Gang of Four & Mekons assault Hegemony

Me ( slumped in chair in flyer jacket, right) of Gang of Four , Andy Corrigan ( seated, left) , Mark White ( seated , centre) & Tom Greenhalgh ( not in picture) of the Mekons wanted to premiere our radical super-8 movie " red Route", a continuous shot at speed, shot prone on a wobbly tea trolley,down Leeds' & Europe's longest corridor . Corrigan had taken charge of this project to produce something we could use at our gigs, in an homage to Velvet Underground's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Mark was the star of the event. He was - and is - a genius at describing a particularly British view of the world , tempered by disappointment and sexual frustrations, feeding a world view that finds misfortune in every beery, leery, glass.

This was just before the first Mekons session on John Peel, where the brilliant "Never Been in A riot" was first showcased. In this song, Mark, a punkified John Betjeman, miserably describes a depressing non-evening out in the greasy spoon we always went to post clubbing, "Sweat's" in Leeds . "Eggburger going cold, twice!" the filthy cook would shout, while Mark ..." in this late night caff/ [was] Eyeing up the till/When in came the British Police/For their egg and bacon grill/ Egg & bacon Griii-ill! " . Along with "Trevira Trousers", "Corporal Chalkie" & "The Building", Mark's words are much to be envied. No surprise that years later & Mark long gone, the Mekons V2's songs embraced C&W, another lonely music of the poor, ruined by cheap drink and unattainable dreams.

Anyway, the night of this photo, Mark made a long, brilliant, improvised speech centred on how drinkers "move from sweet to dry wines", linking this to compromise, failed ambition and personal failure.

Tom had passed out, which is why youi can't see him.
Not many people came.
It was a triumph.

Once upon a time the world was locked in a Manichaen struggle between good and evil. Warmongers in power in London & Washington, wishing to shoo in the second coming, were determined to rack up tension that could take us from here to eternity
( editor's note, this means Thatcher & Reagan, not Blair & Bush ).

People tried to stop the deployment of cruise missiles . Thousands of women symbolically surrounded Greenham Common in the UK, where Cruise missiles had been deployed to freak out the Evil empire ( uh, Soviets in those days, not Iranians/Iraqi's/Afghani's etc)

There were many demonstrations against NATO's massive nuclear escalation. The world stood on the brink.

Gang of Four, aside from playing on the backs of flatbed lorries on demo's and the usual benefit shows, decided to take on these Imperialist crypto-fascists !

This meant:

a) dressing up in DJ's
b) painting Mitt, our guitar roadie, gold all over
c) dressing the golden Mitt in a Ronald Reagan mask, gilded skiddies and dog collar c/w chain and instructing him to wander around on all fours and scoff hamburgers
d) exhibiting ourselves as a tableau vivant in a hip New York City shop window.

This unanswerable cultural intervention led to a lessening of global tension, glasnost and the fall of the repressive Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Mitt was miffed. Geeting the paint off was a dog.

I sing in John Cale's "Life along the Borderline:Tribute

John Cale asked me to sing a couple of Nico songs for a show in Wroslaw, Poland, one of the series of Tribute to Nico concerts. Much more talented people than me do this - Mark Lanegan, Lisa Gerrard etc – so I was flattered to be included.I was sent the German lyrics to Mutterlein, to be learned phonetically, as the only German I know is “Supermaus reter die erde” ( Supermouse will save the world).

Translated into English for context, the song’s a German Catholic paean to motherhood, with all the baggage from back in the days when everyone of Nico’s parent’s generation were under suspicion of grave WW2 sins, the atmosphere that fed the Baader-Meinhof group’s strategy of tension. I doubt if Nico thought this explicitly , but artists are unreliable witnesses and inadequate commentators on their own work, especially if they're on a Class A losing streak.

The song: a perfect rhyming scheme, a meditation on death and heaven & underlying threat of the Nazi’s mission for women : “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche”. It’s a cool starter for 10 but Nico only sticks tight to the plan for four lines and loses rigour in verse 2, and doesn't deliver any 3 or 4, when she should have, when it could get interesting, and doesn’t develop the story. V1's death-wish text morphs into a Marian ode, the joys of the Bethlehem crib tempered by scripted pain and ultimate ascension to heaven after the miseries and blood of Golgotha. The poor half-rhyme - “keit” and “hinein” - is lame, which means we’re not dragged ineluctably to rapture promised in the closing line.

Wierdly , for Nico, the ending has an atom of optimism, like the atypical end of Cormac MacCarthy’s “The Road” , where for no reason the world isn’t ( but surely is ) irredeemably grim.
Whatever, my accent not apparently totally dismal, I gave the song a go, a tune somehow right in Wroslaw, the old Prussian/Russian/Polish/Swedish city that's seen every flavour of misery and destruction and cultural erasure but has come through, somehow, into the winningflood.

The lyrics:

Liebes kleines mutterlein [ Dear little mother ]
Nun darf ich endlich bei dir sein [ Finally I can be with you ]
Die sehnsucht und die einsamkeit [The longing and the loneliness ]
Erlosen sicht in seligkeit [Turn into bliss]

Die wiege ist dein heimatkleid [ the cradle is your costume ]
Ein schweben deine herrlichkeit [ A levitation of your glory ]
In wonne wandelt dein herzeleid [ In joy turns your heartbreak ]
Und greift in die siegende flut hinein [ and grasps into the winning flood ]

How not to make a PA

I've decided to fit a pickup to the awesome Linn record deck that's sat in my loft for the last decade as I have a couple of metres of great vinyl that's nagging me to be played. This reminds me of my old friend Andy Corrigan, who I shared a flat in Leeds with, along with Mark White, the two of them becoming the brilliant front men of the original Mekons.

Andy was an audiophile with a fine hi-fi system. Because of this he became Gang of Four’s first sound engineer . Having lied to us that he knew everything about sound gear , he took charge of our project to build a PA from scrap, army surplus parts and wood salvaged from fly tips. The system was built to his specification, using parts such as adapted 1/4" steel armour plated speaker drivers from WW2 airplanes - originally used to broadcast messages to troops on the ground - and an interesting sound recording device which used wire , not tape, and ran improbably slowly, so that you could hardly see it move. This turned out to be a seismological unit designed to measure earthquakes and not much good at recording music as it couldn’t record frequencies over 300Hz.

The PA horns were made from from plywood harvested from a dumped wardrobe . Overseen by Corrigan , Gill & I took turns holding a steaming kettle to the wood so that it softened and could be bent into the right shape. Corrigan was firmly of the view that, for optimum sound quality, the bass bins had to be extremely big and very, very, heavy. They were. Unfortunately, the PA was so huge that when we took it to Nottingham for a first try out in a tiny club, we couldn’t get it through the doors.

Corrigan’s next key acquisition was a powerful ex-army valve power amp. It was the perfect heart for our monster rig. But at our next show, Middlesborough, the internal circuitry melted when it was powered up. Andy and I mended it on the spot by soldering in place lengths of electrical cable recovered from a skip and made replacement fuses from fag ends wrapped in wire , assuming that a double wrap would have higher electrical resistance than a single wind. Rob Warr, our manager, thought this was very dangerous, but this would have been Health and Safety gone mad, so we ignored him. We were right as the amp , amazingly, didn’t catch fire until the end of the night, just after our final song. A great show, with pyro’s, too.

But do not do this at home.

Living on a prayer

I wish I could write a pop song a fraction as good as I Say A Little Prayer. One of those stories about daily life which rings true, where the expression is unimproveable . The condensed dream of a young African-American working girl, optimistic and joyful, where schmaltz is a stranger. The singer's rushing into a new world where a change has already come.

It's the first Pop song I can think of written in present simple, where whatever's said is always true ; in the past, the present and the future. It makes a magic tension; the words masquerade as being about the now, but they're about the forever; where, just by saying it, she sings into existence love itself.

" I'm combing my hair now/ and wondering what dress to wear now/I say a little prayer for you" The repeated line, the mantra, wishing up her lover, who maybe doesn't really exist at all.

She's a modern girl, earning a living, independent. " At work I just make time, and all through my coffee break time, I say a little prayer for you" . There she is, believing the world has turned for the better, skipping down the street like Mary Tyler Moore, rewarding us with the present of her eternal smile, yesterday, today and tomorrow's reverie of a woman mainlining on happiness.

The song's so powerful, so rich, that Dionne Warwick's office girl daydream becomes Aretha's gospel shout to Jesus, a Saint Theresa of Tennessee falling into religious ecstasy. No more in the North, back down Highway 61, where strange fruit had filled the trees, paycheques are as rare as diamonds and you'll only lose if you try to win. Here, you don't stand a prayer.

Go compare!

The Plan: Meet at Kings Cross station at 8am . Drive in a splitter van to Hassel, Belgium , for a “Sinner’s Day” concert to 10,000. Return home immediately post show. Tidy.
The day should run on auto pilot. But only someone who does not get out much and has never interacted with a musician - let alone a drummer or a bass player - would expect such a simple thing to happen.
On the bus, the new Tour Manager, doubling as The Drive, says, cheerfully: “ Does everyone have their passports?” . This bugs me, as he must really be a Drive doubling as a TM, as TM’s are notoriously bitter and twisted and know not to ask questions they don’t already know the answers to; because any answer will be bad, and everything is , or soon will be , a disaster . His smile betrays him. Everyone has a tell.
Thomas says “Jeeziz Fick! ” or something profane in weegie, and: “ I only thought you needed a passport when you fly” . No passport. Mark Heaney, one of the world’s most talented and experienced drummers, says: “ Bollocks!” . No passport , ditto. We are doomed to gun through East London’s streets of gold to collect travel documents . And miss our cross channel connection . Many hours later , in Hassel, we meet Gill , relaxed and chipper, as he has presciently travelled alone by Eurostar while I have been stuck in a splittervan with idiots .
The retro lineup today includes Front 242, The Human League & the excellent Gary Numan, who I once saw back in the day skeetering around a Hammersmith Odeon’s stage in a Sinclair C5 to the tune of “Cars”. We try to sweet talk him into singing “Anthrax” onstage with us, as he’d done a fine cover of the song in LA a couple of weeks ago with Trent Reznor. But no go. Our show’s good, the punters are great. It is fun. Belgium is a good place for music. Perhaps we have got away with it.
But on the way home, too much is drunk, too fast. Leffe, one of the world’s finest beers, is 6.5% alcohol & can be purchased in petrol stations. In the splitter’s black light, we talk about King Leopold’s genocidal colony in the Congo, in which up to 10million Africans died, and where Europeans invented innovative work incentivisation plans such as cutting off the feet and hands of the lowest producing workers; and when this lost its edge, the feet and hands off the workers’ children. It caused mass outrage in the late nineteenth century and inspired Joseph Conrad to write The Heart of Darkness .
We talk, too, about the most hopeless ad campaign ever on TV, for GoCompare.com , in which a fat opera singer jumps from domestic scenery to sing ( to the tune of the first world war recruiting song “ Over there!” ) rubbish new words boosting a poorly designed financial services price comparison website . It’s appalling ; and the thought perhaps creates the very ugly vibe that develops in the van. Angry voices are raised. The journey home is depressing. Our 11pm undersea train is cancelled. We are in Calais until the small hours. I muse about becoming a motorcycle despatch rider.
Today is Sinner’s Day. Mea Culpa, mea maxima culpa. I apologise to everyone I have not been good to. If this is you, I am sorry. Go compare.

El Condor Pasa No Pasaran!

I have a massage on my knee over the weekend at a “Healing Arts” centre, where Alternative Medicine is practised. This is “Alternative” in the sense that :

a) Nothing whatsoever can be proved to have any effect . (If it did it would be, uh, “medicine” )

b) It costs an arm and a leg

c) There are lots of self-help books around like “Who Moved The Cheese?” ( Elevator pitch: who gives a fuck ? Get over it! )

d) You are forced to listen to terrible musak

It's the last that gets to me. I’ll happily waste discretionary spend on a dippy masseuse fiddling with my cruciate; I’ll put up in a manly way with being relaxed , which always makes me tense ; but I draw the line at being forced to listen to plangent library music produced in some masturbator's bedroom.

This rubbish will drive you to the Samaritans: retro synth washes, quasi-Indian nods & winks to quarter tones, and , worse , duff samples of instruments you never want to hear, ever. We’re talking Tabla. Wind pipes. And - cruellest cut of all - Northumbrian bagpipes! All in 4/4 . WTF! No, MAC obsessive Garage-Band producer dude, they don’t use this time signature in classical Hindustani music.

The melody line goes on and on and on and on , stoner-style, bar after bar after bar after bar of undecodable voices, Gregorian chanters meet The Cocteau Twins on drugs,with gear so stepped on you can see bootprints in the snow .

It's as pointless as the wallpaper tunes that cod Peruvians mug you with in the Underground; the bowler hated muppets who you’d rather pummel to the ground and do six months bird than hear a single hemi-demi-semi quaver of El Condor Pasa. Not on your nelly, cabron!

In this alt-world of emotions and scented candles, the music’s not optional. & here's the rub, if the operation is successful ,the patient will pass away, assassinated by a cheap smile. Not me, pal. I break the rules & ask for the CD player to be turned off.

A froideur falls like an ice storm.

Black clouds gather .

It looks like rain.

In the end we are all dead.