GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

And its good night from him….Goodnight …goodnight….Or maybe not But, for him its not all doom and gloom. There’s money and tunes too - the wronged man,lost his mummy, went to Hamburg, jumped with Janey, castigated by lennon, Left alone without Linda, to hell with Heather and now…all those memories. How’s he going to sing yesterday now? Here’s an idea A stage set with a man at Piano.but behind him a little podium at different point spotlighted thetarical staging, sometimes on screen, sometimes by REAL people, are performed on the podium. To emboss the story suggested in the song..) Piano… Man sings…. Yesterday, All my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they’re here to stay, Oh, I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, I’m not the half million man I used to be, (On the podium stage Man in first thrall of rock n roll fame is seen, lights, action cars, india, ITSAALAPPENING BABY scenes) There’s a shadow hanging over me, (On stage a three Muse chorus - Its the divorce settlement Paulie) Oh, yesterday came suddenly. He he he he hooo aaahh hhaaa (instead of string section just the sound of Paul cryin ghere) Why she Had to go I don’t know, she took all my pay. I said, Something wrong, (quick rolling flashing onscreen vortex of all the newspaper headlines of the leading to and during the divorce period ) now I long for yesterday. Yesterday, Love was such an easy game to play, Podium - (Under the street light an attractive . Man appears and gives her money. The link arms and walk…away from the light. Close up on the woman as she looks back we we see her smile and wink)… Man expounds the classical theatrical flourish here, hits that first piano note hard , then doees a little bar extra) But now I need a place to hide my money away, Oh, I believe in yesterday. Why she Had to go I don’t know,was it cause I was going gray? (The street light setting is now a man in mirror at bathroom the woman alongside scowling as he turns to hear holding his hair - going gray. He looks HORIFIED!). I said, Something wrong? (Picture of Man in old days wiith his songwriting partner,male, smiling in the its all happening era) Now I long for yesterday. Yesterday, Love was such an easy game to play, Now I need a place to hide away, Oh, I believe in yesterday. Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm. THE END

This year has been notable for the way its seen the stars of 1972 come back to haunt and stir the heart. Blues Never Fade Away by Elton John is such an honest hard felt deep truth. Taupin writing a lyric Dylan would have loved to conjure out of the air. Just talking about that song can make salty tears flow. Now Yusuf Islam has come to lay his case. Then he was Cat Stevens, the first British Greek Swedish multiculti, sexually attractive, Mod Popstar, the first spiritually exultant, spiritually abundant, musically explorative, bearded hippy who’d come from the old weird Greek London to hit the highlights. And what songs he sung. My pal Eugene saw him playing with only the acoustic guitar,in the kitchen of someones house when he was starting out - before he was introduced, by one of Dusty Springfield’s old crew, to Deram Record label and popstardom. Matthew and Son, Here Comes My Baby, First Cut Is The Deepest and I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun (see, he even had something for Marilyn Manson fans)….. Cat was the boy who stole the sun and put it in his pocket. “Longer boats are coming to win us they are coming to win us.” How many times have Gerry, my friend from New York, and I burst into that song, the opening uaccompanied chorus of Tea For The Tillerme? Music - a link across time and the oceans. Then Gerry heard it in New York and then I heard it in Ireland but it connects us now. And Ricky Gervais obviously knows Cat strikes a chord, that was his Tea For The Tillermen, the title track of the album which may be Cat’s greatest acheivement, used as the theme music for the Sir Ian McKellen, David Bowie, Chris Martin, Robert De Niro starring second series of Gervais sitcom Extras. What a piece of work was Cat and he had at least two lives, disappeared for 2 years at the end of the 60s and came back to face the new. Singer songwriter Cat he had always been- but now with soft black long curls and a beard too. He was then the world’s first Greek Swedish London born Eastern Mystically inclined world music pioneer. Then he converted to Islam, and was renamed Yusuf Islam. I t was the culmination of a spiritual quest perhaps as fascinating and maybe even more labyrinth than that undergone by Malcolm X. This is the same man who hit the hard crisp acoustic chords of Can’t Keep It In’, a number 13 of that year, 1972. 12 weeks in the chart it was - a 3 month Cat fest. And even then amid the glories of Bowie and Mott and Roxy and Elton’s own (honky) Cat and his Crocodile Roc THAT Cat stood tall With the growling edge of the voice and the way it turned in on itself, twas a glory of outpouring, of sexual awakening, even. A song of oh to …. oh to be alive in that time What a song that was! Can’t Keep It In. Yusuf, the man who makes the music on the new album Another Cup, is like that man who struck those chords, possessed of depth and warmth. Of deep feeling. Yusuf is a man who may have modified the tenor of his thought from when he was Cat, but not the passion of his delivery. Nor has he lost the ability to meet and spark up with a rich and generously disposed collaborative partner. Former Gregg Alexander associate Rick Nowells is in charge of production. His work here is everything that Paul Samwell Smith’s was on Cat Stevens classic 70s recordings because he obviously feels the measure of the man he is working with. Yusuf as heard on this album is a man with the same beautifully measured, precision of thought expressed in the short but stunningly eloquent and moving piece he wrote after being taken off a US plane, separated from the daughter travelling with him, interrogated and imprisoned as a suspect in the so called war on terror. It is no surprise that on Another Cup he isn’t singing about the old days. But he isn’t just singing about now either. He is singing in the eternal before now and ever after now. On Maybe there’s a World, which can’t help recall Cat classic Wide World, Islam sings of “an open world borderless and wide/where people move from place to place/nobody taking sides” With The present UK government more divisive, more intent on appealing to the racist vote by closing up borders, or instigating spurious campaigns against clothing worn for religous or casual reasons, than any British government in history. A more timely song it would be hard to imagine You could say as a singer that Yusuf sounds out of practise. You might even technically (though I don’t know for sure) be right. But there is something truly staggering about the lambent piety of his delivery on One Day At A Time, the suggested low wheezing and final release so parched, but driven and riven by hope and ghosts and memory, it is a vocal subtext that highlights the cautious prayerful intent of the song. An intent that runs through the album. Nowell’s placement of strings and things, and the album’s sequencing, is striking. A stringed chamber thing, short as rosary bead, follows the plea of One Day At Time, it is ornate,spoken word poetry, Yusuf’s voice mysterious and exacting, strangely compelling and imaginative Then, like the opening track, another anthem for the heart - You Can’t Bother With The Truth.That title alone (which may not be the title, I don’t have the sleeve to hand) is so simple, direct and impossible to argue with - unless you are a liar. I Think I See The Light is sunny and optimistic an apprehension of spiritual joy with a flagrantly lovable, warm and a tootling horn section. Yusuf is doing what he does and it has so much Cat Stevens in it. You could swear sometimes that in this music you hear the best of both of them. Though I don’t think Cat ever dreamt of this stunning, pizzicato string sprung version of The Animals Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood Of course way back then there was Morning Has Broken, Cat’s reading of that 19th century English song of praise, its place at the heart of any Christian hymn book still remains . And now he sings “ green Sea And Golden Sands is all I need!” How very, English of him. “A soft voiced singer with a gift for strong melody lines (and a weakness for simplistic philosophizing)” begins the entry on, Cat Stevens b Steven Georgiou 21 July 1947 London in The Faber Companion To 20th Century Popular Music : Phil Hardy & Dave Laing (£20 Faber 1990, 1995 revised and updated) By then Cat was Yusuf and one of the only songs he had written and not recorded was Afghanistan : Land of Islam. The title may have influenced the Companion writers’ judgement over the simplicity of the former Cat’s philosophy (the judgement having been voiced in the present tense). Once again I don’t know but I do know this - the simplicity or otherwise of his philosophy – has wrought some beautifully strong, supple and subtle songs on this album by Yusuf Islam. Call it a comeback. Don’t call it a comeback - Another Cup has the sort of spiritual candour some might be embarrassed by . But its a quality all too welcome in the era of production line pop, its a homecoming from one of the most naturally gifted songwriters and quietly devastating interpreters of Britpop history. Drink Up!

It was the second show that freaked me out when Brian Wilson came back to London to do Smile. Before, IN THE SAME VENUE, seeing him do Pet Sounds, long awaited, dreamt of and never thought possible premiere, the heart flew. By the end even old grumps like Paul Weller where bouncing like giddy kids on a charabanc back home from a day at seaside, tummy awash with fizz and froth, head full of sunny idol /sun idyll memories. Hardened Fleet Street Editors were said to have shed salty tears. Sir Paul Macca was in da house! You felt a collective post (and post post) baby boomer whoop. But oh, the Smile sortie. And ah, oh, Christ on a bike, that first night. Oh no. Brian was the first cyrogenic popstar. A man bled and run dry. Divested of publishing, band, hitting the endless road to pay medical bills and fund a wife and family a whole industry of memoribilia, art and memories. A stunned Manchurian Candidate of pop. Pharmacetically programmed to make the cash registers ring. Thats how it seemed anyway, I’m sure the BBC 3/4 documentary spins the story differently. As any marketing exercise would. But I remember feeling that night that Brian was the dupe at the centre of some bizarre rite of which we were all apart. Something which, if watched objectively, by brothas and sistas from another dimension,say, would look kinda fucked up. It started with that folksy in the round round the campfire at night surf song singalong. Brian and the guys and gal on high stool. Real casua llike. K’know - as in A REAL PIECE OF HAM FAKERY THAT SUGGESTED, HEY, BRIAN’S REAL CLOSE AND CONVIVIAL WIT CHA ALL. BUT THE WILSON FACE MASK COULD NOT HIDE THEN, NOR AS THE SET PROGRESSED, INCREASING ABJECT HORROR AND FEAR. In fact the expression on his face soon came to resemble that of a well bred 14 year old lad in a very classy kitchen recently. The young lad’s mother was drinking sherry and talking to friends. He was busying himself with some housework when his mother was heard to tell the friends, “so that ’s when I’m taking the pole dancing classes”. It was the first the lad had heard of it. And his face was, like Brian, momentarily stalled, stuck in a state of shock, fear and horror-apprehension. A look that was anything but a Smile.

I am. Its not. > Hiya > How are you? > Wondered if you are reviewing the Klaxons single ‘Magick’?? > > Ta >

JAMIE T LIVE REVIEW from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday 23 October 2006 Jamie T, Barfly, London By Gavin Martin Published: 23 October 2006 GIG DATE 18TH OCTOBER With The Streets’ Mike Skinner now making concept albums about his on/off relationship with fickle fame and class A drugs, and Lily Allen crying out for a male counterpart, could Wimbledon native Jamie Treays be the new chav superhero? Clutching his pint glass, dressed in a hoodie and baseball cap, Jamie T looks unprepossessing enough - a skinny 20-year-old with traces of acne. But merely making his way to the stage to tune his guitar he elicits a hero’s welcome from the packed crowd at London’s premier indie sweatbox. With a big buzz around his MySpace site, strong support from hip radio DJs and three much-fêted singles ahead of his debut album, Treays’ time is evidently approaching. Thus far he has done much of the legwork alone, producing mix tapes, hosting his Panic Prevention club nights and playing solo gigs. Tonight, though, he’s teamed with a second guitarist in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, a lean, black bass player (“even 50 Cent says he’s the man”) and, at the keyboard, a bloke in thick dark glasses and a hoodie who adds boisterous harmonies. With an uncanny knack for placing one-liners into his motor-mouth, “spit” style rapping, Treays’ talent is distinct from his obvious antecedents. Like the Arctic Monkeys, his songs are action-packed, full of lyrical detail but with an edge - his love for explosive ska and the offbeat rock reggae finessed by The Clash drives many of the songs. Small wonder many of them are already favourites; the audience all but drowns him out at times. Playing the tale of alcoholic mayhem that is “Sheila”, he issues a reprimand: “If you’re going to sing along at least get the words right.” But there’s a real feeling that his lyrics, and the tumultuous way they are delivered, connect with a recognisable if occasionally surreal world - one where “Mother’s drunk on vino and the kids are smoking Bisto”. Add in helter-skelter accompaniment from a band given to hairpin-bend departures, synthetic string sections and wonderfully wigged-out guitar solos, and the excitement is all too understandable. With the spirit of Strummer so apparent in his music, it was only right and proper that Treays dropped a few lines from “Complete Control” in the stand-out “So Lonely Was The Ballad”. Touring to 8 November (www.jamie-T.com)

Feck Van as the Irish prophet poet in carnate. Liverpudlian wildass John Lennon was sum kind a distant son of a Dalriada Warrior Poet King. Flaming lust in his eye, gorging on the fields of excess. Capable of igniting so much real, human contact. Wrapt up in them never ending beatles contracts. Torn between women, lovers, artists, boyfriends and father figures. Fried to feck on acid. Crying on Janov’s floor over the day when his daddy’s cigarette smell went off to Aus and his mum’s perfume stayed in Liddypool. And Johnny had to choose Tug of Love for 4 year old Johnny, mum or dad. Which one, son? In the Janov session, in which this scene allegedly was reinacted, he ends weeping on the floor sinking in the sands, as a child at Blackpool beach. Helpless to feel amore the hot summer breeze or reach out to the joy of distant voices. Before and after Janov he was raw and real - bared his soul often an easy. Lennon didn’t filgree, emboss and over ween - tendencies inherent in work O’Partner Paul McCartney. Lennon still screams and seethes - into the void and beyond. Christ he left his mark, didn’t he? On the planet I mean. You dont think the Beatles dream thing would be alive if it was all just down to Macca, do you? Heard now the astonishing thing of Lennon’s art is its vertical integration of form, thought and feeling. The way he seizes cultural directness ala Horses era Patti Smith. That’s Patti Smith as absorbed and testamented in Mark Paytress’s joyful call to arms Break It Up : Patti Smith : Horses and The Remaking of Rock N Roll (£16.99 Portrait) the most illuminating and inspiring rocking Polemic currently on the block. Mark’s book is crammed with striking details and observances and is wonderful on how Patti’s shamanic onstage performance was preceded by a becoming. The actualisation of a rocking warrior Poetess Queen. To say that she didn’t influence Lennon is as daft as saying she did. FRom Horses arrival in 75 to John’s re-emergence in 1980 ? Just because Lennon only said about B52s and Madness dont mean he aint heard more. Anyway the acrid smell of the world Patti’d laid to waste, or just newly built, was in the air. Lennon lived sometime in New York, he must a smelt it. A fella I know saw him in a laundrette there. Dont know what date. But right up to the end he could break on through, mad as a fiery fish, taking on Dylan, no less, the daddy of all daddys, on Serve Yourself. I think you can feel the influence of Patti Smith, a picking up of the energy she’d breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out, like a rock n roll Ballerina, in this composition. Well on the acoustic, as opposed to the long - 8 something minutes really is too long, Long Gone John - slow rolling, New Orleanian performance of Serve Yourself. It is John’s answer song to Dylan’s end of decade( wind up ?) address, You Gotta Serve Somebody. Adopting the guise of a sage and homely EVangelist TV prototype - on acid - the most famous Jewish American rockstar in history set out on his Christian era. On the starkly recorded Slow Train Coming he delivered an album that was a testimony to his coinversion (coin because someone, Keith Richards perchance ? claimed it was a purely financial move on Dylan’s part, “the prophet of profit” eyeing up the ever buoyant religious market) Anyway Lennon was incensed. John had been to Mars and back he had danced with the aliens on the foreign shores behind Mount Excess. BUt he never thought the bastards would get to Bobby. Or else …the stark boldness of the Dylan Jerry Wexler produced album excited him so much he got to rocking and raging again. This acoustic Serve Yourself is one of the great moments in Lennon’s canon. But not because of what it says about Bob Dylan. But what it says about the world. Lennon had, with eagle eyed perception, seen the future in his 1958 exercise book at 14 writing in The Dail Howl of IRA bombs. 20 years later they were a horrible blight on the land from where he had fled. Anyway consorting with radicals, drug dealers, mystics, freaks and Phil Spector Johnny had seen a bit of the ole USA by the time he came to write Serve Yourself. Early in his BIg Apple daze he had wrote of Ireland again in Sunday Bloody Sunday. But Serve Yourself? Put it this way NOW its more alive than ever. On a Sunday in October 2006, 28 years after it was recorded (the length a time it takes a rock star to live die and be reincarnated) I stood in a crowded church on England’s south East coast. And looked at plaques on the wall telling of young Brish soldiers dying in distant lands at a young age (I spotted a 36 year old at Crimea in 1853, a 21 year old at Cario in 1883 and a 42 year old officer in India in 1902). John’s words, delivered in thick Scouse trashed acoustic like Billy Bragg hotwired to Lonnie Donegan rather than The Clash, came alive in my head. “It’s still the same old story/A bloody holy war/A fight for love and glory/ Aint going study war no more/A fight for God and country/We’re going to set you free/Or put you back in the stoneage if you won’t be like me/Geddit?” That’s the colonial Imperial voice eternal in those last lines. Its Bush and Blair talking to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. IT could also be a directindictment of so called freedom fighter terrorists who crash planes into buildings or blow up indescriminate innocents. Serve Yourself is the essential corrective to anyone who bought the phooey about Lennon being all squished and lovey dovey by the time Double Fantasy, and then Chapman, arrived.

It was a year ago that I briefly met Keith Urban. He was grinning and a little mechanical, the overloaded, over there Aussie turned Yank, pressing the flesh and grinning the pearly whites at an “after show” at the Hard Rock Cafe in American Leisure Nightmare theme park Universal studios. We were a gaggle of freeloading UK and Irish media types and all of us were in in that state of disenfranchisement known as Florida, in a town called Orlando. This was some time before Keith was publically twinned with that other Aussie by reputation, if not by birth, Nicole Kidman. When Nic and Keith got together it seemed like some sort of fairytale destiny thing. They had conquered their chosen realms in the land of opportunity and temptation - she as mystical onscreen Goddess he as eye candy country man. The only thing left to do was fall into each others arms and , a few months ago, marry in a starry champagne toasting Sydney wedding with other celebrity Aussies that have had some sort of big mark on the US - Rupert Murdoch and Rusell Crowe - in attendance. Now I read that Keith’s ole “substance abuse and alcohol issues” (PC American Death Speak for the Jack slugging, crack toking bad boy lifestyle) have raised their head again and the Golden Boy has entered Rehab. Frankly if he had to play a string of dates like Orlando, had to do however many nights working his considerable charm to fellas and faces and floozies that he’d never see again, but that might help him up that greasy ladder, then I’m not surprised he needed a little something to balance or zone out at the end of the day. Keith was telling us how he had had to work long and hard to get accepted in the closed world of American country. Endless nights turning into weeks turning into months turning into years playing facilities like the Orlando prison camp meeting a variety of radio pluggers, local record company reps and journos. NOt an appealing prospect, IMHO. I didn’t know then what he had to go through in his personal life to “make it” but I was not surprised that he’d made the breakthrough either - I’d just seen him perform his mix of Gung Ho Jovi Rawk and Tall In The Saddle Ride Em Urban Cowboy New Hat Cuntree. The music and the show - well attended by the all important female demographic suckered by his sparkling peepers and sleek gym enhanced denim and leather clad bod - were a bland staging post of shallow certainty for what was in essence a rootless and bizarre way of life. We were there , 3 UK music critics, a lot of Irish journos and some gals from mags/women tv programmes as part of an awareness making exercise. After Urban’s persistence had paid off in making US in roads he needed UK penetration. God knows why I went but after a few nights in Orlando it wasn’t hard to understand how a life consisting of going in and out of such venues, of being the person somehow at the centre of this regimented plastic culture, might have you crying out for alcohol obliteration or crack addled release. Something to make things seem that they had meaning or momentum. Or both, when really it was stasis and a state of nothingness, sinking into the black hole at the centre of Entertainment USA. Orlando was like something out of Dante’s 7 Circles Of Hell. We were hospitality(ised) with endless helpings of deep fried food and servings of Calorific heavy alcoholic cocktails. Wines and Beers. A ritualistic blow out that seemed to be the one beloved by so many folks in a country so long at war with itself and the world at large. Yet while Keith was chasing down or running from whatever demons made him hit the pipe or the bottle I recall the absolutely horrified look on a local record company rep’s face when a British journo responded to her “anything we can do to help just call” offer with an excited request for “some grass”. Because this is a Godfearing follow the rules and stay in line country. Anything that might cause you to veer from the path to be abhorred. And so what if the star is heading for the treatment facility ? There’ll be another hustling gigoloing sequel along in his stead, ready to press the flash and flash the sparkling baby blues for another crowd of holidaying gals and their wife. The walls of the Hard Rock Cafe are plastered with many who have come and had a go, many who have died young and before their time. Keith Urban/Was meant to be curbing/His INtake/But was the marriage a fake? Keith Urban was meant to be curbing his enthusiasm for hooch/Since he made Nicole his pooch/But by entering the facility/He has rendered my ability… Sheeit - I’ll leave the songwriting to Keith Basically this week’s Keith news explains why the interview I was meant to be doing with him to promote the new album did not happen on Monday and seems to have been indefinitely postponed. I suppose Keith’s fall should have seemed obvious when he was interviewed last month by Elton John, in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine - Elton so often has been the rehab celebs last port of call. You’d have to wish Keith well but hope that part of the recovery might involve those around him looking at the world around him, and its part in the cause and effect of addiction….

Interviewed on the Holler If You He You Hear Me blog Seeger Sessions consultant and Sprinsteen biographer Dave Marsh says how he was shocked both by the words which Springsteen wrote for How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live - and the lack of reaction to them. Perhaps that’s how the media deals with such transgressions, such revolutionary rhetoric, these days - wilful ignorance (coupled of course with some irrelevant - and angrily denied - story about the artist’s personal life). The lyric however remains extraordinarily powerful, one of the most cogent direct, descriptive and beautifully weighted of Springsteen’s career. Personifiying (with an impeccable sneer) Bush as the doctor and the dispensing dope metaphor is a smart allusion not only to weasel post Katrina words to the Presidents misbegotten youth when he and others like would come down to New Orleans and “have a real good time” The performance is not only a devastating piece of revolutionary rhetoric, positing, in the narrator’s desperation, an armed revolution from the ghetto, but with the rewritten verse a dynamic piece of character portraiture. The song reveals the face Bush as starkly and completely as anything in contemporary culture. Smug, lying, hypocritical. Feeling some sort of collective shame or embarassment over what I’ve heard described as the “dosey do” nature of Springsteen’s current incarnation - a definite career highlight to all with ears - some of his core audience has drifted away. But Springsteen keeps on singing his song, the route that he has taken this century - from The Rising’s collective communal outreach, to the quiet desperation of Devil’s And Dust (a feeling that must have been strengthened by the disappointment of his failed bid to unseat Bush by supporting Kerry ) to the outright revolt of Poor Man has been the most fascinating political tragectory in his career. It ain’t over and the bastards haven’t won.

Ole miserablemotormouthPete has been bad mouthing himself and others (Dylan, the Stones) for being too old to play live. Is he planning to start a youngsters academy? Move into the Macca market? A remarkable talker, Pete. I saw him in a trance in Hard Rock `Cafe 2005 tour launch talking about how he gets his performing power from the crowd. And werent the (choreographed ahead of time) video shots during Hyde Park of one intention? To write large the message to the drunken hordes. Pete Townshend, rock artiste. Sting style old muso re-investigation for a classical piece ahoy, Grandad.

You can go hear the Beatles in a lot of places. You can talk about em to a lot of people. But when you gotta reeally know about the Beatles, who you gonna call? Sherman, the dub producer. And Sherman will bring onto you choice delicacies that will once again cause you to kneel at The Fab’s author’s altar. Consider something, if you will. Known as , Yer Blues Take 17, an alternative mix from something called The Peter Sellars Tape a track on one of the 2CDS on the Sherman gifted Alternative WHite Album. I mean NEVER was the awesome chasm that had grown between John and Paul expressed more clearly than that what opens up tween John’s absolute flaming Iggyeatshit negation on Yer Blues* And Paul’s ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC LOVE ME PLEASE TROUBADOUR DESPERATION on the do do do do do do, here we go, up the hill, mother,bridge of Mother Nature’s Son. On the mono mix of Mother Nature’s Son the chasm just heightens. Paul is left naked, unadorned AND over exposed - as the hopalong pop star, unable to kick without his other leg. Mother, Asher, Lennon, Linda, Heather and Hell.** The real nowhere man WITHOUT AN OTHER NUMBER. The fact that the monomix is the one chosen by the Alternative White Album compiler might make you think it was a rep from Lennon’s orbit that compiled it. Like the two sides were breifing against each other Like the Gordon Brown and Tony Blair of Britpop . Onto the grave. And beyond. Does Gordon in moment’s of Shakespearian despair sing Help ? *(“feel so suicidal, even hate that rock n roll,” he roars - in the middle of the bloodiest, flying fucking whirlwind of raging rockingroll sharpnel imaginable) ** I jest! Wings had some fine - if ultimately senseless - moments and I lie about the compiler’s intentions here. Can You Take Me Back is a much better song than the one*** it was produced during the sessions for. ***I Will