inspired to pick up a guitar after listening to Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.” More probably, the suicide of his father when Spector was 13, and the family’s subsequent move from the Bronx to Hollywood, drove everything driveable. His first attempt at songwriting and production fortuitously turned out to be the international hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him” performed under the name of the Teddy Bears, the song’s title famously derived from the epitaph on his father’s gravestone. As a record it is a self-enclosed hymn, with already enough echo on the lower registers of the piano to suggest at least partial submersion in an underwater grave; quiet, but why is it so explicitly quiet? Compare it with its 1961 sequel, the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me,” an almost exact parallel – melodically and lyrically – to the Teddy Bears song. The production approach has hardly changed, the tempo remains funereal rather than carnal, Priscilla Paris’ whisper is anything but sensual. The song is either an expression of necrophilia or self-love, and reminds us of the wafer-thin line which separates the two (and as regards “liberal” self-love, compare either with John & Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” from 1972, again produced by Spector, and a song whose structure, by Lennon’s own admission, derived squarely from “I Love How You Love Me.” Despite the presence of the Harlem Community Children’s Choir, the record can hardly be described as open).
“To Know Him Is To Love Him” was a substantial hit around the world, but Spector was ripped off on the money, and a couple of years later flew to NYC to commence work as, firstly, A&R man for Atlantic (one entertains fantastical notions of what Ornette or Mingus records might have sounded like with Spector at the control desk), and then freelance writer/producer, eventually setting up his own indie label, Philles Records. Early Spector hits were generally unpretentious teen fodder (Ray Peterson’s “Corrine, Corrine”) or straightforward, if melodramatically arranged, rock ‘n’ roll (Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” and “Under The Moon Of Love” – both records owing their vitality to Lee’s driven, slightly over-enthusiastic vocals). Perhaps the earliest signs of what was to come lay in Ben E King’s “Spanish Harlem” which, although more or less a Leiber and Stoller production, did feature contributions from Spector, including a gradually enlarging aural canvas, and the beginnings (Spector wrote the lyric) of what was ultimately to prove a dangerous infatuation with the Other (“With eyes as black as coal that looks (sic) down in my soul…I’m goin’ to pick that rose and watch her as she grows/In my garden”). Despite King’s naturally beneficent vocal delivery, this gives us an early indication that Spector was to become pop’s most pretentious plantation owner.
Gene Pitney’s “Every Breath I Take” shows stirrings of portentous and unsubtle rhythmic emphases over a routine Goffin-King ballad, but the Spector “wall of sound” as we know it blossoms in the course of “Uptown” by the Crystals – in fact you can hear it happen at the beginning of the second verse, as a second rhythm section audibly makes itself known to bolster the sonics. Sung by Barbara Alston, the song concerns a downtrodden “little man” who only becomes “a King” when he visits the Other “in my tenement.” The chord changes are tempting, but the record comes across as a glorification of Spector’s own cultural tourism.
Far more disturbing was the Crystals’ unreleased follow-up “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” The poignancy of King’s melody hardly serves as any kind of counterpart to Goffin’s lyric, which seems to me like a prototype Taliban manifesto, exalting the virtues of violence against unfaithful/disobedient women. Alston’s vocal is clearly uneasy about the whole thing, and it might be relevant that she never again took the lead vocal on a Crystals record. “He’s A Rebel” again tells us how great and individual Darlene Love’s baby (or, if you like, Spector) is, apart from when he’s with her. The excruciating and overwrought plod through “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” by Bob E Soxx and the Blue Jeans introduces another Spector trademark – of magnifying something essentially banal by means of pomp and bluster to make it appear avant-garde and/or profound. Note that here we have a black singer interpreting a song from that KKK-excusing Disney flick Song of the South. Note generally the complete subjection of black singers to Spector’s whiter than white wall of sound over the next 2-3 years.
There is not much to say about the well-known run of hits involving the Crystals and Ronettes. Some commentators (perhaps you needed to be born in the 1940s to appreciate Spector) exalt records like “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron” as being Roy Liechtenstein’s pop art transported and reinterpreted within the context of the pop song, and constituting the most articulate expression of teenage dreams and wishes. But a cursory view of the lyrics reveal just how conventional, conservative and dreary these “dreams” are – almost without exception they return again and again to themes like marriage and children, about giving themselves up to their babies, in both senses. The Republican Party would have been proud to use these lyrics as a basis for their election manifesto. Nor do they work particularly well as pop records; the vast armies of musicians employed by Spector (generally pissed-off West Coast jazzers making a living reading flyshit, or else trainee stars like Harry Nilsson, Sonny Bono, Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert and Leon Russell) slow the dynamics of the music, making the rhythms ploddy and undanceable; and what they produce is not very interesting sonically. Spector may have used five guitarists, two bassists and three drummers, but they are all playing the same, banal riffs. The only interesting commentary comes from the out-of-phase castanets which rattle their spermatozoa conduits through tracks like “Be My Baby” (the triple snare drum fills, as on many other Spector records, sounding like rape) and “Then He Kissed Me.” Ronnie Spector’s voice is caressing and brilliant, but too often on Ronettes records does she sound as though she’s struggling to make herself heard, even on what is supposedly the personification of the adolescent male fantasy of female domination, “Be My Baby.” Appropriately, in the booklet which accompanies the Back To Mono boxset compilation, the photograph used to illustrate the lyrics to “Be My Baby” illustrates an elated Spector being literally cradled in the arms of the Ronettes as though they are about to go down on him en masse. He can barely hide his hard-on…and of course he ends up marrying one of them.
It’s a marvel, really, at how these records were taken at all seriously as pop. Compare the sludge-filled, overbalanced plod of things like “Walking In The Rain” with the ebullient and unforced jouissance of what was being produced by Motown at the same time. Spector could never have been capable of anything with the lightness and genuine good humour (humour seems to be a complete absentee from Spector’s work) of something like “Please Mr Postman” or “Mickey’s Monkey” – not to mention the genuine ingenuity of Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield and Holland/Dozier/Holland, working with more or less the same large-scale number of musicians, but without any of the grandstanding (with Spector you are never far away from the semi-despondent cry of “Look how big mine is!”).
When Spector relented on the grandiloquence a little and allowed spatial awareness to intrude upon his work, there were admittedly glimpses of interesting ideas – the genuinely unsettling and unsettled arrangement, for instance, on Darlene Love’s “Strange Love” or the unresolved cadences of Love’s “Stumble and Fall” (with Hal Blaine’s drums appropriately stumbling in distended rolls), or, best of all, when Spector let Ronnie be herself, gave her a beautiful Valentine of a record – her cover of the old doowop standard “So Young,” the strand from which Lynch, Badalamenti and Cruise subsequently drew their own musical visions. For just about the only time in Spector’s music, compassion makes itself known here.
When Spector signed the Righteous Brothers, they were the first male voices with which he had worked for at least a couple of years; yet his work with them is no less histronic or purposeless, least so on the overblown “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” which remains nothing more than a grotesque minstrel show parody of black soul vocalese, and in particular a slowed-down parody of the Four Tops’ contemporaneous “Baby I Need Your Loving” which is scarcely less gratuitous or patronising than Vanilla Fudge’s dreary demolition of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” two years later. Subsequent assaults by Bobby Hatfield’s beyond-hammy falsetto on “Unchained Melody” and “Ebb Tide” are unlistenable – the murder perpetrated on the latter, in particular, is bloodier when set in contrast with Sinatra’s definitive, grieving and understated performance of the same song on Only The Lonely, not to mention the genuine emotion which Roy Hamilton brought to his recordings of both songs in the ‘50s.
I haven’t mentioned Brian Wilson yet, and purposely so, because in Wilson we not only have a musician who, apart from contributing keyboards to some Spector sessions, idolised Spector and listened (and still listens) to “Be My Baby” every day as some kind of talisman/prayer point, but also understood that he, Wilson, could do more with what Spector started, and bring some emotion and architecture to the Wall. Thus Hal Blaine striking a half-filled watering can in “Caroline No” conveys more emotion than a boxset full of martial rolls and crashes, because with Wilson his interest in humanity is paramount. Bassist Carol Kaye, a Spector and later Wilson regular, cried when Wilson played her “God Only Knows” on the piano for the first time. You cannot cry at anything Spector produced, because even the melancholy continually comes across as self-propagating egotism (feel my imagined pain! never mind the pain I cause to others!). Joe Meek was as chilly a human being as Spector, but even at his most seemingly dictatorial you never lose sight of Meek’s eagerness, and even lust, for adventure – not just to try something different, but to convey something of himself onto his productions. Rarely do Spector records caress the listener. The Wall of Sound could easily have fitted into Michelangelo’s mausoleum of a lobby for the Lawrentian Library in Florence. It is cold and fundamentally anti-human (not the same thing as “inhuman”). That having been said, two tracks of this period – “This Could Be The Night” by the Modern Folk Quartet and “Paradise” by the Ronettes – provide clear pointers to Pet Sounds. As both songs were co-authored by a youthful Harry Nilsson, it’s understandable that they offer an escape route which Wilson took and Spector isn’t.
Perhaps most anti-human and sickest of all is the way in which Spector makes his wife perform the clearly heartfelt lament of “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine,” forcing her to express her emotional and physical pain, all of which was caused by him. It is perhaps the cruellest performance ever imposed by a producer on an artist in pop history, only approached by what Bjorn made Agnetha sing on “The Winner Takes It All” (and I remain ambivalent about the mechanics behind Abba’s later work). Go on Ronnie, tell the world you’re in pain – no one’s listening, they just want to get off on it (cf. the screams on Eminem’s “Kim”). Those massed drums thumping (they literally sound like wifebeating). It is a horrendous ordeal to hear; little wonder that the track was never given a UK release. One wonders how narrow an escape she did make.
It’s perhaps entirely in character that Spector’s one indisputable masterpiece of a record was sung by another battered wife whose husband got a label credit but who was kept out of the studio. “River Deep Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner was of course the record towards which Spector had been building over the previous five years, the orgasm towards which he had been fucking pop music. A hollow masterpiece it may be, but in its own David Bomberg way, the art within it exploded into precisely ordered rhombi of sonority.
How hollow? Indeed the song has a wooden heart. It compares love for the Other with love for a rag doll and a puppy – mute, obedient objects who won’t complain about being mistreated. But the terrible, ecstatic awe of both Tina Turner’s vocal and Jack Nitzsche’s for once genuinely multilayered orchestration combine to produce a pop record which actually sounds as though it’s going somewhere, rather than standing still and demanding that you admire it. The dynamics are felt – the quiet middle section remains potent, with its congas and finger snaps, before strings and brass gradually work their way back in, up the register until finally Turner and Spector come, scream, as one. That moment is the cynosure of all Spector’s art, and after it the art could only disintegrate into its fundamental components. The final resonant chord of the record sounds as though the Wall of Sound has been knocked down, demolished.
It was Spector’s finest creation, and because he refused to subscribe to payola shenanigans, radio stations decided to freeze him out and the record stiffed everywhere except in Britain, where it sold a million. Spector retreated to his opiate of a Xanadu, briefly to re-emerge in 1969 to produce some sides for Sonny Charles and the Checkmates. A garrulous and overwrought assassination of “Proud Mary” was the nadir of this period; while “Black Pearl” acts as a kind of bookend to “Spanish Harlem,” and “Love Is All I Have To Give” is more or less an excuse for Charles’ David Ruffinesque vocal to articulate Spector’s plea to Ronnie to “let me live again” (how devalued that expression sounds here, compared to the genuine distress with which the suicidal Jimmy Stewart sobs the words at the climax of It’s A Wonderful Life). The song here is virtually buried under all the ornamentation, the sliding scales of which perhaps constitute a pointer to what My Bloody Valentine would do two decades hence, and a forlorn violin comes in at the fadeout to play some klezmer licks.
After that, Spector retreated, only to come out as a “class” producer, a signifier devoid of signified, to be displayed like a trophy by rockers needing a revival – by Lennon, by Harrison, by Clapton, usually using nothing more than his trademark echoes, now sounding more tangible and less extreme with advances in recording technology (it is a myth that Spector’s sound was unreproducable, as evidenced by the success with which people like Ivor Raymonde and John Franz, with the aid of a Fairchild compressor, were able to reproduce it pretty accurately on the Walker Brothers and Dusty Springfield’s series of mid-‘60s hits; or indeed Roy Wood with Wizzard in the early ’70s, at much less cost and with much more humour). Records such as Lennon’s Rock And Roll or Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man sound like long, slurred, drunken barroom conversations set to some autopilot Spector music.
Individual efforts during this period such as Cher’s “A Woman’s Story” attempt the faux-grandeur of old, but sadder is Dion’s interminable reading of “Born To Be With You.” This latter clearly aspires to kaddish status – when Dion sings “sleep eternally” one almost expects the band to break into “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” – but it’s no more profound than “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”; it, and its follow-up “Make The Woman Love Me” are lumbering, ponderous beasts of records which can’t quite summon angst, making a bonfire out of a couple of discarded lighters. It is significant that Bruce Springsteen and his band visited the studios during the sessions for the latter, and even more so that with “Born To Run” – recorded and released in the same year, 1975 – he managed to do Spector better than Spector. Even to a non-Boss believer such as myself, it’s obvious that in “Born To Run” the epic grandeur – achieved with just the usual E Street Band line-up – is heartfelt and the emotions expressed in the song are urgent and genuine. In its intuitive understanding of the dynamics of pop, it grasps what Spector never could; because Springsteen didn’t, and doesn’t, shut himself away from the world with only his own unmarked standards to live up to. A recording console is so much more straightforward to fuck than another human being.
And with recording studios in the ‘70s not being what they were in the ‘60s, Spector’s records suddenly started sounding smaller – as though anyone could do it. Anyone could have recorded the Ramones’ version of “Baby I Love You” – indeed Dave Edmunds had done so seven years previously. Since 1980 it has been mostly reclusion and silence, except for some aborted sessions with power pop band Outrageous Cherry, and recent sessions (which remain likely to be released) with Starsailor. I cannot say that I am wringing my hands in anticipation. Hear the strident yet subtle brilliance of Trevor Horn’s production of tAtU’s “All The Things She Said” and then imagine what a lumpen, sunken, self-pitying pudding of a record Spector would have made out of it.
But then again, the events of the 3rd of February – in a year in which we may be compelled to question all our beliefs in this thing called pop music as never before – may well serve as a reminder of what happens to those of us who value music, art, wires and plastic over the flesh and blood of humanity.
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