The Mirror and the Scene

Duncan Jones' 'Moon' is a classy homage to Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and a tasteful and subtle love letter to science fiction.

You could say that with 'Moon', Jones boldly wears his influences on his sleeves but I think this embrace of cliché is one of the film's strengths. We know the territory, but we enjoy the journey irrespective. Getting Kevin Spacey to voice GERTY, a sort of benevolent Hal, was inspired. You have the impression that at some point the GERTY is going to turn, that something insidious will happen and it's this possibility which sustains the tension.

The film opens as an advertisement for Lunar, an energy company which supplies the majority of the worlds population with energy resources obtained from the moon. Astronaut Sam Bell, played brilliantly by the ever impressive Sam Rockwell, is nearing the end of his 3 year contract to the company and misses his wife and young daughter. Growing increasingly weary he makes what one could call without revealing too much, an act of self discovery.

Considered as the first of the Ealing Comedies, Hue and Cry (1947) is a socio-realist thriller for children set amongst the rubble of post-war London. Scene after scene show swathes of a crumbling city. The ruins serve as a playground for the children and in an odd way a nurturing ground.




Hue and Cry tells the story of a gang of boys, Joe chief among them, who discover that a criminal gang are communicating to each other covertly through a comic book called Trump. He reaches out to the comic book's author, played by Alistair Sim (best known for his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge) for clues and begins to piece together the activities of the criminal gang. Little does he realise how close to the central figure of the criminal gang he is. Joe and his friends pursue a sinister lady who works for the publisher of the comic books as they suspect that she is is in cahoots with the leader of the criminal gang, played by Jack Warner masquerading as a fruit and veg seller in Covent Garden.

I was reminded somewhat of Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950), which shares the same social realist context featuring child protagonists growing up amidst poverty, yet in Hue and Cry we witness children living in poverty who do not turn to crime and delinquency but attempt to uncover the immoral actions of the adults.

For a film with a dark side, this is a light hearted romp through post-war London. Here the children are bold and triumphant and the adults are devious or disconnected and distant. 

This film is now considered culturally significant because it is one of the last to truly show the damage inflicted on London during the Blitz. In the years that followed, rebuilding projects would considerably change whole sections of the city, and in many ways this film preserves the memory of an older and now lost London.

Utilising black and white much as with The Last Picture Show (1971), Peter Bogdanovich goes vintage again and captures the period, the dust, the radio (archived recordings of Jack Benny); the artefacts of a time gone by.

Paper Moon is the story of Addie (Tatum O'Neal) a girl who has lost her mother and needs to be relocated to her aunt's. A man called Moses (Ryan O'Neal) shows up at her mothers funeral, he is given the responsibility of delivering Addie to her aunt's. He might well be her father (Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal are father and daughter) but this will remain an unknown. Their relationship at first turbulent eventually evolves into a duo up to mischief and adventure. It's a beautiful little road movie about a rather unorthodox 'father/daughter' relationship.

The opening shot in Paper Moon

The film opens with the sound of wind rustling across the plains and the strains of the hymn 'Rock of Ages'. The beautiful opening shot of Addie has evokes Dreyer and Pasolini. Addie is a child of the depression and over the next decade and a half there will be many changes and advances which will define the America she has known, against the one that is to come.   

Addie listening to Jack Benny

Radio plays a crucial role in Paper Moon, and at every juncture Addie relies on it for escapism. She listens to Jack Benny and her frequent references to Frankie (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) contextualises the impact radio had on the population and how FDR's fireside chats connected the country and shaped the consciousness of the people.

Moses and Addie sit in a cafe, while a Will Rogers plays across the street

From the shots of Kansas, to the encroaching commercialism and images from the outside world present in the cafe Moses and Addie dine at it's clear the film presents an America undergoing great cultural and technological changes. Brand names and advertisements are seen on the walls and across the street a Will Rogers film, Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) plays. The American dream is epitomised by the caption 'Dream' which suggests the growing influence of cinema on the American way of life as a form of escapism but also as a medium for reflecting American culture back on itself  and in the process changing and reshaping the culture.

Moses and the hillbilly wrestle

Paper Moon depicts the evolution of the American way of life and the slow homogenisation of the smaller cultural cliques, state to state, town to town - the exchanges of the rural and the City. Much of this is is also represented by the difference between the small towns and the rural areas, highlighted particularly in a scene where Moses trades in his car for a truck and the hillbilly owner of the truck refers to him as a "city boy". The battle of town and country, quaint and new is established in the wrestling fight between the hillbilly's son and Moses.



Things turn sour on the duo's adventure when they encounter a local bootlegger in Kansas and Moses and the music on the radio changes as well. The use of 'Down On The Banks Of The Ohio' by the Blue Sky Boys is perfectly placed after the previous scene which involved Moses discovering the woman from the carnival in bed with the hotel manager, a tryst arranged by Addie, resulting in Moses and Addie leaving for the next town. The song, a Murder Ballad, tells the tale of a man who murders his lover because she would not marry him. The song's theme outlines how Moses and Addie have entered the dark underbelly of American life, and is specifically more rural than the city-sounding tunes heard so far on their radio. It is a rural song about the real grit of love and death in a still wild untamed and morally abtuse land and perfectly placed as it showcases the transfer of early Folk (English to American) into early Country Music against the more refined and newer city tunes of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Unlike 'Ohio', 'Paper Moon' is a city song about dreams and aspirations in an increasingly plastic (or was it Bakelite?) world. The song underlines the darker scenes to follow where Moses and Addie discover that the bootlegger's brother is a crooked Sheriff.


There is a happy ending to Paper Moon. But it's certainly not entirely one of make believe. Addie arrives at the home of her aunt and given the choice to live the perfect American family life, she hesitates and returns to a reluctant Moses. The moment is bittersweet because she would rather remain on the road with him on a path of uncertainty and adventure and he would rather she remain with her aunt. This is a film of surfaces, of subtext, and the final scenes evoke this beautifully. Its not so much how the characters interact or what they say, there is an emotional intensity which suggests the feelings underneath the dialogue. There is no embrace between the two, but as with doubts about Moses denial that he is her father, you sense in the same way that deep down somehow he wants to her to come along with him after all.

The film is highly stylised. Wide shots and close-ups help evoke the sense of classic Americana, the relationships between the characters and their surroundings. Some of the establishing shots in the film are interesting in how they present characters against their environment, particularly in an early shot where Moses aims to swindle Mr Robertson out of $200 because of his brother's connection to Addie's mother's death. Here the perspective shots of the characters in relation to the car, the factory office and the factory, create a beautiful still image, in each case the small insignificance of the characters against their environment. There is something hyperreal about the dainty looking office (which looks much like an American home) against an overbearing industrial backdrop.


Paper Moon is framed by the song 'It's Only A Paper Moon', written by Harold Arlen. It was the sage advice of Orson Welles which resulted in Peter Bogdanovich naming the film Paper Moon. In fact Welles said it was so good that, "you don't even need to release the film, just put out the title on it's own". It was originally used in the film Take A Chance (1933), which was a rehash of a Broadway musical where two small time gamblers leave the carnival circuit to seek out fame and fortune. There is certainly something of this in Paper Moon when Moses forms a relationship with a women from a travelling carnival

1. Another Woman (1988) 

 

 

"I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you've lost" 

Anyone who appreciates the films of Woody Allen is likely to include Manhattan, Hannah And Her Sisters and Annie Hall in their list of his best films. Over the next few weeks I'd like to suggest some more unlikely candidates, starting this week with Another Woman and following with one or two controversial choices.

Another Woman is a bit of a departure for Woody Allen, it's a quiet and thoughtful musing on love and regret in late middle-age. Perhaps Allen was reading Proust and thinking about Ingmar Bergman. Bergman's long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist is the cinematographer here. To an extent Allen's own stylistic voice is somewhat muted, although usual themes of love and neurosis are present; comedy is not the prevalent driving force here. Some will find the film deeply moving others may even find it boring for the same reasons. It is not one of Allen's better known works but it features a masterfully understated Gina Rowlands (best known for her work with John Cassavettes) and a sad, dreamy and watery-eyed Mia Farrow.

Rowlands plays the part of Marion Post a university professor who rents an apartment adjoining a psychiatrists office while working on a new book. She overhears a session in the psychiatrists office with a heavily pregnant and suicidal woman, Hope (Mia Farrow) and is drawn to the woman's story.

She becomes something of a voyeur initially but then begins to reflect on her own life, her marriage to Ken (Ian Holm) and another earlier love interest, novelist Larry (Gene Hackman). The conversations she overhears help reveal to her the cognitive dissonance she has lived with many years, the denials she has sheltered and the illusions she has fostered. She comes to realise that apart from her step-daughter who idolises her, she has both knowingly and unknowingly manipulated and hurt many of those close to her, and is seen by those in her periphery as often quite calculated.

Rowlands reminds me of a combination of characters, Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and for some reason Liv Ullman. Perhaps it's the Bergman influence. Rowlands was not the original choice for the lead part and although she is more well known for playing manically intense psychologically driven characters in her husband John Cassavette's films, here she gives one of the performance of her career, quiet and understated.

"For here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. "

 In one of the best scenes in the film, Marion reads Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' from a book of poetry her mother once owned. She finds the line "you must change your life" underlined and her mothers teardrops staining the page. It underlines the film also.

Another Woman is an example of life as deception, that to go on living we must deceive ourselves on more than one level and that some of us have a larger capacity to do this than others. Sometimes we awake from these little deceptions, sometimes it takes a great trauma or event for us to awake from the greater deceptions and sometimes the mirror of someone else's life is enough.

I saw The Untouchables for the first time tonight. Bond always gets the best lines and the Oscar is well deserved even if his mastery of a Boston Irish accent sounds suspiciously Scottish

Robert De Niro's depiction of Capone is comic, verging on camp, but definitely a classic role.  It's surprising how much his part in the film was ridiculed at the time by Roger Ebert. I think of the part as a precursor to his later more comic work and alongside his role in Brazil it's a bit of light relief after the epic Once Upon A Time In America. A few years later a fellow 'serious actor' Al Pacino, would play an equally comic cartoonish Italian-American bad-guy role in Dick Tracy.

Kevin Costner playing the moral lynch pin, is very much the same part he would replicate for JFK.

The homage to Battleship Potemkin is a nice touch, but it's dramatised in such a way that it's more of a Naked Gun type spoof. The obvious homage was drawn out almost as laboriously long as the classic scene in Battleship Potemkin.

There is one particularly superb piece of incidental music scored by the legendary Ennio Morricone, 'Al Capone's Theme' really captures the comic subtleties of De Niro's Capone. The melody is an impish play on Gangster clichés, recalling the incidental music from The Godfather, it takes the stereotype turns it inside-out with the huge 80s reverb drums, funky bass and synthesizer. Morricone must have been familiar with De Palma's Scarface as there is something of Giorgio Moroder's insidious Scarface theme in there as well.

I am relatively new to Chris Marker, having seen only Sans Soleil (1985) and I feel almost shameful that his work has passed me by. Luckily (perhaps not for him) he died recently and so I was encouraged by a friend to check out his work. Sans Soleil reminded me of Koyaanisqatsi (1981) and Baraka (1992), but perhaps those are rather obvious comparisons, although chronologically Sans Soleil certainly sits nicely between the two.

Sans Soleil has this near Baudrillardian type aesthetic to it in both the monologue and the images, perhaps its this kind of dreamy new-age abstract-speak where everything seems vaguely poetic and vaguely profound or aphoristic. Often with Baudrillard there seems a beautiful illusion in the text and yet it communicates much about the modern world we live in, the space, time, memory, pace, and the interconnectedness of everything without ever really saying too much. This is certainly the case with Marker. There are also touches of Mark Rothko in the colossal stillness and grace that his film-work evokes and I also see kinship with Andrei Tarkovsky - Marker made the documentary One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsinevich (1999) - in the evocative imagery, the focus on memory and the recall of things lost; static images representing static moments, and the clashing together of half remembered life. Some of this is indeed also present in the work of Wim Wenders, notably Wings of Desire (1987)

However it was La Jetée (1962) a sci-fi (which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys) composed only of still black and white shots (apart from one brief moment where we see the blinking of an eye) which floored me completely and most especially in its closing lines:

"He knew that the moment he was granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death."

La Jetée is unlike any sci-fi I have ever seen, certainly in the way the images are composed, although it retains the guy-falls-in-love-with-girl-but-can-never-attain-her trope which seems identifiable in a myriad of sci-fi from Nineteen Eighty Four (1984), Blade Runner (1982), The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) to Brazil (1985) and more recent outings like Source Code (2011) and even Prometheus (2012). When I think of sci-fi I see that it is often significantly underpinned by a struggle or quest for life and knowledge and ultimately a struggle to find love. Sci-fi is often about a longing for someone or something lost, a fulfilment, a discovery, a memory, a moment of happiness and in most cases this always leads to a quest for romantic love, as with Plato's "love is the pursuit of the whole". All one has to do is look at science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The death of his twin sister within a year of their birth haunted him his entire life, so much so that she appears to have served as his muse and the primary reason he became a writer. His experiments with psychedelics and his belief in alternative realities seem connected to the shadow she cast not only in his life, but the traces of her still left in his mind. All great Art is born of loss, and her image, a girl with dark hair forever unattainable, recurs throughout most of his fiction. La Jetée certainly has something of this.

La Jetée captures beautifully the idea of the end contained in the beginning of the recursiveness and reflexivity of time and ultimately existence. We witness a man, a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic time period, who is sent back into the past to trace the memory fragment from his childhood of a woman he had seen on an airport platform and the witnessing of a man's death. The film traces his first encounter with the woman in a flea-market, his fascination with her and the pursuit of his love for her. Over 28 minutes this exquisitely brings us to the closing moments where he runs to meet the woman on an airport pier and is shot dead in his pursuit - becoming the man killed in his memory.

That is a synopsis in short, but between that concept of the end conceived in the beginning is a multitude of beautiful still shots guided by a poetically spoken narrative. The moment where the woman's eyes open and close as she lays in bed, which occurs about halfway through the film, has a dramatic affect, because the film up to that point had resisted the traditional film form of the moving image. It forces the viewer to completely absorb the still shots, perhaps to uncover more meaning than the steady motion of images might allow, and it then breaks this tension or spell, with a short release of movement. It has to be one of the most important moments in film history.

There are no other words to describe this film, just 28 minutes of still shots and a stunning spoken narrative. What La Jetée suggests is that we do not need to always rely upon the rapid movement of images to envisage meaning, to suspend reality or time. The still image can tell us more about the passing of time, about memory, about love, about loss, than the one thing we often think of as the companion of time, movement. Chris Marker shows us the poetry of stillness, but he also tells us something about life along the way.


The entire film can be viewed here:

The beautiful musical accompaniment by Trevor Duncan reminds me somehow of Georges Delores score for Godards's Le Mepris and even ever so slightly of the musical introduction to Her Song by Colin Blunstone (see all below).

 (Bruce Springsteen, Stadium of Light, Sunderland, UK. June 20th 20012)

OK so yesterday I made love to Bruce Springsteen for 3 hours and 4 minutes. The thing is there were at least several thousand others partaking as well.

Bruce Springsteen may be the last 'great' rock star. I hate to call him a rock star. But in a setting like the Stadium of Light there really isn't any other adjective to describe the type of show he puts on nor quantify the presence of the man there up on stage and his effect on an adoring audience.

Stadium Rock has a bad name in some circles and rightly so but there have been without a doubt some great fucking bands to have played in this setting many of who essentially created the form.


You can roll out the names, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, The Rolling Stones and so on. Of course the bad name comes more from the kind of tripe doled out now on a regular basis to the unwashed unabashed cretinous masses from bands like... well do I have to name names? I'm sure you can all fill in the blanks... I'm sure their fans think they put on a great show. But I think they're all shit. And surely some think the same about Bruce. The difference is they're wrong and I am right.

There are of course bands who can reinvent what Stadium Rock means - as my friend Chris pointed out to me this afternoon - like the Flaming Lips. The Boss however is not about reinvention nor is he tripe for the cretinous masses who as far as I'm concerned don't really like music other than to do the ironing to or to numb their brains inbetween eating, sleeping and shitting.


Bruce means business and he gets right down to it without the histrionics and the light shows and the camp displays or even ironic post-stadium-rock, just raw sincere emotional energy surging through the performances and a great knack for knowing how to connect his audience, even if half of them are stood 100 metres away in the rain. He never overdid it, there wasn't a moment I felt was simperingly wet.

He is one of the last performers of his era to hold an audience of 50,000 in the palm of his hands and scatter their hearts like star dust simply by playing the harmonica intro to The River and then carry them through an emotional journey through the sadness of young love and the lack of opportunities afforded to a certain type of American Working-Class that he has been so expert at paying homage and recreating in his songs.




Highlights of yesterdays show in Sunderland were many and people can consult the setlists and make their own assumptions. Until I can listen to a bootleg or bother to consult the setlist properly myself I think the most important recollection of the gig was really the sustained energy level, the sense that he gives his all when he performs, that he is not a selfish performer, that he wants to unite his audience with the power of music and even at times in some shows he can go into that 'preacherman' thing, tonight where he did it I finally understood why and saw in this context why it was important. It had a transcendent effect on the audience most apparent during the sax solo in Tenth Avenue Freeze Out when the entire audience chanted "Clarence, Clarence, Clarence" repeatedly that I don't think there was a single person without a tear in their eyes.

Bruce can take his fans on a journey something you can share with him and something you share in the moment with all your mates and everyone around you, looking at each other saying, 'he's fucking brilliant isn't he'.. Men and women everywhere I stood want to make sweet love to Bruce Springsteen, not just because they love his music nor for his good looks and surprising agility for a rock 'n' roller of nearly 63 years, nor because the man as a whole is one of the last old-style greats from the the royal bloodline of songwriters from Woody Guthrie through Bob Dylan. He is a master songwriter and a master performer, but essentially you can tell even from 100 metres away that he's lovely fucking bloke too.


SETLIST
Encore

We Are Alive
Thunder Road
Born to Run
Hungry Heart
Seven Nights to Rock
(Moon Mullican cover)
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Recently I've been going through quite a Paul McCartney phase. Some might even say that is ill advised. I came late to The Beatles 'proper', having been initiated by my friend Steven when I was fourteen or fifteen but with the result of only liking the occasional track, which in most cases were the Lennon tracks or the Harrison tracks, generally finding Paul's music saccharine, and dare I say boring.

The songs which featured on this list of Beatles dislikes were the typical moon/spoon stuff along with 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be', 'Eleanor Rigby', and 'Yesterday' and so on. The only time I'd ever been taken aback by the song Yesterday, was out of context in a Mantovani type string arranged segment which featured in the film Once Upon A Time In America in between Ennio Morricone's beautiful theme score, other than that I couldn't bear to hear it.


The songs I gravitated towards back then were the more mystical dreamlike Lennon songs like 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'Julia', 'Across the Universe' or the sincere every-note-counts of Harrison's 'Something' or 'Here Comes The Sun'. As pieces of music and sentiments I found them somehow more endearing, more enduring and more heartfelt and soulful than I did of the McCartney material, one exception being oddly, 'I Will' (which as saccharine as a choice it may be) was something I heard first covered (even more saccharine) by Art Garfunkel!

Now, on the flip side one could equally say that Lennon's mystical dreamlike songs were as indulgent as McCartney's were bland.

Other than that most of my musical obsession was taken up for a good few years by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, at least until I turned 21 and was knocked out of the addiction and flung fully into the world of the world of music 'outside' of the Bob Dylan cradle thanks to a broken heart and a new set of mates with more diverse tastes in music.

Anyway, several years ago, after having had a quite strident, 'not interested' opinion on the Beatles aside from the odd track, I began to take them more seriously.

I think the thing that often turns people off The Beatles is the hype surrounding them and the esteem with which they are held, so that even before you've heard their music you know who they are and everyone thinks they're great. The inner contrarian/cynic in me was immediately turned off and decided to avoid these horrific Beatles at all costs.

At some point I got to see A Hard Day’s Night, and began to realise that behind these - what I thought of as - throwaway nursery rhyme rock n' roll songs, or songs you find in a 'Complete Keyboard Player' book in the homes of middle class parents, or a school music teachers idea of 'good' music, were these really satirical, ironic and hilarious figures who were not the sanitised bollocks I'd always believed them to be.

I distinctly remember as a young teenager leafing through my granddad Gibb's 'teach yourself how to play keyboard' to find among 'When The Saints Go Marching In', 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' and deciding from then that everything that was wrong with the world, with music and with people must have something to do with those fucking abhorrent songs and those fucking 'Complete Keyboard Player' books. To this day I still hate 'When the Saints Go Marching In', 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore' and hope they along with every fucking moron who has ever played those songs on a keyboard marches into a fiery furnace of misery.

Anyways, getting back to my love for the Beatles. Seeing A Hard Day’s Night opened my eyes. These chaps were funny and talented and swept up in a new kind of entertainment world which they would serve as future role models. They hadn't had their spirits kicked out of them, the way these despicable Reality-TV-talent-shows now currently murder kids' spontaneity and sense of instinct and when you watched them performing songs from the album the movie takes its name, you realise how effortless and brilliant those melodies were, which can only have come from a mixture of the Rhythm & Blues they'd heard from vinyl shipped in from the states down on the Albert Docks when they were still tear-away teddy boys in Liverpool to the 'granny music' John accurately described as Paul's 'influence' from his father.

When you combine those two elements, and John, Paul, George and Ringo's equal love for Rock n' Roll and Country Music, you have what at that point was the future synthesis and model for modern popular music obviously...

Now getting to McCartney. I can leave Lennon aside, as I had always preferred his music, always thought of it as more emotional, visceral, subversive and sincere. 

My entry to McCartney's music was actually not via his Beatles output initially (I came to appreciate that again later), but his first - DIY - album McCartney and the second one Ram, which as far as I'm concerned are both brilliant. As far as DIY, McCartney set a standard, otherwise established as far as I can tell with Skip Spence's 1969 work Oar.

The linchpin without a doubt with McCartney was the song Junk, that beautiful nostalgic recollections of a junk shop where signs in the shop window wonder why. He gave the artefacts a humanity and married it with a beautiful sorrowful melody, and the fact that unlike some of his earlier work, it wasn't laden with gooey schlocky lushness, but was sparse, spare, a bit rough around the edges made it beautiful. Followed by 'Every Night', 'Oo You', 'Man We Was Lonely' and 'Teddy Boy' (a failed Beatles song Lennon hated, and which in another context I'd probably hate too). Again, taking the contrarian stance the typically honoured 'Maybe I'm Amazed' leaves me cold. Its shit Paul, shit.



So McCartney led me to Ram and the amazing 'Uncle Albert' et al, but most importantly to revisionism of his work with The Beatles and so began my appreciation of the man's music both as a writer and crucially as an arranger. You only have to hear his bass contributions to the other Beatles' work to see how he could lift a song up at the right places. Although Lennon was good at dropping a 'Spaniard' in the works with his wit and cynicism, his musical forms were far less advanced than Paul's, but at times they were equally spellbinding. 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' is ample evidence of how great Lennon could be.

From there I went back to 'Penny Lane' and admitted to myself that I no longer hated it, I loved its nod to the Beach Boys. Then I decided I could stomach Paul's ode to the mysterious Eleanor (Rigby). Having previously thought it boring and farty to make up songs about imaginary people, their imaginary lives (although much evidence suggests she was real) and their lonely existence. Now I think of it as song craft, and admirable to a point. But further back you need only look at a song like Things We've Said Today, which has such a fantastic feel and melodically is gorgeous, never mind the obvious cliché choices people always comment on like 'Here, There and Everywhere', which is also a tremendous song.

I even came to almost like 'The Long And Winding Road' (mainly the piano playing), which had long been a song I had hated for its seemingly pointless sentiments leading to the irritating verse ending chords which cry out that 'daa daa, daa daa, daa'. McCartney certainly knows how to verge on elevator music and Lennon could bring him back from this abyss, but equally McCartney could save John from his indulgence of the self in song. Alas we have Ian Macdonald's book Revolution in the Head, so I may as well say no more on any of this.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that although McCartney irritates me like the incessant drip in the bucket from a leaky ceiling, sometimes I think 'damn, that's a good fucking song'.

Aside from the first two records and obviously avoiding the utterly yuckifying Broad Street, I have steered clear of most of McCartney's other solo work and always kept a 'file for later' policy on 'getting into' more of his stuff. But in referring to the previous paragraph, sometimes I'm nicely surprised by a new song I had not heard before. Two examples of this were hearing 'Jenny Wren', from Chaos and Creation.. and 'Calico Skies'.

The guitar arrangement of the former song is in the classic Macca-Blackbird vein, but it's pretty, prettier than 'Blackbird', and a better song to boot (controversial?). The lyrics are pretty straightforward, but something about the song suggests it was an inspiration song, the guitar piece particularly. Although lyrically it could never match it, it somehow reminds me of how Dylan must have written 'Dark Eyes':

Like so many girls, Jenny Wren could sing
But a broken heart, took her song away

Like the other girls, Jenny Wren took wing
She could see the world, and its foolish ways

She saw poverty, breaking up her home
Wounded warriors, took her song away

For the guitar players out there, the song is down-tuned a tone and the change from Am to Cm is a beast, as is the standard picking change from Am to G to F on the 'breaking up her home' part.





Equally 'Calico Skies' had a similar effect on me. Again, like much of Macca's output the song could verge on the cheese-factor, specifically a video performance of it with him playing it by a crackling fire in a forest with his tracksuit bottoms on. Plonker. I've picked a live version to show below, because I enjoy the strings on it, more than the video footage of Paul playing it by a smoking fire! Although even the strings are slightly cheesy. Either way, great song Paul!

Interestingly, both songs, both just over two minutes in length and both seemingly inspiration songs which feel like they were written relatively quickly share a similiar sentiment about a cruel world outside, with Calico Skies referencing 'crazy soldiers' and 'weapons of war', and Jenny Wren, 'wounded warriors' and 'the broken world' and its 'foolish ways'.



Of recent there seems to be either a cunning PR campaign to revitalise his career or a general revisionism growing (or probably both) around McCartney's cultural role/impact in terms of an avant-garde musician with his interest in electronic music and his apparent love of early experimental music/music-concrete. I had been one who thought of this revisionism in the various music magazines, as rather annoying cynical ploys to reinforce his influence as the Beatles, sell more records and compete with Yoko Ono's genius John Lennon branding.

Having gone through my own revisionism of his work, it seems that in the mainstream at least there is no need to reinforce his credentials, as apart from the young muppets on Twitter asking 'Who the F&*% is Paul McCartney?' after his recent Grammy outing, most know who he is and certainly out of the mainstream enough people appreciate the best of his work. Yet even where I think the arguments (tied in with the 'Carnival of Light' debate) for this 'McCartney as the experimenting Beatle' are weak, there is some importance in this revisionism in that it reminds people that amongst the schlock and the clangers, there are some real diamonds that should be heard.

Having already expressed my hatred of 'The Complete Keyboard Player' manuals and the like I will step back slightly from that. One thing I think crucial about McCartney is how influential a piano player he is. Something that I haven't seen mentioned much. You can pretty much guarantee that students of music theory will have at some point learnt what I had viewed as those atrociously bland and boring songs 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' at music lessons and that essentially the style in which they played those songs came directly from Paul McCartney’s own fingering technique.

Paul McCartney, a self-taught - dare I say - raw and 'natural' musician (whose musical scope and melodic ear is pretty astonishing) who in fact has probably influenced a million student piano players and future classically trained musicians and songwriters perhaps even unconsciously in their playing of piano and in their composition. There are positives and negatives to this obviously, on the negative someone boring like Jamie Cullum or even Chris Martin when that silly prat gets anywhere near a piano.

Even more crucially, McCartney is not hailed as a great piano player, yet most of the kids who learn piano will have within their playing style, especially if they follow the educational playbooks, something of McCartney’s instilled within their own, that unmistakeable piano sound that you hear on 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be' or even 'The Long and Winding Road' have been the basis for many kids to learn piano. Even back when I was at secondary school you'd hear the trickles of those songs flowing down from the music rooms as the teacher tried to teach the kids a 'modern' song instead of a Mozart or whatever else. That's probably why I always hated those songs, because i associated them with institutions and establishments and they seemed to fit so nicely into the worst elements of taught music because they were not idiosyncratic, but in a sense definitive, concise and easy examples of 'how to play'. His playing is almost a lesson in instruction for piano, basic chord patterns, roots and fifths and the switches between them and underneath deceivingly simple and catchy melodies. Look at any musician, who was generally tutored whether at school or privately and somewhere within their style is Paul McCartney and the traces of his Granny Music.

Equally, the same can be said of his guitar style specifically on 'Blackbird'. These two points are something I can't imagine (no pun intended) apply in the same way to John Lennon or Bob Dylan or any other songwriter, although a couple of Lennon's songs, particularly 'In My Life' which have something of the McCartney feel, also have that classic Lennon trope, shift from major to minor on the IV chord (e.g. C to Cminor in the key of G) which has found it's way into the popular song.

So, sorry Paul for not giving you credit where credit was due sooner. I still think you need a kick up the arse sometimes, and although your songs don't always move me soulfully or emotionally you're one hell of a song crafter and musician and an absolutely necessary tonic to people in the John Lennon camp, who can be as loathsomely indulgent as you can sometimes be loathsomely bland.

There is constant twittering about Bob Dylan and Plagiarism and I've often found myself on both sides of the argument, at first on the wrong side, until I come to my senses that is. 

There is a link somewhere on the expectingrain.com forum for Classic Interviews Vol.3 which cover the periods 78 to 81. In one of the 1981 interviews, Dylan explicitly talks of how European and particularly UK audiences appreciate his material, specifically his older material because they are inately familiar with the Scottish/Irish/English Ballad form.

He then goes on to state openly that many of his early songs are taken from those ballads. He lists Masters of War, The Times They Are A' Changin, Girl From The North Country... Of this we all know already, and there are many more significant songs we could add to Dylan's list.

Clearly Dylan has always used the folk process as a way of creating new works of Art. I think if you're as good as Dylan is it's possible to do this legitimately and thoroughly. He has taken the process and moved into the realms of both the popular and the obscure songs in his work and of course into painting and writing non-fiction (or is it fiction?) in Chroincles Vol I. There is no question that Chronicles was a delicately researched project as Scott Warmuth knows. A book "meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover".

I write songs myself but have never adopted Dylan's process consciously as such, however I'd imagine that if I did I would probably benefit as much as my work would because I would become inspired simply by being immersed in it. I would find something new and interesting to say from existing threads. "Sewing new dresses out of old cloth", as he said in Floater, which again was said by someone else in another context altogether.

Unconsciously of course anyone who is in the business of being creative will find they have been influenced, or because of a measured amount of experience, been transported to a new place with which to write and contemplate and will therefore in some way have borrowed inocculuously. In all cases this is growth. It only becomes plagiarism to me when the person commiting the plagiarism has no deeper knowledge of the area they're plagiarising, nor any true artistic intent. In other words sheer laziness and dishonesty. We can certainly vouch for Dylan's artistic intent, we merely need to look at his body of work.

Clearly his immersion in these materials and his exposure to many different things fed into this 'wellspring of creativity' he spoke of (60 Minuted interview in 2004) which created those unique songs that he says he wrote unconsciously, Mr Tambourine Man, Its Alright Ma, Gates of Eden, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and so on. Of course by 1967 or 68 he claims the lights went out and he had to learn 'consciously to do what I had done unconsciously', giving Blood on the Tracks as his first successful proclamation of this new process. (This very process Dylan embarks on is in some ways covered in my favourite Jean Luc Goddard film Le Mepris, which is a self-conscious film of layers concealing layers.)

So Dylan's education and sensitivity, which must have exploded when he arrived in NYC in 1961, and his use of other sources along the way is the main reason we have Bob Dylan. Without it, he's not there, he's gone to borrow from his lost unfinished Basement Tapes gem I'm Not There. In effect, its those little threads that make us all who we are, new dresses from old cloth, or atomically stardust. Plagiarised, if you like, from the universe.

I came relatively late to the great Richard Thompson, and was even later in discovering how great a band Fairport Convention were. I remember watching him play beautiful lyrical guitar flourishes alongside a sleepy whimsical Bob Dylan at the Guitar Legends show in Seville, Spains in 1991 or 92 on an old VHS my Dad had when I was a just bairn. I thought he looked something like a curious, subtle rather shy and retiring Viking, keeping the as-ever unpredictable Bob Dylan boat afloat as it were.

I think the first song of his I remember hearing might have been what I could only describe as a Celtic-rockabilly song, Turning of the Tide, somewhere in the depths of a moment, when and where I do not recall any longer. I remember thinking, wow that is one fucking fantastic guitar lick. Maybe I first heard it in a pub somewhere, because it always felt like a song playing at the end of the night in a pub in the Highlands, when everyone is too drunk to dance, except for the kids who are on holiday kicking up the glitter dust and party poppers. The song is much more than that though.

Later I saw him on TV doing two songs in tribute to Joni Mitchell, and his guitar playing to my unsophisticated ears seemed almost free of scale, key and modes. The guy was and is an unreal, sweet, wild, subtle and enigmatic guitar player, with a voice wrapped in wit-licked Celtic croon.



A friend of mine a few years back turned me onto 'The End of the Rainbow', one of the saddest, funniest, and darkest lullabies I've ever heard. 'I feel for you, you little horror' goes the song and from there it only gets sadder and funnier. After hearing an opening line like that you know you're dealing with a major talent who has a way with words and isn't afraid to lay it down honestly. It's probably the best opening line of anything I can think of other than Charles Bukowski's "it began as a mistake", at the beginning of Post Office. With that song I found myself listening to all of I Want To See The Bright Lights, the album recorded with his then wife Linda Thompson. This led me to 'The Calvary Cross', which I had actually heard first as covered by Tortoise and Will Oldham on 2006's The Brave and the Bold. (While I'm on the subject they also do a sublime cover of Elton John's Daniel.)



This man who seems to live and breathe a mystical England, where witches, wizards, men with bread knives "four feet wide" walk side by side with the modern world, is also an absolute killer love song writer. After 'Bright Lights..'  I got hold of Rumor and Sigh, which contains among others the great '1952 Vincent Black Lightening' a love song to a motorcyle and 'I Misunderstood', also covered unbelievably and rather exquisitely by Dinosaur Jnr.


Another album Sweet Warrior, features a tune called 'Sunset Song' , which when I first heard it, live at a gig in Durham a couple of years ago, blew my mind. The guitar accompaniment is elastic, medieval and spellbinding, stretches around the lyrics bouncing back and forth and drawing you into another place altogether. Again it's not just musicianship or craft with Richard Thompson, his lyrics are some of the best you'll hear. I love the way he sings, "the band's down on the jetty, If you cup your ear", and I think one of the great lyrics about selflessness and desperation in what I can only interpret as unrequited love is encapsulated in the lines:

"You said, if I hold my breath, dive down deep enough I might grow fins. Seems to me I've held my breath, held my breath to please you ever since."

Stunning.



One of the things that strikes you about Richard Thompson is his effortless musical ability. His sense of timing and phrase as a guitar player, the tricks he can roll out would leave most guitarists in the dust. His advantage is the folk and modal traces he interjects with elements of jazz, rock 'n' roll and even elements of punk. Nobody sounds like him and in many ways I've often thought Mark Knopfler's melodic stratocaster picking style and sound might be influenced in some way by RT. He is without question one of the great guitar players. Al Kooper in a 1994 interview with my good friend, songwriter Peter Stone Brown (full interview here) described Thompson as a "giant if people could get used to his voice". Thompson's voice is in fact one of his great assets. He is an amazing singer.

Kooper on Thompson:

"He's a great fucking guitar player...play a long fucking guitar solo and kill me because you're the best guitar player walking the fucking earth... I can get my fix when I go see him live. Because he's the greatest fucking guitar player, he shreds. I'm like a groupie. Since Hendrix, he's the guy for me. He does things that no one else can do. And he's got a brilliant fucking mind musically speaking. He just kills me. It's right up my alley. I love it."

Thanks for the music RT!

See www.richardthompson-music.com

Alongside Dylan there are not many contemporaries who still stand up even now as a live performer or songwriter. I know some might dispute that, but I can tell you now, Dylan is still a formidable force when you see him perform. Leonard Cohen's initial 2008 concerts were a revelation for those who saw them, but again every night is a reproduction of the same stage patter and the endless band introductions and same arrangements without any real variation. As everyone probably knows Paul Mccarteney delivers a slick set with his rather bland yet sophisticated session players, but it's all essentially tribute.

Then there is Van Morrison, who manages to deliver astoundingly passionate invigorating performances of his material.There is ample evidence of this on youtube, even if Van's management love to remove these videos frequently and even though on the later performances Van is prone to slip into what less obsessive fans might see as a scat-sing-mumbling.

A testament to his brilliance as a live performer can be witnessed in the emotional rendition of Celtic New Year as performed on Later with Jools Holland in 2005. The performance complete with string section is deeply moving and is a performance I return to. See below for the video.

As a tribute to Van, who the press have been hounding a lot recently, I figured I should put up some of his best performances on youtube, starting first with a very rare video of him performing - during his Veedon Fleece period - Dylan's Just Like A Woman, at the Winterland, San Francisco, February 2nd 1974, which is sublime aside from the homophobic utterence of "this queer in here" during the bridge..



Van's performance in Montreux 1980 contains some of his best captured performances. Unfortunately not all of it is online anymore. But here is an absolutely superb rendition of Wavelength:


 Here is a t.t.t.t.tongue-tied stutteringly grand version of Cypress Avenue from the Filmore, 1970:


My person favourite however, for whatever inexplicable reason is later-period Van performing Celtic New Year in 2005. Something about the build up in the performance, when he gets to the last 'come back home my dear' to his hum and riff guitar parts at the close of the song make it special and raises a shy tear.


And obviously, we can't leave it without Van's 'electric light' moment during the Last Waltz:


Here's to Van Morrison! Can't wait to see you play live this year you old grumpus.

My favourite album of Van Morrison's without a doubt is Veedon Fleece: