BRITISH ROCK IN THE FIFTIES

Called upon to edit a book about the history of rock on television earlier this year[1], I was taken back into the world of Six-Five Special, Oh Boy! and Juke Box Jury. These names will ring a bell only to those of us who can remember a time when news presenters, all of them male, wore evening dress to inform us of the day’s events, when Woodbine cigarettes were available in packets of five and when Cliff Richard – believe it or not – was deemed threatening. These were not the only televised shows that featured what was termed ‘beat music’, just the best known, and the book I edited is not a nostalgia fest – it is bang up to date and dwells lovingly on Ready Steady Go! and The Tube, to name but two – but somehow I found myself drawn to the first chapter, about the fifties, for the simple reason that it was all so innocent then and, of course, this was the first rock’n’roll I ever saw, as opposed to heard.

All of which explains why earlier today, browsing the CDs in Sainsburys, I was tempted by a CD package called Rock’n’Roll Britannia: The Foundations Of Rock’n’Roll Culture which looked like a snip at £3 for 75 tracks across three CDs. Leaving aside for a moment the undisputed truth that the foundations of rock’n’roll culture lie not in Blighty but somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line in America, this works out at just four pence a song so it’s unlikely Cliff, Marty, Adam, Billy, Tommy and all the rest will benefit much from my indulgence, a sad reflection on the value of music these days.

It was misleadingly packaged with the kind of graphics that suggest it's a Britpop compilation – Noel Gallagher’s Union Jack guitar on the front[2] – and it lacks sleeve notes of any kind bar a track listing, but in no other way do I regret my purchase. Prog rockers would be advised to note that no song exceeds two minutes and 48 seconds, with the shortest ‘Big Beat Boogie’ by Bert Weedon clocking in at just 38 seconds, shorter than any Ramones track on my iPod, as is the shortest vocal track, ‘What Do You Want’ by Adam Faith. The running time is two hours and 45 minutes, which means the average song length is two minutes and two seconds – and they say kids today have no attention spans.

What these early British rockers lack in finesse they by and large make up for in enthusiasm, albeit often misplaced. Nevertheless, I may have been hasty in a previous post when I suggested that Cliff Richard’s debut single ‘Move It’ was the only decent record he ever made, for ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Livin’ Lovin’ Doll’ aren’t bad at all, and he makes a decent fist of ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ too. The rot set in with Lionel Bart’s ‘Living Doll’ which, doubtless because it was his first number one, set him on the path to righteousness and rubbish records. The same thing happened to Cliff’s role model Elvis, of course, insofar as the insipid movies GI Blues and Blue Hawaii were enormous hits, far more popular than his earlier films, and similarly nudged him down the slippery slope to inconsequence.

Tommy Steele was another victim of the dreaded ‘family entertainer ambition’ syndrome. I can remember my mum taking me to the local Odeon in 1957 to see the movie The Tommy Steele Story, a sort of bio-pic that dramatised his rise from ship’s steward to Britain’s ‘first rock’n’roll star’, but of his four tracks only ‘Tallahasie Lassie’ is worth a second listen. I can only hope he listens to Paul Weller’s ‘Come On Let’s Go’ to learn what a song with this title ought to sound like.

The omission of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ ‘Shakin’ All Over’ is strange considering that two other great JK&TP’s tracks, ‘Feeling’’ and ‘Please Don’t Touch’, are included, but I suppose this has something to do with availability. A third JK&TP’s track, ‘If You Were The Only Girl In The World’, is an uncharacteristically bad choice on their part. Quite why they were persuaded to record an inappropriate marshmallow ballad written in 1916 is a mystery to me.

Aching melodrama was clearly a sought after ingredient in fifties pop ballads that dealt with unrequited love and in this respect Marty Wilde (‘Endless Sleep’), Billy Fury (‘Maybe Tomorrow’) and Vince Eager (‘This Should Go On Forever’) all score heavily. It’s not hard to imagine teenage girls weeping buckets and wringing their hands in anguish as these heart-throbs, their voices drenched in doom-laden echo, emote raw feelings of discontent at the faithlessness of their women. Better Fury tracks of which I am familiar are not included.

Men dominate, of course, but the two tracks by girls stand out. ‘A Girl Likes’, a rockin’ 12-bar by Janis Peters, shows the clear influence of Brenda Lee and could easily be mistaken for a Lene Lovich B-side. ‘Getting Ready For Freddy’, on the other hand, is a novelty song by variety star Alma Cogan, the most successful UK female star of the fifties, whose curiously dark life was the subject of a brilliant novel by Gordon Burn.[3]

There are, of course, far too many tracks by relative unknowns for me to asses the lot here but it’s worth mentioning that Dickie Pride doesn’t quite make the grade on ‘Slippin’ And Slidin’’ but the guitar solo is ace; Larry Page, who went on to manage The Kinks, can’t rock for toffee if ‘Cool Shake’ is anything to go by; Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ is more than respectable; ‘Six-Five Special’ by Don Lang & His Frantic Five, which became the theme tune to the TV show, is marred by Lang’s assumption that the faster you play the more you rock; and ‘Rockin’’ by Tommy Sampson & His Strongman sounds like the Black & White Minstrels have washed off their dodgy black make-up and ill-advisedly pitched into this newfangled rock and roll business, ditto The Most Brothers who cover ‘Whole Lotta Woman’, a song originally recorded by Cherokee Indian Marvin Rainwater that I remember my mum buying for her pop mad 11-year-old son, on the yellow MGM label, in 1958.

Finally, there are Beatles fingerprints to be found on this set. Of songs they recorded, we have Terry Waye doing ‘Matchbox’ and Jack Parnell doing ‘Kansas City’; and of songs they covered we have Craig Douglas’ curiously anaemic reading of ‘Nothin’ Shakin’ (But The Leaves On The Trees)’ and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’ by The Tunettes (who they?). Roy Young, who played with the Fabs on stage in Hamburg, rocks out splendidly on ‘Big Fat Mama’, and ‘Raunchy’, the guitar instrumental that secured George’s future after he played it to impress John atop a Liverpool Corporation bus in January 1958, is offered up by the bandleader Ken Mackintosh.
            "Hi there... we've got almost a hundred cats jumping here, some real cool characters to give us the gas, so just get with it and have yourself a ball," spluttered DJ Pete Murray when Six Five Special first went on air on February 16, 1957, a priceless quote from the rock on TV book.

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[1] We Hope You Have Enjoyed The Show: The Story of Rock and Pop on British Television by Jeff Evans, to be published by Omnibus Press on September 12.

[2] In the fifties it would probably have been regarded as treason to use Union Jack imagery to promote rock’n’roll. Townshend changed all that.

[3] Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn (Secker & Warburg, 1991)

BACK IN THE USSR

For reasons that I am at a loss to explain Just Backdated has seen a surge of hits from Russia in the past month, over 10,000 compared with 2,886 from the USA and 1,302 from the UK. Russia has now leapt into third place after the USA and the UK in terms of all-time national visits, overtaking Canada, Germany, France, Japan and Australia in a matter of weeks, and although it still has some way to go to challenge the US and the UK in all time hits totals, if they keep up this pace it won’t be long before that challenge becomes serious.

           As I say, I haven’t the foggiest idea why music fans in Russia have suddenly cottoned on to Just Backdated in the past few weeks, but I welcome them all the same. If any of them are reading this, maybe some could enlighten me. Has JB been promoted by some Russian music forum that I don’t know about? Has a link to JB been shared by some influential Russian rock critic? Has JB been mentioned on a Moscow radio rock show? Or is it something slightly sinister? Please tell me.

           In keeping with the Russian theme, it may be of interest to these new readers to learn that I have some previous in regard to Russia and rock music. In 1986, on behalf of Omnibus Press, I commissioned the noted Russian music critic Artemy Troitsky to write Back In The USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, an account of the history and development of rock music over the previous 25 years in what was then the Soviet Union. As I wrote in a brief note at the beginning of the book, I got the idea for this project when I read a Guardian article about Russian rock that was written by Artemy and commissioned by the paper’s then Moscow correspondent Martin Walker.

           This wasn’t as easy it sounds. Back then Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to initiate glasnost and perestroika, so the USSR was effectively still a closed shop. Artemy wasn’t supposed to accept a commission from a western publisher and all manuscripts by Russian authors intended for publication outside its borders were supposed to be delivered via VAAP, the Russian copyright agency, which would translate it from Russian to English and, presumably, censor it while doing so. We got around this by having Artemy write two manuscripts, one for them and one for Omnibus, ours being smuggled out via the Guardian’s diplomatic bag courtesy of Martin Walker. Not having access to an English-alphabet typewriter, Artemy painstakingly wrote it out in his best English in longhand, meaning I had to type it all out for our typesetter, not the easiest editing task I’ve ever undertaken, and he also sent me about 50 pictures to use in the book.

           It was worth the effort. The book was published to excellent reviews the following year, even though I never received the ‘official’ manuscript from VAAP (to whom, incidentally, we had paid an advance). We made arrangements for Artemy to visit the UK to promote it – the first time he’d visited the west – for which all sorts of official red tape had to be resolved. At one point the Russian authorities wanted to send a ‘minder’, presumably to make sure Artemy didn’t defect, but when we balked at paying the minder’s travel costs they let it drop. I was bemused by a seemingly obvious contradiction that the Soviets seemed to have overlooked: if VAAP hadn’t delivered a manuscript, how come Omnibus had published it, thus requiring its author to visit the UK promote it?

           “Ah, ha,” laughed Artemy when I pointed this out to him. “To understand that you have to understand the way Russian bureaucracy works. The government department that deals with manuscripts is a different department to the one that deals with travel visas. They don’t communicate. To do so would create extra work, and no one wants that.”

Artemy's dedication to me at the front of his book. He told me once what it said but I have forgotten.

           Back In The USSR wasn’t a massive seller for Omnibus but it was translated into many non-English language editions and published in the USA by Faber & Faber. Like me, all these other publishers felt it was an important historical document, a history book if you like, and that the story of rock in Russia needed to be documented for future generations. In this regard Artemy did a wonderful job.

           On his visit to London Artemy appeared on TV and radio and, through my efforts, met up with Paul McCartney, Richard Branson and Brian Eno. He visited Bath, where he met Peter Gabriel, and Dublin, where he met U2. All of these famous names were keen to talk to him, to learn from his experience. That aside, I found the whole exercise deeply enlightening, not only learning about how rock permeated the Soviet Union against the wishes of the authorities – like everywhere else, like Canute and the tide, they simply couldn’t hold it back – but dealing with – and outwitting – official procedure.

           Finally, I’m happy to add that Artemy, who now lives in Estonia, has remained a great friend.

DAVID BOWIE AT THE PROMS

Fitting though it was that David Bowie’s life and music should be honoured at the Proms, I remain unconvinced that rock music played by classically trained musicians is an improvement on guitars, bass and drums played through 100-watt amps by men and women who play gigs and not give recitals. While the enthusiasm, devotion and skills of the Stargaze Ensemble and their leader/conductor André De Ridder could in no way be faulted, these violinists and brass players seemed somehow unable to inject it with anything like the punch that makes rock sell by the bucketload and, conversely, albums of classical music struggle to reach five figures.

On the TV the Royal Albert Hall was dark and gloomy, with Ridder’s announcements formal and painstakingly comprehensive, all of which injected an atmosphere of melancholy worthiness that appeared to me a touch pretentious. The evening opened with ‘Warszawa’, the moody instrumental in an arrangement not unlike Bowie’s original on Low, an appropriate start with its slightly discordant undercurrent and suggestion of impending doom. A xylophone link led to an avant-garde passage that segued into ‘Station To Station’ sung by sober-suited Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy, followed by ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ by an earnest chap with his nylon stringed guitar worn very high, wherein Mick Ronson’s lean guitar lines were adapted for violins and French horn, the whole piece closing with an ethereal choral coda.

‘This Is Not America’, another Hannon vocal, was enlivened by a rap interlude by Elf Kid, a Lewisham grime man. This was followed by Marc Almond’s expressive reading of ‘Life On Mars’, his arms-wide-open dramatics making up for the occasional gratingly off-pitch vocal. He would redeem himself later with ‘Starman’.

This was by no means an all-male affair however. The females in Stargaze assumed the lion’s share of the backing and Anna Calvi (often with Jherek Bischoff on bass), Amanda Palmer (with Fender Telecaster and, at the close, babe in arms) and Laura Mvula (with added soul), all took lead or shared lead vocals as the evening progressed. Mvula’s take on ‘Fame’ finally injected a bit of tempo into the evening as the ensemble achieved the difficult feat of getting foot-tappingly funky with instruments designed for interpreting Mozart and Beethoven.

          The Blackstar trilogy of ‘Girl Loves Me’, ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ and ‘Blackstar’ itself formed the concert’s poignant centrepiece, Palmer and Calvi topped with what looked like crowns of thorns, the music from Bowie’s final album lending itself perfectly to the evening’s heart-rending mood. After that it was a bit of a relief to recognise Robert Fripp’s sinewy guitar motif of ‘Heroes’ and get back into the groove as the audience got behind Palmer’s rendition of Bowie’s most loved song.

          Opera singer Phillipe Jarousky, a counter tenor, surprised us all with his surprising high-pitched vocal on ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’, and Marc Almond brought back a bit of oomph with ‘Starman’ – at one point he yelled ‘Let’s take it up now’, surely a first at the Proms – and I probably wasn’t alone in wondering if he’d pull off the song’s famous octave leaps. He did, just.

It was left to John Cale to bring the evening to a close. Wearing a calf-length dress of the kind work by middle-aged ladies in drawing room plays, his white hair nicely awry, he was in fine Velvety voice, his version of ‘Valentine’s Day, sounding a bit like Tom Waits, while the full-on arrangement of ‘Sorrow’ – an odd choice though Bowie covered the Mersey’s hit on Pin Ups, of course – made it sound as if a real rock band had stumbled uninvited into the RAH. Cale’s final offering was a rather dirge-like reading of ‘Space Oddity’, his deep Welsh tones lending a degree of gravitas to the song that contrasted with Bowie’s more vulnerable interpretation of the plight of Major Tom.

          To close the evening Marc Almond led the ensemble through ‘After All’, and finally the Stargaze players took over for an instrumental version of ‘Let’s Dance’ for which the audience, clearly delighted by what they had seen and head, contributed vocals.

          I can’t help wondering what David would have made of it, though. Flattered maybe, but probably disappointed that no one who’d actually worked with him – Eno maybe – hadn’t taken part, and bemused by its earnestness. Six and a half out of ten.

(The photograph was taken from the web, credited to The Guardian)

JIMMY PAGE – The Day Jimmy Met Robert

For the last few days I have been attending to final proofs of the forthcoming book No Quarter: The Three Lives Of Jimmy Page by Martin Power that Omnibus Press will publish in September. The book is nearing completion, all 704 pages of it, and I have referred to it before on Just Backdated in a post about two instances of Page’s impressive – but largely unheralded – work as a session musician before he joined the Yardbirds and subsequently assembled Led Zeppelin.

          The extract below focuses on the first time Page and singer Robert Plant spent any time in each other’s company. It is July of 1968. Alerted to Plant’s talent by Terry Reid, Page and Zeppelin manager Peter Grant visit Birmingham to see him sing with a group called Obbstweedle and, suitably impressed, Page invites Plant down to spend a three days with him at his house in Pangbourne.

A few days [after the Obstweedle gig in Birmingham], Robert Plant took up Jimmy’s invitation to visit him in Pangbourne, walking the last mile past elegant houses that bordered the River Thames, the bright blue summer sky reflected in its shimmering surface. The contrast with the noisy, crowded streets of Wolverhampton, with its traffic and multicultural mix of Indian, Pakistani and British families, was profound; this was Middle England at its most charmingly pastoral, the setting for Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, an idyll where geese sashayed across the water and garden birds twittered in the trees. This was a land where cows munched in fields and rabbits bustled in hedgerows as the endless river flowed gently past pubs with mock Tudor beams and names like The Swan or The Jolly Angler. Sadly, despite its verdant setting and chocolate box scenery, Pangbourne didn’t take well to hippies. Soon after Plant exited the train station, he was scolded by a pensioner about his scruffy appearance. “Desperation scene, man,” he later told writer Simon Godwin, “but I had nowhere else to go.”

Legend has it that Robert brought with him LPs by Robert Johnson, the Incredible String Band, Howlin’ Wolf and Joan Baez, the latter so as to make Jimmy aware of a traditional song he liked called ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’. Arriving at the house, his knock was answered by Jimmy’s girlfriend. “The door opened and suddenly I saw ‘America’,” he told Nigel Williamson of Uncut in 2005. “There was this beautiful woman clad in a 1920s shawl with the light behind her. She was very charming. Then Jimmy came back from somewhere and I realised that this guy had a lifestyle I could only imagine. He had quietness... a maturity. Then we sat down and talked about music.”

The reality was that by the summer of 1968 Jimmy Page was a sophisticated man of the world, while in comparison Robert Plant was a cultural neophyte. Having travelled far and wide with the Yardbirds, Page had even found time for a solo trip to India, then an exotic location for Westerners. In addition, he had developed a taste for fine art and antiques that cluttered up his Pangbourne home. According to Melody Maker’s Chris Welch, who would visit there to interview Page, the house contained valuable paintings, records, model trains and many books. “A large white telescope has pride of place in the living room,” wrote Welch. “Copies of Man, Myth, and Magic lay around and a huge volume of the works of mystic Aleister Crowley. In one room was a Mutoscope, a hand-cranked seaside peepshow featuring ‘a gentleman’s downfall’, involving a lissome lass wearing not unsexy 1926 underwear and a healthy smile.”

Robert Plant, on the other hand, had travelled not much further than the West Midlands, even if he did resemble a refugee from Haight Ashbury in San Francisco with his gym pumps and snake-hipped bell-bottomed jeans. Still, there were real possibilities here. He was a tall, handsome young man with bushy blond hair that curled over his ears, and a wide, welcoming smile that lit up his friendly face; all assets in a potential vocalist. But Plant was also aware that he had some cultural catching up to do with the more seasoned, urbane Page. “You can smell when people have travelled, had their doors opened a little wider than most, and I could feel that was the deal with Jimmy,” Plant told Williamson. “His ability to absorb things and the way he carried himself was far more cerebral than anything I’d come across. I was very impressed.”

The purpose of the visit, of course, was to share music, establish compatibility within it and, hopefully, establish a friendship, and to this end ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ turned out to be the key link. Jimmy, too, loved the song and had intended playing it to Robert, a symbiotic concurrence that helped Robert pass the audition – if that was what it was – with flying colours. “I’m not sure Robert knew much about the Yardbirds but I started playing things like ‘Dazed And Confused’ and ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’,”[1] said Page. I’m not entirely sure he knew what to make of it all, but he did stick with it…” He was also impressed with Robert’s harmonica playing. “A big plus!”

In real terms, the pair bonding over ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ was incredibly important to all future progress. For Jimmy, the song exactly represented all that he wanted to achieve with his new group, its undulating structure providing the opportunity to weave between moments of musical calm and savage bursts of instrumental power (“scream to a sigh and back again,” said one critic). Equally, the song gave Robert a chance to demonstrate both his vocal range and gift for inhabiting a lyric – in this case, switching the protagonist’s gender to add an extra emotional dimension. Consequently, for a short time at least, ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’ became a pivotal moment in the fledgling band’s live show, its soft/hard qualities counterbalancing their ability to amp it up, as with material such as ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘How Many More Times’, or dial it down as with ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, but all in the space of just one tune.

 At last, Page had found his man. Plant was in.

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[1]  In some tellings of the tale, Robert did not arrive at Pangbourne with Joan Baez’s ‘Babe...’ at all, leaving Jimmy to alert the singer to the song. Whatever the case, it remains obvious that Page and Plant’s love for the tune was crucial in taking things forward between them.

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iPOD SCARE

Regular visitors to Just Backdated will have noticed that I no longer write iPod ‘Shuffle’ posts. This is because I no longer commute regularly and don’t really shuffle the songs on my iPod any more, just select what I want to hear instead. But the fragility of digitalised modern music was brought home to me about four weeks ago when, against my better judgement, I downloaded a new version of iTunes on to my laptop, in the process straining the relationship between the iPod and the laptop which necessitated a visit to the nearest Apple store to sort out. In the end it was but not before the iPod was reformatted to become compatible with the new version of iTunes, a process that for one heart-stopping moment caused me to imagine that all my music might have disappeared. It hadn’t – but I did have to synchronise the iPod again. To download all the music again, of course, would have taken months.

The upshot of this rather stressful episode was that for reasons I can’t understand some music has disappeared. On the last iPodding post here, on December 21 last, I refer to 16,635 songs but my iPod now tells me it contains 16,210, so 445 songs have somehow gone astray. Also, the figure of 16,635 ought now to be higher to take into account new songs (and there’s probably over 300) acquired this year. I have no real idea what the 445 missing songs are, and I suspect more have disappeared because the recent stuff (which I can remember) seems to be all present and correct.

One track whose absence I did notice – because I’d played it a lot around the time of his death – was the David Bowie Soulwax mash up, lasting slightly over an hour. I didn’t notice it had gone missing until I tried to play it on my iPod shortly after downloading the new format, and when I discovered it wasn’t there I checked on the laptop and it wasn’t there either. Fortunately I’d saved it elsewhere, a reflection on how much I love this homage to the great man, so I was able to reinstate it easily. As for the rest, I’ll only find out what they are if I happen to look for something and can’t find it.

There were two further side-effects to this: all the playlists I had compiled were deleted, which is easily remedied by making new ones, and the number of plays each of the 16,000+ songs had received was also lost. This meant I was no longer able to compile a list of my most played songs, as I did here on 26 June, 2014, when ‘Orphan Girl’ by Gillian Welch topped the list with 130 plays, followed by The Beatles’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (126) and Welch again with ‘Make Me Down A Pallet On Your Floor’ (124).

Although the list of plays on the iPod had disappeared into the ether, there was a list of most played on the laptop, however, but it was wildly different from its predecessor in that it consisted entirely of songs I’d bought from iTunes as opposed to CDs, and also bought fairly recently.  The reason for this is that I had synchronised my iPhone with the laptop so as to be able to transfer this music to the iPod and the number of recent plays on the phone had been registered in the iTunes folder. Why older plays on the iPhone hadn’t registered is a another mystery, a case in point being the Under The Covers albums by Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs, which I’ve listened to a lot.

Since phone calls interrupt music and won’t therefore be missed, I often listen to music on the phone and not the iPod when on a train or strolling around a supermarket. It is these plays, concentrated over a limited number of albums, that have registered highly while iPod plays, which cover 100s of albums and, in any case, will only have registered during the past four weeks, are minuscule.

But just for the hell of it, here’s how the ‘most played’ list looks today. The top six are all tracks from The War On Drugs’ album Lost In A Dream, number one ‘Under The Pressure’ with 69 plays. Ennio Morricone sneaks in at number seven with ‘Ecstasy Of Gold’, then Robert Plant with ‘Little Maggie’, then more War On Drugs and then Ravi Shankar since I find sitar music is a pleasing soundtrack to supermarket shopping. In fact, the entire top 50 consists of War On Drugs, songs from Plant’s Lullaby And.. The Ceaseless Roar album, sitar music by Shankar and Nikhil Banerjee, Morricone film music, John Fahey (I bought a Guitar Masters collection of his on line) and a girl trio called Applewood Road, which, like the Under The Covers albums, was recommended to me by old friend Richard Williams.

The 26 June, 2014, list of most played songs took several years to compile insofar as it represented the length of time I’d owned my iPod ‘Classic’ (which, regrettably, Apple discontinued in September 2014). It will therefore take several more years to compile another representative one, by which time I might have traced the missing music or – more likely – this trusty iPod will have given up the ghost and – technology being what it is – all my music will have been transferred into an appliance the size of a pin head that has been implanted into my brain from which I can select or shuffle merely by thinking about it.

PAUL SIMON – Stranger To Stranger

On his recently released album Stranger To Stranger Paul Simon addresses the problem of inequality in a wonderful new song called ‘Wristband’. Set to a brisk tempo, with prominent springy bass, busy percussion and a hint of South America, the song opens as a lament from a performer who has slipped out from the back of a venue for a smoke, only for the stage door to click shut behind him. Realising to his dismay that he isn’t wearing his back stage pass, his wristband, he must gain entry elsewhere, no easy challenge when faced with a 6’ 8’ doorman who doesn’t believe that he’s the leader of the band.

So far so good, but this interesting, potentially comical, scenario is turned on its head in the final verse wherein the wristband of the title becomes an allegory for the disparity of opportunity that plagues life in the USA and, for that matter, the UK as the recent Brexit vote surely indicates. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that instead of concluding the story – whether or not the performer regains entry to the venue – Simon lowers his tone, drops the irony of the earlier verses and cooly shifts his focus to the riots, the homeless and the ‘towns that never get a wristband, kids who can’t afford the cool brand, whose anger is a shorthand for you can’t have a wristband’ and who as a result ‘can’t get through the door’.

Simon rightly thinks highly of this new song for it is included twice on the record, the second time live, slightly sparser, the elastic bass even more prominent. His audience laughs at his predicament, only to be brought down to earth by the third verse and the realisation that there is much more to this song than the droll dilemma of an artist being locked out of his own gig.

‘Wristband’ is unquestionably the highlight of a characteristically thoughtful, well-crafted album by a master of his art who rarely, if ever, disappoints and who, now midway into his seventies, shows no sign whatsoever of flagging or resting of his laurels. He’s still pushing out new sounds and ideas. The first track ‘The Werewolf’ opens with what sounds like a spring being twanged and has a touch of rap about it, and ‘The Clock’, at 1.03 perhaps the shortest tune in Simon’s canon, is a strange, ethereal instrumental set to the ticking of a timepiece.

Elsewhere the album is a judicious blend of the second and third phases of Simon’s career, the first being his period with Art Garfunkel. ‘Street Angel’ and ‘In A Parade’ are both percussive led, ‘Cool Papa Bell’ has the rhythmic pulse of Simon’s South African expedition for Graceland, the title track ‘Stranger To Stranger’ sounds like it could have been recorded for Still Crazy After All These Years, and both ‘Insomniac’s Lullaby’ and ‘Horace And Pete’ see Simon return to his more traditional melodic acoustic style, the notes from his guitar ringing out sharp and clear as spring water. There’s also a couple of brief but lovely guitar instrumentals, ‘In The Garden Of Edie’ and ‘Guitar Piece 3’, and the edition of the album I bought on iTunes also includes a live version of ‘Duncan’, he who in one of Simon’s best ever lines ‘like a dog was befriended’.

I’ve been listening to this record for about three weeks now. Quite simply, it’s another top quality piece of work from a master craftsman.

SCOTTY MOORE

Woke up this morning to an e-mail from a friend telling me of the death of Scotty Moore, the pioneering guitarist who backed Elvis on his earliest recordings and toured with him until – like so many others – he displeased Colonel Tom Parker by asking for a fair share of the profits. So did Chips Moman, the producer who in 1968 suggested Elvis record ‘Suspicious Minds’, and who also died recently too – but at least he and Moore outlived the avaricious Parker by the best part of 20 years.

Along with producer Sam Phillips, bassist Bill Black and the Hillbilly Cat himself, Moore was a key figure when, between takes at the Sun Studios in Memphis on July 5, 1954, Elvis started hamming it up on an Arthur Crudup blues number called ‘That’s All Right’. Moore and Black joined in and Phillips rushed to set the controls. The recording was completed the same day.

As I wrote in a booklet commissioned in 1987 to accompany a Telstar Records cassette of Elvis material leased from RCA: “Although not the best of the 17 sides Elvis recorded for Phillips and his Sun Records label, ‘That’s All Right’ surely embodies the same sense of freedom a prisoner might feel on breaking loose after years in the pen. Flowing like a river in flood, the song is a showcase for Elvis’ pure high tenor, Moore’s precise guitar figures and the trio’s slapping rhythmic feel. Elvis and his two accomplices had made a dynamic debut.”

In fact, Moore was Elvis’ manager when he first started out and after being ousted by Parker managed to hang on long enough to play beautifully on many more early Elvis recordings, among them ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blues Suede Shoes’. He also appeared alongside Elvis, with Black and drummer DJ Fontana, on the TV shows in 1956 and ’57, looking for all the world as if they was born on a different planet from the boy at the front who scandalised America until censors decreed he could be shown only from the waist up.

Just about every rock guitarist who has ever learned to play has done his best to emulate the solos on Elvis’ recordings between 1955 and ’58. In a forthcoming Omnibus Press biography of Jimmy Page, author Martin Power quotes Page as saying: “The record that really made me want to play guitar was ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. When I heard that record, I just wanted to be part of it... the acoustic and electric guitars, the slap bass, those instruments seemed to generate so much energy”, and Power goes on to write: “If one were being picky, ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’’s combination of descending acoustic bassline and bouncing drums was probably more rockabilly than rock’n’roll. In the end, such distinctions were irrelevant. The instrument teasing the best out of Presley’s deliciously slurred vocal and making Jimmy’s ears pop as a result was Scotty Moore’s guitar. Elvis’s secret weapon, Moore was a man who could combine country fills, double stops and hillbilly chord twangs like the ingredients for a gourmet meal, served up on his gold Gibson ES (Electric Spanish) 295 in a way Page once described as ‘heart-stopping’. Obviously, this whole rock’n’roll thing were to be investigated, and quickly.”

Keith Richards, too, was turned around by Moore: “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, I knew what I wanted to do in life. All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play like that. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty.”

        Moore (and Black) left Elvis’ employ in 1957 over disputes with Parker. In his memoir That’s Alright, published in 1997, he claimed to have made just $8,000 in 1957 while Elvis made over a million. “We couldn’t go to talk to Elvis about anything,” he wrote. “It’s not that I feel bitterness, just disappointment.”

        Moore appeared with Elvis on the 1968 comeback TV special that saw a dramatic reversal in his fortunes, but his fee didn’t even cover his travel expenses, so he and Elvis never worked together again. Nevertheless, like many pioneering background figures from the early years of rock’n’roll, Moore was eventually feted by the guitarists he inspired, many of them British. He went on to work with Ringo, Jeff Beck and others and, despite the rancour of the Elvis situation, whenever he made appearances later in life always came across as a genial and eternally modest old soul, slightly surprised at the credit bestowed upon him, deferring always to Elvis and acting like the dignified southern gentleman he was.
        Scotty Moore died yesterday at his home in Nashville, aged 84.

    

PAUL McCARTNEY: THE BIOGRAPHY by Philip Norman

What must it be like to be Paul McCartney? Deluged by gargantuan levels of fame since the age of 21, he has remained squarely in the spotlight ever since. Other pretenders to his pop crown, not to mention Popes and Presidents, come and go but Paul, like the Queen, remains in place, the best known, most loved and most successful rock star on the planet, still at it at 73, his violin bass and cheery smile entertaining the multitudes with yet another chorus of ‘Hey Jude’. Meanwhile, having amassed a fortune as great as the Count of Monte Cristo, he somehow keeps his feet on the ground, always and forever Mr Normal.

It is a life that has been under the microscope many times before and Philip Norman is better placed than most to tell it again. The author of Shout!, the first Beatles biography to look seriously behind the deference that until its publication in 1981 had shielded the world’s greatest and best known pop group from detractors, Norman went on to write a thumping great biography of John Lennon, the Beatle he once suggested was three-quarters of the group. Now he turns his attention to the other senior Beatle who, it must be said, has good reason to detest him. Shout!, highly enjoyable and successful as it was, was so firmly on the side of John that Paul referred to it as ‘Shite’.

Adding to the debate that surrounds the publication of his bulky 850 page McCartney book is Norman’s position in the hierarchy of Beatle biographers, once unassailable but of late challenged by Mark Lewisohn, now widely recognised as the group’s foremost archivist. There is a well-defined difference between these two rivals, however. Lewisohn is a virtuoso historian, concerned with details, painstakingly unearthing previously unknown facts and anecdotes and, with scrupulous attention to accuracy, recording them at great length for posterity as demonstrated in the extraordinary Tune In, the first in what will surely become a remarkable and definitive trilogy of books that tell the Beatles’ story from birth to their formal dissolution in 1974. Norman, on the other hand, is a first-rate literary stylist, a craftsman whose elegant and evocative prose entertains, illuminates and gives pause for thought as he tells the story – the same story, of course, that he’s told twice before, at least up to 1970.

Norman begins his tale by laying his cards on the table, explaining in his introduction his difficult relationship with McCartney which seems to have finally reached a relatively amicable plateau. In what seems like a quid pro quo trade-off, McCartney has evidently given his thumbs-up to this book while Norman has revised his opinions on his subject’s contribution to the group’s music. Hatchets buried, at least for now, we’re off and Norman’s opening chapter, a heart-warming description of the National Trust ride to 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, the house where McCartney spent his formative years, is as eloquent as it is charming, bringing back memories of my own experience of this same National Trust tour in 2010.

Thereafter we get chapters on the McCartney line – in which we are informed that Jim, Paul’s dad, was one of seven siblings who owned two pairs of shoes between then, one for the boys, the other for the girls, and that since the school they attended required all pupils to be properly shod they would take turns to attend, and those that did would repeat the lessons to the others on their return – and Paul’s childhood, followed by the best part of 300 pages on The Beatles. This takes us to about halfway through the book, so the years from 1970 to 2015 occupy the second half, an imbalance that suggests Norman’s interest still rests with the sixties.

It’s an all too familiar story now; how Paul met John at the village fete, joined the Quarrymen who morphed into The Beatles, who learned their trade in Hamburg and at the Cavern, became managed by Brian Epstein who smartened them up for George Martin to light the fuse beneath the firework called Beatlemania. Nevertheless, it is to Norman’s credit that in this, his third time of telling the same story, he still manages to inject it with the magic it deserves, even though this is a more streamlined version. This telling, however, not only shifts the focus towards McCartney but also presents him in a more favourable light than in either Shout! or his Lennon book. Tony Sheridan, for example, states: “Watching them, I used to think that Paul could probably make it without John, but John was never going to make it without Paul”, a particularly strong quote that I couldn’t find in either of his previous books. This surely implies that for this book Norman has adopted a selective policy that favours McCartney.

If it’s well told – and it is – I can enjoy the Beatles’ story again, even if there’s nothing much new of note here. That’s Lewisohn’s job, though even he would be impressed by details such as how Jane Asher’s father taught himself to write his signature upside down so as not to waste time turning around letters handed to him by his secretary. There is, however, new – or at least expanded – material about McCartney himself, and Norman is particularly strong on his close relationship with his father Jim and warm attitude towards his second wife that in time would cool; also his relationship with Jane Asher who, as ever, remains decorously mute, and Paul’s voracious appetite for other girls; his fondness for soft drugs and immersion in London’s alternative culture, led by my friend Barry Miles, which finally puts to the sword any ideas that John was the Beatles’ avant-garde envelope pusher; and family life at Peasmarsh and elsewhere in which Paul and Linda excel as parents. Throughout all this the group’s music seems to take a secondary role, perhaps because Norman realises it’s all been covered so well before, though he delights in hinting how real experiences find their way into Paul’s songs.

Linda’s arrival in Paul’s life is covered in great detail – as it should be – and she, along with Yoko, are held responsible for the break up of the group. As it fragments after Epstein’s death, Norman puts forward a convincing case against the wisdom of hiring Allen Klein to oversee their affairs, the implication being that if the other three had adopted McCartney’s suggestion that Lee Eastman, his father-in-law, be given the job they would all have benefitted to a far greater degree – and John and Paul might even have hung on to Northern Songs. In the event it was not to be, the malice clouding John’s judgement and upsetting the applecart to everyone’s detriment. Paul can be forgiven for being smug when it turns out he was right all along.

And so on to the solo years during which Paul, who always enjoyed performing, becomes the only Beatle to do so regularly (at least until Ringo formed his All Starr Band). Band On The Run (and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’) aside, Paul’s music thereafter rarely reached the heights it did when John was egging him on, and though Norman feels duty bound to cover it in detail there a sense of dutiful ennui to his coverage thereof. Of more interest is the coverage of the Japanese jaunt that saw Paul briefly jailed for importing marijuana, which Norman relates in fine detail, as he does with Linda’s decline and McCartney’s disastrous marriage to the dislikeable Heather Mills.[1]

Linda’s death clearly robbed McCartney of the rock on which he’d built his life, so in her absence seems to have been a bit of a loose cannon. Never one to defer to others, apart from her, we are presented with a man who is known to everyone but surprisingly isolated. Not even his children can prevent this ill-advised union, the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ syndrome having proved his undoing. Fortunately, in the closing chapters of Norman’s book the darkness is exchanged for light with the arrival of the far more suitable Nancy Shevell.

With regard to flaws, I feel duty bound to reiterate comments from other reviewers in that Wings was never a ‘glam rock’ band and that ‘God Save The Queen’ by the Sex Pistols was not a punk-style pastiche of the National Anthem, even if they do share the same title. More importantly, for a book that purports to be a definitive biography of McCartney I could find no discussion of his remarkable skills as a bass player, one of the best in the business. Having myself written a 2,000+ word introduction to a Beatles songbook aimed specifically at bass players (http://justbackdated.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/paul-his-basses.html), I find this unforgiveable, a very serious deficiency.[2]

As Norman brings the story up to date we learn how McCartney finally become reconciled to his past, realising in the end that this was where the love was made, and performing hugely enjoyable, ultra-professional concerts that continue to be celebrations of The Beatles. He is also resigned to forever being second, the second Beatle, after John but before George and Ringo. Indeed, Philip Norman perhaps recognises this as well, choosing to write first about Lennon and then McCartney, albeit with greater insight and depth with this book.

---

[1] I became convinced that this lady has a very distant relationship with the truth when she let it be known that when Paul smoked marijuana he became violent towards her; anyone with the slightest experience of cannabis use knows perfectly well it has the exact opposite effect. I wholeheartedly concur with the judge who firmly rejected her evidence during the divorce proceedings, reproduced here in all its fantasy detail.

[2] Other errors: a suggestion that The Who would have been managed by Nems had Robert Stigwod taken over is well wide of the mark. Joni Mitchell did not perform at Woodstock. Denny Laine was not a member of the Incredible String Band (it was the Electric String Band) and he is incorrectly identified as Jimmy McCulloch (and vice versa) in a photo in the third plate section. The Troubador in LA is certainly not ‘super-chic’. McCartney did not buy his MPL offices in Soho Square in 1977 but acquired the floors of the building one by one as they became empty from 1972 onwards, completing the ‘set’ in 1977 when he brought about a full scale refurbishment. Finally, I don’t believe Paul ever played a Fender bass on stage, as implied on page 627.

ABBA REUNITE (AGAIN) - The Truth

Reports that the four members of Abba performed together on Sunday night for the first time since 1981 seem to have been exaggerated, at least according to my well informed source who was with them at the Berns Salonger, a posh restaurant attached to a hotel in Stockholm. Not only didn’t the quartet all perform together but the songs that were performed, firstly by the boys alone and secondly the girls, were different from those reported in the press.

The occasion was the 50^th anniversary of the date when Björn Ulvaeus first met Benny Andersson, on June 5, 1966, at a pop festival on the Ålleberg hill, three miles southeast of the town of Falköping. At the time Björn was a member of The Hootenanny Singers while Benny was the keyboard player with The Hep Stars, and both bands happened to be playing the festival that day. Afterwards, at the hotel where The Hep Stars were staying in Linköping, the two future Abba songwriters were introduced and ended up with playing guitars together, sitting in a park until the sun came up, singing songs by The Beatles and The Kingston Trio.

Not surprisingly Björn and Benny never forgot their equivalent of the Woolton church fete and, on Sunday, 50 years to the day, they were joined by the female half of Abba, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, to whom they were once married, to celebrate. That much seems to have been reported accurately enough by the media but that’s as far as it went.

“Contrary to reports, the four of them didn’t actually sing together,” I am told by my spy, who was present at the event. “Agnetha and Frida sang ‘The Way Old Friends Do’ and then Björn and Benny came onstage afterwards. But [there was] no actual group singing. The last number before Agnetha and Frida was Björn singing ‘Does Your Mother Know’ with Benny playing the piano.”

According to the erroneous reports the quartet sang ‘Me And I’, their ‘1980 hit’. Not only wasn’t ‘Me And I’ a hit – it was an album track from the Super Trouper LP, released that year – but they never sang it. “What happened was that the emcee introduced Agnetha and Frida by saying they were going to perform a song called ‘You And I’, which are the first words of the lyrics for ‘The Way Old Friends Do’,” reports my insider. “He should have known better, but there you go. Then one of the guests leaving the party told a reporter outside that they’d performed a song called ‘You And I’. And then the media must have concluded that “there’s no ABBA song entitled ‘You And I’ – oh, I guess they meant ‘Me And I’”. Voilá – a rubbish story is born.”

          Just Backdated – not necessarily first with the news but at least we get it right!

TIGHT BUT LOOSE - JPJ & BP Fallon's Story

Perhaps because fame wasn’t to his taste, perhaps because – as the consummate professional – he regarded his employment between 1968 and 1980 as just another gig (albeit a very lucrative one) or perhaps because he thinks he has less to lose than Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, but John Paul Jones has kept himself largely to himself since Led Zeppelin called it a day in 1980. Truth is he’s the kind of rock star I’d like to have been, acclaimed for his musicianship, richly rewarded yet unrecognised on the street. When I worked at Music Sales John Paul would come into our offices from time to time to meet with his publisher on the 5^th floor, usually dressed in jeans and a scuffed jacket, and tell me whether or not the tube was crowded. The tube? Page and Plant are less likely to be seen on the tube than senior members of the Royal Family, unless of course they’re opening a new line named after them.

So it’s nice to see the eternally modest John Paul on the cover of the latest Tight But Loose, Dave Lewis’ superior Led Zeppelin fanzine which arrived this week. Inside he talks about what he’s up to (with a brief mention of his work for Dave Rawlings, musical partner of the very wonderful Gillian Welch) and a bit about his past and his thoughts on his legacy. No one ever seemed to want to interview John Paul in my Melody Maker days and he didn’t seem to mind one iota, happy as he was to do his job properly like the craftsman he is, and go home afterwards. Nevertheless, when he does decide to talk he’s forthcoming, friendly and comes across as the Mr Nice Guy he's always been.

Of equal interest, at least to me because I used to know him well, is an interview with BP Fallon, the impish Irish PR who took on the Led Zeppelin brief around 1973 and hung around doing the same job on and off until 1980. Having previously worked for EG management (King Crimson, ELP, Roxy Music) and Marc Bolan, BP’s arrival in the Zep camp took most of us by surprise, not least because he didn’t share the aggressive tendencies associated with their management. In the event this was a bonus. Already well liked by the press for his laid-back otherworldliness, BP was ideal for easing the rather touchy relationship between band and media that developed after the merits of Led Zeppelin III came under scrutiny in 1970.

Jimmy Page with BP Fallon aboard the Starship in 1973, photo by Bob Gruen

Whenever BP rang me up with some news about a client he would open the conversation by announcing: “Hey man, I need to lay a verbal on you.” He never ceased to fascinate, to intrigue. Nevertheless, like the eternally absent-minded Simon Puxley with Roxy Music, PR for BP was really just a hook on which to hang his hat. His real skill was advising his clients on how best to present themselves to the world, and in so doing to engender sympathetic media coverage at a time when the UK music press was becoming far less deferential towards the artists that peopled its pages. When Bolan was in danger of becoming a trifling teen-idol, BP gave him integrity, and when Led Zeppelin appeared too high and mighty, BP did his best to present them as humans, not quite cuddly but certainly less belligerent than their reputation suggested. Also, there was an obvious affinity with Jimmy Page; both of them small, dark and a bit mysterious, sometimes whimsical, sometimes deep, and both of them powerful magnets for immensely attractive women. After Zep BP went on to work for U2 for a spell, wearing a laminate that read: ‘Guru, Viber & DJ’ – a perfect job description really.

Elsewhere Tight But Loose contains the usual news of what Page, Plant and Jones have been up to, information about records, gigs (including a Deborah Bonham Band show at which Plant got up to sing ‘When The Levee Breaks’ and ‘Shakin’ All Over’) and bootlegs, opinions from fans and everything else the committed Zep fan needs to know. It’s also nice to know that the three men who inspire the magazine’s success and continuing existence now so appreciate the work that Dave does on their behalf that they are happy to support it in the way they do.