My Pop Life #259 : A Change Is Gonna Come – Otis Redding

A Change Is Gonna Come – Otis Redding

There was a time I would go to my brother
I asked my brother, “Will you help me please?”
He turned me down and then I ask my dear mother, (my dear mother)
I said “Mother!”
I said “Mother! I’m down on my knees”

*

This is about the soul man

This blog will appear in my forthcoming book ‘Camberwell Carrot Juice’. Check back for details!

RB

My Pop Life #244 : Stay With Me – Lorraine Ellison

Stay With Me   –   Lorraine Ellison

No no, I can’t believe you’re leaving me…

I first met Lewis MacLeod in the downstairs bar of Carr-Saunders Hall, Fitzroy Street in Fresher’s Week, September 1976.  He was sitting with other first-years Derek Sherwin, who’d been at Priory School in my year, and Norman Wilson, who I’d met the day before.  We had football in common, (breaks the ice at parties), and I was introduced to Lewis, who had wavy and very long hair down his back as “A Rangers supporter“.  I looked at Lewis – in fact I think he was introduced as Louie – and asked “Does that mean that you’re a Protestant?”.  Lewis supped his pint and put it down, looking at me without a smile.  “I think that’s a very naive question actually”, he responded.  We became firm friends immediately.

We were both reading Law at the LSE – the London School of Economics – although I’d taken the previous year off and hitch-hiked across North America with Simon Korner after working in a hospital for special needs patients to save money for the trip.  It had been an incredible year.  It was exciting to be in London, walking to college down Tottenham Court Road or through Bloomsbury down to the Aldwych just below Lincoln’s Inn Fields and there to listen to Michael Zander and others lecture us in Contract, Property and the English Legal System.  But we shared far more than Law, even from the early days.  I had long hair too then – but I soon got rid of it after Anarchy In The UK and the first Clash LP was released and the massive subculture of punk beneath our twitchy feet began to rise.  I was always a dedicated follower of fashion, even from my childhood days,  aware of music, hairstyles, gangs.  Always a pop tart.

Norman Wilson and I, autumn 1977, Fitzroy Street London W1

In our second year Lewis and I lived with Derek and Norman on the 4th Floor of Maple St Flats, owned by LSE.  It was a decent-sized apartment opposite Carr-Saunders Hall with an LP constantly on the record player.   We started to do The Guardian crossword every day and checked the answers we hadn’t managed the following day.  In this way we methodically worked out how to crack it, and one morning we did in fact complete the bastard.  And thenceforth never bothered with it again.  During this time Lew and I also compiled an extremely important Beatles A-Level Exam Paper.

Q1.  “She was just seventeen, you know what I mean.”   Discuss

Q3.   Talk about the lack of guitar and use of a) strings and b) horns on The Magical Mystery Tour EP.  Use examples.  Was Harrison simply too stoned to mind over this period?

Q5.   “It’s such a feeling that my love…”  Finish the preceding line with reference to Bob Dylan and marijuana.  Inhale.

And so on.  But the main thing we got into over this year and the following years was soul music.  We discovered it together – sure we knew about the Motown singles, What’s Going On, Otis Redding’s Dock of The Bay and Aretha Franklin’s Say A Little Prayer, of course, but we went deeper, way deeper.   We were mining for soul, pure emotion in song, stuff that made your ears prick up, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, tears come to your eyes.  We soon found that Stax Records was a goldmine, Otis Redding the King.  Sam and Dave princes too, Carla Thomas the Queen. We loved Wilson Pickett, Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson.  James Brown was the Emporer, self-described Godfather of Soul with very good reason.

I suspect that we were both only dimly aware of race in America, or indeed in the UK.  I may be doing Lewis a disservice, but for me growing up in white East Sussex I was never forced to confront racism.  It was there on British television if we’d had the vision and language to decode it.  But what we cherished as genuine expressions of emotion immortalised on disc (soul music), we later realised were cries of pain and defiant joy released from centuries of slavery and white supremacy.  The sound of pain and courage, generations of loss internalised, managed, endured, a culture of survival in a hostile nation.  This was the soundtrack of black history, along with the gospel music which many of the singers had graduated from, a childhood in the black church leading to local stardom often followed by the crossover to secular song, rhythm and blues, soul music.  A well-trodden path from Sam Cooke to Aretha Franklin, Otis to The Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield to Donna Summer.  Inevitably our musical quest for moments of exquisite soul became a political quest alongside it thanks to our growing understanding – we were both active in Anti-Apartheid for example.  But our initial position was like a revelation of ignorance – we had so many holes in our knowledge, so many singers to hear and songs to find, so much history to reveal.   LPs were bought with grant money – notably an Atlantic Records box-set of 5 Double Albums of Rhythm & Blues from 1952  doo-wop (The Diamonds’ A Beggar For Your Kisses to 1974 Philly (Major Harris’ Love Won’t Let Me Wait)…

…and everything in-between from Ray Charles, The Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack – an incredible resource for the imaginary Soul A-Level (which we would fail if we took it then!) – along with James Brown’s 30 Golden Greats and Otis Redding’s seminal Otis Blue LP.   And then  I found a book.

The Soul Book changed our world.  This is 1978-9 remember, no internet, only knowledge passed down, read in books or the NME/Melody Maker, or gleaned from careful perusal of a record sleeve.  The Radio.  At the back of the book, a resource : playlists of the writers top 20 favourite soul records.  Stuff we’d never even heard of.  If more than one writer mentioned a tune, bang, we simply had to have it.  It was a short walk down Charlotte Street to the record shops and boutiques of Hanway Street and Berwick Street.  Pre-CD these Aladdin’s caves were stuffed with vinyl.  And 45s were flicked through, perused, and purchased, treasure such as I’ll Take Good Care Of You by Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters, Clean Up Woman by Betty Wright and Stay With Me by Lorraine Ellison.  This last song was like a blinding blast of light which ripped our hearts out, such is the intensity and commitment of Lorraine’s testament to bottomless heartbreak. It topped our own soul chart from that day forth, and still does.

24th June 1978. Lewis at Knebworth Festival watching Devo, Tom Petty, Jefferson Starship

We also went to gigs together, paying our respects to Smokey Robinson, Aswad, The Who, Prince, Parliament/Funkadelic The Specials and Roxy Music among many others.  As we finished University and I moved to West Hampstead and then Finsbury Park.  I started to take the train down to Brighton on Saturday mornings to watch my football team, and Lewis started to accompany me.  Yes, he was a Glasgow Rangers fan with a sometimes impenetrable accent which became thicker and more thicketed with drink, but he became an Albion fan which was very moving.  He was living in Mile End by now and had got to know Conrad Ryle in his own right who was living there next door in Tredegar Square.   We went to the great Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park with The Clash, Tom Robinson Band and Steel Pulse headlining.  We watched Brighton & Hove Albion at The Goldstone Ground with Conrad, his brother Martin, my brother Paul and Pete Smurthwaite, Andy Holmes.

Nick Partridge, Lewis MacLeod, Pete Smurthwaite, Paul Brown, Conrad Ryle, Martin Ryle, Kate Soper before visiting The Goldstone Ground in Hove on a Saturday afternoon in the early 80s

One night in late 79 we took magic mushrooms in Lew’s tower block flat on the Isle of Dogs.  I think it was new for both of us.  He had a spectacular view looking West down the river Thames but as the night fell and the mushrooms kicked in I started to feel panic.  The incredible surge of energy reminded me of LSD – the rush which kicks in after about an hour of ingestion.  We were playing records as ever when I was getting fidgety, Blue Öyster Cult’s live LP Some Enchanted Evening was on the deck and its speed-metal crispness was too perfect for the scene.  When their cover of The Animal’s song We Gotta Get Out Of This Place kicked into gear it was both the best and worst song I had ever heard.  I was buzzed off my tits and the song was forcing me OUT of the tower block flat and into a taxi then across the river and south, down to Honor Oak SE23 where I’d lived six months earlier with Mike and Hil and Rosie (my 3rd year at LSE).   They were all in and didn’t appear to mind two buzzed-up punks dropping in for a glass of wine, but I was speeding so much that I couldn’t bear to stand still and so I went outside into the back garden and ran round and round the perimeter for about 20 minutes.   That seemed to do the trick.  Lewis and I thanked our hosts and walked back outside.  Near that house in Canonbie Road was a small park, Honor Oak Park and we climbed up One Tree Hill and sat at the top until dawn smoking dope and slowly coming down, solving the problems of the universe as we did.

Lorraine Ellison

Lewis moved to Reading and worked for the BBC as a journalist in the Monitoring Department in Caversham Park.  He specialised in South Asia, in particular Bangladesh.   He had a long on-again off-again relationship with Alex, a lovely woman he’d met in London.  I would see him for birthdays and other parties while I lived in Archway Road in London, and after we moved to Brighton in the 90s he would travel down for football or just a day trip.

Lewis, Gaynor, Conrad and Simon in the back garden of Archway Road, London 1990

I received an email this Monday just gone from his sister Mairi telling me that Lewis had died in July.  I was broken in half by this news and wept all day on and off.  Lewis lost a lung about 20 years ago and was always really skinny with a shocking cough. He never stopped smoking for long, and drank whisky like a Scot.  Conrad saw him more recently at a Brighton game pre-covid and felt that he wasn’t well, and wasn’t long for this world.  But he felt like the ultimate survivor to me. Until Monday.

Pete, Chris Clark, Erica Clarke, Sophie Holmes, then Gaynor and Conrad just married, best man Lewis, Jenny, me, Andy  – in Lewes 5th August 1989

He’d come down to Brighton for my 60th birthday party in 2017, and was nervous about meeting new people – but there were plenty from the old days there too – Nick Partridge, Tony Roose, Norman Wilson and Conrad.  When Lewis and Conrad saw each other in the party they both burst into tears, because each one of them thought that the other had died.  It was both hilarious and touching.  The very last time I saw Lewis was in the spring of 2018 when my LSE girlfriend Mumtaz Keshani died of cancer and I flew back from New York at short notice for the funeral.  I told the gang who’d known her the time and place of the funeral – in Hendon mosque, then the cemetery – but only Lewis made it that morning.

Uncle Ralph, Lewis and Mikey Keshani at the funeral of Mikey’s mum Mumtaz, August 2018

He was an original fellow, often seeming to be from another dimension or a previous century, possibly a Dickens novel.  One of my favourite Lewis anecdotes comes from that first bar under Carr-Saunders Hall.  People were rude in there. Students.  Lewis would be standing at the bar with his pint of Guinness settling, and a rugger bugger of some sort would be pushing in trying to get served and nearly knocking him off his feet.  Lewis instinctively rammed his Guinness into the toff’s elbow while shouting “fucking hell mate!” in his best Gorbals.  The hooray turned round and saw Guinness froth on the elbow of his coat, apologised and bought Lou another pint.  Ha.

We would go to see plays together too, London being a good place to see plays.  Whenever he bought a programme for a play or a football match, or was in an art gallery and found a wordy plaque, he would refer to these arrangements of words as The Answers.  “What does it say in The Answers?” he would ask.  One of my favourite sayings to this day.

My girlfriend in the late 80s was Rita Wolf, who now lives like Jenny and I in New York City.  She has just reminded me that we travelled up to Glasgow to see the inaugural production of Peter Brook’s extraordinary production of the Mahabharata at The Tramshed and met Lewis up there on his home turf.

Fiercely progressive and essentially Marxist in his politics, he proudly worked on the line at Ford’s Dagenham and drove a Routemaster bus for London Transport before moving to the BBC and was involved in the Union there.  He read profusely and was well-versed in a large number of areas, particularly history, politics and current affairs.  A very bright man.  I am extremely sad at his death.  Mairi told me that shortly his ashes will be taken to the Isle Of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides via Stornaway where I always wanted to visit with him and never made it.  Rest in Peace dear Lewis.  What a short life it is.

Pete and Lewis on Brighton Beach, 1983 (?)

And so I get to some kind of ending for this piece, and what are The Answers?  A list of things we did together, memories almost impossible to recall of jokes, smokes and fervent discussion.  When I learned of his death, I was working on a weekend stint as temporary guru to SongBar, an internet music community that compiles a playlist every week on a different topic.  We take it in turns to be guru, the compiler, and everyone else shouts suggestions.  On a Monday I’m to be found compiling the A-List and the B-list from the various shouts, and awaiting last-minute golden shots when I got Mairi’s email.  It knocked me off-centre, but I still had to complete the work.  The songs could scarcely be heard now.  This is what I wrote at the top of the article:

No writing from me this week. Yesterday I was told that my friend Lewis MacLeod, who went to the LSE with me in the late 1970s to study law and who stayed a good friend, had died in July of heart failure. This crushed me, so that every piece of music was now for him, for us, for moments gained and moments lost forever, for memories and sadness, thus I have nothing to say about the music this week. It will speak for itself. It is for my dear friend Lewis.  Rest in Peace, when your ashes reach the Isle.

And for those who like choir music  – from all corners of the earth I should add, here is the link to SongBar :

https://www.song-bar.com/song-blog/playlists-songs-featuring-choirs

I don’t feel like I’ve done Lewis justice with these paltry words, this rumination in absentia, this frail and patchy obituary.  I prefer the word eulogy.  I wish I could write him a song and sing it.    This one will be for you dear friend – from 1966, the mighty Lorraine Ellison and Stay With Me.  Written and produced by Jerry Ragavoy with a full 45-piece orchestra after Frank Sinatra cancelled a session.  Lightning in a bottle.  Outstanding.  Researchers, soul miners and law students all agree : this is the finest soul record of all time.

My Pop Life #242 : Brown Sugar – D’Angelo

Brown Sugar – D’Angelo

*

Over the course of these blogs I have tried to describe what happens when I hear certain songs, how they echo through my memories through the years, how I have been marked by melodies, touched by tunes, sprung by songs.

So let’s go back to 1996.

When people ask me what my favourite job was, I usually pause for a second, then say Ivanhoe.   The 6-part BBC TV series.

Normans and Saxons, Jewish pogroms, Robin Hood, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, jousting, mead, scandal, intrigue and a mysterious wounded knight, Ivanhoe.

We filmed all over Britain in Norman churches or on rolling hills with no electricity pylons, muddy lanes, deep forests and candlelit castles.

My personal highlight was working with Sir Christopher Lee in Durham Cathedral.

He was playing Beaumanoir, Grand Master of the Templars, knights who led the crusades with the holy cross of Rome and also conducted the witch trial of Jewess Rebecca and others.  I was playing Prince John,  Regent of England while his brother Richard was in an Austrian prison returning from the Third Crusade.  Brilliant Susan Lynch played Rebecca, and swooned at Jenny when she came on set one day because she’d gone to see Pecong at The Tricycle, where Jen played the Trini Medea.

The Wad, Prince John, Susan Lynch

Steve Waddington played the titular character Ivanhoe, we called him The Wad, and years later a group of friends went to see him take part in a genuine boxing match on the Harrow Road – three rounds only but gruelling.  Rory Edwards my old brer from West in 1983 (My Pop Life#221) and who had a tendency to disappear for months on end on his motorbike played my screen brother Richard Couer De Lion.  The next time I saw him was at Heathrow with his then wife Julia Ormond on their way to  St Lucia.    Trevor Cooper my other old brer from Edinburgh 1978 played Gurth.

Trevor getting tooled up

The next time I saw Trevor was when he’d moved to Hove briefly and we played croquet on Hove Lawns, a competition which birthed the catchphrase “He made up the rules – and he won!!”, and he then turns up in BBC3 comedy series This Country

Ronnie Pickup played Fitzurse my advisor and confidante.

What a delightful fellow.  What a great actor.  So pleased when he got such a great role in Marigold Hotel.  Ciaran Hinds played Bois-Gilbert brilliantly as ever, then turned up in The Crucible on Broadway with my wife Jenny in 2016, twenty years later.  Yes, we drank Guinness.  Vicky Smurfitt a beautiful Irish actress played Rowena and we would see her over the years in Los Angeles or London, working, because she is a very good actor.   Another comrade Peter Guinness, veteran of the Alien 3 wars (My Pop Life#171) played Montfichet, Christopher Lee’s right-hand man.  He would later turn up in Lithuania on The Assets in 2013 playing a Russian general.  Dermott Keaney became a neighbour in Brighton.

Chris Walker who had been on The Bill with me in 1983 turned up modelling the Saxon look. 

All these many streams flowing through each other’s lives, crossing and re-crossing each other, growing, working, surviving.  All friends, still.

But my real true highlight and great friend since those days was director Stuart Orme who offered me the role of Prince John.  It was a fantastic role, full of possibility, and I took it by the horns.  Researched it a lot  – then threw it all away and followed my instinct again as ever.  Tried to imagine what it would be like to be born into Royalty in the 12th century in England.  Son of Henry the 2nd.  History of course is written by the victors, or in this case, those who could write – the Church, who hated John because he confiscated much of their land.  I had a ball though, because Stuart was so mercurial quicksilver in his direction.  He would encourage us to play in rehearsal, knowing we could do the scenes but allowing for expansion.

Classically though, he would consistently do two things which have always stayed with me as an actor.  First he would suggest – if the shot would allow (ie no fancy camera moves where the camera finished in a different place from whence it started) – that we do two takes one after the other without cutting in-between.  He would just say reset then Action! again instead of cut.   Second he would, when he was happy, say “Cut” and then announce with twinkling eyes that we’d got the shot for the BBC and so now we were going to do one for us.  What a brilliant guy.  What a great director.  He got the very best out of everyone on that show I believe.  So much trust, so much confidence, so much love for what he was doing, and it was infectious.

Stuart Orme with baseball cap on the left directing Ivanhoe

I have worked with dear Stuart three more times since then, starting with The Last Train a superb thriller about the survivors of some kind of meteor attack or nerve gas or something or other who are on a train in a tunnel and wake up to find an empty land.  Christopher Fulford, Nicola Walker, Treva Etienne… So they move north to find the guy who invented the Thing – me – only to find that I have aged CONSIDERABLY.  Lol.

Ruth Quinn (make-up designer) and the great Nick Dudman (Alien 3 and countless other genius creations) – prosthetics created this look

Then on a TV show with another friend Jemma Redgrave called Cold Blood in 2007 in Liverpool, also with Matthew Kelly, Ace Bhatti and Pauline Quirke and Kwame Kwei-Armah.  Then finally and very wonderfully in beautiful Galway for the first episode of Jack Taylor starring Iain Glen, another old reprobate of the old school and Richard E Grant parties.  People say that your dreams die in Galway, meaning why would you need any dreams (or ambitions) if you lived in Galway?  Having spent some weeks working there I would concur – but then I lived in Brighton for 18 years, another city which fills its graveyards with ambition.

Which means for me I suppose that I will retire in or near Brighton – or Galway !

Stuart was just the same in those other three gigs as he was in Ivanhoe – alive, generous, calm, confident and full of trust in each and every actor he had cast.  He’s a dreamboat really.  I genuinely feel sorry for any actors who have not experienced his ways.

In that year of 1996 we filmed on the beach at Bambrugh Castle – Northumbria, bleak and beautiful with my brother Rory (Richard) and my mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (Sian Phillips).  All of us on horseback.  She gave us both a proper telling off.  Vivid to me today as it was when we filmed it.

We filmed in the Cloisters of Durham Cathedral with Sir Christopher Lee playing the scary Grandmaster Templar Knight.  He had a complicated hair and make-up situation I seem to recall but I’m not a gossip.  Much.

My castle – Prince John’s – was in Essex, the outstandingly well-preserved Norman keep at Hedingham Castle.  Here was my space, my tapestries, my heavy curtains, my servants, my dogs, my faithful advisor Fitzurse and my hawks. I threw cups around, jumped on the heavy wooden tables and schemed against my dear brother in that castle.  We feasted & we received news and ordered executions in that castle.  Those were the days!

The final location for me and most of us was the Tournament sequence which took up most of Episode 2.   It was near London, just outside of the western side of the M25, and we had a hotel we could use if we didn’t want the drive in and out every day, but no PDs to spend.  It was on this gig that I discovered a dark truth about some productions – that it is part of a Production Manager’s job (or a Line Producer’s job, there is considerable overlap) to save money, and often they would get a percentage of any money saved.  Which is called an incentive.  And often why the unfortunate person in that position would often be the least popular person on the unit.

But my overwhelming memories of those two weeks were the sheer numbers of extras who turned up – many of them from Historical Re-enactment Societies so they had all the haircuts and costumes and knowledge of the period already.  We’re in 1194 remember.  There was a jousting arena with a great tent above where the clashes would happen for Prince John and his retinue, (Valentine Pelka, Simon Donald, Ronnie Pickup, Jack Klaff), various Bishops and others.  So we had seats and shade at least.  I had an amazing horse who I loved to ride.  Before we’d even started we all had to spend a week at Steve Dent‘s riding school in Rickmansworth learning to trot, to stop on a mark, to get off and on with elegance, and to act while riding a horse.  I loved it all and have done it quite a few times since.

But it was the extras who did it for me.  In their hundreds.  Dedicated. Strewn around the great park where we were filming, many camping in the woods.  I overheard one group as I walked past one day, a young woman being welcomed to join a group who were sitting down, relaxing for a bit. “Come and join us” I heard one say, “Sit down a while and tell us your story”.  

It was medieval so it was.

And this was the LP – D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar – that I would play in the green room when it was my turn.  Not much to say about that really.  But it is a marvellous piece of work.

My Pop Life #239 : You’re The First, The Last, My Everything – Barry White

You’re The First, The Last, My Everything  –  Barry White

We got it together, didn’t we?
We’ve definitely got our thing together, don’t we baby?
Isn’t that nice?
I mean, really, when you really sit and think about it, isn’t it really, really nice?
I can easily feel myself slipping more and more ways
That super world of my own
Nobody but you
And me
We’ve got it together, baby
Ohhhh ohhhh

*

Pow.  That’s how the long version begins.  When you read it, read it aloud like a white person, sitting down, it seems ludicrous.  That’s because you have to mean it.  And maybe, have a voice that comes from your boots through your gut and out from your heart.  Maybe, just maybe, you have to be Barry White.

*

Remember the early days of lockdown?  Seems like five years ago.

*

Diary Extract

Monday night in Brooklyn, 17^th March 2020.

We are entering the unknown.  The truly unprecedented moment which the world has not faced before.  OK Spanish flu in 1918, 102 years ago.

We don’t go out very much but today – the last day that pubs cafes and restaurants will be open, we decided to have a last romantic meal in Olea on Lafayette, three blocks from our duplex.  We made quite a big deal of getting ready, the sun was pale but warmed the 7 degrees Centigrade air, spring is making an attempt.  When we got there it was closed with a sign on the door.

WE ARE SADLY CLOSED TEMPORARILY

Which was sad.  Would we go home?  We walked back up to De Kalb and found Dino’s Roman’s and Brooklyn Public House also closing up because of the city ordinance.  Walked up Clinton Avenue to Myrtle where Mr Coco had run out of baked beans and potatoes.  Opposite was Puttnam’s – a gastro pub where we ate on our first night in Brooklyn over six years ago.  It was open.  We walked in and the bar menu was available, along with alcohol.  About eight people were sitting at the bar.  We sat in the far corner in a pool of spring sunshine and ordered Impossible Burgers.  I had a pint of Guinness, Jenny a glass of Stella.  When will we next do that?

People came and went, squeezing the hand sanitizer on the wall as they did so.  We paid with a card, and Jenny squirted it with her new lavender sani bottle containing 62% alcohol.  It was a strange but lovely meal.  We tipped the waiter $20 on a $60 bill.  He had four hours left on his shift before they closed for… how long? Where was his next tip coming from?

It was a short walk home with plenty of people out.  I stood outside smoking while Jenny bought apple juice, limes and eggs in Greenville Gardens our local bodega.   The girl serving asked after me and remembered our discount code because she is sweet.  The other girl was scared.  No one knows what to feel.

*

Harry Potter and The Cursed Child closed on Broadway last Thursday at 5pm and Jenny, who plays Hermione, came home stunned and in mourning.  The 2^nd year cast were due to finish on Sunday and there was a grand farewell party planned to send them off in style, including her stage husband Ron, played by Matt Mueller.  She has been in mourning for this stolen moment since then.  But she has also been left without a show to do, without wages (we’ll see what happens there?) and without a distraction for her to stop her thinking about her sister Dee who died last summer.

Now it’s just us four in the house.  Jenny, Ralph, Roxy and BoyBoy.  We haven’t got a routine yet, but every morning I tend to wake and make tea & toast and bring it all upstairs.  I like marmalade and jack cheese, and Boy always gets a corner of cheese which he loves so much that he will chew my fingernail in case there’s any left in there.  Then every other day there is Pilates downstairs to disco music.  I’ve decided to do a PhD in Disco during this lull.  Brother Paul thought it was for real.  He was a disco kid back when it was a thing, a gay man in New York City in 1980 dancing in the clubs to Donna Summer, Sylvester, Cerrone, Patrick Juvet.  I’m a much more recent convert – probably around 20 years ago when I started to really love it.  My way in was via Philly soul and the Gamble & Huff productions of the O Jays, Harold Melvin and Thom Bell with The Stylistics who have become my favourite band.  From there you acknowledge Norman Whitfield and Papa Was A Rolling Stone, Earth, Wind and Fire, Barry White and George Macrae.  It’s been fun talking to Paul about it over the last few days.

I’m also writing up the numbers of Covid 19 cases and deaths every day, country by country.  Some kind of handle to grasp on it, this strange blurry unseen enemy.  Watching Biden and Bernie, in their late 70s arguing on TV about who had the best plans for the virus and thinking they’ll both die if it gets them.  So therefore who will be the running mate?  The British Government, the US President and the Brazilian President have all shown a shoddy and weak approach because they are all populist blowhards who reject experts and appeal to racists and homophobes for their support.  Perhaps this crisis will see the beginning of the end of this kind of leader.  Perhaps the voters will understand that leaders are needed who have a level head and listen to experts.

It’s strange to think how utterly changed the world will be once this passes.  There will be a massive recession.  There will be numbers of dead.  But perhaps, maybe the world will have hit the re-set button and we will have spent some time thinking about how we organise ourselves and our world.  We can only hope.

 *

Now it’s July 10th 2020.  Has anything changed? Oh yes, plenty.  George Floyd was murdered by racist policemen in Minneapolis at the end of May and the world exploded.  This triggered Jenny’s first walk outside since that visit to Puttnams.  Down to Barclays Center and the crowds of protestors.  The anger was greater than the fear.   A police car was burned on De Kalb Avenue and the ashes now form a memorial to George Floyd. We had constant NYPD helicopters hovering overhead ever since and nearby.  Then we had fireworks every night for six weeks, from all directions. And we’ve had Covid-19 powering through all of it.  I had the test a couple of weeks ago at Brooklyn Hospital  just across Fort Greene Park there. Negative.  Yes and I spent many hours immersed in my Disco PhD – indeed when I mentioned this fact to a screenful of students I was teaching one afternoon some young wag said

“Oh so you’re going to be a Doctor of Disco?”

Let’s not get carried away.  But on that first weekend I had volunteered to guru for Songbar once again, I usually do about 4 weekends a year.  I feel as if I have spoken about this before – an online music blog with people suggesting songs and tunes to fit a musical theme which changes every week.   This particular week I suggested Songs Which Quote Shakespeare which was quite max factory of me, but sometimes you have to embrace the cheese mon ami, mon petit gruyére.  (Where’s the backwards accent on a computer?)  Anyway.  And there on Day 2 some young blade named pejepeine suggested a tune I had never heard before called Romeo & Juliet by one Alec Costandinos which is a disco marvel and lasts a full 15 minutes in twelve inch format.  Blimey what a discovery that was, and straight into my top twelve Shakespeare tunes.  The rest you can find here :

https://www.song-bar.com/song-blog/playlists-songs-that-quote-shakespeare

If you so desire.  It seems clear to me that Alec Costandinos was influenced greatly by Barry White.  And listening to these disco tunes every other day as we stretched and twisted and bounced our Pilates around the apartment it occurred to me that disco had been coming for years before Disco.

Not proto disco.  Actual Disco.

I found a Youtube playlist called Proto Disco – the tunes that took us to disco.  They include the ones mentioned above, essentially – Philly Soul, The Tempts and the great Barry White.  Some other nice discoveries – MFSB weren’t just a one-hit wonder for example. The Hues Corporation were though perhaps. And then I swooned into Barry White.  Did Pilates to Barry White.  Did a PhD in Barry White.  Told my friend Simon about my PhD in Barry White.  Confessed that actually it  was more of an O Level in Barry White to be fair.  But, readers who have read thus far, here are the salient facts.

a)  Love Unlimited are Barry’s backing vocalists, sisters Glodean James (who married Barry), Linda James and their cousin Diane Taylor.  They had hits in 1972 with Walking In The Rain (With The One I Love) and 1973 with It May Be Winter Outside (But In My Heart It’s Spring), both written by Barry White, although the latter song was co-written by Paul Politi and was a minor hit for Felice Taylor in 1967 as was I Feel Love Coming On also written and produced by Paul & Barry.  Walking In The Rain was a hit a full year before Barry White’s first single.

b)  The Love Unlimited Orchestra was formed by Barry White in 1973 as a backing group for Love Unlimited.  However they were soon releasing music of their own, with no top line.  I found the first LP, Rhapsody In White at the Brooklyn flea market about five years ago.  What a find !

An unusual combination at the time of funk rhythms and orchestral instrumentation, in retrospect it seems clear that this is the birth of disco.  Barry White wrote long and short versions of the classic Love’s Theme which was released in 1973 and made number one on the pop charts.   It changed the world.  To me it sounds like a TV Theme tune until we start dancing.  It is classic disco from 1973, three long years before Disco was DISCO.  Perfection.  Groove.  I had to tussle with myself about which Barry White song to choose today.  Here’s the long version of Love’s Theme.  Grab your lover and move gently around the room to this baby

There is something supremely endless about this song

c)  Barry White wanted to be a writer, producer and arranger – and so he was for many years, working with longtime collaborator Paul Politi, until one day in 1973 Paul suggested, for the eleventeenth time, that Barry re-record his demo and sing the damn song himself.  Now Barry’s voice is one of the world’s 70 wonders, a bass baritone which shakes the buttons on your blouse.  His voice dropped when he was 14 and apparently his mother wept.  The first of many mothers to weep.  Larry Nunes was Barry’s business manager by now, and together with Politi they persuaded Barry to record the song himself.  That song was I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little Bit More Baby.  It appeared on the first LP I’ve Got So Much To Give and the rest is pop history, R & B legend and musical eternity.

My brother Paul was way ahead of me on this curve because he spotted the genius of Barry White early on, certainly by Never Never Gonna Give You Up with it’s breathy sighs and pillow talk in the mix and

“quitting just ain’t my stick”

But for Paul I think it was the production that he loved, the rooted bass line in lockstep with the warm crisp architecture of the drums.  Wacka wacka rhythm guitar, some french horns summoning us all to the mountaintop, and violins and flutes on the top end creating lush generous fills.  Barry’s voice felt compassionate and passionate at the same time.  Somehow made it sound like he wasn’t going to force anything, wasn’t going to stretch his voice like Little Richard or James Brown, no, this was another style, not reaching but drawing you in, relaxed and centred and genuine.  It was the sound of the heart of the 1970s.

People took the piss from day one, especially men, small dick energy wrote about The Walrus Of Love and stuff like that.  Barry was a smiley performer though, if you watch any of his concerts online (and I do recommend it!) he always takes time to walk through the audience, shaking hands with people and kissing the ladies, never missing a beat, singing the whole way.  Quite a show.  My late development as a soul fan (early 20s) means that I missed many of the greats, including Barry White, Millie Jackson, Teddy Pendergrass and Marvin Gaye playing live.  But I’ve been a lucky boy too and am eternally grateful and blessed to have seen Aretha, Smokey, Curtis Mayfield, Chaka Khan and Parliament/Funkadelic. And now we all have Youtube, where Barry and Teddy and Marvin sing every night.

In 1974 as I started the Upper Sixth at school Paul was leaving his school in Hailsham and leaving home because Mother had sent him a solicitor’s letter, using her mental illness as a weapon to force him out of the house.  He was 16 years old.  He went to live in Eastbourne, then Pevensey Bay and got a job in the local tax office.  In October 1974 You’re The First, The Last, My Everything was released, another of Barry White’s unfeasibly long titles, and a piece de resistance of a song which reached both Paul and I in different ways, and the coveted Number One position on the UK Charts.   A fact which meant that it was in contention (surely) when the Guardian decided to list the 100 Greatest Number One Hit Singles later in lockdown this year and signally failed to include it.  My family had a Zoom Call around that time – May 2020 I reckon – and Paul, now living in Shanghai, was furious.  Given that the Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls had made number one, and Human League were in the top ten he had a good point.  Once again it was Barry White not getting his due, being sidelined, not included in ‘best of’ lists.  It perhaps is partly to do with his physical appearance (maybe he predicted/feared this), or more feasibly his style of music and the way he delivered it.  Barry White made songs that appealed to women, directly.  Men knew this and ridiculed it because deep deep down it makes them feel inadequate.  Which they often are.  I always loved dancing to Barry but I didn’t take it seriously or recognise his true genius until I did my O Level earlier this year.  My Lockdown Lover.  A truly towering figure.

It was the night of Dee’s funeral, October 2019 or was it more likely the night before Jenny and I flew back to New York, two days later.  A Sunday night.  Deep emotional unprecedented days in High Wycombe with the family.  Me, Jen, Mandy, Lucy, Mollie (?), Marlyn, Uncle Lee, I think it must have been around 1.30am and no one wanted to say goodnight, we were camped in the living room downstairs and someone flicked through the channels.  A Barry White documentary.  Talking about his orchestrations, his collaborators, his charisma, and his sad death at only 58 years old in July 2003 in Cedars Sinai hospital Los Angeles when the family were kept from visiting him by the hospital staff on the instructions of his girlfriend and manager, presumably with the support of ex-wife Glodean who became the sole executor of the will.   Two of his children have since sued Glodean as their monthly allowances dried up and stopped.  And talking about how this song was written as a country tune some 20 years earlier (in the 50s) by his old friend Stirling Radcliffe entitled “You’re My First, My Last, My Inbetween”, whereupon Barry changed the words and upped the tempo considerably and then improvised his way through the intro on take 2 which is the one that became the hit smasherooni.

Play this song.  You will hit the snare drum, just a little late, just like the record does, perhaps hitting your thigh, or the person who you are dancing with, or cracking an invisible whip.  One of the signature sounds of my life.  Thwack!

Let’s all hail the Soul Lover, the one and only, the great musical wonder that is

Barry White

My Pop Life #238 : Hot Pants – James Brown

Hot Pants   –   James Brown

Hot Pants…

Number 2 Somerfield Road, Finsbury Park.  Top flat – under the eaves, a one-room attic dwelling with two sloping ceilings.  I lived there with Mumtaz, my girlfriend whom I’d left in 1980 to explore South America with my brother Paul for a year’s travel, but returned after four months spent in Mexico with tail between legs and Hepatitus B.  She took me back in, and life went on.  Finsbury Park, as noted in My Pop Life #42 was a delight.  Every now and again we could hear a muffled roar of delight from Highbury as Arsenal scored.   Not that often obviously, ha ha ha.  One-nil to The Arsenal was the 80s cry.   My beloved Brighton & Hove Albion’s cup run in 1983 took us to a semi-final against Sheffield Wednesday at Highbury.   Down the road.  I went to the game, which we won 2-1 thanks to a brilliant Jimmy Case free kick.  We were in the Cup Final!  1983 was clearly a blessing all round.  Laurie Jones was downstairs, communist, comrade, veteran of the Cable St riots against Moseley’s blackshirts and maker of his own wine.   In work mode :  the premiere and run of  Steven Berkoff’s “West” at the Donmar Warehouse in May of that year.   My first fully professional, fully paid proper acting job.  We ran there for five months then filmed it for the new Channel 4 (see Let’s Dance My Pop Life #221).

In saxophone playing mode I was on this tune – Hot Pants.  Deceptively simple, it has to be precise, punchy, tongued exactly, every note must be the right length, it must attack, and the timing is everything.  Like all of James Brown’s magnificent work, the percussive element is primary, and the bulk of the tune is carried over one chord until the bridge, the long awaited release of the bridge.  Take it to the bridge.  Shall I take it to the bridge?  The famous cry from Sex Machine.  One of the genius elements of James Brown is how long you have to wait for the bridge in almost every song.  He knows his dynamics.  So did George Mack.

Who?  This fella, a tremendous Anglo-Nigerian singer from Finsbury Park.  Where did we meet?  How did we find out that we were both musicians?  I cannae remember captain.  But this I do know – I was playing Hot Pants in the flat while Taj was at work because the band I was in at this time – George’s band Arc Connexxion – had it in their set.   I was one of three horns in Arc Connexxion, an afro-pop outfit which was a bit Fela Kuti, a bit soul, a bit funk, and a bit of George’s own compositions.  It was fun.  Looking back, it is exactly the kind of band I long to play in right now, here in New York : dance music with a brass/woodwind section, african-influenced.

I’d bought James Brown’s 30 Golden Hits while I was at LSE a few years earlier, exploring the landscape of soul music with my Glaswegian friend Lewis MacLeod. We were beyond aficionados, we were obsessed with hunting down the very best soul tunes of the previous 25 years.  Motown of course, Stax Records indeed, Atlantic’s huge six-album box set, Philadelphia Records and then all the other smaller labels – Sue Records, Curtom, Brunswick, SAR, Hi, et al.  I remember buying Stay With Me Baby by Lorraine Ellison one day like finding treasure on a desert island and we played it over and over, What A Difference A Day Makes by Esther Phillips, Why Can’t We Live Together by Timmy Thomas, Love TKO by Teddy Pendergrass, all golden.

But James Brown was the record which got played a lot.  James Brown was on King Records, an independent label based in Cincinatti, Ohio. The greatest hits album was on Polydor and was a great primer to the man’s genius.  Hard to remember life before the internet, but the moment I saw Please Please Please on television I’ll never forget – the famous cape drama, the anguish, the concerned bandmates, the eruption of emotion when the cape is cast aside Yet Again. It’s magical theatre of soul music so it is, check it out, never gets old :

Lewis and I were hooked frankly.  Each song was better than the last – I Got You, Night Train, Think, I Feel Good, Out Of Sight, Try Me, I’ll Go Crazy,  Poppa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Cold Sweat.  We wished we could see him live.   He never came.  But, eventually, he did.  It was in Brighton one summer in Stanmer Park in the year 2000.  It was called the Essential Festival.  James Brown’s star had waned, he hadn’t charted for years, but his name was still synonymous with legend.  However, he was 67 years old, all the hype was that he only did 20 minutes in all, the bulk of the show was the band and younger singers & rappers.  And by then I’d immersed myself in Live At The Apollo the greatest Live Album of all time, and gorged on the youtube clips of the man in his prime, It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud) and the ubiquitous, brilliant Sex Machine.  I didn’t want those images to be replaced by a disappointment.  So I actually chose not to go.  Do I regret it now?  Kind of.  Yes.  Of course.  Other people I’ve rocked up to when in their 70s – McCartney, Aretha, Roberta Flack – and one in his 90s the amazing Tony Bennett – were all superb.  We were a little nervous about Aretha because there was some word of mouth that sometimes she “doesn’t turn up”, well she certainly did that night (see My Pop Life #225) god bless her, so that was nonsense.  But I remember distinctly deciding to swerve the great Godfather of Soul James Brown.  A fairly childish decision really.  The great festival- going kid of the 1970s had turned into the tight-assed muso-snob of the millenium.  But since I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you about The Essential Festival that year.  Silly me.

Arc Connexxion rehearsed at George’s house just down Blackstock Road from where I lived.  Once a week in the evening.  I do not remember the rest of the band at all.  Who were they?  A racially mixed bunch who could play Motown, Fela and James Brown.  Out of my league perhaps, but playing a James Brown horn line is considerably easier than attempting John Coltrane or Stan Getz (see Desafinado My Pop Life #68), in fact playing in a horn section (this was my first time) is easier than playing solo.  But you have to be tight.  Tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm tight. The tongue on the reed has to be exact.  Percussive.  I loved it.  Our crowning moment was playing at Notting Hill Carnival after Aswad in August 1983 where we were last on the bill, and didn’t get to play Hot Pants after all (see My Pop Life #42).  We were hustled on and told we could play one song before the curfew and Carnival had to close.  We played Martha Reeves’ Dancing In The Street, and hundreds of people who didn’t want to go home yet did just that.  Fantastic.  It was our biggest crowd ever.

Jenny and Lulu went to the James Brown gig in 2000 and reported back disappointment and a sense of a great artist being wheeled out, a circus act.  Jenny says that apparently James Brown actually was James Brown for one whole song (I should have gone), after which he went off and the young performers, rappers and funkateers played for 15 minutes before he came back, but he just couldn’t do it again and he simply stopped being James Brown and became a kind of JB tribute act and so she was sad.  So was Lulu.  A few years later Jenny and her sister Lucy saw Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis who were both in their late 80s and while Chuck was still Chuck Berry, Jerry was on a zimmer frame and scarcely present.  I’ve felt this way about Brian Wilson, my absolute musical hero, for the last few years.  They’re wheeling out a cash cow.  He’s not Brian anymore.  Leave him be.

But James Brown?  If you think about it he has to be the greatest genius of popular music.  You could argue Louis Armstrong and it might be difficult to resist.  But JB is a giant.  He emerged from the 1950s as a fully formed soul star before the term had even been invented, fusing R & B and gospel into a funk sound a whole decade before it was even thought of.  During the 1960s the sound was honed and streamlined, the melody lines erased and the rhythms amplified and tightened.  The Vocals were punctuated howls, shrieks, shouts and calls.  Astounding. Pure dance music.  Popular, political, immersive, irresistible.  He was the first and most popular artist to be sampled on the turntables of DJs in the South Bronx, the drum breaks of Clyde Stubblefield are all over old skool hip hop.  All hip hop.  When he stole the rhythm and riff of Bowie & Lennon’s Fame from Young Americans for his song Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved) in 1975, no one blinked.  I suspect Bowie thought it was an honour frankly, which indeed it was. JB was infamous for running his band like a military outfit, musicians would get fined for missing a cue or a bum note or a snare hit on the wrong beat or being seconds late for rehearsal.  Not greasing their patent leather shoes or tying their bowtie.  A number of times bandleader PeeWee Ellis walked out only to come back, but in 1970, Ellis, Stubblefield, Fred Wesley and the other Famous Flames never came back and JB then recruited players from Cincinatti band The Pacemakers to replace them, include Bootsy Collins (see Give Up The Funk My Pop Life #138). He called the new band The J.B.s.  His rhythms are in house music, soul music, funk, hip hop, jungle, drum & bass, disco, you name it.  Michael Jackson’s greatest influence.  I can’t do him justice in this bloglet of mine and by the way he was probably bonkers too but what a musical giant.  What a towering extraordinary figure in the musical landscape. What a force.

When The Brighton Beach Boys played people’s parties or weddings we would play a whole load of other material – disco, funk, ska, rock n roll and even Steely Dan and ELO, and when he can, our very own nutty drummer the itinerant rhythmicist Theseus Gerrard (mentioned in My Pop Life #111 and others) gets up to sing Get Up Offa That Thing and the whole room goes up to a different level.  We played it at Caroline Lucas’ 50th birthday in Brighton at the Indica Gallery in town which is based in an old church, and Theseus quite naturally climbed into the still-present pulpit to deliver his message of funk.  He’s a natural the fucker.  The funk of forty thousand years.

So I’ve played at least two James Brown songs in my short musical career.  Hot Pants is my favourite.  Could I get to play anymore before my ultimate death?  I’m 63 now.  Time is ticking…

 

The original number one hit single from 1971, Parts One & Two

Live and direct in 1985…

My Pop Life #237 : Have You Seen Her – The Chi-Lites

Have You Seen Her – The Chi-Lites

One month ago today
I was happy as a lark
But now I go for walks
To the movies, maybe to the park
And have a seat on the same old bench
To watch the children play, huh
You know, tomorrow is their future
But for me just another day
They all gather around me
They seem to know my name
We laugh, tell a few jokes
But it still doesn’t ease my pain
Well, I know I can’t hide from a memory
‘Though day after day I’ve tried
I keep sayin’ – she’ll be back –
But today again I lied

*

It entered the UK Pop Charts on 15th January 1972.  One of the most original and enduring songs of that era, today it still stands out as timeless superior music.  That Christmas we had enjoyed and endured Benny Hill singing Ernie endlessly smirking at us the grubby little toe-rag, then The New Seekers had cleansed us and tried to help us all to sing in Perfect Harmonover.  1971 had been my year of sentience musically, by which I mean to say that I had started listening to music in a different way.  Being catchy and easy to hum wasn’t enough any more.  Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep they sang.  We had other words for it.  And alongside the dross of Jonathan King and Johnny Reggae there was Rod Stewart and The Faces dropping Maggie May, there was Labi Siffre’s utterly magnificent It Must Be Love and there was Isaac Hayes with the astonishing Theme From Shaft (see My Pop Life #60 ).  I yearned for more complex music now, and wasn’t too discerning or careful – well I was 14 years old.  It was pot luck really.

I’d bought Pictures At An Exhibition by Emerson Lake & Palmer, a moog-synthesised Mussorgsky/Ravel mess which I irritated my family with.  I also had the Van Der Graaf Generator LP H to He (Who Am The Only One) and the title alone should give you a clue to its genesis as pretentious prog-rock but oh how I loved it.  Great band VDGG, they still sound astounding in 2020.  And I had The Moody Blues finest hour In Search Of The Lost Chord which the entire family can still recite word perfectly I’m sure, I certainly can.  One of my LPs that got played downstairs.  Random post-hippie albums. Long Players.  But the singles chart was still the thing for all of us.  Top of the Pops on Thursday and Pick of the Pops on Sunday.  Religious observance of both.  Indeed I am not the only person to hold the music of 1971 so close to my heart – one fella, music journalist David Hepworth, has written a whole book about it.

My friend Martin Steel tried to acquaint me with this particular book of the old testament a few years ago but some technical issue prevented it.  Thus I haven’t read it, but I sense through the osmosphere that this is a faintly rockist tome, and concentrates on white boys and guitars, which is both a shame and a flipping disgrace.  I wait for the day when Black Lives Matter infiltrates that particular monolithic way of consuming music, which I have struggled with for most of my life.

I’ve already chosen a number of songs for this story from 1971 which burned into my ear and thence my soul as I grew into a teenaged boy :  Imagine which I’d just got for Christmas from JD my mum’s 2nd husband in the form of an LP,  then single Jig-A-Jig which I’d mistakenly taken into a music lesson at school and been disrespected, first single purchase The Banner Man (!), learning how to play the sax with Y Sharp, swooning to 45s  Tired Of Being Alone and Morning Has Broken, and absolutely loving I Don’t Blame You At All, and then LP track Bad ‘n’ Ruin which became my theme song later on in life. Proper songs, proper songwriting.  All so vivid.  When I look at the Chart rundowns now from that era – you can do it on Official Charts dot com https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/19720109/7501/ – it feels like a blessed time, pre-worry, post-trauma (see My Pop Life #84) just bumbling along in East Sussex without a care in the world.  In theory.

In fact of course I was undergoing my sexual awakening.  Luckily for you dear reader I remember little of this nightmare, and indeed I would not lose my virginity for another two years, but stuff was happening.  In those days sex was almost completely suppressed, despite the hype of the 1960s.  My mum was reading The World Is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins and there were a few well-thumbed pages in there.  You would find torn pages from a porno mag like Mayfair or Penthouse in a hedge walking along, discarded by some wanker.  The toilets at the train station in Polegate were covered with barely suppressed erections, phone numbers, boasts and pleas.  I shared a bedroom with my brother Paul so wanking in bed was out of the question.  No, this always happened in the bathroom.  Indeed I remember a few years later Simon’s friend Patrick Freyne accusing me of wanking one day as I emerged from the bathroom in St Anne’s Crescent.  Scarring.  But no girl (or boy) had ever touched it in early 1972, even through my trousers.  No, I was an innocent teen, and romantic at that.  Other lads my age – Pete, Conrad, Spark – they were already experimenting with girls in 1972.  Simon too started to go out with the school beauty Kerry Day.  The only girl I liked at school was Sarah Jane.  I did eventually go out with her, but we never had sex.  Sex was rare.

It was all about romance.  Falling in Love.  Holding Hands. Going Out With Each Other.  It was All Terribly Important.  Who Fancied Who.  All that.  There was a group of girls who I’d walk past on the way home from school – I’d catch the train from Lewes to Polegate, then the bus from there to Hailsham town centre and walk home.  On the edge of the estate – now called Town Farm, but dubbed Sin City when we lived there because it housed all the problem families – was a grassy play area and one day a small female child stopped me with an “excuse me?”.  She pointed to an older girl around my age.  “What’s your name? My friend Sharon fancies you”.  Well I told her and can remember almost nothing else but I’m wondering now whether this would have been almost my first sexual kiss, some weeks later I’m guessing, stretching it out a bit.  There was an underpass so the kids wouldn’t get run over, and the kiss was in there.  Was there also a fondling of tit?  Probably.  Maybe. That didn’t burn into my memory like you thought it would.  But I didn’t really fancy Sharon anyway.  It wasn’t a keeper.

My first girlfriend proper was Pam Wickes.  In the year below me, from Seaford.  Lovely girl.  She didn’t take sugar in her tea and persuaded me to give it up.  She came over to Hailsham a few times and spent the night on the settee downstairs, but I was last to bed and we had a little exploratory romp and rumble in the wee small hours.  No sex though.  Both a bit scared I think.  We liked each other a lot, but again it wasn’t destined to last really.  I didn’t love her.  She was like a mate.  We’d tease and joke around a lot.  Listen to music.  I think this must have been about a year later to be fair when I was 15.  Nothing like that happened when I was 14.

The Chi-Lites in 1971

The song burned into me like all the great music of that era.  The Chi-Lites were from Chicago.  Lead singer and songwriter Eugene Record already had some credits, in particular the classic Soulful Strut by Young-Holt Unlimited which he co-wrote with Sonny Sanders & Barbara Acklin and which was produced by Brunswick honcho Carl Davis who also produced The Chi-Lites.  The dirty fuzz guitar with the sugar sweet harmonies blew me away, yes, but when Eugene starts that soulful monologue you have to listen.  And when he says, in a perfect rhythm

I keep sayin’ – she’ll be back – but today – again I’ve lied

All people of a certain age will sing ‘Waaahhh – I see her face everywhere I go’.  Magic.

There are a couple of choruses then an outstanding bridge :

Why, oh why
Did she have to leave and go away ? oh yeah
Oh, I’ve been used to havin’ someone to lean on
And I’m lost
Baby, I’m lost

And after another chorus and another bridge the song starts to wind down – but Eugene is not done, oh no.  He’s been sitting on that bench for some time now – a month perhaps – and he’s been thinking it through.  The soulful monologue returns :

As another day comes to an end
I’m lookin’ for a letter or somethin’
Anything that she would send
With all the people I know
I’m still a lonely man
You know, it’s funny
But I thought I had her in the palm of my hand

And then finally, after five minutes of music, he sings.  A cry, a sorrowful cry of pain, of loss.  Jenny’s favourite part of the song.  The line when he says “with all the people that I know I am still a lonely man” was the one that struck me at the time, and still does.

The single was re-released in the UK in 1975

So why has this song resonated with me so deeply, when I have never sat on a bench and wept for my lost lady love?  Don’t get me wrong, I had a terrible time when my first love left me behind in 1975 – but I knew exactly where she was, and I would see her many times a week at school.  Have You Seen Her?  Who?  The song came out about six months after my family got back together after a 9-month homeless period – all scattered around in different places, waiting to be re-housed by East Sussex County Council.  Eventually we were offered a council house on Salternes Drive (Sin City) and we’d been there about six – nine months when this song appeared.  Maybe deep down in the unacknowledged recesses of my gut I’m missing my mother.  My mother as she was before all the breakdowns, hospitalisations, anti-depressants and suicide attempts.  Before the madness.  Before the fall.  Maybe.

But maybe it’s just a great pop song.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Chi-Lites :

My Pop Life #225 : I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You) – Aretha Franklin

I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You) – Aretha Franklin

You’re a no good heart breaker
You’re a liar and you’re a cheat
And I don’t know why
I let you do these things to me
My friends keep telling me
That you ain’t no good
But oh, they don’t know
That I’d leave you if I could
I guess I’m uptight
And I’m stuck like glue
Cause I ain’t never
I ain’t never, I ain’t never, no, no loved a man
The way that I, I love you

*

We’d been living in New York just over a year when we hit the musical jackpot and scored two tickets to see Aretha Franklin live. She was to perform at NJPAC,  a splendid concert hall in Newark just over the Hudson River in New Jersey.  Her status as Queen of Soul was unchallenged over the course of my lifetime but she had a reputation for being a little unpredictable in a live arena.  Which Aretha would we get on this blustery March evening, joining the hordes of well-dressed African-Americans here to pay tribute to a legend.  Famously Aretha didn’t like to fly, the reason why we’d never seen her in the UK, so she’d travelled here by car from her native Detroit.  I think we’d relaxed our expectations, not seeking the Goddess of Song but simply wanting to be in the same room as a legend who had sung some of the greatest records ever made.

*

What are the greatest soul records ever made ?   I digress.  I have to.  Personal taste you understand.  A list which changes every day but grows over the decades, these represent the cream of the world of soul music, from the 50s – 80s anyway.  Let’s go –

Sam Cooke   ‘You Send Me’

Lorraine Ellison   ‘Stay With Me Baby‘

The Stylistics   ‘People Make The World Go Round’

Michael Jackson   ‘Off The Wall’

Otis Redding   ‘Try A Little Tenderness’

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes   ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now‘

Roberta Flack   ‘Where Is The Love?‘

Stevie Wonder   ‘Love’s In Need Of Love Today’  etc

Earth Wind & Fire   ‘That’s The Way Of The World’

The Four Tops   ‘Bernadette’

Isaac Hayes  ‘Theme From Shaft’

Anita Baker   ‘No One In The World’

James Brown   ‘I’ll Go Crazy’

Al Green   ‘Belle’

The Temptations   ‘Just My Imagination’

The Isley Brothers   ‘Harvest For The World’

Smokey Robinson   ‘The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage’

The Chi-Lites   ‘Have You Seen Her?’

Bill Withers   ‘Just The Two Of Us’

The Staple Singers   ‘I’ll Take You There’

Luther Vandross   ‘There’s Nothing Better Than Love’

Jackie Wilson   ‘Sweetest Feeling’

Diana Ross   ‘Remember Me’

Ray Charles   ‘What Kind Of Man Are You?’

Sam & Dave   ‘When Something Is Wrong With My Baby’

Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell   ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’

What do all these songs have in common?  Well, I’d say it was an ability on the part of the singer to testify to their own feelings in song and thus to reach the listener, deep down inside.  I am touched by these songs, I feel feelings.  Pride, joy, pity, sorrow, sacrifice, surrender, love – the whole gamut of feeling is in there.  And then of course – there’s this…

Aretha Franklin   ‘I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You)

*

The Queen of Soul.  When I repacked my CDs into boxes then into a storage container in England last month I had a thick brick wedge of Aretha Franklin, from the tin pan alley songs and musical numbers of the early 60s, through the classic Atlantic Records era which starts with this song through to the mid seventies, up to the disco hits on Arista and duets with George Michael – a body of work with astonishing singing, total command of the material, the effortless soaring which her voice achieves time & time again, translating the gospel experience into secular song, singing the blues, jazz, pop, soul music, an outstanding body of work untouched by her contemporaries.  This was evident at her extraordinary funeral last year on August 31st 2018 which was televised –  the full nine hours without commercials – and I watched Chaka Khan, Jennifer Hudson, Shirley Caesar, Ariana Grande, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Ron Isley, Faith Hill, Smokey Robinson, Fantasia Barrino, Jennifer Holliday and many more tearing the roof off the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit without ever reaching the vocal heights of the Queen herself. Which is how it should be.  Although I have to say Chaka Khan was outstanding.

*

The first Aretha Franklin record I heard was I Say A Little Prayer  in the mid-sixties.

The moment I wake up
Before I put on my makeup (Makeup)
I say a little (Prayer for you)
And while I’m combing my hair now
And wondering what dress to wear now (Wear now)
I say a little (Prayer for you)

Written by Bacharach & David, originally a hit for Dionne Warwick, Bacharach apparently preferred Aretha’s version.  I was eleven years old and the song has stuck with me ever since.  It was the signature sound of Aretha Franklin, pop gospel, unmistakably her regardless of who wrote the song, the essence of soul music, the swing of her magnificent voice swooping between the cadences of her backing singers The Sweet Inspirations over an irresistible beat.  At some point after that I heard Natural Woman then Respect.   I Never Loved A Man didn’t figure until my early twenties and my previously documented Soul Education (My Pop Lives #98 and #79 for example).  The story behind the song I discovered when I read Peter Guralnick’s book Sweet Soul Music.  There was no Youtube when I was a young man.  The odd TV documentary, records, and books.

The first Guralnick book I’d read was Last Train To Memphis which is about a young Elvis Presley, Sun Records and that bottled lightning moment through to the Army call-up.  It’s one of the finest biographies I have ever read and I recommend it to you, even if you’re not a strong Elvis fan.  It led me to his other music writing –  Feel Like Going Home about the blues and Lost Highway about country music, others.  The Aretha story goes something like this.

Some facts – she had a child when she was 12 years old,  her mother died before she was ten, she was a civil rights activist, friends with Dionne Warwick, Cissy Houston and her daughter Whitney.   She had a natural gift.  Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic after a number of relatively fruitless years singing for Columbia Records – showtunes, blues standards, pop songs.  The arrangements didn’t suit her voice and the results are a mismatch, underwhelming.

Spooner Oldham was on the piano. Ken Laxton on trumpet, King Curtis & Charles Chalmers on tenor saxophones, Willie Bridges on baritone, Chips Moman & Jimmy Johnson on guitars, Tommy Cogbill on bass guitar, and Roger Hawkins on drums.   They decide to start with a song Aretha had brought with her written by Ronnie Shannon.  She sat down on the grand piano and played the song for them.   It was an electric moment for all present.  Spooner immediately moved onto the Wurlitzer electric piano which provides the opening riff and the song’s groove.  After some hesitation and discussion about the groove, the song was recorded in a few hours.  Things were good.  Drinks were available, the atmosphere was relaxed.  Halfway through recording the B-side – a Spooner/Penn song called Do Right Woman, Do Right Man – trumpeter Laxton flirted openly with Aretha. There was some laughter causing her manager and husband Ted White challenge Laxton and there were fisticuffs.  Next minute White is walking into the booth and demanding that Rick Hall sack Laxton from the session.  Hall refused and there were more words whereupon Ted pulled Aretha out of the session and they left the studio and went back to the motel.

The session folded up right there with one and a half songs completed.  Rick Hall sent everyone back home or to their motels.  He then went over to the Aretha Franklin motel to talk to Aretha & Tom White in the wee small hours over a drink and try to relax them and convince them to come back in the morning to finish the album.  More fights.  More words.  White’s masculinity had clearly been ruffled and not for the last time, his ego interrupted the music.  Aretha Franklin & Ted White drove to the airport to catch the next plane back to New York.  Muscle Shoals was done. Ironically the only song they completed – Aretha’s first choice – was a song about being in love with a complete bastard, about being trapped in an abusive relationship.  She knew what she was singing about, and all of herself is in there.

The remainder of Aretha’s first LP on Atlantic Records was recorded in New York City, with the Muscle Shoals session players flying in to bring their particular sound to the album, but not, it should be added, trumpeter Ken Laxton. He was replaced by Melvin Lastie.  The results are historic, a landmark LP that thrust Aretha from struggling artist (I’m joking, she was always a superstar and she recorded nine albums with Colombia) to Queen of Soul overnight.  She sold a million copies of the song, and the album of the same name.  See this short clip below of her singing live and an interview with Wexler talking about that fateful night.

*

It’s hard to have lowered expectations with a musical legend.  Walking into NJPAC and taking our seats, the band was playing a funk shuffle to warm us up.  Full band, with five horns, strings and a grand piano centre stage. We had slightly elevated seats to the side, looking down onto the stalls and across to the stage.  We notice a man carrying a black bag out onto the stage and he places it under the grand piano and immediately a thrill goes through me.  The legendary story of Aretha touring America in the 1960s and insisting that her fee was placed under the piano in cash in a bag before she came out to sing.  If it ain’t broke.  And then the lights go down and electricity crackles across the space and she sweeps in, majestic, all-powerful, gracious, potent and delivers a stunning version of Jackie Wilson’s smash hit Higher & Higher.  She is in total command, the notes fall out of her mouth and yet pierce the air.  We smile at each other.  We’re getting the real deal.  She talks to us.  She sings Day Dreaming and Think and Don’t Play That Song and Natural Woman.  She goes off for a break and comes back wearing a huge fur coat which she offers to a lady in the front row.  The lady goes to take it and Aretha snatches it back with a smile like you must be kidding me!  Proper ghetto fabulous.  Like the very definition of the phrase.  Then she goes into a gospel number – Old Landmark from the Amazing Grace LP (the film of that amazing concert in 1972 came out finally this year) – and starts to testify as the band vamps behind her, telling us of her cancer, talking to the doctor in the hospital, her faith, her healing.  It is absolutely riveting, the entire hall is drawn in to her story, we love her more than we ever thought we could in this moment.  A cover of Gladys Knight’s Midnight Train To Georgia and then, those familiar chords as she sits at the piano, that groove from way back in Muscle Shoals, that moment that changed her life.  I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Love You).  She delivers it. 

My Pop Life #223 : Overjoyed – Stevie Wonder

Overjoyed – Stevie Wonder

And though you don’t believe that they do
They do come true
For did my dreams
Come true when I looked at you
And maybe too, if you would believe
You too might be
Overjoyed, over loved, over me

*

In the summer of 2008 the Olympic Games were held in China.  We had booked a holiday to start soon after that to visit to my brother Paul who was working in Nanjing.  He’d been in China for five years at that point, working in education, and it was time to see him there.  He had made the intrepid move east after living in the Dominican Republic for five years, and a few months back in the UK had confirmed that he couldn’t live in England.    We flew to Shanghai and caught the bullet train in to our hotel in the French Concession area of the city.  We felt some initial trepidation that China might be a little racist, but the sensational performance of Usain Bolt in those Olympics, winning three gold medals and breaking the World Record each time meant that Jenny was greeted with joy everywhere we went.  In fact people asked if they could take photos with her.  You could of course argue that this is still racist, but I know which I prefer. We spent a couple of days with Paul who had come to Shanghai to greet us, doing the Art Museum, the old town, the finest restaurants and so on.

We would be seeing this scenery for real shortly

Then we travelled south, by plane, to Guilin.  There were Moon Cakes that night, and the following morning we embarked onto a riverboat for the four-hour journey downstream on the River Li to Yangshuo.  It remains one of the most astounding journeys of my life, through the karst limestone willow-pattern hills which were eye-poppingly wonderful in every direction.

We disembarked past the cormorant fishermen, now a tourist staple of an older way of life and caught a taxi to The Giggling Tree, a converted farm which Paul’s ex-boyfriend Colin had recommended.  Surrounded by paddy fields and those spectacular hills, we relaxed and explored.  Took little wooden craft out on the river reminiscent of the gondola or the punt.  One night we went to a theatrical performance literally on the river with hundreds of performers, part dance, part music, choreographed and directed brilliantly by Zhang Yimou, the same Zhang Yimou who had just directed the Olympic Opening Ceremony in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing (and was also responsible for many of the finest Chinese films of the last 20 years such as Ju Dou and Raise The Red Lantern).

The rumours doing the rounds then regarded the performers at that Opening Ceremony having to wear nappies because Zhang didn’t approve of tea breaks, or sitting inside an upside down cup for eight hours on the day waiting for their moment.

The Giggling Tree, Yangshuo

with a British Olympian by the paddy fields

  One visitor to the hotel was a British woman wearing an Olympic shirt and we found our that she had represented the UK in the rowing competition. Some of the team had stayed on to explore.  One day Jenny and I hired bikes and cycled to the Assembling Dragon Cave there along the river, over bridges and along the paths.  It was the first time Jenny had cycled for a very long time, and the very first time we’d cycled together.  On the way back we stopped by a rustic bridge.  It was a warm day and I decided to remove my shirt and sneakers and jump into the river.  It was exquisite.

We decided not to take a balloon ride, but enjoyed Yangshuo and the countryside for a few days before flying back north, this time to Nanjing, the old capital of China.  Nanjing lies on the great Yangtze River which flows 3,900 miles across China to the sea, the third longest river in the world.

Paul was living on the 15th floor of a medium high rise dwelling and from his balcony we could see about three blocks before the smog obliterated the view.  The wind blew from the West, the same direction as the river flowed and it was full of industrial muck and eroded soil and sand.

We visited his place of work, a college where Paul was headmaster and met some of his colleagues.

On our last day in Nanjing I suddenly got very ill.  Sweating, fever, aching kidneys, diarrhoea, vomiting.  I stayed in bed that night as Jenny and Paul went out to the neon lights of the city, and the following morning Paul put us on the train to Shanghai, worried about my health.  I was weak and wobbly but we made it to the hotel and decided not to see a Chinese doctor but just get home and sort it out from there.  Which is what we did.

Nanjing

The doctor in Brighton decided to X-ray my lungs which had a shadow on them, and conduct a series of blood tests.  Blood tests are a ‘yes or no‘ answer, you can’t just ask ‘what is wrong with this person?‘, you have to ask : ‘is it pneumonia?‘ and when the test says ‘no‘ then you have to ask the next question.  We went through nine of these tests with a negative answer each time.  So I was laid up in bed, weak as a kitten, wheezing a little, losing weight, and reading the entire Harry Potter series from beginning to end.

Meanwhile we had two tickets to see Stevie Wonder at the O2, a week after we’d landed.   Jenny worried that she would have to go with someone else, but I was determined not to miss my hero – only the second time I would see him live in concert.  We had a car, but Jenny didn’t think I should drive for some reason.  So I asked my friend Rory Cameron, one of the Brighton Beach Boys, if he would chauffeur us to the gig in my car for a small fee.  He agreed, bless him and off we went.

We had pretty good seats – about the 12th row. Stevie was walked out onstage by his daughter Aisha (Isn’t She Lovely!), and rather remarkably opened with a harmonica take on All Blues the first track on Miles Davis‘ classic album A Kind Of Blue.

There were other surprises too among the classics. We’d come on a great night, entirely by chance, because on October 1st 2008 Stevie Wonder played the song  People Make The World Go Round !!! originally by The Stylistics which is one of my favourite songs of all time (see My Pop Life #193).   He also played Chick Corea’s Spain later in the set.  The band were just outstanding.  A quick word here for Nathan Watts the legendary bass player who has been with Stevie since 1974 and is now his musical director.

Nathan Watts, Detroit’s finest

They played a decent chunk of songs from Hotter Than July (the stunning Lately,  plus As If You Read My Mind, Did I Hear You Say You Love Me and Masterblaster) and Innervisions (Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing, Higher Ground, Visions, Living For The City, Golden Lady) and a nice selection from Songs In The Key Of Life (see My Pop Life #39) including As, Knocks Me Off My Feet, Sir Duke and Isn’t She Lovely.

Couldn’t have been happier.  Too ill to stand up, but luckily most folk decided to sit and enjoy the music.  Beautiful beautiful music.  Then he played a song that I didn’t know called Overjoyed.  A tune. It is on one of the 1980s LPs which musical snobbery long ago decided weren’t up to scratch after the power and soul of Hotter Than July, which came out in 1980.  It immediately struck me as a completely astounding song and in the ensuing weeks I bought all of Stevie Wonder’s catalogue which I didn’t already own, then decided to chase down all the songs he’d written for other people.  How could I have missed that ?!? Overjoyed is a song he wrote for the double LP Secret Life Of Plants (1979) but was not included on it.  That album was also critically derided but bears repeated listening.  So many ideas there, so much beauty.  The drops of water which form part of the rhythm of this song, the gentle pulse, the melody are all astoundingly good.   Jenny knew it.

In Square Circle LP released in 1985 also includes Part Time Lover

What else did he play that night?  Wait…OK.  Look.  If you’re a born-again muso nerd like me it is possible nowadays to check on a gig you went to which despite being extremely memorable and seared into your brain for evermore still has huge holes in it for the brain cannot in general retrieve all of the information which is stored inside it.  That is now what the internet is for. And there is a site called setlist.fm which contains much information of this kind.  There are holes in that too, but slowly they are being filled by punters, by muso nerds and pop fans.  Have you forgotten that memory?  Well here it is.  (Of course the gig I went to remains a hole on that website !!  I’ll have to search my memory even deeper…) But yes, Superstition.

Rory was waiting for us outside and I’m sure we burbled at him all the way home to Brighton, but I must confess it was a relief not to be driving for now I was both elated and shrivelling gently.  Further blood tests produced no results, and a 2nd X-ray showed that the shadow had gone on my lungs. Within a few weeks I was up and about and I’d finished the entire Harry Potter series.

In a tributary of the River Li catching Chinese pneumonia, probably

Jenny and I talked about what that illness was, and how I’d caught it.  We decided that it was a river-borne virus because that was pretty much the only thing which we hadn’t done together – a process of elimination I’d used in Mexico back in 1980 when I caught Hepatitus B and Paul hadn’t (see My Pop Life #72) and we established that I’d had sex with Xochitl in Pie De La Cuesta and he had not. When we caught up with her later in Mexico City she was also jaundiced like me.   But this time we just didn’t know what it was.  Maybe the Chinese doctors would have identified it immediately but then maybe I wouldn’t have been allowed to fly with Asian flu – a similar scenario again to the Mexico trip.

The other post-script worth mentioning is that a few weeks after we’d returned from China, news came in on October 10th that one of the hot-air balloons in Yangshuo had crashed – plummetted to the earth, killing 4 Dutch tourists and injuring the other three people on board.

So the moral of the story is this – if you get a chance to go to Yangshuo – take it. Truly breathtaking place. Don’t be tempted by the hot air balloon ride.  Or the river swim.  No.  And – if you get the chance to see Stevie Wonder – go. We all need to feel joy.  Seek him out.  He is a mighty force for good in a dangerous scary world.  He is a legend and a half.  My favourite songwriter, my favourite singer.

Overjoyed live at the O2 Sept 12th 2008

The LP track with water droplets as beats :

My Pop Life #217 : Optimistic – Sounds of Blackness

Optimistic – Sounds of Blackness

*

as long as you keep your head to the sky 

*

I owe everything to my wife in the end.  Almost everything positive in my life has come from her incredible energy, her spirit, her capacity for love above all else.   This is her song.

I write from my dressing room on Broadway.

dressing room, Jacobs Theatre, 45th & 8th

Last August 2018 it was – I was in Malibu with my friend Stephen Kalinich (see My Pop Life #169 : The Magic Hand) when Jenny messaged me – could I make a meeting at 4pm the following afternoon in Los Angeles – with her Agency?  She’d spoken to the boss – Scott Manners – and he’d decided to relax his rule about not representing married couples.  They had an office in New York, and one in Los Angeles.  The next day I am seated at a desk as seven agents, (including Glenn Salners & Michael Chance), ask me questions.  They all love Jenny, but what is my raison d’irt track ?  They’d seen the showreel and liked it.  Good range.  Well, I say, I like to do accents, characters, but I don’t do theatre.  It was a line I’d been using for thirty years.  Ever since playing Macbeth at the Liverpool Everyman in fact, (see My Pop Life #108) although I had done one more play since then at the RSC in 1989, and one at The Bush in 2009.  I do camera.  TV, film. I’m not sure how to do theatre acting.  It seems to require lying on a large scale, expanding the performance to reach the back row, projecting, pretending TOO MUCH.  My wife Jenny Jules is very good at it, in fact she is excellent.  Quite superb.  Better than me by quite a way.  She does the stage stuff, I do the camera stuff, largely.  It’s an amicable if archetypal arrangement.

But that is the story.  They nod, we chat, it feels good.

About a month later, I meet the New York office, including Scott.  He says he is worried by some things I said at the LA meeting.  Specifically the part about Not Doing Theatre.  Well, I said, following my own pre-recorded script, the story I’d been telling myself for the last 30 years : that “I don’t do theatre”.  I was a camera actor, a minimalist whose talent was for microscopic changes of mood and thought that needed a camera close-up into my boat-race. The Agency listened, nodded and Scott said “Ralph, that’s going to be a problem for us.  We use the theatre to build careers.”

“OK then”  I said,  “I’ll do some theatre“.

It was time.

They signed me up.  Two months later, Scott sends me the script and one particular scene from The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth.  I’d seen it in London with Paulette Randall earlier that year.    My audition, just before Christmas, was with director Sam Mendes who’d asked me why I was going back onstage.  I told him that my wife had scored a great gig (couldn’t say what!) which meant that I really didn’t need to work in 2019, so the shackles were off and maybe I felt it was time to get scared again after only one stage performance in the last 30 years.  He reckoned they could provide that.  I’d practised a Derry accent over the weekend listening to Martin McGuinness on Youtube, and learned the lines.  It felt good.  I was offered the part the following lunchtime.

My shadow falls across Broadway, January 2019

Jenny is the theatre actor, she plugs in on stage and burns incandescent like the sun.  Anyone who has seen her, in Ruined, Sweat, The Homecoming, Wine In The Wilderness, The Crucible, Julius Caesar, Her Portmanteau, Two Trains Running, Gem of the Ocean, Pecong,  The Colour of Justice, The Vagina Monologues, Fabulation, Born Bad, Big White Fog, Death & The King’s Horseman, A Raisin In The Sun, Moon On A Rainbow Shawl or Father Comes Home From The Wars knows what I mean.  She is luminescent.   She makes my eyes water, always does.  So proud and moved, so thrilled to see her every time.  I usually go six or seven times to a show she is doing.  I make the money, she does the art.  What’s the story again ? – I subsidised the theatre via TV shows & movies.  Yaawn.  I think we’d both been telling this story to be honest, we’d just got used to it.   The story was tired and had become bollocks.

On day one of rehearsal Tim Hoare introduced himself to me as the director.  Sam wasn’t going to be around.  I told Tim “my story” and how intrepid and scared I felt going back into the theatre.  He told me how Paddy Considine had never done a play when he started in The Ferryman in London.   Tim then nursed me through the rehearsal process with ease, fairness, compassion and great emotional literacy.  I was back in my twenties, in a rehearsal room with a new family, working on a piece of literature that we would stand on its feet together.  Back when I fell in love with the idea of being an actor.

The Ferryman

There are twenty-one actors in the cast plus a baby & the animals, it is a monster three-hour banquet of a play set in South Armagh & Derry in the North of Ireland in 1981 during the Hunger Strike.   I play IRA Commander Jimmy Muldoon. Most of the cast were new, and most of them were American.  Charles Dale, Fionnula Flanagan, Glenn Speers and the children (Brooklyn Shuck, Willow McCarthy Michael McCarthy & Matilda Lawler) were staying on from the Broadway cast.  Charles is Welsh, Fionnula and Glenn are southern & northern Irish.  The kids are all Americans doing a Northern Irish accent (very well).  The new company included the lovely Brian D’Arcy James as Quinn, Holley Fain as Caitlin and Emily Bergl as Mary, Fred Applegate as Uncle Pat and Annie McDonough as Aunt Pat, Graham Winton as Magennis the IRA man with the Prod surname, and Shuler Hensley as Tom Kettle the Englishman in Crossmaglen.  Sean Maloney and Terence Keeney came over from the West End company and the Guinness started to flow, Collin Kelly-Sordelet (Jersey boy!), Ethan Dubin (Brooklyn boy!!), Julia Nightingale (starlet) and Jack diFalco (doing the accent all day and all night) joined us in the various Irish bars of Hell’s Kitchen.  The belly started to grow.  Stories, politics, Ireland, the Troubles. We drank.  We bonded.

Then we moved to the theatre on 45th St.  The show was still on in the evening, so we worked from 12-4pm on the stage.  Shared dressing rooms with the company and had to clear out every day.  The day approached.  For my Broadway debut.  At the age of 61 and a half.  What blessings are these.

Broadway virgins no more : Julia, Sean, Terry, me, Ethan and Annie

Me and Brian D’Arcy James on opening night

What is inescapably extraordinary is this simple fact : the play is set in South Armagh in August 1981.  If you look back at an early entry in my story (My Pop Life #13 : The Green Fields of France) it is the story of a younger version of me in South Armagh, August 1981.  Crossmaglen.  The Troops Out Movement, protected by the IRA through the countryside on a delegation to the British Army barracks there.  A quite extraordinary circle back through my own history, which I discussed in rehearsals.  How could I not ?  Being told by Jean in West Belfast not to go down the shop in Ballymurphy for cigarettes on my own because I’ll get popped once they hear my accent.  Seeing The Undertones in Finsbury Park and other gigs with Fergal Sharkey stripping down one song at a time from a parka to bare chest as he warbled through their pop-punk repertoire.  Seeing Bobby Sands murals on the Falls Road the size of a house.  Being in a war-zone.  The violence of those years in England – Brixton going up in flames, the Falklands War, the NF, the miner’s strike, IRA bombs in Brighton (see My Pop Life #185 : Between The Wars).

The Ferryman cast & crew in rehearsal, Feb 2019

The infamous IRA scene at the top of Act 3 in rehearsal : Collin Kelly-Sordelet, Sean Delaney, Terry Keeley, Michael McCarthy, Jack diFalco

But beyond all of that, my own blood rushing through my veins every day as I boarded the Q train over the bridge to Manhattan with all the straphangers at 9.00am, finally feeling like a New Yorker.  I revisited my own love affair with acting, where I started, in the theatre.  Throughout my 20s I had done plays, above pubs, at the Edinburgh Festival, at the Royal Court, the Donmar, the Tricycle, the RSC.  I’d even written a couple.  Then after a terrible experience at Liverpool Everyman, revealed in My Pop Life #108 : Sumer Is Icumen In, I quit the stage and concentrated on TV and film acting.  Luckily Withnail & I  happened around the same time, and although it would take a few years to permeate the cultural landscape, my future was, unbeknown to me, already assured.  Lucky doesn’t cover it.  I am simply born protected & blessed and always have been.  I am forever grateful.  There was a moment of course in the joy of rehearsal when I thought – wow!  I should’ve gone back to the theatre YEARS AGO, but hey.  At least I got there.  I absolutely feel at home again.  Born again happy.

Ben, associate director, and Tim Hoare at work

And as Tim said to me on the day of the Dress Rehearsal – “you are a stage animal“.  Such a terrific endorsement at a critical time.  I had the Juice.  I didn’t know that at the start of rehearsal but now I could feel it.  I was using an old muscle and it still worked.  This in itself has been a huge thrill.

The Ferryman – the prologue : Glenn, Charlie, me, Graham

And all the while, there was Jenny alongside me as ever, nurturing and supporting, loving and healing, and holding her own secret, and rehearsing her own mighty show, for she had been cast back in September 2018 and signed an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) to not release the information to anyone.  We lived in a state of heightened purse-lipped security for three months.  Not even the word “Broadway” was to be uttered to any friends or relations of rabbit. The best gig she’d ever scored and she couldn’t tell anyone.  Until the day my deal was done, just before Christmas, and then there was the Press Release.

Jenny Jules as Hermione Granger

Jenny was going into another hit Broadway show :  Harry Potter & The Cursed Child, replacing our friend Noma Dumesweni as Hermione Granger.  For a year.  At least.  This was the secret we had held for three months.  Mmmmmmnnnnn.  Biting the soles of our feet.  Such a Great Part.  Such a great show.  I’d seen it with Cush Jumbo & Sean Griffin and Rose Leslie in 2018.  Noma was in the cast.  So thrilling, such a wonderful piece of theatre, full of real magic.  So suddenly we were both Broadway Babes, inheriting parts in shows which were already hits, had already been reviewed and were running on with new companies.  Both produced by Sonia Friedman.  We were local hire in the two West End hit transfers.  Perhaps not that surprising, thinking about it.  It had taken us five years.  We were on Cloud Nine.

Cloud Nine – kind of

Jenny started rehearsing long before I did, and didn’t open until a month after we’d opened – a fifteen-week rehearsal period all in all.  The Cursed Child show is in two parts, two complete plays, and they perform each one four times a week, eight show a week in all, the same as The Ferryman.

Ron, Harry, Hermione – Broadway 2019

The Cursed Child is considerably more technical than our traditional play which obeys the unities of place and time, set inside a farmhouse in Armagh.  The Cursed Child has magic for a start.  To say more would be to spoil the surprises for those who haven’t seen it yet.  But they needed their fifteen weeks.  Jenny opened last night in Part One, and tonight in Part Two.  Her sister Mandy (Natasha, Reginelle, Bad) came over for the opening and is sitting there tonight.  She’ll come to see The Ferryman tomorrow night.  What a star.

Max & his dad Sean

Yesterday dear friends Cush and Sean came to the Ferryman matinee.  They loved it.  They’d seen it twice before, and told me this was their favourite.  That was a secret of course.  This isn’t :  Jenny and I are Oddparents to their son Maximilian who is almost one beautiful year old.  After eating and walking up to the flower shop with them for Jenny’s first night bouquet, I split and bought a bottle of Yoichi Japanese whisky to take up to the lads’ dressing room after the evening show.  They hold an impromptu whiskey bar upstairs every night and it was time for me to contribute.  I deliberately use both spellings as we drink both whiskies.  We finished it in 40 minutes between the seven of us, then walked two blocks to Bar Centrale to meet Jenny, her sister Mandy, her room-mate Diane Davis (Ginny) and Charles Randolph-Wright our friend.  Sean and Terry came with me.  We had a few drinks and some toasty cheese and jumped in a taxi home.  Just a few mates from two shows.  It was a perfect end to a perfect day.  No need for Lou Reed after all.

And it was Jenny who’d done it.  Who’d spoken to her agent and wondered if he would represent me.  Who’d sent the showreel. I’d been without an agent all year, since sacking Oriana Elia in January 2018.  Another tedious story.  I have a manager, Michael Lazo at Untitled in LA.  And I’d done a movie early in the year that he had organised as a straight offer – Gemini Man with Will Smith, directed by Ang Lee.  Nice gig.  But I hadn’t acted since.  I’d written a movie and co-written a 4-part TV show so I hadn’t exactly been idle.  But she’d moved some earth and sorted me out.  She didn’t want me idle when she opened on Broadway.  Something to worry about.  And now here we were both on Broadway, at the same time.  I will forever be grateful to her, for her optimism and faith and love.  For her fierce heart.  For her fire and her ice.  And for just being her beautiful self.  Did I mention I was lucky ?

This tune literally lifts her heart.  From 1991, when we were courting, it is a gospel groove from Sounds of Blackness, a large soul/jazz/gospel ensemble out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Run by Gary Hines and produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.  Jam/Lewis formed a band called Flyte Time with Alexander O’Neal in the 1980s who then supported Prince on tour (but now called The Time and with Morris Day on lead vocals).  They then went on to produce Just Be Good To Me for The SOS Band and Janet Jackson’s hit albums Control & Velvet Rope.

In 1991 they nurtured their neighbours Sounds of Blackness, through their 2nd LP The Evolution of Gospel.  This – Optimistic – was the lead single.  It is pure UP music, and Very Jenny.  Very Infectious.  I swear she could heal the world on her own if she had time.  Their 3rd LP Africa to America : The Sound of the Drum is even better and I commend it also to thy ears.  Communal groove music.

Thank you my darling.  You are my world.

Never say die

My Pop Life #214 : Belle – Al Green

Belle   –   Al Green

Belle….it’s you that I want, but it’s him that I need

A song which turns the history of African American music on its head, the rhythm & blues universe being filled with gospel singers who turned to secular music, including Sam Cooke, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, Sam & Dave and James Ingram – to name but a few – here however, a soul man from Memphis has found Jesus and started to sing gospel music.  I say ‘started’ because although he grew up in the gospel tradition, and had a group called the Greene Brothers in the late 50s with his brothers, he was kicked out of the band by his father when he was caught listening to Jackie Wilson.  The big sinner.  He wouldn’t sing gospel again for 20 years.  Belle is  lodged into my cortex as the great turning point in Al Green’s life when he renounced pop music and went back to God, as suggested in the line quoted above, but lodged in  my heart perhaps as something else.  Maybe I seek God in my life but, I’ve never been a religious man and this morning I felt it more likely that this refers to my need for a father figure?  Let’s explore that possibility for a minute.

Indeed it may in fact roll out to be the same thing.  Safety.  Arm around the shoulder.  Protection.  He knows best.  I must have felt some degree of this from my father for the first seven years of my life.  There he was, getting up, going to work, getting some bread in Portsmouth once he’d finished his English Degree at Cambridge.

where’s dad ?  Gone to work, get some bread

This was actually my first sentence, circa late 1958, according to mum.  He told us stories at bedtime, often made them up on the spot.  We had no idea – we being Paul and I who shared a bedroom.  Various creatures inhabited these stories – The Grimp and The Cahoodler spring out immediately although their shapes have always been blurry and indistinct.  They were cartoon animals though in my unformed mind.  We used to go on long walks together, always, and that continues to this very day when we see each other.  Nature, fresh air, leaves, butterflies, the sky, farms – all part of our shared experience.  Musically Dad never liked Pop Music so never joined in Mum’s and our dances in the kitchen or singing harmonies in the chorus in the living room.  If he was in a bad mood he’d walk in and turn it off and we’d all be sat on the settee and told to listen to Mozart or Beethoven and Paul would giggle first then Mum and we’d be ordered out, banished.  Banish. Ed.  I have some pictures of this era which was I guess 1957-1965.

Cambridge 1958, Mum, Dad, me

When I look back on it all now, how lucky I am to be able to do this, my parents seem so ridiculously young.  How did they do it?  Three kids in the first six years of marriage.  It broke.  He strayed.  He moved out. I’ve told this story before.  But the thing is, emotionally, Dad became missing.  Never hugely physically affectionate in my memory at least, now he was out of the house, almost out of my life, and I missed him.  I’ve missed him ever since.

But.  I’ve never really had a true father figure in my life since then.  Dad is still there, up in West Yorkshire with Beryl, and he and I have a good relationship, we speak fairly often.  So I don’t know if that is why I love this song.  It may seem like a long shot in the end, because there’s a lot deep yearning in there.  It doesn’t belong in Al Green’s gospel catalogue though, because it is still a sexual love song sung by a soul man.  The chords, the changes are fantastic.  Smoky, sultry, sexy even though he’s ultimately struggling with it.  Maybe that’s the twist for me – the magnetic attachment I have to the song, ie  maybe I’m gay !   Haha all theories welcome.

a)  I’m actually deeply religious just haven’t acknowledged it yet

b)  I’m gay, just haven’t acknowledged it yet

c)  I always needed a father figure, just haven’t acknowledged it yet

d)  It’s a sexy song, and I like sex, just haven’t acknowledged etc

e)  It’s a spiritual song, and it feeds my soul, just haven’t blah blah

f)  it’s a fine tune !!

g)  it is actually Al Green’s best performance on record

                    Belle – The Lord and I have been friends for a mighty long time…               

Belle – leaving him has never ever really crossed my mind

The Belle Album was released in 1977 just as punk was sweeping the UK and I was busy joining in (like a good law student).  I think I bought it after the gig though.  I was going steady with Mumtaz, and we were both fans of Al Green.  I wrote about the Damascene conversion I had in 1971 with Tired Of Being Alone on TOTP in My Pop Life #101.   By then my father had been gone for six years and was about to remarry and move to Yorkshire.   I was going to see Al Green with my girlfriend.  The gig was in The Venue, Victoria Street  and it was 1978.  It was a little like The Forum/Town & Country in Kentish Town, but we were sat at little tables which were spread around the downstairs – cabaret seating with waitresses and food.  Slightly raked seating?   It was actually a tremendous place to see someone live, but it didn’t last that long as a venue.  I did see Todd Rundgren there four nights running in 1978, which is pretty fanboy-esque, a series of gigs that became a live album called Back To The Bars.

I scarcely remember the Al Green gig except that it was exquisite. He had a kind of jumpsuit on as I recall, a cravat, and cuban heels. He sang all the greats, the  highlights were Love & Happiness, Tired Of Being Alone, Can’t Get Next To You, and this song Belle.  When he sang Let’s Stay Together he came down into the tables and chairs and distributed stem roses to us, holding the mic and singing to each table.  It was my first time seeing Al Green and it was extraordinary, but every time I’ve seen him since (about eight times) he always does this – walks down, touches people, sings to them, a ripple of excitement goes through the audience every time.  But in the end it’s the singing with Al.  The voice of course is extraordinary but it’s what he does with it, the turns of phrase, the whoops, the ad-libs, the phrasing, the grace notes, the pure inhabiting of every note in every song.  It all comes from within the great man’s soul.

The song Belle is extraordinary.  You think it is finished as the music fades but he has a whole other level to go to, and he goes there.  He is testifying to us and his woman that he wants her more than she can imagine, but he needs The Lord even more than that.  And at that point in his life, he meant it.  Four years earlier, and for reasons that I have not fully understood, but reported to be his refusal to marry her (she was already married with children), his girlfriend Mary Woodson White had cooked a pan of grits (like semolina) and thrown them over him causing severe burns on his back and arms before shooting herself dead with his pistol.  A note in her purse gave the reasons.  After this a shocked & changed Al Green became ordained as a pastor, and even as his record sales were falling he was moving away from sexual music towards holy music, and a holy life.  Just after we saw him at The Venue he fell off a stage in early 1979 and took it as a sign that he had to change direction finally and forever. I was lucky to see him on the point of renouncing sinful music…

In the song we hear Al Green struggling with his love for a woman and sings at one point, about Jesus :

“he’s my bright morning star“

The Morning Star is of course the planet Venus, generally associated with the sacred feminine.  The other line that always pings out for me is :

“I know that you can understand a little country boy”

Al was born on a farm in Dansby, Arkansas in 1946 to a sharecroppers family.  I spent ten years in a small village called Selmeston in East Sussex, opposite a farm.  We used to help with the harvest in August.

The next time Al Green  came to London it was with a gospel set and a huge choir, and none of his soul material got an airing, not even Belle.  This happened fairly regularly through the 80s, usually at Hammersmith Odeon.  The Reverend would always sing Let’s Stay Together (Jesus) though, often coming down into the crowd for that song, walking among us as it were, sometimes handing out roses.  I saw a fair number of these shows as an avowed atheist simply because he was my favourite singer in the world.  I once saw Kevin Rowland in the audience,  paying homage.  No one can touch Al frankly, not even Smokey Robinson, my other favourite, Otis Redding, or Queen Aretha may her soul rest in peace.  Al for me tops all of these.  Maybe Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (My Pop Life #136) would eventually nestle on the pinnacle, technique and passion to burn, but come on – I’d always choose Al Green to be honest.

It was in the late-eighties I guess (?) when Rita and I went to see Al Green at the Festival Hall – and he’d started putting some of the old soul classics back into the show after ten years and ten gospel albums. He sang Otis Redding‘s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long and Sam & Dave‘s Hold On I’m Coming (I think?) and one of his ? but I can’t remember which one, maybe the mighty Love & Happiness.  Over the next ten years he slowly left gospel music behind and started producing pure soul music again in 1995 with the album Your Heart’s In Good Hands which is magnificent, like a sigh of relief almost. On the track Love Is A Beautiful Thing  Al sings the words let’s stay together, cos I’m still in love with you, call me, for the good times, tired of being alone, here i am…  a veritable litany of the titles of his old soul hits which are clearly coming back through his nerve endings into his pores into his heart and out of his mouth.  The great return was a celebration – he is still a Reverend, but now he was back and singing everything.  Our friends Lynn and Tony saw him in Central Park in this period when the concert was almost rained off, then the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine struck Al Green directly centre stage and he announced he was going to sing Love and Happiness for the first time for years. Magical.

In 1988 I went on a long road trip across the USA from D.C. to Phoenix Arizona, written about in My Pop Life #148 .  On the way out west I stopped in Memphis for a day and hit up the various landmarks of that fine city : Graceland of course, the Lorraine Motel where a homeless lady gave me a history lesson, Beale Street where I got suckered, then the next morning driving down to Hale Road in South Memphis to find Al Green’s church, the one he bought as he was recovering from the burns.

He wasn’t there, but I’d needed to set eyes upon the place which was his physical and spiritual base, especially since I’d just lost the bulk of my cash and was about to embark on a strange week of driving without money.

Then with Jenny in 1999 we would see Al Green at The Royal Albert Hall when Lucy was singing with support act Beverly Knight, later that year we travelled down to Glastonbury (not our only visit) and saw him there too.  Quite a contrast, or not.  Two great English cathedrals of music. Magnifique, as ever.   I think my favourite Al Green album (the one that gets the most plays = the favourite doesn’t it?) is Al Green Explores Your Mind from 1974.  It is perfect.  Has the songs Take Me To The River,  The City and Sha-La-La.  But he hasn’t made a duff album.

I always call it “Al Green Explodes Your Mind”.   Which is a more accurate title.

The next record was in 2002 – I Can’t Stop which was when he came back to the UK again and we saw him live, once again, singing soul music.  The voice hadn’t gone anywhere and was still extraordinary.

He’s still handing out roses!

Watching Al Green live I would look forward to his favourite moment, my favourite piece of the ceremony  : you know when singers go high and they move the microphone away from their mouths?  Al does that until his arm is completely straight and he can’t get the mic any further away – so he will just put it down at his feet and sing without amplification.  The audience hush and he draws us in. It is an immaculate moment. He gets the spirit like this at absolutely every gig and it is always the highlight.

Top Al Green tunes that never make it onto Greatest Hits albums you ask?  I can help you there.  Old Time Lovin from 1971’s Let’s Stay Together is as good as anything he’s done. Guitar-based song, which is unusual for Al.  His long-time friend and producer Willie Mitchell played keyboards, often the bubbling Hammond organ on many of Al Green’s songs and it became a signature sound on the Hi record label, all recorded at Royal Studios in Memphis, along with folk like Syl Johnson, Ann Peebles and O.V. Wright.  I should note here that Willie was the first person to visit Green in hospital after his second & third degree burns were skin grafted, they made 11 amazing albums together, but the year before Belle was released they’d parted company because Willie wasn’t interested in producing gospel music.  Al Green produced The Belle Album himself.

Another great song is Home Again on the wonderful album Living For You (1973).  Strings and organ dominate the groove, with tasteful horn flourishes and pads.  His singing is exquisite. Willie Mitchell and Al Green in sync.

My favourite is I’m Glad You’re Mine on the LP I’m Still In Love With You (with its stunning title track !) from 1972. Incredible drumming from Al Clark of Booker T & the MGs across town at Stax Records, who co-wrote many of the early songs with Al Green & Willie Mitchell, and played on most of them.

And finally I’d recommend the last track on the masterpiece LP Call Me (1973) which is called simply Jesus Is Waiting.  Enjoy.

Rare live performance of Belle on my birthday 1978 in Japan :

Playlist of all the tunes mentioned above :