Many British cities possess a distinctive musical character but few have seen their rock’n’roll evolution shaped so profoundly by the prevailing political climate as Sheffield’s was during the early 1980s as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire took on the … Continue reading
Dear RBP’ers, Can anyone identify the guitarist playing on this clip with Nico at 4′? Thanks if you can, Simon
So, after computer games and MP3 downloads, interactive consoles and streamed tracks on tap, recorded music, the lifeblood of maybe three post-war generations, is about to get its final comeuppance. Mobile phone applications, it appears, will crush the CD by … Continue reading
To use the phrase deja vu in the opening sentence of a reflection on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young runs the serious risk of incarceration by the cliche police but my odd experience of the last seven days or so … Continue reading
The death of J.D. – Jerome David – Salinger is sad in its way: the day that any great artistic figure switches off the light of life reminds us that even the mighty are only passing this way for a short time. But Salinger had reached a towering age – 91 – and had spent most of his last six decades reclusively hidden away obsessively avoiding the glare of interest that his books – certainly his debut novel – generated and, in the main, managing to remain a hidden, barely-known personality. In an era when national or international publicity frequently accompanies the rise of nobodies with no identifiable talent, it seems almost otherworldly that a man who wanted to share his craft and his ideas – at least his fiction – should so want to shun the attention of critics, journalists, photographers, biographers, academics and certainly fans. In fact, such privacy is a relic of another age. You could not seek publication today without some commitment to helping with the promotion of a new title. It would be unthinkable to assume that a text had genuine – or at least potential – value without the willingness of a would-be writer to at least accede to Oprah’s – or Richard and Judy’s, to be more parochial – cooings. I know there are those who have turned down that huge US show but, along the way, it’s generated it’s own up-profiling stream: ‘The man or woman who said “no” to Winfrey’, a headling-seizing story in its own curious right. Doubt that Salinger ever thought literature would come to this. But I do actually resent his isolationism: humans are human – they want to converse and debate and chatter and exchange ideas. Why should this individual deny the world some answers to questions – not invasive or scurrilous or voyeuristic questions, but ones that would genuinely interrogate the writer about his art and his talent, his creative approach and attitudes. I also resent him in an irrational way for what his most notorious reader ever did. When Mark Chapman gunned down John Lennon outside the Dakota Hotel in Manhattan in December 1980, he carried with him not only a venomous desire to murder our greatest rock legend but also a copy of Salinger’s most widely-known work. Had Chapman seen in the adolescent resentments of Holden Caulfield a model? Had Chapman cultivated bitterness of such a posionous kind based on seeds sown by the alienated and isolated literary protagonist whom Salinger launched on the world in 1951. This may be a a thought without plausible justification but I sort of feel that if Salinger hadn’t been such a determined and misanthropic hideaway then, somehow, Chapman might also not have become a gun-toting madman on that terrible night. Maybe, just maybe, if Salinger had been more open, more forthcoming, had discussed the motivations behind Caulfield, explained the ideas behind The Catcher in the Rye to a broader forum, perhaps if he had shared some of his analysis and intelligence instead of shielding himself away for so very long, possibly the disturbed Chapman would have understood the book – and life, too – just that fraction better and his criminal intent would not have expressed itself in that horrifically wasteful manner 30 long years ago. Continue reading
The beleaguered land that was once a globe-spanning magazine empire could be about to receive the hypodermic boost that will get it back in the standing position during 2010. Both glossies – and even newspapers – hope they can benefit from the latest product to drop from the fruit-laden Apple tree. The insider predictions are that the iPad – or tablet, or slate, there are various names being banded about as the pre-launch hype trails the January 27th unveiling – will forge relationships with some of the biggest names in print publishing and the association will lead to an ‘iTunes for magazines’, according to recent Guardian online reports. Among those multi-media corporations who appear to have signed up to the project are Time Inc, Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp, all US-located businesses, though Time Warner does own IPC, home to New Musical Express and Uncut . With Germany’s Bauer in possession of the other major UK popular music magazine titles – Kerrang! , Q and Mojo – maybe it will be some little while before this America-centred project spreads its wings across the Atlantic and boosts our key rock and pop publications over here, too. But with promises in the US that the Top 50 best-selling magazines – from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker and even the New York Times apparently allying with the SF computer giant and joining the roster of e-publishers – could soon be online to digital readers, it seems unlikely that this bold venture won’t arrive in Europe in some form in the near future, as well. Okay, so the digital book reader phenomenon has remained largely a Stateside feature so far, but even that is gradually migrating to Britain, with Amazon finally offering its Kindle product to UK customers, though still at a prohibitively high whack of $489 for the larger screen, $259 for the smaller. Interestingly while this gizmo is finally importable the price remains in bucks rather than quids which suggests that the Kindle promotional push here is a somewhat half-hearted affair at present. The cost of the new iPad, of course, is likely to be the biggest disincentive, at least at first, for potential buyers on this side of the pond. The Stateside Apple launch seems sure to follow the usual pattern: slam a dollar price on the product – $1,000 is the prediction – and then convert that number to sterling for the Brits – a bit of an ouch at £1,000. But, as with iPods and iBooks and iPhones, we’ll eventually see a slight fall in the price tag and all be swept along in the Apple cart no doubt. However, if this means that the collapsing news-stand is bolstered by a new raft of readers who buy their mags in the iTunes manner then supporters of print may see this latest tech trick as a vital lifeline to a floundering magazine marketplace. Yet, to end on a note of warning, this idea may not be an instant saviour to the print industry. NME did launch a free digital version of its mag in early 2009, in league with media distributors John Menzies Digital. The short-term experiment was deemed uneconomic after only a few months so the iPad project may offer glimmers of light but few certainties. The hope must be that Apple’s unwavering ability to produce irresistible objects of desire will be replicated here and turn young web-heads back to the notion that well-designed, well-written music magazines are actually worth investing in. PS: Other news from the Jobs labs. Rumours abound that a product aimed at swashbuckling seafarers is in development. Thought to be an aid to pirates, buccaneers and others who may have lost eyes in sea battles , mutinies, aborted boarding raids or one-on-one cutlass duels, the iPatch, believed to aid both 3-D and peripheral vision, could be available as early as the late 15th Century. Continue reading
The beleaguered land that was once a globe-spanning magazine empire could be about to receive the hypodermic boost that will get it back in the standing position during 2010. Both glossies and indeed newspapers hope they can benefit from the latest product to drop from the fruit-laden Apple tree. The insider predictions are that the iPad – or tablet, or slate, there are various names being banded about as the pre-launch hype trails the January 27th unveiling – will forge relationships with some of the biggest names in print publishing and the association will lead to an ‘iTunes for magazines’, according to recent Guardian online reports. Among those multi-media corporations who appear to have signed up to the project are Time Inc, Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp, all US-located businesses, though Time Warner does own IPC, home to New Musical Express and Uncut . With Germany’s Bauer in possession of the other major UK popular music magazine titles – Kerrang! , Q and Mojo – maybe it will be some little while before this America-centred project spreads its wings across the Atlantic and boosts our key rock and pop publications over here, too. But with promises in the US that the Top 50 best-selling magazines – from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker and even the New York Times apparently allying with the SF computer giant and joining the roster of would-be iPad publishers – could soon be online to digital readers, it seems unlikely that this bold venture won’t arrive in Europe in some form in the near future, as well. Okay, so the digital book reader phenomenon has remained largely a Stateside feature, so far, but even that is gradually migrating to Britain with Amazon finally offering its Kindle product to UK customers, though still at a prohibitively high whack of $489 for the larger screen, $259 for the smaller. Interestingly, while this gizmo is finally importable, the price remains in bucks rather than quids which suggests that the Kindle promotional push here is a somewhat half-hearted affair at present. The cost of the new iPad is , of course, likely to be the biggest disincentive, at least at first, for potential buyers on this side of the pond. The US Apple launch seems sure to follow the usual pattern: slam a dollar price on the product – $1,000 is the expectation – and then unkindly convert that number to sterling for the Brits – a bit of an ouch at £1,000. But, as with iPods and iBooks and iPhones, we’ll eventually see a slight fall in the price tag and all be swept along in the Apple cart no doubt. However, if this means that the collapsing news-stand is bolstered by a new raft of readers who buy their mags in the iTunes manner then supporters of print may see this latest tech trick as a vital lifeline to a floundering magazine marketplace. Yet, to end on a note of warning, this idea may not be an instant saviour to the print industry. NME did launch a free digital version of its mag in early 2009, in league with media distributors John Menzies Digital. The short-term experiment was deemed uneconomic after only a few months so the iPad project may offer glimmers of light but few certainties. The hope must be that Apple’s unwavering ability to produce irresistible objects of desire will be replicated here and turn young web-heads back to the notion that well-designed, well-written music magazines are actually worth investing in. PS: Other news from the Jobs labs. Rumours abound that a product aimed at swashbuckling seafarers is in development. Thought to be an aid to pirates, buccaneers and others who may have lost eyes in sea battles, mutinies, aborted boarding raids or one-on-one cutlass duels, the iPatch, believed to aid both 3-D and peripheral vision, could be available as early as the late 15th Century. Continue reading
It would not be outrageous to propose that the two greatest albums of the punk tsunami featured cover images by arguably the most important post-war US photographer. Robert Mapplethorpe was the snapper who wrapped both Patti Smith’s Horses and Television’s Marquee Moon in their distinctive sleeves. True also that Mapplethorpe was part of that extraordinary, early 1970s, American circle that gathered in downtown Manhattan and whose members became such feted practitioners in a number of diverse artistic fields. Smith emerged as the the most powerful rock’n’roll woman of all; Sam Shepard won his spurs as the dominating late-century playwright; Tom Verlaine’s guitar became a searing soundtrack within the blazing panoply of CBGBs; and Jim Carroll was regarded as the best of the poets to arise since the Beats of the Fifties. The fact that Smith was a key romantic axle in this wheel of words, images and music makes the network all the more intriguing. Friend, flatmate, muse, lover or just leader of the pack? Whatever place Patti took in this tangled web of love, art and inspiration, this was hardly an example of a woman taking a ride to the top. Rather here was an artist who was going to find her metier in one medium of another – actor, painter, poet, singer, journalist – and her remarkable, neo-Renaissance diversity saw her brush shoulders, and sometimes more, with the creme de la creme of the gutter avant garde. The great, and the maybe not always so good, clearly raised temperatures beyond the heated confines of the Bowery bar and the Lower East Side club, the SoHo gallery and the off-off-Broadway cabaret. But those images: that skinny and severe androgyne staring from the monochrome canvas of 1975’s stunning Horses ; those manic-eyed beanpoles locked into the camera lens on Marquee Moon , a masterpiece from 1977. Shorn of Mapplethorpe’s snapshots, maybe the history of the new wave would have been a very different one. In fact – let’s go back and let’s go further. Without the input of Mapplethorpe it is conceivable, just conceivable, that punk may never have happened at all. Crazy claim? Who was it who funded the first awesome record that Patti Smith recorded in 1974? That very same chum, that very same cameraman. It is hard to know where and how punk would have found its fire, its fury, its frisson of despair without Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’. Against it, the proto-punk anthems of London – Dr Feelgood’s and Eddie and the Hot Rods’ sparky pub rock work-outs – would sound fraught and frenetic, yes, but hardly ready to change music forever. The title itself breaks taboos but the rolling urgency of the piece, its terse poetry shining a blinding light on a tale of teen, production-line enslavement, brightened briefly by fleeting references to her musical loves – Stax, James Brown – and then leading to the most exilharating escape since Moses parted the waters. ‘I’m gonna to go New York City…I’m gonna be a big star’. And she does. Throw in the debut single’s other side, the re-working of Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’ with its manic mannerisms and references to Patti Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army and we enter a world of bizarre terror – the early days of global terrorism no less – in which the poor little rich girl, daughter of a gargantuan publishing empire, is wielding guns, and for real, on CCTV. Mapplethorpe, beginning to climb the photography ladder, had a few hundred dollars to underwrite that recording session and, in so many ways, it pushed open a door. In New York, the Velvets were spent and the Dolls had imploded. But that funded 45 transformed Smith from a promising St Mark’s Poetry Project bard into a bonafide rock contender and ready to shake some serious action. The Verlaine-driven Television debut was a rather different affair – longer tracks, extended solos and a gothic romanticism, thwacking the symbols when compared to Smith’s grittier street rap. With Richard Hell now departed, the band’s trash thrash had been modified, refined somewhat, and there was more virtuosity than you could shake a punk at. But the eyes have it on the wrapper: four faces that have an alien gleam – shaggy, torn hair-cuts, lean, insect limbs, an unearthly light, suggest a night with the rocking dead rather than the new street corner gods. Louche, loud, jagged music then assaults you, yet played with the crisp attack, the competence and control of a Berklee jazz gang. Charles Shaar Murray dug Horses like he loved the Stones at their best. Nick Kent praised Marquee Moon as if the Velvets had reformed and resurrected Jimi on axe patrol. Those glowing NME reviews that greeted these slivers of epoch-shaking magnitude woke us – and so many Americans, too – to the next phase in rock’s thrillingly erratic course. But the Mapplethorpe portraits are as lasting as the musical contents: the amorphous and curious beauty of the woman who would prove that the intense poet and a monstrous backbeat were not mutually exclusive and a fierce quartet who would ensure that Television was literally on the radio, at least in the UK, for a thrilling year or two as the Seventies blazed towards its conclusion. The man with the Polaroids would do more – plenty more. He would become the pictorial historian of Lower and Mid-Manhattan – capturing Burroughs, Warhol, Grace Jones and many others. Specialise in picture essays on the San Francisco S&M scene. Capture astonishing, no-holds-barred nudes: hunking black models framed in their homo-erotic immodesty. And then dead. Dead at 42. Of AIDS. In 1989. For British followers of the justifiably mourned Mapplethorpe’s black and white odyssey, a fine selection of his work from several periods – including self-portraits and an alternative take of the Horses shot, too – can be enjoyed at Graves Gallery in Sheffield until March 27th, 2010. But for others: pick up the records again, stare hard at those powerful images and devour the music all over again. Continue reading
Three years ago, I planned a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . It was due to take place in my working city of Leeds and in the University’s School of Music where I am based, a commemoration, in words and images, music and performance, of the arrival of this ground-breaking novel. Among those who were slated to take part was the timeless and tireless Carolyn Cassady, a legendary figure herself in the story of the American Beat writers. But then I revealed that an unreleased movie simply titled Neal Cassady , a dramatic portrait of her husband, was to also form part of the programme. Carolyn was very far from happy. In fact, she was quite disparaging of the new bio-pic, suggesting that if that screening remained in the schedule, she would have to seriously consider withdrawing from the event. For me, as organiser, the Sword of Damocles briefly stood poised over my head. Whatever the ins and outs of the matter – and, significantly, my event was maddeningly scuppered by a fire that ravaged my office just weeks before the celebration was due – there is no question that Neal Cassady remains a controversial and contested figure in the discourse of Beat history. The reaction of his long-time partner was indicative that there is certainly no unanimity in the way we should make sense of this mercurial individual who, from his young life on the streets of Denver to his curious death by the tracks of a Mexican railroad, led an existence that was rich in experience, riddled with paradox, concluded in tragedy. Lothario and tea-head, car-thief and racounteur, faithful friend and unfaithful partner, orphan and father, speed-king and spiritualist, literary inspiration and would-be novelist himself, Cassady is hero and villain, saint and sinner, toiling brakeman and reckless bum. The fact that his fame – or infamy – stretched across some 20 years in the rise of the post-war cultural revolution and he was a principal player in the theatre of both Beat and hippie, from the late 1940s to the end of the Sixties, made him an iconic figure, a symbol of liberation in a world that was only just wriggling from the straitjacket of social conformity and sexual repression. Cast as Dean Moriarty in On the Road , Cassady appeared on the page as a fast-talking, jazz-loving, ever-optimistic magician of the roads, a supreme master of the steering wheel, his childlike wonder at the possibilities before them balanced by his rapacious sexual marauding. By the time, the writer Ken Kesey employed him to be the driver of his travelling troupe on the bus dubbed Furthur, the line where the fictional character ended and the actual man began had been largely eroded by the mind-shaking effects of psychedelics and the harsh realities of jail after a set-up drugs bust. Thus Cassady became a star of the emerging Beat fiction, as Kerouac immortalised him as free-wheeling wanderer and one of Norman Mailer’s ‘white negroes’, and then a guru to the hippies as the new journalism of Tom Wolfe recounted later, LSD-fuelled adventures in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test , a book published in 1968, the same year that Neal met his end. Next month, the city where Cassady grew up will pay tribute to one of their more interesting sons, when the premiere Annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash takes place in Denver, Colorado, on Sunday, February 7th, close to, just one day before, the man of the moment would have chalked up his 84th year. The occasion, staged in a well-loved and historic drinking haunt called My Brother’s Bar, at 15th and Platte, promises an entertaining mixture of songs and readings and even guest appearances by the Cassady family, including an in-person appearance by the matriarch of the clan. Resident in London for many years, Carolyn, whose own autobiographical take on these lives and times was provided by her acclaimed 1990 memoir Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg , will join the festivities. The bar even has clear evidence that Neal Cassady had at least an occasional beer there: a prized and framed note, written from the state reformatory, which asks a friend if he’ll cover a drinks tab he had built up there, is on display. “I believe I owe them 3 or 4 dollars….please drop in an pay it, will you,” it pleads. Cassady lived life to the full – his hobo instincts delivered extraordinary adventures and also the carnage of relationships de-railed by that constant urge to seek more – and somewhere else. Even he and Kerouac had fall-outs and the powerful kinship they felt in the late 1940s was tarnished by the early 1960s. But Kerouac believed that Cassady was more than just an untameable livewire and irresponsible hedonist. He saw great qualities in his writing style and claimed to learn from his expression in letters, as electric and loose-limbed as his speech. But little survived the peripatetic rampaging and only The First Third , a novella published in 1971 after the author’s death, has really seen the light of the day. However, the legacy of this larger-than-life figure will be considered and applauded when My Brother’s Bar unveils what promises to be merely the first of a yearly acknowledgement of Cassady’s idiosyncratic contribution to a period of great change in the artistic and political consciousness of the USA. Continue reading
Two US television shows with little in common beyond the fact that they have made their mark on the viewing public and garnered critical warmth, arrived in Britain this week: the debut series of Edie Falco’s post- Sopranos project Nurse Jackie and the fourth season of the superpowered soap Heroes . Yet this pair – one a dirty realistic snapshot of life in a New York hospital, sardonic and sassy, the other a post-modern take on the realm of the comic book crusader, flashy and fast-moving – do share an unlikely association: the musical contributions of a couple of one-time Prince sidewomen, Wendy & Lisa. Nor is it the first time in the last couple of weeks I have noticed their soundtrack credits in a small screen production. I’ve been gently wandering through the boxed sets of the 1930s dustbowl drama Carnivale – a lavishly created and expensive period piece that saw HBO bin it after just two years in 2004 – and who should be the musical maestras but that very same female combination. Now, it’s some little while since guitarist Wendy Melvoin and pianst Lisa Coleman have been on my radar. I may have seen one on stage at the opening night of Prince’s 31 gigs and at the post-concert bash at the O2 in 2007. But I do remember, for sure, reviewing – and enjoying – one of their early post-Paisley Park forays in 1989. Fruit at the Bottom had enough class – a taut, wiry folk funk typified by the single ‘Are You my Baby’ – to briefly make an impression on the UK charts but I think the purple shadow cast by their mentor and diminutive giant was a little too over-powering to allow them to truly forge an identity in their own right back then. Yet, more than two decades on, the collaborative duo have made a definite impression in a field where women composers generally fear to tread – writing for the TV or the movies. Their Hollywood work includes contributions to Toy s, the 1992 Robin Williams vehicle, and, three years later, Dangerous Minds , which included Michelle Pfeiffer among the cast. Most recently, they were involved with the picture Something New (2006), starring Sanaa Lathan, about an African-American woman choosing a career path over romantic entanglement. Yet there is little question that Wendy & Lisa – who have also in recent years stepped out as the Girl Bros – contributed to the most fertile period in Prince’s career, name-checked on Purple Rain , the album and film that turned the artist from adolesecent prodigy into global superstar, and the follow-ups Round the World in a Day and Parade . However, by 1986, they felt sidelined by their leader’s scheme to expand his band the Revolution and the pair believed their input was being under-valued. A solo, or more accurately dual, career would follow and, even though they have made fleeting links with their former major general in the mean-time, their professional lives have been principally forged in other directions. Wendy & Lisa have been prolific, too, since then but their background contributions to a string on on-screen ventures have marked them as two of the smartest operators in that field of incidental, opening and end-title music that can help make or break the atmosphere, the vibe, of a filmed drama. Their 2008 album White Flags of Winter Chimneys was their first Wendy & Lisa official release for around a decade but they appear to have now carved out a comfy niche in that hip gay entourage on the fringes of the LA production hothouse. The ertswhile Princesses came out this year and featured recently with two other pop icons of that scene, Jon Ginoli, lynchpin of Pansy Division, and ex-Chanticleer Matt Alber, in the prestigious Out 100 ‘Class of 2009′ at out.com. Witness Melvoin and Coleman’s creative energies when you catch BBC1’s Heroes – they wrote a theme for each of the characters – or Nurse Jackie , in the midst of a lightning twelve-night run on BBC2. Continue reading
Two US television shows with little in common beyond the fact that they have made their mark on the viewing public and garnered critical warmth, arrived in Britain this week: the debut series of Edie Falco’s post- Sopranos project Nurse Jackie and the fourth season of the superpowered soap Heroes . Yet this pair – one a dirty realistic snapshot of life in a New York hospital, sardonic and sassy, the other a post-modern take on the realm of the comic book crusader, flashy and fast-moving – do share an unlikely association: the musical contributions of a couple of one-time Prince sidewomen, Wendy & Lisa. Nor is it the first time in the last couple of weeks I have noticed their soundtrack credits in a small screen production. I’ve been gently wandering through the boxed sets of the 1930s dustbowl drama Carnivale – a lavishly created and expensive period piece that saw HBO bin it after just two years in 2004 – and who should be the musical maestras but that very same female combination. Now, it’s some little while since guitarist Wendy Melvoin and pianst Lisa Coleman have been on my radar. I may have seen one on stage at the opening night of Prince’s 31 gigs and at the post-concert bash at the O2 in 2007. But I do remember, for sure, reviewing – and enjoying – one of their early post-Paisley Park forays in 1989. Fruit at the Bottom had enough class – a taut, wiry folk funk typified by the single ‘Are You My Baby’ – to briefly make an impression on the UK charts but I think the purple shadow cast by their mentor and diminutive giant was a little too over-powering to allow them to truly forge an identity in their own right back then. Yet, more than two decades on, the collaborative duo have made a definite impression in a field where women composers generally fear to tread – writing for the TV or the movies. Their Hollywood work includes contributions to Toy s, the 1992 Robin Williams vehicle, and, three years later, Dangerous Minds , which included Michelle Pfeiffer among the cast. Most recently, they were involved with the picture Something New (2006), starring Sanaa Lathan, about an African-American woman choosing a career path over romantic entanglement. Yet there is little question that Wendy & Lisa – who have also in recent years stepped out as the Girl Bros – contributed to the most fertile period in Prince’s career, name-checked on Purple Rain , the album and film that turned the artist from adolescent prodigy into global superstar, and the follow-ups Round the World in a Day and Parade . However, by 1986, they felt sidelined by their leader’s scheme to expand his band the Revolution and the pair believed their input was being under-valued. A solo, or more accurately dual, career would follow and, even though they have made fleeting links with their former major general in the meantime, their professional lives have been principally forged in other directions. Wendy & Lisa have been prolific, too, since then but their background contributions to a string on on-screen ventures have marked them as two of the smartest operators in that field of incidental, opening and end-title music that can help make or break the atmosphere, the vibe, of a filmed drama. Their 2008 album White Flags of Winter Chimneys was their first official Wendy & Lisa release for around a decade but they appear to have now carved out a comfy niche in that hip gay entourage on the fringes of the LA production hothouse. The ertswhile Princesses came out this year and featured recently with two other pop icons of that scene, Jon Ginoli, lynchpin of Pansy Division, and ex-Chanticleer Matt Alber, in the prestigious Out 100 ‘Class of 2009′ at out.com. Witness Melvoin and Coleman’s creative energies when you catch BBC2′s Heroes – they wrote a theme for each of the characters – or Nurse Jackie , in the midst of a lightning, twelve-night run on the same channel. Continue reading
Much heralded, the movie version of Nine hit big screens around the world in recent days and this Federico Fellini homage ticks quite a number of my boxes even if it is hard to see the production genuinely appealing to mass audiences and attracting the kind of Academy Award attention predicted by some of the critics. Directed by Rob Marshall who successfully brought Kander & Ebb’s potent Chicago to cinemas in 2002, this presentation has some of the atmosphere of that work even if it lacks the barn-storming score. Like that earlier smash, Nine has to be regarded as a piece of musical theatre lifted, close to intact, from Broadway and expanded to fit the wider horizons of a celluloid venture. It is hardly even a question of spotting the joins: around half the picture takes place on the sound stage of the famed Cinecitta studios outside Rome, in essence within the bounds of a proscenium arch, and, we might add, largely in the imagination of Guido Contini, the Fellini cipher, played by a convincing Daniel Day-Lewis. Contini is in crisis as he plans Italia , a lavish, ambitious tale of a land governed by men who are driven by their women – mothers, wives, lovers, muses. The director, based on Fellini as he schemed his epic 8½, has lost confidence in his craft. He approaches the latest project, all set to run, scriptless and distracted as tensions with his producer, in his marriage and with his mistress leave him on the verge of nervous breakdown. Such criss-crossed emotional wires are the perfect vehicle for dramatic set-pieces as a stellar female cast – lover Penelope Cruz, wife Marion Cotillard, costume designer Judi Dench, leading actress Nicole Kidman, mother Sophia Loren, journalist Kate Hudson and prostitute Fergie – lend a musical gloss to the psychological machinations and the artistic slump in Contini’s life. Where Nine succeeds most is in the neurotic dealings of Day-Lewis’ main protagonist. Oft-cast as the period Anglo, the actor immerses himself in the part with commendable vigour: the wardrobe, the trilby, the shades, the Alfa Romeo speedster and the ever-present cigarettes evoke with conviction the Roman land of La Dolce Vita . But the actor himself inhabits the role in more than a mere sartorial sense. The accent is authentic and without exaggerated strains of caricature, the intensity of the eyes is both piercing and sometimes compelling, and the occasional breaking smile – when he gently taunts the press ranks as the new production staggers and stumbles into life – paints a rounded if wounded personality. Less hypnotic are the songs and the lyrics all too frequently jar. The compositions, principally credited to Maury Yeston, each have that hint of the lightly operatic – moving along the plot to an amorphous and frankly colourless palette. Only Hudson’s effervescent, go-go girl showstopper breaks that somewhat restricted mould. Yet the extraordinary parade of women who grapple with these less than promising tunes actually bring a remarkable verve and passion to the process. It is the drama and the context that pulls you in rather than a blistering hook, an unforgettable refrain or a dazzling fragment of word-play. So where does Nine sit on a scale of ten? Well, I have to say that this film is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts – as a musical extravaganza its soundtrack generally failed to deliver; as a dramatic cycle propelled by a string of engaging ensemble performances it held me quite rapt. So 7.5, not quite 8½, fits my personal bill. To wander the back-streets of a main-house production – the script meetings, the on-set bust-ups, the costume fittings, the logistical difficulties of making life art – is fascinating to most of us; experiencing the behind-the-scenes badinage can be as intriguing as the stage or screen work that is ultimately set before the public. But even if that off-stage, film-within-a-movie structure has less appeal for you, the evocation of the Italian capital in 1965, swinging almost as much as London and more effortlessly stylish, should be enough to keep fans of continental élan, and European art cinema at a particularly fertile moment, content. Continue reading
Much heralded, the movie version of Nine hit big screens around the world in recent days and this Federico Fellini homage ticks quite a number of my boxes even if it is hard to see the production genuinely appealing to mass audiences and attracting the kind of Academy Award attention predicted by some of the critics. Directed by Rob Marshall who successfully brought Kander & Ebb’s potent Chicago to cinemas in 2002, this presentation has some of the atmosphere of that work even if it lacks the barn-storming score. Like that earlier smash, Nine has to be regarded as a piece of musical theatre lifted, close to intact, from Broadway and expanded to fit the wider horizons of a celluloid venture. It is hardly even a question of spotting the joins: around half the picture takes place on the sound stage of the famed Cinecitta studios outside Rome, in essence within the bounds of a proscenium arch, and, we might add, largely in the imagination of Guido Contini, the Fellini cipher, played by a convincing Daniel Day-Lewis. Contini is in crisis as he plans Italia , a lavish, ambitious tale of a land governed by men who are driven by their women – mothers, wives, lovers, muses. The director, based on Fellini as he schemed his epic 8½, has lost confidence in his craft. He approaches the latest project, all set to run, scriptless and distracted as tensions with his producer, in his marriage and with his mistress leave him on the verge of nervous breakdown. Such criss-crossed emotional wires are the perfect vehicle for dramatic set-pieces as a stellar female cast – lover Penelope Cruz, wife Marion Cotillard, costume designer Judi Dench, leading actress Nicole Kidman, mother Sophia Loren, journalist Kate Hudson and prostitute Fergie – lend a musical gloss to the psychological machinations and the artistic slump in Contini’s life. Where Nine succeeds most is in the neurotic dealings of Day-Lewis’ main protagonist. Oft cast as the period Anglo, the actor immerses himself in the part with commendable vigour: the wardrobe, the trilby, the shades, the Alfa Romeo speedster and the ever-present cigarettes summon with conviction the Roman land of La Dolce Vita . But the actor himself inhabits the role in more than a mere sartorial sense. The accent is authentic and without exaggerated strains of caricature, the intensity of the eyes is both piercing and sometimes compelling, and the occasional breaking smile – when he gently taunts the press ranks as the new production staggers and stumbles into life – paints a rounded if wounded personality. Less hypnotic are the songs and the lyrics all too frequently jar. The compositions, principally credited to Maury Yeston, each have that hint of the lightly operatic – moving along the plot to an amorphous and frankly colourless palette. Only Hudson’s effervescent, go-go girl showstopper breaks that somewhat restricted mould. Yet the extraordinary parade of women who grapple with these less than promising tunes actually bring a remarkable verve and passion to the process. It is the drama and the context that pulls you in rather than a blistering hook, an unforgettable refrain or a dazzling fragment of word-play. So where does Nine sit on a scale of ten? Well, I have to say that this film is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts – as a musical extravaganza its soundtrack generally failed to deliver; as a dramatic cycle propelled by a string of engaging ensemble performances it held me quite rapt. So 7.5, not quite 8½, fits my personal bill. To wander the back-streets of a main-house production – the script meetings, the on-set bust-ups, the costume fittings, the logistical difficulties of making life art – is fascinating to most of us; experiencing the behind-the-scenes badinage can be as intriguing as the stage or screen work that is ultimately set before the public. But even if that off-stage, film-within-a-movie structure has less appeal for you, the evocation of the Italian capital in 1965, swinging almost as much as London and more effortlessly stylish, should be enough to keep fans of continental élan, and European art cinema at a particularly fertile moment, content. Continue reading
The power of Lady Gaga has been one of the most scintillating features of 2009: three number one UK singles, a sprawling debut album and enough visual extravaganza to fill a Fellini film, furnish a Warholian Factory, stock a Kubrick movie set, even add a touch of Dada to the austere corridors of the Royal Variety Performance: a killer queen of kitsch paraded before another Queen of the Kingdom. As the year ended with ‘Bad Romance’ one of the hit parade smashes of the festive season, the punch-up between Simon Cowell’s house-trained turn and the sabotage scheme of raging social networkers seemed somewhat contrived and certainly rather limp – manufactured muzak versus the faux fury of a Facebook fix – when set against the extraordinary artistic realm of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. There are a few popular music-makers capable of moving beyond the asphyxiating straitjacket of the three-minute chart song or the excruciating clich e s of rock’n’roll machismo. Some – Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and George Clinton, David Bowie and Prince, possibly the Pet Shop Boys and occasionally Madonna – have managed to create new codes embracing sexual ambiguity, sartorial flair, harlequin games, on disc, on stage and on screen. But the New Yorker named Lady Gaga in homage to a Freddie Mercury classic is incontestably the arch exponent of such devices right now: a chameleon and visionary, a singer and composer, a musician and dancer, she has brought the notion of art, a tantalising po-mo blend of high concept and trash aesthetic, back to the tired halls of the Top 40. Lavish, lush, pretentious, maybe faintly ridiculous, this woman’s blend of brazen confidence, larger-than-life style and pure, undiluted schlock have reminded us that so many of the best sounds of the last half century have been accompanied by a large dollop of foppish and self-indulgent absurdity. Okay, there’s a time for the intense authenticity of Dylan and Lennon and Neil Young but it’s probably back in the past: in these mean and failing times we need something fast, loud and feckless to slightly misquote Lester Bangs’ original take on the Fab Four and the start of the British Invasion. Gaga’s invasion has been impressive indeed. Her main strike weapon has been a series of ludicrously infectious dance beats, her offensive strategy a sequence of melodramatic vocal hooks, her killer blow a string of made-for-MTV shorts that are so compellingly over the top that you can hardly believe there are still major label budgets like that around to invest in such tender talent. But this sexually ambivalent showgirl has bucked the trends and been shifting units almost as fast as Susan Boyle – some feat in a period when the music industry appears to be reaching, almost weekly, for the life support system and with no certainty that the oxygen bottles have actually been re-filled. While I do share the general critical view that the re-packaged The Fame Monster is an over-long debut set with some extraneous flab, the best tunes – ‘Just Dance’, ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Paparazzi’ – and their video accompaniments – an eye-catching collage of extravagant haute couture and retro sci-fi, arthouse flick and S&M, Hollywood and Las Vegas – are an embodiment of the moment, a snapshot of the state of the (dance) nation. The drama that unfurls to the strains of the newest 45, ‘Bad Romance’, is a strange burlesque, recalling, quite bizarrely, Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’, hinting at the menace of Clockwork Orange , suggesting the masqued ball of Eyes Wide Shut , bathed in the dazzling flouorescence of the 2001 flight deck and riddled with a multitude of other fleeting symbols: fetishistic white vinyl, cleft-chinned Russian gangsters, and a Leigh Bowery-like interlude. Derivative maybe, eclectic for sure, its 5′15 is the mini-movie video always promised us. So, in an age where we call fantasy television reality, nothing, it appears, is what it seems. But in Gaga’s cornucopia – where glitter and the gutter mingle, flesh and feathers co-habit, and a simmering soundtrack of porno-pop truly puts the naughty back in the noughties – we have a mirror for our present, morally ambiguous, culturally indeterminate times. No one is quite sure anymore where the cheap and the vacuous ends and the luxurious and the expensive begins but I would speculate that this lady as vamp, the global star of the last 12 months, has, through her sonic and cinematic merry-go-round, probably got her gold-clad finger-nail set firmly on the contemporary pulse. Continue reading
In the closing moments of Glee , the newest US smash to creep on to our TV screens, an ensemble of high school singers and musicians deliver an immaculately turned version of a song that has been resonating through American hearts for almost thirty years. Largely unknown in the UK – Simon Cowell said as much as The X-Factor winner, Joe McElderry, performed the piece in last weekend’s final – the song has struck a chord in its homeland that marks it almost as the ‘God Bless America’ or the ‘This Land is Your Land’ of the MTV generation. It isn’t an anthem in the traditional sense, but ‘Don’t Stop Believin” – a Top 40 hit for the San Francisco band Journey in 1982 – has certainly emerged as an anthem of the contemporary kind, a song that has ornamented a remarkable string of television shows in recent decades, securing it a reputation that transcends the ephemeral nature of the hit parade. The song came to my attention again in 2007 after it was utilised as the musical coda to six seasons of the most gripping drama as The Sopranos closed with Journey’s vigorous slice of vinyl optimism blasting out of the burger bar juke box with Mafia boss Tony Soprano, surrounded by his family, looking forward to a more secure future after a terrible round of blood-letting. It may have been a curious use of an upbeat tale of teen loneliness transformed by love, yet this was not a simple sign-off with the director proposing all was well in Heaven. No, this was the head of an Italian crime syndicate putting in his own quarters into the Wurlitzer and reassuring himself that, amid the carnage, popular music could somehow restore his domestic – and psychological – equilibrium. The key though, in this three minute cameo combining romantic rags, the lure of the road and erotic riches, is the chorus. In an age when belief systems are less certain than ever, the abstract notion of simply believing is enough to instil a feeling of hope in the tens of millions of American listeners who’ve been affected and inspired by the song. And they’ve certainly had plenty of chances to encounter it as the piece has made numerous supporting appearances in everything from Scrubs to King of the Hill , My Name is Earl to South Park , Just Shoot Me to Family Guy , not to mention in the biggest small screen hit of them all, American Idol . It is not without a certain irony that Randy Jackson, one of the permanent judges on American Idol , was bass player with Journey but, it must be added, some few years after ‘Don’t Stop Believin” had enjoyed its stay in the Billboard chart. For writers Neal Schon – once of Santana – and fellow group members Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry, the song must have generated remarkable royalty earnings since its release, yet Perry was said to be hesitant about the song’s use in The Sopranos . Its ubiquity as a signifier of positive possibility perhaps ran counter with the darker themes of the gangster underworld. However, the fact that it has since appeared in the 2009 video game Rock Band suggests a further generation, at least, are going to hooked by this enduring composition. While the group themselves are caught in that strange and anachronistic netherworld of soft rock – a time when Foreigner and Boston ruled the airwaves – their signature song has cast off the veils of nostalgia to remain, unquestionably, a contemporary winner. Continue reading
In the closing moments of Glee , the newest US smash to creep on to our TV screens, an ensemble of high school singers and musicians deliver an immaculately turned version of a song that has been resonating through American hearts for almost thirty years. Largely unknown in the UK – Simon Cowell said as much as The X-Factor winner, Joe McElderry, performed the piece in last weekend’s final – the song has struck a chord in its homeland that marks it almost as the ‘God Bless America’ or ‘This Land is Your Land’ of the MTV generation. It isn’t an anthem in the traditional sense, but ‘Don’t Stop Believin” – a Top 40 hit for the San Francisco band Journey in 1982 – has certainly emerged as an anthem of the contemporary kind, a song that has ornamented a remarkable string of television shows in recent decades, securing it a reputation that transcends the ephemeral nature of the hit parade. The song came to my attention again in 2007 after it was utilised as the musical coda to six seasons of the most gripping drama as The Sopranos closed with Journey’s vigorous slice of vinyl optimism blasting out of the burger bar juke box with Mafia boss Tony Soprano, surrounded by his family, looking forward to a more secure future after a terrible round of blood-letting. It may have been a curious use of an upbeat tale of teen loneliness transformed by love, yet this was not a simple sign-off with the director proposing all was well in Heaven. No, this was the head of an Italian crime syndicate putting in his own quarters into the Wurlitzer and reassuring himself that, amid the carnage, popular music could somehow restore his domestic – and psychological – equilibrium. The key though, in this three minute cameo, combining romantic rags, the lure of the road and erotic riches, is the chorus. In an age when belief systems are less certain than ever, the abstract notion of simply believing is enough to instil a feeling of hope in the tens of millions of American listeners who’ve been affected and inspired by the song. And they’ve certainly had plenty of chances to encounter it as the piece has made numerous supporting appearances in everything from Scrubs to King of the Hill , My Name is Earl to South Park , Just Shoot Me to Family Guy , not to mention in the biggest small screen hit of them all, American Idol . It is not without a certain irony that Randy Jackson, one of the permanent judges on American Idol , was bass player with Journey but, it must be added, some few years after ‘Don’t Stop Believin” had enjoyed is stay in the Billboard chart. For writers Neal Schon – once of Santana – and fellow group members Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry, the song must have generated remarkable royalty earnings since its release, yet Perry was said to be hesitant about the song’s use in The Sopranos . Its ubiquity as a signifier of positive possibility perhaps ran counter with the darker themes of the gangster underworld. However, the fact that it has since appeared in the 2009 video game Rock Band suggests a further generation, at least, are going to hooked by this enduring composition. While the group themselves are caught in that strange and anachronistic netherworld of soft rock – a time when Foreigner and Boston ruled the airwaves – their signature song has cast off the veils of nostalgia to remain, unquestionably, a contemporary winner. Continue reading
I have a compulsion about books. So far, I have filled a small house and a large office and a car boot and it’s starting to make me think that bibliophilia may be incurable. I collect these items with a hunger, even read the damn things, too, but I am rapidly beginning to assume that the power of the collecting bug may have overtaken the prospect of ever reading all of ‘em. This is a quite a long term illness. I remember as a teenager, starting to mop up science fiction, then American cultists, and then realising quite rapidly that half an hour spent in a charity shop or two could actually produce a few cut-price gems, slightly dog-eared but utterly serviceable for little more than pennies. I recall vividly, to this day, a second-hand store on my grandma’s Moss Side high street delivering a second edition of the Beat/Angry Young Men classic 1958 anthology Protest for a far from hefty 15p. I was checking something in it last week. In fact, thinking about it, there was one emporium that truly got me hooked: a shop in my university city of Sheffield called Rare and Racy which became my second, no third, maybe fourth, home, after my basement flat, the Nottingham House pub and the pinball arcade in the students’ union. Rock’n’roll writer-to-be Andy Gill (not the Leeds art student and Gang of Four guitarist, though we were all contemporaries) was one of the kings of the flipper, I do recall, in that long corridor next to the bar. But Rare and Racy was a place to behold. Novels, poetry, photo collections, quirky postcards, and vinyl records by the several hundred. There was certainly a critic in that city – maybe it was Gill (not A.A.) himself – with a veritable supply of new long players because, every week, there’d be another selection of unspun recordings for my friends and I to plunder. It was the intoxicating height of pub rock and punk, new wave and reggae, and this marvellous shop – still there! – was a great place to spend an hour and a few quid, too. This was the period when there was scant cash around – grants didn’t go too far even at 20p a pint – but there was the thrill of the chase. If it wasn’t a music fix you were seeking, then there was every chance you’d find a Kerouac or a Wolfe (Tom rather than Thomas) or a Thompson (Hunter S. rather than E.P.) or a Vonnegut lodged near the Donne or the Marvell (Andrew not Comics) off-loaded by the outgoing Lit students. It was a golden age to build your own paperback library and get an extra-curricular education. Then time moved on and the prospect of scouring musty charity shelves lost its appeal. Yet, eventually, fantastic new bookshops – Waterstone’s, Dillon’s, Borders – came along and, hip to the fact that there was a whole generation of readers who dug that whole late 20th Century bag, from Burgess to Ballard, Plath to Amis, Salinger to Pynchon, provided clean-lined shelves full of the stuff. And knowledgable assistants. And coffee. Like a Left Bank cafe, only smoke-free and hoovered. Then and then, Dillon’s was swallowed up. And now Borders has gone belly up, I’m afraid. But, for good or maybe even ill, our new best best-friend, the worldwide web, has, of course, solved the book collector’s dilemma – and how. It has seen off most of those worthy, offline stalwarts because it’s just simply too freaking good at what it does. Today, I was trying to track a relatively rare collection of verse and prose by punk bassist and poet Richard Hell. Click Amazon. There’s the title in question. Click Marketplace. There’s the item I want – ‘Used, Good’ – at about half the list price. And there’s the link to a series of further recommendations: all of Hell’s output, it seems, and at smile-inducing, knockdown prices. When I was 16 or, indeed, 36, I had only a very small sense of what was even out there in print – in the UK, in the USA, around the world. If I’d gone into a good bookshop in 1986 or 1996, neither I, nor they, would have known what the hell Richard Hell had published. Now, the net gives me instant, comprehensive information and all at prices that are a fraction of what I would have paid in Waterstone’s if I’d known the book even existed!! In other words, the book addict now has a virtual dealer in his own cyber-library and no volume need remain on any shelf – real or imagined – for long. It’s just there. Available. And winging its way in cardboard or brown paper in about three days’ time. I haven’t yet pressed the ‘Order’ button to access Hell and his short oeuvre. But I no doubt will. It’s there in a my hyper-basket. And will, quite probably, be wending a course into my quite literal mailbox very soon. My groaning bookcases will have to accept another gaggle of new arrivals. Continue reading
The news that Paul Scholes, aged 35, would be invited to sign a further year’s contract with Manchester United is a symbol of an older age in English football when one-club players were not uncommon and a career, from teens to retirement, would be played out with the same team. The fact that Scholes’ team-mate, Ryan Giggs, a further year on in life, is also a continuing force in the United squad adds further rarity to the situation: home-grown players who perpetuate their position in the highest echelon of the professional game. Both were part of a so-called golden generation of United player who emerged in the early to mid-1990s and set the club on course for an unprecedented era of success in the national sport. Giggs’ feat of winning 11 Premiership championship medals is surely beyond repetition and Scholes is not too far behind. Their role in the Old Trafford club’s domination of the domestic game for the last decade and a half is a reminder of how football teams once relied on that kind of self-nurtured talent and avoided spending stellar fortunes on an internationally-sourced line-up with several top-notch and expensive players allocated to most positions. Half a century ago, the Busby Babes – a sequence of teams of youngsters shaped by manager Matt Busby – won the first five FA Youth Cups, a clear sign that United were developing a conveyor belt of unknown talent. By the middle of the 1950s, there was every presumption that this supply line of apprentices would create an extended domination of trophies at home and abroad. When eight of the young players – including probably the greatest of all, Duncan Edwards, the youngest ever England international – were killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958, the plan was severely disrupted. Busby himself only survived by the skin of his teeth and dreams of an expected European victory were dashed. Busby, for a period, had to abandon his home-grown squad plans – but not for long. In the early 1960s he splashed a phenomenal, and record-smashing, £115,000 on the Scot Denis Law, unhappily ensconced in Italy at the time. But when the reconstruction saw United eventually win the prime continental prize, the European Cup, Law was absent through injury and eight of the triumphant line-up were from the United nursery, including the mercurial George Best. Yet, when we contemplate the golden moments in the history of successful teams who eschewed huge spending and, instead, relied on their own, self-generated stars, we have to reserve a special place in the canon for a pair of legendary sides – the Glasgow Celtic European Cup winners of 1967 and the Ajax outfit who repeated that feat in 1995. Celtic, who beat United by a year to the title of the first British team to capture that prestigious title when they defeated Inter Milan, consisted of nine home-grown footballers – only goalkeeper Ronnie Simpson and forward Willie Wallace had played elsewhere. More incredibly, especially when set aside the cosmopolitan nature of the present scene, all eleven players were from the city of Glasgow, an attainment of parochial majesty that will never be witnessed again. The Dutch team who saw off Milan had several club-sourced individuals – and some on the bench, too, as the substitute possibilities had expanded several times since Celtic’s achievement – and were also a younger, less experienced line-up when compared to the earlier Scottish team. Ajax’s side reflected, too, a growing, if relatively tiny, international influence. Nigerian Finidi George and Finn Jari Litmanen stood for an emerging trend – long common in Italy, by then spreading speedily to Spain and England – that players did not need to be drawn from within the borders on one nation. The 1995 winners were quite quickly dismantled: this brilliant gathering was dispersed to the most commercially powerful leagues in Europe as money inevitably talked. Today, the idea that home-grown talent is to be valued is barely respected. Liverpool once played Liverpudlians by the dozen; now a couple make the starting line-up. Manchester City had a superb record of finding their own, often Mancunian, players; the 2008 buy-out that saw them becoming the globe’s richest club has done for that. Chelsea, in the Abramovich era, virtually said goodbye, captain John Terry aside, to chicks from the club’s own brood. Yet Manchester United, even at a time when massive deals have brought Berbatov and Rooney and Ferdinand to Old Trafford, have tended to persist with players they can claim as their own – Fletcher and Brown, O’Shea and Gibson, Neville and Evans, Giggs and Scholes are just some of the genuine Old Trafford-ites who are still key players in the 2009/10 squad. One place, though, where United have been extraordinarily exposed in the last 30 years is in their failure to find an outstanding striker of their own – Liverpool had at least two in Owen and Fowler and maybe three, if we include Rush’s signing as a teen, lower league performer. Since the long-gone days of the prolific Best and Brian Kidd, the Manchester side may only cite Andy Ritchie and Mark Robbins as examples of goalscorers who came through the ranks with high reputations. But neither quite proved to be the finished article, drifting off to enjoy only moderate attainments with lower profile clubs. Perhaps, of the current crop of adolescent forwards, Manchester-born Danny Welbeck and – a real indicator of changing times – the Italian Federico Macheda may fill that vacuum. If they do manage to hit the net consistently, we may even have a United manager – perhaps Darren Ferguson, son of Sir Alex the current, and enduring, boss – announcing, during the season 2025/26, that one of them has had his had his deal extended into his 35th year. Continue reading
There are plans afoot to rumble the empire of the world’s most powerful pop entrepreneur. Simon Cowell, whose X-Factor winner has been virtually guaranteed a number one entry, not to mention the prestigious Christmas top spot, for a number of years now, is facing a guerilla strategy to block a repeat of such a feat in 2009. Launched via Facebook, Rage Against the Machine for No.1 is a campaign that calls upon millions of social networkers to shove an almighty spanner into the Cowell-driven mechanism and put the Californian band’s ‘Killing in the Name’ atop the pile when the UK’s seasonal chart is announced on Sunday, December 20th. The battle looks like being a tough one for The X-Factor if we are to believe the numbers already rallying to the Rage cause – over 375,000 have joined the bid to date – and, if all of those individuals do buy the track in question within the qualifying time-frame, it is hard to see how they can fail to prevent a conveyor-belt crooner from hitting the heights on this occasion. It is difficult to work out how such a coordinated plan could have worked before the onset of downloading. For a start, the high street record retailers of old were utterly geared to the industry scheme – they had the material the labels wanted us to purchase. Only if HMV or Virgin could lay their hands hundreds, even thousands, of copies of a particular single could customers buy them in store. To have asked for ‘Killing in the Name’ as a one-off track on CD, once it had enjoyed a brief early life as an actual single, would have been impossible. It wouldn’t have even been stocked after a few weeks. Now, of course, there are millions of tracks available to us at the click of a mouse and, with this piece of orchestrated subversion in place, there seems little reason why one of rock’s most politically-directed acts shouldn’t enjoy the belated glow of a hit parade smash 17 years after the song first reared its head. Riddled with the word ‘fuck’, the anti-war song caused certain notoriety on its 1992 release when the BBC Radio 1’s Chart Show played an uncensored version of the piece as it hit the lower reaches of the chart back then. But ‘Killing in the Name’, with the en masse aid of the Facebook posse, is heading for a loftier ascent this time around. If this does happen, what might it all mean? Well, we may see it as triumph for a certain form of people power. Though the people, we might argue, have already expressed their own power by propelling one of Olly Murs, Stacey Solomon or Joe McElderry, the three surviving singers who feature in this weekend’s final, into this poll position. One of them will be crowned X-Factor winner after a Saturday and Sunday of blockbuster shows with the popular vote deciding on the champ. There is little doubt that X-Factor has infused the British pop scene with an energy and dynamism it has not seen for some decades. With audiences of around 15 million tuning in to watch the weekly sing-offs, the interest levels in indigenous popular music has not been this high since Beatlemania and the early incarnations of the now extinct Top of the Pops . The power of this small screen vehicle – and its US counterpart American Idol which Cowell, of course, also fronts – is plainly evident from the calibre of major established stars who have been flocking to do a live spot in the results show. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga….the parade of the greatest names in this particular firmament hustling for live slots on ITV1 has been quite astonishing. Add to that, the stellar supporting line-up for the imminent final – George Michael, Robbie Williams, Michael Buble and Paul McCartney – and you really do get the sense that X-Factor is the only place to be for the highest-profile, biggest names in musical entertainment. With the broader industry – represented by the major labels, Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner – in state of free-fall, unable to revive its mega-profits of the 1990s and seemingly incapable of turning gradually rising electronic sales into a sustainable financial model, such prime time TV smashes are managing to keep the stars, not to mention Cowell himself, firmy in the public eye. But this scenario is also skewing the marketplace in a way that might be regarded as quite unhealthy. Why should a desperately old version of pop performancve – moderately talented but actually anonymous singers covering other people’s songs in a variety framework that everyone thought the Beatles had killed forever – be the only game in town? Why should Leona Lewis – now a bona fide American superstar to boot – Alexandra Burke and JLS, all recent X-Factor beneficiaries, not forgetting Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle, be so dominating of the UK popular music scene that new bands and performers, original composers and talented songwriters, with their own distinctive identity and voice, are utterly over-shadowed by mainstream pulp? The Rage Against the Machine for No. 1 strategy could pull off something fascinating. It could score a notable victory for independent-minded rock fans who still believe that music should be about something more substantial than manufactured romance and commercial sales. But it will, naturally, prove one-off. Simon Cowell, and business partner Simon Fuller, are not about to knocked off their dominating perch. Yet as his audacious campaign to become global leader gains momentum – with multi-million dollar business moves in train with British retail billionaire Philip Green and an X-Factor experience about to hit Las Vegas, Barack Obama himself may soon be playing second fiddle – it would be a small coup to see his complacent smile, his smug demeanour, reminded that there are opinions other than his that count. Continue reading
I had a young woman studying the Sixties comment in recent days that the era, for all its promise of liberation, seemed to be a time during which women remained under the thumb. Freedom may have been an appealing target for a number of groups of the period – white, middle class students attacking the military industrial complex, blacks struggling for civil rights, gays calling for legal recognition of their own after centuries of ostracism, not to mention ethnic communities of all kinds resisting the global hand of colonialism. Yet female participants, though often present in these campaigns, were generally assumed to be outside the vanguard of change. These huge cultural, racial, political and sexual tussles were men’s work: the women were there not to mount the barricades or theorise the revolution but merely to tend the psychologically – and even physically – wounded, but hardly lead the way. In fact, even when headway was made, there was scant sense that the bounty of these hard-fought efforts was equally available to both men and women anyway. Hippie chicks or black girlfriends were not seen as the natural heirs to anything; they remained, in most cases, the hand-maidens of the patriarchy, at the demo or the festival, in the church or on the street. Yet, if the Sixties was a period when such imbalance was still broadly taken as a given, it was also a decade when women began to slowly, then vociferously, challenge such casual assumptions. American writers such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, a little later, the UK-based, Australian feminsit Germaine Greer would start to express their dissatisfactions with the undemocratic rebellion that was raging in Washington and Chicago, Paris and London and demand that women’s rights be also part of the radical agenda. Step back ten years further and the place of female players in the dramas of the day was still more diminuated. In the US, the Fifties represented an epoch in which many of the seeds that would flower in the decade to follow would take root. It was a time when the nation’s economic comfort – cars, televisions, fridges and transistor radios became the norm, for the white population at least – was in sharp relief to the country’s psyche, haunted by fears of communist entrysim and nuclear wipe-out. Such schizophrenia was played out alongside a soundtrack of rock’n’roll – itself a symbol of racial miscegenation as black blues met white country – and against a backdrop of general unease, generated by signs that the Negro would no longer accept his manacled role, nor would leftist artists, socialist folkies and liberal intellectuals simply condone this absurd truce between fiscal boom and Cold War paranoia as a complacent excuse for contentment. J.D. Salinger and Norman Mailer distilled some of these tensions – the outsider adolescent and the white desire to ape black codes – in their writings. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger pleaded the cause of the worker when unionism was attracting profound suspicion. Movies reflected the generation divide as teenagers left their parents at home watching TV to catch James Dean and the real political melodramas were mirrored by thinly-veiled satires like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible . Then a more integrated group of writers, the Beats, rocked the boat still further, preaching escape from norms, from respectability, by abandoning traditional work for the pleasures of creativity, replacing the suffocating demands of domestic aspiration with the joys of the road, the pleasures of the ghetto, mind-altering odysseys on drink and drugs, and the passions of passing, soon forgotten, girls, all to the pulse of bebop. The men who made this mark – and they did avidly record their adventures in a flood of poems and novels – had scant regard for the part that women might actually contribute . Jack Kerouac, for all his roistering, constantly felt the tug of his mother’s apron-strings and disowned a daughter; William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were homosexual with competing inclinations; Neal Cassady was an inveterate womaniser who married several and slept with hundreds of others. But none was encouraging of the female as artist, as writer. When women did appear they were for sex or soup or temporary escape from the self-generated insanity. The small number of women remembered – perhaps the poet Diane di Prima aside who established an autonomous literary standing – were part of that life support system which permitted the men to booze, to brawl, to ball, and still find something warm, both in the oven and in bed – and space to write when the inspiration came. Yet, in the last couple of decades or so, we have seen a swelling, retrospective literature penned by female figures who were not at the core of what went on but have important memories to share of both the Beats they knew but also their part of the history that unfolded; how they, as women, fitted into these unreformed times. Some were lovers, some muses, some little more than servants. Joyce Johnson was briefly a girl-friend to Kerouac. She was his partner on the day the first editions of the New York Times heralded the arrival of his novel On the Road in 1957. In Minor Characters , Johnson told the story of their relationship. It was acclaimed as an important record of a crucial moment in the writer’s life – long-sought fame and the beginning of his all too speedy decline – but also of how she fitted into the bohemian boys’ club. As interestingly, Johnson was someone who went on to publish herself – she had novels before Minor Characters emerged in 1983 – and a more recent memoir, 2004’s Missing Men , re-visits other episodes. It only fleetingly refers to Kerouac in its near-300 pages but is a sensitive and insightful reflection of an intriguing life: early years as a Broadway child understudy in which she lived out her mother’s, rarely her own, dreams and later as the wife of two painters who struggled and strived without ever making a breakthrough. Missing Men is not only a slice through a rich seam 20th Century life – her family had been East European, Jewish emigres to America – but also an individual account of a woman of ability having to pander, until her later years, to the ambitions, and frustrated ones at that, of men who found it hard to accommodate her as an equal partner. The machismo mood of the these post-Abstract Expressionists, while barely misogynist, left her feeling, eventually, as if the solo course was the only way she could be a fulfilled writer in his her own right. Another more recent addition to this expanding, if esoteric, archive, issued only last year, appears from a different angle, another perspective: a sister who saw her elder brother rise to the ranks, initially as a friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg and then as the first in the group to publish a novel fictionalising the new Manhattan scene at the end of the 1940s. John Clellon Holmes’ Go , although it actually comes after Kerouac’s published debut, is still generally cited as the first Beat novel and is a convincing, and rather undeservedly sidelined, outline of the febrile world in which visions of a new world were plotted on the subway, on bridges, at all-night parties and in downtown bars and with the principal architects of this artistic mêlée all present, if disguised, in the text. Elizabeth Von Vogt was a teenager during the time her story unfolds. 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1954 revolves around an apartment that becomes the occasional haunt of Kerouac and Cassady and the place where brother John shares his wit and wisdom and, most importantly, his knowlege of jazz with his kid sibling. Von Vogt is not a writer in the sense that Johnson is: there is only occasionally art in her telling of these days. But the material is of sufficient moment to justify its recounting. What is fascinating is that this young woman, in her tender mid-teens, is living a relatively unfettered life in the most exciting city on earth – attending jazz gigs galore, making friends and lovers with both boys and older, more worldly, men returning to study under the GI Bill, and meeting the nascent Beats in cafes, in lofts and basements around the island. In one memorable moment, she comes across Herbert Huncke, junkie and thief and gutter guru to all of her brother’s pals, at a dubious party, fuelled by wine and harder stuff, before John whisks her from the half-light of degradation to the safety of her mid-town home. She wanders on the edges of this twilight land, a bright post-pubescent, protected by a circle of brilliant college drop-outs, Village geniuses, white negroes, who long for a dangerous draught of nocturnal spirit. Both Johnson and Van Vogt are determinedly independent forces in the autobiographies they map out. Yet each is quite clearly bound by the contemporary rules and expectations that confront them. They see Kerouac and co, running wild, running free, while they have their moralising, quite sanctimonious, mothers, keen to guide their daughters to some kind of formal path – marriage, mortgage, children – before it’s all too late. Ironically, it was Kerouac, particularly, who soon found himself increasingly drawn to the hearth and back to his mémère , expressing her own disapproval of her son’s past lifestyle and his friends. As the Sixties unfolded, as women stood up for their rights and opened the gates of opportunity to the successors of Johnson and Van Vogt, the King of the Beats was pickling his liver in his maternal home, railing against the progressive activists who battled for change and drinking himself finally into oblivion in the autumn before the decade concluded. Continue reading
It was bad news for yet another established music magazine in the last week: not quite a magazine in the sense that Q or New Musical Express or Kerrang! may be regarded so, but nonetheless a title that had enjoyed six years of existence and which will very soon disappear from the news-stands for good. The Observer Music Monthly appeared on a four-weekly cycle as a colour supplement to the oldest of all British Sunday newspapers though one, like virtually all of its newsprint chums, facing somewhat calamitous times. Not only was the Observer a significant loser in the most recent circulation figures – the numbers that keep the advertisers happy and the financial wheels turning. It also revealed that it was haemorrhaging something in the region of £10,000 a day which few companies of medium scale can survive for too long. After all, that adds up to some £300,000 a month and £3.5m a year. So, John Mulholland, the affable Irish editor who was once my live rock reviews editor on the Observer ’s daily sister paper the Guardian , had the recent, and unenviable, task of announcing that three of the Sunday publication’s mags would be axed in the name of economy. The special edition aimed at women, the sport-focused monthly and the music-inclined instalment were all deemed surplus to requirements as the chill wind of downturn continues to blow down the corridors and up the stairwells of the newish headquarters of a beleaguered newspaper group. I mourn the passing of any print project but this one – and, by that, I mean the music magazine – I was particularly sorry to see fall off the edge. I remember going along to the launch of this venture in autumn 2003 at Waterstone’s in Manchester, as editor Caspar Llewellyn Smith and two prominent writers on rock – John Harris and Paul Morley – joined the small bandwagon that would trumpet this fresh and enterprising concept. Here was a magazine that could report and review the music world with a determined independence, unfettered or unflustered by major label or industrial interests, as it sheltered under the commercial awning of the bigger, then apparently quite sustainable, publishing company. Half a dozen years on, and 74 editions later, another thing occurs to me as I refer to Waterstone’s. Was that the last time I wandered into that tremendous bookshop on Deansgate, a place where, not too long ago, I could be spotted probably at least twice a month, always leaving with a new novel or a pop paperback? Today, I wait, like tens of thousands of others, for those cardboard cartons from Amazon, most likely having scoured their Marketplace service before painlessly credit-carding the purchase. Trips to the city were fun but also tangled by the hassle of traffic and parking, crowds and queuing. The web has banished such aggravations. Last week, heading for a Friday evening concert, I endured the ultimate motorist’s nightmare, towed away minutes after finding an empty spot on one of the main roads on the filthiest, wettest night of the season. It then cost me a nifty £140 to recover my vehicle and a missed gig, penance for infringing a night-time loading bay on an empty street. Who the hell does all this nocturnal delivering, I groaned. It also struck me, as I now regret the imminent death of OMM , how often did I buy the Observer in the the last couple of years? Probably not more than once a month in recent times – and principally for the music mag – whereas for the previous 25 years I shelled out for a newspaper pretty well every day. Print culture is a land under daily, nightly, attack. When I am asked by my students today, how can I get into journalism, I have to change my previously encouraging mode. Once, last year, the year before, I told them this world was very difficult to break into. I revealed how I, a rather long time ago, had to write – yes, hand-write – 78 letters to any and every newspaper title I could track, searching for a starting position. Even then, I got a mere two replies – one rejection and one interview which led, thankfully, to that first post in the business. Previously, I’d said to young, would-be scribes that as long as they were determined, flexible and versatile, could put up with, long hours for relatively modest pay, and could gather a substantial portfolio of published by-lined work before they left university, they might, just might, secure an opening. Such optimism, now properly tempered by real-world pragmatism, no longer has much to recommend it. Jobs go, expire, by the hundred, by the month, and newspapers seem unable to stem this worrying downward spiral. The Observer and the Guardian have been two beacons of liberal reporting and progressive approaches to making newspapers interesting, exciting, entertaining and saleable. They have drawn on potent lay-outs, striking design, eye-catching fonts and brilliant photography to frame their always excellent editorial content. And the cycle of magazines, in the case of the Sunday version, was a further appealing ingredient in the mix. The two newspapers enjoy massive web readerships; tens-of-millions of unique visitors click on each day, each week, leaving their actual, hard copy circulations – somewhere below 300,000 per issue – looking almost irrelevant. But how can you transform that half-interested, passing trade into truly engaged customers, happy to pay up to keep the boat afloat? The Times announced today that from next spring a paywall will be erected which will allow people to buy into the web version of the paper on a daily basis – or they won’t be able to read it all. The Guardian and Observer brand – potent, stylish, global – should be strong enough to head the same way, I expect, and start to make its commendable product economic once more. But what a shame that a splendid piece of innovation in the shape of OMM and its range of sister mags has been axed before the fiscal model to potentially save them has been properly devised and fully installed. Continue reading
Rock’n’roll has always been conscious of its history, self-conscious even: either more than happy to embrace and trumpet its own heritage or, on the contrary, quite determined to tear down the signs and strains of the past, best demonstrated by … Continue reading
There was a time, at the start of the 1980s, when comedy was widely dubbed the new rock’n’roll as a wave of young comedians, essentially in the wake of punk’s original and angry spasm, took to the stage and made the craft of laughter-making a credible pursuit once again. The kind of DIY ethic that had prompted the Clash and the Buzzcocks to make music appeared to infuse, if a little belatedly, a generation of stand-ups who rejected the mordant mainstream and shared material that was frequently spiky, often political, and avoided the tired tropes of TV variety, end of the pier and the fast disappearing music hall. Interestingly though, while many of the punks were genuinely working class characters – John Rotten and Mark E. Smith, Sid Vicious and Jimmy Pursey, for example – the surge of new comedy was largely driven by a brigade of middle class, university-educated graduates. If Alexei Sayle fiercely paraded his blue collar credentials within this emerging community, he was a unquestionably a rarity in the room. The room in question, certainly at the start, was the Comedy Store in London’s Soho, a venue that attempted to capture some of the pioneering spirit of the comedy clubs that had found their feet in New York and San Francisco in the later 1950s and early 1960s. These intimate and sophisticated night-spots – the Duplex in the Village, the Bay Area’s hungry i – were a platform for a fresh generation of post-war satirists – from Mort Sahl to Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen – to project their wry, and often acerbic, reflections of an America that was both commercially watertight and psychologically insecure, a capitalist dream haunted by nightmares of the nuclear annihilation and communist insurrection. These aspiring British comedians were younger and less sophisticated than their US counterparts but they brought their brand of invective to bear with Margaret Thatcher, elected as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister in 1979, the principal target of their rancour, ridicule and abuse. As the Tory right-wing held government and nation firmly in its grasp, there was plenty to get stroppy about – industrial decline, unemployment, military spending, issues of racism and sexism – and the capital’s comic crew employed the weapon of laughter to defuse any notions that the fresh air of authoritarianism was going to revive a wilting patient any time soon. Yet for all Sayle’s sardony, Ben Elton’s ribaldry, Jo Brand’s radical feminism and the subversive antics of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Thatcher’s reign of terror was barely rattled: she saw off the Argentines, repelled the striking miners and won the next two general elections to hold sway until her very own party dispensed with her services in 1990. But, in this heated and controversial period, the new comedy flourished. If you couldn’t bear the policies of the Conservative regime there was at least an outlet for your frustration; you could find a mirror for your misery in a string of sharp-witted jokesters whose routines – an interplay of observation and determined political correctness – were, by the end of that decade, regulars on the small screen, too. Continue reading
Home Box Office has become the esperanto of cutting-edge US television – the company’s two decade reign as king of the small screen epic, the advocate of Hollywood values for the box in the living room, shows little sign of abating. Despite the natural demise of a string of its blockbuster series – Sex and the City , The Sopranos and Six Feet Under , to name just three – the wider project has been by no means knocked off course. Instead, as the new autumn TV season arrives in the UK, one of HBO’s long-running successes, Curb Your Enthusiasm , and its latest hit production, True Blood , continue to prove that when it comes to attention-seizing comedy and drama, this particular outfit retains the golden touch. There has been much media preamble trailing these two shows as the fever that has gripped American audiences is virally imparted to a transatlantic following. Most fuss has been attracted by Curb Your Enthusiasm ’s decision to re-construct one of the greatest US television sensations of all – Seinfeld – within the plot arc of what is, in essence, a latterday spin-off series. Larry David, the main protagonist of Curb , created Seinfeld with its star Jerry Seinfeld. When the plug was pulled, after almost ten years, on the low key adventures of a New York stand-up and his group of dysfunctional friends, David penned a new show in which he would be the central player. For some this would have been the perfect ego-trip but David devised a character so curmudgeonly, so irascible, so misanthropic, that no one could accuse him of mere indulgence or of painting a portrait that was in any sense redeeming. Rather, the viewer wonders constantly about the author’s self-loathing tendencies. In Curb , David, who carries his own name as the principal character, takes Woody Allen’s neurotic anxieties into new terrains and then appears to use this quirky TV vehicle as a form of confessional, Freudian couch. The fact, too, that David is surrounded by a gaggle of real-life friends and fellow comics – Ted Danson and Richard Lewis, to mention only a couple – in these toe-curling vignettes confuses our voyeuristic experience still further. So far, with the contrived Seinfield re-make a little down the line – David decides to re-assemble the cast and the show in a bid to win back his estranged wife – the new Curb has done little to allay our fears about the unsettling psyche of its maker. After the opening episode of season seven, his over-developed, miserablist sensibilities and life-defaming inclinations remain to the fore. As his semi-autobiographical car-crash plays out, his new lover Loretta faces the onset of cancer and his best friend and manager Jeff has become sexually embroiled with a woman recently sprung from a mental asylum. Black comedy, more black than comic, applies; sickness and madness in equal measure beckon. Yet the twists and turns of David’s relentlessly pessimistic life are curiously hard to resist: like a quasi-reality show about the Californian jet set – actors, writers, stand-ups – Curb ’s downbeat drudgery perhaps reassures us that the high life is not as elevated or as sweet as we might all dream. True Blood is something quite else. Southern gothic set in the ficitional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, in the very near future we must assume, this is a slick slice of vampire vaudeville. With larger than life characters, slash and scream set-pieces and some of the most torrid sex yet seen on mainstream television, this fevered fantasy has set pulses racing. When the first episode of the second season was screened in the US earlier this year, HBO audience figures were only just behind the finale of the Mafia gangster masterpiece The Sopranos , a positive augury for those hoping this sweaty, swampy thriller will enjoy a long run. The opening forays of the show have only just crept into the UK schedules so we will have to wait to see if the piece – the brain-child of Alan Ball, whose Oscar-winning flick American Beauty and another HBO monster, Six Feet Under , have made him a hot property – also lures us into into this exotic imaginary where blood-sucking and telepathy lend their twisted energy to a febrile backwoods community. Ball’s canvas is both wide-ranging and richly disturbing, bringing to mind everything from Stoker to Poe, Gone With the Wind to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , Poppy Z. Brite to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . That the leading man in the tale is played by English actor Stephen Moyer – another Brit in a major US show to follow Dominic West in The Wire , Anna Friel in Pushing Daisies and several more – certainly swells the interest for us. Add to that, that he is also having both an on-screen and off-screen love affair with co-star Anna Paquin and you have an extra frisson to this racy contemporary spin on Dracula’s near relations. HBO takes risks – it has had its failures with the lavishly ambitious Carnivale , set in a 1930s travelling circus, a notable casualty – and its material is most definitely pushing at the boundaries of what used to be called taste. Yet if sex, violence and death have proved fertile topics for the station, then art over trash has also been an over-riding principle. Curb Your Enthusiasm ’s storylines are such unpromising laughter-makers yet there are so many opportunities for schadenfreude that we end up smiling anyway. True Blood has delved into legends with a long-standing fascination and simply gone for the jugular: lavish style and stylised acting, guts and gore and few-holds-barred bedroom action. You might say, whatever it takes. But in the cut-throat land of American television, a subscriber service like Home Box Office has only one option: keep making unmissable shows for an adult audience and ignore the often over-sensitive temperaments of the advertisers on whose patronage the bigger, established channels still depend. Continue reading
The saddening death of Matt Lucas’ ex-civil partner this week – he was found hanged at his Edinburgh flat – brought to mind incidents in the lives of the very men the Little Britain star had been on the verge … Continue reading
