Playlist Archive
 |
Louis's listening experiences and recommendations over the last couple of years... The current month's playlist is here. |
|
It’s the same thing every four years. No, I’m not going to fall for it. Overhyped. Over-everything. Then, as D-Day approaches, the butterflies start fluttering, thousands of them – the World Cup is upon us, and, boy, don’t we know it. My desk is groaning under the weight of glossy supplements and special editions, posters and calendars which will soon fulfil their fate – in the recycling bag. White vans break the speed limit in residential streets, blurs of metal whizzing past primary schools and hospitals, knocking off the odd pensioner, scaring the living daylights off lollipop ladies, with St George flags stuck on the roofs, flapping like the wings of a demented bat. I borad the bus, shaken, and what do I see on giant billboards? David Beckham asking me to use Gillette blades to mow the facial hay. And I fall for it, again. Next Saturday, you’ll find me at Bush Halll, yes, that Bush Hall, gawping at a giant screen filled with men in shorts and questionable haircuts. For this glorious venue has succumbed to ‘World Cup fever’, as they’ve, ahem, imaginatively described it in their newsletter. Where I once stood crooning ‘Nightingales’, you’ll see Lennon doing his stuff; not John, mind you, but Aaron, the tricky Spurs winger. And Owen – not Clive, Michael. And James, twiddling his gloved thumbs on the bench – not Elmore, but David. Good thing too. I know he could play a mean slide, but with muffs like that, hey? Please do stop, I hear you begging. So my new playlist is composed of songs and tunes as far removed from ‘soccer’ as can be imagined; no excerpts from the Bend It! compilations (‘guilty, your Honour’); and definitely not Franz Beckenbauer’s or Kevin Keegan’s *pop* singles. For this kind of fare, I refer you to my good friend Arnd Zeigler’s excellent new book (One Thousand Perfectly Legal Football Tricks, just published in Germany), where such horrors are dissected with the hand of a sadistic entomologist. While I think of it, and since I’m quite fond of non sequiturs these days, I’d like to recommend you a few books for your summer holidays, which have also got bugger all to do with making the onion bag bulge with leather. Following the advice of Jonathan Coe, I’ve dipped a toe, then a foot, then my ageing body whole into the oeuvre of GK Chesterton, and have developed a passion for his wondrously imaginative prose. The Father Brown stories are well-known, or used to be, and quite splendid they are too, if sometimes formulaic in their construction. The true wonders of the fattest men of letters of the Edwardian age lie elsewhere, notably in a novel, The Man Who Was Thursday (what a title!), and in the insanely funny collection of short stories The Club of Queer Trades, which is not about what you think, filthy scoundrels, but about the activities of a group of gentlemen who belong to a trade of which they happen to be the sole practitioners. Jouissif, as we say in French. And I am glad to report that Alasdair Mclean of The Clientele shares my obsession with this soul-expanding, rib-splitting literature. Which leads me to another favourite, whose ‘The Best of Myles’ will accompany me on the trip to Paris I’m about to embark upon. Flann O’Brien is best-known (though not by many) for Swim-at-two-birds and the astonishing Third Policeman, a hellish tale of such originality that it killed his career as a ‘serious’ novelist. Think Borges (minus the coldness), think Kafka (but much funnier), think Joyce (but far more readable), and you’ve got O’Brien, who spent much of the reminder of his career writing a deliciously bizarre daily column for The Irish Times – until his death in 1966. The Best of Myles is a compendium of these columns, and has just been reprinted. But Flann O’Brien was not renowned for his prowess on the contrabassoon, so I shall move on, shan’t I? Come to think of it, Donald Fagen doesn’t play the contrabassoon either. What he does, and better than at any time in his career since The Nightfly (released when many of you could only sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star), is write and sing songs in a beautifully elegant language that, unfortunately, few others know how to speak. His latest marvel, coming after the disappointment of Kamakiriad, bears the title of Morph The Cat, and, no, it is not a concept album based on the works of Dr. Seuss. Dr. Freud, maybe. More precisely, about one of the two life pulsions identified by the cigar-chomping psychoanalyst – Thanatos – that’s death, in Greek, or, in WC Fields’s rather arcane expression, The Man in the Bright Nightgown (incidentally, the title of one of the record’s seven-and-a-half tracks). Fagen hasn’t sounded that relaxed since…let’s say Katy Lied, to me the most satisfying of all Steely Dan’s albums. He also seems to have recovered in full the melodic sense absent from most of his output since the magnificent ‘On The Dunes’, the stand-out track on Kamakiriad (for Fagen fanatics, a quick insert here – ‘On The Dunes’ was written in 1982, as part of the aborted follow-up to The Nightfly. No, no, that’s nothing. You’re welcome.) I invite you to zoom onto ‘The Night Belongs to Mona’, the truly affecting tale of a young(?) woman who has found refuge in a world of all her own, dancing in her flat while the city sleeps, except Donald, of course, whom I suspect has aimed his telescope at her balcony. Will she jump? Won’t she? We’ll never know. ‘But the night belongs to Mona/When she dances all alone/Forty floors above the city/CD’s spinnin’/AC hummin’/Feeling pretty’. Call me sentimental, but that ‘feeling pretty’ gets me every time. Fagen was never renowned for his gift for empathy; wrongly so, in my opinion (‘Deacon Blues’, ‘Charlie Freak’, ‘Pearl of the Quarter’ – listen, you can hear a heart beating in there). However, Morph has empathy in buckets. And a superb air of generous detachment about the confusion of our times, particularly in America. Oblique references to Bush’s tinpot empire abound. Could ‘the fire downtown’ refer to 9/11? I think so. And if the superb two-chord wonder that is ‘Mary Close the Garden Door’ revisits the paranoia of ‘New Frontier’, it is, this time, not at the expense of the Red menace, but of the Texan bastard. As one expects from a Fagen record, the musicianship is phenomenal (hats off to the harmonica player), but…what did I say?...relaxed. Tight, inventive, acrobatic at times, but always relaxed. Very little, if any, studio trickery was called upon; a bit of pro-tooling here and there, mostly, I suspect, on some wizard vocal harmonies. This is great music, let loose by musicians who can’t believe their luck to play such first-rate material. Magnificent. Compared to this classic, most the rest fits in the category of, well, ‘the rest’, with the notable exception of one of Chris Evans’s recommendations (thanks again, benign uncle), Luke Temple’s gorgeous Hold a Match for the Gasoline World (Mill Ponds Records/Iris, available as a download from emusic), which contains my *single* of the year, ‘Old New York’. Temple, of which I know next to nothing (except that he also released a 2-track CD, B-Bird/Painted Blue on the same label two years ago), possesses a gorgeous voice that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Millennium album. He also writes delicate pop songs, with a keen ear for not-so-obvious chord and key changes; light, but not lightweight; poetic, but not maudlin. A terrific record for the summer… …as is Fantastic Something’s ‘If She Doesn’t Smile (It’ll Rain)’. I know I’ve harped about this one before, but this luminous folk-pop tune – first released as a vinyl single aeons ago – was almost impossible to find, despite having ‘worldwide hit’ written all over its 3’14” of bliss. Thanks to Cherry Red joining the emusic fraternity, this is no longer the case. A search for Fantastic Something will lead you nowhere; go for ‘Ambition - The History Of Cherry Red Records Vol. 1&2’, and you’ll find this absolute gem (Everly-like harmonies, and the best use of 12-string acoustic guitars I’ve ever, ever heard) ; it is the sixth track on the second ‘volume’ of this topping compilation. No excuses, guys! Now, last, not a recommendation, but a question for the Angels. BBC 4 (bless their little cotton socks) recently broadcast a superb documentary about Vivian Stanshall and the Bonzos…late in the programme, an irritatingly uncredited piano track – apparently recorded very late in Stanshall’s tragic career – was played over wistful images of Bristol, where he’d lived on a cargo ship (you can’t make things like that up), which doubled as a floating theatre for the staging of his one and only opera (Stinkfoot). A big hug to anyone who could identify this beautiful quasi-lullaby, angular as a Steely Dan banjo. I’ll leave you with this thought for the day: every summer should be a summer of love.
Many charges can be brought against Led Zeppelin. Plagiarism, as Bert Jansch and the late Willie Dixon found out; ridiculous haircuts; a rather nasty streak of misogyny in lyrics that, most if not all the time, would make a 16-year-old diarist blush (and not just because of their content); misuse of violins (though not on Kashmir); drum solos; and please feel free to exercise your teeth on other bones of contention. But, speaking of bones, of all the skeletons that have been rattling in my cupboard for as long as I can remember (and I do – 1971, Led Zeppelin III), none have made such a din as the baddest hard-rock band of them all. As if they’d been characters from The Corpse Bride copulating on a tin roof, to misquote Sir Thomas Beecham. Why is it that the delicate, sensitive, popsmith that I’m told I am still fishes out one of his copies (note the plural) of ‘Houses of the Holy’ when little else will do? Good question. This is what I’ll try and answer now, remembering at long last a promise I made quite a while ago. I should say straight away that I am in fairly good company when I confess to my love for Led Zep. My friend Saeko Suzuki, as fearsome on a drum kit as she is deliciously refined in real life, swears by them. So does, or so has in my presence, the Hon. Andy Partridge. Even more interestingly, the extraordinary Rob Kloet (the rhythm man in the Nits musical circus of wonders) will not stop eulogising if you mention the name of John Bonham to him, as I did after the Dutch band’s recent gig at Bush Hall. Rob’s ‘drumming’ had had me close to tears after a few bars. Such lightness, such economy, such power. His bass drum was the size was an orchestral grosse caisse – ‘just like John Bonham’s’, he said afterwards around a bottle or two of Shiraz. That cue was enough to launch me into a near-rant about the great man, encouraged as I was by Rob’s remarks, such as: ‘Bonham played up, not down’. Yes, I could see – hear – what he meant. ‘Up’.There was something spiritual about the violence of Bonham’s playing, and genuinely so. Led Zep’s secret was his as much as Plant’s and Page’s and Jones’s. It is this ‘upness’ of Bonham’s that explains why one of the tracks I keep going back to is ‘The Ocean’, in itself a fairly run-of-the-mill rocker written by Plant about his young daughter, I’m told. Run-of-the-mill – until Bonham unleashes a volley of mini-breaks on the song’s bridge, his snare rolls cunningly combined with down-slides on Page’s guitar. I do not know of any more brutally elemental moment in the whole history of rock’n’roll; and, as with all great music, the effect of it is not blunted by repetition; on the contrary, it has acquired a granite-like awesomeness to me. I can feel it thud in my ears – but I’m not just punched senseless – I can also feel elevated, as if I’d gulped a big lungful of free air and expanded like a balloon. Some of you may ask what I had for lunch after reading this. Nothing untoward, I promise you. I ‘d warned you – this skeleton makes a lot of noise. However, if Bonham’s playing is one key (ha – those cross-rhythms on Black Dog…), it is not the only one with works that particular lock open. Thirty-five years on, when so much of the huff and puff of that era has dwindled to nothing more than a rabbit’s fart on a tarpaulin (ask your French friends where this image comes from), these records have retained their capacity to shock, surprise and seduce. I’m no great fan of the first two, I’ll admit; too much heavy-arsed rock-blues in there for my own taste. For it is (to me, at least) when LZ becomes angular like a Chinese banjo that we’re in for the magic trip. The physical power of their music has much to do with its abstraction. I’m extremely surprised that no-one has ever remarked on the remarkably ‘modernist’ approach to track-construction and, more generally, sound treatment Page adopted on ‘Presence’, one of the most under-rated albums in the rock’n’roll canon. It is black music – as in ‘starless and Bible-black’, from which every hint of ornamentation has been taken off. Even Plant’s ludicrous (and thrilling) vocalising has lost any hint of corporeity; Page, it seems, slowed down the master tapes in order to make his singer gain half-a-tone or more when the tracks were played back at normal speed. Even the guitarist’s brief interjections seem sculpted in a matter that is both hard to the touch – with a grit of its own – and preternaturally smooth to the mind’s eye. Do listen to ‘Presence’ again if you can; and you may agree with me (and my friend Michka Assayas, another great admirer of this opus) that there is little that people find in Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures that cannot be found in a single bar of Achille’s Last Stand, despite the pretentiousness of its title. For those of a less austere disposition (Presence can be hard work), The Song Remains The Same (the track, not the very ordinary live album of the same name) could be an entry point in Led Zep’s rather bleak but astonishing soundscape. I’ve often played the intro to this song to unsuspecting listeners, as well as the tour-de-force of Page’s carefully-constructed riffing in its coda. ‘What the hell is this?’ tends to be the reaction. And ‘what?’ the comment, after I’ve answered the query. Led Zep, it seems, should sound like Spinal Tap, not like this. Nor should it sound like ‘Going To California’, a ravishing song which was somehow forgotten in the explosion of ‘IV’; or ‘Gallows Pole’, and most of the B-Side of III, which was written by someone – Page – who could hear things in English folk music that no-one had heard before. Seriously. In the end, it is all down to prejudice, isn’t it? How could three hairy sessionmen and a hairier vocalist produce something worth hearing three-and-a-half decades later? I learnt long ago that this kind of question wasn’t worth asking. And I also learnt that I oughtn’t be ashamed to have – almost – played air guitar to ‘Misty Mountain-Hop’ in my boarding-school dormitory. Do join in, please. There’s room for a few more people yet.
No need, no chance to hide it – the last couple of months have not been the happiest of times. Still, if the verses and the choruses stank, the coda could not have been more welcome, if too short. For ten days or so, we found solace in our Paxiot retreat, doing nothing much more than eating, reading, diving, drinking, chatting with old friends, drinking some more, and getting to know how my new gizmo (something called a ‘Zen’, of which my daughter is tremendously jealous) would perform under the fingers of one who thought an iPod was something to do with Day of the Triffids. Once I’d worked out that CD’s could be ‘ripped’ (I told you I was a Neanderthal in such matters), wa-hey, I was on my way. At times of doubt, when the need to regroup within the self becomes a priority, it’s all the harder to stay away from tried and trusted companions; Jacques Brel is one of them. ‘Les Marquises’, his last, and probably best, album sounded just perfect with the Epirean coast in the background. Fauré’s Piano Quartets and Quintets follow me everywhere, no surprise there; three Sibelius symphonies (2, 5 & 7) – par for the course; Ravel – ibid., except that this Ravel was previously unknown to me. Happily grazing through the prairies of emusic.com, I picked a strange flower I’d never seen before: Ravel playing his own music, or should I say, the ghost of Ravel – as these were ‘recordings’ made from piano rolls the composer had executed as early as 1903. No hiss, no scratches – the pure sound of a modern piano as he himself played it, from beyond the grave. An extraordinary experience, almost unsettling at first, before the beauty and the unexpectedness of the interpretation blow away the distorted perception one cannot but have of the Sonatine, the Pavane and Gaspard as we have never heard them. The highlights are many – La Vallée Des Cloches is everything Steve Reich has dreamt of, the Pavane a revelation (nothing saccharine in this reading, which is much faster than any version you may have heard before); as to those who wrote that Ravel was a poor interpreter of his own works on the strength of some old wax rolls and gramophone recordings…wrong, gentlemen, all wrong. Magic. For those of you who haven’t succumbed to emusic.com yet, the original CD was published under the title of Masters of the Roll, Vol. 8: Piano Music of Ravel on the James Stewart Music label. Oh yes – magic – The Magic Numbers accompanied me on this trip; but I have already said much about them. Richard Thompson is a regular fellow traveller of mine; this was a chance to live with his latest album, Front Parlour Ballads, which derives its title from England’s greatest living songwriter’s decision to keep out of the traditional studio and cook his soufflés in his home kitchen. I guess ‘lo-fi’ will and has been mentioned in reviews of this magnificent selection of thirteen new songs, to me his strongest collection of material since Mirror Blue, a record I am mad about. It’s a source of wonder to me that, having lived in America for so long, the old Hampstead boy can still draw upon his Britishness with such a sure foot – and such an elegant hand. ‘How Does Your Garden Grow’, a modern madrigal of exquisite finesse, deserves to be included in the Very Best Of… of this masterful musician (that’d be a huge compilation, agreed). Yes, available on emusic, too, as is The Richard Swift Collection, Volume One – The Novelist & Walking Without Effort. By Richard Swift, yes - a chap of whom I knew absolutely bugger all until dear Chris Evans posted some information on this site’s message board. Swift’s world is an oddly convincing compound of California and Weimar, with Brian Wilson and Kurt Weill as guides, with vistas of England (Losing Sleep, sooo late-period Beatles) enjoyable from many a peak. Chris has mentioned Rufus Wainwright as a possible point of comparison – yes – Ron Sexmith too. John Cale? M. Ward. Randy Newman. Can’t put my finger on it. Swift seems to be a bit of a control freak – the credits have him as ‘Engineer, Art Direction, Mixing, Artwork, Instrumentation’ (sic), and good luck to him. This compilation of two records (the first of which, the very extended EP ‘The Novelist’, tells the story of an aspiring writer in 30’s New York and is deliciously ‘badly’ recorded) has great focus, and some quite magnificent moments (Looking Back, I Should Have Stayed Home More), as well as many sonic surprises which nearly always fall into place with a sense of evidence that must have required tremendous work, and much, much talent. One for the present, not the future. ‘Now I’ve got to be gone’… Louis
Can it be that long since I last posted a playlist on this site? Dear oh dear. But you who have, I hope, paid regular visits to our message board, will not be led to think that I have retired from music – as a listener. If anything, the last few months have been amongst the richest in discoveries for a very long time, as far as I am concerned. Yes, even ‘new’ stuff. The word ‘discovery’ is to be taken with a pinch of salt. Playing in the background – right now – is Josh Rouse’s new album, Nashville, which I downloaded from emusic.com (the very best service of its kind on the web, honestly) a few hours earlier. My good friend Michael Cameron had introduced me to this collection of ten sun-kissed songs on the eve of the Cup final in his Cardiff flat (how convenient is that?); even through a wine-induced fog, one thing was clear then: Nashville easily compared with Josh’s magnificent 1972. Playing the record nearly two months later in my West London office, it is even clearer now. Tunes I’d heard but once immediately felt like old acquaintances. There are many reasons why I shouldn’t fall for Josh Rouse’s charms: the simplicity of his singer-songwriter chord progressions, for example, something that, with most other artists, is just an unwilling confession of laziness. But criteria such as this one do not apply to someone who so intensely, so genuinely inhabits a gentler, less cynical tradition. Arnold Schoenberg once remarked: ‘There’s an awful lot of good music yet to be written in E major’; in Rouse’s case, make that E major 7th. ‘Streetlights’, with its beautifully-weighted string arrangement, sounds like a forgotten David Ackles classic, with a superb middle-eight which is, to my ears, is a delightful evocation of The Left Banke at their most lyrical. More than anything, this music is rooted in a time, a place, and a distinct sensitivity. Rouse is everything that Beck should be, if the gazettes were to be taken seriously, but without the nod-nod wink-wink clever-cleverness of the latter. When one hears echoes of the Philly sound (‘Saturday’), the Smiths (‘Winter In The Hamptons’) or of the Beach Boys (the first two bars of ‘Carolina’, which sound uncannily like the intro to ‘Then I Kissed Her’), one never feels like young Rouse has been playing with scissors and superglue; this is not a mere montage; this is a serious, and seriously talented songwriter – and tremendous arranger - drinking from a natural source, which I find marvellously refreshing. Back to the Cup final; for it was on my way to Wales that my friend Amy Lawrence slipped on a white-label CD in her car stereo, and that I fell in love with The Magic Numbers – whom, I’m pleased to say, I’ll see open for Brian Wilson in Brighton tomorrow night. At the time, the hype machine had yet to get into gear, and the band was only a bunch of scruffy indie popsters who’d just released a well-received four-track EP, but certainly not a Top Ten act in the making. That they have achieved this kind of success – in the UK, if not anywhere else – is little short of a miracle. Forget all the music press’s limp-wristed references to The Mamas & Papas (which still baffle me), Romeo Stodart and his crew have first and foremost listened to a lot of girl-group music; which suits fine the Shangri-Las fanatic I’ll always be. This is unpretentious, but bloody ambitious music-making; it is not easy to write, and deliver, five-minutes teen symphonies with what is basically a power trio. That they succeed to do so more often than not is a measure of the band’s talent. I’ve already eulogised at length (on the message board) about the album’s stand-out track, ‘Which Way To Happy’, which has reinforced my conviction (soon to be tested in the studio) that pop songs need not follow a linear, repetitive format. Romeo’s voice may grate with some; try and get used to it: The Magic Numbers are a vital antidote to Coldplay and their clones in this year’s charts. I’m deeply indebted to arch-supporter Chris Evans for leading me to the wondrous terra incognita of 70’s pop that is Andy Pratt, a half-forgotten future of rock’n’roll who went all glam, with disastrous circumstances, around 1973. His debut album – self-produced, it seems – has been made available again through emusic (again), and will no doubt feature quite highly in my revised Top 101 list (which could do with a fresh coat of paint). ‘Records Are Like Life’ is one of these UFO’s which have come from some strange place in the future to startle earthlings like you and me. It’s quite hard to describe what Pratt’s music is like. Jazzy? Yes, quite a bit. In a Pretzel Logic kind of way. But when you think you’ve nailed it, up comes a track like ‘Low Tide Island’, which I’d qualify as a psychedelic madrigal, an absolute masterpiece of a song, full of unexpected twists and turns which do not sound the least bit contrived. Enough said – just get hold of this absolute gem. For amateurs of weird and wonderful things, check out Petra Haden’s almost ludicrously brave re-invention – with vocals, and vocals only – of The Who’s greatest album, Sell-Out. Recorded at home on a (not very good) 8-track machine, this is pure fun and, at times, mesmerising. Exactly the kind of thing one should take a chance on when browsing through the emusic catalogue – should they sponsor this page, I wonder? Last, a record that was sent to me with copious warning by my Bremen chum Arnie Zeigler, who needn’t have been so cautious: Michel van Dyke’s Bossa Nova (EMI Germany) is a cracker – provided you do not mind a bit of Euro-pop nonsense from time to time. This album will never, ever, make the Pop album of the year lists, since it is not so much pop as popular music, an important distinction for one born on the continent. One song – the opener, canny fellow! – towers above everything else on this record: the quasi-symphony ‘Herbst’, which has the kind of glorious chorus one would expect from a Caetano Veloso at his very best. Yes, it is that good. And if you don’t think German can possibly sound like Brazilian Portuguese, well, listen to this, and we can agree on it later. Now back to work. Love Louis
Playing at gail o’hara’s chickfactor festival (no capitals, please) a couple of weeks ago turned out to be a splendid occasion, and in more ways than I could imagine. Bush Hall, a superb example of victorian rococo, with its stucco friezes and crystal chandeliers, was a magnificent backdrop for the set that Stuart Moxham and I had devised; and the place was packed as well. Most gratifying. But even more gratifying, maybe, was the opportuntiy to chew the fat with a fascinating set of musicians who were also due to perform that Saturday. Like Bridget St John – what a voice, what a presence, and what songs – , who delivered a very moving eulogy to John Peel, whom we miss so much, whose absence is fely so acutely and so hurtfully by all of us in England; he was the man who’d given her her first chance, back in 1969. You just had to hear one bar of Hole in my Heart to understand why he’d been so taken with this great artist. But here were other acts on stage that night; one of them was the Bill Wells Trio. Here’s how The Edge reviewed their last album, Also in White (Domino GEOG 15, available through www.dominorecordco.com): “Pianist and innovator Bill Wells forms a unique silhouette
on the Glasgow music horizon. Although in recent years he has fashioned
collaborations with notable indie figures such as The Pastels, Future
Pilot AKA and members of Belle and Sebastian, his musical background
remains firmly rooted in the stultifyingly conventional Scottish
jazz scene. Through sheer frustration Wells began taking his ideas
elsewhere. The Future pilot AKA versus The Bill Wells Octet LP eventually
emerged in 1998 on Domino records, offering up a remarkable synthesis
of Wells' dark chord progressions and Sushi K. Dade's lo-fi tape
spliced backing tracks. Agreed, Sir, agreed. Just one thing missing: the opening track of that CDLP, Presentation piece No. 1, features one of the most haunting melodies I have heard in years – since I discovered a Meirelles E Os Copa 5 instrumental on an Brazilian Acid Jazz compilation, actually. Stuart and I had arrived somewhat late for the sound-check; did our thing, then left the stage to Bill and his two accompanyists. Usually, after you’ve line-checked, you head for the bar, of for any quiet place where to collect your thoughts or, maybe, go through a couple of songs again; but not this time, not quite. Bill started the loop which runs almost unchanged throughout the nine minutes of Presentation Piece No.1; then the guitar and the (mutted) trumpet hooked on that tune of his. We literally jumped out of our seats backstage to listen. The tune had everything, a lilting rhythm, saudade, bittersweet harmonies which, as the piece went on, suddenly took a wondrous turn, heading for the soundscapes Gil Evans designed for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. An absolute classic, a standard worthy of Billy Strayhorn. Bill’s music is not jazz, though; I even guess some jazzers will be taken aback by the non-virtuosity of the playing. Bill’s soloing has echoes of Horace Silver at times, at his most economical. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy. He just sat there, noodling alongside his loop, totally oblivious of what soloists are supposed to do, as if he was stretching his fingers by himself, discovering those chords, checking if that note fitted in – yes, it did, then moving on, until the tune came back, that tune which could go on forever. Magical. I’ve been told that Bill’s records are pretty hard
to come by. It doesn’t surprise me. His talent is not of the
kind you can flog in a Megastore. Too bad for them. But that’ll
do for me. Louis
The other good surprise was to find – at the price of €7
– a decent Pierre Vassiliu compilation, which
features three of his biggest hits of the early 70’s, which
also happen to be three of my favourite songs of that period. His
name will mean very little to non-French speakers, I know. The French
themselves might be fooled by this singer/songwriter’s later
‘comedy’ records, which were far more successful (Le
Pingouin, and other inanities), and obscured his earlier work,
which is delightfully tuneful, sensitive, and ‘musical’,
for a want of a better word, if there is one. Amour et Amitié
(shades of Caetano Veloso here), Marie
en Provence (killer chorus, the kind of chorus that haunted
my late nights in my teenage years) and that UFO of a song, J’ai
trouvé un journal dans le hall de l’aéroport,
one of those tunes that radios kept playing at night (again) without
ever mentioning its full title – three reasons to part with
very little money if you can, and, maybe, start your exploration
of the terra incognita of late 60’s-early 70’s French
pop, where many a treasure awaits re-discovery.
Over the past month or so, many who've posted messages on the Sunshine message board have actively encouraged me to open my ears to a variety of new and not so new bands (in order to feed off other sounds whilst I'm busy recording The Wonder Of It All). However, I've been mostly engaged in a different and altogether more introspective kind of exercise. I rarely, if ever, listen to my previous albums, generally finding more to fault or to regret than to be inspired by; the experience of the recording itself tends to taint my judgement. Some of you may know that I have a 'problem' with Yuri Gagarin, for example; the music has something to do with it: I was not assertive enough in the studio to impose a less severe approach to the sound than the one we 'chose' in the end. I'll always regret not to have recorded 'Diamond' much later on - and that is just one song out of many I've always felt did not receive the attention they deserved, or the treatment they were crying out for. But my response to 'YG' is to a large extent non-musical. These were not happy times, oh no. The undecided intonation of the horns on the title track reminds me of the constant tension that existed betwteen Dean and I at the time, and which fortunately disappeared when we were reunited for Rainfall and Jean Renoir. All this long preamble to come to this - my ears finally regain a measure of objectivity when I'm engaged on a new project, as I am now. Listening to my previous work makes sense then; if only to remind myself that there were many occasions when I could have stretched myself just that little bit further, not through lack of will or work, but because, when your nose is pressed against the glass, it's easy to believe that there's nowhere else to look. This is paricularly true of my singing, an activity which, somewhat maddeningly, involves both loss of oneself and a capacity for instant analysis. Because my melodic lines do move about quite a bit, and generally over an octave and a half at least, 'perfect' (or rather, as close to perfect as is possible) technical control is a must; striving for as exact an 'execution' of the part is a pre-requisite; then I can start to worry about interpretation. Easier said than done, obviously. I've greatly improved - technically speaking - over the years; if I listen to 'Farewell Maria' on Rainfall, for example, I'm struck by how undecisive some of the harmonic lines sound to me - lack of confidence plays a part, lack of (breath) control a greater one. I should have had the sense to pick a different key, for starters. Lesson learnt. Going back to more successful takes - apart from instilling some confidence in one's performing abilities, and confidence is something all singers chronically lack - helps in a different way; a method which has been used with success in the past can be used again. On My Favourite Part Of You, for example, I'm struck by the new vocal tone (which I'd never known I could utilise) you can hear on the chorus to 'I Need It'. Trying to replicate it, I found out that I could only do so if the sound was of the 'ee' family; something to keep in mind when refining a lyric. Similarly, I'm quite proud of the second verse of 'Before The Rain', which has got an almost Robert Wyatt-esque quality in the upper register - not that there was any conscious decision to imitate him. What happened happened because of a) complete and utter belief in Jonathan's beautiful text, and b) a step-by-step progression on the scale that enabled me to go over my 'break' with my natural voice without sounding like a chicken being strangled. What I learn this way can be integrated into my approach to new songs, and improve the performance - not that I'll ever be happy with one (although 'Jealous', on Delta Kiss, comes pretty close...). I for one do not believe such a process of self-appraisal can get in the way of spontaneity, far from it, since what has been de-constructed is the effect; the song should carry the singer of its own accord; if it fails to take you down, it's probably because it wasn't good enough, or too meandering for the interpreter to find a plateau or, rather, a cliff edge to jump from. Mistakes, of course, teach more than successes. One that I have
repeated over the years - though far less since Sunshine,
I'll come to that - is a proclivity to play things rather too safely.
If you hear a line here, a break there - go for it. Don't hide it,
don't be too bloody polite. When Bertrand Burgalat and I were recording
the string parts to 'Rafaella', I came up with the idea
(not extrordinarily original, I confess) to open the song with a
violin glissando, which we duly put down to tape. A few days later,
setting up a basic mix for the track, I set up the relevant fader
at what felt like a 'polite' level; I was probably uneasy to go
beyond that, 'in your face' as it were. Bertrand asked me: 'why
so low'? I can't remember what kind of half-baked explanaion I gave
him; but we pushed up the fader to +3db, and added echo as well.
The line immediately made sense - that's what my ear had heard when
the idea had come up in the first place; I simply hadn't trusted
my ear enough. I now know better, but need to be reminded of past
compromises by listening to my records again. Which is why there
is no 'playlist' this month - but a guided tour of what I've done,
and should not have done, in order to do, now, what needs to be
done. And so to work.
Would you believe it? I've just bought a Korgis compilation. And all this because I heard Beck's version of Everybody's Got To Learn Sometimes on the OS of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, the nearly-but-not quite romantic comedy in which Jim Carrey ACTS and Kate Winslet is a waste of space. Once out of the cinema, I kept on humming the song's main hook ( you know, the 'I neeeeeed your loving' bit), cursing Beck for missing out on the beautiful modulation of that passage; like serving sauce Périgueux with button mushrooms instead of truffles. Back at home, I cracked it at the piano, and thought - Philippe, there's nothing to be ashamed of - you love that song, sugar and all - buy the damn thing. And so I did. You'll have to take my word for it; the Korgis were all right, a bit better than that, in fact; not the most inspired of bands, maybe, but they could turn out a tune, which will do at this point in time, thank you very much. Far weightier fare is M Ward's latest record, Transfiguration of Vincent (Matador OLE5782), which I discovered through my good friend Michael Cameron, the man who also forced Calexico on me when no-one cared a jot about them. Bless him. Ignore all those critics who'll tell you that this album is another step in the transfiguration of M Ward himself - of his morphing into Tom Waits Mk II. In fact, every new record of his marks a step in the opposite direction; but it is enough, it seems, to have a voice that can be qualified as 'gravelly' and to write lyrics that go beyond the sheer surface of Americana to be categorised like this. The strength (correction - one of the strengths) of M Ward is his uncategorizability (ouch); the songs, though fluid in the extreme, display a remarkable sense of architecture; and the sound design (not an expression I use in a positive sense, habitually) of Vincent is astonishing, to my ears, one of the most imaginative uses, through a process of distortion and lateral transformation, of all the tricks served on a plate by modern recording devices. Beck - Ha! here we go again - has tried his hand at this sort of aural gymnastics, but has never convinced me that he was doing so out of a sense of necessity, whereas M Ward, well, does. I won't single out any specific track for praise; but I will recommend every single one of them to whomever has got an ear, a brain and a heart. If 'important' means anything in music, this is without a doubt the most 'important' record of the year. July 2004, a pretty rotten month in many other respects, will nevertheless hold a special place in my heart as I finally got my hands on The Great Lost Kinks Album - in a roundabout way. For the uninitiated, this record had been available for something like a couple of weeks in 1973-74, before Reprise inexplicably shifted its whole stock to discounters. Most of the tracks that made up this jigsaw puzzle of an album had been recorded immediately after the sanspareil Village Green Preservation Society, at a time when a quasi-suicidal Ray Davies was enjoying the last real flowering of his genius (1968). Reprise added a few odd bits and bobs to construct an album that made no sense whatsoever, but contained absolute gems like Lavender Hill and Where Did My Spring Go. A friend of mine had made a cassette of this LP in the late seventies, and I'd be looking for the real thing since then. Hosanna, the quest is over, thanks to the release of a Village Green 3-CD box-set (Sanctuary SMETD102), which includes all of this wondrous stuff and will stand as the Theological Sum of The Kinks from now on. And the price is ridiculous: £8.99 for the lot. Quite nice too to know that it's been in the Top 100 in the UK since its release at the end of June. There's still hope.
I know, I know, it's been a while. I haven't exactly sat there doing niente; far from it; but lovely football had me well and truly tied to my keyboard, when I wasn't trying to chase some ex- or current player to give my readers the benefit of his insight (a big word, in most cases) about Euro 2004. But that is done, done and dusted. Normal service resumed. So what have you been listening to, I hear you ask? The answer is: some vinyl. I was sitting alone at home, when my eye was caught by the spines of all these albums that had been gathering dust (literally) on my shelves. Let's get down to it, I thought. So I cleared the record-player of the dozens of CD's which had somehow been deposited on its lid, and lifted its arm for the first time in ages. And the first song to resonate in the living-room was This Is Love, Come What May, by one of my all-time heroes, Bobby Fuller. For the anoraks, it was a single which had only been released in the LA area in 1965 until it resurfaced on a (very uneven) compilation called KRLA - King Of The Wheels. By the way, by very uneven, I do not mean 'bad'. I doubt Bobby Fuller ever recorded a dud; however, what is simply good drag music (that's cars, not garb we're talking about) and constitutes a good half of the tracks on that record does not compare with the absolute gems that more than fill the rest of the grooves - She's My Girl, The Magic Touch, and the song mentioned above, with its extraordinarily uplifting chorus and some gorgeous 12-string work. Yes, 'uplifting' is the first word that comes to my mind when I think of the Bobby Fuller Four. Next time you have one of those mornings after the night before, try a dose of Let Her Dance or Never To Be Forgotten; that should do the trick. You'll find yourself playing air guitar embarrassingly quickly. When asked to describe Bobby Fuller's music, and once I've done with the 'uplifting' side of it, the best comparison I can come up with is: imagine Buddy Holly playing with Creedence, in a Wall of Sound production. Why the man is not considered an absolute genius baffles me. Died too young, yes - but that's hardly been a problem for some far lesser talents, hasn't it? So do yourself a favour; shamefully, NO BFF records are currently available in the UK; but it's possible - just possible - that you might get the Never To Be Forgotten box-set which Del-Fi put out in 1998 by trawling the net. Having hopped to the sounds of El Paso's greatest, I then moved to dear Colin Blunstone, just to remind me that I Don't Believe In Miracles is one of the ten best singles ever released. Still is. Since then, I've been ruining my voice trying to hit the high G of the song's main hook at the piano (I play this wondrous tune in F, which I know is wrong, but falls better under my fingers). A humbling experience. Carrying on my exploration of long-forgotten treasures, I realised that I possessed no less than 12 - twelve - Machito albums, and about twice that amount of Cal Tjader's . Good grief - when was I so much 'into' Latin music? But that gives me a perfect opportunity to plug a double-CD Verve compilation of two of Tjader's maddest, and most rewarding, recordings of exotica, Several Shades of Jade and Breeze From The East, which I'd been given by a very, very generous Japanese fan some ten years ago. The first one, in particular, features some of Lalo Shiffrin's very best work as an arranger. Tjader has this advantage over the next artist(s) in line, my beloved Microdisney, the band I thought would change the world in the mid-80's (it certainly changed mine); at least his records are widely available. Just peeped into the amazon website and realised that Everybody Is Fantastic - for all its rawness, one of the best debut albums of the last two decades - is not. Neither are Clock Comes Down The Stairs and Crooked Mile. Criminal. Thankfully, my old vinyl copies are not too scratched yet, and I could enjoy the tortured lyrics and sumptuous tunefulness of Are You Happy another half-dozen times. Cathal Coughlan once told me he considered this track to be their finest; or rather, the finest example of the way his and Sean's lyricism could be combined in a single moment. The coda, with its heartbreaking slide guitar lick, could and should go on forever; one gets the impression that, somehow, they played it on and on, and that, somewhere, they still do. I'd like to go there. Louis
This playlist should come with a black border, as France lost one of its great voices on the 4th of this month: Claude Nougaro, who died in Paris, aged 74. I'd mentioned his name a couple of times in this space before, I think. A name that is almost unknown outside of the French-speaking world, when it should be alongside that of Jacques Brel, so outstanding an artist he was. He was not the tallest of men; he was not nicknamed 'The Little Bull' for nothing - his energy was astonishing, as was the power of his beautifully controlled barytone. Some of my earliest musical memories are linked to the superb recordings he did in the early to mid-sixties, with the help of arrangers and co-writers like Michel Legrand and Jacques Datin. Nobody knew how to twist the French language around the syncopations of jazz as he did; nobody else could have put - beautiful - lyrics to tunes as re-hashed as Dave Brubeck's 'Blue Rondo A La Turk' as succesfully as he did, a tune which, sung by him, became a breathless, and breathtaking first person account of a botched robbery ('A Bout de Souffle'). But Nougaro was not just a 'cannibal' putting jazz standards through his French mincing machine. His most beautiful songs were original compositions, which showed him capable of expressing extremes of despair ('Une Petite Fille') and tenderness ('Blanche-neige', or 'Cécile', a love song to his newly-born daughter, imagining her own discovery of love: 'May you ever be touched as I touch you know/My breath on your eyelashes/A kiss on your mouth in your child's sleep/Cécile, my daughter'.) Those of you who are familiar with my él recordings may remember my first single for the label, when Louis Philippe was still The Arcadians - it was a Claude Nougaro classic, 'La Pluie Fait des Claquettes'. I could have covered many others - 'Le Cinéma', for example, another tale of unrequited (or rather, unconsumed) love, told with his usual wit: 'On the black screen of my sleepless nights/Where I make my own films/Once, twice, ten times/I show that sequence again/You fall in my arms/I shoot every night, on Sundays too/Sometimes - the bell rings - it's you/Will I grab your hips/As I do on the black screen of my sleepless nights//No - I say - 'How are you'/And I take you to the movies'... So Nougaro will not sing again of his beloved Toulouse, the town of his birth, which inspired the most gorgeous of his melodies ('Toulouse', what else?). Thankfully, his recordings are still widely available - starting with his fantastic first album, Claude Nougaro (Philips B00006AKTN). I don't think I need to make any recommendation, or to carry on any further; like millions of Frenchmen, I feel dimished, amputated of a small but essential part of myself. Adieu, Claude.
"Why are you always listening to the same music?" The questioner was my daughter Camille, aged 12, whose own tastes have changed a bit since she used to sing the oboe line which opens The Rite of Spring. That was eight years ago. She quite liked Poulenc's Les Biches, too. That was before Beyoncé 'burst' (bust?) on the scene, of course, and before 'Posh' acquired a new sense in her dictionary - and I'm not talking about the Spice Girls. Everything that is not hip-hop or r'n'b is 'posh'. Horace Silver, for example. Which brings us back to... "Why are you always listening to the same music?" In fairness, it's true, over the past few weeks, I've always been listening to the same music - Horace Silver. Over, and over, and over again. That, and a bit of Moloko. I'm very partial to Roisin Murphy. And to Scarlet Johansson. But I digress. One January afternoon, not feeling too wonderful about anything, I entered the Virgin Megastore on the Tottenham Court Road; trying to ignore the racket generated by all the X-Box anoraks in the entrance hall, I made straight for one of the upper floors, and to the relative peace of the Jazz/Easy Listening section (a combination that is new to that shop, and to me too). I'd hoped to find a copy of Dudley Moore's incidental music for Bedazzled (no such luck). Something else caught my eye - brand new re-masterings of Horace Silver's Blue Note recordings. I bought the lot. I'd always cherished 'Songs For My Father',as you'll know if you're a regular visitor to these pages; his other albums I knew by proxy, happy to know they existed, but unwilling - so far - to delve deeper into them. 'What a fool I was'... 'Six Pieces Of Silver'; 'The Stylings Of Silver'; 'Blowing The Blues Away', 'Horace Silver & The Jazz Messengers'; how could I have lived without that? For now I can't. Silver, as I've since explained ad nauseam to some friends of mine who can't quite bring themselves to enjoying jazz, was not so much a composer as a songwriter who happened not to write lyrics. He had - has - a genius for hooks, tunes and arresting chord sequences that should appeal to anyone with half an ear for Pop. Not for him the formulaic 12 bar theme, followed by extemporisations, rounded off by the re-stating of the theme, which bears the pants off those who can't see the point in spontaneous composition. More Ellington that Parker, whatever hard-boppers might say, Silver loved to frame soli within 'new' arranged sections, middle-eights, bridges, whatever you may call them, just like Duke did. Yes, Horace wrote songs. And his great quartet of the late 50's swung like hell. All rise for Louis Hayes, the funkiest - and most elegant - drummer this side of Art Blakey. As years when by, Silver, who had a fabulous knack for writing memorable blues-structured themes ('Dodlin', 'Sister Sadie', 'Senor Blues', at least one classic per album), allowed himself to show a more melancholic persona, and gave us such wondrous things as 'Peace' (on the Blowin' the Blues Away LP), with its gorgeous modulations and superb ensemble writing. Talking about gorgeous, what about Scarlet Johansson, hey? I'd better stop here. Next month, don't bet against Charlie Mingus making a guest appearance in these pages. Till then, toodle-oo. Louis
Yes, I know - am I dead? - have I gone deaf? - why is that that no new playlist has been put on the site for ages? I wish I had an answer to the last question. My ears are still working, and I haven't passed into the great beyond yet. It was more a case of: what and whom could I possibly talk about that I haven't already, erm, talked about? Time has been in short supply too. I wish I could say that has been the case because Danny and I had been rehearsing the new album in the Bahamas. But no. No rehearsals, no Bahamas. Instead, babies galore (Danny, Richard Preston and David Longdon, if you must know, are now proud fathers of their first child) and, for me, an awful lot of writing about an awful lot of things, some of which has been published, some will, some may, and some won't. In truth, I have spent more time watching the Arsenal at Highbury than in the studio - or, simply, at home, listening to music. The few idle hours I get here and there I try and spend at the piano, scribbling away with my concrete fingers. However, some habits you can't lose; when I've tired of my own tinkling, and that has been often, I've tried and refresh myself by listening to a few things, most of them familiar visitors in my sitting-room. But let's have a look at the new faces first. A long time ago, I worked for the strangest of classical music magazines; I say 'strangest', because it was bankrolled by Richard Desmond, the bearded pornocrat responsible for such publications as 'Readers' Wives' and 'Asian Babes'. This mag was called 'CD Classics', not a very imaginative title I agree, but I plead not guilty on that matter. As its features editor (who'd been hired thanks to the recommendation of a friend who thought I knew a bit about the subject), I was able to assemble a pretty decent collection of recordings at no cost until the ineluctable happened: Desmond (whom I saw once, chumping on a cigar, and looking down on us as some weird kind of pond life) pulled the plug. I was also put on the mailing list of every bloody orchestra and publisher in the bloody country, which means that, years later, I still recycle a bag of unopened press releases every bloody week. However, and apologies for this rambling preamble, it also means that, once in a blue moon, something nice happens - a new record is delivered by my dyslexic postman; and that is how, in mid-December, I discovered Richard Rodney Bennett's 'Concerto For Stan Getz', which had been recorded by John Harle for EMI. I should say at this point that I am no fan of John Harle; I interviewed him at length once, and, pleasant as he was, I could not digest his catholic approach to music-making, and his just-about-holier-than-thou attitude regarding the need to 'popularise' classical music; which means, as you know, not playing classical music at all, but something, well, a bit third-stream I suppose, if you forgive the anachronism. As to Bennett - I only knew him though his (perfectly respectable) film scores. Then I put that concerto on, and I was...not enraptured...but charmed, delighted by its lightness, and its sincerity. Harle is no Getz - too much beef in there, not enough breath, and breadth - but acquits himself perfectly in a very simple, very touching piece, which is highlighted by some gorgeous scoring for strings. The result is more Hollywood than Rio, yes, but carried with a lot of style and understatement. Les Baxter fans would be well advised to check this work out. *******
Not many of you will have heard of Qigang Chen. I hadn't until we went to Saddlers Wells to see the Chinese National Ballet perform a staging of 'Raise the Red Lantern'. The dancing itself was ravishing; but what captivated me the most was the music composed by Mr. Chen for the occasion. Like many Oriental composers of his generation (he's 60 or thereabouts), Mr. Chen fell in love with Messiaen (of whom he was the last pupil) and, through him, with 20th century French classical music, which he then absorbed into his own, more abrasive, language. He might never achieve the notoriety of a Takemitsu - well, I don't know, actually, if any more records of his music get released over here. The only one I know of - the one I've been listening to - bears the evocative title of 'Iris Dévoilée' (Virgin Classics 5455492), which I understand to be the portrait of a woman's various moods. I'd like to meet her, if she's anything as beautiful and dreamlike as the music she has inspired. The CD's just out, so getting it should not be any problem. *******
At which point I must play it again, and wish you all a gorgeous
New Year, replete with wine, song and love.
How to select CD’s for a holiday in the Greek sun ... let’s see ... a lot of rummaging, boxes of records falling on my head, CD writer gone to the knackers’ yard ... It should be easier, shouldn’t it? But it wasn’t. But it’s done. A small selection – I travel lightly – and no big surprises. My Brazilian home-made compilations are in there (of course), a couple of Calexico albums, Lucinda Williams, Miles, my own best-of Prefab Sprout (strange how I’ve been coming back to them since I heard I Trawl The Megaherz), an hour-and-a half of Beach Boys favourites, Honnegger’s Pastorale d’été, William Blezard’s Celtic Lament, a sprinkling of Vaughan Williams (The Lark Ascending, nothing fancy), a smidgin of Delius (A Village Romeo And Juliet, the Beecham orchestration), Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, and the demos Stuart Moxham and I have been recording together, just to check they really need the remixing that the Great Man From Cardiff thinks they do (I don’t). Very catholic, and very conservative. I can only go on holidays with old, trusted friends, I suppose. Meanwhile, when I was not devouring another of Haruki Murakami sublime novels (try Sputnik Sweetheart, if you haven’t caught this Japanese bug already), or tracking down another delicious eccentricity written by J.L. Carr (he of One Month In The Country fame), it’s been pretty quiet on the old stereo, as it usually is when I’m working in the studio, or polishing off a few songs. Just time for a bit of Sandy Salisbury, some old stuff by the Neal Hefti orchestra (The Art of Arranging) and ... what else? I must be forgetting something. Yes, Richard Thompson, Beeswing, one of his greatest lyrics. I don’t know if I’ve already told you that, but seeing Richard Thompson on stage, alone with Danny Thompson on double bass, ranks up there in the Top 5 of the greatest concerts I’ve ever been privileged to attend, together with Brian Wilson (of course), Steely Dan (yes, yes), Simon Rattle conducting Malher’s 10th symphony and Ian Dury & The Blockheads at the absolute top of their form, back in 1980 – the only band I have actually followed on the road, and, God, am I thankful for that. Thompson, of course, is an oddity. Everybody knows the man’s a genius, the best English songwriter alive today, the greatest guitarist in the galaxy, etc., etc., but half of my friends haven’t got a clue who he is, what he’s done, what they’re missing. Is it THE BEARD? It must be. Thinking of it, unless you are known for your beard (Bonny Prince Charlie, ZZ Top, GB Shaw, Tony Almeida - I digress) , embeardment is a bad career move. The minute Eminem grows a beard (can he? can he?), my daughter will hide her copy of 8-Mile. I’ve worn a beard myself at times, if “wearing” is the term. It didn’t do wonders for my career either. I should have a word with Sean O’Hagan on the subject, by the way; he’s getting perilously close to letting his mutton chops crawl over his cheeks; the moment the invasion will be confirmed, I’m sure the High Llamas will bleat in the wilderness. Jim Morrison lost his voice when he turned into Yogi Bear. Lennon looked like a prat, poor Brian like a Bowery bum, Ian Anderson like a bum full-stop. Quick check. I am clean-shaven at the moment. But Richard Thompson isn’t! So please don’t judge an artist by his pilous system, and grab everything he’s recorded with Mitchell Froom, then what he’s recorded without him. Time to pack the insect repellent now. And the razors.
June/July 2003 Hendrix excepted, I’ve always viewed guitar heroes with a circumspect eye, probably because I knew that I would never be able to play that FAST, and that that long-haired girl in form 6A would not agree to join her voice to my strumming (ahem), whereas she’d be warbling if I could play the chords of House of the Rising Sun in the right order. That’s how bad I was, and why the 70s were a decade of sexual misery for me. This confession made, You Had It Coming (Epic 5010182, 2001) is a quite remarkable album, coming from a musician who’s spent most of his life pouring notes from his instrument like a diarrhoeic hound. The sound is tight, brutal even; and the record worth buying for an extraordinary version of Muddy Waters’ Rollin’ And Tumblin’, sung by Imogen Heap, which puts every single metal band I’ve ever heard to shame. Pure electricity – and incredibly imaginative use of break-beats in a straight blues context. I promise you, it’s THAT good. Similarly, I’d never even thought of buying the recent Timpani recording of Gabriel Dupont’s La Maison dans les Dunes and Poème (a World Premiere recording) if my friend Jonathan Coe had not assured me it was one of those ravishing pieces of music that got lost in the wake of Stravinskian neo-classicism and Austro-German expressionism. Both pieces were written in the first two decades of the 20th century, when Dupont was one of the great hopes of the French classical scene. He died very young, and was quickly forgotten as the First World War tore Europe, and European culture, apart. Some of his accents are quite Fauré-an on first acquaintance, without the wintery abruptness of the latter’s last compositions; some modulations evoke the Ravel of Miroirs; but the voice of Dupont, even at its most agitated, retains an essential gentleness. Why works such as these are not regularly performed is a mystery to me, and hats off to the Timpani label for rescuing them from almost total oblivion. More please. This said, nobody needed to advise me to go and listen to Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent performing in Bloomsbury a few weeks back; I’d have stolen tickets if I’d had to. For those who had been at a previous Jazz Café gig, the repertory held few surprises – some Argent, the bare minimum, thank God; a generous selection of Zombies favourites, including the heavenly Beechwood Park; a few new tracks – of a very high standard -, including the lovely Sanctuary, from their 2001 album Out Of The Shadows; and, the cherry on the cake, absolute marvels like Misty Roses, Say You Don’t Mind and I Don’t Believe In Miracles, taken from Blunstone’s far too small oeuvre. A bonus was the presence on stage of the very best string section I’ve ever heard in a pop context; they could be good: they were members of the Duke and Eroica quartets. Which leads me to plead with any of you who hasn’t already got Blunstone’s two classic albums One Year and Enismore to do something about it, and quick. Not much space left. Ha, my Led Zeppelin Top Ten will have to wait
– again. I’ll give you a clue: Going To California
is in it. Stairway To Heaven isn’t. Blame it on that
long-haired girl from 6A...
May 2003 I was toying with the idea of giving a good airing to the skeleton in my musical cupboard, ie publish the list of my Top Ten Led Zeppelin songs (things like Going To California, to give you a hint of what's to come) - when I played Paddy McAloon's new album for the first time - after which all such thoughts deserted me. I Trawl the MEGAHERTZ is every bit as extraordinary as Nick Kent's recent review in Liberation makes it to be. As soon as the first, quite beautiful theme of the opening "song" filled my sitting room, I knew I was in for something very, very special, the answer to all the doubts McAloon has had over his own music for a very long time, and which had conspired to make Andromeda Heights such a let-down. The new album, of course, is not a Prefab Sprout album; no Wendy Smith, no Thomas Dolby in sight. No vocals either, except the astonishing delivery of the MEGAHERTZ monologue by one Yvonne Connors, the mysterious recitante of a mysterious work which is also the most achingly personal of all his oeuvre. I guess many fans who were swept away by things like Cars And Girls will be checking out their CD for confirmation that it is indeed the same man who wrote that music. It does not make for comfortable listening - a virtue, in my book - even if there moments of sheer, luminous beauty throughout. Think of a symphonic poem (quite beautifully played throughout) which casts one eye towards Steve Reich and the other towards the Stravinski of Orpheus and Dumbarton Oaks, though with far more emotional immediacy. What the general public will make of it, I don't know, and could not care less about. This is a record I will listen to again and again, a companion if you will, just like Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom has been for many years; it does not hide the pain behind its conception; it dwells on it, it feeds from it, it is its own catharsis. Anything else is pap. I guess it would not make any sense to mention
any other records after this. Comments welcome, of course. April
2003 I rarely, if ever, listen to my own records; but from time to time, as I rummage in my DATs drawer, I come across something that I had totally forgotten about, and that's what happened when I played Loveletter's (that's Simon Turner to you and me) quite extraordinary album for Siesta. Yes, extraordinary. We recorded it at breakneck speed; all I remember of my own input - apart from going through an unreasonable number of bottles of wine with producer Richard Preston, but what's new?, and hours putting together the intricate backing vocals to Penelope and Through Spray-Tinted Glasses - is plugging my classical guitar in a Vox AC 30, and happily blasting away distorted chords over such psychedelic marvels as the Bee Gees' Red Chair Fadeaway, which drummer Andy Lymn swears will be played at his funeral. One of the most curiously affecting records in Simon's curiously affecting catalogue... April was, for the most part, a jazzy month. Horace Silver, Miles, the Tamba Trio, and a wonderfully lyrical - and swinging - version of Bill Evans' Waltz For Debbie, recorded by Cannonball Adderley with the composer. Many thanks to Danny for giving me this record a few years ago. Any more of those gems to follow, perchance? Reading a biography of Gil Evans made me go through my precious Claude Thornhill LPs again, and spend some well-used time to listen to the ravishing Snowflake, over and over again, and again. I'm actually sure I nicked a line from this tune somewhere, but where? Couldn't say. It had happened to me twice already. First, when I quite unconsciously lifted the first verse of Baby (a song given to the King of Luxemburg) from... the East German national anthem; then, when I, just as innocently, appropriated a full eight bars from the standard You Go To My Head for... I won't tell you which song. I'm too embarrassed to tell you. Apart from that, what with the football season coming to a climax
(a disappointing one for the Gunner I'll always be, enough said),
and countless games to watch/commentate/write about, I've hardly
had time to listen to anything. Whatever spare time I've had has
been spent at the piano working through the songs which might appear
on my next album... about twenty of them, at the moment, which I'm
sure will be whittled down to a couple when I'm hit by one of my
customary crises of confidence. Still, a man's gotta do etc. And
may Arsenal win the Cup. There are only so many
suicidal thoughts I can go through in the space of a month. March 2003 Later on, a bit sheepishly, I approached him – could he arrange a couple of my songs for piano and voice, so that Danny and I could perform them on stage? Bill obliged, and offered us two astonishing tour-de-forces – re-inventions of “Deauville” and “Ainsi Va Sa Vie”, which we later recorded in the studio. He’d found amazing harmonic twists in what were already pretty complex – for me – compositions, inserting ravelian discords in my orderly progressions. And Bill was generous, too, praising some melodic turns, delighted that a young chap like me, a pop musician for goodness’ sake, could dare using unusual devices in the tired format of the pop song. It’s true that Bill was no fundamentalist (in any areas of his life); he’d been Joyce Grenfell’s and Max Wall’s accompanyist, had orchestrated a Noel Coward symphonic work, had been Marlene Dietrich’s musical director, organised impromptu soirées with the likes of Swann & Flanders, counted not one, but two Avengers girls among his friends, including the great Honor Blackman, who delivered a heartfelt eulogy at his funeral. Totally incapable of handling his more mundane affairs – to the point that he never even bothered to hire an agent – he continued all along to write superb music that broadcasters and record companies ignored until it was nearly too late. Thank God, over the last couple of years, the world finally woke up, and Bill saw many of his best pieces recorded on a variety of labels. I’d like to name two of those works, which I have listened to with much emotion since his death; the first, Two Celtic Pieces (English Oboe Concertos, ASV-White Line CD WHL 2130), could be described as a fantasia for oboe and orchestra, a gentle elegy very much in the mould of English pastoralism, suffused with an exquisite sense of enharmony. The other, a much darker, quasi-mahlerian “conversation between strings” entitled Duetto (English String Miniatures, Vol. 3, Naxos 8.555069), remains his masterpiece, better than anything Finzi ever wrote. To me, it proves how the “minor” composer he was reputed to be could have become a “major” one, whatever that means, if the powers-that-be had not effectively banned from the airwaves, and the concert hall, all new music that didn’t fit in the plinky-plonky, post-Darmstadt, post-this, post-that, aesthetics of the 50’s and 60’s. Knowing him was a privilege. So was discovering his music. God
bless Bill. February 2003 I finally remembered we’d bought the fourth of Johnny Cash’s albums for American Recordings/Lost Highway (The Man Comes Around), which I hadn’t even bothered unwrapping before this very month - a very foolish thing to do, as it turned out. It would be in very bad taste to say that the tall dark one is in top form on this one, as we all know how ill he has been over the past couple of years. But, just as with his previous collaborations with Rick Rubin, this is the sort of record that makes the spine tingle and the eyes water. Cash is accompanied by Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers on many of the selections – minus the drums, a stroke of genius on Rubin’s part – and the result, if not as raw as Johnny Cash (the first of the series), is just as poignant. How great a singer he is is shown by the pathos he is able to instil into old chestnuts like In My Life, The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, Danny Boy, and, believe it or not, Bridge Over Troubled Water. But the Everest of this magnificent singer’s album is an absolutely extraordinary cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, a slow, dark, menacing, gathering storm kind of ballad which never quite gets to explode like, say, Roy Orbison’s It’s Over– one of the songs I want to be played at my funeral – and is all the more powerful for that. Astonishing, really. Nothing else I’ve listened to over the past few months compares to The Man Comes Around in terms of sheer emotional power; so I’m a bit hesitant to add other albums to that playlist. Following a luminous gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, I’d just like to mention Calexico’s latest CD (their best to date), Feast Of Wire (City Slang 5816932), a beautiful collection of tuneful Americana delivered with a rare sense of elegance by one of the very best, and most underrated bands of the moment. Going back to that gig at the Empire, it struck me, once again, how vastly superior all US bands seem to be in live situations – superior to UK outfits, that is. The reward of non-stop touring in far from ideal conditions? Maybe. But I rather feel that our American friends have kept faith in craftsmanship (here I go again) when “we” (well, not me, but you know what I mean) seem to content ourselves with presentation… or something less than that, but the words fail me at the moment. By the way, full marks to Calexico for a good rant on stage devoted to a certain GWB. It certainly got me going. I told you it would be a short list. Just some news to finish with:
My Favourite Part of You, as you know, is out on March
25th in France. I’m now told that there will be domestic releases
in Germany and Canada shortly after that, with distribution in Scandinavia
to follow. More details soon on this website. January 2003 stop press! back to the playlist, now ..... But the record I’ve been listening more frequently, and with more pleasure, than anything else throughout the last month has been the magnificent David Whitaker compilation just released by Tricatel. It is called, somewhat misleadingly, the David Whitaker Songbook. The misleading bit is “songbook” – yes, there are some songs, which David arranged for people like Nico, Marianne Faithfull, Lee Hazlewood and Long Chris (strange to see the name of this French popster appearing in this list, but La Petite Fille de l’Hiver is just like a sweet wrapped in snow) – but the greatest moments of this great record are the instrumental selections, excerpts from his own fantasy album, Music to Spy By (Mancini plus sex) and from the OST to Hammerhead, a film I confess I did not know existed. For all of you who love Neal Hefti and Ravel, this is a must, a revelation. My only reservation is that it features a re-mix he did of an Air “tune”. But nobody’s perfect, even if David Whitaker comes damn close to it. And the sleevenotes were written by Andrew Loog Oldham. In Bogota. So that’s where all these Rolling Stones royalties ended up, then? A word of consolation to finish with: we will all die one day,
and that includes George Bush.
When I have felt down, which has been too often, the best cure for S.A.D. I have found has been the Trojan 3-CD Rocksteady compilation – all of it excellent, of course, but with my all-time favourite rude boy song, Ba-Ba-Boom, by The Jamaicans (sometimes credited as The Ethiopians, I’m told; these things could be unclear in Kingston circa 1968). It has a devilish quavering motif on the electric guitar, and uses one of my own pet devices (ostinato riff/pedal point below alternate chords, one tone apart, thank you very much – enough of that) better than anything else I know. A friend of mine who’d worked on a documentary about Francis Poulenc last year was kind enough to pilfer video copies of every single British TV programme ever devoted to my hero – plus some treasure chest stuff found in the archives of the INA. Watching these has been a delight – especially hearing old Poupoule chatting about his music with the kind of charm, modesty and wit that probably went forever with him. A poignant interview with his muse Denise Duval prompted me to listen – again and again – to one of his most extraordinary pieces, La Voix Humaine; he’s written music which is easier on the ear, but little that is heartbreaking as this one. La Voix Humaine is the monologue of a dumped woman, alone with her telephone, desperately trying to win back her lover, hurt enough to contemplate suicide, and attempt it, but too fragile to commit it. It’s not for kids, and it’s definitely not for cretins – that’ll do me. On a lighter note, since my upstairs neighbours have moved, we’ve been temporarily granted the privilege to have our house to ourselves, which means we can play very loud music, very late, but not very often, I assure you. My daughter, who is approaching a …delicate phase of her existence (she’s 11) gets terribly embarrassed by all this, of course, even when I play one of her favourite tracks – You Only Get What You Give, by the New Radicals. I am not surprised Gregg Alexander decided to retire after recording this – how could he do anything better? This tune – straight out of Holland, to my ears – has the strange quality to turn me into a wild 16-year-old for a little under 5 minutes - a remarkable achievement, considering I thought I’d been turning into Kingsley Amis lately. Apologies for not keeping my promise to share with you my ultimate Top 10 Led Zeppelin songs. This will come. Too many of us Zep fans are bullied these days, especially when you’ve been described by a journalist as “someone who speaks Bacharach-ese fluently” (I loved it, of course). That’s another New Year’s resolution for me. Which leads me to wishing a you a Merry Christmas, and thanking you for putting up with my ramblings over the last twelve months. I need no encouragement to carry on doing so (rambling), but thank you all the same. Louis
Michel Legrand it was too who co-wrote most of the songs on Claude
Nougaro's first 10", in 1962 or 63 I think, and that
record, thank God, is widely available again in CD format. I brought
back a brand new copy from my last escapade in Paris., and have
been playing Le Cinema and Une Petite Fille non-stop
since then. The English scriptwriter Dennis Potter
once talked of "the songs you hear from the top of the stairs",
when you're tucked up in bed, and your parents have asked a few
friends to play charades, bridge or something naughtier. Une
Petite Fille is one of those songs for me. Its breathless tempo
and beautiful modulations are a perfect setting for Nougaro’s
unique jazz/operatic style. "Une petite fille en pleurs/dans
une ville en pluie/ou est-elle nom de Dieu…" You could
hear the raindrops crash on the pavement as Nougaro chases his love
through Paris. Nougaro also sang impossibly tender ballads like
Cecile and Blanche-neige. And they say French
pop is crap. Maybe it isn't pop? Maybe it's better? Things like
Jacques Brel's Je Suis Un Soir d'Ete do
not exist in the English language, I'm afraid. Or George
Brassens' Les Passantes, with its marvellous tune,
to which there seems to be no obvious beginning, and to which you
hope there'd be no end. Or Les Freres Jacques'
Madame la Marquise a dit, a supremely witty, delicate sucre
d'orge of a song, wrapped in orchestral puff pastry. I suppose I'm
surprising myself; I was not conscious that those songs still had
the power to move me so much. Just a passing phase, probably. Next
month, expect Louis Philippe's Top Ten Led Zeppelin
songs. Will Achilles' Last Stand make the shortlist? En
attendant, un bon mois de novembre à tous et à toutes.
|