Sinead O’Connor – Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week

Five Things, Saturday, August 5th

THE INTRO
Now we’re all getting fully signed up to the future — it’s Philip K. Dick’s world after all, we just live in it — this week, Five Things touches on A.I., a spooked and possessed Marvin Gaye song, a world of music newly discovered, a video that is so French it should be required viewing at Customs and an extraordinary guitar modification. The saddest news was the passing of Sinead O’Connor. I thought back to a performance of the song every news broadcaster defaulted to this week [“Nothing Compares to You“] in 2012, where I tried to convey just how extraordinary her voice was… and Philip Watson sent me this astonishing performance of “Danny Boy.”

{ONE} THE DYLAN-A.I. INTERFACE
I don’t join things, generally — I’m not very clubbable. The only two clubs I’ve ever been a member of are the Levon Helm Fanclub and Fred’s (an Eighties Soho Club I somehow designed the identity for). But there I was at the Dylan discussion group with a Bob-inspired bottle of wine. I had bought it from Dina, our excellent local wine store, and it was made by Joe Jefferies, a man apparently at “the militant end of the natural wine world.” Originally from Warwickshire, he’s now in the Languedoc and producing wines from volcanic soils (100% Carignan in this one, if you’re asking), and he’d named one 2021 vintage, “Where black is the colour, where none is the number”. Seemed like a good wine for the pre-discussion supper. So, a quiz with the wine as the prize, and I hit on asking Chat GPT to write a review of one of the songs we were discussing — “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“ The first attempt was poor — bland and full of signature A.I. terms. Then I thought I’d ask for a review in the style of Lester Bangs (figuring it would add personality).

It added Lester’s rather dismal and critical view of Bob just enough to make the game (I handed round print-outs, first to guess the author won the prize) last for a little while as suggestions were thrown around and out. Finally, Alan peered up from the murk (our table in Soho House West was very dimly lit) and said,”It’s Chat GBT!”. And as he doesn’t drink, the wine went to Mick.
Postscript: I think A.I. had something to do with this weirdness that I found when looking for Dylan pictures on Getty Images: I know Aaron Rapoport’s originals, and they didn’t look like this…

{TWO} THE DEEPEST SOUL
There are still things to discover, Part One:
“Piece of Clay” by Marvin Gaye [hear it in the Music Player on the right].
I don’t know how I found this track, but it comes from the unreleased follow-up to What’s Going On, which was to be titled You’re The Man. Written by Gloria Jones and Pam Sawyer, it’s a brilliant piece of work — and the rough-hewn quality, where the edges haven’t quite been burnished off, make you think it could be a demo. “Father! Stop criticizing your son / Mother please leave your daughters alone / Don’t you see that’s what wrong with the world today / Everybody wants somebody to be their own piece of clay…” As sung by Gaye, that opening line is especially painful.

According to the Apple Music liner notes, “underperformance of the title track ahead of the album’s release, coupled with disagreements the singer is said to have had with the label about the project’s direction, led to the entire thing being shelved, leaving most of the songs to subsequently trickle out as bonus cuts packaged with reissues, compilations, and box sets. The official release [in 2019] of You’re The Man, then, is a time capsule — a portrait of an artist at the top of his game, but also one torn between the socially conscious anthems of What’s Going On and the superman lover he’d embody on 1973’s Let’s Get It On.”

The intro sounds like it was recorded in a church, an organ laying a carpet under a distorted slide guitar, very Duane Allman at Muscle Shoals, pushing the needles into the red before two drum hits and a crash cymbal silences it. Marvin sings the first line, then doubles his vocal like Al Green. Gospel piano drives the melody into the title line, so beautifully weighted by Marvin. A syncopated bass pushes into the second verse as Marvin heats up. The guitar comes back in, adding blues to the Southern Soul of the song. Then we’re into the middle eight — a call and response with the backing singers, joined by a horn section; it’s as if the entire congregation have picked up instruments. Suddenly, on the phrase love, not hate, everything drops out, bar the drums and bass as Marvin soars; then, from the back of the church, the fuzzed guitar creeps in, taking us all to a classic gospel ending and down into the fade.

{THREE} THE LIFE OF REILLY
There are still things to discover, Part Two: The Durutti Column.
Reading the excellent Conquest of the Useless [on Substack], I was sent to a Guardian article by Daniel Dylan Wray on Vini Reilly and the music of the Durutti Column. How did I miss them all those years ago — the music is simply glorious. The first song I hear is “Otis”, referenced in the article.

Reilly is dismissive about his own music — “When I listen back to it, it’s boring,” he says. “It’s done. I’ve already expressed everything I needed to when I was playing it.” I tell him that a colleague told me they wanted the 1989 track “Otis” playing at their funeral. “Give him my apologies,” he laughs before downplaying the beauty of the track, in which sparkling guitar swirls around dreamy vocal samples from Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding. “It was just messing about.”

It is four minutes of heaven. YouTube decides next up is a live performance, “Jacqueline”, with drumming from Bruce Mitchell. I only knew of Bruce as a member of Alberto Y Los Trios Paranois, the art-rock-satire-band, but his duet with Reilly is wonderful, his red brushes flying over the kit in perfect sync with Vini’s guitar and keyboards, his palpable enjoyment wonderful to watch.

{FOUR} THE WAY TO THE NEXT WHISKY BAR…
This was the most extraordinary thing I saw in the week that Jane Birkin passed on. From Off the Fence, the newsletter of The Fence magazine: “Let’s celebrate all that is best in Gallic culture with this amazing video from 1988, which shows a children’s choir decked in full Serge Gainsbourg regalia — whiskies and cigarettes in hand — regale Gainsbourg himself with one of his songs as the Frenchman weeps with emotion. One to warm your stony hearts!”

On a TV appearance toward the end of his life, he was surprised by a choir of children (Les Petits Chanteurs d’Asnières) in full Gainsbourg regalia — black jacket, grey wig, sunglasses, whisky, cigarette, unshaven. They’re singing Serge’s “J’e suis venu te dire que je m’en vais” (“I came to tell you that I’m leaving”) but they’ve changed it to “On est venu te dire qu’on t’aime bien” (We came to tell you that we like you).

{FIVE} THE A-Z OF THE B
Did you know Gene Parsons fitted a Clarence White/Gene Parsons B-Bender to a 1964 Gibson Dove acoustic guitar? I didn’t. Mind blown. Check this out. Nathaniel Murphy, who is playing it, is an Englishman in Chicago, and a fine guitarist.

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 19th December

Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground
As we drove along Spain’s Costa Tropical, past the last remaining sugar cane factory in Europe, the sky turned orange and Blind Willie Johnson came on the CD player. I don’t really have the words to describe this performance, but it may be the loneliest sound ever committed to shellac. Driving as the sun fell it stilled the conversation. Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas is pretty much based around it. from wikepedia: In 1977 Carl Sagan and a team of researchers were tasked with collecting a representation of Earth and the human experience for sending on the Voyager probe to other life forms in the universe. They collected sounds of frogs, crickets, volcanoes, a human heartbeat, laughter, greetings in 55 languages, and 27 pieces of music on the Voyager Golden Record. Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground was included, according to Sagan, because “Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.”

Tony Staveacre, Letter To The Guardian
“Ravi Shankar did a great kindness to a young television director in November 1968. The great man was performing a raga in the BBC Riverside Studios (behind the Hammersmith Odeon) to be broadcast as part of the trendy BBC1 pop series How It Is. The trainee director had told the recording engineer to load a 20-minute videotape—that’ll be long enough. But it wasn’t. A raga is an improvisation, unpredictable in content and length. So the tape ran out while the maestro was still playing. The director, close to tears, had to go down to the studio floor, apologise for his incompetence, and plead with the musicians, Would you mind doing it again? The response was a shrug, a beatific smile and: Of course we can – and it will probably be better this time. And it was. The director was fired shortly after that, by telegram. I’ve still got it.”

Wayne Shorter On The Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way Recording Session, Mojo Magazine
“When we recorded it [in February 1969] there were no written-out parts. Miles didn’t want to know what you were going to play. “Play music that doesn’t sound like music,” he once told me. It was to get you out of your comfort zone… if he heard someone practising, he’d say, “Don’t practice!” He told John [McLaughlin], “Play the guitar like you don’t know how to play the guitar.”

In Praise Of Sinead
Clearing the hard drive, I watch an episode of Later from a few weeks ago. Amongst the dreary hipsters (yes Foals, that’s you—the world doesn’t need a Prog-Rock-Slash-Funkapolitan in 2012—songs that want to be instrumentals but still seem to have words) and the old soulsters (Graham Central Station—Where’s Sly? We need Sly! Larry has a microphone attached to his bass by a gooseneck. We can see why this has never caught on. Awful bass sound. They forgot to bring a song) and the Primark Bonnie Tyler that is Ellie Goulding, there is Sinead O’Connor, She is singing Nothing Compares To You. She has a flaccid band (imagine her backed on this song by Marc Ribot and Jay Bellerose instead, for instance) and by rights the song should have been consigned to the I’ve heard it too many times—it has no power left pile in the corner. But. But. She is one of the great natural singers of our age. There’s not an unmelodic note. Hell, there’s not an unmelodic breath between the notes… She rips the bloody guts out of the song and leaves them on the studio floor, focused on extracting everything it has to give. And, even when it’s just her breath you’re listening to, she sounds like no-one else on earth, and that’s a rare, rare thing.

Blue Note? Is That A Code Name?
Ever see something that you wished you’d thought of?
And something that you know how hard it is to do well?
Take a bow, Ty Mattson at Mattson Creative.