BIRMINGHAM, BACH & BAMAKO

I know it’s not a particularly festive subject. But I haven’t been able to get Ozzy Osbourne out of my head after revisiting his last album “Black Rain” and finding it to be the best thing heavy metal’s self-proclaimed Prince Of Darkness has done in decades, a bone-crunching albeit catchy take on modern hard rock. And there are other reasons to be thinking about the former Black Sabbath singer. December 21 marks Frank Zappa’s birthday, and I can’t think of the maestro without being reminded of a story Ozzy told me back in 1995 to underline his belief that one should never read too much into song lyrics, least of all his own. He once congratulated Zappa on the clever drug cipher in “Montana” and earned a hard stare for his praise as Zappa made it absolutely clear that the song was really about a cowboy setting up a dental-floss farm and not as Ozzy had falsely supposed about cocaine. And that’s only the beginning: In a recent article I read recently about plagiarism (re Joe Satriani’s upcoming court case against Coldplay for supposedly filching a chord progression ), Ozzy was quoted as saying that all good bass-lines in the history of rock were first penned by Johann Sebastian Bach, a name-check one wouldn’t have expected from a man not known for straying too far from blues-derived guitar riffs. But perhaps Birmingham’s most famous son has roots that go even further than Bach: Amadou & Mariam’s recently released new album “Welcome To Mali” sent me back to “Tje Ni Mousso” from 1999, where the opening track “Chantez Chantez” sounds a lot like Black Sabbaths’ “Fairies Wear Boots” right down to the wailing vocal melody if you take away the Marshall stacks and Bill Ward’s muted drumming. Of course, as guitarist/singer Amadou Bagayoko is a big rock fan who cites Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour and Eric Clapton as influences, you might suppose that he took some of Sabbath’s music into his own mix. But I like to think it’s the other way round and that Ozzy’s music owes as much to Bamako as it does to Bach or Birmingham-. Even the most Caucasian heavy metal has roots in Africa, a point one can in my opinion never emphasise enough.

IT COULDN'T HAPPEN HERE

I must be the only music journalist in the world never to have seen "Purple Rain" , the film that broke Prince world-wide back in 1984.
I've obviously seen the videos that accompany such stand-out songs as "Let's Go Crazy", "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" itself, but the actual film has so far eluded me - along with that famous moment everyone goes on about where Prince is late for rehearsal, rushes into the room where his band is playing, straps on his guitar, plugs in and is right in the groove from the get-go. That sort of thing never happens in real life, you say, and until two weeks ago I would have agreed with you had something similar not happened to me. Gretel, the all-female band I have the honour of playing with, was scheduled to support San Francisco avant-garde fireball Death Sentence: Panda! at the Hirscheneck club here in Basel, and I had to step outside for ten minutes after sound-checking my bass to accompany our friend Michelle to the bus stop on the first leg of her long journey back to London. When I got back to the venue, the rest of Gretel was onstage playing a song called "Indians" which is set to make our next CD (no matter what our producer Kieran Kennedy says). I ripped off my leather jacket, picked up my bass from its stand, jumped onstage, plugged in and was on point within a beat or two. Not many people were present to witness my Prince moment, but that doesn't stop me from feeling it was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. So next time I see something in a film that makes me think "that couldn't happen in real life", I'll think again before passing judgement.
Not easy for someone who makes a living out of being opinionated; I'm sure you'd agree.

AMERICA THE BOUNTIFUL

You might have been wondering why posts have been rare of late. It’s all Barack Obama‘s fault: I was of course overjoyed by his magnificent victory, but the interesting press it generated has kept me busy. James Hannaham ‘s piece “Our bi-racial president” struck me as being particularly interesting, and his fantasy about the supposed hip-hop president driving around D.C. in a low-rider with PREZ written across the front is deliciously ridiculous.

Since November 4, I’ve also been holding my breath, waiting for Obama to rip off a rubber mask in best Mission Impossible tradition and reveal himself to be Tom Morello, in recent years most visible as left-wing folk activist The Night Watchman, but best known for his stellar guitar work with Rage Against The Machine. When Obama first broke into European radio, I kept thinking that Tom Morello was getting a lot of coverage, as the Harvard alumni share a clear, clipped way of delivering their sound-bytes. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded Tom becoming President of the United States as he has done nothing but talk good political sense since materializing in the Californian music scene in the Early Nineties.

But since November 4, Obama’s voice seems to have dropped by a tone, so all signs of future mask-ripping have vanished. In the run-up to election night, I had the chance to speak to quite a few American musicians and once again, it was a joy to encounter people who might be downcast about the situation in their country but still talk about politics with enthusiasm and relish. Randy Newman told me that the misdemeanours of the Bush administration meant that he’s had to make up less stuff about America in recent songs, and Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet thinks that many of our present troubles stem from Ike Eisenhower having sold the US out to the military-industrial complex he later demonised. I didn’t get a chance to talk to John Mellencamp, but he also had interesting things to say, i.e. that the only achievement the baby boomers could claim as their own was the smoking ban. Mellencamp stuck his neck out by telling the Deutschlandfunk that although he supported Obama, he wasn’t sure the Democrats had made the right choice of presidential candidate for the 2008 election. I’m glad he’s been proven wrong.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST BELGIAN

dEUS, the art-rock band from Antwerp, played Basel last Friday. Although Tom Barman and his colleagues put on a great show without either compromising the cinematic breath of their music or reverting to rockist posing, it’s irritating to have dEUS treated as if they were the first Belgian act worthy of international attention. What about Arno, Front 242 and Hooverphonic in their more experimental moments? And, above all, what about Jacques Brel?

The 30th anniversary of his death passed virtually unnoticed by the Swiss German press last Thursday when there should have in fact been full-page articles praising the many talents of the Belgian singer, songwriter and actor. Although it takes a more comprehensive command of the French language than I can muster to fully appreciate Brel’s lyrics, the English translations do give some inkling of his surrealist, subversive and sometimes bawdy poetry. Take for instance his brothel tango “Next” (introduced to the rock world by Alex Harvey), “If You Go Away” (a staple for Dusty Springfield and hundreds of other artists) or “Jackie” (made famous in Britain by Scott Walker). The English translations have come under attack from Brel’s widow, however, and my first unwitting contact with his music is a case in point. Back in 1974, “Seasons In The Sun”, a tremolo-drenched variation on Brel’s “Le moribund”, was a big hit for Terry Jacks while avoiding the cynical undertones of the French original. The song used to bring me to tears because the story at the time was that the Canadian singer was in fact dying and that “Seasons In The Sun” marked his impending exit from this world. That of course turned out to be a scam, as to my knowledge Mr. Jacks is alive and well and still producing records for other artists. Unlike poor Jacques Brel, who died of lung cancer on October 7, 1978. He was only 49 years old.

MAT BLACK

I know it’s a sin not to tend your blog for some time, but I can at least bring forward a pretty bad attack of food poisoning in my defence. And it’s not as if nothing worth writing about had happened prior to my absence, either. Between September 19 and 21, I was on the jury of “look&roll”, a Swiss film festival that presents short films on the topic of disability. Quite apart from seeing many moving, beautiful and empowering features, sketches and documentaries, I also got to meet Mat Fraser, an actor, activist and comedian whose film “Born Freak” was also in the competition. I’d wanted to meet Mat ever since seeing him interviewed on BBC’s “Hard Talk” a few years back, but I found him to be even more invigorating and sexy than I’d expected from his television and radio appearances. Mat, who just happens to have short arms, will be appearing in two films this autumn: Kung-Fu Flid, his first action feature that will be shown on a pay to-view basis via the Net from November, and “Chemical Wedding”, a horror film penned by Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. Mat is in the satanic orgy scene where he says he had a great time, but he’s not sure that casting Maiden mascot Eddie as The Devil was such a good idea. The films that won prizes at “look&roll”, by the way, were “Rendez-Vous”, a romantic mini-masterpiece by Polish film-maker Marcin Janos Krawczyk, and “Nikita & Nikita” by Russian photographer Maria Vyulyaleva which showcases the Russian efforts at integrating disabled persons in a stark yet sympathetic way. The audience prize went to Karina Epperlein’s “Pheonix Dance” about dancer Homer Avila’s return to ballet after losing one leg to cancer surgery. The jury also made special mention of Arnaud Six totally engrossing performance in Emanuelle Huchet’s beautiful film “Des putes dans les arbres”. You’ll find more information on these films– albeit in German - on the festival Website. It was an honour to see such great work and to meet such kind and interesting people in such a short space of time, so my thanks go out to festival director Gerhard Protschka and the Procap organisation he set “look&roll” up for as well as fellow jury members Fredi Maurer, Elena Wiele, Claudia Frei and Ewan Marshall. If you get a chance to catch “look & roll” next time around, I suggest you make good use of it. You won’t be disappointed.

Moore is more

Last week the organisers of the AVO Session announced that Gary Moore will be playing Basel on November 13. That isn’t necessarily a reason to get excited, as I’d prefer to hear the Irish guitarist ripping through Thin Lizzy classics when Scott Gorham and friends visit the area on October 7 to the metallic blues he’s been pumping out since the early 1990s. I do, however, have a soft spot for Gary Moore as he has unwittingly given me many an opportunity to bask in his reflected glory. The reason for this privilege was a denim jacket embroidered with his name and a Les Paul guitar that his record company sent me around the time of the “Still Got The Blues” album. I loved the jacket but never got around to removing the embroidery so I ended up being a walking billboard for Mr. Moore for the first half of the 1990’s, and the benefits thereof manifested themselves on a regular basis. Backstage at the St. Gallen open-air festival in 1992, my attempts to pay for my drinks were repeatedly refused, and it was only later that I realised that I had been taken for a member of Gary Moore’s crew as he happened to be the headliner at the festival. A few months later, a salesman in a Boston music store attempted to grill me about life on the road, again assuming me to be a tour veteran because of my attire. My favourite jacket moment dates back to May 1991 when I went to Sheffield to interview Julian Cope, then on his “Peggy Suicide” tour which had him play small venues at night and visit standing stones during the day. After the stellar gig, tour manager Ian Kwinn drove us to a curry-house to get some food. While Julian elected to stay in the mini-bus, the band piled out to place their orders, and while we were waiting, the proprietor asked us who we were and what we were doing in Sheffield. When the musicians told him they were a band, he started working out who played which instrument. He was absolutely certain about who the lead singer must be, i.e. the only member of the party not wearing leather. Much to the band’s amusement, he pointed at me in my Gary Moore jacket. Thanks, Gary, I’m eternally indebted to you for my five minutes of star power.

This Is Pop?

Perhaps it’s just a Central European phenomenon, but I still can’t help getting irate. Over the last few years, the serious-minded media have tarnished the term “pop” with a snide brush, and the word has come to mean music that is conceived exclusively for financial profit, is then devoured by a dumb populace that doesn’t know better, and is finally and justly forgotten once it has exited the charts.

That’s not the way I remember pop music. To me, it’s a noble art form where talented composers and lyricists strive to shine creatively within the narrow constraints of a three- to four-minute chunk of finely structured music. In an interview I did with Pete Townshend back in 1994, the Who guitarist went so far as to compare the elegance of a good song to that of an Elizabethan sonnet, while renowned conductor Leonard Bernstein once hailed the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson as one of the most promising composers of modern times. But it’s not just the old rock hacks that have been pushing the envelope. Madonna has repeatedly come up with profoundly mysterious moments (“Bedtime Stories” with lyrics by Björk comes to mind) while “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson has an otherworldliness that I find enthralling long after Jackson himself has done everything in his power to make us forget the talent that once resided within his slender frame.

But now even the artists themselves act as if pop is little more than another excuse for garish self-promotion, and as Wolfgang Niedecken from German band BAP pointed out when I spoke to him a few months back, it’s perhaps not surprising the guardians of highbrow culture see themselves justified in squeezing pop out of the broadsheets. I really think these people are missing the point: it’s not the job of the critic to say what is and what isn’t art; to my mind it’s the art that makes its inherent value known to the beholder. And if pop music, for lack of a better word, has never made you think or even feel something new and exciting; it’s not the music’s fault. More likely than not, it’s yours.

The Sandman Cometh

Last Sunday, Metallica played on the premises of a sports and education centre near the very obscure Swiss village of Jonschwil. I’m not an enthusiast, but the band rattled through selections from their early repertoire and “Cyanide” from their forthcoming album “Death Magnetic” with more aplomb and precision than I’d come to expect from Metallica. So it was easy to forget the fact that the tow-hour concert was a bit like a juke-box from hell that catered to an audience that had discovered Metallica in its youth and abandoned the band when James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and then-bassist Jason Newstead started straying from the narrow path they’d ploughed for themselves in the Eighties.
A few hors before the gig, I and two other journalists were due to interview Hammett, and when we were ushered into the designated interview space, we found it to be the music room of the school building that was serving Metallica and support act Within Temptation as a backstage refuge. Francois Barras from 24 Heures and I grabbed guitar and bass respectively and started jamming on the riff to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, and had the record company representative not intervened, we would have treated Hammett to a taste of his own medicine. Being professionals, we ceased and desisted, but I couldn’t help greeting Hammett with the opening shot that we were holding auditions and that he was on drums. The quip broke the ice, especially as I told him what we’d be messing about with, and Hammett responded by saying that that must have been the racket he’d heard coming down the corridors. He turned out to be a sweet thoughtful and terribly jet-lagged human being, but I still wish Francois and I had had the bottle to ruin “Enter Sandman” in his presence.

Remembering „Shaft“

So it’s good-bye Isaac Hayes at only 65. His “Hot Buttered Soul” album (1969) had already disappeared from the shelves of my nearest record shop Roxy Records by the time I came looking for more music by the soul singer, composer and arranger who passed away last Sunday at his Memphis home, but I was able to secure a second-hand copy of “Live At The Sahara Tahoe” (1978) instead. It showcases Mr. Hayes in a reflective yet playful mood, responding to calls from the crowd as well as wondering about the state of the planet we’ll be leaving to future generations. What surprises me about the performance is the lightness of his touch. Although Hayes is commanding some 20-odd musicians and singers, he’s doing so with a supple immediacy that makes up for the slow tempo and sheer length of some of the tracks. Needless to say, the concert kicks off with Hayes’ theme from “Shaft”, a song I remember hearing for the very first time in 1974 when I was first getting into music. The track served as the intro to a tape called “Understanding Pop” on which rock critic Derek Jewell mused on the history of 20h century popular music and played snippets of everything from Big Bill Broonzy and “Pinball Wizard” to “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and Yes. “Shaft” fascinated me immediately, as the music sounded futuristic yet earthy, driving yet sophisticated, and I still marvel at the fact that its composer could put together such an effective piece of sonic cinema without being able to read or write music. The piece was so enthralling that the film was a big disappointment to me when I finally got to see it in the Eighties, as the soft focus and long shots that director Gordon Parks employed back in 1971 seemed decidedly dated. However, Roger Ebert's review makes me want to see this period piece again, and perhaps the quality of the movie itself isn’t so important. Richard Round tree as John Shaft was an inspiration to millions of people all over the world, as the Brazilian composer and Basel resident Fabio Freire reminded me recently. Even in Brazil there were no figures a black citizen could identify with, so “Shaft” had a huge impact on Fabio in his youth. We now know that the blaxploitation genre of films was based entirely on shrewd marketing, but Hays’ score still holds all the street-level energy it had in 1971. Once the itchy wah-wah-guitar and crashing hi-hat kick-start the slow but inevitable build-up that makes the song so gripping, one wants them to go on for ever. And in some ways always will do just that. I can’t see “Shaft” or the best of Mr. Hayes’ repertoire slipping from people’s memories in decades to come. Thank you, Isaac.

Cat vs. prog-rock

Cats don’t like Yes.

This is hardly surprising as cats are notoriously cool and there are few things that are less cool in 2008 than listening to the meanderings of veteran progressive rock bands. In my defence, I can say that the Bristol drum’n’bass musician Roni Size got me re-appraising Yes and that it took me all of eleven years to follow his call. A few months prior to the release of Reprazent’s “New Forms” album (1997), I heard his track “Natural Ting” that features the Rhodes piano introduction to Yes’ “Sound Chaser” (off the 1974 “Relayer” album) and questioned Roni about the sample when I interviewed him in late 1996. Roni didn’t want to talk about “Natural Thing” lest he got into trouble for his uncredited appropriation of intellectual property, but the track left me curious about “Sound Chaser” which is the closest Yes ever got to being funky (albeit in 6/4 time).

So I purchased a CD copy of “Relayer” in 2007 and was appalled by some of the music I re-encountered there (notably the 22-minute long “Gates Of Delirium” and hastily shelved the album, but something must have impressed me. as I dug “Relayer” out again a few weeks back. I now found myself marvelling at some of the ideas the band had come up with back in 1974, and “Sound Chaser” seemed to have regained much of its old power, too. This set me wondering about the rest of Yes’ work, but listening to some of the snippets at the All Music Guide made me realise that many of the criticisms levelled at Yes were justified from 1972 onwards. I was, however, moved to buy the “Fragile” album (1971), as it contains several short (under seven minutes) pieces I felt I might learn something from as a musician.

On returning home with the remastered and expanded CD that actually cost less than the LP I had bought in 1976, I found that our tabby cat had done a mother of a dump in my wife’ Viviane’s office and other places to boot. I took this to be a sign of his displeasure at my recent musical choices and haven’t dared listen to “Fragile” yet. Cats are definitely too cool for Yes, but perhaps I’ll sneak a listen when he’s asleep.

After all, cats reputedly only spend a third of their lives awake.