music
- In googling to check that I had the right A-side (how crap is my memory?) I discovered an excellent project that Billy Bragg is involved in. Check it out ↩
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Well, OK, some are better than others, but only because some are worse than others. ↩︎
Redemption Song: the Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer, by Chris Salewicz (Books 2007, 1)
Ah, Joe. I can hardly believe that it's already four years since we lost him. I started reading this on Christmas day, and finished at about two in the morning on the 14th of January: exactly three weeks later. If I read a book every three weeks that would be seventeen in a year, which isn't very many. Anyway, during that time I completely immersed myself in Strummeriana; as well as reading the book I listened to little music other than The Clash or Joe's solo stuff, and I also put my bit in on the various Wikipedia articles.
And none if it can make up for the fact that he’s gone.
In fact, reading the book only makes it worse: it reinforces the sense of what we’ve lost. He was on a great creative upswing when he died, as the the posthumous Streetcore album showed. Its opening track, ‘Coma Girl’ (which, we learn, is about his daughter Lola) was the single best song he wrote since ‘Trash City’, at least.
Alas, we’ll never hear anything new from him again.
Or at least, not truly new: it seems from reading the book that there might be quite a few unreleased recordings out there, and he worked on more film soundtracks than I knew about.
Most interestingly of all, perhaps, is this piece of information. Around the time that Joe and the Mescaleros were writing and recording Global A Go-Go, the second of the comeback albums after the wilderness years, he also sent a set of lyrics to Mick Jones. He seemed to be suggesting that he was considering an alternative to the Mescaleros album. Mick wrote tunes for them and sent them back, but heard no more about it. Some time later, after Global A Go-Go had been released, Mick asked what had happened to the songs. Joe said, “Those weren’t for Global A Go-Go; those were the next Clash album.”
There’s no suggestion that he ever recorded any of them; but you never know: one day Mick might, when he’s not too busy with Carbon/Silicon.
What of the book itself, though? Well, it’s certainly compelling reading (at least if you’re a fan like me). It is flawed in some ways, of course. It can be hard to follow the early sections about Joe’s family, without an actual family tree to clarify things, thought that’s not a big problem.
Despite its size and comprehensive nature, there are parts that come across as too anecdotal and perhaps incomplete. Certainly there are places where I would have liked to have a lot more detail. But a book this size could be written about The Clash alone (several have, of course, but perhaps none quite the size of this one).
Still, it’s totally a must-have for any Clash fan, or solo Joe fan (can you be the latter but not the former?)
I wonder what it would have been like if The Clash had kept going and had become like U2 (who were heavily inspired by them)? In a good sense: I listened to an interview with Salewicz, where he pointed out that, though Joe didn’t like the distance from the audience at stadium gigs, he was very good at handling them. So imagine them doing something like the Zoo TV tour (indeed, when I saw footage of that, all the TVs as backdrop reminded me instantly of the Clash Mk II ‘Out of Control’ tour).
Straight to Elgin Avenue
So I ordered the new Banksie from Amazon, and to get free delivery, of course, I had to order one or two other things, to bring the price up to the threshold. I tend to have a number of things queued up to buy when the time is right, so I selected some things from that list.
All three items I chose are things that I meant to get at the time they came out, but didn’t, for one reason or another. The book was Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which I’ve meant to get since I read the reviews when it came out. I’m not sure why I never bought it (actually I did buy it once, but that was to give to a friend who had a particular interest in stage magic).
Anyway, my interest was recently rekindled because of the film coming out, of course. I may want to watch it one day, and I’m not going to read or not read something on the reported say-so of some film director. I can’t find a reference for that: the director is supposed to have said, “Don’t read the book before you see the film.” Though I suppose that I will, in effect, be doing exactly that – in a contrary way – by insisting on reading the book before seeing the film. Whatever: books come first.
But I didn’t bring you here to talk about books, for a change. No, this time it’s music. Because I also got two CDs from Amazon.
Regular readers might not be surprised to hear that I’m a huge fan of the late, and sadly missed,Joe Strummer. As such, I want to get a hold of anything he released that I don’t yet have. Now, during his so-called “wilderness years”, Joe did a lot of soundtrack work. I’ve got most of that on record, but I never got round to getting the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. I recall hearing a borrowed copy in ‘87 or so, and enjoying it, but not being overwhelmed by it. The one track I remembered was ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’, by The Pogues, more of which later.
In the intervening years, I mostly forgot about the album. Once in a while I might have poked around a second-hand record shop, but it was low on my list of priorities. Recently, though, I discovered that it had been reissued, revised and expanded. Into my “buy later” list it went, until the other day.
As well, I discovered it was possible to jump back to an earlier part of Joe’s career, namely his pre-Clash band, the 101ers. Elgin Avenue Breakdown was originally released back in 19-something-or-other. At the time I was mildly interested, but saw no need to rush out and buy it. I had the ‘Keys to your Heart’ single, and it was OK, but nowhere near as good as the heights of The Clash. And Joe was still around, and we could expect new music from him in the future.
We are in that future now, of course, and we don’t have Joe anymore. So buying the 101ers’ album is a way to hear him again.
And a damn fine album it is. Straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll, jam-packed with bounce, verve and excitement. What it doesn’t have is the political sensibilities of The Clash. Or actually, it does have the first vestiges of them; and indeed, the first vestiges of The Clash’s excellent ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ (the B-side of ‘Clash City Rockers1'), in the form of ‘Lonely Mothers Son’. And I’m sure that title should have an apostrophe in it, but I’m not sure where.
And the Straight to Hell soundtrack? It’s great. It’s mostly film music, of course: largely instrumentals. There are selections by Elvis Costello and Pray for Rain, as well as by The Pogues and Joe. Among the proper songs are one by Joe called ‘Evil Darling’, which is OK, and the original version of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace With God’, which The Pogues wrote during filming, apparently. Then there’s a version of ‘Danny Boy’, by the cast, led by Cait O’Riordan, and the album ends with ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’.
It’s hard to express how good that song is. From the opening guitar riff, through Shane’s crazed-gunman-death-worshipper lyrics, to the shouldn’t-work-but-does device of the verse and chorus being exactly the same tune, it struts into your ears and rips your head apart. In a good way. I’ve hardly had it off repeat on my MP3 player since I got it.
Go and buy it. Now.
Burning Silver Discs for Gold
In which I make a CD compilation, and blow whatever vestiges of my credibility remained
I’ve been a bit invisible on here for a while. First I had two weeks camping in France, during which (among much else) I managed to grow a beard (not that I was particularly trying to: it just kind of happened). In the first couple of weeks after getting back I spent much of my free time on preparing a CD for a special occasion.
The occasion was the golden wedding anniversary of my beloved’s parents. They had asked me to provide some music for after the dinner. The brief was to get the grandkids dancing. The theme we chose was to cover all the decades from 1956 to 2006.
Now, strange as it may seem, I’ve never actually made a compilation CD before, despite having had the technology to do so for several years. I was never really very big on making compilation tapes, either. So the first thing to do was to check that the technology worked.
Our CD writer hasn’t written under Windows since we got Dell to replace the whole drive when it broke down. It’s doubtless some kind of driver problem, but I haven’t bothered to try to fix it. I know what you’re thinking: CD writers are as cheap as potatoes these days; but never buy a new one when there’s a way to get the old one working, I say. The logical solution, then, was to use Linux, where the same drive does work; and which is my preferred working environment anyway.
I’m currently using the Kubuntu distribution, and as it is KDE based, the logical CD creation tool seems to be K3B. This is essentially a graphical front end to various command-line tools, which is a fine approach. Unfortunately the GUI is a bit clunky. Still, nothing I couldn’t live with (once I had dowloaded and installed the plugin that allows it to recognise MP3s, at least).
So the next thing was to consider how to get the tracks we wanted. We already had quite a lot, of course, but inevitably there were plenty that we wanted that we didn’t have. I briefly considered the iTunes Music Store, but rejected it because a) I was using Linux, so couldn’t use iTunes; b) my MP3 player is not an iPod, so it (ITMS) would have been little use to me after this project; and c) most importantly of all, I didn’t want to have to struggle with DRM(Digital Restrictions Management, thought they’d like you to believe it’s “Rights”.).
I already use eMusic, which is good for relatively recent, independent stuff, but is not really a source of classic tracks. I did get ‘Rock Around the Clock’ from there, though. As well as that, Frances bought a couple of new CDs: a Paul Simon collection and a disco compilation.
But for the rest, and for the maximum flexibility, there was only one solution: I would have to enter the murky grey-area waters of AllOfMP3.com.
If you haven’t come across this site, it’s based in Russia and a legal grey area. The people who run it claim to be following the copyright laws of Russia; and presumably that is true, because the site continues to operate. However, they are able to offer a vast collection of albums for mere pennies per track. And all in a selection of formats, and without DRM.
The grey area is that we may be breaking the law by using their services in other countries, such as the UK.
It’s still running, though, so let’s work on the assumption that it’s OK to use it.
I set up an AllOfMP3 account, and by a daft number of steps of indirection, got some money into it, and downloaded a few tracks.
It’s good stuff: they have a huge selection of tracks, and the prices are so cheap. I think it has something to teach iTunes and the other legal download sites: the less you charge (and the less encumbered the files) the more people will buy.
I don’t think there was a track, or at least an artist, that I couldn’t find on it.
Oh, OK, there were two, but they’re both a tad embarassing. We got a late request for the following tracks: ‘Summer Holiday’; ‘Y Viva España’; and ‘Remember You’re A Womble’.
Yes, I know. But since novelty hits (and songs from kids' TV shows) were by no means outwith the scope of the project (and since we aleady had both ‘Crazy Frog’ and the Bratz TV theme), I attempted to comply.
Which was harder than you might have expected. AllOfMP3 had the first, but the second was slightly harder. I did find it, though, squirreled away on somebody’s MP3 blog (which seems to mainly consist of tracks ripped from old tapes found in the Dalston branch of Oxfam: the ripper/blogger is practically a neighbour).
Those Wombles, though: they’re hard to find.
There is a strange class of sites out there that list the contents of albums, and appear to allow you to click through and buy the the tracks; but when you do, you get a screen saying, “That track is not available”, or “This album is not available”. Which makes me wonder why they bother to list it on their sites; or at least, why they list it with live links that make it look as if you can buy it.
Anyway, somewhere on the deeper, darker recesses of the net, on the very last page of sites that, as far as Google knew, contained the string, “remember you’re a Womble”, I found it. Or at least part of it: it ends very abruptly. But in the context of the compilation, that didn’t actually seem to matter too much.
The party was a great success. The music went down very well, with only one slight problem: we overran our time in the hotel’s function suite, and never got to play the second disk. Too much eating, not enough dancing, I suppose.
Still, now that I’ve done one, making other compilation CDs should be a doddle.
Oh, and the beard (I mentioned it earlier, you weren’t paying attention) came off before the party. The kids complained, but some things just have to go.
The track listing? Oh all right then:
The Rocky Pogue to Brixton
This was written before Christmas, and is only being posted now. Such is… something. My ability to get things done, probably.
The Brixton Academy oozes rock ‘n’ roll history from its very walls; and a lot of that history is — or closely mirrors — my own. I saw my first London gig there: The Ramones, in 1987 (and I saw them a few more times there, too, I can tell you). The Sugarcubes spent a bare hour on stage, and it was one of the best hours of live music I’ve ever seen. The Pixies took the place apart and restored my faith in rock ‘n’ roll when I didn’t even realise I was losing it. Stiff Little Fingers — who were the first band I ever saw live (Glasgow Apollo, 1980) — played a farewell gig there (OK, they later reformed, but lets not worry too much about that). At one James gig there, a moshpit full of lovemuppets collapsed on top of me.
But I’ve seen The Pogues there more often than anyone else.
And The Pogues, it seems, have reformed, and are touring. To Brixton, then, with swisstone. I saw them so many times in the eighties and early nineties that I probably wouldn’t have bothered this time. But back in the summer karmicnull gave me a CD by an American band called the Dropkick Murphys, which I love; and guess who was the support band?
The Murphys take US hardcore (in the punk sense) and Irish (and a touch of Scottish) music, and mash them together in the same way The Pogues first did with UK punk and Irish music two decades ago. Loud thrashing guitars meld with bagpipes and rebel lyrics. There are about six or seven of them, and they move around the Academy’s huge stage like it’s their playground.
That said, and though they rocked mightily, the cavernous space of the Academy did them no favours. They would, I think, be enjoyed best in a smaller venue. About a tenth of the size, say. I found it hard work to appreciate some of the songs I don’t know, so I suspect that if you don’t know their work at all, they would be very hard work indeed, live. Then there’s their version of ‘The Wild Rover’. Maybe Americans aren’t as used as we are to every dodgy folk band or drunken denizen of an Irish pub singing this one: but you’d think that when your forté is speeded up, punked up versions of Irish songs, you wouldn’t do a version of it that is, frankly, plodding.
No matter: I’ve now heard them do ‘Fields of Athenry’, live, and am happy.
As to The Pogues: what with one thing and another, I wasn’t totally sure what to expect, after all this time. But I shouldn’t have worried: it was like coming home: both for them and for me.
Let me say this, in no uncertain terms: I don’t think Shane is anywhere near as fucked up as we think he is. Yes, he’s done himself damage over the years, and I’ve seem him interviewed on TV and been embarassed and wished they had left him alone. But that night, although he moved with something of an Ozzy-Osbourne-esque shamble, he was totally switched on. He didn’t miss a single word, as far as I could tell, and the only mistake he made was that he messed up the first verse of the very last song, ‘Fiesta’; and that’s the kind of thing that any singer can do.
Physically, too, he was very together. During one song he kept playing with the mike stand, for example, and seemed to constantly be on the verge of knocking it over: but he always caught it. And at one point he balanced a glass of water on his head.
But what of the music? It was, of course, superb. I say “of course” because The Pogues consists of some of the most talented musicians in rock ‘n’ roll, and perhaps the English language’s greatest living poet.
One of their greatest abilities is to make London seem magical, mystic ghostly: songs like ‘Lullaby of London’ is a fine example of this. And ‘London You’re A Lady’ and ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’ are hymns to the city that are rooted in more mundane concerns; but they still evoke a lyrical beauty. In a way the effect is not unlike that of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802‘. Yes, I think Shane McGowan is as important a poet as Wordsworth, all right?
There was a spectre hanging over the show, though: it was nearly Christmas, and it was unthinkable that they wouldn’t do ‘Fairytale of New York’. But who would sing Kirsty McColl’s part? The song is inherently a duet; there is no way it could be done without two voices.
Tony told me he had heard that Cerys Matthews of Catatonia sang it at the Cardiff gig, but he didn’t think that she was touring with them.
So the end of the third encore and second hour drew close. “This is ‘Fairytale of New York’”, Shane growled, to cheers. Then one of the others introduced “Miss Ella Finer.” One of The Pogues is Jem Finer, as I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve read this far; so I suspected this was his daughter (and internet sources confirm this).
She wasn’t Kirsty, of course, but she did a fine job. Some of her vowels were on the plummy side (“Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our larst”, if you see what I mean): but you can’t hold that against her.
So as far as I’m concerned, The Pogues are back. Now, let’s just hope they write some new material and put a new album out.
Tears and Laugher in the Bookshop
I knew I would buy it, of course. I just didn’t necessarily know I would buy it today. But I popped into Waterstone’s at lunchtime, and had a look at Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel’s autobiography. It was posthumously completed by his wife, Sheila (once better known as “The Pig”, fact fans) and their (grown-up) kids.
Even reading the acknowledgements was curiously moving, listing as it did the likes of Billy Bragg, Andy Kershaw and Tom Robinson. So I read the introduction, which was written by the four kids. I found myself laughing and my eyes filling with tears just from those three or four pages. So obviously I had to buy it.
I’m now thoroughly looking forward to tomorrow’s Home Truths, which is a special edition featuring Sheila.
I also seem to have bought Singularity Sky, but I’ve been meaning to get that for ages.
Me Tired? Well Boo Hoo
Now, more than ever, I realise that we’ve lost one of the greats.
We all blogged Warren Zevon’s death, but now I want to write an appreciation of him. This may turn into a rant against death and the loss of the greats, but if so, so be it.
Seven o’clock, Eight o’clock, Nine o’clock, Ten
You wanna go home?
Why? Honey, when?
We may never get this chance again!
Let’s party for the rest of the night!
I got his last two albums a week or two back, and they haven’t been out of my personal CD player since. I’m listening to My Ride’s Here as I write this. At least as I start it. I’ll probably have alternated between it and The Wind a few times before I finish.
He died at the top of his game: the three albums that closed his career contain some of the best things he’s ever done: Life’ll Kill Ya, My Ride’s Here and The Wind. I don’t believe that there’s ever “a good day to die,” or even, really, that you can have a “good death”. 1
But that’s a thought for another day. The point here is that Warren died having completed his final album, said goodbye to his family, friends and fans, and even seen the latest James Bond film. If you’ve gotta go, it’s better than most of us can expect. Unlike Joe Strummer, for example, who died at the tail end of last year, and who was taken from us totally by surprise: he wasn’t sick, and no-one expected it; and he had no chance to finish things. Which is how most people die, of course.
Eleven o’clock, Twelve o’clock, One o’clock, Two
Me, tired? Well boo hoo!
I’m starting to fall in love with you
Let’s party for the rest of the night!
I like to think though, that, despite all that, Warren went raging against the dying of the light; and ‘The Rest Of The Night’, from his last album, is the perfect roar of defiance to hurl at the darkness. Yet at the same time it shows some of the resignation, or acceptance, we see on some of the other tracks, such as ‘Keep Me in Your Heart’. Many have described the latter track, which closes the album, as the most affecting song on it; and I can scarcely listen to it without a lump coming to my throat.
Yet ‘The Rest Of The Night’ is the song that, for me, captures the end-times nature of the album more than any other.
As a straightforward party anthem it’s right up there with Springsteen’s ‘Mary’s Place’, from last year’s The Rising. (The comparison is particularly apt, because Springsteen provides guitar and backing vocal’s on The Wind’s other rabble-rouser, ‘Disorder In The House’.) But it’s in the context of his impending death that ‘The Rest Of The Night’ really takes wing.
“We may never get this chance again” is the key line here. Of course, considered rationally, that is true of any of us, any time, about any experience; Zevon must have felt it very keenly, though, whether or not he was well enough to party.
Then the line, “I’m starting to fall in love with you” suggests that, even as “the old whore death” was hovering in the background of his life, Warren was still willing to take a chance on the great rollercoaster ride that makes life even more worthwhile.
The song has a similar effect on me to the film Dead Poets' Society, with its advice to “seize the day”: it makes me want to grab hold of life with both hands and hang on for the ride. Because we’re only on this Earth for a short time, we don’t get a second chance, and (I believe) there’s nothing afterwards. We may not have this chance again — whatever it is — so let’s throw ourselves into it now.
Three o’clock, Four o’clock, Five o’clock, Six
Let’s throw it all into the mix
And open up our bag of tricks,
And party for the rest of the night!
[All quotes are from Warren Zevon’s song, ‘The Rest Of The Night’, and are reproduced without permission, but with journalistic intent. Somehow, I don’t think he’d have minded.]{.small}