Sunday 26 April 2015

Stevie Wonder at Glastonbury-just the best party ever!



Stevie Wonder at Glastonbury-just the best party ever!





Waiting for Stevie as the sun goes down.


As it got closer to ten o’clock it became darker and darker and the crowd filled up even more. Chinese lanterns were floating over the crowd, rising higher and higher in the sky until they became mere faint specks of orange light, drifting out of sight. It was a magical scene, although I was relatively uninterested in Stevie Wonder arriving on stage.

How wrong I was.

Spot on at ten o’clock the lights on stage burst into life and there he was with the tightest band ever. From the get go the whole crowd, and by that I mean everybody there, was wholly captivated. We were seeing something truly special. He came on stage playing for the first song, a keyboard/guitar-y thing hanging from his neck and within a minute, probably less than that, there was bopping all around, singing and big smiles. 

Even at the top of the hill, looking around at every face I could see there was a collective sense of joy and happiness. I looked across at Amy and Sacha and gave them the big thumbs-up. They grinned back at me

“This is just brilliant!” shouted Sacha, nodding her head to the music.

Amy, dancing like a loon, “Its so boss!” 

Hit after hit followed. 

Bang. Bang. Bang.

 It’s incredible to think that he has so many great songs in his repertoire. What was just as impressive was the way he put it all together. It was like the perfect compilation, structured in just the right order. Started off with a massive entrance, took it up a notch and just kept it going. Maybe I could ask Stevie for a bit of advice for my next compilation.


Everybody loves Stevie!

When he sang and played a snippet of Alicia Keys’ New York, announcing it as “his favourite song in the last year” the 100,000 plus of us went collectively ape, but to then morph into “Living in the City” and then Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” was an act of genius. 

However, to then follow that with “Uptight”, “For once in my life” and then “Fingertips” was something of Einstein-like proportions. Higher and higher! Hadn’t even reached “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”, “Sir Duke” or “Superstition” yet! 

Which, when they turned up, were beyond perfect. During “Superstition”, he shouted to us all to scream at the end of the first verse, the loudest roar came from the crowd. It was like the Ride of the Valkerie’s scene in Apocalypse Now-all the (few) hairs I had stood up on end. I must admit that a tear came into my eye. Somewhere deep in the crowd a flare was going off but unlike the atmosphere at Muse the previous evening there was no sense of threat, no undercurrent of unease. 

Just the best party ever.                                  
  

Get your flares on.



This is an extract from "Turn Left at the Womble- How a 48 year old Dad survived his first Time at Glastonbury", my first book (of three) about going to the best festival there possibly could be! 

They are all available here either as Kindle e books or in paperback;






There may well be another book on the way after this years festival...watch this space!

Monday 20 April 2015

Totally Shuffled: Teenage Jesus & the Jerks-The Sound of Love




March 7th

Teenage Jesus and The Jerks-I Woke Up Dreaming-Everything   


The sound of what?

Ineptitude. Noise. Clatter.Screaming.

Rock and Roll. Punk. Classical music.

The blue-iest music that there could be.

Woke up this morning and …woke up dreaming.

New York. City. Cities falling into dust.

The sound of. Time.

The sound of uneasy listening. The sound of professionalism. Jazz and something so avant garde it gone round the other side.

Music for talent(less) shows. Music and sound that is utterly irrelevant in 2012. This is so far away from what is considered contemporary that I couldn’t imagine it even being thought of now, let alone being produced. It now sounds so old-fashioned that the shock of the new has been replaced by the apathy of the so what? This is as relevant now as it was in 1979/1980.

This is music that will only make sense in a yet unknown future. It can never make sense at a time when it’s been played-it’s as if it’s waiting for everything to catch up but it’s always moving too fast-it’s too far ahead. If there are alternate, parallel universes-other dimensions-well, maybe there it could be understood-but probably not. It’s a step too far to think that could happen-that Teenage Jesus & the Jerks could be comprehended fully.

The most logical music. It sounds like mathematics. Geometry.

The sound of applied physics.

The sound of particles.

The sound of something so polished, so rehearsed beyond what is necessary. Music that’s been too practiced and honed, sharpened like a craft knife. Every note, every tone, every beat is simply what is required. The most well-versed band there could ever be.

This is the sound of the heaviest music possible.

It’s a cliché, but it’s hard and tough. Sonically. Hard and tough to listen to. It can’t be background music, but should be played in lifts and department stores. Supermarkets. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks piped through ceiling speakers in Asda. The ideal music to have whilst getting the shopping.

The sound of insignificance.

The sound of bafflement.

They are the best heavy metal band there has ever been. Forget Iron Maiden and the rest; Teenage Jesus and the Jerks should headline Monsters of Rock every year.

The most anti-rock group that there could be. Forget traditional chord structures, song structures and any kind of structure in fact. Beyond deconstructed-Teenage Jesus and The Jerks did not have an initial structure to dismantle in the first place.

If anything is a meaningless racket, then this is what it is. It depends what is meant by a meaningless racket though. Even something thrown together at random has its own meaning. What does Teenage Jesus and the Jerks mean? Do they mean something else in 2012 than they did in 1987? Am I asking too many questions about something that is self-evidently obvious?

The ideal way to perform music-ten minute sets with thirty-second songs. There is no reason to do any more. Nothing else to be said.

The sound of unlearnt instruments.

The sound of intense thought and consideration.

Music that if played backwards it would sound exactly the same. The sound of entropy. The sound of the end of days. Or the beginning of something. The sound of “where do we go from here?” What could be next? What could this evolve into? Or have we reached a natural conclusion? What could possibly come after this?

The sound of love.

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
        


  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:



One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 
366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 
From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 
From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   
From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 
From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 
This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 
There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 
But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     



Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle:
          

Sunday 12 April 2015

Howlin Wolf-Totally Shuffled extract



 
December 12th

Howling Wolf-The Red Rooster –Chess 7” single  



It’s getting quite close to the end of the year and therefore to the end of this book. This may be the last blues track that shows up and if it is, then it’s not a bad way to go. Anything by the great Howling Wolf has to be worth a listen; like Blind Willie McTell and very few others that I’ve written about this year, there simply isn’t one single track by him that’s duff. You could pick any Howling Wolf track at random and not be disappointed-they are all equally as good as each other. It would be so simple to make a Howling Wolf mixtape-all you’d need to do is to pick any 80 minutes or so of his music and you’d be done. Even Dylan and The Fall (as much as I love them), have recorded and released the odd track that is frankly,crap and not worthy of attention; not so with Howling Wolf-everything he did hit the mark perfectly.      

He was a true giant of a man; both figuratively and literally. He stood in at 6 foot 3 inches and weighed 300 pounds. His feet were that big that he couldn’t find a pair of shoes either long enough or wide enough to fit him; whenever he bought a new pair of shoes he had to cut them with a razor so his feet would fit. On shaking hands with Wolf, Marshall Chess (of Chess Records) said that, “My hand was a little nothing inside his.”

But musically, well, that was a whole different ballgame. Howling Wolf learned his trade at the feet of the greatest Delta bluesman, Charley Patton. This is not just a figure of speech-Patton actually taught him how to play guitar and many of Wolf’s songs can be more or less traced back to Patton’s work. (This track for instance, although credited to Willie Dixon, is, in the words of Howlin’ Wolf, “a Charley Patton tune”). He first met Patton when he was 20 and went on to play with many of the notable blues artist of all time; Robert Johnson, The Mississippi Sheiks, Robert Lockwood Jr, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tommy Johnson and many others. Sonny Boy Williamson II taught him the harmonica. His idol was the country singer Jimmy Rogers. Wolf tried to emulate Rogers’ famous yodelling but couldn’t manage it; it came out as a growl. “So I kept on howlin’. And it done me fine.” Wolf only started recording in 1950 at the age of 40 in Sam Phillips Sun studios. This was all before he left the South and drove to Chicago to become the Chicago blues master he is best thought as.   

When you work though all the different musicians Howlin’ Wolf had direct contact with, it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. His first band included Matt “Guitar” Murphy, as well as harmonica player Junior Parker (of “Mystery Train” fame); and at times he recorded with Ike Turner, Bo Diddley and many other greats. His finest pick was persuading one of the finest blues guitarists of all time, Herbert Sumlin, to move from the South and join his band in Chicago. Sumlin stayed a part of his band for over 20 years. I could go on and on for another 500 words and another 500 after that about Howlin’ Wolf, but the only thing that needs to be done is to hear the 2 minutes 25 seconds of this song.      

         

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
        


  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:



One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 
366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 
From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 
From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   
From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 
From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 
This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 
There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 
But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     



Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle:
          

Wednesday 8 April 2015

John Coltrane-A Love Supreme



September 24th

John Coltrane-Resolution-A Love Supreme

John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz records ever made. More than that, it’s seen as one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century. 

It’s rated by jazz buffs, rock bands, indie freaks, experimental, electronic and improv artists as a major inspiration. 

It’s loved all around the world from America to Japan, South Africa to Brazil; Tunisia to Australia; from Egypt to England-you get my point. There was a retrospective article about the album a few years ago that I read somewhere-it was in some music magazine and it tied in with the release of the album as a 2CD set-and there was a veritable queue of the great and the good lined up singing its praises- Bono; Bob Dylan; Bill Laswell; Lou Reed; Steve Albini; John McLaughlin; Steve Tyler; Jah Wobble-all the usual suspect were there. This sort of puff-piece type thing usually makes me deeply suspicious. 

There is always a tendency for these big stars to try to out-do each other with ever increasing effusive praise and with one-upmanship about how they first heard it at the age of 7 and that they had the original U.S. pressing as a box of 78 shellac discs. 

I remember a review of Dylan’s’ “Blood on the Tracks” wherein some minor artist was rabbitting on about how the bootleg “Blood on the Tapes” was better than “Blood on the Tracks”. It isn’t. It’s just different; and the officially released album is by far the best version. Even more so in respect of The Beach Boys; these rock stars were raving on about “Smile” and how much better it was than “Pet Sounds”. As if they had some perfect copy of the unreleased (and never actually completed) Smile album. They didn’t. All they had were exactly the same bootlegs that nowadays we can all get off the internet and all their bragging about how their celebrity status allowed them to listen to music that was unavailable to us mere mortals, doesn’t ring true anymore. 

So alarm bells sound whenever a record gets praised to the hilt. The sign of the Emperor’s New Clothes springs to mind.

But, for some reason, I went ahead and actually bought the 2 CD copy of “A Love Supreme” that attracted such incredible praise. Maybe I wanted to prove them all wrong- or maybe I had bought into all the hype. 

As I played it for the first time, I had a vision of Bono and Lou Reed sitting on the couch in our front room, nodding sagely and saying. “See, we told you it was good”. I would have quite liked to have been able to retort that it was a crock of shit and that I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. But I couldn’t, I honestly couldn’t. It truly is a magnificent record.

There’s a lot about how Coltrane intended it to be a hymn of praise to God. Now I’m not sure about all of that, but there’s something about it that I’ve never heard in any other piece of music; something otherworldly, something inspired and inspiring. Whether it was divine intervention or whether Coltrane had reached a point in his musical development that made him produce music that was so special, I can’t really tell and anyway, who’s to say? That it’s inspired is unquestionable; no-one can make music that shimmers so much and is so beautiful without a certain amount of inspiration. And all in one take as well.

The only thing that I can think that it is close to is seeing something as simple as a snowflake. It’s just a little, tiny flake of frozen snow, fluttering down to earth from the sky. One amongst thousands and thousands. But we all know that when looked at under a microscope they’re all unique and incredibly complex. What seems so simple at first sight is mindbogglingly complicated and perfect, but we don’t really know how or why or understand. But we do know that it is perfect.

That is “A Love Supreme”.    

    

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"

        


  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:



One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 
366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 
From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 
From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   
From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 
From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 
This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 
There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 
But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     



Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle: