Category: Music


No future for England’s dreaming

Filed under: Movies, Music, Politics — Leave a comment
December 8, 2022

THE LAST OF ENGLAND directed by Derek Jarman (UK, 1988

“It’s a love story with England. It’s not an attack. It’s an attack on those things that I believe personally are things without value.” Derek Jarman in an interview with Chris Lippard

Derek Jarman was a war child; conceived during the period of the London blitz and born on January 31st 1942. It is perhaps no surprise to find that the spectre of WWII dominates his imagination and helped inspire his surreal poetic documentary ‘The Last of England’ made in the Spring of 1987.  

Jarman was in his mid-40s when he completed the film which graphically depicts a post-war and post-apocalyptic urban wasteland.  While making it he was diagnosed as HIV positive. This illness was for him another battle which he waged publicly. He announced his diagnosis to the world rather than be shamed into silence. The full-blown AIDS virus would end his life prematurely six years later.

The contagion may have partly accounted for his rage but it was in him anyway. “Where’s hope? Have they killed it” are rhetorical questions asked in a movie. “Yes” comes the blunt reply. “And tomorrow?” the unseen speaker asks. The answer comes in the form of a quote from graffiti Jarman had seen scrawled on a wall in London’s Euston Road: “Tomorrow is cancelled due to lack of interest”.

This brief exchange is practically the only dialogue in a movie that evolved through improvisation; there was no screenplay. Aside from Jarman’s freeform poems (read by Nigel Terry) , most of the movie plays out without words. The director’s obscure diatribes offer few clues about his intentions.  They are more full of attitude than meaning. The critic David L.Hirst called the end result  “an apocalyptic roar of a movie.”

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Freak Out! It’s a Moonage Montage

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September 30, 2022

‘Moonage Daydream’ directed by Brett Morgen (USA, 2022)

While this movie is an all the hits celebration of David Bowie’s extraordinary life and times it is far from being a conventional music documentary. Filmmaker Brett Morgen instead painstakingly adopts a more impressionistic and eclectic approach which entails deliberately not being slavish to the chronological sequence of events. Viewers are bombarded with a head-spinningly kaleidoscopic mix compiled as if Morgen were suffering from ADHD. These include clips of German Expressionistic cinema, silent films, Kabuki theatre, contemporary dance, art works, city life and space travel.

The main impetus seems to be to try to capture the thrill of what it must have been like to be inside the head of David Bowie. Amid the chaos Morgen does find space for some more reflective detail which ironically proves to be equally, if not more, revealing. I would have happily watched the whole of the 12 minute  TV interview in 1979 with Mavis Nicholson.

Morgen’s audio-visual collage is most effective in scenes like a montage of dance moves from over the years to accompany a live performance of ‘Let’s Dance’. It does, however, produce forced and misleading juxtapositions. For instance, Bowie’s declared love for Iman, who he met in 1990, is sound-tracked by ‘Word On A Wind’, a song from the Station To Station album released 14 years earlier.

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Does Music Journalism Still Matter?

Filed under: Italy, Music — Leave a comment
June 17, 2022

Earlier this month, I attended an interesting panel discussion at the wonderful Beaches Brew free festival on the Hani-Bi beach at Ravenna, Italy.  

The talk was in answer to the provocative question ‘Does music journalism still matter?’ 

 A video of this conversation has just been released  including the bonus of a rambling observation/question from yours truly! (at 43:10)

Needless to say, the answer to the question of the day was ‘Yes, it does still matter’ but explaining why and how proved tricky. Speakers addressed the huge challenges of making their voices  heard within an increasingly deafening market place.  

Making music and writing about it in 2021 obviously bears no comparison to life before the internet.  In ‘1966 – The Year the Decade Exploded’, Jon Savage writes:  “Music was no longer commenting on life but had become indivisible from life. It had become the focus not just of youth consumerism but a way of seeing, the prism through which the world was interpreted.”  It’s difficult to imagine music having the same impact and influence now since it is just one of an overwhelming number of consumer choices.

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No tears for Mark Lanegan

Filed under: Books, Gender, Music, Theatre — 3 Comments
February 14, 2022

SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP by Mark Lanegan (White Rabbit, 2020)

‘Men Should Weep’ was the title of a 1947 play by Ena Lamont Stewart I saw performed in London in 1982 by Glasgow’s 7:84 theatre company (named from the statistical information that 7% of the people own 84% of the wealth).

I liked the title of this play because it conjured up the image of men weeping en masse . I imagined this as a universal shedding of tears for the patriarchal pain men have inflicted on humankind. Some hope!

Sadly, the macho stereotype is still alive, kicking and oppressing as Mark Lanegan’s relentlessly bleak memoir confirms. Despite the title (a line from his song ‘Fix’ from the solo album ‘Field Songs’) , Lanegan is not much given to weeping or displaying his feelings. It’s therefore a surreal moment when he relates how one huge tear formed after hearing of the death of his friend and mentor Jeffrey Lee Pierce of Gun Club. He writes about this with amazement as if it’s going to be submerged in a pool of tears like Alice In Wonderland.

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The non-routine life and times of a punk poet

Filed under: Books, Music, Poetry — Leave a comment
June 3, 2021

‘I Wanna Be Yours’ a memoir  by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, 2020)

John Cooper Clarke is now officially viewed in the UK as a national treasure by virtue of staying alive against all odds and by being a consummate, albeit erratic,  entertainer for the good part of half a century.

For the majority of his life he has been a heroin addict and this fact inevitably dominates this autobiography.  You won’t learn much on how to write or perform poetry but you will find out how he managed to smuggle drugs through customs in the days before sniffer dogs and terrorist level security.

JCC admits that getting a daily fix has always been a necessity rather than a leisure activity and openly declares that “My entire life was more or less taken up with the junkie routine.”  There is no hint of self-pity in this admission and he takes no moral line. In other words, he’s not one of those addicts who wants to warn others of the dangers of drugs; on the contrary he seems to believe that he would have become so successful without this artificial stimulus.

However, from an objective perspective it is obvious that his dependency has had  a negative impact on his ability to write consistently over the years. After bursting triumphantly onto the scene during the British punk explosion,  the first flush of success proved impossible to maintain. He recognizes that  “Enslavement ain’t too big a word for opiate addiction”.

He only got clean in his early 50s at the insistence of his second wife, Evie.  If it hadn’t been for her, you imagine he’d be living an arm to syringe existence somewhere or else pushing up daisies.  He has already ‘died’ three times and been fortunate enough to have someone around to resuscitate him. In the title poem from his latest collection – The Luckiest Man Alive – there an acknowledgement that the fates are on his side: “I’m the luckiest guy alive/ I got a facial tattoo saying please revive.”

A lot of details he relates in his memoir are fairly squalid and become repetitive. Of poetry he has nothing truly insightful to impart beyond saying banalities like: “The main consideration is what a poem sounds like. If it doesn’t sound any good, it’s because it isn’t any good.”

He sums up his distinctive appearance by referring to “the perilous post-tubercular state of my physique”  and judges others as much on how they dress as on their actions. There’s a long check list of famous people he has met or encountered including un-alternative comedian Bernard Manning, Joy Division producer Martin Hammett, Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, The Fall’s Mark E Smith, Richard Hell, DJ Mark Radcliffe and Nico. There’s anecdotal stuff about each of these but it’s all on a fairly superficial level. He is not settling any scores in the pages of this book so, for instance, we don’t find out who the blistering diatribe of the poem ‘Twat’ is dedicated to. Pity!

For someone who initially set his sights quite low he has done pretty well. A thick vein of Northern pragmatism has evidently stood him in good stead : “I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss.”  What has driven him over the years is a desire to be on the receiving end of “carefully considered adulation” and the likeability factor is in no way harmed by this self-indulgent but highly readable version of his life so far. 

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