CLASS ACTS

                                   Reflections On Social Class,

                       UK Pop Music And Beyond

 

Here’s a question for you – don’t worry, it’s not exactly Mastermind, more like Celebrity Mastermind  – what do the following various luminaries of the UK music scene have in common?

a)      Whiningly cerebral sonic explorers, Radiohead.

b)      The mega-successful, sub-Radiohead, mysteriously named Coldplay.

c)      The mega-successful, sub-Coldplay, boringly named Keane.

d)     Mockney songstrel, Lily Allen, offspring of yobbish actor-comedian,

      Keith Allen.

e)      ‘West London Folk Scene’ alumni Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling and

      Noah & The Whale.

f)       Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, whose No Angel was the world’s best-selling album of 2001 (though you will know her by her other more concise and sniggersome name, Dido).

g)      Sickly balladeer and ex-Household Cavalier, James Blunt.

h)      Voluminously sleeved, super-lunged baroquer, Florence Welch

      (she of The Machine).

i)        Gothadelic up-and-comers, The Horrors.

j)        Will ‘Seems Like A Nice Boy’ Young, inaugural Pop Idol winner in 2002

      and Matt Cardle, shrill-voiced 2010 X Factor victor.

k)      Obnoxious, tasteless, botoxed music-media mogul, Simon Cowell.

Congratulations - but no cigar - if you figured that as well as being some of the best-selling pop people both home and abroad, they are all products of private education, or, if you prefer, the British public school system (synonyms which used to confuse me and probably still do puzzle Americans and people learning the English language).

From this point on, by the way, I’m going to use the abbreviations XPS for ex-public school and XOXB for ex-Oxbridge.

Well, so what, you might ask? Hasn’t the UK music industry always numbered amongst its movers and shakers a portion of the posh? What about Genesis and Nick Drake then, and some of Pink Floyd and Queen, and that Joe Strummer of The Clash – he wasn’t all that he let on, was he? And what of Brian Eno of Roxy Music and beyond - or to accord him his full name, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (he enjoyed his public school days so much that he adopted the French part of his monicker from the order of Catholic brothers who founded the place…)  

And then there’s the managers: wasn’t the biggest and best band of them all managed by an ex-public schoolboy?  That, of course, was Brian Epstein, who, as well as The Beatles, took charge of most of the other scouse oiks of the Merseybeat era. Robert Wace and Grenville Collins were the toffs who encouraged The Kinks to pose in pervy hunting outfits complete with whips and thigh–length leather boots. Kit Lambert who, apart from being assistant director of From Russia With Love, an explorer of the Amazon (in a boat up the river - not surfing the web) and owning a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, also managed The Who through their glory years, a role he shared with the common as muck but well-connected Chris Stamp, brother of actor, Terence. And not forgetting Simon Napier-Bell, multi-talented backroom boy, who at various times steered the fortunes of The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Boney M, Japan, Ultravox and Wham!

That all of the above past managers were XPS is indeed true, but you will notice that my original list of performers are 21^st century success stories (although Radiohead started in the 1990s), and my aim here is to wonder at the increasing prevalence of Posh Pop.

Rock & Prole!

Since the Skiffle and Rock & Roll boom in the second half of the 1950s, UK Pop and Rock music had been a distinctively and predominantly working-class phenomenon (before that it had been largely imported from the USA). Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who, The Small Faces, David Bowie, The Bee Gees, Elton John, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, Slade and The Sex Pistols, to name but a few, were, to varying degrees, significantly influential and, in most cases, massively successful. Some, especially The Beatles, but also Bowie and The Pistols had a cultural impact beyond the usual frontiers of the music industry.    

Beyond the ‘60s and ‘70s, Pop and Rock music movements like Heavy Metal, Disco, Reggae, Punk, New Wave and New Romantic continued to largely draw its

practitioners from relatively humble origins, with many of its most notable successes such as Elvis Costello and The Smiths having attended comprehensive or even secondary-modern schools (the members of U2 all attended the same Irish comp., for instance, whilst all of The Manic Street Preachers went to the same Welsh one).

Until the mid-1950s, pop music in the UK had largely been a matter of importing songs and styles from the USA, with its early solo stars coming out of the Big Band scene of the 1930s and ‘40s (themselves an imitation of American counterparts). British dance band leaders such as Billy Cotton, Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Jack Hylton all came from ordinary backgrounds, as would have most of their musicians. The UK jazz revival of the ‘50s is thought of as a more middle-class affair, but as well as Johnny Dankworth, Humphry Lytlleton and Chris Barber, there were also the more lowly likes of Ken Colyer, Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk leading the trad bands.

I think it’s fair to say that the entertainment industry, of which the music business is an intrinsic part, was, for most of the 20^th century, regarded by the middle and upper classes as rather infra-dig, don’t you know? Noel Coward’s 1930s song, ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington’ humorously summed up the disreputable consequences of such a career (interestingly, despite his haughty upper-crust demeanour, Coward’s own beginnings were far from posh, being barely schooled and on stage himself from the age of seven).

By and large, middle-class musicians, singers and dancers were directed into the world of classical and orchestral music, ballet and opera. The less successful or temperamentally disinclined amongst them may well have found their way into the demi-monde of  the Music Hall, there to rub shoulders with performers who were their social inferiors - but who would often have been their professional equals or even superiors. And in London’s Tin Pan Alley on Denmark Street in Soho, most of the offices and studios housing impresarios and songwriters would have rang with working-class voices, albeit sometimes accented with an acquired air above their station.

Cultural & Political Backgound

In returning to the Rock era, we now need to consider quite why there was such an eruption in working-class talent leading up to and during the fabled Swinging Sixties, before we turn our attention back to the rise of Posh Pop in the 21^st century.

The rise of a new kind of social animal called ‘teenagers’ were being represented in films and on records from America. Dramas like The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without A Cause and The Blackboard Jungle (both 1955) created iconic role models out of Marlon Brando and James Dean, whilst rock & roll vehicles such as The Girl Can’t Help It, Rock Around the Clock (both 1956) and the early Elvis Presley films introduced startling creatures such as Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran as well as Presley himself.

America, so surgingly affluent in the ‘50s, must have seemed like the land of milk and honey to British teenagers, but before the excitement and glamour of the new films and music had caught on in the UK, a much quieter revolution had been taking place here at home. A politician called Rab Butler, a Conservative Education Minister no less, had, in 1944, passed a new Education Act through parliament. The Act reorganized state schools into what was called The Tripartite System: Grammar, Technical and Secondary Modern schools, all of them free to attend. Children had to sit an exam called The 11+ and, depending how well they did, would be channelled into the schools best suited to them.

Seen at the time as a progressive reform designed to increase social mobility, it soon became clear that the vast majority of students ended up in the bottom tier of the system (Secondary Modern) irrespective of whether it met their needs. Momentous implications for the future were thereby decided on the basis of a single exam – essentially an IQ test (childhood friends, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, later of The Rolling Stones, lost touch for years when Jagger went to a grammar and Richards to a Technical school). If you did pass the 11+ well enough to reach a grammar school, as many a future rock musician would, the world was – if not your oyster – then at least a place of considerably more possibilities than had hitherto been the case when the UK state education system was out of date and out of step with its counterparts in Europe and the US.

    

Although the Tripartite System may have been designed to supply the post-war British workforce with a new generation of managers, artisans and labourers to help the economy through the years of austerity, it could not have anticipated the counter-cultural tendencies of its more creative early graduates during the late 1950s as Rock & Roll took hold. The abolition of Conscription in 1960 also liberated young men from two years of forced membership in the armed forces. Instead the potential of Higher Education opened up and although not many ‘50s and ‘60s pop musicians went to university, quite a few entered those hotbeds of free-thinking, the Art Colleges (John Lennon, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, for instance).

In the cinema and on stage and TV, the British ‘New Wave’ and ‘Kitchen Sink Dramas’ were beginning to portray the working classes in a more realistic, perceptive and sympathetic way, the heroes and anti-heroes often being teenagers. A play like Look Back In Anger (1956), along with TV programmes such as Armchair Theatre (1956-68), The Wednesday Play (1964-70), Coronation Street (1960-) and Z Cars (1962-78); and films like Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste Of Honey (1961), A Kind Of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner (all 1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were mainly written by working-class authors and opened up a world that had only previously been glimpsed by a media that had all too often caricatured the lower orders.      
 

When The Beatles emerged in late 1962, swiftly followed by the phenomena of Merseybeat, The Beat Boom, Beatlemania and The British Invasion (of the American pop charts), the final elements were in place for working-classness to become fashionable for the first time. Clothes designer Mary Quant; hairdresser Vidal Sassoon; model Twiggy; photographers David Bailey and Terence Donovan; artist David Hockney; playwrights Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Denis Potter; musical composer Lionel Bart; actors Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Michael Caine all hailed from fairly ordinary and sometimes actually poor beginnings (Sassoon spent half of his childhood in an orphanage) 

It was around this time that the cut-glass accents of the aristocracy and the clipped Received Pronunciation of the middle-class started to fade into the background – to the point nowadays that you really need quite a good ear to detect the XPS and XOXB among us (although, of course, they are much more likely to amongst them: that is to say, the privileged and high-profile elite who dominate the contemporary British media scene).

Let’s now take a closer look at this elite.

The Bigger Picture   

Occasionally you will still hear someone voice the laughable notion that Britain is ‘a classless society’, a drastic misapprehension that gathered some momentum during the Blairmania, ‘Cool Britannia’ years. Who can forget the nauseating spectacle of victorious New Labourites after the 1997 General Election in their blue suits and ties doing an embarrassing approximation of the Dad At A Wedding Disco shuffle to D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ chart-topper (featuring on keyboards the smiley-faced, starry-eyed, future TV poster-boy physicist, XPS Brian Cox)? Then there was arch-Britpop gobshite, Noel Gallagher of Oasis hobnobbing with Tony himself at a Number Ten party. ‘Tony’, indeed – Mr. Blair to you plebs - the first  privately educated UK PM since the early 1960s (Blair’s doomed successor, Gordon Brown, incidentally, was the latest of only five UK PM’s ever not to have been through the golden gates and ivory towers of XPS  and XOXB).

Meanwhile in the real world, class divisions deepened as the golden dawn of New Labour darkened into the resounding maxim of The Who’s ‘Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss’*1. Institutions such as the monarchy and the House of Lords continued to flourish whilst privatisation galloped apace, inevitably undermining the NHSS and state education (wherein provision for music has been more than halved since 1990). Clearly, the UK is not less class-stratified – let alone ‘classless’ – but has become even more divided, its fundamental distinctions becoming more and more entrenched.   

It is well-known that the Cabinet of the current Coalition government is stuffed with privately educated millionaires, but what may not be anywhere near as recognised is the truly remarkable preponderance of the XPS and XOXB who fill society’s top jobs and most glamorous positions in the media.

In January, 2013, a study by The Sutton Trust*2 – an organisation which, in its own words, ‘exists to combat educational inequality’ – analysed the 8,000 names that had appeared in the daily birthday lists of the national press during 2012 (not to be confused with the Queen’s Birthday Honours List).

The study shows that over 90% of the people in the lists attended fee-paying or selective secondary schools (i.e. private, direct grant or grammar schools) compared to only 1% from comprehensive or secondary modern schools. The figures remained virtually uniform when applied to various professions such as Public Services, Law, Business, and Acting. In addition, it was found that two thirds of the Armed Forces were XPS as well as, perhaps more surprisingly, a third of the UK’s 2012

Olympic athletes. Even more disturbingly, it turns out that only 14% of journalists working on national newspapers have attended comprehensive schools: small wonder then, that the British press so often leans to the right…

Overall, 12% of the names on the elite list had been to Eton alone and 31% to Oxbridge.

Whilst you’re absorbing these amazing and appalling statistics, allow me to fashion an informal illustration of how this prevalence of the posh appears in the everyday world of television. Imagine you’re a dedicated couch potato and what follows to be an approximation of a typical day’s viewing:-

* BBC Breakfast – on the sofa, plugging away with Bill Turnbull and Susanna Reid.

* The Jeremy Kyle Show – with the master of mid-morning, down-market moralising.

* River Cottage – back-to-basics organic nosh with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

* QI or Only Connect – a choice of brainy game shows with either the ubiquitous Stephen Fry*3 and  chummy Alan Davies or the supremely supercilious Victoria Coren.

* Pointless – teatime quizzing with the endlessly affable Alexander Armstrong.

* BBC News At Six – with Good Humour Man George Alagiah, combining gravitas with geniality.
 

* Miranda – la-di-dah sitcom slapstick with Miranda Hart.

* Panorama – with DJ, quizmaster and current affairs presenter, Jeremy Vine.

* 20^th Century Battlefields – with lanky, curly, smiley historian Dan Snow.

* Top Gear*4 – Boy’s toys for petrol-heads with Jeremy Clarkson and his gang.

* Sherlock or Homeland or Birdsong - a choice of top-notch drama with either  Benedict Cumberbatch, Damian Lewis or Eddie Redmayne.

*  Newsnight  - in-depth post-news analysis with Jeremy Paxman, Kirsty Wark,

Gavin Esler and Emily  Maitlis.

* Bremner, Bird & Fortune or The Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle – a choice of edgy, late-night alternative comedy between the trio of satirists or the ramblingly acerbic anti-populist piss-taker.  

And so, for the time being, to bed. But consider this before nodding off – every single one of the names in this imaginary TV schedule are XPS. Turnbull, Fearnley-Whittingstall, Lewis and Redmayne all went to Eton; Fry, Armstrong, Snow, Paxman, Maitlis, Bird , Fortune and Redmayne (him again) are XOXB. And this is just the tip of the iceberg – and mainly the BBC iceberg at that…

                                              * * * * * 

It has not been my intention here to attack all of these XPS and XOXB celebrities as artists. Many of them are very talented artists in their field and I doubt that many, if any of them, actually chose to attend private schools (although no-one is forced to go to Oxford, Cambridge or the other prestigious universities that tend to crop up in their CVs). It must be awful for them when people go on and on about their silver spoons: poor little Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, is apparently so fed up with up with it  that for two pins he’d jolly well up sticks and go to America just to get away from the carping about his time at Harrow and all that rot. Meanwhile, Frances King, the headmistress at Roedean, top private school for gels, has already turned her back on the ‘irksome’ UK for pastures new in Switzerland, bewailing the necessity to ‘constantly…defend independent education’. All rather reminiscent, what,  of the gnashing of teeth in London’s ‘Square Mile’ where all those beleaguered and besmirched bankers are threatening to leave the old Green & Pleasant behind if their nice casino is regulated even a tinsy-winsy bit more.

No, it’s just that I’m rather sceptical as to whether the stars above would have enjoyed quite such a seamless ascension to the firmament had they not been able to avail themselves of the rarefied perks that their expensive education has conferred upon them – if, say, they’d gone to ordinary state schools. It is also worth pointing out that the so-called ‘North-South Divide’ is very much alive and well – and strikingly evident in these lists of the XPS that I’ve compiled here. Overwhelmingly, these people hail from the south in general and London in particular.

The fact of the matter is that privately educated people from privileged backgrounds in the UK find at their disposal a succession of doors opening which allow them to optimise their life-chances for more effectively than ‘ordinary folk’. In terms of following a career in music, for example, they are far more likely to enjoy access to musical instruments in the home and at schools where much greater provision for music lessons is available than at the local comp. In addition, they are more likely to be offered and to be able to afford extra tuition as well as equipment for performing. If they do get their show on the road, their level of commitment to the trials and tribulations of gigging in the early days may well be tempered by the knowledge that they will have their cushy home background to fall back on if it doesn’t work out.

But no matter what career the XPS choose, they will always have ‘the Old School Tie’ network of Old Boys & Girls to give them a leg up, as well as the connections of well-placed family and friends to smooth their way. Nepotism, as well as preferentiality, may also work in their favour – after all, it’s not what you know but who you know that is so often the key to success, isn’t it? Behind them, the security of capital, property and a prestigious educational pedigree; before them, the world!    

Being XPS may not be a guarantee of worldly success but, in modern Britain, it indisputably and inequitably enhances your chances of being at the front of the queue.

Rather disappointingly, working-class rock stars are apt to become more conventional as they grow older (a tendency which, to be fair, they share with society at large). So it is that we find John Lydon in a silly TV commercial flogging butter and arsing about on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, whilst Bryan Ferry staunchly defends his Etonian sons for their militancy on behalf of the Country Alliance.  

The UK establishment has a way of gathering unto it the noisy, rebellious children of  rock music once they’re of a certain age and have accumulated vast riches not only for themselves but, also via their exportability, for the Treasury. Ennoblement and assimilation is available for the favoured few - arise The Knights Of The Sound Table:  Sirs Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, George Martin, Elton John, Bob Geldof Tom Jones and Dame Shirley Bassey*5.

Now and then, the glittering prizes are declined – David Bowie has apparently refused a CBE and a knighthood, whilst John Lennon famously sent back his MBE*6, and John Lydon turned one down (a decision which lends credibility to his claim that he only did the adverts and reality TV in order to finance his re-launch of PIL).

Now, let me say before finishing, that I would hate to be without the contribution made to the creative arts by the middle classes. In the music business alone, I would really miss the effortless pop mastery of say, Manfred Mann; the classic Beatlesque beauty of The Zombies; and the R & B punch and dazzling psychedelia of The Yardbirds. Neither do I ever go too long without listening to the soulful ‘Big Music’ of Mike Scott and his Waterboys or the sophisticated wit and tunefulness of Neil Hannon and his Divine Comedy - both of them XPS. And my shelves would certainly be poorer if they were suddenly denied the exquisite presence of convent girls like Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithfull and Kate Bush.

I do wonder though, whether they would all have got as far as they have if they had attended what Tony Blair once memorably described as ‘bog-standard comprehensives’. There should be a level playing field - although various governments have sold off many of the playing fields used by state schools. Whilst we can still be fairly sure that the field of popular music contains many working-class heroes, the rise of the XPS in its contemporary ranks, makes me wonder how long it will be before they attain a similar ascendancy to that which they enjoy in the other walks of life described above. 

N. B.

Images (all courtesy of Google Images): ‘Toffs & Toughs’ photograph by Jimmy Sime, 1937;Ivor Lot & Tony Broke cartoon from Cor! and Buster comics; Lord Charles, ventriloquist Ray Allan's dummy; Lord Snooty cartoon from The Beano comic; 1987 Bullingdon Club (est. Oxford University c. 1780) featuring D. Cameron and B. Johnson.

*1 - from ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who.

*2 - The Sutton Trust’s full report along with press reaction to it is available to read online at www.suttontrust.com

*3 - It has been calculated that during the Christmas and New Year period of 2012/13, Stephen Fry appeared in no less than 189 TV programmes including repeats. Now that’s what I call ubiquitous!

*4 - You might be surprised to learn that, of Clarkson’s right-hand men, haughty, floppy-haired James May went to a comprehensive school, whilst Boy Next Door daredevil Richard Hammond went private.

*5 - ‘Honorary Knighthoods’ preclude recipients from using titles such as ‘Sir’ or ‘Dame’. Thus, U2’s sainted Bono can’t be referred to as ‘Sir Bono’ on account of being Irish.

*6 - Some say that social class is simply a state of mind. John Lennon, who is routinely called The Middle-Class Beatle, never really seemed to have a middle-class state of mind, despite being rumoured to have voted Tory at his first opportunity, before going on to become a hero of the counter-culture. If growing up in a semi-detached house and attending a grammar school constitutes your definition of what it takes to be middle-class, then so be it, but let’s not forget some important context to go with the labelling shorthand. Until the age of five, Lennon lived in a terraced house with his working-class parents before being abandoned by his father, a cook in the merchant navy. He was then given away by his lovable but feckless and less than capable mother to her older sister, the rather hoity-toity and semi-dwelling Mimi, who, however, was soon to be widowed and taking in lodgers in order to make ends meet. During his adolescence, Lennon’s mother was knocked over and killed by a car. He left school having failed all of his exams and all through his astonishing but tragically short life, retained his regional accent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERRATED ALBUM # 10

‘It is a Rock record, but a very melodic one, given that it is dominated by a scorchingly intense guitar sound.’     

Life Is Sweet (1996)
by Maria McKee

Maria McKee will probably end up being best known for the song, ‘Show Me Heaven’ which featured in the film Days Of Thunder (1990)*1. The single, which only scraped into the US Top 30, topped the charts in several other countries including the UK (as had her earlier song, ‘A Good Heart’, covered by ex-Undertone, Feargal Sharkey in 1985).

A passable power ballad written by Eric Rackin and Jay Rifkin (McKee only agreed to sing ‘Show Me Heaven’ on the proviso that she rewrite the lyric), the song may, indeed, live longer in the memory than the film, which was a feeble star-vehicle for Tom Cruise and a box-office clunker. The vehicle in question was a stock car, raced by Cruise ‘around in circles getting nowhere’, according to Halliwell’s Film Guide; or as the Time Out Guide dismissed it, ‘stock cars and stock situations’. The single though, was bought by Cruise’s teenage admirers and subsequently became a stock song played at marriage ceremonies of that generation.

 Life Is Sweet is the third of only five studio sets released by McKee between 1989-2005 (as lead singer with US ‘Cowpunk’ outfit, Lone Justice, there had been two previous albums during 1985-6). Despite the odd performance on songs of Christian praise, she never seemed to much like ‘Show Me Heaven’, declining to sing it live for years. Life is Sweet, though, she declared to be her favourite piece of work.

That is interesting because Life Is Sweet is a very different proposition to most of her   catalogue which has a Country emphasis, as well as excursions into Folk, Gospel and Soul territory. It is a Rock record, but a very melodic one, given that it is dominated by a scorchingly intense guitar sound.

And the lead guitarist is McKee herself.

                                                                   * * * * *

Life Is Sweet, then is a Guitar Record. You won’t find many of those in this era, which feature a woman heading up a rock band - not only writing and singing the songs, but playing lead guitar too*2.

The album has been said to have been influenced by Prog Rock and Grunge, and more particularly, by a record released a year earlier, Jagged Little Pill (1995) by Alanis Morisette. These elements are evident in Life Is Sweet, as well as that part of David Bowie’s career that might be termed ‘the Mick Ronson years’ (1970-73), during which the Ziggy Stardust persona first propelled its maker to enduring stardom.

McKee was apparently interested in Nirvana*3 and it’s possible to hear some of the then recently deceased Kurt Cobain’s self-loathing on the album along with traces of the barely contained chaos of his band’s recordings. McKee may also have been inspired by the caterwauling confessional style of Jagged Little Pill’s songs, but is far too good a singer and musician herself to have been much influenced by the rather repetitive grunge-pop of Morissette. In any case, McKee, around thirty-two at the time, seemed to be wrestling with problems rather more complex than the romantic tribulations of the twenty-one years old Morisette. Not that I mean to trivialise Jagged Little Pill*4 – Morissette was perfectly entitled to dramatise her angst and a powerful job she makes of it too, as testified by the well over thirty million sales of her album; but Life Is Sweet comes from a more mature and interesting place. That said, it almost torpedoed McKee’s career and is an experiment she has never repeated.    

As for Prog Rock, well, there are some unusual song-structures and strings involved, but I’m more inclined to think that McKee had become fascinated by the overall sound of early 1970s Glam Rock by the likes of Alice Cooper, Bowie, Mott The Hoople and T. Rex (whose ‘bang a gong’ from ‘Get It On’*5 she quotes in the title-track).  On Life Is Sweet, her guitar-playing, though less virtuosic and more distorted, certainly brings to mind the heroic style of Cooper’s Glen Buxton, Mott’s Mick Ralphs and Ariel Bender and, most of all Bowie’s Mick Ronson. Marc Bolan, an underrated guitarist in my estimation, though less accomplished than those above, is also stirred into the McKee mix.

The record starts uncompromisingly with ‘Scarlover’, her guitar slashing and clanging around a wordy lyric about a ‘painful, truthful boy’ who ‘fell across my body like a shroud…ugly inside me taught me of beauty’. Her voice, plaintive on the choruses, becomes more and more distraught and the sado-masochistic imagery and barrelling four-piece band would immediately have convinced McKee’s fan-base that they were a long way from home. ‘Show Me Heaven’ this ain’t.

‘This Perfect Dress’*6 which follows, is another intensely physical song swept along by billowing strings and an enormous guitar sound drenched in tremolo and echo. The sexual union she describes is so close that she appears to be wearing her lover in a punning, paradoxical scenario: ‘this perfect room, this little death, birth without womb’. 

‘Absolutely Barking Stars’, the only track to have its lyric printed on the sleeve*7, introduces the theme of the narrator’s identity-crisis with an altar-ego ‘twin’ who ‘plays Pandora’ with her soul. This theme dominates the rest of the album and you may, dear reader, at this point feel yourself backing away a little – but please do hang in there because Life Is Sweet is a record which can easily be listened to as sound and vocals without too much attention on the words. Having said that, I do believe McKee’s rather messy poetics do actually enhance the overall proceedings: listen to how (at 0.52) she sings ‘I’ve tried to trap her in my head but she knows where the light comes in’ and how she blasts out the mighty riff which follows, not to mention the other great riff in a higher key (at 3.20) which leads the song out…

…but only so far as ‘I’m Not Listening’, in which the love-hate combat with her bullying ‘twin’ continues apace, the narrator fighting, it seems, for her sanity, if not her very life. Beginning with solo piano, the strings crash in on the chorus and never let up. When McKee cries out: ‘You’ve nearly killed me once!’ you begin to think that maybe she needs an exorcist rather than a psychoanalyst. Grimly inexorable cellos and viola advance in a coda that might be out of a Michael Nyman score for a Horror film. Fading over this, double-tracked and still locked in battle, two voices (both McKee’s) scream at each other in the distance.    

You might be in need of a breather after all this – if so, fear not, for there is an intermission of sorts in the shape of ‘Everybody’, a slight little pop song which, despite some spirited singing, could be about well, almost anybody, as opposed to the demonically possessed twins with whom we’ve so far been acquainted. The next track, ‘Smarter’ also feels like filler in the overall context despite its Nirvana-like noise-rock and lyrical encounters with a father-figure, a brother and Jesus. The pretty ‘What Else You Wanna Know?’ with its key declaration, ‘I love what we are, but I hate what I am’ is better, but still sounds a little too much like the sort of thing that Morissette or Sheryl Crowe were doing at the time – until that is, McKee’s guitar really starts to kick in about half-way through, pulling the record out of its mid-album slump.

‘I’m Awake’, a song more about making love than having sex – although a not altogether untroubled take on the situation, begins gently, picking up soulful strings along the way until McKee, again using a dramatic paradox: ‘It slays me - I die to live again in your arms’. At which point and out of nowhere, another vast guitar solo turns the song – and the listener – upside-down, roiling around and wrenched from some deep emotional core. It’s one of the most affecting of the many highlights on this record.

As ‘I’m Awake’ drifts away with the strings, McKee repeats the title-phrase whilst playing a guitar-figure eerily reminiscent of ‘The Red Telephone’ by the legendary Love from their masterpiece Forever Changes (1967). I say ‘eerily’ because McKee’s older half-brother, Bryan Maclean was Arthur Lee’s flaxen-haired second-in-command, singer-songwriter in Love – and the next song on Life Is Sweet appears to be about him.

In ‘Human’, McKee refers to being ‘in awe’ of a ‘golden boy’ and struggling with the temptation to ‘mythologise this bond’ and make of him ‘a demigod’ who would ‘never die’. Not long after, MacLean died of a heart-attack, aged fifty-two on Christmas Day, 1998.

Notwithstanding the inherent curiosity of its subject matter, ‘Human’ is not the best song on the album, although it is, as usual, lifted by the guitar-playing – as is ‘Carried’ which features perhaps McKee’s most Ronsonesque riff. This time, the narrator is trying to find spiritual salvation: ‘Jesus, I know you’re out there, in here, out there, somewhere, in here, everywhere’*8 in order to rescue her from that ‘evil little twin’ who has been haunting her ‘since my mother carried me.’

Life Is Sweet borrows its title from a 1991 film by the innovative British director, Mike Leigh (whose name appears in the acknowledgements on the inner sleeve). It is amongst, other things, about the warring relationship between twin teenage girls, played by Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks (aaha…) As with several of the songs, ‘Life Is Sweet / Afterlife’*9 begins with McKee singing unaccompanied over her strummed electric guitar. It’s a song of hope for outsider kids who feel neglected, bullied, unlucky or unloved (including a girl who hears ‘voices in her head’). ‘Life is sweet, bittersweet / And the days keep rollin’ along’ McKee sings until the simple tune is overtaken in the ‘Afterlife’ coda as the strings take off and a tambourine keeps time before a tumult of drums crash in and the album fades out like a glorious vapour trail in the sky.

A meticulously sequenced album with the songs all thematically linked, Life Is Sweet is an emotionally demanding, but rewarding experience. On ‘Human’, she may admit to being ‘desperate-drained from all those tantrums’ but, as with much great pop and rock music, the portrayal of psychosis and heartbreak can be an exciting and uplifting experience for the listener. That word ‘bittersweet’ is the keynote to this record and its connotations are conveyed with tremendous power by the band, with its leader’s singing and playing always to the fore. This album not only underlined her status as a fine singer, but took her out on an edge where she found greatness. Similarly, her playing, as ferocious and distorted as the material frequently demanded, transcended whatever technical limitations she may have had and marked her out as a guitarist of considerable distinction.

N. B.             

McKee wrote nine of the album’s twelve tracks, co-writing the other three as well as co-arranging and co-producing with keyboardist Bruce Brody (who, incidentally also produced ‘Show Me Heaven’, as well as working with Patti Smith and U2, and on films like Diner (1982) and Pulp Fiction (1994). He also wrote Sam Brown’s 1988 global smash hit single, ‘Stop’).

*1 – The Days Of Thunder OST also featured the dread Guns ‘N’ Roses demonstrating their appetite for destruction by murdering Bob Dylan’s ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’.

*2 - Answers on a postcard – although the back of a stamp would do - and no, the great Joni Mitchell won’t count because she’s predominantly an acoustic player with little interest in Rock music. I’ll wager you won’t get much further than  Bonnie Raitt and Joan Jett…

*3 – Nirvana are one of my musical blind spots. I can understand when critics mention them in the same breath as Black Sabbath (another blind spot…), but I’m mystified when they also compare them to The Beatles. I mean, I know there’s tunes in there, but apart from the odd track and the MTV Unplugged In New York (1994) album, I just hear them as a racket, I’m afraid – and, no, I’m not even moved by ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Give me the psychedelic mini-masterpiece, ‘Rainbow Chaser’ (1967) by the original English art-rock Nirvana anytime!   

*4 – I quite like Jagged Little Pill, especially the raging, hell hath no fury angst of ‘You Oughta Know’, but many (predominantly male) critics dismissed it as mere girly whining – which is a bit rich when you consider some of the casual blokeish sexism and downright misogyny hailed as classic rock down through the ages.

*5 – ‘Get It On’ by T. Rex was re-titled ‘Bang A Gong’ in the US to avoid confusion with another song by a band called Chase.

*6 – I can’t help but smile at the title ‘This Perfect Dress’ because whenever I’ve seen clips of McKee, she always seems to be wearing some godawful knee-length tent with heavy-looking boots… 

*7 – The album cover features an uncredited fold-out B/W shot of a circus troupe, probably from around the turn of the 20^th century – and for no particular reason that I can discern.

*8 – MacLean, who, in musical terms, seems to have been something of a chronic underachiever following the handful of his songs which appeared on the remarkable first three albums by Love, became a born-again Christian, for a while attending the same Vineyard church as Bob Dylan. As well as Bryan, both Maria and their mother, Elizabeth - originally a catholic family - all ‘found Jesus’. ‘Lizzie & Bryan’ appear in the album’s acknowledgements.

*9 – McKee revisited the song ‘Life Is Sweet / Afterlife’ on her next album, High Dive (2003), according it a more restrained, conventional treatment…

c. 2013 IGR