B78: Take it to the bridge and other song things

 As much as I cherish my hard-earned B in GCSE music (1994, a fine vintage), I’m not musical. I have never had a better than rudimentary capacity for either piano or guitar, nor do I write songs, nor is my voice anything but an instrument of warfare. I've got a bit of a tin ear, don't necessarily hear small instrumental details that well.  I know what keys, sharps and flats are, I know what bars are, so at least I can stay tuned in when songwriters get technical, but as much as I (as this blog demonstrates) love and think about songs above all else, I don’t often come at it from a very analytical position.

A few months ago, David Baddiel, who I’ve observed to be inclined towards the occasional Dylan jibe on twitter, tweeted asking the leading question of whether any Dylan songs had Middle Eights.

It’s actually quite a good question – and the answer is, yes, some Bob Dylan songs have Middle Eights, but not all that many. The aspect of it that was interesting to me, when I thought about it, is that many years ago I made a category of Dylan songs I called the “pop songs” without ever really thinking about what I meant by that, but it conforms very closely, now I look at it, to those with recognisable “middle eights”.

A great middle eight is a sign of pop sophistication, and I believe what Baddiel was getting at was that Dylan is not as sophisticated a writer as some others, that his status as the great songwriter is inflated.

Well, anyway, it really got me thinking about structure in pop songs – structure as the non-sophisticate listener experiences it, not as the artist puts it together. It took me back to being a small child and gradually developing an idea of what I liked in a song, and the often undeveloped instinct we have for a song’s different parts – tune, sound, structure, lyrics, transition, arrangement, meaning etc. What I realised is that the most important thing to me is, and has always been, movement. I love a song that starts me in one place and has moved me to another by the end.

Which helps me understand why I hated dance singles when they started to arrive in great abundance in the late 80s/early 90s. I didn’t understand dance music, didn’t get what it was for, just heard it, divorced from its context, as 3 minutes that went nowhere lyrically, and quite often, nowhere musically.

I think it was the structure that I hated more than the electronica, but I’m not sure I’d fully realised that until now.

And then, when I consider that my favourite artist by a mile is Dylan who, though he has been through many different styles in his career and has been anything but settled, is rarely particularly eclectic across an album, and certainly not within a song, it makes me realise that it has been more important to me that the lyric takes me from one place to another than the music. I'l forgive an unchanging musical backdrop, if the lyrics and the vocal performance go everywhere, but a song has to be pretty full musically if it offers absolutely nothing lyrically (I don't mean beautiful poetry, I just mean movement) ...

Of course, this is a long way from being universal, and there are many different ways to write/hear a song. The classic pop structure may be Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Middle Eight Verse Chorus, but we’d probably be pretty surprised at how few songs follow that structure.

Lots of songs have just verses and a middle eight, or just verses, or just verses and choruses, or just choruses, or just verses choruses and guitar solos, or intro, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, verse, different chorus, verse, pause, guitar solo, chorus, chorus, outro, or whatever …

What holds reasonably true is that songs need some kind of break/transition. Dylan’s main form of break, especially early on, was the harmonica solo. He also, obviously, took you to lots of different places with his words in a way that few had done before or sense – with length of lines, lengths of verses, changed refrains. His greatest period for trying to write classic pop songs was, I’d say, in the late 60s and early 70s – from I Want You to I Threw It All Away. He had an underrated knack for the simple. He wrote some nice tunes and cool middle eights. He’s been folk, folk rock, rock, country, blues, soul, gospel, showtune, hymn, and a few other things. But Brian Wilson he’s not been.

When I was young, I was very impressed with songs which had relatively complicated structure, like Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody and Band on the Run. I came to find some of those type of songs a bit of a drag if they went on too long, but loved the songs of the Super Furry Animals, which would move you rapidly through several musical ideas within a short time. They toyed with structure, sometimes putting their chorus at the end, or having a massive outro, or a short section which sounded completely different from the rest of the song.

But, importantly, SFA were also full of tunes and lyrical ideas. For a while there, they seemed the absolute ideal band. It’s no wonder they slowed to a standstill.

Songs can “move” in a lot of different ways. Three of the greatest songs of all time hardly live up to what I’m saying. ‘Be My Baby’ is just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-outro, and the words are mainly just darling, baby, love – the movement is the 0-100mph adrenaline rush of the first few seconds and how it keeps you there all the way through. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is just Verse Verse Bridge Verse Outro – the great movement is that first octave leap in the first two notes, one of the most significant single movements in the history of song. ‘All My Friends’ is a two-note riff with a few little kinks – but the music combined with the lyrics make you feel like it’s an epic journey.

But, yeah, that’s been the realisation for me – it’s the movement for me that’s the most important thing – not the sound, not necessarily the tune or the arrangement, but the movement.

B77: Anthems for Doomed Youth

Sorry, a return to well-worn territory – just thinking of those good old rock anthems of the 90s again.

There were a lot of anthemic hit singles in those days. It is interesting to look at the ones which were of the time, the ones that were about something, and the ones which were not of the time, and were about nothing.

None of these things are necessarily better than the others.

I’ve been going through a list of Top 10 singles between 1993 and 1999 – it’s frightening, I know, or can certainly recall snatches of, all of them, even the most forgettable cheesy house tracks. Memory blasts of loved, tolerated and loathed songs.

A lot of the guitar songs that crossed over into the charts were anthemic. That makes sense.

I’d still contend that the first real Britpop hit was ‘Wake Up Boo’ (neither, essentially, about anything nor particularly of the time) in March 1995. Blur, Suede and Oasis had had Top 10 hits before that, of course, but the Boo Radleys were the first of the scene (if there was a scene) who wouldn’t get near the charts in ordinary times. I think that’ll have been the one that persuaded the bands and the record companies that chart domination could be theirs.

Then, for about 3 years, there were a lot of “Britpop” Top 10 hits, though they hardly filled up the charts to the exclusion of all else. There was still plenty of space for pop, dance, hip-hop, r’n’b, easy listening and whatever.

Indeed, it’s definitely cheesy dance hits which are the defining chart sound of the decade.

Occasionally, big dance and pop hits crossed over with the kind of of-the-time anthems some of the Britpop bands were going for. So, I’d suggest, the likes of Things Can Only Get Better, Never Forget by Take That, Born Slippy and even Wannabe are held to be part of “Britpop” as a wider cultural movement.

There were a lot of Number 2 hits – many of the most memorable songs stalled at Number 2, from Wonderwall to Song 2, Bittersweet Symphony to Alright.

There is a reasonable shortage of big pre-millennial anxious and apocalyptic hits. Say what you like about Jamiroquai, but Too Young to Die and Virtual Insanity now sound a lot more tuned in than a lot of the rest. Blur managed End of a Century and The Universal, Radiohead had Paranoid Android, Robbie Williams cottoned on to it with Millennium (vacuous now as it ever was).

Then there’s Three Lions, of course, which is the biggest, and most anthemic, of all them, and in its wake a fair few other football songs.

Tubthumping by Chumbawamba sounds a bit like a football song, a non-political blast from a political band. It has become a cultural touchstone more than most else of the time.

Then there’s Oasis, who dealt exclusively in anthems, albeit wilfully unobservant ones. The clarity of their myopic vision (I know) felt perfectly fine for a time. Then very rapidly sounded dreadful.

It’s a little interesting (to me at least) that the output of Weller (one of the biggest influences and also a massive active part of the era) at the time is wholly apolitical, considering the political songs he made his name with were my entire inspiration for being into that music in the first place.

I think at the time I was a little disappointed with Weller, wanted music to sound like The Jam and coudn't understand why the man who founded The Jam wasn't doing the job, but have come to enjoy the more pastoral, personal feel of his first three albums more in retrospect.

Blur, in general, were not really able to be anthemic class warriors, and were accused of sneering (like that matters), but, though I didn’t like those songs at the time, I think the likes of Charmless Man and Country House stand up quite well.

I’m probably in a minority of one, but in terms of “meeting someone who’s a bit of a dick” songs go, I prefer Charmless Man to Common People.

Charmless Man doesn’t exceed its brief.

Suede’s songs were kind of political. Trash and Beautiful Ones were naked anthems which worked tolerably well.

A lot of the minor Britpop bands made attempts to write songs that were vaguely “about” something with degrees of success – Ladykillers by Lush, King of the Kerb by Echobelly, Neighbourhood by Space, Nancy Boy by Placebo, Punka by Kenickie.

Gene, a band I like a lot, got in early on Blair disillusion with As Good As It Gets, and Edwyn Collins’ follow-up to A Girl Like You was a pleasingly cynical anti-scene flop called Keep on Burning.

The best, for me, are of course, the Welsh bands. The Man Don’t Give a Fuck is probably the Furries’ biggest song, and as solidly joyful an anti-establishment/millennial malaise anthem as you’ll find.

And then there’s the Manics, whose three biggest hits are all political songs (If you Tolerate This, Masses Against the Classes, A Design for Life), which is pretty good going. A Design for Life, Yes by McAlmont and Butler, and Brimful of Asha are my favourite hit songs of the era, still. Different kinds of big songs about varying degrees of something and nothing.

Anyway, as usual, I haven’t been able to find the wider point I thought I had, except to reflect that yes, one can see why people (annoyingly) see Britpop as some writ large cultural movement rather than a coincidence of good bands, since there are a lot of big songs which do seem, whether by design or accident, tied up with the people and the times.

B76: Kids

 Here's a little playlist - a nice bunch of songs about/for/to ver kids.

When you're young and you hear Marvin Gaye singing "Save the babies" you find it a bit ridiculous, but less and less so as you get older.

1. Up With People - Lambchop
2. Baby - Gal Costa
3. Forever Young - Bob Dylan
4. Song for our Daughter - Laura Marling
5. Rise to Me - The Decemberists
6. Hey Jude - The Beatles
7. Little Green - Joni Mitchell
8. My Darling - Wilco
9. The Greatest Love of All - Whitney Houston
10. My Girls - Animal Collective
11. What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong
12. Save the Children - Marvin Gaye
13. Lions and Tigers - Sleater-Kinney
14. For Zion - Lauryn Hill
15. Just the Two of Us - Will Smith
16. Kooks - David Bowie
17. Sarah - Thin Lizzy
18. Afraid of Everyone - The National
19. Kids - Ed Harcourt
20. A Little Soul - Pulp
21. I Knew Your Mother - Loudon Wainwright
22. Only One - Kanye West
23. Father and Son - Cat Stevens
24. Isn't She Lovely - Stevie Wonder
25. Song for Leigh - The Walkmen
26. Moon on Your Pyjamas - Paul Weller

B75: Jack Charlton

 The recent documentary ‘Finding Jack Charlton’ was really a fine, sad thing. Spanning his career as both player and manager, then his last years living with dementia, it covered a lot of profound themes in a short time, and with a light touch – of loss, of brotherhood, of nationality and belonging, of success, leadership, friendship, aging, glory.

It was well known that the two Charlton brothers had a fraught relationship, but I suppose one hoped or assumed there’d be a reconciliation. It seems unlikely such a reconciliation took place.

Bobby Charlton (our kid, our Bobby, Bobby, Robert, Bobby Charlton, my brother … as Jack variously calls him) was the first extremely famous person I ever met. Somewhere lost in my shed, I have a polaroid of myself with him in 1987. I’m standing on a chair. I queued up with lots of other children at a Sport Aid event. I knew who he was, but I don’t think I fully grasped that he was just about the most globally famous Englishman going. I think I remember him being very nice. The documentary makes clear, and his manner has always suggested, he is a naturally shy person, unlike Jack.

I think, when Northern Ireland but not Ireland were in the 1986 World Cup, I asked and was told that they didn’t really play football in the Republic. That was probably my dad who told me that, a hurling/gaelic football/then rugby man, but there was a nudge of truth to it. They’d never been in a major tournament.

What Jack Charlton did as Ireland manager was an extraordinary effective symbolic thing – bringing the diaspora home. A London kid like me was proud to be Irish as half the team (infinitely more so than Tony Cascarino, after all!). You wouldn’t necessarily say he was an alchemist, as such. Certainly the recruitment was a marvel, but, gosh, when you look at what he assembled, there were some fine, fine players.

You’d pretty much hope a team like that could reach the latter stages of major tournaments – Sheedy, Whelan, Brady, Lawrenson, Quinn, Stapleton, Moran, O’Leary, McCarthy, McGrath, Houghton, Staunton, Aldridge, Hughton, Townsend, Irwin, Keane, Bonner, Kelly, Babb, McAteer … those were mostly big players for big teams, not some rag-tag assortment. 

Still, I suppose the whole thing perpetuated itself. There was so much love towards Charlton from his former players, even those he’d treated a bit harshly.

The relationship with Paul McGrath (the first PFA Player of the Year in the Premier League era) in particular is one of the most memorable and moving things you’ll ever see.

Worth a watch.

B74: Otis Redding, the greatest loss

I think I've written words to this effect before but I'm comfortable with being someone who ran out of new thoughts a long time ago, so here goes again.

No premature loss changed the course of popular music for the worse so much as that of Otis Redding in a plane crash, aged 26, on 10 December 1967.

Of that, I'm pretty certain. For all the other tragic deaths, from Holly to Winehouse, Cobain to Joplin, Lennon to Marley, no one else was so perfectly approaching their peak, and a peak that would, surely, have brought together everything that was good about popular music and taken it to a new place.

I started this blog because of Otis Redding - the fact 'Dock of the Bay' existed, this absolute perfection just drifting around in my consciousness since I was a child without my ever having given it much thought ... made me think about the endlessness of popular music ...

The song is, while explicitly an attempt to connect with the San Francisco hippie scene, essentially genreless, and that, I think, is the greatest thing about Redding as writer (with Steve Cropper) and performer - the possibilities were endless.

Many people play with genre, often successfully, but you can always hear it. Redding's voice and style was everything without even trying, within the same album, within the same song - sorrowful and exultant, urban and rural, soul and rock, comforting and threatening - he could have easily sung country, could have sung easy-listening. It was all just there.

He was covering Sam Cooke, Dylan and the Stones,  being covered by Aretha Franklin, he'd already written a handful of songs that became standards.

He had been embraced by the rock festivals, by the British pop shows ... it was only just starting to convert into mainstream success.

It's not true to say that music remained compartmentalised - from The Temptations to Stevie Wonder to Gram Parsons and Joni Mitchell, the late 60s and early 70s saw plenty of attempt at "cosmic American music" or whatever, but I just feel Otis Redding was a step ahead of all of them at making music without barriers, and was only going to get better at it.

B73: Why Bob Dylan fans are the most annoying and boring fans

I think the above probably qualifies as a clickbait title, though it’s not really intended to be. Bob Dylan fans are annoying.

Honestly, I was already planning to write about this before some guy in an American paper reacted to Paul Simon selling his back catalogue by saying Simon would only be a footnote to Dylan anyway.

That’s classic Dylan fan. It’s also classic non-Dylan fan to react by saying Dylan’s a terrible singer, as lots of people have been doing today.

It''s all boring stuff, meaningless arguments played out over decades. And not really my issue either way. I just had a certain thought which I wanted to share about quite why being a Dylan fan is such a heavy, unparalleled, self-perpetuating industry, which hopefully someone could find interesting without being a massive Dylan fan themselves, and not being bothered too much by the fact that I am.

It’s simply this; being a Dylan fan is rewarding – I hesitate to say, uniquely rewarding. It’s a journey which, if you go on it, prompts you to restate your faith/renew your vows at regular intervals.

However much you think you know, there’s always more. I don’t think it’s like that with the other greats. I’ve been a massive Bob Dylan fan since I was 16, I’ve bought more of his music than anybody else’s, listened to it more than anybody else’s, and even in the last couple of years, I’ve heard songs he’d written that I’d never heard before which I’ve found brilliant.

I’m not one of those Dylan fans who thinks there are no bad Dylan albums, who worships Dylan as a prophet, who puts Dylan on such a pedestal that I think no one else has done anything else comparable. Other people have written songs as great as Dylan’s written, released albums as great as Dylan’s released.

But, with him, there’s just so much stuff, and it’s hidden in such unlikely places. And it rewards.

Other folk don’t have a Basement Tapes, a born-again Christian period, a bootleg series, a Rolling Thunder. Or maybe they do, but I guess, it’s that, with Dylan, for a sizeable portion of the fandom, it’s the supposed ephemera that become the heart of the canon.

Like, most Stevie Wonder fans’ favourite Stevie Wonder album is Innervisions, Talking Book, or Songs in the Key of Life, right? His best albums and best songs are broadly agreed? That applies to most great artists. There’s nothing bad or diminishing about that. There’s a solid magnificence, a guaranteed glory to most artists’ best stuff.

Dylan’s so random. Nashville Skyline was supposed to be this little, insignificant country curio, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, thinking they're the only one, that it’s their favourite Dylan album.

The Christian period was meant to be a best-forgotten disaster, then gradually you’d hear some people saying “it’s actually really good” and you ignored that for years, but then, you give it a proper, proper, listen, and then, on the right day, you hear something like Solid Rock, on Saved, and it blows your socks off.

Other great artists don’t have demos which weren’t finished and were left off their moderately rated 22^nd studio album (Infidels) which, like Blind Willie McTell, are broadly considered by fans now as one of the greatest songs ever written.

Dylan is, if you’re a fan of his, a genius for many things, but he is, above all, a genius for keeping you on your toes. Maybe he doesn’t give a shit but maybe he gives more of a shit than anyone else, sees the long game like nobody else, and sees value better than any other.

So this is why Dylan fans are so annoying. Because they’ve worked so hard on the journey and been given so many rewards for it. Because the first thing they hear about Dylan is that he can’t sing, and they, by definition, think he can sing magnificently. Because the second thing they hear is that he’s over-rated (of course, by definition, fans of everyone else think he’s overrated because he’s rated the highest), and they build their arguments as to why he’s not.

There are more books about Bob Dylan because there’s so much material that is on the surface and so much that is below the surface. Because Dylan fans are typically literate men who think they have it in them to write a book about him. So there are 100s of books, 100s ...

Because everyone else followed him – The Beatles, The Stones, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Springsteen, The Band – they all did what they did because of something he did…

Oh, you know, I’m sounding too much like a fan now, I’m trying to persuade, and that’s not what I intended really.

It’s the journey, innit. That’s all. You get to the heart of other folk much more quickly, whoever they are … Dylan’s always got a bit more, and that makes us just that bit more annoying than everybody else.

B72: Handballs

 Football is boring, isn’t it? Especially the boring parts of football, like rule changes and minor gripes.

The discourse around VAR has taken boring football chat to a new level, so it’s time that I add to it, just a little.

VAR will settle. It’ll take a while, like video reviews took time with rugby and cricket, but it will, broadly speaking, settle. I’m not zealous about VAR - until about 2012, I was probably anti-it for all the reasons people are anti-it now, but I think it will greatly reduce injustices, it will reduce cheating and it will reduce serious injuries and bad fouls, and those are prices worth paying.

I feel they’ve steadily messed up the roll-out, of course, but so be it. They should have taken it as an opportunity to be more liberal on laws, as VAR would redress that liberality, but instead they seem to have gone more strict.

I’ll give an example of what I mean, relating to handball, which has been a funny old rule for a long time.

I was thinking about the only time, while I was playing football, I gave away a penalty for handball. It was in 2002, so a long time ago, when football was football, handball was handball and everything was apparently simple.

There was a low, not especially fast, ball into the box, which just grazed off someone’s side about five yards in front of me, bounced up and then hit me on the hand, which I’d, slightly dopily, failed to get out of the way of the ball’s new trajectory.

A penalty was given. No one complained. I didn’t, nor my team mates. It was a clear penalty based on the kind of things that were given as penalties. And yet, it was in no way deliberate. My hand was just there when the ball went in a slightly unexpected direction and I was not sharp enough to make sure it wasn’t.

Deliberate handballs, actual deliberate handballs, are rare in football, always have been. They do happen, but not that often. Somewhere along the line, and not just in the last few years, “deliberate” came to mean “not doing everything you possibly and conceivably can to make sure the ball doesn’t hit your hand”.

That’s slightly understandable, as, without VAR, players could slyly do deliberate handballs which didn’t look deliberate if there was too lenient an interpretation of “deliberate”, so it was reasonable to be strict and say anything that looked like it might, in any way, have been intentional, shall count as intentional.

But, now, with VAR, and the possibility of being able to tell much more clearly what is actually meant, it is surely an opportunity to liberalise the handball law again, so that defenders aren’t terrified, strikers don’t kick the ball at hands, and checkers can check, with a higher degree of certain than has ever been possible, if a defender makes a deliberate, conscious, movement towards the ball, or there hand just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.