Johnny Depp had well-publicised close links to the late American writer Hunter S. Thompson. He attended the good doctor’s funeral, whereby the mortal remains of HST were launched into the sky from a cannon, a cannon paid for by Depp, a cannon fashioned with great subtlety in accordance with Thompson’s wishes to resemble an extended middle finger. Depp gave a memorable personation of Thompson’s alter ego Dr.Gonzo Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He bought the rights to The Rum Diary, an early novel depicting a writer, Kemp, finding an outraged and outrageous writing voice. The novel was finally released late in Thompson’s career.

At Depp’s request, the script was written by a similarly legendary figure, Bruce Robinson, who penned The Killing Fields and Withnail & I, among other choice word pleasures. Robinson had eschewed Hollywood since a miserable experience making the film Jennifer 8, and seemed content to find other outlets for his excellent writing over the last 15 years or so. Somehow, Johnny Depp, through a combination of charm, flattery, booze and outright bribery, contrived to entice Robinson from cinematic retirement to direct The Rum Diary as well. The film has ‘flopped’ in America, meaning it has so far taken less money than it cost to make. The publicity in Britain has had something of a ‘pearls before swine’ tint, the unspoken suggestion being that Robinson’s pungent dialogue and Depp’s performance have shot over the heads of ignorant Yank cineastes, save those East Coasters and selected Gonzophiles dotted across the landscape.

This is unfair, not just in its sniffy pandering to cultural stereotypes. Such a little actually happens at such slow pace in the film, it’s clearly not intended to bust blocks. It’s also certainly, if not a vanity project, then a labour of love for Depp. It is as close an approximation of an ‘indie’ film as one might expect from an eccentric multimillionaire actor hiring in a noted ex-boozefreak auteur to give his tribute film some further loose wolf with a lone cannon outsider cred. Robinson, to his credit, says he read the actual book twice and then put it away. As well as Thompson, his screenplay incorporates Robinson themes of how writing, and acting, can try, fail, but fail better, to make any sort of difference to anything.

It has also got some giggles in it. Bruce Robinson is on his driest form in some of the scenes. One character is described as not giving ‘one fifth of a fuck’, another as having ‘blackheads like braille’. As fans of Thompson, especially of Robinson, and of Depp, when he’s not wearing nail varnish and impersonating Keith Richard, we found ourselves satisfied, in the way that very fine wine from a sensational cellar will give the illusion of you not being drunk, but will taste very well and then render you susceptible in the plain air.

The tormented spirit of Thompson, Robinson’s own taste for the macabre, and ‘infinitum nihil’, infinite nothing, Depp’s darksome production company, also ensure some wonderfully gruesome, surreal segments: a sex scene interrupted by Hitler speeches on gramophone disk; a fighting cock voodoo blessing sequence where Kemp demands the hermaphrodite priest ‘empower the fowl’. These are the brief moments where the black insanity that rides along with us all, claws embedded in the undercarriage, is revealed, slavering and gurgling, as the coach hurtles by. Do we look ourselves in the mirror and see a waning crescent of blood around the iris, metaphorically, symbolically, actually? What does it take to tip us over the edge?

Still, there remain some unseemly moments to mar a good film. You can tell that Depp wanted something of the strange and hilarious sadness of Withnail and I to shape the film, but there’s homage and there’s burglary. We sat there agog as a drug purchase and psychedelic sequence ‘referenced’ Withnail and I so closely (‘What do you want for it?’ … ‘I’ve got fear!’) that we expected Depp to start prancing like a tit, as Giovanni Ribisi’s dissolute Moberg comments that the greatest decade in history is just beginning and they have to go and get some black paint.

I suppose these sorts of self-referential, warm, wet circles on the bar top are an appropriate image to summarise a film that in one layer is by drinkers about drinkers for drinkers… Yet it redeems itself as it goes further, depicting a struggle to say, to do, something about all the horribly seedy shit things that people can say and do to themselves and each other in pursuit of money, meaning, merit, purity, release.

Awesome clear whitish-blue sky, whitish stones, taking the anti-clockwise turn from Victoria Bar.

Following five minutes repose listening to the organist practising in St Mary’s. The sun coming in through the window by the altar casts a shadow that looks like Jesus.

Never noticed it before, but today the Terry’s factory seems designed to mirror the Minster.

I love Baile Hill. On the apex of the knoll today: an abandoned pack of Cutter’s Choice and some filters in their cellophane tube, fallen out of someone’s pocket next to the little plastic bag they sat on. Remnants of a fire, a charred can of Stella, three fireworks tubes. King of the fucking castle. Standing arms up like a star, toasting the lights.

Joan Baez, Ball/Barber/Bilk, bringing big names beginning with B to the Barbican.

Town centre is hell on toast on Saturday. Just off the wall at Monkgate and instantly doing the tourist three-step. One two, one, one two, one… two… and through and through.

Pubs all the way down Goodramgate heave with shoppers and drinkers. Two weeks without massive infusions of booze, my head’s buzzing with delight that I only briefly want to join in.

In Travelling Man, I melt into a glowing puddle of pleasure at the printed products, managing to restrain myself from buying, like, every comic in the whole world. There’s a trio discussing what costume the guy should wear to get his discount into Thought Bubble. I decide to start taking 2000AD again. It’s been years. I do like a nice cultural signifier in my basket.

On the radio in the shop: NWA’s ‘Express Yourself’. That’s the second time today I’ve heard it. God’s Jukebox, clearly indicating that all is proceeding correctly.

Dander for coffee at Dusk. £2’s too expensive for a double espresso, but Dusk wins because it’s not Costa, Subway, Caffe Nero, Patisserie Valerie or Starbleuchs. AND they have good music, a selection of broadsheets and attractive hipsterish staff, alright, well done.

On Coney Street, some cosplay entrepreneur, inexplicably issued with a busker’s license, is accepting money to let people, mainly children, stand next to him and hold his weapon. ‘Aren’t you a little shit for a Stormtrooper?’

Back up the road, still audible, the slightly out-of-breath clarinet proper busker is making me very happy as he wheezes through ‘I’m Alive’, the Hollies tune. He’s accompanied by a tinny amplifier playing the song. I sing along out loud as I walk on, a big daft smile on my face.

In getting that Stone Roses urge my psychic tendrils must have been twitching. For whodathunk, it was but three weeks later that The Stone Roses would announce their resurrection. The announcement was made to moderate surprise, and the crunch of teeth gnashing, through glee, through rage, perhaps through the use of powdered preparations. Moderate surprise, because John Squire had previously been unequivocal about the chances of a reunion tour taking place:

“I have no desire whatsoever to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses” – John Squire, 2009

The words are often cited with a yaah-boo tone, by commentators in the happy position of never having changed their minds about anything. As Sean Connery, and Lani Hall, would tell you, to get mixed up with a man who says never may be big trouble. Life is too short. And, “in the current economic climate”, who among us can turn down a pay day doing something we love with people we work well with? Thuz: while I agree with Ten Minutes Hate – they are just a band, and nostalgia alone is a foolish malady – I echo also the Manchester music writer/maker/event John Robb’s personal responses to the news. The Stone Roses matter.

That John Robb also makes music is worthy of note in understanding his enthusiasm. The continuing slow demise/re-ordering of “the music business”, the biz called show full of radio Joes, through the ongoing and closer embrace of self-organisation, the use of mass communication tools from the dreams of pamphleteers and artists, is bringing with it the punky/rave overthrow of established order that JCG at 10MH alludes to. It’s not going to be a Revolution Day to be enshrined in the calendar, perhaps, although 15 seats for the Pirate Party in the Berlin State Parliament election this year is pretty momentous, for a movement that grew out of a bunch of (music) filesharers. However, we see and continue to see a slow and certain slide away from centrally-imposed models of culture.

What Robb identifies as the crucial point to be got about The Stone Roses is that they facilitated this for a lot of people, back in the day. The subtext I get from Robb is a hope that The Stone Roses may once again awaken a slumbering generation. They were a homegrown joy, with all the horticultural connotations that phrase may evoke. They struck a (12 string guitar) chord: mouthy lads from the North saying things in their own voice, that actually sounded pretty inspiring and uplifting too. Fade to technicolor:

‘For a lot of people, this is the band that changed everything in their lives and was their portal into another world.’

– John Robb in the NME 29.10.2011

Their influence was beyond musical, and whether these Heaton Park gigs succeed or just suck is beside the point to an extent. No one who ever loved The Stone Roses was ever in any illusion on the point that live, The Stone Roses were sometimes to be found wanting. A superb review of a Stone Roses Live in Blackpool video from Select, I think it was, magazine, written by, I think, either David Stubbs or Quantick, held a phrase so perfect that I have remembered it ever since:

‘On record, Ian Brown sounds like a choirboy. Live, he sounds like Shaun Ryder falling downstairs.’

I never got to see them in the flesh, so can only base my judgements on footage. They were great on record. However, friends who saw them (at Glasgow Green and elsewhere) are quite clear on the transcendent properties of the occasion. Friends who were 16, 17… come on, life. Gigs that succeed are often nothing to do with the actual sounds occurring.

The Stone Roses also represented something lemon fresh in the air at the close of the 1980s and the early 1990s. It is crucial to see them in this context. As well as signing a portal into a world of dance music I and guitar-fan pals might never have opened otherwise, at the same time they provided another refraction of the light that seemed to be emerging from the cracks in the walls, off the bits of ice calving off the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell, Nelson Mandela was freed. The Stone Roses were not the only guitar band to straddle and attack musical barriers, not the first nor last, but they were and remain quite open about, and undervalued for, their political influence.

Their first album cover art is called ‘Bye Bye Badman’:

…the lyrics of which song are about chucking cobbles at the Man. The lemons are a reference to a cheap defence against tear gas. Simon and Garfunkel pastiche ‘Elizabeth My Dear’ is unabashedly republican in sentiment, and more subtle than ‘God Save The Queen’. They laughed in the face of the BBC, calling them amateurs. Red white and blue warpaint stripes speak of liberty, equality, fraternity here, now, do it now…

One might go on. Anyway, the super spangly sugar spun rush of hope and enthusiasm that their sound was, sloping into too-cool-for-schule baggy trouser funk, off for a tab, spoke a truth to many people, on a level deeper than the music itself.

To return to the music for a few lines, when Second Coming came out, it was not ‘almost universally loathed’, as JCG puts it. Universally understood as disappointingly anti-climactic is perhaps more accurate, from me and the pals who were also waiting to hear it, anyway. Contextually, we’d had the First Gulf War, enmiring the sweet bird of freedom in thick, crude oil. Fools’ Black Gold. we were becoming used to disappointment. There were enough good, by which I mean exciting, not-heard-this-before, songs on it to rescue it from catastrophe – Begging You, Breaking into Heaven, Ten Storey Love Song. However, there were also lots of John-Squire-as-Jimmy-Page slide guitar blues licks that were not required. ‘Twas neither nowt nor summat, as we say on our side of the Pennines. Not dancey enough. A bit heavy on its feet. Fat second album, even the title a lazy joke at their own expense. The Stone Roses’ well-chronicled demise at Reading was to be honest actually a bit of a relief, when it came. We were ready to move on.

The reunion gigs might be awful, they might not. I’m not that bothered – I know what they done for me with the records. Listening to Paint It Black, I don’t think of Mick Jagger on the Steel Wheels tour. But, and it is riffing on various articles what has sparked off most of this consideration, there seems to be an idea that The Stone Roses are tainting their own discography and, more widely, culture in general by succumbing to the same nostalgia that has pickled their twisted lemons. That they should be giving up the space for other, younger bands. Why are we even writing about this bunch of old timers?

"...tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today."

I think the problem here, if there is any problem, if ‘here’ can be understood, briefly, as a specific point in a specific cultural field that is forever northern England, and full of music obsessives, the problem is not The Stone Roses. It is one of, in the British media, critical poverty. There is the intrusion, or sustaining, of a kind of glib, unrigorous academic what-to-say mentality, that the hapless Sam Wolfson refers to when he writes of legacy journalism. Lists, articles and hagiographies written by single-idea people to fill magazine inches, increasingly desperate measures to retain the kind of consumers they think read magazines, who they think think in inches.

And it affects all the other writers clamouring for inclusion in that sphere. It turns them into the kinds of writers that complain glibly of unwanted Revolution In The Head-style detail yet offer no counterblast. The kind of writers who neglect to offer the bands with which their g-g-generation will short the nostalgia circuits: will it be titans such as Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, The Ting Tings? The kind of writers so culturally conservative that even their oppositional rhetoric of change and variety is based in a cement of cosy assumptions: that the Reading festival, or equivalent, will continue long into the future, that they will sire children to go to it, that their offspring will be ‘post-GCSE’ educated, that they will be educated at all…

The kind of view set out by Sam Wolfson represents a real decay of critical inspiration, replaced by digital facsimile. In one obvious sense, the article is a decoy duck deployed by the Graun to suck in comment and links, but it denotes also a wider malaise in writing about music, in the presentation of music. In the press, on the BBC, Channel 4, More music, Sky Arts 10,500, everywhere, one sees alongside dusty, Rock Family Tree received wisdom, pin-through-the-abdomen criticism, an unthinking acceptance of horribly vague models of musical history, from people who have just not read or listened widely or deeply enough.

Linear narratives nailed haphazardly across spindly struts. Supported only by scant attention paid to hundreds of iTunes folders full of one track. It’s irritating to listen to or read people who are clearly basing their opinions on such a shallow exploration. Wolfson, the DJs bringing you The Glastonbury Experience… it is nothing less than the near complete cultural dominance of people who know only what they’re supposed to say about stuff. People with almost precisely no understanding of what it is they’re talking about.

Quick pop quiz: If someone suggests a band references the 1960s in their music, which bits do they mean? 12 string guitars or 13th Floor Elevators? Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic? “Northern Soul”? The British Invasion? Bert Kaempfert, Long John Baldry, Engelbert Humperdinck? Albert Ayler? Woodstock, punk rock, disco, boogie, pop? When it ‘sounds like the Beach Boys’, does this mean surf guitar, theremin, vocal harmonies, orchestration or the crunching of vegetables? Name more than 10 bands from the 1960s that aren’t The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Do you even MEAN music from the 1960s? Likewise music from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Be specific! Stop using cultural shorthand! And, incidentally, by ‘seminal’ do you mean original and influential, or dripping with spunk?

A fascinating article linked to by 10MH is to be found at the Collapse Board. Wallace Wylie dreams of a day when a proper history of the 1990s will expunge Britpop from the minds of the people. There already have been attempts. For one example, Ben Thompson gave it a go back in 1998 with Seven Years of Plenty. As well as Goldie, Aphex Twin and Portishead, and Blur and Pulp, he discusses Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Super Furry Animals and other bands that ploughed furroughs in fields quite different to those now being used for housing developments by halfwit journalists.

I’ll come back to Those Other 1990s bands, perhaps. It’s already there to be discovered, other narratives written, different dubs plated. One has to maintain abandon to a sense of wonder and exploration. Ian Brown, at another much-discussed gig, said:

‘The time, the time is now, do it now, do it now.’

Everett True’s review wants to know what to do. ‘Do exactly what?’ he wonders. Here, exactly, is the nub of the crux, the problem with a certain type of criticism. Brown was not saying what ‘it’ is, nor should he. He might have meant get drunk, get high, dance, sit down, buy our records, make your own records. Take up triathlons. It doesn’t matter what he meant, it’s what he did. That’s what he was saying: You know. It’s your thing. Get on with it. Immerse me in your splendour.

THAT is what I got from The Stone Roses, why they matter. Now, come on – we’re wasting our time.

Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin

HFC is a ‘fantastical’ account of some of the problems suwwounding the welease of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. M, a fan of Python for many years, has stopped commenting with delight on how similar the actors (particularly Rufus Jones) are to their real-life counterparts, and started enjoying the programme. Time passes. J looks up from the PC.]

J: So, we have to get the tickets to Turkey today.
M: Mmmm?
J: For the wedding.
M: Oh, yes.
J: We said coming back on the Friday.
M: Gets us in when again?
J: 1am on the Saturday.
M: Mehhh… but Sunday morning was the alternative.
J: Yesss.
M: Yes, do it do it do it.
J: [Beat] £670.
M: What, each?
J: No, that’s for the two. £335.
M: Each.
J: Yes.
M: Bit steep, innit? Who’s this with?
J: Jet2.
M: I thought that was a budget airline.
J: Well… it is. That’s still cheaper than the ‘proper’ ones.
M: Hmmm. Well, yes, carry on.

[J clicks and scans, illuminated by the screen. M goes back to watching Holy Flying Circus, illuminated by the screen. The story is well-written and well-done, M concludes, suitably Pythonesque meta-humour, asides and time-shifts, jumps into surreal animations and puppetry that tick his boxes. Meanwhile, also ticking boxes, J continues her tussle with e-commerce.]

J: Do we want to check in online for £10, or at the airport for £36?
M: Is that each?
J: No.
M: Goodness. Well, online, obviously. [pause] So, they’re charging us to check in, online?
J: Yes.
M: Isn’t it included in the price?
J: No.
M: Hmmph.
[Holy Flying Circus continues for a few minutes. M expresses mildly though with some heat...]
That’s a total outrage! Charging us, to check in online, for tickets that we have bought, online, on an aeroplane! It’s not as if we can’t check in. We need to check in. Just include it in the price! [Pause] I’m writing them a stiff letter.

[The Holy Flying Circus continues.]

J: Right, it’s £42.50 for baggage.
M: Okay. Right… £42.50!
J: Yes. So it’s £21.25 each.
M: Is that both ways?
J: Yes.
M: So it’s £85?
J: Oh, right, no, that’s the price for there and back. We’re only taking one bag.
M: Oh, THAT’s okay then.

[M briefly imagines a film depiction of him dragging a massive case, containing J's entire wardrobe and a pair of his shorts, with some difficulty, through an airport. J breezes ahead looking all 60s aviation chic in headscarf, sunglasses and cocktail dress. She smiles and waves at someone in the middle distance, possibly Mick Jagger. Meanwhile the case spins round on its wheels, M struggling to make it comply. He is dragged from his feet in the background as J blithely proffers papers at the check-in. On Holy Flying Circus, the Pythons sit in the office of their legal counsel, discussing blasphemy prosecutions. Gilliam, as usual, drifts into a bawdy animated aside as he reads the journal in question, Gay News. As the fantasia concludes, Cleese clouts Gilliam round the head with a newspaper and the scene continues.]

J: I said, Where do we want to sit?
M: Well, anywhere.
J: We have to pick – it’s £4.99 to guarantee our seats.
M: That we’ve paid £345 for. No! Wait. £335 for the seats, £10 to get to the aeroplane to get to them.
J: Yes. But the £10 is a total check-in fee.
M: Oh. But still. £4.99, to get to sit in a seat you’ve paid for.
J: Yes. £4.99 each to make sure you get a particular one, next to the other.
M: Do we have to sit next to each other?
[J performs a moue-and-peering-over-spectacles manouevre.]
M: Right, yes, yes, of course. [Peers at seating plan] What about those blue ones at the front?
J: £15.99.
M: Get any ones together that aren’t blue.
J: Right.
M: I am definitely writing them a stiff letter.

[The show proceeds. Michael Palin, the Nicest Man in the World, has dinner with Terry-Jones-as-wife and Michael-Palin-as-his-own-mother. M is giggling to himself.]

J: Do we want to have dinner?
M: We’re NOT having a meal! It’ll be £1,000. No.
J: It’s another £10 each.
M: And what do you get for that? Like, a bread roll and a can of Efes?
J: It’s a three course meal and glass of wine. They’ve got another box next to it reminding you that it’s a four-hour flight.
M: They probably waft the smell of baking bread through the plane as well.
J: We’ll take a packed lunch. Put that in the letter.
M: [Grumbles incoherently]

[There is a pause of card detail completion length. During this time, the action on BBC4 moves forward to the eve of the great heavyweight title debate, Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark v John Cleese and Michael Palin. Cleese in particular is becoming vitriolic. Comic on-screen warnings signpost the swearing; the effect on M and J is subtle.]

J: Fucking hell!
M: Now what?
J: I’ve just got to putting the payment through, and there’s a fucking £26.10 booking fee.
M: WHAT?
J: A booking fee! £26.10! It didn’t say fucking ANYTHING about a booking fee, anywhere, on the site until I just got to the check-out.
M: So… right. They’re selling us a fucking ticket, that we have to pay extra to use, plus some sort of… fucking personal belongings tax, plus a, a, a… spatial location fee to ensure that we can definitely sit near each other on the plane.
J: In our £335 seats.
M: In our three hundred and thirty fucking five pound seats.
J: Yes, well. These are the cunts that want to charge you for going to the toilet.
M: For fuck’s sake. I am fucking definitely writing them an extremely stiff letter.
J: I’m sure they get fucking hundreds.

[J and M are crushed as a giant animated foot, decked in Jet2 livery, descends with resounding raspberry noise.]

And it IS a struggle, dear reader, it is. Sidebar/Interlude

So, again, yet, thusly, here we are. I continue to be tickled by the ideas and memories that surface when I look through that list, fondly, of an evening, as if it were only yesterday that I made that little snapshot of what I wanted to remember then. This week I have been inspired by my beloved getting her ears syringed. Consequently, she has been able to hear the footfall of a kitten three streets away (‘Oh darling, it’s dancing’). It made me covet cerumenolysis too: clarity, no fuzz… taking me back to before loud music first assaulted my lugs in a live setting… and what led me there. For it was… Iron Maiden… (Vincent Price chuckle).

And, of course, please feel free to substitute ‘arse’ for a word of your choice in the album title.

8. Iron Maiden – Powerslave

This is difficult. I was quite a large fan of Iron Maiden in my teens – by which I mean both dedicated and slightly overweight. Maiden, as they must perhaps inevitably be abbreviated, which is better than the thin-ice Cockney rhyming slang implications of ‘The Irons’; Maiden. Maiden was my first exciting early-mid teens music obsession, my first tribe, my first gig. The concert included a memorable £40 coach trip to the NEC in Birmingham for the back-to-basics ‘No Prayer on the Road’ tour. With inflation, that would be about £1,850 now. On the bus was a whole troop of my high school’s rock fraternity. Great! Maiden were supported by Anthrax, so in fact Anthrax were the first band I saw live, which a) explains a lot about my unreliable hearing and b) looks pretty good now I come to write it.

It’s difficult to name a specific Album that Changed My Life by Iron Maiden. They’re all different-yet-familiar, all with things to commend them, all with particular resonances and to be viewed as holistic life-changery, really. On most days I would probably go for the template-setting and wonderful Iron Maiden, or Killers. There’s something about Paul Di’Anno’s voice and the urgent fluency of the music, the ‘come on, we’re not here to fuck about’ snark of punk, filtered through the prog twiddling ability of what Steve Harris (long-haired West Hammer Horror and Wishbone Ash fan) suggested were people who could ‘actually play’ (citation needed, interview in Metal Hammer some long time hence). ‘Phantom of the Opera’ from Iron Maiden is still untouchable for the adrenalin/Lucozade jab of energy coming from the stop/start revs and acceleration to actual warp speed twiddling, the ecstatic ‘Woah, yeah!’… ah, Maiden.

… Yeah, but, there’s The Number of the Beast, with Number of the Beast and Run to the Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name… Piece of Mind, with The Trooper and Revelations… then the prog-ression through full-on synth twiddling epics Somewhere in Time (the Wasted Years/Reach Out single would definitely make it on to my fantasy juke box) and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, then No Prayer for the Dying…

Actually, as well as being the last Maiden album I really liked, and then only because it was, y’know, them (something Steve Harris once said about Golden Earring, citation blah bibble blooh) ‘No Prayer…’ was the last album for which Derek Riggs did the cover. Derek Riggs is the illustrator responsible for Iron Maiden’s best cover art. His website used to have a series of embittered-sounding FAQs about what a soul-sapping time he had over the course of his time drawing for the band. These are now nowhere to be seen, although his page labels are nice little exercises in pithy invective. He doesn’t have a lot of time for his Iron Maiden work, which is (absurdist comparison) a bit like Leonardo complaining that all people ever want to talk about is the Last Supper and Mona Lisa, not that little dining room frieze he bashed out for Matteo Bandello. Riggs’ artwork was a major part of the appeal. In-jokes, self-referential and nicely-read allusions to other bands, ideas… and a tendency to have things like ‘this is a very boring painting’ running backwards as a banner in a shop window.

When he left the equation, I pretty much did too, coinkidinkally. It is entirely fair and accurate to note that Maiden effectively stopped trading at Fear of the Dark as far as I’m concerned. The Blaze Bayley years were deliberately shunned… more recent efforts are just not in the part of the radar I’m monitoring. That said, the current three-guitar line-up looks exciting on the old YouTubes, and the interesting Flight 666 (if you will) rockumentary illustrated that, pleasingly, little has changed in the world of Maiden from when I was really into them. My impression from the film, obviously to an extent confirmation bias, was of an occasionally lairy but soft-centred, Goon/Python humoured football crowd… hard working British men and women… (FX: Nicko McBrain humming ‘Land of Hope & Glory’ then blowing a raspberry).

Anyway, yes, so, Powerslave it is. I got obsessed with Powerslave. I got it on CD for my birthday one year, along with a Number of the Beast t-shirt I still have, from the World’s Greatest Aunty. Before that, the tape of the album wore my tape player out. It was the first album I heard by them, at one point a copy off a mate. The cover alone was fascinating. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for (Ancient) Egyptian culture, so the artwork was an immediate draw. The title track considers pharaonic responsibilities, kingly mortality and tomb curses, sort of Bruce Dickinson sitting between two vast and trunkless legs of HP Lovecraft, chewing his pen and looking thoughtful.

The rest of the material on the album is preoccupied with familiar Maiden preoccupations – war, old TV or movies, twiddling guitars ratcheted up to 11, the whole sounding thoroughly electric, I always thought. First track is the awesome chocks-away single Aces High, which for full effect should be watched as performed on the Live After Death double album meisterwerk, complete with Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech as an audio introduction, and the band leaping onstage and into action at Long Beach Arena (Southern California) as if they have short ropes of elastic attaching the monitors to their nipples.

The highlight of the album is the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, epic 13 minute retelling of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lengthy meditation on man’s journey through life, a story for which the subtext may or may not be ‘what not to do if a bird shits on you.’ Being a bit of a bookworm as well as a guitar nut, this enormous tune had a possibly cataclysmic effect, leading me to an abiding affection for STC, and to know parts of the poem by heart, coming in useful for sounding more erudite than I am on occasion.

It also marked a (retrospectively) intriguing period of what might now be diagnosed as onset OCD, in that I would have to listen to the full 13 minute Rime experience uninterrupted all the way through… so I would whip out the tape and FFWD to get to the beginning if disturbed while listening for whatever reason. We had the technology. I particularly recall doing this on a family holiday, in the car in the Highlands of Scotland, where the misty mountains and interminable rains of the west coast in summer lent themselves rather appositely to a tale of a solitary loon trapped in a vessel in dismal meteorological conditions. The tinny rattle of guitar and drums, not to mention occasional exasperated opening and shutting of personal stereo, the whirr of the FFWD, the click and re-opening and shutting, must have been a bit of an annoyance for the family. It is entirely likely that the family took to amusing itself by distracting me just to see me get annoyed about it, or more likely to engage me in conversation/vainly protect my delicate adolescent lugholes.

Ah, youth. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous. Like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in many ways. Concludals: Powerslave was a pivotal album, soundtracking a watershed in Iron Maiden’s career, and in my life, and – in the Cairngorms – an actual watershed. After Maiden it was indie rock fandom, to which I shall return in a forthcoming post, and then off into the wide musical yonder. Chocks away!

When approaching the Facebook/list topic, one group of smokers dressed mainly in black sulks about the silly, superficial idea. It loathes that personally important music, like, actual RECORDS, should be considered reducible to under-explained lists of tracks that stand like water striders, pressing delicately into the surface but never submerging… loathes the very idea of doing this on Facebook, because it loathes Facebook. Facebook, where convenient social intercourse and potentially fun geekery is not only ruined by a holiday camp enforced funtime mentality but in fact becomes sinister through being applied to EVERYSINGLEPARTOFYOURLIFE. “Hey, let’s make a daily ritual out of that brilliant idea we talked about for three minutes once and tell everyone in the whole world even if they don’t care and…” “Piss off, and take your digital zombie farm likes with you.”

That little crowd of grumblers has difficulties also in overcoming the Nick Hornby qualms. The qualms, the qualms… You see, (explains a member of the crowd who looks a bit like me in a John Cusack mask, moving forward to address the camera, punctuating with a cigarette,) I quite liked High Fidelity, which is of course about a bloke making sense of his life through music… but… About a Boy, also about music and self-obsessed bloke, remains one of the few books I have actually thrown across an actual room in irritation. (Aside to a different camera) The first Twilight novel simply slipped from my fingers as I slumped, halfway through that interminable first page. 31 Songs committed the grave offences of picking all the wrong Teenage Fanclub tunes and just being BORING, like, accountancy spreadsheet rock? Files? Lists? Tchoh. [Cigarettes flicked gutterwards with middle finger disdain swirl off in a river of rain].

YET… Another, happier crowd bounces into view, blasting the Club Tropicana eclectimix, dressed like LMFAO, 18-30 reps cross-pollinated with fanzine writers, high on smart drugs and phones, comfortable with their filing, downloading everything now because they can, we can. The sun follows them. WhatEVS, sneerers! they hoot, compiling an instant Top 5 Miserable Sods List, a list that has Morrissey on it, thus further irritating the grumblers because he’s not actually miserable and YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, and the happy crowd DOESN’T CARE, because it is all harmless FUN and it doesn’t actually matter, Mr Frowny, because it’s all just word frolics… and look, what’s wrong with the Book of Face? Because all we have is sharing our souls and talking shit in the face of the abyss, which is actually our own face, but look over here something else and DRINKS TOO?

Yeah, go on then. I need to find some sort of way to just write about things without imagined mobs of idiots arguing me into or out of it.

First pay day in over a year – yippee! – coincided with popping through to Leeds for a bit of a shop, where I was to be found reining myself in, as one might an enthusiastic hound, in the mighty Jumbo Records.

I was partially inspired by the singular event of being followed on Twitter by The Frank and Walters – yes! And you can expect a little flurry of backwards musical glances in the next few posts… but I was keen also to procure more driving music. I found myself seeking out hits from me youth and other more contemporary treats (I promise Jumbo Records I’ll be back for Fabric 60), nosing through the bargain shelves to avoid splurging all my dough in one go, but drawn to the bewildering array around the shop throughout…

Annoyingly, not that I was going to buy them, but still, and evidently a subject that rankles the shopkeeper I chatted with as I purchased, some bands’ labels insist on charging industry-collapsing prices for CDs. Like, a preposterous £16.99 each for Queen’s back catalogue, The Beatles’ collected works continuing to fund the estate of Michael Jackson’s debt mountain, and so forth.

One CD I was seeking, ‘The Stone Roses’, was available only in a ’20th Anniversary reissue’ version, with Fool’s Gold stuck on the end of the album, and an extra CD, for £19.99, but I took offence at this. I was perhaps retro-fitting the offence of burglary that deprived me of my original copy about 16 years hence, but it just seemed… not in keeping.

I got into The Stone Roses late, through a compilation tape from a pal in the USA, circuitously, in 1990-ish. I was converted shortly after Fool’s Gold came out, as I continued a long shore drift from a mainly rocky beach to liking just about anything again. The Stone Roses album remains an era-defining record for quite a few people of my age, I would venture faultless and perfect for all kinds of soundtracks to your life.

Anyway, the inauthenticity and cash-in-aroola nostalgia ruination flick through the racks at Jumbo led me on, I sensed, a potentially frustrating mission to find a proper copy of the original CD, preferably at a proper, inexpensive CD price. As luck would have it, however, down the escalators from Jumbo in the St John’s Centre, there is one of those “3 for £5″ (and various permutations of CDs for small amounts of cash) stores, which I regret not noting the name of. Very dry staff, and an amazing selection of original CDs from the last thirty years. Got some TLC, Cypress Hill, T.Rex and… oh lordy… The Stone Roses, for £2.50 each. Incredible scenes.

Saturday had record-breaking temperatures for October in the UK, and bliss was it in that afternoon to be alive, slinking out of Leeds with I Wanna Be Adored as ever being the ultimate city landscape music (and for foggy mornings on commuter rail networks)… driving back from West Yorkshire along the A64 singing wonky harmonies, fetching up back in York pretty much as the jangles faded for I Am The Resurrection.

Turning off on to the A19, This Is The One was surging and we almost wept at the wonder. Here you are:

(This is all relative to ‘not having to commute at all’, of course, but we’ll gloss on over that, as well as the fact that the A1079 is not the winding up and down glee suggested in the opening credits of ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ but a frustrating not enough dual carriageway split into speed-restricted sections to avoid the massive pile-ups when cars stop to take sharp rights down Storking Lane to Fangfoss or whatever. Without wishing to get all Jeremy Clarkson about it, there can be too much prescription. In the last few days I seem to keep getting stuck behind the driver who has misinterpreted the national speed limit on A roads (60mph) as being ‘about 48mph’, which makes sense seeing as they think ’40mph’ means ’32mph’, and given that they just left a 40mph zone and there’s a 50mph zone coming up in 100 yards and 48 is the mean of these… My apologies to Europeans for the imperial measurements, and mathematicians for a possibly erroneous use of ‘mean’ and the other numeracy issues.)

Among the great thingery of this commute is the actually having to have a car, something it has taken me 19 years of being able to drive to arrive at. Even then I swithered. One doesn’t need a car in central London, where we was, not really. York is pretty notorious for the snarl-ups on its inner ring road. If school were nearer, in the same city, I’d get the bus, or walk. However, for where I work, walking would be a step too far. A bus ride would mean being up, out of the house and on the bus at 06.37 to get to work for 7.10 (simply, no), or getting to work at 08.45 (a capital ‘L’, underlined three times, in the register). There is no train – up yours, Dr Beeching! – so car it is.

The car is not just a necessary evil for commuting, of course. A comment J and I have made frequently in the short while since we got it is the classic new car owner observation that while it was not something we had particularly missed having previously, now we’ve got it… why, its a whole new world! A hundred thousand things to see. Etc.

Brimham Rocks, for example

Another great thing about the vehicle is the capacity to listen to CDs, which never seemed to get played in the house any more. Last year, or jings, it might have been the year before, anyway, recentlyish, some friends and I did a compilation club, where themed CDs were lovingly put together, covers made, distribution to contributors, lovely lovely lovely. I’ve been enjoying those immensely, driving along at 44mph, periodically flicking on the wipers and generally mulling whatever morning mull issues, to a diverse and occasionally deranged set of sets.

Today I re-found a completely classic City Slang promo compilation, a freebie picked up in a record shop in 1995. I’ll scan the cover, which has the band names transliterated into Cyrillic. This reminds me of being about 11 and making a sign for my bedroom door reading ‘No entry!’ in six languages, including a heroic and entirely nonsensical HO EиTPY. The sign must have lasted at least five minutes ’til my dad took it down for my cheek, as well as the inaccurate Russian. I think I’d just seen a documentary about Berlin or something.

Anyway, this CD was a great drive home tonight, so hurrah for City Slang. In the spirit of sharing, and there only being seven tracks, here is that 50 Years City Slang Tuesday night play list for your edification and entertainment:

Built to Spill – Reasons

I think always preferred the track ‘Girl’, and ‘Car’ would of course be appropriate, but this is good Spillage,, with a single still image ‘video’ that just made me start giggling.

Superchunk – Hyper Enough

YASSSSS! Su-per-chunk! Su-per-chunk!

Seam – Tuff Luck

It’s not much of a vid on the ViewTube, a mellow tune though, which does call to mind slippers and sheep, now I come to think of it.

Guided by Voices – Motor Away

QUADRUPLE YASSSS! One of my actual all time top ten desert island back of neck tingling life changers. A nice video tribute here too.

Freakwater – White Rose

Simply cannot find this anywhere, so here’s ‘Drunk Friend’ instead. Let me know if there’s a vid I’ve missed…

Lambchop – The man who loved beer

Drily heart-breaking sentiments, only to be improved by getting full of beer.

Tortoise – Along the banks of rivers

A lovely tune to close. Particularly effective at 44mph with the windscreen wipers on, evening sun trying to get out over recently-ploughed fields, seagulls rising and falling.

Ladies and gentlemen: цитъi cланг!

You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t, rise above.

Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of love

‘Ten years asleep’ is, however, not a Bruce lyric. It’s a song by Kingmaker. Kingmaker was a pre-Britpop band from Kingston upon Hull, chewed up and stuck flat to the pavement by the mid-1990s. I saw them support The Wonder Stuff in 1991, 20 years ago this December. They were not a bad band. Paul D. Heaton, of The Beautiful South, and also a Kingston-upon-Hullion, saw them as middle-class chancers from suburban castles. I would tend to agree that there was an element of the student/indie disco irritant about them, but what their address has to do with anything is beside the by. Perhaps a similar gleam of clever-clever bitterness momentarily threatened Heaton’s industry.

True Pop Anecdote: a personal experience of Paul Heaton. I was working in a hotel bar in 1994, serving him a gin & tonic with Becks chaser at 10.30am, and he invited me out for a drink with him and pals when I finished. I arrived at Bairds Bar in the Gallowgate around 14.00 in time to see him being carried out, paralytic, by two of the crew. My pints of lager were supped with a more together companion of his. Make what you will of that metaphor for the working-class artistic burden.

Anyway, I remember reading that the Kingmaker song ‘Ten Years Asleep’ was written as a comment on the preceding decade of Conservative government, the co-opting of 1970s punks into The MANagement, the gleeful abandonment of a society identified as non-existent by Mrs Thatcher, the triumph of the brutes. ‘Don’t pretend to care when you don’t care,’ it suggested that lamentations were meaningless if a society was just going through the motions, if complicity was commonplace.

Of course, of course, the point is, I was reminded of this track by hearing and reading nothing all week but ‘ten years on’ themed pieces. The ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the USA, specifically the passenger jets flown into the World Trade Centres and the Pentagon, as well as the loss of a flight presumed headed for the White House. I haven’t wanted to join in the mass of commentary, of remembrance and application of meaning and justification. This is partly because I have communicated my thoughts in other places over the years since then, in anti-war pamphlets, blogs and such. It is partly because I thought it would be superfluous. What can I add?

It was a fucking shame, excuse my Anglo Saxon, that so many people died, it always is a shame, as it is a shame that so many more thousands have died since in wars fought to no good purpose but for national leaders to be seen to be doing something about something about which nothing can be done, not by perpetual war.

I said this on the day in 2001, in fact, and I recall because I wrote it down: ‘There’ll be a horrible bloody revenge attack on someone, when they could be turning the other cheek.’ Rising above. By which I meant not doing nothing, but inviting dialogue, finding out why and what for and what could be done to stop it. Perhaps spending military budget money on building bridges, I mean, actual bridges, or schools, perhaps, perhaps getting into actually unbelievable levels of debt doing nice stuff, for example.

However, there was no cheek turning, just a continuation of the previous decades’ posturing and out of focus ideologies. Hearing G.W. Bush today talking about God, as if it helps give him gravity, and Blair in a BBC interview surfacing to offer the demented view that his foreign policy actions have had no impact on people worldwide… I wonder about that failure of logic, the absence of even a smidgen of understanding of words meaning peace, hope, love, the same as I wonder about any people who try to justify murder and vicious attack. I wonder… well, I read somewhere – I am having trouble sourcing the quote – that Christopher Hitchens, who supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticised those opposing the wars as the kind of people who, on discovering a poisonous snake in their child’s room, would first call People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I like to think of myself as the kind of person who would not respond to such a discovery by setting fire to the rest of the house.

It is unfortunate that these are the first things that come to my mind, that this is a world that’s been ten years asleep, having nightmares of planes slamming into buildings and war without end, bitterness without resolution, people believing everything that people tell them about what must be done, that things must be done, that people must be told. I think this is part of the reason why I have become a teacher. I wanted to encourage people to think for their selves, to understand and to question words, so the people that want to burn down the house cannot sustain forever a monopoly on running things.

All I can add today: peace.

Conductive Jelly was a medium for the kind of writing I was doing at the time, which was sort of stream-of-conscious sci-fi wordplay inspired by the sounds I was listening to, or imagined scenes the sounds might track. I used to spend ages in dimly-lit venues feverishly scritching notes in books, on beer mats or on bits of paper towel from behind the bar.

Conductive Jelly came to a halt for a number of reasons, but the main one was that I just started enjoying the sounds, with a subsidiary reason that I didn’t think the words were necessarily adding anything.

However, fourth time around, I thought it’d be much more fun to provide a means for people to take a personal record without having to tear off bits of beer mat or pester hard-working bar staff for cleaning products… thusly, the centre page of CJ4 had some blank spaces for gig goers to record their impressions of the gig in whatever way they saw fit.

Happily, as well as bass and electronics, Tony from Etai Keshiki is a dab hand at drawing, and he contributed this marvellous effort (link to pdf below – I’ll get a pic up asap). I am very happy not only that he bothered, but also that he actually succeeded in capturing the essences of the bands. All of this while waiting to perform, too – great warm-up.

Tony_Keshiki’s_pics

I also note from reading Etai’s facebook page that the gig in York inspired someone to form a band! This also makes me very happy.