LOST HORIZON

„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

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

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

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

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.