Right here. What's going to happen at the end of the countdown? Will Thom Yorke burst out of the page singing Swanee River? Will the long-awaited 7th Radiohead album materialise in your lap? Will it all be revealed to be a humungous hoax? Tune in, if you can remember, tomorrow to find out!
To the Islington Bar Academy last night (which, in spite of its name and conspicuous sponsorship by Carling, appeared to have schooled its single pint jockey very poorly indeed). The reason? To see rising jazz band the Portico Quartet and influential scenesters Partisans launch the Time Out-sponsored bit of the London Jazz Festival.
The first signings to Babel-Vortex, the label newly set up by Will Gresford, manager of the Vortex in Dalston as an offshoot of Babel, the Portico Quartet are notable, initially at least, for their unusual line up: bass, drums, soprano sax, yes, but steel pans too (or "hang" as they seem to call the thing on their website). For a second, as they appeared on stage, I imagined they perpetuating a cruel joke, forming a perverse supergroup in tribute to the buskers of Kensington High Street, whose squawks and bashes on three of those very instruments frequently assault the hard-working journalists in the Associated Newspapers HQ. Happily the steel pan was put to better use than knocking out an arrhythmic version of Take Five, and the soprano player had a much clearer tone than the blind fellow outside Gap, whose maudlin racket has brought me near suicide oh how often of a Friday afternoon.
Yes the Portico Quartet were pretty good - melodic and occasionally rather funky, at their best I thought when they ditched pretensions to breakbeat, loosened up and allowed said steel pan took a more percussive role, playing polyrhythms against the drums. But what intrigued me most was the snippet of information that, when not playing the sax, the band's reedman goes around cheese trade shows in the west country selling Raclette cheese and the kit for melting it for a living. This, it seems to me, is the very thing - the best music/dairy product crossover since Blur's Alex James set up as a cheeswright! If only all musicians had such interesting day jobs; picture Johnny Borrell injecting bacteria into a wheel of Stilton, Phil Collins manfully stacking great slabs of Wensleydale, Kate Nash devising ways of marketing Yarg. It would give hope to us all - and perhaps add a new dimension to the pop lyric.
Working my way through the pile of post that greeted me on my return from hols, I encountered a jiffy bag containing the album which the British public had elected to number one in my absence: All the Lost Souls by James Blunt. It was of near immediate assistance, its title providing an answer to a pub quiz question only last night. Alas I am unable to think of any further use for it. So I will forward it on to whichever correspondant can produce the wittiest epigram on the former soldier (perhaps a limerick: There once was a soldier named Blunt... &c). Please be creative - and please: no obscenities.
Ah! Lost summer... I have just this minute returned to England and work after two weeks of idling in the mellow, antique sun of Tuscany, reading Henry James and listening to the new album by Beirut (pictured). From which I present the following track:
It's interesting what makes good travelling music. Like travelling literature, it differs from its homebound counterpart. I can't imagine finding the time or patience to tackle something like Henry James back in London; taken at a mellow pace on an Italian hillside, his prose is a rich and rewarding pleasure (best drunk with the local Vine Nobile), not difficult and intricate as I imagine it would seem on the Bakerloo line.
Likewise Beirut*, the singname of Zach Condon, a young, non-Lebanese New Yorker whose debut album of last year, Gulag Orkestar, appropriated the sighs and aches of gypsy music much like a 19th century romantic wailing of swarthy chieftains and bejewelled maidens under enchanted oriental canopies in gauche iambs. I found that album a mite over-egged, beautifully conceived though it was; little by way of diversity and too much wallowing in the obvious tropes of gypsy music (taken to include anything vaguely Slavic; accordion waltzes, big indulgent wails, screeching violins). When in London, one craves something a little cooler, a little more cynical, funky, urban. Wisely, for the follow up, Condon has sweetened things considerably, adding a plinky organ and a certain perky Frenchness that gives the songs lift and lightness, mitigating the sense that he is confusing his own suffering for something more ancient.
The result is a delightful confection, still yearning, still questing, but in a less histrionic, more knowing way - and all the more delightful listened to while strolling by a foreign river, or pilfering grapes from a hidden vineyard, just as the listener gives way to just the kind of yearning for a simpler, more passionate, more European kind of life that inspired Condon to pick up a trumpet in the first place... The Flying Club Cup, whence the above, is out on 9 October and is now bathed in that antique Italian sunlight that ought to reflect a mellow glow over the creeping English autumn... Here he is, fittingly, on YouTube, doing Postcards From Italy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMp4CoV7h-o
*I am of course aware of the staggering pretension, not to mention limited relevance of comparing an obscure indie act to one of the great masters of English prose, but do bear with me.
Way back in the 1980's, after much pleading, my sister and I were presented with a Yamaha keyboard by our parents. It was great. About four octaves wide, it feature an amusing playable demo, 16 built in rhythm tracks and 100 voices: 03: toy piano; 22: brass ensemble; 79: glass harmonica, 93: ghost, etc. None of them sounded much like the instrument that inspired them but some had their own certain digital charm - like 78: musical saw. I remember being rather perplexed, mind you, by 96: klaxon. The brusque honk it produced was satisfying enough - exhilarating in its way - but get this: whereas all the other voices repayed the adventurous keyboardist by producing notes of different pitch as his fingers wandered up and down (allowing him to construct a melody), klaxon produced an identical parp whichever key was pressed. It was, quite literally, one note.
I think the well-informed reader will see where this one is going. Yes, years later - last night in fact - a group named after the 96th voice of mine and my sister's keyboard won the Mercury Music Prize for their debut album Myths of the Near Future. Congratulations those men! I am, in spite of my sardonic tone, a fan of the nu-rave trio (left) and their colourful racket - as good a winner as you could hope for I suppose. As soon as Amy Winehouse was installed as favourite, it was clear her very deserving effort would not win - too obvious. It was probably also pretty clear that Bat For Lashes had appeared in one too many feature proclaiming her the best outside bet for her to stand much chance. The real outsiders, like Maps and Basquiat Strings, were never going to get a look in and the rest of the list looks pretty average - if that label is not an absurdly generous one to append to The View. So within the skewiff logic favoured by the panel (who have chucked the thing at M People before now), the Klaxons' win is no travesty... but I can't help feeling the judges have missed the point slightly.
If the Mercury is a prize rewarding the best constructed album, I'm not sure that the rather monotonous Myths of the Near Future doesn't share a few too many characteristics with the 96th voice of my old Yamaha truly to be regarded as a classic. Golden Skans is one of the great singles of the year and certainly the trio's general hyperactive battiness - they intend to use their £20,000 prize to fund research into telepathy, the space cadets! - is greatly to be welcolmed. But their charms are surely best serviced in single form and most particularly in the excellent spate of remixes they have spawned. This is not damning with faint praise - the remix, appended to some fashionable blog, is probably the form of our times, in much the way that the 7-inch single was in the 60s and the 12-inch LP was in the 70s. But if the judges are serious about the album as a format in itself (as the Booker Prize is interested in novels as opposed to short stories, epic poems or novellas) they ought to have thought of rewarding an album that plays to the strengths of the format - such as... the varied-but-unified, all-killer-no-filler, zeitgeist-snaffling... Back to Black. I can't help feeling the Mercury would be taken that mite more seriously if it stopped trying to be so cleverly counter-intuitive. It's a rare occurrence, true, but sometimes a song gets to number one simply because it's very good, and sometimes the favourites is the favourite simply because it's the best.
As suggested in the article below, I recently had occasion to give my flat a jolly good seeing-to. One of the most daunting domestic tasks was attending to the cascading mountain of CDs that take up a large, double-stacked section of our shelf space. I used to take a certain amount of pride in this small library - once it was arranged in alphabetical order and one very stoned and bored day I seem to remember attempting a chronological system (anyone who now cries 'geek!' fails to understand the male mind) - but lately, since the advent of my iPod it has been left pretty well alone. Usually, I'll whack a CD on iTunes (where it usually gets forgotten) and toss the husk onto some stray pile.
So the CD corner was a sad and daunting sight. Here was a foot-high leaning tower of discs divorced from their boxes. Here was a pile of promo CDs I brought home from work couldn't quite bring myself to listen to, each of them a wrecked career. Here, for some reason, was the empty case of a CD by the mediocre R'n'B singer Mario Winans (left). Where had that come from?
The task of sorting them out proved to be one of the most enjoyable musical engagements I've had for like ages. I had not realised the extent to which the iPod had trained me out of listening to full albums - my twenty most played tracks are all by different artists; usually I spend longer on any given commute scrolling down the list of names than listening to anything in particular, and have lately simply confined it to the tomd of my pocket.
As opposed to sitting on a bus trying to ignore the prattling of schoolchildren, performing light and unengaging physical work such as tidying up is a fine state for listening to music. The mostly but not wholly receptive state it engenders makes it perfect for listening to live albums that do not repay the tinny scrutiny of the earphone. Bob Dylan's Live 1975 is terrible to commute to, but somehow perfect to potter to. Feeding C
Ds into the stereo as I went I realised quite how much sound digital cuts out. Scott 4 by Scott Walker (right), for example, is an album I had only really ever listened to on the iPod. What a revelation it is with the full bass-end restored! I soon found myself on a nostalgia trip, lining up the sort of grand and melancholy rock albums I though my iPod had beaten out of me, with its preference for blog house and French disco: Neil Young, Neutral Milk Hotel, Tim Buckley, Laura Nyro. Complexity is an underrated virtue.
By the end of my fit of tidiness, I had a newly appetising pile of CDs edited down to the ones I actually want to hear (plus a sack to take to the second hand shop and a few shoeboxes to stash away). Then I did something I haven't really been inspired to do ever since I bought my iPod: like Bruce Berry when the crowds were gone, I picked up my guitar - my personal sign of true musical health.
Since then I've changed my listening habits - ditching the iPod save for the things it does particularly well (such as creating playlists of certain genres) and listening in a less cluttered, more patient way. Talking about this with a chum, he reminisced about the music he used to take on holiday: the night before he went, he'd simply record the John Peel show on a 90 minute cassette. And that would somehow do for a week. Less is very often more.
I am rather pleased to note that this run of three posts in a day takes me to one hundred not out in the bat and ball game we call blogging - and, who knows, the ball may yet roll across the boundary to make it a clean four! As I accept my applause from the pavilion of the comments section, I note in passing that notwithstanding the recent slowing of the pace, I do try and think of you when I can and furthermore that while you may complain that other newspapers offer blogs updated far more frequently, and do not neglect to pass comment on major happenings in the music world such as whether Amy Winehouse will or won't die, I ought to point out these professional "bloggers" aren't permitted to prattle on in this whimsical and frankly indulgent fashion. Which is to say, ahem, thanks for indulging, and I look forward to the next whimsical century.
Supporters of Tottenham Hotspur have had little to cheer in recent years. We must cling to the consolations that come with being the only English club named after a character from Shakespeare's Henry IV, and our fading recollections of the time we were as swashbuckling as that noble knight. I know it brings great comfort to the firms of the Seven Sisters Road. The news that the club's executives have gone insane - emulating the our club mascot (a cockerel), toying with the idea of sacking the splendid Martin "Tony Soprano" Jol and banning the Evening Standard from White Hart Lane - does little to rekindle my enthusiasm for my boyhood team. Which is why I found myself making flirtatious overtures to another last weekend. On a visit to my grandmother's, I allowed my uncle to persuade me to go with him and my cousins to watch Chelmsford City play Maidstone United in the none-too-glamorous Ryman Premier league. I expected abject tedium; what I got was a delightful day's play in glorious sunshine: the beautiful game had come to Essex for the afternoon. The Ryman league is a good six relegations below the Premiership and is as far removed in terms of the ill-feeling it engenders. The two sets of fans mingled happily in the bar beforehand - standard practise, it seems, except when Chelmsford's bitter rivals Billericay Town visit. The ground, built round an athletics track, is small enough that you can switch ends at half-time and stand, quite literally, within spitting distance of the opposing goalie - a few of the younger Chelmsford fans tested this by trying to flob on his water-bottle. But this was about as ugly as it got. Indeed the abuse levelled at the luckless Maidstone number one was almost quaint. "Oi, Keeper! I heard that when you were a kid you were so unpopular even your imaginary friend wouldn't talk to you", jibed one wag."Well done Keeper, you're doing the job of two men: Laurel and Hardy!" commented another. The criticism seemed fair - not helped by Maidstone's colander of a defence, he did let in seven (almost one for every pound it cost to get in) as Chelmsford's buccaneering winger, Ricky Holmes, ran riot. It was impossible not to be caught up in the optimism of the new season. This was a one-day stand rather than the beginning of an affair. However, newly enthused, I fully intend to revisit my other local club, Enfield Town, whose daring FA Cup runs I used to watch regularly (in the club's former guise of Enfield FC) before their ground was sold to make way for a Tescos - like Spurs they had their own dodgy chairman to contend with. See, non-league football is subject to its own frustrations - and it gets much bleaker than 7-0 romps in the August sun. But it is a heartening reminder that our national sport is not all WAGS, bungs and £1,350 season tickets.
I have been very neglectful of late. I would like to pretend I was simply far too busy discovering new bands and editing arts pages to put up any posts, but this is not true; the real reason for my slackness is that I intended to insult my readers, who are a bunch of idiots. To this end, here are two scraps of prose you might have already turned the page on in the paper edition. Neither has anything to do with music: * * * * * * * * * I am a pig. I have no problem living in my own swill, amid unopened bank statements, humid teabags and scattered boxer shorts. My girlfriend is less swinish than me, but long work hours have had certain piggy side-effects. In short, our flat is a bit of a sty and the problem becomes ever more acute as, 21st-century professionals that we are, our possessions accumulate in inverse proportion to the time we have to put them away. Having broken many resolutions, we eventually decided to enlist the services of a cleaner. My girlfriend found a north London cleaning agency on the web, and one telephone call later, I was giving Nadezhda, a recent arrival from Bulgaria, a sort of counterintuitive house tour. Instead of discreetly brushing over the mess, I was actively seeking it out to impress on her the gravity of the task. "Look! Look how messy it is!" I said in my best Bulgarian - Nadia's English runs to the delectable phrase "I cleaning! I cleaning!", accompanied by a flourish of Mr Muscle. Using her husband as translator, we work out terms, exchanged a few pleasanteries and said our do svidaniyas. I felt rather satisfied. Not long afterwards, however, my girlfriend and I went to a screening of Ken Loach's new film, It's A Free World, which has since premiered at Venice, and will be shown on Channel 4 next month. It put our new role as employers in a disturbing context. The film centres on Angie, an endearingly feisty single mother who works for an employment agency specialising in sending Eastern Europeans on short-term labouring jobs. When she is unfairly sacked, she decides to set up her own agency, the better to provide for her son. Despite good intentions, she finds herself rewarded for exploiting the workers. Needless to say, the tale does not end happily. This ran through my head as I let Nadia in a few days later - more particularly as I negotiated with the agency, and found she only receives about two-thirds of the cash we pay for her service. No doubt trying to employ her directly would break the terms of her contract. She seems happy enough - "I cleaning!" - and has performed a magnificent job. But I can't help but feel uncomfortable about the chasm between our situations. My girlfriend's mother, a lifelong socialist whose own mother worked as a cleaner, certainly made her feelings clear - and I can see her point. It is simply impossible to command someone to iron your shirt and not feel like a bit of a bastard. Or will I get used to it? For now, I am now so determined not to exploit Nadya that the unthinkable has happened: I have started to do her job for her. So I essentially pay to guilt-trip myself into tidying up? I think I'm beginning to understand economics.
