golden years?

For no readily apparent reason David Bowie's classic 1975 single "Golden Years" has just been reissued. It's allegedly been issued to promote the Station To Station cd box set, but as this set came out nearly a year ago I can't help thinking that EMI have yet again proved that they have no idea what they are doing...

To make matter worse the single comes with some dubious bonus remixes, by contemporary remixers who clearly have no idea what made the song so good in the first place. Hideous machine tooled drums and nasty synth stabs replace much of the warm and funky original music and Bowie himself is all but missing in a couple of cases. Again, who thought that this was a good idea?

Anyway, it got me thinking about Bowie at the time he recorded "Golden Years". By the end of 1975 he'd been living in America for nearly two years, during which time he'd barely eaten, and his drug intake had taken him to very brink of insanity. 

At the height of DB's coke madness in early 1975 he was living in a house in Los Angeles which looked like some sort of mausoleum - there were virtually no windows and those that existed had blinds down day and night ("pale blinds drawn all day / nothing to read nothing to say..." as DB would sing a year later). Bowie would frequently be found casting runic spells, lighting special candles to ward off evil spirits and storing his urine in the fridge so 'people' couldn't steal it for their undisclosed nefarious purposes. Many of the lyrics in the song "Station To Station" reflect Bowie's interest in the occult and arcane religions.
At one point an exorcism was carried out.

On his swimming pool. 

He was one seriously paranoid and deranged individual.

But it's clear from the testimonies of various people who were close to DB during this time that this wasn't all in his head, it wasn't all due to the drugs and the weird LA characters who hung around him. It seems that 'bad vibes' genuinely seemed to follow DB around. And very weird, unsettling and totally inexplicable things happened.

Harry Maslin (producer of some of Young Americans and all of Station To Station, and a man who is apparently the very definition of 'down to earth') recounts a day when a dark cloud hovered only over Bowie's house and rain fell for some considerable time. Yet the rest of the street remained dry and basked in the Los Angeles sunshine...

Bowie's regular hairdresser, who also counted Liz Taylor and many other Hollywood luminaries as clients, recounted how he was fixing DB's hair for the March '75 Grammy awards, when Bowie declared that everyone should leave straight away as they were all in great danger. He spooked the salon staff so much that they all left the building - just as the gas station across the road burst into flames for no obvious reason...

And one day in early 1975 Bowie visited Jimmy Page in his hotel suite. Page was at this point deeply fascinated with the dark arts and was researching Aleister Crowley, the notorious Scottish wizard. The various other people present in the hotel room immediately noticed a drop in temperature when Page and Bowie met. After a while the TV began turning itself on and off for no reason. All the time David and Jimmy seemed to be engaged in some kind of psychic stand off - glaring at each other, not speaking, as if somehow trying to out-spook one another. After a thick wine glass shattered without reason in Bowie's hand he decided to leave, later declaring that Page was too full of dark energy and that he (Bowie) didn't want to be drawn in...

Golden Years huh?

kraftwerk

You Tube is great - you can watch all sorts of stuff that would otherwise be consigned to the deepest depths of your memory. I re-watched Kraftwerk appearing at the MTV Awards in 2004, which was actually their first ever live TV performance.

They were introduced by a chirpy Kylie, which seemed slightly odd for some reason. And then there they were, stern and unblinking behind four identical podiums upon which rested their portable Kling Klang Studio - simply four powerful laptops. There were few close-ups of the band, not surprising I guess as there wasn't actually much movement. Clad in green ‘Tron’ suits, glowing in the pulsing lights, motionless apart from occasional foot tapping from Fritz and Henning. Kraftwerk founders Ralf and Florian barely moved at all. Green linear graphics pulsed all over the stage, and all over the giant screens dotted around the venue, which seemed to imbue the whole place with a slightly sickly luminous green glow.

The song itself lived up to its title - “Aerodynamik” pulsed and throbbed and bubbled and bounced in it's ultra precise manner. It was quite simply fantastic - totally out of place at the MTV awards, but fantastic all the same. Inexplicably Kraftwerk are somehow terrifically thrilling to watch. They shouldn't be (lack of movement etc etc) but, unaccountably, they just are.

Rather wonderfully Kraftwerk has not really changed their sound over the past 40 years. More complex and powerful technology means simply that they are able to pursue their singular vision with more clarity and precision than ever before.

nico

I still miss Nico, the foghorned voiced fraulein who I first heard singing with the Velvet Underground. Really weird that I should miss her, because I didn’t know her at all. I'd never even seen her in concert. I’d only ever heard her music, but when she died in July 1988 I felt terribly sad. Can't really explain why, but it felt almost like a personal loss. I played her records repeatedly in the weeks after she died and probably got very morbid... One song that seemed really pertinent was the “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce”, the last track on Chelsea Girl with it's opening line 'I've lost a friend, and I don't know why'.

In retrospect it seems odd that I missed her so much, as by all accounts she could be a deeply unpleasant individual - selfish and spoilt, a desperate junkie for most of her adult life until only a year or so before she died, either utterly lazy or genuinely virtually incapable of looking after herself. Yet for some unaccountable reason she inspired something approaching devotion from her band members, managers and friends.

Born in Cologne just before the Second World War Christa Paffgen grew up a solitary, lonely child. She adopted the name of a male friend when she started modelling in the 1950s. By the mid sixties she was to be found in New York hanging out with the Andy Warhol art set. Andy loved her striking features and Nico appeared in a number of Warhol films. It was his idea to introduce her to the Velvet Underground, a new band he had started managing. Such was Andy's persuasiveness that the Velvets somehow found themsleves agreeing to Nico fronting the band, despite her limited vocal range and inability to keep time. Lou Reed wrote three of his most beautiful songs for Nico to sing, and she would continue to play these songs throughout her career - "All Tomorrow's Parties, "I'll Be Your Mirror" and the song that became indelibly Nico's - "Femme Fatale".

Of course the Velvets soon tired of Nico's lack of contribution to the band and by 1967 she was recording a solo album although she was helped by Lou, John and Sterling. The original Chelsea Girl recordings were simple acoustic guitar songs. The record label, fearing that Nico's limited vocals were too exposed in such bare arrangements, added strings and flutes in order to sweeten the album. Nico was devastated. She vowed to write and perform only her own material from then on and with a surprising amount of self discipline taught herself how to play the harmonium, an instrument that required no outside power source (and was thus perfect for her candlelit existence), yet it could create crashing waves of sound. The constantly shifting rhythmic base provided by the harmonium suited her vocal style which seemed to have its own idiosyncratic sense of timing. Band members, especially drummers, would always have problems trying to play along with Nico's singing as she utterly disregarded any conventional idea of a steady beat. Yet her songs were highly structured and would fall apart if her skewed structure was not adhered to.

The Marble Index was the first album that Nico had written and performed herself. Issued in 1968 TMI is characterised by John Cale's musique concrete arrangements. Wind howls through some pieces, the whole album seems to inhabit some arctic wasteland; it's cold to the point of freezing; it's like no other album ever made. Underpinning every song is the powerful rise and fall of the harmonium, and piercing the gloom and the fog is Nico's lugubrious croon. It was a total flop of course, even the record label boss said that 'no-one wants to buy suicide', not exactly a ringing endorsement... It was so wonderfully out of step with sixties fashions and trends, an album as far removed from the hippy love-ins as it was possible to be. Even today it still sounds like music from another world entirely. And I love it.

Nico followed The Marble Index with Desertshore in 1971, which offered slightly more conventionally arranged songs and then The End in 1974, which didn't. Both contain some stunning, outre arrangements from John Cale, and on The End some synth and guitar work from Roxy Music's Eno and Phil Manzanera. 

By then, however, Nico was a junkie. She had no possessions, no home, she even sold her harmonium. Between 1974 and 1978 she drifted, in a heroin induced fog. No one seems to know where she lived, who she hung out with, what she did. Then she appeared backstage at a Patti Smith gig and poured out such a tale of woe that Patti immediately found her a place to stay and bought her a new harmonium in order that Nico might get her career going again. Perhaps surprisingly, she did, and Nico would always remember Patti's act of kindness. 1979 and 1980 would see Nico frequently performing in New York clubs playing a large number of new songs, sometimes backed by her old friend John Cale.

Then, and for no obvious reason, Nico relocated to Britain. She first recorded what can only be described as an arabic infused rock album. Many of her new songs had been radically reimagined by her new Turkish and French musician friends and the resulting album Drama Of Exile is a true one off in Nico's bizarre catalogue. In fact the album was recorded twice, as the original mastertapes were stolen or something - the true facts are somewhat obscure... Both versions are now available. But some of the songs are stunning - the mysterious "Purple Lips", the miltary "Sixty / Forty", the powerful "One More Chance".

In order to more easily source heroin Nico then moved to Manchester, in the early 1980s a haven for addicts. But despite her drug dependency Nico got herself a new manager and decided to hit the road. backed by various Manchester musicians in various configurations - sometimes she'd play solo, sometimes with a conventional drums, bass, guitar set up, sometimes with three or four drummers only, Nico toured with a vengeance. Not only the UK but all across Europe, venturing behind the Iron Curtain, across the Mediterranean islands, and sometimes criss-crossing the USA too.

Another new album, Camera Obscura, was once again produced by John Cale and showcases a percussion heavy sound that was a feature of Nico's live show at the time. It contains one of my favourite Nico songs, the devastating "My Heart Is Empty". There are numerous live albums, mainly from the 1980s, and most show that Nico could be a spellbinding performer - not always; some concerts display a somewhat indifferent or forgetful Nico. But when she put on a good show, often only with the harmonium for accompaniment, she could be incredible. There is a phenomenal version of “Janitor Of Lunacy” from 1983 on Do Or Die, in which the song is invested with a huge power that is actually very frightening.

Tours across Australasia and Japan in 1986 and 1987 coincided with Nico finally kicking her heroin habit for good. And things were really looking up when when she was chosen to headline a festival at the Berlin Planetarium. She worked hard on a new set of songs. Unfinished and partly improvised though they may be, the new material debuted at the Planetarium displays an improving mastery of dynamics and composition. After this triumphant performance Nico returned to Ibiza where she held a small apartment. 

  

In order to improve her fitness Nico had taken up cycling around the island. No-one actually knows what happened, but on 18th July 1988 Nico was found unconscious at the side of the country road, having apparently fallen off her bike. With proper medical attention she may well have survived, but the first hospital to which she was taken proved to be woefully primitive and due to the slightly bizarre attire in which she was found (heavy black motorbike boots, black clothing and a black shawl - in August - in Ibiza) she was assumed to be some sort of gypsy woman or a homeless beggar. Typically, she carried no ID. Partly because no-one could identify her she was left for hours on a trolley before being given any treatment. When a brain haemorrhage was diagnosed she was moved to a better hospital but by then the bleeding was too severe and there was nothing that could be done. Whether she suffered the haemorrhage and then fell off the bike, or the fall caused the bleeding is something that was never identified. In any case, the result was the same.

She was just 49, and after years of drug abuse and living in utter poverty it seems that simply riding a bicycle killed Nico. She would have found the irony very amusing.  

collecting stuff

I once wrote a small piece for a Zappa fanzine (the late lamented "T'Mershi Duween" named after one of Frank's more esoteric tracks...), in which commented on how most Zappa fans seem to be a certain type of man. I put forth a groundbreaking and possibly earth-shattering reason for this - everybody is different...

Most people, and virtually all women, don't, on the whole, collect stuff. Yes, some women buy clothes and have more pairs of shoes than is often reasonably explicable but they don't go in for the minutiae of collecting.

This is may be a huge generalisation, but men, in general, like details. Very few women follow football with the same attention to detail that many men exhibit. How many women train spotters are there? How many women have collecting hobbies? Whilst I'm hastily trying, but probably failing, to distance myself from these slightly odd pastimes, I have been known to memorize, without even trying, the track times of various songs I like. Pointless, and possibly a poor use of brain space, but men seem to have these spaces in their brains for precisely these lists of facts. Why can I tell you which actors played which characters in Doctor Who? I've no idea. I have loads of books that can tell me this sort of stuff if I really need to know, or the internet can provide this information at the click of a mouse - but I can remember these things, so I do. 

Zappa music is hard work. It requires what Robert Fripp calls ‘active listening’. You can't really have Zappa in the background; it's complex stuff that gives me a great deal of pleasure, if you put in the effort. Many people, probably sensibly, have better things to do with their time. 

Most people enjoy music passively. They just want to hear it, but not get too involved with it. They like pop stuff noodling along in the background because it's nicely funky and there are some catchy tunes. Pop music is precisely that - Popular, hence the name. Most people have no real interest in who played the music, or the name of the recording studio. This is of course the first thing I look at on a new album! I was fascinated when the Phil Manzanera website published the recording dates of the first Roxy Music album. It took only a week or so to record, plus mixing, and I now know which songs were taped on which days. This adds precisely nothing to the actual enjoyment of the music as such, but it added hugely to my overall enjoyment of Roxy as a whole. Inexplicable, but I like this stuff.

It's a strange fact that I can remember all the lyrics, every single one, to songs like Brian Eno's “Miss Shapiro” (verse three runs thus - Dalai llama llama puss puss, stella maris missa nobis, miss a dinner Miss Shapiro, shampoos pot pot pinkies pampered, movements hampered like at Christmas, ha ha isn't life a circus, round in circles like The Archers, always stiff and always starchy, yes it's happening and it's fattening and all that we can get into the show...) yet I can't remember my car number plate.

How many times do I really need to hear a live recording of “Heroes“? I've no idea, but the fact is that I do enjoy hearing different versions of the same songs. Likewise listening to rehearsals and demos gives me enormous pleasure. The fact that some are unfinished / never heard before makes most people quite rightly question the value of hearing the stuff. Why not listen to the 'proper version'? It’s a good question, with no sensible answer.

Why are aborted takes of songs so interesting? To me, they just are. I have the Stooges box set - all the recordings from the Funhouse sessions. There are 28 takes of “Loose”, one after the other - and I can listen to this quite happily. I especially like the fact that the take they used on the record was number 24, yet they continued for another 4 takes trying to better it. Why does this interest me? It is, I'm sure, some sort of genetic thing.

Sad, maybe - obsessive, certainly - fascinating and enthralling, oh yes!

the lost art of browsing

Whilst out on my lunchtime walk I found myself strolling along Baddow Road past where one of my favourite record shops, Slipped Discs II, used to be. What a shame it no longer exists.

In Chelmsford it was truly the last of its kind. A delightfully ramshackle building, a happy place that Health and Safety would have hated, with uneven floors, poor lighting and steps where you least expected them. It was the sole survivor of a breed of independent record shops that flourished between the 1950s and the 1980s, but struggled as the 1990s gave way to the new millennium in the face of internet shopping and supermarkets selling super cut price albums.  

When I started buying records at the tail end of the 1970s, Chelmsford was well equipped with record stores. Serious music supplier James Dace had two shops, with the one in High Chelmer selling instruments and sheet music downstairs and a surprisingly solid selection of classical, jazz and rock records upstairs. Although it was never fashionable, Dace’s was a valuable source of really obscure singles for years - I picked up David Bowie’s 1979 single “Alabama Song” still with the extremely rare fold out poster sleeve at least four years after it had been released.

Parrot Records catered for the rock fan’s needs. Two shops operated under the Parrot banner; the first was in Duke Street, with rather dingy wooden racks containing everything you could possibly need by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all the 'serious' rock bands; the second Parrot Records was newer and brighter and sensibly placed opposite the entrance to the High Chelmer precinct and this shop contained the more commercial pop albums as well as the usual wide selection of other stuff. Between the two shops I was able to buy pretty much all the stuff I wanted.

I remember looking for Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power in 1981. But it only seemed to be stocked in the Duke Street Parrot. One lunchtime I plucked up the courage to venture inside. It was dark, there were large, tattooed, hairy, leather jacketed men sitting on the floor smoking intriguing smelling cigarettes and the little shop was hugely intimidating to this skinny fourteen-year-old schoolboy. Feeling very out of place in my grammar school uniform, I sifted through the albums in the big wooden racks and finally found Raw Power. As I took it to the counter I felt the gaze of the various heavy dudes hanging around the shop. ‘He’s buying Raw Power’ was the general buzz. The long-haired biker type behind the counter looked approvingly at my choice ‘Raw Power eh?’ I’d already worked out my next move and as casually as I could said ‘Yeah, and I’m going to get Metallic KO next’, a statement which was met with another rumble of approval from the guys on the floor - Metallic KO was a Stooges live album, and about as uncompromising a record as you could get. I was ‘in’. For quite a while after that whenever I shopped in Parrot someone would mutter ‘That’s the kid who bought Raw Power and Metallic KO’.

I must have spent hours and hours in those shops. There was something inexplicably exciting about flicking through the rows and rows of records, pouring over the sleeves of albums that I wanted to buy, scouring those 12 inches of square cardboard for every bit of information, so that when I had eventually saved up enough money to actually buy the thing it felt like I was welcoming an old friend into my home. But it was the act of browsing, in a place with lots of stuff to browse, that was, if anything, just as pleasurable as buying and listening to the music.

With Parrot often selling all sorts of terrific albums at just £1.99, cheap even for the early 1980s, I would guess that most of my pocket money went into the Parrot tills. A very sad day indeed when Parrot closed down.

Back in the 1980s, Pop Inn in Baddow Road, just along from the Odeon, was the place to go for singles. Somewhat cramped, due mainly to the sheer amount of stock crammed into the oddly shaped shop, Pop Inn was a delightful place to spend some time, browsing happily through what seemed to me to be the widest selection of singles I’d ever seen. They had a load of albums too. Pop Inn later moved to Moulsham Street and started stocking CDs, but it was never quite the same. When Pop Inn closed and reopened as Slipped Discs II (Slipped Discs I was in Billericay) I was delighted. The shop was back in Baddow Road, opposite the old Pop Inn premises, situated in a wonderfully rambling shop, the floors piled high with stacks of singles and CDs. Goodness only knows how the owners ever found anything, but they seemed to know where everything was, and would tread carefully around towers of discs, often as tall as they were, to retrieve exactly what you were looking for. For back catalogue CDs and long out of the chart singles Slipped Discs II couldn’t be beaten. It was a haven for all music lovers who hated the shiny identikit world of HMV, the superficial supermarkets and the chart only stock in Woolworths or WHSmith.

Later a branch of the East Anglian independent chain Andy’s Records opened in the High Street. A large shop packed with a great selection of back catalogue albums, Andy’s was an excellent CD age replacement for the now departed Parrot. Of course you had to contend with Andy’s endearingly stubborn insistence on stocking everything under first names. In most shops I would go straight to the end of the racks to get my fix of Frank Zappa. At Andy’s I would have to search under F, just after the Frank Sinatra albums. Fans of Tim Buckley wanting to pick up his son Jeff's album Grace would need to trek from the T section back to the J area. But, crucially, at least Andy’s stocked all this stuff. The newly opened HMV was small, not well stocked enough, and generally only contained albums by bands that sold loads. Obscure music, the little known artists and poor selling albums that I wanted were not commercially viable at Chelmsford's HMV. Fortunately Andy’s hung on until a few years ago, but sadly couldn’t compete with the rise of the internet. On the net you could easily find all those obscure Nico albums you needed and, what’s more, they were much cheaper than in Andy’s.

As CDs replaced vinyl the independent shops hung on. But they were smaller than the previous generation of record stores as the CD cases simply required less room to display. There must have been a concurrent improvement in the frequency of deliveries as the new CD shops seemed to stock far fewer copies of each album too. Browsing became less of a viable pastime as it was hard to while away the hours looking at tiny pieces of plastic in a shop not much larger than a decent sized living room.

Whilst I’m as guilty as the next person of buying from the internet (generally cheaper, easy to get hold of obscure stuff etc etc) I still feel rather sad at the decline in the numbers of backstreet record stores. Browsing the internet is too easy, too simple. There's no thrill. Physically flicking through the hundreds of record sleeves, actually finding a record that had long been searched for, holding the cardboard  and vinyl in your grateful hands - this was a true pleasure. And in the age of anonymous internet deliveries it seems that it is a pleasure that is all but lost forever. 

drifting and tilting

With the iPod on shuffle earlier I was treated to an amazing piece of music called "Clara". It's from Scott Walker's last album The Drift and is as far removed from the dreamy 60's sound of "Make It Easy On Yourself" as it's possible to be. Actually The Drift is about as far removed from ANY other sort of music as it's possible to be...

Anyway, it made me think back to the extraordinary evening I spent at the Barbican Theatre watching, experiencing Scott's songs back in 2008. This is what I wrote about it then. Can't really add anything to it now, apart from saying that I can't imagine ever topping that evening in terms of the sheer theatricality of what was presented and utterly astounding reaction it provoked in the theatre.

Drifting And Tilting –
The Songs Of Scott Walker
Barbican Theatre 14/11/08

Well it was certainly an experience. One that I’ve never had before, and I’m certain will never have again.
The performance was undoubtedly the oddest theatrical presentation I’ve ever witnessed and am ever likely to witness, and for the most part I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was full of jaw dropping moments – of which more later – and some stunning vocal performances. The staging and lighting was extraordinarily good, and the sound in the theatre was superb too.

The audience was comprised of plenty of people like me, some teenagers, and a large proportion of late middle aged women – almost certainly Scott devotees from the 1960s. I sincerely hope they’d been keeping up with Scott’s work over the past 30 years otherwise they’d have had a nasty shock! This was about as far you can get from the symphonic pop of "The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore" or the AOR rock of "No Regrets".

I took my seat, in the centre of the third row, and was confronted with a massive metal wall blocking the stage entirely. There was a projection onto the black metal – the words ‘Drifting And Tilting - The Songs Of Scott Walker’ moved randomly over the huge wall, as if the Mysterons were trying to contact us. 

Right on time, the wall divided with part of it folding down into the orchestra pit and the top half moving up into rafters. Down in the pit a full orchestra was assembled and on stage we were confronted with bare boards, a small band (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion) on a cramped riser in the centre at the back of the stage, hemmed in on both sides by what seemed like tall brick walls. Centre stage at the front was Jarvis Cocker – bearded, wearing a dark suit (and Kraftwerkian red shirt with black tie), standing reading a newspaper. "Cossacks Are" began, a row of spotlights at the back of the stage momentarily blazed out into our eyes (something that happened a few other times through the night) and Jarvis solemnly intoned the lyrics as if reading them from the paper. It was rather a shock to hear someone else singing Scott’s lyrics to be honest, and I’m not sure that Jarvis was entirely the right person for this song. He’s too much his own character. But the band was excellent, recreating the song perfectly, and Jarvis’ vocals were excellent on the ‘chorus’ parts where he sang unaccompanied "Cossacks are charging in…" etc. The opening number ended with the lights suddenly switched off and a lone drum beat continuing through the darkness. No one clapped (no one dared...) as the drum beat ominously continued.

Screens were dropped onto the stage, opaque to allow some light through, and projections to be used. Various screens would be used throughout the evening, to huge effect, and these represented some of the cleverest aspects of the staging.

Gavin Friday began singing "Jesse" – although perhaps a little histrionic, this was a very effective performance. The band and orchestra were phenomenal and a foreboding atmosphere permeated the whole theatre. Friday was in front of a screen which stretched from floor to ceiling. Behind him was a shadow of an Elvis-like figure. For a while the shadow copied Friday’s movements then, freakily, the shadow began to move independently. Then the shadow grew, gradually taller and taller until the figure filled the height of the screen. Obviously this was done with clever lighting but it was really quite eerie. Then the shadow morphed into a huge oblong, a coffin perhaps, or a grave… And at the end, the massive black rectangular shape divided into Twin Towers, as Friday sang without any backing, that he was the only one left alive - over and over, almost sobbing out the lyrics. Stunning performance, but even this was dwarfed by what came next.

Again, with no applause the stage changed in the darkness. The band was now shrouded by opaque curtains, an apparent dead body at the stage right, a woman lay contorted in the centre and ropes, looking like nooses, draped all around. A percussionist stood at the front beating time as "Clara" began. A suited man leaned over the body with an old fashioned movie camera. The ‘body’, opera singer Owen Gilhooly, sang most of the song like this – flat on his back pretending to be a corpse with his image, via the camera, projected onto a huge screen! Clara’s part was sung by Dot Allison from behind the drapes next to the band - she was excellent. And another opera singer, Nigel Richards, took some of the later lines. Throughout the song however, the contorted woman in the centre of the stage (as Clara) danced. Sometimes beautifully, sometimes as if in a trance, sometimes as if having some sort of fit and sometimes, brilliantly, as if she was hanging on the end of a rope. It was all most disconcerting, and at one point it seemed as if she was moving in reverse, as if film had been reversed – really astonishing, her movements were incredible, an amazing piece of choreography.

But most amazing of all was the pig thumping.

Hanging upside down by its feet, a pig carcass hung at stage left and a boxer, stripped to the waist, pummeled it. His boxing gloves must have had contact mics in them as the thumping and thudding was relayed through the PA as possibly the most disturbing percussion effect I’ve ever heard. It was all quite astonishing. When this started to happen there was an audible gasp from the audience. I had no idea this effect (which was of course used on the record) would actually be recreated on stage and I was genuinely stunned. It was fascinatingly horrid, but somehow entirely appropriate for the song.

Finally the song finished and once more the audience sat in silence. In fact no-one applauded at all until the very end of the evening. It was as if no-one wanted to puncture the oppressive atmosphere that had been carefully built up.

The next piece, "Patriot", took place on a bare stage again. A fat man wearing tights covered in butterflies, big y-fronts and a stocking over his head came waddling on stage. The audience was baffled by this weird appearance. He was played by actor Philip Herbert (possibly best known as Julian Clary’s cheery assistant Hugh Jelly) and he proceeded to mime what appeared to be the story of a drunk strangely chasing bit of newspaper which were ‘flown’ across the stage by puppeteers. As an accompaniment to "Patriot" I thought it seemed rather out of place despite being very entertaining and impressive. It was, in fact, the only bit of light relief all night. The flute and drums bit was played by masked musicians who stalked very slowly across the stage. Quite what they represented I have no idea. The music on this beautiful song was, as expected, very lovely indeed and a welcome respite from the previous two scary pieces. The vocals were beautifully handled, offstage, by the two opera singers Gilhooly and Richards.

But after this we moved into darker territory as a massive tree made from old wire coat hangers appeared in the middle of the stage. Dot Allison stood on its flat metal base to sing "Buzzers", which started with the radio snippets about Milosevic and then a man at the side of the stage began hitting some sort of metallic shape, creating the unsettling rhythmic dinging heard throughout the song. As the song progressed two dancers appeared from either side walking very slowly backwards across the width of the stage. They wore just loin cloths and their heads were covered by a sheet which lengthened into a long horizontal line of sheeting stretching across the whole stage. It was, again, very clever but rather disconcerting. Superb singing from Ms Allison.

Another screen dropped at the front of the stage as a grid like pattern was projected, almost like rows of windows. Nigel Richards appeared in a disheveled suit, torn, no shoes, looking like a vagrant, staggering around at the front of the stage whilst "Jolson And Jones" was pounded out, very loudly. He sang the bizarre lyrics like a man possessed, and for no obvious reason put a blindfold on himself halfway through. At times footage of booted feet walking very slowly down cellar steps was projected onto the screens. This, for some reason, was very ominous. And of course he sang of punching donkeys in the streets of Galway. Probably, out of all the songs, this was the hardest one to get through. The noise, the intensity of the singing was almost overwhelming.

"Cue" was next – an operatic / musical theatre singer called Michael Henry took centre stage with opaque screens in front of and behind him. What seemed to be fireflies darted all around him – it was entrancing - and these gradually coalesced into an eerie spectral mist which was very realistic. Very clever indeed. There was little other movement for the lengthy duration of this piece but it absolutely held your attention. What a superb singer he was, really powerful and emotionally affecting as he sang of the eerie flugelman and the awful disease he seems to bring. And then of course there were the ‘bam bam bam bam’ bits. At those points the band riser at the back of the stage was illuminated to show two huge wooden crates, behind which the two percussionists each held an enormous concrete block. They created the ‘bam bam bam bam’ with a massively loud echoing noise as they pounded the blocks onto the wooden boxes. One of the concrete blocks actually began to disintegrate during the last round of bashing and bits of concrete flew off in all directions. Terrific stuff – it was, unexpectedly, absolutely thrilling!

The final piece of this eighty minute performance was "Farmer In The City". Two men, in suits, stood at either side of the stage front, a screen with various Italianesque images (including a team photo of (I believe) the Lazio football team) behind them. They wore worrying masks with what seemed like soil faces and tall grass for hair. Quite disturbing looking, to be honest. 

As Gilhooly and Richards sang "Do I hear 21… 21… 21…." from offstage the brain-grass men mimed as if they were auctioneers, pointing weirdly into the audience. All very odd. Damon Albarn, wearing green wellies, took his place behind a lectern and sang the verses. He was surprisingly effective, and didn’t sing in his usual rather weedy voice at all. Still not as good as Scott of course, and I think I’d have preferred "Cue"s superb vocalist Michael Henry to have sung this one too, but on the whole Damon did a pretty fine job. The orchestral backing here was beautiful, powerful, deeply emotional. A really strong performance from everyone and a good choice as an almost triumphant final song.

The stage went dark, the audience was still silent, then all the screens went up to reveal the ‘cast’ in line taking bows, Jarvis and Damon in the middle. They all left and returned in pairs to receive even more applause, with the dancers getting a deservedly huge cheer and that was it. No sign of Scott on stage.

Scott Walker was there however, manning the sound desk at the back of the auditorium, a tall, thin man in jeans, t-shirt and blue baseball cap pulled down low. I knew it was him and after the performance noticed quite a few people getting autographs and shaking his hand. He seemed happy for this to happen, despite his reportedly reclusive nature, so I made my way back intending to meet The Man, but I got just two seats away before security ushered me, and a gaggle of middle aged ladies away, saying that the auditorium had to be cleared. Oh well.

It had been quite a night. A lot of people were impressed judging from the comments I heard. Annie Nightingale said to her companions that she’d never seen anything like it, many people were saying "wow" and variations thereof, but others were making comments of the "what a load of pretentious nonsense" variety. OK so it WAS pretentious – incredibly so – but so what? I wouldn’t have expected anything otherwise. The staging and attention to detail was incredible. The performances were first rate, and the music was astonishing – plus the sound in the theatre was crystal clear. In many respects I finally understood the songs whilst experiencing them live. A track like "Cue" had always dragged a bit on record, and was not one which I liked very much. Hearing / seeing it live has changed my opinion completely. Likewise "Clara" which was always impressive and probably the dark heart of The Drift album, but which seemed still more powerful live; more emotional, more expressive and I will always remember the incredible dancing. The Drift now seems like a much more complete piece of work to me, the themes more apparent after seeing this performance.

The press reviews have been rather ambivalent. Slightly grudging respect is the order of the day it seems. Clearly most of the reviewers were not fans of the recent Walker output, and most write as if they were not personally very impressed, whilst admitting that the show did contain an undeniable power and a sort of horrible beauty. They all, of course, focus on the pig punching and barely mention the more impressive and moving parts of the staging and singing, which ends up giving the impression that the evening was a bit of a freakshow. This is regrettable as the show wasn’t all that bizarre really. Avant garde maybe, pretentious yes, individual, totally original and utterly unique, yes yes yes! But it was way more than just the punching of a pig plus Jarvis and Damon popping up – which is the impression that most of the press reviews give.

The beautiful horror of Scott’s music and lyrics was brilliantly brought to vivid life and created memorable and astounding images which I, frankly, will never forget.
A truly remarkable evening.
 

peter murphy - ninth

Very happy to report that Peter Murphy’s unimaginatively titled ninth album Ninth is really tremendous.

I don’t have the actual CD yet but rather weirdly amazon.com (the US one) have the whole album streamed, so I've captured a decent enough copy of the album to keep me going until the real thing drops through my letterbox.

I’ve known quite a few of these songs for nearly two years now, and right from when they were first performed back in May 2009 it was clear that the Murph would have a storming album on his hands.

This is PM’s most immediate album since 1995’s Cascade, and rivals that album and Deep in the catchy top tunes stakes. PM doesn’t sound like someone in his mid 50s, he’s energized and pumped up, the vocals are strong and clear and as always he commands your attention with That Voice. The lyrics are the usual faintly silly Murph nonsense. For example, what exactly is a Velocity Bird? But he makes the words sound so exotic and fully enjoyable. Thumbs up from me for another mention of Djinn and absolutely full marks for the use of the word ‘vespertilian’ (I had no idea what it meant and just looked it up - it means, pertaining to, or resembling a bat! Brilliant and so appropriate that I can't believe that Peter Murphy hasn't used this batlike word before).

The tunes are superb, cracking melodies and supremely catchy choruses. Many of the choruses consist solely of the song’s title. For example the chorus in “I Spit Roses” is simply that line repeated, as is the chorus of “The Prince & Old Lady Shade” and others. Makes it easy to sing along I guess.

There are a number of tracks that PM hasn’t played live yet and these tend to be the quieter numbers – “Never Fall Out” is a lovely ballad and “Slowdown” is a growling edgy and rather jumpy piece. The closing piano led “Crème De La Crème” has faint echoes of “My Last Two Weeks” at the start but builds dramatically – this tune has been around since 2002 actually and was played live on the Dust tour in a much more funky arrangement but never since.

David Baron's production on this record is great (and I'm looking forward to his production of Lettie's forthcoming record too) – lots of little touches like the synth strings and the hugely meaty guitar riff on “The Prince…”, the amusingly U2ish guitar in the background on “Seesaw Sway” (which is such a commercial track, but in a good way), bits of synth underpinning many tracks, the layers of guitarwork, the backing vocals, the massive and hugely satisfying CRUNCH of the guitars on "Uneven and Brittle", the way a number of tracks have marvelously sudden endings, you get the picture – I like this record. A Lot.

Anyway, this is certainly one of PM’s best albums and deserves to be a big hit. Because PM doesn’t get onto X Factor, it won’t be a hit of course, and that’s a terrible shame, but I guess Peter is used to that by now.