Black Sabbath live at the Birmingham NIA, 22 December 2013

"When I say jump, you jump" 

Call me cynical, but I'm almost embarrassed to admit to enjoying Black Sabbath at Birmingham's National Indoor Arena. But I did, and big thanks to George for inviting me and Tim, Guy, Rachel and Naomi for being fabulous company, as always.

Being there matters less than telling people you were there

Sabbath were good, as were the support, but being a miserable old sod I like moaning. It makes me happy. Besides, you can still enjoy a show without losing sight of the hopeless sterility of it all.

It's collusion. It's a conspiracy to ruin the gig-going experience. It's not just the promoters. The venue, the band and dammit the audience are all in on this.

First up, the band. The NIA is a huge stage. Geezer Butler stood on his own, stage right, and looked like the loneliest man in Birmingham except when Ozzy shuffled over a couple of times to check his pulse. When you've got a right-handed bassist and a southpaw guitarist, they should be the other way round. Having the necks of the guitars pointing inwards puts enough distance between the players that they're not a band any more; just a collection of individuals. Audience and band keep their distance, just in case any un-approved human interaction disrupts the carefully planned event.

And that's where the collusion with the venue comes in. They want everything to be well-managed and ordered. The approved brand of beer comes in approved plastic bottles, which have to be swapped for approved plastic glasses before you go into the hall itself, where your wristband gets checked for the umpteenth time. There's no smoking, of course, but you can't just go outside any old door for a puff - there's a designated outdoor area squeezed between a building site and the car park, chosen specially for being the most grim and miserable place to stand on a wet evening in December. It's unapproved fun, and if we can't stop it we'll make it as unpleasant as we can. Apart from every single played on Top Of The Pops in 1975-6, the worst thing about 70s music was the drum solo, but here at least it served a function. I managed to barge my way out of the hall, buy a beer, traipse about three miles to the smoking area, buy some merchandise and still get back in time for the crunching opening chords of Iron Man.

Sabbath make a great noise live, and the acoustics at the NIA are the best I've ever heard in a sports hall, but Ozzy Osbourne has to be one of the worst frontmen in the history of rock. He was in very good voice, but there's more to fronting a rock band than just singing. Ozzy knows this, but someone should have told him years ago that shuffling across the stage in a semi-crouch like an old man queuing for a soup kitchen, clapping his hands and shouting "Yeah!" at every opportunity doesn't make you Dave Lee Roth. A couple of times in every song he approaches the mic and bellows, "Lemme see yer hands!" before sobbing "We love you," at the end of almost every song.

Then there's the bossing of the audience. When Ozzy says, "This is Tony Iommi; shout his name!" you either shout his name, and a few of the audience did, or you shout, "We know it's Tony fucking Iommi," as we did. And when Ozzy shouts "Jump!", you jump. Most of the crowd did. They were distressingly obedient.

Rock now has rules, and the audience obeyed them. Old farts from the first time round (us), some of them with their teenage kids, turned it from a gig into a day trip to a heavy rock theme park. Ozzy bellowed “Lemme see your hands” again, but most people already had their hands up, brandishing smartphones and even the occasional iPad set to record video. They didn’t come to a live event; they’d come to a life event and were determined to record the fact so they could tick it off their list of 1,000 Things To Do Before Finally Admitting You Really Are A Sad Old Git And Probably Always Were. 

And What did they record? A sea of tiny screens in front of them recording the sea of tiny screens in front of them, and way off in the distance, an enormous screen that dominated the stage, relaying live film of the concert for those too far back to see. Just possibly they might have caught the odd band member, but that was incidental. They didn't come to a gig; they came to to collect social-media-friendly evidence that they'd attended An Event. All this so that when they got home they could upload it onto Facebook and YouTube, so all their friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, former schoolfriends and random people they met at a party four years ago could see their amateur film of a professional film of an event they could actually have seen live if they weren’t so obsessed with their iWanks.

Finally there’s charade of the encore: “We’ll do one more song if you make enough noise.” Or, “You’ve paid for it, but you’ve still got to beg.” I said to Guy, “I wonder what they’ll do if we all keep really quiet.” The audience did their best, but it’s difficult to summon up the passion. Rock’n’roll ceased to be a life-changing experience long ago, and it was all a bit forced. Still, Sabbath played their role in the farce: they went off stage long enough to put the kettle on and put four teaspoons of Ovaltine in four mugs before returning to the stage, noodling around with the riff of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and finally asking what we wanted to hear. “Neon Knights!” we bellowed, but they didn’t seem to hear. Eventually they lurched into ‘Paranoid’, which was a bit of a shock. I assumed they’d left it out because they were sick of playing it. “I preferred the Dickies’ version,” said Guy, but we all bounced along just the same.

Then the balloons came down. They were meant to be black, but most of them were a shade that can only be described as deep purple. Maybe Ian and the boys had been in town and had a few left over. The lights came up and everyone queued for the car park while the band went back to the hotel for muffins and bed.

The rituals of rock are getting as rigid as those of the Catholic Church, and the inclusion of ‘Dirty Women’ – complete with ‘retro’ (thus ironic and not sexist at all) topless photos on the huge screens – shows that rock's attitude to women is no more advanced. In both cases the rituals are slick, well-rehearsed and professional, but the original message was lost long ago.   

Track listing

War Pigs

Into The Void

Snowblind

Age of Reason

Wall of Sleep

NIB

End of the Beginning
(drum solo)

Iron Man

God Is Dead

Dirty Women

Children of the Grave

Encore: Paranoid

Review: Roman Empire: Power and People

Roman Empire: Power and People by Dirk Books

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Booms' and Crerar's book isn't a history of the Roman Empire, but rather a story told through the British Museum's artefacts. In this, it has similarities with the book version of A History of the World in 100 Objects, which was a broadcast triumph for the British Museum and Radio 4 a few years ago.

So instead of a narrative history, we get a collection of essays on different aspects of the empire told through discovered objects. As the title suggests, the story is divided between the political dominance of the empire and the lives of ordinary people (although with the emphasis on the rich, because they left far more artefacts).

It's a short book, well-written and highly recommended.



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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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