Tanita Tikaram, Live & CD

 

TWISTS IN MY SOBRIETY

 

TANITA TIKARAM 

at ‘Sheffield City Hall’ 

(13 February 1990)

 

All good people read good books. Tanita’s been reading ee cummings, Willa Cathar, and the dictionary. 

She roars into “Sunset’s Arrived” in a hellish red glare of down-lighting that melts her eyes to holograms, and a lyrical weight that already has the stage-boards creaking. 

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom, but now she’s introducing a so-far unrecorded song called “Hot Pork Sandwiches” – ‘wrapped in foil, cornered and laced with gristle’, and it’s not lacking in humour. It was written in Basingstoke’s ‘Chelsea Coffee House’, in the tradition of Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel”, Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”, and… Sam Cooke. It concerns her three-way ethical struggle between her Islamist family heritage, her own vegetarian convictions, and the enticingly appetising pork aromas acting on her hunger. It’s a mouth-watering little song, and yes, Cohen and Mitchell – but why, I ask her, why Sam Cooke?

 

‘Because Sam Cooke used to sing about…’ despite her taste for dictionaries it seems she’s momentarily out of words. She grins up for help at a tour manager in a Bob Dylan sweatshirt, as if for inspiration. Because Sam Cooke sang about pork sandwiches? I suggest (not to my knowledge, he didn’t!). ‘Well – yes’ she resumes, ‘but he used to sing about sunsets, evenings, boys meeting girls, things like that. And particularly if you know some of the early songs like “Meet Me On The Corner”…’ So yes, I’m convinced. Gloom? ‘Rich with complaint’? No. She’s animated. She smiles and laughs engagingly. She twists her thick black hair into coils around her finger, then shoves its rich deluge aside while the Presley pout dances in and around her words. 

There’s some discussion about whether her fans are Tanettes (as in Brosettes), or Tikheads (as in New Kids On The Block-heads) – but whatever, with two huge albums in the shape of ‘Ancient Heart’ (no.3 in 1988) and ‘The Sweet Keeper’ (no.3 in 1990, both produced by Rod Argent), there’s no seat left unsold. There’s a five-piece back-up against shifting colour-fields of green, mauve and beyond. Frontline guitarist Mark Cresswell who liquidises “Thursday’s Child” with delicious edges of swooping slide, and the long charcoal-sketched shape of Helen O’Hara (former Dexy’s Midnight Runner) whose violin swathes powerglide the Patti Loveless song “Timber”, which Tanita collected from American C&W radio. Drummer Nick France, bassist Andy Brown, and Bob Noble’s keyboard provide sharp shades to “World Outside Your Window”, or hard angles to – say, “Good Tradition”, with sensitivity or aggression as required. But it’s in solo settings as white as cameos, on the touchingly exquisite “Cathedral Song”, that her tunelessly tuneful low-register voice stands in a relief sharp enough to warm the coldest critic. 

Tanita Tikaram, tonight dressed down in loose black collarless trouser-suit, sprang fully-formed from nowhere, healthily at variance to any discernible trend other than the vague catch-all of ‘World Music’. She does “Ain’t No Cure For Love”, a song by the ‘marvellous’ Leonard Cohen, and that’s about as close a clue as we get. It works amazingly well as a Tikaram song, until you start inverting the equation and imagine Cohen rasping out Tik-songs “Little Sister Leaving Town” or “Preyed Upon”, and it’s a useful exercise. Cohen’s oblique musical and lyrical strategies are compounded and upgeared through her occasional twenty-year-old’s pretentions, but remain intact. And if words like ‘pretentions’ don’t sit easy, her writing is still more fun than a chartful of Stock-Aitken-Watermans, and packs an infinitely less degradable trash-by date. 

 She droodles with the Roy Orbisong “Crying” between numbers, and passes on useful tips grabbed from breakfast TV’s she’s glimpsed in flashes from tour hotels – like ‘shave upwards to avoid spots’. And for every lyrically dense surrealist flourish (‘let the grass around him, scream the sound’) there’s the irresistible melodic beauty of a “Sighing Innocence”, or Helen O’Hara plucking strings over the Korg Oboe seepage of a “Twist In My Sobriety” that even Liza-with-a-‘Z’ plus Pet Shop Boys couldn’t louse up… 

Two hours and counting. Tanettes and Tikheads go away value for moneyed. 

All good children need travelling shoes. 

The pa plays out with the ‘Coronation Street’ TV-soap theme, another Tanita Tikaram joke. 

No goddess of gloom, she. 

THE GODDESS OF GLOOM 

 CD review of: 

‘ELEVEN KINDS OF LONELINESS’ 

by TANITA TIKARAM 

(March 1992, Warner East West 9031-76427-2)

 

Jack Dee describes the kind of morning when your worst nightmares come real and you face the dread existential meaninglessness of all things – you burn the toast, the muesli pack rips apart as you open it, showering the carpet with a dandruff fall-out… 

…and then the radio plays a Tanita Tikaram record! 

Twenty-two years old, just into her fourth album, and already Ms Tikaram has usurped Leonard Cohen’s role as comedian’s punch-line. The drone that’s synonymous with melancholia bordering on manic depression. The title of that number four, borrowed from Richard Yates book of short stories, does nothing to discourage the impression. The lyrics are as elliptical, as sound-as-profound ‘if only you could decipher them’ as ever. Yet there’s nothing here quite as melodically luminous as “Twist In My Sobriety”, “Good Tradition” or “Cathedral Song” to rearrange such preconceptions. But while Tanita hasn’t gone to the extremes of – say, Kirsty MacColl who brought in a Rap Crew, and while she hasn’t included a C&C Music Factory Dance Remix, there are sufficient format variations here to suggest impressive evolutions. 

The long rich lines of her recent single “You Make The Whole World Cry”, the reflective sexual politics of “Men And Women”, and the glistening percussive colourations of “Love Don’t Need No Tyranny” are located well within her expected soundscape. But she’s noticeably ditched two of her long-time collaborators. Violinist Helen (Dexy’s Midnight Runners) O’Hara has gone, as has erstwhile producer Rod (“God Gave Rock And Roll To You”) Argent, although he guests once on keyboards. Producing herself for the first time Tanita achieves a sharper, tighter, more integrated group sound, Nic France’s drums are crisper and more up-front, exorcising Argent’s over-indulgent tendency to seam-free lushness, replacing it with attractively roughened edges. While her already mannered vocal delivery and phrasing get exaggerated into even more extreme positions. “Heal You” and the Blues-inflected “Any Reason” become slurred and pliable, electro-jolting alternating currents of charm and attack. But the album’s most bizarre excursion, “Elephant”, lurches and plods unpredictably, its sobriety decisively twisted from sudden emphasis to effects that sound alarmingly like the pachyderm equivalent of the death-rattle of a washing-machine not covered by an extended warranty. 

“To Drink A Rainbow” was sparked by a visit to Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1940), but Tanita’s is still an insular world, hermetically self-contained. She’s never going to cavort with Wonder Stuff on ‘Top Of The Pops’ like Kirsty MacColl, but while the likes of Jack Dee helps maintain her public profile as the Princess Of Pain, the assurance and greater willingness to bend the formula evidenced here shows there’s more to Tanita Tikaram than that image suggests. 

‘ELEVEN KINDS OF LONELINESS’

 

‘You Make The Whole World Cry’

‘Elephant’

‘Trouble’

‘I Grant You’

‘Heal You’

‘To Drink The Rainbow’

‘Out On The Town’

‘Hot Stones’

‘Men And Women’

‘Any Reason’

‘Love Don’t Need No Tyranny’

‘The Way That I Want You’

Book Review: 'TALES FROM TARTARUS'

 

BETWEEN ECSTASY 

AND TERROR 

Book Review of: 

‘TALES FROM TARTARUS’ 

edited by RB RUSSELL and ROSALIE PARKER 

(Tartarus Press, October 1995, ISBN 1-872621-19-7, £14.95, 202pp) http://www.tartaruspress.com/index.html 

Let us start as we mean to go on – monstrously. 

As black and shiny as beetle-shell, this original anthology of new weirdness is an expressway to your skull. Sixteen tales of haunting nastiness gathered together around a common thematic nucleus provided by Tartarus, editor Ray Russell’s stylish independent press. Erstwhile specialists in beautiful limited edition texts from the more restrained Horror archives of Arthur Machen, the key here is probably Peter Vincent’s story “Completion”. It recreates Machen’s slightly formal prose style perfectly to uncoil the consequences of a bookish Machen-collector locating the rarest of all Machen artefacts, a poem called “Eleusinia” printed in 1881 with only two copies known to have survived. Vincent’s tale is wistfully reflective. About a solitary man of bibliophile obsessions. A literary pleasure, about literary pleasures. 

Ramsey Campbell also develops the ‘enjoyably creepy’ atmosphere of low-key unease where darkness shifts on the landing and shapes move behind the mirror. His “Napier Court” is an internal dialogue of teasing hallucination, black delirium and strange compulsions which move inexorably towards an effectively disturbing climax. But it takes Simon Clark to effectively up-gear the Tartarus ethos and aim it straight at the centre of your brain. In his “Portrait Of A Girl In A Graveyard” he addresses the reader direct, YOU are the troubled adolescent with the Kurt Cobain poster on your wall, YOU swim through a mire of three-hundred-year-old coffins so tactile you feel their chill, YOU draw your own severed head from the deep buried black sack. Simon is less overtly concerned with literary antecedents, and more effective because of it. He switches the anthology’s centre firmly from the hung-over spectres of the bookish past to more fractured terrors of the now. And it’s a breathtakingly macabre sweep of magical realism. 

From there, Rhys Hughes – author of a simultaneous Tartarus collection called ‘Worming The Harpy’, adds an allegorical medieval fantasy in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Masque Of Red Death’ tradition, located in ‘the dusk between ecstasy and terror.’ Clare Johnson is trapped in a surrealist painting, Dale Nelson deals dustbowl dust-demons with skewed biblical subtexts, and Jon Preece is on a supernatural voyage into the African Heart Of Darkness. 

Horror SHOULD be more than mere slasher gore. If not morality there should at least be an ironic symmetry of cause and effect. Weird Fiction – Russell’s chosen term, ranges wide and is inhabited by many wondrous, strange and often terrifying beasts. It’s a place where owls, bats and other more nameless creatures circle and skitter, phantasms dance in darkness, monsters lurch and flinch beneath floorboards and poltergeist conspire mischief in their sad silent darkness. 

This book starts in whispers, and culminates with monsters. A unique, and very strange journey.

 

Full contents: 

‘Introduction’ by RB Russell 

‘The Forest Chapel Bell’ by Rhys Hughes 

‘Saint 505’ by John Clark 

‘Portrait Of A Girl In A Graveyard’ by Simon Clark 

‘Powers Of The Air’ by Dale Nelson 

‘As Gone As The Dead’ by Jon Preece 

‘The Interview’ Colin Pink 

‘Do Bats Eat Cats?’ by Alan Webster Lear 

‘Kruptos’ by Mark Samuels 

‘Forbidden Fruit’ by Elizabeth Brown 

‘The Paper’ by William Charlton 

‘The Reverend Douglas Delves’ by RB Russell 

‘The Lurker In The Room With A View’ by Andrew Darlington 

‘Talking Pictures’ by Clare Johnson 

‘Napier Court’ by Ramsey Campbell 

‘Completion’ by Peter Vincent  

https://www.facebook.com/tartarus.press.5 

http://www.tartaruspress.com/index.html

Classic Horror Movie: Boris Karloff in 'Bedlam'

 

‘SENSATIONAL SECRETS 

OF INFAMOUS 

MAD-HOUSE EXPOSED…!’  

Review of: 

‘BEDLAM’ 

With Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House 

Director: Mark Robson. Producer: Val Lewton. 

Original Release: RKO Radio Pictures, May 1946, 79-minutes 

DVD, January 2011, Odeon Entertainment

 

‘Some are dogs, those I beat. Some are pigs, 

those I let wallow in their own filth…’ 

 – Boris Karloff as poet and 

‘apothecary-general of Bethel’ Master Sims 

This is a film ‘suggested’ by the eighth and final engraving in William Hogarth’s satirical ‘The Rake’s Progress’ series, and the agitational prints are used creatively from the credits on. This is also a Horror movie that critic Timothy Sullivan calls ‘a historical grand guignol set in a famous London asylum.’ With a malevolently brooding Boris Karloff as Master Sims, the ‘apothecary-general of Bethel’, the sadistic curator of St Mary’s of Bethlehem, who charges voyeuristic visitors ‘tuppence’ for the ‘merry notion’ of an afternoon’s entertainment laughing at the bizarre antics of the inmates. Dated precisely 1761, there’s madness afoot, but this is no House of Fun. ‘It does not look so merry a place’ says Nell disapprovingly. 

If there’s a hero, it’s Nell Bowen (played by Anna Lee), a proud, spirited and fiercely independent woman who first appears as Lord Mortimer’s protégé – although she makes it clear, as a former traveling player, she’s not dependent on any man’s patronage. The overweight Mortimer (Billy House) delights in Sims’ staged presentations featuring the unfortunate bedlamites, ‘a masque of madness to set you howling’. At one such pageant a performer is mocked in the guise of ‘Queen of the Artichokes’ (Ellen Corby), another – painted gold to represent ‘Reason’, dies of asphyxiation in a truly creepy scene which glances forward to Shirley Eaton’s gilded fate as ‘Jill Masterson’ in ‘Goldfinger’ (1964). Nell provokes the animosity, not only of Mortimer, but Sims too, by suggesting they improve the Bedlamites conditions. After Nell haughtily rejects Mortimer’s gesture of reconciliation, the scheming conniving Sims persuades him to sign a ‘Commission of Lunacy’, then slants her testimony to ensure that she also finds herself incarcerated in Bedlam.

 

‘Bedlam’ is the last in a series of nine imaginative low-budget horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO, starting with understated cult classic ‘Cat People’ (1942) and ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ (1943) through to ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1945) – based around Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale, and preceded by ‘Isle Of The Dead’ (1945) which also stars Karloff, and also takes its theme from visual art – from an Arnold Böcklin painting. Now, a clever and articulate screenplay allows each character their voice, even Sims has his justification for ‘the loony’s in their cages’. ‘They have their world and we have ours’ he argues, and later ‘all those mawkish theories you learned from the Quaker are lies. Men are not brothers. Men are not born good and kind. Even the mindless ones are savage and must be ruled with force.’ On the opposing side of the moral equation, stonemason William Hannay (Richard Fraser) pities the ‘poor and afflicted’ even though his Quaker beliefs don’t allow him to fight on their behalf, ‘it’s a bad time for the poor and the people suffer’ he laments – even without a Cameron-Clegg coalition government! John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson) was a real-life radical politician and journalist, whose excesses were indeed lampooned by Hogarth as ‘the devil’. He’s shown in a print-shop where they’re churning out such documents on an old winepress-style printing machine. And as Whigs and Tories bicker, he pledges to assist Nell, asserting ‘this is still England, and we have laws here.’ 

Inside the nightmarish Bedlam, she’s understandably terrified, but gradually comes to terms with a group called the ‘people of the pillar’. There’s ‘Dan The Dog’ (Robert Clarke), a woman who never speaks, and Master Sidney Long (Ian Wolfe) who has devised a flicker-book anticipating the principle of movies, which he cleverly uses to animate ideas of reform. Sims taunts and threatens her, challenges her to reform the insanely violent Tom with her gentle kindness. She accepts, and succeeds. With a ‘lady of the lamp’ candle she attends to the needs of other inmates. Meanwhile, efforts to free her gather momentum outside the walls, but before they can succeed Sims intends inflicting the same monstrous ‘treatment’ on her that reduced Tom to his brain-damaged state. Instead, the Bedlamites rise up and restrain him, allowing her to escapes. With eerie off-kilter echoes of Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/ Sade’ (1963) – as supposedly performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Chareton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, Master Long conducts a mock trial leveling charges against the terrified Sims of ‘neglect, cruelty, whippings, beatings, dirty straw to lie upon, chains and starvation’ as a staring inmate chants obsessively ‘split him in two, split him in two’. 

Yet Sims is allowed to state his own defense, that his treatment only reflects the evils of the outside world. And their verdict, ironically, is more just than those of their supposedly sane tormentors. They release him, but as he prepares to bolt, the silent girl impales him with a trowel that Hannay has smuggled into Bedlam for Nell’s self-defense. Protectively, they conceal his mortally-wounded body using stone and mortar to wall him in – anticipating Karloff’s later Roger Corman cycle of Edgar Allan Poe films as his eyes open in horror as the final stone is slotted into place. Finally, with Sims ‘disappearance’, he will be replaced by a ‘better man’. Hannay – who’s faith persuades him that Sims behavior was also a form of madness, suspects the truth, but Nell pleads for his silence. He smiles, they are now a couple. The final storyboard reveals that reforms were implemented in 1773, when a new hospital was built, leading to a more ‘enlightened and sensible treatment of the mentally ill’. Although it’s salient to recall that – in the decades following the release of this film, the Soviet block, and even supposedly progressive regimes elsewhere disposed of inconvenient dissidents and subversive reformers by imprisoning them in mental hospitals and neutralising them with a chemical cosh of drugs. Still, as critic Timothy Sullivan points out, there’s no other movie quite like ‘Bedlam’ (in ‘The Penguin Encyclopedia Of Horror & The Supernatural’, 1986). And in the spirit of William Hogarth’s social-reformist engravings on which it’s based, if this is horror, it’s horror with a social conscience, horror with a warmly beating liberal heart. 

‘BEDLAM’ 

‘BEDLAM’ (Original Release: RKO Radio Pictures, May 1946. DVD, 2011, Odeon Entertainment, Hollywood Studio Collection) Director: Mark Robson. Producer: Val Lewton. Screenplay: Mark Robson & Val Lewton (as Carlos Keith). With Boris Karloff (as Master George Sims), Anna Lee (as Nell Bowen), Billy House (as Lord Mortimer), Richard Fraser (as Quaker stonemason William Hannay), Glen(n) Vernon (as the ‘Gilded Boy’), Ian Wolfe (as Master Sidney Long), Jason Robards Srn (as Oliver Todd), Elizabeth Russell (as Mistress Kitty, Sims’ niece who replaces Nell in Mortimer’s affections, at Sims’ connivance!), Leyland (Leland) Hodgson (as ‘that Devil’ John Wilkes), Joan Newton (as Dorothea ‘The Dove’), Robert Clarke (as ‘Dan The Dog’), Ellen Corby (as ‘Queen of the Artichokes’) & Skelton Knaggs (as Varney, Nell’s loyal friend who first alerts Hannay of her plight). Music: Roy Webb. 79-minutes 

Featured on website: 

‘VIDEOVISTA (March)’ (UK – March 2011)

Poem: 'IN PENNY LANE THERE IS A BARBER SHAVING CUSTOMERS'

 

IN PENNY LANE 

THERE IS A BARBER 

SHAVING CUSTOMERS… 

(visiting Liverpool, July 2014)

 

I wasn’t here 

this never happened 

rumours of a distant war 

once resented, now embedded 

once blood-raw, now no more, 

an endless autopsy, a history tour 

a heritage trail, a legacy project, 

when it all comes down to this 

laminated into a tourist map 

a twist in a leisure industry 

frozen reconstructions of 

memory-distort on pause 

in a national misTrust, 

no stylus bites play-in, 

days blur on the flip-side, 

it was light, it was dark 

this sad escapology 

eradicates every scratch, 

yet I’m here on Mathew St 

where once it happened, 

just six decades too late 

squint ears to catch echoes 

of screams on the screen 

see these walking dead, 

this never happened 

I wasn’t here, 

I’m still trapped 

somewhere in this photo… 

Collected into: 

‘TWEAK VISION: THE WORD-PLAY SOLUTION 

TO MODERN-ANGST CONFUSION’ 

Alien Buddha Press (USA – March 2018)

Book: 'DEREK TAYLOR: FOR YOUR RADIOACTIVE CHILDREN'

 

‘THERE ARE PLACES 

IN MY MEMORY...’

‘BEATLES FOR SALE’ 

You can buy this album – you probably have, unless you’re just browsing, in which case don’t leave any dirty thumbprints on the sleeve! There’s priceless history between these covers. None of us is getting any younger. When, in a generation or so, a radio-active cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about – ‘Did you actually know them?’ – don’t try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play the child a few tracks from this album and he’ll probably understand what it was all about. The kids of AD2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of wellbeing and warmth as we do today.
DEREK TAYLOR 

(liner-notes to ‘BEATLES FOR SALE’, 1964)

 

There are a million stories that take place within the arc of Derek Taylor’s life. 

Beatles’ historians argue about a lot of things. Like academics in any discipline, they dispute facts and interpretations of facts. But there’s one thing beyond dispute. Derek Taylor’s urbane charm. His easy intelligence, and the value of his contribution to the Beatles’ collective story. And the stories that lie beyond it… if you know what I mean? Derek Taylor lived a charmed life. One that describes a fiery arc that goes all the way from 02:00am, Saturday, 7 May 1932, in the Liverpool 17 suburb of Toxteth Park South, into being a writer best known as the press agent for the Beatles. He became the Beatles’ friend and intimate across a span of thirty years, or – as it’s blurbed on the paperback edition of his fragmented memoirs ‘As Time Goes By’ (1973), ‘journalist, publicist and honorary Beatle’. There’s no shortage of claimants to the ‘honorary’ or ‘fifth Beatle’ status. Starting off with those who were, even for a short while, Beatles themselves. The late Stuart Sutcliffe – who rejoins them for the sleeve-collage of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, drummer Pete Best, or even Ringo’s temporary replacement Jimmy Nicol. And that’s before you get to Brian Epstein. But Derek’s claim to ‘honorary Beatledom’ is more valid than most.

 

In 1964 he co-wrote ‘A Cellarful Of Noise’, the best-selling autobiography of Brian Epstein. Soon after, he became Epstein’s personal assistant and Beatles press agent. Derek Taylor put spin on stories decades before the term Spin Doctor was concocted, with his droll, idiosyncratic way of speaking. In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles where he started his own public relations company, managing PR for bands like Paul Revere And The Raiders, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson called him a ‘PR whiz’ and ‘a colourful slick-talking Brit’. But he could also be a ‘theatrical, slightly conspiratorial man’ according to Ray Coleman. Derek was co-creator and producer of the historic ‘Monterey Pop Festival’ in 1967. He’s there in song when John rhymes ‘Derek Taylor’ with ‘Norman Mailer’ in “Give Peace A Chance”. Then spool forward a few years, to when Derek returned to England to work for the Beatles again as the press officer for the newly created ‘Apple Corps’.

He had a deep capacity for friendship. If there were people who disliked him, I haven’t discovered one. The thread running through the various aspects of this remarkable career is his easy personal charm, his ability to create a sense of delightful complicity. A glittering web of friendships through the austerity of the fifties, the hairstyles of the sixties, into the high decadence of the seventies. His own writing can be flip, humorous, spontaneous, wilfully infuriatingly imprecise when it’s exact detail you’re looking for. ‘As Time Goes By’ seems to be an episodic collection of essays and sketches doodled as the mood takes him between appointments. When names elude him, or perhaps when the possibility of litigation intrudes, he substitutes them for play-names that could have been culled from the John Lennon mind-set of ‘A Spaniard In The Works’ (1965). A legal partnership called Absalom, Bollocks, Profit And Motive Ltd based in New Ponce Street, Mayfair. Or Victor Vagina Associates. Another called A Associate & Associates in Fellatio Drive. Easy to see why he became an intimate of the magic sixties circle, but maddening for academics hunting clues. 

Derek Taylor died of cancer at his home in Suffolk on 8 September 1997, after a long illness. He was sixty-five years old. 

There are a million stories that take place within the arc of Derek Taylor’s life. I sometimes feel I have lived the entirety of my own life within them. I’ve spent many hundreds of hours discussing and teasing out details of that time, both in direct relation to, and around the events within which he lived his life. I talked to the late Gene Clark of the Byrds, Dave Davies of the Kinks, Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi of Status Quo, Grace Slick, Sid Griffin, Mick Fleetwood, Donovan Leitch, Graham Nash, Joe Brown, Sam Moore, ‘Country’ Joe McDonald. To my great regret, I’ve acceded to the few sources with first-hand knowledge of Derek’s personal and musical life who specifically request anonymity. However, to such people I’m indebted for their insight and contributions. A person’s inclusion or exclusion from a sequence does not necessarily infer that that person has contributed to this book. 

I’ve also conducted research through countless books, magazines and websites and have gratefully given credit accordingly. However, I apologise for those instances where I’ve been unable to correctly attribute quotes, despite my most exhaustive attempts to do so. I invite corrections to such omissions, which will be rectified in future editions. When it comes to sixties history, the forbidding tower of books and perilous mounds of newspaper cuttings, CD and DVD’s, that should be consulted before tackling the project, you wonder, with a doomy sense of futility in the deepest pit of your gut, how it will ever be possible to scratch your way through the veneers of other people’s words and get down a few of your own. When it comes to Beatles-related tales, try to suck any of it into a novel, try and invent it, and chances are you might be gripped and amused, but you’d not be believed. And there are those who find the truth stranger than fiction, but still plump for the fiction. 

To Derek, ‘I don’t think that if you have a tidy mind you will find this book easy to follow. But who needs a tidy mind? Who has one? No-one I know.’

Softcover with photo insert, 334pp

ISBN 978-1-78952-038-5

SonicBond Publishing

www.sonicbondpublishing.com

www.amazon.co.uk/Derek-Taylor-Radioactive-Children-Beatles/dp/178952038X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Andrew+Darlington+Derek+Taylor&qid=1612107579&sr=8-1

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)

Book Review: 'CAVERN CLUB: THE INSIDE STORY'

 

THE CELLARFUL OF NOISE 

Book Review of: 

‘CAVERN CLUB: THE INSIDE STORY’ 

by Debbie Greenberg 

(2017, Jorvik Press, 

ISBN 978-0-9863770-4-4 Softback. 176 pages)

 

Like Graceland or the Abbey Road crossing, Liverpool’s Cavern is a shrine for Rock-music devotees. There’s been a lot written about Brian Epstein’s ‘Cellarful Of Noise’, with books by Phil Thompson and Spencer Leigh diligently chronicling the venue’s beat-by-beat history, and its role in Pop mythology. But from her first visit – in December 1960, ‘greedy for our fix of non-stop beat music’ mini-skirted Debbie was a regular, so her’s is a more personal account. Her first-hand fan’s-eye gossipy chit-chat and fashion-notes have tactile authenticity. From resident DJ Bob Wooler’s ‘hi there, all you cave-dwellers,’ to bassist Stuart Sutcliffe standing with his back to the audience ‘so no-one could see how he was playing,’ and Pete Best ‘sultry, fiercely good-looking and oozed sex appeal.’ With Debbie and Sue running down to the Pier Head afterwards to catch the last bus home. 

The added dimension is that – following Ray McFall’s bankruptcy and the original closure of the club in February 1966, she became very actively part of the family concern that took over the lease while still aged just twenty. There’s a lot about those ‘magical and breathtaking’ moments, rich with photos and rare memorabilia. An opportunistic Harold Wilson is there for the re-opening, Solomon Burke, Long John Baldry, Edwin Starr and Chuck Berry (‘a wonderful musician but not a particularly nice man’) all play. Until the club’s 1970 closure and demolition under dubious circumstances. Of course, The Cavern is still a Mecca for Macca-fans, Beatles-aficionados, and tourists in general. I’ve been…

 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL’ (Vol.2 Issue.61 Jan/Feb) 

(UK – January 2017)