The Best Band of the 21st Century

I owe everything I ever was to the English writer Nik Cohn, whose style I shamelessly appropriated at the beginning of my career as a music journalist. About a decade ago, in a book about his experiences developing rappers in New Orleans, he spoke of himself as always having been attuned primarily to the lower frequencies, to the bass and drums, to  rhythm. I imagined St. Nik felt great kinship with the sort of guy who turns the bass up so loud in his car as to rattle the windows in any neighbourhood in which he encounters a stop sign. I, on the other hand, have always been about the midrange. While I enjoy a good groove as much as the next person, I’m all about melody, as I have been since my first exposure to music — specifically, the pre-Elvis pop my parents listened to on the radio. At six, the melody of “Where Is Your Heart?”, from Moulin Rouge, made me swoon. 

I was in Istanbul in mid-March. At a restaurant playing English-language pop, I heard an unidentified woman singer’s version of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” and…swooned anew. It seemed to me that each phrase was more gorgeous than the one before it. And now I think Keane might be the best pop band of the 21^st century so far. I can’t think of another group that’s had three songs to compare to “Somewhere”, “Everything Changes”, and “Bedshaped”, which I first heard when a young policeman who was going to audition for my band sent me a link to his singing it. When I found and listened to the original version, as sung by the sublime Tom Chaplin, the key change before the chorus made my heart stop.

Early in the band’s career, the baby-faced Chaplin looked the sort of boy on whom a school’s bullies would delightedly converge on first sight. He had lots of baby fat, sang in a register ordinarily ceded to women, and exuded vulnerability. When he abandoned a major tour to check himself into rehab, one UK working class hero rock and roll bad boy snarkily observed that, being posh and soft and fervently un-rock and roll, Tom must have become addicted to Portuguese dessert wine. Widespread snickering ensued. Keane had no guitarist. Who did they suppose they were — the second coming of The Thompson Twins or Gary Numan?

As far as I’m concerned, Tom Chaplin can drink hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows melted in it so long as he continues to sing as gorgeously as he does. I will also admit to thinking some of Coldplay’s stuff — “Yellow” and “The Scientist” are my own favourites — extraordinarily beautiful. I will be scoffed at by rockists, who think non-blues-based music lacking distorted guitars the province of drinkers of pink tea, to use the wonderful phrase of Ty Cobb — the baseball player, and not Donald J. Trump’s lawyer. 

Well, sneer ‘n’ scoff away, darlings! I do get so very tired of rockism. If I had a dime for every prospective addition to my band who, after hearing our stuff, accusatorily sniffed, “Well, it’s not rock, though, is it?” I could buy myself a doner kebab. Well, no, dearies, it isn’t going to remind anyone of Motorhead. Very little of it is bluesy, and I haven’t been big on, well, raw power for around 40 years, though my first couple of professional bands delighted in playing so loud as to pin audiences to the rear wall. (The Noted British Producer who produced the first one had told us, “You’re not very good, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t be really loud,” and who were we to argue?) But one could make a case for probably half of The Beatles stuff before they disappeared up their own asses being pop, rather than rock, and Elvis was nearly as often a pop singer even in his pre-conscription days as a rock one. Would you call The Beach Boys’ glorious Pet Sounds as rock, dude, or Love’s glorious Forever Changes? 

Rock is very often loutish, overstated (is there a single track in the Aerosmith canon on which Mr. Tyler doesn’t oversing as wantonly as the most brazen Mariah Carey clone on American Idol?), and one-dimensional. It kicks down your front door, or even smashes a window, whereas pop picks the lock on your door, enters your abode, and steals your art and wine collections undetected, and is capable of infinitely greater subversiveness. Balls-to-the-wall bombast can be exciting in small doses, but is there a blues-derived rock lick I haven’t now heard 40 million times? 

Call me a wuss and a judas if you must, but give me subtlety. Give me pop, by which I so do not mean that formulaic, marginally more melodic brand of rock known as power pop, played by persons in retro haircuts on Rickenbacker guitars. I wouldn’t take 20 The La’s — disproportionately celebrated for their tuneful ode to heroin addiction, “There She Goes” — for Keane, the best band of the 21^st century so far.

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With Dame Zelda in Byzantium

Between the two mega-mosques in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square, Dame Zelda spotted a quartet of Muslim women in hijabs taking a selfie with the majestic Blue Mosque in the background. All that could be seen of them was their eyes. I hope I will not be thought Islamophobic for having found this very funny, as I hope also I won’t be found Islamophobic for wondering why exactly we had to be awakened barbarically early every morning by the pre-recorded ululating of the city’s various muezzin blaringly summoning the city’s faithful to reaffirm their submission to Allah, as they would four more times over the course of the day. 

Honestly, how can Al be that impressed by the devotion of people who have to be so noisily reminded to express their devotion? Wouldn’t he be a lot more flattered if they remembered on their own? Doesn’t this insatiable need for affirmation remind you unpleasantly of the God of the Old Testament, the one forever proclaiming, “I am The Lord Thy God,” as though those to whom he presented himself might mistake him for Moise the shepherd, or Terry, the condescending IT guy?

On the Big Bus hop on/hop off tour, we learned that one of Valide Sultan Mosque (the Mosque of the Sultan’s Mother) took a long time to be built because its site was in what was then a Jewish ‘hood, Eminönü. One imagines negotiations. 

Sultan Mehmed III: We'd like to build a mosque on your big vacant lot in the Eminönü quarter.
We’re prepared to offer you a trillion Turkish lira. 

Sol Finkelman, owner of the lot. A trillion lira he offers! In rags we should dress? 
Instead of such an offer, across the punim why not just slap us!

Later on the Red Route tour, we learned the Prophet is never referrred to simply as The Prophet Mohammed, but as The Prophet Mohammed Peace Be Upon Him, which we imagine his smart-alec classmates having shortened considerably, as when wondering, “Yo, Mo? So?”

We learned also that the number of minarets with which one was allowed to adorn his mosque depended on his social status, with four signifying someone indisputably A-list. The Blue Mosque has five, leading one to imagine that the sultan who’d built it, had he lived in the 21st century, would be the sort to click eagerly on penile enlargement advertisements. 

We were delighted to discover ourselves bivouacked a 90-second walk down a hill from a twinkly street lined with restaurants, but our delight was short-lived. Stop to glance at a menu and the hawker who is invariably stationed just outside will descend on you like a plague of locusts, virtually demanding that you dine within, using techniques of emotional manipulation that might embarrass even a spoiled American teenager. Many of the shopkeepers do likewise, and traversing even a short commercial lane can be an ordeal. On Dalbasti Street, where I traipsed for exercise while Dame Zelda napped, I discovered that it isn’t necessary to pause for a millisecond to glance at a menu. The proprietors of kebap places yelled, “Yes, please?” at me from deep within the bowels of their establishments. The good news is that few of them attack you with daggers for ignoring them.

I went for an early-morning walk our first full day in town, and was almost immediately befriended by a guy who turned out to want me to visit his rug shop. And here I’d dared to imagine that it was my personal magnetism inspiring all these strangers to welcome me to their city! 

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We went to a restaurant with live music, to which a dervish who was either bored or ecstatic whirled. When Dame Zelda asked what sort of beer the place offered, our servers eyes suggested, “Die, infidel bitch!” We settled for pomegranate juice.  I will not pretend to have enjoyed the music, all of which sounded identically plaintive to me.

All the restaurants in which we dined displayed Sigara Içilmez (no cigarettes) signs, and much smoking was going on in all of them, on glass-bottomed water pipes in which fruit-flavoured tobacco is covered with foil and roasted with charcoal. I think the pipes are called shiksas. According to research carried out by the World Health Organisation, an hour-long shiksa session gets as much carcinogenic crap into one’s lung as five packs of cigarettes.

We went to the city’s two great bazaars, the Egyptian Spice, and the Grand. The first reminded me of the Notting Hill Festival or Black Friday at Walmart in that there wasn’t room to turn around for the swirling masses, which almost certainly contained a fair number of pickpockets and cutthroats. At the gorgeous, literally awesome Grand Bazaar, there are a trillion merchants all selling the identical merchandise — the same T-shirts, Turkish delight, trinkets, and baubles. It was there that Dame Zelda bought an Istanbul fridge magnet to replace that which she’d impulsively bought at the airport in 2011 during our brief layover before flying to Bodrum, and before she amended her Official Rules of Acquisition to make a new piece eligible for the collection only if from somewhere in which she had actually set foot. (Airports aren’t real places.) She will accept offers for the original magnet, which is mint condition.

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