As there hasn’t been a lot to talk about regarding Newcastle
United in the last week, I thought I’d take this opportunity to publish one of
my bi-monthly culture bulletins. The scope to this one is a little narrower
than http://payaso-del-mierda.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/sound-vision.html
back in late February, as I’ve not watched the telly in the intervening period.
As for the cinema; do me a favour….
Music:
Undoubtedly, the biggest events on the radar for me of late
have been releases by David Bowie and British Sea Power, the latter backed up
by a gig at Northumbria University, which is where we’ll start this blog.
I became aware of British Sea Power in early summer 2006
after a mate at work burned me a copies of their first two albums, in
preparation for seeing them at a gig in Middlesbrough that July. Frankly, it
was one of the best nights I’d had in years; bear costumes, foliage and a
version of “Lately” that was longer and more intense than many holidays I’ve
been on. Subsequently, I’ve tracked their tours and releases, seeing them at
Newcastle University in October 2008 and the Tyne Theatre in February 2011,
with Ben. Unfortunately this latter show at an all-seated space didn’t quite
work; while the beauty and eccentricity of the venue was in keeping with the
BSP house style (I missed them playing St. Thomas the Martyr Church in October
2006 as I was working that night), the inhibiting nature of the surroundings on
the audience and a fairly self-indulgent encore of Spirit of St. Louis made
the thing feel a bit like a damp squib at the end.
Consequently, it took a while to persuade Ben that he ought
to see them again, but that task was helped by the fact that the new album Machineries
of Joy is tremdous and even as good as Do You Like Rock Music?
However, trepidation as to the nature of the evening we had in store still
existed due to references on-line to their latest live performances fitting in
to 2 patterns; either a quiet, semi-acoustic set followed by a full on set of
snorters, or a combination of the two that fell between two stools. The latter
experience, ending with the quietest track on Machineries of Joy, namely
When
a Warm Wind Blows through the Grass had been described as “anti-climactic.”
We were lucky; we got 2 sets, 2 bears and an absolutely pulverising version of Lately
as well.
They began with five quiet numbers at the incredibly early
time of 7.45, which apart from Come Wander with Me appeared to be a
selection of obscure numbers for the presumed benefit of the incredibly cliquey
travelling BSP fan base; admittedly, they no longer wave foliage at the band or
make animal cries and coos to indicate their place in the “inner circle,” but
insist on talking loudly through the gig and making in jokes, as 3 pissed,
boring, social inadequates near us did. Well, that was until a bloke in his 50s
turned round and asked to shut their mouths. They seemed a little put out by
this, but they obeyed and I noticed during a mid, main set tinkle (I’m nearly
50 you know), in Spirit of St. Louis these self-proclaimed superfans were stood
at the back of the room, no doubt aloof from proceedings.
Northumbria University students’ union has been slightly
done out, meaning undergrads are now expected to lash out £3.85 a pint, but the
newly decorated view of the stage was absolutely spot on, allowing us to get
right to the front of the stage; just as well as my two companions (Ben and
Trev) don’t have contact lenses like me. The main part included mainly the new
album, with Loving Animals and Spring Has Sprung really coming in
to their own, as well as more obvious crowd-pleasers like K-Hole or the title
track. I was a little disappointed that neither Facts Are Right, which I
think is a solid-gold classic or Monsters of Sunderland made the cut, but no matter. Obviously older
numbers such as Lately, No Lucifer, Waving Flags and the evening closing Carrion / All In It had
their place as well, showing that British Sea Power have both a brilliant back
catalogue and a continuously evolving creative urge that means they’ll be with
us a few years yet. Their oft-repeated description as the British Yo La
Tengo seems well deserved. Gig and joint album of the year so far….
Perhaps a more heralded release, at least in the mainstream,
was David Bowie’s The Next Day, which garnered both intense media interest and
very positive reviews. I have to say it’s good, but it isn’t brilliant in the
way that I’d hoped it would be after hearing Where Are We Now? a few
weeks previous. Alright, it is really good and, almost cryogenically frozen in time;
it could be the follow up to Heroes, or Lodger, rather than
appearing 35 years later. Certainly Dirty Boys sounds like Beauty
and the Beast part 2, while Heat, with its disconcerting refrain
of my father ran the prison is almost
something from his Baal era showmanship. The fretless bass apart, I’m a fan of The
Next Day in total and think it is both a fine album and a testament to
Bowie’s enduring talent, but it isn’t a musical standout for 2013 as far as I’m
concerned. Perhaps the significance of this release is more a cultural than a
musical one, with the return to the spotlight of an undoubted icon and genius,
after so many years in obscurity and the wilderness.
Another icon, albeit of a much lower profile, returning
after decades away, is David Thomas and his Pere Ubu project, on the back of
January’s Lady from Shanghai album. I’d secured a front row ticket for
their Sage 2 show, which was the first time I’d seen them since March 1988,
with The Mekons, in Leeds. Sadly, March 1981’s show with the Gang of four and
Delta 5 at Newcastle Mayfair is one I’ll always regret not seeing, having had
to miss out with a severe bout of tonsillitis. Knackered after first day back
at work, I wasn’t sure about this one either, but the intriguing style of the
album made me go and I’m glad I did; partly because I had a chance to have a
quick catch up over a coffee (rock and indeed roll) with a dozen or so late 40s
art punk devotee pals I don’t see regularly enough these days. The support were
Variety
Lights, former Mercury Rev frontman David Barker’s
new project and they seemed to be almost a Pere Ubu tribute act; a weird fat
bloke screaming unintelligible lyrics over great swathes of no wave guitar and
squelchy electronic soup. However, the headline artists were far more disciplined
than that.
David Thomas must be over 60 now and he looks frail; he
walks in a shuffling motion, with a stiff-legged, stooped gait that suggests an
arthritic influence. However the band, no spring chickens to say the least, is
tighter than a Mafiosi clan. The main reference points are Beefheart meets Neu,
with Harry Partch thrown in the mix. Thomas is the only original member of the
band and he calls the shots; he’s the only one to speak to the audience,
prefacing the set with a short speech, and the rest of the band defer to him. Musicians
are Scum, indeed. The entire album gets an outing, which is no bad
thing, as well as Over My Head and The Modern Dance; though as set
fillers not crowd pleasers. There’s no Non-Alignment Pact or Final
Solution. When they come back for an encore of Thanks, Thomas checks his
watch at the end of it, decides that’s enough and walks off the stage and out
through the audience like a poorly Pied Piper, leaving the band, including a
brilliantly athletic theremin player, to play us out the building. An enjoyable
night and a good gig, but not a brilliant one.
The next gigs I’ve got lined up aren’t until June, unless I manage
to secure tickets for Rod Clements at Porters in Tynemouth station on May
4th; if I don’t, no loss as I’ve still got The Pastels in Glasgow (1st
June), Camera Obscura at Northumbria University possibly (8th June),
Neil Young at the Arena (10th June) and then Mike Williamson from
the Incredible String Band with Trembling Bells on July 15th,
meaning I’ll miss out on Wedding Present and New Mendicants gigs around the
same time. Trembling Bells have finally got themselves a proper website and
jolly good it is too; http://www.tremblingbells.com/ and it
is from there I managed to combine the discovery of new and old music, much in
the way Trembling Bells do in their wonderful way, I suppose.
What took me to the website, apart from a message on Facebook
by Alex Neilson, was the availability of the download only live album The
Bonnie Bells of Oxford of Bonnie Prince Billy with Trembling Bells,
recorded on last year’s tour that managed to avoid Newcastle. For £7, there is
the chance of a marvellous hour and a bit’s set, which captures the energy of
the two competing entities on stage. Their choice to open the set with a hybrid
of 66
and Just
As the Rainbow makes for a fantastic representation of the band’s
mixture of folk rock melody and narrative, country romance, improvised
looseness, the daring of 60s psychedelic rock and early music's economy, in a
performance that sees Lavinia Blackwall's soprano voice and keyboards vie with
Alex Neilson's undulating drums, Oldham's fragile tenor and Mike Hastings' guitar.
While The Bonnie Bells of Oxford lacks the
finesse of the Bells/Bonnie 2012 team-up album The Marble Downs that it
draws much of its material from, it definitely adds a ragged fervour that the
album didn't have. With the songs being
pretty evenly split between Oldham and Neilson compositions (with a traditional
credit and a Merle Haggard cover thrown in); The Bonnie Bells of Oxford
doesn't end up feeling like a lopsided or bumpy listen. From Ain't
Nothing Wrong with a Little Longing to the farewell of Love
Is a Velvet Noose, Neilson is binds together eclectic strands of
influence. The steely pop chime of Love Made an Outlaw of My Heart is
pure pop. Oldham peaks here as he slips his So Everyone into the set,
after an equally suggestive traditional number My Husband's Got No Courage in Him
from Blackwall. The Bonnie Bells of Oxford is also further proof that Trembling
Bells are a singularly tremendous band; a fact that is borne out by the other
downloads available on the website.
Four hitherto unknown (to me) numbers, featuring 3 Neilson
vehicles, where he assumes lead vocals; in How Much Cruelty Can You Take (Josephine)? Alex
assumes the role of the slighted Napoleon in a Country & Western croon to
his bad-tempered baby, while Elegy for Nosferatu is
self-explanatory. The Day Maya Deren Died is a beautiful acapella tribute to the long dead Soviet art film director, but the
real treasure is Lavinia’s sublime and soaring take of Rudyard Kipling’s early
medieval ballad Sir Richard’s Song that could easily be this band’s A
Sailor’s Life and is clearly the best song I’ve heard in the whole of
2013.
A contender for that coveted title is another sung by
Lavinia Blackwall; her immaculate exploration of Richard Thompson’s Calvary
Cross opens her 2009 project, I Grew From a Stone to a Statue with
Neilson and all-purpose Scots folkie Alasdair Roberts, which was released under
the name Black Flowers. I wasn’t even aware of this CD’s existence,
until the Trembling Bells website went live. It is an absolute treasure,
including a take on Fairport’s Swarbrick-led classic Polly on the Shore and
the beautiful traditional song Sweet Rivers of Redeeming Love. The
2009 release date suggests it is as being a contemporary of Trembling Bells
debut release Carbeth, and it inhabits a similar territory. It’s more than a
curio; it is an essential companion piece to the Trembling Bells oeuvre.
The Professor of Renaissance Literature at Stratchclyde
University, Dr. Jonathan Hope had a namecheck in the last culture blog for
sending me a copy of his sixth-form band Ward 34’s 1979 single. He gets another
one this time for sending me a pair of albums by Davey Henderson’s glorious
failure to be a mid-to-late-80s pop star, Win. Still producing amazing music to
this day with the elusive and uncompromising Sexual Objects, Henderson made a
policy decision following the demise of the eternally lauded Fire Engines in
1984 to go for the big time. Hence Win and their almost hit You’ve
Got The Power, which formed the basis for a bizarre, dystopian McEwan’s
Lager advert in 1985 that seemed to combine Escher with Sisyphus, and
still sounds as fresh today, attired with the usual Henderson garments of camp
disco rhythms, angular post-punk guitar licks and semi-unintelligible,
incomprehensible lyrics, as it did on 1987’s Uh! Tears Babe on London
Records, where it is the stand-out track.
The whole Henderson effect is sadly undercut by smooth 80s
style glamour production, which similarly hampers 1989’s Virgin album Freaky
Trigger; in trying to sound commercial, Win were rendered a little
conformist, which is a charge never previously or subsequently levelled at Henderson.
It would be interesting to hear the Sexual Objects reinterpret some of these
numbers, stripping off the veneer of over production, but as he refuses to do
anything from his back catalogue, that seems unlikely. I can understand that
approach, as typically uncompromising, but such a revolutionary artistic act
would show ever more clearly the continuum in Henderson’s work from Candyskin
to Here Come the Rubber Cops, by way of Super Popoid Groove.
On May 5th last year, I played Paul Brady’s The
Lakes of Ponchartrain and sighed over the fact I’ve not seen him live since
1984, when he played a gig at my university in County Derry. I accessed his
website and was appalled to see he had played the Sage that very night; he’s
playing Durham on April 28th and I won’t get to see him then either.
However, thanks to my foraging at Tynemouth Market the other Sunday, I found
some of his juvenilia for £2, in the shape of an unplayed (for good reason it
turns out) compilation of his first band in 1960s Dublin, The Johnstons.
Riding the stout wave of the Irish ballad revival, family
act The Johnstons emerged from Meath with a chart topping version of The
Curragh in Kildare in 1965 that showed them to be part of the
declamatory style of balladeering that involved histrionic, faltering bellows
of obscure traditional songs of love and loss. While Brady’s career has taken
many false turns with unending albums of West Coast tinged, insipid singer
songwriter pap, at least they aren’t embarrassing to listen to, unlike Ye
Jacobites By Name by The Johnstons, which despite including a passable Paddy’s
Green Shamrock Shore, arrives in folk hell by way of a version of John
Barleycorn that I struggled to recognise as one of the most famous of
all folk songs. The Johnstons; desperately worthy and desperately dated.
Ironically, Tynemouth Market also offered up some jewels on
the same day as my purchase of The Johnstons, in the shape of a pair of
Fairport Convention albums; July 1970’s Full House (on Island pink label!!)
and October 1973’s Nine, for a total price of £8, sold to me by a bloke who’d gone
to the same school as Paul Brady (as well as Seamus Heaney, Martin McGuinness,
several of The Undertones and many others it has to be said), St. Columb’s
College in Derry. Anyway, both of these albums are a steal and an integral part
of the Fairport story; Full House is the follow up to Liege
and Lief, being the first one after Sandy Denny left and the last one
before Richard Thompson (another gig I missed this year was him at the Sage on
March 3rd, so I’ve now gone quarter of a century without clapping
eyes on him on stage; foolish me) departed. Despite the lack of a female
vocalist, this is essentially Liege and Lief II, with many
traditional tunes driven by Thompson’s guitar and undisputable leader Dave
Swarbrick’s fiddle and vocals. To this day Sir Patrick Spens and Walk
Awhile feature in Fairport live sets, but it is the captivating Sloth
and Flowers of the Forest that really stand out on this wonderful
album for me.
Nine was the first Fairport album without an original member,
following the departure of Simon Nichol, but Swarbrick and Dave Pegg were the
clear leaders on this project. Beginning with the glorious Hexhamshire Lass that
Chris Leslie continues to play wonderful tribute to in the current Fairport
live set, Nine is rather a run of the mill affair after that. While Polly
on the Shore is a magnificent number, the other traditional pieces seem
almost to be the sweepings left on the folk workroom’s floor, after earlier
Fairport albums, then Steeleye Span and the Albion Band had taken their share.
Also, Trevor Lucas and Jerry Donohue’s numbers just were not up to the standard
previously achieved by the band. An interesting album, but not an essential
one.
Books:
I’ve been a little less bibliophilic in my proclivities over
the past couple of months, to the extent that only 3 new books (well, second
hand, but you knew that already) have been consumed in this time. First up was
American journalist Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea,
which was predictably intended as a sour-faced, reactionary diatribe against
the political philosophy of Juchean Kimilsungism in the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea. While I’ve no great love for DPRK, other than having them in
the work sweep for the last World Cup, it has to be said that this toadying
homily to the excesses of free enterprise capitalism is the best argument ever
I’ve read for unwavering support for the lads in Pyongyang. As, with
unintentional persuasiveness, Demick says of the Juche philosophy -:
Kim Il-sung took the
least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the
top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family.
From there began a downward progression of 51 categories that were lumped in to
three broad classes – the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile
class.
With little sense of irony, Demick focuses on the latter,
who were the overwhelming majority of the 600 or so deserters from DPRK in the
twenty years after the monument to Yankee imperialism that was the 1988 Seoul
Olympics (typically the 2002 World Cup gets scarcely a mention in the whole
book). These deserters were, in the main, drunks, drop-outs and criminals in
DPRK, who took flight to the South, where Capitalism rewards and celebrates
such egoistic failures of personality. Demick appeared not to countenance the
fact that her beloved free market system enshrines the vices of greed and
selfishness, so frowned upon in the DPRK, as virtues. Perhaps she ought to
consider the words of a popular nursery song in the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea -:
Our enemies are the
American bastards
Who are trying to take
over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns I make with
my own hands,
I will shoot them.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
David Nobbs is most famous as the author of the Reggie
Perrin novels, but taking his stock-in-trade of the hang-dog English underachiever
to a more nostalgic setting than the mid-70s stockbroker belt, are the Henry
Pratt series. First appearing in Second Last in the Sack Race, which
told of his educational and National Service mishaps from the end of World War
II, we now meet Pratt as he takes his first job as a cub reporter with the Thurmarsh
Argus as the tumultuous year of 1956 begins. Set amidst the bleak,
repressed, sexual and social austerities of a composite South Yorkshire
landscape, Suez and the Hungarian Uprising by-pass the eponymous hero, while we
follow Pratt and his wryly comic attempts to live the Bohemian lifestyle, as he
makes a crust reporting on the minutiae of small town, post-war British tedium.
He gets plastered most nights, eats desperately unappetizing meals in the
town’s only Chinese restaurant as it’s the one place open after 10 midweek. He
repeatedly tries, and fails, to bed a series of journalistic women, before
settling on the blue-stocking daughter of a local Labour Party grandee, in a subplot of genuine warmth
and affection, before blowing the lid off a major local planning scandal that
could only be taken from the Poulson affair. Pratt of the Argus is a
gentle, nostalgic comedy of manners that successfully locates the reader in the
mindset and social atmosphere of Yorkshire at that time. I enjoyed it
immensely.
Would I could say the same of Simon Freeman’s deeply
disappointing Baghdad FC; the Story of Iraqi Football. Clearly Freeman is a
talented foreign correspondent and a true football man, but this account falls
dreadfully between two stools; it is neither a history of football in Iraq, as
he is hampered by a lack of written records and the devastation of the country
following the US and UK illegal invasion, nor is it an account of the trials
and tribulations of the domestic game post-Saddam. Instead it is an
unconvincing combination of both, with the most compelling passages being
accounts by survivors of the torture inflicted on players under the rule of the
despotic son of Saddam, the evil sports Minister, Uday Hussein. Following his
deposition, an inordinate amount of time is spent on describing Iraq’s 2004
Olympic football tournament, which the writer watched on television from home,
bizarrely enough. There must be a book to be written about Iraq football,
perhaps telling of the experiences of Irish player Eamonn Zayed and his time in
Baghdad after leaving Drogheda United, but Freeman’s effort is not an effective
exposition of this subject.
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