THE GLORIOUS RETURN OF KEEGANITE RHETORIC

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I know the club. I'm not saying the other managers didn't, but I know it as a player, a manager, I know what it's like in terms of what the fans want. They'd like to win something. When they've worked all week, the match for them is like it is for people down south going to the theatre. They want to see something special. They want us to have a go and that's why we're here. We're going to have a go.
- KK, January 2008

The journalists at the press conference tittered indulgently, sardonically.

The Toon supporters in Shearer's Bar laughed because it was so marvellously, obviously, precisely true, and because no one else ever seems to get it.

THE KING IS BACK!

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More to come on the return of the Messiah when I have stopped weeping with joy

FOALS: A MINOR GRIPE (AND RELATED NORTHERN CHAUVINISM)

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Foals are currently being touted as one of the most promising bands of the moment, and deservedly so. The NME’s decision this week to feature them as their ‘most likely to’ for 2008 represents something of an Olympian leap forward for the increasingly infantile paper from last year’s choice, which was none other than latter-day visionaries The View (oh, the New Musical Express of the twenty-first century - sometimes words fail me!).

In the attendant interview the band make some very pertinent comments regarding the present state of the UK music scene and the unhelpfulness for new bands of the ‘new rock’n’roll saviour tag’, thereby nicely subverting a feature evoked with Bruce Forsythe-style inanity by Conor ‘Ultimate Cunt’ McNicholas in his (gratefully) brief editorial as ‘us putting our money where our mouth is’ (adding, with a showbiz flourish worthy of one of those gravel-toned American movie trailer voiceovers: ‘And one thing we’re never short of is mouth’).

If they deliver, Foals could be something very special indeed. Their sound is truly innovative, adventurous and sophisticated, which is obviously everything a band’s sound should be in 2008. However, it must be noted that they are criminally let down by their vocals, which seem disappointingly lacklustre and derivative compared to the exhilarating experimentalism of the music itself. Put simply, the melodic line just does not seem to contain much melody, which is well and good if you compensate by excelling in other ways – eg. lyrics, phrasing, stylistic weirdness etc – but not so much if you’re merely retreading rather tired post-punk clichés, hoping that affected shouting will make up for a lack of real formal proficiency and imaginativeness in this particular area of composition.

This does seem to be a problem that has in recent years plagued artists from London and its environs (and I include Oxford here: it's less than an hour on the train). Bloc Party spring immediately to mind as another band content to recycle the same feeble, stylised phrases based on the same limited intervals time and time again, a fact that has continually undermined their otherwise superlative music; The Libertines would have been a much better band if Barat and Doherty had let the Smithsian colour of their melodies predominate over the quasi-Joe Strummer posturing of the vocal delivery (likewise Babyshambles and Dirty Pretty Things, holders of NME’s ‘most likely to’ title in 2006).

I can’t help feeling that this has something to do with being part of a metropolitan ‘scene’, being close to the centre of hype, which as Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis so eloquently puts it in the NME piece, creates a climate characterised above all by the ‘ephemerality of success’, a climate in which fashion and short-lived trends seem to have an inordinate bearing on the shaping of a band’s sound. There seems to be something about this kind of atmosphere which favours poseurish charisma in a frontman over and above a focus on melody, a fact that has meant that, historically, the most melodically attentive, melodically original bands have hailed from the British margins where such conditions do not hold sway: The Beatles from Liverpool, the Buzzcocks, Smiths, and Stone Roses from Manchester, Super Furry Animals from Wales, Teenage Fanclub from Scotland (into the present day, it is possible to detect this trend at work by comparing north-western bands like Doves and north-eastern bands like The Futureheads and Field Music with south-eastern contemporaries such as Bloc Party, The Horrors, The Rakes etc). When south-eastern bands do throw melody into relief – the worst of Blur, The Hoosiers etc - they do so with a degree of superficiality, jauntiness, and irony that is funny for about five minutes and then quickly becomes tiresome.

Of course, there is something absurd about such sweeping regional generalisations. XTC represent one of many notable southern bands to buck the trend (other examples on the list might include Kate Bush, The Zombies, Radiohead of course, and on the other side, neither Joy Division nor the Happy Mondays were particularly inventive when it came to writing melodic vocal lines). Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case that, when artists are allowed to develop away from the centre of commerce and the ‘ephemerality of success’, they are likely to dedicate the greater portion of their labours to creating private worlds in which the minutiae of form counts for far more than the latest voguish vocal pose. Maintaining independence from the centralised ‘industry’ side of music in this country is an essential precondition for allowing melody to grow independent of formulaic, commercially-oriented vocal mannerisms and an ego-driven emphasis on style, a fact that Foals seem to be fully aware of, but do not yet seem to have applied with comprehensiveness to all areas of their otherwise encouragingly inventive sound.

(AT LEAST A PART OF) WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT ...

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I think the liberal things that have happened over the past 50 years have come from popular and alternative culture, that they’re an important antidote to business and Western conservative politics.

– Paul Morley

A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF BRITISH POP MUSIC

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IN THE BEGINNING there was an Empire that had the dark heart ripped right out of it.

And into the Void came a sexier, funkier, more humane side to the national character, a side that that had always been struggling to make itself heard but had never quite, until now, been able to do so.

As it grew, the sound became thinner, paler, older, losing much of its kaleidoscopic lustre, so that it became necessary, in the perpetual, irrepressible search for revolution and newness, to state what it was all about all over again. Which it did, with a wonderful primordial yelp.

Very soon the weary, lethal ghost of the Empire returned dressed as a hateful woman, and the sound was forced underground, or hurled kicking and screaming to the margins, where it sang about opposition and loneliness with such eloquent energy that it seemed to have found a new, beautiful form for an old, beautiful truth.

But as the Empire itself adapted to the new way of things by morphing into insidious new shapes, the sound became confused, disparate, lost sight of what it was battling against, and began to lazily repeat itself with an odd mixture of flippancy and earnest inanity, exchanging pure self-expression for pure self-worship, which was exactly what the new order prized above all.

The vociferous cry of the Outsider became the vaguely indifferent shrug of the Poseur-rebel gazing uxoriously at the past, rebelling only against the notion that it might be necessary to stand squarely behind an ideal of what the future could be.

And the Void beckoned once more, unless something come again to fire new light into the darkness.

WILLIAM BLAKE SAID: 'I MUST CREATE A SYSTEM OR BE ENSLAV'D BY ANOTHER MAN'S'

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

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In 1996 (just for the hell of it) it was Gina G singing 'Ooh Aah, Just a Little Bit', it was Euro '96, it was Oasis, it was Knebworth, it was Kevin Keegan shouting with petulance but also visceral, wild-eyed ardour at Alex Ferguson for being so cynical and mean-spirited, it was the end of the IRA ceasefire, it was Mission Impossible I, it was the International Year For the Eradication of Poverty, it was the Dunblane massacre, it was Alan Shearer, it was lime-green, it was big-platforms on trainers, it was bright orange, it was the Union Jack looking OK for a fleeting moment, it was the Nintendo 64, it was Bill Clinton signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, it was Tony Blair smiling a Clintonian rather than a Bushian smile that was nevertheless both hopeful and sinister, it was the death of Tupac, it was the film 'Independence Day', it was the publication of Chuck Palanuik's book 'Fight Club', it was David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest', it was Our Friends in the North summing up the spirit of the age, it was Geri Halliwell, it was Dodgy singing 'Good Enough', it was the birth of Dolly the Sheep.

In 2007 it was Kylie coming back and singing '2 Hearts' in a dark, gothically decadent dress, it was Gordon Brown coming to power and saying very little, it was the BBC adaptation of Dickens's 'Oliver Twist', it was Amy Winehouse's drugs, it was the the intense, monochromatic force of the film 'Control', it was Britney Spears losing control with the world watching, it was 'immigration is getting out of control', it was George Bush and Tony Blair in decline, it was Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man', it was The Klaxons, it was Led Zeppelin reforming, it was black, it was 'everything is going wrong / but we're so happy', it was Lily Allen appearing in her (black) lingerie for GQ magazine, it was gold, it was ketamine, it was spidery shadowy lettering, it was Afghanistan, it was Iraq, it was Iran, it was David Lynch's 'Inland Empire', it was the BBC adaptation of 'Cranford', it was Calvin Harris singing that he had love and hugs for people, but only if they were born in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, it was ostentatious jewellery, it was buckets and buckets of rain, it was Channel 4's T4 Unsigned bands competition, it was Northern Rock imploding, it was the total lunar eclipse in March, it was Nicolas Sarkozy, it was a sad, ineffable absence right in the middle of things with two syllables that said Maddy until nobody knew what it meant anymore.

TEN GAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

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Alexander the Great
Michelangelo
Sappho
Oscar Wilde
Roland Barthes
John Cage
Aaron Copland
Martina Navratilova
Tennessee Williams
Freddy Mercury

BAUDELAIRE, DOHERTY, MORRIS: ARTIFICIAL AND EARTHLY PARADISES

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Pete Doherty (the music of whom is, it seems to me, frequently very good, but even more frequently hugely underwhelming and overrated) has often in interviews touted his admiration for Charles Baudelaire amongst numerous other romantic-outsider literary figures – Blake, De Quincey, Huysman, Camus etc.

There is a fairly evident line of interconnection between Baudelaire and Doherty, the latter having apparently modelled much of his artistic persona on the nineteenth century French writer often characterised as being the first archetypically ‘modern’ poet - modern because of his ironical world-weariness, his focus on urban squalor, and his alienated detachment from the oppressive mores of modern-industrial society, an attitude Doherty has, like many other artists in the last 150 years, updated for a new era in which this kind of romantic-rebel stance still seems apposite.

And, of course, there are the drugs. Baudelaire, famously, was a champion drinker and smoker of weed and opium, even going so far as to publish an article extolling the virtues of the two in 1860 entitled Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch, or ‘French Poets; Artificial Paradises: Opium and Hashish’. For Baudelaire, in the godless, spiritually vacuous modern world, experimentation with the two substances offered the possibility of an otherwise inaccessible salvation for the dislocated individual. Social and religious paradises might remain unattainably lost, but there was at least hope in reducing matters to a small-scale, radically subjective level where utopia, or at least a fleeting glimpse of what looked like utopia, seems reachable.

The intense idealism of Doherty’s artistic project is very much grounded in this particular Baudelairean view. Paradise for Doherty (often conjured as ‘Arcadia’, or the more place-specific Blakean ‘Albion’) is to be achieved through a visionary discovery of the magical colour underlying the greyness of the modern world, a process quite obviously (and contra Blake) helped along the way by the copious ingestion of mind-altering artificial substances. I can recall (but can’t source anywhere) Doherty talking eloquently about creativity a couple of years ago, evoking it as something like a process of ‘walking down a street and turning a brick in a wall that opens up a whole other world’. This, along with other of Doherty’s more poetic pronouncements, reminds me of lines from probably my favourite poem by Baudelaire - ‘Landscape’ - which depicts a similar (and pretty definitely drug-influenced) dream of a private idyll discovered in an urban setting:

And when the winter comes, in monotone of snow,
I’ll lock up all the doors and shutters neat and tight,
And build a fairy palace for myself at night.
So I will dream of bright horizons in the blue
Where fountains weep in pools of alabaster hue,
Of kisses in the glades, where birds sing night and day,
Of all to make an idyll in a childish way.
Riot, that rages vainly at my window glass,
Will never make me raise my forehead from my task,
Since I am plunged in this voluptuous delight –
Of conjuring the spring with all the poet’s might,
Of hauling forth a sun out of my heart, with care
Transmuting furious thoughts to gently breathing air.

There is much of this lyrical idealism in Doherty’s work, and such articulate vision is to be applauded. At the very least this emphasis on revolutionary individual discovery contrasts favourably with the kind of flippant, say-nothing posturing to be found in a ‘post-Libertines’ non-band such as The View. Getting beyond the squalor of the quotidian and fostering private dreams of escape is, it goes without saying, a necessary precondition for radicalism of all kinds, and, if drugs have the potential to provide assistance in this edifying process, then so be it. We all benefit from constructing imaginative fairy palaces in our heads at one point or another.

There is, however, also surely something dangerous in this casual advocacy of ‘artificial paradises’. I don’t want to misrepresent Baudelaire, as there seems to me a good deal of ambiguity on the subject in his work; the idyll in ‘Landscape’ is, significantly, a ‘childish’ one, and elsewhere, in a poem such as ‘Parisian Dream’, extravagantly lush, hallucinatory descriptions of the cityscape finally give way to the ‘horror’ of the poet-speaker’s ‘wretched hole’ as the vision subsides - there is clearly, as in De Quincey, a substantial acknowledgement of the dark side to the life of the drug addict-visionary running as a recurrent theme throughout Baudelaire’s body of work.

Nevertheless, the notion that a life founded on drug-induced visions might offer some kind of utopian solution is the standpoint that Doherty seems to have adopted as his own latter-day translation of Baudelaire, and it is one that must be fiercely guarded against in a present-day context where hitherto unimaginable levels of excessive drug-use run the risk of derailing any solid cultural opposition to the myriad of social ills confronting us. Drug misuse is in reality not an act of resistance to modern day capitalism, merely a confirmation of the doctrines of extreme individualism and personal choice that enable the system to continue to flourish. Isn’t an ‘artificial paradise’, after all, exactly what consumerism promises us? As such, it comes as no surprise that the most eminently marketable British musicians of today – Doherty, Amy Winehouse, The Klaxons, Lily Allen – are also figures whose liberal uses of chemicals are almost as frequently celebrated as their artistic outputs.

Around about the same time as Baudelaire was writing of artificial paradises, William Morris was advancing his response to a similar perception of the spiritual poverty and general dereliction of the modern world, attempting to point to the possibility of what he termed the ‘earthly paradise’. His affirmative vision of the future was founded not on private escapism, but on the idea that paradise could be regained through collective action – through socialism. Pete Doherty would do well to attend to Morris as much as to Baudelaire, and to take a leaf out of Morris's book in focusing on Arcadia’s earthliness, rather than on its druggy artificiality.

I THINK THE BEST ALBUM OF THE YEAR WAS 'WINCING THE NIGHT AWAY' BY THE SHINS AND THE BEST SINGLE WAS 'LITTLE TOO LATE' BY JOJO