Linkblogging For 29/09/09
I really am sorry for the continuing lack of Actual Content here, but I’m physically and mentally drained at the moment – not just exhausted but ill enough from overwork that I actually had to go and have my heart checked out at the cardiac unit of the hospital last week (it’s fine, nothing at all to worry about, just psychosomatic symptoms from stress). Things should be easing off at work as of today – just in time for me to start my Master’s Degree next week. Normal posting *should* resume tomorrow, I hope.
One thing that didn’t help with the stress is Gordon Brown’s announcement today that single mothers are going to be rounded up and put into ‘special homes’. Charlotte has a good take on this, but don’t bother with the comments section – some truly unpleasant comments there. Every time I think New Labour has finally done its worst, it gets one step closer to outright fascism…
Leonard Pierce has a good post on USian right-wing lunacy
Unspeak on Polanski’s defenders.
The government want to put even *dogs* on a centralised database!
Cameron Stewart has Batman & Robin concept art up
And Tucker Stone reviews comics.
And Zom reimagines Superman’s arch-enemy… Nick O’Teen
Linkblogging for 28/09/09
Sorry there’s no real content here for the last few days… I’m utterly, utterly exhausted by work stuff at the moment. I’ve started three posts (one on Darkseid, one on Big Finish, and a playlist) but not had anything like the energy to put what I want to say down. Hopefully that’ll change soon, but in the meantime, some links…
One of the big stories at the moment is Andrew Marr asking the Prime Minister if he’s mentally ill on TV. Anton Vowl says all there is to say about this, although Jennie has a good go, partly in response to Mark Reckons getting it very, very wrong…
Charlotte states what she thinks is our most important policy.
Jazzhandsseriousbusiness continues hir look at Lib Dem activism.
Eddie Campbell responds to James Robinson attacking Alan Moore.
And Lesswrong have a post on The Anthropic Trilemma
Linkblogging For 27/09/09
I’ve got a few things I want to write about over the next couple of days – I want to do a Wednesday Comics review, a Spotify playlist and a Doctor Who post, just for a start – but for now here’s some links (one or more of the above will be posted tonight).
My friend Jazzhandsseriousbusiness (I haven’t had a chance to ask him/her yet if s/he is hiding hir real name for good reason a la ‘Costigan Quist’ or has just not posted it yet) is starting a series of posts aimed at Lib Dems who are disengaged from the party, telling them how to get more involved. I’ll definitely be reading this, as since I moved from my old constituency to the one next door my involvement has dropped down to almost nil (one constituency meeting, one delivery round for a local candidate who’s also a friend, and a couple of days’ volunteering for the Euro elections, in the last six months, not counting non-party activism like No2ID and Hope Not Hate), but I suspect it’ll be handy for anyone who wants to get more active within the party.
Jonathan Calder asks “Will the real Nick Clegg please stand up?”
Anton Vowl on the Mail’s disgraceful attack on ‘comedy Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik’ for having a great-uncle who was evil scum.
And some non-Lib-Dem links:
J.H. Williams III walks us through the stages of composing a Batwoman cover. It’s a cliche, but nonetheless true, that Williams’ work is enough by itself to justify the continued existence of the Big Two comics companies.
David Mitchell argues, quite rightly, that the current plans to fund only ‘useful’ research are the acts of barbarians and savages who want to make *absolutely certain* that Britain develops absolutely no new ideas and anyone with two brain cells to rub together will emigrate as soon as possible…
Absurdist literature seems to make people better at pattern-matching.
The New Yorker has an excellent, if harrowing, essay on how Texas executed an innocent man a few years ago. Of course, with Supreme Court Justices like Scalia saying guilt or innocence shouldn’t matter when it comes to execution, it’s amazing that any guilty people get executed. And even if everyone who was executed was guilty, it’s still a barbaric, inhuman practice. Join Amnesty and help put a stop to it.
And Gavin Burrows talks about girls’ comics of the 1970s.
Quick Extremely Technical Question
Does anyone have, or know where I can find, a prebuilt Linux kernel .deb with realtime scheduling suitable for Debian Squeeze/SID ? I want to do some recording of music on my laptop, but my current kernel version is not up to the task.
Compiling myself isn’t an option – I have various odd non-standard packages installed that mean installing the necessary components from Debian’s repositories would put me into dependency hell (as I discovered when I tried it a couple of weeks back and broke my system). Nor is dual-booting with Ubuntu Studio – the Ubuntu Studio install CD can’t find my network card (I suspect 64studio would have the same problems).
I *could* try just downloading the kernel .deb from Ubuntu Studio’s repos and installing it using dpkg, but I suspect that using a kernel built for a totally different distro *might* just cause some problems…
If anyone knows where I could find such a thing (preferably an updated, reputable repo) I would be a very happy man…
The Beatles Mono Reviews 3 – With The Beatles
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
Cover of With The Beatles
That it has had that success is almost certainly down to Robert Freeman’s cover photo. The Beatles always took care – at least in the UK – to ensure that their fans got a good deal, and as such they ensured that the packaging of their albums was as attractive as the records themselves. The famous silhouetted-heads cover was their first truly great album cover (and looks far better on this CD release than in the picture here – it’s printed darker so you can’t see the turtleneck jumpers they’re wearing, so their heads do look as if they’re floating in empty black space). It’s just a shame that the same attention wasn’t spent on the music itself.
To an extent this is understandable – the album did have more time allocated to it than Please Please Me, but this was still only three sessions as opposed to the earlier album’s one. And it was the epitome of ‘second album syndrome’ – not only did they have to come up with material for a new album after using up songs built up over years on the first album, but they had to do it in five months – and in that five month period they went from being third on the bill to Tommy Roe and Chris Montez to being the biggest band in the history of British popular music (American success would still take another couple of months).
The extra time spent in the studio wasn’t all to the record’s advantage, either. With The Beatles has the first real examples of the band using studio trickery and overdubbing, but what this means throughout the album is out-of-synch double-tracking (practically every lead vocal is sloppily double-tracked – none of the band had the experience to do a decent job), and overdubbed piano and maracas, giving a thick, dense texture without the space of a live performance. The band would get much better at using the studio very quickly, but this album is at an uncomfortable halfway point between the record as thing in itself and the record as recording of live performance, with the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. This also means that With The Beatles has the smallest difference between mono and stereo mixes, and is the least improved of all the albums by remastering. Frankly, the source material sounds bad in comparison to pretty much anything else the band ever did,
And finally, it’s formulaic – the album seems like the product of a conscious, concerted effort to make an album that’s *exactly like the album before*, from Paul doing a winsome cover of a standard, to George doing a ‘little boy lost’ girl-group cover, to John ending the album on a screaming R&B cover, to John taking half the lead vocals (George gets an extra one here, and it feels like more of a group effort, but John is clearly the leader).
Sometimes, though, the formula works – as on It Won’t Be Long, the opening track, and the start of a run of three songs as good as any in the band’s early catalogue. It Won’t Be Long bears all the marks of a song written to order, combining the hooks of the band’s current hit single (the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ of the chorus) with the punning title of their first big hit. Still, Lennon manages to come up with something so unusually structured (seven-bar verse, chorus, and ‘middle eight’ introduced after only one verse) that it carries a lot of conviction, and the arrangement is very well thought-out, particularly the tiny guitar/drum fill going into the chorus. One of the very best of the band’s early tracks.
All I’ve Got To Do, the second song, is practically the only one on the album not to be badly double-tracked, and the result is one of Lennon’s most human vocals. The song itself is an obvious attempt at writing a Smokey Robinson song, but Lennon has internalised this style so much it sounds entirely natural. This is another one where the arrangement makes it though – the snapped, broken drum part under the melismatic vocal line is something the Zombies would later make an entire career out of – Tell Her No in particular is almost a clone of this track.
Much as on the last album, McCartney only gets to shine once here, with All My Loving, by far his best song to this point, and the first time he wrote something up to Lennon’s standard. Even so, the song has signs of laziness in its writing – the fact that he uses the same words to rhyme in both the first and second verses *could* be seen as a clever touch, except that he can’t be bothered to write a third verse (just repeating the first) or a proper middle eight lyric. That said, this would have been an obvious choice for a single for any other band, and (like the two tracks before it) it shows sign of a lot of care in the arrangement. Incidentally, for those of you who still believe the nonsense in Goldman’s book about Lennon being a poor guitarist, listen to those triplets throughout the song – that’s a HARD part to play. Harrison also gets to shine here, doing his best Carl Perkins on the solo, and this is the song here most improved by the remastering – Lennon and Harrison’s backing vocals in the last verse cut through now in a way they didn’t before.
Harrison’s Don’t Bother Me, the next song, was his first solo composition, and surprisingly good for a first effort. One can already see the beginnings of his style – being grumpy over minor chords – but it’s a surprisingly sophisticated song for a beginner.
After that though, we have a whole cluster of sludge in the middle – a lazy, half-written Lennon song (Little Child, where he sounds almost contemptuous of the song while singing it, and where the arrangement is just ‘every instrument including harmonica and piano playing as loudly as possible’), McCartney’s one for the grannies (Til There Was You) , a McCartney song left off Please Please Me (Hold Me Tight, whose only point of interest is the way the chorus lyric carries over into the middle eight, something he’d repeat with The Fool On The Hill four years later), a song for Ringo (I Wanna Be Your Man, where he does a much better job than on Boys) and a cluster of undistinguished R&B covers (probably the best of which is the version of Please Mister Postman, which has far more energy in the vocal performances than the song deserves, and which is again improved by the remastering – I’d actually never heard the ‘ooh’ backing vocals until this release – they’d just got swamped in the stereo mix I own on vinyl).
The album comes together again, however, for the last two songs. Not A Second Time is a sloppy performance and arrangement (apart from George Martin’s (varispeeded?) piano solo), and by any reasonable standards it’s a badly-written one, too – but it’s so unpredictable that it manages to overcome this. It’s clearly a song that meant something to its author, and that does come across.
And the album finishes on Money, one of the Beatles’ very best cover versions. Everything comes together here perfectly, and the mono mix, and remaster, give the track a power it never had in stereo (ever notice McCartney’s almost-inaudible ‘waah’ during the instrumental break?). The sound of the distorted, reverbed guitars playing in synch with Martin’s piano, with the bass end now rich and strong like it always should have sounded, is extraordinarily inventive for the time, Starr’s drumming is exemplary, and Lennon and McCartney both give the vocals their all.
The album works far better as an album than as a selection of tracks, thanks to some smart sequencing – the good stuff is front-loaded, and it closes with the best track – and it shows the first signs of the band’s fascination with studio technique, which would soon start to pay off – but it’s clearly a regressive step. They’d lost the innocence and enthusiasm of the first album, but not yet replaced it with sophistication and craftsmanship. That would soon change, however.
(I may well review A Hard Day’s Night tomorrow rather than in a week, so this rather negative review doesn’t stay the top one for very long. While you wouldn’t believe it from reading this, the Beatles are my favourite band…)
Linkblogging for 23/09/09
Posting will probably be light for the next few days, as it’s a busy time at work. To tide you over, here are some links.
Al Ewing is reviewing Beatles: Rock Band one song at a time. The interesting thing here is that Ewing – as he admits himself – knows almost nothing of the band’s music and is using this as a way of getting into them…
In other Beatles posts, Jog has a post on the comic insert in Magical Mystery Tour, along with some thoughts on how this would translate into the digital age in comparison with the film and album.
Todd Alcott continues his look at Kubrick with A Clockwork Orange part 2 .
For those of you who think I’m too hard on the anti-immigrant propaganda coming from people like racist UKIP, this is why.
James Graham has more on the ridiculous events at conference, which appear to involve the leadership briefing against the party…
And Chris Dillow has an interesting post on a fundamental disconnect in the debate between the religious and ‘new atheists’.
Linkblogging for 22/09/09
So right now I’m quite glad I *couldn’t* make it to conference… reports coming back seem to show the leadership and rank-and-file at each other’s throats, because the leadership seem to be making increasingly bizarre pronouncements. Or at least, that’s what I’m picking up from Twitter and the few Lib Dem blogs that are active at the moment – I hope it’s not the actual case (I have very little knowledge of how the personalities in this party interact…). I’ll know more for sure when people get back and start talking properly…
In more positive news, the Social Liberal Forum and Compass are working together to advance progressive ideas in Labour and the Lib Dems. This kind of working together – bottom-up activists working across party lines – is worlds away from the ‘you do everything I say because we’re a team’ attitude that is often seen in this kind of thing…
Meanwhile Alex Wilcock analyses the pre-manifesto, and is not impressed.
While The Daily Mash have their own take on the conference.
Scholars and Rogues have a balanced look at Norman Borlaug.
And possibly the best scientific paper I’ve heard about in a long while.
And finally – Google may have fixed the IE6 problem for good! Now if we could only get them to do the same for Windows itself…
The Liberal Moment
David Cameron argues in today’s Observer that as far as ‘progressive’ (shudder) policies go, there is little distance between the Lib Dems and the Tories, and we should be working together. His case is very superficially convincing – until you remember their slogan from the last election, If You Want A Nigger For Your Neighbour, Vote Labour It’s Not Racist To Impose Limits On Immigration. And indeed, until you actually look at everything the Conservatives stand for.
Cameron is trying to recreate the ‘big tent’ informal coalition that Blair and Ashdown had in 1997, trying to get us to unite against Labour as we previously united against the Tories (by the major party definition of ‘unite’ which is ‘agree with us in everything we do, even when we’re quite clearly insane’. See also Liberal Conspiracy’s idea of big-tent coalition), but it’s fundamentally misguided. His piece is just inane drivel, and its main reason for existing appears to be to try to persuade people considering the Lib Dems that the Tories would be the same – about as far from the truth as it gets.
The reason for Cameron writing this now – other than as a spoiler for the Lib Dem conference – is because Nick Clegg has just put out his most significant contribution to liberal thought so far, a pamphlet called Liberal Moment , which seems to skewer hopes of a Tory/Lib Dem alliance for good.
In the past, I’ve never been hugely impressed by Clegg as leader, but one thing I’ve always thought impressive was the way he could articulate genuinely liberal views, but in a way that would appeal to the Daily Mail crowd (something that other people, notably Alix Mortimer, have seen as a downside). However, here he is instead putting forward a case for Liberal values as part of a progressive strand of thought, which I’m far more comfortable with.
‘Progressive’ is a much-abused term, but reading through Clegg’s paper, one can see a rough definition emerging – for Clegg, ‘progressive’ appears to mean a commitment to both freedom and equality.
Clegg’s analysis – actually similar to the Blairite ‘big tent’ analysis of the mid-90s – is that there is a fundamental split between ‘progressives’ in this sense and conservatives, but that there is a further split in the progressive side between, roughly, those who think equality is important insofar as it helps bring about greater freedom, who gravitate toward the Liberal Democrats (and before them the Liberal Party) and those who think freedom is important insofar as it helps bring about greater equality, who gravitate toward the Labour Party.
Clegg argues – correctly in my view – that the two are natural allies, despite their very real differences. He then goes on to talk about how the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the dominant progressive force in British politics in the early part of the 20th century, partly as a result of electoral pacts between the two, partly because of the splits within the Liberals themselves and their partial abandonment of some of their principles, but also – as he, rather uniquely for a Liberal (Democrat) admits – because the social democratic/democratic socialist principles of the Labour Party genuinely had something to add.
However, he argues that right now, top-down, centralised, statist governance is a bad idea, for much the same reasons I argue here, and that the failures of the Labour government have been linked to its authoritarian tendencies and wish to micromanage every part of people’s lives:
So this pamphlet starts and finishes with a particular view about the great differences in the Labour and Liberal traditions of progressive thought, and an assertion that as Labour heads fordefeat at the next election the future of progressive politics lies in liberalism. In much the same way that Labour was on the right side of events over a century ago when the Liberal party was not, I will argue that a reverse ‘switch’ in which the Liberal Democrats can become the dominant progressive force in British politics is now more possible than ever before.
What Clegg is definitely not doing here is using ‘liberal’ as a synonym for moderate, as most people appear to (see for example this post by Lawrence Miles – ” To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that’s wholly founded on exploitation.” That’s what ‘liberal’ in the USian/Liberal Conspiracy sense means, but has little to do with real liberalism).
Unfortunately, in the past the Lib Dems have, in our PR if not in our actions, encouraged that understanding of ‘liberalism’ as being smack in the middle (see, for example, this incredibly irritating bit of Littlejohnism from John Cleese. This mostly came about with the alliance of the Liberal Party with the SDP – who really *were* moderate centrists with fairly wooly ideas. The old joke “What do we want? Moderate change! When do we want it? In due course!” has sometimes been all too accurate when it comes to the ‘message’ the party has put out, even though since at least the early 90s we have been far more radical in our demands for change than either of the major parties.
In truth, Liberalism is, as Clegg is finally stating explicitly, a coherent political philosophy in its own right, equidistant from both the two major parties but in the same way the apex of an isoceles triangle is equidistant from the points at the base – further away from either than they are from each other.
Clegg ‘[refuses] to even contemplate’ ‘fall[ing] in line with Gordon Brown to hold back the rise of the Conservatives’ because in the ways that matter Labour and the Conservatives are largely indistinguishable, but he recognises in this paper that many of the aims of Labour members and supporters are ones that many Lib Dem members share. Fundamentally, though Clegg never puts it quite this way, the Lib Dem disagreement with Labour is about means, whereas with the Tories it’s about ends. Lib Dems don’t believe that government micromanagement can ever deliver a fairer world as Labour believe – let alone a freer world, which is what we want even more. But the Tories’ ‘solution’ – to punish the poor and disenfranchised for their position in society – is no solution at all.
There are individual aspects to Liberal Moment with which I find myself disagreeing – the involvement of victims in the justice system is always something that worries me, so the proposals for allowing vandals to say sorry to their victims and negotiate a way to make amends with them rather than going through the court system sound troubling. But that’s a minor point.
A more major one was pointed out by Gavin R in the comments here, when I linked this paper on Friday:
a keyword search suggests a worrying trend. Just look at these word frequencies in a text of about 70 pages:
women: 2
woman: 1
gender: 0
sex: 0
sexuality: 0
patriarchy: 0
gay: 0
Which is a very good point, and I for one would have liked to have seen something about how liberal values apply to those areas – especially as they’re a very obvious area in which we differ from the other two parties. I always liked Alex Wilcock’s suggestions for party slogans – “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right” and “To tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem”. It would have helped to contextualise the much-hyped “Real Women” policy discussion Jo Swinson is leading, as well, minor aspects of which (changing ASA rules so adverts containing photoshopped pictures would have to have a disclaimer) have been rather over-publicised, outside of a larger policy context.
But overall, Liberal Moment does its job – to put Lib Dem policy ideas into a larger political/philosophical context, and to make a clear argument for the Liberal worldview. It’s not going to replace Mill any time soon, but as a flag in the ground, saying “HERE is why we’re not Tories, and HERE is why Labour are wrong” it’s far better than I dared hope from a leader who has previously appeared to be a bit of a lightweight.
More like this, please.
The Beatles Mono Reviews 2 – Please Please Me
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
The cover to Please Please Me, from 1963
“Their first album, Please Rut Me, was made in twenty minutes. Their second took even longer. Success was only a drum-beat away.” – The Rutles
Please Please Me is an album that I’ve only experienced in mono – apart from the title track, which I knew in stereo before I got my mono vinyl copy of this album back in the early 90s. Many people will be having the reverse of the shock I got then, when they listen to their new stereo CDs and realise that the stereo and mono mixes of that track are actually different performances (I think the stereo mix actually edits together two different takes – the difference is most noticeable on the line “why do you make me blue?”)
What’s oddest about this album in retrospect is how much it’s Lennon’s album. At this point the songwriting credits for the Lennon/McCartney partnership were still McCartney/Lennon, and McCartney was viewed by George Martin as the obvious ‘frontman’ of the group (he took lead vocals on both sides of the band’s debut single), yet here Lennon gets seven lead vocals (and wrote Do You Want To Know A Secret?, which Harrison sang) to McCartney’s four.
Possibly this was because the album was made in a rush – other than the four songs that had been on previously-released singles, the other ten tracks on the album were recorded in a ten hour period – and so the band (who still at this point regarded Lennon as the ‘leader’) would have fallen back to the songs that were regulars in their live performances – but then, if you look at the tracklisting of the Star Club live album, recorded just over a month before, only four of these songs were in the set, two of them McCartney tracks. It may also be, though, that Martin had changed his mind for the time about who the ‘leader’ was, after McCartney’s Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You had got to number 17 while Lennon’s Please Please Me/Ask Me Why had reached number one.
Either way, this dominance – which Lennon would only achieve once more, on A Hard Day’s Night – was all the odder for the fact that Lennon had a terrible cold on the day the album was recorded, and was having clear problems with pitching on the day. Luckily, even at 22, Lennon was already an experienced enough vocalist that he could turn this to his advantage, and he manages through sheer willpower to turn in some of the best vocals that had ever been heard on a British record to that point.
In particular, praise must go to his take on Anna, the Arthur Alexander song. Ian MacDonald, in Revolution In The Head, describes this as sounding like a youth singing a man’s song, which just goes to show that even MacDonald could have a tin ear. Alexander and Lennon have very different takes on the song – Alexander being more resigned, the key phrase in his version being the repeated ‘go with him’ of the chorus, while for Lennon the key phrase is the practically-screamed “what am I supposed to do?” of the middle eight – but good as Alexander is (and he is extraordinarily good, one of those figures like James Carr who deserve much wider recognition) Lennon just has the edge.
The only time where Lennon’s vocal is let down by his cold is There’s A Place – which is a shame, as it’s one of his best early songs (McCartney claims this one as a straight co-write, suggested by himself based on Bernstein’s “There’s A Place For Us”. This may well be the case, but the finished product has far more of Lennon’s fingerprints than McCartney’s, from the harmony vocals throughout, to the pensive mood of the lyric, to the harmonica part).
On the other hand, his vocal on Twist And Shout is, without a doubt, one of those defining performances that comes along maybe once a decade. Recorded last thing, at the end of a long day, because they knew his voice wouldn’t stand up after this song, you can *hear* him damaging his vocal cords to get the performance out, but backed by an amazing performance by the rest of the band – taut and wiry where the Isley’s original had been loose and swinging – this is the performance where ‘rock’ (as opposed to ‘rock and roll’) is invented.
Lennon also wrote the bulk of the original material on here, from the Roy Orbison pastiche turned uptempo pop song Please Please Me to the Miracles-esque Ask Me Why (with its lovely turnabout in the middle eight – “I can’t conceive of any more misery”). Not all of it is great, but it’s promising.
That said, McCartney does write three songs here – the first single Love Me Do, its B-side P.S. I Love You (quite possibly the worst thing the Beatles ever did – not just bad, but *lazy*), and (the only indicator of his future greatness) I Saw Her Standing There, which opens the album in as much style as Twist And Shout closes it. (It feels like I’ve sold McCartney short on this album, but he’s just not really a presence yet – he really comes into his own from Help! onwards, though he’s more noticeable on all the albums after this one).
At this point, neither George or RIngo could actually sing – George’s vocals on Chains and Do You Want To Know A Secret are those of an adenoidal adolescent, while Ringo just bellows cheerfully on Boys. Both would get better (Ringo less so than George).
What is very obvious here, though, is that the Beatles were music lovers. The cover versions here were all (with the exception of A Taste Of Honey) of black American music, all soul music and girl groups – two songs by the Shirelles, and one each by the Cookies, the Isley Brothers and Arthur Alexander. I’ve seen people recently saying that the Beatles were just doing ‘obvious Motown covers’ at this point, but these records were largely unknown at the time – certainly in Britain, but even in the US.
But the thing that’s obvious from listening to the originals – and the key to their success – is that the band weren’t *just* listening to soul music. If they were, they’d have been the Rolling Stones. But they were taking from *everywhere*. Yes, John tries to do the Miracles in Ask Me Why, but he also borrows from Roy Orbison (Please Please Me) Bernstein and Sondheim (There’s A Place) and Disney songs (Do You Want To Know A Secret?). I Saw Her Standing There is Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie with the serial number filed off, Lennon’s harmonica style comes straight from Hey Baby by Bruce Channel, Lennon’s vocals owe far more to Buddy Holly than most people realise (listen to Holly’s eponymous album – his only solo one released in his lifetime – and you’ll realise just how similar the two were), George Harrison’s guitar is Carl Perkins, the harmonies are the Everlys…
This is a band that had listened to and absorbed every record they could get their hands on, and learned from all of them. The Beatles, like all great musicians, were syncretists – taking elements from every possible style and genre and adding them to their own style. Which is one reason it’s so sad that many musicians who claim the Beatles as role models have such a limited range of musical influences, often involving only groups of four white men with guitars.
As for the remastering, as this was the most primitive of the recordings, being recorded essentially live on two-track tape, it’s also the one improved least by modern technology. That said, the sound here is a lot clearer than on previous releases – the reverb on Lennon’s voice on Ask Me Why is more audible, for example, and as on all the albums there’s a general improved bass response, as well as greater separation of the vocals and instruments. Overall a *lot* of improvement can be found – like being able to distinguish Lennon and Harrison’s guitars from each other in Chains, even when they’re playing the same part – but they’re subtle differences, not the massive eye-openers of some of the later albums.
At times, this can almost be as much a curse as a blessing – Starr’s brushwork always marred A Taste Of Honey for me, sounding more like tape hiss than an actual instrument (one of the few bits of genuinely bad drumming from Ringo, and more a lapse of taste than of ability), and here it’s even more noticeable. And the missed notes (mostly from Lennon, because of his cold), fluffed backing vocal lyrics and general roughness are all more noticeable now.
But that’s also part of the appeal. Nothing like this would *ever* get released today. My band’s last EP took several times as long to record as this full album, used 64-track digital recording and partly pre-programmed music, and *still* sounds vaguely sloppy and ‘unprofessional’ compared to the mechanical, auto-tuned, compressed-to-death output of almost everyone at the moment, because we only had a budget of what Tilt and I could afford to pay.
The progress of recording technology – in large part spurred by the Beatles themselves – has rendered this kind of recording almost as obsolete as illuminated manuscripts, but the result has been that recorded music has lost a lot of character. This is an album made by humans – the occasional fluffs make it all the more impressive that, for the VAST majority of the time, they get it so very right.
This is the Beatles album recorded before ‘Beatles album’ meant something, and as such is effectively the work of a different band from all the rest of them. And much as I love Revolver and Rubber Soul and Abbey Road and Help!, while I’m listening to this I can’t help but wish that this band had made a few more albums, too…
Spotify Playlist – Jake Thackray, Arthur Alexander, Incredible String Band, Dudley Moore
This week’s playlist doesn’t have a theme as such, but is just some music I like.
After an introductory snippet, we start with Anyone But You by The Mumps. The Mumps were a late 70s art-rock/punk band led by reality TV star Lance Loud (who takes lead on this) and musician Kristian Hoffman (who sings lead on the middle eight). In this form, this song sounds like a very rough demo for the version on Hoffman’s 2002 duets album &, possibly the best album of the last decade, which is near-identical to this but tighter and with Stew singing Lance Loud’s part (other people Hoffman duets with on the album include Darian Sahanaja, Van Dyke Parks, Russel Mael, Rufus Wainwright and El Vez). Unfortunately, Hoffman’s solo work is not yet on Spotify, but this will give some idea of how it sounds. But buy Hoffman’s album, seriously. Best album of the last ten years.
Where Have You Been All My Life? by Arthur Alexander is, shamefully, the only track by the great soul singer on Spotify (not only that, he’s not on eMusic either – a definite argument for the continued existence of CDs). Alexander is mostly known now for his influence on British bands like the Beatles (who covered many of his songs live) or the Stones, but he really deserves much more recognition.
I’ve had a minor obsession with the Threepenny Opera since LOEG: Century was released a few months ago, especially Pirate Jenny. I usually listen to the version by Nina Simone because she interprets the English version of the lyrics best, but Lotte Lenya singing it with Kurt Weill’s original orchestration is the definitive version in the original German.
Suzy Creamcheese by Teddy & His Patches is not, strangely, a cover of the Zappa song, but a totally different song, obviously inspired by the spoken bit and percussion jams at the end of Freak Out! but sounding far more like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, with a bit of the Count Five thrown in. A marvellous garage rave-up.
Lady Lynda by The Beach Boys is included because I’ve always felt that Al Jardine was a horribly underrated vocalist – being in a band with Brian and Carl Wilson would let anyone get overlooked, but I actually think he was at least on their level, and while this song (a hit for the band in the UK, written by Jardine about his then-wife, based around Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring) isn’t one of their best, it does really showcase his vocal abilities. In fact more than that – when the ‘live’ album and DVD this is from came out, it was claimed that there were no vocal overdbubs after the fact, in which case (as you can hear here) Jardine must be the only man in the world who can double-track himself live, while simultaneously singing a totally different backing vocal line – sometimes without even moving his lips…
Baby It’s You by The Shirelles is the first of two Bacharach songs on this playlist – in fact the backing track here is Bacharach’s home demo (as you can tell from the dropped-in solo, awkward and out of place). What always gets me about this song is the ‘cheat, cheat’ in the second verse. She knows that ‘what they say about you’ is true, but has chosen to forgive, but not to forget…
Little Miss Britten by Dudley Moore is Moore doing Little Miss Muffet in the style of Britten’s settings of folk songs for Peter Pears. Absolutely *cutting*. Moore never really got to develop his talent for musical comedy after choosing essentially to become Peter Cook’s straight man, but while these early pastiches are a little glib he could easily have become as good as Tom Lehrer or Flanders & Swann in his own right, rather than being the assistant to an even greater genius…
I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself by Dusty Springfield is another Bacharach/David song. This one has been covered by Elvis Costello (where I first heard the song) and The White Stripes, but this is the definitive version. I was reading someone (Bob Stanley quoted by Jonathan Calder, who I also just realised isn’t on my blogroll, something I will rectify forthwith) recently talking about how at the time, Dusty Springfield was only seen as one of a number of interchangeable vocalists like Cilla Black, Lulu or Sandy Shaw, but now she’s the only one who is still an influence on many, many new singers.
Ride The Wild Surf by Jan & Dean is a fairly formulaic J&D/Brian Wilson early surf song, appaling vocals and all (these records are a lot more dissonant than people remember), but I love the ‘gotta take that one last ride’ hook, the ‘ride ride ride’ at the end of the middle eight (with that throbbing bass staying on one note while the vocals go up and up) and especially the end of the track. Those elements are all things that either Wilson or Jan Berry (probably Wilson) almost certainly lifted from the Beatles (compare the end of every other Jan & Dean or Beach Boys single up to that point, with their fades, to the ‘one-two-three, one-two-three, CHORD!’ ending of both this and I Want To Hold Your Hand).
A Very Cellular Song by The Incredible String Band is a thirteen-minute multi-sectioned song with gospel and folk elements, featuring organ, harpsichord and crumhorn. The album this was on went top ten in 1967… (relistening to this recently, I was annoyed to discover that one of my own new songs bears too much resemblance to this – I’m rewriting it in my head at the moment).
Brother Gorilla (Le Gorille) by Jake Thackray is Thackray’s loose translation of Georges Brassens’ chanson. It actually sounds just like one of Thackray’s own songs – the only clue to it being a translation is the rather forced ‘swinging lissomely out of his cage’ and ‘the judge intoned with tranquility’, both of which have too many syllables for their lines. But how many other songwriters could manage to get ‘paleolithic’ into a song and have it scan? (Incidentally, a warning – this is a comedy song about a hanging judge being raped by a gorilla. Some of you might find it offensive or triggering).
Liebster Jesu, Wir Sind Hier by Dr Albert Schweitzer is, yes, that Albert Schweitzer. As well as his missionary, medical and theological work, for which he’s more widely known, he was also one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Bach on the organ in the early 20th century, even inventing several new mic-positioning techniques for recording Bach more accurately. While this has some surface noise, it’s still a lovely performance.
Wishing Well by The National Pep is one of a very small number of songs where I wrote the words as well as the music (Tilt rewrote two lines of this). In fact the song came to me, words and music, on the bus and I had to scribble it down and work out the chords later – I still can’t actually play it on the guitar, having written it without an instrument. (The last couple of lines were added later, as the bus stopped before I could finish writing, and I still don’t think they fit particularly well). Tilt and our engineer Steve managed to take my tinkly MIDI file (which Gavin R said sounded like the music from Super Mario Brothers when he heard it on its own) and Joe Meek it up enough to be usable (basically they played the MIDI file backwards through a good sampled harpsichord with reverb on it, then reversed the recording, plus a ton of other stuff), and Tilt and Laura Denison provided vocals.
C-H-I-C-K-E-N spells Chicken by The McGee Brothers is another song that some may find offensive – with good reason, as in its very first line it includes two racist epithets. Unfortunately, pre-war rural music like this (a song originally written, I believe, by the phenomenal banjo player Uncle Dave Macon) often has these elements – and I’m very grateful for Van Dyke Parks’ cover of this (unfortunately not on Spotify) for changing those lyrics while preserving the wonderful song itself.
Speaking of cover versions by Van Dyke Parks, Donovan’s Colours is a ragtime-ish instrumental version of Donovan’s 60s hit, with some lovely percussion and cello bits to it. Just gorgeous. Remind me to do several more blog posts about Parks at some point – he’s one of the unsung greats.
And Will You Remember Me by Janet Klein is a lovely little solo performance, just voice and ukulele.
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