I'd like to dedicate this first cultural blog of the year to Bob Crow; an indefatigable fighter for the working class, an inspirational orator and a devoted Socialist. He saw the madness in our area and his legacy must be for us all to carry on the fight. His was a life well lived but ended too soon.
So, 2014 is almost a quarter of the way through already and
I’ve not taken the time to discuss my cultural meanderings with my readership
as yet. This is the time for that action I feel. Firstly I have to say that
certain aspects of my potential intellectual enrichment have been forced to
take a back seat, partly because of indolence and partly because of pressure of
time, what with having my mam in hospital for 6 weeks and the attendant stress
caused by that. Television has been off the agenda; Inspector George Gently and
Moone
Boy are about the only things that aren’t news or football related that
I would have bothered with anyway and both series are stacked up on Sky +
waiting for me to sort my life out. You see Moone Boy is on a Monday
and I play football 6-7 every week, as well as Team Northumbria having 3
successive home games on those nights; what’s a fella to do? I also play on a
Thursday between 9 and 10, so Martin Shaw’s magnum
opus has similarly been rusticated. Less forgivable has been my lack of
reading, but here goes for an analysis of what I’ve actually got round to
flicking through.
Books:
Ken Sproat has been my mate for a long, long time; we share
mutual love of The Fall, loony left politics and non-league football. We are
now both published authors as Ken has issued the product of a decade’s devoted
research, The History of Blyth Spartans. In painstaking, minute detail,
Ken tells the story of football in his south east Northumberland home town from
the earliest mid Victorian days until the present. The result is an absolutely
exhaustive account of his club’s triumphs and travails. I found both the
detailed accounts of the early years and the section from the mid-70s onwards,
because the latter is when my football awareness grew beyond simply the upper
ranks of the professional game, to be particularly fascinating. A joy to read
and a bottomless treasure trove of recondite trivia that both fascinates and
delights. I thoroughly recommend it.
I also recommend Borrokaria (The Fighter), by the
Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga, which was given to me by my cousin John, when
he was over from Vitoria Gasteiz for our Uncle Harry’s funeral at the end of
January. The novel is made up of three different short and intrinsically and
intricately inter-related texts. In the first, a man who recalls his past and
fears his decline meets his destiny; he is no longer the strongest man in the
area, as his son fights him to prove that the next generation is the older
one’s nemesis. In the second, another man, possibly the victorious son, writes
about the boxing match he’s about to fight in in Reno, Nevada and in the third
the narrator reflects on the images that people leave behind when they die,
especially when the dead is the once proud son who has turned into a traitor to
the very people who idolised his youthful bravery. Three different texts, a
single story, beautifully and sparingly written, it combines deep compassion
with unforgiving judgement. A stunning and effective novella that makes me
anxious to read more of Atxaga’s work.
The only other book I’ve got through this year is Eric
Sykes’s rambling and desperately uneven autobiography; If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else
Will. The problem is that Sykes may have been a great writer of
sketches and gags, but he was a dreadful writer of prose, especially during the
latter sections of the book, which are less than scintillating as Sykes cuts
his losses with television and settles into life as a national treasure. It's a
charmed life, for which Sykes repeatedly credits the supernatural guidance of
his mother, who died giving birth, and one does not begrudge him an ounce of
his success, particularly given the debilitating struggle with deafness which
began in early middle age. Yet Sykes's rambling reminiscences acquire a rather
cloying air of complacency as he becomes successful; of far more interest is
his unsentimental account of his poverty stricken Oldham childhood and his
wartime experiences that make the struggle to defeat the Third Reich seem more
like outtakes from a lost Will Hay comedy or a prototype Carry On wheeze. At least
he doesn’t come across as a grade 1 bastard, unlike Milligan or Sellers for
example.
Theatre:
My only previous visit to the Customs House in South Shields
was to see The Fall in October 1996; in the very worst of his Jeffrey Barnard
inspired tantrums, a babbling, incoherent and excessively refreshed Mark E
Smith failed to take the stage, meaning the gig was pulled, the scuffers called
and several protesting fans lead away in cuffs. A bad night. On February 13th,
I returned in the company of my friend Gary on a pair of freebies to see a
play, Away From Home, about the relationship between a young man and
a Premier League footballer. Kyle, a young male prostitute who refuses to work
on Saturdays during the football season, gets a call from his pimp as he is
watching the match with his macho mates in the pub. The pimp has a special
client. It is the footballer who has just scored the last-minute equaliser
against Kyle’s team. Intrigued he agrees to the job.
What follows is an accomplished one-man performance from
Ward which tells the story of Kyle’s strained relationship with his parents,
his deep friendship with his best mate Mac from whom he hides his sexuality,
and the job which turns to an affair with the top Premiership footballer who
goes out drinking with buxom beards after the match, for the cameras, but then
returns to the city-centre penthouse he has bought for Kyle. The twist, whereby
Kyle’s Dad’s terminal illness affects reconciliation between estranged father
and son, is corny and only a step away from melodrama.
However, Away From Home was convincing acted
by the talented Ward and has as much to say about the confines of expected
sporting behaviour as it does about the institutionally homophobic nature of
professional football. Hopefully this play, written by the gay football fanatic
Ward, can educate those involved in football about the dated, destructive
intolerance of homophobia and explain to those from outside the game that
simple act of coming out is not always a viable option for those at the highest
levels of football, because of a multiple matrix of complex and competing
social influences.
Music:
Three purchased CDs and three gigs so far; let’s start off
with the familiar location of Fairport Convention’s 2014 Winter Tour stop off
at Sage
Hall 2.
Later this year Fairport Convention hope to record their
first album of new songs for some time. Test-driving the new material live
brings welcome variety to their annual Winter Tour the set list for which in past
years had become somewhat familiar. The 2014 Tour takes the group from their
earliest techniques into the future. Prior to being pigeonholed as folk-rock
pioneers the group had success bringing an English flavour to songs by American
singer –songwriters. They return to this approach at the start of their set
joining support act Edwina Hayes in a version of John Prine’s Speed
of the Sound of Loneliness. The quality of Hayes’s voice is such that
the group co-opts her back to the stage during their set to expertly take the
vocal parts of the late Sandy Denny on Who Knows Where the Time Goes? and
help to build the anthem Meet on the Ledge.
The new material is refreshingly varied ranging from a
brooding Home through a lively and bright On Me You Can Depend to
straightforward rock. Even the classic material has a fresher quality as the
group chooses tunes that haven’t been played live for some years. Doctor
of Physick is an unexpected highlight, while the raucous jig and reel Dirty
Linen offers a particular challenge for Matthew Pegg who has joined the
group on bass at short notice after his father Dave was left unable to play due
to an injury sustained in a wineglass/dishwasher incident. Rock and roll huh? Pegg
Senior acts as a sort of MC introducing the opening and closing numbers, as Fairport
Convention enjoy a very close relationship with their audience but do not allow
this to hinder the development of momentum that is essential for a successful
concert. Hence, the relaxed approach of the band can switch off instantly for
the climactic, timeless murder ballad Matty Groves.
The Winter Tour of 2014 is a welcome demonstration that,
even after more than 45 years in showbiz, Fairport Convention are unwilling to
rest on their laurels preferring instead to take risks and try out new
material, unlike the first CD to be discussed.
The New Mendicants are Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and
Joe Pernice of The Pernice Brothers; last year’s Australia EP was 2013’s
stand out short release in my book and their debut full length, Into
The Lime, is the best thing I’ve heard so far this year, containing all
of the classy songcraft, jangling guitars, and big harmonies fans expected. It
almost comes as a relief that the two beloved songsmiths didn't use this
project as a platform for some other sort of wild artistic experimentation. Along
with drummer Mike Belitsky, the only native Canadian in this Toronto-based trio,
Blake and Pernice play to their strengths, delivering ten strong songs that
echo not just their own bands, but classic '60s influences like the Hollies and
the Byrds. From the opening organ/piano riff of the brilliant Sarasota,
the band's arrangements are subtly thrilling, yet comfortably laid-back.
There's a very relaxed, unhurried atmosphere to the album which speaks of the
members' many years of friendship and combined studio experience. The sublime Cruel
Annette blends the two singers' styles into something new for both.
Several of the album's songs were originally intended to
soundtrack the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel A Long Way Down, but
ended up on the cutting room floor. However, even when the Mendicants are
singing about suicide and depression, like on A Very Sorry Christmas Eve,
they insist on those big harmonic choruses which have melted the hearts of so
many Teenage Fanclub listeners over the past 20-odd years. There are buzzy
guitars along with piano and organ ornamentations that will please fans of
orchestrated pop, but the focus remains largely on the top-notch songwriting
and the pleasing blend of voices and familiar styles. While it would be a shame
to let the Mendicants' future impede the progress of any new records by the
group's flagship bands, this is a wonderful debut and certainly worthy of a
follow-up album, especially if they can look at Sandy Denny’s legacy and come
up with a song as glorious as By The Time It Gets Dark to
admirably cover, or a hoedown stomp like Lifelike Hair that brings
proceedings to a close. Very highly recommended.
I had to miss Mogwai’s gig in late January as it was on a
Wednesday night and conflicted with my evening class, so I opted to buy their Rave
Tapes CD instead, the band's eighth album outside of their soundtrack
and remix work. The first song to be released from the album, Remurdered,
is something of a red herring. If that song feels like a fuller manifestation
of ideas that have taken over a decade for Mogwai to reach, Rave
Tapes mostly tells a different story; one that digs harder into a place
they've consistently circled back to throughout their career.
This is the second Mogwai album in less than a year,
following their creepy 2013 soundtrack to the French TV show Les
Revenants. That album is among the most introspective work they've ever
recorded and it's a tone they've only modestly advanced on for Rave
Tapes. It's not hard to pull all the elements together and theorize at
how they arrived at the humorous title for the record, which reads as a direct
inverse to the morose worldview of the album and a poke at anyone thinking
they’ve "gone electronic." Still, that's hard to square with a track
like Master
Card, where the circular guitar motions they so often make remain front
and centre, and the analog sounds skirting across the surface only serve to
keep familiar dynamics intact.
It's been 17 years since Mogwai’s debut, Young
Team. There's been a natural fade away from that youthful starting
point, as well there should be, but still, there are elements left behind from
that on Rave Tapes, such as the astonishing ebb and flow of Mogwai
Fear Satan, or even getting Roky Erickson to guest on a track. Rave Tapes is the work of an oddly
conservative band, turning away from the openness they once embraced. At some
point Mogwai got less interested in testing the boundaries of their music, instead
settling for being comfortable working within them. The bassy keyboard grind
that emerges at times is a new appendage, but the material it's dressed up in
strains under the weight of familiarity, ultimately resembling an exercise in
Mogwai box-ticking. It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a band trapped
in their own creation, occasionally looking for somewhere else to go but unable
or unwilling to fully get there. Frankly, it’s more Tangerine Dream than
Throbbing Gristle.
Most groups don't leave behind the core signifiers that
bring them attention in the first place, so Mogwai are far from an isolated
case when it comes to looping back on themselves, but it does make the level of
complacency they're operating at now such a baffling and frustrating end game
to it all. At this point it feels like there isn't anywhere else they can go
with this music, so infinitesimally small are the strides taken toward a better
place. Mogwai have worked heavily in the visual realm in the last year, on Les
Revenants and a live performance of their Zidane soundtrack. Maybe the
cliché about instrumental bands creating "soundtracks for films that don't
exist" has a grain of truth for them after all. Here, Mogwai’s cautionary
approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling
to get out from within. Download only; don’t buy it.
Instead, spend your money on the Band of Holy Joy’s truly
splendid Easy Listening for Difficult Times. Geordie hero Johny Brown,
still with the magnificent Bill Lewington on drums, has assembled another
superb set of musicians to produce the band’s eighteenth long-player, all told.
In a thirty-year career that’s reignited three or four times, what’s
immediately striking is the regularity with which they’ve hit new high points.
They may have seemed to peak in the late 1980s with the classic Manic,
Magic, Majestic, but the recent run of Paramour, How to Kill a Butterfly
and The
North is Another Land, have been of a uniformly superb quality and Easy
Listening is BOHJ at their unsettling best. The music, as ever, is
enough to make your heart soar. The strings, the piano, the horns and those
whipcrack drums all combine to propel Johny on to an ever more passionate
recounting of his extraordinary, everyday stories.
Never is this clearer than in There Was a Fall/The Fall,
the finest song he has been responsible for since Fishwives, What
the Moon Saw or Job Shop. It is a song about Ian
Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who was murdered by the police in 2009. There
Was a Fall/The Fall is as
unnerving as one would expect from a song that draws on coroner's report-style
cold anatomic detail for lyrics, performed with a snarl that, apart from this
pared down objectivity, points up a glaring social injustice. It's a potent, furious
way of addressing a death that fits into a long cycle of police brutality; a grimly
medical account of the consequences of the barbarous assault in question set to
a thrilling freeform accompaniment. It was brilliant live, when they played The Cluny
2 on March 2nd. In the presence of Rob Blamire, Gary Chaplin
and Pauline Murray, BOHJ did a fabulous version of Don’t Dictate as well.
I’ve followed Johny’s career since I saw his first band Speed at the University
Theatre sit-in back in August 1977, days after I turned 13, and his art is as
great now as it has ever been. Buy this
album and go and see The Band of Holy Joy if you can.
Finally, back in 1977, when I fell in love with Penetration,
I hardly imagined that by the time I grew up I’d be pals with them, but that is
what has somehow happened. Indeed, Rob and guitarist Paul are also work
colleagues. Paul’s former band Nancy bone reformed for a one-off support slot,
doing the greatest hits of 1977; everything from The Floral Dance to Heroes
to an absolutely blinding Whole Wide World. However, they were
only the support, though I thoroughly enjoyed them. Here I was, 36 years later,
watching Penetration with my FPX mate Raga, with my son Ben, who went to school
with Rob and Pauline’s kids, accompanying us. Guess what? It was fucking
mesmerising; Don’t Dictate, Free Money, Life’s A Gamble, Danger Signs and Stone
Heroes, the lyrics of which Raga purloined for his O Level English
Language essay and gained a B for, all killed it for me. Age shall not wither this
lot; brilliant to see and hear. Amazingly, each of the gigs I’ve been to so far
this year has been faultless; let’s hope this continues.
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