I'm in love with the 80's... all over again

Currently, for some reason I can't fathom, I just can't stop listening to Billy Idol. In all probability it's just some sentimental nerve popped loose and gone haywire for a bit. "Flesh for Fantasy"... "White Wedding"... "Sweet Sixteen"... it just says early 80's club night, moody lighting. The lyrics are filthy. I can picture all the dry ice and leather. I have no idea. It's so dreadfully homo-erotic glam and I'm well over that crap. I remember the mirror ball on a friday night at my local skate rink. Age.. errmm.. 12 perhaps? (Oh! He's singing about s-e-x!)

My (current) all-time favourite, genre-definitive, 80's classic is Alice Cooper's "Poison". Mainly because I can't stop giggling at the lyrics, combined with the superlatively over-the-top guitar, and the synchronised-but-oh-so-manly backing vocals - "I wan' na love you but I wan' it too much.... ". Surely they were being ironic, or satirical, or something... ah the 80's. Looking and sounding and acting ridiculous and having a whale of a time doing it.

While parked up and making out in this particular generational cul-de-sac, I'm also enjoying; early Madonna, Culture Club, Tears for Fears, Human League, and Del Amitri. And happily laughing along to Cutting Crew, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, the Thompson Twins, Pat Benetar, Bon Jovi ... oh, too many to mention. Remember Paul Young? Alison Moyet? Princess? Marilyn? Ultravox... the 80's are still underrated.

Like I say, I really don't know what's gotten into me. It's just fun.

More to follow I'm sure.

Van Morrision... incorrigible genius

Van Morrision brought an experienced eye, but also the irrepressible energy of a much younger man to Saturday night's presentation of Astral Weeks 09, at the Royal Albert Hall.

In a concert of two halves, the band and Van himself, began slowly with a quick and apparently obligatory sprint through "the hits". Gradually though, they warmed up ... and boy did they, reaching an excited, expectant peak before an intermission.

The second half, Astral Weeks in it's entirety, melted into a solid, vibrant version of "Astral Weeks", and the album as a whole melted forth. Beside You - still my favourite track, seemed as tragically brief as ever... while Sweet Thing spiralled out into a bigger, newer, happier version of itself.

As the show progressed, Morrison was consumed - it's hard to know whether he's even aware we're there too - which is no bad thing at all. We were swept and carried along... like the best jazz it takes you away on a journey.

Most of his music is built on a blues groove abstracted out into jazz. In the enormous combined wealth of life and experience melded into his band, there are echo's of everything; sometimes it's old-time soul, other's it's gospel, or fat-swaggering chicago blues, or God's own showtime country, dynamically moving and falling, weaving and swelling. He'll take a song that seems like a standard big-band swing tune, all synchronised brass riffs and scat vocals, and syncopate the hell out of it freely tossing the lyrics around the beat, before driving it down into a sweaty swampy boogie.

Just fantastic.

The Wailers... only not

At Shepherds Bush Empire last night, we were treated to the Wailers play Exodus. I'm as baffled as I'm sure everyone else is by what constitutes a Wailer these days.

We left after 20mins, unable to stomach the X-Factor-like quality of the show.

You cannot and should not attempt to play Marley's music without a conscious adoption of, and an overt empathy with his message, or some of his message. These are not pop songs.

By contrast we saw the Marley brothers - Damien, Stephen and Ziggy perform Exodus at Glasto 07 and it was my personal highlight. They are a family, they pass on the message as one reggae family. Totally different.

see rather http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2pEEAtwoTI
Oh, but I did see, somehow for the first time, how obvious the west african roots of the music are. Flatten out the heavy accent on the beat and speed it up a little and it's simple, tribal african music. Made me wonder whether Jamaicans nowadays listen to and appreciate modern west african artists, and if so - who in particular and what they hear in it.

PJ Harvey... wilfully losing her self in the service of art

For her latest, A Woman A Man Goes By, PJ has teamed up with the unrepentantly retrograde, producer-musician John Parish. This is most definitely a collaboration and you can hear the teamwork involved. It took me a while to figure out why - but I think it's simply because you can hear the bits which aren't PJ. It's her voice, so deeply familiar, but the lyrics sounds strange in her mouth, the rhythms and background tones are subtly changed. In fact, purely on the impression received, I suspect that Parish wrote all or most of the songs originally, and then they got together to figure out how to execute them.

It's as though she's performing a script. It's not her own music. Even just as a vocalist she's amazing, but it's fundamentally different to her own work. Parish must be a very strong-minded individual. Given the force of PJ's artistic persona and the uniqueness of her sound, it surprises me that anyone could appropriate Her Polly-ness for anything. Intuitively I would have assumed that you'd write for her, you would adapt yourself to her world. To take that voice, the character she has and use it to express your own message, well, it's uncompromising to say the least.
The album opens with the, in this context, easy-listening "Black Hearted Love", before cantering madly about through more progressive, dissonant territory. Whereas PJ's own work will generally employ taut muscular electric guitar and drums, here she's often backed by a plunking banjo, or a sparse piano, and accompanied by herself on backing vocals. Stylistically, it's reminiscent of a less Nordic, more English, Bjork. I'm reminded that one of the great things about PJ is her love of words; with each song she uses her voice to prod and pull at the words, to batter them, to drag them by the hair, and occasionally, to violently disembowel them into a bloody heap on the floor. It's nerve-tingling-ly visceral, though sometimes, perhaps unavoidably, going too far and becoming utterly unlistenable as in "April".

The centrepiece of the album is the title track. A romping, chaotic, foul-mouthed, vaudeville freak show of a song... a diatribe about some rough trade experience gone wrong?... deliberately gender-confused by putting the words into a woman's voice. "Pig Will Not" is another wonderfully crazy mess of a track, seemingly made up and recorded in real time it's largely PJ ranting and wailing over a hailstorm of drums.

They're touring the UK shortly and I''ll be checking them out in London. Can't wait to see this performed... just not sure I'll listen to it much at other times.

Gomez - A New Tide

Gomez... they're one of those bands that I put in my mental 'undecided' basket. For some reason they've never bubbled up into my consciousness, merely floated below the surface pending further notice.


Listening to A New Tide and again I find myself struggling to get a handle on their identity. Wikipedia tells me they're from Southport, but they're a mongrel really (and that's no intended criticism) with a barrow full of broad and obvious musical references they've tossed together to create their own voice. While modern day peers would probably include David Gray, Ryan Adams and Badly Drawn Boy, the electronic touches and laid back grooves suggest a kind of homemade or garden shed Groove Armada.


To describe it as featureless would be a cruel injustice. It's listenable, textured, groovy, skillfully put together .. but (you can see where I'm going...) I can't help finding it lacking the thing that's going to grab me. It sounds like a great album to put on as the party winds down as the sun comes up but you're not quite ready to limp off to bed; it'll make a groovy soundtrack to semi-coherent late-night chatter without too aggressively demanding you dance.

Recommended? ... well, yes - to tide us over while we wait for more from the Fleet Foxes, or if you're looking for an easier listening My Morning Jacket.

Don McGlashan... master craftsman.

I once saw the Chen Kaige film The 1000th String, about a blind old itinerant musician and his wayward young pupil in deepest rural china. It's a gorgeous movie with spectacular backdrop footage of the desert wilderness of some unknown Chinese province (although not for those with a short attention span - it was excruciatingly slow). What struck me at the time and remains with me still was the lifestyle of the pair - they would travel from village to village, staying just a few days, and in return for food and shelter they would play for the whole village. They'd play traditional folk songs, current pop songs, abstract spiritual meditations... with the villagers, entertainment-starved by their geographical remoteness, drinking in every note.

This is the way music, real music, used to be... back before the gramophone and before satellites, before Presley, before Michael Jackson and stadium tours and Billboard charts, before MTV. For the entire human race, for thousands of years, a musician was a guy who came to your village and played tunes on whatever instrument he could carry. He'd try and play songs you liked, but mostly you liked any and every song because there wasn't much choice.

Anyway my point is that music was once, and for some still is, a vocation. It's both a life-long work of art and a livelihood. It's a craft, and, like any other craft it takes years of discipline, and dedication, and love to learn the craftsmanship.

I would contend that the great artists of the twentieth century were Picasso and Dylan; they changed the way whole cultures view the world, and produced multiple bodies of work the scope of which we're only beginning to understand. Don McGlashan is no 'great' artist. He's not revolutionary, he does not speak to or for the age we live in. He's a folk artist both in subject and ambition. He's also an expert craftsman, a master in his chosen art form.

His artistic signature, evident to even first-time listeners, is his adept and liberal use of metaphor. This is so obvious it needs no elaboration, except to say that it is in all probability simply a natural talent. The hard-won mastery, the sweat and tears and blood and hunger part, is in his eloquence, in the balance and natural pace of his lyrics, and in his effortless shifting amongst a wide range of song styles. Like the folk artists of old, he (makes it seem as though he) can make a song from anything, and can perform it using any instrument to hand. The mastery is in the lightness of touch - you can't see the brush strokes.

A brief and probably inaccurate musical-biography. He began with the student art-rock band Blam Blam Blam. They wrote quirky and blackly satirical, post-punk/new romantic songs about social and sexual politics in 80's New Zealand. This was followed by the equally satirical musical theatre-cum-sitcom The Front Lawn. As reported to the folks back home in New Zealand, this was an international hit. I've no idea whether this is indeed true, but their two albums Songs from the Front Lawn, and More Songs from... remain dear in my heart (note: this is the heritage behind Flight of the Conchords).
In 1992 The Mutton Birds emerged, spearheaded by McGlashan though practically a supergroup in NZ terms; a traditional rock 4 piece producing irresistibly catchy, witty pop-rock songs with the occasional darker edge. In a decade they released 4 studio albums - unfortunately each was somewhat less commercially successful than the last.

Finally, McGlashan turned solo with 1996's Warm Hand, and just a few weeks ago his latest Marvellous Year.
His work as a solo artist is in truth very similar to the Mutton Birds in style and sound, though generally a little quieter and more intimate as one might expect. I haven't had a lot of time yet with Marvellous Year, but already I think it's the finest album of his long career. It's varied, engaging, warm and often joyful - he's clearly having the time of his life both personally and artistically, it's almost faultless. My minor quibbles are stylistic, I prefer albums which are consistent in style (which is why I struggle with much American r'n'b) so I find the last three tracks a bit too tangential. The title track though is possibly the best song I've heard this year so far.

A characteristic of McGlashan's material is that while the albums are strong and consistent and can be listened to in entirety, you'll find that each time you hear a particular song, it will grow in depth; each listen uncovers a smart phrase you hadn't noticed, or a quiet trill on his (famous) euphonium, a confident guitar lick or an exquisitely timed pause. His characters come vividly to life, and you'll find yourself randomly humming one of the choruses months later.

Highly recommended music from a lesser-known master.

Available at smokecds.com

u2... when the love has gone...

I've been a U2 fan since the age of 10 when The Joshua Tree hit me like an alien invasion of my young planet. As such, it's always seemed as though U2 are the soundtrack to my life, for better or worse. In recent years however, our relationship has started to feel more like a dying marriage; we're civil, we're overly familiar to the point where it's hard to distinguish love and hate, we live with frequent disappointment... and we can't be truly honest in case the damage is permanent.

The strain is telling. Frankly, I just don't see the point of U2 any more. The new album, No Line on the Horizon, is all very well, but we've seen and heard literally all of it before. Sure, there's the odd flash of colour which the Edge, Eno and Lanois have managed to smuggle under the covers. But Adam and Larry could be playing on any album since Achtung Baby, and Bono seems to be living on a different planet to everyone (one where handy interview-soundbites pass for lyrics). In places I swear it sounds as though they've been influenced by Coldplay. Orwell would piss himself then die laughing.

Somewhat counter-intuitively I believe U2 produce their best work when they're at their over-ambitious, grandiose peak; when they're trying so hard to do things they really can't pull off that you can hear the seams splitting. Pop just doesn't suit them and never did. Nor dance, though with that rhythm section they should do better. Nor blues. No, it's saccharine, stadium sized, super-camera-phone moments which suit them and they do it better than anyone.

Curiously, the album takes in U2's own musical history. So "Unknown Caller" could be lifted from War, while "Moment of Surrender" (how can Bono sing this with a straight face?) sounds like it was actually left over from All That You Can't... (cripes, perhaps it was...that might explain a few things..?), and "Fez - Being Born" is a (pale) imitation of the The Unforgettable Fire era epic-isms.

In a similar vein and harking back to Achtung Baby's Moroccan inspirations, they've made much of how parts of the album were recorded in Fez - you just wouldn't know it to listen to. Where's the collaboration with, say, Youssou N'Dour, Mory Kante, or Amadou & Miriam. Where's the north african instrumentation? The muezzin's call to prayer? The evening marketplace? The desert wind? Where, in short, is the adventure? Fez is an ancient city, with millenia of history beaten into the dust of every wandering alley. (Possibly unfairly) it sounds as though U2 popped in on a eurocoach for a day and a photo shoot.

The lowest points are in the middle; "Get on Your Boots" is the most empty, pointless song I've heard in U2 stripes, "Stand Up Comedy" is surely a song Bono actually wrote himself and then demanded be included despite reasonable objections from the Edge, while "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" (yes - on seeing the title you already know how bad this might turn out) honestly sounds like Bono in a bar singing karaoke to some long-buried Robbie Williams assault on popular radio (go on, I dare you - listen and imagine).

As much as I hate to say it, I finally accept that they need to break up the band. They need to smash it fast and clean. They're trapped and there is no way back. The spark has gone. Let's have the inevitable Greatest Hits Vol 3 and get it over with. After the earlier reinvention phase that was Zooropa, they again tried to freshen things with the Passengers experiment, being someone else, going out, meeting people, trying new things... a trial separation say... but they've come back and gotten stuck in the same tired old rut. Bono has a different audience now, while Larry and Adam have never been the creative soul. This leaves the Edge, clearly the author and creator behind everything they do, a slave to the behemoth he's created. Maybe 10 years apart and they'd come back afresh and firing. Or maybe it's just time to let go. Not sure I'll ever be able to turn my back completely .. we'll see.