The past keeps knock-knock-knocking on my door, and I don't want to hear it anymore.

Here I am, back writing about dead people again.

One day during the summer holiday of 1974, about six or seven of us convened around a friend's house, having brought with us a variety of crappy instruments to entertain ourselves. We had the run of house for the week, so we could make as much noise as we liked for as long as it suited us. The eventual outcome of all this aimless pissing around was that we formed a band, despite only one of us being capable of finding their way around an instrument and a couple of the others barely able to play at all. We weren't exactly taking it seriously, and besides, what could a bunch of near-incompetents realistically play anyway? At this stage it was safe to say Heart Of The Sunrise was pretty much out.

Someone had brought along a copy of Transformer and a copy of Live At Max's Kansas City, and I think we attempted Vicious (successfully) and I'm So Free (less so) from the former. We took a run at just about everything on Max's at some point, before finally settling on Sweet Jane and Sunday Morning. By the end of the week, we could vaguely hammer out the odd song by Sabbath, Free and the Stones as well, but initially it was probably the combination of simplicity and ready-made cool that made Lou Reed's songs so attractive. By the time we first performed in public, at a school dance several months later, almost half our set was Reed/Velvets covers.

A couple of years earlier, Walk On The Wild Side had introduced a world largely unfamiliar with his work to Reed's fascination with what might be called "transgressional" lifestyle choices; the Bowie co-sign representing the perfect entry-point-slash-endorsement for greenhorn teenagers like me. When I found out this morning that he'd died, I was much more shocked than I expected to be. Not because Lou Reed had managed to hold out until the ripe old age of 71, beating odds that, at the peak of his 70s excesses, were tipping him to keel over mid-performance. Nor was it to do with the Velvets' canonical status - "hardly anyone bought the records, but everyone who did formed a band", etc - or with any sadness at the death of a great and ambitious artist (and he was certainly that). No, this is more like that feeling you get when you pay a return visit to somewhere you grew up, only to find that yet another old landmark has disappeared. Suddenly, there's one less thing helping you to make sense of the world and figure out your place in it, even if, truthfully, you don't really need it anymore.

There's probably plenty of stuff being written elsewhere about Reed's notorious curmudgeonliness, his combative relationship with the critical community, and his long-lasting resentment over the mauling that some of his best and most influential work received upon release, so I'm not going to bother with that, nor with the deathless influence of the Velvets. In any case, the contrarians will probably be along soon, holding up efforts like Reed's recent, supposedly ill-judged collaboration with Metallica as irrefutable proof that he wasn't all that. The work, however, says otherwise. Reed made no secret of wanting to create (and leave behind) a body of work that stood comparison not with the rock musicians who it seemed were his obvious peers, but with the likes of Dostoyevsky and Burroughs and Ornette Coleman. Whether or not it manages to do so remains to be seen, but even if it doesn't, he's still responsible for some of the greatest rock music ever made.

Lou Reed wrote Heroin nearly 50 years ago in 1964, a couple of years before the Velvets recorded it for their debut album. It's that rare beast amongst drug songs, in that it avoids taking any sort of moral position and instead just tells you what it's like. I should add at this point that I've never used the stuff, but I'm assured by people who have that Heroin the song is a fairly faithful description of heroin the drug's effects. It's also the song which, more than anything else, was responsible for the Velvets becoming the unofficial poster children for the decadent, anti-hippy nihilism that eventually gave birth to punk. There's a scene in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting - another landmark example of non-judgemental junkie art - where Mark Renton describes choosing the 13-minute Rock 'N' Roll Animal version of the song over the original as "breaking the junkie's golden rule". This probably explains why it's my favourite version.




Rock 'N' Roll Animal is, in my humble opinion, the greatest heavy metal album ever made. Alice Cooper seemed to agree at one point; not long after its release, he stole the entire band for his Welcome To My Nightmare album. But regardless of that (and the opinion of Mark Renton), Heroin is the record's glorious high-point. Here, the Bowery scuzz of the original has been replaced by a chromium-plated, proto-stadium-rock imperiousness that seems utterly at odds with the subject matter until that last verse, where the band steadily raises the tempo until the song is roaring along, and Reed harangues a New York audience still numb from Vietnam and Watergate, and with Spahn Ranch and Altamont fresh in the collective memory;

"'Cause when the smack begins to flow,
  I don't really care anymore,
  About all you Jim-Jim's in this town,
  And everybody puttin' everybody else down,
  And all the politicians makin' crazy sounds,
  And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds...yeah!"

I mean, why the fuck wouldn't you shoot up?

And then, and then...Steve Hunter's death-from-above guitar solo swoops in like one of Travis Bickle's internal monologues set to music, and the dreamy narco-fatalism of the original is blasted to fuck, supplanted by a seething rage at all that's wretched and hateful in the world, with Reed snarling over the top of it. I've played it over and over this morning, and it's still every bit as thrilling and full of anger and joy and desire and love and hate and confusion as it was when the teenage me became slightly, unhealthily obsessed with it. Whether intentionally or not, Lou Reed always represented one of the most truthful, if not the most comforting, of signposts through all that uncertainty, and it makes me sad to think he'll never surprise us that way again.

Remembering a true English eccentric - Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

A journalist acquaintance of mine has a fascinating story about Malcolm McLaren, who died yesterday aged 64, and one which sums up the spirit of the man beautifully. It took place at the offices of hotshot advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, who were responsible for the Tango ads. The agency had decided to host a series of "provocative cultural talks" by "off-beat thinkers", and Malcolm McLaren had been called upon to give the inaugural lecture. To a huge room full of ad types and journalists (of whom my acquaintance was one), he proceeded to give a very detailed and convincing argument which asserted that anyone working in the modern media industry today was using ideas, methods, images and techniques first developed by Dr. Josef Goebbels, and that they were all inheritors of the Nazi legacy. Everyone filed out in silence, and no further talks were organised

My own personal interaction with Malcolm McLaren is limited to a couple of occasions. The only time I ever met him personally was in a club just off Kensington High Street in West London during the 90s. Nobody seemed quite sure why he was there that night but, as this particular club was enjoying a brief spell as one of the place-to-be places, he was probably there just to see if there was anything noteworthy going on. I recall him being surrounded by a number of rather attractive young women, and he was wearing a well-cut, expensive-looking cream suit. Not wishing to cramp the man's style, I waited until his retinue had briefly thinned out before approaching him. I offered my hand and, in my somewhat refreshed state, thanked him for the profound and lasting effect he'd had upon my life. He looked at me disdainfully, as if to say, "Are you taking the piss?", but nonetheless shook my hand and said, "Well...thank you, I suppose". And that was that.

Several years later, our paths crossed once more. By then, I was working for a major music publisher who'd just done a deal with Malcolm to administer his catalogue. He was based in Paris, where he'd lived for some years with his partner/assistant Young Kim. At this point in what had already been a vividly colourful life, he was flitting between there and China, where he was cultivating a female Chinese punk band called the Wild Strawberries and talking up another of his discoveries, "chip music" or "8-bit punk" - low-tech DIY electro-pop built on sounds from old video games. Neither of these adventures bore much by way of fruit. But on this particular morning I'd been assigned the task of navigating the labyrinthine copyright nightmare that was Malcolm McLaren's music publishing interests, and I knew it was going to be difficult enough without the worry of whether or not I'd be able to maintain the appropriate degree of professional detachment. I called the Paris number I'd been given and, to my surprise, Malcolm himself answered. I said hello, explained who I was and why I was calling, and asked him where he thought would be the best place to begin the job of straightening everything out. "Weeeellll...", he began, "Many, many years ago, I used to run a boutique in the King's Road with a lady called Vivienne Westwood, who I was going out with at the time..." He was off. I sat there, grinning to myself and barely able to get a word in edgewise for almost half an hour, while Malcolm McLaren recounted the last thirty years of his life in very precise detail. He'd obviously grown used to dealing with people who didn't really know an awful lot about who he was or what he'd done, but I wasn't one of those people. At any point, I could have interrupted him and said, look, Malcolm, I know all this - I bought Anarchy In The UK the week it came out, I saw Bow Wow Wow in their Your Cassette Pet days, I taught myself how to mix using two copies of Buffalo Gals and, trust me, I am more than aware of your vast cultural significance as regards the development of punk and hip-hop. But we really need to talk business here...

Of course, I didn't. Fucking hell, why on Earth would I? One of the key catalysts of 20th century popular culture was talking to me, telling me his story. And Malcolm loved to tell a story, just as he loved the opportunity to place himself at the centre of it, even if the truth of the matter was often somewhat different. But I'll leave those sort of testimonies to the people best qualified to make them. When I think of Malcolm McLaren, I'll remember someone who brought ideas back to the centre of pop music, even if he'd cribbed many of those ideas from others. I'll remember an iconoclastic prankster who cut holes in the fences of art, culture, thought and politics that enabled millions of people to gain access to worlds they may otherwise never have even imagined. I'll remember the avuncular, yet charismatic raconteur with whom I was briefly on first-name terms. I'll remember the mischievous Svengali who was a landmark figure in that great and enduring tradition of provocative, manipulative, larger-than-life pop managers, alongside Larry Parnes, Andrew Loog Oldham, Simon Napier-Bell, Peter Grant, and many others. I'll remember a true English eccentric who revelled in the many things, big and small, that made (and continue to make) this country such a unique and vibrant place to live, work and create, and who never shied from offering a symbolic fuck-you to those people who still try to stifle and contain the wild, romantic, almost Pagan spirit at its heart. I'll remember someone whose work and ideas had a profound and lasting effect upon my life. And for that, Mr. McLaren, well...thank you, I suppose.

Alexander McQueen and the rise of Shania Twain journalism

I don't know an awful lot about fashion, but I do know that anybody who's ever pulled on a pair of jeans for anything other than the purpose of manual labour is implicitly acknowledging certain things whether they like it or not. There's some proper "no shit, Sherlock" stuff coming up next, but please bear with me. Firstly, they are acknowledging that clothes can be more than just clothes in the most basic functional sense, and the things we wear make very specific statements about us, both as individuals and as a culture. By extension therefore, the people who create or model the stuff we end up wearing can be said to have a tangible influence upon society on all manner of levels. It may not be the most important, or even positive, of influences, but it's undeniably a significant one. You can find all the proof of this you'll ever need if you hang around the Oxford Street branch of Top Shop on any given Saturday. According to a friend of mine who works in the fashion business, it was well-known that Alexander McQueen, who was found dead on Thursday, had endured a grim few years on a personal level but, specifics aside, her view (and that of many others) was that the world of fashion had lost one of its brightest and most inspirational stars. She described him as "a genius in the vein of Yves Saint-Laurent; dark and troubled, but a romantic capable of great beauty". During Massive Attack's London gig later that evening, 3D dedicated Unfinished Sympathy to McQueen, similarly praising him as "an absolute genius".

Some people seem to have bristled at the use of this word in such a context, most notably Toby Young on the Hurleygraph's blog the following day. Rather like the once-omnipresent Canadian pop-country singer mentioned in the title above, Young wasted little time in declaring that the idea of McQueen being a 'genius' certainly didn't impress him much. Disguising his observations as an insight into the shallow world of the fashionista, he proceeded to beast McQueen over the course of a few hundred words. At the point he must have actually filed this tripe - the condensed version being "I met McQueen a few times and didn't like him", coupled with "the world of fashion is superficial" - McQueen probably hadn't even been dead 24 hours.

We see a lot of this sort of thing nowadays (thanks, Internet, but really, you needn't have), and here's how it usually goes. Person of note dies, people whose lives were in some way affected by dead person's work or life express sadness and grief on one hand, mad race to be first at letting the world know how unimpressed they are on the other. "Why all the fuss? He/she was just a pop singer/actor/fashion designer, and hardly a genius". As if only an Einstein could be such a thing and that it's unthinkable someone could be, within their very specific field of endeavour, a genius. In fact, this is more or less Young's opening point - Alexander McQueen? He just made frocks. Oscar Wilde and Jimi Hendrix? Now there's genius! Whilst I wouldn't argue with the latter point, you can always find someone, especially nowadays, who'll take against a well-established consensus for shits and giggles or, in some cases, with absolute sincerity. Such as the person who once insisted to me that Hendrix was simply an over-rated hack blues player, and that the Stone Roses' John Squire was by far the better guitarist. I swear to God.

It seems contrarianism is good for business, though, and in these straitened times people will do whatever it takes to get that money. Someone recently described the practitioners of this strain of lazy, bear-baiting, 'Shania Twain journalism' as "trollumnists", which I suppose is close enough for jazz. To me, it's just further depressing evidence of the general coarsening of public debate we find ourselves faced with; "freedom of speech" or "speaking one's mind" becomes the default justification for anyone in the business of spouting poorly-informed, insensitive, boorish crap. Elsewhere, in the Stygian depths of the comments sections, there's a bloody great hole through which anachronistic concepts like "common courtesy" are slowly draining away, while the malignant, paranoid ravings of what used to be known as The Silent Majority are cheerfully validated by a procession of lionhearted souls who supposedly speak truth to power but who are actually, for the most part, idiots. So, take a bow, Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips, Jan Moir, Kelvin Mackenzie, Richard Littlejohn, etc., etc. You've all done very well. By the way, meet Toby.

You could argue, I suppose, that Young is merely shining a light on a world overly preoccupied with the transient and the trivial and calling for a little perspective in the process. If you were being extremely polite, that is. But how polite would you want to be towards someone whose familiarity with his subject extends little further than having been rubbed up the wrong way by him and his retinue at a few photo shoots many years ago, yet remains sufficiently slighted that he'd apparently use the guy's death as an opportunity to exact some kind of revenge? Throw in a handful of cliches as applicable to the rag trade as the world of haute couture, add a few back-handed compliments about McQueen's "creative flair" (but no real talent, eh, Toby? Just "prima donna-ish...force of personality"), and hit "send". Someone on Young's Twitter feed complimented him for his "courageous and funny" piece. If we're living in a world where sticking the boot in on the freshly dead can be described as "courageous and funny", then we're fucking doomed.

Nice as it is to be paid for having an opinion, I would hope there could still be some value placed upon holding your tongue once in a while. Especially when the person on whom you're offering your "verdict" has, literally, just died. But if you really feel you must be heard, then why not ask yourself a few questions first? Y'know, questions such as, "Is this person a mass-murderer, or a despot who's brought misery and hardship to millions?". How about, "Did this person, through his or her work as a pop singer or a fashion designer, contribute in some way to the gaiety of nations?". Once you've done that, you might want to do everyone a favour and consider this perennial of maternal wisdom - if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

“Turn off the lights, and light a candle” - Teddy Pendergrass (1950-2010)

If you’re of a certain age (as I am), then by now you’ll know the tiresome familiarity of turning on the TV, opening a newspaper or checking a website, to be greeted by the news that yet another significant musical figure from your youth has died. I wasn’t even halfway through the first coffee of the day when I noticed Roots drummer/bandleader Questlove posting a load of Teddy Pendergrass songs in his Twitter feed earlier this morning, so it took a few minutes before I figured out what was up.



Certain voices are probably always going to remind me of less troubled (but no less confusing) times, and Teddy Pendergrass is one of them. When If You Don’t Know Me By Now started getting played on the radio over here in 1972, anyone already attuned to the lush melancholy of increasingly popular Philadelphia vocal groups like the Stylistics would have immediately noticed what set Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes apart from the pack. Instead of the light, Kendricks-influenced falsetto of Russell Thompkins Jr., the voice of the Blue Notes came from somewhere between its owners’ boots and his gut. If nobody had told you otherwise, you might have thought you were listening to David Ruffin on steroids. As it turned out, for a while nobody did tell us, and it was widely assumed by UK audiences that Teddy was actually Harold Melvin. There are a couple of different stories about how he (originally the drummer in the Blue Notes’ rhythm section) became the band’s lead singer. According to one tale, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who’d been trying to sign The Dells to their newly founded Philadelphia International Records label, encouraged Melvin to put Teddy up front because he sounded like Dells lead singer Marvin Junior, and if they couldn’t get the actual Dells, then they were going to create one of their own. The other story - the one they’ll use in the biopic - has Teddy leaping from behind his drum kit in the middle of a Blue Notes show, and grabbing the mic to the amazement of both his band and the audience.



Arguably more than the O’Jays even, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes were the definitive act of the PIR era, largely due to Teddy’s voice, personality and charisma, and their hits rapidly began to dry up once he made the decision to go solo in 1976. From his 1977 solo debut and onwards into the 80s, he became a permanent fixture in the US r&b charts, managing to ride out the disco backlash and cementing his “Mr. Luva-Luva” persona to the extent that he could do a succession of “For Women Only” shows without alienating his male audience. There’s a great scene during one episode in Season 5 of Homicide: Life On The Street where Det. Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) is at home with his wife Barbara. Their marriage is on the outs, and as is often the case in crumbling relationships, they’re bickering over minor irritations. In this case, it’s the garish and somewhat tacky portrait of Teddy that Meldrick insists should take pride of place on the living room wall and which, it turns out, Barbara has always hated. But what’s interesting about the scene is how there’s no suggestion of anything unusual (beyond simple bad taste, that is) in a grown man hanging a picture of an r&b singer up in his front room.



Perhaps the reason for that is that Teddy personified a kind of undiluted, unapologetic, black masculinity that appealed to both genders. Women loved him, and although men may have envied his charisma, they also admired him for the classy, measured way he asserted his blackness without ever pandering to a mainstream white audience. Plus, those men were the direct beneficiaries of all Teddy's hard work on stage and on record whereas, as the man once memorably complained during an interview, he usually returned to his hotel room alone. Black comics like Eddie Murphy and Lenny Henry were able to lampoon his persona affectionately because they understood what he represented, but elsewhere that persona was reduced to cheeseball cliché and held up by many white rock critics as a shameful example of how far post-disco black pop culture had drifted from the radical ideals of the Black Panthers. All of which completely disregards Teddy’s fondness for socially conscious material throughout his career, as well as ignoring the genuinely subversive Garveyite politics that informed a significant proportion of Philadelphia International’s output during the 70s, even at the height of disco. Once it became public knowledge that his passenger on the night of the 1982 car accident that left him in a wheelchair was a transsexual nightclub performer, many felt that neither his image nor his voice would ever fully recover from the damage, but his core audience stayed characteristically loyal. Tiger Woods should be so lucky.



It’s that voice that he’ll be remembered for, of course – that rich, gritty baritone both mournful and declamatory, simultaneously pleading whilst bristling with righteous anger, able to ride the joyous rhythm of a song like The Love I Lost whilst remaining utterly convincing that he’d suffered the cruellest heartbreak. It never really regained its power after his accident, but it’s testament to the man’s spirit that he continued to record and perform for well over a decade after his 1984 comeback. His persona may have been easy meat for lazy parodists, but there was always a tenderness, warmth and likeability to Teddy that the ‘bedroom bully’ crassness of his present-day equivalents could never hope to convey. There are precious few true soul men left nowadays as it is. We ought to cherish the ones that are still around.



Sorry we lost you, Teddy.

'And when the groove is dead and gone...'

So, where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died?

It was about 11pm, and my girlfriend had turned in for the night. I'd just told her about the report on TMZ that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack and been rushed to hospital. It had been a strange day, one that had already brought news of several deaths; iconoclastic music journalist Steven Wells, actress/70s icon Farrah Fawcett and psych legend Sky Saxon. Not necessarily major figures in the grander scheme of things, but all people who'd made enough of a mark on my life to prompt a Facebook status update saying, 'can the great and the good please stop dying now?' The thought that such a day might end with the sudden and unexpected death of one of the 20th century's landmark artists didn't seem worthy of consideration. I was all set to chill out for a while, watching Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World on the Discovery Channel, when the phone rang. It was my girlfriend's mother. 'Paul, turn on the news. Michael Jackson is dead.' I woke my girlfriend up and, for the next hour or so, we both sat on the sofa, stunned and in almost complete silence, as we watched the 24-hour rolling news channels struggling to fill their airtime as they waited for the inevitable confirmation.



The first time I saw Michael Jackson was on The Andy Williams Show in 1970, and it was absolutely spine-tingling. I couldn't believe that this kid, hardly older than me, was able to sing and dance so expressively and soulfully - as much as any adult, if not more so. And the song. Man, what a song. Almost 40 years later, I struggle to think of too many songs as full of joy and life-affirming energy as 'I Want You Back'. Even in my pre-adolescence, I still had a sense that I'd just had my first sight of a major talent and, as the 70s progressed, this was borne out by a succession of glorious singles, both from the Jackson 5 and Michael himself. When the Osmonds - like the Jacksons, another family group who got their first break courtesy of Andy Williams - hit their peak in the early 70s, the Jackson 5 became the cool kids' alternative, the teen-girl pin-ups it was OK to like. Even as their first wave of success began to plateau and the pop hits became less frequent, they were still coming with gems like 'Dancing Machine' or 'Mirrors Of My Mind', and a disco-era move from Motown to CBS (leaving Jermaine behind) seemed to galvanise them once more as they ended the 70s on a high. However, at the end of the 70s, Michael was about to leave his brothers, and everyone else, far behind.

I bought one of the 20 million copies of 'Off The Wall' in late '79, some five or six months after it had first came out. Punk was still a significant musical force, and a few of my friends sneered at me, wisecracking about how they didn't know I was into disco now. 'Fuck that, it's just a good record', I said. And it still is; for me, arguably his best. This was where he became an adult as an artist, where all those idiosyncratic ad-libs - the little whoops, squeals and hiccups - that had peppered his vocals on songs like 'Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground) or 'Show You The Way To Go' had developed into an arsenal that was to mark him out as one of the great vocal stylists of the era, as unique and original as James Brown or Elvis. 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough' was a thrilling two-chord jam that can still smash dancefloors to this day, and the combination of the songs, Quincy Jones' flawless production, and that voice, was the absolute zenith of turn-of-the-decade r&b. And then he fucking topped it. Christ, did he top it...



One of the things I remember most about 'Thriller', apart from the rapid-fire succession of dazzling hit singles, the groundbreaking videos, and its almost supernatural perfection, was that it marked the point where Michael Jackson ceased to be the best r&b singer out there, and became instead 'the biggest rock star (my italics) in the world'. It was as if, by virtue of breaking the MTV colour bar and getting Eddie Van Halen to play on 'Beat It', he was now deemed sufficiently important to sit at the big people's table. Never mind that he'd just released one of the richest, most vibrant albums of the decade, in any genre; he was now worthy of 'serious' analysis. The cultural and racial implications of his success, questions about whether visuals were becoming more important than music, and the whole MJ phenomenon, right down to those crummy LA Gear trainers, all went under the microscope. I don't think that's ever happened to a black artist, either before or since - at least, not to anything like the same extent. There used to be a lot written about how Ray Charles' innovative album 'Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music' did a phenomenal amount to dissolve racial barriers during the early days of the civil rights movement in the US, and it occurs to me that 'Thriller' did something similar - about 42 million times over. All those kids, particularly white kids, who wanted to look, dress and dance like - ah, fuck it, who wanted to be Michael Jackson. I think we might have forgotten just what a big deal that was.

It still amazes me that CBS execs actually rejected MJ's follow-up to 'Thriller'. Here was a man who'd effectively just put the next few generations of their families through school, and they were sending him back to the lab with a note saying, 'must do better'. Whether 'Bad' actually was better than what he first delivered, we don't know (although I suspect we'll find out before much longer). All the same, its release was An Event, and it lived up to its billing, even if it didn't surpass 'Thriller' in sales terms; five US number ones, a Scorsese-directed video for the title track, and the whole thing backed up by a wildly successful world tour that cemented his status as the biggest pop superstar in the world. 'Dangerous' actually managed to outstrip it; Quincy was gone, but as a parting shot, he'd put in a word for Teddy Riley, whose production nudged Jackson in a more explicit r&b direction than the one he'd taken for much of 'Bad'. It's a decent album, and it sold well - better than its predecessor - but just as it was peaking, the stories of Jackson's well-documented eccentricities and increasingly bizarre lifestyle began to take on a much uglier tone.

I suppose it's inevitable that a lot of the comment following his death will focus on the persistent allegations of sexual abuse that dogged his career for much of the 90s and beyond, leading up to the trial in which he was acquitted of all charges brought against him. There were already enduring rumours - which turned out to be true - that he was living beyond what must have been considerable means, and even after beating the rap in 2005, he still seemed to be facing certain artistic and financial ruin. But I think that, at some point, you have to try and separate the art from the artist. There's no end of testimony which suggests, for example, that Miles Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye and Pablo Picasso were all fairly unpleasant human beings, to say the least. But does such knowledge diminish the greatness of their art? Indeed, should we allow it to? Is it because we now demand so much more of artists, beyond just their work, that we end up learning things about them that we'd really rather not know? I don't want to seem as if I'm ignoring the less savoury aspects of Michael Jackson's lifestyle, but I can't help thinking what a shame it would be for someone as clearly troubled as he was, who'd been brutalised by his father as a child, and who'd lived virtually his entire life in the public eye to be remembered first for his transgressions, rather than for a body of work that, at its best, is at least the equal of anything in the realm of modern popular music. Y'know, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I can understand why some people would feel differently, but equally, I can't help looking for whatever good there might be in the circumstances, if indeed any remains. Given that there's certain to be a plethora of books examining the darker side of Jackson's life, I see no possibility of an end to the debate for quite some time.

After he was acquitted in 2005, me and a few friends played a game of 'Fantasy A&R', wherein we talked about what we'd do if we were given the job of revitalising Michael Jackson's career. I suggested that he hooked up with the Neptunes and made a straight-up modern r&b record that would put him back on every dancefloor and radio station in the world, or perhaps followed Outkast's lead and struck out in an altogether more adventurous direction to see if he could turn pop music on its head the way he'd done in the 80s. Someone else came up with an absolute, can't-fail, shoo-in - an album of Beatles covers, something which, if he'd reined in his latter-day tendency towards lachrymose schmaltz, would surely have sold shitloads. Even though I struggled to see any way back for him after the trial, regardless of its outcome, I still hung onto the possibility that he might yet have had a career-saving comeback in him. The planned season of shows at the O2 could possibly have kickstarted a revival in his fortunes, but, equally likely, it could have pointed to a bleak vision of a possible future where an increasingly-isolated Jackson ran down the clock of his twilight years as a living jukebox amidst the buffets, slots and tables of some high-end Vegas resort like Caesar's or the MGM Grand, redeemed financially, but artistically a spent force. We'll never know.

Still, there's always the music...

The Jackson 5: Never Can Say Goodbye



The Jackson 5: It's Great To Be Here



Michael Jackson: Almost There



The Jackson 5: Mirrors Of My Mind



The Jacksons: Living Together (Ron Hardy Tribute Edit)



Michael Jackson: Rock With You




Michael Jackson: I Just Can't Stop Loving You




Michael Jackson: Remember The Time





Goodbye, Michael.

John Martyn (1948 - 2009)

I think I was about 13 when I first discovered John Martyn. Back in the days when there were only three television channels in the UK, and the concept of music television was little more than a weak joke, I'd regularly try and sweet-talk my parents into letting me stay up late to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test, which was broadcast at an ungodly hour on BBC2. Most of the time, they'd say no, but on one of the occasions they relented, John Martyn was amongst the performers. I didn't have much of an idea who he was, although I'd seen his name mentioned in NME, Melody Maker or Sounds from time to time. I remember he did two songs, the first of which might have been Solid Air, although I couldn't be certain. What I'm certain I do remember was his version of Skip James' I'd Rather Be The Devil, because I'd never heard anything like it - clouds of Echoplexed wah-wah guitar, tinged with feedback and a slurring, whisky-drenched, sandpaper growl over the top of it. From then on, I made a point of saving my pleas to watch OGWT so's they'd coincide with his appearances on the show.



John Martyn belonged to another age, one when musicians seemed to take a more pluralist approach to their craft than perhaps they do now. I remember him mentioning people like Lester Young in interviews, which although a little unexpected from someone who was, to my ears, ostensibly a folk musician, still sent me scurrying to my dad's record collection for further enlightenment. His sense of adventurousness, which led him to work with people as diverse as Lee Perry, Phil Collins and Sister Bliss of Faithless, seemed to characterise the broader approach of his generation. He and many of his peers, such as Pentangle (home of his one-time sparring partner Danny Thompson) would think nothing of working the jazz, folk and blues forms they grew up with into something modern and original, occasionally throwing a curve ball by applying a more free-form, experimental approach, which in Martyn's case led to some pioneering excursions into dub and what later became ambient music.

He also wrote many beautiful songs, a few of which I've posted below. Solid Air was written as a tribute to his friend and label-mate Nick Drake, and I once remember a Saturday morning kids' TV show where I was gobsmacked to hear Marti Pellow and another member of Wet Wet Wet do a lovingly faithful take on May You Never (they later got into trouble for hoisting a big chunk of Martyn's Sweet Little Mystery without permission, but that's another story).

I'm a bit pissed off at myself that the first thing proper I get around to writing for this blog in 2009 should turn out to be an obit for a musician whose work has given me pleasure for almost as long as I've been seriously listening to music, but that's how it goes sometimes. We're now at a point in time where many of the true greats and genuine mavericks of modern popular music are leaving us at an alarming rate. In John Martyn's case, there's left a hole that's unlikely to be filled anytime soon. I shall miss him, and I won't be the only one.

Solid Air (Solid Air, 1973)



May You Never (Solid Air, 1973)



Bless The Weather (Bless The Weather, 1971)



Small Hours (One World, 1977)

Guy Peellaert (1934 - 2008)

Guy Peellaert has died in Paris, aged 74.

Who hell he, you may ask? Well, if you own a copy of Bowie's "Diamond Dogs", then you've seen his work. He first came to my attention as a schoolboy, when I bought a copy of his book "Rock Dreams" in the sale at a local bookstore. It featured text by Nik Cohn alongside Belgian-born Peellaert's astoundingly vivid paintings and illustrations, images which were amongst the first to explore and examine the burgeoning mythology of rock'n'roll using a medium other than the written word.

Being barely in my teens when "Rock Dreams" came out, and having no concept that the book might be the kind of thing worth looking after and keeping in one piece, I relentlessly cannibalised my copy, decorating my bedroom walls with Peellaert's representations of the Stones, Hendrix, the Beatles and so on. The book was such a critical and commercial success that Peellaert was later commissioned to do the cover art for one of David Bowie's greatest albums,"Diamond Dogs". Controversially, Peellaert represented Bowie as half-man, half-dog, canine genitalia and all. These latter details had to be airbrushed out for the cover of the final release. Original unretouched copies are as rare as rocking-horse shit, and will doubtless become a little more sought-after now.

Peellaert's work was more far-ranging than just "Rock Dreams" and the "Diamond Dogs" sleeve, covering comics and movie posters as well as paintings and the kind of illustrations which brought him fame, but it's for these that I knew him best. RIP.