1,000 years of pop

Suppose you had to sum up 1,000 years of popular music in a couple of hours worth of songs. Which would you choose?

That’s the task Richard Thompson set himself when Playboy magazine asked various musicians to pick their top ten songs of the millennium in 1999. While most of those asked didn’t go back much further than their own lifetimes, Thompson decided he’d call Playboy’s bluff and do a real thousand-year selection. It wasn’t printed.

Thompson is currently touring the UK with his latest choice of songs, which range from medieval madrigals and ‘colloquial Renaissance Italian dance music’ (you can really dance to it, as it happens), via Richard the Lionheart, Henry Purcell and W D Yeats, to Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall – and all that before he even starts on the last hundred years.

In London last night, he had Stick (brother of Brownie) McGhee’s ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-Oh-Dee’ stand for the rock ‘n’ roll canon. The Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ (reputedly the first piece of Indian-influenced western pop music after Ray Davies was inspired by fishermen chanting outside his hotel window on a trip to the east) represented the 1960s; Abba’s ‘Money, Money, Money’ the 1970s; the Korgis’ ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ the 1980s; and – here it gets a bit weird – Nelly Furtado’s ‘Maneater’, complete with medieval church Latin interlude, brought us up to the present.

Encoring with a medley that climaxed with ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ put the Beatles – justifiably, I think – at the top of Thompson’s charts. But if I had to pick one song that will still be featuring in selections in another 1,000 years, Cole Porter’s 1932 classic, ‘Night and Day’, which he once said had been inspired by a Moroccan call to prayer, and has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to U2, would be a choice I could happily live with.

Virgin Killer: ban this image now!

You can find the Scorpions' Virgin Killer image of a naked girl that has been causing all the fuss 32 years after it appeared as an album cover by doing a simple google search, if you're so inclined. You should even be able to access it on the Scorpions' Wikipedia page again without any problems now that the Internet Watch Foundation has lifted its ban on the page, which was adhered to by most big UK internet service providers.

Unfortunately no one is currently proposing a ban on the image that replaced that of the girl, which I'm sure you'll agree is a disturbing picture of 1970s' rock idols at the peak of their perverted powers, with no redeeming 'artistic' context of any description. It's enough to make you thank The X-Factor for giving us the straightforward kiddie-porn of Eoghan and Diana and, gawd help us, JL 'it's just like the Beatles' S.

Feeling good

Yo Obama!

Banks of Marble

Les Rice doesn’t appear on Wikipedia and if you Google his name the top search results come back with ‘the best tattooist in Sydney’, who may well be a great guy but isn’t the one I have in mind. Back in the 1940s, though, the Les Rice I’m referring to wrote a song that’s worth revisiting today in the light of the bankers’ greed that has been bringing half the world’s economy to its knees.

Pete Seeger recorded the song, ‘Banks of Marble’, on at least two albums; and in a note in one of his songbooks he wrote that Rice ‘farms across the Hudson from me, near Newburgh [Orange County, New York]. Like most small farmers, he was getting intolerably squeezed by the big companies which sold him all his fertiliser, insecticide and equipment, and the big companies that dictated to him the prices he would get for his produce. Out of that squeeze came this song.’

I've travelled round this country
From shore to shining shore.
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw.

I saw the weary farmer,
Ploughing sod and loam;
I heard the auction hammer
A-knocking down his home.

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for.

I saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore.
I heard the bosses saying:
'Got no work for you no more'.

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the seaman sweated for.

I saw the weary miner,
Scrubbing coal dust from his back;
I heard his children cryin':
'Got no coal to heat the shack'.

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for.

I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land;
I prayed we'd get together,
And together make a stand.

Then we'd own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door;
And we'd share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for.

Tramp the dirt down

Today, Bastille Day, is forever associated in my mind with the beheading of Margaret Thatcher. For it was on this day in 1989 that my aunt, who is French, set up a giant guillotine at the front of her house in Southampton to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. I’m not sure what the neighbours made of the tricolour flying in southern England. But they came to the party, some of them got very drunk on French wine, and some of them joined in when the family (or at least those parts of it who didn't secretly vote for her; the rest sat quietly with their knitting) carried out a ritual beheading of the then prime minister.

That was the same year that Elvis Costello released Spike, which I still think is possibly his best album and certainly contains some of his best and most varied songwriting. As well as the spine-tingling anti-capital punishment ballad about Derek Bentley, ‘Let Him Dangle’, there’s ‘Veronica’, ‘Coal Train Robberies’ and ‘Any King’s Shilling’, to name but five songs that still have the power to move me today.

And then there’s ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ (‘When England was the whore of the world Margaret was her madam / And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tarmacadam’) with its chilling refrain:

Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave

Because there’s one thing I know I'd like to live long enough to savour

That's when they finally put you in the ground

I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

People who weren’t adults at the time sometimes find it hard to believe the extent to which Thatcher divided Britain (and families, including mine). I won’t tramp the dirt down on her, or anyone else’s, grave. But the optimist in me still hopes that I’ll live long enough to see, one day, her social and political legacy well and truly buried.

Smoking the celestial dream

Jimmy Cliff is playing in Finsbury Park later this afternoon as part of the Greater London Authority's Rise festival. One of Boris Johnson's first acts as mayor was to strip the free event of its anti-racist theme, a decision that led to the withdrawal of £60,000 in trade union sponsorship but was greeted with delight by the new BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook.

Of course any multicultural event still carries an implicit anti-racist message and Bojo hasn't invited the BNP to set up a stall - yet - so it's still worth trying to get along. Jimmy Cliff did as much as anyone to bring ska and reggae to an international audience, starring in Perry Henzell's iconic film The Harder They Come, currently revived as a stage musical at the Playhouse Theatre; and there's a huge range of other acts, all free.

I reviewed The Harder They Come before its West End transfer in a piece called 'Guns and Ganja', which you can read here. And if you want to read even more from me about the blessed 'erb, my article 'Smoking the Celestial Dream', from the June/July issue of Red Pepper, is now available in full on their website,

Hail to the thief: Radiohead rip-off

Why do we put up with it? I paid £98.45 for two tickets to last night’s Radiohead concert at London’s Victoria Park (great music, lovely lightshow and a muggy head this morning), roughly what a couple would get as weekly jobseeker’s allowance. That’s £85 for the tickets, an extra £8.50 ‘service charge’ and an extra £4.95 postage. I think they charge another fiver per ticket if there’s an ‘r’ in the month, so we were fortunate it’s June.

For that we got one hour, 59 minutes and 35 seconds of Radiohead, with the sound turned off 25 seconds short of the licence-requirement curfew of 10.30pm (fair enough, it’s a weekday at an outdoor venue in a residential area). There was one support act (Bat for Lashes, a cross between Bjork and Portishead), who might have played for an hour if the power hadn’t packed in part way through; and a near three-hour void for anyone who turned up when the gates opened during which the only thing to do was eat, drink and buy merchandise.

And get searched by security on the way in, of course.

These sorts of events have progressed from bans on people bringing glass or cans into the arena into a wholesale prohibition on any personal food, drink and funny-looking cigarettes. And the searches have progressed from perfunctory checks that you’re not carrying crates of alcohol, wholesale quantities of MDMA or an Uzi machine pistol under your jacket into something one stage short of a full-body strip search.

One man was made to finish his Pret A Manger BLT before he was permitted through the barriers. We had to empty our bottles of water onto the ground before being permitted to proceed on the grounds that the rules of the gig provided for only one unopened 500ml bottle per person and we’d taken a sip from ours while waiting to be searched.

I pointed out that the rule at the last event I’d been to in Victoria Park (Love Music Hate Racism in April) had been that you couldn’t bring unopened bottles in and that the stewards confiscated the top off your permitted bottle. (To make them less effective as missiles, supposedly, as at football matches. The fact that you could buy bottles, with tops, once you were inside the barriers rather undermined that claim.)

If they are going to have rules designed to make us give our money to the stallholders selling food and drink at these things, can’t they at least be honest about it and make the rip-off strategy consistent?

Huggin' up the original Monkey Man

It’s getting on for 30 years since I first got my body moving to 'Monkey Man' at a bonkers 2 Tone concert featuring the Specials and a bunch of booted-up skinheads sporting Anti-Nazi League regalia. I’ve heard it done by a few ska bands over the years, and I love Amy Winehouse’s more recent live performances of it (you can find a lot of clips of them on YouTube).

But tonight was the first time I’d seen it done live by Freddie ‘Toots’ Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals fame, the man who gave that and many other ska classics to the world and who is widely credited with inventing the word ‘reggae’ in his 1968 song ‘Do the Reggay’. All I can say is that for a man who is knocking on retirement age (he was born in 1945), he looks, sounds and moves real good.

Aye aye aye, aye aye aye
Tell you baby, you huggin' up the big monkey man

Off to bed now – and I’m going to be dancing in my sleep.

Lock me up with Doherty

Pete Doherty and Babyshambles are playing a special comeback gig to celebrate his release from jail at one of my favourite music venues, the Kentish Town Forum, on Tuesday. There are still tickets available at the time of writing, which at £22.50 are a fair bit cheaper than the last London gig Doherty did at Wembley Stadium towards the end of last year. Doherty off the smack and crack is one of the best live performers around (he’s not too bad on it either, though a mite less reliable), so catch him while he's straight. Be warned, though, if you’re over 21: his audience is one of the youngest around and the mosh pit will be full of 14-year-olds.

I’m going to have to miss the gig myself as I’m pre-booked to be blindfolded and tied up in a wheelchair that evening as part of the Battersea Arts Centre’s Burst season. Later, I’m mixing it with the New York performance weirdo Ann Liv Young (sorry, Ann, but the performance is a bit, well, weird) in her ‘high energy explosion of pop songs, movement and mess’. Part of it involves her smearing her naked self with chocolate (or is it ketchup? I forget). The Burst programme says it’s ‘a powerful, open honesty’; my daughter insists it’s soft porn. I’m easy either way.

I’m paying my political dues before my quick Burst of debauchery (there’s a month of it to come, with A Trashy Multi-Artform Bingo Blowout Party at the old town hall that is the Battersea Arts Centre tonight) by turning out for the ‘1968 and all that’ event at London’s Conway Hall today. And tomorrow I’ve got to be in Morden by 8am for the ‘6n6’ swim and run duathlon. Someone should have locked me up with Pete Doherty.

Cliff Richard and the real spirit of '68

History isn’t always written by the winners. There’s an exhibition at the National Theatre at the moment that consists of photographs and newspaper front pages from 1968. While the photographs, in the main, tell the familiar story of a world in revolt, the newspaper cuttings serve as a reminder that for all that it has been the politics of the left in ’68 that have dominated the 40th anniversary media coverage (give or take the occasional nod towards Enoch Powell and his ‘river Tiber foaming with much blood’), you could paint a very different picture of what really happened in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, where the right fought back and the left didn’t win.

One of the front pages on display at the National features the huge demonstration in Paris on 30 May 1968 in support of the French president, Charles de Gaulle. It was quite likely the biggest demonstration of the year, not only in France but anywhere in the world. And of course it was De Gaulle who won a landslide victory in the election he called for the end of June. So there's at least a case to be made that '68 should be remembered not as the annus mirabilis of revolt but as the apogee of reaction.

I was set to thinking about this by the news that Cliff Richard is demanding that he be awarded the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest trophy retrospectively for his song ‘Congratulations’, which came second at the time. This follows a Spanish television documentary, which suggested that only a vote-rigging plot by the dictator Franco prevented Richard from winning.

The idea of Cliff Richard, of all people, being conspired against by a fascist dictator in the midst of all the turmoil of the time is just the sort of surreal snippet that would have appealed to the ‘Marxist, Groucho Tendency’ of ’68. So maybe it’s time to revisit a few other cultural phenomena from the year of ‘les évènements’ and see what else we ought to be marking in the anniversary commemorations. A couple of multiple-choice questions as starters for ten, then, to see how you shape up on your cultural studies.

What was Britain’s best-selling album of ’68?
a) The Sound of Music
b) The Beatles’ White Album
c) Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding

Which of these singles sold the most copies in 1968?
a) Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin
b) I Pretend by Des O’Connor
c) Lady Madonna by the Beatles

The answer, in both cases, is that their sales match the order in which they appear above.

Jay Z, Rolf Harris and Glastonbury

My favourite piece of Glastonbury memorabilia is a Rolf Harris autograph. A friend got it for me on the first day of the festival in 1993, one of those golden years when the sun never stopped shining and everyone was praying for rain (the following year was even hotter). Rolf opened the event to a huge cheer with Jake the Peg (diddle iddle iddle um) and spent the next hour or so leading the best sing-along ever to grace the Pyramid stage. Forget about Robbie Williams and the crowd singing Angels in the mud in1998, or Oasis and Wonderwall in 1995 and 2004. You haven’t earned any Glastonbury medals worth boasting about if you weren’t there to sing along to Two Little Boys. (Go on, admit it, you know all the words, don’t you?)

I think this is at the root of Noel Gallagher’s outburst about Jay Z being one of the reasons why Glastonbury hasn’t sold out yet this year. The Oasis frontman reckons hip-hop is ‘wrong’ for the festival, which he says was ‘built on a tradition of guitar music’. Really he’s jealous that more people know the words to Rolf Harris songs than they do his own. But he wouldn’t look very cool slagging off Rolf playing at Glastonbury, so he’s had a go at Jay Z instead.

Of course Gallagher is talking nonsense anyway. Glastonbury was built on a tradition of musical eclecticism – of which Oasis and all the other guitar bands (how can you lump all ‘guitar bands’ together?) are just a part. On Noel’s reckoning, there wouldn’t be a place for dance acts like the Orb, Orbital, the Chemical Brothers, Roni Size, De La Soul, Leftfield or Groove Armada, all of them stars of past Glastonburys. Or women artists like Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Bjork, not to mention the dangerously hip-hoppish Nelly Furtado, Kelis and Macy Gray. Or the old-time novelty acts like Rod Stewart, Paul McCartney, Isaac Hayes and Noel’s mate Robbie. Or, ahem, Dame Shirley Bassey, the English National Opera and James Blunt.

Jay Z is Glastonbury to a ‘t’. Get him to duet with Rolf and the remaining tickets will sell out in minutes. A hip-hop Tie Me Kangaroo Down anyone?

Dread beat and blood

The dub poet and radical icon of black British resistance culture, Linton Kwesi Johnson, who appeared at the Barbican on 9 March, has his own take on the guns that are taking such a toll in black communities across the world. In Britain, he puts it down to an increasing materialism and the shrinking of collective political alternatives. And he questions why the police find it so difficult to deal with the supply of guns to those communities in the first place. ‘Why is it so easy for young people to get hold of these guns?’ he asks the audience at a concert that marks that start of his fourth decade of recording.

For people of my generation, many of whom cut their political teeth in the anti-racist mobilisations of the 1970s, LKJ is a symbol of much that was best about the left during those times – not the least of which was an openness to all cultures and colours and an utter determination to stand together against racists and fascists of all descriptions.

Some of dem say dey a nigger hater
Some of dem say dey a black beater
Some of dem say dey a black stabber
Some of dem say dey a Paki basher

Fascists on de attack?
Don’t worry bout dat
Fascists on de attack?
We will fight dem back
Fascists on de attack?
We will counter-attack
Fascists on de attack?
We will drive them back!

(‘Fight dem back’, from Forces of Victory, 1979)

My daughter Rachel was born within a couple of weeks of the huge anti-National Front mobilisation in Lewisham in 1977, at which I was knocked senseless by the police and carted off on a stretcher but more importantly the NF attempt to march was broken up and defeated. Her first demo (complete with ‘Babies Against the Nazis’ banner) was the 80,000-strong Anti-Nazi League march through east London, which took place 30 years ago this April.

These mass demonstrations and the campaigning that went on around them helped turn the fascist tide, and despite the recent electoral gains by the British National Party in places like Barking, the London into which Rachel’s son was born a few months ago is an immeasurably more open and tolerant city than the one that greeted her back then. Sometimes, it’s good to celebrate our victories as well as preparing for the fights to come.

We’re the forces of victory
An we comin’ right through
We’re the forces of victory
Now what you gonna do?

Guns and ganja

Guns and ganja at the Barbican for The Harder They Come, the Theatre Royal Stratford East’s stage musical version of Perry Henzell’s 1972 film featuring Jimmy Cliff. The guns weren’t real but some of the ganja was. Either that or the Barbican backstage crew can produce some remarkably good sensory effects, with the sweet smell of the sacred ’erb wafting across the audience from the stage.

‘Fifteen minute ganja break,’ announced the Rasta ‘trader’ with the monster spliff at the interval – and at least a few of the audience made their way to the Barbican lakeside to take him up on his suggestion.

The Harder They Come is an exhilarating reggae stomp through the Jamaica of a half-century ago, loosely based around the true story of outlaw anti-hero Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ (bad, hot) Martin, who died in a shootout with police in 1948. The original film, by a (white) Jamaican director with an all-Jamaican cast, was the first full-length feature film to be made on the island focusing on the realities of life for its inhabitants; it is widely credited with taking reggae music onto a world stage. The Barbican musical, which runs until 5 April, is blessed with an energetic and talented cast and two of the sweetest, most soulful singers performing in London today, in Rolan Bell as Ivan and Joanna Francis as Elsa, his girlfriend.

There’s no doubt where your sympathies are meant to lie in this tale. Ivan may have shot two policemen but it’s him who’s the hero who’d ‘rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave’, in the words of the song. A Caribbean Robin Hood, give or take a bit of ganja.

But does it glamourise guns, which seems to be a question you are required to answer about any black creative project that features or mentions the things these days?

No more so than (for example) westerns is the obvious answer, a point that the production makes implicitly by screening a particularly bloody Spaghetti western bar fight and shootout during the ganja break.

Wembleyshambles

Kate Moss didn’t turn up but Pete Doherty did and Babyshambles turned in a set last night that made it worth the trip to that graveyard of English footballing aspirations called Wembley. (I said nothing about the Croatia game here last week and don’t intend to do so now. But Belarus, Andorra and Kazakhstan – the ninth biggest country in the world, bet you didn’t know that . . . aren’t you just itching for them to show us how it’s done in the World Cup qualifiers?)

I was told a possibly apocryphal tale by two lads in the Sports Bar across from the Wembley complex that the last time they’d been to a Babyshambles gig, on the Jools Holland show, Doherty’s failure to show resulted in his replacement with James Blunt of all people. Doherty himself remarked from the Wembley Arena stage: ‘They said that QPR and Babyshambles would never play at Wembley.’ Which might have been a good joke if it wasn’t for the fact that QPR have played there at least four times to my knowledge, including twice in the same year in 1982, when the FA Cup final against Spurs went to a replay.

But let’s not begrudge Doherty his moment of gloating. Given another chance to prove he can perform after a series of drug-induced disasters, he and Babyshambles seized the opportunity. Which is more than be said for the shambles of a football team who failed to turn up last Wednesday.