The
beat is a little too forceful to be considered lithe. There appear to
be trapped voices deep within the rhythmic sarcophagus. But a woman's
voice emerges, slightly bruised by circumstance but still capable of
mandated enthusiasm and only partially-stifled wonder. The flashing
lights indicate that she is in the club - if the club is to be
considered shorthand for the world, which it must - and dancing with
someone she might not love but at this moment does not want to love. The
sixties girl group "yeah?"s herald some doubt imposing on the singer's
self-imposed ecstasy - she could look for love "to get over you," or
"for a deeper kiss."
But
the orchestral shimmers indicate that permanence is the last thing on
the singer's mind. It illumines her what-other-world wonder and
underlines the perceived fact that there is nothing, nowhere, no one, no
time, but the singer and whoever is dancing with her and making out
that they love her for, oh, another hour at least. It may all be a
dreamed Holy Grail, but nothing in the singer's whole life has seemed so
touchably real to her and this, and only this, is what she decides
matters. In her partner's eyes, she sees the sunrise, but her song never
climaxes; having made its point, it fades with gentle abruptness into
nothingness, as all sunrises must, its guitar strokes casting the shadow
of half a lifetime away.
It could be said that this singer feels love.
The
song had nothing to do with Jesus Jones but may have been Giorgio
Moroder's way of saying hey, I'm still here and haven't fallen asleep.
The Daft Punk modules and Nile Rodgers chordalities underline a legacy
perhaps a little too firmly, as though this union were convenient rather
than symbiotic (as had already been demonstrated on "Get Lucky," which
works so fully because not for one second does it sound as though it is
trying to make a statement about something). Some wondered whether
Moroder was now gamely following trends rather than creating them. Kylie
Minogue sings as a Selfridges cosmetics assistant lost in consumable
space might.
As
a pop record it was slightly reticent. One radio disc-jockey commented
that it sounded slightly dated. It didn't catch on. But its beacon beams
an unreal, yet concretely palpable, aura of magic which only practised
professionalism can blur into an adornment.
from the album Boomerang: Original Soundtrack Album
Released: June 1992
Although it was very far from being the last hit on the Motown label,
“End Of The Road” was maybe the last recognisable “Motown hit” that most
people would remember without looking the rest up, and listening to its
full-length 5.48 version, and having grown up with Motown in my bones,
it is difficult not to become emotional at the spectre of a long and
crucial chapter in music being brought to a close. Everyone involved in
its making, from writers/producers L.A. Reid and Babyface onwards, must
have known the record’s real significance, since stylistically it
reaches far, far back, towards the fifties street corner symphonies
which gave Motown its original life. This may have been recognised by
the record’s American buyers, who made it the most commercially
successful of all Motown singles and kept it at number one for a then
record thirteen weeks. Here in Britain, although the song only stayed
on top for three weeks, it had climbed the chart slowly and patiently
for over two months – a real slow burner – before peaking, just as in
the old days.
The four members of Boyz II Men take turns to voice
the one soul, the soul who knows that he can’t really stop his girl
from leaving, but is not confident that he will survive her departure.
Their voices cluster and dovetail together just as the teenage
Temptations (when they still called themselves the Primes) would have
done back in Detroit, but the pain steadily escalates. At first they
try to laugh her words off – there is a somewhat forced giggle after the
line “Girl, I know you really love me,” and the following lines of “You
just don’t realise you’ve never been there before/It’s only your first
time” suggest that he may give her the benefit of the doubt (“Maybe I’ll
forgive you” – is this “Band Of Gold” narrated from the other
perspective?). But then there’s the untrammelled agony of the screaming
“Pain in my head/Oh, I’d rather be dead!”
And finally, the
crucial break in the song’s smooth 6/8 journey, as the bass narrator –
taking the tradition even further back, to the Mills Brothers and
Inkspots – voices (possibly to himself) his true feelings: “When you
just hurt me and just ran out with that other fella…baby – I knew about
it…I just didn’t care…You just don’t understand how much I love you, do
you?” he asks in rhetorical pity. As the song swells up towards its
final climax behind him, his hurt becomes more palpable – “Yes baby, my
heart is lonely…My heart HURTS, baby…Yes, I feel pain TOO!…Baby PLEASE…”
So
the soul knows her untruth, yet the soul clings because it doesn’t know
how not to; because “End Of The Road” stands as a metaphor for the
imminent passing of Motown, and the extreme reluctance not to let go of
those memories, that sometimes utterable magic…”Although we’ve come to
the end of the road/Still I can’t let go/It’s unnatural!/You belong to
me…I belong to you!” The music finally fades to leave the voices on
their own, clapping their hands to the slow rhythm, back to doo-wop,
back to reminding us all how it started; they wave their farewells, the
book is closed…but for those of us who lived through even half of Motown
as it happened, that book will always remain open.
One
grey, overcast Wednesday afternoon in the very late summer of 2010, we
made our way to Portobello Road, or at any rate just off it, because
Mark Ronson was in attendance at Rough Trade West promoting his then-new
album. I had the day off work and we were always keen to spend as much
time away from our accommodation - as it then was - as possible. I can't
remember whether we saw Kelly Hoppen directing the unloading of a van
across the street from the bus stop - well, we did, but I cannot recall whether it was on that same afternoon or another time altogether.
In
the shop, Ronson was seated, having dyed his hair silver, chatting
enthusiastically to a couple of young ladies. He signed our copy of the
CD without really looking at us. Others in attendance, namely Rose
Elinor Dougall and I think Amanda Warner, a.k.a. MNDR, were more
forthcoming and gave us nicer signatures. Other books are available.
"Bang
Bang Bang" was the first single from an album intent on reconstituting
the musical elements of its chief creator's childhood and rendering it
meaningful in the 2010 present tense. In any setting it would be a
daunting declaration of principles, even if, as guest rapper Q-Tip is at
pains to point out, principles are everything a living society should
fulminate and act against ("We're believin' in the proof, we're believin' in the truth/We're believin' in each other, not you, you,
YOU!"). The music is Heaven 17/Leisure Process-level insistent (the
harmonic fab four of F, C, G and B flat) with swirls of atonal
improvisation darting around the verses' background and that key
vibraphone button so central to pop qualitatives.
Warner's
lead vocal, plucking heads in a cruel, CRUEL world, is remorsefully
remorseless; she licks the ice of her assassing lips with valuable
venom. She'll apologise for killing you as she does it. The song rotates
in Clairol Travelcards of baffled blossom. The song quotes "Alouette,"
which in itself celebrates the lark, the first bird to sing of a
morning, and also the worst gossip. Since that song was initially
published in A Pocket Song Book for the Use of Students and Graduates of McGill College
in 1879, i.e. in Montreal, it is technically French-Canadian. The
staccato shoots and sudden ending of "Bang Bang Bang," if they are not
to represent the end of the world, should indicate the building blocks
for another, better one, and that's what the song would show anyone. I
think we caught a 328 bus to go to West Hampstead, the penultimate time
we've been there to date.
We've
never had a record collection. Collections are dead things that you
just sit and stare at and never actually like, let alone listen to. We
have a record library. Everything gets used, listened to and loved and
they're maybe not in mint condition but we don't run a museum or a
mortuary. We're on the side of life, while that's still legal.
The
summer of 1973 was non-existent. Unlike the previous five summers, we
didn't go anywhere on holiday, although I suspect that was for reasons
beyond, or beneath, the weather. It was not a pleasant time to be alive
in Britain, not for me personally or for anyone else as a whole. I
dreamed as much as possible because it was preferable to Formica-ground
reality. I read some comics and also two week-by-week encyclopaedia-type
magazines, All About Science and (a bit later that year) The Story Of Pop. I even ordered binders to house those.
The
future was as clearcut as ground glass. I would grow up to be a
scientist, or an expert on pop music. Perhaps I could become a pop
scientist (but Thomas Dolby beat me to that). It was better than the
rubber violence I experienced at the time, from father and supposed
school peers alike. The aura of the times was as grey as spent pork.
There
were quasi-idyllic interludes, even if those involved rambling randomly
around the backwoods of Blantyre and Uddingston, emerging on a sunny
early evening of a Wednesday in July, looking in the window of the local
electricity showroom and the washing machine we were shortly to buy.
That's what springs to my mind whenever I hear "You Are The Sunshine Of
My Life," anyway.
And
there was also light entertainment, which in 1973 involved various
then-well-known comedians, magicians and talent competitions, as well as
the Eurovision Song Contest. That year Cliff Richard, someone I had
never known not to exist, was back after five years with the slightly
reluctant schlager-UK of "Power To All Our Friends." Representing
Spain were Mocedades with "Eres Tu," a huge hit everywhere around the
world except here.
But
both songs were nudged out of first place by this elusive lament.
Trumpets blow a fanfare, slithery saxophones recall Palais dance bands
of an era long since evacuated, or perhaps were just keeping late
fifties 6/8 jukebox ballads like "Born Too Late" in their minds. Then
the singer tells us, in French (even though she was representing
Luxembourg), of "childhood dreams, in the student whom the master
punished, in the station where the first adventure of your life begins."
The life mirror unnerved me.
She
goes on to reassure us that "you" - that is, all of us - will recognise
ourselves in every manifestation that life throws at us, in the artist
whose glory is denied by the selfish world. "In those who fear, in those
who are cold." Look beyond your self, and you will see yourself
reflected in all of us. In Luxembourg City the red-dressed singer
performed it in a somewhat distressed fashion. In a promotional film she
is wearing a suit and tie and glances at the camera conspiratorially
from time to time.
The
song won, if only by four points, and was recorded in four other
languages, including two entirely different Italian editions. In one of
the latter, "The King's Bed," she angrily laments the childhood love she
knew which has evaporated, abandoning her in a bed far too big for her.
What is the point of that empty pillow? "It's not you, that king that
once I dreamed of; the man that I wanted and in my fairytales. But you
are the only truth, the one I'm going to accept - crying a little bit."
Every now and then she falls apart.
The
other Italian translation, however, is entitled "You Can't Live By
Fear." In this setting, her lover is tormented by an unspecified terror.
"I don't feel safe any more," she cries. "Why aren't you speaking?
What's in your heart?" Later she indicates "You have a knot in your
throat" - trying to avoid the noose? And yet, she will stand by him: "I
would fight even if I knew that you were guilty...I'm here to help you,
even knowing that I will always have fear and tears that tie me to you."
Or is it the mother singing to the abused child?
In
Britain the song was renamed "Wonderful Dream" and the singer's
delivery is only very minutely uncomfortable, though a lot more
discomfiting. The theme of youthful love gone to waste is reiterated,
but in Mme David's closing cry of "Oh Lord, don't let it die," I think
of the European dream signed into our laws in that very same years, and
of how, hauntologically, the hellish present of the past six years* and
counting are transposed back into 1973 and Anne-Marie David warning us
not to fuck it up. The song - which says all it needs to say in less
than two minutes and forty-five seconds - reminds us that an enclosed
world will end up a suffocated one.
(*Reminder: this piece was written two years ago.)
This
record - for it is much more a record than a song - begins like the
remnants of a sixties song newly uncovered behind some awkward
plasterwork at the Scotch of St James's. Lurking low-pitched Hammond
organ and bath salts-calming electric piano materialise over what is
thus far the ghost of a pulse. Discrete Moog white noise button sound
effects flutter around like bashful Red Admirals. So far this might have
come out on Vertigo Records circa March 1970.
Then,
however, a modestly insistent rhythm and riff make themselves known,
and we are gently reminded that we are no longer in the sixties. A voice
appears which is far more in keeping with Howard Jones, including the
sarcastic one-octave-down spoken response ("Your head is gone and your
body's shaking"). They are playing in this club and the line between
musicians and audience is not readily definable. The further their
audience's minds are blown - and the audience may be responsible for
that blowing - the more the musicians are...transfixed or transported?
Their conclusion is "There
is nothing you can do because there is no solution/You gotta get down
to the noise and confusion." The world is a mess, the singer seems to be
telling us (as the semi-random Moog flutters reinforce), but all we can
hope to do, since it is unchangeable (and therefore, by implication, so
are we), is to celebrate the chaos (the singer's midway ecstatic
"OW!"), thrive in it and learn from it. Learn what? A different way to
live?
The
song's quiet radicalism is subtly sneaky. As you dance to it - as, in
the spring of 1991, you really had to - you realise that it is not quite
like anything else that's preceded it, including the fluffy Pollocking
of the Manchester School of Practised Derangement. The drums are
slippery, rarely On The Beat. The song finally disperses into a wistful,
synthesised coda worthy of...Camel, perhaps, or Ashra. It dares to
leave response and rationalism in your hands.
The trouble is, nobody really got this song, or the one before it ("The Storm") or World Of Twist per se.
They were perhaps too knotty a group to engage any real attraction.
They formed in Sheffield in 1985 and several of its original members
transferred to the bucolic yob-art of Earl Brutus, including James Fry,
the elder brother of Martin. Their singer was their former drummer, one
Tony Ogden, and it may be that he didn't quite have the spark that would
render unsuspecting lovers intrigued, or that the group's songs did
their best to avoid or conceal hooks. There isn't really anything to
hold on to in "Sons Of The Stage," which in many ways is the song's main
point. Their solitary album Quality Street was misproduced and
the singles traduced to their own shadows. Both Ogden and drummer Nick
Sanderson died long before they should have done.
In
the context of early 1991, however, which emotionally was something of
an undecided year for me, London felt newly glamorous and purposeful and
I wish I had then been worthier of it. This song, however, was a key
element of the times - the group are cited in Saint Etienne's "London
Belongs To Me," released later the same year, in a fantasy world where
they already had three number ones - and showed me how a
satisfactorily-enclosed world could yield unexpected opulence.
(To
memories of Hampstead, the Everyman cinema, the long-gone fish
restaurant on Heath Street whose name I cannot recall, Italian
restaurant lunches on Kensington Church Street, Hyde Park Corner in the
deep snow one curious Wednesday afternoon, David Lynch encomia and
above all to the best friend I ever had in my professsional career,
with whom I have had no communication since 1994 and who will here
remain unnamed but who I hope is still with us and happy.)
Released: May 1997 (single release and initial album release in Japan)
You
can't know about it if you never went to Habitat at the Botley Park
Roundabout, groaned as you sat down in a 100 bus heading to Witney,
never heard Bill Heine on the local radio or saw his shark in Headington
demanding that we not be destroyed - apt that the shark house was close
to an industrial complex in Shotover. Never scoured the racks of
Russell and Acott for pre-war popular music, when it was still
considered civilised by too many kindly people you were kind enough
never to bump into on the High Street of a Saturday, even if you were
disembarking from the London coach. Never ran off to the Carfax Chippy
when trout was on the High Table menu (again). Never went into the music
section of the Westgate Library itemising what they needed to order.
Never considered the two record store majors, facing each other across
Cornmarket like wearied gunslingers.
Never
went past the barracks on the 4B bus to Abingdon without thinking how
much they must have thought about them. Never asked (in their head, they
wouldn't dare ask out loud) the techno connoisseur banging out his
joints one floor above if he wouldn't mind turning the noise down, since
you're trying to get to sleep despite all those even louder voices
crowding your head out.
(So
many of these things not actually existing any more. In fact, most of
them have long since stopped existing since you were there.)
Never
sprinted to Massive Records behind the bus station to see what London
is like. And if London at its best in those days could make you feel
massive, this place could make you feel like an insect. You can't help
but react, conjuring up a dismally amusing fantasy involving the people
who hate you most, or perhaps it's the people you hate most if you've
got handy access to a mirror.
Never scooped up the tyre listlessness of Park End Street.
Fantasies
about revenge on the smugly rich. The song clocking on at the beginning
as though beginning the closing day's work. The nervous jingle of
vulnerable but that radio voice from your childhood (listening to Marvin
all night long indeed); this is becoming an imbalanced nightmare.
Then
the plea starts to show its teeth. You'll be first against the wall
(but who'll be last is the question the singer really daren't ask).
"What's THIS?" he exclaims, hurt and baffled. Random terms pulled out of
the Situationist hat, burbling Fender Rhodes (emergency on Planet
Patrol)...
...then
a SLASH, and a BASH, as guitars thumbnail a battering ram into this
plea, DO YOU REMEMBER MY NAME I THINK HE DOES - Kurt, are you here
("OFF WITH HIS HEAD, MAN!")? The guitar/rhythm lines transform the
Nirvana into a Rush before it all slams suddenly into a wall of molten
what
(the insomniac Tube driver in Geoff Ryman's 253, who finally manages to fall asleep, and as a welcome bonus never has to wake up either.)
An adagio ensues, an elegy for something not yet departed, a solvent sickness, a resigned doubt ("God loves His children - yeah").
At the quiet climax, the lead guitarist takes over the main vocal
refrain - nothing really matters to them. But there's one quick, final
roundelay of heaviness which splutters to a stop as though its steam
supply had all been used up (is that a plug being pulled out at the end,
or just a computer being switched off?).
Like
"Bohemian Rhapsody" - though structurally the song has far more in
common with "Happiness Is A Warm Gun," and perhaps specifically the
Breeders' cover - "Paranoid Android" is a stylistic advertisement for
the band. This is what we do, look at the range, what do you think? Its
real genesis is perhaps a lot more humdrum - some cocaine heads were
being obscurely disturbing when gathered around the singer in a bar in
Los Angeles - but you can't know THINGS if you never knew exactly why
they were done or who prompted the doing.
The song reminded me how easy it once was to mistake an enclosed world for an outside world.
Blinking through the
trees, grinning like a knowing but permanently concealed Cheshire cat, stood the
tower at the centre of power.
“This is a BEAUTIFUL day…a NEW day…”
There were many days
of this nature in that year. A flawlessly blue sky, everybody acknowledging
each other, talking with each other, statues, parks and the occasional taxi all
co-mingling in closed acceptance of their combined need and purpose.
The egg-white sun
dazzling all who chose to neglect its existence.
It felt to her like a new city. A different
city. A better one.
“We are to-GETHER! We are unified, and of one accord!”
How privileged and
inspired she felt to bear witness to the beginning of the end of the world.
*
Many
argue about the nature of hauntology but usually the real thing makes
itself known. It is the late spring or early summer of 2018 and I am
immobilised in hospital, dazed and, due to a combination of repeated
anaesthesia - I needed to return to the operating theatre some thirty
times during my admission for dressings changes alone - antibiotics and
morphine derivés, tripping, unmistakeably and unavoidably tripping.
Then
I would hear the deepest inner breathing that anyone could hope to
hear, the distorted perspectives, the angular volume balance. Later,
back at home - had I really been away, in all senses, for
nineteen-and-a-half weeks? - it struck me; Bobby Gillespie's slowed-down
breathing at the beginning of, and intermittently punctuating
throughout, Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson's mix of a song which
had once spoken to me of defiance and promise, that warm Westminster
ten-month summer of 1991. It was thr reproachful ghost of the past
materialising more meanginfully in my then-present.
In 1991, the writers of the New Musical Express voted “Higher Than The Sun” that year's best single, ahead of both “Unfinished
Sympathy” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That would mean the record had to be really special, and for a lot of people
in Britain
“Higher Than The Sun” was “our” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; a
declaration of anti-principles, a gigantic NO! in the face of
post-Thatcher/Reagan conformity. But where Nirvana screamed out their message with
great joy, Primal Scream had a subtler, more gently disorientating approach.
One is invited to overlook the clunkiness of using the word “hallucinogens” in
a lyric and the song's scratch mix of clichés (“experience and innocence,” “state of
grace,” “wasn’t born to follow”). Actually the clichés might be part of the
song’s point, since the words elope from Gillespie’s mouth only semi-clearly;
this is not the exuberant beyond-phonetics tongue-talking of fellow Glaswegian
John Martyn’s “Outside In” but more an A.R. Kane-ish swoon (“I live just for
today/I don’t care ‘bout tomorrow,” "fanta...stical places...").
The song as such barely exists beyond that statement; the
Orb mix which is the song's main feature on the album Screamadelica
foregrounds the song, with only a hint of the John Barry harpsichord (or
possibly cimbalom) melancholy and weeping dervishes which stream
through Weatherall and Nicolson’s 12” mix. There is an upward whooping
of something
approaching liberation, and then the spirit of (of all people) Tears For
Fears
(“Shout”) peers through the instrumental bridge, before the song mutters
itself
into fading vaporisation. You get the feeling that it could go on
forever, and in a lot of ways it has.
Weatherall
and Nicolson treat the song as tantric. They delay expressions, murmurs
and climaxes and render the song - or piece of performance art, as I
suspect Gillespie would prefer you to view it - darker, scarier and more
radical. Their sense of structural symmetry is peerless and emphasise
the possibility that you are bearing aural witness to a scared child's
prayer. There isn't very much of American Spring (as the duo was only
known in Britain, to avoid confusion with the Leicester progressive rock
band Spring, whose drummer Pick Withers later turned up in Dire
Straits) about the mix - the most remarkable thing about the Spring album is the cheerful lightness of its radicalism.
Yet
this mix of "Higher Than The Sun," as it stood to and for me in the
approaching summer of 1991, was at the time and in itself an indicator
of what had not yet even been thought of as hauntology, from twenty
years before, when pre-teen Bobby Gillespie was growing up in East
Kilbride, just across the A725 Expressway and Bothwell Bridge from where
I was growing up. The residual memory that our brains were, in their
own ways, different. The veering voices, the steel cube anomalies - my
childhood haunts of Uddingston and Bothwell crouched in the prowling
shadows of the Birkenshaw Industrial Estate - the need for escape. I
didn't do drugs, so any revelation was necessarily second-guessing. Or
at least was until I awoke, or did I remain lucidly asleep, in the
centre of 2018, knowing that I had also seen those "fanta...stical
places" though, for reasons I will go into later, bore no wish to see
them ever again.
I did always think that the American Spring Mix should have been included in, or supplanted the Orb mix actually on, Screamadelica.
Its inviting darkness passes to us a hint of the direly ecstatic
nothingness in which side three of that record culminates (despite the
latter's absurd payoff). As Weatherall and Nicolson view it, however,
like stout DJ Cortez in sight of the Pacific Aquaclub, the song proposes
a grandeur which far exceeds record collectoritis, a benign infinity
capable of embracing us all.
The
song escorted me through that other door and reminded me that the other
world I had always feared could be palpated and extolled.
(Author's Note: the opening italicised section was previously published as part of a Then Play Long piece on, of all benign infinities, Fleetwood Mac's Behind The Mask. I altered it very subtly for this piece.)
It
was Friday 29 June 2001 when L.G. presented at our local GP surgery,
just around the corner from where we lived. She had been suffering from
breathing problems and coughs for some while. From the surgery she was
admitted to the Radcliffe Infirmary for an emergency tracheotomy. Nobody
could quite ascertain the cause of what seemed to be an obstruction in
the larynx.
Weeks
of investigations followed and it was finally established, as L.G.
frantically and tearfully informed me on the telephone on the afternoon
of Wednesday 18 July 2001, that she had cancer. A particularly rare and
brutal subglottic squamous cell carcinoma, the type of malignancy which
doesn't make itself visibly known until it's too late to do anything
about it.
Nobody
really knew what to do about L.G.'s cancer and I don't blame them for
not knowing. It is one of the rarest cancers - truly the case of one in a
million, unless the woman you love happens to be that one. To cut an
otherwise pointless story short, she lasted - I hesitate to say
"endured" - another five-and-a-half weeks until the cancer killed her at
11:30 pm on Saturday 25 August 2001, on the Intensive Care ward of a hospital which
has since been demolished, its resources reallocated elsewhere.
I returned to work - at the time I couldn't really afford not to
- in the manner of a dazed zombie. Life went on everywhere else but not
in me. How could it? How could one properly grieve when surrounded by
people protesting that your grief is spoiling their fun, getting in the
way of their work?
It
therefore follows that I had no reserve or capacity for shock or
emotional engagement when 9/11 happened about two-and-a-half weeks
later. It felt like a dream happening to somebody else. I was all out of
grief, drained by pain.
Still
less did I harbour any appetite for music. Music for a period became,
to me, unlistenable. It reminded me of too much. I felt that I needed to
venture beyond it - but to where? If you didn't see me stumbling around
Oxford of a weekend between, say, September and November of 2001, then
count yourself lucky. I very nearly didn't come back from that.
Then,
very early one Sunday morning, exhausted and ready to follow Laura out
of this world, I put on a record at very low volume (it being very early
one Sunday morning) and its final, nearly fifteen-minute-long song
felt, even at that dim distance, that it was speaking to me, urging me
to come back. It was "I Dream A Highway" by Gillian Welch from her third
album Time (The Revelator), which had come out about six weeks
before. I breathed. I came back. It was a fucking elongated struggle but
I came back. To music and VERY eventually to all else. If that song
could theoretically go on forever, so could I.
The
day before 9/11, a song called "How Wonderful You Are" was brought to
the attention of the BBC DJ Johnnie Walker. He was so taken by it that
he played it on high rotation on his radio show, and it got one hell of a
reaction, mainly from listeners who'd had enough of hell.
Its
author, singer and guitarist was a fifty-five-year-old Dorsetian named
Gordon Haskell whose name would at the time only really have been
familiar to King Crimson fans - he cameoed on In The Wake Of Poseidon and appeared on some of Lizard.
But Gordon had no illusions and stood for no bullshit, meaning that
after the early seventies times became fairly tough for him, even though
he continued to write, perform and occasionally record music.
Certainly
by 2001 Gordon had lived enough to know that he was just going to do
whatever he wanted, not what others second-guessed or ordered him to do.
He'd put out an album in June of that year called Look Out and
"How Wonderful You Are," done live in the studio with bass, brushes,
saxophone, slightly treated guitar and a voice which sounded as though
it had trod the seabeds underlying the canals of forever, was one of its
songs.
But
the song spoke to enough people that demand for it went through the
ceiling, if not quite the roof. It didn't sound like anything else on
the airwaves that autumn and that was its advantage. It seemed to
reassure folk who were sorely in need of reassurance, that everything
was still normal and was going to work out. Not the living hospital
nightmare of me coming off the Oxford Tube at Gloucester Green Bus
Station one late Saturday night, hearing the thud of DJ Otzi's "Hey
Baby" coming from the nearby pub and wondering whether this world had
anything to do with me any more.
Which
is odd because "How Wonderful You Are" is not a reassuring song. It
begins immediately - no prelude, no intro of any kind, predicating the
instant-fix formula of most of today's hits - and to what end? He goes
out most nights (why? Isn't there a "home" as such of which to speak?),
attracted by the lights. He goes to a pub to hear jazz and this pub may
be busier than or equally as deserted as the one in Deptford that Mark
Knopfler visited for "Sultans Of Swing"; the trad purists blowing (both
music and blowing away the cares of their day jobs) onstage, the
glam-rock leftovers in the bar sneering at them.
As
with "My Sentimental Friend" by Herman's Hermits (although writer John
Carter's demo cuts more cleanly to that song's emotional nub), Gordon is
waiting for a song to come on and spark off - well, something in
it that may well be love, or the suggestion of his potential for love.
He is a sentimental fool but possibly also a creep ("Makes me want to
fool around"). He strides up to someone with his hat down low and issues
the corniest of chat-up lines. He is almost certainly pissed, and maybe
as desperate as the George Michael of "Fastlove," the young gun who
didn't go for it and who is now middle-aged and wondering why his
routine doesn't work any more, suspecting that the world has moved on
and lefr him behind. Until you reach the point where he confesses "I
miss my baby." This is a bereaved man drowning in poured grief.
But
does Gordon's character even bother saying, or is capable of saying,
these corny words? He admits to always having struggled with the art of
conversation, and readily admits that others will regard the song which
gives him the spark with blank indifference or befuddled contempt - he
doesn't identify the song in question, but the implication has four
walls, meaning that Gordon understands that not everybody is going to
get how wonderful "How Wonderful You Are" is. This song's itchingly
perfect grammar and Hazlittian formality ("those for whom," "that it
illustrates") indicate the portrait of an intelligent person who
experiences regular difficulties transposing his inner articulation into
outward communication. He's seen it all in "Harry's Bar" (presumably
not the one in Venice); things happening fast, others built to last, and
the two may be interchangeable.
Yet
Gordon's man is confident that "this show will run and run" and that
things have "only just begun" - Al Bowlly could have crooned these words
seven decades earlier - although one is never sure how many times a
week or night this happens. "How Wonderful You Are" examines a condition
of emotional disrepair yet helped repair many emotions in late 2001
Britain. It made number two in the Christmas chart and so, the following month, did Harry's Bar, a compilation of songs from Look Out
and its two predecessors. Since Haskell continued to refuse taking bullshit, however, such success never came his way again, but by the
time he too died of cancer in October 2020, aged seventy-four, I'm
certain he was securely glad about himself.
The song helped remind me that there still existed an outside world.
![World Of Twist – Sons Of The Stage – Vinyl (12", 45 RPM, Stereo), 1991 [r12690962] | Discogs](https://i.discogs.com/aMMBZ5t6MtC-C_6rauYUF3Uhjp_ofrV1LK18iqJD6O0/rs:fit/g:sm/q:40/h:300/w:300/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTEyNjkw/OTYyLTE1NDAxMjk3/ODctOTQxMC5qcGVn.jpeg)
