LIVE: JETHRO TULL IN HULL, 1969

‘LIVING IN THE PAST…’

JETHRO TULL – LIVE IN HULL

Jethro Tull, with Terry Reid

and Savoy Brown

Live at ‘Hull City Hall’, 6th October 1969

‘Come lend me your ears while I call you a fool…’ Jethro Tull are a strange conundrum of a band. Always were. There are rumours, myths, stories, which may be apocryphal, or not. They centre on the alleged Machiavellian machinations of one Ian Anderson. You probably know them already. Questions and equations that fuck with your head. Things were less confused back then. The orange programme, with its white cover butterfly, announces Chrysalis presenting its Autumn Tour. And yes, 1969 had already been a year of significant escalation for the Tull. Earlier – 12th June, they’d played the ‘Locarno Ballroom’, a smaller venue, with Kenny Burrell as support. But just two weeks after that, “Living In The Past” shoved them up to no.3 (two places beneath the Beatles “The Ballad Of John And Yoko”), with associated ‘Top Of The Pops’ hit-status mega-increased visibility and quantum ticket-sales (7s 6d). From the jumpy bass play-in to the line about ‘now there’s revolution, but they don’t know what they’re fighting’, it catches the perfect pulse of the moment. Headlining at the City Hall this night represents a major up-swing.

It’s a big cold venue overlooking the City Square. Its chill unfriendly stone hosting an unruly audience rabble. Massed hairies within striking distance. First up – ‘Bang Bang it’s Terry Reid’, young and intense, doing power-vocals all over Donovan’s morally-dubious “Superlungs”, ‘she’s only fourteen but she knows how to draw’…? Well, things seemed different then. Less about under-age nubiles and more about liberation, freedom and joints. Then, Savoy Brown are leaden sweaty worthy plank-spanking Brit-blues. Tull are already different. So much is obvious. They’re not about to settle for the quotidian. Not so much against the current, for they take the same hard blues gantry to string it onto, but more a parallel evolution. More focus. More presence. More theatre, with Ian Anderson as the great shape-maker. Already an exaggerated half-‘Worzel Gummidge’ cartoon, half-Rasputin and half half-mad half-witted holy fool. A demonic lasciviously leering jester in a cod-piece. But amid the galumphing and cavorting, his frenetic flute-flaunting darts bright as mirrors as it plunges and soars. Burbling and bubbling with stomach-lurching mood-switch time-changes. “Living In The Past” itself is taken in 4/5 time. Would that there’s a chart band now capable of such muscular dexterity.

When they first emerged from Blackpool, or thereabouts, in the apocalyptical final month of 1967, playing their jazz-blues set at a ‘Marquee’ residency, they seemed four more-or-less equal musicians – solid Mick Abrahams (guitar), Glenn Cornick in black waistcoat and hippie headband (Gibson Thunderbird bass), Clive Bunker (drums) and Anderson (flute and vocals). In fact, the Tull’s debut single – “Sunshine Day”, is an Abrahams song. And much later Abrahams would rerecord their debut LP ‘This Was’ (October 1968) in its entirety (as ‘All Said And Done’ in 2005) as a deliberate act of reclaiming his own creativity from the artifice subsequently structured around the group. For sure, it’s an album that illustrates Ian’s breathy stylistic debt to Rahsaan Roland Kirk with his “Serenade To A Cuckoo”, but also debuts “Dharma For One” as a showcase for co-writer Clive Bunker’s drum solo, an extended part of their live set at least through to the 4 November 1970 Carnegie Hall ‘Drugs Benefit’ set hoovered up onto the ‘Living In The Past’ double-LP (1972). The music-press styles such musical indulgence as extemporisation, like jazz, and since Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix the improvised solo has been de riguer. Even when not all bands are adequate enough to deliver, devaluing the currency. Tull seldom disappoint. Supple enough to flex around the testosterone jousting, excess kept in check. It’s impressive. At Hull’s ‘City Hall’ I’m impressed, undeniably. If more cerebrally than on gut-level.

When they started, as Anderson told journalist Nick Logan, they played ‘other people’s music, predictable Blues stuff, things Mick Abrahams said we should play.’ But ‘playing variations of “Dust My Broom”’ was never going to be enough (‘Melody Maker’, October 1970). And when it comes to writing, Mick doesn’t like Ian’s songs, and Ian doesn’t like his. So Mick Abrahams is first to quit, to become almost like Tull’s Pete Best – to ignite a more purist Blodwyn Pig with ‘Ahead Rings Out’ (August 1969). Exuding eloquent derision on a recent BBC4 TV-doc Ian Anderson regales how Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, the label suits, had at first suggested that just maybe Abraham’s guitar should be Tull’s lead instrument instead of Anderson’s flute. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling in patronising ‘what do THEY know’ exasperation. As if…? Cunning, articulate, with a total absence of false modesty. A sly fox, for sure. Was this the plan all along? Mick Abrahams is replaced for second Tull album ‘Stand Up’ (also August 1969), by Martin Lancelot Barre – its elaborate novelty gatefold pop-up sleeve inset with card band-figures that, yes, actually stand up. With “Bourée” which he announces on stage between adlibs and doo-dad scat as ‘this one’s by Bach, I couldn’t have wrote it, it’s just ripe for prostitution’, and it’s an artful stop-start jazz interplay between bass and flute over a Bach piece in ‘E’-minor, a walking dialogue interspersed with bestial grunts and tasteful balance. And “Fat Man”, a Celtic hoe-down scored with Barre’s high-tuned mandolin and Cornick’s manic-rattling bongos, riddled with politically-incorrect jibes at obesity.

Glenn Cornick survives until ‘Benefit’ (May 1970). He was fired – or ‘invited to leave’ during the album’s tie-in US tour. He forms Wild Turkey as Tull continue ever-upwards. And ‘Aqualung’ (March 1971) is the last to feature Clive Bunker. He leaves to flicker briefly as part of Jude. So the coup – if coup it was, is complete. The resulting cleansed line-up leaves only Anderson from the original four – not just the flute-player, but the group. The original Jethro Tull was one man, inventor of the horse-drawn seed-drill. Is Jethro Tull still one man? One man, with Barrie ‘Barriemore’ Barlow replacing Bunker on drums, Anderson’s long-time friend Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond on bass, and grammar-school pal John Evans recruited on keyboards. Fine players all, doubtless, with impeccable skill sets. But following the cull, they’re also musicians more amenable to interpreting Ian’s ideas. A less conflict-prone restructuring, less inclined to pull troublesomely towards alternate poles. With long-standing associations going back to the Blades – for this line-up is a virtual replication of Ian’s first group in his native Blackpool, the ‘Golden Mile’ and the ‘candyfloss-sales man’ that he gets all reminiscent about in “Up The ‘Pool”. And it works.

Uncomplicated by internal opposition, the ‘Aqualung’ sleeve-art caricatures the album-themed rough-sleeper in ‘Uncle Nasty’ tatty-overcoat – a vivid blow-up of Anderson’s ratty stage-persona. While the pervy ‘sitting on the park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent… watching as the frilly panties run’ is feral in pace, even given its killer metal riff. Ian’s cup of bile runneth over in its cracked North Country voice. It’s what he’d later describe as ‘a singer of these ageless times, with kitchen prose and gutter rhymes’. But “Locomotive Breath” gets you ‘by the balls’, accelerated by the shuffling madness of Barre’s choppily-chugging guitar work, using the runaway steam-train as metaphor for life hurtling you towards death. Part of the album’s second side reserved largely for pointed attacks at religion, with the Pope coming in for some verbal kicking along with those gods you ‘wind up on Sunday’, or whose names are reserved as a final refuge in death. It’s an LP astutely art-targeted at the sniggery prurient puerile adolescent male. All those sixth-formers who cleave to the hard poetry of ‘snot running down his nose’, who carry the album conspicuously to establish that elitist clear blue division that stands them above and apart from the trashy glam-glitter stomp of the latest ‘Top Of The Pops’ singles from T Rex or Slade. With the distinction between concept album and ironic comment on concept albums getting lost somewhere in translation.

The rich wine-red ‘Living In The Past’ double-LP sleeve also shows just Ian in characteristic one-legged troubadour pose. Yet its pick ‘n’ mix compilation format draws in their run of clever boisterous exuberant singles, each of which serves its purpose in shoving Jethro Tull across the awareness threshold, while retaining their integrity. “Sweet Dream” (no.7, 1 November 1969) with dense horns and David Palmer’s orchestration, but still space for a blistering guitar break. The intriguing “The Witch’s Promise” which reaches no.4 (24 January 1970). And the charting EP “Life’s A Long Song” (no.11 in September 1971) about the brevity of an existence that ‘ends too soon for us all’, with keyboard and tasteful acoustic guitar-duetting between Anderson and Barre. It opens ‘when you’re falling awake’. You don’t ‘fall awake’, you ‘fall asleep’. It’s wordplay like Procol Harum’s ‘all hands on deck we’ve run afloat’ on their “A Salty Dog”. Ships don’t ‘run afloat’, they ‘run aground’. It’s creatively poetic use of language above and beyond gratuitous snot and glimpsed panties. The track promises ‘don’t you fret, don’t you fear. I will give you good cheer’, and it delivers on its promise.

‘Thick As A Brick’ (March 1972) with a sleeve that opens up into a twelve-page spoof-newspaper, is a single 43:46-minute track, supposedly penned by schoolboy ‘Gerald Bostock’. ‘I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think’ pens the fictional Bostock, ‘ I’ve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways.’ And ‘A Passion Play’ (July 1973) is also a single track broken into ‘Acts’ – pretentious? Moi? To Allan Jones it resembles ‘a naïve adventure that sounds like the results of Roy Harper jamming with the Nice on lyrics by Tristan Tzara’ (in ‘Melody Maker’, 5 February 1977). Much-derided by critics it leaves you crying out for the one concise single-length accessible track. Delivered finally on ‘War Child’ (October 1974) with US no.12 hit “Bungle In The Jungle”, a luminously brilliant record by anyone’s standard, one that rediscovers the playful frivolity and fun of the single after all the preceding dour intricacy. Against a slithery snuffling background of rainforest noises he anthropomorphically warms ‘I’m a tiger when I want, love, I’m a snake if we disagree’. Well, maybe. But soon it would no longer matter. All those Prog-Rock sixth-formers would start slashing their hair spiky-short in response to Punk and furiously denying they’d ever listened to Yes, ELP… or Jethro Tull, like never, ever. While the realignment shunts Tull off into a new Folk-Rock parallel dimension where trend no longer matters. Their audience-future predictably assured.

But that still waits beyond tomorrow and tomorrow. For now Jethro Tull is a strange conundrum of a band of contrasting personalities. A jazz-rock combo. A sell-out chart band. A seven-legged Blues group with a manic edge. Things end in radiant meltdown, releasing the audience rabble across the chilly sprawl of City Square into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

CD REVIEW: 'ALL SAID AND DONE' by BLODWYN PIG

CD review of:

‘ALL SAID AND DONE’

by BLODWYN PIG

(Shakedown Records SHAKEBX126Z-UK)

www.secretrecordslimited.com

Tales of Ian Anderson’s control-freakery are probably apocryphal. About how, after Jethro Tull’s first incredible year he deliberately eased out equally strong-willed band-members to replace them with musicians more pliable to his will. So leading Tull off into hugely successful, but less interesting concept albums such as ‘Aqualung’ (1971) and ‘Thick As A Brick’ (1972). Now Mick Abrahams convincingly re-writes that history in his favour by re-recording the entire first Tull album – ‘This Was’ (1968) as a solo project, so emphasising the importance of his own not-inconsiderable input. And it’s a stunning reminder of just how innovative that album was. At a time when preconceptions had been blasted beyond the commercial stratosphere, and all was up for grabs with no obvious signposts, the Tull were playing to the max they were capable of, from the gut until the speakers vibrate. An ambitious jazz-Blues concoction unlike anything else before, or since. Cut it, it bleeds.

Here, from “My Sunday Feeling” with Mike Summerland’s walking bass and Steve Dundon’s scat-vocals, into the slow Blues “It’s Breaking Me Up” with Abraham’s excoriating extended soloing, and “Song For Jeffrey” on which I can hear the lyrics for the first time, Dundon excels at that most difficult task of convincingly replicating Anderson’s vocal while retaining his own interpretive skills. Highlights include the breathy swing of Roland Kirk’s jazz-paced instrumental “Serenade For A Cuckoo” and an outstanding 10:54min version of Dr Ross’ “Cat’s Squirrel” (via Cream), moving through tight-fingering sequences back to that jaggedly era-defining riff. The Anderson/Clive Bunker “Dharma For One” persists nicely to 5:15mins whereas Tull’s own re-creation goes to twice that on their live-at-Carnegie-Hall side of the ‘Living In The Past’ (1972) double-vinyl set (and longer still when I caught them doing it at Hull ‘City Hall’). Then there’s Abrahams’ prominent slide on his own “Move On Alone” and his writing-collaboration with Ian Anderson for “Beggars Farm”.

As such tracks indicate, that original line-up was a vibrantly creative contradiction, which hung together for a bare twelve months. Mick was already gone – temporarily replaced by Tony Iommi, by the time they did the ‘Rolling Stones Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’ at the end of 1968. By then Blodwyn Pig had taken Mick into another career-phase. There’s a second CD in this elaborately-dressed package sampling new impressions of those subsequent incarnations (as well as a DVD interview explaining the project). He even reassembles his original Luton-based McGregor’s Engine (Andy Pyle on bass, Clive Bunker drums) – the template for Tull during its living guitar-to-mouth years, with “Let Me Love You Baby”, then Pig’s first slide-illuminated single (“Dear Jill”) plus highlights from ‘Ahead Rings Out’ (August 1969) and ‘Getting To This’ (August 1970), which precede Mick’s first exit from Pig. Supposedly fired from his own band! But there’s much more too, including piano sax boogie Blues (“Road Roller”), brawling Brit-Blues just aching for a showcase on Paul Jones’ Radio 2 R&B Show, old Alexis Korner (“I Wonder Who”), jaunty neat-picking rag, dust-bowl lament – “How Can A Poor Man” which compares well with Michael Chapman’s recently released version, plus three tracks revisiting the Pig’s 1994 re-union album ‘Lies’. Although it’s tempting to say that neither Anderson, nor Abrahams were ever to be as powerful apart as they had been – briefly, together.


Published in: ‘SONGBOOK no.6 (Winter)’
(UK – March 2005)

1950's SF NOVEL - 'WHEN THE MOON DIED' by RICHARD SAVAGE

SKYFALL 1955:

‘WHEN THE

MOON DIED’ 

‘WHEN THE MOON DIED’

by RICHARD SAVAGE

(1955, Ward Lock & Co Ltd,

then 1963 ‘Digit’ paperback from

Brown, Watson Limited, London – 2/6d)

‘My name is Karsh. I am an ordinary man…’

Diligent archaeologists grub about in the dust and relics of ancient empires, striving to explain the story of their decline and fall. Such as Howard Carter’s tomb-busting in Pharonic-Egypt which so caught the public imagination, or those piecing together the lost histories of Chichen Itza, Mycenae or Mesopotamia. Opportunistic Science Fiction writers fastened upon that evocative melancholia and took its mood to other worlds, excavating extinct Martian cities already abandoned before the time of the dinosaurs. Or else they project it into the far future of terrestrial civilisation itself. ‘AI’ – the 2001 Steven Spielberg movie based on the Brian Aldiss story, envisages alien-like Mecha investigating the submerged glacial remains of Manhattan. But Spielberg’s was far from the first team to use the future-history scenario. Richard Savage was there, with his 1955 novel ‘When The Moon Died’. Here, aliens from ‘Universe Five’ seek the remains of human cities that lie frozen beneath the ice that sheaths the dead planet once called Earth. By chance they happen upon a functioning tape-recording made by ‘Karsh’, through which the long-deceased narrator answers some of their questions.

Critically ignored as a junk-lit genre throwaway even at the time of first release, the novel was neglected and is now all but forgotten. ‘Richard Savage’ was the pseudonym used by London-born writer Ivan Roe (12 November 1917 to 1976), through which he embarked on this single SF venture subtitled ‘A Modern Novel Of Science And Imagination’, in which the destruction of the Moon prevents a nuclear war and inaugurates a new era of scientific peace. Under the same alias he also wrote crime thrillers and mainstream novels, including ‘Murder Goes To School’ (1946), ‘The Horrible Hat’ (1949) featuring his Dr Ferenc series-character, a psychoanalyst-detective who investigates strange manifestations, ‘Set Free Barabbas’ (aka ‘The Green Tree And The Dry’) (1950), the story of revolutionary Daniele Maroc on an unnamed Mediterranean island, and ‘The Salamander Touch’ (1952), telling of the unexpected consequences that result when an atomic scientist disappears.

The Digit paperback proclaims ‘When The Moon Died’ as ‘One Of The Most Startling Novels Of All Time…’ which is maybe pitching it a little high. But it’s certainly an intriguing curio. I came across this paperback edition while rummaging in a second-hand bookshop during my late teens, drawn by its garish cover showing a pall of black smoke hanging over a devastated red landscape dominated by the approaching Moon, and was sufficiently impressed to hang onto it across the intervening years, to rediscover it now. The opening italicised framing-section sets the scene as the aliens look out ‘across the grey deserts and ice-caps of the useless Earth’ and conjecture about the confusingly racially-diverse species who once occupied this ‘sad, abandoned sphere’.

In Simon Wells’ poor movie-remake of HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ (2002), the accidental destruction of the Moon by lunar colonists renders the Earth temporarily uninhabitable. But, typically – there were other yet-earlier precedents, at least in RC Sherriff’s ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ (aka ‘The Cataclysm’) (1939), which might well have provided the template for the pseudonymous Richard Savage. Here, Abyssinian archaeologists a thousand years into the future discover a document supposedly written in 1944 by retired schoolmaster ‘Edgar Hopkins’ of rural Hampshire, relating how Hopkins’ Lunar society detects that the Moon is due to collide with Earth. Although intended as political satire, the dramatic build-up to the catastrophe is not without tension, the vision of devastating hurricanes and tsunamis created as the Moon conveniently falls into the Atlantic, and – as fortunately it turns out to be largely hollow, it forms new lands for disputed mineral resources, colonial expansion, and the terminal nationalistic conflicts that follow. Revised and reissued as a Pan paperback in 1958, then later by Persephone Books in 2005 with a new preface by Michael Moorcock, there are claims that its sober post-apocalypse description of a devastated England exerted an influence on John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss.

Yet the vivid spectacle of the Moon’s destruction is located at the halfway point of the Richard Savage novel. Not as the build-up climax, more the hinge on which the narrative operates. It happens during the final years of the 1990’s, overlapping into the start of the twenty-first century. Half-a-century into Savage’s future, but already receding further into our past. And it’s not years that we’d recognise. If Savage intended it as a conjectural future, it now appears a parallel universe, an alternate time-stream. Instead of our grappling with the lethal resurgence of stultifying medieval fundamentalism, the time he envisages is dominated by still-escalating Cold War tensions. Then, as the year 2000 approaches, a secret cabal of scientists band together and step in to halt the superpower mutually-assured-destruction, demonstrating their power by using an ‘N’-bomb to destroy the Moon, then emerging after the ‘ten days of terror’ as the Moon dies, to assume global control and establish the Interim Rule. What is left of the Moon forms an arc of luminous fragments subsequent generations call the ‘supernova’.

For his protagonists, the real future-action is located thousands of years later, with people living in an enlightened World Technocracy, a scientific dictatorship administered through eight semi-autonomous regional committees. Back when I first read it, Savage’s vision of cities seemed a viable future scenario to me. The region formerly known as France consists of a series of 1,500 sky-scraping cities, each with a five-million population, yet separated by bush and wild forest-land, connected only by air-freight. It’s a curiously engaging image. Paris is the Quiet City of Glass where Karsh’s usual workday as a ‘humble electronics Tech’ at the Media Video Communications-Propaganda System lasts no longer than four-hours. But there’s a price to pay for living in this sustainable new-build utopia, which only gradually becomes apparent. For Karsh there’s an enforced forgetting of the barbaric warlike past. ‘A perfect state, a utopia, has no history. It is unchangeable.’ Nostalgia, the ‘sickness of the past’ is a treatable condition that can be controlled by pills, ‘we had pills for everything’. Yet Karsh experiences strange yearnings for the past.

His formless unease is given substance when he meets up with former-colleague Drew, a discontent who has illegally produced a new element, a red crystal called Xonos. There’s an evocative early passage in which Karsh relates light to time, that by simply gazing up into the night sky he is peering into the distant past, that the starlight he sees is already thousands of years old, the ghosts of stars that may already be dead. Xonos takes that idea further. It enables visual access to the past, at first alarmingly so when it accidentally conjures a vision of a French Revolution execution by tapping into the cameras during a Videocon broadcast. Deciphering its principles – that light leaves its retrievable residue on old buildings, Karsh secretly constructs his own monitor as a ‘dangerous telescope’ into the past, not always understanding what he sees. When he eavesdrops on the destruction of the Moon, and the ‘monstrous birth’ of his own era which grew from it, he believes the lost satellite to be fictitious, the product of collective hysteria. After all, the stable unchanging Earth has no Moon! Surely, it has never had a Moon? But, as a ‘man who had leaped the barriers of time’, the more he sees, the more he understands the limitations of his own society.

Stalked by sinister investigating Inspector Blok, he’s informed that Drew died in ‘Psycho-Refuge 87’. And travels to neglected London intent on uncovering the truth, to find the city a dilapidated European backwater gradually being reabsorbed into the encroaching bush-lands of Middlesex and the forests of Essex. Somewhere beyond its sad decay, possibly Oxford, he uses his device to observe the more recent past. Drew had not died. He was drowned by two thuggish Refuge warders. All the while Karsh uses his ‘peepshow that troubled my mind and heart’ to learn more, like a diligent archaeologist grubbing about in the dust and relics of past times striving to understand its unfolding story. Like the aliens of ‘Universe Five’ listening to his preserved tape-narrative. Level upon level of glimpses into future-histories.

With co-conspirator and ally Landers, a London-based Datum Clerk, and his own mute servant Cooper he taps into, and records, a Zone Committee meeting, coming to realise how seventy-two men control the world through their seats on these regional committees, eliminating risk and innovation, maintaining conformity through a kind of eugenics that entombs excess population in a state of suspended animation, to be reactivated or retired as required. And they conspire to return change to their world by disseminating film-copies through the network of Cooper’s marginalised servant-class menial-workers. ‘Our aim was not a modest one. We proposed to start a world revolution.’ Meanwhile, he watches, so fascinated by and more than a little in love with Donna, a poet who has been interred as a social misfit, that he travels to Zone 6 in the American Arctic Circle, bluffs his way past the custodian of the ‘Chamber of Rest’, revives and rescues her.

Although biographical details are scarce, it’s apparent that Ivan Roe had a spread of abilities. It’s as though he uses the ‘Richard Savage’ alias to keep his more serious Lit-crit work unsullied by association. For his other listed titles include ‘Breath Of Corruption: An Interpretation Of Dostoievsky’ (1946), ‘Style Of Your Own: A Commonsense Guide To Clear English’ (March 1972) and the literary biography ‘Shelley: The Last Phase’ (1973). And such ambitions are not entirely absent from ‘When The Moon Died’. The extinguishing of the Moon becomes a metaphor that represents the end of poetry, of dreams, moonbeams, moondance, moonlight and moonshine. But illogic has its uses. As Karsh and his friends realise.

Before their proposed revolution can begin there’s betrayal, capture and brutal interrogation. In some of Savage’s best, most reflective writing the trio – Karsh, Cooper, and ‘fortieth-century girl’ Donna are forced to flee into the wilderness beyond the Great Lakes where they find refuge in the ‘friendly tower’ of a reclusive lighthouse couple. From their far isolation they watch the global insurrection they’ve seeded begin, enabling the ruthless Blok’s counter-insurgency coup. With the world realigning into two east-west powerblocks Karsh activates his final gamble, releasing the rest of the frozen prisoners from the Chambers of Rest to form a new White Army, ‘the past itself had awakened and the technocrats had fallen’. How will the conflict be resolved? There’s no final chapter. The tape has ended. The men of Universe Five speculate as they look around the dead planet. Is this frigid desolation the result of humanity’s last war? Savage lets the question hang.

There’s some wildly overheated and scientifically absurd purple-prose, ‘had they in their fury splintered the Earth? Had they sent it reeling like the Moon in its orbit, till it broke away and went spinning, white hot, to the farthest and coldest fields of its own galaxy, there to burn, a bright star, through the aeons, then gradually cool and condense, its outer skin cracking and sloughing, till now it moved slowly, the sluggard planet, forever beyond the warmth of the sun that had given it life in the beginning? Had men done this to their home, or was the banishment the result of some cosmic caprice, or the eternal flight of the whole universe from its central star, the yellow one?’ Wow! For me, caught up in Cold War uncertainties that threatened their own global annihilation, there seemed a kind of poetic profundity at work here amid these vast cosmic questions. And it still exerts a certain undeniable power.

So is it a good novel? A lost classic awaiting rediscovery? No, obviously not in any objective way. Even by the admittedly shoddy standards of much genre fiction of its time. Names are single-word blunt, Karsh, Blok, Donna, Drew. Conversations are sparse and used largely for the exchange of information. Characterisation is razored so slight as to be negligible. And he portrays a strangely retro future in which they still smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and use a typewriter. The plot zigzags alarmingly with little sense of logical development or pacing. It’s difficult to see how such a fiction would even achieve print or ebook status in today’s focus-group publication environment. Yet it has a compulsive readability absent from more conventionally-structured formula-fiction. Noel Coward once mused about ‘extraordinary how potent cheap music is’. The same can be said for overlooked genre fiction. As Richard Savage proves, illogic has its uses, and attractions.


Books by ‘Richard Savage’:
‘Murder Goes To School’ (Jarrolds, 1946)
‘Murder For Fun’ (Jarrolds, 1947)
‘The Horrible Hat’ (Jarrolds, 1948)
‘The Poison And The Root’ (Jarrolds, 1950)
‘Set Free Barabbas (aka ‘The Green Tree And The Dry’)’ (1950, Harper)
‘The Salamander Touch’ (1952, Hutchinson)
‘When The Moon Died’ (Ward Lock, 1955, Digit Paperback, 1963)
‘The Lightning’s Eye’ (Museum Press, 1957)
‘Stranger’s Meeting’ (Museum, 1957)
‘The Innocents’ (Museum, 1958)

Books as Ivan Roe:
‘Breath Of Corruption: An Interpretation Of Dostoievsky’ (1946, Hutchinson & Co, Kennikat Press), ‘Style Of Your Own: A Commonsense Guide To Clear English’ (March 1972, David & Charles) ‘Shelley: The Last Phase’ Literary biography (1973, Cooper Square Publications).

Poem: 'MANIFESTO'

MANIFESTO

I disown word-games.
I despise academic constipation.
I’m sick of literary incest.
I want to write poems fueled by anger.
I want poems grimed with perspiration,
poems that leak like mildew
through tenement walls,
poems punctuated by
the rhythm of factories,
poems of insolence,
poems that belch from
industrial chimneys showering
cities with syllables,
poems that thumb noses.
I want poems that slum children
can play with in gutters.
I want poems to chalk on the
walls of condemned buildings.
I want poems of hope for those
who slouch on street corners.
I want poems to be chanted at picket-lines,
poems set to the metre that measures despair,
poems to inspire insurrection against inequality,
poems that explode myths like neons at midnight,
poems encapsulating hopelessness.
I want poetry that is real.



Published in:
‘XENIA’ (UK)
‘PAPYRUS CACAMA No.14’ (Germany – August 1977)
‘KRAX No.12’ (UK – November 1978)
‘PACIFIC QUARTERLY Vol.3 no.4’ (New Zealand – December 1978)
‘SYDE LINES ANTHOLOGY’ (UK – December 1981)
‘HARD LINES’ (Faber & Faber anthology, UK – January 1983)

IT'S A WONDERFUL ROCK 'N' ROLL XMAS...!!!

“IT’S A WONDERFUL

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL XMAS…” :

THE BIZARRE HISTORY OF

THE CHRISTMAS RECORD

What’s the point of a Christmas single? Why bother?

It’s a shameless merchandising ploy, obviously.

But can it be anything more? A returning reminder of those

we’ve lost – like Queen’s “Thank God It’s Christmas”.

An obligatory shot at adding your voice to the regularly

regurgitated pantheon of pap – like The Darkness’ “Christmas Time”.

Or an increasingly desperate career-end attempt to wrench

just one more hit from a sadly over-worked formula.

Like Shakin’ Stevens or Gary Glitter. And where to now?

How do you tap into spirituality in a godless age?

Andrew Darlington tries to make sense of it all...

“ROCKIN’ AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE…”

‘They know Christmas is ‘ere when they start hearing that record’ goes Noddy Holder’s relaxed anecdote. Of course, he’s telling me about Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everbody”. But you knew that already. He leans forward, ‘the only thing that pisses me off is when I’m doing me own Christmas shopping and it’s on in every store I walk into – there it is, BLARING out, and everybody’s looking at me, pointing and going (in comic voice) ‘that’s him, he made that record!!!’ That DOES get a bit embarrassing.’ Chances are it’ll happen to him again this year. It’s impossible to avoid.

The Christmas record. Hate them or hate them, you can’t escape them. So be afraid. In an industry not exactly renowned for taste, sensitivity or artistic integrity, seasonal schlock has been responsible for some of the vilest atrocities ever inflicted upon the human ear. Christmas comes but once a year, but when it does, it brings Slade, Band Aid, Phil Spector, Elvis, John & Yoko, the Pogues & Kirsty MacColl… and now The Darkness.

So where do I begin? With the first snowflake and ruddy-breasted robin on sentimental Victorian illustrations? The shopping-mall Santa’s in their Coca-Cola TM colours? Or the cloying yet strangely affecting Yiddish cadences of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”, invested with the exact measure of yearning and cosy nostalgia that makes it an all-time hyper-seller. Originally featured in the movie ‘Holiday Inn’ (1942), then spun-off into immortality by the black-and-white movie-clip where avuncular fossil Bing Crosby croons to the wistfully attentive and adoringly rapt June Reynolds, it comes from a time the world forgot, before record-charts and Top Forty radio, to become the biggest selling single of all time. You’ll hear it again this Cool Yule, you know you will.

But oddly – when you take it all the way back to the earliest published Top Twenty charts, listing records cut on shellac as the 1950’s 78rpm gives way to new-fangled seven-inch 45’s, the illusion persists that religion is something of a necessary ingredient to the Xmas hit. Illogical – but after all, this was an age where to be an ‘unbeliever’ was to be the exception, rather than the healthier more tolerant more inclusive reverse situation that prevails today. Hence you get Harry Belafonte’s “Mary’s Boy-child” – not only a 1957 chart-topper for seven weeks, but also the first record to sell a million copies in the UK alone, around the same time that saccharine Pop-harmonies are propelling the hit-song story of the “Little Donkey” that carries a pregnant Mary towards Bethlehem. While the “Little Drummer Boy”, using an episode obviously omitted from the gospels, plays his best drum for the ‘new-born king’ as the ‘ox and ass keep time’. The song gets revisited by David Bowie in an uneasy TV partnership with an aging Bing Crosby many years later – on the crooning cardigan’s ‘Merrie Olde Christmas’ TV special, in what Bowie’s biographer David Buckley celebrates as ‘one of the most surreal events in Pop’. Yes – that one-time Scary Monster bisexual coke-snorting Ziggy Stardust. And yes, that same Harry Lillis ‘Bing’ Crosby who’d carved out an early career as a jazz vocalist recording with giants Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, and Count Basie – as well as Louis Armstrong. Odder still, Bing finally found himself charting posthumously with the Thinner Whiter Duke a couple of years after the heart attack that killed him, after completing his last round of golf.

But in tune with that long-lost era, all of these hits work at their most simple-minded ‘Christmas-Story-in-pictures’ level, direct, unquestioning. Designed for an audience soothed by the repetition of their reassuring message. Of course, we now know that the Catholic Grinch had merely stolen Christmas from the healthier pagan solstice rituals. There’s not even any real evidence that the birth of a mid-eastern mystic twenty centuries ago occurs anywhere near this time. Probably it didn’t. Informed consensus says it was more likely some time around Easter. But then – hey, we already have Easter, so why confuse a good party with awkward facts?

“SANTA CLAUS IS BACK IN TOWN…”

Yuletide hits go from the cringingly dire, such as Dickie Valentine’s “Christmas Alphabet” which has the audacity to displace Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” at no.1 for a trio of weeks in December 1955, to the haunting “Scarlet Ribbons” written and interpreted by the incomparable Harry Belafonte. A singer and actor born in the Harlem ghetto, a black sex symbol a decade before Sidney Poitier, Belafonte worked his way up through clubs singing Folk songs, and through the ‘American Negro Theatre’ into acting, until his 1957 movie role opposite Joan Fontaine in ‘Island In The Sun’ led to the Ku-Klux Klan torching cinemas to ‘protect’ the young from his liberating influence. A politically radical life-time campaigner against racial injustice he was able to use his resulting high-profile celebrity to lead anti-segregation marches beside Martin Luther King. Yet in this Festive hit he’s merely a poor man, a loving father, who is tortured by his inability to buy the one gift his daughter most wants – ‘scarlet ribbons for her hair’. Until – returning home later, he finds her bed inexplicably inundated with them. The rich silky depth of his voice rises in mystified awe as he’s unable to explain their miraculous appearance. The implication – of course, is divine intervention. But we’ll let that pass.

With the new popularity of long-playing record albums, it seems that every artist with an eye to maximising their seasonal percentage had to have a Festive set on the market decked out in tinsel and holly-wreaths – Perry Como, the Beach-Boys, Johnny Mathis, the Carpenters… and Elvis, naturally. For Elvis it formed the first phase of his retaliation against the outraged moral guardians who were busy self-righteously condemning his sinful stage-antics. It was also a chance for him to draw upon those deeply ingrained Gospel roots he’d carried with him from those childhood Church Sundays at the ‘First Assembly of God’, and use them to vindicate himself in the sceptical eyes of the great American mainstream. He began by performing a moving “Peace in the Valley” on the nationwide event-TV ‘Ed Sullivan Show’. His interpretation conjuring the power of a transcendent vision of Heaven-on-Earth, one capable of transfiguring the world from weary pain and strife – something Presley, even at this early stage of his career, could find solace in. Emoting his plea for redemption with a deep sincerity sufficient to convince Mr & Mrs White America that beneath the hard-Rocking Satanic sex-animal there was a god-fearing mother-loving good ole boy. Combined with a personal intensity strong enough to touch the stony heart of even the most atheistic ear. Recorded at the Hollywood ‘Radio Recorders’ Studio between the 12th and the 19th January 1957 with the classic line-up of guitarist Scotty Moore, drummer D.J. Fontana, bass-player Bill Black and the smooth supporting close-harmony vocals of the Jordanaires, it emerged as a charting EP soon after.

Never one to miss a commercial opportunity, he followed it up with an album balancing the sacred with the profane in more or less equal proportions, like a hoodlum Santa arriving in a big black Cadillac, his bulging gift-sack generously packed with the future hit single “Blue Christmas” (for both Elvis and Shakin’ Stevens), as well as his own idiosyncratic take on “White Christmas”, and the surreal innovation that must be the first-ever down-and-dirty Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas song, Leiber & Stoller’s “Santa Claus Is Back In Town”.

The only other Xmas long-player worth your serious investigation is ‘A Christmas Gift For You’, re-titled ‘Phil Spector’s Christmas Album’ for its 1972 Apple-label re-release. Laboured over for almost half a year at the Los Angeles ‘Gold Star Studios’ at a (then)-astronomical budget in excess of £15,000, with his Philles stable of artists, an all-star studio orchestra including Leon Russell on piano, Steve Douglas’ roaring baritone-sax, plus Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert, Sonny Bono (playing the horse’s-hooves effects on “Sleigh Ride”) and Jack Nitzsche, it resulted in what remains indisputably the quintessential Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas album. Only, on its originally scheduled release date – November 22nd 1963, President John F. Kennedy had the inconvenient misfortune to get himself assassinated in Dallas, and in Spector’s words ‘nobody was vaguely interested in buying records, let alone a jolly Christmas album’. As a result, it took almost a decade before its timeless brilliance was recognised, and rescued. A sound that’s never been bettered, exemplified by the Crystals “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, the Ronettes delicious “Frosty The Snowman”, or the infectious enthusiasm of Bob B Soxx & The Blue Jeans “Here Comes Santa Claus”. Spector himself voices-over his own greetings-card message – ‘of course, the biggest thanks goes to YOU, for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music I love’. In print it sounds to be schmaltz overkill, yet somehow, against the odd, it works. For this is also the album from which one of Darlene Love’s four exquisite contributions, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich’s “Christmas Baby Won’t You Please Come Home”, is lifted by Steven Spielberg to play over the credits of his ‘Gremlins’ (1984) movie, perfectly evoking the warm Frank Capra-style nostalgia of festive small-town USA. As Spielberg well knows, it’s that kind of album.

Elsewhere, things aren’t quite so good. The first phase of Adam Faith’s diverse career – as Pop Idol, is not exactly enhanced by “Lonely Pup (in a Christmas Shop)”, a cutesy-trite proto ‘A dog is not just for Xmas’ warning to us all, with an ineptitude way beyond the damage-limitation salvage that even John Barry’s string arrangements can deliver. But this was a stupid time when, at regular twelve-month intervals the inky Pop press would break out into a rash of silly-Santa covers, with some embarrassed Beat Group or other – say Freddie & the Dreamers, or Gerry & the Pacemakers, kitted out in red suits and stick-on beards for photo-shoots beside the Xmas tree.

More sensibly, the Beatles don’t do things like seasonal hits. What they do do is mail out a series of seven flexi-disc Xmas messages exclusively to members of their fan-club (dated between December 1963 through to December 1969). Now hotly bootlegged and much sought-after the first few are simply a ‘Hi, and thanks for the year’ audio letter. In a limited edition of just 65,000 copies, the second one fades in with a kazoo and harmonica rendition of “Jingle Bells”, and Paul McCartney’s wacky gaffe ‘we hope you’ve enjoyed listening to the records as much as we’ve enjoyed melting them… no, that’s wrong – ‘making’ them’. While the sleeve informs us ‘this disc will not be in the hit parade’ and ‘additional copies will not be pressed’.

But year-on-year these annual bulletins from Beatles-central complexify into the full 1966 ‘PANTOMIME: EVERYWHERE IT’S CHRISTMAS’, with “Yesterday” re-written to include the line ‘I believe in Christmas Day’, a Bob Dylan-styled “Old Lang Syne”, a snatch of the Four Tops “It’s The Same Old Song”, and a threatened “We’ll Gather Lilacs In An Old Brown Shoe”. With the flexi’s previously done as an after-thought tacked-on at the end of album sessions this longest-yet edition is done in time specially booked at the Dick James Music Studio in New Oxford Street and comes complete with surreal audio-sketches in John Lennon’s absurdist ‘Spaniard In The Works’-style, such as “A Rare Cheese (Two Elderly Scotsmen)” and the Spike Milligan oddness of “Podgy The Bear And Jasper” (already performed as part of their Hammersmith Odeon Xmas Show, with Paul as the hero, George the heroine, John the villain, and Ringo throwing snow around as the Props-effects man). There’s even manic Goon-ish songs like “Please Don’t Bring Your Banjo Back” (‘I wasn’t hardly gone a year / when it became the scene, / banjos, banjos, all the time / – I can’t forget that tune’). The fifth flexi-disc, ‘CHRISTMAS TIME (IS HERE AGAIN)’, ‘another little bite of the Apple’ for 1967, is even issued in a full ‘Sgt Pepper’-style collage sleeve, and opens with John Lennon announcing the ‘Interplanetary Remix Take 444’. He then reappears in the guise of ‘Audition Announcer’, ‘Sir Gerald’, ‘The Quizmaster’ on a spoof TV Quiz Show, and an incomprehensible ‘Scottish Poet’, alongside special guest interventions by ‘the feet and voice’ of Victor U Spinetti (who does a tap-dance routine with Ringo!), Malcolm Lift-Evans, and George Martin playing organ. Interspersed with mock-commercials, manic laughter, songs like “Plenty Of Jam-Jars, Baby”, and ‘augmented applause recorded on location in Dublin’. A good time is guaranteed for all. If you happen to have a full set of these in playable condition, you’re sitting on a rare treat.

“IF EVERY DAY WAS LIKE CHRISTMAS…”

The only sociologically redeeming aspects of 1970’s Christmas Pop is that Jesus no longer gets a look in. From now on it’s the party that’s important. Get dressed up. Get drunk. Fall over. Away from the serious heavy Prog-Rockers the new teen-gods were embarrassingly eager to plug into consumerism’s Yuletide gross-out. All Glam and glitter and already trussed up like oven-ready turkeys, Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everbody” – their final no.1, tops the chart for no less than five weeks in 1973, going on to clock up no less than thirty weeks on the lists. And bizarrely, it’s probably Noddy Holder’s most enduring contribution to chart history. ‘It just goes on and on and on,’ he confides. ‘It’s probably the one everybody will always think ‘THIS IS THE ONE’, even though I personally don’t think it’s the best record we ever made. Funnily enough “Merry Xmas Everybody” never actually gets re-released. It’s just never been deleted. It’s been on sale continuously. If you want to try, you can buy it at any time of the year. You just have to order it. And I don’t think there’s ANY other record that’s been on sale for that long – EVER!’

‘I wrote that lyric all in one night!’ he elaborates. ‘I’d been down the pub, got a bit pissed up, couldn’t drive ‘ome. So I stayed over at mi Mam’s ‘ouse. I’d already got the first two lines – ‘are you hanging up your stockings on the wall’, but I wanted to get the rest finished. Me Mam’d got a little bottle of whisky in the sideboard. So I sat down at 1 o’clock in the morning, got that bottle out, and by four or five I’d finished all the lyrics to the song. I’d set out to get a Working Class Christmassy-type feel to it. So I thought of all the Working Class Christmassy-type things I could think of to cram into the song. And probably two of the best lines lyrically that I ever did are in that song. Which are ‘does your Granny always tell you that the old songs are the best, then she’s up and Rock ‘n’ Rolling with the best’ – and we’ve ALL ‘ad it. Your Granny comes round at Christmas. You put a new record on and she says ‘ah, that stuff’s not as good as it was in my day’. But give ‘er a couple of sherry’s and she’s up and twisting and showing her knickers. It happens in every family. It’s those sort-of things I wanted to capture. And I think it works. Yet if you listen to the record, there are no Christmas gimmicks on it, no sleigh-bells, no jingle-bells at all. The only thing Christmassy about it are the lyrics. It’s a straightforward Pop-Rock song, that happens to be about Christmas. It’s probably the only Christmas hit that’s ever been like that. And funnily enough – in France, it got to no.1 at Easter!’

Meanwhile, Roy Wood was master-minding Wizzard’s more artfully Spectoresque “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” (no.4 in 1973, re-charting in 1981 and 1984), an impenetrably rich layer-cake coated with an inch-thick icing made up of the Suedettes, sleigh-bells, a children’s choir and ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’s in the fade. While Paul McCartney was writing one of his most clumsily inept lyrics for Wings sad festive fare, and Mud were aping Elvis doing it. Their Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman-penned Presley pastiche, “Lonely this Christmas” sat at no.1 for four weeks through December 1974. Gary Glitter did it. Shakin’ Stevens did it. Tediously. And even those seriously-heavy Prog-Rockers got in on the act with Greg Lake’s “I Believe In Father Christmas” charting 1975, 1982, and then again in 1983. As the Damned say – via the Marx Brothers, ‘there ain’t no Sanity Clause’.

Steeleye Span do it in Latin (“Gaudete”), while Jethro Tull remember the true (Pagan) meaning of Christmas (“Ring Out Solstice Bells”), and George Harrison skips a week and goes for New Year instead (“Ding Dong”). John and Yoko, with Phil Spector in tow, use their Plastic Ono Band green-vinyl single to fuse the trashy yuletide feel-good factor with political purpose – at the time “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” was originally recorded the Vietnam war was still a nightly TV atrocity. And taking yet another course, Johnny Mathis – eighteen years after his first Xmas success with “Winter Wonderland”, gives a bizarrely interdenominational racially non-specific twist to the messiah’s supposed Second Coming with “When A Child Is Born” (no.1 for three weeks in December 1976). While Boney M wear massive white fur coats and take it all back to the 1950’s with their revitalisation of the Belafonte-penned “Mary’s Boy-Child” (no.1 for four weeks through December 1978).

It all begins to beg the question what is the point of a Christmas single anyway? Why bother? It’s a shameless merchandising ploy, obviously. But can it be anything more? A returning reminder of those we’ve lost – like Queen’s “Thank God It’s Christmas” (1984). An obligatory shot at adding your voice to the regularly regurgitated pantheon of pap – like Elton’s genial bounce-along “Step Into Christmas” (1973). Or an increasingly desperate career-end attempt to wrench just one more hit out of a sadly over-worked formula. Like Shakin’ Stevens and Gary Glitter.

And where can it all go now? As the Darkness ask – ‘When Will The Bells End?’ How do you tap into spirituality in a godless age? Cliff Richard is still trying – shamelessly using a seasonal anaesthetic to disguise his cartoon-simple coded Christian metaphors into the chart. And although he’s succeeded time and again, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s Band Aid are more accurately attuned to the zeitgeist, striking all the correct nexuses of consumer moral guilt and charitable benevolence with an all-star cast and a ridiculously catchy hook. “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, the first and greatest of all the charity singles, sells a cool three-and-a-half million copies in the UK alone, stays at no.1 for five weeks in December 1984 while holding Wham’s “Last Christmas” in second place, then goes on to spawn sequel singles and the Live Aid event. Superficial, ego-driven? Sure. But it achieves something more than all of those smugly pious 1950’s songs which merely quote or misquote antique myth-texts. For if Christmas is to be about anything, this is about as good as it can get. Global consciousness. Wealth redistribution. A slight tinge of ‘love’ in a left-over biblical sense for an agnostic age.

Since then – if it wasn’t already so ridiculously ludicrous, it would be tempting to say that from now on it gets really silly. Mister Blobby. “Nelly the Elephant”. East 17. Bruce Springsteen. Jive Bunny. “Bob the Builder”. Even the mighty Chumbawamba. And it’s even more difficult to say where it’s going now. Product targeting is so precise a science it seems to overlook the essentially ephemeral nature of the seasonal hit altogether. Despite the perennially annual air-play reappearance of such phenomena. And as the year-end spending orgy remains the highest sales turnover period, powered with gift tokens and present-purchasing, singles can so easily get lost in the floods of mammon if they don’t get super-charged by the cross-media tie-in incentives of a ‘Pop Idol’ to amplify awareness. But instead, the endless recycling up-gears. Until, surely even Noddy Holder must get sick of hearing his own Xmas hit? ‘No. I’m PROUD of it. When I hear it on the radio, or in a Club or a Pub today, it doesn’t sound dated to me, it still sounds quite fresh. It stands the test of time, which is the test of a good Pop record. And it still sells every year, so it’s a nice little pension for us too. It’s a great record and I think it’s got a fondness in everybody’s heart.’ Well, maybe.

But the greatest of them all? I’m watching a slurred Shane MacGowan and a wonderful Kirsty MacCall doing “Fairytale of New York” on a Festival stage in Leeds’ Roundhay Park in August. Yet even in this late-summer sunshine it’s a transfixing spectacle – evoking a range of reactions from poetic wistfulness to comedy as Shane forgets his own lyrics and she has to coax and lead him, waltzing him gently into the next verse convincing – as if you need convincing, that this is the finest seasonal record ever made.

Published in:
‘HOT PRESS’ December 2003 (Eire)

INTERVIEW: NODDY HOLDER FROM HIS OWN GOB

NODDY HOLDER:

YOU BOYZ MAKE

BIG NOIZE

Glam-Rock Ikon – or Xmas Turkey?

‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ of turning pages

as NODDY HOLDER does a Literary Tour

to promote his autobiography,

telling tales of Phil Lynott, Oasis, Gary Glitter,

Glam-Rock Excess, “MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY”,

and Suicidal Groupies.... while

ANDREW DARLINGTON

tags along. CRAZEEEE...!!!!!

CUM ON FEEL THE NOIZE

... OF TURNING PAGES

Two desk-mikes. Red-back Noddy-books in anticipatory piles. A polished table adjacent to the History/Modern History section of the largest bookshop in Yorkshire. And Naomi – in delectably contoured ‘BORDERS’ T-shirt, spikes of hair and black-rimmed glasses, obviously flailing out of her depth when faced with publicly interviewing an amiable icon of an age before she was even born. Behind them, as she fiddles with bits of paper that other staffers have suggested her questions on, there’s a poster for Simon Clark’s exquisitely nasty horror novel ‘The Fall’. Another poster announcing. Terry ‘DISKWORLD’ Pratchett’s signing-visit to this very same bookshop. And in front of her, a patiently waiting block of Slade fans. “Which current CD do you listen to, Noddy?” she begins. “Macy Gray’s ‘On How Life Is’, best album of the year, in my ‘umble opinion” he comes back – live in person, with sideburns, to a mild swell of approval. Naomi smiles nervously, obviously encouraged by her success, and ventures ‘If I said to you ‘Who’s Crazee Now?’, who would you nominate? “You for a start” he teases, “and probably this lot for coming tonight” – indicating the audience, drawing them into the joke. “But Crazee bands? Jamiroquai – he’s crazy. Fun Loving Criminals – like ‘em, but they’re on another planet. And Geri Halliwell. She’s definitely lost the plot.”

So they muddle through, until in a final act of desperation Naomi suggests “alright Noddy, now is there anything You want to ask Me?” He grins mischievously, pulls a lascivious expression. “What colour knickers are you wearing, Naomi?” “NODD-EEE HOLDER!!!!” she gasps in polite shock, before throwing him over to the assembled fans. Lenny is first up. He has a tired Autumn 1972 Tour programme printed red-on-black. Thin Lizzy. Suzi Quatro – and Slade. “First gig I ever saw” he gushes. Noddy smiles indulgently as he sips his Britvic Clear Tonic Water. And signs it. Behind him, Michael has an original gatefold red ‘Slade Alive’ (1972) vinyl album to sign. “How’s the book selling?” he asks. Noddy brightens. “Went in the book charts at no.50” he chirps, “now it’s up to no.24”

Phew…!!! Avarice. Pride. Sloth. Lust. Gluttony. Wrath... and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Noddy’s autobiography ‘Who’s Crazee Now?’* tells it all, travelling from his childhood in the Black Country, through his pre-Slade scuffing bands during the sixties – into Glam-Rock and its aftermath. And this literary tour is designed to promote the book through local radio chat-slots, bookshop talks and signings. Right now he’s in Leeds, down from Macclesfield. And it’s my turn. So come on Nod – be honest, how can this tame literary slog compare with the insane anarchy of a Rock ‘n’ Roll tour? “It’s absolutely different to Rock ‘n’ Roll tours. A lot more civilised” he gags with a shocked expression. “But I’ve enjoyed everywhere we’ve been. And yes, I’ve been asked some STRANGE questions, but nothing I can’t cope with.” So try this on for size – there’s a lot about Rock ‘n’ Roll in your book, but very little sex and drugs. Does that mean that sex and drugs didn’t happen, or just that you’re not admitting to it? “There wasn’t drugs in our career” he straight-faces. “Slade weren’t a druggy band. We were a Boozing band. So we never got into that side of the business. We saw too many fatalities among our mates that were doing it. I mean – they were dropping like flies in the seventies. And we were – in a way, too PROFESSIONAL to go that same way. When we were doing an album, or a gig, we were always very focused, we were always on the money. We never partied until the job was done. Then we’d go overboard. But we certainly wasn’t going to let the partying be the main part of our life.”

And sex? “When you’re in a successful band you obviously have a lot of female followers chasing you around. And when you’re young you make the most of it, don’t you? You’d be daft not to, wouldn’t you? But people think it’s all fun and frolics, which generally it is. But the public only get that one side of it, there’s a downer side too. You’ve got to be careful, certainly in America. I had this one girl who followed me everywhere, today you’d call her a Stalker, but of course they weren’t called Stalkers in those days. One day we did a show in Philadelphia and drove back to New York. And when I got back to my hotel she was actually in my bedroom. She’d bribed the hotel maid to get in. I said ‘You’re going to have to leave.’ She starts crying and all that business, then she says ‘can I use the toilet before I go?’ And I say ‘Yeah’. So she locks herself in the toilet. Twenty minutes – she still hasn’t come out. I’m banging on the door. No sign of her. So I call our tour manager – Swin, we break in, and she’d slit her wrists. There was blood everywhere. We had to call the paramedics. She survived. But that’s the other side of the coin. People throw themselves at you, put their lives on the line for you, so you have to be very careful how you treat them. These things happen. It’s frightening. It’s great being a Pop Star, being mobbed and all that, and I don’t regret a minute, but when you’re at the centre of it all, it can be very scary too.”

Did you ever throw a TV out of a Hotel window? “No. And I’ve never met a band that HAS. It’s a myth. Probably younger bands do it now because they heard somewhere that bands used to do it, so now they feel if you’re in a band you’re SUPPOSED to do it! But sure, we did our fair share of damage, wrecking rooms now and again, but we always paid for it.” So what was your greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll excess? “I drove a car into a swimming pool once. Not my own I might add” he erupts into raucous laughter. “And not on purpose. I was under an excess of drink in this hotel car-park, the throttle slipped, I went over an embankment and the car ended up in the pool. That’s probably the worst thing that ‘appened to me.” Right. Ho-Hum. So – and this one’s for Naomi, what colour Boxer-shorts are you wearing Noddy? Now it’s HIS turn to look just a little coy. “Erm... I don’t wear Boxers, Darlin’” he manages eventually in contrived-camp.

Slade – of course, are the quintessential early-seventies band. Rock ‘n’ Roll without brakes. Sartorial atrocities and rampant innuendo delivered at mega-echo volume. Shiny mirrored hits and more bacofoil that an entire Wal-Mart hyper-store chain. Their “Coz I Luv You” knocked Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” off the no.1 slot in November 1971, to be deposed by... Benny Hill’s “Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West”. Crazzee times?!?!?! But yeah, yeah – whatever, the first half of the seventies was a pretty stupid time, agreed? Old Hippie bands getting older, hairier, and more tediously self-indulgent. While all the young Dudes too new “to get off on the Beatles and the Stones” were busy aggravating their acne by sticking sequins all over their stupid faces. But hey, Pop without morons is like Capitalism without victims, or Catholicism without Hell. And if Marc Bolan was this generation’s new Beatles, then Slade were their new Stones. Only louder. Cruder. And more un-pretty.

Listen to the 21-track ‘Slade Greatest Hits: Feel The Noize’ (1997) compilation now, and it’s a solid wall of loutish volume with bass-lines repeatedly kicking you in the head with the intensity of repetitive brain-injury. From the straight-ahead Rock cover that started it all, “Get Down And Get With It” laced with Little Richard keyboard runs, into the Pure Pop madness of twelve top five hits, six of them no.1’s with football-chant choruses and graffitiised-titles threatening to corrupt the spelling of a generation. Even a ballad like “How Does It Feel” gets a dirty guitar riff slashed across it, while the reflective “Far Far Away” opens with a demented Don Powell drum barrage erupting into a vocal delivered at full frontal tonsil-mangling volume. Later there’s the 1980’s post-Reading Festival metal-revival with “We’ll Bring The House Down”, and the mature anthemic “My Oh My” – which not only became a no.2 hit here in 1983, but also Slade’s biggest ever Top 5 USA hit. And all that’s before you even get to mention “Merry Xmas Everybody” which alone entered the Top 20 no less than seven times. The lives and times of Slade are wondrous tales indeed... but never before have we heard it from Nod’s own gob. Until now.

WALKING ON WATER –

RUNNING ON ALCOHOL

Today, Noddy’s sideboards are sparser, his outfit less flamboyant – purple shirt, long black drape jacket, stretch-side black boots, with his gold-rimmed spectacles worn on a Larry Grayson black expander-twine around his neck. Neville ‘Noddy’ Holder grins. “I was born being rowdy... I was screaming when I hit daylight”. His thick Midlands accent intact all the way from Walsall – just north of Brum, “the opening credits of ‘CORONATION STREET’ always remind me of Newhall Street” he says, getting nostalgic for the tin-bath in front of the fire and the outside lav. He saw Little Richard ‘with his bouffant hair, banging away on the piano’ in the 1956 ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ movie, and “I didn’t think Rock ‘n’ Roll could get any better”. Later, he got to see that same Little Richard headlining at the Wolverhampton Gaumont, with support from The Everly Brothers... and the Rolling Stones.

And soon, early Slade line-ups were moving in a star-system of other stalled sixties launches. Bolan, Rod Stewart and Elton John were all hanging out with routine loser sixties bands that never quite made the grade, all relentlessly gigging, all waiting for that first big career-break, and Noddy’s pre-chart history follows pretty much the same contours. While around this time, as part of the proto-Slade ‘N’Betweens Noddy made his first German trip to play ‘The Star Club’, a venue so wild that the waiters packed guns. It was here he ran into fellow wannabe Paul (Gary Glitter) Raven – ‘a Rocker in lots of leather with an Elvis-style quiff’. Living in red-light Keil, north of Hamburg on a diet of Glitter-recommended pea-and-ham soup the band were ‘farting all week’.

Then came the hits – and new associations. That Autumn 1972 tour with Slade supported by Thin Lizzy, for example. “Yeh, they supported us a couple of times, in America as well. Phil Lynott was a madman. Towards the end of that American tour he actually caught hepatitis, the –whatcha-callit, the contagious sort? We didn’t know until the tour was more or less finished. But when he went back to New York he was diagnosed with it, so everybody who’d been in contact with him on the tour had to have tests, all the bands and road-crew. Then we all had to have shots. They lined us up in a big row, we all had to drop our trousers, and there was this hideous sight of the bands and road crew showing their arses, and all having this hepatitis injection. Not a pretty sight, as you can imagine. And that was all Phil’s fault. Which we never let ‘im forget!”

Slade were always a strange band. Bass-player Jimmy Lea – a quiet, creative, formally trained violinist and the perfect song-writing foil to Noddy (‘to be honest, I think he would rather have been in Led Zeppelin than Slade’). Gum-chewing Don Powell on drums. Noddy. And Dave Hill on guitar, always the most outrageously flamboyant member of Slade, the SuperYob ‘Metal Nun’ in his all-over silver leather costumes. “Yeh. He was a constant source of amusement for us. His stage-gear was never intended to be a great fashion statement.” But unlike Ziggy Bowie or Bopping Elf Bolan, and despite Dave’s flirtation with his ‘feminine side’, Slade were never gender-transcenders. During their second TV appearance – promoting their single “Shape Of Things To Come” on ‘Top Of The Pops’, Dave was jealous of Elton John, also debuting, “because he thought Elton would end up pulling all the girls. How wrong can you be?”

And outrage has always been a part of Rock ‘n’ Roll anyway. Little Richard was doing it in the 1950’s... “sure. Little Richard was doing it. But even before that, the comedian Max Miller was doing it. A lot of the influences for various bits of stuff I wore later on, came from Max Miller. They were all seeds that had been planted when I was a little kid. You get it in every era of Show-Biz. You take a little bit here, a little bit there from somewhere else. Which happened in Glam-Rock just the same. Nothing’s new. Everything comes around from something else. I mean, a lot of Glam-Rock stuff, certainly the platform shoes and that came from the 1930’s. The Flappers were wearing those sort of shoes back then – in their own way. You just turn it on its head and give it a new lease of life. At the end of 1975/’76 everybody was saying platforms, bell-bottoms and flares would never be worn again. But here they are. They’re back. Now everybody’s doing it again...”

But at the height of Glam, wasn’t there ever a time when Noddy looked at himself in the mirror and thought “what the hell am I doing dressed like this?!?!?!?” “No. Never. I mean – it was all a big piss-take. We even used to take the mickey out of each other. We never looked on it as anything other than a lot of fun. Probably the only one in the band who wasn’t into all the dressing up part of it was Jimmy. It wasn’t him at all. He went along with it because he had to. But it wasn’t his bag. And he’ll admit it. He wanted more of that ‘serious musician’-type-thing. With the other three it was different, we weren’t interested in that at all.” But I’d always interpreted the lyrics of “Cum On Feel The Noize” – a song later revived by Oasis, as an answer to hostile critics. After all, Noddy is singing ‘so you think I’ve got an evil mind? well you should know better... so you think my singing’s out of time? well it makes me money’. Was I right? “Erm – no, it was more a statement than a come-back to the critics. We never had no problems with critics really, they were never harsh. Although they never took us seriously as a band. As serious musicians. We realised that at the time. They thought we was just disposable Pop, which all Pop is in a way. But now people look back and realise we wrote some classic Pop songs and made some classic Pop records. Oasis covered “Cum On Feel The Noize”, and it was good. I like it – it helps keep the band’s name alive, and the Slade back-catalogue too. It’s made me a few bob, so I’m not complaining. I went to see Oasis when they played Maine Road, Manchester. They invited me up to see the show and Noel Gallagher actually sent Meg – his missus, up to the place where I was watching them to take a photo of me just to see my reaction when they did that song. They did “Cum On Feel The Noize” as the encore and she took my picture. It was great – 40,000 kids going mad to a song me and Jimmy had written twenty-odd years before, y’know? It shows the song is still valid. So now we’ve got the recognition we deserve. It’s took us twenty-odd years to get that recognition, but it’s come eventually.”

Yet bizarrely, “Merry Xmas Everybody” is probably Slade’s most enduring contribution to chart history. “Yes, it’s probably the one everybody will always think ‘THIS IS THE ONE’, even though I personally don’t think it’s the best record we ever made. Funnily enough it doesn’t actually get re-released. It’s just never been deleted. It’s been on sale continuously for twenty-six years, it just goes on and on and on. Yet I wrote that lyric all in one night! I’d been down the pub, got a bit pissed up, couldn’t drive ‘ome. So I stayed over at mi Mam’s ‘ouse. I’d already got the first two lines – ‘are you hanging up your stockings on the wall’, but I wanted to get the rest finished. Me Mam’d got a little bottle of whisky in the sideboard. So I sat down at one o’clock in the morning, got that bottle out, and by four or five I’d finished all the lyrics to the song. I’d set out to get a Working Class Christmassy-type feel to it. So I thought of all the Working Class Christmassy-type things I could think of to cram into the song. And probably two of the best lines lyrically that I ever did are in that song. Which are ‘does your Granny always tell you that the old songs are the best, then she’s up and Rock ‘n’ Rolling with the best’ – and we’ve ALL ‘ad it. Your Granny comes round at Christmas. You put a new record on and she says ‘ah, that stuff’s not as good as it was in my day’. But give ‘er a couple of sherry’s and she’s up and twisting and showing her knickers. It happens in every family. It’s those sort-of things I wanted to capture. And I think it works. Yet if you listen to the record, there are no Christmas gimmicks on it, no sleigh-bells, no jingle-bells at all. The only thing Christmassy about it are the lyrics. It’s a straightforward Pop-Rock song, that happens to be about Christmas. It’s probably the only Christmas hit that’s ever been like that. And funnily enough – in France, it got to no.1 at Easter!”

Aren’t you sick of hearing it? “No. I’m PROUD of it. When I hear it on the radio, or in a Club or a Pub today, it doesn’t sound dated to me, it still sounds quite fresh. It stands the test of time, which is the test of a good Pop record. And it still sells every year, so it’s a nice little pension for us too. I think Jimmy’s sick of it. But he still takes the royalty cheques. The only thing that pisses me off is when I’m doing my Christmas shopping and it’s on in every store you walk into – there it is, BLARING out, and everybody’s looking at me, pointing and going (in comic voice) “that’s him, he made that record!!!” That DOES get a bit embarrassing. But I’ve lived with that for twenty-six years now, and my ears tend to block it out. But it’s a great record and I think it’s got a fondness in everybody’s heart. They know Christmas is here when they start hearing that record!”

SEVEN YEAR (B)ITCH

A guy from local band Neon shoves a copy of their CD ‘Heroes’ across the table at Noddy. “We’re playing ‘THE ADELPHI’ tonight. Why don’t you come and see us?” “I might just do that” lies Noddy. Then in an aside to me, “you’ve got to do that. When you’re in a band you’ve got to shove yourself.” But during those long early Slade and pre-Slade days wasn’t there ever a time when you thought it wasn’t going to happen, that you were never going to make it? “We-e-e-ell, it obviously crosses your mind. But we always had amazing confidence. We were cocky little gits. It was only a matter of time. We knew we’d got the goods to do it. It was just a case of having the right record at the right time to get the breaks. But we had no doubt in our minds that we would break through at some point. And that when we did break through it would snowball for us. We had that sort of youthful cockiness to think that we were the best band in the land. And you’ve got to have that confidence. You’ve got to have that level of self-belief.” As Blur say it, Confidence is a preference. But Slade always came across as a highly motivated band. “We were very highly motivated. But you have to be if you want to get into the Rock ‘n’ Roll business. If you go into it with the intention of making a fast buck, if all you want is quick killing – nothing’s going to happen, it’s not going to work. It certainly wouldn’t in those days, and I don’t think it will today. We always looked on it – me in particular, as a long-term thing, a long-term proposition. And that’s why we stuck at it as a band for so long. We had the same line-up together for twenty-five years. NO band has ever achieved that, with the same line-up for that long. There’s none. There’s bands that’ve been going for twenty-five years – but not with the same line-up.” So will you go and see Neon tonight? “No. I’ll be gone by then. But I will listen to the CD.”

And will there be new Noddy Holder recordings? “I don’t know, people keep asking me, but I haven’t planned anything. After I did a couple of acoustic songs in the last TV series of ‘The Grimleys’ all the record companies were coming onto me to do an album. But that would mean getting used to the corporate structure of the business again. And it’s awkward for me to take that on board. ‘Cos I’m a bolshie so-and-so. You get record company A&R men who are – like, twenty-five, and they’re telling ME what to do, as though I’m a new artist and I don’t know what I’m talking about! And I have to say – LOOK! – I’ve been in the Music Business for over thirty years!... I’ve been through the mill a few times. I know the structure of things, and how things work. But honestly, this year’s been chock-a-block. I spent the first part of the year writing the autobiography. I delivered it to the publishers, and the next day I started out on three months filming for ten new episodes of ‘The Grimleys’. After which I started out on the book promotion. But I would like at some point to go into the studio and record, as a solo project. I’m hoping I’ll have time to write some new stuff next year, and then maybe record it the year after. But at the moment I’m just happy doing the things I’m doing. I’m acting with ‘The Grimleys’. I’ve written the book. I’m doing a lot of music for TV-adverts, I’m doing voice-over stuff. I’ve got my own radio show in Manchester. So I’ve got all these things going on. And I know what makes me feel right. Even if I don’t sell one copy or not one person watches it. I can’t help that. That’s out of my control. It’s not a case of how many records I sell or whatever. It’s more at the end of the day if I think I’ve done that work to the best of my ability – and if I think it’s turned out good, then – to me, I’m successful.”

Naomi shuffles the few remaining unsold, unsigned red-back Noddy-books into a neat pile, and bins the empty Britvic bottle, as Noddy watches the last of the Slade fans contentedly dispersing through the History/Modern History section and back out into the Leeds Briggate precinct beyond. His book is not a complex one. There’s little depth or insight. But he can be a man of unexpected contradictions. A curious oscillation between bragging bombast, and the consideration to care about the sensitivities of the groupies who once demanded his carnal attentions. A one-time Glam-Rock animal who played to a sold-out Earls Court Stadium, yet is now happy to perform to a rabble of fifty fans in a bookshop and enjoy their uncritical adulation. He once wrote a song that went ‘many years from now there will be new sensations, and new temptations... many years from now, there will be new tomorrow’s, How Does It Feel?’ It seems that now those new tomorrow’s are here he’s quite content to simply enjoy them.


 * “WHO’S CRAZEE NOW?: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
by NODDY HOLDER (with LISA VERRICO)
(Ebury Press, £16.99, ISBN 0-09-187075-5)

Interview originally published in:
‘HOT PRESS Vol.24 no.1’ (Feb 2000)
‘G.C. ROCKS no.8’ (UK - March 2000)

CD: 'THE GENESIS OF SLADE'

Album Review of:

‘THE GENESIS OF SLADE’

by THE VENDORS, THE ‘N BETWEENS,

and STEVE BRETT & THE MAVERICKS

(NODDY HOLDER, DAVE HILL, JIM LEA & DON POWELL)

(Cherry Red Records CDMRED 173)

There are few bands so essentially matched to their time-frame as Slade are to the tacky glam ‘n’ glitter stomp of the 1970’s. Yet, as this album, and as Noddy’s autobiography ‘Who’s Crazee Now?’ (Ebury Press 1999) shows, the various elements of the band were lurking on the outer fringes of Pop-dom throughout the sixties waiting for the big break that never came. Some of these tracks are lifted directly from carefully hoarded fans’ vinyl, and bear the ‘unobtrusive’ surface-hiss and scratch-noises of authenticity. Other tracks never even got that far, and are salvaged intact from a never-released lost cassette. So pristine sound quality is not an issue here.

Archaeological speaking, the earliest examples date back as far as 1963/64, with the quaint period charm of a privately-pressed EP by the Vendors – a name derived from an instrumental hit of the time called “Peanut Vendor”, and used by youth-club Beat-Boomers Don Powell, guitarist Dave Hill – and vocalist John Howells, who is now Jurassically resurrected to provide the sleeve-notes. They harmonise on Buddy Holly’s “Take Your Time”, write their own “Don’t Leave Me Now” (Hill and Howells), and do a note-perfect cover of the Shadows’ “Peace Pipe”. Meanwhile, as Noddy recalls in his memoirs, his school-age band the Memphis Cut-Outs were recruited by Steve Brett, already ‘a well-known entertainer in the Midlands’, as his new ‘Mavericks’, and it was in this guise that he got his initial ‘taste of the music industry’. “Wishing” was their first of three 1965 singles – all the A’s and B-sides collected here, which provide Noddy with his introduction to studio-time, albeit playing ‘exactly as we did every night on stage’. Essentially a ‘bunch of hicks from Wolverhampton’, they played Germany together with their mix of Brett’s big-voice Country ballad-cover of Elvis’ “Anything That’s Part Of You” and their failed Surf cover of Jimmy Gilmer’s American no.1 “Sugar Shack”. While “Candy” is a cheesily bounce-along Austin Powers Swinging Sixties quasi-TV-theme. Now That’s What I Call Easy Lounge-Core!

But by then Hill and Powell had graduated to become The ‘N Betweens, and tracks 12-15 are regulation Soul / R&B covers about dance-crazes with stupid names like “Can Your Monkey Do The Dog” and their take on the Yardbirds’ “I Wish You Would”, tracks lifted from a ‘cassette recording of a private acetate that has since gone missing’, plus further tracks originally put out on a French-only Barclay-label EP dismissed by Noddy as ‘just basic Blues tracks straight from their live set’ – including an inferior version of the Sorrows’ “Take A Heart”. The final six tracks come from 1966 and – although credited to The ‘N’ Betweens (Mark 2), unite the complete Slade line-up for the first time, with Noddy’s vocal debut clearly not yet at his microphone-wrecking best, but getting there. The sequence consists of one single – a flawed cover of the American Young Rascals hit “You Better Run”, plus the previously unissued out-takes they did with legendary American madman and fractured genius Kim Fowley, its ‘B’-side, “Evil Witchman” which ‘Kim made up on the spot’ around Noddy’s guitar riff, plus studio try-outs of Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich’s “Hold Tight”, and “Ugly Girl” – dedicated to ‘Our Fan-Club President in Afghanistan’. ‘See how beautiful her ugliness is’ Fowley voice-overs, then fades out with ‘buy our next record, it’s even groovier than this one...!’ And, of course, it was. For by the next record they were re-branded by Chas Chandler as Slade. But meanwhile, it’s sadly obvious to see why the 1960’s overlooked these naive and unfocussed attempts, and that it was only when the decade’s real innovators were either dead or creatively burned-out that Slade achieved their long-awaited moment. So this is a souvenir for hard-core fans and tacky Glam-Rock archivists only.