How We Made Boogie Wonderland, The Guardian
Allee Willis, songwriter: “In the late 1970s, I teamed up with Jon Lind, who’d written “Sun Goddess” for Earth, Wind & Fire. In the disco era, lots of songs contained the word “boogie”, but we didn’t want to write just another dance song. I’d just seen Looking for Mr Goodbar, a harsh film starring Diane Keaton as a dissatisfied teacher, who takes drugs, goes out dancing every night and picks up a different guy. One night, she brings home a sexually confused Vietnam vet who beats, rapes and kills her. I wanted to write about the desperation some people feel – and how dancing can provide a release. The line, “Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts of men who need more than they get/Daylight deals a bad hand to a woman who has laid too many bets”, is so bleak. But the groove came first and – musically – it’s uplifting, with a chorus that feels almost theatrical, like Broadway, like Mary Poppins”.

I’d never noticed those lyrics (or their inspiration). The following lines aren’t much more uplifting: “The mirror stares you in the face and says,‘Baby, uh, uh, it don’t work’/You say your prayers though you don’t care; you dance and shake the hurt”. More ammunition for the Nile Rodgers take on Disco: that the songs were often lyrically acute portraits of the society of the time.

From Chris Floyd’s Blog on photographing Ronnie Wood,
“We are in a prime piece of four story Georgian Mayfair, on the first floor – the second floor if you’re American. The place attracts a multinational crowd.  It’s not an art gallery. It’s a fine art gallery… cultured people with good legs and fine watches. I am here to photograph Ronald David Wood. He is the artist in residence at the gallery. Up on the top floor is his studio. It has all his paints, his brushes, his canvases, a snooker table, and although he’s not actually living here, a huge bed should he wish to take advantage of the resources and crash for a while. Later on I make a joke about how handy this must be if he doesn’t have enough money in his pockets for a cab back to Holland Park, especially after a big night out in the West End. It went right off the cliff.  Sometimes I worry that I get too subtle at the key moments. I’ve been doing it for years.

Everybody who works here calls him Ronnie. They tell me what to expect. Ronnie likes to be involved in the creative process. Ronnie doesn’t like to dwell on things for too long, Ronnie does tend to get bored. That’s ok, I say, I get that a lot. Wherever I go in the building, on any of the four floors, the music of The Rolling Stones plays continuously. All the hits from the last half century. We bring in our equipment from the car outside. It’s the hottest day of the year, thirty six degrees centigrade. The lunchtime streets of Mayfair buckle under the weight of the heat but back inside the fine art gallery the cool air of wealth wafts over all of us from the air conditioning vents.

I set up two different shots simultaneously, so that we can wheel Ronnie from one seamlessly to the next, without losing him to boredom somewhere in between. The most important element is to not give them time to think. If you do that they will always choose to slip away, wander off, disappear. In summary, they will do one. Why? Because when you’ve been in The Rolling Stones for almost forty years you will have had your picture taken tens of thousands of times. There is nothing interesting about it, nothing new, nothing to cause you to think. Having your picture taken for a magazine cover is like what a Payment Protection Insurance cold call is to us. On the whole, you don’t want to be rude but if they go on past a certain point you’re just going to hang up and not feel guilty about it

Sight, target, engage. It’s a military situation. There’s no mirror, signal, manoeuvre here. Whatever it takes. As one gilded Stones hit fades away and a new one immerses us in its familiar scent, a thought comes into my head. A question for Ronnie. Yes, can I ask you something, Ronnie? “Yeah man, as long as it’s not about The Faces”. I gesticulate to the speakers, to the music. “Well, when you go somewhere, a bar, a pub, a restaurant, a shop, a cab, and you hear a Stones song on the stereo, the radio, well, what do you hear? What do you hear that we don’t hear?” The opening bars of “Gimme Shelter” are washing down over us. Ronald David Wood cocks an ear, his body comes up on its haunches as he searches the spectrum for the signal. The only thing missing from this familiar posture is a guitar. The apocalyptic, heart of darkness groove of my favourite ever Stones song cascades down in a torrent over us: “Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today…”

Ronald David Wood finds the signal or, more correctly, the signal finds him and his arm starts to move, followed quickly by his hips. He loses himself in it for five, maybe six seconds, locked inside. Then his head slowly comes up, he pulls his Ray Bans down his nose an inch and his black, black eyes look at me for a second before his nineteen fifties, postwar, Hillingdon ration boy face breaks into the slyest little smirk you’ve ever seen, and he says:

“Yeah…

I like it.”

Record Shop Berwick Street: Ricky Gervais, Seona Dancing
I’d never actually seen one of their covers, but Ricky makes a very convincing Boy George/Jon Moss cross…

Journey Through The Past: One
I find some things while we’re moving house. This is a favourite… 16 years old and a winner. Zachariah turns out to be a hippie musical western loosely based on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, adapted as a Musical Western by the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe. Country Joe and the Fish star, as an inept gang of robbers called The Crackers.

Wikepedia: “Underneath the gunplay, the jokes, and the music, an important message is delivered: a life of pacifism, quiet contemplation, male bonding and vegetarianism is preferable to a life of violence”. I don’t remember getting that at all. But Elvin Jones (!) is great as drumming gunslinger Job Cain, and Doug Kershaw plays a fantastic Cajun stomp, ”Ballad of Job Cain” that I treasure to this day – my first exposure to Cajun music, before Charlie Gillett gave us all the Sundown Playboys on Honky Tonk. It gets better. Apparently Ginger Baker was originally going to play the part of Zachariah…  and the film recorded a loss of $1,435,000 (impressive for 1971, no?)

CSN at the Albert Hall
It was almost worth it for Steve Stills’ guitar playing in “Bluebird”. Almost. Three hours of dodgy harmonies, the backing band churning it up like buttermilk and pleas for peace were, frankly, a bit of a slog. Even for songs that feel part of one’s DNA.

It all started with the lights going down to Jeff Beck’s version of “Day In The Life” (a change from “Fanfare For The Common Man”, say, and a neat reference to both the Albert Hall and Stills’ debt to Beck in his soloing). The sound was muggy for the first few songs – the drums in particular a horrible cardboard thump – but it gradually cleared. Unfortunately this revealed that Stills’ voice is shot and that CSN’s live harmonies haven’t got any tighter since the late Sixties. We’re then on a merry-go-round. A couple of Crosby songs followed by a couple of Nash songs followed by a… you get the idea. Crosby comes out pretty well, always an interestingly different songwriter (apart from a dreadful reworking of “Triad”, sounding not unlike a bad 80s cop show theme). Nash, however (Brian Nash, according to the Guardian’s review), is just dreadful. Pompous, pretentious, unpleasantly nasal and off the cliché-ometer lyrically. “Military Madness” and “Cathedral” haven’t improved over the years. A new song, “Burning For The Buddha” is as dreadful as its title.

Why are band logo’s so bad? It’s as if they’ve asked Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer to design them. Oh, and only £2 for CS&N rolling papers…