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Enchanted by an image of itself which is decades out of date, rock and pop music continues to strike a rebellious pose, in denial of the Faustian pact its dreary narcissism has allowed it to make in order to accommodate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?

Still fighting an old war

Last week the Sunday Herald published an article in which the Scottish Catholic Church’s Director of Communications Peter Kearney claimed that Scotland is “a hostile environment” for Catholics. Reading it, one might easily have deduced that the piece had just been dug up, having been written and then sealed in a time capsule sometime around 1954.

Starting with his conclusion and then knocking the ‘evidence’ into a shape that conveniently suited his theory, he asserted that Scotland “has an issue with anti-Catholicism”. On one level, this can be viewed merely as an amusing snapshot of an anachronistic mindset. Rather like one of those old Japanese soldiers stranded in the jungle and still believing that World War 2 was in full swing, Mr Kearney seems to have been frozen in time. In that sense, we might be tempted to have some sympathy for the old warrior, still fighting ancient battles, his besieged psyche still sensing persecution at every turn. There is, however, an altogether less palatable aspect to his outrageous assertions and his egregious talk of ‘apologists’ and ‘deniers’.

In a country where asylum seekers face actual discrimination and where only two out of 129 MSPs are from ethnic minority backgrounds, Mr Kearney’s risible claims to victimhood on behalf of Scotland’s Catholics is in extremely poor taste.
One simply can’t have the power and influence that Scotland’s Catholics have earned over the last fifty years and yet continue to claim ‘underdog’ status. We can laugh at the absurdity of Mr Kearney’s position, but it represents an affront to those in our country who genuinely are without power, status or influence, those who truly are disenfranchised. He really ought to be ashamed.

How not to not watch cricket

When I was at Headingley last year for the test match with South Africa, I blogged about a load of young men dressed up as Jimmy Saville, doing the conga around the stadium to raise money for charity. I was there again this weekend for the match with New Zealand and somehow –I don’t know, call it a weird kind of intuition- I had the feeling that those events were unlikely to be repeated. But don’t worry, cricket fans; there was still plenty of fancy dress on display, with my vote for the 'most amusing /least annoying' group going to a quite sober phalanx of Mister Bean lookalikes.

Having seen the New Zealanders dismissed for 174 in their first innings, most spectators were disappointed by Alistair Cook’s decision not to ask his shell-shocked opponents to bat again on Sunday afternoon. Predictably, a dullish passage of play ensued and some of the crowd seemed to lose focus on the cricket. As the English batsmen set to work on increasing their lead from the merely huge to the positively gargantuan, various pockets in the rowdy Western Terrace started to amuse themselves by passing empty plastic beer glasses around the ground, an activity which -for reasons mostly to do with beer consumption- has become popular at some matches. The object of the exercise is to get as many glasses as possible into one long ‘snake’ before gravity intervenes. At one point, there must have been several hundred tumblers in the ‘snake’ as it made its way from one end of the terrace to the other, accompanied by the chant: Feed the snake and it will grow. It was like an improvised version of ‘It’s a Knockout’, lacking only a bit of Euro-glamour, a complicated scoring system and perhaps Stuart Hall providing one of his famous guffawing commentaries. Although on second thoughts, perhaps we could live without the commentary.

Excessive consumption of beer can lead a person to believe many foolish things. It might, for instance, make them believe that they are quite funny and that their friends are even funnier. It might also make them forget the fact that they have paid good money to watch some highly-trained international sportsmen do their stuff, leading them to concentrate instead on watching some highly untrained beer-fuelled spectators collecting empty plastic glasses and passing them around the crowd until –guess what?- those glasses eventually fall and they have to start all over again. As the test match trundled along, many folk in the Western Terrace were focused, mobile phones in hand, on the unfolding drama of the tumbling tumblers. The cricket, at that point, may have been dull, but I had the feeling that the beer-people would have been concentrating on their beer-snake no matter what was going on out in the middle. In their defence, at least those folk were having some kind of authentic experience; they were living in their moment and that moment was all about ignoring the cricket to take sozzled delight at the attempted transportation of some empty plastic glasses around the crowd, all the while shouting: Feed the snake and it will grow.

Some folk however, had not only paid money to not watch the cricket, they were now not experiencing the beer-snake game because they were busy filming it on their mobile phones. Consequently, they were now two steps removed from the thing that they had paid money to watch. I tried to keep an eye on the cricket, but found myself distracted not only by the beer-people passing those tumblers around, but by the phone-people not watching the cricket, not passing the tumblers, not quite having that authentic, beer-fuelled experience. I was, in effect, watching other people watching other people not watching the cricket.

On some weird kind of meta-level, I think I might have been having quite a good time.

Song of the Week: 'Useless Love'

This was the first track on the 'Almost half-undressed' album. The opening line is: “If you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what you’re missing”. Yes, being in love can suck, but this song delights in a little misery as it talks up the pain and heartache of it all.  

Musically, the trick here was to try and make it all sound easy and relaxed in order to evoke a certain heady and wistful feeling; we ended up with quite a delicate arrangement, as befits the subject matter. Stuart MacLeod does some rather fine bottleneck work amid the lush textures, while the strings -for those interested in that sort of thing- are actually sampled vocals. Once we’d finished the recording, this track just seemed like the natural choice to open the album. Wallowing in the sweet pain of infatuation, it floats dreamily along, sounding like a slightly tipsy Beautiful South trying to impersonate XTC. 

Useless Love

Five reasons why Ferguson reigns supreme

It’s hard to believe that Sir Alex Ferguson is no longer going to be the manager of Manchester United. Given his relentless, almost legendary drive, I thought that he might have gone on for a few more years; in fact, I half-suspected that he would one day have to be carried out of Old Trafford in a box. On the thirtieth anniversary of one of his greatest triumphs – Aberdeen’s win against Real Madrid in the final of the European Cup-Winner’s Cup- it seems fitting to republish this piece from a couple of years ago. Ferguson’s fierce competitive streak might not have endeared him to some, but –to my mind- there are five reasons for stating, with confidence, that he is the best manager the game has ever seen.

1. He had unprecedented success with an unfashionable club.
Most professional leagues are dominated by a handful of powerful clubs, so anyone who can buck their local trend deserves to be considered an exceptional talent. Perhaps you’d have to live in Scotland to appreciate the scale of what Ferguson achieved at Aberdeen in the early eighties. To break into the Celtic-Rangers duopoly was a monumental achievement; to win a European trophy was simply off the scale. It can be argued that Brian Clough, in terms of over-achieving at unfashionable clubs, has a better record than Ferguson. His feats at Nottingham Forest and -to a lesser extent- Derby County were remarkable, but Clough doesn’t score in the other categories.

2. He had success over a sustained period.
Ferguson won promotion with St. Mirren in the mid-seventies and won his first league title with Aberdeen in 1980. 33 years later, he was still winning. Old-timers might mention Bill Struth at Rangers, who managed for 34 years, amassing ten league titles, ten Scottish Cups, two League Cups and various other Glasgow Cups and Merchant Charity Cups. With all due respect, some of these trophies don’t carry a whole lot of weight in historical terms and Struth’s Rangers (like Jock Stein’s all-conquering Celtic in the 60s and 70s) competed in a relatively weak league that is dominated by two teams.

3. He had success with different clubs, in different leagues.
Some managers have great success at one club, but fail to replicate that success elsewhere. Don Revie, for instance, was outstanding at Leeds, but did little of note away from Elland Road. It takes truly exceptional talent to achieve great success in more than one job and Ferguson has been a league champion and a European trophy winner with two teams in two countries. Mourinho has succeeded in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain, while Huddink, Robson, Trappatoni, Herrera and Eriksson (and probably a few others) all have very impressive CVs, but none of them score as convincingly in the other categories.

4. He successfully built a number of winning teams over a prolonged period.
Ferguson built at least four or five successful teams at Manchester United. Bob Paisley scores highly for his work at Liverpool, as does Jock Stein at Celtic, but Paisley inherited a side that was already very successful. He clearly took his club to another level, but his 1977 European Cup-winning team featured six players who had played in Bill Shankly’s last match in charge. Jock Stein, brilliant as he was, worked at a club with massive domestic advantages, playing –to all intents and purposes– in a two-team league, wherein any achievements have to be viewed in the context of an extremely lop-sided domestic set-up.

5. He won the trophies.
Nothing in the modern era compares with the haul achieved by Ferguson. He won thirteen league titles at Man Utd, three at Aberdeen, four major European trophies and god knows how many FA Cups and League Cups. It's a frightening total.

Some have suggested that for a club of Manchester United’s stature to have won the Champions League ‘only’ twice is a tad disappointing. Bob Paisley, after all, won three European Cups in five seasons and, since it is the major trophy in club football, there is a case for saying that he was more ‘successful’. But the European Cup in those days, much as it might be difficult for fans of Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and Celtic to concede, was a knock-out tournament in which two successful rounds (perhaps against part-time Scandinavian or mediocre Eastern European opposition) took you to the quarter-finals. The European Cup was an easier tournament in which to be successful than the current Champion’s League. That is why teams like Malmo, Bruges and Partizan Belgrade could make it to the final; that is why teams Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and Steau Bucharest could win it.

It has been claimed that Ferguson was lucky to survive at Old Trafford after his first three seasons appeared to lack any obvious signs of progress, but he had inherited what was, in effect, a social club that played occasional games of football. He recognised quickly that he would have to dismantle not only the team, but the whole culture of the club. That was always going to take time and, if the progress at first appeared to be sluggish, it now seems clear that Ferguson was far too talented and driven not to have succeeded, one way or another.

Some folk say that he wouldn't have been successful away from Manchester United, but that is a bit like saying that Roger Federer wouldn't have won the British Open if he had taken up golf instead of tennis. It's entirely hypothetical and pretty close to being pointless. On the available evidence, it would more logical to speculate that, had he gone to another club when opportunities arose in the mid-eighties, further success would have led to him moving on, because Alex Ferguson was born to manage Manchester United.

Thirty years ago, we might have guessed it, but now we know it; love him or loathe him, he was the best. The football landscape just won’t be the same without him.

A quick point (about pedantry)

Further to my post last week about the correct grammar to use while commenting on popular music, I was emailed by one correspondent who suggested that I had spent rather too much time lurking in what he called ‘pedantry corner’.

Without wishing to appear pedantic, my understanding of 'pedantry corner' would be that it is a term designed to describe an area or, if you will, milieu, in which the general practice (and celebration) of 'pedantry' is permitted and perhaps even encouraged by those who (might choose to) linger therein.

Perhaps my correspondent would have been better advised to have used the term ‘pedant’s corner’, which I think would accurately describe a corner (or, to be more precise, a nook or cranny) to which one would occasionally retreat (or retire) in order to consult various reference books (and also magazines and websites) for the purpose of resolving (or attempting to resolve) any dispute arising from a discussion on matters pertaining (or relating) to the arts, sciences, politics and /or popular culture.

And, just to be clear, by 'discussion', I do not mean an extended interval of interlocutory jousting carried out between persons located in the same room, or persons located in different places but communicating via telephone, 'walkie-talkie' or an internet connection. I mean (or meant) a printed representation purporting to reflect (or represent) a moderated series of opinions (or postulations) on a given topic, in this case the use (and, presumably, abuse and /or misuse) of grammatically robust terminology while discussing the merits and demerits of pop groups.

I hope that clears things up.

The correct terminology

The other day, I was talking to someone about music and he ventured the opinion that "Mumford and Sons are a pile of shite". Leaving to one side the question of whether or not I was inclined to agree with this assessment of the musical abilities of that particular combo, I paused before making a reply. Surely, I thought, both 'Mumford and Sons' and 'pile of shite' are singular terms? Accordingly, I believe my friend should have said: 'Mumford and Sons is a pile of shite', or perhaps: 'Mumford and Sons are piles of shite'. Or, to be more accurate: 'The music made by Mumford and Sons bears some resemblance to a pile (or piles) of shite’.

But eagle-eyed readers will already have spotted the glaring weakness in my reasoning. Yes, I had assumed, a priori, that he was talking about the musical abilities of the musicians collectively known as Mumford and Sons. But what if he was referring to the physical appearance of those musicians? What if he actually thought that the members of that group in some way resembled an aggregation of feculent debris? Harsh as such an assessment might have been, it would at least have been supported by a statement that was robust in its grammar and hermeneutics. After a few awkward moments, I decided to go with my gut feeling and settled on my initial interpretation, namely that my friend was talking about the musical abilities of the aforementioned combo (this in spite of having reservations about the incongruity of his comparison between the noise made by musicians and an essentially silent pile of waste). Even so, I could not help but suspect that it would have made things far simpler had he compared the noise made by the musicians known collectively as Mumford and Sons to another noise (perhaps, for example, a drunken folk singer with toothache trapped inside a malfunctioning industrial dryer).

For the sake of brevity, I granted his erroneous comparison while politely suggesting that he might have avoided confusion by framing his opening remark thus: "Notwithstanding the apparent incongruity of the attempted equivalence, the noise made by the musicians known collectively as Mumford and Sons bears some resemblance to a significant (and perhaps stacked) accumulation of human or animal waste material".

Grammar, I mused, can be such a minefield, or rather, series of minefields.

Incidentally, on the question of what constitutes a 'pile' of 'shite', I have long maintained that an accumulation of excrement dropped in one sitting by a large animal (an elephant, for example) should have a different status and nomenclature to a random scattering of fecal matter dropped by a number of smaller animals and then gathered into a 'pile' by a zoo-keeper or park attendant. At the risk of provoking the kind of heated exchange generated by my recent post on Thatcher-hatred, I would suggest that while these two 'piles' -to the untrained eye, at least- might appear to be similar, they are, in fact, entirely unrelated entities.

For anyone interested in exploring this topic in more detail, I've posted an article over at:

www.ohforfucksakestoptalkingshite.com