Mike Oldfield as good as Can shock

In defence of Mike Oldfield.

In a parallel universe, back in 1977 Mike Oldfield topped himself midway through the recording of his fourth album Incantations. Chronically depressed, painfully shy, he couldn’t take the adulation and the attention that his three hit albums had brought him. He’d hidden away in remote cottages, shut himself in studios and generally kept the world at bay for nearly five years. Now he was under some pressure from his label Virgin to take his music on the road. It was therapy or suicide and Mike chose to lock himself in the garage, turned on the engine and inhale that sweet sweet carbon monoxide.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just went Syd Barrett/Roky Erickson mental.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just disappeared and was never heard from again.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just suddenly quit music altogether and opened a chip shop.

Whatever happened, today all you pissy little hipsters with your bumfluff beards and skinny jeans and Morrissey haircuts and chunky specs just love him. The original vinyl copies of Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge that you paid way too much for nestle in your collection next to your original Jamaican copy of Big Youth’s Screaming Target and the Harmonia bootlegs and some unreleased Wooden Shjips 12 inches that you wank off over on a regular basis. The original Roger Dean Virgin label gives it a warmer sound, doesn’t it?

And you, bald over 40s bloke, would alternate the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures t shirt with a Tubular Bells one to show that you were still down with the avant garde kids.

And fucking Mojo would have Oldfield gazing soulfully from every fourth cover and the smug bastard Guardian would constantly run these 50 great lost album features about the greatest albums that were never made where Incantations would regularly pip Smile to the number one slot.

But when Schrödinger opened the box, the cat was still alive…

In the real world, Mike signed up with Exegesis, a rather nasty cult therapy group that cured its acolytes by physically and psychologically abusing them relentlessly, destroying them and building them up again, much as the Chinese commies did to all those Iowa farm boys back in the Korean war. Whatever they did, in Mike’s case, it worked. He was transformed from a shy retirer into a hyper-extrovert – some have said ‘overbearing cunt’ – obsessed by extreme sports, fast cars and powerful motorcycles. The Bill Oddy-like diminutive hippy was replaced by a confident clean cut chap in a hip white suit.

The music changed too, though in subtle ways. After 1978′s epic double Incantations, Mike abandoned the uncompromising album-length suites for a while. He toured. He had hit singles. He reworked the theme from Blue Peter. In some ways, in the 1980s he shadowed the trajectories of contemporaries like Yes and Genesis, moving from ‘head’ music to the heart of the mainstream.

In the post-punk musical marketplace, Mike was far from fashionable. He sold millions of records, certainly, but this was despite Virgin records rather than because of them. Can a man be more cursed than having his music filed under ‘new age’?

And while Yes and Genesis have been ‘rehabilitated’ – surely you’re prepared to admit that The Yes Album and Nursery Crymes have their merits? – Mike Oldfield is loved by no-one except his millions of fans. As one hater told me: there’s always a nagging suspicion that Tubular Bells is something that Jeremy Clarkson would like. You’d certainly prefer Dennis Nielsen as a fan. Which, of course, he was.

For me, the first four albums are staggering pieces of music, works that nearly 40 years on, I can still hear in new ways, still find new things in. I wore the grooves out on my first copy of Tubular Bells. I played it almost every night in 1973, power cuts permitting, and later used to ‘trip’ to it on Saturday afternoons. There are light and dark passages in Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn are both bleak and sad, a message from a man who was slowly going mad. The disturbing multiple overdubbed guitars on Hergest Ridge – like 10,000,000 bees swarming in a cathedral – and the maddening ever building crescendo on Ommadawn are still as potent now.

Oldfield’s music has more in common with Can, Faust and Guru Guru than with the homeopathic tinklings you hear in crystals’n'candles shoppes.

It’s not minimalist music, though it was a jumping-off point for me to discover Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Tubular Bells also pointed me in the direction of Soft Machine and the wilder edge of krautrock. It got me used to long-form pieces, ultimately softening me up for everything from John Coltrane to the Western classical canon.

More importantly, it whetted my appetite for music the like of which I had never heard before. Everything else that I was into at that time – Bowie, Roxy, Sabbath – all had some anchoring in the familiar. Oldfield’s music for good or ill encouraged me to seek out the shock of the new.

After Incantations I lost interest, though recently I’ve rediscovered just how good that album was. His best music in the 80s was filmic – his score for Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields is particularly good – though again, fine as some of it was, the best was at the start.

Perhaps it’s unfair to prefer the works of suffering artists. Would Van Gough be a painter of minor interest had fluoxetine been prescribed? Would Dostoyevsky’s novels be somehow shallower and less interesting if he’d undergone Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

It’s the gift of the artist to transform pain and suffering into something of worth and beauty.

Mike Oldfield created worlds and to enter them is to visit a landscape that’s as dreadful and unsettling as it is placid and pastoral. You feel the panic as well as – occasionally – the peace.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hergest ridge, incantations, mike oldfield, ommadawn, tubular bells

Buyer’s Guide to Jazz Rock

This is a piece written for Classic Rock in 2008. Normally I hate reading and writing stuff like this. Lists. Consumer guides. But I’m a whore. I did it for the money. I had a bit of ‘guidance’ with the list, so I probably wouldn’t have included Colosseum and would have put something by Soft Machine in its place. And whither George Duke, Spirit, Ian Carr’s Nucleus, Seventh Wave, Alan Holdsworth and newcomers Diagonal? I know, I know…

Let’s begin with a warning: jazz rock can be terrifying and it isn’t for everyone. But you can take comfort from the fact that it alienates and angers as many ‘proper’ jazz ‘buffs’ as it does rock fans. If you think Dylan going electric was a big deal, you should have heard the hissy fits from the hep cats when Miles Davis went on stage in the mid-60s and started playing along with a bunch of crazy muthas with Afros who fed their instruments through wah-wah pedals.

Jazz rock, or fusion, was the last gasp of jazz, the final surge of energy and creative power before lapsing into the hideous heritage industry that it has become today. Jazz rock is pretty hard to define. For bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra it involved hard rock structures but with complex, improvisational elements.

Rock and jazz have a few ancestors in common – the blues, even ragtime – but it wasn’t until the mid-60s that the two converged in what came to be known as jazz rock/fusion. Bands like The Grateful Dead, The Byrds and The Doors cited jazzers such as John Coltrane as major influences (listen to The Doors’ Light My Fire back to back with Coltrane’s Ole), although jazz fans and musicians tended to regard most rock as inferior.

By 1967, rock had become more creative, and for the first time jazz artists began to take influences from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, The Beatles and Sly & The Family Stone. There were also commercial considerations: jazz had waned as the dominant form of popular music.

It was a two-way street: rock artists like Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker and the late, great Tommy Bolin wanted to stretch themselves as musicians, and acceptance by the jazz fraternity was like passing the cycling proficiency test. Had he lived, there’s little doubt that Hendrix would have followed the logical course set by his Band Of Gypsies and become a jazz-rock star.

From roughly 1967 until the mid-80s, the intermarriage of jazz and rock produced some of the most stunning, original and mesmerising music of the 20th century (to be fair, it also produced more than its fair share of unlistenable toss.) Much of what we know as progressive rock – Yes, ELP, post-Red King Crimson – was essentially jazz rock lite. Today we can still hear the influence of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis in bands as diverse as Tool, Mastodon and The Mars Volta.

Essential – The Classics

MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA
Birds Of Fire
CBS, 1972
“A person would be a moron not to appreciate [John] McLaughlin’s technique,” Frank Zappa once said. “The guy has certainly found out how to operate a guitar as
if it were a machine-gun.”
Birds Of Fire was the Mahavishnu Orchestra at their absolute best, a multi-ingredient fusion – jazz, rock, blues, Celtic folk, Indian classical – churned out at an amazing breakneck speed.
John McLaughlin’s guitar work was staggering, and keyboard player Jan Hammer and violinist Jerry Goodman were also virtuosos. The seemingly telepathic interplay and improvisation is a joy to hear.

JEFF BECK
Wired
CBS, 1976
Beck was one of the few rockers to make the transition to jazz. His 1976 masterpiece Wired – particularly his cover of Charles Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat – is one of the few albums you could describe as jaw-dropping and mean it.
Entirely instrumental, and at just under 35 minutes comparatively short, Wired is an album that passes in a blur of high-speed funk, ultra-heavy technoflash guitar solos and thrilling power chords. Yes, it’s Beck shamelessly showing off, but it’s hardly self-indulgent.
It’s like a shopping list of musical ideas and directions, each of which could have spawned an entire album in its own right. Marvellous.

Superior – The Albums That Helped Build the Genre

BILLY COBHAM
Spectrum
Atlantic, 1973
As the drummer with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Cobham was one of the foremost musos of his generation. Spectrum, though, is more than a bunch of difficult drum solos.
Opening with the truly amazing Quadrant 4 – which highlights the high-speed roller-coaster guitar of the young Tommy Bolin – Spectrum is all about the interplay between great musicians, crossing every boundary from hard rock to the soulful heavy funk of Red Barron. The drumming, as you’d expect, is from the realm of the angels – listen particularly to Stratus, where Cobham proves the superiority of the human over the drum machine.

RETURN TO FOREVER
Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy
Verve, 1973
There’s some debate among aficionados as to whether this or its follow up, Romantic Warrior, is the superior RTF album. …Galaxy is a less polished album, leaner and meaner, full of high-jazz musicianship and a low-down hard-rock attitude. The inventiveness on the title track, and keyboard player and leader Chick Corea’s reworking of his own Latin-flavoured Captain Senor Mouse, are definite highlights, as is After The Cosmic Rain which showcases bass player Stanley Clarke’s propulsive style. RTF is kind of the next stage left after Yes’s Close To The Edge.

MILES DAVIS
A Tribute To Jack Johnson
CBS, 1971
Miles Davis always bragged that he could put together the best rock band ever and blow everyone away. With this album, a soundtrack for a movie about boxing champ Johnson, recorded with John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham, Miles lived up to that boast.
Two extended jams, kicking in with Right Off, McLaughlin playing heavy blues rock guitar, breaking down into moody psychedelia, James Brown-like funk and going back to bar-room rock, this is probably a clue as to how the mooted Hendrix/Miles collaboration might have sounded. A good jumping off point for Miles’s electric work.

WEATHER REPORT
Heavy Weather
CBS, 1977
Easily the most accessible jazz rock release here and the most commercially successful, Heavy Weather actually spawned the hit single (albeit a minor hit) Birdland. However, it was possibly that success that closed the book on fusion’s more creative years and gave birth to the ghastly easy-listening mutation that was jazz funk.
Regardless, this album still sounds as fresh today as it did at the time. Weather Report went straight for the jugular, delivering marvellous tunes, keeping the instrumental flash in the background, and made an album that was less jazz rock and almost jazz pop.

Good – Worth Exploring

FRANK ZAPPA
Hot Rats
Reprise, 1969
After he disbanded the Mothers Of Invention in 1969, Zappa surrounded himself with some little-known but extraordinary musicians to record what became his breakthrough album, praised or damned as the Zappa record that people who don’t like Zappa like.
From the instrumental opener Peaches En Regalia, through the scatological blues of Willy The Pimp, this album album heralded Zappa’s foray into jazz rock. While Mahavishnu and even Miles had a sort of spirituality, Zappa remained cynical, deflating the undeniable brilliance of the arrangement, writing and performance with the usual lame dirty jokes. A brilliant album nevertheless.

COLOSSEUM
Valentyne Suite
Vertigo, 1969
Colosseum’s second album finds them reaching beyond their limitations as, essentially, a Cream-influenced blues rock band and groping to create something revolutionary. The extended jazz rock jams and particularly the 15-minute title track are reminiscent of what US bands like Blood, Sweat And Tears, Chicago Transit Authority and Chase were also doing at the same time. Essentially these were the handful of bands from rock backgrounds who were able to make a convincing transition to jazz. Along with King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, Valentyne Suite is one of the early milestones where prog rock and jazz rock met.

TONY WILLIAMS LIFETIME
Emergency
Polydor, 1969
There’s no argument that this album is seriously flawed: Williams can’t sing for toffee, and the production is truly awful. That said, the music made by then-prodigy drummer Williams and his band is pure electric hellfire. To the staid jazz establishment of the time, it must have been as shocking as Anarchy In The UK.
Emergency emphasises the rock in jazz rock, John McLaughlin’s guitar almost anticipates classic heavy metal, while Williams’s drumming veers from hostile to ecstatic joy in the space of a few beats. Years ahead of its time, this album is a slightly ragged and tattered masterpiece.

Also Try

Although the best jazz rock was released between 1967 and ’77, there are a lot of paths and tangents for the explorer to follow. Jazz rock in Britain is best represented by Soft Machine’s Third (’70), with more profoundly avant-garde noises following from the likes of Henry Cow’s Unrest (’74) and cult classics like Centipede’s Septober Energy (’71). The early works of Blood, Sweat And Tears, such as Child Is Father To The Man (’68), the Buddy Miles Expressway – most notably Expressway To Your Skull (’70) – and Chicago Transit Authority’s self-titled 1969 debut represent strand of US jazz rock which came from rock bands rather than from jazzers ‘slumming’ it.
European jazz rock is where things got really weird and wonderful: Wagnerian French band Magma released several sci-fi concept albums, most notably ’73’s Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh (which reimagined John Coltrane fronting an orchestra from Saturn), while the altogether gentler Gong fused jazz rock with late-period psychedelia on their excellent ’73 album Angel’s Egg.

Avoid

ANYTHING BY KENNY G.
Kenny G represents the dire depths to which fusion eventually sank. Flushed with and egged on by the commercial success of Weather Report’s Heavy Weather, a few jazz-rockers decided to chuck out all that scary, innovative stuff and just play some peaceful elevator music to soothe the folks after a hard day being yuppies.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Frank Zappa, jazz rock fusion, miles davis

Cathedral The Guessing Game

Review of their most recent album from Classic Rock.

Clocking in at a statuesque 85 minutes, this double disc set from UK doom vetrans not only marks a renaissance, but may well be their finest album ever. From the outset, though, it’s obviously a massive break from the doom laden past, piling in with sitars, mellotrons, synths and glockenspiels, creating something that at times sounds like a phenomenal lost British prog album from 1971 (on Vertigo, obviously). Not that it’s in any way an exercise in nostalgia or pastiche: the doom roots are still there throughout and for all that it creates an impression of afghan coats and incense, it’s an albumn that could only really be made in 2010. Songs like Death Of An Anarchist and Funeral Of Dreams (featuring singer Alison O`Donnell of 70s Irish folk rock band Mellow Candle) are classic Cathedral, but with a little bit of a psychedelic twist. The Running Man, a nod to King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, and the pulverising doom of Requiem For The Voiceless (a protest song about factory farming) are the two strongest tracks and the two poles of The Guessing Game. The double disc format allows Cathedral’s imagination to be unbounded. It’s an exciting reboot for a veteran band.
8/10
Tommy Udo

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock # Kung Fu Hustle # Marilyn Manson # Metal Hammer # Music journalism # NME # Progressive rock, Psychedelia

Progcast One

This is a podcast for the launch of Classic rock Presents…Prog that I took part in last year. It also features editor Jerry Ewing, and writers Malcolm Dome and Nick Shilton.

Progcast here

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Progressive rock

Mark Linkous

Mark Linous

I met Mark Linkous a few times in the mid 90s and again about five years ago. I wish I had some great insight to give you based upon these meetings which consisted of a couple of interviews, a conversation after a gig and a few chance meetings where only small talk and small gossip was exchanged. Perhaps I should tell you that he was a generous man, a kind man, a beacon of hope in a hopeless world. He may well have been, but I’m fucked if I noticed it. Maybe I should say that I saw right away that he was spiralling towards an unhappy end. That would just be bullshit.

For example: one of the occasions that I spoke to him was in London in 1996 just before he went back to his hotel, had an overdose and collapsed in such a way that he almost had to have both legs amputated. When I spoke to him he seemed fine. A bit laconic and tired, but no more so than any other jet lagged American junkie muso that struggled to answer my asinine questions in those days.

Hearing what happened that same week was shocking. But it was one of those classic overcoming adversity narratives that everybody loves and nobody wants to question too deeply. You know the story: he’s a great artist, but he has problems  with drugs. He nearly dies but he survives against the odds. Then he comes back and makes a stunning life affirming piece of art. And gets the girl. Freeze frame and roll credits to some high energy 80s power ballad.

But let me tell you something: surviving death and feeling overjoyed at being alive, you’d be surprised how fucking quickly that fades. You’re left with the same problems that you had before with some new ones added for good measure. Linkous could never walk properly again and had to wear braces on both legs. He never complained but then you’re not allowed to complain. You’re supposed to feel blessed, or lucky to be alive, an optimistic good sport, not some self obsessed depressed and miserable old cunt with two gammy legs.

Linkous, we’re told, struggled with depression all his life. Like many people who do, he self medicated with drugs, which may have compounded his problems but some of which may have numbed him physically and mentally enough to make it to the end of another day. Maybe we’ll never know what the text message he received was, the one that supposedly upset him enough to go and get his rifle and shoot himself through the heart. That’s not important. The cause can be any trivial, insignificant event. All thinking people consider suicide at one time or another. It takes a ‘perfect storm’, where all the necessary elements come together. Most suicides start days or weeks before triggers are pulled or high windows are opened.

What Linkous had in common with Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Pete Hamm, Nick Drake, Vic Chesnutt, Kurt Cobain, Billy MacKenzie and  Per Yngve ‘Dead’ Ohlin is not that they created introspective music that contemplated the shadowy side of life. No, what they had in common was being male.

Men are nearly three times more likely to kill themselves than women. Among men under the age of 35, suicide is the second most common cause of death. Suicide is more common than homicide. Among middle aged men – Linkous was 47 – the rate has soared over the past decade.

There are kneejerk explanations for this: men can’t talk about their feelings the way that women supposedly do; men are a redundant sex; men are full of bad chemicals that makes them predisposed to depression and suicidal tendencies; men are just plain bad. Is is economic boom or bust? Too much responsibility or too little? The truth is that nobody knows why and all snap ‘common sense’ judgements are wrong. All of the artists mentioned who killed themselves were able to express themselves very articulately through their music. Linkous wasn’t a great confessional songwriter; he conjured up skewed wonderlands, a musical and verbal equivalent of the films of Tim Burton or Jan Švankmajer. But it’s unlikely that you’ll find many clues to his death on any of the Sparklehorse albums other than that Linkous was no stranger to the ‘dark side’.

Linkous had drug issues and was also upset by the suicide of his friend Vic Chesnutt earlier this year. Suicides sometimes have a nasty habit of spreading like a contagion.

It has been suggested that people who are depressed are actually seeing the world as it actually is, and it is everyone else who is deluded, clinging onto false hope, convincing themselves that life is worth living. People who kill themselves are just incapable of bullshitting themselves anymore.

But what could anyone have done? Maybe not allowing him to live as a virtual recluse. Maybe intervening in his drug use. Maybe forcing him to talk about what was going on in his mind. Nothing he’d have thanked you for or actually allowed anyone to do.

Linkous was a great talent. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is one of the best albums of the 1990s. He never topped it but always seemed to promise that he would. Maybe his Dark Night Of The Soul collaboration with Danger Mouse and David Lynch is the classic last word. Maybe something he had secreted in his beloved studio is the final masterpiece.

More likely there will just be a few tantalising odds and ends and a lot unresolvable questions.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Music journalism, NME, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse, Suicide

ROBERT CALVERT Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (Atomhenge/Esoteric)

The great Calvert

Although often described as “overlooked” or “neglected”, Hawkwind’s sometime frontman Bob Calvert’s first solo album  actually scraped the album charts and was – along with an afghan coat, a quid deal of red leb and a Mayflower paperback edition of one of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books – an essential possession for the mid 70s adolescent Brit stoner, filed there alongside Warrior On The Edge Of Time, Fish Rising and something pre-Virgin by Tangerine Dream.

It’s a Hawkwind album in all but name, the line-up augmented by various Pink Fairies, Viv Stanshall, Jim Capaldi, Arthur Brown and (uncredited) Brian Eno. It’s popularity with the ‘heads’ can be put down to the Pythonesque sketches that link the songs – surreal skits about Luftwaffe pilots wearing make-up and dodgy Yank jet salesmen that are even funnier when herbally enhanced – but also to four absolute killer space metal songs The Aerospaceage Inferno, The Widowmaker, The Right Stuff and Ejection. It was everything that Hawkwind promised on Silver Machine and Urban Guerilla.

It’s more straight ahead punk rock before there was punk rock metal, alluding to other Calvert songs and stories, moving “sideways through time”, that sort of thing. Calvert, as a boy wanted to be a fighter pilot but a perforated eardrum put paid to that dream. With Hawkwind he lived out his fantasies – a few years later he appeared onstage dressed as some glam rock combination of Biggles and Lawrence Of Arabia. And in these songs he seems to be flying with an afterburner.

The concept is about the Lockheed Starfighter, sold to the revitalised West German Luftwaffe in the 50s to help build the Federal Republic as a bulwark against the commies at the height of the cold war. The crashed and burned in alarming numbers as poorly trained pilots and ground crews earned them the nickname Flying Coffins and The Widowmaker.

Calvert’s songs have an almost JG Ballard-like fascination with the crashing aircraft, eliciting an almost sexual thrill from the disaster. You sense that he didn’t so much want to fly a starfighter as crash it into the ground.

Of all the songs on the album, the greatest is the masterful Ejection, probably the best song ever written about bailing out of a fighter plane. Legendary rock hack Nick Kent, a longtime champion of Calvert and Hawkwind, described Ejection as having the best riff since (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and although he was no stranger to hyperbole, in this case he was bang on.

The remastering on this edition gives the sound a much needed punch. The only disappointment is the additional tracks: a more complete collection might have included The Widow’s Song, planned for inclusion with Nico on vocals, though eventually recorded by Calvert and his girlfriend just before his untimely death.

That’s a petty quibble though: a brilliant monument to the great psychedelic warrior poet of the English underground.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hawkwind, Robert Calvert, Viv Stanshall

John Martyn – maverick of prog

This was written for Classic Rock presents Prog, a profile of the late great John Martyn who has been a musical presence in my life since I was about 12 (the song Dusty, from his album The Tumbler was included on the Island records compilation You Can All Join In – the third album I ever bought!)

Bearded men with acoustic guitars always appeared to be the antithesis of prog: by their very nature, folkies seemed to be making regressive music, retreating to “tradition”, to rootsiness. They also seemed to epitomise that most nausea-inducing spectacle: the sensitive young man, the lonely boy outsider, the bedroom poet who can’t get a girlfriend and tells the world so in dreadful self-pitying verse. Who among us has not guffawed uproariously at the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House when John Belushi descends the stairs to find some anaemic beatnik with an acoustic guitar serenading a girl with a sensitive folk ballad, seizes the guitar and smashes it savagely against the wall? Who among us has not wanted to do the same to the whey-faced bum-fluffed fun-annihilators who produce their bloody 12 strings and start picking out the opening of Neil Young’s The Needle And the Damage Done at parties?
Growing up in Glasgow in the late 70s and early 80s, one of the party favourites of the acoustic guitar and scraggy beard massive was John Martyn’s May You Never, a haunting Celt-tinged blues ballad from his classic 1973 album Solid Air. You probably heard it murdered many times by some flat voxed James Taylor wannabe before actually hearing the original.
Your reporter then was probably not alone in having, for many years, an unreasonable prejudice against Martyn based solely upon those who sought to interpret his work. This prejudice, like so many, was a stupid one. It was also a prejudice that was happily blasted to pieces in 1978 when he performed Big Muff from the astonishing One World album in a live film for the Old Grey Whistle Test. Fed through a labyrinth of effects pedals, it sounded like the madder end of dub, it sounded like music that had more in common with Can than with any of the rootsy folkies that I then so detested. It was one of those what-the-fuck??? moments that we have all experienced upon being confronted with music that blows our minds. Man.
And any preconceptions that Martyn was some knock-kneed introspective bedroom wallflower were soundly destroyed a year later when he headbutted my mate in a bar in Glasgow.
Martyn had been enjoying a small sherry after dinner, as it were, and my pal had, metaphorically speaking, spilled his pint. Martyn drew his head back and cracked him in the nose. There was blood. Soon, after a few minutes spent tearing lumps of flesh from each other’s faces, Martyn put him in an armlock and rammed him face first into the wall. “Stay the fuck down cunt!” he growled in the sort of Glasgow accent that can loosen the bowels. My chum, slumped in a heap, was no longer in a position to argue. At which point one of the bar staff tried to calm John down and get him to leave. Martyn grabbed him by the throat: “You want some too ya fuckin’ fanny? Do ye?” The hapless   pint puller acknowledged that he did not, in fact, want some or indeed any. Martyn slowly released him and was led out of the bar.
Twenty minutes or so later he was onstage at the Glasgow School of Art and we were in the audience, my friend still pressing a wet towel to his now-ruined nose. Martyn was mesmerising. It is still a performance that I remember clearly: much of the material was drawn from One World, at times spacey, dub crazed, at others jazzy and late-night. May You Never had the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks bristling. In a month when I also went to see The Pop Group, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, Kevin Coyne, Suicide and Pere Ubu, Martyn’s remains the most disconcerting and memorable show. Was it really 30 years ago? Well Jesus.
Afterwards I saw him and bass player Danny Thompson and my busted-nosed friend sitting together in the bar. All pals together after some eye to eye apologies and manly handshakes. Martyn was by now very convivial, a beardy uncle, telling us about his trip to Kingston, Jamaica to record at The Black Ark with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (“Now Scratch, he is really fucking mental, by the way,” said the pot of the kettle) and recommending that we listen to Pharoah Sanders and Davy Graham. We did. He also said he’d come and see our band the following week. He didn’t, of course. Probably just as well. He’d probably have kicked fuck out of us for crimes against music.

Martyn was many things. He actually was a sensitive poet, though a proper one, firing off autobiographical despatches from a life that was happy but knew more than its share of sorrows. He was a Glasgow hard man when it suited him, though he was born Iain David McGeachy in New Malden in Surrey and spent only part of his early childhood in Scotland. He grew up in the respectable South Side of the city, brought up by his father and grandmother. Still, to outsiders, when he lapsed into that Glasgow snarl which he sometimes did, he may as well have been the Razor King from the violent streets of the Gorbals.
When he was in his teens, Martyn straddled the sub cults of beat and mod, dressing like a tramp to go to folk clubs but donning a sharp suit on a Saturday night to go to the dancing with his girlfriend.
Glasgow had a thriving folk scene in the 60s, thanks in part to the influence of the great Scottish traditional song revivalist Ewan McColl and the active encouragement of the Communist Party who had decided that this was authentic people’s music in opposition to commercial trash like rock’n'roll. By 1965, a new generation – Martyn among them – inspired by Dylan was discovering folk music. New clubs, particularly Clive Palmer’s Incredible Folk Club in Sauchiehall Street, catered to this less traditional traditionalism. Clive’s group The Incredible String Band ,, regulars at the club in 1965 were already starting to branch out and experiment with other ethnic musical sounds. Martyn was a contemporary of the ISB as well as Billy Connolly and Bert Jansch. His biggest inspiration and mentor was the now largely forgotten Hamish Imlach, who taught Martyn to play blues guitar and allowed him to play the odd song of his own between sets. At just 17 he was a prolific writer and performer, though hadn’t seriously thought of music as a career.
Like many Scots, Martyn permanently migrated south of the border almost as soon as he had the bus fare.  He started playing in folk clubs in London. A meeting with label boss Chris Blackwell resulted in his becoming the first white artist to sign with Island records, until then best known as a UK outlet for Jamaican bluebeat, ska and reggae. John’s 1967 debut album London Conversation is a fairly standard folk album of the time (mostly self penned, obligatory Dylan cover) though the flute and sitar on Rolling Home hint at a more expansive sound to come. His voice had yet to develop into the slurred instrument that he said was his attempt to sound like a tenor sax.
The second album The Tumbler was still more adventurous, thanks in part to the happy fusion of Martyn’s pastoral songs with jazz flautist Harold McNair’s ethereal woodwind sound. But John was dissatisfied with his recorded output. “I got bored with the folk/acoustic thing. You can’t keep churning that out, it stifles innovation, kills the personal touch,” he said.

In 1970 John was hired as guitarist on an album by Beverley Kutner that was to be produced by Joe Boyd, who had been instrumental in the success of Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and Nick Drake, who would become a close friend of Martyn’s. John and Beverley became an item, began writing together and released the subsequent album Stormbringer as a duo. Stormbringer marks a big departure for John. It was the first time he used the echoplex on his guitar, a sound that would become his signature. On the next album The Road To Ruin, Martyn fell out with Boyd over the multiple overdubs. He also worked with a band for the first time, one that included his long-time collaborator bassist Danny Thompson, a muso for hire who had worked with The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle. Thomson moved John in a jazzier direction, becoming the perfect foil for Martyn’s guitar and voice. They worked together right up until John’s death earlier this year.
John began to experiment with effects pedals, feedback and keyboards. He collaborated widely, most notably with Steve Winwood of Traffic, Paul Kossoff of Free and Back Street Crawler, Richard Thompson ex of Fairport Convention, improvisational jazz drummer John Stevens, Phil Collins and John Giblin who were then working together in Brand X.
The music became free ranging, from the complex 1973 classic Solid Air (written about the decline of Nick Drake,who would die the year after its release) to the echo laden 1977 masterpiece One World. Island boss Chris Blackwell became a close friend and encouraged Martyn in his collaborations. Other Island artists like dub producer and certifiable genius/madman Lee Perry worked with John, a fruitful if unlikely combination. While in Jamaica he played on Burning Spear’s roots reggae classic Man In The Hills as well as some sessions with Perry and Max Romeo. He later claimed that he was paid in Tia Maria and porn films.
He was no record company darling. Chuffed with the success of Solid Air, Island received the follow up Inside Out anticipating more of the same, some nice mellow pastoral jazz folk. What they got was about 40 minutes of wild electronics, free jazz and vocals that sounded like a drunk in space. In retrospect, it anticipates the Island era of Tom Waits nicely. At the time, to put it mildly, it was misunderstood and critically panned. Martyn had a serious disregard for the press ever since.
Martyn’s music was not difficult in the sense of being unapproachable. It was definitely ‘progressive’ by any definition. Not all of it: much that was recorded after 1980′s harrowing Grace And Danger was conventional by comparison. He was always a great songwriter, though, and his songs as covered by Eric Clapton, Dr John and Wet Wet Wet probably earned him far more in royalties than any of his own recordings.
Martyn never settled into a comfort zone. In the 90s he signed with then hip as fuck label Independiente. His 1996 album And saw him experimenting with trip hop and drum & bass. Later he made an album of startling covers called The Church With One Bell, where he played music by Lightning Hopkins, Portishead, Dead Can Dance, Elmore James and others. And on his 2000 album Glasgow Walker he abandoned the guitar and wrote the whole thing on keyboards.
The last time I spoke to him, interviewing him around the release of the CD box set Ain’t No Saint, he was still wildly enthusiastic about music, chuffed to bits that Pharoah Sanders had asked him to work on a new album with him, and generous about younger bands. He was also talking about releasing music on the internet.
Sadly, now that he’s dead, there’s an almost inevitable process of rediscovery and reassessment going on, not unlike the cult which grew up around Nick Drake.
“I don’t want to talk about Nick. It’s creepy, ghoulish and strange; this lionisation is too late when you’re dead. If they’d dug him enough then, he’d still be here now. I’ve often thought of faking my own death and watching the record companies fucking drum up all the shit they can…” he told Classic Rock in 2000.
So beware of cashing in on his incredible legacy: if there’s one guy who’d get so pissed off up in heaven that he’d jump back down to Earth and stick the heid on you, it’s definitely him. Definitely.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

Notes from underground

One of my favourite albums ever, recently reissued. This review originally ran in Classic Rock.

The Deviants

Ptooff!

Esoteric

The (Social) Deviants were the great steaming turd in the hippy dippy strawberry incense world of the late 60s London underground scene. First and foremost they were psychedelic hooligans, upsetting the nicey nicey comfy reveries of the docile hippies, scaring them from the stage of the UFO club in the wee small hours. While everyone else was turning off their minds, relaxing and floating downstream, The Deviants were making trouble. They were like The Sex Pistols a decade too early – they were, in fact, one of the first bands ever to be described as ‘punk rock’ – and as well as the sneering attitude and leather trousers, they also pioneered the DIY ethic, promoting community gigs and releasing their first album Ptooff! independently.

Their revolution-first-music-second ethic has borne up rather better over the years than many of their contemporaries. Opening track I’m Coming Home sounds like a low budget strung-out version of The Doors who are just straight enough to grasp a rudimentary I’m A Man riff while frontman Mick Farren sneers and spits his way through the ensuing acid deranged mess. There is the amazing Nothing Man, a Fugs/Zappa-like collage of disjointed music, noise and FX with Farren reciting an equally crazed poem that almost seems to prefigure sampling. The anti-consumerist Garbage is definitely a punk rock song, maybe something by The Fall, that they miraculously managed to channel from the future. The final song Deviation Street is like eight minutes of Bo Diddley playing on an airport PA with lots of stoned-freak conversations recorded and laid over the top. It’s an attack on self-satisfied hippie complacency more savage than anything Lydon would later dish out.

There are two tracks by bass guitarist Cord Rees that don’t really fit, where he mistakenly imagined that The Deviants could be a ‘proper’ band. But in an odd way it’s these glaring flaws and the fact that this is such an amateur effort – in the best sense of the term – that makes Ptooff! an album that is in every way as pioneering as Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Sgt Pepper.

This welcome reissue restores the original fold-out quasi pop-art cover, 1967 sleeve notes by John Peel and new ones by Mark Powell.

No phoney nostalgia here. This is the real sound of the English psychedelic underground and A Whiter Shade Of Pale it ain’t.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Music journalism, Psychedelia, Boss Goodman, English underground, International Times, Mick Farren, Paul Rudolph, Pink Fairies, Psychedelia, Russel Sanderson

The Sound of the Kraut

Like punk, writing about krautrock is what all music journos love to do. It’s like the cycling proficiency test of pomposity and pontificating. And sneery as I may be about it, I’m no different. Here’s my yadda yadda on the subject from Classic Rock presents Prog 4.

Can back in the day.

Krautrock: was there really more to it than six hippies and a drum machine? In retrospect it’s hard to say what krautrock is or was: like every ‘genre’, when you get too close there’s no real cohesion. Did the late psychedelic freak-out sounds of Amon Duul really have anything in common with the primitive disco of Kraftwerk or the frenetic explorations of Can other than that they all hailed from West Germany? Probably not. And despite the impression given by krautrock cheerleaders at the time – NME writer Ian McDonald, DJ John Peel and Brian Eno of Roxy Music being among the most prominent – these bands actually meant very little in Germany, outside of small radical circles, where fairly conventional hard rock bands like Jane, Atlantis and Kraan were more likely to attract the average fan. Krautrock may be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Guru Guru, they were krautrock. Except, well, was it really rock? The Scorpions were krauts who unquestionably rocked, but were they krautrock? And Nektar, they were obviously a krautrock band. Except they were actually British…ho hum.

What is indisputable is that in the late 60s and early 70s there was a vast underground scene in Germany of musicians who wanted to take their music further. Their inspirations ranged from, obviously, Pink Floyd to the avant garde. Members of Can had studied music under composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and many universities and music schools had departments where they pioneered electronic music. There was also a huge upsurge of interest in American ‘minimalist’ composers like Terry Riley, LaMonte Young and Steve Reich as well as in another rock band who successfully straddled rock and the avant garde, The velvet Underground. Many of the musicians who drifted in and out of the line-ups of krautrock bands came from the jazz scene, heavily influenced by the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman, as well as the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Sly Stone and The Grateful Dead. While many of the cutting edge US and UK psychedelic bands of the late 60s had – after a brief and glorious period of LSD-inspired weirdness and wild experimentation when all things seemed possible – retreated to the comparative sanity of country music, blues based hard rock and even pop, in Germany the great experimental leap forward had only just begun. In arts labs and improvised recording studios, at all night acid fuelled jams in radical communes and in the minds of its pioneers like Michael Rother, Holger Czukay and Ralph Hutter, the revolution that started with The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates  Of Dawn  continued relentlessly.

Like many rock fans of a certain age, your reporter’s musical world was turned upside down in the early 70s thanks to an album that cost the then bizarre price of 48p. It was the novelty of an album by a name band – albeit one that few of us had actually heard – going on sale at this price that sent thousands of fresh faced innocents to their local hip record emporium to snap up their copy of The Faust Tapes. No doubt we all saw ourselves as being somewhat more adventurous than our contemporaries who were into – ugh – glam pop like Slade and T-Rex. We were the kids who regularly listened to Zappa and Genesis and King Crimson and thought we were into the real heavy shit.

No doubt many took the album from its disconcerting sleeve (originally a nausea-inducing op art painting by Bridget Riley) and after about 10 minutes of listening to cut up sounds, snatches of songs, electronic instrumentation and the speaking clock in German thought What the fuck? before ditching it for the comparatively easier listening of the new Tull album. But others persevered, possibly because – and I throw my hand up here – they were chronically pretentious gits who wouldn’t admit that the emperor was bolock naked. More charitably because Faust were rich with possibilities that a lot of so-called progressive bands at the time barely touched on.

The story of Faust is bizarre: they were essentially a manufactured band, put together from two existing groups by political activist, journalist and producer Uwe Nettelbeck who somehow managed to convince the Polydor label in Germany that what they needed was an  album of chilling Zappaesque noise collages and what’s more that they should press it on transparent vinyl. Faust made two albums for them that still sound like nothing before or since. Inevitably they sold shit – less than 1000 copies – but not before piquing the interest of a few fans, critics, DJs and label bosses who took the term ‘progressive’ at face value. The newly launched Virgin label signed them – in the days before spaceships and airlines, let’s not forget that Branson made his dough supplying hardened avant garde prog fans with their fix – and in an artistically inspired if fiscally questionable decision, decided to release a ‘bootleg’ style album while Faust were in the studio working on their third proper album (confusingly released as Faust IV) and sell it for the price of a single.

Faust were German and those who had been affected by The Faust Tapes wondered if there were any more at home like them. The answer, of course, was how blown did you want your mind to get? Scouring the imports section of the full page Virgin mail-order ad that appeared every week in the music papers revealed a vast unknown world of terrifying music emanating from Germany. You might have heard of bands like Can, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Amon Duul II. But who the Hell were The Cosmic Jokers, Annexus Quam or Ash Ra Tempel? Once a week we listened religiously to John Peel’s Top Gear show on Radio 1, where you might hear what sounded like 25 minutes of radio static with a child reading the periodic table of elements through an Echoplex only to be told by the great guru that it had in fact been the opening track on the new Kosmiche Osiris album. If British bands were still at heart middle class white boys trying to play like American bluesmen, getting it wrong but creating something unique in the process, this whole German scene was something else again. It was like music from the future and not necessarily a future you ever wanted to see. While most British prog band were still struggling with early synthesizers, sometimes using them as a novelty fill in pieces played by conventional instruments, sometimes as a poor substitute for an orchestra, groups like Neu! were using them to create sounds and music never heard before.

The press – arguably it first appeared in a Melody Maker article on the scene – dubbed it krautrock, originally a pejorative term, employed by

critics who dismissed these bands with their experimental and electronic edge as being ‘cold’ and ‘soulless’. Nevertheless, a small but fanatical cult of devotees sprang up, kids who would spend ludicrous amounts of cash on imports on the Ohr or Brain labels, derided by their mates because they had forked out a fortune for Atem by Tangerine Dream which, they sneered, was ‘just a lot of bloody noise’.

For a short period in the early 70s – about five minutes to be exact – great things seemed to be promised by krautrock. The newly formed Virgin label signed Tangerine Dream along with Faust and Can. Kraftwerk enjoyed a minor novelty hit with Autobahn. Slade, however, need not have lost any sleep…

Where the krautrock bands fell down was as live performers. There were exceptions: Can were always entertaining to watch. But when Kraftwerk arrived on these shores to tour in 1974, they played to empty halls. At the Glasgow Apollo where they had been booked to play doubtless on the understanding that Autobahn was not, in fact, a one hit wonder novelty, they actually  had to give the tickets away and even then, on the night, the venue was practically empty. Watching a few boffinish blokes hunched over what looked like telephone exchanges couldn’t really compare with watching Alice Cooper hang himself. Eventually, of course, they would learn their lesson and just stick a few shop dummies there instead!

Tangerine Dream, who were the first krautrock band to start selling out large venues thanks in part to their abandonment of the formless cosmic noise of the earlier work in favour of  the more structured proto-disco sound of albums like Rubicon and Ricochet, went the Floyd route, with an ever more impressive light show. Otherwise a Tangerine Dream show was, after all, just a few fat blokes onstage sat at  black boxes. Amon Duul II – who were at heart a fairly standard rock and roll unit – kept the liquid lights and strobes at maximum. But few of the first wave of krautrock bands made many ventures out of the studio and onto the stage, at least not outside of Germany. So even if there was an appetite for 40 minute free-form freakout jams and extended ring modulator solos among the world’s pop kids at that time, it wasn’t as if you had Cluster or Popol Vuh playing down at your local rock flea pit every week to sell you on the idea.
Krautrock ultimately suffered from a serious lack of commercial potential. Having enjoyed massive success with Tubular Bells, Virgin records no longer saw any merit in funding a mob of dirty German lunatics to make appalling noises in the studio. Hence Faust went into mothballs for a few decades after the 70s ended.

But krautrock was like prog rock’s Trojan horse: while the mainstream media sneered at Yes and Genesis, they were oddly respectful of krautrock. Barely 10 minutes after punk started and threatened to sweep away everything that had gone before and smacked of long hair and hippiedom, bands like Public Image Ltd and Alternative TV were namechecking Can as a massive influence while the likes of This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle had certainly tapped a toe to Faust in their time. Krautrock never really suffered the derision that other prog bands were subject to, probably because Can, faust et al were much more difficult targets than Rick Wakeman and ELP.

Space barely permits us to argue that it was krautrock started hip hop – DJ Afrika Baambaataa mixed tracks using kraftwerk; Holger Czukay seems to have invented sampling on some mid 70s Can tracks – and acid house. Obvious really.

Krautrock was the most progressive aspect of progressive music. It was prog’s prog. Albums made in 1971 can still make you sit up and wonder aloud What the fuck is all that about? Collectives like the two revitalised versions of Faust continue to rattle the cages of sanity after nearly 40 years. And its influence is everywhere: electronic dance music from disco to dubstep still acknowledges its debt to the pioneering work of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Neu! Bands as diverse as Stereolab and Ufomammut are constantly rediscovering and re-exploring different aspects of krautrock. You can hear its influence in everyone from Radiohead to – God save us – U2. And what is more, every day some blogsite seems to unearth a lost or unreleased album from krautrock’s golden age – roughly 1972 – 1979 -  that is every bit as essential as Can’s Tago Mago, Tangerine Dream’s Rubicon or Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine.

Makes you wonder who really won the prog war?

Krautrock: was there really more to it than six hippies and a drum machine? In retrospect it’s hard to say what krautrock is or was: like every ‘genre’, when you get too close there’s no real cohesion. Did the late psychedelic freak-out sounds of Amon Duul really have anything in common with the primitive disco of Kraftwerk or the frenetic explorations of Can other than that they all hailed from West Germany? Probably not. And despite the impression given by krautrock cheerleaders at the time – NME writer Ian McDonald, DJ John Peel and Brian Eno of Roxy Music being among the most prominent – these bands actually meant very little in Germany, outside of small radical circles, where fairly conventional hard rock bands like Jane, Atlantis and Kraan were more likely to attract the average fan. Krautrock may be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Guru Guru, they were krautrock. Except, well, was it really rock? The Scorpions were krauts who unquestionably rocked, but were they krautrock? And Nektar, they were obviously a krautrock band. Except they were actually British…ho hum.

What is indisputable is that in the late 60s and early 70s there was a vast underground scene in Germany of musicians who wanted to take their music further. Their inspirations ranged from, obviously, Pink Floyd to the avant garde. Members of Can had studied music under composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and many universities and music schools had departments where they pioneered electronic music. There was also a huge upsurge of interest in American ‘minimalist’ composers like Terry Riley, LaMonte Young and Steve Reich as well as in another rock band who successfully straddled rock and the avant garde, The velvet Underground. Many of the musicians who drifted in and out of the line-ups of krautrock bands came from the jazz scene, heavily influenced by the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman, as well as the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Sly Stone and The Grateful Dead. While many of the cutting edge US and UK psychedelic bands of the late 60s had – after a brief and glorious period of LSD-inspired weirdness and wild experimentation when all things seemed possible – retreated to the comparative sanity of country music, blues based hard rock and even pop, in Germany the great experimental leap forward had only just begun. In arts labs and improvised recording studios, at all night acid fuelled jams in radical communes and in the minds of its pioneers like Michael Rother, Holger Czukay and Ralph Hutter, the revolution that started with The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates  Of Dawn  continued relentlessly.

Like many rock fans of a certain age, your reporter’s musical world was turned upside down in the early 70s thanks to an album that cost the then bizarre price of 48p. It was the novelty of an album by a name band – albeit one that few of us had actually heard – going on sale at this price that sent thousands of fresh faced innocents to their local hip record emporium to snap up their copy of The Faust Tapes. No doubt we all saw ourselves as being somewhat more adventurous than our contemporaries who were into – ugh – glam pop like Slade and T-Rex. We were the kids who regularly listened to Zappa and Genesis and King Crimson and thought we were into the real heavy shit.

No doubt many took the album from its disconcerting sleeve (originally a nausea-inducing op art painting by Bridget Riley) and after about 10 minutes of listening to cut up sounds, snatches of songs, electronic instrumentation and the speaking clock in German thought What the fuck? before ditching it for the comparatively easier listening of the new Tull album. But others persevered, possibly because – and I throw my hand up here – they were chronically pretentious gits who wouldn’t admit that the emperor was bolock naked. More charitably because Faust were rich with possibilities that a lot of so-called progressive bands at the time barely touched on.

The story of Faust is bizarre: they were essentially a manufactured band, put together from two existing groups by political activist, journalist and producer Uwe Nettelbeck who somehow managed to convince the Polydor label in Germany that what they needed was an  album of chilling Zappaesque noise collages and what’s more that they should press it on transparent vinyl. Faust made two albums for them that still sound like nothing before or since. Inevitably they sold shit – less than 1000 copies – but not before piquing the interest of a few fans, critics, DJs and label bosses who took the term ‘progressive’ at face value. The newly launched Virgin label signed them – in the days before spaceships and airlines, let’s not forget that Branson made his dough supplying hardened avant garde prog fans with their fix – and in an artistically inspired if fiscally questionable decision, decided to release a ‘bootleg’ style album while Faust were in the studio working on their third proper album (confusingly released as Faust IV) and sell it for the price of a single.

Faust were German and those who had been affected by The Faust Tapes wondered if there were any more at home like them. The answer, of course, was how blown did you want your mind to get? Scouring the imports section of the full page Virgin mail-order ad that appeared every week in the music papers revealed a vast unknown world of terrifying music emanating from Germany. You might have heard of bands like Can, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Amon Duul II. But who the Hell were The Cosmic Jokers, Annexus Quam or Ash Ra Tempel? Once a week we listened religiously to John Peel’s Top Gear show on Radio 1, where you might hear what sounded like 25 minutes of radio static with a child reading the periodic table of elements through an Echoplex only to be told by the great guru that it had in fact been the opening track on the new Kosmiche Osiris album. If British bands were still at heart middle class white boys trying to play like American bluesmen, getting it wrong but creating something unique in the process, this whole German scene was something else again. It was like music from the future and not necessarily a future you ever wanted to see. While most British prog band were still struggling with early synthesizers, sometimes using them as a novelty fill in pieces played by conventional instruments, sometimes as a poor substitute for an orchestra, groups like Neu! were using them to create sounds and music never heard before.

The press – arguably it first appeared in a Melody Maker article on the scene – dubbed it krautrock, originally a pejorative term, employed by critics who dismissed these bands with their experimental and electronic edge as being ‘cold’ and ‘soulless’. Nevertheless, a small but fanatical cult of devotees sprang up, kids who would spend ludicrous amounts of cash on imports on the Ohr or Brain labels, derided by their mates because they had forked out a fortune for Atem by Tangerine Dream which, they sneered, was ‘just a lot of bloody noise’.

For a short period in the early 70s – about five minutes to be exact – great things seemed to be promised by krautrock. The newly formed Virgin label signed Tangerine Dream along with Faust and Can. Kraftwerk enjoyed a minor novelty hit with Autobahn. Slade, however, need not have lost any sleep…

Where the krautrock bands fell down was as live performers. There were exceptions: Can were always entertaining to watch. But when Kraftwerk arrived on these shores to tour in 1974, they played to empty halls. At the Glasgow Apollo where they had been booked to play doubtless on the understanding that Autobahn was not, in fact, a one hit wonder novelty, they actually  had to give the tickets away and even then, on the night, the venue was practically empty. Watching a few boffinish blokes hunched over what looked like telephone exchanges couldn’t really compare with watching Alice Cooper hang himself. Eventually, of course, they would learn their lesson and just stick a few shop dummies there instead!

Tangerine Dream, who were the first krautrock band to start selling out large venues thanks in part to their abandonment of the formless cosmic noise of the earlier work in favour of  the more structured proto-disco sound of albums like Rubicon and Ricochet, went the Floyd route, with an ever more impressive light show. Otherwise a Tangerine Dream show was, after all, just a few fat blokes onstage sat at  black boxes. Amon Duul II – who were at heart a fairly standard rock and roll unit – kept the liquid lights and strobes at maximum. But few of the first wave of krautrock bands made many ventures out of the studio and onto the stage, at least not outside of Germany. So even if there was an appetite for 40 minute free-form freakout jams and extended ring modulator solos among the world’s pop kids at that time, it wasn’t as if you had Cluster or Popol Vuh playing down at your local rock flea pit every week to sell you on the idea.
Krautrock ultimately suffered from a serious lack of commercial potential. Having enjoyed massive success with Tubular Bells, Virgin records no longer saw any merit in funding a mob of dirty German lunatics to make appalling noises in the studio. Hence Faust went into mothballs for a few decades after the 70s ended.

But krautrock was like prog rock’s Trojan horse: while the mainstream media sneered at Yes and Genesis, they were oddly respectful of krautrock. Barely 10 minutes after punk started and threatened to sweep away everything that had gone before and smacked of long hair and hippiedom, bands like Public Image Ltd and Alternative TV were namechecking Can as a massive influence while the likes of This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle had certainly tapped a toe to Faust in their time. Krautrock never really suffered the derision that other prog bands were subject to, probably because Can, faust et al were much more difficult targets than Rick Wakeman and ELP.

Space barely permits us to argue that it was krautrock started hip hop – DJ Afrika Baambaataa mixed tracks using kraftwerk; Holger Czukay seems to have invented sampling on some mid 70s Can tracks – and acid house. Obvious really.

Krautrock was the most progressive aspect of progressive music. It was prog’s prog. Albums made in 1971 can still make you sit up and wonder aloud What the fuck is all that about? Collectives like the two revitalised versions of Faust continue to rattle the cages of sanity after nearly 40 years. And its influence is everywhere: electronic dance music from disco to dubstep still acknowledges its debt to the pioneering work of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Neu! Bands as diverse as Stereolab and Ufomammut are constantly rediscovering and re-exploring different aspects of krautrock. You can hear its influence in everyone from Radiohead to – God save us – U2. And what is more, every day some blogsite seems to unearth a lost or unreleased album from krautrock’s golden age – roughly 1972 – 1979 -  that is every bit as essential as Can’s Tago Mago, Tangerine Dream’s Rubicon or Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine.

Makes you wonder who really won the prog war?

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, amon duul, ash ra tempel, Brian Eno, can, cluster, kraftwerk, Krautrock, neu!, tangerine dream

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE

This is a feature written for Classic Rock a few years ago when QOTSA released Lullabies To Paralyze. Josh Homme actually lives up to the hype and is one of the coolest guys on Earth; he’s in the room with Dennis Hopper, David Carradine and Evel Knevil.

JOSH HOMME, frontman and founder of Queens Of The Stone Age, facilitator of the Desert Sessions, occasional Eagle Of Death Metal, boyfriend to Brody, pal of Dave Grohl, has a fairly good claim on the title of World’s Coolest Guy. Of course he’s so damn cool that the suggestion of bestowing such a title upon him would make him blow chunks over the table. But the fact remains, if you were the corporate suck ass who picks the models for Gap ads, you’d put your granny on eBay to secure his services.

Offstage as well as on the guy has charisma. He also has that quality of being able to discuss anything from the merits of pickled onion chips (what the yanks call crisps, apparently) to great underrated albums like The Groundhogs’ Thank Christ For the Bomb and always have you thinking ‘Damn, I wish I had said that’.

Lullabies To Paralyze, the fourth Queens Of The Stone Age album, entered the US charts at number 5 and the UK charts at 4 and is already on the way to outstripping its million-selling predecessor Songs For The Deaf.

Reviews in the mainstream press – the broadsheets in particular – were almost universally positive, even ecstatic, while the rock and metal mags gave it a much frostier reception. There’s a sense that some fans and critics feel betrayed by the direction in which the band has travelled but also a sense that others outside the narrow self-imposed stoner rock ghetto are just discovering them.

If anyone regards the accessibility of recent Queens albums as a ‘sell out’ then Josh Homme isn’t concerned.

“I wanted to take people with me and make records that were like a mix tape that you would make for a friend. And this album is the first time I feel that we’ve really achieved that. It’s an amalgam of things learned on the first three records,” he says.

It’s not only the music: it’s Homme’s new status as a celebrity that riles them as well as his much publicised sacking of Queens co-founder and bass player Nick Oliveri last year.

“We’re gonna have detractors: there’s gonna be some people, you know, there’s nothing that we could do that will take away from their maniacal readiness to attack with Nick gone,” he says resignedly. “We could have been like a fucking Slayer record and they’d be like ’Pshaw! Pretty lightweight, huh?’  But you know, I implore them to eat balls!” 

Queens has always been a band with a revolving door policy for its members and to some extent it is that fluidity and uncertainty that has always lent vitality to the band.

“I feel like the more nebulous Queens of the Stone Age is – from people who play on the album, to the cover art, to the name of the album, to the name of the band – the more freedom exists for us to change, should we feel the need,” says Homme.

As well as a core that includes Homme, A Perfect Circle guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, former Danzig drummer Joey Castillo and  bassist Alain Johannes (replacing Oliveri), guests on the album included Polly Harvey, Garbage singer Shirley Manson and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons.

“We’ve got Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top in the room playing guitar and singing harmonies with Mark Lanegan. I mean God, how often does that happen? I was like wearing diapers during the recording,” Homme enthuses.

Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan joined the band just before Songs For The Deaf and while he reportedly left after the recording of the new album, he has popped up at several shows on the band’s European and US dates.

But while the departure or non departure of Mark Lanegan is just par for the course, the sacking of Nick Oliveri last year came as a shock to everyone. The statement issued at the time read: “A number of incidents occurring over the last 18 months have led to the decision that Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri can no longer maintain a working partnership in the band.”

Oliveri hit back, claiming that the original intention of the band had been compromised. “The concept was simple,” Oliveri said on his website. “A rock band: selfless, mindless, ego-free, unprotected, about danger, sex and no bull rock and roll. You know what happens when a pure and original rock band gets polluted, poisoned by hunger for power and by control issues? Things get really out of control.

“The strongest leaders are chosen by their followers, not self-appointed. The best frontmen are chosen by their fans. And whatever happened to loyalty?”

Then, only a few weeks after this, Oliveri and Homme were spotted together at a gig. Oliveri then started telling everyone who would listen that he really really wanted back into Queens; he admitted that he had “fucked up” and was prepared to do anything to reclaim his old job.

“I told him last time I was hanging out with him, ‘If anything falls through and you need somebody, you know where your bass player is, dude — you know where the bass player for that band is. So pick up the phone,’” he told Billboard magazine. “It ain’t about a money gig thing for me – I know which band I play bass in.”

Rumours abounded that he had been sacked for his penchant for party chemicals(something denied by Homme) with Oliveri himself claiming that he had left because Josh had sacked Mark Lanegan without telling anyone.

“Mark wasn’t sacked,” insists Homme. “It just so happened that the recording of the new album coincided with the release of Mark’s solo record (Bubblegum) and he wanted to go off and promote that.”

Homme further claimed that it was the band themselves who had been behind a campaign of disinformation, spreading rumours about the departure of Lanegan. So if Lanegan wasn’t sacked, why would Oliveri leave if this wasn’t the case? If anyone was in on the ‘joke’ then surely it was he?

Even now, almost a year on,  the reasons are unclear and when pressed on the point, Homme retreats behind vagueness and a professed – and no doubt very genuine – affection for the man. Like Sid Vicious, Oliveri’s role in Queens was more than just his ability to play a few basslines: he was in many ways the soul of the band. No matter how serious things got – and with the addition of the gravel voiced Lanegan to the band there was definitely a dark counterweight to the lighter songs of Josh Homme – the fact that there was a bald guy with a beard playing bass stark naked tended to stop things from getting too A Level. Offstage he was fond of a small sherry after dinner, as it were. One look at him and you knew that he was a past master at lighting his own farts.

While nobody doubts that he could be a royal pain in the arse to have around 24/7, Nick remains a popular guy with fans, and with other bands and with all the members of QOTSA.

“Well because Nick is the realest motherfucker in rock’n’roll,” says Josh. “There’s Lemmy, then there’s…I dunno, I’m scouting around for somebody in rock right now, a contemporary, man, that is as undeniably…(words fail) I love him, man.”

But would you have him back in the band?

“I never say never. But I’m also the kind of guy that will always stand on his own two feet and get up when he’s knocked down. The only time I won’t get up is when I’m dead. And so we all need to stand up, because that’s what I’m about. And Nick is that way to.”

All this raises the question as to whether Queens Of The Stone Age is a band or Josh Homme plus some musicians. He thinks hard: “I think this is the most collaborative record that I’ve ever made – notwithstanding The Desert Sessions, which is ONLY everybody. Songs For The Deaf I made more or less by myself and that experience was not good for me because it was like being left alone. We worked with an outsider on Songs For The Deaf and the first thing he said was ‘ I wanna study your vibe and then I can perfect it’. And I was like…FUCK! So after he was fired it was all about trying to get back to where we were at originally.”

Nevertheless, that illustrates that while you’re not exactly a control freak, you do like to call the shots and say who is in and who is out.

“I think people have a perception that I steer the ship like a Nazi general and that that is the most important role. But it’s not. It’s a whole family of artists that includes Chris Goss, Ween, Alain Johannes. And my role includes a lot of the stuff that sucks. We have a saying in the band: You fire yourself, but I tell you.” 

Perhaps there would be fewer detractors were it not for Homme’s illustrious rock’n’roll past. 

It’s said that although in their day The Velvet Underground only sold a few thousand albums, everyone who bought a copy was inspired to go out and form a band of their own. The same could be said of Kyuss.

Formed in 1990 by vocalist John Garcia, guitarist Homme, bassist Oliveri, and drummer Brant Bjork, Kyuss (named after a character from Dungeons & Dragons) played a number of legendary ‘desert jams’ in and around their home town of Palm Desert, California.

“Sometimes they were so beautiful that you’ve never seen anything like it,” recalls Josh. “Sometimes someone was firing a shotgun on acid or some Mexican gang members were throwing someone onto the bonfire.”

At one show, Oliveri was so Taken by the mood that he smashed up his bass at the end of the second song and didn’t have a spare or another one that he could borrow. Doh!

Their 1991 debut Wretch was poor, but the follow up Blues For The Red Sun  – produced by Masters Of Reality frontman Chris Goss – is a classic slab of space rock, blues and classic metal. Lost in the maelstrom of grunge and the death throes of big hair metal, neither Blues nor its equally good major label follow up Welcome To Sky Valley registered much outside of a small but vociferous clique of fanatical fans.

They were a truly awe inspiring live band, but the tensions within the band between Oliveri (who left and was replaced by ex-Obsessed bassist Scott Reeder) and then between Garcia and Homme meant that they were not destined for the long haul.

“I felt that in Kyuss we were so fiercely defending something that  when we looked up we said ‘Fuck!’ and realised that we were painted into a corner of our own making,” says Josh. “I loved Kyuss, I wouldn’t change a moment of my time in that band but I left because I loved it and I wanted to preserve it by destroying it.”

The dissolution of Kyuss in 1995 resulted in a confused period for Josh: he relocated to Seattle where he joined  The Screaming Trees as second guitarist. By 1997 he had rekindled his friendship with Nick Oliveri (who had been playing in the legendary sleaze-punk band the Dwarves under the name Rex Everything) and  Alfredo Hernandez, who briefly replaced Brant Bjork as Kyuss drummer in the band’s dying days. They returned to the Palm Desert region and created what became the earliest manifestation of Queens Of The Stone Age.

It was an incredible U-turn for Homme: where Kyuss was – even during their short tenure with Elektra records – a defiantly underground band, the first self-titled self-financed Queens Of the Stone Age album had a ravenous eye on the mainstream. To this day Kyuss has a devoted posthumous cult following and for many of these true believers, the MTV-friendly approach of Queens Of the Stone Age is apostasy. From the get-go, Josh has taken a perverse delight in rubbing the purists up the wrong way: even the choice of name with its allusions to 50s Roger Corman b-pictures on one hand and Freddie Mercury et al on the other is just as camp as a pink campsite for Shirley Bassey impersonators on every level.

“It’ll be interesting if they can say the name ‘Queens of the Stone Age’ to their friends,” Homme said at the time, meaning the “homophobic rednecks” he used to see at Kyuss shows, the thickos who started using the word “gay” as a general derogatory term.

Josh admits to a slight unease at his new status as a ‘celebrity’: people who have never heard a note of Queens Of The Stone Age’s music now know him as part of that vague aristocracy of people who are famous for being famous. The fact that he is part of a ‘rock couple’ with Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle helps to keep him in the gossip columns.

“That’s the part that’s so hard,” he says. “It’s only good for collaborating with other artists and for getting a table in a restaurant. My personality is not geared for it. I feel like I give enough through the music and if you want extra, you’re not going to get it without a fight. I don’t like people knowing about me. Some things are private…y’know, fuck off”

He has yet to smash a camera or attack an reporter from one of those Celebrities Behaving Badly shows. He is aware that intrusions into his private life go with the job: “I’m not complaining because I understand that. See, the ’suck’ part of being a musician is extremely small. The ‘suck’ part of being a roofer is extremely large. I’ve done both things. I went from a hard working job to working hard at this job and I understand and remember that. I just love to play and I love people and to me things have just got more simple as time goes on.”

It’s always ironic, particularly at he moment when the A list of rock is so sorely depleted – only Metallica, U2 and REM are bigger, with Foo Fighters, Velvet Revolver and Audioslave on an even par -  that Queens Of The Stone Age should be taking brickbats for being successful. The sad truth is that the purists and the true believers need a band like Queens more than they will ever need them. 

“I doubt that some of our detractors would have the balls to do what we’ve done, because it’s not easy. I think you have to humble yourself at the altar of rock’n’roll. You put the music first and realise that you’re not entitled to play music. It’s a luxury, a gift, you’ve got to be really careful. You spit in the face of music and you will be gone. Music is a whole series of steep stairs on the way up but it’s a fireman’s pole on the way down…don’t touch the pole.” 

Filed under: Classic Rock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Josh Homme, Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, STONER ROCK