The pedal bin in my kitchen sounds uncannily like The Move

The Move had a hit in 1971 with a song called 'Chinatown'. The track started with a gong, followed by some gentle wind chimes, before Bev Bevan’s thunderous drum roll kicked in. Every time I use the pedal bin in my kitchen, I am reminded of this song.

Let me explain how this happens.   

Rubbish in hand, I place one foot on the pedal in order to open the lid, which allows me to deposit some domestic waste. Once I remove my foot from the pedal, the lid closes, causing the bin to issue a metallic clang that sounds uncannily like the opening gong from ‘Chinatown’. Once that faux gong rings out, I am then compelled to mimic the thunderous drum roll and sing (with my internal voice) the first lines of the song: 

Bury a jar of shaoxing
When the girl is born
Surely you know the wine will age
Till she's fully grown

You may or may not be aware that these lines allude to a tradition of the Shaoxing province in China, in which a bottle of wine is buried underground whenever a daughter is born and is only dug up for her wedding banquet. It was quite an achievement for The Move to celebrate this tradition in song and get to number 23 in the British charts.    

That thing with the pedal bin is not the only aural cue that inserts itself, uninvited, into my daily routine. Whenever I power down my laptop, it issues a series of little notes, the first four of which are exactly the same as the introduction to Radiohead’s ‘Everything in its right place’ (from the album Kid A … or maybe Kid B; I always get those two mixed up). You may remember the song from the soundtrack to the film ‘Vanilla Sky’. It gets played when the Tom Cruise character is driving down a wide city boulevard early one morning when nobody –as in nobody- else is around. I think it’s because the character is dreaming or he’s on drugs, or he’s possibly dead; or perhaps it’s a metaphor for his state of mind. Whatever.   

The PC that I use at work (another sly machine), in the process of powering down, plays the opening two notes to Colin Blunstone’s 1972 hit ‘Say you don’t mind’. It’s a string quartet that plays on the track, but the PC does a decent job of imitating it. The song was written by Denny Laine, by the way; he was in Wings (the band that The Beatles could have been).     

   

It’s not just things in my house and at work that insist on playing pop songs. A few years ago, I was a regular shopper at a certain supermarket chain. Whenever they made an in-store announcement about special offers and so on, the first two notes of the electronic clarion preceding each notice resembled the coda to Tubeway Army’s 1979 number 1 hit, ‘Are ‘friends’ electric?’ Every time the store manager updated the customers on the "roast chickens now reduced in our rotisserie", I was compelled to follow that phantom coda, drifting off in an electric dream. ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ was a top 3 hit in 1985 for Phil Oakey and Georgio Moroder. The story goes that Oakey, thinking it was just a rehearsal, recorded the vocal in one take.   

Everything reminds me of music. And, once I’m reminded of a piece of music, it sticks in my head until I’m able to distract myself by inserting something else in its place. On the train into work the other day, I couldn’t shake off 'Ai no corrida', a Quincy Jones hit from the early 80s. I neither own nor particularly like this tune and I can’t even remember how it got into my head, but it took me most of the day to expunge it.  

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like someone to explain this to me: How come you can ‘hear’ music in your head? The act of hearing, surely, involves the primary auditory cortex receiving auditory input? But nobody was playing ‘Ai no corrida’ on the train that morning; if I wasn’t ‘hearing’ it, what exactly was going on?

This is not just about old songs; some modern stuff is catchy too. Lukas Graham’s ‘Seven years old’ (225 million hits and counting on Spotify) has recently taken up residence in my brain, demanding attention. He’s Danish, you know. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any other Danish pop stars, although John Grant’s ‘Queen of Denmark’ was a beautiful album from 2010, featuring not only a song about a sweetshop but one about feeling like Sigourney Weaver in ‘Aliens’

And I feel just like Sigourney Weaver
When she had to kill those aliens.
And one guy tried to get them back to the Earth.
And she couldn't believe her ears.

John, clearly, isn’t that big on rhyming.  

 

There is no escape from this sort of thing. It extends to everyday conversations and close encounters at work. I was talking recently to a colleague about how to keep oneself amused during particularly boring meetings (not, if anyone from work is reading, that I ever have to attend boring meetings). My answer was that I play my favourite albums in my head, or, alternatively, take my musical cues from the conversation.

If anyone ever says: “What’s it all about?” my internal rejoinder has to be ‘Alfie’.

If someone starts a sentence with “To cut a long story short”, I have to sing (internal voice, again) ‘I lost my mind’.

If anyone asks “Who knows?” my response has to be: ‘not me; we never lost control’. 

And, if someone –perhaps at the end of a tricky piece of negotiation- says: “Where do we go from here?”, there is only one fitting reply:  

Is it down to the lake I fear?

Aye aye aye aye aye aye

Aye aye aye aye aye aye 

Here we go.

(If you were not born an embarrassingly long time ago, you may need to look some of those references up).

A friend once suggested to me that this insistence on ‘hearing’ music was probably due to a ‘condition’, perhaps some form of musical autism. In the immortal words of Otto Harbach (music by Jerome Kern):

I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed

The desire to ascribe ‘condition’ status or to concoct some phoney-baloney diagnosis for perfectly normal human activity is a modern phenomenon that I’m convinced will both amuse and mystify our grandchildren. My guess is that most people who love music (and particularly musicians) have music in their head most of the time. If that is the case, then the ability to hear it in everything is neither a gift nor an affliction; it’s more of a predilection, like a disposition to gardening, spotting trains or binge-watching zombie films.

The Zombies had a huge hit in 1969 with ‘Time of the Season’ and I’ve got an unusual version of the song on an album by the Japanese pop outfit Ippu Do. Their front man, Masami Tsuchiya, joined the English band Japan for their final tour in 1982, wherein his guitar pyrotechnics enlivened a largely electronic oeuvre. I caught one of the gigs on that tour, which was recorded for the live double album ‘Oil on Canvas’. 

Oh … and Colin Blunstone, who lives inside the PC in my office, was also in The Zombies. 

The Move - 'Chinatown' 

Keep on rocking in the free market

Enchanted by an image of itself which is decades out of date, rock and pop music continues to strike a rebellious pose, in denial of the Faustian pact its dreary narcissism has allowed it to make in order to accommodate the vagaries of advertising and fashion. Where once it might have been informed by genuinely counter-cultural impulses, rock and pop’s sheer ubiquity makes it ludicrous to argue that it is, in any meaningful sense, ‘anti-establishment’. 

Yet in spite of enjoying the riches generated by its cosy niche within the capitalist machine, the rock aristocracy, ostensibly at least, has long held an overwhelmingly leftist-liberal ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ worldview, with very few willing to deviate from the stifling orthodoxies of the party line.  

It was easy (and profitable) for John Lennon to ‘imagine no possessions’; not only would he never have to worry about actually having no possessions, he knew that the sentiments expressed in that anodyne lyric would strike a chord with an audience primed to accept easy answers to complex problems. The notion that all we have to do is to ‘imagine’ a better world in order to make it happen is, at best, a tad naïve; at worst, it is a fatuous piety. But Lennon, after all, was only writing a song; it’s hardly a big deal that most rock and pop lyrics are about as profound as the kind of sentiments normally expressed on cheap greeting cards.          

The actual business of rock can be more problematic. Take Radiohead, for example. At the turn of the century, they announced that they would not be ‘promoting’ their new album -Kid A- in the sense that other big acts ‘promoted’ their work, but would instead be running a low-level campaign aimed to ‘dispel the hype’ about the new record.   

No advance copies of Kid A were circulated, but the album was showcased under strictly controlled conditions for critics and at special listening parties for selected fans. Yes, it was played in full on MTV, but apart from that (and all the clips on the internet and the articles in magazines), there was hardly any promotion; in fact, I remember seeing lots of Kid A posters in town telling me that Radiohead wouldn’t be promoting the album. In spite of their best efforts, the hype was not dispelled and the album duly shot to the top of the charts. In the summer of 2000, the band toured Europe in a custom-built tent that was smugly declared to feature no corporate logos. Having enjoyed the album (released through an obscure little cottage-run label called Parlophone-EMI) the fans could go along to the concerts, safe in the knowledge that they had not succumbed to any horrid multi-national business practices.  Lots of folk enjoyed those gigs, but some will have noted that capitalism failed to collapse in the face of Radiohead’s disdain.

Student angst is one thing, but perhaps a more egregious example of rock’s apparent hypocrisy was provided by U2. Their spokesperson Bono is fond of preaching about the crippling debt of African countries and about the developed world’s abject dereliction of moral duties, yet in 2006 his band decided to move its publishing operation from Ireland to the Netherlands in order to exploit a more lenient approach to taxing sensitive artistic types.  This in spite of the fact that Ireland’s tax regime was generally perceived to be quite favourable to artists. 

With an accumulated net worth said to be well in excess of €800m, U2 had plenty of motives to avoid paying tax, but it’s not the avoidance that grates. After all, how many people and how many businesses on the planet would volunteer to pay more tax than they have to? Their tax avoidance was merely sound business sense; what makes them deserving of opprobrium is their insouciant ability to preach one thing and practice another. U2 wanted to pay less tax into the very system that they argued should have been doing more to support poorer countries. In other words, they wanted support for African countries to increase, but just not on their dime. 

With the music business providing the perfect illustration of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, it seems rather odd that we’d struggle to find many examples of rock artists being brave enough to kick against the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy to actually make the case for free-market capitalism. Enter stage left (or should that be stage right?) Jean-Jacques Burnel, bass player with The Stranglers. In 1979, JJ released a solo album called ‘Euroman Cometh’. It appeared to present an argument -in as much as a rock album can present an argument for anything- for a federal United States of Europe. JJ was all kinds of wrong about that, but the single from the album did strike an unusually libertarian, pro-market note.   

‘Freddie Laker – Concorde and Eurobus’  managed to get a dig at the protectionist policies of the United States (who fought long and hard to stop the Concorde landing on their shores), but was also a celebration of the work of Freddie Laker, one of the first airline owners to adopt the ‘no-frills’ business model. Up until the mid-seventies, transatlantic air travel had been mainly the preserve of folk with a higher-than-average disposable income.  The airline industry -heavily unionised and shackled by outdated protective practices- would have kept its iron grip on transatlantic travel for decades without Laker’s determination to challenge the vested interests of the established companies. After years of legal battles (which included having his licence revoked by the Labour government in 1975) Laker finally saw his Skytrain take to the air for the first time in September 1977. It flew from London to New York, charging a fare that was about one third of the price at that time charged for a transatlantic flight by the established airlines. 

‘Freddie Laker - Concorde and Eurobus’ was released in April 1979. Sadly, it created barely a ripple in the nether regions of the pop charts, but remains, nonetheless, a bracing little slice of abrasive pop. JJ wasn’t much of a singer and you had the feeling that he was only getting to do a solo album because the record company wanted to appease the bassist in The Stranglers, who were –at that time- a very successful new wave act. 

This video captured something of the anarchic joie de vivre of the song. The use of the vocoder brought a certain ominous energy, a hint of dystopian menace. In 1979, a vocal like that sounded like it came from the future, from a strange and exciting world in which some of our key assumptions (about nationhood, about business, about art) might have been broken down. We may even have imagined that the act of singing in a band might one day be the preserve of industrially-manufactured art robots. 

So hats off to Jean-Jacques. He set his sail against the prevailing wind and made his personal statement, cocking a snook at the received orthodoxies of his peers.  

Now doesn’t that represent the authentic spirit of rock and roll?