Nick Joyce On Music

REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE

2010-08-08T11:57:00.002+02:00

Tom Jones’ new album „Praise & Blame“ has drawn quite a few comparisons to producer Rick Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash. Not all of these have been favourable, partly due to the fact that Tiger Tom’s pipes are just too big for the small band format he’s currently working in. But Mr. Rubin’s work is also horribly over-rated. Although I appreciate many of his rap and rock productions (RUN-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way” is still one of my favourite records of all time), the sound of his acclaimed acoustic albums for Donovan, Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash has started to bore me: the hushed vocals, gossamer guitar and muted piano backing have become a parody of themselves.
Add to that the fact that Rubin is working with consummate performers who hardly need spiritual guidance to get back to basics in the studio, and you start wondering what it is that the producer really does on such projects besides choosing the repertoire and musicians to work with. In Rubin’s case, a “hands off” approach might mean having his hands tied behind his back when he’s in the studio. In fact, I prefer Ethan Johns’ work for Tom Jones to Rick Rubin’s latest Cash production “Ain’t No Grave”. Although “Praise & Blame” is flawed, there’s a sense of risk-taking here that is absent from Rubin’s all-too-tasteful acoustic work of late. Tom Jones may rip into tracks like Bob Dylan’s “What Good Am I?” and John Lee Hooker’s “Burning Hell” with more Las Vegas bluster than is good for this material, but you’ve got to admire the man for his energy and verve. And for upsetting his record company in the process. If the reports are true, the vice-president of Island Records tried to stop the release of “Praise & Blame” as late as May. Even at 70, Tom still manages to right people up the wrong way. He might be a veteran, but he’s also a rebel of sorts. Chapeau!

SECONDSIGHT

2010-07-21T18:04:00.004+02:00

Anyone who knows me personally also knows that I’m partially-sighted; a fact that only really causes problems when I meet someone for the first and sometimes only time, i.e. in an interview situation. I used not to mention my eyesight when meeting musicians, as I wasn’t always comfortable with that amount of self-disclosure, plus I didn’t want it to take up valuable interview time. But I’ve changed my tack, thanks mainly to Chuck D of Public Enemy. Because of the rap crew’s then radical political stance, I was very nervous about meeting him in 1992, and that made my attempts at eye contact even more erratic than usual. Chuck complained about this fact, saying that he was used to people looking him in the eye. I thought that his outburst would be the end of the interview, but in fact he became quite interested in my predicament, and the tone of the conversation lightened up considerably. So much so that he was in a decidedly buoyant mood by the time we parted. That encounter made me realise that mentioning my sight gave me an invaluable opportunity to make contact with interview partners by jolting them out of promotion stupor. These days, I bring my partially-sightedness up right at the beginning of my interviews, and people react to it in quite different ways. The Brits are usually very clued up and realise there’s something there before I say anything, Central Europeans are quite glad of the mention as eye contact is more important here than in the UK. And some people are kinder than they need be. David Bowie once tried to lead me from the door of a conference room to the table where we would be having our interview.
Why am I mentioning all this? A few weeks back, I met Nina Hagen, German punk’s most enduring and colourful personality, a bit like Lotte Lenya on Ecstasy or Lene Lovich with a greater vocal range. Her first two albums “Nina Hagen Band” (1978) and “Unbehagen” (1979) still stand up as some of the best rock music to come out of Germany, as they combine new-wave aggressiveness with an almost Zappa-like sense of musical adventure. When I told Frau Hagen I had a problem with my eye-sight, her first response was to coo “how sweet” which I found a little patronising. But she redeemed herself quickly by adding: “If you’re partially-sighted, then you can see eternity, you’re not missing much by not seeing a lot of what’s happening in the here and now.” If she’s right, eternity looks pretty darn fuzzy. But perhaps that’s not really surprising.

CHRYSTAL CLEAR

2010-06-26T14:01:00.002+02:00

It’s interesting to know that “Rolling Stone” magazine still gets read by some very important people: This week, Barack Obama dismissed ISAF and USFORA commander General Stanley McChrystal for disparaging remarks about the President and other Washington residents as reported in Michael Hastings’ article “The Runaway General”. The incident has confirmed my suspicions that RS publisher Jan Wenner is pursuing a subtly subversive course with his magazine. The political reporting in “Rolling Stone” still adheres to the high standard you used to be able to expect from the magazine, always giving you the feeling that the writer had really got to the centre of his or her subject matter without being sucked into a PR vortex. In contrast, current music reporting in RS makes you wonder about the magazine’s editorial stance. The coverage given to casting show “American Idol” seems both excessive and sycophantic; which music writer Christian Weingarten puts down to the sorry fact that such copy generates clicks and thus makes RS more attractive to potential advertisers. This is definitely a case of the proverbial tail wagging the dog, but if RS can get some of the “American Idol” crowd thinking about American politics in a more critical way, that seems like a trade-off worth considering. One that in fact runs true to the ideals “Rolling Stone” gave up decades ago when the magazine started courting the mainstream rather than championing the counter-culture.

GOTCHA!

2010-06-08T18:03:00.005+02:00

You can’t blame them for doing it. Every performer has stock phrases he or she uses on stage to communicate with the audience; the great art lies in making the crowd feel that that particular night is special for the artist. Justin Currie once told me that when his band Del Amitri supported Tina Turner in Glasgow, the stage was littered with notices reminding la Turner of where she was performing lest she address the crowd incorrectly. A sensible precaution in the light of the rate at which successful artists change location or even continent while on tour. When big names come to Zurich, they regularly apologize for not being proficient in Schweizerdeutsch and then inevitably stammer a few words of the local tongue for which they are rewarded with resounding applause. Fergie, the singer with Black-eyed Peas, made use of the apology gambit when I went to see the band play recently, but dropped an absolute clanger in the process. Shortly before launching into “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, she apologised for not speaking Schweizerdeutsch, got the expected roar from the faithful, but then made the mistake of saying what a beautiful language she thinks Schweizerdeutsch is. The reaction to that remark started to gain momentum but died away quite abruptly as the audience realised that Fergie obviously didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Schweizerdeutsch is far too guttural to be called a beautiful language even with a lot of imagination, and the clanger showed Fergie’s banter for what it was, a set of stock moves she pulls every night, whether she’s in Barcelona or Zurich. As Michael McKeegan of Northern Irish band Therapy? once said, there’s a thin line between being a professional and a cynic, and this seems to be a case in point.

GIVE THE DOG A BONO

2010-05-10T15:55:00.002+02:00

2010 is definitely the year to be considering rock music’s potential as a force for positive change in the world. Not only will we be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts in July; Bono of U2 turned 50 today, giving admirers and detractors alike the opportunity to analyse his success as Africa’s most visible ambassador to the industrialised nations. It would take an expert on aid policy to tell you with any authority how effective Bono activism is, and his debt relief and more money policies have attracted criticism from writers such as Paul Theroux who are more than sympathetic to Africa’s troubles. I feel more at home considering Bono’s activities within show business which is what rock at the stadium level undeniably is. U2 put on a clever show, but funnily enough, the weak link at their concerts is often the music. As Bono once said the band is like “a boxer who has the grasp but not the reach”.

Perhaps it’s the realisation that U2 are far better songwriters than musicians that leads Bono to be so cocky when talking about the band and its music. Given, if you are beloved by millions, you do have the right to be a little self-assured, but I can’t help thinking of Golda Meir when I think about Bono. The fourth Prime Minister of the state of Israel reputedly once said to a fellow politician that “you’re not great enough to be modest". With Bono, a man painfully aware of his limitations as a singer and an instrumentalist, Golda Meir’s quip has a canny ring. I think his subtle shortcomings more than his evident triumphs are what make Bono interesting as an artist, and he’s always most engaging when he’s not trying to convince you of his own greatness. As he himself once said, sometimes the least serious music turns out to be the most eloquent. The song “Sugar Daddy” he co-wrote for Tom Jones is proof of that. It by far outstrips anything on U2’s current album “No Line On The Horizon” because it’s funny, sexy and autobiographical all at the same time. That’s a combination not many song-writers achieve.

HIS MASTER’S VOX

2010-04-21T18:18:00.004+02:00

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

2010-04-12T13:41:00.005+02:00

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

2010-04-05T10:54:00.002+02:00

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.

WATER EVERYWHERE

2010-01-27T09:30:00.003+01:00

I have to give Steffen Fuchs, my favourite Berliner and adopted member of the Joyce family for some ten years, credit for this one. While visiting us here in Basel over New Year, Steffen, a passionate fisherman, expressed his appreciation of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line”, only criticizing the fact that June Carter Cash’s prowess as an angler hadn’t been emphasized enough in the film. To his knowledge, the accomplished singer and song-writer had also been a stellar sportswoman who could out-fish both her husband and her son.
This little-known fact, confirmed in John Carter Cash’s book “Anchored In Love” got us thinking that perhaps the film (and the song it was named after) should in fact have been called “Cast The Line” instead of “Walk The Line”. We then developed the possibility of niche journalism as a growth market for the otherwise shrinking field of print journalism. For example, one could start by judging films only on the basis of their aquatic content, but that’s a dangerous road to go down, as that would man rating Kevin Costner’s disastrous “Waterworld” much higher than David Lynch’s rambling yet powerful “Dune” epic. Furthermore, any film with Laurence Fishburne would inevitably get a five-star rating and Jacques Cousteau would be a superstar far outstripping the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Taking this line of argument on to music, Fishbone would be the sharpest band on the planet (which they in fact were around 1992), but Stock, Aitken & Waterman would go down in history as the greatest record producers of all time. Considering that the British trio was responsible for 80s pop horrors by Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and Samantha Fox, I’m not sure that fishy music criticism is such a good thing. Sorry, Steffen.

I FOUGHT THE LAW

2010-01-04T11:27:00.005+01:00

Happy New Year to you all. My posts got even less frequent towards the end of 2009, but as usual I have decent reasons for going incommunicado. i.e. an over-ambitious workload, an undiagnosed iron deficiency and quite a few interesting encounters with Joss Stone, H.I.M. and Massive Attack which I’ll come back to at a later time. The most pleasant reason for radio silence was Gretel’s new CD “Chop Chop” and the preparations involved in getting the album to press and back again. The band had its launch party at the “Hirscheneck” music club here in Basel where we supported unwavering Swiss punk veterans The Bucks.

The gig had a potentially very rock’n’roll epilogue: While saying good-bye to The bucks outside the club at around three in the morning, a passing Black Maria grazed my shoulder with its right wing mirror; I thought nothing of this pain-free encounter until the van emitted three irate-looking police officers wanting to know who had beaten against the side of their vehicle. I owned up to having been in contact with their wing mirror albeit not by my own design but was nonetheless asked to provide some ID. While taking down my details I was asked about my professional occupation, and I knew exactly what effect this piece of information would have. Sure enough, the blood drained from the officers’ faces when I also gave them a full list of the publications I write for. They were obviously dreading headlines along the lines of “Basel police ram handicapped journalist” and departed in an apologetic hurry.

Although I was sure that the encounter wouldn’t have any consequences for me, I was a little unsettled to receive a letter from the Basel police a few days later. In it, the police woman who had headed the team apologised for the encounter and asked me to get in touch should I have sustained any injuries from the encounter with her van. So I now tip my hat to the Basel police for doing such a careful and also caring bit of damage limitation - even though their good work has severely dampened my rock’n’roll credential.

THE PUDDING’S PROOF

2009-11-03T09:42:00.002+01:00

Whatever you might think of U2, they do give good interview. And I’m not just talking about Bono, the dreamer with a fistful of facts. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. often sheds light on the inner workings of a group of people who like to pretend that they’re still the four muckers who started out together some 33 years ago. I recently remembered a U2 interview from 1997 when they were making the distinction between records that are truly great and ones that con you into thinking they’re great because they remind you of another great record. These words have been resonating with me while listening to Japanese composer Ryuchi Sakamoto’s aptly titled new release “Playing The Piano”.
Although Sakamoto’s slightly lackadaisical attack and ponderous rhythm jarred with me from the get-go, there was something familiar about the album I liked, and it wasn’t just the Spartan re-workings of Sakamoto favourites like his theme
to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, the 1983 war film in which he starred alongside David Bowie. The general atmosphere reminded me of one of my favourite jazz records, Bill Evans’ “Conversations With Myself” from 1963, an early experiment with multi-track recording that had the pianist layering his own playing track-by-track and revelling in his virtual interactions. What makes Evans’ musical shadow-boxing great and Sakamoto’s solo performances less so is the fact that “Conversations With Myself” was at the cutting edge of the then available recording technology and knew it while “Playing The Piano” surfs on a wave of nostalgic melancholy not supported by the playing.
It is a prime example of a record that only reminds you of a great record
rather than being one itself.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

2009-10-08T22:17:00.002+02:00

For a change, this post has nothing to do with music, as Swedish crime author Stieg Larsson doesn’t go in for the rock ’n’ roll name-dropping that so endears me to his Scottish colleague Ian Rankin. I’ve just finished reading Larsson’s book “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, the first part of his “Millennium Trilogy” and I found myself strangely moved by the book – despite my reservations both about the time Larsson takes to tell his story and the plethora of characters that inhabit it.
What got me about the novel besides the author’s strong stance against violence towards women (the Swedish title in fact means “Men Who Hate Women”) and his intricate depiction of a dysfunctional family of industrialists was the way that Larsson, himself a journalist, handles the media side of the story. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” might turn out to be one of the last major crime novels written before the background of an intact newspaper industry, as many daily publications have either ceased to exist entirely or have retreated from the news-stand since the book came out in 2005.
What also moved me about the book was the camaraderie among the characters who work on the “Millennium” magazine that gives Larsson’s trilogy its name: as a freelance writer, I sorely miss the regular and friendly repartee with other colleagues in the field. But Larsson is in no way painting a rose-coloured picture of the press milieu. He also warns how easily journalists can be corrupted when personal matters infringe upon their work, and also demonstrates how people who might be crucial to a particular project often find themselves high and dry when a piece has been written up and published. Lisbeth Salander, the character who gives the novel its English title certainly discovers that to be true - at least at the end of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. There are, after all, two other books in the trilogy that I have yet to read. By the way, I lied about this post not having anything to do with music: Mikael Blomkvist, the central figure in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is a big Elvis fan.

NOTHING’S NEW

2009-08-11T19:32:00.003+02:00

Some time ago I promised to write more about musical discoveries I’d made. But at the time of that pledge, I’d temporarily forgotten how difficult it is to find bands that haven’t already been uncovered and written about by other media. Take for example Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from the Southern Sahara whose music sounds like a mixture of Ali Farka Touré's Mali blues crossed with the Wu-Tang Clan’s broken hip-Hop beats, albeit played on electric guitars and assorted percussion.
Their 2007 album “Aman Iman: Water Is Life” was nothing less than a revelation to me when I first heard it, and now that Tinariwen have released the follow-up “Imidiwan: Companions”, I’ve been quick to review it in glowing terms. In the course of my research, I discovered that the world music scene has been fawning over the band since a WOMAD appearance in 2001 and that Tinariwen have a history that spans more than two decades. So in fact I’m a late-comer to the fold. Still, that hasn’t deterred me from lauding Tinariwen for their virtues as instrumentalists and singers, as their music only gains in power and beauty on repeated listens. One can’t praise these records enough, even though many journalists have tried before me.

I CATCHER

2009-08-06T12:10:00.003+02:00

Ironic as it may seem, it’s actually quite difficult to get music journalists to go out and see new bands or listen to albums by as-yet unknown artists. There’s a reason for that glaring contradiction, and that’s the fact that people who listen to music for a living would rather indulge their passion for artists they know and love than fill their already cramped cognitive space with sound they can neither digest comfortably nor derive fee-paying prose from.
I know we’re not the only professionals guilty of conservative crimes against the performing arts: In “Prick Up Your Ears”, his biography of Sixties playwright Joe Orton, John Lahr remarks that getting critics to attend premieres is a headache New York theatre producers have always had to contend with. The joy is all the greater when you encounter new music that instead of cluttering up your mind makes you feel richer for having stumbled upon it.
Such was the Case With “Balance Instars”, the debut album by London-based prog-metal band Of The I, who not only have a penchant for Californian avant-rock masters Tool, but also have the chops to match said band’s most complex work – plus the imagination to go beyond it, adding ambient and classical inflections to Tool’s intricate guitar lines, angular rhythms and darkly plaintive vocals.
That’s no mean feat, as Tool themselves did a near-revelatory reworking of the in itself virtuoso music of latter-day King Crimson in the Nineties. I really look forward to hearing what Of The I will do next, but it might be some time before I get to see them live. True to form and much to my shame, I managed to miss their gig in Zurich a month or two back.

CELEBRITY-PROOF

2009-07-23T08:59:00.002+02:00

It can be funny to be partially sighted at times. Quite apart from the fact that life regularly treats you to both legal and free psychedelic flashbacks, it also makes you immune to celebrity. I was reminded of this last week when I interviewed British band Muse, whose upcoming album “The Resistance” incidentally contains three of the best songs they’ve ever written as well as a three part symphony. After the final interview (the band insists that journalists meet all three members to take the media focus off front man and songwriter Matthew Bellamy), I checked my recordings and set off across the outdoor terrace of the Dolder hotel perched above Zurich. On my way to the exit I encountered a man with garish sunglasses and a light blue top who seemed to be circling me with a quizzical expression on his face. I’d almost passed him by the time I realised that he was Matthew Bellamy who I’d interviewed only ten minutes before, so I proffered my hand to redress my fauxpas. It must have been quite unusual for Mr. Bellamy to be so unmemorable as to have his face forgotten so quickly, but as I’d told him about my poor eyesight at the beginning of our conversation, he reacted with grace and humour. I then managed to get lost in the dimly light corridors of the Dolder, and that’s the down-side of being partially sighted: You might be celebrity-proof, but any alien architecture is likely to make you question your sense of direction and reality in general.

ISLAND OF REASON

2009-07-20T07:48:00.002+02:00

Quite some time has passed since my last post, and there are many reasons or excuses for my silence. Oodles of work for daily papers here in Switzerland, a move to a new home as well as recording sessions with Gretel in Ireland. Posts should follow more regularly from now on, as befits a blog, but please accept my pre-emptive apologies for any future interruptions in communication.
The professional highlight of the past few months was an interview with Chris Blackwell, famed founder of Island Records, the label responsible for launching Bob Marley and U2 as well as giving the world such wonderful anomalies as Roxy Music, Grace Jones and the B-52’s and saving Marianne Faithfull and Tom Waits from descents into obscurity. It was an honour to meet Mr. Blackwell, but also a sharp reminder of my job as a journalist. “I was always much more focused on press than on radio,” he told me, back in London for Island’s 50th birthday bash. “Because the roles of radio and press are vastly different: Radio always wants you to stay tuned to a station and not switch channels while it’s the press’s role to introduce you to new things.”
In the last few years, even the broadsheets have fallen prey to the allure of mainly reporting on the renowned and respected, and I myself plead guilty to that particular crime. Mr. Blackwell’s reminder of my journalistic duty seems even more poignant two months after our meeting as the Swiss album and singles charts are currently clogged up with Michael Jackson re-issues. So much so, in fact, that they make up about 60% percent of the respective Top Tens – and that’s not even counting USA For Africa’s “We Are The World”. Not that I’m averse to Jackson’s music, it’s just that I think the true proof of his pop prowess remains hidden from the general public. If you can still get your hands on the Special Editions of the “Off The Wall” and “Thriller” albums released back in 2003, you’ll find the demo versions of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Billie Jean” Jackson recorded at home with members of his family. Listening to these first captures of future hits, you realise that contrary to popular belief, he had these songs down well before taking them to producer Quincy Jones. But now I’m falling into the same trap of writing about a major star rather than uncovering the obscure or forgotten. I promise to mend my ways.

CONCEPT? WHAT CONCEPT?

2009-04-13T10:26:00.004+02:00

You might be wondering why I don’t write about Swiss music much considering the fact that I’m a music journalist living and working in Switzerland. I think this blind spot has something to do with the fact that although I appreciate the high level of musicianship abundant in the scene, I miss the grand ideas behind the hard graft: Only very rarely do I sense the bands’ artistic, political or absurdist reasons for doing what they do. The glaring exception to the rule is The Bianca Story from Basel, a self-proclaimed art collective in best Roxy Music/Pulp/Franz Ferdinand tradition that not only plays angular pop songs but also directs and produces its own videos and installations. My beef with the band is that I think The Bianca Story should put more time and effort into the music and less into the extra- curricular activities and generally show more conceptual consistency. Consider the following: After having been assigned to write a concert preview I ordered the new mini-album “Unique copy” from the band’s agent. Only after reading the relevant press release did I realise that the album could not in fact be ordered as the unique copy of the title would be mounted in a multi-media artefact that weighed half a ton an was due to be auctioned off with a starting price of 10 000 francs. Apparently, the idea was to raise the question of the value of music in a time of digital over-availability – a little like Radiohead with their name-your-own-price download album “In Rainbows” back in 2007. I then wrote an embarrassed e-mail to the agent apologizing for demanding the conceptually impossible. A day later I received a call from The Bianca Story’s publicist, asking whether I needed any additional information about the project, pointing out that all five tracks off the album were available via the band’s Myspace page. He also offered to send me the music on CD if I liked – which to my mind defeated the object of the enterprise. The album arrived the very next day and since then I’ve been wondering how many other people have unique copies of “Unique Copy” sitting on their shelves.

LOST HORIZON

2009-02-25T23:17:00.002+01:00

„No Line On The Horizon“ arrived in the post yesterday. It’s by far not the worst album in U2’s catalogue, but it’s not their best, either. The problems with “No Line On The Horizon” concern the slowness of most of the material (one of the reasons the jubilantly playful “Get On Your Boots” is such a stand-out), the presence of bridges and intros that detract from the general thrust of some songs and the fact that Bono’s vocals and lyrics seem more ad hoc than is good for the music. There are exceptions: “Magnificent” is an instant U2 classic with something approaching a disco beat, and “Cedars Of Lebanon” has an understated precision that perfectly couches Bono’s thumbnail sketch of a war correspondent’s view of the tragedies that surround him. The stunning song ends (as does the album) with the lines “(Enemies) gonna last with you longer/Than your friends”, and these words resonate even more deeply if you have ever met writer, music connoisseur and publicist extraordinaire Rob Partridge, to whose memory “No Line On The Horizon” is dedicated. Until reading the dedication, I hadn’t known that the man who brought U2 to Island Records’ attention almost thirty years ago passed away last November, and I was stunned by the sad news. I’d only met Rob three times in his capacity as Tom Waits’ publicist, but like many others before me appreciated his fierce intelligence, hovering wit and compassionate professionalism. Even though I was thousands of miles from home on the few occasions I med Rob, I always felt in the best of hands. I last spoke to him in 2006: I had just returned from California and called to say thank you for setting up yet another interview with Tom waits. "Are you still here?” he joked from across the Atlantic when he heard who was calling and why. “Well, see you again in two years’ time” were his parting words, and I very much regret that there won’t be another opportunity to discuss the varying merits of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”, Rob’s self-proclaimed definitive article on Allen Toussaint or his many dealings with Bob Marley. There are many artists and associates who knew Rob far better through his work at Island and after 1991 at his own PR and management company Coalition, but despite only having had the pleasure of a few encounters, I too feel poorer for the loss of the force and personality that was Rob Partridge, a man who made me feel part of a bigger and more interesting world.

HISTORY REPEATING

2009-02-15T09:54:00.005+01:00

The name caught my eye immediately. A Nirvana tribute band called Courtney & The Shotguns will be playing the Abart Club in Zurich on April 10 to “celebrate the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death”, as the unfortunately-worded announcement puts it. Quite apart from the fact I find the name tasteless in the light of Cobain’s suicide, the advertisement made me remember how quickly personal experience passes into ancient history without you noticing. It seems only yesterday that Nirvana were playing one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen in Neuchatel, but since that memorable evening in early 1994 the world has changed beyond recognition: The Internet has revolutionised the way we communicate with one another, we are involved in wars raging in parts of the world we could previously ignore, and the first black president has taken residence in the White House. The first inkling of how the planet can change beneath your very feet overtook me when I went to see the film “Enigma” with my father back in 2002. The thriller starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet is set in England in 1943, more accurately in Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking headquarters where my father worked during World War II. Watching the film, I realised how much the planet had changed since he was a young man deciphering Japanese military dispatches – so much so that the world he knew back then has become a thing of fiction only remembered to varying degrees of accuracy by historians, journalists and scriptwriters. And now I’m having similar feelings about my own life. Last Wednesday I attended the launch of the Swiss arm of the Nokia Music Store in Zurich, and although the event under-impressed me with its lack of PR punch, it none the less sent me on a reverie. Nokia’s music platform might only be one of many such sites currently in operation, but it is another step away from a world where browsing dingy record shops like Virgin Records in Coventry was the highest of pleasures for prepubescent males like me. Now that you can access any piece of music you like and transfer it to your favourite piece of tech within seconds, the independently owned record store will at some point become a thing of the past. And with it will go that heady atmosphere of danger and disdain that once added to rock, reggae and rap music’s particular tang: I wonder what Kurt Cobain would have made of such developments.

BOWL OF CHEVYS

2009-02-01T22:06:00.003+01:00

The Superbowl XLIII is going down in Tampa, FL, tonight. Although most musically-inclined people will think of U2’s rousing yet much-criticised mid-game performance in 2002 or Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, I always associate the NFL final with Tom Waits, an artist who for commercial and artistic reasons will certainly never perform at the event.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I was riding a bus down to San Francisco airport after an interview with Waits and was surprised by the fact that the entire population of California seemed to have been abducted by aliens. The bus driver assured me, his only passenger, that the Superbowl was keeping people indoors, and it was only then that I realised what a phenomenon American Football is in the US. To Europeans, it’s an outlandish pastime played by men wearing pirated Star Wars merchandise.
This year, Bruce Springsteen will be providing the mid-game entertainment, and the time somehow seems right for his first musical appearance at the event. His latest album “Working On A Dream” might not be a masterpiece, but to me it showcases an artist wisely side-stepping the pressure to come up with the soundtrack to Obama’s first term in office (apart from the title track) while doing exactly what he wants to be doing (i.e. veering madly between Howlin’ Wolf’s fuzzy blues shouting, Ennio Morricone western pastiches and Brian Wilson sunny orchestrations). One should, of course, never underestimate the breadth of Springsteen’s taste. It might be easy to typecast him as a blue-collar traditionalist, but try listening to his haunting “State Trooper” after Suicide’s heart-rending „Frankie Teardrop”. Not only is Springsteen uncovering Suicide’s secret blues roots, his also honouring the original synth duo’s narrative powers, whose song predates “Mr. State Trooper” by about five years. And of course, Springsteen was quick to pick up Tom Wait’s “jersey Girl”, a fact Waits reputedly commented with the following words: “I’ve done all I can for his (Springsteen’s) carrier. He’s on his own now.” Although I’m not a Springsteen fan, I’m glad to say he’s doing just fine.

BACK TO NOAM

2009-01-11T15:15:00.004+01:00

I’ve never been good with other people’s birthdays, so don’t be surprised that I’m only now getting around to honouring Noam Chomsky’s 80th birthday which was in fact on December 7. When I was at college, our lecturer in sociolinguistics told us Chomsky’s ideas about deep grammar were so complex that we shouldn’t bother with them, but since the Eighties, Chomsky has obviously made his way into the mainstream, as quite a few musicians have name-checked the veteran intellectual and peace activist in recent months. In a conversation I had with British multi-instrumentalist and film composer Nitin Sawhney about his thought-provoking new album “London Undersound”, we soon got on to the subject of the ever-expanding surveillance state in England and Chomsky’s Orwellian conviction that governments encourages fear as a means of controlling the populace. Swiss rapper Gimma referenced Chomsky in a rhyme about potentially inspiring people on the album “Iisziit” by Bucher & Schmid, and German singer and song-writer extraordinaire Farin Urlaub also mentioned the great man when we met up to discuss his latest solo album “Die Wahrheit übers Lügen”.Urlaub, ever an avid reader and thinker, brought up Chomsky’s point that any Presidential candidate who makes it through to the campaign proper would have to have made so many promises and endured so many humiliations along the way as to be unable to pursue policies vastly different to those of his predecessors. I quipped that I was impressed that Urlaub could understand Chomsky’s prose and then felt rather silly, not having read any of it myself. Luckily for me, an essay by Chomsky appeared in the December 6 issue of the “Tages-Anzeiger”, one of the Swiss news-papers I write for, and through reading the text I found my old prejudices confirmed. Although I agreed with everything that I read in the interesting and well-researched article outlining Chomsky’s reservations about Obama and his choice of staff, I found his writing to be rather convoluted. If I wrote like that, my editor at the same paper would have a fit. So happy birthday, Noam, but please watch your syntax. More people would benefit from your deep and varied insights into the fabric of American politics if you’d only avoid the parentheses and sub-clauses.

BIRMINGHAM, BACH & BAMAKO

2008-12-29T10:24:00.003+01:00

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

2008-12-15T12:17:00.006+01:00

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

2008-11-26T19:25:00.004+01:00

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

2008-10-17T09:03:00.003+02:00

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

2008-10-08T07:31:00.004+02:00

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

2008-09-07T22:12:00.003+02:00

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?

2008-09-01T07:04:00.003+02:00

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

2008-08-22T09:06:00.003+02:00

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“

2008-08-15T10:30:00.001+02:00

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

2008-08-11T14:20:00.003+02:00

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.