Author: kevinrevell

Blogging that is in imminent danger of disappearing into its own middle aged, middle class, middle England hole...

Yarmouth…so much to answer for

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Last night I dreamed that somebody loved me…well, kind of, insofar that I found myself 18 rows back from the god-like genius that is Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

I’ve always thought of Morrissey as someone completely at ease with his (slightly snobbish) lot, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that his shows at the Royal Albert Hall (cancelled due to throat infection) and the Birmingham Symphony Hall (ditto) were followed by The Great Yarmouth Britannia Pier. Because Great Yarmouth doesn’t really have that high culture feel to it – to complete Norfolk snobs like myself it’s always been a bit of a tacky embarrassment, the bit that you visit once every couple of years to remind yourself how lucky you are not to have to go there more often.

Anyhow, by Friday, his master’s voice had cleared up sufficiently for an attempt at a gig, and thanks to my good friend DJ78 we had tickets clutched in our hot and sweaty hands. And as a result myself and Mrs Emu fair skipped along the pier to one of the more surprising venues on Morrissey’s world tour. As we queued, we passed under massive signs for forthcoming attractions – the Chuckle Brothers, Cannon and Ball, and (of course) Jim Davidson. Then a huge sign for “Long John’s Show Bar – where the stars of stage and TV enjoy a drink”. I’m not making any of this up. I did venture into the bar before the gig, hoping to catch a sight of Morrissey enjoying a pre-gig chaser with old ‘nick-nick’ himself, but no joy – they were probably in Long John’s VIP area.

Anyway, suffice to say the gig itself was fantastic – the band was as tight as ever and Morrissey exuded his rather bored coolness with a lot more self-deprecation than he used to manage in his younger years. Shirts were ripped off, the security bods on stage were kept busy by a series of reverse stage dives, and the venue suddenly seemed just the right mix of intimate and ironic.

But the most extraordinary thing was the audience. Having spent my formative years in the shadow of the Smiths, I thought I understood the importance of looking right at indie gigs. You need to work hard at not looking as if you’ve tried too hard, and look bored and interested at the same time. Ideally you will wear clothes belonging to someone now dead. But the audience at Yarmouth seemed to have missed these vital lessons in deportment. I witnessed a really challenging pair of elasticated velour trousers, and not sure that was the worst crime.

And yet, we should presume that every member of the audience had shelled out £32 on a ticket, so you’d think they must have been fans. So, either you can’t judge a book by its cover, or we are being overrun by morbidly obese philistines with too much money. Or both. To test this theory, the next time you see somoene lumber towards you in a massive pink velour leisure suit, try singing a couple of lines from ‘The Queen Is Dead’ or ‘Meat Is Murder’. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Felix hits a home run

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Junior Emu #3 has never been a great fan of team sports. In fact, his first instinct when seeing a ball is to move at great speed in the opposite direction. And bats and racquets are largely used as props to recreate Abba concerts.

So it was with a little surprise that I heard about his success yesterday on the rounders field, in which he hit the winning run.

“It was quite simple, Dad”, he said.

“The first ball hit me on the head, which was a bit disappointing. But I connected with the second one, and hit it towards my friend Katy, because I know she can’t catch. So it went past her while I started running. Then, the fielder threw the ball to Michael, who has special needs. He caught it, but fortunately he thought he was on the same side as me, so held on to it while I completed the run.”

Ah, the benefits of a comprehensive education.

Mind the gap

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A short observation based on a delightful train journey last weekend, in which we travelled first class from Norwich to Edinburgh for next to nothing, fuelled constantly by smiling rail staff wielding teas and coffees at each stop. lounging back in comfortable seats and enjoying a spot of free wi-fi. I’m not being sarcastic – it was fab.

Anyway, when visiting the train toilet, which was one of those strange Tardis constructions when you’re never really clear whether you’re locked in or not, I noticed that all of the signs were in English and Braille. This was the case for the flush, the tap, the soap…and the baby changing unit.

Now, I don’t quite understand these things, and I’m sure needs must, but under what circumstances on a high speed train would you expect a blind person to use this ?

One of us is Lying

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Waiting in an office for a meeting on Thursday, I noticed copies of The Daily Mail and The Times.

Having been in London the previous day, and having managed to avoid the protest marches, I was interested in how they’d turned out. Unsurprisingly, the focus was very much on the disruption and violence accompanying the marches, and the following photo and caption was on the front page of the Mail:

Interestingly, inside the Times, there was a similar picture, probably taken just a few seconds before or after. In fact, I might even guess that they were taken by the same photographer. In the Times picture, however, there are a couple of subtle differences. The protestor is backing off, and holding his arm up for protection. The second policemen from the left has his riot stick raised. And, well I never, it looks like the protestor is wearing a jacket, that’s been removed by the time the picture above is taken. Incidentally, I also read in the article that there was a lot of red paint being thrown about, which made everything much more dramatic.

Now, far be it from me to suggest compromise in the fourth estate, let alone go off on an anti Daily Mail rant. But I can’t help feeling that we’ve been a bit set up here.

And if we’re being set up on something as important as the right to protest against financial meltdown and climate change, that doesn’t feel terribly good. By the by, this also feeds into my blog which I really must write down, on Why Telling People What They Already Believe Is Bad. But that’s for another time.

It’s Good To Be Back (not)

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I’m not absolutely sure how this current stream of consciousness will end, but a funny thing happened to me while walking through Prague last weekend with Mrs Emu.

I heard a song I couldn’t quite place. Then, the horrible dawning that it was Gary Glitter singing, rather ironically, about wanting me to be in his gang.

So a number of things struck me, all in a very short space of time:
– for a fleeting moment, just before I realised what the song was, I enjoyed it, thinking ‘I’ve not heard this for a while’…
– then very quickly chastised myself for enjoying the work of someone who, let’s face it, is a pretty despicable individual…
– then felt slightly miffed that the person in the shop with the music on hadn’t realised that civilised people just don’t listen to GG any more for very good reason….
– then began to wonder the degree to which we should separate or integrate what we think of people with their artistic output…

Which is where I got a bit stuck. So we just don’t hear anything by the Glitter Band any more , which is kind of understandable, up to the point at which we deny people the pleasure of listening to some fantastic glam rock self-deprecation.

At the other extreme, we listen innocently enough to music that, for all we know, might be being played by Nazi sympathisers, Paedophiles, or…well, actually most other things are pretty ok in Rock n Roll.

Sometimes a terrible dawning hits you like a brick after you’ve been enjoying the music, then you feel obliged to discard, or end up listening to it with an apologetic grimace. To my knowledge, this has happened to me three times in my listening career (Herbert von Karajan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, seeing as you ask), and I genuinely find it difficult to listen to those artists any more without thinking of their political or moral views. But I’m probably enjoying listening to output produced by even more extreme individuals without knowing it.

So maybe we should just completely separate the political from the music. But then we wouldn’t have Bessie Smith, Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg, and the world would be a worse place for that.

So, as I say, I’m stuck in this stream. I rather fear that the answer will be that we should always have an eye on the alignment of the artist’s views, but there’s probably a degree of forgiveness along the madness/genius axis. Which still doesn’t help your correspondant, who ironically has just found himself tapping his feet along to Rockin’ Robin by Michael Jackson…which is a fantastic song that I’d really like to recommend, but…

The luxury of airline travel

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Here is a list of personalities I would rather not sit next to on a packed plane:

1. The horrendously overweight. I have nothing against fat people (actually, that’s a lie, but let’s not digress for now), but I really don’t want to be wedged between them and the window, or have them mould themselves into me in a confined space.

2. People with a colds. I know that you can’t really help having a cold when you have to travel…but you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be passing it on to at least one of your fellow passengers, particularly now that air con & air flow seems to be a thing of the past on aeroplanes.

3. Members of a hilarious stag party who have decided that fancy dress would be a great way to ingratiate themselves into the Czech Republic.

4. As above, but having decided to start drinking at breakfast.

5. As above, but liberally distributed around the plane on account of being late out of the bar, so keen to keep up their merry/abusive/misogynistic stag party banter across a dozen seat rows.

On my last Sleazyjet flight, I managed to get 5 out of 5. Flying can be a truly unpleasant experience.

More irony

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Greetings from Prague, where it seems that the world of irony has many many forms. Here are two:

1. The Museum of Communism, although well worth a visit for the footage of the velvet revolution alone, is run down and staffed by pretty miserable individuals…and situated directly over a McDonalds

2. One of the most important parts of Prague’s history is the Jewish cemetery. You have to pay to get in.

Two ironic things

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Thing One:

There is no ironic content in Alanis Morrisette’s song ‘Ironic’.

This is a) useful to know, and b) a potential intro to the wonderful world of graphjam.com, which I heartily recommend to you all

Thing Two:

We are currently on holiday in (very) rural France. The two things we had to buy today were toothpaste and onions. So we went to the very very small Tabac in the very very small village nearby. No onions to be found, but we did get some toothpaste.

A blues primer

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MusicPosted by kevin Mon, February 16, 2009 23:04:56

So, I get an email from a friend….

‘I know its strange to email you at this time but sitting in a blues bar in Chicago and thought of you – fantastic I have a new appreciation’

And these, gentle reader, is a fantastic email to get, as it gives me a very easy excuse for a blog, and a chance to write about probably the most under-valued and misunderstood music around these days.

Almost 30 years ago, I wandered into a record shop in Edinburgh, all new wave attitude and stupid haircut, and heard some music that just completely blew me away. I had a related discussion with Mrs Emu about this a few nights ago; where she claimed that there was something about sound systems in record shops that makes music sound great, whereas I believe that there are just sussed people in charge of the music. Whatever, this was fantastic – it was ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, and I did something that I’ve only ever done that once – I went up to the counter and asked for a copy of whatever was playing. Now, slightly unfortunately this was the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack, so my next few years were spent trying to backtrack from that to the source of this fantastic music, and that in turn meant some pretty challenged purchases, but it was a reasonably entertaining journey.

Years later, and a bit more up to speed on what was what in the Blues canon, I ordered an Elmore James album from my local HMV. I happened to know the manager there, and when I went in to pick it up, I asked if I could play a couple of tracks through the sound system. (Thereby, incidentally, proving both mine & Mrs E’s theories to be correct.) Now, Elmore James is an artist who you just have to listen to. I could go on about why he is so fantastic at some length, and I may well do just that in a future blog, so to hear him thumping out throughout the shop was something pretty special. But not nearly as special as the woman who rushed up to the desk….”That music – I’ve never heard anything like it before – where can I get a copy?”.

And so it is with some sorts of music. It’s a pretty good feeling to be able to share it with people, so, in the style of Hi Fidelity, here’s a top 5 blues artists you really, really ought to own. Note that this concentrates on Chicago blues, we could go down to the delta, but that will have to wait for now…

  1. Muddy Waters – has an astonishing history – the Father of the Blues, kept Chess records alive, inspired the British Blues revival in the 60’s, worked with Sunnyland Slim, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Bill Broonzy, gave Chuck Berry his first break…so he was a pretty influential sort of fellow. And in 1977 he recorded ‘Hard Again’, with James Cotton and Johnny Winter. Recorded it in 2 days indeed. And, in my opinion, you’ll never hear a harder, more perfect blues album. If you don’t own it, buy it. If you do own it, take it down to your local record shop and get them to play it back to you and see what happens.
  2. Elmore James – could play the slide guitar like no-one else before or since. His technical genius owed a lot to Hawaiian influences, and in addition the two great complimenting factors were his screaming, almost falsetto voice, and his band – the Broomdusters. You’ll be hard pressed to find a tighter backing band, and it’s a huge shame that EJ and the Broomdusters never found the fame they deserved in the early 60’s. So track down what you can – if you can find a copy of the Charly album ‘One Way Out’, fantastic, otherwise try to get a recording with ‘The Sky Is Crying’, ‘One Way Out’ and ‘Dust My Blues’. You should find yourself crying or dancing, and ideally both.
  3. Sonny Boy Williamson (2). There were two SBW’s, but the one you want to listen to initially is SBW (II), aka Rice Miller. Mad as a bucket of frogs, but you can’t fault his influence. I saw some footage of him on a recording of ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, dressed in a ‘city gent’ suit, and wearing a bowler hat – I think he was trying to fit in with the English audience. He once et fire to a hotel room by trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator. Anyway, the point about SBW is that he was playing straight Chicago Blues that people just felt they had to reference, or in some cases, downright plagiarise. There was something about the way that he approached his music that made it instantly accessible, which given that he was taking often fairly sinister songs from the delta, hopping up to Chicago, and then travelling to play to audiences in Europe, is no mean achievement. You really ought to listen to ‘Help Me’, Eyesight to the Blind’ and ‘Checkin’ Up On My Baby’ to understand what I mean here.
  4. Koko Taylor – Not a big name outside blues afficianados, but her stuff is pretty easy to get hold of, and you could do worse than go to one of the Alligator compilations. Try to get something that uses the big Chicago sound with lots of horns, like she has on ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. The inspiring thing about Koko Taylor is the ease with which she can move towards a gospel sound while still sounding completely genuine.
  5. Howling Wolf – another huge influence on the British Blues scene in the 60’s, and his ‘The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions’ album, is worth buying just to hear him make mincemeat of the trendy blues wannabees. He sometimes comes across as pretty scary, which is all part of the package, and he must come pretty close to Willie Dixon in the output he’s produced over the years. Have a listen to the anthology album (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Howlin-Wolf-Anthology/dp/B000NIWITA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1234824783&sr=1-2) if you need an introduction.

And no time for BB King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and all the rest. But this was just to get started, so maybe another time, another club and another blog.

Happy listening!