IT'S ABOUT . . .

Among the verbal tics infesting contemporary society, one seems to have slipped in without anyone passing comment. At least as prevalent as “You know what?..." (the prefacing remark of every belligerent person on television, including all  X Factor panellists) is the formulaic “It's about...", sometimes varied to “It's all about...". This has become the way a whole generation of public spokespeople automatically frames its arguments. You hear it from primary school headmistresses (“Real education isn't about exam results: it's about giving children confidence"), Hampton Court Palace curators (“It's all about displaying wealth... the differing brickwork is about emphasising class distinctions"), media historians, trade unionists and politicians.

From New Labour architect Peter Mandelson's speech at LSE, 2009:

“It would not be right to turn the remarkable and necessary period of catch-up in public service provision over which Labour has presided into some kind of eternal doctrine: that social democracy is about high growth in public spending for its own sake... Politics is about elaborating alternatives...”

From PM David Cameron speech's to the Conservative Party conference 2010:

“The big society is not about creating cover for cuts... It’s about government helping to build a nation of doers and go-getters... Fairness isn’t just about who gets help from the state... This is not about a bit more power for you and a bit less power for central government... And no, we’re not about self-interest either... Britain’s reputation is not just about might. It’s about doing what is right.”

From Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's speech on a ‘new economy’, 2011:

“The change we need is about the rules of the system, it is about the culture of shareholding, it is about the norms our society expects.”

From a Mandelson speech on globalisation, March 2011:

“The ‘new activism’ I initiated as Business Secretary is about building the capability of business...”

From Mayor of London and political journalist Boris Johnson's speech to the Conservative Party conference 2011:

“...we all know it is not just about numbers...everything we do is about putting the village back into the city.."

From Deputy PM and Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg's speech on tax cuts, January 2012:

“This is about fairness in the middle. More money in the pockets of the people who need it.”

No-one used to reach for this sloppy, dumb-down formulation. People spoke both more plainly and more eloquently. It's unnecessary rhetorical goo. Boris Johnson could have said “We want to put the village back into the city." Clegg could have said “We aim for fairness in the middle." Mandelson could have said “Politics elaborates alternatives."

Churchill's first speech to parliament as Prime Minister, 13 May 1940, included this:

“I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
            You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

            You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

He did not say “It's all about blood, toil, tears and sweat." He didn't say “Our policy is all about waging war..." or “Our aim is all about victory..." And the following month (4 June) he did not say this: “It's all about fighting on the beaches, about fighting on the landing grounds, about fighting in the fields and in the streets, about fighting in the hills; it's all about never surrendering.”

Similarly, a generation later and a continent away, Martin Luther King Jr, speaking at the March on Washington DC on 8 August 1963, felt no need to declare: “I have a dream  - it's about how one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’... I have a dream  - it's about how my four little children will one day live in a nation where it won't be about the color of their skin but about the content of their character.”

It's about... time we shouted these people down.

BLUE SKY THINKING

I'm always behindhand reading my copies of the London Review of Books, which arrive fortnightly (though it seems more often than that), and yesterday, still on Vol.33 no.22 from last November 17th, I reached Jenny Diski's review of a book called The Myth and Mystery of UFOs by Thomas Bullard. Her review began with this admirable argument:

“The problem with that ‘blue sky thinking’ we were introduced to by New Labour is that we happen to perceive the sky as blue only because of our particular physiology and arrangement of senses on this particular planet. ‘Blue sky thinking’ doesn't so much encourage limitless imagination as embed in its own metaphor our absolute inability to think outside our perceptual and conceptual limitations.”

Exactly. (The comparable metaphor that dooms itself is ‘pushing the envelope’. Intended to mean to bravely go where people usually haven't, what could sound more timorous than fiddling with stationery?)

The literary figure who famously points out that the sky isn't really blue is Paul Bowles, explaining his novel title The Sheltering Sky by saying that it's a kindness that the sky shows itself to us as blue rather than as the cold black void it really is. Of course to say so is to emphasise the void, and this was Bowles' speciality. Here's a typical, endearingly gloomy quotation from him:

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems...limitless.”

Bowles himself, a composer as well as writer and translator, survived to the age of 88. He died of heart failure in Morocco, where he had lived and held expatriate court for 52 years, in 1999.

OLD RECORDS ÉPATER LA BOURGEOISIE

One of the great joys of that long-running TV series from my youth, Juke Box Jury, was the occasional record that would outrage panellists like Lady Katie Boyle. The normal consensus of the panel, to whom were played portions of a few new single releases each week, was that everything had gone downhill since the glory days of the big bands and crooners of the 1940s.

This idea was so noxious to the immature  -  ie my generation  -  that it didn't matter that Freddie Cannon's ‘The Urge' was not a very good record; what mattered was that these weary old numbed professionals on the panel found it “shocking" and “disgusting" and, their ultimate put-down, “not like Frank Sinatra".

Naturally the records they hated most were disrespectful revivals by rock'n'rollers and R&B singers of Classic Songs. The Mel Tormés interpreted; these barbarians trashed. How they loathed The Marcels' ‘Blue Moon', the double offence of Little Richard's ‘Baby Face' and ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon', Bobby Rydell's ‘Bye Bye Blackbird' and Bobby Darin's ‘Nature Boy'.

But there was one record that left them spluttering more effectively than any other  -  the edited-down single by Billy Stewart of ‘Summertime'. The full track ran to five minutes, and you can hear it here on The Music's Over, which has reminded me that Stewart died on this day in 1970. But someone did a fine edit to bring the single in at 2.51, and it still has the power to make any reasonable person smile. Here it is:

THE QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST, NO. 1

 

This is a Moog Synthesiser from 1970. 

I probably found the photograph at the website SuperSeventies. It was uncredited.

DISTINCTIVE BOOKSHOPS

I love to travel  - I've often written travel features for the broadsheet press, and my book Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell is almost as much a travel book as a biography. I am drawn to independent bookshops in towns I travel through. Their sometimes beguiling distinctiveness seems beautifully represented on this video, which I discovered via Galleycat today:



The owners of the shop (Type in Toronto) “spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books.. Everything you see here can be purchased at Type Books. Grayson Matthews generously composed the beautiful, custom music. But none of it could have been done without all the volunteer hands who shelved and reshelved books all night, every night."

I have no connection with Type or with Grayson Matthews. I just like their work here  -  and love the way that while someone at an ad agency could have had the whole book dance faked on a computer, the people at Type did it by hand.

DEATH OF JIM MOTORHEAD SHERWOOD

photo credit unknown

There's no sadder day of the year to die on than Christmas Day, and I'm sorry to have learnt that one of Frank Zappa's crucial early colleagues and Mothers of Invention, James Euclid Motorhead Sherwood, died this Christmas Day just gone, aged 69.

A book of mine is a Zappa biography (lumberingly titled Mother! The Frank Zappa Story), and though I'm not very proud of it  -  I couldn't afford much first-hand research and it was taken up by two terrible publishers, one after the other  -  it meant that for a while back a long time ago I was reading avidly about Zappa's earliest career moves . . . and as that much-missed giant of the music told me in an interview in London in 1975, Motorhead was there right from the start. They may have met at high school as early as 1956, though Zappa claimed later than it was only when he had a regular gig at a club called the Village Inn in Sun Village in 1964 that Motorhead came to his attention, playing saxophone while a club regular called Cora sang the old blues song ‘Steal Away'.

Soon afterwards Zappa held a party at the little studio in Cucamonga CA he'd just bought from Paul Buff (for $1000, in August 1964), and “At the party was Beefheart, a guy named Bob Narcisso, Ray Collins, Motorhead..."

Jim Sherwood became a Mother of Invention while he was dating Joni Mitchell. Zappa told me, possibly inaccurately: “Yeah, he picked her up in New York some place and brought her to the house. And I remember her sitting in the corner,  playing guitar, singing to herself. She had a beret on the first time I saw her and she was leaning over the guitar and she was drooling. That was before she had a record contract."

Jim was in the line-up from the time of the group's second album, Absolutely Free, recorded in 1966 and released 1967, through to the Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh albums issued at the end of the decade. He left in late May or early June 1970 (but took part in the movie 200 Motels  -  Zappa said he'd “got into scientology for a while, but then he recovered") and came back as tenor sax player and ‘guest vocalist' a decade later on Zappa's own album You Are What You Is, released in September 1981.

In later years Motorhead played in and recorded with post-Mothers spin-off bands The Grandmothers and the Ant-Bees and on the 1995 Sandro Oliva album Who the Fuck Is Sandro Oliva?!? on Muffin Records. (To answer the question, Oliva is an Italian guitarist and wannabe Zappa lookalike who plays at Zappa tribute festivals.)

Jim Sherwood, born Arkansas City, Kansas, May 1942; died December 25, 2011, believed to be in Los Angeles.

GERRY RAFFERTY'S 'BAKER STREET' REVISITED

BBC Radio 4's arts series Soul Music, which takes a significant song and explores its genesis and residual importance, will turn its attention to Gerry Rafferty's ‘Baker Street' on the last day of January 2012 (at 11.30am UK time). It was last January that Rafferty died, aged 63, from problems related to his alcoholism.

The programme has been made by independent producer Karen Gregor, who writes about it here for the BBC's Ariel magazine (which has now been abolished in print form). She interviewed me for the programme in Bristol back in November (and tells me I've made the final cut). I come into the story because after I'd come in, briefly, from the cold of freelance writing in the second half of the 1970s, I was head of press for the record label that released the record, and then moved across to become Gerry's personal manager I knew him well at close quarters over a period of around four years.

Notably the Soul Music programme has succeeded in getting an interview from Rafferty's daughter Martha, but has failed (I believe) to track down the sax player from the session, Raphael Ravenscroft, in spite of many attempts to make contact. Can the programme finally vanquish the idea that Ravenscroft created the riff that was so crucial to the record becoming such an international, long-lasting hit? The audible proof is there from the demos that Rafferty himself created the riff and placed it within the song's structure exactly where it ended up.

After Gerry's death I blogged a personal piece here and my more formal obituary was published in The Guardian. Unsurprisingly, it argues that 'Baker Street' is not the be-all and end-all of Gerry Rafferty's achievement:

 Gerry Rafferty in Air Studios, Montserrat WI

photo © Michael Gray 2012

“The Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty, who has died aged 63 after a long illness, wrote the multimillion-selling hit Baker Street, which more than 30 years after its 1978 release still netted him an annual £80,000. At the end of the 1970s he did his best work, a series of richly resonant albums that gave no hint of their creator's inner troubles.

Rafferty was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, an unwanted third son. His father, Joseph, was an Irish-born miner. His mother, Mary Skeffington, whose name would provide a Rafferty song title, dragged young Gerry round the streets on Saturday nights so that they would not be at home when his father came back drunk. They would wait outside, in all weathers, until he had fallen asleep, to avoid a beating. “If it wasn't for you, I'd leave," Mary told Gerry. Joseph died in 1963, when Gerry was 16.

That year, Gerry left St Mirin's academy and worked in a butcher's shop and at the tax office. At weekends, he and a schoolfriend, Joe Egan, played in a local group, the Mavericks. At a dancehall in 1965, Gerry met his future wife, apprentice hairdresser Carla Ventilla. She was 15, from an Italian Clydebank family. They married in 1970, after courting at the bohemian bungalow of the artist and future playwright John “Patrick" Byrne and his wife, Alice. Byrne, also educated at St Mirin's, had long been Gerry's mentor, and had first interested Gerry in playing the guitar. Billy Connolly was also in Clydebank, and after Gerry's song Benjamin Day failed as a Mavericks single, Gerry and Egan quit the group and Gerry joined Connolly's outfit, the Humblebums, a Clydeside folk act.

The Humblebums' first LP, on the folk-oriented label Transatlantic, predated Gerry's involvement, but he and Connolly were the group for the albums The New Humblebums (1969, with cover art by Byrne, a partnership that later spanned the albums of Gerry's heyday) and Open Up the Door (1970). Despite US releases, singles written by Gerry (Shoeshine Boy and Saturday Round About Sunday) and John Peel sessions for the BBC, there was little reaction and tensions grew between these strong personalities. It was Gerry who urged Connolly to go it alone as a comic. He went solo too. Staying with Transatlantic, his characteristically titled first album – Can I Have My Money Back? – began his real career in 1971, establishing him as a singer-songwriter, bringing folk fans with him and promoting his songs.

Yet in 1972, now with a young daughter, Martha, Gerry rejoined Egan to form Stealers Wheel, a soft-rock group. Their eponymous debut album climbed the US charts and included the million-selling Stuck in the Middle With You, memorably resurrected for a key scene in Quentin Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs (1992). But their A&M record contract tied them to huge touring and album commitments, and imposed musicians upon them. Gerry quit.

He was persuaded back, and he and Egan became the sole group members, using backing musicians in the studio and on tours. A now-forgotten single, Everyone's Agreed That Everything Will Turn Out Fine, preceded the minor hit Star and the 1974 album Ferguslie Park. But Rafferty learned that their royalties had been filched, Egan returned to Scotland, and Stealers Wheel collapsed before the release of the album Right Or Wrong in 1975.

Disentangling Gerry from his contracts took three years, but his second solo career, beginning with City to City, was constructed more cannily. Demos for the album were made in Carla's parents' old house, on a four-track machine. Gerry played every instrument, including lentil-jar percussion. Signed to United Artists, he and Hugh Murphy co-produced the album for £18,000 in 1978. Fuelled by the smash hit single Baker Street, it sold 5 million copies and Gerry became a millionaire “overnight".

Refusing to tour America, he played a few British dates and recorded his successful follow-up, Night Owl (1979), which yielded further hits: Days Gone Down, Get It Right Next Time and the title track. These, plus the less popular Snakes and Ladders (1980, recorded in Montserrat), are the gorgeously produced works of Gerry's prime. The voice, redolent of both Lennon's and McCartney's, yet unmistakably his own; the music, a shimmering delta of sound; the songs, romantic yet pushily sardonic – all came to fruition thanks to Gerry's gift of perfect pitch and an obdurate determination to stick to his guns.

These were the years I worked for him. I was his personal manager – employee, not svengali – visiting the record company in LA, accompanying Gerry when he was working, and running the small office we set up for him in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Sadly, my job was mostly to say “no" to people.

He did not want to have to out-platinum himself: he had money enough, and disliked being recognised. But behind an aggressive front, and a strong awareness of his own musical excellence, was fear. He turned down working with Eric Clapton, McCartney and others, telling Carla “nobody was good enough". In truth, he dared not sit down with superstars without a drink or five. So he sat at home – now 300 acres of Kent farmland and a Queen Anne house in Hampstead, north London – and convinced himself he could work alone with Murphy. Carla said later: “He was just stalling for time. Maybe some new project would suddenly happen, but I knew he'd crossed the line as far as the record business went."

His last successful foray was when, after contributing a vocal to the soundtrack of the film Local Hero (1983), he produced the Proclaimers' 1987 hit Letter from America. Gerry made two more albums that decade – Sleepwalking (1982) and North and South (1988). On a Wing and a Prayer followed in 1992, Over My Head in 1994 and Another World in 2000. They marked a decline in sales and standard.

He had always drunk too much, and now he spiralled into alcoholism, putting on weight, which made him unhappier. “He became dangerous at airports," said Carla, “and he'd scream across restaurant tables at me." In phases of renunciation, he smashed cases of superb wines into a stream on his land. Carla finally left in 1990: “There was no hope. I would never have left him if there'd been a glimmer of a chance of him recovering." She remained a source of dependable help, in contact until the end.

After their divorce, farm and Hampstead home gone, Gerry eventually moved to California, near to Martha, who worked for him. In 2008 Gerry left America, helped from wheelchair to plane by a woman he met in a video store. They rented a house in Ireland, until taxis and doctors refused to attend him. That August, a five-day binge at a five-star London hotel ended when the management had him admitted to hospital. He vanished in the night.

Splashed across the Sun, this story was otherwise ignored until 2009, when the Daily Mail resurrected it. Rafferty, urged to issue a statement, announced that he was “extremely well", living in Tuscany and preparing a new album. He was relatively well, but in Dorset, not Tuscany. He never made another album. For two decades, alcohol had dominated this creative and intelligent man's life."


Gerald Rafferty, born 16 April 1947; died 4 January 2011

Baker Street, BBC Radio 4, 11.30am January 31, 2012

MAKING AN ANIMATED FILM OF A COMIC BOOK ABOUT PHO

I know nothing about graphic novels / comic books  -  in my childhood comics were either the Beano (good) or war comics (boring), and then when the Fabulous Furry Freaks generation came along, I was turned off, despite the palpable mad genius of Robert Crumb, by how sordid a representation they were giving to what I experienced as the glorious 2nd half of the 1960s. But I just stumbled upon this, loved the hand-drawn style of the SubmarineChannel page where I found it, and was both painfully envious of the joy of collaborative creative work  -  my own work always seems lone and less creative  -  and entranced by the whole process. (This isn't important but there's even a little bit of a mid-60s Dylan song in here, from around 08.12 to 08.35.) Watch to the end and it'll make you feel hungry too...


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TOUGH TEST

I don't know where this came from but I like it: