The Ministry Of Truth

Drum intro
[0:00-0:32]

Some SMIPs revolve around profound lyrics. Some SMIPs revolve around painstakingly constructed aural soundscapes. Some SMIPs warrant intricate dissection.

This SMIP isn’t like that.  

This SMIP is just a mad bloke belting seven shades of shit out of his drum kit for 30 seconds.

The history of Blondie is a soap opera that has been recounted countless times by better and more authoritative writers than me.  Suffice to say that today, 34 years on, only three of the seven founding members of a band then called Angel And The Snake are still standing – guitarist Chris Stein, vocalist and general deity Debbieorah Harry and drummer Clem Burke.

(Keyboard player Jimmy Destri retired in 2004; bassist Gary Valentine left in 1978 just as the band began to achieve success, replaced first by Frank Infante and then, when Infante took up second guitar duties, by Stockport’s own Nigel Harrison; singing sisters Tish and Eileen ‘Snooky’ Bellomo came and went very quickly.) 

Burke – a rock’n'roll survivor who really has been there, seen it and done it all – is a whirling dervish, perpetual motion machine of a drummer.  If it’s there to be hit, Burke’s going to hit it.  Hard.

Where some of pop’s best and most successful drummers are there to hold things steady and blend into the background – the Charlie Watts and Larry Mullens of this parish – Burke sees himself as an entertainer first and foremost.  Sticks are twirled, sticks are thrown, sticks are dropped: but you never forget he’s there.

“Clem had this attitude that he was Keith Moon and just
wanted to play EVERY drum ALL of the time. My first
challenge was to get him to play in time.”
- Blondie producer Mike Chapman

When Blondie first split up in 1982, Burke became one of pop’s most in-demand drummers: The Eurythmics, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Bob Dylan, Nancy Sinatra and The Ramones are just a few of the acts to have benefitted from Burke’s tub-thumping either in the studio or on tour before Blondie’s second coming in 1998.

When Jimmy Destri’s vintage Maria hit number one in February 1999, Blondie became the only American act to have UK number one singles in each of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.  They may add to that record yet.

Nigel Harrison wrote the music for Union City Blue; Harry provided the lyric, inspired by the movie in which she was filming in 1979, Marcus Reichart’s extremely odd Union City and its location.  (The song does not appear in the movie.)

Union City itself lies in the state of New Jersey and is the most densely populated city in the USA, with more than 67,000 citizens crammed into just 1¼ square miles.  Joined to Manhattan by the Lincoln Tunnel, wave after wave of immigrants have made up Union City’s resolutely working class population, working in its docks (on which the main part of the song’s video was filmed, Burke and his drum kit banished to the upper deck) and manufacturing factories.  The Union Dry Dock office building can be seen over Burke’s shoulder in the early shots of the video.

Harrison says:

“When I started it, I tried to come up with one of those anthemic flag and banner songs.”

He succeeded.

From the pulsating intro [0:00-0:16] to the full-on main riff [0:16-0:31] and Harry’s early moans of the first chorus – “Oh-ho, oh-ho: what are we gonna do?” [0:32-0:37] – this record is defiantly in the listener’s face.

When the band breaks things down after the second verse and third chorus [2:00-2:04 - four seconds and no drumming!] it’s almost an act of mercy, allowing the listener to gather breath and sensibility for a final push over the top.

Harrison’s bass [2:04] heralds in that last minute-long onslaught, a never-ending sonic wave of cymbals and drums breaking over a sea of guitars, while one of pop’s best female voices writhes around with trademark silk and steel phrasing.

The song repeats to fade – a song that doesn’t stop, a feeling that doesn’t end.  ”What are we gonna do?”  We are going to submit absolutely, Goddess Debbieorah – even if we’re eight years old and haven’t a clue what it is to which we are submitting.

There are fewer than 100 words in this song’s entire lyric (and half of those are indistinct – despite loving this record for almost 29 years I genuinely didn’t know the word “turquoise” featured [1:32] until I started researching this SMIP) and the recording is an archetypal straightforward guitar, drum and bass thrash with a bit of synth low in the mix [most prominent at 1:50-2:00].

Blondie – perhaps the best singles band in pop apart from The Beatles and ABBA - released a run of 13 almost flawless UK Top 15 hits in 5½ years.

Union City Blue, never released as a single in the States, was the lowest charting of their singles in that run, cresting at number 13 in December 1979.

It was the final record I bought before I was consigned to a two-year, four-month long pop-cultural exile in the Middle East.  By the time I got back to the UK, Blondie were no more.

The unexpected reunion allowed me to fulfill one of my outstanding desires – to see the band live.  On 22 November 1998 at the Lyceum Theatre in London the Minister was privileged to witness the re-formed Blondie launch their second coming.  Harry exuded sass (there’s no other word for it) and the Minister dug the Mrs. Robinson vibe, at least until the Minister’s Wife slapped him a couple of times.  The hits brought the house down and tears to the Minister’s eyes.

It would only later emerge that Harrison and Infante had been excluded from the reunion and unsuccessfully sued the other original members in an attempt to prevent them from using the name.

Union City Blue isn’t the band’s best record – that honour falls to the colossal Atomic (from the same album, Eat To The Beat) – but its throbbing intensity and Burke’s manic percussive noise propellingthe show along makes it one of the most perfect, singalong-at-the-top-of-your-voice driving records ever made.  It’s what Monday morning commutes to work were made for. 

“‘Union City [Blue]‘ is the most celebratory [song].
It could have almost any words to it, it just sounds so anthemic.”
- Debbieorah Harry, Platinum Blonde – A Portrait by Cathay Che 

I’ve just noticed: a child conceived tonight and carried to full term will be born Post Bush.

I’m about half an inch away from removing The Guardian website from my bookmarks.

Its Comment Is Free section is becoming a sandpit for chimps who’ve been given a box of Crayolas to play with by Alan Rusbridger. The pisspoor Martin Jacques column of last week was today almost surpassed by a pisspoor Zoe Williams column that, unlike Jacques’ effort, is so pisspoor it can’t even be considered funny and to which I refuse to link.

Meanwhile, its Breaking News section currently has one “headline”:

COMING UP TONIGHT: Follow The Apprentice with Heidi Stephens’s live blog from 9pm

To paraphrase Keith Burkinshaw, there used to be a newspaper in there.

I’ve just updated WordPress.  It transpires that we’re only up to 392 posts (including this one), so we’ll get to celebrate the 400th anniversary again soon-ish.

I won the court case yesterday. This may have had less to do with the brilliance of my oratorical skills than with the fact that the claimant didn’t turn up.

The District Judge and I sat and looked at each other for 20 minutes; she then asked me a few cursory questions about what my case was; she then looked at her watch, sighed and said, “It’s his case and he can’t expect it to get very far if he doesn’t turn up. The claim is dismissed. I suggest you leave as quickly as possible in case he arrives any second.”

“Thank you, Madam.”

This full version of events may not have been disclosed to my colleagues, though I have made them aware that the outcome was favourable…

The court usher had more facial piercings than I’ve ever seen on one individual.  I’d love to see him try to eat soup.

Over the course of eleven years my advocacy record is played four, won four.

Undefeated.  Me and Joe Calzaghe.

On two occasions the other side didn’t turn up and on another the chairman of the tribunal opened with the words, “Sorry to keep you waiting but we’ve just read your submission and your appeal is successful.  Do you wish to add anything?”

At some point some fucker’s going to make me open my mouth and then my client is really going to be shafted…

Nobody likes a smart arse show-off…

…except the Minister.

One take, one camera, one sickeningly talented musician.

At 2pm tomorrow in Lambeth County Court, the Minister steps up to the advocacy oche for the first time in a decade.  How pisspoor is that defence going to be..?

If I escape without being found in contempt of court it’ll count as A Result.

You didn’t used to like it when people said you were a miserable old bastard.

Well, you are.

Read this, read this, read this.

I’ve almost ruptured myself laughing at both the paucity of the piece and the vitriol of the comments.

Well done, Rusbridger.  Another new low reached.

In a shock noble gesture coming, as it does, just weeks before the BBC loses all its live football, Ian Wright has quit the BBC as a football pundit!

“I feel like I’m just there as a comedy jester to break the ice with Alan Shearer and Alan Hansen, who just do run-of-the-mill things. I can’t do that any more. People want something different.”

Since becoming a professional personality in 2001 Wright has played the comedy jester host of BBC entertainment shows such as I’d Do Anything and Friends Like These.

He is about to do “something different” by playing the comedy jester host of the Sky One revival of Gladiators.

Henry Kissinger is 84.

Imagine what Heather could have done if only she’d thought of this…

Mark Steel in today’s Indie:

Why is Gordon Brown so useless? Maybe the answer could be found on the American Idol charity show he appeared on at the weekend, where he announced that the British government was donating millions of mosquito nets to Africa.

Because anyone who saw it must have been terrified at his wildly over-zealous showbiz smile, that was supposed to make him look joyful and generous, but actually made him seem like a baddie in Batman, and you expected him to add “But now for my little surprise my tender talents, a-haaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaa,” and the room to fill up with deadly custard.

Because it was so obviously false, the product of an image meeting that’s concluded he needs to come across as less stern and more cheery. As that didn’t work, maybe they’ll try another image next, such as camp. Then the next time he’s asked about the economy on Newsnight, he’ll pout and say “Hmmm, money can be such a worry – but when I was Chancellor I aaalways got a nice surprise when I saw a larger than expected growth. Youuuu know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Jeremy!”

Because Brown can’t carry off the image of genial game-show host… Brown can’t master that sort of performance for the same reason that Blair was an expert at it. Because Blair was always vacuous, whereas Brown’s had to learn it…

But Brown did believe in things, writing a biography of his hero, the socialist James Maxton, and raising enough support for the miners’ strike to be made an honorary member of the Scottish Miners’ Union. Then he changed his mind and helped to create New Labour, and tried to change not just who he was, but who he’d been…

Unlike Blair, he had to reconcile [his] fondness for business with his more radical past. So in one speech he insisted he was still passionate for socialism, because “Socialism is the creation of a deeper and wider entrepreneurial culture.” In other words the aim of socialism is more capitalism and less socialism. He should have come up with a few more, like “Supporting Tottenham is about wholeheartedly supporting Arsenal, especially when they’re playing against Tottenham.”

So he comes over as a fraud. Just as you could see in his eyes on that programme that Brown was thinking, “I’ve written serious books about inequality indicators, what am I doing waving like a cretin on American TV?”

Watching Brown trying to act jolly and popular is like watching an actor who’s in something he feels is beneath him, when you can tell they’ve probably called the director over and said something like, “I’m feeling I could bring some of the pathos of my Petruccio from Taming of the Shrew into this role.” And the director’s said “Look mate, just say ‘Then why not call elephant.co.uk?’ and we can all go home.”

And the Tory strategy seems to be, “For years we couldn’t win because they had an unprincipled vacuous prick who’d look convincing whatever twaddle he was asked to spew out. And thank the Lord, now we’ve found one of our own.”

Welcome to the Ministry’s 400th post (apparently).

I have little to say for myself, apart from to confess that this week I have been mostly falling in love with Tammi Terrell.

Again.

This happens about once every 2.3 years.

It is hard to think of a sadder story in pop music than that of Thomasina Winifred Montgomery.

The 22-year-old Terrell hit the big time in early 1967 when Motown chose her as the new duet partner of Marvin Gaye, following in the footsteps of Kim Weston and Mary Wells.

It was Gaye and Terrell who recorded the exuberant original version of the Ashford & Simpson composition Ain’t No Mountain High Enough that would later be butchered into a dirge by Diane Ross.

In a few short months they also recorded classics like Your Precious Love, You’re All I Need To Get By and Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing. While their records were old-school Motown and increasingly unfashionable (compared with the earthier soul sounds emerging from the Stax/Volt stable), theirs was a dynamite combination.

But in October 1967, on stage in Virginia, Terrell collapsed into Gaye’s arms, to be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. After a series of eight operations – which would leave her with amnesia and partial paralysis – Tammi Terrell died in Philadelphia in March 1970 at the age of 24.

Terrell’s slow decline shattered Gaye; at the height of his powers, he did not perform for three years. Re-entering the studio after Terrell’s passing, the spirtual turmoil induced by her death, the breakdown of Gaye’s marriage and the civil rights movement of the late 60s resulted in the 1971 masterpiece What’s Going On album and, arguably, the course of popular music.

My current trip into Tammi’s world came about after I chanced upon this innovative mash-up on YouTube of the Gaye/Terrell duet If I Could Build My Whole World Around You and U2’s One:

But forget everything you remember about that God-forsaken travesty by Ross and treat yourself to everything Ain’t No Mountain High Enough should be:

It’s Wednesday: the Minister bids you peace.