101 Faces - 16

76 to 80

NINA SIMONE

She's kind of creeping up on me, Nina Simone. Not that she's not always been there, always been known about, always been listened to, but I think it's only recently becoming something I love as much as other people love it. And this story by previous lauded Cave and Ellis is one I never tire of.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge842COFHSs

BRIAN MOORE

Of all the sportspeople I could pick, someone who initially seems so symbolic of the hated England rugby team of the 90s. But I love Moore because he's such a confounder of expectations.

When I used to watch Six Nations matches with Celts, they'd complain that he and Eddie Butler were a biased commentary team, and I'd point out a) Butler is Welsh and b) Moore is, in his commentary, emotionally biased to England, of course, but more fiercely critical of England than he ever is of anyone else.

And, off court, he's a proper renaissance man - clever, surprising and thoughtful. They say "don't judge a book by its cover" but, you know, most of us books can be judged by our covers, can't we, but it's for people like Moore that the maxim is worth keeping.

ROSS NOBLE

 It would be easier to have Stewart Lee, because I obviously love Stewart Lee, but I'm including Noble for the element of surprise (like when I saw the Polyphonic Spree at a festival and they were shockingly amazing). I'd seen Ross Noble a bit on TV, wasn't blown away, got taken to see him live ... and ... it was art.
It was two hours of heightened brilliance. I've no idea how he does it. Perhaps others do. It's like the best kind of close-up magic. I remember it was at the time the Saville story was breaking, and he talked about the full horror of Saville a lot, and yet it felt at the end like it had been good, clean, constant laughter.
I've never seen Daniel Kitson who I believe is similarly revered, but I can't believe British stand-up comedy has ever been much better than Stewart Lee and Ross Noble at their best.

JOANNA NEWSOM

However different they sound, it somehow makes sense to me to have Simone and Newsom in the same entry, two singular instrumentalists with distinct voices whose music is unclassifiable. 

I just don't think anyone this century in the medium of song has made art as brilliant as Newsom - I just don't. I think this is the next level of song, like Bob Dylan was in the 60s.

STUART MACONIE

I want to represent the music journalists, because the music journalists so filled my head in the late 90s and early 2000s - i could fill this page where their names and the things they got right, the things they got wrong. I read NME cover to cover week on week year on year. 

Maconie had stopped writing for NME by the time I started reading it regularly, but he's really a great writer - he's written several books which deserve credit for getting to the heart of "folk" Britain. 

This is a guy that really understands this country - he actually fulfils my ambition of being able to tell the story of Britain with its popular music. In fact, he inspired, to a little extent, my longest ever poem, which, well, here it is again, since that's what I'm doing ... I revised it a bit, and it's now way out of date anyway, but let's just say, Maconie's The People's Songs really was a a bit of a kick off point, and he's written other great ones ... anyway, this giant vanity is by me, me, me (actually quite like the look of it centred ...)

A FOLK AGE

A folk age of scarce skill and little fire

Sprung forth, from street to screen and back again,

a deadly hybrid of hysterias

Disquieting the chastened missioner

Returning weary, bloodied, from a quest

non sponte secutus erat.                    But

What land is this, that I left in safe mind,

which (if it turned) turned slowly, with regret -

What land is this that I left in cold hand,

Whose eyes would wryly squint o’er rose - scratch rose -

No, sepia-tinted beige health service frames.

Those eyes are weeping now. Weeping for what?

This mind persuaded far too easily

To heed the measured words of a sellsword

Who led with the pretence he could be cut,

The first and gravest deal maker, always

Upgrading and outsourcing to no end.

We met to share before we’d made full count

Of what we were free and prepared to lose.

So, lost it’s been - for freedom and for shame,

So lost, we’re safe to shed our privacy …

Or dignity, as if that were a fraud.

But how did we get here, I ask again,

Where folk songs find a new voice and create

The most unlovely karaoke stars

reshaping flames of lurid campfire storms,

where hieroglyphs of hate stunt, poison, mock

all hope of quietly impressive growth?

There were, of course, impasses, no, even more,

Outbursts of humour, harmony and harps

In bingo halls and country parks alike,

That strange uncertain union of glee

Released from shuffling feet and stumbling fast

O’er midnight branches laughing wildly at

The most unlikely icons newly framed

In sweating glade, afoot on burning lake.

They’ll say it’s gentrifying at its worst,

They’ll say, those miseries who made it so.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how

It could have made a difference far beyond

The natural footsoldiers left behind.

Perhaps we were waste, mere collateral,

A sweet distraction for dissenting hearts –

To revel, not to fight, until too late.

And what to fight, and how? For most, half-blind,

Soft moving targets virtually cry out

To bear the declawed fury that just serves

As catnip for a foe now long escaped –

I see your virtue and I raise contempt.

Your so-called folk songs aren’t the people’s now,

Your protest is an empty selfish bawl.

The happy guilt of postcolonial bliss

Expired, a short-lived naïve liberal’s dream,

In patronising charitable frauds

And aid gifts that declined to decompose.

It’s hope, irrational hope, that breeds disgust

At calm pragmatic suited ex-firebrands,

It breeds the endless scuffling of the good

And their intent that good’s uncompromised

Or it’s no good at all. In hope they live.

Reared into the great independent age

Of visionaries, proud of their mistakes,

First ghastly apparitions from the deep

Washed golden, then, by Olympian gods,

For brief but long-remembered glory days,

who ruined themselves for art, for Channel 4

Voxpops on documentaries way too late

To make the difference that they think they made,

Though it was beautiful, they do recount.

Exact timelines are harder to agree –

So many tribes, with valid claim to paint

Some key ekphrastic scene in what may be

The final epic worth a silver tongue,

Discount the other. How this story needs

A chronicler of independent soul,

Who’ll write and rewrite, true to their one task,

The grand expanding history of pop –

And how it never really stood a chance.

Nowadays, the people’s songs sound like they weren’t

Written by living people, at least not

The kind you’d dream of ever giving love.

Democracy moves further from the will

And the consensus of the feverish

Hive mind, all impotent petitions for

The daily stigmatising of some Christ-

Forsaken sniper, who’ll ascend in time.

From where did these Eumenides descend?

For not one single tear was shed between

Fifty and Ninety-Seven, then dams burst far

And wide at once, feeding the soil where sprung

In time, this wild poisoned incontinence

Of empathy, all sharing, caring more.

And not a single person died between For-

Ty five’nd Two-thousand-one, then each

New death was marked by gathered epitaphs

Of deeply saddened sad machines, so quick

To tap out tides of grief; if not, then rage.

Some barbs, impossible now to delete,

Wound and affect more than the next last post

Aggrieved of Tunbridge Nowhere up-in-arms

Fired to eviscerate some long-way-down,

All shorn of poise, all decontextualized.

No trumpet lends such screeds new dignity,

No still small voice is heard above the storm.

No man or woman waits, ablaze in time

For pale blue origami promises

in airmail’s grand adventure, long withheld.

Oh time, how do you fill so easily?

I miss your tricks; now, I prostrate myself

Before the ticking strap, relentlessly

Informing and returning to the game.

I miss the doubts, not knowing what I thought

Or what I ought to think, or what the folk

Without coherent thought might know so well.

It is, in fact, a numbers game, just not

The one I planned for. X-hit wonders click

And click the clock to scattergun renown.

Those hard-earned stark statistics stand and fall

By show of thumbs, and those about to die

Have no direction nor an emperor to turn

to raise respectful yet resigned salute.

We loathe and glorify the fight at once,

We crucify dissenters, then deplore

The crucifixion. Numbers keep us safe,

But not as safe as remote solitude

fits armour on this folk age chorus line.

And Dikaiopolis, this sleeper cell

Of jovial loathing, makes obtuse demands

revering some lost Angles’ language, claims

the common tongue is his and his alone,

this simp’ring rhetorician’s puppet toad.

And oh, the chorus howls and boos and laughs

And oh, it claims and counterclaims anew

And cites new sources, mobilised to stamp

Its modern expertise into the ground,

Promoting condemnation for its sins

While earmarking forgiveness to forget.

Redemption last was mentioned as a choice

On Christmas Day after Joe Strummer died -

Two ancient cultures held each other’s gaze

Just long enough for monsters creeping past.

Now, all the guys on t-shirts must be dead,

Can we recall their names? Erm, No We Can’t!

Can hope and change survive unspecified

Unrealistic, self-destructive cloud-

high expectation? Hell, no! No, it can’t.

Is music still impossible to tame?

Do songs still burst beyond all vain attempts

To break them into pieces and to chain

Them to campaigns and then to list all their

Devices and to judge precise demand,

To number them and edit them and tell

Them they’re not good enough, to playlist them

And subjugate them, wed them to a cause

Unwanted - one nation under a groove,

And two turntables and a microphone

And three chords and the truth, and four young men

From Liverpool who went and shook the world?

What was the last folk song? The last elite

Liberal folk song to take the world to task …

The last great anthem wide-eyed youths collect

To sing in protest at injustice? You might

Have missed it, look it up online. Alright,

So what, it’s not your music anymore –

These summer children scowling in defiance,

These skills you never learnt nor ever would.

This folk age may come to a bitter end;

Young punks are more alive than first assumed.

Fierce independence is now prized above

Those other values wasted on the age –

The most compelling hangover from hope

Might yet renew what looked to be expired.

So how did we get here? Someone explain,

Someone who’s not been two giant steps behind

At every turn, who saw it all the way

And welcomed progress out of more than fear,

Eventually, of being left in the dark.

My friend, it is, again, a numbers game,

A game that shifts one second to the next –

A sequence ever changing far beyond

a commentator’s poetry by rote.

I learnt a song when I was still a child,

Not quite a folk song, whatever they say,

I’m happy with its answers even now.