Right, no excuses, you've all got to come along to this ...
Mark Fisher, Peter Fleming, and myself will be talking at Waterstones in Trafalgar Square, at 7.00pm on Wednesday 13 March, 2013. Tickets are £5 including wine.
[From the introduction to United - The First 100 Years: The Official Centenary History of Newcastle United (updated edition), 1995]
It is a great honour and privilege to write a tribute to my
football club on the occasion of the publication of this new book on its
history. As someone who was brought up in the North East and now represents
Sedgefield constituency, I know how important it is that we now have success in
sport.
The current
era is the most exciting for the club and its fans since I first began
supporting the team in the early sixties. Becoming leader of the Labour Party
puts great demands on my time, but wherever I am on a Saturday I anxiously
await the results. And, as someone who has a keen interest in sport, when
political engagements permit, I consider it a great privilege to be at the
match with the family – especially at St James’s Park. Though I have to confess
that there isn’t always domestic harmony at 4.45pm on Saturdays. My elder son,
Euan, supports Liverpool, as does his mother, and my younger son, Nicky, backs
Manchester United.
Football is
a great passion, loved by countless thousands of people throughout the country.
When I get to a match I’m always reminded that Bill Shankly’s famous comment
‘that football is more important than life or death’ s much to Tyneside as on
Merseyside.
I recall as
a teenager being elated by Supermac and his hat-trick home debut against
Liverpool in 1971. But, of course, in football as in politics we have to live
through the darker times as well – and I recall my gloom when we lost the FA
Cup final to Liverpool in 1974. I didn’t see Jackie Milburn play, but he and
Jimmy Smith, whose genius on the field I did witness, were my great childhood
heroes.
We are very
fortunate to follow the club in the current era. This is the most exciting
period since I started supporting ‘The Toon’. We are a forward looking club
with a magnificent new stadium, an ambitious and enterprising management, on
and off the field and, of course, a great squad of players.
I wish
everyone in the club well and know that we can build on our current success. Most
importantly we can foster high standards of endeavour and conduct inspiring our
young people – which I think is the greatest contribution one generation in
sport can bequeath to the next.
I know that
this revised edition of the history of the club will give great pleasure to
everyone.
Those motifs are at the front of my mind right now, what with this and all. Definitely Maybe as a tug-of-war between John Smith and Tony Blair versions of Labourism isn't a bad notion.
By the way, please feel free to send me any virulent anti-Oasis arguments at this point. It's best we get that sort of thing out of the way sooner rather than later. (I know: I should be so lucky).
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On a completely unrelated note, I recently came across the foundation moment of The Fantastic Hope buried in this otherwise highly embarrassing old list of putative band names (Phillip?!). Seeing as I forgot to celebrate the fifth anniversary back in September, consider this right here a fuggin party!
For the one of you at the back bashfully murmuring half-assent, myself and the indubitable Joe Kennedy are going to be reading a long-ish collaborative poem at this event in Bethnal Green in February. You should definitely come.
Vague concept: the North Pennines, the past, the future, leftism, modernism - the usual shite.
In a similar vein, I've got a poem out in the latest issue (XIV.2) of Oxford Poetry. Buy it!
(Actually there seems to be a problem with ordering single issues on the OP website so you might have to do the two-issue subscription thing, which is only 3 quid more.)
Away from the sound of drums, I wrote a few things this past couple of weeks about Britain, politics, poetry, and such ...
1) A review of the year in The Quietus. I sort of agree with some of the comments to this: I don't actually think there will be a revolution next year. But I do think it's at least noteworthy that ordinary folk have started using the phrase again.
Well how about boiling down this Deep-South-as-the-centre-of-the-percussion-universe meme to a single album?
New Orleans Funk: surely Soul Jazz's greatest ever compilation, and a veritable apotheosis of late-twentieth century drummery. When I was a 16-year-old living in the wilds of rural Northumberland, this was all the rhythmic education I needed.
Re. Ringo, in response to Joe's comment below and Blissblog's, I think I stick by the view that Ringo is clunky, but that's not to say that he's not great. If you listen closely to Rain, you can hear that he's frequently out of time, and those fills are basically what a ten-year-old would do if you told him to be "adventurous" with the kit. But it's because of this that Rain works. Pop music is always undergirded by a populist impulse which means we applaud amateurishness and gaucheness far more than technical virtuosity. Or rather, the ideal thing is when we hear an amateur doing something extraordinary, when someone tries on a role that she or he is not quite at home with, and the listener thinks I could do that, any man or woman could do that, on an extraordinary day. This is partly why X Factor and its attendant culture is so damaging: it reverses the populist principle by taking incredibly ordinary stuff and pretending it's somehow technically accomplished, effectively saying to the populace you think you could do this, but you can't, because you don't have the X Factor. This is elitism, pure and simple.
Or, in Adorno's phrase, the "barbarism of perfection".
There's clearly a lot more to say about the formula primitive = good in pop. If you want a radical example, I think this is why early Oasis were so good: they had a truly dreadful drummer in Tony McCarroll.
This must be the shittest beat ever committed to record, but it works perfectly in context (as a foil for the trippy, corruscating guitar line; as an onomatopoeia of hopeless mundanity; as a launching pad for a melody that soars).
Here's another one:*
And another:
Rave exploited exactly the same trick (primitive pulse + soaring hook), but that's outside of our purview ...
Charlie Watts is another notable example of the primitive-populist principle in action:
I could go on, but you probably hate me enough by this point.
*I would advise all you Oasis sceptics out there - and I'm aware that's probably everyone - to give Listen Up and Fade Away some serious attention. They really are rather good.
Part of why pop music has always been resistant to muso professionalism (unlike, say, jazz) is that as soon as the rhythm section departs from the groove (the self-abnegating communitarian base) into narcissism and stylised elaboration, the whole thing will collapse. This is why the "drum solo" is so often cited as the ultimate transgression and tragic flaw of seventies prog.
So I've always had a lot of sympathy with the Stephen Morris of New Order theory that a drummer should try as hard as possible to resemble a drum machine. Ringo is another obvious (pre-electronic) example.
Listen closely and it sounds pretty clunky on a technical level, but taken as a whole (in Heideggerian jargon, when we regard the totality of equipment) it sounds fucking immense. As long as the drummer doesn't try anything fancy, everyone else in the band can get on with the baroque stuff (production as in the above example, songwriting, lyrics, politics) with the added bonus that simpler drumming is also likely to be more conducive to dancing from a listener/audience point of view. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think this is the hardboiled essence of late-twentieth century pop/rock/whatever, the thing that really distinguishes it from other macro-genres.
But, as the walrus said, THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS ...
The obvious Western indie example is of course Reni. On pretty much every Stone Roses tune, there is a palpable sense that Reni is single-handedly rescuing music that would otherwise be lumpen and grey, and transforming it into danceable, genre-crossing future-funk with a sort a casual, effortless virtuosity. Everyone knows the obvious examples (Fools Gold, the I am the Resurrection outro), but listen to his drumming the whole way through Where Angels Play, the way it builds and wanders and shimmies:
Without Reni, this would be dull as dishwater. As it is, the other members of the band are spurred on to be better and more alive and Where Angels Play gambols with magic.
Then there are the virtuoso moments from funk and groove-based music proper. The obvious example here I guess would be Tony Allen. Again, one of the most noteworthy and heroic examples of his brilliance is when he "rescues" this tune, which would otherwise be relatively trite white Western pop:
Now this is a drum solo, of sorts. But it gets exactly the right balance between groove and ornament. The drum riff is pretty constant throughout, but when the melody begins to open out around 3:30, Allen cracks open a can of virtuoso - ever so briefly, only for about 20-30 seconds - and when the vocal melody drops we're in Elysium again.
