CLOUDS & TREES

 

 

 

 

Consider the wild transcendence of clouds:
Painting the sky as long as light allows,
Blown above us on the wind’s holy breath,
Sublime as the stars ranged above the earth;
Each one as abstract, fluid and mixed
As every star appears eternal and fixed.
From high cirrus, through rolling cumulus
To horizon’s far-following stratus,
Clouds change every day, blazing in the dawn,
Glowing in the dusk, always weatherworn,
Carrying rain that feeds the crops and trees;
Making with sea and sunlight that which frees
The energy of life to fire and surge and whirl
Through everything waking in the wuthering world.

Ponder now the perfectly evolved tree
In all its casual, ancient beauty:
In avenues, gardens, fields and mountains,
Its bare bark flowing into green fountains.
From rainforest to municipal park,
Exhaling oxygen through day and dark,
Each one its own world, there to resurrect
An Eden for blossom, bird and insect.
Processing life and leaf through birth and time,
Passing through childhood and youth into prime,
Down old age and death to rise in rebirth,
Blown above us in the wind’s holy breath;
And when the certain time arrives that we must cease,
Then lay us under the clouds and amongst the trees.

(2012)

I’d been wanting to write a poem about trees for a long time, but I didn’t know that when it came, it would have to share the bill with clouds.

One of those that ‘wrote itself’ quite quickly, though I laboured long over a handful of words and phrases here and there. The picture is another one taken in our back garden.

 

1st JULY, 1916, THE SOMME

1st

JULY,

1916,

THE SOMME

 

After all the dramas

And documentaries,

After all the poetry

And the histories,

That summer morning

Never fails to appal:

The dull intelligence,

The wasted week

Of bombardment;

The Germans safe

In their rolling slopes

Despite the million shells;

Their wire uncut,

Their trenches intact;

The orders still standing

And sixty thousand fallen.

Men sent walking - walking –

Into a hell of fire and metal

And hundreds of thousands more men wasted

In the wasted months before the battle’s end,

When snow drew a shroud over the sludge,

In the dead of the wasted, wilderness winter.

(2012)

This was written in just a few minutes after we had watched BBC TV’s tremendously moving adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ WWI novel, ‘Birdsong’, the centerpiece of which is his setting of the Battle of the Somme.

In a negative and tragic sense, the history of mankind is the history of war – we just can’t seem to do without it. There is, however, something particularly compelling about the so called ‘Great War’. The Somme represents the top of the arc of the fighting halfway through the conflict. As far as I’m aware, there have never been so many military casualties on a single day of a battle in all history. When it was finally called off in November, 1916, well over a million British, French and German soldiers were dead. The allies had advanced barely five miles in those four and a half months…

The photograph shows the WWI memorial at Bradgate Park, Leics. This poem is my personal cenotaph.

NOCTURNE

Here in the foreground,
Black, silver and blue,
Slates glint with the frost.
Further back, churches
Spire up in starlight.
See the chimneys curl
And the rooftops slant
So sensually
On those hard angles
Of smokestacks and walls
With dark curtains drawn,
In the street below.
Observe now, midground,
The vague huddled figure
In a dark trench-coat,
Hurrying along
The moonlit cobbles,
Just past that street lamp.
See it hesitate
At some sharp corner.
Does it move toward
A familiar hearth,
Out of the cold night;
Or will it proceed,
Further on outward
Into the background
Of a destiny
Yet to crystallize,
Black, silver and blue,
In the icy dawn?

 

(2012)

Another one that came very quickly after I’d been looking at a photograph of a Prague roofscape by the Czech photographer, Josef Sudek who I discovered recently. The poem is by no means a literal description of the picture – it might just as easily recall scenes from the film noir, ‘ The Third Man’ – but it was the original point of departure.

 

The picture is one of a set of four that we bought from a photographer (not Sudek) who had a stall on the Charles Bridge in Prague several years ago. Interesting how all these elements come together...

FUERTEVENTURA

Afterwards,
As the wind rushes through the palms,
We sleep in each other’s warm arms
With your cooling breath on my face,
Far from home, in this island place;
And away
We slip into night’s strange fictions,
Beyond the hot, blue day’s actions,
Yielding to the Moon’s shifting sands,
Before tomorrow’s high commands
Are issued long before the noon;
So soon above wave, sky and dune.


(2011)


Fuerteventura – literally, the island of ‘strong winds’ – has wonderful white, sweeping beaches and bright blue sea much beloved by surfers. With its roiling riptides, it can however, be a perilous place and I nearly drowned there a few years ago. Nevertheless, we’ve just returned from another visit.

Those winds move the weather around quite dramatically and I took the picture on Corralejo beach after a sweltering day had changed in a trice to a dark, cloud-wracked evening.

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 13

‘sees [him] creatively channelling the ongoing trauma of his childhood relationship – or lack of one – with his father, through what were  the present trials and tribulations of his romantic life as a grown man in his mid-30s.’

Photograph Smile (1998)

by Julian Lennon

Following Father Into The Family Firm

Consider the names on the following list:-

Jeff Buckley    Adam Cohen   Jakob Dylan    Charlotte Gainsbourg

Chesney Hawkes     Enrique Iglesias    Jean Michel Jarre    Norah Jones   

Ziggy Marley    Liza Minelli     Randy Newman    Nancy Sinatra   

Chris Stills    Teddy Thompson    Rufus and Martha Wainwright    Kim Wilde

Carnie and Wendy Wilson with Chynna Phillips (as Wilson Phillips)

Hank Williams Jnr.   Dweezil Zappa

The list is not intended to be comprehensive, but it does at least show that, as in so many walks of life, family connections have opened doors for many a would-be pop star (showbiz is a particularly nepotistic world and a list of film and TV stars would be even longer). Markedly, it is the offspring of famous male musicians who seem most likely to follow in father’s footsteps – Liza Minelli and Chynna Phillips would be the exceptions above, unless we count the Wainwrights, whose mother was Kate McGarrigle but she, of course, was married to the more well-known Loudon Wainwright III.

A famous family name, however, is no guarantee of success, although some of the artists above have actually outsold their parents: Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene (1976) sold more than 12m copies, which is probably way more than his father, film composer, Maurice shifted in his entire career; meanwhile, the eponymous Wilson Phillips debut album knocked out over 10m sales in 1990, far above any single Beach Boys or Mamas & Papas LP; and Enrique Iglesias may yet overtake the sales of father Julio to become the most successful Latino singer of all time.

In terms of critical rather than commercial success, singer-songwriter, Randy Newman’s uniquely satirical albums are highly rated and he has also proved himself to be the equal of his film composer father and uncles by winning two Oscars amongst other awards for his own soundtrack work. The protean talents of Rufus Wainwright may have well have eclipsed those of his father Loudon, although he’s yet to achieve a US Top 20 single (Loudon did in 1972 with the fragrant ‘Dead , Skunk’). Although his recording career (only one finished album) was nowhere near as long or varied as that of Tim Buckley (dead at 28), Jeff (dead at 30) is also regarded - along with his father, who he barely knew - as one of the great voices of the late 20^th century.

Sons Of The Beatles

As we see above, musical genes are inherited with varying levels of career-development. Musicians descending from The Beatles – or to put it another way, The Sons Of The Beatles – might be expected to have higher than normal chances of maximising the nature / nurture equation. It seems, however, that the heat from the torch passed on by senior Fabs can sometimes be a little too hot to handle.

Dhanni Harrison, at 34, the youngest of The Sons, has yet to make an album, despite being described as a working musician. Three years older, Sean Lennon, has made the most of his celebrity background, having been involved in numerous projects as well as having made three albums under his own name, but he has yet to register any high profile success. In terms of musicianship, 47 years old Zak Starkey not only has Ringo’s nose, but also his drumming ability, having worked considerable stints with prestigious bands like The Who and Oasis amongst others.

It is, however, Julian Lennon - now 50 years old, the first born of the Fab juniors, who has been the most successful in terms of a solo career. In the 1980s, he had several hits, but in a recording history now approaching thirty years, his tally of only six albums seems a meagre return. He regards the fifth of these, Photograph Smile as his best work, despite its failure on the charts and its current unavailability other than on import.

Now, I’m no expert on Julian and I can’t actually recall what made me buy Photograph Smile, the only record of his that I own, but I do know he’s had a relatively rough deal over the years as a character in the long-running saga of Post-Beatles World. I say ‘relatively rough deal’ because I’m not about to lose any sleep about a Poor Little Rich Boy who lives by Lake Como and is rumoured to be worth about $40m.

Having also been the 5 years old only child of a broken marriage, more or less estranged from his father, I have, however, sometimes empathised with his situation. One gets the impression that Julian has also had quite a tough time of it with Yoko, his extended family, and the snobbery of many Rock fans and the music press. He has, understandably, felt it keenly when, on various occasions he seems to have been snubbed by The Royal Family Of Pop. If this sounds rather lame, then let’s remind ourselves, that Julian was the direct source of no less than three Beatles  songs (‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, famously inspired by one his nursery school paintings; the lullabye, ‘Goodnight’, another song by John; and ‘Hey Jude’, McCartney’s song of solace for the small bewildered boy in the midst of his parents’ break-up).

To his credit, Julian has never appeared to directly milk his association with his father in the subject-matter of his material, although the genetic link in his phizog and vocal cords is sometimes undeniably apparent in his singing, as are various Beatles musical tropes in some songs (but hey, how many acts could that charge be levelled at?). As we shall see, however, any sensitive listener is likely to detect areas of metaphorical significance in the lyrics which may be entwined with the peculiar – and unavoidable – history of his background.

 

Songs For Lucy – Amongst Others…

As well as playing various guitar, sitar, keyboards and percussion, Julian also sings all the backing vocals, which he arranges as well as some of the strings – and he co-mixed and co-produced the record. Three of the songs are solo compositions, ‘Way To Your Heart’ is co-written with Canadian singer songwriter, Lisa Dal Bello, whilst the others are co-writes with either pianist, Greg Darling or top AOR songwriter, Mark Spiro.

 

First up is ‘Day After Day’, a love song for his then new fiancée, Lucy Bayliss*1. It’s a superior example of a rock ballad but, with its complex arrangement and Beatlesque guitars and drumming, not to mention the chip off the old block vocal, it was bound to provoke cries of ‘Beatles rip-off!’ (interestingly, no-one ever says that anymore about Badfinger, do they – one of whose hits was also titled ‘Day After Day’ and was equally Beatlesque? But then critical acceptance was inevitable for a band who had the integrity to feature double-suicide – if only Julian had strung himself up after this record, his kudos would now be assured.

The emotional weather turns ‘Cold’ though, on the next track, one of those ‘please don’t leave me’ songs, lifted here by its pleading melody, elegant acoustic guitar solo and an opening couplet which could easily refer to you-know-who (‘I’ve read the headlines covering your wall / A thousand lifetimes, you must have lived them all’).  A third ballad, ‘I Should Have Known’, finds the narrator ‘trapped in this lonely room’, by someone who, mark you, has cast him aside:-

                                 ‘Cos time and time again

                                  You’ve disappeared and then

                                  You’ve come home to me

                                  And played my emotions.’

The bitterness of the lyric, which also includes the line ‘You killed my inner heart’ and which is likely to strike a chord with many kids from broken families, is offset by the stately but unsentimental progress of the melody and cello-led sting arrangement.

The tempo picks up with ‘How Many Times’, a song reflecting the singer’s sincere, active and sustained interest in ecology*2 which compellingly observes:-

                   ‘Well, we’re always looking for something new,

                   But what difference does it make when there’s no point of view

                   Cos when you can’t even take care of the past.

                   How do you expect the future to last?’

‘I Don’t Wanna Know’, with its spirited time- to-move-on theme, is a beat song which might almost have been one of John Lennon’s up-tempo numbers from his group’s first four albums. Clearly an homage then but, listen if Oasis could do it over and again, then anybody is entitled! The originals, however, would have trimmed the all but four minutes of this by half…

‘Crucified’ – ‘on a cross of innuendo’ – appears to sum up how Julian may feel about his life and work being scrutinised and sneered at by gossip columnists and rock-critics. It canters along winningly, whipped up by swirls of Arabic strings, but loses out eventually by again being overlong.

The following trio of songs are attractive ruminations on the need for reconciliation. The piano-led ‘Walls’ resolves to empathise and keep on keeping on in the face of adversity; ‘Believe’ devoutly hopes for resolution only for that hope to ultimately founder; whilst ‘Good To Be Lonely’ rises above the doubtful rationalization of its title with a liltingly classical string section and some succinct imagery:-

                          ‘Wind through my window,

                          Come sing me a song,. 

                          Show me the way home,

                          I’ve been disconnected,

                          Loved and rejected,

                          Travelling inside of my soul.’

 ‘Kiss Beyond The Catcher’ is the sort of pleasant, sun-kissed shuffle that Jack Johnson would be selling vast amounts of a few years down the line. It’s a fairly simple tune about the pursuit of an elusive girl but, of course, we know that John Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, was carrying a copy of J. D. Salinger’s famous novel of teenage angst, The Catcher In The Rye when he shot the star. Julian, who has admitted that he’s struggled with the pressures of adulthood and hasn’t so far had any children of his own, clearly identifies with Holden Caulfield*3, the book’s protagonist with a troubled hero-worship-relationship with his older brother who leaves the family home to make it big as a Hollywood screen-writer…

‘And She Cries’ is another mid-tempo ballad, this time with guitar-parts which recall George Harrison and The Searchers. About an obsessive, abandoned lover, it’s another above average cut, but what raises Photograph Smile above the level of a good album to one that is very good is the final sequence of three songs (it may not be a great album because, at more an hour, it is perhaps overlong and ballad-heavy – but it is certainly an underrated one.).

The title-track is a beautiful torch song by any standard and highlights what a fine singer Julian is at his best. On these last three songs he is backed by a melancholy piano and sharp, sweeping strings which never for a second descend into schmaltz – quite an achievement, considering that ‘Faithful’ is practically a marriage proposal in which the narrator offers to exchange vows of faith and declares himself ready ‘to sign upon the dotted line’.

‘Way To Your Heart’, the closer, is the killer track. Intensely moving, it begins with the sounds of studio noise, a clock ticking and a cigarette being lit. As the first drag is exhaled, the piano chimes and a dark undertow of strings lurches in like a heart coming up into a mouth. It’s as if the singer is needing to take a deep breath before taking on a song which will make testing demands on his emotions. The narrator, a besotted, desperate lover, pleads for acceptance, almost demented with the depth of his feeling: ‘I wanna leave you / So I can miss you.’ The clock is a constant presence, reminding us, between the verses, of time trickling indifferently away.

As the bridge begins though, time starts to go backwards as the narrator, his vocal now heavily reverbed, urges himself to waste no more time: ‘Open your eyes as you look to the skies / And you see her just floating by’. The strings, joined by synthesisers, then take off in a deft echo of the melody of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. The effect is magical and as soon as the verses return, one longs for it to be repeated. The fact that it isn’t only strengthens the emotional pull of the song and when it ends with that solitary clock ticking away into infinity, I always feel drained.

 If you’re thinking this sounds like Julian ripping off his old man, you couldn’t be more wrong. ‘Way To Your Heart’ works wonderfully well on its own terms, as a yearning love song and when it summons up the spirit of the Beatles song, it does so in a way which transcends quotation. In any case, if Julian doesn’t have the right to refer to that song, then outside of the remaining Beatles, I don’t know who does. Let’s not forget either, that the object of his romantic affections at the time was named Lucy… 

                                 

If I’m right about this, then Photograph Smile sees Julian Lennon creatively channelling the ongoing childhood trauma of his earlier relationship – or lack of one - with his father through what were the present trials and tribulations of his romantic life as a grown man in his mid-30s. The album’s front and back covers feature sepia pictures of him as a lttle boy – probably taken around the time of his parents’ separation (on the front he is, indeed, producing a photograph smile).

The dedications in the sleeve-notes subtly caution us from viewing Julian’s every move through the prism – or should that be, from the prison – of you-know-who and co. ‘Crucified’ is dedicated to a friend ‘who tragically died last year’; ‘Faithful’ is for someone called Valeria; and ‘Kiss Beyond The Catcher’ is for Lucy (though teasingly, with no surname attached*4).

Most tellingly of all, the whole album is dedicated to his mother, Cynthia’s second husband, Roberto Bassanini*5, who is described as ‘my ‘Step’-Father (Julian’s inverted commas). Nowhere on this record will you find any mention of John Lennon.

 

N. B.

*1 -  Lucy Bayliss – usually described as a ‘socialite’ was engaged to Julian for some ten years, after which he was also engaged briefly to actress Olivia D’Abo (daughter of singer-songwriter, Mike d’Abo, who took over as vocalist in Manfred Mann from Paul Jones).

*2 -  Julian’s interest in ecological issues seems to be sincere, rather than just another celebrity’s publicity pose. He is actively involved with both the Whaledreamers Organisation and The White Feather Foundation (which he founded in 2009).

*3 - The second line of track 4, ‘How Many Times?’ goes, ‘How many times must I catch you from grace?’

*4 – The other Lucy, Lucy O’Donnell – the little girl who inspired Julian’s original ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ painting, died in 2009 from the disease lupus. Julian wrote and released a song called ‘Lucy’ to raise money for lupus research.

*5 – Cynthia and Roberto were only married from 1970-73, but the Italian ‘Step’-Father’ must have made a very positive impression on Julian…

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 12

'Neu may be something of a one-trick pony, but as with Chuck Berry's riff and Bo Diddley's rhythm, Neu's motorik is one hell of a trick.' 

Neu! 75 (1975) by Neu!
 

During 1975, in the midst of the Disco era and approaching the cusp where Prog Rock would be all but pulverised by Punk Rock, three epically ambitious singles were released. They were ‘No Woman, No Cry’ by Bob Marley & The Wailers, ‘Born To Run’ by Bruce Springsteen, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen.

Although never a fan of Reggae, I couldn’t help but be moved by Marley’s stately hymn of nostalgia for Jamaica, a song which effortlessly transcended the limitations of its patois and setting (I can still recall many a singalong to jukeboxes in Leicester pubs). Neither did I ever much like Queen and, despite appreciating their magnum opus as an impressive feat of record-making, I just couldn’t take its overweeningly poperatic pomposity in general, or Freddy Mercury’s preeningly soulless histrionics in particular. ‘Born To Run’ however, was a bona fide classic from first hearing and I still think it’s one of the very greatest and most exciting records ever made*1.

1975 was also the year the genre becoming known – somewhat contentiously - as ‘Krautrock’, enjoyed a commercial break-out from Germany in the form of ‘Autobahn’, a single edited down from a version which took up a whole side of an album of the same name by a group of four synthesiser players called Kraftwerk. It reached # 11 in the UK and # 25 in the US.

No such heady heights of chart success in the western world awaited Neu! - either then or thereafter. Both members of Neu!, guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, had been in an earlier incarnation of Kraftwerk with Florian Schneider*2, before leaving to record their eponymous debut album in 1972. It wasn’t until ’75 though, that it came to pass that yours truly was listening to The John Peel Show on the BBC when I heard two songs on the same programme which stopped me in my tracks. The first was Patti Smith’s reinvention of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ by Them from 1964*3. The second was ‘Hero’ from Neu’s third album, Neu ’75.

Both of these songs seemed to me to be fired with a similar kind of ambition to the records discussed above (the full title of Smith’s was ‘Gloria In Excelcis Deo’, after all!), but they were coming from very different angles of production and direction. Both were relatively lo-fi and, unlike Springsteen, Marley and Queen, who were all working broadly in the continuum of rock music’s evolution, Smith and Neu! appeared to be actively breaking away from it. The ferocious attack of these records did, of course, foreshadow and significantly influence the coming of Punk – but there was no way of knowing that at the time.

Neu! indeed, shared an experimental and anarchic aesthetic with other Krautrock acts such as Can, Faust, Amon Duull II, Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Klaus Schulze.

Their first album had featured a pneumatic drill on one track, whilst the next, Neu 2 (1973), had a second side which ‘remixed’ the first side to varying degrees, ranging from interesting to unlistenable*4.

But, gentle reader, do not start here to run away with the idea that I’m luring you into some cachophonous catastrophe by recommending Neu! 75. Far from it – Neu’s penultimate album is a beautiful and accessible record, their best by a country mile and one of my all-time favourites. It’s a mystery to me why it, as opposed to they - as in the band*5 – isn’t more widely known and heard.

* * * * *

In the history of guitar and drums duos, Neu come a fair while after Shadows off-shoot, Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, and long before the likes of The White Stripes and The Black Keys. Apart from being a largely instrumental act like the ex-Shads, they resemble none of them, let alone the synth and singer merchants who sprang up in the 1980s. If they resemble anything, then it might be an unholy alliance between their contemporaries, Suicide, a confrontationalist electro-punk pair, and Santo & Johnny, the Hawaiian-styled melodists, who emerged in the late ‘50s.

What Neu! are most known for is their creation of the motorik drumbeat, a relentless 4/4 attack punctuated by occasional volleys around the kit (Klaus Dinger, the drummer , preferred to call it ‘The Apache Beat’). Complemented by phasing, volume variation and Michael Rother’s guitar harmonics and bass throbs, the motorik has about it the impression of perpetual motion, always urgently on the move, although appearing and disappearing, usually by means of studio fade, from - or into - some mysterious distance.

         Dinger                                         Roth                   

                                                                                                                                 

The motorik made its debut on ‘Hallogallo’ (‘wild partying’ in English, roughly), the instrumental opener on the first Neu album, lasting for ten minutes. It could easily have gone on for twice as long without becoming remotely boring, so arresting is its effect. Because of its hypnotic originality, it is the piece that Neu! are most lauded for and it played to the more accessible features of the obsession with minimalism and repetition that characterised the worlds of the avant garde and classical music at the time. Neu would repeat the trick, almost as effectively, at the start of their second album with ‘Fur Immer’ (‘forever’ in English).

By Neu 75, however, Neu had discovered keyboards, and the album opens with a heavily reverbed piano before the motorik gets going, its propulsion abetted by rhythm guitar and overlaid by fluttering synthesisers. It is the piano which carries the eminently whistleable tune and ‘Isi’ (‘easy’ in English), is a fabulously catchy instrumental. I’m amazed that it’s not as much a staple of TV incidental music as say, Nick Drake or Moby – perhaps it is in Germany. It resembles a cool, uptempo take of Sound Orchestral’s great 1964 cover version of Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Cast Your Fate To The Wind’.

‘Isi’ also clues in the listener to the fact that this is a much more tightly produced album than the first two records*7. ‘Seeland’ (German for ‘island’ generally; more specifically Sjaelland, the largest of the Danish islands), wanders in with a strolling bass, more relaxed drums and a woodblock, and some of Rother’s most melodic guitar playing in which he achieves the sound of trumpets drifting on a breeze. The track fades into rainfall, distant thunder and echoes of his guitar.

The hushed, slow ‘Leb Wohl’ (‘goodbye’ in English) is again led by piano, accompanied by great washes of surf and muted, metronomic percussion. Rother’s soporific, breathy vocal delivers a sparse lyric about making love on a hill by the sea and feeling free. Wordsworth it ain’t, but it works and, as with the other two vocals on side 2, it is in English (singing in English, along with the more considered production, may be indicative that Neu! were aiming for a wider audience with this album).

Rother                      Dinger

By the time the first side ends, the sunlit buoyancy of ‘Isi’ has gradually sunk into a cloudy melancholic dusk. Side 2 suddenly blasts through this inertia, with Klaus Dinger, now on rhythm guitar, carving out an aggressive intro strum (or should that be sturm und drang?) as Rother soars in on lead and the thunderous double-drumming sets in. This is the track I heard on the Peel Show and its sheer intensity still strikes me. No wonder a certain John Lydon pricked up his ears back then. The imagery conjured up for me by the sonic storm and the words about a ‘hero driving through the night’, is of apocalyptic horsemen galloping through a cloud-tossed, moonlit darkness. Dinger’s slurred, furious vocal, largely incoherent as well as being positively unhinged, actually relates a tale of a man driven to nihilism (i.e. ‘fuck the bourgeoisie!’) by a friend’s betrayal with his ‘Honey [who] went to Norway’ (to Seeland, perhaps?).

As the galloping dies away, it is replaced by the compelling urgency of ‘E-Musik’, which takes its place alongside ‘Hallogallo’ and ‘Fur Immer’ in the trinity of tracks which best exemplify the motorik. Its carefully controlled dynamics and phasing eventually give way to sweeping wind effects and what I can only describe as the sound of some great beast stirring from the depths. Then there is an echoing glimmer of ‘Seeland’s’ melody played backwards, before the galloping comes crashing back in with the electic guitars and double-drumming of ‘After Eight’, Dinger howling for help to get him ‘through the night’ so that he ‘can see the sun’, with Rother vamping away on piano and the leviathan on backing vocals…

In truth, Neu may be something of a one trick pony, but as with Chuck Berry's riff and Bo Diddley’s rhythm, Neu’s motorik is one hell of a trick. And as with Bo and Chuck, there’s significantly more to Neu than their one big trick. The trick is at once obvious and mysterious. Ask David Bowie or Brian Eno; ask Joy Division; ask Hawkwind or Primal Scream.

Nearly forty years on, Neu! 75 still enthrals me. It occupies a unique place in the history of rock music wherein Prog Rock and the avant garde coalesce with the Ambient genre, which Neu themselves helped to create, and the proto-Punk Rock which pointed ahead to the musical upheavals of the decade’s last few years.

N. B.

*1 – The Queen disc hit # 1 in the UK, staying there over the Dec./Jan period of 1975-6, a feat which it repeated during 1991-2, following the Assumption of St. Freddy (in the US, it reached # 9 in ’75 and # 2 in ’92). Marley reached # 8 in the UK but failed to crack America, whilst the ‘Born To Run’ single – and I do find this extraordinary – missed the UK chart altogether and only struggled to # 23 in the States.

*2 – The same Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, immortalised by the track, ‘V-2 Schneider’ on David Bowie’s album, Heroes (1977).

*3 – ‘Gloria’ was the b-side of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, which reached # 10 in the UK (now there’s value for money! They don’t make ‘em like that any more - at least,

not for 6s/8d, or about 38p in ‘new money’). Them reissued it the following year as an a-side, but it failed to chart. 

*4 – Call it cynicism, spite or simply avant garde expression, but when the record company pulled the budget-rug from under the production of Neu 2, the duo completed the album by speeding up, slowing down or generally warping material from Side 1.

*5 – Over the years, Neu have gradually become the most cultishly cool Krautrock act – and after Kraftwerk, probably the best known. In 2009, a largely excellent tribute album appeared called Brand Neu!, featuring,  tracks inspired by Neu! from, amongst others, Primal Scream, LCD Soundsystem, Oasis and Kasabian as well as pieces by La Dusseldorf and Michael Rother.

*6 – On the second side of Neu! 75, Rother and Dinger are joined by two further drummers, Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe, who play together on all three numbers. The short-lived quartet of Rother, the Dinger brothers and Lampe did some live work together as Neu! before the latter three formed the slightly more pop-orientated (and less distinctive) La Dusseldorf who enjoyed some commercial success in Europe 1976-81. Rother joined forces with Cluster to form Harmonia, with whom he’d already recorded Musik Von Harmonia in 1974. He stayed for two further albums during which time they were augmented by Brian Eno.

*7 – As with their previous albums, Neu! 75 was engineered in the studio of legendary German sound-man Conny Plank who co-produced with Rother and Klaus Dinger. Rother's fine 'Neutronics 98 (A Tribute To Conny Plank)' closes Brand Neu!

Neu’s minimalism extended to titles and cover art, both of which are virtually non existent. All three of their albums (four if you count – wait for it – Neu! 4 (1986) – an ill-advised reunion, sometimes referred to as Neu! 86 and featuring a revised track-list on the vinyl box-set supervised by Rother in 2010 have album covers which vary only in their colouration and ‘home-made’,
 hand-scrawled liner info.

                                                               C. IGR 2013

UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 11

‘The golden age of The Kinks

begins more or less here.’

Face To Face (1966)
by The Kinks

It isn’t easy picking an underrated album by The Kinks because, apart from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society  (1968), which has, over the years, gradually acquired classic status and been accorded the deluxe reissue treatment, all of their albums might be described as underrated. I struggled, for instance, to choose between Face To Face, Something Else By The Kinks (1967), Arthur (1969) and Muswell Hillbillies (1971). The reason Face To Face won out for me was because it is a key transitional album for the band and, song for song, one of their strongest sets after Village Green.

I think Kinks albums are underrated due to the perception, even amongst many serious music fans, that they were a singles act. Certainly, that seemed to be the opinion of the UK record-buying public by the mid-1960s because, although Face To Face reached # 12 and stayed on the chart for nearly three months, its overall sales were disappointing. The follow-up, Something Else fared even worse, spending just a fortnight on the chart and peaking at only # 35. It would, remarkably, be the last time, barring compilations, that a Kinks album appeared on the British chart. Given their reputation as one of the all-time great bands, it’s strange to reflect that only 5 of their  24 studio albums ever charted in their homeland. But then, even during their glory years, certain great Kinks singles like ‘Mr. Pleasant’, ‘Shangri-La’ and ‘Celluloid Heroes’ also failed to chart at all.     



Ray, Mick, Dave & Pete c. 1966

The Kinks were the first of that fabulous triumvirate of working-class ‘Mod’ bands*1 from London to make it big (the others being The Who and The Small Faces). Led by Ray Davies, one of the very best songwriters of his generation, The Kinks started off by pretty much inventing Heavy Rock with singles like ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ and ‘’Til The End Of The Day’. With songs like ‘Tired Of Waiting’ and ‘Set Me Free’, they were also early exponents of the Power Ballad. Meanwhile, with the shimmering strangeness of ‘See My Friends’, they, along with The Beatles and The Yardbirds, pioneered the period’s fascination with the East and, in     particular, the hypnotic drones of Indian music.

Ray Davies though, had not finished breaking new ground and, ahead of Face To Face, had begun creating the sharp slices of social commentary for which he is most revered. ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ point the way forward to a very different kinda Kinks and the style of song that came to define them.

The earlier Kinks material had been all about beat and rhythm and sheer power, with lyrics simple to the point of monosyllabism. By 1966, however, melody had taken over and the vocabulary of their songs had rapidly expanded. There was also a growing desire amongst the more imaginative pop musicians to produce LPs as artistic statements rather than the casual hotchpotch of songs that was then more or less the norm. Bob Dylan and The Beatles were spearheading this movement and, with Rubber Soul, released at the end of 1965, and Revolver, which came out just ahead of Face To Face, The Beatles were also demonstrating how the recording studio could be a more colourfully creative environment.

Although the Kinks album stands up well today, it can also be seen very much as a record of its time – it certainly comes dressed in the styles of the day. The front cover painting has a stream of butterflies fluttering into the foreground from the top of some groovy hipster’s head, whilst the back has one of those publicist’s sleeve notes that were in vogue at the time and which attempts to be arty and witty without succeeding on either count. With its warm, analogue, four-track mono sound, the record was the fourth and last of their albums to be produced by Shel Talmy before Ray Davies himself took over in the studio. It was also the first album to feature entirely original material by Ray.

1966 was a difficult year for The Kinks. As well as having to cope with their perennial management problems, Ray suffered what was described as a ‘nervous breakdown’ which led to him being replaced by Mick Grace*2 for a tour of Belgium, and bassist Pete Quaife broke a leg and temporarily left the band, to be replaced by John Dalton*3 You can hear the strain in Ray’s voice –  always a dry, fragile instrument – which sounds quite rough around the edges on some of Face To Face.

The fruity tones of Grenville Collins, one of the band’s managers, opens the album, answering a telephone on ‘Party Line’, a bouncy guitar tune about invasion of privacy. It features one of Dave Davies’ occasional lead vocals and provides a lively, if inconsequential start before ‘Rosie, Won’t You Please Come Home?’ strums in with its lament for a girl who has flown the family nest (Rosie Davies, one of the six elder sisters of Ray and Dave had emigrated to Australia several years before). It’s a more complex song, underpinned, as are so many Kinks songs from the ‘60s, by their distinctive rhythm section, and effectively economical flourishes of guitar. It also features the first of several appearances by Nicky Hopkins on harpsichord.

                                                                                                  

Dandy Dave

‘Dandy’*4, like the single, ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Two Sisters’ (issued the following year on Something Else) is another song which may well be about that famous peacock and man about town, Dave Davies. Ray, who by now was married with a child, envied his younger brother’s gallivanting around Swinging London. Although the narrator chides the ‘low-down dandy’, warning him that he’s ‘moving much too fast’ and ‘can’t escape the past’, it’s an affectionate portrait which concludes that he’s ‘alright’ and will ‘always be free’ and ‘needs no sympathy’.

The pressures of stardom and the responsibility weighing on the band’s most creative member is the subject of ‘Too Much On My Mind’, one of Ray’s loveliest ballads. Considering his recent history at the time, it’s a remarkably candid song featuring a tinkling acoustic guitar and harpsichord, punctuated by a repeated bass slide.

That harpsichord is to the fore on the next track, ‘Session Man’, with Hopkins playing a baroque run before Ray delivers a withering put-down of the protagonist who’s ‘not paid to think, just play’ and who ‘always finishes on time / No overtime or favours done’. It’s a cracking tune, but one wonders what Hopkins – virtually a de facto member of The Kinks in the studio - made of it – especially as he’s strongly rumoured to be the inspiration.

The mood darkens with ‘Rainy Day In June’, a great track in which an apocalyptic storm is described poetically amidst minor chords, spectral backing vocals, handclaps and dramatic sound-effects of the thunderous summer downpour which unleashes ‘a demon’ snatching butterflies ‘in its crinkled hand’. Presumably this was one of the tracks Ray had in mind when he complained that he didn’t like the psychedelic album cover and would have preferred something ‘black and strong, like the sound of the LP, instead of all those fancy colours’.

‘A House In The Country’*5, which closed the first side of the LP, reverts to the less interesting style of opener, ‘Party Line’. A wordy, but one-idea beat song with a bam-bam chorus, it’s about the failure of a status-symbol property to satisfy its rich, shallow owner who, in reality ‘ain’t gotta home, oh no’. Ray’s singing sounds tired on this and it may have been better fielded out to his younger brother.

‘Holiday In Waikiki’ is much better. A wry tale of disillusionment, it features a narrator who wins a holiday in a newspaper competition, only to find the exotic resort ‘commercialized’, expensive and ersatz. Even the hula-hula girl wears a plastic grass skirt and comes from New York of Greco-Italian parentage. Without ever sounding nearly as accomplished as their session men, The Kinks yet again demonstrate their knack for getting all of the right sounds in the right place on this buoyant pop song, with Mick Avory’s drums captaining the ship.

The swashing surf effects which bookend ‘Holiday’ lead into ‘Most Exclusive Residence for Sale’, a song which not only recalls the scenario of ‘A House In The Country’, but acts as a precursor for ‘Sunny Afternoon’ later on. This time a man who ‘made good…hit the hard times and had to sell out’. A somewhat more sympathetic character than that in ‘House’, we’re told that:-

                               ‘Because he had a heart and not a head

                               He spent it all on girls and fancy jewellery

                               Then he found himself in front of a judge and jury.’

Ray is on his best laconic crooning form here and the booming guitar riff and mocking ‘bah-bah-bah-bah’ backing vocals create an entertainingly tragicomic picture of a hero who ‘soaked away all of his troubles and let them drown’.

The tone and tempo are then suddenly arrested by ‘Fancy’ – for me, one of the highlights of the album and, indeed, of the Kinks’ classic period. A close relative of ‘See My Friends’, it begins with a glistening twelve-string guitar, then picks up a repeated sliding bass note and Ray’s droning vocal (one of his best on the record). Halfway through, urgent down-strokes bring in a pattering tabla*6 as Dave’s six-string emerges, eventually hitting high notes at the end as the bass note, enormously compressed and sustained, melts into the fade. It’s not so much Indian as other-worldly…

The words to ‘Fancy’, sparse and awkward on paper, work wonderfully well in the mysterious sonic haze of the record. Ray’s own attempts to explain the song have been vague but the phrase’, ‘No-one can penetrate me’ seems to have psychological rather than sexual significance. No such abstruseness clouds ‘Little Miss Queen Of Darkness’, a neat mid-tempo song about a discotheque dolly-bird who disguises a broken heart by losing herself in dancing. It is enhanced by subtle guitars and a totally unexpected, echo-laden, but musically interesting drum solo (and I don’t know of too many of those…).

‘You’re Lookin’ Fine’ is a fairly straightforward blues work-out which doesn’t go much further lyrically than its title suggests. It’s a bracing couple of minutes though, and at least gives Dave a chance to shine with his only real solo of the album. It’s followed by one of The Kinks’ best loved and most heard songs, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, one of the band’s three UK # 1 singles - and on the chart throughout England’s World Cup winning summer.     

Too much on Ray's mind?

Opening with one of those great Kinks introductory descending bass lines (cf. ‘Dead End Street’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’)*7 it’s a classic sunshine song and has appeared on numerous ‘Summer Hits’ type compilations but, paradoxically, its lyric is as much doom and gloom as it is lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer*8. England is not so much ‘swinging’ as suffering an economic downturn and the narrator of the song is being squeezed by a ‘big fat momma’ government and ‘the taxman has taken all [his] dough’. The over-riding message that listeners take away though, is that of cocking a snook at adversity. Before the narrator sails away into tax exile (or lurches into bankruptcy), it’s his cool insouciance that we identify with:-

                           ‘My girlfriend’s run off with my car

                           And gone back to her ma and pa,

                           Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty

                           Now I’m sitting here

                           Sipping at my ice-cold beer

                           Lazing on a sunny afternoon.’    

The album ends anti-climactically with ‘I’ll Remember’, a wistful lost-love power ballad recorded nearly six months before the Face to Face sessions. One wonders why other superior songs from the period such as b-sides like ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ and ‘Big Black Smoke’; and ‘End Of The Season’ (which ended up on Something Else) weren’t preferred in the final programme*9.

The first of these, defiantly roared out by Dave, would have fitted into the album’s identity-crisis theme well – as would the second, with its tale of a country girl who runs away to London only to succumb to what Dylan Thomas called ‘capital punishment’. The third, another poor little rich boy’s Cowardesque lament for the girlfriend who’s flown abroad for the winter, leaving him behind, wailing ‘Now Labour’s in, I have no place to go’, would also have complimented the record’s satirizing of the British class system. 

Face To Face is an album whose writer and characters, be they first or third person, gaze critically beneath the constructs of self and society. From now on, the songs of Ray Davies would focus on family, friends, the industry he worked in, and the world at large. Songs of ‘social commentary’, yes - but all presented through the peculiar prism of his own personality. The golden age of The Kinks begins more or less here.

 

N. B.

In 2011, I wrote a poem about Ray Davies called Old Ray after watching a BBC Imagine documentary about him. If you'd like to read the poem, it can be found in the POETRY CORNER top tab on the home page of this blog - click on the tab, scroll down to the list of poems and click on Old Ray.

*1 – To pigeon-hole such great bands as ‘Mod’, is of course, to diminish their achievements; The Kinks, The Who and The Small Faces were all so much more than that – but, until about 1967, they were all known as ‘Mod’ groups.

*2 - Mick Grace, plucked from a London band called The Cockneys, shared lead vocals with Dave Davies on the Belgian tour, before sinking back into obscurity, much like one Jimmy Nichol, who famously – and forgettably – replaced a sick Ringo on several Beatles gigs during a 1964 world tour.   

*3 – ‘Little Miss Queen Of Darkness’ was the only Face To Face track on which John Dalton, formerly of Mod outfit The Creation, played bass, although he is also on ‘Dead End Street’. He permanently replaced Quaife between 1969-76.

*4 - ‘Dandy’ was a ‘turn-table hit’ in the UK by anachronistic radio star, Clinton Ford, but the cover by Herman’s Hermits, at the peak of their success in the US and Canada, had a bona-fide hit Stateside. As you’d expect, it’s a rather anodyne version made even worse by the addition of a twee string arrangement.     

*5 – Ray Davies moved to a country house himself around this time, but quickly became homesick and returned to London. The song was a minor hit for The Pretty Things.     

*6 – I’m guessing about there being a tabla on ‘Fancy’ – it might be someone hitting cardboard boxes, for all I know.

*7 – A word here about the highly distinctive use of backing vocals on Kinks records such as ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Usually some combination of Dave, Pete Quaife, Rasa (Ray’s first wife) and Ray himself, the effects created are more than merely harmonious and add mood, wit and eloquence to the songs.

*8 – ‘Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days Of Summer’ was the title track of a 1963 album by Nat King Cole.

*9 – Ray Davies originally had the idea that all of the tracks on Face To Face would be blended together by sound-effects such as the ringing phone on ‘Party Line’, the storm on ‘Rainy Day In June’ and the waves on ‘Holiday In Waikiki’. Had they been included on the album, there would also have been the pealing church bells on ‘Big Black Smoke’ and the birdsong on ‘End Of The Season’. Sadly, nothing came of the idea but, had it come off, it would have predated The Beatles’ famously segued Sgt. Pepper (1967) by some seven months…

 

 C. IGR 2013