Thursday, September 27th

September 27, 2018 by 6 Comments

It’s Thursday, and Teresa May is currently redefining the word awkward. Donald Trump is on some quest to recalibrate all norms of human behaviour, and The Bodyguard has thankfully finished (hands down, the worst series that I have ever watched right to the end). However, this week’s Five Things was written in the cool Dark Mode of MacOS Mohave, while listening to a bootleg of the demos for the White Album mostly recorded at George Harrison’s house in Esher. They’re possibly on the new boxset to be released in November.

I like Paul McCartney’s take on it: “We had left Sgt. Pepper’s band to play in his sunny Elysian Fields and were now striding out in new directions without a map.” Ah, musicians in the act of creating something, before it gets nailed down, still loose enough for a certain amount of fun. In a sense, this is their Basement Tapes, and it’s interesting to hear “Back in the USSR” sounding much more Beach-Boys-y, and “Child of Nature” before its melody became re-purposed as “Jealous Guy”.

I wish I were at The Village Trip in New York this week. Congratulations are due to Liz Thompson for having the determination to pull the whole thing together. Starting with a photo exhibition featuring the work of David Gahr, it features a free concert in Washington Square Park with Susanne Vega headling and ends with a gig, Talkin’ New York Folk Revival, at The Bitter End featuring David Amram and Happy Traum. Liz hopes this will be the first year of many celebrating the importance of Greenwich Village in America’s music history.

ONE DAVID & SYD
Writing a profile of my first boss, David Driver, for Eye magazine, I ended up with much material that had to be excised. Here’s David’s recollection of Syd Barrett at the Cambridge School of Art: “Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett was also at the college. He formed Pink Floyd and played at our Christmas parties. I remember going to Syd’s home a few times, and he had a huge collection of singles. There was a mountain of them on the floor. Incredible. He was very clever. But I think he was quite limited in what he could do. He wasn’t a brilliant musician.”
But an interesting all-rounder – did you ever see him post-college?
“Yes. I did. But he was a bit strange around that time. Very sad. You wouldn’t have expected it. When he was at college Syd and Roger Waters were just so desperately keen to pick your brains, they were like magpies. They were a good two or three years below us and, they’d come and scour the place and talk to older students during lunchtime.”

TWO WHENEVER BLUE TEARDROPS ARE FALLING…
I wouldn’t really recommend pulling into Ostend on a Sunday night – there was something menacing about its silent, deserted streets, only punctuated by music belting out of overlit pizza joints that seemed to be filled with over-oiled patrons. I’m sure it looks way better midweek, or on market day. Hotel located we headed to the seafront promenade to find something to eat, passing concert halls and galleries.

There’s a lot of music going on in Ostend, and it embraces its part in the Marvin Gaye story with this: “14 February 1981. Marvin Gaye arrives by ferry in Ostend, together with his little boy, Bubby. It marks the start of a fascinating story about Ostend, Marvin Gaye and the relationship between the two. This documentary walk through the city tells you everything about his comeback and how the monster hit song “Sexual Healing” came to life.” Sadly we won’t be taking that tour, or witnessing this…

5-ostend

THREE IT MUST BE BOOTLEG WEEK…
…as bobdylan.com announces the Blood on the Tracks entry to the Bootleg Series. So we’re at Volume 14 with More Blood, More Tracks. “The 6CD full-length deluxe version includes the complete New York sessions in chronological order including outtakes, false starts and studio banter. The album’s producers have worked from the best sources available, in most cases utilising the original multi-track session tapes.” Two thoughts. How staggering is it to reach number 14 in a multi-disc series using mainly just your unreleased masters and alternate takes. And, secondly, I could fill a week just listening to the 18 CDs in The Cutting Edge box set. Trouble is, I don’t have a week to devote to it, or worse, the desire. When is too much enough?

FOUR JUNK PARTNERS…
The reason I was listening to the Beatles bootleg, above, was to find out more about the song that titles Hailey Tuck’s first album, “Junk”. I feel slightly guilty for liking the record as much as I do, but as with all of Larry Klein’s productions the musicianship is so damned musicianly and the songs so well-chosen it’s hard to resist. Dean Parks is all over it, and Jay Bellerose on drums gives his usual masterly best – check out his accented playing on “My Chemical Life”.

The song is very cute, spun off a quote by W. H. Auden. “He said that in order to wake up, he would drink coffee, down a shot of whiskey, and take whatever drugs would get him into the mood of writing and he called it his chemical life. So the song’s about a suburban wife who is addicted to drugs kind of try to escape the banality of her wifey existence.” – Hailey Tuck, talking to Charles Waring of SoulandJazzandFunk. “Speedballs and cappuccino / My mother called from San Marino / Where Lambourghinis float down soft suburban streets / And gardeners keep the rhododendrons nice and neat”.

Other songs include Pulp’s “Underwear” (“If fashion is your trade, then when you’re naked / I guess you must be unemployed…”) and The Kinks’ “Alcohol” (“Barleywine, pink gin / He’ll drink anything…”), and the rather lovely version of McCartney’s “Junk” that started this.

FIVE SEEN AT A VINTAGE FAIR AT WALTHAMSTOW ASSEMBLY HALL

5-walthamstow

EXTRA LET’S FINISH WITH THIS!
If you haven’t seen it… The Band of the Welsh Guards played Aretha Franklin’s “R.E.S.P.E.C.T” on the day of her funeral, on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. 

If you’re receiving the email out, please click on the Date Headline of the page for the full Five Things experience. It will bring you to the site (which allows you to see the Music Player) and all the links will open in another tab or window in your browser. 

The book of Five Things is available from Amazon here.

Front Cover

“He writes with the insight of someone who has inhabited the world of the professional musician but also with the infectious enthusiasm of someone who is a fan like anyone of us. It’s entertaining and inspiring in equal measure.” – from an Amazon review by Zuma

“What a treat! And it has the years before I discovered your blog…” – Dan Franklin, Publisher

“A terrific book, stuffed to the gills with snippets of news items and observations all with a musical theme, pulled together by the watchful eye of Martin Colyer… lovingly compiled, rammed with colour photos and interesting stories. Colyer has a good ear for a tune, an eye for the out-of-ordinary and he can write a bit too.” – Steve Carr, everyrecordtellsastory.com

“I’ve been dipping with huge enjoyment since it arrived” – James Walton, writer and presenter of Radio 4’s books quiz, The Write Stuff, and the R4 pop quiz All the Way from Memphis.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 18th July

July 18, 2012 by 5 Comments

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, born 14th July, 1912
My favourite photograph of a musician is this, a picture of Woody Guthrie, kindly given to me by the peerless Bob Gumpert. It’s my favourite because it has all the essential ingredients for a great music photo: An Icon. A Cigarette. A great location. A wide-angle that puts you right there. An acolyte, absolutely in the moment of playing with an trailblazer. A fascinated, curious crowd, all looking about fifteen. Their expressions are priceless.

Jack ’n’ Woody

I asked Bob how he came to have the picture: “It was taken by a photographer named Art Dubinsky—I am guessing the late 50’s-early 60’s in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, NYC. The other guitar player is Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. Art was a friend, a generous man who was a far better photographer than he got credit for. He lived in NYC at the time—at least I think so. I met him when he lived in LA and I was working in a rental darkroom, time behind the counter for time at the enlarger. He came in one day to use the darkroom as his home had burned down. We got to talking and became friends. He put me in contact with the National Lawyers’ Guild which led first to my photographing farmworker housing at Gallo wine, housing they said they didn’t have, and then to Harlan County, Kentucky for three months of photographing a coal miner’s strike. That in turn led to everything else. Sorry—I guess that is really more about Art and I and not the photo. He gave me the image, probably for no other reason than I liked it and had said so.” An appropriate story to celebrate Woody’s hundredth birthday—a story of friendship, inspiration and workers’ rights.

Poor Old Donovan, Destined To Be Dissed By Dylan Comparison Forever*
The always-amusing Barney Ronay on André Villas-Boas, new Spurs Manager, Guardian. “…there was something oddly heartening about the return in full-page panoramic close-up of André Villas-Boas, now formally in place as the new head coach of Tottenham Hotspur, and appearing, austerely suited in the middle of all this wretchedness, like an unexpected knock at the door from the local curate, who against all expectation you find yourself delightedly ushering inside. Welcome back, André. It has become fashionable to see Villas-Boas as a rather tarnished figure, to recall the frictions of his time at Chelsea, to balk at that familiar air of manicured expectancy. And to portray him instead as a kind of weak-chinned, own brand José Mourinho, Donovan to Mourinho’s Dylan, a provincial Wimpy bar to Mourinho’s gleaming McDonald’s, a managerial Sindy doll of prodigious inauthenticity. This is more than a little unfair. If nothing else there is much to admire in the way Villas-Boas is still out there… displaying the unshakable backseat extroversion that all the best managers have, as he winces and struts centre stage in skinny-trousered splendour, looking each time a little more like a tiny little dancing soldier on top of a wedding cake, or, increasingly, like a particularly convincing waxwork of himself.”

* However, Donovan doesn’t see it this way himself—there’s not much humility going on in his autobiography, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. The evidence of Don’t Look Back doesn’t lie, however—It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue vs To Sing For You?

Roll Away The Stone
The Stones played their first gig at the Marquee club 50 years ago this week. Bill Wyman, in his book, Stone Alone: “On 3 March 1963 we played… an afternoon session at the Ken Colyer Club, Studio 51, in Soho. It was ironic that we were given a great welcome by the ladies, Vi and Pat, who ran this stronghold of New Orleans-style jazz, whereas the jazz snobs at the Marquee and elsewhere saw us as upstarts who should not be encouraged.” The Stones went on to play Ken’s club most Sundays for a year. On September 10th, 1963, The Beatles visited them as they rehearsed at the 51. They presented them with a new, unfinished song, I Wanna Be Your Man. On hearing that the Stones liked the song, John and Paul went into the office and completed it.

The Sound Of Gatz
Ben Williams is on stage through the whole of Gatz (so that’s about six-and-a-half-hours in all), sitting at a desk off to one side, controlling the sound effects and cues, as well as playing various characters. He does a stunning job—sometimes intensifying the drama, sometimes broadening it out with humour—running the gamut from car crashes and gunshots to air conditioner hums and vaudeville turns. One of the most (unexpectedly) moving moments comes when Mike Iveson, playing Gatsby’s houseguest Klipspringer, turns the office sofa into a piano and mimes the gestures of a pianist, paying along to Williams’ tape. He abruptly stops and sings, acapella, the only words in Gatz which don’t come from Fitzgerald’s book, the song The Love Nest.
Building houses still goes on
Now as well as then
Ancient Jack and Jill are gone,
Yet return again.
Ever comes the question old,
“Shall we build for pride? Or,
Shall brick and mortar hold
worth and love inside?”
Just a love nest, cozy and warm,
Like a dove rest, down on the farm,
A veranda with some sort of clinging vine,
Then a kitchen where some rambler roses twine…

In an exquisite rendition, Iveson turns the theme from the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, a pretty standard Twenties musical number, into a complex, achingly poignant commentary on the emptiness at the heart of Jay Gatsby’s mansion.

M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls’ Video, As Recommended This Week In Metro By Shirley Manson
Words are extraneous. Just go to 2:03. Go on.

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: