I've not previously been able to share my songwriting credit here but now find the record safely archived on You Tube for posterity. It was an enormous pleasure to get my name on a record at the age of 58 and, while accepting that it's too late to become the new Neil Sedaka, there's plenty on my CV I'd relinquish before that.
While remaining on track with the programme of reading Proust, one does not live by Fin de Siecle French decadance alone and so I've had easy-going downtime with David Hepworth, hep by name and hep by nature, who can roll out books of pop music memoirs as easily as Marcel Marceau can mime that he's trapped in a glass box. Anybody can scribble out their precious memories of the pop music they heard at an impressionable age in the 1960's or 70's and it becomes fascinating for all those for who Roxy Music, All the Young Dudes, Wig Wam Bam and Diana Ross (Thank you, Ma'am) are much more part of their DNA than any test that suggest one is, to a large extent, Middle Eastern.
David Hepworth's books are among the more readable, less because he is encyclopedic on the subject and still deeply in love with it but because he can divine what was really happening, which was the absurdity of an industry commodifying the 'cool' that its customers were so rapt with and so wrapped up in. So, while one empathisizes so completely with the obsession with the LP, which lasted from Sgt. Pepper to Thriller, he says, one also admires the way he can now appreciate that,
It was a number of years before I was to realize the truth about men and music - that they like the things they think they ought to like rather than the things they do like.
I was ahead of him there, moving to Al Green and Motown as soon as I could from the absurd posturings of the machismo provided for teenage boys in the 70's by 'rock' bands and I'm always glad to see David dismiss Frank Zappa with short shrift because he was the worst of the lot, imagining himself so far into the distance except that The Stylistics could completely beat him up without even wanting to.
It's perfectly possible to enjoy Hepworth as entertainment without subscribing to his opinions or point of view. He implies that he might not be capable of subscribing to them himself sometimes but his re-listen to Hunky Dory is hard to take, that even by then Bowie was somehow gauche and name-dropping. He saves the day by saying it is the best thing he ever did.
My own time of considering some of these bands - the likes of Faust, Tangerine Dream and Focus - was from roughly 1972-74 and I agree with him how hard it was to find out about and buy the right records on the proceeds of a paper round. David once got it so wrong that he bought UmmaGumma, immediately realized he'd done his money and was grateful to the record shop that they let him swap it for Liege & Lief. It seems I found the out-ball before he did. He knows that The Belle Album 'has no right to be as good as it is' with Al Green working without the Willie Mitchell Band but I don't think he ever realizes that white pop music was only an adjunct of 'black' pop music. He still seems to think it's 'rock', it's white but Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone had certain credentials.
That is not what happened.
For me, I could write such a book forever and make Marcel Proust's effort look like a haiku. Why would anybody in their 60's still be listening to the passing music fads that they were beguiled by as teenagers unless they stumbled on to the right answer straightaway, the answer to that being More Hits by Cliff. Were Barclay James Harvest any good. No, they were as dull as it could get.
It didn't have to be like that. There was reggae. Motown was so commercially successful because it was fantastic. You could let Deep Purple make their loud noise in some other kid's bedroom and their complaining parents probably had a point.
My Top 30 Game involves listing the songs of any artist or songwriter(s) and comparing their no.30's.
The Beatles, The Motown Hit Factory (Holland-Dozier-Holland), Goffin-King, David Bowie, anybody you like. I add in Stephin Merritt even if I have recently suggested he's a busted flush and I'm not sure where you arrive when you stretch T. Rex to 30 but Marc isn't going to be too sadly lacking. See how you get on. I might do a few and see what happens but Holland-Dozier-Holland are favourites because they are almost the Motown back catalogue without Smokey Robinson.
Pop music. One really ought to be over it by now. You don't come here for the latest news because I have none. The latest news is on Radio 2. I can listen to Ken Bruce for maybe 20 minutes but then have to switch over because the computer that wrote all that identical racket makes one feel like an idiot that deserves no better.
