Category: music (Page 2 of 2)

Just as I am convinced that being born in E1 mystically bound me to the city of London forever, so I feel certain that the music of Sandy Denny, playing in the background of my life throughout my formative years, must have secretly sewn itself into the fabric of my being.

It’s hard for me to sum up what Denny means to me and why. The truth is that I don’t have any conscious memories of her music from when I was a child, but on first discovering her songs a decade or so ago I felt an instant kinship with them, a painful surge of recognition that said these were treasures I had somehow lost and had been searching for ever since. On a recent trip to Dorset, the landscape that informs not only A Dream of Wessex but also Keith Roberts’s incomparable Pavane, I timed Gold Dust, the CD of Sandy Denny’s final live concert at the Royalty Theatre in 1977, so that it would start playing the track ‘One More Chance’ just as we rolled off the Sandbanks ferry and into the tussocky, wind-toughened landscape of the Isle of Purbeck. If this action sounds premeditated then I’m forced to admit that it was. It was something I had dreamed of doing. The music arose from that landscape as a gusting breath of its own wind, and I knew that it would.

I think I might have mentioned before that I’m a bit of a list junkie, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a compulsive player of the Desert Island Discs game. My final eight-disc line-up changes constantly, but ‘One More Chance’ is unfailingly a part of it. How can you make a choice between Schnittke’s brutally blessed third cello concerto, the zenith of Mahler’s art in Das Lied von der Erde, and the live cut of ‘One More Chance’? You can’t – or at least I can’t. But if I had to name just one track that sums up how I feel about the soil I grew out of and the atmosphere I inhabit it would be that one. The impassioned and slightly enigmatic lyrics, the wilful ecstacy of the long instrumental passage that follows (Jerry Donahue’s sublime guitar) – these are the epitome of the maverick strength that characterises a brand of creative iconoclasm I see as peculiarly and indefinably English.

Denny’s songs, built around the natural rather than the harmonic minor and possessing that sound you might loosely characterise as ‘mediaeval,’ draw on the English folk tradition and are usually labelled ‘folk rock’; like all the greatest art though they trascend the form they spring out of, subverting it at the same time they play homage, evolving triumphantly into a mode of expression that is new, steadfastly original, timeless in its message and its appeal.

Like Dylan, like Cave, Denny is a poet who wrote music, a composer who saw her music as being inextricably linked with the voices in her head.

For me, the songs and the music she left us with are a source of artistic renewal and a constant inspiration. I only wish she had lived long enough to leave us with more. How thrilling then to learn that the contents of her last notebooks, songs and lyrics she was immersed in writing during the final months of her too-short life, have been released by the Denny estate and turned into an album?

If anyone had asked me who would be the right person to translate these ‘lost’ lyrics into songs for performance I would probably have said no one. That it would be better not to tamper with what was sacred and to simply publish the fragments in their written form so that those who cared might read for themselves and enjoy them. When I heard that the artist who had been chosen to realise Sandy’s material was Thea Gilmore I immediately changed my mind.

I’ve seen Gilmore live, own three of her albums, and she’s an amazing presence. Her lyrics rattle and rage, and when I think of her I think of protest, of political defiance, with Thea herself as a kind of female English Victor Jara. And yet there’s great tenderness in her too, a poetic sensibility that is clearly and definably….. Sandy.

Thea Gilmore’s album Don’t Stop Singing will be released on November 7th. I’ve already ordered my copy and can’t wait to hear it.

Working on a new and rather nasty little story called ‘The Elephant Girl’ and listening to Sandy throughout in the hope that she might bring some measure of redemption to my troubled protagonist.

Walking at dusk as I love to, I find the whole town is filled with Michaelmas daisies and the scent of autumn.

A warm afternoon after rain. Working on my story for An Arkham Garland, of which more later. September gardens, the chalk-whitened, fresco colours of famished roses and Michaelmas daisies.

Listening obsessively to Diana Krall’s ‘Departure Bay’, the song she wrote with Elvis Costello about her home town of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and the first Christmas without her mother. This is the penultimate track on Krall’s album The Girl in the Other Room, which I often listen to on my headphones as I am returning to Hastings from London. Departure Bay comes on in deep darkness, just before the train reaches Robertsbridge.

I never tire of these lyrics, the sense of place, the feeling of renewal after great personal sadness. It’s a midwinter song, but the approach of Michaelmas is enough to start me thinking about it.

My Arkham Garland story is called ‘Sunshine,’ and it takes place during those last, Naples-yellow weeks of summer. I think it will surprise people. I hope they will like it anyway.

As the stories I write tend to adopt the weather conditions prevailing at the time they come into being, so they often become irredeemably associated with a certain album or piece of music. I must have listened to Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto about thirty times when I was writing ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ five times in succession on some days. I can’t always have music playing when I am writing – if a first draft especially is proving difficult it is dangerously distracting – but while second-drafting it is a wonderful stimulus.

The odd thing about it is that it seems to be the stories themselves that guide my choice of music, that demand the concentrated absorption in certain pieces that only obsessively repeated listenings can bring. I’ve been working on the second draft of ‘Rewind’ this week, and the story will now be forever associated for me with The Harrow and the Harvest, the hypnotically sublime new album from the alt-country singer Gillian Welch.

Gillian Welch became famous when she guested on the soundtrack album of the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou. She is an infamous perfectionist. Fans of her music have been waiting eight years for a new album – she simply won’t put anything out unless she feels on a gut level that it’s the best work she can produce at that given moment. As someone who found her 2001 post-O Brother album Time (The Revelator) as close to being a perfect piece of work as it is possible to produce, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by her 2003 follow up, Soul Journey. It wasn’t that I didn’t love it – there were some great individual songs on it, and I’ll listen with pleasure to anything Gillian sings in any case. But for me at least it had a bit of a commercial feel about it, and the tracks simply did not fit together the way the tracks on Time did. In its marvellous coherence, Time is like a set of linked short stories; Soul Journey felt more like a ‘best of.’

So I was apprehensive as well as excited when I heard that Gillian finally had a new album out. Could it possibly be as great as Time, or would it be another Soul Journey, enjoyable but not quite it?

I think if I tell you I’ve listened to The Harrow and The Harvest approximately twenty times in the last three days I think you’ll guess my answer to that question: Gillian Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings are at the top of their form, and this gorgeous album is worth every day of the nine-year wait.

How can I dsecribe her music, except to say that Gillian Welch is a natural born storyteller. The thing that’s most often said of her tracks is that they have the sense of being already old, of being handed down for generations among the musician-families of the Appalacians and the Adirondacks.  I can’t add to that really because it’s true. The songs are like cross-stitch samplers, or patchwork quilts, the story as much in the making, in the texture of the warp and weft, as in the recounting of specific events.

Her language, both musical and verbal, is strong, simple, direct. The images she conveys are arresting and often stark. Yet there is a tenderness and poetry in the rendition that grabs at the heart.

The Harrow and The Harvest is not lighter than Time, but its silks are finer. If Time (The Revelator) reminds me of Wisconsin Death Trip, Harrow reminds me of Tarnation. The lyrics and rhythms of my favourite tracks – the central triptych of ‘The Way it Will Be,’ ‘The Way it Goes,’ and ‘Tennessee’ – already feel like they have been in my life for years.

Gillian Welch is a writer’s musician.  Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another decade for her next album.

Just started reading: Mr Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi. Loving it so far, magical and funny and assured.

Walking: along the Stade, with echoes of Daphne…..

Sorry I’m a bit late with this post. I wanted to have it out in time for Bob Dylan’s birthday on the 24th, but what with being deeply embroiled in writing a ghost story and my own closely adjacent birthday to contend with it didn’t quite happen. Never mind. So far as I’m concerned, any day is a good day to talk about Dylan.

I’ve been enjoying the various articles in the media this week: fans listing their Dylan top tens (I have to admit I’m a bit of a list junkie), personal reminiscences and most of all the imput from the next generation of Dylan obsessives, young people who weren’t even born when Dylan first started cutting records but who find his timeless lyrics and unique delivery as affecting and relevant now as they were for their mothers, fathers and teachers in the sixties and seventies.  I couldn’t help smiling though when I came across yet another discussion around the subject of whether Bob Dylan should be counted as a poet or not. I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone reading Dylan’s lyrics that his use of rhyme and assonance, word association, literary reference and pure lyrical expression makes him one of the most gifted, original, anarchic, articulate, relevant and expressive poets of the 20th century.    

My first awareness of Dylan’s daring use of assonance came when I first listened – properly – to his classic of 1975, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’:

They walked along by the old canal/A little confused, I remember well/And stopped into a strange motel with the neon burning bright/He felt the heat of the night/Hit him like a freight train/Moving with a simple twist of fate

The cheekiness of the line-break on ‘freight train’ still astounds me, makes me lighter inside with the pleasure of it. Thinking about this, it came to me that what people are responding to when they call Dylan a prophet or a revolutionary – even if they don’t consciously know it – is his graceful articulacy, a use of language so fluid and so natural that it can break any rule you set for it and still come out kicking ass. The ‘message’ of Dylan’s lyrics, after all, is not a call to revolution or political activism but an injunction to remain true to oneself, to reject all party allegiances in favour of artistic integrity. It was this rejection of the political that was one of the central causes of his split with Joan Baez.

I’m privileged to have genuine memories of Dylan from the time when the tracks were still new. Indeed it was Dylan’s lyrics that formed the basis of one of my earliest horror stories. The track in question was ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ which I must have heard for the first time when it was released as part of the Greatest Hits Vol 2 in 1971. From the moment I started paying attention to songs – which happened at a very young age – I was obsessed with their lyrics even more than their melody. My interpretations were often distinctly strange. At six years old I was convinced that ‘Mobile’ was about a kidnap victim being held in some kind of underground cellar! I’m happy to say that I also have more nebulous, magical recollections of songs like ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ that for me then were cornucopias of imagery, words like jewels that I hoarded and wondered at, not knowing quite what they meant, understanding only that I found them bewitching.

My rediscovery of Dylan came in the early 2000s, when I began listening to him seriously and this time as a writer myself. I was stunned by what I found. Not just by the classics, but by songs I’d never known existed and from every decade of his remarkable career. It was then that I started looking at him ‘on the page,’ and became a devotee. His lines make me shudder with rapture, not simply at the depth of emotion expressed but with the sheer power and strength of the writing. To see something done this well, intention so boldly and securely executed, is one of the purest delights known to me.

I’m not going to list my top ten – there are plenty of those to choose from already – but I would like to draw attention to a strand of Dylan’s oeuvre that means a lot to me, that stimulates my imagination endlessly and that perhaps has deepest resonance for any writer and that is Dylan’s work as a narrative poet, a balladeer in the truest sense of the word, where the ballad is not a slow love song but a compacted, lyrical retelling of a tale of love, freedom and infamy.  The first stanza of ‘Idiot Wind’ illustrates this perfectly:

They say I shot a man named Gray/And took his wife to Italy/She inherited a million bucks/And when she died it came to me/I can’t help it if I’m lucky…..

Who was Gray and what did he do to get himself shot? Is the narrator being ironic with his use of the word ‘lucky’ and how did the wife die anyway? It’s a mini-ballad in itself, enough to provoke a thousand much longer stories.

In ‘The Changing of the Guard’ we have a story and a lyric that could encompass the whole grandeur and repeating tragedy of Greek mythology:

‘Gentlemen,’ he said/’I don’t need your organization/I’ve shined your shoes/I’ve moved your mountains and I marked your cards/But Eden is burning/Either brace yourself for elimination/Or your hearts must have the courage/For the changing of the guard’

I love the earlier line about being ‘caught between Jupiter and Apollo,’ summarizing the woman’s divided attraction between the man of power and the man of physical beauty. The song – which has sometimes been derided as ‘incomprehensible’ – is a masterpiece of passion and concision. 

The shaded beauty of Dylan’s scene-setting in ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,’ is given as much weight as the bloody action itself and demonstrates a commitment to the business of storytelling that is up there with Leonard and Chandler:

Outside the streets were filling up/The window was open wide/A gentle breeze was blowing/You could feel it from inside/Lily called another bet/And drew up the Jack of Hearts

I can feel that breeze, the only relief from the stuffy, dustbowl heat that is a metaphor for the fight that is about to take place. Dylan’s narratives are filmic in their scope.  ‘Senor: Tales of Yankee Power’ takes place in the same blasted, blood-streaked landscape as Jodorowski’s El Topo or the Coen brothers’ magnificent No Country for Old Men. The sound of that song is the sound of the spaghetti Western, the mariachi-sounding sax riff directly evocative of the music of Morricone.

And the lyrics! If we’re still playing top 10s, which I think we probably are, I would have to place ‘Senor’ as my personal number 1:

There’s a wicked wind still blowing on that upper deck/There’s an iron cross still hanging down from around her neck/There’s a marching band still playing in that vacant lot/Where she held me in her arms one time and said ‘forget me not.’

It must say something that I don’t have to check these lyrics online before I post them because I have a typed copy of them folded inside the cover of my current working notebook. Scanning the dozens of reader comments on The Guardian‘s ‘Top 10 Dylan’ blog, it struck me forcibly that not one person had included ‘Senor’ among their line-up. I’m therefore doubly proud to draw attention to it here.

Time to stop listening to me, and get back to your own favourite Dylan! On Dylan’s birthday itself I put Blood on the Tracks on my headphones and walked from Hastings through St Leonards along the promenade. The sea was a glister of rhinestones. The castellated facades gleamed white against a burnished sky.