Music: Angusband as Theatre

Rock'n'roll is dead. When it died is open to debate. Let's say, for argument's sake, that it was buried with Kurt Cobain. There's only so much you can do with guitar, bass, drums and the human voice. It's surprising it took four decades to occupy all available territory, given it's many practitioners. Jazz has far more permutations and ceased to evolve as both a popular and creative art form circa 'Bitches Brew'. Electronica fared no better. It had two decades of development ending in the mid-nineties. By then, its parameters were defined.

Which isn't to say good rock'n'roll won't be made again. It is being made every day. It's just that it is unlikely to be doing anything new while appealing to a mass audience; what it needs to be a social force as against an act of mere consumption. Any innovator that finds an empty niche is unlikely to set the charts alight. Instead, we'll get diminishing returns on karaoke. Which isn't a bad thing, because rock'n'roll is best enjoyed in a drunken crowd anyway. A listen or two and you've got all that is new from even the best of it. After that, the listening experience is mainly an exercise in nostalgia.

Yes, I know there are new bands. There are even new genres, although they're generally fusions of, variants on or revivals of what's gone before. Most of the young bands that have come to prominence in the last decade sound like music to wet your bed to to me, but then my incontinence years aren't far away. ACDC never made music to wet your bed to, although they are piss yourself funny on occasions, and best enjoyed pissed, the more pissed the better. They make back-to-basics riff-driven rock and that is all they've ever made.

The phenomenon of the tribute band is a relatively recent one. As a mass phenomenon, I suspect their emergence began around the time rock'n'roll as a creative force was on it's last legs. Bjorn Again bounced out of Australia in 1988. The Australian Pink Floyd Show, ditto. Infact, Australia is the home of the tribute band, probably because most world tours never get that far, and although Antipodeans have their own place in rock history, most of them had to relocate to England to make it, ACDC an honourable exception.

The tribute band is distinct from the covers band: groups who entertain club and pub audiences by playing the hits of the day. Many groups of note started out that way, The Beatles included. The history of Beatles tribute bands predates all others, going back to the birth of The Bootleg Beatles in Tiverton, Devon in 1980 but until 1990 the UK was disinterested, still considering the concept somewhat naff, and they earned their crust in Eastern Europe and Asia, also omitted from most tour schedules. Now they play the Royal Albert Hall. Tribute bands don't just play the odd song by an artist, they attempt to recreate the experience of that artist in their prime. In some cases, they endeavour to exceed it, wanting to live up to our fantasy of the true innovators of rock'n'roll live. The Beatles retired from touring before their most ground-breaking years in the recording studio. The Bootleg Beatles can draw from their entire oeuvre, wardrobes as well as tunes, complete with a vanity case of false moustaches.

Let me state it now: I have no problem with tribute bands. I have no problem with a contemporary theatre company putting on a Shakespeare play without the author playing the role of Banquo's ghost. I take no issue with hearing a Mozart symphony without Wolfgang Amadeus on the podium in his powdered periwig either, although I do think conductor and orchestra should be attired in period dress for my visual pleasure. And I see tribute bands as playing to a classical score in a different genre. Only rock'n'roll is not limited to notes being played in the sequence in which they were composed. The experience is multi-sensory. Ideally, a tribute band should ape the original in every aspect; their only creative input should be that of skilled mimics.

Angusband is a tribute band. At least, they are twenty percent of a tribute band. Their Angus Young hasn't just been playing along to ACDC CDs, he's been studying the videos. If I were him, I'd spend a bit more on my shorts - red velvet would be nice - and the nose ring is inauthentic - but he's got the hair - which is more than the original has now - he's got the riffs and he's got the moves. I missed the cannons and I missed the wrecking ball, but loved the spotlit solo from the balcony at the back of the hall. The lead singer fits both Bon Scott and Brian Johnson into his manly frame and does a good job on the vocals of both, although he looks like neither. The rest of the lineup are sidesmen: heads down, crunching riff replication. When they played the Phoenix on November 21st - all proceeds to Phonic FM, thanks lads - all they lacked was an audience ready to play their part. There was insufficient leather, denim and ACDC t-shirts on show for my liking; not enough long hair on the men or poodle perms on the women. Come on people - a tribute band is nothing without a tribute crowd.

Cinema Review: Bright Star

Has there ever been a good film about a poet, about poetry?

If you measure quality in body count and explosions, certainly not, although Arnie as The Terminator had a way with a catchphrase.

If you rate your films in laughs, probably not, unless your idea of a joke is James Bond playing Ted Hughes in 'Sylvia'. There is something preppy about Gwyneth Paltrow, but you can't imagine her writing 'Ariel' or 'The Bell Jar'.

Take your pick of the Bukowski flicks, but they're about the bum, not the bum's work. That said, the bum's life was his work and Mickey Rourke, the star of 'Barfly', was at least a kindred spirit.

'Il Postino' is a fine film and Pablo Neruda was a great poet, but the film takes plenty of liberties with the man - transplanting hims exile from Chile to Italy - but you do get a sense of a poet working, or trying to work. The real star, however, is the postman of its title, and although the soundtrack of the movie contains plenty of poetry, it is the protagonist's belated coming of age and finding love that is the at movie's beating heart, Neruda being his guide to life and romance. It won an Oscar, and deservedly so, but had the postman's mentor been a novelist, painter or composer, would the essence of the film been lost?

As for 'Tom and Viv', it began as a stage play and its cinematic incarnation doesn't entirely transcend those more intimate origins. William Dafoe and Miranda Richardson are both talented actors, but whether they inhabited their characters as they were in life is moot. Perhaps the form of a biopic will never serve poetry well, and this example isn't helped by the Eliot estate's refusal to allow the incorporation of any of his work, not surprising given the not entirely sympathetic depiction of the plight of the straitlaced banker being married to a more-than-kooky heiress. Ultimately, I didn't find empathy with either character easy and that limited my enjoyment; if you get over that, it could be a rewarding two hours.

As for 'Bright Star', the Jane Campion biopic of John Keats in the last months of his life in England, I didn't find empathy either, but that's because Keats is played as a wet rag and Fanny Brawne switches from cutesiness to hysteria without much in between. Yes, it is beautifully shot and fans of the costume drama will no doubt forgive its faults and wallow in the period charm and Pre-Raphaelite cinematography, but its not one for the boys' night out.

Incidentally, 'Bright Star' the sonnet was first published in the Plymouth and Devonport Gazette. If a contemporary local paper publishes a poem at all, it is invariably Aunt Maude's Ode to her recently deceased cat. No doubt Aunt Maude would love the film and like the poem, which conveys - in fourteen lines that define nineteenth century Romantic poetry - what the movie fails deliver in two hours - of what John Keats felt for his greatest love:

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The Undead Poets Society: John Cooper Clarke

To be deemed worthy of induction into the Undead Poets Society, a writer must have something of the night about him.

Born in a coffin in 1949, with his cadaverous complexion and just got-out-of-the-grave hair, John Cooper Clarke fits the bill, but isn't he just a funny man in a pall bearer's suit, his pipe cleaner limbs fitting those drainpipe kecks most snugly?

He is funny, sure - shoot flies off the ceiling with syringes of blood funny - but that isn't the end of his talents, and nor are his winklepicker boots. To describe him as a performance poet or stand-up doesn't do his stagecraft or pagecraft justice, although he is an example to the purveyors of both of those dark arts. Whatever a poet is, he is it, though some poets would deny it.

He wouldn't trust a man from the academy, and neither should you, but he gets their respect for his metrical ability, dead-eye image play and verbal dexterity. Before the Beat, Pop Art and Punk knocked down the walls of the old school, little Johnny would've been kept out of the playground of poetry, but the Children of Albion let him in on their game and then he changed the rules to ones more to his liking; it's Johnny Clarke's world and the fuddy-duddies will just have to get used to it.

Neither is he a musician, although many of his early works were released on vinyl, the best being 'Snap, Crackle and Bop' produced by Martin Hannett - the man who made Joy Division sound like a World War Two factory - and backed by some of Manchester's finest, Pete Shelley and Vini Reilly among them. But even Yorkshiremen admire the Bard of Salford, Simon Armitage and Alex Turner included, and now he lives in the belly of the beast that is Essex; rumour has it even southern softies like him, and not just the Honey Monster.

In the 2007 film 'Control' he played his self of thirty years before, and looked no more ancient now than he did then, surely proof he is more dead than alive. And yet he lives on: on a stage somewhere near you, often with Mark E Smith of Prestwich not far behind; or between the covers of 'Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt'; or spookily providing the soundtrack to an episode of the Sopranos with the bloody-tastic 'Chickentown'.

If he didn't have to drink so much blood, he'd no doubt lend his name to product again, and sink his fangs into a new generation. By making him our first honorary member of the Undead Poets' Society, perhaps we can urge him back into the immortality of print, before the River Styx takes him down to the dark beyond. If we can't, he has already done enough to live in our veins forever.

Maestros of the Movies: Charlie Kaufman

Who the hell is Charlie Kaufman? That's the question Charlie Kaufman has been asking himself across the course of his screenwriting career. Not in the trivial sense of delivering six autobiographical pieces when few lives deserve one, least of all that of a cranky Hollywood screenwriter. But in the deeper sense of exploring the human condition and the nature of the conscious self:

- In 'Being John Malkovitch' a struggling puppeteer discovers a portal into the mind of a well known actor, who ultimately becomes a world-renowned puppeteer, bringing the art of puppetry to a mass audience.

- Again working with the Director Spike Jonze, 'Human Nature' concerns a scientist couple's attempts to train a man brought up by apes in the ways of the world, until the freedom of the wild life becomes more attractive than civilisation.

- A fictionalised Charlie Kaufman gains a twin Donald in 'Adaptation', more successful in life, love and work but without his artistic integrity. Charlie struggles to adapt an intriguing work of non-fiction, 'The Orchid Thief', seeking the advice of Donald's screenwriting guru, before finally travelling to Florida to confront the author and her real-life lover and inspiration, with tragic consequences that break Kaufman's writer's block.

- 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' is the biopic of the gameshow host and supposed CIA hitman Chuck Barris, directed by George Clooney who opted to strip Kaufman's scripts of much of its surreal and reflexive trickery and go back to source; the movie bombed and Kaufman disowned it.

- 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' was Charlie's first Oscar-winning script, in which the shy Jim Carrey character seeks the help of a medical team who can erase all memory of a failed romance with cookie Kate Winslet from his brain, following her decision to do the same. Two years later, they meet again, just as instructed in their last shared memory, and have another try at mismatched love.

- 'Synecdoche: New York' is Charlie Kaufman's first movie as writer-director, a five-year labour of love in which an alienated and depressed theatre director, Caden Cotard, receives a genius award, funding a project into which he can pour his whole self, a recreation of city life in a gigantic warehouse. Years later, the production has become a world within a world in which Caden Cotard finally relinquishes control to take on the part of a cleaning lady, still obsessed with the artistic problem he has set himself as his mimetic urban creation is abandoned and his own existence ends. It is a dream of life as life is, a rare and fragile thing.

You'll have concluded that a Kaufman movie doesn't lend itself to the one sentence elevator pitch. Though stars queue to work with him, they aren't star vehicles either. Never short of critical acclaim, he's also flirted with popular success; it's prospect has driven him deeper into exploring his self, universalised in the most significant corpus of twenty-first century cinema so far realised.

In 'Adaptation', Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman confronts the aforementioned screenwriting guru with a question: "What if the writer is attempting to create a story when nothing happens?" Larry David asked himself the same when conceiving 'Seinfeld' two decades ago with nine series - fifteen if you include six seasons of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' - of hilarious consequences. "You write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears," comes the reply. Charlie has spent his entire career proving that advice wrong, provoking tears of gratitude and joy in those of us who follow his work.

There is conflict of course: the inner conflict of coming to terms with your self in the world and trying to create something worthwhile out of it; the challenge of artistic endeavor taking on philosophy's perennial conundrums. Beginning with a bang - 'Being John Malkovitch' was the most stunning authorial and directorial debut of the last decade - and ending with a terrifying whimper - I'm convinced I may be living in my own Synecdoche, even though I can neither pronounce or define the term - Charlie Kaufman has broken all the rules of screenwriting. In doing so, he has created a new set of principles for screenwriters - indeed, creative writers of any kind - to follow:

- Write from yourself, not about yourself. There is a Kaufman-like character at the heart of each of his most successfully realised scripts. None of them - even his namesake in 'Adaptation' - are living a Kaufman-like life in the outer world; all of them share one of his inner obsessions.

- Bring the inner world outside. His subjects - the philosophy of mind, the creative process, human nature, the predicament of mortality - are not promising cinematic subjects. But with them, he makes great cinema, by finding a means of untangling them in the outer world, that we all can share, thus proving that big ideas can make big movies, without the conventional virtues of character, plot and story arc dominating their construction.

- Make the unreal real. All Kaufman films are predicated on a ridiculous premise. That's Hollywood. The trick is to make the audience believe it isn't Hollywood for a couple of hours. Charlie takes it further by making movies that Hollywood should never have taken on, and proving those who said so wrong.

- Learn the rules, then break them. Any poet should know their way round a sonnet, but you need a good excuse to write one in couplets of rhyming pentameter. All artists should have a go at drawing from life, whatever their ultimate discipline, however contemptuous they may become of the figurative painter. CK understands the rules of cinema and story telling but isn't constrained by them.

- Trust your audience. So many mainstream movies - and American TV shows - are scripted by committee, that by the time they're made, all the jagged edges of individuality have been smoothed off. We are patronised by such creations, designed for mass appeal, the greatest art form of our times reduced to a marketing exercise. Real artists believe if they resolve a problem for themselves, they resolve it for others.

- Screenwriter good, auteur better. Charlie Kaufman has worked with some talented and individual directors. Spike Jonze has complementary genius: the ability to create compelling visuals from abstract ideas. Michael Gondry also began his career as a pop video maker, but has discovered a talent for intellectually and aesthetically satisfying comedy. But as good as these directors have been, none of them have gone as deep into the Kaufman world as K himself. 'Synecdoche: New York' is a Russian doll of a movie that we may never get to the bottom of, but will keep returning to, happily and unhappily, until we can return no more.

Guest November 2009: Phil Bowen

Phil Bowen was an ideal guest for our first show. He is based in the south-west, living in Cornwall. Although primarily a writer of poetry and plays, he's also been involved in film and visual art. And the day of the launch show coincided with the first night of his play 'Anything But Love' at the New End Theatre in Hampstead.

We have Phil's hour long interview in our digital archive and  it is now available on my co-host Rachel McCarthy's website - keep an eye out for future interview podcasts. I don't intend to transcribe or summarise our conversation which traced his life from childhood in Liverpool through college in Chester and onto careers as a teacher, publican and writer touching on his favourite music and how it has informed his work as a writer.

His New and Selected Poems 'Nowhere's Far' has recently been published by Salt. He has edited books about Bob Dylan and the Beatles. He is the biographer of the Mersey poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. His plays have been staged in England, Scotland, Wales and the USA. He conceived of 'Adrian's Wall', an art installation for Liverpool Year of Culture 2008. And he has inspired a love of poetry in thousands of children in hundreds of schools as well as staged plays and made films with young people.

There follows a list of links we used in preparing for Phil's visit to the studio:

PHIL BOWEN

Career Resume
Salt Author Page
Nowhere's Far
Shearsman Review
Stride Magazine Review
Anything But Love video
Books on Amazon
A Gallery to Play to - Preview
Dylan Thomas Festival talk in The Independent
Larkin Society talk
Database of Plays (incomplete)
Poetry in Schools
At Port Eliot Festival
Sample Poetry Lesson
Sample Poetry Workshop
Poets on the Buses

Playlist: November 2009

My memories of the November Show are already hazy and our audio recording is sans music - for copyright reasons you understand - but these are some of the tracks we played:

1. 'When the Man Comes Around' by Johnny Cash off 'American IV: The Man Comes Around'

What better way to kick off than with Johnny Cash singing his last great composition. The chugga-lugga rhythm of his early work on Sun records and Colombia isn't for everyone - it is for me - but few discerning ears can resist the five albums - and one boxed set, 'Unearthed' - he made with Rick Rubin and released on American Recordings.

2. 'The Man With the Child in His Eyes' by Kate Bush off 'The Kick Inside'

Maybe not the most apt way to introduce a school teacher, but even Phil Bowen knows this is a great Sunday morning record. Kate Bush was in her early teens when she wrote it. Most artists spend a career never getting close.

3. 'Wonderful Land' by The Shadows off just about any Shadows compilation you care to name.

Phil still hasn't forgiven Rachel for playing 'FBI' instead. And I haven't forgiven Phil for insisting we play this as well, two Hank Marvin instrumentals on one show...

4. 'She Loves You' by The Beatles - their second single

'Please Please Me' came first but this was their first number one, their best seller to this day, and the record with which they conqueured the UK, America and the world. Phil Bowen comes from Liverpool too, you know.

5. 'I Want You' by Bob Dylan off 'Blonde on Blonde'

One of Bob's more melodious and romantic numbers off possibly the greatest album of all time, purportedly written about Anita Pallenburg, then girlfriend of Brian Jones, one time member of The Rolling Stones and wearer of Chinese suits.

6. 'Suzanne' by Leonard Cohen off 'Songs of Leonard Cohen'

Rare proof that a good poem can become a great song, 'Suzanne Takes You Down' was first published in 'Parasites of Heaven' then recorded by Judy Collins who introduced a nervous Leonard Cohen to the world of music. Mr Cohen is 75 and back on the road.

7. 'Downtown Train' by Tom Waits off 'Rain Dogs'

Still probably Tom Waits most recognisable - and most covered - song, Phil used this as an excuse to reminisce about his publican years, sharing early morning snifters with Keith Floyd in Clifton, Bristol.

8. 'I'll Give You Anything But Love' by Ella Fitzgerald

Phil Bowen's play 'Anything But Love' - a fictitious meeting between Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Fields - was opening at The New End Theatre, Hampstead the Sunday we interviewed him. Ella turns this Dorothy Fields lyric into a slow burning smooch.

9. 'Human Nature' by Miles Davis off 'You're Under Arrest'

Some find the Miles' late work a little too close to elevator music for their liking - we had complaints that said as much - but whatever you think of the eighties synthesized setting, the trumpet playing on this John Bettis/Steve Porcaro written number locks into the melody and never lets it go.

10. 'Human Nature' by Michael Jackson off 'Thriller'

And the complaints continued as we segued into The King of Pop's take on the song which we used to introduce my review of 'Michael Jackson's This Is It'. Not that we cared. The sweet Jacko vocal and limbic Quincy Jones production still move the eighties child inside the noughties man. They use a Michael Jackson CD as a doorstop in the Phonic FM studio, you know.

11. 'Psycho Killer' by Talking Heads off 'Stop Making Sense'

The link was corny - leading into my 'Maestros of the Movies: Alfred Hitchcock' feature - but there's nothing corny about the music, off one of the greatest concert films and live albums ever released.

Maestros of the Movies: Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was devoted to the production of pure cinema, directing 52 films.

Beginning his 50 year career as an art designer in the silent movies, he was a master of visual story telling, story-boarding every scene. So far as Hitch was concerned, most of the work was done before the cameras rolled. Compare his working sketches of 'The Birds' with the finished product.

He was a master technician, being able to call shots and count frames without needing to be behind the lens, and loved to work within constraints and innovate his way out of them:

- 'Rear Window' was filmed within and looking out of a single New York apartment, that becomes a window on the world.

- 'Rope', possibly the first mainstream movie to feature homosexuals as the - albeit murderous - protagonists seems to happen in real time and be composed of just one shot, in fact ten spliced by clever edits.

- In 'Frenzy', he used a similar technique to maintain the continuity between scenes shot in Pinewood Studios and Covent Garden, London.

- Hitch and his cinematographer Irmin Roberts introduced the dolly zoom, moving the camera in while zooming in to stretch an image, mimicking the experience of vertigo in the film of the same name

- They also pushed blue screen technique further and got better results than any other crew, though his preference for studio over location and love of car shots sometimes gives the modern viewer a sense of unreality; some of the remake of his own 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' was shot in Morocco, but you wouldn't know it

Although his minor works have dated, budding film directors can still learn plenty from his finest creations:

- Direct the audience, not the actors. The cast are there to fake it, the audience to feel it. Method acting made no sense to Hitchcock; you don't need to feel how it is to be a murderer to act like a murderer; and if you're feeling murderous, you won't be a bundle of fun on set.

- Make the film before you make the film. For all his use of ground-breaking set design, Alfred had the first cut down in his head before the clapper board came down. Every frame of the famous shower scene in 'Psycho' was conceived and sketched before it was filmed.

- Tell the story with the sound turned off. Hitchcock began his apprenticeship in the silent German cinema of the Expressionist era, when visuals were primary and music completed the emotional palette; when used, dialogue was there not to carry the plot, but to illustrate it in words.

- Music has more emotional impact than words. Hitchcock's closest working relationships were with his camera men, set designers and, most of all, the composers of his soundtracks. Actors might be fun socially, but were never co-creators. Bernard Hermann's decade long stint as Hitch's own maestro took the sound of movies from the melodic and orchestral to the screeching electronica of 'The Birds'.

- Suspense is the withholding of information: from the audience, from the characters, from the actors. Hitchcock was the master of the long pause: a steady, silent shot while something crucial was happening just out of hearing, just beyond view, became his trademark. He wasn't a horror film maker, but every film maker working in that genre learnt their tricks from Hitch.

Not all of his work will satisfy the modern audience. By the sixties, he was over-stretching himself, making more than cameo appearances to introduce his TV series and working on multiple projects when his best works were his sole obsessions. By the late sixties he'd lost touch with the times. Not all of the comedy in 'Family Plot' was intentional.

His raw material was pulp fiction and cod-psychology and in most of his work, neither plot nor character motive bear too much scrutiny. It was on the occasions when the screenplay transcended its source and the movie-making transcended its screenplay that he achieved greatness; his greatest scenes get beneath the conscious mind and into your dreams.