song of the week: werewolves of london
My lovely friends have invaded my lovely home and the wine has been poured, and I, like a freak, am sitting at my dining room table typing away because I simply MUST post my song of the week TODAY because it is Hallowe'en.
So, Warren Zevon's
Werewolves of London it is - and should you ever go down to Lee Ho Fook's in Soho, try the eel - you shall be pleasantly surprised. A less truncated post, expanding on the jaunty cynicism of this little gem shall follow shortly, I promise.
Happy Hallowe'en....trick or treat x
song of the week: rattlesnakes
Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront
The first time I ever heard Rattlesnakes, it wasn’t performed by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, but by Tori Amos on her Strange Little Girls covers compilation. It instantly became my favourite song on the album, despite being one of the few tracks where I didn’t know the original. It is a rather melancholy, introspective, downbeat affair, and perhaps most significantly, it takes its time. This is because Tori Amos’s cover of Rattlesnakes is sung from the perspective of somebody analysing its protagonist, Jodie.
So when I first heard the original Lloyd Cole and the Commotions number I hated it. Where was all the pathos, the stillness and reflection in the Tori Amos song? The original was so fast it sounded like it was being played at the wrong speed.
That was in June (how could I have got to 23 and not acquainted myself with Lloyd Cole?). Over July and August I got used to the original and grew to like its apparent exuberance and jingle-jangle poppiness, but it still didn’t affect me like the Tori Amos cover.
And then suddenly this week, I realised why the Tori Amos cover is so affecting. If her understated reworking takes the point of view of an observer of Jodie, then the Commotions’ version is Jodie.
Jodie wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days
She says a girl needs a gun these days
Hey on account of those rattlesnakes
She looks like Eve Marie Saint
In On the Waterfront
She reads Simone de Beauvoir
in her American circumstance
She's less than sure if her heart has come to stay in San Jose
And her neverborn child still haunts her
As she speeds down the freeway
As she tries her luck with the traffic police
Out of boredom more than spite
She never finds no trouble, she tries too hard
She's obvious despite herself
She looks like Eve Marie Saint
In On the Waterfront, she says
All she needs is therapy
Yeah, all you need is, love is all you need
Jodie never sleeps because there are always needles in the hay
She says that a girl needs a gun these days
Hey on account of all the rattlesnakes
She looks like Eve Marie Saint In On the Waterfront
As she reads Simone de Beauvoir
In her American circumstance
Her heart's, heart’s like crazy paving
Upside down and back to front, she says
Oh, it's so hard to love when
Love was your great disappointment
Rattlesnakes opens with a desert boots guitar twang, is joined by a typically early ‘80s dance-inducing drum beat with string accompaniment, and perfected by Lloyd Cole’s deliciously unstable, whiney voice (hated it first time I heard it, adore him now – Miles Hunt et al acknowledge your maker) as he sails into the verse. And I mean sails – part speaking, part singing and literally tripping over words to reach the chorus. The introduction, which anticipates the chorus, lasts a full 20 seconds. The first verse, really half a verse, lasts ten seconds. Before you know it, we are in and out of the first nod to the chorus within 55 seconds. Speedy or what?
Rattlesnakes breezes along with this restless nervous energy, always teetering on the brink between anxiety and joy. There are none of the thoughtful reflections that Tori Amos enjoys in her cover. Instead, the band literally steamroll you through the song as if they are desperate to finish it. Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions is Jodie: this poignant basket-case of a girl, perpetually looking over her clearly beautiful shoulders, self-conscious, scared and neurotic, yet lacking any self-awareness.
Like Jodie, Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes begins life at the wrong speed, hurtling with a giddy manic energy, full of fevered strings and impatiently squeaking guitars. This dizzy car-crash of a song is littered with hints that, further back on the freeway, cruises a slow-moving, melancholy little song – discarded by Rattlesnakes’s paranoid mania - but bound to catch up with its faster counterpart, which will inevitably steer itself off the road. If those skipping strings were given the space and time to soar, Rattlesnakes’s frenzied chorus could become a big expansive sing-a-long hug of a song, but instead we speed on to the bitter end, ignoring all the beautiful little touches that Tori Amos graciously rescues in her cover.
Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions is perhaps one of the finest portraits of mania in indie-pop, and Tori Amos’s cover one of the most tender lullabies to a depressive I have heard. Of course, Lloyd Cole never intended for Tori Amos to create a companion piece to his big breakthrough hit, but all the same, I think each song enriches the other, which is surely the ultimate aim of any serious cover version.
On balance, I now prefer Lloyd Cole’s version, if only because the breathless peak of mania is always more fun than the slow emergence from depression. And, for all the reverse-snobbery against Lloyd Cole’s occasionally pretentious lyrics, the line, ‘She looks like Eve Marie Saint/ In ‘On the Waterfront’ manages to be an incredibly evocative, although admittedly, lazy description, with a nifty little half-rhyme that's highly rewarding to sing-along with. Yeah, I know it should be Eva Marie Saint, but the fact it’s inaccurate makes it a tiny bit daft, and therefore strangely better– plus it’s the only line where the music and vocals suggest that Jodie might just let go of the wheel any moment now….
All together now…
She looks like Eve Marie Saint
In On the Waterfront
She reads Simone de Beauvoir
in her American circumstance....
song of the week: made up lovesong #43
Every so often, a bunch of things will collide in my head at the same time and cement themselves inseparately together. Around two years ago Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Curtis Hanson’s truly wonderful Wonder Boys became accidentally but happily stuck together for ever more, making each one better than it was originally because of their associations with the others. I won’t bore you with the details, but mention of any one sparks off such a precise set of emotions, pinpoints a particular afternoon in a particular point in my life and succeeds in charting the gap between then and now so acutely that it makes me feel more of a person.
Last Saturday night presented me with an equally beautiful and surprising collision. I had just finished watching Pawel Pawlikowski’s ‘My Summer of Love’. The script and performances are flawless, but not in that dull, earnest, conservative way of, say, L.A. Confidential (another very good Curtis Hanson) but in a gloriously chemical way, where they become more than the sum of their parts. And never has the English countryside looked so exotic than through the eyes of the film's Polish director - I only wish it existed in reality. My Summer of Love is funny - very funny - bittersweet, sad and blissful, and like Wonder Boys, has taken an unexpected residency in my top ten favourite films.
Alongside this, having lost Wuthering Heights the day before, I had headed to the library on Saturday morning and, for reasons I quite can’t work out, borrowed Julie Burchill’s Sugar Rush. A well observed story of teenage infatuation with a very astute, yet affectionate look at the relationships and power games between girls, it stars two of the most successfully drawn characters I have ever met. So move over Margaret Atwood – I’ve never really thought you were all that anyway.
I wasn’t that far through Sugar Rush and I was already feeling rather cheated that my piece of salacious, disposable trash was turning out to be a work of brilliance. How can a teen book, transformed into cringey Tatu-inspired soft porn for middle-aged men in the late night slot on Channel 4 be so good? How can any book that name checks Samantha Mumba, Jerry Springer, Craig David and Reese Witherspoon within the first four pages be a work of understated genius?
I was half way into a glass of wine when Kim and Maria ‘Sugar’ Sweet had bunked off chemistry to play the arcades on Brighton Pier. Our heroine, Kim, was trying desperately, and failing, to beat up her friend in a game of Tekken, when she realised that her feelings for Maria may not be limited to friendship. And then it happened.
Turned down low on my stereo came a little playground keyboard riff, mobile phone beepings, and a weird slowed down sample like a fairground carousel, coming to a halt, fresh from Brighton Pier... and then Alex Lloyd of The Guillemots sang:
I love you through sparks and shining dragons, I do,
now there's poetry, in an empty coke can.
I love you through sparks and shining dragons, I do,
now there's majesty, in a burnt out caravan.
You got me off the paper round, just sprang out of the air,
the best things come from nowhere, I love you, I don't think you care.
Yeah, I know, it’s cheesey, and a bit dumb, and rather overdone, but so is falling in love when you’re fifteen.
My Summer of Love, Sugar Rush and The Guillemot’s jubilant Made Up Lovesong #43 manage to evoke the dizziness and excitement of first love so instinctively that you feel drunk on love enjoying them. But while all three pretend to be about the object of love – this single amazing person who flies into your life, dismantling all that was there before and building a shiny new home for you and them for everandeverandeverandever etc – they are really about how first love is seeing yourself transformed, and is as much about how you perceive yourself magically changed by the influence of another person, as it is about how you feel about them.
I think one of the reasons love is such an addictive buzz is not just because you've met someone wonderful, but because it poses the possibility that you might actually be lovable. And even if the other person doesn’t love you back quite as hard as you’d like, you still feel more than you are - because you must be somebody great and romantic, bold and tragic, superhuman and majestic to feel this much.
lost book
Bit sad today as I left my book on the train and I was really looking forward to downing some wine and devouring it tonight. Yes, after no less than five aborted attempts, I am finally enjoying
Wuthering Heights. I have submitted an online lost property form to South West Trains, where you have to list your personal details, outline your journey and then meticulously describe your lost object. Reading mine back, I felt quite proud of my little book taking a voyage to Waterloo and probably back through south west London and, with Truman Capote in mind, considered this is a book would break the heart:
A small red hardback Everyman copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Missing dust jacket. Inside front cover has handwritten inscription to a young girl whose name begins with 'M' (Margeret? Marjory?) congratulating her on finishing the Lower IX at school, dated 1950-something. Inside there is also a small yellow post-it note with train timetable details on it. The bookmark is a postcard of Caravaggio's painting of Salome with the Head of John Baptist from the National Gallery with some handwritten notes on the back. I was sitting on one of the single seats near the doors, and left my book in the nook between the train walls and the seat. I was sitting in one of the carriages that enables you to get off right by the stairs leading into Vauxhall train station.
So, if you find it, and you like that sort of thing, I guess you can keep it. But if this sort of thing bores you to tears or inspires snorts of derision, please return my book to the surly people at South West trains and reunite us. Or throw it on the moors where it belongs.
song of the week: oh well
Sometimes I wish minifig was a bit more of a bastard so I could properly enjoy break-up music. Don't worry, I'm not pining for lost Saturday nights spent drunk in my pyjamas sobbing along to 'All by Myself', it's just some of the women I most respect are at their most beautiful when they're singing about the one that, thank god, got away. Obviously,
Carly Simon's You're So Vain is the greatest (also read wittiest, sharpest, knowing, ironic, painful) portrait of heartbreak ever written, but I doubt it will ever be song of the week, mainly because I listen to it
every week. But
Fiona Apple's Oh Well is probably the greatest break-up song of 2006. Not only is it perfectly aestheticized heartbreak by numbers, but it also has what all perfect break-up songs demand - killer lyrics.
Now, there are many Apple-haters out there, and I'm sure I can't tell you why she went out with David Blaine, but I think anybody who doesn't think she's amazing is a bit of a too-cool-for-school-fool. I saw her live in April, during my blog hiatus, and I nearly took it up again just to tell you all how much stage prescence she has. She's also pleasingly crazy, gloriously enigmatic and hypnotically beautiful - so boo you, mockers.
Oh Well is the break-up song written for that complete and utter bastard, intent on undermining and destroying you into blind submission. The words are those of the girl who has realised this, and yet, is obviously still hopelessly devoted, but with no plans to forgive and forget. This is the perfect angry break-up scenario for pop music.
The song begins with a sulky, miserable door-slam of a piano chord, before swinging moodily into a shuffle beat mixed with syncopated Broadway-style singing, channelling Blanche DuBois, reeking of alcohol and wearing her prettiest underwear as Gloria Gaynor stands outside in the cold, waiting for her to get dressed. Its opening lines could almost be the beginning of a much happier love song: 'what you did to me made me see myself something different / though I try to talk sense to myself, but I just won't listen', and then, with that chord shift comes the realisation that he is clearly what is known in the trade as 'a sod'. Or, as she puts it, 'you came upon me like a hypnic jerk when I was just about settled'. Brilliant.
The lead into the chorus is knowingly dramatic. As the song crescendos and Fiona reveals
'My peace and quiet were stolen from me', the entire accompaniment halts on 'quiet', before a deliberately theatrical piano intro backed by drum rumbles, into the full, angry defiant orchestral punch ('what wasted unconditional love!') before miserably falling away into a big comforting hug complete with strings, woodwind and harps ('on somebody, who doesn't believe in the stuff').
Oh Well is a highly self-conscious homage to the classic break-up song. It's so lushly Bacharach, with a harmonious marriage of lyrics and melody, yet full of bitterness and violence, mixed up with the total stupidity of love that makes you, quite literally, selfless. By the reprise of the second chorus, she apears to have fully realised what a wretched waste of time and energy all these emotions have been, and with a wilted resignation she throws away the sentiment of the song with an understated 'oh well', the stock statement of the chat-show guest who suddenly realises why their partner has brought them on Ricki Lake - and it ain't to get down on one knee.
Oh Well is the kind of tune that could be sung prostrate on a grand piano, slither of thigh on show with smudged mascara, or walking miserably through the park on a crushingly beautiful day, or alone, with a bottle of rose, in your pyjamas.
I shotgun the grand piano.
song of the week: feeling this
i shouldn't love you now I'm 23 - what's my age again?
Like many previous posts I may look back on this song of the week with mild embarrassment, possibly even shame. But like all the others, I can’t regret championing what I feel is a very underrated song by a rather overlooked band.
I love Blink 182. I loved them ten years ago when I was just about young enough for it to be excusable, and I love them still. I believe most redblooded girls love a couple of boy (or girl) bands in their lifetime. My sister will be a Boyzone fan when she collects her pension and one girl at work still refuses to remove her Busted sticker from her computer. [I worked with Busted for a day - the little piggie one is a twat, but the others are actually really nice boys.] Another spent six hours in her pyjamas, singing with her best friend after seeing Take That’s reunion tour. (It was a jolly good show, but they were never close to my heart like Blink 182). There’s also much to be said for the positive influences of boy bands. My heart-throbs led into a much deeper love affair with The Clash and The Specials and the hours of good music that comes from getting into those bands aged fifteen. I’m not really sure what Boyzone did for my sister, but her taste in music has significantly improved, so at least all is not lost.
Nobody has written better about boy bands since Julie Burchill’s juicy expose on the dark minds of teenage girls in her fantastic article on Take That (which I can’t find online anywhere – somebody help me) so I won’t try here. Instead, I’ll make my remit more specific: why Blink 182 are, as they say, awesome. (Next week on missing dust jacket: junior-punk Boy bands part II – Billie Joe Armstrong: cutoffs, baggies or drainpipes - the preferred pant examined up-close.)
I admit, part of my love for Blink 182 may have something to do with Travis Barker, a fine focus for brimming teenage hormones if ever I’ve seen one. But my reasons are far broader than mere unrequited love. For starters, he’s a fantastic drummer, and lord knows I love drummers. And it’s his part in Feeling This that makes it song of the week.
Feeling This the first single from the band’s 2003 Untitled album is a perfect 2:54 of teen-punk that proves Blink 182 stand head and shoulders above their copycats, just as Green Day stand on the baseball caps of Blink 182. It begins with the most excellent drum solo, which feeds into the rest of the song, anticipating the beat and giving it this great big thrust of hormonal energy, perfect for a song which I’m positive is about losing your virginity at the end of the summer holidays. It also has a slightly downbeat, nostalgic, back to school feel, meaning it stands alongside Kate Bush as crunchy leaf music.
Essentially the same guitar riff and militant drum beat propel the verses into a stripped back, ska-lite influenced chorus with classic teen-movie-style harmonies. Vocals on the verses are provided by Tom DeLonge, blessed with the kind of voice that belongs to boys who pull your hair and snap your bra-strap if they like you. Choruses and backing vocals are provided by the slightly more grown up, laidback stoner voice of Mark Hoppus. Transitions between chorus back to verse are provided by merciless, take-no-prisoners drum solos from Travis, the indispensable shouty intro that all pop-punk classics thrive on, and a corkscrew tight guitar solo. And then, as if it couldn’t get more textbook, whilst simultaneously exceeding all expectations, the chorus is repeated, this time sung by whiney little DeLonge, mixed way down so Barker’s effortlessly complex rhythms beat him into submission.
And then… the blissful middle eight with Mark Hoppus reminiscing about ‘that girl’ and romanticising cigarettes as only either adolescent or very old songs do, before the chugging guitar rushes you right back into the chorus. Finally, the song winds itself into a triumphant crescendo that falls away to a capella closing duet where the chorus is overlapped by looped solos from both Hoppus and Delonge mimicking the earlier guitar part.
Oh yes sirree, I'm feeling this.
jurassic 5 @ brixton academy
Falling out of our flat and into the
Brixton Academy on Saturday night, minifig and I were treated to an exceptional night out with the Californian 5-piece
Jurassic 5. Now I don't know much about hip-hop, but I know wot I like, and
Jurassic 5 is it.
It's bizarre to think these fellows got together over 15 years ago, for they all still look fresh as a daisy - esp. cute little
Akil. Watching them on Saturday, there was something instinctive and effortless, relaxed and warm and excitable about their performance that I didn't expect from five blokes in their late 30s. It made me realise how often I must go to gigs and chin-scratch as I watch four skinny indie boys look nonchalant and pasty without really have that great a time. I think the last time I bounced around this much at a gig was when minifig and I went to the see
The Beastie Boys (a ten-year obsession finally sated by seeing them live) and I realised the meaning of the phrase 'beside myself'. At the end I wanted to tie myself to Adrock's legs and let him drag me back to New York and spent the next few days sulking like a child that the gig was over. It was wonderful.
Refining the old school a'la
De La Soul and
A Tribe Called Quest has always been the J5's goal, but I really think they're better than that, with the benefit of fifteen years of superstar DJ action under
DJ Nu-Mark's belt (he touched my hand!!!). 15 years has also meant that each MC has refined his style so beautifully, carving his own niche in the band, that not only did watching them really highlight each member's distinctive style, but also the refreshing lack of ego on stage.
Of course, there was a little bit of hip-hop posturing, but equally, there was much goofiness, especially when they dragged on their roadies to freestyle with them. But above all, there was oodles of unabashed interaction with the audience, and I am positive minifig would agree that
Chali 2na and I shared a special moment and
Akil was
definitely dancing with me.
In fact, like pretty much anybody with the patience to hang around after the show, minifig and I shared a special moment with each member of
Jurassic 5, being as all five members hung around the barrier or leapt into the pit at
Brixton Academy after the show finished to sign pretty much
anything thrown at them (trainers, ticket stubs, t-shirts, records, breasts etc), posing with superhuman good humour for photo after photo. The end of the gig was rather like going to PortAventura theme-park where they give you a passport on your way in and you have to charge around the entire site getting stickers and stamps from members of staff dressed in sombreros or armour, only with hip-hop superstars and ticket stubs. Now that's class. And it was only a five minute walk home.
So thanks
Jurassic 5, I needed that.
