While loath to send traffic towards the Daily Mail’s website – as if the Keyword Kings of Northcliffe House need the help – this article about “vintage” record bags was forwarded to me. It is worth a look, if you can bring yourself. I tried to find a tumblr account with similar images, but couldn’t, sorry.
Alors, it stirred some interesting thoughts about records. Actually, the first thing it made me do was turn around and look at this on the wall behind me:
That’s a carrier bag from Satisfaction, which was a second-hand record emporium in Gothenburg, Sweden. The bag-in-frame is situated above my record collection, illustrating a decorative taste for the obvious that can be seen also on the other side of the room, where I have a bag from Gosh! comics, London, above the comics shelves.
So, bags. The Daily Heil article of course touches on the seeming demise of record shops over the last 10 years, as new means for the mass production and distribution of pop music are embraced. Regular readers of The Mortal Bath may recognise a theme relating to hard copies, in particular the superiority of vinyl/CD/cassette over many aspects of e-music, for want of a better all-encompassing term. I’ll not grumble too much about it: there’s a lot to commend the digital age, but a lot of ways in which It Just Ain’t The Same.
It doesn’t take much to make men of a certain age and demographic wax prolix and nostalgic about stuff in any case (or sleeve). I remember the colours of the WHSmiths bag shown in the article. The first single I remember buying myself came home in a WHSmiths bag just like it. I’d like to say it was one of the Adam and The Ants’ records, but I’m pretty certain it was Brown Sauce’s ‘I wanna be a winner’.
Written by B.A. Robertson (my childhood’s second-favourite B.A.) Brown Sauce was loveable Cheggers, the lovely Maggie Philbin, and N**l Ed****S, off Swap Shop. I think it safe to venture that my purchase proves the diabolic power of TV on impressionable young minds.
Smiths is probably not on many people’s list of go-to places for records now, although they do still stock a Top 40, I think. Further mental baggage includes leaving Our Price, Harrogate, with carriers containing They Might Be Giants (Lincoln on vinyl, an absurd £1.99 in the sale and one of the best spends ever)… singles by The Wedding Present (most of The Hit Parade as it came out) and Manic Street Preachers’s Motown Junk, which I heard on Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session and was totally smitten with, HAD to have it, one of the rare occasions I have actually gone out the next day to buy a record I heard on the radio.
Our Price has closed too, along with pretty much every other record shop in Harrogate. I understand the relatively-recently-arrived HMV is still holding on by the skin of its teeth, although it’s probably only a matter of time before it and all its brethren and sistren are turned into earphones-and-mobile-phone-skins shops by the new owners. Mutter, bah, grumble.
I visited Satisfaction when holidaying in Sverige with pals. Ah, happy memories. The record in the bag was some version or other of Rarities Volume 1 by The Who.
I could have spent about 10m Kronor in there, but I only had 70 SEK spending monies spare. Discovering little troves like that and making a small deposit (“A MONETARY deposit!”) are part of the glory of wandering about in the real world, perhaps an increasingly rare experience in many places. Finding record shops, I mean. Discovering just now via the magic of the webs that Satisfaction has closed down, with the magic of the webs a possible contributing factor, gives me all sorts of contradictory feelings. Much like the Brown Sauce record, in fact.
Yet there are pockets of resistance to this march towards the Musical Singularity. Local-to-me shops in York, UK, such as the excellent Inkwell and Rebound Records (both on Gillygate) or Attic Records (near the market), to name the three I can think of right now, are troves similar in ethos and layout to Satisfaction. As I mentioned in a previous post about jukeboxes, charity shops here remain quite reliable sources for yer vinyl fix, although often they have fallen prey to using Record Collector to price their Fair or Good Copies at Near Mint prices. Hiss, crackle!
When I go a-browsing I tend mostly to have my own bag with me these days, but if I find a shop en passant that has an appealing design on their carrier, it might well end up decorating a wall. And you can’t do that with a zipped folder, kids.
Saw the film The Prestige via Lovefilm the other week. I wasn’t sure what to expect as it passed me by on original release, but we (J and I, as usual) ended up quite liking it. Magic! Bowie! Two of our favourites. And, in a nice bit of musical synchronicity that same day, I had chanced upon a Prestige Juke Box and been enchanted.
The Prestige Juke Box in question was a 1982 model, holding 80 7″ singles. For those few of you unacquainted with seven inch singles, these were one way people used to get their own copies of recorded sound… At time of writing (late 2012) they have been pretty much superseded in the mass market, first by CD singles in the 80s and 90s, and now by mp3s and other formats.
Bear with the level of detail, and a perhaps slightly starey eye on “the reader”, whenever this may find them. I’m labouring the contextual point because when I saw this juke box… well, let’s come back to that. Let’s start with where I saw it, which was in Handicraft Hall, in Ripon, Yorkshire.
Handicraft Hall, indeed. Why, this seems a sort of name JK Rowling might devise, I thought cynically on entering. It looked discouragingly wholesome, in concept and execution. Basically, it was a large, former department store-sized premises, filled with stalls touting arts and crafts, nearly new items… Shortbread and apples and gingham, oh my! However, like The Prestige, it was actually quite good. While there was over-priced organic food and a certain amount of what I shall term for kindness’ sake trucs bijoux frou-froux, pardon my French, the whole Hall set-up was a good idea, well-enacted. Small and medium-sized enterprises collaborating to utilise an unused space: whodathunkit?
Making my way further inside, I was drawn by audiomancy to the stall of jukebox lender and second-hand-record vendor, Betterdaze Juke Box Hire. The second thing that caught my eye was their prices for the second hand jazz records. A mere “£2”, which is what Oxfam and the like used to sell their sides for before they began to price themselves out of the cheapskate old sound hound market, with stupid Record Collector prices for stupid records in stupid nowhere near collectible quality.
Actually, I’ve wanted to mention this for ages, so, side-bar Exhibit A: One Spike Hughes and His All American Orchestra LP. I bought a copy out of Oxfam or the Sally Army or something for £0.99, near-perfect condition. Super.
Recently, a damaged copy in Oxfam, Micklegate, York, was going for £9.99. I mean, really damaged, though. The cover looked like it had been gnawed by rodents. This was when I stopped buying records from Oxfam. I also understand that Oxfam pulp books that “won’t sell”. It’s probably not just them, and I’ll continue to give them my cash periodically, but that’s a bookseller that *destroys books*, instead of, say, whacking them all in boxes on a trestle table and flogging them three for a pound, or something. It’s not as if they cost them anything, and it’s all ‘money in the tin’, isn’t it?
I digress testily. Betterdaze in Handicraft Hall had plentiful records, in v. good nick, for an acceptable price. It was only a consequence of me having spent a tenner on, like, indispensable books in the St Michael’s Hospice shop up the road that I didn’t avail myself of a handful. That and the fact that we don’t have a record player, something J pointed out patiently as I dribbled on the vinyl. A record player is currently on my ‘laters’ list, joining the growing assortment of mid-life crisisery to follow when Junior eventually goes to college, or requires their synapses jacking into the Neuroframe, or whatever vastly expensive future child education cost scenario it may be.
However (wakey, point imminent), the first thing that had drawn me over to the man with the records from Betterdaze was the selection of fine, fine looking juke boxes, which you can hire out, with a record selection of your choice, for any and all social functions. Check out their website, it’s quite impressive.
The Prestige had a price tag of £750 on it, which I thought was a bit steep for hiring, but I asked and the man said no, this was a sale price. Lordy. As if I need anything else to covet and nearly but not quite be able to afford. We had a nice chat along these lines before I went back to browsing the records.
Then, and this links to all that contextual overkill from earlier, a guy of about my age brought over a sceptical-looking teen lass to talk to the salesman. He said she wanted to know what a juke box was, is.
Three other people of about my age looked up, over-hearing the same thing, from their vinyl browsing. Glances and wry smiles were exchanged. “This one’s just about to change,” smiled the salesman, gesturing at a Wurlitzer model with a gleam of magic in the eye. The turn of the disc, the whirr of gears, the sound coming out of a speaker. Seven pairs of eyes watched it, dewy.
Juke boxes are ace. 7” singles are ace. They have two songs (usually), art work, sometimes a pithy messsage scratched into the run-out groove (check to see if any of your disks were ‘A Porky Prime Cut’!) and the kind of tactility that no amount of roundel icons can ape. Imagine not having had the joy of 7” singles – never mind just jukeboxes, but at home, dancing in bedroom, perhaps a stack of them on the autochanger… perusing the sleeves… Imagine only knowing digital juke boxes, where thousands of tracks are available because the landlord has outsourced their imagination. I think there is an impoverishment that comes from virtually unlimited choice, from reducing everything to an easily-attainable facsimile.
Well, anyway. I do like a well-stocked juke box. The right juke selection can trigger moments of afternoon triumph, as the value track that lasts three times as long as other people’s choices comes on. Even CD juke boxes have a similar kind of appeal, the album selection (like in the Note or Sleazys in Glasgow, for two examples) saying a lot about the venue, clientele, ethos.
A great example of what a venue can do with it is the one in Bradley’s Spanish Bar, one of London’s worst-kept secret best-kept secret pubs. A Prestige is the model used there. It had a splendid singles selection on it last time I was in, and the pub itself is a well-loved, nicely dog-eared establishment. If you’re in the West End you could do much worse than spend an afternoon sat in the window seat reading and feeding pound coins in to generate soundtracks while you drink yourself squiffy.
It was just such a dewy-eyed reverie that prompted me to imagine what sides would go on my Prestige when I get it. I think I dig the Prestige more than a Wurlitzer because it’s my era, maybe because the colours and lines mirror scuffed 70′s/80s architecture of the future. I’m not going to analyse the list, oppa Nick Hornby style. It is as it is, to paraphrase the Pope on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. You have to imagine starting an argument in my pub. “Why haven’t you got…?” Inscrutably, I point to the suggestions box on the end of the bar.
For such arguments’ sake, for such choices will have to be made – because it will be mine! Oh yes. It will be mine… – here it be, in alphabetical order:
…and we’re puttin’ it on wax…
A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray/Arcade Fantasy
Adam & The Ants – Stand and Deliver/Beat My Guest
Herb Alpert – Up Cherry Street; Numero Cinco/Mexican Shuffle; The Girl from Ipanema
Anthrax – Anti-Social/Parasite
Baccara – Yes Sir I Can Boogie/Cara Mia
Baccara – The Devil Sent You To Lorado/Somewhere In Paradise
The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice?/God Only Knows
Beastie Boys – (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)/Paul Revere
The Beatles – She Loves You/I’ll Get You
The Beatles – Paperback Writer/Rain
Chuck Berry – Maybellene/Wee Wee Hours
Blondie – Heart of Glass/Rifle Range
Bomb The Bass – Don’t Make Me Wait/Megablast
David Bowie – Starman/Suffragette City
David Bowie – Drive-In Saturday/Round and Round
The Bug – Killer/Version
The Charlatans – The Only One I Know/Everything Changed
The Crimea – Lottery Winners on Acid/Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Cypress Hill – The Phuncky Feel One/How I Could Just Kill A Man
Dead Kennedys – Kill The Poor/In-Sight
Dr Hook – The Millionaire/(?)
Duran Duran – The Reflex/Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) (Live)
Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues/She Belongs To Me
El-P – Deep Space 9mm/Tuned Mass Damper*
Fleetwood Mac – The Chain/Go Your Own Way*
Grandaddy – A.M. 180/Here
The Heptones – Equal Rights/Ting ‘A’ Ling
Buddy Holly – Brown Eyed Handsome Man/Rock-A-Bye Rock
The Honeycombs – Have I The Right?/Please Don’t Pretend Again
Iron Maiden –Wasted Years/Reach Out
Iron Maiden – Twilight Zone/Wrathchild
Ivy League – Tossin’ and Turnin’/Funny How Love Can Be
Michael Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough/I Can’t Help It
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Crosstown Traffic/Gypsy Eyes
The Kinks – You Really Got Me/It’s All Right
The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset/Act Nice and Gentle
Led Zeppelin – Good Times, Bad Times/Communication Breakdown
Led Zeppelin – Black Dog/Misty Mountain Hop
Madness – One Step Beyond/Mistakes
MARRS – Pump Up The Volume/Anitina
Madonna – Borderline/Think of Me
Madonna – Ray of Light/Has to Be
Manic Street Preachers – Motown Junk/Sorrow 16
The Mooney Suzuki – Oh Sweet Susanna/Say Man, What Time Is it?
Giorgio Moroder & Phil Oakey – Together In Electric Dreams/Instrumental
Musical Youth – Pass the Dutchie/Give Love a Chance
Oasis – Cigarettes and Alcohol/I Am The Walrus (live)
OMD – Maid of Orleans/Navigation; Of All The Things We’ve Made
Prince – When Doves Cry/17 Days
Prince – Girls & Boys/Under The Cherry Moon
Prince – Pop Life/Girl
Public Enemy – Fight the Power/Fight the Power
Queen – We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You
Queen – Bicycle Race/Fat Bottomed Girls
Rainbow – Since You Been Gone/Bad Girls
The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers/Silent Morning
Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side/Perfect Day*
S’Express – Theme from S’Express/The Trip
Sly and the Family Stone – Stand!/I Want to Take You Higher
Soft Cell – Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?
Britney Spears – Toxic/Toxic (Instrumental)
The Specials – Ghost Town/Why?; Friday Night, Saturday Morning
Dusty Springfield – I Close My Eyes And Count to Ten/No Stranger Am I
Bruce Springsteen – Badlands/Candy’s Room*
Bruce Springsteen – Prove It All Night/Factory
The Stone Roses – Made of Stone/Going Down The Stone Roses – Fool’s Gold/What The World Is Waiting For Donna Summer – I Feel Love/Can’t We Just Sit Down?
Strawberry Switchblade – Since Yesterday/By The Sea
Super Furry Animals – The Man Don’t Give A Fuck/ The Man Don’t Give a Fuck, The Man Don’t Give a Fuck (mixes)
Super Furry Animals – Ice Hockey Hair/Smokin’
T. Rex – Hot Love/Woodland Rock
Talking Heads – Road to Nowhere/Television Man
Unit Four Plus Two – Concrete and Clay/When I Fall In Love
The Wedding Present – Dalliance/Niagara
The Wild Bunch – Danger! High Voltage/Neurocameraman; She’s Guatemala
Whitesnake – Here I Go Again (US Single Remix)/Guilty of Love
The Who – Substitute/Circles
The Who – Summertime Blues/Heaven and Hell
Amy Winehouse – You Know I’m No Good/Monkey Man
ZZ Top – Gimme All Your Lovin/If I Could Only Flag Her Down
SO, my dream juke box list… for my dream jukebox. I should probably set my sights on a normal turntable first, of course, but if I should happen magically upon £1,000 and a larger house, this is totally happening.
What would your selection have to include?
“Fool’s Gold, mate. Seven minutes.”
*The inevitable annotations:
Beatles choices: I know, I know. I really, really would like to have the single version of ‘Revolution’, but it’s got ‘Hey Jude’ on the other side [shakes head sadly].
El-P – Was this actually available as a 7″? I’ve got the 12″ version, but that wouldn’t really work, obvs.
The Fleetwood Mac side was Disc 2 of a special double single for ‘Everywhere’, so I didn’t just make it up.
I almost couldn’t believe it might be possible to get Badlands and Candy’s Room on one single, but the French did it. Un-deux-trois-quatre!
Harvey Pekar: See this page at Metabunker for an excellent write-up on Pekar and his work.
I wasn’t kidding when I suggested that Civilization II was a menace to one’s productivity (which is down, so I suggest building a Factory). It has now been uninstalled, and normal life can resume. Let us never speak of it again.
Friday last, 22nd June 2012, to the Etihad Stadium in Manchester, UK, to watch Bruce Spingsteen and the E Street Band.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the high esteem in which I hold The Boss. You might wish to cast an eye over this post, part of the interminable “25 albums that changed my life” series, on Born in the USA or the one about The Big Man, the late Clarence Clemons. If you’re on the Mortal Bath homepage, you could also click on the ‘hey ho rock n roll deliver me from nowhere’ tag, a Bruce quote that serves as one of my enduring prayers.
We arrived in a moderate fluster about five minutes after he was supposed to start, realised he hadn’t, sauntered in, grabbed a beer, made our way down to the pitch, looked around a bit and then he came on pretty much immediately. Timing’s everything. Venuewise, the stadium is a big prefab-looking number, everything one might expect from a building sponsored by an airline, with all the warm permanence of a concession stand in a Departure Lounge. Nice lines, just a bit plastic-looking.
Bruce, and the E Street Band, are more durable. With a combined age of about 10,500, they still played for pretty much three and a half hours. This is standard – they managed four and a half at a gig in Madrid. Watching the BBC’s Hackney Weekend festival footage over the weekend after, I was hard pushed to name more than about three artists that might be capable of or inclined to doing the same thing. Different ball parks, perhaps different leagues, perhaps not even the same sports.
Ah, look, anyway, Bruce was great. Sincerely uplifting, as a collective experience and as a personal experience. I couldn’t believe no one else around me was as excited that they played The E Street Shuffle!
Maybe they were, they just didn’t shriek with joy and do the Snoopy dance for 10 minutes.
The only thing I can add to any of this is a couple of clips, 20 minutes of performance, filmed by YouTube users LucyMearns and Outrightunlawful – thanks to whom for their sterling work. It’s all here: crowd dancing, James Brown-esque faux-fatigue, panto cameo by Miami Steve and his Magic Sponge, triumphant shirt removal, beautifully judged tribute to Clarence… oh, and two pretty amazing songs.
“Bootleggers! Roll your tapes!”
…and Hey ho, rock n roll! Delivering us from nowhere.
“25 albums that changed your life” (5×5 Part 9):
The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at Winterland
This was Number 9 (‘…number 9…number 9…’) on a chronologicalish list of ’25 albums that changed your life’. THAT was a thread some people were doing on Facebook “back in the day”.
If you get bored or disagree, substitute the word ‘arse’ for a word of your choice in the album title.
This piece has been kicking around for ages in search of a theme, if any theme other than the cosmic awesomeness of Jimi Hendrix is necessary. Then Jo Greenway at 10 minutes hate read my mind as usual and posted about the assault on the intellect that libraries have been undergoing in the UK, and it all came together.
The things we discover when we believe we are looking for something else entirely are often the most valuable.
This needs no further amplification. It is all about riffing (whatever “it” is, as Faith No More suggested), as far as I am concerned, and I am at my happiest digressing (no shit!). Riffing on what has gone before is essential for people to develop whatever happened, have fun with it, come up with something new.
Right, so, this Jimi Hendrix live album. Around the same sort of time that I was into Iron Maiden, Guns n Roses, etc, the medium of maximum profit for record companies was CDs. Lord how “they” miss it, as I type, attempting to convince digital natives, using electronic beads, that there is a better value proposition than free. I might as well note now that in typing CDs I had a sudden flash of future – possibly present day – readers of this rushing to a glossary, in the way that readers of Shakespeare have for at least three hundred years. There was a great joke about someone ‘of a certain age’ mentioning to a child that “Prince has released his new CD free with a newspaper,” to receive the response “Who did what with a what?”
CDs, anyway, had only been around a few years and were (as they remain) quite pricey. In the days prior to everything being available virtually immediately, if you didn’t want to buy something we had TV shows, radio, dial-a-song services, copied tapes and that was it. But what lovely it! Personal contact, whispered secrets, did-you-see?s, slow voices on waves of phase, hand-drawn packages passed from person to person in class, in the schoolyard, from siblings, teachers, mates.
In addition, there were the communal joys of the public library. I got into a fair number of bands through the library in Harrogate, where I grew up, and which at that time had a very well stocked record/CD library. Books as well, of course, but it was a great place to seek out new sounds, new civilisations. With my library card and at 80p per item, I got to take home and listen to (and tape at home, thus killing music) luminaries such as Pixies’ Surfer-Rosa-and-Come-On-Pilgrim, Pink Floyd, Prefab Sprout, Syd Barrett, The Kinks, Roxy Music, Led Zep… and this CD by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Live at Winterland.
You do still get CDs and you do still get libraries, and they are often found together, but it is a matter of sadness, or, fuck knows what it is, nostalgia, bio-sentimentalism, sehnsucht, that the corporeality seems to be dwindling. This rush to GET RID of half the books in favour of computer terminals, no music and a fucking coffee bar, because that’s what will SAVE MONEY; stupid, needless cuts in the name of faith-based economics, one market under God… There is also the factor of a vogueish rush to have everything clickably instant and monetised into an app and flattened out into neat lines of 1s and 0s. Uncle Ray Kurzweil and all that immanentizing the e-schaton rag. Do we wish our physical lives away? Probably not really, not yet. I mean, I quite like many of the biological aspects of existence. Yeah, yeah, though, 2083, a merman I should turn to be, exploring strange new forms, all that, would be good. Don’t get me wrong! However, this keenness to digitise and mediate, spectacular and cosmically Arthur C Clarkeishly indistinguishable from magic though it is, is dependent on a food/air/power supply deal we have not yet fully worked out. Well, read yer Asimov.
Back in ‘consensual reality’ (that place with all the trees and birds)… As any geocacher might tell you, there’s something to be said for trove finding. Actually finding a magic lamp, or even just something hidden under a rock. Time and memory mix up the exact sequence of events through which I discovered James Marshall Hendrix. I thought it might have been through a CD from the library called The Marquee: 30 Legendary Years. This had Purple Haze on it, among other standards of the guitar rock canon. Bands I came to love, like T. Rex, Thin Lizzy, The Who… all the Ts… That is also perhaps an album that could be on a Top 25 list, but – alas! – it has Genesis’s Turn it on again on it, and I’ve never understood their work. Too artsy, too intellectual.
Also, according to AllMusic, the Marquee CD came out in 1993, which is too late for the timeline in my head. Considering this crucial and vexed issue further, I am pretty much sure that First Contact with Jimi was made through the BBC Arena documentary on Heavy Metal, which first broadcast in 1989. Thanks to the super Real Gone blog and the other super blog Heavy rock – the playlist I have been able to confirm this. And thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The internet has replaced virtually all of this wearying, hand-tooled, questing on foot, Well-at-the-World’s-End-styled organic education. Bah, now I’m conflicted. It’s a double-edged thing. Not a sword, Ralph! Some sort of tool, certainly. I mean, now that knowledge is more selective and not a cultural imposition from state broadcasters… but, there’s my issue with why old-school libraries are ace and the modern experience is a little… sterile. My school has a tiny, understocked reading room and a huge ‘ILC’, which makes my English teacher heart thud a little forlornly. Half the interweb is blocked off for ‘safe searching’ reasons, which seems kind of counter the point somehow. And, consider my Year 10s. Actually, I could just start a blog called that, writing about the culture gap between a late-30-something teacher and his Year 10 (~15 years old) class. We were doing The Clown Punk, a poem by Simon Armitage about… well, here, read this:
The Clown Punk
Driving home through the shonky side of town,
three times out of ten you’ll see the town clown,
like a basket of washing that got up
and walked, towing a dog on a rope. But
don’t laugh: every pixel of that man’s skin
is shot through with indelible ink:
as he steps out at the traffic lights,
think what he’ll look like in thirty years’ time –
the deflated face and shrunken scalp
still daubed with the sad tattoos of high punk.
You kids in the back seat who wince and scream
when he slathers his daft mush on the windscreen,
remember the clown punk with his dyed brain,
then picture windscreen wipers, and let it rain.
Nice work, Armitage. Keep that brain undyed, and the inside of your head shaved. As part of My Year 10′s learning process I played them ‘God Save The Queen’, The Sex Pistols tune. You know, Jubilee, topical, relevant… There may have been some interest from about three of the class, but the rest were of the opinion that it was “just a noise”, “He’s just saying four words over and over,” “annoying…” Well, you know, yeah. To be expected in some ways, I suppose, but still, I was kind of appalled. They sounded like MY folks. This is generation ‘like’, or at least the children of it, and on many occasions it seems that anything troubling or challenging enough to require more analysis beyond closing off a tab is not worth the effort.
[/half term hols rant> Maybe it's just me, and there were always only about three people interested in granddad music. When I was growing up, as well as Arena, TV shows like The Rock n Roll Years provided a vital supplement to my education. Cultural context, innit? TRNRY was a seminal (spunky and original!) series, featuring historical clip montages, accompanied by music. A crucial detail from the Wikipedia entry on it: "no presenters or voice-overs". Definitely not one of the interminable sort of "100 Greatest Minutes of Rentaquote No-marks Being Facetious About Things They Didn't Really See At The Time And Don't Really Get". Rock n Roll Years provided an in-depth education about (pop) culture, which proved of great benefit in getting an A in my General Studies A-Level. Seriously, there was a question along the lines of "This image is the cover of which David Bowie album?" they'd removed the name, obviously, but still, get in!
Dragging ourselves back into the Arena, I don't think it was a case of watching the documentary and the scales falling from my eyes, because I'd got hold of a few Hendrix records, and had been sent a few Band of Gypsies tracks on an extensive compilation mailed in a sock by a repatriated American best mate from primary school. Yet, it definitely had a big effect. It was all the meta-context, if that's the right term. Seeing this exotic footage of Greenwich Village cafes, the British support cast - not only the Experience, but manager Chas Chandler, Alan Price, foils Clapton/Cream and The Who, etc... imagining the Beatles turning up to the hotly-ticketed gig and watching open mouthed as the Experience zip through a cheeky cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the day after it came out...
…these little scenes captured on grainy film, like flashes off a gold plate on the side of a deep space probe, remnants of an age of exploration. I found it compelling and fascinating.
At that time, 1988-89ish, rock music was shoring itself up culturally against the encroaching tides of dance music, the continued growth of hip hop, etc. The advent of CDs was carrying all the young dudes’ youths back into their living rooms, remastered, digitally convenient, but also reaching a new audience of heritage seekers like me, whose parents had grown up with it. I’m sure there are hundreds of words to be written about cultural legitimation/confirmation processes.
I do still find it fascinating, despite the attempted ruination of a lot of rock culcha by what I like to call the Uncut Mojo tendency, with all the connotations of belligerent academic white maleness that title might summon. It was a vital, LSD-binge exploration time for some, of course, but a money’s too tight, time down t’pits for others. A country struggling to loose the tie and hat legacy of wartime austerity and do something for and with itself, yet constrained (as now) by all the spare money being pushed up the noses of pop stars. Although now pop stars are all old grey whistle clean, it goes into trust funds, and it seems like no one is trying to kiss this guy.
Just watch the whole Arena documentary, because we can… the minute or so from 15.30 fried my little brains. I was fascinated by the history of the “baby boomers”, born as the second world war ended and by the 1960s ready for excitement, colour, music, clothes. So alien. In later years, other associations come into play. There is the closing theme to the decade, Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which needs to be seen with the wrecking ball clip from perhaps the ultimate ‘escape from the 1960s’ theatrical masque Withnail and I.
That would be followed most appropriately by the National Anthem. Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock is a performance about which millions of words have been written and muttered, none of which add anything.
However, I’ll take you back to the CD in hand, to the inappropriately sequenced end of track 2/start of track 3, ‘a kind of instrumental jam thing’, Sunshine of Your Love, by some real groovy cats, the Cream. Hendrix introduces the band again by detailing the equipment they’ve managed to destroy, with the fuzzy inexactitude of the has-to-be-just-a-teeny-bit baked, before uttering what is my favourite ever count-off, “And Mitch over here is on his third pair of arms… Fucking hell, I don’t give a damn,” and off they go.
In the absence of the Live at Winterland versh, here’s one off the Old Grey Whistle Test, noted for Hendrix’s comment as they abandon ‘Hey Joe’ that they are going to “stop playing this rubbish”… That and Sergeant Pepper and guitar music gone bonkers is what made me love Jimi Hendrix. Good new stuff is created when people have fun with old stuff.
And I would have maybe never come to it if wasn’t for our local library. Hands off the bibliotheques, you heathens, you’re getting in the way of some convoluted journeys of discovery.
The demise of Robin Gibb was noted with some sadness in The Mortal Bath. A few of the Bee Gees’ choicest records have been played, and I have marvelled as ever at the harmonised vocals, the often overlooked lyrical depths, the grooviness. The Gibbs sustained a remarkable career, as songwriters and performers. I hope -genuinely – that Barry keeps going.
The Bee Gees are of particular interest for their contribution to the development of a pop trope. It was one I had been aware of but that had drifted from my attention, until I re-listened to the amazing New York Mining Disaster 1941.
This was, you will note, years before their disco period, where they set the world a-boogie with impossible nut-cracking harmonies and sublime Saturday Night Feverish grooves. It is easy to acknowledge the foregrounding of sex in their music at that time. Yet, in this earlier era of the Swinging Sixties, they were one of the first bands to offer an examination of the everyman character “Mr Jones,” who (with various members of his family) recurs throughout pop history as a representative of human explorations of mind and sexuality.
“Have you seen my wife, Mr Jones?” The Mr Jones in question here is a paradox. He is Jones the Spirit Guide, a pretext for the speaker keen to assert the reality of his surface life in the face of possible death, a chink of light through a fallen-in cluster of boulders, as the speaker laments his family. And he is Jones the Threat, paternalistic, overbearing, whose response is secretly feared, whose very voice is capable of initiating a seismic, calamitous end to the ruminations of the narrator and of course the rest of the trapped group.
It seems evident to suggest that the interment theme, and the danger implied in the threatening Jones, reflect insular, self-analytic preoccupations. “My wife” would in this case of course represent a version of the Jungian anima, a female aspect of the male narrator who, as emblematised in the mining accident imagery, is cut off from personal psychological understanding by a perceived inability to reconcile the differing parts of his own psyche. “Mr Jones,” then, represents the conscious, the ego of the nameless narrator, addressing the self in a solipsistic moment of emotional entrapment.
However, it could be further argued that the narrator is addressing not “Mr Jones” a fellow miner but another, nameless individual. In this reading, the lyric becomes a desperate plea about one person, “my wife, Mr Jones”, revealing a previously unexplored taboo-breaking stratum in the history of the Bee Gees. Given their androgynous voices and later synonymity with the ambiguous sexualities of the disco era, this should come as no real surprise.
A “woman’s man” indeed.
NYMD 1941 addressed a particular frustration for these “miners” that we turn to in Part Two of “Keeping (It) Up With The Joneses”. It is a frustration derived from the fact that as early as 1965 Bob Dylan had already established “Mr Jones” was in fact powerless to help. In “Ballad of a Thin Man”, Jones the Milking Cow represents a confusion of feelings of performance anxiety, and, obviously, a primal mammalian dependency – and fear – of the Udder.
Meanwhile, thanks again to the Bee Gees, and the late Robin, for their work. This poignant clip from a gig in 1971 shows Barry being introduced by Robin, who is comically reluctant to leave the stage.
Today I was surprised with a marvellous surprise present. A “Music Journal”, made by the ever-desirable book object people, Moleskine, from the ever-desirable affection object person, J.
The marvellous artefact has pockets and stickers and tabs – oh my! – and space to write music, do playlists, “music maps” for non-listy moments and, oh, all sorts. New notebook excitement! I actually did a little dance when presented with it.
Of course, I am not in the slightest bit getting paid by Moleskine for this gush, although if they want to send any freebies my way I will happily witter all day about their erotically fine acid-free paper products. However, I was quite tickled by the supporting bumph on their website, so here – gratis, Sr. Moleskine, note ye well – is a Moleskine ad jingle:
Yeah, but can it cook? I mean, just to sound a note of realism – HA! SOUND A NOTE – and grateful excitement at the ace pressie aside for a sec, I remain unconvinced by the bland marketoid assertions about ‘contemporary nomads’ in the packaging, particularly with how connected to a digital lifestyle these delovely pre-hacked notebooks are. Compatible, yes… yet there are no USB ports, you can’t actually play a CD in it… and this is all kind of the point. I’ve said it before, I dig the internets, but increasingly as part of one’s complete experience of whatever we’re calling reality at whatever we’re calling this time. It’s nice to not be joined up/switched on so much.
Why, I feel a lashing-rain-forecast, weekend-fast-approaching, brand-new-book-to-baptise playlist coming on. I shall compose one and get back to you directly.
Recent articles or features I have been interested by have had, to appropriate the deathless pot/kettle words of Ann Widdecombe on Michael Howard, something of the night about them. Similar purple-shades-of-evening-coloured threads through a couple of media outlets I follow. This article from the Beeb here details some of the things people do if their sleep is ‘segmented’.
Most people, when they go to bed, aim to sleep until the morning – but some wake up and are active in the middle of the night.
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Hey, I wake up and are active in the middle of the night too! SYNC! It’s never quite black-eyed insomnia, mercifully, but I often suffer from disrupted sleep. There’s the usual stuff. Sometimes it comes from an elbow in the ribs… snoring, eh, what can one do? Although praise be to Breathe-Right strips, opening the nostrils to alleviate the symptoms of a deviated septum… which begins to sound like a Pharaohe Monch lyric… So, that. Sometimes it’s a call of nature. Sometimes it’s the epic Cinemascope dreams, although I quite like those. What does for me is not so much the waking up, it’s the instant snapping into life of the synapses, and subsequent extreme difficulty getting back to sleep. Be still, brain, be still.
Stuff running ’round my head that I just can’t live down
(Bruce Springsteen)
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In this regard, Bernie the ex-full-time teacher’s comments for the BBC article caused a particular resonation. It’s a busy life NQTing. A small spate of observations, masses of marking and, you know, wanting to do it right has been causing mind churn overdrive in the small hours recently. This has been characterised by a tedious cycle of coming awake around 03.00, alarm set to go off at 05.30 (I like a lengthy potter, breakfast, etc), calm brain down with a bit of meditation-style breathing, drift off, wake up again, repeat every 10 minutes till 05.25.
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I was too tired and grumpy to take the Beeb piece as anything other than a productive affront to my nocturnal fretting. My best efforts were spent in compiling sarcastic lists while my eyes flickered restlessly behind irritated lids.
10 things I do during the night:
Worry (Totally wired/And I’m always worried)
Wake up from vivid dreams, try and fail to remember them
Attempt a cuddle, get elbow in ribs
Get up and eat something
Have drink of water
Go to toilet
Play Super Jewel Quest game on phone
Check watch twenty thousand times
Get up and read
Try to write something, get distracted reading web articles, go back to bed.
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However, in a funny old world bit of night moves sync, an article here at The New Inquiry came recommended from The Browser mailshot later the same week. It too discusses the idea of ‘first sleep’, ‘second sleep’, and what sorts of things people do to while away the hours. Appearing a few days after as it did, it was sort of a useful snooze alarm. It reminded me that I have risen regularly at ungodly o’clock and settled down contentedly on the sofa for a read, some writing, a snack, playing of the guitar (softly, softly), watching the light change outside, listening to the birds, hearing that definite moment when the rest of the world wakes.
So, I stirred from the pit of non-slumber and cobbled together a short Weekday Night Fever play list of segmented sleep-related tunes… some of which have hopefully provided a soundtrack for your reading pleasure
Jellyfish – Hush
Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night
Chuck Berry – The Wee Wee Hours
The Ivy League – Tossing and Turning
The La’s – I can’t sleep
The Fall – Totally wired
LCD Soundsystem – Never So Tired as When I’m Waking Up
Pixies – I’ve been tired
Bruce Springsteen – Night
Grovesnor – nitemoves
Previously, in The Mortal Bath: a post about The Stone Roses, in which I wrote of the pleasures to be found in driving out of cities on sunny days, blasting out music with great depths, emotionally and sonically. Sometimes you have to stop and enjoy the Roses, basically.
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.
Hello, if you’ve clicked here searching about Iron Maiden, perhaps owing to their quite exciting Donington/Download 2013 announcement, or even if you’ve just shown up to snaffle the Powerslave album cover image. I wrote this piece a while ago, but I started listening to Maiden even more of a while ago, so we are, of course, caught somewhere in time. This post shares some of the things that made me a teen Iron Maiden obsessive… more than 20 years ago… illustrating the enduring appeal, I hope, of the mighty Maiden! Enjoy…
This is part of ’25 albums that changed your life’, a thingmy some people were following on Facebook(about 10,500 years ago). A full explanation of why I thought this was a good idea is floating elsewhere in the Bath. If you hate all this Nick Hornby list nonsense, please feel free to substitute ‘arse’ for a word of your choice in the album title.
I was thinking about my first gig this week, set off by my beloved getting her ears syringed. Consequently, she has reported being able to hear the footfall of a kitten three streets away (‘Oh darling, it’s dancing’). It made me covet cerumenolysis too: aural clarity, no fuzz… taking me back to a time before loud music first assaulted my shell-likes in a live setting. And what led me there… was Iron Maiden… (Vincent Price chuckle).
8. Iron Maiden – Powerslave
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 were 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 in 1990. With inflation, that must be about £1,850 now. On the bus was a whole troop of my high school’s rock fraternity. Great! Iron 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 very 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-changers, 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. I think Harris actually said, in the same interview part-cited above, that Lucozade wanted the band in the ad, all sitting round looking knackered and then going daft onstage after a swig of the orange sugary stuff. I’m very glad they didn’t do it.
… So, yes, first two albums, yeah, but, there’s the advent of Bruce and The Number of the Beast, with Number of the Beast and Run to the Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name… or Piece of Mind, with The Trooper and Revelations… 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. 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. Yet 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 only slightly on the radar. 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 (“soccer”!) 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, like lightning, I mean, I always thought. Back in the Village, what a riff. First and possibly favourite 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, though, has to be, is the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is an 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. Hey, 1988. 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. And in fact it is entirely likely that the family didn’t really care that I HAD to hear all 13 perfect minutes uninterrupted, and were in fact more concerned to engage me in conversation, or vainly protect my delicate adolescent lugholes. The trauma! Ah, youth. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous. And over much quicker than you appreciate at the time. 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’m coming back, I will return in other posts… then off into the wide musical yonder. Chocks away!
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:
