Author archive: Simon Warner

This month is the 40th anniversary of the death of a writer who inspired a generation or three to shake the dust off their lives and find themselves on their own picaresque journeys, aping the cross-country treks he had described in his most famous novel, On the Road , published in 1957. Jack Kerouac became the personification of the Beat Generation, that gathering of novelists, poets and artists from both coasts of the USA which resisted the repressed and stifling hand of post-war, nuclear death-fearing, Commie-bashing America and preached a doctrine of peace and individualism, artistic experimentation, personal frankness and spiritual awareness. Curiously, Kerouac, dubbed the King of the Beats after his best-selling travelogue-cum-fiction fired the imagination of tens of thousands of young men in their late teens and early twenties and prompted them to go out and discover something of themselves in a frenzy of hitch-hiking, was a conservative figure at heart. While his friends, the committed junkie William Burroughs, the liberal campaigner Allen Ginsberg, the jailbird hustler Gregory Corso and lothario car thief Neal Cassady, largely lived lives on the edge – narcotically, politically, criminally and sexually – Kerouac endured a life riddled with Catholic guilt, expressed an undying love for his his mother and a deep suspicion of all things anti-American. Not that his life was short on paradox – he indulged in marijuana and benzedrine, loved women galore and left several, experienced homosexual relations, and even faced charges as an accessory to a murder in his young adult years. Yet he became, after the success of On the Road , an increasingly bitter, drink-ravaged critic of those very transgressive values that he and his friends had pursued during the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, as Ginsberg and Cassady, particularly, became protagonists in the new counterculture – the former as activist and leader, the latter as mythic figurehead – Kerouac retreated to middle and suburban America, often with his beloved mother, generally with bottle to hand, and enough invective against the hippies, their psychedelic drugs and revolutionary rhetoric to keep traditionalist fires well and truly stoked. Alongside this arc of juvenile adventure, literary celebrity then painful decline, Kerouac rarely stopped writing and the autobiographical factions he published between 1950 and 1968, the last one the year before his premature demise, charted most of the detail of this extraordinary saga – smalltown boy, emerging athlete, Ivy League student, merchant seaman, rail brakeman and inveterate wanderer – in prose that was vivid, vital and often ground-breaking in its structure and its expression. Kerouac grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, a one-time thriving textile mill-town which underwent the same disastrous decline that Britain’s northern industrial centres experienced in the latter half of the last century. While the writer left the place several times – for New York, the West Coast and Florida to name just a few of his escape hatches – he made a final and permanent return to the town when he died aged 47 to be buried there in October 1969. At the end of July, I joined Kerouac’s nephew, the record producer Jim Sampas, and the film director Curt Worden on a visit to Lowell and to the writer’s grave, a modest, metal tablet flat to the ground in a Catholic cemetery quite large enough to require roads to carry you around its criss-cross routes, and thousands of memorial stones. It was a visit, on an overcast but balmy, summer’s day, that brought to mind that moment in 1975 when Dylan and Ginsberg, by then good friends, took time out from the Rolling Thunder Revue to pay their respects at the location where Kerouac had been interred. They recited poetry and briefly sang, each, in their way, indebted to the model of creativity that this novelist had provided to both these men at seminal stages in their lives. Sampas is related to Kerouac by family marriage. His aunt Stella became Kerouac’s wife in 1966. She is buried alongside her late husband. Jim, who met Jack as a toddler, and his Uncle John, who manages the literary estate, have spent much of the last couple of decades engaged in work to both protect and promote the Kerouac legend. Around the turn of the new century, Jim Sampas worked on several albums which paid homage to the writer’s legacy. The albums drew involvement from an amazing cast of performers – from Patti Smith to Johnny Depp, Jeff Buckley to Tom Waits, Joe Strummer to Graham Parker, John Cale to Jim Carroll. They were joined by a string of key Beat survivors – Ginsberg, Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – in a series of recordings which tapped into Kerouac’s prose, his articles, his verse, and set them against rock, punk, folk and blues. Now Sampas and Curt Worden have embarked on their biggest Kerouac project so far – a documentary film based on one of Kerouac’s darkest novels accompanied by a soundtrack album created by two of the great talents of the current US indie scene. One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is both movie and CD. Worden has directed the 90-minute film tribute which reflects on a passage in the novelist’s life at the start of the Sixties when acclaim had left him exhausted and psychologically bereft and alcohol had drained his writerly spirit. He hoped that a sojourn in Ferlinghetti’s remote, Monterey mountain cabin, would renew his waning constitution and get his fraught mind and typewriter fingers back in gear. The attempt barely achieved its objectives but did provide another potent stream of dramatic material, much of it painfully downbeat, which emerged as his latest novel not long after. The musical accompaniment, eschewing the usual jazz score that tends invariably to connote Kerouac’s life and times, is composed by Jay Farrar, member of alt.country legends Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, with Ben Gibbard, the leader of independent darlings Death Cab for Cutie. The songs, intriguingly, take verbatim text from the Big Sur saga and wrap those lyrical lines in a blend of roots and blues, folk and Americana. Rich in atmosphere and sensitive to their subject, the work stands up both as incidental music to the documentary but also in its own right. Sampas, who shares production credits on the album with his musician collaborators, says that Farrar, who is the principal architect of the material on disc though he and Gibbard work together throughout, tapped into a creative approach that had been one of Kerouac’s touchstones as an author: spontaneous prose and that essentially existential notion of ‘first thought, best thought’. ‘I found Jay’s methodology fascinating, the spontaneous manner in which he worked, the quick-shot style. He felt he wrote his best songs that way,’ Sampas explains to me. This speedy working proved mightily productive. ‘It flowed so naturally that we ended up laying down 10 of the songs in little more than two days,’ he says with a note of surprise. The film, overseen by one-time NBC war cameraman turned film-maker Worden, brings together a blend of insightful interviews and breathtakingly atmospheric panoramas, eye-witness memoirs and finely-observed urban cameos, to tell the tale of those few weeks surrounding Kerouac’s escapade on the Californian slopes above the Pacific Ocean. Attached to the musical backdrop, it is a high quality affair: visually powerful and emotionally affecting. ‘It is a compelling story, one that unfolds when Jack’s life had come undone,’ Worden remarks. The film will enjoy a limited theatrical release in the US from October 20th after premieres in New York and LA a few days earlier. It will also be issued on DVD and the soundtrack will come out on CD. There are a also a range of versions, too, which include both film and album and even one edition with a copy of the Kerouac novel included. The project, coinciding with that four-decade anniversary since Kerouac finally gave up the ghost, proves that the reputation of this penman hardly died with him. Interest in his life and his canon remains high with his wide range of work in print and in demand from readers. The enthusiasm of a younger generation of musicians to commemorate his prolific output and highly eventful life story suggests that there will soon be another wave of hitch-hiking young men – and no doubt women – heading out to look once more for America and maybe finding themselves along the contemporary highway. Continue reading →

I can’t quite recall when I first came across Jim Carroll. It was probably around the mid-Seventies when the hip, young gunslingers of the New Musical Express were perennially opening up fresh cultural vistas and plugging new names and exotic-sounding talents from the other side of the Atlantic – acts like the Shirts, Mink DeVille, Tuff Darts and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In those days, it was easy enough to keep track of the British music scene by catching a couple of gigs a week – always making sure you saw the supports so you’d know who’d be up and coming in the next six months – and scouring the record shops and second hand stores for both singles and albums. The big labels rationed their releases and the independents were only just finding their feet so, if you were smart and kept your ears open, you didn’t miss much. But the US was just a land of the imagination. You could see Graham Parker or the Clash or Tom Robinson or Eddie and the Hot Rods and buy their latest releases, but as punk erupted in Britain around 1976, the American scene seemed a world away, a musical haven that could only be enjoyed vicariously, principally by consuming those red-hot, front-line reports by writers like  Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray who covered the latest developments at CBGBs in New York City. Yet things moved quickly. During 1977, the groups who had been shaking up the Bowery in the toughest neighbourhood of Manhattan – Talking Heads, Television, Blondie and quite a number of others – released their key debut long players and were speedily dispatched to England on tour to promote them. And there was certainly sense in this – while America itself was barely aware of this new wave of homegrown music-makers, British fans were already briefed by the sharp-witted, weekly rock press and hungry to see them live. Jim Carroll was both a part of this scene and apart from it. The great poet-cum-rocker, a New Yorker in every essential sense, actually left the city some time before the CBGBs sound exploded. In fact, Carroll, after enjoying extraordinary acclaim at the end of the Sixties and the start of the Seventies, had quit his home town for California in 1973. Why? Well this teen prodigy, whose abilities as a street poet and a nascent literary star had already won praise from Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac before he was even 20, had decided finally to try and escape his demons. Carroll, a High School basketball ace, had become hooked on heroin from his teenage years. His departure for California was a device to help him kick the habit. Whether Carroll ever successfully found the cure is open to conjecture but there is no doubt that while he was away he embarked on resurgent adventures that would see his special talent as a poet revived and coupled to the power of rock’n’roll. After he appeared on stage with Patti Smith,  his long-time friend and rock-poet in her own right, he decided that the best way to express his artistic manifesto was through his own band. In 1978, Carroll would not only form the group that would carry his name. He also issued what would prove to be his signature work, The Basketball Diaries , an emotionally powerful and sometimes torrid memoir of his youthful years as ambitious sportsman, apprentice junkie and would-be writer. Filmed in 1995, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the central, autobiographical role, the book confirmed its author as a rare case: someone who could both live on the edge and then find the dazzling prose to document that experience. By now, punk, new wave and the legend of CBGBs were well established and the Jim Carroll Band were able to ride this rising tide of interest in a frenetic rock style that was fast, furious and pared down to the basics. The act’s 1980 debut album Catholic Boy spawned the hit single ‘People Who Died’, a potent and certainly harrowing reflection on the casualties of narcotics row. It was a scene the writer of the lyric knew only too well. Yet, when the death of Carroll was revealed on September 11th, it was quite surprising to think that this precocious adolescent and then hard-living adult, who had stood too close to the flame too many times, had survived to 60, not a grand old age in contemporary terms but a mark we may not have predicted for him when he was showing all the signs of an early demise in those dangerous, touch-and-go times. One thing that Carroll did do, before a heart attack took him as he wrote at his New York desk, is chalk up a full and colourful existence: one that stretched from Andy Warhol’s Factory, through the fertile Lower East Side poetry scene and then on to the great rock renaissance that ran from the early 1970s to the turn of the 1990s, from the New York Dolls to Seattle grunge. Carroll connected several eras in the Manhattan cultural underground: from the Velvets – he worked in Warhol’s film studio – to the Beats – he became friendly with Allen Ginsberg through the St. Mark’s Poetry Project – and the punks – he was closely linked to the downtown sounds of Patti Smith, sharing both accommodation and, for a time, a romance with the other major rock bard. His final years were less dynamic than his hyperactive decades of productivity as writer and rocker. Working on the manuscript of a final novel called Triptych , a book that had been some 20 years in the making, he became something of a loner. Struck by pneumonia a couple of years before, he was also struggling with some pressing domestic matters – a poor physical condition, record company litigation and some tax issues – Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitar accompanist who played with Carroll on a few occasions, revealed when I spoke to him in the days after the news. Another friend, the poet Anne Waldman, also a close collaborator with Ginsberg, told me: “Allen was impressed with his accomplishments. Worried about him, at times, as we all did. The Methadone was a deadening necessity. But Jim was sharp, alert, funny and  could still loop you around  with some great stories and monologues. He had some enlightened humour about his own self. Women adored him, though it was hard to be totally enfolded in his increasingly reclusive life.” Continue reading →

The cultural capitals of the globe parade their art today in the way they once showed off their cathedrals and palaces. Those great reclaimed hunks of stone – Tate Modern – or shards of re-shaped metal – the Guggenheim in Bilbao – or the concrete snail shell that is New York’s original Guggenheim all represent an engaging alliance of style and content: monumental structures that contain and convey the treasures of the 20th Century’s magnificent creative adventure. The buildings lure you into their lair and then enchant you with their bounty. I went art hunting this summer and caught me quite a bit; caught, that is, the pleasure and surprise of seeing a timeless Picasso and an eternal Matisse in the flesh at MOMA in New York City. Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural fantasies, some even realised, stretched out on paper and carrying his very own signature. Not to mention the splashes and flashes of pure colour – inspired by nothing more than the spectrum of the domestic paint chart – that formed the theme of Tate Liverpool’s current touring show. Yet, to return to London after too long a gap is to encounter the place that seems most art-rich at present. If Paris once ruled the roost, if Manhattan took over for the two decades after World War II, it is the city on the Thames that has seized the initiative in the last 15 years. It has possessed the four key ingredients – galleries, dealers, auction houses and, yes, artists even – to bring the eye of the art storm back to Europe and into spaces, large and small, where painting and sculpture seem to be at their most active and fertile and inventive. Plainly the public investment in Tate Modern, the continuing private enthusiasm of Charles Saatchi to sponsor new and untested talents, and the legacy of the YBAs – those Young British Artists who set the pulses racing over a decade ago with their Royal Academy Sensation show – have all combined to keep the London pot boiling. Damien Hirst, the greatest name to emerge from that rush of fresh blood in the mid-1990s and now not only the most recognised creative force but also the most valuable under the hammer, has been a vital cog in this aesthetic machine, half fuelled by hard cash and half by bright ideas. However, the two exhibitions which caught my immediate attention were the product not of the UK but other lands. They featured pieces – and ideas – around a century apart, both radical in their utterly contrasting manner: one political in purpose, the other about as far from notions of the political as you can imagine, at least in any reforming or revolutionary sense. Futurism is a wonderful Tate Modern show, sited in the huge former power station of Bankside, opened in 2000 as the major shop window for great art of the previous hundred years. The exhibition gathers some fascinating canvases from the movement alongside an impressive body of documents and publications. But it also strives assiduously  to place this style in its wider context. This is commendable because Futurism for all its verve, flair and energy – you can see it in the paintings, you can feel it in the sculptures – is a largely discredited moment. Why? Because its broadly Italian founders praised the technology of the new age with such intemperate indiscretion that war machines – the planes and tanks which represented the latest generation of combat hardware – were uniformly lauded alongside cars and trains, electricity and the ever-rising city. Nor were the Futurists merely abstract in their praise of technology that brought such terrible destruction: in its carnage, these artists saw their twisted ideological dreams played out. They believed that on the battlefield, the power of their ideas – action over passivity, the masculine over the feminine, militarism over pacifism – could be literally – and viscerally – enacted. Their particular doctrine of modernity – a faith in the sleek, the fast, the streamlined, the brutal even – would, they hoped, victor over the gentler, kinder aesthetic sermons of the past. And in the bloody struggles of the First World War this clique of artists were able to experience their aspirations vicariously as machines joined men in the fiercest conflict ever known. One, Umberto Boccioni, would even meet his red-meat fate within that barbed-wire abbatoir. Filippo Tomasso Marinetti , a principal figure in the Futurist family, proposed “a total modernisation of contemporary culture in line with the advances in technology, philosophy and anarchist politics. Most controversially, he celebrated war as a means of political change and dismissed contemporary feminism,” as the gallery’s excellent supporting notes explain. Fellow travellers Giacomo Balla,  Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini saw Nietzsche’s theories of the superman as appealing and it is little surprise that their philosophical and artistic concerns provided both inspiration and succour to the Fascist regime that Benito Mussolini would impose on the Italian people from 1922. The ideas were terrifying yet the art is often thrilling, a paradox of the highest order. Yet the Tate, by connecting Futurist themes to the work of the France-based Cubists, the British Vorticists  and the Russian Cubo-Futurists, show how often the narrative of history all too often insists on black and the white tale-telling over the muddier waters of grey. Arguably the most important artistic figure of the whole century, Pablo Picasso had a bearing on the art that Marinetti, Severini and Russolo produced and the Spanish painter even name-checked a number of participants in this dynamic, if misguided, movement in one of his famous collages of spring 1914 which also incorporates a copy of the Futurist newspaper Lacerba . This revelatory Futurism exhibition, on until September 20th, reminds us that in the churning waters of art and politics, culture and ideology, there is always rather more than one story. Retrospection has largely condemned Marinetti and co to the dustbin; this show reconsiders their legacy with an intellectual dispassion. Dispassion is also the order of the day for the cutting-edge contemporary artist Jeff Koons, an heir to neo-realism, a post-Pop giant, conceivably a latterday Warhol, presenting a show called Popeye Series , a reference, of course, to the spinach-eating strongman of cartoon strip fame who has just turned 80. I’ve always had a soft spot for the diminutive though muscle-bound sailor. When I was three years of age, maybe just four, I would rise well before dawn to await the doormat arrival of my weekly fix of a kids’ mag called TV Comic , which showcased a curious mix of US and UK small screen stars when the medium was in its infancy. The cover king though was Popeye, battling the witless Bluto and holding on to the affections of Olive Oyl. Simultaneously, as the monochrome Fifties turned into the Technicolor Sixties, Roy Lichtenstein was adapting comic book frames for his own, heavily pixellated blow ups and Warhol was sketching another strip hero, Dick Tracy, for his silkscreens. So Popeye’s turn was always likely to come and so it’s been proved. Half a century on from my childhood obsession with the merchant-scrapper, Koons produces a show at the Serpentine Gallery that is high on eclectism if a little short on actual thread, though it was curiously reassuring to see the over-developed forearms, the corncob pipe and the excrutiating scowl take their place within a number of distracting, if over-busy, collage canvases. That said, Popeye is somewhat over-shadowed here in a way he never was on television or in newsprint. For the most fascinating thing about this display is surely the sculptures. Koons has taken a number of children’s blow-up beach toys – a lobster, a whale, a bug as swimming ring – and recreated every curve and fold, every minute detail, of the inflatable in immaculately turned aluminium. The effect is deliciously disorientating: you want to squeeze each lilo, you want to feel the smoothness of the light metal. But you can do neither – the ‘do not touch’ police are particularly on their toes here; the tactile is terribly taboo on this occasion, which is something of a shame. The artist has made – with the aid, for sure, of a crack and talented team – a set of delightful visual jokes. Banal and inane on one level, they are wonderfully entertaining on the other. They are both puns to delight the eye and optical illusions of sorts, a great use of the artistic imagination, reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s brilliant soft sculptures of the Sixties but with the conceit in exact reverse. Do they say much about childhood? About ephemerality? About consumerism? About play? They may say a little about all of those things but this artist-as-trickster, this sculptor-as-mischief-maker, this craftsman-as-conman, is more concerned with art for its very own sake. The Futurists, in the their terrible naivety, thought they could change the world. Koons can only change our facial expression. And a smile definitely beats the prospect of a world governed by techno terror. Continue reading →

It may have lost its title as the tallest building in Manhattan as long ago as 1899, but there is little doubt that, for most of the 20th Century, the Chelsea Hotel retained its reputation as the highest. Its multi-colourful … Continue reading →

The news that the iconic Greyhound Bus is to debut in the UK in September raised golden memories of an amazing summer, several decades ago, when vehicles bearing that famous name carried me on a three month adventure through the highways and byways of North America. The escapade is still burnt on my memory but it seems as if I travelled in another age. At one time trains, then buses, would have been the usual way to traverse the thousands of miles that crisscross the USA. Today, most travellers needing to make an essential journey would, I’m sure, choose the plane. But in the 1970s, the bus seemed still to rule the roost and the road. And for two recent graduates, juggling their nickels and dimes, the Greyhound was an economic option – just under $300 (then not much more than £120) purchased an open ticket for twelve weeks of travel. Plus, of course, the buses took you to corners and outposts that you would never have gone near by utilising the nation’s airports. The other great recommendation, too – and this will seem paradoxical – is that the buses took you so long to get anywhere. For the average American, keen to reach family or a loved one or friends, the Greyhound may not have quite lived up to its name. Never that speedy, the seemingly eternal treks across the great wide continent may have appeared disconcertingly inconvenient. But for my friend and me, these stretched-out odysseys gave us two great benefits – hour upon hour of views of the town and the city, the plains and the mountains, the rivers and the deserts. But, much more usefully, they gave us a free place to stay for the night. From May to August, we took our extended trek and, for other than maybe half a dozen occasions, we bedded down for our kip in our seats as the Greyhound headed into the neon night, the forever darkness, allowing its two English customers a chance to catch up on their shut-eye. It’s also worth saying that, at that time, transatlantic travel was only newly affordable. Freddie Laker’s Skytrain had led to a price war with the traditional carriers like BA and, for the first time, someone like me could scrape together the cash to fly to New York. And scrape pretty well covers it. For almost a year after I left university behind, I toiled as a labourer on a local building site for £1 an hour wages and, by saving hard, managed to secure just enough to cover air fare, the bus pass and very modest living expenses. The fact that Anglos were not seen that often over there – at least, once you got beyond Manhattan – made the journey all the more intriguing. Serving staff in a Mid-West McDonald’s – the burger chain hadn’t arrived in the UK then and was a cheap staple in my pre-vegetarian days – would be amazed to hear your accent. “Please say that again,” would be the delighted response to your request for fries! The bus became a kind of home-from-home as we followed the fantastically detailed and reliable timetables, enormously complicated listings of destinations and connections, running seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Stop-offs in remote Southern villages or Rocky Mountain settlements conjured up the real America we were seeking though, of course, the depots and stations of Chicago and LA, Nashville and El Paso provided their own distinct visions of this multi-cultural continent. There was craziness, too – no attempt to replicate, however loosely, the 1940s escapades of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, fictionally recounted in the 1957 novel On the Road , would have been without incident, and so it proved. Picked up by a gay Colombian called German on my first night in the Big Apple – the innocence of youth! – led to my waking up the next morning on the tiled floor of Port Authority, the huge bus terminal in the heart of New York, with scant memory of too many beers and wild detours through the Lower East Side. Chasing women we’d met on a bus took us hundreds of miles out of our way to the lost ranges of Montana; transport police waved guns menacingly at us when we jumped train barriers without the money to buy tickets in San Francisco; and a journalist warned us to leave Lowell, Kerouac’s place of birth and death, as soon as we were able with our long-hair all too likely to attract redneck attention. There were dozens of such interludes – meeting poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Frisco, catching Elvis Costello on tour backed by Mink DeVille on the West Coast, seeing Scorsese’s The Last Waltz in a deserted movie house in Baton Rouge, visiting Canada and Mexico and so much more. And, most nights, settling into the relative comfort of a Greyhound seat to sleep and await the next turn in the road, the next twist in our twenty-year old lives. Continue reading →

There are conflicting accounts of the state of jazz in the USA. On the one hand, the style is championed as the great, ground-breaking music of the American 20th Century – a bold, brash blast from a downtrodden people, a … Continue reading →

I was in Liverpool this week taking part in the two-yearly, world conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, as academics gathered from the four corners to talk rock and reggae, grunge and goth, dub and … Continue reading →

I was in Liverpool this week taking part in the two-yearly, world conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music , as academics gathered from the four corners to talk rock and reggae, grunge and goth, dub and dance, club culture and subculture, in the heart of a city that has justifiably assumed the status of one of the global capitals of pop. Popular music has been a late arrival in the corridors of academe with universities belatedly opening their doors to the study of this mass produced, mass consumed form of expression. There was a time when the very fact that an art-form had widespread, most likely working class, appeal would mean its serious study was considered quite inappropriate. The elite arts – literature or theatre, orchestral music or ballet, painting and opera – were the only ones, it was argued, that possessed sufficient substance to merit intellectual consideration. In fact, there was a strong body of opinion in the upper echelons of the conservative intelligentsia that the very pillars of civilisation might come tumbling down if those elevated pursuits were not protected from the rising tide of mass cultural activity. But attitudes have gradually shifted. Since the 1960s, with the emergence of cultural studies – in essence a field of investigation which crosses disciplines from sociology to history, economics and politics and takes account of sex, gender, ethnicity and class and the complex power relations that link each of us to wider society – the lifestyles and practices of ordinary people have been addressed in a less prejudicial and, indeed, increasingly rigorous fashion. Film and television were among the first popular forms to attract the attention of a new generation of academics as related fields of enquiry such as media studies and communication studies gained a foothold. By the later 1980s, popular music had finally joined that gallery of ground-breaking subject areas though its junior status in the university ranks means it nonetheless faces a constant struggle to assert its status in the halls of learning. IASPM, founded in 1981, now has thousands of members and the work they pursue covers every continent. The very meaning of the term popular music raises a multitude of questions: What does popular really mean? Where does folk fit into this canon? How do we make sense of non-Western forms? Is jazz a popular or an art style? And what happens when opera singers or classical virtuosos make the Top 40? Furthermore this field of enquiry embraces a wide range of potential topics – from composition and recording to performance on stage or on video, media coverage and fan behaviour, industrial process and technological change, social evolution and cultural history. Just as genres and youth movements shift, so to the very methods the business uses to sell us music are transformed, and it is against this background of dynamic change that Popular Music Studies continues to unfold. It was great to be back in Liverpool to participate in such a conference. I studied there at the start of the 1990s when the university’s Institute of Popular Music was launched and a brand new Masters degree in the subject was unveiled. I joined the first cohort on that course and realised that a lifelong pleasure in this topic – as a record-buyer, as a concert-goer, as a journalist and critic – could become a genuine professional pursuit. In fact, the music of Merseyside was at the very heart of the presentation I gave at the event. ‘You only sing when you’re winning’ was an attempt to make sense of the rivalry that Liverpool has shared with Manchester, a mere 35 miles away, over many, many decades. The two cities have a long history of cultural and economic competition. In more recent times, that contest has been played out in football stadiums and the rock arena, from United to Liverpool, the Beatles to the Smiths. Whatever antagonisms or empathies characterise this geographical connection, there is no doubt that the achievements of Liverpool as a musical city are immense and, I’m glad to report, that this great centre of creativity has a current exhibition worthy of its legacy. ‘The Beat Goes On: From the Beatles to the Zutons’ , on at the World Museum until November, is one of the finest displays of its kind I have ever seen. While the city has a great deal of musical success to tap into – from the Cavern and Merseybeat to Eric’s and Cream – the exhibition that commemorates more than 50 years of pop history in Liverpool is a delight. Posters and records, instruments and other artefacts, costumes and film clips, combine to tell this remarkable tale with energy, vibrancy and insight. The fact that the Institute of Popular Music has been a key mover behind ‘The Beat Goes On’ illustrates the way a creative saga featuring several generations of music-makers and the efforts of a relatively new centre for serious study can come together in a harmonious union. Here is a living example of the way pop can offer a telling commentary on our times, a lens through which we can better understand a city and its people. Continue reading →

I once worked with a wise and wealthy man, as creative artistically as he was economically, a pianist with a penchant for notes on the stave and on the accounts, who expressed the view that no one is ever actually paid what they are worth. “You are,” he opined, “always paid too much or too little.” Having digested the implications of those words over a decade or two, I can’t help feeling that this simple piece of wisdom is probably close to the mark. When the Prime Minister of the UK struggles by on £194,000 per annum and the newly-crowned, world’s most expensive footballer, is reported to be on a salary of £180,000 per week, you have a graphic illustration of the principle. On the final day of the soccer season, I was at Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United, to see Ronaldo’s Premier League swansong against Arsenal, a tense and tetchy goal-less draw but enough to allow the Red Devils to seize their third title in a row on their own turf, the first time any side had achieved a consecutive hat-trick of championships twice . It wasn’t much of a game but context was all: as long as United prised a point they would carry the trophy off. And so they did. In that bathetic manner now familiar to sporting audiences, a gang of fluorescent-jacketed workers spent half an hour constructing a shaky plinth of plastic and tubular steel – not, in truth, for the triumphant gladiators but more so the sponsor’s name would fill the television screens that afternoon and evening. I left before the fireworks and the cascading rain of silver foil showered on the players and so caught my final live glimpse of Cristiano Ronaldo, respledent in the scarlet that has been his Superman cape for five years, but soon to give up the blood for the pure, angelic white of Real in the city of Madrid. Ronaldo is a moody man but a magnificent machine in motion. He has skills and pace that mark him as one of the greatest players ever to perform in the English top flight. But I cannot say that I will miss his moping, his moaning, his spoilt and petulant demeanour. Nor I suspect will he miss Manchester much. Manager Alex Ferguson’s swoop to take the young winger from Lisbon in 2003 was never going to prove a permanent arrangement. After all, if you were a footballer from a Latin land, would you want to spend your whole career in the North of England? To me the North-West may mean home, a familiar, solid, stolid, faded place, known for its friendliness but hardly for its sophistication, its hard work but not necessarily its elegance. Yet Manchester and Liverpool, the two cities that form the principal axis of this region, have both interesting histories and aspiring presents: if the gilt has long tarnished on their ancient industries – shipping, cotton and so on – there is a fresh verve built on culture, sport, entertainment, even tourism. Such measured analysis though does not include that magic ingredient that keeps most Italians at home, the mass of Spaniards in their own backyards, and even the Portugese flocking to their local beaches: long, hot summers, mild and mellow winters. Manchester’s famous rain, often cold and generally drenching, a frequent foil to the gelled black locks of the roaming Ronaldo, does not have quite the same attraction, I’m afraid. But is Ronaldo now over-paid as well as over-preened? Will the sun shine on the back of Madrid’s latest galactico and bring a warmer smile to those Valentino looks? If cash registers alone could raise laughter, then Real’s dressing room will soon be a place of high comedy, with Kaka and Albiola and probably Benzema and Ribery – the cream of current Euro ball players – all linking at the Bernabeu for next season on the kind of wages that would keep a developing country in healthcare for a year or two. Yet money has been tried before to solve Madrid’s occasional malaises – they did worst when they spent most on transfers at the start of the century – and older standbys, like toil and loyalty, comradeship and team spirit, were temporarily forgotten. The result? A string of coaches blamed for failure and dismissed, and a core of peseta-laden playboys barely able to scrape a victory on the park. Manchester United, hardly innocent in the realm of free-spending, will hope that the loss of their best performer to their oldest continental rivals, will lead those who remain to work harder together and try to dissipate the memory of a recent May evening when they were humiliated by Barcelona in the European Champions League Final, even with Ronaldo in tow. Worth saying, too, that if Ronaldo has found the pitches of England a war-game too far, the attentions of defenders a little too gritty and the patronage of referees hard to attract, then what he will discover in Spain’s La Liga is better, brighter, faster backs who use tactics not ankle-taps to rein in marauding strikers. Look at the way Barca stopped their Anglo opponents in Rome, winning 2-0 with a good deal to spare. The Brazilian Pele, the outstanding footballer of all time, has spoken this week about football’s obscene spending habits and has made a plea for something to be done to halt the parade of profligacy when the globe, from West to East, is in a downward financial spiral. Michel Platini, another great of this game and now a leading UEFA official, would also like the sport to self-regulate and end an era of decadent excess. But as long as shaky plinths for sponsors are part of football’s over-riding ethos, as long as financial institutions or staggeringly rich men are content to bank-roll the the whims of Madrid or Milan or Manchester (remember that United rivals City are now, courtesy of Arab money, the richest football club on Earth), then nothing much will change. Was Sinatra paid too highly? Was Elvis over-rewarded? Did Michael Jackson really deserve the mega-fortune he made and spent? Few ever ask these questions but I guess football, this magnificent, universal sport that emerged from the industrial cities of the late 19th Century as the panacea of the working classes, is no longer what it was. The oil in this machine is no longer the sweat of local heroes but the vanities of the super-wealthy owners and the transferable loyalties of a brigade of talented mercenaries. Can these badge-kissing glitterati justify their awesome remuneration? The market, such as a viable market still exists, will, I guess, decide that. But if 80,000 Madrillenos are willing to turn up at their stadium just to greet their new god, few can argue that the opiate that is football has lost its kick. All Ronaldo has to do is make Real the top dogs in their homeland, the champions of Europe and the kings of the world, once more. Perhaps, you know, with expectations this high, his salary may be just about right. Continue reading →

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If punk blew the cobwebs off the British rock industry, it was the generation of bands who came in its wake that would produce, in many ways, a more enduring music. For if the Sex Pistols and the early Clash … Continue reading →

Two pieces of news in the last couple of days have reiterated the transatlantic crisis in the print media and particularly the pressure on two long-running and respected titles covering the broad waterfront of popular culture. i-D, a veteran of … Continue reading →

In the realm of the web, buzz-words, fresh brands, new and essential street-speak, emerge with a regularity and rapidity that leaves older notions of promotion and publicity some way behind. To be talking about Spotify, around three months into its … Continue reading →

The passing of the great British novelist James Graham Ballard in recent days brought back a period in my life when I was establishing my own identity as a reader, as a person – those teenage years when you escape … Continue reading →

It’s a little hard to avoid the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the moment. New album. Tour commencing. Television appearances. Radio interviews. Podcast reviews. Media spotlight. But, I must confess that, even in the midst of this publicity onslaught, I am … Continue reading →

A little while ago, I wrote a couple of pieces for Pop Matters on artists who pay tribute to another band or artist in their name (like the Trash Can Sinatras) or reference a musical genre in their name (which … Continue reading →