HIS MASTER’S VOX

Who said promotion doesn’t work? After speaking to Midge Ure of Ultravox a week ago, I got curious and went to see the band play in Zurich last Thursday. It turned out to be a very educational experience. What really struck me was how the band straddled the gap between Krautrock fanfares (“Astradyne”), and Roxy Music melodrama (“Visions In Blue”)during their hay-day - and how their atmospheric tracks far out-shone their more straight-forward songs. The concert also got me thinking about 1981, the year synth-pop rally broke through into the mainstream. I remember returning to England after a long summer holiday to find bands I’d never heard of like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode high in the charts dragging previous niche favourites such as Japan and The Human League with them. I wonder whether Ultravox’ success with the “Vienna” single in early 1981 helped to bring this paradigm shift about, then I started wondering what had happened to turn Ultravox from nobodys dropped by Island Records after three albums into a viable commercial proposition. For one part, Midge Ure joined the band in 1979, giving Ultravox Celtic fervour, rock guitar crunch and a clear-cut image, the other factor bears the name of Gary Numan who took Bowie-style alienation to the top of the charts with “Are Friends Electric?” in summer 1979. Although Numan became a figure of ridicule in the following years due to concepts that grew ever more ambitious as his career waned, one shouldn’t underestimate his influence on musicians to come. Even Nine Inch Nails now hail him as an inspiration.

THE GREAT PRETENDER

Malcolm McLaren died last Thursday at an as yet undisclosed location in Switz-erland, and most of the ensuing obituaries concentrated on his efforts as the manager of the Sex Pistols. It’s wrong to reduce the man who brought hip-hop to the British charts with “Buffalo Gals” and taught Madonna how to vogue to his punk years. McLaren remained an astute observer of pop culture right up to his death, deploring the karaoke culture we live in where everybody wants to be in the limelight without putting in the work and declaring Napster inventor Shawn Fanning to be the greatest artist of the early 2000’s (“I don’t want everything in the world to be free, but I don’t want everything to have a price-tag either”). I met McLaren in 1994 while he was promoting “Paris” an album that nobody was really interested in, as it was a gaudy tribute to the French capital that featured icons such as Françoise Hardy and Catherine Deneuve as well as lush adaptations of Erik Satie’s music and McLaren’s own dodgy singing. I didn’t expect him to reveal any truthful insights into is chequered past, but I did find McLaren to be a generous and gracious interviewee. In the course of our conversation, he enthused about Bill Clinton’s sax playing (“You’d never get Jacques Delors doing something like that”), outlined the shortcoming of the then omnipresent dance scene (“It doesn’t produce any stars”) and predicted England’s demise as a leading nation (“Once the troubles in Ireland end, and all the Irish return, England will become a backwater as Portugal was between the wars”). By sheer coincidence, I had the pleasure to speak to Midge Ure of Ultravox two days after McLaren’s death, who, as legend will have it, was offered the job of the Sex Pistols’ singer in 1975. Ure, also an engaging interviewee, confirmed the story and went on to say that McLaren and later Clash manager Bernie Rhodes were selling stolen musical equipment in Glasgow when they popped their question. “I didn’t join the band but I bought an amplifier off them”, Ure chuckled. “And it actually worked. But I sold it quite quickly just in case it was hot.” He was very complimentary about McLaren’s business acumen: “It was phenomenal that he got EMI to let him walk away with 100’000 pounds just because they were embarrassed to be associated with the Pistols. It was like David against Goliath.” One doesn’t need to condone all of McLarens’ practices (especially with regard to how he handled his artists) to concede that he was one of the music business’s great personalities, always showing it for what it was: A smash-and-grab industry where mavericks like him could flourish. Provided they were brave and brash enough, that is.

MORE THAN THE SON OF HIS PA’S

I really think the idea of the guitar hero is out-dated. There have never been that many virtuosos who can dazzle and still be entertaining, and even the late great Jimi Hendrix manages to lose me at times - which is why I prefer his studio work to the many live recordings released since his untimely death in 1970. Of course, there are modern guitarists I very much admire, such as Tom Morello of Rage Against The Mmachine who combines white noise fret-play with a hip-hop sensibility. But I don’t go out to watch guitarists play any more, it’s usually the bands (or for personal reasons) the bassists that interest me these days. So last Thursday, I was shocked to come away from a gig with a new guitar hero to marvel over. The musician in question is Vieux Farka Touré, the son of Mali guitar master Ali Farka Touré who died in 2006. And Vieux isn’t just a younger version of his dad: he’s replenished Ali’s lyrical runs and tricky rhythms with techniques and effects drawn from the vocabulary of blues and heavy metal without cloying the original beauty of Mali guitar music.

So when I went to see him play at the Moods club in Zurich, I was astounded to see a consummate performer who seemed to be reclaiming the electric guitar for Africa with melodic wit, elegant phrasing and a strident albeit subtle aggression in his playing. Watching Vieux Farka Touré left me dumb-founded and open-jawed at times, and I can’t wait to hear more of his music. I have seen one possible future of the guitar, and his name is Vieux Farka Touré, a musician who is definitely more than the son of his pa’s.