101 Songs: May 2020

Friday 29 May 2020

All the Mercury Winners - ranked

I listened to all the Mercury Prize winning albums.

I’ve pontificated on the rights and wrongs of the winning choices in the past without actually having listened to all the winners all the way through. Who would believe I could be such a phony?

I wondered if there’d be many surprises. There weren’t really.

Before I started, there was only one winning album I truly loved, 'The Hour of the Bewilderbeast' by Badly Drawn Boy, and that remains the case.

I think the one I dreaded most was Roni Size’s ‘Reprazent’ – 1 hr 20 of drum’n’bass, oof – but actually I found it very agreeable, much more full of nuance and peaks and troughs and hooks than I expected. Conversely, I couldn’t be arsed with 'Screamadelica' this time around (I have listened to it a fair bit in the past) – yeah, yeah, I know it’s great, but Bobby Gillespie’s voice just gets me in all the wrong places, and it drifts in the middle.

It’s interesting that, after the 90s, where each winner stands on its own, there are a few patterns – early 2000s – a bit urban, mid 2000s, solid, successful indie, turn of 2010 – slippery, arthouse indie, bulk of 2010s – varied, eclectic black artists.

My least favourite is the slippery indie – I just can’t be doing with the XX and Alt-J, especially the latter. James Blake pretty much, too, though I heard a glimmer this time around with him.

Anyway here’s my list from favourite to least favourite:

The Hour of Bewilderbeast - Badly Drawn Boy
Psychodrama - Dave
Suede - Suede
Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
Boy in da Corner - Dizzee Rascal
The Seldom Seen Kid - Elbow
Dummy - Portishead
I Am a Bird Now - Antony and the Johnsons
At Least for Now - Benjamin Clementine
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea - PJ Harvey
Visions of a Life - Wolf Alice
Process - Sampha
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys
Screamadelica - Primal Scream
New Forms - Roni Size & Reprazent
Dead - Young Fathers
Konnichiwa - Skepta
Different Class - Pulp
Elegant Slumming - M People
Speech Therapy - Speech Debelle
Let England Shake - PJ Harvey
Overgrown - James Blake
A Little Deeper - Ms. Dynamite
xx - The xx
Bring It On - Gomez
Ok - Talvin Singh
An Awesome Wave - alt-J
Myths of the Near Future - Klaxons

Friday 15 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 10: Ash (Somerset House, 2003)

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs" (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

I’ll end with this one. I noticed I’d mainly neglected the festivals, and there were a lot of fabulous slots at festivals. There we go. I’ve written about a few other gigs before – links here.

https://101songs.blogspot.com/2019/07/bob-dylan-neil-young-etc-at-hyde-park.html

https://101songs.blogspot.com/2017/10/nick-cave-and-bad-seeds-at-o2.html

https://101songs.blogspot.com/2015/09/background-noises.html

https://101songs.blogspot.com/2015/05/super-furry-animals-at-brixton-academy.html

https://101songs.blogspot.com/2013/10/this-is-for-leonard-if-hes-still-here.html

Wilco (followed by the Bad Seeds) are the best band I’ve seen, Iron and Wine doing ‘The Trapeze Swinger’ at Green Man was the best moment, Leonard Cohen at the O2 was, next to Blur, the best single gig.

I considered writing about Arcade Fire headlining Green Man, Arcade Fire being a band I’m mainly disappointed by but in the moment of their wordless chorus to ‘Wake Up’ as the whole crowd sang along, I could have believed they were the greatest band imaginable.

But I’ll end with Ash at Somerset House in 2003. A beautiful London evening in a beautiful London courtyard. I went to two Somerset House shows I think. Ash supported by Electric Soft Parade, Belle and Sebastian supported by The Shins the following year. I’m trying to figure out why I don’t consider any one single B and S gig memorable enough to include. I’ve probably seen them about 10 times, and never been disappointed – they do good gigs, but they did settle for all-round entertainment, didn’t they? I can’t think of many people hating a B and S gig, but you never know.

But Stuart M has always (or at least since 2001 when I first saw them) been determined to make it a bit of a fun, rather than a soul-stirrer …

Not that Ash are soul-stirrers… I’d remembered the gig as one of the all-time greats, yet, when looking it up online to check my memories, found a really sniffy 3* review of it in the Independent saying it didn’t really enhance the setting, it was just another quite good Ash gig, the band had only one gear, Tim Wheeler was a limited lyricist etc … and time tells us there’s a truth to that.

That was a band at their peak, I suppose. Ridiculous to think they were only 26, they’d already had a Greatest Hits collection out. Charlotte Hatherley added something extra to the band, undoubtedly, some Pixies element. Wheeler wielded his v-shape guitar, they had Girl from Mars, Burn Baby Burn, Envy, Wild Surf, Oh Yeah, Goldfinger, Kung Fu, Candy, Angel Interceptor, Candy, Shining Light, Jack Names the Planet, Walking Barefoot, Sometimes, A Life Less Ordinary, three gleaming new songs.

They had enough for a relentlessly fun and joyful gig in London in the summertime … and Ash have done plenty of good songs since then, they really have, but nothing’s really bothered popular consciousness again. You wouldn’t have guessed that evening that that would be the case, that Tim Wheeler wouldn’t hit the sweet spot perfectly again.

And sometime a great gig is when a band is just at that point, when they have neither too few great songs nor too many, and the sun’s shining and you’re happy, and that’s all …

Thursday 14 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 9: Fence Collective (West London, 2001)

I mean, Notting Hill, of all places. I was at university in St Andrew for four years, complaining about the lack of live music, literally living for two of those years a few yards from Kenny Anderson’s CD store, going in there every week to buy music, talking to him, asking him if he had the new Beta Band record in, looking at posters on the wall and over town for gigs at the Cellar Bar for the likes of Pip Dylan, The Lone Pigeon and King Creosote, and I didn’t really put two and two together. Or, at least, not until 4^th year, when they weren’t doing so many gigs in St Andrews anymore.

What do I blame? Two things – 1. The monikers … King Creosote sounded like it would be a silly student band, all the names did. I’ve seen Kenny Anderson now playing in all kinds of places, on the main stages of big festivals, at the Royal Festival Hall, the Assembly Rooms, at my local church, I’ve seen him nominated for the Mercury Prize, and I still reckon he’d have twice as many fans if he had a different pseudonym. 2. I think early in first year someone had told me The Cellar Bar was a bit of an old man pub … in St Andrews there were great old man pubs and rubbish old man pubs and I’d foolishly categorised it as the latter … a big mistake – it was only in 4^th year I realised it was one of the better pubs in town.

So, anyway, Notting Hill, some new club called the Cherry Tree or something, there was a Fence Records Night in December of 2001.

By then, I was a Fence fan – the legend of the Lone Pigeon had spread. There were Fence samplers you could buy – one of them, Fence Sampler 3, https://www.discogs.com/Various-Fence-Sampler-3/release/5546546 contains some pure genius. If you don’t know ‘Amsterdam’ by UNPOC, I’m telling you that is one of the best pop songs ever written and you can believe me or not.

We’d bought a Lone Pigeon EP called ‘Touched by Tomoko’ and then there was a joint single that got a bit of play on late night radio, and that’s when I first heard ‘St Patrick’ by James Yorkston, which remains one of my all-time favourite songs. I think that was just a few days before the show at Cherry Tree.

I went along, I think with my friend Jamie, it was a pretty disorganised affair, but there was music all night – I think they’d play in three song bursts. Lou Barlow was there, and I think some other American indie hero, though I can’t remember which one – Barlow played a couple of songs, included ‘Flame’, which I like a lot, and then some guy was nagging him and I gave him a knowing sympathetic look which was probably as annoying as the guy nagging him. Yorkston played ‘St Patrick’ and ‘Sweet Jesus’, I reckon, King Creosote played, maybe, ‘What a Klutz I Was’, something like that, was Pictish Trail there, maybe, I was most interesting in the Lone Pigeon, who played a few songs, I bumped into him giving himself a pep talk in the toilet.

Jamie left earlyish and I think it went on a fair bit, later than gigs usually do, and I stayed getting progressively drunker on my own – when I left I went up to Kenny Anderson and thanked him, which was a) weird because he was the star of the show but b) not weird because I’d bought CDs off him for four years. But probably weird.

Anyway, around this time, and really all the time between 2001 and 2011ish, I really did go to a lot of gigs in London, just, gig gig gig, whatever came up. For better or worse. Some of them I have little memory of, some of them were somehow a bit magical.

Wednesday 13 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 8: Gruff Rhys (Ashford, 2014)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourites per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs" (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

I worked out that I’ve seen over 300 different acts all told. Probably a fair few more that I’ve forgotten. I’ve seen some of them multiple times. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone more than Gruff Rhys, if you combine the Furries and Gruff solo – I think it’s about 10 of SFA and 5 as a solo artist.

I started off writing about the incredible Furries comeback gig in 2015 at Brixton Academy, but then realised I’d written about that at the time! https://101songs.blogspot.com/2015/05/super-furry-animals-at-brixton-academy.html So, I thought I’d write about the first time I saw the Furries, in September 2001, also at Brixton Academy (which I’m pretty certain is the venue I’ve been to most, and my favourite), and the way both gigs gained great potency from the earth-shakingly bad events that had preceded them (9/11 and the Tory 2015 election win, respectively), the way the Furries were a deeply political band who could both capture and fight against the spirit of the times.

Maybe I could have written about seeing them at Brixton in 2003, when the actor Kieron O’Brien stood directly in front of me being filmed during ‘Slow Life’, which I later realised was for the “experimental” Michael Winterbottom film ‘9 Songs’, which, then, wondering if I’d be in it, I went to see on my own at the Ritzy, just down the road, and I wasn’t the only man on his own there. In fact, it was only men on their own (I didn’t see myself in the film, sadly …)

Instead, because I’m writing a lot about gigs in London, I thought I’d write about one in Ashford – at St Mary’s Church, which is a lovely place for a bit of music. This will be about Gruff as a solo artist but also about the Furries, and the difference between the two.

Gruff doesn’t say much when he’s fronting the Furries. Why would he? The songs speak for themselves. But also, I wonder if he recognises his famous speech patterns would disrupt the momentum of the show. The songs run the gig, not the performer. Apart from the occasional “Thankooverymuch. This next one is about … digestive … biscuits” you don’t hear a great deal. Music, costumes, visuals do all the work.

Whereas, particularly when he was touring ‘American Interior’, he talked a great deal. Brilliantly. The point of ‘American Interior’ was that it was, as well as a gig, a lecture, a slideshow, a story, but nevertheless the skill, the flare, the timing, the humour, with which Gruff told the story was a revelation (at Revelation).

I thought of that when watching the brilliant comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, last year. She uses her timing as a great asset, leaving the spaces, holding back the punchlines – the audience bends to the speed at which she talks, and then bursts with laughter at the pay-off. So it is that as one man on stage, telling his story in its entirety, with slides, words and songs, Gruff controls the atmosphere, which is, I think, different from a Furries gig, where the setlist, the noise, is everything.

Of course, being as how it’s a gig in a church in the middle of middle-England, as I was leaving, I heard a woman grousing that “she couldn’t understand a word he was saying” just as there were people who thought ‘The Wire’ should have subtitles.

Anyway, I’m proud to be part of that little sub-category of people who think Gruff Rhys is all the Beatles at once (well, he still describes himself as a drummer, which is where he started, so that’s the Ringo bit) --- he has, I think, a peculiar ideological purity which may have hindered things at various points – it is funny that the solo and group career are completely distinct, that he’s never (as far as I’m aware) played a Furries song at a Gruff Rhys gig. Which is a shame at first, but now I think he’s right.

I 'n' Gigs 7: First Aid Kit (Islington, 2010)

This was a good gig for me. I met my wife Juliette there. Good place to meet a person, Union Chapel. Great place for singers to sing too.

I remember I’d just got back from holiday in Portugal, so London felt particularly freezing that early March night. I waited outside with my friends Laura and James, whose friend Juliette was also due to attend. She texted him to say she’d be late. We went in.

That it was a church with pews, and that, with my many years of churchgoing, I had developed certain notions of pew etiquette, probably proved crucial to our future lives.

We sat on a pew quite near the back. I was on the end. Juliette, who didn’t know that anyone was attending apart from James, Laura and her, arrived during the support act, smiled and gestured at me as if to indicate, “sorry, can I get past, my friends are sitting next to you”. I, armed not only with the knowledge that they were my friends too, but also with the understanding that people who turn up late for church just pop themselves at the end of the pew and that’s that, smiled back politely and unbudgeingly. Juliette sat down next to me. And here we are.

What else do I remember about the night? Ed Harcourt was there. Over the previous years, not only had I seen Ed Harcourt in concert several times, I’d also, coincidentally been at a lot of the same events as him, whether gigs or even the cinema a couple of times. I remember a concert he played a year or so before that, he’d begun the show by walking through the crowd playing the guitar, and I’d remembered he’d walked past me and given me a look of half-recognition. Well, this time, at Union Chapel, as I passed him on the stairs, I remember he nodded/smiled at me like he properly knew me – whether this was a mistake, a simple fact of recognising a fan, or he was thinking “jesus, it’s my stalker again, be nice and I’ll get away alive” … I’ll never know.

First Aid Kit were young, very young. They had few songs, and some of those songs (as they still do) sounded a bit callow. But the glory of their voices together when they really sang was undeniable, unstoppably beautiful.

They did ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, the Fleet Foxes cover that had first made them a youtube sensation, they did ‘Ghost Town’, which remains one of their very best songs.

I feel like it was quite a short gig, because there was plenty of time to have a drink in the makeshift bar afterwards, which, again, I suppose, was a good thing.

Tuesday 12 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 6: Sufjan Stevens (London, 2006) or rather St Vincent (London, 2006)

Support acts, you know … they don’t get their due. A great support act can really set up a gig. So can a terrible one, to be fair, as you’ll be begging for the main event.

Went to see Sufjan Stevens, still Illinoise-making, in late 2006 at the Barbican. Out rolled quietly beforehand, “Hi, I’m Annie, I’ve started calling myself St Vincent, I play in Sufjan’s band and I’m going to play a few songs of my own before his show”.

Here’s a thing, it’s of more interest to me than anyone else, but since I’m here and this is how my mind works, St Vincent had named herself, shortly before that, after a line in Nick Cave’s ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’ … “and Dylan Thomas died drunk in St Vincent’s Hospital” which happened on 9^th November 1953 which was my dad’s 14^th birthday, and anyway I love that it’s Dylan Thomas and Nick Cave that inspired St Vincent as the link’s not obvious what with her supposed persona being cool and futuristic, but actually there’s so much depth and sadness in some of her songs.

And Dylan Thomas did the drinking that took him to St Vincent’s Hospital in the White Horse Tavern, where Brendan Behan used to drink, and Liam Clancy used to drink with Bob Dylan and they’d sing ‘The Parting Glass’ and also at the Barbican in 2005 I’d seen Liam Clancy and Odetta, two old friends and such huge parts of what influenced Dylan, reminiscing and duetting, and, anyway, I used to listen to Clancy records at my dad’s flat, and my mum had an Odetta record, so I love how all these pieces of trivia fit into a pot.

Another thing about Annie Clark when she was Annie Clark not St Vincent – she was in the Polyphonic Spree. They had a bit of hype in the early 2000s, then their album was pretty disappointing and it seemed like a bit of a silly stunt.

They were playing while the sun was still beating down on the first Thursday evening of my first Benicassim in 2005, and much to our surprise, they were brilliant. And, though I don’t remember it that well, I remember that it wasn’t just that they were funny and fitting and a bunch of people having fun in cloaks, but there was something actually brilliant and compelling there, and though I know it’s my visual imagination playing tricks, I can see Annie Clark in my version of that gig, singing and playing guitar in that bold, angular style, elevating the whole enterprise.

Well, anyway, at the Sufjan Stevens support slot (for what it’s worth, the actual Sufjan Stevens gig was also utterly superb), I remember she played ‘Paris is Burning’ and that was cool but the one that I loved was ‘Marry Me John’ and that line “let’s do what Mary and Joseph did (long pause) … without the kid” and I think I audibly gasped at the brilliance of it.

And as it happens, these “John” songs have been down the backbone of St Vincent’s work – there have been three of them, ‘Marry Me John’, ‘Prince Johnny’ and ‘Happy Birthday Johnny’ and the latter is just one of the saddest saddest songs you’ll ever hear … ithe whole thing’s like the ‘Before’ trilogy of indie-rock platonic love.

When I think of the support acts I’ve caught – St Vincent, Feist, James Blunt, The Shins, Vampire Weekend, Florence and the Machine, Goldie Lookin’ Chain, The Magic Numbers, Father John Misty, that I can think of (though there may well be more) have gone on to be bigger, in a sense, than the act they were supporting.

I 'n' Gigs 5: Blur (London, 2009)

This is, when all the votes are counted, the best of them.

Blur in Hyde Park in July 2009.

This was the first show they announced after a 5 year absence. I snapped up four tickets. They’d go on to announce another Hyde Park show the day before and, of course, headline Glastonbury the week before. I tried to avoid seeing the Glastonbury show on TV or hearing clips of it, not wanting to spoil the impact.

Everything about the day. It was one of the great London days. Sizzling, before sizzling gave us the shivers. I went with Mikey, Alexander and John. I remember Mikey had broken his arm the month before, so one of our duties was to protect anyone from bumping into his sling. John came down from Edinburgh. He’d been down 8 months before, having bought me tickets to see Paul Weller for my birthday, but then the weekend before that was meant to happen, in November 2008, I’d broken my leg. Accident-prone times.

This was a better replacement for Weller. It was an event. Blur were the band of my generation, I think. More than Oasis, because I tend to think Oasis transcended generations a bit more, and they feel like a damaged and woolly entity now. Blur were more precise, so could never be quite so massive, yet they really were as massive as they could be for a while, and being there, a decade and a half later, with 60,000 others that day felt like a generational happening.

We four were all 30 – younger than we thought. It felt, at the time, like going back to youth – now, of course, it feels like we were still, just about, in that youth. None of us were married yet or had children – the other three would all be married within a year, for me it would be 5 years later.

Everything about the day. We approached from Green Park, walked up through Mayfair and had a lunchtime pint in a pub. So I’d already had my two DVTs and my leg break – I think this will have been one of the first days after being put on blood thinners for good that I fully relaxed, went against medical advice, and thought fuck it with the alcohol, thinking life’s too long not to (for better or worse).

I’d missed seeing Blur in their first prime, even though they were the gateway for me, the first music of my own generation that I loved (it was, of all things, ‘End of a Century’ on ‘Top of the Pops’) – there were a couple of times I should have gone, but between 94 and 99 I just wasn’t a gig goer, and, then suddenly, stupidly, it felt like the chance to see them had gone.

So, this was the next century, and, thankfully, the universal was … not free but a very reasonable £45 for the day. These days, something like that would be upward of £70. The support line-up … Deerhoof (who we didn’t pay much attention to), Florence and the Machine, Amadou and Mariam, Vampire Weekend … pretty fucking good really.

We were well-positioned. Of course, then the worry is timing, food, drink, toilet breaks, losing your position. Other friends were nearby, within about 50 metres, I think, but we never found each other, too densely packed and losing signal.

But I think we all got it right. I don’t remember missing anything. Florence and the Machine and Vampire Weekend became headliners in their own right not long afterwards, but that day, they were a glorious warm-up pleasure.

I’ve been looking at pictures of the day. We look happy. And thin, and young. There were a lot of Fred Perrys about, including on stage. We sang along to almost everything. It seemed like everybody did. I think Blur’s songs are exceptionally good for singing along to. Maybe ‘cos Albarn is a good not great singer and when he writes some of those soaring notes, he’s testing himself and you feel like you in the crowd are testing yourself along with him.

“And it LOOOKS like we might have made it …”

“This is a LOOOOOW”

“When the DAYS JUST SEEM TO FALL THROUGH YOU”

“And I don’t know bout YOOOO”

And, of course …

“Oh my baby, oh my baby”

which was as cheesy and wonderful as everyone said ...

I remember that day seeing lots of people I vaguely recognised, or fully recognised. It did feel like a massive gathering of friends, which is so rare. I mean, for me, it’s pretty unprecedented.

It was a hits set. Nothing to promote. Mikey and I went to see them in Hyde Park again in 2015 and they were brilliant again. I love ‘The Magic Whip’, I think it’s one of their 4 best albums, but as they played about half of it, sometimes the mood dropped a little, just a little. Also, in 2009, I feel like a band at Hyde Park could still get away with a massive sound. By 2015, if you were well positioned, it was fine, but the ground didn’t shake.

Blur are such a proper band, aren’t they? Four such entities, for good or bad. Each one irreplaceable. I tend to think the fact Albarn was able to diversify so successfully has meant Blur have, very unusually, never got too small or too big ... they haven't dwindled to a decent but smaller version of themselves, not have they kept on chasing big success and become flabby.

Funny, I’m not sure, now, I’d place them in my 10 favourite bands, I’m not sure they’d quite make it in terms of what I fall back on listening to, but the love they inspired in the 90s and on that day had a hugeness I think I’ve only been part of the once.

Here’s a lovely postscript I’ve just remembered. Me, Juliette and Rosa were at Leeds Castle last year and we got talking to a mother and her little boy, who was about R’s age. And he was talking about something he liked … I can’t remember exactly what it was, trains, I think, and he said “they give me a sense of parklife” and we did a double-take and the mother said they were massive Blur fans and played it to him all the time and he loved it.

How about that … good days that give me a sense of parklife.

Monday 11 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 4: Brian Wilson (London, 2002 - could have sworn it was 2003 or 4 but seems to have been 2002)

This was a stunning gig, part of his ‘Pet Sounds’ residency, though my memories of it are a bit patchy. I remember, inevitably, that the crowd was a different vibe to most of the gigs I was going to back then, and that when they stood to dance for the encore it felt like a bacchanalian letting-go for some.

I remember there were a lot of famous people there. A lot. You could see them everywhere. When I was waiting at the Royal Festival Hall bar beforehand, Brett Anderson was also there, looking a little pensive, and then Crispin Hunt, formerly of the Longpigs, came past, and they spotted each other, and greeted each other like long-lost friends, and it was a rather lovely moment. Britpop seemed such a long time ago to me then, but now the 6 years or so since their prime seems like the blink of an eye.

What also do I remember of the concert? The band, primarily comprised of the Wondermints, were incredible. Incredible. There were so many people on stage. Brian sat behind his keyboard but was clearly having a wonderful time throughout. His voice was what it was, you know ... there were a lot of other voices doing a lot of work.

The moment of ‘Pet Sounds’ I was looking forward to the most is the one moment of the whole album which didn’t happen – the ineffably beautiful bit in ‘Caroline No’ where he goes “oh Caroline you broke my heart” … he clearly couldn’t get up that to that note, so they arranged it differently, which is fine, and just a reminder that sometimes the very best bits of pop music are the most difficult (I remember a similar things seeing the Shins around the same time when, on record, he goes up an octave to sing the refrain “mercy’s eyes are blue when she places them in front of you” and, live, he, to my great disappointment, didn’t do that octave leap …)

They did Pet Sounds, and (before or after, I can’t quite remember) there were more songs, all the great Beach Boys megahits, 'Help Me Rhonda' and 'Don't Worry Baby' and all, and there were so many of them – they just kept coming, and it really really was joyous.

I suppose that was the high point of the notion that Wilson was pop’s greatest genius and ‘Pet Sounds’ the greatest album of all time.

I’m not sure that many people would say that now, and I’ve gradually moved away from that album and from listening to the Beach Boys regularly myself.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the late recreation of ‘Smile’ both live and on record – there is a certain truth in the fact that the Beach Boys lyrics can go too much one way or the other. I read a very persuasive article once by Ian MacDonald arguing that, for all its beauty, ‘Pet Sounds’ is essentially a childish album, compared to what the Beatles and the Stones were doing at the same time, and what others would do later.

Aah, but who cares, really … Fun. Fun. Fun.

I 'n' Gigs 3: Badly Drawn Boy (Glasgow, 2000)

In one respect I’ve found that most rock stars are, thankfully, not that rock’n’roll at all. And that is punctuality. One hears different things about the megastars, but, for 95% of the gigs I’ve ever been to, they have started pretty much on time, and ended on time.

However rebellious they are in their hearts, most performers are clearly not keen to annoy venues and promoters, not to mention their fans, by playing fast and loose with timekeeping.

So, you know where this is going …

We went through from St Andrews to Glasgow in October 2000 to see BDB, hot off his Mercury success, at Queen Margaret’s Union. It was a memorable gig.

It was wild.

I think we were aware it was going to be his shtick – the music papers were speculating how much it was for real and how much it was an act – I’ll get to that in more detail a little later.

He was drinking heavily throughout; perhaps aware of the likes of Dave Allen and Dean Martin who had pretended to drink through performances, I remember briefly wondering if that’s what BDB was doing … but it wasn’t.

He was late on, he got cross, he made jokes, he fell over, he started and stopped ‘Disillusion’ over and over again, he got a piggy back, he went on and on and on. I feel like the gig finished about 1.30 – maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I have never before or since seen an artist allowed to flout curfew laws so thoroughly.

It was, on balance, a great gig. He was properly funny and compelling, his best songs were brilliant, he was on the edge and knew how to pull through to victory.

I remember the next day, we went for the first time to Fopp on Byres Road and it was like being let loose in heaven, we’d never seen anything like it. So, a great expedition.

Badly Drawn Boy soundtracked that last year at Uni for me more than I care to remember. I still maintain ‘The Hour of Bewilderbeast’ is one of the very best British albums of the era.

What next for him? Maybe he never hit such heights again. Though I wouldn’t say that’s the whole story.

I saw him live again, in Edinburgh, in the summer of 2003, just before the release of his second full album ‘Have You Fed the Fish?’. In between there’d been the soundtrack to ‘About the Boy’ which was a pretty unambiguous success and there was every reason to think success would build on success. He seemed to have a capacity for hit records, for pop songs.

It wasn’t so good a gig as the one in Glasgow. It was fine. There were attempts to recreate the spontaneity and madness, but they felt a bit forced. Still, the songs sounded good.

He’d been recording the album in Olympic Studios, Barnes, and my friend Laura, who was at the gig, had been working there. So, rather splendidly, we were able to go backstage. Andy Rourke was in his band then, he was there, so was Andy Votel the producer. I must say BDB, and the rest of them, were altogether delightful, very nice, welcoming and funny. The hour or so we were there, nevertheless, still haunts me for a couple of dim, embarrassing things I said, but that’s just me!

But ‘Have You Fed the Fish’ was, though initially engaging, just not quite the album ‘Bewilderbeast’ was. His star started to fade. I remember seeing him playing on something like TOTP a couple of years later and I remember being struck by how static and scared he looked. It made me think of that first, wild, wonderful, well-watered gig in a different way.

By and large it’s been diminishing returns since then – there has been little buzz about any of the succeeding albums. I was listening to a couple of Apple Playlists of his songs while writing this, though, and there were a few startlingly moving songs from later on in his career I’d not paid much attention to before.

He has a new album next month, which I have, despite myself, a renewed excitement for. Not sure I’d see him live again, though.

Sunday 10 May 2020

I 'n' Gigs 2: Slushfund (London, 1995)

The first gig I went to was a band called Slushfund. I saw them five times. Either the first or the second was at the Garage in Highbury, which is a pretty impressive venue, considering they were a band started by some boys from school.

I was friends with the drummer Andy. Then there were three on guitars, all extremely tall. Two brothers and a cousin. I’d known one of them, Tom, for a long, long time from cricket – he’d always been pretty surly and sarcastic to me, but now that surliness all made sense – he’d been rock’roll along. The singer was one of the brothers’ girlfriend – she, as I recall, wore a red cocktail dress, whereas the boys all looked suitably grungey and dishevelled. It was a solid well-considered all-round look.

I was, by that stage, into that thing called Britpop in a very nascent and ill-informed way, so Slushfund weren’t quite my thing, as I thought all songs should be about markets and roast dinners.

But they were really very good, I think in retrospect. Andy, my friend, was, in particular, excellent at drumming. I think I watched him for most of that gig. I didn’t do much else. I was literally and physically petrified. I was stone. I had no idea how to be in the space. There were some boys from the year below me who were also there, and they were dancing and singing along and punching the air and I remember thinking “how have they even got the nerve to do that?”. I didn’t even tap my toe. I know that, because I remember watching the Flaming Lips about four years later and thinking “wow, this is the first time I’ve ever tapped me toe at a gig, I’m wild, I’m elemental”.

So, I’m not sure I massively enjoyed the experience. I went five times out of duty and I suppose because it was going out and I hadn’t done much of that by that point, so it was something. I don’t think I drank. I began to recognise their pretty catchy songs, and that helped me find a little more ease from gig to gig.

As well as the Garage, I’m trying to remember where else I saw them … those classic North London venues, maybe the Monarch, maybe the Bull and Gate … I remember one of them was a kind of “Battle of the Bands” and one of the other bands had this blonde lead singer who looked like Joe Elliott from Def Leppard and one of the lyrics he sang was “the soul is dead, long live the skin” and, even then, I knew that was years out of date and naff beyond any reckoning.

Tom, his brother and cousin, looked the part and could really play - I remember thinking “god, some people have spent their adolescence well. I wish I’d done that.”

It’s a frustrating habit to always think “dammit, I’ve missed my chance”. I was 17 and I already thought I was too old to learn guitar, too old to catch up with that level of competence. So I didn’t (pretty certain I’d have been shit with my fat fingers, but anyway …). When you’re young, the point where you’ve missed your chance is often later than you think, isn’t?* With cricket, I went through most of my youth being, you know, pretty good, and then, at 16, I went up to actually really pretty good for a few months, and it still pains me that I didn’t grasp that nettle and spend the next couple of years trying to get from that to noticeably very good and thus give myself a small chance. But, at 16, I already thought it was too late. * of course, it’s just as true that sometimes your chance is gone before you know it.

Anyway, those were the thoughts I had watching Slushfund. It didn’t get me into gig-going. My university town was desolate in that respect (or so I thought, that’s another story I’ll get to), and it wasn’t until 99/2000 that we started going through to Glasgow fairly often for some decent shows.

Slushfund were, I believe, offered a deal but turned it down to go to uni and be sensible. Aah, youth…

I 'n' Gigs 1: Joanna Newsom (Somerset, 2007)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourite per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs" (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs) ... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

Here's the first.

I first saw Joanna Newsom at All Tomorrow’s Parties at 2007. I’m pretty certain she played two sets at that wonderful festival at Butlin’s, Minehead. I don’t think my memory is betraying me.

Here is the thing that strikes me about it – she was playing the “second stage” which was basically the bingo hall of the holiday camp. It’s a pretty huge room, but not limitless. She was playing in the afternoon. And the queue, and the buzz, was immense, like nothing else that whole weekend.

I wasn’t really there for Newsom – I was more there for Nick Cave, Cat Power, Spiritualized. But that queue, that buzz, made you feel the weekend was all about her, that this was a STAR happening.

When I saw the queue spilling out, I’d have happily passed. I didn’t like her first album ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’ at all when it came out, and though I had been won over by ‘Ys’ from late 2006 (I first listened to ‘Ys’ in a hotel room in a seaside town in the Netherlands on a laptop running out of charge cos I’d forgotten to take an adapter, not to mention appropriate shoes for the extremely fancy quiz I was due to host that night … all another story …) I would still have been happy to leave Joanna to her more ardent fans.

But my friends were determined, and we actually found a way to bypass the queue by going round the back of the room and then through the fire escape. It felt terribly illicit, though, in truth, we had every right to be in the room, having paid for the festival, and we didn’t break through any cordons or anything …

I think we were nevertheless a little furtive and crouched down at the back of the room. Which is why I’m pretty certain she played two shows, because I also remember staring pretty close up at her playing the harp and thinking “right, now I get it”.

I realise that admiring pure virtuosity is not something one does all that often at rock gigs. That’s not a bad thing per se. Bands can be magnificent without virtuosity. Virtuosity can be a tremendous bore. But Newsom’s high-wire virtuosity is thrilling. I’m trying to think of other times I’ve been as thrilled by an individual’s musicianship in a live setting – Nels Cline of Wilco playing guitar, Richard Thompson filling a field with sound with the power of his fingers on an acoustic guitar, Dr John on piano perhaps …

And it is truly high-wire with her. It can go wrong. It can go slightly, charmingly wrong, as it did when we saw her at Latitude a year later. The last time I saw her, at End of the Road in 2011, after a bright clear mid-September day which turned, suddenly and shockingly into a Baltic evening, her fingers were too cold to play harp properly, and songs stopped and started with multiple mistakes, and, despite the encouragement of the crowd, it was pretty upsetting to watch her gradually getting defeated and flustered.

But the thing I think about that 2007 show, as I said, was the feeling that this was a STAR. It was the same at Latitude in 2008, when she played a special Sunday lunchtime slot to the big field and there were 20,000 people or so completely rapt. And yet, Joanna Newsom, for all her acclaim and cult status, has really not sold many records. Not in the scheme of things. A few hundred thousand worldwide. ‘Ys’ apparently sold 45,000 in the UK, so really and truly, a noticeable chunk of the Joanna Newsom fans in the UK were at those shows. And despite the sheer wonder and attentiveness those crowds felt, despite the buzz, there has not been a long way for her sales to grow from that.

Not a fair comparison at all, but I think of being in Borderline on Charing Cross in 2004 as a handful of us punters ignoring James Blunt playing a support slot for Damien Dempsey, just a few months before he went stellar with a terrible song and sold more records than almost anyone else in the decade, and think “you really can’t always tell” …

I’d have sworn then that Joanna Newsom would overcome/had already overcome the idiosyncrasies of her form and content, and become, not just a cult star, but a proper massive star famous person, more famous than her famous husband, more famous than anyone else at those festivals that day.

Fame, oh it is a funny, funny thing …

Monday 4 May 2020

Normal People II: Even Normaller People

I had a few more thoughts about ‘Normal People’, or rather at a tangent to it. This is more about ideas of taste, and love for the arts, in general.

I loved ‘Normal People’, both the book and TV series, a great deal, as I’ve already said. I found it very moving and all-consuming. There are a great many things I like and admire which do not come close to moving me in the same way.

E.g. When I made a list last year of the books I’d enjoyed reading the most in the last 12 months, ‘Normal People’ was second, behind ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford. I wouldn’t say I was greatly moved by ‘The Good Soldier’, I wouldn’t say I was consumed by it, or that it stirred up many emotions about my own life … I just thought it was brilliant and a great joy to read.

We are all affected by works of art in different ways, and what’s more we are all affected by different works of art in different ways. This is obvious, but is often forgotten.

When things really corkscrew their way into our very beings, we are affected by the opposing view of them in a different, and always unexpected, way. We take it to heart.

I’ve sought out, and seen, lots of opinions on ‘Normal People’ this week, mainly positive and a few negative, and at times, wanted to (though haven’t) oppose the negative views, or to wonder out loud if they’d read a different book/watched a different show.

I have felt a bit silly about this, but then realised this ...

It’s quite rare for a work I love to be in the wider popular conscious, such that there are lots of opposing views to be seen. I wouldn’t view the sweet spot of my taste as being particularly esoteric and offbeat, but it’s possible most people would.

E.g. In my head I’m a bit of a standard cliché … What kind of guy is he? Oh you know, he likes The National, Iris Murdoch, Our Friends in the North, and Sideways. Aah, fucking hell, one of those … but the thing is, and I know this, I know it from my job running and writing quizzes above all, those are all subjects to the topics well to the left of general knowledge. I wouldn’t have a q about The National in a standard music round, the only Iris Murdoch q would be “Who is this author?” and a picture of her, you might have something related to Daniel Craig and OFITN, and Sideways, well maybe, but only for certain crowds … those are just examples, anyway. In most quizzes (Only Connect being different), "stuff I really really love" doesn't come up all that often.

The point is, I realise, loving something “popular”, genuinely popular, like ‘Normal People’ leaves me feeling peculiarly vulnerable … most people are not interested in most of the stuff I love (the last example I can think of was Bob Dylan in Hyde Park last summer where, cos of the setting, it generated a lot of mixed reviews, it ticked over into being something lots of people with bad opinions had opinions on, whereas usually most of us who still love old Bob in his dotage can just get on with it undisturbed) ... so I don't need to protect and defend them all that much. There are not rows of people queueing up to slag off the 'The World Won't End' by The Pernice Brothers.

It's not like I'm not also a fan of entirely popular stuff, like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Beatles, but I'm not a fan of them in a poignantly personal way. I love them, but they don't make me feel like they're "my thing", like 'Normal People' does. I realise that some people do feel that way about extremely popular things.

And so, you know, I, generally oblivious to these things, belatedly realise there’s an extra degree of sensitivity called for when people really love something. I recall, with a certain shame, when someone was telling me years ago how much they loved Queen, and I set up my own little joke, “Oh yes, I used to listen to Queen loads when I was young … fucking embarrassing …” and I remember, even at the time, that I’d caused genuine hurt, because the other person really loved Queen, and why shouldn’t they, and I couldn’t really have been more of a dick, though … if they’d only quite liked Queen, rather than loved them, it would probably have been fine.

What does taste matter? As in the idea of good taste, of taste makers and critics and ideas of what is good … two opposing examples spring to mind whenever I consider that

1. When there was a broad survey a few years ago of Britain’s best book, the winner was one of the Harry Potter books, and, of course, that was because, since it was a broad survey, most people, including lots of children who were asked, hadn’t read all that many books, so yeah, they liked Harry Potter the best, and actually, it really is better to ask that question to people who’ve read lots of books, as their answer will mean more, but then, again

2. The one song that, for many years, was in the UK’s Top 10 songs played at both weddings and funerals was ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, and, you know, to me, that song, in composition and realisation, is cheap, phoney, meretricious, ersatz trash, but, the thing is, those won’t have been cheap, phoney, meretricious, ersatz, trashy, weddings and funerals, will they, they’ll have been great affairs of real love and loss and heartbreak and beauty. If you’re on the sidelines for people’s real emotions rolling your eyes and going “oh god, how ghastly, why did they pick that?” you’re going about life wrong.

So, taking that back to ‘Normal People’ … because my connection to it is emotional, I take greater issues with criticisms I’d usually ignore. If people are saying “I don’t like the main characters”/”I can’t empathise” I take that more personally than usual.

I’m usually fairly baffled by liking the characters as criteria for enjoying a book or film. Surely that only matters if they’re explicitly meant to be likable and thus badly-written or acted, I usually think … but, in this case, as warmth towards the main characters is part of my enjoyment of the work, my own usual position is turned on its head.

What is it, particularly, about ‘Normal People’ that has drawn an emotional response not just from me but from millions of others? My life wasn’t like that in most respects – I imagine that is true for most, but Rooney has, I think, used specifics to trigger universal memories.

If I was to point at one thing as an example that really hit home, it was remembering the way “becoming yourself/feeling natural in your own skin” isn’t a linear thing – as we grow up, we can be shocked from social setting from social setting how we do/don’t feel comfortable in them. I think ‘Normal People’ gets that across brilliantly. A sense of belonging/not belonging and even when you find belonging of whatever sort, it’s not necessarily the answer to everything.

So, that was probably my biggest emotional hook - identifying in some sense with Connell and his not breezing through life like he/others might have expected him to ... whereas for others, there will be completely different hook, perhaps in Connell's story, perhaps in Marianne's, perhaps in the setting. It is daringly, thrillingly, about being young, and perhaps it has take someone who is still young themselves, like Rooney, but also so thoroughly accomplished, to do this magic trick