Book review: The Rough Guide To The Best Music You’ve Never Heard
Posted by Chris on November 23rd 2008 with 0 Comments »
The Rough Guide To The Best Music You’ve Never Heard
Edited by Nigel Williamson
Published by Rough Guide Books
Words by Reggie Chamberlain-King
There is an awful lot of music that I haven’t heard. Some of it is mentioned by name in this very book. By this time tomorrow, there will be yet more, somewhat less of which will be referenced in the new Rough Guide. Music appreciation is a losing race; over the duration of one record side, at least ten more will have been conceived, arranged or recorded and most will never be heard of, let alone heard.
What heroic men these are, then (and, bar a sliver of thought from Ms Khan of Bat For Lashes, they are all men) who aver to be experts on The Best Music You’ve Never Heard! It is a claim at once presumptuous and foolhardy. On what ground can they presume that a reader will or will not have heard of a certain artist or recording? And if, as seems to be the book’s thrust, the thrill is somewhere in the realm of the unknown, what are they doing treading over this old turf, unless as an act of great musical snobbery?
This is quite plainly unfair, because the idea of collecting together the music that has not been heard by a universal ‘you’ is confusing enough, without the added responsibility of sorting it by quality. The ridiculous task would seem to be canonising the uncanonisable, like a pop cultural form of Russell’s Paradox. Or validating the idea of initial rejection as a form of worth, which has been a central part of cultural mythmaking since, at least, the impressionists; a notion that, if misused, can make bad a synonym for good and unlistenable interchangeable with rapt.
It is easy for someone who received their copy for free to say such things. And needlessly cheeky as well. The problem is certainly not that, for the reviewer, there were no revelations inside, but that, given the same remit, I would have made much the same choices. Perhaps, at this point, the mythology of pop has become truth and it is the lost albums and outsiders at the circumference that maintain its rigid form. Their position in the mythology is guaranteed, because the mythology is all about the distance between the victors and the victims Some knowledge of this on the reader’s part is presumed; why else would an entry on ESG make reference to The Shaggs, with not entry on The Shaggs anywhere to be found?
This idea is repeated throughout the book, with a leitmotif subheader lamenting that the featured misfit could have been a somebody. Mr Phil Ochs could have been Mr Dylan by all accounts and would have been, had Mr Dylan not got there first. Such is the economy of dreams on which rock runs - the rock star is an everyperson, whose everyperson qualities set them apart from the rest of us. Mr Dylan is Mr Dylan, not solely because he is Mr Dylan, but because the story of pop needed a Mr Dylan. Mr Ochs makes Mr Dylan more himself. Although, it is probably more important that Mr Ochs made Rehearsal For Retirement in 1969.
It is strange that Mr Dylan’s career starts with his being the man of the moment, the right ear and voice to convey the concerns of the time, only for the shifting conceits of that career to suggest a mere, fleeting interest in any of these causes. It was Mr Ochs who threw himself into the political ring with all conviction and sincerity. If the folk movement and its generation had room for only one voice (and, as a fan of Peter, Paul & Mary, I think it has space for, at least, three), why was it Mr Dylan and not Mr Ochs - Opportunity? Talent? Looks? It is impossible to say why the one is heroic and the other romantic.
However, The Rough Guide does raise many points about the ways in which otherwise good music can be lost: glut of ambition or lack of it; self-destruction; eccentricity; ethnicity; wilful perversion; these themes appear and reappear in all of the stories told. Some of the reports suggest no greater failure than a musician being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which reminds one of how tenuous and unreliable the arts industry is, while an account of the composers and other artists murdered in the concentration camp at Terezin reminds one how lucky we are to hear any music at all.
The book is underpinned by this idea of timing - that, for something to enter the mainstream, it must be heard by a lot of people at the same time, but, for it to enter the mythology, it must be heard by a number of people at different times. Many of the artists are described as being ‘ahead of their time’, but as Ms Stein pointed out (and you will forgive me for not running off to check exactly how she said it), the men ahead of time are the ones most clearly of their time; it is the tentative step of history that falls in line behind them and normalises what they already knew. With that in mind, it is easier to forgive some of the more contemporary inclusions. Non-mainstream, but hardly obscure, acts like The Handsome Family and Yo La Tengo have entries, as does recently underexposed pop singer, Ms Candie Payne, and respected genre man, Mr Kool Keith. While any reader may well have heard these acts, they all sit in the same peripheral positions that allowed the other names in this book to be obfuscated by time.
In an electronics subsection that gives good account of the legendary White Noise, it may seem unnecessary to include Boards Of Canada and M.I.A, while overlooking such innovators as The United States Of America or oddities like Lothar & the Hand People, but this is only because the included are still with us. The book is intended, clearly, for the Musiphilosoph or musical explorer, for whom acts on indie labels are no big surprise, but, for readers-as-yet-unborn, their inclusion may be as inspiring as that of The Swan Silvertones was to me.
Editor Mr Williamson, proclaims that he hoped to compile “an alternative history of music”, which is an admirable idea. However, in an age of musical ubiquity, when so much music is so easily available, it is left to us all to orientate ourselves through our own history of music, by necessity, if not wilful extraction. The realm of the unknown is wide and daunting and must be travelled through alone, but this book is, at least, an interesting and sometimes amusing place to begin.
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Book review - A Girl Called Dusty: An Intimate Portrait Of Dusty Springfield
Posted by Chris on November 20th 2008 with 0 Comments »
A Girl Called Dusty: An Intimate Portrait Of Dusty Springfield
by Sharon Davis
Published by Andre Deutsch
Words by Reggie Chamberlain-King
I am uncertain what it takes for one to become a gay icon, which is why I haven’t tried. Ms Springfield certainly did achieve such status and seems to have done so without restricting her base to only a particular type of fan. Although ripe for camp appropriation in her lifetime and since, her records are not so sticky with association as those of Ms Garland, say, or Ms Minnelli. The import of Dusty In Memphis has seen to that.
Ms Springfield did seem acutely aware of the possibility, though, fearing the word ‘come-back’ and the connotations of Ms Garland that it held. The very hyphen seems to hide a pitiful plea that she attempted to answer in listless starts and faltering stops from the Seventies until her death. To so grandly oversell herself, she thought, would make her that most tragically iconic of figures, the drama queen. Yet, it would be hard to say whether she ruled over the drama or if it ruled over her. Ms Davis’ book doesn’t make the question any clearer.
The many problems that cluttered Ms Springfield’s life do not clutter the prose to quite the same degree. She was an alcoholic and made occasional misuse of drugs, both of which duck and weave, quickly and evasively, through the story. Yet, only one cursory allusion suggests that her 1972 marriage to a woman in Los Angeles turned abusive, while her history of self-harm is only revealed through a joke made on The Kenny Everett Show. It is not until the p.181 that the reader hears of Ms Springfield’s “life-long battle with flab”, although what exactly that means is left unspoken.
One interviewer quoted explains that she never asked Ms Springfield about her sexuality because the singer’s life was not as important as her music. If that were the case, then one could skip over the years between 1972 and 1985, when her music wasn’t very important either. However, the pop records leading to Dusty In Memphis and the one true come-back of the Pet Shop Boys-produced Reputations deserve to be contextualised more thoroughly. To imply that she sang the way she did because of her troubled private life concedes too much to blind romanticism, but it must have informed her performance in some way or coloured how she was received by her audience.
It is not enough that Ms Davis concludes: “Dusty Springfield was one of the finest white soul singers of all time, a singer who sang with the same depth and emotion as black Americans…” Or that Sir Elton John considers her “the greatest white singer there has ever been”. These loaded statements insinuate that black singers have been granted the greater depth of expression and it is for performers of differing racial origin to catch them up. Yet, it is never asked why Ms Springfield sang with the equal of their emotion or even why she felt such affinity with black American R ’n’ B. It is quite probably too crass to suggest that a repressed bisexual and lapsed Catholic may feel the same freedom in performance as an African-American of the Fifties or Sixties. It is noticeable that Sir Elton does not call her the greatest bisexual singer there has ever been. Although, he may just prefer Skin from Skunk Anansie.
It is hard to say what attracted Ms Springfield to black American music without asking her outright, but she certainly saw it as a duty and a great pleasure to push the Motown sound in Britain. Although she continued to have hit singles with Mr Bacharach’s songs, her love for the Exciters and the Vandellas saw R’n’B tunes squirreled away on flip and album sides. Her escalating interest in the music and its gradual move into the British charts is well-explored here, but Ms Springfield’s connection with it is not. It was perhaps the intense urgency of these songs that appealed to her, or the greater sexual frankness of the blues tradition, from which soul came, than the sophisticated Jewish conventions that gave rise to the Brill Building. It may just have been that these songs demonstrated music’s ability to bridge difference and bypass prejudice. However she came to identify with them so strongly, the love gave birth to her one truly monumental record, 1969’s Dusty In Memphis.
That record saw Ms Springfield working with black musicians, just as the other important album in the story, Reputations, was made with gay musicians. Equally, on the two occasions, in the book, when the singer seems to take a firm stand on anything, it is about one or other of these groups. In 1964 she was deported from South Africa for publicly refusing to play before segregated crowds (although, it was argued that, in so doing, she ruined things for white performers that had been secretly playing for mixed audiences). And in 1970 she came out in a national newspaper interview, even though she would refuse to talk about it in later years.
Perhaps, for each gay icon that comes along, a different set of criteria presents itself. Or, like Mr Wittgenstein’s analysis of the word ‘game’, they may all bear a family resemblance, but share little in common. What ensures their iconic status is that one thing that makes them different from all the other icons. In Ms Springfield’s case, it may be how she brought together the feelings of repression and loss felt by all those on the outside of Western culture of the sixties; she expressed these feelings through the balled-up ballads of soul, when the fixed-face urbanity of Ms Garland’s show tunes or the melodrama of Ms Callas’ arias couldn’t.
There is a duplicity to many gay icons, a tension that exists between the innards and outards. Ms Springfield was Caucasian on the outside, but black was how she felt on the inside. On the outside, she was glamorous and bright, but…um, black was how she felt on the inside (a Morrissey reference that I will regret using for some time). But a female figure seldom comes to be adored by gay men if she conquers her problems and Ms Springfield never did. As she got older, she became less secure and more secretive. Her troubles could not be contained. And, certainly, aren’t contained in this volume.
Built To Cover M.I.A.
Posted by Chris on November 18th 2008 with 1 Comment »
A couple of weeks ago, American indie legends Built To Spill graced Belfast’s Limelight venue for a very special show. They are well known for covers of everyone from Macy Gray to Ozzy Osbourne, and during the gig they unveiled their unlikely take on one of the biggest alternative pop hits of the last couple of years, M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’. It’s a pretty faithful run-through with genuinely lovely guitar line. AU snapper Loreana Rushe was in attendance and managed to capture it on camera. Take a look below:
Five To One: Really Bad Movies
Posted by Chris on November 13th 2008 with 0 Comments »
Stargazing_Philip Byrne
Showgirls
In 1995, Paul Verhoeven had everything going for him: he was working in the Hollywood big leagues, and had scored a deuce with the witty and explosive Robocop in the 80s. Time to derail the train, then, with a stupidly lurid sex drama like Showgirls. Aside from just being awful, there are some genuinely funny set-ups in it, like the pool sex scene where Liz Berkley kisses her career goodbye amid splashy over-exaggerations.
28 Days Later
Danny Boyle was shambling around looking for credibility with a Trainspotting hangover, when he discovered that by stealing the plots of two George A Romero movies he could turn out a really ‘uncompromising’ horror movie where all the straight-up horror is spoiled by jittery camera work and too much shouting. No doubt spawning a twelve disc box set as we speak.
I Want Candy
When Carmen Electra is your movie’s selling point you know you’re in deep trouble, and this ridiculous British sex comedy just keeps going down hill from there. A gang of bright-eyed film students get into oo-er missus scrapes as they try to make a porno in their mum’s house, while the mob are on their tale and their audience try to fit their entire fist inside their mouths to distract from what they’re seeing.
Talladega Nights
Take a sport that nobody outside of barbecue-obsessed southern America gives a hoot about, assume French, British, Spanish, Japanese and German people have a clue what it is, and toss in a decidedly unfunny Will Ferrell for good measure. And isn’t John C Reilly meant to be a serious actor? He’s like a geeky mate trying to get in on the new thing, for God’s sake.
xXx
It’s honestly hard to call xXx a ‘bad’ movie, but we’re going to stick to the conventional approach and denounce it as crap despite its many, many hilarious moments. Xander Cage, an extreme sports criminal badass who ‘lives for this shit’ is sent in to blow up stuff and do extreme stuff and other stuff until the credits roll and enough money has been spent on all the stuff he does. Vin Diesel looks like a giant musclebound phallus in this film, which is rather fitting.
Heartwork: S’Express – Nothing To Lose (Rhythm King, 1990)
Posted by Chris on November 6th 2008 with 0 Comments »
One of the most awesome things about this sleeve is that producer Mark Moore and vocalist DJ Sonique (yes, that one) are sitting in an S shaped chair and, what’s more, the way they are seated linking arms also makes them look like the letter S. It’s a clever piece of photographic choreography, and we know that they probably intended for the letter S to stand for S’Express, but in this case we think it actually stands for ‘shit taste in clothes’. Honestly, it might have been the nineties, but is there really any excuse for the pair wearing coordinated gold outfits? ‘Nothing To Lose’ is right - they already shelved their self-respect alongside their sense of taste and decency once they donned the mega-tacky get up gear. The only human beings who have ever been able to pull off wearing this much gold are the Egyptians, Elvis and Mr T. We do admire the audacity of their sartorial choices though and, secretly, we’re just jealous that we don’t have any clothes in our wardrobes to make us look like a walking Oscar statue too.
For Frock’s Sake
Posted by Chris on October 28th 2008 with 0 Comments »
Regular readers of the mag will know all about the amazing vintage shopping options we have in Northern Ireland, and an event this weekend looks like being even more proof of that. Called ‘Frock Around The Clock’ (see what they did there?), it’s a major fair showcasing the best of Northern Ireland’s vintage sellers. In the organisers’ own words, it’s going to offer “a wide range of original vintage clothing for ladies and men, vintage accessories, homewares, costume jewellery, textiles and lace, vinyl, and also hand made bags, jewellery and clothing, recycled from vintage textiles.”
So basically, if you have any interest in, well, any beautiful or rare old gear, make sure you head down. It takes place this Saturday, November 1 at the Wellington Park Hotel in Belfast, between 10.30am and 4.00pm. Admission on the door is £5, but £3.50 for students and children under 16 go free. ‘Frock Around The Clock’ is planned to be a quarterly event, with the next instalment due in February. For more information and a full list of exhibitors, visit the ‘Frock Around The Clock’ website.
Mr E’s Beautiful Download
Posted by Chris on October 23rd 2008 with 0 Comments »
Although Eels have been busy this year - E has released his memoirs, and they have toured and released two separate compilations - it’s now over three years since their last studio album, Blinking Lights and other Revelations. However, the album is now being re-released in a ‘Deluxe’ four-LP vinyl edition, including a bonus disc containing a 17-song live show from Manchester in 2005. The set is limited to 2500 copies, each one numbered and signed. However, at $205 it’s a bit pricey.
But fear not, Eels fans! If you still fancy some new stuff from Mr. E, he has very considerately offered up four tracks from the live disc as a free download. The songs - ‘Fresh Feeling’, ‘Packing Blankets’, ‘Jeannie’s Diary’ and ‘Climbing To The Moon’ are available online until next Tuesday, October 28. To grab the lot, click here.
New exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery, Belfast
Posted by Chris on October 22nd 2008 with 0 Comments »
Belfast-based artist Sheila McCarron hosts the opening reception of her solo exhibition this Thursday, October 23 at The Phoenix Gallery, Grand Opera House, Belfast. The painter’s work is on show until December 13, with Thursday’s opening event running from 4.45-6.45pm.
The painting shown above is entitled MissDemeanour
Free Escape Act Track
Posted by Chris on October 22nd 2008 with 1 Comment »
Belfast trio Escape Act are previewing their new album by scattering free tracks far and wide, and we are lucky enough to have one of them, ‘Jupiter Storms’, to pass on. If you fancy bathing your ears in some melodic power-pop, click here and download that mother.
Super Extra Bonus Freebie
Posted by Chris on October 21st 2008 with 0 Comments »
Free music! Free music! Kildare mentalists Super Extra Bonus Party love their fans so much they’ve decided to give away an album for free. They’ve roped in friends including Jape, Cadence Weapon and The Vinny Club to remix every track of their Choice Music Prize-winning debut album, and they are giving away the resultant Appetite For Reconstruction for nothing. That’s 16 tracks, each one in a bewildering choice of nine (no, really) different formats. To grab any one or all of the tracks, click here.
Do use the comments and tell us what you make of it.
Ringo-ing The Changes
Posted by Chris on October 14th 2008 with 0 Comments »
Because we’re nice, sociable people, we like getting letters in the post. I’m not sure promo CDs count as fan mail, but it makes us happy to think that way. On the other hand, tubthumping, Maxwell’s Silver Hammering, grizzly Beatle Ringo Starr has had enough. He’s had 45 years of fielding your deranged missives and requests for signed tat, and he has issued a warning that if he gets any more stuff postmarked after October 20, it’s going in the bin. No messing, he doesn’t want to hear from you. This is a mildly amusing notion in itself. However, it doesn’t quite stack up against a video of the man himself trying to be mean and moody. Enjoy.
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