R.i.P: Death of the iPod

Are you glad to see the back of the iPod?

Recently the BBC reported on what we all knew already: now that there’s music on the tablet, the phone and the bleedin' vacuum cleaner, who needs an iPod?

Those of you who know me – and those of you who have joined me on the Rock’n’Roll London Walk – will know that I am over-fond of a rant about CD’s being the work of the devil, how they are not fit to lace the boots of a vinyl record.

Surely, therefore, a traditionalist such as I (everybody knows that traditionalist is just another word for Grumpy Old Fart) will be happily dancing on the iPod’s grave. A grave, by the by, that might look a little like this…

(The illustration: is it too much? Can you tell I flirted with being a Goth as a teenager?)

So, good riddance to bad rubbish, then?

Far from it.

The thing about CD’s: I NEVER liked them. Didn’t stop me buying hundreds of the feckers, o’course, but it was under duress, your honour.

I first came across the Compact Disc in a science classroom at school. Some well-meaning teacher had brought in his CD player and an already impressive collection of CD’s (New Gold Dream by Simple Minds was one of them, making this 1982/83). He was giving a demonstration and waxing lyrical about how much better they were than records.

I remember picking one up in its little square-ish case and turning it over in my hand. Plasticky. Brittle.

“No sleeve notes,” I griped. “Not as good as a record.”

At which point the teacher took the CD case from me and like some end-of-the-pier magician pulling flags-of-all-nations from his sleeve, unfurled a hefty booklet full of sleevenotes with a smug flourish.

There was something about his smugness from which I never recovered.

His smugness.

His moustache.

The fact that we were in a science classroom.

The well-meaning attempt to be “down with the kids”.

The fact that the CD he was playing to demonstrate his – sorry, the CD’s – wonderfulness was Private Eyes by Hall and Oats.

The fact that the track was Mano a Mano, the worst track on an already terrible album.

AND you couldn’t get The Beatles on CD back then.

Done deal: why bother?

The iPod, on the other hand, appealed directly to the music anorak in me. All of your music in your pocket, wherever you go. All ordered in Playlists (best thing since the mix-tape, of which I was an addict). It was listening AND curating. I loved it from the very first.

And, like The Walkman (another invention I was very fond of), you could listen on the go and didn't have to creep like a cat burglar so's not to upset the disc, unlike the wretched CD Walkman (crap hardware for crap software).

Having said that, my first iPod (illustrated above) is about 10 years old and went on the fritz years ago. The Bush record player with the Garrard turntable upon which it is posing (also above) is more than 50 years old and still goes like the clappers. For records, and their players, I rest my case

But I’ll be sorry to see the iPod go.

Confessions of an International Vinyl Smuggler

Last year I went on a trip to Amsterdam, my first in 20 years. So what was taking me back? Was I going to smoke my brains for an entire weekend? Was I going to purchase an exquisite diamond ring for my wife? Was I on some Proustian quest to find fingerprints of my teenage self left behind on my last trip to the ‘Dam?

None of the above.

I was going to slake the thirst of my most secret habit, the pursuit of which I scarcely dare tell a soul for fear of the social stigma attached.

I was going to Amsterdam to fatten up my collection of picture sleeve European pop singles and E.P’s from the 1960s – at Record Palace, the great record shop opposite the famous old music venue, the Paradiso.

I feel as if I am typing these words in silhouette, to keep my identity a secret – for am I not to be more pitied than scorned? Do we not all have guilty vinyl secrets lurking like a politician’s past?

At home, I keep them away from the main body of my record collection. I play them on a red Dansette Popular from 1962.

There, in private, I dig the easy tones of Adamo (unjustly never accepted as one of my five famous Belgians when that pub challenge arises) and the gossamer charms of Lucky Blondo, perennially in skinny rib polo neck and bad slacks (that’s him, not me)…

Then there’s the stomping covers of Spain’s answer to The Beatles, Los Mustang (El Submarino Amarillo, anyone?) and the mad yodel of L’hotesse de L’air by Jacques Dutronc (roughly equivalent to being France’s Ray Davies)…

My tragic tale begins about 12 years ago on a rainy morning in North Finchley, in the North London Hospice Charity shop. There, hidden in a shoe box composed largely of singles by The Bachelors, the bane of the seven-inch hunter’s existence (how many units did these feckers shift? It must be in the billions) lurked a picture sleeve.

The period was irredeemably 60s, lower case font, clean cut guy with a pre-Beatle cut, cool suede jacket, rakishly loosened woollen tie, RCA Victor blue label.

Neither the song – Elle Était Si Jolie – nor the singer – Alain Barrière (think Don Draper re-cast as a crooner) – had troubled my radar to this point. But the words “sélectionnée par la R.T.F au Grand Prix Eurovision de la chanson 1963” caught my eye.

I bought it. It cost 50p.

I had carried a Jacques Brel fixation from college, so I thought I could handle it.

I never thought I’d get sucked in.

Who does?

But at the syrupy sound of this mawkish ballad, I immediately felt like Gene Wilder in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) at the moment he suddenly falls for the sheep. I knew it was wrong. But I just had to find out more about this Alain Barrière.

The label revealed that he wrote his own material – impressive, I thought – and that the Play Bach guy, Jacques Loussier was one of his arrangers.

After a little research I found that old Al, like some Breton Cliff Richard, was still on the go! And this was his 1963 Eurovision entry! I began to seek out his records. I quickly resolved to limit my collection to his 1960s oeuvre on the grounds of coiffure alone – Monsieur Barrière had woken up on a bad hair day sometime in 1971 and had never quite recovered. His record sleeves thereafter look like those pictures on the wall of men’s hairdressing shops that seem to say: you too could have a haircut like this… if you’re not careful.

It was only a matter of time before I found (and on the spot became a fan of) Mireille Mathieu, Jacques Dutronc and a plethora of Ye Ye Girls. Then it was Drafi Deutscher (and His Magics, of course) from West Germany and Hervé Vilard (did you know he was born in the back of a Parisian taxi?) and… if it wasn’t for the fact that I was typing right now, I’d be holding my head in my hands in shame.

I have to stop this confession now, as I can hear my wife coming up the stairs, and she doesn’t know my dark secret, either. Last time she nearly caught me alphabetizing my Dutch E.P’s and when she burst in and asked why I had such a guilty look on my face I had to tell her I was watching porn on the internet. It seemed like a less shameful alibi than collecting European 60s pop records. You won’t tell her, will you? Cheers. You’re a mate.

Phil Everly, Proust, Freud and Drinks For All My Friends

The first Everly album I ever owned, inherited from an uncle when I was 13.

Hidden within music we often find those mystical triggers that set off involuntary memory.

Radio provides the best and most delicious of such moments, when the random selection of music opens up sometimes repressed areas of the subconscious. Or, to combine Freud with Chuck Berry:

Rock the pfennig right into the slot/You gotta hear something that’s really hot

(Freud and Chuck Berry. That would have been quite a gig. Freud would have been the supporting act. That goes without saying.)

The radio brought such a sensation to me this morning when I heard the news that Phil Everly had died at the age of 74.

There’s not one of my best and most beloved friends with whom I have not played or sung Everly Brothers music.

And memories of each and every one of them flooded in this morning. Some of them I see all the time. Some of them I still play music with. Some I haven’t seen for ages. Some are absent friends.

I think of these people most days anyway. But the passing of Phil Everly brought back golden times. And not just that. It brought the promise of golden times to come, singing and playing or simply just listening to the records together. But particularly singing and playing…

Rest in Peace Phil Everly and thanks for all the great times yet to come.

 Here's Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, my favourite of all their albums:

First Song of 2014

This, I fear, is the shape of things to come.

The first song I heard in 2014 was Best Song Ever by One Direction, blaring through my six-year-old daughter’s bedroom door.

The other day, out of the blue, she announced:

“One Direction are the hottest band on the planet right now.”

“Are they really?” I asked. “How do you know such a thing?”

“Darcey told me at school,” she shot back, “and she read it on the internet.”

So, there you go.

Happy New Year.

Mondegreen No. 1 & 2

A Mondegreen is the mis-hearing of a lyric resulting in the meaning being rendered in a more comic fashion.

The phrase was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954, writing in Harper’s Magazine. As a child she had listened to her mother recite the old Scottish ballad The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray. Part of which deals with the bloody end of the titular noble – particularly the aftermath of the slaying, at which point they, “Laid him on the green.”

La Wright, however, heard that not only was the Earl o’ Moray dead, but so too was “Lady Mondegreen.”

And so the Mondegreen was born.

My pal Sandra was, for a long time, under the common misapprehension that Jimi Hendrix had come out as bisexual in his song Purple Haze. The evidence? The line:

“’Scuse me while I kiss this guy”

Very polite, these bisexuals. ‘Scuse me. You’re excused I’m sure, don't mind me.

My mother is as adroit a mondegreener as she is a malapropist.

The scene: Top of the Pops, some time in the Autumn of 1983. Boy George croons on a Mississippi Riverboat (actually a stretch of river somewhere near Weybridge in Surrey).

My mother laughs and tuts, and says:

“He’s a comedian, right enough.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what he’s singing: I’m a I’m a I’m a I’m a I’m a comedian…”

Stories Behind The Music

SCENE: A Living Room.

MUSIC: Florida Suite (1887) by Frederick Delius

ME: “Did you know that Delius was buried at night time?”

LSP*: “No I did not know that. Did you know that I can’t hear Delius’s lovely music because you keep telling me stuff such as ‘Did you know Delius was buried at night time?’”

(*LSP stands for Long Suffering Partner, referring to my wife Karen. It will elsewhere on this blog stand for Long Suffering Pal. Both will refer to people who have been greatly tolerant of my music anorak-ism down through the years. Those who could not stand it will be abbreviated as XLSP.)

I have always been fascinated by the stories behind the music and the musicians. It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I would end up spending at least a part of my professional life writing reviews and criticism as a journalist.

I recently found myself wondering where this interest – obsession? – came from. And whether or not I’d have a greater appreciation of the music if I forgot all about the backstory and just listened.

Frankly, I didn’t fancy the prospect.

Rather than change the habits of a lifetime, I tried instead to trace back up the tracks of my trainspotterish proclivity for musical biography. And the line led, as it so often does, to my father.

My old man had an eclectic taste in music.  For the purposes of the tale at hand I’ll set the gamut as being everything from Souza to Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash, my old dad was fond of saying, could sing heartfelt songs of life behind bars because he had himself been a hardened jailbird.

My dad (top pic) and me

This last is a PR man’s dream. Cash served several one-night-stands in the pokey for various minor misdemeanours (including the daft flower-picking incident that featured in the song Starkville City Jail). Down through the years, however, these incidents have, in the retelling, become a tale to rival anything out of Dumas. Such a Past, of course, does no harm to The Image.

John Phillip Sousa, my dad told me, also had a backstory.

Sousa, according to my dad, was a man obsessed with precision. Evidence? Well that was plain in the marches so beloved of my father. Martial music. March time. Brisk. Not a hair out of place.

Sousa’s obsession was such, so my dad told me, that his quest for precision in all things eventually drove him stark staring MAD.

I have always LOVED that story.

But I’d never sought to question it. Until, that is, I decided to trace back up the tracks, etc, etc (see above)…

It turns out, thanks to just the most cursory glance at Google, that J.P Sousa lived to the ripe old age of 77, was happily married and had three kids. The maddest thing he ever did was that he once considered joining a circus band, but soon thought better of it. He was fond of wearing his Marines uniform when performing, even long after he left the military – eccentric, rather than barking, I would have thought.

Does it make me think any less of Sousa? Well, he was never going to feature on my Desert Island Discs at the best of times. Does it diminish my dad, somehow? Not at all. The fact that my old man was a bit of – ‘ow you say? – a Romancer, was one of things I loved most about him.

I just wonder where the story came from? Did my dad just assume that the slightly unhinged undertone of marching music would surely drive you to the booby hatch over time? Was it a paternal cautionary tale to take Sousa in small doses?

And, frankly, who could take large doses of Sousa? For most listeners, a march spends most of its time either approaching and/or receding – based on the reasonable assumption that the listener is standing watching a parade. Thus the music never outstays its welcome. The only folks exposed to the music for protracted periods of time are the band members themselves. Or people who like following parades. Those band members are often soldiers with training to toughen them up for horrors almost as bad as martial music. Those who jig along in their wake, however, would need to be judged in another court.

So is this another tale of parental let downs and disappointments then? Far from it. Especially not on Fathers’ Day some seven years after his death. It’s a thanks-giving tale. My father’s love of music and a good yarn both – regardless of how tall that yarn may be – are the greatest gifts he bestowed upon me. They are central to my every living day.

Besides, it instilled in me the central principal of British journalism, which, as any fule kno, is… why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Here’s the U.S Marines giving it large on Sousa’s most famous piece…

The Monday Shuffle

The Monday Shuffle – the first five songs to come up on my iTunes/iPod this morning…

1. Punky’s Dilemma – Simon and Garfunkel (1968)

Pulled out a plum, here, in terms of a good way to start a freezing cold Monday.

Wistful, hippy-dippy, sunny, with a whistling coda, Punky’s Dilemma is from side two of 1968’s Bookends album. It’s a great song to use as a litmus test on Paul Simon. If you weren’t sure as to whether you can stick him or not, give this a go. Its writerly squibs – boysenberry jam rhymes with ordinary, for example – will either have you smiling all day, or throwing your iPod across the room.

For the record, I’m in the former camp.

2. Watching the Wheels – John Lennon (1980)

Truth be told, if this didn’t pop up on shuffle from time to time, I probably wouldn’t listen to it. The geek in me has to have it to complete the collection. But I always have to ask – is Double Fantasy, Lennon’s last album, really any good?

In the context of a comeback, sure, it’s great news: here’s a finally happy man making a nice but bland record. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But is it a great record?

Is it a tragedy that it was his last record? No doubt about it. And there’s the rub: it’s just too tough to judge this album on its own merits, standing alone.

Great sentiment in the lyric of this UK No.1 single, though: I’m out, I’m done, I’m not competing any more, and do you know what? I feel happy. Lovely stuff.

The voice – a voice that Lennon was always unsure of – sails here, as he’s right behind the sentiment of the lyric. It’s one of the best recordings of his voice left to us – nasal, raggedy, still raw and plaintive. It remains one of my favourite voices.

And the Proustian effect of music to bring back December 1980 is vivid indeed. From the Bush wireless over which I heard the news, to my granny giving me my breakfast, to the spiral wallpaper on my bedroom wall to playing that day the only Beatles album I had at the time – Beatles For Sale.

Nothing like a song to bring it all flooding back.

3. Can’t You Find Another Way of Doing It – Same & Dave (1968)

From 1968, tight and funky in the face of all that flabby psychedelia, this Atlantic single only made number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100. Viewed in the context of previous singles – Hold On I’m Comin’ and Soul Man among them – I suppose it could seem something of a potboiler. There’s the requisite brass jabbing like Cassius Clay, the loose-wristed snare drumming, the cat-on-hot-bricks bass… maybe in 1968 it all seemed a bit same-old-same old.

It’s a case of pearls before swine, if you ask me.

Writers Homer Banks and Raymond Jackson bring quite a pedigree to the table. Both born in Memphis, Banks is responsible for (among many others) I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down with Jackson’s CV boasting (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right and, in the best tradition of these things, many, many more.

As time goes on Sam and Dave seem to have become the unsung heroes of soul. Their relationship was a famously stormy one, with Sam Moore once claiming that he and Dave didn’t speak offstage for a period of 13 years.

A girl at college introduced me to Sam and Dave back in the 80s. She was a big Otis Redding nut, too, and she once made me an outstanding mix tape (more of that another day).

4. Things Are Going to Get Better – Small Faces (1967)

Hard on the heels of Sam and Dave, a disciple: Steve Marriott. And it’s his great vocal performance that keeps the interest here – despite the best (or worst?) efforts – of Ian MacLagen’s harpsichord, an instrument as well-suited to the Small Faces bluesy sound as a Telephone is to Bach’s Matthew Passion.

An album track from side one of 1967’s Small Faces album, their debut for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. Marriot and Ronnie Lane composed all the tracks on the album, and perhaps the strain is showing here on this filler.

Of Andrew Loog Oldham as a producers, the aforementioned Ian MacLagen once observed” “Produce records? He couldn’t produce a burp after a pint of beer.”

5. White Lightening – George Jones (1959)

It’s by George Jones so it’s either about a bad woman or booze… and this time it’s the latter.

A 1959 US Country No.1, it’s a paean to the delights of homemade hooch. Legend has it – and the phrase “legend has it” is seldom very far from any tale about George Jones – that Jones took 80 takes to get the vocal right, having “warmed up” for the recording in a bar.

The song’s rockabilly flavour is no coincidence. It was written by J.P Richardson, who is of course more famous by his stage name The Big Bopper. The tune was recorded six days after the Big Bopper perished in the same aircrash that took Buddy Holly.

My earliest memory of this one is in my grandfather’s car, listening to it on the eight-track stereo, and everyone laughing at the cod basso profundo vocal on the title line, “Oooh! White Lightning”.

I laughed all over again this morning. Have a great week. Here’s George in action.