Tolkien the pee

 

Happy World Read a Book Day to all who celebrate!

This is my current reading. I had any love for The Hobbit beaten out of me at primary school when one of our teachers decided to read it to us. Clobber us over the head with it, more like. I think we were slightly too young and I never took to it. She would have been at teacher's training college in the early-mid 70s when Tolkein was all the rage, what with him being an influence on the lyrics of a load of the rock bands at the time.

So all of those Peter Jackson films passed me by. "Bloody fantasy crap" was what I thought about those.

Fast forward to about a month ago and I'm listening to a podcast and the guest is talking about an adaptation of an abridged The Hobbit that she had as a child, that was on a double album and read by the actor Nichol Williamson. They played clips from it on the podcast and were talking in general about other non-Jackson adaptations of The Hobbit. What was mentioned was the 1979 Jackanory adaptation which celebrated the 500th Jacaknory story and was told over two weeks and with four actors, which included Bernard Cribbins and Jan Francis. I distinctly remember that, and they sat around a camp fire while they told the story. So I thought "Why aren't I into this? It's about things I love: folk tales, mountainous landscapes, runic symbols, adventure etc. And it's been a massive influence on a load of music I like and directly referenced by both Led Zeppelin and Rush. And I'm also into old telly" so I thought I'd look to see if the Jackanory adaptation was on YouTube. But of course the Tolkien estate is rather controlling, so it isn't.

However, what is on Spotify is the album version that was talked about on the podcast. So I thought I'd listen to it. And do you know, I really rather enjoyed it. So I bought the book. And I'm actually reading Tolkien. This is a slippery slope to The Lord Of the Rings, isn't it?

Supermarket car park reviews: Steven Wilson

 This week's supermarket car park retrospective review.

Narrator's voice: "To the Bone didn't get to no.1 on the week of release. The no.1 album that week was some estate of Elvis Presley cash-in to mark 40 years of his death which was heavily promoted in supermarkets. Back when supermarkets sold CDs"

Forgot to mention in the video that when we saw the tour to promote this LP at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, Robert Fripp and Toyah bloody Willcox were in the foyer having a drink during the interval. They’re only slightly taller than The Borrowers.

https://youtu.be/rYth2CpRawk?si=sXBhIusdgRFibPXo

Commotion At a Book Festival

Lovely afternoon and evening at Newark Book Festival. First up talking all things ABBA was Giles Smith. He wrote one of my favourite books about music, Lost In Music. I have two first editions of that book but couldn't find either of them when I looked last night so bought the new, updated edition at the festival for him to sign.

Then this evening a great time with one of my favourite writers, Nottinghamshire's own - via Devon - Tom Cox. And he knew who I was! He said to me "Are you the Rich who runs the vinyl club? I wondered if you'd be here". How cool is that!? I've told him via socials before, but reiterated again tonight, that if he wants to come and do a presentation at Vinyl Sundays when he's up here visiting his parents, then he's always welcome. And Vinyl Sundays sounds miles better than the record club he goes to in Exeter. What a lovely man. Plus there's a free bookmark made by his very talented mum. And he brings all the hippy chicks to the yard.

I also bought a copy of his latest, yet to be released, novel, 1983. I helped crowdfund it, so another copy will be coming through the door on publication day in August.

 

Spirit

Interesting evening in Sheffield on Monday when I attended a talk and Q&A by the biographer of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis, Ben Wardle. The evening also included a playback of Talk Talk's most celebrated LP, Spirit of Eden.

These author events are becoming more and more popular which matches the large increase of books about pop, and indeed, rock music. 

1988 was a torrid year for popular music. Stock, Aitken & Waterman and dreck like Bros seemingly had a stranglehold on the charts. Spirit of Eden is such an anomaly of the time because unlike virtually everything else, it didn't contain things like a synthesiser, sequencers, click tracks, gated drums etc. I'd say that the only instruments on Spirit of Eden that requires electricity to reach its potential is the Hammond organ, electric guitar and maybe an electric bass guitar used sparingly. There is an electronic instrument on the LP called a variophone but then again, that's something else about Spirit of Eden - the instruments used that are so far outside the bounds of what rock records normally contained. I mean do you know what a shozygs is? Well, you can hear one being played on Spirit of Eden.

It was recorded in an unorthodox manner too. Hollis and co-producer and co-writer Tim Friese-Green would have a basic idea of what they wanted and would then bring in a whole range of session musicians to play whatever they felt like over a very sparse backing track, and in darkness with just a strobe light or oil projector for light. Quite often, when these musicians had left, Hollis would decree that "it didn't feel right" and delete hours and hours of recordings. 

I mean, how do you decide what is right? What was it within him that made him decide that only three notes of Danny Thompson's double bass would be used out of hours of recordings? 

And yet the album works completely. It's so massively understated. For 80% of the vocal, Hollis's voice barely registers above a whisper. Even the band photo on the cover is deliberately obscure.

I have a funny relationship with Spirit of Eden. When it was released, in 1988, I was 17 and a fan of TT's earlier more synthpop albums and also their excellent album from 1986, The Colour of Spring, their real breakthrough album in the UK (although they'd been very popular in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands before then).

I think I was far too young for Spirit of Eden in 1988. I bought it on cassette because I had the luxury in those days of being able to walk to work and would use a Walkman to help me on my way. I recall thinking at the time "What the hell is this? Where's the hooks and choruses?" I really didn't like it. I listened to it once put the tape in a drawer and never touched it again.

Then, in around 2000, a funny thing happened - Q magazine gave away a cover mount CD that was themed around chill out, which was all the rage at the time. Included on that CD were tracks by Goldfrapp (the first time I'd ever heard them) and a lovely song called Underneath the Weeping Willow by the Radcliffe & Riley endorsed American band, Grandaddy.

Also in this CD was a track from Spirit of Eden called Inheritance. And that's when it struck. That's when Spirit of Eden hit for me. Inheritance has this strange woodwind instrumental section that is hugely reminiscent of music that Oliver Postgate would use in Ivor the Engine or The Clangers. Kiddies telly is a weird way into an album as important as Spirit of Eden but that's what struck me. I needed to go back and listen to it again. So the cassette came out of storage and that's when the whole album revealed itself to me. I needed to be nearly 30 and not 17. I was too immature to understand it.

There's a lesson there - if something doesn't hit immediately then leave it and go back to it, years, or even decades later. That's why I try again, annually, with Jeff Buckley's Grace. It's yet to have any kind of impact on me but I'm patient. 

Talk Talk were signed to EMI with the hope that they would be the next Duran Duran. Can you imagine Simon Le Bon writing a lyric like this:

"Desire, whispered, spoken

In time

Rivers oceans

That ain't me babe

I'm just content to relax

Than drown within myself

Of mind

Sheltered broken

Denied

Gifted stolen

Ain't got a bed of excuse for myself

That ain't me babe" 

Hungry Like the Wolf, it ain't. The understatement at work in that lyric is just perfection.

It most definitely isn't a record for everyone but when it does reveal itself to you, you're in for life. My companion on Monday was saying that it isn't something he listens to much, not because he doesn't like it, quite the opposite, but because it isn't that sort of LP that one would listen to all the time. You need to make time for it and give it your full attention. It's also hard to take any of the tracks out of context. The album was intended to be listened to as two separate pieces of music - Side 1 and Side 2.

Oh, and the joke's on Ben Wardle - I haven't bought the book twice; my original first edition was a gift.

 

Cue the Music

It's with a tinge of sadness that I read that the next issue of Q magazine is to be the final edition. Q is a magazine that I started reading when I was 17 and had a disposable income in my pocket. Smash Hits, as excellent as it was, I'd outgrown, the 'inkies' like NME and Melody Maker always seemed to take thmeselves far too seriously while Kerrang! just seemed rather childish (and there's a whole other post in how hard rock and heavy metal in the media is dished up to the fans). So Q came along at just the right time as my interest in music was growing massively with its mix of what we now call 'legacy acts' and pushing the hot new darlings. There was also a sense of humour at work, which I wouldn't expect any less with former Smash Hits editor Mark Ellen at the helm.
So yeah, I'd found my mag. Each month I'd devour the mag from cover-to-cover, learning about the aforementioned legacy acts like The Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd while looking to see what was new and exciting with the expansive Q Review which covered everything from albums to films to books. I'm not entirely sure but did they invent the star rating system? At the very least they popularised it. A one star review was always much more fun to read than a five star (complete with red stars to emphasise how great this thing was) because you knew the reviewer had put the boot in. This was 30 odd years before the admirable 'be kind' movement. It was the 80s and despite Live Aid, people weren't particularly kind.
Ah yes, Live Aid. Would Q have existed without the events of July 13th 1985? Probably but not in the form it went on to take - Live Aid validated the appreciation of artists whose best work was released perhaps ten to twenty years earlier. So it's no great surprise that McCartney appeared on the cover of issue 1 and the likes of the revitalised Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and Mick and Keef were regular cover stars in the first decade of its publishing life.
Then, bouyed by the success of Q, the publishers decided to launch Mojo. I think this diluted the brand somewhat. The legacy acts that had their place in Q were now on the cover of Mojo, so Q's shift was then on to the newer artists. To me that wasn't what Q was about. It was supposed to be 'the modern guide to music and more'. So as much as I wanted to read about Radiohead or PJ Harvey I also wanted to read about Fairport Convention or The Isley Brothers. I resented that I was being ased to buy two magazines. So I didn't.
I stuck doggedly with Q until 1997 when my circumstances changed - I had my first mortgage and percieved luxuries like glossy magazines were put on the backburner - I remember the last issue I bought as a matter of course clearly: the issue where the Oasis album Be Here Now was given a five star review. Now I know that artists are much more receptive to giving a magazine more access if that mag is seen as being on board with the product but five stars for Be Here Now? Really? Britpop was already going down the dumper and this lumpen, rambling, overlong, cocaine-fuelled muscal travesty was surely no serious music journalists idea of a five star album, was it? That was where the mag lost some cred with me.
So I did buy the odd issue when I could afford it or if there was something I really wanted to read in it. In fact for quite a while I hardly bought any music magazines regularly. Then the team that brought us Q originally then brought us The Word (or just Word as it was back then, not the definite article). Now this was the very magazine for me: legacy acts? Yes! Newer acts? Yes! Decent review section? Yes! Funny? Yes!
And then, sadly, The Word left us. But that had rekindled my love of music magazines. So I now subscribe to Prog and regularly (not every issue but regularly enough) buy Mojo (I finally succumbed,), Uncut, Classic Rock and Record Collector. Cherish these things and buy them because it's no good lamenting them when they're on the way out. Buy the physical copies. Don't be like the person I heard on a podcast a few months ago say that he no longer bought music magazines "because someone invented the internet". In all spheres physical product is king, streaming services whether that be Spotify, Netflix or Apple can and will pull things down and not bother paying the creatives their worth. Nobody discovered The Incredible String Band because they clicked a link on Pitchfork.

The photo up there is of the first Q I bought. So I was a regular for nearly a decade. Not bad going.

Percy

There's a good documentary to be made about Rockfield Studios to be made. Sadly, the one shown in BBC4 on Saturday night wasn't it. Dave Edmunds, the guy who made the studios name, was only shown in a brief clip and as much as I'm not fussed about Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody was talked about only in passing. However, we did get treated to Liam Gallagher effin' and jeffin' for ages and Chris Martin droning on about the gestation of Yellow. Which was nice*...

I was listening to a podcast the other week that claimed Robert Fripp had 'won' rock music: he's very highly respected, lives in a nice house and is clearly still able to make a substantial living from his work. Sadly for him, he  has the misfortune to be married to Toyah Willcox so no, Bob hasn't 'won' rock music. I'll tell you who has, another Robert and a contributor to the Rockfield film, Robert Plant. He's filthy rich, can pick and choose what he does, people are still interested in his output, can sell tickets, can and does tell Jimmy Page to do one, retains a highly approachable everyman image which sees him sitting in the stands with all the other punters at football and, crucially, he ISN'T married to Toyah Willcox.
So why not give this a watch instead of the Rockfield film?

*It WASN'T nice.

Concision

On Saturday night we watched This Is Spinal Tap, a film which clips along and lasts barely 75 minutes. We then watched Letter to Brezhnev which lasts just over 90 minutes. I've also been listening to a podcast about the third greatest film of the 1980s, An American Werewolf in London, which has a running time of 97 minutes. No film needs to last more than 105 minutes at the very most. Reservoir Dogs lasts 99 minutes which is the perfect length. Tarantino's latest film lasts for over 160 minutes. Why? Films are too long these days. If you need your film to last more than an hour and three quarters then turn into a TV series. And don't get me even started on The Irishman. Difference there is that at least you can watch that at home if you're one of these people with Netflix, so you can at least get up and have a walk around.

Rocket Man, the Elton John biopic could have done with some serious editing, knocking at least 20 minutes off it. I was well square-arsed when we came out of the pictures. I'm currently reading Elton's autobiography, as well as being a right rollicking read, we've already met Bernie Taupin by page 50, he's slayed the American glitterati by page 70 and the entire book is out of your way in less than 350 pages. Brevity in all things is what I now demand. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to. Films lasting far too long is what puts me off going to the pictures these days. I'm nearly 50, life is short, I have other things to do.

I like what this band do. They do prog, but hardly any of their songs last more than three and a half minutes. Which is nice. For prog.

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