Womble 4!!! Sneak preview!!!

Because it's only a month before ticket sale day for Glasto 2016 and I'm halfway or so through writing my new Glasto book, I thought it might be worthwhile posting a bit of it on here, just in advance. This excerpt is unedited and a touch raw and maybe it won't even reach the final cut. But for now, here's the beginning of Chapter 4... 

The Glasto line-up had just been announced... 

Chapter 4  

I switched my phone off that morning in work. 

It would have been too tempting to keep peeking at it, although I was distracted so much that I did go on the earliest lunch possible. 

As I headed out down the lift and down the 13 floors to the outside world, I wondered what exactly was I doing getting so excited about which bands were playing Glasto? 

Why did it matter if some relatively obscure band from Salford were playing? 

A band from 1977 with a chequered history to say the least? 

A band that I loved and a band that I’d been into longer than I’d been married, had kids, had a mortgage, longer than I’d been working for. 

A band I’d been into for nearly forty years. 

A band that is a bit of a cult and undoubtedly an influence to many other artists, but a band that’s far from being a household name. (In our house they are of course, but that’s only because I’ve been going on and on about them for the past quarter of a century.)

 I’d bet that of all the people I’ve ever worked with, only a handful of them have ever even heard of The Fall. Even amongst my closest, non-work friends, who are into music as much as I am, there’s not much, if any love for The Fall. 

Bafflement, if anything. 

I’ve even given up trying to convince my best mate Andy, of the sheer majesty that The Fall are in full flow. Thirty-odd years of pressing Fall mix tapes - and latterly mix CDs - into his hands and exhorting him to “listen to this, it’s really great” and failing, have made me give it up as a lost cause. 

And I’m running out of formats as well.

What made The Fall playing Glasto so significant, so important that I was acting like some spotty, teenage fanboy? I was 53 for goodness’ sake. I was now a grandfather. I should have been past all that and have moved onto more age-appropriate activities, like gardening or crown green bowling. I don’t even have a shed.

But I do have stacks and stacks of Fall CDs.  Studio albums. Compilations. DVDs. Books. 

And fuck loads of live CDRs. 

Probably not even got time to listen to them all. However, it’s better than any old shed.

I have to accept it. 

The Fall will always be there.

As I got out of the lift and into the street, I took my phone out of my pocket. I’d be able to get a signal. I switched it on and looked at the line-up again. Maybe I’d imagined that The Fall were playing. Maybe it was all, in a soap opera sort of a way, “just a dream.” 

But no! They were there on that Glasto line up page. 

The Fall.

At the same time I was looking at the line up, my phone started buzzing and buzzing. Twitter notifications. Buzz buzz buzz. It was like holding a fistful of bees.

My previous three books about Glasto are all available here-

either as Kindle e books or in paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Turn-Left-The-Womble-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B0060YCKGW 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Left-Again-Womble-middle-aged-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B00IBK2V6M 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tea-Toast-Rock-Roll-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B00Q1UJACC 

Totally Shuffled extract-Mbuti Pygmies of The Iruti Rainforest

January 30^th

Mbuti Pygmies of The Iruti Rainforest- Animal Dance Song- Mbuti Pygmies of The Iruti Rainforest

From Genesis to this. 

What may be seen as a quantum leap; two opposite ends of the spectrum. This is possibly one of the most obscure tracks on the iPod. It’s from a pair of albums recorded in the early 1950s and is a collection of field-recordings from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire at the time these recordings were made). I didn’t have the original 1950 albums-I got it sometime off the net when it had been issued as a cd just because it sounded different.

It certainly does sound different however. Most of the tracks are just vocals, repetitive chants and singing.The titles of the tracks are simply descriptions of what is happening;  “Elephant Hunt Song”, “First Monimo Song Sung Only On Occasions Of Great Importance”, “Honey Gathering Song” and so on. 

The first track on the album is entitled, “In the Rainforest Approaching a Forest Camp”, and is credited to “Birds, Crickets and Young Mbuti Pygmy Boys in the Ituri Rainforest.” It sounds exactly how it is described. You hear the rustling of leaves, and the gradually increasing sound of birds and insects slowly overwhelmed by chanting voices. It’s over half a century old, but close your eyes and listen to it. It sounds as if you are right in the middle of some green canopied forest with barely any light, yet it’s from a strange continent and fifty years ago. 

The rest of the tracks are hypnotic in the extreme; it is difficult to estimate how long each of them lasts. They could be two, three or ten minutes long. (I’ve just looked at the track times-the longest is 5 minutes, the shortest is 59 seconds and most of them clock in at about 2 minutes or so). 

This is not a criticism, but rather the reverse. The sheer repetitiveness and rhythmic nature of each track makes time a slight irrelevance. There are a few tracks where basic instruments are used-sticks to beat out a tune, simple stringed and strange instruments and a flute song (called “Flute song”). 

According to the liner notes, these instruments were either “borrowed or stolen.” It makes me wonder how old these songs and chants were-had they remained unchanged for tens of thousands of years? 

Has it all gone now? Is it everyone in the Iruti rainforest lsiening to rap?

I do have to ask myself, “Do I only like this music because it is strange and exotic or because I actually appreciate it?” 

As with any music that is “different”, I think that this is an impossible question to answer truthfully. Well, not truthfully, but realistically. I don’t think that you can really disentangle what you feel about this sort of music from any preconceptions you may have, or how you respond to anything that has been labelled “world”, or “ethnic”, or whatever. (By the way I detest the term “world” music; surely everything we listen to is world music?). 

All I know is that I do enjoy listening to this. I wouldn’t have played it more than once if I didn’t and listened to it on long car journeys when driving alone. It makes a change from guitars and drums. (It is good however, to pop the CD out and say to my 21 year-old son, “Enough of Coldplay, let’s rock out with some Mbuti Pygmy music.”)    

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:
          

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA 

Paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X