you tell me it's the making of me...

 

As I was driving to an appointment this morning, I was listening to the band James. I’ve been a fan of the band for a long time now, but it’s fair to say that I’m more familiar with some of their back catalogue than others. A song called “Ten Below” began to play. This is on the album “The Night Before”, which was released in 2010 and which I bought when it first came out. I’ve listened to the song before and I’m familiar with how it goes, but this morning, perhaps for the first time, I found myself really focusing on the lyrics.

 

It’s about being sent to a boarding school.

 

-

 

So I'm on my own
Far from my broken home
And it costs
Feels like 10 below
Pack me off to school
Innocence and trust
Are all lost
Where did my childhood go?

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie
When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

I'm at the bottom of my bed
Headphones on my head
John Peel's show
Feels like 10 below
The sky's a dull gun metal
Where did the sun
And it rains and rains
Feels like 10 below

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is
And the organ praise the lord

When's the holidays
Holidays
Holidays

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate
Feel like a cold war spy
If I'm caught
Take the easy way out

 

-

 

I’m fifty years old now, and my school days are a long way behind me now…. And yet, it seems that the damage it caused is still very much with me. The song finished, and I found myself reaching to play it again, taking the time this time around to really let the lyrics sink in.

 

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie

 

I was seven when I was first sent to board. I didn’t know any better and just trusted that my parents knew what they were doing. What seven-year-old would be any different?

 

Looking back at photos now, I look impossibly small and vulnerable and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to pack up my new school uniform into a trunk and to drop me off at this strange new school about an hour away from the only home I’d ever known. But drop me off they did, and I can still remember that first night in the dormitory, surrounded by the beds of around fourteen other small children, some sobbing quietly in the dark. I didn’t cry, and I don’t remember ever feeling particularly homesick. I just adjusted to this new life.

 

Looking back on it now, I can see how I learned to survive by bottling things up inside. You quickly learn that emotions are a weakness that someone else can use against you, so you smother them. It’s a defence mechanism; you are surrounded by bigger, older kids and it’s so much easier to conform than to stand out. It’s something that I didn’t notice was happening at the time, and it wasn’t really until much, much later that I began to wonder what long-lasting damage this might have done. Did my parents see this happening to me when I came home for the holidays?

 

Many years later, I saw an animation created by an artist to a narration by her father explaining how he walled his emotions up inside so that he could survive at his school. The animation is of a small, scared boy peering out of a window in the chest of a robot. The robot is marching, and we soon see that he’s part of a robot army, each robot with a small window in its chest containing a small, frightened child. This was very close to home, and I found myself moved by the thought of myself as a small child with mousey brown hair, glasses and wonky teeth learning to survive by supressing and hiding my emotions.

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is

 

It's taken me a long time to start to be comfortable showing and expressing my emotions. Thirty-five years later and I’m still a work-in-progress, as my wife will happily tell you (largely single-sex schooling probably didn’t help). I look at some of my schoolmates – still my closest friends - and realise that I’m one of the luckier ones and for some, the damage is still very clearly visible. I think I’m always going to be guarded about sharing my feelings and I’m told that I am very difficult to read, but I think I’m far more emotionally articulate than I used to be, and definitely more so than some of my other friends.

 

My mum died last year, and I’ve found myself thinking about how especially hard it must have been for her to send her child away like this. As we contributed to the eulogy for her funeral, my elder brother suggested including a memory of having burgers for tea on a Saturday evening in front of the A-Team. It’s a vivid memory, but for me, it’s tainted by the fact that we had only arrived back from school that evening and would be dropped back at school first thing on Monday morning; we were visitors in our family home and just passing through. Not just that, but we actually ate those burgers in a room in front of the tv and away from our parents, who ate somewhere else, so it’s not even a memory that we share with them. In any case, by the time I was thirteen and moved to another school, even those weekend visits stopped as we became full-time boarders.

 

When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

 

My father has been coming to terms with the death of my mum for the last 18 months, and I’ve found myself thinking more of him and the damage I think our schooling did to him. He was a busy doctor, and my childhood memories are that he was always on call or out helping patients and didn’t particularly seem to have all that much time for his own family. At Christmas, we would not open our presents until he was back from his rounds. He always volunteered to be the doctor on call because, so he said, the other doctors all had young families. What on earth were we? Even now, when I think that I haven’t spoken to my dad for several weeks and I should perhaps give him a call to see how he is, I sometimes stop myself and think that telephones work both ways and that he can always pick up the phone to me if he wants to chat… but somehow he never does. When I ask him, it’s because he doesn’t want to bother me. How damaged has he been by the fact that I stopped being a part of his daily life when I was 7 years old and I’ve never lived at home with him properly since?

 

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate

I count my blessings, really. I survived my schooling and I don’t think I’m an unexploded bomb, liable to blow at any moment. I did go through an angry phase in my early twenties, happily sabotaging my own relationships and career prospects. I think I was trying to adjust to life outside of the bubble afforded by school and by university. My schooling was so immersive that I don’t think I ever really experienced university in the way that many people do: it wasn’t my first time away from home and, in large part, it was more of the same. I’m so grateful now that I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. The universities I did attend were large and filled with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been good for me to be in an Oxbridge College, surrounded by people of similar backgrounds and experiences. It certainly wasn’t good for those of my schoolfriends who went, anyway. University wasn’t a big deal for me, but I think I made the first few tentative steps of my journey back towards emotional balance there, even if there was a long way still to travel. I just had no real preparation for life in the real world, interacting with real people.

 

I don’t have any kids, but my mum once asked me if I would consider sending any offspring to a boarding school. When I said “under no circumstances”, I can remember my mum bursting into tears. My parents made huge personal and financial sacrifices to send their three sons to boarding school. I’m sure it wasn’t a decision that they made lightly, and they did so with the very best of intentions to give us the best possible start in life. Both had come from relatively humble backgrounds and had worked hard to be in a position where this was even a possibility. How can I hold it against them?

 

They did the best they could.

 

It's just that the emotional scarring runs deep.

Thumbs (a glimmer)

As the ancient Chinese curse apparently has it, “may you live in interesting times”. While sounding superficially like a blessing, of course it’s nothing of the sort. When it really comes down to it, although we all talk a good game about wanting to lead exciting lives, don’t most of us just want to live out our time quietly in uninteresting times of peace and tranquillity? I suppose it all depends upon your definition of “interesting”. Some people like to do sudokus and to watch reality TV. Chacun à son gout, I suppose. Each to their own taste. 

Besides, the last five years or so have demonstrated quite nicely that we live in anything but tranquil times. Brexit. Trump. Johnson. Ukraine. Rampant inflation. Fuel poverty. Climate change. Mass migration. Wildfires. Mass extinctions. Police brutality. Race riots. Islamic State. Do I need to go on? Our certainty in the inexorable advance of liberal ideas has been suddenly badly shaken and right to abortion, the right to be gay or non-binary, the right to freedom of expression and even the right to freedom of speech all seem much less certain than they were not so very long ago. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the very foundations of British life were shaken to their core last week by the death of the Queen. Even mourning, it seems, is now a source of controversy. 

It’s a lot. 

Perhaps then it is entirely in keeping with these turbulent times that the expression “may you live in interesting times” has no equivalent in Chinese, no Chinese source has ever been produced for its origins and it is mostly likely to have sprung up sometime around the late nineteenth century. Still, a superficially authentic sounding aphorism that is widely known but turns out to be entirely apocryphal seems somehow appropriate, doesn’t it? Still, who fact checks anything these days? It's easy to be angry with the world at the moment, and much harder to take a breath and to see the beauty that is still around us. Amidst all the noise, it’s easy to forget that the majority of people are just like you and me. Decent. Kind. 

I was reminded of this at a music festival a couple of weeks ago. Festivals like this are bubbles at the best of times, but End of the Road is perhaps more cosy than most. It takes place in Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset and is small enough to feel intimate, with stages surrounded by trees and with peacock walking around amongst the crowds. Glastonbury it is not. It’s a comforting thing to be surrounded by people who are a lot like you and probably share a lot of the same opinions, even if only for a long weekend. Just to forget about the troubles of the world for a few days to drink cider in the sunshine and watch some live music. 

On the Sunday evening, we made our way to the Garden Stage. As the name suggests, this is a natural amphitheatre surrounded by trees and gardens. It has a relatively small capacity of perhaps two or three thousand people, and when we arrived at about 7pm, it was nowhere near full and the grass around the stage was covered with people just sitting with their friends, quietly drinking wine and waiting for the next act. We sat down on the grass towards the back. After a few minutes, a man perhaps a little older than me made his way into the space just behind us and set up three little chairs, before sitting down in his own chair and settling in for the evening. The next act was a singer called Lucy Dacus, I wasn’t familiar with her music, but she’s an American singer/songwriter and basically performed on her own with an acoustic guitar. It quickly became clear as she drew me in that she was really good, my musical highlight of the festival. At some point, the man sitting behind us was joined by two girls, each maybe about twenty years old, who sat down with him in the other chairs. I didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it, and I certainly wasn’t about to turn around and start staring, but I thought that one of the girls was this chap’s daughter, and the other was maybe her girlfriend. As Lucy Dacus played on and I became more absorbed in her music, I realised that her lyrical content was quite intimate and confessional. At one point, she warmly addressed the crowd and asked if any of the audience were gay and here with their partners. From the crowd reaction, it seemed that a lot of people there were (I subsequently learned that Lucy Dacus herself identifies as “queer”). Now, I’m a 48-year-old man and I was at the festival with my wife, but I’d also been wearing rainbow shoelaces on my shoes and rainbow wristbands on my wrists all weekend. I think inclusion is so important and it costs me very little to signal that I’m an ally. I know that I was in a bubble at this festival and maybe even as part of this crowd, but it’s a bubble that made me feel warm and happy in an angry, uncertain world. 

As the music continued, the two girls got up from their seats and came to stand just in front of me so that they could get a better view. It was now getting dark, and at one point, they were beautifully framed by the stage lights, gently holding hands and leaning into each other. It was a beautiful sight. I glanced behind me and saw that the man in his seat had seen what I had seen and was taking the opportunity to take a photo of the two girls as they were silhouetted in the stage light, lost in the music and in each other. He caught my eye and we exchanged a smile. What a beautiful thing that this guy was at the festival with his daughter and her girlfriend and that he was gently bursting with pride about this. It was a lovely moment. 

The moment stuck in my mind too because of the song that Lucy Dacus was playing. It’s called “Thumbs” and it’s about two people (lovers?) talking about the return of an abusive father. The final verse goes like this: 

I wanna take your face between my hands and say 

“You two are connected by a pure coincidence 

 Bound to him by blood, but baby it’s all relative 

You’ve been in his fist ever since you were a kid 

But you don’t owe him shit even if he said you did 

You don’t owe him shit even if he said you did”  

It’s a powerful lyric, but at the same time, it’s almost impossibly tender. Watching the two girls in front of me together sharing that moment together, and me sharing that moment with the watching father behind me, was wonderful and filled me with renewed hope. When there’s love in the world like that, how can you not feel optimistic? However dark it seems, there’s always a glimmer of light. That was my glimmer.

round and around...

In the process of clearing out the 10,000 surplus emails in my inbox, I've come across another post that I wrote for someone else (in 2009). As I'm loathe to let good(?) content go to waste, and because I find it interesting (even if no-one else does).... I'm (re-)posting it here.  Enjoy. I still have a soft spot for Nik Kershaw.

---

Memories Can't Wait.... a song that reminds me of a friend (originally written for Ben on Silent Words Speak Loudest, or possibly The Art Of Noise. I can't remember)

I didn't grow up in an especially musical household.  Neither of my parents are particularly into music and because it had never formed a large part of their lives, it was only natural that my two brothers and I didn't initially form much of an interest ourselves.  I've always found it a little hard to understand how two people, both just five or six years younger than Paul McCartney and presumably slap bang in the prime demographic for the Beatles, could have both have missed out on such a vibrant period of British music, but miss it they did.  My mum tells me that she owned a copy of Revolver and my dad had a pile of "Top of the Pops" LPs that he had inherited from his father's pub, but their hearts weren't in it and our house was largely devoid of background music.

My first real musical exposure, then, came instead from regular visits to the house of a friend just down the road.  Like me, Will had two siblings, although where I was a middle child, he was the youngest by several years.  I don't know if his parents were especially into music, but his dad worked for Rotel, manufacturers of high quality stereo equipment, and their house was naturally filled with top-notch hi-fis.  Although we spent a lot of our time together mucking about with computer games, playing with our Star Wars figures and riding our bikes outdoors, we did occasionally mess around with the record player and with his brother and sisters' 12" singles.  Although I can remember listening to the likes of Murray Head's "One Night in Bangkok", a bit of Level 42 and "Hole in My Shoe" by Neil from the Young Ones, the artist that always stood out the most for me was Nik Kershaw.  Both "Human Racing" and "The Riddle" were released in 1984, and we used to sit entranced by songs such as "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down on Me", "Human Racing", "Wouldn't It Be Good", "Wide Boy" and - especially - "The Riddle".  Our listening coincided with our reading of "Masquerade", the book of illustrations for children by Kit Williams that concealed clues to the location of a golden hare hidden somewhere in the UK.  The book was first published in 1979, but the hare had only (apparently) been discovered in 1982, so the idea of riddles was fresh in our minds as we tried to work out what on earth Nik Kershaw was trying to tell us when he spoke of trees by rivers, holes in the ground and old men of Arran.

Kershaw has, of course, subsequently revealed that there is no meaning to "The Riddle" at all, but to our ten year old minds it was a puzzle well worth trying to solve.  Besides, it was (and remains) a fantastic record, and through it I began to discover a love of music that has stayed with me to this day.  I can't say that I listen to Kershaw very much any more, but he has the proud distinction of being the artist who created the first two albums that I ever bought with my own money.  Better yet, whenever I think of him, I can't help but think of the letter that I wrote to Jimmy Savile in the summer of 1984 asking if he could fix it for me and for my best friend Will to meet our hero.  Saville never wrote back, sadly, and he certainly never fixed it for me.  Although his parents still live down the road from my folks, I lost touch with Will a few years ago after we both went to University.  Musically we had drifted apart, with him baffled by my love of heavy metal and me a touch confused by his love of Lenny Kravitz.  We'll always have Nik Kershaw though, and whenever I hear the chiming opening chords of "The Riddle", I'm reminded of my first best friend.

trip to Spa is like a trip to Mars....

I've been writing album reviews for Leftlion magazine for the best part of ten years now.  It's fun to listen to something that you have absolutely no pre-conceptions about.  The odd 150 word review also isn't all that strenuous, to be honest.  I also get a bit of a thrill throwing in ridiculously obscure references for my own entertainment, picturing baffled bands wondering what on earth I might be talking about.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I was persuaded by the editor to take a step up and take on my first interview.  Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods probably wouldn't be my first choice of interviewee because he seems so unforgivingly ferocious.... but when I met up with him in a West Bridgford cafe a few weeks ago, he was unfailingly polite (at one point, the man who furiously sings about waking up with shit on his sock apologised to me for swearing).  To be honest, I find their music fascinating, so fairly quickly I stopped worrying about meeting him and started thinking of questions to ask and worrying about whether or not my recording would fail (it didn't).

A 1000 word interview has been published and is available in this month's Leftlion or online here.... but as the interview is about four times longer than what I whittled it down to for print, I thought it might be interesting to put the whole lot up here.  Well, here it is:

---

Sleaford Mods

How do you remember it all?

It just takes you a while to rehearse.  Three weeks, four weeks. I’m doing a batch of new tunes now, but because I’m obsessed with it, because it’s your thing, you listen to a recording, you listen to a demo, then when it’s mastered, you listen to that.  You just keep listening. You kind of know half the lyrics anyway by then. Then, when you go to rehearse it, I’m doing a batch of new tunes at the minute.  It takes about three or four weeks and then they’re in.  Once they’re in, as long as you gig them, they kind of stay in.  It’s pretty straightforward.

It’s been an amazing couple of years for you. How’s 2019 shaping up?

Good. It’s looking good. The single’s got a great response, Kebab Spider. The tour is about 70% sold, so it’s looking alright.

I was reading the declaration you made when you announced Eton Alive: “Here we are once again in the middle of another elitist plan being digested slowly as we wait to be turned into faeces once more….” I know you get asked this all the time, but how do you feel about Brexit?

[laughs] Like anybody else in this country. In Europe they can’t understand it. I’ve been over in Berlin doing press for two days and they just don’t get it. They don’t really get the idea of class and of the aristocracy. In Germany, although there is an elitist class, it’s a republic so they don’t get it. In France, they’re quite similar to us.  Everyone feels so sad about it, and it is quite a sad thing regardless of the plus points, and there are some intelligent points. Jeremy Corbyn believes in it and I don’t exactly know his reasons and couldn’t relay them to you now, but he’s obviously got his reasons and he’s not a stupid man…. But at the same time, it’s not right, it’s not right at the minute. With everything in the package that it was produced in, the jacket it put on when it introduced itself to the masses. It’s just not acceptable. Nationalist, patriotism. Once again the working classes were conned and fed a load of dogshit. The idea of enlightenment, class consciousness thing. It’s not happened. It’s just pretty bad.

How have you seen it impact the people around you?

It’s created a massive divide. I was reading an article the other day about how the leave/remain divide will surpass Brexit and the psychology of it will be ingrained into other things. You had the divide and rule thing with immigration, with benefit scroungers, and now you have it with this. From an elitist point of view it’s quite genius. They’ve never had it so good. It’s fantastic, it must be fantastic to be motivated by making money, paying no tax, getting away with it, which is what most of them are probably doing, without trying to sound naïve. It’s fucking horrible isn’t it?

Since the beginning, your lyrics have focused on the lives of working people, working dead-end jobs at the bottom of the pile. Do you ever feel that you saw some of this coming? The way people feel, the dissatisfaction?

Yeah, as soon as the coalition got in, I knew that was it. You just felt it. You felt this darkness came over, this mist. I remember seeing George Osbourne’s face at this dinner when they first got in. He had this tuxedo on and it was this dinner for supporters of the conservative party, potential contributors. His face said it all: right, we’re going to do a better job this time. We’re going to finish off what she started and it’s going to be worse. You could see it in his face and it was fucking horrible. Sorry to swear.  I knew then, and without being politically aware, which I’m still not really, you’ve just got to be an idiot not to see what these people represent and what their policies will mean.

A lot has changed since you first started out: you’re more settled (married, kids, West Bridgford, Ken Clarke is your MP now). Is it harder to summon up the focus and the anger?

No, no.  It just comes in different ways. Part of it is not repeating yourself, as I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to try and make out I’m the person I was 5 years ago. Physically and psychologically things change.  It’s still there, it just comes out in different ways. It’s not so much a challenge, it’s more interesting to find out where it’s going to go next.

The thing that struck me most from watching the film (2017s Bunch of Kunst) was that you  look particularly drained when you come off stage. You sit there trying to gather yourself.  I read that you stopped drinking. How do you bring yourself back? How do you decompress after that burst of intensity?

I have a cup of coffee, loads of fruit, nicotine tablets. Another coffee, more fruit, another nicotine tablet and then I’ll get back to the hotel and get to sleep about two, three o’clock. I’m loving it. I love life. It’s great now: I’m sober, I’m happy… I’m alright I’m obsessed with the band and trying to keep it looking good, it’s a competitive thing to be in, especially after five years. We’re no longer a buzz band, but we’ve managed to maintain a reputation of being interesting, an integrity. Contemporary.  I’m in a great position.

I saw you in the guardian doing a round table at the start of the year with people like Paloma Faith.
She was actually okay, to give her her dues. She annoyed me at the start. She’s nice actually. She gets a lot of shit, but all these people when you meet them in person are actually alright.

Austerity and Brexit aside, what are your other sources of inspiration for the album?

Lavinia. The absurdity of fame. I wouldn’t class myself as famous-famous, but well known. Some of these people we’ve met, it’s ridiculous. The absurdity of awards shows, scenarios from how people behave in certain situations, usually at the bottom of the spectrum. From a personal perspective, there are some pop songs on there that are more form than on English Tapas where we hinted at doing something like that, but on this one there are three songs where we make a shift away from the usual sound.

Wikipedia describes your vocal style as “Sprechgesang (dramatic vocalisation between speech and song). You described it in the film as “a way of beating people up without hitting them”. You used to do spoken word stuff at the start, but on the last two records you’ve started doing more singing proper. Is that conscious decision?

Yes, it is, but I’ve also got into a lot more soul and R&B from the 80s.  People like Chaka Khan, Alexander O’Neill, Luther Vandross and stuff like that.   Andrew’s music was suggesting that to me from as early the EP we released last year with songs like Joke Shop.  With the new batch of stuff he sent through, there was a continuation of that, so I manipulated those ideas to fit my desire to want to try and sound like that. Obviously, it took a while because I didn’t want to sound stupid, and to want to do a pop song, coupled against what we normally do was going to be a bit… but I think we did it.

After ten years, has the process for writing and recording changed much?

A little bit. Andrew sends me the songs now and I spend quite a while writing and thinking about them, cultivating them at home. Whereas before we depended a lot more on improvisation and impulse. It has changed a bit.

Johnny Marr once said he spent ages pulling together a beautiful piece of music, sent it to Morrissey and it came back as “Some Girls are Bigger than Others”

That’s what Morrissey was like wasn’t it. His lyrics are weird, aren’t they? They’re still weird.  At the time, I was like 13 or 14. I hated them. I thought they were shit. I was a big Jam fan. They were frowned upon at our school. But, in retrospect, what a brilliant band.

Eton Alive is your first release on your own label, Extreme Eating. What was the trigger to take the plunge?

We thought, because we were independent before, we thought that perhaps we didn’t need a record label.  Some of the camp felt that they were working for the Man, some of them felt that everything was just being done for us and it just wasn’t very exciting, so we decided to leave. But it’s been a bit of a struggle really. You get to a certain point as a band where you’re quite big really, and when you release stuff you need quite a lot in place because you’ve got to promote it or it will just die.  We didn’t have much in place when we left and it was quite stressful really. But we have now got it up to speed. My wife Claire has jumped in and organised it all really, together with Cargo Records the distributor and all the people we’ve got on board to help push the album and give it a good sending off.  I think we’ll be alright.

Is this how you’d imagined it would be like being a record mogul?

I knew it would be hard work, but we left Rough Trade too early. We should have waited for another year and we should have perhaps released this album on Rough Trade and then done it. But we didn’t, and it hasn’t suffered. Well, it has a little bit, but not too much. I’m not sure if we’ll get a higher chart place. We’re releasing around the time of the Brit awards, and what tends to happen is that all of those artists around the Brit Awards get a surge in sales and we’ll probably be nudged down because of that.  Not the greatest business move, but we don’t suffer too much for it.

As a band, you’ve moved from playing venues in Nottingham like the Chameleon Café through Rock City and on to the Royal Concert Hall. I notice your tour in the spring is back in slightly smaller venues, so do you have any plans to play the Ice Arena or are you taking a conscious step back?

It’s taking a conscious step back. We just thought it would be good to do a proper, classic UK tour. It’s paid off, those venues are filling up quickly and why not take it back to that? People have loved it. We did it a few years ago and people loved it then, and we thought why not.  It made a change to just doing 8 dates in the UK at big places that, to be honest, we just didn’t fill anyway. We’re not the kind of band that just sell out somewhere straight away. We thought it might be a good idea, with the decision on Brexit looming around that time, to take it back to the far corners of the country. We did two nights at the Roundhouse last year. We should have just done one. It looks good, but you don’t fill’em.  What’s the point? I just got sick of that. Who gives a fuck? We just took it back to smaller places that we did a few years back, intermingled with a few bigger places like Manchester and Birmingham. There’s a few quite big, but why not pepper it with bigger ones. We’ll be looking at Rock City at the end of the year. People didn’t like the fact that we played the Concert Hall last year. It was a weird gig.  It was good, but weird.  We shouldn’t have done it, but hey, at least we can say we’ve played it. U2 played there back in the day, apparently, so it’s not unheard of, but it felt odd.  When Rock City is full, it’s fucking fantastic!

In the past, you’ve had the Trussell Trust at your gigs. Is this something you’re looking to do again?

Yeah, we’ve had the Trussell Trust, we’ve had Shelter, we did Refuge last tour and we’re working with them again on this tour. It’s quite a lot of working out, so it’s whether it’s feasible at some gigs. We’ve asked the fan club to help out and I think that’s what we’re going to have to do.

How would you describe your relationship with Nottingham and has this changed over the years?

Good.  I’m proud of representing Nottingham and I think we do.  We’re not wankers, we haven’t turned into wankers and we’re a bona-fide band from this area. There’s not been that many.  Us, Jake Bugg, and who else? Not many.  Paper Lace! You get a bit of shit from people, especially since I moved to West Bridgford, but what can you do. You get the keyboard warriors online, but people who know the band are quite respectful.  Twitter’s an art, you have to learn to get your head around it and not take things so seriously.  These days I’m better, but I used to be quite horrible.

Iggy Pop played a 30 minute Sleaford Mods mix on his 6Music show on New Year’s Day which he described as being “Like Jive Bunny on Spice”. Iggy’s been a fan for a while, have you met him.

No.  Not yet. He came to watch us backstage but we didn’t meet him as he left before we’d finished.  I don’t know if I would, really.

How does it feel to have someone like that enthusing about you?

It’s fucking great! It’s a real honour.  Meeting him would be a bit weird. What would you say? I’d just crumble and get a bit fan boy.

There’s a great moment in the film where Iggy is looking at a copy of Grammar Wanker and this magnificent rock god pulls out a pair of reading glasses.

It’s fucking brilliant. It’s proper punk. That’s how it should be!

Is there anyone else who’s support for the band has surprised you?

Whatsisname from Eastenders. Shane?

Ritchie?

Yeah.  He’s a big fan.  Collared me at the Brit Award [does cockney accent] ‘alwight mate!’. Yeah, he’s alright. A nice guy.

I guess being the kind of band you are, you don’t get to hear your stuff on the radio all that often.  Tarantula Deadly Cargo was used over the end credits of Channel 4’s Prison’s documentary the other day.  Do you have much involvement with that sort of stuff?

Not really. I spoke to the director a bit and he’s come to a couple of gigs.

After the album release and the supporting tour, what’s next?

Festivals, more gigs in the autumn and then figuring out next year what we’re going to do, where we going to play. Are we going to go to Australia, America? We’ll see what happens.

Glastonbury was a really big moment for you guys.

I don’t enjoy Glastonbury too much as it’s almost turned into a music industry event, but if you can get the gig it’s brilliant.  We’re not doing it this year as they won’t let us, but hopefully next year or the year after.

They won’t let you play?

You play one year and then you have a year off.  We played the year before, they had a year off and they won’t let us play this year even though we’ve got an album out. They’ve been told, quite rightly so, that they need more of a female presence on the bill, so the booker is scrambling around trying to get more women on the bill.  Fair enough, you know what I mean? To be honest, I’ve done it twice. You get that feeling when you’re there, because it’s televised, you get really nervous. You never know, they might offer it to us. Stormzy is playing this year, he’s headlining, and he played when we were there. I think the bigger you are, the more access you get.

It’s a bit depressing to see the fuss people made about Stormzy being announced as a headliner. The same fuss Kanye got, the same fuss Jay-Z got.

It's racist. Essentially they’re just saying, no we don’t want this black man playing. They don’t pipe up about anybody else. It’s just racist.

Is there anything else you’d like to say to Leftlion readers.

Thanks for the support. To anyone who likes us in Nottingham, thanks very much.

And anyone else?

Try and have a listen! Keep giving it a go.

One more question: with your 50^th birthday looming on the horizon, are you planning a birthday party in a pub?

No. I think me and the wife are going to go to Paris.  She’s 40 and I’m 50, have a nice weekend in Paris.

It’s not a crap job, but it’s hard work. You’ve just got to keep going. It’s a vicious game to keep yourself up there. You’ve got to be alert, you can’t be messing about. It’s not the 70s anymore, you can’t be wasted.

I’ve now got this image of you training like Rocky, running up the steps of the town hall.

Yeah. That’s what it’s like. It’s going against this image that you have to be wasted. It’s not the done thing to say that you go to the gym. There’s this big stigma, but go against that. Smash the stereotype. That’s punk rock.  Bring it on.  I’ve not had a drink for three years.  I had to stop and the band’s got better. 

back-scrubber...

On the way to work this morning, I was listening to 6Music and they played the lead single off Morrissey’s new album, “Spent the Day in Bed”. I saw him performing it a couple of weeks ago on Later…. (watch that here) and wasn’t terribly impressed. It sounded better second time around, I think at least partly because the very sight of Morrissey now annoys me and I was able to just listen to the song without any other distraction.

There was a time in my life when I absolutely adored Morrissey. I discovered The Smiths relatively late, in my first year at University, but I fell hard. My gateway song was “Half a Person”, heard on a friend’s cassette copy of the compilation album, “The Complete Picture”… but the timing must have been just right for where I was in my life at that time, and I was in love. I even spent a fair bit of time, way back in the early days of the world wide web mucking about getting into arguments on alt.music.smiths and alt.music.morrissey. I wonder what happened to thrill/Jill. She was easy to bait but remains the most passionate Morrissey fan I ever came across, and that is really saying something. He certainly seems to attract them, doesn’t he?

It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time, their entire back catalogue was deleted and you could only buy the albums on import. I remember being delighted to find a French import copy of “Hatful of Hollow” on CD at a record fair at the Birmingham NEC. It was quite an event when Warner Brothers re-released the back catalogue (which managed to upset Rough Trade indie purists, of course… extra track and a tacky badge and all that). In 1993, my three housemates and I agreed that we would each draw another housemate out of the hat and buy that person a Christmas present instead of everyone having to buy something for everyone else. I was given a limited edition 10 inch vinyl copy of “Hatful of Hollow”, still my favourite of their albums and something that I had framed and still has pride of place in my man cave to this day. I didn’t even own a record player until 2015.

Eventually, I started to realise that Morrissey was a bit of a prat. Not only that, but the quality of his output seemed to drop off a cliff and he seemed to disappear entirely for a few years towards the end of the 1990s. Maladjusted was pretty bad, I know… well, have you ever met a keener window cleaner? I still loved a lot of the music ("Bona Drag" is brilliant, “Vauxhall and I” is a classic and there’s lots to like on “You Are the Quarry” too, even if it’s been very patchy since), but something had changed. Maybe Morrissey had always been like this and I’d just got a girlfriend and moved on with my life… but he’s obviously pretty awful now, isn’t he? Do you think he ever looks at the seemingly endless cycle of feuds with his record companies or the press or high court judges and former band mates and ever wonders if perhaps it might be him? Maybe, just maybe we were prepared to overlook “Asian Rut”, “Bengali in Platforms” and “National Front Disco”, but when he’s trumpeting on about Nigel Farage, Brexit and his noxious views on the Chinese? Hmmm. Was he always like this and the fans were just too blind to see it?

As the late Sean Hughes once remarked, “Everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase. Except Morrissey.”

Well, whatever… Let's just say that, as the years, have gone by I’ve come to realise to a much larger extent quite what a pivotal role Johnny Marr played in the Smiths.

The thing is, it’s started to become difficult to separate the man from his music. “Spent the Day in Bed” might have grown on me, but there isn’t a cat in hell's chance that I’m going to buy the album. It might be catchy, but I can’t hear this lyric:
“Stop watching the news!
Because the news contrives to frighten you
To make you feel small and alone
To make you feel that your mind isn't your own”
without immediately thinking that, rather than perhaps talking about the inherent subjectivity of the news that is editorialised and presented to us for uncritical consumption, the reactionary berk is instead brainlessly barking “FAKE NEWS”... uncomfortably like that other kindred spirit in the US with an overly-elaborate stack of hair.

I've never really been one of those fans who hang around on True to You and think it's clever to pepper every sentence with old Morrissey lyrics... even at my most lovelorn, I think I've had far too firm a grasp on my critical faculties for that.  Even so, given that it seems to make me angry to even look at the man now and I find his studied archness irritating even before I've considered the nonsense he's actually speaking... I suppose you can say I'm probably over Morrissey now.

Damn, but the Smiths were a good band.

Please never re-form.

we built this city on rock and roll...

I don't know what's more troubling: that I find myself completely ignorant of almost all contemporary music, or the fact that I don't seem to actually care all that much and don't have the least desire to rectify the issue.

Perhaps this is a symptom of my age (although I know a few people my age or older who have not lost their musical curiosity), but I seem content to listen to the bands that I've always listened to.  If I purchase some new music, it's likely to be by someone who already has a place in my record collection.  I suppose it could be worse: I did go through that cliche phase last year where I was re-buying on vinyl records that I already own in at least one other format... but I seem to have moved past that now.

Ed Sheeran is a case in point: I know it's fashionable amongst music fans of a certain ilk to dislike him.  Well, he's successful, isn't he... and if there's one thing that a music snob can't abide, it's mainstream success.  I didn't much care for his cameo in Game of Thrones because it seemed a bit forced, but I can't summon up the energy to dislike him because I simply don't know any of his music and can't be bothered to find out.  I have a vague assumption that I won't like him, but this is based on nothing more than a vague dislike of the very green tattoo sleeve he has on one arm (and I *like* tattoos) and on a fifteen second burst of "Galway Girl" that seemed a bit Riverdance to me.

It's all the more ironic then that I seem to have quite happily switched the way I consume music away from physical formats and even away from MP3s towards streaming on Amazon Music.  Never before have I had so much music at my fingertips; there's something ridiculous like 40 million songs available and the only limit to my listening pleasure is my imagination.

...and there's the problem.

If I keep asking Alexa to play me Toto's "Africa" whenever I'm in my kitchen, then I'm never going to hear anything new, am I?  There are dozens of curated playlists available and all I have to do to hear something new that might rock my world is to have a go, skipping past anything that doesn't take my fancy.  And have I done it? No.  To be honest, I'm just as likely to ask Alexa to play BBC Radio 5 as to listen to some music.. so I haven't even really had the time to listen to the new album by Lorde or the Fleet Foxes.

This will not stand.  I don't want to become that guy, do I? You know, the one who simply refuses to believe that any new music by a new artist could be as interesting as the old classics and therefore isn't worth the effort (unless it's already too late for me on that score).

Must. Try. Harder.

...Not least because the new season at choir starts in a month, and from then until Christmas it will likely be rehearsal tracks all the way. I think we're doing some Starship!

just go with the magic, baby...

I had a revelation this evening.

I was listening to Father John Misty when it suddenly came to me that "Don't Stop Moving" by S-Club 7 might just be the purest, feel-good song ever recorded.  I don't even like to *start* movin' to the funky, funky beat.... but that song is pretty much irresistible.

Tay-Tay will no doubt be delighted to hear that, in spite of an obvious lack of hella good hair, I think that "Shake It Off" is a pretty close second.

I'm not even joking.

Like the man says, No need to reason why: just listen to the sound and it makes you come alive.

(Yeah. Uh. Come on.)

rock and roll star...

I stumbled across an interesting article today: “Why British Men Never Got Over Oasis”.

What? Well, okay…. let’s give the man a listen before we dismiss him.

“Oasis weren’t just the biggest band in the world – they encapsulated British masculinity like no one before or since. And us men were never the same again.”

Um. Speak for yourself, mate. It’s hard to know where to start with that statement, really. Oasis were many things, but original isn’t one of them; there’s pretty much nothing original about Oasis. Even the fraternal fighting was nothing new to anyone who knows anything about the Kinks. Like most guys my age, I’ve got the first three Oasis records. I quite liked them and they were undeniably a phenomenon, but they weren’t ever in my all-time top ten. I’m not even sure that they would even make a top ten of their contemporaries: I still listen to the likes of Blur and Ash and the Auteurs and I haven’t listened to an Oasis album in full for years. Hell, I haven’t listened to “Be Here Now” since 1997. I watched Wales v England at the weekend, and during the National Anthems, I marvelled at how grown men could get tearful at something as arbitrary as this; that their sense of personal identity was so bound up with their nationality. Like many people before me, I went through a phase where the music of The Smiths and the lyrics of Morrissey just seemed to speak to me in a way that no one else ever had… but Oasis definitely weren’t in that league, and why on earth would you tie your masculinity up with any band, never mind that band?

He’s just getting started.

“Between 1994-97, and further still, Oasis took it up a notch. During this heady era when the British zeitgeist was riding high on all things laddism, Britpop, and football coming home – they embodied what it meant to be a man. Oasis weren’t just the sound of a cultural moment, they led the cultural moment. It was the age of bolshie, sweary, boozed-up men, and the true personification of mid-Nineties manliness, they swaggered around like they owned the place, kitted out in football shirts and indie clobber, giving it the big I am.”

Let’s be clear: Oasis have never embodied to me what it meant to be a man. I’ll go further: men who behave like this strike me as mindless gibbons. When they headlined Glastonbury in 2004, even though the tickets must have been sold months before the announcement, on the day they were playing, suddenly the bars were full of people wearing bucket hats and chucking beer around. What the hell? Radiohead and R.E.M. headlined the same year. Where the hell did those idiots go when they were playing? If Liam Gallagher is your idea masculinity perfected, then what the hell must you make of Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe?

“Listening to them now - and you'll remember most of the words - they’re like a jolt of pure nostalgia. It must have been bloody magic at Knebworth, to be one of those quarter of a million voices singing along. And I’m not the only one who wishes they’d been there. One in 20 Brits applied for tickets – a testament to Oasis’ cultural impact at the time."

I was at Knebworth, as it happens, and what I remember most clearly (apart from sitting for several hours in the middle of the night in a traffic jam around Stevenage) was 125,000 people bellowing along drunkenly, completely un-ironically to the chorus of “A Design for Life” as Manic Street Preachers played. I think most people were happier when Cast were playing, to be honest. Ocean Colour Scene played on the bill the day before, which pretty much sums it up. I was there, and it was ridiculous, but…. nah.

“Be Here Now…has stood the test of time to rank alongside Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?”

No, it really hasn’t. It’s a horrible record, full of songs that aren’t good enough and are too long and over-produced. I bought it on the day of release and I’ve only been able to listen to it about three times. I’m certainly not about to listen to it again now. The album – five star reviews all round and a gazillion sales – didn’t mark the end of an era just because the Spice Girls came along, it marked the end of an era because it was shit.

“no band has managed to capture that sense of masculinity so perfectly since.”

Why would this even be a good thing? You only need to go to a Kasabian gig to see drunk people throwing £7 pints of beer over the front row. They’re pretty much the same people, aren’t they? (and, if anything, Kasabian are a much more inventive band than Oasis ever were). Maybe they’re a bit younger than the sad 45-year old dads who went to Heaton Park in their bucket hats to watch the Stone Roses the other year, but very much from the same lineage.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. Maybe the flouncy dancing and self-important warbling of Chris Martin is the look and sound of modern masculinity, and I’m just too much of a curmudgeon to feel it. But it seems to me like ever since Oasis, there’s been something missing between men and rock music. “

You know what? It’s actually almost sweet reading this. This guy is clearly a bit young to remember Oasis in their Imperial phase, and it’s almost touching to read how much they moved him. He’s clearly wrong to generalise about what does and doesn’t define masculinity, but at least he’s allowed music to move him… and you can’t fault him for that, even if the band he’s chosen to be moved by is completely baffling.

Bless.

sidebar: check out this list of the ten best Britpop songs in the Guardian the other day.  Luke Haines will doubtless be furious that he's been included... and the arguments about the choices are still raging in the comments section. Two Pulp songs? No Supergrass? What the hell? etc. I saw Pulp, Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers playing mid-afternoon slots at the 1994 Reading Festival (shortly before hopping across to the Melody Maker tent to watch Jeff Buckley by mistake when I was waiting to watch Gene).  We were fully a year away from the release of "A Different Class" and Britpop wasn't yet a thing.  The Manics were releasing The Holy Bible the following Monday, and I have to tell you, that although it's the least "Britpop" album you could possibly imagine, that's the record from that era that really stays with me.

just aim for my heart if you feel like it....

My wife is a fan of classical music in general, but she has a particular soft-spot for Mozart.  I like all sorts of music, but for some reason, I've never really been able to wrap my head around classical.  Over the years, my wife has tried to rectify this with the judicious gifting of things like Mozart's Requiem or Shostakovich, but nothing has really taken root.  I'm afraid I'd much rather listen to some banging rock music.

The other day, she was listening to the Queen of the Night aria from the Magic Flute.  It's a lovely piece of music, but I thought it would be amusing to reference the famous scene in the film "Amadeus", where the audience at the premiere of the opera are horrified by what is one of the most famous pieces of music ever written.

"It's just scales"

Or... as Salieri says in the film:

"There she was.  Onstage for all to see, showing off like the greedy songbird she was. Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios. Whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground."

Sadly, she didn't catch the reference and turned on me in a fury as the ignoramus I clearly am.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I followed up with this:

"It's just like 'Moves Like Jagger' by Maroon 5.... scales!"

Apparently, one does not simply compare the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to that of Maroon 5.  Who knew?

After 18 years, it seems like I still have a lot to learn about my wife.

And music.

Moo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooves like Jagger.....

pseudo human being...

Back in the day, it was an iPod that was my first introduction to Apple.  It was one of those rare devices that absolutely and immediately changed my life: in this case, by completely revolutionising the way that I listened to music.  I was one of those kids who was always taping things off the radio; I made mixtapes for people well into my 20s (it seems ridiculous to think about it now, but writable CDs weren't really a thing for most people for a really, really long time.  Long after all my music was on CDs, the only really practical way of making a compilation was to use a cassette).  I had a minidisc for a while, and that was okay but distinctly limited by the fact that not many people had minidisc players.... which may be at least part of the reason why that didn't really work out as a format.

Anyway....

I think my first iPod had a capacity of 30gb and I was suddenly able to carry around so much more music in my pocket... although, because my music was almost entirely on CD, I also had to learn how to rip CDs into MP3s first.  I then had to buy and install a firewire connection for my PC to be able to connect my new device to my computer.  I don't know about you, but how many times have you opened up a PC and installed a card? I worked in IT and it was my first time.  On top of all that, Apple hadn't made a version of iTunes for the PC yet, either... so I was forced to use something called "Media Jukebox" by JRiver (I haven't used this in over a decade and I think they still send me emails).  So I started ripping CDs onto my hard drive, and the choices I made then can still be seen in my library of MP3s today: every new CD that I bought was ripped immediately, but I selectively went back through my back catalogue, and loads of the CDs I didn't rip then have never been added since. The process of ripping a CD took ages on my old PC, and I just didn't have the time or patience to rip my way through a back catalogue of 1000 or so CDs... so I made some choices, and I'm still living with those choices today.  I guess I'm a completist, but not *that much* of a completist. Pah.  Evict me from the man club.

iTunes arrived for the PC eventually, and I moved my library over and downloaded my first track from the Apple Store.  79p for "Vertigo" by U2.

I loved the old iPod.  Even when Apple did everything they could to move us into newer technology, I loved being able to buy a device that had storage big enough that it was capable of holding my whole music library and I didn't have to choose what I loaded.  For me, the 160Gb iPod classic was where it was at.  I had an iPhone and used that for my day-to-day consumption of music, choosing playlists and albums that I wanted to carry with me all the time... safe in the knowledge that I always had my classic, and my classic had everything.

...and then Apple stopped making it.

Lots of people made a massive fuss about this and seemed angry at Apple for taking this choice away from them.  I sort of understood where they were coming from, but what the hell did they expect Apple to do about it?  They'd decided to move on, and that was that.  I was a touch worried that I wouldn't have the choice of something with this much storage, but my (second) classic was still pretty new, so it wasn't something I needed to lose any sleep over quite yet.

When we went on holiday to Switzerland and Austria this summer, we were going to be driving around everywhere, and I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to some music, so I packed the classic.  In truth, I'd been using the playlists on my iPhone more and more, but I still liked the idea of something with everything; something that had the whole of "Surf's Up" by the Beach Boys and not just a playlist of the band's greatest hits.  I quickly discovered something that Apple already knew: the iPod classic has a spinning hard drive and not solid state storage; it's built on old technology... and in the car we were using, it was painfully slow and crashed every couple of songs, requiring a full reset each time.  Needless to say, I just used my phone for music.  Suddenly, the iPod classic felt every bit an almost obsolete piece of technology.

Imagine my delight when I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 7 and discovered that I once again had a device with the storage capacity to easily hold my entire music collection.  In fact, the 256Gb storage capacity of my new phone is in fact significantly bigger than the 160Gb of my old iPod classic.

Technology, eh?

Naturally, in the time since I've started curating a digital music collection on my hard drive, I've bought a record player and started buying 180g vinyl, sometimes of music that I already own on cassette, CD and on MP3.

That's just the way of the world though, eh?

so you go, and you stand on your own and you leave on your own...

When we went to see Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds the other night, I was in the somewhat unusual position of being well into the younger end of the demographic. This is not something that happens to me very often anymore, unless it's one of those gigs where the kidz are accompanied by their parents (when I saw Jake Bugg playing at Rock City a couple of years ago, I was one of about four people in the audience who recognised "Folsom Prison Blues" when Bugg covered it.... all of the others were dads).  It seems that Brian Wilson (aged 73) is something of a draw for the grey pound, most of whom no doubt bought Pet Sounds the first time around and not, like me, when they started to get into music and heard it was one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

On the way to the Royal Concert Hall, we walked past Rock City. It was a Wednesday night... student night... and there was a huge crowd of kids in their late-teens and very early twenties queuing up outside the Rig.  It was quite a gathering of the tribes, and as we walked past, I had a good look and saw a real mixture of people.  Well, after all, everyone goes out for the big nights, don't they? The ones that really caught my eye though were the awkward ones; the ones who looked like they were trying a bit too hard to fit in and weren't quite managing.  They caught my eye because that was me.

As we walked on to the Concert Hall, I told my wife that I wouldn't go back to being that age for any money in the world.  I remember it far too well for that.  I might be twenty-odd years older, but I'm a lot more confident in who I am and in what I like to do these days; I don't feel much of a need anymore to pretend to be something I'm not.

If I could go back to being nineteen, then maybe I'd spend more time doing things I enjoyed with people that I liked. What I didn't know then is that if people don't like you for what you are, then they're probably not worth knowing.

Plus, if Brian Wilson is in town performing Pet Sounds, only an idiot would want to be anywhere else*.

Brian Wilson!

* admittedly, ticket price may prove prohibitive... although you could equally be at home listening to Pet Sounds instead, and I pretty much guarantee that's a better night than any you would be likely to have at the Rig. Certainly better than any night I had at the age of nineteen in anywhere like that.

dreams hang in the air...

About six weeks ago, I decided that I'd take the next step at choir and sign up to sing a solo at a singposium.  This isn't an audition as such, but it's a chance to sing in front of an audience and to receive feedback on your performance.  It's a step up from just being a member of the choir and towards perhaps auditioning a solo for one of our concerts.  I wasn't sure if I was ready to do it, but I'd already picked out a song, and I signed up because I knew I would be disappointed in myself if I didn't at least try. The worst thing that can happen is that I get some feedback that might help make me a better singer.

I chose a song that I thought would work well in my register (and actually, because of the backing track that I have, I'm probably singing it even deeper than I initially thought).  The song came to mind because I heard a cover of it on the wonderful Smith & Burrows album on the way back up in the car from my parent's house at Christmas.  Tom Smith has a pretty deep and resonant voice, and the idea sort of took root from there.

The song?  "Wonderful Life" by Black.  It's a song that I've loved since it was first released in 1987.

The singposium is on Saturday, and I'm not really sure how I feel about it.  I'm not exactly nervous, but it has been an awfully long time since I sang on my own in front of other people.  I've practiced the song a lot and know it pretty well.  I'm singing it quite low in my register, but I hope it sounds okay... although I suppose I'm about to find out.

This evening, when I got home from choir practice, I found out that Colin Vearncombe, the voice of Black and the author of the song, has died at the age of 53.  I knew he had been in a serious car accident a while back, but actually hearing that he's died was a bit of a shock and is very sad news indeed.

It's a beautiful, sad song and I hope I can do it justice.

gonna get you, no matter how far...

Shamelessly copying Pete from Uborka, I’ve decided to do an album-by-album career retrospective of a band that have remained a musical touchstone in my life. Pete has been working his way through the many and varied back catalogue of David Bowie, but I’m choosing a band who have been ground zero for my musical taste: Iron Maiden. For all their commercial success, Iron Maiden have never exactly been cool, even if you can now find their t-shirts worn by people who wouldn’t dream of listening to their music. Truth be told, it was the album cover that led me to pick up that cassette copy of The Number of the Beast in Our Price in 1987, but it was the music itself that proved to be a turning point in my listening life, moving me away from my juvenilia and opening the door to a much, much wider and more interesting musical world. The only other band that have had anything like the influence that Iron Maiden had on me were The Smiths, but I didn’t discover them until I was nineteen years old and starting at University. Iron Maiden took hold of me when I was thirteen, and I still get a fierce sense of joy today, aged 41, when I listen to their music.

Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden (1980)

Iron Maiden are very much Steve Harris’ band: formed in 1975 and working their way through a number of experimental line-ups before finally releasing their debut album in April 1980. Only a couple of members of the “classic” Iron Maiden line-up were in place at this time, with the band featuring, as well as Steve Harris on bass and Dave Murray on guitar, Paul Di'Anno on vocals, Dennis Stratton on guitar, and Clive Burr on drums. The band’s mascot, Ed the Head, is also in place on the album cover…. albeit looking a little more intact than in some of his later incarnations. Steve Harris has always reacted angrily to suggestions that the band’s sound has ever been influenced by punk, but you only have to listen to the moment when Di’Anno’s vocals kick in on opening track, “Prowler”, to realise that Harris is fooling no-one and the influence of punk is writ large across much of this album. Mostly this is because of Di’Anno’s growly, throaty vocal style, but there’s also a raw-ness to the band themselves that makes the comparison impossible to avoid. It’s true that Bruce Dickinson’s operatic foghorn wail and enormous vocal range took the band to another level when he joined for The Number of the Beast, but there’s surely no denying that Di’Anno’s vocals were a large part of Iron Maiden’s early success (and the album charted at #4 in the UK charts, which seems remarkable). Maybe it’s controversial to say so, Bruce Dickinson is clearly the better singer with a much bigger range, but Di’Anno’s singing here on songs like “Running Free” and “Iron Maiden” has never been matched or bettered by Dickinson, even though both songs remain in the live set-list for almost every gig. For all the punky influences, there are also hints of the band’s future direction in songs like “The Phantom of the Opera”, with its sprawling arrangement and duelling guitars (that will forever, in my head at least, conjure up images of Daley Thompson in that brilliant Lucozade advert).

Listening back to the album now, what strikes me the most is quite how good it is: the band had been honing their craft for five years by the time they released this record, and although they apparently aren’t happy with the production on the album, it still sounds pretty good to me. Raw, maybe, but that suits the songs (follow-up album "Killers" actually suffers from having more of a production sheen on it, in my opinion). In fact, I don’t think there can be many records that are 36 years old and still sound this fresh. Maybe the band doesn’t sound entirely like classic Maiden yet (mostly because it doesn’t feature Bruce Dickinson), but it’s barely dated. This incarnation of Maiden are some way from the finished product, which was probably still three or four years away at this point, but they are edgy and exciting and clearly on the cusp of something big.  As a sure sign of how much I like this album, I even really like the instrumental piece, "Transylvania" too.  Without Di'Anno singing - the single biggest factor in the band sounding so different - it actually sounds a lot more like the Iron Maiden we've come to know and love over the years, albeit a punkier version. Steve Harris once said that "I think if anyone wants to understand Maiden's early thing, in particular the harmony guitars, all they have to do is listen to Wishbone Ash's Argus album. Thin Lizzy too, but not as much. And then we wanted to have a bit of a prog thing thrown in as well, because I was really into bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull. So you combine all that with the heavy riffs and the speed, and you've got it". Hmm.  Maybe that's true, but I think the punk is in there whether he likes to admit it or not, even without Di'Anno's vocal style.

 One of the most interesting things about Iron Maiden over the years has been the sheer breadth and variety of their lyrics. I’m sure that, in most people’s heads, they sing about nothing much more than war and the devil… which is probably an easy assumption to make given the subject matter some of their most famous songs (“Aces High”, “The Trooper”, “The Number of the Beast” to name three). Actually, they are incredibly varied: myths (“Flight of Icarus”), ancient Egypt (“Powerslave”), poetry (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Nightmares (“Fear of the Dark”)… etc. etc. The lyrics on their debut are somewhat cruder: “Prowler” is a great song to open the record, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s about a stalker and “Charlotte the Harlot” isn’t exactly at the forefront of feminist thinking. Some of the slower songs are good, but perhaps a bit cheesy and derivative (“Remember Tomorrow” sounds a bit like Thin Lizzy, and “Strange World” sounds a lot like a re-heated version of “Remember Tomorrow”), but at least the band are trying to mix it up a little bit.

Best Song: Phantom of the Opera. Not for nothing do they still play this one at most of their gigs. It’s the best signpost here of the direction the band are heading.
Biggest Surprise: I’d forgotten how good Sanctuary sounds
Weakest Song: I’m not a big fan of “Strange World”, but even though they’ve revisited her in four subsequent songs, the lyrics to “Charlotte the Harlot” just make me wince
Ed the Head looks…..: …. Like a zombie punk. Just don’t tell Steve Harris that I said that.
Three word review: Raw, vibrant, fresh.

Next: Killers (1981)

This should be an interesting journey: with the release of this year's "The Book of Souls", Iron Maiden now have 16 studio albums.  Many of them I know extremely well from my youth, but I essentially stopped buying new Iron Maiden records when Fear of the Dark was released in 1992.  I'm looking forward to this, although it may take me a while.

daddy cool...

Apparently we’re in the middle of a vinyl revival. In 2015, it was the fastest growing musical format and accounted for 2% of all musical sales. Alright, so the numbers aren’t all that large, relatively speaking (Ed Sheeran has sold more copies of X on CD this year than the entire vinyl category put together), but they are growing and it was over a million units sold this year. Big enough for people other than specialist retailers to take notice, anyway. Tescos are about to start selling vinyl, for goodness sake.

There’s an official vinyl chart now too.

So who’s buying this stuff? Well, I think the chart for this week tells its own story:

Alright, so Adele tops the chart…. But ELO? New Order? Nirvana? The Pulp Fiction OST? The Clash? Led Zeppelin? the Stone Roses? The Smiths? NWA!

I’ll tell you who’s buying vinyl…people like me.

It doesn’t get much more contemporary as you go further down the top 40 either, Alongside albums by Taylor Swift, Sam Smith and the 1975, we have Dark Side of the Moon, Rush of Blood to the Head, Let it Bleed, Houses of the Holy, Nevermind, Rumours, Sgt Pepper, The Number of the Beast, AM and Whatever People Say I am That’s What I’m Not by Arctic Monkeys, Definitely Maybe, Bad, Abbey Road, Legend by Bob Marley, The Wall….

Let’s face it, this is a hipster chart, isn’t it? You can practically see the beards and smell the excellent artisanal, cold-filtered coffee.

As you do....

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Of course, I bought my record player, started buying vinyl and grew a beard way before it became a thing.

Way before.