David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf.
The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
Extending the franchise, remit and all such things of DGBooks, the website, it is with tremendous pleasure that I can announce DGBooks Radio, in conjunction with the ongoing pop music items.
I hope you'll shuffle it and try it, the first 146 tracks have not been put in any meaningful order beyond the onrush of them occuring to me and I'm sure I'll keep adding to it. No DJ, no news, no sport. I think there could be adverts but what can you do.
I thought the music review job was the best I've ever had but making up a playlist is possibly even better. Opinion might be divided about how good I am at it.
It's not often I can go more than three records on any radio station without coming up against one that I'm not interested in but I can come here without worrying about that.
It wasn't obvious when Princess
Diana complained that,
There were three of us in this
marriage,so it
was a bit crowded
that she was citing Van McCoy and
Betty Everett from 1964. Neither did her doe-eyed complaint about her
misadventure into the royal family have quite the same resonance. It was emotive, to be sure, but a different thing entirely to this
self-possessed statement.
Betty Everett was one among many
such singers that hopefully haven't been entirely forgotten about but it's
mighty crowded in the Northern Soul Hall of Fame and they can't all be as
famous as Aretha. There was Freda Payne, Doris Troy, Timi Yuro, Brenda
Holloway and as many more as you could want.
Getting Mighty Crowded suddenly became the stand-out
choice of what to open the Soul Show with. Defiant, positive and dance floor
certainty, it sets the tone and makes it clear that is how we mean to carry
on.
To mark the appearance of Candi Staton, aged 83, at Glastonbury, there was plenty more to pick from than Nights on Broadway, Young Hearts Run Free and Suspicious Minds to represent this major favourite singer.
The same age as Tina Turner, and likewise achieving her biggest commercial success in the 1980's on something of a comeback trail, those successes didn't quite equal those of Tina's raunch but maybe she was actually a better singer.
I'm no fan of Glastonbury, which is more of an occasion than a musical event. Diana Ross was rubbish there but she was Diana Ross and that counts for a lot. Very few artists found themselves gifted with the quality of material that Berry Gordy put her way. So one is expecting Candi to be better than Diana was but she is 83 and the point is that she's Candi Staton, with a much under-rated back catalogue of passion, loss and hurt.
Greyhound's user-friendly Moon River was when reggae and Trojan Records properly came onto my radar, not having appreciated at the time that My Boy Lollipop was in any way from any other 'culture' but it was in the late 70's that reggae became comfortably a part of pop music in Britain.
I don't think 'Lover's Rock' owed all that much to Island Records breaking Bob Marley to a worldwide audience beyond the cognoscenti. Waiting in Vain was a paragon example on the first reggae album I ever bought, in Boots on Northgate Street, Gloucester, that den of the subversive underground, when Exodus was released and we all caught up quickly from then on.
The pop music market being what it is, though, it doesn't take long for those who know what they're doing to make their move into new territory. Some of those moves are more convincing than others. The usually immaculate Fleetwood Mac thought they ought to acknowledge punk but could do no better than Tusk; we were told that The Knack were the USA's idea of punk rock, seemingly having forgotten so soon that they had invented it with the New York Dolls from which the Sex Pistols had been copied.
But an expert will get it right and, having found a singer, Dennis Bovell gave Janet Kay Silly Games to give her such a good start that she couldn't maintain it, so perfect and extraordinary were her performance and the record that was made of it.
History will have her down as a One Hit Wonder and maybe even a One Trick Pony but none of that distracts from her having done this much.
Mr. Neville Holder MBE, a singer of some repute in his 70's heyday, relates the story in interviews, when asked, about when he lost his voice which, a bit surprisingly given his full-throated approach to the art, was only twice.
He is on tour, in Texas I think he says, and goes to see a voice therapist. While waiting outside, he can hear an operatic tenor going through some exercises and thinks, Chroist. I don't think it was on that occasion that he was asked if he wanted a kipper tie and replied, Yes, please, two sugars.
But when it's his turn to see the consultant, he's asked what the problem is and he explains that he's lost his voice. What is it that you do exactly, he's asked, so somehow (which is where the story falls down a bit) he does the opening of Get Down And Get With It.
And how often do you do that? asks the therapist.
Well, we're on tour so it's nearly every night actually.
And the therapist says, Get out. I can't help you.
Famously, in 1971, some twenty-odd years before the big Blur-Oasis chart showdown, in which I was on the wrong horse both for preference and who I thought would win when Blur did, one was supposed to be Slade or T. Rex. T. Rex were for the arty types and Slade were for those more laddish.
Quite honestly, at first, ex-skinheads Slade were far too threatening for me but their chart success and the encouragement of how much money was to be made from becoming more fun than bovver soon made Slade a mainstream act and Nod, with his grandad image, Dickensian whiskers and spelling that pretended that he hadn't been very good at skool became as acceptable as Gilbert O'Sullivan's similarly retro character and no more dangerous than Dave Bartram from Showaddywaddy.
And that is how a sense of humour, and some common sense, can save some people from themselves. By no means all of them, of course, because pop music has a high casualty rate but Nod became elderly with some grace and was inducted into that hall of 'national treasures'.
It's about time we sneaked another one of these in,
The royalties from A Whiter Shade of Pale were the subject of a protracted court case and very much worth fighting for, it having been the soundtrack to the summer of 67, spending six weeks at number 1 and played regularly ever since. The law suit would have been made exponentially more complicated, though, if J.S. Bach had still been around because Gary Brooker couldn't have done it without his Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068.
A Whiter Shade of Paledoesn't sound like pop music and its venerableness is augmented by words that, although quite possibly meaningless, sound most profound. It's perhaps mostly due to,
As the miller told his tale,
which suggests Chaucer and that Keith Reid had done The Canterbury Tales at school, but also the 'light fandango', the 'vestal virgins' and something affecting about 'wandering through my playing cards' with the formality of 'playing cards' and 'leaving for the coast'.
Even the band name, Procul Harum, looks as if it is Latin and means something. It has been taken to mean 'beyond these things' but it might not. Like the song, it suggests things without standing up to too much rigorous scrutiny.
Of course, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Puff the Magic Dragon and much of what was recorded in later 1960's pop music, the use of drugs has been implicated as its inspiration but intoxication can serve to blur as well as enhance creativity and what we have been left with is a masterpiece of psychedelia, evocative and redolent of much more than hazy weekends spent in fields. It's a piece that stands alone not only in a period of hectic creativity that puts some much later chapters in the history of pop music to shame but even within the work of Procul Harum because, as any number of acts have demonstrated, trying to go back and work the same miracle again is a short cut to the law of diminishing returns.
I'm guessing it's Peter Knight doing most of the vocal gymastics, oh-wha-ah-a'who'a' whoopa, on this on the grounds that, some 40 and more years ago, I remember him saying, while introducing a song, that he was a great admirer of Prof. Stanley Unwin, whose quirkilarity in the usilarouousness of the Englistic lingusistocity was in those days by some thought to be the most hightilomonious achievementimum of erodicious although it might by now look as subversive as it did then.
Buddy Holly, we also understood in those days, was the Mozart of pop song writers. I'm not quite so sure about that as I once was but the point is that Steeleye Span were prepared to try to be 'quirky', for better or worse, of which this is an example, and it only represents them in The Rock Show because I'm very short on 'rock' records that I genuinely like to fill such a show and have shifted 'folk rock' into it and programmed this after one of Buddy's less sentimental efforts.
Rave On by Steeleye Span puts on a great show of folky vocals, as if some local yokels in a Thomas Hardy novel had done it ahead of their time.
There is plenty of more representative, more genuinely folky, Steeleye Span than this and not many bands came up with more evocative album titles than Hark! the Village Wait, Ten Man Mop, Please to See the King and Parcel of Rogues.
It almost seems as if the success of having an extraordinary hit with a Latin hymn in Gaudete and then completely 'selling out' by having an album produced by such an inauthentic purveyor of pop music as David Bowie should have done for them. Success ruined a lot of artists, possibly most of those that achieved any measure of it, but you might find that Steeleye, made up of whoever they can find, recovered from such glamour and stuck to what they did best.
As long as Maddy Prior is doing the front stage, top line part, they still can but, just looking at their website, she is the only one left from the 70's so it's really 'Maddy & Friends'.
It's not necessarily the song, it's the way it's done. The Shadows put in one of their finest performances as Cliff's support band in 1962 but that was an entirely different thing to the Mamas & the Papas relaxed harmonies on their first album in 1966 and different again was a version by the T. Rex Disco Party on the B side of Dreamy Lady. The Beach Boysalso had a gobut they were all paying tribute, and royalties, to Bobby Freeman who wrote and recorded it in 1958.
Anybody who does better than a Cliff classic and, admittedly, not one of T. rex, most memorable outings, is doing well but the Mamas & the Papas must always be in with a chance, re-imagining what I had thought was a Cliff record. Gentle and sensitive before rising to something quite impassioned, it was a revelation when I first found it and it is some measure of their achievement that it was only filling out the album and never a single for them.
They had plenty of options but this hidden-away treasure was once quite a find, hasn't lost anything in the decades since and is possibly really their masterpiece.
Thursday, 2 March 2023
Jess
Davies Band, Mama Told Me
Tim
Curtis, (It’s the) Things She Says
Tony Blackburn, whose Sounds of the 60's show eventually generated this ongoing series of mine, was never shyabout his unsuccessful attempt to be a Northern Soul singer, as Kenny Gamble, and if you listen to his version ofI'll Do Anything (He Wants Me To Do) alongside Doris Troy you can see he has much to be modest about. But at least he plays Doris on the radio rather than himself.
I'm even less likely to let the recording of me playing my own song, Break, out of my sight because if I was a terrible guitar player, my thrashing on the cheap acoustic does at least make me sound as if I've got a vague idea compared to the toneless singing. I defy even the profoudest musicologist to say what key it is in.
But, never mind. It was a fine thing to get lucky once, and to have lightning strike twice, by having two talented musicians and songwriters give me the opportunity to provide some words by way of collaborations. One was a teenage genius in the 1970's who hardly needed my input but we came again circa 1999 with a masterpiece that maybe could have kept Cliff Richard's sequence of number 1's going into the 2000's but it wasn't given the chance. The other was my mate's daughter, who was 'Country'.
Good Lord. I thought that was the last thing I'd ever be but one can't let such prejudice get in the way at the age of 58 when time is running out.
Wow. Jess Davies took my ordinary words into unforeseen dimensions by re-arranging them and then recording them with some proper session musicians and briefly, however briefly, I saw it at #114, I think it was, in the Amazon download chart, only 90 places below Ed Sheeran.
I don't know if Uncle Tony Blackburn ever got that high in any hit parade. He did get to number 1 with I'm Still Waiting by Diana Ross, as a talent scout and a tipster. However many times I tell you that, he'll never tire of telling you more.
We would all love to be pop stars, wouldn't we. Wouldn't we?
I'd rather have been Burt Bacharach but that's the closest I got. And I was more grateful than I can say.
For preference, I might have represented Family with My Friend the Sun but they find themselves in The Rock Show rather than Sounds of the 70's and The Rock Show is gentle enough, for a 'rock' show, as it is. There's no need to go the whole way into Roger Chapman's bellowing lunge at In My Own Time but Burlesque has a jagged, passionate charm to it.
Chapman was a very acceptable alternative to Joe Cocker's histrionics in a way that Donovan was only a fey, whimsical surrogate Bob Dylan. His ragged, impassioned delivery seemed to be authentically from a lifestyle but he's lived to the age of 80 so far and kept performing to a good age.
The Burlesque was a Leicester night club and the 'rolling and tumbling' he did there and elsewhere maybe didn't do him too much harm. There was a lot of posturing going on in 'rock' music and no doubt many of the self-styled 'bad boys' that did it also did their best to live up to their stage reputations but I suspect Roger Chapman of also being a singer and one of the best at this rough and ready sound, helped in no small part here by John 'Charlie' Whitney's guitar part and a juddering rhythm section.
I try to say the right thing, I really do, but it doesn't always work. It can be best just to 'tell it how it is' if you can get away with it but there's no such issue with nominating White Horses by Jackie on a 7 inch single as one of the best birthday presents I ever had. I was probably in my early 40's but my sister had the internet and could find the sort of things I was going to spend much of the rest of my life stocking up on before I could. When I very much mistakenly sold off that significant portion of my life represented by my pop vinyl records for meaningless cash, I kept back White Horses for myself. I could somehow let the Sex Pistols bootleg go, and the Public Image Ltd Metal Box, but money is nowhere near enough to part me from this.
I'm not sure I ever watched the dubbed, European TV series it was the theme for. I did sit through any amount of chivalrous swash-buckling in The Flashing Blade and Belle and Sebastian was a much better drama than the mawkish indie band that took their name from it. White Horses had done all its best work by the time its signature tune was over.
Jackie Lee made a brave attempt at cornering the market with Rupert, Rupert the Bear and Johnny Said Come Over but the dreaminess and fantasy of this could never be equalled, could never,
Benny Hill doesn't fit with recent thinking on what is acceptable and what isn't. Apparently a fat-faced man being chased around a park by a string of nurses in short skirts to a saxophone soundtrack isn't funny anymore but maybe not all of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Morecambe & Wise or Spike Milligan accord entirely with the dire restrictions of such correctness.
And the careers of the likes of Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle can be examined elsewhere as to how far they succeeded in living out their professed principles. They both did brilliant work but didn't Ben write the Queen musical and isn't Alexei still Corbynite.
No, Benny Hill was a proper poet to be admired because the appreciation of work like his was precisely what all my school education, and some of it beyond, on poetry was concentrated on.
It is heavy on alliteration, rhyme, hyperbole, epic and drama. There will be assonance whether he meant it or not. Hill is not a poet given to enjambment but you can't have everything. At least anybody who comes across this poem can be expected to understand it which is more than can be said of Ezra Pound.
What he does is exactly what we were educated to believe meant 'poetry'.
I think it's 'verse' but the definition of 'poetry', with plenty of input from me, is available elsewhere.
It has taken a lifetime to recover from the education the system in place at the time visited upon me. I don't know if I'd have been better off without it And so it bounds along as the greatest of all those heavily nuanced presentations, like The Gay Caballero, that filled out his once prime time television shows.
You just do what you do. Like Frankie Howerd, and even the greats like Tommy Cooper or Ken Dodd. Like Robb Wilton, Julian Clary and maybe even Ronnie Corbett. They just did what they did and they got away with it. And that's all anybody wants to do, for as long as they can, unless something that they do becomes a timeless masterpiece. Or no longer acceptable.
There is a war on, as there usually is. Some of them are being fought to defend the sort of harmless fun that we can live with against tyrants who'd prefer us to be beholden unto them. I'd rather have Benny Hill, thank you very much. There wasn't much point taking all those years to educate me about poetry only to find that a poet who did many of the things I'd been taught to recognize turned out to be verboten.
