Storm Thorgerson 1943 - 2013

It is with sadness that I take up my metaphorical pen to write yet again about the passing of another music business personality.  Only this time the subject is not an international rock star nor even a little known fringe artist, but a designer; Storm Thorgerson, who died on 18 April of cancer, aged 69.

He, of course, will be best remembered for being the ‘fifth member’ of Pink Floyd who, through his design company Hipgnosis, created a series of unforgettable album sleeve designs through the 70s and 80s – the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ prism, the mournful cow of ‘Atom Heart Mother’, the Pig flying over Battersea power station of ‘Animals’ and the burning man of ‘Wish You Were Here’ being just a few of his creations that are welded to the Pink Floyd brand.

His unique style can also be seen on a whole host of sleeves from Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and The Scorpions to Muse and Biffy Clyro and I can’t help but think that with his passing the final nail has been well and truly driven home into the coffin of the album sleeve.  Whilst the CD still held out as the premier conveyor of music, the sleeve, in its reduced form remained a fixture but with the increasing move towards download files and music streaming through the likes of Spotify, the requirement for an iconic sleeve design has all but gone.

Which is a shame.  I still have all my old albums, hundreds of them, stored in cupboards and whilst I only play them very occasionally, I shall never give them away because they represent a repository of Art.  These days I seem to spend more time taking out covers and just looking at them rather than playing the disc they contain.  In many respects, the covers hold more memories than the music - times and places, purchases and parading.  Let’s face it; you can’t walk around school exhibiting your immaculate musical taste with an MP3 file, now can you?

Many of my old albums now spend their declining years in frames on my wall, being rotated every now and again so that their beauty can be admired by all.  In remembrance of Storm Thorgerson, I think I shall have a small exhibition of Hipgnosis sleeves up for a week or two.  They are going to be these four:

'Sheet Music' - 10cc

Peter Gabriel II

'In Deep' - Argent

'Atom Heart Mother' - Pink Floyd

Side 4 - Was it Really Necessary?

How exciting!  In April, I am going to meet up with some old friends to see the Genesis tribute band, ‘The Musical Box’ play the whole of the ‘Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ show, complete with costumes and back projection, at the Shepherds Bush Empire. Our little band of gig-goers first met up in the mid-1970s during the Genesis prog years but never saw them in their original line-up with Peter Gabriel, so this should be an interesting exercise in nostalgia.  Watch this space.

In fact, the anticipation prompted me to dig out my Genesis Archive 1967-1975 Box Set and listen to the live version of the Lamb recorded at the Shrine Auditorium, LA on their ’75 tour of the USA.  I say ‘Live’ but many of the vocal and some guitar parts were re-recorded to replace indistinct or error-strewn originals.  Egos eh?  As a double studio LP, I always felt that ‘The Lamb…’ was a bit front loaded, with all the good stuff on the first 2 sides and the remainder waning towards side 4 where it ends on the less-than-impressive ‘It’.  Which got me thinking about other studio double LPs – those much maligned products of the vinyl age.

Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ suffers from the same malaise whereby each of the first three sides has an ambience and continuity all their own but the fourth is a bit of a dumping ground for a rag-bag of left-overs.  And don’t get me started on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ which is great for three sides then after ‘Run Like Hell’ descends into pseudo-operatic boredom on side 4.  Some doubles are a little short of material, full stop.  Joni Mitchell’s ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’ is barely 16 minutes a side and those Dutch instrumentalists’ magnum opus, ‘Focus 3’ runs out of steam on side 4 with just the drum solo and reprise continuing from the previous track on side 3 and an old unrelated song (left off the CD reissue!) bolted on to make up the running time to about 14 minutes.  Hmm.

Even The Beatles weren’t immune from the falling off side 4 syndrome as the inclusion of ‘Revolution 9’ on side 4 of the White Album shows.  In fact, barring ‘best of’s’, I can’t think of a single double album where side 4 is the best.  It may be a deliberate ploy by the record companies, knowing that no-one ever gets as far as side 4 so why put all your best stuff there?  It begs the question: is the natural length of an extended musical work is nearer to three sides than four?  Since the advent of the CD this assertion has legs, as many albums issued since the mid-80s have a running time of 50-55 minutes, approximately equivalent to three sides of vinyl.  Q.E.D.

T'was in the Year of '77

1977 was an interesting year.  It was the year that The Sex Pistols released ‘Never Mind The Bollocks…’ and bloated corporate rock was blown away forever…allegedly.  Just to underline the brutal military coup undertaken by Punk, Johnny Rotten sported a lurid ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt and dared anyone to defend the old proggers.

1977 was also the year that the said Pink Floyd released ‘Animals’ and pigs flew over Battersea Power Station.  History shows that I bought and enjoyed both albums in equal measure in direct contravention of the Us And Them – Choose Your Side of the Fence Act 1976.  You see, musical genres never allow for this sort of thing.  Backed up by the music press with axes to grind, nobody with any street cred to protect was allowed to like, well, just music, you had to choose.  I definitely felt aligned with the energy that the New Wave brought and to a certain extent agreed that the mid-seventies needed a shake-up, but I still liked some of the bands that were in the firing line so I was a fence-sitter with interests in both camps – it gave you more options.

The reason for my musings on this interesting juxtaposition of styles has been brought about by the purchase of the Pink Floyd Discovery Box Set (all 14 studio albums remastered in a natty box).  Whilst I have many of the Floyd’s albums on vinyl, I never converted them to CD and have never owned, or even listened to, many of their back catalogue so a cheap eBay purchase seemed like the answer.  So here I am in 2012 listening to the Soundtrack album, ‘Obscured by Clouds’ (excellent) and ‘The Final Cut’ (dreadful) for the first time, well,  ever.

But more particularly, I have been listening to ‘Animals’, an album that I have not set on the old turntable since the 80s and my overriding impression is not one of bloated self indulgence, but one of anger.  It is a very angry album indeed, driven by Roger Waters various neuroses.  Which is somewhat ironic, for the punk movement that sought to replace the established bands was based almost entirely on anger.  Yet now by comparison, ‘Never Mind The Bollocks…’ sounds a little tame and its ‘anger’ just false political posturing.  On the other hand, the anger displayed on ‘Animals’ is very real.  The vitriol pouring from ‘Sheep’ and in particular, ‘Pigs’ reeks of a genuine hatred (especially against TV clean-up campaigner, Mary Whitehouse).  Frankly I find Waters far more scary that Rotten, and that’s before you get to Gilmore’s final solo on ‘Pigs’ which slashes at you like broken glass.

Yet, and this is the cruncher, I still find myself in the same position that I was 35 years ago and that is that really, I still like both of them.

What Value Music?

The other day, in a moment of supreme weakness, I made the mistake of answering my phone without checking that the caller had WITHHELD their number.  This can only mean one thing; a cold call and if there’s one thing I hate it’s a cold caller.  I usually ignore such intrusions but this time I was caught and had to go through the rigmarole of politely telling them to bugger off.  This time it was from an on-line wine seller that I use regularly and whilst it started promisingly with the ‘only available off line to you, mate’ patter, it ended with a price that was no better than their normal on-line prices.  What was the point?

The trouble is, everyone wants something for nothing these days, including me, so ringing me up to offer the same price I could expect to spend elsewhere was never going to hold my interest and what goes for wine goes for music too.  Having said that, I am of a generation that at least expects to pay something for music, unlike many of today’s kids who seem to think it is their birthright to download everything for free, so cheap rather than free is always on the menu.

The old marketing hook of offering stuff at low prices can be a bit hit and miss.  For reasons that I don’t really understand to this day, back in 1973 I declined Virgin Records’s offer of ‘The Faust Tapes’ by Krautrockers, Faust for the miniscule price of 49p – an LP for the price of a vinyl single at the time.  Perhaps it was TOO cheap?  See how difficult it is?  In retrospect this was probably the correct decision as it is a jumble of live off-cuts but nevertheless, at that price who cares?

Yet some years before, in 1971, I had snapped up ‘Relics’ by Pink Floyd, a band I didn’t really know much about, but when it appeared on the cut-price Starline label, I couldn’t resist.  ‘Relics’ is a peculiar mixture of 1967-1969 period Floyd material bringing together the brilliant early Syd Barrett singles, atmospheric tracks from the soundtrack album, ‘More’, a collection of B sides and odd album cuts from their first two albums.  It was my introduction to The Pink Floyd and remains one of my favourite albums of theirs to this day.  As I have mused before, the late sixties was a strange period and the music created against the backdrop of social unrest and end of the Hippy dream still has a slightly haunted quality to it.  Certainly, this has an ambience that no other record I know of has.

So in the case of the budget label release, ‘Relics’ scored a hit and set me on the trail of proper grown-up Pink Floyd LPs.  Just let someone ring me up today and try and sell it to me…grrr.

Pink Floyd: The Dinosaur That Lived

Sometimes you can just never tell how people will react. People whom you have known for yonks turn out to have the most unexpected responses in certain situations. Personality surprises can often be shocking.

Take my sister, for example. I’ve known her for, well, all her life and musically, we couldn’t be more different. I still haven’t recovered from being forced to listen to all her vast collection of interminable 12-inch disco singles from the 1970s blaring through the wall into my bedroom when we all lived at home. My sister was a clubber and a dancer, whereas I was a stay-at-home-with-the-lava-lamp type of listener. And never the twain.

So you will probably be as amazed as me when you learn that her all time favourite album is not ‘Saturday Night Fever’ nor anything by Chic or KC and the Sunshine Band…but ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Just what is it about this album that seems to cross all known boundaries? You can’t dance to it (well, not until the Scissor Sisters get hold of it), yet my sister loves it. In fact, when you come to think about it, Pink Floyd is a mass of contradictions. Underground, yet mainstream. Experimental yet accessible. Dinosaur, yet loved. Let’s face it; anyone who can make a hit album out of something like ‘Umma Gumma’ deserves some respect but then bands were indulged and encouraged to develop once upon a time.

I watched some of the ‘Live at Pompeii’ extracts on YouTube the other day and hearing the live versions of ‘Echoes’ and ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ offers a few hints to the answer and it is quite simply this: they are (or were) a damnned good band. They managed to do exactly all those things I mentioned above. They were weird yet wonderful, edgy yet musical and above all, talented and committed. I think the real reason DSOTM succeeds is that it is genuinely tuneful whilst being a bit quirky and it deals with timeless themes of the human condition, which affect us all whether you’re a wallflower or exhibitionist.

Not all art appeals to everyone yet Pink Floyd seemed to have managed it with DSOTM whilst thinking they were being wilfully experimental. This must be true otherwise there’s no way that my sister would have it as her number one, it would be ‘Spirits Having Flown’ by the Bee Gees and then where would we be?

15 Minutes

Andy Warhol famously postulated that ‘In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes’, and although I still seem to waiting for my golden quarter of an hour to turn up, there is no doubt that some ‘ordinary’ people have had theirs and then some as the limit gets extended by fate to infinity (and beyond). I love those old black and white iconic photographs of unknown people that are now instantly recognisable years after they were taken – the two women on a windy Margate seafront trying to keep their skirts down whilst eating ice-cream springs to mind. Other, perhaps more serious examples would include the student in Tiananmen Square and the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.

But it’s not just photographs that allow the statutory 15 minutes to extend over the decades in contravention to Warhol’s law. There are many instances in music where the average man-in-the-street is called upon to contribute a small favour which inadvertently becomes part of a rampaging monster.

This thought occurred whilst I was listening to 10 cc’s ‘I’m not in Love’ where in the middle section a woman’s voice scolds, "Be quiet, big boys don't cry...” Who said that? I did a bit of research on this and it turns out that they were spoken, not by anyone in the band or associated with it, but by a woman named Kathy Warren, the receptionist of the Strawberry Studios where the band recorded the track, probably in between doing her nails and answering the phone. It is instances like this where Kathy’s 15 minutes of fame is extended to 15 years and maybe 15 centuries for all I know on the back of a massively successful single, that show how fate moves in a very mysterious way indeed.

Further examples are provided by the voices recorded for ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by various members of the Pink Floyd management, road crew and sundry studio doormen. They had their 15 minutes almost immortalized by one of the biggest selling albums of all time but probably didn’t expect to at the time. Reportedly, Paul McCartney’s responses were considered too cautious and thus missed out. I’ll bet he’s kicking himself now (or not).

It is a rather pleasing irony that those who specifically set out to make themselves world-famous have often failed miserably, yet those that have no such intent have had notoriety thrust upon them. Of course, they weren’t paid for it, but who said fame pays?

Dance Mission: Impossible!

Imagine the scene. You are a DJ at the office Christmas Party where, let’s be frank, your punters are not exactly talented dancers. What’s the worst thing you can possibly do? Apart from snog the boss’s secretary. Top of the list will probably be to play one (or all if you’re really wanting to visit the job centre the next morning) of the following:
‘Living in the Past’ – Jethro Tull
‘Money’ – Pink Floyd
’15 Step’ – Radiohead
‘Four Sticks’ – Led Zeppelin
‘Solsbury Hill’ – Peter Gabriel

Leaving aside the various artistic merits of the songs and artists, the real reason why these songs should never grace a social occasion where amateurs stalk the dance floor like primeval beasts (after a few stiff gins) is that they are virtually impossible to dance to - unless you happen to have trained with the Bolshoi Ballet during that summer season in Europe. And the reason why George from accounts will have difficulty with them is that they do not have simple time signatures, or to put it another way, a consistent, danceable beat.

The majority of pop/rock songs march along in 4/4 time (4 beats in every bar) and a lesser number waltz around in 3/4 time (3 beats in the bar) and these are relatively easy rhythms to understand and thus dance to. The songs in the list above have complex time signatures with either 5 or 7 beats to every bar for at least 50 % of their playing time and this makes them very difficult to decipher on a dance floor. Believe me, as a non-dancer myself I am particularly sensitive to this sort of thing and sympathise entirely with the hapless George.

Nevertheless, whilst not great for the disco, songs or music with complex time signatures can be thrillingly different. The progressive bands of the early 70s experimented with odd time signatures endlessly with greater or lesser success, but my favourite by some distance is the theme to Mission: Impossible, the 60s TV spy thriller series featuring self-destructing tapes and lots of false walls. Written by Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin, it rampages along in 5/4 time giving it a slightly ‘lumpy’ and syncopated feel which really suits the inventiveness of the programme itself. Over the years, this piece of music has rather taken on a life of its own and is now used constantly as background accompaniment to any daring deed (unsurprisingly, Shrek 2 used it in a rescue scene) and is probably recognised by most people even if they are unaware of the original TV programme that spawned it.

All in all, a truly iconic piece of music. Just don’t try and dance to it.

Richard Wright (1943 - 2008)

As the world now knows, Pink Floyd’s enigmatic keyboardist Richard (Rick) Wright died on 15 September of cancer, aged 65. He now joins Syd Barrett in the Great Gig in the Sky.

I wonder how many of us who watched the Floyd play the Live8 concert in London’s Hyde Park in July 2005, when Roger Waters joined the remaining three to play as the original line up for the first time in 25 odd years, realised that this would be the last time we would see them as a complete unit.

I have fragmented memories of Richard, mainly because he was slightly in the shadow of the Waters/Gilmour axis, but nevertheless he had his moments. One of my favourite Pink Floyd albums is the oddments collection, ‘Relics’ which I bought very cheaply when it was originally released on the budget Starline label in the UK. It comprises a strange assortment of tracks and includes two Wright compositions, ‘Paintbox’, originally a ‘B’ side to ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘Remember a Day’ lifted from ‘Saucerful of Secrets’. Both these compositions are overtly memorable; being snapshot examples of late 1960s post psychedelic Englishness. They stand easily against Waters’ solid musicianship and Barrett’s brittle genius and I was impressed.

Another memory involves his trademark single line keyboard ‘noodles’ which pepper the live versions of both ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ and ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ from ‘Umma Gumma’. Mike Oldfield once said that it was this technique that inspired parts of ‘Tubular Bells’. It is their spiralling invention that keeps you listening even though it is essentially a very simple idea.

But of course, Richard’s lasting legacy will be the melancholy grandeur of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ with its beautifully evocative chord progressions under Clare Torry’s wailing vocals. It is music of the highest order.

Farewell Richard, we’ll miss you. And say hello to Syd for us.