THE BLACK WATCH

Battery-powered, hour on hour,                                     
Time tocks digitally, silently,
Slowly on my workaday wrist.
Clear of face and sober,
My Monday to Friday watch
Is a faithful old timekeeper
Who buses me to work
With morning Metro
For wake-up coffee,
As the great, grey grind
Begins again and again.
Then, on Monday to Thursday
Evenings which never become nights,
I watch tired TV on the somnolent sofa
And retire early to bed, early to rise,
Too weary to wipe sleep from bleary eyes.
Meanwhile, waiting all week long,
The strong black watch has been brooding
In the gewgaw and jewellery drawer,
Impatiently counting down the flight
To freedom and the heyday of Friday night.

Identical quartz disports
Time, ticks quickly, gallops
Apace on my late-night wrist.
Dark and mysterious,
My holiday-weekend watch
Converts must-do into want-to
And jets us to pleasure
With midnight vodka
Until Sunday’s Rose` glow
Glisters, gleams, grins
And beams golden again.
But bar, garden and conservatory                          
Drift blithely towards industry,
As Friday turns into Monday,
As candlelight turns to electricity
And music and talk turn to work and TV.
Willing old workwatch, up every weekday, 
Heaves the leaden hours all the way

Down through the tunnel to the light of payday;

But dark in the drawer, soon to make hay,

Our thrilling, deadly nightwatch waits to play.

c. 2007 IGR

Was it really six years ago that I wrote this? Tempus doesn't half fugit, doesn't it!
Even though I'm now fully retired, I still have those two watches and the black one
only goes on at weekends and holidays.

POLLOCK

 

Jack The Dripper, Action Man of the art world,

Prances around the canvas-covered floor of his barn

In a trance of creativity, here a flick, there a flick,

The colours dance beyond beginning or ending

In paintings where the centre simply will not hold.

Lost in the image, the painter dances out his dream

As the pattern revolves and advances below his feet,

Gliding where the chances and mischances lead him

Through new land and seascapes into a changed world.

C. 2012 IGR

I was browsing through an art book when I came across some pictures by Pollock and a description of his modus operandi. Although not particularly interested in him previously, I was fascinated and found myself writing this poem very quickly.

The picture is reproduced courtesy of Google Images.

VAN GOGH



See the painter on his way to work al fresco,

Toting bags with an easel under his arm, 

His straw hat gold as the cobbled road in sunlight,

And that dark, constant companion, his shadow.

He passes the peasants reaping or sowing in fields,

Bent dark over their tools from daybreak to sunset

Before finding his place and the day’s way to work.

When his feet stop walking, his hands start to paint,

For it is his way to work, work, work:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

In a perpetual motion at one with his eye;

Work, work, work and the pictures come:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

As the world rolls and turns around him,

The wheat and clouds and trees,

Rocks and farmlands and furrows

Radiate through sunlight to twilight,

Past long shadows and low crows

Whose black wings bring the storm

Into the world’s changing form,

Through moonlight to starlight,

Dusk to dawnlight.

C. 2012 IGR

Van Gogh has always been one of my favourite artists. We’ve been to Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a couple of times and the paintings are even more stunning close-up in three dimensions. The accompanying picture here ‘The Painter on his Way To Work’, comes from one of the happier times of his life when he believed he might set up an artists’ colony in France. Like so many things in his short life, it didn’t work out.

The picture was the initial inspiration for the poem and is reproduced here courtesy of Google Images.

HOPPER

Blink and you could miss them:
The detached clapperboard houses
By the rail tracks, the lighthouses,
An occasional blue flash of sea,
The sunlit meadows and rooftops,
Gas stations and lonely roads,
The drug stores and diners,
Theatres, offices and hotel rooms
Where figures gaze into space or read.

You glimpse them caught between
The shadows and light which fall
In an implacable geometry
Around the heavy angles Of half-shuttered windows,
And empty sunbeaten streets.
And the women on beds and balconies:
You will note them there, waiting
In various states of dress and undress,
In doorways, at windows and on trains,
Where the light finds them out,
But you can only guess at their stories.

The skies are always bright and blue
In a world forever poised and dreaming;
Except for a rare breeze on a curtain,
Stillness presides over everything,
Inside and outside, in town and country,
And a certain echoing silence prevails,
Whilst the deep woodlands wait
At the edge of everyday things,
Dark and patient and mysterious.

C. 2012 IGR

Hopper is an artist who kind of crept up on me. Although many of his pictures are bright
and colourful, they always seem to retain a sort of film noir quality. Seeing them for
real in a London exhibition a few years ago was a memorable experience.

The picture, ‘Cape Cod Morning’, is reproduced courtesy of Google Images.

AEGEAN SUNSET

 

The Zenith

Sunlight shimmers on swelling wavelets
Down through to the sand-bed below
Where it pulses like sparkling veins
Deep in the high life;
And we are in our element:
Swimming with glinting sardines and distant sails
Whilst bodies brown on rocks and beaches
Where cicadas whirr continuously in the green cliff
As they have since time began,
On this island
To which we have now returned.

The Blueness

Pure azure
By late afternoon,
The blueness has emerged
Infinitetisimally:
A slow water-colour evolving
In the faraway hills of the bay.
Greens, browns and yellows
Of trees, soil and beach
Coalesce in tones of blue,
Dissolving down from the sky,
Rising up from the sea.
The sun, still high, fringes the horizon
With a brilliance about to send bright scintillas
Sailing towards us.

The Shimmering

Now the sky, hills and sea merge
Into the blueness,
And a glittering spire of sunlight
Advances on the lambent water,
Flashing instants and breaking on the shore at our feet
Like seconds in the golden grains of ancient time.

The Dazzling

Down through the ages,
Romans, Turks and Venetians
Have watched this same shimmering
That we see now,
Turn to dazzle
On the sea between these shores,
And the point of this spire
That touches our toes
Now, in this lazy, hazy present
Touched others long past:
Always the same and always different,
Now and then,
Here and gone,
Always one.

The Afterglow

Molten gold,
The sun sinks to the crest of distant hills
And the moon rises silver behind us.
The last of the dazzling draws us in
To slip like snakes
Into the liquid silk of still sea.
We silhouette our way
Far out,
Into the twinkling heart of the dazzle
As the sun, its spire built,
Burns down behind the blue hills
Where a small, solitary cloud darkens and dispels.
In the afterglow burnishing the sea,
An aurora appears
From great unseen lanterns of gentle gods,
Briefly dawning the dusk,
And we glide back
To our deserted beach,
Naked and new
In the moonlit night.


c. 2005 IGR
 

We'd been to the Greek island of Skiathos several times and I'd wanted
to write something about how the light changed over the course of an afternoon,
viewed from our favourite beach.

Eventually I managed to sketch out a few notes on the inside covers of my paperback
copy of William Peter Blatty's novel, 'The Exorcist' - a sort of dark, gothic counterpoint
to the the brilliant Skiathos sunshine.

Back in the autumn chill of Leicester, the poem finally came together. I took the photo of Lisa
silhouetted against the sunset on the actual beach.
 

 

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 6

‘a matter of life and death, taking on issues of love, family, friendship, religion, reconciliation and, as much as anything else, the relationship between the brothers themselves.’

Everyone Is Here (2004)

by The Finn Brothers

Three flashbacks. Two of them blurry.

 

Very late 1970s or very early ‘80s. A gig by Split Enz at Leicester Polytechnic. Eraserhead  hairstyles, clown make-up, Pierrot outfits. Great show – somewhere between Art Rock and New Wave. Crowd wildly enthusiastic. We’re right at the front and, at the end, the Finns et al line the stage, bending over to shake hands, dripping sweat and greasepaint over us all…

Early ‘90s now. It’s Crowded House at The De Montfort Hall, Leicester. Volunteers from the audience have joined Neil Finn at the mike to sing ‘Better Be Home Soon’. At some point, extrovert drummer, Paul Hester vanishes, only to reappear above us where we stand downstairs. He balances on the rail of the balcony, which he proceeds to skip around…  

Early 2007. We’re pulling our cases on to the bridge outside our hotel, on our way to catch a boat, a bus and a plane back home. There standing on the crest of the bridge, is Neil Finn, gazing around, taking it all in. The way you do. In Venice. We’d like to stop and tell him how much we love Everyone Is Here, which we’ve been listening to for the last year, but the moment passes and we move on… 

                                                   * * * * *

The musical adventures of Tim and Neil Finn, working apart, have been too multifarious to detail here. Suffice, for the moment then, to say that their  collaborations – in Split Enz and on Woodface (1991) by Crowded House – are regarded as the commercial and creative high points of their careers.

They have, however, also released two albums as The Finn Brothers. The first, eponymous release in 1995, is a low-key, low-fi outing, low on memorable tunes, which felt like a failure at the time and in no way suggested that, nearly ten years on, they had Everyone Is Here in them - in my view, the best record either of them have ever been involved with, even having the edge on the great Woodface.      

Dedicated to their recently deceased mother, Everyone is Here is, in a sense, a matter of life and death, taking on issues of love, family, friendship, religion, reconciliation and, as much as anything else, the relationship between the brothers themselves.

Although they apparently get on well (compared, say, to other pop music brothers such as the Everlys, the Davieses and the Gallaghers) the Finns have generally tended to keep their distance creatively, only occasionally making music together after Split Enz. Whilst they have remained consistently successful in Australasia for over four decades, it is Neil (b. 1958), the younger brother by six years, who has, with Crowded House, sold the most records by far in the northern hemisphere. Neil it was too, who after joining Split Enz six years into their career, steered them into more commercial territory, writing and singing their UK/US breakthrough pop hit, ‘I Got You’, after which they entered their most profitable and critically acclaimed phase. 

Tim Finn, with Phil Judd, the founding members of Split Enz, may therefore have felt some satisfaction that his temporary membership in Crowded House resulted in their high water mark, Woodface, more than half of which he co-wrote with Neil. The degree of equilibrium thereby restored to whatever sibling rivalry existed between the Finns wasn’t, however, enough to extend Tim’s tenure in the band. Meanwhile, it was Finn jnr. who continued to display the magic ingredient required for mass appeal. Age-gaps can matter to friends and siblings, and six years is a not inconsiderable one. 

In the sombre, sepia photographs on the sleeve of Everyone Is Here, the brothers resolutely and unsmilingly face in different directions. Another shot shows a bridge over the Waikato River near where they grew up in New Zealand; it appears exactly in the middle of the CD’s lyric booklet, separating ‘Disembodied Voices’ and ‘A Life Between Us’, tracks 6 and 7 of 12 and the two songs which most clearly deal with the brothers’ relationship.

The ‘Disembodied Voices’ are recollected from ‘Down the hallway forty years ago’ where Tim and Neil used to talk together in their bedroom after lights out before falling asleep. As the Finn boys both attended boarding school, this presumably alludes to the nocturnal conversations they’d have during holidays when ‘What became much harder was so easy then’. Floating above the nostalgic, pastoral combination of banjo and mandolin*, the gentle rise and fall of the melody, sung in close two-part harmony – as are so many of the songs – works towards the understanding that:- 

                                  ‘We all made our choices -

                                   Let’s work out what we’re going to do.

                                   Disembodied voices    

                                   Revealing what we know is true.’ 

The next song begins with the yin and yang of sibling love, Neil singing lead – 

                                  ‘In so many ways I’m the same as you

                                  And so many things are better left unsaid.’ 

Tim takes over at the start of the following verse, admitting ‘I won’t give control to any one’, whilst in the hushed final verse, referencing the album cover, the two of them harmonize:- 

                                  ‘And brother, must be the different

                                  Direction we’re facing –

                                  You’re still as unknown as ever.’ 

before Neil asks his big brother, ‘Are you still someone / Who’ll watch over me?’ In between, the choruses, again reminding us of the cover photo’s, use the terrifically effective image of riverbanks to illustrate the ambiguity of the brothers’ relationship:- 

                                  ‘And we’re staring at each other,

                                  Like the banks of a river

                                  And we can’t get any closer,

                                  But we form a life between us.’ 

Musically it all flows along, turning here and there, the current strengthening in the chorus to produce mature song-writing of the highest order. The second half of the album, heralded by ‘Disembodied Voices’, gathers in lyrical intensity with the songs becoming more personal and powerful. Which is not to imply that the first half is somehow weak – far from it. 

The opening track, ‘Won’t Give In’, is the one which most sounds like Crowded House. Underpinned by Neil’s subtle electric guitar, it is about the gathering of the Finn clan for the funeral with the narrator reflecting that ‘Once in a while I return to the fold / And the people I call my own…Cos everyone I love is here’. ‘Nothing Wrong With You’ is a rousing call to someone who the world has turned against to ‘just keep on singing…Even as you fight to go on / Turn it into something else.’ In ‘Anything Can Happen’, in between salvos of electric guitar, the narrator gives himself a good talking to, resolving not to give up but to ‘Give in to the mystery’.

A strong sense of determination to get on with things no matter what characterises these first three songs before ‘Luckiest Man Alive’, Tim’s inspired love song for the woman who ‘cut right through his foolish pride’, lifts the mood and tempo. It features yet another soaring chorus and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion on 12 string and a distinctively ringing ‘Turkish banjo’. ‘Homesick’ though, is another downbeat number lyrically, dealing with a sense of dislocation  arising from ‘thinking ‘bout what I’d lost…my home town feeling strange…homesick for the country I’m living in.’ Amidst its strings and staccato riffing, pedal steel and lap steel guitars create a yearning atmosphere to compliment the song’s emotional force. 

Back at the album’s second half, a strong sense of urgency ‘to make you less lonely’ drives ‘All God’s Children’ which starts with a good theological joke:- 

                           ‘We’re all God’s children

                           And God is a woman

                           But we still don’t know who the father is.

                           I can’t help thinking

                           There’s a fortune riding

                           On the answer to that question.’         

The chorus rises up on a swell of Beatlesque guitars - and this would be good point at which to commend Neil Finn’s playing which, like that of George Harrison, is never either flashy or fussy, but is always exactly right for the song. 

‘Edible Flowers’, a beautiful song left over from the Split Enz days, but which fits into this album perfectly, begins with richly orchestrated minor chords and Tim at the piano, melancholically reflecting that ‘Everybody wants the same thing / To see another birthday’.  On the chorus, Neil’s voice rises like sudden sunlight pouring through a stained glass window:-  

                            ‘Bright lights dissolve

                            Like sugar deep inside you now

                            And silver rain falls down now;

                            I’m hardly here at all.’ 

On an album full of great singing, this is perhaps the most sublime highlight and it moves me to the core every time I hear it. Then Tim comes in again, as low as he can go, reflecting on ‘all the trash and the treasure’ and ‘the pain and the pleasure’ and ‘the edible flowers / Scattered in the salad days’. Then that chorus returns to rip out your heart again. Even if it didn’t bring so vividly back the image of my own mother floating away on a sea of morphine, I’m sure this song would still wrap itself around my heart.       

Tim takes the verses once more on ‘All The Colours’, a lovely tribute to his  mother featuring harmonium and euphonium, which pictures her being gathered up by a rainbow as she finally leaves her family:- 

                           ‘Now we’re left here

                           To get on with our things,

                           Writing it down

                            And working with wood and strings.’ 

Those lines could provide a suitable epigraph for the album which continues with the close harmony of ‘Part Of Me, Part Of You’. It comes marching in – drummer Matt Chamberlain in fine form here – with its positive declarations of reconciliation with the Finns’ environment and each other. The closer is ‘Gentle Hum’, with Neil singing lead at the piano, Tim doing the hum and other vocal effects, as the song casts its mystical spell over the record: ‘This gentle hum / Will make us one.’ 

The twelve short songs on Everyone Is Here form a remarkably consistent, sensitive and soulful whole. You will wait a long time before you hear another album with as many melodies as strong as these. Into its second decade, I’ve yet to hear a better album in this new century.

 

N. B. 

* Tony Visconti, who plays the mandolin as well as double-bass and cello on ‘Disembodied Voices’, which he also produced was, in fact, the original producer of Everyone Is Here. Crowded House producer, Mitchell Froom helmed most of the re-recording, which was the version actually released (albeit with Visconti’s string arrangements). Between them, the two producers have an impressive track record: David Bowie, T. Rex, The Moody Blues, Morrissey (TV) and Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman and Richard Thompson (MF) to name but a few.    

There are no song-writing credits in the otherwise comprehensively detailed sleeve-notes to Everyone Is Here; I thus infer that all the songs here are more or less co-written. Under each lyric however, where we are told who plays and sings what, Neil is sometimes above Tim and vice versa. Maybe therefore, as with Lennon and McCartney on Beatles albums, we can assume that the lead vocalist is mainly responsible for composition? In any case, Neil gets ‘top billing’ on tracks 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 12; Tim on tracks 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, and 11.   

Crowded House drummer Paul Hester’s balancing act at the De Montfort Hall may well have been an early display of self-destructive tendencies – he hanged himself from a tree in an Australian park in 2005. Neil Finn sang ‘Better Be Home Soon’ at a memorial service. 
  

Two other albums primarily involving the Finns, which seem to be getting lost in the mists of time, are Enzso (1996) and The Sun Came Out (2009). The cleverly titled Enzso is a set of Split Enz songs rearranged with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, which features, as well as both Finns, various ex-Enz and other NZ luminaries on vocals. The Sun Came Out, a 2CD charity project for Oxfam organised by Neil under the banner of 7 Worlds Collide, features consistently good original material by not only himself and various other members of the Finn family, including Tim, but also the likes of Johnny Marr, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, K. T. Tunstall, Radiohead’s Phil Selway and, again, various Kiwi artists. Both of these records are well worth seeking out.

 

c. 2013 IGR                                                         

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 5

‘the soundtrack works extremely well as an independent entity and is a fine, if slightly avant garde Folk album, in its own right.’
 

The Wicker Man (OST 2002)
by Paul Giovanni & Magnet

I first saw The Wicker Man when it was released in 1973 as part of what must have been one of the last cinema double-bills with Don’t Look Now – a memorable pairing of films if ever there was one (double-bills are pretty much defunct nowadays, as is the dear old Fosse Cinema with its art-deco façade in Leicester where I saw the films – demolished to make way for a Tesco Express and petrol station as part of the city’s ongoing policy of architectural vandalism).
 

The music for The Wicker Man always stayed with me though, and my love for it grew whenever I watched the film again. The soundtrack, however, didn’t become available until the late 90s and was only issued in its entirety in 2002. The relationship between the music and the film is an unusually close one in The Wicker Man: you simply couldn’t imagine the film without its sixteen songs and instrumentals (Christopher Lee, who plays Lord Summerisle and sings a duet with Diane Cilento, still thinks it ‘probably the best music [he’s] ever heard in a film’). Even though it may seem indivisible with the film, the soundtrack works well as an independent entity and is a fine, if slightly avant garde Folk album, in its own right.

Comprising a melange of old folk songs, Celtic tunes, Robbie Burns ballads, nursery rhymes, sound effects and snatches of dialogue, the music was assembled, adapted and arranged by Paul Giovanni, who also wrote some of the lyrics and music, and his assistant musical director, Gary Carpenter. It is played by them with Carpenter’s  folk-rock band, Magnet, who are augmented at various points by a brass section. Vocals are handled by a chorus of voices including those of children, with Giovanni himself often taking the lead. The instrumental palette is a collection of folk paraphernalia and includes guitars, various hand drums, pipes and recorders, fiddle, concertina, ocarina, Jew’s harp, harmonica and Nordic lyre.

For the uninitiated, the plot of The Wicker Man involves a tightly-buttoned Christian police sergeant played by Edward Woodward (aka TV’s Callan and The Equalizer) being lured from the mainland to the remote (and fictional) Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Sergeant Howie, still a virgin in his thirties, is appalled by the pagan customs and erotic atmosphere on the island, but sets about his search with tenacity, only to be frustrated at every turn by a conspiracy between the islanders and their laird, Lord Summerisle. The missing girl, Rowan, eventually turns up alive, but it is Howie who burns up alive in the towering edifice of the film’s title, a Mayday sacrifice of innocence and purity contrived to turn around the previous year’s blighted harvest. Thus the hunter becomes the hunted and Howie, as the representative of the crown, becomes the ideal offering to the pagan gods, fulfilling the role of ‘king for a day’. 

Proceedings begin with ‘Opening Music’ – or track 12 if you don’t re-sequence as I suggest below. The noise of seagulls and the engine and propellers of a seaplane  announces Howie’s arrival amidst ethereal pipes and horns and a fragment of song about a penniless migrant shepherd (indicative of the policeman’s hapless fate as lamb to the slaughter).

‘Corn Rigs’, Giovanni’s rewrite of a Burns ballad, is the first song-proper. A nostalgic tale about a roll in the hay, it introduces the pungent eroticism that so disturbs the pious Howie - it’s also a classic little slice of Celtic folk-rock. It is quickly succeeded by a lusty rendition by the denizens of the local pub, The Green Man, of  ‘The Landlord’s Daughter’, a lollopingly salacious testament to the generous charms of the ‘strumpet of yore’ who, ‘when her name is mentioned /  The parts of every gentleman / Do stand up to attention.’
      
Giovanni himself can then be seen in the pub singing ‘Gently Johnny’ although we can imagine its sensual lilt as a duet with the heroine of the previous song:-

 

                              ‘I put my hand all on her thigh
                               And she said ‘Do you want to try?’
                               I put my hand all on her belly
                               And she said ‘Do you want to fill me?’

After witnessing all sorts of alfresco shenanigans on his post-prandial walk, a distinctly rattled Howie takes to his bed where he’s staying in the pub. The following morning, on his way to interrogate the village teacher (played by Cilento) he sees the boys of the school dancing around a maypole singing a song. Later, when he seeks out the laird, he can’t help but observe a stone circle where Cilento is directing a group of  girls who dance around a fire - naked. That night, following an unsuccessful exhumation of the girl Rowan’s ‘grave’, he returns to the laird, finding him and Cilento (who is clearly his mistress) engaged in a duet around the piano. Back at The Green Man, he retires but cannot sleep because the landlord’s daughter, Willow – for it is she whose name has such a salutary effect on ‘the parts of every gentleman’ – is seductively serenading him through the bedroom wall next door.

 

The four songs which accompany these scenes embody the pantheistic eroticism of Summerisle, as well as reminding us that music is a key element in pagan religion as well as the orthodox Christian church, in which we see Howie singing hymns early on in the film. ‘Maypole’, with its very neat lyric about pastoral unity and regeneration beautifully sung by the children’s chorus, whirls around with a twanging Jew’s harp, guitar and fiddle, periodically making dramatic stops along the way. ‘Fire Leap’, again sung by the chorus, plays as the naked girls metaphorically ‘take the flame inside’ preparing them for the spark of creation they will later carry

The duet between Christopher Lee (aka Dracula) and Diane Cilento (aka Mrs. James Bond / Sean Connery) is great fun, with Lee’s basso profundo something of a revelation. The giggly Cilento almost corpses as the bawdy tale of the tinker trying to fix her cracked ‘kettle’ unfolds, insisting that a ‘large, large nail’ is required to do the job. The rueful tinker, however, apologises:-

                             ‘There hath so many nails been drove
                             Mine own could not take hold’

 

 

The lovely ‘Willow’s Song’, probably the highlight of the set, drifts quietly in, all shimmering guitar and violin, over one of the most notorious scenes in the film. The naked Willow – played by Britt Ekland (aka Mrs. Peter Sellers) performs The Temptation Of Sgt.Howie, dancing sinuously in the bedroom next door, wrapping herself around the fixtures and fittings whilst miming to a vocal performed by Lesley Mackie, who also had a small acting role (although one of the many rumours that shroud The Wicker Man is that Scots jazz singer, Annie Ross voiced not only the song, but Ekland’s entire speaking part).
 

Somehow an increasingly desperate and sweaty Howie manages to resist this siren song despite almost literally climbing the walls as Willow promises to show him ‘How a maid can milk a bull / And every stroke a bucketful!’. Phew! If he had been less tightly buttoned, poor old Howie might have saved himself from the martyrdom that rolls inexorably into action the following day.

The sense of tension and dislocation gathers momentum in ‘The Masks / The Hobby Horse’ and ‘Searching For Rowan’ with dischords, hurrying footfalls, various splashings, knockings and scratchings, scornful laughter, a sawn fiddle and a bicycle bell moving into an interlude with organ and electic guitar and a girl singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. All of this provides telling accompaniment to the surreal goings-on amongst the islanders as they prepare for the Mayday rite.

A trumpet and funereal drum are joined by more brass as the procession begins and a bagpipe takes up the tune which I will forever associate with the TV commercials for Scots Porridge Oats. Then the Nordic lyre eerily announces the brass march up to the cliff-top where the wicker man waits as the daylight dims.

As days by the seaside go, this is not a good one for Howie. To the sound of crashing waves, gulls, and Lord Summerisle’s  pronouncement of his ‘Appointment With The Wicker Man’, he is anointed by the three blonde harpies - Cilento, Ekland and Ingrid Pitt (aka Countess Dracula), then caged with the other assorted livestock (Edward Woodward, as well as sustaining a badly sprained foot during this scene, was also pissed upon by a goat through an upper chamber of the structure). As the fire is set at the base, Howie prays vigorously, defiantly belting out ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ as the assembled islanders and their laird join hands to sing a rousing ‘Summer Is A- Cumen In’ (possibly the oldest song in the English language).
 

The flames rise up and the structure crumbles, paradoxically suggesting a kind of salvation for Howie as well as the fulfilment of the islanders’ offering to their heathen gods. Finally, in the sombre trumpet fanfare of ‘Sunset’, the camera focuses on the glowing seascape as the sun sinks below the horizon. It’s a tremendous climax and an unforgettable moment in the history of British cinema.

The Wicker Man, along with some of the other more outré British films of the era – If (1968), Performance (1970) and Get Carter (1971), for instance, benefits from surprising and fascinating choices made with music. None of them, though – or, indeed, many films in general – feature such a coherent, imaginative and simpatico soundtrack as The Wicker Man.
  

N. B.

The 2002 issue of the complete soundtrack on Silva Screen Records has its virtues – including remastered sound and an excellent CD booklet that details the complex history of the film and music – but track-sequencing is not one of them. The album separates four tracks of incidental music from the main programme, tacking them onto the other twelve songs – for no good reason that I can detect. I would therefore advise anyone buying the album to immediately do what I did and burn a rearranged copy which commences with track 12, continues with tracks 1-7, followed by tracks 13-14, reverting to tracks 8-11 before concluding with tracks 15-16. In this way, the correct chronological order of the music can be restored as effectively as possible in line with the order of events in the film.

At the risk of adding yet more fuel to the smoking monument of rumour that surrounds The Wicker Man, I noticed that Oak, the imposingly large, bearded character who lugs the doomed Howie up into the actual wicker man, is named in the cast list as one Ian Campbell. Notwithstanding that this must be a common Scottish monicker, the actor does bear a striking resemblance to the leader of the well-known Ian Campbell Folk Group who just missed the UK Top 40 with their cover of  Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. I can’t verify that they’re one and the same person, but the singer, Ian Campbell (1933 - 2012), would have been about the right age to have played the part in the film…

 In 2011, the director, Robin Hardy, now in his eighties, who had made only two films since The Wicker Man, neither of them successful, suddenly delivered The Wicker Tree, the first of two films he described as completing what he referred to as ‘The Wicker Man Trilogy’. Confusingly, neither of these films (the third in the series is to be titled The Wrath of The Gods) are intended as sequels to the original, but are designed as thematic companion pieces.

The Wicker Tree attracted only lukewarm reviews. I’ve yet to see it, but I have seen the 2006 Hollywood remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage which deservedly met with a frigid response and featured utterly unremarkable soundtrack music.

Paul Giovanni died at the age of 57 in 1990 of an AIDS related illness in his native New York. Curiously, The Wicker Man is the only soundtrack he ever worked on. 
      c. 2013 IGR

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 4

‘a gloriously giddy celebration
of falling in love.’

Invincible Summer (2000)
by K. D. Lang

Most people probably only know two things about K. D. Lang: 1) that she is a Country artist, and 2) that she is a lesbian. Ironically, both of these facts have long since ceased to be particularly relevant when discussing Katy Dawn Lang as a singer and songwriter. Indeed, they are no more significant than details such as her being Canadian, Buddhist or vegetarian. Lang’s live audience may still predominantly reflect her strong female and lesbian fan-base, but her records deserve to reach far beyond such parameters.

What really matters about her is that she is markedly the best female pop singer to emerge since Dusty Springfield. Lang is more of an album-artist than Springfield, who is chiefly known for her string of hit singles during the 1960s. Although she has hits in her native Canada, Lang rarely troubles the singles charts elsewhere. She achieved crossover success eight years into her recording career with Ingenue (1992), on which she collaborated with co-writer, co-producer and backing musician, Ben Mink. The album included what have become her signature songs, ‘Miss Chatelaine’ and ‘Constant Craving’. It is, however, the sinuous mingling of country, pop and eastern tones that made the record so distinctive, with Mink’s Asiatic violin and viola playing blending seamlessly with steel guitars, exotic percussion and the sensuality of Lang’s singing.

Fittingly released during the first summer of a new century, Invincible Summer is a gloriously giddy celebration of falling in love. Neither as successful commercially or critically as Ingenue, it is certainly a record that warrants reappraisal. It features a different backroom team (although Mink reappears, contributing violin on ‘Love’s Great Ocean’, which he co-wrote). Taking its defiantly optimistic title from a quotation by Algerian novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus - ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer’ - the album’s cover is full of out of focus, sun-dazzled, extreme close-ups of Lang on a beach. The images aptly reflect the blur of heightened emotional sensation that shimmer through the eleven songs.

Producer Damian LeGassick, who arranges the brass and strings, conjures a dreamy atmosphere with subtle, liquid electronica warmly mixed in with the guitars, bass and drums, all of which compliment the sustained romance of the lyrics. Generally avoiding cliché, the words, benefiting from the clarity of Lang’s diction, map out the  perils and pleasures of embarking on a new love affair.

Opener, ‘The Consequences Of Falling’ finds Lang teetering on the brink before surrendering to her ‘new fun thing’ and the ‘uncommon breeze [which] did with our hearts whatever it pleased’, blowing through the delightfully bouncy ‘Summerfling’. The tempo slows with a simple cornet figure straight out of Bacharach and a cautionary sense of déjà vu in ‘Suddenly’ which finds the narrator ‘thinking I might have been here before / My only distraction is the attraction that I’m dying to explore’.

By the time the programme reaches its two strongest songs, ‘Extraordinary Thing’ (‘since you came waltzing in’) and ‘When We Collide’, with their intense, passionate choruses, the relationship has reached its zenith. In between, the music is gently sensual and the imagery intoxicating: ‘Here is the ocean I’m longing to be streaming into’ (‘Love’s Great Ocean’); ‘love, as a philosophy, is simple / I am calm in oblivion’ (‘Simple’); and, in the chiming ‘What Better Said’, ‘Why this synthesis whenever you are near? / Truth is delirious in love’s great atmosphere’.

Towards the end of the album, momentary doubts begin to appear: ‘basking in the sun seems dangerous and fun…this infatuation is getting out of hand / In this kind of situation one needs discipline’ (‘Curiosity’). Finally, however, in ‘Only Love’, the singer reconciles herself to the adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all:-

                          ‘With every drop of life inside us.

                           With every heart we’ve left behind
                           Everywhere you’ll find it’s
                           Only love brings you back around.’

Approaching her forties when she made Invincible Summer, K. D. Lang was operating in an adult realm way above the teen-dream banalities and crass sexual posturing which were dominating the charts at the time (and, of course, still do). And yet she still managed to capture the emotional and physical feelings of falling in love in a sensitive and sophisticated way on this record. Throughout the songs, she effortlessly creates the effect – as did the likes of Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick before her – of floating on top of the music like a seabird riding thermals, or like an olympic gymnast in the dance section uses a streamer to create graceful patterns in the air.

One might say that it’s a classy trick – except that, with singers of this quality, it’s the natural way they inhabit a song, rather than a trick.   And you can, I think, believe that Katy Dawn Lang has really lived this joyously melodic and life-affirming set of love songs. Mature albums full of happy, positive songs don’t come around very often: Invincible Summer shines out among them.   

 

N. B.

Lang has issued two albums of theme-related cover versions: Drag (1997) and Hymns Of The 49^th Parallel (2004), both of which work well as collections. The former is made up of songs more or less about smoking, whilst the latter features material by fellow Canadian songwriters Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jane Siberry, Leonard Cohen and Ron Sexsmith. Lang’s cover of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ - a song which became almost ubiquitous some two decades after its original release - is one of the best. Hymns also includes a re-recorded, piano-based version of her own ‘Simple’ from Invincible Summer.   

 

UNDERRATED ALBUMS #3

‘The first and finest flowering

 of his more accessible style.’
 
Clear Spot (1972)

by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Consult any Best Albums Ever list and you’re likely to find Trout Mask Replica (1969) significantly placed. Beefheart’s third album, it’s a world away from the psychedelic blues-pop of his debut, Safe As Milk, released less than two years before.

A double-LP of brutally atonal, abstract blues, TRM is an album that I’ve gallantly tried to listen to several times over the years to see if older ears would find what I was missing originally, but I’m afraid it requires not so much an open mind as a full-on commitment to the avant garde which I simply don’t have the energy for. The album became a freak flag waved by Rock critics eager to demonstrate their cool bona fides, but I’ve often wondered how often they actually played the damn thing.

By the time the 1970s had got under way, Beefheart was following what was, by his standards, a more ‘commercial’ path, and Clear Spot is the first and finest flowering of his more accessible style. Co-produced by Beefheart with Ted Templeman (fresh from success with The Doobie Brothers and Van Morrison), the record is the only recognisably rock album of his career. Having said that, it’s not a very close relative to Van The Man and is only a distant cousin to the Doobies…

If you’re not familiar with Beefheart (1941-2010), then you need to know that he had an unusually powerful, multi-octave voice and was a fine harmonica player. His singing was influenced primarily by Blues giant Howlin’ Wolf, whilst his song-writing, informed by a powerful urge to deconstruct and subvert, was influenced by no-one. Many of his lyrics were written in a spirit similar to the way he painted (colourful and abstract:  after retiring from music in 1982, he earned a more lucrative living from his art). His music – often jaggedly challenging – could also be melodic and, at its best, extended the Blues-Rock genre more imaginatively than many of its practitioners who were his contemporaries. He was a school friend of Frank Zappa in Los Angeles and the two of them occasionally worked together. Eccentric in the extreme and until the last, he suffered with MS in his later years.

Clear Spot opens in catchy style (yes, catchy!) with a priapic paean to hip-swivelling girls and masturbating men called ‘Low Yo Yo Stuff’ (‘I bin doin’ that low yo yo yo yo / Like any other fella / Away from home all alone’). It’s funny and sexy, like ‘Long Neck Bottles’ which praises a certain lady’s prowess at putting away the alcohol, nudgingly telling us that ‘Woman like long neck bottles / And a big head on her beer’. Meanwhile, ‘Nowadays, A Woman Gotta Hit A Man’ finds the Captain playing around with those new fangled notions of feminism and reversing the cartoon cliché of the club-wielding caveman. This last features a terrific bottleneck solo by lead guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo.

At this point, we should pause to consider the revolving door of the Magic Band, many of whose members were given their fabulous stage-names by the Captain (whose actual name was Don Van Vliet). On Clear Spot, apart from Rollo, we find Rockette Morton on rhythm guitar, Orejon (Spanish for ‘Big Ears’) on bass, and Ed Marimba on drums.

The album also features a couple of straight soul songs which demonstrate that Beefheart may well have forged a more conventional career in that sphere had he been so minded. ‘Too Much Time’, complete with brass and girl backing group The Blackberries, might easily have been a credible cover by Otis Redding had he lived that long.

There are several churningly energetic rock numbers including the title track, but the set peaks towards the end with two of the best songs you’ll find anywhere on Beefheart’s twelve studio albums. The first, the beautifully titled ‘Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles’ is a simple love song arranged with chiming acoustic guitars which really should have given the band what would have been their only hit (‘Too Much Time’ was the flop single). It would though, turn up twenty years later in a film by the Coen brothers, stoner classic The Big Lebowski.

Then comes the record’s tour de force, ‘Big Eyed Beans Of Venus’, a dollop of Sci-Fi nonsense set to an electrifying arrangement and possibly the most exciting cut in the band’s catalogue. Beefheart is on top form here – check out his announcement at 0.55: ‘Mister Zoot Horn Rollo, play that long lunar note and let it float’ - which it does, and how! An epic riffarama of electric guitars with thunderous volleys of drums kicking in the changes, this really should have been the album’s climax, although the poem, ‘Golden Birdies’ which actually brings proceedings to a close, is an effective coda. Declaimed with loony authority by the singer, it ends ‘And the pantaloon duck, white goose neck, quacked / Webcore, webcore.’ What could be clearer?

Despite its more commercial intentions, material and production, Clear Spot failed to sell, reaching only #191 in the US and nowhere in the UK (amazingly, Trout Mask Replica had, in 1969, surfaced on the British chart at #21 for a single week before sinking back of sight). Perhaps, in an age of extravagantly artistic sleeve art, people simply failed to notice the uninspiring, small B/W cover shot of Beefheart in the studio, leaning over a mixing console, wearing a Chinese hat – or possibly a lampshade…     

 

N. B.

Received wisdom has it that Beefheart’s next two albums, both issued in 1974 following his move to Virgin, are worthless: merely cynical forays into commercialism - the cover of Unconditionally Guaranteed featuring The Captain leering out over fists full of dollars didn’t help. But UC is actually not bad at all, and includes some strong melodies and fine guitar-playing by Rollo and Alex St. Claire. It’s a different, funkier band on Bluejeans & Moonbeams and yet another line-up on Shiny Beast (1978) but I’d strongly recommend the following tracks from these records:-  

 

‘Upon The My-O-My’; the guitar showcase ‘This Is The Day’ and ‘Peaches from UC.

 ‘Same Old Blues’ (a J. J. Cale cover); ‘Observatory Crest’ and the title-track from

 B & M  (a soaring guitar and synthesiser ballad, no less).

‘Love Lies’; the Mariachi-drenched ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’ and ‘Owed T’Alex’ (a crazed tribute to guitarist St. Claire with wild harmonica and maniacal laughter) from SB.             

If listened to without prejudice, there is much to be enjoyed on these records. Had they been issued by an artist carrying less baggage in the form of the critical snobbery surrounding his earlier releases, then they might have reached a wider audience.

                                    c. 2012 IGR 

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 2

(‘it crowns their struggle to fill the gaps left by their lead singer, chief songwriter and producer…’)

Holland (1973)
by The Beach Boys

Two albums tower over the career of The Beach Boys: the first is Pet Sounds (1966), a universally admired masterpiece to be found near or at the very top of Greatest Ever Albums lists; the other is Smile, recorded the following year, but never released in its entirety until it finally appeared in various forms four decades later. The band’s other albums languish in the long shadows cast by these twin peaks of Brian Wilson’s genius.

Several of the band’s earlier records easily qualify as underrated, but I’m going to concentrate on Holland (their nineteenth studio album in eleven years…) as it crowns their struggle to fill the gaps left by their lead singer, chief songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson, whose main contribution to the sessions was Mount Vernon & Fairway (A Fairy Tale), a short suite intended for children and OK as such, but justifiably relegated to the status of bonus EP by the band. Unlike other albums of the post-1967 period, which had all featured a trickle-down of tracks from the aborted Smile, this time there was to be no tapping of the mother-lode.

Recorded in Holland (hence the title and inverted cover photograph of an Amsterdam canal) in an attempt to be refreshed by the experience of living abroad – and perhaps enjoying a tax-holiday – the album ironically recalls the lifestyle they’d left behind on the west coast of the USA. Its centrepiece, ‘California Saga’, is a worthy addition to The Beach Boys’ legacy of songs celebrating the endless summer of the American Dream. It is also, however, concerned with the emergent ecological movement and a perception of the sublimity of landscape – a concept which extends over the first two thirds of the album. The three parts of ‘California Saga’, which includes a Robinson Jeffers poem, are narrated and sung by Al Jardine and Mike Love. It’s probably Jardine’s finest ever moment with the band.

The younger Wilson brothers are also key factors on Holland. Carl ran the sessions, handled much of the singing and brought his first significant solo composition, ‘The Trader’ to the project. The song sensitively laments the ruthless exploitation of the sort of environment described in ‘California Saga’. Dennis, meanwhile is represented by ‘Steamboat’ which blends well with the frontier atmosphere evoked by the above tracks in summoning up the spirit of the river and memorialising the ‘Mister Fulton’ responsible for developing steamboats as a viable means of river-travel in the US.

‘Only With You’, co-written by Dennis and Mike Love and sang by Carl, is a simple, elegant ballad, whilst the final track, ‘Funky Pretty’, sings the praises of a hippy astrologer ‘pisces lady’ that the narrator used to know well and who he believes will come back ‘when the aspects are right’. It’s an amusing, soulful and indeed funky performance, although one is left at the end of the record, feeling that the evocative concept underpinning the first six of the album’s nine tracks has been allowed to dissolve.

Carl, Brian, Al, Ricky, Dennis, Blondie, Mike

The ranks of The Beach Boys had recently been swelled by the recruitment of two young South African musicians, guitarist Blondie Chaplin and drummer Ricky Fataar who was deputising for Dennis who had injured a hand (the days of Hal Blaine and The Wrecking Crew sessioneers had now passed). Notably, Chaplin is heard singing lead on the terrific opener, ‘Sail On Sailor’, an anthemic shanty of the high seas written by Brian, Van Dyke Parks and three other non-Beach Boys (the bewildering array of co-writers used by the band over the years is an article in itself).  Chaplin and Fataar are even accorded inclusion of one of their own songs, ‘Leaving This Town’, which, though pleasant enough, is rather plodding and overlong. Chaplin is still a busy sideman these days whilst, somewhat bizarrely, Fataar turned up later in the '70s as one of The Prefab Four in the Neil Innes / Eric Idle Beatles spoof, The Rutles.

The instrumental palette of Holland includes strings, flute, banjo, slide guitar, and on ‘Steamboat’, clanking bells and a suitably liquid electric guitar solo. It is, however, a keyboards-led production, with organ, synthesiser and especially piano - played by regular band-associate, Darryl Dragon (of The Captain & Tennile), along with Carl and Dennis - providing the undulating backgrounds for the record’s strong melodies.

Lyrically, the songs find the band striving for poetical effects – successfully on the whole, although they do tend to overdo the close rhyming in places.

Holland would be the last Beach Boys album to garner any real critical acclaim before their long and steady decline into irrelevance. Apart from the occasional hit single, their sales were generated by compilations, which various groupings of the Beach Boys brand would tour like a travelling jukebox. The hope of forging a creative identity more or less independent of Brian Wilson had proved to be a short-lived one.  

N. B.

Who could have predicted, come the 21^st century, that Brian would be the only Wilson brother still alive? Even more extraordinary, given his well documented eccentricities and flaws - including fear of flying and the stage - that he would not only be releasing new albums, but actually touring them? Also to be found in the Fact Is Stranger Than Fiction department in 2012 was the phenomenon of the competing factions in the Beach Boys reuniting to tour their highest charting album of new material since Pet Sounds? The album, That’s Why God Made The Radio, with production credited to Brian Wilson (although almost certainly involving a degree of smoke and mirrors) is not bad either, and when it’s good – as in the title and closing tracks – it’s very good indeed…