Music Banter

So, here’s the next album on this countdown. I can almost hear the Top of the Pops music in my head as I type these words, the neon glitz of whatever showbusiness nobber they had on that week reciting the words as I type them. Oh, the excitement. Oh, the drama. Oh, get on with it:

5: Johnny Cash- ‘The Man comes Around’

Johnny Cash was a legend. A tower of song, one of those figures in popular culture whose influence simply cannot be denied. I think he’s better than Elvis. Think about it, he’s the original tough guy, like a block of granite striding out of the Wild West onto the stage, and his music was like the words of some Hellfire Preacher. He lived it, too- whilst Elvis sang about Jailhouse Rock, Cash went into prisons and played to murderers, violent men locked away for their crimes, risking riots, risking his reputation, walking the walk. I’m not a Christian or a religious man in any way but I can’t help but be awed by the sheer conviction Cash displayed throughout his life. Some religious believers are hypocrites, shying away from the harsh truths their professed faith entails, if the actual details of carrying them through prove to inconvenient. Not Cash.

This record shows this, too- it’s the last released before his death, and Johnny is well aware of this. It opens with the title track, which is nothing less than a musical version of The Book of Revelations, set to something akin to the narrative structure of ‘Santa Claus is coming to Town:’

‘There’s a man goin’ round, takin’ names,
and he decides who to free, and who to blame,
everybody will be treated just the same,
There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down,
when the man comes around.’

In anyone else’s hands it’d be terrible, risible self-parody. But with Cash, somehow, there isn’t even a whiff of that. He transcends even the very possibilty, makes it real, makes you believe.

There’s a terrible dignity to this album which is beautiful to behold, and frightening at the same time. It’s full of stories about men dying in ditches (‘Give my love to Rose’), of Men who killed, men who sinnned, dying alone but refusing to let go of hope that maybe they can do something good. It’s heartbreaking.

This is also the album which has ‘Hurt’ on it. It’s astonishing, not least because of the sheer gravitas which Cash can invest in this. Originally, this song is an insipid and self-pitying Nine-Inch Nails track which is almost embarrassing to listen to. Seriously, go check it out and if you don’t find yourself thinking that Trent Reznor is a self-pitying, whining loser then you’re either lying, or seventeen! When Trent Reznor sings ‘I hurt myself today’ then every right-thinking human being has no option but to respond ‘GOOD.’ It’s awful, just awful- the tedious, bellowing yelps of someone trying far too hard to look tormented.

With Johnny Cash, though, somehow that doesn’t happen. You believe it. When he calmly asks ‘what have I become/my sweetest friend/everyone I know/goes away in the end’ you just want to cry.

And that’s Cash’s genius. He did and said things that no-one else could, and throughout it all he retained a certain iron dignity, an honesty and truthfulness that no-one else even gets close to.

Listen to this alone, in the dark, when you sit weighed down by all the choices you ever made and their dreadful consequences, and know that next to Johnny Cash, you’re a wuss.

Yeah, here we are. It’s 2010. A decade has just finished, according to our arbitrary measurements of time. Clearly, the best way to respond to all of these momentous changes is to write a big list of albums in some kind of order, to try and somehow chronicle or catalogue this period of time.

I’d love to sneer at the practice, and do something much more interesting and created, but being entirely bereft of originality and principles (see how quickly I leave behind my previous disdain for list-making in music writing and dispair at my terrible hypocrisy!), I’ve decided to do my own top 10.

It was an interesting process- I initially found it difficult to remember which albums I really rate actually came out in this decade. A lot of them ended up being from the start of the decade, which is because I’m old. On a few, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how with it I am. Here they are, then, from ten to six today, and then I’ll devote a post each to the top five.

10: Gutter Twins- ‘Saturnalia’

Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan were, in the the Afghan Whigs and the Screaming Trees respectively, two of the better voices of Grunge, albeit slightly overlooked at the time below the likes of Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. On this album these two scarred survivors combined to tell their dark stories and make something stunning, compelling and remakable, which rocks as hard as anything else issued in 2008, and many other years besides.

9: Mercury Rev- ‘The Secret Migration’

Mercury Rev’s more renowned albums are ‘All Is Dream’ and ‘Desrter’s Songs’ but this is my favourite of theirs. It’s a strangely pastoral album, with lyrics about the change of the seasons, and white horses leading people through forests. The title is well-chosen, too- it’s about a subtle change in life, things sensed but not quite seen as one’s life and one’s relationships change, and a lot of Jonathon Donahue’s lyrics seem to be musing on a decayed romance. Musically, it’s all twinkles and light, and the band are playing wonderfully together. A real joy.

8: Sufjan Stevens- ‘c’mon feel the Illinoise’

Sufjan seems to have written off his ‘one album for every American state’ project as a silly idea, which is a shame. Looking at it in perspective, fifty albums is more than Dylan, Johnny Cash, and any number of greats have managed to put together in a lifetime of songwriting. Still, for a brief shining moment, ‘Illinois’ looked like it could be the start of something truly momentous. It’s a great album, too- a beautiful combination of soft vocals and deceptively simple orchestration, and wonderful lyrics about the state’s history. Heartfelt, spiritual, and profoundly moving.

7: Bat For Lashes- Two Suns

This, the second album from Natasha Khan, saw her hitting her stride gloriously. The whole album charts a relationship between the ‘Two Suns’ of the title, which is described in fantastical terms. The lyrics of the first track, ‘Glass,’ read like a Michael Moorcock novel, but strangely, you know exactly what she’s on about when she says that ‘And when the battle was done/I was promised my son/But with a thousand knights gone/To a new kingdom I run’ on ‘Pearl’s Dream.’ The music is thoroughly modern, blending acoustic and electronic to mesmerising effect.

6:Godspeed You Black Emperor!- ‘Yanqui U.X.O’

I love Godspeed. They were unlike any other band that came before them, in the way that they blended electric guitar, bass and drums with cello, violin and other classical instruments to make something which wasn’t so much ‘songs’ as ‘pieces,’ strange primal jams which sounded like the end of the world.

This album, recorded by Steve Albini, is more focussed than their previous offerings. Steve Albini, as is his wont, strips back everything extraneous, and frees the band up to make what they called ‘”just raw, angry, dissonant, epic instrumental rock.”

GYBE! went on hiatus after they completed this album, splitting off to form a thousand different offshoots, most notably A Silver Mount Zion. This album stands as their high-point- the band at its most resoundingly apocalyptic.

Oh, to be young in the Thames Valley in the early nineties. Everything was beautiful and wondrous, and a thousand skinny indie boys with terrible fringes frowned over their effects pedals, crafting giant washes of sound that deafened the happy masses in their thousands. We’d heard the future, and it consisted of overdriven guitars and whispered vocals, reverberating and echoing forever in the student bedsit of the mind.

Or something.

According to the popular orthodoxy, the world woke up, showered, and re-discovered the Tune. The Stone Roses, then Oasis, Blur, Pulp and all the rest showed us that choruses could work, and the three-minute pop song wasn’t entirely the domain of moronic ladette fascists in union jack mini-skirts, or terrible European synth-pop by idiots in leather hats. Intelligent music could compete in a pop environment, and Shoegaze was condemned as last year’s fad, a willful turning-inward which betrayed a lack of ambition, a self-defeating lack of confidence. It was a dirty word.

That’s a shame. A lot of amazing music came out of Shoegaze, and is still inspiring people today. If you don’t know much about Shoegaze, here’s a look at some of the key artists of that movement:

My Bloody Valentine; simply put, they created the movement, and arguably perfected it. Their debut LP, ‘Isn’t Anything,’ laid down the blueprint that everyone else- Chapterhouse, Slowdive, etc, was to copy. This consisted of a wall shimmering, searing guitars, loud, angry bass, vague, half-heard lyrics which seemed to be about sex but could have been anything at all, and an absolute commitment to sonic assault. Their second album, ‘Loveless’ took five years to create, almost bankrupted Creation Records, and is the towering achievement of the genre. It’s like single song- one piece of music runs into another, in an ecstatic fuzz of layered guitars and melodies that sound like they come from outer space. The bass is sinuous, pulsing, and the drums have a rattle and a bounce to them which meant you could even dance to them, if you didn’t want to just lie back and feel ecstatic.

I can’t talk enough about My Bloody Valentine’s influence. All the bands I’m mentioning after them talk about their influence. Bands like Garbage were ripping them off almost a decade later (compare the opening riff of ‘My Lover’s Box’ off their first album to ‘Soon’ off Loveless, and you’ll see what I mean!), and Kevin Shields, their genius guitarist, has remained busy over the years, most notably in a latter incarnation of Primal Scream, and on his soundtrack for ‘Lost in Translation.’ The band reformed last year, and made a large group of aging fans very happy, and very deaf, indeed.

the boo radleys were another band who happily followed in MBV’s shadow, but brought a more varied instrumentation to bear in their sound. Their classic album, ‘Giant Steps’ makes use of beach-boys harmonies, dub basslines, trumpets and pretty much anything else you can think of, including the kitchen sink. The result is a glorious symphonic album which owes as much to the spirit of Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper than anything else in music. It’s remarkable, a decade on.

A year and a half later, they went pop in the great Britpop boom. You probably heard annoying trumpet-led hit single ‘Wake Up Boo’ if you listened to the radio at all in the nineties, but please don’t hold them accountable for that. The next album, ‘C’mon Kids’ is perhaps a more successful balancing of their earlier eclecticism with a pop instinct, containing as it does, ‘What’s in the Box?’ which is the only song I know of which rips off both ‘Material Girl’ and The Who at the same time.

Martin Carr has recorded solo stuff under the name ‘Brave Captain’ and is currently looking for people to invest in the making of his latest album. You know it makes sense, kids.

The third band I want to remember is Lush These were a band that didn’t quite fit the mould. No shy and retiring male guitar obsessives here! Miki Berenyi, the band’s brassy, scarlet-haired singer, was loud, assertive, and outspoken, and gave a great interview. Every week, the NME’s gossip columns seemed to feature another story about their drunken antics. Musically, however, they were wonderful, ethereal, wispy, slow, and astounding. Their masterpiece is the album ‘Split’, a beautiful collection of songs from beginning to end, and a glorious fulfillment of the promise of their earlier recordings, ‘Spooky’ and ‘Thoughtforms’.

Lush were different from most Shoegaze bands per se, in that they weren’t as reliant on distortion and feedback as the rest, relying more on echo and atmospherics, which gave their music a sense of dusky space. I remember first listening to their standout track, desire lines on Radio One DJ Mark Radcliffe’s late-night show, and feeling like I was transported to a desert.

Once again, sadly, they declined, in the aftermath of commercial failure. They were reportedly told by their manager before the making of Split that they should sound ‘more like Pearl Jam,’ which thankfully they ignored. Before the making of their next album, ‘Lovelife,’ it appears someone told them that they should sound more like Elastica (possibly Chris Acland, their drummer, as he was at the time living with Elastica’s drummer!). As with the Boos, this album was a pop album, consisting of commercially crafted songs. ‘Ladykillers,’ ‘Single Girl’ are good, serviceable mid-nineties punk-pop, but to my mind at least, something was missing. Still, it’s hard to begrudge a long-running band some chart success.

Sadly, Lush’s career came to an end in 17 October 1996, after their drummer Chris Acland killed himself as a result of a depressive illness. Their legacy still remains, however. Their Best-of, ‘Caio!’ was released in 2001.

There. That’s three. There are many others, of course; I haven’t mentioned the Cocteau Twins, Chapterhouse, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Mazzy Star, the Blue Nile, Curve or This Mortal Coil, but I could have. Take these three as a gateway drug, if you will, on a slow and mysterious journey into this much-maligned genre. You can then also explore forwards, through bands like Mogwai, Gifts from Enola, Explosions in the Sky and the rest of the so-called ‘Newgaze’ bands who are carrying on this kind of music.

If you only ever hear three Shoegaze albums in your life, however, then your list has to be ‘Split,’ ‘Loveless,’ and ‘Giant Steps.’ Trust me on this, because I am right. Ok?

There. And I didn’t mention Sonic Cathedrals once.

You know who I’m talking about. Let me give you some clues, though.

I’m from Oxford. I grew up in a little town just outside those dreaming spires, walking along the Thames, enjoying the calm beauty of classic Middle England. If I wanted excitement, my friends and I would hop onto the bus and go drink and dance and see bands in Oxford’s Cowley Road, or at the Apollo. Sometimes we’d drive about just enjoying the quiet country roads. Often we’d end up on Boar’s Hill, overlooking the city. My best friend and I would sit and play guitar together, and dream of stardom.

At school that friend and I were in a band together, our closest friends making music on cheap instruments in a tiny little room. More enthusiasm than ability, I’m sure, but some of my most happy memories are from that place.

Of course, we didn’t become famous. We drifted off into life, and work, and money, and all those other things that get in the way of youthful dreams. That friend and I don’t see much of each other, these days. Neither do the rest of the band. We’re all scattered to the four winds. It’s a shame, but inevitable.

Why do I mention this? Well, by way of contrast, really. You see, a few years before we began to make our primitive, flailing noises in that little room, five other schoolfriends were doing the same thing, in Abingdon, a very similar place to the one we happened to live in. Those friends probably did a lot of the same things we did, drove the same Oxfordshire roads at night, drank wine together on the same summer hillsides. It’s true what they say about age, I do only remember the warm summer evenings. Maybe they do, too.

Their story is a little different to ours, however. They stayed together. They took on the world. I remember seeing a show they played, just before their second album came out, and thinking it was like being in on a secret. There were all these songs we didn’t know, which were just remarkable. I remember the thin, long-haired guitarist, whose name I didn’t know at the time (but you might by now), playing the keyboards on a track with the neck of his guitar, and being amazed. I remember their one hit (remember when that was their one big hit?) sounding amazing, but not as good as these songs. I knew they were going to conquer the world, and I was proud. These were people from the same place as me. My father met their drummer when he volunteered for the Samaritans. People in my sixth form had been babysat by their legendarily edgy, strange-eyed genius singer. I babysat for an old morris dancer (seriously!) who knew them because they came into his shop and bought sweets a lot. The singer was often found in the WhSmiths where my friend worked, looking awkward, like he both did and didn’t want someone to recognise him.

They were part of my world. And they were world-beaters.

And now, I love them still. They’re still that school band from long ago, that band I kid (A) myself that I and my friends could have been if things had been different, challenging each other, growing, :re-writing the rules with a friggin’ marching band behind them.

Breathtaking always.

Radiohead are STILL the best band in the world.

Rock and Roll is about youth. It’s about sexuality, it’s about the burning, tortured soul of the perpetual adolescent screaming their urges to the skies. The stars of modern music are teenagers, stuck in eternal youthfulness, playing to teenagers.

So if that’s the case, at what point should a rocker hang it up? It’s an issue that’s more and more relevant, as the rock and roll generation hits its 60s and 70s. In fact, there’s a compelling argument for the notion that we are in the last great flourishing of the great cultural firework that was the 1960s. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, all these old bands are doing the reunion thing whilst they still can, and whilst enough of them are still alive. The Stones are carrying on but look more and more like the walking dead, there are only two Beatles left walking on the face of the planet. It’s all leading to a close.

That notwithstanding, maybe it is better to burn out than to fade away. Maybe the memories that people have, of these great figures in the prime of their youth striding across the world’s stages, they should stay untouched.

I’m not so sure.

I think our musicians should carry on. I think they should chase their dreams, and carry on, for as long as the fire burns them. If they don’t have that fire in their bellies, then that’s when they should stop. Not before.

U2 had an interesting take on it a while back, about the pressure of expectations. ‘We are a new band. this is our first album.’ Now, that might well be Bono the master salesman talking his band up like he always does, and you might not agree that they are a worthwhile force in music, but that is the spirit you need in music. Yes, youth should be served. Yes, eventually careers will end and as musicians get older they can make fools of themselves. But that’s what they are doing at the start of it all. Do you really think that Iggy Pop should be told to tone it down a little? For that matter, do you think that Iggy Pop was considered appropriate behaviour when he was twenty-one.

Rock music is about being spectacular, about having the spark of life within you. More power to the old bastards.

I love band names. They’re endlessly amusing, some because of the unique way they sum up that particular band’s sound or ethos, some because they really don’t. It can take a band AGES to choose a name. There’s a lot of ways to go about it.

First things first, don’t go for a joke. I’m a fan of the weird, and the polysyllabic, the sort of name it would have taken John Peel some time to get right on his radio show, but let’s be fair, a terrible name can make you into a joke. I’m talking Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts, Shellsuit Massacre, Pestilent Stench, Do Make Say Think, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the Virgin Prunes, maybeshewill, Doctor Collossus and the Fifty-Foot Spider Monkeys, Helpshecan’tswim, and a thousand others who all live in my memory for their names, not their music.

Some bands just aim for something that sounds good but doesn’t mean anything, much in the way that a multinational corporation will choose a jumble of randomly chosen consonants and vowels, in an attempt to ‘brand’ the music. U2 is a good example. It means something, sort of, but it’s more just an empty label, a blank signifier which can be whatever you want it to mean. Here’s a few more examples. The Who. ABBA. Coldplay (seriously, who could believe for a minute that that meant anything?). Snow Patrol.

Bit of a theme developing there, one might think. But the indie kids are at it too, have been for years- Kyuss, Nitzer Ebb and Pulp are all deliberately empty names, and more recently bands like Interpol, Bat For Lashes, and Elbow have deliberately eschewed meaning in favour of a name that just… sounds good. My favorite band name of all, however, is Husker Du, which apparently is Norwegian for ‘Do You remember?’-doesn’t that instantly create an air of yearning, of mystery?

Others just go for one-word statements of intent. Metallica, Stereolab, Mogwai. Wolfmother. R.E.M. You read those names, you know what you’re getting, or at least get some kind of hint. That’s a good way to do it, setting your stall out, letting people know what you’re about. They don’t tell the whole story, though. At the end of the day, a name should not be the most interesting thing about your band. If it is, you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s a final thought- sometimes a band name doesn’t matter. Imagine a young band, known for good live shows, playing a recognizable and well-defined form of music, choosing a name which is a pun on their chosen genre. They’re going to be terrible, right?

Well, that would be the Beatles.

There are a lot of good bands and solo artists around in this world. You know who I mean. Talented and hard-working musicians who write songs that people quite like, and who forge careers being- alright. Not bad. And it’s not their fault.

They don’t set the world on fire, their tracks are enjoyed, but are no-one’s favourite. I’m not talking about Pop Idol and its ilk here, they’re an altogether different kind of beast, a sort of devilish imitation of music which amounts to nothing more than a vulgar advert for itself. No, I mean the middling bands. The triers, who stick around but never seem to get better or worse. They all care. They all devote their lives to their music. What it is it that dooms these people (and us, by proxy) to lives of musical mediocrity, plodding along whilst others soar. I’m talking about the way Bjork manages to be a marvelous, unpredictable firework, and Dido, who seems like a nice girl into the musical equivalent of flock wallpaper. The way Coldplay calmly and carefully fashion a music which will fill the stadiums of the world but will never truly touch someone’s heart in the way that Elbow’s ‘Asleep in the Back’ does from the opening bar.

There are others. I’m sure you can think of them. It’s a good parlour game, actually. Find a genius, and a corresponding mediocrity. You could call it ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ if you wanted to get all classical.

So what makes a genius? 

Sheer dumb luck. unique influences. A spark. Genetic luck. Ah, damned if I know. 

All I know for sure is that when that spark, that greatness, that genius exists in someone, it is their duty to keep it alive at all costs, to let it grow, to let what is inside them come out, whether the world ever notices or not.

Mediocrity will always spring up. It is plentiful. For every Bobby Gillespie, every Karen O, there’s a dozen Paulo Nutinis or Joss Stones. For every potential Nick Drake, there are a thousand people who could be the next Chris DeBurgh. Now there’s an image to terrify you. 

If you have that spark in you, don’t you dare let it go out. You’ll know if it’s in you. It’ll eat at you, itching and twisting, trying to get out. And you can’t ignore it. You have to let it grow. You have to save music.

There’s too much mediocrity out there. Go out there, out into the big bad world and fight, fight for all your worth, to make that spark spring it into a fire. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. 

Without musical genius, all we’ll have is a sea of mediocrity, competence and beige conformity to a sea of pointless musical sludge. Without genius, the future is Chris Martin’s Vegan-friendly environmentally-sourced hemp-laced boot, stepping on the human face forever.

In case you hadn’t heard, things aren’t that good out there in the economy. Unemployment is up, stocks are down, bankers are figures of public hatred and across the planet, and Iceland has gone bust. Let’s say that again- Iceland, a whole country, is bankrupt. Seriously, how does that even happen?

Governments have been resorting to all sorts of desperate measures to put things right, with stimulus packages, quantitive easing, and a thousand other increasingly arcane measures aimed at pulling the world economy out of its nosedive. In some places, it’s worked, in others, you might as well have donned some spectacles, waved a wand at a graph of economic indicators and yelled ‘recoveramus!’

What does this mean for music? Well, for one thing, the average punter in the street has a little less cash in his or her pocket, which means less to spend on gigs and records. Let’s be honest, it’s kind of hard to get by right now.

It also means that record companies have less cash to spend on artists, which can force them to look increasingly to safer bets, proven cash-cows and rock dinosaurs who have pre-existing fanbases and can be relied upon to bring in a certain amount of revenue that an up-and-coming band, however good they may be, just can’t be relied on to do.

You’d think that’s a picture that spells doom and gloom, but it needn’t. the truth is, that hard times haven’t put a dampener on the party in the past. In the Depression, spending on luxury good actually went UP- the thinking being that people wanted to make themselves feel richer, or to reward themselves for making it through another month with something special.

What’s more, the abundance of money hasn’t always made for good music. The blues were born in the poorest part of America, in a time of grinding poverty and destitution. Jazz was improvised because musicians didn’t have the money to rehearse.

And then there’s punk rock.

Punk Rock was a product of the 1970s depression, with mass unemployment and dissatisfaction throughout the UK. A Labour government was on its last legs, and politicians seemed to have no answer or genuine connection to a generation who was growing up in a country full of empty promise, crap towns with nothing but crap jobs and drudgery to look forward to. Sound familiar at all?

No wonder Punk flourished. It was a flame in the darkness, a wild voice of the people who just would not be silenced. There has been no more powerful force in modern music than the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten screaming his contempt for the royalty in the year of the silver jubilee, censored at the top of the pop charts with a whirlwind of anger and energy surrounding him. Music was alive, it meant something, and after a decade of untouchable supergroups like the Eagles and Pink Floyd being all we had, music was once again being played by people who looked like they were members of the audience.

It’s always been the case- music, in troubled times, reflects them, gives the opportunity for those people who have nothing, those who have been let down and shafted on by the powers that be, to take to the streets and make a bloody great racket, or to gather together and remind each other that companionship and warmth is free, and can never be taken away.

It’s happened before- Woody Guthrie’s guitar was wielded like a weapon, emblazoned with the message that ‘this guitar kills fascists.’ Dylan knew this be true. He claimed in ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that all he had was a red guitar, three chords and the truth, and sang passionately about the possibility for change.

In the seventies, a punk fanzine famously published a picture of three chords and told its readership ‘this is a chord. this is another chord. now go form a band.’

It’s all you need. Just like Seasick Steve, you started out with nothin’ and you still got most of it left.

here you are again. Three chords, and a whole lot more.

Now go form a band.