The chronicles of Ruin, continued.
Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.
Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here.
10 September 2009 22:59
Jesus, it's an unacknowledged aspect of the Murdoch tyranny that he has made uncritical sportsfreaks of many; any old competitives shit, and they'll watch it - ice hockey, BMX riding, fucking obesity darts, would you believe it and now golf. It was bad enough when it was just snooker and football, a bit of cricket but mainly on the radio, and a fortnight of Wimbledon but now the Sports News takes up[ fifteen minutes of every hour on the skymadeupnewsandfilth channels - ie all of them. Then there's ten or fifteen minutes of weather and take away the adverts and trailers and you realise you're watching bilge. Now there's a new Andy Moron, some grinning kid from Ulster., wants to be a heavily sponsored, multi-millionaire entertainer by playing golf on the TeeVee. If this television hadn't cost so much it'd be outside, getting jumped on.
This here is Loudon on golf, anyway; now a grisly parody of his quirky, ebullient younger self. Mind, if I'd spawned the insufferable Rufus Wainwright and the hideous Martha Wainwright, I'd feel pretty grisly, too. Serves him right.
Maybe hizonner detested the sight of Gilmor senior, strangling the same notes out of his Stratocaster
decade after decade, maybe he just loathed the lardy bastard and the ghastly, chilly bombast of Pink Floyd and he gave junior a good taste of porridge, just to balance the cosmic books, so to speak; Charlie won't greet tomorrow with a million bright ambassadors of morning fluttering around his cell, that's for sure. Climbing up the Cenotaph is the next best thing to shitting in Money's face and their honours are there to stop that sort of thing happening.
I actually don't care if twenty-year olds are disrespectful, I was, and I'm not now. And I believe that Charlie Gilmour throwing a dustbin at Charlie-Saxe-Coburg-von Battenberg, aka Windsor and his Horsefaced Nazi, FagAsh Lil, is entirely admirable and the more people do it, the better, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want the worthless, idle bastard himself injured, just his simpering amour propre.
What's depressing, though, is young Gilmour's grovelling for leniency, his suit and haircut, all that stuff, bright young man, at Cambridge, one of the Establishment, really. Would've been lovely to see him going into Court with his two fingers up; as it is, he has completely devalued his protest, and, in my view, also, devalued the short lives of those whom the Cenotaph claims to honour, did they really die so that international crime families like the Murdochs and financial terrorist like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan can shit all over us? 'Fraid they did and old men listening to - or worse, performimg - The Wall and Dark Side of The Moon are just passing them the toilet paper.
Maybe one of their own going to jail will shake the Showbiz aristocracy out of its indolence but I wouldn't hold my breath.
It's said that Ludwig van Beethoven, mad and deaf, had to be turned around to see the applause of the audience at the first performance of his Ninth symphony; it is a poignant example of Art really being created for its own sake, written over decades, never to be heard by its composer; if you cried, you know you'd fill a lake with tears.
Biographies have revealed that he was stone mad, as well as stone deaf, how could he not be? His diaries read, Monday: engaged housekeeper, Monday afternoon, dismissed housekeeper; Tuesday morning: engaged housekeeper, Tuesday morning, dismissed housekeeper, just couldn't get the staff, those days - I know how he felt, it has been a long time since I have been even content with the efforts of anyone I have engaged to do anything for me, and if I ever was, it was only because I was stupider then than I am now.
Outside his muses, Beethoven's relationships were shit, nobody really knows who Elise was and his closest known relationship was up and down, one-sided, with his nephew, he infuriated friends and patrons alike and sank, eventually, into tragic, lonely deafness. Doesn't matter a fuck, at least not to us - sonatas, quartets, concerti, symphonies, opera, among the greatest ever to be pulled from whoknowswhere and written down, sometimes sixteen lines at a time, for the rest of us to hear, to weep and wonder at, the quality of genius, troubled, ailing, non-conformity bursting out of the shadows, outshining wretched normalcy, provoking, captivating and enchanting the Earthbound.
I listen to the Beach Boys now and again, normally in the Summer - Little Deuce Coupe, I Get Around, Barbara Ann, Help Me Rhonda; Fun, Fun, Fun and on into the sublime God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains; perfect pop songs, albeit snippets of white, verging on redneck Americana; Chuck Berry, sanitised in four-part harmony, carsangirls, loveanmarriage, California girls and beach parties, all summer long......Before he became too much for himself and disappeared into bed, sandpits, drugs and therapy, Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' composer, arranger, and producer, pissed all over everybody, including the Beatles, crafting his pet sounds into popular songs and albums rated as among the best ever. Ever.
Jools Holland, however, is rubbish. He suits the BBC, though, what with his clunking, faux Edwardianism, his midget suits with too many buttons and pockets and his arse-clenchingly embarrassing interviewing style, ladeezangennulmen; he wasn't even the main man of his original band, Squeeze, a no-account bunch of Cockney wankers, still, sans Jools, performing their handful of miserable chart-toppers, in tiny concerts, unplugged, at any opportunity. Christ alfuckingmighty, bad enough we endlessly revisit the 'sixties - although there were hugely important societal changes in that overfluffed celebrity decade - the 'seventies and 'seventies 'ensembles don't bear thinking about. Squeeze and Jools Holland, who the fuck are they?
I don't know many people but I must have known a good half-dozen who could play better barrelhouse piano than Holland - and as for his R and B Orchestra, well, you wouldn't go and see them if they were playing in your back garden. Jools sings, but he shouldn't, he has no voice. He's like a Bruce Forsyth-lite, for our times, doing duets with the proper stars, only he can't sing or dance, like Brucie does. Rock icon, Carol Vorderman, was on the show, tonight, often it's the bints from AbsFabs, R and B legends like Krishnan Guru Murty, off Channel Four News, a charmed circle of Celebrity shits, drinking our money and cheering any old rubbish, as though any of them gave a fuck about music. Time it was scrapped and Joolsie sent off to his wardrobe studies, producer Mark Cooper sent to work on the Archers. There have been seriously important artists on the show, for sure, - although Seasick Steve isn't one of them - but Holland is an intolerable, smirking, over-promoted prick and the format - of us watching liggers, media whores and Z-list cclebrity cocksuckers cheering to order - makes tabloid the occasionally excellent. Who says that this little tosser must be the vehicle through which popular music is presented, this isn't intelligent music broadcasting, this is Goddamned fucking Hobbitry.
Brian Wilson was on the Jools show tonight and he shouldn't have been. Fronting his own Beach Boys tribute band, a slew of session men, singing all the parts and playing most of them, Wilson perched on a stool, gutty and goitred, playing nothing, barely singing, waving his arms like a loony at the mental hospital long-term residents' Christmas Party, making wavey gestures with his fingers, in time to Good-good-goo-ood-Vibrations, an offence against Man and God. Lord, how the studio crowd loved it.
It doesn't matter, much, that Bob Dylan grunts and wheezes his way through his own repertoire; instrumental flawlessness, sophisticated arrangements and heavenly harmonies were never his stock-in-trade, on the contrary, swift Chaos, unrehearsed, wrought his ensemble meisterwerks, often first takes, recorded live and people, maybe too young to know any better, still visit his dreary concerts, it doesn't matter, man's a legend, people have bootlegs of his kettle boiling, his dog barking. In concert, Paul McCartney plays Beatles' songs much better than did the Beatles, and generally that's saying something. The Rolling Stones do what they've always done, play a load of old dross, illuminated by selections from their two or three exceptional albums, nobody overvalues the Stones, just as long as they get to hear Keef Richards riffing in open-G, like he was a bluesman, or something.
But Brian Wilson, tonight, a madman in an empty room full of heartless strangers; a third-rate, jive-talking emcee, who believes that his being there, gobbing, dignifies the unforgiveable, is all; and one of the very few musical classics of our times is trashed by its composer. Watch it and weep.
YELLOW SUBMARINE. YES, DEFINITELY STRINGS, A FULL ORCHESTRA.
YEAH, GEORGE, THAT'S WHAT I THINK, TOO.
'COS IT, LIKE, HAS A LORRA MEANING, THAT SONG.
No doubt the tellydroids would urge us that a timely reappraisal of George Martin, Sir George of Beatlemania, is timely, and that Monday night's hymn of praise to him is a timely reappraisal, the fifth Beatle, he was, you know, and a great human being, aye, tell it to Pete Best.
With Martin's help, The Beatles destroyed rock'n'roll; that some poor numbskulls believe that recording cymbals backwards is a stroke of genius - how the fuck would anyone know, anyway, backwards or forwards, a cymbal is just a cymbal? - just shows the power of what we now call the Industry and its stooges, all across skymadeupnewsandfilth - Rolling Stone, Q Magazine, Radio One, all engaged in mutual masturbation with succeeding kings of the studio.
What the Beatles and their corporate masters did was consumerise disturbed teenage hormones, male and female and coincidentally rob much of my generation of what critical faculties they may have developed. Rowing with them, sad old men, over at The Guardian one can almost smell, through cyberspace, the inhaled heart attack medicine of silly old farts, duped and confused into thinking their silly teenages were part of a movement, aghast and outraged that not everybody thinks Strawberry Fields Forever sublime,
There is no question that much of the early Beatles repertoire is enchanting, magical, timeless music but if we look at the decades of tripe, progrock and concept albums, double and triple - mr mongoose can fill in the gaps, name the guilty - ushered in by the sorry druggy doggerel, the overblown bombast of Sergeant Pepper we see their real, corrosive impact on popular culture; I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in, to stop my mind from wonderin', where it will go, Jesus wept, what a load of old shite. Among many intolerably pretentious gabshites The Electric Light Orchestra, those prancing dummies, are down to Martin.
Guardian commenters misattribute, well, everything, really but specificallyNoel Coward, putting his words in the noisesome mouth of railways enthusiast and KylieMeister, Mr Pete "Pete" Waterman. It was Noel Coward, said that thing, about No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British Public, the sayings of StationMaster Waterman are, like his music, rather less acerbic but Noel was right. Millions, including, probably, these sad old gits above, pondered the meaning of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, even though there wasn't any and flocked, later, to learn the latest aphorisms of bullyboy, wife-beating, smackhead Lennon, pontificating from inside a bag or a bed, on peace and love, the horrible bastard.
One can imagine, four squabbling Scousers, stoned out of their gourds, one in the corner, thumbs-upping, singing a music hall tune, one chain-smoking himself to HareKrishna death, the dopey one at the back, trying to count his fingers and the vicious, angry peacenik with the stupid glasses - Hey George, you're the maestro, I wanna have a sound like, you know, like penguins, man, eating cornflakes, while riding motor bikes, only, like, they have to be ridin' 'em underwater..... you know, 'cos I'm a genius, Yoko says so, and like, she's an artist, she don't look back. No, problem, boys, what key do you want it in????? Er, like wossakey then, George, you takin' the piss?
Chuck Berry produced the definitive rock'nroll music. And even though he took our childhoods to jail with him, Phil Spector wrote the insane, joyous book on rock'n'roll production - then he asked me to be his bride, always be right by his side, I felt so happy I almost cried, and then he shot me. Holly, Spector, Berry and a host of US black groups, they informed the genius years of the Beatles, Martin helped them wank themselves dry, a novelty record producer, too pleased with himself to say No. Bob Dylan, the miserable, croaking, sourfaced old git, lacking the input of a trickster like Martin, still produces the occasional triumph, the occsional number one album; McCartney, meantime, fronts his own tribute band, Hey-Judeing his life away.
Time, of course, will tell, who has fell but all these people, investing so much of themselves in the frothy, lightweight and meaningless entertainment of their youth, making genius of over-indulgence seem to have the critical faculties of a lamp post; Please, Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Thank You Girl, Things We Said Today, I'm Looking Through You, Eight Days A Week, these were truly great examples of popular song, if they want to hear harpsichord, they should listen to Handel, If they want to hear string quartets they might try Beethoven, but if they wanna hear some of that rock and roll music they should avoid Martin's dreary Sergeant Pepper like the plague. Thinking outside the box, Aye, right. That Beatlemania still dominates the lives of so many sheds some light on how it is that CallHimDave can so effortlessly march us back, whistling, to the 'thirties.
The rockumentary was as bad as one might have guessed in advance. McCartney and Martin reminiscing on their joint, inspired greatness, the mutant, Starkey, grinning, with Sir George at his percussive triumphs, although never onscreen in the company of Fab Sir Paul
As to the historical/social commentary aspect of this dreadful piece of fanshit, the most significant event of the early 'sixties was not the release of Love Me Do - as so many insist - or anything else but the introduction, in 1961, by Health Minister, Enoch Powell, of the contraceptive pill, that, now, was truly transformational. That was proper Baby You Can Drive My Car stuff.
Way back, before before, there was a cadre of respectful, if not always respectable British blues players - Alexis Korner, Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, guitarists all, and cool jazzheads like Chris Barber & Ottilie Patterson, trad jazz men, like Lonnie Donegan, scuffling around for a gig, a record. All these people saw themselves as ambassadors of the Blues, some of them setting up UK tours by Uncle Sam's finest sub-humans, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Many of the great US bluesmen were dead - Blind Willie McTell, Lightnin' Hopkins, Big Joe Williams and of course Robert Johnson, and could only be heard on scratchy acetates; it's true, nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell. Or Jimmy Reed or Little Walter or Elmore James;
there were legions of country and urban bluesmen, and some women, picking and sliding and slashing magically at cheap guitars, thumping rolling twelve-bars from out of tune pianos, rasping bent notes out of tiny mouth harps, summonsing the mojo of the grateful dead, their slave parents, passed over to Beulah Land, no more auction block for them, no more masters' whips. Heavy shit.
These people were just poor nigger trash, busted flush sharecroppers, no 'count cottonpickers; the great, the divine Mississippi John Hurt, the most fluid, enchanting and original of country fingerpickers, was recorded in the 'twenties and then consigned back to the Delta's poverty stricken, racist oblivion, before being rediscovered in the 'sixties, by white college boys like John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald, who plagiarised his double-timed Corrina, Corrina, his Candy Man, his Make Me A Pallet Down On Your Floor;
Nearer My God To Thee, he sang, on his handful of Vanguard albums, and so it was - those who've suffered the most have to be better connected than those who are most content. But those early British players, anyway, intuited the grace and the power of the Blues, electric or acoustic, and proselytized it, as best they could, an act of devotion, almost.
Those early, Mississippi Delta blues were tunes shipped across the Atlantic in slavers, played originally on fife and drum, gourds and bamboo, songs originally to other gods and then adapted to a new misery, a new, endless, manacled sorrow, relieved only by the slave masters' foreign God - Jesus, gonna make up my dying bed; Meet me, Jesus, meet me, meet me in the middle of the air. And with the partial passing - the sanitisation - of slavery came songs of grinding poverty and cruel, smirking AnafuckingBaptist segregation - Me and a man was workin' side by side, it didn't make no sense, They was payin' him a dollar an hour, they was payin' me fifty cents, they said, If yous White, yous alright, If yous Brown, stick around, but if yous black, Oh, brother, get back, get back get back. Leadbelly and Broonzy sang of a different reality to that of formal slavery, but it was no less shameful. As the white twentieth century lurched between recession and world wars, the nigger music became a little more risque, If you don't want my peaches, honey, don't ya shake my tree; I am the little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day; Good mornin' little schoolgirl, can I come home with you; but lamentatious or salacious, the cultural nigger product of Uncle Sam's great experiment with freedom was powerful Juju; while Robert Johnson was down at the crossroads, dealin' with the Devil, in England we had George Formby, leanin' on a lamp post, at the corner of the street, in case a certain little lady comes by. No wonder that 'forties and 'fifties musos gazed longingly across the great divide. No wonder that Donegan, a largely tuneless, nasal excuse for a singer created a bastard singalongablues and called it skiffle, singing US prison songs, railroad songs, in a high , white whine to a crude, amateur accompaniment of guitar, washboard and one-string, tea-chest bass; such was the dire state of UK popular music that Donegan was a runaway success, happy, eventually to abandon his Limey blues interpretations for novelty recordings about chewing gum and dustbins, no, as we never tire of saying here, no business like show business.
But then came the insufferable John Mayall, Britain's self-styled professor of the blues and in his wake, under his tutelage, a whole slew of grasping wannabes, like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, posturing, absurdly, their heart-on-sleeve identification with the music of the slaves, their like, total, man, immersion in the culture of, like, blackness, man. Just gotta get my shit together. Arseholes.
There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, into the blues, man, really into it, paid their dues, they had, not exactly on the road gang, or in the county farm or down on that killin' floor but in the wardrobe mirror, in their Surbiton or Stourbridge bedrooms. It was the biggest, most maladroit cultural misappropriation of the twentieth century, as though the Welsh had claimed bullfighting as their own; Eric Clapton's facially contorted, tedious stringbending seen by gullible teenagers as divine, bendingness is next to Godliness. And there was the rot - hairy, white middle class boys, bearing the new WhiteMan's Burden, stealing the BlackMan's Blues, and selling it back to him, all in the best possible taste.
I read a few years back that Eric was feeling really down, his new Ferrari was six months overdue, what a bummer, woke up this mornin', my sportscar still hadn't done arrive; still, he was able to advertise those gaudy Rolex watches, or timepieces, in Time magazine, musta eased his troublin' mind no end, that.
And at the end of the 'sixties so-called Blues Boom, from the squabbling ruins of Page's awful, pretentious Yardbirds came the clunking, sybaritic behemoth that was Led Zeppelin, managed by the loathsome bullyboy and racketeer manque, Peter Grant,
a twenty-stone fuckpig and dyed in the wool moron who would nevertheless guide Zeppelin to Devil-worship, to orgiastic, underage rough sex, to fatal drug overdose and to fortunes almost beyond the dreams of avarice.
I never went for that androgyne stuff, so popular back then, David Bowie and Lou Reed were at the head of it, so to speak,
I thought it was unwholesome, nothing to do with me, gender benders, can't stand them, one thing or the other, anything else endangers the spacecraft, nothing to do with rock and roll, nothing to do with music, even, dragging-up and queening all over the shop. Buddy Holly never did shit like that, that'll be the fucking day and maybe Phil Spector did wind-up shooting folks and taking our childhoods to jail with him but he never dressed up as a woman. The great Little Richard is as bent as a nine-bob note - or a forty five pence piece - but you wouldn't ever catch him faking fellatio on his guitarist. Bowie hanging out in Berlin, acting as if he was Isherwood on amphetamine, he and his mental Mrs, banging the same poxed-up rentboy, what a load of old shite, pretentious art school wanker. And while I could understand young women being turned-on by Led Zeppelin's vulgar, bombastic, ostentatious and meaningless cock-rock, I could never figure out why so many young men in greatcoats had a hard-on for Robert Plant. Although, on the strength of last night's evening with Plant, on BBC 4, the biggest hard-on in town is the one he has for himself.
Mark Radcliffe is a stupid as deejays can get, not as universally, unequivocally fawning as Paul Mr Pretentious Gambuccini, for instance, but certainly as mindless as Tony Blackburn in his prime, as insincere and jumped-up as Simon Bates, Radcliffe is an affront to anyone interested in music, rather than in "the industry." I heard him once before and only once, he was interviewing the great John Prine, on Radio Two. Prine, the gentle songster, has more talent in his little finger than Radcliffe has in his entire charmless, epsilon body, save that of patronising a quiet, unassuming artist of great stature, a typical BBC celebrity wanker, is Radcliffe, and he was obviously thrilled to be interviewing the great rock god and cock-waving numbskull, Robert Plant, about his lemon-squeezing life and career.
Even by the abysmal, pathological standards of showbusiness, Plant emerged as almost uniquely self-obsessed, seeing himself as, I dunno, rock catalyst, Svengali, mover and shaker but mainly as just, well, great, his greatness being the vocal icing on the dodgy battenberg of Page and Jones and Bonham, his co-Zeppers, them all being great together, their greatness, collectively and independently, greatness, like Handel or Beethoven, really, truly great. Almost, like the cunt, Clegg, third-personing himself, Robert was all, There I was, doing this, with so-snd-so, it was incredible. I was incredible. I was a new incredible thing, a new greatness.
I wouldn't have gone to see them if they were playing in my back garden,
but I heard a few of the albums, back then, histrionic rubbish, noisy, vulgar and flashy, twin-neck Gibsons, guitars played with 'cello bows,
wow, man, and drug-crazed, interminable drum solos where a couple of bars would have done, and Planty, bare-chested, shrieking and howling, a cucumber down his kecks, a study in pointless homoerotic excess.
His Zeppelin drummer, wotsisname, Bonham, had been his mentor, had got him the gig and so, when the stupid fuck had drugged himself to death, he and Pagey and the other clown just couldn't, you know, couldn't....
And so Stourbridge's greatest son has proudly gone his own, irrelevant way, forming bands and closing them down, disappointing legions of poor Zeppheads, all bleating for a reunion between Plant and the ridiculous Page and the other one. Doctor Bob Dylan has been unable for forty of his fifty career years, to carry a tune and is the sort of out of tune, out of time, wrong key player who, if he wasn't who he is, nobody in their right mind would want in their ensemble, not even if he was playing outside in the carpark and yet he is never short of sidemen and women. Plant's career highlight has been howling lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely with all the finesse of that other great entertainer, Tom can you lower your voice to a shriek, you fucking moron, Jones. And he, too, seems able to at least brush shoulders with people whom you wouldn't suspect of giving him houseroom, much less of sharing a stage or a studio with him. He has had several bands of often competent and original players but none have lasted. He's tried the African connection, too, both with Page and without him, but to no effect; greater talents, proper musicians, rather than cock-waving shriekers, people like Maestro Ry Cooder and the ever accomplished and tasteful Paul Simon have made fabulous albums with local musicians, Cooder with Mali's Ali Farka Touree and Simon with loads of them, South Africans, notably Ladysmith Black Mombasa; Nick Drake went to Morocco and came back with a feast of new tunings, novel arrangements and an album still highly regarded;
Plant's adventures have resulted in video clips of him waving his hair around rythmically, man, and of a Moroccan ensemble busking along, for the cameras, bemusedly, with Whole Lotta Love. It's a sign of his greatness, perhaps.
Plant's latest project, however, his new Band of Joy, is to recruit a load of grizzly, boringly competent, sixty-year old players, like himself, and crunch out a few limp covers; their concert, of the album, screened last night, at the Roundhouse, featured songs by Richard Thompson, Townes van Zandt, fragments of early Bob Dylan interpretations and a typically shamefully unacknowledged version of an Incredible String Band arrangement of I Bid You Goodnight. We finally found the perfect song to close the show, he smirked, never mentioning that the IBS, often an inspiration to the creative desert which was Led Zeppelin, had arranged that piece to close their own concerts, way back in the nineteen sixties. Man's a cunt.
As well as the white-haired old guys in woolly hats, with banks of expensive instruments, there's a desolate looking bint, too, upstaged by Percy, Patty Griffin, a harmonising country singer and songwriter, Jesus, how many are there, but in the perfectly predictable solo breaks, where she should properly be doing a bit of coloured girl bump and grind, Planty himself is, after a fashion, dancing vainly around the stage, flexing his OAP arse, but mainly standing, rocking cross-legged, in his cowboy boots, like some gross chanteuse naive ancien, his snuffler's beard not quite hiding the jowls, the turkey neck, Christ, he's revolting. Nothing wrong with being old, it's just his being old and acting young. Never mind rock god, more like a nightmare Kylie Minogue. The industry, of course, loves it and will probably "award" the album a score of Grammies, just like it did with Raising Sand, the truly great, handclapping extravaganza he recorded with the great Allison Kraus and the great T-Bone Burnett. Just all great people, great musicians, doing greatness together. If you saw a bunch of old geezers doing this down the pub, you'd say, well, fair play to them, it's not half bad. But as full-price, new music it's shit, really it is.
The long hair, why do you keep it, enquires Radcliffe, fearlessly, towards the end of this orgy of Plant worship and self-worship. Ah, well, we old hippies made some really nice and profound changes to the world., and so we keep the hair to remind us. Right, Robert, changes, groupies, smashing up hotels and bad example, fatal drug use.
Finally, listing all the incredible and great musical directions he's hollowed, I mean followed, since he first heard the blues, listing all his personal greatnesses, Mr Plant, wriggling in delight at himself, enquires, of the air, How many Mes can there be? One's enough, Robert, plenty, perhaps even one too many.
The choir, the new Stratocaster, everybody's doin' it,
The first in a series of exclusive interviews in which famous Japanese people tell us how they are feeling about the terrible events back home. The famous avant garde artist and shithead, Ms Yoko Ono, reflects on common, unartistic people, drowning and being crushed alive in her homeland.
Herro to all my fans. Yoko is with you. As I say in my song, Let It Be, when I find myself in time of trouble, mother Yoko comforts me. I am thousands of miles away but I can feel your pain and for an artist like me, distance is non-existen, you can buy my works of art online. And I would just like to say that if my darling John was alive we would both be concerned to make an artistic contribution to my fans in Japan, now that they are in such difficulties. As an artist my fans are very important to me and their money keeps on adding to the enormous fortune I have earned from my art. I think that is so important to an artist. Writing all those Beatles songs with John was the early flowering of my creative genius. And when I hear that Yesterday is being played publicly on Japanese public sector broadcasting I am touched to think that John and I wrote it together about our love, one of the times he was beating me up. Although I do hope the Japs are paying the right royalties to me. It is not, as any artist knows, about the money, it is to do with protecting the artistic integrity of the Ono-Lennon brand. And the money. I mean, if people could hear Beatles music for free it wouldn't be worth anything, would it?
If John was alive today we could take some naked photographs of our front bottoms and sell them to the Japanese people for, oh, say just ten dollars apiece, just imagine how that would lift their spirits. They could just focus on the photos and breath, in a cosmic sort of way. They would very soon find that they were feeling better about the radiation and losing their homes and everything. It was photos like those, of John and I,
From the Ono-Lennon album, Two Tossers.
which helped end war in the world. You know, things were different in the 'sixties. My message to my slope-eyed fans, concerned about radiation sickness? Buy my new album, it rocks. And even if you can't play it because you are living in a muddy tent with no power, don't worry, just look at the album, it's every bit as good as listenting to it (Better, Sir P McCartney, Liverpool and New Hampshire but mainly New Hampshire.) The main thing is that, like me, they make some sacrifice for their art. John and I, for instance, had to sacrifice his first wife and son on the altar of our love. But it only made them better people. And John did give her a hundred thousand pounds, after all, to last the rest of her life.
Yoko Ono was talking to Jonafun Woss; for the full interview, in which Jonafun asks the eighty-year old if she takes it up the Gary, see the currrent edition of the Radio Times. Yoko's hot new album, Etudes, A Cat Screams As It Is Skinned Alive, on Sony records, is available in a signed, limited Edition, price £999, order your copy now to avoid disappointment.
It's my great unwritten post: How the Beatles Killed Rock'n'Roll; how the dire, druggy doggerel of Sergeant Pepper ushered in decades of equally pretentious concept albums by legions of equally jumped-up, gobby tossers, almost but not quite obliterating the genius of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Phil Spector, anaesthetising us with Tales From Topographic Oceans, Songs From The Wood, Days Of Future Passed and Pictures At An Exhibition, to name but four monstrosities; overblown, grandiose, pompous rubbish - all inspired by the Fab Mopsters and notably a simpering, over-indulgent George Martin.
There can be no questioning the rare magic, the energy, the charm, the invention of earlier Beatles' albums but sadly it is for Pepper that they are most revered and it was their inability to row back - or Get Back - from its excess which sundered the band; they were all, by then, egotisitical pricks, of course, even the dummy at the back, although they could have coped with that, The Eagles do, Keef and Mick do, Queen did, but a self-conferred status of genius will ruin all involved, and with the Fab Four it did, McCartney now fronting his own tribute band; Hari Georgeson, meditating and smoking his days away in wealthy isolation, dodging the Taxman; the dummy grunting and farting his way through a now bitter, meaningless life and Scouse Lennon blown away on his own doorstep, one of the worst things, possibly the worst thing ever to happen, ever, Oh, Man, it was just so, like, bad.
A mean drunk, a drug addict, a wife beater, an absent father, a cruel, selfish, spiteful, vicious arsehole, was Lennon. And stripped of his collaborative muse, Macca, Johnny proved a mediocre musician post-Beatles, screeching about Peace, from inside a bag or a bedroom or some such shit, ineptly regurgitating rock'n'roll classics with wanker-junkies like Elton John and Harry Nilsson or gurning about his new-born and favourite son, the other one having been Yoko- junked, along with poor, mistreated Cynthia; Jesus, a tightfisted, sanctimonious arsehole, a tuneless waster and an emissary from Househusbandsville Nouvelle. And yet somehow martyrdom becomes him, even as it enriches his horrid widow, so much so that today is like another November 22nd, Dead Kennedy Day, I remember where I was when John Lennon was blah blah blah, even if people didn't remember they'd think they did, so remorseless is the annual industry blitz, even if they weren't born then, Q magazine and the rest would persuade them that they were, somehow, there, in that terrible moment.
Much as I love Eight Days A Week, I'm A Loser and Hide Your Love Away, I don't care that he was killed, better him than me. And if you court celebrity, showbizzing, facetiously grandstanding around the world like some junkie Mahatma Ghandi, then it stands to reason that among the millions whom you seduce there will be some who want you dead. Everybody knows that.
The thing that is upsetting is that over at the Observer, the world's leading liberal voice, the mesage boards are full of young people saying, Normally I'm Opposed To The Death Penalty But I Have To Say This Was A Case For It and that every time, these last thirty years that BeatleKiller Mark Thompson and parole are mentioned in the same breath, the revolting Yoko Ono screams the house down, as only she can, the rotten old witch. Peace, Man, yes, and love; all you need is love, love, love is all you need, love is all you need......
The Band nailed lots of things down, before, like so much Americana, being itself warped through the coke-lit prism of the poison dwarf, Scorsese. The Last Waltz, as well as containing some amazing performances from the Band and their mates, exposed the drug fuelled homo-eroticism of Scorsese and stunning guitarist and songwriter, Jaime Robbie Robertson, half-Injun, half-Russian, half-Jew and hundred per cent Dylan sidesman, confidante and acolyte.
Robertson, post-Band, never did anything worth shit, while drummer Levon Helm and keyboardist and music professor, Garth Hudson, work and tour yet. Rick Danko died of the usual excesses and Richard Manuel hanged himself. The Band's is one of those rock and roll stories that perhaps we'd be better off not knowing
This isn't from the Last Waltz's 35 mm homage to Robbie and nor is it his song. Maestro Dylan's Tears of Rage, here hauntingly interpreted by Manuel, takes Melancholy's biscuit. I have never shed any, tears of sorrow a-plenty but not of rage; if they do exist, maybe now is the tine for them.
Maybe, in the end, if he lives long enough and doesn't die from smugness fatalisarseholeitis, cheery Jock, Andy Neil, will interview us all; We are joined on the Daily Politics by Mr Dick The Prick and Mr A Young Anglo-Irish Catholic, for their take on Prime Minister's Questions.
Today, or yesterday, it was Mr Brian May, guitarist with the Rock-Bombast ensemble, Queen, more accurately Dead Queen.
Dr May has a PhD in astro-something and is a regular on BBC's The Sky At Night, with the oldest, angriest fairy in the world, Sir Patrick Moore. As RockGods go May's not so bad. He has far too much money, of course, his group dusted in the golden fairy glitter brought by the death of its frontman, the distraughtly promiscuous, exhibitionist, Freddie Mercury and although his playing - on his home-made guitar - is both trademarked bitter-sweet elegiacal and manic, full-on stadium rock bluster at virtuoso standard, it doesn't seem to have changed much, these last thirty five years. And nor does he. Trainers and long curly hair. And bags under the eyes. I have no time at all for Queen's canon and one of my Visions of Hell is of being locked in a 'seventies bar, with only two songs on the juke box - Bohemian Rhapsody and All Right Now - and them alternately playing, loudly, throughout Eternity. But May seems together and thoughtful. No scandal attaches to his name, if he does or did drugs he did or does them privately, none of Keef Richards' toxic, bad-example, millionaire junky chic and he seems to have remained with his wife, Wotsername, the actress, rather than grossing-out, nonce-ish, with impressionable teenagers. Unlike fellow showbiz giants, such as Fab Macca, May seems able to be Off, not forever playing, thumbs-up, the rock hero, and to engage in other things. Today's isshoo was fox-hunting. May is dead agin it and pissed off at the Tories, for whom he has always voted, seeking to reverse the ban. He was quite straightforward, using dogs to tear apart other creatures isn't by any stretch of the imagination, sport, degrades all concerned, is cruel, sadistic and repellent and should stay banned. Culling badgers instead of inoculating cattle against TB was nearly as bad. The recent fox attack on children was a ten billion to one event, foxes don't do this unless frightened by something or cornered, it was the careless disposal of food waste, together with the vicissitudes of the Hunt which drove rural animals into urban settings, leave 'em alone, he said, normal, sensible farmers would rather keep the foxes down themselves than have the Hoorays galloping all over their land.
May runs a charity, establishing shelters for wild animals orphaned by human cruelty, caring for them until they are fit to be released into their natural environment, Save Me, it's called. On the odd occasion that I hit a rabbit or a hare, very, very rarely, WatershipDown's chilly anthropomorphic horror floods my mind and that's what I think, too - Orphans, frightened, hungry and defenceless. It is not, I know, very manly, but there it is. We are what we are.
I know. May would be better using his money and his energy to damn WarCorp, Gauntanamo, SriLanka, China, the live incineration of young widows in the Ancient Civilisation, Aye, right, of India; the Israelis' Nazi torments in Palestine. Fuck, you could talk for a month about violated humanity, why worry about foxes. Well, maybe, like most people, maybe more so, May is aware of his impotence in the face of global brutality and therefore turns to something at which he might succeed, something in which small acts of kindness, of mutuality, have a knowable benefit.
On the DP, May was flanked by the odious, twisting and turning every which way but truthfully Hillary Benn, a grotesque, camp caricature of his Dad, the wretched old phony, and by some loathsome braying Toryboy, up his own arse at being a junior minister in the coalition of the unwholesome and playing to the huntin' an' fishin' - and probably hangin' an' floggin' - dark hinterlands of RightWing Filth-O-Graph cruelty.
Against these two worthless ciphers, Benn pro-ban, the other tosser pro a revisiting, as we call these things, Brian May, forever young, really shone, sparkling not for his celebrity but for his spontaneous, honest, angry compassion for the Others, with whom we share this place, without whom, we are nothing.
The blogging farmers are up in arms, of course, because, subsidised, supported and infrastructured by the rest of us, they own the country and detest townies having an opinion on matters agricultural, the fisherfolk are the same, would fish the oceans empty if they could, and then bleat at everybody else; there are no trees or hedges where I live, apart from my own, those clever farmers grubbed 'em up, so that, behind barbed wire, they could grow a few extra turnips, fuck 'em. C'mon the foxes.
May was, on that dismal show, a breath of fresh air. Catch him if you can.
George Harrison was the second least talented of the fab mopsters; both the meanie, McCartney and the wife-beating drug addict, Lennon were far more accomplished guitarists and all-round musicians. Harrison was never more than an ersatz, doped-up Chet Atkins, his country licks later augmented by tremolo and whine in the style of his cuckolding chum,
Mr & Mrs Clapton is God, Eric & Patti-Layla.
Clapton ( who actually played the guitar part on the Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps); Georgie's over-rated solo efforts saw him hauled through the New York courts for plagiarism and his later, ensemble affairs with Orbison, Dylan, Petty and that Brummie from ELO - the Travelling Stooges -recycled forty years' worth of pop cliches. Harrison, though, corny, lacklustre and risibly sanctimonious, is the bastard to blame for all this charity-pop, the useless fucking would-be swami, Hare-Krishna-ing his way round the world in a private jet, smoking himself to death, lecturing us, from his hundred room palace, on our materialism. Prat.
Chez George. All you need is love.
The Concert for Bangla Desh, in 1971, the first charity bash concert, organised by Harrison, in deference to his new inspiration and second, replacement Maharishi (the first one having turned out to be an altogether too Earthly, cock-waving shitbag ) Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro, revitalised a moribund Bob Dylan and brought to prominence the monster skills of Leon Russell; aside from that, it achieved bugger all, monies earned were squandered in litigation, how very Beatles, how very Apple but the idea of the light entertainment - or rock - aristocracy revitalising it's flagging sales whilst claiming an amaterialistic ministry was born.
Since then, of course, every natural disaster or famine seems to have spawned a concert, great or small; in Hyde Park or the Orkney Islands, shameless exhibitionists have insisted that only their talents can truly acquaint a cruel, uninterested world with whatever the tragedy is, that charitable giving can only be unleashed by the combined piety of the likes of the toilet-creeping George Michael, by the bombastic stompings of Queen and the relentless geriatric boogying of the Undead, Status fucking Quo, and by Phil Collins jetting across the Atlantic to beat his drums and whinny about the homeless, modestly exercising his limitless talent on two continents in the same day or by some skriking, beardy fiddler announcing to his ghastly, greybeard audience that this interminable and indistinguishable reel is for the poor people of wherever it is; it's off my new album, on sale at the door. Recently, snapping at the behemoth heels, come all sorts of revolting boybands and freak graduates of Cruelty TV, blinking in the limelight but keen to blackguard us with their concerns for the world's trod-upon, a world of which they know nothing but in which their pimps and handlers can smell opportunity.
Save for some poor bastard being pulled miraculously from the ground, the earthquake in Haiti has slid down the news agenda but it is coming to the top in the world of showbiz/Cruelty TV. This from the show-biz industry Bible, the fucking awful Rolling Stone:
"The Simon Cowell-curated all-star rendition of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” premiered this morning on U.K. radio, Reuters reports. The Haiti benefit single, which will be available for download this Sunday, February 7th, features Mariah Carey, Leona Lewis, Susan Boyle, Rod Stewart, Jon Bon Jovi and Miley Cyrus. Cowell’s version sticks pretty close to the Automatic For the People original, with all the stars involved each singing a line from the R.E.M. classic.
With Cowell’s involvement, “Everybody Hurts” aims more at a British audience than an American one, as several contestants from Cowell’s U.K. shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent make appearances, including Joe McElderry and X Factor judge Cheryl Cole, and members of Brit boy bands Take That (including Robbie Williams). JLS and Westlife. Rounding out Cowell’s crew are Mika, Kylie Minogue, James Morrison, Michael Buble and James Blunt.
As Rolling Stone reported yesterday, producers Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie and RedOne rounded up 100-plus stars in a Los Angeles studio for a re-recording of “We Are the World” that will also raise money to help those struck by the earthquake in Haiti. So far, the entertainment industry has helped raise at least $64 million thanks largely to the “Hope For Haiti Now” telethon."
It may seem churlish to compain about sixty-four mill being raised by posturing egomaniacs but fuck it, let the fabulously wealthy pay more tax, instead of giving their "time" in the hope of shifting more product, let the UN and the MFI and the World Bank establish a global Emergency Fund and the personnel and materiel necessary to storm in and blitz Disaster wherever he strikes. We will need one.
Fuck me, if the survival of the damaged and damned depends upon the squeaky voice and the scrawny gyrations of the buck-toothed mutant, Kylie Minogue or the faux blue collar gruntings of Bruce Springsteen or, God fucking help us, the charitable instincts of the grotesque gabshite Simon Callow then we are all doomed to drown in shit. The idea that we may only respond to our fellows' plights if, in exchange for our money, we receive some discordant, atonal anthem by the dregs of showbusiness is so obscene as to curdle the milk of human kindness, Fuck off Cowell, fuck off SUBO, go back and stuff your face in Dumbarton and fuck off showbusiness, is there nothing, no sorrow which you cannot bend into a photo-opportunity? Speaking of which, the vile Cowell was energised by a 'phone call from our friend, the great warmongering humanitarian, Gordon Snot. Odd how we have billions to spend Chilcotting the Iraqis and Afghanis, yet need record sales to help the Haitians. It is probably the right thing for the country. And the world.
We are the world.
Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangla George,N.Y., 1971
Well, like it's just a shame, man, that these little dudes don't have a proper role model. You know, man, when me and Ronnie're playing, man, it's like more than the Blues, it's like some ancient art, man. Like, we been playing this shit for like forty years, or is it fifty, fucked if I know, eh, who's counting. If only those little bastards could dig it, man, know what I'm saying, like Ronnie an me, we're tight, man.
I mean, man, all these little dudes need to do is like score some good smack, carry a couple of guns and a knife maybe, cop an open tuning off Ry Cooder and like just stagger about on stage, smacked out of your head for fifty years . If you can find some foxy little chick, mebbe young enough to be, like, a schoolchick, man, and you looking like a ten thousand year old Egytian mummy, man, then that's really cool shit, slap her around a bit, y'know, it's what chicks expect. They respect ya for it. Y'know, man, it's like Under my Thumb, right, man?
So what I'm sayin' here is like, Rock'n'Roll, Y'know, man. It's those Ho-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-onky-tonk wimmin, gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues. Ayn-gee, Ay-an-gee, when will those dark clouds dis-a-pe-e-e-ar. Can you dig my shit, man, it's like, Holy, man, no other word for it. Holy shit.
One of Maestro Thompson's trickier songs, nobody sings it, let alone plays it as well; unfortunately, a decent Thompson YouTube version doesn't exist, this is the best I could find.
"Ah, they came in their thousands, from the whole human race, to pay their respects at his last resting place." And this, his seventy-fith birthday, so they do, bless them.
