Tuesday, September 19th

ONE JONI BUGG
Well there’s inspiration, and then there’s stealing, but if you steal you have to make something better than the original, which this sorry attempt fails to be.

The cover of Hejira is made up of 14 different photographs collaged by Mitchell and retouched by an airbrush artist. I had bought UNCUT’s Ultimate Music Guide to Joni Mitchell which has the unretouched image by Norman Seeff [above, left] on its cover. It’s generally terrific, and a good companion to the recent Rock’s Backpages book, Reckless Daughter, but I was slightly appalled to find that it barely mentions my favourite song, “Black Crow”. Mitchell’s open-tuned electric rhythm guitar scrubs out a midwest blacktop backdrop for Jaco Pastorius to dig into and move around, all angles, like a tractor twisting and turning in the endless fields that line the road. At the same time Larry Carlton’s hovering above with an electrical storm of distorted guitars. At one point Carlton and Pastorious leap into the air like a couple of crop dusters and circle the skies before being reined in by Mitchell’s high yelp. The song irons out for the fade where it races off into the distance and, right before it disappears beyond the horizon, Larry Carlton suddenly summons up the ghost of Mick Green and plays an outrageously swaggering rock & roll riff. It’s a unique sound, a unique song.

TWO I’VE JUST ORDERED…
…The Invisible Man: The Story of Rod Temperton, the “Thriller” Songwriter, partly because it’s such an unlikely story, partly because he wrote “Always and Forever”. From Heatwave to Hollywood, he ended up as Britain’s third most successful songwriter. Jed Pitman on Thriller: “Temperton wrote three songs for the record, including the title track which began life as a song called “Starlight” but [Quincy] Jones asked Temperton to come up with new lyrics to fit the tougher theme that was emerging from other tracks around it. Rod knew he wanted one word because that fitted in with the song He said about writing lyrics that the meaning of them didn’t necessarily matter, the lyrics to him would disappear into the melody of the song. The lyrics themselves were all about how many syllables they were for each word to fit lyrically and melodically with the song structure. He’s effectively using the words as another musical instrument rather than sending a message. He wrote about 300 words down and then he wrote the word ‘Thriller’ and that was it, he stopped and went, ‘Wow, I can see it on top of the Billboard charts, I can see the merchandising, I can see everything – Thriller by Michael Jackson.’”

THREE ONE TRACK MINDS
The wonder of Wilton’s Music Hall is in its restoration. When you hear that a venue from the past has been restored you imagine a lot of gilt, a kind of “overloud” painting where the brashness of the colour may be accurate, but shouts too much, and there’s a general air of fussiness. None of this has happened at Wilton’s. A building at risk has become a beautiful encapsulated ruin (in the nicest possible sense).

A couple of months ago it played host to One Track Minds, a series where generally well-known people talk about a song that means a lot to them. A varied lineup included Tulip Siddiq, MP, comedians Mark Thomas and Harry Mitchell, sports writer Jenny Offord and session man and all-around entertainer Guy Pratt. It was great to hear Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Want Fi Goh Rave” again, from the fantastic Forces of Victory album, to be reminded of how great Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” is. Guy Pratt, session man extraordinaire [below, left], talked about being on a disastrous teenage holiday. There’s an excellent review of the show by John Sills at thoughtsfromwestfive: “In Guy’s case, he was at one point lying on a bunk bed, recovering from having tried smoking with an ‘evil’ cousin. He noticed a cassette player nearby and pressed play. A song came on, all jittering synthesizers, throbbing bass, strident guitars and, at the end, an Irish violin. He was mesmerized, and at that moment knew what he wanted to do with his life. Be a musician. And the song? “Baba O’Riley”, the opener on the Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next.”

Harry Mitchell was the highlight, though. After a long set up about relationships and angst, he revealed that he cemented his friendship (with his friend, Ed) through a shared love of dancing to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al”. Sadly, he said, Ed can’t be here tonight… at which point, Ed arrived, and said dancing commenced.

One Track Minds is highly recommended, and back at Wilton’s on October 9th. Simon Napier-Bell is one of the six guests. Details here.

FOUR WIND RIVER: DON’T GO THERE
I expected much more from Taylor Sheridan. The scriptwriter of Sicario and Hell or High Water, here – as both writer and director – piles an implausible plot with clunky dialogue: “Can’t we call for backup?” “This ain’t really backup country… this is go it alone country” goes one bit of business, six words too long. Jeremy Renner is a hunter (and philosopher, judging by his gnomic utterances) and Elizabeth Olsen an FBI agent investigating a murder on a Native American Res. It’s an irritating film with a pretty good soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (although there’s nothing as memorable as the music created by Robbie Robertson for tv doc The Native Americans). It also has that thing where an unrelated song by a sensitive male songwriter plays over the end credits (in this instance, “Feather” by William Wild).

FIVE HAVE YOU HEARD OF BENARD IGHNER?
Me either. A month ago I was listening to Peggy Lee sing, sensationally, “Everything Must Change”, from an album recorded live in London in 1977. I knew the song – Nina Simone had covered it [among too many others to list here] but I wondered where it had come from originally. So I went looking, and found this obituary, by A. Scott Galloway (at TheUrbanMusicScene.com), of the man who wrote it, Benard Ighner. He had died a week or so before.

“Benard (not “Bernard” and the last name pronounced “eyeg-ner”) was most widely known and adored for his composition “Everything Must Change”. A deeply existential musing about the unmovable ‘way of time,’ it was introduced [on Quincy Jones’ platinum-selling 1974 album, Body Heat] by Ighner singing with hushed intimacy ascending into reverent earnestness over a dreamy surround sound arrangement of piano, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer, rim shots and a trombone solo by the great Frank Rosolino. Never a single, the haunting masterwork went a long way toward selling the full-length album as a 6-minute slice of interstellar Heaven.”

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