Tag: Mark E. Smith

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In at the Deep end

 

 

I love live music and I live in Singapore, where in recent months there’s been much excitement about major bands and singers coming and staging concerts.  But I’ve felt like the title character in Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834) when he laments, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”  Yes, there’s been a buzz about Singapore being south-east Asia’s number-one stop for famous musicians on tour.  But frankly, as a grumpy old punk / goth / heavy-metal guy, the music made by the acts performing lately in Singapore really isn’t my thing.  Indeed, if I had to choose between listening to it and sticking a sharp stick into my ear, I’d probably go for the ‘sharp stick’ option.

 

Firstly in January 2024, Singapore’s National Stadium hosted half-a-dozen concerts by English group Coldplay, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘pop rock’, ‘post-Britpop’, ‘pop’ and, supposedly, ‘alternative rock’ band.  I regard Coldplay as being so wimpy they make Belle and Sebastian sound like Rage Against the Machine.  That’s all.

 

Then in February English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran played the National Stadium too.  Regarding Ed Sheeran, I can only say I agree with the late Mark E. Smith, mainstay of the fabulously unhinged post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, who likened him to “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops.”

 

And then, in March at the National Stadium, Taylor Swift put on six shows of her Eras tour.  That meant for a week Singapore’s usually orderly streets were filled with fans from all over Asia – ‘Swifties’ I believe they’re called in modern-day parlance – clad in spangly skirts, pink gowns, cowboy hats and friendship bracelets and with rhinestones arranged in the shape of hearts adorning their faces.  Taylor’s lengthy stopover in Singapore – the only shows of the Eras tour in Asia – prompted politicians in Thailand and the Philippines to grumble about the generous subsidies Singapore offered for each concert.  According to the Straits Times newspaper, these allegedly “were contingent on Swift not performing in other South-east Asian nations.”   To be honest, as someone immune to Taylor’s musical charms, if I was a politician in Thailand or the Philippines, I’d be thanking Singapore for keeping her away from my shores.

 

Anyway, this is a preamble to the fact that, last week, I felt totally starved of decent live music – I hadn’t been to a gig for half-a-year – and did something I wouldn’t normally do.  I bought a ticket for a Deep Purple concert.

 

Deep Purple are often referred to as one of the ‘holy trinity’ who, in the 1970s, fathered heavy metal.  But while I love the other two members of that trinity, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I’ve never been into Deep Purple.  To me, they didn’t have Led Zeppelin’s knack for coming up with irresistible guitar riffs nor that band’s ability to experiment, successfully, with other musical genres: blues, folk, reggae, rockabilly, world music.  And they didn’t have the splendidly ominous sound of Black Sabbath, which would influence future sub-genres of heavy metal like black and doom metal.

 

© Phonogram Ltd

 

I also wasn’t into Deep Purple because, even as a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the band seemed like ancient history to me.  This was because when I was at secondary school in Scotland, Deep Purple had split up – temporarily, it turned out – and spawned a bunch of splinter groups with former Purple members as their movers and shakers.  Ritchie Blackmore, Purple guitarist from 1968 to 1975, had formed Rainbow, which during the early 1980s included in its line-up Purple bassist Roger Glover.  For a while, Rainbow had as their singer the late Ronnie James Dio, a man I greatly admired, and I think their 1976 song Stargazer is a work of stomping, over-the-top brilliance.  But their later stuff I found mostly lame.

 

Meanwhile, David Coverdale, who’d been Deep Purple’s singer from 1973 to 1976, had formed Whitesnake, which during its early years contained such other Deep Purple stalwarts as drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Jon Lord.  I liked the 1980 Whitesnake album Ready an’ Willing for its agreeable, aggressively bluesy sound, but later albums like 1981’s Come an’ Get It and 1984’s Slide It In seemed, in their inuendo-heavy way, to be about the size of Coverdale’s todger and his irresistibility to the ladies, and I gave them a body-swerve.  Later still, Whitesnake metamorphosised into a then-modish, American-west-coast hair-metal band à la Motley Crue, which in my mind made them yet more unspeakable.

 

© EMI

 

I’m writing about this in detail because, at my school, the great Deep Purple break-up had resulted in there being two antagonistic tribes among the kids who were into heavy metal.  Those who had the Rainbow logo (with a giant fist bursting out of the sea and grabbing hold of, yes, a rainbow) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who thought David Coverdale was a giant dickhead.  And those who had the Whitesnake logo (WHITESNAKE spelt in joined-up letters by an ultra-long and ultra-squiggly white snake) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who entertained a similarly uncomplimentary opinion of Ritchie Blackmore.

 

Incidentally, there was a third Deep Purple splinter group on the go at the time – Gillan, unsurprisingly fronted by Ian Gillan, who’d served as the Purple vocalist from 1969 to 1973.  But nobody I knew at school liked poor old Gillan or his eponymous band.  My beef with Ian Gillan, though, is that afterwards, from 1983 to 1984, he sang with the mighty Black Sabbath and the album he recorded with them, Born Again (1983), is dire.

 

In 1984, Deep Purple reformed with their most popular line-up: Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice.  But I had zero interest in this.  And while over the decades since, I heard about comings and goings within the band – Blackmore quitting again in 1993 and Steve Morse replacing him a year later, Glover departing in 2002 and being replaced by Don Airey, and Morse leaving in 2022 with Northern Irish guitarist Simon McBride stepping into his shoes – I’d never felt any inclination to listen to their music or see them live.  In fact, I could only name three Deep Purple Songs: Smoke on the Water (1972), Black Night (1970) and Hush (1968).  Oh, and Woman from Tokyo (1973), which makes it four.

 

And it didn’t surprise me to learn that Deep Purple was why Mark E. Smith (him again) sacked Marc Riley, bassist, guitarist and keyboard player (and future DJ) from the Fall.  Riley got his marching orders in part because Smith saw him dancing to Deep Purple in an Australian nightclub: “Get in the hotel and stay there till I tell you.” Smith raged.  “You don’t need to be dancing to Smoke on the Water.”

 

Anyway…  Onto last week’s Deep Purple gig, which took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.  I found it a mixed bag – but the good bits in that bag were enough to make the evening worthwhile.  It was noticeable how Simon McBride and Don Airey, the band’s newest members, did a lot of heavy lifting, embarking on lengthy guitar and keyboard instrumentals that allowed Gillan, Glover and Paice, all in their mid-to-late seventies, to take a break.  Admittedly, Airey is no spring chicken himself, but presumably being behind a keyboard is less tiring than having to prowl continuously around a stage or belt continuously at a drumkit.  My tastes in music developed after the advent of punk rock and I’ve been conditioned to believe that instrumental solos are inherently evil, and believe that those who perpetrate instrumental solos should be locked away for 20 years in Prog Rock Prison.  However, tonight, I made an effort to switch off the punk part of my brain and just enjoy the quality musicianship on display as McBride twiddled his guitar-strings and Airey plinked his keyboards.

 

 

One of a long line of rock guitarists from Belfast – see also Gary Moore, Vivian Campbell, Gerry McAvoy and Eric Bell – and, at 45, three decades younger than his Deep Purple compadres, McBride must find these moments a dream come true.  According to Wikipedia, McBride started to teach himself guitar when he was nine years old and while he was listening to his dad’s hard-rock collection, which included Deep Purple, on the family stereo.  Now, 36 years on, there are times when he’s practically carrying Deep Purple on his shoulders.

 

Airey knows how to play too and, perched over his keyboards and grinning manically like a mad scientist at work over a table laden with smoking vials, he was clearly enjoying himself.  Incidentally, in the past, Airey has played with Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Saxon, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, among many others, and thus has a heavy metal CV to die for.

 

 

Of the other members… Roger Glover and Ian Paice did what was required of them.  Whenever the giant screen above the stage showed a close-up of Paice, he seemed to me to be a dead ringer these days for the actor Timothy Spall.  Which is ironic since Spall has played a rock drummer – he was Beano Baggett, the hapless tub-thumper with fictional 1970s rock band Strange Fruit in the underrated 1998 comedy movie Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson and written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

 

 

As for Ian Gillan…  Well, I don’t want to rag on him because of his age, but his voice has definitely seen better days and there were moments, as he tottered stiffly about the stage, when he looked like he was in pain.  Also, during some of the stretches in the songs when he wasn’t required to sing, he’d hirple offstage where, presumably, a chair awaited him.  Still, I’m past the days when I used to believe that old rockers should be forced to retire and make way for the Young Turks.  Probably that change in attitude is because I’m now an old codger myself.  If Gillan still enjoys what he does, and people are still willing to pay money to watch him do it…  Good on him.

 

 

The songs were well-performed even if, tune-wise, they didn’t leave much of an impression on me afterwards – I can still only identify four Deep Purple songs.  And at the end, rather wonderfully, the band signed off with three of those four: Smoke on the Water, Hush and Black Night.  As Gillan finally managed to hit the operatic high notes, and Airey channelled the spookily thunderous organ sound that was the speciality of the late Jon Lord, the hairs rose on the back of even my sceptical neck.  Finally, I understood why so many people loved this band.

 

Loved?  A lot of people evidently still love them. The concert attracted a good-sized crowd, not all of them old buggers like myself, and everyone seemed extremely happy by the end.  It was just a pity that many folk spent the gig staring at their phones whilst dutifully filming everything.  Jesus.  Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen?  Why not immerse yourself in the excitement and drama of what’s actually happening around you?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage.  (Suede’s Brett Anderson made this point forcefully in the same theatre six months ago.)  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.

 

I’m no bigger a Deep Purple fan now than I was before the gig, but credit where it’s due.  Despite the occasional shortcoming, they made an effort and put on a decent show, when they could easily have coasted on past glories and phoned in their performances.  I only wish someone had de-phoned the audience.

 

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Live bands behaving badly

 

© Warner Bros.

 

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water.  They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000).  They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts.  Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are.  We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music.  Who likes rock music?  Nine people, brilliant…”  And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…”  Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

 

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then.  Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

 

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection.  Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it.  But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it…  Or just cancel your appearance.

 

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area.  That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen.  I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment.  As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

 

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder…  What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

 

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s.  Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mari

 

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming.  Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity.  “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!”  At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in!  Well done!”  Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.”  I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!”  My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me.  “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!”  I decided I should make myself less conspicuous.  This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd.  I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

 

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour.  Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

 

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall.  Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!”  But it was hardly the crowd’s fault.  The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit.  Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage.  The band continued to fume about the experience later.  A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

 

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves.  In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue.  Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!”  I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers.  This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul.  The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge.  At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him.  In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off.  He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

 

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band.  In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes.  The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage.  The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes.  Then they buggered off too.  And then there was a riot.  Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape.  Well, a bit better.

 

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic.  It showed onstage.  (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years.  If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”)  At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key.  It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

 

© Creation / Astralwerks

 

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted.  Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them.   So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’.  (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke.  His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories.  That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

 

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008.  Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich.  “What a knobhead,” I thought.

 

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill.  Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes.  The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act  to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on.  Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs.  Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers.  “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Frank Schwichtenberg

 

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform.  The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them.  Sometimes you get what you want in life.  Sometimes you don’t.”

 

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly.  This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene.  And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK!  F*CK!  F*CK!”

 

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years.  Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved.  Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year.  They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set.  Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again.  Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

 

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act…  I might pay money to see that.

 

From twitter.com / © Cadell’s Ltd / Entertainment Ltd 2003

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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

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Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family

 

© Horla Magazine

 

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine.  As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

 

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today.  An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine.  For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door.   One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted.  So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police.  Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

 

© SpectreVision / RLJE Films

 

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft.  This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts.  A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’.  The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley.  The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

 

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective.  Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall.  The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else.  I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

 

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’.  Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here.  Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.

 

© Librairie Ollendorff

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Edinburgh’s statues – keep, erect or chuck in the Forth?

 

 

It’s been an exciting week for Britain’s civic statues.  Normally, these often antiquated, discoloured and birdshit-splattered lumps of sculpted stonework, which adorn town and city centres across the land and commemorate important figures and events of bygone eras, go cruelly unnoticed by 99.9% of the folk who trudge past them.  Well, that’s changed after what happened a week ago.

 

On June 7th, in Bristol, a statue of the 17th-century Bristolian merchant and Tory politician Edward Colston got hauled down by a crowd protesting the police’s murder of George Floyd in the USA and was tossed into the drink at the nearby harbour.  It’s ironic that this monument of Colston’s time on earth should end up underwater, for that was where many of the victims of Colston’s business activities ended up too.  During his involvement with notorious slave-traders the Royal African Company, the company shipped an estimated 84,000 Africans across the Atlantic and 19,000 of them died en route and were thrown overboard to the waves and sharks.

 

Suddenly, everybody’s eyeing up the statues that, at some time or other and for some reason or other, have been erected in Britain’s public spaces.  Suddenly, everybody’s wondering about the virtue, or lack of virtue, of those statues’ subjects.  Do they deserve to occupy public space?  Or, like the representation of Colston, do they deserve to be dumped in the nearest body of water?

 

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the city I know best, Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh, and the chunks of stony civic artistry that decorate it.  In the manner of the old, risqué question-and-answer game kiss, marry, kill? (which was known in the less genteel parts I hail from as shag, marry, kill?), here’s an evaluation of Edinburgh’s existing statues and potential statues under the options keep, erect or chuck in the Firth of Forth?

 

The first statue many people see when arriving in Edinburgh – when they walk out of the bus station into St Andrew Square – is a strong candidate for being chucked into the chilly waters north of the city.  Perched on a 150-foot-high column in the middle of the square is a statue of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.  Melville started off as a lawyer and became Lord Advocate (Scotland’s chief public prosecutor) at the age of 33, but then moved into politics.  It was as Secretary of State for Britain’s Home Department in the 1790s that he was responsible for delaying the abolition of the slave trade.  By the time it was abolished, a decade-and-a-half later in 1807, a huge additional number of Africans had ended up in slavery, a half-million according to Dundas’s Wikipedia entry.

 

According to his descendent Bobby Dundas, 10th Viscount Melville, Henry Dundas was actually an abolitionist who’d been forced to be pragmatic.   He’d supposedly “provided the word ‘gradual’” so that abolition “would get through legislation and became law, and without that, it wouldn’t have passed for decades.”  But while there is something good to be said about Dundas during his time as a lawyer – which I’ll describe later in this entry – by the time of his political career I doubt if he was anything more than what J.M. Barrie described as ‘a Scotsman on the make’.  He saw his fortunes bound up with the rise and reputation of the ‘second’ British Empire and spent, for example, eight years as Director of the Board of Control over the East India Company.  Concern for the hundreds of thousands whose lives were blighted or ended by slavery was surely not high in his list of priorities.

 

I suppose you could make a case for Dundas remaining in St Andrew Square (with a giant plaque providing information about his misdeeds) as a rebuff to those Scottish nationalists, still too many in number, who kid themselves that Scotland was only ever a subject, a victim even, of the British Empire.  As the historian Tom Nairn memorably put it in 1968: “Scotland is not a colony, a semi-colony, a pseudo-colony, a near-colony, a neo-colony, or any other colony of the English.  She is a junior but (as these things go) a highly successful partner in the general business enterprise of Anglo-Scots imperialism.”  Dundas’s statue is an uncomfortable reminder of this.

 

From the Brown digital repository at Brown University Library

 

Meanwhile, another statue I’m not fond of stands close by, that of George IV at the intersection of George Street and Hanover Street.  This annoys me because it embodies the grovelling, forelock-tugging attitude that a certain, bourgeoise section of Scottish society has always shown to the British Royal Family.  In 1822 George arrived in Edinburgh on what was the first visit to Scotland by a British monarch in two centuries and was greeted by a grotesque, over-the-top display of kilts, bagpipes and tartanry stage-managed by that great Caledonian romanticizer Sir Walter Scott.  This helped cement the tartan-swathed Brigadoon image that the outside world has had of Scotland since (though of course Scott’s novels helped cement it too).

 

The fact that it went bonkers over a king as unappealing as George IV is rather humiliating for Edinburgh in retrospect.  George is best-known today as the vain, idiotic Prince Regent character played by Hugh Laurie in the TV comedy series Blackadder the Third (1987).  (“Someone said I had the wit and intellect of a donkey.”  “Oh, an absurd suggestion sir, unless it was a particularly stupid donkey.”)  However, Hugh Laurie was at least slim.  By 1822 George had become grotesquely obese after years of gluttony and drunkenness.  His vanity remained, though, and according to the artist David Wilkie would spend three hours getting dressed and corseted up but still resembled ‘a great sausage stuffed into the covering’.

 

Of course, the depiction of George IV on George Street / Hanover Street is a highly flattering one.  Perhaps the absurdity of 1822’s pageantry should be highlighted by having the current statue of George replaced with a more accurate one.  I’d like to see a statue of him as he really was during the visit – crammed into Highland dress with, under his kilt, his swollen gout-stricken legs wrapped up in flesh-coloured tights.  A sight for sore eyes, in other words.

 

Over in Edinburgh Old Town, within the precincts of Edinburgh Castle, you’ll find another statue that’s problematic.  This is of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the 1st Earl Haig and commander of the British Expeditionary Force during the latter three years of World War One, who was born in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square in 1861.  Haig’s reputation as a military commander and tactician has taken a battering posthumously, notably with the publication of Alan Clark’s damning historical volume The Donkeys in 1961 and the release of Richard Attenborough’s equally damning film Oh, What a Lovely War! In 1969.  These helped create the present-day image of Haig as a deluded mass-murdering incompetent, worthy of the nicknames ‘Butcher Haig’ and ‘the Butcher of the Somme’.  His reputation also got a kicking in 1989’s Blackadder Goes Forth, in which Geoffrey Palmer appeared as Haig, using a dustpan and brush to nonchalantly sweep up fallen toy soldiers from a battlefield diorama and toss them over his shoulder.  Yes, Edinburgh has cornered the market for statues of people who were in Blackadder.

 

But I wouldn’t throw Haig’s statue into the Forth.  It really belongs in a museum – a museum that illustrates the historical ebbs and flows of reputation as time moves on, events become distant, viewpoints shift and opinions change.  It’s easy to forget today that up until his death, Haig was massively popular among the British public, which included the many ex-soldiers who’d served under him, and his funeral in 1928 was marked by a day of national mourning.

 

And problematic too is the statue in Parliament Square, behind St Giles’ Cathedral, of King Charles II.  After he came to the throne in 1660, Charles and his brother, the future King James II, set up the Royal African Company of which Edward Colston was a key member.  During its operations, the company was responsible for the transportation of more slaves than any other institution – an estimated 212,000, of whom 44,000 died before they reached the Americas.  However, Charles II’s statue has just been the subject of a thoughtful article by Alan Ramsay in the web magazine Bella Caledonia, so I won’t say any more about it.  Here’s a link to the article.

 

However, not far away, in the New College Quadrangle on the Mound, you’ll find a statue of a slave.  The subject of this statue spent two years toiling in a galley.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he and his fellow slaves ‘were chained to benches and rowed throughout the day without a change of posture while an officer watched over them with a whip in hand’.  Wow, you’re probably thinking, well done, Edinburgh!  You made the right choice with one of your statues!  Well, don’t get too excited.  For that slave was none other than the minister and theologian John Knox, who led the Reformation in Scotland and founded the Church of Scotland.  Earlier, from 1547 to 1549, he’d been a galley slave under the French.  Obviously, Knox is someone whose views on women (in 1556-58 he penned the memorably titled treatise First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women) and on practitioners of other religions (he described the Catholic church as ‘a synagogue of Satan’ and a ‘harlot’ that was ‘polluted with all kinds of spiritual fornication’ and full of ‘pestilent papists’) are ones most people find unpalatable today.

 

From the National Library of Wales

 

I really don’t know about Knox’s statue in Edinburgh.  He established Scotland’s national church and indirectly shaped the nation’s character for centuries to come, so you can’t really not have a statue of him there.  But it’s like have your reactionary and slightly Alzheimer’s-addled granddad at the table for Christmas dinner.  He may be coming out with a stream of racist inventive, but you know you owe your existence to him.  So you just smile at him and pretend not to hear what he’s saying.

 

To be more positive – there are statues in Edinburgh I like too.  Unexpectedly but pleasingly, the Old Calton Cemetery on Calton Hill has one of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, the man who delivered the Gettysburg address and preserved the American Union during the Civil War, and surely a contender for the title of Most Awesome US President Ever.  (Not that he’s had much competition for that title recently.)  Honest Abe’s statue stands magisterially atop a memorial to Scottish-American soldiers.  Nearby in the cemetery is an obelisk – okay, not quite a statue – erected in memory of the members of a universal suffrage group called the Friends of the People, who were persecuted in 1793.  Nowadays, of course, their ideas are seen as the stuff of basic Human Rights, but to the establishment of the time the Friends of the People were unspeakable subversives.

 

I like the fact that Edinburgh has some statues of writers.  So it should do, as it was designated the first ever City of Literature by UNESCO in 2004.  There’s one of Sir Walter Scott on Princes Street, at the bottom of the Scott monument, and one of Robert Burns at Leith (in addition to the Burns Monument on Calton Hill), and one of Robert Louis Stevenson at Colinton, and one of Sherlock Holmes commemorating the Edinburgh-born Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Picardy Place.  A few less well-known scribblers have statues too.  For example, the poet Robert Fergusson has one pacing past the entrance to the Canongate Cemetery, the poet and playwright Allan Ramsay has one in Princess Street Gardens, and the 19th-century children’s novelist Catherine Sinclair has a gothic, tapering structure in her memory standing on the corner of North Charlotte Street and St Colme Street.

 

 

I’m also glad the city has paid tribute to its most famous philosopher David Hume, who has a statue on the Royal Mile, to its most famous economist Adam Smith, who has a statue on the Royal Mile too, and to its most famous mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who has one on George Street.  And let’s not forget James Braidwood, who created Edinburgh’s – and the world’s – first municipal firefighting service and is honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.

 

And what statues should be erected?  Well, it seems a no-brainer to have a statue somewhere in Scotland’s capital city commemorating the man who established the illegality of slavery in the country.  This was Joseph Knight, an African slave purchased in Jamaica by the sugar-plantation owner Sir John Wedderburn of Ballendean, 6th Baronet of Blackness.  Wedderburn brought Knight back to Scotland as a servant in 1769 and when Knight protested his freedom, the pair of them ended up in court.  A final decision went in Knight’s favour in the Court of Session in 1777, when it was decreed that slavery was not recognised under Scots Law.   Indeed, a statue of Knight in Edinburgh might even improve Henry Dundas’s reputation by a smidgeon, for it was Dundas, Lord Advocate at the time, who acted as Knight’s counsel in the Court of Session.  According to the famous lawyer and biographer James Boswell, Dundas gave a stirring speech in support of Knight’s cause.  Which makes his subsequent actions regarding the abolition of the slave trade seem even more depressing.

 

From the statues I’ve listed so far, there’s obviously a dearth of female ones in Edinburgh.  So I’d also like to see a statue of Elsie Inglis, the Edinburgh-educated, late 19th century / early 20th century doctor and surgeon who founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and did much to improve healthcare for female patients.  She was also involved in the Suffrage Movement and during World War I set up Scottish Women’s Hospital units to care for injured soldiers in Belgium, France, Russia and Serbia,  That last country awarded her the Serbian Order of the White Eagle a year before her death in 1917.

 

© Penguin Books

 

The great Edinburgh novelist Muriel Spark should be honoured too.  Why not have a statue of her most famous literary creation, Miss Jean Brodie, swanning around Marchmont, where Spark went to school and supposedly got some of her inspiration for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) from a teacher there?  Mind you, I could see people objecting to the statue on account of Brodie’s politics, for in the novel she was a fan of Benito Mussolini and an admirer of fascism.  Finally, I don’t see why the much-missed parliamentarian Margo MacDonald shouldn’t be commemorated with a statue outside Easter Road Stadium in Leith, home of her favourite football club, Hibernian.

 

And now for a few more personal choices…  If his hometown of Salford doesn’t get around to honouring him with a statue, why can’t Edinburgh stick up a statue of Mark E. Smith, the driving force behind the great punk/post-punk band the Fall?  Smith lived in Edinburgh in the late 1980s, wrote a song about the city, 1991’s Edinburgh Man, and is rumoured to have supported Heart of Midlothian Football Club.  Meanwhile, two of Edinburgh’s greatest bands, the Exploited and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, could be jointly honoured by a statue of the man who played in both of them (as well as performing briefly with Nirvana), guitarist Big John Duncan.  Yes, a statue of Big John would be… imposing.  I’d also like to see a statue in Morningside of the Scottish trade unionist Alec Kitson and the young Sean Connery delivering milk on a cart together, as they famously did there in the 1940s.  And while I hate the man’s politics, I’d like to see a dynamic statue of Nigel Farage fleeing into the Canon’s Gait pub on the Royal Mile in 2013, to escape protestors who were chanting, “Nigel, you’re a bawbag.”

 

However, for visitors to Edinburgh, there’s one statue that’s famous above all others.  This is of course the one of loyal wee Scots terrier Greyfriars Bobby, which stands on the corner between Candlemaker Row and George IV Bridge, outside Greyfriars Kirkyard.  Poor Bobby has had it rough lately because a modern custom has evolved whereby sightseers rub his bronze nose to bring themselves good luck.  As a result of continued, countless rubbings, the nose has been gradually eroding away.  If Henry Dundas is ever removed from the top of his column in St Andrew Square, we’ll know where to move Greyfriars Bobby for the sake of his health.