New Spotify Playlist – XTC, Laurie Biagini, Neil Innes, Wild Man Fisher
Before I start, I’d just like to apologise for the lack of content for a week – work’s finally calmed down, but I’ve essentially spent the last week asleep as a reaction to the lifting of four months’ constant stress.
Anyway, I’ve decided that to start posting again I’m going to do another hyperpost like series, this one starting off with thoughts on authorship rather than canon. I’m going to talk about Cerebus, Smile, Wednesday Comics and Strange Adventures, Darkseid and Jack Kirby, and copyright law, among other things. I’ll also try, next week, to get more Beatles stuff posted.
But in the meantime, here’s a playlist I’ve put together…
Hand 19 by Andy Partridge And Harold Budd is from an album I only discovered existed through Spotify, a collection of somewhat new-agey jazzy stuff. I almost wondered at first if it was a different Andy Partridge, but it has his melodic fingerprints…
How Sweet To Be An Idiot by Neil Innes is probably Innes’ most famous solo song, thanks to appearing on a couple of Monty Python things (and being ripped off by Oasis for Whatever). It’s deserved though – Innes is a *shockingly* underrated songwriter, easily as major a talent as someone like Ray Davies, who gets overlooked because so much of his material is hilariously funny, so the craft (an the often very poignany emotions) underlying it gets lost.
Buttons Of Your Mind by The Scaffold is a rather lovely B-side to their novelty hit Lily The Pink. It sounds like a poor man’s Bonzo Dog Band – which is, of course, what The Scaffold essentially were – but they have their moments. (For those who don’t know, The Scaffold were a comedy group which featured the poet Roger McGough and Paul McCartney’s brother).
Stagger Lee by Mississippi John Hurt is still my favourite version of this – a completely different song to the more well-known one performed by everyone from Lloyd Price to Nick Cave, but containing many of the same lines.
Season Cycle by XTC is, amazingly, from the same album as Dear God. Rather amazing that the band capable of such a terrible song about atheism could also be capable of such a wonderful song about religious awe at nature. Rather obviously ripped off from Sagittarius’ version of My World Fell Down, but none the worse for that.
Mr Guru by Laurie Biagini is a fun piece of 60s pastiche from someone who does a lot of that sort of thing. It actually sounds rather like Bananarama, but in a good way, if you can believe that.
Good Sounds by Linus Of Hollywood is one of the best pure pop tracks of the last decade – an absolutely gorgeous, fun chorus with some rather disturbing lyrics – “I was just thinking/We were both drinking/So we should fool around/Things would be much easier if you’d just stay the night”, along with a promise to ‘play your favourite record if you promise that you’ll stay’ is rather too creepy to be an effective pickup line, or at least so I hope…
Cross Hatched World by Chewy Marble is by far my favourite song from last year’s Modulations, their first album in several years, a Beach Boysy track about drawing.
Loveland by The Mello Cads is a fantastic piece of lounge music pastiche, based around Come On In by The Association (which if I remember rightly was the theme music for lead Cad David Ponak’s radio show for a few years) but with some rather incongruous Indian stylings and backwards guitar on top. The Mello Cads are one of about a million bands with Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg in, always a sign of excellence.
I’ve Loved Her So Long by Neil Young is from his eponymous first solo album, which I still consider the best thing he ever did. Jack Nitzsche’s arrangements, and the more melodic stuff Young was doing then, place this firmly in ‘interesting LA pop’ territory with The Monkees, Love and Jimmy Webb, rather than the hippie singer-songwriter or proto-grunge furrows he spent much of the rest of his career in.
Flaming Carrot Theme Song by Wild Man Fisher is a theme for the great surrealistic 80s indie comic.
Don’t Make Me Over by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the great late-Merseybeat singles, obviously no match for Dionne Warwick’s original, sung as it is by a slightly flat Scouser, but that in itself is its charm – when Ray Ennis sings “Accept me for what I am”, it’s a flawed human doing so, rather than a vocal goddess.
Killing Floor by Howlin’ Wolf is the song which Led Zeppelin… er… homaged in The Lemon Song. However, good as Led Zep are, Howlin’ Wolf is roughly ten quadrillion times better – he sounds like he could bite Robert Plant’s head off between phrases.
And Long Black Limousine by Elvis Presley is a masterpiece of resentment and nastiness. She went off and said she’d be in a fancy car – well look at her now, she’s in a limousine all right – a hearse. That’ll teach her for wanting to do something with her life, won’t it, the stuck-up bitch? She’s dead now and everyone can see her funeral. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant song, as so many of those in this playlist are, but dear god Elvis’ voice in the last verse after the key change… what a singer…
I Am, I Am, I Am Superman, And I Can Do Anything
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
There’s a joke doing the rounds of various comic blogs at the moment – started by Doctor K – asking what the song is that Superman is singing in Final Crisis 7, the song with which he kills Darkseid. Here’s a couple of photoshopped guesses…
This is actually an interesting question (even though it is not of course actually answerable using only the text). Morrison does, after all, talk about comics as if they were music – a lot of the difference between him and the average comic writer is that most comic creators think of comics as films, while Morrison thinks of comics as music. Morrison also talks a lot about how, when he’s writing for a character, he always knows what kind of music they like (Animal Man liked paisley pop, according to Morrison – and this is borne out by the only song we ‘hear’ him listening to – REM’s cover of Superman. King Mob, on the other hand, pretty obviously loved British pop music from the precise moment when Mod turned into psychedelia). So what kind of music *would* Superman sing? What music would kill a god of evil?
We must first dismiss the ‘tastes’ given to Superman in the 90s, when he was shown liking grunge-lite pop music. Much like the mullet and big-shouldered jackets, this clearly never happened. So what *would* he be singing here?
Many people have suggested John Williams’ Superman theme, and that makes a kind of sense, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the author’s intent, but it’s always seemed too martial to me for Superman. The Wagnerian feel would actually fit much of the rest of the story, but there’s not enough joy to it for it to fit here.
My original thought is Bach, simply because Bach’s music is the closest I’ve ever heard to perfection (Douglas Adams used to tell a story about how NASA were sending out a deep-space probe with examples of human culture and eventually decided *not* to send any Bach, because they didn’t want to seem like they were showing off), and Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring or the third Brandenburg Concerto could certainly fit the bill, but they’re a bit too much of the head rather than the heart.
The Ode To Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth? No… Superman’s an essentially simple man, and very American.
Elvis.
Elvis was born six months before Superman, and Alan Moore had Superman die ten years to the day after Elvis (something I’ve never seen anyone note other than myself about Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? even though Moore is clearly riffing on the ‘Elvis Alive?’ headlines that were around at the time) in a story that Morrison is clearly playing off in FC 7 (having the whole thing narrated by Lois Lane in much the same voice as she had in Moore’s story). Superman and Elvis both have similar iconic statuses (Kinky Friedman talked about going to Borneo and meeting tribes who’d never seen a white person before, but who knew three words in English – Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola. That’s roughly the kind of company Superman is in…) and Elvis even desperately *wanted* to be a superhero (specifically Captain Marvel Jr. His ‘TCB’ lightning bolt was based on the Captain Marvel logo, and his jumpsuits were based around his costume. He even dyed his hair to look more like him…). Elvis just seems *right* for Superman.
But at the same time, you can’t see Superman defeating Darkseid by singing Hound Dog or Heartbreak Hotel – much less Do The Clam or Queenie Wahini. So what *could* he be singing?
It’s obvious, when you think about it.
One of Elvis’ last hits was An American Trilogy, a horrible mush of patriotic sentiment, bashing together three songs without much regard for musical or lyrical coherence, or taste, or anything else. It’s tasteless, tacky Vegas kitsch, the very kind of thing that makes Elvis a laughing-stock today. But the thing is, no-one told Elvis that.
In his last years, Elvis lost any sense of taste he once had, seemingly choosing songs completely at random. But he *believed* in those songs, and he still had that voice. He was taking utter *shit*, songs like “You Gave Me A Mountain”, and turning it into art through pure force of will. Which is why, incidentally, he was a better artist than Sinatra. When Sinatra sang My Way, you could hear the contempt in his voice. When Elvis sang it, he believed every word, and let you know he believed every word.
And it’s that sincerity, that ability to take cliche and platitude and make you believe in them, which Elvis shares with Superman (and if you don’t believe me look at this – If I Can Dream may be one of the most banal songs ever written, yet hardly anyone seems to have noticed, mostly because of Elvis’ voice on the middle-eight) that makes the first few minutes of An American Trilogy listenable despite the material. But then he gets to The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.
For those who don’t know that song, here’s its history in brief. Originally a campfire song, after the execution of John Brown, the anti-slavery campaigner, it became a song about freedom, and freeing the slaves, and about how ideals can live on after death, and how it’s sometimes worth dying for a cause you believe in – “John Broan’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave/His truth is marching on”. John Brown later became God, when the song became a hymn, but the song remained about freedom – “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”. And it contained lines like “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,”
And Martin Luther King’s last speech, before his death, ended with the opening line of the ‘spiritual’ version – “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”.
So we have a song with resonances with current events and the election of a black man to President (as also shown on page one of FC7), with freedom, with sacrifice, with dead comrades acting as an inspiration for a continuing struggle, and with liberation from slavery. And the chorus to this song is the ending to Elvis’ American Trilogy (I could here go into a digression about how you could make the three parts of American Trilogy into Truth, Justice and the American Way, but it would be a hell of a stretch). And while most of American Trilogy is pabulum, lifted only by Elvis’ conviction, there’s a moment right on the last line, where the orchestra builds, and JD Sumner and the Stamps do their low white male harmonies and the Sweet Inspirations wail over the top with their perfect black female voices, and Elvis sings “his truth is marching ON!” and holds that note for what feels like eternity…
THAT is what Superman sang to Darkseid. I can guarantee it.
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