*Warning: contains content of a 'HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD!' nature*
On my way back into Waterloo after a trip to Salisbury I saw a poster South West Trains had put up. Yellow background; picture in the bottom right of a stick man in the act of, or just after the act of, falling on his head. Big black letters:
What went through the mind of the person who slipped on the platform?
The floor.
Smaller letters:
Last year 77 people fell on our platforms. Don’t let this trip be your last.
Cut to a platform in a suburban train station, early noughties. I’m waiting with some of my school chums, a couple of whom are sitting on the platform edge dangling their legs over the side. Not the best idea, sure – though they can see trains coming from half a mile away. A train going in the other direction hurtles past on the far platform. A red-faced, moustachioed man in uniform leans out of the window and shouts something at my chums, shaking his fist. His train will terminate at the next station, then double back to where we are, by which time all legs will be well out of harm’s way.
We are sitting in the carriage when the door opens and in comes our man. He is – there is no other word for it – bristling with righteous indignation. “So these are the schoolboys who like cheating with death!” he cries in triumph (mixing his clichés). He proceeds to tell us a cautionary tale about “Little Johnny” (the kid’s always called Little Johnny) who blah blah blah legs blah blah blah crying mother blah blah wheelchair – you get the idea.
The man’s name was Terry – I read it on his name badge – and he became a running joke of ours, a byword for petty and generally arsey behaviour. Sure, my chums were being irresponsible. Sure, he was doing his job and was concerned for their safety. But it was the way he expressed himself, the patronising cautionary tale that rankled.
Flashback over – cut to present day.
What went through the mind of the person who slipped on the platform?
The floor.
Last year 77 people fell on our platforms. Don’t let this trip be your last.
Everything about this ad annoys me. It’s trying to use the same tricks as those manipulative “Think!” ads, but failing. Ooh, let’s suck them in with a joke, then send them a CHILLING MESSAGE. Except – what’s the message? 77 people fell over in one year? Most of whom didn’t die? (If they did die, SWT have really failed on the shock-tactics front, as it’s not at all clear).
Bear in mind there are over 200 stations on the SWT network, including some of the busiest in Britain. Thousands upon thousands of people use these platforms every day. It would seem that their health and safety record is actually remarkably good.
So what’s the point of the ad? Do they really think we don’t know that if you run on a wet surface, you might fall over? Do they really think that anyone who is too stupid to realise that will read their ad? Couldn’t the money they spent focus-grouping, designing and producing it have gone towards, I don’t know, making rail travel affordable? What was going through their minds? (Not the floor, that’s for damn sure). The spirit of Terry is alive and well.
There's a book review I wrote in the latest issue of The Literateur, which is a nifty new online magazine. It's great to be a part of the magazine, though admittedly the book I was given to review was a stinker. Read my vitriol here - unless you are the book's author, in which case please don't.
The other day I bought a copy of Getz/Gilberto, the definitive 1963 bossa nova album that features Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto and Tom Jobim. This is the record that brought bossa nova in general, and ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ in particular, into the mainstream in America. It’s a lovely album and, on a sunny day, the perfect accompaniment to my morning bagel.
I was more struck, however, by its liner notes. I think these were written as recently as 1997, by an American jazz writer called Doug Ramsey. He begins thus:
"It may seem that after Elvis came the deluge, but American popular music did not go into the tank overnight. In 1956, the year of his florescence, Presley dominated the charts with ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ and ‘Love Me Tender.’ Radio listeners could not escape Presley, Bill Haley, the Platters or Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, but public taste allowed a few items of reasonable quality.
"Gone was the era when good music and popular were often the same. […] Still, at one time or another in 1956, Frank Sinatra’s ‘Love and Marriage’ and Dean Martin’s ‘Memories Are Made of This’ were in the top ten. Nelson Riddle made it with ‘April in Portugal,’ and Doris Day with ‘Que Sera Sera.’ Great stuff? No, but my god, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?
"Popular music was sliding toward the day when salesmen, programmers, accountants, and marketers would manipulate the music business into one vast pop emporium.
"Before the music industry perfected the filtering system designed to eliminate the possibility of a record rising to the top on its musical merits, a few good ones slipped through."
(Ramsey cites the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’ and then turns his attention to Getz/Gilberto. He concludes:)
"As long as unyielding avarice rules the pop record business, it is unlikely that a jazz album will again dominate the charts. However, we have this imperishable reminder that it is possible for art music to kindle a response so universal that it becomes an indispensable element of the cultural environment. There’s hope."
I actually laughed out loud when I read this. And the jazz world wonders why it has a reputation for snobbery. I was also reminded of Harry Haller in Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, which I am currently trying to adapt into a musical. Harry begins with much the same view of jazz music – which was just emerging in the 1920s dance halls where much of the novel is set – as a cheap, mindless form for the masses to gyrate to, infinitely inferior to his beloved Mozart and Haydn. It occurred to me that this has been an endlessly repeating cycle for much of musical history. A musical style begins as something visceral, instinctive, and designed for dance, then becomes absorbed into the establishment and becomes sterilised or intellectualised to the point where it is no longer danceable. So by the time trad jazz and swing had mutated into bebop and cool jazz, they were no longer fit for purpose as dance music. Similarly, bossa nova happened when Gilberto, Jobim etc took the infectious dance rhythms of the samba and cooled them down to the point where they were better suited to my morning bagel than to hip-shaking. From classical composers appropriating folk dances, to rock become prog-engorged, to Marvin Gaye making What’s Goin’ On, so many musical styles have moved, in their focus, from the hips to the head.
All of which is a roundabout way of guffawing at the ridiculously blinkered view offered by Ramsey’s notes. Not only does he posit that the music industry pre-1956 was avarice-free (ha!), he claims that not a single decent record ever rose to the top of the pop charts after 1963 (ha! ha!). Not only does he confuse "art music" with jazz (the jazz music in question being more often classified under "elevator music"), but he totally overlooks where jazz music came from and where rock ‘n’ roll went next. And much as I love Sinatra (I REALLY love Sinatra) I’m probably not the only person who’d rather listen to the Beach Boys than ‘Love and Marriage’...
There are some cover versions that just indisputably blast the original into oblivion. When Otis Redding heard Aretha Franklin singing Respect, he famously said: “I just lost my song. That girl took it away from me.” I’d like to look at another recording that renders its original, in my view, utterly obsolete. The song is My Baby Just Cares For Me by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson. The recording artist is Nina Simone.
Nina Simone was, by Otis’s criteria, one of the most light-fingered figures in popular music. Again and again she makes the songs she essays totally her own. Heard the original of Feeling Good? No? Don’t bother. From her gut-wrenching take on My Man’s Gone Now from Porgy and Bess to her versions of Bob Dylan songs (Just Like A Woman, I Shall Be Released) Nina proves you don’t have to be a songwriter (though she was that too) to bring your own creative stamp to a record.
Not convinced? Here’s the (more or less) original version of My Baby Just Cares For Me, by Eddie Cantor. Yep, he’s in blackface.
Nina recorded her version for her debut album in 1957 – at the end of the session, almost as a throwaway. But perfection has a funny way of creeping up on you unawares, and the result was 3 minutes and 37 seconds of the most immaculate pop music I’ve ever heard. Out goes the rhythm of the original, out goes the melody. In comes a cool swing shuffle and a serenely descending left-hand line that anchors Simone’s version. Her vocal is understated and warm, altering the lyrics to fit the gender reversal. Then comes a brilliant, equally understated piano solo, the work of a Juilliard graduate equally comfortable with Baroque fugues and jazz (that this was before Jacques Loussier or Ward Swingle had made the two seem like natural bedfellows). Then the head returns, and Nina plays around with the melody and lyrics some more (including a mischievous reference to Liberace), building in intensity until the simple piano figure that rounds it all off.
In the Eighties, after laying dormant for a while, the song was used in a Chanel ad, sparking off a revival of interest in Nina (which has grown and grown, perpetuated by those Ain’t Got No – I Got Life Müller ads, and now “Very Best Of Nina Simone” compilations are among the best-selling jazz albums in the UK). The song was re-released as a single in 1987, and Aardman Animations made a video for it – which was the form in which I first encountered the song. Here it is.
It’s a lovely little video, paying close attention to both music and lyrics. The singer’s goofy, bow-tied fella captures what my friend Hugh recently observed: your baby sounds like a really boring bloke. No interests at all? Must be a clingy nightmare. I love the way he walks downstairs at 0:41-0:50, highlighting the distinctive bassline. In other ways it’s misleading – it was years before I realised Nina played piano. But in fact I think my sense of what jazz singing was or should be, and what a jazz club looked like or should look like, were heavily influenced by this song and this video.
I think I realised how important this song was to me in the summer of 2006 when I was travelling solo in Europe. Berlin was the first stop on the trip, and I spent most of my time there wandering around entranced by the city in summer with all its pavement cafés and mocked-up beach bars. On the first or maybe the second evening, I came across a boat moored in the river near the Museumsinsel, an open-air theatre that doubled as a bar, on which you could sit in a deck chair and drink a beer while a DJ played summery tunes. Which I duly did, feeling very self-conscious, just starting to come to grips with the unfamiliarity, the daunting grown-up freedom of it all (I’d only been legally allowed to drink in the UK for two weeks by this point). It was at once terrifying and exhilarating. I drank my beer quickly and crossed back over the river. But as I was on the bridge, My Baby Just Cares For Me came on. And I was transfixed.
So often when we listen to music – our iPods in while we commute or do the ironing – it’s discrete and disconnected from the experience we’re having. Where and when we listen to a song, and what we play it on, doesn’t necessarily affect the way we perceive it. But there, and then, the echo of the music as it reverberated across the water, the warmth of the evening sun that matched the warmth of Nina’s voice, the sense of simple joy in the music that matched how I felt, how I wanted to feel… all these came together to make a completely beautiful moment. It was – and as an un-superstitious atheist I use this word carefully – magic.
My relationship with the song didn’t end there, though. A few months later I joined an a cappella group, The Oxford Gargoyles (see link on the right). I was in the group for two thoroughly enjoyable years (and am rejoining them for the Edinburgh Fringe this summer), an experience which really came to define my time at university. And the Gargoyles’ signature song is… My Baby Just Cares For Me. The Gargoyle arrangement is based on Nina’s version. It’s a simple but excellent arrangement, and a showcase for 8 soloists. It’s also useful for busking because it’s got a nice loud beginning. For all these reasons the Gargoyles sing it more than any other song, and I would estimate I have probably sung it with them over a thousand times. Literally. So the song has a whole other layer of associations as a result. It’s so deeply scorched into my consciousness and muscle memory that I could sing it while doing long multiplication or composing a poem. I don’t have anything like perfect pitch, but for a while I could sing a D from a standing start, because that’s the key My Baby is in (Nina’s version is in A).
Here’s the Gargoyles version, as it was two years ago. (I’m 4th from the left).
Let’s be clear – I’m not making any claims for the above as a rival version of the tune. Nina’s is and will always be the greatest. I’m simply fascinated by the path one song can take through more than eighty years of musical history – and the more modest but (to me) no less fascinating path it has taken through my life.
There we go. This blog is certainly turning out to be centred around songs, and my personal responses to them. Which maybe isn’t a matter of general interest. But then again, all writing about music is a personal response of some sort, isn’t it? Stay tuned.
Well, the exams are over. So that's good. In fact they were over almost two weeks ago. Since then I've not actually been on a non-stop bender (turns out the pressure to have fun after Finals is almost as extreme as the pressure of Finals - almost), but I'll pretend I have by way of an excuse for not writing anything on here in a while.
I'll be back with a proper blog soon. In the meantime, continuing the trend of "ooh, I quite like this song": see if you don't warm to this track (Spotify required)
It's called But California and it's by Eg White. And it's a lovely little demo-ish slice of regret and opportunities missed and rediscovered.
I'm intrigued by Eg White, not just by his name (which has given rise to plenty of "Albumen of the Year"-type gags) but by his regular occupation. He describes himself as a whore. A songwriting whore, that is. This is the man responsible for Leave Right Now (Will Young), Chasing Pavements (Adele) and You Give Me Something (James Morrison). Although all these artists fall on the wrong side of the cool/taste police, it so happens that they're all cracking songs. Nice job, Eg.
On my travels examward, I recently learned a new word: "zeugma". It's a classical rhetorical device whereby a word (usually a verb) is made to refer to two or more disparate things. Anyway, this welcome addition to my vocabulary reminded me of an old Flanders & Swann song - containing the best uses of zeugma in the English language (he suggests provocatively)?
"He said, as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps..." "She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes" And best of all "When he asked 'What in heaven?' she made no reply, up her mind and a dash for the door"
I've got a lot of time for Michael Flanders. A great wordsmith with an equally masterful delivery, he was also (I recently learned) an early champion of rights for the disabled, and his was probably the first wheelchair to make an appearance on the West End stage. Had I been 20 in 1967 when the above footage was filmed I would (I hope) have been hanging out with the hippies, and I suspect Flanders & Swann would have seemed a throwback to an outdated tradition of light entertainment - the sort of thing your parents and their friends would like. But from the standpoint of 2009, the two stances fortunately aren't mutually exclusive. (And actually, maybe they weren't then either: the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band were a kind of sillier, more psychedelic Flanders & Swann; Paul McCartney and Ray Davies both had/have music hall in their blood)
I do apologise for the long expanse of dead air since my first tentative postings. The fast-approaching exams, it would seem, have robbed me of (a) spare time and (b) any interesting thoughts with which to fill it. It’s a measure of my sorry existence that the most exciting thing that’s happened to me recently is that I have grown some rather puny sideburns.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so modest. These babies are my first vaguely successful foray into the manly territory of facial hair growth and I’m pleased with the results. I sang at a black tie event last night and they really set off the whole look quite nicely. And the process has also let me in on some insights about the whole thorny issue of facial hair.
Firstly, I’ve discovered that there is a huge disparity between facial hair as viewed by the wearer and the observer. The process of growing and lovingly sculpting these things has been a huge emotional investment for me. You noticed the use of the word “babies” in the last paragraph? It wasn’t casual. As a man this is as close as I will get to childbirth. Two hairy little runts of twins whom I love, disproportionately to any real merit or beauty they may possess, but simply because I brought them into the world. And there’s no bond stronger than that.
It’s been a painful process: not just because shaving around them blunts my razor blades even quicker than usual and I am even more of a bloody mess after shaving, but also because the precarious task of evening them up has made me painfully aware of how asymmetrical my face is. What do I use as a guideline? My slightly lopsided ears? It’s a nightmare.
But of course, no-one who sees these paltry pillars of fuzz could suspect that they have been the focus of so much angst. To an outsider they are just sideburns, the most routine and unremarkable of all facial growths. Richard Herring, who has shaved himself a Hitlerian toothbrush moustache for his new stand-up show, recounts in his blog the emotionally turbulent experience of walking around London sporting the most inflammatory facial hairstyle of the 20th century. He found, however, that people (especially Londoners) don’t really care. To him it’s a Hitler moustache, an embarrassingly sixth-form pseudo-“statement”; to the general public it might equally well be a Chaplin or Ron Mael. And if Herring’s Hitler can’t raise more than a shrug, what chance do I have of setting the world alight?
And indeed, since growing my sideburns precisely TWO people have commented on them: my ex-girlfriend, and one of my oldest and closest friends (who is also, coincidentally, this blog’s only known reader. Hi Richard.) Both, in their way, experts on my face. Anyone ranking below an expert is unlikely to notice; or if they notice, to care; or if they care, to comment. It didn’t help that I had my first haircut in months around the time I started growing them, so the haircut has tended to act as a smokescreen, and people comment on that instead, either taking the facial hair as part of the overall package or perhaps assuming that some of the hairdresser’s trimmings simply got stuck to the side of my face.
I’d like to close with a rather out-of-date observation on that Joaquin Phoenix appearance on David Letterman that set the internet abuzz back in February. Surely the most implausible aspect of the whole business is the fact that when Letterman compliments him on his enormous beard (in the first 45 seconds or so), he seems totally nonchalant about it.
You’re fooling no-one, Joaquin, least of all me. I know there’s an ecstatic, breathless voice in your head crying: “YESSS! He noticed!”
(a) I am an English grad, and as such, of a pompous and verbose disposition.
(b) I may occasionally have an interesting thought. In the rare event of this happening, I'll write a blog about it.
Please feel free to comment on anything I've written, though do bear in mind that, this being the internet, I am mainly looking for withering semi-literate abuse.
***UPDATE: I HAVE MOVED TO PASTURES NEW***
