Wednesday 11 March 2015

The mystery that is Muse



extracted from "Totally Shuffled: A Year of Lisening to Music on a Broken iPod" 

October 9th

Muse-Uprising-The Resistance

Twaddle.

October 9th

Muse-Uprising- The Resistance

It’s going to be difficult to limit myself to 500 words about Muse, but as can be seen from the initial stab at it maybe the Zen approach of less being more would be the best way of tackling them. 

Alternatively, I could just go through a thesaurus and come up with 500 words that encapsulate my intense loathing of this band. There must be at least 500 words associated with twaddle, bollocks, nonsense, pompous-I could go on really for another 496 without having to refer to old Roget’s mighty tome.

It would be helpful if I went through a bit of a back story regarding my (short) connection with Muse. I had, thankfully, managed to avoid them for a long time.  I’d obviously heard of them, but never heard them. I can’t remember through making any conscious decision to not dabble my toes into the cess-pit that is their entire discography. That is a bit odd, because generally I’d pay some sort of interest into most things that are up and coming music-wise. 

I must have read some reviews of them in the music magazines, but if it had been something completely slating them, then I’d have probably had my interest piqued and, in a perverse way, I think I would have tried to hear them; just to see what all the fuss was about. But there was nothing-they barely registered with me. It was only when I got tickets for the Glastonbury Festival in 2010, and found out they were headlining the Pyramid Stage, that I thought I should really try to get to know some of their songs. (I was also surprised that they were that big a draw-in hindsight, I am not just surprised, but totally baffled). 

However, all that explains why this “song” appears on the iPod. If I could actually sync the damn thing and get it and the rest of Muse’s dreadful caterwauling consigned to a recycle bin, never to cause me emotional pain again, I surely would. That would mean losing the rest of the stuff on the iPod and I wouldn’t want that to happen. On the other hand, and weighing one thing against the other, it mightn’t be too poor a deal. If I could find a way of retrieving everything apart from Muse, it would be one of the proudest things I could ever do.

So, I got this album and a couple of others by them on the iPod, and I did really try to like them in the week preceding Glastonbury. I drove up and down the motorway to work with this weedy, proggy, sub-Queen/Rush dribbling out of the speakers and I just didn’t get it. 

Why were they so popular?

 It left me confused. I couldn’t see anything at all, not one little thing, that accounted for their success. Personally, it just left me totally cold. But even looking at it analytically with the benefit of someone who must have listened to a whole heap of music over the years, there was nothing there at all. 

There were no killer hooks, no melodies, nothing to connect with. It wasn’t as if it was wildly experimental either, and I that I didn’t understand it; it was all formulaic and bombastic. I think I have fairly wide-ranging tastes and I’m prepared to give most music a go-I’ll even sit down and watch the X Factor- but this was utter rubbish.

I made the mistake of giving Muse the benefit of the doubt right up to three songs into their set at Glastonbury. Of all the gigs I’ve ever been to, this was by far and away the worst. By a country mile. There was so joy, no humour, no excitement or passion. 

Nothing. 

Probably the longest twenty minutes in my life. 

I walked away and went to see the Pet Shop Boys-and they were everything that Muse were (and are) not and so much the better for it. 

Three cheers for Neil Tennant!



Get/see/read the rest of "Totally Shuffled" here;
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Monday 9 March 2015

Totally Shuffled extract- Muddy Waters


extracted from "Totally Shuffled: A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"


May 31st

Muddy Waters-All Aboard-Fathers & Sons



Plenty of blues musicians are called giants of the blues; many of them could rightly stake claim to that title. It depends a lot on personal taste; for me, it has to be Blind Willie McTell, but how could Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Howling Wolf, Lightning Hopkins and many, many others be left out? 

Whichever way you look at it, Muddy Waters has to be up there with the rest of them.

Born in about 1913 (it’s all a bit sketchy), in Issaquena County, Mississippi. His mother died when he was very young and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother. A simple fact speaks volumes. 

The shack that he was brought up in whilst he was a youth on Stovall Plantation is now preserved at the Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. A shack. On a plantation. 

In 1932 he married for the first time-the blues guitarist Robert Nighthawk played at the wedding, which was so wild that the floor fell in. In 1940 he moved to Chicago for a year or so and played a bit of blues, but in 1941 he was back in Mississippi, running a juke joint, complete with gambling, moonshine and a juke box. His break came when he was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1941 and 1942 on one of Lomax’s trips to the South. Muddy Waters finally moved to Chicago in 1943 and supported his musical career for a while by driving trucks and working in a factory in the day whilst performing at night. (Can you imagine many (any) of today’s rock stars doing that?) 

It can’t have been easy for Muddy-Big Bill  Broonzy managed to get him some shows playing in rowdy Chicago clubs and Muddy’s uncle gave him an electric guitar just so he could be heard above the noise in the clubs. It took until 1947, and early recordings for the Aristocrat label-which mutated into Chess- for him to strike it big.

His band was probably one of the best blues ensembles of all time; Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (a.k.a. Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann on piano. What a great band, and what fantastic records they made-“Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I’m Ready” and “I Just Want To Make Love To You”, to name but three. Little Walter soon broke out on his own but he remained close to Muddy Waters.  Rogers and Spann went onto have successful solo careers from this start in Chicago, but Waters was the true giant of blues in the city. Howling Wolf (another great star), had also moved to Chicago and he had a good natured, friendly rivalry with Waters throughout. 

Doesn’t it all sound special? Imagine living in Chicago in the 50’s and being able to see both Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf perform?

In that sense, I was born too late- and in the wrong country. But I still can listen to records like this, close my eyes and be transported across an ocean and half a century away.