Farewell, Micky Jones
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Surfing around the net in pleasant, post-Christmas idleness, I came across a sad piece of news: Micky Jones, guitarist of the Welsh rock band Man, died back in March. He wasn’t exactly a household name, but he was the guitarist who gave me more pleasure than any other, including all the big names – Page, Hendrix, Slash, Zappa (who said Jones was one of the ten best guitarists in the world) etc.
The best concert I ever attended was given by Man - at Exeter Uni, some time in 1973. My favourite rock album remains their live set from a concert at the Roundhouse in June 1973. The album features just two tracks: the band liked to ‘jam’, to play long improvisations. This may sound like a recipe for self-indulgent misery for listeners, but when they got it right, they were fabulous. The jams were always pretty tight, and much less indulgent than a lot of rock at the time: for example there were no long breaks featuring one instrument, while other players all sloped off the stage for a quick smoke, a common feature of many early 70s rock gigs.
So why weren’t Man better known? I think the main reason is that they were unable to keep a consistent line-up for more than about five minutes. Jones was the one fixed point, around which a whole solar system of musicians revolved. Every Man fan has their favourite line-up: mine featured Jones, keyboard player Phil Ryan, Will Youatt on bass, another guitarist called Tweke Lewis and drummer Terry Williams, a magnificent player who went on to work with Dire Straits. There are many, many other combinations to choose from. Another reason is that they didn’t really care about fame: I think they were happiest playing to audiences in small venues – especially in their beloved homeland, Wales. What other band would have released an album called ‘Live at the Padget Rooms, Penarth’?
I once met Micky when Man came to Walkern Rugby Club, near Stevenage, in the 1990s. They played a fine set, and in the interval I saw Micky at the bar and brought him a pint. I thanked him for all the pleasure he had given me over the years, and he smiled and shrugged, adding: ‘It’s what I do’.
And now he is gone. Micky Jones never compromised his approach to music, which meant he never achieved stardom - which I suspect this modest, talented man would have hated. Instead, he made music that means a lot to a relatively small group of people. That’s a fine achievement.
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Happy Birthday Stairway to Heaven
Thursday, November 24th, 2011
40 years ago – well, 40 years and a couple of weeks – Led Zeppelin produced their great fourth album, at the centre of which was Stairway to Heaven. In other words, the song is as old now as Mood Indigo, On the Sunny Side of the Street or Sleepy Time Down South were in 1971. 40 years before Led Zep IV (or ZOSO or whatever you want to call it) appeared, the music world was mourning the deaths of Bix Beiderbecke and the man who was arguably the founder of jazz, Buddy Bolden. The names of these great patriarchs of jazz sound biblically ancient, while Zeppelin are still being listened to by twenty-first century kids (OK, not every kid, but many, many more than listened to Bix in 1971…) History doesn’t go in nice straight lines, but in leaps then quiet bits, in punctuated evolution.
Of course, certain themes recur across these time-chasms. Excess, for example. Bolden, Beiderbecke and Bonham – three fine musicians destroyed by alcohol. What was totally new about Zeppelin was the amplification technology that allowed them to play to tens of thousands of people in giant venues across America. That and their post-gig behaviour, of course – which I think is related to the stadia: there must be something deeply unsettling about having that level of control over that number of one’s fellow human beings. (What, exactly? It’s an area of psychology not well enough understood.)
Reading about the Zeppelin roadshow now (in Hammer of the Gods), I’m reminded of the rather daft anarchy of the early seventies. The sixties party was over; Margaret Thatcher hadn’t come along to knock economic sense into our heads. The old blues misogyny is lurking in the background – there’s more than a bit of Spinal Tap in Zeppelin. But the music lives on. I’m amazed how well (most of) it still works – especially Stairway. Happy birthday!
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Two stories from 1960
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
I’m clearing out my parents’ old house at the moment, and have today been going through old books. They were great readers in youth and early middle age, but a kind of terrible gloom settled over them in later life, and they didn’t buy a lot after about 1975.
So the collection is a fascinating journey back to a bygone era, to an old middle-class England that seemed wonderfully sure of itself.
One book that I at first thought was a send-up but now seems to be at least half-serious is Noblesse Oblige, a series of essays about the aristocracy – how they speak, live (etc.). The tone is humorous, but essentially deferential. There’s a long essay about ‘U’ (posh) versus ‘non-U’ speech – my parents seem to have used the former, though we were not aristocrats.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about the book is its sense of permanence – the social order is taken for granted. It might be a source of some amusement, but there is no question whether England is going to continue to be run by ‘U’ amateurs – of course it is!
The edition is dated 1960. In the same year, The Beatles made their first trip to Hamburg and came back to Liverpool a tight, creative unit. On 27 Dec, they played a famous (to Beatle aficionados) gig at Litherland Town Hall, where people realized this wasn’t just another covers band but something very special. Change was in the air…
Tags: 1960s, beatles, english social history, mitford, nobless oblige, non-U, waugh
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A Night at the Opera
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Last night, a rare treat: a visit to the opera. More specifically to Don Giovanni, done by English National Opera.
It was a marvellous evening full of different emotions. Some of the arias were deeply, timelessly moving. Some of Jeremy Sams’ translation was witty and totally 21st century. There was pathos, especially where a scene in which Giovanni tries to seduce a maid had been changed into a solo piece, so we got to see that, behind the mask, Giovanni was looking to recapture some lost early love. And the ending, where the Commendatore comes to drag Giovanni down to hell, brought the simple thrill of being totally seized by great music: real goose-pimple stuff.
The programme notes got me thinking about Giovanni and his character. The notes rather made him out to be a pleasure-seeker that we could secretly admire, then also enjoy seeing his destruction and come away from the show knowing that we are wise to rein in our pleasure-chasing instincts after all. But I don’t see him as this. To me, Giovanni doesn’t want pleasure, he wants power. He is a narcissist, whose great passion in life is controlling others. Women he controls with sex; men with bullying, money or deceit. The scene where he says how much he enjoys seeing Leporello suffer is just as instructive as the ones where he lies to and seduces women.
A problem for the modern viewer is that modern aristocrats don’t command the automatic respect, and even fear, that they clearly did back then. If I were producing Don Giovanni – hardly a likely event! – I’d set it in a world of gangsters. There is – I believe, anyway – still a rigid hierarchy in that world, based on ruthlessness and cruelty. The rather fawning attitudes of Leporello, Zerlina and (some of the time) Masetto fit perfectly into this. Ottavio, who calls himself a friend of Giovanni, could be one of those stupid posh people who think it’s cool to hang around with low-lifers.
I’d play the piece as a dark meditation on narcissism and cruelty, with a few comic interludes, rather than a comedy – though Wolfy called it an opera buffa, which was essentially a comic form. That’s the way they liked it in the nineteenth century – Baudelaire, for example, saw Giovanni as the classic literary model of evil. (I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not really a reincarnated Victorian…)
And I’d end the piece where Giovanni is dragged down into hell – there’s a kind of coda where various loose plot ends are tied up and a rather obvious moral drawn (don’t do bad stuff), which is a bit camp for the way I like the piece.
But however it’s played, it’s still utterly amazing music – Oh, and tremendous storytelling from da Ponte (the changes the characters go through…) I look at the picture of Mozart in the programme, a funny looking guy, rather juvenile and earnest, and marvel at how the music he wrote in 1786 still moves me so deeply today.
Links
A website on opera buffa: http://operabuffa.com
English National Opera: www.eno.org
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Players vs. Gentlemen
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
I’ve been reading ‘Blokes’ by David Castronovo, a New York based Professor of Eng Lit. The book is essentially about the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the late fifties, though he does extend his study to Philip Larkin and Ken Tynan and to modern ‘blokeish’ authors, AA Gill, Nick Hornby and, of course, Martin Amis. He also points out that ‘blokes’ have long featured in literature – Chaucer’s Miller, Tom Jones, the critic William Hazlitt, Sam Weller, characters from Kipling.
He’s a big fan of the Angry Young Men (a term I use for convenience, not one Castronovo particularly likes). He admires their ‘struggle to live vitally’ in a starchy and smothering environment. He contrasts them with the ‘gentleman’, a type that he sees as hollow and lifeless, snobbish and inauthentic. Graham Greene is a kind of turning point, in books like ‘England Made Me’ (1935) where the gent was clearly shown up to be a loser. The War gave the gent a bit of a boost, but the game was up, Suez being the coup de grace for this endangered species.
The gents vs. players stuff isn’t hugely original, but I still enjoyed the book. I like the Angry Young Men’s passion for authenticity and hatred of deviousness, their ‘gusto’ (Hazlitt’s term: the Ancient Greeks called it ‘thumos’). And the book is full of detail about the backgrounds of these writers. John Osborne’s family, in particular, seems hellish (in a very understated, Brit, passive-aggressive way). “Comfort in the discomfort of others was an abiding family recreation,” Osborne wrote of his mother’s family. His dad’s family was more lifeless and supine than spiteful. Both families had a ‘script’ about ‘coming down in the world’, and seemed to take pleasure in belittling the boy and stifling any joie de vivre in him. Then there was Philip Larkin’s dad, with his admiration for Hitler (he had a model of the Fuhrer at home, which gave a little Nazi salute when you pressed a button). The (Kingsley) Amis household was less full of undercurrents of malevolence, though his father was an unimaginative man given to deference to authority and ‘class’, and his mum an overprotective woman who collected “bunny rabbit ornaments”.
These soul-destroying environments had to be escaped from, and the Angry Young Men did it in their writing – especially when using humour. But did they escape it in their personal lives? I rather fear not. That’s the tragic thought unexpressed in but underlying the book – that Jansenist stuff: ‘Give me a child till he is seven…” (And he will either turn into a copy of what we want him to be, or react violently, erratically and in its own way equally inauthentically against it.)
That’s the downside with the Angry Young Men for me. They remained Angry and (emotionally) Young, rather than growing up and becoming adults. The old adage ‘the best revenge is to have a happy life’ applies here: if you really want to stick two fingers up to petty bourgeois whining and passive aggression, don’t just get pissed, brawl, tell people to fuck off, chase then drop women (etc.). Make a point of finding out how to be happy, and follow those rules.
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