More Great Drumming

Back to Paul Weller playing live again, as easily available on YouTube. After singing the praises of B.J. Wilson it occurs to me that Steve White, a regular conspirator with the Modfather from The Style Council onwards, was probably my favourite of the next generation of Brit drummers. Evidence of just how good he was is all over the place, but I'll limit myself to linking just to a totally cooking performance of Sunflower from the early 90s. (And it doesn't hurt that it's the great Yolanda Charles on bass. Who said that the ladies couldn't rock out when it was necessary?)

Great Drumming

I've been continuing to blast my ears with Procul Harum, the 1971 vintage, in odd breaks at work and, alongside enjoying a superb band, have been trying to figure out if it was B.J. Wilson, their drummer who made a deeply profound impression on me in my early years of attending live concerts. I have this incredibly powerful memory of seeing a band in concert with the drum riser placed centre and upfront and me looking down from the circle (second level at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester) utterly mesmerised by the sheer drama of the drummer's playing. I'm pretty sure this was the first time I'd ever really picked out a single musician in concert and made them the fulcrum of my consciousness of the great noise they were part of. Even watching early Crimson it was the totality of the sound that did it for me. But this time my listening, in tandem with the visual, visceral power of it all, went up a level or, possibly, two.

The thing is, that it could be I'm remembering the excellent Mel Pritchard, the drummer with Barclay James Harvest - a fine live combo. Having said that, I can't think of BJH, for all their many virtues, having quite the same variety of tempi that PH indulged in. And it's difficult to think of any drummer quite as visually expressive as Barrie Wilson. Also, in the numbers I gave links to from Procul's Beat-Club performance the other day he's very much front and centre. Just to add to those, I thought I'd better post a link to Powerfailure, a stunning drum-feature, if ever there was one, and Shine On Brightly, in which the playing is flawless in terms of providing exactly the right dynamics at exactly the right moments. Those fills!

Oh, and here's a bit of an erratum. It turns out that Simple Sister is a Brooker/Reid song after all despite that great guitar riff. Surely Gary must have copped it from Robin Trower at some point in their jamming?

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake - 1

Entertained some disconnected thoughts on History in the course of the day and vaguely wished I hadn't. Then read this in the Graun in relation to a famous massacre a couple of millennia back and definitely wished I hadn't. (Read it, I mean. And thought too much about history, I suppose.)

Soul Sister

Here's a bit of a follow-up to my recent singing of the praises of the esteemed Paul Weller & Gary Brooker. This morning I was giving a spin to Amy Winehouse's debut album Frank, and wondering why I don't do so more often. The thing is, I know the answer. It's glorious stuff, with that voice and all, but I always feel a bit sad playing it, given her early death. Thinking of what might have been, I suppose.

A day or two back I was reading something about how great Back To Black - her 'breakout' album - is and how it moved way beyond the debut taking Amy into the very top league. Now I wasn't close enough to the current music scene at the time (I never am, in truth) to know all that much about the presumed ranking of various contenders. But I've always preferred the earlier work. According to the article Frank is more of a niche piece and her appeal as a performer on its release was limited to precisely the kind of musos who love all that jazz & the off-beat. So, since I'm very much in that minority, I suppose that's why its (and her) appeal to me goes so deep.

Anyway, this leads me to a sort of happy fantasy about Ms Winehouse. That she didn't get uber-famous; that she thrived in her little niche and the jackals and hounds from the tabloids never got their nasty claws in her; that she become a part-time member of The Specials (a band she loved); that she became a co-vocalist of sorts with the Modfather; and that, somehow, this engagement with what she loved and what is really real put her back on the straight path.

And that somehow we got many more years of Amy, Amy, Amy.

Lazy Days And Saturdays

Not just a bit of a lazy day but a lot of a lazy day. Listened to bits of The Byrds, Dylan, Paul Weller, Lou Reed and Beethoven (a couple of piano sonatas.) Read bits of poetry and a good murder. Enjoyed three naps.

Then off to dinner at a halal Vietnamese place down Clementi Road with Boon & Mei and lots of inconsequential, non-sequential, conversation. Though Boon and myself did get down to discussing the usefulness of Bloom's Taxonomy, so it wasn't all just sweetness and light.

Don't think I'll get quite such another lazy day for a while, so here I am savouring it whilst I can.   

Another Soulman

A recent discovery I've made, of the life-enhancing variety, involves the realisation that there are numerous videos of fairly early Procul Harum playing live. I'm talking about the line-up around 1971, about the time of the release of Broken Barricades, their fine fifth album and the first one I bought. I saw the band live in the same period at the Free Trade Hall, though when I watched them Robin Trower was still on board playing guitar, whereas the five piece version featured live on Beat-Club, playing classics like A Salty Dog and Simple Sister has got Dave Ball on guitar.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant to the point I want to make today, following yesterday's post on Paul Weller as a great soul singer, which is that Gary Brooker is in the same league even though what he's singing isn't exactly soul. Mind you, Simple Sister (I think a Trower composition, though I might be wrong) is steeped in the blues, so it's not so far off. But A Salty Dog is sui generis I reckon, though I suppose prog ballad might work as a ludicrous classification.

To think I had the great good fortune to grow up alongside this music. And now can blast it out through my ear-buds (as I think they're called) in well-earned tea-breaks.

Soulman

I thought I had a pretty good idea of the various covers the Modfather has performed over the years, his covers album Studio 150 being a bit of a favourite of mine. But somehow or other it had escaped my attention that he'd done the business with a Marvin Gaye classic. If his live performance of What's Goin' On doesn't seriously rock your boat there's something wrong with you.

Oh, and this surely puts an end to the ludicrous myth of cultural appropriation. If Mr Weller isn't a serious soul brother I honestly don't know who is.

Still Navigating The New World

It's official: the Gods of Commerce are not on our side. Nor the Gods of Tech. (Probably pretty much denizens of the same pantheon, if you ask me.)

We wended our way to the Guardian at Clementi Mall this afternoon, retracing our steps from last Sunday. I was (foolishly) confident that this time we would be able to 'spend' our e-vouchers. They were there, on my phone, website open, bar codes clearly showing as we made our way to the cashiers - fortunately before buying anything - to check we could use them. Just before we were about to get into conversation with someone from the shop I pressed upon the little button to open the page where the vouchers (with barcodes) appeared and nothing happened. It looked like the page had frozen. I pointed this out to Noi and pressed a couple of times more but guessed that the signal for Internet access wasn't strong, the 4G readout being down to two bars.

Never mind. A bit of patience. Wait for a stronger signal just outside the shop. Which came. Back to the page to log-in to the site. Key-in the phone number, carefully so no slippy finger. Key-in the password, with equal care. And up comes the message: Your account has been locked due to multiple failure attempts. That was around 4.00 pm. Still getting the same message several hours later.

I made no failed attempts. The system failed despite my accurate logging-in. 

The future sucks.

The Hard Life

Am annoyed with myself for neglecting to mention anything about my Dad yesterday on the anniversary of his death. I'd been thinking about him before going to work but after that the deluge of Monday stuff swamped me to be followed by the excitement-cum-bewilderment of a super-sized telly and catching up with Hakim & Fifi & life outside our four walls.

Still busy today but found the time to think about Jack Connor and what he would have regarded as tough work and a tough life. Always a healthy perspective because my life and work is a cakewalk compared to what was expected of Dad & his generation in our little corner of Manchester & environs around the middle of the last century.

Slumped in his chair in our small living room, in front of the fire. After a ten hour shift on the dirty roller at Rotunda. Close to breathless. Nothing left - dozing before our tea. Finally at ease in a life in which nothing came easily.

On The Big Screen

We're undergoing some mild disruption on the home front at present. Fifi will be our permanent house guest for a month or two or three or four (possibly more) as Hakim needs to temporarily take shelter at Fuad & Rozita's place at Woodlands. We're storing some bits and pieces for Hakim at our storage facility out at the IMM building and this evening we took delivery of his television.

The thing is that his telly dwarfs ours, being at least twice the size, possibly more. But our little telly is the one suffering from all those spots of light I've moaned about previously, and we're definitely going to have to get rid of it. So Hakim's set is now occupying pride of place in our living room, despite the fact it's all a bit much for our needs.

However, I'm manfully trying to come to terms with this by playing my DVD of Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Festival 1963 - 1965. Somehow seeing the Bobster dominating the front room doesn't feel bad at all. So progress, of a sort. Stay tuned, as they say, for further updates.