1967, part one: Nothing to get hung about…very strange.

A fragile detente exists inside my head at any given moment. My happy domestic order and my eternal discontent with the universe vie for axial ascendancy. I’m afraid for me a sense that good things are temporary and conditional hums like an ever-constant background radiation level reading. I daresay you feel something similar wherever you are to a greater or lesser extent. Outside in the world right now, it seems similar: the national frenzy of the last few weeks rages on, shifting from actual physical conflict on the streets to more socially acceptable verbal exchanges in Parliament and swift, arbitrary sentencing in Courts up and down the land. Only time and hindsight will tell whether anything satisfactory will arise from this.

One thing I suspect most of us can agree on is that things don’t develop in a vacuum. That the malcontent, social disconnection and boredom that fomented the riots had been fermenting for some time goes almost without saying. As I said last week, a close examination of the past and the passage of social history may provide us with forewarning, possible reassurance and — hopefully — some solutions. Meanwhile, life flows on within you and without you, as George Harrison once said — now there’s a seamless segue for you. Let us discuss the late, venerable Hari’s kick-ass combo: specifically, I shall examine two of the 24 astonishing and varied songs that comprise The Beatles’ output in 1967. Anno Domini ‘67 exerts a constant, powerful fascination for historians of pop culture and the mystique that surrounds it seems to have been recognised even as the year unfolded. For The Beatles, the year started on a promising high, with the release in mid-February of their latest single, the double A-side Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane.

Principally John Lennon’s composition, virtually no detail of Strawberry Fields Forever’s intricacies has been left unchronicled — it is easily the most deconstructed piece of music recorded by the Fab Four up to this date. It’s worth reiterating the highlights: the slightly woozy flute setting on the Mellotron breathing out the intro, Lennon’s dry, slightly slowed-down vocal drifting icily over Ringo Starr’s curt, snappy drum fills, the letters J and L tapped out in Morse code and the oddly folksy guitar picking — and all this in the first 20 seconds. One minute in and we hit the most audacious and astonishing piece of editing in the history of recorded music: the song descends from pleasingly hazy acid-folk pastures into a darker, harder and more threatening sonic landscape. Brass blares in brief bursts, echoing the Morse-tapping of earlier, double bass spreads ominously, like the shadow cast by oncoming storm clouds and Starr’s drumming becomes denser with intent: a busy, syncopated rhythm engine rumble underpinning the song. Faced with two separate recordings of the song and Lennon’s keen request that they be joined somehow, producer George Martin managed to bring the two ostensibly different halves together thanks to a serendipitous discovery: that the pitch and tempo disparity could be reconciled by varispeeding the recordings — one faster and the other slower — until they effectively met in the middle. If George Martin hadn’t already impressed Lennon with his mastery of production and fertile, practical inventiveness, then this single day’s work alone clinched it and gave Martin a highly polished anecdote to dine out on into the bargain — and quite rightly so.

Elsewhere in the song, classy, effective tricks abound. The extensive use of backward-recorded cymbal has since become a virtual psychedelic trademark, but its all-enveloping, whoosh-suck quality remains beguiling, alien, unsettling. The false ending fades out and back in again with sly humour and still retains the ability to wrong-foot the unsuspecting listener. Hidden within the dying embers of the song’s groove can be discerned Lennon playing silly buggers, amusing himself with half-heard voices. One detail, the now-famous words ‘cranberry sauce’, rendered with crisp diction but layered under studio slap and played in a million households on  substandard turntables, soon became widely misinterpreted as ‘I buried Paul’ with a speed that is incredible for a pre-internet age. Unfortunately, this harmless fun would retroactively fuel the flames of sinister rumours in 1968 that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash months earlier, having never even seen in ’67. We shall have to return to this in a later article.

Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane share their titles with locations in Liverpool that had vivid childhood significance for Lennon & McCartney — but whereas Lennon’s song created a gauzy, uncertain-yet-epic evocation of childhood, Paul McCartney, as principal writer of Penny Lane, imbues his creation with breezy, brisk confidence. McCartney’s clear ear for melody and  facility for composition also ensures that the recording relies less on studio artifice and more on a deceptively simple band arrangement of drums, guitar, bass, piano, plus a small group of chamber instruments scored with warmth, emotion and a pinch of music hall drama by George Martin.

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs of ev’ry head he’s had the pleasure to know…

From the off, McCartney’s bright, chatty delivery of the lyrics outlines a cast of characters with the matter-of-fact liveliness of easy conversation. But there’s a musical spectre in the crowd.

…and all the people that come and go…

It all goes a little dark in the second line of the song as the melody dips into a descending minor key for several bars — the musical equivalent of a worried narrowing of the eyes — before emerging to major for a smiling final line to each verse.

…stop and say hello.

How strange the change, as they say, from major to minor — a tonal pivot of happy/sad encoded in the music that is matched equally, perfectly, in the lyric. Ian MacDonald, in his superb book Revolution In The Head: The Beatles’ Records And The Sixties, neatly outlines some of the wonderful ‘kaleidoscopic‘ contradictions in the lyrics — describing as they do a scene which is both raining and sunny, summer and winter. Again, George Martin brings considerable taste and expressive genius to bear on his score and seals the deal with a beautifully eloquent series of counter melodies, lyrical punctuation and the greatest trumpet solo ever heard in pop music. The final coup-de-grace administered is a leap in key change for one more refrain and a joyous, sudden psychedelic question mark of an ending; blurring, hazing and fuzzing away.

Another marvellous thing about both songs is how little either one is couched in conventional rock syntax. Neither piece is guitar-driven, relying more on piano, keyboards and chamber instruments.  Neither are they wrought from any obvious, potentially predictable Blues-inspired structuring, as so much that had gone before. What you bought on that day in February 1967 was a pair of songs so cohesive and uniformly brilliant that they simply had to be made a double-A side release. This could be interpreted as a way of mollifying two immense, but fragile egos each insisting their song is the leading track, but I prefer to imagine, given the quality of these songs, that a genuine decision of superiority could not — should not — be reached. From an era when B-sides were starting to become more than filler, this double A-side arguably represents the most solid individual example of the complimentary, complementary compositional collusion of McCartney and Lennon — a veritable embarrassment of riches piled onto two sides and seven inches of vinyl. Dark-yet-light, esoteric-yet-accessible, totally full-on psychedelia as weird and obscure as anything found at the time, yet paradoxically performed by the most popular band in the world. And we’re only into February. As we shall see, this is going to become the way of things across the year.

Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was kept off the Number One slot in the UK singles charts by Englebert Humperdinck’s Release Me — in Beatle terms, a stunning body blow for a group that had grown accustomed to instant peak success. It goes to show if nothing else that the record buying public’s propensity for sentimental crap and mindless pap in vast quantities is not a new phenomenon. Like I said, there are many things great and small that we can learn from history.

PM

Currently watching:

Blake’s 7: series 3 (BBC, 1980)

Man About The House: series 1 and 2 (Thames, 1973-74)

The Hour (BBC, 2011)

Currently listening:

The Medieval Sound (David Munrow, 1969) 

The sinister Summer of Love.

I was going to write an article on The Beatles’ collected output in 1967 and the curious darkness that I think runs, like a sluggish underground river throughout it, using the title above. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? Maybe even a bit sexy? Certainly sibilant at any rate. I will do so very soon, but sadly, I feel obliged to myself and to you, dear reader, to pass some comment on recent events first. Who am I to waste your valuable time and countless kilobytes of webspace if I only spoke about music, films, drinking and whimsical personal pomposity, while blithely ignoring the world existing and unfolding around me? Unimaginative at best; callous at worst, maybe. 

I find the title of this article still woefully apposite. Wherever you may be reading this in the world, I’m sure you greeted the news about the wildfire rioting and resulting devastation across England in the past few days with despair and a degree of depression. I was very tempted, believe me, to sit down and type out a rabid piece of vitriolic invective aimed at…

Ah, but there’s my problem: who to aim at? The rioters themselves? The parents? The Government? The Big Society?

That anyone could ever think that their own hardship, lack of encouragement and sense of disenfranchisement would be best addressed by smashing up other people’s properties, homes and livelihoods is so self-defeating as to obviate further debate. Furthermore, any belief that going on such rampages might cause other people to sit up, pay attention and consider their plight with a sympathetic disposition, quite frankly, beggars mine.

As for the parents: well, when were they ever not to blame? Many parents have indeed been instrumental in fucking up their kids, having been fucked up in their time, but Philip Larkin’s famous, succinctly profane pertinence on the matter of one’s upbringing overshadow the poem’s final lines, which are curiously more accurate in their generality: Man hands on misery to man; it deepens like a coastal shelf. I’m sure a good child psychologist could explain to me in words of one syllable exactly how formative the first five years in a child’s existence can be, but surely it’s more accurate to determine one’s reality from what was done about it in the last five years, five hours or even five minutes? I could go further and quote Aristotle or even Qui-Gon Jinn on the subject, but really, there’s no need.

That the Government are venal, transparently inept, socially disconnected and internally divided to such unproductive measure that they may drive people to destruction as well as distraction is blatantly obvious and grossly understated. That they got in because the previous lot were identically and openly as ineffectual and corrupt also needs no more explanation — MPs handing on misery to MPs.

As for Society, ‘Big’ or otherwise, well it’s a constant, eternal mystery to me and unlikely to be solved in my lifetime. Society ebbs and flows and creates fearful, momentary eddies in its passage. Frank Zappa spoke of ‘The Great Society’ in disdainful terms on his first album back in 1966, referring to the unwanted war waged on foreign shores and the lack of education for ‘the minds that won’t be reached’, ‘those left behind’. My my, how things have changed, eh? It’s evident David Cameron isn’t a fan of Frank. He probably thinks Zappa is some kind of taser.

It is both an unfortunate byproduct and the beauty of humanity that people have a genetic predisposition to make things complicated in all manner of ways. The ‘interesting times’ of that alleged Chinese curse is the compromise we tread on and trade off every day. People are complicated the world over — never let anyone tell you otherwise. They always have agendas, for good or ill and none of us can read minds. We often crave simplicity in life, but that isn’t the same thing as being simple oneself. Me, I would simply like everything to be nice in the world and I wish for no-one to be marginalised, subjugated or discriminated in the process of making it so. I hope no one has to feel that way on my watch. All I ask is that everyone is the best they can be — as I’m sure you do too.

Anyway, that’s me herding the principal scapegoats onto the field — now I’m going to weigh in with my controversial opinion. It’s one that I haven’t heard many people on the news or in the papers come out and forth with. I’ve weighed the sides as best I can and come to a dynamic, reasoned conclusion that I Really Don’t Know — or if you prefer a more intellectual response, I shall be that wise man who keeps his own counsel until I have fathomed the myriad conventions and contradictions of the species. How can I offer a specific opinion on the matter if I find I cannot apportion blame equally as precisely? Nor should I. I’d be foolish to try. 

What I do know is that none of us appear to be sufficiently close students of History. I’ve have read enough bullshit in the last few days, conjured up by people with all the authority of someone imparting fatuous facts they learned on Wikipedia in the last thirty seconds. I have neither the time, patience nor articulacy to outline specific historical precedents for our current behaviour on the planet but one thing, the most ire-inducing of all things I heard, was the suggestion that social networking media, Blackberrys and the like act as some kind of super-misconduct-conductor, marshalling the berserker hordes from one location to another with crack precision and law-defying speed. Well, hogwash to that. The largest scaled, most well-orchestrated riots in history date largely from a time before Tim Berners-Lee — or even Alexander Graham Bell. It is the supereminent feature of the human condition to communicate and associate, whether it be organising a Parish Jumble Sale or municipal mass mayhem. We’ll be blaming horses for Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt next. Well, they help you get around, horses, don’t they?

In my experience, stupidity can be a choice. At my Secondary School, you spoke with a London accent or you were ridiculed for being ‘clever’, for maintaining the Home Counties diction I had learned up till then. I watched and listened in despair as my colleagues rapidly mounted a painfully obvious, conscious campaign to drop their tees and aitches, the better to ‘fit in’. It is a sad thing how anyone could find one’s intelligence a quality to be feared or suppressed. It was and remains puzzling that no-one ever reversed the trend and aspire to hang out with the so-called brainy people. Even if you view yourself as stupid, don’t the clever-clogses have something you can use by association? As for the smart ones, well, you try being deliberately stupid for any time and see where it gets you — on Big Brother, maybe, but the odds make it rather unlikely. As I’ve mentioned before on several occasions, I left my Secondary School with no A-Levels — it took me a year in a miserable job to realise that my life would improve considerably with further education — and I retook them a year later. Like I said, stupidity can be a choice.

Right this minute, literally as these words sally forth rapidly from behind the cursor, I find I have become annoyed. Annoyed at how angry things like this make me feel. Angry that I am compelled to make comment on it at all. Hatred, selfishness, prejudice, conflict, destruction, fear, murder: this is not my world. I have not come here to sermonise — certainly not on any subjects of pressing importance at any rate. My grasp of world events, politics and the internecine machinations of government — any government — is tenuous at the best of times. My political views tend to be rather half-formed, but I hope I am wise enough not to burden you with them. Be assured they are neither controversial, nor particularly offensive. This blog exists primarily to entertain and on this score I apologise, for this week, I am clearly letting you all down. I’ll be back soon with something fun for you to read, but for now, I’ll stop here. It’s all become so very boring.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe, well and are being good to people around you. I shall do my best too.

But first, a drink.

PM

Currently watching:

Blake's 7 series 2 and 3 (BBC, 1979-80)

The Hour (BBC, 2011)

Currently listening:

Mostly my own album, work in progress.


Currently reading:
Lots of things that are annoying me!

That Difficult Third Side.

Sadly, it seems more than ever that Famine, War, Pestilence and Death gallop across our world without sparing their horses. Come to think of it, the demarcation of the Apocalypse itself is rather unfairly weighted, considering how Famine, War and Pestilence all must have their distinct and individual work given a swift once-over by Death on every occasion — who in signing off, cops all the glory. A terrible micromanager is the Grim Reaper. Those boys should have taken a tip from the Three Fates: Clotho spins the yarn of human life, Lachesis draws it out to length and Atropos cuts it off. Does it really take three Fates, I wonder? I can see that job done by two people — at most. That Lachesis must have really good Union connections. Talk about middle management. OK, let’s not.

The world is going crazy, but some of it is in a good way. We live in the most interesting times right now — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We genuflect in temples to Mammon, knee-deep in recession with rising debts. Nations wage war unto nation, cultures and convictions for good or ill. Random people increasingly go crazy and have neither the imagination nor the decency to keep it to themselves and not kill other people into the bargain. We watch daily as our governments, law enforcers and media moguls ascend in Logan’s Run style, careering crazily on a coruscating carousel of corruption like so many faeces flurrying up towards the cosmic fan. It’s all we can do to draw our heads in and not get hit by the shit-shrapnel — and yet the thing uppermost in my mind, the problem that dominates my waking hours and a majority of my sleeping ones…is completing that difficult Third Side of My Double Album. Really, it’s virtually all-consuming. I’m only writing these articles as a way of having some downtime from the blasted thing. No need to explain the irony here, believe me.

To be fair, I feel justified in allowing such feverish mental activity to take me over, as cresting the hill of Side Three means the home stretch is in sight — and if you consider that I am in the process of completing the kind of album I’ve dreamed of making since 1979 or thereabouts, when I first started composing, you may have an inkling of my excitement. Oh, I’ve recorded hours of music previously, and some of it I have deemed worthy enough to compile into several fixed collections of songs you could call albums — I certainly have — but this one I intend to sell online. Yes, for cash. It’s really good, if I say so myself — but never mind that just now. Those sensitive to the finer points of presentation in pop music culture of the past 50 years or so would have instantly detected this week’s theme, like a warning shot across the bows of my fervent scribble earlier. Yeah, you read me right first time: I said Double Album.

The list of double albums in pop music history is visibly finite, sufficiently short for someone to compile a neat little book on the better-known ones and elicit some heated discussion in the process. That’s the instant thing about double albums — they divide opinion. For some, many musical crimes have been perpetrated repeatedly across the vast vinyl wasteland that four whole sides can afford the prolific, but overweening, musician. For others, the double album has been the apogee of creative achievement, a monument to artistic fecundity and a desire to take the listener — forgive the cliché — on an epic musical journey.

The history of the beast itself is shrouded in some ambiguity, with numerous claimants for the distinction of first issue. That Benny Goodman’s Live At Carnegie Hall was released in 1950 as a double vinyl set makes perfect sense, being in effect a near-complete record of an entire live performance. In the studio, however, it’s another matter. It’s open to debate who exactly hit upon the idea first to conceive and produce a double album in of itself. The first studio-recorded double album ever released seems to be Bob Dylan’s impressive 1966 Blonde On Blonde, but its primacy of provenance is uncertain; an obscure composer called Frank Zappa had spent several concurrent months in the creation of The Mothers Of Invention’s debut album Freak Out! — which then emerged mere weeks after Dylan’s album and caused a considerable stir for more than just the number of sides. In any case, it’s obvious now that whatever else was wafting in the air in 1966 sought to expand your attention span, your patience threshold and your record collection as much as your mind.

Soon after these seminal recordings came what is arguably the double album archetype: The Beatles’ White Album (official title: The Beatles), released in 1968. I would certainly consider it to be the pop paradigm of the genre: it’s probably the most-discussed double album ever and presents to the listener the pleasures and pitfalls of such an undertaking as well as any. Producer George Martin has gone on record — on numerous occasions — stating that he would have preferred the Fab Four in this instance to hive their work down to one “really super little album” consisting of the strongest songs. McCartney’s opinion is that the chocolate-box diversity of the album is its greatest strength. Well, we all know who was given his head on the matter. Elsewhere, Lennon and Harrison voiced their enthusiasm for the variation of music available there, on their most epic release, although Starr has some reservations about having “a lot of information on a double album”. There is a certain visual irony about an album with the most minimalistic cover ever containing some of the most fascinating and all-encompassing music of the Sixties, let alone The Beatles. Apart from the number stamped on early copies, even the sole words on the cover (The BEATLES) are embossed, not printed. It’s as if only the play of light and shadow is permitted to sully the blank and expansive icy waste that contains and conceals music that is anything but Arctic. What is it Our Kid Paul says on The Beatles Anthology documentary? “It’s the bloody Beatles White Album — shut up!” I’m inclined to agree.

Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti of 1975 was something of a Chimera, being cooked up from a combination of earlier album outtakes and new material — and yet it works, not least because Zeppelin’s quality control in the studio was generally sure and sound; even the songs rejected from previous LPs had enough of the Zep magick to sit alongside their newly recorded brethren. It also contains some of the longest and strongest songs of Zeppelin’s ten year flight, making double the usual vinyl requirement seem like a logical, sensible expedient rather than tumescent decadence. It’s noteworthy that 1975 probably marked the high watershed — or the lowest point, depending on where you stand on the twinned subjects of groupies and drugs — for Messrs Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones on the road; how Physical Graffiti’s considerable taste and variety fail to reflect that excess is a small miracle.

Other bands have not enjoyed such unilateral approval within their ranks concerning their output. Rick Wakeman once said — only very slightly harshly — that Yes’ 1973 four-sider Tales From Topographic Oceans was “three sides too long. I used my copy as an ashtray…and I don’t even smoke.” Furthermore, the extended, keyboard-less longeurs within these sidelong pieces gave Wakeman precious little to do onstage during the subsequent tour. Legend has it that he even found enough time on his devilishly idle hands to phone for a curry during one interminable gig — and eat it with pointed disgruntlement behind his considerable bank of organs and synths. In any event, Rick Wakeman left the band not long after, felled by an album so ponderous, so pretentious that he, one of Progressive Rock’s most formidable proponents, capitulated under its weight. Weird, actually: as an absolute and entirely reflective product of its time it should have worked, it really should.

By 1977 Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s best days were behind them: those giddy, abundant days of the early Seventies, when the album held sway over the single as a more credible artefact of any hip rock group, when songs could take up a whole side of an album and lyrical subject matter took in everything from the Middle Ages to dystopian, far-flung futures, via the Wild West; anything, it seemed, except the present day. Prog Rock’s stock had dwindled by 1977, that most seismic and schismatic of years for popular music. ELP’s position in their chosen firmament had itself diminished; they had not released a studio album of new material for nearly four years. Then Works Volume 1 came out. The band name and album title were set in a sober font on a classy, minimal black sleeve with the band’s logo — designed back in wilder, exciting times by no less than HR Giger — embossed, White Album style, into the sombre darkness of the cover. Unfortunately, the sleeve deceives: inside, we get three sides, one by Emerson, Lake and Palmer each apiece, plus a side by ELP, the band. Superfluity disguised as diplomacy: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could learn a thing or two about demarcation from these chaps if nothing else.

Coming in a definite third, Greg Lake serves up what by now would have been his expected fare: sensitive, acoustic guitar-based ballads, similar to the ones that had contrasted with and leavened the older ELP LPs — although sadly not as good. Emerson went the whole hog and presented the world with his Piano Concerto No.1 (I love the ‘No.1’ in the title — like the Volume 1 suffix of the album, it carries a degree of ominous portent, the implied threat that there’s gonna be more coming) — which I am pleased to report is tuneful and concise, indulging Emerson’s obvious love for American, Copland-style string arrangements and Hollywood film scores. It’s more than competent and certainly entertaining — but I wonder how the average ELP fan of the time dug it — or would have done so had it been issued separately. Carl Palmer provides the surprise element of — whisper it quietly — fun, with a varied bunch of believably rocked-up classical interpretations and some genuinely delightful bits of big band instrumental funk. The final side of the album is the band: two epic songs that spread across the length in perfectly enjoyable — and entirely typical — fashion. The funny thing is, it’s not a bad album, musically speaking, taken on the individual merits of its subdivisions, but we’ve definitely moved from the pungent, rich, meandering madness of Yes and instead have descended further — it’s possible — to an even worse kind of double album: one whose length is determined by the need to satisfy each band members’ egos individually and collectively. It was a move screamingly symptomatic of a decaying working relationship. So it proved. ELP released a second Works Volume 2 later in ’77, as threatened, consisting of obvious barrel scraping B-sides and evidently substandard studio tinkering. That the egregious Love Beach album of 1978, their final studio effort for 15 years, should feature a cover that depicts our heroes dressed like the Bee Gees says all that you need to know about the parlous state of Progressive Rock by the late Seventies — and that one wasn’t even a double album.

Of course, even the best of these albums, by dint of their length, must contain some flab, a bit of sag in the middle or even an outstanding clunker or two. While I love Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I tend to side with Dave Gilmour when he said it could have done with less of that stuff about Roger Waters’ obsession with World War II, Vera Lynn and Bringing The Boys Back Home — and Dave bloody played on it. On All Things Must Pass, George Harrison went one better, managing to take a good double album and make it worse by adding an unnecessary third disc of alternate versions and jam sessions that must have been fun for the participants, possibly amusing for the listener once, but eventually not at all. The overlong jam sessions and funky Sixties space-age electronic freak-outs on Electric Ladyland serve to demonstrate what a stunning album it could have been had George Martin brought the editorial authority to The Jimi Hendrix Experience that he wished to bear on The Beatles. Don’t get me started on Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion — I have spent more time than is necessary working out a superior single disc version of those. Genesis’ 1974 double The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway succeeds because Peter Gabriel has finally learned to curb his desire to slather vocals on any spare bit of instrumental music he can find — just don’t spend too long reading the lyrics; they hurt after a while.

Herein lies the rub, the thing that has distracted me so much of late. It’s not just a question of making sure all the songs are good. After all, a Black Forest Gâteau all to oneself, as wondrous as it could be, swiftly becomes a bloated, immoderate and unnecessary thing. It’s not enough for the songs themselves to have variety and dynamic range — juxtaposition is paramount. In other words, one could create a procession of brilliant songs that would nevertheless demonstrate a reductive quality when listened to in one relentless whole — the wrong whole. So if you’re going to have a double album at all, could it possibly be — gulp — a good idea to have some substandard songs thrown in there, just to add to the flavour? Is that really how it works? Is ‘Vera’ really an integral brick in The Wall? Is your White Album experience incomplete without ‘Wild Honey Pie’?

Of course, all of this is magnificently irrelevant in a world where a CD can often carry as much information as four album sides, or where one can download individual tracks willy-nilly off epic albums, to enjoy in isolation from their parental home — but we can still find room for these disciplines of time and running order occasionally, surely? I rather like expressing things in vinyl terms; as a length goes, I think the 45 minutes or so of a single album, 23 mins a side here and there, is an elegant sufficiency. Whether the old technology has dictated this threshold for my attentiveness isn’t too relevant — I think it’s as good a place to start as any where quantity is concerned and no medium of more recent origin has supplanted this for me.

As for my own album, you may bridle all you like at my expansive folly. I make no apologies for a shameful, almost slavish adherence to the more excessive aspects of the Seventies rock music I so adore and you can sling all the rotten tomatoes you like in my direction. Such a shame that as a double album, it’s more than likely going to end up merely spread across two CDs or scattered about as so many MP3s. The world is going crazy, but some of it is not in a good way.

PM

Currently listening:

I A Moon (North Sea Radio Orchestra, 2011)

Currently watching:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season two (20th Century Fox, 2009)

Blake’s 7: first series (BBC, 1978)

The miracle of synaesthesia: Delia Derbyshire and the Doctor Who title sequence.

Architecture, as someone once said, is frozen music. What a beautiful and correct expression this is. One only has to gaze upon the vaulted arches that spread as so many serried ribs along the ceiling of a medieval cathedral to hear in one’s head the spacious chanting and dense, block-chorded polyphony that makes such a virtue of the long sound decay embedded, encoded even, in the architectural acoustic. How could the elegant, wedding-cake aesthetic of 18th Century architecture be matched in sumptuous splendour by anything else but the triumphant bustle of Handel, Vivaldi and their Baroque music contemporaries? Was there ever a more perfect evocation of the broken, decaying urban wastelands of Thatcher’s Eighties than ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials? I defy any TV documentary maker to come up with a better candidate for a song to play over tracking shots of desolate, graffiti-strewn concrete tower blocks.

Synaesthesia — perceiving one sense with the stimulation of another — manifests itself in all of us to a greater or lesser extent. Now, don’t tell me you haven’t experienced this sensation. I’m not saying you necessarily see the steely thin charcoal-black rods that radiate from the corner of my mind every time I hear overdriven electric guitars, the hard squares and bell-like shapes that get conjured up on listening to brass music or the smooth green curved formations that accompany a lot of 70s Prog Rock whenever I close my eyes — but I think a degree of it is intrinsically hard-wired into the human perception matrix. As someone says in the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, speaking of film direction: you’ve got to hear the colours; you’ve got to smell the sounds. Hm, I think a little harder and recall that this may have been said by the neurotic, psychotic serial killer, but hey — I’m right, aren’t I? Well, aren’t I? When another’s sense of synaesthesia identifies so closely with my own it feels like they’ve literally read my mind. 

If you have seen the Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille you may recall the moment early on when our redoubtable rodent hero bites into a particularly toothsome piece of cheese. As he does so, the background fades away to black around him as we see him lose himself in the magnificent moment, while bursts of colour and shape explode, fizz and fizzle this way and that with every delirious, delicious mouthful. Whoa! That’s synaesthesia. It’s possible that this is the most subtly detailed, yet wondrously observed depiction of it I’ve ever seen on a moving screen. With one exception.

I shan’t express any incredulity if you have never heard of Doctor Who — only last week did I find myself having to outline the entire premise to a young chap from abroad who really hadn’t seen it. It’s been a while since I met someone with no Whovian foreknowledge and I was left scrabbling, struggling to describe a show that has been part of the British public consciousness for almost 50 years. It’s a show of inherent contradictions; often grappling with high-flown concepts and bold futuristic ideas, yet (sometimes unfairly) remembered for its stagey, often low production values. It’s an action show where the hero wins largely by using his brains — who flies a spaceship that also travels through time and is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Answer anyone’s question on one aspect of the show and you’ll find three more questions spring, Hydra-like, out from your response. It’s part of the beauty of it all. If you are not up on your Who, I shall spare you a passionate and largely incoherent torrent of babble by way of explanation and suggest you look it up while you are online. Thank me later!

I have spoken briefly before of my enduring love of the Doctor Who theme tune. It has featured in my life longer than I have been cognisant, having been used on the programme years before I was born. It was written by Ron Grainer, an established Australian composer who was already enjoying success with popular TV series tunes: That Was The Week That Was — that was Ron Grainer, that was. The jaunty clod-hop he wrote for Steptoe & Son was — still is — effortlessly evocative of that show. His catchy, likeable tunes would inform much essential viewing in the coming years, including the curt, purposeful Sixties strut of The Prisoner and the genial-yet-sinister fairground waltz of Tales Of The Unexpected in the Seventies. In 1963 he was at the top of his game and a logical choice for the Who production team. Doctor Who’s young, sparky and intelligent producer Verity Lambert had already commissioned a suitably unearthly title sequence for her brand new children’s show; now it needed a melody to match.

Before I say any more on the music, I must discuss the title sequence, designed with care and supreme skill by Bernard Lodge, who was a BBC designer at the time. You should really watch a video link of the titles to appreciate their fluid, shifting quality, but I’ve isolated the salient points below. The abstract, ephemeral shapes that seem to ripple out towards the viewer were achieved by making a virtue out of two normally unwanted video effects. 

First, if an object in the camera’s view is too bright, the light source has a tendency to bloom and create a burnout afterimage onscreen, exactly as your own eyes do should you stare too long at anything bright. You will notice on old pre-Eighties videotaped shows how excessively bright moving light sources, such as car headlamps or a candle flame leave a dark trail behind them. Recent advances in video technology have all but done away with these side-effects. I don’t believe you can replicate the effect quite the same way with a webcam, for example.

Second, when an analogue video camera’s lens is pointed at its own monitor screen, the tone value of any image and indeed any light coming from the monitor itself is fed back again and yet again in a series of recursive, degrading and regrading signals that pulsate and create visual echoes of themselves. It’s an effect not dissimilar to holding a mirror up to a mirror and seeing infinitely regressing images, but the shortcomings of the camera eye and fluctuations in the electronic signal keep the visual information fluid, ever-changing. This phenomenon was recognised in the Fifties and dubbed ‘howl-around’ — although it is visual feedback by any other name. Several years before Pete Townshend (with his Who), Jimi Hendrix and their Sixties rock peers were pioneering the use of controlled feedback in music, Bernard Lodge was doing exactly the same thing with vision. It doesn’t get more Sixties than that.

Top left: the rising line, reminiscent of the exhaust trail of a rocket or missile soaring skywards, is the first thing you would see in Doctor Who for the initial three years of transmission. Interestingly, it’s the only part of the title sequence that was not made specifically for Doctor Who — it’s an excerpt of experimental howl-around imagery created in the late 1950s for a scene in Amahl And The Night Visitors, an opera commissioned by the BBC specifically for television, conceived by Giancarlo Menotti. Bernard Lodge has cheerfully admitted no credit for this opening shot, having found it while researching all the test footage made thus far with video effects and wisely decided it was worth recycling. In doing so, he brought this striking, weirdly disturbing image to a greater audience than it ever did within the context of Amahl. It crossfades into… 

Top right: Lodge’s tumbling howl-around cloud-blobs, for want of a better description, that comprise the main element of the titles. 

Bottom left: the evanescent shapes coalesce into the words DOCTOR WHO. Bernard Lodge had observed in early tests with lettering that boldness and symmetry created better, more balanced results from the howl-around signal. Consequently, he selected a sans-serif typeface, placed the words one on top of the other to create a solid square-ish shape and processed the image both forward and reversed (note the ‘OHO’). This generates a pleasingly Rorschach-like pattern before finally it sharpens into focus as…

Bottom right: the title logo, which recedes through the billowing howl-around continuing throughout. I use the word ‘logo’ but Bernard Lodge would describe it as merely typeface. I forget the name of the font, but it is stark, austere and reads crisply onscreen, like a newspaper headline. It’s both a televisual hangover of the Fifties and the start of Sixties Pop Art. It’s effortlessly cool, classy, contrasty and contrary. It’s William Hartnell’s Doctor. 

Back to the music. How many ways — how many different, unexciting and ordinary ways — it could have gone, but Verity Lambert decided the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop could handle the realisation of Ron Grainer’s theme and in a brilliant move, sat Grainer down in front of the newly minted title sequence along with the talented Delia Derbyshire, a delightfully mercurial, mischievous member of the Workshop who was obsessed with the texture of sound and its musical application. What happened that day as they watched the images unfold and expand was pure, direct synaesthesia.

Grainer and Derbyshire must have left the room after seeing Bernard Lodge’s monochrome psychedelia with a million ideas fermenting at once. Grainer set to work immediately and promptly presented the Radiophonic Workshop with a scribbled single page of music, upon which he had marked out some whimsical and poetic instrumentation suggestions — including guitar, bass bassoon, clouds and wind-bubble. The words conjured instant magic in Delia Derbyshire’s head.

Electronic music was relatively new, but not unheard of and Grainer possibly expected Delia and her boys to turn in a thoroughly electronic, but essentially solid arrangement, played on the newly emerging sound generators, the prototype synthesisers of their time. What Grainer didn’t know was that he’d handed his work over a collective of eccentric English alchemists bent on creating melody from the strangest of sources. Derbyshire’s recording featured sine-wave generators playing short, bent notes in a pulsing bass sequence, sampled repeatedly via tape loops, in conjunction with the sound of a piano string being plucked with a slap-back echo/reverb added to create rhythm. There’s no real percussion in the piece at all — just the pure drive of Delia’s bass line and her imagination. Behind it all, there appear to be sounds like water drips, or steam puffs, played backwards to create a beguiling, whooshing, sucking texture that plays arrhythmically throughout. The melody was recorded at half-speed on a basic electronic sound oscillator, with the notes arrived upon by turning the dials to the appropriate intervals, like a mad scientist’s Swanee whistle. Everything is then plastered in just the right amount of echo and reverb. I make it sound easy. Don’t you believe it: Delia Derbyshire, having completed the arrangement in her head, would have taken painstaking weeks, often working alone in the wee small hours, to assemble the loops and run them at the correct timing. None of the piece was recorded in real time.

The resulting recording — and I say this with all the understatement I can muster — remains astonishing, ageless and unique. Derbyshire’s realisation of Grainer’s score took the theme — and the show too, no question about it — into a whole new realm. Never — and I mean never — has a TV series and its theme tune been so insolubly linked, conveying in a scant thirty seconds of sound and vision something that has now been going for half a century and still carries with it all the fear, wonder, excitement and sheer alienness of Delia Derbyshire’s stunning, eerie arrangement. Many other people have made recordings of it; none have matched it. 

No less impressed, Grainer lobbied for Derbyshire to receive a co-composing credit; so far gone, so otherworldly, so removed from his original sheet music did he deem the end product. BBC parsimony ensured that sadly, Delia never did. No doubt she received her scale BBC wage packet, or at most a modest ex gratia payment, but nothing like the revenue made by the theme itself for the BBC. After she left the Corporation she continued in her quietly naughty, wildly experimental way. Her other most notable recordings were in collaboration on the wonderful album An Electric Storm as part of the collective called White Noise, along with fellow Workshop alumnus Brian Hodgson, in 1968. She died in 2001, leaving behind hours of music made with passion and loved with equal reverence by her devoted followers. While her fame within the world of Doctor Who is considerable, she remains largely unsung to the larger universe. Her website is here. 

PM

Currently listening:

I A Moon (North Sea Radio Orchestra, 2011)

Silly Sisters (Maddy Prior & June Tabor, 1976)

Paul Hardcastle (Paul Hardcastle, 1985)

Currently reading:

Fire & Rain (David Browne, 2011)

Currently watching:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles seasons one and two (20th Century Fox, 2008-2009)

Doctor Who: The Gunfighters (BBC, 1966)

Doctor Who: The Awakening (BBC, 1984)

Doctor Who: The Sun Makers (BBC, 1977)