Hack at work.
Killing Bono
"The best book I have ever read about trying to make it in the music business" - Elton John
"A fantastic book, which manages the difficult trick of being simultaneously very funny and very sad." - Bob Geldof
"I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book" - Bono
The Jolly Boys: sound that rocked Jamaica
Published: 5:18PM BST 21 Jul 2010
Jolly Boys, featuring Albert Minott, centre
‘Everybody knows Albert,” says Albert Minott proudly as he walks through the streets of Port Antonio, Jamaica, recognised by many of the passers-by. “This is my town. I was born here, and I’ll die here. All my life, singing and dancing. It’s like a fire inside.”
Tall and lean, the 71-year-old Minott cuts a dapper figure in a matching ensemble of crisp shirts and slacks, waistcoats and cravats, set off with nifty colour co-ordinated trilby hats. He would stand out anywhere, let alone amid the faded Caribbean glamour of Jamaica’s north coast resort, where painted wooden shacks lean up against collapsing colonial buildings, and the locals favour bright T-shirts and shorts.
Albert pauses to point out the marina, where he used to dive for coins back in the Forties, when the banana boat pulled in. “Way back when England was our mother,” he says, a mischievous smile displaying his few remaining teeth.
<<read More - >>
The xx factor: its the quiet ones you have to watch
Published: 21 Jul 2010
When the Mercury Prize was announced this week, the xx were quickly installed as bookies favourites. Actually, they were favourites before the shortlist was even announced, topping every critic’s list of predictions.
There are more established names up for the prize (Paul Weller, Dizzee Rascal, Corinne Bailey Rae) but the xx have been taking the music world by stealth not storm, creeping up on the slow lane with one of the most original yet seductively approachable debut albums in recent memory. It never even broke into the UK top thirty (peaking at number 31, although that is likely to change now) but it has already quietly notched up over 150,000 British sales, with another 179,000 in America (where it just scraped into the top 100, at number 92).
Quietly is the operative word. Everything about the xx is low key and understated. Even their name is typed in lower case. Indeed, so minimalistic is the xx’s ethos that when keyboard player Baria Qureshi left right before a gig, they opted not to replace her, instead boiling down their already basic arrangements to accommodate a three piece of drums, bass and guitar.
What is truly remarkable is that they manage to create something unique with such a standard rock line-up.
<<Read More >>
Why I’m not going to Glastonbury
Published: 23 Jun 2010
I once asked Paul Simonon of The Clash how he felt about the Glastonbury music festival, and he looked utterly aghast. “I have never played Glastonbury and I never would,” he said, in tones of near comical outrage.
“Joe Strummer spent years trying to get me to change my mind but culturally and even ethically it has got nothing to do with my life. Notting Hill Carnival is more my speed.”
Glastonbury disasters Strong words. So I wonder how he felt when Damon Albarn informed him that Gorillaz were filling in for U2 as Glastonbury headliners this year? His old Clash band mate, Mick Jones, now a fellow member of the Gorillaz ensemble, had a good chuckle at Simonon’s dilemma. “I wouldn’t say Paul’s changed his mind. Maybe he’s had it changed for him. Glastonbury is a little bit of an endurance test, especially if you don’t like mud.”
I have some sympathy with Simonon. I’m not going to Glastonbury this year. I didn’t go last year. And I probably won’t go next year, if I can find a reasonable excuse, like staying home to do the laundry. I realise this is a controversial position for a music critic, akin (as my fellow critic and Glastonbury nay-sayer Paul Morley recently remarked) to a tennis writer missing Wimbledon. Since its 1970 inception as the Glastonbury Fayre (when a mere 1500 people attended) it has built a reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent music themed gathering, with a near mystical status. This may be part of my problem with it.
<<Read More - >>
Gorillaz drop the mask
Published: 21 Jun 2010
As they step up to headline Glastonbury, Gorillaz seem finally ready to break free of cartoon artifice and reveal themselves as the most extraordinarily vital flesh and blood musicians on the planet.
When Bono put his back out, a hole was left at the top of the Glastonbury bill. There were rumours about possible replacements with Coldplay, Jay Z, Prince and even Led Zeppelin mentioned. And yet, when a certain green-skinned zombie bassist popped his cartoon head up and claimed the spot as his natural birthright, it all seemed to make sense.
Gorillaz at Glastonbury? How could the festival have ever been contemplated without them?
“We’re like some great big horrible warship pulling into the bay of Glastonbury to save the day,” was the statement attributed to Gorillaz imaginary band leader, Murdoc Niccals. “It was us or the Beatles and they split up years ago.”
Well, that’s the official line and it’s a pretty funny one, but I’m not sure Gorillaz need Murdoc’s comic patter to justify anything any more.
<<Read More >>
Lennon Naked (but for some wigs & fake beards)
Published: 18 Jun 2010
Christopher Eccleston and Naoko Mori star as John Lennon and Yoko Ono Photo: BBC
We do, literally, get to see Christopher Eccleston as John Lennon naked in BBC Four’s upcoming Lennon Naked. It is not a particularly pretty sight, but then neither was the original when he notoriously photographed himself and Yoko Ono in their birthday suits for the album cover of Two Virgins in 1968, a scene recreated by the BBC in all its pimply glory.
However, the title of the latest Lennon drama is not meant to be taken quite so literally, instead representing a portrait of the star stripped to his psychological essence. As interpreted by writer Robert Jones and director Edmund Coulthard, the BBC Four showpiece drama portrays rock’s greatest icon of peace and love as a selfish, paranoid, insecure, cruel, narcissistic, messianic genius.
So what’s new? This kind of thing is often referred to as “warts and all”, the flaw in the conceit being that Lennon himself had already shown us his warts. And everything else.
<<read More >>
The Reel Deal
Neil & Ivan McCormick, circa 1986
Have you ever wondered which actor would play you in the film of your life? Perhaps you’ve also wondered if anyone would bother to tell a mass audience the story of your spectacular failures in the face of trying to make it to the big time? If you happen to be Neil McCormick, wondering is no longer necessary. With the film based on his life growing up in the shadow of his former school mates U2 now in post production, Killing Bono ensures Neil’s story of the underdog who never quite makes it, is soon to be immortalised forever.We had a chat to the real Neil and Ivan McCormick about having some of the hottest young actors playing themselves and would-be-probably-soon-to-be-real fame:
How close did you really get to becoming rock stars?
Ivan: As close as possible without it actually happening … and yet it always felt so far away
Neil: We got a deal from Warner then got dropped ’cause they didn’t like my hair
Ivan: Well, it was a crap haircut.
<<Read More at The Official Killing Bono Blog>>
Exile on Main Street: the myths & the magic
The making of the Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main Street is a rock legend. But what really happened in those long weeks of 1971?
Published: 11:36AM BST 18 May 2010
The Rolling Stones’s Exile On Main Street is an album so shrouded in myth it practically defines the bohemian, decadent, counter-culture appeal of Seventies rock ’n’ roll. It is wild, electric music played by narcotic demigods with one foot in the 20th century and the other in some ancient, mystic swamp of steamy, primal passion. From the freak show photo montage on the original gatefold cover to the four sides of black vinyl crammed with a weird concoction of ragged r&b, country, soul and gospel, this was a voodoo jam from a band of outlaw rockers on the run.
The myth goes something like this: It was 1971. The greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world were forced into exile, chased away from Britain by Labour’s 93 per cent tax on the rich (and the revelation that their accountants hadn’t been paying it). Desperate, they decamped to the south of France, where the heroin-addicted Keith Richards set up a studio in the basement of the rented Villa Nellcote.
<<Read More >>
The Public School Invasion
Another UK singer tops the US charts. Could this be the start of a new British invasion?
Published: 5:01PM GMT 24 Mar 2010
Jay Sean & Taio Cruz purveyors of upmarket urbanity for the Queen
Last week, the US number-one single spot was held by a British artist, Taio Cruz, with his self-penned belter Break Your Heart. This is a surprisingly rare achievement. The UK enjoys a creative reputation as one of the twin engines of pop culture and is the second-biggest music exporter in the world – but you’d never guess it from the American charts.
The continued appetite for our Sixties and Seventies veterans (the Beatles were one of our biggest sellers last year), the profile of rock bands such as Coldplay and Radiohead, and the Simon Cowell poster-girls Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle help us hang on to about 10 per cent of the US albums market. But the days of the British Invasion, when our stars sang the hits that fuelled American teen dreams have long since passed.
<<Read More >>
Lady GaGa: nothing succeeds like excess
Published: 5:05PM GMT 17 Mar 2010
Does GaGa wear a Wonder Woman outfit for post-homicide dance as a symbol of pop art female empowerment or just cause she looks cute?
When was the last time a pop video became a global talking point? Lady GaGa’s all-singing, all-dancing, lesbian-prison-sex and mass-murder promo for Telephone has stirred up the kind of pop sensation not seen for a decade or more. It has featured on television news bulletins and the front pages of newspapers, as well as predictably tearing through the internet, breaking records on YouTube, trending on Twitter and inspiring frame-by-frame analysis and vigorous pro and anti blog commentary.
Most debate has focused on whether the video could be considered a work of pop art or just salacious sensationalism threatening the moral fabric of society. Lady GaGa herself claims it is a “commentary on the kind of country we are.”
In which case, as GaGa and Beyoncé ride off into the sunset following a series of semi-naked dance routines, random outfit changes, B-movie locations, clunking product placement and a near-incoherent plot centring on infidelity and mass poisoning, one might be forced to conclude that America is a nation straining under its own decadence, producing a jaded, thrill-seeking, attention-deficit generation who can communicate only through irony. It is certainly not the state-of-the-nation message that President Obama would like to be sending out.
Can a video really tell us about the times we live in? If anything, GaGa’s video seems to refer back to the excesses of the Eighties, the supposed golden age of the music video, when bigger was better, and decadence and transgression were the standard currency of pop.
<<Read More >>
Gorillaz: return of a big beast
Published: 5:49PM GMT 24 Feb 2010
Next month, one of the most popular British bands in the world return after a four-year absence. And when I say absence, I really mean it. Gorillaz may have sold 12 million albums, conquered America, scored number one singles and won Brit and Grammy awards, but when not on the campaign trail they are as camera-shy as their primate namesakes. They’ve never been snapped by paparazzi, caught up in a tabloid scandal or volunteered for a celebrity reality TV show. Indeed, they’ve never been seen in the flesh.
Are Gorillaz the ultimate 21st-century pop group? It’s not just that they are so unapologetically a product of our virtual age, a computer- friendly chimera, a multi-faceted, multi-media, multi-million selling global brand who don’t really exist at all.
<<read more >>