Review: Blackmore's Black Death

Autumn Sky by Blackmore's Night, 2010

It's said that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter, the parachute and the robot, all in the 15th Century. If he'd invented the elevator, this album would be playing in it.

Despite being released in 2010, Blackmore's renaissance lift music has the added annoyance of vocals and lumpen production in a 1980s style, with opening track Highland evoking unpleasant memories of Big Country. It all adds to the misery of hearing one of rock's great guitarists wallowing in stickily sentimental ballads or hey-nonny-nonny folk dances to be played in a Tudor theme park that nobody has built. Only 'Song & Dance pt.II' pulls it off with any panache.

The music evokes an era of poverty, plague and the pox, any of which would be preferable to hearing this again.

Review: Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary Fiction by Robert Eaglestone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



At first I didn't like this book. It's certainly a short introduction, but it didn't seem very simplified. I've got a degree in English (albeit not modern English literature), so I was surprised to find it as difficult as I did. Eaglestone seems to be in awe of Sarah Waters; the attention he gives her in the early chapters seems disproportionate, but thankfully he gives other authors equal attention later on and the book recovers its balance.

Eaglestone makes some bold assertions without feeling the need to back them up. The most glaring of these is that modern people have far more complex and difficult lives than their ancestors. This is arguable, to say the least.

But it's worth persevering. Eaglestone does know his stuff, and the occasions when his political bias intrudes are rare enough to be forgiven. A good critique enables a reader to form an opposite opinion, and his praise for Nicola Barker's Darkmans is enough to convince me that this is a terrible example of up-its-own-backside literature to be avoided at all costs. Elsewhere, his takedown of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer for its use of a child narrator - simplifying and thus avoiding the issues - seems spot-on.

I wasn't convinced till I read the final chapter on criticism, which added something new (to me) and put the rest of the book into proper context.



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Review: Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy by Nikos Kotsopoulos

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Krautrock is one of the most neglected yet important genres in popular music. Without it, 70s rock would have been doomed to keep aping the blues with ever-diminishing marginal returns while everyone else went off to have fun with disco or get stoned to reggae (or, worse, watch as pop music degenerated from 60s Beatles majesty to 70s Brotherhood Of Man irrelevance). The Ramones get the credit for English punk, but Neu! and Can were just as important, and were even more important when it comes to 80s alternative music.

Now, CD re-issues have made Krautrock available to everyone who wondered what Julian Cope, Stereolab, John Lydon, Radiohead and countless others were wittering on about, so the renewed interest makes a definitive book essential. Sadly, this isn't that book.

Content is important, but no reviewer can ignore the glaring flaws in production. Other reviewers have complimented it, but such claims are madness. This book was made by amateurs. I have read praise for the photography, but most of the pictures are mundane and some are unquestionably poor. West Germany in the 1970s wasn't some distant age where photography was unknown; there are far better pictures available than the fuzzy, out-of-focus images that occur too often here, usually with inadequate captions. The main photo of Can has been laid out such that Damo Suzuki is lost in the centre fold; even Klaus Dinger of Neu! suffers the same fate, and Neu! only had two members. Other pictures lose their captions in the same gutter. Clearly whoever was in charge of layout either didn't know that this would be a large, perfect-bound paperback, or simply didn't care. No designer is ignorant of where the centre of the page is. There's no excuse for such sloppiness.

Worse, the font seems to be Courier (or something similar). I'm sure this was chosen to reflect the forward-looking modernism of the music, because this font was designed for computer screens. It's small, faint and not intended for printed narrative, so it's no surprise that I CAN'T READ IT. Even with the main light on, my bedside light on and my glasses on, I CAN'T READ IT. Can I offer a bit of advice to the whizzo - sorry, amateur - designer who chose that font? Mate, you would have done a better job using Comic Sans. This is the worst insult you can pay to a designer, but here it's justified.

Oh, sorry, the content. Since I was given this book as a present towards the end of summer, there were enough bright, sunny days left for me to read it. The biographies of the bands and the main producers, which make up three-quarters of the book, are pretty solid. Some are excellent (Can, Faust, Popol Vuh, both Amon Düüls), although others are so cursory that we learn very little from them (Anima is particularly poor). All of the main bands are there, as well as several more minor luminaries. Even La Dusseldorf, who are probably as much Neue Deutsch Welle as Krautrock, get a look in, but the main interest lies in the first quarter of the book where the contibutors discuss the origins and context of Krautrock.

These are fascinating and are what (for me) earn the book its stars. David Stubbs writes a fine essay on the origins of the genre, ably supported by Ken Hollings and Michael Faber. Stubbs examines the socio-political background; Hollings delves into the history of the avant-garde with important references to Sockhausen; Faber talks about why Germans are baffled by the reverence paid by foreigners to what they see as a minor blip in their country's musical development. He cites Grobschnitt as a typically popular non-Krautrock band, likening them to both Spinal Tap and The Mothers of Invention. This I have to hear.

There are only two let-downs here: one is Stubbs' reference to "the murder of Benno Ohnesorg", which is even worth a photo but is unexplained other than the fact that it was important and it happened in 1967. The other is the the sprawling and irrelevant piece by Erik Davis - his only contribution to the book, even though he seems to get top billing among the contributors - who dribbles on about the cosmic without suggesting any awareness of what the book was about and whose only interesting points were made much better by Hollings. He also doesn't know the difference between 'pare' and 'pair' or 'pore' and 'pour'. Maybe he's a big star, or perhaps there's another reason why his writing was considered not only worthy of inclusion but too important to merit the attentions of an editor who can actually write in English.

I'm aware that I've concentrated on the negative here, but the faults are too glaring to ignore. Nevertheless, this is an interesting book that curates much of the knowledge about a hugely important musical movement. But it could have been so much better.



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Review: Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography by Danny Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



It took me more than two decades to realise that Danny Baker isn't a chattering imbecile but is in fact a genius. This revelation came through spending an hour a day listening to the gloriously surreal inventiveness of his BBC London radio show.

Despite being co-founder of the legendary punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue and a major writer at New Musical Express in the late 70s and 80s, where conformity to 'correct' opinions was almost Maoist in its intensity, this is a man who has never denied his love for unhip, old music (such as Steely Dan and Anthony Newley) and who was almost lynched when, aged 20, he leapt on stage to berate a punk audience that was cheering at the news that Elvis had just died. More recently he's been railing against the tyranny of 'cool'.

This covers the first 25 years of his life, and what a fascinating life it is. His father was a docker who supplemented his income - as they all did - by taking a cut of Britain's flagging export trade. Baker sold knocked-off records to the Petticoat Lane traders and left school at 15, despite being top of the class, to work in a hip record shop in Soho, where he met all the stars but chucked Queen out for demanding that the shop play their debut album, which he and the manager hated.

Baker's story isn't a tale of triumph in the face of hardship: it's a story of of a happy, trauma-free, working-class upbringing; staying just the right side of poverty by keeping just the wrong side of the law; being happy by spending every penny as it comes; and succeeding by cheek, talent, wit, blarney and outrageous good fortune.

His warmth and utter lack of pretention keeps the book charming, while his comic talent keeps it fun and sometimes hilarious, never more so than in his record-shop days or his japes as receptionist at the NME. He even apologises for calling Kate Bush Chicken Licken.

My only complaint is that, having never given Nick Kent's testicles a moment's thought, I now have an image of them in my mind that can never be erased.



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Farage, Dulwich and the Hitler Youth songs

It has been reported recently that Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party, sang "Hitler Youth songs" while in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at his school, Dulwich College, in 1981.

I know Farage didn't sing any Hitler Youth songs because we didn't know any. Yes, ‘we’. I was there; Channel 4 News wasn't and nor, for that matter, was Chloe Deakin (the teacher whose letter about Farage was the basis of the stories).

The letter itself was kept by Bob Jope, a teacher I knew well and admired very much, and who was the epitome of what right-wing commentators would describe as a "trendy leftie". His motives in keeping and later publicising the letter will be obvious, but he didn't hear the cadets singing in Sussex because he wouldn't have been seen dead in the CCF. He was still a good teacher though, and one who inspired creative thinking – a much-needed counter-balance to the school's more usual obsessions with Latin and rugby.

Deakin was never a friend of the CCF (and I'm more sympathetic to her view now than I was then), so it's no surprise that her hearsay report to the headmaster, David Emms, was exaggerated. By the time the story appeared in the newspapers this month, it was a report of a report of a letter reporting a report: in other words, the fourth round of Chinese whispers spread over 30 years. 

Bob Jope in November 1981, singing in a school band

The songs we sang were often racist and sexist, but none were Nazi songs. Nobody could sing in German, and anyway, where would you learn the Horst Wessel song in 1981? Look it up on YouTube? They sold some pretty questionable records in Our Price in Croydon (REO Speedwagon anyone?), but I don't remember seeing Lieder aus der Hitler-Jugend in the bargain racks. 

I'm ashamed of the songs we did sing, and I'm disappointed the teachers didn't stop us, but maybe they were consciously not rising to the bait. After all, the point wasn’t to express an opinion; it was to sing something to shock our elders, in the loutish ways adolescent boys often do. It wouldn't have been shocking if we hadn't known that the sentiments were repellent. That's probably why the Red Flag also got the occasional outing (only occasional: we didn't really know the words), because a Communist song was considered just as likely to raise the hackles of the authorities at a public school. Another song celebrated homosexuality in a boys' school where no one would ever admit to being gay. We were almost daring ourselves to shock each other as well as the teachers.

Nobody ever expressed these views in normal conversation; after all, we had black, Asian, South Asian and Jewish friends. There were a few racist songs in the canon, but when marching we were more likely to sing something like Yellow Bird - a cheerful song about animal cruelty that provided the title of Kevin Powers' recent novel about the Iraq war, with a rhythm much better suited to marching than Ivor Biggun's Winker's Song.

Did Farage join in with these songs? My (possibly flawed) recollection is that we all did. Did he instigate the singing? Possibly, but I don't recall him doing so, whereas I often did, despite being a left-leaning liberal then and now. Despite our political differences, Farage was a friend of mine and he appeared then as he appears now: nationalistic, right wing on social and economic issues but not a Nazi or a racist.

As an old school friend of mine commented on Facebook this week, "I don't recall him being particularly strident or offensive and I was almost the only Jew in (Dulwich) Village."

The songs we sang are irrelevant because they tell you nothing about our political beliefs now. They don't even tell you about our political beliefs then.