Mystery Music March which was in April and is now briefly in May

Thank You -- Dido

Finally then, as promised, Dido. I thought most of the criticism which greeted Dido's first album No Angel was a bit unwarranted. It wasn’t too far away from the jibes James Blunt received a few years later, but whereas in his case he deserved it (not least for spoiling the memory of watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk by borrowing the theme tune), Dido’s doubters seemed to simply dislike the woman because her music sudden popularity was surely going to herald the return of the light ballad, the soulful music for the soulless once epitomized by Sade and Beverley Craven. And so it was as Dido was followed by the Norah Joneses and Madeleine Peyrouxes to the supermarket shelves – a slightly bluesier sound clearly but still hitting the same aural comfort zone.

If Dido’s second album, Life For Rent descended into maudlin territory, to these ears, No Angel is a treat from top to bottom with Thank You the highlight. This isn’t challenging music, but it doesn’t want to be; it’s an attempt to capture honest feelings without anger, a musical Bridget Jones’ Diary without some American stealing the part played in my head whilst reading the book by Sally Philips. The singer describes a typically shitty day in Dido-land – having to go to work on a rainy day with a hangover, missing the bus, late for work but throughout she encounters her lover, in photographs and in person and to quote another lyricist it's all ok. In her subsequently much copied naturalistic singing voice she tells him or her that they’re the best thing about her day, no matter what’s happening.

Of course, never having been in a relationship, these are emotions I can’t really tap into, and so I’ll admit there’s a certain wish fulfillment involved in my attachment to the song. Blokes and other spouses should love this song though because it suggests that just by being there they can turn their girlfriends and partner’s life around. Lyrically it isn’t exactly economic, or as impressive as Regina Spector or Kate Nash, but it’s still a lucid daydream, the listener romantically projecting themselves inside. It’s clever too, somehow managing to use the word ‘imply’, something I’ve not heard in a song before or since. The production is deceptively simple – the bongo drums, echoing choral bits double banking some of the lyrics (shades of Nelly Furtado when she was good) and rather looser to these ears the first time it appeared in public with other Music From The Motion Picture Sliding Doors.

I can absolutely understand why some of you hate its breeziness, and I’ll never convince you. There are just some people who hate music which fails to challenge the ear, which is passable background fare sometimes, but emotionally useful otherwise. Predictably, I loved Dido as I love all this music, from Diana Krall through Natalie Imbruglia to Stacey Kent, drawing the line only at Katie Melua who at no point has or does sound authentic or as though she has much at all to do with the music. I bought The Closest Thing To Crazy the day it came out, and regretted it ever since, sounding as it does like a mechanized attempt at recreating Norah Jones in much the same way as Avril Lavigne stole Alanis’s thunder. Oh and Natasha Beddingfield, who is just scary. I suppose it takes a fan to see the difference between all of this stuff.

We know that only a fraction of the music that made the playlist of Michael Parkinson's Radio Two show was any good.

Mystery Music March in April

God Be With You Till We Meet Again – Ralph Vaughn Williams

At the Liverpool Blue Coat, the then all-boys, mostly a grammar school, officially a comprehensive school, that over seven years shaped some of who I am, assemblies were very important. Every morning the school would unite either in the main hall of the school chapel for the same routine – organ voluntary, reading, hymn, prayer and school messages – what club and society activities there would be that day and whether anyone in particular was doing something worthy of a telling off. Every Tuesday, a charity speaker would attend and tell us exactly why we should give our pennies to Amnesty International, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth or the PDSA. Randomly what can best be described as an evangelist would turn up and give us a sermon, which these days would be considered very curious indeed considering it wasn’t what modern jargon might be labeled a faith school.

Being a contrary person, even though I’d dabbled with Christianity in my first year but rejected it soon afterwards, I really appreciated these assemblies – the voluntaries were often spectacular, the collective experience of singing hymns and being able to hear the appalling notes drawing from nearby teachers and the readings, which through some bizarre twist of fate (and volunteering) I managed to give a hell of a lot of in the sixth form (once an exhibitionist etc). I even helped to pick the charity speakers as one of the class representatives who bothered to show up for the termly meeting to look through the box of leaflets which had been sent pleading for money. We’d always seem to end up choosing the same ones and often on the basis of who would be speaking. Friends of the Earth always did well because their visitor had a funny name.

At the end of each year there would be a final assembly at the close of the last day. The format was roughly the same as in the morning, but the aspects were rather more fixed – the same reading, the same voluntary (I think) and the same hymn, no 740 in Hymns Ancient and Modern, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. It was a school tradition which fled across the decades and happened each and every year. The words, by Jeremiah E. Rankin, cumulatively inspired one sentiment. Take care, and I’ll see you soon. Even though I was bullied horrendously for years at the place, habitually had a horrible time all told, and leaving the discussion of what I thought 'God' meant in this context, I often choked up during this part of the assembly because I was still intensely proud of the fact that I went to that school and that once you were a Blue Coat boy, you were always a Blue Coat boy.

Inevitably after seven years I was sitting in the final ever assembly in the school. I remember it oddly just being my year group and for some it being quite a chore (they wanted to get to the pub, which was predictably called the Coffee House). By then, girls had joined the school, there we no longer borders living there, and some of the other traditions had fallen away but we were still singing this hymn, and yes I did get as emotional as I’d hoped. This had been my final proper day at a school I’d worked so hard to get into at the beginning of my teens letting me loose towards the end. Just exams to go and then hopefully university. We were finally becoming adults (!) and there certainly would be people here we wouldn’t see again (until the invention of FriendsReunited and Facebook) and yet we still sang those lyrics – and loudly – it sounded like a soccer chant. But it still seemed right to say take care, one more time.

Food The case for Quorn. I'm still not convinced, partly because I love meat and also since it sounds exactly like the stuff Professor Jones and his colleagues at the Nut Hutch were growing in Doctor Who's The Green Death.

Web Friends Reunited redesigns. Now looks like every other boring website online. Owners ITV miss point (as usual) and now want to turn it into Facebook for oldies. At least it's free now. And easier to use. Hmm.

Books A cautionary tale for researchers and writers everywhere. What I don't understand is how the writer,Veronica Buckley, could have used a purposefully fictual work as a primary source without reading the back cover or introduction which presumably fess up to the intrigue. And even if they don't, what about the fact that the book is credited to an author rather than an editor (as a real diary which had been prepared for publication would).

Mystery Music March in April

The 'Internet'

In September 1995, BBC Music Magazine published this article which helpfully introduces the internet to a readership who may still be getting used to hearing their music on cd:

It’s the kind of writing which still needs to put the words like browser and phrases like World Wide Web into apostrophes and which spends a lot of time explaining what the Usenet is. This is pre-Google and the search engine of choice, Lycos didn’t even have its own domain name yet.

Over a decade later the various news groups are still there (rec.music.classical, rec.music.early, rec.music.makers.piano) and can be seen though Google Groups, but the WWW Vitual Library’s been lost and I’m pleased to see Lycos is still in the topic five web portals along with their doggy logo. Most impressively though, the Viola Jokes domain still works and takes you to a page which notes that the magazine made a typographical error in the URL before usefully pointing you in the right direction!

With the exception of this organ, I haven’t been in sight of a high street magazine about music in years. Most of anything I read about music is in the papers or online which probably explains why I still haven’t understood exactly how writing process works despite spending the best part of two months in the attempt. As a homage to John Warburton’s fantastic piece of journalism, here are the five music related ‘websites’ ‘online’ which I’m using right now. Don't expect any great revelations ...

No Rock And Roll Fun
I’m not subscribed to too many music-related gossip websites largely because Simon seems to read them all for me (and us). Covering everything from the business to what the tabloids are saying I might not always have a clue who he’s talking about but his posting rate is impressive and the writing between the links is often funny and acerbic.

Wired: Listening Post
As you’d expect this offers a slightly more corporate, technology orientated version of the above but with more a more proactive approach. More often than not, I’ll read a story here which isn’t picked up by the rest of the media until days later and with less detail.

Winamp
My music player of choice. Having tried iTunes and found it cloggy and slow on my dial-up connection, Winamp continues to be a lean, useful alternative. A recent overhaul added a little box which appears and tells you unobtrusively which track is just beginning, although I still can’t get the ID3 editor to work as well as before.

Soundamus
A tool which analyses your scrobbling habits through Last.fm and then sends news via an RSS feed of new releases by the artists whose music you’re listening too. It works too – Jewel’s new lillbitcountry album is released in June.

Wikipedia
Well, yes, clearly. Does anyone actually remember what the web was like before the Wikipedia came along and could tell you very quickly why Lou Reed recorded Metal Machine Music? Pointlessly criticised for the few minor errors which are corrected almost as quickly as they’re noticed it’s been the main source for many of these articles. If the coverage isn’t always as detailed as you like, at least you can go in yourself and make it as detailed as you like. Even if you’re wrong.

Obituary Bye Humph. I can't imagine how I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue will work without you. Oddly though, George Melly managed to write your obituary for The Guardian before he died himself, which shows forward planning.

Film Rather lovely if slightly tragic Vanity Fair article about Doris Day. I didn't know she'd married a wrongen: "In the course of their 17-year marriage, Melcher took over Day’s career completely. Long before prenuptial agreements became standard among Hollywood celebrities, the Melchers entered into something even rarer: a post-nuptial arrangement. Dated December 28, 1955, the document underscores that, after four and a half years, the Melcher union had become more professional than conjugal. In it, Day is referred to as “the Artist” and Melcher as “the Manager.” When Melcher died suddenly, in 1968, Day discovered that he and his business partner, Jerome Rosenthal, had lost or misappropriated all of her $23 million fortune. Terry Melcher (Marty had adopted Day’s son from her first marriage) would spend the next decade fighting a legal war with Rosenthal to get some of his mother’s money back."

Mystery Music March in April

By The Sea – Roosta

In the late 90s I worked as a roadie for rock band called Roosta. Well, I used to carry the drums in for my friend Chris who was in a band, but since the opening line sounds cooler, we’ll stick with that. I used to be a roadie for a rock band called Roosta. They were a four, sometimes five piece, who met at university. As well as Chris's drumming, Rick was the lead guitar, Tony on bass and Mark on guitar and vocal, with Eddie around to cover for Mark when his voice was having a few problems.

They played mostly pubs and bars, in Manchester and North Wales, the biggest gigs were at the famous Flying Picket when it was still on Hardman Street in Liverpool (in September 1999). They fooled around with mostly covers -- Oasis, The Stones, U2, The Kinks, Quo and Hendrix. Their signature Radiohead reworking became something of an in-joke as we shouted Creep throughout the gig until they finally relented with a sweary and lengthy rendition.

The best of their own material was By The Sea. On the version I have, recorded at the old Fold & Firkin on Wavertree Highstreet in 1997, the words are largely inaudible, drowned out slightly by the rebound of the drums and excellent guitar work, but the chorus is all too clear ‘By the sea […] Is were I wanna be […] Is were I wanna send me away…’ (with some lyrical duplication in there). I don’t know if it was their best performance of the song, but it was certainly tight, with Rick for once not going off into a ten minute guitar solo.

I know this because Chris recorded a few of these concerts and he passed on a bootleg. The whole set is on here, and between songs you can hear the chatter from pub visitors and even what sounds like the barmaid asking them to turn the amps down. Just as this song begins Mark says ‘This is one of ours…’ and someone from the crowd, our crowd mocks ‘Oh no!’ and boos which is just the kind of support a band needs when it’s starting out. But I remember that night more clearly than most simply because I think everyone turned out to hear them.

I like to believe that By The Sea was autobiographical, that Mark (assuming he wrote it) was lamenting some lost love, last seen on a beach. To these ears it’s as good, if not better than most of the cover versions they played, with great hooks and a complex counterpoint within the wall of sound. It follows some of the rules (ABA) throws out others (guitar solos after each chorus and not just before the bridge) and it improves with each listen. I’m bound to say this, but it’s a tragedy that they never managed to make it into a recording studio to lay down a definitive version, but as it stands this is good enough.

The Sontaran Stratagem.

TV Well, that about wraps it up for what the Wikipedia gamefully describes as the UNIT dating controversy (controversy?!? It's hardly the Kennedy assassination, which as we know was carried out by young Kiwi tabloid journalist James Stevens). If the Doctor says they happened "in the Seventies...or was it the Eighties?" that's good enough for me, because actually they did happen in the Seventies and the Eighties and so along with Sarah-Jane’s recently revealed date of birth, our lords Lance and Lars can quite happily publish another edition of Ahistory integrating that sticky special UNIT section into the main text. Pheeuw. Glad that’s sorted out, because really in relation to inflating the importance of the unimportant that’s the big one. Now if only someone would admit that C-19 is a code number for Torchwood, everything will be hunky-dory. Except that wouldn’t be so much a kiss to the past as a full on shag.

What a stonking episode! This was clearly Helen Raynor’s best ever script, perfectly paced, with all of the problems of Daleks Take, sorry In Manhattan cleared up. That episode didn’t gel because the audience were too far ahead of the Doctor – we already knew it was the Daleks and had an inclining about what they were up to and essentially watched the timelord spending forty-five minutes getting up to speed. This episode worked as a proper detective story, as the Doctor stumbled into the Sontaran’s ship refreshingly early which meant that the mystery rightly became what their stratagem was for him and us. And no visible goal posts.

If said stratagem wasn't entirely original – it’s another alien something pretending to be an ordinary something which has invaded the ordinary lives of the ordinary population – it did lead to a half decent if over extended cliffhanger which can’t be dealt with too quickly presumably. Unless the Doctor suddenly reveals that his lungs are bigger on the inside and he breaths in all the gas – or he turns the Tardis into a catalytic converter or something. It’s worth adding to the chorus of hackles which suggest granddad could be saved with a well aimed brick, but for that matter, was the lock on the car door deadlock sealed, or is it a dodgy Watchdog-bating make of car which can’t be opened using sonic devices?

There aren’t many other series that would run the alien invasion, evil twin and boy genius stories together in the same episode and unlike, say New Earth, which also attempted a similar conflation of ideas (evil medicine, mind swap) it actually worked because none of them seemed randomly placed and all were logically connected. Into the mix there’s the companion’s return home, the revisit of a recent in the memory companion (which is something the television series has never done) and the already mentioned venerable organisation. All in forty-four minutes. With this much creativity, it's almost as though someone's been snorting the Ritalin, Elizabeth Wurtzel-style. I’m surprised there weren’t clowns as well.

Instead we had the Sontarans back and probably the best they’ve ever been. It’s an interesting new strategy, reinventing one of the ‘classic’ alien races by doing nothing to them other than designing and producing some decent prosthetics so that the person behind the mask has more than his lips and voice to act with (Christopher Ryan stonking and stomping performance was perhaps the best we’ve seen from a long line of men to assume the potato head) and giving them some decent characterisation. The key, as writer Raynor says in her commentary, was to acknowledge they had ‘small man syndrome’ and run with it. So we’re making fun of them rather a lot, but also introducing some pathos in that they’re built for war but weren’t actually ‘allowed’ the participate in the big one.

Raynor wasn’t afraid to mess about with some of the tropes of the new series, particularly in relation to the Doctor. That scene in which he got the wrong end of a very big stick about Donna’s trip home was a perfect antidote to similar slightly forced scenes and the expectation of a massive explosion from a jeep with the accompanied by the launch at the floor followed by a pfft from the sat-nav may well have been one of the funniest moment this series. You could argue that the timelord’s visit to Rattigan saw Tennant channeling the favourite Baker, but the character is at his best when we can see that he’s the sum of his parts and would the Fourth Doctor have been so bold as to take down a Sontaran using a shuttlecock?

Catherine continues to provide a multi-dimensional performance. By now, all of the apparent baggage has melted away and I actually think she’s giving the best filmed performance we’ve ever seen from her (I hear she’s always been scorching on stage). She was about the best thing about Planet of the Ood and it’s a testament to what she’s doing that the trip home feels so fresh even though it’s a scene we’ve seen at least twice since the show returned from its multi-medium sabbatical. The chemistry with Bernard Cribbins is divine and you can believe that they’re relatives enjoying their giddy secret about who the Doctor is and were she’s been.

Whilst we're here, might as well note that Donna was as the epicentre of the arc-clue additions. The Doctor mentioned the Medusa cascade during his thank you speech, but also more curiously registered an interesting kind of surprise as Donna piloted the Tardis. It wasn’t so much what he said, that he couldn’t believe she was working the controls, as to how he said it, as though she, in truth, shouldn’t have that kind of knowledge. Connected with whatever’s supposed to be on her back, perhaps? I really hope that it’s not revealed that she’s under some kind of alien influence or been lying all of this time about who she actually is, Turlough with a double X chromosome, a tool of The Trickster or whatever.

Martha’s back too of course, her eyes still sparking. Freema’s received some rather mean spirited notices for this episode, but I really can’t see what the problem is. She’s as good as she’s ever been, it’s just the character thats changed. Like Sarah-Jane, we’re watching an ex-companion dealing with the after-Tardis-life and this is a perfectly logical extension – she’s become a scientific adviser, a professional albeit with less authority than the Doctor. The potential misstep of having the character tied down and being experimented on again was nicely twinkled with the introduction of evil Martha, a figure who offers some of us the perfect opportunity to nip over to the dark side (or the bathroom). Again. And again.

We’ll hopefully see more of UNIT in action next week, five rounds rapid and all that. It was very strange not to see The Brigadier in there somewhere, but it’s clearly a case of trying to strike a balance between the old and new elements and with everything else going on, to have yet another returning character would have been messy – and it wouldn’t have been fair to bring back such an icon simply for a cameo. In any case, according to the good book, he's still retired in 2009 when this episode is set. It is a shame that Bessie couldn’t have been dragged in from whichever Doctor Who exhibition she's currently parked in, with a nice ‘WHO 10’ already attached to the front. But for story reasons, the Doctor had to be stuck in a jeep with a satnav so it kind of makes sense, and the interplay with young Ross Jenkins just about recalled similar scenes between the Third and Alistair.

My first episode reviews always turn into a few random thoughts and that’s largely because they're essentially giving half an opinion. The first three episode of The Twin Dilemma are just rubbish, but the final part has that powerful scene between Colin and his mentor which dwarfs his entire era in terms of its emotional reality (honestly). Which goes to show you never can what will come next. On this occasion, I’m very optimistic that The Poison Sky will be as good as this. The Sontaran Stratagem I mean. Not The Twin Dilemma. I'd hate to think Luke's got a sibling. He was about the only real disappointment, a mirror universe edition of Wesley Crusher selling his own people out to the Whoniverse's own Klingons, Ryan Sampson’s sometimes pleasingly arch portrayal undermined by a slightly wayward accent. Exactly why is he supposed to be American though? Are we suddenly trying to offer payback for the well-worn Hollywood villainy shorthand?

Next week: I go blind and Terrance Dicks receives a royalty cheque as we’re given a status report on the Sontaran’s battle with the Rutans.

Mystery Music March in April

Answer Machine Message (Baby Call Me Back) -- Britney Spears

Despite every attempt to contrary I seem to know an awful lot about Britney Spears, largely because whenever anything happens to the sometime Disney Club singer (see what I mean) it’s splattered all over the rolling news, sometimes to the embarrassment even of our British presenters. Last month footage of the singer’s emergence from hospital was greeted by a warning from BBC News presenter Simon McCoy who suggested that if we really didn’t care we should "look away now" (then).

It's good to see that lately she's slowly begun to get her life sorted out if only so that her every move isn't turned into breaking news and we have to endure it. How interesting that it seems to be happening now that the cameras and everyone else are generally pointing in a different direction (unless you Heat readers know differently), largely blocked by a beehive hairstyle.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the cause of Spears’s problems, ill informed pet theories which don’t really match reality. So here’s mine. I’ve absolutely no idea how I came by this but listening on random one night Baby Call Me Back passed through my ears and although it’s clearly not the actual reason for Britney’s troubles it’s exactly the kind of thing that could at least have contributed. It begins which the familiar piano bass from Baby One More Time and then ‘Oh baby, baby’ and then the creepiness begins as the singer talks directly to us …

“Hi, this is Britney Spears and sometimes my friend can’t come to the phone and this is one of those times so leave a message after the beep and baby they’ll call you back one more time and thanks for calling!”

… or in fact the person who’s calling you up assuming you’re the kind of person who’d want this instead of your own regional tones on your answering machine service.

I’ve only ever heard the pop songtress (description © Smash Hits some time in the last century) actually speak three times before. The first was during an infamous interview in the final week of The Big Breakfast in which the infamous presenter Richard Bacon proposed to her and during this video outtake from her reality television programme being commented on here (was she saying Spawn, Spun or spam?). On each occasion her voice has been completely different and this soliloquy is no exception, young sounding and professional and actually like the opening introduction to Lucky (which would be the third).

It’s not a bad idea I suppose and certainly preferable to the soundalikes which litter this ‘market’, trainee John Culshaws giving us their Simon Callow (‘My God, you’re rubbish, you’re the worst singer I ever heard, leave a message…’) In another universe, this twenty-two seconds could be seen as a blueprint for saving the pop industry. Whoever mixed it, has somehow managed to include both of the major hooks from the song and in the middle what might as well be an advert for the singer’s personality. Throw in the chorus and it’s a quick hit of pop whose only negative point is that its too short to get to the dancefloor.

It’s also the kind of thing a singer might only do early in their career when she’s drumming up support for their first single (is it worth citing here the video for Billie Piper’s single Because I Want To With which features an alien invasion? Thought not.) Do these artistes later on, when they discover that their new album is already half price at Woolworths, long for those days when everything was fresh and new and their career was ahead of them and they were being called upon to record proxy answer machine messages? Is that what led to Britney’s more recent troubles, the remembrances of these times past?

Yes, ok. I know. Three days to go...

Mystery Music March in April

Having spent the best part of a month mostly talking about music I genuinely do like, it seems only fair to inflict some utter rubbish on myself and write about that too. Taking a glance at my mp3 player, I now have enough music on here that it would take over fifty days listening non-stop to get through it all, my entire cd collection. Logically I really should delete the music I don’t like; I've certainly ferreted and filleted already with everything from Simply Red to the Traci Lords album (don’t ask) heading towards the recycling bin.

But there are some tracks which, despite making me scream I just can’t part with. Sometimes they're the early work by artists who turned a corner or rubbish versions of favourite songs or in one case below my own petty annoyance with a single aspect. So even though I can almost hear them festering on there, as though the binary ones and zeros within them might have the ability to melt my hard drive like acid, I'm risking disaster through retention.



We Built This Starbucks On Heart and Soul – Jefferson Starbucks

The original Starship version was my favourite song ever when I was eight years old, just as every song was my favourite song ever if it was getting enough airplay on the local radio station. Now, I’m really not so sure, but it's certainly superior to this corporate reworking created for what they called a ‘leadership conference’ and leaked onto the internet. It’s the kind of work which has the power to make you like your favourite coffee chain just a little bit less each time you hear it.

Two weedy vocalists over a disappointing backing track pass the ethos of the company on to its employees without irony and with horrid, demoralising lyrics such as ‘So many partners / working late at night / living the ways of being / in the green apron look’, a totalitarian message, that knocks on for five whole minutes and blows the impression Starbucks wants us to have of their shops being a comfortable regular third place to be with staff that are our friends.

Reason for keeping: It’s horrendous but hilarious. I’ve started going to Costa Coffee. That fantastic image was borrowed from here.



Big Yellow Taxi (Traffic Jam Mix) – Joni Mitchell

In case you can’t see me right now, I’m putting up my hands in the universal sign of ‘Hold on a minute let me explain’. This isn’t the version you know, from her album Ladies of the Canyon. That’s gorgeous, a beautiful depiction of the destruction city developers continue to wrought on nature. It’s also, you’ll notice, not the cover version by Counting Crows featuring Vanessa Carlton’s ‘um-bap-bap-baps’ which though corporate still has just enough soul to commemorate the original. No, my approbation is reserved for the anodyne, put the vocals and a bunch of clichéd samples into a computer and press a button remix version that appears on the first soundtrack to the sitcom Friends.

I loved Friends and I largely quite liked this album which also features such luminaries as KD Lang, Lou Reed, The Pretenders and Toad The West Sprocket in all their unmessedaboutwith glory. Yet, the producers also include this indigestible slab of chopped liver, Joni’s vocal being chased around a parking lot by the kind of backing track which sounds as though it was made up from the demo version of the old eJay software. How ironic that this song about the ruination of beauty should be subject to this kind of cultural vandalism and appear on an album dedicated to songs about six people living in a big city.

Reason for keeping: Fades out into the moment in Friends when Phoebe sings ‘I made a man with eyes of coal / and a smile so bewitching / how was I supposed to know / my mom was dead in the kitchen’. The soundtrack everyone really wanted was ‘Phoebe sings…’ I think.



Goldberg Variations – Glenn Gould

Bit of a difficult choice because one of my access points to classical music was François Girard’s film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, a biography of the pianist which thematic took ideas from this his most famous recording. It’s undoubtedly a work of genius, both in composer and performer, the two married perfectly and particularly brilliant in the opening aria so beloved of European filmmakers and Woody Allen. Here’s the problem: what critics tactfully call his ‘singing’.

Gould wasn’t a quiet pianist and on this recording of Bach's masterwork, he grunts, breaths, sighs and indeed hums his way through the tunes, the microphone close by picking up his humanity as well as the sound of the piano, essentially everything that would be inaudible in a concert hall. Since Gould gave up playing live, eventually the only way to enjoy his virtuosity was on tape and vinyl, audio interference included, and it’s a distraction that’s sometimes hard to take. A company recently released a computer generated recording which mimicked Gould’s finger work but filtered out his other performing. Critics welcomed it with open arms. There’s a lesson there.

Reason for keeping: It is still Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. It just depends how tolerant I’m feeling on that day.



Real World – Alanis Morissette

I’ve written endlessly about Alanis in the past, eagerly awaiting each new album, even though in my heart of hearts I could be paraphrasing Sickboy from Trainspotting – ‘Jagged Little Pill was a mere peak in an otherwise downward spiral’. Nothing’s been quite as indispensable as that opening salvo and yet mostly loveable and I’m still desperate to hear what her next album Flavors of Entanglement (despite the title), especially after the My Humps cover. Except. Pill was not her first record, no matter how many Best New Artist awards she might have been nominated for and won. Her first two records, released in the very early nineties were Canada only releases and clearly influenced by the likes of Tiffany and particularly Debbie Gibson, only, um, not as good. They might sold reasonably well, giving Morissette the impetuous to move to LA and try again, but they’re nearly impossible to listen to.

The second platinum selling album, Now Is The Time, is doubly dispiriting because she was a co-writer but there’s not a single real emotion throughout. This opening track, an Electric Youth knock-off, begins with a chant ‘We play the game with determination / We don't give a dam 'bout our reputation baby / It's not a game, it's a revelation / Step inside the real world / The real world...yeah yeah yeah... The real world...yeah...” which is about as lyrically complex as it gets. The rest sounds like a London Boy’s seminal Requiem rendered by a Pat Benitar impersonator, with Alanis’s vocal betraying an overbearing producer’s interference. She told Rolling Stone in 1995 that wasn’t “scared (that) people might hear these records. I never did Playboy centerfolds. There's nothing I regret. Maybe people will just understand my lyrics a little more if they hear those records.” Indeed.

Reason for keeping: It’s always good to be reminded of where your favourite musicians came from because it makes their later work seem even better (see also Shelby Lynne before I Am Shelby Lynne) and it cost me fifteen pounds on ebay. A decade later Alanis considered including a couple of her Canadians on her greatest hits compilation but decided against it on the grounds that she only really became an artist when she met Glen Ballard, the Pill producer. To be honest anything here would have been better than the clichéd cover version of Seal’s Crazy which did appear on The Collection. Recorded for a Gap commercial and considered acceptable enough to be released as a single, the video for this opus which actually ‘borrowed’ the twist ending from the promo of Smack My Bitch Up. Great. Perhaps I should have included that instead.



Always Look On The Bright Side of Life (radio edit) – Eric Idle

Because a single word makes all the difference. When Liverpool Football Club last won some European tournament, the city centre filled with people, live footage of the area around St. George’s Hall featuring shoulder-to-shoulder supporters awaiting the arrival of the bus, cup and players. In one voice they sang not only You’ll Never Walk Alone but also in a surreal twist Always Look On The Bright Side of Life which, I think, has become the theme song of the football fan, warming the cockles as each potential defeat beckons. As that lyric loomed I was on the edge of my seat, thousands of people shouting the s-word in one voice. And sure enough, there it was, in all its broadcast glory, with no Ofcom apology forthcoming.

Except they were clearly singing along to this radio edit, blasting out from loudspeakers, rerecorded by Idle on the back of its airplay on Simon Mayo’s Radio One Show in ’91 and totally ignoring the replacement of ‘shit’ for ‘spit’ in the line ‘Life’s a piece of ****, when you look at it’. Radio Edits are entirely understandable – we still live in a world were swearing isn’t acceptable in the afternoons and if that means that the vocal silences in some R&B sonically cripples them, so be it. Except in this case, it sounds like a censor too far. Spoils the record. Even in the early nineties, and entirely pointless on the single release which these days would have welcomed a ‘Parental Advisor’ label and especially since, he inconsistently says ‘bugger’ at the beginning of the fade out. The song is the theme song for a satire about organised religion after all.

Reason for keeping: In this rerecord, Idle slots in some solid new Python material during that fade out ‘It’s nearly the end of the record. You’ll be announcing another tune in a minute. Alright so your wife’s just run off with an Argentinean polo player. OK, so your husband just decamped with a baby sitter – and he’s from Norway. Alright so your team’s lost 15-0 to Barnett. It’s not the end of the world is it?’

Politics I've been reading the Daily Kos which should strike some of my readers (all one hundred and twenty odd of you via feedburner alone apparently) as a bit odd since (a) I'm British and (b) I don't pay much attention to uk politics at the best of times. But I'm clearly a Democrat, the outcome of the US election effects the whole world and it's a good way to see some of the detail which gets frowned out as our media attempts to interpret the position as it stands in the race to the big house. Much of the time though, admittedly I have no idea what they're walking about.

This post has caught my eye though. The content is fairly self explanatory and if nothing else the word 'suckitude' is being downloaded into my long term memory right now. The point made is very good and slightly disappointing -- that bloggers are still being seen as a 'group' with an 'attitude' rather than just as the public using a particular piece of software to get their ideas/life/news across -- just a (not even a) new way of disseminating information to a wide group without the need to for anything more than a computer and a web connection.

Mystery Music March in April

What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong

Working towards writing this piece, I was horrified to discover that Clear Channel, the corporation that owns a large percentage of the commercial radio stations in America added Wonderful World to the ‘inappropriate’ list of songs that should not be played in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As well as completely misunderstanding the meaning of the song, surely exactly the thing you need in times like those is something which reminds you that actually this world is a wonderful place to live even if there’s minority of people existing on it who have a habit of doing some very, very evil things.

I’ve no compunction about saying that this is one of my favourite songs. Top ten, any list, John Lennon’s a hack for appropriating the sentiment. From hearing it over the closing titles of the non-rubbish radio and tv versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to the closing titles of the film Twelve Monkeys, I can’t think many songs infused with such hope and beauty that were also originally sung by someone who sounds as though they’ve been swallowing gravel at every meal time for their entire life. The simple accompaniment on that version, a small orchestra emphasising that voice is perfect and it’s absolutely right it should have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

It’s been covered often but rarely well. The Joey Ramone is a gold standard because it’s different enough from the original to stand alone. All too often though, balladeers, female usually, overdo that sentiment to the point of rancidity, emphasising the chorus to the point of absurdity and, well, making it sound like every other ballad they’ve ever sung. Orchestral versions fare better, The Pavão Quartet inevitably hitting just about the right tone, even if, by the mid-section you could imagine it being used on a daytime charity commercial with a Paul McGann voiceover.

The problem is, in the midst of all that, I can’t really talk. In November 2006, at a quarter to midnight according to the file’s date stamp, I recorded my own version. I don’t remember now exactly why it happened, and why I thought it would be a good idea, especially since I can’t really sing. At all (despite what I said yesterday about Zadok) . Listening back to it now, I can detect a certain amount of affection, a misguided attempting at professionalism which just sounds a bit wrong. But it is what it is even if it just sits there.

I remember dropping it onto a mix cd for someone (hello Kat) and them saying something nice. There it sits on my hard disk – and now on this blog, because it does appear to sum up what the song means to me and even if it isn’t perfect, and includes a couple of moments when I start thinking I'm Louis, it seems only fair that after criticising other people’s voices and music I should offer some of my own.

What A Wonderful World. Acapella (sorry). (2.3 mb .mp3 download)

Mystery Music March in April

Zadok The Priest -- George Frideric Handel

Only the best classical pieces can drag themselves unscathed from being eviscerated and used in a hundred finance commercials and being selected as one of Tara Palmer Tompkinson’s top five classical pieces but Zadok has that ability. Composed in 1727 for the coronation of George II of Great Britain its been a repeat fixture in every subsequent ceremony including the one attended by our current monarch. As with a certain percentage of choral music, it’s not lyrically complex, with Handel paraphrasing 1 Kings 1:38–40, no doubt because it includes a line which could be belt out to venerate the new king:

“Zadok, the Priest and Nathan, the Prophet anointed Solomon King.
And all the people rejoic'd, and said:
'God save The King, long live The King, may The King live for ever!
Amen Hallelujah!"

I know what that sounds like because I’ve actually sang it for the Queen on the occasion of her fortieth year as monarch It was my next to final year of secondary school and someone decided it would be good idea to fill the Anglican Cathedral with school kids and have them sing Handel very loudly, whilst oddly other kids offered a martial arts demonstration. We practiced solidly for two weeks, frequently after school and on the day the big church looked a treat, and even though we had all rehearsed separately, the collective sound was suitably epic. Even the anti-royalists amongst us were excited about meeting her majesty. But she was clearly having a very busy day and didn’t have time to stop and listen, passing by on her way to the altar.

It is a great piece to sing. As well as the slightly bonkers out of context second line ‘Nathan, the Prophet anointed Solomon King’ (which makes him sound like a sidekick) it's replete with lengthy vowel sounds and even for us basses a chance to project, not simply provide background for the vocal stylings of the sopranos. Co-incidentally, the best recording I have is from ten years later when a special Prom was held at Buckingham Palace in which the crowd cheer with the onset of the opening few bars played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Sir Andrew Davis), the vocals provided by the BBC Symphony Chorus. My memory of our attempt is faulty but my fantasy is that despite our schoolchild voices it was good as this and greeted by the same sea of applause at the conclusion.

The Many Hands.

Books The best scene in the film version of The Addams Family is the surprise revelation that Thing, hitherto trapped in a box during the television series for reasons of practicality has found a job working at Federal Express, and we see him sprinting along spider-like, parcel in tow. This, along with the titular disembodied appendage from The Hand of Fear seem to be the image that Dale Smith is attempting to conjure for his antagonists in The Many Hands.

It’s potent and creepy enough to keep your interest on its own, but the book is also a clever experiment in atmosphere and a surprisingly ripping read.

It’s Edinburgh in 1759, and minutes after beginning a tour of the castle the Doctor and Martha find themselves hurtling through the city streets after a runaway stagecoach for reasons which only become apparent as the novel winds on. The dead are walking, aided by something from the Loch. After about ninety pages the pace slows and we drift into Hinchliffian gothic horror territory, as we’re assaulted by a range of gruesome body horrors, the origin, given that this is a Doctor Who story should be obvious but are nonetheless surprising in their form. If all of that sounds irritatingly vague it’s because this is the kind of book which works best the little you know about it. The blurb on the back cover might even give away too much.

What I can say is that Smith (who already has two Doctor Who novels and a few short stories under his belt) writes with a buoyant but meticulous style, the streets of this eighteenth century city convincingly portrayed and someone who knows Edinburgh quite well will be pleased with the geographical accuracy, a surprising bonus in these kinds of tales. There’s never a sense that the writer’s imagination is thinking itself around a television budget taking advantage of the location -- in places you can smell the squalor, the hopelessness of people trying to make ends meet and the primitive lifestyle of a population still on the edge of industrialisation.

Smith has clearly done his research but at no point does the narrative seem bogged down by detail; the writer remembers that his story is first and foremost a romp with thriller overtones, with description on a need to know basis, particularly when Martha’s fumbling about in the darkness. But the real joy is the ending, which again without spoiling things seems to be going in one direction, a well oiled over-familiar deus-ex-machina which has been seen in at least two other novels, before heading off in a totally different direction. Clever kids should giggle at the audacity. I know I did.

Smith keeps his main cast to a bare minimum. The Doctor spends much of the story gaining the confidence of a Captain McAllister, a Lethbridge-Stewart gone dark who eventually comes good. Martha falls in with The Munros, the Steptoe and Son of anatomical research whose experiments may be the cause of much of the bother. None of the three are complex souls but they’re far from one-dimensional and you’re certainly able to care for their fate. It’s often the case in Doctor Who novels that characters really lack for an actor to breath life into the dialogue but that’s certainly not the case here.

Pleasingly too, the author doesn’t make the mistake of trying to tell parts of the story from the Doctor’s point of view – even in his latest huggable incarnation he’s best left mysterious in his actions and so we largely meet him and his ‘wand’ through McAllister or Martha’s eyes. There are plenty of the big speeches and grand gestures that Tennant loves getting his vocal chords wrapped around, and since this is Scotland in his own accent (which might prove confusing should he record the audiobook version).

Smith captures Martha perfectly too, Freema’s portrayal springing from the page, her tenacity reminding you how, even though Donna’s brought a different chemistry to the TARDIS, that it’s a shame we’re not experiencing another full season of adventures with the student doctor as the plus one. But if this is to be one of the last of the printed adventures for this crew during the third season for now, it’s an excellent send off.

Doctor Who: The Many Hands by Dale Smith
ISBN: 978-1846074226
RRP: £6.99
Released: 10th April 2008

Music Alanis Morissette has a new album coming along in June. Flavors of Entanglement. Musically it sounds a touch confusing:

"Morissette has noted an expansion of her musical sound on Flavors of Entanglement, and that there are "more technological aspects to it on a sonic level" than previously. She said that because of her love for dancing, the album incorporates beats and loops that enable one to, in her words, "dance your face off". She has described the album as "a combination of everything" in which she has a musical interest, including hip hop beats and organic instruments. Morissette has referred to the album as "techno-sounding but organic" and said, "I like fusion." According to Billboard magazine, the album "balances world- and folk-influenced tracks against the experimental pop leanings of producer Guy Sigsworth."

As always, I'll reserve judgement although Sigsworth's had an interesting track record. Was in Frou-Frou with Imogen Heap, has previously produced Seal, Bomb The Base, Adamski, Bjork, the cool Hinda Hicks tracks on the GMT soundtrack (which is a favourite even if the film's not very good), Talvin Singh, Madonna (What It Feels Like For a Girl), Sugababes (then hasn't everyone?), Bebel Gilberto and Mutya Buena (the sappy R&B track Wonderful. Oh dear.)

Journalism Is it just me, or does this Iranian news website have a conceptual design similarity to the recently redesigned BBC News website?





Or is it just that news websites tend to look pretty much the same anyway?

Mystery Music March in April

Video Killed The Radio Star – Buggles

The thesis of Trevor Horn’s song (from the album The Age of Plastic) is that radio stars have become irrelevant in the world of video. With the growth of file sharing and youtube that message should be intensified but actually radio would appear to be as relevant today as ever, especially since the advent of podcasts. I recently attended a focus group for the local radio station and the opinions were a reminder that more than ever people want their lives lived to a background of music and chatter and that they hardly ever want to stop to watch that same song with pictures. Trevor Horn is wrong. There, I’ve said it.

In fact it’s very rare now for a song to become a hit on the back of a video alone – the promo’s become part of a general marketing campaign which can include talent show appearances, magazine and newspaper interviews, live appearances on radio and television, paparazzi baiting and radio air-play. And the DJ’s still king. On the asteroid I’m presently living on unfettered by popular music in which I’ve not heard of half the people in the Gallup Top 40 (or whatever it’s called these days) let alone listened to any of it, but even I’ve heard of Chris Moyles not that I could actually tell you about any of the songs he’s playing. Except Leona Lewis, because there was something about her on the news.

My suspicion is that the other reason that video hasn’t killed the radio star is because of the quality of recent work. Flicking through the freeview channels at umpteen time of the evening and stopping on The Hits, I’m yet to be impressed by what I see. Presumably because production costs have sky-rocketed, pop promos just seem so dull and samey, featuring large men shouting at each other in night clubs, women writhing up against each other in libraries or both being attacked by a giant CGI effect. If Beavis and Butthead were still around they’d have nothing to talk about. Except perhaps for the boobies. H-huh-huh. H-huh-huh.

Before you interrupt, I know I’m wrong and there is some very interesting work being done in pop videos, but since none of it is connected with music these kinds of channel generally show, we’re stuck with what looks like an inherent lack of innovation. The last really exciting video I saw was for Snow Patrol, the one with the POV from a car bonnet rushing through the streets of Paris, and that’s only because they’d appropriated the second half of Claude Lelouch’s short film C'était un rendez-vous (and makes better sense in its original form). The Culture Show recently featured an interview with Garth Jennings, the man who ruined the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and he seemed to be doing some interesting things with giant prop legs and Supergrass but really I miss the days when you could turn on the television and be sure to find Peter Gabriel turning into plasticsene or Madonna doing naughty things to Jesus.

But the song is about more than that. Horn was apparently inspired by a JG Ballard short story, The Sound-Sheep in which a deaf boy searched the world for stray music and stumbled upon a outcast opera singer hiding in a sewer. It’s about how new generations hardly ever appreciate the technology of the past, unable to comprehend that at one point, radio was the primary source of entertainment. Which is why, despite the record being available on cd and download, my only copy of Video Killed The Radiostar is a crackly but still playable original vinyl pressing. I know those clicks so well that a clean digital copy would just sound weird.

Mystery Music March in April

Plays The Music of Oasis – The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

I bloody love The Puppini Sisters. And The Pavão Quartet. Frankly I love genre busting cover versions and the groups who sing or play them and could have filled every day of this month (or so) spanning musical 'celebration' with examples. It’s the change in idiom, the ramming of one set of musical intentions into another and witnessing the fallout. This threesome and foursome do exactly that, turning Blondie’s Heart of Glass into a 40s wartime dance number or making Singin' in the Rain sound like a swinging Mozart string quartet.

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays The Music of Oasis is the apogee of this decent into madness, a full orchestra trying to get its thematic rocks around rock music and only partially succeeding, but glorious in the attempt. It’s certain that when Noel and Liam recorded the opening guitar riff on Roll With It that the last thing they expected was that it would be at some point rendered by the string section of the RPO or that their mid-song wall of sound could inspire a dramatic saxophone solo which in the end has nothing to do with the work its trying to mimic.

Orchestral covers are nothing new of course. I’ve a cassette somewhere of Rock Legends, a chivalric knight on the cover hiding disappointing versions of You Can Call Me Al, Bat Out Of Hell and The Final Countdown. But what makes Plays The Music of Oasis so special is the obvious commitment of the players, finally allowed to lay to rest the demons of the past and youth which would have been misspent had their parents not pushed them into joining the school orchestra – or as the sleep notes explains:

‘Now the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra may prefer a dress code that’s closer to a penguin colony than the streets of Manchester, but beneath those starched shirts and evening gowns lie primeval passions shaken, but not always stirred, by their customary classical repertoire.’

Who writes this stuff? Oh Christopher Valentine, London 1997.

It’s not entirely successful or as brave as it could have been. On some tracks, including Rock n Roll Superstar and Wonderwall, electric and acoustic guitars herald the start of the song which seems like a failure of imagination. But that’s more than made up for by the orchestration on She’s Electric which sounds like it was inspired by Pentangle and The Monkees and has a rather wonderful Vivaldi-esque solo in the middle as surprising and unexpected as the jazz mess during Less Than Jake's cover of I Think I Love You (which turned up on the soundtrack to the film Scream 2).

You do wonder who all this is aimed at. Listening to Radio 3, I get the impression that a large percentage of classical music fans are anti-rock, judging by the hate mail they receive whenever they experiment and slot in even the most acoustic of tracks to fill the gap before the news on the hour, so they’re hardly going to pick this up. Oasis fans might give it a look, particularly if they’re completists, but would probably be wholly dissatisfied by the lack of their idol’s vocals, substituted in places by a French Horn (which does sound surprisingly Mancunian). The target audience then are those of us attracted by unusual juxtapositions and think that Shakermaker pretending to be a John Barry theme is a very good thing indeed.