Category: [Music]

Q90

Happy 90th birthday to Quincy Jones, who’s lived quite the life, which is particularly impressive given that, nearly 50 years ago, it looked like he was dying:

In 1974 Jones had a pair of brain aneurysms, and the prognosis was pretty grim. Since it looked like he might not have much time left, his family and friends started planning a memorial service. Although Jones was in poor health, he talked his neurologist into letting him attend the service, which was held at the Shrine in Los Angeles. The doctor was worried that Jones’ health would suffer if he got too worked up during the service, so he sat next to Jones throughout the ceremony. Jones later told Newsweek that staying calm “was hard to do with Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, Sarah Vaughn and Sidney Poitier singing your praises.”

I’ll bet it was. Not sure how those aneurysms resolved but obviously they didn’t do too much long-term harm given that he flourished thereafter and he’s still with us nearly 50 years after they thought he was on his last legs… and he’s outlived all those people he mentioned from his memorial.

And I still find it so hard

“Blue Monday” by New Order turned 40 the other day, and I am just old enough to remember it being new, and if there’s anything I really need it’s something to make me feel old… Anyway, the Graun has a piece by Alexis Petridis looking at some of the tunes that inspired it and that it in turn inspired, and I was intrigued by a reference to something called Gerry and the Holograms, which I dimly recalled having heard of somewhere but I couldn’t place where; I now gather it is widely considered by those who’ve heard it to have been a primary source for “Blue Monday”. Anyway, I duly went in search of them and found this:

Now, Bernard Sumner has denied having heard this and claimed “Mighty Real” by Sylvester was actually what New Order really ripped off, but GODDAMN. If Sumner’s telling the truth, then we have a truly odd case of parallelism at work here… I know there’s not exactly an infinite number of ways in which you can combine notes so you’re perfectly likely to innocently come up with a note sequence someone else has already come up with, but even so. But Petridis reckons the band have been otherwise honest about where they nicked bits of “Blue Monday” from, and Sumner said he would’ve admitted it if he had borrowed from “Gerry”. So.

Anyway, Gerry and the Holograms were a duo of fellow Mancs who had variously played with the Albertos and John Cooper Clarke and released two singles in 1979, one of which was designed to be unplayable cos the record was sealed inside the sleeve with glue, rendering it impossible to play the disc even if you could get it out of the sleeve. Much more of an absurdist art project than a band (their label was in fact called Absurd Records), hilariously the “music” on the unplayable record was actually two minutes of silence. Frank Zappa was a fan. Found their complete works on Bandcamp, too.

Rollermania redux? Maybe not…

I’ve seen some… counterintuitive live music lineups before—Sisters of Mercy and Public Enemy, Pantera and Powderfinger (even allowing for the latter being a bit heavier in its earlier days, that was still bizarre), Dire Straits and Talking Heads— but I don’t think I’ve ever been as confused as I have by this:

…in which THE BAY CITY ROLLERS headlined a post-punk/goth festival in September 1983.

The organiser claimed to have decided to add them as a bit of light relief at the end of the first day (and to replace Howard Devoto, who had apparently pulled out despite still being advertised), similar to when he hired GARY GLITTER (!) for the second Futurama a few years earlier. The difference was, Gary was having an unlikely revival at the time among the post-punk crowd who remembered their glam roots (so it made a sort of odd sense after all to have him headline that sort of show), the Rollers… were not. Morrissey and co. refused to perform when they discovered Les and co. were the new headliners, and the crowd weren’t impressed either, with lots of bottles and cans and glasses being flung at the Rollers. Until finally McKeown snapped and threw one back, and wound up getting arrested as a result. Not quite the light relief I think John Keenan was hoping for; wonder if this had anything to do with the six year wait until the next Futurama…

This did not age well

So, in the comments section of that post I just wrote about, one of the participants also linked to a series of articles published on a site called Grantland, a popular culture blog operated by ESPN until they got bored with it, all written by Steven Hyden about “the winners of rock ‘n’ roll”. Curious to see what else he had on the site, I spotted a piece that looked interesting…

…oh. And, well, much as Kanye looms over everyone in the picture, he comes out at number one on the list. In fairness to Hyden, it’s really only hindsight that makes this look as bad as it does now; when he wrote this in 2015, Kanye’s fascination with Hitler (which may go back a lot further than we thought at first, depending on how much credence you give to unnamed sources) was something the rest of us didn’t know about in the way we do now. Still, there’s something terrifically ironic about that picture and the article. I wonder what Hyden would make of this now, though he certainly appears to have cooled on Kanye not too long after writing that piece…

Brian Eno’s top 38 (1977)

Here‘s a rather delightful thing posted by Simon Reynolds on one of his numerous blogs, Brian Eno listing a selection of his favourite music for Sounds magazine in February 1977… some amusing choices (his own “Discreet Music”), some you might expect (Bowie, Cornelius Cardew, Kraftwerk) and others you might not (“Tattoo” by The Who?)… but for me the interesting part of the post comes in the comments section where two commenters go into a discussion about how few concessions Eno makes in his list to popular taste, what popular taste even meant at that time, and the whole concept of “artsiness”, taking the latter to indicate a given artist’s conscious ambition and/or pretensions to artistic seriousness (as opposed to the question of how actually good or bad the end result is). This turns into an evaluation of various artists and their degree of artsiness, some of which are kind of marvellous:

Beatles – ended up artsy (for all the talk of their differing personalities, the only Beatle not arty and sensitive was the gregarious, down-to-earth Ringo)
Beach Boys – Brian grew artsy, but not the others (Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art)
Stooges – artsy (codifying punk is very artsy, especially in Iggy’s formulation of modern urban white blues, plus we have We Will Fall and LA Blues)
Black Sabbath – Very difficult to determine, I find. Inventing a genre is artsy, but it feels deeply wrong to call Ozzy artsy.
Sex Pistols – I can’t say right now, I need time to think. (Jones, Cook and Matlock were resolutely not artsy, but Lydon had a fierce artsy streak. Although, the artsiest figure associated with the Pistols was McLaren, so are they artsy because of his conception of the band as a living sculpture?)
Happy Mondays – a little bit artsy but not much (there’s the New Order connection, and being the only group with a fondly remembered dancer has surely got to be worth something)
Oasis – might actually challenge Status Quo as the least artsy band imaginable

Like I said, this is not an evaluation of these acts’ quality or otherwise, but damned if that comment about Oasis doesn’t feel like a mighty burn anyway. And I know there’s a theory that Mike Love is actually not the champion scumbag of popular music he’s generally considered to be, but I’ve never seen much to suggest that the sentence “Mike Love may genuinely despise the entire concept of art” is not the definition of harsh but fair.

We don’t need no reconciliation

Lovely. This is the latest installment in the never-ending fight between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, in which the latter’s wife takes potshots at the former, and which David concurs with, apparently forgetting he also made a point of dodging his taxes in 1978/79 when the whole band, including him and not just Roger, went into tax exile while making The Wall. I mean, fuck Roger for being a Putin apologist (I don’t know about the other charges Polly levels at him, though I presume the “antisemitic” thing is something to do with him supporting Palestinians), but Dave’s not always been a model of moral superiority himself.

And I got snapped at on Facebook for making this point, someone noted the vast quantities of money Gilmour has apparently donated to charity, which is great, I’m all for that, I wasn’t aware of his charitable works. I’m just saying that accusing someone else of tax-dodging when you did it yourself with them entails at least a bit of hypocrisy. Oh well. No point hoping for better from these two alleged adults by this point…

A music lover

What if you can’t tell the difference between the Sex Pistols and some random bunch of dickheads wearing stupid sunglasses? What does that make you, Gerald, apart from someone who doesn’t appear to actually know what he was going on about? I remember being puzzled by the “US Labor Paty” bit the first time I saw this image, cos I couldn’t understand why a presumably left-leaning political party would be that interested in turning people onto Beethoven (unless they were really into Theodor Adorno). After seeing it again today, though, I decided to do a quick bit of research, and evidently the US Labor Party were a front for Lyndon LaRouche, pushing socialism while also cuddling up to Nazis like Roy Frankhouser and Willis Carto. No wonder I was confused, cos so were they…

I am no longer Iron Man

Ozzy Osbourne cancels all tour dates, saying he is ‘too weak’ to perform

The spine injury he picked up in 2019 has apparently proven insurmountable and he’s declared an end to his touring days. Which is awfully sad, obviously, but let’s face it, the fact that Ozzy is still alive to be able to declare an end to his performing career in 2023 is miraculous in itself. How he made it out of the 70s, never mind the 80s, is something I don’t think anyone will ever work out, especially cos Ozzy has even less idea than the rest of us…