Tag: Keith Richards

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The Moore, the merrier

 

© Bloomsbury

 

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen.  One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

 

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985.  Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens.  (Shandor was a 19th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons.  He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior.  At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.)  However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

 

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown.  But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

 

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult.  Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile.  It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

 

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s.  Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity.  Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

 

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen.  After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity.  And we’re all the better for it.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

 

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations.  Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion.  Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel.  It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

 

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud.  No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird.  Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y.  (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything.  It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

 

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman.  It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades.  For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics.  (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

 

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists.  I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’.  Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…”  Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee.  That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world.  If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

 

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20th and early 21st centuries.  They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed.  The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose.  If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh.  Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

 

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens.  Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s.  I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

 

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

 

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State.  This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist.  In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe.  Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does.  As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

 

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location.  He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford.  This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be.  They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming.  In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house.  The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover.  This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above.  Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

 

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry.  Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist.  Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is.  And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing.  He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

 

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother.  A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric.  Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort.  Moore obviously relishes describing the setting.  The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970).  And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

 

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry.  I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally.  Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

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Bali bits and pieces

 

 

My partner and I have just been in Thailand.  But before I put anything on my blog about that, I suppose I’d better post this last instalment about our experiences in Bali…

 

Taman Ayun Temple

This was our first stop on a tour we did with a spritely, 60-something Balinese guide who spoke English with an Australian accent – the result of years ferrying Australian tourists around the island’s attractions.  Also, his raspy tones made him sound like an Australian Keith Richards.  Appropriately, he complained about how life had been in Indonesia during the brutal military regime of General Suharto, who among his many sins had banned Western rock music.  Our guide recalled the joy of being able to listen to the likes of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC after Suharto’s departure in 1998.

 

Unlike the Balinese mountain and coastal temples we visited, Taman Ayun Temple was sedate in its topography.  Its buildings, compounds, stone-tiled paths, lawns, gardens, trees and green-painted, Victorian-style lampposts were arranged over a flat strip of ground contained within a long, narrow, U-shaped waterway.  But I liked it because we arrived early, before other tourists, and had the premises to ourselves.  I especially liked wandering the sides of the complex and looking across the water – tall, thin, poplar trees spearing it with their reflections.  And at the temple’s far end were paths leading into some woodland with immensely fibrous and creepered banyan trees.  That part was the closest I got to exploring Bali’s nature during our holiday.

 

 

Typically for Balinese temples, there were tapering, tiered pagodas shaped like stacks of ceramic bushings you’d find in an electrical substation.  And at the end of the circuit we made around Taman Ayun, we encountered a display-area that was half-gallery, half-museum.  In addition to many traditional and modern paintings, it had on show a trio of shaggy Balinese demon costumes.  These included one of Rangda, whom Wikipedia describes as “the demon queen of the Leyaks in Bali…  Terrifying to behold, the child-eating Rangda leads an army of evil witches against… the forces of good.”

 

 

Coffee Plantation

We’d known a coffee plantation was included on our tour itinerary.  Unfortunately beforehand, we hadn’t given it much thought – or done any research.

 

We were shown around the plantation and ended up in a treehouse-café that resembled Tarzan’s jungle home in one of the old movies featuring Johnny Weissmuller.  It looked particularly Tarzan-esque because of a catwalk that snaked from it, through the treetops, to a platform where you could take photos of the adjacent mountains, round, blue and caressed by tufts of passing cloud.  In the café we were presented with 17 little tasting glasses containing 17 differently flavoured and coloured coffees, teas and other plantation-produced drinks.

 

 

What soured our experience there was the sudden appearance of a luwak, a type of civet used extensively in the production of ‘luwak coffee’.  The process, to quote a somewhat ungrammatical information sign at the plantation, goes like this: “Luwak eats coffee beans that are still intact… Through the luwak digestive system, undergoes natural chemical treatment, fermenting in the stomach and come out with excrement… The taste very unique!  Fermentation in the luwak stomach make low caffeine.  It has rich flavour like almond chocolate taste and very smooth.”  In other words, luwak coffee is made from beans eaten, digested and shat out by luwaks, which supposedly have less caffeine but a richer, smoother, more chocolatey taste.

 

A plantation staff-member brought a luwak around the café’s tables so the visitors could look at it.  The poor beast seemed befuddled.  Worse, when it was brought to us, the luwak panicked, sprang out of the staff-member’s hands onto my left arm, clambered across my shoulders and descended my right arm before being captured again.  Upset by this, my partner consulted her smartphone.  She discovered that luwaks should be fed on a varied diet of fruit, seeds and insects, not the monotonous, nutritiously-deficient diet of coffee beans they get at the plantations.  They’re also confined to small cages and, as shy, nocturnal animals, being displayed to tourists during the daytime traumatises them.

 

I know – in all cultures, animals used in the production of food are usually treated cruelly.  I’m well aware of that, being from a farming background.  But the poor old luwaks could at least be spared the indignity of being dragged from their cages, during daytime, for tourists to gawk at.  If we’re in Bali again, we’ll make sure coffee plantations aren’t on the itineraries of any tours we do.

 

Ulun Danu Beratan Temple

This temple complex was beautifully sited on the shore of Lake Beratan in central Bali.  The view you got from it across the water was, basically, a rhapsody in blue: the shimmering, rippling, glassy blue of the lake, the solider green-blue of the Bedugul Mountains rising above the lake’s far rim, the crystal-clear blue of the sky.  Also, horticulturalists would love the place even if they didn’t walk as far as the temple-buildings.  The approach was gorgeously landscaped with lawns, flowerbeds, flowery borders and neatly groomed trees.

 

 

After our experiences a few days earlier at the tourist-infested Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to be in a Balinese temple that was busy mainly with local people.  Crowds of them, both adults and children, had assembled wearing white sarongs and red senteng (shawls bound around the waist) and white or red udeng (traditional Balinese male headdress).  Not all the locals had gathered for religious purposes – for, at the lakeshore, a squad of boys were using fishing rods, their lines out in the water among the water-lilies and between the moored wooden boats.  However, there were still a few foreigners around.  One hideous spectacle that stuck in my mind took place at a stage where folk were invited to don historical Balinese costumes and pose for photographs – a Western lady, no doubt an influencer, had tricked herself out as a Balinese princess and was posing for picture after picture with a nauseating, full-of-herself smile on her visage.

 

A little disconcertingly, along the shore from the temple buildings, the complex became more family-friendly, with the statues of traditional Balinese deities and mythological creatures giving way to Disney-esque ones of animals: fish, peacocks, parrots.  There were also bird-headed paddleboats and even a little compound where youngsters could hang out with and cuddle large fluffy rabbits.  Oh well.  I suppose parents visiting the temple appreciated it having attractions to keep the kids occupied too.

 

 

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces

We stopped for lunch at an eatery that was in the middle of this UN World Heritage Site.  It’s prized for the traditional rice fields that occupy the multiple terraces scaling its hillsides.  When we stopped at a booth to buy our entry tickets for the area, I noticed a sign on the booth listing possible activities on the terraces and the prices that doers of those activities needed to pay.  The list of activities ran up to the shooting of movies in the area, by foreign directors, which cost vast amounts of Indonesian rupiah.  (The rupiah was currently worth 0.000088 Singaporean dollars, so a lot of zeroes were involved.)  Shooting a movie there with a local director was slightly less expensive.  As far as I know, the famous shots of Julia Roberts pedalling her bicycle through the rice-fields in Eat, Pray, Love (2010) – or, as I prefer to think of it, Watch, Gag, Puke – were not filmed here.

 

After we’d eaten, we ventured along a footpath leading in amid the expanses of rice.  The rice-fields occupied a slightly-undulating plain of green and yellow, occasionally carved up by lines of trees, which stretched off towards distant, broad mountains.  The path was bordered by a channel, full of water, and the edge of the adjacent rice-field collapsed over it, the plants dipping their golden heads in the water as if drinking it.

 

 

This tour took place on Tumpek Landep Day in Bali, which according to balispirit.com is “a ceremonial day at which offerings are made for objects that are made of metal,” which nowadays include “cars and motorbikes…  Most Balinese people truly believe that these ceremonies and blessings will bring them luck and keep them safe in traffic.”  Thus, as we drove around, we saw multiple vehicles – stationary and in motion – with charms and rosettes fixed on their bodywork, dangling long, dried strands of coconut-palm leaves.

 

 

However, these vehicular decorations didn’t sway the police in the city of Ubud, where we were staying.  When Balinese / Australian Keith Richards returned us there at the tour’s end, we noticed some 4x4s that were naughtily parked in ‘no parking’ areas along the sides of the main street.  To chastise them, the local cops were letting all the air out of their tyres.

 

Nyang Nyang Beach

We visited this beach three days later, after we’d relocated from Ubud to Uluwata.  Its main attraction was the claim it was very cut-off and secluded.  A taxi dropped us above the beach.  From there we had to descend a long, very steep road that dropped down through a deep cleft cut out of the shoreline’s rock. The sun blazed from the strip of sky visible above. The road looked like it’d be an ordeal to walk up again, but our plan was to follow the beach to its far end, from which, supposedly, a flight of steps climbed back to civilisation.  At the bottom of the road we found a parking lot and a ramshackle bar. From there, we stepped down onto the beach itself.

 

It was busier than we’d expected, both with bronzed teenaged and 20-something bodies lying on the sand sunbathing – or in a few instances, sitting straight-backed, meditating – and with a pod of surfers out on the water, each awaiting his or her turn to ride in on each big wave that passed by.  A little way down the beach, we found another ramshackle bar – just a shed with a two solid walls and two open sides, a couple of fridges, an icebox, some clunky old wooden tables and chairs, and battered metal signs advertising rum, mojitos and something called ‘Friendship Coffee Vodka’.  We stopped there for a rest.  Nearby, a Balinese guy was operating a film camera, pointed in the direction of the surfers.  They ‘d hired him to film their surfing antics, clips of which would later be uploaded to their social media accounts.

 

 

Then we walked further.  The other holidaymakers disappeared behind us and we definitely felt the vibe of solitude and isolation that’d drawn us here.  Disappointingly, though, Nyang Nyang Beach still had some gunk washed up on its sands: plastic bottles, bottle-tops, cartons, cups and cutlery, and flip-flops and shoe-soles.

 

At the beach’s far end we found a little old man with an icebox who was selling water, Coca Cola and beer.  He showed us the flight of steps, which he proudly told us he went up and down several times a day.  Actually, the ‘steps’ were a chaotic track of rocks, earth and rubble, an assault course rather than a staircase, which wound its way up through the vegetation covering the cliff-face.  Hurriedly changing our plans, we thanked the old man and made our back along the beach to the bottom of the super-steep road.  Luckily, another old guy there with a motorbike offered a ‘taxi’ service – for a fee of 25,000 rupiah, he’d shuttle you up to the top of the road on the back of his bike.  My partner rode up with him first.

 

While waiting for the motorbike to return, I had a quick beer in the bar beside the parking lot.  A slogan had been graffiti-ed on a timber column there: ‘F**K EVERYTHING AND BECOME A PIRATE’.  Pirates, I thought sourly.  That’s what all you wee influencer / Instagramming surf-boys out there are.  Modern-day pirates.

 

Aye, right.

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Rock star insults

 

From youtube.com

 

This blog entry starts with Kate Bush… but isn’t about Kate Bush.

 

The other day I read a news report about how Kate Bush’s 1985 song Running Up That Hill had just gone to number one in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium and Sweden and reached number five in the United States.  The renewed popularity of the song was due to it being featured in season four of the American sci-fi / horror TV series Stranger Things.  My curiosity was sufficiently piqued for me to go to YouTube and type ‘running up that hill’ into its search-bar, wondering if it would provide the clip from the TV show where the song was used.  That didn’t happen, however.  Instead, YouTube – presumably its algorithms had taken note of my past musical preferences at the site – sent me to a cover version of Running Up That Hill performed by the late 1990s / early 2000s band Placebo.  I have to say the cover version didn’t sound bad at all.  And incidentally, the comments below were full of Americans saying things like, “I’d always assumed this was an original Placebo song.  I hadn’t known some English chick had sung it first, back in the 1980s!”

 

Meanwhile, my reaction at that time was: Placebo?  Wow, I haven’t heard of them for years…

 

And then I thought: Hold on! They were responsible for the greatest rock ‘n’ roll insult I’ve ever heard live!

 

Let me explain.  In 1999, I attended T in the Park, then the biggest annual music festival held in Scotland.  Placebo was one of the bands performing on the main stage and I was near the front of the crowd at the start of their set.  Also appearing that day was the rock band Gay Dad, who’d recently scored hit singles with the songs To Earth with Love and Joy, although sceptics grumbled that the hype surrounding the band was nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the fact that its singer Cliff Jones had previously been a music journalist – his former colleagues in the media were promoting his outfit as a favour.  Placebo’s singer Brian Molko was obviously one of the sceptics.  Before they began playing, Molko apologised for the band being slightly late in coming onstage.

 

This, he said, was because: “I was getting a blowjob backstage from the singer of Gay Dad.”  He paused, then added with timing worthy of a master comedian: “Believe me, it’s not just their music that sucks!”

 

Anyway, that memory got me thinking about the following question.  What are the best rock star insults of all time?

 

There are a few famous ones that come immediately to mind.  I recall Robert Smith of the Cure saying of the self-consciously fey and militantly vegetarian frontman of the Smiths, “If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I eat meat. That’s how much I hate Morrissey.”  Also memorable was Nick Cave’s comment on a well-known Californian funk-rock band: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the f*ck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”  Van Halen singer Dave Lee Roth was pretty brutal about a certain post-punk troubadour of the late 1970s and early 1980s: “Music journalists like Elvis Costello because music journalists look like Elvis Costello.”  Though for brutality, you can’t beat the Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards talking about Slowdive, one of the key bands of the shoegaze movement of the late 1980s: “We hate Slowdive more than we hate Hitler.”

 

George Melly, though strictly speaking not a rock star – he was a jazz / blues singer – deserves inclusion here for his response to Mick Jagger.  Melly had drawn attention to the deep grooves on the Rolling Stone’s face and Jagger had tried to dismiss them as ‘laughter-lines’.  “Nothing,” pronounced Melly, “is that funny.”  Meanwhile, I was never a fan of Boy George but I’ve always chuckled at his verdict on Elton John: “All that money and he’s still got hair like a f*cking dinner lady.”  And just to prove that the art of the rock-star insult remains alive and well in 2022, there was recently a spat between Joan Jett and gun-humping, Trump-worshipping rock-neanderthal Ted Nugent, which produced this Jett-gem: “Ted Nugent has to live with being Ted Nugent.  He has to be in that body, so that’s punishment enough.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Will Fresch

 

The world of rock contains certain individuals who can be relied upon to denigrate their contemporaries practically every time they open their mouths.  Two who spring to mind are siblings Liam and Noel Gallagher, late of Britpop mega-band Oasis.  Among those suffering the wrath of Liam Gallagher have been Keith Richards and George Harrison (“jealous and senile and not getting enough f*cking meat pies”), Bob Dylan (“a bit of a miserable c*nt”), Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day (“I don’t like his head”), Bono (“he looks like a fanny”) and Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine (“sounds like someone’s stood on her f*cking foot”).  For my money, though, his best insult was heard at a Q Magazine Awards ceremony, where he yelled at Coldplay’s Chris Martin, “You’re a plant pot!”

 

As the older and supposedly more cerebral Gallagher, Noel’s insults have been more elaborate, if a tad less savage.  Of the musical output of Justin Bieber, he once opined, “My cat sounds more rock ‘n’ roll than that.”   He likened the appearance of the White Stripes’ Jack White to “Zorro on doughnuts” and mused about skatey Canadian punk rockers Sum 41: “After I heard Sum 41, I thought, I’m actually alive to hear the shittiest band of all time.”  Needless to say, Oasis’s Britpop arch-enemies Blur came in for some stick too: “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.”  And inevitably he’s had some choice words for his wayward younger brother since they acrimoniously parted company in 2009.  That same year he famously described Liam to “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”  (For his part, the younger Gallagher has repeatedly referred to Noel as a ‘potato’ and called his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds ‘the High Flying Smurfs’.)

 

© Weidenfeld & Nicolson

 

The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards has also had a famously barbed tongue, powered by his apparent disdain for any form of music that isn’t structured around a 12-bar blues progression.  He’s dissed Prince as “an overrated midget”, REM as “a whiny college rock band” and P Diddy as “bereft of imagination.  What a piece of crap.”  He dumped on the Grateful Dead for “Just poodling about for hours and hours.  Jerry Garcia, boring shit, man. ”  Of Metallica he speculated, “I don’t know where Metallica’s inspiration comes from, but if it’s from me, I f*cked up.”  Hilariously, he said of Elton John after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and after John had reworked his 1973 ode to Marilyn Monroe, Candle in the Wind, as a tribute to the deceased princess: “His writing is limited to songs about dead blondes.”  (To which Elton John retorted that the venerable Stones guitarist resembled “a monkey with arthritis.”)

 

But surely the man who’s suffered the most ignominious put-down from Keith Richards is his long-term singer, writing partner and fellow Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.  Jagger’s image as a tireless lothario took a dent when Richards wrote about his manhood in his 2010 autobiography Life: “Marianne Faithful had no fun with his tiny todger.  I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.”

 

From vassifer.blogs.com

 

However, when it comes to rock-star insults, one man is – or alas, was – the undisputed champion.  Mark E. Smith, for four decades until his death in 2018 the driving force behind the fascinatingly off-the-wall post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, was never more entertaining in interviews than when he directed his guns at his peers and rivals in the music world.  Among those getting it in the neck from Smith over the years were Badly Drawn Boy (“fat git”), Echo and the Bunnymen (“old crocks”), Garbage (“like watching paint dry”), Bob Geldof (“a dickhead”), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (“should have his rock licence revoked”), Mumford and Sons (“We were playing a festival in Dublin…  There was this other group, like, warming up… and they were terrible.  I said, ‘Shut them c*nts up!’  And they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them…  I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers”), Pavement (“They haven’t got an original thought in their heads”), Ed Sheeran (like “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops”) and Suede (“Never heard of them,” said Smith cruelly, just after off coming off a tour where Suede were the support band).

 

And in fact, not even a songstress as lauded as Kate Bush escaped Smith’s vitriol.  In 2014, when Bush’s Before the Dawn concerts – her first live performances since 1979 – triggered massive interest in her and her music again, Smith told the Manchester Evening News: “Who decided it was time to start liking her again?  I never even liked her the first time round.  It’s like all these radio DJs have been raiding their mam and dad’s record collections and decided that Kate Bush is cool again.  But I’m not having it!”

 

It’s a shame the wonderfully curmudgeonly Smith isn’t around today to witness Kate Bush’s latest return to prominence with Running Up That Hill.  I’m sure he’d have some entertaining pronouncements to make on the matter.

 

© EMI

Posted on

Charlie was our darling

 

From beatsperminute.com

 

The death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts on August 24th came as a blow.  Ask me to identify my favourite all-time band and four days of the week I’d say the Stones, at least during the years from 1969 to 1974 when they had Mick Taylor playing guitar with them.  (Ask me the other three days of the week and I’d probably say the Jesus and Mary Chain.)

 

A drummer who’d schooled himself in jazz music but paradoxically found himself thumping the tubs for the self-styled ‘biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’, Watts performed with none of the bombast of your archetypal rock drummer like Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham – of whom Keith Richards once inquired perplexedly, “Did he have to hit those drums so hard?” But his immaculate backbeat imposed discipline on the Stones’ blues-rock sound, reining it in and holding it together when it could so easily have degenerated into sloppy, all-over-the-place chaos.

 

Meanwhile, Watts was endearing as a figure of modesty, decorum and decency amid the maelstrom of outrage, hysteria, decadence, heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels, swimming-pool drownings, Hells Angels slayings, groupies, wild partying, alleged Mars Bar abuse, alleged whole-body blood transfusions, dabbling in black magic and shenanigans with Justin Trudeau’s mum that swirled around the band for the first two decades of its existence.  Among the many, many tributes to Watts this week, one that sticks in my mind is a below-the-line comment in the Guardian.  It was from a guy who’d once worked in a quarantine centre for animals arriving in Britain.  He’d made Watts’s acquaintance when the drummer’s cats and dogs ended up there after he and his wife returned to the UK from tax exile in France.  Apparently, while many owners never looked in on their poor pets for the whole duration of their quarantine, the animal-loving Stone made a point of coming to visit his every day.

 

As tales about Watts’s mild manners and niceness were legion, when he did lose the rag, it became the stuff of legend.  After he passed away on Monday, I noticed Mick Jagger’s name trending on twitter and discovered this was because people were tweeting and retweeting the tale of what happened in an Amsterdam hotel in 1984 when Jagger referred to Charlie Watts as ‘my drummer’.  Watts responded by yelling, “Never call me your drummer again!” and landing a right hook on him.  Such was the force in the punch, probably the only time that Watts exerted as much unsubtle power as John Bonham did, that the lippy one was knocked back onto a silver platter of salmon.  He then tilted towards an open window that overlooked a canal.  Supposedly, Keith Richards grabbed hold of Jagger before he disappeared out of the window, though only because at the time he was wearing one of Richards’ jackets, which the owner didn’t want to see dunked in a canal.  This is recounted in glorious detail in Richards’ autobiography Life (2010).  Therefore, it’s got to be true.

 

For me, the height of my Rolling Stones infatuation came during the 1990s, while I was living in Sapporo, capital city of Hokkaido, the northernmost island and prefecture of Japan.  For the first time in my life, I was earning a decent wage and didn’t feel guilty about splurging some of it on music.  By good luck, there was an excellent wee music shop dealing in specialty, bootleg and second-hand records on Hiragishi-dori, the avenue where I lived.  The shop’s lugubrious owner did very well out of me during the five years I was there.  It was at his establishment that I bought remastered versions of classic Stones albums that I’d only owned previously as crackly, crap-sounding cassette tapes: Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) Exile on Main Street (1972) and so on.  I also bought albums that people had told me were a bit duff, like Goat’s Head Soup (1973) and Black and Blue (1974), though I ended up thinking they were quite good.

 

One spooky Stones-related thing that happened during this period was when I held a Christmas party at my Sapporo apartment on December 18th, 1993, and then discovered that the party-date coincided with Keith Richards’ 50th birthday.  As a result, the evening was more Stones-themed than I’d planned.  I spent an early half-hour of it at my record player, playing and replaying a section of Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, the 1970 live album of the Stones performing in New York and Baltimore.  This was at the insistence of my Japanese colleague Tokunaga Sensei, also a Stones buff, who was convinced that there was a bit of it where you could hear members of the audience shouting in Japanese.  (The cover of Get Yer Ya-Yas Out features the shocking sight of the usually dapper Charlie Watts prancing around in white pants and T-shirt and an Uncle Sam hat.  The album also contains Jagger’s affectionate but accurate onstage remark: “Charlie’s good tonight.”)

 

© Decca 

 

The party got truly Stones-ian later on.  A lady I’d invited from the local hairdressing salon flipped her lid after a few drinks and started assaulting the other guests, while Sympathy for the Devil played in the background.  As Jagger remarked at the ill-fated Altamont concert in 1969, after someone had been stabbed to death in the crowd, “Something always happens when we play that number.”

 

Early in 1995, I heard exciting news.  The Rolling Stones were playing seven concerts at Tokyo Dome in early March as part of their Voodoo Lounge tour.  I hadn’t seen the band live before, so this seemed a golden opportunity to do so.  Unfortunately, I had other commitments at that time.  I’d arranged to do some freelance work with the Fodor’s Travel company, who planned to bring out a new edition of their Japan guidebook and wanted someone to update its chapters on Hokkaido and Tohoku, the northernmost part of the main Japanese island of Honshu.  As I had a break from my regular job during February and March, I’d intended to wander around Hokkaido and Tohoku, doing the guidebook research.  Determined to have my cake and eat it, I bought a ticket for the Stones and planned to spend late February and the first half of March in Tohoku, doing research, but taking a break for a few days in the middle to pop down to Tokyo.

 

That research trip in Tohoku proved to be one of the most physically punishing things I’ve done in my life.  Hokkaido was cold at that time of year, but I hadn’t expected Tohoku to be so bloody cold too.  Also, in my haste to clinch the Fodor’s job – wow, I thought, here’s my big chance to be a travel writer! – I stupidly agreed to accept a lump-sum payment at the end of it, which meant I got nothing to pay for my expenses while I actually did the work.  Therefore, to minimize costs, I decided to stay in youth hostels and hitchhike around rather than travel by bus or train.  Sleeping in Tohoku’s drafty wooden hostels and thumbing my way along its highways during wintertime proved not to be a good idea.

 

To make things worse, my itinerary depended on what was written in the previous edition of the Fodor’s Japan Guidebook.  Trying to find many of the tourist sites, whose prices, opening times, attractions, etc., I was supposed to be checking and updating, proved a nightmare because whoever had written the previous edition seemed to have been drunk at the time.  Or more likely, hadn’t actually been to many of those places and had just made it up instead.  Getting hopelessly lost became a daily occurrence.

 

Looking back on it now, I can laugh, but there were times when I thought I was going to die or go insane.  Trudging in ever-maddening circles around the castle town of Hirosaki in Aomori Prefecture, trying to find a tourist attraction, until a local explained to me that the streets’ layout was deliberately confusing, designed in medieval times to confuse any attackers who entered the town intending to locate and assault the castle.  Getting a lift in a pick-up truck with an old geezer who’d never spoken to a foreigner before and was so excited by my presence that he might have been tripping on LSD while we whizzed at top speed along the highway.  Venturing up to Lake Tazawa in the mountains above Akita City, arriving at night, wandering into a snowbound youth hostel and finding it inexplicably deserted, and wondering if I’d just strayed into an uncanny tale of the supernatural by Lafcadio Hearn.  Coming into a freezing Fukushima City after dark, discovering that a big conference was taking place there and all the hotels were fully booked, and having to spend the night sleeping among the local homeless community in an underpass next to an open sewer.

 

© Universal Music LLC / From discogs.com

 

It was after the Fukushima episode that – thank God – the time came for me to jump on a bullet train and head down to Tokyo, where I holed up in a hotel and spent the next couple of days in a bathtub with an unlimited supply of beer. Then, scrubbed up and feeling human again, I went to Tokyo Dome to see the Stones.

 

No doubt it wasn’t the greatest Stones concert ever.  The set leaned towards the overly familiar – Satisfaction, Start Me Up, Angie, It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll – although I was delighted that they played Tumbling Dice off Exile on Main Street.  But as a communal experience where you switched your brain off for a couple of hours and just got into the groove, and especially after the wretched, wintry experiences I’d been through up north, it was rather wonderful.  Jagger tried to show off his mastery of the Japanese language, which was funny.  Keith Richards shambled to the front of the stage to sing a song at one point and, looking at the Tokyo masses, croaked, “I don’t see you very often, but when I do, I certainly see a lot of you.”  At his drumkit, Charlie Watts sported his usual expression, half-bemused, half like that of a man nervously eyeing the misfits around him and thinking, “If I just keep on playing, maybe these nutters won’t notice I’m here…”

 

Tellingly, when Jagger introduced all the musicians to the crowd near the end of the set, starting with backing vocalists Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler, working his way up to Darryl Jones (who’d replaced Bill Wyman on bass) and then onto the Stones themselves, it was Charlie Watts who got by far the biggest and longest cheer of the night.  In fact, for so long did the Japanese crowd show their adulation that the poor guy looked a bit embarrassed by it.

 

Then again, with his modesty, humility and politeness, with that hardy gaman shimsasho-type attitude he displayed whilst playing with the Stones for 58 years and, simultaneously, the sense of wa that he had with his bandmates, with his love of a sharp suit and his occasional flashes of samurai spirit – which Jagger experienced to his cost when he got lamped in Amsterdam – Charlie Watts exhibited many of the finest Japanese virtues.  No wonder the crowd that night loved him.

 

From twitter.com/officialKeef