Farewell Bel

A couple of hours ago, I had a post almost finished. I stopped so we could take Beryl for a walk. When I came back, I checked my feeds before finishing the post and saw on MassivelyOP that Belghast had died.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify to anyone reading this who Belghast was. I probably don't need to explain how he'd been undergoing a difficult course of chemotherapy following a cancer diagnosis. Reportedly, it was complications with that course of treatment that led to his extremely untimely death.

Everyone who's likely to be reading this most likely followed Bel's blog, just like I do. We all learned about everything in his life, good and bad, through his conversational, very open posts. We all know he'd had the worst of years, with his wife dying suddenly and unexpectedly and then his own illness appearing.

But I imagine most of us were confident he'd get through all these very bad times and come out the other side, still Bel. Still himself. Still positive, forward-looking, optimistic, ready to give life the benefit even if it didn't seem to want to cut him much slack.

I knew from his posts that he was struggling with his chemo routine. I know from experience how difficult chemo can be like although my own experience was a lot milder than his. But I also know how unpredictable it can be, filling yourself with poisons week after week. Sometimes very bad things happen.

I had my own brush with death thanks to complications with chemo, as documented here on this blog. It's such a terrible shame Bel didn't survive his own to tell us all about the experience on his blog, too.

He would have, of course. He was a fearless examiner of his own life. He talked about all kinds of issues, practical, medical, emotional and personal on what was supposed to be a gaming blog. He was a core influence on my own move to make this blog about more than just games, although his willingness to share far exceeded my own.

But then Bel was ever the sharer. He tried to help wherever he could and he led always by example. His influence has been both deep and wide.

I knew Bel from his blog and also from Blaugust, of course, but he was very active in all kinds of social media and in gaming communities. He was always willing to talk to new people and turn them into friends, even though he didn't always find socializing easy, something he often mentioned on his blog. 

A lot of people knew Bel. A lot of people are going to miss him. No-one's going to forget him easily, not least because his legacy will live on.

According to Roger, Blaugust is going ahead. I'm absolutely certain that's how Bel would have wanted it. I'm sure everyone will have plenty to say about the inspirational figure who started the whole thing when it rolls around again next month. 

For now, though, I'll leave it at that. There's only so much you can say when something like this happens. I just hope someone's looking after Bel's cats. He really loved those cats. 

Nothing Seems To Satisfy

I wasn't going to do anything to commemorate the death of Ozzie Osbourne. But then I didn't have anything else in mind and I hate to skip a day when I'd normally be posting...

And it is true that although I haven't listened to Sabbath for, oh, about half a century and I've never heard any of Ozzie's solo stuff - ever - and I haven't seen even a few seconds of The Osbournes... Black Sabbath was my first favorite band.

Weird but true. For about five minutes (Okay, a year.) when I was in my very early teens, my best friend and I thought Sabbath were the best band we'd ever heard. Of course, we didn't exactly have the breadth or depth of musical experience we'd have by the time were fifteen...

Anyway, I bought Masters of Reality when it came out in 1971 (Meaning I must have been thirteen...) and then backfilled the first two albums, Paranoid and Black Sabbath, which turned out to be very easy to find in my favorite used record store. My pal bought Sabbath IV the following year but by then I'd already moved on to kneel at the feet of the Velvet Underground and the rest of their art-house ilk so heavy metal just wasn't pretentious enough for me any more.

There was no second coming for metal for me, either. I still don't much like any of it. My fling with the heavy stuff was brief and left little impression. While I retain a nostalgic affection for some of the prog bands I liked around the same time (Well, Yes mostly. The rest I can do without.) I can't say I've ever felt the urge to go back and listen to my old Sabbath albums. Which I still have, of course.

There is one song of theirs that I do still listen to, though. It's hard to beat in its field and it seems to stand a little to one side of most of the rest of the Sabs catalog. What's more, it's the only Black Sabbath song I'm likely to hear coming at me down the street from the bunch of buskers who "perform" on weekends, fifty yards from the doorway of the bookshop where I work. (That said, they did take a run at War Pigs once. I bet that didn't put much in the bucket.)

Obviously I'm talking about Paranoid. Let's hear it one more time. 

Paranoid - Black Sabbath

There they are on Top of the Pops in 1970. I don't remember seeing them. It might be very slightly before I started watching the show or maybe I was out that evening. Kicking a ball against a wall, probably. 

I didn't actually realise Paranoid was a Top 40 hit. (Top 30 then, I think, actually... Top 40 came later.) Again, I think it just predates my obsession with the weekly chart rundown. I'm slightly too young to have been there for the start of Ozzie's career and I'm only ten years younger than he was when he died.

There are many covers of Paranoid on YouTube and most of them are like you'd expect. Not all of them, though.

Paranoid - Lonely Sock 

Paranoid - Harp Twins

Paranoid - Cindy Und Bert 

Paranoid (That She Mighteth Be A Witch) 

Starshine Audio

Something there for everyone, I think.

Ozzie famously had a great sense of humor. I hope he'd be amused by at least a couple of those.

Rest easy, Prince of Darkness and thanks for starting me on a lifetime of listening to great music. Even if very little of it was yours.

All The Old Dudes

When I wrote something about the deaths of Brian Wilson and Sly Stone a couple of weeks ago, I began by saying I didn't want to get into the habit of posting every time some significant performer or artist died because there are just too damn many of them. It's an unfortunate artifact of decade after decade of pop culture, a snowball rolling down the hill that's never going to stop.

I went on to say that I'd try to stick to "marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me" and I do hope to stick to that, which is why I'm writing this post. Either that or because I've got a half-decent anecdote. Could be both.

Almost the first thing I read this morning, when I started to go through my entertainment news feeds, was that Mick Ralphs had died. The news did not create a strong reaction. My first thought was a very mildly nostalgic "Aww... Mick Ralphs died...", immediately followed by "I didn't know he was still alive." Not exactly visceral.

As I read the report on Stereogum, it became apparent why I hadn't heard anything about Mick in a while. He had a major stroke almost a decade ago and hadn't been active since. He was "bedridden", in Stereogum's curiously Victorian phrase, until his death at the age of 81. 

Mick Ralphs doesn't have the name recognition of superstars like Brian Wilson or Sly Stone but he was a founder-member of one of those bands who had their fifteen minutes as "The Biggest Band in The World". That was back in 1974, when Bad Company's first album went quintuple platinum. I am very much not remembering Mick today because of that. I didn't like Bad Company then and they certainly haven't gotten any better with the benefit of time, for all that this year will see their induction into the Rock Hall of Fame.

My affection for Ralphs rests wholly on the work he did before then, when he was lead guitarist and co-songwriter with Mott the Hoople. At one time, when I was in my mid-adolescence, Mott were close to being my favorite band. Never quite, but always close.

As the obituaries are explaining today, Mick was with Mott long before they settled on their idiosyncratic name. Mind you, the one they started with wasn't much better. I knew they were called "Silence" before they were called Mott but until today I didn't know they started out as "The Doc Thomas Group". Clearly this was in the days before focus-group marketing.

Whatever they were calling themselves, like most people, I only became aware of  their existence when longtime fan David Bowie chose to sprinkle a little of his glitter dust over them in the form of All The Young Dudes and production duties on the album of the same name. That was in 1972, when I would have been about fourteen and just emerging from my thankfully brief heavy metal and prog rock phase into the sunlit uplands of art rock and New York sleaze.

I was also entering my cultural hunter-gatherer phase, something I have yet to grow out of more than half a century later. Back in the early seventies the pop culture slag heap was nothing like the environmental hazard to young minds it is today but it was still pretty damn huge and I spent most of my free time picking at it like a half-starved crow. 

Having latched onto Mott thanks to one very catchy single, I proceeded to chase down just about everything they'd done, which was a lot. They'd released four largely unsuccessful albums and were on the verge of breaking up when Bowie tossed them a lifeline. 

Mick Ralphs plays at least some guitar on every Mott album, even the one released after he left the band, but for the first half-dozen (Out of seven.) he's the keystone of the group. Ian Hunter, recruited in 1969, almost immediately became the face and de facto leader of the band but Ralphs was always the heart, which was why, almost as soon as he left, the heart went out of the band and they called it quits.

Or so it seemed from a fan's perspective, anyway. There's a lot of reportage and personal testimony from the insider point of view that suggests a much more complex narrative but I was a fan so I'll have it my way. 

I can remember being pretty gutted when Mick left Mott, not least because at that time I hadn't yet managed to see them live and now my chance at the classic line-up was gone. Also, by then I'd bought and listened to most of the back catalogue and it was pretty clear that, while Hunter was a great rock lyricist, Mick had the best tunes.

Or so I thought at the time, although it's an analysis largely unsupported by the evidence. My favorite Mott album has always been Wildlife, their third and the one with the strongest country/folk feel. It's drenched with Ralphs' unmistakable, ringing, lyrical lead guitar and that always led me to think of it as an album filled with his compositions. 

In fact, he wrote four tracks, Hunter three, and the rest is covers (Including their version of Melanie's Lay Down, which suggests another reason why I found her death so affecting a while back.) What's more, the tracks I like best on Wildlife (Waterlow, Angel of Eighth Avenue) turn out, on investigation, to be Hunter's, whereas Mick's contributions, particularly the opener, Whisky Women, can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to prefigure his much more commercially successful, yet much less aesthetically pleasing, work with Bad Company. 

All of which was just the kind of thing I filled my head with when I was in my teens. Lucky for me the internet wasn't around back then or I'd probably never have gotten out of the house.

As it was, I got out a lot and mostly what I got out to do was go to gigs. I saw a lot of bands in the seventies and eighties, some of them many times, but sadly I only got to see Mott the Hoople once and that was after Mick Ralphs had left. They'd just released what was destined to be their last album, the follow-up to their most commercially successful, Mott. They chose to call it "The Hoople". No, it didn't seem like a great idea then, either.

When it came time to tour the new album, Mick was off forming his supergroup Bad Company with Paul Rogers, Simon Kirke at al and Mott were stuck with the job of replacing him. As other bands have proved, successfully replacing even a key founding member is not an impossible task but Mott really fluffed it by bringing in Aerial Bender. 

As you may have guessed, Aerial Bender was not the name he was given by his parents, who knew him as Luther Grosvenor, which was also what he was called when he played guitar in the not very well-remembered rock group Spooky Tooth. Weirdly, Mick Ralphs was indirectly responsible for Grosvenor's name change. 

The scarcely-believable story, which also involves diminutive singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul, involves Ralphs walking down a street in Germany, bending the aerials on a series of parked cars for reasons unknown. Apparently Lynsey, who was there with the band following a German TV appearance, used the phrase "aerial bender" about the incident in Ian Hunter's hearing and for some inconceivable reason he remembered it and later offered it to Grosvenor, who needed to work with Mott under a name other than his own for contractual reasons.

For even more inconceivably, Grosvenor accepted the suggestion and that's what he called himself for quite a while, even after his short stint with Mott was over. He was still with them when I finally got to see them, though, and let's just say he wasn't very good. Maybe it was an off night.

I was exceptionally unlucky to catch Mott in this short window of mis-opportunity. Immediately after Bender departed, he was briefly replaced by Mick Ronson so I missed the chance to see two of the best guitarists of their generation live. Except I didn't.

When Mott broke up soon after Ronson joined them, he and Ian Hunter formed the Hunter-Ronson Band, who I saw play live on their first UK tour. They were excellent. A lot better than the dying Mott had been, except for one moment in that gig - the encore.

In a scene that later came to feel like an eerie pre-echo of one in Spinal Tap, after a not very impressive showing from Aerial Bender, an assessment of their performance I remember being obvious from the stage if not from the audience, Ian Hunter came to the mic to announce a very special guest for the encore: Mick Ralphs. The audience's inevitable reaction must have been very uncomfortable for the great man's stand-in.

So I did get to see the classic line-up or something closely approximating it at least, if only for a couple of songs. Sadly, the brief appearance did not lead to a Tufnel/St Hubbins style reunion for the band. Mick went back to Bad Company and the immense commercial success it brought him, while Ian Hunter left Mott to carry on pretty much as before, only without the hits. The rest of Mott struggled on for a while without either of them then called it a day until the inevitable re-union bandwagon brought various combinations back together again in the new century.

By all accounts, Mick Ralphs was a jolly nice chap who played guitar really, really well. He also wrote some good songs. He had a good voice too, when he chose to use it. He made it big as a rock star without ever being anything like a rock star but I don't think I'd be writing about him now, all these years later, if it wasn't for the work he did with Mott in those five years at the start of the seventies. 

And especially if it wasn't for those few minutes at the end of one gig, when his unexpected appearance really did make me feel like the roof of the venue had opened up and the sun was shining down on me in a great ray of light from heaven. 

For that moment, Mick, many thanks and rest easy.

Dance Dance Dance To The Music

As I've said before, I don't really like to do a lot of tributes or obituaries for the simple reason that creative people die all the time and I could quite easily record the passing of someone significant two or three times every week. One thing I really don't want to start doing is ranking celebrity deaths in order of importance until I have some kind of amateur Hall of Fame thing going on.

Mostly I've stuck to marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me, something I find quite hard to predict or even, occasionally, to explain. For that reason, I wasn't immediately motivated to post anything, when I saw a couple of days ago that Sly Stone had died. 

Sly Stone (and his eponymous "Family") is a bit of an outlier for me. I'm not even sure I'd heard of him at all before I snuck in to see the Woodstock movie when it had a brief cinema revival in the mid-seventies. 

I can place that fairly precisely because it was rated 18 (Or in fact, "X", I think, because we would still have been on the old letter-based ratings then.) and I wasn't old enough to see it legally. I was close though. I'm pretty sure I was seventeen. I remember it clearly because it was the only X-film I ever lied about my age to see, which tells you everything you need to know about my priorities as a teenager.

In the movie, Sly and the Family Stone are seen doing the now-classic I Want To Take You Higher, which Rolling Stone just this week described as showcasing the power of live music "better perhaps than any other performance ever captured on film". It certainly had an impact on seventeen-year-old me because after that I sure as hell knew who Sly Stone was. 

It was probably also the moment when I realised I liked funk. Until then I don't think I'd paid much attention to it at all. It was the mid-seventies by then and funk was all over the radio. As a recovering prog and heavy metal fan I was finding new musical interests in all directions, something the supposedly barrier-breaking but actually frequently prescriptive punk hierarchy strongly discouraged, as I was about to discover.

Didn't stop me listening to and enjoying all kinds of forbidden sounds, from Joan Armatrading to the Hues Coroporation but for a while I did learn to keep some of my less culturally acceptable tastes to myself. I don't recall anyone ever compaining about me listening to Sly Stone, though. To have done so would have been be tantamount to admitting you were a cloth-eared philistine (Which, to be fair, would have been a badge some people I knew then would have worn with pride...)

So, I was still pondering on whether or not to say something about Sly's passing, when someone else rolled over and stole Sly's thunder. Sly Stone was a very major figure in the history of popular music, albeit he'd been off the pace for a long while, so it was going to take someone very big to put him in the shade. And of course it was.

If we're talking western 20th century pop/rock canon, there aren't a lot of names left alive bigger than Brian Wilson. When I was talking to Mrs Bhagpuss about it, I described his demise as a Bob Dylan level event.

Bob, of course, is still happily and very actively with us, so maybe I could more accurately have referenced Bowie or Lennon but I already had Dylan in mind because Mrs Bhagpuss had been telling me only the day before about a video she'd watched, going through the top musicians and bands he hated.

I haven't watched it myself. I know how these things go. I'm also way, WAY more tolerant and accepting of all kinds of different music now than I was fifty years ago and I bet Bob is too. I mean, he has to be or what the hell is he doing acting as hype man for Machine Gun Kelly?

Anyway, most of Bob's pet peeves, as relayed to me by Mrs Bhagpuss, didn't surprise me much - Coldplay, the Grateful Dead, the Eagles, Oasis... there's a particular kind of monocultural blandness to them all that you might expect would rile him up, but the one that really didn't fit the profile was the Beach Boys.  

For one thing, he seemed to be homing in on their early surf era, which is hardly the whole of their identity. Given that most of Bob's heavyweight contemporaries were falling over themselves to praise the Beach Boys even when they were only singing about cars and girls, even that seems odd. Post Pet Sounds, just about all the critical traffic was headed in their direction, with the Beach Boys being widely thought of as America's best answer to the Beatles, something openly acknowledged by the Beatles themselves, especially when Paul McCartney called God Only Knows "the greatest song ever written", an opinion he seemingly still holds today.

That conversation meant I'd already been thinking about the Beach Boys and their legacy even before the sad news of Brian's death exploded all over the entertainment news feeds. And one thing I'd been thinking was that although I'd never shared Bob's disdain for the band, I certainly used not to take them any more seriously than he apparently did.

Unlike Sly Stone, I was very well-aware of the Beach Boys even before I was old enough to start buying records or going to gigs. Those early-sixties singles are very child-friendly, with their bouncy rhythms and cheery harmonies. Plus Good Vibrations always sounded utterly weird whenever it came on the radio. Who could forget that?

 

A curious thing that happened around the time punk began to take over my attention in 1976 was that I started listening to a lot of 1960s bands I'd never really bothered with before. Somewhat ironic considering the Clash's proclamations about "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones" in 1977. There was a very simple reason for it: if you wanted to listen a lot of short, loud, fast, songs back then, you'd run out in about half an hour if all you had was a stack of punk singles. There just weren't enough yet.

Which is how my punk-inflected pals and I ended up listening to a lot of sixties r&b, early Who, Tamla, US garage bands and... the Beach Boys. I played the hell out of a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits I picked up second-hand around then and the whole vibe seemed to fit right in. A lot better than all that dub reggae that got the official punk stamp of approval anyway, that's for sure.

Even then, though, I never thought of the Beach Boys as having any gravitas. In the 'eighties I developed a theory, which I would occasionally expound at parties if anyone put a Beach Boys track on the stereo, that only men liked the band. For some reason the band's obsession with sports, automobiles and objectifying women (Or "Girls", as they would have it.) seemed archetypally male to me. Plus I had more than once heard women express distaste for the band or even ask for Beach Boys records to be taken off if they were playing, so it seemed like a safe position to take.

Eventually I did meet women who really liked the Beach Boys so I abandoned that one. I had a lot of strongly-held musical opinions in those days but I was always happy to give them up and make up new ones. Few survived for long, I'm happy to say. (Simply Red are still crap but that's not an opinion, just a fact.)

The Beach Boys as major figures in contemporary music, though? That one took a looong time come  through. I don't think I even began to notice that anyone was taking them seriously until the 'nineties and it took me a few years of reading that "Pet Sounds" (Consistently ranked #2 in Rolling Stone's influential Top 500 Albums list.), or maybe "Smile" or "Smiley-Smile", might be the greatest album of all time before I thought maybe I should find out what any of them sounded like.

I still don't have much of an opinion on that. Certainly not an informed one. I suspect it's one of those "You had to be there" things and although, technically, I was there, I would have been eight when Pet Sounds came out, which is probably a bit young to appreciate its subtleties.

In fact, embarassing though it is to admit it, I still have never sat down and listened to any of those three albums all the way through. I've almost certainly heard every track at some time or another but the only Beach Boys albums I've ever owned are the aforementioned Greatest Hits and the really excellent early seventies album "Surf's Up", which I do love, although by then Brian was already having issues and his influence over the album isn't as all-consuming as it once would have been.

For all of the above reasons, I wasn't going to do a tribute to Brian Wilson either. Also, it's interesting that throughout this piece I've been implicitly suggesting he and the band are interchangeable, when of course there were other songwriters in the mix. It's always Brian Wilson that everyone thinks of in that context though, isn't it? That's where the Beach Boys differ from their friendly rivals the Beatles or even from the Rolling Stones, where the other Brian (Jones, that is.) used sometimes to be cast in a similar role, until he made the mistake of dying young and leaving Jagger and Richards the field.

This morning, despite my reservations, I thought maybe I would do something after all and as you can see I followed through on that thought. And as usual it's ended up being much more about me than them. But then, that's just a sign that they had some definite impact on my life, I guess. It would be worse if I just rehashed their biographies, like one of those vicars at a funeral who never met the deceased.

I don't really want to just slap up three or four of either of their top tunes, which would be extremely easy to do since they both wrote so many absolute bangers (Not, I imagine, the term either of them would have used and, to be strictly accurate, I don't think it's controversial to suggest Brian wrote a lot more bangers than Sly.)

Instead, I've chosen to include a couple of my personal favorites and a selection of odd or unusual covers. Not to suggest that some of each of their work wasn't already weird enough...

The legends may have passed but the legacies live on.

Goodbye, Marianne

As I've said before, I don't plan on running obituaries on every artist, writer or musician that once meant something to me. If I did that, I'd never post anything else. Certain people pass, though, and it feels necessary, somehow, to mark a fresh absence in the world.

In the case of Marianne Faithful, who died yesterday at the age of 78, it just so happens I once wrote a song about her. I thought I might just post the lyrics. They have an elegiac feel to them or I like to think so.

Naked Under Leather

Downtime waiting at the jail gate door
Taken so much you gotta take more
Love so rich he's making you poor
Don't understand what you're doing it for

Eyes wide open, hair so long
Wrapped in the paper of a throwaway song
Looking at you hard like you grew up wrong
You'd like to break down but you're too damn strong

Moroccan sand and the white paint wall
You can hear one crying and the other one call
They say the higher you fly the faster you fall
You listen and look and say nothing at all

It's something so easy to do what they say
You tried to keep it and to give it away
Followed the path and lost your way
You try to come out but you're in there to stay

There's a scarf on the lamp and smoke in the air
You're begging for help but there's no-one there
You want to go out but there's nothing to wear
It's all been sold and you're running scared

You fight your way clear of Norwegian wood
It's dirty and clean and they tell you it's good
It wasn't worth waiting but you thought that you should
You'd let it all go but you never could

You're naked under leather
Naked under leather
Naked under leather

The title, of course, is the alternative name for the infamous feature film in which she starred, Girl On A Motorcycle. The full movie is on YouTube if you're interested although how long it'll stay there is anyone's guess. I saw it on TV once. It's a slow watch.

It's also not what I'd want to remember Marianne for. That would mostly be the superb Broken English album she released in 1979. That's also available in full on YouTube if you don't own a copy, which you certainly should, although nowadays who owns anything?

She made a lot of good music before and after but that's the one that matters. To me, anyway.

The song I wrote is mostly about the time she spent as what people used to like to call a muse to various famous musicians That's something that will always be linked to her memory but again, it's not what I want to remember her for. She far surpassed any kind of supporting role to become the superstar of her own, exceptional life.

That's about all I want to say. Probably ought to finish with an example of her work. She had to go to court to prove her co-authorship on this one. Figures.

Both Wonderful And Strange - RIP David Lynch

 

I was going to do a grab-bag for Friday as is traditional but the sad news of David Lynch's passing dictates otherwise. Reports suggest the LA wildfires were indirectly responsible for his death at the age of 78. He suffered from emphysema as a result of a lifetime of smoking and could no longer walk without the aid of additional oxygen, and the strain of having to leave his home under threat of the spreading conflagration was apparently just too much.

I make no claim to be any kind of Lynch completeist. I still haven't seen Eraserhead although I've seen a lot of clips from it and once I came home and switched the TV on and it was playing. I should probably watch it sometime. I also have never seen Dune or The Elephant Man, although once again it's been impossible to avoid the odd scene from both, here and there. Lynch's work pervades our lives, wish it or not.

Plenty of people had tried to sell me on the supposed attractions of all of the above over the years, especially Eraserhead, the film that first made Lynch notorious, if not famous, but I resisted. I was for a long time (And still somewhat remain.) opposed to the concept of horror as entertainment. Maybe Eraserhead is a horror movie. Maybe it's not. Either way, back then I didn't like to be horrified, terrified, scared or shocked if I could manage to avoid it and I could, so I did.

Even The Elephant Man could be seen as a kind of body-horror, I suppose. For whatever reason, I avoided that, too. Probably it was just too popular and I was too much the hipster then. As for Dune, it would take more than Lynch or Denis Villeneuve to get me to sit through an adaptation of what I consider one of the dullest, most tedious science fiction novels I've ever read. Fool me once...

My first exposure to the master's work came with his fourth feature, Blue Velvet, which I saw at the cinema on release in 1986. I went to see it at one of the two riverside art cinemas, The Watershed or The Arnolfini, in Bristol, where I was living at the time. I forget which. I went to both a lot.

As I remember, it wasn't my choice of movie. I went with my then-girlfriend, who introduced me to a number of directors I was unfamiliar with, chief among them Lynch and Roman Polanski, who she really liked. Considering she had no issues watching Knife in the Water and Repulsion, which we saw as a double bill, it seems strange now that she walked out of Blue Velvet about five minutes in, at the moment when Kyle Maclachlan discovers a human ear, crawling with ants, lying in the grass.

She left but I stayed to watch the whole film. The relationship survived but didn't endure. My connection with Lynch's work lasted much longer. In some ways, it never stopped.

In other ways, though, it kind of did. It's odd. I was about to write that I haven't seen any of Lynch's recent movies but when I go to check I find there really haven't been any. His filmography is very sparse for a director of his age and reputation. The last film of his that I went to the cinema to see when it came out was Lost Highway in 1997, five years after I'd been to see Fire Walk With Me. I saw both at The Watershed, even though by the time Lost Highway arrived I was no longer living in the same city. Despite his commercial success, there were still only so many places you could go if you wanted to see a David Lynch movie.

After that came just three more features: The Straight Story, Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire, the last arriving in 2006. I have Mullholland Drive on DVD but haven't watched it. The other two I've done nothing about although I've always wanted to see The Straight Story, an outlier in Lynch's canon. Sometimes described as Lynch's Disney movie, entirely accurately since it was released by Disney in the US, it's based on the true tale of a man who rode all the way from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion in Wisconsin - on a lawnmower.

Inland Empire, which I remember receiving excellent reviews, was his last full-length movie. He made just ten in a career lasting more than forty years. And anyone who can count will realize I've only mentioned nine of them. Missing from the list is my favorite, the magnificent, ever-underrated Wild At Heart. If you want a movie that's horrifying, terrifying, scary and shocking, here it is. I love it. Obviously my horror-avoidance policy only extends so far.

David Lynch may have stopped making movies almost twenty years ago but he never stopped making something. I have never seen a Lynch short but according to Wikipedia he's made close on fifty of them, the first in 1967, the last in 2020. He's also directed or written web series, commercials and music videos. Lots of them. And he had a whole side hustle going for many years as a musician, releasing three critically acclaimed albums and a host of singles from the late nineties through the twenty-teens.

For all of that ceaseless enterprise, it's likely Lynch will be longest and best remembered for one thing above all others: Twin Peaks. Frequently cited as the best TV show ever made, even more often as the weirdest, Twin Peaks ran for just two seasons in 1990 and 1991 before making a return for a third and final run more than a decade and a half later in 2017. 

Of those three seasons, the first and the third enjoy stellar reputations. The second was seen as something of a let-down at the time, although it regained much of its lost critical ground in later years. Lynch didn't actually direct all that many episodes of the original two seasons, just two in the first eight-episode run and four of the second season's twenty-two. He took complete control over the final season, directing every episode, another twenty-two-parter, making fifty-two in all.

As a work of art Twin Peaks could be considered inconsistent, even self-indulgent. As a cultural force the show had the impact of a boulder falling into a still, mountain pool. It made a gigantic splash and the ripples are still spreading even now. It was and it remains a phenomenon. 

It is very necessary at this point to mention the involvement of Mark Frost, the writer with whom Lynch created the show and who wrote and/or directed many of its episodes. I actually started watching Twin Peaks as much because of Frost's involvement as Lynch's. Frost was extensively involved with what had been my personal high-water mark of American television prior to Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues. 

I'll leave Mark Frost for a tribute of his own, some day hopefully far away. In any case, Twin Peaks is inexorably linked to David Lynch and always will be. It showed on BBC2 in the UK in 1990, the same year Wild At Heart appeared in the cinema and the mere involvement of a major Hollywood director in a TV series made headlines. The world was changing and Lynch was doing his part to make it happen faster.

There's no need to recap the plot of Twin Peaks, as if anyone ever could. Everyone who cares knows and countless millions who care not at all have unknowingly benefited from the sea-change the show brought to the entire medium. There are a surprising number of shows about which it could reasonably be said nothing was the same after but on any such list, Twin Peaks would be right at the top.

It scared the crap out of me, honestly. I was living on my own in a studio flat at the time and I didn't even like to watch it alone. I remember having at least one nightmare about Killer Bob. Twin Peaks isn't horror per se but it is horrifying. Also surreal, elliptical and often incomprehensible. All marks in its favor.

I watched every episode as it was broadcast and I also taped them all on VHS cassettes, which I still have. The recordings came in very handy when I bought a tiny sampler that connected to my Amiga 500  and with which I put together a three minute "song" entirely composed of samples from the show. If I had it in a format I could access I'd play it for you now. Luckily for us all, I don't.

At the time I held the peculiar and scarcely supportable opinion that the second season of Twin Peaks was better than the first. I haven't seen it for more than thirty years but I'm pretty confident now I was talking nonsense. It's hard to be sure because despite my love and reverence for the show, I only ever watched it that first time, as it was broadcast. I never watched the tapes I'd made and even though I own all three seasons on DVD, they're still in the shrink-wraps.

In fact, somewhat shamefully, I have never watched Season Three. I want to but I also want to watch the first two seasons again first and so far I haven't found the right time. Or just the time...

Maybe now I will. A reissue of the limited edition box set "Twin Peaks Z-A", containing all three seasons, the movie and wealth of ancillary material, was announced, entirely co-incidentally, on the day of his death. Maybe I'll get that and actually watch it this time.

It's an insidious truism that it takes a death to make us remember, sometimes. If nothing else, it reminds us we don't have all the time in the world to get around to doing the things we mean to do. David Lynch made the very most of the time he had. Maybe we should take that as his legacy and follow his example. 

Just without all those cigarettes.

Header Illustration Netflix.©

Death Trip

Although I said I didn't want to turn this blog into an obituary column, I probably need to recognise that the road is about to run out for most of the significant names from my teens and twenties. I try my best not to give in to nostalgia but there's ample evidence now that biology plays a part, too, and that's less easily shurugged aside. 

Even if that wasn't true, I am literally sitting here typing this while looking at a visual reminder. There's a faded satin scarf strung across the wall behind the monitor that's been there since we moved into this house thirty years ago. Most of it is obscured now by stacks of books but the part still showing reads "Steve Harley And Cockney R..."

Steve Harley died yesterday at the age of 73. It was a shock in a way although as I said in reply to my ex-wife, who sent me a link to the news, I'm always a little surprised when any old rocker makes it past sixty. They really didn't hold back in the seventies and eighties and it catches up with most of them eventually.

In my teens, Cockney Rebel came very close to being my favorite band. I first heard them through the scratchy, fading signal of Radio Luxembourg in 1973, when the band's first single, the magnificently overwrought epic Sebastian, became a hit all across Europe. 

It was then and remains now one of my favorite songs of all time, although as with all such favorites, I almost never listen to it. The more you listen, the less you hear. You have to pace yourself if you want to live with a song forever.

I bought the first album as soon as it came out a few months later and played it incessantly and melodramatically, as we all did with our favorites in those days. Cockney Rebel came several times to play in the city where I lived  over the next couple of years. Bands, even quite successful ones, used to come round and round on a kind of musical conveyor belt back then, which is one reason I rarely found it necessary to to travel far to see any of them. If they couldn't be bothered to come to me...

The first time they played, I saw a card on the noticeboard of the super-hip record shop I was almost too nervous to go into, asking for volunteers to come hump gear for the band in return for a free ticket and beer. I was a bit too young for that but I've always kind of wished I'd offered my services anyway. It would be a story.

The next time, they'd had a few hits in the UK and had upgraded from clubs to concert halls. I went to that one. The thing I remember most about the gig isn't anything from the performance. It's the row of stalls outside the venue selling scarves and tees and badges and who knows what else. 

It was the first time I'd really noticed anyone selling "merch", as we definitely didn't call it then. I imagine it was beneath the likes of Hawkwind, Yes or Pink Floyd, the kind of bands I was used to going to see. By their standards, Cockney Rebel was almost a pop group. 

So I bought a scarf. I mean, why not. I doubt I was even being ironic. And I wore it for the gig and when the band got to Tumbling Down, the epic number (All Steve Harley's songs were epics) that ended with the whole audience singing the chorus for what seemed like hours, I held my scarf above my head and swayed from side to side along with everyone else.

I'm not going to say it was magical. But it was.

The next year, I saw them again at the same venue. By this time they were on their fourth album and Steve had gone weird. Weirder, I should say. It's not like he wasn't weird to begin with but now he was heavily into Rosicrucianism along with everything else. 

The whole sound of the band (The second iteration of Cockney Rebel, after he sacked most of the first line-up) had changed almost out of recognition, from Bowiesque glam to a funkier groove that somehow managed to feel dry and swamp-ridden all at the same time. Out of all expectation, I loved it. 

Cockney Rebel released five studio albums in the 1970s before calling it a day until Steve got the band back together a good few years later, when they recorded one more. The first two were released under the band name alone, the others as Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel. 

Of those six albums, the first - The Human Menagerie - is an acknowledged classic, while the rest are generally considered at best hit or miss. I like the second (The Psychomodo) and the third (Best Years Of Our Lives) a lot but they aren't entirely coherent. They each have a couple of his best songs but also some undeniable filler. The fifth, Love's A Prima Donna, is not great and the much later sixth album I have never heard.

The fourth, Timeless Flight, was not well-received at the time and I'm not sure what its critical reputation is now. It is, however, one of my favorite albums. I listened to it a very great number of times back when I used to play vinyl but unlike The Human Menagerie, which was the first album I bought on CD, I never thought to upgrade. 

I have, however, listened to some of the tracks online, now and again, and relatively recently (By which I mean in the last decade.) and I think it stands up pretty well. I have All Men Are Hungry on in the background as I type and it sounds great, still. What it's about I have no more idea now than I ever did although I do now realise it has something to do with Hemingway...

That's the thing with Steve Harley. He was a striking lyricist, famous for it, and yet rarely did I know what he was trying to say. He was so fin de siecle you couldn't make out the meaning for the brocade.

It didn't matter. It never mattered. As he once said of Sebastian, "It's poetry. It means what you want it to mean... I can't define its meaning. It's like most poetry, it's a lovely word." He made his method even clearer in another interview "'Sebastian' is possibly a sort of Gothic love song, possibly not: I'm not really sure to be honest."

If Steve didn't know what his songs were about, I don't know why we should be expected to. What always mattered with his work was the imagery and the emotion. That was a powerful narcotic to an adolescent and it hit me hard enough the bruise hasn't faded yet.

Thanks for all the memories, Steve. Like your songs, they've lasted well.

Lay Down, Melanie

As I've said before, if I posted an obituary for every notable musician, artist and writer whose death, timely or untimely, appeared in my cultural news feeds, I'd have a full-time job of it and there'd be no time to write about anything else. I'd say I have to pick my tributes, except it doesn't quite work that way. It's more like they pick me. Somehow, I just know immediately on hearing of someone's demise that it's a moment I need to note.

The strange thing about it is, it can be someone I haven't thought about in years. It's somehow as if their passing tears a small rip in reality that's going to take a while to close. Well, my reality, anyway.

I own just one album by Melanie, on vinyl. I can't even remember what it's called. I bought it some time in the 1990s, when I was trawling thrift shops and yard sales for anything that looked interesting. I think I might have played it a couple of times. Melanie Safka is not someone I've listened to a lot, now, then or before.

And yet her music has been a perpetual presence in the background of my life. When I was a young adolescent it was impossible to avoid her best-known tune, Brand New Key, an infuriating earworm that tinned out of transistor radios everywhere, once heard, impossible to shake. It annoyed the hell out of me and I liked it a lot all at once, a reaction that's become a signature note of many songs I've admired over the years. 

From around then, I also remember her cover of Ruby Tuesday, a bleak reading from the far reaches of the other end of the emotional spectrum, which eclipses even the Rolling Stones' original. She clearly had some range.

When I was at school, as I've mentioned before, we had a relatively young, very enthusiastic music teacher, one of whose big ideas was to arrange school trips to see live performances. He's the reason I can put a tick against AC/DC on my "Seen Them" list. 

It's hard to exaggerate just how odd that must have been at the time - a bunch of boys from private school being taken on an official school trip to see a touring heavy metal band - but another gig he arranged a trip to was more believable. Melanie was, among other things, a folk-singer and even fifty years ago, folk music enjoyed a respectability neither punk nor heavy metal will ever achieve. Probably.

At this point I ought to be reminiscing about what a great gig it was and what a marvelous performance Melanie gave. Only I can't, because I didn't go. By then I was a paid-up punk, in so far as you could be when you were still going to a fee-paying school. I only went on the AC/DC trip as an ironic joke. (Joke was on me - they were stunningly good.) An hour in a bus to go see the dippy woman who sang Brand New Key? Hell, no!

My best friend at school also declined to attend but our other pal, the uncool one, went. The next day we heard a lot from him about how great Melanie was, especially how, after the official part of the gig ended, she came back on stage, sat down and played a whole bunch more songs, just her and her acoustic guitar, for the people who hadn't already gone home after the encore. 

It's strange how I still remember that. I also remember how I wished I'd gone, after all. It sounded like exactly the kind of experience punk was teaching me to expect from live performance - lack of front, rapport with the audience, we're all in this thing together. Which just about pegs punk itself as a kind of folk music, I guess...

Before I was a punk I was, briefly, something of a fan of progressive rock. I really liked glam rock, too, although I was a bit shy of admtting it. How the order changes. Just as with punk a little later, there were a few bands who jumped tracks or tried to, slipping out of their afghan coats into spangled jumpsuits and stack heels. One of the most successful to make the switch from sweaty denim to sparkles and silk scarves was Mott the Hoople.

I loved Mott. Still do, although as with the Smiths, it's increasingly difficult to calibrate that affection with certain aspects of the singer's persona, in this case a close read of some of the lyrics, which don't necessarily come over the same way now they did back then. In both cases, however, any of that applies more to the solo work and for my purposes today I'm looking back far beyond Ian Hunter's solo career, back farther even than the band's brief, Bowie-inspired glam heyday.

As would have been my normal practice then, once the band had come to my attention I did my best to dig back through their back catalog, which in Mott's case was extensive. They'd been around a long time before anyone outside the club circuit began paying attention. 

They'd made, I think, four albums before All The Young Dudes, none of which sounds all that much like any of the others. They were clearly looking for a direction and not fnding one they could all agree on. 

The album I liked by far the best and which I played over and over again was Wildlife. It's apparently the album of theirs over which guitarist Mick Ralphs had the most influence, which seems odd since it's close to being a folk-rock album and he went on to form Bad Company, a numbingly straight-ahead, hard rock act with almost no soft edges at all.

Wildlife, though, is a drifty, dreamy album among whose several highlights is a great cover of one of Melanie's best and best-known songs - Lay Down. Also known as "Lay Down (Candles in the Wind)", the lyric attempts to encapsulate and communicate Melanie's transcendent experience, playing Woodstock as one of only three female performers to appear solo at the legendary festival. The other two were Joan Baez and Janis Joplin, which gives some perspective.

I listened to Lay Down last night, after I heard of her death. I watched the epic performance on Dutch TV with the Staples Singers in front of an audience, most of whom look actively traumatised by the experience. Then I listened to Mott's version, which still sounds as good as it did all those years ago. I've included them both here, so you can hear them too. If either is new to you, you're in for a treat. If you know them already, you won't need any prompting to listen to them one more time. 

And then, since it came up on the recommends, I also listened to the ineffably warm and wonderful duet between Melanie and Miley Cyrus on another of Melanie's classic tunes, Look What They've Done To My Song, Ma. I'd forgotten she wrote that one. Now I wonder just how many more great songs she wrote that I've never heard.

I guess I'd better take some time and find out. Melanie may not be with us any more but her music is and always will be.

R.I.P. Keith Giffen

As I've said before, I don't like to do a lot of obituaries here on the blog because if I got started on that, I'd never stop. Someone worth remembering seems to die pretty much every day; musicians, writers, artists, entertainers. All the people that make up a life of the mind. Once in a while, though, I hear news that makes me think I maybe should at least mark the date. 

It's not remotely predictable which celebrity death is going to trigger a sense of loss, either. Obviously, almost none of us knows any of these people personally but knowing the work sometimes makes it feel that way. Other times, it's just the name is so familiar, it feels weird to hear they're gone.

I had that momentary frisson this week, when I heard Keith Giffen had died. He's not the biggest name but there was a time when almost everyone I knew would have known who he was and what he did. Not that they'd all have liked it. He was a controversial figure in his prime.

Keith Giffen drew, wrote and did some mysterious thing that seemed to be both and neither, that made him responsible for several of my favorite comics of all time. If I had to pick a single comic-book run to take with me into space, where it would be the only thing I'd have to read for the rest of forever, I might go with Giffen's forty or so issues of The Legion of Super-Heroes, published at the cusp of the 'nineties.

Known as "5 Years Later" it wasn't so much a reboot of the longstanding teen title as a complete rewrite. It was the classic audience divider. People either loved it or utterly loathed it. As a quondam nihilist and lifelong Legion fan, I thought it was the best version of the title I'd ever seen. I still do. It still is.

It would be fatuous to go into expositionary detail about the plot or the characterization or the setting and how every expectation was confounded. If you aren't a fan you won't care and if you are you'll already know. The point is, Giffen tore up everything and started over and still kept everything and carried on, which is a hard trick to carry.

He didn't do it alone. Comics is a collaborative medium. Most of the dialog was handled by husband and wife team Tom and Mary Bierbaum, who did an exemplary job of it. Keith Giffen handled the plotting and initially did the pencils, later moving to layouts. I guess if it'd been a TV series, he'd have been the Showrunner.

5YL was Keith's second stint with my favorite super-hero team. He'd penciled The Great Darkness saga for Paul Levitz in the early 'eighties, another high-water mark for the title, He also worked frequently with another of my favorite comic-book professionals, writer Robert Loren Fleming, co-creator of what I always used to say was my favorite comic, Thriller, and he penciled another of my all-time favorites, the Defenders, one of the first series I collected on my return to the fold, having briefly dropped the medium when I was "too old for comics" in my mid-teens.

I didn't just like Giffen's ideas; I loved the way he drew and I especially loved his layouts. He was an exponent of the nine-panel grid, a rigid format that turned a lot of readers off but that I found exhilarating and weirdly stimulating. I just had to look at the shape of those frames to feel the chaotic energy dammed up behind the restraining frames. It felt electric.

One of the things that continues to surprise me about modern life is the way people who used to be utterly unknown to all but a small cadre of obsessives now merit mentions on the national news and lengthy obituaries in the quality press when they die. At the time Keith Giffen was doing his best work, I don't believe there would have been a single newspaper, television or radio program in the UK that would have marked the passing of a comic artist of his stature with so much as a single word.

That said, Keith never attained the stature of an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison even within the industry. He was a comic fan's favorite more than any kind of breakthrough artist and even among comics fans he was always something of an acquired taste. The dark and disturbing direction in which he took the LSH was atypical of his work in general, which tended more to the comedic than many super-hero fans found comfortable.

He was responsible for bringing Ambush Bug into the world, an act for which there are many who'll likely never forgive him. He gave us Lobo (Ditto.) and Rocket Racoon, thanks to the movies now the best-known of his amoral, anarchic, anti-heroes. 

He also turned the Justice League of America into a sitcom, something he'd previously helped do to Marvel's Defenders when he penciled that excellent series from Steve Gerber's idiosyncratic and irreverent scripts. Strangely, for an artist with such a gift for visual discipline and intensity, he probably leaves us with a reputation as a humorist above all else.

Most of what I've been talking about happened quite a while ago although Keith was still working in comics until fairly recently. I need to catch up with the comics he wrote and drew in the first decade of the new millennium. I bet they're great. Everything of his I've ever read was at the very least good. Most of it was excellent.

Not everything we once loved stands up to re-examination but Keith's work does. I re-read the whole of 5YL only a couple of years ago. It was even better than I remembered. 

I think I might read it again. And those Justice Leagues, too, if I can find them.

Born On A Ray Of Sound: RIP Mark Stewart

 "To inspire somebody would be one of the best things we could possibly do."

That's Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, speaking to Paul Rambali of the New Musical Express back in 1978. Mark died last week. I was surprised to learn he was 62, a couple of years younger than me. I always just thought he'd be older.

As The Pop Group's wikipedia page puts it "Despite their lack of commercial success, their music inspired and influenced many bands and artists that followed them. They are cited as an influence by artists and bands like Minutemen, Primal Scream, Sonic Youth, Steve Albini of Big Black, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Massive Attack." And the rest, eh?

In retrospect, I think it's possible to overstate The Pop Group's outsider status. I recently had cause to go through a stack of music papers from the late '70s and I was surprised at the sheer number of times the band's name appears, often prominently. They were cover-featured on the 30 September 1978 issue of NME, behind a gorgeous photo of Mark, looking like a male model or a matinee idol from the age of the Silver Screen. At that point they'd never made a record.

The uncanny ability to draw attention was theirs from the start and Mark's charismatic force was a major part of it. I was in the audience for The Pop Group's first gig. It was at a nightclub on Clifton Downs in Bristol called The Locarno, a sizeable venue for any band who'd never cut a record or played live, let alone one all of whose members were still at school. The place was packed. The Pop Group had a rep in their home town even before they showed up to earn it. Even their first gig was An Event.

As I remember it - and it has to be stressed my memory is fallible and I wasn't, sadly, in the habit of keeping a diary back then - there was no support band. Instead we were treated to a couple of hours of the band's own favorites and influences, an eclectic selection of unfamiliar and frequently uncomfortable slabs of jazz, funk, dub and if I'm not imagining it, musique concrete. I'm pretty sure there was some Pierre Henry in there, somewhere. I think that's how I came to own one of his albums.

It felt like a long two hours, although I had reasons not to want it shortened that had nothing to do with the music and upon which I don't care to elaborate. Eventually the band appeared. They looked uncanny and sounded... less alien than they would in a few months. Among a storming set of powerful originals they included rousing covers of Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner and - unbelievable as it sounds now - Marc Bolan's Solid Gold Easy Action.

A few weeks later my best friend Chris and I published a fanzine, which we called Mrs O'Reilly's Dog, because even then I was determined to make sure anything that had my name on was as obscure, inaccessible and uncommercial as possible. In that opening and, as it turned out, only issue, there was a review of the Pop Group's first gig written, I think, by Chris, in which the band were described as something along the lines.of "four midgets and a giant".

I can't recall the exact phrasing. I do have a copy I could refer to but it's in the loft and I'm too old to be climbing through that tiny hatch any more. Anyway, chances are the review wouldn't be there to check. Someone in The Pop Group or their management took offense, either to the way we'd characterized their physical appearance or the way we honed in on those cover versions, I can't remember which. 

Mark Stewart's height, sometimes given as six-foot seven, comes up frequently in pieces about the band. I doubt that was a problem but no-one likes to be called a short-ass - or a covers band. 

Chris agreed to remove the offending review from all the copies we had. He literally cut them out with scissors. We would have sold them with half a page missing, had anyone wanted to buy them, which fortunately for our nascent journalistic integrity, they did not.

How we dressed in 1978. If we were The Pop Group.

Possibly despite that incident or possibly because of it, relations between our band and The Pop Group flourished. We supported them twice at local gigs and I learned, too late, that we'd been invited to support them at a more prestigious London show.  Supposedly a couple of the group really liked us, while the rest very much did not. I was told which was which at the time but it's long lost knowledge now. It'd be nice to think Mark was one of the pair who thought we had something but I fear it wasn't him.

I retail this anecdote second-hand because I, personally, don't recall ever doing more than passing the time of day with any member of The Pop Group. All communication went through either Chris or his brother, Phil, our drummer and guitarist respectively. The first I ever heard of this supposed invite was when one of them told me they'd turned it down because London was too far to travel. If there's one thing I regret more about my time in the band than that we never made a record it's that I didn't involve myself more in the administration but what nineteen-year old wants to do that? It just seemed so much easier to let someone else do it.

All of this I told, years later in the mid-1990s, to an eager American guy who'd just started a website dedicated to The Pop Group. I'd found the site while trawling the web, something that seemed like an adventure in itself back then. Following my already-established pattern I left a long comment, which led to first to a correspondence, then to my sending him a copy of the controversial review, and finally to a personal visit from the website's creator, who came to the city where I live and stayed with us for a night.

Double page spread in Sounds, three months even before the NME cover.

 

All of these events framed and shaped my attitude to what information I was willing to reveal about myself across the internet for many years. I mean, it was exciting and all but when people come to your house it gets weird.

Backtracking, almost the last time I saw The Pop Group was around 1980 at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, where I was at university, studying English. They were co-headling a bill with Linton Kwesi Johnson, the dub poet. Mark Perry's band, The Good Missionaries were supporting.

I dragged a bunch of college friends along to see them. Like most of the audience, they were mainly interested in LKJ. When it was announced, after the gig had begun, that he wouldn't be appearing after all, half the audience left. The Good Missionaries played their fairly uncompromising set, which shifted a few more people out into the street. Then The Pop Group came on to see if they couldn't get rid of the rest.

By then, they'd released what is still one of my favorite singles of all time, the incendiary She Is Beyond Good And Evil, as well as their now-legendary first album, the enigmatically-titled "Y" but most people left in the room hadn't come to hear any of that. The Pop Group didn't care. They played it all anyway, giving one of the most inacessible, challenging performances I've ever heard. There certainly weren't any crowd-pleasing covers this time. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil - The Pop Group

By the end of the gig, the hall was more than three-quarters empty but most of the people who'd stayed were onstage with the band, having a great time. It was a rioutous, joyous, celebratory affirmation of acceptance of the other, a philosophy The Pop Group lived as well as preached. Until a year later, following the release of their second, even more uncompromising album, "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?", when the band split up. 

As Rolling Stone described it "The Group broke up in 1980, as Stewart’s interests drifted deeper into reggae and his bandmates wanted to explore free jazz.", stretching the old "musical differences" cliche to its absurdist limits. The various members dispersed, forming a number of more commercially successful outfits that included Pigbag, Maximum Joy, Rip, Rig and Panic as well as my own favorites, the before-their-time and decidedly not commercially successful Head. 

Mark Stewart wasn't in any of them. He moved smoothly into a successful solo career, rich in collaboration. He transferred his very considerable talents to Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound collective, where he recorded and toured through the eighties alongside the likes of Tackhead, African Headcharge and the New Age Steppers. 

Hysteria - Mark Stewart and The Maffia

I saw him on stage again, for the final time, sometime in the mid-eighties, when he made a triumphal return to Bristol, playing in a kind of On-U Sound package tour with Tackhead and Gary Clail, among others. The entire event was top-class musical entertainment but even among that stellar line-up, Mark effortlessly prevailed. His overwhelming physical presence and the floor-shaking resonance of his voice made him a standout in any company.

According to all of the personal tributes from those who knew him, he was an affable, friendly kind of giant, immensely willing to help guide and mentor other musicians. He offered a wellspring of creativity and imagination and acted as an indefatigable campaigner for social justice as he conceived it - and he was a right good laugh, to boot. 

I know nothing of that. I just know he was a blindingly good performer who fronted a blindingly good band at a time when few either wanted or understood what he and they had to offer. It meant those of us who thought in the know were able to feel all clever about it.

Fortunately for Mark, there were some people out there who really did get it. Time proved him right and everyone else wrong. He found an audience who truly understood his message and in his wish to be an inspiration to others he absolutely succeeded.

He will be missed. He already is.

Walkin' With The Beast

When I began following Pitchfork a few years ago the thing I noticed most was that famous musicians die all the time. Partly it's that there are a lot of famous musicians for a given value of "famous", that value being "anyone someone at Pitchfork has vaguely heard of". Partly it's that popular music has been popular for a really, really long time now, so a lot of popular musicians are getting really, really old. Partly it's that even more musicians don't get to be old at all because they have a tendency not to look after themselves very well. Or at all. In fact, the opposite.

After a while I stopped being surprised by the death toll and only really paid attention when someone I own records by or had seen perform or who were so famous I knew who they were without either of those things being true upped and died. Even then, it took the death of someone with truly epic cultural reach to make me consider mentioning it here. 

Mostly I didn't because, as I saw it, this blog only concerned itself with video games, specifically the massively multiple online role-playing kind. I think the only exception I made was for David Bowie and that only because he was such a polymath he actually had made a significant contribution to gaming.

That was in the before times. These days anything goes. At Inventory Full we're still more about the mmos than anything (also we talk about ourselves in the second person plural now, apparently...) but music is a regular strand along with movies, television, books...

So, when I read that Phil Spector had died I thought I might mention it. I definitely wouldn't say Spector was on Bowie's level, not even close, but his cultural reach was significant. He was also a convicted murderer, which is going some even by rock and roll standards of bad behavior. 

That's not really why I thought I might commemorate his passing. It was more that he, or more accurately his famous Wall of Sound production technique, was strangely important to me at an entirely inappropriate time and for a peculiar reason, one that I believe was and still is emblematic of the way certain cultural events end up being misconstrued and misrepresented by those who get to the tell their histories. 

I have no personal experience of how important Spector's musical innovations were when he was big news in the sixties. I was a small child and if I heard the Crystals or the Ronettes on the radio I wasn't listening.

Even when I bought the Beatles last album, Let It Be, aged twelve or thirteen, I had no idea what a record producer did, let alone the names of any. I had no clue Phil Spector had produced that record nor how controversial it must have been for Beatles fans to see his name on the sleeve instead of George Martin's. Then, I was no Beatles fan. I picked them as one of my first purchases precisely because I knew nothing about pop music.

But I wanted to learn. And I did. Fast. A few years later, in my mid-teens I could tell you the full line-up of any and every band I whose records I owned. I could tell you what instruments they played, who wrote the songs and, yes, who the producer was. Probably could have had a fair stab at naming the engineer, too.

By 1976 I for sure knew who Phil Spector was. I was backfilling my knowledge on the last twenty years of rock, pop, folk and even jazz just as fast as the print media of the day could get it to me. Which wasn't nearly fast enough. 

I'd exited my mercifully brief infatuation with hard rock, proto-metal and prog to immerse myself with increasing intensity in the darker, artier sounds of the anti-sixties - The Velvet Underground, the Social Deviants, the Stooges, the Fugs, Captain Beefheart - but I was a voracious and eclectic consumer. I gulped down everything from Joan Armatrading to the Doctors of Madness. 

I knew what I liked because what I liked was the good stuff. It had to be, because I liked it. I never lacked for confidence in my own tastes. Still don't, as may be apparent. I was pre-made for punk. I just had to wait for it to happen.

In the summer of '76, in a story I've told here before, I stumbled across my first punk band. I'd read about the concept. The movement had been mumbled about in the music press for maybe two or three years by then but it was something else entirely to see it happening in front of me. 

Like many teenagers who had similar experiences, my friends and I went home that very day and started a band. A punk band. We had to get hold of some instruments and amps first. Also write some songs. Maybe learn to play, although that never seemed very important, certainly not to our drummer.

It took a little longer than we'd have liked. And we'd started quite early. There weren't a lot of punk bands to go and watch or punk records to listen to while we waited for the scene to coalesce. So we improvised. 

We doubled down on our musicological excavation of the deep past, namely the 1960s, which seemed about as far away as the Dark Ages to us and about as real. Anything uptempo with a running time under three and a half minutes was fair game. I remember listening to a lot of early Who and Tamla Motown. Honestly, we might as well have been Jam fans. Which we weren't.

There were a few albums I played a lot. A two-disc Monkees retrospective was one. Another was a compilation of surf and doo-wop hits, some of them produced by Shadow Morton, I think. It must be somewhere in my unsorted piles of vinyl but I'm blowed if I'm going to go look for it. I remember it had New York's A Lonely Town by the Trade Winds. I played that one a lot. 

Way better even than a bunch of ironic surfers, the standout act on that startlingly random collection was the Shangri Las. I loved the Shangri Las in 1977. Almost as much as I love them now. I couldn't get enough of them.  

No, seriously, I couldn't. It was 1977. You didn't ask Alexa to "play the Shangri Las". You didn't Amazon Prime their Best Of so you could listen to it before ten the same evening. You didn't even get the bus into town, go to your favorite record shop and pull the Shangs' Greatest Hits off the rack. There were no Shangri Las albums for sale in 1977 unless you lucked out and found one in a second hand store.

Okay, there most likely was some kind of import you could have ordered but the only time I ever tried ordering imports from my supposedly friendly record store they lost the order and really weren't all that bothered about it. Customer service was another thing you couldn't easily find in the 1970s. And come to think of it, Leader of the Pack had been a hit all over again only a couple of years before so there probably had been a Greatest Hits out to go with it. Maybe I didn't try as hard as I could have.

And maybe that was because I'd already found something else that did the job almost as well. Not quite but close. A collection of Phil Spector hits, only not the really obvious ones. Again, it's downstairs somewhere. Haven't seen it in a quarter of a century. Doesn't matter because I remember the two tracks that really counted. 

The first was Darlene Love's Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry. I thought Darlene Love had one of the most distinctive voices I'd heard, so strong even Spector's battering-ram battalions had to take a back seat for once. I wasn't to know she'd just get better and better.

The track I really loved, though, the one I played again and again, singing along at top volume (thick walls and no immediate neighbors, luckily for them) was less celebrated yet than even Darlene's minor hit (#39 on the U.S. Hot 100 in 1963 ). Home of the Brave by Bonnie and the Treasures reached the less than dizzy heights of #77 two years later, part of a bizarre who-got-there-first battle with Jody Miller, which you can read about here. Spoiler: Jody wins.

 

I frickin' love Home of the Brave. I love the performance. It starts out angry, storms through outraged and climaxes at vengeful. I love the pacing, the loping, stalking menace and threat. I love the bombast and the sturm und drang of the arrangement. Most of all I love the lyric, quite possibly the purest case for the rebel without a cause ever put to vinyl.

It's a perfect pop song in every way that matters and it's perfectly punk, too. It's in your face, snotty and it doesn't give a fuck. Which is supposedly a lot like Phil Spector although no-one much seems to have found him endearing the way everyone did Charlotte O' Hara. Then, she probably never held anyone at gun point, locked them in the studio, made them sing the same line over and over for hours until they begged to be let go. And she certainly never shot anyone with that gun she wasn't always waving around. 

Yes, by pretty much all accounts Phil Spector really was a bad boy. The judge thought so, anyway, when he sentenced Spector to nineteen years in jail. Spector was seventy. He'd have been eligible for parole in 2024, by which time he'd have been eighty-five. He didn't make it.

Reading over his dealings with the many acts he produced, wrote for and recorded over a long career, he doesn't seem like he'd have been all that much fun to work with. Or any. But it wasn't his job to be nice. His job was to facilitate the making of great music, maybe even great art, and that he managed handily, even if now I read the full story he had precious little to do with Home of the Brave, having neither written nor produced it, nor even done the arrangements, merely picked it for release on one of his labels.

I'd say he'll be missed but I have no idea if that's true. His work remains and that will stand. It's enough. It's more than enough. It might even be too mcuh. 

Just like everything he put his name to.