the glass hoover

If you had such a dream, would you get up and do the things you believe in?

2008-03-13T12:35:00.018Z

Way back in the mists of time, before there was ever an Arctic Monkeys, oh, just under a decade ago, there was a Brit Award for Best Newcomer that didn't turn out quite as expected, thanks to a bit of fan-rallying on the interweb. The hot favourites for 1999 were Steps, who were protegés of Pete Waterman, the 'Hit Man' himself who'd introduced the world to Rick Astley, Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue. But the winners on the night were an obscure (ish) indie band from Glasgow called Belle and Sebastian.

Waterman cried foul, perhaps not without some justification: at the time of the awards, the winning 'newcomers' were in the studio working on their third album. They were so sure they wouldn't win that they sent their drummer and trumpet player 'down' to London, so that they could at least have the chance to schmooze a bit and maybe guzzle some free champagne.

With a bit of hindsight, a marketing mind as adroit as Waterman's must have seen the demographic inevitability of this: B&S were an indie band, beloved of students, who would have been more likely to have internet access (especially back then), while Steps fans were probably out buying clothes, or alcopops, or sitting around in tanning salons, or something.

The indie kids went online and voted en masse for their favourites, and lo and behold: an obscure band on a minor independent label were surprised in the studio by a Scottish news team looking not so much like award winners as maybe small furry nocturnal animals who'd been spooked by a flashlight. The violinist lamented that her mum would be mad at her for not going down to the ceremony and putting on a nice dress; the keyboard player expressed utter bemusement, and the guitarist kept throwing things at the TV, on which the awards ceremony was playing. A nice, refreshingly ordinary wee bunch of boys and girls.

It all turned out okay in the end. The following year, the Brits introduced a new award for Best-Selling Most Awesomest Popstars In The Universe Ever, or some such, and Steps won hands down. Such was the enormity of their achievement that the award was immediately retired after that, so that history will remember Steps as the only ever winners. (And that's about all they'll be remembered for.)

A few years later, Belle and Sebastian signed a major label deal and decided that they'd make an album with a Real Producer at last.

Someone with a real proven pedigree in the pop charts.

Someone who'd produced guaranteed, epoch-defining smash hits.

Someone who wasn't Pete Waterman.

So Trevor Horn, the man behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda, tAtU, the man who gave us Seal, the man who'd made "hip-hopera" fusion records with Malcolm McLaren, the man who Replaced Jon Anderson In Yes forcryingoutloud... the man who gave us The Buggles... manned the boards for Belle and Sebastian's major label debut. (Well, it was Rough Trade...)

In some quarters, the indie kids wept and gnashed their teeth. What were they doing, making proper sounding pop records when they should have been enabling the lifestyles of arrested adolescent hipsters everywhere? They were even sticking in Thin Lizzy bits... what was going on?

Belle and Sebastian were growing up, is what was going on. They were playing the same music, but it now sounded much brighter and punchier, as though a fresh pair of ears was subjecting every note to careful scrutiny and putting everything in the right place so that it worked more effectively, which was exactly what was going on.

Not so long ago, I was browsing the racks of the local emporium when I came across the band's DVD. It looked interesting, it was reasonably priced and I had enough disposable income (that weekend) to spring for it. The cover of the DVD said "Fans Only", though, which gave me pause. I liked some of the band's stuff, but did that really make me a fan? I mean, fans are people who play records over and over again. They sit in coffee bars with other fans talking about the band incessantly. They nick setlists after gigs. They choose their friends according to who likes "their" band and who doesn't.

Unfair of course. That definition of "fan" is based on my own stereotype. And the fact is, even though I never considered myself a "fan", over the years I've found myself defending the music of Belle and Sebastian to anyone who puts them down. But it's not as though they haven't produced music that I can't stand. They have done this, and they have done it, oh, several times. When I'm Waking Up To Us came out, for instance, I figured that B&S were finished as a band, and that they knew it. Why else would they put out a song with a bright, snappy arrangement, a catchy melody, and what sounded like the most whiningly adolescent, self-pitying post-breakup lyrics ever?

It was almost as though they were trying to sabotage their career, to take themselves apart in public as a final self-destructive statement, much like the Beatles did with Let It Be, or the way drag artists smear their makeup when they finish the act. (I was wrong. IWUTU is a fine track, and you just have to take the lyrics with a pinch of salt. It's a pithy and funny examination of the bitchy and ill-considered things people say when they break up, is all.)

The truth is, it took me many years to stop worrying and love the Belle and Sebastian band. Bear in mind that most people I know who like the group like their newer stuff, the post-Jeepster, post Trevor Horn, "frog in my throw-it" stuff, and are glad they grew out of those wispy-sounding old indie records that I sometimes play them.

And they have a point. By some trick of time, or of the marketplace, or a bit of both, or maybe just inevitable maturation, Belle and Sebastian have become a very different band since they left Jeepster Records. Some fans welcome this, some don't; some would sooner sit around and listen to Tigermilk over and over again. (Personally, my own choice would have been If You're Feeling Sinister, but then I'm not a "fan", am I?)

At whatever stage of their career, though, the band has made the most of the fact that they're a unique blend of different, equaly cardinal, personalities. The band's titular leader, Stuart Murdoch, does most of the singing and writes (or originates) the bulk of the material, but in terms of the group he is merely playing the "singer-songwriter instrument", in the same was as Stevie Jackson plays the "rootsy-guitarist instrument", or Sarah Martin the "quiet but effective multi-instrumentalist" instrument.

Fans Only, anyway, is a DVD retrospective of the band's Jeepster years, from the Dog On Wheels EP (when the band consisted only of the two Stuarts, trumpeter Mick Cooke and some session players) through to the Storytelling album (which was nominally a soundtrack album, though most of it was never used in the film). And you know what? It's quite a lot of fun. You get the snappy pop singles like Legal Man and you get the early, funny stuff - flickery, studenty looking films with a lot of gooning around and acting silly. In those far-off early days, Belle and Sebastian didn't do interviews or press photos. People assumed they were a male/female duet or maybe just a bunch of students having a laugh.

The official tracklisting of the DVD gives you the impression that it's a roughly chronological compendium of the band's videos; this is a cruel and callous trick. What you really get is a deftly put together cut-and-paste documentary of the band's career, including bits from an early BBC documentary, TV appearances (that Brit awards thing in full) and vignettes from the band's various tours, all in between (yes) the promotional videos. Sometimes there's a rude, home-movie feel to it, or even (gasp) the very occasional song you may not like, but overall, it's a film to sit down and watch all the way through; it tells a tale.

Before your very eyes, watch keyboard player Chris Geddes transform from a gangly bespectacled chap into a fully fledged Monster Soul DJ! See cellist Isobel Martin change from a cute indie schoolgirl with a floppy dog into a self-assured and capable arranger, performer and filmmaker (she directed quite a few of these vids). Tremble in amazement as Bowlie bard Stuart Murdoch transmogrifies, before your very eyes, from a bookish church warden into a gunslinging groupie magnet, while managing to look Exactly The Same! Thrill as snooker ace Richard Colburn swaps his cue for a pair of drumsticks and a bowl of pasta and chicken soup surprise! Most of all (in my own case), yelp with delight as guitarist Stevie Jackson makes an amazing job of the Beach Boys' Darlin' in front of an ampitheatre full of sundazed Coachella concertgoers...

Fans Only follows the group from their earliest incarnation as a self-described "product of botched capitalism" to a bona-fide hit making machine in their own right, and by the time the closing credits roll you realise you've been following the story of this band for almost two hours. Depending on your temperament, you may even want to do it again. For a band who've never really been too concerned with pushing themselves out in front or drawing too much attention to themselves, they've managed to carve out their own niche in the world of popular musicianry, and good on them for it. Watching Fans Only feels like cheering on your local team, even if you come from half a world away.

Anode Enzyme, IQ 12,790...

2008-02-09T15:04:00.000Z

...it was 12,794, but he lost four points watching TV.

From Genius by John Glashan.

It's about that time...

2008-02-09T14:48:00.002Z

Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul et al, Paris 1991.

It's about bloody time...

2008-02-09T06:49:00.000Z

You're 6:49 a.m.

You're the time of day right around sunrise, when the sky is still a pale bluish gray. The streets are empty, and the grass and leaves are a little bit sparkly with dew. You are the sound of a few chirpy birds outside the window. You are quiet, peaceful, and contemplative. If you move slowly, it's not because you're lazy – it's because you know there's no reason to rush. You move like a relaxed cat, pausing for deep stretches that make your muscles feel alive. You are long sips of tea or coffee (out of a mug that's held with both hands) that slowly warm your insides just as the sun is brightening the sky.

O - kay...

The Void on celluloid...

2008-02-08T10:24:00.004Z

Control, the movie about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who took his life in 1979, came out last year, and guess which lazy blogger is only getting around to writing about it now?

As befits a film with photographer/video-tician Anton Corbijn at the helm, Control looks fantastic, especially the "live" footage. Musically it's something of a (pleasant) surprise too. The actors actually play their instruments reasonably well, and while they're no Joy Division, they come as close as you could ever get to evoking the spirit of the band in performance. Some of it is based closely on clips of the original band, playing live and on TV, and a lot of work obviously went into these very impressive sequences. And yes, it is in black and white, like many of Corbijn's great rock photos were back in the day.

Control is based on Touching From A Distance, Deborah Curtis' memoir of life with her late husband. The book itself was guileless and honest, and the movie has something of that tone. Unlike the book, though, Corbijn also draws on others' memories of the Joy Division years, so the portrayal of all that boys-on-the-road stuff, as well as Ian Curtis' affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, is a bit better fleshed out.

It's interesting to compare this with the first half of 24 Hour Party People, which treated of the rise of Joy Division and Curtis' untimely suicide with less depth but great economy, and a certain amount of black humour. Control for its part tends to focus on romance and relationships. It reminds me more than a little of Walk The Line, which was more love-story-told-with-real-characters-and-based-loosely-on-real-events than straightforward biopic, but quite effective for all that.

This movie is clearly aimed at a younger audience, the sort of people who buy records by modern bands who've been namechecking Joy Division and Curtis as an influence. And why not? Control tells the tale with exactly the right balance of sympathy and objectivity, humour and honesty.

I really didn't expect to like this, but it was well worth watching. Like I say, it's a seriously good-looking film, with enough substance to justify all the pretty pictures. And if it gets a new generation into the music of Joy Division, then I for one will be very happy indeed.

I was not so happy about Once, directed by former Frames bass guitarist John Carney, which is only just out (though I managed to get hold of a preview copy last year). It features Frames lead singer Glenn Hansard (who first appeared on cinema screens as Outspan in The Commitments) and Czech songstress Markéta Irglova in a sort of musical romantic tale set on the streets of Dublin's fair city. I expected to like it - I've seen it several times now, and really tried to like it, but I'm sorry, it just left a bad taste.

I'm not a big fan of the Frames' music, though I do admire them for the fact that they've survived as a band despite all the begrudgery and sheer malice they've had to endure in their native land. The kind of spite that would be more properly levelled at, say, that other Dublin band, the one whose name consists of a letter followed by a number...

Anyhoo, Hansard plays a street busker and Irglova a flower-girl (awww) who also turns out to be a pianist. They bond over her broken vacuum cleaner, which he mends (that's his day job, y'see). Then they get to know each other and help each other out musically. And, well, that's about it.

Maybe I'm being too hard on this movie, but what is all the fuss about? Do Seppoes think they have, like, totally cute accents and stuff?

It's not that Once doesn't have some good qualities - Hansard and Irglova are both fine musicians, and though not 'proper' actors, they have a pretty good onscreen chemistry. Their friendship develops believably. The music isn't my cup of tea, but it's worked well into the movie. Director Carney clearly knows his stuff. The ending may be a bit of a cop-out but at least it's not standard boy-gets-girl schmaltz. It's just that I couldn't find anything in this that actually added up to, you know, A Movie.

Joy Division were a band whose music was associated with despair and alienation but actually had its own cathartic, uplifting power. And some of that came through in Control. Whereas Once, for all its celebration of the joys of music and the virtues of friendship and (tentative) romance, just leaves an empty feeling. As though one had just been watching an adaptation of Notting Hill for raggle-taggle groupies.

Friday On My Mind #8

2008-01-11T16:45:00.003Z

Being a semi-regular Friday feature wherein we take a look at three songs from the canon of Mr. David Robert Jones of Brixton, London SW, latterly of Bromley, Kent and currently of New York, New York.

Art Decade - Low
This is inventive and engaging; not necessarily everyone's cup of tea but it's short, to the point and full of economical little musical phrases that kind of creep up on you. The Low album, for those of you who just came in, is divided into two very thematically distinct sides - the first mainly vocal, the second mainly instrumental. Side one begins and ends with instrumental tracks too, but these are full band tracks. The four pieces on side two, of which this is the second, consist of two long, rambling tracks that make use of wordless, multitracked vocals, and two short purely instrumental pieces in the middle. The sounds are pretty much all made by Bowie and his chosen aide-de-camp, Brian Eno, who'd been Roxy Music's musical secret weapon before striking out all on his ownio.

Art Decade, as far as I can tell, is mostly Bowie's own work, layering bits of synth, sax, random effects and (probably) mellotron over mechanical beats from a rhythm box (or maybe even a couple of rhythm boxes). There's a romantic-sounding, complex melody that resolves itself a couple of times, but I defy anyone to try and whistle it...

I didn't hear Kraftwerk's Ralf und Florian album until a few years later, but this sounds like it could have come from there - it has a similar sense of space, and even some of the loose, improvisatory feel. Don't forget, before Kraftwerk hit it big as electro-humanoids their music was a lot more space-rock, Kosmischemusik influenced, and to this day I still maintain that their music swings mightily. Maybe this is what "Krautrock" would have sounded like if it had been invented by Englishmen...

Anyway, this isn't just pretentious wafty ambient music, it's a beguiling listen for them what has ears, and surprisingly rich and full of ideas after you listen a few more times.

Bring Me The Disco King - Reality
Heathen had managed to reassure all of us Bowie fans that the man was still doing his job in fine fashion; Reality, which is his last original album to date, only suffers in comparison because by then we know the man was still plugging away. For the most part, this album has a more pared-back sound, but the writing is, thankfully, strong and our hero is in as good shape as he's ever been. Bring Me The Disco King is rueful and contemplative, based around a Mike Garson piano comp that could have come from Steely Dan circa Pretzel Logic. Garson's accompaniment really takes off as the song develops, and weaves around a bravura vocal performance from Ol' Traffic-Light Eyes himself, his voice sounding notably more mature than, say, the dashing young blade of the Ziggy era.

Not too long ago I saw the DVD of Bowie at the Point in Dublin from 2003, and in the middle of a set pretty well balanced between old and new, this absolutely brought the house down. Our singer muses here, not only on fame and all that comes with it, but on life and memories and regrets, all the while looking onwards to... what? There's a very palpable sense of mortality in this song, and Bowie puts heart and soul into it; Bring Me The Disco King is easily up there with his best stuff. Fair dues.

Free Your Heart - Hunky Dory
Probably not the first song to escape the lips of Bowie fans asked to name their favourites... I mean, this is a cover of a Tiny Tim song, yes? So I thought, but a bit of digging I discovered that Free Your Heart was co-written by Paul Williams and Biff Rose... I'd almost forgotten about Rose, who used to do light, humourous songs in the 60s on various comedy shows. So this tune has Williams' melodic invention as well as Rose's gentle optimism, and it's quite nice if not particularly classic. Bowie takes just the right approach, gently taking the mickey and singing with tongue firmly in cheek, though there's also an easy, unhurried sense to the singing that's kind of appealing. Hunky Dory is an album of many moods, and I don't know who else would segue this into something like Andy Warhol with odd synth effects and studio chatter. I still can't stop thinking of Tiny Tim though, and wondering why there are no ukuleles on this version...

Friday On My Mind #7: "...Told her that he'd found a chum..."

2008-01-08T07:10:00.000Z

Okay, now that we're well and truly into 2008, and it being Bowie Friday, let's remember that next Tuesday is an important date for us Thin White Duke fans, being the 61st birthday of the man himself. So, for the sake of celebration, and because the guy needs a bit of a break, it's time to devote this birthday blog post to three songs by other people for a change. Well, sort of...

The Man Who Sold The World - Lulu
Yes, somebody did actually cover this before Nirvana. Stateside Bowie fans have probably never heard of Lulu, which is actually something of a pity. On this side of the pond, this Scottish-born chanteuse has been pretty much ubiquitous since the mod days of the early 60s, when she brought out an absolutely stratospheric version of the Isley Brothers Shout! that made even the Who's version sound tame. (YouTube clip from Ready! Steady! Go! here.) She ended up with her own TV variety show and by some odd serendipity ended up giving young Jimi Hendrix his first TV appearance (more YouTube). Unfortunately, she also ended up representing the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest with an unspeakably awful song called Boom Bang-a-Bang.

By the time this Bowie cover version came out as a single, around the same time as the Pin Ups album, Lulu had, somewhat unfairly, been dismissed by rock fans as some sort of chirpily cute light-entertainment songstress, and the idea of her doing a song by David Bowie, the weird androgynous glam rocker guy, seemed as incongruous as you could possibly get. In fact, Lulu and young Davy Jones were contemporaries on the R&B club scene of the early 60s and would have known of each other from way back. So there.

The odd thing is that this version actually sounds more like a "typical" Bowie song than the original album track from 1970, probably thanks to the fact that Bowie and Mick Ronson produced the single, and got the Spiders in to play on it. So the original's rough mating of acoustic balladry and scuzzy, Sabbath-era metal gets replaced by some snappy latter-day Ronson guitar fills, a much more syncopated and straightforward backing track, and of course, the customary wheezy horn overdubs which serve to remind us that it's actually a relief that young David packed in the sax and took up singing instead. Though Lulu herself does a great job of interpreting a tune that sounds a bit like Brel, a bit like Brecht, a bit like the Velvets and maybe a bit like Bowie's other cronies, Mott the Hoople.

The other odd thing is, this would have fit perfectly well on the Pin Ups album. Except of course it wasn't a cover version. And had some Scottish bird singing on it. I'm sorry. Where were we? Would you like some more tea?

Saw Lulu on TV not too long ago (on the New Year's Eve Hootenanny) and was pleased to note that not only is she still keeping busy and in good voice, but she is still - let's admit it boys - damn hot at 61.

The Secret Life of Arabia - British Electric Foundation
The BEF were Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware, who'd been in the original Human League before Phil Oakey got those girls in to sing songs about waitresses in cocktail bars. After leaving, they set up the BEF as an electro outfit with a different guest vocalist for each song, and inadvertently ended up reviving Tina Turner's career with their version of the Tempts' Ball of Confusion. But enough on that: this cover version is all about a remarkable young man from Dunfermline, up in Scotland, named Billy Mackenzie.

Unfortunately, Billy will always be a young man in our memories now, because his life ended way too soon, but he was one of the great singers of his (post-punk, pre-New Romantic) generation. His band The Associates based their early sound on something not unlike Bowie around the Station To Station era, except more dissonant and shredded. Mackenzie's unique four-octave range swooped and soared around arrangements that sounded like all of European music being thrown up in the air and let fall wherever.

TSLOA, from the "Heroes" album, was a number the Associates would cover back in their early days. I'd never cared for the track much myself; it just made me want to flip the record over and put on Beauty and the Beast again. On the BEF / Mackenzie version, though, it gets a dramatic, cinematic, and dare I say funkier (that word again) arrangement that's more than worthy of the original. Mackenzie's inimitable voice luxuriates in the melody, intoxicated, in love with itself. I'd love to know what the composer thinks of this one.

Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop
Okay, so not really a cover version, since this is the original, and it was written by Bowie, Iggy and Carlos Alomar for Iggy's comeback album The Idiot. Not long after, Bowie recycled the same tune and put new words to it on his Lodger album with the title Red Money, with not quite as impressive results. Bowie's "own" version wasn't a bad track, well played and all, and it's always great to hear yet another one of Alomar's classic slowhand-funk riffs, but on the album it kind of palls after the Lodger's real climax, a harrowing tale of domestic violence called Repetition that's admittedly hard to follow.

Sister Midnight starts Iggy's album where Red Money finishes Lodger, and even though Bowie, Alomar and rhythm section Dennis Davis and George Murray are present on both versions, they couldn't be more different. Where Red Money sounds like a muso jam that's precision-tooled itself into a corner, Sister Midnight drips with menace and dread. Iggy dredges up words from the bottom of some psychic abyss, conjures up Oedipal and patricidal demons, and works himself into a frenzy calling out to someone he's not even sure can hear him at all. The album may be named after a book by Dostoyevsky but the sentiment is pure Beckett.

The band (which includes Bowie on keyboards) grunt and grind like machines that are just about to break down and the beat is claustrophobic, desperate, struggling with itself. The mass-produced nightmare delineated here and on the rest of the Idiot album could be happening anywhere on the globe: in Berlin, in the north of England, even in Detroit. Iggy solo will never top his Stooges work in my book, though Bowie proved a worthy mentor and collaborator, but The Idiot is a classic work that somehow manages to be more than the sum of the people who created it.

We can't, of course, forget that the eighth of January is also the birthday of Elvis Presley, who used to take his influences from everywhere around him, wear makeup, dress weird, sing up a storm, change his appearance a lot, and sometimes looked like he could have come from another planet. Fancy that.

In all seriousness, it goes without saying that if not for The King himself, David Bowie would have ended up either playing sax in some dance band or doing mime on some street corner. Who knows, he may have even given up altogether and joined the Army. So happy birthday to both of them.

Friday On My Mind #6: Deck the blog with clips from Bowie...

2007-12-25T12:25:00.001Z

...seeing as it's that time of year again, with a glittery sleigh pulled by spiders on the roof, and old Uncle Ziggy sliding down the chimney,,,

Here's the Jazzin' for Blue Jean short from 1984, in two parts. Many years ago, I actually paid to see a terrible breakdance film just to get a look at this. It's not bad, Bowie refreshingly taking the mickey out of himself as both Vic the painter and the decadent rock star Screaming Lord Byron.

Plus of course the inevitable...

Friday On My Mind #5

2007-12-21T11:59:00.002Z

Song for Bob Dylan - Hunky Dory
It's not hard to see the Dylan influence on early Bowie, especially during the Space Oddity days; at least he comes clean about it in this awkward if sincere tribute. And the extra-musical influences too are easy to spot, especially the way Dylan, very early on, learned how to use the persona of the performing artist, to hide behind it or even use it as a prop. In a sense this song is really about a strange woman who comes around, "from the brow of the Superbrain", no less, and won't leave unless she hears a couple of Dylan albums. O-kay. Musically, it's pretty slight stuff, moving from an acoustic-by-numbers verse into a slightly, er, funkier chorus. Ronson throws in some very nice, melodic guitar licks, and the general atmosphere is pleasant but not particularly rivetting.

Hunky Dory is Bowie's namedropping album, for sure. Sit down sometime and see how many people get namechecked, from Dylan and Warhol to Crowley, Himmler, the Velvets, Churchill, Garbo, even the great Mickey Mouse himself. Only fair that Bobby should get a look in.

Oh and by the way: Todd Haynes has just brought out a brilliant, fascinating, thought-provoking film called I'm Not There. You should go see it. The character of Jude Quinn alone is much more interesting than the lumpy, vaguely approximate (and terribly acted) cypher that was Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine. And sexier.

The Supermen - Missinglinksoneziggy (bootleg)
As Bowie tells it, he was a Velvet Underground fan from way back. Somehow he'd chanced on a white label of the Velvet Underground and Nico album before it came out and was even covering Waiting For My Man in early bands. The Supermen has always been one of the more perplexing songs in the Bowie canon; you can't help but wonder if all the scattershot images and mythical references add up to profundity or pisstake. In any event, I can't help but think of the Velvets roughing out some new tune in the studio when I hear this early demo version. It's sketchy and tentative but good fun. The tom-tom heavy drums definitely make you think of Maureen Tucker.

I'm not too sure when this was done, but the occasional snazzy guitar fill seems to suggest that Mick Ronson was on board by now, so I'm assuming that this demo is roughly contemporaneous with the album. The album version is a pretty well-wrought piece of rock'n'roll concept-building, with touches of Nietszche, Lovecraft and maybe a bit of Arthur C. Clarke thrown in. The demo is rough-hewn and sketchy but it's kind of fun.

Win - Young Americans
This is one of my favourite Bowie songs and I'm not really sure why. The lyrics are as oblique and vague as anything he's written. The backing is slick and expertly played, but that's the case for thousands of other songs too. It's just that there's real but indefinable emotional impact, and a certain kind of sensual delight, going on here that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

If it makes you feel good, it must be working I guess. Singer(s) and band strive together to conjure up a certain atmosphere, and you can almost see it in front of you: lush but dangerous, tropical but torrid. A smooth guitar comp underpins the easy, west-coast sounding verse but the chorus kicks things up a notch, built around some very Abbey-Road style guitar arpeggios.

Bowie went out of his way to work with the cream of backup musicians for this album; the whole idea was to cross over to R&B listeners and finally break it big in America. Carlos Alomar (that would be him on the sweet, flanged seductive rhythm guitar then) would end up being a fixture until the mid-80s, and vocal arranger Luther Vandross would go on to bring out, oh, one or two records himself, bless him. The star player on this track, though, is top-class session saxophonist David Sanborn, who sprinkles fairydust all over the tune with a simple, repeated hook played through a pickup and echoplexed from one speaker to the other.

A little touch, but it's one of those little perspective tricks that come at the right time, in the right place. It's pretty. Relax. Put your feet up. Get into the tropical fish. Try not to think about Kenny G...

Friday On My Mind #4: From Central Park to Shantytown, changing at Berlin.

2007-12-14T12:59:00.000Z

It's No Game (part 1) - (Scary Monsters and Super Creeps)
So our man and his band of faithful retainers (Messrs. Visconti, Eno, Fripp, Alomar et al) have just made three odd albums full of weird sounds, throwing pop music convention up in the air, picking it up off the floor and putting it all back together the wrong way around. On the Scary Monsters album, though, Bowie is back in the mainstream, recording in London and New York and leaving Berlin behind (for the moment).

So does that mean he's back to playing nice? Does it fuck. This track is Bowie at his most uncompromising, growling his litany of defiance while Michi Hirota spits out invective in Japanese and Robert Fripp strangles the life out of an electric guitar. "SHUT UP!" bellows our beloved artiste at the end, while machines wheeze and grind and run down around him. Then straight into the elliptical, oblique pop of Up The Hill Backwards and you're not quite sure what you've bought.

Interestingly, some of this tune is a reworking of one of David Bowie's earliest ever compositions: a tune called Tired Of My Life that he wrote when he was 16. The whole "put a bullet in my brain / and it makes all the papers" section is pretty much lifted from there. Tired Of My Life was evidently in the running for the Man Who Sold The World album, because a later demo of it turns up on the Missinglinksoneziggy bootleg. So is Bowie just recycling old teenage angst out of desperation, or is it just that he has a talent for bringing old sketches back to life and giving them meaning in a new context?

Scary Monsters is certainly a strong record, precisely because (once again) the singer completely confounds expectations throughout. And It's No Game is a brave introduction to an album that's difficult and problematic, but it also seems to be a favourite with a lot of fans. SM(ASC) has definitely improved over time; but its initial promise was never fulfilled: the 80s were a period of creative inertia for a lot of artists, and it turned out Bowie was no exception. (Though, to be fair, he always seemed to turn out sterling work on outside projects like the Absolute Beginners movie or the Baal TV play; it was just David Bowie the label-bound recording artist who hit a creative lull.)

Don't Look Down - Tonight
So Iggy Pop had just made two albums with Bowie helping out, The Idiot and Lust For Life. Great records both of them, but a long way from The Stooges. His 1979 album, New Values, saw him reunited with James Williamson - not an original Stooge, more a later-stage interloper, but a fine guitarist and co-writer, and a pretty good musical foil - a Ronson to Iggy's Bowie, if you like. After Raw Power, Pop and Williamson had collaborated on the promising but only half-finished Kill City while Iggy was an outpatient. Williamson didn't actually do much guitar playing on the New Values album, but he did co-write this with Iggy and the original is a decent piece of work: poppy and accessible, with some nice grinding guitar, but still full of guts and heart. Listening back to the original, it's the sort of hummable guitar groove that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Big Star's Radio City. Bowie's cover, on the other hand, is insipid and uninspiring.

Maybe it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to take a short, snappy, rocky guitar song and try to do it as a lovers rock tune. Reggae was flavour of the "month" in the mid 80s, which meant that a lot of great music got exposure in the UK pop charts, but it also meant that a lot of third-rate, ersatz imitators jumped on board the bandwagon for a ride. The backing track on Bowie's version is smooth, slickly played and entirely inconsequential and I'm sorry, lover's rock is not meant to sound like that. It's meant to sound pretty but not poncey. Romantic but maybe just a little bit rude.

It's a shame that an ex-mod from South London with a lifelong passion and respect for black music couldn't have done a better job of this, is all. This is one of three Iggy Pop covers on the album, and Bowie also duets with Iggy on a number they co-wrote called Dancing With The Big Boys which is so forgettable I actually had to look up the title. And the moral of the story is: avoid Tonight like the plague, especially if you're a David Bowie fan, because by all appearances he's barely involved in the making of it. You don't believe me? You want me to tell you about the Beach Boys cover? Take my word for it.

(In all fairness, Tonight does contain the single Blue Jean, which was a perfectly agreeable pop song, and a very inventive long-form video you can find easily enough hanging around at YouTube. Not a classic tune by any means, but on this album it stands out like a diamond from dross. Buy it on a compilation instead.)

Subterraneans - Low
The three of us assembled in the music room where Dusty got one together. He'd assembled skins and a bit of a cigarette box for roach, and he was frantically cooking hash and crumbling it onto tobacco on top of the piano keys. The lid poised right over his hand in case a priest stuck his head around the door. Spanky, the California kid who'd been sent over by his family for a year in an Irish boarding school, kept nervous lookout. Owly, a priest with a booming voice and a menacing walk, was "on" tonight, and we only had a twenty-minute window in which we could skin up, have a smoke, and get back inside in time for the second evening study period.

I was the day boy. It was my job to get the cigs and papers. I didn't even bother asking who Dusty had got the hash from, everything was hush-hush and cloak and dagger, don't-ask-don't-tell. In any event, he put the whole thing together adequately, licked the papers shut with a flourish, poked in a rolled-up bit of roach with a matchstick, stuck the thing behind his ear and out we went, unmenaced by Owly, up the hill to the handball alleys at the back of the school.

The moon was fat and creamy, waxing gibbous, and the walls of the alleys made odd, angular shadows. Dusty lit up and passed the first blast around; it was good resiny tasting Afghan Black and he'd put plenty in. "You know," he said, "I'd love to get a tape machine, bring it up here and play something deadly, like Dark Side of the Moon or fuckin' the second side of Low. "For sure," said Spanky in his long California drawl. He very rarely came out with anything other than some mumble of vague assent, like "for sure" or "far out". It went without saying: we were all Bowie fans. Dusty'd been a prog-rock fan before he got into the Ramones; I'd liked prog and some metal before I'd heard The Saints and Television; Spanky loved the Eagles and all that American FM stuff but was pretty much up for anything. We all agreed on Floyd, Dylan and Bowie.

I started half-singing a minor melody from one of the songs of the second side of Low; I forgot which one. Dusty joined in on the wordless syllables: "So-la-mee, ee-lay-ho..." Which one was that again? "Warszawa", he said, trying his best to pronounce it like a Slav with vees instead of doubleyous and a chewy bit in the middle. "My favourite track is Subterraneans, though." "Shelly shelly shelly owm..." He took a deep toke and passed it on to Spanky. "That's what the whole album was about, you know. The Subterraneans." The spliff came around to me. "You listen to that song and you can almost see them," Dusty continued, well into a nice hash reverie. "You can see their eyes. He puts it so well you don't need words that mean anything."

You know, he had a point, and it seemed even more credible standing there in those handball alleys late at night thirty years ago, turning on, with the moon casting crazy shadows and every step or shuffle creating some weird echo somewhere else. The shadows swam with the likenesses of those left behind, forgotten people passing through the basements and the U-bahns of some faraway city, with hollow eyes and whispery voices. Forget those glittery alien rock-star myths, it really did seem right then as though Bowie was giving a voice to those forgotten people. Even today, some thirty years later, I can still almost see those faces when I hear the song, humming along with that slow ascending bassline, wondering if that's the sound of the subterraneans slowly making their way up into the light.

Myself and Dusty both went on to play in bands; we met up by accident at some record business do in Dublin years later. Spanky went back home to the US at the end of the school year and we never heard from him again. Owly became principal of the school a few years later, after we'd gone, and ended up leaving the church and marrying his housekeeper. They had kids and everything. By all accounts he's still a bollocks, though.

Friday On My Mind #3

2007-12-07T12:40:00.001Z

It being the third Friday of this here Bowie-based feature, it behooves your humble blogger to once again, and for the third time, pick out three of the Bowie songs he's been listening to this past week. Picking out tunes isn't quite as simple as hitting shuffle and then just writing about whatever comes up. (God forbid.) I've made a deliberate point of listening to at least ten, more like fifteen, Bowie songs a week; plus the odd album if I start feeling curious. Then at some stage I actually (gasp) pick up pencil & paper, write out what I've been listening to, take a deep breath and pick three out of that list, more or less at random. Unless of course there's a particular song among them that really sticks in my head and demands to be written about. As for instance:

Drive-in Saturday - Aladdin Sane
A whole lot of very appealing things going on in this dreamy slice of sci-fi 70s pop. A bit nostalgic, with the doo-wop chord changes, greasy saxes, and references to old movies. A bit futuristic too, with all the whooshing synth noises, sci-fi imagery and backing vocals by droids on helium. But the tune, in just a shade over 4 minutes (on the album version) is a great exercise in invention, throwing in all sorts of cultural references and still managing to paint a convincing picture of a future dystopia where all those ordinary things that kids did back in the 20th century (movies, rock'n'roll and what have you) have been turned into a sort of mythology.

For all of his need to look outside the box and experiment, Bowie could never really stay outside of pop music for too long: on the evidence of pieces like this, it's obvious that he delights in pop way too much to alienate himself from it. Drive-in Saturday is like a mini-Thomas Pynchon novel distilled into pop-song format: it flits from character to character, giving us (in a relatively short space of time) a pretty comprehensive picture of what it's like to live in this future world, whether you're some starry-eyed young couple hooked on old "video films", or poor old John The Foreman, who's so starved for companionship he has to turn to some sort of artificial companion called "Sylvian" (Japan fans take note). All is not lost, though: you get the feeling that 20th century pop culture is a sort of touchstone for the people of this weird future world where the seas have all dried up, something that keeps them going.

We Bowie fans spend a lot of time talking about how the man spent a good wedge of his career changing roles and inventing new characters for himself, characters like Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke; we spend little enough time noticing how great he's been, throughout his career, at making up wholly credible minor characters who sometimes only play walk-on parts, though they're crucial to the stories he tells. But the important thing is, Drive-in Saturday is just a damn good, cleverly written pop song that makes you want to wave your scarf (or indeed, lighter) in the air, and sing along.

The Width of a Circle - Bowie At The Beeb
An ambitious piece, coming as it did halfway between Space Oddity's acoustic-based, very conventional "singer-songwriter" narratives and the more metal-oriented Man Who Sold The World material. The album version of this probably surprised Bowie fans the first time out when they dropped the needle on it, expecting windblown twelve-string balladry like that last album, only to have their poor, sensitive ears pummelled by what can only be described as Heavy fahcking Metal. Written by some bloke in a frock, no less.

Lyrically, this song shows the singer trying to come to terms with his carefully-cultivated androgynous image, by writing about what it's like to actually sleep with someone of the same sex. Highly laudable subject matter for sure, and it's inspired plenty of great works of art over the years. The only problem is, for all its musical and structural merits, Width of a Circle fails to convince you that such an encounter had any real meaning for the person who's singing about it (other than perhaps giving them something to write about). The first half sounds like it could have come off of Space Oddity, with all the hectic acoustic scrubbing and nervous wordplay, and the second half, when the song's narrator and the Other Guy (who could even be God, or the Devil, or something) actually seem to Do The Deed, simply sounds forced and overdone.

There's no doubt that the games that Bowie played with identity and the question of sexuality were highly influential on a lot of people. The ironic thing is that Bowie helped pave the way for a greater acceptance of gay artists and themes by pop & rock fans, and as a result we can now listen to a wide range of songs by people who all write about homosexual love a lot more convincingly than Bowie does here, quite simply because their hearts are actually in it.

Musically, the album track remains notable because, well, it's the former acoustic balladeer dipping his toe into the hard rock waters, a lot more credibly than his attempts to dabble with alternative sexuality. Lyrical weaknesses aside, it sounds great and has a brooding sense of drama. Much of this is down to the new guitarist, a gent from Yorkshire who manages to completely upstage the singer's mannered, affected performance with some grandstanding guitar pyrotechnics.

This early BBC airing of WOAC is an interesting listen, mainly because it shows the song early in its evolution, a lot more acoustic-based and less pompous sounding than the eventual album version, though it kind of falls apart towards the end and the "awkward second half" doesn't sound as though it's been written yet (unless the singer himself was self-censoring for a radio audience.)

What's more, the Yorkshireman on guitar I mentioned above has only been in the band for two days, and hasn't had the chance to rehearse much yet. (The singer helpfully explains this afterwards to an unabashed John Peel.) Young Mick Ronson (for it is he) kind of busks along the first half, half-aware of the chord changes, but really comes into his own in the middle bit, wailing away like Jeff Beck's baby brother or something. After which the thing kind of dawdles around, unfinished, and Bowie himself contributes what sounds like a completely improvised acoustic coda. So there you go, the first appearance of the guitarist who ended up being an important part of David Bowie's (and indeed, Lou Reed's) sound for the next few years. He'd just come all the way from Hull, actually.

Here Comes the Night - Pin Ups
The early-mid 70s were the decade of nostalgia, for sure. There were rock'n'roll and doo-wop revival bands like Sha Na Na and (ulp!) Showaddywaddy, movies like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, and "cover" albums like this one, the Band's Moondog Matinee and Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things. Easy to see the appeal of something like this: established singer-songwriters taking a break from the whole spokesman-for-a-generation thing and just playing songs by other people that they liked. Where Ferry went outside rock for his inspiration, Bowie very deliberately chose a narrow field of music to cover, and not the fifties revivalism that was then popular; instead, he picked songs from the era he grew up in, when R&B bands like the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Pretty Things filled up tiny clubs all over the Home Counties, and sent a generation of pop kids home sweating.

Their Ulster cousins Them made a bit of a racket on both sides of the pond too, and the original of Here Comes The Night, written for them by US r&b maestro Bert Berns, was and is a British Invasion crossover classic. That big rumbling guitar over a simple chord change, and Van Morrison intoning that irresistable chorus. There's great drama and tension in the original too: the verse sails through on a brisk, skipping, Gene Pitney-type beat, the sort of thing that housewives probably liked dancing to in the early 60s, and then the chorus rips away the workaday veil with some growling, id-drenched R&B.

For this careful re-working, Bowie and the Spiders are careful not to try and improve on perfection, but they're confident enough as a band to give this treatment just the right mix of modernity and reverence. Plus, you know, plenty of those overdubbed greasy saxes that Bowie was putting, kitchen-sink style, into just about everything he recorded between Ziggy and Diamond Dogs. The sax break on this goes on a bit and is kind of silly, but doesn't really spoil a snappy and listenable cover. Extra credit for the swoon of sheer delight that opens this up - Bowie the singer coming all over all Dionysiac on us, as he does sometimes (compare the ecstatic "oh yeah" at the start of Ziggy Stardust, for instance), but also giving the very clear message that he and the Spiders are covering this old material because they love it, plain and simple.

Friday On My Mind #2 - Neumusik Nacht und (Frei) Tag.

2007-11-30T23:00:00.000Z

So, three more Bowie songs to look at this week. (Closes eyes, reaches into basket, pulls out three slips of paper.) First one out is...

Yassassin - Lodger
Here, Bowie plays some very middle-eastern sounding fills on a Chamberlin, which was an updated and slightly more compact version of the Mellotron, a sort of low-tech, primitive, tape-based version of the samplers people use today. Around the time of "Heroes", our hero lived for a time in a pokey flat above a garage in a very Turkish district of Berlin; who knows, perhaps some of the musical inspiration here came from that period. In any event, he manages to squeeze some very apposite and memorable sounds out of his Chamberlin, and creates an excellent atmosphere with a hint of edgy menace.

The tune itself isn't a very challenging piece of music, but its simple riffs and motifs are well expanded on by the backing band, and it leaves a definite impression. There's something very Bowie about a narrator who declares "I'm not a moody guy!" and then proceeds to spend the next couple of minutes convincing us otherwise. Not a major Bowie work, but it fits well into the travelogue theme of Lodger's first side, and helps move the album along well enough. Yassassin is Turkish for "long live", as the sleeve notes very helpfully inform us.

Sound and Vision - Low
Hm, so we're back in "orange album" country again: This is a simple, engaging piece; taken out of its context on the first side of Low, it sounds as bright and breezy as an ad for breakfast cereal. Which is kind of strange, seeing is it's about wanting to stay in your room all day with the blinds drawn... Sound and Vision certainly kept the record company happy (at least on this side of the pond); the first single taken from the album, it sailed to number 3 in the charts, helped along by the fact that the BBC had adopted the tune for its 'coming attractions' theme music. If you think about it, the Low album is heavily biased in favour of music over words: of the seven songs on the first side, only five have lyrics, and even then words are used sparingly. "Nothing to read, nothing to say", indeed.

Much of the appeal of Low lies in the way it strips pop melodies down to their component parts and then builds them up again from scratch in new ways, and Sound and Vision is a case in point. Its three-and-a-bit minutes are brimming with sonic ideas and minimal, catchy hooks; the Davis/Murray rhythm section is right on the money, Alomar's snakey guitar riff sits right in there, part Bo Diddley, part reggae, next to Ricky Gardiner's slippery countrified double-stops, and there's even a couple of Welsh girls (i. e. the overdubbed voices of Mary Hopkin-Visconti) going "do-do-doo".

The snare-drum sound on this was a closely-guarded industry secret for many years until producer Tony Visconti eventually admitted that it came from running the snare through an Eventide Harmonizer. What really gets me about this song, though, is that weird percussive "hiss" that punctuates every bar when there's no singing going on; presumably white noise generated by Eno's briefcase synth. In the days before earbuds and digital compression, this is a piece of music very clearly designed to be played on a transistor radio in the middle of the afternoon. And why not?

Heathen (The Rays) - Heathen
I never stopped being a Bowie fan. It's just that by the time Heathen came out, I'd come down with Bowie fatigue. I'd listen to his new releases with interest, but never really engage with them. While there was no doubt he was still producing and playing excellent music, forty-something me just didn't feel the same urgency to run out and buy it straight away as teenage me had done , and that says a lot more about age and culture than it does about David Bowie's music, I think you'll agree. Heathen piqued my interest though; there was enough going on to keep you listening. It's kind of a sign of the times that the album got so much attention for including a cover of a Pixies song (Cactus); it's also a pity because it contains some of Bowie's best writing in a long time, skilfully interpreted by an excellent, sympathetic backing band. And this (almost) title track is one I always had a soft spot for. It's short, simple, and full of guitar buzz; I'd almost call it Bowie's attempt at crafting a soundscape for shoegazers. Again, like the Low track I mention above, it's not heavily reliant on words or verbal messages but it's strong on mood and atmosphere.

Friday On My Mind

2007-11-23T13:22:00.000Z

Friday On My Mind is a new, weekly (fingers crossed) feature wherein I'll be writing about three songs by David Bowie every Friday. Why Bowie? A whole bunch of different reasons, but the one that most concerns us here is that he's spent much of the last 40 years building up an extensive body of work that (hopefully) will hold up to some kind of critical analysis. I've been a Bowie fan for almost as long, though I have to admit that not all of his work has been brilliant, so it's probably fairer to write about the good and the bad, along side each other, to try and get some idea of what makes the man tick and why his music still resounds with people today.

Of course, there are plenty of sites devoted to Bowie and his music, by people who know a lot more about the man and his work than I do, and I'm hardly trying to compete with all the resources that are out there; I simply hope to offer my own fan's-eye-view perspective on his works and the impressions they've left on me.

That sounds nice and noncommital, so here's something a bit more concrete to give you some idea of what to expect: My aim is to pick three Bowie tracks every week and write about them. Three and no more than three; the number shall not be two, nor neither shall it be four, but three only. I'll try and post them all together, once a week. For the most part I'll choose them at random, relying only on the exigencies of shuffle play. Every now and again I may go ahead and choose three tracks grouped under a particular subject or maybe a common phase of Bowie's career, but the time-honoured technique of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo is enough to be getting on with for the moment.

Why Friday On My Mind? It's the title of a tune by an Australian band called the Merseybeats who had a hit with it back in the 60s, and Bowie covered it on his Pin Ups album.

Anyway, I'm a fan, not an expert, and any comments, questions, corrections are more than welcome.

Now let's get stuck in...

Breaking Glass - Stage
A-a-a-a-nd the first coloured ball to fall down the chute is this live treatment from 1978 of a track from 1976's Low album. Barely four years after David Live, which had managed to fill in the gaps between the tail-end of Bowie's 'glam' phase (Diamond Dogs) and the beginning of what he liked to call his 'plastic soul' period (Young Americans), the Stage album came along. The overall mood and sound on this one is much more sombre and 'musicianly' than the bright and upbeat (if somewhat soul-less) David Live. For a live album, Stage s meticulously well recorded, every instrument thoughtfully given its place in the mix, though the 'live' feel kind of suffers as a result and you're almost surprised to hear (very faint) applause at the end of each number. DB's usual late-70s rhythm section - Dennis Davis and George Murray plus guitarist Carlos Alomar - get fleshed out with keyboards from Roger Powell of Utopia, sometime Zappa guitarist Adrian Belew and Simon House from Hawkwind on violin.

Stage drew praise when it came out for showing that it was possible to re-create the difficult, studio-bound tracks from the Low and "Heroes" albums. This live version of Breaking Glass comes at the end of the third side of the original double vinyl; all the other tracks are treatments of Low / "Heroes" instrumentals and for the most part they're pretty good; top-class musicians bringing their chops to bear on some difficult and challenging material. (I never could stand Sense of Doubt, though...)

This thoughtful re-work of Breaking Glass rounds the side off nicely. Bowie and band re-structure the song from the ground up, emphasising the "wonderful person / but you've got problems / let me touch you" chorus, which is only thrown in once or twice on the original. Belew's guitar and Powell's synths snake around the hookline riff and the last line, "let me touch you" is again extended and repeated. What was a sketchy, fragmented sounding ode to dysfunction and blighted communications in the original becomes something else given the Stage treatment; something that feels a little bit more mutual. It's almost like the "give me your hands" bit from the end of Ziggy. Classy bit of work.

Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed - Bowie at the Beeb
Not all of the Bowie at the Beeb stuff is brilliant, as with many such warts-and-all collections, but much of it is quite fine indeed. I prefer the treatment here, from a 1970 radio session introduced by John Peel, to the version of Unwashed that actually made it onto the Space Oddity album. Bowie wrote on a 12-string guitar during this period, and it's all over this tune, frantically scrubbed with some latter-day Bo Diddley-style syncopation and some wailing harmonica thrown in on top.

Things start out very mellow and singer-songwriterly, with sensitive chords and melancholy modality, but sooner or later the Bo-Diddley-on-downers bit comes along to rock things up a bit. When the band kick in on the album version things lift a bit but much of the song's appeal is lost; this "live-in-the-studio" version isn't as big or bold in sound but packs a much better punch, and the very playful and surreal Dylanesque lyrics come across a lot better ("phallus in pigtails" indeed). It's more fun, quite simply, and you don't feel that the singer is being swamped by big horns and rock production as he is on the studio version. In general, I have to say I prefer the Bowie at the Beeb versions of songs that ended up on Space Oddity, which I always thought was an album full of interesting songs ill-served by production.

Cat People - (Single version) - Cat People OST
Co-written with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder... I've always thought it was a shame these two didn't collaborate more. Suppose Bowie had teamed up with Moroder a few years before, when he'd started to get all European on us, instead of Brian Eno? I mean, Moroder did just as much for electronica in popular music as those Kraftwerk fellas that Bowie and Eno used to pal around with in the Berlin days. Though this alternate-reality reverie also conjures up the unlikely and disturbing image of Ol' Traffic Light Eyes crooning Love To Love You Baby...

But I digress. Apparently the backing track was all ready and Bowie just came along, wrote some lyrics and sang over the top of it. But that's a bit like saying Homer found some words, strung them together in the right order and came up with The Iliad. This is really a striking piece of work and both parties involved should take pride in it.

Cat People came not long after the Scary Monsters album and sounds way more focussed and nasty, as though all the frustration and confusion on that album were channelled into a single track. But Bowie doesn't sound confused here at all. He sounds quite certain of one thing: unremitting despair. Cat People is put together with a finely honed sense of dynamics and drama, starting very cinematically with cheap rhythm box and synth, DB putting on his biggest, most cavernous sounding baritone croon, and when he first brings in the "Putting out fire -- with gasoline" refrain it stops you in your tracks. With a few changes, this could have been a track off Station To Station except that album was more oblique, detached and druggy; here there is no doubt about it: "it's not the side effects of the cocaine, things actually are pretty fucked..."

It's a pity that after this, he produced little memorable work for the rest of the 80s. The version of this on Let's Dance isn't bad, with those punchy, gated sounding drums and slinky blues guitar from Stevie Ray Vaughan, but this record is an absolute monster, a hard one to beat, and something of a beacon in what turned out to be a bad creative period for our hero.

It's Number One, It's...

2006-07-29T10:53:00.001+01:00

Paul Weller wearing an apron. John Peel complimenting the singer of Kajagoogoo on his "nice hat". John Lydon handing some kid in the audience a violin. Iron Maiden getting to play live when everyone else had to mime. Mark. E. Smith guesting with the Inspiral Carpets-uh and reading the lyrics-uh off a sheet of paper. The Clash, conspicuous by their absence. Judy Tzuke's lead guitarist and his extremely NSFW guitar, festooned with erotic art. Ian Anderson in possession of an unlicensed flute, with intent to cause grevious bodily harm. Hot Gossip (i.e. Sarah Brightman keeping her mouth shut). Chas, Dave and an entire orchestra wearing Doc Martens. Pan's People. (Pan's People? God I'm old.) The Sensational Alex Harvey Band doing "Boston Tea Party". The Rezillos. The Orb playing chess. Finbar Furey with his finger in his ear and his eyes clenched shut singing Sweet Sixteen. St. Winifred's School Choir. Kate Bush. Terry and Arfur doing What Are We Gonna Get For Christmas (For 'Er Indoors). Jimmy Savile OBE (surely this man is the son of God). Jonathan King - may he rot in hell. Whole Lotta Love by Alexis Korner's CCS (via Zeppelin). Foster and Allen in green lamé leprechaun suits doing A Bunch Of Thyme (Their manager - this is true - tried to pass them off as "New Romantics"). Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. Keef shaking his head like a Beatle and cracking the rest of the Stones up doing I Wanna Be Your Man. Legs and Co. (Mmmm. Legs and Co.) Tubeway Army spending an entire summer at the top. Bob Geldof playing a candelabra on "Rat Trap" (union wouldn't let him use a sax, y'see). Morrissey swinging flowers around the place. Madness doing The Prince. Tammy Wynette with the KLF and that improbably pneumatic dancer (the cameraman definitely liked her; most cleavage close-ups ever). Mike Skinner of The Streets being indiscreet about a particular female pop-singer. The Timelords and That Police Car. Mud doing Tiger Feet. The Faces kicking footballs around while John Peel "played" mandolin. Yellow Peril by Phil Lynott.

As of tomorrow, Top Of The Pops will be no more. I actually watched it not too long ago. Was it good? Was it bad? That doesn't matter, it was Top of the Pops, wasn't it?

Hibernian Squalour #5,468, or, Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea

2006-07-16T15:00:00.000+01:00

So the sun is spilling down, splitting the rocks and sending us all out to the nearest beach-al area, there to sit around until our complexions turn beet-red. In a week or two, things will be back to normal and we can pretend it’s always been raining for as long as we can remember, except for that nice heatwave back in '98. In five or six years perhaps we’ll finally accept the spell of nice weather in ‘06. Until then, there are icecreams to eat, trouser-legs to be rolled up, and sun-cream to splather on our faces, limbs and delicate bits.

I used to swim in the sea practically every day, first thing in the morning, rain or shine. I say “practically” every day because, in fact, I abstained during the months with BRR in them. Well, September and half of October were okay, before “the turn”, as the hardcore swimmers used to call the time when the water temperature suddenly dropped a few degrees. Not many degrees, but just enough to make the difference between Refreshing and Bollock-shrivelling.

Being beside the seaside is always a balm to the soul, whether you dunk yourself or not. There is the refreshing sea air, full of negative-ion goodness, guaranteed to lift your mood. The riot of life, plants and birds and small skittering things, a tableau of nature on the march, a daily reminder of the large portion of the planet that simply gets on with things and (thankfully) doesn’t particularly give a damn about you.

Getting in there is a bonus though, striding out to about knee-height and just throwing yourself in. There’s always the preparation bit, where you get goosebumps and start wondering if it isn’t maybe a little too cold. But once you’re in, you’re in, and you wonder why you ever doubted. Breasting the waves, slithering down under like a fish with your eyes open, checking out the happenings in the benthic community. (Benthic is from the Greek, means “of the sea bed”.)

Who cares if you’re not Olympic material? That isn’t the point. You’re in there and you're moving around. Do it for a few weeks and your back will feel better, your limbs not so stiff, and your complexion will glow. Swimming in the bay, if you have a bay, is a highly recommended pursuit, good for what ails you.

For a few years the bay was simply too filthy to swim in though. Blame the recent population growth, the high rate of conspicuous consumption, whatever. Since they built the sewage treatment plant, things are better, though it looks like they’re going to need another one soon, what with all the Celtic Tiger cubs needing somewhere to send all their poo, etc.

I still like going for a dunk, even if it’s not a particularly nice day. It’s one of those things: even if you’re not in the mood for it, after you’ve done it you’ll be glad you did. Of course the high summer is the most opportune time, with plenty of sun and the tides at their peak. Plenty of people around, so the ideal time is when there aren’t so many people that you’ll fear for your clothes and possessions left piled up on a rock, but not so few that you feel like a complete antisocial bastard.

There is another great advantage to having a few people around. The more people there are in the water, swimming and paddling and thrashing about, the less likely it is that you’re going to meet a jellyfish.

I have a major bee in my bonnet about these jellyfish. Spotting one in the middle of the swim is often enough to make me turn around and head back in for the towel and tobacco.

Jellyfish are, of course, very aesthetically appealing, as desktop backgrounds or screensavers for instance, and look very pretty when you’re watching them bob around on your TV, but in real life the bastards sting. Now the quality of the sting varies from Mildly Annoying For an Hour or Two to Making You Feel Like Someone’s Spiked Your Fanta. The worst I ever had made me feel like I’d pulled a muscle in my leg for about a day, but it was enough to put me off the buggers.

So there I was yesterday, happily ploughing along through the calm waters at low tide, when I spotted one. Turned around and then spotted another.

Bastards.

But it was such a beautiful day. Perfect for a swim. They weren’t going to put me off this time, no way. So I just went in to a safely shallow bit and started marking off my territory. Thrashing and kicking and stomping. They started moving away.

So I stayed there for a bit, free of marine invertebrate molestation. Grumbling a bit, not wanting to swim too far out in case I came across one. But not wanting to let the bastards win anyway. For now, I’m content with a minor victory.

Victory? It’s no more than a squabble with your neighbour about the apples that fall on his side. The jellyfish, after all, don’t come up to swimmers with the express intent of chomping on them (with accompanying Jaws soundtrack). They’re like the old tramp who gets upset when someone sits on his bench, or the guy who parks in the same public space every morning, or the kids who come to the playground every day and feel it belongs to them. No more than my thrashing and kicking and water-agitating, they’re marking off their territory.

Besides, creeping middle-aged-hippie-ism compels me to try and see the other side. Of course there’s more of them, the bay is clean again, after all - that’s why there are more people swimming in it, yes?

Call it peaceful co-existence then. At least, it had better be. Next time, I’m bringing a couple of heavy rocks just in case.

Further aiding me in the achievement of balanced, reasoned perspective on the jellyfish issue was the arrival of two foreign gents, denizens of a neighbouring island, who were happily strolling along nearby when one of them pointed out a big trunk of dried-up kelp. They started moving away rapidly, and from their talk it became clear that they were afraid it was a poisonous snake of some kind.

O-kay...

So much to answer for...

2002-12-16T10:24:00.002Z

I finally saw 24 Hour Party People last night. It was good fun and I especially enjoyed seeing Steve Coogan playing the part of Tony Wilson (he also plays the part of God, but Tony Wilson doesn't need quite so much makeup). If you didn't know better, you'd swear Coogan had made Tony Wilson up himself. A lot of myth and legend abounds about the growth of Manchester's alternative music scene, but if this movie had a message, it would probably be something like "truth really is stranger than fiction".

Needless to say, a lot of history was necessarily telescoped in order to fit into a movie, and a few tweaks given to the corpus of truth, but the story of Manchester's music scene from the seventies to the early nineties is told well and with flair. Plus, a few real Manc musos turn up in the course of the movie - Mark E Smith, Howard Devoto, Vini Reilly and Paul Ryder among others.

Much is made of the importance of Joy Division in the early days, and that band would have made for a movie in itself, but the great A Certain Ratio are fobbed off with a few jokes about scout uniforms and fake tans. It's a pity, because ACR had a lot to do with galvanising Manchester's early dance scene. They blurred genre (and racial) distinctions, mixing up garage punk, funk, and Latin music long before Talking Heads cashed in on a very similar strategy. If not for A Certain Ratio, Manchester music may well have remained in its industrial ghetto (and there probably wouldn't have been a Remain in Light, come to think of it). You could even go so far as to say there wouldn't have been a Happy Mondays without them.

Tony (or, if you will, Anthony) Wilson has been variously described as a charlatan, a genius, a mug, a poseur, a visionary, a bumbling dilletante, a Machiavellian manipulator, a postmodernist before postmodernism became cool, and a pretentious git - the Malcolm McLaren of Manchester. Coogan's portrayal manages to get all of this in to great comic effect, as well as hinting at greater complexity in the man's personality - he quotes Boethius and Yeats, goes out with Miss UK, and wishes the rest of the world would wake the fuck up.

Anyway, what I liked most about the movie was the way it refused to mythologise or sentimentalise. What happened happened, for better or worse. The people involved are historical figures now, but they were still ordinary folk prone to the usual foibles, and all the warts are on show here along with the wonders. There's a healthy irreverence at the heart of the movie, as well as plenty of dry Mancunian wit.

And would you believe, not a single mention of The Smiths or even The Stone Roses. Or even Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds. Because they weren't on Factory records, you see.

And when is the Durutti Column going to get that much needed revival?