Paranoid Collage

The Internet, eh? Just chock full of STUFF. So much stuff in fact that you will never ever see it all. You won't even be able to wade through all the bits you want to see. Luckily there are people out there who are devoting themselves to organising, marshalling and curating content, sometimes even re-working it into something new, and directing it to your eyeballs.

Here's something you want to see, something that exemplifies this process. It's a collage of cover versions of Paranoid Android by Radiohead.

I know grumpy people (people anyway who are differently grumpy to me) who might say "Oh yeah, look! If you knit together all these mediocre homespun covers you end up with a version that is almost as good as that which was skilfully produced by the original artist!"

But that misses the point. Firstly, this is the point of the Internet: how wonderful that anyone can share their passion, their musicality, their personality in this way? How brilliant that their efforts could be combined so cleverly into a new and different and, arguably, wonderful version that includes contributions from so many people? How touching that people who will never know each other can collaborate on a larger project?

Secondly (and I can't stress enough how much you should click on this link), everything is a remix.

'Oh Yeah', Ash

'Oh Yeah' CD single cover.

Time for some more music.

Ash were never one of the very biggest hitters of '90s Britpop, but they did make some great records. Oh Yeah, is definitely one of them, a top-ten hit no less, but its brilliance lies in the fact that it is a song about misty-eyed nostalgia written by teenagers, for teenagers.

This is the song I was going to start with when I first thought about writing occasional music posts. When it popped up the other day I have to say it startled me - for reasons we'll get to in a moment. I bought the single back in 1996 and I liked it plenty at the time; but it is only now, fifteen years later, that the full impact can be felt.

Personally, it doesn't evoke a particular or specific memory but it revels, like a dog in Autumn leaves, in a rich sense of nostalgia. What we were thinking back then I can't remember but the track is taken from an album called 1977 and there was a sense that my generation was, even then, being encouraged to look back at our (Star Wars fuelled) childhoods as a golden age. Certainly I was introspective enough to get nostalgic about things that had happened only months or weeks earlier but, when you're twenty, that's a long time ago, of course. Thinking about it now, with all my university years compacted by hindsight, it seems at least possible that I was being sold the idea that I could be nostalgic about events and feelings that were happening even whilst the record was still playing. That might be my best guess now at what being young feels like, an instantaneous mixture of exhilaration and sadness, but this is really a back projection and an ill-formed one at that. No matter how miserable, happy or bitter-sweet you felt at the time, it is only later, physically separated by the passing of years from those feelings, that it can become nostalgia.

So when the song surfaced recently in a shuffle, it caught me by surprise even though it has been in my mind, off and on, all this time. Suddenly I was forced to listen to the song anew, to calibrate for the extra fifteen years as if they had all passed in one moment.

Listen to Oh Yeah on Spotify.

The lyrics deal with a Summer love affair remembered years afterwards and, although the word 'bitter-sweet' is often used to describe the song, really there's hardly any bitterness to it whatsoever. If there is sadness that the romance didn't last longer ("I don't know why these things ever end") then it is wholly over-shadowed by the fondness of the reminiscence. This is someone looking back with no regrets to the moment of greatest potential, of greatest excitement, the instant when anticipation peaks and beginnings begin: the moment of infinite promise when "her hair came undone in my hands".

With that, the world changes and a new endless future, full of new possibilities, is revealed:

"And, oh yeah, it was the start of the Summer.
It felt just like it was the start of Forever..."

The joy of the song, the joy of looking back, is being able to see right into that moment and yet also, simultaneously, to know everything that happened next, good and bad, and even, if you like, to watch all the subsequent years unfold in a fast-forwarded montage inside your head during the guitar solo.

In short, regardless of when or if you grew up, this is not just great pop music, it's 4'45'' of perspective-shattering temporal engineering with a sing-a-long chorus and that, Kirsty, makes it rather special.

Flanders & Swann

Definitely cheating with this one - but then, the whole eight disc thing has gone out the window already, hasn't it? So I don't actually have any compunction in calling up for my next selection, Kirsty, the two live albums of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann - At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat.

Growing up, my musical influences missed these chaps. I knew of some of the songs, but I didn't know how they were connected, or who they were by, and I was wholly unaware of the concept of musical comedy - or should that be comedic music?

I did sort of come into contact with them, or come under their influence at least. My school friend Chris was definitely au fait with Flanders & Swann and he and I spent a long time collaborating on our own songs as a result. I can't in all honesty say that I knew we were emulating anyone, however, when we rattled off such classics as "I Had a Drawing Pin" and "The Mole Song". As far as I was concerned it was just what we did. Sadly, no recordings survive from this period.

So having unknowingly stumbled into the environs of Flanders & Swann, I unknowingly stumbled away again. It wasn't until after I left university that I re-encountered them, and when I did, it was through my wife.

Very early on, early enough that we were both still trying to simultaneously impress and size up the other, we got onto the subject of the laws of Thermodynamics, this being exactly the sort of thing that two arts graduates talk about in such a situation. I got excited, but only really because the Second Law is referenced heavily in the final Tom Baker Doctor Who story 'Logopolis' and consequently I felt confident enough that I could bluff my way through a conversation on the subject.

What happened next stunned and delighted me: this strange woman started to sing and click her fingers. Nobody sang. I had never had anyone sing at me in the middle of a conversation before. And she was singing a song about.. well, it was this:

So that was that.

The years that followed saw us do a lot of motorway driving and those two CDs got listened to an awful lot as we went. It turned out I had been missing out on quite a lot. They are wonderful performances. Funny, clever, even moving, they are an unambiguously English slice of mid twentieth century wit.

Here a few of the stand out tracks.

The Hippopotamus Song. I won't link to it here. It is easily their most famous song. It's also the one I have tired of most as it is the one I have sung so often (probably hundreds of times); for several years now it has been the 'bedtime song' that I have had to sing to my children. I'm letting the tradition slide a little now but I'm sure I've got many more renditions left to do...

The Slow Train. Exquisite and not at all funny, it is a lament for passing of the local railway stations and branch lines following the Beeching reforms of the early Sixties. Rather like film footage from before the First World War, it presents a picture of a England that has now vanished, overrode by modernity.

Which brings me to my last pick. "I don't know if you've ever thought of this," intones Michael Flanders, "but England hasn't really got a national song." He's right - God Save the Queen/King is really a British anthem - and, having dismissed other contenders (Jerusalem?), the pair offer this modest ditty.

Typical English understatement indeed. Nothing so perfectly captures the dilemma of English nationalism, torn as we are between an instinctive contempt for vulgar jingoism (at once both beneath our dignity and a shameful reminder of our past crimes) and our inherent and private conviction that we really are best after all. What rotters we are.

I've often wondered if there is an existing song that could be pressed into use as an English national song. The criteria are challenging, but if I think of any I'll mention them in passing. In the meantime I think we can agree that it shouldn't be this one.

Soave sia il vento

This is the corollary to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I liked because the music enhanced the drama. This aria, from Così fan Tutte, is a wondrous and beautiful musical delicacy which holds little dramatic weight in the context of what is a fairly ribald farce. That's not entirely fair - the two women singing this genuinely believe they are waving their fiancés off to war. But their noble sentiments are undermined by the audience's knowledge that these men are actually playing a cruel trick upon their girlfriends, having been manipulated by the owner of the third voice in this sombre trio, Don Alfonso.

But never mind the context because, once rescued from the knowing winks and leers of Mozart's comedy, this aria deserves to be considered a thing apart.

Così is another opera that I have seen a lot. I spent the Summer and Autumn of 1998 hanging around a woman who worked at Glyndebourne and this was the piece that I always seemed to catch. No wonder that this aria increasingly drew focus from the rest of the show.

The words too are beautiful, even in English. 

Soave sia il vento,
Tranquilla sia l'onda,
Ed ogni elemento
Benigno risponda
Ai nostri desir.

May the wind be gentle,
may the waves be calm,
and may every one of the elements
kindly fulfil our wishes.

I can't think of a better benediction with which to begin a long and challenging journey. What I can't have been sure of then was that I was setting out on just such a journey myself. I kept hanging around that woman and eventually managed to persuade her to marry me. Soave sia il vento was sung at the ceremony, but then you probably remember that yourself.

If you have Spotify (and if not, why not?) you can listen to a rather good version of it here.

Desert Island Disc #2

And then there's this.

Today, in Britain at least, it's so familiar that you might take it for granted. You might find it difficult to remember a time when this music was considered mysterious, alien and terrifying. Difficult, that is, unless you ever watched Doctor Who as a child and experienced the delicious sting of panic as the opening theme began. Too late now to run and hide, the show was starting and you were caught!

For viewers in the '60s and '70s, unfamiliar with the musique concrète avant garde, it was utterly unearthly. Devoid of recognisable sounds, the recording was literally physically constructed: each note was painstakingly produced from white noise, plucked piano strings or oscilloscope harmonics, before being modified, cut and edited by hand into vast lengths of analogue tape that ran out of the Radiophonic Workshop and up the corridor. With no multi-track equipment, the different tracks were mixed manually by synchronising individual tape players - that is, simultaneously hitting the 'play' button on multiple machines!

The writing credit belongs to Ron Grainer, but the genius behind this extraordinary arrangement was Delia Derbyshire. This original version of hers from 1963 is still bizarre, remarkable and like nothing else in British popular culture.

And... it's the first piece of music I ever bought.

On a shopping trip, my mother allowed us to choose one record each. My sister, Hannah, chose a double A-Side release of "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window" and "Polly Wolly Doodle", I think. And I found a seven inch single of the (relatively) new arrangement with a grinning Peter Davison on the cover. I was five years old or so - it's difficult to be sure because I can't find any catalogue details for this particular release. Since I can't track it down, I can't tell you what the B-Side was called either, but Han and I called it "Running Through the Jungle" music, by which we meant (self-evidently) a spacey, alien jungle because this was Doctor Who after all. We would play it and run around and around the front room until it stopped or we got dizzy and fell over, whichever came first..

If I could find it, I'd post that, but I can't so it'll have to be this instead!

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'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Benjamin Britten

This wasn't where I was going to start. It's not early or very recent, it doesn't produce the Proustian rush of memory that some songs do. But it is important to me and it is beautiful and it is the opera that makes all the duff ones worthwhile as far as I'm concerned.

I'm still dubious about opera, partly because I can't really appreciate or understand all the effort that goes into producing it. I very much enjoy being told a story but for me the music is normally pretty, ha ha, incidental.

What I have found is that the more productions I see of a particular piece, the more important and memorable the music becomes - partly just through reinforcement, partly because I am concentrating less on who is stabbing who and partly because it is the bit that doesn't change between versions. The opera I have seen done most often is Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It's my favourite too. It benefits greatly from Shakespeare's play, inheriting a familiar story, strong characters and a beautiful, compelling English libretto that mixes mortal wit and passion with eldritch poetry. As an opera it has other advantages. Opera isn't reality - people are singing for God's sake - and it suffers when forced to portray the humdrum. Dream not only takes us, the mortal audience, into an escapist love story, it shows us a whole new fantasy world order where the realms of Athens and Faerie intertwine under the trees. And Britten's music wonderfully evokes this fantastical setting. The opening, a sliding sinewy chorus of twisting branches and swaying boughs, brings the forest to life immediately and pushes us deep within.

My favourite part, the extract I have chosen, as it were, Kirsty, is from the beginning of Act III where the lovers awake from the muddled madness of the previous night, calmed and remedied. It is the emotional catharsis of the piece, the resolution of the drama. In the play, this scene features quite a blustery piece of exposition, with Demetrius explaining to the Duke that everything has been fixed. But the opera shows us the emotional journey. One small line from the play is taken and magnified, echoing around the lovers, first as realisation, then as growing wonder and finally, unifying and mutual bliss, as they each declare their chosen partner "mine own and not mine own".

Out of context it might seem a disturbing or sceptical analysis of a relationship, dwelling on ideas of possession and ownership. But really it's a beautiful, arresting thought, hinting at the mysterious and inexplicable alchemy that binds us to another and them to us. The act of falling in love is often a solitary, internal process, beset by doubts - this moment in the opera shows us the transcendent, wonderful instant of reciprocity, when the jewel we have found sings back our own thoughts.

For all that, the piece, and the moment, is not without its problems - both the play and opera ask that we conveniently forget that Demetrius preferred Hermia to Helena before the Fairies chemically overrode his desires and one might be left hoping, for his sake, that the effect is permanent. I've a hankering, now I think about it, to see a production where Demetrius visibly and knowingly resigns himself to the narrative inevitability, not coerced by magic, but submitting to the needs of the many.

But of course, to us as much as to the Faeries, these mortal lives and loves are mere playthings and, at the end, the four lovers are paired correctly to our satisfaction.

All is well and as it should be.

Music

I'm not at all musical. Living, as I do, surrounded my professional musicians, this has become something of a mantra. I consider myself to be a civilian.

But I am musical, of course, in the sense that I have spent my life absorbing it, as we all do. I listen, I hum, I mull, I (God help me) might even do a little dance if nobody's looking.

And of course I am aware, as we all are, that there are songs, pieces of music that prise us open and leave us vulnerable or exuberant or bewitched. When they materialise from the depths of a playlist I become transfixed, transported... but, agh, I am invariably alone when this happens and thoughts, if not shared, either wither or fester. And if I write them down here, it doesn't feel so much like I am talking to myself, which is an important consideration too.

Rather than limit myself to the paltry eight tracks that are allowed by the fabled Desert Island Discs ("Yes Kirsty, my luxury item is the Internet.."), I'm going to start jotting down the important ones as they occur to me. Where possible, I'll include links to Spotify, which you can get for free in the US and UK. Sometimes I'll be trying to safeguard a powerful memory against accidental deletion, sometimes I'll just want to share something special, or rant momentarily.

I won't loftily dangle the promise of esoteric gems and eclectic range before you - there'll be a depressing amount of '90s Britpop I expect - but hopefully what I can do is demonstrate my own connection with each piece, the thing which makes it mine. I don't know where we'll end up, but it'll be more than eight and less than everything.

(You're probably not allowed to take the Internet, but someone (Nick Hornby?) took his iPod. My luxury item would actually be Salisbury Cathedral, which poses other problems I suppose..)