SUNNY AFTERNOON - The Kinks' Musical

A few weeks ago Ray Davies was in the building that houses Omnibus Press to attend the launch of a book entitled 100 Years Of British Songwriting, a lavish coffee table affair commissioned by the Performing Rights Society for Music that we had effectively packaged for them. So I sidled up to Ray and had a chat, firstly about his book Americana, which I’d recently read, then about Effingham where Ray had lived and which is close to where we live now, and finally about Sunny Afternoon, the musical based on the music of The Kinks that is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre near Leicester Square. He was, he said, on his way there to check that some new cast members were doing their job in the manner that was expected of them, which is why he ducked out of this bash early. It was a genuine hit, he told me, clearly pleased, and this was the first time I realised how closely involved he evidently is in its production.

Well, it deserves to be a hit I thought last night as I left the Pinter Theatre along with the rest of my family who had conspired to take me there as a surprise birthday treat. It’s lots of fun, like The Kinks a bit topsy-turvy, full of spirit and energy as it combines the juke-box musical format with a plotline that follows the far from comfortable trajectory of The Kinks’ career from The Ravens to headlining at New York's Madison Square Garden, though this latter episode is bolted on at the end a tad hurriedly.

For anyone unfamiliar with the real story of The Kinks, and what was going on behind the scenes, Sunny Afternoon will be a bit of an eye-opener, for Davies – who with playwright Joe Penhall wrote the story as well as the music – hasn’t tried to hide the less than edifying goings-on that were hidden from view, at least until drummer Mick Avory chucked a cymbal at Dave Davies during a gig in Cardiff in 1965. Dave was rushed to hospital, Mick did a runner and it hit the headlines. All this is dramatically played out as the climax to the first act, so audiences who are either too young or unversed in Kinks lore to know about it will probably assume it is dramatic licence. It isn’t.

Neither are the management woes involving the pair of toffs, Robert Wace and Grenville Collins who took them on as The Ravens, inviting experienced impresario Larry Page to join them along with music publisher Eddie Kassner. All these characters are present and correct, all taking their cut and leaving the increasingly paranoid Ray Davies to ponder the wisdom of a career in showbiz that seems to benefit all but him. This isn’t helped by the disaster that was The Kinks’ introduction to America and their subsequent banning from the land of plenty, which occupies some lengthy and especially funny scenes in the second act.

The action is set in Swinging London in the Swinging Sixties with Swinging Dollybirds dancing go-go style against a backdrop of wall-to-wall speakers and along a catwalk that stretches out into the stalls and fosters a close connection with the audience. When the fashion-dedicated group sings the title song towards the end of the second half ticker tape floats down from above, all to recognise the inescapable fact that the world spun around England in those days. After all, we did have The Beatles, the Stones and the World Cup.

Rightly the show is centred around the character of Ray, sympathetically portrayed by gangly John Dagleish, who finds the balance between art – the integrity of his songs – and commerce – the need to be productive – difficult to maintain. The plot hinges on this and his difficult marriage to Rasa Didzpetris (Lillie Flynn), the daughter of Lithuanian refugees who settled in Bradford. Ray – the real Ray – is to be commended for his willingness to permit these glimpses into his private world to be aired in this way.

Meanwhile younger brother Dave (George Maguire), perhaps inspired by the example of Keith Moon, embarks on a debauched journey that involves a regiment of groupies, a fondness for wearing their clothes and a sea of booze, all of which displeases his elder brother to the extent that their relationship descends into toxicity. The ying and yang of the brothers’ relationship serves as a secondary plotline, the more Ray backs away from the pop world’s more disagreeable traits, the more Dave embraces them.

Of course, all this unpleasantness is accompanied by a wealth of brilliant Kinks music, from ‘You Really Got Me’ – with Dave shoving a screwdriver into the amp speaker to create distortion, as per the legend – to ‘Lola’, played as a sing-along encore at the end, as it often was at real Kinks concerts. All the great Kinks songs, and some not so well known ones, crop up along the way, not all of them played by the group. The girls, who double as Ray’s many sisters, screaming fans and dancers on shows like Top of The Pops, get their fair share, as do the male characters from the management, and all of them seem to play some instrument or other, including trombones, trumpets and a banjo. The sound is fattened out by a guitarist and piano player at the rear of the stage and is rarely less than rock gig volume. Nevertheless, ‘Days’ is given a particularly effective a cappella treatment, ‘I Go To Sleep’ is sang by Rasa, on the phone to homesick Ray in America, and ‘Dead End Street’ sees Ma and Pa Davies grumbling about their downtrodden circumstances.

Pride of place, though, is given to Ray’s masterpiece ‘Waterloo Sunset’, played by the group with Rasa on back-up vocals as the penultimate number in the show. Here we find The Kinks in the studio working on the song, bassist Peter Quaife having just decided not to hand in his notice (yet) because he loves playing the descending bass line intro, Dave figuring out the licks on his electric guitar, Ray strumming the chords, Mick tapping softly in the background until it all comes together. “What are the words Ray?” asks one of them. Ray approaches the mike. “Dirty old river…”

As long as I gaze on…

It was the cue for the theatre audience to rise as one and sing along, as did we. Back in the nineties I used to drive my two children to primary school each morning and (to discourage squabbling) I taught them to sing this lovely song as we made our way down Percy Road past Ravenscourt Park to Flora Gardens. They’re no longer kids nowadays but as I glanced across the seats I noted that they still remember the words; paradise and the Southbank sunset were ours. Thanks L, O & S, and thanks Ray for this wonderful song.

         

RICK BUCKLER - That's Entertainment

The middle of May marks the anniversary of my washing up on Melody Maker, joining the music industry as an immature but rock-mad lad of 23, so this year I’m celebrating 45 years on the obstacle course that my dear departed friend Derek Taylor christened The Industry of Human Happiness. I’m not sure it’s quite such a happy place now as when Derek spoke those immortal words, though it certainly was when he was in his prime. While it would be going too far to call it The Industry of Human Misery, nowadays it’s more of a sprawling land mass, much of it troubled, and occupied – as ever – by ne’er do wells, by get-rich-quick hawkers of tat (hang your head in shame descendants of Opportunity Knocks), by too many lawyers and accountants, by too many musicians hanging on for dear life, by those who made their pile and by genuinely nice guys whose pile ought perhaps to be a big bigger.

         One of the latter is Rick Buckler whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with this year on his autobiography That’s Entertainment: My Life With The Jam, which Omnibus Press published this week. I’ve had plenty of close-encounters with rock stars over these 45 years and few have struck as such an all-round, down-to-earth nice guy as Rick who hasn’t a bad word to say about anyone – not even Paul Weller who, in a manner of speaking, pulled the rug from beneath his feet – and seems truly grateful to all of us at Omnibus for publishing his book. Rick is cheerful, friendly, gracious to everyone he meets, a tribute to his profession.

         Last night Rick was at our offices for the book’s official launch – see photo below – and he’s spent all this week helping to promote it, including an appearance on Breakfast TV.

Rick with CC & Chris Magill, visiting from Australia.

With an introduction by Keith Moon biographer Tony Fletcher who began his life as a writer by publishing a fanzine called Jamming, That’s Entertainment is both an insider’s intimate chronicle of the heyday of The Jam, and a revealing personal memoir. In exhaustive detail, Rick retraces the story of his fifties childhood, one of many kids who went through school dreaming about being in a band. Unlike almost all of his fellow dreamers, Rick got his wish. Rick takes fans through the whole story: growing up in a working-class family in Woking, the early Jam – a covers band who worked their asses off until they got it right – the early records, the competition with the Pistols and the Clash – they were never really punks – through to the glory days and the break-up, then the post-Jam realignments of personnel through a succession of other groups and even a spell as a craftsman-like furniture restorer. It is the story of the dissolution of schoolboy friendships, the highs professional triumphs, the lows of quarrels, and the ongoing influence of a politically abrasive band that for so many music fans dominated late seventies and early eighties British rock.  

         He was also a damn good drummer as testified by a slew of great Jam songs.

SITAR MUSIC

And now for something completely different…

         Until very recently the only Indian music I owned was the opening track on George Harrison’s Concert For Bangla Desh, once a triple vinyl album set, now a double CD. Recorded live at Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971, George introduced Ravi Shankar as his opening act whereupon Ravi and his three accompanists tuned their instruments for a couple of minutes which prompted a round of applause from the sell-out crowd. “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more,” chided Ravi before settling down to play a 16-minute piece entitled ‘Bangla Dhun’.

         In my haste to get to the songs by George or, more likely, Bob Dylan (his four songs [five on the CD] are the highlight of the show), I tended to skip past Ravi. That all changed earlier this year when Mrs C and I sort of rediscovered it, in the process kindling a shared but dormant fondness for sitar music. This led to my buying a ‘best of’ Shankar album from iTunes but many of the tracks were duets with the violin maestro Yehudi Menuhin which weren’t really to my taste, so I chanced my arm with a couple of CDs by Ravi’s daughter Anoushka which were nice enough but, to use an Indian analogy, a bit Korma-ish when what I was looking for was more of a Vindaloo.

         Help came from my friend Adrian Boot, best known as the music photographer who took more shots of Bob Marley than anyone else, including the one on the front of the multi-million selling Legend CD, who just happens to live quite close to us and plays the sitar. “Although Ravi is the most famous, he is not regarded as the best,” Adrian told me. “The Eric Clapton of the sitar is Nikhil Banerjee. Other good sitar players are Vilayat Khan and Shahid Parvez.”

         Adrian sent me a download of music by Banerjee and some others and he’s right. This music is quite extraordinary; long, winding pieces of extreme delicacy, most of them starting slow (Alap) and speeding up towards the finish (Jor), the longest lasting just over 45 minutes, an Indian symphony in fact, meditative and graceful, like watching a leaf floating down a stream or a feather on a breeze. On most of the nine pieces that Adrian sent me, a tabla – a bit like a conga drum but played very fast – joins in about half way through as the pace hots up.

         Of course I know next to nothing about the sitar and how to play it but my modest knowledge of the guitar tells me that in terms of fretted instruments the sitar is to Everest as a guitar is to a peak in the Lake District. It can have anything up to 20 strings, not all of which are plucked, and roughly the same number of frets, under which certain strings drone, or resonate in sympathy with the plucked strings. Unlike on a guitar, the frets are rounded and high up from the neck, enabling the player to use vibrato extensively, and its tuning is quite unlike the western 12-note octave which explains why to it can sound discordant to ears attuned to the scales of a piano.

         One of the pieces that Adrian sent me, a duet between Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt from Jaipur, was called ‘A Meeting By The River’ and was so lovely I simply had to get the album of the same name which I’ve also been listening to this week. It sounds as if Bhatt is playing a sitar but in reality it’s an instrument of his own design, which he calls the Mohan Vina, a remodelled f-hole guitar on which a steel rod is used slide-style over what sounds to me like a much depressed alternative tuning. Cooder plays glass bottle neck on the four pieces, all of them spontaneous and lasting around 10 minutes each, occasionally straying into the territory he explored on the soundtrack to Paris, Texas, but more often playing runs that complement the Indian style music. Percussion is added by Cooder’s son, Joachim, on dumbek and Sukhwinder Singh Namdhari playing tabla.

A Meeting By The River is more Korma-ish than Vindaloo, but in some ways can serve as the perfect introduction to sitar music for those too hesitant to try it. It’s highly recommended as a pleasant and surprising change from the music I usually listen to and write about. 

THE WHO - Track Singles

Last month I was commissioned by Universal to write the notes that will appear in the booklet accompanying a forthcoming box set of 15 7-inch singles by The Who, all of them on Track Records. This follows on from a Brunswick Box containing eight singles (including ‘I’m The Face’ on Fontana), released at the beginning of April, and a soon to be released Reaction box with five discs.

              Here’s what I wrote about the first two Track singles, ‘Pictures Of Lily’ and ‘The Last Time’. More to follow.

A. Pictures Of Lily

Written by Pete Townshend. © 1967 Fabulous Music.

Produced by Kit Lambert.

B. Doctor Doctor

Written by John Entwistle. © 1967 Essex Music.

Produced by Kit Lambert.

Originally released as Track 604 002 on 21 April, 1967, it reached Number 4 in the British charts.

Recorded at Pye Studios, London, on April 5, 1967, ‘Pictures Of Lily’ was The Who’s first release on Track Records, established earlier in the year by their managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. Unlike many subsequent labels set up essentially as vanity projects by artists or their management, Track was a genuine independent label in search of fresh talent and its first signing, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, signalled their intention to seek out innovative new artists. Indeed, Hendrix recorded Track’s first hit, ‘Purple Haze’, which reached the UK charts in March 1967, beating The Who by one month. The much discussed rivalry between Hendrix and The Who was certainly exacerbated by their sharing a brand new pioneering record label headed by The Who’s own managers.

              ‘Lily’ sees Pete Townshend entering what John Entwistle sometimes referred to as The Who’s ‘blue’ period. Not to put too finer point on it, it features Pete’s observations on onanism, written from the point of view of a young lad whose father sympathises with his son’s raging hormones and offers relief in the form of soft-core pornography to hang on his bedroom wall. Naturally he falls in love with Lily, a scantily dressed pin-up, only to learn to his deep regret that she died long ago. Quite daring for its time, even today ‘Lily’ might generate a ban from sensitive radio stations and, on a quiet news day, a lurid headline in the prurient tabloid press. During the solo John steps forth on the French horn, which he played in a Boys’ Brigade band in his early teens.

              John: “It’s all about wanking... Townshend going through his sexual traumas – something that he did quite often. I suppose you could say this record represents our smutty period, or to be more refined, our blue period.”

              Keith Moon famously played a Premier drum kit adorned with pictures of ‘Lily’ who, judging from her demeanour, seems to have been abducted by The Who from a music hall in the Roaring Twenties.

              ‘Lily’ was a welcome addition to the set list for the ‘Who Hits 50’ tour in 2014 and 2015.

              Recorded at Ryemuse Sound, London, circa April 5-6, 1967, ‘Doctor Doctor’ continues what would become a Who tradition of John Entwistle B-sides on which his name was spelt incorrectly, with an ‘h’ after the ‘w’. In this, one of the bassist’s best ever sixties songs, the composer sings disconsolately about his various illnesses in a high-pitched voice to a lively rock melody. 

A: The Last Time

Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. © 1965 Mirage Music.

No producer credited.

B: Under My Thumb

Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. © 1965 Mirage Music.

No producer credited.

Originally released as Track 604 006 on 30 June, 1967, it reached Number 44 in the British charts.

Recorded as a gesture of support to Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who between June 28-30 at Chichester Quarter Sessions were imprisoned briefly on drugs charges, The Who released these cover versions of two Stones songs while the trial was in progress. A cause célèbre of the day that pitched the hedonistic glamour boys of the counter-culture against the stuffy British Establishment, the issue was settled in part by a now legendary editorial in The Times newspaper in which Jagger’s fate was likened to “breaking a butterfly on a wheel”, a line borrowed from a 1735 poem by Alexander Pope.

              With remarkable swiftness, The Who and Kit Lambert recorded the two songs at De Lane Lea studios on June 28, with Pete playing bass because John was away on his honeymoon aboard the QEII. In a full-page advert published in the London Evening Standard they announced their intention to record Stones tracks until Mick and Keith were released “to keep their work before the public”. “It’s just a simple gesture,” said Lambert. “We are not trying to cash in at all. All royalties will go to charity.” Fortunately for all concerned, the errant Stones were sprung before The Who got around to recording any more.

              The Who’s version of ‘The Last Time’ is far from sloppy with clanging guitars, a chaotic solo and an upward key change towards the end but despite following the Stones’ arrangement almost note for note it lacks the menace of the original. They are better suited to the nimbler ‘Under My Thumb’, a song from the Stones’ notorious but short-lived misogynistic period in which The Who inject a touch of their own style, eschewing the catchy little riff in favour of acoustic rhythm, galloping bass and some Who-ish harmony vocals. Still, it was the thought that counted. 

LAMBERT & STAMP – The Managers’ Tale

Managing a rock group is not for the fainthearted and managing The Who was as arduous as it gets, calling for extreme measures in the face of many obstacles. These included a chronic cash-flow situation, profound ignorance of the workings of the music industry, the ever-present threat of the group imploding, a maniac for a drummer and a singer predisposed towards violence as a means to resolve disputes. Somehow, though, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp kept The Who afloat during the key period of their career because deep down inside they knew that if the ship didn’t sink and take them with it, sooner or later they’d end up sailing it past the winning post. No sooner had they done so, however, than they walked the plank. 

          This is the theme of Lambert & Stamp, a film directed by James D. Cooper that was premiered last night at London’s newly opened and rather swish Regent Street Cinema. It’s a lengthy documentary, perhaps too long at 117 minutes, and its appeal rests largely with Who fans and students of the 'swinging’ sixties, so I can’t see it becoming much of a commercial success. Also, writing as someone who’s probably seen more footage of and about The Who than most, barring the new interviews done specifically for the film, there wasn’t much in the way of unseen vintage material. That said, there was still much to enjoy as the film shed further light on one of rock’s most tempestuous and unlikely partnerships, even if it did at times muddy an already murky pool.

          There are many versions of The Story Of The Who and this is yet another take on it, with subtle variations that can be attributed to Pete’s notorious tendency to embellish facts, Roger remembering things the way he prefers and Chris Stamp, who appears on screen more than all the rest put together, mostly in interviews conducted towards the end of his life, inclined to gloss over controversial issues. The most reliable witness interviewed at length is probably Richard Barnes, long term Who chronicler and Pete’s Ealing flatmate back in the day, who was promoting a High Numbers gig at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, most probably on July 14, 1964, when Kit Lambert showed up. At first Barnes thought he was a man from the local council come to check that the number inside didn’t exceed safety limits but once he realised Lambert’s true intention was to make a film of the group he duly bid him to enter, thus changing the lives of everyone concerned.

          In short order Lambert contacted his friend and business partner Stamp who was away filming in Ireland. They decided not only to make a film but to manage this group, quickly ousting His Modness Pete Meadon, a slightly under-the-counter ploy that is not mentioned in the film, thereafter setting about the task with relish. The Who believed Lambert and Stamp to be rich and influential – they were neither – and accepted them as brothers, effectively bringing the team’s core complement to six, and after many hair-raising escapades they triumphed. Success, however, rent the partnership asunder since for Lambert, and to a lesser extent Stamp, the mission had been accomplished and there was nothing left to do, neither being temperamentally suited to the dull but essential administrative duties involved in managing a successful rock group. Lambert also took umbrage at being side-lined from the Tommy movie but by then both had succumbed to the hedonistic lifestyle that riches had brought, leaving The Who’s affairs in the hands of others, mostly notably Bill Curbishley who has been at the helm since 1976, prudently handling all their business matters while consolidating their position and bank accounts.

          But everyone knows it might never have happened without Lambert and Stamp. The film opens with summaries of their contrasting backgrounds: Lambert, the posh son of a classical musician and music critic, public school and Oxford educated, cultured, plummy voiced, pleasure-seeking, unashamedly gay, immensely reckless; Stamp, the son of a stoker on Thames tugboats, working class, tough, a bit of a Casanova, highly imaginative, also something of a chancer and desperate for a life that would take him away from all this. They do say opposites attract.

          Having established the characters we move towards life with The Who, and here the film seems unsure of its purpose. Is it a documentary about Lambert and Stamp or (yet another) documentary about The Who? In fact it flits between the two, the first 25% L&S, the next 50% mostly The Who and the final 25% back with L&S. There’s plenty of previously seen live footage of The Who, snatches of songs up to and including Tommy, and footage of Lambert and Stamp in conversation at the Speakeasy club, all soundtracked by (mostly) Who music, not necessarily in chronological order according to the story on screen. Due space is given to the establishment of Track Records from whence the dynamic duo derived their fortunes, much of which Lambert squandered on maintaining a palace in Venice. Curiously, in the film the multilingual Lambert speaks more German and French than he does English, this no doubt because no decent footage of him being interviewed at length (in English) seems to exist, and, although he was unquestionably the dominant and most interesting figure in the partnership, his voice is therefore seldom heard. So Stamp, by virtue of having outlived him, now silver haired and wise after the event, is the star of the movie. Sadly he will never see it as he died in 2012, 31 years after Kit.

          There is a good deal of flattery. Stamp believes Townshend and Moon were both geniuses; Townshend states that John Entwistle was a musical genius and Daltrey a great actor who used this talent to become a great rock singer; Daltrey is unstinting in his praise for the efforts of both Lambert and Stamp, although it’s no secret that of all the members of The Who he was the most instrumental in jettisoning them back in 1975. Moon evidently wanted no part of this and made his feelings known. Entwistle barely gets a look in. But there’s a happy ending with Daltrey paying rich tribute to Lambert and Stamp from the stage during a fairly recent solo show and all three of them – Pete, Roger and Chris, along with Bill Curbishley – attending an event in Washington in 2008 when The Who were honoured for their services to music.

          Finally, the film is not without humour. The rumpy-pumpy with the ballerinas mentioned in Mark Blake’s book Pretend You’re in A War (via Andrew Loog Oldham’s book Stone Free) is referred to by Chris’ actor brother Terence Stamp, also interviewed on screen. Everyone agrees that Lambert chose to live in Eton Square because the address enabled him to get credit from banks and local merchants and Pete, who had a room at the same address for a while, says he was still able to get wine on credit long after he’d gone on the wagon in the eighties. Kit was a gambler, too. If the bank would only cash him a cheque for £30 he’d be off to a casino immediately, his thinking being that because this was insufficient for his needs the best course of action was to risk it on the roulette wheel since only then would he be able to trouser what he required, all assuming he won of course.

          Documentaries of persons who have passed on usually end with a note of this on screen but this one doesn’t. Perhaps the producers thought it was obvious. Either way, the film does offer another angle on a rock saga that continues to fascinate. And while it would be too much to suggest the destiny of The Who rested on the spin of the wheel at Kit’s casino, we can all be thankful that Barney didn’t send him packing that July night back in 1964. 

MOLE VALLEY – Our Constituency

Although we live closer to Guildford than Dorking, our parliamentary constituency is the Dorking-centred Mole Valley where at the last general election the incumbent Tory MP Sir Paul Beresford was returned with a majority of 15,653, or 53% of the vote, making it the sixth safest Tory seat in the country. At that 2010 election the Lib Dems came second with about half of what Beresford polled, and Labour a poor third with 7% of the vote, one of which was mine. Well, at least they beat the loathsome Ukip whose 2,752 votes pushed them into fourth place ahead of the Greens’ 895. These are the only five parties standing this time.

So Beresford’s seat is as safe as houses, as is he when it comes to being a Tory MP – in Wikipedia it states that he is among a minority of backbench MPs never to have voted against the government. This probably explains why he wrote to me a few weeks ago expressing his support for fracking. The letter was in response to my having signed a petition against a method of extracting fossil fuel from the ground that not only strikes me as unsafe but also foolhardy insofar as I feel the government would be wiser to invest in other kinds of energy – but this wouldn’t help their friends in the oil industry who no doubt contribute significantly to party funds. Beresford would probably feel differently if the fracking was taking place within 100 yards of his home, but this is unlikely as I don’t believe he lives in the constituency anyway. Nowhere on the web can I find out exactly where he does live but he’s a practising dentist with a surgery in Putney for which he claims ‘second home expenses’, so he probably has another house somewhere else, probably elsewhere west of London. Also, figures have revealed that, during 2014, out of all the 650 MPs in House of Commons only four of them spent more time than him working outside Parliament which doesn’t inspire me with much confidence. 

Whatever, I wouldn’t vote for him anyway, though it’s quite difficult to know who to vote for when you live in such a solid Tory constituency as this. In nearby Guildford the issue is complicated by the number of green GGG signs on the roads leading there, this evidently a one-issue party that is against the extension of the green belt into this part of Surrey. GGG stands for Guildford Greenbelt Group but they don’t have a candidate for Mole Valley, only in Guildford. It might split the Green vote there though it’s probably Tories who don’t want more homes built near them to house riff-raff from the cities so GGG might eat into the Tory vote too in Guildford and give the Lib Dems a fighting chance, especially as this is a marginal between them, with Labour again a poor third. Of course, this won’t trouble Beresford in Mole Valley, the part timer who follows the Tory line on every single issue.

There are signs everywhere promoting his cause. Driving in and around the Guildford-Dorking area last weekend I counted more than 50 blue signs and only one red Labour sign, strangely enough in Green Dene on the back road from the A25 towards East Horsley. I say strangely because the houses on either side of this road are all big detached affairs worth well over a million a pop, so what’s a Labour supporter doing in a place like this?

         The political leanings of the area are reflected in the piles of newspapers in the village shop in nearby Shere: stacks of Mails and Telegraphs while the number of Guardians can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The shameless prejudice of the UK’s right-wing press is one of many things I don’t like about this election, all those headlines prophesying doom and gloom if Ed Milliband gets in. Is it really surprising that 100 rich businessmen wrote a letter to the Telegraph supporting the Tories? Well, they would wouldn’t they, to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies. Two weekends ago the Sunday Mail’s headline predicted that if Labour got in and allied themselves to the SNP, it would pre-empt the ‘greatest crisis since the abdication’. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the abdication of Edward VIII probably affected less than 0.001% of the country anyway, the period in question includes World War Two, Profumo and the break-up of The Beatles (had to get my specialist subject in somewhere), so this is tosh of the highest order. It’ll be ‘Labour’s secret plan to assassinate royal baby’ next. Don’t their readers realise that the owners of the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Times (and Sun), respectively Viscount Rothermere, the billionaire Sark-dwelling Barclay twins and globe-trotting ogre Rupert Murdoch, are all multi-millionaire tax exiles whose support for the Tories merely reflects their own selfish financial interests. Doom and gloom for them more like. As for the Ukip supporting Daily Express, its owner Richard Desmond made his millions from TV porn channels; says it all really.

         Another thing I don’t like is the imbalance in donations towards election expenses with the Tories winding up with far more money to spend than all the rest put together, the predictable result of their support from the rich. Election spending should be capped so as to even out the playing field in this regard, but this’ll never happen as the Tories would suffer the most. I certainly don’t believe that the NHS, the greatest social institution we have, is safe in their hands, and I’m a bit worried about the BBC too. I take the view that, like the Republicans in America, the British Tory party represents the interests of the richest 10% of the population, and they don’t really give a toss about the rest. I also think they’re soft on tax evasion, even if they won’t admit it. Come to think of it, apart from Dennis Skinner and Caroline Lucas, I don’t really believe much of what any politician says these days and the fact that none of them, especially Cameron, seem to want to interact with real voters and instead choose to appear at stage-managed events in front of their own supporters, is particularly galling, as is their tendency to prefer the company of primary school children and animals when TV cameras are trained on them. The other thing I don’t like about Cameron is that he never really answers a question, just twists it around so as to blather on with a pre-rehearsed sound bite promoting his austerity policies alongside fellow toff Gideon ‘George’ Osborne who seems think that wearing high visibility jackets and a hard hat makes him a man of the people.

         If I thought Len Amos, the Labour candidate for Mole Valley, stood a chance against Beresford I’d vote for him but this time around a Green vote seems like a better way of supporting a cause I believe in. The Greens are the only party to put environmental issues – surely the biggest problem the whole world faces – at the very top of their agenda. Unfortunately this won’t be a vote winner until our world is either blazing like a torch or completely flooded, so even though Jacquetta Fewster, our local Green candidate, hasn’t a hope in hell’s chance of getting elected to Mole Valley, she’ll get my vote tomorrow. 

Jacquetta Fewster, who looks like she's chilling out at Newlands Corner, a mile or three from where we live. 

SGT SLADE’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

The question of whether or not Slade fans were slightly unhinged (‘CRAZEE’) was never far from my mind as I chronicled their adventures during in their glory years. They were certainly a rowdy bunch, especially en masse during the early years of the seventies, a bit like football fans in that they enjoyed making a great deal of noise, drinking pints of beer in pubs and, not least, preferred girls who were unlikely to create much of a fuss if their bra strap happened to become loosened. Most of all, though, they liked to see their heroes in concert, Noddy leading the charge with his best Little Richard voice, Dave leaping around in some outfit made from the material in which chickens are roasted, Don sturdily holding down the beat at the back and Jim holding it all together on bass while his mind was somewhere else entirely, perhaps on a volume by some scholastic philosopher than he’d borrowed from Wolverhampton Library.

          Evidence that the rabid Slade fan is still alive and well comes with the above picture that one of their breed, David Graham, sent me today. Created by those behind the Slade In England website, it features dozens of characters that have a link with Slade’s past, including your man at Just Backdated who can be seen just above Dave as he appears in the film Flame, snugly placed between Al Jolson and Phil Lynott. Noddy sang like Jolson, of course, and Phil Lynott’s band Thin Lizzy supported Slade back when it was helpful to do so.

          In payment they requested that I send them a selfie of me holding it, so here it is.

Thanks lads. 

BEN E KING - Save The Last Dance

Pete Frame never did a Drifters Family Tree. It would have been far too complicated and occupied too many pages, but if he had one name would have stood out above all the rest of the singers, and there were scores of them, that passed through The Drifters and other singing groups that called themselves a variation on the name, all of whom contained at least one singer who at one time or another sang with the parent group.

That name, of course, was Ben E. King, who died on Thursday, evidently from natural causes. For me King was the true voice of The Drifters, for he sang lead on ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’, one of my all time favourite songs. Of course King was most famous for ‘Stand By Me’ and for signing the gorgeous Phil Spector ballad ‘Spanish Harlem’, but for me ‘Last Dance’ was his masterpiece.

As I have mentioned elsewhere on Just Backdated, at the bottom of the road where I lived in Skipton, on the corner before the right turn into Skipton High Street, there was a coffee bar with a juke-box where at the start of my teens I discovered American pop. I spent hours in there sipping coffee or coca-cola, putting three-penny and sixpenny bits into that juke-box and listening to my favourite records, mostly those that were released between the decline of the first wave of US rockers and the advent of The Beatles. I discovered ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ on this juke box and played it endlessly, along with ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ by Chuck Berry, ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ by The Teddy Bears, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ by The Shirelles, ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ by The Platters, ‘Only The Lonely’ by Roy Orbison and ‘Rave On’ by Buddy Holly, some of which I’ve written about here. In hindsight, it occurs to me now that the hours spent in this little coffee bar was an education that served me far better than maths or history. It was only later that I realised that all my favourite records came from America, the spiritual home of pop and rock, and these records were universally loved by other music nerds like me that I would meet and share similar memories with in the fullness of time.

I would have been 13 going on 14 when ‘Last Dance’ seeped into my consciousness. It was written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, mostly by Pomus, a wheelchair bound blues fanatic, evidently on his wedding night as he watched his bride dance with others while he waited on the sidelines, knowing that it was in his arms she’d be when he took her home.

In his eloquent obituary of King in today’s Guardian*, my former MM colleague Richard Williams rightly credits ‘Last Dance’ as the zenith of King’s tenure as lead singer with The Drifters. Richard also points out that King was a refined and dignified singer, perhaps too much so to compete with the more upbeat R&B and soul material from the Memphis-based Stax label later in the sixties, or the poppier end of the market that was virtually monopolised by Detroit’s Motown. King belonged in that twilight zone between Elvis and The Beatles, an era that better suited his sophisticated style, and it is his enormous credit that his voice can be heard on three of the period's most memorable recordings. 

As I’m writing this I’m listening to a Drifters compilation on Atlantic called, appropriately enough, Save The Last Dance For Me. All 20 tracks are sheer magic but it’s track 4, ‘You can dance, every dance with the guy, who gives you the eye…’ that still gives me goose pimples; such a lovely, perfectly realized, perfectly recorded song.

RIP Ben E.

*http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/01/ben-e-king

FRIDAY MORNING SHUFFLE

It’s the first of May which always reminds of a 1974 visit to O’Henrys, a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, when my female companion returned from a visit to the loo grinning like a monkey. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “There’s some graffiti on the wall, and it says, ‘Hooray hooray, the first of May. Outdoor fucking starts today.” Shame it was February.

          Recent additions to my iPod like some rare David Bowie courtesy of David Buckley (see below) and an album of blues instrumentals by John Fahey has pushed the number of songs on my iPod up to 15,995 now, and this morning I settled into a shuffle session as the train sped towards London, all the while reading about a fire that has gutted the lovely Clandon Park House, an 18^th Century National Trust-owned stately home, which just happens to be close to where we live. Indeed, I pass its gates as I drive to Guildford each morning.

         First up was David Bowie, though I didn’t recognise him from the intro of ‘She Shook Me Cold’ from The Man Who Sold The World, a song I haven’t heard in years. At first I thought it was Hendrix on guitar, then eventually realised who the singer was. This is Bowie doing heavy metal, or more like Mike Ronson channelling his inner Led Zeppelin. Even the title sounds a bit Zeppish. Not the best start.

         In complete and quite surprising contrast I found myself being serenaded by Mary Ford singing ‘I’m Confessing (That I Love You)’, from an album of Les Paul and Mary’s best known work that I bought many years ago after having heard Jimmy Page raving about ‘How High The Moon’, now one of my all-time favourite tunes. ‘I’m Confessing…’ is a bit on the schmaltzy side and doesn’t feature Les much but on ‘HHTM’ the double-tracked guitar playing is fantastic, and there’s a happy purity to Mary’s singing, a charming, almost childlike, inflection to her voice, and it sounds very black and white, before the age of colour.

         ‘Love Is A Stranger’ by Eurythmics cropped up next, probably my favourite song of theirs in that it displays them at their melodic best, skittering drums setting up a lovely tune with a little guitar riff that sounds like the one from ‘Needles And Pins’ inverted. When Annie Lennox sings about her obsession the pressure builds up beautifully, and I could listen to this again and again and not get tired. Back in the days of cassettes I remember adding this to many a car tape I made up.

         There are 303 David Bowie tracks on the iPod so for two to come up within three songs is a bit of a coincidence. ‘You Feel So Lonely You Could Die’, from The Next Day, is a dramatic ballad and just to ring the changes I’ll hand over the reins to my friend and fellow Bowiephile David Buckley who, in his forthcoming guide to DB’s music that Omnibus will publish later this year, reviews the song as follows: “Here, Bowie mixes Young Americans-style with, again, pre-Beatles American rock’n’roll, in this song of rejection (does the song, perhaps reference Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ or Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?). Like several songs on The Next Day, Bowie appears visited by unwelcome shades of the past, singing, ‘I can see you as a ghost, hanging from a beam’, while the line ‘And people don’t like you’ appears so personal, so direct, the listener, hit with just five words, is twisted into a spiral of self-examination about their own lives. Both ‘Rock And Roll Suicide’ and ‘Five Years’ are quoted musically in the ending section, reinforcing the ‘Spectre-Sound’.” Thank you both Davids.

         ‘Long Black Veil’ from Music From Big Pink, The Band’s first album follows, sung by their bassist Rick Danko. This is a mournful but moving country ballad dating from the fifties and covered by many, about a man hung for a murder he didn’t commit, his alibi undisclosed because at the time of the crime he was in the arms of his best friend’s wife. Rather than expose her he submits to the gallows, leaving the lady to visit his grave in her long black veil. It’s a beautiful song but I always felt The Band didn’t do it justice somehow, their version a bit lumbering and lacking the depth of others I’ve heard. I have it by Johnny Cash too, and his version is better.

         I’ve always had the time of day for Andy Fairweather Low whose happy, choogalooging ‘La Booga Rooga’ crops up next, nice wah-wah guitar and wailing Hammond behind his always nicely pitched vocals, very danceable but not an option on South West trains.

         I didn’t recognise the slow guitar intro to ‘Summertime’ but once the vocals kicked in there was no mistaking Janis Joplin who really hasn’t been bettered as a female blues shouter. Her scorching vocals here are terrific as she throws herself headlong into the song. Note to self: must listen to the whole of this hits album one morning next week.

         Lasting just over a minute and half, ‘Think’ by James Brown from his wonderful Live At The Apollo set was over too soon, serious kicking soul of the sixties variety, quite until the mellower, modern soul of John Legend whose pleasant ‘Used To Love U’ followed. Much of this kind of music sounds too samey to me but I did like the line: ‘Maybe we should rob somebody so we could live like Whitney and Bobby’. Maybe not such a good idea after all.

         The final track this morning was from a Peter Gabriel best-of, ‘A Different Drum’, one of his many world music forays which reminded me of the Afro Celts, all heavy percussion and wailing vocals from somewhere in the Dark Continent south of the Sahara. I have enormous respect for Peter Gabriel for the about turn he made after Genesis that eventually drew attention to this kind music. It’s not always to my liking but this track built up to a handsome and dramatic conclusion as the 8.54 glided into Waterloo two minutes ahead of time.