Blimey, Is That The Month Gone Already?

Would be viral/meme thingummy on Facebook: 30 songs in 30 days, wherein the participant names a song that best fits a different daily category over a period of roughly one month. Starting with:

1. Your Favourite Song. What kind of dumb question is that? My favourite song tonight isn’t the same favourite song I had thirty years ago. It’s not the same favourite song I had this afternoon, for chrissake (Oblivious by Aztec Camera until about half past three this afternoon, when it was usurped by Panic by the The Smiths. The last couple of minutes of that song, with all the little kiddies joining Mozzer singing ‘Hang the DJ!’  over and over again, and if you listen you can hear the tiny differences in each go-round, which means they actually got a childrens choir in to sing ‘Hang the DJ’? Genius. Pure brilliant genius. Even better if you imagine the Mozzer in the studio at the same time, brandishing a sinister gladioli and waving an emphatic quiff and egging the kiddies on with a detached yet maniacal glint in his eye). Thirty years ago? God knows. Probably either something by Frank Sinatra or The Goodies. That’s the kind of kid I was.

2. A Song From Your Favourite Album. That’s just not fair. Again, your ‘Favourite Album’ is a mutable thing, changing with the seasons and infinite in its variety, man. For years my FA was Sergeant Pepper until I realised that loving Sergeant Pepper was pretty much received wisdom and that Sergeant Pepper is over-indulgent shit. There’s a terrible thing gnawing away deep inside about 95% of us that makes us, every time we take part in a thing like this, choose something that makes us look just a little bit cooler than we actually are. And I’d bet that no matter who you are, even if you’re some nightmarish hybrid of Brad Pitt and Alexa Chung, you’ll still be thinking “Is the first Strokes album still cool? Should my favourite album be something I bought in Papua New Guinea or somewhere else like that where not many people have actually been except me and my cool mates? Should it be something by one of my cool mates that isn’t actually out yet and probably never will be?” Straight answer; anything from Surfer Rosa by Pixies. Usually Gigantic.

3. A Song That Makes You Happy. Shouldn’t that be your favourite song? No, seriously, I mean to say, what’s the point of having a favourite song that doesn’t make you happy? Why have a favourite song that makes you feel pissed off, or psychopathically violent, or reminds you of your dead wife’s smile? Maybe these are upcoming categories. I don’t know, I’m taking them one at a time because I’m scared of overloading on Song Category Conflictiness. But face it, it’d be fan-flippin’-tabulous if several million Facebookers all over the world were trying to think of the song that reminded them of their dead wife’s smile. Yes it would. Don’t deny it. You know what always makes me happy? It makes me so happy that I have a playlist on my iPod labelled ‘Happy’ and this is the only song in it. Don’t Rain On My Parade. Streisand’s. Jesus no, not Darin’s What kind of freak are you? But why just one? What about Great Things by Echobelly? Mushaboom by Feist (now there’s a girl. Saw her standing alone on the stage of an almost-deserted Royal Albert Hall when she supported The Divine Comedy, several lifetimes ago, forcing people to come in from the bars and listen, just by playing her very own damn good songs on an acoustic guitar. Couple of years later she headlined the place herself)? I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family? Or the glorious opening few seconds of Roxy Music’s Pyjamarama, with its relentless crazyman drumming? All of those – not to mention near enough the entire oeuvre of Leonard Cohen – make me smile.

We shall continue with this at a later date. Set your alarms. 

Frustrated Crooner? Me?

Tonight we have been mostly rehearsing I Get A Kick Out of You. Yes, the Cole Porter song. Why not? Why shouldn’t a rock band reinterpret one of the all-time greats in their own unique fashion?  (Alternatively: three barely-musically-literate old gits take a Ramones drumtrack and shout somebody else's beautiful, timeless lyrics over the top while making up something approximating a tune).

Now, I’m known for my love of classic songs and of Great American Musicals. Why, just last week I was happily discussing ‘Hello Dolly!’ with an eighteen-year-old girl. As you'd imagine, I was more than cheered when Guitar John suggested we cover this ‘tune he’d heard in the pub at lunchtime’. So I found the chords, and the words to the seldom-performed opening verse, printed the buggers out and skipped off round to rehearsals.

What I can’t understand is this: IGAKOOY (Yay! Dopey acronym!) – seldom-performed opening verse aside, surely one of the best-known songs ever ever ever? Surely there’s not a man-jack in the English-speaking world who doesn’t have at least a passing acquaintance with Sinatra’s version, or at least with the guitar-and-strings-led Gary Shearston[1] cover that hit the big number 7 in the charts, pop-pickers, back in 1974?

Then why is it that my two fellow musical adventurers have no idea how the damn thing goes? I can accept most of our failings as a band; the need to excise ‘extraneous’ chordage, the increased speed that is part and parcel of what we do - everything full-pelt all of the time, even the sensitive ballad what I did write - but being unaware of ‘Kick’, being completely bereft of any clue as to how the bridge (‘I get a kick every time…. I see… You standing there…. Before me’) is constructed… I despair. Really I do.

But then I grew up on steady diet of old Frank Sinatra records thanks to my father, and every Sunday afternoon at our old family homestead was occupied with Benny Green’s Radio 2 show[2] which examined the Great American Songbook, playing great songs by great singers and great interpreters of those songs way before the phrase ‘Great American Songbook’ was usurped by the straggly likes of Rod Stewart[3].

And as a result, I can argue for hours about the relative merits of the Gershwins versus Rodgers and Hart[4], or whether Coward was a songwriter or not (he wasn’t: he was a playwright who, regardless of the number of musicals he wrote, only dabbled in music[5]). Man, being able to do that’s a real babe magnet in this day and age, I can tell you.

So: as it stands, we have a version of IGAKOOY with no seldom-performed opening verse (but by thunder it will be performed, and I know exactly how!), a (shall we say) up-tempo main section, and a bridge that bears no musical relation to Porter’s original whatsoever. But we’re getting there. Give it another fortnight and I think we’ll have cracked it. That, or it’ll join our cover of Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ in the vast, never-to-be-opened mausoleum marked Not Doing That One Again.

We shall see.

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[1] I do so like these footnote wallahs. In 1990 the Tamworth Songwriters Association  awarded Shearston the award for ‘Bush Ballad of the Year’. Your guess is as good as mine. Shearston is now a priest in New South Wales.

[2] Radio 2 on Sunday afternoons is now nothing but Elaine Paige and her god-awful sycophancy, or Paul O’Grady and his god-awful ‘comedy’, or John F***ing Barrowman and his endless quest for the perfect curtains. 

[3] Five volumes? FIVE F***ING VOLUMES? Couldn’t someone have thrown a thirty-years-younger woman at him, if only to slow the bastard down?

[4] No contest. George and Ira every time.

[5] Seriously. Hum me something from ‘Cavalcade’. See? 

THE NEW REM ALBUM...

THE NEW REM ALBUM

…is no such thing. It’s doubtful there’s been a new REM album for a good few years now, possibly not since Green. There have been REM album releases but they ‘ve had very little new about them. To announce a new REM album is a bit like announcing a new summer or a new rainstorm; eventually one will come along and although it may initially be refreshing, in the end it’ll turn out to be warm or wet, just like the one before it and the one that follows.

Collapse Into Now, which is what this REM album is called, is admittedly a pretty good example of its type. It’s probably the best REM album in a few years, possibly since Automatic For The People (which I must confess is where I fell out of love with the band). It does what it’s supposed to do in a functional matter, but that’s to be expected. This is their fifteeneth album. Most other bands would be ecstatic to reach fifteen albums, especially with near as damnit the same personnel as they started with. REM aren’t exactly the Sugababes on that score.

The downside to the continuity of personnel is that continuity of creativity inevitably accompanies it. Being in the same band for as long as the three remaining REMmers have isn’t the same as going to an office and sitting in front of a spreadsheet for the same period, but there’s always the danger – especially with a band as successful as REM – that the writing and recording of a new album will become just as routine. And as a result of that, the need to turn out new product  within an acceptable timescale will be prioritised over the need to experiment musically. CIN doesn’t exactly sound like a band going through the motions, but there are times when it’s obvious that there’s a tried-and-tested formula to follow.

There’s a song that sounds a bit like Whats The Frequency Kenneth? (Alligator Aviator Autopilot  Antimatter) There’s one that sounds a bit like Everybody Hurts (Walk It Back). And there are a couple which, because of the use of arpeggiated strings and mandolins, sound quite a lot like Losing My Religion  You can’t blame them for this. Even the most ardent of experimenters and the hardiest of self-reinventors fall into some kind of routine. Even David Bowie, for whom every new album was an excuse to wear new skin, went through a few years of being crap (mainly because Bowie  was always a re-interpreter rather than an innovator, always taking extant styles and twisting them into something new, but he ran out of new things to be excited by, and ended up going all drum’n’bass just because it was, y’know… there).

As routines go, though, it’s a half-way decent  furrow. The song that sounds like both Everybody Hurts and Losing My Religion  (which is called Oh My Heart) is, yes, one of Michael Stipe’s muttery-vocal numbers. He’s been doing these since Murmur was released and possibly – this is purely my own supposition  - it’s a vocal affectation that was initially tried as a nervous, confidence-less experiment, was accepted and lauded, and so gained both momentum and life of its own to become Stipe’s signature style. Oh My Heart is not a bad example of it, though; it’s original in its unoriginality.

The two standout tracks are the ones that sound most like the REM of old. Mine Smell Like Honey is a not-quite thrash that channels  Near Wild Heaven and maybe Man On the Moon; and That Someone Is You is It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) after realising that jumping up and down, even for only a few minutes, isn’t something it can do anymore.  In the midst of its enthusiasm it namechecks both Young Marble Giants and ‘New Order covers’ which, given the proximity  to YMG, I take to mean Frente!’s version of Bizarre Love Triangle.

And that sums up Collapse Into Now. It’s music for people who danced (or rather swayed and stared at the floor) to Young Marble Giants and who originally preferred the New Order to the Frente! but have now changed their minds. It’s music for sitting back with a nice glass of red, or for the commute home when Radio Two’s playing Leona Lewis again. It’s for reminding yourself of yourself fifteen years ago. You remember, back then when albums like this, and bands like REM, were new and original and occasionally groundbreaking and, for a few glorious years, you hoped you were too.