My adventures in experimental music
David Keenan acquired his craft as a music writer, he says, from reading the crème de la crème of critics who milked rock music for all it was worth during the 1970s – Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, Paul Morley, Biba Kopf – before deciding that rock criticism was not his bag. In the preface to this weighty collection of his music journalism, he says he considered himself more of a 'rock evangelist'. The pieces originally appeared between 1998, when Keenan was writing for hardcore music magazines such as Melody Maker, MOJO and the Wire, and 2015, after which he checked out of regular reviewing duties to pursue his career as a novelist. Luckily for him, his debut novel This Is Memorial Device proved a smash hit.
He dedicates Volcanic Tongue to ur-rocker Lou Reed, but the point is pressed that stylistic labels barely compute to Keenan, and there are lengthy and insightful pieces about free jazz, folk and modern composition too. Concerned not so much with the technical nuts and bolts driving music forwards, or re-examining existing mythomanias, Keenan is instead motivated to capture 'the first rush of hearing' and the attitudes behind – even forming – the sounds. Rock, he says, tends towards collapsing into nostalgia. But tracing what he terms the rock and roll 'urge' elsewhere has taken him far beyond rock – towards other music unafraid to work itself out in the moment of playing.
Keenan's interview with the free-improviser guitarist Derek Bailey, when it was published in the Wire in 2004, made me grasp the extent to which Bailey's inquisitive, nigglingly provocative music was an extension of his acerbic wit.
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The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- The Herald Scotland
'Masterpiece' - Scot blew the door of psychedelic revolution wide open
The Glasgow-born troubadour, whose mission was, in his own words, 'to bring poetic vision to popular music', began to make his name when, as yet unsigned, he appeared on the television show Ready Steady Go! in January 1965. On March 12 he sang his debut single, Catch the Wind, on TV, impressing a certain Little Steve Wonder, who was in the audience. The song zipped into the charts at number four, and continuing exposure on television and radio helped ensure that 'my name, my face and my music were in every home in Britain'. America beckoned, and he found himself on the Ed Sullivan Show – the same show that had broken the Beatles in the USA, less than a year earlier. His refusal not to join the rest of the performers for a final bow at the end brought him to the attention of industry heavyweight Allen Klein, who rang the renowned record producer, Mickie Most, and recommended Donovan to him. Donovan also toured Britain, where he was linked in the public mind with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the rising stars of folk music. A second single, Colours, reached the same chart position as Catch the Wind. His debut album, What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, was released in May, a few days after his 19th birthday; it peaked at number three in the charts. Such sudden fame did not come without its critics, however. Some in the music press had sniped that Donovan was but a pale imitation of Dylan, but after Donovan had met Dylan in his room at London's Savoy Hotel, the American told Melody Maker: 'He played some songs to me. I like him. He's a nice guy'. So ended, the magazine reported, 'one of the biggest controversies that has ever split the British music scene'. One Savoy encounter, incidentally, was immortalised by D.A. Pennebaker for Dont Look Back, his documentary about Dylan's 1965 British tour; Donovan borrowed Dylan's guitar to play a song, To Sing for You; Dylan responded with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Little could impede Donovan's rise. He played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the one in which Dylan famously 'went electric') and was feted in the States. He was friends with the Beatles (below), the Byrds and PJ Proby, was introduced to Paul Simon, had chart success with an EP featuring Buffy Saint-Marie's Universal Soldier, and took his first LSD trip. He had fallen in love, too, with a woman, Linda Lawrence, the former girlfriend of the Rolling Stones' guitarist Brian Jones, and mother to his son Julian. The Beatles appeared on the same showA second Donovan album, Fairytale, was released in October 1965. It contained some of his finest songs: Colours, Sunny Goodge Street and Ballad of a Crystal Man, and a cover of Oh Deed I Do, the work of his fellow Scot, the brilliant pioneering guitarist, Bert Jansch. In his memoir Donovan refers to the 'new way of seeing' that he was industriously developing at that time. He cites the lyrics to the jazz-fusion track, Sunny Goodge Street: 'I was describing the sub-culture emerging from the underground and the elusive search for the self. Two years before the beginning of 'Flower Power' and before the Beatles used the same refrain' he was singing … 'I tell you his name is/ Love, love, love''. He also records that he 'felt the need to introduce key spiritual ideas' . [The album] set the scene for my performance as a 'Bard' who would present a way of seeing the wonder of the natural world. I was mocked as a simpleton, when I sang of birds and bees and flowers like a child. Indeed, I was keeping the 'wonder eye' open - just like a child'. Among the many budding musicians who bought and loved Fairytale, here or in the States, was a young man in Indiana named John Mellencamp. The year 1965 had not quite finished with Donovan: in December, at Abbey Road studios, he began work on his 'experimental' third album, Sunshine Superman, with producer Mickie Most and the noted arranger John Cameron. Most, Donovan writes, 'realised I was hearing sounds which came from many sources: classical, jazz, ethnic, medieval minstrelsy, and he saw the potential for a veritable new fusion of music, a 'world music' sound, before this term was thought of'. Read more The album itself was a clever blend of folk music and some of the first psychedelia to ever be committed to vinyl. Musicians such as the double bass player Danny Thompson guested on the album. Shawn Phillips, a Texan musician, contributed sitar. By this time, Donovan's relationship with Linda, who was living thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, was looking uncertain. The title track (on which Jimmy Page, then a session guitarist, played) was the first song to emerge from his oppressive fog of sorrow. When Most heard it in the studio, he instinctively knew that it would be a hit single. He was right: it went to number two in the charts towards the end of 1966. The second track, Legend of a Girl Child Linda, saw Donovan finger-picking his acoustic guitar in front of an orchestra. 'We certainly broke the mould of pop music – and folk music, for that matter', he recalls in Hurdy Gurdy Man. '…There were no songs like mine to compare with. It was all new directions, uncharted seas'. Donovan continued to write songs for the new album in the new year of 1966. Linda appeared in most of the songs on one guise or another, including the gorgeous track, Celeste. Its aching lyric, Donovan notes, said he was disillusioned with everything. One striking line – 'I intend to come right through them all with you' – was in one respect about the changes his generation was encountering but at a deeper level was a song to Linda. In February he enjoyed another turning-point in his career when he headlined at New York's prestigious Carnegie Hall, accompanied by Phillips on sitar and 12-string guitar. It was the first time that a Western pop audience had witnessed the former instrument on a stage. Donovan writes entertainingly of his adventures in the States that year as he finished work on the new album in LA. 'This much I knew then: I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation. I was here to do this … I felt the spirit move within me. I knew that this album would be my masterpiece'. When the album was released in the States in September, the LA Times's Pete Johnson said: 'Donovan, a very talented, if unearthly, writer and singer of folk songs, croons 10 songs to form an album follow-up to his very popular single record, 'Sunshine Superman'. The LP does not fulfill the promise of his single, but it supplies a good measure of his soft understated singing of the medieval-modern, dream-reality mystical imagery. 'The best tracks', Johnson added, 'are 'Sunshine Superman', 'The Trip', 'Season of the Witch', 'Legend of a Girl Child Linda' and 'The Fat Angel'. Like many other singers, Donovan has fallen under the spell of Indian music, which provides structure for most of his non-rock songs'. For business-related reasons the album did not go on sale in the UK until June 1967. It reached 25 in the album charts, someway short of the exalted number-one status it enjoyed in many countries across the world. Melody Maker wrote that "every number has a mood, an atmosphere, a current along which the perceptive listener can float. Donovan glides playing beautiful guitar and singing his songs like they should be sung - with love'. Much lay ahead of Donovan, including a sold-out January 1967 headline appearance at at the Royal Albert Hall, his continuing involvement with the Beatles, his lasting popularity in the States and elsewhere, his 1968 masterwork – the double album box-set, Gift From a Flower to a Garden – and bestselling singles such as Mellow Yellow, Jennifer Juniper and Hurdy Gurdy Man. In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, John Cameron, Donovan's arranger and collaborator, reflected: 'The amount of work we did between '66 and '70 was phenomenal, we had a string section that rode motorbikes. They'd be on Yamahas with their Strads [violins] strapped to their backs, going from studio to studio. It was the only way they'd get from one to the other on time'. Donovan himself reconnected with Linda, and they were married in October 1970. Having done everything he had wanted to do, he then took a decisive step back from the industry. New records followed, but his time in the cultural spotlight was over. Read more On the Record Interviewed by Mojo magazine's Sylvie Simmons in 1996, to promote his 'comeback' album, Sutras, which was produced by Rick Rubin, Donovan explained: "If I can do a thumbnail sketch of 20 years, around about 1970 I had achieved everything I could have possibly dreamed of and much more. "Having been at the top of the ladder, there was nowhere else to go. So I walked onto a British Airways jet in Tokyo and out of a tax plan called a drop-out year where I was going to earn more millions of dollars than any young solo artist of his time. It had ended. I didn't burn out, I wasn't a drug addict, but I was wounded in some way, and I came home to my cottage in England.... I married Linda, my great love and teenage muse — four years of '60s madness had kept us apart — and I walked away from fame, the Rolls Royce, the yacht, the mansion. "We went to Joshua Tree in the California desert for much of the '70s and brought up the children up as an alternative family... But something was happening while I wasn't watching. In the '80s, things were getting very dark, the earth was wounded, and I felt dispirited. In '83 I stopped making records completely, I had a personal crisis, musical crisis, and Linda saw me through it. I came out around 1990. "A new impulse got me... I'd gone into the studio and started recording these song ideas... Rick Rubin had been in the studio with Tom Petty, who was playing one of my songs. Rick says, 'I love Donovan, I've always wanted to record him'. Tom says, 'Why don't you phone him up?'. So he did. We met and we found similarities extraordinarily alike." Speaking to Record Collector magazine in January 2024, he said: 'When I started singing, the message was in the song. The revolution was on. The important part was giving young people a shock in that there were different things to talk about in songs, other than, 'I love you, why'd you make me blue?' This was important' In the same interview he noted: 'I think my songwriting was very influential. Breaking all the rules and experimenting in the studio was encouraging to others'. Things came full circle in a way in 2102, when Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by none other than John Mellencamp. Donovan was introduced as the man who "blew the door of the psychedelic revolution wide open". Recalling the first time he had bought a Donovan album, in 1965, Mellencamp told the audience: 'I was in the seventh grade, and back then we waited for every record and I waited for every album to come out so that I could learn to play those songs. I wasn't just listening to Donovan, I was living Donovan. I was stealing all the s— from Donovan'. A few moments later, to applause and cheers, he held up his original, much-played copy of Donovan's second album, Fairytale. The word 'Mellencamp' was etched in ink along the top of the cover. 'See how it says Mellencamp?' he said. 'In Indiana, we used to use these things like money. If you didn't have any money, you would sell this for a dollar and a half or trade it for two Led Zeppelin records and then they'd trade it back. You always wanted to keep track of your stuff. That's why I have my name all over it'. * Donovan is marking his 60th year as a recording artist with a week of events in Paris between June 1 and 7. Website:
Daily Mirror
19-05-2025
- Daily Mirror
Phil Collins poses with footballer son in rare photo and makes sweet gesture
Phil Collins travelled to Austria to watch his son Matthew's play-off match but it wasn't to be for the 20-year-old after Hartberg shattered his promotion dreams Music legend Phil Collins was there to support son Matthew in his big game this weekend as they posed for a rare photo together in the stands. The musician, whose hits include 80s anthem In The Air Tonight, has two children, Nicholas and Matthew who he shares with Orianne Cevey, as well as daughters Joely and Lily, and son Simon, 48. Phil and Orianne met in the 90s when she was working as his translator in Switzerland, and they eventually tied the knot in 1999, but divorced nine years later in 2008. Matthew plays for Austrian football club WSG Tirol, and Phil travelled over to see him in action. They may have lost their play-off match to Hartberg 3-2 on Saturday, but the family stuck around to show their support after the match. Coach Manuel Ludwiger said he had no idea his player was related to Phil when they signed him. '"We Google the players we take on trial to find out about their past careers, it was only then that we found out Matthew is Phil Collins' son. We haven't signed him as a publicity stunt. It is purely down to his footballing ability." Phil spoke about son's passion for football and knew he had a shot at turning pro from an early age. "Matt loves music, but loves his football even more," he said. "He is certain he'll turn professional. 'The other day he said, "Another five years and I'll be gone". Genesis star Phil earlier this year opened up about being so ill that he's completely lost interest in making music. The 74-year-old drummer, singer, and songwriter - who retired in 2022 after he experienced worsening physical limitations as a result of a 2007 spinal injury - made the admission as he gave a poignant update on his health battles, after also being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2017. He told Mojo magazine: 'I keep thinking I should go downstairs to the studio and see what happens. But I'm not hungry for it anymore.' Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Phil added: 'The thing is, I've been sick, I mean very sick.' The musician first opened up about about his spinal problems in 2009, saying: 'My vertebrae have been crushing my spinal cord because of the position I drum in. It comes from years of playing.' Phil added: 'I can't even hold the sticks properly without it being painful. I even used to tape the sticks to my hands to get through. Don't worry, I can still sing.' Phil looked back at his life and music in his documentary, Phil Collins: Drummer First, which came out late last year after two years of filming. In the moving film, the star focused on his drumming career rather than his vocal fame. Some emotional scenes also show the multi-talented musician coming to terms with the fact that drumming was a skill lost to him, and that he'd never perform live again. "It's still kind of sinking in a little bit. You know, I'm 71. I've spent all my life playing drums. To suddenly not be able to do that is a shock," Phil said as he sat at his drum kit and held his sticks. He also shared: "If I wake up one day and I can hold a pair of drumsticks, then I will have a crack at it. I just feel like I've used up my air miles," and admitted: "To be suddenly not be able to do that is a shock. If I can't do what I did as well as I did it, I'd rather relax and not do anything." Explaining just how mentally debilitating his physical deterioration was to him, he also added: "I'm not a singer who plays the drums. I'm more of a drummer who sings a bit."
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- The Guardian
Dealer's Choice review – Hammed Animashaun is the ace in a busted flush
In 1995, two British playwrights made their debuts with all-male, six-character chamber-pieces strongly influenced by Pinter and Mamet, and set over one long, tense night in London. Jez Butterworth's Mojo and Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice proved to be superficially dazzling calling cards rather than enduring classics. Now a pallid 30th-anniversary revival of the latter reveals its weaknesses. Set in a restaurant where the manager Stephen (the Paul Bettany-esque Daniel Lapaine) and his employees Frankie (Alfie Allen), Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) are gearing up for a late-night card game, the play brims with bants. Mentions of the National Lottery, which was only a few months old when the play premiered, hint at an incoming gambling epidemic. There are even period-correct beer labels, though credulity is stretched when someone repeatedly gets phone reception in a basement. It is when the writing veers away from jokes and jibes that the play sags irredeemably. Two-thirds of the characters have no inner life, and half are prone to sudden outbursts which resemble artificial attempts to raise the stakes. That almost succeeds when Stephen discovers that his son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille) has been gambling with Ash (Brendan Coyle), a rival patriarch, and reacts like a spurned lover. But the absence of peril and gravitas in Matthew Dunster's staging, and in his conception of character, is total. Ash is defeated rather than dangerous. Carl, a slot-machine addict, is about as troubled as Doogie Howser MD. The card games are fatally boring. There are compensations. In Moi Tran's design, the restaurant is dominated by a pebbledash wall the colour of dried blood, which hints at the premises' butcher-shop origins. A spectacular piece of engineering makes us feel as if we are descending into the basement for the second act. This is eclipsed by the most special effect of all: Animashaun, an exuberantly geezerish geyser of charm, toweringly tall and quarterback-shouldered but with a dancer's grace. It is fitting in a play about competitive masculinity that a single performer should emerge victorious, but the contest isn't even close: this is practically a one-man show. 'You've lost the plot,' someone tells Mugsy. 'I am the plot,' he snaps back. Hear, hear. At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 7 June
