Movies today

Going to see Days of Heaven today 6.25pm.

Battle of Orgreave, tomorrow 6.30pm.


I wanted to see Martin Scorsese's George Harrison movie on Tuesday, but I have an unnegotiable date at that time, my Parochial Church Council meeting to start the process of choosing a new vicar.


Never mind, I have reserved a rental from LoveFilm. Currently, I've got The Runaways from this rental service. Though I was personally responsible for bringing Joan Jett and the girls for their one and only UK tour, I don't expect to figure in the movie, since I let my colleague Steve Sparkes handle the detail of the tour. Still, I did have an interesting conversation with Kim Fowley, which I must remember to include in the full version of Rockopedia on Kindle.

Back at work

Still coughing and sneezing a bit, but not so bad as previously, so hope to put in a normal day today. Since I usually get a cold when I've been overdoing it, must try to take it fairly easy over the next few days.

Roger Waters mother in Bradford

A letter in today's Bradford Telegraph & Argus:

The recent Pink Floyd Night on BBC4 was a reminder of an anecdote I heard on Desert Island Discs, featuring founder member Roger Waters.

He spoke lovingly of his mother and recalled the time when she was doing teacher training. She became politically active having seen children going to and from school in heavy snow without shoes or socks. As he said, she thought “there was something wrong with this picture”. Roger Waters’s mother did her teacher training in Bradford.

Mary Duncan Waters died at the age of 96 and, assuming from age 18 to 25 was her college time in Bradford, the era to look towards would be the late 1930s, obviously pre-dating McMillan College.

I wonder if any of your readers can help with information of Mary’s time in our city? The music of Pink Floyd played a special part in the recent mourning of my brother-in-law. Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Wish You Were were written by Roger as a lament to the departure of Syd Barrett from the band, but each song is totally relevant to anyone enduring a time of grieving.

It would be nice to grasp this historic link to what is arguably one of the five most important bands in musical history.

John Murphy, Cooper Lane, Bradford

Bid for my too-small Harley T-shirt

I found a wonderful second-hand clothing shop in Leeds, yesterday. It's called SECOND HAND (appropriately nice gimmick name) and it's in The Calls. In rack-on-rack of vintage wear I found a nice leather jacket, and a sensational T-shirt emblazoned with Harley logo front and back:

Unfortunately, when I got it home, it was far too small - in fact, I think it's probably child-sized. So if you've got a Harley (or would like to pretend you've got one) and have a biker kid, you might like to put in a bid on eBay.

Olive Tree Calendar 2012 - Order Now!

Joint Advocacy Initiative	24 September 2011
Olive Tree Calendar 2012 Order Now Calendar can be placed on the desk, with texts, dates and events in both Arabic and English in the same copy. It includes: topics related to the Olive Trees, land, and the impacts of occupation on farmers with personal stories, Christian and Muslim feasts and holidays, Palestinian and international commemorations, and the JAI 2012 events and programs. Free Copies will be available very soon. Order Now, in various quantities to your YMCA or YWCA movements, Churches and other groups, for copies to be posted or shipped to you.

Please feel free to forward this announcement.
If you got this announcement forwarded and you want to subscribe,
you may do so at our JAI website
 

 If you have any questions, please contact:

Ibrahim Hannouneh
ihannouneh@jai-pal.org

Joint Advocacy Initiative	24 September 2011
Olive Tree Calendar 2012 Order Now Calendar can be placed on the desk, with texts, dates and events in both Arabic and English in the same copy. It includes: topics related to the Olive Trees, land, and the impacts of occupation on farmers with personal stories, Christian and Muslim feasts and holidays, Palestinian and international commemorations, and the JAI 2012 events and programs. Free Copies will be available very soon. Order Now, in various quantities to your YMCA or YWCA movements, Churches and other groups, for copies to be posted or shipped to you.

List owner: info@jai-pal.org

The following physical address is associated with this mailing list:http://www.jai-pal.org

My latest BCB radio shows

Check out my latest BCB radio shows: Movietime, Swing Easy, and Classics.

Another Floyd scan

For in their early days the Floyd were in the only real sense, a folk group.

In December 1970, the perceptive American rock critic Jon Landau - one of the first to realise how debilitating was the idea of rock as art -pointed out what made the rock of the Sixties different from what came before, and from what came after: 'It was a folk music - it was listened to and made by the same group of people. It did not come out of a New York office building where people sit and write what they think other people want to hear. It came from the life experiences of the artists and their interaction with an audience that was roughly the same age.'

Landau was writing about America, in, ironically, Rolling Stone, the single publication most responsible for the rock-as-art theory which has so led the music down a blind alley. The comment applies to Britain at that time, too.

It is one of the hallmarks of a true folk art that doesn't travel well; if it is taken out of its natural environment, like a Norfolk pub singer at the Festival Hall, it either dies, or, to survive, it becomes something entirely different. The Scottish tinker lady, Jeannie Robertson, metamorphosed into a gypsy queen after she had been 'discovered' by the folk scene, was a magnificent person, able to chat on equal terms with the real H. M., and a commanding presence until her death, but far from the gentle singer of the original field recordings.

So with the Floyd, nurtured by the environment of the Tuesday night 'sound/light workshop' at the London Free School in Netting Hill Gate, which grew into UFO in the basement of the old Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road, and expanded into the Roundhouse, eventually to expire when Joe Boyd called in the hard men of Michael X's black mafia to act as bouncers. They paid their dues, as the saying goes, once they ventured out to tour for what Nick Mason called 'a daily dose of broken bottle'. As Rick Wright commented: 'When we started in UFO it was a beautiful place to play, but when we went outside London nobody wanted to know. People used to throw bottles at us.'

'Actually,' recalls Roger Waters, 'the worst thing that ever happened to me was at the Feathers Club in Haling, which was a penny, which made a bloody great cut in the middle of my forehead. I bled quite a lot.

'And I stood right at the front of the stage to see if I could see him throw one. I was glowering in a real rage, and I was going to leap into the audience and get him. Happily, there was one freak who turned up who liked us, so the audience spent the whole evening beating the shit out of him and left us alone . . .'

That was at first. Then, when they began to achieve some chart success, with appearances on Top of the Pops, the punters couldn't understand why they wouldn't play their singles, and why they kept on droning on with the 'freak outs', long modal improvisations upon a single chord.

Waters commented: 'We get very upset if people get bored when we're only halfway through smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear 'Arnold Layne' and they flip all over again. It's sad when an audience isn't always with you.

'At the UFO Club in London, the people there are so blase that they are bored to death with 'Arnold Layne' because it's become a pop song. Yet in other clubs this song is the only song of ours they know and enjoy. Some don't like the song because they think it's a smutty idea for a man to run around pinching clothes from washing lines . . .'

Another time, he said: 'We're being frustrated at the moment by the fact that to stay alive we have to play lots and lots of places and venues that are not really suitable ...

'We've got a name, of sorts, now among the public, so everybody comes to have a look at us and we get full houses. But the atmosphere in these places is very stale. There is no feeling of occasion.

'There is no nastiness about it, but we don't get re-booked on the club or ballroom circuit.'

What they were thinking of doing, he said, was to take a circus Big Top on the road, and thus export the atmosphere of UFO, where they were truly the 'house band of the underground', in Nick Mason's phrase.

Although I was at UFO dozens of times when Floyd must have played, I can't remember hearing them there specifically. I remember Kenneth Anger's film, 'Fireworks', Jeff Nuttall's People Show, and individual lone groovers like the guy who danced backwards, barging into people and accepted with the sort of amused tolerance I wasn't to experience again until the heady days of early punks pogo-dancing at the Roxy ten years later. I remember the way vertiginously circling sparks of light on the stairway down, reflected from a spot by an old-style ballroom mirror-ball, created a disorientation that was no less powerful for being non-chemical, and therefore legal (a technique the Floyd themselves were to employ on a much larger scale in their Earls Court and Rainbow shows in 1973).

More than this, I remember a melange, a flavour, a totality which was more than just the sum of individual parts, in which music and slides and films and theatrics and audience antics added up to become something quite unique.

'It's got rosier with age,' recalled Nick Mason, 'but there is a germ of truth in it, because for a brief moment it looked as though there might actually be some combining of activities. People would go down to this place, and a number of people would do a number of things, rather than

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Songs for E.Africa concert gig

I am organising a benefit for the victims of the East African famine on October 19.
I'm hoping to perform new words to two songs: Leonard Bernstein's Some Other Time, and Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller's Is That All There Is?
You can hear Tony Bennett and Bill Evans performing the Bernstein at http://youtu.be/Brooklyn.
Here's a video of Peggy Lee singing the Lieber & Stoller masterpiece:

I'm writing some new words for them both. I haven't done the words for the Lieber & Stoller, but here are my new words for the Bernstein, which I believe to be one of his finest melodies (not to mention Bill Evans' superb accompaniment, which he also turned into his Peace Piece).
For some reason, the song wasn't included in the On the Town movie (Sinatra would have done a great version) and, actually, though Bennett is one of my favourite singers, he doesn't convey the weltschmerz of the song's resignation as well as well as the Broadway cast. Did: You can hear the original Broadway cast recording HERE:
Here are my new words, which are dedicated to my friend, Rosebud:

This is the only moment,

Time to find what each high and low meant.

Go well!

There can be no other time.

There have been vows unspoken.

Now when our hearts are still unbroken

Go well!

There can be no other time.

Just when we thought we'd never

Find a way to love for ever

Suddenly we are fancy free, and now . . .

There's no more time for waiting

We've spent too much time hesitating

Go well!

There can be no other time.

Stay well!

For this is the only time.

This is not a song of parting. Go well (Hamba Khalie in Zulu) and the
response, Stay well (Sala Khalie) suggest "until we meet again". 

Which Kindle cover for my Floyd book do you like?

I can't make my mind up which cover design I prefer for my upcoming Kindle book. Please let me know what you think

Should I choose A?

Or should I choose B?

If you don't like either, then please choose C.

Scanning the Floyd

I'm creating a Kindle book based on my various writings on Pink Floyd over the past half-century or so.
I'm svcanning extracts from publications I have contributed to over the years, and will post them here, for your interest.
I am posting them immediately after they have been scanned and OCR-ed, without any proof-reading. My OCR is 99 per cent accurate, but some errors are inevitable. Hopefully, I shall have corrected them when the book comes out. So here they are, unedited and un-proofread:

Despite the reputation 'Saucer' gave them as musical revolutionaries, they have never been innovative, as I wrote of them at the time of the 1977 'Animals' tour,'. . . but then they never claimed to be. Their use of electronics adds very little to the musical vocabulary. Their melodies are tonal, their harmonies consonant; their rhythms (with the notable exception of 'Money') four-square and almost flat-footed.

'And yet, somehow, using all these well-tried devices, they nevertheless indicate widening horizons.

'On the other hand, they are not really the greatest live band in the world, well though they play. If it were not for the necessity to go on the road promoting their albums, they could actually confine their work to the studio without any great loss to anyone. They make few obvious attempts to communicate, a failure which the proliferation of visual effects is presumably meant to fill.

'The improved sound, if anything, heightens the sense of being at home listening to the album if you close your eyes for an instant, and while the solos are longer, the greater freedom doesn't necessarily produce anything of greater moment than in the narrower compass of the album.

'And yet, here again, their very ordinariness on stage puts their work back into a human perspective. If they were the proverbial superhuman titans bestriding the auditorium like colossi, they would be unbearable.'

matter was Bob Dylan. As Josh Dunson said after Dylan's first album had sold 150,000 copies, and Peter Paul and Mary's recording of 'Blowin' in the Wind' sold a million, 'His success forced other large commercial companies to listen to the audition tapes of topical singers with more interest than they had previously shown. Dylan had forced his songs and his contemporaries into the mass media.' ('Freedom in the Air', International Publishers, N. Y., 1965) After coming into contact with Dylan during their first US trip, Lennon and McCartney composed the Dylan-inspired 'I'm Down'.

The other thing that distinguished rock was that 'audiences or creators can determine the content of a popular art communicated through the mass media,' as Charlie Gillett wrote in 'The Sound of the City', the most important - probably the only important - book about rock. 'The businessmen who mediate between the audience and the creator can be forced by either to accept a new style. The rise of rock and roll is proof.' And so, though the music business was slow to come to terms with what was happening ... for a long time Bob Dylan, discovered by John Hammond, was dubbed 'Hammond's folly' within the big grey CBS building in New York, until the sales figures came in, that is - eventually they decided that they could make a buck out of this kind of thing as readily as any other. And so the rock poets became incorporated into the market system. They had no beef: it gave them huge audiences, larger than any other poet had ever had before, even Dylan Thomas in his heyday. Interestingly, the only previous comparison would be Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

You can't blame the artists for grabbing their opportunities with both hands: anyone who thinks people like starving in garrets for their art just hasn't met any artists. And apart from the odd dilettante, the artist wants to reach an audience. Money is not so much the issue here as feedback, the response, in laughter or tears or jeers, which indicates that some kind of contact has been established. The real irony of mass circulation rock is that it provides money in plenty, but feedback becomes less and less possible as fame and fortune increase.

Pink Floyd were victims of this basic contradiction in the mass marketing of art. At the time of the recording of'Saucerful of Secrets', EMI staff producer Norman Smith was going round talking about forcing them to 'knuckle down and get something together' after the self-indulgences of this second album.

As Roger Waters tells it: 'It was the actual title track of 'A Saucerful of Secrets' which gave us our second breath. We had finished the whole album. The company wanted the whole thing to be a follow-up to the

* * *

first. But what we wanted to do was this longer piece. And it was given to us by the company like sweeties after we'd finished; we could do what we liked with the last 12 minutes.

'It was the first thing we'd done without Syd (Barrett) that we thought was any good.'

In fact, it's pretty inconsequential and consists mainly of almost random assemblings of keyboard work by Rick Wright (as he said, 'we go into the studio with absolutely nothing and we sit around saying Look, we're gonna write something, with no preconceived ideas'), processed electronically, with some wordless voices at the end, though it certainly led the way to the mastery of 'Echoes' on 'Meddle', three years later.

Despite the reputation 'Saucer' gave them as musical revolutionaries, they have never been innovative, as I wrote of them at the time of the 1977 'Animals' tour,'. . . but then they never claimed to be. Their use of electronics adds very little to the musical vocabulary. Their melodies are tonal, their harmonies consonant; their rhythms (with the notable exception of 'Money') four-square and almost flat-footed.

'And yet, somehow, using all these well-tried devices, they nevertheless indicate widening horizons.

'On the other hand, they are not really the greatest live band in the world, well though they play. If it were not for the necessity to go on the road promoting their albums, they could actually confine their work to the studio without any great loss to anyone. They make few obvious attempts to communicate, a failure which the proliferation of visual effects is presumably meant to fill.

'The improved sound, if anything, heightens the sense of being at home listening to the album if you close your eyes for an instant, and while the solos are longer, the greater freedom doesn't necessarily produce anything of greater moment than in the narrower compass of the album.

'And yet, here again, their very ordinariness on stage puts their work back into a human perspective. If they were the proverbial superhuman titans bestriding the auditorium like colossi, they would be unbearable.' Of course, that's what many of the audience wanted, which is why a Canadian boy on that very tour found himself being spat on in the face by an enraged Roger Waters.

Though they didn't originate the concept album - that dubious honour belongs, arguably, to the Pretty Things''S. F. Sorrow', which inspired Pete Townshend to write his 'rock opera' (oratorio, strictly speaking), 'Tommy' - during this period they were edging towards 

Welcome to my day

Welcome to KD Day, a record of my writings, doings, thinkings, and the happenings I know about or am involved in. I lead such an active life that it might be easier to list the things I shall NOT be coveri8ng. For instance, though I was a wine writer at one time, I no longer drink alcohol, so wines and spirits won't be covered. (Though I have strong feelings about liquor advertising, much of which is dangerously brilliant, so I may log my concerns in that direction.)
Though it's called KD day, please don't get upset if it's not updated every day. This blog is part of my living, but not the whole if it.
Please don't neglect to feedback your comments to me!