Torn and frayed in Manila

The Clash—live

Many of the most intense moments of my life have been at live music events, none more so than the Clash at Brighton Top Rank in early 1980. London Calling, their highwater mark, had just been released and my mates and I had played it non-stop for weeks. I’ve never loved a product so much – from Pennie Smith’s iconic cover photo to the rock steady Revolution Rock and Wrong ‘em Boyo and flat out nuttiness of the Right Profile. They played the whole thing at the gig and as an encore Pete Townsend joined them for My Generation.

I’ll never have a night like that again for sure, but browsing through the Clash videos on YouTube really took me back to another place, time, and, I suppose, another person. I am so glad that I was able to spend my youth during such an incredibly creative period.

They don’t make ‘em like this any more.

This next one is from Paris at about the time I saw them. Oh man ...

Radiohead: Fake Plastic Trees (Glastonbury, 2003)

The littlest birds (sing the prettiest songs)

A lovely slice of Americana to accompany the Be Good Tanya’s best known song.

I'll dedicate this one to Frayed.

Chez Sting

It has always depressed me that, of all the great music produced in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most well known artist in the Philippines is Sting. I’ve detested him from the outset and the day he and the other bleach blonde poseurs from Police arrived I figured that was the end of punk.

I knew the smug Sting was a bourgeois at heart, so it was heartening to see the vanities and excesses of his household exposed so mercilessly in a court case this week. There’s nothing like an aggrieved domestic servant to open up the nasty side of the family circle, eh?

The rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler were ordered to pay their former chef £24,944 yesterday after her “shameful” dismissal when she became pregnant.

Jane Martin, 41, had worked for the 55-year-old singer and his wife for eight years, cooking for stars including Sir Elton John, Bob Geldof and Madonna. The Cordon Bleu chef won a claim of sexual discrimination against the couple after she was unfairly dismissed from her £28,000-a-year job.

… Revealing the lavish lifestyle of the pair, said to be worth £188 million, she told an employment tribunal in Southampton that “opulent extravagance reigned” at their mansion in Wiltshire. She claimed that there was “no regard to expense, cost or wastage” where food and entertaining were concerned at the 300-acre Lake House estate.

On one occasion Mrs Martin restricted caviar at a party to £3,000 worth, but was told by Ms Styler to serve the whole £6,000 stock, much of which was then wasted.
…

She said that, when she announced that she was pregnant in 2005, Ms Styler set about being unpleasant to force her out. She wept as she told the hearing that Ms Styler knew that she had already suffered one miscarriage, but was still required to remain standing for long periods, which sometimes left her doubled up in pain.

She claimed that Ms Styler had said: “Who the f*** does she think she is? She’s my chef in the UK. She needs to be available if I need her, or she should rethink her position.”
…

In an outspoken judgment, the panel castigated Ms Styler for her “shameful conduct” and also for trying to distance herself from the unlawful dismissal by getting “minions” in the family business to “perform her dirty work” during the hearing.

John Lydon interview

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to see John Lydon (neé Johnny Rotten), the old “army of one”, being as difficult as ever in the current Uncut.

The interview starts like this.

What are your memories of the Summer of Punk?

The Summer of Punk? What a meaningless and preposterous term. It sounds like some fool wants to put a compilation album out. I mean it’s all very well and good for you liars in the media. But I intensely dislike that term. It’s emotionally meaningless and historically untrue. An obnoxiously romantic tale on the reality we suffered.

It doesn’t get any better for the interviewer.

There is an argument, postulated by Uncut’s Simon Reynolds, that PiL [Public Image Ltd, Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols split up] were a more important band than the Pistols. What do you reckon to that?

Whoever Simon Reynolds is he’s wrong. He has no knowledge of what happened back then and he dares to compare one aspect of my life with another. He shoves in his two bob’s worth of self important nonsense and expects me to applaud . Well, I’m sorry, but “No”! For me, the Sex Pistols were my first step in life and they were for countless others too. The Pistols were as important to me as when I fell out of the pram and learnt to walk.

They don’t make ‘em like that any more eh?

Bob Dylan—When the deal goes down

Bob + Scarlett Johansson + Super 8 camerawork, oh man – this has to be one of my favorite ever music videos. As Albert said, “it made me long for something I can't put my finger on.” Or as a commenter on YouTube put it:

I just love this video. I can't stop watching it from time to time. It brings me peace.

Thanks John P.

Bob Dylan: Chronicles

Last year Louis Menand of the New Yorker wrote “nothing having to do with Dylan can be alien to me”. I guess that’s an odd way of putting it, but I knew what he meant.

When Chronicles was published in 2004 I avoided it, fearing disappointment. However, a couple of weeks ago I was in Kyoto having a pretty crappy time and I pulled it out on a late night subway train. Now when I think of Bob’s reminiscing I associate it with that train and cracking up over passages like this.

France had just been booted out on North Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh after one hundred years of colonial rule. He had seen enough of the French. They had turned Hanoi, the capital city, into the “brothel-studded Paris of the orient.” He kicked them out and would now be getting his supplies from Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The French had been plundering the country for years. The press reported that Hanoi was grubby and cheerless, that the Chinese dressed in shapeless jackets and you couldn’t tell the difference between the men and the women—everybody rode a bicycle and did calisthenics in public three times a day. The newspapers made it sound as if it were a weird place. The Vietnamese might have to be straightened out—might have to send some Americans over there.

What comes out so strongly from Chronicles (and from “Theme Time Radio”, of which more another time) is Dylan’s passion for the work of other musicians. In fact he talks a lot more about other artists than about his own work. Here he is on another of my heroes, Hank Williams.

They called him a “hillbilly singer” but I didn’t know what that was. … Hank was no burr head. There was nothing clownish about him. Even at a young age, I identified fully with him. I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad. … I’d learn later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on the New Year’s day, kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true. But it was true. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud.

Dylan also talks knowledgeably and interesting about the recording process (“Johnston’s thinking that everything I’m recording is fantastic, he always does”), the perils of being a “spokesman for a generation”, and a whole lot of other stuff from the good old days. It’s at a bookstore near you, as they say – and there is nothing in it that can be alien to me, as Louis Menand and I would say.

Home — where’s that?

Funnily enough, this dirty old town is about the closest I’ve ever got to having one.

Home it’s where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.

Some of you are going to hate the next one I'm afraid. In anticipation of this, I can only adapt Elvis Costello’s warning in the liner notes of Almost Blue: “This video clip contains Country & Western Music & may produce radical reaction in narrow minded people".

Iris DeMent watching her home town die under her feet.

Opening lines

Happy new year everyone (if there is anyone still out there after such a protracted spell of laziness).

Let’s kick 2007 off with some opening lines from rock songs. I won’t identify them, since if you are broadly from my generation you will know them already and if you are not you won’t care.

I compiled this list with a couple of old friends, so it is biased towards the songs we shared in our youth. I listen to very few of them these days, but believe me they’re still locked away. When the years have taken away my memories of my homes, my friends, even my lovers, there will still be a gin-soaked bar-room queen floating around in there somewhere …

Take it away Mick:

”Childhood living, it’s easy to do"

”Busted flat in Baton Rouge"

"I was born in a cross fire hurricane"

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"

"I read the news today oh boy"

"Dressed like that you must be living in a different world"

“Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste"

"London calling to the faraway towns"

"If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?"

"As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent you asked for the latest party"

"Her green plastic watering can
For her fake chinese rubber plant"

“The screen door slams"

"I am an Antichrist, I am an anarchist"

"It's so funny to be seeing you after so long girl"

“Maybe I didn’t treat you, just as good as I should have”

”We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor"

”There must be some kind of way out of here"

”We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun”

“Start spreading the news"

”And now the end is here"

“I always flirt with death”

“God save the queen her fascist regime
It made you a moron”

"I can't seem to face up to the facts"

”I don't know just where I'm going"

"As the snow flies, on a cold and gray Chicago mornin'"

”I keep a close watch on this heart of mine"

“Mother, mother"

“I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis”

"Well I just got into town about an hour ago.
Took a look around me which way the wind blows"

"Outside another yellow moon punched a hole in the nighttime"

"Keep your eyes on the road your hands upon the wheel”

"Nobody feels any pain"

"Dreamed you paid your dues in Canada"

"Holly came from out on the Island"

“Watch out. You might get what you’re after”

"Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans"

"With your mercury mouth in the missionary times"

Wow, those lines are the madeleine to my Proust I can tell you. They work in different ways; some set the tone (“skipped a light fandango”), some would be good lines wherever they appeared (“Watch out. You might get what you’re after”, some provide a shock entry (“I always flirt with death”), sometimes it’s just the way he sings it (“Start spreading the news”).

And some change the world (“Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans”)

Anyway, if these tunes mean anything to you I hope you enjoyed recalling them and that they took you back to somewhere nice.

Thanks for the songs John and Al.

Postscript. Sometimes it’s not really the first line that does it but the opening two or three or even the whole opening verse. I couldn’t resist adding these.

"She used to work in a diner.
Never saw a woman look finer.
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor"

“Left a good job in the city,
Workin' for The Man every night and day,
And I never lost one minute of sleepin',
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been.”

“Standing on the corner,
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset, and Jane is her vest,
And me I’m in a rocknroll band!”

“Today I passed you on the street and my heart fell at your feet
I can't help it if I'm still in love with you”

“They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark,
She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones.
'Twas then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate.”

And sometimes the second verse is so good you just have to put that in as well!

“I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.”

David Byrne on packaging and music

For my generation, cover artwork is an inseparable part of the concept of an “album”. Here are a few famous examples of what I mean.

However, David Byrne has recently argued on his blog that the link between the artist and the cover of an album is usually a tenuous one.

The usual assumption is that much of this imagery, like music videos, is a reflection of, and extension of, the music creator’s sensibility. As if the packaging and the videos were usually under the direct control of the author. This is absurd. Though pop artists attempted to wrestle control of the way they were presented from the distributors beginning in the 60s, most LPs design, and music videos as well, are directed and designed under the control of the record companies.

I usually see eye to eye with the great man, but I’m not entirely with him in this. Is it necessarily a bad thing for artwork to be arranged by the record label rather than the artist? When I was a book publisher, I was amazed at how many cover suggestions from authors were predictable (all my Chinese authors wanted a book in red and gold), irrelevant (“but it’s my wife’s favourite painting!”), or downright tacky. Some writers, like some rock stars, have a great feel for design, but in my experience many are completely clueless. (This is not to say the record labels and book publishers always get it right of course. There is nothing more depressing than entering a book store to see an old friend enfolded in a picture of Meryl Streep or Johnny Depp, just because a second-rate film adaptation has just come out.)

Still, the role cover artwork plays in forming the concept of an album is an interesting area. No doubt it was immature of me, but in my teenage years the photo of the Doors leaning up against the bar on the inside sleeve of Morrison Hotel (and my yearning to look as cool as Jim Morrison) meant at least as much to me as the driving Roadhouse Blues. It may the case as David Byrne says that “The (sometimes) imaginary connection between the author and the packaging of his or her product is not in fact a direct link. It is a marketing button that the sales people have learned to press, over and over”, but couldn’t one say the same about some of the music, the clothes, the image? If I listen to “Life During Wartime” (as I am doing now) how direct is my connection to the four human beings who made this song? Even just after Fear of Music, the album it is on, came out, the relationship between me and the artists who made it was filtered through the opinions of the music press, of my friends, of other music. All in all it was a cloudy brew that made up my relationship with the bands of my youth -- the "art", for want of a better word, was the main thing of course, but there were plenty of other elements too.

And at a gap of more 25 years the relationship to the artist gets even more complicated, covered by layers of nostalgia, irony … oh man.

The point I’m slowly coming to is, even if the packaging was to a large extent a commercial decision, that doesn’t really matter. For a fan, especially a young fan, while there will be album covers, like songs, that you prefer to others, generally you buy into the concept hook, line, sinker, and artwork.

Funnily enough it doesn’t seem to matter too much whether you like the cover artwork or not. Take the Aladdin Sane cover (above). If ever there was an iconic cover (and I’m quite pleased that I avoided using that word until now) the androgynous rockstar with the Z across his face is it. Yet, although the cover artwork of its more path-breaking predecessor, the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was a much more drab affair (being a touched up photo of David Bowie in a rainstreaked street in Soho), we loved it anyway. (Though now David Byrne mentioned it, I could well believe that this one was dreamed up over a boozy lunch by a lazy marketing executive.)

The relationship between the cover and the rest of the “concept” becomes apparent from the sense of dislocation you feel on encountering an album you know well with a different cover. The Spanish version of Sticky Fingers (with its brilliant Warhol-designed zipper jettisoned in favour of a jar of treacle in deference to Franco-era sensibilities) is a good example. Somehow such vandalism taints the whole notion of Sticky Fingers; how can you enjoy Sister Morphine when it is wrapped in treacle?

Finally, going back to the 1960s-1980s heyday of vinyl album covers, there is the practical function they perfomed as drug paraphernalia. iTunes ain’t gonna be be much use for that is it?

There, I’ve rambled on for so long I haven’t even come to one of the main points in David Byrne’s post—what the digitization of music means for cover artwork. However, he knows much more about this than I ever will, so if you are interested in that subject here is that link again.

Thanks for the link Butch.