Beverley Knight - 100%

Beverley Knight, 100% (Hurricane)

One night last week I was flicking through the pre-set channels on the radio and stopped for a while on a track that sounded good enough to stay with and it turned out to be our Beverley who was something of a favourite when she did Shoulda Woulda Coulda.

She only enhamced her position a couple of years ago on one of the best ever episodes of Celebrity Mastermind when she beat the sinister Michael Howard who was falling for that tired old politician's trick of showing how much he liked football. Beverley's subject was Prince.

Amazon, for reasons best known to themselves, advertise this album as 2011 but it is ostensibly a 2009 release from all other indications. It hardly matters to me. Being two years out of date on pop music is the most up to date I've been for a long time.

Beautiful Night was the piece I heard on the radio, a highly passable expression of transient romance but, as has happened with so many albums bought on the strength of one track, not all of the rest of it is quite as good. In Your Shoes sounded familiar at track three, possibly because I did actually remember it and not because it samples Orange Juice's Rip it Up riff. I don't know if that makes it 'dubstep'. For the most part, perhaps the album as a whole is more workmanlike than genuinely inspirational. Bare is Beverley in more authentic Aretha-diva mode. Gold Chain brings to mind Aretha's Ship of Fools or when The Temptations went a bit funkier. I just can't tell the echoes from the new ideas any more, like if Moneyback would sound like Patrice Rushen's Forget Me Not to anyone else but me. Painted Pony is nicely forlorn and might have been a good place to stop but Robin Gibb turning up to help on a version of Too Much Heaven presumably kept him in work for a day or two back then. I admire the early Bee Gees as much as anyone and they did a fine job in re-inventing Diana Ross once upon a time but not as good a job as Chic did. Robin has by now left his thumbprint in a few too many places on pop music over the years.

It's not entirely fair to review an album while listening to it for the first time but I can't see this ever persuading me it's as good as 2003's Who I Am. She's a good girl. I can't help thinking that she doesn't quite establish an identity here that her obvious talent and personality should be capable of. I think she would benefit from better songwriters. I'd love to help.

The Shortlists - Best Poem and Best Collection 2011

I don't see many more things happening between now and Christmas that will affect this website's very sincerely considered but hopelessly disregarded awards for Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of 2011. It's not as if I read everything and so such books as the Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy were deselected without being given a fair chance, it has to be said.
We could add in further mentions for Best Event and Best Novel. In which case Tasmin Little's Naked Violin recital in Portsmouth in the summer wins a helluva classy affair for Best Event, holding on in a compelling battle with the Glyndebourne Rinaldo at the Proms and Natalie Clein's Cadogan Hall Prom as well as Muldoon, O'Brien and Harsent at Cheltenham. But one appeciates what a good year it must have been when The Tallis Scholars make the effort to come all the way down to a cultural outpost like Portsmouth and don't even get shortlisted for their trouble.
Julian Barnes would probably get the verdict over Hollinghurst for being a somehow better done job in the Novel but I also enjoyed the re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Twopence Coloured and they could all be surpassed by Murakami's 1Q84, which I am halfway through as yet but does look like his best work and is proving most worthy of the time it is taking. 
But the real issue is the poetry and I'll leave you with the shortlists before returning with the answers some time later. There is no point including anything on the shortlist if they aren't potential winners and so I will keep the shortlists short. Only to say that Sasha Dugdale narrowly misses out on a place on the Best Collection list and so is compensated with a Best Poem contender.

Best Poem

Judy Brown, The Helicopter Visions
Sasha Dugdale, Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer's)
David Harsent, Ghosts
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Sean O'Brien, Elegy

Best Collection

David Harsent, Night
Roddy Lumsden, Terrific Melancholy
Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

I'm fairly sure that the answers have finally been decided upon but I'll let it simmer for a while and if you come back next week the winners might have been announced by then.

Stephin Merritt - Obscurities

Stephin Merritt, Obscurities (Domino)

Albums of oddments and rarities aren't expected to be classics and can't fairly be compared with the choicest bits of the back catalogue. The Jesus & Mary Chain's Barbed Wire Kisses seemed as good as the real thing at the time but in general we might as well accept that such albums are the remnant sale that tries to scrape the last few dollars out of the fanbase while it can. And I don't think anybody pretends any otherwise. There's often a reason why a rarity is rare. But being a Merrittophile, I had no choice but to purchase my own copy.

Like its author, it's no better than it should be. Most of the tracks listed as The Magnetic Fields are those 'experimental' studio exercises in which Stephin tries out every noise he can find on his keyboard. The version of I Don't Believe You here is so full of mobile phone ringtones it's like being in the office on a Tuesday morning. Rot in the Sun by The 6ths has a good locomotive percussion track on it; Plant White Roses has Shirley Simms in her accustomed plaintive, country role. Most of the songs are in Stephin's lovelorn doomed romantic mode without breaking out of a creative canter, which make them very good songs compared to 99% of the world's pop songwriters but nothing to put alongsdide his own highspots. There's nothing at all wrong with When You're Young and In Love,

You can teeter on the brink of a precipice

Ov'r an infinitely deep abyss

And somehow not even notice this

When you're young and in love

but you've all but given up on the album by then and, once it's lifted your hopes, he leaves you with one last synthesizer doodle. The thing about experimental music is that one seems to get served up with the result whether the experiment worked or not. You wouldn't do that with a recipe for sponge cake. I suppose it's reassuring to know that even a genius like Stephin Merritt has a weak spot.

And let this CD purchase serve as a warning to any other would-be almost completists of anything. You don't really need everything.

Michael

I was told by a friend that her friend's partner had died. He wasn't someone I had met but I had heard plenty about him over the years. Would I write something for him. Well, I didn't know him., etc. Okay, I'll see what I can do.
And now it might be read at the Catholic Cathedral in Portsmouth at the funeral. It's a strange feeling.


Michael

The world enjoys some showmanship, bravado,
A challenge to reticence done with style.
There’s no point having rules if you obey them
And the way it’s done defines the man.

We know that everything is temporary,
That even kings can only briefly reign.
Some go bravely, unwilling to concede it,
And fly south forever into the sun.

Judy Brown - Loudness

Judy Brown, Loudness (Seren)

I didn't even notice Judy Brown in the Identity Parade crowds last year and it took a while before her poem in Best British Poetry 2011 revealed itself as a favourite. This was not love at first sight.
But The Helicopter Visions in this year's anthology demands attention once it makes itself known. Judy Brown's effect is often through visual effects and

How the dawn breaks open, orange and fatal,
like a pomegranate landing on concrete.

is almost too good. You can imagine a creative writing group loving it like mad. But there's a deft use of phrase and cadence, an easy modulation between perspectives and a confident exploration of the strangeness highlighted in the book's epigram, 'a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost' (Thoreau, Walden).
As a debut volume, one can trace a bit of autobiography in the youthful readiness for booze, romantic encounter, travel and London. And there's a relationship or two that's done with, possibly acrimoniously. But, the other stand-out poem is from a similar but less elevated vantage point, not in a helicopter but cataloguing the detritus seen on top of bus shelters from the top deck of the bus.
As in The Helicopter Visions, Sky Burial brings her to the thought that she interpreting code in what she sees. But there only appears to be an enjoyment of gentle mystification, an appreciation of possible beauty when in fact, much of the book is set in ordinary places and times. She finds extraordinary things where others might find none.


In Dignity,

In the toilet you fall in love
with your own boozy sweetness.

I know. I know.

One day someone might get a degree for counting how many times the collection mentions 'water', whether as tears, a constituent part of the body, a drink or geographical feature. Then its significance might be set against the latent resentment that flickers under so many of the poems. It might or might not mean anything. Nothing, it seems, needs to mean anything these days but this is a memorable and telling collection that will keep many of us interested to see in which direction the difficult second album takes us.

The Saturday Nap Week Three

I did usher you in the direction of the safest race to bet on last week and the favourite duly obliged but the tip was a more ambitious 6/1 shot which probably in all honesty wasn't going to win when impeded just when it was making a forward move but that clearly wasn't part of the plan.So, this week, it's back to first principles and if you can get the even money or better about Silvianiaco Conti, Sandown 2.15, then there was no disgrace in his third place on chasing debut behind two top prospects and this time he'll open his steeplechase account.
Volcan Surprise, Sandown 2.15, will have to be scrutinized for confidence in the movement of his price later in the morning because a juvenile hurdle with a number of unraced horses in the field is not quite the open and shut case one might hope but there might be a double to be had if it looks solid.

Top 6 -Television

Some wireless broadcasts over the last couple of days have been remarking upon and marking in their way the 75th anniversary of television, which I think is very fine and generous of the older form of broadcast in respect of its trashier upstart sibling. Not all of us will be available for the centenary so we need to do it now.

The form of the events have revolved around celebrating great or historic television moments and, in a break from the strict rule on only mentioning six items in a Top 6, I will have to make room for such memorable sporting moments as Alberto Juantorena in the Olympic Games, Stephen Roche in the Tour de France, Fulham's fairytale progress two seasons ago through the Europa Cup towards the inevitable debacle five minutes before the end of extra time, Grundy v Bustino in the King George at Ascot in 1975 and, most movingly, Little Polveir winning the 1989 Grand National at 33/1 when I still believed in him. I cried.

Of course, one wants moon landings, Camberwick Green, General Election nights, Bolan or, possibly Hendrix, on the Cilla Black Show or even the time on Big Brother when George Galloway said, 'Rula, do you want me to be the cat now'. Or possibly not that last one.

My favourite moment of all time might be this moment when the great Barney Curley has John McCririck for breakfast,

'I saved your bacon one time. You were gone.' (And he apparently did and he apparently was).

And all McCririck can say is 'yes, yes, yes'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfPpBpDaSXE

But, Top 6 Television programmes, apart from all that.

The Simpsons, above all others, the defintive show of its generation and, I suspect, all others. And proof that a committee can be better than one writer, which is hard to believe but ostensibly true.

Fawlty Towers. Just about flawless and impeccable. Still laugh out loud on the twentieth or thirtieth time you see them and already know what's coming because it is now all written deep down inside you.

Two somewhat different quiz shows. Gallery, in which actually the lovely Pat Nevin, a sensible footballer, guested once with the imperious Maggi Hambling and outrageous George Melly in a panel game about paintings. Admittedly, the answer almost always seemed to be 'Gericault' but Maggi's awestruck comparison of a painting with Chartres Cathedral was devastating.

And the fey romp through opus numbers, Kochel numbers and old Joseph Cooper battering at the dummy keyboard that was Face the Music. If they really are going to do away with University Challenge, then there's precious little chance we'll get that back.

There will, of course, have been music performances of endless brilliance but I'll take Top of the Pops as not only a thing to look back on with both affection and horror but the night that Jeepster was on, or when Rod did Maggie May. And, especially, this week of all weeks, when it was 'now then, now then, now then, howzabout that, then, guys n gals.' Thursday night was the only night you had to make sure of a place in the TV room at University and so we all saw at least the second half of Tomorrow's World whether we wanted to or not.

And with one choice left, although I'd like Monkey Dust, Blackadder, Alan Bates in The Mayor of Casterbridge or test match coverage when it was Derek Randall, Michael Holding, Basil D'Oliviera, Viv Richards and all, I'm going to have Brookside, because at its best in the early 1980's, it was consistently the best drama on telly week after week, month after month.

Hats off to the telly in those days. I only switch it on for horse racing and Vicky Coren now.