RosieBell

Will you stay in our lovers' story?

There are multitudes who really loved him. Young misfits found him a transformative influence  and have loved his music and him ever since.  As with a private death the true lovers should be the ones with the greatest right to speak – and to sing.  Analysis of musical and cultural importance will come along soon enough.

Those who complain about other people speaking and singing and weeping should STFU. 

Julie Burchill scored highest for pointless mean-mindedness. I can put up with her going on about her ever fascinating self as she will often chuck in shrewd and funny insights but not this time with her "sob-signalling".

Brendan O'Neill who is usually the most annoying of contrarians wrote an excellent piece about how in the age of tabloid nosiness and celebrity scar flashing, Bowie stayed private.  As Flaubert lived like a bourgeoisie and thought like a demi-god, so Bowie was a public spectacle and left his secrets for his intimates. 

Back in '73 Martin Amis called Bowie 'a mild fad'.   In his pompous youth Amis was sent off to Rolling Stones concerts and the like to produce disdainful writings. though he seems to have had less feeling for rock music than the average teenager blagging the latest album.

Amis's young and amoral characters are anachronistically uninterested in music, quite out of step with the Anglo youth of his times for which it was THE art form – their stories, their feelings, their own dreams as they strummed a guitar for a year or two and scribbled down lyrics. The young of the 70s and 80s without music are as odd as the present day young would be without Smartphones.

Skinheads used the dramatic apocalypse (bang not whimper) 5 Years   

as a theme song and in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting the characters are delicate about the right mood music to accompany their shooting up. Welsh's tribute was this:-

I daresay there are other notables who have refrained from writing one as well and haven't told us about their refraining.

The cybernats  got a splash for their crappy behaviour but the Nats of my Facebook acquaintance were reacting like everyone else, sharing memories of gigs and the musical among them jamming the back catalogue.  Nicola Sturgeon reminisced nicely about how as a wee girl she had listened to Major Tom over and over, to see if it could turn out right for him.  Meanwhile Unionists have taken delight in putting round the picture of Bowie in full Union Flag regalia while Europhiles claim him as a European. 

I am sad at his unexpected death and I can totally understand the flowers and the weeping from the real fans.  I preferred his contemporaries Lou Reed and Pink Floyd and only owned Hunky Dory and Space Oddity. Still, all the well-known songs and words are sloshing in my head and here's one of my favourites played on an organ.

 

 Life on Mars works on an instrument it wasn't written for and it works without the words as well, which is a test of a tune.  It is one of those soaring rock anthems which for the 70s and beyond young people were our epiphanies, our hallelujahs. As Bowie said in Memory of a Free Festival:-

The Children of the summer's end
Gathered in the dampened grass
We played our songs and felt the London sky
Resting on our hands
It was God's land
It was ragged and naïve
It was Heaven
…..

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love upon a white balloon
And fly it from the toppest top of all the tops
....
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party

Two sorts of pedalling

From The Singing Bourgeois

About the decline of the British ballad in the 1890s:-

There are other factors to consider, however, not the least of which concerns the improvements made in the comfort and safety of bicycles. The attraction bicycling held for young women in the 1890s created growing resentment in the music trades, culminating in a welter of anti-cycling propaganda in 1896. Here is an examle taken from the Musical Times of that year:

We may point out that a new and msot formidable enemy of the pianoforte has arisen of late in the bicycle. . .there are literally thousands of young ladies whose leisure hours, formerly passed in large part on the music-stool, are now spent in the saddle of the 'iron bird' … proof positive is afforded by advertisements which announce the sale of pianofortes by individuals at great sacrifice on the ground that their owners are 'going in for cycling'.

Attempts were made to dissuade women from cycling by appealing to their concern for health – 'the rapid passage through the air my be a positive source of danger' – or by appealing to their vanity – 'the bicycle hand … becomes flattened, bulges out at the sides, gets lumpy and out of shape, and the fingers become crooked.; The last bit of 'expert' advice issued from the United States where cycling was also turning women away from music during their leisure hours. It would be wrong, therefore, to see the bicycle as something only threatening the profits of the British music trade. The situation was obviously being exaggerated since there still remained an enormous demand for teachers of music (particularly piano teachers), the number of 'music masters' almost doubling between 1881 and 1911, according to census figures. These teachers were forced to compete in a 'payment by results' environment where the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music developed a system of graded examinations.. However, their pupils were now able to gain good passes on all of the exams by restricting their learning to a few pieces a year. In 1899 the British Medical Journal voiced their concern not against cycling but against too much piano practice, suggesting it was responsible for 'the chloroses [green sickness - a form of anaemia] and neuroses from which so many young girls suffer'...

I would have thought a young middle-class woman would have leisure for both bicycling and piano, since during bad weather she could play the piano. However, it may have been part of the general hostility towards girls cycling at the time.

I did the Royal Schools of Music grades during my youth and I think they were a menace because you only did concentrate on about three pieces.

Also The Singing Bourgeoisie: Songs of the Victorian and Drawing Room and Parlour is probably sound about the actual musical quality of drawing room songs but is otherwise a bit glib in which it derives songs from the economic sub-structure.  I bought it thinking it was a collection of songs.   

Gig for Strummerville Sunday 22 December

My band, FRAKtured Fingers, is part of the line up playing for Strummerville.

Date: 22 December
Time: 6pm to late
Venue: The Banshee Labyrinth, Niddrie Street, Edinburgh
Entry: £5

Strummerville is a charity set up by friends and family of Joe Strummer in the year after his death  Strummerville gives opportunities to aspiring musicians and support to projects that create social mobility through music.

Fundraising Gig, Sunday 1 December, Bannermans, Edinburgh

Fundraiser for Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty  and Autonomous Centre for Edinburgh.

 

 Full Moon Club style DIY punk ethic music night. Expect everything from seasoned professionals to brand new talent. With a bit of experimentation thrown in.

6pm til midnight.

Back room: The Bucky Rage, Sad Society, The z28s, Babylon Dub Punks, Desperation A.M., FRAKtured Fingers, Ugly Baby, The Phlegm.

Front room: Rodney Relax and NUSS, Tommy MacKay, Liz Cronin, Freeloadin'Frank, Etrange, and Kirsty Kennedy.

£5 before 9pm, including veggie haggis, neeps and tatties. Food finishes at 9pm, £3 door.

Bannerman's Bar
212 Cowgate, Edinburgh, EH11NQ

I'm playing at this gig. My band, FRAKtured Fingers, is on at 7:30.

 

In Search of the Dischord

I thought his Berlin too glamorously decadent for words, and Walk on the Wild Side had a real sweetness and warmth about people who most would have regarded as depraved deadbeats.

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 71

 

On the sidelines by choice

I was sorry when I heard of the death of Alastair (Ali) Donaldson who I knew as William Mysterious, once a member of The Rezillos. His obituary in The Scotsman is here. The Rezillos were, and are, a lively punk/new wave band fom Edinburgh who performed some great, light-hearted songs.  I didn't know The Rezillos in their heyday of the late seventies but their reunion gig which I saw in around 2003 was about the best I've ever been to. Edinburgh audiences are known for their coolness, but for them the venue shook with ageing punks dancing themselves out of their old Rezillos T-shirts.

Ali left The Rezillos before they got big enough for Top of the Pops. He did various things after that, including busking and  playing in Edinburgh's pubs.  He appeared a lot at the Full Moon Club which my boyfriend Fritz Van Helsing ran and I helped out at, where he did  humorous songs like Bring on the Pancakes. He often did The Rezillos' (My  Baby Does) Good Sculptures, a song full of lightness and humour:- 

 

She don't care
For one night stands
And naughty boys
With sweaty hands
She got a thing
About carving wood
Or shaping a figure
From a lump of mud

Don't love my baby for her pouting lips
Don't love my baby for her curvy hips
I love my baby 'cos she does good sculptures yeah...!

We'd visit him and his lovely wife Ksenija in their little flat in the Southside. It was his second marriage and they had a baby, which Ali looked after while Ksenija worked. My memory is of Ksenija and I talking our heads off while Ali was present, handsome, a little detached and with a dry, understated humour.

Someone wrote a poem about him called "Billy, You've still got that Sax Appeal". (Ali played sax and bass, and other instruments as well).

The picture of a
Power pop combo
In the first flush
Of joyous youthful arrogance
Burns bright from within
Scottish pop's murky depths
They all had guitars
They all had chords . .

And still, you sit
On the sidelines by choice
Watching all and sundry
As if you're saying

"I'm free" and doing
Exactly whatever the hell
You want, just like
Any true punk would

 His funeral last week was attended by a lot of people from Edinburgh's music pub scene. Ali's own songs were played, as well as Johnny Cash performing The Beatles' In My Life.

 

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Sing Along

I saw Robert Ellis last night supporting Richard Thompson at Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Sing Along - guitar-picking song about being brought up as a Southern Baptist in the bible belt. 

 

Nobody talks too loud in my home town
Nobody stands too tall for fear of getting knocked down. .

And the flames of hell, they seemed so high
I could barely see over the view
I was just a boy when they told me that lie,
But lord it seemed so true.

And that's a hell of a thing to do to a kid
Just to teach him right from wrong
You can burn in hell  the rest of your days,
Or you can choose to sing along.

Richard Thompson started off with songs from his new album Electric, including Salford Sunday

 

(He pointed out that Salford was the dirty old town of Ewan McColl's famous song.) 

He still can write the songs though he did spend a lot of the evening doing guitar pyrotechnics - too much for my taste.  I prefer him doing straight ballads.  And he didn't do Beeswing or Vincent Black Lightening.  But he did do this great version of Hey Joe:-

 

Rest in noise

Gig, Bannermans, Cowgate, Edinburgh

Sunday 9th December from 6pm

First band on 7pm

My band, FRAKtured Fingers, is on at 8:30pm.

Fritz Van Helsing was Embra's first, original and lifelong punk rocker. He died Feb 15th of Hep C related liver failure. There was an amazing turnout of Edinburgh's original punks and many others at his memorial gig earlier this year, out of respect for his 36 year dedication to the Edinburgh music scene and the punk rock attitude. The DVD of this event are on sale. Proceeds to The Hepatitis C Trust.

Rest in noise, Fritz. Punk's not dead.

Headlined by The World Famous SHOCK AND AWE!!! with Mystery Guests..

also featuring

The Cathode Ray
Sad Society.
The Z28s
Geek Maggot Bingo
Babylon Dub Punks.
FRAKtured Fingers
Norman Lamont and The Invisible Helpers
Desperation A.M.
The Infirmary Inn.

Jet Hay will be collecting for Youth Music: Music is Power.

The Hepatitis C Trust will be hosting a special C Party in Bannermans from 6pm as part of the gig

Party Hard for Pussy Riot

Can't Not Mention the Olympics

I really enjoyed the Olympics opening ceremony.  Some people have been saying the music was Danny Boyle's music collection, which is okay by me, as his is about the same as mine. (I would take the piss out of Chariots of Fire but be respectful to Elgar and end with a rousing Pink Floyd). Some complained about the rustic scenes giving way to smoking chimneys was far too lefty (if anything it's Tory Romanticism). 

Its history was the Industrial Revolution and All That, skipping imperialism - which seems fine for a showcase pageant.  The big part of Britain's view of itself, World War II, with its library of iconic images - St Paul's above a burning London, air-raid sirens, Chamberlain's umbrella, Spitfires - could not be done when celeerating a time when the nations are competing with games, not guns. Churchill turned up for the closing ceremony, but only to quote Shakespeare - no fighting on the beaches.

My favourite part was when the winged cyclists emerged.  In the heaven that I go to the cyclists will be winged, the geekier ones explaining to each other how they find realigning the feathers and using carbon instead of titanium struts makes for a better flight.  This marvellous, surreal spectacle was set against the Beatles song I love best, Come Together.  One thing though - the Arctic Monkeys were singing it slightly off key - or so it sounded. (Here - 3 hours 5 minutes in).

Compared to:-

 

At the end of the ceremony, after the seven young athletes had been handed the torches and lit that elegant cauldron I found myself quite moved - against all expectation, as I had groaned when London got the Olympics. I regard Olympics time as a fortnight of no news except for who got bronze in the shot-put.  Other Olympics haters I know have said the same, and we've even planned to catch something at the Commonwealth games when they come to Glasgow. One of the pleasures was the accidental beauty of the athletes - the beauty of youth, supreme fitness and dedication.

Also at the end of the opening ceremony, I thought:-

One plus - there was no Morris dancing;
One minus - there was no Ray Davies doing Waterloo Sunset - how could they possibly leave that out?

Both these omissions were fixed in the closing ceremony. 

Ray Davies performed but looked as if he felt his age.  I saw him a few years ago and he was in good trim, jumping up and down on the stage. 

Morris dancing - even if done ironically - is the silliest dancing on earth.  Maori Hakas, Scottish ceilidh dancing, Bollywood - all have their points.  But there's nothing to be said for Morris dancing, except that it looks ridiculous.