| rss2email.ru |
 Удобные штучки  |  Портал о Турции - Турция сегодня  |
 |  Music: Music blog | guardian.co.ukArticles published by guardian.co.uk Music about: Music blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- New music: Erland and the Carnival – Map of an Englishman
A pop song inspired by a Grayson Perry artwork? Yes, and with a rather fine video too
Map of an Englishman – the first single from Erland and the Carnival's second album, Nightingale – is named after a Grayson Perry artwork that hangs in the studio where the band recorded. A mock-Tudor etching, it maps out Perry's prejudices and fears, which inspired Erland Cooper's direct lyrics: "I drew myself an island, of what I am made from." Along with Cooper and drummer David Nock, the Carnival also include former Verve guitarist Simon Tong, who has recently worked with Damon Albarn in the Good, the Bad & the Queen and Gorillaz. Map of an Englishman eschews furrowed-brow seriousness for joyous literate pop. The video's rather lovely too.
Map of an Englishman is released on 28 February
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - What the hell has happened to Razorlight?
Have they auditioned for Pirates of the Caribbean 4? Recruited Jack White and refused to feed him? Or more worryingly, are Johnny Borrell's band the new Sugababes?
Razorlight have always been a deliriously inscrutable band. But a new photograph, released to announce a career-crowning appearance at Guilfest, provokes both open-mouthed (quite literally, in Johnny Borrell's case) awe and genuine concern for their wellbeing.
It's a thing of wonder, isn't it? If you look closely, the guy on the far left could just about pass for a bloated Björn Agren, but a little research reveals that Razorlight appear to be following Sugababes' career-lifespan-optimisation-model in replacing all the members. By this logic we should expect Borrell to shortly follow Agren, Carl Dalemo and Andy Burrows out the door to be replaced by Joe Lean, or perhaps UK Eurovision entrant Josh Dubovie.
The precise identities of Razorlight 3.0 are being teasingly released to keep us on our toes. So for the time being we can assume that they have recruited Jack White (second from left) on rhythm guitar, or more feasibly kidnapped him and not fed him properly – a member of a UK indie band has hardly looked so gaunt since Neil Codling joined Suede.
Meanwhile, Razorlight clearly prophesised this year's in-no-way-at-all-silly-season-fodder revelations that Rock Is Dead by taking up work as extras in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 to subsidise their advance. They were always famed for thinking outside of the box after all, and you must agree this is a far more likely explanation than the possibility that they actually chose to dress like that.
And then there is Borrell himself, looking more bemused at his own existence than ever. We can only conclude that the wind changed somewhere around the most histrionic segment of North London Trash
and he stayed like that. These mysteries and more will doubtless unfurl at Guilfest and on the fourth album that surely lies beyond. Delightful to have them back, isn't it? But please share your theories as to what could have happened to Razorlight in the run-up to this amazing photograph ...
Exciting Razorlight update! The new line-up is, from left to right, as follows Skully (drums), Gus (guitar), Johnny Borrell (vocals) and Freddie Stitz (bass)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Jon Savage on song: Roy Harper serves up Hors D'Oeuvres
Folk might now be mass-marketed as the Tory rock-lite of Mumford & Sons, but 40 years ago Roy Harper made a record that was ambitious in arrangement and ferocious in sentiment
Listen to Hors D'OeuvresA new year brings with it a whole new list of anniversaries, so let's play the game and get in there quick. The media will be full, as is right, of Dylan (70) and The Queen Is Dead (25) and grunge (20) among many others, but 2011 also marks two major landmarks in the life of a great living Englishman. So I'd like to celebrate Roy Harper (70) and his greatest album, Stormcock, released 40 years ago.
Now that folk is mass-marketed as the Tory rock-lite of Mumford & Sons, it's hard to remember that at one time it was the province of outcasts both real and self-styled, that it was more underground than any acid-rock group, that it was as upstart as any punk, as freighted with the cares of the world as any goth. In 1964 and 65 folk was heavy, and it carried the pop world before it in ways that would enrich the musical culture of the next decades.
There was a window into this world thanks to the recent programme Folk Britannia. This showed extracts from an extraordinary 1966 BBC documentary, called Meeting Point: Outcasts and Outsiders, which aimed to cover Soho low-life and the pastoral work of that area. As part of the remit it focused on the scene around Les Cousins, the premier Soho folk club that had opened the previous year, in April 1965.
Located at 49 Greek Street, Les Cousins was not the start of the British folk revival: that had a long, long history – much of which is delineated in Colin Harper's excellent biography of Bert Jansch: Dazzling Stranger. But it was where folk music intersected with youth culture and transatlantic influences, just at the point when – partly thanks to Bob Dylan – the wider marketplace was ready for something new, something deeper.
The clips from Meeting Point show a basement space with a deadbeat, all-night crash-pad ambience, but two brief performances set the mood: a brief clip of Jackson C Frank – the most haunted of all mid-60s folkies – and then a young Al Stewart, singing the cautionary rent-boy tale, Pretty Golden Hair. Also interviewed is the outreach worker Judith Piepe, who befriended Paul Simon and many other club habitués.
In his memoir of the 60s drug scene, Keep the Faith Baby, the pastor Kenneth Leech remembered that songs about "loneliness, rejection, brotherhood, inhumanity, were sung around the Soho folk cellars in 1965 and 66". He felt that this folk scene "mirrored the problems of the world". This was a new kind of romanticism, anti-pop (although soon to become so), weighed down with the cares of the world yet soon to trip into inner space.
A quick scan through the repertoire of those who played at Les Cousins reveals few topics unturned: male prostitution (the aforementioned Pretty Golden Hair), drug addiction (Bert Jansch's Needle of Death, Donovan's version of Codine), mediated alienation (Paul Simon's The Sound of Silence), as well as the haunting visions ("cloud dreams all") of Jackson C Frank's Carnival and soon-to-be-classic Blues Run the Game.
Roy Harper played Les Cousins – he even recorded an album there in 1969 – and his first album, Sophisticated Beggar, drank deep from the same well. It included Big Fat Silver Aeroplane, a spacey rant with six verses, each delineating the effect of a different drug, as well as a song about Jackson C Frank, My Friend. It concluded with Committed, an aptly hysterical account of his brief time in a "mental institution".
Three albums for three different labels followed, all of which added rock instrumentation to the basic folk sound: Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith had Freak Street, Ageing Raver, and the infamous You Don't Need Money. Produced by Shel Talmy (the Kinks, the Who), Folkjokeopus included the heartfelt She's the One, a song for Albert Ayler, One for All, and the 17-minute McGoohan's Blues, inspired by The Prisoner.
During 1969 Harper began a fruitful association with producer Peter Jenner, who had also worked with Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett. Flat Baroque and Berserk was a step up, with enduring songs such as I Hate the White Man and Hell's Angels and added instrumentation provided by David Bedford and Harper himself (electric guitar). On the sleeve note, he thanked "Cousins where it all began …"
If Flat Baroque and Beserk saw the first successful integration of sound and production with Harper's highly idiosyncratic lyrical and vocal approach – part ranter, part mystic, with an unusually direct and earthy line in invective – then 1971's Stormcock saw its full flowering. Containing only four tracks – ranging between seven and 13 minutes – it resolutely and uncompromisingly creates its own world.
As an opener, Hors D'Oeuvres takes no prisoners. It begins with descending standard first-position folk chords. We're immediately pitched into a courtroom drama: the images pile up line over line (13 in all) before you get near a chorus. The effect – apart from the spleen: you know the minds of this jury are closed and will never open – is suspended and suspenseful: cueing up the first chorus at nearly three minutes.
Harper's singing is subtle and serpentine: some times he stretches out syllables in complex patterns, at others he fires them out like a bullet. The second verse develops the idea of being judged into a splendid anti-critic rant that transcends every other effort in this crowded genre. In the early version recorded at Les Cousins in 1969, Harper pointed out a Melody Maker journalist as the target: "He said that I didn't offer any panaceas for the world's troubles."
The ferocity of the sentiments in both verses – Harper wrote the song "thinking of Carl Chessman, fighting for his life in his death cell" – are enhanced by a brilliant arrangement. The instrumentation slowly builds after the first verse: adding an organ, and then a Leslie'd guitar, as the backing vocals become more complex. For the last two minutes, these different elements weave around each other in a joyous exploration of pure melody.
By the time Stormcock was released, Harper was a counterculture icon – name-checked by Led Zeppelin in the song Hats Off to Roy Harper, and Jimmy Page provided uncredited electric guitar on The Same Old Rock. The album's artistic success makes it a pinnacle of a particularly English kind of folk-rock at the same time as it powerfully restates the outsider position of the original 60s Soho scene.
Listening to Stormcock, you can also hear a great British singer. Like Syd Barrett, Harper had experienced madness, but he was a northern boy, tougher and more acerbic. You can also hear his influence on Hunky Dory era David Bowie, who would also return the favour, covering Harper's Highway Blues (from The Lord's Prayer) with the Astronettes in 1973. Then there was the matter of Pink Floyd and Have a Cigar, which featured Harper on lead vocals.
Best of all, Roy Harper is still performing. I saw him in 1990, on the night that Margaret Thatcher was deposed, at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road, and it was the perfect way to celebrate the moment. He played a small hall in Anglesey, a few years ago, in an autumn storm, and was equally as good. On 2 April this year, he is playing a special show, to be filmed at Metropolis Studios in London: for more information, visit royharper.co.uk.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=90855&u=756462&r=477547156 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp |
