SHEFFIELD ELECTRO - THE BE-BOP OF ROCK

 

SHEFFIELD ELECTRO -

THE BE-BOP OF ROCK:

 

THE BIRTH OF A NEW COOL 

‘None of The Human League have any orthodox musical 

 training, but prefer to regard composition as an extension of 

 logic, inspiration and luck. Therefore, unlike conventional 

 musicians their influences are not so obvious’ 

(Fast Product Press Pack, June 1978)

Rock ‘n’ Roll was never intended to be about virtuosity. It was more a DIY Folk music. 

Skiffle was a 1950s fad championed by Lonnie Donegan, which ignited a thousand ad-hoc austerity groups repurposing household items – a washboard, an old tea-chest impaled with a broom-handle and tension-strung to create a stand-up bass, and maybe a couple of battered acoustic guitars played with more energy than technique. Two decades later Sheffield created a new kind of Electronic Skiffle. 

Why Sheffield? 

The M1 slip-road 34 takes you into the small South Yorkshire industrial city, but with a greater music tradition than that description would imply. We could start with Wurlitzer organist Reginald Dixon, famous for his radio broadcasts from the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. But we probably won’t. Instead we’ll begin in the Beat Boom era with Dave Berry, his distinctive creepy stage persona and hits that included ‘The Crying Game’, his cover of Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Little Things’ and the Ray Davies-penned ‘This Strange Effect’. Dave was born in Woodhouse, to the south-east of Sheffield in February 1941. Then there’s Joe Cocker who took the Woodstock Festival by storm with his anguished take on Ringo’s modest singalong ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. He was born at 38 Tasker Road in the Crookes suburb of Sheffield in May 1944. Tony Christie might have been born in nearby Conisbrough, but his long association with the steel city includes his 2008 ‘Made In Sheffield’ album, produced by Richard Hawley with contributions from Alex Turner and Jarvis Cocker.

Of course there’s Def Leppard, jazz guitarist Derek Bailey, singer Paul Carrack, jazz drummer Tony Oxley, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and beyond. But this book is largely centred around the cluster of electro-musicians who were feeling their way through the 1970s, to upsurge into the 1980s as the ‘soundtrack for the second industrial revolution: 45 and 33-&-a-third rpm.’ 

The first time I visited Sheffield, where now there is the labyrinthine Meadowhall temple to opulent consumerism, there were still foundries you could smell in the air and that shook the street beneath your feet, ‘like a metronome, like a heartbeat for the whole city’ according to Ian Craig Marsh. ‘We all come from pretty strong working-class backgrounds’ Ian told me, ‘my Dad’s a bricklayer and my Mum used to work at Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts Factory. My Grandfather got burned clear down his right side when he was splashed with molten steel at a steel works!’ De-industrialisation left abandoned factory units to colonise as rehearsal rooms and studio space for insurrectionary anti-musicians who ‘discarded natural sound source in favour of synthetic instrumentation because of its convenience, mobility and vast source of, as yet, untapped potential’ (the Vice Versa manifesto). 

And there was cheap front-room technology easily adaptable, Skiffle-style, sufficient to bend to purpose. Original – in the sense of not using drums, which were just too tedious to learn, and guitars which were considered obsolete. ‘We wanted to sound like a proper Pop group, but we were not prepared to put in the five or six years that it would have taken to learn a traditional instrument’ explained Philip Oakey. The non-Sheffield Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran described his discovery of synths as ‘this is a new planet that I could live on.’ And yes, that’s how it was. 

It was a time of dense-black Xeroxed fanzines, Sheffield had its own ‘GunRubber’ produced since February 1977 by Paul Bower and Adi Newton, as well as ‘Modern Drugs’ from Martin Fry, ‘NMX’ from Martin Russian and the photocopied ‘Steve’s Paper’ from Stephen Singleton, all documenting the burgeoning local music scene, centred around Cabaret Voltaire and The Future. And the cassette-underground where, for the first time, bands and musicians as well as poets could use their bedrooms to home-record their own experimental sounds, then cheaply reproduce and circulate limited edition C30s or C60s among a proto-internet of linked like-minded activists. It was ignited by the Punk energy and ethos that anyone could get up and do it. It was new. It was exciting, combining the dissident samizdat self-publishing spirit of insurgency with mischievously incendiary early-Dada art-confrontational energies supercharged by the relentlessly dark cut-up strategies of Beat-Generation writer William S. Burroughs and his SF New Wave disciple J.G. Ballard. Each bubblepack package that arrived in the morning mail was ripped open up to reveal new bulletins from the innovative edge of luring and sometimes-scary tomorrows. ‘NME’ carried its own weekly review-column with the addesses of more DIY weirdnesses a mere postal order away.

The first experimental synthesizer system had been devised in 1955 by RCA, but it was a certain Dr Robert Moog who gave his name to the cheaper more marketable modular version that began to infiltrate awareness during the late-sixties, as demonstrated on the first entirely-synthesized ‘Switched On Bach’ (1968) album by Walter – later Wendy Carlos, followed by ‘The Well-Tempered Synthesizer’ a year later. Martyn Ware recalled hearing Carlos on the Clockwork Orange (1971) soundtrack. Heaven 17 would take their name from the same movie.

Bands such as The Byrds, The Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues and others began to dabble in the effects that electronics could produce, with Terry Riley, Tonto’s Expanding Headband and The United States Of America taking it incrementally further, nodding to John Cage as a kind of spiritual godfather. The cosmic synth genre was an extension of the psychedelic ‘music to take trips by’ drug culture, an avant-garde trance deployment of otherworldly textures. Then, incorporated into banks of keyboards, the synthesizer became an exotic embellishment to the assault arsenal employed by virtuoso Prog-Rock musicians. Synths were bulky, heavy, fragile and temperamental, utilising voltage-controlled oscillators and related devices that respond to room-humidity and temperature. Heat changes from the lighting-rig could affect tunings. A Moog required a two-hour warming-up period. 

While in Germany Tangerine Dream, Neu and Kraftwerk were not only adapting and developing their own rhythmic variations but were inventing new ones through the use of sequencers. Kraftwerk – ‘the most important group of the century’ according to Philip Oakey, compressed eccentrically catchy musical ideas into the appropriately stimulating shape of wires, programmes, images, trackers, scanners, impulses and screens. 

Championed by DJ John Peel, Tangerine Dream grew out of the Berlin Zodiak Free Arts Lab, where they evolved the hypnotic pulsations of their LP ‘Phaedra’ (1974), a first charting album for them as well as for Virgin Records. Abstract solo albums by Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese dissolved into sound-pixels which absorbed the listener into a Rorschach eyelid-movie of aural fantasia. The 1976 success of ‘Oxygène’ took Jean-Michel Jarre as close as Space music could get to conventional Pop, with brisk programmed percussion and melodic synth-lines that made it both accessible and relentlessly catchy. Yet it was closer to soporific mood-music, conjuring an aid-to-getting-high mindscreen for recumbent sofa-surfers. To gonzo journalist Lester Bangs ‘the men at the keyboards send out sonar blips through the congealing air… three technological monoliths emitting urps, hissings, pings and swooshings in the dark’ (in his ‘Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung’, Serpents Tail, 1987).

In Sheffield it was different. ‘We didn’t need to spend a lot of money to be creative’ said Martyn. The Sheffield answer was to leap obliquely into exploratory voyages to uncharted areas of electronic experiment, sidestepping both conventional musical standards and accepted modes of Rock celebrity. It was innovation inspired by the can-do attitude of Punk, and the art-school Bowie cool. On one side of town was Cabaret Voltaire, on the other there was The Future, a ‘more adventurous but less commercial’ version of The Human League which cannibalised Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware alongside Adi Newton – who operated tape machine-loops and treatments and was destined to form the excellent but much undervalued Clock DVA. 

If there was a pre-existing language, Kraftwerk had utilized tape-loops, while Holger Czukay used random bursts of short-wave radio interference for his work with Can. Cabaret Voltaire began in trainee telephone-engineer Chris Watson’s attic, inspired by a brief eighty-page book called ‘Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrète For Beginners’ by Terence Dwyer (1971, Oxford University Press). So first Chris – then Chris in cahoots with Richard H Kirk, played collage sound-games with reel-to-reel tape recorders, speeded-up, slowed-down, spliced and looped, adding a Farfisa drum-machine with rudimentary mail-order ring-modulator signal processing patched together by Chris – no keyboard, just knobs to twiddle and tweak. ‘I was never a musician’ Chris explained, ‘I had no interest in playing a musical instrument. I had no interest in that sort of discipline. I just wanted to make some noise… we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we knew we wanted to do it!’ 

Later the acquisition of an EMS Synthi AKS titled no less than three tracks on their ‘Methodology ’74-’78: Attic Tapes’ (Industrial Records, 1980, expanded for Mute Records, 2002). Where Cabaret Voltaire are concerned, definition remained nebulous. How to classify a 01:10-minute ‘Jet Passing Over’ which is simply a doubled electronic sound-replication of aeroplane jets in the sky, phasey, like a radio tuning itself in and out of focus? Or ‘Jack Stereo Unit’ which is a confusion of conflicting speech, ‘Treated Guitar’ is splodge-sounds, at least the 01:47 ‘Sad Synth’ recognizably utilizes a synthesizer, while the 39-second ‘Space Patrol’ uses cheap TV Sci-Fi effects in the way that The Future would. These were what Chris Watson described as the ‘new-found freedoms.’

Adding Stephen Mallinder’s bass guitar, their first gig was a ‘Science For People’ Student Disco at the University Upper Refectory on Tuesday 13 May 1975, percussion consisted of a tape-loop recording of a steam-hammer – recorded by Chris in Belgium, while Richard improvised on clarinet while bedecked in flashing Xmas-tree lights. Needless to say, reception was not even mixed – it was hostile, resulting in Mallinder’s trip to the A&E department as a consequence of a fracas with the unruly and unappreciative audience. But if there has to be a date for the Big Bang ignition of Sheffield Electro, this is it. The E=MC2 moment. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were taking note.

 

Lest we forget, there was still a Soviet Union and a Cold War going on, the world seemed breathlessly paused on the brink of mutual assured destruction. But if the crack of doom wasn’t to be heard on some hydrogen jukebox, it just might uncoil from that next C60 in the mail. 

What semantic references, mythological splendours and glittering epithets can be attached to The Human League? Their career was lived forwards, but must be understood backwards, from today back to then. An exercise in de-structuring images and image-making. But all that’s really essential to know is that The Human League brought Pop from the age of the Flintstones to the age of the Jetsons virtually overnight. This is my chance to set history straight, for they were as original as the solar system. 

Sheffield is a small city, and isolated from what was happening in London. In the same way that Liverpool had been isolated from the fads and fashions of the Southern-based music biz in 1963… and by the end of the 1970s simple Casio synths were as cheap and easily-available as guitars...

This is the ‘Introduction’ of my book:
‘ON TRACK... HUMAN LEAGUE &

THE SHEFFIELD ELECTRO SCENE,
EVERY ALBUM, EVERY SONG’
(SonicBond Publishing, 2022)

Rolling Stones DVD & Book

 

ROLLING STONES – 

‘TRUTH & LIES’ DVD 

Review of:

‘ROLLING STONES: 

TRUTH AND LIES’ 

(August 2007 – Liberation Entertainment LIB6112)

 

Can the Rolling Stones’ story be conveyed through image as much as music? Surely those who pay to see the antique relic’s ‘Bigger Bang’ tour only do so to glimpse ghosts of former glory? Whatever music is involved – perfunctory tribute-band umpteenth-regurgitations of “Satisfaction”, must be incidental rather than central to the experience. Andrew Loog Oldham’s vital contribution to the scam was to seize on the group’s surly visual power from the beginning, and to mould it into a durable rough-trade contra-Beatles brand, a highly-marketable identity refined and ultimately pared down into the ubiquitous protruding-tongue logo. But is that enough? This DVD, a smaller and more modest ‘bang’, succeeds in relating the full arc of ‘Their Satanic Majesties’ career devoid of a single note of original music. You want the hits and clips? go to the excellent 130-minute ‘25x5: The Continuing Adventures Of The Rolling Stones’ (originally CMV Ents, 1989) which has them all. 

By contrast, this is purely voice-over, enhanced by an assemblage of public-domain newsreel items and film of theatrefulls of screamage teens – and it was theatres then, not stadiums. Study the swaggering insolence without the distraction of block-chord riffs. Or hear Jagger’s educated articulate sneer out of the context of lyrics. This – after all, as much as the Gered Mankowitz portfolio of feral tour photo-studies, conjures the inflammatory alchemy the Stones contrived during their ascent, an iconography of images plundered and replicated by generations of bands since. Of course, it couldn’t possibly last. But it did. While the Beatles always had the edge when it came to cutesy girlie fan-mags, it was the Stones more confrontationally rebellious stance which became the default setting for US garage-Punk bands from the Chocolate Watch Band on. With Brian’s damaged stoned smile as an integral asset. Wherever the sixties were not Fab, they were Rolling Stoned. Then the New York Dolls were one Mick Jagger backed up by three Keith Richards. Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler sought to out-pout Jagger. The Stone Roses Ian Brown took and remodelled the pout, while Primal Scream attempted a total artful replication.

 

This DVD re-tells the familiar tale efficiently. Mick and Keith meeting on the platform of Dartford Rail station in October 1961. Brian Jones’ forming his Blues Band, and the group living ‘in squalor’ on Jagger’s student grant at Edith Grove SW10. Oldham moving Ian Stewart back-stage because his image was wrong. John and Paul gifting them “I Wanna Be Your Man”. Brian becoming marginalised within his own band as Mick & Keith’s writing partnership develops. The hits. The pissing against the garage wall. Now we shrug – yeah, Rock ‘n’ Roll life-style. But it wasn’t like that then. We forget how fast things were changing. As a positive example to the ‘kids’, Elvis never publicly drank or smoked. Cliff neither. The Beatles indulged in their ‘ciggies’. But the ‘b’-side of the Stones second single was titled “Stoned” – pretty risqué even considered as a pun on the group’s name. They followed it with teasing references to “Mother’s Little Helpers”. So when the ‘Redlands’ bust and Jagger-in-handcuffs photos hit the tabloids it was far more than just another tedious Peter Doherty escapade, it was seismically breaking new ground for Pop-culture. Seeing this newsreel stuff now captures something of that moral panic.

 

A ‘Pathe News’ cine-sequence illustrating their appearance at the Hull ABC cinema on a bill with the Mojos, and Ike & Tina Turner, a visit to my home city which I remember well. Another, ‘The Stones Roll In’, documenting the ‘frantic and disorderly’ arrival of the ‘shaggy-haired’ reprobates at Sydney airport for their 1965 Australian tour. There are no original to-camera Stones to narrate the tale as talking heads, but journalist Chris Welch was there at the time, writing for ‘Melody Maker’ through the Swinging London hits, and he adds knowing – if scarcely revelatory comments. Paul Gambaccini fills in during that amazing run of albums that go from ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ (December 1968) to ‘Exile On Main Street’ (May 1972) when the band were literally the finest most dangerous thing around. 

If Redlands was the establishment’s revenge, and Altamont was the counter-culture’s Faustian reckoning, both were feeding as much on the Stone’s image-threat as on their music. Grace Slick – who was there, told me Jagger was wearing a devil’s costume at Altamont. He wasn’t. But in the intensity of the event, that’s the way she saw it. That’s how powerful the demonic vibe was. There’s also spoken-word contributions from a youthful-looking David Hepworth of ‘The Word’ who talks about growing up the fifties, but surely must only have been there for the Ronnie Wood tax-exile career-low through to the brief resurgence of ‘Some Girls’ (June 1978), and even ‘Voodoo Lounge’ in 1994 . But if we don’t get to hear any of the music, it runs as a subliminal soundtrack in your brain, surely even those born twenty years after the hits know them all anyway. 

Among the generous selection of bonus cine-featurettes is a dayglo-colour ‘Pathe Pictorial’ exploration of those lost Swinging London days done in the manner of an Attenborough ‘Strange Planet’ wildlife doc. Explaining the phenomenon of ‘swinging youth’ – ‘this strange and disturbing generation’, these weird new creatures, mutant and exotic with their radiant garb and incomprehensible language. It’s essentially a shameless promo-piece for a magazine-launch ‘written by the kids for the kids’ with sequences regularly plundered ever since for every TV sixties retro-flashback you’ve ever seen – Carnaby Street trendies and proto-Flower Power poseurs, and it’s amusing to have the opportunity of viewing the full short movie, although I don’t remember actually noticing the magazine itself in the local newsagents. ‘Rave’? – yes, that was everywhere, but ‘Intro’? – sorry, no. 

www.liberationentertainment.co.uk 

Published (abbreviated form) in: 

‘ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.12’ 

(UK – November 2008)

ROLLING STONES – 

TRACK BY TRACK 

Book Review of: 

‘THE ROLLING STONES: ON TRACK… 

EVERY ALBUM, EVERY SONG 1963 TO 1980’ 

by STEVE PILKINGTON 

(SONICBOND PUBLISHING) www.sonicbondpublishing.com 

ISBN 978-1-78952-017-0 Softcover. 144pp

 

I bought the Stones debut single – “C’Mon”, when it was gathered onto the September 1963 ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars Vol.2’ spin-off compilation from the TV Pop-show, alongside tracks by Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, Karl Denver and the Marauders. It was the first time they appeared in twelve-inch format, and I played it to death. Steve Pilkington is dismissive of their “The Rolling Stones” EP, although it reached no.15 on the NME singles chart (22 February 1964) with a moody beach film-clip, providing early indication that the fivesome were more than just another Beat-Boom fad. But he’s good at teasing out track-by-track details of their early US albums, rejigged and padded out by the London label to include B-sides, EP tracks and some rarities including “Blue Turns To Grey” on ‘December’s Children (And Everybody’s)’ (December 1965) which provided an unlikely hit single for Cliff Richard, struggling to retain some kind of relevance in the tsunami of the new weird. The Stones first US hits – “Time Is On My Side” and “Heart Of Stone” weren’t even singles here. The value of this book, and others in the SonicBond series, is that it concentrates purely on the recorded vinyl evidence, with none of the distracting gossip-stuff, and effectively tells the story via fax ‘n’ info through to ‘Emotional Rescue’ (June 1980) with all the gritty studio detail you could reasonably expect to get. 

Published in: 

‘R’N’R’ Vol.2 Issue 78’ 

(November/ December 2019)

       

DVD: 'BEATLES BIGGEST SECRETS'

 

BEATLES - SECRETS…? 

WHAT SECRETS…? 

DVD Review of: 

‘BEATLES BIGGEST SECRETS’ 

 (2007 – Prism Leisure/ Fremantlemedia FHED2024RD)

 

‘The inside story of the world’s greatest-ever pop group’ it says. And, as everyone knows, it’s a great story. Here, there are stills and non-copyright newsreel stock-footage, and it’s always good to see those familiar waving-at-the-airport clips, the quick-fire press conference sight-gags, the gurning at the cameras, and the Harold Wilson ‘purple-hearts’ quips at the Variety Club awards. In the gaps between there are some poor ‘reconstructions’ by some Beatles wannabes (The Prellies), a voice-over that pretends to be Ringo, but isn’t (it’s Bernard Hill), and no real Beatles music. That was ‘withheld’ as damage-limitation, because ‘every image is policed by the company they created’. In other words, this formerly-screened TV-documentary is another in the growing proliferation of non-authorised Fabs product. And secrets? Well – not exactly. 

Mostly it’s fairly routine stuff to anyone who’s read a few biographies, spiced up with some thrown-in conjecture. There was sex at Hamburg, apparently. Cue some gratuitous red-lit film of a pole-dancer. And penury. Allan Williams, who first booked the five Beatles there talks about how ‘Paul used to argue with John Lennon because it was one penny extra to have jam on your toast.’ ‘Look at all the jam he’s got now, the bastard’ he adds straight-faced. ‘He owes me £15 by the way, don’t know how he can sleep,’ perhaps unconsciously quoting Lennon’s own “How Do You Sleep?” Mc-attack on the ‘Imagine’ album? He then relates how he directed the young pre-Fabs to the Seamen’s Dispensary when they pick up their first dose of the clap.

 

Brian Epstein was gay, and had a thing for John Lennon. Hardly a revelation. Even their weekend together in Barcelona is fairly common knowledge, someone even wrote a play about it*. Admittedly, what happened there is less certain, but Tony Barrow – the first ‘Press Officer to the Fab Four’, suggests only that Lennon was ‘an intrepid sexual adventurer’, a description Poet Royston Ellis – who claims to have shared a three-in-a-bed romp with Lennon, extends to ‘ambi-sexual’. There are no scurrilous revelations beyond that. They dabbled with drugs too. Ellis claims to have turned them on to getting high, like the Beat Poets used to, by chewing on lint from prescription inhalers. Later, Epstein’s chauffeur talks of picking up mysterious packages of hash at Archer Street. Stuff like that. There are talking-head interviews with participants, including Tony Crane of the Merseybeats, posing stylishly with his guitar. And Klaus Voorman – who designed the ‘Revolver’ sleeve, and now contributes his own perceptive wash-art sketches. Long-time friend Tony Bramwell talks about Paul first meeting George upstairs on the no.86 bus. Both Bill Harry of ‘Mersey Beat’ magazine, and Tony Barrow have told their stories before, at greater length, in fact Barrow’s book is pretty much a standard Beatles text (‘John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me: The Real Beatles Story’, Andrė Deutsch, 2005). Tony Sheridan recalls how they stole socks from C&A, but later ‘sold-out’ when Epstein buffed up their image.

 

And as their career takes off chart-wise Alistair Taylor, Epstein’s assistant, talks about buying off paternity or sexual claims with NEMS money, and speculates about the trail of unacknowledged Beatles-brats, who maintain their anonymity. ‘Beatlemania Grips Gotham’ like ‘a collision of planets’ says the newsreel voice-over as they hit New York. But everyone already knows that. They tour America – according to Barrow, under conditions of ‘five-star house arrest’. Albert Maysles, who has his own Beatles tour-doc DVD jostling for space at the megastore, adds his own insider contributions. Nudging the story further, into the studio years, and what the newsreel voice calls the ‘psychedelic Garden of Eden’ which was Apple – ‘the company they created’. Chauffeur Bryan Barrett talks about Epstein’s early suicide attempts. Paul’s step-sister Ruth McCartney describes fannish excess. A raddled Francie Schwartz talks about shagging Paul. But that incident is more widely discussed in Tony Barrow’s book anyway. Finally, May Pang repeats her oft-repeated story about how Yoko Ono’s control extended to even masterminding Lennon’s adultery, adding little to what was already widely known. There’s an ongoing need for stories to re-told and reinterpreted, for the benefit of newly evolving audiences, or with new slightly titillating twists. So yes, this is ‘The inside story of the world’s greatest-ever pop group.’ The problem is, it’s a great story, as everyone already knows. 

 *‘THE HOURS AND TIMES’ 

(DVD Release 4 June 2007 through VDI Entertainment). 

In 1963, John Lennon (Ian Hart) & Brian Epstein (David Angus) spent a long twelve-day weekend together in Barcelona. Although a fictionalised account of an actual trip they took together, this is a hugely resonant piece of independent cinema that perfectly captures the calm before the storm of Beatle-mania. Its black-and-white cinematography starkly evokes the early 1960s. It’s filmmaker Christopher Münch’s suggestion that the Beatles’ brilliant but troubled middle-class manager Epstein (29), is hopelessly in love with Lennon, a working class lad six years his junior, whose career is on the precipice of sky rocketing. Nominated for Best Director and the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, it convincingly conveys the complex emotional reality of Epstein and Lennon's strong and curious friendship.

 

Featured online at: 

‘THE ZONE’ 

(UK – March 2007)

Solo Beatles: RINGO

 

‘RINGO STARR: 

THE BEST DRUMMER 

IN THE BEATLES…?’ 

Book Review of: 

‘RINGO STARR: A LIFE’ 

by ALAN CLAYSON 

(Sanctuary 2005 – ISBN 1-86074-647-0 £7.95)

 

When Ringo was briefly hospitalised for a tonsils-removal operation in 1964, his Beatles-logo’d drum-seat got temporarily filled by stand-in drummer Jimmy Nichols for a European tour. That doesn’t happen much these days. Now, they just cancel the bloody tour. But back then, Ringo merely posed for a ‘Melody Maker’ cover-photo with a placard saying ‘I Feel Fine’, as his contribution to their current hit. Of course, it’s easy to write Ringo off as fame-by-association. He wasn’t there for the ‘Backbeat’-period Hamburg group-bonding. He wasn’t even there for the rejected Decca audition. Instead, he was drafted in last-minute for “Love Me Do” as the acceptable fringe when Pete Best refused to sacrifice his quiff. On such whims are history made. In some alternate time-stream could it have been John, Paul, George… and Jimmy Nichols – or Pete Best? If so, how would things have panned out differently?

Alan Clayson uses meticulously exhaustive research to navigate his eventful path, the years that lead up to him joining the Beatles – through Rory Storm & The Hurricanes. To how American fans single him out as ‘cute’ from the first tour. ‘If you had to be in a band’ he quipped, ‘it might as well be the Beatles.’ Probably the worst track the Beatles ever recorded was “Octopus Garden” – Ringo’s second-only writing contribution. Although afterwards he charts with a number of half-decent solo hits of his own. He plays on George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ sessions (1970), then on John Lennon’s first solo ‘Plastic One Band’ album (1971), when they could have had their pick of just about any drummer in the world. He even drums on McCartney’s ‘Tug Of War’ album (1982). So – why Ringo?

 

He’s the jester, the good-guy, the cohesive force defusing the in-group tensions around him. His role throughout was not just to drum for the Fab Four, but to arbitrate between their internally warring poles. A demilitarised buffer-zone. But across the decades since, there’s only the indulgences, the rehab, and the long inactive spaces between, the occasional mediocre albums, and the mildly entertaining movies. Ringo’s amiable comedic talent first surfaced in the ‘Hard Day’s Night’ movie-sequence by the river. Although his subsequent acting career failed to develop whatever potential it indicated, sleep-walking through movie-adaptations of Terry Southern’s cult novels ‘Candy’ (1967) and ‘Magic Christian’ (1970). Yet the Beatles story must still be chockfull with secrets and untold stories unvoiced through loyalties to the dead, or to the living. And if Ringo won’t write it, and McCartney’s never likely to divulge it, this is about the best we’re likely to get. It is by turns sad, touching, comic, and never less than informative. But betrayingly – rather than checking out the ‘Ringo’ index-references, you tend to search out the more creatively-interesting names around it. 

(First published 1996 as ‘Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker’, this revised edition 2005) Sanctuary Publishing Limited, Sanctuary House, 45-53 Sinclair Road, London W14 0NS

www.sanctuarypublishing.com 

 Published in:- 

‘THE SUPPLEMENT Issue.30’ (UK – October 2006) 

‘ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.1 Jan/Feb’ (UK – December 2006)

WITH A LITTLE 

HELP FROM… 

Album Review of: 

‘STORYTELLERS’ 

by RINGO STARR 

(1998, Mercury/ Polygram 538-118-2) 

“With A Little Help From My Friends” is ‘the song that gave me a thirty-year career.’ Ain’t that sad? Best drummer in Rock? Naw. Ringo was hardly the best drummer in the Beatles. And he was their fourth best writer. As they simultaneously disinter a Lennon box-set of ninety-four out-takes complete with John’s “I’m The Greatest” written for one Mr Richard Starkey, Ringo assumes his ‘Thomas The Tank-Engine’ persona as laconic drone-over link-man for a live traipse through his own back-catalogue. Songs that might have been perfectly adequate if they’d been written by a member of the Searchers or Gerry & The Pacemakers, but which got sadly over-shadowed when compared with Lennon-McCartney. Or even Harrisongs. He’d been kicking “Don’t Pass Me By” around for years to general Mop-Top ridicule until they eventually donated space for it on ‘The White Album’ (‘Let’s hear it for ‘The White Album’. Let’s milk it for all we can get...’). And his ‘you were in a car-crash, and you lost your hair’ does have an attractively stoned oddness. But semolina pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower it is not. 

He follows it with “Octopus’s Garden”, his aquatic ‘Yellow Submarine’ retake from ‘Abbey Road’, probably the most skipped-over track in Rock history (‘I’d had one of those ‘herbal’ cigarettes’ he explains lamely). Then – a handful of solo hits co-written with ‘the one-and-only George Harrison. Let’s hear it for George...’ (“It Don’t Come Easy”), or taped after a night of drunken indulgence with Marc Bolan, ‘a very good friend of mine, god bless him...’ (“Back Off Boogaloo”), clear up to “I Was Walking” from last year’s ‘Vertical Man’ album. The ‘VH1 Storyteller’ project is a step on from ‘Unplugged’. Plugged. But with audience intimacy. And, as required, they hang on every Ringo-ism, ask questions (“who yells ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers’ at the end of “Helter Skelter?” – hey, it was Ringo!), and supply rapturous ovations at the slightest provocation. The band includes Joe Walsh, plus a bunch of adequate session non-entities. And it all makes for a very undemanding pleasantly jog-along wallow in the soft thirty-year underbelly of amnesiac nostalgia. 

Album Review of: 

‘RINGO STARR & HIS 

ALL-STARR BAND: LIVE 2003’ 

(2004, CNR Records 22.999052) 

It’s a thankless task, being Ringo. Eight years as a Fab. Then the longest lost-weekend retirement in Rock. Now he hollers ‘What’s my name?’ and they all holler back ‘RINGO!!!’ ‘It’s the only reason I’m here’ he adds. So at least he’s under no illusion, he knows it too. But apparently in the States that’s enough to keep the ‘All-Starrs’ on the road. This time round, it’s a live set in Detroit during an eighth tour, and there’s the solo Ringo hits, in lifeless facsimile. Beatles hits even more so. Paul Carrack is on piano and vocals (“How Long”), Colin Hay who I once interviewed when this – “Down Under”, was first a hit for Men at Work. John Waite (“When I See You Smile”), Shelia E (Prince’s “Glamorous Life”). Two songs each from these disparate also-rans. Updated with Ringo’s tribute to Sun records “Memphis In Your Mind” from his recent ‘Ringo-Rama’ (‘like you bought it, right?’ he mocks truthfully). Then “Don’t Pass Me By”, Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t” from the ‘Beatles For Sale’ album, and – inevitably a bored karaoke “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Utterly pointless. An appalling abuse of CD-space. 

Published in: 

‘SONGBOOK no.5 (Autumn)’ 

(UK – December 2004)

 

DVD Review of: 

‘RINGO STARR & THE ROUNDHEADS: LIVE’ 

by RINGO STARR & THE ROUNDHEADS 

(2012, Image Entertainment) www.watchimage.com 

Own up, who really needs another Ringo Starr DVD? With Global Warming, Syria, and Simon Cowell to worry about, does anyone still give a toss about another amiable jog-through of the usual suspect old clunkers? Even now they must be camping outside HMV stores and crashing websites with orders for this fifty-six minute package, NOT! The same old one-track-per-LP Beatles songs get dusted off alongside the handful of post-Fab solo hits, all to no real purpose. Done live at the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan, Illinois, and first broadcast in 2005 for PBS, Ringo’s without his regular All-Starr Band, but manages to rustle up Colin Hay (of Men At Work) to guest on “Who Can It Be Now?” And obviously a good time was had by all. But is that enough? Ringo was on TV’s ‘Loose Women’ a while back, talking-up his useless retread of Buddy Holly’s ‘Think It Over’ from his ‘Ringo 2012’ album, provoking pretty-much the same conundrum. Who needs it? What possible audience-need is this targeting?

 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 Issue 33’ 

(May/June 2012 – UK)

Jazz Giant: Charles Mingus

CHARLES MINGUS: 

THE PULSE IS INSIDE YOU 

Expanded Book Review of: 

‘BENEATH THE UNDERDOG’ 

by CHARLES MINGUS 

(1971, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 

1975, Penguin Paperback ISBN 0-14-00-3880-9)

 Charles Mingus: 22 April 1922-5 January 1979 

As a kid buying music papers, there were the Rock pages in which new Stars and Pop-groups were introduced on a weekly basis, and the Jazz pages in which learned and very serious journalists mourned the deaths of aged New Orleans pioneers. The dichotomy thus presented itself to me as Rock = youth-energy. Jazz = senility-death. A decade and a half later those doing the dying were musicians to whom I’d developed a particular affinity – Roland Kirk, Charlie Mingus, and I found myself in the paradoxical situation of feeling a need to justify this affinity to a largely uncaring posterity who, if they listened to Jazz at all, preferred the electronic droodling of Chick Corea or the fusion-Funk of Herbie Hancock.

So why remember Charles Mingus? I can think of four immediate reasons.

(One) To those with a literary orientation it should be noted that Mingus was probably the most poetically referenced musician of his generation. Adrian Henri thefted the Mingus title “Tonight At Noon” for one of his best-known poems. For Pete Brown, parties were incomplete without ‘a live octopus in the sink, trying to swallow a record by Charlie Mingus,’ while Philip Larkin was moved to praise the Mingus ‘hell broth ensembles’. Mingus himself worked in experimental spoken-word projects with wordsmiths such as Kenneth Patchen – performing jointly at the New York ‘Living Theatre’ during March 1959, and he went on to write one of the most exhilaratingly freewheeling ‘spontaneous bop prose’ tracts to come out of Jazz, the tactile autobiography ‘Beneath The Underdog’ (1971).

(Two) For those with a socio-historic orientation it should be noted that during the birthing process of Black Awareness, Mingus was a constant presence. He was born 22 April 1922 in Nogales, Arizona, but after the death of his natural mother the family moved to 1621 East One-Hundred And Eighth Street, in the Watts district of Los Angeles. He was black, and colour was significant, but there were degrees of blackness. He recalled that his father ‘taught race prejudice to his children – said they were better than others because they were lighter in colour.’ The lesson stuck, and later, whenever he looked in the mirror ‘he thought he could see a number of strains – Indian (Native American), African, Mexican, Asian and a certain amount of white (German) from a source his father had boasted of. He wanted to be one or the other, but he was a little of everything, wholly nothing, of no race, country, flag or friend.’ As a child, ‘big and clumsy, with a tendency to bow-legs and pigeon toes’ he experienced the racial injustice of the 1930s which sparked off a sense of acute justified anger that remained with him until his death in January 1979. Watts was a black no-exit catchment where becoming King Pimp was the ‘closest thing to one of our kind becoming President of the USA.’ His was the bitterness of an intelligent sensitive kid ‘subjected to the galling rules America inflicts on negroes.’ The kind of bitterness that culminated in the Watts riots of the sixties which tore the city apart.

Jazz historian Nat Hentoff wrote of black musicians who ‘do not see mirages of Jim Crow as Mingus frequently does. Nor, when they do scrape against its real manifestations do they hit out as wildly and with as uncontrollable a hurt as Mingus’ (in ‘The Jazz Life’, Panther 1962). For he was a vulnerable, proud musician, unable to mask his intellect with demeaning vaudevillian self-deprecation, dismissing the likes of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong – with whom he played from 1941-1943, as ‘Tomming’, telling Jazz archivist Marshall Stearns ‘it’s time we negroes quit crying the blues.’ Stearns interpreted this as symptomatic of a racial ‘real hunger for the musical and intellectual culture of the white community’ (in ‘The Story Of Jazz’, Mentor Books, 1956). More perceptively, poet Jeff Nuttall detects that it is within the work of musicians such as Mingus that ‘the authentic pulse of violence was first felt’ – quoting the Mingus dictum ‘two four six eight, I want to teach you to hate’ (in ‘Bomb Culture’, MacGibbon and Kee, 1968 and Paladin, 1970).

Mingus hit out at the ‘smallest hint of malice towards him, negroes, friends, Jazz, music, or the new African nations.’ But his reputation as a fighter was based on hard lessons he’d learned on the streets of Watts, that ‘if he doesn’t get in the first punch, the other man surely will.’ And lessons learned on the road, playing Jazz. From 1950 to 1951 he toured as bass-player with the Red Norvo Trio, a group made up of the white Norvo on vibes and Tal Farlow in guitar. They worked dates in the South under insulting segregation conditions, which Mingus endured, but he quit when Norvo agreed to replace him with a white double-bass player for a one-off TV slot – ‘they had sponsors who worried about the ‘southern market’ where ‘mixing’ was taboo.’

Mingus became a Hindu – his ashes were scattered on the River Ganges, but he avoided the hip affectations of other black 1940s musicians who professed similar spiritual convictions to Islam, preferring to target his message more effectively. In the early-sixties he was numbered with the ‘Newport Rebels’ protesting against the commercialism of the ‘Newport Jazz Festival’ – by setting up an ‘alternative Festival’ in a tent outside the grounds. And in the early seventies while Bob Dylan was writing paeans to jailed boxer “George Jackson” and John Lennon was angrily affirming his solidarity with the rioting victims of “Attica State” prison, Mingus titled one of his pieces “Remember Rockefeller At Attica”, making sleeve-note comment about the late Vice President’s decision to send troops into the Penitentiary to quell a riot – killing both prisoners and troopers. ‘Rockefeller’ he notes ‘is a very dangerous man.’ An earlier composition similarly snipes derisively at the racist Governor of Arkansas who presided over the Little Rock Crisis, in “Fables Of (Governor) Faubus”. The same awareness provoked other such inflammatory titles as “Free Cell Block F” and the pointed accusation “‘Tis Nazi USA”.

But his protests went beyond rhetoric. A ‘Beneath The Underdog’ conversation quotes Fats Navarro as saying ‘we (blacks) are just work-ants. He (whites) owns the magazines, agencies, record companies, and all the joints that sell Jazz to the public. If you won’t sell out and you try to fight they won’t hire you and they give a bad picture of you with that false publicity.’ So Mingus set about attempting to circumvent the machine. He taped a historic Toronto Massey Hall gig 15 May 1953 boasting a line-up of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – masquerading as ‘Charlie Chan’ to avoid litigation from Mercury Records, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and Mingus himself, playing so ‘right’ that it’s easy to forget he’s there at all – to the extent that he chose to later overdub his bass parts in the studio. It was a euphorically chaotic event – Gillespie clowning and moving offstage at intervals to check the latest developments of a Rocky Marciano boxing match, yelling out the crucial lyrical message ‘Salt Peanuts! Salt Peanuts!’ to the rafters, Bud Powell – fresh out of Long Island Sanatorium following Electric Shock treatment, drunk from the first number on, and Bird – who’d forgotten his horn, playing a white plastic alto lent by a sympathetic local music store.

Mingus salvaged the resulting soundtrack and put it out as the first release on his own ‘Debut’ record label. Although intended as a commercial venture the label quickly hit distribution problems and went bust, selling its masters to Fantasy-Prestige in Berkeley where they remain on catalogue, but not before it had lain foundations for subsequent projects in artist-control such as the 1966 ‘SRP’ (Self-Reliance Project) label founded by Milford Graves and Mingus-alumni pianist Don Pullen. Mingus even launched a second label himself, founding ‘Bethlehem’ in 1967 as a mail-order operation – releasing his fine ‘East Coasting’ album as Bethlehem BCP6019, until he was later forced to sell it to CBS.

(Three) It was, however, as a composer and leader that Charles Mingus excelled. His ‘workshops’ were created from the same self-help ethos, and they had a flawless history of figuring in the careers of many forming jazzmen. Musicians such as John Handy, sax-player Shafi Hadi, Charles McPherson, Paul Bley, Jackie McLean, the excellent Booker Ervin, and others. Nat Hentoff who recorded Mingus as an A&R man in the early-sixties (with Eric Dolphy and Ted Curzon on the sessions), sleeve-noted that ‘Charles wants you to play what he writes, but he wants you to do it your way. He won’t stand for coasting, and he does not suffer careless mistakes lightly.’

While still living in Watts, Mingus had studied compositional theory with Lloyd Reese (who later instructed Eric Dolphy), working out his ideas on piano, and although he wrote the beautiful “The Chill Of Death” (1939) at seventeen, he had to wait three decades to get it onto record (on his ‘Let My Children Hear Music’ LP, CBS 64715). Instead, his first recorded composition was “Mingus Fingers” cut for Decca under the auspices of the Lionel Hampton group in 1946 (he played with Hampton 1946 to 1948). The first Composers Workshop was founded at Brooklyn’s Putnam Central Club. And the ‘Workshop’ project coincided with his swing from ‘pencil (written) composition’ to spontaneous improvisations with the workshop experimental groups. Learning that ‘a wrong note doesn’t completely throw me. I can make something out of it that’s right. In a way, there are no wrong notes.’ And despite his fierce racial pride he openly acknowledged influences ranging from Arab to Spanish music. A 1954 Realm album ‘Jazz Composers Workshop No.1’ – featuring ex-Julliard tenor-player Teo Macero, later a CBS staff producer for artists such as Miles Davis, betrays ‘Mingus love of polyphony in embryo’ – as detected by Philip Larkin, while he was simultaneously experimenting with fingering and chordal notions picked up while studying Segovia records. All of the influences came together into Mingus Jazz Quintets playing the Café Bohemia at the Greenwich Village Eighth and Ninety-Second Street intersection throughout 1956, and the YHMA sponsored Music Of Our Time street concerts.

His first album to achieve real Jazz acceptance – ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’ (1956, Atlantic 1237, reissued as 587-131), was a quintet Jazz tone poem in four movements. A hauntingly impressionist piece. A career turning-point on which Mingus inspired saxophonist Jackie McLean to produce a ‘wild and blue voice within the ensemble playing.’ The improvisational basis of Jazz has proved problematic for writers and arrangers since its inception – scores from those of the Paul Whiteman to the Mike Westbrook Bands are meticulously charted with spaces of finite duration for improvised passages, a kind of premeditated still-life spontaneity. Duke Ellington, by contrast, wrote his scores around the known abilities of his familiar soloists. Mingus had first heard Ellington – and his influential double-bass player Jimmy Blanton, on the radio when he was thirteen, telling writer Richard Williams ‘I turned on the radio and heard something that I loved, and followed it until I found out where it was’ (‘Melody Maker’, 12 August 1972).

He got to work briefly in the Ellington band in 1953 but was ‘asked to quit’ after a violent dispute with an arranger after Mingus raised his solo an octave above that specified, so the ‘bass isn’t too muddy’. His respect for Ellington remained untarnished despite this glitch – and later appeared on the Duke’s ‘Money Jungle’ (1962, United Artists UAJS15017) album, while listing his personal pantheon as ‘Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Duke, Bird and Art (Tatum)’. Mingus went on to tribute Ellington in compositions “Duke’s Choice” and “Pussy Cat Dues” before, and “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love” after Duke’s death, while the thumbprint of Ellington’s influence is that most readily identifiable in his own compositional style. The difference in attitudes was that Mingus scored with the soloists often-unrealised potential in mind, not their known limitations, hence the quality of discovery in McLeans playing on ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’. Mingus utilised spontaneous composition, wrote scores on ‘mental charts’, giving sidemen general rundowns of his requirements orally – or often as not hollered across the stage!, leaving them considerable freedom in the selection of phrases played during ensemble passages, while setting and directing the mood of his soloists by regulating what went on around them.

Following the album’s success Mingus formed a more permanent group for touring and recording purposes, including long-standing drummer Dannie Richmond, an ex-R&B tenorist and occasional Rock drummer, the Texan Booker Ervin (tenor) whose raw emotional playing was an early influence on the Jazz-Soul of the sixties, Eric Dolphy who played bass clarinet on John Coltrane’s proto-Indo-Jazz fusion set “India” (1963), but who died of a heart attack in West Berlin in 1964, plus pianist Don Pullen who reached his widest audiences through the Mingus groups. Inevitably, other musicians passed through. Small-group albums emerged, ‘Tijuana Moods’ (1957, RCA 7514, LSA 3117), a move into Latin Americanisms with hoarse vocal encouragements from Mingus himself, ‘Blues And Roots’ (1958, Atlantic 1305/ K50232) with Ervin’s sax burning through “Moanin’” and “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, and ‘Tonight At Noon’ (1964, Atlantic 1416) with Roland Kirk guesting, followed by a period of experiments with large-scale compositions such as ‘The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady’ (1963, Impulse! A35) – one long 39:25-minute piece divided into six ‘movements’ described by Philip Larkin as ‘a furious pretentious plumcake of sound’, including “Hearts Beat And Shades Of Physical Embrace” vaguely based around the ‘Tristan And Isolde’ love duet, plus various recordings of the 22:48-minute “Meditations On Integration” (1964), done live at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and in Paris as part of the posthumously-issued ‘Revenge!’ (1996, Revenge 32002) album.

Such ventures saw Charles Mingus gaining recognition as a composer, acquiring a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and graduating a year later to lead a twenty-three-piece orchestra for special performances of his more ambitious pieces at the Philharmonic Hall, or as part of the 1972 Newport Festival. His early music had predicted much of what was to be achieved by the BeBop revolution, and he was just as aggressive in his pursuit of the New Wave avant garde, utilising hair-raising neck-snapping tempo shifts and accelerations, volcanic climaxes, multiple simultaneous soloing, dissonance and counterpoint, yet stopping short of the brink of total free-form by retaining melodic anchors sunk deep into Ellingtonia. Never quite abandoning bar-lines and harmonic sequences, the tempo changes were always unexpected – but supremely logical.

He wrote the score for John Cassavetes poorly-received Beat Generation movie ‘Shadows’ (1959) which dealt with racial issues, and incidental music for a London-based noir movie version of ‘Othello’ called ‘All Night Long’ (1962) with Tubby Hayes, John Dankworth and Dave Brubeck. His final movie score was for Elio Petri’s political drama ‘Todo Modo’ (1976, aka ‘One Way Or Another’), this ‘fantasia’ adapted onto the ‘Cumbia And Jazz Fusion’ (1977, Atlantic) album. It was as a composer that he hoped to gain real recognition, with individual stand-out pieces such as “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” for Lester Young, “Celia” for his then-wife, “Reincarnation Of A Lovebird” for Charlie Parker, plus “Alice’s Wonderland”, “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” – with a cryptic dedication to ‘all mothers’, and “No Private Income Blues” which all form a significant and durable catalogue of his music on vinyl.

(Four) His influence as an instrumentalist is more difficult to gauge, particularly as the double-bass has since lost ground in favour of the electric bass – but his legacy can still be felt in the freedom extended to this – traditionally, part of the rhythm section. At the age of eight he got a Sears Roebuck trombone which his father traded in for a cello after some non-productive lessons. He was taught by a door-to-door part-conman part-musician, despite which he achieved a level of proficiency that enabled him to join the Jordan High School Symphony Orchestra, and play Beethoven with the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic Orchestra – getting beaten-up after rehearsals by neighbourhood kids, but always dragged the cello behind him. It was Buddy Collette, a friend and local Swing Band musician who enlightened him to the realities, saying ‘you’re black. You’ll never make it in classical music no matter how good you are. You want to play, you gotta play a negro instrument.’ So he switched to double-bass, rapidly developing amazing speed and skills on the instrument despite the then-pervasive idea that it should only be used to ‘keep time’. Ellington’s bassist Jimmy Blanton had pioneered its ‘liberation’, but Mingus aimed ‘at scaring all the other bass players’, driving himself relentlessly to become a virtuoso by eighteen.

He played High-School dates with Red Callender, jammed with Art Tatum, played with Lee Young – Lester’s brother, and eventually pacted with Lionel Hampton, making his first trip to New York with the band – although ‘all he saw of it was underground.’ From pure technical dexterity he began to emphasise emotion and empathy, evolving an almost vocalised tone, reaching perhaps the apex of his innovatory creativity on the Atlantic sessions, touring Europe with his groups in 1960, then 1964, 1970 and 1972. His style is difficult to pigeonhole, as befits a man who – at various stages of his career, had shared stages with as diverse musicians as Kid Ory, Roland Kirk and Charlie Parker – appearing in Bird’s disastrous 1955 ‘come-back’ at ‘Birdland’, ludicrously and beautifully described by Ross Russell in the ‘Bird Lives’ autobiography (Quartet Books, ISBN 0-704-33094-6). A determinedly eclectic musician, he resolved styles and periods to create something inimitably his own, sometimes thoughtful and romantic, but just as easily sharp and audacious with a controlled ferocity. He told Nat Hentoff that ‘some of them say I have no soul. Maybe I have a different kind of soul. I don’t want to act any parts, to worry myself about being hip. I’m only concerned with communicating what I feel.’

Charles Mingus was a large man physically and intellectually. A man shot-full of human contradictions. Physically impressive enough to dominate any stage he was dropped down onto, playing music of almost classical purity, he never lapsed into the confectionary nature of the more acceptable ‘chamber Jazz’ or ‘Third Stream’ ventures. His music never became commodity – even to the extent that Duke Ellington’s became commodity – none of his albums sold more than 50,000 copies, with sales averaging out around 15,000 per disc. He was a man whose hatred of racial stereotypes didn’t stop him playing up the Black sexual athlete mythos in his autobiography – a man capable of fucking twenty-six Mexican whores in a single two-and-a-half hour debauch, and fusing the incident – related in an unusual third person form, intro one of the most intense accounts of the Black experience since Eldridge Cleaver’s ‘Soul On Ice’ (1968). Exposing the vulnerability beneath the thin skin of bravura.

In the music press around the time Mingus’ death was being written up in the Jazz pages, the more garishly sensational death of Sid Vicious was not only being splashed lavishly across the Rock pages, but across the tabloid dailies too. The exact contemporary equation has yet to be formulated.

Research material also includes:

‘Jazz Masters Of The Fifties’ by J Goldberg (MacMillan, 1965) chapter on Mingus

‘Melody Maker’ (12 August 1972) Mingus interview by Richard Williams, plus various ‘Melody Maker’ reviews

‘The Jazz Scene’ by Francis Newton (Penguin, 1959)

‘Jazz’ by Arrigo Polillo (Paul Hamlyn, 1967)

‘The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Jazz’ by Brian Case and Stan Britt (Salamander Books, 1978)

with selected Discography that includes:

‘Jazz Composers Workshop’ (1954-1955, Savoy) combining two earlier albums, ‘Moods Of Mingus’ with sessions released on the ‘Wally Cirilli And Bobby Scott’ LP

‘Improvisations For Piano, Bass And Drums’ (1956, Vogue ten-inch LP LDE) as by Paul Bley, Charles Mingus and Art Blakey, originally issued in 1954 as ‘Introducing Paul Bley’ (Debut Records DLP7) with ‘Spontaneous Combustion’, ‘Split Kick’, ‘Can’t Get Started’ etc

‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’ (1956, Atlantic) with Charles Mingus (bass), Jackie McLean (alto saxophone), JR (Jr) Monterose (tenor saxophone), Mal Waldron (piano), Willie Jones (drums), with Tom Dowd recording engineer

‘Jazz Portraits: Mingus In Wonderland’ (1959, United Artists UA ULP 1004) recorded live at the NYC Nonagon Art Gallery, with ‘No Private Income Blues’, Mingus with John Handy (alto sax), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Richard Wyands (piano), Dannie Richmond (drums)

‘Blues And Roots’ (1960, Atlantic SD1305) on the sleeve-notes Mingus writes ‘I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I’ve grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But Blues can do more than just swing’, with ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting’, ‘Cryin’ Blues’ and ‘Moanin’’

‘Mingus Ah Um’ (1959, Columbia) his first album for Columbia, issued in an art-abstract cover by S Neil Fujita, includes ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ for Lester Young, ‘Self-Portrait In Three Colours’ originally intended for the ‘Shadows’ soundtrack, and ‘Fables Of Faubus’

‘Mingus Dynasty’ (1960, Columbia CBS BPG 62261), includes ‘Gunslinging Bird’, intended as a warning to Charlie Parker copyists over the romanticised lure of drug addiction, originally titled ‘If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats’

‘Mingus Revisited’ aka ‘Pre-Bird’ (1961, Mercury SMWL 21056) a Mingus tribute to his pre-Bop influences, including Duke Ellington, produced by Leonard Feather, with Max Roach (drums), Ted Curson and Clark Terry (trumpets), Eric Dolphy (alto sax and flute), Booker Ervin (sax), Dannie Richmond (drums) and Paul Bley (piano)

‘Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus’ (1961, Candid Records, America 30 AM6082) issued on writer Nat Hentoff’s label, recorded with spoken introductions although it’s a studio recording, and including politically explicit spoken-word call-and-response passages between Mingus and Dannie Richmond to ‘Original Faubus Fables’ that Columbia supposedly refused to permit on the ‘Mingus Ah Um’ version. Musicians are Mingus, Ted Curson (trumpet), Eric Dolphy (alto sax and bass clarinet), Dannie Richmond (drums)

‘Mingus, Oh Yeah’ (1962, Atlantic, London HAK8007) unusual in that Mingus plays piano throughout, and sings on three tracks, with Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Rahsaan Roland Kirk (flute, siren, tenor sax, manzello, strich), Jimmy Knepper (trombone), Doug Watkins (bass), Dannie Richmond, produced by Nesuhi Ertegün with Tom Dowd as engineer

‘Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus’ (1964, Impulse A54), a Mingus collaboration with arranger Bob Hammer for large brass and sax ensembles, includes ‘Theme For Lester Young’ aka ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ and a version of ‘Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul’ from ‘Mingus Ah Um’

‘Mingus Moves’ (1973, Atlantic 50-040), re-united with dummer Dannie Richmond after several years, with ‘Canon’ and ‘Opus 3’ which harks back to ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’

‘Mingus At Carnegie Hall’ (1974, Atlantic 1667-0698), two long tracks, one per side, Duke Ellington’s ‘C-Jam Blues’ and ‘Perdido’ (by Juan Tizol), with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Don Pullen (piano), Dannie Richmond, John Handy (tenor and alto sax), Charles MsPherson (alto sax)

‘Changes One’ and ‘Changes Two’ (1974, Atlantic SD 1677/8) with ‘Rockefeller At Attica’, ‘Tis Nazi USA’ and ‘Free Cell Block F’, ‘Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love’, ‘For Harry Carney’

‘Mingus’ by Joni Mitchell (1979, Asylum Records) the final Charles Mingus project, recorded in the months before his death, is a collaboration with Joni Mitchell who adds lyrics to four Mingus compositions including ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ with musicians Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Jaco Pastorius