The Next 30 Day Song Challenge - day 19

Day 19 - A song that tells a story


Sadly I've already mentioned Joel and Rosselson on the Another 30 Day Song Challenge, so those two great singer-storytellers are out of consideration. This song and this song immediately sprang to mind when thinking about the challenge but I think that has more to do with my unresolved issues concerning Red Wedge and my unread copies of Marxism Today from the '87/'88 period.

So I'll get off the eighties lefty schtick - if only for a moment - and plump for Janis Ian's 'At Seventeen'. Drop dead gorgeous:

"Wearing badges is not enough . . ."

. . . but I've always had a soft spot for this one:

Now, where can I find a button hole?

Mention of the SPGB badge in the comments to this old post from Alan J's blog.

Pop Kid Without Needs

The music mag, Zig Zag, passed me by as a pop kid.

I've got a sense that I was maybe too young when it was in its heyday. I'm sure I saw it on the shelf at the local newsagents but I think at that point (in the early eighties) it was too much of a goth magazine for my liking. I want to say I once bought a copy because there was a featured article on Marc and the Mambas on the front cover but that might just be false muso syndrome.

This yabbering is just my way of leading into the fact that it's such a pleasure that Highlander over at Cactus Mouth Informer is continuing to post old articles from Zig Zag on his blog. It's such a simple but brilliantly effective blogging idea. Why isn't there a legion of music bloggers out there scanning in their old NMEs' or Melody Makers'? What's the point of posting out of print classic albums from '79 if all you're posting alongside is yet another cut and paste from Trouser Press? How are you supposed to get the scent of sweat, idealism and bullshit in your nostrils if you can't read the half-manifesto, half-monomania from the lead singers concerned when they were releasing the albums?

Whilst I'm on a mini-rant - waiting for the kettle to boil brings that out in me - what about the political bloggers scanning in their old Subversions or Now That's What I Call Marxist? I'm usually not the biggest fan of reading PDF's on the net but surely the old political and musical inkies are prime candidates for rediscovery in their original format? I think it shows that the internet and blogging is still largely in its infancy. But that might just be me throwing my toys out of my play pen because I want to read old Sounds articles about Blue Rondo A La Turk that date from 1981.

Rant over. Kettle boiled. Tea masking. And back to H's excellent series over at his blog. A recent post in his series is a three page article on Theatre of Hate from October 1981. (Featuring an incredibly young Billy Duffy.) Never really got Kirk Brandon and the devotion that he's known to inspire. The music is a bit to clangy, the lyrical sentiments a bit too earnest and po-faced despite their obvious sincerity and I still can't delete from my memory bank an image of him sitting and smiling with Vera Lynn that dates from a mid-eighties issue of Record Mirror. It was the stuff of nightmares. Oh, and Then Jericho stole Kirk's blueprint anyway and just added some nice v-necked jumpers into the pop mix.

The latest Zig Zag article featured on the blog is a two page Simple Minds article that dates from 1981. You know, when they were still brilliant.

Here's some articles from Zig Zag that caught the eye:

Nice interview with John Peel from the October 1983 issue. 'fraid I was never a Peelite, Too much of a pop kid, I guess. Too busy watching shite tv from 10pm-12pm Monday thru' Thursday. Whatever the reason, it was my loss.

From the same issue a three page spread on the Cocteau Twins. I was a pop kid but that didn't stop me buying the Cocteau Twins 'Pearly Dewdrops Drop' and This Mortal Coil's 'Song To The Siren'. Beautiful, beautiful songs and for some of us born too late, Elizabeth Fraser was our Claire Grogan. What can one say about the excellence that was the Cocteau Twins? I think Harry Lauder expressed it best in the Ealing Comedy classic, 'The Third Ned':

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Grangemouth for 30 years under a Labour Council they had cronyism, terror, murder, packed meetings, bogus town twinnings and bloodshed, but they produced Gordon Legge, Isla St Clair, and the Cocteau Twins. In Nottingham they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? Paper Lace."

I still think that Jarvis Cocker, Noel Gallagher and Billy Bragg are the three most entertaining interviews in pop music. Back in November 1983, Jarvis Cocker was kept in a state of perpetual fear that the 1967 unsold copies of Pulp's debut album on top of his wardrobe might cascade down one night and suffocate him. Noel Gallagher was having an epiphany in a sitting room in Manchester whilst watching The Smiths perform 'This Charming Man' on Top of the Pops for the first time but Billy Bragg was sticking out like a sore thumb in a Zig Zag issue that also featured King Kurt, Death Cult and Lords of the New Church, with a four page feature to support his debut solo album, Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy.
What with it being 1983, the Billy featured is not so political but the army experience is mentioned and there's also the details of him recently playing the Futurama festival which, 25 years later, only conjures up images of an indie Spinal Tap for this reader. By the by, I've mentioned the Billy Bragg podcasts approvingly on the blog before and I'm happy to do so again. The podcast, 'PJ to top of the indie charts', covers the same period featured in the Zig Zag interview.

The November '83 issue also carries an interview with Mark E Smith. Marc Riley has just left the band; Smith makes a casual reference to once held left-wing beliefs that I never knew he held; and, spotted through the interview, are references to Smith's new wife, Brix. Minor pop stardom was just round the corner. If late '83 showed us a Billy Bragg who was yet to be party political, the same period shows a Mark E Smith who had yet to get the crusty curmudgeon persona down pat. For all his personal make up, the bloke comes across as genuinely happy. Strange one.

That's the articles that caught my eye, but if the word 'Batcave' means anything to you, there's enough stuff in this very link to keep you happy between now and the start of the football season.

"The revolution is just a T shirt (and a panel discussion) away."

Back from The Cooper Union

Just a quick post to mention that I attended the following meetings at the Left Forum today:

It's official: We're up shit creek.

Frank Lampard is an overrated Tory bastard.

That wanker, Karl Kautsky, broke Little Lenny's heart.

What's so funny about peace, love and revolutionary socialism?

I may have half-remembered the titles of some of the meetings, but I'm sure that you get the gist. Hopefully, I'll write a bit more about the event . . . erm, after the event. Or at least, I'll get the titles of the meetings right if nothing else.

At the moment, these are the meetings that I fancy attending tomorrow:

Waiting for the working class to turn up . . . again.

"Concentrate, you bastard. CONCENTRATE!"

Selling your back issues of 'Subversion' on eBay

Anybody spot the deliberate reference to Gregory's Girl? Speak to you soon. Just popping out for a loaf of bread.

Street Fighting Men

The revolution has been put back three weeks. Billy and Tom Morello have to work on their backhands:

"The night before in the hotel bar, Tom Morello had issued a challenge to all the bands to take part in a ping-pong tournament on Rage Against the Machine’s travelling table. The Big Day Out Invitation Tourney took place backstage during the afternoon.

"Having defeated Adam from Silverchair, I was knocked out in the semi-finals by Win Butler, lanky lead singer of the Arcade Fire. His final match against Zac de la Rocha of Rage was a thriller. As the light faded, the wind was getting up and playing havoc with the finer parts of each players style. Zac won the first game and for a while, it looked as if Win might pull level and take it to game three, but he went down fighting 21-18."

*Still looking for a jpeg of Billy's table tennis bat - with the words "This bat kills fascists" etched on the handle - to accompany the post.*

Brooklyn Half Irish

I know that he can be an acquired taste - "Shouldn't he be Irish?" - Kara, Brooklyn NY 6/10/06 - but I caught a brilliant performance by Billy Bragg Thursday night/Friday morning on the 'Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson'. Performing on electric guitar - with accompaniment from Ian McLagan on piano - he played a reworded version of 'Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards' as part of his promotional tour to plug his book, 'The Progressive Patriot', and Volume II of his 'Billy Bragg' boxset.

As it is one of my favourite songs* of his, I thought I would reproduce below the reworded lyrics** from last night's perfomance. I know that Bragg is a dyed in the wool reformist, and the editorial committee of the Socialist Standard would no doubt use up a box of red pens, going through the lyric line by line, but the fact remains that he is one of the best songwriters of the last twenty years and I'll give kudos to anyone who takes the time out to heckle from the stage the Ashbourne Court Group, like he did a few years back when he was performing at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival.

And on the subject of acquired tastes and all things Irish, I was in my natural state of cringing embarrassment when watching the risible Craig Ferguson - one upon a time the Dennis Leary to Gerry Sadowitz's Bill Hicks - but it was especially excruciating the other night when, at the end of the perfomance from Bragg, he swept up to Billy to gladhand him with the words: "Billy, it's always a pleasure", only to turn around as an afterthought to Ian McLagan, and mumble "Thanks Mate" as if he was some sort of nobody. That would be THE Ian McLagan, the bloke who played keyboards on 'Itchycoo Park', 'All or Nothing', 'Maggie May', and 'You're Wear It Well', amongst countless other bona fide classics.

Christ, it's 'cos of Craig that I tell people in the States that I'm Irish.

* Other favoured songs of Bragg include 'Levi Stubbs Tears', 'Greetings to the New Brunette', 'She's Got A New Spell', 'Valentine's Day is Over', 'Accident Waiting to Happen', 'Body of Water' & his version of 'The Red Flag' with Dick Gaughan.

**An earlier alternative version of 'Waiting For The President Elect'', performed at The Bottom Line, New York on 01/01/01, can be found here.

UPDATE

Some kind soul on has posted a clip of the performance on YouTube.

'WAITING FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARDS

(Alternative version performed on 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson', Los Angeles, 5/10/06).

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Hugo Chavez highway filling up with gasoline

Little Donald Rumsfield spies a rich lady who's crying

Over luxury's disappointment, so he goes over and he's trying

To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her

To prepare to be bombed back into the Stone Age

In the former Soviet Union the citizens demand

To know why they are still the target of Strategic Air Command

And they shake their fists in anger and respectfully suggest

We take the money from our missiles and spend them on our hospitals instead (yeah)

The Cold War now is over but the stakes are getting higher

I'm frightened of collateral damage and of friendly fire

And I don't think we can defeat no Axis of Evil

By putting 'smart bombs' in the hands of dumb people

Mixing Pop and Politics they ask me what the use is

I offer them my acupuncturist and massueuses

While looking down the corridor

Out to where my ego is waiting

I'm looking for the New World Order (yeah)

Jumble sales are organised, all my mates got fat

Even after all this time you know you can still send me a fax

You can be active with the activists or sleeping with the media

While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Oh, one leap forward, two leaps back

Will YouTube give MTV the sack?

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Well here comes the future and you can't run from it

If you've got a website I want to be on it

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune

But this is reality not American Idol

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards (yeah)

So join the struggle while you may

The Revolution's just an ethical haircut away

When you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Words & Music : Billy Bragg