Willie Nelson – Heroes

Rollin' and Smokin' With Ol' Willie

Another aural treadmill traverse tonight, this time striding with the quintessential Country rhythms of Willie Nelson’s recent, glorious album Heroes. At 79, Willie is still crooning out the most sublime songs with a little bit of outlaw sensibility here and there [Roll Me Up] and with classic Country melody. Synonym son Lukas offers support throughout – and it is a more dynamic duo than when Willie supports on his boy’s albums – and there is further help provided by the likes of Merle Haggard, Snoop Dog [with smoking proclivities rather than any Country affiliations], Kris Kristofferson, Jamey Johnson, Sheryl Crow, Ray Price and others.

Opener A Horse Called Music is a gorgeous cowboy lament with Merle Haggard, and next Roll Me Up [and smoke me before I die] keeps the proceedings lively and irreverent. There is a clutch of beautiful lovelorn songs, like third That’s All There Is To The Song. Fourth No Place To Fly is another painful love confession and the father/son singing of the Nelsons resonates with the varying experience of loss and how to tug us along with the sorryful narrative. This is followed by the two again on Every Time He Drinks He Thinks of Her [but every morning her memory fades away], so more from the heartache of such familiar themes.

Sixth track Tom Wait’s Come On Up To The House, sung as a superb Country gospel, sees Crow providing emotive female vocal support, and it might have been endorphins aroused by the brisk walking [my back is too fucked to run anymore] but I had goose bumps listening to this on full volume to drown out the treadmill’s noisy swirl. Pearl Jam’s Just Breathe sits more comfortably within this whole album than on its own, but I struggle with the cover of Coldplay’s The Scientist, but that is largely down to my antipathy to their latter work. But with lines like Come on back Jesus and pick up John Wayne on the way from Come On Back Jesus, the Country ideology is, thankfully, the predominant feature of this wonderful album.

Joe Bonamassa - Driving Towards the Daylight

Briefly Examining the Blues

Exam work has been demanding and listening to music has been constrained, or more correctly has been restricted to the radio. But I listened today to most of Bonamassa's 13th album release Driving Towards the Daylight on an early evening treadmill escape from online standardising, moderating wayward marking, phone calls to guide and support, listening to scripts being read aloud, and pursuing my own prime marking load.

It's another great album from a great artist. His superb guitar work is surely beyond question. I used to enjoy his Planet Rock radio programme where he talked knowingly about the influence on his playing of other great guitarists and how he would always illustrate by playing perfectly in the style of his then focus. He possesses the true artist's gifts of instinct and work ethic.

There isn't time to review the album and you should just make sure you listen to it if you like soaring rock blues. There are covers of Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson - hardly a surprise - but also Tom Waits. In mentioning his expert knack of fully knowing and emulating great guitar styles, Joe delivers a fine echoing tribute to Gary Moore with the ballad A Place In My Heart that so clearly takes Parisian Walkways as its emotive model.

Child of God - Cormac McCarthy

More Travels With Cormac

I’ve just started reading The Crossing, second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Those following this blog will know I started reading his work with No Country for Old Men, and then All The Pretty Horses. I have written about the wonderful, lengthy compound sentence structures he uses in that latter novel mentioned, and he continues with these in The Crossing.

I am writing now briefly about Child of God, his novella that I have just finished. In looking for a copy of a cover to post with this, I read that the book was written in 1974 [I hadn’t looked when I read!]. Shows how stupid I am: I perceived of him as a modern writer, in a recent time sense, not the literary one of which he clearly is ‘modern’. It must have been prompted by a sense of the recent movie of NCFOM, and The Road, which I haven’t yet read. And ATPH was written in 1992. It hadn’t struck me that he had started writing and was published in the sixties. And I have only really taken note of him this year. Astonishing.

Child of God is a brilliantly and at times beautifully written story of the disgusting and despicable Lester Ballard, a man-thing who roams and ruts and routs around the hill country of East Tennessee. I’m not sure that there is a classic tension in what we as readers feel about this nasty protagonist, who is never even an anti-hero, and who never seeks our forgiveness or understanding either consciously or otherwise. I don’t believe McCarthy does. Ballard’s isolation both socially and physically in the story isn’t compromised by any authorial hand-holding. You must read this to experience the degradation for yourselves. The only one of two palliatives I can offer is that there are moments of humour. But they don’t last long.

The other is the writing style. At times, this sickening story is expressed so poetically that this could provide the only chance of being serenaded to some kind of empathy, but it is never about a Macbeth who is given salvation and redemption though a heightened language. There are many styles too, from vivid description to first person vernacular by unidentified speakers. Near the end, the sheriff and his deputy think and express themselves as templates for the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men. Here, fairly randomly, are two poetic narrations: the first about fireworks –

High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky

 and the second, hounds attacking a boar –

Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done

There are countless more, some where the poetry is more lyrically in tune with the qualities being described, others even more antithetical in the grotesque juxtapositions of beautiful language and horrific events/situations. In this respect, there is schizophrenia in the reading, and I highly recommend the madness.

Joe Deninzon and Stratospheerius - The Next World

Se Ven Ties

Sev en ties / Se ven ties: three syllables, or three sounds – I suppose this makes it apt as a mantra. A music mantra. Music does not need to evoke the sound of the seventies to win my favour, but it can. Or invoke the sound of the seventies.

The violin as rock lead instrument is a seventies speciality, and I have addressed this elsewhere so will not return to details now. New York band Joe Deninzon and Stratospheerius has a lot of the seventies in its sound, not least the electrified violin of the band’s leader, but there is also bluegrass and folk – which is quite timeless – that dances around with the progressive and fusion layers. The violin Joe uses has seven strings: se ven / sev en.

Joe plays all the strings with virtuoso variation, and he sings. It is an excellent band and the album’s eleven tracks are all fine songs. Two great instrumental tracks are Ballad for Ding Bang and Road Rage, the first with melancholic moments that lead to an electric end, and the second plugged into the grid from the start. There is obviously a hint of Curved Air here and there, but that is an inevitable consequence of the precursor echo. There are many other progressive ricochets, as well as a tinge of West Coast in occasional harmonies. 7 out of Seven.

Seventies Again

BBC Sounds of the 70s 2

Another slice of seventies nostalgia on tonight's BBC Sounds of the 70s 2, and if you missed it, chase it down with a snorter or two on iplayer. A mainly live set of archive footage apart from the two mimed Top of the Pops selections that bookend this fine blast from the past:

Alice Cooper
The Faces
Nazareth
Bad Company
AC/DC
Thin Lizzy
Whitesnake
Black Sabbath

Monophonics - In Your Brain

Summer Soul Symmetry

Today was a suggestion of summer with the warmth and sun - sounds enough, but May's grey length has cast a long shadow of doubt - but other good shadows have been thrown by this energising light of hope for at least one more week of the same to remind us we don't live at one of the Poles, and Monophonics, who hail from the San Francisco Bay Area, cast their own sunny sense of something special, this time the psychedelic and sweet soul/funk of the seventies so that listening to their latest release In Your Brain does just that: gets inside the head and mixes sounds of old soul and summers gone to provide a template for tomorrow. There's A Riot Going On they sing and things are hotting up finally.

Robin Gibb

Sad to hear of the news of Robin Gibb's death.

I have always been a fan of the music of the Bee Gees, and Robin's songwriting partnership with brothers Barry and Maurice is a significant part of that, as well as in the major contribution to the world of popular music this represents. Those who follow this blog will know I have a considerable fondness for harmony and ballads, and all-time favourites of mine are,

Massachusetts
Words
I've Gotta Get a Message To You
I Started a Joke
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
How Deep Is Your Love

Robin's tremulous tenor/falsetto also made a massive contribution to the enduring quality of these great songs. Various commentators today have compared Robin and his brothers' songwriting partnership with Lennon and McCartney and I'll go along with that. Even the move to Disco, and to each their own.

Culinary Hit

Statistics

Taking a brief exam break, I think it is worth mentioning that my most 'popular' blog posting to date - if I am judging the number of site hits correctly [and it is simply noting the highest number next to a single posting as far as I can work out] - hasn't been one about music, which I could have reasonably hoped, or poetry, which would have been personally rewarding, but is instead my posting Taking The Biscuit. Whilst this mentions as a ruse the band Cracker, it is simply a reflection on American graham crackers and my discovery of their British equivalent, the digestive biscuit.

For breakfast this morning I had black pudding, fried egg and fried potatoes. Lunch will be fruit. Tonight I shall be eating a chicken curry.

Let's see what bites this gets.

State of Sass

Just listening to a greatest hits of Donna Summer. I was never a huge fan, but no one who likes music could ignore the impact and excellence of stunners like Love To Love You Baby, Could It Be Magic, and I Feel Love. Even more so State of Independance which has just played and I am now replaying with its rousing repetition of the anthemic melody. As she provided so much sexuality to synthesised sound, Summer is now surely singing in Sass Heaven. Amen.

Davis On Fornicating With Presidents

Not sure why this came up as a link on today's Guardian page [seems to be written in September 2011], but it did, and it is interesting, so here's a taster from that blog entry which one hopes is true

His explosive wit

Davis was a man of few words. When he did speak, his words often had a similar effect to a hand grenade being lobbed into the room. In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?"

And here's the link if you wish to read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/sep/28/miles-davis-20-years

I am heavily into exam work at the moment and thus my own blog entries have ceased. No one seems to be sobbing into their empty aweless moments, so I will be returning when I do.

Cracker – Kerosene Hat

Collectively Chameleon

And now for the album itself – not one of the greats for me – yet in the early 90s this had enough heaviness to become a part of the rock renaissance I have been writing about recently: but it is more punk than grunge, the opening three tracks, including single Low, leaning loosely to the former.

What really appealed was the title track, a languid narrative with one of those obtuse storylines that pulls you into its uncertain depths, the guitar lick providing a balladic rock anchor,

How can I fly with these old doggy wings

While the magpie sings some shiny song?

Old corn face, row of teeth

She says sweetly to me in the elevator

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

Here come old Kerosene Hat

With his ear flaps waxed, a-courting his girl

Come clattering in here on your old cloven skates

With that devilish spoon

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

When you're submarine

So don't you bother me, death

With your leathery ways and your old chaise lounge

Wickerman's fence of leathery tyres

And the cook's gone bad, started several fires

Everything seems like a dream

When you're submarine

Head like a stream, she says softly to me

From the rattling chair

"Bring me a steak and my old pair of crows

My medicine lamp"

Everything seems like a dream

So life's a scream

This is followed by another folkrock song Take Me Down To The Infirmary with more lyrical as well as musical echoes of the past, here sounding like the Stones, if only marginally. Sweet Potato has the most rock street cred on the album, again aping TRS, if only partially. I Want Everything is an internal echo of Take Me Down... and reminds of Tom Petty, whilst Lonesome Johnny Blues further establishes its 70s qualifications as a countryrock outing with fiddle and pedal steel cameos. The poles of this album are reflected in tracks eleven and twelve, respectively punk pace in Let’s Go For A Ride and storytelling ballad in Loser, and it is this chameleon collectivism from a past sound that attracted particularly at the time, and entertains though doesn’t grip and hold tight today.

The Fugs – the fugs final cd [part 1] - 2003

Poignant Yodel

Arrived today and now plays, more of the political [Government Surveillance Yodel] and puerile [Septuagenarian in Love], set to country-tinged harmonies or rock’n’roll parodies, there is ironic wisdom in the humour, for example this sage advice from a band whose core members Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg will have obliterated so many personal bridges in their irreverent lifetime,

Don’t burn a bridge that you’re standing on

Never try to sleep down a burning bank

Don’t try to cling upon a burning plank.

Context is everything, and when you know these lines actually follow

Oh isn’t it true that sometimes

the river is more beautiful

when the bridge is gone

you realise the satire is tinged with real regret as well as silliness. As these hippies rage in their old age the compromise is embraced in the song’s chorus

Mix prudence with my ashes;

Write caution on my urn,

While life foams and flashes,

Burn, bridges, burn.

It’s not an abnegation of the past but an awareness of the present where death is the biggest joke of all, and it is the banal and mundane that drives us to the grave as well as the bigger issues,

Please can I have my job back?

Burn, bridges, burn

I don’t want a divorce, after all

Burn, bridges, burn

I’d like a security clearance, please forget my past

Burn, bridges, burn

I’d like to rent the same apartment, I know I trashed it last year, but

Burn, bridges, burn

[Burn, Bridges, Burn]

And just when you might think The Fugs really have regressed to a primary concern for the domestic, they come up with an absolutely gorgeous song that reminds us of those bigger issues, and the ultimate purpose and power of the yodel,

It’s time to think

of ultimate things

-          yodel

what will happen to the soul?

what will happen to the soul?

[Ultimate Things]

Another beautiful song is A Western Ballad – For Allen Ginsberg [by band member Steve Taylor with echoes of both Arlo Guthrie and Roy Harper], its potent and political poetry set to a gorgeous tune, and this is what The Fugs can merge so well: meaning with melody.

There’s the wonderfully witty too: getting there with A Short History Of The Human Race and its three core lines,

World War 1: The human race stinks

World War 2: The human race shrinks

World War 3: The human race extincts

and is fully realised with IS, where Bill Clinton’s ‘apothegm’ is captured as a soundgrab to be sampled within the song playfully, set up for its first ridiculing by the lines,

Get ready, Mr. Nietzsche  Get Ready, Kierkegaard

Stand down, Mr. Hegel, and Bertrand Russell too

‘cause someone has come up with a homily

that’s sharper than Plato and Wiittgenstein

& shivering with truth

It depends on what the meaning of the word IS is

It’s all good fun [in the album booklet’s introduction and description of the songs, it is acknowledged that Clinton was ‘unfairly hounded by an interlocking geek-pack of right wing nuts throughout his presidency’] so the attacking is assuaged by understanding and explanation rather than any outright contempt – the kind of contempt allowed for rebelling youth and revolutionaries, not senior citizens even with attitude.

It’s not therefore the caustic comedy of early Fugs nor the polished pillorying of It crawled into my hand....., but it is still the brilliance of social and political commentary coupled with clever songcraft, now tempered by the maturity of age and perhaps knowing that raging against it all doesn’t stop it coming.

Taking The Biscuit

Coincidence and fortuity are natural phenomena, and in the way these things occur – by surprise – both did so today.

A good friend rang this morning to chew the proverbial, but he also talked about having just bought another Cracker album, a recent one, and he enthused about their '93 album Kerosene Hat, at which point I talked about the coincidence of only yesterday writing about influential and rejuvenating rock bands of the early 90s, of which KH would be a solid representative.

So a little later, and only a few moments ago, I decided to research that album and the band's first eponymous one which I don’t know that well. When typing ‘cracker’ into a search engine it is no surprise that the foodstuff rather than band came top of the list [along with the TV programme....]. What also got presented was the ‘graham’ cracker: search engines being clever in their plethora of prediction and suggestion. Now for years – not consistently throughout the full 45 I have lived in England – I have had occasion to refer to and then need to explain to people here exactly what a graham cracker is. My memory of such is as a child in America and being given these with a glass of milk at nursery or kindergarten school. I know we also used to have them at home and I loved them, as kids do, because they were sweet. But I have always wondered why you couldn’t get them here, and why the only English cracker was what we called a ‘soda’ cracker in the States.

graham

Well, praise be to research, and the apocalyptic moment that has taken all of 45 years – though, as I say, not a daily intense search and scrutiny for the answer – but I discovered just a short while ago that the English equivalent to the graham cracker is of course [drum roll] the digestive biscuit!

digestive

Fucking simple, when you think about it.

For 45 years, what should have been the easiest of extrapolations has been thwarted by the difference in nomenclature – graham rather than digestive; cracker rather than biscuit - and the simpler difference in shape – rectangular rather than circular.  A fortuitous discovery, if ridiculously belated, but I am enlightened, and relieved.

More on the band later.

History Lesson

At the beginning of the 90s I’d been teaching for ten years and these were good professional times: independent, creative, fulfilling. I wasn’t financially comfortable, and there had been struggles in the previous decade, but I was three years into a mortgage [a principle shattered as I readily grabbed at Thatcher’s legacy of offering the cheap chance to buy a council house, mine having been rented as teacher accommodation] and there was plenty of 60s/70s music to keep me fully entertained as I’d moved up from the Amstrad stereo [though it did have that thundering volume boost button] to a Toshiba system – I think the Kenwood was later, and I now have Cambridge: these listening stepping-stones a critical aspect of the aural journey.

So this was neither exceptional nor terrible in the life and times of a 36 approaching 40 year old English teacher and father of two whose loves were family, teaching [at that time], writing and music, but with regard to the latter where I’d primarily mainlined on nostalgia, bands like Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, Brad, Alice in Chains and, to a lesser extend in terms of familiarity at the time, Soundgarden, all kick-started that new decade with their heavy albeit newly-named grunge sound, and it is clearly the quality of this music coupled with a rather amorphous other emotive reality that turbo-charged this launch. In my previous posting on Brad I also mentioned The Black Crowes who brought out the classic rock revival of Shake Your Money Maker in 1990, therefore joining this rejuvenating mix, and there were other bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Screaming Trees filling and exploding my 80s void. Students at the time were making me cassette tapes of these new bands – it’s how I first heard Temple of the Dog – and a close friend was also regularly introducing me to these contemporary musical riches: pulling one from the abundant offerings would be Mark Lanegan’s 1994 solo album Whiskey for the Holy Ghost. 

All of these bands had great rock/grunge vocalists and that did much to attract and appeal. The centrality of the guitar with wah-wah and/or fuzzed and/or extended solo also returned to detox the 80s’ contamination. Highlights from some of the bands mentioned would be all of Pearl Jam’s Ten [already a nailed-to-the-wall Top Fifty], Temple of the Dog’s Hunger Strike with Eddie Vedder taking over the lead vocal from also excellent and accompanying Chris Cornell, and consummate grunge anthem Rooster from Alice in Chain’s monster album Dirt. Brad’s generally softer sound, reviewed as such yesterday, earned its distinct placing but was also carried on the back of the overall sense of musical renewal linked to the palpable if inexplicably generated feelings I had at the time.

It’s a snapshot musical history of the time, but I wanted to try and articulate, what I think I intuited in yesterday’s Brad posting, how this period made such an impact. It can’t compete with those teenage listens to the life-defining sounds of the 60s/70s, but maybe that is the key factor: the early 90s’ experience was an adult one, informed by adult preoccupations but always attached to those teenage foundations – thus nostalgia and echo became another defining moment in the construction of musical appreciation, memory and meaning.

Top Fifty - Brad

Brad – Shame [1993]

Brad, a band formed in 1992 and including the core members of Shawn Smith, Stone Gossard and Regan Hagar, has just released their latest album United We Stand, only the fifth over their twenty years of playing together. A band often described as a Stone Gossard [Pearl Jam] side project, this is a typical PR but erroneous tag.

Their first album Shame earns its place in my Top Fifty because of its musical timing and triggering of significant memory. Brad in the early 90s - along with The Black Crowes [straight rock], Temple of the Dog, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam [grunge] - ignited my full engagement with contemporary music because it revisited and reinvigorated the 60/70s rock sound with which I had grown up and which the 80s had by and large replaced with synth-pop, fake drumming and glam/new romantic tweakings [I admit I should/could have taken more note of punk].

Whilst Gossard provides crisp guitar throughout, it is Smith’s distinctive vocals that make this album memorable for me – all four band members contributing to songwriting duties. And though I have characterised this as a resurgent rock band, opening track Buttercup is actually a rather slow ballad and establishes the sound that makes this such a fine album, Smith’s fragile vocal dominating the plaintive core and Goddard’s guitar striking out rising chords. Second track My Fingers is much more psychedelic with echoing, slightly fuzzed vocal and swirling guitar around a grunge drum and bass beat.

Third Nadine returns to the more melancholic tone of the first, Smith by now establishing his signature slight snarl and cracked high tenor, and the song’s rather sudden, lightly shambolic ending reflects the rawness of the album’s recordings completed over only 20 days and often emerging, apparently, from studio jam sessions. Fourth Screen continues the hypnotic lament and Goddard adds a softly toned guitar solo and then empathetic wails to close.

20^th Century is a funky fifth, rolled out across its repeated grooves, simply but effectively. Next Good News, like Screen, is a Smith-penned number and continues the propensity for these slower songs with carefully structured melodies to foreground Smith’s singing, here pushing to a falsetto chorus. Seventh Raise Love is a pulsating grunge-come-softrock anthem with surges of Goddard feedbacked lead.  Eighth Bad For The Soul is a funked-up tease of a song – no doubt a snippet from one of those jams – but it sets us up neatly for the penultimate Down which is a classic [but incipient here] grunge dirge, the voice distorted with other percussive sound effects until piano, organ and a cleaned vocal emerge – then it segues into and finishes on a grotesque, brutish narrative that is the unnerving, fleeting track eleven We.

It isn’t an album in and of its time as brilliantly dominant as Pearl Jam’s Ten for example – not by a long way to be candid - and I’m not sure I have been able to characterise its particular strengths through the track descriptions above, so it may be one of the few in this category that really does hold its place by the skin of its clinging teeth, a bite that still draws blood from a mood and effect it created then for all kinds of reasons beyond the aural and which therefore bleeds whenever I play again.

Recent Brad

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer - Little Blue Egg

Posthumous Power

This album of posthumous songs and performance by Dave Carter – with musical partner Tracy Grammer - has brought a significant folk talent to my attention, having missed out in his lifetime where he had been, and still is, championed as a songwriter by Joan Baez as well as had his songs recorded by the likes of Chris Smither [Crocodile Man], and tribute songs written about Carter by Mary Chapin Carpenter and Mary Gauthier amonst many others.

The story of these songs’ discovery is special: they were found in the basement of the pair’s home recording studio, eight years after Carter’s death - songs that had been left off other recordings. Not a single track has the sound of a cast-off and therefore attest to the absolute quality of those already recorded as well as the difficult process of selection when there is such a wealth of material. And as home recordings they have an intimate and immediate quality.

The songs are all ‘traditional’ in their sound, a mix of classic folk and Americana, with their storytelling reflecting the richness of the lyricism. A cover of the Guthrie/Bragg song Way Over Yonder in a Minor Key is one of the more traditional sounding, beautifully song by the alternating voices of Carter and Grammer until they then harmonise on the chorus, with simple banjo and acoustic guitar by Carter and sweet fiddle by Grammer. Hard To Make It tells a highly poetic narrative of a tough life and has the simple quality of performance and storytelling reminiscent of Devendra Banhart. Cross of Jesus has the bright country echo of Drug Store Truck Driving Man. Carter’s excellent singing voice is highlighted on the fine song Any Way I Do.

There are eleven ‘discarded’ tracks in all and it is the definite treasure trove other reviews have labelled them, an album that really does deserve attention for its outstanding quality, whatever the circumstances of its construction.

Lacking Lemov

1.   Less is more: government initiatives should be limited to one side of A4

2.   Targets are for archers, not teachers: adorn your classroom with who you are

3.   League tables struggle to measure the sensitive inside leg

4.   You can lead a horse to a test but that won’t make it think for itself

5.   Teaching is like riding a bike: when you fall off it hurts

6.   Ofsted is awful: sound and symmetry and sense

7.   If they’re laughing they’re learning

8.   Don’t wear a tie just to look like a teacher

9.   A full house beats a flush and metaphor beats the literal, hands down

10. Praise everything said that is serious and genuine

11. The best objective is that which discovers itself by accident

12. Only one of the Gospels reports seeing a four-part lesson plan

13. The ‘wrong’ answer often reveals how learning works wonderfully

14. If a sonnet has 14 lines, is this a poem? Discuss, but there is no answer

Roughly 20 months into my retirement from teaching I am still incensed by the complete bollocks I hear about targets and testing and other crap. I continue to get emails from teachit, for whom I still occasionally contribute [ideas for creative writing with no measurement involved!], and today's advert for ActiveLearning online just dredged up all my anger against the compulsion for dryly drilling students to 'get that grade C or above' bullshit - the anger clearly not buried very deep...

...which has prompted me to post this, another in my sonnet sequence, written not that long ago in response to the stated 49 techniques devised by American educationalist Doug Lemov to help teachers 'teach like a champion' - yet another set of strictures and structures to convince the philistines there is no art nor humanity needed to do this job.

Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game

Father's Most Pop

Rufus Wainwright’s latest release is as pop-lush as he claims [“the most pop album I have made”], and whilst we know the production touch belongs to Mark Ronson, he would appear to have drawn on precursor strokes of lavishness from the likes of Todd Rudgren, Godley and Creme, and on fifth track Welcome To The Ball, George Martin with its Beatlesesque use of trumpets and other sundries. It is all very pretty with Wainwright’s polished tenor and the whirling choruses that sing hand in hand as they dance down this luxuriant pop boulevard.

It is this production that dominates over songwriting, nothing quite matching the quality of songs from early work on Poses, Want One and Want Two, but the confession and angst that ignited that creative spark has been lessened by that catalyst's familiarity and, presumably for Wainwright himself as much as family and the public, its acceptance. One of the strongest tracks for me on this album is in many ways the least ‘pretty’, Montauk, a song written for Wainwright’s daughter, and its internal key changes provide upsets to the classic descending melodic line. The lyrics drive this one, and Wainwright’s imagining of a future meeting and assessment of the father figure seems to reflect the preoccupations he has had with his own, and perhaps confronting the possible conflicts he now feels as the one dad who plays a piano and the other who wears kimonos. It is a song that has an honest anticipation about its hopes and fears,

One day you will come to Montauk

And see your dad trying to be evil

One day you will come to Montauk

And see your other dad feeling lonely

Hope that you’ll protect him

and it ends poignantly by appearing to invoke the memory of his mother Kate McGarrigle

One day years ago in Montauk

Lived a woman, now a shadow

But she does wait for us in the ocean

Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls

Soul Wheels Keep On Turning

Another soulful presence joins the retro resurgence of 60s sounds, with Alabama Shakes and singer Brittany Howard’s offering of Joplinesque vocals and Otis Redding timings, the latter sound echoed on You Ain’t Alone by the fine guitar work of Heath Fogg. Their live sound - seen on last night’s Later....with Jools - isn’t fully captured on the album, especially the guitar licks Fogg played with such character on that session.

Opener Hold On has a little of Creedence Clearwater ghosting in its rhythmic underbelly, Fogg again providing the subtle layers, and Howard’s vocal is at one of its strongest efforts here. Title track Boys and Girls gives Howard a slower showcase for her broader depth and tone, and those soul roots dig in deep on this gentle track. Be Mine, played on last night’s Jools, is a favourite already, Fogg pleasing with his funky picking, and Howard pushes herself to emotive heights – it’s a raucous climb.

Van der Graaf Generating at Weeley

Van der Graaf Generator – Weeley Festival, 28.8.1971

Having written about Peter Hammill and VDGG, here’s a link to what I think is a great bootleg recording [1971!] at one of the greatest unknown festivals ever, much of which I do remember and have written about here and there on this blog.

Setlist for this gig is

Darkness

Lost

Man-Erg

Killer

After the Flood

I Once Wrote Some Poems

Theme One

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