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Posts from the ‘Pop music’ Category

Mar 7

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The Pauline Boty film

The restoration of the painter Pauline Boty to her rightful place in the pantheon of British pop art took a further step this week with the screening of an hour-long biographical documentary on BBC4. I enjoyed Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties, despite its rather silly title, which it didn’t really attempt to justify, although the programme was certainly suffused with aspects of the spirit of that decade.

It justified the increased attention Boty been receiving in recent years, and the producer, Vinny Rawding, and the director, Lee Cogswell, deserve credit for their persistence in getting it made. If the inclusion of so many talking heads sometimes makes it feel rather old-fashioned, they do take a chance on inserting, between the clips of Boty from various sources and the testimony from talking heads, a handful of sequences of an actress (Hannah Morrish) resembling Boty, overlaid by passages from an imagined memoir written by Rawding. Perhaps devised as a solution to cost and copyright problems, it just about comes off.

Some of the talking heads are not worth their space. Among the exceptions is the artist Derek Boshier, who appeared with Boty, his fellow student at the Royal Academy, in Pop Goes the Easel, the film made by Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor series in 1962. Boshier, who died last year, says something interesting about the culture from which they sprang: “The ideal art college should be one where all departments integrate.” That was certainly the case at the English art college where some of my friends went in the early ’60s: Students of fine art, photography and fashion all took part in each other’s projects.

It was to Boshier that I turned, a few months before his death, when I found myself wondering about Boty’s taste in music. Apparently she listened to music while she painted. What could it have been?

In Pop Goes the Easel, she and Boshier are seen doing the Twist at a party to the record of “Twist Around the Clock” by Clay Cole and the Capris. In another scene the pair, with their fellow students Peter Blake and Peter Phillips, are seen walking through a street market to the Chicago doo-wop of Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl”. I got a mutual friend to ask Boshier what Boty might have been playing on the Dansette while she worked. Sadly, he couldn’t remember.

Boty died in 1966, aged 28, so maybe she’d have liked the Beatles and the Stones and the Yardbirds. She’d danced at the very first edition of Ready Steady Go! in 1963 — presumably not, by then, still doing the Twist — and made a painting called 5-4-3-2-1, after the Manfred Mann signature tune.

She also met Bob Dylan, thanks to her relationship with the film-maker Peter Saville. In 1962 Saville directed Evan Jones’s play Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, casting the unknown Dylan as “Bobby”. This was Dylan’s first trip abroad, and according to Marc Kristal’s very good Boty biography, the couple picked him up at London Airport.

I imagine her liking Dusty Springfield and the Walker Brothers. But the pop references in her paintings generally came from a different vector: Marilyn Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Monica Vitti and — in her portrait of her friend Celia Birtwell — Elvis and the Everlys. Other figures were drawn from outside the world of the arts, such as Christine Keeler and Fidel Castro.

In 1964-65 Boty painted a diptych titled “It’s a Man’s World I and II”. Where the first panel has images of masculinity (Muhammad Ali, El Cordobes, a B52 bomber, the dying JFK, Elvis, Ringo and Lennon, Einstein, Proust), the second depicts what Boty sees as going on inside men’s heads: images of naked young women in sexualised poses. At the centre is the dominant image of a full frontal nude, cut off above the shoulders and below the knee.

Caroline Coon, one of the film’s talking heads, hints at a greater significance behind this woman’s lack of a face, and therefore of an individual identity. But later on the film also includes a brief clip from a film called The Day of Ragnarok, a nuclear-scare drama written and directed by John McGrath for BBC2 in 1965, in which Boty made one of her appearances as an actress. It shows her in her studio, working on “It’s a Man’s World II”. At that stage, as can be seen in the screen-grab above, the figure originally had a head, which must later have been painted over. Nobody comments on this in the film, but it’s an interesting decision for the artist to have made.

Inevitably Boty’s career was affected by the attitudes of the time, particularly the assumption that, as a woman, her work couldn’t possess a significance equal to that of her male contemporaries. Perhaps that prejudice lay behind her decision to diversify into modelling and acting (there’s a brief scene in Alfie with Michael Caine). If her looks and her exuberance were attracting more attention than her art, then why not exploit the opportunities?

We’ll never know what might have happened had her progress to a full career in painting not been affected by passive (and perhaps active) obstruction. Nor what she might have done had she not, while pregnant and in what seems to have been a good marriage to the literary agent Clive Goodwin, been told that she had cancer. She declined treatment rather than risk damage to the unborn baby. Four and a half months after giving birth to a daughter, she died. Her renaissance continues.

* Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties is on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028nyw

Feb 2

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Laura Nyro: a woman in full

If you don’t own much of Laura Nyro’s music and have a couple of hundred quid to spare, a newly released 19-CD set of her complete studio and almost complete live recordings titled Hear My Song would be a good investment. All the 10 studio albums are there, from 1967’s More Than a New Discovery to the posthumously released Angel in the Dark, plus the official live albums — Spread Your Wings and Fly (1971), Season of Lights (1977) and The Loom’s Desire (1993-94) — and two live performances from a San Francisco hotel in 1994.

For me, though, there’s one thing missing: a double album called Laura, subtitled Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line. Recorded during a tour in 1988, her first in 10 years, it was released the following year on the independent Cypress label after the A&R department at Columbia Records, her home since 1968, indicated that they didn’t want her next album to be a live recording and gave her permission to make a one-off deal with another company.

For the tour she put together a small band with Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass guitar, Frank Pagano on drums, Nydia Mata on percussion and Diane Wilson on harmony vocals. It’s not the kind of virtuoso-level team with which she toured in 1976 and whose work with her was preserved on Season of Lights — guitarist John Tropea, double-bassist Richard Davis, Mike Mainieri on vibes, Andy Newmark on drums — but it’s a much better fit with her music and recorded with much greater warmth, richer textures and sense of space. Laura’s own performance is much more mature and confident.

The whole lengthy set is very fine, but the one thing I wouldn’t be without is a song called “Companion”, of which this seems to be the only recording. It begins with the drummer ticking off the time and a heart-melting guitar-and-bass lick that leads into a slow 12/8 blues ballad. It’s the fourth song in, and Laura addresses the crowd in the Greenwich Village club: “Well, now that you’re finally my captive audience, I’m going to force these new songs on you…”

Then she sings. “I don’t want to marry / I don’t want your money / But love’s come our way / Just a warm companion is what I want, honey…” The melody as simple and gorgeous as the lyric: “Life is complicated / Funny, love can be that way / When just a warm companion is what I want, honey / A very special trust / A very special lust…” There’s a short bridge passage (“Walk inside the rain / Laughter in the dark…”) that goes out of tempo, then the guitar-and-bass lick returns and the band riffs quietly as she introduces them, one by one, before three part harmony (Nyro/Wilson/Pagano) gently takes it out.

There nothing here of the wild originality she brought to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry when she was in her very early twenties. She’s a different person, no longer sitting on a fire escape above a New York street. Her life has changed. She’s been through a marriage. She’s living in Amherst, Massachusetts with a female partner, the painter Maria Desiderio. She’s a radical feminist campaigning for women’s rights, Native American rights, animal rights. She’s a mother, bringing up a son, Gil. But as different as the songs may be, the voice is still hers, with all the poetry it contains.

Some people criticised her later studio albums — Smile, Nested, Mother’s Spiritual, Walk the Dog & Light the Light — for lacking the fire of her early music. That’s like accusing her of growing up. We’re lucky to have all of it. And for me, alongside “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Emmie” and “Been on a Train” and “When I was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag”, there’s “Companion”, the expression of a woman no less powerfully connected with her deepest feelings but now finding peace.

Maria Desiderio was with Laura when she died in April 1997 of ovarian cancer, the disease that had killed her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her maternal great-aunt. She was 49 years old. It’s a great thing to know that, around the world, people are still listening to her voice and her songs with admiration and love.

* The Hear My Song box is released on the Madfish label. Live at the Bottom Line is out of print in both vinyl and single-CD formats. The photograph is by David Bianchini, to whom Laura Nyro was married in the early ’70s, and is taken from the booklet accompanying The Loom’s Desire.

Nov 28

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Andy Paley 1951-2024

The first time I heard Andy Paley’s name was when my New York friends Richard and Lisa Robinson gave me a copy of the first album by a group called the Sidewinders in 1972. It had been produced by their friend — soon to be mine, too — Lenny Kaye. It was on RCA, where Richard had taken a job as an A&R man.

“Listen to the song called ‘Rendezvous’,” Lisa and Richard told me. I did. I loved it. A sweet slice of early power-pop, inspired by the girl groups of the ’60s. Easy to imagine with a full Wall of Sound production and a Darlene Love vocal. It sounded like a hit, but it wasn’t. Anyway, it’s still in my head today.

A year or so later, Andy came to see me at Island Records in Hammersmith, where I was in A&R. It was just a social call, but he left me with two things: an impression of the charming, very handsome young man he was, and a C60 cassette on which he’d put some of his favourite stuff, as a gift.

I’ve still got it somewhere, but the track that I had to get on vinyl became one of my all-time three favourite girl-group records: the Inspirations’ “What Am I Gonna Do With You (Hey Baby)”, written by Russ Titelman and Gerry Goffin. (And don’t tell me that the Chiffons’ version was better, or the Fleetwoods’, or Skeeter Davis’s, or Lesley Gore’s, or even Carole King’s lovely demo, because you’re wrong.)

The Sidewinders didn’t happen, and Andy just missed being a teenbopper sensation with his brother Jonathan in the Paley Brothers, but he went on to do lots of things in the music business, including working with Jonathan Richman and writing songs for Jerry Lee Lewis and Madonna. But probably the most important contribution he made was to Brian Wilson’s return to action in 1988. Andy and Brian became close, and together they wrote and co-produced some of the songs on the comeback album (Brian Wilson, Sire Records). You can hear the pop sensibility they shared on “Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight” and “Night Time”.

Andy died of cancer last week at his home in Vermont. He was 73. Lenny went up to see him in the last hours. Andy wasn’t conscious, but Lenny sang to him. Among the songs he sang was “Rendezvous”.

* The photo of Andy Paley was taken at CBGB in 1977. I’m afraid I’m unable to credit the photographer.

Jun 25

A Soho creative

Tot Taylor has an interesting history. Back in the mid-’80s, from an office near Oxford Circus, his Compact Organisation threatened to become to the London pop scene what Brooklyn’s Daptone outfit would be to R&B in the next century: a clever, occasionally brilliant re-imagining of past euphoria, creating music that could sometimes rival the sounds from which it took its inspiration. Compact’s founders, Tot Taylor and Paul Kinder, released records by Mari Wilson, Virna Lindt and Cynthia Scott that recalled the great days of the ’60s girl groups, while “The Beautiful Americans”, the sole 45 released by a non-existent group called the Beautiful Americans, evoked the early Walker Brothers in their semi-operatic prime.

Then Taylor and Kinder went their separate ways, the former diversifying his career. He composed music for film, TV and theatre (including the eight-hour Picasso’s Women for the National Theatre). From 2004-19 he co-ran a cutting-edge Soho art gallery called Riflemaker (after the business that had once occupied the premises on Beak Street). And in 2017 he published a 900-page novel titled The Story of John Nightly, a kind of Carnaby Street War and Peace, set amid the Swinging London music scene, its protagonist a pop star called “the most beautiful man in England” by the Sunday Times. And then he started making records again.

A confession: although I was sent an early proof copy of The Story of John Nightly, I haven’t read it properly. But I extracted it from the unread pile the other day. The reason is that I’ve been listening to his last two albums, Frisbee (2021) and Studio Sounds (2023), and falling for them to the extent that I’ve started thinking that if a bloke capable of this music has written a novel, it’s probably going to be worth reading.

Taylor makes records with a (sometimes deceptive) air of light-hearted whimsy and a deft, flexible craftsmanship that seem to have disappeared from contemporary pop music, overwhelmed by the prevailing modes of communal ecstasy and personal trauma. Crudely, you could place what he does somewhere between the Beatles of 1965-66 and the Beach Boys of Sunflower, maybe the last evolutionary step in songwriting terms before the art-rock of Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett, but nothing he does sounds dated.

Every song has to have its own subject, shape and mood, just like a Beatles album. The humour is wry, never far away in things like “This Boy’s Hair” and “Vanity Flares”, both from the new album, on which he sings in his light, pleasant voice while playing pretty much everything except for drums (Shawn Lee), some of the guitars (Paul Cuddeford and Lewis Durham) and harp (Alina Brhezhinska).

Studio Sounds is a very good album, but the earlier Frisbee is, I think, the classic. The opener came about when the Guardian asked him to write a song for National Music Day, which is what the song is called. “Fortune’s Child” is a great slice of power pop. “Do It the Hard Way” opens with the sort of quatrain you don’t find much in a pop lyric any more (except maybe from Taylor Swift): “I drive my car up a one-way street / Dirty looks from everyone I meet / I ask the Lord my soul to keep / No reply — must be asleep.” Then there’s something called “Yoko, Oh”: a homage to John Lennon in the form of a gentle, loving pastiche of the ex-Beatles at his most blissed-out. Titles like “The Action-Painting Blues”, “Baby, I Miss the Internet” and “Sunset Sound” suggest the breadth of the topics that get him writing. A song called “This New Abba Record” lives up to its title.

The eight-minute “American Baby (Two-Part Invention in C)” is the one to which I keep returning, hooked by a minor-key electric piano riff that finds the ground between the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” and the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, achieving a momentum almost as subtly relentless as Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”. As a song, there’s not much to it. But you could say that about many of the greatest pop records. And the potency of the groove somehow turns the blankness of its lyric into something mysterious and compelling.

* Tot Taylor’s Frisbee and Studio Sounds are on the Campus label. The photograph of Taylor is from the sleeve of Studio Sounds. The Story of John Nightly is published by Unbound.

Jun 11

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Mod dreams

Q: Were there ways of walking?

A: Yeh. You walked speed-wise which is you put your hands in your mod jacket, in your Tonik jacket, which had three-inch lapels and a seven-inch centre vent, and breast pleats to give it enough tuck. It was a very solid cloth, a very heavy cloth, so you’d tuck your hands in there and you’d have flaps on the pockets. You’d have your jeans turned up and you’d have Hush Puppies with a pair of white socks. You’d be walking with three other friends up Great Windmill Street or Wardour Street at five or six in the morning just as light is coming up. Your head is bent against the wind, you’ve got your head down…

That’s Peter Meaden talking, interviewed by the writer Steve Turner in 1975, three years before he died at the age of 36, felled by barbiturates and vodka in his parents’ house in North London, where he had dreamed his mod dreams many years earlier, finding the Who and turning them from the Detours into the High Numbers — turned them into mods, getting them the French crop haircuts and the correct clothes, and writing the words for their first single — before accepting £500 to hand over their management to Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

Meaden was one of those people, like Guy Stevens, Andrew Oldham and Tony Hall, who shaped the London music scene in those vital years between 1963 and 1965. He deserves a book of his own, and now he has it. Steve Turner’s King Mod is his story, in all its slender, obsessive, doomed glory.

Once asked to define modism, Meaden came up with a much repeated phrase: “Clean living in difficult circumstances.” He provides another version here: “Mod is another aphorism for precision in life.” Romantic nonsense, of course. But part of the legend.

“Modism was my dream,” Meaden says in the unedited transcript of the interview that constitutes the second half of the book, after Turner has taken us through a relatively conventional narrative. Meaden’s words are rambling, repetitive, sometimes inaccurately recalled, the strange and touching testimony of a man who had a dream and saw it come more or less true but lacked, as Turner says, the business acumen and ruthlessness to profit from his vision as others did.

Stevens, who played records from his collection of red-hot R&B obscurities at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, just off Great Windmill Street, and had the 45s from which Meaden borrowed the music for his High Numbers songs, went on to involvement with Island Records, Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free and the Clash. Oldham, who had partnered Meaden in a short-lived PR company, managed the Stones until they were taken from him, and created the Immediate label. Hall was one of the great promotion men of the British music business, a cool cat who moved smooth from the bebop ’50s to whatever came next, and who once threw Meaden out of a reception for Ben E. King with the words, “You’re a pilled-up mod!”

Which Meaden certainly was, as he goes to some lengths to explain in his descriptions of the virtues of Drinamyl — “good old Purple Hearts” — particularly when mixed, as was his preference, with cider. “It was bliss. Cocaine they say is bliss these days but it’s not bliss like a bit of speed in you, a couple of pints of cider maybe, down there bopping round from Friday night through until Sunday morning. Say no more!” One of the things he liked about Drinamyl was that it suppressed the libido. “You no longer have to worry about pulling a chick and making it because that’s what you feel the world made you for.” With girls out of the picture, there would be more time for the purer pursuits of choosing the right shirt at Austin’s on Shaftesbury Avenue or the right boots from Anello and Davide on Charing Cross Road.

Then acid arrived on the scene, and the picture — once so sharp and precise — started to go fuzzy. Some, like Townshend, who gave Meaden his first trip, could cope. Meaden was one who couldn’t, spending chunks of the years before his death in psychiatric care, as much of a casualty as Nick Drake or Syd Barrett.

It’s a curious book. More meticulous editing would have removed a plethora of irritating misspellings and inconsistencies: Kingley Street, vocal chords, Petula Clarke, Roger Daltry and Rick Gunnell are just a few of them, while a Miracles song that the High Numbers covered appears on the same page as “You Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in the text) and “I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in a caption). And there is the increasingly common habit, infuriating to me, habit of capitalising the definite article in references to The Who, The Beach Boys, The Goldhawk Social Club, and so on.

But it’s clearly a labour of love by an author whose previous works have dealt with the Beatles, U2, Marvin Gaye, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and religion in rock, and it’s very well illustrated. For anyone to whom the all too short era of modism — to use Meaden’s term — was something precious, its historical value in unquestionable.

* Steve Turner’s King Mod: The Story of Peter Meaden, the Who, and the Birth of a British Subculture is published by Red Planet Books (£25).

May 28

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‘Won’t last for ever…’

There’s a moment in Love and Mercy, the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic, when Paul Dano, as the young Brian, sits at the piano to play a song he’s just written. When his hands form the opening chords of “God Only Knows”, we’re overwhelmed by a sense of sheer wonder. You can’t watch it and not think that Derek Taylor, the English publicist who went to Los Angeles in 1966 and took on the Beach Boys as his clients, was absolutely right to propagate the idea that the oldest of the three Wilson brothers was a genius. I mean, where did that stuff — those voicings, that progression — come from?

I thought about that, and a lot else, when I read with great sadness earlier this month that, as a result of Brian’s advancing dementia, and only a few weeks after the death of his second wife, Melinda, he had been put into a formal conservatorship. “Won’t last for ever,” the 22-year-old sang with great prescience on a magnificent single in 1964. Sixty years later, a court in LA has ruled that his personal, medical and financial affairs will now be in the control of his family and associates.

In the car that day, I listened to some favourites, from “Surfer Girl” to “Surf’s Up” and beyond. “Please Let Me Wonder”. “Wendy”. “Girls on the Beach”. “Caroline, No”. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”. “Let Him Run Wild”. “The Little Girl I Once Knew”. “She Knows Me Too Well”. “The Warmth of the Sun”. “Kiss Me Baby”. And, of course, “Don’t Worry Baby”, which probably encapsulates more of the essence in a single track than any of them: the sun-kissed harmonies, the cars, the girls, the youthful rapture and the underlying sadness. And the way Brian was starting to make a standard guitar-keys-bass-drums line-up sound like a new kind of orchestra.

And then I watched The Beach Boys, a new 112-minute authorised documentary directed by Frank Russell and Thom Zimny, which tells the group’s story from its creation in the Wilson family garage in Hawthorne, California in 1961 to the comeback in the early 1980s. That’s a sensible limitation, although it means omitting Brian’s triumphant 21st century renaissance with the Pet Sounds concerts and the SMiLE recreation. But the saga is so vast that many of its salient features are necessarily overlooked.

It’s the survivors’ tale, in a way, which means that Mike Love gets another chance to tell his side of the story, although not to an unbearable extent, at least until “Kokomo” is chosen to play over the final credits — and he does thoughtfully identify Brian’s “melancholy” as being a vital ingredient in their music. Archive interviews with Carl and Dennis Wilson are included, and we’re reminded of how their long-hidden talents emerged during the period covered by the film. Al Jardine and David Marks provide interesting insights (Jardine describes “Don’t Worry Baby” as “definitely a turning point for us, and for Brian”), as does Marilyn Rovell, Brian’s first wife.

Interviews with some of the LA studio musicians who played on the great records, including the pianist Don Randi, the bass guitarist Carol Kaye and the drummer Hal Blaine, paint an interesting picture of Brian’s relationship with these highly professional, mostly jazz-trained players. From very early on, he was pursuing an approach very different from most of those who enlisted their help in search of hit records, earning their respect through his seriousness of purpose and originality of thought. There’s a tiny but very telling clip in which he’s explaining to Blaine the rhythmic emphasis he wants on the out-of-tempo introduction to “California Girls”, itself a small miracle of creative imagination. Blaine has heard it all before, but not this.

There have been many Beach Boys-themed films, but this one is still worth watching for its wealth of archive footage, on and off stage. Their difficulties in coming to terms with change could hardly be better illustrated than by a truly teeth-grinding sequence from a 1969 TV show called Kraft Music Hall, in which they attempt to hold the counter-culture at bay by miming to “California Girls” surrounded by bikini-wearing girls, with Love wearing a yacht skipper’s cap and blazer. Some of the scabs are picked at — mostly to do with the behaviour of Murry Wilson, who gave his sons his genes but also a lot of unhappiness, and whose legacy of poor management eventually caused a permanent rupture.

But there’s enough remembered joy here — capped by a silent reunion of the four survivors at Paradise Cove, where the famous early photo of the group with a surfboard was shot — to make it a good way to start the summer, with immeasurable gratitude to Brian for all he gave us.

* The Beach Boys is streaming on Disney+.

Dec 7

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Goodbye, Denny Laine

Denny Laine, who has died at his home in Florida, aged 79, was the best thing about the Moody Blues, even though he was only in the band for a couple of years, from its foundation in Birmingham to his departure two years later. It was his voice that made “Go Now”, their No 1 hit, more than just another British beat group’s cover of an American soul record.

The original of “Go Now”, by Bessie Banks, released in January 1964, was itself a classic. Produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, arranged by Garry Sherman, written by Larry Banks (Bessie’s husband) and Milton Bennett, it was first released in the US on the Tiger label. “It shines,” wrote the great enthusiast Dave Godin, who released it in the UK on his Soul City label before including in the second volume of his Deep Soul Treasures series, “like an epic beacon in the history of soul music.”

Alex Murray, a young Decca A&R man, produced the Moody Blues’ version at the label’s West Hampstead studios. Denny Laine said the song had come to them via the journalist James Hamilton, a soul music fan who wrote for Record Mirror and received regular shipments of new records from the New York radio disc jockey B. Mitchel Reed. They speeded it up very slightly and took some of the gospel feel out of the 3/4 rhythm but, crucially, they kept Bessie’s unaccompanied opening vocal line, giving Laine the chance to seize listeners by the lapels: “We’ve already said goodbye…”

“Go Now” was still slipping down the charts when the band I was in supported the Moody Blues at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham in March 1965. No doubt the booking had been made before they hit No 1. In front of an audience of a couple of hundred kids in the basement premises, the Moodies were wearing their early uniform of dark blue Regency-collared double-breasted suits. As they went through their repertoire of covers, including James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy”, they were impressively powerful and professional. By the end of the year they were supporting the Beatles on their final UK tour. Two degrees of separation, eh?

Nov 22

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22 november 1963

My friend Mark Lewisohn, currently at work on the second volume of his majestic history of the Beatles, broke off from his labours to remind me that today is the 60th anniversary of the UK release of the group’s second LP, an event whose significance might be hard to convey to those who weren’t around at the time.

Within days of its appearance on 22 November 1963, with the beatles was a presence in just about every home in the land containing one or more teenagers, irrespective of social class. For a pop record, that universality was a first. It also arrived just in time for Christmas parties, at which it became a fixture, whether in stately homes or council houses. In my memory, it represents the moment that sealed their acceptance as something much more than just the latest chart sensation.

Unlike Please Please Me, its predecessor, with the beatles was not conceived as a couple of hit singles plus a dozen other assorted tracks. It was a proper album: a package of 14 tracks that sold itself on its own merits. Ignored were “From Me to You” and “She Loves You”, their No. 1s of the spring and summer, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, which would come out a week later. That took some commercial nerve, and it paid off, with advance orders of a half a million.

The front cover, which made the album into a new kind of desirable object, is a story of its own. Robert Freeman, a 26-year-old Cambridge graduate who had been working for the new Sunday Times colour magazine, asked Brian Epstein to look at his photos of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians. Once he’d been hired to shoot the cover image for the forthcoming album, the Beatles themselves showed him the moody black and white photos Astrid Kirchherr had taken of them in Hamburg. Freeman’s side-lit monochrome multiportrait of four young men holding coolly neutral expressions lifted the group out of the ingratiating banality of glossy publicity images, bringing echoes of French new wave cinema into the lives of young pop fans.

There’s another touch of the avant-garde in the use of all-lowercase sans-serif type for the title. Although by Christmas, like every other 16-year-old, I knew the whole album off by heart, it was years before I really noticed that the black letters had been subtly nudged out of strict alignment, as though they’re dancing.

Jun 29

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The bending of headlights

“We have a new very quiet album out,” Rickie Lee Jones said as she greeted a packed Jazz Café in London last night. I bought Pieces of Treasure, the album in question, a few weeks ago, played it three times, and filed it next to the rest of the evidence of her long and remarkable life in music. It was certainly nice to see her reunited with Russ Titelman, the co-producer of her unforgettable debut album back in 1979 and a careful curator of this new collection of standard songs, but it didn’t make a huge initial impression. Last night she brought it to life.

She’s travelling with a three-piece band: Ben Rosenblum on electric piano doubling accordion, Paul Nowinski on string bass and Vilray Bolles on electric guitar. For the first half of the 75-minute set she just sang a selection of standards, starting with a pin-drop “The Second Time Around”, which she recorded on Pop Pop in 1991, and continuing with “Just in Time”, “One for My Baby” and “September Song”, which are on the new one, then “Up a Lazy River” from 2000’s It’s Like This, “Hi-lili, Hi-lo” from Pop Pop (with the accordionist not just exquisitely replicating but actually improving on Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon part on the original recording), and “Nature Boy” from the new one.

It didn’t take long to appreciate not just how well she was singing but how beautifully her musicians were creating a matrix for the way she was so thoroughly inhabiting the songs. You might have heard “September Song” a million times, interpreted by some of the greatest singers in the history of popular music, but by bringing herself so close to the song, by eliminating the distance between song and singer, she made you think, as if for the first time, about what it meant.

Later on she did the same with another song worn threadbare by repetition. “There will be other lips that I may kiss / How could they thrill me like yours used to do? / Oh, I may dream a million dreams / But how will they come true? / For there will never be another you.” It was as though she’d just written it.

The groove changed with Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”, which she recorded on It’s Like This. The slinky funk-lite keyboard riff summoned a whole universe of laid-back rock and roll hipness, and the audience enjoyed singing along: “Show business kids makin’ movies of themselves / You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” (And how prophetic was that, written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen 50 years ago?) She did her father’s song, the lullaby-ballad “The Moon is Made of Gold”, and her own much loved “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, and finished by returning to the new album for “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, a song her dad taught her in the summer of 1963 (“a big year for me” — she would have been eight years old, and he also taught her “My Funny Valentine” and “Bye Bye Blackbird”). She left to an ovation, on a wave of profound affection.

But earlier, after about an hour, when she had strapped on a guitar, there had been “The Last Chance Texaco”. Those two gentle chords, instantly recognisable, then: “A long stretch of headlights / Bends into I-9…” It’s a movie. It’s a poem. It’s a confessional. It’s a communion. It’s the song that defines her. The one that most fully draws us into her world. “(It) wasn’t like anything I’d ever written,” she remembered in her wonderful 2021 autobiography. “It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard.” As she sang it, once again the space between then and now collapsed. And when the sound of the car on the highway faded to silence, I might not have been alone in discovering that my cheeks were suddenly damp.

* The photo of Rickie Lee Jones at the Jazz Café is by me. Pieces of Treasure is on BMG/Modern. Her autobiography, Last Chance Texaco, is published in paperback by Grove Press. Thanks to Allan Chase (see Comments) for identifying the musicians.

Feb 9

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Maestro (1928-2023)

By bringing his own elegant sensibility to bear on a personal blend of uptown R&B and Broadway, Burt Bacharach took music to places it had never been. He could use a cheap plastic electric organ and an orchestra of strings, a twangy guitar or a French horn, a rack of boo-bams or pair of flugelhorns, and make them all sound as if they were worth a million dollars. He also had the taste to work with lyricists of the quality of Bob Hilliard and Hal David, whose eloquence and imagination illuminated “Any Day Now” and “Walk On By”.

I saw him in concert twice, both times at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The second time he sang at the end, sitting at the piano, the way he must have done when he first demonstrated his brand-new songs to Chuck and Dionne, and I can still hear that papery non-singer’s voice, so affecting. Now he’s gone, at 94 years old, leaving such treasure behind. “Anyone Who Had a Heart”. “If I Ever Make You Cry”. “In Between the Heartaches”. “Alfie”. “Don’t Make Me Over”. “This Guy’s in Love With You”. “Make It Easy on Yourself”. “What the World Needs Now Is Love”. “A House Is Not a Home”. “Here I Am”. “The Windows of the World”. Songs whose lustre will never fade.

And if I could only keep one of his records, it might be the one below: the epically titled “(Here I Go Again) Looking With My Eyes (Seeing With My Heart)”, in which he musters all his originality in an orchestration full of sweeping strings and busy percussion, on a melody that demands all Dionne’s virtuosity, the last word in something beyond words.

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