For this year’s advent calendar we are stretching our wings and travelling around the world in search of Christmas songs from twenty-four different countries. Some you will know, some you will know by a different name, some you will be delighted to hear for the first time and some you might not be. Europe is over-represented, but I think we’ve got something from every continent.
But that’s for tomorrow. For today, here’s Cliff.
Good things come to those who wait. I waited twenty-one years for it, and this month my patience was finally rewarded when I got to see Carter USM, the best band in the world, play Brixton Academy, the best (big) venue in the world.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that twenty-one years of anticipation would be too much to live up to? That now that I’m, frankly, 30 Something, and they are, well, older than that, the frenzied excitement and wild fandom of my teens might have faded, and the sparkle and energy of their live performances dulled? I’ve never seen them before so I can’t tell you it was as good as seeing them in 1991, but it was as good as I’ve ever imagined seeing them to be, and better. As good because it was as thrilling and lively and boisterous a show as you could hope for, and better because it hadn’t occurred to me until I had the evidence before me that south London is full of people who love Carter as much as I do, who know all the words and were having exactly the same amount of fun as me. I have always said that the reason radio will never be killed off by Spotify and its ilk is that there is something transcendent and intimate about being one of a group of people who don’t know each other all sharing the same musical experience, and if a DJ can do it then a band can do it times ten. The last time I wrote about them I said I liked to keep Carter as my own secret band, but it turns out that sharing them is even better.
Other things: this may be the first gig I have ever been to at Brixton where I didn’t drink anything more exciting than a Pepsi, and that was good too, because I was in a place I loved, full of people I loved, watching music I loved, and none of it was the fake love that a couple of vodkas inspires (“No, YOU’RE amazing”). I wanted to hug everyone there, and I still do.
(That said, we skipped out of the aftershow party quite quickly because we were tired and flaky, so we didn’t get to have our photos taken with the band themselves, but that’s probably for the best. If you shouldn’t meet your heroes, you definitely shouldn’t meet your superheroes, right?)
I posted this over here rather than over there because it’s not a review. It’s a thank-you note. To the band, to everyone who made the show happen, to Shona who bought me a ticket (and who has a photo of me, aged 15, in a knocked-off Carter t-shirt which was my pride and joy) and to everyone who was there on the night. I got beer spilled on my difficult-to-wash jumper and I lost my voice, and everything about it was perfect.
Long posts about writing and product management and corporate hierarchies are percolating somewhere in the back of my mind (bet you can’t wait!), but in the meantime I want to introduce you to what might be the best thing on the internet. Songtapper lets you use the space bar on your keyboard to tap out the rhythm of a piece of music, then tells you what the music is. Despite the name, it doesn’t just do songs – I have just used it to find out the name of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor which, if you are like me, you will know better as that piece of music that Dracula would play on the organ, if he had one.
I don’t think it’s brilliant for very new music, but you can’t have everything and it’s still like having your most musically knowledgeable friend on hand day and night, ready to pop up with an answer whenever you can’t remember the name of the music from the Old Spice advert.
(You can learn more than the names of songs, too: it was Songtapper that led me to the discovery that parts of Daisy Bell and Funiculi, Funicula have almost exactly the same rhythm. I have also learned that knowing the name of a piece of music but not which advert I remember it from is almost more annoying than the other way round, and that O Fortuna features nowhere in The Omen, and the piece of music I vaguely remember as being from Carmina Burana is actually a specially-composed piece called Ave Satani, for which Jerry Goldsmith won an Oscar. Maybe it’s only me who had them confused, I don’t know. That said, the number of places where O Fortuna is used is mindboggling. No wonder everyone knows it without knowing why.)
I listened to Sleigh Ride this morning, because even though it’s not Christmas I was cold and tired and it is a song that never doesn’t cheer me up. It is also the most crazily complicated song in the world – if you are a musician, pick up your instrument of choice and try busking along with it and you’ll see what I mean:
But Dan says it’s too early to listen to Christmas music, so I turned it off and listened to some show tunes instead, and found myself shivering with glee at the lyrics to Thoroughly Modern Millie. I can’t decide whether my favourite is
Men say it’s criminal/What women’ll do
What they’re forgetting/Is this is nineteen twenty two!
Or
What we think is chic, unique and quite adorable
They think is odd and Sodom and Gomorrable
Both are pretty perfect. What song lyrics make you happy?
You know those times when one coincidence follows another, and you suddenly get the groundless notion that the threads of your life are more closely and weirdly bound together than you thought? And then it turns into a really vivid dream, and you get reality and your dreamworld confused?
No?
It started with Primo Levi (who, by the way, is the one writer who makes me want to stop writing, because he writes so beautifully that I think I might as well give up trying). I picked up Other People’s Trades, a collection of his essays, as we were leaving for Naples last month, because you’re not allowed to read your Kindle during take-off and landing, and I thought I might as well read something Italian. When we got home I broke off and started reading the Kindle again, so I’ve been progressing through the Levi in fits and starts, and on Sunday I started to read an essay called The Language of Chemistry, which reminded me that Levi was a scientist as well as a writer – specifically, a chemist (and if you haven’t read it, you must immediately go and read The Periodic Table, which I think includes his most beautiful writing of all).
Later that day, after dinner, we watched some Breaking Bad (the beloved has seen it all before, but I am new to it and loving it), in which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, the main character is Walter White, another chemist. The episode we watched, the last in season two, ends – I am trying to do this without spoilers, but if you really mind, look away now – with Walter looking into the sky, followed by an aerial shot of the New Mexico desert, while something spins rapidly through the air above it. We’ve been watching for a few weeks and it was sheer coincidence that we reached that episode minutes before turning the TV over to see Felix Baumgartner spin rapidly through the air above the New Mexico desert during his freefall descent to earth from 128,100 feet, which might be the most exciting thing I have ever seen happen in real time. I almost didn’t want to watch, but in the end the thrill of seeing someone do something so brave and brilliant won out over the fear of seeing someone fall to his death, which was always a possibility.
And then, when I went to bed that night, I picked up the Primo Levi again and carried on reading, and when I went to sleep my dreams were full of tortured chemists falling to their deaths in a brightly-coloured desert, and then I woke up with a start and remembered that Primo Levi did fall to his death, in circumstances which remain unclear. And I shivered, and read myself back to sleep with Stephen King, who at least is supposed to be spooky.
Last night’s dreams were even more vivid, but I don’t think I can bring myself to tell you about them. Maybe one day, after everyone implicated is dead, but not till then.
I had a bath this morning, which is very unusual on a weekday but I was cold and aching from running in the rain a couple of evenings before, and – well, frankly, I wasn’t ready to be vertical.
Having a bath meant I listened to the Today programme, which most mornings I don’t any more, and listening to the Today programme reminded me why I don’t any more. I can’t have listened for more than 15 minutes but in that time it made me feel quite separately cross about three things, and I came out of the bath less relaxed than I’d gone in, which is all wrong. So to make me feel better, I’m going to make you cross about them too.
NUMBER ONE. John Humphrys exclaiming that nobody in authority had shouldered the blame for the child sex abuse gang uncovered in Rotherham last year. Nobody, that is, apart from the PERPETRATORS WHO WENT TO JAIL. I can’t bear the journalistic tendency to assume that when vulnerable people are harmed, it’s social services’ fault, as though the social care system isn’t full of desperately overworked and underfunded people trying as hard as they possibly can to stop people from coming to harm. Do the job yourself, Humphrys, and live on a social worker’s salary for a year, then start blaming them for organised criminal activity.
NUMBER TWO. David Cameron, on Letterman last night, was asked what “Magna Carta” meant, and apparently didn’t know the answer. Now, I didn’t know the answer either, but I know what Magna Carta is, and I speak English which means I can understand some Latin, so I was able to work it out. If I can do it, bloody David Cameron should be able to. I knew he was stupid, but I didn’t think he was stupid.
NUMBER THREE. A piece on Jamie Oliver’s new 15-minute dinners book, in which the nonsense argument was made for the sake of controversy where none existed (this technique will be familiar to regular listeners) that the target audience for the book was owners of Jamie’s earlier 30-minute dinners book, and good grief, were we really so desperate for time that we needed to claw back another fifteen minutes in the evening, and what was wrong with spending an extra quarter of an hour doing something useful and enjoyable like cooking? Somebody (I have no idea who was being interviewed about it, except that none of them was Jamie Oliver) tried to make the OBVIOUS POINT that the book is aimed at people who don’t cook at all, and not at people who already enjoy cooking, but this was shouted down in the general frenzy.
I think tomorrow I shall return to comforting silence.
Do you read xkcd? If you don’t, you should, but go and have a look at it now, to get the flavour of it. Then have a look at this entry, from last week, which I think is just fabulous.
(You’ll have to click on it to launch the version with the special surprise in it – and then click and drag your mouse on the last panel.)
Last Friday was the hundredth anniversary of Bram Stoker’s death, and to mark the occasion the Dracula Society (I know, I had no idea either) held a celebratory event at the Lyceum Theatre, to which I was lucky enough to be invited as a representative of The Public Reviews, a website which does what it says on the tin.
It all lasted about an hour, and most of that was people standing around drinking, so I had to be creative in order to get a thousand words out of it, but it was worth it because now I really want to re-watch all the old Dracula films, and I can’t think of a better way of spending what promises to be another wet weekend.
The piece is here.
When Bert Jansch died, I said here that I was going to make a list of the musicians I wanted to make the effort to see while I still had the chance. I never made the list, partly because it’s a bit morbid to try and come up with a list of musicians who you think might die soon, but mostly because I am lazy and don’t follow up on my promises.
But someone who would have been on the list, because he was a contemporary of Jansch’s, was John Renbourn, who I am delighted to say I saw perform on Saturday night at the Union Chapel, and my goodness, it was terrific. At the Union Chapel you can sit about twelve feet from the performers, so we did because when you are watching guitarists, you want to be able to see their fingers. John didn’t speak much (he had raconteur extraordinaire Robin Williamson, formerly of the Incredible String Band, to do that for him), but he made his guitar sing like a young Beach Boy, and seemed to do things with it that oughtn’t to have been physically possible. I am not a guitarist, but I had one seated either side of me, and they both agreed afterwards that there were notes in there which, even with three people playing (Wizz Jones was the third), seemed to come from nowhere at all.
There is music which is designed to take you outside of yourself – prog rock, trance, punk – and there are musicians who can transport you to somewhere entirely new (I always think that seeing Bobby McFerrin perform live is the closest thing we have to evidence for the existence of a higher plane). And then there is music which takes you deep down inside of yourself, and for me that is acoustic blues and folk guitar. Sitting in the Union Chapel with a cup of tea and my coat still on because try though they might, it is not a well-heated space, I seemed to live my life again in a series of images and memories which the music evoked. Not because they were songs I knew – less than half of them were – but just because the very sound of them spoke to a half-hidden part of me, where unremembered thoughts and feelings live.
I don’t think this is because I was a blues musician in a previous life, or because the music invokes supernatural presences: I think it’s because this is the music I heard before I heard anything else, and what it arouses in me is probably more or less the same set of feelings that any sudden sharp sensory link to my early childhood would, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting.
I count myself lucky to have been brought up by this music, because there is something timeless about it – I joked on the night that we were the youngest people there but we weren’t, not by a long way – and I’m not sure it would be the same if my earliest musical memories were of the Village People or Boney M. There are other types of music which transcend their time, of course – jazz, classical – but their time was earlier. Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and the three white-haired geniuses I saw at the Union Chapel were living, breathing artists when I first heard them, all the more so to me because the way I first heard them was not on vinyl or cassette but on wood and steel, tapped out by my dad on his own guitars. This music made me, and it was a privilege to be able to see it first-hand.
I didn’t record any of the show, because that would be rude, so here instead is a lovely video from the olden days.
Here are three things I have seen this week.
Thoughful graffiti in Dublin:
A friendly notice in a cafeteria, also in Dublin:
A toilet called “Laura”, in Crystal Palace:
Glad All Over 