18 Sept 2011

PINK FLOYD - LEGACY FATIGUE

Once again, those caring, sharing people at EMI are, in all their beneficence, inviting you to part with your shekels to buy the music of Pink Floyd.

In this era of heritage rock, when anyone who managed a top 20 single sometime between 1965 and 1985 can be called legendary, there are few bands held in higher esteem than Pink Floyd. Hardly a month goes by without them gracing the cover of one of the few remaining music magazines. Classic rock radio stations bulge at the seams with the sound of Dark Side of the Moon, while legions of new bands queue up to proclaim the genius of those terribly well- spoken chaps with a penchant for concept albums about the nature of human despair.

In short, they are everything I should hate. I once attended a concert by the Australian tribute act, called, with breath-taking literalness, The Australian Pink Floyd, at the Albert Hall in 2004. Expecting an evening of hilarity amid like-minded freaks, I was disappointed to find myself amongst an audience seemingly comprised of engineering graduates and members of provincial college rock societies. There were mullets and satin bomber jackets, for Christ’s sake. Even more worryingly, there were acres of Division Bell t-shirts.

Yet, of all the bands I have followed over the years, its Pink Floyd I keep coming back to, like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. What is it about this most peculiarly English of bands which so appeals? Brett Anderson of Suede, in a rare moment away from using the word gasoline as an inappropriate adjective, once pointed out that they are simultaneously enormously popular but incredibly obscure, and therein lays their appeal.

As a youth, I vaguely remember my dad having library copies of Wish You Were Here and Animals lying about the living room. I was transfixed by these weird covers. Pigs floated serenely over grim industrial landscapes, while faceless business men from the pages of nightmares made incomprehensible offers in the wilderness and burning men shook hands on deserted back lots. It was the kind of landscapes which populated dreams, the kind of landscapes which were somehow intriguing to my eight year old self but which also said, somehow, that this was something you approached with caution. I had a similar feeling when I opened one of my dad’s art books and found a Magritte painting which transposed a facial portrait into the form of a naked woman. In short, this was something decidedly adult and therefore attractive.

Imagine my surprise when these strange beings appeared in the charts in 1979. Not only that, they hit the Christmas No. 1 spot. With a weird disco type tune about hating your teachers. And it was in my Christmas stocking. Hooray!

I listened to Another Brick in the Wall obsessively. I even listened to the B-side, One of my Turns, but had no fucking idea what it was going on about. I wondered at the strange cartoons in the video, and though how cool it would have been to be one of the kids in the video, running happily through a wet council estate while pondering the inequities of a cruel system. Or something. To this day, I could probably whistle you every single note of the guitar solo, infinitesimal semi-tone bends all.

Throughout the eighties I was obsessive about The Wall. I even, for a few years, thought the follow-up, The Final Cut, was one of the greatest records ever made. Thatcher was in power, you see, and anything which reinforced my opinion of her as an evil hag was all right by me. (Incidentally, I don’t think Pink Floyd ever got enough credit for coming out in opposition to the Falklands war on that album. Can you imagine any other pickled 60s survivor doing something similar? Genesis? Yes? Eric “Enoch was right” Clapton?) And, as Wham! reigned supreme and most of the people at my school looked to U2 and Simple Minds for their thrills, I found solace in the portentous strains of Comfortably Numb, Not Now John and The Fletcher Memorial Home.

Of course, I came to realise that The Wall is an album which is best listened to when angst ridden and fourteen. The Final Cut is altogether too personal to ever be considered a proper Pink Floyd album, and, apart from some searing solos from David Gilmour, is pretty much a Roger Waters solo album in all but name. I can’t say I listen to them at all these days, unlike many of the people at the Albert Hall, who probably have side three of The Wall on repeat in their fucking Vauxhall Insignias.

However, what they did do was open the door to the exploration of a remarkable back catalogue, which even these days continually reveals itself anew to me like a shy lover in the waxy light of a stolen bedsit tryst. The peculiar English misery of many of Waters latter day lyrics seems to strike a melancholy chord as our world becomes increasingly confusing. Of course, it’s also worth remembering that we approach most things with the arrogance of all generations, assuming that our particular version of impending Armageddon is somehow more valid than any other. When “Dark Side of the Moon” came out, the Vietnam War was drawing to its bloody denouement, Israel and her neighbours were littering the deserts of the middle east with burning tanks, the Bahder Meinhoff gang were getting busy, and the streets of Northern Ireland were already running with blood. Apart from the latest series of X-Factor and the upcoming global financial meltdown, what do we really have to worry about? As the years go by, it all seems rather quaint, and it seems quite sobering to think that Pink Floyd’s magnum opus was released only thirty years from the battle of Stalingrad. Of course, it’s all relative. We think we are in dangerous times, therefore we are.

The band have all but dismissed the music made between the departure of Syd Barrett and their eventual commercial flowering with Dark Side of the Moon, but I maintain that it is here that their most enduring music is to be found. Take “Obscured by Clouds”, the album immediately preceding “Dark Side…,” made for the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s hippy flick “La Valee” . Knocked off in a couple of weeks it contains some wonderful moments, not least Rick Wright’s lovely piano ballad “Stay”, which finds its writer once again grappling with guilt at rock and roll’s illicit pleasures of the flesh, like any nice grammar school boy would. There is also the marvellously portentous drone of the title track, where synths gather like storm clouds over a primitive drum machine while Gilmour’s stately slide guitar soars like a B-52 overhead.

I’d quite happily never hear most of the orchestral cow pat that is Atom Heart Mother ever again (apart from the funky middle section) but the second side comes alive with “Summer 68”, a strange kind of chamber pop piece totally out of kilter with just about anything else the band ever did. Gilmour still retains a soft spot for “Fat Old Sun”, his first good Floyd tune, and it’s easy to see why, even if Nick Mason’s drumming is hilariously inept during the guitar solo.

Virtuosity, though, was never the main reason to like Floyd, which is why their music has weathered the storms of the great Prog Rock Purges better than some of their more studied contemporaries. At the heart of many of their finest moments is a sense that they were just, well, arsing about, such as the fortuitous piano note which kicks off “Echoes”, which to me beats the more favoured “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” for the title of “Best Floyd Epic”. At times, this could be embarrassing, such as most of the studio half of “Ummagumma” or “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, but occasionally it would yield enduring hallmarks of experimental rock such as “One of the These Days”, built around an echoing pattern on the bass. When Pink Floyd stopped arsing around, their music suffered and became predictable.

Of course, predictability is the one word which could never be used to describe Syd Barrett. His time as leader of the band was brief, yet his presence casts an enormous shadow over everything they have done since. To many, Pink Floyd ended the day the rest of the boys decided not to pick him up for a gig. Syd, his mind blown either by incipient mental illness or a massively heroic dose of LSD and Mandrax, drifted off into reclusive legend, leaving the legacy of a pair of remarkable solo albums and one full album with The Floyd. But what an album.

“Piper at the Gates of Dawn” certainly has its faults, but there as an artefact of Brit psych it makes Sgt Pepper look like Brothers in Arms. Certainly, it toned down aspects of the band’s live act to suit the straight laced EMI studios, and the version of Interstellar Overdrive doesn’t really measure up to the Joe Boyd produced original featured on the soundtrack of Peter Whitehead’s movie “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London”, but to listen again to Astronomy Domine and try to figure out just where this music was coming from in 1967. Barrett’s chromatic chord changes and glistening, echo-laden guitar glissandos have no precedent in British pop music, while his focus on the dark inner space of childhood resonated with the acid drenched climate of the times. And has there ever been a song as gleefully and unselfconsciously mad as “Bike”?

So, we are now promised “immersion” sets of the classic albums, starting with “Dark Side…” and “Wish You Were Here”, replete with reproduced memorabilia, various rarities, posters, coasters, alternative mixes – in fact, all the usual bollocks we expect when a major record label decides to make the pips of loyal fans squeak one more time. How much more re-mastering can they take, I wonder, before the oddities and foibles which made them unique are leeched out and we regard the albums as little more than the musical equivalent of the remains of a plate of half time oranges at a school football match? Can we, as fans, really take any more of this?

I don’t think we can, and I think EMI’s policy of drip-feeding Floyd fans with the occasional rare nugget bundled with new versions of the same old albums is flawed. Why not release a series of CDs containing all the rarities, outtakes and rare live recordings in one place, including the final Syd Barrett recordings, “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”, in proper quality at last? I’d be willing to replace all the bootlegged mp3’s and old cassettes for a proper, official release, and I’m sure many others would too. Look at the success of The Beatles’ Anthology to see how it could be done.

Alas, they probably won’t, and the music industry will continue to vanish up its own arse while selling ever more spurious collector’s items to superannuated “fans” who last bought a new album sometime around the turn of the century. And, as the last member of the Australian Pink Floyd is buried beneath the last re-mastered, quad sound, 5.1 DVD Audio SACD super heavyweight vinyl mix copy of “Dark Side of the Moon” (with special 3D backstage pass reproduction), those of us who actually cherish the maverick spirit of the band’s original incarnation as avatars of the English underground will breath, breath in the air and let out a sigh of relief.

27 Apr 2011

The Abiding Influence of Nick Drake


Originally appeared on Radio 2 website as part of promotion for a documentary hosted by, of all people, Brad Pitt.
It's an oft repeated cliché that only 500 people (or something similarly insignificant) bought the first Velvet Underground album, but all of them went out and formed a band. The same may not be true of Nick Drake, but as his cult reputation has grown, so has the number of artists citing him as an influence on their own music.
The first major re-appraisal of Drake's work came with the release of the Fruit Tree box set, containing all three of his original albums, in 1979. This was a largely unprecedented move for an artist so obscure, and was a testament to producer Joe Boyd's continued faith in Drake's work - when he sold his Witchseason Production company to Island Records in the early 70s a precondition was that Drake's albums would never be deleted.
The albums gradually accumulated a small but dedicated band of admirers, including REM guitarist Peter Buck and ex-Television guitarist Tom Verlaine. In the UK, ex-Duran Duran member Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy called his band The Lilac Time after a line in Drake's song River Man. Dream Academy's Life in a Northern Town was dedicated to Drake, even as his albums continued to sell to an ever growing band of devotees who cherished his work like a family heirloom.
By the turn of the 90s Drake was being cited as an influence by artists as diverse as country rocker Lucinda Williams, Robyn Hitchcock and Mark Eitzel of American Music Club. However, actual covers of Drake's songs remained thin on the ground, apart from the fabled acetate of Drake songs recorded by Elton John as publishing demos in 1969 shortly before finding fame in his own right. Original copies are extremely rare – although you can find it on the Internet if you look hard enough.
The release of Island Record's Way to Blue compilation in 1994 was met with rave reviews, while Drake was rapidly becoming the hip name to drop. Paul Weller was introduced to Drake's music by his mates in Ocean Colour Scene, and the mellow pastoral vibe of his 1994 comeback album Wild Wood was directly inspired by it. Latterly, artists such as Turin Brakes, Kings of Convenience and Kathryn Williams have all come in for Drake comparisons, not always justified, as did Belle and Sebastian, largely thanks to Stuart Murdoch's breathy vocals. Perhaps the best known fan is Badly Drawn Boy, whose Hour of the Bewilderbeast album bore the unmistakable mark of Drake's influence. Norah Jones has also recorded a cover version of Nick's song Day is Done.
Drake's latter day renaissance has also been fuelled by television programmes, radio documentaries, numerous articles and a fine biography by Patrick Humphries. But perhaps the strangest appearance of this quintessentially cult artist was in 2000, when Volkswagen used Pink Moon in a US commercial, introducing thousands of new fans to Drake's music for the first time.
Mick Fitzsimmons

Cat Stevens - A Musical Journey


Feature article written to promote Yusuf Islam's return to the spotlight. Interestingly, I met the former Cat Stevens as he was leaving a studio in Broadcasting House. I, and various others, were gathered round a small television set watching the second plane crash into the Twin Towers. The next day Yusuf Islam was all over the papers appealing for tolerance and calm. I have to say, I found him a thoroughly decent chap.

In late September 2001 Yusuf Islam gave one of the most revealing interviews of his career to Radio 2's Bob Harris. From his youth in London's West End, through his pop stars years and his subsequent conversion to Islam, it's a fascinating journey.

Cat Stevens was one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, with a string of best selling albums which virtually defined the concept of the sensitive singer songwriter. Albums such as Teaser and the Firecat and Tea for the Tillerman were classics of their genre, and his tours regularly sold out. Rising again after an abortive career as 60s pop star, Stevens' introspective and often highly personal songs connected with a huge audience and made him a star.

Then, in 1978, he turned his back on it all, embraced Islam and changed his name. For many of his long time fans, it was a baffling decision - why would a man who appeared to have it all throw it all away? Now, in a major interview for Radio 2, Yusuf Islam charts the long journey from pop stardom to religious enlightenment and reveals the reasons behind his decision.

Steven Giorgiou was born in London in 1948, the son of a Greek Cypriot father and Swedish mother. He was raised in the heart of London's West End where his parents ran a café, just round the corner from the then heart of the British music industry, Denmark Street. Young Steven developed two consuming passions, music and art, and initially fell under the spell of Bernstein's West Side Story when it opened in nearby theatreland in 1958. The arrival of The Beatles in 1963 inspired him to get his first guitar, but he was also listening to blues and folk music.

POP STAR
Early demos (one of which is included on his new boxed set) led to a deal with the fledgling Deram label. Along the way he changed his name to Cat Stevens and before long found himself a bona fide pop star, with hits such as Matthew and Son and I Love My Dog. However, sudden fame carried its own pressures. In February 1968, he was admitted to hospital suffering from tuberculosis.

"I felt I was on the brink of death," he tells Bob Harris in the programme. "At the same time I had incredible hope. I kind of made the best of it as much as I could. Now I had a break I could review myself and decide where I wanted to go and not necessarily where my agent felt I should go."

By the time Stevens left hospital he had started writing songs again. He told Melody Maker: "I think I will just use guitar as backing. I'm not doing a traditional folk thing, but a contemporary thing - my own version of folk, if you like." He had also started studying various religions, and his new material reflected this mood of reflection.

The first evidence of this new direction was the Mona Bone Jakon album, which emerged in May 1970. The new decade brought a new Cat Stevens, now sporting long hair and beard. The album reintroduced him to the charts, but it was the follow up, Tea for the Tillerman, which launched him onto the international stage and gave him his first top ten in the states. The follow up, Teaser and the Firecat, was even more warmly received, producing three hit singles.

THE TURNING POINT
Stevens' star would continue to rise, but within himself he was becoming increasingly troubled. Typically, this was addressed in songs such as Sitting or the Majik of Majiks, which contained the line "What kind of man can make me turn/and see the way I really am". The beginnings of an answer came to him when he was swimming in the Pacific near the home of record company boss Jerry Moss. Caught in a strong current, he found himself fighting to get back to shore.

"There was no-one on this earth who could help me and I did the most instinctive thing," he told Bob Harris. "I just called out and said 'God, if you save me I'll work for you' and in that moment a wave came from behind me and pushed me forward."

The following year his brother David gave him a copy of the Koran as a birthday present. Increasingly drawn to it, Stevens began losing interest in the music industry. In December 1977 he formally embraced Islam at Regent's Park Mosque and soon after changed his name to Yusuf Islam. The Back to Earth LP, released in November 1978, was the final Cat Stevens album - with no artist to promote it and no chance of a tour, it sold poorly, but by now yusuf had no interest in playing the pop star game.

FAITH
In the years that followed he devoted himself to his faith. Initially he channelled his efforts into the establishment of the UK's first Muslim school, but by the mid-eighties he began giving lectures at universities throughout Britain. Increasingly he's been an articulate spokesperson for Britain's Muslim community - in the wake of the September 11 atrocity he was once more called upon to defend his faith, advocating peace and tolerance at a time of anti-Islamic hysteria. He's also made forays into recording again, with the spoken word album The Life of the Last Prophet in 1995. 2001 saw the release of a box set, collecting work from all the stages of his career.

Strange as it may have seem to many of his fans, Yusuf Islam is far happier today than he ever was at the height of his stardom in the seventies. He also seems to have come to terms with his former life, working with A&M in the production of the box set, writing some touching liner notes and contributing previously unreleased material.

"Being more mature now," he writes, "I've managed to make peace with my past, as it's making peace with me. Certainly there's a mutual gain for reflecting on both phases of my life and although I consider the here and now perhaps to be more important there are still many people who appreciate my past ephemeral stages and the lessons they represent."

Mick Fitzsimmons
The article can also be found, along with lots of other interesting stuff, on Yusuf Islam's official website.
Just out of interest, here are some more reviews written for the BBC Music Website.


I even got my own page and everything!

26 Apr 2011

Summer Sounds

To almost paraphrase Captain Boyle from Sean O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock", I look up at the sky and ask meself, "What is the sun?" As I look out the window we are in the midst of an unseasonal spell of sunshine. I am currently working my way through the almost 20 minutes of La Dusseldorf's "Cha Cha 2000", a shimmering electronic groovefest driven by Klaus Dinger's trademark motorik beat, and it strikes me that it's perfectly suited to the weather.

In fact, loads of music from the 70s seems to conjure up the sun for me. Perhaps it was the regular heatwaves, or perhaps its just the strange hindsight that renders everybody's childhood shiny and bright, but if it's a beautiful sunny day I find myself inexorably drawn to the music from that wonderful decade. And I don't mean disco (although that, of course, has its place.)

On the other hand, the 1980s for me are characterised by drizzle. And even "Club Tropicana" can't change that. In fact, it actually conjurs up images of sodden espadriles queuing up outside some shady Essex "nite spot", the whiff of hairspray and odour of Bezique heavy in the dreary air.

25 Apr 2011

Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson Interview


Interview conducted with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, Saturday 3rd August 2002, as they prepared for an appearance at that year's Cambridge Folk Festival.

Neither of you are strangers to the Cambridge Folk Festival. Can you remember the first time you played here?

Norma Waterson I was here at the very first Cambridge festival in 1965. It was small - one stage in a field and a few seats out the front. Paul Simon was on, and the Clancy Brothers. It was a pound to get in.

Martin Carthy I was on the second one and it wasn't much bigger. The first one he had to make a thousand pounds to break even. And he did and that's why it's still going.

NW The thing I really remember was the Clancy Brothers arriving on site in an open top jeep. They roared through the crowd in this open top jeep. Nowadays pop stars would come in on helicopters.

The most obvious change for Cambridge is the size, but do you think the atmosphere of the festival has changed much since the early days?

NW Yes. It's much more populist than it was. It used to be very much a straight folk festival, although it wasn't a traditional one in the sense that you could only get up and do stuff from your own country, but it definitely has got more poppy. But then I think the whole folk scene in general has become much more pop orientated than it was in the 60s.

Do you think people see folk music as a viable career option these days?

NW I think the media have got hold of it. Certainly since we've been singing there have been three or four occasions when nothing's been happening in the charts and someone's realised that there's this thing called traditional music happening - let's have a folk revival! Are there any young and pretty people that we can put pictures in our papers of? It's no bad thing if it gets people interested in folk music, though.

MC It's really bad news for us to be isolated. You get an awful lot of righteousness around, but not a lot of sense. And frequently not a lot of music either!

But neither of you have ever been accused of being purist in any way…

MC I've never really understood what purist meant, honestly, because I don't really know what impure music is.

NW The music in England is a hybrid music anyway. In fact, most of the music in the British Isles is a hybrid - none of it is pure. To go back to pure you're going to have to go back to the ancient Britons.

MC Back to banging rocks…

You're playing with Blue Murder tonight, and there is a definite buzz about your appearance. Expectations are heavy.

NW I hope they're not disappointed!

MC It's very much a band that hits or misses. If it works it's fantastic, but it requires everybody to be on song. There's a lot of chances get taken and a lot of opportunities for falling off the wire, walking into the door and falling over your own feet. But we have a great time.

The way the group started was fairly informal, wasn't it?

NW In the 70s our local school in Robin Hood's Bay was bursting at the seams and needed a new room. We did a concert and all the money went to building this new room. We grabbed as many people as we could. There was Peter Bellamy and Swan Arcade and the Watersons and various other people. We did a concert and we did a few songs together at the end and really liked it.

MC Then in 1987 Iain Anderson asked The Watersons and Swan Arcade to put together a one off concert with an hour's worth of stuff. After the first gig we decided to call ourselves Blue Murder, but the party aspect took over from the music and it fell to bits basically. We had a fantastic time…

NW Rehearsals were very boozy!

MC We started being really industrious then got to talking, telling stories, drinking a bit of wine…

NW …you know, like folkies do.

MC It just got silly, so we gave it up for a while. Then when Jim started up with Lester and Barry we decided to give it another go and it's great fun, it really is. I mean, Barry Coope is a stupendous singer.

Shall you be leaving the boozing until after the gig tonight then?

MC Well, we don't do much of that now. I think 'cos we're older our livers have given up!

NW I think this is about the third time we've been together as Blue Murder. We did the 70s and 80s, but we missed the 90s.

Can we expect another Waterson: Carthy album in the near future?

NW It's finished already, but Tony at Topic didn't want it to clash with the Blue Murder album. You can't flood the shops! We were happy that the Blue Murder album came out first and our album, A Dark Light, comes out in September.

It's been a remarkable couple of years for you, Martin, what with the boxed set, the birthday concert and the honorary doctorate…

MC Yeah, that's astonishing…

…What's the betting on a knighthood?

NW There's no betting. He wouldn't accept it.

MC Knighted folk singers is silly. I mean, knighted rock and rollers is bad enough. Sir Elton John, Sir Cliff Richard… come on lads! To go on from there to knighted folk singers, I mean, what a ridiculous idea. Sir Mick Jagger is bad enough...

NW What would be really nice would be something like the French Legion of Honour, which is just your country recognising you've done something really good. But it's not going to happen in our lifetime.

So what about your solo careers? Can we expect more of that?

MC For the last few years I've been doing an instrumental album, but I'm not entirely happy with doing an entire album of guitar tunes, so it'll probably turn out half and half. I've no idea what I'm going to call it yet.

There's a lot of young talent emerging. When you look to the young talent does it give you hope for the future of the music?

NW Oh, yes. There's some young performers doing some really good stuff. John Boden and John Spiers, they take risks, which is what we did. It doesn't seem risky now, but when the Watersons came along, nobody was singing unaccompanied apart from the traditional singers and people like The Copper Family. We really like it when there's something wild about what the young people do, and there's a few around like that, which is great.

MC The only reservation I had about a lot of the crop of the new singers was that they were all tremendously accomplished and there was not one hint of a risk anywhere, and performing is about risk. But people like Boden and Spiers really are risky. They may make mistakes, but by God, the passion's there, and that makes up for a lot. But they both happen to be very good instrumentalists and very good singers.

NW What I do like is that the young performers specialise in English material. Irish and Scottish material is so lovely, it's easy to go that route, but English songs are weirder, they need more listening to. It really does please us that people have taken that route. It's very exciting.