Another Olympic Triumph

More great news about the Olympics, via the BBC:


"Residents at an estate in east London have received a leaflet saying soldiers could be placed there during the Games. The Ministry of Defence says it is evaluating sites for surface-to-air missiles for the Olympic Games, and could place them at residential flats. It says part of an air-defence system might be based at a water tower on the estate, where 700 people live."


This really does reassure you that the Olympics is a worthwhile event and that it is being managed sensitively and sensibly for the benefit of us all.


See also 'Go Figure'.

In Memory Of Syd

I know I had a good time last night because I have the bruises to prove it. All down my right leg. That's where I was banging the tambourine to help "conduct" a music workshop performance by the Homeless Oratorio.

These great people and musicians get together regularly at Crisis in east London, and I was lucky enough to be there as part of a course I'm doing in leading music workshops.

This particular workshop is led by the remarkable Clare Kenny, bass player to Sinead O'Connor, and (in her days with Hank Wangford) aka Cherry Red Footwear. Also helping out on percussion was local resident Dave Rowntree, drummer with Blur.

The piece for the night — rather surreally — was Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine, which the 14-strong group performed with tremendous energy.

In just over a week, they will be on stage at the Royal Albert Hall with Brit Floyd (leading Floyd soundalikes) in a performance that has largely been brought about by the late Syd Barrett's sister's involvement in charity work. It looks like being an amazing night...

Go Figure

The Olympic Games.. There are arguments for and there are arguments against. The most eloquent argument against has been produced by the combined forces of the Mayor of London, National Rail, the Department for Transport, the Highways Agency and Transport for London.

It conveys in an instant — and visually — the argument against staging the Olympics in London. It is this brilliant map showing the impact of overloading an already overburdened public transport system.

The tube stations with orange rings around them will be "busier than usual" and the ones with red rings around them will be "exceptionally busy". I think the idea of this extremely helpful display is to show you which stations to avoid as you make your way around the tube network.

So just take a look at the map above... and everything should become clear....

The Death Of Levon Helm

Strange that I chose to write about the late, great drummer BJ Wilson just a few days ago. For BJ said long ago that his own favourite drummer was Levon Helm. And now Levon has finally passed away, after a long and successful career post-The Band and post-cancer.

Perhaps even more so than BJ Wilson, Levon was a truly musical drummer. And not only that, he could sing and play drums at the same time. That is, really sing and play drums at the same time. He didn't just do a bit of backing vocals, or sing a song while still keeping time. He sang lead vocals with heart and soul while playing full-on in the same fashion. If you need proof, check out his performances on Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz. Or see the news clip on Levon's website.

Like many of The Band's members, Levon Helm had his roots in a pre-rock era that stretched back to circus tents, medicine shows and vaudeville, when the power and the mystery of the song and the performance were everything. It's no wonder that Bob Dylan picked Levon's men to back him up through one of his most crazily fruitful and creative periods.

There cannot be another Levon Helm. But any drummer who has watched him play and sing is bound to take something of Levon into their own playing, even if it is subconsciously.

Sympathy For The Devil

A taxi driver explained to me yesterday that there were just three fundamental problems in Britain: one, the fact that we are run by Europe; two, mass immigration; three, the selling off of public utilities to foreign companies.

He reckoned that the "immigrants" would, because of their higher birth rate, take over the country at some point before too long.

And then he added something that shocked me.

He said, "You can see where that Anders Behring Breivik is coming from." The taxi driver did concede that killing 77 people was an extreme act, although he suggested that the media had given the impression that these people were killed at random when, in fact, there were clear political reasons why they had been targeted.

He — the taxi driver — seemed a really nice bloke, and I don't think for one minute that he was advocating violence. But he did — like many, many others, no doubt — feel there was a need for a strong political leader to stand up and tell the truth about the three big issues mentioned above, and for the British to stop moaning and do something.

Will there be a British Breivik?

The Literary Drummer

Question: What do you call someone who spends all their time hanging around with musicans? Answer: A drummer.

Not particularly funny jokes like this reinforce the idea that drummers are not proper musos. Trying to think of the most musical drummer in rock, I reckoned it had to be BJ Wilson.

You might know him for playing on Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, or you might know him from the various stories about Jimmy Page asking him to join Led Zeppelin prior to his thinking about a bloke called John Bonham.

But you should know him for his epic work with the classic line-up of Procol Harum. Wilson's style has been described as "literary", so closely did the drama of his percussion follow the drama of Keith Reid's lyrics and Gary Brooker's music.

If you need any persuasion, listen to the drum fills on the song A Salty Dog — a piece for which Brooker said there was no drum part, but Wilson proved emphatically there was. This was totally original drumming, played completely for the song, using space and silence just as much as sound. And always surprises.

Scores of other tracks, such as the similarly cinematic Whaling Stories, illustrated Wilson's musicality. But check out his time-stopping barrage in the climaxes of Repent Walpurgis, from the very first Procol album, if you want to hear him in fullest flow.

Wilson died awfully and tragically young. And no one has ever quite matched him — as a rock drummer and musician.

From Tooting To Tokyo

The wonderful Das Fluff who climaxed last year's Tootstock fest have gone on to even greater things. Dawn Lintern and her hypnotic songs have been wowing audiences in Japan this week (see live video from Tokyo). Dawn and her Fluffers deserve to be big here as well as in Japan. Check out their website to find out why.

The equally talented Hero & Leander will be following in Das Fluff's gigsteps when they close this year's Tootstock on June 30. There is already interest in H&L in Germany.

Today Tooting. Tomorrow the world...

Dying For A Pie

The visual pun is better than the verbal one on this PETA poster. But either way, it seems to have upset a few people. Of course, being a vegetarian or a vegan is supposed to upset people.

I remember once being the only vegetarian at a dinner party and being seated alongside the owner of a meat-products company. "Do you realise that people like you could put me out of business?" he asked me, quite seriously. "Yes. That's why I'm doing it," I answered as politely as I could.

This latest PETA campaign is making the point that meat-eating isn't healthy. Which it isn't; vegetarians tend to live longer and healthier lives than meat-eaters. But if it were proved that vegetarians die earlier and more miserable deaths than carnivores, I wouldn't stop being vegetarian. Better health is a bonus from refusing to eat meat, but not the main reason for it. The main reason for my being vegetarian (and for admiring the principles of vegans) is because the meat industry is cruel, disgusting and unnecessary.

Playing Games

The Olympics. Isn't it a wonderful event? It's sole raison d'etre is the promotion and enjoyment of sport rather than moneymaking and exploitation on a grand scale.

Or did I get that the wrong way round? The Musicians' Union has just announced reports of musicians being asked to perform for no payment at Olympics and Jubilee events. As is so often the case, it seems it's assumed that musicians enjoy what they do so much that they will do it for free.

The MU says: "Our understanding is that all other sectors involved in putting on these events, eg security, staging, equipment hire etc are being paid their usual fees, but not musicians." It is urging its member to refuse to work for nothing, and to report any such offers.

This is nothing new in London. Pubs, clubs and bars there have long exploited bands' desire to play by offering them no-pay gigs, or gigs with convoluted contracts that basically ensure the band only gets paid if it brings in an impossible number of punters. The venues make money on the bar, and sometimes on the door too, and the bands tend to make nothing.

London is supposed to be the hub of the music scene, but it's generally only in the provinces that pubs and clubs pay bands a reasonable fee. That's why the gig list for Russ Payne and the Shark Dentists looks kind of provincial; the reason is that we refuse to play for nothing.

Of course, professional musicians enjoy what they do, but they enjoy it a whole lot more when what they do is recognised as having some value.

Fundamental Problem

Staying on the subject of compassion... or rather its absence. Comments from Joe Public about the deportation of Abu Hamza to the US read like something from Private Eye's From The Message Boards... but really you couldn't make them up: "only another 3.4 million to go" and joky comments about Hamza's suitability for waterboarding and death by firing squad...

Are people really so unaware of what they are saying? Is this real fundamentalism? Fundamental self-unawareness? What exactly is the difference between these fundamentalists of the right and the fundamentalists of the Taliban?

Or perhaps the question is: what is the obvious similarity?

Just Another Brick

I was looking at Samantha Brick's website, just to see where on earth this person was coming from. I found that it wasn't that dissimilar to my own... an attempt to say this is who I am and this is what I do... oh and if you like the look of me, why not give me some work... It's what we're all doing, isn't it?

Brick's "crime" seems to have been (a) to write for the Daily Mail (and a few of us have done that, too) and (b) to expose how she perceives herself and how she thinks the world perceives her.

The observer is the observed, as discussed in a previous post, and Brick seems to be tied up in a feedback loop or two when it comes to being aware of what's going on. But that, too, is not much different from the rest of us, is it?

So instead of pillorying her, maybe we should just see if there is something of us in her, and vice versa. And if there is, maybe some compassion would be in order.

The Juice On Johnson

Robert Johnson... He had to get in here sooner or later... If Sleepy John Estes was scary (see previous post), then Robert Johnson was downright terrifying. He became known to me through the composer's credits on Rambling On My Mind (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the Blues Breakers album) and Four Until Late (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the first Cream album, Fresh Cream).

From there it was a short step to hearing pretty much everything that Johnson had ever recorded in his brief but almost unbelievably brilliant blues career.

There's not much to add to all the thousands of words written about Johnson. It's enough to point out that without him, it's difficult to imagine any of the subsequent evolution of blues/rock. Oh, and can we please remember that it was Johnson, not Zeppelin, who coined the immortal line: "You can squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg."

Men Of Mystery

Dylan, Tooting, doubling up, Like A Flower, Sabatini, Scaravelli... One thing leads to another in BlogWorld... And Vanda Scaravelli's yoga probably leads on to Jiddhu Krishnamurti. It was the great teacher Krishnamurti who introduced Scaravelli to Desikachar ... If you're interested in any of this, follow the links... But be warned, once you start going into the teachings of Krishnamurti, you may find (and even accept) that there is no way back out again.

While Dylan, or his songs, seem to come from the mind and heart of a shaman/poet/jokerman in tune with mystery and that semi-enlightenment that shines through the work of musical and poetic geniuses, Krishnamurti appears to be the full real deal, the mind and heart in full enlightenment and in complete touch with the nameless.

Why mention Dylan and Krishnamurti in the same sentence? I've seen them both on stage and can't think of any other humans of that stature that have moved me as they have. But while Dylan notoriously declared he saw himself as "a song and dance man" (which those who have seen him in recent times will probably appreciate), Krishnamurti always made it clear that "this is not an entertainment".

Krishnamurti, like Dylan, sees the positive in the negative. Only in rejecting everything that is "known" can one come to truth, or, more correctly, can the truth reveal itself. It's not clear whether Dylan has now rejected religion, although a telling line on his 2009 album Together Through Life suggested that the road that had led him from 1973's Knocking On Heaven's Door to 1997's Tryin' To Get To Heaven (Before They Close The Door) had finally brought him to the conclusion that "The door has closed for ever more, if indeed there ever was a door..." Is it just me, or is this one of the most powerfully haunting lines Dylan has ever sung?

Krishnamurti rejects religion, along with nationality, identity, politics, philosophy. You name it, he rejects it. And, like Dylan, he gives you no answers, just asks questions... and suggests you ask questions... for all the answers are inside you... and you are the world (literally, not theoretically). And that statement is a universe away from the dire charity song We Are The World (which, amazingly, managed to drag in Dylan for a fleeting contribution).

Krishnamurti always comes back to the fact that the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought. The "I' is a false construct of thought, memory and psychological time... and psychological time does not exist, any more than the past or the present exist.

Heavy stuff. But if you want lighter stuff, you'll be content with preachers, gurus, entertainers and those song and dance men who have no connection to the power of mystery.

Krishnamurti died in 1986. He still seems to live in the minds and hearts of thousands of those who heard and saw him and tried to get to grips with his 65 years of teachings. He was 90. Dylan is still only 70 and has a few more gigs to play.

I can't think of anyone else but these two whom I would give almost anything to see... apart from maybe the Buddha... and Robert Johnson... uh oh, more blogs coming on...

Double Double Trouble

First, I manage to organise a music fest on the same day as Bob Dylan headlines a festival down the road (see yesterday's post). Then I find I've done it again.

I'm still finishing off the tweaks on my novel Like A Flower, when I find that a book called Like A Flower has just been published.

When I chose the title — and theme — of my book at the beginning of 2011, I checked everywhere to make sure nobody else had used it.

But Sandra Sabatini's Like A Flower has been published since then. I can hardly be too cross. Sabatini's book is subtitled My Years Of Yoga With Vanda Scaravelli. And it is absolutely beautiful to read and to look at.

Scaravelli was an amazing teacher who developed a "yoga with no name", concentrating on the awakening of the spine and working in harmony with gravity. I was fortunate enough to be able to study for a few years with one of her "disciples", Sophy Hoare, another remarkable yoga teacher, who still informs my own yoga practice.

Since Sabatini's Like A Flower is a non-fiction yoga book and my Like A Flower is a novel, I guess they can co-exist. I hope so because, without giving away too much, my title became the whole point of my book, so no other will really do.

Dylan Unlikely To Play Tootstock

Having organised the Tootstock festival for June 30, 2012, so that it didn't coincide with the Olympics, other gigs and everybody's holidays, I now find that Bob Dylan has announced his one and only UK date for the year is, yes, you guessed...

This is frustrating since I always go to see Dylan whenever possible. If you're alive at the same time as the greatest of all singer/songwriters, you have to make the most of it.

Mind you, Dylan has been known to add on extra dates around his "one-off" gigs. When he played the Feis last summer, it was supposed to be his only 2011 UK appearance, but he managed to sneak back into the country twice in the autumn for two more legs of his Never Ending Tour.

The only certainties are that I won't be going to see Dylan on June 30, and Dylan won't be playing Tootstock. But I'm willing to bet he'll announce more UK dates this summer...

Wrong Is Right

Thoughts of Sleepy John Estes and making a change led on to We're Going Wrong. It has to be a contender for the most perfect song. Okay, there's Like A Rolling Stone and A Day In The Life and Layla... and everyone can add their own contenders.

But We're Going Wrong, which first appeared on Cream's Disraeli Gears album in 1967, is perfect for its simplicity, for its emotion and, of course, for the musicianship.

Ginger Baker's wonderful tom-tom patterns on a 6/8 rhythm could probably hold the song together on their own. Jack Bruce's bass is largely restrained, but his pure voice is increasingly unrestrained as the song unfolds. And then we get Eric Clapton, at the height of his fuzzy-haired, woman-tone period, with sublime notes played in just the right places.

On stage in the Sixties, the song became a tour de force, and still possessed its power when Cream revived it — and themselves — in 2005.

Many listeners, particularly in 1967, took We're Going Wrong to be a political/philosophical/protest kind of a song. Look at the lyrics and you'll see why. But it is documented that Jack Bruce wrote it after a row with his wife, and that it is simply about a fractured relationship.

Whether it's about the failed relationship between two particular people or about all the failed relationships that make up the world we live in, the song works. And if the microcosm and the macrocosm are all one, then it's not even worth differentiating.

Either way Jack Bruce wrote a masterpiece. For him, it might have been personal. For us, it's a perfect and universal call for change.

First Time I Met The Blues

The first real blues record I ever heard was an album by Sleepy John Estes and it was actually quite terrifying. I had never heard anything remotely like it in my little schoolboy life.

Not only did it sound scarily grown up, but it opened a window into another, darker, more real world.

And it wasn't just that voice and that guitar. There was also the blues harmonica playing of Hammie Nixon. Altogether, this new (to me) sound was almost too much to take.

"Everybody ought to make a change some time," sang Sleepy John. And that's about all any of us needs to remember...