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.

A Christmas Double Shot (Part 2)

Primal Scream are a band it isn't always easy to like. Their near-fundamentalist adherence to the tenets of The Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle can sometimes make them appear little more than a bunch of dicks suffering from an advanced case of arrested development rather than a group of people with a sincere belief in the redemptive power of music. Yet both live and on record, they're often capable of shoving such doubts right back down the throats of those who hold them. One of the best live shows I've ever seen was their performance at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool in April 2000. So often you'll hear bands say how they're influenced by this or that, or that their new direction is like X meets Y, and when you actually hear the end product, you wonder what the fucking hell they were talking about. But if Bobby Gillespie had said in 2000 that the new Primal Scream sound was like a Krautrock Stooges scrapping in a pub car-park with Sun Ra's Arkestra, Charles Mingus, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth...well, after that show, I'd have believed him, because that's exactly what they sounded like, and it was fucking astounding. I've seen them three times since, and they've never come close to matching the thrilling, terrifying, remorseless racket they made that night. They divided our party right down the middle and all; half thought it was near-transcendent in its magnificence. The other half thought it was a load of shite. Well, so long as you get a reaction, eh?

The album they were touring back then, XTRMNTR, is, for me, probably their best. I've never entirely bought the argument that Screamadelica is one of the great creative touchstones of late 20th century rock music, although I do like it. What's interesting when you play those two records alongside each other is just how radically different they are. Essentially, it's the same band on both albums, and this is the thing I admire most about Primal Scream; they don't stay in the same place for too long and, for a band that supposedly once typified the intensely conservative indie ethos of the 80s and 90s, this is pretty remarkable if you ask me.

They've also long been market leaders when it comes to mucking around with dance-music idioms, drafting in DJs and remixers like David Holmes, Andrew Weatherall and Jagz Kooner to not only remix their material, but to produce it as well. As a result, those less conventionally rock'n'roll/dancefloor aspects of their sound never give the impression of having been bolted-on as an afterthought for marketing purposes, as was often the case with some of their peers, back when "indie dance" was the buzzword of the day. Consequently, what you end up with is dance music which properly rocks out, and rock'n'roll with the kind of pilled-up, hip-twitching groove that today's pop kids are really diggin', daddy-o! Jagz Kooner's Spectre Mix of Swastika Eyes is absolutely fucking brutal. Imagine Neu! if they'd grown up on a Salford sink estate listening to nothing but Belgian techno from 1990 and Fun House by the Stooges. If you can't, then I suggest you play it as loud as you possibly can and find out what such a thing might have sounded like.

Primal Scream: Swastika Eyes [Spectre Mix] (single, 2000)

MP3 of the Week - Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin"

This record cost me a (then) prohibitively expensive £1.50 on a French Skydog import when I bought it from Probe Records in Liverpool during the summer of 1977. I can't remember whether the person who actually sold it to me was a future pop star or not, but Probe being what it was around that time, the odds are it probably would have been.

If you're anything like me, you're probably sick of reading a seemingly endless stream of absolute guff about how this bunch of herberts or that shower of slumming Tristram Trustfunders are this week's Living Embodiment of the True Spirit of Rock'n'Roll - they're dangerous, they're wild, they bunk taxis, they date fashion models, they appear in the gossip weeklies, and they all look exactly the fucking same. Invariably, when you hear the music, it sounds just as you'd imagine from a band who've probably hired a PR company first and built everything else arse-backwards from there. It therefore becomes difficult to imagine that any such band would ever - indeed, could ever - make a record as terrifyingly, psychotically good as this as long as they had holes in their arses.

Recorded sometime in 1972 by my favourite Stooges line-up - Iggy, Ron Asheton on bass, his brother Scott on drums, and the great, great James Williamson on guitar - but unreleased until around five years later, "Gimme Some Skin" sounds less the work of a rock band than it does the end product of supplying musical instruments and studio time to a gang of delinquents, sociopaths and sexual perverts. Iggy's vocal sounds depraved, becoming ever more hysterical to the point where he's almost literally gibbering by the final verse. Scott Asheton pounds the kit like he just caught it robbing his stash, and Williamson's primitive, slashing riffs are closer to threats of violence than to music. It probably cost about $50 to record, and it sounds completely out of control. There was a particular reason the Stooges remained at the fringes of the music scene for as long as they did; they disgusted people, and it isn't difficult to hear why. Every time some knobber has tried to convince me that, say, "Appetite For Destruction" is a great rock'n'roll record because it supposedly signalled the death of Corporate Rock - as if a record that sold 28 million copies could signal the death of anything - I'd have loved to have played them this. Over thirty-five years after it was recorded, it still sounds as if you could catch something unpleasant just by listening to it.

Iggy & the Stooges: "Gimme Some Skin" (1972)

'Chinese Democracy' - the rock equivalent of 'The Phantom Menace'?

Tomorrow, on November 23rd 2008, Guns 'n' Roses finally release "Chinese Democracy". If you've ever wondered what an album which took almost fifteen years and cost $11m to make would actually sound like, fill yer boots.

I can't stand Guns 'n' Roses, for reasons I can't be bothered to go into here - the "blogosphere" is already overrun with peanutheads who'll tell you at great length why Band X/Movie Y/Celebrity Z sucks, is an oxygen thief, or holds a metaphorical pillow over the face of "real" talent, so I'll pass on this opportunity, thanks. Nonetheless, it's undeniable that G'n'R are A Big Deal to many, including several people whose opinions I respect, and whatever else one may think of the band, their music and the Hammer-Of-The-Gods-turned-up-to-11 universe they inhabit, it's equally undeniable that "Chinese Democracy" is that rare thing nowadays - an Event Record.

I like Event Records, or more precisely, I like the idea of them. I mean, I can't remember the last time I was startled by an Oasis record, for example, but each time a new one comes around, I'm curious to hear whether Noel Gallagher's managed to pull anything out of his arse that's near the measure of "Slide Away" or "Rock'n'Roll Star". Likewise, with every new Madonna album comes a degree of certainty that it won't sound too much like the previous one. Which is to say that Event Records often hold a fascination for both fans and non-fans, even if only, in the latter case, to shore up an existing belief that the performers in question are no more than charlatans, fanfarons and snake-oil salesmen. Being somewhat long of tooth and grey of beard, I can remember when Event Records seemed a good deal more plentiful and frequent than they are now. The two-year gestation of Stevie Wonder's masterpiece "Songs In The Key Of Life" is a good example; how on God's Green Earth, people asked at the time, can an album take two years to make? When the end product finally arrived, though, and everyone got to hear it at the same time (more or less), the wait was, in the case of "Songs...", definitely worth it. Now, if you'll please briefly excuse me while I draw a discreet veil over "The Second Coming"...

Anyway, content notwithstanding, it could be that "Chinese Democracy" marks the passing of the Event Record, on some level at least. Reviewing it for The Onion's AV Club, Chuck Klosterman makes a very astute point to this effect;

"For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that."

I think this is dead-on. Peer-to-peer trading of watermarked copy-protected advance promos, the drip-drip of officially-sanctioned leaks, being able to treat albums like the buffet at a wedding (courtesy of iTunes et al), where we pick and choose what we want with no obligation to take anything we don't - all have rendered the notion of the album as a self-contained 'Grand Artistic Statement Which Has Something Important To Say About The World And That' rather redundant. It appears that nobody's told Axl Rose any of this - or if they have, he wasn't listening - because "Chinese Democracy" has 'Grand Artistic Statement, etc.' embedded in its very DNA. But the inherent risk in giving the world advance notice, as Rose has done, that the next one will be The Magnum Opus is this; what if it turns out to be a load of shite? What if, after all this time, Axl Rose has completely lost sight of whatever it is he wanted to say, to the extent that the making of the statement has now become as, or more, important than the statement itself? After all, Rose's megalomaniac tendencies have been well-documented, and megalomania can do funny things to one's sense of perspective. Now, I should add at this point that I'm not much of a "Star Wars" fan, so I could never quite fathom the eagerness with which the arrival of "The Phantom Menace" was anticipated by those for whom "Star Wars" was a formative part of their childhood. But one comment made upon its release by a bitterly disappointed fanboy has stayed with me; "It's official - I have wasted my life". So, to return to the doubtless not-terribly-original observation at the top, has a decade-and-a-half of sitting on your hands been worth it? Or is "Chinese Democracy" rock music's equivalent of "The Phantom Menace"?

Well...yes. And no. If it was ever Axl Rose's intention to cause a paradigm shift in rock music with this record, then I'm afraid he's fallen flat on his arse. I've often been told by fans of G'n'R that it was the stripped-back directness of "Appetite For Destruction", and its preference for the fundamentals of rock'n'roll (or G'n'R's idea thereof) over stadium-rock hair-metal bombast, which caused it to have such a seismic impact (I'm still not buying that line, but that's another story). Well, guess what? In the bombast stakes, this makes the complete works of Richard Wagner, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jim Steinman sound like a Nick Drake demo. Minimalist it most assuredly is not. And, like most modern rock records, it's been ProTooled to fuck and back - Rose's vocals are clinically on-the-money throughout, and every riff, bass line and drum fill has been arranged with draughtsman's precision; a sure-fire indicator that several hundred man-hours have been spent in post-production. There is nothing raw about "Chinese Democracy"; the dirty fingernails, cracked lips and calloused fingers of G'n'R's previous manifestations have been comprehensively excised. You could eat your dinner off this album. It's been polished, buffed and polished again, almost to the point of blandness. But here's a funny thing - when it works, it sounds fantastic. Case in point being "Street of Dreams", a spectacularly over-written mid-tempo rock ballad that's a dead cert to be bashed out at "American Idol" auditions from now until the franchise utters its death-rattle. "Madagascar", one of several songs with somewhat gnomic titles, is the sort of swaggering, roided-up, industrial trip-hop you could've heard on umpteen movie and videogame soundtracks over the last decade or so, but the twist here is that, instead of yet another guitar solo that sounds like a massacre in a poultry farm, there's a spoken-word collage featuring snippets from "Cool Hand Luke" and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Yet when you hear it, rather than thinking, "Oh, for fuck's sake!", you instead begin to think that, despite the played-out nature of this and other devices, such as the dated nu-metal grind which drives a number of songs, "Chinese Democracy" is actually a very coherent-sounding record. The cliches make sense. There's plenty of light and shade, a first-rate grasp of modern hard-rock dynamics that might conceivably have Josh Homme rushing back to the drawing board, and any number of surprising and even affecting melodic and compositional flourishes. When you think about what a maddening clusterfuck its creation must have been, this is pretty remarkable. Imagine if the best thing that could have been said about it was, "Well, at least it's not completely fucking awful..."

And, you know, it isn't. In fact, it's pretty good. Whether or not Jimmy Iovine and the board of directors at Interscope feel they've got their money's worth now that Rose has finally delivered the bloody thing is moot. One thing's for certain; somebody did a bang-up job of keeping advance copies out of the reach of mp3 blogs, so there's a genuine likelihood it'll actually sell. If there's enough about it to have a committed naysayer like me conceding that, yes, this record is a qualified success which will perform well on its own merits rather than on the reputation of its creators, and no, it is nothing like the bloated, sprawling, unfocused, Ishtar-like monstrosity that many people might have expected, then it probably deserves to. I might even buy it myself. If it recoups, mind you, then I'll show my arse in the Vatican.