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QUANTICK'S WORLD
'Dead Pop Stars'
Quantick's World this week
takes up its mighty spade and it's going to be looking at dead pop
stars. They're very current - you've got the Ian Curtis biography
just out and The Courtney Love Travelling Wake is still going
around, so everyone is still banging on about death and particularly
Kurt Cobain.
You just don't want to hear anyone say that
name anymore, do you? Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain.
It's starting to sound like something Nurofen's supposed to clear up rather than the name of a rock star - but that's life, or rather it isn't.
Rock music doesn't half love its dead blokes. Death kind of puts a nice frame around the Athena poster, rock star wise, because your pop fan loves to be morbid.
Take someone like John Lennon. He spent most
of his life writing jolly tunes, but he'd be turning in his
fur-coat-lined apartment to see half of New York out there singing
"She loves you and you know that can't be bad"
like it was the worst news ever. It's like when Ringo Starr
finally cops it, the streets are going to be full of people moaning
"We all live in a yellow submarine"
, like the bugger had sunk or something.
But, for me, the great dead bloke is the
recently anniversaried and biographied-up Ian Curtis. He wins every
time. Never mind your Kurt Cobains with their tunes about shooting
themselves and the wife getting on their nerves. No such ambiguity
like that
for Ian Curtis. Hits like 'Think I'll Buy Me A Rope' and 'Hurray! I'm Gonna Top Meself' not only invented goth but said to a new generation, "Come and end your life if you think you're hard enough."
So I want to know, who's going to be next?
Will it be Richard O'Sullivan*
out of Gene? Will it be them eyebrow boys out of Oasis? Gary Barlow? Paul Bloody Weller? Nope. These lads are lightweights. There's only one man with the track record, the fans, the back catalogue and the lyrics. We're referring of course to Mope Man himself, the git with the hits, Morrissey.
I know it's obvious, but that's the whole
point. If, say, Sonia** topped herself
you wouldn't really get that frisson of "told you so" out
of it. If Deuce***
did themselves in with a four-way suicide pact, the papers couldn't be endlessly analysing their lyrics for clues. But Morrissey? He's virtually bought himself the sleeping pills. So, I say let's club together. Buy him a revolver and a bottle of whisky, lock him in his bedroom and make him do the decent thing. At least that way he'd only be making one person unhappy.
* As in Martin
Rossiter, lead singer of Gene and nephew of Leonard Rossiter.
'Indie Dance'
This week I'm waving my ample
bum-cheeks in the air like I just don't care, because I'm taking a
look at indie-dance. Now, indie-dance music is to proper dance music
what moths are to butterflies - that's musty, dull-eyed, fat-lad
insect failures the colour of The Levellers' Calvin Kleins after a
hard day's mung-bean supping, with a thing for banging their soft,
dope-filled heads on the bright thrilling light bulb of the
Melody Maker dance pages.
The pop mags' discovery of dance music is a
tragic thing. Once, the kids who bought dance music and went out
raving did so because they'd seen Saturday Night Fever
and they liked the cut of John Travolta's flare bulge.
Or they'd spend the night sowing two old flags together for soul
trousers and throwing chalk onto the floor to summon up the spirit
of old soul singers called General Sir Hilary Hot-Pot or Lee-Ann
Epaulette and the Del-Hyphens. But it's a sad indication of just how
uncool and studenty dance music has got that the kids only put on
their funkin' shoes if they've been told to do so by that smudgy
indie dance page at the back of NME with the space craft
logo and the photo of a baldy, slaphead vegan in a
Crystal Tipps & Alistair* tee-shirt.
Now, I'm no elitist - I believe everyone can hate Menswear - and dance music is, I grant you, an elitist thing. Many dance nonces think that you shouldn't even be allowed into a rave if you haven't got a hat shaped like a cow doo, a stupid, skinny, gargoyle man face and a goatee beard. Hey, acid jazz records and your useless beatnik tit mates - who tell everyone they like jazz when really the only jazz records they own are 'The Style Council Live In Turin' and a TV themes album with the Film 96 music on it - tell me this, re the matter of goatee beards: since when did we take shaving tips off an animal which lives up a hill and eats tin cans? But I digress. Elitism apart, since when did crusties become the big dance experts all of a sudden? If my memories of Glastonbury in the Eighties are reliable - and I can assure you, they're not - I don't recall the crusties as being the ones with the DJ mixing skills and the ability to mull the mass of people into a jiving sex jelly. The crusties were the ones who sat around burning their dogs and smoking special drugs to make them even less keen on dancing, or thinking, or even saying sentences without the words "hey" or "like" or "busted" in them. They were all painting each other's faces and going "what does it say on my face, man?", and if they did dance it was only if Hawkwind were on the free stage, and even then it wasn't so much dancing as pretending to balance lots of plates on a pole while an imaginary leper chewed your bum off. And in the 1990s people like this are making dance records.
Listen kids. You wouldn't let M People feed your baby on meat-and-milk-free products so it went yellow and grew up looking like that bloke from the Stereo MCs, and you wouldn't expect James Brown to build you a brilliant rope walkway through a forest scheduled for demolition. So why let indie-dance order your feet around? Like The Levellers say, "big dance crustie brother is hassling you!"
* Old animation series,
treated with insufferable reverence by twats.
'Easy
Listening'
This week I'm wearing a stupid
blonde wig and a really funny tie, because I'm taking a look at easy
listening. Now, when I was a punk rock lad, pistol-whipping members
of Genesis through the streets of Budleigh Salterton, easy listening
was something your mum and dad liked. It was Herb Alpert or James
'The Hunn' Last, or any old grandad with a big band and a Kaiser
Bill moustache, whose idea of a good time was to get a load of songs
by The Carpenters or the Pink Panther or Burt "Noel Gallagher
likes me, whoever he is" Bacharach, and then rip out their raw
bloody guts and stuff them with some kind of pop cotton
wool.
These records were designed
for people who didn't like music - like alcohol free lager, or Tofu,
or Elastica - and they were crap! They were so crap they were played
in lifts! Now, if you're going to be a big star, getting your record
played in a lift is not going to do it for you. Nor is getting it
played by a tone-deaf piano player in a hotel lobby, or having it
sung by some eunuchs with a banjo on Radio 2, or performed by some
pensioners who have found the bar too quickly on a day trip to
Rhyl.
No, easy listening is arrant wasp toss and
was always meant to be so. But, in the addled 1990s, rave kids who'd
normally be dancing to the sound of iron foundries playing with
themselves, are going out and buying eight copies of 'The Spanish
Bloody Flea'. Rock lads, who'd normally bite your eyes from their
sockets if you so much as hummed a Black Grape song a bit
ironically, are giving all their money to Mike Flowers. Mike Flowers
is a man whose previous claim to fame was that he used to be sent to
tough schools on the Wirral so that teachers and pupils would be
united for a brief moment as they punched the silly grin off his
face over and over again. And rock kids are buying these records
because Mike Flowers - a man who wants to be the Mari Wilson*
of the Nineties, when, if he's lucky, he might get to be Aneka of 'Japanese Boy' fame - did a comedy version of 'Wonderwall' that really sounds like Scott Walker or Burt "Noel Gallagher? Does he have that 'House Party' on your BCB television?" Bacharach. It's the kind of ironic wit that Dave Lee Travis might appreciate, so what's going on? Have the kids finally lost it? Has the evil grip of Hollyoaks and Andi Peters finally washed clean the collective pop brain? Did Richard Carpenter swear a terrible revenge on the world, as it slowly sank in on him that he was the crap one in The Carpenters, the Bez of easy listening?
Well, naturally, I blame Brian Eno. After years of everyone taking the mickey out of his sighing vacuum cleaner records, and 'Lowly Breathe Through Sad Tower-Block' music, Eno finally got everyone to like it by saying "look, I know Bono! Hey, fat opera man - sing this if you can!" and everyone has just given in to tedious easy listening. For thanks to Eno and his soft lad Music For Kipping, we will listen to any marshmallow-buttocked nonsense. And alas, we are indeed all going home in a flaming ambience.
* An early-Eighties
signing to the Compact label, once described as "the Neasden
Queen of soul". About as retrospective in style as Mike
Flowers, with a heavy influence from Peggy Lee and the like.
'George
Michael'
This week I'm sticking a lot of iron
filings on my enormous chin, because I'm taking a look at George
Michael. Because George - a man known incredibly to his friends as
Yoda - has returned from the pop wilderness with a new single, a new
contract and, scarily, the exact same haircut and half-quickened
beard he had five years ago. It's as if the moment he left the Old
Bailey, George told his team of lawyer scientists "pickle me in
vinegar, put me in the fridge and wake me up when I
win-win."
Yes, George Michael - the boy who sulked wolf, the man who would have written 'slave' on his huge wobbly jowls like Prince did, only the felt pen would have clogged up in his five-o'clock-super-stubble like a helicopter trying to leave the jungles of Vietnam - is back. And back with a vengeance we are told, and sure enough, if you open a dictionary at the word 'vengeance' its original meaning has been tippexed out to read "vengeance: the desire to write a song so like unto a sleeping pill that many of the musicians who played on it went into a coma during the recording and could only be roused by a tape of Boy George reading a personal message of goodwill."
Why did George Michael come back? Hadn't we suffered enough? Even the makers of Caddyshack 5 knew when to stop, but George goes on. From the early days of Wham!, when he was followed around by Andrew Ridgeley - the planet-faced man who used to silently copy everything George did as a kind of practice for becoming a crap racing driver later in life - to the middle era - when Moon Faced Mansel Man was joined by Pepsi and Fanta, who were learning how to marry Spandau Ballet - to 'Careless Whisper', where George told us that "guilty feet have got no rhythm." This line was particularly useful as it enabled teachers everywhere to tell their class that if the person who hid the chalk duster doesn't own up, their feet will become guilty and they won't be able to dance. Then George became a serious artist. He dropped Tizer and Cresta and Luna Loser Lad and wrote possibly the least appealing chat-up line ever recorded - 'I Want Your Sex'.
The thought of George Michael - chin-a-wobble and Paul Gascoigne haircut a-shining like the hairs in the plug-hole - coming up to you in a wine bar and saying "Hello, my name's George Michael and I want your sex", raises horrible questions. Why does he want my sex? What's he going to do with it? And will he, Danny Baker style, offer to swap two of his cheaper sexes for my one sex? Well, we never found out because after his album 'Listen With Mother, Volume One', George read his record contract, discovered he was supposed to make some more records and resigned from pop.
But now, here he is, again, with his new single 'Jesus As A Boy' and an album that's probably going to be about as much fun as a night locked up in the Metropolitan Police Black Museum.
What can we do? Feed him Menswear and hope
he'll get pop indigestion? No, there is sadly only one answer. Do
what we did in the 1980s. Reactivate Simon LeBon, because only Duran
Duran can save us now.
'Rock
Video'
This week I'm slapping my monocle
and screwing some jodhpurs into my eye, because I'm having a gander
at rock video.
Now, rock video was invented by Queen who decided the best way to illustrate a song about murder, love and a little man dancing the fan-dabby-dozi like Jeanette Krankie - namely the great 'Bohemian Rhapsody', which was a song that combined rock and opera like 'Tommy', only shorter and without Tina Turner waving a great fire pump in the air - was to get an old camera off Top Of The Pops with one of those amazing this-is-how-flies-see-us lenses and stick it up the band's nose, giving the world the illusion that 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was a song about a fly who wanted to see Brian May's bogies. The result changed rock music forever, in that no one else made any rock videos for the next twenty years until MTV was invented.
MTV changed the way that we think about pop. Who can now listen to Elton John's 'I'm Still Standing' without thinking of the cast of Cats on a day trip to Bridlington, all doing handstands behind an overweight Alan Bennett clone in a straw hat?
Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean': lyrically, a somewhat convincing song about how he has not got a lady up the duff, but visually a tribute to a man who goes to the bad part of Toy Town wearing a trilby hat that makes pavements light up.
And, the greatest video of all time: David Bowie's 'Ashes To Ashes'. Boffo the Lonely Clown goes to the seaside to visit his mates from Cats, gets shagged by a washing machine and then goes for a paddle in some jam.
Why, even movies are like videos now, except without the bit where the band pretend to sing a song. This is a shame. Modern hit films like Seven would be much improved by randomly cutting to footage of the drummer from The Cult hitting his drums and getting talcum powder everywhere. Similarly, why go and see a Mike Leigh film when we have Blur videos? Never mind social realism, the kids want three minutes of Keith Allen making a tit of himself while Phil Daniels saws a cow in half. It's nearly as good as that advert where the man is so maddened by hearing a Gary Numan record that he walks over a hundred cars to go and drink some beer.
And then there's Oasis, who have changed the face of multimedia entertainment with their fifteen varied and exciting promo vids. Like the one where Noel stands by a ladder, the one where Liam stands by a ladder and the one where Paul McCartney turns up and raises his eyebrows while sitting on a tiny piano. Oasis's stark, stylised, black-and-white videos have so defined the band that, when they were last on Top Of The Pops, millions were amazed to discover that Liam had a side-profile and a pink face and thought they were watching a documentary about mutton instead.
But that's the power of video, listeners.
Like Buggles said, 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. Although the
actual video for that song didn't, because it was crap.
'Stars' This week I'm putting on a vicar's
robe stained with old nighting, mounting my pulpit as an aphid might
mount a rhinoceros and taking as the topic for my last-for-now
sermon the subject of, bizarrely enough, a recent chart hit for
Dubstar, namely 'Stars'.
Now, in the olden days it was easy to tell who the stars were. If you were famous, good looking and cranked up to the glittering tits on cheap pills and whisky, you were a star. If you were such a manky driver that you rammed your car up a tree's arse and went straight to heaven, picking the bark out of your skull as you did, and if gay men put your photo in a frame with light bulbs all over it, you were a star. Incidentally, if gay men put your photo in a frame with light bulbs all over it when you're still alive, you are a star about to make an album with the Pet Shop Boys.
Now, the invention of pop music brought two new kinds of star: the pop star, and the rock star. In Biblical terms, your pop star is An Smooth Man and your rock star is An Hairy Man. PJ & Duncan are pop stars; Liam and Noel are rock stars. Bono is a twat. This is how things should be. Girls want to shag pop stars, blokes want to shag rock stars, and nobody wants to shag Jimmy Nail.
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies this distinction held. Cliff Richard - skin smooth as though rubbed daily with a mystery secretion, age only to be revealed when the secret casket of the Pharaohs is finally dug up: a pop star. Lemmy from Motorhead - skin like a cane toad that has just rescued its kittens from a burning oil refinery, age easily worked out by counting the rings on his manhood: a rock star. Bono: twat.
Even in the 1980s, despite new categories specially invented for Marc Almond - action man beatnik in his mum's Woolworths pearls, pretending to be Judy Garland - and Ultravox - baggy-trousered RAF pilots with a dangerous fascination for the lizard like glamour of 1930s Germany - were pop stars. Bryan Adams - sort of if Bruce Springsteen had been a lumberjack - and Fish - sort of if Robbie Coltrane was lying drunk, face down in the face-painting tent at Glastonbury, with Dimmity, aged six, jumping up and down on his nadgers - were rock stars.
But, in the post modern 1990s, stars are slightly different. Now Keith from The Prodigy is definitely a star. All he does is shake his head like it was full of milky tea and he was stirring it, cut his hair to look like Pogo The Punk Rock Poodle, and look at you like he knows who you are but he doesn't know who he is, and he's a star.
Even Alex from Blur is a star. Having mastered one skill - smoking a fag while playing the bass - Alex can afford to swan around like a cruel fencing master, occasionally slicing bits of Damien Hirst's arse cheeks off with his rapier.
But what about everyone else? Now, Dave Rowntree, also from Blur. He's got ginger hair, he doesn't drink and he owns an aeroplane. That's not a pop star! That's a flying doctor! Michael Hutchence, Bob Geldof - famous because they've done it with Paula Yates. Mariella Frostrup - famous because she's got a deep voice like Trigger in Only Fools and Horses and she knows a woman who's done it with Liam. Bloody hell! We all know a woman who's done it with Liam! I've probably done it with Liam!
No, there are too many pop stars, and I tell
you this, I wouldn't have Matthew Kelly's job for a million
quid. |
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© David Quantick |
