11. instruments of torture
We had a name, then. Any songs to go with it?
If the original project had survived longer than a guitar intro - the band that was meant to be bad on purpose - we could've done Johnny G Goode twice, sandwiching an endless version of Midnight Rambler. Written a couple of bad poems and put them to music. But you need something more normal for a party. And the choice is huge.
Still, it's easy to narrow things down when you've got a consistent attitude to different kinds of music. I can't stand nearly all of them!
I always say most people hate most Olympic sports. You'll disagree, then think about it. And most people hate most kinds of music.
The rest of this chapter is a righteous rant, which slows down the narrative. But you won't skip it. Bad restaurant reviews are fun.
Jazz and prog rock
I'm lumping them together because of the boarding school I was sent to.
One of the many horrors of that open prison was the tyranny of music. You had to listen to what everyone else listened to. What they listened to most in those days was prog rock. And prog rock is shit. All of it. Every single fucking note of the pompous bollocks.
They called it it progresive, with the implication that you were backward if you didn't like it, inferior somehow. Calling themselves progressive was like tories saying they're the natural party of government.
If not prog rock, hard rock (it was a boys' school).
Me, I wanted to put on Creedence and the Stones, the Who, bit of Motown. Instead I had to sit through Zeppelin and Deep Purple and worse still King Crimson, Captain B Fart, Yes, Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator, and Emerson Lake and fucking Palmer.
The Moody Blues were bad enough. Orchestral bollocks and Graeme Edge's up-themselves words, with backing bollocks by Justin Hayward.
Letters I've written
Never meaning to send
Then leave them on the desk when you shoot yourself. Twat.
And Tubular Bells: oh shit.
Meanwhile ELP brought out an entire live album based on a classical suite by Mussorgsky. Can you imagine sitting through that? The pretentious pricks.
There again, when two of ELP died in the same year, I was tempted to make a crack about forty years too late - till I found out Keith Emerson shot himself. Depression because nerve damage stopped him playing well and he was worried about disappointing his fans. Music should never matter that much.
As for Roger Walters addressing the UN security council at Putin's invitation: I had to read that twice.
A lot of music in the early 70s was just so fucking...earnest.
Years later, a reporter asked someone why punk had to happen. Reply: 'Two words. Rick Wakeman.' He played keyboards with Yes, then brought out solo albums about King Arthur and the wives of Henry VIII. Six instrumental tracks played on various synthesizers. 'Listen, everybody. Anne Boleyn sounds like this'. Fucking augean stables.
And did anyone really like Frank Zappa? Come on, own up.
Meanwhile get this about a well-known track:
'The verse is in G major, with a lydian implication in the melody supported by the supertonic major. At the start of the chorus, an interruption of the expected cadence by the subdominant chord (C major) establishes this as the new tonic, with the remainder of the chorus centered around the submediant, dominant and subdominant chords of this key. A similar interruption at the end of the chorus converts an expected perfect cadence in the new key to a modal cadence back into G major. At the end of the song, a dominant seventh on the tonic resolves as a perfect cadence into a new key to finish the song on the subdominant chord of the principal key (C major as viewed from the perspective of a G major tonality).'
This is an April Fool's, right? I want to make a joke about tonic. You have to have a punk attitude to this kind of thing.
No-one at the school had heard of the Velvet Underground. Instead, when the Woodstock triple album came out, some of the lower sixth mimed to it in a basement common room. And I mean all of it. A triple album in its entirety. More than two fucking hours, using set-squares for guitars and anything for drums, pretending they were stoned. I sat through half a song by Ten Years After then made my excuses. What a sack of sad shit.
But you can catch stockholm syndrome from anything. I heard Deep Purple in Rock so often I bought the pile of crap. Same with Led Zeppelin III and John Barleycorn. I've got Atomic Rooster on my ipod, for fucksake.
Jazz, too. They played Bitches Brew so many times I got to quite like the dark feel, even though it's a double album. But I haven't touched it since. Better than trad jazz, but what isn't?
I went to Sydney in 1985. Hooked up with a girl I'd known in London, a smart and attractive blonde called Lyndsay Brooker.
We'd go around with two other people sometimes, or in a small group. One night we're in a bar in Balmain watching the Hippos again, the ideal pub band. I can't stand the rain through to Evangeline. Two of them were really big men with bald heads.
That night I'm not looking at them so much as two guys in our posse. An englishman and a polynesian from somewhere I've forgotten. By some distance, the worst dancers I've ever seen. A kind of mad pogo which missed the off beat as well as the on.
Guys, you two are the worst dancers I've ever seen.
Ah no, they said. That's the point. You have to dance as badly as possible.
I could picture them moving around to the deliberately rubbish band I originally imagined.
The pub was shutting for the night when one of them came over.
D'ya like jazz, mate?
Well, I thought. I'm in the country where you speak your mind...
Jazz? I fucking hate it.
They both look at me.
Good. So do we. Wanna go to a rock club?
???!!!
I mean, who asks something that way round? The rock venue was small and underground, which is everything you want.
Reggae
I gave the same answer in St Lucia once.
There's a guy selling CDs from a satchel. You like reggae, man?
Uh, no. I hate it. (I think I left out the F word).
I've never seen anyone stop in his tracks like that. He actually spluttered, then pretended to throw a punch. He was laughing but genuinely unprepared. Most tourists probably told him they loved reggae.
Well, what do you like, then?
Rolling Stones and the Clash.
Ah, now that's fine. But hey! The Clash did a lot of reggae.
I like it when they do it.
You have to admire the balls on Joe Strummer. A voice nearly as bad as mine taking on Toots (Pressure Drop) and Junior Murvin's ethereal plaintiveness (Police and Thieves). White Man's even better.
I did give reggae a go. In the early '80s, I decided I needed some in my cassette collection. I remembered Trojan Records from the late '60s, and anyway I quite liked reggae's heavy style. So I went out and bought a Bob Marley. What a letdown. That and the reggae compilations people have insisted on plying me with over the years.
I've got a theory. Reggae's like punk. They're both best live. In basements, with drugs of the fast or slow sort. Put them in a recording studio and you clean them up too much. Sheena is a punk rocker sounds like the fucking Beach Boys, and witness the Clash's second album - or Natty Dread. I played it a number of times but never since. I get on more with Ska, because it's faster - but only british two-tone bands and even them not very often. I'll dip into the Specials and Beat now and then, but they weren't my thing at the time.
Opera
Easy target here.
I bow to no-one in my admiration for Franco Corelli ('golden thighs', voice like liquid bronze) - and any music is worth a listen when it's live, Corelli more than anyone who ever sang. But opera's crap, of course. Ludicrous overblown melodrama with rubbish lyrics, overdressed men and women shrieking in each other's faces. As for ersatz rubbish like Paul Potts and Bocelli: even worse than the real thing.
Classical music
When I was eleven, I wrote some small pieces about famous composers, for no-one in particular. I made lists even as a kid.
Researching these pieces, I read things that were fun if not necessarily gospel. Rossini was so fat and lazy, if he dropped a sheet of manuscript he wouldn't pick it up, he'd carry on with a new one. Handel slept for forty-eight hours after composing the Messiah in less than a month. One of our neighbours heard I'd mentioned Handel at home. She taught speech and drama and took me to hear the Messiah at Reading town hall (where I saw Roxy years later). I enjoyed it, too - though I was glad when we all stood up for the Hallelujah Chorus, because I was desperate for a slash, and any change of position was a relief!
But classical music generally bored me to sleep. Still does, despite my wife's efforts.
She plays the cello. Her dad played the piano. I swear he had four kids just to make up a quartet. The son plays viola, the two sisters violin (one gave up). In our first few months together, wife-to-be took me to concerts.
People who like classical music have the arrogance of evangelists. They genuinely believe that if you expose someone to it often enough, the philistines will perforce fall under its spell. We went to the Festival Hall for an argentinian woman pianist, a Brahms symphony, and something else. I spent my time looking at the drummers (who don't do much in classical) and the double bass players when they used their fingers.
During my speech at our wedding, I said I couldn't remember which Brahms symphony it was. But I could have a good guess. He only wrote four. Meanwhile the Rolling Stones have brought out 33 studio albums. It got a bigger laugh than I expected.
I watched her brother sing in a choir at the Albert Hall and in a smaller place somewhere, which cost me the best match of Euro 2004. Never again. His string quartet played at our wedding, but at least I got them to do a version of Jumpin' Jack Flash!
Country music
'New Country' (Dwight Yoakam) was no improvement on the old. They worship Hank Williams, who gave them Hey good lookin', what you got cookin'? Kenny Rogers, for fucksake. When they put you on the legends stage at Glastonbury, you know you're shit. Fucking pedal steel.
Folk
Same thing as country. Including folk rock. Cropredy would be my idea of purgatory. Anything that involves singing with a hand behind your fucking ear.
In my college days, two different girls took me to folk functions. A good looking brunette called Briony insisted on a club above a pub, where the main act asked the audience if it was OK to sing Clouds. Fucking hell, life's too short. That was our only evening together, though not for that reason.
A year earlier, my first girlfriend dragged me to various folk horrors at the New Theatre, but I forgave her.
Funk, heavy metal, big bands, american crooners
Ragtime, samba, gospel, postmodern (no, me neither), choirs, marching bands, medieval, k-pop. Easy listening isn't.
Not an exhaustive list, just a few I can bear to remember.
Pop masquerading as the real thing
ELO, U2, UB40, ZZ Top, Marc Bolan, Queen, Springsteen, Blondie, Simply Red, Eurythmics (give me back the Tourists), Simple Minds, Van Halen, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Prince, the Killers. Especially Springsteen.
Bolan had a song called Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart. I bought the album! I blame it on being a virgin, m'lud.
All head and no heart
Talking Heads and the Police.
Like Björk, David Byrne's eccentricity was too self-conscious to be real. Look at me, I wear a suit too big for me and sing about psycho killers. How nice, dear. I admit to buying Little Creatures (good memories of Sydney), but binned it soon after getting back to London.
I bought a Police album too, even Sting's first solo thing - but he's a dick, of course. The name's as irritating as the rest of him, a crude attempt at sounding like a punk. Claims it came from a striped top he used to wear, colours of a bee. Then call yourself Bumble and piss off.
U2 had two of those. Bono is bad enough, but The Edge? Really? Mum, say hello to The Edge. Fancy a cup of tea, The Edge? What did they call him for short, him and El Greco: The? A joke.
I once watched Sting teaching a difficult time signature to the Memphis Horns. What a tosser.
Late R&B
No rhythm, no blues. Poor man's soul.
Disco
The bane of my life in the '70s.
You couldn't go to a party or hospital disco without hearing this shit. I ended up at Tramp a couple of times. I hate nightclubs but got dragged along. The place was full of rich middle eastern men with their escorts for the evening. And wall to wall disco.
Asking a DJ to put Brown Sugar on got you a shake of the head. Someone took me to see Saturday Night Fever, which is high-pitched garbage, and the other end of the scale you had women swooning over a huge lump like Barry White. Never mind the voice, sisters, you'd have to be on top all the time. He died of obesity and fags.
Singer songwriters
I'm still a big fan of early Cat Stevens. The vocal power as well as that sense of longing.
When I broke up with my wife for a while, I sent her the words to How can I tell you. While I was writing them, the ink was smudged by a teardrop. Honest truth. I was 48 at the time. We had the words read out at our wedding.
But like all those wordsmiths, the Cat was a downbeat saddo moaning about his love life. Carole King, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Adele, Winehouse, Joni Mitchell (an entire album called Blue, and even her environmental classic Big Yellow Taxi ends with a man leaving her).
I got into early Neil Young, knew After the Gold Rush and Harvest backwards, and Crazy Horse are watchable live - but he's another one who was forced on me at school (see above). With good reason, the most miserable of the lot.
Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around
Translate, Neil. On second thoughts, don't.
If they weren't saddoes, the singer-songwriters were right up themselves. Donovan thought he was a fucking poet. The endless spoken-word bollocks on Atlantis was only good for a smoochy dance at Top Rank when I was barely in my teens - and is there a more irritating sound in pop than his pronunciation of Jennifer Juniper? Maybe one of his choruses:
Hurdy hurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy gurdy
They call me Mellow Yellow. No they don't, they call you a cunt. Shut up, cunt.
I exempt early Dylan, of course. And a troubadour from Dublin called Chris Singleton, who writes up-tempo pop with attitude, as well as playing most of the instruments himself. Not bad for someone with hyperacusis. There's no better London album than Twisted City.
American soft rock
For some mad reason, I bought the Eagles' biggest hits. I wasn't the only idiot: it was in the charts for years. Makes me shiver to think I still know some of the words to Take it easy and Desperado. As for Lyin' Eyes...
Their irritating harmonies, with no main voice: no surprise they started out as Linda Ronstadt's backing band, and we all had a thing for her. We fancied Stevie Nicks too, but it doesn't excuse what happened to Fleetwood Mac after Peter Green. The cover of Rumours has two wooden balls hanging down from Mick Fleetwood's crotch, which probably says it all.
The Doobie Brothers were much the same, though in a moment of weakness our band pondered a go at China Grove.
Meanwhile Lynyrd Skynyrd's biggest hit was a response to Neil Young's Southern Man. They called it Sweet Home Alabama even though they came from Florida. The battle of the tracks ended when Young wrote Alabama. They lost. Their hair was almost as long as their fucking guitar solos. During the one on Freebird, I changed channels. When I came back, they were still in the middle of it while the singer stood around redundantly. That was never going to happen to me. Their name was shit too, of course.
As for the Grateful Dead: dear christ. I can't be the only one to make the joke about being grateful if they were. They put you to sleep faster than the drugs they took. Interminable jams for people who couldn't tell the difference any more. Insane that we eventually played one of their tracks.
Musicals
A blight on my childhood.
Some perfectly bearable film would be on, invariably a romantic light comedy, when someone would suddenly say a word differently, or the orchestra would strike a note - and Maurice Chevalier would start singing. I'd go out for a slash or a biscuit.
On stage, musicals cost a fortune to put on. Spend the money on promoting good new plays, proper theatre, persuading the public they're worth seeing instead of a bunch of shit showtunes. The only good thing about Spamalot is the name.
Anything from Europe
Abba, for fucksake. Yes we've all danced to Mamma Mia and fancied the blonde, but forget the camp revival and remember what we thought of it at the time. The ultimate europop shit. Johnny Hallyday: what was that?
But Italy's worse.
During my short miserable stay in Rome, a couple of guys tried to relieve the boredom by taking me to a gig. One was an italian I'd met in England, the other a little american called Tommy, who brought his italian girlfriend. We queued for an age outside the Palazzetto dello Sport, where they held basketball matches and the like. I've never been a fan of that, but it would've been preferable to what I was about to endure.
Perigeo were a kind of prog jazz group, two horrors in one. They weren't even Perigeo that night, just a couple of them plus guests. I'm dutifully sitting through this unspeakable mire when Tommy leans right back in his chair. He's at the far end of us. I lean back too, so we can talk behind people's backs.
Waddya think?
I put on a non-committal face. After all, they've been kind enough to take me out -
Total crap, isn't it?
I couldn't disagree vehemently.
Americans know more about rock music than italians, who still sound shit when they try it. Playing the blues twenty years late, all those daft power chords. Lisa dagli occhi blu was the soundtrack of my summer in Italy as a 14-year-old, but they wrecked it with that fuck-awful wah-wah and overpowering strings. I think a version of Perigeo is still going, which tells you something.
*
I don't know how you categorise Ry Cooder. But I couldn't stand him either. Though I couldn't refuse a ticket to one of his gigs.
My art director when I was in advertising, we knocked around together for several years after I left. When he invited me to a Cooder concert in London, I had to accept - because he did it out of the goodness of his heart, knowing I was short of cash.
I sat through the gig and thanked him profusely, but it bored the crap out of me! Flaco Jiménez played the accordion, so it was real hell. One of the humiliations of being on the dole is not being able to choose, to say no thanks.
Anything from Africa
Yes I do know it's not all the same. That just means there's more types to hate. African, asian, tex-mex: anything on Graceland, basically.
The blues and rock 'n roll
I'm putting together a rock 'n roll band and I don't like rock 'n roll? Well, it was what college students danced to. I did too. And Jerry Lee and Little Richard were incendiary on stage. But the old records sound like each other. One of my cousins in Italy was a real Elvis hound, but he was twelve years older and I didn't get it.
And real ole blues is just drab and dull. I bought a CD with twenty Robert Johnson tracks, but skimmed through it. Again, it all sounds dead similar.
Rap
Same with this.
I like the idea, though. You can't sing but you've got something to say. The Streets and so on. Sort of thing I could imagine myself doing but didn't bother.
Hip hop
Don't know how you define it, but chuck it on the pyre anyway, if only for the name. Straight out of McCartney's Frog Chorus.
Most punk
The Buzzcocks (Howard Devoto had a look about him, but spare me Pete Shelley's whine). The Damned were a joke band, Geldof a bighead in terminal decline before Live Aid, and the Oi wave was meaningless. We're goin' dahn the pub. Fucking stay there, it's all you're fit for. As for the Green Day revival: why?
The 1980s
So bad the album of the decade was London Calling - which came out in December 1979!
Thatcher's decade. I refuse to call it a coincidence.
The Beatles
Don't get me started.
*
Above all, here's something. Cut this out and think on't.
MUSIC DOESN'T MATTER.
Nor does writing, in case there's any misunderstanding. I'm a writer, and I’m aware it's not worth anything.
I imagine human beings are the only species that know, way before they die, that they're going to. And that colours our entire existence.
You can't spend your life thinking about death, so you distract yourself. A lot. Most of the time.
You invent sport. You have sex for fun, not procreation. You drink alcohol and take drugs. You write about things that never happened and call it literature. You spend billions making films and billions more watching them.
You make sounds out of inanimate objects and tell yourself it's our highest level of attainment. Up there with chess, which is useless.
A martian lands here and asks what our greatest achievement is. Laser eye surgery? No, we'll play him some Mozart. Mozart's a Genius.
What is that?
It's Mozart. He's a Genius.
Yes but what is it?
Madness, really. Death drives you mad. Get back in your spaceship, there's fuck-all here.
sound tracks
You get the message by now.
But it's all very well wielding a hatchet. Did I like anything at all?! Just the Stones? They were on their way down by then.
Well, I admit the list wasn't long. But I contend it was good.
The Who
It surprises me how short their back catalogue is. Of really good songs. Who's Next doesn't live up to the opening track and the cover's just disgusting, a childish attempt to shock. But I listened to it a lot, they were exciting on stage, and there's nothing like Magic Bus. The band's name is the best ever, too - though we can do without the male phallic symbol on the O.
Oh, and Pete Townshend's guitar work was what you want in a punky rocker: exciting if occasionally approximate. That prat Frampton once congratulated him on making 'some great mistakes!' I knew a band that was about to make its share.
Anything with a mouth organ
My instrument!
All good except Dylan. That fucking caterwaul.
Proper rhythm 'n blues. A band like Manfred Mann, who would've stayed in the top six if Paul Jones hadn't got it into his head he could become a solo star.
I didn't hear Dr Feelgood until after 1977, then fell for Lee Brilleaux's mouth harp and Wilko's guitar struts. Roxette is the ultimate R & B track, and they influenced an entire roll-call. The Ramones and other american proto-punks, Strummer, Rotten, Weller.
Wilko never used pedals ('I'm a guitarist, not a fucking cyclist') and described his pancreatic cancer as 'a fabulous career move'! He survived that, then died years later while I was writing this. Naturally he was fluent in ancient icelandic.
All four Feelgoods had John as a christian name, which is great somehow.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
With a name like that, you'd better come good. An improvement on their previous one: the Golliwogs! Complete with white afro wigs.
I was a serious fan. We listened to Proud Mary till it cracked, though the B side was better, Born on the Bayou, a dark swampy epic. The wistfulness on Lodi, the guitar on Green River, both underrated. And there wasn't a better Vietnam War song than Fortunate Son. The anger in that vocal: jesus.
Like Joe Strummer, John Fogerty didn't write love songs. But you didn't notice. His vocal delivery never changed, but his guitar playing did. No show-off solos, nothing except what the song required. Green River, Bayou, the Steve Cropper imitation on Proud Mary.
About the same time the Stones were producing their four best albums in a row, Creedence released their first six in two and a half years, imagine that, including three in 1969 alone.
I don't care about albums. They all have fillers. Alan Partridge was right when he said the best Beatles album was The Best of the Beatles! Show me the body of work as a whole. Creedence were one great rock track after another, plus some exceptional covers. They got a fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Albert Hall.
Until he was worn down by the terrible record deal he'd cut, Fogerty was king of the whole hill.
Early Bowie
Well, Ziggy Stardust. And a few tracks on other albums, from the time I was fourteen and we were blown away by Space Oddity. I could live without the Moonage Daydream Burroughs bullshit of cutting up lines of words and moving them about (the Stones had tried it for a rubbish track on Exile) - but Blond Steve and me, when we had dinner outside college, we'd be in the Nags Head putting Amsterdam and Sorrow on the jukebox.
The Small Faces
I saw Steve Marriott in Humble Pie with the Who at Charlton, but he was never the same outside the Small Faces. Nor was Ronnie Lane when I saw him at Camden Palace, though he already had MS by then.
Before that, he wrote superb songs with Marriott. The musical experiments and clever backing vocals on unique tracks like Itchycoo Park and Lazy Sunday, with no american accents.
Marriott's voice was something else. Jimmy Page tried to recruit him for Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant: 'I wanted to be Steve Marriott, for fucksake!'), but some heavies had a word in his ear. That guitar and stage presence too. It's said he would've joined the Rolling Stones if he hadn't upstaged Jagger at the audition!
You can trace the Small Faces' influence on any number of bands. The Jam, Sex Pistols, Blur and Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene, the Libertines.
No doubt Marriott was thrilled to share the same birthday as me. Oh and ignore the claims of London spaces: Itchycoo Park is about Oxford. 'Over Bridge of Sighs...under dreaming spires.' I know because I went there.
Rod Stewart replaced Marriott in the Faces. On Every Picture Tells a Story, the three great tracks are the only ones he wrote.
Some punk
Didn't hear much of it till 1977, then played Pretty Vacant to death. The Clash, of course, and the Stranglers a bit, though they had fewer good tracks. They should've stayed with their first choice of name, the Guildford Stanglers. The Stranglers is generic and a bit 'look at us, aren't we bad', whereas the original has some wit, Guildford not being particularly known for its throttling.
The Ramones were fun to start with.
Tom Robinson came out of punk. Danny Kustow's power chords should've kept him in the limelight all his life. Dolphin's drumming. Glad to be Gay never stopped being relevant. And Up against the wall could've been written about Boris Johnson and his heartless useless cronies.
I didn't want any musical backing for John Cooper Clarke's poems: they stand out on their own.
Took me years to find a copy of Ten years in an open necked shirt, but it was worth it. Beezley Street, You'll never see a nipple in the Daily Express, that wedding staple I wanna be yours.
This from I mustn't go down to the sea again:
the rain whips
the promenade
it drips on chips
they turn to lard
a string of pearls
from the bingo bar
for a girl
who looks like ringo starr
And the one about Chickentown:
the fucking pubs are fucking dull
the fucking clubs are fucking full
of fucking girls and fucking guys
with fucking murder in their eyes
Mind you, he nicked that from a wartime poem, Bloody Orkney. It's not just rock bands who borrow from other people.
When he reached a certain age, Clarke told us
Things are gonna get worse nurse
I ain’t optimistic
I’ve got a mouth like a purse nurse
and a bungalow smelling of piss and biscuits
*
Meanwhile, just for fun, check out a track by the Skids in which the only words are names of characters from 1960s soaps. You have to shout along to the chorus: Albert Tatlock! Albert Tatlock! We could've covered that.
Early Elton John
No, really. There was a time when him and Bernie Taupin were cutting edge. Tumbleweed Connection, their Wild West album. Naturally the front cover was shot at a station in Sussex.
Status Quo used to have cred too.
The Pogues
The Eighties weren't all bad, then!
Punk meets irish folk leads to songs about the potato famine, making you want to kill anything with an english accent - from a band called Kiss My Arse. What's not to like?
Velvet Underground
The banana album, with Nico, is dark and dangerous, with not a bad song on it (the last one goes on a bit) and some all-time giants. Venus in Furs, Femme Fatale, Waiting for the Man, I'll be your Mirror. The same year the Beatles were singing about being 64, the Velvets had a track called Heroin.
When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
Meanwhile Ringo was getting by with a little help from his friends. Bless.
Tommy James
I've got a soft spot for Tommy, though he was a bit before my time.
I did a slow dance to Crimson and Clover when I was thirteen. Still remember that haunting first sigh coming through the speakers.
He'd had a No.1 hit with Hanky Panky, mainly because it was a bit naughty for 1965. The words aren't much more than a repeat of the title, but it has a garage feel. 'Nobody,' he said, 'could record a song that bad and make it sound good. It had to sound amateurish like that. I think if we'd fooled with it too much we'd have fouled it up.'
Tommy James had a voice to end them all.
He could do warm and wistful on Crimson, though the words still have an edge: Yeh, I'm not such a sweet thing, I wanna do everything - and rock like nobody else on Mony Mony, a bluesy shouter with real soul.
Like Crimson and Clover, the name Mony Mony doesn't mean anything - which adds to the appeal. In the middle of flower-power 1968, Tommy James decides he wants to do a party dance number. And he's got everything except a title, which is driving him nuts.
Then one night he's out on a balcony in New York with his songwriting partner, taking a breather from their frustration. And he looks across the skyline and sees a building with initials in red across the top. An insurance company called the Mutual of New York. If he'd been looking in a different direction, he said, Mony Mony would've been called Hotel Taft!
The lyrics are deliberately meaningless but in your face: Shotgun, get it done, come on Mony. If they'd used a guitar for the punctuation notes, instead of a organ, there'd be no accusations of Bubblegum. It doesn't even have a proper drummer. The recording engineer managed a couple of bars, which they spliced together to make one of the most insistent beats in rock history.
Music videos were dead rare then, but Tommy insisted on one. It wasn't shown in America for another twelve years! But it's a kitsch classic. The long indian coat, love beads, bouffant hairstyle, complete confidence in what he's doing.
Someone else's version of Mony Mony went to No.1 in 1987. It took over at the top from another Tommy James song, I think we're alone now, sung by a 16-year-old girl. So both tracks were covered by pop singers, but Mony's much better than that. Maybe even better than Crimson and Clover.
Same year as Mony Mony, Tommy decides he needs a change of tack. He drops his usual songwriting team and now he's on his own. And he's got to get it right or his career's fucked. I knew the feeling, up to a point. Go away and think of an advertising slogan, the pair of you. Hotel overnight. Come back with a big idea or you're fired. We didn't get fired. And Tommy James emerged with Crimson and Clover, which is simply unique. Naturally it hit No.1 too.
The tremolo effect on the chorus is an embarrassing experiment, but that opening 'Aaaaah' is worth more than most people's entire output. He played nearly all the instruments, too. There's a well-known cover version, but it can't compare.
Tommy James didn't write many great songs, but Crimson and Mony make as good a double act as anyone's, especially anyone's in a single year. Utterly different kinds of song, both perfectly voiced.
Not so clever him turning down Woodstock. He was in Hawaii at the time, and a farm in upstate New York didn't hold much appeal. Tell them to start without us, he said! A career move to match John Fogerty's, when he wouldn't allow Creedence's set to appear on the Woodstock album. Because it wasn't good enough, he said. Though it was.
Nessun dorma
Only by Corelli above - and by Sweep, as in Sooty & Sweep. No need to see it to start smiling: you know what Sweep sounds like. He may lack variation of tone, but those ears really fly.
Cajun dance
At dances.
And the queen of them all. Florence Foster Jenkins - who may have invented the deliberately bad act before I did...
*
Nothing there after 1979, you'll notice. When I was 24. Perfectly normal if you ask me. The last single I bought was Common People. So long ago, I got it on cassette!
I'll play Kings of Leon from time to time (everything you want in a rock band), and I used to jog to Arcade Fire! The beat on Keep the car running and Rebellion. I quite wanted to like Sigur Rós, like I wanted to like guinness.
But in 2008 I went on a birding trip to Scotland with my nephew and a mate of mine. All those hours in the car, I couldn't escape being sandwiched by REM and fucking Radiohead. All I needed was Coldplay to slash my wrists.
The only music I had was on an ipod, and you can't use earphones in a car with other people. So I had to wait till they dropped me off at a station after five days. Before they were out of sight, I had White Riot on, to put some blood back in my veins.
*
Thinking about it now, it's a shame our band were so limited in our choice of what to play. We should've covered the Velvets' Waiting for the Man. Bill would've groaned at the unchanging rhythm, but he had wrists of steel like Maureen Tucker, and the singing would've suited me (Lou Reed was no crooner). The words are sleazily ambiguous (could be meeting a drug dealer or paying for gay sex):
Hey white boy, what you doing up town
Hey white boy, you chasing our women around?
Oh pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind
Totally different was a bizarre bit of Bubblegum from the late Sixties. I danced to it as a kid, at the Top Rank in Reading. Quick Joey Small, by the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, no less. It was one of the first four singles I ever bought, all at the same time. It's about a jailbreak.
With his chain still draggin'
He thumbed down a wagon
Sayin' 'Friend, are you goin' my way...?'
It's written for fun but really rocks and sounds easy to imitate (straightforward power-drumming), plus no-one would've heard it before. The vocal delivery's deliberately daft, but we had the right singer for that.
*
I said we could've tried Virginia Plain too. That was a unique thing at school: a band I introduced to everyone else.
I managed to sneak the odd Creedence single past the prog rock police. And eventually people had to listen to something I championed.
I passed my A levels a year early, then came back for an extra term to sit the Oxford entrance exam. The school wasn't so bad then, relatively speaking. I still got caned (in the sixth form!), but I was back with the class I started in, and we got on a bit better. I played in the rugby team, lost my school colours in a rebellious way, had the lead part in the school play - and discovered a band.
In October 1972, two of us bunked off school. He used to tell people he was going to beat me up, but he must've done some growing-up in the summer holidays. That night, we end up at Reading town hall, where we watch one of the gigs on Roxy Music's first major tour. All we'd heard was something weird on the Old Grey Whistle Test, which I didn't like at the time, and Virginia Plain, the single that came out after their debut album. The gig was mostly that LP - and it freaked me out.
Their clothes, for a start. The good end of glam rock, though Eno was obviously a vampire. Me in my flared cords and bumfreezer jacket. The music was electronic, space age, and downright effing odd. Bryan Ferry's voice: strangled and haughty. But there was something about them.
After an hour, I ask the other guy what instrument Eno's playing. He looks at me as if I know nothing, which I don't. Synthesizer, he hisses. Oh, right. Of course. What the fuck was a synthesizer?
We were all waiting for Virginia Plain, which they played as an encore. Ferry: Oh, we didn't expect this. Yeh yeh. After another concert on that tour, a newspaper report said 'Bryan Ferry's feigned surprise was a nice touch.’ He introduced the song with the obligatory 'What's her name...?'
Anyway, I bought the album, and I really liked it. Still do, though maybe the second one's better.
When I put it on in the common room, everyone told me to take it off. No way, it's my turn. They moaned about it for a few days, but I played it every time. Before the end of term, four of them bought it. I got to play Who's Next too.
There was nothing like Roxy Music. They came out of nowhere. After the second album, Eno left (no room for two egos or Brians with different spellings) and they became a backing band for Ferry's interminable crooning.
But those first two LPs were something else - and all of them used glamorous models on the cover. Sexist cringe, if you ask me - but easier on the eye than King Crimson's main LP, with its close-up of cartoon nostrils and gullet and mad eyes. Robert fucking Fripp.
And to think Ferry audtioned for them. Brrr.
*
So I did like some stuff. We just didn't use most of it!
To get people to dance at Patrick's party, we didn't look much beyond Chuck Berry and the Stones, including Chuck Berry songs covered by the Stones. We threw in one or two other people, but it still left us with a set list of nine.
You read that right. Nine numbers. After six weeks' work.
Well, we were doing student things most of the time, Bernie had a nine-to-five, and I was singing from scratch. We did try other songs, and we could've managed about a dozen, but one or two needed work. Anyway the extras were Chuck and the Stones too! We were right to leave out Midnight Rambler.
Plus there's this: Pat thought nine was plenty, as a back-up for his jazz band. He was wrong.