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.

Bennett & the Golden Amex

Thinking about the myriad dumb things I've done, Gang of Four recording "Hard" in Miami with the useless Albert Brothers is right up there.

This potentially career murdering choice was bulldozed through by our machiavellian manager Bennett , because he thought Nile Rogers, our No 1 choice of co-producer ( when Chic was uncool & pre Let's Dance) cost too much and the Alberts were the nuts! And we gave in! Doh! Which meant Hard didn’t become what we dreamed of it being - a post post-modern post-disco confection ( which made Green's brilliant Wood Beez era work so irritating to hear when it came out 2 years later.) We should've been insomniac in a New York loft with Arthur Baker & an 808, not with 2 bearded fuckwits in Hawaiian shirts reminiscing about Dionne & Aretha .

Whatever, one night we're dining in a ritzy Miami restaurant after a hard day laying down tracks in Criteria sound, a marching powder addled BeeGee's studio . The band's joined by Bennett and his pneumatic Personal Assistant, H- . He's wearing, as always, tennis whites and his assistant has forced her impressive rack into a rib-breaking boob tube. We look like shit, as always.

The next table, a plaid clad salaryman and pant-suited partner, dressed like they spent a million dollars in Woolworth’s, are angry. We're ruining their evening . “It’s disgraceful they let anyone in here dressed like that” says the man to the woman, “ They should throw them out!” He won’t give it up.

We're professionals and ignore this, since Andy’s busy ordering the most expensive wine in the world because we think that someone else, like EMI, is paying! No! We're ripping off ourselves! Brilliant, not! But H- is wound up by the backchat from the dead zone and grabs Bennett’s wallet to leap over to the suit's table. “See this!” she says , waving it at the man in tartan as the credit cards concertina down in their little plastic pockets “See this!” she says “ This is a GOLD Amex! THIS IS A FUCKING GOLD AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD!”. It's getting out of hand, so Bennett says he’ll schmooze things out. He pulls H- off, jabs fatboy in the chest and says “I wore clothes like yours when I was poor! ” Good gag, but when the guy heads out of the restaurant, we’re told by the sommelier a few minutes later, he's seen in the parking lot with a handgun to maybe pop Bennett when we leave! It would've been a dream come true! But, sadly, cops are called . We've all had a drink. We've all got homes to go to.

But if you don’t have a dream how you gonna make a dream come true?

Sitting on a Virgin train is horrible. Two-tone announcements ruin my fitful dozing, ugly augmented 5ths, is it really a G sharp followed by a C, who can tell with these tired ears, but what philistine came up with this torture?

In mainland Europe, steeped in the Romantic tradition , a dream of democratic pluralism and joy is embedded in the mellifluous beeps and bongs of public announcements ; even Mussolini wouldn't mess with it; concordant thirds , sweet memories of Beethoven seducing us as we optimistically careen through the night toward the Mediterranean sun, life enhancing bings and tings doppler effecting by.

Not on Virgin , with its vicious neo-Schoenbergian frequencies haplessly knocked out to remind us that modern life doesn't deliver Le Corbusier but high rise slums built on the cheap by lump labour . It says : the misery of private equity will grind your dreams of happiness into the dust. Outside the trains don't run on time. True!

Musicians must get paid!

UK music posted a newspaper ad yesterday which really connected with me. It reproduced a blog from Falco, whose recent recording was illegally posted on the internet 8 weeks before scheduled release for so-called fans to download this for nothing. This totally devalued their work, destroyed any potential spike of interest in the band, meant they had no subsequent increase in audience, sinking any boost to their gig fees and ruined their hopes to make their mark from their music. I don't know Falco's work , but I felt for these guys. It's wrong.

Falco is just one of many victims of the rip-off notion that creative people's work doesn't deserve to be paid for; that resisting filesharing is luddite and old school; that simply saying that filesharing is wrong is somehow uncool (typically advanced by crews who've already made a career packet and are established live acts commanding decent fees) ; that the music industry ( whatever that is, these days ) has only itself to blame , so who gives a toss; and that it's right that a Mars bar is paid for but not a song.

The winners are criminals and new technology bores who think talking about new distribution paradigms will help musicians make a living, but really make an income from talking themselves into some blogosphere media guru commentariat rep. It's contemporary vicious capitalism at work by guys in sloppy tees and jeans masquerading as hipsters. Filesharing is not about friends swapping song lists or copying tracks they love to their buddies. It's about the bulk transfer of masses of data - songs! - facilitated by crooks & ISPs for misguided fans.

The pathetic recourse proposed last week by FAC ( the Featured Artists Coalition) is to send a warning letter - scary! - to the worst offending filesharers to tell them to stop . But if they ignore this, and the theft persists, they'll get another letter! Whoah! & third strike, they'll support squeezing their bandwidth! Strong stuff! It's pathetic. It's like saying that restricting shop hours would limit shop lifting! Musicians' livelihoods are at stake along with their support networks, roadcrews, suppliers, set designers, sound engineers , studio owners and myriad others. I have contempt for the apologists who won't stand up to this organised theft.

Gang of Four is lucky. Last month we got a gold award for Entertainment! celebrating the sale -the sale! - of 100, 000 units in the UK over the last 30 years. Are we the last generation of non-pop bands who'll ever again be able to do this? We earned little bits here and there when we started, which meant we could afford to keep at it, get signed , make records and attract an audience so that relatively early on we earned a wage & could do the job fulltime. Technology creep is dooming musicians to perpetual dayjobs. To hell with poverty! Say no to illegal filesharing! Don't do it!