Now this an odd one for me. American AOR, category which this pretty much fits squarely within, is generally a closed off area of pleasure to me. But on Friday I found myself listening to this and the band's mid-Seventies album Toys in the Attic and enjoying both. The unashamed borrowing from Led Zep and the Stones is blatantly apparent (Stairway to Heaven came up next on the YouTube playlist after it). Aerosmith were copyists. Music journalist Dave Marsh said of them, 'understood in the Seventies as a second-rate imitation of the Stones with a first-rate guitarist offsetting a third-rate frontman'. But it's a sunny day outside my window, it made me feel like watching Dazed and Confused again, and I'm on holiday and heading down South to see my parents.
An American psychedelic rock and blues band from Cincinnati, Ohio formed in the late 1960s. Here's the opening song from their self-titled album from 1969.
Even in a year as star-blessed as 1966, the Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee stood out. There was a harpsichord, a string quartet, a keening vocal and a lyric of real teenage heartbreak – “Your name and mine inside a heart, upon a wall/ Still find a way to haunt me, though they’re so small.” There was also, apparently, a guitar in there but you wouldn’t have known it. This was baroque pop. Walk Away Renee had been written Michael Brown, who has died, aged 65. Back then, 15-year-old Brown worked as a part time engineer at his father Harry Lookofsky’s recording studio in New York. In photos he looked mournful and out of time, with King Charles spaniel hair. He looked as if he would have felt at home in a Victorian drawing room, but the studio was where he met George Cameron, Tom Finn and singer Steve Martin (not the comedian). They became fast friends, forming the Left Banke in 1965. A No 5 hit, Walk Away Renee was big enough US hit for the group to record a Coca Cola jingle, and others – in their idiosyncratic style – for Hertz car rental and Toni hairspray. Pretty Ballerina gave them a second top 20 hit in early 1967, in what should have been the start of a brilliant career for Michael Brown, but instead the Left Banke’s catalogue would be depressingly small.
Brown had unlimited access to his father’s studio where, according to the Left Banke’s part-time lyricist Tom Feher, “he’d just pound away at the piano, and we’d all stand around the piano and try to emulate the Beatles and the Hollies.” One day in late 1965, Tom Finn had brought his girlfriend Renee Fladen along to the studio, and Brown was instantly smitten – in short order he wrote three songs about her, including Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee; Finn and Fladen must have been very understanding of this infatuation. With orchestral arrangements from his father, and Brown’s knack for odd, bunched chords and a taste for extreme melancholy, the sound was quickly tagged “baroque pop” by the press. To show the songs could stand up perfectly well without the ornate arrangements, the Four Tops’ apocalyptic cover of Walk Away Renee reached No 3 in Britain at the start of 1968.
It wasn’t an entirely new sound – the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, the Stones’ Lady Jane and even the Troggs’ Anyway That You Want Me – were baroque in approach, and both the Zombies and Glasgow’s Poets had based their careers around minor key, semi-classical songwriting. But Brown had a special talent, and an instantly recognisable style that was realised on the Left Banke’s first album in early ’67, the awkwardly titled Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina. The writing and arrangements of Lookofsky and son could make your heart twist and snap: for example, there’s the moment on Pretty Ballerina, as the middle eight begins, lurching into an unexpected minor key woodwind and string section; and on the brumal Shadows Breaking Over My Head, at the point where Martin sings “It’s through for her and … me”, and the full barrage of strings and Brown’s piano come together, giving the impression of a love affair ending at that precise moment. The latter also features the briefest of matching, five note introductions and codas – they are quite beautiful, like miniatures, and just tossed away by a 16-year-old boy on an album track.
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That suggests Michael Brown thought there was plenty more where Walk Away Renee came from. Two hits into the Left Banke’s career, he took Brian Wilson’s lead and decided he would stay home and write future Left Banke classics while the rest of the band slogged away on the road playing sock hops and college gigs. The other members told him to get lost. One of the most pointless and depressing scraps in pop history meant that, at the height of their fame, they split into two factions, releasing two Left Banke singles almost simultaneously, the fey Ivy Ivy (by Michael Brown and hired hands) and She May Call You Up Tonight (by the rest of the group). Their label, Smash, understandably put minimal promotion behind them and by the time the spat was over, and Brown rejoined the group in late 1967, the momentum was lost. The real tragedy of this was that the Left Banke then released arguably their greatest single, Desiree. Urgent strings played Eleanor Rigby line at double speed, a bassoon was used as percussive counterpoint. there was a booming brass bridge – or is it a first chorus? – of Wagnerian import before massed harmonies sang out the title. Desiree was a masterpiece; it dared radio not to play it, laughed at contemporaneous efforts like the Stones’ Satanic Majesties and the Beatles’ lightweight Hello Goodbye, urged other groups to follow its lead, and then peaked at No 98 in November 1967.
Brown quit the group again, this time in disbelief. His career never really recovered. He continued to flit from one project to another, always placing the firmest imprint on whichever group he worked with. He wasn’t a member of Montage but may as well have been, as he wrote and produced their sole 1969 album, as well as playing keyboards. The highlight was I Shall Call Her Mary, another song about a would-be girlfriend (he had a huge unrquited crush on Mary Weiss of the Shangri La’s). By 1970 he was in Stories, a powerpop group, but left in 1973 – with typical ill fortune – just before they scored an American No 1 with a cover of Hot Chocolate’s Brother Louie in 1973. In 1976 came an album with another bunch of unknowns, the Beckies, on Seymour Stein’s Sire label – it was more than a decade after the Left Banke’s brief peak, but within the first five seconds of the Beckies’ One of These Days, you are quite aware that it’s a Michael Brown composition. It must have been heartbreaking for Brown to know that the group he had worked with so briefly in his teenage years were the musicians who could have made him a star. Occasionally he would get back together with members of the Left Banke and produce a single (Myrah in 1969, Two By Two – as a Steve Martin solo single – in 1971), but inevitably they would fall out again. In 2006 I was lucky enough to be an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre. The then contemporary music programmer was Glen Max, whose main ambition seemed to be getting the Left Banke back together to play the Royal Festival Hall, the building their modern baroque sound was made for. Steve Martin was located by a go-between, though apparently in poor health, and record dealer Bill Allerton was in touch with Michael Brown, who was apparently still writing plenty of songs, almost all of which went unreleased. There were promising email trails but, after several months, they all went cold. It seemed though, that there might be a second chance for the Left Banke. In 2011, a version of the group reunited, centred around Finn and fellow original member George Cameron, and the following year Finn announced there would be a new Left Banke album featuring compositions by Brown, but there’s been no sign of it. Looking back, it’s clear that Michael Brown’s talent was always going to be too fragile to sustain a music industry career. We should be grateful that he had any opportunities to record, that his dad gave him a break, and that other younger bands – Montage, Stories, the Beckies – were happy to accommodate his writing and playing. They must have been fans; they knew that, even with just those two hits to his name, Michael Brown was a songwriter of the very highest order.
Put on the jukebox tonight on a bit of a session. One of the great Existentialist Pop songs and one of the first I attempted to teach students almost Twenty Five years ago now in Czechoslovakia. What was I thinking! Wish I could teach it again now with a bit of the wisdom accrued from the intervening years. A very clever lyric which seems to me about the idea that we have that our lives can really change utterly from one day to the next when in actual fact we carry our past, problems, memories and flaws with us wherever we go. Still stands up extremely well..
UB40 have been pretty much written off in terms of credibility, (in the UK at least), probably due to their move into covers which catapulted them into the international league. They had their moments though, particularly early on when they were a rather melancholy, downbeat outfit from Birmingham much more obviously rooted in the music they love.
With Andy Fraser's death just yesterday, I'm re-posting this, which I wrote round about this time last year. I now have amended the situation and have a vinyl copy of my own.
Back to the original reason for starting this blog in the first place. It was intended as a site to review albums and I was doing pretty well. Up to twenty reviewed after six months in. But it was just getting too time consuming. I'd live in these albums for weeks trying to do them justice and get to their essence. Frankly, if I was finding it such a grind out reviews which increasingly came to be like book chapters they must have been a bit of a chore to read to say the least to the non-committed. I still have Pere Ubu's Modern Dance to get back to from January. Will get there eventually. But so to Free. And this will be brief. I'm also breaking a rule in that I don't own the record and aren't listening to it on vinyl. But such is life!
It's a wet, winter's Friday in Newcastle. The streets are dripping with rain. I was sat at my desk a couple of hours ago mid-afternoon churning out admin for my colleagues as I'm asked to do quite a bit in my role in return for recompense. I like what I do generally but on a Friday afternoon my mind tends to wander and I need some kind of soundtrack to keep me ticking over before I get to clock off.
For some reason I thought about Creedence's single Green River single and how straightforward and pure its sentiments are. So it was Googled and after trawling through a few pages of song lyrics and cds and records to buy I found myself at a Dwight Yoakham feature where he was choosing is favourite singles. Green River was there as was this. Free's All Right Now.
I've never been a fan of this song and I'm not likely to change now. It's probably by several leagues what Free are destined to be remembered for when we're all dead and gone. A massive shame I think. But I liked the title of the B Side, Mouthful of Grass and went from there to its source, the bands second album, also entitled Free. It seemed a good way to spend my last half hour at work.
The album sounds very 1969. The band remarkably were all still in their late teens but their playing is deeply versed in the blues sound they're trying to pull off. It's remarkably accomplished, came out on Island, has an absolutely classic sleeve and was produced by Chris Blackwell so it's quite strange it did nothing particularly commercially. I imagine it served a purpose to spread the word further while Free trawled the live circuit where they were building a strong reputation.
It's long haired and laid back. You can practically inhale the banks of pot smoke, and see the curly teenage sideburns, fringed jackets and Persian rugs of its participants and their rehearsal space. Kossoff, Fraser and Kirke. They're expert players and Rodgers isn't particularly flashy. It's just the right side of British blues rock music for me before the drugs got heavier and the audience started to expect longer solos to allow them to nod off.
The titles are clipped and unfussy and the sentiments of the lyrics existential. Lying in the Sun, the third song describes the mood of the album perfectly. Occasionally things becomes slightly more urgent, 'I've been a bad boy and I know I should be good'. Well they're teenagers. Some of this stuff got a bit ugly over the next few years as British Rock turned to codpieces and eight minute solos. But Free are leaner and smarter than that here.
It's all of a piece. They barely sound a wrong note. It's surely best listened to on a sunny afternoon rather than during the wet miserable downpour happening outside my window now. I'm very pleased I've chanced upon it and I'll listen to it again and eventually buy a vinyl copy when I find a reasonably priced one. It's an elegant record and really quite a remarkable one given the ages of the people who made it. Blackwell's influence must have helped but they're an incredibly self contained unit.
Free is a good word for it. The band are captured in a dozy, spaced mood that stretches itself in feline laziness across the whole record. An album that relaxed and soothed me on a horrid, bleak afternoon. I'm grateful to it and off to my local for Friday pints. Another evening when I'm there and it's quieter I'll have a look for Mouthful of Grass or Lying in the Grass or Mourning Sad Morning on the Jukebox and if they're there stick them on because they've already won me over.
His name's Tobias Jesso Jr. and he almost deserves Song of the Day just for that. His album Goon out round about now is worth a listen. Very much in the early Seventies singer songwriter tradition and particularly and most obviously reminiscent of Nilsson and Lennon.
'It's not eternal, imperishable. Oh yes it will go.'
I realised I'd gone 423 consecutive days without once having Stereolab as Song of the Day. This situation has now been amended. It could have been any one of their songs but today it's this one.
A January 1943 Billboard magazine feature headlined The Negro Makes Advances noted how black performers are doing relatively well in radio and films, but “better than ever in music.” Further into the piece we met (white) bandleader Raymond Scott who, the entertainment business bible marvelled, “uses four [black artists] in his CBS group.”
Known throughout the 40s as “the master of the rhythm novelty”, Scott was so much more. Born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn in 1908, he was a composer, engineer, recording studio pioneer, an inventor of electronic instruments and a forward-looking bandleader who was, during his heyday, on a par with Duke Elliington and counted Igor Stravinsky among his millions of fans. This was a man so in love with the power of rhythm he even chose his own moniker because he liked its flow. During the 50s, Scott became a huge star. Then rock’n’roll happened and it was game over. However, that’s Raymond Scott you hear illuminating the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, while The Simpsons and Ren & Stimpy have both featured his work, so his reach and influence live on everywhere.
There is a brilliant At Home With feature in Popular Mechanics from 1959 that describes Raymond and Dorothy’s NY dwelling as, “not a home in any ordinary sense, [but] a 32-room musical labyrinth” which was full of Scott’s incredible creations which included a rudimentary sampler, a self-built synth-like device and his own “Videola” which projected movies into other rooms by remote control. Heady stuff indeed for 1959.
The feature ends with the quote, “The Scotts are definitely in tune with each other” which, sadly wasn’t true as they divorced a few years later - but let’s not let that spoil this utterly brilliant collection on Trunk Records. Somewhere between post-war big band jazz and the in-coming exotica wave, this album is endlessly inventive, amusing and, oh yes, exciting.
It’s an LP that positively vibrates with energy and a peculiarly mad-cap, perfectionist joy – Ectoplasm has the most incredible arrangement, Snake Woman is B-Movie gold – as the rehearsed-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives band stretch out and gyrate around you.
An early shot of the MC5 (or possibly The Bounty Hunters the group that preceded them), playing a burger joint in Detroit in 1964-65. Kick out the ham!
A friend on Facebook yesterday was cataloguing the absolute awfulness of I am the Walrus. I won't get involved in that discussion not that it's my favourite song of theirs. Here are The Rutles.
'When I first went down South, I remember that a quite common expression would be, "Well don't worry, the South's gonna rise again." At one point when I heard it I thought it was kind of a funny statement and then I heard it another time and I was really touched by it. I thought, "God, because I keep hearing this, there's pain here, there is a sadness here." In Americana land, it's a kind of a beautiful sadness.'
Robbie Robertson
Pop Music was never supposed to be able to do this. Of course The Band were never about Pop Music. Far from it. Their first two albums, released towards the end of the Sixties brought about a huge sea change in terms of what Rock Music could do and talk about.
'Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is The Red Badge of Courage. It's a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.'
The song was written by Robbie Robertson but sung by drummer Levon Helm and his voice inhabits it. The clip above is taken from Martin Scorsese's film of The Band's last concert The Last Waltz in 1978.
'Virgil Caine is my name and I drove on the Danville train
'Til Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.
In the winter of '65, we were hungry, just barely alive.
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell.
It's a time I remember, oh so well.
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringing,
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing
They went, "Na,na,na.na,
Na na na na na na na na na.''
Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me,
"Virgil, quick, come see, there goes Robert E.Lee!"
Now I don't mind I'm choppin' wood, and I don't care if the money's no good.
You take what you need and leave the rest,
But they should never have taken the very best.
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringing,
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing.
They went, "Na,na,na na
'Na,na,na.na na na na na na..'
Like my father before me, I will work the land,
And like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand.
He was just eighteen, proud and brave,
but a Yankee laid him in his grave.
I swear by the blood below my feet
You can't raise a Caine back up when he's in defeat
This goes back. From their first album Reachin' (a new refutation of time and space), this song was a big American crossover hit, making # 15 in the Billboard chart in 1992. I need to get back to writing about albums on here and say something more about the parent record, a wonderful jazz-soaked album. In the meantime...
'We like the breeze flow straight out of our lids Them they got moved by these hard-rock Brooklyn kids Us floor rush when the DJ's booming classics You, dig the crew on the fattest hip-hop records He touch the kinks and sinks into the sounds She frequents the fattest joints caught underground Our funk zooms like you hit the Mary Jane They flock to booms man boogie had to change Who freaks the clips with mad amount percussion Where kinky hair goes to unthought-of dimensions Why's it so fly cause hip-hop kept some drama When Butterfly rocked his light blue-suede Pumas What by the cut we push it off the corner How was the buzz entire hip hop era Was fresh and fat since they started saying audi Cause funks made fat from right beneath my hoodie The poobah of the styles like Miles and shit Like sixties funky worms with waves and perms Just sendin' chunky rhythms right down ya block We be to rap what key be to lock
But I'm cool like dat I'm cool, I'm cool
We be the chocolates taps on my raps She innovates at the sweetest cat naps He at the funk club with the vibrate Them they be crazy down with the five plate It can kick a plan then a crowd burst Me I be digging it with a bump verse Us we be freaking til dawn blinks an eye He gives the strangest smile so I say hi (wassup) Who understood, yeah understood the plan Him heard a beat and put it to his hands What I just flip let borders get loose How to consume or they'll be just like juice If its the shit we'll lift it off the plastic The babes'll go spastic Hip hop gains a classic Pimp playing shock it don't matter I'm fatter Ask Butta how I zone (man Cleopatra Jones)
And I'm chill like dat I'm chill, I'm chill
Blink Think
We getcha free cause the clips be fat boss Them they're the jams and commence to going off She sweats the beat and ask me cause she puffed it Me I got crew kids seven and a crescent Us cause a buzz when the nickel bags are dealt Him, that's my man with the asteroid belt They catch a fizz from the Mr. Doodle-big He rocks a tee from the Crooklyn nine-pigs The rebirth of slick like my gangsta stroll The lyrics just like loot come in stacks and rolls You used to find a Bug in a box with fade Now he boogies up your stage plaits twist or braids
And I'm peace like dat I'm Peace
Check it out man I groove like dat I'm smooth like dat I jive like dat I roll like dat
Yeah I'm thick like dat I stack like dat I'm down like dat I'm black like dat
Well yo I funk like dat I'm phat like dat I'm in like dat Cause I swing like dat
We jazz like dat We freak like dat We zoom like dat We out, we out.'
A rather remarkable character assassination of Noel Gallagher by Luke Haines, former Auteurs leader/. I'm not by nature bitchy on here, preferring to dwell on the things that I like rather than those I don't but I'd have to say that Noel Gallagher has been living and thriving on exceptionally rehashed ad fundamentally lazy and dishonest wares for the best part of two decades now. From here. It's already attracted the ire of Alan McGee who would have been wounded by Haines' quoting Grant McLennan's aside, 'That Alan McGee. 'Not much going on up top.' in the first chapter of the first part of his autobiography Bad Vibes over five years back. McGee's reply was.
'LUKE HAINES of many MANY failed shit rock bands is
in this ''review'' having a go at noel and me/he truly does amuse me LUKE HAINES
has been in music for years without any success on any level (has he ever even
had a hit record} which does actually take some doing/he looks like a fat
homeless tramp/he's bitter, fat and penniless apart from that he's doing
great.'
Luke Haines (the Auteurs. Black Box Recorder) Talks Noel Gallagher and the Scourge of Dad-rock
We’re not going to mince words: this piece is just Luke Haines mercilessly ripping on Noel Gallagher.
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Noel Gallagher’s latest solo album begins with a brutal edit into lo-fi studio ambience, and then a count-in: exactly the way “Taxman,” the first track from the Beatles’ Revolver, begins. So, in case you were wondering, Gallagher demonstrates straight away that he hasn’t moved on one centimetre in the past 20 years. This is the first track of the disastrous Chasing Yesterday Tomorrow, and “Riverman” is the name of the song. It is, of course, being a Noel “song,” not an original title/idea/thought. Nick Drake had the title originally; it’s a song from his 1969 debut album Five Leaves Left. But Drake’s “River Man” is built on unusual time signatures, subtle orchestration and a mantric, mystical, spare lyric. It is a masterpiece, whereas, with its “Wonderwall” chords and “baggy” shuffle beat (or what Steve Albini refers to quite excellently as “The Little British Drumbeat”), Noel’s “Riverman” falls mightily short of being a masterpiece. This ain’t no ballad. It’s a bollard. As if all this weren’t bad enough, Noel has felt duty-bound to “write” some lyrics over his rotten stew and duly invokes the first line of George Harrison’s “Something” to get the old Gallagher blunderbuss lyric method a-rolling. Somehow, Noel manages to come up with 11 lines of hard-won doggerel, concluding with “I waited in the rain, my feet too wet to stand in… but somewhere in the crowd she heard me jingle-jangling.” Noel Gallagher is 47, far too old to be “jingle-jangling” in the crowd. Indeed, whilst taking up the challenge to actually sit through Yesterday’s Chase for Tomorrow I am reduced to letting out audible groans, whimpers of “Jesus Christ” and “Noel, you poor sod” after something called “The Girl With X-Ray Eyes.” (Sample lyric: “Going nowhere down the hill is hard to swallow like the pill/that was twisted on your tongue by the sea that was standing still.”) It wasn’t always this way. But it mainly was. Oasis were a good band, with a shamanic singer and a pretty average songwriter, who managed about one and a third decent albums before the rot set in. The rot being “Wonderwall,” a song that invented an unwanted genre: dad-rock. “Wonderwall” is, of course, the King Dad of all dad-rock songs. The Big Daddy Daddy Long Legs of Dad. So Dad that Fathers for Justice should use it as an anthem. “Wonderwall” was also the moment that Noel decided that, to be a “proper” songwriter, his songs should be portentous and have gravitas. Which is a pity. Noel’s best song from the early Oasis days is a fantastic ditty called “Round Are Way.” (The ugly, illiterate use of “are” matters not a jot.) It contains the genius lines “Round are way birds are singing/Round are way birds are minging.” Noel was channeling the greats — and he didn’t even recognize it. Poor Noel. I ain’t no grammar wanka. And in rock & roll you may as well keep it dumb, mum. The two greatest lyricists in rock are Geezer Butler (who wrote the words for much of Sabbath’s classic output) and Iggy Pop. Their greatest works are some of their dumbest. “Generals gather in their masses/just like witches at black masses,” sang Ozzy in “War Pigs.” “Now I wanna be your dog,” sang Iggy Stooge, along with plenty of other genius moronic drivel on the Stooges’ first album. The beauty of these examples is that the writer has applied no filter. Ozzy/Geezer/Iggy have decided to say something, and have addressed it in the simplest way possible: by pushing it out of their idiot brainboxes and yowling it out from somewhere within the sixth dimension of utter nowhereness. The imbecilic and the banal are transformed into poetry. On Yesterdays Chase Today, Noel’s lyrics have reached an almost admirable new nadir. Lines such as “I’ll follow you down to the end of the world just to wait outside your window” cower in the mix like frightened, unflushable turds in the shitter. Luckily, Noel has found a new role as a sort of People’s Raconteur, and a new Noel album is an excuse for the Noel Gallagher Interview. And whenever Gallagher is called out on some questionable view, he responds with the line, “Come back to me when you’ve headlined Glastonbury.” It’s easy to imagine William Blake trying to explain his visions of Christ and Noel raising his eyebrow in that mock-quizzical way, looking into the camera and saying, “Tell you what, mate, come back to me when you’ve headlined Glastonbury.” In fact, Noel seems to lay claim to ownership of playing Glastonbury — and if I ever refer to it as “Glasto,” make me go there for the weekend as punishment — but then I guess it was the one time he was never questioned: on his musical conservatism, his dwindling songwriting, even his godawful lyrics. It was a time when 300,000 people could sing back drivel at the beaming songwriter. A kind of human mass-entertainment version of the dog having his vomit returned to him. It’s the conservatism that rankles. Musical and otherwise. Media Noel has taken to putting down (the harmless) Ed Sheeran — for his, in Gallagher’s view, musical conservatism. Not noticing that if he were to collaborate with Sheeran it would hardly change his music drastically. It might even sharpen up his lyrics and force him to kick out all that simpleminded fake ponderous wisdom, which is an odd contradiction, as Noel is smart enough at least to know that no song is ever going to change the world and we are all fucked. The excellent Sleaford Mods also know that we are all fucked, but their songs sound like surrealistic rants from a John the Baptist figure speaking in tongues. Noel doesn’t like Sleaford Mods very much. “Come back to me when you’ve written a chorus,” says Noel. Poor old Noel. And then there is the other kind of conservatism. That horrible vainglorious period when Noel and Alan McGee were courted by New Labour. A couple of rock & roll dunces led like lambs into the political media death-mincer. And those nasty boasts about wealth and commercial success that have been a feature of the Gallagher interview from day one. Nowadays, though, Noel sounds less like a working-class Manc on the make and more like a self-made Tory boasting to the other golf club bores about his new mooring in the marina. But even after all the above, Noel comes across as a decent enough guy. He’d be OK in the pub. (Well, he probably wouldn’t be OK with me in the pub after this.) You’d trust him to look after your cat as well. (Although I wouldn’t trust him with my cat, not after this.) But it’s his reactionary fear of the extraordinary, and the clapped-out Cloughie act, that need questioning. These are ultra-conformist times we live in; the imagination is unwelcome, the maverick is unwelcome and the weirdos need not bother turning up. The music industry and the publishing industry are grasping at straws to survive. The middlebrow media have a stranglehold on culture, and art is, amazingly, still seen as “not for ordinary people.” Poverty abounds. No one wants to hear a rich man boasting, but when Noel speaks, people listen. As for the records, they sound like they’re getting harder and harder to make. Noel never seems like he’s had any fun making them. The slow turning of the cogs in his brain grinding to a halt is almost audible. So, as Noel has all the money in the world — as he is often so keen to tell us — maybe it’s time to give up.
Yoko Ono has been much derided over the years. But this sounds fairly close to what the almost universally lauded Can were doing at around about the same time. It's not quite in the same league to my ears but there's some of that spirit there.
This was released. So little of Dylan on YouTube because he won't have it so he doesn't feature much on the blog but this is there. With commentary from D.A. Pennebaker and Bob Neuwirth.
