My Pop Life #266 : All In Love Is Fair – Stevie Wonder

All of fate’s a chance
It’s either good or bad
I tossed my coin to say
In love with me you’d stay
But all in war is so cold
You either win or lose
When all is put away
The losing side I’ll play

A version of this blog will be appearing in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back for more details.

RB

My Pop Life #232 : C’mon – Man

C’mon   –   Man

it’s better than doin’ nothing
it’s better than sittin’ round thinking of yourself
Get up !  c’mon
Get up…c’mon 

*

The summer of 1973.  I’m thinking right now it was the most carefree moment of my entire life.  Just turned 16.  Just finished my ‘O’ Levels.  Hardest exams ever, but they were done.  Free.  In a band.  Happy.  Just happy to smoke dope, drink beer, listen to music, chat to friends.  My family was Ok, by which I mean no crisis for the moment, but I didn’t spend much time there anymore.  My friends and family were in Lewes, 25 miles away.  Sixth form coming up – a long way off, with no exams for two whole years.  A-levels were the distant horizon.  Let’s face it, my recollections are fuzzy, and so are the photographs….

maybe 16, maybe 17 in Hailsham, East Sussex. Youth.

Then it was summer holidays.  I had tickets to Reading Festival, as advertised in Melody Maker with some of my favourite groups –  Rod Stewart & The Faces (who I’d seen the year before My Pop Life #128), The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Status Quo among others.

Before that treat were lazy hazy days in East Sussex and a holiday up in Scotland with Simon Korner’s family.  They’d rented a cottage on The Isle of Arran…in a little village called Lochranza on the north coast.   Simon and I decided to hitch-hike up from Lewes.  Would we make the last ferry from Ardrossan in Ayrshire?  Would we even get there?

Simon had emerged as a close friend earlier that year when I’d stayed with his family in St Henry’s Road while Mum was in hospital.  Nerves they called it.  I wrote a little bit about it in My Pop Life #64 ‘Fresh Garbage’.

I think it was 1973 when Simon became my best friend.  We both had other friends of course.  He had Mathew Ford, Chris Clark and Patrick Freyne, one of the year above boys.  I had Conrad Ryle and Martin Cooper in particular, and soon, Andy Holmes.  But I think Simon and I liked each other kind of unreservedly already.

Simon and I hitched up in late July and got to the ferry terminal in Ardrossan at about 10pm.  The ferry was not there, but the gangplank was, so we unrolled out sleeping bags and slept on it.  Woken at dawn by seagulls and the sun, and caught the ferry across to the island. Arran.  It’s one of those places that looks spectacular from every angle.

The crossing of the Firth of Clyde was an hour, and breakfast was available on board.  We were scruffy and unwashed of course, but that was the fashion in 1973 for teenage boys.  Maybe it still is.  The town of Brodick welcomed us and upon perusing our handy map (no phones then kids) found the road out north to Lochranza and stuck out our thumbs.  A yellow ex-GPO transit van pulled over after about 30 minutes, they were going our way, perfect.

Two fellas up front, Simon and I were in the back of the van with our rucksacks amid a heap of random rubbish, a mattress, papers, and a football which I sat on against the side of the van.  It was an hour’s journey more or less.  As we started a long gentle downhill road from Sannox to Lochranza they sped up somewhat – they could see nothing ahead for a mile – and then, remembering that we couldn’t see out of the windows really, apart from glimpses through the front window – something extraordinary happened.

I felt the side of the van disappear behind me as the doors I was leaning on opened and I started to fall, ever so slowly backwards out of the van and into the air towards the road.  I distinctly remember thinking, because I had the time to do so, that it felt like I was doing some kind of James Bond stunt in slow motion and perhaps if

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I hit the ground with a thump and instantaneously went into fast forward backward somersaults once twice thrice four times before the absurd circus act stopped abruptly and all was still.  I was on my back at the side of the road, head facing downhill legs up.  I dare not move in case of pain. I would lie there for a while until I felt braver.  There was grass on my right, road on my left where my hand was.  I moved my fingers one at a time, then my wrist, my arm, twitched my shoulder. The right hand and arm.  The feet, one at a time.  Nothing was broken.

I could hear a voice behind me shouting my name.  I didn’t move yet.  Simon got there first and then the two ashen-faced scotsmen.  They helped me stand up, checked that all was in working order.  My trousers were ripped right across my arse.  That was about it.  Everyone was shaken, disbelieving.  It was a kind of miracle that I didn’t land on my head because to quote Johnny Moped “Crack afore the skull, blow the skull open, OK?” * The van reversed back up the hill and I got into the front seat.  By the time we got to Lochranza I felt lucky, indestructible, magic.  The fellas dropped us off and – according to Simon because I do not recall this – we both ran up the fell opposite the house because we were the first there.

The others arrived – Shirley, Joe, Jess and Shirley’s friend Noreen Ford and it was decided to call a nurse the next day because there appeared to be some of the road left in my buttocks.   She was a cheery young woman who cleaned it up and put a dressing on the rather sore area.  I should note that I didn’t fancy her.  She came every day for about four days as I recall.  She would arrive in uniform then briskly announce her task “Good morning Ralph, I’ve come to change the dressing on your bem”  You have to read it in a Scottish Accent!  At some point around here Martin Cooper arrived.  He was a proper carrot-top redhead with pale skin and blue eyes.  We’d become friends via the school football team, and subsequent visits to The Goldstone Ground in Brighton to see The Albion.  Martin wasn’t like the rest of my friends – he didn’t take drugs, or grow his hair, or play records.  He and I would become political allies in the 6th form when we became Head and Deputy Head Boy.   I wrote about him a bit in My Pop Life #70 : The Stylistics.  Simon had long fair hair and brown eyes, I was bushy-haired with grey/green/blue eyes and slightly darker skinned than both which is odd, perhaps.  Simon tells me that he felt slightly challenged by Coops’ presence now, as if competing for my brotherly love.

Goat Fell in the mist and the ferry to Claonaig leaving Lochranza

Coops and I it was who made the journey to Goat Fell, hitching back up that same road to Brodick Castle then walking through the grounds and up the rocky path.  It was a stiff climb but stunning at the top.  Highest point of the island, which is all peaks.  We shared a mighty joke at the top when we noticed a man walking up the path, no sweat, perfect clothes, not a hair out of place. When he reached the summit – we were on the east side by now looking at southern Scotland – he stopped and gazed at the horizon with strange purpose then pfffft opened a can of Tizer as if he was in some cheesy advert.  Fuck me it was hilarious.  We had to duck behind a boulder to laugh hysterically.

Lochranza, Isle of Arran

Other days we went onto the beach.  Clear water, so much clearer than the English Channel in Sussex.  We took the ferry north to Claonaig one day on the Mull of Kintyre then took it back to Lochranza.  I suspect we smoked some dope and read books too.  Simon was reading Sons and Lovers by D.H Lawrence.  I cannot remember what I was reading but I was into Dostoyevsky at the time.  It was all bliss.  We talked about the incident, and Simon felt that the van had been going about 50 mph, which would account for my absurd rolling backwards down the hill.  I don’t remember any aches or bruises – apart from the obvious – but maybe time heals.  Ot maybe I just bounced.  The trousers – kind of blue flares with a black stripe pattern – were ruined and binned.  I must have had a pair of jeans with me. Or borrowed some?

Scotland is so beautiful.  It was my first time back since I was one year old.

Dad and me, 1958.  Scotland

And I have been back many times since, especially to the West Coast, which is where I suspect I am in the photo above.  My Dad had just finished at Cambridge University and we went on holiday with his friend Tony Inglis and his wife.  I don’t remember it obviously but it is nice to have this picture of us enjoying ourselves.   Jenny and I have been to Iona & Mull, the Kintyre peninsula, Fort William, Arisaig and Skye together on three separate occasions, (twice with cats!).  I’ve been to Edinburgh many times (3 – Ed.) as a fledgling actor (see My Pop Life #140 Carly Simon), visited Shetland when Mark Williams did a gig up there, worked in Glasgow a few times on TV shows, went to Aviemore and Inverness one year.  It is a beautiful part of the world.  I’ve always fancied the Hebrides, especially since my university buddy Lewis actually came from Lewis.  Not Lewes.  Another story.

Bright clear air, bleak moorland, heather everywhere, wild flowers, rocky outcrops, sheep, water close by, streams and rivers. Mist.  Nurses who dress your bem.  It’s all good. But all good things must come to pass and thus the day came to say farewell to Korners Coopers and Fords and hitch-hike south to Reading and the Festival.  I cannot remember this journey at all.  It is quite possible that Martin Cooper hitched south with me, because I have a vague memory of us camping together in Newbury on the side of the road near a nuclear power plant?  Perhaps we even went to Reading together?  All assistance gratefully received, and apologies to Martin if indeed it was he, for it would have been a dry run for our giant intrepid hitchhiking escapade behind the Iron Curtain two years later to Budapest (see My Pop Life #70 The Stylistics)

I’d been to Reading the previous year which was something of a vintage line-up (see My Pop Life #103) and particularly dug the Welsh band Man who’d played Saturday afternoon.  Lovely groovy guitar work, intermeshing riffs with a tone a little like Joe Walsh my guitar hero, but a vibe all their own.  I’d come back from Reading 72 and bought the LP Be Good To Yourself At Least Once A Day the following spring.  Rumours that it referred to wanking, which was big news in 1973 (he flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor – Bowie’s Time) could not be verified.  The 1st track on side two Bananas was certainly about dope though :

I like to eat bananas cos they got no bones I like marijuana cos it gets me stoned

The LP had a quite splendid gatefold-out map of Wales as a cartoon to enjoy while listening and smoking :

I can’t remember who else liked this record but I’ll plump for Tat, who played guitar in Rough Justice, the band I was playing in.  It has a certain sound which takes me right back to those carefree days of 1972/3 – it’s certainly of its time in that respect.  They have riffage in abundance and twin lead attack like Wishbone Ash or Blue Öyster Cult, they have a terrific organist on top like Osibisa or Greenslade (my discovery of Reading 73), a warmth to the vibe like Jo Walsh or Spirit, a sense of humour like Gentle Giant or Status Quo.  They weren’t trying to be American blues or country.  Just a good band.

Reading 73 wasn’t as good as 72 but had its highlights.  Rod Stewart & The Faces were going through the motions a bit.  Ronnie Lane had left and we had Tetsu on bass like the year before… thus I’ve never seen Ronnie Lane with the Faces.  What was good about early Reading Festivals was the open-minded spirit that meant you could see The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and French bands like Magma or Italian bands alongside folk, rock or even >gasp< R’n’B or jazz – George Melly’s Feetwarmers or Johnny Otis.  And even country which would become the sound of the early seventies. The Eagles didn’t play Reading but they were huge.  We watched the mighty Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen with hoedown fiddles and harmonica and accordion along with the slide guitars and speeded up bluegrass country rock.  Quite tremendous.  Then there was the beer-can throwing vibe in 1973, a practice which I believe has continued to this day.  Some slightly heavy scenes too.  But we – whoever we were – just got stoned & enjoyed the music .  It was the year of feeling carefree and not worrying, of being giggly and stoned and untouchable, miraculously unbreakable, free.

Rory Gallagher was amazing by contrast playing the Irish blues.  He could play.  *

The police walked around a bit busting people for dope.  Pretty shit really but you could see them coming for miles off because they weren’t blending in very well.

Sunday afternoon was a treat – in retrospect at least because I hadn’t heard of these people – because we got Tim Hardin (If I Was A Carpenter, Reason To Believe), Lesley Duncan and…

John Martyn with Danny Thompson, soon to be a hero on the University and drink circuit (see My Pop Life #153 Small Hours).    And of course we had Genesis again.  They did more or less the same set as the previous summer, ie Supper’s Ready, The Knife, Hogweed, Musical Box – but with different sets and costumes.  Peter Gabriel had gone full theatrical.  In fact I recall that the set opened with him suspended from a rig 25 feet above the stage inside a pyramid with his head poking out the top.  Having just written and remembered that I cannot find any evidence of it on the internet.  But I saw it readers.

Gabriel at Reading 1973

I found their songs kind of indigestible though frankly and although I enjoyed the costumes and the undoubted musicianship of Tony Banks, Steve Hackett and Phil Collins the only song of theirs which I almost liked is called Firth of Fifth from the LP Selling England By The Pound which they’d recorded a few days earlier, but revealed none of in the live set.  It was released in October with a single I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe.  Whatever…

Look at these guys*

That was me that was.  Reading Festival, August 1973. 16 years old. Stoned, drunk, skinny and couldn’t care less.  Precious moments.

*all photographs taken by kind permissions – credit to Vin Miles, Steve Austin, Stan Was, Gareth Tynan, Peter Kelly from the website http://ukrockfestivals.com/reading-73.html

My Pop Life #165 : My Love – Paul McCartney & Wings

My Love   –   Paul McCartney & Wings

my love holds the other key to me…

 I bought the Wings LP Red Rose Speedway in the spring of 1973 because of the single My Love which had got to number one.  I thought it was McCartney’s best effort since the Beatle’s split – or to be fair at least as good as Another Day from 1971.  The album Red Rose Speedway was vilified and booed from the rafters.  Critics scorned it.  Schoolkids in the 5th year weren’t having it.  Pink Floyd & Led Zeppelin had taken over.  Roxy Music had arrived. David Bowie was blowing our minds.  Elton John was on the Yellow Brick Road and Genesis were Selling England by the Pound.  Everyone was still growing their hair.  Wearing loons, stack heels, denim, embroidered shirts, tear-drop collars.  Were we hippies, greasers, bikers, rude boys or what.  Marvin was Getting It On and Stevie was having Innervisions – I wouldn’t hear that until the following year.  The Isleys had a summer breeze on.  And Hawkwind were delivering Sonic Attack (see My Pop Life #159).  Confusing.  Which tribe to join ?  All, and none.  This photo is from early ’73 :

Ralph, Andrew, Paul, Rebecca 1973

and henceforth I will use any excuse to place it into the blog.  You can see the clash of fashions already.  Hippie with a fringe ?  Macca influenced.  Hippie with a teardrop collar ??  Be your own judge.  I love this picture.  Happiness, innocence, time frozen in an instant.  1973 was a big year for me.  I turned 16 in June.  Took my first LSD trip (see My Pop Life #133), lost my virginity, joined a band (see My Pop Life #80).   But I didn’t join the army, get married or go to prison.  My uneventful pop life.  

Paul McCartney has always made me feel comfort, happiness, sweet feelings, those fleeting safe feelings that major chords and harmonies can bring.  This LP has no edges of any kind.  I think the harshest moment is on the song Single Pigeon when Paul sings

“did she throw you out?  Sunday morning fight about Saturday night”

Which is entirely not harsh in any way.  Otherwise my loves, it’s My Love, Lazy Dynamite, One More Kiss, Hold Me Tight, Hands Of Love and probably my favourite Wings song Little Lamb Dragonfly.  I should have chosen it as the song, but it’s not as good as My Love.  It’s a little indulgent, a little long, and little soft and gentle.  That’s why I love it.  This LP is like a big barn bed covered in a warm blanket with a log fire, a view of the valley and warm slippers with a cat or three lying around.  And what’s wrong with that ?  I’d like to know.  Cos here I go again…

Denny Seiwell, Linda McCartney, Paul, Denny Laine, Henry McCulloch

McCartney was always derided by groovers for being too pop.  Too soppy.  Too lovey dovey.  “Lennon gave him the edge” is the concept.  Together they were great, they lifted each other to higher standards, pushed each other and then when they split and wrote as solo artists, apart, well we all moved on didn’t we ?  Nothing to see here.   It’s like a permanent talent show with judges stroking their chins, thumbs down for that, naaah mate.

But you miss so much music that way.  Let it be.  Let him be.  After the Ram LP, which critics hated, Paul and Linda made two edgy singles that were both banned : Give Ireland Back To The Irish which was a political response to Bloody Sunday and which was referred to on the chart countdown (#16) as “a song by Wings“, and in December ’72 the raunchy sex’n’drugs boogie Hi Hi Hi  which contained the line

“gonna make you lie on the bed get you ready for my body gun“

except that Paul always insisted, and still does, that the lyrics actually say  “polygon” but such was the BBC in 1972.  The song also certainly claims that he is

“going to do you, do it to you sweet banana, like you’ve never been done…. ” 

Whatever that means.  The B-side C Moon got the radio airplay.

I love this early period Wings/McCartney stuff.  They were having fun.  I love that the band were named after the difficult birth of Stella, Linda and Paul’s 2nd child, which was touch and go at the time and a worried Paul had visions of angels protecting his child, and Wings came from that moment of panic, faith and trust.  I love that they toured England in the spring of 1972 without a tour being booked, they drove up the motorway in a van and phoned Nottingham Students Union and said “can we play there tonight?”  This was repeated up and down the country.  Great scenes.  Didn’t play any Beatles songs.  At all.  But the music of this period is joyous and lovely.  For example – the harmonies of Linda McCartney on Red Rose Speedway are a wonder on almost every song – not the expected thirds and fifths but way more adventurous and unexpected.  Lovely.  Lennon and McCartney did have this much in common as they left the greatest group of all time to strike out on their own – they didn’t want to do it on their own.  Yoko and John worked together musically right up to his untimely death in 1980.  She was his confidante, his editor, his collaborator.  And famously, Linda joined Wings along with Denny Laine from The Moody Blues and was given a keyboard and shown middle C.  And despite ridicule (from males mainly), her contributions are really excellent.  Linda sings the high harmony on Let It Be by the way pop fans…

Ram is a fantastic album, credited to Paul & Linda McCartney

…while Red Rose Speedway is credited to Paul McCartney & Wings.  Gentle, undemanding cosy beautiful songs from people in love.  I don’t need all my music to thrust and challenge and have edge.  I don’t need my life to feel like that either.  I play it all the time.

My Love starts with a long sustained A natural, then ‘falls’ into a Bb major seventh chord for the opening line

“and when I go away I know my heart will stay with my love”

which musicians will know is actually a semitone UP from A, which means that it rises, but it sounds as if it falls.  How does this work ?  The A is the major seventh of Bb – a favourite chord of Bacharach – but that’s the magic of music.   Beautiful chords on this song.  When they recorded My Love McCartney had planned to play the guitar solo after the bridge, but Henry McCulloch who’d joined Wings after playing with Joe Cocker, (and who wouldn’t turn up for the Band On The Run sessions in Lagos, Nigeria which followed this LP), insisted (as far as one can insist with a Beatle I’m imagining) that Paul allowed him to play the guitar solo.  And the result is rather marvellous.  In fact the production on this song is outstanding, understated horns and strings, a lovely clipped guitar, harmonies from Linda, prominent fat bass as ever on a Paul song, subtle tasteful drums.  It’s a beauty.  He may never have surpassed this song since 1973.

with James, Stella and Mary later in 73

I’ll find out for myself on Sunday since we have two tickets to see McCartney at Meadowlands in New Jersey.  Been a long time since I saw him playing live.   1979 at Wembley.  Live and Let Die was the standout that night, recorded during the Red Rose Speedway sessions but produced by George Martin – all lasers and smoke – while at the other end of the scale a solo acoustic I’ve Just Seen A Face followed by Blackbird was breathtaking.  He didn’t do much Beatles in those days, still looking over his shoulder, running from his legacy,  and trying to create a new one.  These days he plays for three hours and crams them all in, Beatles, John songs, George songs, the lot.  Can’t wait.

This is Jenny’s favourite Paul McCartney song.   She thinks it matches God Only Knows and Just The Way You Are (Paul’s favourite songs that he wishes he’d written).  High praise indeed !   I share a birthday with Paul McCartney.  And I Love Him.

My Pop Life #159 : Sonic Attack – Hawkwind

Sonic Attack   –   Hawkwind

In case of sonic attack on your district, follow these rules
If you are making love it is imperative
To bring all bodies to orgasm simultaneously

Do not waste time blocking your ears
Do not waste time seeking a sound proofed shelter
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible

Not all music is the food of love.  Some music is challenging, ugly, vicious, cruel and cold.  Many of my friends like certain bands who perpetrate these kinds of musics.  There is almost a family tree which runs from The Velvet Underground throughout guitar music which is bleak and discordant.  Deliberately so.  It’s not for me.  Not much anyway, which is why the vast majority of this blog has been melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, beautiful in one way or another.  But of course that’s not the whole story, of my life or any other.  Music has been used for war and torture ever since the trumpets sounded out against the walls of Jericho.  Eminem was used extensively in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, as was Christina Aguilera.  There are theories that early hunters used music to lure animals into the open.  Guitars are strung with catgut – the word for sheep or goat intestines.  Horn instruments originally were the actual horns of beasts.

I first heard Hawkwind’s Space Ritual when I was tripping in the early summer of 1973.  Andrew Taylor – Tat – had bought it – and invited a group round to listen, handing out the microdots first.  Tiny little black dots which I knew from experience (see My Pop Life #133 ) were powerful.  I’d already done acid – once.  I was just sixteen years old, it was 1973, I was in Lewes, East Sussex, with Tat, Martin Elkins, Jon Foreman and Pete Smurthwaite.   Adrian Birch declined to trip and thus became the steady hand on the tiller of the next 12 hours.  Always a good idea we found.  We ‘came up’ sitting around and smoking joints in Tat’s bedroom and Hawkwind were playing live.  When Sonic Attack blistered through the speakers into my warping brainwaves I was fully tripping and I almost freaked the fuck out.  Perhaps privately I did because I can still remember the flickering light and vibrating forms of my friends who seemed unfeasibly OK.

 The hollowed-out voice of Robert Calvert, entirely lacking in compassion but brimming with arch, vitriolic & dripping disdain shattered my illusions of hippy bliss, sharing, getting stoned with mates…

Think Only Of Yourself (yourself)

A horrible little elfin voice echoed the first one – is it Nik Powell the sax player or Dave Brock the leader of the gang ?  Chilling, evil, wrong.  Ice trickled down my spine.  Some of the lads found it funny, especially Jon Foreman who’d also laughed hysterically at The Exorcist which we all went to see that summer (for another post)…  Tat chuckled knowingly to himself and poked a biro down a circular rizla tube, evening-out the tobacco and hashish mixture.  We only smoked hash in 1973 – it was all we could get.  Afghani black, Red Leb or Moroccan Gold mainly.  With tobacco.  Old Holborn, Golden Virginia or occasionally a Number Six.

Every man for himself…..
Statistically more people survive if they think
Only of themselves….

Was this some kind of test ?  Does taking LSD always have to invoke some kind of demonistic energy ?  Calvert’s english voice haunts this LP, and it does not comfort the listener at all.  It stares out at the void of Space and finds it to be NOTHING.

We walked out of the house after a while, perhaps a cup of tea had levelled things off (always calming) and climbed the steep downland path above Tat’s house.  He lived on South Street, at the end of Cliffe High Street and below the great chalk cliff which looms above the River Ouse at the east end of Lewes.  Up we went towards the golf course, and found a grassy outlook point overlooking the river, the whole town, what felt like half of East Sussex.

Perfect.  I remember little of what happened after that, except that we wandered through Lewes, hallucinating gently.  But I never forgot the chills of Sonic Attack, and they were to reappear the next time I took acid too, on Kingston Ridge with Andy Shand, in the middle of the night.  Or maybe it was the same trip

The great mythology around LSD was that everything that happened to you came from inside you, that if you can’t handle acid, you can’t handle yourself.  Your own fears, your own demons.  You wanna see them ?  Actually see them ?  I realised too late, sitting high on the hillside with Andy at 2.00 a.m. that yes, he relished this aspect of the drug.  As the few cars on the A27 echoed into splinters of sound pierced by starlight, he announced without protocol or reason two words :

Elephant’s Vagina

He didn’t laugh, and neither did I.  I suddenly found him to be rather weird.  He said it again.  I think I might have asked him why he’d said it.  His answer was equivocal.  We walked down the hill and he sang a few lines of Black Sabbath :

“what is this that stands before me ?  A figure in black who watches me…“

Again, I wasn’t full of joy at this image either.   My vulnerability increased.  I was panicking really.  We were in Waterlilies that night, home of The Ryles (see My Pop Life #47 ) and for some reason Tat was sleeping in Conrad’s room with Elvira his girlfriend.  At one point I couldn’t stand Andy’s incessant embrace of the darkness any longer so I woke Tat up.  Must’ve been about 4.00am  He glowed a pale lilac in the moonlight.  Even as I tripped I was aware that he was tired.  He counselled me words of wisdom :

It’s just the acid.  It will wear off.  

At which point Andy came in with the cat in his hands, put it down and said :

Urgh… I can feel all it’s bones and innards…

I felt vindicated by this public display of uncool dark glee and drifted back to the kitchen for the apparent organic downer of orange juice as Tat went back to sleep.  I was convinced that I had unearthed a vital precious stone, a clue to my so-called friendship with Andy Shand.  We had absolutely nothing in common.  Christ !

Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones
You have only a few seconds to escape
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die

Do not panic…

Hawkwind were based around the figure of Dave Brock, a spaced guitarist from Notting Hill in West London, and neighbour of the writer Michael Moorcock.  Full-on greatcoat-wearing acid-casualty hippies, the band were pioneers of the Stonehenge Free Festival, (which happened to be the next time I took acid the following summer) and they also pioneered a smoky but eerie space rock sound.  The only bands that sounded remotely like Hawkwind in 1973 were Can, Neu! and Amon Duul II, German garage rock now seen as seminal.  We didn’t listen to them.  We didn’t know them.  Masters Of The Universe was our big Hawkwind record, and of course Silver Machine, the single from 1972 which allowed them to mount the huge Live experience which was The Space Ritual Tour, with synths & electronics courtesy of Del Dettmar and DikMik, dancers like the legendary Stacey, lights and smoke, weed and the words of Michael Moorcock, the walking bass guitar of Lemmy Kilmister and the thundering drums of Simon King.

Michael Moorcock I did know,  for Tat and I were immersed in the world of Jerry Cornelius, hero of a quartet of Moorcock novels :

The Final Programme

                    A Cure For Cancer

                 The English Assassin

              The Condition of Muzak

which I thought (aged 16) were flipping marvellous, but I didn’t make the connection to Hawkwind – or at least I certainly didn’t realise that Moorcock had written the words to Sonic Attack.  Would I have forgiven him if I’d known that ?  He was my hero.   I know now it was a chilling spoof of the public information films which polluted our screens in the 1960s, the feeling that an official death was awaiting us all in some soulless nuclear bunker.  Peter Watkins‘ The War Game had covered similar ground, made in 1965 but had never been shown on television.  BBC bosses felt it was too realistic.  We all grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which my parents actually witnessed on the cinema newsreels.  My father was in CND (Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament) in the early 1960s and carried me on his shoulders on the first Aldermaston March.  Unsafe, safe.  Now I was left, alone and abandoned, with my mum & brothers and sister, but fine enough to listen to Hawkwind on LSD without disintegrating into the nearest mental hospital.  Unsafe, safe.

On the album Space Ritual, Sonic Attack is on side 3, immediately after 7 By 7 which is a marvellously evocative Space Odyssey-type journey through a meteor shower and a swirling galaxy with “my astral soul” by my side, and includes another spoken word interlude by Bob Calvert as your friends and companions slowly melt beside you, quivering, vibrating softly, juddering into infinite glistening spiderwebs and droplets of mirror, chuckling gently into infinity as their smiles remain like the Cheshire Cat.  “A doorway, to which I must go”

My Pop Life #133 : Sun King – The Beatles

Sun King   – The Beatles 

Questo obrigado tanto mucho cake and eat it carousel

18 long and eventful months after being asked by John Lennon to imagine there’s no heaven I dropped my first acid trip.  It was the beginning of summer 1973.   I’d just turned 16.  School had almost broken up and the fifth form was abuzz with the plans.  We’d all completed our O Level examinations at Lewes Priory and there was a sense of freedom in the air.  Most of us would stay on for the sixth form, not all.    Before the summer holidays started, Tat’s girlfriend, the mysterious gypsy-eyed Elvira, invited what felt like the entire school to her house in Ashdown Forest for a midsummer night’s dream.  We travelled by bus then walked.  It was balmy and dry.  We were stoned and happy.   I travelled with Conrad Ryle I think.  Also present were Simon Korner, Pete Smurthwaite, Patrick Freyne, Chris Clarke, Martin Elkins, John Foreman, Adrian Birch, Andy Holmes and some older kids.  We lay around on the vast lawn of Elvira’s parents’ house.  Presumably they were away, but they may not have been.  A large set of speakers on the terrace blasted out The Beatles’ final album Abbey Road.  It was everyone’s favourite LP.  It seemed like an impossible piece of confectionary that went on forever and had the most satisfying last piece.  It still feels like that to me.  It has been varnished by time into a shiny antique pop marvel, but at the age of sixteen it was just 4 years old, and already a classic, an album for the ages. It was perfectly natural to be selected to play as the sun went down over a raggle-taggle gang of groovy student wannabees smoking dope and nodding wisely at each other’s amusing observations.  It was uncontroversial and universally admired by the cognoscenti.

The Beatles : Abbey Road

Elvira and Tat were like the alternative hippy royal couple that summer.  They both had curtains of long hair, flared jeans and embroidered tops.  They should have been on an album cover.  Elvira wore dark kohl eye make-up and flowing beaded skirts and she looked at everyone with witchy suspicion and a twinkle.  Her party was guaranteed to be a hit.  Tat – or Andrew Taylor – played guitar in the band Rough Justice (see My Pop Life #80) and wrote songs, had a sweet easy-going nature, a dry and pleasantly absurdist sense of humour, laughed easily and was slow to anger.  He’d become a closer friend of mine when he introduced me to his favourite band Gentle Giant, (for another post naturally).   He lived with his parents on South Street in Lewes, under the chalk drop of The Cliffe and the Golf Course which would be the location for our second acid trip.  Elvira was mysterious to me yet friendly, I can’t remember having a conversation much longer than a minute with her.  Who were her parents?   We didn’t talk to each other’s girlfriends much to be honest.  She was Tat’s girl.

There must have been food at the party but I can’t remember it.  Perhaps a barbecue.  The sun was starting to set.  We drank cider and lager.  Wine. Then the acid was handed out.  Tiny black microdots of  LSD.  We all took one and swallowed.  “It will last twelve hours” someone said.   Perhaps Space Oddity was playing…Memory Of A Free Festival…

“the sun machine is going down and we’re gonna have a party…”

Before the light disappeared completely we all walked into the forest.  About a 20-minute walk ?  I do remember that Patrick (and Simon?) still hadn’t arrived and we wondered how they would find us.   They did.  We found a small clearing, a small stream, a few rocks amid the trees and made a base camp.  Something weird was happening.  I felt nervous.  I looked around.  Someone winked.   Someone laughed.  It echoed with a ghoulish chuckle.   Shit – what?    A host of golden daffodils were flowering inside my stomach up through my veins through my fingertips, an unmistakeable rush of gold surged through my nerves, my skin, my eyes, like a huge chord with an impossibly large number of notes swelling lifting quivering getting louder and louder like a motorbike coming straight towards me.  Rather like falling off the top of a fairground ride with no brakes or a bunjee jump, except going upwards.  Can be fun.

here comes the sun king?

It’s entirely possible that not everyone was tripping, that we had a guide vocal, but I can’t remember who it was, even if I knew at the time.  Later on, in subsequent acid adventures we always used to have a guide on hand to hold our hand in case things went weird.  When things went weird.

because,

well,

they always did.

But not this time.  This being my first trip I didn’t know what to expect but I wanted hallucinations mainly.   I remember laying down on the rock in the stream to get a stereo effect of running water.  I remember looking at the trees dancing at dawn for about an hour, their branches wavering together in choreographed vibrations.  I remember staring at my hand for about an hour.  My eyes couldn’t focus properly for hours.

everybody’s laughing

       I remember laughing a lot with Conrad, Pete, John, Simon and Patrick.

everybody’s happy

It felt safe.   We smoked and drank.

Here comes the Sun King

There was undoubtedly speed in the acid which kept us keen.

Quando paramucho mi amore de felice corazón

It wasn’t cold, and we had sleeping bags and coats.   I can’t remember any music, amazingly.

Mundo papparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol

 

Just the wind in the trees, the stream, the birds, the snatches of conversation.

Questo obrigado tanta mucho cake and eat it carousel*

 

 It didn’t change my life.  But I would do it again, and I did.

Sun King, like most of Abbey Road, is inspired by the music of the late 60s.  The Beatles had their ears open for the people around them, and this song is inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross with its heavy dreamy guitars.  Lennon put the chords together and he and McCartney added the nonsense lyrics at the end.  It is the second song on the medley which completes side 2 of the band’s last LP.  The story goes that Paul McCartney, keen to leave the legacy on a high, spent hours in Abbey Road studios with producer George Martin polishing and reworking the “Huge Medley“as it was known on the tapes and later bootlegs.  But the studio out-takes, some of which are available on Youtube, show a band working together to learn each other’s songs, as they had been doing for years. Both versions are probably true.  The Huge Medley,  almost all ‘Paul songs’, opens with You Never Give Me Your Money the song about the break-up of the band, and what Ian MacDonald (in the magisterial Revolution In The Head) called “the beginning of McCartney’s solo career“. It contains the immortal harmony and lyric

Oh that magic feeling : nowhere to go

and the song finishes with a spiralling guitar lift into

one sweet dream

and the three chords:   C   G/B   A  which will return at the end of the Huge Medley for the finale, but this time we have a whispered

one two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven

and a bluesy guitar solo fades slowly into the faint sounds of an organ and bells, gongs and cicadas, a lush exotic other-worldly sound which ushers in the lazy guitar shape inspired by Peter Green and Albatross and played by George Harrison.  Sun King is a minor John Lennon song which can’t be imagined outside of the context of the Huge Medley, but which is quite magical inside it, especially the G 11th chord which bridges the E major section and the C major section – very lush, very Beach Boys.

The song ends abruptly and punches into Mean Mr Mustard, another Lennon snippet which wouldn’t stand on its own as a single or album track, but which gives the Huge Medley its charm and delight and keeps us interested and entertained.

When The Brighton Beach Boys chose to perform Abbey Road live at the Brighton Festival in 2011, Sun King presented a variety of tricky problems and we spent a fair amount of time on the 2 minutes and 26 seconds of this song, not least the vocal harmonies, particularly that G 11th chord on 52 seconds.  I actually bought a small gong which played a shimmering E from the percussion shop Adaptatrap on Trafalgar Street where I used to get the kazoos for Lovely Rita and bought the tambourine for Mean Mr Mustard.  Good shop.  Since The Beatles are largely unrepresented in their original form on youtube I will post a version of  by the Fab Faux who are the best Beatles tribute band out there I believe, having not just the accurate notes and tempos but the feel too.  Tribute bands, so low in status, will be the classical music players of late-20th century pop in the future.  We always played in black suits for that reason.

It wasn’t the most difficult song on the album, but it was close.  But for me it’s less about the song, more about the feeling and the memory.  I can’t remember how we got home from Ashdown Forest that midsummer night’s morning, but Andy Holmes remembers a group singalong of Here Comes The Sun at 5am.   I suspect I caught a bus in Uckfield and ended up in Kingston with Conrad Ryle and his family.  Buzzing faintly, getting shivery electric echoes of the vision interference.  Strange taste in my mouth.  Slept all day Sunday.   Was this the same Uckfield bus trip that Simon Korner and Patrick Freyne took, or were they on the bus in front ?  They were threatened by a man with a large head, a kind of combine harvester of a neanderthal, who, taking exception to their stoned and strung out giggling, told them that: “If you don’t shut up, You’re Gonna Die.  BY ME.“

The following acid trips wouldn’t be quite so simple.

Questo obrigado tanta mucho cake and eat it carousel*

*lyrics websites hilariously have this as “Que Canite” rather than “cake and eat it“…

My Pop Life #110 : Dreams – Joe Walsh

Dreams   –   Joe Walsh

…off to waste the day plunging headlong…

For some reason it always feels indulgent to write about Lewes Priory school 1970 -75  and my teenage musical passions.  See for example My Pop Life #78 – a eulogy to Blue Öyster Cult.   I’m not embarrassed about any of the music I listened to then – or since – and I deride the notion of ‘guilty pleasures’ when it comes to music, as if there is a canon of excellence that we must worship publicly and then privately enjoy our own rather suspect taste.  The Alan Partridge joke about liking Abba and Wings – because they’re “not cool”.   In this scenario the supposedly “cool” bands are usually skinny white guys playing atonal miserablism.  My taste has widened considerably since 1973 but my enthusiasm for The Velvet Underground (and those they influenced) still hovers around ‘lukewarm’.

But this song is still an unalloyed joy for me.  The Joe Walsh LP  The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get was released in america on my birthday, June 18th 1973, and three months later in England.  I have no idea from whence it came among my friends, perhaps the opening track Rocky Mountain Way caught somebody’s ear, or perhaps Andy Holmes just went ahead and bought it after sitting on a beanbag with headphones on in Virgin Records at Brighton Clocktower.  Or perhaps I did – but where I got the idea who knows ?  I don’t remember Rocky Mountain Way (Joe Walsh’s most famous song) being played on the radio.  Anyway – there is was, this amusingly-titled LP which acknowledged our new favourite past-time (getting stoned) with a brightly-coloured cover design and a selection of rather brilliant songs.  I associate this whole LP with happiness.  Sitting somewhere rolling a joint on the LP cover, glueing rizlas together, burning hashish  (invariably – grass was very rare in 1973) into little brown worms and sprinkling them evenly among the Golden Virgina, Old Holborn or Players Number Six cigarette broken down.  The music washing over us as we pass the joint among us, people nodding, agreeing on stuff, giggling, being witty and honest.  The best kind of getting high, when there’s simply nothing else to worry about.

There’s a section in the middle :  “she’s easy on my mind…she thinks my jokes are funny, makes me feel fine..” which reminds me of a girl whom I started going out with halfway through the lower sixth.  My first love.  She wore Diorella and flower-print dresses.   I think that’s a great lyric, the idea of a girl being “easy on your mind“.   But the lyric also reminds me of my wife now, Jenny, who still laughs at my jokes.  I try to make her laugh every day, and if we’re not having a punch-up I succeed.  Makes me feel fine.

The song is a beautiful homage to being relaxed in a way that seems impossible today.  Having nothing to do.  Sitting on the grass somewhere.  Going for a walk.  Going for a drive, nowhere in particular.  The music has a marvellous lazy laid-back feel, minimal instrumentally but hugely effective and evocative of an endless summer’s day when time seems to stop and allow you to step off for a while.  Where did those days go?

Joe Walsh’s band at this point were called Barnstorm – they’d done one album previous to this which is also brilliant, called “Barnstorm” and also produced by the great Bill Szymczyk.  How do you pronounce that?  Kenny Passarelli played bass.  Rocke Grace joined on keys. But Joe Vitale on drums, synths and flute was a particularly important collaborator for Walsh, and wrote and co-wrote some of these songs.  His influence is very musical, as opposed to the rocky flavours of some of the rest of the LP – but to be fair, Joe Walsh has a huge musical palette and always has.   He emerged from various east-coast bands to join The James Gang in 1968, recording three studio LPs with them including the tracks Funk#49, Walk Away, Collage and Ashes, The Rain & I.   All tremendous.   After The Smoker You Drink… LP, Walsh was asked to join The Eagles and they proceeded to record Hotel California, Walsh sharing guitar theatrics on that song with Don Felder.  I saw this line-up live in 1976 at Wembley Arena, thrilled to bits to be witnessing one of my teen idols live.  They played Rocky Mountain Way and possibly one more (Time Out?) but it was an Eagles concert and so they remain the only two songs I’ve ever seen Joe play of his own, until one special night in Westbury 2016.

However I just bought two tickets to see him at The Beacon Theatre New York City on October 1st 2015.  Unbelievably he is re-united with Joe Vitale for this show. This is a big deal.

    

Joe is a hugely likeable person by all accounts – he visits the same AA group in Hollywood as one of my friends – and his other big hit Life’s Been Good is testament to his sense of humour about money, fame and success.  As a rock guitarist I don’t think he’s ever been bettered with the sole exception of Jimi Hendrix but like Jimi he also has a gentle lyrical side and a beautiful delicate touch, none more so than on this song, a wistful evocation of plunging headlong into a relaxed endless day where you will do absolutely nothing.  Taking the time for dreams…  

My Pop Life #80 : Heartbreak Hotel – Elvis Presley

Heartbreak Hotel   –   Elvis Presley

the bell-hop’s tears keep flowing and the desk clerk’s dressed in black

They been so long on lonely street they never can go back

and they’ve been, they been so lonely baby, they been so lonely

they been so lonely they could die…

By the time I was 16 I had learnt the rudimentals of the saxophone, I could play a tune, I could ‘tongue’ the notes, bend the notes and more or less join in with a jam.  I could only play in a handful of keys though.  And better jokes were to come.  When I joined school band Rough Justice – my friend’s band which starred Conrad Ryle, Andrew ‘Tat’ Taylor, Andy Shand and Tigger on the drums – it was as a saxophone player.   I arrived at Waterlilies in Kingston village, sax in hand, having hitch-hiked from Hailsham, sat down, had a cup of tea, perhaps a joint was smoked,  knelt down and opened my sax case, red-velvet-lined, the horn came in various parts which had to be slotted together, then a reed selected and placed onto the mouthpiece (Selmer C) and tightened, a sling around my neck and we were off.  Give us an E said Tat.  I blew a nice clear bell-like E.   Wow that’s high.  All the guitarists tightened their strings to the right pitch.  Saxophones cannot be tuned (much*) so the the guitars, including the bass, must be.   I can’t remember how many rehearsals this went on for, but at every rehearsal someone – often two people – broke strings.   Then one day, weeks later, someone, perhaps Andy played an E on the piano out of curiosity.  Clearly none of us had perfect pitch !     It was lower than my E.  Way lower.  It was my C# in fact.  I consulted my book “How To Play The Saxophone“.    I had an Eb Boosey & Hawkes alto.   I don’t actually know what this means even today, but I think I worked out that it is pitched 3 semitones above ‘concert’ C – ie Eb.   Which means that when I play a C it sounds remarkably like an Eb.  What this meant for my bandmate’s guitar strings, not to mention their fingers, was that when they asked me for an E, I played my fingering of an E (same as a recorder) BUT I was giving them a G !!!  No wonder strings broke – three semitones higher than concert pitch, I got blisters on ma fingers !   I felt stupid, humiliated even, but they were all relieved.   Next time someone asked me for an E, I blew a C# and we were all sweet. *

*Muso’s note – to tune a saxophone you must move the mouthpiece up & down the cork.

– After a few more rehearsals it became evident that no one wanted to sing.   No one.   So guess who volunteered.   I’ll give it a go.   Someone who would become an actor one day.  Now, this meant learning the words to the songs which Tat and Conrad – or Crod as we all called him in those days – had written, among which were Tat’s song Muster Muster Monster which required a kind of Vincent Price delivery, and Crod’s song about Mevagissey in Cornwall where he’d been on holiday camping with Spark and Fore and possibly Martin Elkins (“wake up with the sun run down to the sea…”), which was a basic pop vocal.  More tricky though were the choice of covers – basic 12-bar rock songs which the nascent guitar players could play with confidence – and which included THREE Status Quo songs and THREE Elvis Presley songs and Birthday by the Beatles from the White Album.  I’ll discuss the Quo in greater depth another time, for I ended up meeting them years later, (see My Pop Life #172) but this seems like a great opportunity to put Elvis into my pop life.  Aged 16/17 I sang 3 Elvis songs, kind of unaware of his legendary status, he was just a good rockin’ boy to us East Sussex lads.   I wasn’t overawed like I would be now if I sang an Elvis song.   It was just rock’n’roll.   But the songs were 15 years old even then in 1973.

Most of the Rough Justice set were rockers, so true to form I’ve picked the ballad to represent.  It was the hardest song to sing with the exception of “Birthday” which is a scream-fest.  Two of us sang that I think.  We would perform at Kingston Village Hall, Grange Gardens for some private party, Lewes Priory school dance, not that many actual gigs.  The gigs were good, but my main memory is Crod’s bedroom, amps and speakers, fags, instruments including Crod’s homemade lemon-yellow electric guitar, carved from some tree and wired up by hand.  In my recall it went out of tune on a regular basis, but Crod didn’t seem to mind.  In fact Conrad didn’t seem to mind about much it seemed to me.  He had a gentle giant atmosphere around him, smiled a lot, was very forgiving and understanding, had a good left foot on the football pitch, came to the Albion with his brother Martin or with us, enjoyed a pint of cider and a smoke of weed, is a committed socialist even now and still lives in Lewes with his wife Gaynor Hartnell.  Lovely people whom I see all too infrequently.  Along with Simon Korner I would say he was my best friend at Lewes, since I had spent so much time with both of those families as my own family slowly disintegrated amid dysfunction and doctors and drugs.  They’d both reached out a hand and invited me into their homes.  They’d saved my sanity and my future probably.  I cannot really measure it, but I will always acknowledge it.

We had fun with Crod one day – me, Spark, Fore, Martin, Tat.  Crod fell asleep early one night.  Too early.  Wankered on cider.  Someone wondered aloud whether we should lift his entire bed with him in it outside and place it carefully in the garden, without waking him up.  Much laughter.  I think we tried it.   Of course the bed wouldn’t fit through the door.  So we settled for completely re-arranging his bedroom, moved the bed to the opposite wall, moved the bookcase and wardrobe and amps and speakers.  Then we fell asleep too.   Hadn’t worked that out – that we’d have to stay awake all night to get the juicy climax to our prank.  Then someone woke Crod up to get the joke.  He looked blearily around, said “oh you’ve moved the room around” then fell asleep again.

Matthew Wimbourne would turn up to Rough Justice rehearsals too.   He was younger than us and smaller too.   Wispy beard-hairs and glasses, hippy scarves.   Carried a set of bongos.  Sat on the floor and played along without ever really being heard.   I hope he had fun.   Tigger the drummer didn’t go to our school.  He looked a bit like a kid from fame, mullet and all.   We made a logo for his bass drum.  It said Rough Justice round the rim and had a hangman’s noose in the centre.  We wore whatever we wanted on stage which was mainly denim, although Crod had some interesting shapeless clothes, and I had my Mum’s pink blouse (glamrock!!) and a pair of stripéd pants (see MacArthur’s Park! My Pop Life #216) that were red, blue and yellow and a pair of wedge-sole AND wedge-heel shoes.  I thought I was in The Sweet !!  Singing Elvis and Quo !!!  hahahahahahahaaaaaaa…

As for Heartbreak Hotel, it’s quite a song.  I think people used to dance even when we played it.   It was Elvis Presley‘s first million-selling single.   Not the first thing he recorded, by any means – he walked into Sun Records in Memphis aged 18 and recorded That’s All Right Mama for producer Sam Phillips which is totally fantastic, as are all the sides he cut for Sun Records.  But once he got signed by RCA Records who bought out his Sun contract thanks to new manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, the sky was the limit.  In essence they tried to bottle the lightning of those first magical two years.  And, sadly, they did.  Bottled it, labelled it, mass-produced it, gave it a haircut and sent it to the army.  They couldn’t quite smooth out all of the rough edges but near as dammit that’s exactly what happened to Elvis.  The famous episodes of him being shot on TV only from the waist up were a real threat, not a joke – a white man dancing and singing like a negro, mixing black and white music with ease, conquering both with charm, rockabilly and sex.

He was a powerful dangerous young man in the mid-fifties, and those first two years at Sun Records are the best of Elvis.  Not to say that the other stuff is bad – hardly that – and I have favourite Elvis songs from every period of his life.  In The Ghetto.  Are You Lonesome Tonight?   I Just Can’t Help Believin’.  Lawdy Miss Clawdy from the comeback gig.  There are two wonderful books that have all the details, all the gossip and all of the stuff you need.  Peter Guralnick wrote both – Last Train To Memphis goes up to the army, Careless Love takes it from there.  Highly recommended.

I visited Graceland in Memphis in 1989 on my way out to Dallas delivering a car for Auto-Driveaway.  Really that’s for another post, but Graceland is everything you want it to be.

In other news Kenneth Cranham (see My Pop Life #6 and My Pop Life #46) or Uncle Ken had thrust a pair of C90s into my grubby little paws one night entirely made up of original material covered by Elvis, followed by Elvis’ version.  In pretty much every respect the Elvis versions are better.  And of course they were huge hits too.  Parker and Elvis demanded half of the publishing for any song they covered, and most writers (though not Dolly Parton) agreed.

I knew very very little of this in 1974.   Just as well I think.   I was an innocent singing rock songs for kids to dance to.    I didn’t want to be stepping into a legend’s shoes.

And yes, the legend of Elvis would flourish and bloom in later years and become a kind of religious touchstone and a musical crossroads too.    There’s so much myth and bullshit written and spoken about Elvis.   I’ve heard tons of it.   Make up your own mind.   Did you know, for instance, that Elvis used to wear eye make-up in the early 50s?   There’s some amazing photos of him back then, on the cusp of his power, under arrest for an assault.   He was a tornado.    I’ve spoken about my conversation with Bristol trip-hop pioneer Tricky (My Pop Life #61) regarding the Public Enemy “Elvis was a hero to most…” lines on Fight The Power.   But whatever, he was one of the original rebels.   A white working class kid in Memphis singing black music in 1953.   He was it.    There’s two clips below, the original single from 1956, the young man aged 21 making his first million dollars, below that the ’68 comeback gig in Las Vegas where he appears to be taking the mickey out of himself and his schtick.  He was a complex man in some ways, a very simple man in others.  I’ve got a lot of time for Elvis.

and live at the comeback gig in Vegas ’68 :

My Pop Life #47 : The Great Gig In The Sky – Pink Floyd

The Great Gig In The Sky   –   Pink Floyd

A version of this blog will be appearing in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back for more details. RB

From Kingston Ridge towards Waterlilies, Juggs Lane, and Lewes

My Pop Life #41 : Poor People – Alan Price

Poor People   –   Alan Price

It’s no use moaning.
It’s no use groaning.
Life just isn’t fair
There’s no easy days
There’s no easy ways
Just get out there and do it!

So smile while you’re makin’ it
Laugh while you’re takin’ it
Even though you’re fakin’ it
Nobody’s going to know.
Nobody’s going to know.

I was 16 when I went into Eastbourne to watch Lindsay Anderson‘s film O Lucky Man with a girl in the year above me at school – Mary Beth.  It was the only date we had.  Maybe she didn’t like the film as much as I did.  Maybe nobody liked the film as much as I did.  I liked Lindsay Anderson.   Five years earlier he’d directed the anarchic anti-public-school revolutionary film “If…“ also starring a young Malcolm McDowell and in many ways, O Lucky Man is a sequel, a kaleidoscopic canter through Great Britain with all its class, corruption, sycophancy, greed and – yes – fun, seen through the eyes of an eternally hopeful everyman (Travis) who only sees good in people, and is thus used, abused, beaten up, arrested and generally crucified.   McDowell was everyone’s favourite actor in 1973 – because of “If…” and  “A Clockwork Orange“, and in this film you can see why…

Eternally appealing, he is used by Anderson to wander through this green and pleasant land and lift the lid on the truth.   At every turn our hero meets corruption, cheating, bending the rules, selfishness and dishonesty.  It’s rather like as if told from a left-wing point of view.   It’s a top five film of mine not least because the soundtrack – all by Alan Price and his band – is perfect, and each song is treated like an interlude;  thus when a song starts to play in the film, we dissolve to the studio and watch Alan Price playing the song before picking up the story again as it finishes.   I’ve never seen this done before or since and it’s brilliant.   As is the music.

Price is from County Durham, and went to school in Jarrow, south of the city of Newcastle in North-East England.   A piano and organ player, he formed blues pop band The Animals in 1962 (House Of The Rising Sun, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood), then left in 1965 to form the Alan Price Set (House That Jack Built, Don’t Stop The Carnival) before turning his hand to a TV show with Georgie Fame (Fame and Price together!) and introducing Britain to the music of the great songwriter Randy Newman (rather like Harry Nilsson did in the US – but Nilsson would be Alan’s US equivalent though, not Newman).  There was a stage musical in the late 70s : Andy Capp – which I saw purely due to Price’s involvement – on the Aldwych.  Tom Courtenay playing the lead as a cuddly giggly sexist git – it didn’t work.   But before that he had written the songs and played himself in this dark political comedy of manners – which for me at 16 was a blueprint for understanding the world.  I already knew the world was corrupt.  I knew we were being shafted.  I knew everyone was lying.   And I knew that essentially I was on my own.   I loved this film and this music – I bought the vinyl LP shortly after seeing it for the second time.  Here was a director, an actor and a musician speaking for me.

Christine Noonan, Anna Dawson, Malcolm McDowell, Arthur Lowe

Not to mention that many of the finest and my personal favourite actors are involved – many of them playing more than one role, which also lends the story-telling a theatrical arc, a surreal edge as Travis (McDowell) thinks he recognises people – and sometimes has.  From the great Arthur Lowe playing a northern mayor who demands a “chocolate sandwich” at a live backstage sex-show, an African dictator from an un-named country buying “honey” to decimate his own population with, to Rachel Roberts, Geoffrey Palmer, Graham Crowden, Helen Mirren, Philip Stone, Dandy Nichols, Mona Washbourne, Peter Jeffrey, Warren Clarke, Brian Glover and Ralph Richardson among many others.  A feast of acting chops all at their peak.  So many exquisite moments – but I must mention Richardson near the end : “Hold this.  Wait here.“

At one point Travis escapes from a weird frightening hospital and hitch-hikes to get away – and who should pull over to pick him up but Alan Price and his band.  The music is uniformly excellent and provides an extra wry commentary on the lessons we – and Travis – are being shown.  I’ve chosen Poor People because I think it’s the best song on the LP, and it’s a beautiful moment in the film as Rachel Roberts invites Travis to sample the coffee…

My Pop Life #22 : Ladytron – Roxy Music

Ladytron   –   Roxy Music

You’ve got me girl on the run around, run around got me all around town

June 1973, Lewes Priory 5th form are doing their O Levels – for some reason I’m only doing six – English Literature, English Language, Geography, History, a split course Biology/Chemistry and Latin.  I know.  Latin.  I hated it.  The teacher was a permanently drunk Welshman called Dai Jones and I learned nothing and failed the exam with a 9.  The lowest possible score.  I’d already done French, Art and Maths in the 4th year, and the following year in the Lower Sixth I would take Geology which was my favourite subject of all time.   I very nearly did a degree in Geology because I loved it so, particularly the section-maps going underground to reveal the layered rocks beneath, which you had to draw only from surface evidence – wow that was cool.   I still love those maps.   Had I followed that particular nose I would have been lost to all but the oil companies  I suspect, perhaps the main reason, in the end, that I decided to do Law instead.   But in the 5th year all these considerations were way off.   There had been a mini-cultural explosion the previous June 1972 when the LP Roxy Music was released and kids started carrying the distinctive blue and pink cover with Kari-Ann Muller giving us her pin-up flex around the classroom.  Derek Sherwin certainly had a copy !

15-year old boys with pin-up LP covers !  Further examination revealed a music that none of us had even imagined before, let alone heard.   This was a musical box of chocolates with every shape, flavour and colour and we became obsessed, none more so than me.   I couldn’t get enough of this record and played it to death over the summer of ’72, with the result that my younger brother Paul, turning 14, became an even bigger Roxy Music fanatic than me – almost an impossible feat!   Deep inside the carefully-designed sleeve were more delights, pin-ups of the band members who appeared to have beamed down from an outer space glamour convention, the whole lot “designed” by Anthony Price.

Well Graham Simpson on bass looks pretty Andy-Williams-normal.  But Andy Mackay became my new saxophone guru although he also played the oboe and could do things that I couldn’t even contemplate on the saxophone, nevertheless I did play along with Ladytron from time to time, a moment that sums up everything about Roxy for me at that time – Mackay’s sax and Phil Manzanera‘s electric guitar playing a harmonic riff together while a mental piano plinks and plonks some kind of rhythm around it under an odd electronic bubbling from weirdo Brian Eno (bottom middle in the pic above), making it all sound sci-fi, and still everything, and I mean everything is rooted to the rock-solid rock-steady drums of Paul Thompson (with a tiger on his shoulder above).   And Ferry, above all else, Bryan Ferry’s vocals, mannered, exquisite, English, haunted, pleading, romantic.   I worshipped the man.   This feeling grew over the ensuing three years as further LPs came out, costumes were worn, lyrics were caressed.    But for now all I had to go on was this picture, these strange but compelling gentlemen from the planet Roxy.   Some of them were wearing make-up!   They were clearly obsessed with style as much as music.  With glamour more than chasing a hippie dream.  That summer my first eyeshadow was bought, and worn, although not around the council estate where I lived.   I knew that young men were a little sensitive about these matters.

When I listen to the LP today it still has the same effect on me as it did when I was a 16-year old boy.   It thrills me to the core with it’s daring clashes of style, it’s thunderous drumming which anchors every splash of electro-wierdness, the oboe, the guitar, the lyrics about Humphrey Bogart, about World War Two, about Brief Encounter, but above all else a huge confident new sound, rooted in rock’n’roll but re-made, re-modelled for the future.   It became my musical badge of honour and remains my favourite of their LPs.   I have them all of course, and all of Ferry’s solo output and Brian Eno’s.   This LP is a pinnacle of art-rock, and they would never return there.   I’ve seen them live too, and met the man, but that’s for a later conversation.  For now, just listen to those castanets, and the sheer thrill of the beat doubling up for the instrumental drive-by.  Sensational music.