Let's do it for the kids

A few days in and its clear that 2021 is going to be what my Nan used to call a “buggers muddle.”  All hopes are pinned on the life-threatening pandemic being curtailed, to a significant degree, by a massive vaccination programme to protect the vulnerable and the elderly.  The news media describe the vaccine roll-out, jabbing 23 million over 50’s in three months, supported by 200,000 volunteers and 24/7 hour project management as akin to a “war time effort”.  Indeed, the programme is being run by Brigadier Phil Prosser, whose day job is “to deliver combat supplies to UK forces in time of war”.  So far, so good and the sunny uplands glimpsed at the end of tunnel, just round the corner,  are looking hopeful!

But, until the policy makers opine on reduced transmission rates, proven jab efficacy and falling ward admissions, then social-distancing will still be mandated, perhaps for years. So if you love a disco, singing in close harmony, shouting in stadiums, or have dreams of standing in your wellies waving your glow stick in a field, then at best, it is very unlikely that those joys will be allowed in 2021. Yes, this year is going to be the “buggers muddle” mix of being given some hope that it will soon be Friday, while having to wake to an endless series of gloomy Mondays.  

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If we can’t hope for normality in 2021, what about 2022?  Well by the autumn of this year, the UK government aims to give “every adult who wants it” a vaccination jab, and may well be on a second phase of boosters, top-ups and re-shots for the elderly, vulnerable and shielding.  So a year from now - what of the young?  What of the kids?  The students, the youth, the teenagers, the children, the rug-rats, and the graduates whose lives have been on hold?  Perhaps, in 2022, we should collectively make that year “pay back time” for the young?  If the chances of a healthy 19 year-old being killed by COVID-19 are already vanishingly small and the rest of us have the reassurance of a sore upper arm and a new-found sense of security, then surely we should unleash the kids?   In 2022, I propose payback time for the generation we “grown ups” have spent the past year making miserable, anxious and bored. 

For the young, rather than “shielding”, perhaps we should have a government policy of “unleashing”.  A minimum of four hours a day outside the home, not including School.  All feral teenagers will be required by law to meet up with at least nine other kids each week, even if it just to take a selfie and shrug wordlessly. Home-Schooling will be banned by law. Going to the cinema, ice-skating, playing “British Bull Dog” in the playground and hanging around outside McDonalds on Saturday will be part of the National Curriculum.  On Thursday evenings, there will be a media promoted ritual called “clap for parents”, where kids will pay noisy homage, while banging pots and pans. Freshers Weeks at University will be upgraded to a Freshers’ Month across the country, even in Scotland, and a full-on Freshers’ Term for those in Manchester, who were treated with such disdain by their University in 2020.  Older folk will be still be wary of attending football stadiums, so the Premier League will roll out a new scheme, where matches are completely free for kids to gather and scream, though the cost of a pie and a drink will remain usuriously high.  The underage drinking of cider will be banned in parks, outdoor spaces, and behind bike-sheds, and rigorously policed, so Wetherspoons profits will soar. Those fancy “Mark Warner” style holidays, where kids and parents are separated for eight hours a day, will be funded for all pandemic home-schooling parents by Rishi Sunak. Parents will sleep and talk about something “other than bloody corona”, while sipping ice-tea, as their kids learn to skateboard and face-paint, while developing a painful crush on an instructor they will never forget. For the “youth”, raves, underground house-parties and music festivals - with young people gathering together in huge festering clumps of hormonal angst will be celebrated nightly on the BBC.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in 2022, let’s do it for the kids.  

Insert appropriate emoji of choice in the comments section below.  

Public Service Re-Invention

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IT WAS A perfect night for dressing up like Public Service broadcasting...

I used to 'hang-out' a lot (if that the right term for frequenting a comfortable bar) at the British Film Institute, or its better TLA name: the BFI.  It's one of those treasures of a place right "on your doorstep" (well it is if you live in a building on the Southbank of the Thames).  I became a Member of the BFI, watched lots of films, dragged my kids along to see a restored print of The Railway Children and met Marton Scorsese there (if 'met' is the right term for having attended an intimate Q&A with him and a film historian).  In 2010, I had the most extraordinary night at the BFI when I met (and this time met is the right term) Damon Gough [aka Badly Drawn Boy].  Unfortunately, I spent much of the evening calling him Damian, which he didn't seem to mind, but in hindsight, my getting his name wrong was probably less tiresome than my non-sensical ramblings about the wonders of his Once Around The Block.  The man with a beanie, it seems, did not take himself as seriously as some.  Damian, I mean, Damon and a number of other Members had managed to blag tickets to an 'audience with Bruce Springsteen' [if that is the right term for watching from afar Bruce being interviewed by some rock journalist] as he introduced a new film about the creation of Darkness On the Edge of Town.  The bar of the BFI was heaving, and Bruce joined the crowd after introducing the premiere of the film to an adoring throng of genuine Springsteen fanatics.  Now it's not every night of the week you get to have a beer within shoulder-rubbing distance of a living rock legend.  But Bruce was all humility and graciousness to all the punters asking for a photo, or an autograph, or those genuinely wanting to know what some obscure lyric referred to.  I stood with a friend agog.  Bruce Springsteen.  He shook my hand.  In the bar at the BFI. 

Despite this ready exposure to genuine rock and film making legends, I lazily let the BFI membership lapse when I joined a proper "grown up" Club.  Here, no one comes in who's famous, or rather if they are famous, everyone there pretends they are not famous and the famous person likes that and the non-famous members like that they like that and then everyone continues to eat too many chips.  So it was guilty nudge in my ribs this month when I spent so much time listening (and watching) and being wholly absorbed through some dull commutes by the rather wonderful Public Service Broadcasting.  A London-based band made of J. Willgoose, Esq. on guitar, samplings and electronic instruments; and his friend Wrigglesworth on drums.  They make great use of samples from old public information films, archive footage and propaganda material and while writing their album The War Room they formed a close relationship with the British Film Institute, using their material during live-shows.  They have scoured the archives to great effect, not just in to use of visuals, but in the finding inspiration.  Check them out on Spotify, or better on You Tube.  Night Mail is particularly evocative and provides echoes of some of the best moments from Dreadzone's Second Light.    

So it seems those hours spent in the BFI (either through some Membership subs) or contributed across a counter o'er which drinks may have traversed, continues to have been a wise investment, not just in the preservation of some old 'silent' Hitchcock films [which the BFI have magically restored] but in the creation of a new fusion of guitars and samples and old-film footage.  For a taster, try this on the subject of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian hero of the Space Race which happened in the late 1960's [allegedly].  

David responsible for saving music + the future*.

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David Laurie will shortly publish his "labour of love" book about the way pop music in the early 1980's was transformed from a world of pedestrian dinosaur monochrome lumps, into a new realm of kaleidoscopic enigmatic synth powered marvellousness, inspired by Kraftwerk and David Bowie. OK, David puts it such better than I can and he has supported the launch of the book with a neat Kickstarter campaign, short film, and curated some Spotify playlists to get you into the pivotal early 1980's mood.  I have not had the courage to tell Mister Laurie that I was mainly listening to Rush and Thin Lizzy when he had Visage on the turntable, but am hopeful the book will inspire me to revisit both.  

I have written at length before about David Bowie and particularly how he crash-bang-walloped his self back into our musical lives with The Next Day in 2013, and better still, had given no real clue to the degree with which he would rock-out in that re-emergence through the unexpected release of Where Are We Now.  Now we hear that Bowie is involved in a musical version of the The Man Who Fell To Earth, due to emerge off Broadway sometime this year.  The play is to be called "Lazarus" and it's being made by Ivo van Howe and Enda Walsh.  We loved what Enda Walsh did with Once [one of the highlights of the whole of 2014 for me] so anticipation is high here at Wave Your Arms towers, though mainly hopeful that Bowie's involvement will in some way be creative, not just one of financial support.  Meanwhile, on the theme of creative rejuvenation, David (Laurie) predicts a "really good album from Duran Duran" in 2015 and, as he says, no one would have predicted THAT 35 years ago.  You can see a trailer for David's new book DARE, here.  

*David Bowie.  

The Thrill of It All

Joseph O'Connor

I've just finished reading Joseph O'Connor's The Thrill Of It All.  I first came across O'Connor's books when I read Cowboys and Indians about twenty years ago.  I had just moved to London from the more glamorous Hull, via Birmingham, and although I had neither Eddie’s (the hero’s) swagger nor the Mohican, I loved the tale of a punk finding his way, skint in the city.  Fast forward 22 years and I was mooching around in Waterstones opposite Exeter Cathedral and came across his new book.  I had loved The Star of The Sea (a brilliant tale set aboard a famine ship, making the journey from Ireland to New York in 1847) so I grabbed the book and I devoured it in two days.  It is a wonderful heartbreaking book about music, friendship and family.  

The story follows the formation of a band called The Ships in the Night (see what he did there) and the relationship between two close friends from different sides of the planet geographically and in all other ways (Irish Robbie and Vietnamese Fran) and a brother and sister rhythm section to die for.  The typical mode for the tale (see The Commitments, Once) is for heroic failure to be celebrated amidst fart gags and much acoustic troubadour-ing.  Here the scale is writ much larger: from Luton to Dublin to New York, from backstreet bars 'open mike' to headlining the Glastonbury Festival.  From sleeping in crap vans to flying on private planes.  Success and failure is found not heroically and humbly, but hugely and devastatingly.  The characters are drawn like old friends you will have loved, lost and clung onto over the years and the two-thirds-in kick in the teeth for Robbie and the reader is a masterstroke.  Since finishing the book I keep hearing The Ships on the radio, and on Spotify, and in old records I have not heard for years.  Someone will surely make a film or a musical of the book and however well or badly it is made, with characters drawn like this, it will be massive. 

Post-script/..17th January: I found myself in a pub last night eulogising about the book to a group of old University friends, including an Irish friend (from Hong Kong) who used to play in a raggle-taggle band.  There is a new Dublin band called Cloud Castle Lake who have a falsetto singer and an extraordinary sound (think Radiohead meets the Tijuana Brass).  For me, they have Fran on vocals.  A taster, below.  Happy New Year. 

A Year of Living Legends...

It's that looking back/looking forward time of the year again, etc.  It was a mixed year creatively, with few of the knockout films of previous years, but some wonderful records which are still being played.  Herewith then, my annual review of thrills and spills from music, film and books follows:

MUSIC

My 2014 soundtrack was provided by a few familiar artists and one or two very new. Finding the Album of the Year was simple.  I discovered The War Against Drugs (fronted by the Neil Young soundalike/lookalike Adam Granduciel) in January and according to some algorithm from iTunes, I have played their album Lost In the Dream pretty much more than anything else this year.  If you get a moment, try listening to Under The Pressure (no relation to Queen and David Bowie's song) and it's hard not to become wholly immersed in the layers and layers and layers of guitar.  The Springsteen references are obvious (and so are Dylan, John Cougar, Roxy Music and many others), but for me it brought to mind some of the early Waterboys tracks like This Is The Sea or A Pagan Place.  The song just builds and builds, rocks out and then burns away in three minutes of exhausted noise and feedback.   For an obvious taster, see below; the band, playing their single Red Eyes live in Barcelona, Enjoy.  

Living Legend.  Rick Rubin.  

Also in Music, some other highlights: Baseline of the Year was Best Friend by Foster The People. Guilty Pleasure of the Year was provided by Tears For Fears who did a special feature show on Spotify. Like many of us: older, crustier, talking about song-writing and playing music again.  Angus and Julia Stone accompanied me on my increasingly random commutes with an elegant record produced by the 'living legend' Rick Rubin, who described the experience of working with the Aussie siblings as "extraordinary, I've never worked with anyone like them before."  The album is an absolute gem.  They rounded off the year by selling out a European tour topped off at the Hammersmith Apollo.  I have already bored anyone I could grab hold of about how wonderfully good living legend Kate Bush was at the same venue [see post below].  Ben Howard made a hauntingly good record and I Am Kloot produced (with help from Guy Garvey) the Song of the Year with These Days Are Mine. Interpol failed to hit the heights with El Pintor (though they sounded great at Glastonbury), U2 did a 'Gerald Ratner' through their full-on marketing love-in with Apple: telling their fans (and non fans) that their music was indeed puerile worthless tosh by giving it away for free to 1/12th of the planet's population via iTunes. Their hum-drum inoffensive album now has the ignominy of being "the most deleted album" in music history.  Shame.  More spirited and genuinely heartfelt was the Pop Music Performance of the Year [and several million YouTube hits later] of Future Islands Seasons (Waiting On You).  If you've not had the pleasure of watching Samuel T Herring, see the video link below.  What a guy, and an affected gravelly voice that made me think of the too recently late Joe Cocker.  In NME he claimed the tune took only 30 minutes to write. Extraordinary.  

FILMS

I neglected films badly this year. I wrote no words. I saw too few films.  I failed to get to the London Screenwriter's Festival in Regent's Park. I drank no beers at the BFI. Abrupt memo to self for 2015.  

But then again, was it a vintage year? Inside Llewyn Davies was so absent of any cheer, I basically gave up.  Marvel's Winter Soldier was a surprise and fun and action packed in a way that Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't. A preview showing of The Kingsman was enjoyed for an hour, but then spoiled by Director Matthew Vaughn's penchant for extreme violence.  Blue Valentine was a compelling performance, but the film dragged after the opening. X-Men Days of Future was rare in its ambition and passed all the required tests for pace, imagination and plot.  Great fun.  Grand Budapest Hotel made me wide eyed for an hour and then became a bore as they chased to the ending and beyond that: Imitation, Boyhood, Dawn of the Planet, Hobbit3, not really sure anything really got me in the gut like a Senna, or Liberal Arts or A Royal Affair.  You will see from the above, there are about 10 candidate films I have neither seen or noticed this year.  Could do better.  

BOOKS

I've read too few fiction books this year, but the ones that hit home included Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, Half Bad by Sally Green and & Sons by David Gilbert.  I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes was extremely good in a demented and I-am not-that-happy-about-how-scary-this-is sort of way.  I will write properly elsewehere about a number of new start-up/business/entrepeneurship books that I devoured from Easter through the summer - but two standouts were From Acorns by Caspian Woods and a fun, witty little book called Out of Office by Chris Ward. Appropriately, I read it in my favourite Pret coffee shop. Recommended.    

ELSEWHERE

Seeing King Lear at The National theatre, whilst eating popcorn in my local cinema was fun.  Attending a meeting in 10 Downing Street and being informed by a seriously gurning Mandarin that I would not be able to go to the toilet, because we "were in lock down" was quite a moment.  Doing a panel event with Alain de Botton, Jo Malone, Sarah Harper and various others in London was pretty special, but, highlight of the year was in found miles away in New York City...

Living legend.  Derek Jeter.

I have written before (and pretentiously) about baseball, but had never actually watched a game. In August, that gap was filled and I watched 3 hours of major league baseball in Yankee Stadium.   It was both brilliant and befuddling. 50,000 fans sat and cheered and munched their way through six-million tonnes of food. Meanwhile, led by the 'living legend' Derek Jeter, the home team actually hit the ball three times in nine completely non-eventful innings.  My prejudice was borne out.  It is just so flipping hard to hit a ball thrown at ninety miles an hour by some 7-feet tall monster on too much caffeine (or something stronger) stood on a pile of sand only a 'stones throw' away.  Unfortunately, I was queuing for a beer when the only home-run was hit and soared into the distant stand.  Towards the end of the game, the whole crowd stood and sang God Bless America. I knew there was a reason why I had enjoyed all those american Sports movies over the years.  This was sport, not as a game, but manufactured as live theatre; grandiose and celebratory, writ large, widescreen with a choreographed cacophony of sound that no 'Dolby' filter can replicate.  Jeter retired a few weeks later, having somehow hit the ball about 10,000 times in 20 years with the Yankies.  Another, living legend.  

That was the year that was Once

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January 2013 started with a rainbow.  Early morning, on the coast path, heading home to coffee and toast,  we were stopped in our tracks.  It was a sign.  Of a better year than the last.  Indeed, an excellent one.  So in classic web-log fashion, after The Times 'best books of the year', or Q’s 'top fifty albums', or NME’s 'records of the year'...  Herewith, a few reasons why there was indeed gold at the end of the rainbow.  MUSIC  It started with Bowie who tricked everyone.  Everyone.  Where Are We Now sounded weary and tenorous.  Like an old man singing listfully for the artist he was once was.  A decade or more before.  But then the album landed.  Guitars, tunes, solos, choruses.  It rocked.  The Stars Are Out Tonight, in particular.  Still, an artist.  A wonderful retrospective of 'stuff' at The V&A in March only reinforced the sense of wonder.  Bowie grew up less than a quarter of a mile from where I've lived for the past twenty years.  I pick up my dry-cleaning at the end of THAT road.  My kids remain unimpressed however much I eulogise.  Meanwhile, Night Beds produced a lovely record and then Foals released a monster single, Inhaler, and one of the albums of the year, with horses on the cover and a pop tune called My Number which was never topped all year.  Ben Howard won awards and filled my office with Keep Your Head Up.  Imagine Dragons teased momentarily, then The Boxer Rebellion released a magic record called Promises, which played better out of speakers and on video than it did live.  Why the band didn't hire a keyboard player for the tour rather than have Nathan Nicholson 'trying' to rock out while stood behind an electronic rack on stuff, I don't know.  It killed the shows for me.   The National plumbed new wonderful depths of morose shoe-gazing gloom with Trouble Will Find Me.  Karl Wallinger played live in London, World Party stripped down and brilliant.  He seemed a well man, alive in his music.  My daughter bought a guitar the same colour as Taylor Swift's.  More records this year tested on flights to New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai included ballsy-ness from Editors, electronic squeakiness from Chvrches and absolute knock-outs from Volcano Choir and London Grammar (I know).  Peter Gabriel and The Waterboys both did '25-year anniversary' tours of classic albums.  Fisherman's Blues won hands-down.  FILMS  Last year I found a historic melodrama from late eighteenth century Denmark as my film of the year.  This February I fell for Elizabeth Olsen in Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts, an altogether more cheery offering than Martha Marcy May Marlene and I've not had much come close.  Woody Allen's To Rome From Love was an entertaining postcard to a place I hold dear, but not scripted with the wit and wonder of Midnight In Paris. [I have yet to see Blue Jasmine, but hear great things.]  Gravity lived up to all the pre-release hype and even 3D-phobe Mark Kermode made it one of his films of the year. Sound City (a documentary homage to an analogue sound-desk) was fascinating.   Blockbusters mainly blustered, though the Costner mid-section of Man of Steel was wonderfully done.  Hobbit II was stunningly done - and looked extraordinary, but was way too long and spoilt by a strange 'Monty Python'- esque second act, with Stephen Fry annoying, not entertaining.  BOOKS were fab in 2013, with complete immersion in the Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy (now optioned by Ridley Scott) and Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series took another step forward to awesome with a fourth volume. But amidst much that was wonderful, it was in the Phoenix Theatre in London, where I found the best moment of 2013.  Once is the stage adaptation of the film of the same name, which won an oscar for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song Falling Slowly.  The stage adaptation won 8 Tony awards on Broadway and the London show is awe-inspiring.  Usually, for a stage musical show, the band is in the pit, hidden from view.  Here they are on the stage (which is a pub), playing, and singing and performing like their lives depend upon it.  The lead, Declan Bennett (who plays Guy), is charismatic and holds attention throughout.  The cast are brilliant character actors and can PLAY.  The interval drinks are served on the stage, from the bar, blurring the line between performers and audience in a way that is not contrived or trite, but somehow genuine.  The music is the thing.  Not the Oscar song, but Gold, the song that ends the first half and is reprised in the second.  Wonderful.  Once will close in mid 2014.  It has none of the special effects of a West End 'spectacular' like Charlie [see review], but it is the best thing I have seen in a long time.

Wilko Johnson. Guitar Levitation.

The extraordinary, Wilko Johnson

Inspired by the new Foals record (check it out here), I found my way back through the wonder that is Spotify to rediscover Talking Heads this week.  Even my unimpressible thirteen year-old has been killing his eardrums under his Beats to the joy that is 'Slippery People' and 'Burning Down the House'.  Which got me thinking.  What did I listen to when I was an early teen?  Surely, something really cool and completely different to all the other kids?  Surely, I knew about REM or Echo and the Bunnymen way before anyone else?  I wasn't running round with a stripe of white across my nose, or cultivating a fringe like the bloke in A Flock of Seagulls.  I wasn't sat in the corner listening to Yes or Genesis (though I sagely did so in a big way, post-Acne).  No, I was led astray down a path towards the glory and guttural wonder that is the guitar.  And my first guitar hero was Wilko Johnson.  

I went to my first ever 'proper' gig at Bradford University to see Wilko.  The man in black was like some mysterious illusionist.  He could do the rock equivalent of levitation.  Wilko played rhythm and lead guitar.  So, big deal?  "No, you don't understand," I would plead, whilst disinterested mates tried to see who could spit the furthest.  "He plays rhythm and lead…AT THE SAME TIME!"  Wilko's playing transformed a tight three-piece RNB band into a thunderous gang of four.  Striding like some manic exile from the Ministry of Silly Walks, Wilko chopped chords, mixing rhythm with wah-wah and frenzied solos.  When he soloed it was like there was some force of nature simultaneously chop-chop-chopping through the bar chords.  Rock n' roll levitation.  

Wilko is playing his last ever gigs in March.  After decades of touring and making music, Wilko has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has refused chemotherapy.  In interviews, he has talked with a touching candidness and honesty about his situation. Told by doctors his cancer was inoperable, he said he felt "…vividly alive. You're looking at the trees and the sky and everything and it's just 'whoah'.  I am actually a miserable person. I've spent most of my life moping in depressions and things, but this has all lifted."  

No surprises.  It is impossible to get a ticket for the last ever shows.