Checking out early

For the return from absence of What Would David Bowie Do? (no note from matron, just been busy with other things), I'd like to draw your attention to death. Not an uplifting topic, nor particularly entertaining. In fact, death is quite serious.

If there is, though, one certainty in life, it is that some day we will all pop our clogs. Sorry if you had another expectation, but it clearly says in the instruction manual that we turn up, we schlep around for however many years the Great Life Lottery allocates us, and then that's it. Ta-ta.

When someone we know, or know of, dies, our response ranges from mortification and deep gloom, to mild acknowledgement and a token, and somewhat disposable, comment of condolence. For the family of the deceased, it's an understandable tragedy, even it provides welcome respite from the condition that preceded the terminal breath.  For everyone else, grief will only ever be an assumed state, the acquisition of a character, no matter how genuinely-intentioned it might be.

This morning I woke up to the sad news that Clarence Clemons, the iconic saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band had passed away at the age of 69 following a stroke. By spooky coincidence (and unaware that the big man had even been ill) I'd been playing the Born To Run 30th Anniversary box set only the night before, luxuriating in Clemons' sax solo on Jungleland and considering that after lead guitarist, there is only one other solo star in any band.

Clemons was more than just the cool horn player with his moment in the spotlight each time the middle eight came around; his sax, tied to the blatant Spector soundscapes, shaped the Springsteen sound, and made it and Springsteen himself, a musical representation of the size, scale and enormity of America.

It is sad: life is finite, we all know, but seeing anyone who has contributed - even a little - to the cultural enjoyment of my own life pass away while still active and still able to contribute more, saddens me. Is it a vacant emotion? Should I just get a grip?

Last October it was Solomon Burke, a performer who I'd come to appreciate late in my life and even later in his, but whom I realised - only through accessing his back catalogue - what a true musical pioneer he was.  Just last month I was confronted with the demise of another legend, Gil Scott-Heron, whose early albums like Pieces Of A Man exposed me - relatively young - to another side of jazz, funk and whatever it was you could call Heron's music. I felt compelled to express my sadness about his death, for the simple and self-indlugent reason that like so many others who have gone before they should - John Lennon, George Harrison, Nick Drake and my über-hero, John Martyn, to name just four - their music has had a profound influence on my listening enjoyment.

Keith Richards once famously remarked that some musicians aren't meant to live beyond 30 (or thereabouts): the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Marc Bolan, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison all had some degree of misadventure to their expiration (though to be fair, Bolan's had more to do with his Mini losing an argument with a tree on Barnes Common). Were they just destined to go young? Should we feel any less grief for John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters reaching their dotages and then pegging out, much like anyone else who isn't in the spotlight?

Not wishing to get over psychoanalytical about it, it boils down to association and impact. John Martyn's death affected me for days, and still does. I should get over it. One musician out of millions. Likewise the comedian and writer Spike Milligan. He was 83 when he went. "He'd had a good innings" trilled the frequently issued and thoroughly vacuous platitude. To me, it was tragic, because it removed someone who had played a part in my own development, the gradual genetic shape-shifting that is each of our lives. Milligan's sense of humour, channelled through tapes of The Goon Show my father blessed my family life with, influenced my sense of fun, appreciation of English wordplay and the absurd, and to this day, still brings amusement to the moribund downward escalator we call existence.

To see great people taken away from the world at any age is, sadly inevitable and inevitably sad. We should move on, celebrate all the other good things that are out there, of course. But those who make some impact on the lives of many and the lives of only a few - who might have only been responsible for something of just fleeting enjoyment - deserve whatever appreciation comes their way.

Dead men walking in the Roman empire

"I knew my time was up. I knew from the start, from the very beginning I was just a dead man walking." Those were the reflections of Claudio Ranieri, the likeable if somewhat erratic Roman sacked by Roman Abramovich as Chelsea manager after a year of speculation. The poor man had to endure almost a season of rumours, including the clumsy, clandestine meeting between the Russian oligarch and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

When Ranieri was sacked, after a season in which he had earned the tag "Tinkerman" for his often eccentric team selections, he left with a rare dignity in an era of professional disrespect in football. Contrast that with his replacement, Jose Mourinho.

Roll on seven years and history has repeated itself: Carlo Ancelotti, another highly likeable Italian, has been dispatched by Abramovich, with the club explaining that: "This season's performances have fallen short of expectations and the club feels the time is right to make this change ahead of next season's preparations." This is the same club which won the Barclays Premier League title and the FA Cup in Ancelotti's first season in charge, the first league and cup double in Chelsea's history (patronisingly, the official club statement does make a nod to the Italian's achievements by adding: "Carlo will always be welcome at Stamford Bridge, where he will be given the reception and respect his position in our history deserves." Cheers. Thanks. Grazie.)

It is, of course, ludicrous to sack a manager who wins The Double in one season and only manages the  runners-up spot in his next. By this token, Arsene Wenger would have been fired years ago. But when you're Roman Abramovich, Britain's third richest resident and the 53rd richest man in the world, you can - and patently do - whatever you want.

What makes it all the more ridiculous, however, is that Ancelotti was the manager Abramovich wanted in the first place, even before he signed Mourinho (who remains Chelsea's most successful manager ever). So the story goes, when the newly-minted billionaire decided that his next 'must-have' bauble would be an English Premier League club, he began an obsession with winning the European Champions League - just as AC Milan seemed to be very good at doing...under then-manager Ancelotti.

Abramovich is said to have courted Ancelotti to become Chelsea manager several times before he eventually prised him away from the San Siro in 2009. Until then, all Abramovich had been able to get out of Milan was the perma-crocked and extremely expensive Andrei Shevchenko. With Ancelotti finally he had the manager he'd always wanted; and with the results of the 2009-2010 season, it would appear his obsession with the Reggiolan had been worth it.

Come the new season, and Chelsea came back out of the traps like Wile E. Coyote strapped to a new Road Runner-seeking rocket, winning their first two games 6-0 and seemingly running away with the Premier League before most people's summer tans had started to peel. But then the wheels started to fall off: Ray Wilkins - the genial former club captain-turned media-friendly coach was informed - at half-time of a reserve match, if you please - that his contract wasn't being renewed. Both the timing and the motivation of this stank. Almost at once, Chelsea's fortunes turned, soon conceding top spot and the generous margin it had built over Manchester United, and enduring a winter of discontent which even saw them fall out of European positions for next season.

Whatever magic Ancelotti had applied in his first season had somehow been irretrievably lost down the back of the sofa by Christmas. Nothing, and no-one seemed to be getting the side up on its feet. Ancelotti was already looking like the next dead man walking. Given that Abramovich had dispensed with Jose Mourinho after an indifferent Champions League match in September 2007, his successor, Avram Grant went within days of taking Chelsea to within a penalty kick of the European Cup, and his successor Luis Felipe Scollari walked the plank after just seven months in February 2009, Ancelotti's departure was a foregone conclusion, regardless of the logic.

To his credit, the club rallied: despite or in spite of the preposterous £50 million arrival of Fernando Torres in the January transfer window (an arrival which has produced just the one league goal since), Chelsea clawed their way back into contention for the league title itself. However, as incredible as it seemed that they could still retake the top spot they'd conceded to Manchester United some months before, defeats in Europe and the league to the Mancunians sealed Ancelotti's fate.

Disarming and dignified to the last, the Italian maintained a que sera sera stoicism that whatever would happen wouldn't bother him. There would be no wailing or gnashing of teeth, no Latin histrionics. He would politely walk away.

No Chelsea manager walks away empty-handed, of course: the modern penchant for golden parachutes means that in prematurely jettisoning five managers in seven years, Roman Abramovich has also forked out a substantial amount of money - as much as the price of a Torres - in payoffs.

And so, Chelsea starts its search for the eighth manager of the Abromovich era. Money is already changing hands on who will be the next lucky individual. Meanwhile, Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates his 19th league title in almost 25 years as Manchester United manager. That's almost a quarter of a century, and 27 trophies in all. No prizes for guessing the secret of his success, then.

Success for anyone mad enough to take on the Chelsea job will always be fleeting. Jose Mourinho won back-to-back Premier League championships but was still sacked; Ancelotti was even the one Abramovich had wanted, but was still sacked. Whoever enters the Roman lion's den next will have but one objective - win the Champions League. If he fails, there will be only one outcome.

Ain't No Saint

New Malden, my home town, is one of those unprepossessing London suburbs that earns passing mention but precious little attention otherwise. Mentioned in the Domesday Book, it languishes amongst a collection of conurbated towns on London's Surrey edge which developed in the 1930s as the capital spread outward, branching suburban railways and trunk roads with it.

After the war, it sent battalions of middle-ranking professionals to work in London's banks, insurance companies and chartered accountancies. New Malden was - and still is- the archetypal middle-class dormitory.


Sitcom writers - probably because they lived in neighbouring Surbiton, Kingston, Teddington or Wimbledon - have regularly referenced it in British sitcoms like The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin (another, Bless This House, even featured New Malden's distinct 60s-built office towers as a backdrop), largely because of it's typification of English suburbia. All that aside, New Malden's greatest claim to fame today is that it is home to Europe's largest Korean community (clearly famous residents like Jimmy Tarbuck, Gyles Brandreth and, apparently, Avengers goddess Diana Rigg, don't even register on the geographic scale of notability).

Amongst New Malden's ex-residents are yours truly and, though humbly mentioned in the same sentence, Steven Wilson, all-round über talent and front man of progressive rock giants Porcupine Tree. Steven lived in New Malden until the age of six. I know this because his house backed on to mine and we pretty much played together every single day until he moved to Hertfordshire.

There is one other notable ex-resident: Iain David McGeachy. It's highly unlikely you'll have heard of him and, sadly, it's almost as unlikely you'll have heard of John Martyn, whom McGeachy became at the outset of an acclaimed career as one of Britain's finest and most under-rated singer-songwriters. Martyn's final album, Heaven And Earth has been posthumously released this week, almost two-and-a-half years after his premature, but somewhat expected, demise at the age of 60.

Martyn was as complex as some of his music simple: growing out of the mid-60s London folk scene where he - along with Ralph McTell and Gerry Rafferty, together with a young Billy Connolly (then members of The Humblebums) - frequented a Soho music club known as 'Les Cousins'. At the time they thought they were plying their trade at a club owned by a local bloke called Les Cousins - until they discovered it was actually a pluralised French noun.

John Martyn was born in New Malden on September 11, 1948, to light opera-singing parents. When they divorced Martyn moved to Glasgow, where he grew up with his father, only occasionally returning south to spend summers with his mother on her houseboat in Kingston. As a result, Martyn would, in later life, flip effortlessly between speaking in a near-incomprehensible Glaswegian brogue and broad Mockney 'geezah'. Critics suggested a mild form of schizophrenia bordering on fraudulence, but for Martyn it was simply how he engaged the world.

Picture courtesy of the Daily Telegraph

Martyn was undoubtedly an incurable romantic, who wore his heart on his musical sleeve with, at-times, uncomfortable honesty. When his marriage to fellow folkee Beverly Martyn ended, he poured his heart and several gallons of whisky into the album Grace And Danger. Writing and drinking with Phil Collins - who was himself in the midst of the divorce that led him to write Face Value - Martyn stripped bare his marital relationship. Ain't No Saint, one of his titles, was certainly apt. When he performed one of Grace And Danger's most moving songs, Hurt In Your Heart, for a TV special almost 25 years after writing it, Martyn - by now a big burly bear of a man - was seen wiping tears from his eyes, such was the emotion drawn out by the performance even then.

Martyn was a hellraiser: his booze-sodden and drug-fuelled touring antics with bassist Danny Thompson were legendary. Many a Martyn punter has stories of seeing him falling off the stage, drunk, or bumping into him at the bar of an adjacent pub minutes before he'd be due on stage. Such antics often overshadowed Martyn's tremendous writing and performing talent. His musical apprenticeship in Glasgow and London's folk scene helped him develop an amazing guitar technique which found it's strength in performances with his Martin acoustic famously looped through an Echoplex box to create woozy soundscapes which matched his trademark vocal style.

Martyn died from pneumonia on January 29, 2009 aged 60 and not long after receiving an OBE, arguably for being Britain's best-kept musical secret (something he actually preferred, although his 1982 album title Well Kept Secret may have taken a sly dig at the lack of commercial success his creative direction at the time was providing).

He'd been working on Heaven And Earth after what would be best described as a challenging period in anyone's life. Four years before he'd had his right leg amputated just below the knee, bizarrely, the result of a burst cyst, rather than anything more expectedly associated with his lifestyle.

Regardless, he continued to tour and showed no signs of giving up his blend of blues, jazz and folk-influenced songwriting, as Heaven And Earth testifies. It will hardly rank amongst his best albums, but then the likes of Solid Air (whose title track was written about Martyn's troubled friend Nick Drake), One World and Grace And Danger are so peerless that anything would compare badly.

Posthumous releases can be macabre cash-ins; John Martyn's catalogue has its fair share of poor quality fan-fleecing compilations released by the myriad record companies he was signed to over 41 years. But Heaven And Earth is a beautiful, if whisky-soured finale.

Quite rightly installed by The Sunday Times as album of the week, Martyn's swansong spans his love of jazz and the blues, with his signature slurred vocal giving each track a honeyed tone unlike no other musician I can think of. It takes one last, satisfying drink from the well, bringing closure on the checkered life and checkered career of one of the most gifted singer-songwriters of his generation. And certainly of the town he was born in.

The alternative Royal Wedding playlist



Image: Salvatore Vuono


1. I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) – Meatloaf
2. D.I.V.O.R.C.E – Tammy Wynette
3. My Favourite Mistake – Sheryl Crow
4. Emotionless – Good Charlotte
5. Grounds For Divorce – Elbow
6. Haitian Divorce – Steely Dan
7. Before You Accuse Me – Bo Diddley
8. But Not For Me – Various (Elton John, Sinatra, Elvis Costello, etc)
9. Some People Are Crazy – John Martyn
10. White Wedding – Billy Idol
11. Slave - Prince
12. Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division
13. There My Dear – Marvin Gaye
14. They’ll Need A Crane – They Might Be Giants
15. Slip Slidin’ Away – Paul Simon
16. What’s Love Got To Do With It? – Tina Turner
17. Jezebel – 10,000 Maniacs
18. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore – BB King
19. Farther On Up The Road – Eric Clapton
20. Pretty much anything by Phil Collins

#goodnews

Twitter can be credited with so many great things since Jack Dorsey came up with his novel 'micro-blogging' concept five years ago, but one Tweet in particular brought a welcome smile to my face this weekend. 

Actually, it was these two Tweets: "So. I'm fine. If I could eat I'd be perfect. But I can't. Not for ages. There was a disaster with a jacket potato last night," shortly followed by "Should have said 'attempted jacket potato'. Who, coincidentally, I once saw supporting Ten Years After at the Marquee".

These were the inaugural statements to herald the arrival to Twitter of Danny Baker, one of the finest, most inventive, idiosyncratic and - damn! - funniest broadcasters of his generation. Life in the Baker treehouse got decidedly grim towards the end of last year when he announced via Facebook, on November 1, that he'd been diagnosed with cancer.


True to style, his statement chimed with defiant self-effacement: "Hello cats and kittens," it began. "As you know I am queasy about introducing vulgar real life onto the vaudeville stage so let's keep this crisp. After a pretty mouldy diagnosis about a month back I finally begin chemotherapy on Monday with further radiotherapy from January." Baker continued: "Once the quacks have soundly thrashed this thing I shall return like a rare gas and as if out of a trap. In the meantime I am watching Tommy Steele box sets (and has there ever been a more lying title to a film than TS's It's All Happening?) and urge you all to keep yakking up a storm and laugh extra loud at the incumbents," before stoically ending with: "So. Manly handshake. Walk right on. In the words of King George, 'What what and there it is...'". 

At the time this emerged I was embroiled in dramas of my own which, looking back, seem petty by comparison. In itself, Baker's announcement wasn't so shocking, either: after all, almost 11 million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer every year. Even more cheerily, one in three of us will develop some form of the disease in their lifetime.

Just about everyone will know or know of someone who has it, beaten it or, sadly, given in to it. My father has it (though thankfully, it's under control); my former next-door neighbour survived it; and I learned a short time ago that a very good friend of a very good friend succumbed to it at the age of 51. Boom. Gone. An effusive life cut short by something you would have thought, by now, medical science would have sorted out.

Cancer is, we're told, "not necessarily" a death sentence. Early detection is the key to surviving it, depending on which of the 200 varieties you've got. I can't begin to imagine what goes through anyone's mind when they've been told they have The Big C. For my dad, who is now 81, being confronted with prostate cancer must have been baffling, bewildering, distressing and any one of a number of emotions. All of a sudden, something was attacking him from within and, unlike most other things he'd been confronted with in life, there was very little he could do about it. Well he could: agree to the treatment and let medical prowess do its work. Except that the medical treatment to beat the cancer led to all sorts of side effects, physical defects and energy-sapping fatigue - entire days when you don't feel right but can't put your finger on why (which may also have been worsened or accentuated by the first signs of mental decline).

I know this post has just taken a somewhat downbeat mood, but I come back to my original thesis: Danny Baker's appearance on Twitter on Saturday, and the rat-a-tat-tat of his subsequent musings reflecting one of British broadcasting's sharpest wits, reassured me that life does go on.

Back in November, when Baker announced his affliction, I was bitching and moaning about painters' bills, about the apparent challenges of changing jobs, of selling houses and moving countries, and everything else that seemed to anchor an ever-present black cloud of grumpiness above my bonce. What I failed to do then, but seeing this minor event on Twitter reminds me to do now, is put it all into the correct perspective. Shit not only happens, but there are people in this world who are dealing with copious amounts of it. And coping with it relatively well.

The placebo effect of a royal wedding

Living, as I am, in a country with a less than embracing attitude to royalty, some of France's republican tendencies may have rubbed off on me.

I have only just found out - significantly later than most of my compatriots, it would appear - that Friday, April 29, 2011 has been declared a public holiday in the UK to celebrate the wedding of Mr William Wales and Ms Catherine Middleton, respectively a 28-year-old helicopter pilot from Gloucestershire, and a 29-year-old occasional photographer from Berkshire.

It will be a day of national exuberance, patriotic fervour and knees-up street parties of a breed not seen since a certain mono-bollocked Austrian corporal shot himself and Europe rapidly descended into peace and tranquility in the spring of 1945. In preparation, grannies the length and breadth of Britain have been buying commemorative tea towels, coffee mugs and sticks of rock in irrelevant gestures of support for the royal nuptials.

OK. Super. But when Britain's finances remain about as robust as a binge-drinking Essex girl trying to walk down Harlow High Street at closing time, Her Majesty's Government has effectively pulled a sickie on the national economy, as the workforce takes an enforced day off, regardless of their view on royalty.

At risk of sounding like an embittered Spartist, the public holiday smacks of a Victorian placebo: "Let's give the proles a day off to wave flags, watch the telly and eat jelly in the street  - they'll soon feel better about things after that."

Actually, it's the last thing Britain needs: with a long Easter weekend just a week before, having everyone take another day off, especially just to watch two people getting married at the taxpayer's expense, is madness and will cost millions in lost productivity.

Constitutionally, William's wedding to Kate, three weeks from today, will be as important as anyone's betrothal should be. But is it really worthy of the country collectively downing tools for the day?

Sorry, my head is full

"How is education supposed to make me feel smarter?", Homer Simpson once opined, adding: "Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."

If only I had his problem: thanks to obscure prog rock lyrics from the early 70s, trivia about Glen A. Larson productions from the mid-70s, and even more song lyrics from the New Wave of the late 70s, my head is full.

You can try pushing new stuff in, but the old stuff won't budge. My 43-year-old noggin needs decluttering. That seems to be the only reason why, in taking French lessons currently, precious little seems to stick.

It's been 30 years since I last sat in a French class, learning such useful phrases as: "Nikki le singe est dans l'arbre". As Eddie Izzard brilliantly observed, that is not too helpful when you first arrive in Paris as there are precious few monkeys up trees to point out. In fact so far, I've seen none.

Strangely, some of that O-level tuition did get lodged in the deep recesses of my nut. I can confidently order an ice cream, even ask politely for a beer in French. Probably, all essentials are covered with those two requests alone.

So here I am, for three hours each week, wearing the dunce's hat because I'm failing to remember how to  conjugate a verb we went over three weeks ago...or last week...or ten minutes earlier. It's not that I don't want to try: nothing would give me more pleasure than to be able to converse freely in another toungue. I used to think it was the height of erudition: what could be more impressive than James Bond describing exactly how he - and the lady - wanted his filet mignon prepared in any one of a number of languages?

I have dutifully attempted the lingo wherever I've travelled, but this has amounted to nothing more than bad Berlitz versions of ordering a sandwich in German, or requesting a table by the window in Spanish (and wondering why a toasted shoe has turned up in Berlin, and a wine glass and two Nurofen in Madrid). My Italian is, apparently, even worse, sounding closer to an Olive Garden menu being read out by a Midwestern farm boy than anyone genuinely from the Roman peninsular.

For nine of the last eleven years I have lived in the Netherlands. Where they speak Dutch. Given that the Dutch only have to look at a guidebook on a foreign country before they're fluent in its mother voice, my command of het nederlands taal has been woeful.

I can blame the fact that I spent five days of the week in an English-speaking business environment; I can claim that Dutch TV was crap and I watched, mostly, the BBC; I can argue that this nation of polymaths would simply give up listening to my awful attempts at their language and revert to English (arguing, somewhat patronisingly, that "yours is the more popular language, so we should speak English, rather than you speaking Dutch"). The bottom line is that the Dutch language just doesn't sound as poetic or as romantic as Italian, Spanish or French. Still, I should have learnt it; it wasn't about speaking it for effect - it should have been about learning it to communicate.

Now I find myself living in Paris, I know that I must learn French. Why? Because as Steve Martin famously warned: "If you go to Paris, France, 'Chapeau' means 'hat', and 'oeuf' means 'egg'. It's like those French have a different word for everything!".

Almost a month into my course, I'm wondering whether my brain has been progressively and poorly rewired over the years. I'm even seriously contemplating the possibility that mice have simply found their way in and chewed through the wiring. Whether it's stress, tiredness, laziness, or that you really can't teach an old dog new tricks, these twice-weekly, post-work lessons are making no progress whatsoever. What I can say, I can say. What I might want to say seems unattainable.

I'm frustrated by a glass ceiling of sorts: I see children of four learning new languages in a matter of months, their sponge-like brains soaking it up; I'm surrounded by non-native English speakers who are fluent in a variety of tongues, and yet by virtue of the fact I was born to speak what appears to be the closest the planet has to a common language, I feel cursed by ignorance and the inability to add to it fluently.

Technology hasn't helped: we're becoming congenitally lazy thanks to the Internet, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. Need a fact? Wikipedia will have it. Confronted by another language? Whack it through Google Translate.

Perhaps my only hope is that, now we're in the 21st century, science fiction will become science fact: someone must be out there working on a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy's Babel Fish, or BIG RAT from Gerry Anderson's Joe 90. If they are, it will probably be Google.