Drums in Pop Music and others stories

 It's not just entering this next phase of quite galling lockdown - not a problem, let's do it, then but I did have a November to look forward to- that brings with it the thought that Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow would have been a title I could use if Jerome K. Jerome hadn't got there first. One of my latest theses involved taking the drums out of pop music. 

It might have come from the revelation on the radio, on the anniversary of Keith Moon's death, that Keith was only voted second best ever drummer in a poll by Rolling Stone. I looked it up to find that John Bonham was voted top which made me reflect that polls only reflect the constituency that voted in them and Led Zeppelin supporters were better represented than The Who. I'm not these days particularly interested and certainly not qualified to comment. 

It didn't, though. It came from thinking about percussion in classical music which, give or take Evelyn Glennie and James MacMillan's Veni, Veni Immanuel, isn't the first thing you think of. Chamber music manages entirely without and Bach, Handel, Mozart and most that preceded them don't offer much employment to timpanists. So I wondered what pop music would lose beyond my favourite bit of drumming just before one big, last chorus in Daydream Believer. The Magnetic Fields don't have a drummer and Stephin programmes a machine to do it when he wants one on his electronic studio productions. My own songwriting contribution to the history of recorded music, which isn't significant enough to be a footnote to a footnote, doesn't have a drummer on it and I vividly remember thinking Steeleye Span didn't need one when it was announced they had signed up Nigel Pegrum although, admittedly, one of their best tracks, Rogues in a Nation, had benefitted from somebody doing it.

But then this morning, compelled to augment forlorn feelings while playing chess, I put this on and, of course pop music needs drums, and bass. Jamaica would hardly be so high up in the world rankings without rhythm sections like the Roots Radics Band, Sly'n'Robbie and the celestial hosts of all those that make reggae tick.

Oh, yes, and, glory be, in chess, having reported the doldrums of last week- I floated back to a rating I belong at with a winning sequence of 12 games, which is a personal best, the day before Fulham set a new season's best winning sequence of one.

 

 

It's been a while since I played that and the masterpieces that follow it. Floods of tears.

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Meanwhile this arrived recently and so far is a fine example of the biographer's art with no reason to think it's going to stop being. Hannah Gluckstein was an unconventional figure but not in the least, it would appear, one with affectations and a brilliant painter which I hope the acquisition of any available book of them will confirm in more depth. 

But don't call her Hannah. She insisted on being called Gluck and so leaves us having to make it clear we're not talking about the composer of Orfeo e Eurydice.

A biography of Rembrandt came with the same order. That looks less promising and might turn out to be one of those occasional mistakes one makes but we will see.

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 And so, even if you never pray - and let's face it, nobody's listening- it might be worth praying tonight.

That the total nightmare of the 74yo toddler-tantrum president gets his due verdict emphatically from the voters of the United States because if it's close, he won't have it and, having appointed dodgy judges to majorities in the courts, a win that isn't a complete thrashing could be overturned.

Somewhere upstairs is a book called The Emergence of Greek Democracy in which Solon features as its prime instigator. He might not have been all that 'democratic' by the standards we might hope for now but surely even he didn't see Dinald Trump coming.

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And, finally, the pleasures of writing a book are possibly fewer than you might think but it's much better if you do it for pleasure, take as long as you like and don't worry about the outcome and not for any other reason.

Wide Realm, my workmanlike survey of Thom Gunn, is uncovering more than I ever realized in the 45 years I've regarded him as a 'favourite poet' but it falls well short of the academic standards of those foremost in the area of Gunn Studies, like Prof. Clive Wilmer. But just because there's no point in adding it to the vast ocean of ISBN numbers doesn't mean it's not worth writing it because I'm hoping to be the author of a sentence that goes something like,

If 'Moly' is not the light-filled paradise of revelation and sensual contact that it first looks like but contains a dark undertone that knows that such transcendence is illusory, that is no more than the 'heroic' figures celebrated in 'The Sense of Movement' are examples of empty machismo. 

 

I'm not convinced that my essay will revise traditional readings of Gunn but any resolution he can be credited with in solving his difficulties with being human come a long time after those.

 

But what a pleasure it is to name drop in this episode of 'and other stories', not only the recent consignee, Gluck, but such long-standing stalwarts as The Magnetic Fields, Thom Gunn and Gregory Isaacs, the likes of which I couldn't have imagined before the best of their work explained and extended the whole purpose of creative work.