When the future dries up. (Well, has it?)

This morning I took my youngest to see The Pirates, which we rather enjoyed, the voice actors saving it from being a bit Aardman by numbers. As we came out I saw an advert for the rebooted Spiderman franchise and then this poster for the Top Cat movie. (My daughter, Abi, is helpfully pointing it out for you in the photo.)

This made me feel a bit low, to be honest. It’s not often I find myself quoting Bono but there is a line I like in U2′s song ‘God Pt II‘ that runs “You glorify the past/ When the future dries up”. Whatever the dictionary definition of decadence (oh, all right: “marked by decay or decline” and “characterized by or appealing to self-indulgence”) to me it always suggests a lack of forward momentum. Resting on one’s laurels seems a form of decadence to me and that is where we seem to me to be in cinema at the moment.

Of course, that may simply be symptomatic of the fact I don’t go to the cinema very much, these days. When I worked in Edinburgh, I’d go two if not three times a week, spreading the love across the Dominion, Cameo and Filmhouse. And then I did get to see films like ‘Warm Water Under A Red Bridge’ and ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’.

As ever, when thinking about the arts, my mind to turned to music. My dad played me a lot of music when I was young and I could hear the difference between, say, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Eddie Cochran, and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Simon and Garfunkel. Some of this was, no doubt, down to the recording techniques and sound quality but also a lot of it was down to what was being done with the music. Buddy Holly was clearly ahead of his time, in this respect, but it was clear that, for example, the much (and, probably, rightly) maligned ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, was a different beast from ‘Love Me Do’. My point is that music had a strong and apparent forward momentum and an enthusiasm amongst those who were making it, resulting in some incredibly constructive competition.

In 1979 I made my first clear break from the music that I discovered through my dad when my friend Adrian Coe played me Madness’s ‘One Step Beyond’. I fell in love with the band immediately. (I did like other ska bands but The Specials were a bit too serious, Bad Manners too far the other way.) It was exciting music, clever and funny, plus there was the whole gang within the band element of The Nutty Boys.

However, 1979 was also the year I bought ‘Are Friends Electric’ and discovered electronic music. I’ve documented my love of those early electronic bands elsewhere on this blog but my point is that, actually, this was a period of amazing innovation, musically. Some of this seemed instinctive – Shriekback – some quite self-conscious – Peter Gabriel – but there were many bands in between, such as Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, Devo, Talking Heads and, of course, Simple Minds to name just a handful. To me, 1978 to 1981/2 was pretty much the best time for music but there still appeared to be a forward trend after this specific period. Even The Smiths, who always seemed to have an eye on the past, were creative in forging a new sound.

It was sampling that first struck me as indicative of a creative decline – a decadence, in fact – even if some of those tracks were very good. This phenomenon reached its nadir with the sampling of entire songs to sing over, although, again, I still found room in my heart to love Sugarbabes’ ‘Freak Like Me’ and Richard X’s ‘Finest Dreams’. But I think what really disappointed me was the arrival of Oasis who looked to The Beatles not just for inspiration but also for templates.

Since then I have enjoyed many new albums but I find myself going to gigs by bands I’ve loved for years and buying CDs by groups that already feature in my record collection (as we used to call it in olden days). I want to hear new music. I don’t just mean songs I haven’t heard before I mean styles of music that are fresh, new and different.

In the same way that the conservatism of the film industry has led to formulaic storylines, films defined clearly by genre, so the music industry repressed musical innovation. But with the advent of the web and then social media, not to mention affordable high quality home recording, so I’d hoped to hear a proliferation of new music. Maybe it’s out there and I just don’t get to hear it.

I’m always happy to take a recommendation of a great new band, album or song, but can anyone recommend to me some new music? I’m not looking for stuff that’s difficult – I’m a great lover of pop – but just music that will excite me because it’s different from what I’ve heard before.

Thanks, in anticipation.

The devil is in the retail

This is Devil’s Bridge in Kirkby Lonsdale. The story goes that the townsfolk made a pact with the devil that if he built them a bridge over the river, he could have the soul of the first person who crossed the bridge. When the bridge was completed, a canny old lady sent her dog across the bridge and the devil had to be satisfied with the animal’s soul. Now, putting the old woman’s callous attitude towards her dog to one side, this suggests both an impotent devil and also one rather lacking an eye for legal detail.

Away from the stuff of legend, though, the real devils in our society are those large organisations (and governments) that lack a moral compass. Often, profit is the end the justifies the means and over the last few years, this seems to have come to affect charities. Of course, this isn’t a completely new thing. A young and very broke Jeffrey Archer became wealthy overnight after his first charity event – for which he took a 10% organiser’s fee – raised four million pounds. His justification was that the charity made a whole load of money it wouldn’t have had otherwise and his percentage was an incentive to raise as much as possible.

It’s a seductive argument, isn’t it? And an amoral one. Now companies have sprung up that will hassle you on the street, collecting money for charities in return for 30% of the takings.  I went passed a chap last year, collecting for Save The Children, who tried to intercept me and I told him, politely, that I wasn’t interested. As I walked away he said “Not all kids are as lucky as yours, mate”. I found this pretty offensive. Not because it wasn’t true but because he was using guilt as a weapon. Not because he cared about the children – he wasn’t working as a volunteer for Save The Children – but because he wanted to make a “sale”.

Last week, someone knocked on my door collecting for, I think, Cancer Research. I explained that I already gave to some charities and I didn’t feel able to give any more plus that, if I did, I would donate directly to the charity and not sign up on the doorstep. This time I was treated to a shake of the head.

Even this practice of seeking you out in your own home is not quite as invasive as Christian Aid’s policy of ringing up existing donors to ask them to give a bit more. I’m not by nature someone who gets angry but I wanted to snatch the ‘phone off my wife when I heard her listing her monthly expenditure to justify why shouldn’t couldn’t give more. (Incidentally, this practice was defended by Christian Aid, saying it wasn’t actually them who make the calls, which is cowardly.)

And, finally, today, I saw an advert for Help For Heroes, which appeared to have a mocked up stamp on it saying “Charity of the Year”. Having googled once I got home, this appears to be a project to get companies to adopt a certain charity as the recipient for their donations for the year. The way it looked on the advert implied (or, at least, I inferred) that Help For Heroes was THE charity of the year, like it had won an award.

I think a mistake is being made here. Charities are being seduced by short term gain, by focussing purely on the target of raising money. Now, OBVIOUSLY that is what charities are for. But that doesn’t mean they should do anything to raise money. I run a company and sales are massively important to us, they are the lifeblood of our business and I’ve been approached frequently by companies offering to generate leads for us, on a commission basis. It’s very tempting, especially when times were tough.

However, I care too much about my business, about how we approach and engage with people, to let someone do that on our behalf. Save The Children for me – someone who cares a lot about children – is now associated with the young man who tried to make me feel bad so he could make a sale. That’s not intellectual, that’s just my emotional response. But intellectually, I hold them in low regard for allowing an amoral third party company to take a cut of the money that well-meaning people want to give to help children.

I don’t know what the answer is, except to say don’t deal with the devil, don’t be lazy. You are doing good work but you need to work at it.

On Simple Minds

When I was in my early teens, I would take the bus home from school, do my homework, eat my supper and then, usually, either I would cycle up to my friend Darren Lodge’s house or he would come to me. (I think we slightly favoured his house as his dad would occasionally let us share a can of beer.) It’s been so long now that I can’t even imagine what we used to talk about – although the limitations of attending an all boys school would almost certainly have featured – but I do remember that we used to listen to David ‘Kid’ Jensen‘s radio show on Radio 1 from eight o’clock until ten.

Whilst we knew that John Peel was officially cooler than Kid Jensen, we preferred the latter’s show for two principle reasons. Firstly, we had to be home by ten-thirty and, secondly, we simply preferred the music. And, in fact, whilst I remain full of admiration for John Peel’s huge, pioneering and eclectic appetite for music and also aware of many of the bands he championed, thirty years later it is the music that Kid Jensen played that I still listen to.

My memory won’t be 100% reliable on this but I believe it was on Kid Jensen’s show that I first heard Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model‘, OMD’s perfect pop moment ‘Messages‘, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Human League, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, Shriekback and many other bands who made the early eighties such a musically rich period. In fact, the quality of the singles chart in the early eighties was, I believe, a direct result of the abundance of good music that was being encouraged by the myriad independent labels of the time.

At some point during this period, I heard Simple Minds’ ‘I Travel‘ for the first time. It was, I must admit, not love at first hearing. In fact, they sounded a bit like one of the bands John Peel might favour; melodies not immediately apparent, a syncopated rhythm, something hard about it. I was still, at that point, drawn to more immediate pop (with the exception, arguably, of Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn‘).

But the subsequent singles that Kid Jensen played – particularly ‘The American‘ – swayed me ’round and I started to listen to Simple Minds in earnest. For my sixteenth birthday in 1982, my brother (I think) gave me my copy of ‘Empires And Dance‘ and every time I hear it, I can vividly remember being sat in a dining room chair, hunched forward (due to the short cable on my dad’s headphones), intoxicated by a music that was different from anything that I’d heard before.

Those first five releases by Simple Minds range from the derivative (but still high quality) pop music on ‘Life in a Day‘,  through the improvisations and experimentation of ‘Real to Real Cacophony‘, to the sudden mature accomplishment of ‘Empires and Dance’, followed by perhaps their finest release, the double album ‘Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call‘ to the transcendent pop of ‘New Gold Dream (81~82~83~84)‘.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved a band or artist more than I loved Simple Minds and although I had my misgivings about the rather rock and populist ‘Sparkle in the Rain‘, I was always very proud to describe myself as a Simple Minds fan. I didn’t go to my first gig until 1982 and I missed the New Gold Dream tour that year and then for reasons I can’t recall I couldn’t go to any of their – at the time record breaking – run of seven nights at Hammersmith Odeon on the Sparkle in the Rain tour. Those, of course, were the days when bands played extra nights to satisfy demand rather than simply moving into venues that were so big that they made the entire live experience redundant.

And then disaster struck. Like the most dramatic tragedies, the catastrophe was not immediately apparent. The iceberg took the form of a pleasant enough track that the band agreed to record for John Hughes‘ movie, ‘The Breakfast Club‘. ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)‘ was initially released in the US and only became available in the UK when Jim Kerr heard how much fans were paying for imported copies. This concern led to a huge hit for the band and I’m tempted to think this went to their collective head.

Certainly, the band that appeared at Live Aid in 1985 were nothing to do with the band I loved with such a passion. Their excellent drummer Brian McGee had left the band prior to the recording of New Gold Dream and now bassist Derek Forbes was gone, too. The rhythm section had played an unusually prominent part in the band’s sound for those early albums and suddenly their absence was very apparent. (Incidentally, they now perform as Ex-Simple Minds and they are far better live than one might expect.)

And then, immediately before I left for university, Simple Minds released ‘Once Upon A Time’, which, frankly, I’m not even going to provide a link to. It is, perhaps, the most disappointing album I’ve ever bought and God knows I have made some unwise purchases in my time. Thus, I arrived in Liverpool to find myself, for the first time, in the company of many Simple Minds fans. I wonder how many friendships were nipped in their first flower  as I bitterly railed against a friendly comment on my Simple Minds lapel badge followed by an innocent comment about the virtues of ‘Don’t You’ and ‘Alive and Kicking’.

With my characteristic optimism, I had bought a ticket for the album’s tour and despite the pleasant surprise of finding Shriekback in the support slot – their beauty lost in the vast, echoing space of the Birmingham NEC – the concert itself was a clanging, clattering disappointment.

For the subsequent twenty-six years, I battled on, telling anyone who would listen that these stadium rockers, now synonymous with pomp and vacuity, had once been the most exciting band in Britain, with their finely crafted albums and surprisingly powerful and passionate live performances. In fact, my friend John joked on Twitter today that “for many years I thought they were called “Simple Minds 78 to 82″ so determined was FP to clarify his fandom “.

Over recent years, however, the band started re-introducing older songs into their sets, with an unexpected respect for the original material. In a gig at Hampton Court last year, they played good versions of both ‘Sons and Fascination‘ and ‘This Earth That You Walk Upon‘. And then they announced both a boxed set of the first five releases and also a tour where they would play five tracks from each of those first five releases.

I was cautiously excited.

After all this time, it seemed my broken heart might be mended or, at least, there might be one final evening together for old times’ sake. And so, last Friday, in the splendid company of John and our friend Ash, I proceeded to The Roundhouse in London. Suffice to say we were by no means the only forty-somethings who had decided to go along that evening. I wish I could have had a lens that would have enabled me to see everyone as they were thirty years ago, to see the fans inside undisguised by the passing of time.

And so the band came on. Only Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill from the original line-up, although the drummer, Mel Gaynor, has been with them since playing on bits of New Gold Dream in 1982. They launched into ‘I Travel’ and I was immediately reassured. Whilst Jim Kerr would prove incapable of dropping the vocal stylings he had picked up over the many years of stadium performances, he was, I think, as restrained as he could manage. But the band were spot on, particularly the bass player who was gratifyingly playing without ego, doing his best to play as Derek Forbes did.

The next track was ‘Thirty Frames A Second‘ and at the end of it Jim Kerr said “This is the stuff’ and I couldn’t have agreed more. I’ll put a full tracklisting at the bottom of this post but as the gig progressed all my anxieties evaporated and I found myself transported back to the days of my first love, unsullied by the disappointments of the intervening years. Played live, the intricacy and beauty of the songs becomes even more apparent and suddenly the yearning I’d felt all through the years of listening in frustration to my collection of bootleg live recordings was sated.

What I liked particularly was the care that the band showed in curating this exhibition of their own material. For example, Charlie Burchill producing his flying V guitar and playing the violin on ‘Pleasantly Disturbed‘. And, as I’ve mentioned, the care taken over the bass playing and, particularly, the sound, especially on ‘Theme For Great Cities‘ and even exposing a part I’d not previously noticed on ‘70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall‘.

John wrote a very sweet piece after the gig which you can read here and he’s right, I did shed a tear or two. Although the songs weren’t adjacent, hearing ‘Hunter and the Hunted‘ in full flight, followed a little later by the complex powerhouse of ‘Love Song‘ just about tipped me over the edge.

I do a daily blog and I had assumed my photo for that day would be of my ticket for the gig or a poster or, quite possibly, a blurred snap of the band on stage. But in the end it was a picture taken facing the other way because, when it came to it, I didn’t need a special lens to look back in time when I could see the rapt faces of my fellow fans.

You know, I had thought that these gigs might have provided a kind of closure for me but if anything my love for Simple Minds (78 to 82) has grown. The gigs were a reminder of just how much Simple Minds meant to me, how very, very good they were and also, if you’ll grant me a moment of pride, made me think very fondly of my teenage self. Excellent taste, young man!

The set list:

I Travel
Thirty Frames A Second
Today I Died Again
Calling Your Name
Scar
Life In A Day
Hunter And The Hunted
Premonition
Wasteland
Love Song
Pleasantly Disturbed
Room
The American
In Trance As Mission
70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall
Celebrate
Changeling
Factory
This Fear Of Gods
Promised You A Miracle
Someone, Somewhere (In Summertime)
Theme For Great Cities
Someone
Chelsea Girl
Glittering Prize
New Gold Dream (81~82~83~84)

The astute reader will notice that despite the tour being called 5×5, there were actually twenty-six tracks played. I’m a bit gratified the album that they couldn’t whittle down to five songs was ‘Empires and Dance’ (I swear I still have a crick in my neck!).

I’ve put the tracks onto a Spotify playlist here.

Olympic Remedy

Here’s a letter I wrote to The Independent years and years ago. I was highly amused by the idea although I wasn’t expecting it to be published in the sports pages. The sports editor rang me and we spent a little while giggling at the prospect of watching members of the public taking part in the Olympics. It still tickles me from time to time.

Anyway, here’s the letter:

“From Mr F Pearson
Sir: I must admit that I am not a keen sports fan at the best of times, but the Olympics has stirred sensations of great boredom in me. Hundreds of finely tuned, occasionally drug-enhanced competitors participating in events that are decided in fractions of a second have taken away any possible thrill.

As a remedy, I suggest that in future Olympic Games the competitors be selected by a random process from the general public, eight weeks before the Games commence (to give them a chance to train). I believe even mundane events – such as the pole vault, gymnastics and synchronised swimming – would be given a new lease of life.

FENNER PEARSON

Cumbria”

The letter, which was originally published in the newspaper, of course, on Wednesday 24th July 1996, can still be seen here.

The Sun on Sunday

Now and again – well, quite frequently, in fact – Twitter gets itself in a froth about something. This weekend the little corner of Twitter that I inhabit has been exercised by Rupert Murdoch’s new Sunday newspaper, the Sun on Sunday. People are slating the (apparently) two million people who are going to buy it, whilst one person threatened to unfollow anyone who bought it.

Now, I’m unlikely to buy this paper to be honest. Not because it’s bad – I wouldn’t know, I’ve never read it – but because it is an extension of the Sun and thirty years’ experience has told me that I don’t like that paper. A friend of mine assures me it has the best sports coverage, so maybe I would buy the SoS if I liked sport. However, I’ve no real criticism of the people who will buy it. In fact, I rather like the idea that so many people will buy something to read at least once a week.

Our society is a broad church of cultural tastes. I find it inexplicable that anyone would watch more than two minutes of ‘Come Dine With Me’ or buy Krispy Kreme doughnuts. But people do enjoy those things and as long as I won’t be forced to join in that’s fine by me.

What does concern me is the unregulated behaviour of some of the institutions that interact with our society. Murdoch’s business empire is one of those and I wonder how many of my fellow tweeters who were lambasting him this morning have a Sky box in their living room?

But even when it comes to the press, he is hardly alone in his bad behaviour. A few years ago a teenage pupil took a knife into the school at which I’m a governor. She bragged about it on the bus and another pupil notified a member at staff. The girl was approached and spoken to and she surrendered the knife. Then the police were called in. By the time this reached the national press, it was the police wearing stab jackets, who had been called in to disarm her. The stab jacket, of course, is part of the regular uniform.

It was the most shoddy piece of journalism I’ve ever read precisely because I knew the facts. It’s the sort of thing that one associates with the late News of the World. The paper in question, however, was the Daily Telegraph.

We need our news to be accurate and free from bias and interpretation, except where writing is clearly marked as comment. That news should be obtained legally, too. We have an institution to monitor this called the Press Complaints Commission, which consists of the people who run and work for those newspapers. For as long as I can remember, people have complained about how toothless, hypocritical and ineffective it is but nothing has ever been done about, presumably due to politicians’ respect for Murdoch. And by respect, I mean fear.

I think it’s wrong to criticise people for buying the Sun on Sunday. It’s moral bullying by people who don’t stand up to Murdoch in other respects. What we need is a strong PCC and for that we need people to lobby their MPs and force the government – *our* government – to do something.

Sons and Fascination

I recently started using This Is My Jam and today I have put up ‘In Trance As Mission‘, the opening track to the ‘Sons and Fascination’ album and one of my favourite songs by Simple Minds. Despite their enormous commercial popularity, they have, since the mid-eighties, been used as a shorthand for a band that it’s naff to like.

However, between 1979 and 1982 they released a string of albums – ‘Real to Real Cacophony‘, ‘Empires and Dance‘, ‘Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call‘, ‘New Gold Dream (81~82~83~84)‘ – that were inventive, original, melodic, unorthodox and, in places, quite beautiful.

To go with today’s post on This Is My Jam, I wanted to reproduce this review of Sons and Fascination that I wrote for Amazon on June 4th, 2002.

“It’s a rash music lover who doesn’t pay heed to the musings of John Peel and during the playback of a session that Simple Minds recorded for his show to promote these albums, he speculated that they were “a band at the very height of their powers”.

Certainly the band – unceremoniously and unfairly dumped by Arista after the record company misread the demand for Empires and Dance – were brimming with confidence and riding the flood of their creative juices. Placed by new label, Virgin, into the studio with ex-Gong guitarist Steve Hillage in the production seat, the band recorded a wealth of material, which resulted in a second album, Sister Feelings Call, being released free (initially) with its sibling, Sons and Fascination.

Ironically, years later Jim Kerr would blame Hillage for not imposing more discipline on the band and went on to suggest the songs could have been better arranged. Sometimes, he said, it sounded like there was more than one song going on in the same track. It’s an exaggeration, I know, but it’s like Monet saying that he wishes someone had made him paint more precisely; an artist decrying the elements of his work that made it so compelling.

At the time, though, the then evidently more artistically switched on Kerr did a fantastic job of turning the band’s complex musical creations into songs. Certainly it’s difficult to think of many vocalists who, confronted by the music, would fashion something so catchy as 70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall or, indeed, would have the good taste to resist the urge to take part in the invigorating Theme For Great Cities.

In an unfortunate twist of musical history, this was to be Brian McGee’s last album with the band, just as the powerful drummer appeared to reach his creative apogee. From the perspective of today’s homogenised beats and drum sounds, the performances are even more astounding: his casual, easy management of In Trance As Mission’s 6/8 signature through to the pounding, imaginative loop of Boys From Brazil. In retrospect, it is possible to see his departure as the beginning of Simple Minds’ creative decline, although this wouldn’t become evident for some time.

Overall, the albums are far more colourful than their predecessor; rich in melody and far subtler in their methods. The dark dramas are replaced by more evocative feelings of nostalgia on tracks like Seeing Out the Angel and Sons and Fascination, which contrast with the excellent upbeat singles: The American; Love Song; and Sweat in Bullet. However, the videos for these last two singles also revealed that the band’s daunting creative vision did not extend to that medium.

Contrary to what you will read on the fan sites of those who adore the post Live Aid Simple Minds, I’d suggest that this is their finest hour, the essence of what made the band great. Released on CD simply as Sons and Fascination, with no liner notes, this release omits both Sound in 70 Cities and League of Nations, although they would have fitted onto the single compact disc. However, both can be found on the Themes releases of the band’s 12″ singles.”

Twitter Blackout

Late last night, Jan 27th, I saw some tweets about Twitter’s intention to increase their ability to censor tweets. I am largely anti-censorship – the main exception to this being the Daily Mail – and so I promptly tweeted my intention to sign up to the #twitterblackout whereby tweeters would not use the service for the whole of Jan 28th (today).

However, this morning I took the time to read around about more and see the arguments of some other twitterfolk, as well paying a bit more attention to Twitter’s own statement.

These I think are the salient points:

Twitter are not increasing levels of censorship. Up until now when they have been required to censor a tweet they have had to remove it globally.

Twitter will now be able to censor a tweet in a single country, thus leaving it available to the rest of the world. The improvement here is obvious.

Twitter won’t remove a tweet’s visibility in a given country just because that government requests it, i.e. it won’t be any easier. Correct legal process will have to be followed on each occasion.

Users will have visibility of where Twitter has been required to remove tweets here at Chilling Effects.

@johnnor has pointed out that the censored tweets are not simply removed. There is a record left to show that a tweet was censored. I found this example on thenextweb.com

Finally, it appears that Twitter have allowed a loophole. For all users, twitter (the software) takes a guess at which country the user is based in. This can be overridden using existing functionality in the settings.

The upshot then is that governments will lose their ability to suppress tweeted information globally. That seems like a good thing to me and Twitter deserve credit for what they’ve done.