Blog
27/08/12
Masks
Country music has a long and rich history, much of it misconstrued by non-aficionados who more often than not see it as conservative, white red-necked and exclusively American.
Anyone who knows anything about music history will know there’s a huge flipside to the Garth Brooks stereotype, not least in the roots of country music and some of its greatest legends, as well as the stable of bands that came out of the 90s pioneered by the likes of Uncle Tupelo and Will Oldham etc, although they weren’t the first – such artists as The Long Ryders or Jason and the Scorchers had sown the seeds some 10 years earlier – moreover the 90s alt-country bands were probably the first group of country musicians who were clearly rooted in punk. Disillusioned with the clichés that punk had paradoxically conformed to they opted to take their music for a ride through Bakersfield and Nashville, and like 2 opposites attracting; punk and country eloped spawning the bastard child otherwise known as alt-country (aka americana) that was about as red-necked and conservative as your average indie nerd.
Meanwhile over here on the other side of the Atlantic - just as Ryan Adams was taking his checked shirt over to the mainstream - a small but fanatical bunch of followers and bands emerged taking their cue from the scene in the States, there were some great bands, but they were never fully accepted, especially by the music press, mainly on the parochial grounds of the fact that they were deemed “too American” and therefore not “real” enough, unlike say NME darlings such as The Libertines. People would question “how come that guy from Whitstable, South Norwood or wherever sounded Californian?” "How could he possibly be authentic?" A bit like rappers from Peckham sounding like they’d grown up in the Bronx - which was usually the case in the 80s and 90s until Grime came along giving UK rap a voice of its own.
But the transatlantic musical symbiosis is not nearly as black and white as the Parochials would have you believe, it’s more of a toing and froing ever-evolving cross-fertilisation of all forms and genres of music.
It’s not about your vernacular, it's simply a case of whether what you're doing is fundamentally believable or not.
There’s this whole UK thing that if you’re not American - unless you’re Sir Mick Jagger or a member of the Alabama 3 - you shouldn’t sing in an American accent, I understand the logic behind the point, but it gets confusing when English singers as opposed to singing in fake American accents end up singing in a fake English accents instead, which is most definitely the case with that stable singers that sound more like Arthur Askey singing with the aid of a helium balloon than anything from the streets of London or Manchester.
To me, it’s not about accent or technique, it’s about character, many singers sing with a mask on, but the real character is clearly the one underneath the mask but you will never get to see it, when the great singer stands up, the mask comes off and you’re like putty in their hands.
To me, the ultimate example of someone who sang with absolutely no mask was Johnny Cash.
And if anyone were to ask me who my inspiration in music was, I would only have one answer and that would be without doubt the God-like figure that was Mr. Johnny Cash.
I love the characters and stories, I’m devastated by the way he can convey tragedy without sentimentality, I have a freindship with the outcasts, murderers and anti-heroes all over his songs, I believe him when he talks about the word of God even though I’m a non-believer, he’s never judgemental, he can mix dark humour with violence - but never in a gloating way – he creates pathos like virtually no one else, and above all he is 100% bereft of any bullshit unlike so much of what we regard as cool or post modern.
These are universal subjects, but obviously Johnny Cash coming from a poor American bible-belt background will deliver them in the context he knows and understands.
Which goes back to the whole transatlantic thing, reviewers have quoted Morton Valence as a ‘quintessentially English’ band on more than one occasion – albeit that in the past we’ve had recruits from Latin America, China, France, Portugal etc – but I assume what’s being referred to are the narratives in the songs, and the conversations between Anne and myself and I take it as a massive compliment.
But having said that, when someone asks me what type of music my band play, I always without hesitation reply, country music.
Surely it's impossible to be quintessentially English and make country music? Isn’t that some sort of oxymoron?
Absolutely not.
Our forthcoming 3rd album (that is finally recorded and in the can) is most definitely country, even though the country purists will almost certainly not like it. It’s not a sentimental record and there are plenty of other musical influences outside of country, so musically I guess you could call it a country hybrid that we simply like to call ‘country exotica’ and I think once you hear it you’ll figure out why.
It isn’t an album of introspective love songs, but more an album full of villainy, ne'er do wells and outcasts in the classic country and western outlaw tradition, but set in locations that I know and can therefore write about as a native Londoner, sung and delivered by myself and Anne backed by a fantastic band and hopefully not a mask in sight.
Coming very soon.
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04/08/12
Positively negative
I can’t believe how dead London is at the moment, far from the predicted stampeeding masses, the Olympics has turned the place into a ghost town, everyone bar a few sports fans seems to have left.
In my last posting I was mithering on about how the mainstream has embraced a lot of what were once considered “alternative” concepts and usurped them for their own ends, multinational companies now take their employees away on obligatory tree-hugging excursions and I can imagine David Cameron’s bedtime reading as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” rather than say something by Rudyard Kipling or Shakespeare.
It’s what I would call the beige revolution, all fluffy smiles and organic 'hey nonie-noo-nahs' first embraced by the Tony Blair ties-for-headbands generation at some gluten free high fiving jam session with Sting, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jamie Oliver, Clapton, Edwina Currie and a couple of lesbian vicars… just hence to bombing the crap out of some less fortunate country of course.
So why am I bothered?
It’s the way the facebook generation seems to have moved into a new era of totalitarianism without even realising it.
It’s not that I have anything against facebook per-se, it’s just this blinkered positivity about everything that does my head in. The way bands are judged less on their music but more on how many fucking “likes” they have – we recently played a show with a band that had thousands and thousands of these “likes” and er…. 4 real people watching them play live.
Recently, after having drunk far too many beers, I made some bitchy comments about Arcade Fire on facebook and the next thing I’m receiving hate mail from complete strangers and being told off for being so negative.
Well, in my opinion there’s nothing more negative than blind positivity, which apart from being all over a country like North Korea, also seems to be very prevalent on facebook.
Now you’ve read this; click the “like” button.
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28/07/12
I'm confused
Like just about everyone else in the country I watched Danny Boyle’s Olympic extravaganza on telly last night. Many people whose opinions I admire seem to be gushingly positive about it, all round legendary geezer and someone I have the upmost respect for - John Robb - hailed it as some sort of genius situationist prank, and the fact that it wasn’t the usual Simon Cowell/Gary Barlow insipid parade of the lame and pointless has to be a good thing… sure, who could disagree with that? Blasting the Sex Pistols and Underworld at the amassed figures of the World Order was a nice touch, and without a doubt The Arctic Monkeys were absolutely fucking brilliant, nevertheless, the whole spectacle kind of left me confused and perturbed.
Was it revolutionary? Or just another example of the “counter culture” being assimilated into the establishment?
When you have the likes of The Sun trumpeting its virtues, and about the only people who seem to have taken umbrage are those slightly to the right Vlad the Impaler such as Peter Hitchens (surprise surprise) and some Tory MP who likes dressing up as Hitler at the weekend - who incidentally also happened to tweet “bring on the Stones”… huh?????? – I’m getting even more confused.
Some Cocksucker Blues on the big screen for the right honourable gentleman perhaps?
It’s a topsy turvy funny old world.
I guess revolutionaries either die in a blaze of youthful glory, or grow old get rich and become respectable, whether it be Johnny Rotten, Wordsworth or Sir Mick Jagger, unfortunately the knock on effect is in doing so they invariably become completely disconnected from the very reason as to why they existed in the first place, mutate into ridiculous caricatures of themselves and by default become irrelevant.
All-inclusive, family friendly rock n roll… doesn’t sound very exciting to me, happy to see Cowell and Barlow looking after that department thank you very much.
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22/07/12
One year later
Well here goes blog instalment 2, precisely 12 months after instalment one, so I guess that technically makes me a lazy git.
Coincidentally in said blog entry I was banging on about Rupert Murdoch who was in the news again today, anyway, do I care anymore? Not really.
Far more importantly today is probably the first day of sunshine this summer and I happen to be in bed dying of man-flu, can’t believe it, is this bug doing the rounds? Or is my body trying to tell me something?
Anyway, we’ve nearly finished our third album, should be ready for mastering in the next couple of weeks, this 3rd instalment will be our best to date without any doubt whatsoever, in fact I would go so far as to say it’s in another league to anything we’ve done thus far, that’s not to take anything away from the other 2 albums, but this is a step up.
I would say this is down to our current line up, which apart from having an unwavering belief in what we do - in spite of all the knocks – we have what I regard as perfect chemistry.
Good chemistry is pure luck, supernatural forces may be at work? But I’d bet it wasn’t the hand of God that made John, Paul, George and Ringo etc but simply Lady Luck configuring well.
Not everybody loves the Beatles, but even your most ardent Beatle-hater couldn’t possibly deny there was chemistry within that particular combo.
John Lennon summed it up when someone put it to him that Pete Best - the original Beatles’ drummer - was by far a better drummer than Ringo, Lennon simply replied, “sure, but Ringo is by far a better Beatle.”
Playing ability has nothing to do with good chemistry.
Individuals shouldn’t join bands, they should become solo artists, in any band with any value there is no “me”… only “us”, which of course will inevitably lead to tension as musicians are notoriously egotistical.
No more so than say The Sex Pistols who had fine chemistry, until Sid joined that is, just go and look at the Pistols pre-Sid on Tony Wilson’s “So it Goes”, compared to when they went to America with Sid, 2 different bands.
This was nothing to do with Sid’s lack of playing bass-ability, but more to do with Sid being totally self absorbed in “me” “me” “me” land.
If you’re in a band with a drummer who claims his “style” of drumming is to hit the drums so hard you can’t hear the singer, get rid of that drummer immediately, they don’t get it, and they never will, same goes for singers with the ego minus the catchy tunes, or wank off noodle bullshit guitarists with too many fucking pedals, kill them all.
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23/07/11
You ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
I was as enthralled as everybody else to see the Murdoch Empire devouring itself, witnessing a grizzly old tyrant being thrown to the very pack of dogs that he created, while his cabal of self-appointed moralists squirmed in their own hypocrisy, that tired old smokescreen of national-worthiness – aka the News of the World - came crumbling down, irreversibly exposing its true face to the entire world, albeit something most people had probably just assumed and taken for granted anyway – but to quite the extent that has now become apparent is even a shock to the most ardent Murdoch hating leftwing conspiracy-theorist.
Ok, so what’s an upstart and bit player in the world of music such as myself got to do with any of this anyway? Shouldn’t I just be towing the usual insipid inoffensive line of how Morton Valence are currently working on our difficult 3rd album? How we’ve been wowing audiences across the country? How many great bands there are around at the moment? How Mumford and Sons rule the world and how amazing Beyonce was at Glasto?
Errr… no, not this band.
Once upon a time, popular culture could unnerve the sacred, threaten the established order, shake up royalty, kick off bible-belt mass album-burnings, ignite the wrath of the bourgeois, spark the flames of revolution, unleash rebellions, beguile the uninitiated, awaken the unconscious, empower the disenfranchised etc etc etc…
… so what happened?
… and what’s any of that got to do with Rupert Murdoch?
… besides, the 60s pushed on a long time ago, right?
But that’s not my point… my point is, popular culture once had an authentic resonance that could define a person, it wasn’t just sounds on a piece of plastic or colours on a wall, it was the backdrop of an era that reverberated politically and said “this is us!” But at some point between who knows when and now this has been diluted and finally swept aside to make way for something other.
Personally, I would describe this other as a meaningless antiseptic world of anodyne sound bites, blandness and conformity, presided over by an industry and media that relentlessly dole it out dressed up and sell it as something clearly “other” than what it quite patently is if you actually bother to have a look.
Still… we lap it up in our droves.
It’s easy to see through the hypocrisy of a “newspaper” that moralises about paedophiles on one page and publishes pictures of teenage girls flashing their titties on the next. It’s the crudest form of what I was talking about in the previous paragraph, the embodiment of the idea that simply because someone with power over you says it’s true, it therefore becomes “true” by default on their say so, unfortunately this isn’t just confined to the emperor’s new clothes, paranoid dictators, your boss, the council and a few gutter-tabloids, it’s everywhere, not least in the world of music.
As I am writing this I’ve just heard the tragic news of Amy Winehouse’s untimely death, a lonesome voice of her generation, although she was an English girl who unapologetically adopted an American idiom, she was a quintillion times more authentic than that stable of UK singers who ham up that preposterous caricature pretend chavney accent - most of them are toffs - that's about as authentic as a Bangkok Rolex and sound more like Arthur Askey singing through a helium balloon than anything you’d hear on the mean streets of London in 2011.
People complain about English singers singing in fake American accents, it doesn’t bother me nearly half as much as English singers singing in fake English accents, yet it’s touted as something credible by people who are either deaf, stupid or just completely cynical.
And this cynicism goes from the bottom right to the top of the media, and who’s the man at the top? Where does the buck stop? Yes of course, Mr. Murdoch no less.
Could his demise usher in a new era? Post Murdoch? Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as post punk or post modernism, but I think what has happened recently is a good thing, not just as far as Murdoch is concerned, but right across the board, too many people have spent far too long sat on their fat arses taking it all for granted becoming vile complacent corrupt human carbuncles in the process, I say we stick the boot in while the going’s good and get rid of them.
I’m not quite sure what post modernism is, but I’ve been told such a statement is very post modernist. I guess it’s the knowing raised eyebrow, the politically incorrect, the price superseding the value, the tat cloaked in irony, the inauthentic, the overrated and the out and out bullshit. Things that in the modernist era would have been considered uncool and fake became acceptable in the boom post modern years, idealism morphed either into cynicism, fundamentalism or simply died a death, and at some point in the 90s if you didn’t like the Spice Girls and found the spectre of Noel Gallagher sipping bubbly with Tony Blair distasteful you were dissed as some sort of worthy beard stroking dinosaur that just didn’t get it, patted on the head and told to run along check out the new Green Day album.
Well, as always, with the passage of time the tables always turn.
So here’s to the death of the post modern.
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