Tag: tv

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the reality TV myth…

The reality TV people do like to tell us that it’s all about finding talent, people with star quality, the ‘x-factor’ as the show-title goes. Which makes this quote particularly laughable –

“after last year’s winner, Steve Brookstein, sank without trace, X Factor bosses are confident they have found a real star this time around.” (from the daily record).

look, if they can’t find hugely talented people with a nation wide search, a TV budget and a captive audience of 10 million, the whole thing is a charade. I think I’ve said this before here, but the best that reality TV has thrown up so far is Will Young – an above average white-soul singer. Gareth Gates has vanished, Hearsay have vanished. Liberty X are hanging on, getting closer and closer to performing naked in the vain hope it’ll keep them an audience. If the shows had ANY validity at all they’d be finding the people who are genuinely the most mind-blowingly gifted musicians, singers and songwriters in the country. But they aren’t. They are unearthing malleable brainless pop-star wannabes that they can trap in usurious deals, make a load of money off then dispense with. No time is spent developing talent, no time is spent helping them to find a style, to practice their craft. It’s all about the ‘rags to riches’ story of someone who sings in the bath and then ends up on stage because of natural talent.

the problem with that is that that kind of ‘natural talent’ doesn’t exist. Some people have developed a musical sensibility sort of by accident, but to become a performer, to work with a band, to write songs, to communicate as a musician, you need to work hard. You need to do gigs, to spends weeks, months, years in rehearsal rooms honing your craft. That doesn’t happen in the bath.

I’ve worked with ‘naturally gifted people’ – they’re a pain in the arse. They sound great if the arrangement is exactly the same as the one they’ve been singing along with on the radio, because their skill is mimickry, not being a musician.

The reality TV shows aren’t set up to find musical depth, just one hit wonders and losers turned ‘boy dun good’ stories like Darius Dinesh and The Cheeky Girls. It’s shameful, and a blot on the music life of the UK.

All we need to remember is that it’s got nothing to do with us – we just carry on making the music that matters to us, avoid all the crappy competitions and flash-in-the-pan dancing for chicken BS. Music is worth more than that. Simon Cowell can shove it up his arse.

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Peep Show

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Ricky Gervais – I mean, I found The Office funny, but have never felt any real affinity with the co-writer and star of the show. However, when he commented on stage at the British Comedy Awards this week that it was a tragedy that Peep Show hadn’t been nominated for any awards, I almost applauded the TV (I didn’t, because people who actually applaud the TV are clearly insane, like middle aged blokes who shout at referees on televised football matches).

Peep Show is without doubt the most original comedy to hit the screens in the UK for quite a few years. At least since the Office, if not before. For those who’ve missed it thus far, it’s a sit-com about two losers who share a flat. All the camera work is POV – you’re always looking at the scene from one of the character’s point of view, so there’s no third person camera work – and there’s a running commentary by the two main characters in the from of their inner monologues. Brilliantly observed, hilariously funny, occasionally surreal and a little bit twisted, it’s just come to the end of the third series, and I so hope it gets recommissioned for a fourth.

Til then, you can catch up with the repeats on E4 (oh yes, we’ve finally gone and got a Freeview box!) or buy series one and two on DVD.

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dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Our present to ourselves last christmas was a DVD player – it had just got too annoying to go to the local video rental place and find that they had it on DVD but not video, and that the DVD had loads of cool extras. So we gave in.

This year, our pressie to ourselves is a Freeview box – like cable or satellite without the millions of shit channels. You just get the free-to-air stuff that’s worth watching – BBC 3, 4 and News 24, More4, E4 and some other vaguely interesting stuff. And all in digital loveliness… which is great til the signal drops, then it goes mental… Anyway, lots of TV fun to be had – from this evening’s viewing, More 4 and BBC four seem to be showing a lot of shows that are like TV versions of Radio 4 shows, which is just fine by me.

So that’s our chrissy pressie to ourselves. And this is my christmas present to you – enjoy.

Soundtrack – Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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sidetracked…

ah, now I remember what I was going to talk about WRT Springer the Opera!

It’s the news story that Woolworths and Sainsbury’s have refused to stock the DVD. How ridiculous is this?? Both shops have no ethical trading policy that I’m aware of, and as Stewart Lee pointed out on the radio, both will receive far more calls to stop stocking Nestle or Proctor And Gamble products, but won’t do that because that’s about money. It’s a marketing balls-up, and just highlights the double standards of the big chainstores…

However, what it will also do is give a whole load of publicity to the DVD release of the show. After the loons at Christian Voice protested the stage show, attendance went up, when they complained about the TV show, it broke broadcasting records, hopefully the same will happen with the DVD…

When will these minority interest groups get their heads around the notion that picketing and complaining about stuff just gives it publicity. The same thing happened with ‘the Last Temptation of Christ’ – not, I’m told, a particularly good film, but a box office smash thanks to a bunch of well meaning complainers who made it a front page news item when it came out.

Right, so my next album is going to be called ‘all religions can kiss my arse… and atheists can piss off as well.’ With track title targeting each of them in turn. Hopefully I’ll get banned and sell a million.

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art vs totalitarian religion

I’ve just been listening to a fascinating interview with comedian Stewart Lee, on BBC Radio London – Stuart is the writer of Jerry Springer The Opera, a stage show that had a hugely successful run in the west end and then became the biggest watched opera or music in the BBC’s history when it was shown on TV. It also racked up 67,000 complaints from lots of people who hadn’t seen it and probably wouldn’t have understood it if they had.

The controversy arose from the supposed depiction of Jesus in the show – Jesus being a guest on the Springer Show, dressed as a baby. So the show was accused by a few people of blasphemy, and as the church loves a good scandal, an email campaign was started which lead to tens of thousands of complaints to the beeb and threats to the writers and members of the cast (oh yes, how marvelously Christ-like).

Anyway, Stuart on the radio made a very apposite observation, the the effect that ‘Good art is about questioning everything and then leaving those questions open to the interpretation of the audience. Bad or repressive religion is about absolutes and certainties’.

Which is true – I’ve been around a few repressive religious scenarios where questions and doubting were seen as dissent of the worst kind, and blind faith was encouraged. If you’ve got a question, just ask the leaders and believe their response, however bizarre it may be.

Conversely, I’ve also been around a lot of good people of faith, people who see the life of faith as a journey not a destination, one on which we have to constantly reassess our take on things, to question everything, to leave ourselves open to questioning and scrutiny, and keep searching, open to the possibility that we might be wrong. And I’ve met people like that from a whole range of faith traditions, be they christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist or agnostic/athiest. Whatever it is that you place your faith in has to be tested and questioned.

Which is where art like Jerry Springer The Opera comes in – satire is a very powerful tool in asking questions, a great way to expose elements of belief systems that require exposing, and should be a debate starter not a debate crusher. One of my favourites of late is the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster – a spoof religion set up to counter the decision of the Kansas School Board’s decision to teach 7 day creationism as the alternative to Darwinian evolution. It’s hilarious, both as a pastiche of religions in general, and in its treatment of its main target.

The problem, of course, is that you end up in a situation where the two camps are polarised and the more mystical middle ground is ignored – either you believe that the world is 4000 years old, and God is the supreme bull-shitter who made the world look like it was a lot older just so he could send a load of people to hell, or you reject any notion of there being a creator who was involved in the development of the universe. The evidence for evolution in the trad darwinian sense does have a few gaps in it, but is nowhere near as impossible to grasp as the notion that the world was made 4000 years ago! But neither are where my head is at. I don’t see Genesis 1 and 2 as supporting a literalist interpretation of the jewish creation myth, but neither do I think that all of this could happen by accident.

Ultimately, if your faith in either god or there being no god is reliant on the veracity of the jewish creation myth, you really need to get out more…

Anyway, back to Springer the Opera… So they are off on tour – I’m told the show isn’t actually all that good, but I still really want to see it to support people who are asking questions, to have my own faith challenged and see where the answers sit. I missed the west end run, sadly, but will see what I can do to get to the stage show. And if I’m offended, so be it – it does us good once in a while to have our sensibilities scandalised. I can’t quite imagine what could be in it that would offend me though…

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"Intention is Audible"

It’s one of those things I tell my students all the time. ‘Intention Is Audible’ – if you’re writing music just so other people who play the same instrument as you will think you’re a badass and can play faster than them, that’s going to come across in the music, and it’s very unlikely to have any emotional impact on your listeners. If you are playing out of some sense of obligation to some outside standard of what is and isn’t acceptable, the likelihood is that it’ll be plainly obvious that it isn’t from the heart. It’s why so much modern pop is as dull as shit, why not one of the TV talent shows has, as yet, produced a genuinely creative artist. That Will Young is the best we have is a sad indictment on the whole sorry charade.

Every now and again, the ‘intention is audible’ line is hammered home to me in a positive way (the negative stuff is there in so much music every day, sadly). One such experience is listening to ‘Duw A Wyr’ by Lleuwen Steffan/Huw Warren and Mark Lockheart. It’s a collection of Welsh hymns from the time of the revival, sung in welsh and given a european jazz reworking. And it’s beautiful.

But more than that, it’s deeply moving. Remember, it’s sung in welsh – there are translations on the sleeve, but I’ve intentionally avoided them thus far, as I’m allowing the music to impact me on a purely emotional level. And it works. Boy, it works. One particular track, ‘Gwahoddiad’, is one of the most uplifting things I’ve heard in years. The intention of the song is crystal clear in the performance, in the intonation of the voice. It’s incredible. Maybe I’ll have a read of the words later on. Maybe I won’t. It’s gospel music in its purest form – ‘good news’.

And it reminds me why I do what I do. Playing solo bass that isn’t all histrionic fretboard gymnastics and slapping, tapping circus tricks is definitely a ‘road less travelled’. There are very few solo bassists around, even fewer that aren’t spending their time pushing speed and agility as their main frontiers. To keep heading down this path into music where the emotional narrative is front and centre is a juggling act, given that it requires a lot of work on all those technical control and awareness issues that the twiddly stuff requires but without the pay-off that your peers rave about your wikkid skillz. Instead you get the pay-off of people being moved by what you do, being changed in some way by hearing it. I get enough of these stories from people to make it worthwhile. It’s never going to be a mainstream choice of music career (well, I guess it might be, I’d be happy to end up looping, layering and noodling on Top Of The Pops… or at least on Jools Holland’s show…), but it’s one that ultimately is so much more fulfilling for me creatively.

For any musician, learning to practice, absorb and then dismiss virtuosic technique is a huge challenge. For extreme virtuosity and emotional impact to be resident in the same player is incredibly rare – Coltrane would be one, Michael Manring another. Keith Jarrett’s one, Pat Metheny is more than capable of it. And Eric Roche, for whose family I’m playing a benefit gig on Sunday night, was definitely one, one who inspired me hugely, who encouraged me to pursue those aims, to carry the tension forward on my own journey into deeper musical understanding, and greater control of musical vocabulary and expression.

The gig on Sunday night, at Haverhill Arts Centre will be a great chance to give credit where it’s due. The rest of the bill is pretty fine too – Boo Hewerdine, Steve Lockwood and Stuart Ryan are all fabulous musicians that I’m really looking forward to playing with and listening to.

Soundtrack – Lleuwen Steffan/Huw Warren/Mark Lockheart, ‘Duw A Wyr’

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Cambridge gig

Last night’s gig was a lot of fun. It was in St Ives, which until a couple of weeks ago I thought was in Cornwall. There’s one in Cambridgeshire as well, dontchaknow. Anyway, it was a benefit gig organised by The Free Church (URC), who are celebrating 25 years since the building was done up and the church was reborn, and instead of raising money for themselves, they’ve picked 25 local, national and international charities to support. A good thing.

The lineup for the gig was Alias Grace, Rob Jackson and me. Alias Grace is a duet of Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill, playing lovely folky piano/vocal stuff. Rob toured with me on the Grace And Gratitude tour, and is always a treat to listen to. So even if it’d been rubbish gig for me, it would’ve been worth going to see the others play. As it was, it wasn’t a rubbish gig for me at all. The church hall was a lovely space to play in, and the audience seemed wonderfully attentive. I didn’t play quite as well as I did last Sunday in Manchester – not badly, just not quite as sharp, but I did get to play my new ‘Scott Peck’ tune, which will be on the next album. Ran out of time all-too-soon and wasn’t able to play the one request that I’d had (for Highway One, from Catherine Street-Team) – will play it at next Cambridge gig, I promise!

Tonight’s gig will be lots of fun – it’s an improv thing with Filomena Campus, Roger Goula and Rowland Sutherland – all great musicians, and the last time we did it it was magic. Plus there’ll be dancers and video projections… should be v. interesting.

In other news, the TV and radio have been blanketed by the news about George Best’s death, which is undoubtedly a tragic moment for his family, and an important milestone in the history of British football. However, as a dispassionate observer, it’s tough not to feel some anger at him having started drinking again after liver transplant. 70 people on the transplant waiting list died last year before they were able to get their new liver – these are very precious things, and for someone to squander their second chance like that is terrible. The people who served him may also need to do some soul-searching. I guess it’s partly a testimony to the power of addiction, but is it also the stubbornness of Best that he thought he could go there again and not die??? I dunno, I’ll never know. right now I’m very sad for his family and those who loved him, and for those who have lost people on the transplant waiting list – I’m guessing this news isn’t doing much for their pain.

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And it's goodnight from him

Ronnie Barker, star of The Two Ronnies, Porridge and one of Britain’s best-known comedy actors and writers, has died aged 76.

What a sad sad loss. Without a doubt, one of the finest comedy actors and writers Britain has ever seen. When they recently brought back the best of the Two Ronnies on BBC1, the thought that they might be gearing up for some new material was fantastic – That Ronnie Barker hadn’t been writing comedy for 15 years seemed like such a waste. His love of word play, and remarkable facility with language meant that it was comedy that often required focussed listening, and it was justification for their writing when the ‘Four Candles’ sketch was recently voted the nations favourite comedy sketch. (It was that sketch that inspired the titles of two of the tunes on Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt II)

So he’ll be hugely missed, and we’ll now never have that one last Christmas special. Just endless hours of Two Ronnies and Porridge videos to remind us of one of the funniest people any of us have ever seen.

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Top comedy gig…

TSP and I are determined to make up for the fact that we missed all the great comedy stuff at the Edinburgh Festival that we really wanted to see.

So last night we went to The Banana Cabaret at The Bedford in Balham. We knew it was a nice venue from going to the new Kashmir Klub there fairly regularly.

The headliners last night were Milton Jones and Gina Yashere – obviously a v. popular choice judging by the ‘standing room only’ situation by the time we arrived. It was also extremely smokey and we were reconsidering our decision… until the first act came on, John Fothergill – a regular on the London comedy club scene (apparently – I’ve never been to a comedy club before, only comedy gigs in theatres), and a very funny man.

Then came some poor bloke who pretty much died on his arse – given that I’ve only gone to Comedy in theatres before now, the standard of live comedy I’ve seen has been very high – people like Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, Ross Noble, Rhona Cameron, Barry Cryer etc… hang on, I have been to a comedy club before – Club Senseless in Crouch End, but their booking policy is so choosy there’s never going to be any rubbish there either (I’ve seen Rich Hall and Rob Deering there – both top pros).. so, that doesn’t really count. Where was I? Ah yes, poor bloke dying on stage – it’s not that he was dreadful, he just wasn’t very funny. Which just goes to confirm my response to anyone who ever says ‘you should do stand-up’ after one of my gigs. No I shouldn’t. If I’m not funny, but vaguely friendly and endearing on my gigs, I can still win. People will like me, enjoy the music, and smile a bit, and that’s a success. If you’re not very funny but just come across as a nice bloke at a comedy gig, YOU’RE RUBBISH! there’s no halfway measure. No-one can say ‘shut up and player yer guitar’. They just get impatient for the next act.

So I’ll stick with making people laugh between songs – that way I still have my proper skill to fall back on, something I’ve spent decades honing, rather than a half-arsed haphazard approach to comedy, which just sort of happened and is really helpful for getting reviews on the Edinburgh Fringe, but isn’t really what I do for a living…

Anyway, the headliners were, as expected, fantastic. Very very funny. I’ve seen Milton Jones live loads of times – at Greenbelt, and a few other comedy gigs around, but he never fails to make me fall about laughing. An exceedingly skillful comedian. Gina is someone that TSP and I have enjoyed on TV for years, and is equally if not more funny on stage. Great observational stuff, very endearing personality and some top absurd stories.

All in all a great night out, despite having spent £12 to stand up. Next Time we’ll get there earlier.

Soundtrack – Erin McKeown, ‘Grand’.

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the American political landscape post-Katrina

There’s been a heck of a lot of coverage of the battle for the ideological mind of america in its collective response to Katrina. The left have been very quick to target the incomprehensibly slow response of the Bush government, while the right have looked to lay the blame with local politicians and the looters (or at least the black looters, who were overwhelmingly portrayed at thieves, compared to the footage of white survivors foraging for food.. I’m guessing the divide between those trying to survive and those ‘looting’ was not strictly racial…)

However one area that seems to have come up for discussion more than most has been the effect that America’s welfare system has had on things. One article that I had forwarded to me from a few different sources said that what the aftermath of Kartrina demonstrated was that the welfare state had bred an entire sub-society of spongers and freeloaders with no sense of their place within society, who didn’t see hard work as the answer, but instead looked to the government for handouts etc. etc. It was a particularly poorly written piece, heavy on the appeals to America’s pioneer heart and generalisations about the nature of people on welfare, and very light on the reasoning behind the welfare state or any sense of responsibility for the nation’s poor.

On the other side, this article on the BBC website expresses the hope that Katrina will expose the rotting heart of the American social darwinian project, and that Americans will be able to relight the social concience that got them through the depression.

The responses at the bottom of the page are fascinating from the overwhelmingly supportive, to the scathingly critical, to those who just seem aggrieved that any damn Euro-Commie would dare to comment on the majesty that is the USA.

I’ve never been able to understand the American reaction to the notion of ‘welfare’ – surely the word itself is overwhelmingly positive – an institution to look after the WELFARE of the people. A recogntion of our collective responsibility to the people who share our laws and economy. It seems there are many in the US political elite who refuse to recognise the role of the upwardly mobile in stepping on the heads of the poor. The fallacy of ‘worldwide economic growth’ is writ large across the US political scene, with lots of talk of trickle down economics and a rising tide floating all the boats, and all that horseshit. It clearly doesn’t work. The net has too many holes, the trickle down structure isn’t porous, too many people have no boat to start with, so are drowned.

Katrina has placed the faces of the poorest of the poor on the TV screens of america for the first time. The dark underbelly of the American dream, those for whom it’s been a nightmare, are now on the nightly news. A lot of people seem to be alarmed that so many people were without transport to get out, or without the technology to even know fully what was going on. I’d love to know how many of the ‘looters’ had mental illnesses which they couldn’t afford to get any help for.

It truth, I think arguments about the welfare state in relation to Katrina are a bit of a red herring. The lack of funding for the reinforcing of the levees is a far greater question hanging over it. The lack of any coherent disaster plan, the utter confusiong that permeated the post hurricane planning and led to no-one doing anything except bussing people to the Superdome to die. (actually, that’s where the welfare system comes in – with a decent welfare state comes government-paid doctors, locally practicing, who would have had more chance of knowing what was happening with their patients… The image of people in wheelchairs left outside the superdome, many in desperate need of medication, abandoned to die, is one of the most harrowing TV images I’ve seen since the first pictures of Darfur came through. That alone should be grounds for a total governmental shakeup.)

But why the richest nation on earth should balk at the idea of taxation to help the poor is utterly beyond me. A nation that hold claim to a ‘christian’ heritage, but where the christians overwhelming vote for a party of lower taxation and less assistance for the poor (who’s the Good News meant to be for exactly?) It all leaves me rather bewildered. As I’ve said before here, many of my favourite people in the world are Americans, I love visiting the country, and there are things about the american way of life that we in Britain could really do with a dose of, but the political landscape still leaves me utterly bewildered, incredulous that such a country could put up with the festering sore of abject poverty within its own borders.

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