Posted on by Richard Dove

A charm of Ffinches

Alexander Ffinch, by Harriet Lloyd-Smith (2011)

Parallels

Alexander Ffinch, the organ of Cheltenham College Chapel, Divine Art Recordings. DDX 21112

RICHARD DOVE is transported by a new album of organ music

My father adored church organ music. At the weekend, I would often wake to the grand noise of Nôtre Dame, Rouen, or the three manual, 44 stop organ at Freiburg Cathedral (a particular favourite). I was constantly reminded of him as I listened to Parallels, a new CD by Alexander Ffinch.

Ffinch is the organist at Cheltenham College and oversaw a complete rebuild of the organ in 2017. There is an intimacy between player and instrument which is both rare and wonderful. There is also a refreshing boldness in the selection of compositions. Where else could one find Gustav Holst alongside Coldplay’s Chris Martin? As Ffinch explains in the sleevenotes:

Today, one of my daily duties is to play to 700 students at the start of their working day. I am facing a generation with the power to instantly access the music they want at any time and trust me, it’s not likely to be original organ music. So to capture their attention, I have enjoyed turning to classical some pop/rock arrangements to present music they hear elsewhere.

The Coldplay song ‘Paradise’ soars around the college chapel, stirring even the most indolent student.

There are other surprises on the recording – a Suite by Florence Price, an African-American composer who combines her classical training with Southern black American culture. Her ‘Symphony No 1 in E Minor’ was premiered at the Chicago World’s Fair by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. The concert was the first performance of a composition by a black woman by a major orchestra in the US. The ‘Suite’ is jaunty, mellifluous and immediately engaging, with jazz phrasing and gospel singing inspiration.

There is a wonderfully atmospheric, gently-paced interpretation of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod,’ benefiting from the resonance of the chapel’s ancient stones.

Dan Locklair’s ‘Rubrics’ is another surprise, and requires Ffinch’s masterful dexterity. After a tumultuous first movement, we move to a gentle second movement using silence as a sort of leitmotif. As the composer explains in the excellent accompanying booklet: “To be sure, it is impossible to have true silence when music is sounded. But the illusion of silence can be suggested.”

The recording closes with Leon Boellman’s ‘Suite Gothique.’ It was early morning when I listened to the Suite and its third movement ‘Prière a Nôtre-Dame.’ My father was almost with me in the room as the melody floated and swirled. Nôtre Dame was his first port of call on any visit to Paris. From this embracing reverie we launch into the thunderous final movement, the Toccata. It awakened the household as Dad was prone to do. Time to put the kettle on.

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Enlightenment on Nirvana

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD feels slightly guilty about Kurt Cobain

The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place one might have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing the entrance to Seattle’s exclusive Leschi neighbourhood, with its panoramic views of Lake Washington and the snow-capped mountains beyond, where one morning in April 1994 Cobain, then in the third year of his marriage to his fellow musician and sometime actor Courtney Love, first injected himself with heroin and then took a shotgun and blew his brains out.

Yes, he was 27, like several other high-profile musicians including Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison before him, and Amy Winehouse to follow, which has helped popularise the belief that age is imbued with a mystical horror for anyone who plays the guitar or goes near a microphone for a living. A professor of psychology at the University of Sydney named Dianna Kenny has even published a statistically detailed paper on the subject. It concludes that the most common age for a rock musician to leave the mortal stage is in fact 56 (2.2%, compared to 1.3% at 27), although she concedes that an inordinate number of those both in and out of the 27 Club have succumbed by suicide, murder, injury or accident. The percentage of professional musicians dying by their own hand reached 9.6% of all such fatalities in the early 1990s, before falling to 4.5% today, set against an overall suicide rate which remains broadly stable at 0.25% of the adult UK population as a whole, while remaining the major single cause of death for males under the age of 45.

Why did Cobain do it? That’s a question the statistics can’t answer. Among other contributory factors, there was a history of self-harm in his family; he was a heroin addict, and, perhaps not coincidentally, suffering from crippling stomach pain; he may have been bipolar. And then of course there’s Richard Burton’s aphorism about the toxic nature of fame, which he defined as ‘a sweet poison you drink of first in eager gulps, before you come to choke on it.’ In 1989, Cobain moved from the ghost town of Aberdeen, Washington (British readers need only think of one of the country’s sadly reduced former Northern manufacturing hubs, but with rows of domino-like houses built of decaying wood, rather than brick, to get some of the flavour) – where, showing a bitterly precocious lyrical talent, he once scrawled on his childhood bedroom wall, ‘I hate Mom. I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom. Mom hates Dad. It simply makes you sad’ – 100 miles up the road to the comparative bright lights of Seattle.

Kurt Cobain (playing drums) in 1981

Within two years Cobain and his group Nirvana, with a sludgy, bottom-heavy guitar sound and a matching dress sense that some critics fastened on to dub ‘grunge’, had accommodated themselves to signing a seven-figure contract with the corporate behemoth Geffen Records. Six months later, the band released its breakthrough album Nevermind, which to date has sold 35 million copies worldwide, been recognised by the US Library of Congress as ‘culturally, historically and aesthetically important’ to the nation, and which Rolling Stone magazine, displaying its usual air of critical reserve, describes as

…a dynamic mix of sizzling power chords, manic energy and life-changing words … boast[ing] an adrenalised skill at inscribing subtlety onto dense, noisy rock … At the album’s sonic extremes, “Something in the Way” floats a translucent cloud of acoustic guitar and cello, while “Breed” and “Stay Away” race flat-out, the latter ending in an awesome meltdown rumble that’s both prehistoric and very contemporary in its approach.

(No, I don’t really know what it means, either.)

Before long, Cobain was wasting away in his own private Graceland, in this case a multi-level Seattle lakefront home hidden behind a brick wall topped by a screen of bushes with a sign out front reading ‘Beware of the Dog.’ He seems to have enjoyed the money, if not the deceitful comfort of living amongst the very software billionaires and corporate bankers whom he despised.

At bottom, I think the sad but inescapable truth is that Cobain saw himself as ill-placed in life’s queue. Perhaps only in America could a multi-millionaire in his mid-twenties complain of being under-valued, but there were compelling reasons for his dissatisfaction beyond the obvious material ones. Not only did Cobain have the misfortune to come from a family of depressives, he chose a profession notorious both for the brevity of its successes and the shark-like aspect of most of its managerial class, whose business morals might well have raised tuts of disapproval among the more malevolent attendees of a Sicilian Mafia conclave. Add the proximity of drugs and guns, for both of which he had a marked taste, and you can see the beginnings of the potential for disaster.

Cobain’s cousin Beverley, herself a psychiatric nurse, once told me that it was always hard to envision him growing old and contented, or for that matter reconciling himself to the indignities of today’s burgeoning senior-citizen rock tour circuit. For what it’s worth, I happened to write a slim biography of Cobain which appeared in the summer of 1995, about a year after he died, where I allowed myself the reflection: ‘The prospect of him playing Nevermind to a crowd of paunchy, late middle-aged fans in the year 2020 must have been unthinkable for a man who insisted life effectively ended at the age of 30.’ I’d change quite a lot of the book if I had the chance to do so today, but I think that one observation, at least, has stood the test of time.

Speaking of which biography: looking back on it now from my advanced antiquity I feel that in certain fundamental aspects I may have done its subject a disservice in suggesting to the world, or at least that small part of it that actually bought the book, that Cobain was at bottom little more than a petulant, self-loathing young man, admittedly with an ephemeral talent to entertain, who ultimately stands as a representative specimen of the sort of individual, surely found predominantly if not exclusively in the United States, who can be both materially pampered beyond avarice and yet simultaneously and vocally unhappy. This was not quite fair of me.

Cobain had certain quantifiable reasons for his misery: ill health, the residual effect of his wretched childhood in the backwater of Aberdeen, a difficult marriage, the bitter aftermath of Nevermind, which led to renewed record-company pressures for more of the same and to the consequent regime of doing tour after album after tour ad infinitum, which Cobain himself likened to the spectacle of a caged gerbil running on a treadmill. Both perversely nostalgic for his impoverished childhood and ever apprehensive about the future, he seems not to have had the gift of enjoying the moment. In the years since his death, several of Cobain’s journals have come to light in either commercial or private form. His disregard for dates and names, his rather approximate handwriting, and his apparently only passing familiarity with the rules of English grammar can often serve to confound the reader. As a rule, he narrates in a kind of singsong stream-of-consciousness which, disconcertingly, gives equal weight to events great and small; drugs and deaths, and thoughts of suicide, roll along with minute observations on the physical appearance of things. But Cobain’s voice is nonetheless always compelling. Reflecting on the whole thing today, one is increasingly left with a profound sense of sadness and waste, as opposed to any more venal emotion, at his loss. There’s also the fact, in passing, that with hindsight I should never have wholly swallowed the reminiscences of certain of those of Cobain’s near contemporaries with an axe to grind against him, or for that matter with some obscure agenda to pursue of their own that might have led them, and thus their interviewer, to an at best partial understanding of the events of the-then recent past. Nonetheless, it should go without saying that none of those who in their different ways contributed to my understanding of my subject can be blamed for the shortcomings of the text. They are mine alone.

Three decades on, Cobain’s image as the unwitting poster-boy of Generation X, the ones experiencing the world through the fun-house mirror prism of MTV and cheap drugs (later stigmatised by the American author Douglas Coupland as “42 million gripers”) serves as a distraction from his actual body of work. For the patron saint of slackers, he was surprisingly prolific. Nirvana released three full studio albums in just four years, which borders on the Stakhanovite by modern standards, quite apart from the profusion of greatest-hits compilations, live recordings, remixes and box-sets padded by spurious ‘rarities’ that help to pay for the Geffen company Christmas bonus to this day. Added to that, Cobain was constantly writing, touring, subjecting himself to interviews and in general becoming the world’s consensus rock star in the era between Michael Jackson and Michael Stipe. No, none of Nirvana’s music changed the world, despite what some of its more excitable proponents claimed for it. But it was always meticulously well crafted, and there are countless stories about Cobain’s habit of simulating ennui (what was Nevermind, but a shrug of indifference?) while in reality spending endless hours polishing the product. An early and rather touching example of this dedication to the job was recalled by a woman named Betty Kalles, who hired the 22-year-old Cobain to work as a summer maintenance man at a Washington state seaside hotel at the time Nirvana were coming up through the ranks.

Kurt was quiet, but he was also clean-cut and polite,’ Kalles told me. ‘He was never able to work on Fridays or Saturdays because his band would go out and play on those days, but he would always make it in to work on Sunday morning on time. He was really a model employee, but when he finally quit his job he told me the chemicals he was using to wash the windows were making his fingernails soft, and he was unable to play guitar. “I have to do everything for my music,” he said.

The author William Burroughs, who knew a thing or two about life (and for that matter death, having once drunkenly shot his wife through the head), whatever one makes of the literature that ensued, once remarked that he thought Cobain had been ‘acting out a kind of morality tale about what it means to be famous in America.’ Essentially, the plot was a simple one: the mother-dominated yet wayward boy from the wrong side of the tracks, discovering a talent to amuse, knows enough to turn it into money and stardom, but would always rather be elsewhere, doing something else.

In that context, I’m always reminded of the story Cobain’s estranged father Don told me about seeing his son for the first time in seven years after talking his way backstage at a Nirvana concert in Seattle in September 1992. The scene was an unprepossessing, concrete-walled room filled with tables of sweating, plastic-wrapped cheese plates and domestic beer, with people constantly tugging at Kurt’s arm even during his few minutes alone with his father. ‘I felt sorry for him,’ Don said poignantly. ‘It didn’t look very glamorous to me.’

Perhaps in the end it’s enough to say that when a materially and emotionally stunted childhood gives way to an adolescent taste for heavily amplified rock music and nihilistic literature, and factors such as debilitating stomach cramps, heroin, and the need to project oneself on stage in front of tens of thousands of delirious strangers are added to the mix, even a more self-confident man than Cobain might have been brought to the point where he considers his options.

Just twelve months after Cobain’s brief reunion with his father, Nirvana released a new album containing a sardonic and often caustic collection of songs named In Utero. One of the record’s tracks contained the line, ‘Wait, I’ve got a new complaint’, and another one ended with the repeated chorus, ‘I miss the comfort in being sad.’ Six months later, Cobain barricaded himself in a spare room above the garage attached to his Seattle home, took a lethal dose of drugs and then put a shotgun to his head. Sadly we’ll never know, but it’s entirely conceivable that had he lived he could have become a sort of David Bowie figure, his cutting edge progressively dulled, perhaps, but still remaining creatively restless across a variety of media, and on balance not likely to be found today crooning a medley of Nevermind-era hits from the stage of a Vegas casino auditorium. He is badly missed.

Posted on by Michael Yost

The Testified and Witnessed Ballad of the Truly Risen Elvis Aaron Presley

MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form.

The Testified and Witnessed Ballad of the Truly Risen Elvis Aaron Presley (As Reported in World News Weekly)

He rises from the purple sheen

    And velvet of his box

His sequined vest aquamarine

    Pomade spread in his locks,

His face unaged, bright red with youth

    As an immortal god.

He’s risen! This I know for truth

    (Although it may seem odd.)

He rocks death’s jailhouse even now,

    From Graceland, where he waits,

To play his last, and take a bow,

    Before the mighty fates.

For when Amurka’s own true king,

    Begins to gyre his pelvis

The juke-box joints will leap and sing

   “Salvation comes from Elvis.”

His golden buckle girding on,

    Likewise his golden shades

The King has come in bronze and brawn

   As our world’s music fades.

And after Armageddon, all

    Will be Banana-Bacon-

Peanut-Butter Sammich. All

     The lost, unloved, forsaken

He’ll shower with amphetamines,

    Cake, Coca-Cola, Jam,

Butabarbital, morphine,

    And piles of honeyed ham.

    Girls will dance naked, all for love

And T.V. sets will ring

    And squawk our songs and praises of

Our Once and Future King.

Posted on by Richard Dove

Good times in Kent

Photo: Drew de F Fawkes. Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE cavorts to Chic at Rochester Castle

In this year’s Grammy Awards, Nile Rodgers received the rare and prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. He told us last night (6 July) that whilst very honoured, it implies a career end and he announced: “He ain’t done yet.” On cue, his band launched into ‘Everybody Dance’ – and we did.

The grounds of Rochester Castle saw the latest chapter in Nile’s legendary career. His band, Chic, were drilled, tight and in the groove. The thousands of us sprawled on rugs and mats got to our feet (some with difficulty) and threw shapes in the night air. Chic was always Rodgers and partner Bernard Edwards, but he died in 1996 and the band has become Nile Rodgers and Chic. They play hit after hit of their own and Nile’s other work with Madonna, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Sister Sledge, Peter Gabriel and Daft Punk, with whom he co-wrote the megahit, ‘Get Lucky’.

Rodgers is now a sprightly 70 and has survived, he engagingly told us, two bouts of cancer. He says music has its own way of healing and we all swing into the infectious groove of ‘Lost in Music’. It is a balmy evening and the ruins of Rochester Castle are illuminated behind the crowd of thousands. The cathedral tower shines a vivid blue into the dark night sky. The audience contains young and old, some wearing that old glitter dress or top found at the back of the wardrobe – a gathering, largely, of the well high heeled.

There is little room for extended solos as the band glide one dance floor hit with another, with the subtle moves of musicians complemented by the sinuous choreography and almost gospel-like singing of Audrey Martells and Kimberly Davis. Chic’s music relies on restrained but virtuosic drumming and bass playing. Ralph Rolle looks as if he was born behind a drum kit, and filling the huge gap left by Bernard Edwards is the heavyweight (in all senses) Jerry Barnes who plays some breathtaking bass lines throughout the evening. He keeps the less mobile in the audience literally on their toes.

Rodgers’ career is that on both a survivor and innovator. He was at the forefront of Studio 54-inspired disco music and then moved on swiftly when the tide turned and disco was regarded as mindless or toxic or both.  His work with Madonna (‘Like a Virgin’, ‘Material Girl’) and David Bowie (‘Let’s Dance’) put him back on track. Along with his Lifetime Grammy award he has also won this year a Grammy for the best R&B song with Beyoncé. He certainly ain’t done yet.

Rodgers dedicates a song to his old band mate, and the backdrop screens black and white photos of Edwards. Astonishingly, Chic has in some form been on the road for over 50 years. It has to be ‘We Are Family’, and we all shout out the words more or less in tune.

Whilst reminding us of his sackful of Grammys, Rodgers remains a modest stage persona with his precise, jaggling rhythmic guitar playing. He confesses he is not much of a dancer himself but encourages us once again to shake our ‘tushes’. I reflect that there will a variety of aches and pains and sprains in the morning. We wave our arms to his and Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ as the moonlight slips across the River Medway. This is a wonderful setting for an open-air concert. Indeed, this is the first of four concert evenings with the Sugarbabes and Soft Cell entertaining the ancient stones of the castle.

How to close the concert? It has to be the beguiling beat and melody of ‘Good Times’, a song that has been sampled by hip hop artists countless times. It dates from 1979 and is still as fresh and energising as ever.

The song is extended allowing some bass gymnastics that his old partner Bernard Edwards would approve. With a ‘Thank you Rochester’ they are gone, and we bounce and shuffle into the night hoping we can recall where we put that parking ticket. As the song says: “Let’s cut the rug, a little jive and jitterbug. We want the best, we won’t settle for less.” Long may Nile and Chic continue. Get out the Voltarol.

Posted on by Richard Dove

Basso profundo

Image: Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE is bedazzled by a phenomenal bassist

Being a virtuoso musician presents a fresh set of responsibilities. You can play anything at any tempo, and you do. The results are not always, shall we say, rewarding and affecting.

That could not be said for bassist Shri Sriram and his quartet at Ronnie Scott’s. Shri’s fretless bass was accompanied by the keyboards and analogue synthesizers of Bugge Wesseltof, the energetic drums of Gary Husband and the adventurous trombone of Dennis Rollins. Shri’s bass playing is a wonder, combining delicate tones and robust, percussive slapping. The music is taken and transformed from Shri’s recent album The Letter, produced and released by Bugge on his own Jazzland label.

You can hear that Shri is very influenced by German bass legend Eberhard Weber. His compositions are tone poems with unexpected twists and turns. The bass lines are restrained as we journey across empty Arctic landscapes, and then Mumbai at rush hour when the bass almost becomes a tabla.

Shri Sriram performing in 2015. Image: Birgit Fostervold, Wikimedia Commons

Shri announces a “British classic”. Is that Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ with jazz inflections? It surely is, and we cross from Mumbai to Bromsgove. Rollins seems to be playing an accompanying riff and soloing at the same time. Bugge gets his analogue squeaks and swirls going, and the band lock together. It is as if they are at the end of a lengthy tour, but this is a one-off performance to a packed house. Many more audiences need to see what this unique quartet of gifted and empathetic musicians can do. They close with a lilting, jerky reggae version of a tune already played – clearly, an improvised mash up with some magnificently dexterous bass from Shri.

You leave with a smile. We all did. As my friend observed, there is nothing better than live music in the right place at the right time. Come back soon, Shri.

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Wilko Johnson, 1947-2022

Wilko Johnson
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD remembers the first time he met Dr. Feelgood’s ace guitarist

It’s a strange thing about biography. No matter how many facts are told, how many details are given or lists are made, the essential thing all too often resists telling. To say that so and so was born here, that he did this and did that, that he wrote this song or painted this picture, that he went around the world and married and had children and grew old and died – none of that tells us very much. What we want is a story.

In that spirit, all I can personally add to the numerous obituaries of the guitarist, sometime actor and raconteur Wilko Johnson, who died on 21 November at the age of 75, is a primordial memory of around December 1974, when I was just up at Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam student union somehow scraped together enough money to hire the band Dr. Feelgood to enliven our college Christmas party. This was the season, let it be remembered, of ubiquitous high heels and loon pants, of crushed velvet jackets with lapels as wide as hang-glider sails, when the charts were full of extravagantly quiffed artists like Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry, or David Bowie camping it up in his soul-revue phase, with a rather depressing weekly Top of the Pops regimen characterised by names like Charlie Rich, the Carpenters, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John and Jasper Carrott doing his ‘Funky Moped’.

Anyway, into the midst of this dross came the Feelgoods, and such was the shock I had to momentarily check the cigarette in my mouth (those were the days) to see if it might possibly have been tipped with something more exotic than Players Number 6. I mean, incredible. Four stony-faced Canvey Island geezers who looked like they might just as soon put the boot in as entertain you: two brooding hulks on drums and bass, both well tasty, and the twitchily charismatic figure of Lee Brilleaux up front singing – snarling, really – in a suit that might once have been white, jabbing his fist around in time to the beat in a way that suggested definite malice rather than some hippy-like state of being transported by the music, banging out a no-frills mix of sweaty rock and rhythm and blues typified by two-minute songs with titles like ‘I’m a Hog for You’ and ‘Stupidity’ and ‘Tequila’. This was not a group you could imagine sitting cross-legged over a communal bowl of brown rice to a backdrop of herbally-tinged joss sticks and the wafted strains of the latest Yes triple-gatefold concept LP.

And then slightly stage left, right there in front of me, Wilko Johnson on guitar. Amazing. Clad totally in black, pudding-bowl haircut, eyes staring out across the audience like searchlights, about twice a song he would suddenly take off like an overwound Energizer Bunny and go lurching across the stage, side to side, back to front, all the while keeping up a stark, percussive rhythm with a chopping right hand interspersed with a few demented solos that seemed to be more the product of a semi-tuned chainsaw than a traditional musical instrument, a routine he varied only by periodically lifting the guitar to his shoulder and peering down it as if to strafe the audience. As I say, stunning. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Johnson’s distinctive guitar style and powerful stage presence can be seen here.]

At the end of the show, Wilko walked right past me. He had little choice in the matter, because there was no backstage area to speak of and the band just had to push their way through the crowd as best they could in order to make it out to the impressively knackered-looking transit van waiting for them at the back gate. Anyway, there he was: sweating, hollow-eyed, carious teeth, funereal two-piece suit that looked like he might have slept in it. ‘Great show,’ I said with that originality of phrase certain critics later so admired in my various rock biographies. And since Wilko apparently still wasn’t going anywhere, I had a further moment of inspiration. ‘Who’s your favourite guitarist?’ I asked, thinking it might be one of the consensus heroes of the day like Clapton or Beck or Page, or even dear Keith Richards, with whom he undoubtedly shared a certain laconic, back-to-basics playing style. But no. ‘Mick Green,’ my new friend informed me, and then to my surprise stuck around long enough, right there in the chaotic aftermath of the gig, ankle deep in spilled beer and stubbed-out fags, as people banged past us, to tell me, a total stranger, all about Green, another great British eccentric, it transpired, and sometime staple of early-60s combos who also liked to chop up his lead and rhythm parts into one percussive wall of sound, and – proving his versatility if nothing else – later went on to rock up albums by everyone from Paul McCartney and Van Morrison up or down to Cliff Bennett and Engelbert Humperdinck. At the end of what became a sort of oral PhD thesis on the whole history of early British R&B, Wilko asked my name, introduced himself – as though he might not already be familiar – shook my hand, and effusively signed the scrap of paper I hurriedly thrust at him. ‘Keep in touch,’ he said. My first interview. Then he was gone.

Speaking of versatile, it later turned out that Johnson himself had been to university, wrote poetry, spoke Old Icelandic among half a dozen other slightly fringe languages, and in later years developed a keen interest in astronomy to the extent that he built an observatory on the roof of his Essex semi. Along the way, he married his childhood sweetheart Irene and they remained together, raising two sons, until her death from cancer 38 years later. As the world knows, Wilko himself was diagnosed with an apparently incurable tumour in 2013. He reacted with notable stoicism, remarking that he had never felt so alive than whilst under an imminent death sentence, continuing to perform every night he could and teaming up with The Who’s Roger Daltrey to make the album Going Back Home. Then the apparent miracle happened, and doctors in Cambridge performed a nine-hour procedure that saved Johnson’s life while relieving him of most of his intestines. Paradoxically, having cheerfully faced death, Wilko fell into one of his recurrent funks once given the all-clear. ‘I knew I was really getting better from the cancer when I started getting depressed again,’ he said wryly.

It seems funny to say this, but for all the bug-eyed stage antics and raucously loud, sweat-soaked nights in dingy rock clubs, there was a quality of innocence – an innate modesty, the eagerness to please, to connect with the audience, never to lose sight of his roots – that distinguished Wilko Johnson throughout his life and career. I doubt we’ll see his like again.

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Fifty years of Exile on Main Street

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD remembers a basement-born, band-defining album

According to most accounts of the genesis of the Rolling Stones’ iconic album Exile on Main Street, there was a richly symbolic moment early in the recording process.

One of the group’s satellite members, in most versions the pianist Nicky Hopkins, reported for duty in the Stygian bunker-studio in the south of France where the Stones found themselves in the summer months of 1971, along with an extended cast of friends, hangers-on and others of a more narrowly entrepreneurial mien, perhaps most prominently the great country-rock pioneer and one-man cocaine industry Gram Parsons, who was eventually evicted for having come to assume he was a de facto member of the band.

More specifically they were in the cellar of Keith Richards’s rented house named Villa Nellcote, which stood perched on a clifftop overlooking the sparkling Cap Ferrat. The other Stones – Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor – were similarly domiciled, in varying degrees of luxury, with no immediate plans to return to their native land, hence the evocative eventual title of their new album.

To this day some disparity exists as to the reasons for their French sojourn. Keith himself insists that it was the logical result of a vindictive British ‘establishment’ campaign to rid itself of the Stones, while others saw it as a prosaic reaction to certain more material matters concerning the Inland Revenue. During the winter of 1970-71, the group’s newly appointed financial adviser, the portly, Mozart-loving Prince Rupert Loewenstein of the bankers Leopold Joseph, had hammered out a deal whereby the Stones would collectively spend between £150,000 and £200,000, or roughly £3 million in today’s money, each year of their chosen exile, and that the French government in return would waive any claim it might have to tax the band’s corporate earnings. So much for the anarchic spirit of rock and roll.

Anyway, working on the basis that it was easier to bring the band and its accessories to Keith Richards than it was to ask Keith to assume the vertical position long enough to report to a commercial studio, everyone went downstairs into the Nellcote cellar and plugged in their instruments, leaving Exile to become the greatest and most profitable record ever to emerge from a basement. And it was in this grim, chthonian spot that Hopkins, or whomever it was, had his sudden moment of insight into the uniquely troubled history of his present working environment. ‘I looked around me that first night we were down there,’ this individual reported, ‘and there were actual swastikas carved on the walls. The place had been local Nazi headquarters during the war. Somehow that really set the tone for me.

It’s a good story, with an almost theatrical quality to it: as in a stylised Hollywood film, a young man stands gazing up at the symbol that brings a frisson midway between horror and a strange exhilaration at the task that lies ahead of him. Keith Richards’s own abiding memory of the recording sessions might be said to display something of the same spirit. ‘It was a sick scene, man’, he recalled.

The basic vibe was like Hitler’s bunker. It was about 110* down there, no air conditioning, sweat pouring off the walls, people crashed out, shirtless, out of their minds. Hazy blue light, crappy equipment, everyone zonked, and yet somehow out of this chaos came maybe the greatest moment in Stones history.

Again, there’s a sort of cinematic vividness to the scene. Rock music’s own Boris Karloff figure lurches around in the sinister old Nazi redoubt – a cell or even torture chamber of some sort, he later theorised – conducting his similarly dead-eyed accomplices through the most gloriously debauched weeks of even their career. It seems an almost churlish technicality to note that the Germans occupied that particular part of France only from May 1943 to June 1944, and that Nellcote itself remained in private hands throughout the war, or that, for all the undoubted privations of the subterranean workplace, the estate itself was one of the loveliest on that stretch of the Riviera, with spacious formal salons decorated with antique brocade chairs, their floors inlaid with purple and white tile, and white silk curtains flowing from the windows, which offered a commanding view of hills almost obscenely bright with bougainvillea. But, anyway, there you have the enduring and pervasive legend of Exile‘s birthplace – a grim Nazi dungeon bathed in candlelight.

Even so, we can perhaps take Keith’s point. The album we know as Exile on Main Street, then going by the somehow fitting working title of ‘Tropical Disease’, was largely recorded by distinctly low-fi means, at the home of a musician then as legendary for his chemical intake as for his songwriting, in the last non-air-conditioned studio the Stones would ever inhabit, where the group sat around in their underwear bathed in a ghastly grotto-blue light, keeping their customary vampiric hours, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the work that ensued tended to be a bit on the dark and sludgy side as a result.

In fact, many of Exile’s best tracks worked in close connection with the chaotic and increasingly paranoid atmosphere at Nellcote, which the local police, alerted by the nightly arrival there of men in dark suits wearing sunglasses with briefcases chained to their wrists, kept under constant supervision that hot Riviera summer. ‘Rip this Joint’, to give one example, was comfortably the fastest thing the Stones had ever recorded, sounding as if they were in a collective race to finish it before the gendarmes kicked down the door. Sometimes it seemed the band were happy even to live with their mistakes, such as that heard in the guitar intro to ‘All Down the Line’, which was shrill, nutty and out of tune – if also perfect for the song. By the time it came to ‘Casino Boogie’, Keith himself once informed me, ‘Jagger and I had run ourselves ragged’ and resorted to William Burroughs’s cut-up technique for the lyrics, which perhaps helps explain lines like: ‘Sky diver inside her, skip rope, stunt flyer/wounded lover, got no time on hand.’ Friends could almost hear the banished Gram Parsons on the countryfied ‘Sweet Virginia’, like a musical phantom limb after an amputation. Likewise, ‘Soul Survivor’ seethed with subversive energy and a riff that lingered long after it was over. According to Keith’s inamorata Anita Pallenberg, the final part of Exile was recorded with power diverted from the French railway system. Mostly, though, it drew its electrical charge from an interior source, the tension between Jagger and Richards.

Apart from the central issue of drugs (Keith enthusiastically pro, Mick broadly anti), the Stones’s venerable songwriting firm faced a number of other creative and logistical challenges during the making of Exile. Agreeing to work in one of their own homes was no guarantee that the band members would actually all be present at the same time. Jagger particularly disliked the communal vibe – ‘you didn’t know whether you [were] recording or having dinner’, he later complained – and he also had his heavily pregnant and vocally unhappy wife, the former Bianca Perez-Mora Macias, to consider. Before long, Bianca decamped to Paris, effectively forcing Mick to commute across France for the remaining sessions. More than once, she threatened to leave him for good. The band sometimes called her ‘Bianca the Wanker’ behind her back. The drummer Charlie Watts was his normal congenial self, but his rhythm-section partner Bill Wyman was unhappy both about money and being forced to leave England in the first place (‘You’re getting up my nose’, Keith would remark to his lugubrious colleague, if so by no means the only substance to do so), although Wyman would at least go on to find that the Riviera was the ideal spot to indulge his hobby of photographing topless women. More than once, Bill sat in a boat anchored off the nude beach at St Tropez, aiming his camera at the obliging sunbathers, although often even this mild ruse wasn’t necessary. According to the journalist Robert Greenfield, who visited the Stones in exile, Wyman would ‘simply ask the most attractive woman at the dinner table to slip in to another room for a moment and remove her blouse so he could snap a quick photo to add to his collection.’

Mick Jagger for his part had now exchanged cheek for chic, dressing like a Frenchman in a beret and tight suede maxicoat, also the subject of some in-house chafing around Nellcote in his absence. His sometime host Keith was meanwhile living up, or down, to his most gloriously debauched 1970s rock star image. By the autumn Nellcote was beset on every front. The local flics were making their interest in the house and its hollow-eyed tenants more obvious by the day. Burglars walked in one morning while everyone was sleeping off the previous night’s session and walked out again with most of Richards’s prize guitars. The resident cook somehow managed to blow the kitchen up. The men in sunglasses began dropping by with generous offerings of what the musicians called ‘cotton candy’, otherwise known as pure Thai heroin. A stoned Anita duly set her and Keith’s bed on fire. One of the band’s chauffeurs broke down the door to find them lying there, comatose, with the mattress in flames all around them. ‘A wake-up call,’ Keith later ruefully admitted, in every sense of the term.

Shortly after that, Jagger, Richards and their immediate families and entourage deemed it expedient to catch a midnight flight from Nice to Paris, and then on to Los Angeles, where in time they were joined by the rest of the band. In their haste to decamp, they abandoned most of Keith’s sizable record collection, his two boats, and his E-type Jaguar. Some doubt exists about the exact nature of the mass breakout. In one version, the French authorities had let, perhaps even invited, Keith to leave the country on condition that he continue to rent the house while abroad, as proof that he meant to return. In another popular account, the local force was unaware that its wrecked-looking prey had moved on. In either case, neither Richards nor anyone else in the Stones would ever see Nellcote again.

Exactly two weeks later, on 14 December 1971, a squad of twelve policemen rammed open the gate and poured in to Nellcote through the doors and windows. According to published reports, they turned up enough heroin, coke and hash to throw the book at the home’s principal tenant. A maid told them that everybody had suddenly left one night, taking their mysterious cannisters of tape with them. A year later, a court in Nice charged Richards and Pallenberg with possession, tried them in absentia, and imposed a sizable fine.

Mick, Keith and the technicians spent most of the winter of 1971-72 at Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles, turning ‘Tropical Disease’ into Exile on Main Street. The album may have had an underlying note of film-noir in its conception, but it still got its Hollywood ending. Horns and washes of pop-blues hollering would flesh out tracks like the ever-popular ‘Tumbling Dice’, ‘Shine a Light’ got the full gospel-organ treatment, while ‘Let it Loose’ was subjected to a week-long revision by the Stones’ friend Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John, and a soul-sister chorus. Bill Wyman wanted nothing to do with any overdubbing, and would appear on only eight of Exile’s eighteen finished tracks. In his absence, the Indo-jazz pioneer Bill Plummer came in to play upright bass. ‘The Stones weren’t exactly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’, Plummer later confirmed.

There was a lot of lubricating going on, and of course it’s always a thrill to be asked to play on a song called “Turd on the Run”. But they also knew exactly what they wanted. I did four tracks in about four hours, shook everyone’s hand, went home. There was a big crowd at the back door, I remember, and people were worried it was the Hell’s Angels. Mick and Keith were being hassled by them.

Plummer’s rollicking bass helped make Exile a major hit in Britain, the US and twenty-four other markets. He was paid his standard session fee of $125, or about $2000 in today’s money. Thirty years later, someone in the Stones organisation thought to send him a commemorative gold disc, which arrived snapped in half in the mail.

Wrapped in an arresting cover designed by the Swiss filmmaker Robert Frank showing a collage of circus performers and freaks, Exile on Main Street was released on the world in May 1972. The album’s legacy would loom large over both the Stones legend and the whole subsequent history of rock and roll, ushering in several decades’ worth of lo-fi tributes and parodies. It did a brisk enough business, if judged a failure by some of the reviewers – one of those ‘honourable’ failures, however, that rather endear a band to its critics, who noted that among other flaws the record sounded a touch murky, a discordant note coming at a time when studio technology was already aiming for the crisp, digitally-sharp result we expect of our music today. Although time has been kind to Exile, now one of those official classic-rock double albums, like Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, whose reputation ought to be sealed up in an eternal amber of chart and sales statistics, it initially flummoxed some of the same sages who had flocked to its more accessible predecessor Sticky Fingers, and who were left scratching their heads, not nodding them.

Writing in Rolling Stone, the journalist and future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye said, ‘There are songs that are better, songs that are worse, there are songs that will become your favorites and others you’ll probably lift the needle for when their time is due … You can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied, not quite brought to the peaks that this band of bands has always held out as a special prize in the past.’

Other critical assessments were that Exile was an ‘hour of bluesy clatter’, sounding  as if ‘recorded down a pit’ (not far off the mark), with an ‘overall vibe [like] a gang-fight inside a rusty trash-can’, while some of the era’s moral guardians, among them the venerable Mary Whitehouse of the UK’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, had more specific reservations about the likes of ‘Turd on the Run’, or for that matter the jaunty chorus of ‘Sweet Virginia’ which remarked on the need, in reference to low-grade heroin, to ‘scrape that shit right off your shoes.’ The album itself was a summer number one and spent six months on the chart before returning to the top on its re-release thirty-eight years later. You could do worse than listen to the song ‘Loving Cup’ as a brief taster of the insinuatingly loose-limbed feel of the record as a whole. Sticky Fingers may have been more organic, it’s true, but Exile was a flawed, sprawling masterpiece, and the last great extreme work the Stones have ever done.

                                                                   

Posted on by Richard Dove

An older New Romantic

PHOTO BY GIORGIO ERRIQUEZ
Commons.Wikimedia
RICHARD DOVE drops back into the Eighties with one of the era’s great singers

Anthony Patrick Hadley has an MBE and a voice from the Gods. He has forged a forty-year career in the skittish world of pop music and, by last night’s (5 May) showing, is still going strong.

At Folkestone’s Leas Cliff Hall, there is a large audience of a certain era. Some ladies have gone to a lot of trouble with fresh hair dos and posh outfits. They want to see their Tony. He has always sung ‘True’ and ‘Gold” just for them. He greets seemingly everyone from the stalls to the upper tier as he arrives on stage with a band who are clearly long term mates. He has an easy charm and a sharp suit. And then the voice. He opens with some 1976 Chuck Berry rock n roll and we are off on a journey through his career. It is now a stretch to see this burly 61-years old as a pioneer of the New Romantics. 

After plentiful name changes, Hadley co-founded Spandau Ballet in 1976. They had the image of rather effete posh boys from the start and their first single ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ reached number five in the pop charts. 

Tony took us back to the days when just 18 years old he would regularly attend gigs at the legendary Hope & Anchor pub in Islington. He told us of his enduring love for The Damned and, blimey, launched into ‘New Rose’.  The New Romantic plays Punk. For tribal, obsessive NME readers this would have been unthinkable in those heady days but at this place and at this time it just seemed right. This man has been around and experienced extraordinary triumphs and setbacks. 

He follows this with ‘Confused’, a punk song sung like Spandau, he explains. His seven piece band have hit their stride with flamboyant percussion matched by understated guitar and keyboard flourishes.  Tony keeps us entertained between songs with vignettes from his career. He tells us his first solo album, with LA musicians, was a “massive mistake”.  He wanted to emulate Jon Bon Jovi and John Mellencamp by growing his hair long and pouring himself into Spandex. It did not work and the sharp suit triumphed. However, he did deliver a song from the album ‘State of Play’, which clearly resonated with many in the audience. A new song, ‘Because of You’, recorded during lockdown has the potential to become a new Hadley classic. But when would we get to ‘True’ and ‘Gold’? 

We had a gentle interlude perched on stools with a Jim Croce song and even some jazz as he recalled a gig at Ronnie Scott’s in Birmingham. He told us of his love for Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones and Ella Fitzgerald.  

Many in the audience were shouting ‘Gold’ but he kept us waiting with a bit of Sinatra and then the piano struck up a familiar riff and we were singing.  “Huh huh huh hu-uh huh.  I know this much is true.” We all sailed back close on forty years – Top of the Pops with T. Blackburn presiding.

Tony told us he last played the Leas Cliff Hall around twenty years ago. Let’s hope he is back soon as the dancing in the aisles got a little more frenzied. We had all been transported back and forwards across a momentous career. Cheers, Tony. 

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Charlie Watts, 1941-2021 – the solidest Stone

Credit: Terry Murden/Shutterstock
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD salutes the most grounded member of the Rolling Stones

There can be few terms in the English language more debased than ‘rock star’. Nowadays, it seems, the press makes a fetish of every halfway plausible such chancer to appear over the horizon, regardless of whether their art will endure, or their generally slim recorded oeuvre instead be among the detritus one eventually takes to the nearest Oxfam shop. But the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died on 24 August aged 80, truly merits a place in the pop pantheon. He wasn’t just an original among the standard tub-thumpers of his profession. He was unique. Back in 1963 the Stones’s first manager, Eric Easton, fastened on the essential thing about Watts, which was that he was “totally unpretentious” and “perfect at his job”. Those same two qualities would remain intact for the next 58 years.

It was a curious path that took the impeccably polite, suave young drummer into a group that were to hear themselves described as ‘morons’ by a High Court judge, and to read newspaper accounts citing their UGLY LOOKS! UGLY SPEECH! UGLY MANNERS! among other unattractive characteristics. Watts, born on 2 June 1941, grew up in and around Islington, north London, at a time when the area was still a byword for urban decay rather than the spiritual home of Britain’s left-wing intelligentsia. His father, also called Charles, was a van driver for a precursor of British Rail, and his mother Lilian had been a factory cleaner. “He’s always been a good boy”, Mrs. Watts informed the press in 1967, the year of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request:

Never had any police knocking on the door or anything like that. And he’s always been terribly kind to old people. He was always a tidy dresser. That’s why I get nonplussed when he’s called ugly and dirty. When he’s home you can’t get him out of the bathroom.

Ten years later, Watts’s father remained equally perplexed by his son’s public image, especially because Charlie (who never learned to drive) still came up on the tube every Friday night he possibly could, “with a lovely fresh cake for me and his Mum”.

Watts himself was later to remark,

Part of my problem was that I was never a teenager. I’d be off in the corner talking about Kierkegaard. I always took myself too seriously, and thought Buddy Holly was a great joke.

And it’s true there was something a bit melancholic about the London lad with the long, Buster Keaton face who only ever wanted to read about cowboys or play the drums. He acquired his first kit at Christmas 1955, after at least a year of practicing nonstop on his mother’s pots and pans. At 18, Watts had only one ambition, which was to somehow find himself at Birdland in New York, wearing a hipster suit and sitting in behind the likes of Stan Getz or Miles Davis. Instead, he drifted in to a smoke-filled suburban London blues club one evening, to be confronted by the embryonic Rolling Stones. They courted him for about a year before he agreed to join, and even then he contained his excitement. The Stones’ roadie and sometime piano player Ian Stewart remembered that he’d simply driven up to the Watts’s front door one night in his van. “I said to Charlie, ‘Look, you’re in the band. That’s it’. And Charlie said, ‘Yeah, all right, then, but I don’t know what my mum’s gonna say.’”

In March 1971, the Rolling Stones began a short tour of Britain prior to their taking up residence in the south of France. To this day there are different views of the primary motivation behind the group’s decision to embark on an extended Somerset Maugham-like exile on the Riviera. Keith Richards would long rue the fact that “the Establishment – a lot of fuckin’ judges and politicians – kicked us out of our country”, while others believe that Keith’s ire might have been better directed at the Stones’ highly paid business managers for allowing the band to run up an unpayable debt to the Inland Revenue and thus necessitating a period of non-residence in the UK. Either way, there was a so-called ‘farewell tour’ to mark the occasion. Everyone’s parents came to the final show at the Roundhouse in London. Mick Jagger was later forced to admit that “It was weird wigglin’ around in front of me mum”, and that the general atmosphere of the night had been “crazy – everyone was out of their brains on dope”. Against this debauched backdrop, Charles and Lilian Watts sat together in the front row, wearing their Sunday-best clothes, and courteously handed round biscuits to their neighbours. You could see again how their boy Charlie might have developed into the personality he did.

Amidst all the surrounding Stones-related tales about Mars Bars, drug busts and Margaret Trudeau, Watts remained the calm eye of the storm. He bought the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s country home in Sussex, raised sheepdogs, and collected American Civil War memorabilia. He was the politest man in rock music. Once, in Detroit, a record executive named Mo Schulman invited the drummer up for a drink in his hotel suite, which was awash in champagne, caviar and an impressive variety of recreational drugs. When Schulman was then urgently called away on business, he affably told his guest to help himself from the display. “Anything you want”, he stressed. Charlie took a bottle of beer, leaving both a five-dollar bill and a polite thank-you note on the counter. A few years later, again on tour, the Stones were living it up one night in the pinball room of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion with its underwater bar and hot and cold running Bunnies. Charlie took one look at the Satyricon-like scene, rolled his eyes, said, “Uh-oh, this is star situation”, and retired alone with a good book.

I saw this same unaffected modesty for myself when Watts once quite unnecessarily wrote to thank me for a small cricket-related gift. His actual handwriting was always a bit of a challenge, but the signature was clear enough. It read “Charlie W”, or possibly “Charlie R” (his middle initial), followed by a pair of brackets, in which he neatly inserted – as if his current occupation might not be generally familiar – “Of the Rolling Stones”.

Watts was always the steadying influence of a band that often seemed to be on the brink of a messy, Beatlesque breakup. For large parts of the 1980s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were united only in their mutual affection for the dapper, self-effacing man doing the locomotion behind them on stage. Richards called Watts “the secret essence of the whole thing”, and “the perfect drummer for the material”. Watts’s light touch and crisp, jazzy sensibility distinguished some of the band’s most iconic songs. Sitting impassively at his minimalist kit, he lit the fuse to ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Brown Sugar’ and many others. Variety once wrote of him on stage, “He looks like the mild-mannered banker who no one in the heist movie realizes is the guy actually blowing up the vault.”

That’s not to say Watts was ever a pushover. He may have been the most genial of all rock musicians, but there was no way he was going to let the buggers tell him what to do. In the winter of 1984, the Rolling Stones and their sundry friends and aides convened for a few days in Amsterdam, not so much to make new music as to take advantage of the Netherlands’ uniquely generous tax provisions for those entities at least notionally based in the country. Following a lengthy presentation by the band’s business advisers, Keith Richards apparently felt the need to take Mick Jagger out on the town and get him drunk. The latter’s usual transition from gregariousness to mindless exuberance was abnormally swift. A blotto Jagger returned to the group’s hotel in the early hours of the following morning. At that stage he made the decision to pick up the phone to dial Charlie’s room, and to then rashly refer to him in the course of the ensuing conversation as “my drummer”.

At that Watts got up, showered, shaved, dressed in a Turnbull and Asser shirt, silk tie and three-piece suit, went downstairs, seized Jagger, and punched his lights out. “It was like a scene in a movie”, Keith Richards later said of a room containing 30 or so well-oiled musicians and their friends. Anyone familiar with The Island of Dr Moreau, with its apes and dogs surgically turned in to semi-human form, has only to think of these same fauna dressed in 1980s pastels to get a bit of the flavour. The band’s ever-present security crew froze in place – nobody seemed quite sure what the protocol was for separating one Rolling Stone from another – leaving Keith himself to grab Mick as he “landed on a plateful of smoked salmon and slid along the table towards the window”. Richards later remarked that he had been moved less by humanitarianism per se than by the fact that Jagger happened to be wearing his own favourite silk jacket at the time. His intervention possibly saved Sir Mick from being defenestrated into the canal below, but its real motivation was to “stop my gear being ruined”.

“Don’t ever call me your drummer again”, Charlie observed on his way out. “You’re my fucking singer.”

On another occasion, in 1992, Watts emerged from a period of seclusion to record his own big-band album, broadly in the style of Cab Calloway, which he promoted by a short American tour. Sitting behind his kit for a show at New York’s Blue Note club in his immaculate zoot suit without removing his jacket or loosening his tie, it was hard to remember that this silver-haired gentleman was the drummer in the world’s most notorious rock and roll band. A night or two later, the ‘silent Stone’, as he was billed, was to have appeared as the musical guest on NBC television’s Late Night with David Letterman. This highly coveted spot would have exposed Charlie and his album to an audience of some six million potential customers, but it came with an important condition. In keeping with NBC policy, the show’s in-house band would have to accompany him. The subsequent discussions had not proceeded far before it became apparent that Charlie would not be open to this arrangement. Minutes before the programme’s scheduled air-time, he left the building with a muttered “Sod it” and wandered off alone into the warm New York night.

 In 2014, Watts became the first rock star to celebrate a golden wedding anniversary. He married his childhood sweetheart Shirley Shepherd when they were both in their early twenties, and the couple remained together to the end. In later years the Wattses lived on a sprawling farm in north Devon, which they shared with a stable of 23 Arab horses and several dozen cows, sheep and dogs. ‘The squire’, as he was known locally, could sometimes be seen walking in a waxed jacket and gumboots around the nearby village of Dolton, unmolested by the few residents who associated him with the Rolling Stones.

While Shirley tended to the farm, Charlie was content to sit inside listening to jazz records or watching old cricket videos, a routine he sometimes varied by perching, in motoring cap and goggles, behind the wheel of his stationary 1937 Lagonda Rapide. When compelled to go on tour with the Stones, he typically assumed the air of bemused detachment that was as much a part of the whole spectacle as Mick’s rooster-on-acid gyrations or Keith’s laconic riffing. For years, Charlie enlivened the experience of clocking on and off for group rehearsals by the expedient of hanging an old-fashioned shop’s ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’ sign in front of his kit. Drummers, like goalkeepers, are a bit different.

The Stones’ final public appearance with Watts was a filmed segment for the first We’re-all-in-this-together Covid broadcast in April 2020. Seated on his living room floor, Charlie played along on a spirited version of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, drumsticks in hand, using a trio of musical storage cases and a nearby couch for percussion. It was an effortless, funny, and musically deft performance, and absolutely right for the occasion. Only the drummer in the world’s greatest rock band, it seemed, might not wish to keep a set of drums at home. Somehow that summed up the man.

Posted on by William Stroock

The resurrection and evolution of a metalhead

Jacek Karczmarczyk, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
WILLIAM STROOCK reforges an old musical allegiance

In 1987 this scrawny, disgruntled 14-year-old became a metalhead. It’s an old story. I hated school and life and everything, really. Metal was the best available outlet for expressing that. I stamped my feet and pumped my fist to drums and bass thumping like a British coal ring jack hammer. I wore all the black metal band T-shirts and grew a long, blond mullet that chicks told me was soft and lustrous. Whitesnake’s Slide It In was the first metal album I bought with my own money. But David Coverdale’s hair metal band was a gateway to the likes of Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy and other bands more ‘respectable’ within the metal community. With glee, I discovered that Ozzy had been in a band before his solo career. Who knew?

Grunge killed metal, so the cliché goes. In truth, by 1990 metal may not have been dead, but it was certainly dying. The hair metal bands had done just about the last thing one could with the genre. This was chick-friendly metal, and the hard-core fans hated it. The usual hair metal band formula was to release a party anthem, followed with a ballad. It worked for Extreme. Heavy metal collapsed under the weight of its own success and hair metal un-seriousness. As music progressed I progressed too. I grew up and out and lifted weights. Much to the delight of my parents, I cut my hair and put the black heavy metal t-shirts away. I listened to Grunge.

Grunge eschewed glitz and big hair for flannel and sneakers. The Seattle sound was serious. In college, I listened to Kurt Cobain’s stories and Eddie Vedder’s songs about suicide and depression. It seemed Grunge would dominate the 90s. But Kurt Cobain killed himself, and Pearl Jam moved away from the power chords and searing guitar riffs of their first two albums. They became something of a niche band with a cult following. Grunge’s second wave, led by the likes of Creed, was decidedly unmemorable. Dave Grohl soldiered on with the Foo Fighters. Grunge flared out faster than anyone could have imagined and rock was left with what?

In the early 2000s, the last true rock stars were probably Kid Rock, who fused hard rock with rap, and Cheryl Crowe. In Seven Nation Army, Jack White found the last great guitar riff. Rock and roll had run its course. After Grunge died, this former metalhead had abandoned rock entirely and spent years discovering classical music and jazz. By 1998 I was really into Tchaikovsky, not just The 1812 Overture, but pieces like the triumphant Marche Slave. I got into the big bands too. Duke Ellington can whack one over the head with thundering drums just as well as AC/DC. Tchaikovsky and Duke Ellington may not have been metal, but they were heavy. Ten years after I got into heavy metal I didn’t care about it at all.

My metal revival began in early 2003. The 90s were already a lost world of frivolities like the Clinton impeachment and the return of disco (it doesn’t suck, by the way), brought to an end by 9/11. I turned 30 and began writing my first novel. Back then, I liked listening to music while I wrote. I broke out the Led Zeppelin box set of ten CDs. I hadn’t listened to them in years.  But now I approached Zeppelin as a grown man, with an ear for music honed by a half decade of listening to classical and Big Band. Now I could pick out bits in a Led Zeppelin song I never would have when we were 15. That summer, I listened to Metallica’s Black for the first time in years. The controversial album, considered by some to be a departure from the band’s oeuvre, sounded as fresh and hard hitting in 2003 as it did upon release in 1991. Slam producer Bob Rock all you want for lightening up Metallica a bit, but Black is an utterly unique album and we’ll not see it’s like again.

During the winter of 2004, I picked up a guitar for the first time. After a gruelling year learning the basics, I taught myself hard rock songs like Free’s ‘Alright Now’, and the ethereal mist that obscured the likes of Jimmy Page slowly lifted. The mystery was gone. I could play Jimmy Page pretty well, and there was no more overrated bit of balderdash than his violin bow over a guitar. AC/DC’s Malcom Young liked simple chord progressions like Back in Black, but brother Angus’ leads were herky-jerky and violent and difficult to pick up. I’ve come to think of Page as more of a pioneer than a maestro and if asked the age-old rock question, believe the greatest guitar player is recently deceased Eddie Van Halen. He was classically trained but played manically like he wasn’t. In time, I could play. After a while, I could shred, nimbly picking strings and moving our fingers up and down the fretboard. I fired out notes frenetically, like a gunner on a quad .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun spitting tracers over the Pacific. Or so I told myself.

Iron Maiden’s Eddie

As I learned to play guitar, I noticed that heavy metal was creeping back into the culture. By then this former metalhead was a more or less permanent substitute teacher at a high school in suburban New Jersey. In the hallways, I saw some of the kids wearing reprints of black heavy metal shirts from the 1980s. I spotted the classic Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhodes Tribute T-shirt, Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ cemetery album cover, and even the old Iron Maiden Eddie T-shirts. Eddie, the tattered skeleton that became the sixth member of Iron Maiden, was ubiquitous in the 1980s and now he’d returned. There was Eddie as a white-wigged English judge handing down a ten-year sentence. There he was again in the cockpit of a Spitfire. And most famously, Eddie carried the Union Jack into battle as The Trooper. I pointed out to these young Millennials that I had the same T-shirts, and they actually asked me about metal in the 1980s. With pleasure I recounted, but not too much; I didn’t want to overdo it like a Boomer who can’t shut the hell up about the 60s, man.

I then discovered Sam Dunn, a Canadian anthropologist, documentary film maker and lifetime metalhead. In 2005 Dunn released his first film, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, a two-hour meditation on the history and meaning of heavy metal. He followed this up in 2008 with Iron Maiden: Flight 666, an inside look of Iron Maiden’s 2008 world tour. The author attended their shows at New Jersey’s Meadowlands and PNC Bank Arts Center.  On 11 November 2011 (the very date is a heavy metal inside joke), Dunn released Metal Evolution. This was an 11-part history of heavy metal, from the very earliest proto-metal bands like Jimmy Hendrix and Cream, right on through to the Nu Metal bands of the 90s. Dunn’s series is akin to the BBCs The World at War. There will never be a better documentary series about heavy metal.

As the metal revival grew, in 2008 VH1 launched That Metal Show. Heavy metal was back on the air, albeit on VH-1, which in the 1980s would have been a mark of shame. That Metal Show was hosted by radio DJ Eddie Trunk and his comedian sidekicks Don Jameson and Jim Florentine. The trio were children of the 70s and 80s, and lifelong metal fans; Trunk had been a record industry producer in the 80’s. That Metal Show was a platform for the discussion of all things hard rock and heavy metal, often hilariously so. Florentine bragged about seeing fellow Long Islanders Twisted Sister during their epic pre-MTV touring days. Jameson bragged about losing his virginity while wearing an Iron Maiden T-Shirt. Over the course of fourteen seasons That Metal Show added greatly to heavy metal’s historical record and taught us much I didn’t know.

Twenty years after I first joined the heavy metal scene, I was back, a better metalhead than I’d ever thought possible – and a better music lover too.