Dalek, I Love You

As we prepare to sadly divest ourselves this Christmas of a very popular Doctor Who in David Tennant, a few thoughts…What is the most significant or symbolic element of the Dr Who programme? That’s right, the Tardis. As well known in our cultural conversation as the red pillar box. What does the Tardis ‘say’ to us? Ever thought about that? The ‘doctors’ are dispensable, interchangeable, necessarily so, for the fiction to play out. But the Tardis is not only eternal, but strangely real-life. Why is that? Through the Tardis, it’s not so much that there is an unimaginable world ‘out there’, but that there is a very possible universe ‘in here’. It’s a box that’s way bigger on the inside than on the outside. Sound familiar? A rather prosaic police box opens with a simple, everyday key to reveal the womb of our mind, where all our possibilities, opportunities, fears and insecurities are at play. Admit it or not, for each and every one of us it’s a truly recognisable place, yet also a very personal, even secret space, that we all withdraw into many times a day. It’s where we sleep, dream. It’s where we hope, invent, worry, win and lose. There’s really nobody in it but us, our single self. It is our psyche. And it’s how we travel this world, or any. In a sense, we never leave it. The Tardis is where we live and breathe.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Mediocrity killed the reality star

The Quinq is still absorbing the signifance of this. Today sees the 30th anniversary of the seminal track, Video Killed The Radio Star, by the unfortunately named Buggles, then the vehicle for the talented Trevor Horn. Today, as yesterday and the day before, we’re seeing the first publicity for the release of the album Robbie Williams is describing as a turning point in his career, Reality Killed The Video Star, produced by Trevor Horn. Now, back in 1979, few of us saw the relevance or the prescience of the Buggles track. If we liked it, we did so against our will. Many of us have never liked Robbie Williams, who has never had his own style, while borrowing a bit of everyone else’s (mind you, much the same can be said of Madonna, but nobody does). So, some of us will see this new album title as being about Robbie Williams and some will see it as being about Trevor Horn. The Quinq knows where he stands. But the thing is, The Quinq remembers exactly what he was doing 30 years ago the first time he heard Video Killed The Radio Star playing on the radio. Driving up the M1 motorway in a blue Austin Allegro to a rented back-to-back terraced house off Otley Road in Bradford, where he was due to start co-habiting with his then partner for the first time. After months of waiting and preparing, he had finally torn her away from her parents’ smothering clutches and was happily moving up the motorway with her and their seven month-old daughter towards what he thought was going to be the first day of the rest of his life. How optimistic. How wrong. Robbie Williams wouldn’t have known anything about it. He was five years old at the time, fifteen years younger than The Quinq. And his nemesis. In my mind and in my car/We can't rewind, we've gone too far.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Day 18357 (the Revrrbaliser edit)

Everybody’s prodding me for the latest musical sampler. Hang on a while, can’t you! Your electrendster is discovering and listening as fast as he can. Put aside your 13,000 tracks from the past and all of your guitar memory. As ever, The Quinq has something new for you…

Dorian Concept Clap Beep Boom from When Planets Explode
King Midas Sound One Ting (Dabrye Remix) from Cool Out
J Todd Aaaa from Ryzzynynce
Flying Lotus Bad Actors from 1983
Hudson Mohawke Everybody Else Is Wrong from 7 x 7 Beat

Dorian Concept sounds like R2D2 having a breakdown inside an Osaka pachinko parlour. King Midas Sound is a stable-mate of Burial and, therefore, untouchable for that unmistakably skeletal Dubstep sound. J Todd, on the other hand, is the fusion that would have fissioned had Parliament collaborated with Kraftwerk in 1975. My funkatronic favourite from this list. As for Flying Lotus, it’s a kaleidoscopic collision of TV theme tunes and film set soundscapes. The Avengers meet The Professionals for A Few Dollars More. As for the noise of Hudson Mohawke, well, it sounds like nothing less than a Red Indian lost in the middle of a modern metropolis (I saw one once on the night of 4th January, 1981, but he was walking very determinedly towards Leeds railway station). And all of this under the beat of electronica. It’s a far cry from beautiful Röyksopp. But I’m giving you another slice of the future. Go hear it! And don't bother me for a week or so. The builders are in. And The Quinq is learning Norwegian.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Everything is new

Who was that at Glastonbury with the exploding firework tits? Who was that at Glastonbury with the 50s pantie-girdle and precious little else? Who cares? Seen it all before. Who was that at Glastonbury with the hip-jiving music that sounded like Robert Smith snogging Brandon Flowers? Why, it was Jack Peñate, the best gig at the festival by far. Jack Peñate is 25 today, half my age, yet with considerably more than twice as much going for him. Jack Peñate was born in Blackheath, London, 1984, a few months after I stopped living there. But it was nothing to do with me. Jack Peñate is the grandson of Mervyn Peake, who wrote Gormenghast. My long lost friend, Mark Eason, liked Gormenghast, but I don’t know what he’d make of Jack Peñate. How can someone so sensitive and so talented share the same birthday as Joey Barton. No matter. For, Jack has the best body-jerk dancing style that I’ve seen since my long, lost friend, Max Jingoff, back in Bradford in the late 70s. For me, it’s great to discover that something new can be done with simple guitar, bass, drum and voice. I had thought that, when Japan moved the guitar out of the equation with their 1980 LP, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, that we were done with that particular stringed instrument (which looks so silly on girls – not that some of the girl-led bands at Glastonbury realised). Henceforth, I thought we’d be looking to keyboards and voice, or drum and bass. I was not wrong, though only half right. Robert Fripp has made the guitar sound like an orchestra playing in a cathedral. With everyone else it’s more or less a banjo. With Jack Peñate, everything is different. I know the guitar is there and it looks great round his neck, knocking against those hips. But the main instrument is the voice. I thought I’d heard it somewhere before and I have. Perhaps in a forest, or when killing an arab. Maybe Saturday night 10.15, sitting in the kitchen sink. But I know that everything will be alright. This is a guy who can write about anything because he can talk about death and dying. I haven’t been as excited about a singer-songwriter since the emergence of Elvis Costello. With Jack Peñate, everything is new. Out of the womb/And into the tomb. Indeed.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Are we not Devo?

It’s 30 years today since Bauhaus released their seminal single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead. I ought to talk about Bauhaus. But I’ll save it for another day. For today, I’d rather talk about Devo, who, 31 years ago, released their first album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo. Now, I liked Devo. They divided opinions like no other American band of the time. They were too intellectual. They were insensitive. They were ahead of their time. They were young. They were old. They were wierdos. Their message was nonsensical or dangerous. Was it really possible then, never mind now, to open the eyes of the world with song titles like Mongoloid and Jocko Homo? They were championed by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who produced their first album. Did Devo invent that snare drum sound that Bowie nicked for his Low LP? Stiff Records took them on board in the UK. There must have been something there, so why didn’t Devo ever crack it? At Knebworth in 1978, in the very month they released their debut LP, they experienced the same fate as U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds had at Reading in 1976. Canned off for being too different, in the wrong place, with the wrong audience. But was there ever a right audience for Devo? Poor Virgin Records. First U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds. Then The Sex Pistols imploded. Then there was Devo. Virgin had only ever had success with Mike Oldfield’s tubular balls. But now they wanted to be a rebel brand who only took on the challenging, so what did they expect? And Virgin wasn’t to get any mainstream success again until David Sylvian’s Japan – and then only briefly, before he, too, walked away from the limelight. (True, Virgin did bring Human League from the margins into the mainstream.) But that’s another story. Back to Devo. Trouble is, nobody ever really knew how to take Devo. In a time of simplistic, cut-through Punk, Devo wanted you to think about this idea they had whose name nobody could quite remember, never mind grasp. I was one of the only one among my peer group who engaged with the de-evolution idea, which went something like this…Forget evolution, think of the opposite. De-evolution. Instead of evolving, humankind is actually going backwards. Just look at all the social dysfunction and mass mentalism of the so-called most developed countries. Especially America. Although bizarre, it was quite refreshing for an American band to avoid flying the flag and all that sentimental chest-beating. It didn’t last. Devo had their 15 minutes in 1978. Are We not Men? We Are Devo flopped and America began to embrace Born To Run whereas Britain eventually turned to U2. But, since Devo, those of us who remember what it was all about have always been able to point at elements of society – from Big Brother to Facebook - and say, We are Devo.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Naked Hippies in Teepees

33 years on, I still can’t get my head around August 21st, 1976. On the day, it seemed quite simple. Wake up in a tent in a Hertfordshire field, your first night away from home with mates, aged 17. Following a magical evening of camp fires, acoustic guitars, joss sticks, awe and wonder. (One of the Plonker People - as we called the naked hippies in the teepee - sold Corf what turned out to be a soggy cigar butt for 10 pence.) Hoards of hairy, kaftan-wearing youths, all here for one purpose. To see the one and only Rolling Stones headline the Knebworth Festival. Some of us had even paid the extraordinary sum of £4.50 for our ticket – nine houses on my Saturday window-cleaning round. For this was also to be one of the last live performances from 10CC at the time of their biggest hit single, I’m Not In Love. And, little did we know, but this was also one of the last gigs by the complete line-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the crash that killed half the band. Then there was Todd Rundgren and Hot Tuna. And instead of the few tens of thousands expected, over 200,000 more gatecrashed the event. Like ants and locusts, they climbed the fences and overwhelmed the turnstiles. So large was the crowd that those at the back heard reggae, off-beat versions of the bands, as the speaker banks at each corner of the massive event struggled to synchronise. We loved it – Buffalo Johnson, Corf, Pubic and me. We didn’t know it was the end of an era. Or that what was about to change that era was actually happening that very same day at another festival in France, at Mont De Marsan, where Nick Lowe, Pink Fairies, Eddie And The Hot Rods, Tyla Gang, Little Bob Story, Count Bishops, The Boys and The Damned, were featuring at a famous Punk Festival. It was the day where Ray Burns actually got his Captain Sensible moniker. But we were oblivious. We read about these upstarts in the paper the following week. We even saw Eddie And The Hot Rods as the Reading Festival the next weekend. But this was yet another festival from the old school, featuring the likes of Rory Gallagher, Camel, Black Oak Arkansas and Ted Nugent. The change was under way. Some people may well have seen The Sex Pistols perform at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 76 and had their world changed overnight. But this never happened to the majority of the people in the sticks where we came from. So, for us, August 21st, 1976 was a seminal day. And we didn’t even know it. We just enjoyed it for what it was. By the way, I’ve still got the packet of joss sticks I bought the previous evening. I wonder what happened to the Iron Cross I put round my neck. And that red and green, harlequin-patterned Knebworth ticket hanging up on our toilet wall today is fading somewhat now…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Night 18340 (the Insomniac mix)

To my hoards of readers, thanks for waiting. For weeks, I’ve been immersed in the world of Electronic music, considering the role of the sublime in art, defoliating my blight-ridden tomatoes, amid a host of other blog-smothering activities. Last time I was here in front of you all, I was wondering about the Electronic influences of Southwold painter, Marc Brown. I’d discovered The Field and Murcof and bemused myself at the starry array of sub-genres within the Electronic fold, of which Techno is but one sliver. Now, I can say I’m more experienced. The Quinq has been places in his mind he didn’t know existed. And, sitting on the patio of my long lost friend, Rog, in Nottingham last Saturday evening, I was minded to describe my new found love for the winning Electronic genre of our times, Dubstep, sometimes known as Electronic Dub. I’ve found that you can tell someone you like Electronic, but, although they may be a fellow devotee, they may not have heard of the artists you can name. There are as many artists as there are sub-genres. I had to step back in time to pull up 70s Dub Reggae as the continuum here. Had King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo had this technology at their disposal, what might they have achieved? For me, with the eclipse of Reggae in the 80s at the hands of Rap and Hip-Hop, and with the impenetrable ugliness of most Dancehall, it’s a joyful relief to hear the re-emergence of Dub, albeit in a darker guise as a sub-genre of Electronic. No longer a purely black music preserve, Dub is, in its new Electronic form, susceptible to the influence of many formats, from Ambient to House and even Nu-Jazz. Now, I get to combine best of three worlds I’ve loved – Dub, Electronic and the dark night noise that characterised some of the Post-Punk era, including A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. And nary a guitar in earshot. Dubstep has been a long time coming. When XTC tried dubbing their music with a freebie inclusion to their second album, Go2+, nobody picked up on the excellence. Andy Partridge himself hated it and moved on to become the hippy he really wanted to be. But it’s all collected together in the wonderfully titled Explode Together – The Dub Experiments 1978-80. A step up from German bands like Can, 23 Skidoo championed an anarchic ambient noise that I hear in Dubstep way back in the early 80s. Check out their Seven Songs LP from 1982. Everything was moving away from Reggae and towards Rap and Rave. Apart, that is, from New Order, whose own dub experiments were a world apart (but, then, as a band, they were a world apart in the 80s). But now it’s time for Dubstep. The Garage, 2-Step and Grime influences of Dubstep seem to have passed me by, but the new sound has caught me by the hairs on the back of my neck. Oh, I can’t follow any of the 140 beats per minute technicality of it all. But I do know it incorporates elements of music I like, including Dub – if not the Reggae beat, then the sound effects. One of these days, I will discover Lee Scratch Perry up to no good in the thick of it. Dubstep may well be a technique, but it’s an atmosphere, a layered sound collage that induces a feeling, moving from the spaced-out to the edgy. I even hear it in the 80s German film music of Nikos Mamangakis, particularly Die Zweite Heimat. Whether it’s Burial, Skream, Pinch, Distance, Starkey, DJ T or 2562, it seems there’s a time for listening to Dubstep – a few minutes either side of 3 o’clock in the morning. Dubstep is your inner soundtrack, your personal sonic dreamscape, the sound your memories make. Dubstep is a surprise encounter with a recollection, just around the corner from your heartbeat. Dubstep is a pause in the sentence you use to describe your life. Dubstep is an echo of something you meant to say. Dubstep is your shadow demanding to be heard. Dubstep is a tacit understanding between an insomniac and a nightwalker. Dubstep is a crepuscular exchange at the edge of your world. Dubstep is reaching out to something just beyond your fingertips. Quite alien at first, Dubstep can sound very familiar after just a couple of listenings. But then, the Quinq is close to any form of expression that’s just below the pavement. When I listen to this kind of music I can sense people walking overhead on the world of surface. And, like the track from DJ T’s perfectly entitled album, The Inner Jukebox, I feel I’m Lit From Within. So that the imagery I see is on the back of my eyelids. Yes, as much as I like The Field and Gui Boratto and the lighter side of electronic, in Dubstep I think I’ve found what I was looking for. With my limited exposure to date, I’m assuming that Burial has truly defined Dubstep in his two albums. It is a dark mood, a Dickensian fog enshrouding the Thames, but very definitely a backdrop for humanity. All breathy heartbeats and footsteps, voices in puddles, one song seeping into the next. Amplified for every glitch, the background becomes the foreground - what I used to hear in the ante-room of The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Pet Shop Boys and even Neil Young. Personally, I don’t care whether Murcof fails to make the list of Dubsteppers. The album from this Mexican, Martes, evokes the same mood in me as Untrue by Burial. It doesn’t matter that Amon Tobin and Craig Taborn cannot make the Dubsteppin cut, because their albums Bricolage and Junk Magic give me the same feed as Underwater Dancehall by Pinch or My Demons by Distance. Dubstep only really works as a thematic collection of songs – which is why some albums, like Skream! by Skream, don’t cut it as an entirety and are less than the sum of their parts. But since you asked for a sample of Dubstep, The Quinq is only too happy to oblige with 10 up…

Burial Near Dark from Untrue album
Distance My Demons from My Demons album
DJ T Lit From Within from The Inner Jukebox album
Ezekiel Honig Broken Marching Band from Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band album
Modeselektor The White Flash feat. Thom Yorke from Happy Birthday! album
Pinch Widescreen from Underwater Dancehall album
Skream Kut-Off from Skream! album
Starkey Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits album
Swayzak Distress And Calling from Some Other Country album
2562 Techno Dread from Aerial album

Quite clearly, in order to get a handle on the future of Dubstep, I’m going to have to walk backwards into Grime, 2-Step and Garage, its forbears. Watch and hear this space.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Southwold Sound

In his own words, Marc Brown says, “The sea has been a connecting thread that runs through generations of my family, which has its roots in East Anglia and Holland…Working in mixed media, my work aims to capture elements of sea and coastline found along my native North Sea coast. I often explore the juxtaposition of large open skies with strands of finely detailed horizons which often focuses on isolated buildings or objects. I am particularly drawn to the vast open stretches of our coastline that feature remote or derelict buildings or structures.” While this captures it ‘like it says on the tin’, it somehow isn’t enough for me. I’ve been wondering about what sort of soundscape would accompany a viewing of the online gallery of this Southwold-based painter. The vast open shorelines seem to call for an absence of noise, but silence is not what I hear. I needn’t have worried. Marc recently emailed me, along with his other supporters, to announce a new website, featuring this gallery of his work (http://www.marc-brown.com/). His home page details several influences. You’d expect visual artists to appear on the list. They do. There’s De Chirico, Edward Wadsworth and Jean-Pierre Roy. But it’s music I hear when I stare at Marc’s mixed media work. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all to see that most of his influences are musical and that most of these musical influences are electronica. Although I find Murcof, one of Marc’s influences, too minimalist and glitchy, the music has helped. I’m not yet able to say in any great detail, however, why I connect with Marc’s paintings. But I’ve been following his progress since my first visit to Southwold in 2005, when I discovered by accident the art gallery in which he was exhibiting his work. It’s very rare that a painting can arrest my attention so that I not only do a double-take, but do a backflip like a slinky spring. But one did. So much so that I felt I had to engage the guy at the desk in conversation. I had to offset the overwhelming feeling of breathless surprise I was experiencing. The last time I felt that was at the age of around nine, when, attending the local brine baths with school sports legend David Field, I jumped in what I thought was the shallow end of the pool, only to find it was the deep end. At the time, I could barely swim and had no explanation for what was happening. Survival was instinctual. The same was happening here, before this painting. In this mixed-media shoreline depiction of a boat, lying lopsided at low tide, I’d no idea that the earth could be so deep. I was drowning in the texture of sand. The guy minding the gallery turned out to be Marc Brown himself, a young, unassuming fellow who, then, of course, rendered me speechless through the revelation of his identity. I didn’t buy the painting, mistakenly valuing the presence of higher numbers on my bank statement more than the transcendental capacity of Marc’s work. Since then, I’ve contented myself with occasional visits to the gallery’s online site. But I had to go back. And 50 provided my excuse. Ever since I bought a small piece of Marc’s art, entitled Distant Mooring, on a trip to Southwold for that very purpose at the end of June, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, hearing and thinking about electronica. Until I’d plumbed Marc’s influences, it hadn’t occurred to me that the painting now facing me on the wall opposite our bed – the last thing I see before sleeping and the first thing upon waking – could be having such an effect. Now, as some of you will know, I’ve been writing about electronica these past few weeks. For me, there’s a sonic temporal loop that connects today with the summer of 1977 that had such a great effect on my life and direction. There is a definite link between hearing Showroom Dummies by Kraftwerk, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre back then and the music I’m hearing in my sleep after viewing Marc Brown’s Distant Mooring today. Yes, Marc, it’s very tempting to see your work backdropped by the articulate silences of Stars Of The Lid. But to me, you see, you hear, your art has a looped rhythm to it. So, when I look at Memory Horizon or Strange Moon, Orford Ness I get Axel Willner, otherwise known as The Field, working with Sound Of Light – Nordic Light Hotel or From Here We Go Sublime. Whatever, I think I’m saying that Marc Brown’s painting is a time machine, or at the very least, a catalyst for personal transcendence. I’m well aware that I’m making the kind of transformational connection that Andy Blade talks about at the end of his book, The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker. Andy talks about his life as if it was like emerging from the other end of a tunnel in his 40s, having entered it as a 15 year-old in 1976. For Andy, the revelation takes him straight back to the moments just before he entered that tunnel. Back then, he didn’t recognise the revelations for what they were – the first stirrings of connection with the real, inner self. Then, he spent much of his life moving away from that inner self, just when he thought he was winning and his chance came to be king. And now, after many, many years and a long journey, here they are again, those self-same feelings of excitement and dawning awareness. Yet, what they really are is a return to self and the meaning of who you are as a person in this world. Except that this time, you now have the chance to live with and explore that self, instead of running away from it. The ebbing tide in the shorescape I’m now moving towards is on an internal horizon. Unlike before, there’s no rush to reach it, because I know it’s always there. I walk towards it every day. Through the Marc Brown window.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

The thick brick I couldn't swallow

Today is the 31st anniversary of the release of Kinnell Tommy, by Ed Banger, on Rabid Records – a punk-related, jokey football song. It reminds us that there was a strong relationship between the working class punk ethos and everyday aspects of life, such as football. And that, very quickly, something like Punk would break down into various elements that people were comfortable with. The same week a year earlier at the height of Punk in 1977 had seen the release of Ain’t Been To No Music School by the same band, then called Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds. Look at the pic sleeve (http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/nosebleeds.htm or watch it on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WzW246mKy8). This is how most provincial Punks dressed in 1976 and 1977. People have an image of leather-clad Punks with brightly coloured cockatoo head-dresses (but this came later and is largely down to the Kenny Everett piss-take, Gizzard Puke, and those postcards you can still buy on London tourist shop stands). Early Punk in the provinces was naïve and innocent. It may have been leather, chains and razor blades at the London Roxy scene, but, elsewhere, it was about wearing what clothes you had in a different way. You didn’t have leather. You couldn’t afford leather. Besides, leather was what bikers wore. Or it belonged to the S&M scene that Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood toyed with in Seditionaries, their clothes shop that kitted out these early Punks. For the rest of us, following on, there was Millett’s hardware store. It was the only place you could get drainpipe jeans that only blokes who worked in cardboard box factories would wear (thanks, Johnny Moped). You borrowed your dad’s pointed suede shoes from the 50s. And wore a sullen expression all of your own. You didn’t spike your hair, you just cut it shorter – very unusual at the time. In school, you pulled your tie into such a tight knot it wouldn’t undo. The trouble with adopting this semi-styled, dishevelled look was that the kids at school who looked naturally like this didn’t appreciate it because they were (a) thick (b) bullies and (c) in and out of Borstal. And this was one of the credibility issues of early Punk. Were you hard enough to adopt what was essentially a rebellious image? Punk was street-wise music for kids wiv no futchah. In order to gain this credibility themselves, some of the bands produced songs aimed at this audience. Band members in their early 20s were shouting about how crap it was to be at school. It may have rung true for the thickos, but, for the likes of me, a certain dumbing down was required. You could see it in certain bands, too. Howard Devoto left Buzzcocks before this happened to him. Another aspect of the credibility factor was the need to have two separate record collections: first and foremost, the collection you’d be happy to show – your growing set of Punk singles; then, hidden away at the back of the cupboard, would be all your pre-Punk, the stuff you really cherished and played on the sly. You’d have to deny this past, yet it was part of what had influenced Punk and brought it into being. For such a liberating sword, Punk didn’t half have some rigid rules. But I always found this school obsession laughable. My experience of school was about getting on so that I could get out, escape this life. You felt that some of the early Punk bands were from the B stream, the lads who played football and did a bit of bullying on the side. There was no intelligence in it. Some bands, like Eater, were still at school themselves. Or, should I say, of school age, because they never attended. Dee Generate was a 14 year-old drummer. The Damned actually supported them at London’s Roxy Club in January 1977, as did Johnny Moped in February, followed by The Lurkers and Sham 69 in March. Some Punk elements never really escaped from this association with school and yoof culture. You wouldn’t want to bump into any of them in a school alleyway. Slaughter and the Dogs, Sham 69. The Jam actually made something of it and helped to generate an anti-Punk mod revival. While post-punk was metamorphosing into miserable raincoats or multi-coloured New Romanticism, the Ska-beat bands, including Madness and The Specials, also had that lads-next-door, I-hate-school, anti-intelligence feel about them. Which is why it always feels ridiculous to me to see these two groups performing songs about teen life live at the age of 50. Andy Blade, Eater’s leader, finally published a book in 2005 called The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker: schoolboy by day and low-rent punk rock star by night. This tells us more about what the Punk scene was actually like than any number of weightier, more erudite tomes. It’s the best book on the era I’ve ever read. OK, it’s London-centric and full of contradictions, but it doesn’t attempt to dumb it all down. It has the ring of truth about it. It feels like it’s describing the period I experienced. It remembers it as it was – The Damned came out of glam, The Clash came out of pub rock, The Sex Pistols came out of hell and went back there. The Heartbreakers were junkies. Sid Vicious was a thug but also a little boy lost. Johnny Rotten was an arrogant arsehole surrounded by sycophants. Malcolm McLaren even worse. So much of that scene is blatant lies that it’s refreshing to read a book like this. At times, Blade says strange things like he couldn’t understand why there was such a violent reaction to Punk and Punks. A bunch of London ne’er-do-wells who stole to fund a habit, ran around in gangs and sold their grannies for five minutes of fame (an image that we innocent provincials then had to live up to or live down). But at least he’s honest and tells it with humility. It sounds and feels right. From a Muslim background himself, he makes a great analogy between Punk and Islam. “The West, largely, sees Islam as an angry, confrontational religion and I can understand that. If punk rock had a corresponding religious belief to match its aesthetics, it would have been Islam. The raging, the rallying, the cliquey-ness of different sects, the refusal to compromise and the lack of tolerance for other movements would have been a perfect match….At Muslim meetings, sermons or whatever, the overriding theme appears to be the laying down of some kind of threat, that God is very angry, getting angrier by the minute and wants you to do something about it before it’s too late. There are no such things as hymns in Muslim ceremonies or services, but if there were, they’d probably sound something like the most ferocious punk-rock anthems ever written.” Near the end of the book, there’s an amazing paragraph where he’s glad to see the back of the 80s. “As the 1980s made way for the 1990s, I felt a tangible sense of relief, a wind of change drifting inexorably towards me. I felt no fear or trepidation, just a calm, welcoming acceptance. I was only too happy to shrug off a whole decade, like the discarding of an ill-fitting jacket I’d never wanted in the first place. For me, it had been a decade of misery.” I felt exactly the same. My appreciation of Punk and experience of post-Punk life was similar to yours, Andy. Except that you took the drugs and I took the education. I never pretended I was thick or hard. My big problem with Punk was that this was a credibility requirement. Nevertheless, we can both ask ourselves the question you left us with at the end of your book: “I sometimes wonder how my life would have unfolded had it not been hijacked by punk rock.” Kinnell, Tommy!!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica 3 (the Mark De Boffin mix)

Move over Edward de Bono and Alain de Botton. This is the Mark de Boffin mix. Based on the kind of thinking I call Avantgardening – digging for the roots, nurturing what’s growing at the edge of the world of memory. I’m looking for Numu. That’s new music to you. This is how it’s going to happen. The best voices and lyricists from the world of rock – certainly including Jack Penate and Brandon Flowers – will move away from the guitar/bass/drums four-square rock band format and into electronica. Oh, I know, similar movements have been tried before. But have they succeeded? No, I say. When Billy Mackenzie’s arrogance gave up Alan Rankine, the game was up for The Associates. He kept the name but henceforth, William, it was really nothing. You were a perfect soundless voice in the eighties wilderness. Only when Boris Blank, the sound of Yello, picked you up could we hear your mouth move. Then, you were the rhythm divine on single occasions, inside Yello albums, alongside Shirley Bassey and banks of perfectly orchestrated technology. If only you’d acceded to the request and actually joined Yello, we’d have had the first, perfect crossover. But you wouldn’t and didn’t. The only Associate, your power dwindled. There was no techno-soundtrack to your voice, as there couldashouldabeen. You took to raising racing whippets, won a few prizes, but put yourself down once and for all. For you, maybe the crossover was too early (or too late for your glamour chase). So, I’m calling for musicians to cease holding onto anachronistic modes of making music and cross over into electronica now. Indie, rock, soul, funk, jazz. Move over. The world has become electronica. We are living inside it. Touch wood. Torchwood. If only I were musical, I’d do it myself. I’d make it happen. I’d form the perfect band called Florence Mightinhale, whose first album would be entitled I Sink Therefore I Spam. Not about sampling and stealing and borrowing and begging and all that laziness afforded by technology ever since the early 80s. But a newly minted sound, bouncing inside a triangle of Blondie, Associates and Kraftwerk on a great day (and Abba, Blood Sweat & Tears and Human League on a good day). A new genre incorporating dubjazz called Afrodizzi or Blisstempo; but, of course, electronica, like all good music today. Oh, no, I can smell mushrooms. Hvordan frustrerende! Somebody’s already got there before me. Röyksopp. Junior is the best album in the first decade of this, our last century. I don’t have to listen to all the rest to make that judgement. I just know. Those perfect pop lyrics. The sound of today. Anneli Drecker and Karin Dreijer Andersson, your voices are liquid loveliness. You abbadabadoo it for me. You put the English language through a crushed velvet Manga machine before sending it first class on the Nozomi bullet train from Tokyo to Hiroshima. It’s a sound I can eat for breakfast Melody AM, or when I’m having a Junior Senior moment as the cocks are crowing.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

About time

Today, we celebrate the 138th birthday of Marcel Proust, who invented our understanding of the purpose of memory – to rediscover and reconsider the past in order to better appreciate the present. If you think this is telling you what you already know, you’d be right. (Yet, as Mark E Smith has said: ‘There’s nothing stranger than the things you know but don’t quite realise.’). It’s just that you haven’t done enough of it. You certainly haven’t made an art form out of it, like Marcel did. Today, nobody expects you to read the six volumes of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. And few could. It’s a marathon. It’s an ocean. I took my first dip in my early twenties, yet only found the necessary time commitment when commuting for four hours a day about ten years ago. Proust died at the age of 51. He’d spent the previous 15 years writing these volumes. What was he doing, shut up in his cork-lined bedroom, with papers spread all around him? Well, he was making an investigation into the infinity of tiny moments of time, officially gone, but effectively re-happening as he found them, as new psychological events. For most people, it appears that the past is a dead zone, best left unexplored. For some who cannot but help remember, it’s full of creatures, admonitions and warnings. Here be monsters. Yes, life is about moving forward, constantly pushing the boundaries of the present beyond arms’ length, plunging headlong into the future in the hope of catching it by the tail. Yet, within this momentum, is always the opportunity of exploring pockets of experience we call time past. Nobody should believe that Proust was just an aesthete who gave up on life and retreated to his room to contemplate a disappeared world he could not hope to recapture. He did rediscover that world and he continued to live in the now. Alain De Botton said as much in How Proust Can Change Your Life. It’s short. Read that instead. ‘Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it…this may be only the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to recreate it in our mind’s eye…It suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.’ For De Botton, Proust and other artists like him, actually bring back to life valuable yet neglected aspects of our experience. When I was growing up, the title was translated as Remembrance of Things Past, which misses the point in a big way. Today, the title is translated literally, as Proust intended, as In Search Of Lost Time. For that is what it is about. Time. And extending the memory muscle in pursuit of it. If I take a moment to consider, all my favourite authors take time as their common subject, in one way or another. James Joyce captures a culture and a lifetime in one Dublin day in Ulysses. Haruki Murakami enters parallel universes through doorways from everyday, mundane life. W G Sebald literally walks through time and illuminates layers of the past. Samuel Beckett watches time drip from a tap and waits. Gabriel Garcia Marquez stretches time until you can feel its sinews snapping. My favourite films and film makers follow suit. Edgar Reitz with his Heimat trilogy and Wim Wenders with Wings Of Desire. And, as I keep saying, music is about time. Well, I would. Like Marcel, I’m a natural born reflectionist.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica 2 (the Avant-gardener mix)

I like various aspects of electronica and always have. Now, I'd like to explore it more, to see if there's something new I can take in. To see if there’s somewhere new it can take me. For me, it will always be a means to an end, a technological support system to convey another feeling. That first feeling was pop - what we grew up with. Or should I say Popcorn? Hot Butter re-recorded this, the first synthpop instrumental hit in 1972 (and covered again by so many since, from Jean Michel Jarre to Herb Alpert and Aphex Twin - and, another techno-dance favourite of mine, Daft Punk, who included elements of it in Around The World). Popcorn emerged around the same time that Brian Eno was wowing us with his synth. I remember that it was the Roxy Music single Pyjamarama (not on any of the LPs) that did it for me. Stuck in a long traffic jam near Llangollen on the A5, on our annual summer pilgrimage to the homeland in Bangor, I recall shouting at my father to switch the station back on half way through the song. I was 13 and very aware that I had just walked my mind into another world and there was no going back. When Kraftwerk emerged with Autobahn in 1974, I knew Bowie and was growing into a world of rock music. This German band represented the acceptable tip of a world of dark and brooding LP covers I'd discovered in W H Smith's record department from bands called Amon Duül, Can, Cluster and Neu! Autobahn was my first experience of ‘found sound’ and the appliance of technology to replicate real-life noise. When Lou Reed produced Metal Machine Music in 1975 (the aural equivalent of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake), it was nothing to do with electronica and more about his state of mind and bad relationship with his record company. Just as Brian Eno was inventing ambient, with slightly disappointing albums like Another Green World, Kraftwerk were changing their sound, introducing the Minimoog among a whole bank of new technology in a purpose-built studio called Kling Klang. I read about it and wanted to be there. Radio-activity was a superb LP, yet somehow also disappointing, because, title track aside, Kraftwerk had turned away from the approachability of Autobahn. It wasn’t until mid-77 when they re-emerged. I’d gone into Stafford’s only Punk record shop to buy God Save The Queen, but what I heard was Showroom Dummies. I was as knocked out by this as I had been five months earlier by Bowie’s Low – still the best album and electronica of 77, ahead of Marley's Exodus for me. This track, and the accompanying LP, Trans-Europe Express, took electronica into another dimension. It was entirely behind my desire to go around Europe by Interrail, which I finally did in 1981. But Kraftwerk still didn’t truly make it to the mainstream until the Man Machine LP in May 78. By then, we’d had the Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder breakthrough I mentioned. Yet, as beautiful as Man Machine was, it seemed like a swan-song to me. That Kraftwerk had reached their height and, from now on, would just be an influence for others. And so it proved. While we were all distracted by Power Pop, Mod and Ska revivalists, Kraftwerk paved the way for many of the Post-Punk and New Romantic bands, from the drum machine of Echo and the Bunnymen and Martin Hannett’s production of Joy Division, to the techno-funk of A Certain Ratio on the one hand, to The Associates, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on the other (the latter, amusingly, claiming to have invented the incorporation of ‘found sound’ into recorded music!!). Rediscovering the catalyst of electronica was a great lifesaver to me when I emerged from two years in the heart of darkness at the end of 1980. As ever, electronica was the way to somewhere else. But the purest sound of electronica will always be Kraftwerk’s to me. OK, they’d topped out and were in Computerworld by 1981. But everything else we hear today is ‘son of’. They’ve toured as recently as 2007/08. The resultant double LP, Minimum-Maximum, has its good points, but it sounds like what it is – a retrospective without the energy and excitement and sense of time and place of the originals. Nevertheless, I was listening to the version of Radio-activity on this album as we entered Hiroshima, by bullet train, in April this year. But I guess the big point I’m making in all this is to say that, for our generation, the baby-boomers, electronica was never an end in itself, but only a means to carry something else that already existed into a new place. I read an interesting article today about Generation Y – the kids born 1978-1994. How, for these people, rather than us or Generation X (1965-77), new media are not a tool, a means to an end. Technology is where they live. The medium is the message. That’s why so much electronica is mediocre, even crap, soulless and unedifying – rather than the exciting, cutting-edge support system, the escape route, it was for us. In our day, so much rock music was also dull, average and lacking. That’s where we lived. So, what electronica needs is its own Punk revolution to weed out the dross, clarify all that has gone before and set a new direction.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica (The Quinquagenarian Mix)

Yes, I know I should be listening to the Marcin Wasilewski Trio or Tom Farrell, but I’ve given in to a need to explore electronica. I’ve had to do something about a knowledge which began with Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, got drunk on DAF in the Palais Schaumburg, then stumbled up the Holger Hiller before falling foul of Aphex Twin and The Orb. So I dove into the deepend of a music download site somewhere on the west bank of the Rhine and emerged with Kompact Total 4 between my teeth and a piranha called Superpitcher on my tail. The latter’s version of Eno’s Baby’s On Fire sounds like Boney M doing Hendrix. That good? That bad? It’s all pretty relative, isn’t it? ‘Are you in the market for repetitive beats?’ the download site asked me. Actually, on first hearing, much of this stuff sounds like the klang you curse the 18 year-old knobcheese who drives past your window at 80mph four in the morning blasting out a death pulse from a neutron star. You feel like you need a day’s gardening after enduring Frei’s Freiland, or quality time at a health spa after subjecting your spirit to the doorbell disco of Maria by Closer Musik. A lot of it sounds like the soundtrack to a vicious burglary, produced by people who have forgotten what it means to put their arms around another person. This is the noise of a cold criminal nailing a cat to a wall in Yates’s wine bar in the centre of a city like yours. To get anything out of this you surely have to be more plastered than a plasterer from Plaistow. Or totally wired, can’t you see?! But you have to get through this cloud of confusion. There’s a long way to go and you need to enjoy the journey, so pay attention! After all, what with people so obsessed with genres these days, it’s difficult to take two steps forward into electronica without zig-zagging left and right and getting quite, quite lost. 2-Step/Garage. Abstract. Breaks. Dance. DJ Mix. Downtempo. Drum ‘n, Bass. Electroclash. Electronic Ambient. Electronic Dub. Electronic Experimental. Electronic Industrial. Global. Groove. House. IDM. Jungle. Krautrock. Leftfield. Nu-Jazz/Broken Beat. Remix. Techno. Trance. Trip-hop. Turntablism. Not to mention Aphrodisiac, Cannibalism and Roadrage. Actually, I made up the last three, but you get my point. Everybody wants their own genre in electronica. And, in this world of digital recording, precording and frecording, is anything not electronica? Or, looking at it the other way round, does electronica exist at all, or is it just a way of playing another style of music? I’m surprised about how incestuous it all is – everybody recording and remixing everyone else’s versions. You wipe my bottom, I’ll wipe yours. I don’t knock this approach – The Good Son vs The Only Daughter is a brilliant, Sylvian-supported remix of his album, Blemish, probably better than the original. But wipe your own arse is all I’d say, you 21st century gigolos. But is electronica worth it? That’s my question. Do I like it beatless, banging, grinding, sensual or glossy? You ain’t going to keep me out with no semantic smokescreen, Jörg! Even though, today, electronica is as wide as jazz and as deep as a painting by Marc Brown. Just because it starts with synthetic pop of the Rice Krispies variety like Röyksopp and ends way over the horizon with the avant-garde emetic of Triola. I will find something I like and turn it into memory mix. But just a word, D J Koze, about your mix of Reinhardt Voigt’s Zu Dicht Dran...remember you’re a human being - not even a dentist would do that. Finally – it doesn’t take long if you’re persistent - I think I’ve found something under Nu-Jazz: an album by Craig Taborn called Junk Magic. Sounds like The Pop Group or James White’s Contortions put through a synth. But I might start with The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime, a bottle of Adnam’s Innovation and a couple of Neurofen.

Maybe we make too much of electronica. It used to be nothing more than sequenced keyboards. Brian Eno showed its true worth, as ambient sound. Post-Punk bands like Human League and Simple Minds were keyboards-based bands. Remember, Punk had banned keyboards from the stage. They were Rick Wakeman’s toys. Yet, the summer of 77 may be recalled for the flowering of Punk, but I also recall it for two big tracks, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. These changed music forever. The Giorgio Moroder-led I Feel Love became the platform for the dance music we’ve known ever since. Oxygene was MOR Tangerine Dream, spawning the soft ambient and trance music to come. Interspersed with Dub and Punk, I played them over and over again. With Punk out of the way, keyboards were back. The early, experimental Human League singles and albums went nowhere. The hypnotic, multimedia live shows were witnessed by two students and a robot dog. Electonica had arrived on these shores. And it didn’t have to be Germanic or intellectual. It took a while for Human League and Simple Minds to work this one out. Cabaret Voltaire and bands like 23 Skidoo never did or didn’t care. They were happy with art-house. Then the New Romantics came along, bringing brightness and fun and a recall for Pop. With synth drums the technology of the day, electronica progressed into the mainstream. Simple Minds were very much part of this progression from German experimentation into British pop. They grew out of the ashes of a fake Punk band with a great name – Johnny And The Self-Abusers. They got their new Post-Punk name from Jean Genie by David Bowie, or Play It Safe by Iggy Pop. One way or the other. They were influenced by Lou Reed but interested in the experimentation that new synth technology now offered. So, early albums tended to reference Kraftwerk and Neu! and the more unapproachable Teutonic groups. It was not until they signed to Virgin that they began to make headway (this label had faith and patience and gave the breakthrough for so many bands, including The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Human League and Japan). They were even produced by the hippiest of hippies, Steve Hillage. They got to support Peter Gabriel. When I first saw them in March 1981, they were stretching out to headline places like The Venue in London. Jim Kerr would stride onto the stage in knee-length leather boots and jodhpurs. For all the world, the 21-year old electric equestrian. Something was changing. There was a new dream of gold. Jim Kerr is 50 today and much more has changed. Simple Minds occupied my thoughts greatly in 1981 and 1982. They promised me a miracle but they delivered something considerably less than that to the multitudes thereafter, during the course of the 80s. After a brief flirtation with pop somewhere in a new romantic summertime, they became a bloated stadium rock band, produced by the same man who went on to produce U2, Steve Lilywhite. In this, they had their greatest success. So that, at one point in the mid-to-late 80s, there was little difference between Simple Minds and U2. A long, long way from the roots in electronica. And that’s what I mean – electronica used to be a means not an end. The drum machine was never the star, only the satellite of love. Now it’s owned by the German death-heads once again. Personally, I like the bands who are trying to take it away from them and breathe some humanity back into it - like my favourite Norwegians, Royksopp.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Incendiary Device

I’ve been writing about the causes and effects of Punk. One rarely mentioned influence is humour. An important and often overlooked element of it all is the people who brought a smile to our faces towards the end of a very grim decade. It was more than the names of the bands or band members, though these were massively attractive in their own right. For some, the humour detracted from the seriousness of the message and the impact. It was plain for all to see when The Sex Pistols toured with The Clash, The Damned and The Heartbreakers at the end of 1976 that Captain Sensible and his crew were just not serious. Yet, for many of us initially put off by the violence of The Sex Pistols and the earnestness of The Clash, The Damned were the way in. Not that the Captain wasn’t political. He was originally a member of the Green Party. Even recently, in 2006, passing 50, he formed his own political entity, the Blah! Party. In his launch statement, he said: ‘Politics is dead. The British public aren't voting because the parties are totally ignoring their opinions. At the moment, the only real method of mass protest against this is by not voting, which is why voting figures continue to fall. But we believe that voting is an important part of the democratic process, and we want the Blah! Party to be the party of protest: a channel through which the people of the U.K. can vent their dissatisfaction at nonsensical everyday things, and protest against the government and the current crop of political parties.’ Now, it’s very hard to take someone seriously who wore a ballet tutu on stage. But somebody had to do the nonsensical thing back in 1976. We needed the fun that ought to be part of life when you’re 17 or 18, when you don’t really care about voting. To make a splash, The Damned were more than happy to forget the message and cover themselves with foam or margarine for a newspaper or album cover. Ray Burns, aka Captain Sensible, had been trying to make his mark on the music business for some years. As I’ve said, Punk, and therefore Punks, had history. They didn’t just arrive out of nowhere. Although it does, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that Captain Sensible ended up topping the charts with Happy Talk in 1982. Already 22 by 1976, he had to get a move on. And he’d started his musical career as part of Johnny Moped’s band. Paul Halford, aka Johnny Moped, was and remains a mysterious figure. Throughout his admittedly short-lived career as an unlikely Punk icon, Paul Halford had trouble holding on to his job in a cardboard box factory. In 1975, Halford, Burns and a bunch of Croydon mates managed to record but not release a single called Disco Girls. By mid-76, they were calling themselves Johnny Moped and could say that they were around at the birth of Punk in the UK. You only had to look at Paul Halford and you’d burst out laughing. Unprepossessing was the word. Yet you soon forgot this when you heard the vinyl or saw the band play live. Not that they had any vinyl until the summer of 1977 – today’s date, in fact. Incendiary Device/No-One is still considered a Punk classic. The growling voice and hard-driving rhythm was the best that the Chiswick Records label - second only to Stiff Records in re-launching the careers of never-has-beens - had to offer. Ray Burns left after weeks in 1976 to form The Damned. But he introduced his replacement, Slimey Toad, who had played with Damned drummer Rat Scabies in a band which had had a residency at a mental home. Johnny Moped first really came to the notice of the Punk press through being one of the early bands to play live at London’s Roxy Club. Indeed, their debut on vinyl was their live contribution to Live At The Roxy WC2 album in June 1977. But it wasn’t as good as Incendiary Device. John Peel championed it and it became number 15 in his Festive Fifty of 1977. One critic described it as moronic punk ‘n’ roll. OK, the lyrics wouldn’t win the Germaine Greer prize for poetry (Walking down the road with my incendiary device/Looking for an ear to blow it up with gelignite/Stick it in her lughole/Watch it blow her head apart/Stick in her lughole/Stick it in her other part/My device is nearly ready/Grab her neck and hold her steady/Stick it in her), but its energy enabled Martin and me to bounce off the corridor walls of our halls of residence in Bradford a few months later. It may well have been beer-sodden pub-rock, but it gave us what we wanted. But Paul Halford wasn’t giving his band members what they wanted. He wouldn’t give up his job in the cardboard box factory, which tended to get in the way of recording and releasing their first LP while the Punk boom was still on. To get their singer to a recording session, the rest of the band had to kidnap him from his workplace. Once, they painted him all green so he couldn’t go back. The paint didn’t come off for weeks. On another occasion, they found him queueing up to get into one of his own gigs to see himself. The band split. After the band split, that’s when they decided to record the album. That was Johnny Moped for you. Halford was persuaded to gig some more, to great acclaim. They reformed for a couple of well-received gigs at London’s Roundhouse. In March 1978, they even released a second single, the wonderfully titled, Darling, Let’s Have Another Baby (only Johnny Moped could have got away with the lyric I’ll be quite happy/To wash and change his nappy; you can see Paul singing this with his wife, Brenda on a recent YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCo2nxh1XA). This was quickly followed by an ignored classic of an LP, Cycledelic. The Guinness Encylopaedia Of Popular Music names it as one of the best 50 Punk albums of all time (personally, I’d struggle to name 50 Punk albums!). And I still hadn’t seen them live. When the chance came to see them support Adam and the Ants at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street in early April 1978, I couldn’t resist. Max Jingoff and I cancelled our lectures for a couple of days and hitch-hiked our way there and back. It was a fabulous gig, riotous and energetic, number eight in my all-time top 25 gigs. Johnny Moped was an eccentric. Both Punk and the world of cardboard box manufacture would just not have been the same without his humour.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

I like Jodie Foster, but...

Late Saturday night I broke one of my own rules for life. I was wide awake, waiting for the flush of alcohol to dissipate – after a Mojito, half a bottle of a decent NZ Pinot Noir, topped off with several shots of a Guavita, a Cuban liqueur, sweetening a fine Monte Cristo cigar. When I drink too much these days, which is rare, I have to wait for my head to clear before going to bed. It’s a dangerous time. What do I do with this intoxicated me that isn’t me? Read? No, impossible. Listen to music? I seemed to require something visual. So the mistake I made, and the rule I broke, was to switch on late night TV, instead of watching a favourite film. It could have been Blue Velvet, or Rumble Fish, Wings Of Desire or any of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, even something from the Marx Brothers. But no, it was TV – which is always a mistake for me, whatever my state of sobriety. For, at this time of night, or any time of night for that matter, all there is to watch on TV is crime. I have not yet fathomed why the entertainment providers (that TV companies are) have decided to force-feed us crime. People do not like crime. Everything is about the human short-cut that is crime: the worst side of human nature. First, I watched Flightplan, an unlikely but compelling tale of a woman whose child is ‘stolen’ on an airborne plane by a hijacker and secreted in the hold. It was the ‘one person against the world’ scenario that Hollywood regurgitates constantly, with Jodie Foster playing the female Bruce Willis. Jodie Foster excels in such roles. I always stick with her films because I find her very attractive. It would, however, be good to see her in something that didn’t involve rape, murder or some other form of grisly violence. But my negative force field wasn’t sated yet. From this, I went on to watch Wallander, the original Swedish film of a TV series that Kenneth Branagh has recently starred in over here. Incest, religious bigotry, insanity, murder, the lot, in yet another police detective drama. The whole thing only redeemed by a performance from the female lead, Johanna Sällström. There was always the off button, I can hear you saying. But these dynamic women kept me watching. And I always wonder about women and crime. How crime is, by and large, such a man-made thing. How, by and large, women are caught up in it. Different chromosomes. But I was there, still watching, waiting for burning alcohol to escape my body, feeling acutely sensitive to such subjects. To watch them is to feel vulnerable and, eventually, desecrated. And to realise that there is a need for an intoxicated part of me to watch them is what makes me sad and depleted. When I finally went to bed it was 2am. Wary and weary of humankind, I went into the spare room, having a need to be alone. I slept badly, awaking at 8 to the enervating sound of barking dogs, let out by our anti-social neighbours. I felt that there was something I had to attend to, but could not bring my mind around to it. I felt dizzy, nauseous. Our own dog needed walking. Eventually, I knew I would have to spend my day undoing the damage I had done to myself in the late hours of the previous night. I had left myself wide open to a virus from the world of entertainment. At such times, I know only one tool that works. Music. I keep coming back to that thought. The one invention of humankind that justifies the species. So, after walking the dog, a long, difficult, hot walk with a humming in my head, we eat breakfast. But there is the joyful Sunday morning sound of Jazz FM. I hear something that reminds me of Steely Dan and sends me off into a reverie of how much this band saved me in my nervy mid-teens back in the 70s. When I’ve made a mistake and broken my own rules for life, there is always somebody to help in the world of music.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

He did Poinciana his way

It’s a hot day. All the windows are open. Different thoughts are competing lazily for attention, if such a contradiction is possible. It’s the right day for listening to Poinciana, the song Ahmad Jamal released in January 1958. It’s a perfect foreground to the ear-splitting grinding of roof tiles going on three doors down the road. Ahmad Jamal, 79 today, was a favourite pianist of Miles Davis, who felt that his playing revolutionised the use of space and time in jazz. Both got a huge amount out of very few notes. Loads of people have recorded Poinciana, before and since. Dave Brubeck, Glenn Miller, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, Nat King Cole. It wasn’t Jamal’s song, but it was after he’d recorded it live. He owned it. Just as Sid Vicious owns My Way, leaving Sinatra’s version trailing in its wake. And, yes, Jamal’s version of Poinciana is also better than Sinatra’s. OK, one is instrumental and the other vocal. But, hey, Nat King Cole’s is better than Sinatra’s.

Today, last night, in fact, a very long, lost friend came to the forefront of my mind. I haven’t seen or heard from Martin Higgott since we were both 12 years old. We’d spent the previous three years growing up on the same housing estate. His father had been a triallist for Stoke City. His sister had got pregnant while listening to Albatross by Fleetwood Mac. Presumably, someone else was involved, though we all felt it was supernatural at the time. But, then, we were only 10. Martin didn’t have his own football boots. I was picked for the first team at our secondary school. First game, away to Rising Brook, 0-0 at half-time. Me, substituted. By Martin. Can I borrow your boots? Goes and scores a hat-trick. In my boots. 5-0 to us. He stayed in the team and I didn’t get a look-in till he left the school over a year later. I never lent my boots to him again. But they never scored three for me. Anyway, Martin, you’re 50 today, somewhere. So, happy birthday!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Roadrunner once

Everybody has performed Pablo Picasso, but it’s Roadrunner that really made the difference. As you can tell, I need to say something about Jonathan Richman today. Trouble is, I haven’t got another lifetime in which to say it. But I have to try. Jonathan Richman had one great thought and it was worth hanging on to…Late at night. Out on the open road. Alone in the modern world. Driving with the radio on. Aged 18. Free. This is how it’s always going to be. It’s a moment in your life you know you’ll remember forever. And, clearly, I do. I can appreciate it as much today, aged 50, as I could when actually experiencing it along the byways of Staffordshire in the summer nights of 1977. A rare coincidence of being and feeling alive. And the soundtrack to this would be something like Spanish Stroll by Mink Deville, Whole Wide World by Wreckless Eric, Less Than Zero by Elvis Costello and First Time by The Boys. Plus, of course, that song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers that described it all. Roadrunner. Going faster miles an hour. Released, or rather re-released on the wonderfully named Beserkley Records at this time, the end of June, 1977. In the middle of the Punk explosion. That Jonathan Richman was considered to be part of the Punk scene is as difficult to understand now as it was then. For starters, he was 26 and far too old. To even begin to understand, you have to know the story of Punk. It didn’t just come from nowhere in 1976/7, though it felt much like that to most of us at the time. Punk had a heritage that was both American and British. Even The Sex Pistols played songs from 60s bands like The Monkees and Dave Berry. The 60s were not the problem – that was the hippies and nestheads, everything they represented and the control they exerted. And we all know Joe Strummer wanted to go even further back to the 50s and become Eddie Cochrane. I’ll leave the British story for another time. The American part of this heritage is what concerns us here. Understanding Jonathan Richman depends on knowing that the American story splits into three strands. The first, as represented by Iggy and the Stooges and MC5, was the garage band scene – essentially, bad-ass hippies on acid progressing the darker side of the beat group explosion. It’s exemplified by the bands on the 1972 LP collection, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, compiled by Lenny Kaye, soon to be part of Patti Smith’s band. The cover notes in the gatefold sleeve were among the first to describe ‘punk rock’ bands like The Electric Prunes and The Seeds. The MC5 took this music to the extreme with Kick Out The Jams. Then Iggy and the Stooges took it further with Funhouse and Raw Power. At the very same time, the second strand was the sole province of Andy Warhol’s house band, The Velvet Underground – the ultimate, inside-out, negative image of Californian peace-and-love psychedelia (on the surface). A very strange mixture of Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico, The Velvets combined progressive rock with art-house antics, avant-garde noise and folksy doo-wop harmonising. The influences of Punk are curious indeed. Utterly unsuccessful at the time, The Velvets produced a spate of seminal LPs which were to gain them a retrospective credibility for being so single-mindedly ‘unhippy’. Although some of their songs were more complex than anyone thought (as musicologist and ex-Passage frontman, Dick Witts says in his biography of the band, The Velvet Underground), many were simple constructions that newly formed Punk bands could copy and include as covers to add credibility to their 1977 sets. Buffalo Johnson’s Punk band, Trash, performed a very passable version of White Light, White Heat. Now, aged 18 in 1969, an impressionable Jonathan Richman became infatuated with The Velvet Underground, leaving his home town of Boston for New York, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to break into their scene as a musician. He returned to Massachussets. Not long after, Lou Reed and the Velvets followed him, having themselves failed in New York. They actually found their audience among students in Boston. The sound that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground then adopted was to be the sound that Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers would take forward when they formed in 1970. In retrospect, this sound has been described as proto-punk garage rock. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Listen to What Goes On and New Age from The Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, Vol 1, then to She Cracked and Hospital from the first Modern Lovers album, produced by ex-Velvet John Cale, and you’ll find it hard to disagree with me that there isn’t a great deal of difference between Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. They’ve been trying to sound like each other on and off for the last 40 years. It was just that Jonathan Richman took time to emerge. As for Roadrunner, it first emerged as a single in the States in September, 1975. Then again in October, 1976, when that first album, The Modern Lovers, was eventually released after four years. Ironically, this was around the time that the third and final strand of US Punk heritage was kicking in. Although Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers had nothing whatsoever to do with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Talking Heads (although one founder member, Jerry Harrison, left to form the latter), it was this awakening, with its early vinyl releases, that led to the lumping in of JR with Punk. There was hardly any new vinyl around, so having an early release meant you got your record played in all the right places, wherever Punk was mentioned. So, Jonathan Richman got to ride the wave and make it first in the UK, just as The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads did. And, so finally, Beserkley released Roadrunner for the first time in the UK, because we’d been listening to the import for the previous six months. It wasn’t till even later in the summer that they released the first Modern Lovers LP in the UK. They obviously knew something we didn’t. It would soon become clear. For Richman was ready to release his next album on an unsuspecting public - Rock’n’Roll With The Modern Lovers. Here were whimsical songs about leprechauns, insects and abominable snowmen. Was it Steve Hillage and Gong all over again? Then came his biggest UK hit, Egyptian Reggae. After this, JR never again left his own version of Narnia. Though he did leave a bemused Punk and New Wave audience in his wake. I never saw Jonathan Richman live, though I did hear him. He came to Bradford University in 1978. I was refused entry by a bouncer with whom I’d had a recent disagreement. While I stayed outside, Bingo, Sparky and Max Jingoff went in, saw him and even talked to him afterwards, sitting on the edge of the stage. I sat outside and listened. It was late at night. The stars were shining. I was alone in the modern world. Aged 18. And free. And that’s the way it’s always been.


Roadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive past the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio onI'm in love with MassachusettsAnd the neon when it's cold outsideAnd the highway when it's late at nightGot the radio onI'm like the roadrunnerAlrightI'm in love with modern moonlight128 when it's dark outsideI'm in love with MassachusettsI'm in love with the radio onIt helps me from being alone late at nightIt helps me from being lonely late at nightI don't feel so bad now in the carDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerThat's rightSaid welcome to the spirit of 1956Patient in the bushes next to '57The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quickSuburban trees, suburban speedAnd it smells like heaven(thunder)And I say roadrunner onceRoadrunner twiceI'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be out all nightRoadrunnerThat's rightWell nowRoadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive to the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio on at nightAnd me in love with modern moonlightMe in love with modern rock & rollModern girls and modern rock & rollDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerO.K., now you sing Modern Lovers(Radio On!)I got the AM(Radio On!)Got the car, got the AM(Radio On!)Got the AM sound, got the(Radio On!)Got the rockin' modern neon sound(Radio On!)I got the car from Massachusetts, got the(Radio On!)I got the power of Massachusetts when it's late at night(Radio On!)I got the modern sounds of modern MassachusettsI've got the world, got the turnpike, got theI've got the, got the power of the AMGot the, late at night, (?), rock & roll late at nightThe factories and the auto signs got the power of modern soundsAlrightRight, bye bye!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

The road less travelled by

Writers, artists, often talk about the muse in their lives. Others dismiss the idea as some kind of shape-shifting or mental displacement. I’ve always been open to the idea. I’m not superstitious, but I prefer to protect my muse while at the same time publicly recognising her and the role she plays in my life. Last night I dreamt about my muse. She’d just had a baby and needed to get back from work to attend to its needs. We were at our place of work together, a large corporate entity, trying not to let it dominate our intended activity – which was, at last, after a very long time apart, to spend some time together. I won’t deny that there was an element of sexual anticipation. Yet, as ever, tenderness was the most important expression of our relationship – a soft understanding of mutual need. As I helped her with some household tasks while she attended to her baby’s needs, I ran the back of my hand down her cheek and said, ‘It’s good to spend some time together.’ Then I awoke, with an unusually full reflection of the dream. My muse only appears at times of my life when there is a fork in the path. It’s as if she’s there to remind me that there is an important choice to be made. In guiding me, she is ever herself – a calm combination of a will to love, with a quiet, unshakable, inner confidence about who she is and what she stands for. I’ll be watching and listening closely to see what this means.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Nopane in my brain

Lester Bullock, more famously known as Dillinger, is 56 today. How did I get to Dillinger and why is he still running around my brain? We can all post-rationalise and say we were into reggae in the lead-up to Punk. Truer to say that some of us were into Bob Marley, the first reggae ‘crossover’ artist. I first noticed Bob Marley on my Sunday morning paper round. At the age of 15, I was delivering two heavy, Sunday paper bag loads for 50 pence, to bulk up the 75 pence I got for my five-nightly, five-mile evening paper round. While I was baiting a dog and jamming several newspaper supplements through a rusty letterbox one cool November morning, a front page caught my eye. It was taken up entirely with the front cover to Natty Dread, the newly released LP from Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was the most beautiful LP cover I had ever seen. Buying the LP would have been beyond the pale (and cost over two weeks’ ‘wages’). I wasn’t yet that experimental. My meagre record collection contained albums by David Bowie, Status Quo, T Rex and Elton John. Disco, soul or black music of any kind was not for me. I lived in a quiet, traditional, mostly white Midlands county town in which it was normal to poke fun at people with dark skins. I hadn’t realised that Eric Clapton’s hit, I Shot The Sheriff, was a Marley cover. There had been Ken Boothe. But, even when Everything I Own reached number one in 1974, solitary reggae artists still seemed like novelty acts on Top Of The Pops in the early 70s. A few weeks after I saw the Natty Dread cover, however, we had Rupie Edwards’ Ire Feelings at the top of the charts. Something was stirring in me, but local conditioning and peer pressure kept it down. But not for long. By 1975, I was actually attending gigs and literally feeling the bass sound run right through me. Now, the whole world was talking about Bob Marley. I didn’t get down to London to see Bob Marley and the Wailers live at the Lyceum in the summer (my big trip was Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court instead), but I was aware of it and rushed out to buy Live! when it emerged in December. A few months later, even The Rolling Stones had included a reggae cover version on their LP, Black and Blue. Reggae was officially OK if they said so. Then, the fledgling Virgin record company made what seemed a brave decision at the time to release The Front Line, a promotional LP of various reggae acts, including U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds, pushing these bands into appearing at the Reading Rock Festival in August. At the time, I remember thinking this was a bad idea. I attended the three days of this festival with Buffalo Johnson and a couple of other mates. The two reggae acts were literally canned off by heavy metal fans who had come to see Rory Gallagher, Ted Nugent and Black Oak Arkansas. I wanted them off, too. It was the right time, but wrong audience, wrong place. Punk was around the corner. John Peel was playing dub reggae. The old order, exemplified by the Southern Man Lynyrd Skynyrd brigade, was slipping away. I was faced with a choice that took me several months to make. The fact that I chose Punk meant that I brought reggae with me. The tie-up between Punk and Reggae was certainly odd. Even Bob Marley thought it strange at first, though he ended up releasing Punky Reggae Party as the B-side of Jamming in 1977. He could never understand why Punks desecrated themselves with safety pins and ripped clothes. In Jamaica, people were striving to get away from such things. It was only when he made the rebel connection that congruence became possible. Punk and Reggae were anti-establishment. Both were resistance movements in the heart of Babylon. Dope and weed were associated with hippies and the old order, but their prevalence in the Rasta-related reggae world meant that it was OK for Punks to indulge in an underground way. Which they did. Especially at the Roxy Club in London’s Covent Garden, the major showcase for Punk acts in the first six months on 1977, when they were banned from playing most everywhere else. The music press regularly reported the goings on at this den of iniquity. For us, in the provinces, it was our vicarious taste of the action. We would be told the playlist of host DJ Don Letts – in between the acts of adrenalin aggression from the likes of Wire, Buzzcocks and Adverts, Letts would play all the latest Jamaican 45s. In our remote Midlands hideout, we’d hear of acts like Big Youth, Culture, Lee Perry and Junior Murvin, the latter with his Police And Thieves. And, naturally, we wanted to hear what was happening. John Peel played more of it. Then The Clash finally emerged on vinyl and championed it, with their cover version of Police And Thieves. Marley was touring again and about to launch his best and most popular LP, Exodus. I’m hardly likely to forget it, as it was released on 3rd June, 1977, my 18th birthday. The Sex Pistols were number one in our hearts with God Save The Queen during Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. I was in the middle of my A level exams. My parents were splitting up. The first love of my life was not responding. I was exploding. I spent some of the summer of 77 recording whatever dub reggae John Peel played. And this I took with me to Bradford University at the end of September, thinking that I would be the only white person in this new universe to like Punk and Reggae. I was wrong. I very quickly met Martin, Graham and Alan, who liked both. Martin had Live! He’d played No Woman, No Cry on the mornings of his A level exams. Graham loved dub. Alan had Virgin’s Front Line LP. And, right at that very time, there emerged a single by a Jamaican artist called Dillinger, called Cokane In My Brain. Martin bought the single. He was the only one who had a record player. That’s how I got to Dillinger. Cokane In My Brain/Buckingham Palace/Ratnam Pizer. And after that, we didn’t need no fertilizer. A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork...

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Andy and Jeff

Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark is 50 today. A very underrated band, OMD – definitely worth a revisit for people like me who like to see where the sound of today actually came from. They were a celebration of electronica, managing to avoid the label of New Romanticism yet riding on the wave. Their lush sound was ahead of its time. As singer, McCluskey himself brought intelligence to his lyrics and passion to his live performance. I saw OMD as a singles band – Joan Of Arc, Souvenir etc. These came at a very troubling time of my life. But I hear them today and can face that time with equanimity. I did and will always associate OMD with Enola Gay, however, their crowning moment. After visiting Hiroshima a couple of months back, it obviously carries an even greater significance. But OMD were more than a singles band. They are also remembered for albums like their first eponymous LP and Architecture and Morality. Their biggest selling LP was Sugar Tax, from as late as 1991. Somehow, that passed me by. I was beneath the surface with David Sylvian. I never realised that McCluskey was the force behind Atomic Kitten and their number one single, Whole Again, in 1998. A reformed OMD performed gigs to celebrate thirty years as a band in 2007/8. Where was I? In New Zealand or Cuba, or simply somewhere down the garden path looking for messages.

It shouldn’t be this way, but most of my generation (and those following) know Jeff Beck only for the party perennial, Hi Ho Silver Lining. It’s hard for me to believe that Jeff Beck turns 65 today, just a week or so after Chris Spedding. They seemed to serve different generations. For me, Jeff Beck was definitely the previous generation. OK, that didn’t stop me liking Hendrix and The Doors. And I grew into music with The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Eric Clapton, Beck’s contemporaries. He was one of the famous trio, alongside Jimmy Page and Clapton, who played guitar in The Yardbirds. It’s strange how things happen. There’s The Jeff Beck Group, with Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and others. Then just Beck working with Stewart. Beck has a car crash and leaves music for a year. Stewart joins Ronnie Wood and The New Faces. Stewart’s career trajectory changes. Beck’s goes underground. Everybody remembers The Faces. They become John Peel’s favourite ever band. Not many people remember Beck, Bogert and Appice. Yet, Beck’s guitar prowess lived on through many solo projects and diversion into jazz rock. To those who know, he is one of rock’s top 10 great guitarists. Hey ho. Every cloud…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

How little we need to be happy

June 2009 marks 25 years of the solo career of David Sylvian, whose music has made a major contribution to settling the serotonin and other neuro-transmitters in my brain over half my lifetime. It had seemed like a brave and cruel decision to ditch Japan at the height of their hard-won fame in 1982. Hard on the band, hard on the fans. But, for Sylvian, fame was the problem. With a lifetime of interior travelling still to do, fame was an exterior journey he was not prepared to take. Being voted the world’s most beautiful man had seemed like the last straw. When Brilliant Trees emerged, however, Sylvian still had much of his loyal retinue. Red Guitar was a Top 20 hit. It was to be his only one. For, with his first solo album, Sylvian had jumped in the deep end and most Japan fans either couldn’t swim or found that the water would not support the weight of their bodies. The music was too philosophical, profound, inward-looking. The jump from the thoughtful pop of The Art Of Parties to the avant-jazz of Weathered Wall was cavernous. From this point on, by his own contrivance, Sylvian was ‘hiding in backwaters’. To find him, you had to be on a similar inward journey. I remember how, late one morning in June 1984, I asked permission from my employer, an antiques dealer in London’s Mayfair, to take a couple of hours out to go and queue outside HMV Records at the junction of Oxford Street and South Molton Street. The first so many hundred copies of Brilliant Trees had been autographed by the man himself. On my way around the corner from Bond Street, I remember encountering Griff Rhys Jones pushing a small child in a pram. The first series of Alas Smith and Jones had just run on the BBC. Our eyes met as I joined the end of the queue. I was very excited. That sense of anticipation and heightened consciousness has remained with me whenever it’s been time for a David Sylvian music release over the last quarter of a century. His very personal journey from the edge of pop to the jazz avant garde has been one I’ve been very willing to accompany him on. We’ve had a lot to share. And he’s been a good listener. I’ll have much more to say about this long-standing relationship. But, in the meantime, occupying various rooms in my head, here are 25 for the 25. My favourite is Camp Fire: Coyote Country from the Gone To Earth album of 1986. It doesn’t even feature Sylvian’s voice, an instrument in its own right – just the most sublime piece of Robert Fripp guitar work I’m ever likely to hear. There’s a special crystal-lined corridor in my mind that’s purely dedicated to it. The only piece of music that’s ever approached it was the version of Threnody For Souls In Torment I heard Fripp play in Coventry Cathedral a month back. But that’s typical of David Sylvian’s collaborative work. He contains the genius of so many others, just as they contain him. His next LP, Manofon, due out in September, I eagerly await. And I look forward to our next 25 years together.

A New Career In A New Town (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Nightporter (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Ghosts (single from Tin Drum LP, 1982)
Forbidden Colours (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from soundtrack of film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, 1983)
The Ink In The Well (single from Brilliant Trees LP, 1984)
Words With The Shaman, Part 2: Incantation (from cassette LP, Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities, 1985)
Taking The Veil (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Before The Bullfight (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Camp Fire: Coyote Country (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Upon This Earth (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Maria (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Mother and Child (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel) (with Holger Czukay - from Plight & Premonition LP, 1988)
Pop Song (single from Pop Song EP, 1989)
Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki) (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from Sakamoto LP, Heartbeat, 1991)
Pocket Full Of Change (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Cries & Whispers (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Thalheim (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Café Europa (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
All Of My Mother’s Names (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Linoleum (with Tweaker – from Tweaker LP, The Attraction To All Things Uncertain, 2001)
Late Night Shopping (from Blemish LP, 2003)
How Little We Need To Be Happy (from Blemish LP, 2003)
The Librarian (with Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – on their Out In The Sticks EP, 2005)
A History Of Holes (with Nine Horses – from the Nine Horses LP, Snow Borne Sorrow, 2005)

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Lost friend

I ought to say something. Buffalo Johnson is 50 today. We were friends from the age of 10. At the age of 29, he married my little sister, his second wife. Today, estranged from me as well as her, but not their three, fantastic teenage sons, Buffalo Johnson is half-way through his fourth divorce. They say he looks like Henry VIII. He’s certainly acting like him. Two wives to go. Fortunately, nobody has been beheaded. Except, perhaps, Buffalo Johnson himself – who has suffered from severe depression throughout his adulthood, but these last ten years in particular. It cost him his career. It’s lost him three wives. And our friendship. But, then, I was never a very good friend. Any more than he has been a very good husband. It all makes me wonder…how we come into each other’s lives and what purpose we serve there. According to his father, I was a kind of beacon of achievement for Buffalo Johnson at a time when he was going off the rails. Buffalo Johnson was certainly a kind of leader for me during my teens. He seemed to know his own mind when I never did. He had the well-paid Saturday afternoon job at Tesco while I went to see Wolves. He could afford all the David Bowie, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums. I had to record off the radio. We attended our first music concerts together…Status Quo, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Genesis, Rolling Stones, Reading Rock Festival, Knebworth. Dated our first girlfriends together. Ironically, I ‘lost’ him when he chose the risky membership of a local Punk band rather than University. He chose a new clique. I had to find new friends. Including the best-looking girl in the sixth form, who also shares Buffalo Johnson’s 50th birthday today (happy birthday, Lesley, wherever you are - I know that you, too, like Buffalo Johnson, were suffering mentally, even in your early 20s). By the time I had made my way into Punk at 17, he was too deep. I went to University. He got married in December, 1979. It all went quiet. Then, in early August 1979, I met him and his wife at an Adam and the Ants gig at Newport, Shropshire. The next time I saw him was in the summer of 1981, when I had given up life as a trainee chartered accountant and was about to spend a month travelling around Europe on Interrail with Sparky and Blind Ray. His first marriage was over. Buffalo Johnson had plaster casts on both forearms and I never twigged. When I went to live in London with Sparky and Ray, I’d pick things up with Buffalo Johnson during Christmas breaks back home in Stafford. It was all heavy drinking and slot machines. By 1984, Buffalo Johnson would occasionally come down to London for the weekend, kipping on the sofa, much to Blind Ray’s objection. Things were not right. Buffalo Johnson was describing himself as an emotional cripple, then drowning the thought with twenty pints a night. Being his size, he could take it. At the bar, he’d order one to drink, while waiting for his change, then bring back the round. I couldn’t keep up with him. I rarely tried. When I did, it ended in vomit and stitches. I still have the scars to prove it. Then everything started to go right for him. I was stuck in Brixton, on the dole, writing hopeless novels, working in a Nigerian grocery, six nights a week till midnight and not getting paid. He had been snapped up by an up and coming IT company. He was a hot computer programmer, someone who could take new systems into companies and bed them in. It was 1987, big bang. And, for Buffalo Johnson, big bucks. The next thing I knew he was marrying my sister. For our friendship, it all went downhill from there. Big houses in Twickenham and Manchester. Buffalo Johnson never there. My sister bringing up young boys by herself. I have this particular memory of Buffalo Johnson going berserk at my little sister because she had folded over a pair of his socks at the top, so that the elastic was going. He had lost his sense of priority. When my sister divorced him early this century, we all wondered if he would survive. He has hospitalised himself in a sanatorium more than once. I don’t know how he has managed to persuade two other women to marry him since. His close relationships have been a disaster. But his sons, my nephews, are fantastic lads. The eldest, Sam, now studying sound engineering at Bolton University, looks like a perfect cross between Buffalo Johnson and me. It’s uncanny. Like I said, I don’t understand what we bring to each other’s lives. And then I see Sam…I feel like I also ought to say that Ray Davies of The Kinks becomes a pensioner today. Many more lazy Sunday afternoons to you, Ray. But my thoughts today are with Buffalo Johnson, in California with his brother, though we may never speak again for years.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Hello, my darlings

One of the first memories I have of TV humour as a kid was Charlie Drake. Today was Charlie’s birthday. He died in 2006, aged 81. I was barely at school when I first noticed this diminutive, red-haired slapstick joker – probably in The Charlie Drake Show. Every show featured a long sketch with an orchestra in which Charlie appeared to play all the instruments while simultaneously conducting. Eventually, there’d be one scene in which he was waiting for his cue to hit the triangle with a single strike, but would always miss it. Everybody aged 6 or 7 thought this was hilarious. It got us through our own turbulent music lessons at school (I always opted to play the triangle). His catchphrase in this show was Hello, my darlings. But I never realised until today that this represented his response to the fact that, being small, his eyeline was invariably at the height of the breasts of any woman he might come across. I feel I’ve learned something and, as a result, am defragging my memory banks. Do I remember The Worker, in which Charlie went for a new job in every episode, but it always ended in disaster? Do I remember that he actually had some musical hits? He certainly recorded a lot. The Top 10 hit Splish Splash was actually a cover version of a Bobby Darin tune. He even had a hit in the States with My Boomerang Won’t Come Back. As late as 1975, the recently post-Genesis Peter Gabriel actually produced a Charlie Drake single called You Never Know. Yes he did and no it wasn’t a hit. What makes me laugh today, however, is that one of the mostly unsuccessful films Charlie made was called Mr Ten Percent, in 1967. Although this is a phrase that is habitually used to describe financial sharks and swindlers, it has been adopted today by Gordon Brown, in an attempt to smear the leader of the opposition. Now, whenever I clock David Cameron, all I’ll be able to see is Charlie Drake. Hello, my darlings.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

A very influential pensioner

Chris Spedding turns pensioner today. Quite something for a rock, pop and jazz guitarist who had already reached that milestone in the eyes of the up-and-coming of 1976, half a lifetime ago. Back then, if you were over 21, you were too old for Punk. So the likes of The Vibrators, Chris Spedding’s backing band at the famous 100 Club Punk Festival in September 1976, and with whom he released two singles for Mickie Most’s RAK Records in November 1976, quickly became persona non grata. Yet I saw The Vibrators twice in the first six months of 1977 (without Chris Spedding) and I liked them. I was happy to walk around with a little badge with a red ‘V’ on it. After all, the sound of The Vibrators was the sound of Chris Spedding - a driving guitar grind, which somehow recalled Chuck Berry and 50s teens. And I, and many others, had a history with the bloke. I can trace the success of his single, Motorbikin’, in July 1975, as the very beginning of a change in my musical tastes. It was a dull time for music. The excitement of glam had gone. No more Sweet, Slade, Glitter, Mott or Sparks. It was all about waiting around for the next Rolling Stones tour, Led Zeppelin gatefold LP or David Bowie outrage. Motorbikin’ sounds tame now but it was a fast-paced pop single for its time, making a mockery of offerings from Wings and ELO, cutting a different note to the drive of Status Quo. It said that pop could be something different, more energetic, with bite. It paralleled the pub-rock movement which was making Dr Feelgood the cult band of the day. I bought Back In The Night around the same time as Motorbikin’. They went well together. In 1976, I still hadn’t finished with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator. And David Bowie was very much at the centre of my universe. But Chris Spedding and Dr Feelgood led me onto Eddie And The Hot Rods, the true bridge to Punk for those who had come from the rock route I had. So, by the autumn of 1976, when The Sex Pistols were first outraging the nation and getting banned everywhere, record companies were in a huge hurry to get Punk records out there. And, even at the age of 32, Chris Spedding was in demand. He could play. He’d been playing in bands since 1957 and had worked with the likes of Jack Bruce, Nilsson, Roy Harper, Lulu, Dusty Springfield and John Cale. This man had influence and credibility. He’d played on Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets. He was a customer of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren at their Seditionaries boutique on London's King’s Road. He actually produced the first three-song demo by The Sex Pistols – Problems, No Feelings, and Pretty Vacant - which led to their first single release in November 1976 (he denies playing on the demo). Yet it was his collaboration with The Vibrators that ended this street-cred. Nobody wanted a pop song called Pogo Dancing (it was still two years before The Buzzcocks were to prove that Punk could go pop). It was a slip that the early Punk glitterati never forgave him for. Yes, there was Motorbikin', but we still remembered he was a Womble, in a furry costume playing his trademark Gibson Flying V on a tour around the very same time. He was everyone’s guitarist - and fledgling Punk was very exclusive. The Vibrators had started out as Chris Spedding’s backing band. They played the 100 Club Punk Festival. They were one of the first to play the infamous Roxy Club in London's Covent Garden, open for the first six months of 1977 only. They ended 1977 by playing support to Ian Hunter, solo after Mott The Hoople. But they were influential. Stiff Little Fingers took their name from a Vibrators song. And The Vibrators are still touring today. Singer, Knox, is 63. Almost as old as he looked in 1977. But Chris Spedding had shed his Vibrators mistake and moved on. He escaped to America and, by 1980, he was recording an album of his own again, ironically entitled I’m Not Like Everybody Else. He’d certainly played with everybody else. And that’s how it’s continued. Paul McCartney, Tom Waits, Roxy Music. Now he’s playing blues rock with his own band, Click Clack, at the age of 65. Tonight, he’s live at Nottingham Arena on Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds Tour. So, happy 65th birthday, Chris. It’s thanks to you that I…

Postscript: In late 1976, very few Punk records had been released, so, in order to believe that something was happening, we had to extend the genre to New Wave. Interestingly, below are the first 10 Punk and New Wave singles in order of date of release. The Sex Pistols were actually 7th or 8th into vinyl and not the first in the UK. With Blondie, a band we did not really begin to recognise until mid 1977, there is some dispute over whether X Offender was released on this very day, June 17th 1976 (or December). And the first Ramones single passed most of us by. Also, while we were listening to Eddie And The Hot Rods’ new Live At The Marquee EP, we weren’t sure whether The Saints were Status Quo on speed. Some people will dispute this listing. Where is Iggy Pop or Patti Smith? In reply, I’ll say this: Iggy Pop and Patti Smith were neither Punk nor New Wave, any more than Lou Reed or the New York Dolls were before them (largely an age/generation thing). Iggy was an influence, who outlasted those of his generation such as the MC5 and Velvet Underground, to have an important presence throughout the Punk and New Wave era and beyond, into parody. In 1976, I saw Iggy as a Bowie acolyte. I'm not even going to mention Jonathan Richman or Television, both of whom had singles in 1975. You can't be included in a movement before that movement has begun. For their part, bands like The Stranglers, Talking Heads, The Jam and many others after them - were passengers who surfed the New Wave. But, like them or loathe them (and I liked The Stranglers, seeing them twice in the first half of 1977), they were important to the movement at the time. The following songs and their B-sides you heard at every Punk gig or gathering you went to, because they were the only records available. You have to remember that so much of this hinged on whether The Sex Pistols, the leaders of the movement, would get a UK recording contract in 1976. Had they not succeeded, none of the Americans or Australians would have made it in the UK either and Punk would have fizzled out before it started, instead of becoming the inspiration for a whole host of movements which followed it, from the Ska and Mod revival, to Post-Punk and New Romanticism, early 80s pop and every Indie band since. So, the influence of Chris Spedding is there for all to see. You’ve earned your bus pass, Chris…

FIRST 10 PUNK/NEW WAVE SINGLES

April, 1976: The Ramones: Blitzkrieg Bop/Havana Affair (Sire) US release

June, 1976 or December, 1976: Blondie: X Offender/In The Sun (Private Stock) US release

September, 1976: The Saints: I’m Stranded/No Time (Fatal) Australia release

October, 1976: The Damned: New Rose/Help (Stiff) UK release

November, 1976 Chris Spedding and The Vibrators: The Pogo/The Pose (RAK) UK release

November, 1976: Richard Hell and the Voidoids: (I Belong To The) Blank Generation/(I Could Live With You) In Another World/You Gotta Lose (Stiff) UK release

November, 1976: The Vibrators: We Vibrate/Whips And Furs (RAK) UK release

November, 1976: The Sex Pistols: Anarchy In The UK/I Wanna Be Me (EMI) UK release

January, 1977: The Stranglers: (Get A) Grip (On Yourself)/London Lady (United Artists) UK release

January, 1977: The Buzzcocks: Spiral Scratch EP (New Hormones) UK release

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk