Why You Mustn't Miss David Bowie - Five Years on BBC2 on 25 May

On the day that YouTube reinstated the blocked video for David Bowie’s latest single, I was at the Victoria & Albert Museum watching a remarkable new feature-length documentary on David Bowie to be screened on BBC2 this weekend.  Sitting amongst such vintage hacks as NME’s Charles Shaar Murray and Michael Watts and esteemed directors like Nicolas Roeg and video guru David Mallet, I assumed I’d see yet another profile of Bowie’s 50 years in music marking 30 years since The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and I thought I’d seen it all before.  

But producer/director Francis Whately’s David Bowie – Five Years is an insightful, focused and often amusing documentary showing a surprising amount of unseen footage, with fresh, entertaining commentary by the people who were at the centre of crucial creations across different Bowie epochs.  Whately chose to focus on five significant years in Bowie’s career: 1971/72, 74/75, 76/77, 79/80, 82/83. When introducing the film, he said that many people would argue that there were more important years that he should have chosen, to which he responded that they were welcome to make their own films.  They surely wouldn’t be as intriguing or surprising. This was bursting with ‘imagine that!’ moments, with remarkable, newly discovered archive footage, brilliant insight from key players, truly imaginative editing, stunning colours that pop off the screen and, of course, sensational sound.  

The sound matters greatly as the film is bursting with excellent Bowie music, and not just the usual hits. You watch as Bowie painstakingly constructs compositions, for instance, teaching a young Luther Vandross and other backing singers precisely how he wants his soulful song “Right” from Young Americans to be arranged.  Cuddly guitarist Carlos Alomar, singer Ava Cherry, and Alomar’s wife, the ageless Robin Clark (The Voice on Simple Minds hits like “Alive and Kicking”) marvel at his method, how he would coach them until they understood the puzzle he had pieced together.

The film is full of craftsmen marvelling at Bowie’s genius for this craft.  Rick Wakeman, who played piano on Life on Mars, talks us through Bowie’s unexpected chord change.  He seems charmed with the piece as he plays it for the first time in 40 years, and I am moved by the beauty of a piano piece that I might attribute to an 18^th century composer if I heard It on Classic FM.  Even Wakeman stops and stares at the keys with admiration before pronouncing the song a piano player’s dream. ‘I must go home and learn it.’ 

With Life on Mars, we delight in the privilege of seeing Bowie’s façade slip for a moment with a grimace as flubs the lip sync for a video of the song. It’s jolting as the convincing performance sucks the viewer into believing in the painted otherworldly creature recounting this alienating, frightening tale, but he suddenly drops that mask with a sneer at his human error. In another scene, we see him painting on the mask before his assistant helps him step into his freaky one-legged onesie.  In a later photo shoot of quite a different look, we watch him pretending to rock out like Gene Vincent like any boy with a toy guitar.

There are plenty of reminders that Bowie was all about image even before he lived up to it—or before most of us knew that he lived up to it. We see Bowie on stage rocking a version of “Suffragette City” fit for a stadium,  then a close-up  of a girl up front screaming hysterically at the rock god before her. But when the camera angle changes, you realise there are only three people in the audience, though at least they are dancing.  The screaming fan is his wife Angie, perhaps trying to force feed her feigned hysteria to the world so it comes to accept his icon status.  We catch on eventually,   and meanwhile Bowie delivers performances fit for the screaming masses, though crucially he has the sense always to leave them wanting more.

We hear from numerous collaborators, even Robert Fripp, who Whately pointed out rarely gave interviews but was apparently so calmed by the researcher who interviewed him that he later braved an appearance on All Star Mr and Mrs with wife Toyah Wilcox. Sitting quietly, looking every bit the tie-wearing accountant he once was (and rather like actor/producer Bob Balaban), his quirky use of colourful language is given more impact as it emerges from such a deceptively prim looking character. 

The difference between pop guitar and rock guitar, he explains, is that “You might get f**d”. Pause. “Can you put that or should I express it in alternative terminology?” As Bowie explains the thinking behind the lemming dance in the “Fashion” video, Fripp dryly mocks its lyrics. He also declares that anyone who plays “Beauty and the Beast” gets erections, making porn of the clip that follows of Alomar beaming with his eyes closed as plays it. 

Of course, that’s nothing compared to the long scene with Mick Ronson on stage performing “Moonage Daydream” with Bowie miming acts that make me want to avert my eyes even though I’m over 18. That must have been even more shocking at the time, but Bowie was never shy…. despite a young Spitting Image-like Janet Street-Porter demanding (in an ‘I worship you so let me help you deal with that issue’ way) that he admit to being shy, which he sweetly and patiently dismisses before calmly pointing out that he had a show to do.  He strolls straight onto the stage and stands in darkness in front of a roaring crowd as the band strikes up “Heroes”; the excitement is tangible, and I want to be there.  He has become the rock god Angie was screaming about.  More than three people are there now.    

Co-producer Tony Visconti tells us of an extra contribution he made to Heroes, as the lyric about kissing by the wall and guns was written after Bowie saw him and singer Antonia Maas snogging by the Berlin wall, which at the time was lined with armed East German soldiers (where, weirdly, we see a clip of the wall with what looks like Brian Eno’s cat nearby, but more on that later). Visconti tells us how he was brought on board by appealing to Eno and Bowie’s love of new gadgets (Bowie even bringing in some demos at one stage on a newfangled Walkman thingie), as Visconti told them he had a new thing called the Harmoniser, which “f**cks with the fabric of time” like Science Fiction.  We hear Bowie praise Eno’s expert use of three takes of Fripp’s emotive guitar to give “Heroes” its amazing sound, when it could have turned into a mess.

Heroes is the second album of Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, after the experimental and less adored Low.  Brian Eno,  with a pained look behind his eyes, tells us that some critics who wrote about Low really needed to get a proper job.  Cut to a shot of Charles Shaar Murray, a veteran music journalist who I always think looks like a melting Ian Dury, reading a scathing review from a faded old broadsheet NME: ‘’It stinks of artfully counterfeited spiritual defeated futility….We’re low enough already, David. Give us a high, or else just swap tapes with Eno by post….’ He turns to the camera with a mischievously defiant smile. ‘Yeah, that’s what I wrote’. 

The presence of the likes of Murray in the film, never mind in the room with us, ensured that this was no Bowie gush fest.  In fact, although several people in the film marvel over Bowie’s genius, it was generally bemused collaborators who had been amazed by his unusual way of constructing an arrangement and his focused method for delivering his vision.  Musicians, producers, a couple of useful cultural historians adding context to Bowie’s choices and fame—the only people given a voice in this film have something insightful to offer us, usually observed first hand.  Whately, clearly a fan himself, wasted no time on a the Channel 4 style of retrospective full of unknown talking heads too young to remember the subject at hand, whose view we care nothing about.  These contributors all have something to say that we want to hear.

The Modern Bowie is not actually one of the talking heads, but he is omnipresent. We observe him through enlightening clips while quotes are artistically draped over the screen. His voice leads us through it all, sometimes with the proliferation of promotional soundbytes Bowie designed himself over years of spouting wisdom and philosophies, sometimes sharing brutal feelings such as when he was ‘psychically damaged’, coming close several times to overdosing. The film is effectively narrated by Bowie, linking the gripping interviews from people who matter as they explain in layman’s terms how his masterpieces—and misses—were created.

Mind you, not everything Bowie and his producers tried worked.  When discussing Brian Eno’s methods in the studio when working on Low, drummer Dennis Davis wearily conveys his resistance when Eno brought a blackboard into the studio as though they were in elementary school.  Carlos  Alomar, wonderfully frank, fun and someone you wish you were buddies with, tells the same story through bubbly smiles as he recalls having to play random chords as Eno pointed to them on the blackboard, before finally saying, ‘Dude, this isn’t working for me, man.’  With his optimist’s spin, he concedes that the unusual technique took him out of his comfort zone and taught him to see things from a different point of view.  ‘I didn’t like that point of view,’ he adds ‘but when I came back, I was fresh.’

Eno admits that he didn’t understand how good musicians worked since he wasn’t a musician himself in that sense.  That follows an art-house style would-be outtake that’s delightfully kept in, where Eno is seen to shoo his gorgeous cat up a splendid spiral staircase presumably to avoid any distractions or continuity issues during the interview.  Eno is sufficiently interesting that you still listen to him when his cat sneaks back into the shot, and it’s fun to play a sort of Where’s Wally called Where’s Eno’s Cat, even in gritty landscapes as an identical cat is spotted by the Berlin Wall. (Why did Eno shoo the cat with sweeping gestures rather than pick it up and move it, I wonder, imagining that the adorable Persian fluffball is actually vicious like the Python Holy Grail cave rabbit.)

Around this period, we hear Bowie speaking of freedom after downsizing to a wardrobe of just jeans and checked shirts (I gladly missed his bluegrass lumberjack phase).  He turned to David Mallett to create his music videos, although Bowie often storyboarded them himself—and we see him drawing them.  Mallet is a fan of checked shirts himself, appearing in a flannel plaid shirt in the film as well as in the audience, wearing it under a jacket as though it were a Brooks Brothers pinstripe.  It makes me think that if I were truly creative, I would have such a gimmick, and maybe my conservative dress is why I’m not yet a creative success.

Mallet, a video guru in those early days of MTV, was also a producer/originator of The Kenny Everett Video Show, on which Bowie and numerous other impressive guests appeared.  He talks about the “Space Oddity” video being cobbled together quickly [I’m also a big fan of Cmdr Chris Hadfield’s genuine Space Oddity video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo ].  He talks of Bowie wanting to be on a beach with a clown and a digger on the “Ashes to Ashes” video, which includes a cast of Blitz club regulars like Steve Strange and Boy George, so he sees Bowie as a precursor to the Modern Romantic movement. Watching Bowie’s skill on the storyboard for what he thought was one of his better songs demonstrates that he is an all-round artist not just clever at creating music, which is perhaps why he disliked being limited by the ‘rock star’ tag, and why he carefully honed various looks and personas.  An artist—a creator, a writer, an actor—is all about creating rounded characters.

He is, of course, an actor as well, more than I realised.  I knew he often seemed to linger in the background of films as a vampire and flitted about the disappointing Absolute Beginners,  and I had hazy memories of seeing the Man Who Fell To Earth on late night Cinemax as a young child.  I was surprised to learn that he played the title role on Broadway in The Elephant Man in 1979.  Better yet, the film shows long clips of him on stage in that role, twisting his body in a warped way to convey the essence of the character without prosthetics. His Joseph Merrick has romantic views about Shakespeare, and we hear from Jack Hofsiss, whose direction of the play won him a Tony, the youngest director to have done so then.  Having later injured his spinal cord in a diving accident, he speaks in the film through a damaged voice, full of praise for Bowie the Actor.

I was seated behind the director of the Man Who Fell to Earth (along with amazing suspense classic Don’t Look Now), Nicolas Roeg. Boldly bearing scarves as one expects a director to, I watched two visions of him in the polka dot scarf before me, watching himself with clasped hands and no visible reaction.  The on-screen Roeg speaks of seeing in Bowie a man who wasn’t frightened to ruin his image, whom he spotted in Alan Yentob’s 1974 BBC documentary Cracked Actor when it was time to cast the lead alien. We see a clip from that documentary, with Bowie in the back of a limo putting in an Aretha Franklin eight-track tape and singing “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman” before spouting philosophy about the fly in his milk that he proceeds to drink.  Bowie’s Earth co-star, the now 65-year-old Candy Clark, says he looked naturally like someone from another planet so few changes needed to be made.  “He’s wrong when he says he’s expressionless” she says in praise of his acting skills.

Dick Cavett concludes that Bowie is an actor in character when he appears on his show in America, watching the tie-wearing pink-haired Bowie paw at the floor with his cane, a man he had been warned might  just bite his neck.  Bowie was rather scarier perhaps than Barbra Streisand, Maria Muldaur or similar pop stars of the day, but he delivered a fantastic “Young Americans” before covering The Flares’ “Footstompin”, which sounded oddly familiar. We learn how Bowie took Alomar’s infectious guitar riff on the latter and transformed it into “Fame” by cutting the song up into a blues format.  Bowie explains that co-writer John Lennon came to that session and joined in.  “Lennon sang ‘aim’ and I put an ‘F’ in front of it”.   Fimagine that. 

Astonishingly, we also see Bowie performing on Soul Train, a show WASPs like me never watched as it was seen as “the black American Bandstand”, with shows beginning with guests unscrambling letters to spell a notable figure in African American history. So why would Bowie be on it?  The clue must be in the name.  Yet the next clip we see has Bowie talking about how he was influenced by Kraftwerk, and we move away from soul to Station to Station. The man journeyed through more genres than I remembered.

On the other side of the pond, we see part of a supremely awkward Russell Harty interview via a satellite link (as Bowie is “in retirement” from the pop world in 1975), where Bowie comes across as the smoother professional. Harty blunders through the name of the song so that Bowie has to introduce it himself (pronouncing his own name to rhyme with “Joey”, incidentally).  He  also patiently corrects Harty when he introduces his film as ‘The Man who Came to Earth.’  [We don’t see the whole slow sticky exchange, during which Harty suggests that Bowie may have no audience to come back to because everyone in England now worshiped the Bay City Rollers, and why come back if he’s not that good a musician? It’s on YouTube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCVyt9saPM . Maybe this is the real reason Grace Jones smacked Harty in the face years later.]

From the clip we see of Bowie arriving back in London at Victoria station surrounded by adoring crowds as though he were the Queen, Bowie needn’t have worried.   We see him develop in the film from the captivating glam rock figure in those embarrassingly awful one-legged knitted onesies (a close-up of his crotch shows that crochet does not flatter) to the breathtakingly glamorous blonde be-suited Let’s Dance era MTV God.  I recall that it was that persona that made me snatch up tickets when he came to my college town, only to be subjected to the dire Glass Spider tour with no hits until the very end, long after most people had given up and left despite Peter Frampton’s presence on guitar. The mood was not helped by Bowie pretending to pull a local girl onto the stage who danced far too well because, it transpired, she was Toni Basil.  But this film reminds me that Bowie is fascinating to watch and has incredible presence, something that should have been indelibly etched on my brain. 

This highly successful Let’s Dance era Bowie, who we know with our hindsight deserves the EMI party we see thrown for him at Claridges, follows the unusual step of hiring producer Nile Rodgers (Chic, Sister Sledge), who met him when Billy Idol pointed out Bowie sitting alone in a club.  Bowie wanted hits, and Rodgers was a hitmaker.   Rodgers refers to the ominous folk overtones of Bowie’s 12-string guitar (with only six strings) before he found that Bowie was jazzy and cool. But he had

concerns.  “If I don’t make a record that makes people want to dance, and we call the song Let’s Dance,  I’m gonna have to trade in my black union card.” He plays the intro he developed for “China Girl” and tells of his relief when Bowie recognised its comedic value (which had been lost on philistine me), and with these videos, MTV gave his career another life.  We’re reminded how stunningly beautiful Bowie looked then, once his teeth eventually become as slick as the rest of him. In his own words, Bowie suddenly wasn’t a cult artist anymore; he was playing stadiums.

It’s a long way from the period at the start of the film, when young Bowie was desperate to make an impression on a bored, wigless Andy Warhol, who does not welcome Bowie into his enclave after having hurt him by saying that Bowie’s tribute song to him was the worst thing he had ever heard. After long shots of Bowie looking like a child longing to join in the game, we are treated to a bewilderingly thin Bowie miming his own disembowelment, almost too graphically, before (miming) ripping his heart out and setting it free.  And following his heart, continuing to find his own way worked out rather well for him.

Francis Whately clearly adored crafting a film about a subject he was evidently passionate about, after meeting Bowie in 2001 when he approached several of his heroes in search of a presenter for a show about sculpture, and the first response was a phone call from Bowie.  Like Bowie, he surrounds himself with the very best talents, resulting in an outstandingly edited, aesthetically arresting and absorbing film with eye-popping colour, which uses clever devices throughout but happily shuns the inexplicably trendy irritating gimmicks of showing close-ups of speakers’ nostrils filmed by a drunken gibbon on skates.  This film artfully focuses without distractions on the world of Bowie during these five years, naturally playing plenty of music  through gorgeous sound. It reminds you of the joy to be had by playing those old Bowie records that you lost touch with or thought you were bored of, and you may want to explore the tracks you previously neglected. This is not just a rehash of everything you know. This is special.  Don’t miss it.

Afterwards, at the V&A, just like in the old days at the pictures, everyone applauded the superb film.  Some of us retired to a pub, where Charles Shaar Murray berated a BBC production coordinator for saying “Jay-Zed”, explaining “You wouldn’t say Zed Zed Top!” and Bowie’s PR disagreed with the genius behind the film’s sound mastering, Patrick Cleasby, about which was Morrissey’s best solo album.  There, I learned that the international version of this priceless film will have to be cut substantially in length, which seems a crime.  So acknowledge your privilege in seeing the Director’s Cut while you can…..and for free.

David Bowie – Five Years will be shown on BBC2 at 9.20pm on Saturday, 25^th May 2013.

The film will be followed at 10.50pm by a showing of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. The ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition, featuring handwritten lyrics, original costumes, videos, set designs and Bowie’s musical instruments, continues at the Victoria & Albert Museum until 11 August 2013.

 

Messing with Thatcher's Equipment

(I intended to post this on the day of the funeral, but was hampered by technical difficulties.  However, as Radio 4 has Charles Moore's biography of Thatcher as its book of the week, accidentally hearing it each day has reminded me of this abandoned post, so I thought I would post it anyway.)

I try to keep my life relatively anonymous here. I don't want an online presence in case, say, I ever take a job as a Youth Police Commissioner. Although writing about things I have encountered in my working life might be more interesting, it would be unprofessional.  But Margaret Thatcher's funeral turned my mind first to my original trip to London as I 'researched' a report on her for a US high school class, and then to a time years later when she was on my radar through my job at the time, when I messed with her equipment. Purely accidentally, of course, and that's no euphemism. Since I'm no longer doing that job, I thought I might on this one occasion refer to it in vague terms (although it's not too challenging to decipher) and share a story that I recounted in the speech I made at my main leaving party when I was made redundant decades later (owing to substantial government cuts. But no, I was not a civil servant.)

My first thoughts about Thatcher took me back to my very first trip to the UK when I was 15. I had always been a bit of an Anglophile, and since MTV had arrived in the States a few months before in 1981, my mind was focused on the exciting, new mysterious world of New Wave music and the incredible looking and sounding artists largely coming out of the UK when the US seemed stuck on disco.

Within hours of settling into the Kensington Close Hotel, I walked into the tiny Our Price Records on Kensington High Street and, in true teen spirit, blew most of my budget for the whole trip on these artists who were unheard of in the States, other than on the then obscure video channel that I watched religiously: Split Enz (my favourites-Kiwis, but London had albums that were unavailable at home), Human League (Don't You Want Me had been number one in the UK a few months before and I adored the video and, inexplicably now, envied the haircuts of the women in it), Haircut 100 ('aren't they all cute in their sweaters!'), Madness, the Specials and many others, all when they were fresh and apparently innovative. 

I remember how we American students queued patiently to pay and then suspected we were nearly the victims of some Limey scam when we realised that the album sleeves were empty, then figured out we traded them for the real thing at the counter. I handed over most of my money to Our Price and Miss Selfridge, where I bought trendy London make-up and clothes (nearly including brightly coloured and patterned stockings that would have been useless had a dear saleswoman not rightly assumed that I had thought they were tights. It didn't occur to Americans that anyone would still stock stockings. That meant that, other than the thankfully pre-paid but dreary boiled-meat dinners at our hotels, I was forced to survive for the duration of the trip on the Crunchie Bars that I had promised to take back to a school friend who never got them and never forgave me.

I had come over with a friend's school but was expected to deliver on my return a progress report on then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to my European Studies class, which was full of gorgeous high school seniors on the soccer team, so I couldn't bomb. Most of my time in the UK was taken up visiting all the tourist haunts, and certainly London was too lively to see me heading for the British Library to do research. Plus we were at the theatre every night, seeing Evita! with the late Stephanie Lawrence, Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor (sitting so close to that screen legend, I could see her stunning violet eyes), something at the Royal Court that baffled us as we didn't know what an MP was, particularly when said in an accent that, at the time, was indecipherable to us (horribly, customs stole all the theatre programmes that I had posted home so I can't re-evaluate the play with hindsight) and other joys.

So my research for my Thatcher report comprised a slight nod to the giant banner on the old GLC building (County Hall) referring to two million unemployed, occasionally listening with fascination to the rowdy and confrontational Parliament sessions on the radio news, and buying newspapers with Thatcher on the front page, planning to read them later. I befriended a marvellous old ex-policeman who worked at reception at the hotel, who one day sat with me and explained that I was reading all the wrong papers and steered me toward something more suitable. I wouldn't have bought a tabloid so I think I was buying the Daily Torygraph and he pointed me in the direction of more balanced, respectable papers. Thirty-one years on, I remember the joy of chats with that delightful man who took the time to try to educate me, more than I remember the content of his lessons. But I took his advice and got an excellent grade on my paper and presentation. I vaguely recall that it was a glowing report of how Thatcher was doing (things were not quite so angry yet). Some of the cute senior jocks praised me for going all the way to England to research my project, which at the time was pretty up-to-the-minute given that most pre-internet research relied on old microfiched periodicals and dated encyclopaedias.

Perhaps that distant experience made me predisposed to be, at most, apathetic towards Thatcher. Plus I had to admire a strong woman in a top post in what appeared to me to be a country completely untouched by the women's liberation movement that had hit the States with gusto a decade earlier.  But honestly, that was probably the last time I gave her a thought.

When I next saw her, I barely looked at her, although she gave a lengthy speech.  I ended up in a job back in London seven years later, aged 22 and fresh off the plane from America.  I had spent more time in the UK in between but I found the business language more of a barrier than I had experienced as a visitor, as I couldn't even recognise the weird English hole punches when people asked me to hand them one. I entered a strongly ceremonial world that was baffling, learned the important things quickly, yet still bumbled about a bit in my naivety, in a heady cloud.

It was an amazing new world to a foreigner, and early on, I worked on an event that involved giving the Freedom of that city to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.  My main job on the day was to seat on the dais most of the Cabinet, and because the seating plan unhelpfully gave titles eg 'Home Secretary' instead of names, I had to learn who was in what post. There were no Wikipedia iPhone apps then so I had studied Whitaker's Almanac on the way into work, and then went up to people like Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine and asked their names, although others, like Douglas Hurd, I recognised from their Spitting Image puppets. That show proved to be a useful resource to me in those early days. I was also charged at that event with seating the Archbishop of Canterbury if the Prime Minister didn't take care of that. I kept an eye out for him and I did see Margaret Thatcher coming towards me with a sweet little old man beside her, but I paid him no notice because I had to keep my eyes peeled for a man in a tall pointy purple hat. But it turns out they don't always dress like that!

This event in particular always makes me feel a bit guilty. Gorbachev made a speech in Russian, which we all heard in English as an interpretation was fed through headphones we were all wearing, Sony Walkman-like gadgets that had been placed on everyone's seats. The Prime Minister then replied, but her response bore little relation to anything that Gorby had said, almost as though she had been paying little attention to his speech.

....Here's the thing.  I had to put programmes on all the seats before the event, placing them under this then high tech audio equipment, and when I did the Prime Minister's chair, her audio kit went clattering to the stony floor of that ancient hall. But there was no one around to tell, and I was a shy, scared temp, and it looked like it survived the fall okay. But I've always worried that the reason Thatcher's speech, which followed Gorbachev's, didn't address any of the issues that he had raised was because maybe she didn't hear a word of it because of me, and maybe, for all I know, Margaret Thatcher had Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon piped in through her headphones instead. I just felt it was time now to apologise for what I might have done.

Since her death, I have been watching the tributes and condemnations of Margaret Thatcher with bemusement. Had I not been working, I might have watched part of the funeral with interest as the music and sense of occasion would have no doubt impressed me, and I often hope for soothing words from the clergy at funerals in case they finally provide the key to comforting me about my own losses. But I have been a bit baffled by the passion of the long-standing hatred people still hurl in Thatcher's direction, particularly as she no longer had any direction, and a quarter of a century has passed.

I don't begrudge people who felt they suffered in her reign this hatred. I do have trouble grasping the fortified, filthy living bitterness in people decades after she became a non-entity. Perhaps because my father taught me that bitterness is giving someone free rent inside your head, I don't value the concept. I'm particularly baffled when so many of the vitriol-fuelled protesters seem to be too young to have experienced Thatcher in any way, other than through some Legend of Sleepy Hollow story passed down to them by their parents or teachers. As a young child, I gladly wore the Impeach Nixon button that had been pinned to me before I knew much about anything, yet I felt no inclination to go out of my way years later to attend his funeral and shout insults at a corpse who couldn't hear me in front of the devastated newly orphaned children of the politician.

I might have tapped my foot to Elvis Costello's Tramp the Dirt Down in '89 with the same glee I had applied to spitting Pink Floyd's words 'Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone' despite being a teacher's pet and loving school. It is trendy when you're young to lash out at the establishment, and part of the joy of education is choosing to rebel.  Every generation challenges what has gone before and thinks they were the first to think of it.  It's fun to be angry young men and women, but most of us grow out of it.  You can still hate the politics, but why hate the person to such an extent that you dream of spitting on the corpse and singing silly songs from century old musicals to torment the ones who grieve? Those who make the effort to deny the mourners some peace remind me of eight-year-olds giggling as they practice newly learned curse words in front of the elderly, hoping to impress their peers with the clever shock value. I just think it's a bit pathetic to hurt people who are hurting. Gleefully celebrating someone's death by taking to the streets to shout 'Maggie Maggie Maggie Dead-dead- dead!' when her family is in pain is surely uncalled for unless you're living in some sci-fi scenario where an entire planet is suppressed by an evil big brother figure who has finally been conquered, thus freeing the world, or if you're a victim of Hitler. Perhaps I am a soppy lone voice on this, but is a bit of humanity and decorum so difficult to find in one's soul?

I never imagine anyone reads this blog but no one need leave comments explaining the horrors of Thatcher. I do understand, and I'm no superfan. My 1989 class assignment was the most positive comment I ever made about her, and these days, I'm apathetic as I long ago moved on from any feelings I had during her administration.  There have been several useless prime ministers since then and only one that affects my life in any way now, so I'll save any annoyance for the here and now.  It's still not productive but has a better chance of achieving something than aiming it at a person whose senses sadly left her some time ago, whose power left her decades ago, and whose life has left her now. I would also have to be intensely keen on something to brave the event crowds in Central London, and I can't imagine camping out for hours in the cold for a prime spot even for something fantastic, never mind just to turn my back when the moment everyone else is waiting for comes.  You have to be pretty committed to looking away to waste your time and energy so colossally. That lifeless body, a harmless old lady in the end, would be unaware of your gesture, so it could only hurt innocent people who, for instance, cared for their mum who was always in their world before.

I acknowledge that not everyone agrees, and I am glad that most people had the sense to bark before and not bite at the funeral itself. But as someone who suffered the shock of losing a parent (and more recently a grandmother to a sudden devastating stroke) and immediately felt like an astronaut whose line had been cut whilst doing a spacewalk, I can't watch anyone suffer without empathising. I know the full horror of sitting near a coffin in a church as it dawns on you that all that is left of this crucial lively towering giant who brought you life and led you carefully through it lies inside that wooden box like breadcrumbs in a breeze. I know how it feels to leave the church and know that is The End. I can't imagine wanting to bring even more pain to someone in that position at that moment. Presumably those people who hate Thatcher for being unfeeling can imagine her being thoroughly proud of how they behaved around her funeral.

My madly meandering reminiscences turned into an accidental rant. And I certainly didn't intend to attack people, many of whose views I might once have shared. There's just so much pain to be borne in life, I can't stand to see people needlessly pour more over people teetering on the edge of a newfound sudden void at a time when they are probably struggling just to stand upright and remember to eat. But my sole point of writing this was to reminiscence about my first exciting trip to London and to apologise into the ether once again for possibly damaging the then Mrs Thatcher's equipment and maybe making her hear Pink Floyd instead of Gorbachev.  I hate it when that happens.

PaJaMa Club at The Borderline – Saturday, 16 July

Last night was the premier UK gig of Neil Finn’s new project, PaJaMa Club, which you technically could call an ‘indie band’ whose other Members comprise his wife Sharon (hence the ‘pa’ and ‘ma’ reference—which wouldn’t work with the British spelling of jimjams) on bass, Sean Donnelly (also known as SJD, a solo performer and Don McGlashan collaborator) on keyboards and guitar, and Alana Skyring (formerly of Australian band The Grates) on drums.

Like everyone else, I was initially keen to go see the band because any Neil Finn performance is unmissable. That morning, however, I was slightly less enthusiastic when picturing queuing in a dreadful downpour outside the Borderline in order to get a decent spot. Particularly after listening to the beginning of the only PJC track available, From a Friend to a Friend (listen on http://www.reverbnation.com/pajamaclub), as frankly it initially did little for me, particularly with its minimalist vocals and wailing guitar effects. Upon arrival in Soho, my friend agreed that the music was a bit experimental, and that’s not usually a word that bodes as well for the paying public as it does for the experimenting artist.

Perhaps my wet wariness and doubt was useful in contributing to my being so pleasantly surprised by the concert. The music seemed heavily influenced by early 1980s and late ‘70s electronica, of which I have always been a fan. The band even slipped seamlessly from Suffer Never, one of only two songs from Neil’s past that they played (the other being his collaboration with Sharon on his 7 Worlds Collide project), into a delightful cover of Tubeway Army’s Are Friends Electric?, sung very much like Gary Numan would. One song’s influence sounded like an unexpected mix between Kraftwerk and The Waitresses. The fact that some excellent Talking Heads classics were playing as we waited in the club might also have been a hint that PJC were in similar minds or musical corners. There were still very catchy Neil Finn-style choruses to reward us as well, although impressively, this was clearly a distinct project, and the songs were not material that could have just as easily been on a Crowded House or Finn Brothers album.

The band itself was likeable and not just the backdrop behind Neil Finn’s star. Australian drummer Alana Skyring looked like a sweet, gentle, young, unassuming character practically in a sweater set who you might bump into at a church bake sale, not at all the tough rock musician sort one might expect. Perhaps that made me think of her and Auckland keyboardist Sean Donnelly (who donned a tea cosy on his head) like The Other Two from New Order. They fit in well; both were clearly lovely people who were very much part of the whole, not just backing musicians, and Donnelly often joined in with a bit of banter, not quite the quickfire wit exchanges with Neil that we are used to with past stage companions like brother Tim and Nick Seymour, but I’m sure it will develop. Overall, it left one with a fuzzy feeling that these were nice people on stage who happened to make great music for us.

As this was their first gig together in the UK, the four often shared endearing smiles when they were pleased with how each track had come together, although as the material was so new, the acutely attentive audience rarely knew when to applaud and often did so only after seeing Neil turn to the band and say ‘Yeah! That was good!’ which was our cue that we had missed our cue. Sharon seemed often to look to her husband for reassurance, which she always got, and he easily spoke of the pleasure in playing with his beautiful wife. For a great deal of the concert, her soft vocals were drowned out and I could only tell if she were singing by watching, but later she had a few solo or contrasting parts that helped her really stand out.

Whilst I have numerous detailed comments I want to make about the songs, the banter, and the entire experience, budget cuts that are making me redundant mean that Friday may be my last day of work at a place where I’ve spent half my life (about 20 years). What that means in terms of this concert (apart from it being an excellent ‘redundancy present’ from my friend Lesley) is that I don’t have the time now to write up a full review for my neglected website http://www.aboutlastnight.org.uk/ as I must focus on the work I’ve brought home, but that I will have plenty of time after next week (amidst sending off job applications!) to write up more fully this review and myriad others that have long been stored in my head and in scribbles on various notepads now languishing around the flat—including other Finn concerts. So watch that space….

For now, I just set out below the set list with a few quick comments [actually, they turned out much longer than expected]. The titles may be wrong, and the worst thing about the gig was that the album does not come out until September, which is a cruel wait. I had rather hoped they would be selling something on the tour, even an EP of the tunes, but there were only T-shirts, though you can purchase by download the Friend track (http://amzn.to/mP6Nqd).

1. Can’t Put It Down Until It Ends – Overly strong thumping bass drowned out the subtle vocals until Neil thankfully reach a part where he did a bit of belting out, which was grand. As he did several times during the gig, Neil played a small keyboard in front of him as well as electric guitar. Some vaguely Suffer Never style music with keyboard effects and an electric guitar solo stretched out at the end, and overall not the punchiest start to a gig, but then the excitement of seeing them for the first time was enough to wow the crowd. I imagine this song will be much stronger on the album and maybe first night nerves or shaky mixing weakened it, but the verses, full of weak ‘woo-oo’-ing, and instrumentation did little for me, though I may have been alone, considering its reception.

2. These Are Conditions – Fantastic song, with a sort of angry male chorus that reminded me of Heaven 17 and Human League in the early days when they were fascinating. Additional angry males were the crew, including one youngster from Te Awamutu who we’d watched tuning the guitars and folding and sellotaping the set lists before the gig and having to keep moving them as the audience began to scrutinise them. The middle drifted into a sea of dreamy effects that the band is prone to, but the song was the best of new wave meets enjoyable funk.

3. Dead Leg – The first song where Neil sang the verses in a more conventional way, albeit still competing with a fuzz guitar sound; I still couldn’t hear Sharon, and other ‘woo-ing’ backing vocals sounded slightly off key. It may have been the mixing, my position in the club (front stage right), or what they’re going for, but it seemed to be a mass of echo-y sounds that were fine, but not memorable, although the chorus was better. We clapped only after we watched Neil speak to the band about how it went—not because it wasn’t enjoyable, we just didn’t know the song inside out, which is probably refreshing.

4. Diamonds in Her Eyes - I’ve just realised that these points sound really critical when the gig was tremendously enjoyable overall. But when this song started, I found myself wincing repeatedly as it sounded as though Neil Finn and his band were singing a wonderful song in one room with thin walls but were being drowned out by awful drilling sounds as someone carried out works, but rather than drilling, it was someone playing Space Invaders or Asteroids unbelievably loudly. In other words, I thought the keyboard effects during the song should have been much more toned down or at least vaguely integrated with what was a bright, upbeat feel of a song. But again, maybe it was because I was closer to the keyboards, though given that I love electronica, I don’t think that’s the only excuse. I am certain I will love this song when it is eventually released. The lack of applause at the end was because no one realised they were moving straight from one unfamiliar song to another.

5. Go Kart – Terrific fun, with Sharon singing quite a bit on her own, though she was still hard to hear particularly over imposing guitars, but she seemed to be singing saucily ‘Are you ready for me?’, which the crowd loved. What I did hear reminded me pleasantly of the attitude of The Waitresses, and then Neil would kick in with an ultra-catchy chorus of ‘I saw you standing there’, with some synth and bass effects that reminded me of Kraftwerk and Translator. My friend Lesley thought it was a bit Split Enz meets Talking Heads. This song was definitely a high point, and I can’t wait to hear it when I can really hear it.

6. Golden Child – (After Neil decided the venue was familiar and asked if it was the place they played a few years ago—about 20 years ago, someone pointed out—and he apologised to friends he had told the Borderline was in Covent Garden). This started with Neil and Sharon singing in harmony throughout, with music that was finally peaceful enough for us actually to hear Sharon. Initially, some of the guitar notes (Sean and Neil were both on guitar) sounded so off key that I almost thought they would stop and start over—or as though the two guitarists were playing different tunes at once, but I’m starting to wonder if I was listening badly, or maybe I was hearing Cam(?) tuning the next guitar as he was near me…..At times, it reminded me of son Liam’s first hit, Second Chance. Sean joined in with pleasantly deep John Gorka-style vocals, and the audience really loved it.

7. TNT For 2 – Absolutely stunning song. Wonderful tune with Neil belting out excellent vocals throughout that had our toes tapping. He had moved to the keyboards by me (and did a great Doors-like keyboard solo) and Sean played guitar near Sharon. Brilliant and yet so different from any previous Finn fare. Much of the music was playfully slinky, then Neil and Sean’s deep vocals blended marvellously to create some Spanish-style handsome wailing with amazing integrity. Outstanding, and I hope they release this before September.

8. Suffer Never – The only real nod to the past; there was no Weather With You or Don’t Dream It’s Over tonight, which made sense. As a Tim Finn fan since my teens, I would never be able to say this was as good a rendition as the original Finn song, but it was wonderful. Neil beamed quite a bit at the audience and eventually I realised that he seemed to be making the night of some people who were photographing him, which was kind, though I’ve no doubt he was generally pleased with how the night was going. At the end of the track, Sean faultlessly synced in a synth riff that worked wonderfully and then turned into…..

9. Are Friends Electric? – My face was covered in smile. This was such a clever, seamless transition, a fantastically fun nod to the sort of music that was obviously a part of the PJC ethic, and I assumed they’d just treat us to a few lines and stop, but they performed the whole Tubeway Army tune, quite faithfully, with Neil singing like Gary Numan rather than delivering a Crowded House-style guitar-led version. Which might be neat some time, but this brought the house down.

10. Game We Love – A grinning Neil said ‘this is fun’ and looked as though he was about to banter, but Sean had started delivering mouth percussion (ie making drum sounds with his voice) to start the next song, which worryingly began a bit like Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, but quickly moved on to something very PJC, with more of a nod to Finn than other songs. It had a dreamy feel, heavy bass, wailing echo-y vocals. Neil stood looking half-naked without a guitar so nearly did a dad dance, and the song stopped suddenly, unfortunately to someone in the audience shouting ‘F—k off!’, which might have been a way of saying ‘I say, that was jolly good, chaps!’ Neil was clearly thrilled with how the song had gone, which was lovely. He then tested the popularity of various English towns by calling out ‘Grimsby!’ ‘Weston-Super-Mare’ (following on from some previous banter and his reference to how, on the Letterman show, you could shout out any tiny town’s name and someone in the audience from there would cheer). He marvelled that everywhere got cheers but Bath, oddly, got boos, so ‘Grimsby was bigger than Bath in London.’

11. Daylight – A delightfully frothy chorus, quite catchy. I won’t injure it by saying it was vaguely of the Travis ilk, it’s just that it seemed very positive and happy a la ‘daylight, it’s all right’, which is no bad thing, and Neil seemed understandably happy that the crowd was already joining in on a new song. This will surely be worth listening out for when it’s in its final polished form on a recording, and I could see it as a single, although it’s not their best song. The crowd loved it.

12. From a Friend to a Friend – Loads of effects to sift through to find the vocals, but clearly they’re not prioritising vocals here. This was better than the version I’d heard online, which did not impress me, and Sean’s deep backing vocals added a great deal of character and depth, as the verses sounded a bit weak. As different layers of the song were piled on, it did sound more interesting, and I imagine it will grow on me considerably. It drew great cheers from the crowd.

13. Tell Me What You Want – this was a true highlight of the evening. Neil moved to the drum set, and Alana stood beside him playing other drums. Sean told us Neil had told him off as he walked past, which Neil denied and said they were words of encouragement. He indulged in a quick drum solo for fun (the unexpected whack of the hi-hat was his ‘favourite bit’), then said ‘right, onto business’ and they played a marvellous song that Sharon—finally audible—led on vocals, seductively singing the title as a refrain at the beginning, before Neil sang the verses from the drum set in back, until Sharon joined in with her refrain again and it blended together wonderfully. Steamy and catchy, another song I can’t wait to own.

The band then left the tiny stage, with Neil stepping down but waiting for his wife to reach him, then offering his hand to help her down the few steps. It was lovely to see how they interact after almost 30 years of marriage.

Encore

14. Little By Little – The only other nod to the past, this being the recent past, from Neil’s 7 Worlds Collide project, the first release where he and Sharon shared vocals.

15. Don’t Look Back – (After some toilet humour) I hear that guests on Dermot O’Leary’s BBC Radio 2 show have to play a classic song as well as their own, and that PJC had played Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back that afternoon. (You can listen to it until about 23 July 2011 here: http://bbc.in/pMShRD) I don’t believe this was planned for the night’s performance; Neil spoke to the others and then announced that they were going to try something on stage that they had not tried before (which is when someone yelled out ‘Toilet?’ which led to Neil recounting a toilet seat incident). This was a real treat, Neil’s voice sounded a bit Johnny Cash, clear and deep, until he went wild Neil-style at the end, and happily we could hear it clearly without being drowned out by any effects. Afterwards, he apologised to Bob for mauling his lyrics, though he said he’d added a mention of ‘encyclopaedia’, of which he thought Bob would have approved, and then noted his own unfortunate habit of drawing attention to his mistakes.

16. It’s Alright – A cover of the ESG (Emerald, Sapphire and Gold) song, all funk and long guitar sections with a lot more of the ‘experimental’ thrown in. Eventually, the crowd started clapping to the beat and, with Neil’s encouragement, sang along to the chorus.

Then the band went off to rapturous cheers at about 10.30pm, having started at 9pm on the dot. I can categorically say that the audience were thrilled with a magnificent evening, and the band seemed justifiably pleased with their UK debut as well.

I will put more photographs (no great ones as I don’t like to use flash, and Neil in particular rarely keeps still) on my website when I write up a full account of the night. Meanwhile, a brief video clip of the group performing perhaps at Neil’s home is one of the few things available on the official website at: http://www.pajamaclubmusic.com/ . If you join their mailing list, you get a chance to download for free From a Friend to a Friend, but if you don’t love that, bear in mind that’s one of their lesser songs. Do go see them if you can as they have just started touring the UK, and this stellar show is bound to become more polished and glowing. (Incidentally, support artist Sam Scott, of The Phoenix Foundation, was worth getting there early for and held the fortunately well-behaved and kind audience captive, and I’ll review his performance on my site in due course, too.)

Electric Gig by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

I had the absolute joy of experiencing an Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark concert on Sunday (7 November 2010) at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, something the 16-year-old me would have killed for in 1982 in the States when MTV first brought these amazing ‘new’ artists to my attention. I struggled to the concert on a Sunday (ie The Day of Sleeping Transport) excited but feeling that I should not announce with pride who I was going to see lest I be set upon by a set of youths, as somehow some people think OMD is no longer fashionable.

Frankly, they’re wrong. Look at the charts and playlists today and you’ll see that they’re full of acts influenced by, if not practically imitating, the sound of OMD. To paraphrase what Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys said in an interview, if everyone else was going to be imitating the OMD sound, then OMD might as well be making that sound, too. This was not just one of the many reformed 80s bands (not that I’m complaining) out on a greatest hits tour, either. OMD have a new album out, and it has been received well by critics as well as fans, with most saying it sounds just like the OMD of yore but fresh. Which surely, in the circumstances, is exactly what you want.

I have that album but, like the other dozens I have bought over the past few months, have not had time to sit and listen to it, so I raced through samples of it quickly before running for the train/replacement bus service to make the concert. And it does contain some wonderful OMD material. In fact, the first single, History of Modern Part I, is delightfully catchy synth pop with a wonderfully memorable keyboards riff. The next single, Sister Mary Says, was spoiled for me on first listen by the new video, as it reminded me too much of the stress of the everyday English news (bring back Joan of Arc riding Clydesdales into the winter night after playing chess with OMD in a beautifully warm cottage, I say), but without that is another good pop tune, which some feel nods towards their early hit Enola Gay.

These new songs were greeted with just as much relish by the Hammersmith Apollo crowd as some of the slightly lesser known old tunes at the concert on Sunday, which caused amazing bassist Andy McCluskey to remark upon it, saying to Paul that something worrying was happening in that it was a London crowd and they even liked the new tunes, so it was safe for Paul to come out and sing his first song of the night, (Forever) Live and Die. Indeed, the generally more blasé and harder to please stiff London crowd rose to its feet the second the four early members of OMD took to the stage, and they remained there until after the encore, roaring and cheering, clapping to the beat without much encouragement, and adoring the people on stage.

I’ve never seen Andy McCluskey in person before so I don’t know how he tends to walk down the street, but no doubt it was this madly adoring mob before him that turned him into the astonishingly energetic, incessantly bouncing Tigger of a bassist that he was, bursting with a beam of glowing snow white teeth that joined his white shirt to portray some surely deceptively angelic vision before us. My friend and I, at 44, were constantly commenting on where a man of 51 could possibly find that much energy, but it was breathtakingly joyful. He raced about the stage, sometimes playing bass, sometimes waving his empty arms about histrionically, always interacting closely with the audience, and regularly shaking hands or whacking the many extended ‘high fives’ that were desperate for his attention. Obviously a heartthrob, he had to call the roadies out to clear away the lingerie that fans had flung onto the stage so that he could dance safely, after Humphreys suggested that we must be hinting that they should open a lingerie shop, assuming and hoping that the donated underwear was new and unused.

McCluskey joked about forgetting loads of lyrics during the performance, which didn’t show, and thanked us for sticking with the band despite loads of technical problems in the first part, which weren’t remotely noticeable other than his mention that he could not hear his voice through his earpiece, which just makes it more remarkable that that beautifully familiar, painfully emotional voice could emerge so perfectly. The light show was fine, the films behind them were enjoyable literal depictions of the songs (such as clips of silent film star Louise Brooks during Pandora’s Box, images of Vietnam during Bunker Soldiers and World War II planes for Enola Gay, thankfully instead of showing the result of their handicraft).

The show kicked off with an impressively high-tech feel intro with two Blade Runner-like hologram heads appearing above us and singing to the great techno music being played as the band snuck onto the dark stage below. There were some additional recorded sound snippets played into some songs, which I normally would frown upon as I believe that live should mean live, but they consisted simply of such things as the ‘No, no, no!’ from the beginning of Tesla Girls, which is effectively part of the percussive beat, and when you’re dealing with synths, it’s okay to play these things as notes on the keyboard. Similarly, it was okay to leave the synth switched on and playing for us even after the band had left the stage before the encore. The real vocals were always fresh and outstandingly impressive, notably so on the chorus of (Forever) Live and Die, on which Humphreys sang the lead vocals while bassist McCluskey took the controls of his synth, but joined in on harmonies in the chorus to show that the two former teen friends’ voices blended mellifluously. I mention that example as I had assumed it required quite a bit of electronic treatment to accomplish the sound on the record, but no, their singing just really sounds that great.

Throughout the show, Paul Humphreys presented the calm, friendly figure one would expect, but oddly the pair rarely acknowledged behind them the presence of still life artist and multi-instrumentalist Martin Simpson, who usually sat concentrating on his keyboards but occasionally blasted a sax, and drummer Malcolm Holmes, whose hairy appearance would look more at home with a Free revival than this oft stylish band that came out with cropped hair and ties. I confess that, in the early days, I thought the band comprised just Humphreys and McCluskey on synth, which means I must have assumed the synth was sufficiently magical to produce such realistic bass, sax and drum sounds. It was marvellous to have the full band before us.

But this was just meant to be a quick note before presenting the set list to those of you who are interested in such things; instead, I’ve accidentally added a bit of my usual stream of consciousness mental meandering. A full review of the concert, or my play-by-play account of everything that happened, will shortly appear on my website http://www.aboutlastnight.org.uk/ . I’ll include more photographs there, although I have few since we were back in Row U, the lights were often dark, I never used a flash, and Andy in particular was, like some wildlife, too wriggly for me to capture without a flash and tripod, particularly through the constantly up-stretched, waving arms of the oddly dancing girl in front of me.

I believe the clearly crowd-pleasing set was as set out below, but as I decipher my scribble when writing up the full review on my website, I may well discover something I’ve missed…..

Setlist – Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark at the Hammersmith Apollo on 7 November 2010

1. New Babies/New Toys
2. Messages
3. Tesla Girls
4. Bunker Soldiers
5. History of Modern Part I
6. (Forever) Live and Die
7. She’s Leaving
8. Souvenir
9. Joan of Arc
10. (Joan of Arc) Maid of Orleans
11. New Holy Ground
12. Green
13. Talking Loud and Clear
14. So in Love
15. Locomotion
16. Sister Mary Says
17. Pandora’s Box
18. Sailing on the Seven Seas
19. Enola Gay
Encore
20. Walking on the Milky Way
21. Electricity

I could only have been more thrilled by the energetic experience if they’d played two other songs I adore: Telegraph and Was It Something I Said? (I particularly love McCluskey’s hurt, embittered growl on the line in the latter ‘Don’t you even have me on your mind!). But their omission genuinely did not affect the show being the most ecstatic and electric experience I’d enjoyed for ages, and I have strong, and I hope realistic, hopes that there will be a next time.

Graceless Gracenote Entries

Having upgraded my MP3 player and finding myself with twice as much space than before, I’ve recently spent way too much time loading up the more obscure albums and compilations that didn’t make the ‘first cut’ of my previous player, which still had a significant capacity. As time went on and my compulsive CD buying continued, I had to prune more and more songs from the Creative Zen so that I could fit in the new albums, and I ended up being much more satisfied with the outcome, as the continued random shuffle regularly touched upon more prized songs, rather than so many would-be B-sides and easily forgettable tunes that I’d not heard for years, often with good reason. A bright and booming random playlist frequently lifted my spirits, even more so than when I created my own playlist, which is odd as I have for so many decades made myself and friends mixed tapes, then mixed minidiscs then mixed CDs, where the order of the songs was crucial to the overall effect.

At the end of my time with my Zen, it contained about 30GB worth of favourite songs, as I had removed the less interesting ones and most of the dross. I marvelled at how, when I first bought it, I had thought to myself that 30GB was a huge amount of space so I loaded up any old CD, and the whole CD, rather than selecting only my favourite tracks. I would even add things like The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan, when I’m not even that big a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, and umpteen classical compilations even if they contained 10 minute symphonies that I usually found too dull and syrupy and would have no interest in or patience for whilst out and about.

So you would think that I would heed my own warning, having lived through that and having to recover from my initial blind bloat of MP3s, and only load up a carefully chosen selection to my iPod—-YES, I caved in and (bitterly) got an iPod, which I will go into another time, but it offered more than twice as much space and the imperfect 60GB Creative Zen was no longer available. But no, I’ve found that I’ve just spent a week loading up a tonne of CDs that have held so little interest for me over the years that I had to look up my (admittedly anal) rating of and comments on each song when I first played it, which I scarily keep in indexed books. I’ve again recklessly added all sorts of obscure classical music collections including Flemish Romantic Horn Concertos and loads of free CDs with Classic FM magazine, I’ve added albums full of big bands and CDs of singer/actors like Doris Day and Danny Kaye, and have worryingly considered adding that Noel Coward CD I bought years ago after some nostalgia trip but never even unwrapped. (The latter thought was sparked by a review of the new West End stage version of Brief Encounter mentioning that they play A Room with a View at the end.)

There are artists I liked once in their day but haven’t recently, such as Lou Dalgliesh, and some whose albums were given to me by friends long ago but I just didn’t really ‘get’ them, like Eleanor Shanley, Robyn Hitchcock and Paul Kelly. I’ve added them in case I liked them more than I remembered, giving them a chance a resurgence, and maybe when I’m sitting on a train some time, one of their songs will come up and I’ll be bewitched by it. It’s like having my own radio station where all of the 10,000 songs that might be played have been pre-selected by me, but there is still plenty of room for discovery amongst them, as well as a smile raised when the most loved favourites rear their beloved heads. Or maybe I’ll want to delete the less loved ones, and then I’ll miss the fact that the Zen would let you do such pruning instantly whilst out and about, whereas the vastly less flexible iPod would make me remember which song I want to remove and do so when I’m next on the PC that contains my iTunes directory, and frankly, there’s little chance that I would even remember by then that I’d wanted to delete anything.

But those are rambling musings, and now for a rambling rant. Gracenote, the CD track identification service used by iTunes and other software to gather the information on the audio tracks…. I fully acknowledge that this is a blessing, as all we have to do is insert our CD—even some obscure collection of Lithuanian Disco classics played on the fipple flute that you bought in the Woolworth’s bargain bin in 1987, which you can’t imagine anyone else owns—and suddenly all the information you need comes up automatically. iTunes has accessed the Gracenote database, and in theory, everything you need to know is there—the name of each tune, the performer, the composer, and the album name. It is a blissful change from the days when I had to enter the title and artist on the minidisc by rotating a dial to painfully select each individual letter at an excruciatingly slow speed. Even when I invested in a package that would hook my minidisc and stereo up to my PC in the early days and enable me to type the titles in, that still was a lot more work than the simplicity offered by Gracenote. In theory, I shouldn’t have to do anything as some other owner of the CD in question has already gone to the trouble of typing in all the information and adding it to the database.

But why can’t they do it properly? Okay, I accept that I’m a terrible pedant. I get annoyed by typos—which we all make, it’s just a shame that they’re in the now official version that pops up for everyone—and the shortcuts. I don’t want it to say '10 Pole Tudor', making me go back to change everything to ‘Tenpole’-—and I usually try to race the downloader and get it fixed before each song is added to my collection. I don’t want every single track on one album to say ‘Beatles’ so I have to go back and add the ‘The’, or remove it from ‘The Counting Crows’. I can’t cope with someone having put the artist throughout a whole album in the form of ‘Hewerdine, Boo’ when all the other albums display the first name first. But mostly, classical music is a nightmare. I am so completely grateful to the poor souls who painstakingly entered every bit of the many, many details—the aria name, the key it is in, the catalogue number, in which act it appears in which opera, which tenor backed by which orchestra conducted by which conductor performed it, sometimes even including the acute é’s and so forth so everything looks perfect.

But most of the souls have even less patience than I and have, for some reason, entered the artist, that is the performer, as being ‘Beethoven' or ‘Puccini’, which is intensely irritating, particularly when they have also entered the composer’s name in the song title section (eg “Puccini: O Mio Babino Caro”) and in the composer’s section, so I cannot understand their thinking. I also hate the cop-outs who put ‘unclassifiable’ as the genre description of albums; I can understand having loyalty to an artist who might claim to be so, but what if you want to listen to a particular genre one day and that artist is hidden away as ‘unclassifiable’?

Some of it is personal preference, of course; I prefer to put ‘(Live)’ at the end of song titles so I can distinguish the live version from the studio recording, particularly when iTunes coughs up a list of duplicates. I also prefer to mention performers who make a significant contribution to a piece. For instance, it might be Colin Reid’s album and him playing guitar (wonderfully) on Never Going Back Again, but it would surely be silly not to mention Eddi Reader at all when she is providing lead vocals, as you might otherwise come to wonder who you are listening to (were it someone with a less distinctive voice), but the Gracenote contributors often omit the significant additional artists, even though there is also a section for ‘album artist’. I would prefer to put the song’s artist as ‘Colin Read & Eddi Reader’ if not Colin ‘featuring Eddi Reader.’

Clearly, my insane rant here is driven by the fact that I have spent too much time adding too many albums at once, necessitating quite a lot of amendments in my iTunes catalogue. Tackling a listing for a classical CD can be utterly exhausting. I’m sure normal people don’t bat an eyelid about this and are thinking I need to get a life, which is true, I know. But if anyone out there is the first to enter a CD’s details into the database, and that may well be true if you eagerly rip open your copy of Word magazine (or fellow pedants can point out my hypocrisy here as they’ve changed the name to The Word, but I can’t bring myself to adapt to that as it just makes me think of Terry Christian) and you load up that issue’s excellent free compilation CD, please have some respect for the anal among us who need the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, or at least the songs spelled correctly and the performers to be given due credit. Though no doubt by tomorrow, I’ll have recovered from this ordeal and remembered that it’s of serious little importance, and I’ll want to ask for your forgiveness for my scary whingeing….Perhaps listening to some music for a while will calm me down. I’ll go put on my favourite album of Mozart performing ABBA’s greatest hits.

Another Day in the Life with Music on the Journey

Sorry for the lack of posts but I’m so often snowed under by work….I hope to post something shortly but in the interim, I shall do something boring, just let you know what my MP3 player played me (in random play mode) yesterday on the train. It was in an agreeable, peaceful mood, and led me to reminisce about my brief encounters with Pete Townshend and Bobby McFerrin (they weren't together).

1. Over My Head – Aztec Camera. I adore Roddy Frame’s work but this one’s a bit sickly; I’ve heard this track compared to Chet Baker-like jazz, and oddly the first time my Zen ever played a Chet Baker track, which it has held silently for over a year, is on the same day.

2. I Need Love – Luka Bloom. Christy Moore’s kid brother can do no wrong in my eyes, and though he’s an incredible songwriter, he does good covers, even getting away with this LL Cool J number. The day before yesterday, the Zen played the excellent and catchy Sam Phillips song of the same name.

3. One—Aimee Mann. Originally recorded for a Harry Nilsson tribute album (see below), it was reused on the Magnolia soundtrack album—a fine Paul Thomas Anderson film largely based around Mann’s music that everyone should see; it’s a great ensemble piece where even Tom Cruise doesn’t come out as ‘the star’, although it’s a bit long but worth it. Backing vocals on this track are provided by Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Neil Innes of the Rutles and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I believe Innes was the one I saw open for legendary comic Bob Newhart a few years ago when Innes was painfully out of step with the audience, which remained largely silent, and the whole night was awful as the dreadful barely existent sound system (a single amp on stage) meant most of us heard nothing and much of the audience spent Newhart's set searching for theatre staff to kill.

4. Celtic New Year – Van Morrison. Fairly recent recording with an early Van feel.

5. Silver Lining – Steve Poltz. I deleted this mid-way; it was too country for starters and must have been a result of my thinking, when I first bought the Zen, that 30GB was an endless amount of space so I could slap on any old whole album. I’m astonished to learn this was a single. Steve's other stuff is enjoyable, but I must confess to learning about him at a Jewel concert when taking a friend as a birthday gift; he opened the show with a delightfully zany set and loads of confident talent in comedy and on guitar, then joined her on stage as part of her band. He was her ex-boyfriend and co-writer of her hit You Were Meant for Me, which got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running single in the Billboard Top 100, and apparently it was he who first discovered her, asking the waitress to join him on stage, where she was spotted by talent hunters. He has a freaky MySpace site that, with typical wackiness, suggests that most of his songs are about wolves and that his genre is gospel/Chinese pop/death metal.

6. Bring Him Home/Vincent - Peter Corry/Brian Kennedy. From the George Best memorial service. Kennedy replaces the one mention of “Vincent” in Don MacLean’s lovely tribute to Vincent Van Gogh with “George”, and Corry gives a moving rendition of the gorgeous song from Les Miserables, which was recently so perfectly delivered by Alfie Boe at the Festival of Remembrance, as I mentioned in a previous post.

7. Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Bobby McFerrin. Cute, but I can’t really take his advice because he offers no solutions. If the verses were ‘here’s how to win the lottery’ or ‘give me your address, I will send you some of my vast wealth’, I would find it a lot easier not to worry and be happy. When you’re worried about not being able to pay your rent, I don’t see how it’s helpful to have someone warn you that frowning might bring everyone else down, as you really wouldn’t care. But it’s catchy. I once encountered McFerrin at the gourmet grocery/restaurant where I worked in North Carolina; he was a guest at the adjacent inn and had been in for breakfast, and I was working the till. He was so quiet, I took little notice until the couple behind him in the queue gushed after he’d left, as they had tickets to see him in concert that night. He’s very nice, very normal. Doesn’t walk around making sound effects, saves it for the show.

8. Words of Love – Mama Cass. Sublime. My father raised me as a big Mama Cass fan, and Dream a Little Dream of Me is one of my ‘default songs’, ie one I find myself singing around the house nearly all the time—along with Tim Finn’s Young Mountain. If I were to struggle to find a connection between some of the artists in this Zen-produced random playlist, I could point to the fact that it contains Aimee Mann’s cover of a Harry Nilsson song—one of a tribute album to which Ron Sexsmith also contributed--and that Mama Cass died (of heart failure—she didn’t choke on her own vomit as the story goes) in Harry Nilsson’s London flat when he was away, as did Keith Moon (not on the same night; a few years later of an overdose, when Nilsson was also away), and Nilsson then sold the flat to Moon’s bandmate (in The Who of course) Pete Townshend.

9. Baby This Night – Hawksley Workman. Quirky Workman, real name Ryan Corrigan, is a Juno award winner—the Canadian Grammies—for Best New Solo Artist. Known for great live shows with odd dances, but I've not yet had the privilege...

10. Under the Skin – Lindsay Buckingham. Title track from his first solo album in 15 years, largely acoustic with him playing almost all the instruments—as Joan Armatrading (see below) tends to do on her more recent albums.

On the train home after working late at the office:-

1. Come Rain or Come Shine – Peggy Lee. Nothing I can add to this splendour; it’s Peggy Lee.

2. Give Me My Rapture – Van Morrison. From Poetic Champions Compose….I can forgive the Zen playing Van more than once in a session as I have so very much Van on it.

3. Ferry Cross the Mersey – Gerry and the Pacemakers. I only recently learned that Frankie Goes to Hollywood recorded a cover of this, which I’ve lived happily without hearing, but I must have heard in 1989 the charity version recorded by Frankie’s Holly Johnson, Paul McCartney, the Christians and Gerry Marsden himself in aid of those affected by the Hillsborough disaster. I was in London most of that year, and I always remember my worried father ringing from the States to make sure I was safe when he’d heard the tragic news, and I cruelly acted like the thoughtless youngster I was by replying to his caring kindness with a sarky, “Why on earth would I be at a football match in Liverpool?!?’, which I so regretted saying.

4. Kare Kare – Crowded House. The Finns have been top favourites for decades, but I seem to be the only Finn fan who didn’t see as masterful this Youth-produced Together Alone album, which was recorded (after Tim Finn left following one album) at Karekare Beach as used in The Piano; I never took to it as much as their earlier albums, and though this near jam session is good, it feels a bit like Crowded House imitating Moody Blues. I can be that critical because they set the standard so high; even their lesser pieces are relatively outstanding.

5. Keep On Running – Spencer Davis Group. I must confess that my first real awareness of Stevie Winwood was the Higher Love video played endlessly on MTV. Thankfully I’ve gone backwards, and I love this and I’m a Man; they’re always strangely uplifting. I recently saw on TOTP2 an archive clip of Chicago of dreary If You Leave Me Now fame covering I’m a Man, but they were quite different from that Chicago; it was on their debut album in 1969 and they were called the Chicago Transit Authority then. Thinking of Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship and then just Starship), I wonder if transport was a popular theme in band names at the time; I’m sure more will occur to me later. Like, uh, Steve Winwood’s Traffic, for starters….

6. Angelou – Van Morrison. You see? Lots of Van to choose from. I’m always reminded when I hear Van sing this one that I’ve been pronouncing it wrong; he says it like some nativity scene proclamation: ‘Angel, Lo!’. I always thought of it as sounding more like Angela combined with toilet, more like: Ann-je-loo. Or if calling her name in Paris, as in the song, I might say Ahnzh-ih-loo. But maybe it’s the Belfast accent. I saw Holly Lerski’s excellent band called Angelou, which has been described as being the spiritual sister of Jeff Buckley, open at Ronnie Scotts once when Boo Hewerdine, whose label picked up Angelou’s first album, played—I think the time he performed with with Gary Clark of Danny Wilson, followed by Colin Vearncombe (ex-Black) and his tremendous voice. But I don’t recall how Angelou the band pronounced their name.

7. The Kids Are Alright – The Who. There used to be a guy in my junior high French class who wore a badge/button with Pete Townshend’s warped-looking 60s face on it every single day. It took me ages to understand this hero worship of such a weird looking guy. (Imagine if, as adults, we went around wearing badges every day of people we admired.) A few years later, I found myself staying in a large hotel in Florida where the Who were also staying, and I convinced the mater to park her car near where I was sure they’d exit the sprawling hotel en route to the concert so I could wait and watch discreetly. I seemed alone in my interest as everyone else at the hotel was there for a field hockey tournament. When they hadn’t appeared by the time I thought they were due to leave, I looked down and fumbled with the newspaper to find the concert listing to check the time, then looked up to find that I’d just missed seeing Roger Daltrey get into a white limo, which drove off. I was about to give up when I saw a single groupie set up camp nearby and I figured she knew something. Sure enough, I soon made my mother jump out of her skin when I surprised myself by shouting, ‘OHMIGOD THAT’S PETE TOWNSHEND!’ ‘Who’s Pete Townshend?’ she asked. ‘I thought you wanted to see The Who.’

This was long before the days of compact digital cameras and cameraphones, but I remembered as I jumped up that my mother, a realtor, kept a camera in her glovebox, which I grabbed as I ran out of the car the few yards to where Pete was reluctantly, grumpily pausing for a photo by the groupie. I muttered a sort of ‘me, too?’ request, and he nodded vaguely but made it clear he was leaving in one minute. I pressed the shutter button, nothing happened, and as I helplessly examined the camera in panicked agony, Townshend turned and got into his limo and left. I was initially miserable until I realised that I had accomplished my original mission of just getting to see The Who—or one of them—close up. My lasting memory was that this older Townshend looked nothing like that warped figure on John from French Class’s badge. He was actually a fairly attractive man in person with beautiful blue eyes that seemed too gentle for a rock star who smashed precious musical instruments that had done him no harm.

So back to the MP3 list….

8. Love Will Tear Us Apart ’95 – Joy Division. The 1995 Permanent remix with added guitar. I look forward to finding the time to see finally the highly praised Anton Corbijn film of Ian Curtis’ life, Control.

9. Look for the Silver Lining – Chet Baker. He always makes me think of watching Ewan McGregor from a front row seat in the stalls do an excellent job in his uncle (Local Hero etc actor) Denis Lawson’s revival of David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs, originally a 60s play and film with Beatles connections, which I seem to recall played a lot of Chet Baker to create the atmosphere, unless it was Dave Brubeck and I’m remembering wrong.

10. Idiot Boy – Ron Sexsmith. “God so loved the idiot boy / He gave him coffee grounds in a paper cup / And a reason everyday to keep getting up / In a world that drags you down”. Perhaps he’ll be next on the Starbucks label. Humble and very highly regarded by well-known fellow artists, but bizarrely underappreciated by the average record-buyer, this excellent Canadian singer/songwriter has, like Workman, won a Juno: Songwriter of the Year in 2005, having been nominated several times before and no doubt in future.

11. Everyday Boy – Joan Armatrading. Kinda interesting that the Zen chose two ‘adjective Boy’ songs. This one is also grand: “But you respect yourself / And you let it show / Some fade with guilt And the shame / The way you Tell your story / With no tears For yourself.” That's made me think of someone I've mentioned in posts here before but I've gone on about that enough.