Nick Drake tribute

Way To Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake, Barbican Hall, London, 22 January 2010

‘Fame is but a fruit tree,’ wrote Nick Drake. The motif was picked up in the sylvan stage décor of entwined branches, and Green Gartside (ex-Scritti Politti) gave us his breathy version of ‘Fruit Tree’ early in this tribute gig curated by Drake’s erstwhile producer Joe Boyd. Drake’s fame has indeed ramified into every corner of our musical life. Many in the sell-out audience weren’t even born when Drake died in obscurity in 1974.

Vocalists took one number each. Krystle Warren was feisty in ‘Time Has Told Me’. With four other soloists as backing, Teddy Thompson delivered a rambunctious ‘Poor Boy’. Robyn Hitchcock was wonderfully mannered in his acid-rock take on ‘Parasite’. Meanwhile, Vashti Bunyan, with her little-girl voice, struggled to assert herself in ‘Which Will’ and Kirsty Almeida swished her gypsy skirt distractingly through ‘Cello Song’.

With his four decades in the business, Joe Boyd must have an address book to die for. Over the years so many high-calibre people have name-checked Drake as an influence. I’ll be honest – given these facts, I found the line-up of soloists a tad underwhelming. Perhaps only Nick Drake can sing Nick Drake. For me the real virtues of the night lay in the band and orchestra and their opening out of Drake’s complex guitar parts. In a eulogy, Boyd paid fitting tribute to the much-missed Robert Kirby, whose delicate arrangements were brought to life here. The house band was anchored by Danny Thompson, the one person on stage who’d actually played with Drake. His double bass rightly prominent in the sound mix, he duetted with the brilliant jazz pianist Zoe Rahman as she switched effortlessly from Debussyan arabesques to free jazz stylings reminiscent of Chris McGregor (piano-player on the original ‘Poor Boy’ recording). Their chemistry, in a number like 'One Of These Things First', shows where the Drake industry should really be heading.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Michele Ari

"I wanted to perform for people. That much I knew. Any time I’d see a performance, I found myself with a great feeling of longing and belonging. I knew it was what I should be doing." This is American singer Michele Ari explaining how she became a musician. At a recent gig in Chicago someone asked her, "How do you just get up there and perform like that?" Ari, who, by her own admission, had just executed "a few rolls on the floor and other moves unbecoming of a lady", had her answer ready: "I don’t think about it. I’m here to have fun. If I think about it, if I worry about the possibility of looking stupid, it’s all over."

Ari takes her inspiration from the late 70s and early 80s, music she finds "unique, rebellious, spirited and forward-thinking": Elvis Costello, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Clash, The Damned. "Give me Psychedelic Furs, Kate Bush, Robyn Hitchcock and I am content and inspired," she says. "They all just resonate with me lyrically, musically and in style, ideals and attitudes. They are all ‘different.’ There’s nothing cookie cutter about any of them. Creating music that is not ‘faddish’ or could soon become irrelevant is important to me." "Faddish" and "irrelevant", in Ari’s book, means someone like Tila Tequila, the MTV reality show starlet.

Many of her fans are old punk rockers, who tell her that she fills a void in today’s music. "When I look around for contemporaries I struggle to find them". There is a classic directness, a renunciation of artifice in her work, which perhaps explains why her first album 85th and Nowhere was recorded to analogue and mixed to digital, just like Buena Vista Social Club. She likes things "a bit primitif", as she puts it. That debut recording, described by Ari as "a love story from start to stop, cover to cover and inside and out", attracted attention in the UK – though sadly we have yet to see her tour on this side of the Pond. She believes there’s more acceptance of left-field artists in Britain than the US, hence her fanbase here. I was drawn in by one song on the album, ‘Nevermind’, and its opening lines: ‘Woke up in last night’s make-up, wearing last night’s dress’. "It’s definitely a song about loneliness," she admits, "a bit of madness and the downward slide you can go on when you lose your integrity in a futile pursuit".

She’s lived all over – Florida, Chicago, Atlanta. Now she’s based in Nashville, but not because she’s on a Country music jag: "There’s a lot of music going on here every night of the week. So, if you need to get out and get some juices flowing it’s very easy to do. It’s a place for me to hang my hat, hone my skills, find musicians to work with and places to record, all of which I have done and am doing. In that way being here has affected my own music because it’s rich with the resources that I need."

Ari’s feelings about Britain are reflected in a couple of songs on Mal a’propos, her new EP: ‘Atom Bombs’ and ‘Transatlantic Love Affair’. The new work she describes as "cleaner than 85th. It’s more pop and punk, though not a blend of the two". On ‘6 a.m.’, the opening track, she seems to be heading for rock-disco territory, another retro genre.

As for that French title, which she translates as "out of place"… Is that how you feel, I asked, like you don’t fit in?

"24/7. Don’t you?" was her comeback.

Photograph by Richard Call

Michele Ari on Bandcamp

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Rufus Wainwright biography

THERE WILL BE RAINBOWS: A BIOGRAPHY OF RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Kirk Lake (ORION) ISBN 978-0-7528-9838-4 Hardcover. 291 pages

The family is a perfect incubator for talent. It can also be a prison from which we struggle to escape all life long. Rufus Wainwright, flamboyant offspring of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, has experienced both sides of this conundrum.

Kirk Lake’s new biography of the star does rather more than it says on the tin. It’s actually a family biography, with Rufus at the centre (which is undoubtedly where he wants to be). Loudon emerges in unflattering light, though the picture is no harsher than the self-portrait he paints in his own lyrics. Martha struggles in her brother’s shadow until grabbing the attention she deserves. They all write disobliging songs about each other, criticise (and envy) each other’s work, then they all gather on stage at Carnegie Hall for a Christmas truce. It’s fiercely competitive, but out of this "algebraic equation" (Martha’s phrase) comes superb work from every family member, and Rufus’s is some of the best.

Lake demonstrates how Wainwright’s sense of difference as a gay man in a mostly straight business fuels his music. From the off, his frame of reference (show tunes, cabaret, opera) was way outside what his rock’n’roll contemporaries were doing. Out of his skull on crystal meth, convinced he’s a great artist, he pushes himself to the experiential limits because great artists thrive on unhappiness. All this would be insufferable hubris – as hubristic as his determination to recreate Judy Garland’s 1961 stage act – were it not that he probably is a great artist.

Lake’s perceptive analyses of individual albums make you want to go and seek them out and his control of detail is enviable (who'd have thought, for instance, that bassist Pat Donaldson relocated to France to become a professional clown?). The footnotes may beckon you down obscure literary byways but the focus always remains sharp in this impressive biography.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Olivia Chaney

Singer Olivia Chaney is on a distinctive musical journey and, increasingly, people are sitting up and taking notice. I’ve caught this lady four times in the last year and every time she’s doing a different show. One month she’s mezzo-soprano soloist in a new classical piece from the Camberwell Composers’ Collective; the next she’s combining Monteverdi, Joni Mitchell and English traditional songs in a Topic Records anniversary concert on London’s South Bank. I asked her how she weaves together these different musics: "In my solo shows I’m trying to point out that they’re not disparate. Although I’m pretty analytical about what I do and trying to carve out a sound, it does come naturally. It’s actually a lot to do with taste – that’s the music I love."

Chaney grew up in Oxford picking out tunes on the piano and playing boogie-woogie with her dad, an academic. "I’ve always been an improviser, before I learned to read music". Happily, that spontaneity wasn’t lost during the formal training she received at the Royal Academy and the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh. You get the feeling that she thrives on dissolving one genre into another. She believes passionately that "it’s important to break down barriers and reach as big an audience as possible".

Latterly her journey has taken her back to English traditional music, via people like Bert Jansch who rediscovered it in the ’60s. "I wasn’t popping down to Cecil Sharp House as a teenager," she admits. "I grew up with the revivalists. But I’d like to think that my projects, the collaborations with other musicians, the solo concerts are about searching for some sort of ‘purity’ which is inherent in traditional songs, the ones that survive." Directness, immediacy, timelessness: these are the qualities she prizes in folk music. With eyes tight shut as she accompanies herself on harmonium, she seems deep inside the song, where lesser singers merely skim the surface.

At music college she felt pressure to produce a big operatic sound, but in some repertoire "it didn’t feel natural enough, ‘me’ enough, honest enough". Despite acquiring some pretty high-profile admirers in the classical world, Chaney still frets over the question: "Are they going to hate how I’m ‘folkifying’ everything?" She needn’t worry. In an environment where drum’n’bass star Goldie gets premiered at the Proms, even the stuffed shirts of the classical establishment are loosening their ties.

She is about to embark on her biggest venture yet: a world tour with electronica and trip-hop pioneers Zero 7. "Someone recommended me," she explains. "Surprisingly, they’re huge fans of what I do, my solo singing. They pride themselves on being eclectic: Henry Binns [one half of the band’s core membership] has very open ears to sparser, more traditional stuff." She hopes to bring something more direct and earthy to their sound but recognises "it’ll be a fascinating challenge to maintain my identity and my artistic search within quite a ‘poppy’, commercial thing."

Meanwhile her own songwriting has been put on hold. She’s so steeped in the singer-songwriter genre (Dylan, Neil Young, Sandy Denny are all high on her playlist) that she’s a bit intimidated by what’s been achieved by others. "A friend of mine once said, ‘If you try and be original, that’s exactly the time when you won’t be’." So she’s waiting for the songs to come as naturally as the leaves to a tree. Doubtless some will find their way onto the solo album she plans to start recording shortly. Expect to see guest contributions from her numerous collaborators over the years, a colourful range of musicians spanning early music, jazz and folk.

Oh, and did I mention that Ms Chaney has just made her professional acting debut in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida at the Globe Theatre? The poet Lorca described life as "a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads"; Chaney’s life as performer seems to be just that.

Olivia Chaney official website

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel) Nov/Dec 2009

Judy Dyble CD

Talking With Strangers (BRILLIANT/FiXiT, 2009, CD)

The original vocalist of Fairport Convention, part of the loose assemblage around Robert Fripp that would become King Crimson, one half of Trader Horne: you can’t mistake Judy Dyble’s clear, very English diction. She was never going to be a torch singer, but on this album she brings to perfection her talent for the miniature. Julianne Regan, Jacqui McShee, Celia Humphris (yes, she of Trees) pitch in too – and that’s just backing vocals. Fripp supplies ‘soundscapes’ and sundry guitar parts. Although the contributors were scattered around the world, thanks to smooth production you’d think they were in the same studio.

Several tracks impress, but Dyble leaves the best for last. ‘Harpsong’, checking in at over 19 minutes, is a résumé of her career to date, the eclectic style mirroring her successive incarnations. Starting in her gentlest pastoral vein, it opens out into a free-form instrumental jam reminiscent of early Crimson, all distorted guitar riffs and wailing saxes, before the first verse returns, now with past tenses updated to present, as if her life’s come full circle. The lyrics, clearly autobiographical, reference Sixties hedonism, her long sabbatical from music as she diverted into librarianship, bereavement, and her welcome return to performance. ‘So much music fills the air, and I’m still busy growing,’ she sings: Dyble’s optimism is heartening.

Judy Dyble on the Web

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Marianne Faithfull at St Luke's

Live at LSO St Luke’s, London, 18 February 2009; broadcast BBC Four, 24 April 2009 (photo by John Chase)

Still beautiful at 62, Marianne is in town to promote her new album Easy Come, Easy Go. She’s recording a TV special before an invited audience and I’m flattered when an invite comes my way.

The audience is packed with industry people and BBC staffers, not enough of her friends and loyal fans for her taste, and she seems nervous, taking a while to connect. A huge jib camera sweeps over the audience, at one point threatening to brain a musician who forgets to duck. “It will all come together,” she assures us midway through. And it does.

‘The Crane Wife’, a cover of The Decemberists, builds to an ominous crescendo. On ‘Solitude’, a homage to Billie Holiday, she uses that lived-in voice to smoochy effect. ‘Hold On, Hold On’ is about a “very naughty girl”, we’re told, and Faithfull should know. An instrumental of ‘Mack The Knife’ – hats off here to the soloist on musical saw – seguës into ‘In Germany Before The War’. Her “decadent moment”, she calls this. Merle Haggard’s ‘Sing Me Back Home’ is a laid-back encore.

Sometimes she has to glance at the sheet music; sometimes she messes up, requiring a retake. But, hey, this was the first public outing for mostly new material, so we forgive. Backed by a versatile 11-piece band and in the presence of producer Hal Willner, she is most confident on her older numbers – the scabrous ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’, the punky ‘Broken English’ and a reconstruction of the original Sixties arrangement of ‘As Tears Go By’.

“We’re all still here,” she muses, gazing out into the audience, as if amazed at her own survival. So many have fallen by the wayside but Faithfull, rejuvenating herself continually by working with younger musicians, remains defiantly of this moment.

Marianne Faithfull on MySpace

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

John Lennon biography

JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE Philip Norman (HARPERCOLLINS)
ISBN 978-0007197415 (hc)/978-0007197422 (sc) Hardcover/softcover. 853 pages

Does the world need another Beatle book? Well, it needs this one, surely the most important since Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head.

At the outset anyone but the most committed Lennon anorak fears information overload. The story begins with the moment of John’s conception "on the kitchen floor" at Newcastle Road, the detail barely relenting until the last five years of his life (skated over in a mere sixty pages). But then you realise Norman’s goal is a kind of real-time biography. By merging what will later be recognised as events of seismic importance in his subject’s life (first meetings with Paul, Brian Epstein, George Martin, Yoko) under a wealth of quotidian and possibly expendable detail, the effect is to reconstruct a life as it is lived, in all its messiness. Benefit of hindsight is applied only sparingly, but tellingly: John’s manic, audience-baiting acrobatics in Hamburg are rightly seen as ‘punk’ sixteen years ahead of the game.

Norman is a fluent writer. Despite its girth, this is an easy read. Avoiding the flashy overwriting so typical of rock biography, he sketches in, often with humour, the marginalia of Sixties showbiz – I love Larry Parnes’s stable of pseudonymous crooners, ‘Marty Wilde’, ‘Vince Eager’, ‘Billy Fury’ – while never losing sight of Lennon’s evolution from troubled child to angry young man to contented house-husband. Magisterial.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Mary Epworth

Mary Epworth seems like a woman whose time has come. But it was only when she put together a new outfit recently, the Jubilee Band, that things started moving her way. Their debut single, ‘The Saddle Song’, attracted the attention of Radio 2’s Steve Lamacq and earned serious airplay. Described by Mary herself as a "pub shanty", the track is both the perfect example of a resurgent folk-inspired English rootsiness and a calling card for a distinctive new voice. A lop-sided march, somewhere between a wedding procession and a funeral cortege, it gets into your head like a Kylie song but – important difference – you don’t feel guilty about humming along.

For several years Mary was gigging around the North London/Home Counties circuit; she provided backing vocals for The Broken Family Band and The Sweeney and fronted Hannah Fallen and Bambino, but the breakthrough eluded her. So she concentrated on refining her writing: "I think I’ve spent too long being a backing vocalist or playing second fiddle, so I’ve got something to prove with my writing". The results will be obvious on her long-gestated debut album, scheduled for spring release. When we meet up in a London pub, I ask Mary why she has held off so long. "I think I was still not quite happy with being whatever my own strange mixture ended up being. I was too concerned with whether it was going to be ‘psych-folk’ or whatever".

Genre labels clearly don’t bother her now. "I’ve always had some kind of weirder songs and then some more straight, classic-sounding songs, like ‘Heal This Dirty Soul’ or ‘Ray Of Sunlight’, and I’ve always been unsure how these things would fit together on an album. But I think now I’ve come to terms with it". Her songwriting reflects her restless curiosity. One demo, ‘Come Back To The Bough’, which I took for a quirky love song, is apparently inspired by Frazer’s Golden Bough: "I’m a big lifelong subscriber to Fortean Times, so I’m really interested in fringe science and also folklore".

Her music draws on her enthusiasm for psychedelic West Coast harmonies – she listens to a lot of ‘sunshine pop’ – and filters it through a southern English sensibility. Shirley Collins is an inspiration; she also loves the acid-folk noodlings of neglected bands like Forest. "I’m just always looking. I’m never really that interested in contemporary music, so I’m always exploring back". Over the years friends have given her mix-tapes. Will Twynham, her bassist, producer and significant other, is an "obsessive record collector." What excites Mary are "the unsung people. There’s always some amazing album that nobody’s talking about from 1971. There’s always more!"

I sense in her what literary critic Harold Bloom called the "anxiety of influence". In a global supermarket of sounds, with eighty years of recorded music on the shelves, she has to emancipate herself from the past and find her own voice. "If I listened to more of something, maybe I’d just be a straight-ahead clone," she reflects. For years she didn’t listen to any other female vocalists. "When I was younger there were a lot of really bad female singer-songwriters about, so I sort of ended up resenting all of them". Then she discovered the Shangri-Las, which got her into female singers. But still "if I feel that somebody is kind of similar to me, then I don’t like it sometimes. Because I’m afraid of being too much like them."

She’s passionate about Gypsy music. Since her teens she’s worked with Moravian singer Ida Kelarova. "She runs workshops where she uses traditional Slovak Gypsy songs, and it’s not like teaching singing, it’s almost like teaching a gospel method where you learn a song and you learn it phonetically. You don’t know what these words mean and you’re taught how a song can be the vessel for whatever you want to express. If you’re actually emotionally engaged when you’re singing, that’s an extremely beautiful experience". Just as there are perils when white men sing the Blues (or blue men sing the Whites), so Mary is suspicious of Western Europeans who do "fancy-dress" Gypsy. "When you’ve seen little 6-year-old kids who can play guitar, violin, every instrument to virtuoso level, it’s really mind-blowing. I love it so much but I wouldn’t even dream of being a pretend Gypsy band". In her song ‘Six Kisses’, by way of homage, she slips in a couple of lyrics in Romany but – she laughs – "nobody ever spots that".

In December 2008 Mary was a guest soloist at the Sandy Denny tribute in London, where she caught the eye and ear of Guardian reviewer Robin Denselow. "It increased people’s awareness about a thousand fold," says Mary. "An amazing night, and a big honour. Already so much has changed." The smart money says there are more changes ahead for Mary Epworth.

Mary Epworth on MySpace
Photo by Andrew Batt

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Welcome

A couple of years ago, over on my other blog, I wrote:

I have a plan, long in gestation, quixotic in ambition, to found a new popular music magazine. It will carry articles combining documented facts with biographical insights, broad cultural context with precise (but not forbiddingly technical) discussion of words and music and their interrelations. In its field of view it will accommodate makers of music and consumers and every mediating jobsworth and technology that comes between them. But though it dares to inhabit the no-man’s land between Brixton Academy and the Oxbridge academy, it won’t be all serious. Provisionally, this magazine, I call it Brush on Drum, adapting a favourite line from one of my favourite artists, Laura Nyro: ‘A rush on rum / of brush and drum’ (New York Tendaberry, 1969). Is anyone with me?

Well, times are perilous for magazine launches, but I thought I’d make a start by laying out some of my own wares; and that’s what you’ll find here. I hope you like it.

(By the way, the header photo shows The Bookhouse Boys, whom I plan to write about shortly.)