CHAPTER 25

 

 

#76: MATT BERRY

"Are You Being Served?"

from the album Television Themes

Released: October 2018

This is a substitute track, substituting for a time when I prefer to imagine I was properly and completely looked after with nothing to fear, isn't that a tautological cliché, shut up and get on with it. The real work was co-composed and directed by Ronnie Hazlehurst and to me it still sounds like a snatched-away future, an awkward twelve-bar cha-cha with a cash register for percussion, a comforting pair of slippers of a unison horn section (closely-voiced flügelhorn and alto sax), and a jet stream of a Korg string synthesiser indicating another and hopefully better century.

 

 

Over the flight path spires of tomorrow, or was it 1963, we hear a happy female voice engaged in subtle harmonic Sprechgesang, reading out all the departments on each floor of the store. There are only three stories - no basement? - but the ludicrous optimism of the music suggests there might be three thousand. Going up, and never looking down.

That was the future once upon a time and that dreamable feature was half a century ago. Of all the leading actors and actresses who appeared in the series over its thirteen years, only one - the former pre-Beatles sixties pop star Mike Berry - now survives. Everybody else got old and/or ill and died. That future was snatched from us. Snatched.

I don't suppose Matt Berry (not, I think, a relation)'s rendition of the show's theme was ever intended to be more than an amusing variant, but it is in circulation, unlike the Hazlehurst (and David Croft) original which remains under BBC lock and key in all its forty-five perfect seconds. Matt Berry's version extends to two minutes and twenty-two seconds and there is some extemporising (mainly with the bass guitar). It is in a different key to the original and the voice which reads out the information doesn't quite gel with the music. In addition the rhythm underlines the original cash register undertow a little too squarely.

 

Yet there remains this dim light of the future, perhaps related to one of the many lucid dreams which I experienced while a long-term hospital inpatient during the spring and summer of 2018. I was on this huge aeroplane. It was 1963. We were slowly coming in to land. Brisk, bright light orchestral music issued from the speakers. Placid stewardess announcements, the wording of which I cannot now precisely recall.

It looked as though we were actually flying in from space. We permeated the Earth's atmosphere. So many houses, built so high up, higher than Everest but it was only Birmingham. Art deco blocks of flats so high above the ground that they were permanently snowed in. I wondered how the Earth could possibly support so much elevated architecture.

We moved closer towards a recognisable city, or at least airport (perhaps Heathrow). The sun was rising, the sky was pink and hopeful, the view beneath me clear and invigorating. Everything was attainable, let alone possible. All the passengers looked forward to the prospect of forward.

 

 

I looked up the composers of the airborne music on a database provided with the DVD box set*. Two women, born in 1910 and 1913 respectively, both apparently still alive in 2018.

I will be getting back to those pellucid dreams.

 

 

*What DVD box set? Oh, the one of the imaginary film for television that I dreamed in 2018... 

CHAPTER 24

 

 

#77: STEWART COPELAND & STAN RIDGWAY:

"Don't Box Me In"

from the album Rumble Fish (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Released: November 1983

 

 

Was it really that long ago? I had it in my head that this was early '85. But no, it comes from that weirdly snowy liminal period over winter '83-4 where nothing was really settled and most unattributed pop records were...foreboding.

Naturally it would make complete sense for this to seep from the back door of Synchronicity. Hadn't Copeland semi-joked that they should kick Sting out of the band and replace him with the guy from Wall Of Voodoo? This is how such a mongrelisation would sound and it certainly remains considerably more bearable than "King Of Pain" if less superficially explicable. The song, as such, plays out over the closing credits of Rumble Fish, just after Matt Dillon is eyeing the Pacific and experiencing the glorious post-nothingness that evaded the Motorcycle Boy. It is basically the Police but with pop's Martian Jimmy Stewart on vocals and oblique harmonica. It disturbs, it irrupts, why is it here?

 

 

CHAPTER 23

 

 

#78: CHARLES MINGUS

"Hobo Ho"

from the album Let My Children Hear Music

Released: February 1972

 

There is little jazz to be found in My Top Tunes 2022, which is a grievous misrepresentation of my general listening habits. Perhaps it's just that when I'm doing other things or idly listening to something online I tend towards short, direct hits. Or else the jazz I want isn't on Spotify and I have to go to YouTube or Bandcamp to find it, or more likely to the jazz CDs we already have anyway, many of which are not adequately represented or replicated online, which in turn is why we have to hang onto them. As I write this, I'm approaching my sixties and we need to reclaim the physical space that music has occupied for perhaps too long a time.

 

 

But that merciless culling mentality does not extend to our jazz section. Frequently I despair about the way music is going, like anybody's notion of Derek Dull, and proclaim that's it; let's lose everything except the jazz, which was my first musical love and likely to prove my last (respectful bow to the shade of the late John Miles). It seems to be the only music that persists in coming through when all other forms fail for whatever reason. Then I'm reminded of Miles Davis' particular peccadilloes and where does one stop?

 

 

So it's curious that the only two pieces of jazz music on the playlist, and therefore in this book, are in extremely close proximity to each other and on the same album. This of course can in part be attributed to algorithmic quirks - the previous consecutive trio of fifties chart-toppers derive from their usage in a playlist I entitled Platinum Jubilee Number Ones - but I don't know what it says or suggests about my life beyond that.

 

 

Anyhow, "Hobo Ho," a locomotive of a piece which I first heard Peter Clayton playing on Jazz Record Requests. My father abhorred it and I secretly loved it (being open about one's preferences in my teenage years was, to put it exceptionally mildly, inadvisable). Of course its parent album was out of print despite only having been released five years previously. I searched for it in vain until I found a copy which cost nothing, exactly when I wasn't looking for it (that is always how these things turn out).

 

 

"Hobo Ho" is an artful studio reconstruction, or recutting, of something that was allegedly so complex that Mingus' musicians couldn't get through it in one take. Hence it was down to Teo Macero to manipulate the tapes, re-edit, repeat key sections etc., much as he had done with Davis in then-recent years. Records were records, rather than documented performances - as Mingus well knew, since he had used the same tactics on Black Saint And The Sinner Lady nine years previously. 

So the piece is artificial in execution, but beautiful in gut. Mingus' bass riff sets the thing up, and then James Moody's tenor saxophone comes in to play the bluesy melody. But sheets of low woodwind and ascending brass then blow in like an incipient tornado, topped by Kenton-esque trumpet squeals - the vendor will never sell any peanuts in this weather - not all of which are tonal. The choreography here is magnificent - solo bass riffs answered by sudden jump-backs from the trumpets (we are definitely in a holy roller of a church assembly) and I wish someone would still conceive a ballet to it - I'd say there's quite a bit of Bernstein in here, but then again there was an awful lot of Mingus in the West Side Story overture.

Like a swinging Sisyphus, Moody's riff recurs over and over, eventually joined by other, initially isolated voices - a gruff tuba (or tubas - Howard Johnson and/or Bob Stewart and/or Jack Jeffers?), an insistent low-end piano (Sir Roland Hanna), and a couple of jousting trumpets offering their obbligati (Joe Wilder is the only credited trumpet soloist here, but Lonnie Hillyer may be the second trumpeter we hear, or it may even be two multitracked Wilders).

Then the flood of horns and brass pours in, overlapping, disorientating, as Moody does his best to ride the surf. Indeed there wasfor several years some question about exactly who the featured tenorist was on "Hobo Ho"; originally it was insisted that Bobby Jones was the soloist, but Jones himself said that it was James Moody, brought in for an unavailable Illinois Jacquet - hence in the middle straight swing section, which comes as a marvellous relief following several minutes of teeth-grinding tension, the orchestra plays a transcription of the "Moody's Mood For Love" solo rather than the "Flying Home" solo which had originally been planned. Baritone (or baritones - Joe Temperley himself told me that he played on the piece, but Danny Bank may also have been present) snarl(s) like alligators.

Everything keeps building up and up, and Moody does well to retain his unflappable countenance, even when the piece is interrupted by the repeated train-stuck-at-red-light slow dance section. It is this side of chaos and that side of maximalist minimalism. It never quite veers out of control, and as the final fade confirms, it could theoretically run for ever. It was absolutely unreproducible in a real-life situation, as absolutist in its staring-you-down way as George Martin's more ambitious Beatle adventures. "Hobo Ho" lurks just beyond quite a lot of things. Adjacent to its unlikely contemporary, Davis' On The Corner, and maybe that was the point.

CHAPTER 22

 

 

#79: THE KORGIS

"Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime (Alternate Version)"

from the album Dumb Waiters

Released: July 1980

 

 

It's one of the saddest residual feelings that ever can be, that moment in late May or early June when the prizes have been given out and school is officially over for the summer. If you were me you went over the street from the school, downhill to the railway station and boarded the train for Glasgow. In your seat you'd watch Kylepark, the dividing river, everything you'd ever known, gradually vanishing, and it was hard to contemplate the prospect of being away from your friends - your orientation - for the best part of three months; at least, those you presumed to be your friends.

 

 

I recall a very specific spell of melancholy in the summer of 1978, end of my third year, around the time school stopped being fun and changed into preparation for the workplace, when everybody started to take this lark seriously. Retreating from the village, the song "Many Too Many" by Genesis, then a not very successful single (but a better and subtler song than the big hit from that album, "Follow You Follow Me"), came into my mind and rendered me sad. I had the feeling - a very accurate one, as it turned out - that the peers I'd see again in August wouldn't be the same people I'd known in May. They'd look and sound the same, but in every other important way they'd be different.

How would that feel if you knew you were doing it for the very last time, leaving absolutely everything and everybody behind? It felt like the melancholy articulated by James Warren in what was intended to be a musical examination of zen philosophy, ways of making oneself a better human, but which to my sixteen-year-old heart played like the saddest break-up song I'd ever heard. Warren sings "change your heart" like there were no hearts left to be changed. There is simply this lush emptiness, filled partly with string synthesisers, a guzheng refrain and solo violin, as though everything had...gone, but departed beautifully. There is also this rhetorical pause after the guitar lick at the end of the final chorus - does the singer have anything else to say?

He does not, and the shoulder-shrug/there's-nothing-else-to-be-said pause is heartbreaking. The string synthesiser wells up like a reasonably-sized hug. I prefer the alternative take which, rather than repeat the one verse twice, gives us a whole new second verse, bearing the world-wrecking sigh of "You know, we live such lives." Let it all come down. All of my heart. There is no going back. Everybody who heard the song felt it before they liked it.

 

 

And my suspicions proved correct. When my father died in July 1981, eleven days past his fiftieth birthday, none of my alleged former school friends got in touch. None of them appeared at his funeral or wake. The truth was clear. They had never really been my friends. They just tolerated me. They secretly hated me. They left me behind, or I them. I had been scrubbed out of their collective memory. I haven't learned to forget or forgive that at any time.

CHAPTER 21

 

 

#80: PUBLIC ENEMY

 

"Fight The Power"

 

from the album Do The Right Thing: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

 

Released: June 1989

 

 

You had to be in the audience at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton in the summer of 1989, one sweaty early evening Friday, the house packed, to get it. The opening titles, with Rosie Perez dancing and shadowboxing in the tenement window. played the song LOUD. Not "loudly" because this wasn't Merchant and Ivory. But played fucking LOUD.

EVERYBODY was up out of their seat, dancing, yelling, shrieking, clapping. The track burned through accepted 1989 like the devil's razor. For the next two hours, people didn't just watch the movie. They argued with it, there were heated and imperfectly audible debates in the stalls. The dynamics generated by the film's deliberately contradictory polemics radiated into the movie theatre, and the audience's words fed back into the celluloid. In the end they depended upon each other, and those arguments, that underlying celebration, ought to have reminded us that this is how an audience should handle a piece of art. It goes back to Shakespeare at the Globe with his last-second rewrites, audience hectoring leading to improvisatory speculations and even Choose Your Own Denouement. It wasn't about sensible jerseys hovering over their inedible ice cream tubs, solemnly and patronisingly nodding.

"Fight The Power" mattered in 1989 like no other song of that year mattered, largely because it went so purposively and boldly against the fabric of what was reluctantly understood to constitute pop music. For a proper grasp of its renewed shock, you need to hear it in the context of the soundtrack album, complete with the opening Take 6 radio jingle - get ready to assemble, troops - and closing harmolodic Branford Marsalis self-duet. While Marsalis didn't intend his solo to be anything approaching harmolodics, Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad had other ideas; like Ornette, they wanted Public Enemy's music to be about a feeling as opposed to harmonic coherence. Like "Revolution 9" all these factors - all twenty-one records sampled, anyway - fly across the ears and land in the cortex. It doesn't' matter if they're tidy or structurally congruent.

Did it matter to Elvis, who never meant shit to Public Enemy? The point is, like awopbopaloobop or ying-tong-iddle-i-po it is just THERE, it comes at you and is fun, inspires you to get up and act. The track's factors pile up, deliberately disparate, with the consequence that you have to immerse yourself in the act of glorious revolt or take up croquet. Public Enemy were not making music to be your friends. I saw them at Hammersmith Odeon on 1 November 1987 - the concert sampled on Nation Of Millions, which means I'm technically on the record - and it was while flying over Italy en route to the European wing of the Def Jam Tour that Chuck D had the idea of updating the Isley Brothers (in 1975, their "Fight The Power" was played, in its radio-friendly edit, on Luxembourg and not at all on the BBC apart from Paul Gambaccini's American chart countdown).

The revolution is upon us and who gives a fuck if you get it, or are offended, or neither? The track's mere existence represents an insurrection in itself. How fitting it should appear on, of all labels, Motown. THAT'S what was going on in 1989. "I Shot The Sheriff" - Wailers original rather than Clapton, I think - appears as a "the fact that" punctuation mark throughout. Hey, Britain, why was there no hip hop on your corporate wall? Like Coltrane's Ascension, proceed into the church and worship. Those who don't get "Fight The Power" were never meant to do so - in any sense.

CHAPTER 20

 

 

 

#81: DENIECE WILLIAMS

"Free"

from the album This Is Niecy

Released: August 1976

 

Whilst on the subject of the Glasgow of my mid-seventies youth, I should iterate that this was not the grim, two-dimensional one which was its outward appearance for most of that period, but the sunny Saturday morning/school holidays Glasgow. The type of Glasgow where you could stand at the corner of Sauchiehall Street, looking downhill into the cascading Georgian terraces leading to Central Station, or walk the imposing uphill route from St Vincent Street through West Nile Street, heading towards a road to nowhere, or to the Mitchell Library, and imagine you were in Rome or New York. A smoke-laden Glasgow; not the crass fumes of cigarettes, but of rolled pipe tobacco, a scholarly, meaningful scent.

The music I'd associate with those visions was that unique strand of, shall we say, pacific soul; not the upmarket hustle of Philly, but the cool, long-held gazes of things like Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness," Smokey Robinson's "A Quiet Storm" and Earth, Wind and Fire's "That's The Way Of The World." Part of this was no doubt due to imagining that I was Pacino as Serpico, hurtling hairily but placidly through streets of stoned sun (and the International Herald Tribune; I neglected to mention my daily consumption of that newspaper - ah, even the smell of that paper, its inherent authority, the feeling that in those pre-internet days you were connecting with the world by just holding a copy in your palm).

Earth, Wind and Fire's principal member Maurice White makes a good segue point, as he began his career (when not depping for Roger Blank in the Sun Ra Arkestra) as a studio drummer for Chess Records in the mid-late sixties. There he encountered the writer, producer and arranger Charles Stepney, a name less celebrated than those of Gamble and Huff, or Whitfield, but a man equally eager to lead soul music into a new and vaguely opulent dawn. More than equal; the man was a fucking genius.

 

 

Stepney was responsible for some of the most sublime musical art of the 1966-76 ear; he oversaw and co-wrote for Minnie Riperton's early group Rotary Connection (an avant-garde Fifth Dimension) as well as orchestrating their still astonishing reworkings of songs like "Respect," "Sunshine of Your Love" and the Stones' "Salt Of The Earth," and also provided the ideal framework for such visionaries as Marlene Shaw and Terry Callier to produce their most committed work. There were also The Dells, The Ramsey Lewis Trio and Billy Stewart. I WILL GO ON.

Stepney was another one of those who did not survive 1976 - he died in May of that year, aged merely forty-five - and one of his last works, in collaboration with White, was "Free," tailored for the then 25-year-old ex-Stevie Wonder backing singer Deniece Williams - ironically, "Free" went on to keep Wonder's own "Sir Duke" at number two in the UK. So the record is an elegy, of sorts, and though Williams seems already to be singing as a ghost for Riperton - the latter was still recording, but the breast cancer had already been diagnosed - the record sums up all that was warm and good about the best soul music of this period; the comforting conduit of bubble from the low-pitched electric piano, the distant but stalwart horns, the cloud-like non-motion of the song's central harmonics - every element flows into each other, like rum into blackcurrant.

Williams' voice doesn't soar quite as high as Riperton's, but her performance is radiant, albeit slightly impassive. Her expansive tributes to the power of good union ("Whispering in his ear/My magic potion for love," "Teasing hands, all his might/Give our nights such mystery") cleverly mask the fact that "Free" is a song about not wanting to be in love, turning away from commitment; thus "But I want to be free, free, free" is a plea for extrication, and the aura of impermanence is discreetly underlined by the couplet, "Let's not waste ecstasy/'Cos I'll only be here for awhile." As, regrettably, are we all. Billy MacKenzie, who gazed at the song under the British Electric Foundation's 1990 remit (Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 2) realised that more and sooner than most. Dundee in the blackberried haze.

 

 

Alternatively it is an early Tuesday morning in early May 1977 which I seem to remember with fairly startling clarity. It was mid-spring and the day promised to be sunny and lovely. It was nearly the end of the school year; we had sat our exams and were now permitted to loosen up a little. We could come to school out of uniform. I wore a red Adidas T-shirt with white piping at the neck and short sleeves, as did most boys in my year at that time. I came out of the house - that is, the flat - early that Tuesday morning, before most of the shops on Uddingston Main Street had opened, so there was this eerily splendid aura of space, light and freedom. We were all rehearsing for the end-of-term House Shows and plays (I only participated in the latter). But I think of that sense of freedom, light and space and wish, as my friend in Cornwall C.F. recently expressed it, that I were that age again, feeling immortal with the future still all in front of me. Later that day, "Free" climbed to number one, and that was how I felt.

CHAPTER 19

 

 

#82: CHARLES MINGUS

"The Chill Of Death"

from the album Let My Children Hear Music

Released: February 1972

 

 

A hornet's nest of bowed double basses buzz with barely suppressed anger as though you'd just stepped on it accidentally. Then the Richard Strauss touches - the timpani, low brass, high woodwind, harp as pulse, though Bernhard Kaun's Frankenstein theme also comes to immediate mind - before a deep, weary voice resembling an aged and bruised Isaac Hayes tells a midnight story.

Actually the voice tells the same story as had been told throughout the whole history of the blues - since this is basically a blues piece - the story of the devil woman there to end the man's life and make sure he pays for his lifelong transgressions, killing him with her embrace. We knew that anti-philosophy was always fundamentally wrongheaded, but the best blues performers, whether shouters or whisperers, can momentarily engage a deep emotional connection with the most wishful of listeners.

As the piece progresses, the voice way upfront and the large orchestra seemingly two blocks away, you can get the feeling that maybe he's enjoying this death thing. He's already scheming, looking forward to claiming the gold on that assumed pathway to Heaven. As if he'd ever imagined they'd ever let him in.

Of course the gold vapourises and he realises that he's been entombed in an inescapable Hell. One step was always too far beyond reason. But he sounds resigned to his fate, and even grateful for it. As though Hell was actually all he had ever wanted.

One sustained organ note and the piece is then repeated but with the speaker having metamorphosed into a saxophonist, already behind the barriers, unreachable and incomprehensible, but you can still sense the underlying emotion. Can't you? Help me, let me out, or, come on in, the heat is on?

* * * * * *

 

In late seventies Glasgow I was in the habit of picking up jazz albums from the discount bins or bargain basements of record shops and sometimes supermarkets, department stores and even newsagents, since these were the only places you'd find jazz albums in late seventies Glasgow. The ones you wanted, anyway. Well, some of them. The rest were located in mysterious shops in London, and initial mail order satisfaction blossomed into an urge to escape.

You'd hear Peter Clayton play these astounding things on his Jazz Record Requests show on Radio 3 at Saturday teatime, and there was Charles Fox to spin the new stuff on his Jazz Today programme on the same station, teatime on Tuesday. For the latter I used to rush off home early from our weekly school Debating Society meeting, much to the vocal disgruntlement of my classmates. But how to get those records? Many were already swiftly out of print, hence the habitual rummaging through what was then by far the least fashionable form of music because then you'd most likely find them retailing for next to nothing.

On one of those rummages I encountered Let My Children Hear Music, a then-recent relic of a brief era where somebody in Columbia Records thought that jazz might be going somewhere profitable, hence the signings of Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Charles Mingus, among others. But while the post-Bitches Brew glee club of Milesian musicians - not just Miles himself but also Hancock, Mahavishnu, Weather Report and Cobham - profited comparatively enormously, the knottier types didn't, and were quickly offloaded.

I've never been quite sure what to make of Let My Children Hear Music, despite having listened to it a thousand times. Mingus thought it his best record but he said that about nearly all his records, at the time they came out. A quasi-orchestral remodelling of previously rehearsed and abandoned pieces, dating from 1939 through the sixties, several outside arrangers were engaged and may even have helped write some of the music. Moreover, a combination of contractual obligations and sloppy bookkeeping meant that we can never quite be sure who exactly is playing on what. We know that the record was based around Mingus' working small group of the period - Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones saxophones, Lonnie Hillyer trumpet, Roland Hanna and/or John Foster piano, the ever-imperturbable Dannie Richmond drums - with the enhancement of most of New York's top session players (and a few others get solo credits on the album sleeve).

But it's also true that, as compelling as this music is, the experience is like Mingus once removed; he is there, in the studio, on his bass, but others are doing most of the work for him, as though he were the main guest at his own memorial. We're hearing his music through a filter. "The Chill Of Death" was apparently written back in 1939 - I'm not sure whether he means the poem and/or the music - and to wait until one is nearly fifty before it could be performed and recorded would be enough to make anybody resentful.

Nonetheless, Mingus addresses the high school poetics with grave vim - at times ("if not, I'd have the gold") akin to Orson Welles (I guess one admirably stubborn Taurean recognises the other). After the lone(ly) organ note (probably played by Patti Bown), the piece goes into looped syndicate with an alto saxophone which hints at an uncredited Ornette but its more settled sense of key awareness probably points to the player being producer Teo Macero, who played alto in Mingus' Jazz Workshop of the early fifties. He too is left alone at the chasm of a climax, speaking more to Dolphy than to Bird.

CHAPTER 18

 

 

#83: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

"Killing In The Name"

from the album Rage Against The Machine

Released: November 1992

 

 

If this allegedly devalued world has told us anything, it is that people respond most quickly and deeply to slogans. Repeat the same thing over and over, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. The point is that it has been expressed, not suppressed.

This song creeps like an expectant panther. I wouldn't recommend trying it on any dancefloor - too slow, then too free, then the brain's senses get clouded and people get fatally confused. It doesn't fit square into anything, hence its efficacy at repelling squares. Its tempi follow the emotional pattern of the song; they change as often and as naturally as those of another Columbia recording artist, Laura Nyro.

What they are saying on this song, though, is pretty much "Save The Country," a nation being gladly or glumly beaten back a century and a half. Those who work forces also burn crosses with equal fervidness. The backward guard of the robber barons who recede back into the time of Brown and Lincoln remain as stolidly and violently reactionary as they are salaried to be. MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN is what they crave, or savour, and too bad for any Rodney King who happens to suggest otherwise.

 

 

The song was a direct response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and knew that the only way it was going to make any impact was to hammer its slogans to something approaching emotional home. The singer howls and hisses the song because what did you expect him to do, croon it over the reassuring backdrop of some incredible high school marching bands? The solo - what is that? A guitar? A synthesiser? Nothing you could hitherto pinpoint? Exactly.

 

 

The reaction, the only workable reaction to a dead anti-culture poised to kill everything you and I were taught to believe while we were growing up, which determinedly fails to differentiate between life and existence, which would regress civilisation into an everlasting medieval feudalism with lords who think that everybody else should be serfs, that having been the default setting of human society since forever, with democracy an accidental and momentary blip, is to refuse, and to refuse loudly. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. The singer final, extended shriek of "MOTHER-FUCK-ER!!" is a moment of exultant triumph, as though he knows that we have already won. Then the song tangos to a halt because it's made its point, abruptly and lengthfully. The social contract is smash, smash, smashed. Cornelius Cardew would have thought Rage Against The Machine impossibly vulgar and naïve. But the ancestry of lies and deception have been thought through, and transcended.

 

 

Or so it was hoped. An online campaign hoisted the song to number one in the U.K. at Christmas 2009. Victory. The following week Joe McElderry climbed to the top as though nothing had happened. The song was chanted by Trump supporters following the 2020 Presidential election. You tied one set of door knockers to another for a week then went back to school. But it's like Eric Dolphy said; you send those notes out into the air, it's up to us to make what we will of them. Los Angeles, home of punk rock. Where else could it have started?

 

CHAPTER 17

 

 

#84: LONNIE DONEGAN AND HIS SKIFFLE GROUP

"Gamblin' Man"

From the 78 rpm disc "Gamblin' Man/Puttin' On The Style"

Released: August 1957

 

 

The man is at the end of his tether. He has gambled everywhere he's been, which is pretty much everywhere. But he's run out of luck. Maybe he tried gaming the saloons and was lucky to escape with his limbs and life intact when caught out.

 

But then he meets this woman in Washington and she wants in, even though she, and more vocally her mother, know exactly what type of man he is. She doesn't care. She's attracted to the transient glamour. Farmers spend too much time in the rain, never wear a gold watch and chain. Train drivers? They always lie. The gambler's mien may be bullshit, but she appreciates and is attracted by it; see Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann in the film La baie des anges. It is an adventure and, whatever becomes of her and her gambler, will never, ever be boring, which is what life should be constructed to avoid.

 

The singer begins his song rubato, patiently outlining his own impending doom, mourning his messed-up self. But there's a light at the end of this tunnel and it isn't the Rock Island Line train coming to mow him down. His voice moves from austere to enthused, the fast tempo comes into view, life is being restored to him with those expectant finger snaps and the excited, Christmas morning whisper of "many more weeks than three."

 

The song picks up like the most efficiently insolent of express trains. One by one the cancellation options present themselves only to be briskly ironed out of existence by the music's growing stampede - the accelerating snare drum, backing vocals that side of androgyny. The song's pace just keeps on gathering until the ecstasy of tongues transmutates into ejaculatory babble "HEY JIMMY!" roars the Glaswegian barely buried beneath the singer's smart suit and Cockney tones, and lead guitar, bass and drums form a battering ram ("HOW-A-BOUT-THAAAAAT?").

 

The piledriving increases until practically all that is left is practised incoherence. This song is erupting beyond the boundaries of politesse. There are no barriers left; the two of them have broken them all down. Little is now readily comprehensible in the song, with everyone rushing to batter down that wall of restraint and reason, other than a suddenly clear "STRAIGHT IN EVERY NERVE," as straight down the middle as Bing Crosby's golfing technique.

 

They have gotten away with it, these two, and are gloriously happy. The climactic "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN" gives birth to the future, and the musicians joyfully collide with this dimension before collapsing and reassembling in others. They will gamble, and therefore live, forever, and the audience you didn't hear before are firmly behind them. They cannot, and will not, die. They have won.

 

In childhood I didn't know Lonnie Donegan as anything other than a comedic light entertainer who came on peaktime or children's television to sing comic songs about dustmen and chewing gum. It wasn't until later that I realised what skiffle had been, and how immense an irruption into the achingly chuckling world of Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine it proved. In 1957 his music must have felt like it was detonating the residue of war memorial clinging.

 

"Gamblin' Man" was a modified arrangement of a folk song by Woody Guthrie and was half of a double-sided disc recorded live at the London Palladium - at the heart of the fortress of reaction. The other side was a vaudevillian ditty called "Puttin' On The Style" which made affectionate fun of Kids These Days and perhaps outlined the path Donegan would eventually take. In fairness it probably got the bulk of radio airplay. But anyone who bought it would be faced with the Rosicrucian apocalypse of "Gamblin' Man" on the other side.

 

Although the record carries production credits for Alan A Freeman (an Australian producer, not to be confused with the Australian disc jockey Alan "Fluff" Freeman) and Michael Barclay, the real recording work was done by a rabid young engineer, sitting in the audience, crouching down over his equipment and watching dazed as the volume pointers stayed firmly in the red. So the sound is alternately focused and fuzzed. The young engineer's name was Joe Meek, someone who was already always there when something different needed doing.

 

And this record, this performance, was definitively and defyingly different. That final "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN," bleated like a newly-born lamb by a Glaswegian man who in hindsight looks like the father of Billy Bragg, gives birth to the voice of John Lydon, to the end of reserve. The lead guitarist was Jimmy Currie. The breathless backing vocals were by household middle-of-the-middle-of-the-road duo Miki and Griff. The whole experience is as if Donegan had decided to yell "I DOUBLE DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING BRITAIN TO POP!" Pop as in, to protect other people, as well as to burst, or shine.

CHAPTER 16

 

 

#85: AL MARTINO

"Here In My Heart"

from the 78 rpm disc "Here In My Heart"

Released: April 1952

 

 

My mother spent most of the Second World War being held prisoner, along with most of her family, by the Germans in their own home in Filigano, Italy, just over the hill from Monte Cassino. Specifically, they were kept in one room of their own home by the German army. Her family farmed, and their crops were burned and their cattle slaughtered. For fully four years, from 1941-45, they were more or less kept at gunpoint. That was my mother's youth. She saw far, far worse things than you or I are ever likely to see. Her family were finally liberated by, firstly, the Canadian army, then the U.S. Army. The soldiers in the frontline were largely Black, and were the kindest to my mother's family. Then came the British army. Still regarded as the enemy, the English were on the point of executing the entire family, but then the Scottish soldiers came through and prevailed; they offered the family food, drink and clothing, among other things.

 

This would in itself explain why, in the ruined post-war Italy, so many of its citizens would flee the counrry for Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, rather than England; the Scots were nicer to them, treated them as equals.

 

My mother came to Britain in February 1953, two months past her twentieth birthday. One of her uncles had gone ahead of her to Glasgow and sent for her. He gave her a job as an assistant in an Italian café situated near the Botanic Gardens, and therefore close to Glasgow University. In 1956 my father would walk into that café and start talking with her about things Italian.

 

Despite arriving in this country without knowing a word of English, my mother was very quick to pick up the language, albeit filtered via the Glaswegian dialect, and soon felt at home in a city which to a great extent was a Little Italy in itself. The decade she found fun and lively.

 

She loved cinema and especially music. She had brought over with her a few ten-inch Italian 78s of popular ballads, her favourite being Luciano Tajoli’s 1941 reading of “Mamma Son Tanto Felice" (the song would subsequently be anglicised to "Mama" and prove a huge hit for Connie Francis). There was little, really, in Glasgow other than a wind-up gramophone but that, at the time, was enough for my mother, and the first record she purchased in this country, once she had saved up some of her wages, was the 78 of "Here In My Heart" by Al Martino.

 

"Here In My Heart" was also number one in the first nine British singles charts, which the NME's Percy Dickins had initiated in the week ending 14 November 1952. In those early days the chart was compiled from a relatively limited number of retailers, perhaps fifty in total, mainly in London and the South of England with a few northerly outliers. The record was far bigger here than in the U.S.A., largely because in Britain it was issued on Capitol, as opposed to the small Philadelphia independent label BBS. Martino had recorded it after his fellow Philadelphian Mario Lanza had passed on it, or passed it onto Martino at the latter's pleading request, depending upon which account you read.

 

Had our charts begun earlier, there is little doubt that "Here In My Heart"'s run at the top would have gone into double figures. As it is, the record certainly sounds, from Monty Kelly's arrangement on downwards, as though it wanted something big to happen, and as an introductory fanfare it did its job with pointed efficacy. Martino sings as though for his life, boisterous and soft in all the right places, offering his self, not merely his love or his heart but his very essence, to the person he loves. Trust in me, he seems to say, and I will promise you the greatest and most wonderful of adventures. Such a welcoming building block. Moreover, he bends away from the unreachable (even by Lanza, who also had a familial connection with Filignano and visited the village on at least one occasion during the fifties) final high note simply to prove that he is human like the rest of us, willing to settle for the nearest thing to perfection rather than perfection itself. In that way "Here In My Heart" is comparable to the opening and final chords of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

 

As far as my mother was concerned, the song also served as a gate of welcome to a new world and a new life. Perhaps it explains my own primitive attachment to the pop charts, which were likewise brightly awaiting me in my extreme infancy. This is where so many stories started. Now I simply have to find a way to finish it.