CROWDED HOUSE – GRAVITY STAIRS

Not content with sounding a bit like The Beatles, the cover of the new Crowded House album, Gravity Stairs, looks a bit like the cover of Revolver and, what’s more, it opens with a bit of studio weirdness, a bit like ‘Taxman’, before settling down into familiar Crowded House territory that is sustained throughout the entire record; a change, then, from many of the tracks on the last two CH albums that sounded to me as if Neil Finn was groping around looking for something beyond the perfect pop style he’d perfected for the group he’s led since 1986. I’m glad he’s back where he belongs and looking forward to seeing him and the latest edition of CH in Brighton next month, a review of which will appear on Just Backdated in due course.

In the meantime, we have Gravity Stairs, recorded by Finn with long serving bass player Nick Seymour, also responsible for graphics, ergo the Revolver look, Finn’s sons Liam, on guitar and vocals, and Elroy, on drums, along with Mitchell Froom, producer of four CH albums, who now plays keyboards with the group. Tim Finn, Neil’s brother, adds occasional backing vocals, and the blend of the brother’s voices here and there is probably responsible for the new record sounding as pleasing to these ears as 2007’s Time On Earth, the last CH album I really liked, and that bit more enjoyable than the two that followed it, Intriguer (2010) and Dreamers Are Waiting (2021).

Crowded House still sound a bit like The Beatles, which is no bad thing of course. This stems not just from the vocal harmonies which can, at times, appear inspired by the second side of Abbey Road, but how Nick Seymour’s lyrical bass lines underpin many of the songs on Gravity Stairs in ways that echo Paul McCartney’s sense of melodicism and occasional flights of unexpected fancy. The overall emphasis on song writing is a CH trait that goes back to their first hit ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, still their best known-song, which may or may not be infuriating for Neil Finn.

After the studio trickery, the new record opens with ‘Magic Piano’, a wistful song brimming with optimism, its inscrutable lyrics giving the album its title and setting the scene for songs that for the most part seem to float on the breeze, tranquil, unhurried, considered, this latest alignment of CH comfortable in its own skin but not afraid to add a touch of weirdness here and there to spice the pie. 

        ‘Life’s Imitation’, which follows, is a tad quicker, driven by a rhythmic acoustic guitar, its lyrics similarly enigmatic, its title appearing on my computer as ‘Teenage Summer’, a repeated phrase among words that seem like an apology for absence. ‘The Howl’, the first single from the album, written by Liam Finn, takes its cue from past CH endeavours, underlined by one of those sparkling guitar figures that inhabit so many CH songs, before it slips further into familiar territory on a soaraway chorus featuring high harmonies. ‘All That I Can Ever Own’ sees Neil musing on his past on an anthemic ballad in the same vein as ‘How Will You Go’ from Woodface, while ‘Oh Hi’, not a million miles away from Bowie’s ‘Everyone Says Hi’ on Heathen, boasts another catchy chorus. The midpoint is reached by trilling mandolins that lead into ‘Some Greater Plan (For Claire)’, a gorgeous, luscious ballad, a love song, the slowest song on the album, quite lovely, and to these ears the album’s key track. It’s certainly superior to the three that follow, neither of which reach the standard set thus far. Indeed, ‘Blurry Grass’ by Elroy and his dad, sounds like an outtake. Happily, Gravity Stairs is redeemed by the two closing songs, ‘Thirsty’ and ‘Night Song’. The former features female voices quite prominently – there are hints of them elsewhere on the record, some belonging to Finn’s wife Sharon – which I believe is first for Crowded House. After a bit of weirdness ‘Night Song’ opens dreamily but gathers pace to bring the album to an eccentric conclusion. 

        Anyone seeking more CH gems like ‘Weather With You’, ‘Distant Sun’ or ‘It’s Only Natural’ might not find it amongst these songs but I’m not bothered. Gravity Stairs is beautifully produced pop record by a group led by a craftsman. 

A CONTINUAL FAREWELL: MY LIFE IN LETTERS WITH TONY WILSON by Lindsay Reade

Lindsay Reade was once Lindsay Wilson, long suffering wife of Tony Wilson, Manchester man about town, Granada TV presenter and founder of Factory Records and its offshoot, the Hacienda club. Ambitious yet raised in a traditional household where wives shopped, cooked and cleaned, she certainly found life with Tony “challenging”, nowadays the preferred euphemism for difficult.       

        The challenge was Tony’s relentless energy which left her neglected and alone, and it forms the basis of this, her second, and quite lovely, book about the marriage, a follow-up to Mr Manchester and The Factory Girl: The Story of Tony and Lindsay Wilson in 2010. It differs from the first in that it tells the story of their see-saw relationship through letters, mostly from him to her, and it’s certainly brave of Lindsay to expose her innermost feelings to this kind of scrutiny. Tony believed in honesty, however, and if nothing else, Lindsay’s book is scrupulously honest, so much so that in part it has the feel of a novel, fact as fiction. 

        It’s also well-written, not just by her but also by Tony, who died from cancer in 2007, by which time he and Lindsay had long since reconciled. Well read, he was a regular, loquacious and literate correspondent, sprinkling his lengthy letters, most of them typed and reproduced as facsimiles in this book, with lines from Shakespeare, Proust, Yeats and modern lyricists, Latin quotations and even philosophy gleaned from books about Ancient Greek warriors. It’s left to Lindsay to analyse them, which she does in hindsight with remarkable clarity and candour, explaining how the various references allude to aspects of their life, both together and apart, and interactions with friends, lovers and Factory colleagues. It’s like looking through the keyhole at a disintegrating marriage, the sort of thing kitchen-sink playwrights like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe or Shelagh Delaney might have used for research material.

        Running parallel to the marriage are the fortunes of Factory Records and the acts on the label, most notably Joy Division, whose singer Ian Curtis was the subject of Torn Apart, the book Lindsay co-wrote with Mick Middles, commissioned and edited by myself and published by Omnibus Press in 2006. I went up to Manchester to meet with her and Middles, their original intention to write a book about Factory Records, but over dinner I persuaded them to drop this idea and concentrate instead on Curtis, Factory’s most charismatic performer, which I’m happy to say worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. 

        But I digress. Married in 1977, wedded bliss somehow eludes Lindsay and Tony, and within a couple of years both are unfaithful, on her part (initially with Howard Devoto) as a form of revenge, not only for Tony’s own tomcat impulses but also as a response to the boys’ club culture at Factory where women are excluded from decision making, which righteously vexes her. So does Tony’s laissez-faire attitude towards punctuality and bookkeeping, with the result that the portrait Lindsay paints of him is that of a loveable rogue, attractive and erudite but irresponsibly consumed by restlessness and his sense of self-importance. “He was an easy man to love but a hard man to stay in love with,” she writes. 

        All of which makes for a compelling read, especially as the relationship lingers on after they separate. Tony doesn’t seem to want to let Lindsay go, so he keeps on writing letters to her, even from China where he holidays in 1981, leaving her to muse despondently on his intentions. Though they live apart, this prolongation occupies the central part of the book, leading to a sort of will-they-won’t-they tension, this despite copious references to Tony’s next wife, Hilary Sherlock, with whom he had two children, and, following her, the former Miss UK Yvette Livesey, with whom he spent the final years 17 years of his life. 

        We also learn that Lindsay naively signed away any rights she may have had in Factory which, as she points out, was launched with funds that were held jointly. Neither are acquisitive, however, and money is frittered away by everyone involved to everyone’s ultimate detriment. Only after the Hacienda takes off do Tony’s fortunes soar and by this time Lindsay has gone, not just from Tony’s life but also from Factory, where she was briefly employed looking after foreign rights before her abrupt dismissal for what she rightly regards as confected crimes. 

        But this isn’t a book about money or even Factory, it’s about love, a love that endured despite everything that was thrown at it, from Tony’s occasionally appalling behaviour to what Lindsay now regards as her immature reaction to this. It’s somehow comforting that in the closing chapters Lindsay reveals their secret trysts on trips to America and, at the close, the nights she spent by Tony’s deathbed. “I stayed with him every weekend in the three months of his illness but she [Yvette] never knew this,” she writes. And later: “I bear much guilt for the failure of our marriage. After all, I was the volatile one who finally walked away from it, the one who broke it up. Tony really meant it to be for life, as evidenced by his letters… He might have been a self-confessed twat, he might have treated me appallingly many times, punishing me severely for my offences, but there it is. He really was the nice boy his mum wanted him to be, he just went astray, as we all do in one way or another.”

        A Continual Farewell is beautifully produced and illustrated throughout, not just with their typed and handwritten letters but with photographs, many of them from Lindsay’s archive. It has 350 pages and costs £25.00, 18.39 on Amazon. 

REVIEWING MUSIC BOOKS

My review of David Hepworth’s Hope I Get Old Before I Die on Just Backdated earlier this week was the 114th music book review I’ve posted since I launched the blog 10 years ago, and it occurs to me that Just Backdated just might have become the largest dedicated rock’n’roll book reviews website on the internet. I say ‘might’ because for all I know there could be a site along these lines of which I am unaware but when I type ‘rock and roll book reviews’ into Google, all that comes up are individual reviews of individual books, not a site that is dedicated to reviews of lots of music books. If there is such a site, then please tell me about it. 

        When I launched Just Backdated back in 2014 it was never my intention to create a site that featured primarily music books reviews. It just happened that way but I suppose it was inevitable. After all, I spent 33 years as the editor at Omnibus Press, the world’s largest dedicated music book publisher, and in the course of that employment commissioned and edited upwards of 800 rock books, probably more than anyone else in the world, and read many more than that, some to check out as potential Omnibus titles, others purely out of interest. So, I guess I’ve read a few more music books than most people. 

        Nowadays authors and publishers send me loads of music books to review. In many cases the authors are known to me, but some publishers have become aware that they might sell a few more copies if a decent review appears on Just Backdated. Some of the books I’ve reviewed I’ve bought, of course, but I’d say that 75% are sent to me as review copies. BTW, before I buy a book I always always scan the acknowledgments page: if there’s a long list of relevant names then the chances are the book will be OK but if it’s on the short side and the names don’t mean much to me I’ll pass. 

        In my opinion, music book reviews in magazines are invariably too short. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious to me that the reviewer has merely scanned a book, especially when whoever is writing the review uses the opportunity to write more about the act – the subject of the book – than the book itself. In others it seems to me as if all they’ve read is the first chapter and maybe the blurb on the back but I can’t really blame reviewers for this. After all, unlike the hour it might take to listen to an album for review purposes, or the two to three hours or so at a concert, it could take up to a week to read some books in their entirety, and knowing how little magazines pay freelance book reviewers that’s hardly optimum use of time on a sliding pay scale. I don’t get paid for writing book reviews, of course, which goes some way to explaining why most of those I write exceed 1,000 words, far more than you’ll find in any music magazine or even the book reviews pages in most newspapers. Truth is, I do it for fun and generally I’m pretty benign. Only when I decide a book is a load of old rubbish do I say so and, of course, I tend to avoid such books anyway. 

        Inevitably, our house is chock full of books though in 1997, during a house move, I was obliged to sell about 500 music books for space reasons. In those days there was a shop on London’s Denmark Street called Helter Skelter that specialised in music books and its manager, Sean Body, now sadly deceased, and I became quite friendly, so he sold them for me. We split the proceeds 50/50. Now I wish I’d kept a fair few of them as I realise some were quite rare and are going on Amazon for well over their original price.

        I chose to illustrate this piece with one that I will never sell, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock’n’Roll, published in early 1976. I was living in New York at the time, working as Melody Maker’s US editor, and was sent my copy by someone at the magazine. I recall being impressed by the book’s scope, the quality of the writing and pictures, and the attention to detail in the discographies that followed each act or genre it covered. I loved Nik Cohn’s piece on Phil Spector, and Paul Nelson’s investigation into Bob Dylan, written in the hard-edged style of a Raymond Chandler short story. I found only one mistake, a picture of Uriah Heep vocalist David Byron identified as Ian Hunter but when I pointed this out to the magazine someone there told me to fuck off (as if they didn’t believe me!). This book can still be picked up on Amazon for a reasonable price, and is highly recommended for connoisseurs of this kind of thing but be sure to pick up the original edition above and not later, smaller sized, editions in which the photographs are reduced in size.

        The first rock book I ever read was Hunter Davies’ Beatles biography, in 1969, closely followed by The Sound Of The City by Charlie Gillett, Rock From The Beginning (aka Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom) by Nik Cohn and Elvis: A Biography by Jerry Hopkins. In those days rock books were few and far between, unlike today when rock books vie with books about film, sport or the royal family in the non-fiction departments in bookshops. 

        Inevitably I have far more books about The Who than any other act. My first Who book was simply called The Who, by Gary Herman, in 1972, and I have reason to believe that the copy on my shelf is a reprinted pirate edition as the cover is in b&w and not colour: see below, with my copy above the genuine one.

        This was the first ever Who book to have been published (in 1972) but now there are over 70, and 68 of them sit on a shelf in my study; biographies of the group and its individual members, day-by-day chronologies, discographies, collections of press cuttings, fiction by Pete, photo books, sheet music books to which I contributed editorial matter, books that focus on one phase of their career and even one on John Entwistle’s guitar collection. Three of them were written by me, and a fourth co-written. There’s about half a dozen Who books I haven’t bothered with because I sense they won’t be much good but by and large the group has been unusually well served by biographers and chroniclers, which is a testament to their cultural importance, though Pete Townshend’s own literary ambitions may have something to do with it. 

        And like my reviews of books on Just Backdated, I didn’t set out to amass a Who library. It just happened that way. 

HOPE I GET OLD BEFORE I DIE – by David Hepworth

David Hepworth writes about the rock trade with great authority, often spiced with dry humour. He mixes facts and figures with judicious comment that can come only from someone who’s seen it all and done it all, and emerged with an understanding that enables him to reveal not only what goes on behind the scenes but also humbug and hypocrisy, occasionally on a large scale. The subject of his latest book, its title a neat transposition of the best line in Pete Townshend’s most famous song, is how and why rock stars and the music they make go on and on and on, gathering younger audiences as the decades pass, a seemingly incomprehensible denial of rock and roll’s first principle, which was to rebel against anything and everything embraced by our parents. 

This subject matter offers Hepworth the opportunity to paint a broad canvas, both chronologically and musically, and include plenty of tales that portray rock stars in a less than favourable light. It unfolds over 36 shortish chapters, all highly readable, that explain just how much the music industry has changed since the days when he and his teenage friends bought vinyl LPs and 7-inch singles, queued at box offices for inexpensive concert tickets and obtained all the info they needed about their rock heroes from the UK’s once thriving weekly music press. This latter aspect of Hepworth’s book has a special significance for me, of course, and I was wryly amused by his observation that, “In the twentieth century, when the job ‘rock journalist’ could at least have been said to exist, there were no academic courses teaching it. In the twenty-first, when the job no longer exists, there are hundreds.” 

        Hepworth astutely cites Live Aid in 1985 as the turning point in the fortunes of the rock industry and those who toil within it. Designed initially as a charity event to benefit the starving in Ethiopia, it became a showcase for several rock stars and groups whose best years were perhaps behind them. It was, writes Hepworth, “the dawning of the Age of Spectacle” and, largely because it attracted a massive global TV audience, it supercharged moribund careers by reminding the world at large, not just fans, of rock’s existence. Experienced performers with savvy, most notably Queen, used the opportunity to present an assured suite of greatest hits, a 20-minute free advertisement for their wares, and since Live Aid coincided roughly with the dawn of the CD age, with it came the realisation on the part of record labels that they could resell all those vinyl records all over again in this shiny new user-friendly format. Ka-ching. 

        His concept established, Hepworth goes on to illustrate it through various manifestations: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; groups reforming, not always harmoniously, to cash-in in middle-age; the rise of merchandising, or branding, with the Rolling Stones’ lips and tongue logo “arguably a greater asset than their music”; Elton at Diana’s funeral, signifying that what was once anti-establishment was now the establishment itself; the arrival of computers and iPods and the wholesale realignment of the record industry brought about by the internet and file-sharing; how performance became more significant than selling records; the requirement for once famous headliners to sustain a certain income level in order to maintain obscenely large mansions; how Bob Dylan’s 1985 retrospective box-set Biograph ushered in the trend for expensive multi-disc sets that feature alternative, previously rejected, material; exhibitions of rock ephemera at the V&A; tribute bands; rock at Las Vegas; Dylan’s Nobel Prize; the rise of Clear Channel and Live Nation; how sampling can enrich those who least expect to be enriched; negligible sales of new records by old acts; acts selling their back catalogues to hedge funds; how Abba’s Voyage might signpost the future; and, last in this far from comprehensive list, how death can be good for business. “Death and social media were made for each other,” writes Hepworth, “making it possible to mourn without putting yourself to even the smallest inconvenience.” 

        The book is not without a few minor shortcomings. The chapter on Liz Phair seems surplus to requirements. I fail to understand why in the chapter on Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac Hepworth fails to mention the extraordinary success of their 1977 LP Rumours and how this impacted on group dynamics. Chapter 18 – The Not Entirely Lonesome Death of John Entwistle – relies overmuch on material gleaned from Paul Rees’s depressing book The Ox. And was Bing Crosby really “the most successful musical entertainer of the twentieth century”, as claimed in chapter 34, when that same century produced Sinatra, Elvis and The Beatles? But these fairly trivial quibbles are mitigated by my delight at the pinpoint turns of phrase with which Hepworth litters his book: Kiss described as “reliably preposterous”, Elton “cannot abide to be idle”, Dylan is “never appropriately dressed”, Mike Love is “traditionally the least modest of the Beach Boys” and Roger Waters “prides himself on not fitting in”. They reminded me of how he described Marc Bolan as “not one for digging out a valuable away point” in his earlier book 1971 – Never A Dull Moment. I still chuckle at that one. 

Hepworth closes his book with a lovely chapter on the legacy and longevity of The Beatles – who else? – and Paul McCartney in particular, entitled – what else? – And In The End.... He equates the life Paul has lived with that of Queen Elizabeth II, “with whom he had something in common… he knew that a large part of his job was simply to raise national morale by being seen, to smile and to wave and give people something to go home and tell at least a hundred other people about… being Paul McCartney might just be wholly unlike being anyone else on earth.” Quite. 

Published today, Hope I Get Old Before I Die has 414 pages, black and white photos introduce each chapter and there’s an eight-page colour section, an idiosyncratic playlist and a useful index. RRP is £25, £20.99 on Amazon.