Archives for June 2010

One of the real joys of children is their unexpected acts of creativity - the mad drawings, the word play, the clarity of vision and the made up songs. One of my daughters once improvised a lyric about a bumblebee that almost had me in tears. She was perfectly unself-conscious, trying to voice the moment: bee here now.

That's been a regular feature in popular music - an escape to the bower of childhood. The Beatles would commission Ringo to sing about submarines and octopuses gardens. Syd Barrett would get enthralled about his bike, and so on. In more recent years the tradition has been furthered by the wibbling tones of Devendra Banhart, Sufjan Stevens and the new folkies like Tunng.

Locally, we've got some new practitioners called Pretty Child Backfire. They sing about painting the stars and lost innocence in the small hours. Kiddy instruments twinkle and the guitar guy plays those wonky riffs and were returned from African pop music by Vampire Weekend. I like 'em.

Bob Dylan voiced a similar concern about the dangers of age and experience on the artist. On the song 'My Back Pages' he bleated about being lost in the fog of routine and assumed adulthood. In the chorus however, he happily confessed, "I'm younger than that now". It's something to aspire to.

Yes indeed, it's a photograph of myself and Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden. We have swords and we're having a bit of a duel. The venue is St Paul's Public School, the year is probably 1994 and there's plenty at stake, notably self-esteem and personal safety.

This was all in the name of an article in the NME. I had challenged Bruce a couple of times and he'd ignored the thump of my gauntlet, resounding across the gossip columns. You see I was a bit of a fencer in my youth, and had even represented N Ireland as a schoolboy international. Why if truth be told, I had been the Irish Intervarsity Sabre Champion of 1982. Meantime I had seen Bruce in action in a London tournament, and I'd not been too impressed. I could take the fella, I reckoned.

So I did a bit of training, squeezed myself into the old breeches and got ready for the messy business. Bruce was looking a bit nervous. Like any rock star, his PR machine had massaged the truth and the common consensus was that he was a fencer of international repute. As we saluted each other on the piste, we both knew that this was a fable. And so the foils were engaged and the hits started to land.

I took the lead early on. Being a leftie, I had a bit of an advantage, and my muscle memory was taking me though a few old moves, like the quarte parry, disengage combo. Easy.

But the contest had been laid out in sets, making it a long battle, which was when Bruce and his stage fitness started to tell. He made a comeback, and crucially, we found the entire duel hanging by the last hit, otherwise known as La Belle Touche...

And Bruce got me, on target, a final time. I was deflated and mildly humiliated. Also, intensely tired and reaching the limits of my cardio-vascular capacity. My fencing career was officially over and the resulting feature caused a few cruel laughs.

Bruce was a decent sport. Never liked the music, mind.

Buster Poindexter was the nom de plume of David Johansen, sometime leader of the New York Dolls. After his nasty punk experiences, the guy reinvented himself as a pompadoured lounge singer, belting out tunes on the manner of Joe Turner and Louis Prima.

The results were patchy but that self-titled album from 1987 has weathered quite well, and Johansen always had enough theatre in his bones to make such a conceit worth hearing. Later, he sang the blues and then reformed The Dolls and I had the pleasure of seeing him with the Harry Smiths in Auntie Annie's and then getting the revived blast of his punk best in Botanic Gardens. Quite the chap.

STUART BAILIE

BBC Radio Ulster, 92-95 FM

Online: www.bbc.co.uk/radioulster

Mondays, ten - midnight

Playlist 28.06.10

Buster Poindexter - Bad Boy (RCA)

Paul Weller - Grasp And Still Connect (Island)

Jim Jones Revue - High Horse (Punk Rock Blues)

Alabama 3 - Jacqueline (Hostage)

Cherry Ghost - Kissing Strangers (Heavenly)

Bob Dylan - Mozambique (CBS)

Carolina Chocolate Drops - Cornbread And Butterbeans (Nonesuch)

Ted Taylor - Too Late (Retro World)

Pretty Child Backfire - And All The Things Said In The Twilight (white)

Avi Buffalo - Truth Sets In (Sub Pop)

Pam Hall - Dear Boopsie (Blue Trace)

Ty - Something Big (BBE)

Julia & Co - Sugar Samba (London)

Jan And Dean - Drag City (Sequel)

Gaslight Anthem - Orphans (Side One Dummy)

Joel Plasket - Deny Deny Deny (Blue Grace)

Vic Godard - Stop That Girl (Rough Trade)

Cherry Ghost - Black Fang (Heavenly)

Gayngs - Cry (Jagjaguar)

Frazey Ford - Firecracker (Nettwerk)

Touissant McCall - Nothing Takes The Place Of you (Retro World)

Kele - Yesterday's Gone (Wichita)

Sister Sledge - Thinking Of You (WEA)

Tunng - Don't Look Down Or Back (Full Time Hobby)

Sinead O' Connor - Song To The Siren (Elevation)

Andreya Triana - A Town Called Obsolete (Ninja Tune)

Back at Glastonbury Festival in 1988 I came across a little stall that was exclusively selling vintage copies of Rolling Stone magazine. Many of them covered the 1969-75 era when the publication was arguably at its best, and so I bought a stash of these issues and read them with satisfaction.

Rolling Stone came out of San Francisco when the city was trying to envisage a counter culture - a fresh way of dealing with music, politics, materialism, writing and lifestyle. You could sense some of that adventure in the yellowing newsprint, people who believed in the giddy promise of the Aquarian age.

Alternately, some of the writers were in a lather about Vietnam, Watergate and phoney music, but that was an important part of the brief also. I came to appreciate that Rolling Stone had given a platform to wonderful writers like Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe and later, PJ O' Rourke.

A few years later and I encountered a book, The Rolling Stone Story by Robert Draper. It was a much less flattering account of the publication and its founder Jann Wenner. I wasn't totally surprised to learn that egotism and social advancement were also part of the agenda and that the publication had lost a big deal of its rebellion in the bid to chase advertisers with large budgets or celebrities with aggressive PR handlers.



That's why I was so delighted to read the Michael Hastings profile on General McChrystal and to learn that it caused trouble at the very top of the US establishment. 'The Runaway General' is vintage RS stuff: a writer with access to revealing scenes and who's bold enough to tell it that way. Hastings had his lucky moments, notably when the volcanic ash kept him in Europe and at liberty to follow the story even deeper. He listened well, told it with clarity and caused the President to remove McChrystal from his position.

Old-fangled journalism. Revolutionary, eh?

There was a moment during the televised coverage of the Gorrillaz gig at Glastonbury when the camera swung down over the front of the crowd. Normally, TV grammar dictates that the audience will be happy, effervescent and totally into the music. Only this time, the lens focused on a girl who was having a good old yawn.

I know how she felt. Glastonbury is normally the chance for an artist to delight the crowd, to rev up the populism, to fill your booster rockets with that potent festival bonhomie. Yet watching from the comfort of my home, my ears still blasted from a Panama Kings / In Case Of Fire gig in Belfast, the Gorillaz were dull.

Damon had that professorial tone about him, like he expected us to be taking seminar notes. So many amazing musicians were introduced, from Bobby Womack to Lou Reed, by way of Mark E Smith and a couple of Clash legends. But it was only Snoop who changed the dynamic, cutting across the Damon conceit and addressing the crowd like they were his best mates.

On another part of the site, The Flaming Lips were giving it all. The canons and confetti, the emotion and the delirium. It made excellent sense and I couldn't help wondering how U2 might have behaved if they had made their Glastonbury debut. It would not have been quiet or under-achieving. Maybe they would have misjudged the scene and patronised Glastonbury with their enormity. But I think not. And I don't think there would have been too many yawns in the front rows.

So I'm at a school art exhibition, looking at a portrait of myself. The top of the head has been sliced off like a boiled egg, but instead of an escaping yoke, there's an outpouring of words, rushing out of that cranium. No wonder why the facial expression is a little pensive. And when I get closer, I find that the words are all mine, chopped and spliced from a series of old articles and interviews.

The artist who came up with the plan is my eldest daughter. Apparently she was inspired by an Australian called Anna Higgie. There's some text to accompany the illustration, which states that writing is my occupation and that very often I am removed from the day-to-day world.

Which is probably accurate, but also a little disconcerting to think that those many words are also taking hostage of my mindfulness, removing me from family time and present time. Note to self: make the effort to be here, more often.

On Monday night I was joined by photographer Kevin Cummings, an old colleague who has taken over 200 NME cover stories and authored many defining images. He gave us the Stone Roses splattered in paint, Shaun Ryder on top of a giant E, Joy Division in the snow, Ian Curtis puffing on a ciggie, Courtney Love in disarray and Blur dressed as Blondie. His speciality has been Manchester's rich trail and so there's a poignant image in the National Portrait Gallery of Tony Wilson, profiled against the girders of the Hacienda.

Kevin is never the guy to undersell a story but he does have one of the most breathtaking portfolios. Check out his Facebook site for the deal on Coronation Street icons, football players, actors and sundry cultural chancers. It was a good opportunity to measure his character on the radio and to play tunes by Joy Division and Happy Mondays, plus a very late track from Lee Hazlewood, pictured so beautifully by Kevin in the final days, smoking hard because the lung cancer had just about beaten him and there was little else to do.

STUART BAILIE

BBC Radio Ulster, 92-95 FM

Online: www.bbc.co.uk/radioulster

Mondays, ten - midnight

Playlist 21.06.10

The Fantastic Baggys - Summer Means Fun (Sequel)

The Drums - Let's Go Surfing (Moshi Moshi)

Alejandro Escovedo - Faith (Fantasy)

Kevin Cummings interview...

Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart (Factory)

Lee Hazlewood - The Old Man (BPX)

Happy Mondays - Step On (Factory)

Miracle Bell - Love Sounds (white)

Tom Waits - Tootie Ma Was A Big Fine Thing (Red)

Wheat - Changes Is (No Dancing)

Hal Blaine - Dance With The Surfin Band (Sequel)

Ash - Wild Surf (Infectious)

Joel Plaskett - Precious Precious Precious (Blue Grace)

Alejandro Escovedo - Fall Apart With You (Fantasy)

Blow Monkeys - Digging Your Scene (RCA)

The Magic Numbers - Why Did You Call (Heavenly)

Al Supersonic and The Teenagers - To Be Young (Unique)

The Coral - 100 Years (Deltasonic)

Buck Owens - Please Don't Take Her From Me (Righteous)

Caitlin Rose - For The Rabbits (Names)

Gaslight Anthem- We Did It When We Were Young (Side One Dummy)

Amy LaVere - Baby Won't You Please Come Home (Red)

Jo Bataan - I'm Satisfied (Harmless)

The Style Council - Long Hot Summer (Polydor)

The BDIs - Hallelujah Era (BDI)

At the Ward Park concert a few weeks back, I fell into conversation with Bobby Gildea, guitarist with Belle And Sebastian and former resident of Bangor. He was back in his old haunt to see Snow Patrol and to hook up with Terri Hooley - another member of the Good Vibes home for wayward boys and girls.

We didn't really know each other well and so we chatted about local music and then riffed a little about the NME. The music mag had not been particularly kind to B&S. In particular, the writer Steve Wells had called them: "self-loving, knock-kneed, passive aggressive, dressed-up-in-kiddy-clothes, mock-pop-creepiness peddling, smug, underachieving, real-pop-hating no-talents celebrating their own inadequacy with music so white it's translucent".

We mused on the fact that Swells had been dead almost a year and that at a memorial service in London's Monarch Bar, we had watched a filmed tribute by Chumbawamba. They had read out the Belle And Sebastian critique, slowly and with feeling. It was a lovely moment and even Bobby thought this was amusing.

All this week, the Guardian online has been running unpublished blogs by Swells. I would send you a link but the language is a bit racey, y'know. But search the stuff out if you will, and marvel at the humour, the word contortions, the grandstanding, the bile and the beauty. The more we recede from such writing, the more remarkable it appears.

'Gold Star' is a wonderful track by Belfast act Cashier No 9. It's a story told through the eyes of Phil Spector, tycoon of teen and pathological soul. Danny Todd recounts it smartly and the production is boldly handled by David Holmes. You may have heard the music used as the theme tune for the BBC Ni programme Art Space. Enormous drums and harmonica playing from the legendary Tommy Morgan, who was a feature on 'Good Vibrations' and other Beach Boys treasures.

So this is not the work of underachievers. The album has been batted to Los Angeles and back, tended by David and delivered with grace with the Cashier team. Primal Scream worked with Andrew Weatherall to enhance the beauty of 'Screamadelica' and there's a comparable partnership here.

STUART BAILIE

BBC Radio Ulster, 92-95 FM

Online: www.bbc.co.uk/radioulster

Mondays, ten - midnight

Playlist 14.06.10

Beach Boys - Amusement Parks USA (Capitol)

Cashier No 9 - Gold Star

Gaslight Anthem - Stay Lucky (Side One Dummy)

Alan Sims / Belsonic interview:

The Jam - That's Entertainment (Polydor)

808 State - Pacific State (WEA)

Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes (Verve)

The BDIs - It Was Not Serious (BDI)

Tired Pony - Dead American Writers (Fiction)

Howling Wolf - Dorothy May (Charly)

Health - USA Boys (City Slang)

Pet Shop Boys - Se A Vida E (Parlophone)

Gaslight Anthem - The Diamond Church St Choir (Side One Dummy)

Duke Special - Wanda (Reel To Reel)

The Hold Steady - Weekenders (Rough Trade)

The Handsome Family - Eleanor Rigby (Loose)

Grovesnor - Find A Way To Stop Him (Lo)

Beach Boys - Kiss Me Baby (Capitol)

Beach House - Love Of Mine (Bella Union)

Tiff Merrit - Live Til You Die (Fantasy)

Hats Fitz, Cara Robinson - Black Cat Bone (white)

Chief - Breaking Walls (Domino)

Band Of Horses - The Funeral (Subpop)

Frazey Ford - If You Gonna Go (Nettwerk)

I do like it when pop music uses big words in amusing places. Julie London set the standard in 1955, when she rhymed "plebeian" with "through with me... and" on the song 'Cry Me A River'. And fair play to Sam Cooke, who slipped "trigonometry" into 'What A Wonderful World' without missing a beat. In this cool tradition, Edwin Collins enlivened 'A Girl Like You Before' with the plea, "I hope that I'm talking allegorically". Quite.

Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy fame is terribly good at this. In 'My Imaginary Friend', he intones that "he works peripatetically". That sounds like it was written for a bet. But the lyric that makes me chuckle most is something that Neil recently donated to a Duke Special project, 'The Silent World Of Hector Mann'.

'Wanda, Darling Of The Jockey Club' is a splendid story of a lowly waiter who is smitten by a female flyer. The setting is the Twenties Jazz Age, the style is ragtime and Hannon writes that she is an "aviatrix". Which as any Latin scholar will know, is a female aviator.

Anyway, the word tickled me. And the song itself is a delightful thing, a tale of bravado above the Rockys and love amongst the gin slings. The mood is pure F Scott Fitzgerald, a writer that Neil previously evoked on 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' and which seems to fit with his more dapper demeanour.

When Duke Special performed the song last week at the Waterfront Studio in Belfast, the song was perfectly enlivened. The band were playing in the New Orleans vernacular and Ben Castle was a perfect wheeze on the clarinet, dancing the Charleston and celebrating the magnificent lady in her flying machine. Somewhere, Amelia Earhart is smiling.

Righteous Records put out releases that are mostly satisfying and deep. They compile old murder ballads and new gospel songs. They resurrect the pain and clamour of the honky tonks and sometimes voyage into barmy jazz degrees. The packaging and the attitude recall the verve of those old Harry Smith collections and I'd say that might be intentional.

In the middle of this project it is a chap called Dave Henderson. I first contacted him about Hit magazine in 1985 and we shuffled about the media haunts of Mornington Crescent for much of that decade. Dave was one of the first to see a durable community in indie music. Now he compiles cover mount CDs for Mojo magazine and as I understand it, Dave's radio shows for Mojo made the case for this new label.

'Radiogram: 24 Songs That Inspired The Teenage Gram Parsons' is a perfectly simple riff. It's an attempt to recreate the music that drifted across the airwaves of Waycross, Georgia back in the '50s. Gram came from a prosperous but very dysfunctional family, and seemed to find solace in these simple tunes about love, abandonment and deliverance. The songs would serve him well in The International Submarine Band, The Byrds and in his compelling solo records. And therefore without much fanfare, a whole creative awakening is provided.

In turn, Gram would bring life to tired old rock music, putting a direct line into Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones, 'Sticky Fingers' and 'Exile On Main Street'. Here's where it all comes from.

STUART BAILIE

BBC Radio Ulster, 92-95 FM

Online: www.bbc.co.uk/radioulster

Mondays, ten - midnight

Playlist 07.06.10

Aztec Camera - Somewhere In My Heart (Warner)

Band Of Horses - NW Apartment (Columbia)

Colenso Parade - Find Your Mother (white)

Johnny Flynn - Agnes (Transgressive)

Harry Nilsson - One (RCA)

Harry Nilsson - 1941 (RCA)

Harry Nilsson - Cuddly Toy (RCA)

Harry Nilsson - Coconut (RCA)

Grosvenor - Dan (Lo)

The Coral - 1000 Years (Deltasonic)

Love - Orange Skies (Elektra)

More Than Conquerors - A Crooked Old World (white)

Patti Smith - Because The Night (live) (BBC)

John Hartford - Gentle On My Mind (Rounder)

Duke Special - River Chanty (Reel To Reel)

Olof Arnalds - Innudir Skinni (One little Indian)

Band Of Horses - Factory (live)

Leon Payne - Crazy Arms (Righteous)

Glen Hansard - High Hope (Elevation)

Tibby Edwards - But I Do (Righteous)

Gayngs - No Sweat (Jagaguar)

Gentry Morris - Sweet Anne Marie (white)

Villages - Ship Of Promises (Domino)

John Hartford - In Tall Buildings (Rounder)

Grasscut - The Tin Man (Ninja Tune)

Jagga Jazzist - One Armed Bandiot (Ninja Tune)

Stuart Cable was a decent guy. He was good company, amusing and free of any obvious hang ups. In the early days of the Stereophonics he was the light-hearted balance to Kelly's more brooding nature, and the band needed some of that. When he parted around 2003, the group dynamic changed a lot. I wasn't familiar with his cable TV adventures, but I gather they were well received and I assumed that rock and roll had given him a decent payback and some value from his surname.

The Stereophonics may not enjoy the kudos that Kelly would like, but it really was exhilarating to watch them on the rise in the late '90s - crowned at Cardiff Castle and then rampant at the Morfa Stadium. Other musicians may have found the ascent difficult, when whenever I saw Stuart, he always had a refreshing drink in his hand and a smile on his face.

I met Yann Martel briefly on Friday, ahead of his Black Box appearance in Belfast. The writer had noticed a line about the Miami Showband killings and he wanted to know how a bunch of musicians were shot at point blank range on the way home from Banbridge and why a the paramilitaries had pretended to be a 'proper' security force. Why were they planting a bomb in the band's tour van? What was the point of it all?

It's an unpleasant story and I wasn't especially comfortable with the details. Then again, I had yet to read the author's new story, 'Beatrice And Virgil', which circles the Holocaust with layers of fable and banality, revulsion and evasion. Later, I find out that Yann Martel has spent many years trying to make resonant art out of a horrendous history.

There was a play, and essay and some kind of flip book, combining different kinds of response. Some years later and after consulting with editors and publishers, parts of this process were included in the novel, reduced to fragments, macabre games and ghosted visions.

The millions who appreciated his Booker-winning Life Of Pi, may not find this book so easy. With Pi, even the American president had been moved to send Yann a hand-written note, calling it, "a lovely book - an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling". But the new publication has sent a few critics in a lather and it may confound the book clubs.

It took almost nine years to deliver 'Beatrice And Virgil' and it may take a proportionate time to reveal its worth. It's a slender book, but dense with it. The guy is no slouch. Yann has not been hurried and neither should we rush the jury.

They played here as Shrug and as Polar Bear and then as Snow Patrol. There was a deal of drama and possibly even a tantrum along the way. But in the Snow Patrol story, The Duke Of York in Belfast was a fairly significant venue.

And so they gathered, just ahead of the statistic-busting Ward Park show, to unveil a little plaque to celebrate the place. This after all was the joint to be seen in around 1995, a time when live music facilities were modest and a music-friendly publican was a friend indeed.

So promoter Shep was at the unveiling and so was Willie Jack from The Duke. Memories were exchanged and another landmark appears in this vibrant little warren of streets, that witnessed the recording of 'Teenage Kicks'. the site of the old Harp Bar, the legendary Assembly Rooms and future legends such as The Black Box.