Waits & Measures

Dastardly computer problems have been keeping me quiet lately, but I'm resurfacing to gloat. It's slightly off-topic (OK, completely off topic, though he did play Dirt In The Ground, which I talk about briefly in Reno), but I went to see Tom Waits on Sunday night, and I'm still not quite past the bragging-about-it-in-public stage.

I was asked to write down my thoughts for The Word website, and you can read them here. The fabulous setlist is here, courtesy of the Eyeball Kid. It was quite a night.

"Won't You Spare Me Over For Another Year...?"

There is a new 2-cd anthology of Shirley and Dolly Collins’ Harvest recordings out shortly. I'm reviewing it for Word magazine and it’s absolutely brilliant. It contains all of Love, Death & The Lady, one of the all time great folk albums, and I was struck listening to it again by the extent to which the title track resembles O Death, the great Appalachian dirge made famous by Ralph Stanley a few years back via the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou.

Both songs try to use their wiles, their riches and their youth to bribe Death to return some other day. Alas, death ain’t cutting a deal. Which, when you think about it, is how it will be....

This live version of O Death is even better than the recorded one. I find the fact that this song now resides in some 10 million homes worldwide strangely comforting.

The Big Goodbye

An interesting blog over at the Guardian recently about funeral music.

I devote a chapter to this topic in Reno, using a recent poll of 45,000 people as a starting point. The poll found that the ten most popular funeral songs in Europe are:

1. Queen - The Show Must Go On
2. Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven
3. AC/DC - Highway To Hell
4. Frank Sinatra - My Way
5. Mozart - Requiem
6. Robbie Williams - Angels
7. Queen - Who Wants To Live Forever?
8. The Beatles - Let It Be
9. Metallica - Nothing Else Matters
10. U2 - With Or Without You

I make my opinions clear in the book (especially about 'My Way'), but what are yours? Do any of these songs ring your bell? Are you generally in favour of using pop music at funeral services? If not, why? And if so, what would you play?

A Pig's Ear

Helter Skelter , the Beatles song from the 1968 White album, will forever be associated with the Charles Manson murders. Piggies, too. I almost always feel instinctively inclined to stick up for songs that get blamed for inciting sociopathic acts of violence and hatred, but I have to admit that I’m not a fan of either of these two. In fact, I really don’t like Piggies, and while I'd never suggest that it deserves to be held to account for the horrific crimes perpetrated in its name, it does betray a deeply unpleasant misanthropic streak.

Here’s a brief extract from the book, taken from a section in which I look at the content of songs that have been used as scapegoats for real life acts of murder. (Yes, of course Marilyn Manson and Eminem show up.)

“Musically, Helter Skelter is what can only be described as Macca Metal, a terribly tame attempt to ape the growing trend for “maximum heaviosity”, as Woody Allen once put it, that was thundering into popular music courtesy of bands like The Who, Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. It fails rather miserably. As Ian MacDonald points out in Revolution In The Head, the Beatles were “the quintessential Sixties four-piece, their natural inclinations were for balance, form, and attention to detail, and in straining to transcend these obsolete values in Helter Skelter they comically overreached themselves.” It is a tendency that marred a few of their later songs. Helter Skelter wasn’t so much dark and threatening as ersatz-heavy rock punching well above its weight.

Piggies, meanwhile, is bad but not quite criminal. It is smug, sour, and pious, but on the surface – which is all jangling harpsichord and the bitter scratch of strings - it contains the combined threat and menace of a wet sponge applied to the shins. In many ways the sentiments sum up all that went wrong with the hippie movement as it travelled from its original come-all-ye ethos to a holier-than-thou misanthropy which was rather spiteful. It’s not an anti-police song, despite the popular counter-culture coinage of ‘pigs’ as a derogatory term for the boys in blue. The mention of piggies in “their starched white shirts” suggests Harrison’s blunderbuss is instead aimed at the mythical Man, the be-suited pillar of the British establishment, in which case such Beatle-friendly types as George Martin are presumably among the number being sneered at.

Piggies has the sing-song, edge-of-violence tone of a dark old nursery rhyme. It displays very little evidence of any belief in the redeeming qualities of humanity, which makes it a far less palatable piece of music than the more rowdy Helter Skelter. In the end, it is an example of the worst kind of anti-all-life song that Will Oldham talks about. But aside from the mildly interesting denouement which shows the piggies consuming themselves – “Clutching forks and knives/ To eat their bacon” - this is hardly revolutionary satire. There is vitriol, but it’s hard to really know or care who it is directed towards, so muffled and unlovable is the song, while there is only one couplet that could in any way be interpreted as a call to arms: “In their eyes there’s something lacking/ What they need’s a damn good whacking.” In the context of the song, only a madman like Manson, or perhaps a devout Sopranos watcher, would interpret ‘whacking’ – part of a line written by Harrison’s mother Louise, a middle-aged housewife from Liverpool who occasionally taught ballroom dancing – as denoting anything other than a brisk slap on the back of the legs with a wooden spoon. No, there's no murder in here. But it is certainly a nasty little song.”

Monday Morning Face Off # 3

I love it when the same song gets twisted in two very different directions. Dylan’s Death Is Not The End has an inbuilt ambiguity – the tension between the horror of the verses and the soothing message of the chorus is always going to be somewhat unsettling – but his original version leans towards hope and comfort, the idea that no matter how desperately hard this life becomes, something better awaits.



Nick Cave’s cover version, on the other hand, uses a hell-choir consisting of, among others, Blixa Bargeld, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan and Kylie Minogue to forward another view. Without changing a word, he leaps on the song’s ambiguity like a highwayman and ransacks it for all he’s worth. The net result is a blackly comic evocation of a world where the myriad horrors of earthly existence are destined to be replayed over and over and over again into eternity. If death is not the end, then there is no end to our suffering. As a man in a moustache and singlet once asked, who wants to live forever?



I know which one I like best. What about you?

Monday Morning Face Off # 2

Death and war today.

Two very different views, the first reminding us that the first, last and most devastating consequence of war is always the fact that people die - and not 'heroically,' as our politicians would want us to believe, but battling bravely against confusion and abject terror. It's useful to be reminded of that, particularly right now, so thanks to Richard Thompson for Dad's Gonna Kill Me. Thompson talked to me at length for I Shot a Man in Reno, about everything from Tupac to the Faerie Queen. Here's an acoustic version of one of his greatest songs.



Or perhaps you'd prefer this simple song of fraternal love, the bonds enduring through childhood innocence to the throes of deadly serious combat? I didn't speak with Rolf Harris for the book, but I kind of wish I had. Some people think Two Little Boys is camp and silly. Maybe it's because I have a brother, but I find it profoundly moving in its evocation of lost innocence - and also a little disturbing. It was one of the first songs of death I recall hearing as a child.

Anyway, click on Comments and let me know which one hits you where it hurts. To me, both these songs in their very different ways manage to convey the deathly horror of the reality of warfare.

Ich Bein Ein Berliner

Went to see Lou Reed perform Berlin the other night. I must admit, I was half-dreading it. I haven't listened to the record in a long while, and the idea of hearing Reed mono-mutter his way through an entire album of drugs, bad sex, violence and suicide didn't really fire me up on a balmy June night.

The reality, however, was superb. Great band, fantastic choir of angelic kids, and - although Lou could make a little more effort on the singing front, because he occasionally revealed that he can still hold a note - the songs were even more bleakly beautiful than I remember, particularly the sequence from Caroline Says onward. I left singing 'They're taking her children away' softly to myself, alternating with 'I'm gonna stop wasting my time / Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.' Lovely.

As a piece of work Berlin doesn't resonate particularly on a universal level - it's a very specific, stylised take on a certain kind of life and death in New York - but it was still deeply moving in parts. So much so that the two 'classic' Reed songs he performed as an encore - Satellite of Love and Rock and Roll - felt a little slack by comparison.

The night also reminded me that one of my first girlfriends bought me Berlin on vinyl for my 16th birthday. In retrospect, I think she may have been trying to tell me something.....