Yoko Ono...

A lot of people who like the Beatles have a problem with Yoko Ono. A lot of people like the Beatles, so that's a big constituency of people to be having a problem with you. But at least these days, they're not quite so vociferously racist and misogynistic about it as they once were. So I'm sure Yoko will be taking whatever problems people have with her in her stride as she always has. She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

Perhaps her early work was preparing her for her forthcoming role as a Beatle wife. 'Cut piece' (1965) seems now to be little more than an abstraction of the kind of thing she was soon to be subjected to by the British press and public for real.



She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

I started taking a closer interest in Yoko when I kept seeing her 'Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band' LP nuzzling up next to her husband's similarly eponymous counterpart in a lot of these '4 zillion LPs you have to hear before you snuff it...'-type books. So I gave YO/POB  a listen. It is, to say the very least, erm....challenging. The first track, which goes on for a fair bit, is a cacophony of banshee wailing, discordant overdriven guitar (Lennon) and a rhythm section that doesn't seem to be able to keep up with either husband or wife in the avant garde stakes (Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman). But by track two, it's clear that Ono is streets ahead of all three of them. 'Greenfield morning' is like nothing you've ever heard - or would have been back then in 1970.



Lennon said in the 1970s that Yoko was making 1980s music and it was only in that decade that people began to recognise it in larger numbers. Indeed, contemporary reviews of the couple's 'Double Fantasy' LP I recall were grudgingly accepting of the now evident fact that, in terms of cutting edge and relevance, Yoko was leaving her bread-baking hubby quite some distance behind. A few cool ones like Viv Albertine and John Lydon were in on Yoko from the start, but it was only when that generation started to make its own music that her own influence and importance began to emerge from the shadow of 'him indoors'.

They were, their very publicly aired fallings out and difficulties notwithsatanding, a pretty solid and admirable couple I think. Testament to John's self-proclaimed A&R abilities is his decision to stand aside and allow Ono to carry on her career - helped, no doubt, by her uncanny abilities with the investment portfolio. Not many artists would make that sacrifice for their partners - even fewer great ones. But it was (and probably still is) so easy to laugh at them. Lennon's notorious biographer, Albert Goldman who, incidentally, should really have callled that book 'The Lives of Yoko Ono', such a hurry is he in to get his claws into her much easier to pillory contribution to the sixties counter-culture that he's so determined to piss all over - notes with glee how she was working on 'Walking on Thin Ice' with unseemly haste in the wake of her husband's assasination. Her steely-eyed resolve to be a pop star (how dare she!) over-riding any sense of decency. No mention of the fact that, back in Sussex, Paul McCartney was doing precisely the same thing. Lennon would have expected nothing less of either of them. Anyway, have a listen:




And take note Mr. Goldman's ghost: the woman watched the man she loved being gunned down in the street.

I'm thinking of ways to write a song about her - maybe John singing to her from beyond the grave? Vague idea for the title: 'Woman is the nijab of the world'. Playing on the ironies of the veil - the elimination of the superficial as a path to inner freedom. She and Lennon explored similar ideas when they (yes, it is as hard to type it without laughing as it probably is to read it) conducted interviews whilst sitting inside a bag. We'll see - there's enough there for several songs.

So yes, she deserves a song, I think. She's a cool chick, baby. And a brave one.

L.U.V. on y'all

xx

Shirley Trampled (another bloody pavement)...

This song was sparked by one of those rare and odd moments where you whizz pass someone you don't know while you're on a bus and their whole life flashes in front of you. The Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow mentions are less cultural reference points than suitably hurried attempts at description. I had, for reasons beyond my ken, pinned her as a travel agent, and that was the (presumably complete) misapprehension out of which the song developed. From there, it's a short imaginative leap to the rest of her life conditions - she spends most of her waking hours immersed in the minutiate of other people's happiness. So what better mindset from which to speculate upon the philosophical nuances of the annual British holiday?

I had in mind an update of the Pistols' 'Holidays in the Sun', but the musical palette - despite tantalizing whiffs of mid-90s Brit Pop (Pulp's 'Have You Seen Her Lately?' and Blur's 'Girls and Boys' - or was it 'Boys and Girls'?) it ends up sounding more like Pistols contemporaries Magazine - doesn't move it on all that far I suppose. But then it's almost an ancient (in pop terms at least) trope - from Cliff's 'Summer Holiday' to Weller's 'thinking 'bout your holidays', it's another to add to the above and the song's main contention - that the great British getaway is less of an escape and more another form of incarceration is equally hackneyed. The vacation as not so much relief from as reinforcment of the workaday horrors of the rat race is probably just about redeemed by genuine concern for Shirley's need for a holiday: we've all, to varying degrees, felt that same desperation at some point I should imagine.

I'm assuming that it's her own 'two weeks in a dancefloor hell' that she's imagining - perhaps not; maybe Shirley's is just a general meditation on consciousness? A teeny suspicion of class consciousness peeps through towards the end and I think perhaps Shirley shares my disdain for all those 'Keep calm and...' t-shirts/baby grows/topiary effects etc. My favourite is suitably subversive: a poster put up by a fiery Roman work colleague - 'I can't keep calm, I'm Italian....'

The video: I originally foresaw two seperate bits of footage running against one another. I wanted air hostesses marching towards the Red Army but I couldn't get the lovely footage I found of Aeroflot stewardesses doing a tacky 70s style floorshow to play on youtube. But I think the footage of female Red Army soldiers (wo)manning anti-aircraft guns kind of works. Don't ask me how I got the animation effect. I just overload the footage with as many gizmos as I can, slow it down so it fits the length of the song and hope that the copyright commissars never get wind of it and so can't get the KGB onto me. I've been pretty lucky so far...

Anyway, I think it takes the song somewhere quite abstract and interesting. Hope you agree. I'll be posting more on the new one soon and hopefully be able to clear the decks once Urbane is mastered and out of the way.

L.U.V. on y'all

xx

Mista Feminista...

That's about all I have at the moment. A title. Vague inklings: an inchoate sense of working in a different, less bullish, more sensitive way and an idea for a unisex cover image that will probably be typically embarrassing. So I may well go back to plan A on that one. The cover artwork I originally wanted to use was based on a photo of my maternal grandmother (i.e. my grandmother on my mother's side - she doesn't look very maternal in the picture, I can assure you!) She's 17, flaxen haired, indomitable and wielding a rifle. It's a great photo, but I can't find it anywhere. I'm starting to wonder if I ever had a copy of it in the first place or whether it's just such an entrenched piece of family history that I've assumed I have the thing in my keeping. I may never even have seen it, just been so entranced by the description that I've convinced myself that I have. The mind, it starts doing funny things to you as you get older. Anyway, I like the perversity of starting where most people finish - with the cover design - so I'll keep doing that. Maybe things will come into sharper relief once I have an image or two to bounce off.

But yes, I digress in typically Ronnie Corbett style. I have the title - or maybe it will morph into a 'brand name' or whatever. Mista Feminista sounds about right. And I know I want this to be a very stridently feminist piece - because that's the overarching thing I feel at the moment; stridently feminist. Yes, there are loads of other things to rile and perplex one, but there seems to be a disturbingly deep misogyny threaded through all of these contemporary news stories. In Gaza, it's the terrible numbers of women and children who are being hurt and killed and - how could we have forgotten this? - violence against women is *always* violence against children; the present and the future. UK gangs now target the girlfriends and sisters of their rivals - sexual violence dished out with the same senseless disregard as rival gangs just a few days ago blasted away a poor young woman who had the temerity to be out celebrating her birthday while they were out imposing their mutual deathwishes upon the streets of Kilburn. This is what men do; they kill each other; they wreck the present; they destroy their own futures.

So, there's the theme - nice easy one this time.

But how to go about it? I'm clueless right now, but that's nothing new and can be a good place to start. Mista Feminista - I think that's what's needed. Because men need to change - (that will probably become a song as it's my mantra at the moment. Might even be a better title in the end. We'll see). So the plan is to try to document the creative process on this one - jot down the inspirations, the mechanics, the twists and turns of the strange mental incarceration and lunacy that descends upon me when I try to get some music together. I think (I hope!) that this one will be easier to follow than some of the others. But there's been so much misunderstanding of motive and execution with previous efforts that I wanted to guide you through this one a bit more. It will probably be more interesting than the finished work - I always found that with the others; the journey was always more exciting than the destination. So hopefully you will find these accompanying notes valuable, if only in relation to 'end product'.

OK, just so we're all starting on the same page, here are some almost finished versions of most of the songs on the last one. I haven't kept any notes on that one, so I'm afraid you're on your own. But it's sort of urban - ey..:

Urbane