The Ministry’s new theme is on its way!
I test drove the pre-release version this evening: there are a couple of little kinks to iron out but I really like it.
Kid; candy store.
Pathetic, isn’t it?
I went down to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I know I’m a light-year-and-a-half behind everyone else, but I actually watched an episode/edition/broadcast of The X Factor – the final, in fact – for the first time last weekend.
It’s made me fear for the future of Britain and convinced me absolutely that Simon Cowell is Satan.
I saw Peter Kay’s recent parody and assumed it had amplified and magnified everything but, if anything, what I saw last Saturday suggested that Kay had actually underplayed the original’s ludicrous pomposity and emotional blackmail.
As with Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin, the parody was all the more forensically cruel because it used the very lingua franca of its target: indeed the word “journey” should now be expunged from the Oxford English Dictionary, having been bsatardised out of all recognition by programmes like this and presenters like Dermot O’Leary. (Oh, Dermot: you showed such promise once. Is being Cowell’s shill really worth such self-debasement?)
Why do people lap this shit up? It’s manipulative, the sob stories are almost certainly embellished and everything about the production is just naff.
I don’t deny that the lass who won can sing a bit, though she’s Fourth Division rather than European Cup.
I certainly don’t deny that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is an excellent song – it’s one of the five best pop songs written in the Eighties.
I do, however, believe that Alexandra Burke and Hallelujah make about as easy bedfellows as Dick Cheney and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
Let’s consider Ms. Burke’s interpretation of the lyrics in the song’s first verse:
I heard there was a secret chord…
It goes like this -
The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall
And the major lift…
As every woman entering The X Factor competition must do, Ms. Burke asks herself: “What Would Mariah Do?”
Mariah, being as thick as mince, would recognise the words “fourth”, “fifth”, “fall” and “lift”. So if she screeched “fourth” she would display four fingers. If she yelled “fifth” she would add an extra digit. For “fall” she would point down towards the ground. For “lift” she would reach for the sky.
Needless to say, Alexandra Did Exactly What Mariah Would Do For That Is What Satan Decreed.
On witnessing this debacle, anybody remotely familiar with either John Cale’s or Jeff Buckley’s versions of this beautiful and frail little song must have cringed as I did.
On seeing the white-clad gospel choir then stroll onstage they must have started chewing their cushion along with me.
(Satan thinks: “The word “Hallelujah” appears in the Bible and gospel choirs sing religious music therefore we must have a gospel choir on a song called Hallelujah.” Never knowingly understated.)
Cue a crashing I Will Always Love You-esque snare drum and a thousand layers of syrup for a big finale – shouty lead vocals, synthesised strings, gospel choir, gloop, gloop, gloop, repeat to fade.
To quote Alan Connor:
The final chorus is more like Handel’s original Hallelujah Chorus mashed up with Cher’s I Found Someone.
I agree with Connor – the saving grace is that the quarter of a million quid about to hit Cohen’s bank account is hugely deserved. The shame is that Laughing Len’s so broke that he’s had to allow a delicate concoction that took him a year to create so painstakingly to be slaughtered on the altar of Satan.
I’ve done all I can: I spent £15.80 downloading Buckley’s Hallelujah from iTunes 20 times last night in an attempt to get something – ANYTHING – else to the top of the chart for Christmas.
If the ITV masses prefer Burke and Satan’s overproduced, overinflated bobbins, well: fuck you.
Jingle Bells
I’ve never previously had a Christmas dinner where the sprouts were bigger than the turkey, but office Christmas parties never lose their capacity to surprise, do they?
It’s the economy, stupid (Part 3)
From today’s Independent:
Britain has become a worse credit risk than McDonald’s and a host of other large companies, figures produced for The Independent reveal.
The collapse in Britain’s credit rating has taken place over the past two and a half months, since the Government underwrote the banking system and decided to spend its way out of recession. Investing in UK government debt is now almost twice as risky as buying McDonald’s corporate bonds, according to the market in credit default swaps (CDS), which provides insurance for the buyers of such debt.
The government debt of large economies such as the UK would normally be considered far more secure than corporate bonds. However, on 29 September, the cost of buying insurance against default on UK five-year government debt became more expensive than the equivalent cover for the US burger chain and has since overtaken Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola, according to data from Bloomberg.
The cost of insuring for a year against default on £10m of five-year UK debt has jumped from less than £30,000 to £120,000, compared with the current price of £77,000 to protect against a similar McDonald’s default.
The extraordinary movements in the CDS market also reflect market concerns about the highly leveraged British economy, which is sliding into a recession that the International Monetary Fund has predicted may be worse than the slowdown in the US.
“It looks daft, it is daft, but that is where the buyers and sellers are and the way business is getting done in the CDS market,” one analyst said.
Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play…?
It’s the economy, stupid (Part 2)
Today, the Cameron Experiment ended.
For three years, in a haphazard and incosistent manner, PBD’s been trying to convince us that his NuTories were different from the rabid right-wing Conservative options served up at the 2001 and 2005 General Elections.
Until today PBD’s NuTories – if you’ve believed the hype – have been green, caring, touchy, feely, concerned about “society” (which therefore may actually exist after all) and generally bloody good chaps.
Today, with PBD’s poll lead all but wiped out and – unbelievably – no evidence of anybody having the cojones to put Arrivederci Gordon out of his misery, NuTories became SameOldTories.
Today, PBD stood in front of a bunch of economic wonks and did a Geoffrey Howe:
The first step is to set realistic targets for public spending.
It’s simple. Borrowing is now going beyond acceptable limits. Taxes are already too high – and Labour’s plans for even more taxes will act as a drag anchor on recovery. They’ll put people off from investing here and help to destroy jobs not create them.
So the choice is clear, and it’s a tough one – we need to restrain public spending…
So I can announce today that in order to keep spending at a responsible level and to ensure the quickest possible end to the recession and the strongest possible recovery, we will not match Labour’s new spending plans for 2010 and beyond…
But setting tough targets for public spending is only the first step.
The next step is showing how we will meet those targets and that requires a credible long-term plan. A credible long-term plan for controlling public spending has three components.
First, reducing the demands on the state by fixing our broken society.
Second, increasing the productivity of the state by reforming our public services.
And third cutting Government waste.
Even the Economics Editor of The Daily Telegraph can’t hide his opprobrium.
It was the 31st President of the Untied States of Yankee Doodle, Herbert Hoover, who first fucked up a modern recession when he raised taxes and cut spending with the Revenue Act of 1932 in response to the recession that folllowed the 1929 stock market crash. This led to a decade-long global slump called the Great Depression which saw American unemployment rates hit 25% and was only truly reversed by a worldwide war.
Forty years of economic orthodoxy followed – the way to handle a recession is to borrow a bit more, spend a bit more and cut taxes a bit. That way a recession does not become a depression.
Fuck that, thought That Bloody Woman, as she sent Geoffrey Howe in to bat in 1981 with instructions – despite double-digit inflation, spiralling unemployment and plummeting economic output – to slash the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement.
The ever-affable Howe duly obliged – spanking the poor bastards already struggling to pay their rent with a freeze on income tax personal allowances (at a time of 13% inflation), increases in VAT and excise duties and big public expenditure cuts.
Jim Prior got a bit huffy but wasn’t pissed off enough actually to be arsed enough to resign from the Cabinet. A couple of Tory MPs joined the SDP.
364 economists wrote to The Times to point out that this was, er, fucking stupid and that it would make the recession become a depression. 364 economists were told to fuck off because That Bloody Woman knew best.
Cue panic on the streets of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and pretty much everywhere else; more than 3½ million unemployed; the systematic destruction of British manufacturing.
That depression lasted five years.
And most people with half-an-inch of brain now accept that Howe probably did go a bit over the top.
Stephen Nickell, now a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, still thinks that the budget was over the top, and that it did deepen the recession, because unemployment continued to rise for several years afterwards.
So, having no concept of history or ability to learn from past mistakes, PBD has now abandoned all pretence of seeking to reposition the Conservative Party and decided that he’s going to repeat the mistakes of Hoover, Hilda and Howe.
He’s not going to cut taxes, he’s going to cut public spending and he’s going to shrink the state. In the middle of a recession.
It didn’t work last time.
It won’t work this time.
But at least we’ve now learnt PBD’s true colours. After three years the mask has come off.
Vote PBD, get more Thatcherism.
Arrivederci Gordon’s Christmas has come early.
But the rest of us should be working out if we’ve got enough points to be able to emigrate to Australasia…
It’s the economy, stupid (Part 1)
A Chancer is forced to resign in disgrace following the discovery of financial and regulatory irregularities.
And goodness gracious me, who do we have here floating around the edges of the latest Chancerism controversy?
Disgraced Chancer David Ross and his former girlfriend
Shelley Ross with Dave and Smanfer Cameron
at a Conservative Summer Party at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 2006
In October, Mr Cameron flew from London to West Yorkshire and back on Mr Ross’ private helicopter. Two summers ago, Mr Ross paid for Mr Cameron’s return flight from Germany for a World Cup match. Since 2001, Mr Ross has donated £117,560 to the Tories, either to Conservative Central Office or to local branches of the Conservatives near his home in Northamptonshire.
Who’dathunkit?
You’re not fit to wear the shirt, PBD, you plastic-faced doughball.
Chancerism: a right, not a privilege
SMIP #11: Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show by Neil Diamond
Whether you believe him or not The Minister persists in maintaining that, between roughly 1968 and 1973, Neil Diamond was perhaps the best, most underrated and most innovative pop songwriter around.
In 1968 Diamond acrimoniously left Bang Records – the company that made hits of Solitary Man, Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon, Thank The Lord For The Night Time, Kentucky Woman and Cherry, Cherry – to hook up with UNI after Bang’s owner Bert Burns refused to give The Artiste his creative head.
Diamond’s first releases for UNI bombed spectacularly. Introspective, autobiographical ballad Brooklyn Roads – a million miles from the bubblegum of Cherry, Cherry – peaked at 58 on the Billboard chart; Latino-infused rocker Two-Bit Manchild made it no higher than 66; and the anodyne singalong country number Sunday Sun crested two places lower still. The album from which all three were taken – Velvet Gloves And Spit, its back cover bearing a picture of a leather-jacketed but shirtless Diamond leaning on an armless tailor’s mannequin (as horrifying a visual proposition as it sounds) – failed even to make the Billboard Top 200 album chart.
Diamond, New York, c.1968
(inner sleeve of Bang Records’ 1973 Double Gold compilation)
Today, such a run would almost certainly spell the end of the careers not just of the singer in question but also of the record company executive who signed him. The music industry in the late Sixties was a very, very different beast.
So it was in January 1969 that a sallow, Brooklyn-born Jew decamped from New York to Memphis to record at American Sound Studios, where house band The Memphis Boys awaited to commit to tape a gospel number (complete with mid-song sermon by a fictional preacher) that would be lead single from an album that would be released with this artwork:
Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show – the album:
further evidence of Diamond’s shirtless late-60s tendencies
(Click here for larger front and rear covers if you dare)
It’s probably not a business plan that would meet with Simon Cowell’s approval…
The Memphis Boys may not have the name recognition of their Memphis neighbours Booker T. & The MGs, Alabama’s Muscle Shoals house band or Motown’s Funk Brothers, but their pedigree is unimpeachable.
In 1967 The Memphis Boys had propelled Aretha Franklin to superstardom thanks to her and their reinterpretation of Otis Redding’s Respect; a few months before Diamond arrived the band had backed Dusty Springfield on her seminal Dusty In Memphis album; the next session at American Sound after Diamond’s was for Elvis Presley, who would record with The Memphis Boys Suspicious Minds and In The Ghetto. In their heyday, American Sound and The Memphis Boys created 122 Billboard hit singles in the three years from 1967.
American Sound Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, derelict in the
1980s before it was demolished to make way for a parking lot
The Memphis Boys comprised organist Bobby Emmons, pianist Bobby Wood, drummer Gene Chrisman; bassist Mike Leech; and guitarist Reggie Young. They were produced by Stax-alumnus Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill (who would also sometimes play bass).
The Memphis Boys with the King in 1969
Whether the song was originally designed by Diamond as parody, pastiche or homage (his own explanation of the song’s genesis has varied down the years), these good ole Southern boys understood gospel revivalism and in one of the happy coincidences that litter the history of pop music, the right song found the right musicians at the right time in the right place.
From Wood’s opening chords [0:00-0:084], played above Emmons’ gentle organ and [from 0:04] Leech’s pulsating bass, this record catches the ear. It didn’t – and still doesn’t – sound like anything else on the radio. Whether we’re in a Harlem church hall or a revivalist tent we don’t yet know, but this is not vanilla pop music.
While it doesn’t quite rival “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” as pop’s greatest opening line, Diamond immediately paints the picture:
Hot August night
And the leaves hangin’ down
And the grass on the ground smellin’ sweet
[0:08-0:16]
Wood and Leech propel matters along [0:16-0:22] until more of the canvas is unveiled:
Move up the road
To the outside of town
And the sound of that good gospel beat
[0:22-0:30]
Then Wood signals a change in mood [at 0:33], Leech cuts out the fancy stuff, the backing singers start to “Woooooo” and the build to the chorus begins:
Sits a ragged tent, where there ain’t no trees
And that gospel group tellin’ you me…
[0:35-0:46]
Having gently kept time throughout the first verse, now Chrisman cuts loose [0:45-0:47] to demonstrate why he’s possibly the finest rock drummer whose name you’ve never heard and we reach one of the daftest choruses ever laid down on tape, underpinned by Emmons’ pulsing organ riff.
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
[0:47-1:02]
This is mental. Absolutely crackers. And superb. Which is why we stop it dead in its tracks and, with the help of trombones punctuating the sultry summer night air, we continue to paint the wider picture:
Room gets suddenly still
And when you almost bet you can hear yourself sweat
He walks in.
Eyes black as coal
And when he lifts his face every ear in the place is on him.
Startin’ soft and slow, like a small earthquake;
And when he lets go, half the valley shakes
[1:09-1:48]
And when Chrisman starts beating the crap out of that drumkit again [1:47-1:48] you know what’s coming around again:
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
(Hallelujah!)
[1:48-2:04]
Was this really the same man that had written I’m A Believer, sitting at number one for The Monkees precisely two years earlier in January 1967? Where had this come from?
BROTHERS!
[2:06]
To quote Keanu Reeves: “Whoa.”
I-I-I SAID BROTHERS!
[2:09-2:10]
What the fuck?
NOW, YOU’VE GOT YOURSELF TWO GOOD HANDS:
AND WHEN YOUR BROTHER IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR ONE HAND FOR HIM
‘COS THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR;
AND WHEN YOUR HEART IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR OTHER HAND,
REACH IT OUT TO THE MAN UP THERE -
‘COS THAT’S WHAT HE’S THERE FOR.
[2:12-2:30]
He’s freaked out. The New York Jew is sermonising in the middle of the song like a Southern Baptist. You can’t do this on a pop song.
Take my hand in yours,
Walk with me this day.
In my heart I know
I will never stray.
[2:32-2:45]
He’s calmed down again. We’re back in familiar territory – singing instead of screaming. Soothing piano chords atop the organ. That’s a bit better.
No, it’s not. He’s off again – smacking a tambourine – and this time he’s got the girls in tow:
Halle! Halle!
Halle! Halle!
HALLE! HALLE!
HALLE! HALLE!
[2:46-2:52]
Chrisman must have got through three snare drum skins in those six seconds alone. Leech is no longer just playing his bass – he’s positively spanking its strings. And at 2:53 the trumpet heralds the crescendo of the final choruses.
During this final part of the song, the kitchen sink is thrown at the master tape in a manner that even Phil Spector would admire. Diamond has thrown off all pretence of decorum and is simply yelping out the words to the chorus.
If one of the many criticisms laid at Diamond’s door is that his vocals too often lack soul – that his performances do not reflect the passion at the heart of pop music – his critics are not familiar with much of his output from this time.
This is a sultry and sexy performance, the singer throbbing within the music’s groove. This is a vocal that is utterly convincing, particularly as the song swells through the choruses and when Diamond adopts the persona of Brother Love for the “sermon”.
There is, appropriately, a fervour to the production, arrangement and the playing of this music – and the singing reflects that fervour. The coarseness in Diamond’s voice is undeniable and, if anything, the disappointment is that the record fades a little too soon – might there have been a full-blown vocal wigout if we’d gone round the chorus one more time?
As it is, our SMIP prefaces the final chorus we hear. Repeat to fade. And what a fade. Lost in the moment, gasping for air, Diamond’s voice involuntarily leaps an octave.
I-I SAID!
[3:06]
The “I” becomes a half-strangled, half-screamed howl. He’s in a different place – a magical, mysterious place only music can go – where the only thing that matters is staying atop the cacophony of drums, cymbals, piano, organs, gospel choristers, trumpets, trombones and tambourines that make up the final 40 seconds of one of the strangest, yet most seductive, singles of Neil Diamond’s career.
At the healing hands of Brother Love, that career was reborn. Released on 22 February 1969, Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show would reach number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, ending an almost two-year-long run of six single releases that had failed to hit the top 40. Diamond’s live performances were also revived by that good gospel beat, Brother Love becoming his set’s closing number to this day. (A peerless, stripped-down live version can be heard on Diamond’s March 1970 album Gold: Recorded Live At The Troubador.)
Neil Diamond, March 1970, backstage
at The Troubador club, Los Angeles
Emboldened by the creative and commercial success he rediscovered in Memphis, Diamond would return to American Sound in March 1969 to record Sweet Caroline, Emmons in the process improvising one of pop’s catchiest and most distinctive introductions.
You think you know the rest of the Neil Diamond story.
You don’t.
As we shall see in due course.
Harry Potter And The Futility Of Parting With 80p Daily (And £1.60 On Saturdays)
When even Popbitch has noticed the decline of a once proud newspaper, something’s gone very wrong indeed…
>> Big Questions <<
What people are asking this weekIs the Guardian’s daily “wrapping paper designed by a celebrity” special an elaborate spoof on the vacuous nature of celebrity media coverage or have they gone totally insane?
No. No. A thousand times no.
Channel 4 News.
Gideon Osborne.
It’s very important to try to keep people in their home [and] if necessary to restructure their mortgages to help them do that, and we’ll look at the detail of this scheme and support anything that works. But the real thing you could do is keep people in work and I’d like to see much more done to help businesses in this difficult time.
If you don’t believe me, the soundbite begins at 2:25 in this clip:
Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s a Conservative finance spokesman advocating state intervention in commerce to protect jobs.
You may remember the Tories: free market economics, 3½ million unemployed, get on your bike, let’s destroy entire communities because there’s no such thing as society, survival of the fittest, never bail out any business unless it sells arms, fuck the poor and disadvantaged proletarians, annoying woman with pompous hair.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
Harry Potter And The Onset Of Self-Doubt
Cock it.
I cannot remember the last time there has been such hysteria over something so relatively minor as the Damian Green affair. Rarely can so many normally reasonable people have lost so many of their marbles.
Marcel clearly must have missed Manuelgate…
The political and media reaction has been stunningly excessive and mostly misguided. The band of columnists and so-called expert commentators fearing the demise of parliamentary democracy – as absurd a slippery slope argument as I’ve heard – or worrying about the decline in our civil liberties, have taken the concept of disproportion to a new level. If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.
Let us look at the reality of what has happened. We don’t know all the facts; indeed, we can be sure of very few. But even accepting a worst-case-scenario speculation, there has been a quite extraordinary over-reaction. I’m not saying everyone involved has behaved perfectly. Mistakes appear to have been made all round. But they do not justify the response that has occurred…
After a flurry of inquiries and furrowed brows, whatever wrongs were committed this time won’t happen again. The Speaker won’t be as accommodating in letting the police into parliament, the police will learn to be more subtle when investigating certain kinds of crime, and the home secretary may learn not to look quite so shifty and terrified each time she appears on television. The unnecessary panic and the suicidally gloomy prognostications will be laid to rest.
What I fear, though, is that this relatively unserious incident will be used to rearrange the relationship between police, politicians and government. This would be damaging.
I’m going to have to kill myself.