The chances are that I will never appear on Desert Island Discs. But just in case, and like many people, I have spent odd moments over the past ten years thinking about the eight records I’d choose if I was. Continue reading
Music
A trip down Memory Lane
Pound Lane, to be precise. A few weeks ago I found myself in Godalming, the local town of my latter schooldays. After lunch with my old friend David, my main adult conduit to the record business, I thought I’d go and see what now stood on the site of Record Corner, my main teenage conduit to the record business. Continue reading
Tom Russell at the 100 Club
There’s a Mexican dead on a power line
He’s deader than yesterday’s communion wine
That’s a good opening for a song by any standards. It’s from Stealing Electricity by Tom Russell. He sang it last week at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, calling his audience ‘bastards’ many times over, as is his wont. Somewhere, I have a weird recital of the lyrics by the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They include one of my favourite couplets from any song: Continue reading
Money to burn
I don’t know where I was on 23 August 1994. But I managed to miss an event then, and have managed to go on missing it for the past 23 years. Until a month ago, when I finally read about it. Two musicians, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, best known as the band KLF, set fire to a million pounds in £5 notes on the island of Jura. Burnt them. Destroyed them utterly. [read more]
Teenage idols
Like any teenager, I had heroes. I’m not talking about pin-ups: that was something different. (Marianne Faithfull and Sandie Shaw, since you ask.) I mean proper male heroes: a sporting hero, a musical hero and a celluloid hero. One of the curiosities of my life is that – thanks to a series of staggering coincidences – by the time I was 20, I had met and talked to each of my teenage idols. [read more]
The Vinyl Countdown
In a week or two’s time, we move house. This is not something that I have undertaken often, or lightly. A lifetime’s clobber needs to be accommodated or, worse still, thrown away. And then there is the overriding question of what to do with the vinyl! [read more]
The Promised Land callin’
It’s a matter of luck in the end. You can be a great songwriter and performer but, if you are living in ordinary times, fame may be limited. If, on the other hand, you are living in extraordinary times, you can become a legend. Chuck Berry was a legend. He made the times and the times made him. [read more]
You say you want a revolution
Did you say that? John Lennon didn’t when he wrote the song: that’s why his lyrics say ‘you’ and not ‘I’. Most people in Britain didn’t say it, at least in the context of a political revolution. These thoughts and many others occurred, along with a thousand memories, when I went to the V&A last Sunday to see You Say You Want A Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970. I may now forget my reason for going upstairs at home, but I remember almost everything this exhibition was celebrating as if it were yesterday. [read more]
The Red Army Choir
A piece from the vaults, summer 1999, marginally amended
Well that’s three thousand words knocked off today, so I think I deserve a drink. Off to Villeneuve-sur-Lot for une pression underneath the arches. In fact, it isn’t underneath the arches, partly because there isn’t a bar there and partly because I find I am subject to the Lightning Seeds at full volume. I register with relief that the song is not Three Pints Down My Shirt. An England football anthem played publicly in rural France would be beyond satire. [read more]
John Stewart: a great unknown
When I belatedly went online in 2000, the first words I typed into a search engine were ‘John Stewart’. I wanted to know what had become of my great musical hero since I lost track of him in the 1980s. In the pre-internet days, it was easy to lose track of musical heroes if they weren’t played on the radio and their records were not in the shops. [read more]
