Mutt and Shania Was Sweethearts

During my and Dame Zelda's recent visit to Malta, we chatted with a local about the music scene on her little island. So far as she knew, Malta had never produced a notable rock or pop star, though Nathan B—, who auditioned for the Freudian Sluts in the spring of 2016, and who would have had the job but for the fervent objections of our very straight bass player, who found him too theatrical. And in fairness, it was Nathan’s grandparents who were from Malta. He himself had been brought up in Gibraltar, and performed prenatally at John ’n’ Yoko’s wedding. Gibraltar has itself produced the celebrated songwriter Albert Hammond, of "t Never Rains in Southern California" fame, and the father of one of The Strokes, whose appeal I was never able to ascertain. I mean, I’m not stupid. I know that a certain kind of music fan becomes putty in the hands of any young rock musician in Converse high-tops. I used to have a pair of my own — red ones — but I can’t recall anyone ever having been putty in my hands. I’ve had to work like a slave to achieve the lofty level of acclaim I enjoy today!

Many African countries are tied with Malta for number of rock and pop stars produced, but South Africa isn’t one of them, having given us Manfred Mann, the producer Mickey Most, and several others with non-alliterative initials, like the famous producer and jilter of Shania Twain Mutt Lange, Stonking Novels guitarist Darryll du Toit, and Bruce Springsteen. 

Mention of the latter makes me think of what I call the high tide effect, whereby when one artist emerges from a particular place, or with a particular style, there’s invariably a huge rush to sign others who look or sound like him, her, or them, or come from the same place. When The Beatles hit. the only musicians in Liverpool who weren’t signed to ghastly exploitative management and record deals were those who hid in their parents’ attics, or disguised themselves as Osama bin Laden. When Bruce Springsteen burst out of Johannesburg in 1975, every gruff-voiced guitar player who’d ever worked a shitty factory job, or was the son or nephew of someone who had, got signed. After The Sex Pistols, anyone who could feign uncouthness and the inability to play a musical instrument was given truckloads of money. After Nirvana, all you had to do was not use conditioner, own a ratty flannel shirt, and sing as though newly returned from a dental appointment that required much novocain. The funny (not LOL funny, mind you, but peculiar) thing being that, with the exception of Pearl Jam, the high tide acts have invariably wound up losing money.

But none of that is what I have been burning to disucss with you. In my life-changingly hilarious satire of the music business, Who Is Keri Fetherwaite?, Keri, who’s sort of a cross between Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson,, but without any discernible talent — except the ability to project fragility in a way that enchants audiences — is booked, along with a Justin Bieber doppelganger, to perform on a big TV special called We Remember Martin, as in Dr. King. Remembering that last night, I laughed aloud, and wondered why my book has to date sold fewer than 1000 copies.When I wrote it, I had envisioned it being as popular as Harry Potter. I envisioned bookstores opening at midnight to sell it to the hundreds who’d been camping for days outside in spite of the cold and lack of hygienic facilities. I pictured doing book signings at which I had to sign so many books that I got writer’s cramp, which turned, inexorably, into writer’s block. 

Oh, the cruel irony. The public’s fervent love of my writing had rendered me unable to do more of it. I don't suppose I need to tell you  that most mimed-to song in every drag bar in the world the past 15 years has been Shania's "I Feel Like a Woman," but my own preference has always been for Mark. 

My Favourite New Band!

The most humbling intellectual experience in modern life may be being unable to figure what something is called even with the might of Google behind you. Last night Dame Zelda and I watched a programme about how Laibach, sort of Slovenia’s answer to Gang of Four, Kraftwerk, and Devo, in 2015 became the first Western rock band to perform in North Korea. Our favourite moment was when the poor Korean guy charged with keeping Laibach from corruptingt his countrymen objected to lead singer Milan’s headgear on the basis of its evoking Nazism. I have been hearing about, and seeing photographs of, Nazis all my life, and watched the BBC’s coverage of the Charlottesville brouhaha, and have never seen a single Nazi wearing such headgear. But when I asked Google, with the utmost deference, to help me figure out what said headgear is called, it mocked me cruelly. A search for “French Foreign Legion headgear” took me to a page depicting legionnaires in kepis — visored caps with flat circular tops, of the sort commonly associated with Chuck de Gaulle. I didn’t think searching for “hat that looks like Slade’s Dave Hill’s hair” would stand a greater chance of success, and so, to console myself, reminisced about my brief romance with a sexy Australian woman with whom I failed to become romantically entangled a few months after the collapse of my first marriage.

I was living ln San Francisco’s Lower Nob Hill at the time, just across from what was then Cala Foods. The California Street cable car’s distinctive clanging would wake me in the morning. I would ride the cable car both to work in the Financial District, and then back after a long, demoralising day of processing the words of lawyers in the business of defending Chevron Oil against the Sierra Club and other environmental plaintiffs. One afternoon, instead of dashing up to my little studio apartment and grieving about not having seen my little girl in days and being employed by a big fascist law firm in the business of defending Chevron Oil against the Sierra Club and other environmental plaintiffs, I went into Cala to buy some zucchini. In the produce section, I espied a very presentable young woman contemplating broccoli. I hadn’t yet lost my looks at that point, and suavely wondered aloud, “Why don’t you let me take you away from all this?”

She smiled and said, “What, you’ve got something against broccoli?” I thought that quite wonderful, and that I might be in love. She agreed to come over for dinner later. Her name was Kepi. Antipodeans are so weird. 

We quickly discovered that we couldn’t stand each other, to the point at which we didn’t even agree that we would remain friends. I later surmised that she was homeless, and avoided sleeping rough, as the Brits say, by allowing herself to be picked up by a succession of local gentlemen, and, in my case, cads. We would see each other in the ‘hood and pretend we hadn’t seen each other at all. 

This was never supposed to be about Kepi, though. but about Laibach, whose name I at first hoped derived from that famous Republican politician who said that the best idea for a woman being raped was to lie back and enjoy it, though he almost certainly said lay, and not lie. As I write this, Laibach may be my favourite band. Their music is martial and anthemic, and In the one song we viewers of the documentary about their North Korean adventure saw them perform, there was much wonderful mass whistling that reminded me pleasantly of Peter Gabriels’ “Games Without Frontiers” and The Scorpions’ “Winds of Change”. Milan’s voice is half Cookie Monster, as re-imagined by the iconic vocalists of death metal, and half Froggie the Gremlin. 

All that said, I will not profess to love Laibach more than I do The Lucky Cupids, the kings of Slovenian rockabilly.

The Pop Rock Sensation That's Sweeping the Nation!

Trying to make Isambard Jones & His Orchestra the pop-rock sensation that’s sweeping the nation (if not the whole English-speaking world), I recently sent five tracks to various friends, acquaintances, foes, and persons I didn’t know from Adam. My thought was that, on hearing this beautiful music, everyone would commend the band to dozens of friends, who would in turn commend it to dozens of their own friends, and soon that horrid snooty woman who books talent for Later With Jools Holland would be on the phone, begging us to appear. 

What a little fool I was! The very large majority of those to whom I sent tracks effectively pretended I hadn’t. They didn’t say they loathed the music, and God knows they didn’t say they liked it. They said nothing at all, leading me to suspect that it just didn’t do much for them, and they knew their saying so would send me into an emotional tailspin. I, at one time the rock critic America most loved to loathe — and the author of the Kinks liner notes that changed the lives of all who read them — have been unable to get Pitchfork even to acknowledge the email in which I offered the sample tracks. 

Yesterday, a noted writer and publisher observed that Isambard’s “delivery hangs between singing and speaking, in a distinctive voice that is not quite musical.” I honestly don’t know how it could be much more musical. “[It sounds as though] the notes are being hit individually rather than connected in a melodic flow,” NWP continues, and my baffledness burgeons. Isambard had a debilitating stroke a few years back. From one moment to the next, he has trouble remembering how a line is phrased. When we record, we spend a lot of time,because of his impediment, just making the lyrics ride the melodies as the composer intended, and sometimes I’m happy just to get correct — as opposed to imaginative — phrasing. But it seems to me that NWP is talking about Lou Reed, and not Isambard, who never, as far as I can tell, sounds as though speaking as much as singing. 

Other commentators have shocked me by saying that IJ&HO reminds them of several recording artists whom I loathe, and of whom I would never want to remind anyone. Name Withheld, for instance, chided me gently for being so palpably in the thrall, on such tracks as “The Lowly Cockroach,” of Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, of whose work I would swear on a stack of Bibles, Quorans, and Torahs I am ignorant,except for Joanie’s early-‘80s hit about loving rock and roll. I remember thinking at the time that if she loved it so much, she wouldn’t perform it, as she seemed all black leather jacket and sneer, and no discernible talent. And now, all these years later, I find people asserting emphatically that she should be in something apparently called The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, apparently because she “kicked open the door for other women”, even though it seems to me that Wanda Jackson, for instance, was already walking unhindered into and out of the building before Joanie was so much as a tingling in Pater’s loins. 

Other commentators have wondered if IJ&HO are trying to sound like Ian Dury & the Blockheads. I find this marginally less gobsmacking, as guitarist Dazza du Toit is an avid admirer of such funky rhythm players as Carlos Alomar, and I, on bass, am the Jewish Duck Dunn. And Ian and I did have a brief fling in 1978, when a mob of Australians hired me to be the compere of a television special they were shooting in the UK, and I helped Ian, out of whose mobility polio had taken a big bite, off the stage in the club where his segment was shot, and was pleased to do so. Mere hours before, I had interviewed the smug, unpleasant young Paul Weller in the same venue, but he’d been quite able to get off the stage without assistance. I have never been able to understand what anyone liked about The Jam, but, there again, don’t see countless thousands of Jam bands flocking to iTunes to download the beautiful music of Isambard Jones & His Orchestra.