GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

Van Morrison at Ronnie Scotts, on evidence collected during 4 charity shows over 2 nights back in October last year, is an occasion not to be missed. The man himself has spoken of how he favours smaller venues and, with a capacity of 280, the central London Jazz club has an intimacy and, as the portraits that line the walls remind you, a history, that Van, for all his much-voiced disillusion, can appreciate. The club has been re fitted since his last appearance and Van’s band has seen some changes too. Not that there can be any complaints on the musicians he has now assembled. The stage right anchoring triangle are as dab handed a group of gents as you could wish to encounter on Ronnies, or any other, stage. Behind the frontman itucked into the right hand corner is bassist David Hayes, Van’s longest standing collaborator. Hayes has a profound connection - historically and musically - in Van’s music, rooting him just like Dylan’s long serving bassman Tony Garnier. Hayes’s remarkably rich and fluid bass lines are instinctively tuned to the way Van’s vocal timbre has deepened over the years. Impeccable keyboard great Geraint Hopkins, directly to Van’s right, doubles on piano and organ. He is a joyful presence - offering chunky funk chops, vintage barroom plonk or simmering on the boil organ – Geraint’s the sort of musician who thrives in Van’s musical hothouse. Said hothouse is an eco system, which, naturally, allows George Ivan himself to thrive on sax, harp, vox and, significantly, on the second set, guitar. With a fiddle/trumpet player and a pedal steel rather than the dual horn section and vibes set of the October shows, tonight’s band bears traces of the style ofmusic essayed on Morrison’s most recent CD release, Pay The Devil. But these aren’t anything like the first gigs that Van has played since that album’s release and so it is an outfit moving on from whatever way station Pay The Devil suggested. Indeed the move was already in process by the time Devil arrived, the album having been recorded many months, years even, before it was released. As Van explained, talking to Pete Doggett in Mojo around the time of the album’s release, the record industry simply isn’t capable of marketing product at the same speed as he (and many other artists) create. Anyway feck the clearing houses and the categories schmatagories - the important thing about any Van band worth its salt is that its flushed with all the tricks, musical colour and ingenuity of the Morrison brand - blues and funk and existential soul, surrealist rock n roll, incantatory mysticism. …And more. It was all to come but he was noticeably ruffled at the beginning of the evening’s first set, telling the soundman “if that’s the best we can do on the vocals we’re going to have problems”. Bu, problems ironed out, getting into his stride, Van had settled in enough to crack a joke, about categorisation, for the Jazz Club audience, at the midway point. “We did a bad thing earlier - in fact we did two bad things. ” One was called country and the other was called western. Then we did another bad thing - and recorded them, ” he explained when introducing Pay The Devil’s first track, Webb Pierce’s alcoholic lament, There Stands The Glass. The melancholic mood was in keeping with a set top loaded with hard realism. That tremendously cynical assessment of career “arrival” Back On Top (the title track of his 1999 album), the tabloid mashing Talk Is Cheap (from Down The Road, 2002) and Fame (from 2003’s What’s Wrong With This Picture, surely in style and substance an answer/ echo to the Lennon Bowie Young Americans tune of the same name ?). But though much of this material suggested a pugnacious but fatalistic mood the off mic plea/direction/explanation to the band that he was trying to “get off the ground here” preceding the spiritual calm at the centre of Days Like This swirling meditative closer In The Afternoon ushered in a guaranteed highlight. His by now legendary cover of St James Infirmary - the archetypal New Orleans funeral song, as chilling an apprehension of the very smell of death as his own T B Sheets - also shone. Here, swapping between sax and singing, his breath finally resolves itself in the wordless bleating (on the beat) agony of a lost lamb or sheep crying for a beloved soul. Such vocal tics, essayed in Lester Bangs much celebrated Astral Weeks appreciation, have long been a Morrison trademark but they don’t come lightly and would lose their impact if they did. The dramatic build up and the illusion that it casts (the illusion that is one of the stock in trade of the musician/magician) must take hold for those “tics” to mean something. With that particular proving ground having been crossed by the close of set one Van and the band had hit a goose loose groove. Before blowing up the lusty mouth harp riff of Sonny Boy Williamson’s plea for sexual assistance Help Me he declared, “this is the stuff I was brought up on”. Indeed the performance showed just how deeply that particular foundation informs his musical psyche - the band’s solo spots in the song would have fit, snug as a tabloid bug in a superstar’s rug, into Moondance. The latter, his self-composed jazz standard title track of his 1970 sophomore solo release, was wheeled out before hitting the final strait. But the 70s throwback that worked much better came nearer the close with Wild Night (from the countrified Tupelo Honey 1972), the song’s expectant optimistic rush brightened by those pedal steel licks and sparks. Then it was an hour or so break outside on the pavement between shows one and two. David Hayes was chatting, rolling his own, talking to well wishers on the street. Van, his onstage straw boater swapped for a baseball cap, discreetly sidled into the waiting silver BMW. No one makes a move to bother or annoy him, why would they? Songs such as Fame, moved from song 4 to song 2 for set 2, makes his attitude to the goldfish bowl clear. (“You’ll never be the same when you’ve been bushwhacked by fame”). With that and the introductory Back on Top reruns from show 1 the heart sank a little - where we in for a repeat performance? Was the £70 ticket price, rather than £50 price for show one, not going to be reflected in the performance? A scarily good sax laced Stranded (Magic Time, 2005) - so much better than its recorded incarnation now that the band have had time to size up its effect after many live outings - allayed the fears. But even as he floated into the song’s gorgeous reverie there was a sharp reminder, that he knows the limits of the illusion (“I know, nobody needs to tell me, what time it is – its hustle time”) The terse, autobiographical Chopping Wood, Down The Road’s song for his father, was a jolt back to terra firma. The song describes the Zen (and “quiet desperation”) that informs the working man’s lot. Those themes are later echoed in the punchy Cleaning Windows. “On the street where I was born - ULSTER” he shouted during that number - a declaration of personal roots that you felt could only be made after establishing the sense of isolation and disaffection in the earlier songs. But if one song provided the Van hallmark, in all its improvisational, tenderly constructed free flowing exactitude, in all its fleeing from the pain and illusion of the world wonder, it was Little Village (like the aforementioned St James Infirmary from What’s Wrong With This Picture? 2001). Barely noticed or remarked upon on its release the song had several crowd members on their feet when its opening chords were spun from Van’s inimical acoustic last October, so poignantly did the quicksilver chording call to mind his halcyon Astral Weeks/Caledonia Soul epoch. But as played now the song is a true living wonder, reaching the sort of area, unfettered by verse/chorus/categorising constraints, where past epic live workouts (Its All In The Game/Summertime In England/Cypress Avenue) have ventured. The craftsmen (and in the pedal steel gal’s case woman) polish and cut the diamond. Van’s voice - rich warm and honeyed - strikes nectar as he finds the rain in the forest, the moonlight through the trees. The trilling loveliness of the music flows like the mountain stream of It Stoned Me and as the arcs of the pedal steel suggest a High Plains Elvis style drifter the guitarist takes it down to the end of the his fret. Van catches the flowing mood perfectly “we should have a Mandolin, didn’t we bring a mandolin?” It’s become boringly commonplace for reviewer’s to comment on Van being in a “surprisingly” good mood. But these are folk that only see him once in a while, unaware of the natural joy, which, when all the illusions have been set up and broken down, he regularly displays onstage. Visibly energised by the response to – and group accomplishment in - Little Village he hits a decidedly frisky mood. The ole Hustler now gambolling, rather than gambling with, his luck. On St James the dramatic build up is dispersed when something - maybe the mischief-making look he catches on Watkins face or the necrosex allusion suggested in the lyric – brings about a mild chuckling fit. But that mood is parlayed through a knockabout Its All In The Game and a sparkling Don’t Start Crying Now (his Them debut single, 1964), which is now stretched to include a request for “some of your custard pie, before you give it all away”. Mmm it’s a while since I had any Custard Pie but from memory it can be just as edifying as Jelly Roll. Next up Enlightenment, where the pedal steel licks suggest sun on water, the feel of a Brand New Day, all shiny and new. Notable, innit, how the feminine touch keeps bringing light and loveliness into the songs? One Van Two Ronnies and its been a long rewarding journey before he bids a good night from him and sidles into the silver car. And he ends on his first ever recorded – and written – composition Gloria. This was one of those performances where the song escaped its long embedded status in his live sets. Like Dylan’s Like A rolling Stone you can imagine it as talismanic of the troubadours endless grind and toil. How many times has he played, how many times had he had to make it breath anew? Surely the strain of the years can’t help but show. But tonight it just rings out clear and true as an extraordinary achievement for a 17-year-old Belfast lad to have accomplished. To turn the term synonymous with the holy reverence of them ole Latin Monk hymns into a celebration of sexual ecstasy! And to have that banner taken up by 100s nay thousands of garage bands across the USA. What a great gift he has given.

Sorry if I’m late catching up on this but Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002 at The Tate Modern)? Surely its impossible to talk about essential rock n roll experiences in the Capitol without referencing this 13 minute mind blowing collision and cut up of desiccated images and sound from over 70 years of onscreen music making and musical drama? That music can be a looped Rita Hayworth (?), tip tip tapping her tap dancing feet in a semi circle with a widening smile as she lifts her shining skirt to reveal her pins. Or the sad haunted look of the lone little minstrel fella a plucking his geetar in Deliverance, Holly Hunter, of course, at The Piano, is that Daryl Hannah dazed and transported as she eases the soaring (sore-ing) echo from the cello cradled between her thighs? It’s certainly a dapper Cary Grant in dress suit approaching the ivories. Projected across a four-screened wall VQ can only be viewed in Tate Modern, or any other gallery that deigns to show it. Lots more should -Its an ace use of public space. Like all truly great works of rock n roll art it is at once disruptive and unifying, raiding the cultural archive to present a work that reconfigures the past in new, enlivening and inspiring ways. Marclay - an associate of avant gardeistas such as Sonic Youth and John Zorn -has previously made Guitar Drag and a pillow sculpture from the Beatles product. But its a shame if, because of its location and past associations, VQ is allowed to fester in an “art” ghetto. VQ is unfettered, a true joy, the sort of thing anyone with a sense of fun, energy and cultural wildness will rejoice in. I imagine, for instance, that “ver kids” untrammelled by the need to culturally place very reference will trip (or have been already tripping) their merry little heads off on it. Over a years work on a laptop produced this incredible mash up of, well, EVERYTHING. From Ingrid Bergman giving a brief la la la lee in Casablanca, to Hendrix searing over sonic mountaintops, Jack Nicholson, Thelonious Monk and forty or more other fingers caressing and careering over the ivories (there’s a dizzying sequence of piano pounding sliced and diced across the screens the fingering frenzy a peak of pure sex). There is Maria Callas, giving way to Marilyn Monroe, Janet Leigh’s psycho scream, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Josephine Baker, Pete Townshend, a lone blast of Dylan’s harmonica…. But even as you tick off the cultural reference points something else is taking hold the sweet, strange and spirit soaring music Marclay is making out of the sources. The totality of this work is immense and in its 13 minutes VQ has a way of concertina-ing time, you zing through so many epochs, sensations, buoyed by a fantastical rhythm. Its the sort of thing that requires a book - a second, third and 100th look - before you get to the bottom of it, which you never will of course, its like a great big cultural river an ever replenishing well spring. And musically, as a soundtrack, even without the visuals, it’s an astonishing achievement. But that disc aint for sale and its only in the Museum that it can be seen. It is a sonic visual Sensurround of the order of Warhol’s The Velvets Exploding Plastic Inevitable (as screened at the Liverpool Tate Psychedelic Exhibition across 3 white walls in an empty room). Only this embraces a much broader cultural canvas - a world of sound and visual wonder. And it’s only at The Tate, mate. Get ye to the gallery!!

Some sub at the Bolly perhaps, or a simple brain wire fizzing out, but the “news” on page 79 of The Observer Music Monthly, in a review of REDEMPTION SONG: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF JOE STRUMMER Chris Salewicz (Harper Collins) £20 that “heroin addicted drummer Topper Headon” is “now an esteemed chiropractor!” did get the imagination rolling. Ie imagine if the STRICTLY NON HEROIN ADDICTED esteemed chirporactor Terry Chimes had been a heroin addicted drummer. who became an esteemed chirpractor. Would that not be grounds for a biographical book of some magnitude ? Or at least a comedic Simpsons episode. Anyway… the review ends by saying Strummer “always was at heart : a family man, a beatnik rocker, a beautiful outsider. Chris, you done him proud.” With the last sentence at least we can only concur. A GREAT BOOK! And as someone now says how do we know that, in certain circles, Topper isn’t an esteemed chiropractor? But as someone else says isn’t Topper more likely to be into acupuncture. Given his past needle experience…

- in a Hollywood diamond hypnotised by the mirror image of her celeb reflection from the deepest recesses of the Narcissus pond life style. JULIANNE: I’M OBSESSED WITH JADE Hollywood actress can’t get enough of Jade GOBBY Jade Goody has found a celebrity fan in Hollywood actress Julianne Moore. From today’s Mirror Web Headlines EMail Shot. Love the way an “O” has transmorgified to “B” - and a “D” to a “B” too…Human error, no doubt.

The story about the inspiration behind some words on the Masters Modern Times Masterpiece is now all over the media the link below is one such example http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1603668.ece So what is this? An old Civil War Poet becomes one of the “tough sons of bitches” that Bob recruits from cultural “orphanges?” Sounds like a result FOR, Y”KNOW, ART to me. Next thing you know they’ll be claiming that his early work was inspired by Woody Guthrie…

Just found this in an old notebook, extract from a transcript of interview with a wounded soul , starry eyed poet and raw voiced witness bearer to the anguish within… Mister Ray Lamontagne. “I thought about it I didn’t have anybody. I hated myself. There was a railroad trestle over the river, no rail. I used to stand there loaded when a train came by , close by my ear. Maybe I just didn’t have the inner strength…” Did finally making his first demos offer a sort of deliverance? “No I was very disappointed at how I sounded.; I’d never heard myself before. I was still holding back. It was a year or two years until I got it.” But he got it, oh yes, by golly he got it.

Following recent fulminations on the seasoned magnificence of the new Elton album on this and neigbouring myspace blog it appears that the praise has reached the ever poised ears of the man himself. The Tumbleweed Connection twixt writer and subject (subjects in fact as the dapper Taupin was there in tow too, though not a tutu) was made tonight before Elt’s show at St Luke’s Church Old Street London. Elton said comments/responses like the one’s previously printed/felt here were the reason he makes music. Not to get too sick making about it all - but he then went and delivered the sort of performance that was the living embodiment of why I keep listening to it. SERIOUS POINT THOUGH…. Someone suggested that Jamie Cullum can but, I mean, really, where are the young pianists who can do the Jerry Lewis style rolling piano thunder blitz ala Elton on the new The Captain And The Kid roof raiser Just Like Noah’s Ark ? Show me them - NOW!! That musical skills base and them wild rockin’ ivory grooves must be MAINTAINED. Does it half to be only the small an ferocious (hammered and yammered down through years of piano playing?) EJ digits wot do it? ..

THE FINANCIAL FALLOUT HAS become part of the story of the Verve’s song, Bittersweet Symphony, which celebrates its 10th Anniversary next year. What a theme for our times that tune became, on the changeover in power that came after 18 years of Tory rule to Tony Blair’s New Labour it now seems like an exact and prophetic commentary- on the defeat of ideals that followed that ultimately hollow victory. So how does it feel to have a massive hit, to strike a real public chord but for the creator to make no direct financial gain from it? And how does it taste? Probably more bitter than sweet but that is something Dickie Ashcroft would never admit it. And good for him, in the iniquities of copyright laws and business practices true artists know where the real power and glory is to be found - in the music, telling truths far beyond the banker’s ken.

It’S A SLOW TRAIN COMING THIS ONE. I’N MY ATTEMPT TO MARK THE ROAD TO MODERN TIMES BY GRAPPLING WITH MY OWN SPIRTUAL CONNECTION to Dylan’s music IVE BEEN SERVED A CURVE BALL BY dwight of Pinner (SIR ELTON JOHN AS IS) and his partner in arms Taupin. On the new album, y’see, Taupin is writing words that Bob will take his hat off to. Or at least this Bob fan feels a spiritual connection to . Elton John is on the cover of Mojo this month talking about This new album - Captain and The Kid. The album is autobiographical it traces the years from captain Fantastic 1975 to now, further back than that, actually there is a song on there called Old 67. Anyone who stood for just a minnit in the garden, a garden any garden in the mid 1960s aned felt that moment of connection to like souls all over the world might - as I have - been moved to blub by the the simple lines (so affectingly sung by Elton) “Old 67 what a time we had /what an innocent time/what a time we lost” Him and Bernie Taupin first met in 1967 “we hit it off straight away, he became the brother I always wanted” says Elton. Brothers its that connection, the love men aren’t/ weren’t ” meant” to express, that is half (at least) of what rock n roll is about. (Hence the great Manic Street Preachers quote “all rock n roll is homosexual”) The EJ album is autobiographical but Taupin says he wanted, by dealing with the big themes that affected them, to connect with others. Well he sure succeeded here. But I was thinking - am I just having this reaction because of my personal circumstances? Is Taupin not really a great ? Just someone who was part of something I got into when I was younger and didn’t know the full depth of what music had to offer (Dylan, Velvets, Coltrane, Orchestra Baoba, Talib Kweli and on and on and on) Now - nostalgically back tracking - I am rekindling reconnecting and his deciding to go back and tell the ole ole stories is just an easy sop to wallow in? Is that what is happening? No! And here’s how I know. In Tom Doyle’s Mojo piece Elton reveals how in 1969 - as early in their songwriting brotherly relationship as 1969 just 2 years after they met - Bob Dylan (the brother of brothers, hell, the daddy of daddies) invited Bernie and Elton into his Isle of White dressing room to tell them that he loved a song on the album Tumbleweed Connection. The song title, by these two newly cemented brothers? My Father’s Gun!! (don’t even know it, but I’m gonna have to buy it now!!). This was BOB DYLAN who had just released John Wesley Harding that album with the strange mystical cover. I used to look at the sleeve in the lounge room back there in 47 Windmiil Road, Ballyholme (where the Vikings came in the before time) Bangor (where the ancient Monks abbey surrounded by fields of psylocibin mushrooms became the centre of European learning - this of course long before the inaguration of the resident powerbase North Down Borough council), Co Down (the lower part of the ancient kingdom of Dalriada), Northern Irleand( created arbitrarily by English appartchiks in the early 20s, a funny little Irish joking border where the most Northernly part was in the “south”). A place then in another time, in my other life. The good room, the music room, had the brown carpet with the black patterns and a sheepskin rug. It had the two or 3 bar electric heater and the fading light coming thru the venetian blinds - I was puzzled but transfixed kind of hypnotised looking at that JWH cover. It called to me on some level. But soon enough Elton came along with Rocket Man and Bernie and the nah nah nah nah crocodile wotsits. Then I went to punkdom (met a man called Strummer living in the pain of brotherly loss who was making brothers anew in his band, all over the world) and back - of course - to Bob. And now from Bob to Bernie who writes these words “it’s like rolling a dice in the belly of the blues, and the blues never fade away” the circle is complete. Because on one level at least that line a Bernie’s tells the story of what a large part of Modern Times is “about” more than my effusions ever could. The circular healing power of music, sing out the pain !!

The main thing was , though you’d hardly know it, was that the bands were there - on screen, in person, onstage. They were why it was able to happen. So - Isobel Campbell seemed to be away with the fairies, in a nice way. Mark Lanegan seemed to have been recently disinterred - in a scary way. Thus my Hot tip slithered into Mercury also ran-dom. And up to the top seemed to shimmy Hot Chip (with those zany green specs it wasn’t hard to tell who was the Brains in that band, was it Thunderbirds fans?). But it is at this time of the year, as we knock back free building society supplied fizz and food meet our fellow hacks (lovely people all - I shit you not!), that we should remember those left out in the cold. Banished even from consideration for the nominations because of one simple thing. Money (that’s what THEY want) Bands like The Scanners who perhaps baulk at the fee for Mercury entry (over £250 an album I beleive). Their album, loaned by a neighbour has been the soundtrack this morning. Great title - Vioence Is Golden - and how can you not listen more keenly when the first song springs the “my love leaves a permenant stain” line on you, eh ? Thing I wonder is how does all the Mercury money divide up. It’s not simply that the building society is sponsoring it (getting some of that magic music juju by association) the artists, the artists are actually being asked to make a contribution for the honour of taking part. Is that what makes the prize money? Is the man in the suit, like the landlord in Lou Reed’s Dirty Boulevard, “laughing so hard that he wets his pants? Or is it what pays for the corporate blonde on the table next to us to talk all the way, almost a word for every shummering vocal arc, every tinkled note, of Thom Yorke’s GREAT performance? The disrespect shown for artists playing live - particularly in Yorke’s case when fans, real fans, would have paid handsomely to be were the totally oblivious corporate blonde was - was staggering. The thing is that the artists themselves are sometimes completely unaware - Richard Hawley was - that their record companies pay this money, on their behalf. It was for the then independent SethLakeman a gamble that left him strapped but produced major dividends with his 2005 nomination. My sweepstake pick the Guillemots Fyfe had a top hat, a fabric chess board over his shoulders, big production number for their live performance. ZEitgeisty (sp.?) style quirk - isn’t it striking the way that Fyfe, Yorke, Green Gartside and the OMM editor have all effected this tall bearded, John The Baptist look ? You could almost say, Christ - who’s next? Hopefully it is onward and upward for Zoe Rahman whose performance (accompanied, of course , by the corporate blonde’s incessant chatter) impressed those there for the music (ie both of us) as that of an honest, uncynical and devoted musician. It is certainly good to see women like Zoe and Lou Rhodes and Isabel on the list. Funny but this year it was the excellent Sway’s presence that seemed like the token card in the Mercury Prize, the least acceptable to the people who come to the wing ding to gabber and jaw. As Paul from Rotd reminded me there is a famous music biz adage - all to apparent at events like this - most people don’t like music. Quite literally so, I mean The Arctics are lovely lads an all, but a womanly presence maketh music more meaningful, for some. Though not the corporate blonde who is much more intrigued by the dinky little mini skillet housing the creme brulee. An implement , it must be said, that suggested other uses for those familiar with the rituals involving certain Class A substances. What a sad life, not just ignorant but cheapskate too. Imean if you want to talk all the way through the music , why not go to a restaurant? Oh yeah, I get it because then you would have to pay. Though probably not as much that it would cost for an musician to enter the Mercury…..