Sunday 7 September 2008
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.
Monday 1 September 2008
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.
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.
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