Tonight is the last night of the London Jazz Festival, but after a week of (what felt like) non-stop gigs I badly needed a quiet one. This afternoon, though, I went to my last session of The Write Stuff, a fabulous course run by the LJF and Jazzwise magazine. If you've any aspiration to being a music journalist (jazz or otherwise) or just a journalist in general, I really can't recommend this enough. It's a free course, for 8 participants, taught by seasoned jazz writers including the wonderful Kevin Le Gendre.
On Wednesday all 8 of us had to write a 300-word review of John Surman's festival gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. One of these will eventually be published in the print edition of Jazzwise, but until then, all 8 are up on their website.
I have had reviews coming out of my ears lately. Not literally, thank Christ. There is enough ill-informed punditry around without my ears getting in on the action. Anyway, I'm up at this hour because I've just finished my first review with a proper deadline (the gig finished at 10.30pm, the copy's in for 11.30 am). The gig in question was John Surman at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which I really enjoyed. It was great to see the legendary Jack DeJohnette on drums as well as Surman himself. That review will eventually go up on the Jazzwise website, and I'll link to it from here.
In the meantime here's another of my reviews on The Literateur. Unfortunately I seem to have only written negative reviews on their site. I fear the editorial team must think I hate books. Oh well. By way of compensation: in the last couple of month or so I have hugely enjoyed Graham Swift's Waterland, was all shook up by Cormac McCarthy's The Road and am currently loving Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro. So there.
A few years ago I was revising for some tedious exams (AS Levels I think) and, though not much mental energy went into the revision itself, a huge amount went into finding more and more ingenious and bizarre diversions (the same impulse that prompted me to start this blog). I came up with something I tentatively call 'musical synchronicity'. This is the phenomenon of what happens when two entirely unrelated songs 'fit' together - as if played simultaneously on two different CD players. Far from the musical car crash you might expect, this sometimes yields listenable, even beautiful results.
Here is, I think, the finest example I've discovered. It's called 'Black Rainbow', because it combines 'Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair' as sung by Nina Simone, and 'The Rainbow' from Talk Talk's classic Spirit of Eden album. I've put the two songs into separate YouTube videos, rather than pre-mixing them, so you can have the experience of playing both. You can fiddle around with the volume on each to make your own mix. Below the videos is a bit more waffle from me.
So. I hope you enjoyed that.
These, then, are not mash-ups as such. No mixing skill is involved here - that would be cheating. Vocals have not been isolated, nor tempi changed, nor pitches altered. I have pressed 'play' (as you just did) and let the songs intertwine of their own accord.
The seeds of this idea were planted, I think, when I was waiting in the corridor of my school's music building before a singing lesson. Two cellists in two different practice rooms were playing two different pieces. They couldn't hear each other: only I was privy to the startling results, as the two melodies unknowingly clashed against each other in wonderfully strange and dramatic ways. And as I had revision to do, I set about trying to apply this to the records I loved.
Perhaps the nearest point of comparison for these musical blind dates is the so-called 'Dark Side of the Rainbow' effect: the crackpot theory that Pink Floyd intended Dark Side of the Moon as a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. While it's clear that this wasn't, in fact, the Floyd's intention, it's also clear that there are points where the audio and video really do fit together remarkably well:
I've chosen 'Black Rainbow' as my first example of this phenomenon's musical cousin, not just because of the rainbow theme, but because it's the best, the most natural-sounding. There a number of reasons why the pairing works. Both tracks are in the same key. Both are in free time, until the beat kicks around 2:45 on the Talk Talk track. Both are spare and stripped-down in their instrumentation. But even so, in combining them all these strange musical coincidences appear: the relay-race of Nina and Mark Hollis's vocals, the sustained harmonica whine that matches Nina's held note, the guitar that often seems to be doing a call-and-response with her.
So, there are genuine congruences and coincidences between the two. But above all the fact that these pieces of music can combine, in blissful ignorance, and seem to make such strong musical sense - this surely tells us something about the human brain's ability to make connections, to notice coincidences and disregard all those moments that don't conform so well. It suggests a neural preference for pattern and harmony rather than chaos.
I'm thrilled to bits to be published in this week's Times Literary Supplement. My piece is a 500-word review of a rather unexciting book about jazz and its role in Cold War cultural exchanges. But more importantly, here I am next to Tom Paulin on the contributors' page. As someone who enjoys nothing more than talking in a dodgy Tom Paulin impression, sometimes for hours on end, I'm very tickled by this.
Dead chuffed with tonight's effort, the 7th and final song of this whole experiment. I'd reached midnight and was still completely lyricless, though I had some chords for a chorus and a nice melody to go with it. Then I had the idea of writing a song about writing a song every day. I know, I know, but since it was my last one I thought I'd indulge myself. In this version (life translated into pop) the song-a-day thing is a symbol of missing someone you love - hence the chorus:
While my love's away I'll write a song each day And pin them to the trees in her neighbourhood Have you seen this girl Finest in the world Please send her back to me
The whole thing is very sweet and innocent, but often that's the hardest kind of song to write (or at least to write well). I'm very proud of it. It also has a proper middle-8, as promised.
So there it is. The full list, in chronological order:
Everybody Makes Their Own Jam Trains And Sunsets Maida Vale Higher Shelf Miles From Land I Draw The Line A Song A Day
As predicted, there are songs in there I'll most likely never return to (except to record them for posterity). In the case of I Draw The Line, I'll probably play it to myself (the guitar part is lovely to play) but not to an audience (especially if that audience includes its subject, who really doesn't deserve to be subjected to it). Some - like tonight's, and Trains And Sunsets - I think stand on their own as some of my best songs. The self-imposed deadlines were fantastic for pushing me to the end of a song, and forcing me to run with ideas I would usually have rejected at an early stage. Every day it would get to the afternoon or evening and I'd worry that I wasn't going to be able to produce anything, but somehow 7 songs materialised (though some are short and runty).
As soon as I get all the gear I need, there will be some musical evidence to go with all this verbiage. Thanks (to whom it may concern) for reading, though.
You might think that after a Friday night of boozing and dancing I'd get off the nightbus and head straight to bed. But, with a song to finish, there was no chance of that. This side of the Atlantic, it's hard to claim that it's still Friday, but you can't fault my dedication.
This will be a short post, and not just because it's past 4am and I'm shattered. Today's song is, in terms of lyrical content, pretty personal, certainly more so than anything else I've written this week. And I'd rather not rake over the subject matter in public. Suffice to say it's called I Draw The Line, and lyricswise it's pretty short (12 lines) - which is down to laziness more than anything. I wrote on the guitar today, and returned to the chords I'd been playing around with a couple of days ago for Higher Shelf. This time the lyrics fitted better. The resulting song is very earnest - think John Mayer meets Gary Barlow - and not remotely ironic. It's not very sophisticated, but the chords are pretty. And goshdarnit, it's a song at least.
Incidentally, though I've turned out some fine choruses, I've yet to write a song with a proper middle 8 this week. An aim for tomorrow (which will be the last day of this project, as I'm starting an internship on Monday).
I got distracted by Bonnie Greer giving Nick Griffin a good drubbing on Question Time tonight, so didn't get round to writing the bulk of the song until almost midnight. I'd had a few ideas brewing since the afternoon, though. This morning I was thinking about the musical influences on the 4 songs I've written so far, and how there hadn't been any real correlation between the music I'd listened to that day and the song I ended up writing. Well, today I bucked that trend. I had Beirut's 'Gulag Orkestar' album on at lunchtime, and when I sat down at the piano I started fiddling with some gypsy-ish chords. More flamenco than Balkan, but still decidedly Beirut-ish.
I then went out for a couple of hours, and jotted down a few lyrics on the train. The music called for something wild and exotic, and I went for a description of a hellishly drunken evening in a dive bar. Admittedly, 'Everybody Makes Their Own Jam' was also about a boozy night, but THIS song would drink THAT one under the table. Whereas 'Jam' (as it's sure to be known among fans) was about bored kids in the British countryside, I wanted this to feel like a foreign country (the opening lines are "Smoke and gloom / Filling the darkened room", which wouldn't wash in post-smoking ban Britain).
In contrast to the minor-modal verse I wrote quite a tuneful, but structurally awkward, chorus:
Take me away from this watering hole This hanging and drawing and quartering hole Won't someone help me to stand Looks like I'm three sheets to the wind And miles from land
The scansion makes sense with the music. Sort of. Note my use of "quartering" to rhyme with "watering", thumbing my nose at my American friend Rhymezone.com. The ye-olde / nautical imagery gave a slight sea shanty dimension, which I liked. I went with 'Miles From Land' as my title.
I bashed out verses 2 and 3 pretty quickly (in truth I wanted to get the thing finished): more stuff about reality slipping and oblivion drawing close. My structure for the verses (AAABCCCB) meant that I was having to dig deep into the rhyme box (as with 'Jam') - so in order to find a rhyme for "cab" and "tab" I put in a line about walking like a crab. In fact the line was originally about a hermit crab, but I realised hermit crabs don't walk side-to-side. In fact, as the clip below demonstrates, they don't walk much at all.
[I enjoy her repeated claims that the crabs are "walking around" despite the overwhelming visual evidence to the contrary. Though Sonny deserves a mention for his attempted jailbreak at 1:25.]
Enough about crabs. Not sure this one's a keeper, but with the addition of an accordion and the odd brass or string instrument it could be fun.
So, after 5 days, the tally stands at:
2 songs about getting pissed 2 songs about public transport 1 song about some bollocks with a ladder...
I didn’t leave things as late today. After yesterday I wanted to write something more substantial, and after 3 piano-driven songs I thought it might help if I wrote on the guitar. The problem, however, with my writing songs on the guitar is that I tend to spend the whole time finding voicings that sound nice rather than focusing on the song itself. This was certainly the case today, and I ended up with this big, powerful chord progression that didn’t really leave any room for a melody.
So, to help me think about melody I opened the first book I could find - which happened to be a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry on my desk - and tried to sing one of the poems along to the chords. The poem I chose is called ‘Need the Speed’ and it’s written in short two-stress lines, eg:
need the speed need the wine need the pleasure in my spine
I liked the idea of writing similarly short lines, and this pushed me towards abstract, cod-mystical territory. This kind of writing seems to come naturally to Cohen, but it demands a gravitas that I feel I don’t really have - and when it’s done badly it can be the worst kind of tosh (eg Oasis). Still, I had a crack at a first verse: “Take a step / Above yourself / And try to reach / A higher shelf”. I didn’t quite know what this meant, but decided that rather than use the “higher shelf” image as a rather cheap throwaway metaphor I should build the whole song around it.
So I came up with a little fable: there are two people who want all these wondrous, mysterious spiritual goods that are kept on a high shelf. One of them’s light enough to climb the ladder, but not strong enough to lift the things down. The other is strong enough, but too heavy to climb the ladder without breaking it. Deep stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Anyway, I’m pleased with the lyrics (I’ve included them in full below). I wasn’t happy with the music, though, so I went crawling back to my old friend the piano, where I came up with a much better tune and chord pattern that sounded like an old hymn. I then timed it, found it came in at under 2 minutes, so took the 1st verse and used it as a repeated refrain every 2 verses (for padding - but also giving it a bit more cohesion).
All in all, a classic case of 'change the handle, then change the blade'. And you know what, I like it.
HIGHER SHELF
Take a step Above yourself And try to reach A higher shelf
There you will find The hidden hoard Where higher forms Of truth are stored
Things cumbersome And so profound You cannot lift them To the ground
And as you climb To greater grace I’ll hold the ladder At the base
And as you climb Back to the floor I’ll ask you all The things you saw
For you alone Are swift and light So I can never Reach that height
And I alone Could lift that freight But these old rungs Can’t take my weight
Take a step Above yourself And try to reach A higher shelf
"Go on," I said to my friend Hugh over lunch, "give me a word, and I'll put it in today's song. I need all the help I can get." "Oh, I don't know," said Hugh. "Something about the Metro. You know, the free paper."
I'd been feeling pretty smug about yesterday's effort, playing and singing it lots and thinking about what a soulful genius I was. But then I noticed I had 2 hours in which to write something before I had to leave for a pub quiz. So. I'm afraid I took a lazy way out. Hugh's suggestion about the Metro reminded me that I'd had a vague idea to write a light-hearted song about love on the Tube. I went back to an old notebook and found a few scribbles. I also thought I could get away with incorporating bits from a little 4-line poem on the same subject I wrote years ago, in which I ingeniously rhyme "charming filly" with "Piccadilly", and "pretty" with "Hammersmith & City".
The opening couplet of my song dealt with the Metro:
At first our love seemed perfect; it went off without a hiccup Then you left me like a freesheet for somebody else to pick up...
And subsequently the song was an excuse for some dodgy wordplay on names of Tube lines and stations. But, I dunno, some of it's quite funny, and I'm pleased I managed to fit in the word "phantasmagoria" (to rhyme with Victoria - I had to look it up to check what it meant). Lyrically I was aiming for a Flanders and Swann vibe, but then when I came to write the music it turned out a bit more 1920s / Noel Coward (or rather Monty Python 'doing' Noel Coward). It's called Maida Vale, because I make a wildly original pun on said tube stop at the end of the song.
So. Day 1: silly song, finding some kind of emotional centre by the end. Day 2: emotional song, slightly ashamed of its own emotionalness. Day 3: just silly.
First, some thoughts, on the second day of this fool's errand.
- Rhymezone.com is my best friend. Even though it's American, so it doesn't think water rhymes with quarter.
- Songwriting can be a bit like that riddle about the axe. You change the verse, and then you change the chorus, so is it still the same song? With today's, there were a few instances of this: I'd want to use the word 'black' at the end of a line, so the next line would end 'I want you back' - a sentiment plucked out of the air, for the sake of the rhyme - and then I'd go back and change the first line to end with 'track'. And hey presto, for no very good reason, the song's about wanting someone back.
- Though this whole exercise is partly about lowering my standards for myself, I've still (happily) got some in-built sense of quality control. Today's song is almost very cheesy, but hopefully, my constant desire to undercut the sentimentality will have saved it from total schmaltz.
- Both today's song and yesterdays have seriously challenged my piano-playing abilities. If/when I do them live I need to either do some practice or bring in a real pianist.
So. Today's effort is called 'Trains and Sunsets'. I find that I'm often at my most introspective on train journeys, and when I happen to be on a train at sundown I'm even worse. I remember a moment from my pre-university travels when I was on a train from Munich to Prague, standing by the window, wind in my hair, listening to 'Dust In The Wind' by Todd Rundgren as the sky turned pink. I had been a bit down at the time and I just had the most epic emotional wallow. This song isn't about that train journey, but it's about that feeling.
I like songs about trains, too. Seriously, I've got a whole playlist on my iPod. I've long wanted to write one, and since the rhythm I'd been playing around with on the piano sounded vaguely train-like, this seemed a good moment. The first bit of the lyric to come was a lighter-waving chorus:
I barely think of you but every now and then Trains and sunsets set me off again
I took a moment to congratulate myself for the accidental wordplay of 'sunsets set me off'. Then I had to pad out the sentiment into a couple of verses. I wanted to have a specific train journey in mind as I wrote, and toyed with a few ideas before settling on the standard train from Victoria I take to get home from central London. Consequently I refer to it as the 7.21 (there actually is a train at that time), there's a reference to the Thames in there, and when I mention chimneys I was thinking of Battersea Power Station.
That aside, it's not a very specific lyric. As I said, there are lots of attempts to save myself from cliché by drawing attention to the cliché (which is a cliché in itself), so there's a bit about a "clichéd colour scheme", a "chocolate box display", a "manipulative lighting plot". But then that became, I suppose, the central idea of the song: that certain moments (like a sunset on a train) conspire to manipulate us into feelings that we wouldn't usually have; that the epiphanies you get at such moments are produced, as it were, under duress.
Anyway, after two verses I thought I'd have trouble stretching the idea any further. So for the third verse you get some good oldfashioned "da da da"-ing. Which, in the context of a band, would be solo time. And I think that just about constitutes a whole song...
I've always been in awe of prolific people. When I write a song I'm usually quite pleased with the result, but the occasions when I actually manage to see one through to the end - music, lyrics and all - come around less often than Halley's comet. Whereas there are some people for whom it seems like the easiest thing in the world. Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields is one such jammy git. The album 69 Love Songs is, well, sixty-nine songs in total. Most of which are proper songs, with middle 8s and everything. And the album i is equally maddening: all the songs begin with the letter I and are arranged in alphabetical order - as if he's got a whole index-worth of songs in his locker, and has just chosen to put out one twenty-sixth of them. Similarly, it's said that Ed Harcourt writes, on average, a song a day. I'm lucky if I write one a year.
A while ago I got to thinking that it would be a fun project to force myself to write a song a day. That way, I figured, after a month you'd have 30 songs, many of which would be crap, but a few of which might be salvageable. With a bit of luck it would also push me out of my comfort zone as a songwriter and encourage me to write about anything and everything, rather than just about my own romantic failures (plentiful though they are).
Well, last night I decided it's time to bite the bullet, after prompting from my friend Emma (who has agreed to try to do it too - but she's in full-time employment, and I do nothing all day). The Song A Day project starts here. I'll try to do a week's worth, and then if that succeeds I might push for a month. Anyway, I'll use this blog to keep track of my progress.
It had got to about 7pm when I realised I hadn't done anything. I duly sat down at the piano, fiddled around for a bit, and came up with a few musical ideas including one with quite a nice repeating melodic pattern. It sounded, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot like a Magnetic Fields track. Then I had dinner, and with it, a glass of cider. I took the glass of cider back to the piano and started to think about lyrics. And - you've guessed it - I looked at the cider and thought "what rhymes with cider?"
I came up with a verse that didn't make much sense on its own, but rhymed:
Spider Off his face on white cider Like a bike with no rider Tumbled into a ditch on the side of the road
Then I tried to fit some kind of narrative around this. It's an odd way of writing, I'll admit, but it's worked for me before. I decided that the song could be a series of little vignettes from a boozy night among some kids in the countryside. The next thing to come was the chorus:
Round here everybody makes their own jam And we have to make all our own fun but no-one gives a damn
I was pretty pleased with this and felt it set a good tone for the song - light-hearted but maybe with some genuine teen angst underlying it. So I cobbled together 5 more short verses, full of forced rhymes and also vaguely Lily Allenish stuff about getting pissed and giving head - which felt a bit strange, and not very me, but appropriate for the character singing the song. I'm usually so literal in my songs that it's nice to do a bit of storytelling.
So it's done. 1 day, 1 song. 100% success rate so far. Whether it's a good song is another question, of course. It's called Everybody Makes Their Own Jam.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's result. I will get round to recording rough versions of these at some point and will put them on myspace.
Twitter is the internet's gift to lazy journalists.
Witness this story. Almost entirely constructed from a few simple mouse-clicks. The story itself is devoid of any genuine controversy or intrigue, and is only of interest if you care what Sarah Brown thinks about things - in which case you're probably one of her >774,000 followers already. And 'tweets' occupy an odd middle ground: they're not candid private remark, and they're not press releases. So they're neither substantial (at 140 characters, how could they be?) nor exclusive (however much hacks try to present them that way).
Twitter, to use its own strange parlance, has been a Trending Topic (#twitter, if you will) for a while now, nestling alongside The Wire in the bargain bin of zeitgeisty dinner-party subjects. (And here I am, talking about people talking about it! I'm in a hall of meta mirrors!) Received wisdom divides into two camps. On the one hand, there are those who say it heralds a new dawn for social networking, or the internet, or humanity in general. On the other, there are those (including, notoriously, David Cameron) who'll wheel out some version of the following: "What's the point of twitter? I mean WHAT is the point? I don't care if you're having a cup of tea! Shut up already!"
Both are wrong.
Twitter is almost certainly not the future. Even with all the hype it's been getting in the media, it hasn't caught on in the way facebook did - and without a certain tipping point of users, it doesn't quite work. In certain communities where everyone uses it (say, journalism or stand-up comedy) it can be a vibrant and entertaining means of communicating and exchanging ideas. But essentially, if your mates aren't on it, there's not much point. My own twitter page is a rather forlorn thing: my tweets tend to go unheeded, and should I fire off a message in the direction of one of the journos or celebs I "follow", I feel like a kid rather desperately trying to join in with a playground kickabout.
BUT it can work brilliantly. This is largely due to the simplicity of the format, which leaves users in control of how they want to use their 140 characters - unlike facebook, whose cumbersome and irritating applications (game of zombies, anyone?) have pulled it in too many directions. So, in among all the people tweeting about their cups of tea there are a few gems. Like an ongoing fantasy soap opera of Nick Griffin's life (@realnickgriffin), or an 18th-century commentary on current affairs (@DrSamuelJohnson). Within moments of Michael Jackson's death @jeremylimb was musing: "Has anyone told Paul McCartney the girl is his?"
Meanwhile, the papers (with only a few hours to fill pages and pages of their Michael Jackson Death Special Editions) were dedicating substantial column inches to the reaction on Twitter: instant and copyright-free comment, without having to pick up a phone. So, a site which is uniquely positioned to aggregate responses to the news becomes the news... and we're back in the hall of mirrors.
I recently bought Suzanne Vega's 1996 album 'Nine Objects of Desire'. Decent album, nice Mitchell Froom production.
My complaint: there are twelve tracks. Not nine. Twelve.
I suppose this is a bonus really: I'm getting one-third extra, for free. But it raises the question:
Why does pop music hate counting?
Think about it. Ben Folds Five had two fewer members than advertised. There were three Cocteau Twins and three Thompson Twins (faking blood relationship being another classic pop con, from the Flying Burrito Brothers to the Puppini Sisters). Blink 182, Sum 41 and Eiffel 65 all fall drastically short of their purported member count. (Come to think of it, those last three groups have been all off the radar for a while - the moral of the story being, surely, that innumeracy doesn't pay).
We deserve better than bands who fiddle the figures. Next time you go to see a beat combo calling itself "The ******* Five", should there be fewer than five members on stage, stand up for your consumer rights and demand your money back. Unless it's the Jackson Five, in which case there may be a valid reason.
*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!”
Funny, isn't it - the arbitrary way in which certain songs lodge themselves deeply in the consciousness while others of no less quality prompt an apathetic shrug. Having thoroughly psychoanalysed myself, I'm convinced that one of the main reasons I so adore The Divine Comedy's song "Our Mutual Friend" is that it reminds me of a much-loved childhood audiobook of Roald Dahl's The Minpins (deliciously narrated by Joss Ackland).
There are, of course, other factors. The song tells a story to which we can, surely, all relate: boy meets girl, boy and girl get along like house on fire, get drunk, dance, kiss, pass out. Boy wakes up; girl is in the arms of boy's friend. But the brilliance of the song, as suggested in the line "it's like the soundtrack to our lives", is the way in which this humble little narrative is blown up onto a cinematic scale, complete with bombastic orchestral arrangement. There's something wonderfully, naively romantic about the effect these events have had on the narrator: "No matter how I try / I just can't get her out of my mind / And when I sleep / I visualise her".
And yet the strength of emotion, however apparently disproportionate, achieves its own validity. It helps that there is always a knowing twinkle in Hannon's writing and vocal delivery, a hint of self-parody (which, by the way, is notably missing from Daisy Chapman's beautiful cover - see below). Behind the lushness and pomp are occasional reminders of the everyday nature of the source material: the reference to Tom Jones, the word "settee". I love the way the phrase "above the beat" cues the tympani and sleigh-bells - suddenly a sweaty nightclub becomes an enchanted ballroom.
It probably helps that I first fell in love with this song as a melodramatic adolescent. But I still have no trouble really, really caring about the outcome of this mini-tragedy. I hold my breath when the narrator tries to hide his excitement with a casual "Cool - the feeling's mutual"; my heart leaps when Hannon rapturously sings "and then we kissed..."; I share in his indignation as he spits out "WRAPPED around another lover". The lyric ends with a neatly dovetailed twist, as the mutual friend of the title is reintroduced, bringing all the satisfaction of a great short story. But it's also a great piece of music - and no matter how I try, I just can't get it out of my mind.
OK, so the internet isn't exactly gasping for another blog. Who in their right mind would care about my views on anything, except possibly my friends, who could just ask me in person?
Well, quite. So by way of excuse: firstly, I do have an awful lot of twaddle in my head, and it has to go somewhere; secondly, and boringly, I do quite want to eventually make a career out of writing twaddle, and it's probably as well to get some practice in.
So this is primarily a cyber-void for me to scream into - but never fear, I'll keep it on matters I think might be of (some) general interest, rather than the cringe-inducingly personal. Contents may vary.
(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***
