Blur versus Oasis

Blur and Oasis were arguably the most important British bands of the Nineties. Blur adopted an Englishness that kind of kick-started the whole Britpop thing and became quite popular in an intelligent low-key way, before breaking up, or just taking a long break. Oasis were exponents of big, dumb rock and became phenomenally huge and then faded into being a Rolling Stones type of commercially successful yet creatively empty.

IN 1994 I bought Parklife and Definitely Maybe on the same day at the same record shop in Cavendish Square. I'd read a lot about both bands and had heard the "Girls and Boys" single on the radio but I don't think I'd heard anything by Oasis at the time.

When I listened to the two albums back to back I found that I preferred Blur even though their English inflected pop music was not as much to my taste and the gigantic guitar rock sound of Oasis. It came down to my irritation with Liam Gallagher's voice and vocal mannerisms. He was allegedly the best British rock vocalist of his generation but to my mind he was possibly the worst. There was little emotion in the voice and he had the excruciating habit of extending single syllables into many. Damon Albarn had a less individual voice but sang more conventionally good. The Oasis guitar wall of sound ultimately became too much where Blur obviously valued song craft and production.

I played Parklife quite a lot and listened to Definitely Maybe a few times. When The Great Escape came out and I saw it at Vibes Music I bought it immediately although I did not yet know anything about it. I completely ignored (What's The Story) Morning Glory? when it was released and even when it became an enormous hit.

Ultimately I bought every Blur album up to 13, and only bought (What's The Story) Morning Glory? 14 years after its release when I found it at a Cash Crusaders shop. I had in fact bought Blur's debut album, Leisure, in about 1992 because I had read good things about them in Select magazine and because I thought the album cover photograph was great, but it was stolen from me in 1993 and I never bought a replacement copy, mostly because I did not think of it as such a great album.

The Great Escape was not to wonderful either. By this time I was no longer keen on the Blur pop sound and lyrics about colourful characters that may have been no more than figments of Damon Albarn's imagination and this is no doubt the Blur album I've least often listened to. There was the great fight at the time with Oasis for a number one single and even if Blur won the battle, I thought the winning song, "Country House", was very twee and even stupid without being exciting or interesting. As far as I was concerned Blur was a spent force, perhaps successful but no longer compelling listening.

With "Song 2" my attitude changed completely. "Beetlebum" came out first and I quite liked it and almost thought they had returned to the heights of "Girls and Boys" but the very punk "Song 2" got me back into the fold. It was your perfect slice of 2 minutes' worth of riff, excitable vocals and arresting hook. No wonder "Song 2" broke Blur in America. It was simple yet effective and energizing. It made an old punk like me want to pogo again

The album was Blur, and it is kind of strange for any band to give its fourth album an eponymous title. It is more usual for the debut, but I guess this album was a kind of debut of the new Blur who were so over Britpop and no longer prepared to peddle the cheeky pop chappies image. Some reviews suggested that Blur represented such an about face that it would be commercial suicide. As it turned out, "Song 2" helped make it a very commercial proposition.

I also bought Blur (as was the case with 13 the next year) from Vibes Records, and as had been the case with The Great Escape, I found it when I was merely browsing, without specifically looking for any Blur product. I bought it without considering whether I really wanted it but I guess "Song 2" was as compelling a reason as any to own this album. When I took it home and played it for the first time, I also found that the album was an overall musical success and much more to my taste and liking than its predecessor, or any of the preceding albums. This music was different, darker, more skewed and much more satisfying as a piece of work than the Britpop Blur.

Then came 13, which was the breakup album, after Damon Albarn had parted ways with Justine Frischman and was feeling very sorry for himself. Once again Blur moved away from their previous sound, very far away from the Blur of 1994, and made music that resonated and hit home, emotionally and musically, and made me believe that Blur had at last found a proper, intelligent rock groove. There was gospel, weird post-rock shapes and superior melodic pop. For my money this album is the Blur masterpiece, but I would pair Blur and 13 as two of the best British albums of the Nineties.

About 4 years after 13 and during the making of the Think Tank album, Graham Coxon left the band. By then I was kind of over Blur and the British scene as a whole and never had any intention of buying Think Tank, despite the very positive reviews it received. In any event it seemed to me that the absence of a guitarist would tend to make the music more keyboard and sample oriented and therefore less rocking and this prospect did not excite me. By and large I am into guitar pop and rock.

Somewhere between Blur and 13 I finally got around to buying Modern Life Is Rubbish, the album that was the first of the trilogy that ended with The Great Escape. It was far better than the third album of the group and it was perhaps because the songs were more ambitious and yet also simpler to appreciate. But ultimately it was also an album that appealed to me only so much. The sound of the record is not the type of music that I had listened to before that and still does not truly float my boat to this day. I like more basic, primitive rock music. All this clever pop stuff is all very good but it appeals more to my mind than my gut. I guess that is why it paled after a while.

Today my Blur albums are packed away in a box in a spare room and for a while I seriously considered giving them all away. I cannot think I would ever want to listen to Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and The Great Escape all that much again, I would imagine that the same would really apply to Blur and 13 as well Blur relates to a certain time in my life, when I still made an effort to follow the music of a contemporary band and I do not do that much anymore for any but South African bands. The other thing is that I never listened to Blur type music in the ordinary course and Blur represented some kind of anomaly in my musical taste.

I suppose I bought the Blur more for what they represented than out of a genuine interest in, and love for, a weird kind of parochial British pop.

After Definitely Maybe I ignored Oasis, even as I was buying all those Blur albums. I did not like the music all that much, mostly for the reason of my dislike for Liam Gallagher's vocal performances, and could not understand why they became so massive in the UK. It was almost because of the phenomenon that (What's The Story) Morning Glory? became that I refused to buy it, although I should have at least investigated the music behind the mega success. Never mind, I was quite happy to ignore it and just read about how massive Oasis was becoming.

There was massive hype when Be Here Now was released. One of the songs was on a freed CD that came with a magazine I bought and it seemed kind of nice but by then I had developed a mindset that militated against buying any Oasis product and that resistance has lasted up to now when Oasis is still a major band but seems to me to be a modern day Rolling Stones where the brand is the thing, not the product the band puts out. The odd Oasis single played on local radio seemed quite nice and solid in a pleasurably dumb rock manner but did not motivate me to spend money on Oasis. Not even on a collection of B-sides or a later greatest hits album.

The drought was broken in 2005 when I found the DVD Known To Millions, companion to a live CD of the same title, in a French supermarket at a budget price. When I eventually played the DVD, and I have yet to play it all the way through, I saw that it was visually a pretty boring record of an enormo Oasis gig somewhere. This is the late period Oasis from the period of Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants and the set list consists of old favourites and more current numbers but over the length of the DVD the songs do tend to start sounding the same and because there is very little to stimulate the eye (the band just stands there and plays) my attention started wandering. I might just as well think of it as a CD album; put it on and walk away and do something else without bothering to watch the so-called action.

In 2009 I finally bought (What's The Story) Morning Glory? because I found it cheaply at Cash Crusaders and finally found out what the hype had been all about back in 1995 and 1996. The sound is more traditionally produced that than the wall of sound of the debut album and songs are therefore more conventionally tuneful and appealing. By this time I had already heard a number of the songs, such as the title track, "Roll with It", "Wonderwall" "Champagne Supernova," and "Don't Look Back In Anger ", and the collection feels like a bit of a greatest hits collection. Very nice album, Liam Gallagher's voice still grates, but it is not a bad little record. I still do not understand why this album caused the band to go so massive. In my opinion the original underwhelmed reviews were spot on, as much as the overenthusiastic, overblown reviews for Be Here Now nowadays seem slightly silly and hysterical, the product of music journalists who did not want to be wrong again.

I have not listened to Definitely Maybe in years and I do not listen to Morning Glory all that much either. I still feel no compelling reason to acquire any other Oasis product though a formal greatest hits album may be an option. Oasis are now old hat, rock monsters going through the motions because that is how they make their money and not because they still matter or have relevance. Noel Gallagher made his mark and it was a large mark and he will go down in rock history for his achievements but in 20 years' time Oasis will be as much of a novelty nostalgia act as the Rolling Stones have become despite all protestations to the contrary.

On Easter weekend 2009 Oasis played at the Coke Zero Fest in Somerset West, Western Cape, as the headliners, above the likes of Snow Patrol and Panic at the Disco. It was a money gig for Oasis. They walked on stage, ran through the usual suspects of their hit repertoire, finished with "I Am The Walrus" and walked off. It was a big sound, it rocked, the audience went crazy for them and it was oddly unsatisfactory. The most I could say for the experience was that I had never thought I would see Oasis live and at least they are not officially a nostalgia act.

The war between Blur and Oasis in the mid-Nineties now seems quaint and silly and not particularly relevant in the bigger scheme of things. I guess you had to be there and perhaps you had to be a publicist for either of the bands or their respective record labels. To make a comparison with the Beatles and the Stones is somewhat odious and I think the more apposite comparison would be between an act that specialised in the clever musical idea and either well observed vignettes of real life or dark autobiography, and an act whose leader boasted of how many musical ideas he's lifted from the likes of the Beatles and where guitar power was the main thing and the lyrics were facile and seemed to be written just to give the singer something to sing. At the end Damon Albarn was not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and to try apparently difficult music, while Noel Gallagher never revealed himself in his lyrics and has been content simply to keep on refining his basic blueprint.

It is also fatuous to try to define which was or is the better group. They were both good in their chosen field and both deserved the success they attained and who knows who will have the most standards if the fashion finally gets around to the Nineties in the same way the Eighties have been so thoroughly revisited for so long now.

Britpop waxed and waned in the slipstream of Blur and Oasis begat dozens of traditionalist guitar bands. If there has been a longer lasting influence from either it seems too early to show.

Blur dissolved at the right time, before the music got repetitive or bland or just superfluous. Damon Albarn has proved that there can be second act in pop by having a very interesting solo career and piloting Gorillaz to superstardom. Graham Coxon has released a bunch of solo albums ranging from raging full on rock to quite pastoral stylings and if he is not as wildly successful in this as Albarn is, he is absolutely gaining an immense reputation for what he is capable of. Alex James had a side-line pop career, kept on partying and got rather literate as well and I have no idea what he is currently doing. The same applies to Dave Rowntree. For all I know he races model cars in his spare time and raises a family fulltime. There was a Blur reunion of sorts in 2009 for live shows. As far as I know there are no plans for another album but it could still happen.

Oasis releases a new album every couple of years and keeps ton touring and the Gallaghers keep on battling each other. It is a show that can keep running for a long time, for as long as money is to be made from the brand, anyway.

No doubt there will be financial reasons for intermittent Blur reunions.

Both bands will be best served by a "greatest hits" or "best of" compilation to explain to posterity what the fuss was all about way back when they were young and fresh and there was a new optimism in the UK led by New Labour and the media hype of Cool Britannia. In due course there will be the box sets with unreleased tracks, either outtakes or demos, and the adoring notes of long-time fans that never stopped believing. Hey, it's nothing but rock and roll and if you are lucky you can symbolise an era or zeitgeist and make money at it as well.

 

 

 

NEIL YOUNG’S TIME FADES AWAY

Time Fades Away (1973) is the one Neil Young album that he refuses to sanction for CD release and I do not understand why he thinks it is his worst album ever. For my money there are plenty of candidates for that status among his output over the last 30 years or so and if Silver & Gold could have been released in the first place there is no reason why Time Fades Away should not be released, even if Young cannot stand it. Anyway, he is plainly wrong if he believes it is such a bad album. It may not have turned out to be what he wanted for it, but for my money it holds up with anything he recorded in the Seventies and beyond.

Time Fades Away and On The Beach (1974) were the third and fourth Neil Young albums I ever owned because I bought them at a bargain price as part of a Warner Brothers "twofer" re-release campaign of the late Seventies or early Eighties, where they paired oldish albums by selected artists for mid-priced release. In this way I acquired not only the two Neil Young albums but also The Doors' LA Woman and 13 and Frank Zappa's Hot Rats and Waka Jawaka as double packs.

It took a long time for On The Beach to be made available on CD, perhaps because it has always been seen as a "difficult" album and not as commercial as the record company would have liked. To my mind Time Fades Away was the more exciting rock and roll album of the two and the one I found most immediately appealing. On The Beach needed more effort and time to appreciate.

Most of the tracks on Time Fades Away were recorded during Young's North American tour of 1973, in the wake of the huge success of Harvest, and the band is the Stray Gators, with David Crosby and Graham Nash on one or two tracks. From the visceral stomp of the title track to the ripping and roaring Last Dance, the album is a delight and a great record of what a Neil Young live show was like when it did not just feature the grungy mid-paced guitar workouts of Crazy Horse, but a band of varied musicians who could rock as much as they could be subtle and with songs that had melody and poetry.

I recorded the 2 albums on one side each of a C90 cassette tape and played that tape quite a lot back in the day when I still listened mostly to cassette tapes rather than CDs. Along with Rust Never Sleeps and Re-Ac-Tor those two albums made up the core of my Neil Young collection, until I eventually bought Harvest, and in die early Nineties started seriously collecting Neil Young on CD. I still believe that the albums from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to Rust Never Sleeps probably represent the pinnacle of Young's oeuvre and is a body of work.

Never mind the "lost" years of Eighties experimentalism, the triumphant return as the Godfather of Grunge and the latter-day political and polemical approach, since 1979 and whether deliberately or through lack of inspiration, Neil Young has not much of anything that resembles a sturdy, long-lasting, worthwhile body of work. He can still rock out when he wants to, or go all country folk rock on us, but it seems to me that he writes lyrics just to be able to sing something or just say something and not because the spirit truly moves him. The melodies are still sublime and the voice always sends chills up my spine when he does the high lonesome thing, but over the length of any given album the trite and often baldly clichéd lyrics start to grate and one tries not to listen to what he say and concentrate on how he says it instead. For a songwriter who was thought of as something of a poet this is a terrible thing.

Over the past couple of years Neil Young has released a bunch of recordings from his archives, from a live set at the Fillmore East with the first incarnation of Crazy Horse to a solo concert in Massey Hall in Toronto to a whole box set of studio and live recordings of the very early years of his career when he was making the transition from folk rocker to folkie to rock star. Unless Young just wants to release everything so that one can get a complete picture of what he had done over the years, from juvenilia to mature work, one must believe that there was a selection process and that the stuff that is now commercially available is regarded as good stuff. This is a real journey through the past and I do not believe that every morsel is of the same high quality and some of it is pretty redundant, such as the various solo gigs. If you have Live Rust you pretty much have as much solo Neil Young as you need.

This vast project of trawling through the past makes it even more peculiar that Young refuses to allow a CD release for Time Fades Away. I know that album and it is pretty damn entertaining and no worse than, and really of a piece with, the period from After The Goldrush to Rust Never Sleeps and a damn sight better than Harvest Moon, Silver & Gold, Are You Passionate, Prairie Wind, and the like. In fact, I would like to see an expanded Time Fades Away with more songs from that tour as re-issue extras.

 

Blues Broers Return To Rock The House again

In 1996 I wrote a long piece about the late Nico Burger, guitarist for All Night Radio, Any Driver and Blues Broers, which was the first extended piece about music I ever wrote. I also digressed a bit on various other bands of the era I had followed and so the piece turned into a bit of nostalgia fest of a bygone Cape Town, in the lean years of the late Eighties and early Nineties when so many promising bands either never released any recordings or could not sustain a career in the music industry.

 

Since then I have published a lot of stuff on my 2 music blogs but it is the Nico Burger piece that has attracted the most responses, from merely interested parties, to Nico's last girlfriend, to John Frick, the original guitarist for the Blues Broers.

John now lives in The Hague, Netherlands and leads a blues band there, called the Blues Hombres. He gave me the links and I checked out a couple of videos of his band on stage. Clayton Frick, John's older brother, who played guitar for The Flaming Firestones and then his own blues band, lives in Australia.

In late April 2010 John wrote to me via Facebook and announced that the Blues Broers would reform, or return after a long hiatus, to play a number of gigs in the Western Cape. Clayton Frick would be here as well and they would try to get as many of the old band members involved too. Nico is dead, as is Frank Frost, the original drummer and father of Albert Frost the last Blues Broers guitarist, but the rest are still alive and kind of kicking.

Locally Albert Frost is probably the most successful alumnus of the Blues Broers as a well-respected session guitarist and recording artist in his own right, with Frosted Orange and also under his own name.

Back in the day the Blues Broers were one of the hardest working bands in South African show business and regularly drew happy crowds who loved nothing better than to have a drink or two and get down to the hard hitting R & B and blues of the Broers and to call the band much loved (as the cliché has it) 9is probably not an understatement. There was an entire band of brothers, so to speak, who hung out with the band and attended the gigs, and I was one of them.

Last Friday night (14 May 2010) and at The Hidden Cellar, upstairs at De Akker in Stellenbosch, a bunch of us had a chance to relive our relative youth and once more experience the groove that is the Blues Broers at their best.

In the mid-Eighties the space that is now known as the Hidden Cellar had no name. It was just the upstairs room at De Akker where bands played. One entered through a door on a side street and walked up carpeted stairs, paid your entry fee, and entered a dark, wood panelled smoky room with rustic tables and benches and an equally rustic looking bar at one end. The stage was low and the band usually had a huge stack of speakers on either side of the stage (the gigantic bass bins of yore were a particular favourite of mine as one could stick one's entire drunken head into one) and probably no monitor for the singer. There was no sound guy, just a primitive mixing board at the side of the stage. The band played its own mix tape during the 15 minute intervals between sets.

It was gloriously low rent and primitive, but I spent many Friday and Saturday nights there, got drunk on Tassenberg and danced most of the night away. In Stellenbosch one danced to the band; in Cape Town the crowds danced to the DJ and stood stock still when the band was one.

Nowadays the Hidden Cellar's entrance is through a different stairway one accesses from a Dorp Street entrance to De Akker, and the interior of the room has been somewhat remodelled and it seems the benches are mostly gone, but otherwise there is a real sense of déjà vu for anyone who spent as much there as I once did. This place is a part of my personal rock and roll history.

De Akker was buzzing with students either already drunk or working hard at getting there and it was crowded and the air was pungent with cigarette smoke. Ahead of me on the stairs was a bloke with a ciggy in hand and one of the woman who worked the entrance told him it the Hidden Cellar was a non-smoking venue, took his cigarette, had a puff and put it out. It was somewhat weird listening to the blues in a room entirely free of cigarette smoke as somehow one must have dim lighting and cigarette smoke to have the entirely psychologically and emotionally correct ambience for blues. Anyhow, that is how it was when I went to clubs a lot. No place for asthmatics or sensitive chests.

Clayton Frick took the time to thank the audience for not smoking and this was, as they say, ironic, seeing as how once upon a time he was a founder of the Smokehouse Blues Club. Maybe it was a smokehouse like the one Ina Anderson of Jethro Tull owns in Scotland, that smokes salmon.

I certainly did note a few familiar old faces, like Vernon Swart, artist and drummer, Valiant Swart (no relation, I guess), Gees (who crouched at the side of the stage and took lots of photographs), my old university and Army buddy, Dan Lombard, and his brother Jack, and a couple of faces that seemed familiar though they were people whose names I never knew in the first place. The younger generation was also suitably represented. Dan's one son plays in the band Stack Shot who opened for the Blues Broers, and some of the kids must have been their mates, but there were also a bunch of student types and others who were between 20 and 50 and I would imagine that many of them either never saw the Blues Broers live before this night, or must have gone with their parents. The crowd absolutely did not consist only of the diehard fan base that would have grown older with the band.

As had been my custom since my early days at De Akker I stood stage left (as one faces it) close to the guitarist, and almost next to the rather small speaker on a pedestal that has replaced the PA stack and humongous bass bins of prehistory. My ears still rang for a couple of hours afterwards though.

Tim Rankin is the new kid in the band. I do not know whether he's played with these guys before, but Rob Nagel was highly complementary of Rankin's skill as tub thumper, saying, as a bassist, that he really appreciates the value of a good drummer, and that Tim Rankin is one. I kind of agree. Rankin is that rarity in a blues or rock drummer – the guy who keeps time, keeps the beat tight, and who is unobtrusive.

Rob Nagel and Simon (Agent) Orange are the core of the band because they are the only members who've been Blues Broers in all incarnations of the band. John Frick was a founder member, but left, to be replaced by Nico Burger and, in a sense, John Mostert, and in turn Nico was replaced by Albert Frost. Tonight therefore, we had the founder guitarist returning to cross frets with the (then) kid who was the last guitarist for the band.

Rob is a pillar of strength on bass and a fury on blues harp, and Agent Orange may not quite resemble Memphis Slim but he can pound a keyboard with the best of them. The combination of keyboard and mouth harp as band instruments meant that the band had 3 lead instrumentalists and also gave it a dimension and depth their contemporary blues bands did not have, as most of them were guitar bands with the emphasis on hot shot lead guitar and not the kind of ensemble playing the Blues Broers were capable of.

 

The other good thing about the Blues Broers was that it always had three vocalists. John Frick, Rob Nagel and Agent Orange took turns at the microphone and the variety added enough spice to the mix to keep the show from being boring, especially once John Mostert came on board. Mostert is not much of a vocalist, whether with the Blues Broers or with the Boulevard Blues Band he joined when the Broers went into hiatus. At best Mostert is a serviceable hoarse voiced shouter; at his worst (and this is particularly true of his recorded vocals) his voice lacks strength, emotional depth or any sign of a blues feeling.

Tonight Mostert was not too bad. One could almost forgive him for his past sins against the blues, but then he also did not sing so many of the tunes, and I must say he slowly strangled Dolly Mae, not the best of tunes to begin with, to the point that the concept of bathos started to have meaning for me. By that I mean that he did not do well.

Weirdly enough a fan club of women started shouting for his return to the stage when, to their dissatisfaction I guess, there were too many songs in a row by a variety of the other possible singers in the band. The women must have been friends and family of the singer.

Clayton Frick was never a member of the Blues Broers, as far as I know, and led his own band, but was obviously tight with the Broers, given that his brother was their guitarist and because he was in The Flaming Firestones with Rob Nagel. Clayton was a great vocalist and strong rhythm player but I never did like his lead style, which was a bit too harsh and excessive for my taste. Tonight he seemed a tad subdued, except for the couple of words he spoke on stage to thank the audience for not smoking and informing us of the philosophical nature of his band mates. He played a lot of rhythm, some lead and sang some, but his presence, even if it was right in front and centre, was not very authoritative, as if he were slightly uncertain of his position.

John Frick was a good example of the quiet guy who lets his guitar do the talking on stage, except when he sang a couple of songs. One of the interesting aspects of that original version of the Blues Broers was that not every song had a guitar solo, again unlike so many of the other so-called blues bands where the guitarist somehow felt compelled to solo on each and every tune. It was refreshing to have a guy who was content to serve the song and the performance rather than feed his own ego with his fleet fingered brilliance – and a lot of bad solos were played by guys who could not seem to pull their fingers off the freeboard.

Tonight John did more of the same, though he was a lot more flash than I recollect, but then time and experience would count for something and this was after all a little bit of a guitar master blaster reunion, so why not show off your chops? He was still fiery, interesting, his own man and self-effacing yet effective, and he sang a bunch of tunes and played a bit of slide guitar. Not bad for an international superstar; well, he did fly in from the Netherlands.

 

Albert Frost is possibly not unaware of his status as the kid made good. If memory serves he was 17 when he played second guitar in the Blues Broers behind Nico Burger. When he took over the lead slot, the transition was seamless and, apart from some recordings of shows or rehearsals, his guitar sound is the recorded guitar sound of the Blues Broers.

Albert stepped on stage in spiffy black suit and black shirt and looked like the business, somewhat overdressed compared to the casual attire of the other guys, but he only lacked the trilby to look every inch the professional bluesman. He worked his guitar with the casual insouciance only the very talented and very confident should attempt, and he carried it off. The jacket soon came off, when the sweaty stuff started kicking in, and he showed off all he had and more over the course of the evening, whether he was doing his version of the Stevie Ray Vaughan shuffle, the Bo Diddley beat or just fiery lead breaks.

The Blues Broers managed to have top flight guitarists throughout their lengthy career and tonight the first and the last emphasised that fact over and over.

The songs comprised a heady mixture of own compositions and standards, some from the Broers repertoire and some from John Frick's repertoire. Simon Orange is the best songwriter in the band and his compositions could probably succeed in a pop or rock context as much as in the blues context, and Glove is in my opinion still the best rockin' blues the Broers ever recorded. It is a pity that there was no Hoochie Coochie Man, always a Rob Nagel showcase, or even Clayton Frick's take on Rock Me, Baby, a great tune from the Flaming Firestones days. I guess it was a question of so many tunes and only so much time. As it was, the band finally left the stage at about midnight, after a substantial encore set.

The audience was well entertained and exuberant. A bunch of us hung out at stage front, also because of the pressure from the numbers behind us, and a lot of the youngsters danced and waved their arms about. There is very little to beat hot, sweaty, live R & B on a good night, and this was a good night. It always amazes me that hearing the opening chords or notes of tunes, such as Glove or The Sun Is Shining, still makes a chill of thrill run up and down my spine each time I hear it, regardless of how often I've heard it before. Although I was a teenager in the punk rock era, the blues was my first love (and may well be my last love), and if they run in your veins you can never be separated from them.

I do not care how many bands there are who play similar sets of classic blues tunes. If they are any good, they have my vote. Musical fads come and go but the blues stays, sometimes more fashionable and sometimes virtually ignored by the mainstream, but the blues keeps satisfying those parts of the heart and soul and mind no pop, rock, jazz, rap, funk or classical music can truly satisfy. The blues is not about intellect or deep lyrics (though the topics can often be pretty heavy) or technique or anything to do with mechanical application of principles. You feel it in your gut or you don't. Once you have felt it in your gut, it's there for life.

 

That was, and on recent evidence is, the thing about the Blues Broers. Although the band was obviously serious about what they did and dedicated enough to keep going long after their peers had given up, they were not po faced about it. The Blues Broers realised that one could and should have fun with the blues for it is party music after all; the music of dark backrooms and country juke joints; the music of alcohol and dancing, and fucking. It is a cliché but I guess you left a Blues Broers gig happy regardless of your state of mind when you entered the room.

I certainly left the Hidden Cellar pretty happy last Friday night.

Dan Patlansky Does Not Move My Soul

Dan Patlansky's Move My Soul is album number 4 for South Africa's very own Stevie Ray Vaughan clone and I guess this is one more time where can only say Dan is keeping on keeping on doing what he does best.

The talent is undeniable, as is the drive and dedication, and the pure will to be the most technically gifted blues guitarist he can possibly be. Is there really any soul to this skill, though? Most of these lyrics sound like Patlansky's approximation of what the blues should sound like, a pastiche of tropes, and not truly something he feels deeply, as ought to be the case with blues. You can learn the elements of blues guitar but you cannot learn to have the blues; you can practice your licks till your fingers bleed but you cannot practice having the blues.

Patlansky covers BB King's You Upset Me and Arthur Crudup's That's Allright (more famously Elvis Presley's first hit single) and lesson's are noteworthy. King is arguably the most famous bluesman alive (at the writing of this piece) and perhaps the best blues guitarist there will ever be, not because he could showboat but because his technique and emotional attack combined so seamlessly that he is pretty much own his own at the top of the blues pyramid, with no-one even close. Crudup, on the other hand, was your basic journeyman bluesman who could write decent songs, almost pop blues, yet did not have the talent or ability to do proper justice to his own songs. In his case, other people made his songs shine.

Patlansky falls somewhere between the two poles. He has emotional intensity when he sings, and his guitar can sound like demons screaming in hell, but his own tunes are pretty basic and not particularly memorable. The groove is the thing.

To his credit Dan Patlansky does not attempt to sound like B B King on this version of You Upset Me, but apart from the Vaughnisation of the song, Patlansky brings nothing new or interesting to his interpretation, if one could even call it an interpretation. He just plays the hell out of it and that's he does and that's all he does.

Wendy Oldfield, I guess, adds the gospel wail to Insufficient Man, and Guy Buttery adds sitar to the accoustic Peace of Eden instrumental. The latter tune is so much the better off for being a lullaby of sorts, with bottleneck flourishes, as it provided the proverbial oasis of calm amidst the intense pace of the guitar fireworks

The title track of the album is, natch, a kind of soul blues lament, once again with Wendy Oldfield emoting in the background and one can imagine the tune being a showstopper on stage providing Patlansky plays with more backing than his usual trio. Now that I think of it, weren't there horns on the previous albums? Move My Soul, the song, cries out for a riffing horn section driving the theme home.

Come & Play is obviously a pivotal song as it has a video and it seems to be an attempt at creating a rockin' good times boogie type of thing one would play at a juke joint for dancers a couple of drinks ahead of the game. Not essential but fun.

Unfortunately the album loses its plot round about here.

Luca is the second, almost 12-minute long, instrumental and this time I am reminded of three guys jamming in the studio, with the rhythm section basically vamping behind a masterful improvisatory guitarist. The song has many sections, some quiet and mellow, some relying on intricate jazzy chordal work, and some with bravura soloing. Maybe the track is intended as some kind of guitar masterclaas in which Dan Patlansky can show off his chops without the distraction of lyrics. I do not know who or what Luca is and why he/she/it merited this homage or tribute or compliment and I do not understand why this complete piece of filler, albeit it very well played filler, is on the album. At half the length it would have been too long.

Lord You Are Beautiful is as superfluous but it is less than a minute long.

That's Alright Mama is an exercise in fleet fingered blues, reminiscent of Alvin Lee's Ten Years After way back in the mid- to late Sixties, and not very alright at all. Why did Patlansky bother to maim this song in this horrible fashion? He brings nothing noteworthy to it, does not enhance it and should just have recorded one more of his own compositions to show off how fast he can pick, if that is what he wanted to do.

After the filler comes Backside of Paradise, which is a bottleneck and percussion tune that is about as close to the Delta as Patlansky gets and it is quite wonderful, not least because it is slower, more thoughtful and a hell of a lot more tuneful and succinct than the electric showboating he so loves. If I were to make a mix tape of Patlansky songs, this one would feature on it, no question.

The album closes on yet another instrumental, which again sounds like a jam and like something added because they needed to make up a number of tracks.

I now own all four Dan Patlansky releases and I still rate the second album, True Blue, as overall the best of the bunch for variety of styles, strength of songwriting and the sheer audacious ambition of it in the South African context where a blues band may make money playing live but I cannot quite see that albums would be commercially viable. Move My Soul is too much like "Real – Part Two", and not in a good way. My problem with most of Dan Patlansky's stuff is that there is little that is compelling enough that I would want to listen to it a lot I am speaking as a guy who loves the blues a great deal and who owns a bunch of albums by the real Stevie Ray Vaughan. One can listen to only so much virtuoso blues guitar playing before you start longing for some proper songwriting, some tunes, something that will stick in your mind.

 

All that sticks in my mind about Dan Patlansky is an admiration for his ability and an astonishment that he is as good a guitar player as he is. The songs do not stick. He has a schtick, and it may be sincere schtick form someone who must love the blues, but it is a schtick nonetheless. The blues is meant to be about realness and Dan Patlansky is still way too much of an imitator, an expert at pastiche and not a innovator. He may one day write a proper blues and I would want to around when he does.

 

Until then I'll listen to Stevie Ray when I want to hear someone who sounds like Stevie Ray, or to the old giants of Chicago blues when I want my soul moved by blues.

 

 

 

Suck

Suck played what was known as "underground" in South African in 1970 when their debut album Time To Suck was released on Parlophone Records, not so long before the home of the Beatles. Nowadays it is available on a CD from RetroFresh Records who have made it a mission to introduce us classic South African rock albums that have languished in total obscurity since their vinyl release.

I was 11 years old when Time To Suck was unleashed on the South African rock public but was totally and blissfully unaware of Suck's existence as I was not much into underground at the time, preferring the likes of Neil Diamond and the bubblegum pop of the time.

As I understand it, "underground" was a mixture of heavy and progressive rock, more or less anything that was not pop. The exponents ranged from Freedoms Children, to Hawk, to Abstract Truth, to Otis Waygood Blues Band, to Suck, and probably more.

Suck was apparently quite outrageous and shocking for its time and that someone was prepared to release even one album by them is pretty amazing considering the political and social restrictions applicable in South Africa at the time. The other interesting aspect to this, judging by an album full of cover versions, is that Suck seems to have been just a typical bar band of the time, playing a selection of songs from some of the heavy hitters of the time in the UK and the USA, such as Grand Funk, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Free and Deep Purple, rather than their own songs. In fact there is only one original tune in the set.

I guess, if you could not listen to Black Sabbath at your local club, Suck doing a version of War Pigs was the next best thing. They are nice and heavy, with a powerful vocalist, a guitarist who knows his power chords and a rhythm section with as little subtlety as would be required to stomp the audience into submission. There are also a few touches of flute just to add the progressive edge.

Almost all of the songs on the album were previously unknown to me, but Deep Purple's Into The Fire (utterly without organ flourishes by a Jon Lord impressionist) and Donovan's Season of the Witch are, so to say, old friends. I know the latter song best in the Stephen Stills / Al Kooper version off the Supersession album, though I have also had the pleasure of hearing Donovan doing his song. Suck do a very heavy version that removes all of the psychedelia from it and adds a drum solo; those were the days.

For the rest, I do not know whether Suck improves on Grand Funk Railroad, King Crimson or Free thought I would be so bold as to say that Andy Iannides is a far superior vocalist to Mark Farner of Grand Funk. In any event, never knows whether the songs sound different to the original version because the cover band is inventive and want to bring something new, or if they simply are not capable of an exact reproduction even if they try.

So, as a record of a band Time To Suck is probably important and it was necessary to release it on CD. My impression is that local rock albums were a relative rarity in the Seventies (and remained so until the mid-Nineties) and for that reason each and every local rock LP should be brought back in the public eye by CD release. Having said that, I cannot think that Suck or its one and only album were extremely vital parts of the South African rock tapestry, except maybe for the band members and those living fans who were around at the time. Say what you will, but the album is still a pub band's jukebox repertoire, and there were many such bands at the time and if most of them were less outrageous on stage than Suck, it does make then any less meritorious.

 

 

Lank Sweatband

Sweatband was the second Cape Town band I followed from gig to gig after All Night Radio, from the early days in Die Stal in Stellenbosch to the almost endless series of farewell gigs at the Hout Bay Manor Hotel, and in particular their spectacular homecoming concert at the Brass Bell in Kalk Bay after they had conquered Johannesburg.

At the time, possibly because I found it on sale, I bought the cassette tape version of the Lank Sweat debut album and not the vinyl LP, and now recently I've bought the Fresh Music reissue with bonus tracks from the sessions of the second, never released album.

After the heights of success of two hit singles on Radio 5 Wendy Oldfield left for a solo career, was replaced by 2 female vocalists, first Michelle Bestbier with Kelly Hunter, and then Tanya Malherbe joined Kelly. The band fell apart with huge debts and no record company support. John Mair followed a solo career playing his hits and covers in pubs and then died. Wendy Oldfield had something of a successful solo career but that has long since died the death. I have no idea what happened to the Dieter the bassist, Leslie the drummer and Kelly Hunter.

By the time the debut LP, No Sweat, was released the boys in the band had splendid late Eighties mullets and Oldfield had become a kind of sex goddess of local rock and roll after she lost the puppy fat she had when she joined the band and discovered the effect of tight black leather.

On stage both Oldfield and Mair sang, and in the beginning it was almost an equal division, but once they had gone to Johannesburg and were discovered, management obviously decided that Oldfield, who had a voice, should be the focal point and Mair had the cold comfort of singing just one or two numbers a night. After Oldfield was gone, and even with the 2 new chick singers, Mair reasserted himself and sang about half the songs on stage again.

In the beginning Sweatband sounded pretty much like a standard early Eighties reggae and white funk influenced New Wave band and then mutated into a highly tooled hard rock band with perhaps the best rock songs in South Africa at the time. On stage the band was killer and the best part was that John Mair kept writing superior songs even after the debut album was released and by the final gigs had a store of songs that cried out for vinyl release but not many were.

The CD reissue, called Lank Sweat (with an almost forgotten piece of slang, indicating that it contains almost all the tracks the band ever recorded)
brings together the songs on the debut album and unreleased tracks intended for a follow-up. When No Sweat was released I compared it to All Night Radio's The Heart's Te Best Part, produced by a stupid American Steve Louw had imported, while Sweatband was produced by local guy Kevin Shirley, and found that the completely local product kicked the ass of the sessions on which the ugly American had gotten his filthy paws.

Listening to those tracks now, the sonic effect is still powerful yet the production is so much of its time that the drums sound far too leaden for comfort. Sweatband may have had a heavy inclination but they were at heart a superior pop band and the drums should have skipped where they plodded. If there has been digital remastering, it has done the album a disservice by emphasising this type of flaw.

The effect now is that the songs sound overproduced and overweight and not bright and peppy enough. Ironically the two ballads that close the record (The Ballade and Sleep Like A Child) have the lightest touch of all the songs. The hits Shape Of Her Body and This Boy (originally sung by Mair, and taken over by Oldfield) suffer from the leaden sound and that is a disappointment.

Even at the time I thought No Sweat had too much filler and most of them were songs that had not been in the original set and I have always wondered why better, earlier material was excluded in favour of later lightweight nonsense, and now I see that some of the early tunes were recorded for the second album. There was also a cassette only demo tape sounding album I've heard, of the early Sweatband sound, with even more apparently lost tunes and some of them were integral to the set list in the band's struggle days in Stellenbosch and were quite good. John Mair certainly had great depth as a songwriter.

It seems that Sweatband, whether of their own accord or perhaps from pressure to boost Oldfield as front person, intended to go for more slow songs on the second release, giving Oldfield some work to do, with a mixture of new and old tunes, and this does not really work well. In a way, although it may have been seen as a progression, it seems to me that the band was not hitting any targets with this second batch of songs. The production values are high, with the drums once again way up front in the mix, but the effect is lacklustre, as if the band was going through the motions rather than being passionate about what they were doing. No wonder Oldfield was so easily persuaded to jump ship and forge ahead on her own. Some of the songs could be prototypes for her new career as diva with a conscience.

Sweatband did not have much competition in Cape Town, and perhaps the rest of the country too, in the period 1986 to 1989, and I guess I must have attended most of the gigs they played in and around the city in those years, well, from 1984 in fact, and though some of the shtick, like the unvarying bass solo and the endless soloing on Johnny B Goode, became a tad trying after a while, the band was unstoppable when it was in full rock monster mode on stage. Cape Town had lots of unrecorded indie bands in those days, most of which possibly aspired to be no more than the kind of band the musicians' girlfriends and close mates would be impressed with. Sweatband looked to be something much more than a scrabbling indie group with wacky image or way out sounds and cultural politics. John Mair and Wendy Oldfield were sexy front persons with a lot of va va voom, and they worked it. The leaders quite obviously had a vision of full on biggest act in the land status, not to mention that (then) elusive dream of making it "internationally" and who's to say they would not have had a shot in a different time?

That is why it is such a pity that the songs on Lank Sweat do not truly reflect the potential greatness of Sweatband.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Prior

The man was dubbed, or maybe it was self-styled aggrandisement,, the Rock Professor because, I guess, he knew a lot about rock, especially what we now call classic rock and all kinds of esoteric, fringe rock acts of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. For my money he may well have been the single most important DJ on South African rock radio, with only the guy form the Hobnailed Tekkie Show on Radio Good Hope to offer any competition, and Chris Prior is certainly the last rock DJ I made a point of tuning in to.

Back in my late teens and early twenties the NME was the fount of a large amount of information on the rock scene of the time, and some old stuff they covered, but the problem was that hardly any of the music the NME wrote about was freely or at all available to me. Chris Prior was the guy who gave me some practical knowledge of a bunch of acts I treasured then and still do today.

Prior had a regular slot on Audiomix, the youth oriented magazine programme the English Service broadcast in the late afternoon, and he gave short courses on acts he deemed worthy of our attention. This is where I first heard the Texas blues rock of Z Z Top and the folk punk stylings of Van Morrison. He must have had inserts on a number of other groups but these two stand out, perhaps because in time, some years later, I made an effort to acquire the music of both acts, and owned a bunch of records by each.

Prior also championed Tom Waits, and Rickie Lee Jones end though I eventually started buying Tom Waits, mostly, though, due to the influence of a girlfriend of the time, with a little nod to the Waits music I'd heard at m y friend Sean's house.

Chris Prior went to work for Capital Radio 604, based in Port St Johns in the then Transkei so-called independent homeland and, as I could not pick up Capital Radio, Prior disappeared off my radar until het popped up as the late night jockey on Radio 5 in the mid-Eighties, when the station was being revamped and repositioned as a format free rock station, under a British station manager, a welcome change from the awful disco format it had followed under Pieter Human since shortly its inception.

As I understood it, the new plan at Radio 5 was to have a top-notch morning show guy, who turned out to be Martin Baillie, to draw in a large audience, with middle of the road rock and pop during the daytime and early evening, with specialist rock shows later at night, and on Saturday afternoons. From this change we got the Saturday Shadow Show, featuring Barney Simon who later kind of assumed the Prior mantle as guru of modern rock, and Rafe Levine's Friday night metal show, and of course Chris Prior's late night rock show.

At first the Prior show was on between 22h00 and midnight and when Radio 5 became an 24 hour station, the Prior show expanded into a 4 hour showcase for all that he considered top of the range rock, pop and esoterica. It is at about this time that the Rock Professor monicker appeared and it might even have been a pure marketing ploy dreamt up by the station's PR team.

I tuned in to Chris Prior most evenings as I had no television and listened to a lot of music and liked what he played.

By the late Eighties Chris Prior was so powerful he could even tour the country and present DJ set of clubs, filled with the best of his rock collection and could draw substantial crowds. He must have been one of the last local DJs, apart from Barney Simon, who could fill clubs without playing house or trance or any of the other genres of dance music that were so prevalent in the day of the globetrotting superstar DJ.

Prior was very influential and his imprimatur could make acts that were slightly outside of the mainstream, like The Waterboys, whom he played relentlessly, or local act Sankomoto. In a way, the Rock Professor ID could also be related to a slightly fuddy duddy approach to what he found acceptable. This meant, for example, that he could popularise The Waterboys but play only one or two of their songs and not much else from the albums. In a way he must have had a rigid playlist of sorts and if some of the choices of acts were adventurous, the selection of what he played was far less so.

One of the most interesting sections of the Prior show was the nightly Priority Feature, where for 30 minutes to an hour he featured the music of a specific artist. Once a week the Priority Feature concentrated on local rock and he gave exposure to bands and individuals who probably got very little radio play otherwise. Not only did he play the music but he had interviews with the musicians and publicised their ventures, such as the night when he chatted with Steve Louw about the forthcoming All Night Radio album, and played some acetates of a couple of tracks off the album.

Radio 5 paid lip service to the idea of promoting local rock music and did programme some of it during the daytime schedule but Chris Prior made a point of doing it, and doing it properly. This was long before the SA Music Explosion of post-1994 and there was not that much local rock that got recorded and released, and there was not that much good stuff among the releases, and to make the kind of effort Chris Prior made, deserved and deserves recognition. Nowadays you could programme a radio station to play nothing but local rock 24 hours a day and not have to repeat any song. Back then supporting local music was a brave act.

I have no idea when I stopped listening to Chris Prior or when he left Radio 5, or maybe it was already 5 FM by then. At the end 5 FM had been repositioned once again to be more of a top 40 station and with more autocratic imposition of playlists, even on the superstar Prior. Not only that but his show was cut too. To be honest, by the early Nineties I was kind of bored with Chris Prior and he really became the professor who was not prepared to be too adventurous anymore because he was much too stuck in the rut of what he thought of as good stuff. The end came when he insisted on playing Stairway to Heaven every night. I have no idea why. Did he think it was the best rock song ever written? Was it some kind of statement? Was it a big fuck you to those who were trying to dictate his playlist? Whatever it was, I was not happy with the concept and I was even less happy with the other songs Prior was playing, as it seemed that he was no longer the barnstormer I had grown to like way back. Perhaps it was also the constriction of the playlist he was forced to follow so that he became just an announcer of songs he had not chosen. Either way, the Chris Prior had lost its lustre and 'must listen' aura.

I must confess that I stopped listening to 5 FM altogether somewhere in the mid-Nineties. If memory serves Barney Simon took over the late night slot with his modern rock show. Although Simon should be as lauded as Prior for sticking steadfastly to his chosen genre and for being the poster boy for alternative rock, I could not stand him as a radio presence or persona. It amazed me that someone who had been a presenter for as long as he had been by then, could still sound as nervous and awkward as someone who had just started out. Only Tony Sanderson was worse.

Simon's choice of music was also not very compelling but the major turn-off was that he talked so much. He must have loved his own voice, or maybe he just did not have that many tunes to play and plenty of airtime to fill. I soon tuned out. In 1998 I went over to Good Hope FM for the latest in urban music, dance music, R & B, hip hop and whatever else they played.

The next radio station I listened to with any regularity was Radio 2000, in the period 2001 to 2006, when its evening format was a seamless rock playlist in a DJ free environment with lots of local music. One did not always know the act or the name of the tune, but the mix of old and new, local and international, rock and pop, was innovative and compelling. Sadly this is no longer the case.

I have no idea where Chris Prior went to after he left 5 FM. I think it might have been Radio 2000's daytime slots, or some other radio station that would allow him to ply his wares.

I am still thankful to Prior for introducing me to early Z Z Top, the Van Morrison of Astral Weeks, Listen to the Lion and the better Eighties stuff , John Hiatt (mostly Bring The Family but also earlier stuff), Linton Kwesi Johnson (mostly Tings and Times), The Waterboys, and others I cannot even remember now.

Chris Prior was important for bringing us good rock and roll, mostly pretty classic, sometimes innovative, but at all times his choice until the corporate structures took his freedom away and subjected him to a playlist system that stifled the very nature of the beast. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing, all things considered, because he had become a bit of a dinosaur anyway and needed to be shaken up, but it is always bad for a free spirit, and one with nous too, to be caged in such a way.

In the ordinary course I would no doubt have stopped listening to Prior regardless of the playlist because my musical tastes were no longer his and to a degree my perception was that I was a couple of steps ahead of him in my eclectic tastes and was far more willing to adopt, or just to listen to, all kinds of new music. Chris Prior did in effect become the fusspot professor who had made his mark so long ago that one could almost no longer remember the nature of the beast and who was then content to rest on his laurels and never again be as progressive and innovative as he had been when he was young. I suppose Prior's argument might have been that he had his classic rock slot and Barney Simon had his modern rock slot and their respective audiences preferred it that way, and that the two approaches were meant to complement each other, but frankly, I would rather have listened to Chris Prior introducing the kind of modern rock that Simon was championing than listen to the Barney. Chris Prior should have seized the moment and embraced all of the new rock out there in the late Eighties and early Nineties, as he had 4 hours of airtime to fill, instead of sticking to the old stuff he knew so well. There was no reason why Van Morrison could not have coexisted with Nirvana or the Stone Roses, or whoever.

So, Chris Prior turned from revolutionary to radio careerist and disappeared into the void. He must still be out there somewhere, spinning his tunes, in the relaxed style and air of assurance and authority that made him my DJ hero for a number of years, but I do not know where that radio station is or on what frequency it broadcasts and I am not sure I would care to find out.

It is never good to revisit a hero to find out what they are currently up to, as inevitably it cannot be as good or as exciting as what he had done to make him a hero in the first place.

 

Lady Gaga

The video for Bad Romance is all over the local music channel MK, along with Jack Parow's Cooler As Ekke, and though one should always separate the visual from the music as the sights may detract from the sounds and take the place of the imagination when it comes to interpreting the lyrics, this video is probably one of the more arresting and gripping videos I've seen for a dance act.

The high concept is a big production full of erotic symbolism, with lots of pretty explicit eroticism, and plenty of symbols of alienation. There are dance sequences, dream sequences, image vignettes, and plenty of fast paced flow from scene to scene. Red leather, white leather, weird futuristic couture outfits, masks, icy, distant men in suits, and one glimpse of a voluptuous, lace panty-clad ass, which may be the diva's derriere, or at least one likes to think so. Mostly Lady Gaga is hidden behind hair and make-up yet there are also images of her as more or less open, innocent and naïve disco waif.

The video ends with the artist posing elegantly on a bed alongside an equine skeleton. Perhaps it is a homage to The Godfather movie, perhaps it is a visual pun for the phrase "flogging a dead horse." it is possibly one of the more bizarre endings to a music video I've ever seen.

Behind all of this is a disco beat and a catchy tune and it is not difficult to understand why Bad Romance is yet another monster neo-disco hit from the alleged new Madonna.

Some crappy entertainment magazine recently claimed that the Lady is searching for love in al the wrong places and is lonely, lost and desperate. At least, that is what I gleaned from the cover blurb. I did not read the accompanying article as I believed it would be bare of facts and chock a block with half-truths and innuendo, as these articles tend to be. It's not as if I am about to write a love letter to Lady Gaga to advertise my availability.

The only Bad Romance I'm interested in, is the hit tune of the moment.

I believe she has dark hair but the look she sports is blonde and a part early Madonna and part Christina Aguillera when she is blonde. The vocal strength is close to Christina than to Madonna, and the music Is nothing like the very Eighties electro dance tracks Madonna used for her breakthrough hits. Like Aguillera, Lady Gaga relies on her pipes as much as she does on her image to get through to the masses, and I salute her for it. There is nothing like a disco diva with a proper voice singing good, tuneful dance pop songs, though I would imagine that the Lady would want to be regarded as more than mere dancefloor fluff. She has something to say and will say it to a beat you can dance to.

Lady Gaga makes music you have to play loud. And you must want to shake your booty. And maybe you can read the lyrics and marvel at her philosophical insights.

Pretty Blue Guns

Blues rock is a style that is not too popular or prevalent in South Africa today where the modern rock styles of the new millennium are the fad of the moment. Globalisation has caused a situation where the majority of local bands sound little different to any number of foreign acts, and the generic effect is of groups who sound alike and not very interesting. Guitar solos are not cool; big, soaring anthemic rock is the hip thing. That everything sounds alike is a minor issue.

It is always refreshing to hear a band who does something different to what their peers are doing and who then distinguish themselves from the herd in so doing. One such group is The Pretty Blue Guns who may look like emo kids, or whatever look the common or garden band aspires to, but sound a hell of a lot different.

If I cast my mind back the best (relatively) recent comparison I can think of is the defunct Billygoat (one of the Trippy Grape bands from the mid to late Nineties), who came from much the same concept as Pretty Blue Guns, and Delta Blue who started as a purist blues band and then became soulbluesrock monsters by the time of their third album Inbluesstation.

There have also been other blues bands in South Africa over the years who perfected their cover versions of blues and blues rock standards and entertained thousands in pubs all across the land, but apart from being quite entertaining they did not contribute much to the development of the local scene because they hardly, if ever, wrote their own songs.

Then there is Dan Patlansky who channels Stevie Ray Vaughan and is happy to be the hottest guitars linger in the country and is incredibly earnest about it all.

Now we have The Pretty Blue Guns who are named for a Tom Waits song and who bring the proverbial modern rock energy to a blues sensibility in a kind of first for South Africa where this kind of roots blues infused rock is not yet as prevalent as it is elsewhere, because most local rock acts are very serious about their modernist and up to date hip credentials.

PBG look like every other local rock act from Bellville to Benoni yet stand apart because they dig a different beat. They have guitar solos and slashing slide guitar And they write damn good traditionally recognisable tunes.

Lost Faith is the best lovelorn kiss-off song I've heard in a while.

The piece de resistance is Devil Do, the last track, which is a fine approximation of an old timey gospel blues, much like the song Ain't Going To Heaven off Delta Blue's (so far) last album, Heaven. For some reason South African white boys are rather more keen on the delights offered by Satan than the heavenly rewards good Christians are supposed to enjoy.

 

There is not much of a Tom Waits connection here, except for the band name, and the blues is more of a background to the muscular rock the boys play, yet it is a fine debut, assured and full of the kind of energy punk is supposed to have and which sounds so lacking in so much of modern rock today. The guys are young and still have to absorb their influences fully but if they slightly overreach themselves when they sing about subjects best left to old bluesmen, I sense a genuine commitment to the style and sources and perhaps a keen interest to build on a tradition.

If they can get it together to be a bit of a jam band, as blues rock really demands of its practitioners, The Pretty Blue Guns would be a very satisfactory live experience.

 

 

New Holland

Google New Holland and you find a bunch of links for a company that manufactures agricultural equipment and machinery, such as heavy duty tractors. They even have some YouTube videos.

There is also a reference to a very old name for Australia. There is just one link to the band New Holland's 2009 album Exploded Views.

Strange, eh? In this day and age I would have expected the band to have a more prominent profile on the Internet. Anyhow, it does not matter, I guess. Exploded Views is a corker of an album and for my money one of the best local releases, along with the debut from Pretty Blue Guns, of the last year.

New Holland are lumped in with the "Bellville bands" that have been celebrated in a compilation of their own. Obviously the bands that do come from Bellville now completely disavow this kind of shorthand categorisation. On the one hand, belonging to a scene is good when the scene first gets attention, as the identification with what is perceived to be hip and happening can be of great assistance in making a breakthrough to commercial viability, but then it may become a millstone when the tide goes out and the attention moves to another scene. Then you are just stranded along with the driftwood of that faded scene and nobody is willing to accept you in any other context.

The first, and the best, always transcend whatever scene they come from and I believe that New Holland should easily be able to do so as well. This is just a great rock band with passion, intensity, excellent songs and inspired arrangements. New Holland is one more example among many of the kind of band that produces music that makes me believe South African rock need no longer stand back for anyone in the world. There may be internationally hugely successful bands New Holland would never be able to outdo purely and simply because of geographical limitations, but I cannot see many of those bands delivering a product that could surpass Exploded Views.

The joyous thing is that the guitars bounce and crunch in much more individual style than the modern rock bands that sound like cut-outs from the same base metal template. It is refreshing to hear a group with a different aural appeal, who are not scared to fly closer to the sun than the rest, or to jump sideways when everyone else try the slam dunk. The other wonderful thing is the odd washes of electronica that colour the rock with a vaguely ambient, uh, ambience.

Another odd thing is that the band members seem to be nice Afrikaans boys who have obviously decided that it is not their road to stardom to sing in Afrikaans. The Afrikaans rock scene seems pretty substantial, as large, if not larger, than the more internationalist scene where English is still the language of rock and roll. The 'taal' is now fully accepted and acceptable as a language in which all manner of local youth can express themselves from stupid pop to rap to death metal, not to mention Christian rock and roll, yet many of those bands are as unimaginative as their English singing peers and are as interchangeable. If singing in English, even if it is not the home language, helps New Holland gain a worldwide audience, more power to them.

Something To Believe In is the classic hit song: it's about putting your creative efforts out there and only being happy when you sing your song, and it sounds just like something you've heard before but never have. If that is not a sign of a world conquering hit, you can call me Meyer.

 

Fleetwood Mac: The Dance

In 1997 Fleetwood Mac reformed as the late '70s version of the band, the most commercially successful incarnation of an organisation that'd started out as a purist blues band and, after some lost years in MOR limbo, ended up as one of the biggest era defining groups of the '70s and early '80s.

By the late Nineties Fleetwood Mac was pretty well dormant and the various members kept themselves busy with solo careers or simply relaxing by the pool, enjoying their money, or at least one hopes they did. The band did not truly manage to retain its strength and creativity after the departure of Lindsay Buckingham and it limped on for a while before the remaining individuals realised it would be better to have a long hiatus than to try to regain past glories. It is interesting to note that Fleetwood Mac could survive the departure of all its previous guitarists but could not manage the same trick when Buckingham went off to do his own thing. This would possibly mean that he was the creative heart and soul of the band. On the other hand, the band was no longer as hungry and struggling as it had been during the tenure of most of the previous guitarists and this probably meant that it was not too difficult simply to lie back for a while and not flog the deaf horse of a moribund creative unit.

Anyhow, in 1997 the band got back together for a series of gigs. No doubt money played a role, and the rekindling of a monster success story, even if everybody concerned was considerably older than in the heyday of the Rumours juggernaut.

On stage the band dress quite conservatively in good, only slightly Bohemian taste, much like the somewhat older audience it drew to its concert. The 3 frontpersons wear black, which is of course highly chic and fashionable and not an intimation that they are really up there for the eulogy of a once great band whose nostalgic memories they will be attempting to revive. The audience is profusely thanked for listening while the band members do their patented Fleetwood Mac thing with the assurance and authority that come from long years of experience. This is the kind of show that once again redefines adult oriented rock, this time for an audience who may have been kids back in the day.

There is a powerful sound system and the visuals are great because the camera coverage is so extensive, and it seems that a good time was had by all, the musicians on stage and the paying audience. Of course there is no wild dancing in the aisles, everybody is super cheerful and happy and well behaved. You cannot imagine this slightly wonky group of middle aged people, wearing lots of makeup to hide the years of hard living going backstage between numbers to do a line or two just to keep the energy levels up. The look like the spring water and macrobiotic food types, though John McVie was always a bit of a lush, and Stevie Nicks probably had regular whole body blood transfusions to maintain her youthful appearance. Even her profile shows signs of a certain blowsiness and Christine McVie looks exactly like every other well preserved Englishwoman of a certain age and class, perfectly made up and every bottle blonde hair in place. She should be the chairwoman of the parish library and not some kind of rock star. In fact, on reflection, she makes me think of the female sidekick to Donald Trump in his Apprentice reality TV series.

Lindsay Buckingham is a little gray around the temples but otherwise looks quite young and fresh though in close ups his eyes seem rather sad. Maybe he is not really comfortable revisiting the old hits. Buckingham still sings as good as ever and plays great virtuoso guitar, even doing some solo numbers from solo albums just to drive home the point that he had, and has, a life outside of the monolith.

Overall the music is mixture of the old hits and some new numbers and the USC marching band is trotted out yet again for Tusk – obviously the kids of the band that played on the original version – and great fun is had by all. I would imagine, other than the styles of dress, this concert would have been pretty much similar to any performance the band gave at the height of their success and as such it is a good souvenir of one of the giants of pop rock.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Shaar Murray

In the mid-Seventies Charles Shaar Murray (or CSM as I soon came to know him) wrote the first article I ever read about Dr Feelgood, published in Hit Parader magazine.

Today I watched a YouTube clip from 2009, of CSM and his band Crosstown Lightnin' performing Hideaway, the Freddie King number also made famous by Cream. CSM plays a white Fender Stratocaster and throws a bunch of conventional lead guitarist shapes.

Although he plays a different guitar and has a different stage personality, I was struck by the striking similarity between the way CSM looks today and how Wilko Johnson, erstwhile guitarist for Dr Feelgood looks today. They could well be brothers in more ways than just in the blues.

Crosstown Lightnin' sounds like a lot or competent blues bands and there is nothing in particular about the performance on the video to suggest that we are dealing with a whole new deal in blues. Evidently CSM is having fun, he can play the guitar well and I would imagine I would have a good night out at any venue they play.

I must make a confession and say that Charles Shaar Murray was the first rock writer I really rated both for his erudition in matters of which I knew little at the time, and for his hip, funny style. In 1977 when I started buying the NME I was more or less clueless about rock music in its broad spectrum although I had started on my journey to learn as much about it as I could. The thing was that the books I had dealt with older music, the glam rock of the early Seventies was the most recent music they dealt with and by the dawning of the age of punk such stuff was well and truly old fashioned. The NME provided me with a window into what was happening in the UK at the time, albeit always about 6 months behind the times, and of its many good writers CSM was the guy who spoke loudest to me.

He liked the blues, and I was just starting on my journey into the blues as well, yet he obviously had all the right credentials and moves to fit right into contemporary rock with a somewhat more jaundiced eye than some of the young guns at the NME who either did not know much about anything before punk or chose to pretend that none of it mattered.

It was only when I bought Shots From The Hip that I read CSM's earlier pieces and fully realised how wide his experience in rock journalism had been, and I must also say that the self consciously hip style and gonzo affectations of many of the items from the pre-punk era seemed a trifle pretentious and precious and grated slightly on my nerves, but on the whole it was a good way of learning how a style develops and how a rock writer can change his viewpoint over time and yet remain true to his original vision.

I liked CSM's style in the weekly NME because he was funny, cool, and wrote in clear, precise English and said what he meant and meant what he said, unlike, say Ian Penman who specialised in clear as mud bullshit. Of course I shared many of CSM's opinions and he became a guide. If he liked something, I would like it too and if I did not know anything about the artist, his recommendation was a motivation for seeking out a record.

An NME with plenty CSM in it was a delight; an NME with no CSM in it, was a bit of a dud.

Over the years I've bought Shots From The Hip, the collection of articles for various publications, Crosstown Traffic, the critical study of the music of Jimi Hendrix (the very serious style of this book made it seem like a doctoral thesis, very unlike the loose style CSM usually employed) and Boogieman, the John Lee Hooker biography, where the CSM of old made a reappearance, in the style as well as in the narrative. I wish there was more, either anther collection or maybe just another book. Perhaps he is busy researching or writing something new, and playing blues guitar in his spare time.

Maybe he is doing a Tom Wolfe and is working on his debut novel at this late stage of his writing career which had been focused on journalism. Whatever it is, I look forward to it. This man is a major talent.

Nowadays CSM is gray and wears his hair very short, possibly to camouflage the bald spot. Back in the day he had a mop of curls and liked wearing a dark suit with red Converse sneakers. When I first read of this sartorial style, I thought the guy was unspeakably hip. Not only could he write like a god but he fitted right in with his subjects. I wanted to emulate him and in my home town there was not much call for a pudgy, spotty faced, clueless pseudo punk and I was in any event way too scared of public ridicule to adopt a complete punk attitude and style. In my heart, though, I wore a black suit and red sneakers, and cultivated irony and wit as my defence against a cruel world.

Anyhow, my view of CSM made me believe that being a rock critic or maybe just music journalist, would be one of the best careers ever. In my fantasy life anyhow, as I did not pursue that route but stuck to my law studies instead.

I did not write about music at all until 1996, after I'd heard of the death of local guitarist Nico Burger, and was motivated to write about my interaction with Burger and the music scene in Stellenbosch and Cape Town from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties. After that I wrote a steady number of pieces about various acts I liked or did not like and started publishing them on my various blogs. So, rock journalist I am not and will never be. CSM may not even write much about music anymore as he is now elevated into the rarefied atmosphere of the famous who can probably elect what they want to write about and no longer has any deadline issues to deal with.

Greil Marcus is another of my top favourite rock writers but he is almost the anti-CSM in that I do not believe that Marcus sees anything humorous in rock and his writing style is far too scholarly and literary and I believe that he overworks the subject matter a lot of the time. It is difficult to understand why anyone could take any aspect of rock music that seriously. Maybe Greil Marcus never practised his craft as music journalist, much less in the cauldron of the competition between British music weeklies in the heydays of the Seventies and spent little time around working, big name rock acts and never really saw the ridiculous side of it in action. CSM met a number of the big names and was not to beholden to mock the pretentious and stupid. He knew that rock stars were not infallible or even intelligently articulates because he saw them face to face and was not going to suffer fools simply because he or she may be earning millions in the popular music sphere.

Greil Marcus may continue to be regarded as some heavyweight observer and critic of popular culture and CSM may become a footnote as just another Brit who got a bit lucky in his career but never quite transcended is roots in the populist rock weeklies, but for my money I would almost rather have a collection of CSM's product than that of Marcus. When I regularly bought the NME I also kept scrapbooks of cuttings from it: reviews, articles, photographs. Those scrapbooks contained copious amounts of writing by CSM, from articles to reviews to Smart Arse Oneliner replies to letters addressed to NME, and covered pretty much everything he got published in the NME between 1977 and 1981 and of course I am talking about many more items than collected in Shots From The Hip. Some years ago, when I amalgated my household with my girlfriend's, I threw away a lot of stuff, including those scrapbooks, some 40 in all, and every now and then I feel a pang of regret. It would still be nice to look back at rock music history on the go as presented by NME and to have a comprehensive collection of CSM's opinions on the passing scene as he observed at the time.

One of the earliest CSM pieces I kept, was a profile of Muddy Waters, then in the twilight of his life and career, though the career had been resuscitated under the auspices of Blue Sky Records and Johnny Winter. For some reason I did not simply cut out the article, perhaps because it ran over a couple of pages and there may have been something else of value on the reverse of the Waters article. So, in order to keep the article (and the fact that it was about a legendary bluesman weighed very much in favour of the piece) I laboriously typed a copy of the article. The typing took much longer than I had anticipated as I used only 2 fingers to type and it turned out that what seemed a relatively concise article in printed form, took up more paper in A4 size than I would have thought possible. Apart from anything else it gave me a new insight in the amount of effort required to produce such a piece.

The NME writers were fond of referring to themselves, perhaps not completely sardonically ironic, as hacks but it is difficult to believe that a hack would have been able to turn out high class prose and entertainment almost each and every time he put his fingers on the keyboard of a typewriter. CSM has talent in spades, has an enquiring mind and sharp wit and was not, and probably is not, afraid to make use of these tools to make his mark and to say his say. Whether he is a genius as a guitarist, is difficult to say from the evidence of one video clip but I must say that I always found it slightly weird that the man would be a blues aficionado, to the extent of playing in a R & B band, amidst the New Wave acolytes of the NME who would have considered the blues as so obsolescent that it would make boring old farts seem fresh, hip and happening. This was one reason why I loved the concept of CSM; he was not afraid to be different amongst the young Turks and to be tolerant of their brutish Philistinism and almost reactionary antipathy towards anything that did not jibe with the new orthodoxy. CSM was not that old but he must have been regarded as fucking ancient by the newbies who seemed not only to know little of rock's history but did not care.

CSM knew that it was, all jokes apart, a big tapestry furl of rich colour and images, that a lot of it would be repeated in different shapes and forms over the future years and that even a young Turk will grow old and be superseded by even younger and more radical Turks. In rock music writing you are only as good as your last published piece, and CSM was good in every one and excellent in most.

 

 

 

Big Bill Broonzy

In the Forties and Fifties there were a handful of bluesmen who became favourites of the hip White establishment particularly those who favoured American folk music and the Black sub-variant thereof, and they were Leadbelly, Josh White, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. These guys knew the blues and perhaps played quite deep blues in their time but were also successful with White audiences because they sanitised the blue, removed the salaciousness and deep emotion and presented it almost as a pop music.

Big Bill, for example, was well-known as a musician in the Thirties for the Bluebird label, recording blues tunes with small groups that had much more in common with the small group jazz popular at the time than with the typical Delta bluesman. Big Bill's very urban, very commercial blues was very much a musical style that appealed to his audience and not quite a serious expression of any kind of mental state even if being Black in an American city was only slightly better than being Black in the rural countryside of the Deep South.

When he was a young guy, Big Bill was a professional musician who made his living by entertaining his people; he played for dancing and not for contemplation.

Some years later, when his commercial value had waned, he was "discovered" by trendy White loves of Black music, still somewhat of a taboo, and they were some times more purist than truly at one with the music they purported to love and to support, yet I have always thought it had more to do with fashion and the assumption that the so-called love of blues music was more of an intellectual discourse than a really visceral experience.

This was why the British blues and trad jazz aficionados were so appalled by the noise and energy of the Muddy Waters band when he first played in the UK. The British blues fans thought of blues as a quaint folk type of music played by one guy and a guitar, telling tales of a hard life and unfaithful women, not some electrified band concerned with entertaining their audience in the same way they entertained back home.

Broonzy came from the musical background of blues as popular entertainment and not some 'authentic' style practised by unsophisticated back country bluesmen. That aspect of his career had gone forever and he quickly realised that a new career beckoned if he were prepared to change his style and adopt the guise of the type of blues musician approved of by the White impresarios who would market him and of the audience he would be playing to. He picked up his guitar, learned some country blues and suddenly he was lionised all over Europe as the very epitome of the authentic bluesmen. Apparently he lapped up the attention, and who could blame him, and had an excellent last few years of his life, a bit like the resuscitation of Muddy Waters in the late Seventies.

The music from the Bluebird years showcase Broonzy as a musician who can master a number of styles and it is mostly joyful blues, sometimes racy and salacious, sometimes more serious, always played by an ensemble of musicians who probably know more about infusing their jazz with blues than sounding like anything that came from the Delta. One feels that the Delta musicians, even if they were employing the technique of composing new blues from putting together bits and pieces from a standard selection of licks and phrases, more or less reflected the truth of their lives, where Big Bill Broonzy's urban blues tunes sound composed from scratch with an intellectual, musicological approach rather than as life experiences.

Lots of overly serious White blues enthusiasts saw blues as a pure folk expression of the musician who wants to make art out of his life, whereas in fact most blues musicians of the very old school, the guys from the Mississippi Delta, for example, made music as a way of getting out of manual, low paying labour, or to supplement the income from manual labour and not as some expression of high art. The folk art aspect of it was a pure invention of the intellectualised approach to blues appreciation by people who mostly knew the blues because they listened to records and not because they went to rent parties or Saturday night fish fries, or visited juke joints where the audience wanted to eat, drink and be merry, and wanted the musicians to play loud and long for dancing and maybe fighting, not to make art. Those audiences were not sitting down, quietly and reverently taking in the subtle nuances of the lyrics or instrumental backing, they shouted, argued, laughed and had a good time. It was only much later on his career that Big Bill Broonzy found himself playing to audiences who were so well-behaved you would hardly know they were there until they politely applauded at the end of numbers. No rowdiness or rambunctiousness here.

And, being no fool, Big Bill soon realised that he had to present his craft, and his life, as art in order to keep his new set of patrons happy, and by all accounts he did. He had entertained his ghetto audience in one way and he now adapted his act to entertain his uptown audience in another way; but one way or another it was all schtick.

I love the story of how Muddy Waters brought his electric band to Britain on his first visit there, because he heard the English audiences were keen on the blues, and then freaked them out by the sheer loud energy of his superb Chicago band, when the average British blues lover thought of the blues as a quite folk-style performed by some old guy and his acoustic guitar. When Muddy returned some years later, having learnt his lesson, he left the band at home and packed only his acoustic guitar, happily prepared to be the folk blues guy he thought the Limeys wanted. Much to his surprise fashions had changed and now the audience was annoyed precisely because he did not have his Chicago band with him.

The point of this is also to demonstrate that blues is as much subject to popular fads and taste as any other popular music and that the average bluesman had to, and still has to, keep abreast of what his audience wanted from time to time. From this perspective Big Bill Broonzy was no sell out or cynical seeker of the White man's moolah when he turned all down-home and folksy. This was his time, a bit like the revitalisation of Muddy Waters in the late Seventies, or the rediscovery of Mississippi John Hurt or Fred McDowell, who were genuinely country bluesmen, and Big Bill knew a commercial opportunity when he saw one and had been after that pot of gold his entire career in music.