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Oct 28

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Phil Lesh 1940-2024

Phil Lesh wasn’t anything like the person I’d been expecting to meet when I turned up to interview him one Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1970 at an apartment in Bayswater. Lesh, who died last week aged 84, was acting as the advance guard for the Grateful Dead, whose other members were due to fly into London the next day. The following Sunday they would make their British debut at a rock festival on a piece of Staffordshire farmland. They were bringing their Haight-Ashbury psychedelic legend to Newcastle-under-Lyme on the heels of the UK release of Live/Dead, including its epic 23-minute “Dark Star”, recorded a year earlier at the Fillmore in their native San Francisco.

Far from conforming to the acid-head stereotype, Lesh was alert, bright-eyed and responsive to everything . He was even happy to agree with my somewhat presumptuous suggestion that their first three studio albums had been disappointments, particularly to those who had only been able to read about their live appearances and for whom “Dark Star” was the first piece of conclusive evidence in support of all the claims of collective transcendental genius made on their behalf.

“We simply haven’t known how to make records,” he told me, “and we figured the only way to make them was to learn ourselves, because we tried recording with a producer at the beginning and it was really hopeless. It all sounded completely flat. Anthem Of The Sun is the most satisfying of the first three to me, because we had the almost impossible task of making an album from very little material.

“The way it went very tight from the compositional standpoint was pleasing, and it’s very coherent – I can still follow it all the way through. But still we all knew that it was a hundred per cent non-commercial, and I certainly don’t like the way it was mixed. I know we could have done it better, but we didn’t know how. It was strange because we took stuff from three studio sessions and eight or nine gigs and put it all together without thinking of levels or equalising. We just did it from a musical standpoint, which is not enough. Anyway, it took us four albums and untold thousands of dollars to learn how to record ourselves. The music, though, was really good, and deserved a better fate.

“Even the live album, which I like, was put out six months after it was recorded, and even longer in Britain, and we do all the numbers completely differently now. The music is constantly evolving, progressing and regressing on many different levels.

“We have a new one out in the States, called Workingman’s Dead, which I’m very pleased with. It’s certainly the best of any of our studio work, and I hope it’s a success because we want to stop touring. We’ve been on the road every weekend since October, and we really need a rest… if only to think up some new music.”

I liked Lesh a lot, and I wish I’d gone into the interview knowing more about him — about his background in classical music, his studies with Luciano Berio, his college friendship with Steve Reich. Then I might have asked him some more interesting questions. But there you go. Life is full of unknown answers to unasked questions.

The Dead’s performance in a field that Sunday afternoon was a mix of the countryish songs from Workingman’s Dead (I think they kicked off with “Casey Jones”), R&B standards (Pigpen’s “Turn on Your Lovelight”) and spacey improvisations, including “Dark Star”. Oddly, for a band by then obsessed with developing the best amplification, the sound was a bit weak, which in my memory reduced the impact of the unique contrapuntal interplay between the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Lesh’s bass. Committed Deadheads (readers of IT and Frendz) loved them; others who’d come out of curiosity, or were there primarily to hear other artists, seemed a bit nonplussed. But I’m glad I saw them at that stage of their long, strange trip.

* Here’s the Guardian‘s obituary of Phil Lesh, by Adam Sweeting: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/27/phil-lesh-obituary If you want to know more about the Grateful Dead’s British debut, there’s a website: https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Holly-dead.70.html

Oct 19

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Springsteen’s road movie

About halfway through Road Diary, Thom Zimny’s new film of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returning to action in 2023, Patti Scialfa steps forward to talk about the diagnosis of early-stage multiple myeloma she received in 2018. Treatment for the rare form of blood cancer has compromised her immune system and kept her from appearing on stage on all but rare occasions.

And that’s where we’re at. Deep into an eighth decade, with more future behind than ahead. The girl you took to both shows at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 is dead. Your parents have gone, which — depending on your relationships — may be a loss that doesn’t fade. (Adele Springsteen, who was in her eighties when she sashayed across a stage in her son’s arms to “Dancing in the Dark”, died this year at 94.) Your husband or wife — or you — have health issues. Your kids are suddenly what you once were. And priorities change. But some stuff doesn’t.

That stuff includes the feeling of joy that Springsteen can still bring you, and there’s a big helping of it in Zimny’s 90-minute documentary, which blends together contemporary and archive footage of rehearsals and performances with interviews: Springsteen himself, Steve Van Zandt and the other members of the band, from those now gone — the eternally missed Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons — to recent arrivals, such as the very engaging percussionist Anthony Almonte. And we hear the voices of others, from dedicated fans in Italy, Norway and the UK to his manager of almost 50 years, the erstwhile rock critic Jon Landau, who broadened his cultural horizons while guarding his interests.

Bruce turned 75 this year and he looked a little stiffer as he mounted the short flight of steps to the stage for a Q&A after an advance screening of the film in London last night. He spoke very touchingly about keeping a band together for so long. It’s hard enough with just two guys, he said: Simon hates Garfunkel, Sam hates Dave, Hall hates Oates, Don hates Phil. Can you imagine having four friends at school and then spending every day for the rest of your life with those same guys? That takes some good decisions at critical moments.

The keystones of the 2023 shows were two newer songs: “Last Man Standing”, about the realisation that he is the now last survivor of his teenage band, the Castiles, and “I’ll See You in My Dreams”, the final solo encore, about George Theiss, that band’s other guitarist and singer, who died in 2018. Mortality is more than just the subtext of the film.

Later last night, on Graham Norton’s BBC1 chat show, he was an amiable presence alongside the actress Amy Adams, the singer Vanessa Williams and the comedian Bill Bailey: a very congenial lineup. When he and Bailey got into a discussion about Fender guitars, Norton might have said, “Come on, girls, let’s leave the boys to talk about their hobby.” But then Bruce called Adams “my second-favourite redhead”, which was very sweet and turned this viewer’s thoughts back to Patti. And although we know the outline of that part of the story, the reality of it is theirs alone.

At the screening I was sitting next to Damien Morris, who writes for the Observer. Before the film started we were chatting about Springsteen gigs. He asked me which song that Bruce doesn’t normally play in concert would be the one I’d ask him for, if I had a request. That was easy. “Thundercrack”, which he actually played on his return to Asbury Park in September. But later, when I thought about it some more, there were other answers. “Santa Ana” or “The Promise”. “Rendezvous”, of course. “Wreck on the Highway”. “Brilliant Disguise”. “One Step Up”. “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)”. There’s so much, isn’t there? All of it resting on the unshakeable twin pillars of “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road”. Such depth and richness.

Or there’s “Fire”. During the film Zimny suddenly cuts to Bruce and Patti on stage together somewhere or other last year, leaning into each other as they croon that song into a single microphone. “Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah / Baby, you can bet, a love they couldn’t deny…” His favourite redhead.

During the Q&A, he was asked how long he saw himself continuing to make music. “Until the wheels fall off,” he said.

* Road Diary is on Disney+ from October 25.

Sep 11

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Autumn books 2: Chris Charlesworth

Chris Charlesworth has a good memory and loves to tell stories, which makes Just Backdated — subtitled “Melody Maker: Seven Years in the Seventies” — very good value for those with an interest in the rock scene of that era in the UK and the USA, and in the contemporaneous history of the British music press.

He was recruited to the MM in June 1970, shortly after its editor, Jack Hutton, had left and taken many of the younger members of staff with him to start a rival weekly called Sounds. Chris Welch, Alan Lewis and I were among those who rejected his invitation to join them, as did our photographer, Barrie Wentzell. Ray Coleman, a former MM writer, was appointed editor in Jack’s place and set about the job of filling the empty desks and rewarding those who’d stayed put with swift promotions.

Just as Welch, Lewis and I had all come from local papers, so had Ray. He wanted properly trained young journalists, so among his hires were Michael Watts from the Walsall Observer, Roy Hollingworth from the Derby Evening Telegraph, and Charlesworth from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. We had two things in common: we’d all been in bands, and we’d all written weekly pop columns for our respective local newspapers.

I think their experience was like mine at the Nottingham Evening Post & News: the editors were older men who knew that teenagers were up to something, hadn’t a clue what it was, and so decided that the best people to write about it would be the teenagers on their staff. After that, they tended to leave us to it. So when I showed a sheaf of cuttings to Hutton during my own job interview in 1969, it included pieces on Albert Ayler and the Velvet Underground.

Charlesworth remembers arriving for his first day at our offices on the second floor of 161-166 Fleet Street, the headquarters of IPC Specialist and Professional Press. We were at the far end of a long corridor also housing several other publications: Rugby World, Cage and Aviary Birds, Cycling Weekly and Disc & Music Echo. The last-named, which had been edited by Coleman until his return to the MM, was the home of two female journalists, Penny Valentine and Caroline Boucher, who were great friends and very good company.

On that first day, Charlesworth remembers being told by Laurie Henshaw, the veteran news editor, to call Ginger Baker to ask him about personnel changes with his band, Air Force. He was soon in the swing of things, and in his first full week he interviewed the singer of Free, whose “All Right Now” was heading up the charts.

“I met Paul Rodgers in his poky little flat in a big old redbrick block in Clerkenwell and we chatted in a nearby greasy spoon café,” he writes. “The same issue featured my interview with Don Everly, done in his suite at the Inn on the Park. After I left him, my head spinning at meeting an old hero, I found myself sharing an elevator with Dustin Hoffman.”

That week he also interviewed Cliff Richard on the phone, reported on Jethro Tull adding the keyboards player John Evan, and reviewed gigs by Pete Brown’s Piblokto! and Status Quo. A few days later, he was at the Shepton Mallet festival, listening to Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa and to Led Zeppelin, with whom he was soon spending quite a lot of time. Not as much, however, as he would soon be spending with the Who, once Keith Moon had rung him up to thank him for a kind review of their show at Dunstable Civic Hall.

As we all did, Chris was soon going on the road with these and other bands, and his anecdotes are amusingly illustrative of the rock and roll lifestyle of the time. There’s plenty of drinking, a certain amount of drugging, and plenty of sex — although at the Status Quo gig, in his first week, he turns down their publicist’s offer to bring along “a bird” for him for the night. That PR man was the later-to-be-notorious Max Clifford. As he makes clear, Chris was perfectly capable of finding companionship without assistance.

A quick promotion to news editor was followed in 1973 when Coleman invited him to become the MM‘s man in North America. The paper was selling 200,000 copies a week and could afford such an appointment, although the technology of the day meant that copy had to be typed up and handed to a courier — in a package that also included 10×8 prints of photographs to go with the stories — to be transported by air to London in order to meet the weekly deadline.

Most of the book is taken up by his American adventures, starting with a few months in Los Angeles (where he stayed first in the Chateau Marmont and then in Phil Ochs’s apartment) before he relocated to New York, where he would spend the next three years. From an apartment on the Upper East Side he ventured out to interview Lou Reed, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Sly Stone, John Lennon, Paul Simon, David Bowie, John Hammond, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, the Bay City Rollers and countless others, including testy encounters with Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart, and to attend shows ranging in scale from Madison Square Garden to CBGBs, where he encountered the fledgling Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie (and went on a date with Debbie Harry).

The front page pictured above, from the MM of August 7, 1976, features a story about Lennon winning his fight to stay in the US. That was Chris’s, with his full report inside of the New York hearing and the subsequent press conference. Just another day’s work from an era when you interviewed stars from the next seat in a plane, or in the back of a stretch limo, or in a hotel room with no PR in attendance. There were lots of post-gig parties or album launches where musicians and journalists mingled.

To his regret, at the beginning of 1977 he was told that his US posting would be coming to an end. A revived NME was winning the circulation war, and budgets were being cut. Soon he would be leaving the MM and eventually returned to London to work at RCA, where his duties included Bowie’s public relations. In 1983 he embarked on three decades as the editorial director of Omnibus Press, where he was responsible for commissioning and editing countless music books, including such best sellers as Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher’s biography of Keith Moon, and Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba, by Carl Magnus Palm.

There was never anything pretentious or verbose about Charlesworth’s own writing. His memoir reflects the extraordinary boom of the music business in the rock era, the guilt-free hedonism of the time, and the excesses — sometimes amusing, occasionally grotesque — for which somebody else would always be picking up the tab. That somebody, we assumed, would be the record company. In our naivety, we had yet to understand that the bill for all of it — the flights, the hotels, the drinks, the canapes, probably the drugs, too — would eventually be presented to the musicians.

I’ve never been quite sure what I think of the 1970s. When you remember Watergate and Thatcher, not to mention loon pants and mullets, it seems almost as worthy as the 1930s of Auden’s withering dismissal — “a low dishonest decade”. But there was the music, and with the music came fun and games, exactly as my old colleague describes it.

* Chris Charlesworth’s Just Backdated is published by Spenwood Books. His blog is justbackdated.blogspot.com

Jul 26

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Another night on E Street

The epiphany came early at Wembley last night, only a couple of songs into an unbroken three-hour set. That monster freight train called “Seeds” howled into the stadium, carrying with it all the dread and desolation that can be packed into the repetition of a single word: “Gone… gone… gone…”

I wrote about “Seeds” the last time Bruce Springsteen played Wembley Stadium, so I won’t repeat myself. But something about it moves me in a way I haven’t been moved by rock and roll since Elvis recorded Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”, finding all of America in a song you could get on one side of a 45.

Last night I wanted it to go on for ever. But there were other good things. “The E Street Shuffle” turning into a soul symphony that made perfect use of the horn section. The way “Land of Hope and Dreams” did the same for the backing singers, with a gospel coda of “People Get Ready”. Steve Van Zandt strapping on a Stratocaster painted to resemble the flag of Ukraine for “No Surrender”. A beautiful “Racing in the Street”, the patina on its bodywork deepening as the decades pass. The Latino trumpets and cowbell turning “Twist and Shout” back into something of which Bert Berns would be proud. The softly spoken introduction to “Long Walk Home”: “This is a prayer for my country.”

It’s a show now, of course, carefully routined and built with the help of high technology to reach a crowd of 50,000 in a sports stadium. But there are still moments when the place goes dark, the spotlight picks up the lone figure at the front of the stage, a harmonica wails, and those opening words — The screen door slams / Mary’s dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch / As the radio plays — bring all the magic back to life once again.

Jul 1

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On visiting a friend

The front of the home of Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge, a pretty Georgian house on a quiet street close to the centre of the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, was bathed in sunshine as I pressed the bell one day last week. The door was opened by Dee, Robert’s daughter in law, who took me inside to see him.

I’ve known Robert since the end of the ’60s, when he was still with the Soft Machine. He and Alfie tell the story of how I officiated at their marriage one night at Ronnie Scott’s in the early ’70s, before his accident, using a twisted-up piece of silver paper from a cigarette packet as an improvised wedding ring. A couple of years later they were formally married at Sheen register office on the day of the release of the extraordinary Rock Bottom, his great 1974 album of songs expressing fathomless emotions.

Alfie was in London for attention to her eyes on the day I visited to see Robert for the first time since before the pandemic. She’d warned me that a near-fatal encounter with something nasty called Lewy Body Dementia had impaired his memory, although “he’s far less away with the fairies than he was.” And his sight had improved after long-awaited double cataract surgery.

His eyes were bright as we started to talk, his conversation just about as animated and every bit as surreally funny as I remembered. A mention of that first informal wedding ceremony prompted him to talk about how he had been 10 years old when he first met Ronnie Scott, when they were both guests at Robert Graves’s famous house in Mallorca (Robert’s mother, Honor Wyatt, was a friend of the poet, and may have named her son after him). He loved Ronnie and his co-director Pete King — whose name provoked a chuckling mention of “The great smell of Brut!” — and the whole vibe of the club, where Alfie had worked behind the bar. He remembered young Henry, who looked after the cloakroom and saw the ageing Ben Webster safely home every night during the great and hard-drinking tenorist’s residencies.

We talked about a little about how Robert had enjoyed contributing vocals to three tracks on Artlessly Falling, Mary Halvorson’s second Code Girl album in 2020, about Duke Ellington, and about Gil Evans, another venerated figure whose “Las Vegas Tango” Robert turned into a mesmerisingly wayward two-part invention on his first solo album, End of an Ear, in 1970. And about the 1971 Berlin jazz festival, where Robert — having just left the Softs — was selected by the festival director, Jo Berendt, for the rhythm section accompanying a Violin Summit starring Don “Sugarcane” Harris, Jean-Luc Ponty, Michal Urbaniak and Nipso Brantner (“I don’t think they liked my playing — I was either too rock or too jazz”). When I remarked that a mutual acquaintance perhaps “fell in love too easily”, he picked up the cue, hummed the opening of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and talked about how much he still enjoyed listening to Chet Baker singing such songs.

I stayed an hour and a half, longer than expected. On the drive home I listened to Comicopera and …for the ghosts within, two late masterpieces. It had been a joy to find that Robert is still entirely himself, one of the most original and loved figures of his generation, still living his “improvised life”, not making music any more but continuing to incarnate his socialist principles and thereby justifying his friend Brian Eno’s description of him (in Marcus O’Dair’s excellent authorised biography) as living without “any glaring inconsistencies between what he claims to believe in and what he does as a person and as an artist.”

Alfie wanted to leave me a copy of Side by Side, the book of poems, lyrics and drawings that she and Robert published in 2020. “It came out during the lockdown,” she said, “so it didn’t get much notice.” I told her I’d already bought one. If it escaped your attention, this might be the time to rectify that omission — maybe as a way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding (the official one), which falls on July 26**: a milestone in a remarkable, wonderfully creative and happily enduring partnership.

* Side by Side by Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge is published by Faber & Faber. Marcus O’Dair’s Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2014. The photograph of Robert and me was taken by his son, Sam Ellidge.

** Correction: the piece originally said that the anniversary is on July 24. It’s the 26th. Alfie also points out that that they originally chose the date to coincide with the first day of Fidel Castro’s first attempt to start the Cuban Revolution: the attack on the Moncada garrison in 1953.

May 20

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The return of Beth Gibbons

Thirty years after Portishead’s debut, 22 years after her last album of original songs, Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is indeed long awaited. Anyone who fell in love with the lush mysteries of Out of Season in 2002 will have wondered not just whether a follow-up would ever arrive, but if it did, whether it would manage to equal the rare combination of delicacy and strength, of glowing textures and unresolved feelings.

Just as Out of Season was made in partnership with Rustin Man (Paul Webb of Talk Talk), the new album is the product of collaboration. Six of these 10 graceful pieces are Gibbons’ own, but four were co-written with the percussionist Lee Harris, also formerly of Talk Talk, one of the two main contributors to the album, along with the multi-instrumentalist James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Gibbons’ co-producer. Harris is also credited with “additional production”, and one imagines that his presence is responsible for the subtle foregrounding of rhythm, starting with the measured pacing of soft mallets on tom toms behind fingerpicked acoustic guitar and cloudy harmonium on the opening “Tell Me Who You Are Today”.

The sound of the album is a step on, but no less beautifully detailed: the vibraphone and the small choir on “Floating on a Moment”, the violin and baritone viola of Raven Bush on “For Sale”, the care lavished on the timbre of an acoustic guitar, the twang of a dulcimer and the sudden eruption of skronk on “Beyond the Sun”. There’s the contrast between, say, the controlled but definitely sawtoothed climate-protest anger of “Rewind” and the pastoral reverie of “Whispering Love”. Strings are used with strategic subtlety. Some songs refuse to end in silence, preferring the real world of distant children’s voices or, at the very end, blackbirds and cockerels.

Gibbons seems to have abandoned completely the pinched, acrid tone that drew comparisons with Billie Holiday and prefigured Amy Winehouse, the sound familiar from Portishead’s “Glory Box”, which she was still employing on Out of Season‘s “Romance”. Instead she now relies on a natural open vocal sound, perfectly suited to the introspection that drives these songs, apparently a decade in the making and seemingly the product of much thinking about change, mortality and responsibility.

Two literary voices from the last century came into my head as I listened to these songs and tried to understand their mixture of deceptive fragility and guarded optimism. The first, that of Samuel Beckett, in the oft-repeated advice from Worstward Ho: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The second, that of Philip Larkin, the last line of An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.” Maybe those are her perspectives, too.

* Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown is out now on the Domino label. The photograph, borrowed from the CD insert, is by Netti Habel.

Mar 11

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Diamante visions

Phil Manzanera has been a friend since I first interviewed him during the days of Quiet Sun, the band of school friends he was in before being recruited by Roxy Music in time to play on their debut album in 1972. So I can’t pretend to be completely objective about Revolución to Roxy, his newly published autobiography. But I can be completely honest in saying that it will prove informative and entertaining to anyone who’s followed his career over the past half-century, even from a distance.

Here’s a sample that had me almost collapsing with laughter, when he spins a metaphor out of one of the trappings of early success: a maroon Rolls-Royce coupé whose combination of heavy weight and light steering was guaranteed to induce car sickness in children, making it “completely useless as an everyday family vehicle” and forcing him to keep in storage, bringing it out only on special occasions.

“The car carried a famous brand name,” he writes, “it was sleek, stylish and smooth, and undoubtedly in its own way it was iconic. It was a treat to take out, and whenever I did, it was admired and enjoyed by everyone who experienced it. Eventually, though, the time would come when it needed to go back into the garage and once again be covered by the tarpaulin to keep it well preserved and in good order, ready for the next outing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. There was something about that Roller which felt to me to be a bit like Roxy Music. Eye-catching, stylish and high quality, extremely enjoyable and I was proud to be associated with it. From time to time, it would be an absolute joy to take out for a ride so that it could be admired and appreciated; but the ‘steering’ difficulties and the resultant discomfort meant that its outings were strictly limited. After a while it had to go back under the tarpaulin so I could live my everyday life in my runabout.”

The history of Roxy Music as a kind of artistic Petri dish is, of course, explored in some depth throughout these 300 pages, from Manzanera’s first failed audition through the years of great success to the period in which, he began to feel like “not much more than a session player in my own band” — a band in which “I had to find out what was going on more or less by accident.”

Not least, the book is an interesting exploration of rock-band dynamics, with all the associated uncertainties, insecurities, frustrations and exasperations, and Manzanera has a perceptive take on Bryan Ferry’s legendary penchant for procrastination and prevarication: “His Fine Arts background obliged him to tinker and fiddle way beyond the point where the vast majority of people would long since have settled. I now understand this is about his need to make everything he does artistically beautiful and perfect. I tend to want to do things quickly and I’m not worried if they have a primitive edge, and what I’ve learned is that in Roxy opposites can attract. That’s integral to what makes Roxy music special. Makes it us. Makes us it.”

As musical director of the Guitar Legends festival in Spain is 1991, he had the job of telling Bob Dylan that the organisers expected him to perform “All Along the Watchtower”. How he coped and got there in the end, with the aid of Richard Thompson, is worthy of a place in Ray Padgett’s recent book of interviews with people who’ve worked with Dylan. Recollecting in tranquillity, Manzanera writes: “The way I think about the whole thing is much the same as I used to think about my first visit to various foreign countries. I’m really keen to go, really keen to get to know their individual customs and idiosyncrasies, but having been there and done that, I don’t necessarily ever feel the urge to revisit.”

There are stories about his long collaboration with David Gilmour, a shorter and almost Dylanesque one with the Argentinian hero Fito Paez, a WOMAD tour of South Africa and the Antipodes, his discoveries of the pizzica music of Puglia while directing another festival, his adventures with Jack Bruce in Cuba, his songwriting partnership with Tim Finn and his long relationship with Robert Wyatt. And about 801, that short-lived but incandescent all-star band he created in 1976 with Brian Eno, Bill MacCormick, Francis Monkman, Simon Phillips and Lloyd Watson. And, of course, about those diamante-studded bug-eyed sunglasses created for him in Roxy’s early days by Antony Price.

But, as the man who interviewed Phil for today’s Times observed, this isn’t one of those rock-star biogs where you skip the early chapters dealing with childhood, family and schooldays. In this case, that aspect of the narrative is quite as compelling as the rock-star stuff. Phil was born in London but grew up in Cuba during the run-up to the Castro revolution, the son of an Englishman, Duncan Targett-Adams, who had worked for the British Council in Colombia but now represented BOAC in South America, and a Colombian mother, Magdalena Manzanera. There were mysterious elements on his father’s side of the family — was he a spy? where did an Italian opera singer fit into the picture? — and the Latino influence from his mother’s side on his life and work is interestingly explored.

In a way, though, the most striking passage in the book come when he discusses the phone call from America one day in 2012 in which he was told that Kanye West and Jay Z had sampled a riff from K-Scope, his slightly obscure second solo album, then more than 30 years old. They used it on “No Church in the Wild”, a bleak modern masterpiece and the lead track from their album Watch the Throne, which went platinum in the US and gold in the UK before the track appeared in ads for Audi and Dodge cars. Most significantly of all, as it turned out, it was used by Baz Luhrmann on the soundtrack and the trailer for The Great Gatsby.

“Who knew,” Phil writes, in a sentence that tells you a great deal about the evolution of the music industry in our lifetime, “that I would earn more money from a short guitar riff I wrote one evening on a sofa in front of the telly in 1978 than I ever earned in the entire 50 years as a member of Roxy Music?”

* Phil Manzanera’s Revolución to Roxy is published by A Way With Media (£35)

Oct 27

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Our Island Story

To those who found Chris Blackwell’s 2022 autobiography, The Islander, long on charm but, shall we say, short on detail, The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68 will be the answer to their prayers. Here is the story of the UK’s most charismatic independent label during its formative years, in which the foundations were laid for the company that would later become the home of King Crimson and ELP, the Wailers and Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, Sandy Denny, Sparks, John Martyn, U2 and Grace Jones before Blackwell sold it to Polygram in 1989.

Comprehensively compiled and meticulously edited by Neil Storey, who worked in the label’s press office (and was more recently responsible for the Hidden Masters archive box sets devoted to Chris Wood and Jess Roden), the book’s large square format — handsomely designed by Jayne Gould — enables LP covers to be reproduced at their original size. The scale also allows the enormous amount of information to breathe amid the mass of photographs, press cuttings, record labels and other paraphernalia and ephemera, plus masses of oral history from figures both famous and unknown to the general public but significant to the way the label was run, all deployed to inform and entertain.

After Storey’s discursive and amusing introduction, it begins by describing Blackwell’s origins in Jamaica and the UK, including a Daily Mirror clipping from 1933 showing a picture of his mother on her way to Buckingham Palace be presented as a debutante to King George V and Queen Mary, and his own Harrow School house photo from 1954. Island’s first release, the cocktail pianist Lance Haywood’s At the Half Moon Hotel, Montego Bay, from 1959, is accompanied by quotes from Blackwell, the guitarist Ernest Ranglin, the drummer Clarence “Tootsie” Bear, and the daughter of the hotel’s director, who invited Blackwell — then a water-ski instructor — to listen to the trio performing in the lounge, an encounter on which history hinged.

That’s the degree of depth the reader can expect, whether the subject is Jackie Edwards, Millie Small, Traffic, Jimmy Cliff, Spooky Tooth and the nascent Fairport Convention or the American artists — Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Inez & Charlie Foxx, J. B. Lenoir, Billy Preston, Jimmy McGriff, the pre-Spector Righteous Brothers and Huey “Piano” Smith — released on the Sue label by Guy Stevens, the DJ at the Scene club in Ham Yard whose vision was recognised and given free rein by Blackwell, to the lasting benefit of me and many other ’60s teenagers.

The more obscure bands — Wynder K. Frog, Art, Nirvana, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble — are covered in full, as are the projects undertaken to pay the bills while providing a laugh along the way: That Affair (about the Christine Keeler scandal), Music to Strip By (with a lace G-string stuck on to the cover), For Adults Only (comedy) and Big Theo (Johnson)’s Bawdy British Ballads. The company’s first gold disc was apparently secured by Why Was He Born So Beautiful by the Jock Strapp Ensemble, the first of several volumes of rugby songs, at least one of which was recorded at Sound Techniques by the engineer John Wood, who would later record Nick Drake and the other Witchseason artists at the same Chelsea studio.

The making of all these is illuminated by the people who were there, not just the artists but those who were playing important roles in the background, whether by working in the Basing Street office — where everyone sat at round tables, erasing a sense of explicit hierarchy — or by going around the country selling the records, or simply by being Blackwell’s friends. How they all made it up as they went along, and how the founder encouraged and allowed it to happen, is an object lesson in human and cultural dynamics.

“I’m not a collector,” Blackwell says. “I was always looking forward.” Island maintained no real-time archive during his era (which, of course, made Storey’s task of research more demanding and almost certainly more entertaining). When I worked in A&R there, in the mid-’70s, someone told me one morning that the Richmond branch of the Blackwell-owned One Stop Records was closing that evening and that the basement contained a cache of the company’s old 45s. They were going to be chucked out and did I want to do something about them? Collectors had better close their eyes at the next bit: I drove straight down there, found boxes and boxes of mint Sue and white-label Island singles from the ’60s, sorted out two of each — one for the company, one for my office — and sent the rest to be melted down. I have no idea what happened to the ones I saved after I left in 1976. Everyone was looking forward, which is the right way to run a record company.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press (£85).

Sep 26

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Exhuming Nico

It was out of sheer curiosity that I went along to Café Oto last night to hear a performance of Nico’s The Marble Index by the string quartet Apartment House (Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono on violins, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello) augmented by Kerry Yong on piano and other keyboards. The part of Nico was taken by the singer Francesca Fargion.

The room was sold out and the audience expectant. The original album, in which John Cale added his viola, other instruments and post-production touches to Nico’s seven songs, has a special status within the history of rock: barely half an hour long, it arrived as a message from a different world, seemingly shaped by the sensibility of European art-song and the practices of the American classical avant-garde, completely uncompromising in the challenge it offered the listener in 1968.

I suppose the nearest it ever came to being played in concert in its original form during Nico’s lifetime was when she performed a couple of its songs with accompaniment by Cale and Brian Eno at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1974, where they were received with the mixture of applause and outright derision that had greeted the album’s release six years earlier. I certainly never expected to hear the music performed live again after her death in Ibiza 35 years ago.

It was brave of Yong to attempt a modified transcription of the full work, and of Fargion to deliver Nico’s words and melodies. Of course it wasn’t remotely like hearing Nico herself, whose strong, unabashed, wilfully inflexible and uninflected voice defined the music every bit as much as the sound of her harmonium and her strangely memorable melodies, with their echoes of folk tunes and lullabies.

Very wisely, Fargion did not attempt an imitation. But although she is a fine, classically trained singer with a pleasant tone, her interpretations seemed colourless, fading into the strings rather than dominating them. Only “Frozen Warnings”, where the string writing was at its most economical, and “Nibelungen”, a lovely acappella song unreleased until Elektra put out an expanded edition in 1991, allowed the emergence of an attractive poignancy at a worthwhile creative variance from that of the original.

If you wanted to do something really interesting with The Marble Index, to try and match its own inherent challenge, you’d probably have to take it apart and reconstruct it in a different form. This was a careful and respectful performance, observing some of the details of the original, such as the tiny vocal echo on “No One Is There” and a modest version of the pealing piano on “Evening of Light”, although the sound of the harmonium was not heard until “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)”, the fifth song in the sequence.

The audience listened intently, and the warmth of their response spoke of the veneration in which this extraordinary piece is now held. In the end, though, what was completely missing was the sense of outright shock and enigmatic purpose that the original artifact itself still conveys, 55 years later, and which is such a part of its eternally untranslatable meaning.

Sep 25

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Requiem for a soft-rocker

Terry Kirkman (extreme left) with the Association at the Monterey Pop Festival

The members of the Association were still wearing suits and ties when they played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the opening act on a bill including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other heroes of the new counter-culture. Their qualification for inclusion might have been their first Top 10 single, “Along Comes Mary”, a three-minute proto-psychedelic masterpiece written by Tandyn Almer.

The follow-up, “Cherish”, a No. 1, had swiftly recast them as purveyors of soft-rock before the great “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”, with its koto intro and inner-light lyric, earned praise from no less a psychedelic authority than Dr Timothy Leary, despite going no higher than No. 35. But then “Windy” (another No. 1) and “Never My Love” (No. 2) put them firmly back in the middle of the road, where they have remained in the public mind ever since.

Anyone interested enough to turn over “Never My Love”, however, found a B-side that restated their claim to hippie credibility. It was called “Requiem for the Masses” and it begins with military snare drum rolls introducing a choir singing acappella: “Requiem aeternam, requiem aeternam…” Then a young man’s voice sings the opening lines against an acoustic guitar: “Mama, mama, forget your pies / Have faith they won’t get cold / And turn your eyes to the bloodshot sky / Your flag is flying full / At half-mast…” The snare drum tattoo continues behind the second verse: “Red was the colour of his blood flowing thin / Pallid white was the colour of his lifeless skin / Blue was the colour of the morning sky / He saw looking up from the ground where he died / It was the last thing every seen by him…” The backing falls away and the unaccompanied choir returns: “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison…”

And here’s the chorus: “Black and white were the figures that recorded him / Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in / Black and white was the question that so bothered him / He never asked, he was taught not to ask / But was on his lips as they buried him.” The song ends with a lonely bugle against snare drum and muffled tom-tom.

In 1967 this song could be about only one thing: the war in Vietnam. Of course there already had been “Masters of War” from Dylan, “Universal Soldier” from Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Eve of Destruction” from P. F. Sloan. And perhaps “Requiem for the Masses” is not a truly great record, but it stands alongside things like Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and Earth Opera’s “The Great American Eagle Tragedy” as an ambitious and powerful contemporary statement from the world of white rock music.

Its composer was Terry Kirkman, a founder member of the group, who sang, played percussion and brass and woodwind instruments (maybe including the bugle part). Before “Requiem for the Masses”, he had written “Cherish” and another soft-rock classic, “Everything That Touches You”. Born in rural Kansas, he was brought up in Los Angeles, where he studied music, but it was while working as a salesman in Hawaii that he met Jules Alexander, with whom he would go on to found several groups in LA, including the Inner Tubes (with Mama Cass and David Crosby), before the Association came together as a six-piece band in 1965. He left for the first time in 1972, returned in 1979, left again in 1984, and thereafter took part in various reunion concerts while working as an addiction counsellor.

Terry Kirkman died this week, aged 83. It would be absolutely wrong to underestimate the courage it must have taken for a band famous for their soft-rock hits to record such an unequivocal song of protest during a year in which the B52s were pounding Hanoi and Lyndon Johnson was sending ever more ground troops into the fight against the Vietcong, still with support from the majority of the American public. Respect to him, then.

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