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Oct 4

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Finding Lulu

Lulu was on a breakfast TV show the other day, talking about overcoming a drink problem that had its roots in her family background. She was engaging enough to make me want to read her newly published autobiography, If Only You Knew. Compiled with the help of a ghostwriter, Megan Lloyd Davies, it’s quite a surprise. Its 76 short chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, are not just extremely readable but full of interesting observations from a long career.

I was never a fan of her singing, but I’m a considerable fan of two of her songwriting efforts. They come from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The first is “I Don’t Wanna Fight”, a hit for Tina Turner in 1993, a great pre-breakup song full of complex grown-up feelings — resignation, defiance — to which Tina could bring a sense of her own history. The second is “My Angel Is Here”, a track from Wynonna Judd’s 1996 album Revelations, a luminous love song of perfect simplicity.

Lulu didn’t write those songs alone. Her brother Billy Lawrie worked with her on both, with contributions from Steve DuBerry in the first case and Mark Stephen Cawley in the second. My guess is that, since she doesn’t play an instrument, her main contribution was to the lyrics. Anyway, they’re two of the best tracks of the ’90s, if you ask me.

What’s good about her book? Its candid descriptions of her Glasgow childhood, for a start, as Marie Lawrie, the oldest of four children of an alcoholic father; of her audition at Decca in 1963, when the power of her voice blew a microphone; of the resulting decision to move down to London, aged 14, with her band; of her experiences in the ’60s scene, when there the absence of a real division between “rock” and “pop” meant that Jimi Hendrix was a very memorable guest on her Saturday-night BBC TV show; of her short-lived involvement, musical and personal, with David Bowie in 1973. And of her inability to say no to the schemes dreamed up by her devoted manager, Marian Massey, who steered her resolutely towards light entertainment and mostly away from the stuff she wanted to sing, resulting in pantomime seasons and the Eurovision-winning “Boom Bang-a-Bang”, which she clearly detested.

For me, the most interesting section deals with her experiences with Atlantic Records, to whom she was signed by Jerry Wexler in 1970 and with whom she recorded two albums, New Routes and Melody Fair, at Muscle Shoals and Miami’s Criteria Studios respectively. She leaves no doubt about how much this meant to her, in terms of moving closer to the music she loved. Wexler choosing the songs, Arif Mardin doing the arrangements, Tom Dowd at the mixing desk, the Swampers and the Dixie Flyers laying down the tracks: it seemed like the answer to her prayers, a guaranteed escape from the middle of the road.

But it didn’t work out, and I was curious enough to listen to tracks from both albums to try and understand why. The song choices aren’t great, which is weird when you consider that Wexler would have had access to material from the finest country-soul writers of the time, people like Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. But it’s a mish-mash. The real problem, however, is that although Lulu had her first hit with a raucous cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, she isn’t a soul singer. She’s a pop singer. For all her ability to add a rasp to her voice, she skates across the surface of the songs. It’s not hard to imagine Wexler concluded quite early on that he’d made a mistake. She wasn’t an Evie Sands or a Merrilee Rush, and this wasn’t going to be a repeat of Dusty in Memphis.

The book’s later episodes include a success with Richard Eyre’s Guys and Dolls, touring with Take That, guest-starring in Absolutely Fabulous, and a grim experience on Strictly Come Dancing. And gradually, coming in like layers of cloud, the drinking that took a grip as she went through middle age, finally taking her into six weeks of rehab in an American clinic at the age of 65.

Yes, it’s a bit showbizzy in places, because that’s partly who she is, but she’s honest about things like her two marriages, for instance, which both ended in divorce, and her looks (“some Botox and filler around my jaw, plus some kind of eye lift”). She also at pains not to bore us: she never dwells too long on anything, which keeps the narrative rolling along.

It’s not normally the sort of book I’d choose to spend time with, but I’m quite glad I did. I suppose I was most genuinely moved by the description of how, while still in her teens, she horrified her family and their neighbours by her appearance in a TV soap ad, speaking in a voice from which, after four years in London, all traces of Glasgow had been smoothed away. “I sounded as if I’d grown up somewhere between Cheltenham and Chelsea,” she writes. “The erasure of Marie Lawrie, on the outside at least, was complete.” But, as we discover, that was very much not the whole story.

* Lulu’s If Only You Knew is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Sep 25

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Danny Thompson 1939-2025

The first time I saw Danny Thompson, he was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham. This would have been the spring of 1965. I must have liked his playing a lot because I got him to autograph a paperback copy of Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life that I happened to be carrying that night.

A couple of years later I saw him with the Pentangle, a band that to my ears never equalled the sum of its parts. It was his long-standing partnership with John Martyn that brought out his best, whether racing alongside the effects-driven guitar on “I’d Rather Be the Devil” or adding a darkly poetic arco line to “Spencer the Rover”.

Danny, whose death at the age of 86 was announced this week, was a member of a generation of great double bassists who emerged in and around the British jazz scene in the ’60s. If you wanted to line them up in some kind of taxonomy of interests and instincts across a spectrum of the music with which they were associated, starting with folk and proceeding to contemporary classical, it would probably go something like this: Danny, Ron Matthewson, Dave Green, Jeff Clyne, Harry Miller, Dave Holland, Chris Laurence, Barry Guy. Obviously that’s not everyone.

Danny was the Charlie Haden of British bassists, his playing warm and deep-toned, as rooted in folk modes as Haden was in bluegrass music, but just as capable of dealing with the most advanced and abstract forms.

Maybe the best way to celebrate his life is to listen to Whatever, the album he recorded for Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label in 1987. It finds him with a trio completed by two relatively unsung heroes of the scene, the wonderful Tony Roberts on assorted reeds, flutes and whistles and the terrific guitarist Bernie Holland.

I remember giving it an enthusiastic review in The Times, commending its highly evolved fusion of folk materials and jazz techniques. It’s a little bit like a British version of Jimmy Giuffre’s Train and the River trio, unafraid of the bucolic and the open-hearted.

Most of the pieces are credited as joint compositions but some are arrangements of traditional pieces, such as “Swedish Dance”, which opens with a bass solo rich in disciplined emotion before moving into an ensemble workout on a light-footed tune whose complex rhythms are made to sound as charming as a children’s song. The stately melody of “Lovely Joan” is delivered by Roberts on a set of Northumbrian pipes — mellower than their Scottish or Irish equivalents — before he switches to soprano saxophone for an intricate conversation with Holland’s nimble acoustic picking and Thompson’s firmly grounded bass. Of the originals, “Minor Escapade” adds elements of the classic John Coltrane Quartet to this trio’s distinctive approach.

Not having played it for some years, I’d forgotten what a truly exhilarating album it is. Now it’ll be at the top of the pile for some time to come, adding the sparkle and freshness of its understated virtuosity to the room. RIP, Danny.

* The photo of Danny Thompson is from the cover of Whatever and was taken by Nick White.

Sep 9

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Every beat of my heart

This is the bass-drum head from the kit I used as a member of an R&B band in 1964-65. Last week, two days after I’d taken it to the recycling centre as part of a general clearout of superfluous possessions, a mid-evening collapse on a platform at St Pancras station saw me in an ambulance, where a pair of paramedics gave me an ECG that showed I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia.

What kind of a drummer, even an ex-drummer, suffers from arrhythmia? To injury was added insult.

I was admitted, via A&E, to St Thomas’s Hospital, directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament. For the first four days I was in a ward on the seventh floor, in a bed by a window giving me a view across the Thames that would cost you £5,000 a night were it a hotel room. At some time during those first four days under the care of the National Health Service the monitor showed that my heart stopped for four seconds — I thought only Aretha Franklin could do that to me — and then restarted itself.

Long story short, there was another episode that led to a rush into the Intensive Care Unit, and from there a day later to an operating theatre where a cardiac pacemaker was installed. My problem had been caused by bradychardia: the unnatural slowing of the heartbeat. The pacemaker will ensure that it won’t fall below 70 beats per minute. In a couple of months, a second procedure will lower the safe limit to 60bpm.

That sounds like a nice, steady, medium-pace lope, which probably suits me now. And thinking about it set me to imagining the possibility that one day, when you have a pacemaker fitted, it might come with a variety of settings, based on the characteristic approaches to tempo of great drummers. Naturally, I thought of jazz drummers.

Which button would I want to press? Elvin Jones would be too turbulent, Art Blakey too disruptive, Tony Williams too hyperactive, Tyshawn Sorey too unpredictable. Sunny Murray? Not sure I’d want my heart to run on free rhythm. If I were younger, I’d opt for Billy Higgins, not least because, along with that amazing sense of lift, I’d probably get, as an extra, the lovely smile he always wore. But I’m not young. So the graceful swing of either Kenny Clarke or Jimmy Cobb would do for me.

Anyway, the point of this profoundly self-indulgent story is that between one Sunday and the next I spent part of the time wondering what our elected representatives were up to in the big building on the other side of the river and the rest of it marvelling at the astonishing amount of kindness and consideration shown towards me by the skilled, wise and compassionate NHS staff whose job was to save the life of someone hitherto completely unknown to any of them.

I didn’t get the name of the young female maternity nurse who was getting off the same train and immediately came to my aid, or those of two more fellow passengers, a pair of young women doctors, who stayed with me until the ambulance arrived, or those of the two paramedics who took over, made the initial diagnosis, and decided that St Thomas’s would be the best place for me, or that of the doctor who triaged me in A&E and sent me up to the seventh floor.

But thereafter I did start writing down the first names of as many of those who helped me as I could catch: nurses, doctors, cleaners, cardiologists, electrocardiologists, radiographers and others. Those names, unsorted by function or rank but in more or less chronological order, give a sort of a portrait of the health service that is a riposte to those both working hard to destroy it and to divide us by undermining the stability of our post-colonial, multicultural society. Here they are:

Abdul, Melody, Beth, Eva, Cielo, Jonathan, Alma, Lily, Simran, Isaac, Angelo, Favour, Aba, Aboudin, Lina, Mehari, Precious, Nabila, Chris, Parth, Tracey, Izabela, Konstantinos, Serena, Gloria, Anoup, Shawza, Rawlston, Diego, two Clares, Richard, Sabeen, Emma, Terry, Elorine, Nikki.

I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service — comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers — at their best. Something I’ll never forget.

Aug 31

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Isle of Wight 1970: The getaway

The problem with the 1970 Isle of Wight festival was how to get out of it. On the morning of Monday, August 31, exactly 55 years ago, something like 600,000 fans were going to be trying to leave the island. In all probability, the queue for the ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth was likely to resemble a less frostbitten version of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow.

I’d attended the festival with my friend Geoffrey Cannon, then the Guardian‘s rock critic. I was one of three Melody Maker writers on the case; the others were Chris Welch and Michael Watts. Poor Watts, a recent recruit, had been sent to a camping supplies shop on Holborn, around the corner from the office, and given enough money to equip himself with a small tent and a bedroll. His job would be to tell the story from the perspective of the kids up on the hill.

Welch and I would be taking notes in the relatively salubrious area reserved for VIPs and the press in front of the stage, revelling in the experience of seeing Miles Davis play to a crowd of more than half a million with an average age of probably 20. And there was Joni Mitchell, and the Who, and Richie Havens, and John Sebastian, and the rest of an extraordinary bill.

Geoffrey and I both had to be at our respective offices by the Monday lunchtime, and it was he who came up with a brilliant solution. He called the flying school at Portsmouth airport and asked if they had a plane that could pick us up and take us across the Solent.

The flying school could indeed meet his request, and we were invited to report at something like six o’clock in the morning, maybe a bit earlier. After leaving the festival and making it to the nearby Bembridge airfield, we sat in a hut by the grass runway, waiting for our plane to arrive.

We’d been there for a few minutes when a limousine drew up. Out of it stepped Jimi Hendrix, still wearing the flowing multicoloured silks he’d worn on stage only three or four hours earlier, giving a performance that had begun badly but eventually coalesced into something those who heard it would never forget (luckily, the whole set was filmed).

For Jimi, a helicopter was waiting. He climbed in and disappeared into the misty dawn sky. Eighteen days later, after returning to London from gigs in Denmark and West Germany, he was dead.

Shortly after his departure from Bembridge, our single-engined Cessna turned up and off we went. I expect we shared a taxi from Portsmouth to London and put it on expenses, as we did with the cost of the plane ride, which came to nine pounds and six shillings, including landing fees. The bill was made out to Geoffrey. Somehow, I’ve managed to hang on to it for the past five and a half decades.

Aug 28

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Farewell to Bra Tebs

There used to be a civilised convention that normal reviewing practice should be suspended for certain kinds of musical events: those put on for charity, or memorials. Of the celebration of the life of Louis Tebogo Moholo-Moholo at a packed 100 Club last night, it need really only be said that the whole evening was suffused with the indomitable spirit of the great South African drummer, who died in June, aged 85.

The trumpeter Claude Deppa, his friend and frequent bandmate in Viva La Black, started the proceedings at the head of his warm-hearted quartet. Then the pianist Steve Beresford and the drummer Mark Sanders took over for an intricate and absorbing free conversation. Evan Parker brought out his soprano saxophone, removed its mouthpiece, and tapped the keys to produce a quite extraordinary 10-minute percussion solo which managed to be both a shadow commentary on what he might have played with the mouthpiece in place and a unique tribute to his former colleague in the band Foxes Fox. The trio of Larry Stabbins on alto saxophone, Paul Rogers on bass and Sanders again on drums played a set notable for Rogers manoeuvring his bespoke seven-string instrument into the expressive space between a Celtic harp and a cello.

The heart of the celebration of Bra Tebs (as his friends knew him), which was organised by Hazel Miller and Mike Gavin of Ogun Records, came in the set by Four Blokes + 1, his last London-based band. Pictured above, this featured Jason Yarde and Shabaka on saxophones, Alex Hawkins on piano and John Edwards on bass, with the superb Sanders once more on the drum stool, embodying rather than imitating the characteristics of Louis’s playing. They came out roaring, and that’s how they were still sounding as I had to make my departure, with the darkly ecstatic closing cadences of “Dikeledi Tsa Phelo” accompanying me up the stairs and into the night.

Aug 21

20 Comments

Major dudes, minor ninths

The implied flavour of much of the music made by Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker might be read as that of hard bop as played on the West Coast: laconic, brainy, slyly coded, but also somehow sunlit. By contrast with the jazz musicians they admired, the Steely Dan duo were afforded the sort of time and effort needed to make their records as immaculate as possible, successfully substituting wit and taste for spontaneity. The result, almost airtight in its perfection, would seem to render any attempt at recreation by third parties not just superfluous but doomed from the outset.

There are, nevertheless, several Steely Dan tribute outfits of high repute, existing to satisfy the appetite in particular of those never fortunate enough to hear the original band in person. I haven’t seen any of them, although I was sorry to miss the 14-piece Royal Scammers when they played the 606 Club in Chelsea last year, having heard good reports from reliable sources.

But if tribute bands live are one thing, offering at least a partial guarantee of satisfaction, an album of reinterpretations is a great deal riskier. The British singer and pianist Chris Ingham brings it off with Walter / Donald, his rearrangements of 13 songs performed by a quintet in which he’s joined by the trumpeter Paul Higgs, the saxophonist Harry Greene, the double bassist Geoff Gascoyne and the drummer George Double.

Ingham is a former music journalist (for Mojo, mostly) and author of books on the Beatles, Billie Holiday and others. Now he writes TV soundtracks and leads a band that has also recorded and toured its surveys the music of Hoagy Carmichael, Dudley Moore and Stan Getz. A fine pianist, he has a light, pleasant singing voice, totally lacking in affectation but not in character, wisely avoiding attempts to imitate Fagen’s distinctive sardonic croon. It’s a little like listening to Georgie Fame singing Mose Allison’s songs: a intelligent take, full of the sort of implicit affection and respect which, along with the musicianship involved, make it stand up as a valid adjunct to the originals.

There are some fine moments, many of which bring the latent jazz to the surface. “Your Gold Teeth II” has a lovely two-horn unison intro, a little like a gentler Horace Silver arrangement, and “I Got the News” finds a hint of Monk in the melody’s staccato phrases. The choice of material also veers into less obvious areas, as with “The Last Mall”, a warped blues-with-a-bridge from Everything Must Go, the last Dan album, released in 2003, which has its chords straightened out and is enlivened by the smart addition of the irresistible horn riff from Fagen’s cover of “Ruby Baby”, from The Nightfly. And I think I might even prefer Ingham’s reading of the quietly heartbreaking “Paging Audrey” to that on Becker’s second solo album, Circus Money (2008).

There are fine horn solos throughout, Higgs displaying an almost cornet-like brightness and an adroit use of cup or plunger mute on the brief coda to “Your Gold Teeth II” and the intro and solos on “Haitian Divorce”, while Greene’s tenor has a fluent mobility reminiscent (to me, anyway) of Hank Mobley, excelling on “What a Shame About Me”, a really great song — a John Cheever short story in five verses.

Honestly, if you walked into a club and found yourself listening to this band playing this material, you’d be extremely happy. It might not be a revelation but you’d be hearing wonderful songs carefully turned so as to catch the light from a different angle, in the process drawing out their humanity.

* The Chris Ingham Quintet plays a launch gig for Walter / Donald at the Pizza Express in Soho on September 17. The album is out now on Downhome Records, available from https://www.chrisingham.co.uk/shop

Aug 7

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Aces high in Camden Town

On the first floor at the Hawley Arms, a pub in Camden Town, Ted Carroll is spinning the discs. He’s started the session with the Bobbettes’ “Mr Lee”, a record that changed his life when he bought an original copy on the London label. He’ll go on to play Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley”, Inez and Charlie Foxx’s “Mockingbird” and other choice stuff before resuming his conversations with guests at last night’s 50th birthday celebration for Ace Records, which he and his co-founders, Roger Armstrong and Trevor Churchill, turned into the most prolific and consistently rewarding of reissue labels.

I used to visit Ted’s stall at the back of 93 Golborne Road, up at the then-untrendy north end of Portobello Road, soon after he opened it in 1971 with a stock built around 1,800 London 45s from the ’50s and ’60s. The equivalent of New York’s Village Oldies and House of Oldies, it attracted a clientele of people — some of them famous — looking for rare old R&B, rock and roll and doo-wop vinyl. He added a stall in Soho later in the decade before opening the Rock On shop on Kentish Town Road, next door to Camden Town tube station, from where he also ran the Chiswick label.

Ace began with the acquisition of Johnny Vincent’s label of the same name, out of Jackson, Mississippi. That was the first of many such deals made with some of the great American post-war record men, including Art Rupe of Specialty, Hy Weiss of Old Town and the Bihari brothers of Modern, a species now extinct. Carroll, Armstrong and Churchill had set off on their mission of creating high-class reissues of neglected music, assembled with love, care, and thousands of hours spent in tape vaults across the US. Among later additions would be the Fantasy group of labels, which included Stax/Volt, thus enabling Armstrong, as he told me last night, to stumble open-mouthed upon the session tapes of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”.

Personally, I’m profoundly grateful to such compilers as Mick Patrick, Ady Croasdell, Tony Rounce, John Broven, Dean Rudland and Alec Palao for the enthusiasm and scholarship behind dozens of wonderful CDs devoted to stuff I care about. There’s the imaginatively programmed songwriters’ and producers’ series, covering the works of Goffin & King, Leiber & Stoller, Greenwich & Barry, Mann & Weil, Jackie DeShannon, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, P. F. Sloan & Steve Barri, Bob Gaudio, Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Bert Berns, Jerry Ragovoy, and others. There’s the four-volume Sue story, put together by Rob Finnis, and the epic five discs of the late Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures. There’s Ady Croasdell’s beautiful Lou Johnson anthology, his two-volume This Is Lowrider Soul, and his compilation of Doré label tracks called L. A. Soul Sides, including Rita and the Tiaras’ magical “Gone With the Wind Is My Love”. There’s Mick Patrick’s collection of Teddy Randazzo’s great productions and, going back to 1984, Where the Girls Are, his first compilation and one of many devoted to the beloved girl-group genre.

That’s just scratching the surface. And whether pop, blues, R&B, Northern Soul, funk, gospel or jazz, the packaging of Ace’s releases has always been exemplary, thanks to the informative and enjoyable annotations and picture research by the compilers, and to intelligent artwork by designers including Neil Dell, who worked on many of the CDs I’ve mentioned.

The label was sold a couple of years ago. Its new owners, a Swedish company called Cosmos Music, seem committed to continuing on the same path, with the same managers and contributors. A lot of them were at last night’s very convivial party, which started well for me when I walked in to the sound of Dean Rudland playing Oscar Brown Jr’s “Work Song” off a French EP, followed by Ray Charles giving the Raelettes’ Margie Hendrix her finest hour — well, 16 bars — on “You Are My Sunshine”.

Ted, who followed Dean on the decks, now runs a new incarnation of Rock On in the lovely market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, just off the A1; a bit different from Camden Town — where, as I walked back to the tube, a trio called Thistle were trying to convince their audience that the ground-floor room of the Elephants Head pub was CBGB, this was 1975, and the next band on the bill would be the Patti Smith Group.

Fifty years ago Ted, Roger, Trevor and their helpers did a great thing by starting Ace. When a label introduces you to such gems as Margaret Mandolph’s ” I Wanna Make You Happy” (on Croasdell’s Tears in My Eyes compilation from 1985) and the Vogues’ “Magic Town” (on Glitter and Gold, the first of Patrick’s two Mann & Weil CDs), you can only raise a glass to the work they’ve done and thank them for the happiness it continues to bring.

Aug 4

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Too much, too late

Once upon a time there was a phenomenon called the rip-off, a form of commercial exploitation that could be defined as being overcharged for something you really wanted and had to have. I guess that was back in the ’60s. You knew it when you saw it. Now we live in a rip-off culture, where the price of things is calculated not on the cost of the parts plus a bit of profit for the maker and distributor but on what a sufficient number of buyers can be induced to pay.

I’m writing this while wincing from the pain of having parted with £229 for Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums. This, as you may be aware, is a set of seven CDs recorded between 1983 and 2014, six of them conceived and recorded at the same time and one assembled from bits and pieces. I’ve loved Springsteen since reviewing Greetings from Asbury Park, N. J. for the Melody Maker in early 1973, I bought bootlegs like You Can Trust Your Car to the Man With the Star and the Roxy tapes in the early days, and the last of the many times I’ve seen him, at Wembley in the summer of 2024, is a cherished memory. So I was looking forward to hearing these “lost albums” (which, of course, weren’t lost at all, merely filed away in Bruce’s personal tape store).

Their arrival was a bit disconcerting. They came in a container of very large dimensions, carefully packaged up, opening to reveal a box big enough to hold seven 12-inch vinyl albums, never mind seven little silver discs. The reason for the use of the outsized packaging seems to be the inclusion of a large-format 100-page hardback book containing a lot of impressionistic black and white photographs — Fender Esquire headstock, Twin Reverb amp, Bruce on horseback, Bruce on a motorbike, Bruce in the studio — and a series of short essays explaining the making of each of the CDs.

Despite this early evidence of art-director overkill, I was still looking forward to hearing the music. Gradually, though, as I worked my way through the CDs in sequence, it became obvious that their maker had made the right decision to put them on the shelf. There is virtually nothing here that reaches the level of his best officially released music. What it shows most clearly is that he’s written and recorded a lot of songs over the years in his various home studios, and some of them aren’t very good, which is why they were left on the shelf.

That’s most clearly apparent on the first disc, LA Garage Sessions ’83, where he sounds uncomfortably like the guy of limited horizons gently satirised by Prefab Sprout on “Cars and Girls” in 1988. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions is no better: one-paced and somehow enervated. Faithless, commissioned as the soundtrack for an “as-yet unmade” movie, is better: a well-turned essay in Americana with atmospheric instrumentals and lots of acoustic slide guitar and harmonica, a bit like one of Ry Cooder’s soundtracks, or Dylan’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with a strong song in “My Master’s Hand”, making it an album you can put on and quite enjoy from beginning to end.

Of Somewhere North of Nashville, a quite lavish but ultimately heavy handed production with lots of Soozie Tyrell’s fiddle and Marty Rifkin’s steel guitar, you can only say that if it were a bunch of demos it wouldn’t get him a publishing contract on Music Row, not when the best of the dozen songs is “Poor Side of Town”, written by Johnny Rivers and Lou Adler, here delivered in a version that lacks the charm of Rivers’ original, a No 1 hit on its release in 1966. Bruce’s stab at a Tex-Mex album, titled Inyo, is fresher, but still not really convincing, despite the occasional use of mariachi musicians, the pleasant textures and the attempt to create complex, poetic lyrics; you merely end up wishing he’d make an album with Los Lobos.

The worst, by a distance, is Twilight Hours, his stab at writing and recording a sumptuously upholstered album of saloon songs, laments for lost love glimpsed in the bottom of a whisky glass in a dimly lit cocktail bar while car tyres hiss by in the rain and neon signs glow in the puddles. That sort of thing. When Sinatra patented the genre, he had the benefit of repertoire composed by likes of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern, Yip Harburg, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jule Styne and Gordon Jenkins — people who could fit together richly chromatic melodies and highly literate lyrics. And just as none of them could have written “Thunder Road” or “Badlands”, so Springsteen couldn’t write “Angel Eyes” or “Violets for Your Furs”. His decision not to release this album six years ago shows that he knew the results were not satisfactory.

The final album, Perfect Days, although cobbled together from various sessions, is paradoxically quite the most coherent of all the discs, with some songs that would have taken their places happily in second-rank Springsteen albums like Working on a Dream or High Hopes. Big and beefy in an E Street Band way, “Another Thin Line” is a fine take on the “Gloria” template, while “The Great Depression” is a particularly attractive strummed ballad.

If you told me that Dylan often leaves great stuff in the vault until it finds its way into a volume of his Bootleg Series, I’d answer that there’s no “Blind Willie McTell”, “Red River Shore” or “Cross the Green Mountain” here. If you were to say that Dylan often tries on costumes, whether for Nashville Skyline or Shadows in the Night, as Springsteen does here, I’d reply that the older artist made important strategic use of those genre-hopping adventures, allowing them to condition the music that came next. Dylan may have recorded “Autumn Leaves”, but he didn’t make the mistake of thinking he could write something like it; instead he used the experience of delivering it to redirect his approach to singing his own songs.

So I dunno. Previous dives into Springsteen’s vaults have delivered excellent official versions of much loved and often bootlegged songs such as “Santa Ana”, “Thundercrack” and “The Promise”. When it comes to this set, I admire him for exercising good judgment when it came to making an initial assessment of the material. I suppose it ought to be interesting to hear the stuff that didn’t work — but at more than 30 quid a disc? I really don’t think so.

Jul 30

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A salute to Tom Lehrer

‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.

The songs of Tom Lehrer presented me, in my early teens, with my first exposure to the art of modern satire. He was some kind of genius, a Randy Newman with sharper teeth, achieving popularity in the 1950s and ’60s and then giving it all up to pursue his career as a teacher of mathematics at Harvard, MIT and elsewhere. In 2020 he announced that all his work was henceforward free from copyright considerations; anybody could do whatever they wanted with it.

He died the other day, aged 97, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve read some good obituaries, particularly one in the Guardian by Francis Beckett, whose play Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You will be performed at the OSO Arts Centre in Barnes, south-west London, in November. But none of those I’ve seen mentioned the couplet at the top of this piece. It comes from his song “Wernher von Braun”, about the German scientist who helped create the V2 for Hitler before working on ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA. These lines have stayed with me all my life, helping in a small but not insignificant way to form a view of the world.

Jul 29

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The return of Larry Stabbins

Not often does a jazz club dedicate an evening to the memory of a regular customer. Last night’s show at the Vortex was dedicated to Shirley Thompson, who died earlier this year, aged 87. For many years Shirley and her partner, John Jack, the founder of Cadillac Records, were fixtures at a table for two alongside the left-hand wall; the seating arrangements have recently changed, but a photograph of the couple and a bottle of wine were placed on a table in their old location.

As it happens, a lot of emotions were floating around the Vortex last night. The event also commemorated the late Louis Moholo-Moholo by functioning as the launch of a new CD, recorded live in Foggia during a short Italian tour 40 years ago, by a special trio: Louis on drums, Keith Tippett on piano, and Larry Stabbins on tenor and soprano saxophones and flute.

Stabbins was the featured attraction last night, leading a trio completed by the most suitable replacements possible: Alexander Hawkins on piano and Mark Sanders on drums. Having made his reputation alongside Tippett, his fellow Bristolian and mentor, in Centipede and Ark, and confirmed it with the the SME, the LJCO and others, as well the band Working Week, the saxophonist left music for 20 years. His return to activity is greatly to be applauded.

Last night he led off with “Ismite Is Might”, a beautiful Chris McGregor composition that he remembered from his experience of depping for Alan Skidmore in the Brotherhood of Breath. A sober, hymn-like piece, it displayed the strength of his tenor tone and the sharp focus of his phrasing: stronger and sharper than I remembered, indeed. There were other evocations of the South African influence throughout the set I heard, most obviously in a marvellously powerful Hawkins solo. Sanders kept the pots boiling throughout in a way that Louis would have admired. This was life-enhancing music.

* Live in Foggia is out now on the Ogun label (Ogunrecording.co.uk). There will be a full-scale tribute to Louis Moholo-Moholo at the 100 Club on August 27, featuring many musicians with whom he worked, including Claude Deppa, Evan Parker and Shabaka Hutchings, and members of his band Four Blokes (tickets: https://wegottickets.com/event/669285).

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