MUSIC:
When
last I wrote about culture, I was compelled to dedicate the piece to my friend
Alex Neilson, drummer, polymath and wandering troubadour, who had suffered the
tragic loss of his younger brother Alastair. My sympathies are still for the
grieving Neilson family, but I would still beg indulgence to write a few words
on Alex’s solo debut, Vermillion, released
under the name Alex Rex.
This
is not the time for false modesty. Vermillion
is a work of genius. It is perhaps the best solo album to be released since
the Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61
Revisited, Blonde on Blonde trilogy. Like those three magnum opi, there is a seam of eclectic genius running through the
project that Alex and his collaborators (the usual helpers; Alasdair, Lavinia
and Mike) mine imaginatively and zealously, but not exhaustively. The
subterranean pit of Neilson’s artistry has many shafts of magnificence as yet
undiscovered. With typical insouciance,
it begins with Screaming Cathedral;
a duet with Lavinia Blackwall that is more Bosch and Dante than Peters and Lee;
“it’s horror heaped on horror,” they endlessly chirp like Sonny and Cher
jamming with The Third Ear Band on the walls of Bamburgh Castle. Postcard from a Dream has vocals
similar to Visions of Johanna, pushed along by a jolly electric organ
and an optimistic spring in its step. Just lovely.
The
Perpetually Replenished Cup must be the only song in 2017 that
borrows from Wilhelmus van Nassau, the national anthem of the
Netherlands (a fact admitted to in a tweet by Alex himself) and turns it into
an endearingly shambolic Klezmer pub crawl of a song. Best of all Song for
Dora begins with an unaccompanied doo wop surreal poem in the style of
Ginsberg, before a tight and dirty Magic Band style romp, with the most
effective three note fuzztone guitar figure you’ll hear all year. Then all of a
sudden, it’s Song for Athene at last orders in a social club Karaoke.
You can’t want more than that. It is the finest album of 2017 so far and only
likely to be bettered when Trembling Bells release Dungeness late this
year.
The last time I saw Alex was when he was drumming
for Shirley Collins at the Sage in March.
Another Glasgow based artist who sought to work with a grande dame
of the folk tradition is Aidan Moffat, the engaging , bearded Arab Strap singer
and sometime Bill Wells collaborator. Seeking to rewrite traditional Scottish
folk songs for the modern world, he contacted the legendary travelling
balladeer Sheila Stewart. Their artistic relationship was sometimes spiky,
often frosty and bedevilled by distrust; on her part at least. Perhaps her
songs were so personal to her and almost living fossils of an extinct age; she
was reluctant to let them go. Thankfully, Moffat was not dissuaded.
The documentary and live album Where You’re
Meant To Be chronicles the project from the inauspicious start to the
triumphant climax at a packed Barrowlands. Sadly Sheila died just before the
project was released, but Moffat talks (and writes in the sleevesnotes) of her
with enormous fondness. While numbers such as The Ball of Kirriemuir,
both in traditional and modern forms, will never be anything more than rugby
club singalongs, the achingly poignant beauty in both words and music of the
title track and the musical deoch an doris that is The Parting Song
could never be beaten. At Barrowlands, Sheila barged on stage to deliver her
version of The Parting Song, which can be seen on the documentary, as
she emphatically dropped the microphone on Moffat. Sadly, sound quality issues
meant the Sheila-less performance at Drumnadroichit makes up the CD and it is
great, like all of Moffat’s stuff. Nobody else could deliver the line “another
wee ned with another burst nose” and make it sound like poetry.
As a companion and a comparison, I also bought a
Sheila Stewart sampler; Songs from the Heart of the Tradition. Now I
don’t know if it’s my instinctive bias towards the Irish over the Scots and the
English when it comes to the folk tradition, but like Shirley Collins, I find
that a small amount of Sheila works well enough; obviously The Parting Song,
but also Ewan McColl’s Moving On Song, the standard Blackwaterside
and the compelling Oxford Tragedy are
worth the entrance fee alone. However, the rest of it can seem a little too
much like Lulu with Jimmy Shand at the White Heather Club to these untrained
ears.
2016 was the year of 4 Wedding Present gigs; in
comparison 2017 has been a Gedgeless desert. Having made the schoolboy error of
assuming there would be Stockton tickets left at the gig itself, I missed out
on the March tour. Thankfully, there was the 30th Anniversary George
Best farewell tour to look forward to, especially as Newcastle didn’t get a
visit on the 20th anniversary tour for some reason (not that we’ve
been short of Weddoes gigs recently).
The only that that put me off was the fact it was at the Academy, on
whose sticky carpets I’d last trodden in March 2016 for TWP supporting The
Wonder Stuff. Considering recent Weddoes
Newcastle gigs have been at Think Tank, The Cluny and Riverside, this showed
that they were again on an upward trajectory in terms of audience figures;
though that was as much to do with a deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia than
anything else I’ll admit.
As is oft the case on these occasions, we had a few
other numbers to warm us up. It was a slightly arcane set list, with the
instrumentals Scotland and England bookending this section. As
I’ve said previously, I adore the instrumentals on Going Going and The
Home Internationals, seeing a whole new potential Gedge oeuvre nascently
flowering, though I’m not sure the well-behaved crowd really got what this bit
was all about. Perhaps that’s why Ben and I could slowly creep forward through
a static crowd to the point the Academy’s notoriously muddy PA could be
counteracted by the sound of the back line. Meanwhile Broken Bow and Deer
Caught in the Headlights were both received deliriously by those who knew
them and politely by those who didn’t. The stand-out songs, as opposed to
instrumentals, from the opening bit were a truly down and dirty Love Slave
and a stunning Click Click which is sounding better now than at any time
since Watusi.
And so to George Best; it’s a classic isn’t
it? The album that defined the received, though incorrect, popular opinion of
TWP as the C86 band it’s acceptable to like. Obviously it’s not their greatest
album; Seamonsters, Watusi and possibly Going Going vie for that
accolade. It does contain great songs, as well as the bona fide drop dead
classics My Favourite Dress, A Million Miles and Give My Love
to Kevin, with very little filler. You have to say though, The Wedding
Present of 2017 are not the band of 1987 or even of 2007, when that era’s
incarnation “reimagined” George Best in Albini’s studio. The CD of that
recording (raw, elemental and unpolished) was available exclusively on this
tour. Needless to say I got a copy. The
live version of the album on the night was enormous fun; joyous and nostalgic.
I’m amazed that Gedge can still play Shatner at his age; the bloke’s
still got the kind of dexterity in his wrists similar to David Gower in his
pomp. So many of the crowd knew every word; it was a good evening, topped off
by an absolutely barnstorming Kennedy. We left for a late one in The
Head of Steam with a smile and our ears ringing.
A
couple of days later, I listened to the 20th anniversary recording
and it’s pretty good. They play them quick, they recorded them live and it
hasn’t been produced to death; this is Steve Albini we’re talking about.
However, it’s not as good as the original, because the 1987 George Best original was a product of a
time, a place, an idea and a vision that subsequently changed. The band
changed, they evolved and developed from Bizarro
onwards. It seems incredible to think the bloke who wrote Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft could even
countenance the thoughts behind the words of Love Slave or Skin Diving,
never mind writing the music for them. I mean I’m glad I bought this relic,
this memento mori as it tells me
Charles Layton is the finest drummer TWP have ever had and that Terri De Castro
is the best bassist ever to have worked with Mr Gedge. However, given the
choice, I’d rather have the youthful optimism of the 1987 album or the slightly
beery bonhomie of the 2017 performance, if you don’t mind.
BOOKS:
Andrew
Waterman was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Ulster University
between 1983 and1986. At the time he was an erudite and conscientious lecturer
whose courses on Fiction 1880-1914, Modernism and British Poetry after World
War II were meticulously planned, insightful and stimulating. Away from the
classroom, he was a deeply unhappy drunk whose third marriage had just
disintegrated, with his wife leaving County Derry for rural Lincolnshire,
taking their son Rory with her. Andrew was also a poet of some repute, whose
deceptively simple personal narratives were very much in the tradition of The
Movement, like a less sardonic and less gifted Larkin. After graduation I kept
in touch with Andy for a few years, until his drinking got so bad in the early
90s he entered rehab, successfully.
I
met him once more, in November 2005, in the company of Rory in the slightly
surreal surrounding of Mark Toney’s on Clayton Street on a late Sunday
afternoon. By this time Andy was happily retired, remarried and living in
Norwich, while Rory was doing an MA in Modern Literature at Durham. Rory went
from that to a PhD to a lecturing job at Nottingham Trent, as well as being a
published poet. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree does it? Rory’s first
collection Tonight the Summer’s Over came out in 2015
and I liked it immensely. It was
published by Carcanet, who had previously issued his father’s work. However
these days, as perhaps befits the diminishing profile and talent of the father,
Andy’s work is published by the disarmingly modest Shoestring Press in Norwich.
While Rory is 36 and seeks to address
philosophical and temporal questions of great import, Andrew’s horizons are
shrinking at he turns 77; his previous collection By the River Wensum was
a consideration of life and ageing in the quietude of Norfolk. Recently, he has
issued Bitter Sweet; a cycle of poems meditating on the death of his
partner’s mother. This is done with care and compassion, avoiding all
histrionics, but one wonders if the highly personal nature of such verse would
be better kept private, especially as with his desire to provide support for
his wife, Andrew has effectively removed himself from the narrative and reduced
his role to chronicling rather than interpreting events.
Perhaps Andrew’s pamphlet could have been better
analysed by the wonderful cricket writer David Foot. I’d not come across his
work until earlier this year when I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of his
biography of Harold Gimblett, Tormented Genius of Cricket. Having
sympathetically and compassionately addressed the tatty ruins of the life and
legacy of Somerset’s greatest batsman, it seemed natural for Foot to consider
the case of neighbouring Gloucestershire’s enigmatic legend, Wally Hammond. Not
only was Hammond a prolific run scorer and stylish batsman, he was an
insatiable womaniser, despite being almost devoid of any fellow feelings or
even personality to any large extent.
Foot’s euphemistic, prim prose deals with
indelicate facts with delicacy and disdain. Hammond came from a loveless
background in a shotgun armed services marriage. As well as excelling in
cricket, football (two years with Bristol Rovers) and drinking (always pints
and never appearing to be drunk), he was apparently very good in bed. This provided little problems when his
conquests were showgirls and rural socialites in the West Country, but was a
life defining issue when it came to ladies of the night in the Caribbean on the
1928 MCC tour.
Wally returned from the Windies with a dose of
gonorrhea; in those pre penicillin days (ironically, his other major health
issue was repeated tonsilitis), the established treatment was to administer
mercury. Unfortunately, if the dose is wrong, it can cause severe neurological
problems. Foot’s contention is the fraught journey back from Jamaica while
suffering from the effects of what was called a venereal disease, as well as
the treatment with mercury and recuperation from this, in isolation in a
nursing home, meant that 1928 shaped Hammond’s personality forever. It’s a
compelling argument, sensitively put and a fitting explanation for the demons
that affected Hammond’s life that was only a fraction less miserable than
Gimblett’s post cricket privations.
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