Following my Grimshaw horror of yesterday – which sounds pleasingly suggestive of an H.P. Lovecraft excerpt, The Grimshaw Horror,
‘Running from the room with my nerves jangling, all my senses in appalled revolt, I had but one phrase worming through the synapses of my shattered mind. That thing… IT HAD NO EARS.’
and so on. It’s ok, it’s ok. I’m over it. It does disturb me, but I’ll rise above it. Actually, between changing CDs this morning (Outgoing: Purple Rain) I was partly pleased to note that Grimly commences his ‘Wakey wakey People of Britain’ 7am segment with a spoiled Pharaohe Monch jingle (“G-G-Get Up!”). ‘Partly pleased’ and ‘spoiled’ in that although reminding me of a great tune it was a radio Bowdlerisation, a coy approximation of a daring choice, and in that it was about to be followed by Kelly Clarkson, which is kind of semi-proof of something, I ah-ha’d at the radio, as if proof or indeed semis are needed at such a time in the morning on one’s way to work in the car.
Look, I have to put up with this stream of bollocks all the time. Listen to the babble, bobbing pink and playful across the pebbles.
– a more subtle flow of musical consequence insinuates itself today. As I wound the car through Ryedale, I was listening to the CD I’d changed to: MC Solaar, the Prose Combat album.
Prose Combat was one of my lost Golden Age collection, part of a batch of CDs stolen from a flat in Partick, Glasgow late last century, along with everything else from L to Z, a consequence of partly-shelved alphabetisation and hurried thieves. About a couple of months ago I found a copy, incongruously, among the Kelly Clarkson and Steps albums in the ‘three for a pound’ CD section at the St. Leonard’s Hospice shop in Acomb. Le result! Delighted.
Solaar, Claude M’Barali, is a Senegalese/French rapper, born in Dakar, brought up in France and a Francophone rapper. He’s still recording, according to the online, so I shall be pleased to chasse down some of his later works, of which I have been ignorant.
Prose Combat is nearly 20 years old but it still sounds very fresh, some era-specific early ’90s soul jazz warbling on quelques tracks notwithstanding. The rapping in particular is funny and articulate, offering a welcome contrast to some contemporary commercial rap – such as the new 50 Cent single, My Life, which I have observed on radio and video a charmless three times this week. Fiddy’s tune also features Eminem, who is in typically vituperative form, and quite cheesily, Adam Levine, the singer from Maroon 5, who in his refrain adds unwelcome notes of Jamiroquai where you were already hoping for less as more.
I mean, not to get too sidetracked here – and I do not pretend to any kind of authority in matters rapular, incidentally, it’s just mes pensées, in’tit? – but, as an aside, the appeal of 50 Cent kind of baffles me. With regard to this particular record, you have self-consciously stagey ‘like a movie’ references indicating a degree of sophistication, distance, and the ‘who hunts the hunted?’ helicopter chase motif in the video adds some sort of sense of a commentary on fame/artistic drive paranoia. Yet these jostle for attention with a humourless and aggressive street “sewer entrepreneur” persona, literally a peddler of shit, that spends its time bullying the listener into ‘accepting and respecting’ the unpleasant content. A kind of witless and insistent hustling. In fact, if this IS a persona, added to the knowing asides about ‘confusion’ and ‘illusion’, the whole is actually quite contemptuous of its audience.
My Life, as well as sounding like the score to a movie that would just make you sigh with despair at the protagonist’s relentless will to consume (as distinct from hunger), with a video that does everything possible to amplify this, has lyrics that are resoundingly, epically angry, the sound of their fury as a consequence signifying nothing. They seem to be offering a glimpse into the mood of a colossally wealthy writer, rapper and producer, who, as he drives around in a big, expensive car, contemplates how, since he became successful a decade ago, is now, mysteriously, being snubbed by former protégés and overlooked by the public, despite – perhaps, paradoxically, because of! – having sold 40million records, furthermore threatening to flip out and go ‘Michael Myers’ on those opposing, as if all this doesn’t make him sound like a sort of irate attention-seeking Ronald McDonald of rap, armed and up a water tower on the brink of psychotic carnage because someone said his burgers taste awful.
This response is not intended to be ‘full of hate’, per the lyrics, and I am certainly not threatening to kill anyone because they might disagree, but seeing as 50 Cent seems to be addressing by extension all critics in My Life, I think it pertinent to enquire by return why one might be expected to, never mind respect, actually give a fuck about such monotone posturing.
More bollocks! Bob-bob-bobollocking along, pink and floaty, clacking in the foam, shining in the sun.
Anyway, back in the car, the sun, mais oui, was shining off the snow in the valleys and warming my face as I drove along the long and winding road, motoring through the villages of Yorkshire en route to work, digging the beats. MC Solaar juggles his themes mellifluously, with wit and dexterity. At one point I was actually giggling at the facility, the lightness of touch with which MC Solaar delivers lines like these:
Oh! Belle, elle est belle, elle est bonne, elle a du bol la demoiselle,
Elle se trouvait des défauts, je trouvais qu’elle était belle.
J’en garde des séquelles mais je sais qu’elle sait
Que le silence est d’or, et dort, alors, je me tais.
–From the song Séquelles
(My cack-handed translation:
Oh, she is beautiful, she is fine, she’s lucky, this girl,
she finds faults with me, I find her beautiful.
I keep the aftermath in mind, but I know that she knows that
silence is golden, and she’s sleeping, so I just shut it.)
Something like that? It’s also all in the delivery. In fact, here’s a nifty video from the YouTubes, with further traduction of the paroles, Ms Gainsbourg playing the Belle, and MC Solaar’s voice, all of which are a far better use of your temps.
Driving to work this morning up the B1363, lots of twists and turns, long hills, a light dusting of snow on the ground, I had Radio 1 on. Nick Grimshaw is the current Breakfast Show DJ. Here’s “Grimmers” from his twitterfeed.
He was doing the usual Breakfast Show DJ nonsense, this was all fine. Couple of not bad tunes in there. Then he introduced a segment about sport, using Soul Limbo by Booker T. and the MGs. He said, during it, that he loved it from growing up and had been disappointed to learn that it wasn’t an actual pop record. He only knew it, as generations of British kids who watched any kind of sport on telly ever would also be familiar, as the music from Test Match Special. The “cricket theme”. Oh, you KNOW:
“Grimmers” then starts having a five-minute discussion with the studio extra, who pointed out that it was, in fact, quite well known as a separate entity, “back in the day”. He sounded a bit embarrassed, to be fair. The piece about sport ensued. Meanwhile I am having an increasingly shrill imaginary conversational Q&A with “Grimmers”. It is one of those rhetorical rounds where a series of statements of fact are ended with an interrogative because you CANNOT BELIEVE that the person with whom you are speaking is unaware of this information:
‘It’s called Soul Limbo. By Booker T. and the MGs? Booker T. and the MGs, you know?’
‘They were the house band at Stax? Responsible for most of those classic soul/R&B sounds?’
‘They did a really famous song called Green Onions?‘
‘They were the backing band in The Blues Brothers?’
‘You are telling me that you got to be nearly 30 YEARS OLD, and a DJ on national radio, and you DO NOT KNOW the name or performing artist of one of the most iconic pieces of music in recent British media history?’
In my fever’d mind, Grimshaw, who has been nodding at me open-mouthed, responds:
‘We be, uh, jammin?’
David Bowie, or Derek, (“I suppose it’s another quotation from Derek Bowie, is it?”) has released a new song. It made the news today – oh boy! You can see it at his website.
Is it any good? Well, that’s up to you. I like it. It occurred to me that I could blether on at length offering my opinion on the tune, Bowie’s importance and cultural context, perhaps making some pithy remarks on the music media commentariat in the UK, but it occurred further that there’s no point. This is David freakin’ Bowie we’re talking about! “If you have to ask…” …as the Red Hot Chili Peppers once suggested.
I’ve liked Dame David for a long time. I had a couple of teachers at school who used to obsess about Bob Dylan and David Bowie, getting me into them and a bunch of other ‘cultural touchstone’ bands through careful pointers. One of them created a memorable tape compilation for when I was leaving sixth form, called ‘I remember when all this were fields’. I sometimes say that when looking at the YouTubes, “I remember when all this were compilation tapes”.
These were the two Bowie songs on that compilation:
You betcha! And a version of this, which makes me wish we’d had the YouTubes back then:
Given his near half century of professional superness, I think it doesn’t really matter if David Bowie’s new song could maybe be more awesome. He’s still moving, doing it. On the rare occasions people have tried to argue with me regarding Bob Dylan’s continuing relevance, while I’m on the DB/BDs, I’ve said that anyone who managed to come out with Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, in the space of 18 months, is allowed to do what they like as far as I’m concerned. The same goes for Bowie.
History will show that Coldplay performed at the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony, but everyone was more bothered that Bowie did not. That is all. You betcha!
Thanks to the numbercrunchery provided by WordPress, I am able to get granular with my viewing stats. Nitty gritty, fine details about who’s turning up and looking at what when. By far the greatest number of views I get each day is an article what I wrote about Iron Maiden.
I quite like it… it’s one of my more sincere pieces, and they’re almost always the most effective. I’d like to think that my unique combination of wit and waffle has endeared this post and further writings to the clickers of the world… Seriously tho! I get Slovenians, Colombians, Russians, South Koreans, Americans, people from all over. One might consider the global reach of this technology and feel a small tear issue from the corner of one’s eye… something something that’ll be the granularity something see the world in a grain of sand, something.
However, I strongly suspect that the high number of clicks for that post in particular is actually due to me having used an absurdly large image of an Iron Maiden album cover in it.
You find me on the horns of a dilemma as to whether to get rid of the massive image of Derek Riggs’ lovely artwork and replace it with something smaller that may give a more reliable, but less satisfying, view/visitor ratio… or not. I mean, am I that shallow that I’m even thinking about this? Who gives a fuck, right? Well, why bother writing in a public forum then? It’s all about the clicks, innit? Not the false clicks! Hmmm, band name… This process of finger chewing of course triggers wider artistic and existential concerns, such as subjects, style, justification for turning your fingers to the keyboard, getting out of bed… and wasn’t there some shopping you were supposed to do? And hang on a minute, why are you referring to yourself in the third person? Rapidly whistling up to a boiled kettle shriek of WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
Et bleedin’ cetera. Indecisions, indecisions! Hypnotised by this rope trick plait entanglement of self-esteem and clickcount… I shall listen to this:
…and give the matter further consideration. While going to the shops for more loaf.
“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.
Happening to be on the phone to our local medical practitioners this morning, the choice of holding music was pleasant, but incongruous. First piece:
I mean, I hot-diggedy dig The Stranglers’ Waltzinblack. Insistent and increasingly dense absurdity. It’s most recently been used in an advert – Stranglers gotta eat – but for a certain generation (mine) it will always bring to mind the quixotic TV chef Keith Floyd, whose ‘recipe and piss-up’ formula still remains a high bar for gourmet broadcasters.
However, most of the comments on this nifty clip in situ at YouTube reflect The Stranglers’ original concept from The Gospel According To The MeninBlack, alien influence on religion, evermore Lovecraftian interpretations, the music a soundtrack for a merry-go-round of netherhell dwellers, wizard imps and interstellar mongrel nymphs spinning stately, unhinged across dark galaxies. I see circumstances in which someone phoning a doctor’s surgery might not be in an appropriate state of mind to enjoy such implications.
Actually, The Stranglers make a stealthy exit, perhaps in anticipation of this. While Dave Greenfield’s keys rumble and squeak in the cosmic locks, they periodically still to allow in the soothing tones of a Geordie receptionist’s recorded messages, apologising that we are being held in a queue, reassuring the listener that they can book appointments or renew their prescriptions online, or call xxx for out of hours emergencies. After a terminal fade to black before the chortling gremlins start up the bumper cars, the next song comes on. On the surface, still more soothing:
REM’s Endgame, which closes off side one of Out of Time.
It’s probably just knowing the titles that made me suspect there might be a diabolical comedian at the docs’. If I might offer a tip of the jester’s hat to Christopher Knowles at The Secret Sun blog, I’m sure one could make a great deal more of the chessboard imagery on the REM CD…
…coupled with the prevalence of ‘Endgame’ as a trope in sci-fi, in particular with the discovery that ‘The Endgame Syndrome’ was an episode of Men In Black: The Series…
… I’m getting woofs of Beckett as well. How easily one might become distracted while waiting for a receptionist to pick up. In a more suggestible state of mind, the choice of third song might have been enough to tip one over the edge into fear and trembling… or misplaced feelings of omnipotence.
On this super Tuesday it was all idle speculation while the answerphone droned… What would Number Three be? Who might be phoning and how eerily resonant the tune for them? (Receptionist’s notes accompanying):
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (Chris MacNeil, daughter experiencing sickness and sore throat)
Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb (Randall Floyd, hands feel like two balloons)
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.
********
********
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)
********
********
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.
********
********
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.
********
********
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
Last week was half term holidays, a blissful week off in the school schedule. I got lots done, including making some time to write for the blog, in a fictionalised writing about writing writey write write kind of way. Which I enjoyed, and there’ll be more of it soon… whether you enjoyed it or not, gentle reader, ha ha ha (Stephen King chuckle).
As well as that, two visits to the theatre – culcha, innit? – and several rounds of the second hand bookshops, comic shops… oh, and I went to see Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds. Watch this:
How’s about that then? Eh? EH? Well, whether you enjoyed it or not, gentle listener, I encountered ‘Sweet Tooth Bird’ on Nemone’s show on 6Music about four weeks ago and adored it at first hearing. I was getting woofs of ‘Hounds of Love’ and Dusty Springfield and 1970s disco harmonies and oh, all sorts… I was delighted to see she and the Hooves were playing in Leeds, so I had to go and get tickets. Actually, no, I went to some website and bought an eticket. And thereby hangs my tale.
Interlude: listening to some Year 10 girls wittering interminably about One Direction as we walked to assembly this morning, we got into music conversation. I made the mistake of knowing the One Direction’s names. Asked which one I thought was best, I countered by asking why all the lads wanted to be the lead singer. On closer consideration, I was probably thinking about JLS, who in one of their videos (my love J noticed, I have been told to add) had this irritating tic of all inhabiting their own world of emoting, like a moving version of one of those Anton Corbijn photos of Joshua Tree-era U2. “You can’t ALL be lead singer!” Not on the same song, at the same time, anyway.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I was only baiting the teenyboppers. Of course, I was baited back. One student asked me if I preferred Olly Murs. With curmudgeonly wit I suggested this was like being offered a choice between being smacked in the face or kicked up the backside. A poor move! “Well, do you like any modern music?”. I heard the distant circling of buzzards… I said, “I recently saw Beth Jeans Houghton and her band, the Hooves of Destiny.” Blank looks. “So, er, that was really good,” I added.
Blank looks. It wasn’t quite tumbleweed time, but getting there. “Beth Jean Hooves?” “She’s a bit like Florence and the Machine, only much more fun.” “I hate Florence and the Machine.” “She’s more fun.” “What, is she a stand up?” My collar tightened, and I sensed a suddenly widening gap, somewhere between Generation Y and Generation AG, or whatever ‘We’re going to need a bigger alphabet’ combination of letters is now being used. Context, as I was telling my Year 10 class only hours later, is everything. Here was a textbook example of how one man can, despite his finest efforts, be suddenly powerfully, bafflingly unhip, so unhip it’s a wonder his bum doesn’t fall off, as Zaphod Beeblebrox would of course have it.
Hip’s not the issue, obvs, daddio. It’s just pop, and life it ain’t real funky unless it’s got that pop. One Direction do their thing, the Hooves theirs, the proper avant weird stuff does its. For every Pixies there has always been a Brother Beyond, for every Hendrix a Monkees. And peace be unto Davy Jones, incidentally. “What number is this, Chip?” “7A!”
I indulge this lengthy skool digression because the same pupils are studying text messaging in class. Many of them are having an interesting time conceiving of a world in which teh internetz, and all mod. comms, were not normal, although most of them, interestingly, are also baffled by what the exam board think is contemporary text speak. For the record, this is all 2008-style ‘wld U lk 2 av a mone abt da decline of da englsh? LOL’ [Beat] “Sir, WTF is this rubbish?”.
Anyway, right, it made me think about buying this ticket online during the hols. I could see other tickets being handed over at the BJH gig, some of which looked like good old style *tickets*, like actual bits of product in their own right, nice printing, being bought across the bar for the same amount of money as I paid on the internet… and I know the point is the actual gig, and all that, but look, LOOK:
1 x Beth Jeans Houghton @ Brudenell Social Club, Leeds (23/02/2012 19:30)
Cost (per ticket): 8.00, Booking Fee (per ticket, if applicable): 1.30
Please bring your eTicket with ID to the event. Please bring a print out of this eTicket and a form of Identification to verify that you are the person named on this eTicket. Passport/ Driver’s License/ Student Card/ Validate Card/ Citizen Card/ Credit Card/ Bank Card, are all acceptable forms of ID. If you should lose or delete this email eTickets are available to download from …
Please read the terms and conditions regarding eTickets at …
PLEASE NOTE YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANY TICKETS THROUGH THE POST. NO TICKETS WILL BE DELIVERED
Actually, the font on WordPress has made this look nicer than it was in the email. Horrid. “May your senses respond favorably to these electronic sound vibrations, Dave.” It’s all so functional! Would you want to carefully paste such a printout into a scrapbook – perhaps with your tongue protruding slightly in concentration? Would you want to draw a little heart round it, or a cloud? Some cryptic notes (“Stevie S. = Lime Cordial Saviour of the Universe!”)? Some partially forgotten imagined tryst allusion?
The emotional resonance of a credit card statement. “That thing I bought”, rather than that thing I lived at. Maybe not… maybe I’m just ossified, pressed into a little strata stratum of nostalgia, maybe etickets will be lovingly cherished as souvenirs in such ways. Or perhaps eticket companies will all collapse under the weight of their own preposterousness, as suggested by this article on Viagogo’s “non-discriminatory” ticket policy.
Still, in the absence of something suitable to add to my scrapbook of vintage gig tickets, I got a set list signed by lovely BJH and two of her lovely HOD. They were, actually, really funny, in a dry way. The gig was great. Dancing! Proper harmonies! Dolls! Silly clothes! Trumpets! Fun! Plus, the first support act, Pip Mountjoy, was really good as well. If I was trying to write for a local paper I would say ‘Late arrivals should have been kicking themselves for having missed Pip Mountjoy. The Richmond (Yorkshire)-based singer has a clear voice,accompanied simply on Joni-esque guitar, and shows remarkable emotional depths and lyrical acuity for a 17 year old. The lengthy queue of early-bird supporters wanting to chat and buy her EP suggested she may be able to make the transition to headlining in her own right in fairly short order.’ Lyrics about staying in and reading Sherlock Holmes are always going to sway it for me, although buying an actual CD from an actual human being was kind of nice too, especially a CD with a stitched sleeve.
Add in the lady from Jumbo records pressing A Hawk and A Hacksaw flyers onto the leaving crowd, taking time to talk about the artists, and suddenly the electronic convenience world seemed inconsequential and intangible and insufferable, and I got my usual post-good-gig hankering for hard copy and bits of paper. So I came straight here the moment I got some free time and e-published this account. Next time: should there be a hyphen after the e in eticket, mail, publishing? Discuss. Perhaps not with Year 10s, though. For they will destroy you.
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.
