Open bigotry, it seems, is coming back into fashion in our media. Barely a day goes
by without a filthy rabble-rousing rag like the Sun or the Mail attempting to pin
society's evils on the door of scrounging asylum seekers / shrieking Arab terrorists
/ cheese-eating French surrender-monkeys / faceless European bureaucrats.
Faced as we are with a society that grows steadily more spiteful, nasty and stupid,
we suddenly seem perfectly happy to seek refuge in patterns ingrained in us in childhood
- we whine, we pout, we shake our fat little fists and point our fat little fingers.
We didn't make this mess, mum, it was those other boys!
But even in an increasingly fucked-up world in which no minority seems safe from
the rise of neo-conservatism, there remains one group of people more sinned-against
by the Western media than any other. This untouchable caste chafe silently under
attack after attack - no accusation seems too unbelievable when directed at them,
no slur too extreme, no stereotype too outlandish. It's hardly an exaggeration to
state that this group have been the targets of more negative portrayals in the media
than Jack The Ripper, paedophiles and the Spurs back four put together.
I am, of course, referring to clowns.
I really don't get it. I just don't. What have clowns ever
done to make themselves the go-to creepy villain of choice to a whole generation
of movie writers without an original idea between them? Surely there
can be few sections of society more admirable than clowns? Aren't they people who
nightly surrender their identity and dignity in order to try to make small children
laugh? So shouldn't we be lauding their efforts rather
than portraying them as psychos, demons, aliens and general all-round wrong 'uns?
Is it really all the Joker's fault? These are plainly
issues that we, as a mature and caring society, should be thinking long and hard
about.
It's gotten to the point now where, upon glimpsing a clown we skip right past the
"lovable slapstick entertainer" part of the cultural knee-jerk reaction
and jump straight to "grinning psychopath". Seriously. When was the last
time you saw a clown on-screen who didn't turn out to be some kind of hideous space-mutant
hell-bent on sucking people's brains out through a straw?
And yes, that includes Ronald Mc-fucking-Donald.
Is there no pressure-group that can make a stand against the negative
images of clowns that we're bombarded with day after day? And if there was, would
they all arrive to protest the premier of It II - The Impersonal Pronoun Strikes
Back in one impossibly small car whose bonnet would explode with a bang and
a cloud of steam after they'd all piled out of it?
[ War, Insanity, Social Injustice and Unhappy Love Affair ]
"Good evening, Watford!" called Richard
Thompson with his characteristic gentle, self-depreciating smile. "Oh,
how I've longed to say those words..."
Hang on. England's greatest living singer-songwriter? Playing a slightly shabby
little commuter-town twenty miles outside London? Shome mishtake, shurely?
To be honest, though, the surroundings were no more incongruous than Thompson himself,
whose wry, engaging stage-persona is completely at odds with the darkness and emotional
power inherent in his music. "It's a note to myself," he commented after
glancing down to the setlist by his foot. "It says 'Be More Intense'. Yeah.
'Really Give It Some'."
As advice goes, it's roughly on a par with telling Graham Norton to try and crank
the campness up a notch.
Somewhere along the line, folk music has picked up a bad rap. The mention of folk
brings to mind chunky men in chunky jumpers smoking chunky pipes through chunky
beards, quaffing chunky ale and singing with a chunky finger shoved in their ear.
It's All
Around My fucking Hat, it's songs that start with the line
"as
I was a-walking", it's girls named Molly, it's fol-de-rol and it's hey-nonny-sodding-nonny.
And, let's be fair, those impressions aren't entirely unjust.
But as the name suggests, folk is the music of the common man and, to paraphrase
Sid Vicious, "I've met the common man. He's a cunt." It really doesn't
take too much scratching at the repertoire of most folk-artistes to find the injustice,
betrayal
and human
tragedy lurking inside - it's gangsta rap for the 16th century, really, and
Richard Thompson always seems to have drawn inspiration from that. The FourHorsemen
Of FolkMusic
stalk his work like the inevitable four big stalking things, and even when he does
meander down the familiar hey-nonny-nonny pathways, he does it with a freshness
that's all the more remarkable given that he's been at this shit for thirty-five
years and counting. And that's not thirty-five years in a Neil-Young, Bob-Dylan,
David-Bowie, five-or-ten-years-of-genius-then-a-couple-of-decades-we'd-all-prefer-to-forget,
either.
But enough of the faux-music-critic psuedointellectual wankery.
The evening got off to an inauspicious start as we - myself, Mrs. Blue, Rob and
his (much) better half and my dad, whom I hold personally responsible for the gloomier
excesses of my music taste and so was recently introduced to Thompson by way of
a small dose of his own medicine - arrived at the legendary Watford Colosseum fifteen
minutes late to find the doors still resolutely sealed. A smattering of scraggy
old hippies meandered about outside, each and every one a torpedo aimed at my carefully-constructed
depiction of folk music as a living, vital genre with something to say about the
modern world.
There's no helping some people.
The support for the evening came in the form of Jim
Moray, whose half-hour set appealed to Mrs. Blue ("Of course it did, he's
young, pretty and soulful") but didn't do much for me. Nice if slightly characterless,
boyband-ish voice, decent musician, not really doing anything I hadn't heard before.
AND he did a tune that began "As I was a-walking...". I mean, Jesus. You're
standing at the bottom of a musical hole right from the start, aren't you?
The only song that really caught the imagination was his closer, Two Sisters,
which he introduced as "about killing your siblings and the benefits thereof"
and cleverly used reverb, echo and various other effects way beyond my layman's
comprehension to produce a sweet, haunting folk-meets-ambient, Beth-Orton-esque
soundscape which on later listening proved to be much closer to the style of his
CD (bought at Mrs. Blue's insistence, natch) than had the slightly bland stuff that
had gone before it.
Not bad as a palate-cleanser, then, but as with any good hors d'oeuvre it only left
us more hungry for the main course. Suitably lubricated by standard-issue half-time-change-of-ends
gig-venue beer, we found our way back to our seats and awaited the appearance of
the Man himself.
Yeah, I know. Seats at a gig, never a good thing. But if you're going to be at a
venue that COMPLETELY FUCKS THE ATMOSPHERE FOR EVERYONE by putting seats in, then
you'd better make bloody sure you get some decent ones.
Front row do? Fifteen feet from centre-stage? Yeah. Yeah, I s'pose.
Out comes Thompson, no band, just an acoustic guitar and that same all-black ensemble
he seems to have been wearing constantly for about the last ten years, including
the deeply regrettable beret which still, unfortunately, makes him look like a Cub
Scout Akela. Richard, you know I love you, but do you think any of us haven't sussed
that you're going bald? Show a little dignity, man!
Okay, well, in a stupid way I'm getting nervous, now because I've been looking forward
to this ever since the tickets went on sale - the Colosseum is a pretty bloody big
venue, is it really possible for one guy, even the Greatest Living Englishman, take
over the place without some other decently talented noise-makers to back him up?
Yes. Yes, I can confirm that it is.
It might have been possible to get around the lack of a backing-band by steering
clear of any songs that relied on the band to lend them power and concentrating
on the gentler, more reflective end of his repertoire, but Thompson plainly regards
that as a solution for wusses. Instead, he made up for the missing musicians by
putting enough fucking energy for five men into each and every one of his numbers
and so carrying off venomous, no-way-in-Hell-can-that-be-done-unplugged stuff like
Crawl
Back or She
Twists The Knife Again with breathtaking aplomb.
It shouldn't work, of course. With the best will in the world, there's absolutely
no way that you should be able to make an unaccompanied acoustic guitar fucking
rock. But it does work, and the reason why isn't merely that Richard Thompson
is amoung the greatest guitarists of this or any other era. What sets him apart
from those who are merely hugely gifted with technical skill is his commitment to
his songs as songs, rather than as shop-windows to display his virtuosity.
Thompson understands the organic nature of songwriting, that the lyric, the vocal
performance, the melody and the production all have to fit seamlessly together in
a holistic construct, and that overstrengthening any one aspect weakens the whole.
No fucking five-minute bouts of Jimmy Page/John Squire/Mark fucking Knopfler "hey,
look at ME!" solo-wankery in Thompson's music, instead he lets the guitar become
merely a tool to emphasize or extend the themes and mood of the song. If that remit
calls for the sort of blazing, towering solo that describes emotions no human voice
ever could, as in the could-you-possibly-have-a-more-archetypal-Thompson-title A
Love You Can't Survive, then that's great. But more often, it means restraint
and subtlety, allowing the music to breathe and find its own identity unburdened
by clever-clever elaboration - exemplified last night by a spare accompaniment to
Cold
Kissesthat added immeasurably to the song's paranoid, claustrophobic nature.
It seems such a stereotypically English attitude - humble arrogance. It's as if
he's perfectly well-aware that he's a genius, and so doesn't really feel any particular
need to keep beating us over the head with the fact.
And, to be honest, most of my personal highlights from the show were songs from
the second category, those that required less bravado and more finesse. Examples
off the top of my head would be a heartbreakingly sweet version of From
Galway To Graceland, the bittersweet Did
She Jump Or Was She Pushed? and Outside
Of The Inside, best described as bitter-without-the-sweet ("This is
sort've a fundamentalist theme-song. Do we have any members of the Taliban in tonight?").
Such is Richard Thompson's range that everyone present was bound to go away from
the evening with a different favourite moment - Rob enthused about his inclusion
of Hokey-Pokey,
dad mentioned Beeswing
as a highlight (although he was disappointed by the absence of I
Feel So Good, regarding the lyric "Now I've got a suitcase full of
fifty pound notes / And a half-naked woman with her tongue down my throat"
as one of the greatest in the history of popular music), while Mrs. Blue enjoyed
Thompson's wry tribute to Alexander Graham-Bell. But for me, the crowning glory
was a wonderfully understated performance of Down
Where The Drunkards Roll - hardly a natural audience-participation number,
but transformed from great to hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising sublime by several
hundred entranced people crooning along with the song's melancholy refrain.
Mwah.
I could rave for hours more, but no doubt it feels like I already have. Quite simply,
the greatest live gig experience I've ever had. I came out feeling emotionally drained,
utterly blown away, and have yet to completely recover.
You should know by now not to trust statements like "there'll probably be an
upturn in the quality and quantity of my posts here," you really should.
In actual fact, I was idle for less than a week, before a combination of nine-to-five
temping and evenings spent doing drawing work left me left me feeling drained, exhausted
and with exactly zero spare time for doing things like, say, posting here. And,
more importantly, no time for falling into the sort of furious despair that tends
to produce my best writing.
Never mind. I'll just have to try and watch a few more Tom Hanks movies.
So what's gone on in the last few weeks you've missed out on?
I think it says something about just how shallow my life is when I tell you that
by far the most significant event can be summed up in just one word.
Haircut.
I don't think it's entirely truthful to claim that I've been growing my hair since
I left school, because that implies some sort of conscious, bold, chin-jutting fashion
statement, that one morning I looked in the mirror and declared, "Yes! I
AM going to base my look on the Comic Book Guy!"
I think it'd be more honest to say that it's been growing for the last ten
years, and with the exception of one hack back to collar-length for a job interview
in 1997, it's seemed churlish to try and contain my hair's boundless enthusiasm.
Net result - a foot and a half of what a charitable person might describe as "auburn
curls", but a more realistic observer would call "a bloody mess".
All the same, it was my bloody mess, and if there's one trait that defines the English
as a nation, it's the tenacity we show when we're clinging to something that was
plainly a bad idea even before we started. Just look at the House Of Lords. Or suet
puddings. Or Cliff Richard's career.
Anyway. Long story short - out of work, need money, don't need to be walking into
interviews looking like Davy Crockett King Of The Wild Frontier. So snip-snip. Snip
snip snip snip snip snip. Snip-snip. Snip-snip-snip. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Snip-snip.
Snip-snip. AAAAAAAARRRRGGGGHH!
Fucking hell. Now I know how sheep feel on the first day of summer.
