A great song to start your weekend to: Victoria performed by The Fall. One of the great cover versions, in my opinion.
Proof of the value of the Internet
Sometimes people question whether the Internet is actually at all useful or if it’s full of silly rubbish clogging up our minds like cholesterol. To those people, I say: without the Internet, we wouldn’t have YouTube. And without YouTube, we wouldn’t have Hairdresser.
New toy
This is our joint Christmas present, the Pentax K100D Super. It’s absolutely gorgeous and we’re really happy with it. As our first move into the world of DSLRs, it may take a little time before we get used to it… but as soon as we’re up to speed, we’ll try to put together a nice album of photos of winter in the Collserolla & South Hams or something like that.
Two concerts in Barcelona
It has been a great week for live music in Barcelona. As well as the ever popular Wilco (who I didn’t go and see), the two most notable concerts were by very different acts. Jazz legend Ornette Coleman played the Palau de la Música Catalana on Wednesday evening and Welsh indie favourites Manic Street Preachers played the new Espacio Movistar on Friday.
The term genius is certainly bandied around too often. But that’s what Ornette Coleman is, so forgive me my use of this tainted word. Coleman, for those who don’t know, is one of the last surviving jazz legends of the late 50s, a time when Western music was changed forever by a small group of men working mostly in New York City. A Texan, Coleman (and his quartet) performed a now legendary two month residency at the Five Spot Café, and revolutionised jazz music. Despite having learned to play the saxophone ‘wrong’, the music he and his band created and performed was a sharp break with the current output of scene leaders, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Davis hated Coleman, which is probably as much of an accolade as anyone could wish for.
At 80 years old, I must say that I was worried that Ornette Coleman would be a talent diluted somewhat by age. I shouldn’t have worried: though physically quite frail, he played with a power and tenderness which was truly captivating. The band, a five piece, was interesting, consisting of two bass players, and electric bass and Ornette’s son on drums. At the centre sat the master, who led us though several numbers from their new album, Sound Grammar. As well as this, he performed a few of his classic pieces from the old days, including the astoundingly good Lonely Woman (a personal favourite). The venue is OK: beautiful looking, but the acoustics aren’t perfect and the seats are damned uncomfortable. The concert was magnificent, however, and I remarked to Gemma as we left that I might never attend another gig, Ornette Coleman was that good.
But statements like that don’t last long in Barcelona. The very next day, while browsing the internet working, I stumbled upon information about a Manic Street Preachers gig in Barcelona on Friday. Looking further into it, I discovered that it was a concert especially for Telefonica Movistar mobile network customers, and that it was free! To get hold of a ticket, you needed to be a Movistar customer. By sending a text message to a special number, you’d receive a code to be presented at the entrance to the venue. Awesome! But I’m a Vodafone customer and my (admittedly foolish) attempts to trick the system by using my Vodafone account failed miserably. So my friend Nick hatched a plan to get all the Movistar customers he knew to send a text to the special number, and then forward the response on to him. He sent me a code, we queued and we got in. For free!
There was no support band, so after buying several very expensive beers from an impressively busty (though slightly inept) barmaid, the lights went down and we awaited the gig. I was expecting a concert built around the band’s new album (again), but was pleasantly surprised when it turned out that we to experience a greatest hits concert, with all the Manic’s most famous songs performed in what felt like quite an intimate setting. So we had You Love Us, Motorcycle Emptiness, A Design For Life, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and the rest of their best songs . The band seemed to enjoy themselves, despite the fact that most of the audience seemed to be moderately bemused (though excitable) students. We had a great time and Nick managed to get some pretty good footage of the gig.
In all, a great week for live music. There’s no doubt that Ornette’s was the most impressive and exciting, but to see the Manics performing as well really capped things off. I love this town.
Ornette Coleman, Palau de la Música Catalana, Nov 7 – 1/1
Manic Street Preachers, Espacio Movistar, Nov 9 – 1/1
Updated: Ornette Coleman in Barcelona
Any fans of jazz in Barcelona should definitely put November 7th in their diaries: Ornette Coleman, he of the ‘toy trumpet’ and founding father of Free Jazz, is playing at the Palau de la Musica.
I’m no sure what to expect from the concert… I love some of his older albums like Something Else! and The Shape Of Jazz To Come but I don’t know whether he plays any of the classics from them any more. Either way, it’s sure to be a magical evening with a true grand old man of jazz. At 80, I guess that it won’t be quite as blistering as in the late 1950’s, but who knows?
Those of you in Barcelona who might not be sure, I recommend you come to check him out: he’s a genius. I wrote something here about Harmolodics, the music theory he created.
Ornette Coleman, November 7th, Palau de la Música, 21hrs. Tickets: € 28-60
Update: See my review of Ornette Coleman’s Barcelona concert here!
This machine kills fascists
Regular visitors to thebadrash.com (yes, both of you) may have noticed the image I have in my sidebar. The words (and the intention) are fairly clear: “This machine kills fascists”. What may not be immediately obvious is the source of the image. It’s a cropped version of a great photo of Woody Guthrie, the slogan sellotaped to his guitar.
I’ve long had a great respect for Guthrie. His songs about the country, the working class and especially the Spanish Civil War are simple, sweet and genuinely life affirming. Sadly, many of my favourite songs (like the one about the battle for the valley of Jarama) were recorded either on a tight budget or live, with bad equipment. Guthrie, of course, was one of Bob Dylan’s greatest influences – and while I adore numerous Dylan songs, Guthrie came from a simpler time when the fight for workers’ rights still felt like it could be won.
The concept of a guitar killing fascists came so far before the popular rock bands of the 1960’s. Its representation of the idea of expression destroying repression is still valid today. I wonder if you can buy his records in China.
I’ve always thought that musicians like Ted Nugent who openly eschew the rock’n’roll philosophy are cheating themselves as much as they cheat the people who buy their records. Whether they like or not, they owe their careers to the work of people like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. They remind me of the fascists who sometimes demonstrate in Madrid: there’s something weird about right wingers adopting the discourse of the left to promote their ideas. I’m not trying to claim ownership of a means of protest. I just think it’s kind of perverse when arseholes use methods they’d happily ban if they had the chance.
Nugent, incidentally, is a fairly odd individual. His music is terrible, he’s involved in ‘hunting’ trips which consist of killing creatures whose meat isn’t eaten, and he obtained custody of a 17 year-old girl so he could continue fucking her. Like I say, odd chap.
Idiocracy: reasons not to like Kate Nash
Gemma and I recently watched the 2006 film Idiocracy and I can’t recommend it enough. Luke Wilson plays the most average man in the US armed forces, who is selected for a top secret experiment into freeze-drying humans. He was meant to be awoken after a year but – you guessed it – ends up being frozen for 500 years. In the meantime, various factors combine to cause the human race to gradually become more and more stupid. They replace water with Gatorade, watch films called things like ‘ASS’ (which features one close-up of a man’s arse farting for 90 minutes) and are governed by an incredibly vain former pro-wrestler. Actually, it felt more like 50 years in the future than 500, but you get the point.
Shortly afterwards, we watched 5 minutes of Big Brother on Channel 4 and switched off, shocked. Yes, Big Brother was stupid before we ever saw Idiocracy but it had always at least seemed funny. Not any more. Society really does feel like it’s getting stupider. Dumbing down, it’s often called. BBC Breakfast has been reduced to a 2-hour commercial for forthcoming BBC television programmes. Car surfing is the new cool pastime. Kate Nash is in the charts.
There are many reasons to dislike Kate Nash. Her popularity, for example, or her chart success. It would be perfectly acceptable to dislike her for sounding very similar to Lily Allen – the dropped-aitches of their mockney accents are particularly grating. But none of these things make me dislike Kate Nash as much as her lyric:
You said I must eat so many lemons
Cos I am so bitter
You see, lemons aren’t bitter. They’re sour. Now I’m not the first to point this out but I am probably the first to waste half an hour writing a blog post about it. That lyric renders an already poisonously self-involved and poorly structured song so infuriating that I nearly wept when I first heard it. Last time I heard it, I immediately thought of Idiocracy. I mean, sure, there have always been bad pop lyrics around but this young woman is being lauded on all sides. She’s being given recognition and praise for a songwriting talent that just doesn’t exist.
Another thing I don’t like about Kate Nash is her use of the gender card. Responding to yet another suggestion that she might sound a little bit like Lily Allen, Nash said:
It’s lazy journalism and also quite sexist that there’s not enough room for more than one female singer songwriter from London
No, Kate: the reason that people are comparing you to Lily Allen is because you sound more or less exactly the same as her. It’s not sexism at all and I reckon it’s pretty low of you to use such a fallacious claim in order to divert attention away from your rubbish music.
So, yeah, I don’t like Kate Nash.
FIBERFIB: Benicassim 2007
It’s that time of year again. Two weeks of holiday carved out of the second half of July could only mean one thing round here: we’re off to the Benicassim festival (FIB) for the 3rd year running. For those who haven’t been, Benicassim is a rock festival like no other. It combines the usual noise, large cups of beer and haze of marijuana smoke with an attractive beach town, lots of sunshine and all the other benefits of a traditional Spanish beach holiday. In the evening (until 6 am), we’ll enjoy performances by Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Wilco, Herman Düne, and Cansei de Ser Sexy – and during the day, we’ll sunbathe and swim. Quite simply, it’s the highlight of the year… and yet none of my Barcelona friends ever go. Losers.
The main downside to FIB is the heat. While it’s great to have a festival by the beach, the temperatures in Castellón in the last fortnight of July are hot, hot, hot. Last year, I nearly died while erecting our tent. Without the help of my stalwart amigos, I may well have undergone a complete mental and physical collapse. So this year, we’re doing things differently. We’ve got an apartment on the beach with a pool and a parking space. No more tents for us. I’m not sure which part I’m looking forward to more: hearing the Stooges play Search And Destroy or relaxing in the shade the next day.
Update: some photos of the festival are now available on my Flickr. More coming soon. http://flickr.com/photos/thebadrash
Exile On Main Street – Pussy Galore
I first really got into Exile on Main Street about two or three years ago. It was the sort of time in a Barcelona summer when you go to xiringuitos, get drunk then head into town and get high. My Monday morning commute would be rendered about 300% better if I could listen to the trashy stoned noise of Shake Your Hips and the bombastic rock of Loving Cup at top volume. Late night sessions got much messier with Keith and the boys as the soundtrack.
But that was just the Stones’ version… I mean they were already millionaires and they didn’t even record it in New York City. They did it in tax-exile at Keith’s château in the south of France.
So at the same time, my permanent addiction to Royal Trux was just continuing steadily. I had begun to get my head around ideas like never believe a word Neil or Jen says in an interview and yes, it is possible for a man and a woman to be the joint incarnation of the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, even if he’s still alive. I’d read that there was some mysterious tape in existence which featured Pussy Galore performing a cover of Exile on Main Street, in its entirety.
Anyway, I always thought that this would be the most amazing recording ever… but it was always impossible to get hold of. I mean, this was a limited tape release from about 1986 or something.
Well I managed to get hold of a copy (in digital format) a couple of months ago and it doesn’t disappoint. Of course, you’ve got to like the messy, scabby, Pussy Galore sound if you’re going to dig it. You’ve probably got to know Exile pretty well and not mind hearing it on the stereo in the background as Pussy Galore play, karaoke style.
Just one track from this recording is better than the total output of bands like The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys and that lot. It’s a completely different thing, naturally, but that’s what makes it better.
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Reposted from my Last.fm blog. Listen to Pussy Galore – Exile On Main Street.
Constructing a national myth: architecture in Barcelona
Robert Hughes in The Guardian Review writes a very interesting history of the development of the Catalan national myth through art and architecture. He writes a great deal about Antoni Gaudà but also manages to mention Ildefons Cerdà (creator of the Eixample) and Lluis Domènech i Montaner who designed the Hospital de Sant Pau and the Palau de la Música Catalana. He also draws attention to bourgeois Catalans’ apparent love for famed anti-Semite, Richard Wagner. His mythological dialogue of the Bavarian/German nation was apparently very attractive to Catalan nationalists for whom the only way to create the new Catalan nation was to root it in the misty glories of medieval times.