Let's (not) dance

Bowie released a single this week. He hadn’t released one for a while. He’s sixty six you know? Pensionable, bus pass and heating allowance qualifier. It was a number about Berlin – retelling stories and past glories – hanging with Iggy and wearing black and that.   Then out of the woodwork came all the glam queens and diamond dogs to pledge allegiance to the starman. You know Jonathan Ross gets a front page leader in The Guardian to basically tells us how hip and connected he is. And you wonder why the Guardian lost £44 million pounds last year – I wonder. I wonder why why why why why.  You’ve got Skyped calls to old producers, friends on Radio 4 and fans in the street – all ready to tell their Bowie story. I don’t have one. I’m going to make one up today.

I think I’ve said it before – but I don’t quite get Bowie.

There’s always some writing about him playing with the expectations of the audience – the boundaries. But he’s selling pop music isn’t he – you’re not really playing with our expectations are you? I mean it’s gonna be a tune – he’s not going to really play with our expectations of the genre is he? It will be a tune – last around four minutes – have a chorus and bits we can hum. He might dye his hair – he might put on a bit of slap – he may well ask Ronson to grow his sideburns and wear a bit of gold. We will not come out of that dumbfounded – confused or knowing anymore than we did before.  

We will be entertained. Happily sated on melody and performance.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Just stop making it into something more. I like music. You know David didn’t "challenge the core belief of rock music of its day’ as his biographer stated by adding a  bit of spoken word in Future Leader before the seven minutes of Diamond Dogs kicked in. Yes – you read it right – seven minutes of sub Rolling Stones swagger.  David made records – appropriated this and that and sold a lot of them.

Who has ever ‘challenged’ the core belief of rock music? What does that phrase actually mean? Iggy, Lou, Rob Tyner – on the edge performers – challenging the core belief of rock – oh pleaseeeee.

Perhaps I need educating. Schooling in Bowie’s ways and given reasons as to why this monarch of pop is vibrant, relevant and exciting. Perhaps I should dig out those albums picked up in second hand shops and start listening again – they are nestling in the collection – from Space Oddity to one where he seems painted blue or some such thing. I forget its name.

To be honest – I was just too young for that son of a gun. Bowie seemed over to me by the time I was getting my fix of the popular. You know his songs were on tapes for my dad made by his brother – they were not for the young things – us boys needed to keep swinging in different ways. He already seemed like a relic. I remember thinking who is this fella – with Bing Crosby – with Queen? Yet the press seemed to laud him as an artist – an alternative. What with Bing and Freddie? I might have been missing the point – but then again I don’t like points being made – do you get?

And if we trace a lineage from him through the musical ages and stages we get to Boy George – we get to Marilyn -  wearing a frock and releasing mediocre pop smashes does not make for a legacy. Oh I know it’s in lots of music – I’m being banally confrontational. Saying that Arcade Fire can fuck off – that’s not confrontational that’s a fact.

And Talking Heads. Next question?

I know Bowie fans get riled when someone takes a sideways slap at him – I sometimes get that way when Emma has a go at Brian Wilson. Yet over the years I’ve dealt with it – and let’s be honest there’s a fair amount of shit in the Wilson cannon. Sacrilege I know – but I’m starting the new year with a Lou Reed kind of mood. I want some fucking street hassle – mmaaaaannnnn.

So maybe I should give the alien another chance to fall to earth and land in my lap – I might enjoy it. Perhaps I don’t know where to start. I have tried – I tried listening to Diamond Dogs and Hunky Dory today. But it just widnae work for me.  I can’t get past the deaden rasp of his voice – clearly unique – but the pretention of the ‘cut up’ approach or the mime. You know Howard Jones tried that – mind you he got another fella to do the trapped in a box bit. And somewhere lodged in the back of my mind is the whole Let’s Dance era – all pleats and false smiles. Wrung through with Thatcher and hollow of spirit. I am certain it is the way I remember the times and not something specific to the thin white duke – but I can’t help associate that with this and then with now and that’s why Bowie’s not getting a look in.

I also remember an attempt by older lads – all part of the Scunthorpe scene – to recreate a Live Aid moment in a church hall on Ashby Road by instigating a mass sing along to Heroes at the end of a charity night of bands. The bile was rising then – it still is now. What a fucking liberty. I know Bowie wasn’t involved – he hadn’t given his blessing but it gets my gander up and typifies those big brash popular cultural sweeping statements and moments. Geldof was a cunt so why ape it – eh?

I hate being part of the masses.

I know I am part of the masses. I know I am not individual in anyway but let’s not get into all this mutual appreciation back slapping congratulations and all that sycophantic stuff that comes with an ageing pop star releasing a tune. There’s other things that should be filling our front papers.

They’re dismantling the welfare state. They’re shutting hospitals. They’re stopping trade unions. They’re taxing the poor but hey Bowie’s back though – Let’s dance. 

I managed to find this - it's more Marc Bolan than Bowie - so worth a look. It grooves. 

and like they invented disco and grunge and new wave and that

I found a copy of one of my fanzines – tucked in a file and stuffed in a cupboard. All courier new and cut up – pritt stick and photographs sitting behind words that meant something once. I laboured over those fanzines, those words – in between school then college and setting up market stalls and serving old folks in Kwik Save. Because I guess that it mattered. Like it does now I suppose.

Nowadays words come ready selected from Oxbridge journalists mining pop culture in broadsheet pages. Everybody’s clever nowadays. I say this because we take The Guardian in our house – all delivered and that – rolled up and half stuffed in the letterbox. When I was paperboy – I was told to push them all the way through – stopped them getting wet and all that.

Anyway lately I have found myself more reluctant to read the thoughts of these people. So I know how people might feel about all of this self indulgent scribing. But what seems to have offended me was the ‘free guides to music’ that appeared this week for Pop, Hip Hop, Rock and all the rest. I mean I was already having my gander put up and out by the fact that the Friday Film & Music supplement has a blurb that reads voted the UKs best Music Newspaper – I mean what other fucking newspaper exists – and it isn’t a music newspaper – it has seven reviews, an article by Bob Stanley and someone ripping off my blog and calling it Hail Hail Rock n Roll [that actually was meant without irony].

Now, don’t get me wrong I wasn’t hoping for an in depth discussion of the micro-politics of the death metal scene in Norway but I was looking for something more than the ‘clip culture’ we have come  to view as the norm. Sort of a Blue Peter for the rave age – a sound bite – a record mentioned and a touch of glo-stick – you know what I mean. Before I left this morning to get to work I managed a paragraph – well actually the journalist had only managed a paragraph – it was on Blondie – it said that Blondie was like a punk icon and that she released like an album and that it had some songs on it – and she named a few – because she could google ‘Parallel Lines’ and then it ended by explaining that she did like disco and new wave and rap.

And that was it.

And I was all huffing and puffing and thinking I was sweating blood over the words I wrote about The Impossibles, pale saints, Spaceman 3 and The Field Mice all those years ago and stuck down on card to be taken to a printers and manufactured for the masses. Which demonstrates how you don’t get a career in music journalism – although I read an interview with Danny Baker recently [okay it was in The Guardian] and he said he never gave a shit what the public thought rather he wanted to make his mates laugh in the office. Yeah cheers Dan – I think I bought The Chesterfields ‘Ask Johnny Dee’ because you made it SOTW.

This is a lie.

But part of me felt that yeah – if you’re getting a reaction somewhere from your writing then at least to see that happen where you work – well it helps. And the thing about these guides these listless lists for nothingness is the fact they reinforce the utter banality of popular culture. And whilst I fill up my head with the superficial sounds of Blondie or The Stones or the Pistols and Autechre I still want people to give it credence and write with some feeling about it – not simply serve it up as the commodity it is. Before I turned thirty I read countless biographies and auto biographies of bands and weighty tomes on the rise of bass culture and rebellion. I will be forty this week and here I am looking for some more answers in pop music.

In music.

It’s not like I’m after a great deal is it?

And sometimes the answers stare you in the face and tell you that with them everything will be alright. I used to get that feeling listening to The Impossibles. The Impossibles were Leeds’ answer to Simon and Garfunkel in mini-skirts and pea coats – they sang with harmony and finesse but could pack a punch. I fell in love with it all – and so did Kevin Shields who produced their first single – simple songs and simple strumming. All falling through the music hedge – through the forties and fifities, the sixties and seventies, even the eighties and finding parts sticking together at the end – but somehow sounding alive in the 1990s as rave raved and we looked to softer sounds in our comedown times.

Lucy and Mags were funny, unpretentious and joyful.

None of it was studied and The Impossibles have not made it into The Guardian’s Guide to the greatest pop moments in History – but being in The Duchess as the exploded into song or seeing them nervously take the stage supporting The Primitives at their all day event at Tufnell Park - you know that these are our secret histories – our own Top 50 events. It is hard to explain all of this in a few paragraphs and perhaps I should find my teenage ramblings – delve back into those feelings untainted by age.

I know there will be no paragraphs, epitaphs or half full baths to The Impossibles. They did not bring us new wave, punk, disco nor rap – but they did bring a great deal of joy. I Think they may well have been No.51 in The Guardian list and couldn’t be fitted in.

The Impossibles How Do You Do It?