Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Classical Hardrock

I was pretty late coming to classical (or orchestral, or symphonic - whatever shorthand label you prefer) music. It coincided with turning thirty and acquiring my first CD player. The resulting expansion in my listening CV has been pure pleasure, but there is the odd associated niggling annoyance, mostly related to non-zealots' attitudes to "classical music" (whatever that is).

First, there's the belief that it's all really difficult, cerebral stuff, not for the likes of those who "just enjoy a good tune". Well, yes, if simple ditties are your bag, and you come home with an impulse-purchased heap of CDs by the likes of Cage, Messiaen and Alkan, expecting to be whistling your favourites after a quick listen or two, then you're going to become rapidly disillusioned. But an awful lot of classical music was originally written as dance music, back when the only discos were balls held by aristos who could afford an orchestra to provide music for dancing, and a composer to write the tunes. A disc of Strauss waltzes, Chopin mazurkas, or Handel's orchestral suites shouldn't challenge anybody who's simply after a good choon or ten.

Worse than the above misconception, however, is the rock fan who believes that classical music is all rather sedate, polite, and proceeds meekly at low volume levels. They also associate it with a lack of "attitude", and assume it was all written by ivory-tower-dwelling intellectuals. My personal favourite method of dealing with this belief-set is to persuade them to go to a concert featuring something like Shostakovich's mind-shattering Fourth Symphony. Or (the cheaper option) to sit them in front of a suitably cranked hi-fi and play them the CD - though this leaves the problem of convincing them that in a live setting, a symphony orchestra really IS that loud! That symphony has everything a rock fan could possibly want: pounding metronomic rhythms, deafening crescendos, and sections played at such speed that you can almost smell the smoke rising from the smouldering violin strings. But unlike most rock tracks, the music's constantly twisting and turning, changing shape, repeating itself just often enough to lodge itself in the brain, but not often enough to become comfy. And it lasts for over an hour. My wife turned to me after seeing it performed live for the first time, shook her head and said "Wow! That was like a real white-knuckle rollercoaster ride!". And the ivory tower? Well, Shostakovich (who lived in Stalinist Russia) had just finished writing the Fourth Symphony, when a scathing review of his Opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" (itself a seething cauldron of sex and violence) appeared in Pravda, expressing Comrade Stalin's personal displeasure under the headline "Muddle Instead Of Music". This spelt an almost-certain death sentence for the terrified Shostakovich, who was sure he would now be "disappeared". Desperately, he hid the equally-radical Fourth Symphony in his desk, and quickly wrote a symphony (the Fifth) as an appeasement, subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Response To Just Criticism". Shostakovich survived, but never again did he write anything quite so savage and uncompromising. The Fourth symphony itself was not premiered until well after Stalin's death. At a performance of the Fourth, late in his life, Shostakovich turned to his companion and remarked sadly that, had circumstances been different, he would certainly have continued further down the path indicated by the Fourth Symphony. There's poignancy for you!

So, if you're a rock fan reading this, and wonder what anyone could see in something as feeble and namby-pamby as classical music, please buy a CD of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (THIS is a really fantastic modern performance), turn up the volume, and give it a try. There's lots more around in the same vein. Classical Hardrock, if you like.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Fairport, por favor

Sometimes, the omens gather with just the right density to persuade me that I should revisit a previously-overlooked artist. Just prior to last year's Glastonbury festival the Beeb screened "Glastonbury Fayre", the film record of the 1971 festival. This included footage of a very young Fairport Convention, playing something manic and rootsy. "Mmm...", I thought, "I must check them out someday". I'd been saying this to myself, on and off, since the very early 70s.

Does anyone remember those excellent sampler albums which companies like Island and CBS used to release? The Island samplers were particularly good, with an artist roster including Traffic, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Free. Oh, and Fairport convention. Each successive Island sampler brought a new Fairports track ("Meet On The Ledge" on "You Can All Join In", "Cajun Woman" on "Nice Enough To Eat", "Lord Marlborough" on "El Pea"...), and every time I thought "Mmm... I really must check out their new album". It's funny when you get into that anti-groove where, somehow, you always intend to buy a band's albums, but somehow never do.

Anyway, after watching "Glastonbury Fayre", the pressure stepped up. First, BBC4 showed a couple of superb documentaries about Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy. Thompson was a member of Fairports through to their fifth album, "Full House", so there were plenty of Fairports clips. The Carthy documentary filled in a few gaps in my knowledge about the links between Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and the rest of the 60s/70s electric folk-rock mafia.

Finally, JeanGenie's blog references to this year's Cropredy Festival, combined with several stories in MOJO about various internal marital upheavals posing a threat to the future of Cropredy, and possibly to the seemingly-eternal Fairports, gave me the final push.

So I went eBaying, of course!

I have a simple rule for buying CDs on eBay: no more than a fiver per CD, including postage. But with about 50 auto-searches active at any time, I get about 3 or 4 "bites" each month. So I baited my lines with searches for the first five Fairports CDs, dropped 'em in the eBay waters, and waited...

(Why the first five? Because for me the key figure in the Fairports was Richard Thompson. Next most important was the voice of Sandy Denny. Finally, the most Golden era of the band came on Liege And Lief, when Dave Swarbrick joined the line-up. Swarb and Thompson were constantly pushing each other's virtuosity, sometimes reaching such speeds in live performance that the whole thing teetered thrillingly on the verge of chaotic collapse. After that album, Sandy Denny left. Then "Full House" was the last Thompson album. End of their peak period, where my tastes are concerned).

Anyway, for several months, I had little success, snaring only a copy of "What We Did On Our Holidays". Then suddenly, yesterday, I won an auction on "Unhalfbricking". Good news, but better was to come: today I won TWO auctions, on the first album, "Fairport Convention", and on the mighty "Liege And Lief". So all the PayPalling's done, and I'm sitting here writing this, to pass the time while I wait for those padded envelopes to thud onto the doormat!

Oh yes, Trivioids: "Fairport" was the name of the house where the embronic band first gathered...

Rebirth

I may have finally figured out what this blog should be. I'm a music obsessive, so this will simply be my responses to whatever music I've been hearing and buying recently. No limits - jazz, world, chamber, orchestral, roots and folk, blues, alt rock, prog rock, punk rock, seaside rock... well, maybe not that last one. I'm no critic, so those seeking the next Charles Shaar Murray or Nick Kent will find little here to amuse them. But it'll amuse me, and that's enough for now.

This blog's former incarnation is no more. All gone, kaput. Just listen to the music...

Dylanphobia Revisited

I've never got along with Bob Dylan's voice. For years I thought he was just a talentless, tuneless exemplar of The Emperor's New Clothes. Then someone pointed out how many of my favourite songs were actually written by The Zim. OK, at some subliminal level, I'd always known The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" was a Dylan choon, but I'd assumed he must have written it on one of his rare good days. Then I heard his original version of it. Gaaaaahhhddd! The awful whine, the gasping, whooping phrasing - all still in place. Hardly believable it was the same song. Likewise I find his original of "All Along The Watchtower" all but unlistenable, yet Hendrix's version is still sublime to these ears.

So I had the usual aversion hurdle to leap, when I read about Robyn Hitchcock's "Robyn Sings", a double CD of Dylan covers by one of my favourite songwriters and performers. It was hearing Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna" that first made then-teenage Hitchcock decide he wanted to be a singer-songwriter more than anything else in the world, and this loving recreation of 15 Dylan songs is clearly a labour of love. I've always been delighted by Hitchcock's freewheeling surreal imagery (despite the occasional suspicion of misogyny, a trait he readily acknowledges in the sleevenotes), and never realised just how much this also applies to Dylan's lyrics.

I doubt this will inspire me to seek out any Dylan albums - his horrible nasal delivery is one of my very few all-time musical turnoffs. But as a songwriter I now believe the hype, he's pretty damned good. So, Robyn, what I think I'd now like is for you to work through Dylan's back-catalogue, recreating each of his albums. Whilst still turning out your own stuff, with and without various Egyptians and Soft Boys, of course!