GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

IMMENSE!!
Christian Rock just got itself exalted.
For all the craven Calvinism of early U2.
For the sainted shimmer of Patti Smith and the apostasy of DylAn or mystic Christian wonder of Van Morrison.
No one lass or laddie has gone as far out and wildly cutting to the core as does Ms Sinead O’connor on her new album.
Theology.
>  IF I Had A Vineyard is an Irish folk soul gospel classic of Astral
> Weeks standard a wild light out for unchartered territory of the Biblical derived soul song.
The lady has had the most rivetting journey in public
> of any star from her time or place.
Tearing pictures up of the Pope. J’accuse on the U2 massive, busting Shane MacGowan (for his own good), hanging out with Dylan Morrison Kristofferson, PRINCE. A heavyweight talent and natural original.
Nothing Compares to etc.
.Joining the ministry, leaving the ministry, smoking pot and praising Jah.
All she ever wanted to do, she’s said, with this new album “was make something beautiful”
Terribly beautiful, beautifully terror filled - her telegrammatic diction and her savouring of the words (non) fiction chills chafes - to accent the graphically Middle East locations newsworthy relevance. On her original composition If I Had A Vineyard the whispered sensual and roaring imploring performance is of a live in the now feel of Annie Briggs or the late Karen Dalton. The song
eliding a shepherdess voice with pentient’s purpose.
The lady brings it all home deep down and familiar on Rivers Of Babylon, that song may have come close to comedy on ocassion but here its Marley-esque in form and wonder..
The spikiest and deepest record I’ve heard in an age…

VAN MORRISON

10TH JULY 1980, the Montreux Casino.

Johnny Rogan who, shamefully and wastefully, wrote a whole book about the connection between Van Morrison and Ian Paisley never even remarked on this performance – given the night before the night before Belfast’s first post Thatcher 12th of July celebrations. It was chosen by Van himself as one half of last year’s Live At Montreux DVD

Van’s Wavelength album, the album he once described as a fun return to rock n roll youth, is two years old.

Things have moved on since then. As played tonight on the shores of Lake Geneva the album’s title track (one of Van’s BIG songs about the mystic marvel of sound waves, of the Voice Of America calling, baby, calling a wee Belfast boy to “comeback, baby, come back home”).

As a young man that’s what Morrison (born Belfast August 31st 1945) had done. He went “home” via a family record collection, western movies, Paul Oliver, Mezz Mezzrow and Kerouac’s jazz Beat books and Gis he met in Hamburg.

He went “home”, from Belfast, where he was born, to his spiritual home across the Atlantic. And he toiled on America’s East and West Coast, fighting back biters and syndicators, to stake out a formidable musical terrain in the USA.

All the way from Belfast to Buffalo, from Carnalea to California.

Tonight, is the start of a new era, or at least it feels like it is as Wavelength is stretched out, its shape kept, but a jazzy meditation uncovered within. The elegant expansive band – including profound bassist David Hayes, the sleek suited, quicksilver finger picking  guitarist John Platania, the great Pee Wee Ellis/Mark Isham brass duo – get deep into the grain of the song.

         Another Wavelength tune follows, Kingdom Hall, an exuberant song, full of community and rocking good times, named after the Jehovah’s Witness church meeting house the young Van attended, at least once,  with his mother, jazz singer Violet.

But in Van’s world nothing is quite that simple. You get the picture, you get the feeling of The Kingdom Hall from the song, but something in the timbre of his voice, in the way the words fall means Kingdom Hall has the perspective of a bystander, a man just off to the side, away from the crowd, looking back.

You might remark, as Van keeps the momentum going with a faster than the recorded version of It Stoned Me, that there is a strange dichotomy here - seemingly pathological shyness allayed to increasingly astonishing vocal insight.

Where is it all leading?

On the musical accompaniment to Venice USA it seems to be going toward Jamaica and the tropical West Indies, through the Baion beat and Latina traces of Van’s Bert Berns associated, post Them, pre Astral Weeks era.

This musical playfulness becomes a fascinating conceit, when Joyous Sound is similarly shaken up later on in the set. Just when you think, at this rate of going Van could have hit Graceland 5 years before Paul Simon, he uses the backing as an electrifying counterpart, a foil for his percussive and slurring vocal.

It is all done with the same audacious ease that hallmarked his true contemporary and East Belfast homeboy – footballing genius George Best.

Fuck the fact that Van is an unremarkable looking chap in a yellow Grandad shirt, cigarette smouldering in his hand. As he steps up to the mic for a truly magisterial Troubadours he is Celtic Warrior Poet Jazz King incarnate, the voice dancing all over the scale, stretching out a word (“saaAAAnng”), to make it soar like a cannon of love (Rogan, you daft, deluded fool – LISTEN!!).

And what is he doing? Making his solemn and ecstatic, pure and true, tribute to the ancient, sacred power of music - the sacred and healing power of music

This thought occurs, although they were not recorded together  - like fellow Belfast musical Family The McPeakes - the Morrisons of Hyndford Street East Belfast where one of the city’s great musical families. Violet sang and her late husband George collected records in that respect they were custodians, nurturers for a man - Van The Man (their only son), in fact - to come through.

“Listen,” he announces and  the music folds to a stop, Van controlling the musicians with his hand, breathes now, reaching Troubadour’s extraordinary climax.

In a minute Van will be pacing, nervous, perhaps, about having deal with something as mundane as STANDING ONSTAGE. No wonder, really, after having so consummately turned his awkwardness into molten poetry. But, before he has too much time to let it worry him – or us, he is off again, into Ballerina.

Hold it right there. Did you say, why doesn’t he talk to the audience?

Ladies and gentlemen the performance will be 40, 50, 90 minutes old, over, dead and buried, before George Ivan Morrison will deign to patronise the audience with a “hello, how are?”

I mean …ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO SPOIL THE SHOW THAT WAY?

“Let’s go,” Van will sing 6 years later   “into the mystery – let yourself go.”

This ain’t no corny rockstar geeing up the troops and putting out a welcome hand, like he wants to be your phoney friend.

This is Van Morrison, 10th July 1980 at the Montreux Jazz festival doing Troubadours.

Smoking, in more ways than one.

The rave reviews for The Arctic Monkeys comeback live show are in and the inevitable universal thumbs up for their second album Favourite Worst Nightmare are starting to pile up.
And no wonder..
No-one, not even Michael Jackson, has managed to pull off the trick of staying eternally young in pop.
Youth is a precious commodity, too often squandered on giddy popsters behaving like bunnies blinded by oncoming headlights.
Thankfully Alex Turner’s mob, one unfortunate bass playing casualty aside, have both managed to enjoy the champagne supernova that greeted their first album AND produce a corking follow up.
One thing is certain - age will come to The Arctic Monkeys, as it comes to us all.
When it does “time will take care of time, so leave time alone,” as that whiskery old sage Willie Nelson says.
But right now The Monkeys new single Brianstorm and the soon to be unleashed album serve a great time honoured pop function.
They make nearly all the homegrown competition - the increasingly pompous Johnny Borrell, the post rehab Keane, the character free zone that is Snow Patrol - seem old before their time, dutiful but decrepid careerists pedalling a formula.
The Monkeys are different - a wiry and explosive force, the sound of youthful intelligence - free of the dread hand of Simon Cowell and the deathly marketing men that rule pop.
This is still a rare and precious thing - the sort of Nightmare that will save pop from a safe, slippers and cocoa, death by dullness.

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of Bob Marley’s landmark album Exodus.

In Marley’s native Jamaica 1977 was the year of reggae prophesy, the year of the two 7s clash.

That numerological phenomenom was identified on the album of the same name, Two Sevens Clash, by Joseph Hill’s VOCAL GROUP Culture - a 1977 product of Jamaica’s music scene every bit of as worthy of legendary status as Marley’s crossover masterpiece.

As a result of Hill’s album, on the 7th of July 1977 the streets of Jamaica’s capitol Trenchtown were deserted, a voluntary curfew in force as people stayed off the streets fearful that an apocalyptic reckoning was around the corner.

In the event nothing happened to warrant the panic but 1977 certainly brought a major trauma to the reggae movement for which Marley was the figurehead.

It was during that fateful year – right at the point his long sought international success was reaching a new peak – that Marley had his toe removed, in an operation to arrest the cancer which would kill him 4 years later on, gone into legend, aged 36.

The music of Marley and Jamaica remains a fascination and, at some level, a mystery.

How come an island this small – distinct from all its Caribbean neighbours – should have given the world so much in terms of rhythm, songs, feeling – why Jamaica and not St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua, Dominica or Haiti?

Actually if the music of Haiti was more widely known, was allowed to pierce the public consciousness as fully as the next simpering ballad from a Pop Idol Wanna be, the world would be a much different, I can only think better, place.

During the 70s every major  Western act – Rolling Stones, Wings, Paul Simon, Ther Police, The Clash, Steely Dan, Elton John and on and on  – adopted the distinctive JA beat to great advantage commercially.

When the upwardly mobile rich youngish white stars had their way, the Jamaican talk over style of U Roy and I Roy provided the seed from which rap - the multi million record industry saving phenomenom of the 80s and 90s - grew.

And yet so many of the Islands musical pioneers died in violence, poverty or , in the case of Marley’s early producer and sonic wunderkind Lee Perry, emigrated.

Jamaica, like Memphis – the place that gave the world Elvis Presley and much of 60s soul – seems, ultimately, to have lost out in its bargain to the wider world.

It gave so much (just ask UB40, Bono, Bob Dylan) and got so little back.

Poverty and violence there are still commonplace – the post slavery era of peace and contentment promised in song and scripture has not come. Today its music industry is a besieged cartel, many of  whose artists are prevented from travelling the  wider world because of security restrictions. And pressure groups in the UK incensed by  what they castigate as homophobic lyrics.

Yet any  music fans shelves will bulge and bustle with the fantastic sounds of Jamaica’s Masters – Big Youth, Keith Hudson, Dennis Alcapone, Gregory Isaacs, The Heptones, Susan Cadogan.

Mick Hucknall’s Fire And Blood reissue label, run by reggae historian Steve Barrow is a guaranted mark of quality. Possibly the only label in Britain that you can buy any album on its catalogue and be assured of absolutely pucker gear.

Incredibly a famous London based oldies radio station recently released a compilation album of songs from “great” labels. It is a bonkers enough idea (who listen to a label?) totally crazy when you consider that no music from original Two Tone label Trojan, Blood and Fire, Greensleeves or any other reggae label was featured.

In 2007 its good to listen back to Marley, sure t’ing. But when listening to the title track of Marley’s 30 year old masterpiece it is important to remember that this is a song about the movement of a people.

It is not, despite the deluxe CD reissue, the book and the Arena documentary that will mark its release, simply a dead celebrity fuelled event around which to make a killing.

In that regard the song was literally prophetic as the movement of people, through tears and turmoil and madness and lies and murder and despair, is a constant, as are the sweet sad truths of Waiting In Vain, Three Little Birds singing a song of love in a blessed new morning.

It is a true song also because in the 30 years since Bob wrote that bravely anthemic song a kind of passing has taken place.

Something, even if its not the  death of celebrity, is seen in the rise and fall bleach out edification vilification of the AngelDemon Jackson, the  now Beatified Smugness of The Bard of Dublin, Ballymun bred egomaniac Bono, posing as an African in Comic Relief, “representing” the poor people of Africa, Cowell’s pull the trousers up 15 minute of fame show, the fester sore on the barnacle on the arse end of the media that is Big Brother.

The focus on the person, the frontman is well,fine, but not, ultimately, where you learn and where you feel what the art, the thing that made him interesting in the first place, is about.

That is revealed right there in the heart of the music you can  listen to the music of Jamaica, not just Bob Marley. It will give you a lot particularly a  sense the country’s past hurt, present pain, future and hopes.

Exodus is a great album you can rock and swing and sing and skip lightly to.

Or you get down deep and real as you like, meditate on the truths that are as deep and old as time itself.