THE BEACH is where the

Haggard go to heave their

Grumbling bodies up

And down, as the statues

On Easter Island surely

Would had they access to

Lifting gear equal to the

Task — and been dug up first.

On the beach is where we

Dig in, not up. It’s where

We sink and then swim, a

Gallant inverse of earlier

Ideas of how things go in

Nature. The shingle is also

Greatly preferable to sand, which the

Young can never understand.

I want to die upon a shingled

Beach — preferably the one I’m on.

Want the tide to gather me from

My place of end and gently

Draw me in its arms to where the

Incorrigible shakes are never seen and

Pain is rinsed away like summer sweat

Running into endless playful Time —

Off the beach at last.

FEELING A LITTLE small in the face of the Hellenic Revival? Worried that others will laugh when you confuse the 'Fall of Ilium' with 'Hector's House'? Concerned that another four hours of Christopher Nolan will suffuse you with the intellectual pain that only Sisyphus endured?

Then you need Coley's Notes, the one-stop shop for instant grasp of the Greats of Literature edited down (and down) into a single image which you need stare at blankly for no more than two minutes to fully ingest the most complex of Classical works.

#1 in the series is available now: blink and you missed it. Here at a fraction of the price of a Penguin Robert Graves is: The Odyssey (also doubling for added value as the Complete Samuel Beckett).

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press

NO, NOT ANOTHER review of The Odyssey. Instead, an analysis of the sensory experience, especially composed for the hard of hearing.

Unusually for me, I shall be curt and to the point, and I shall not bandy flowery language or attempt jokes. It is worth bearing in mind also that it is the first time I have been to the actual flicks for four years, since I staggered out of Moonage Daydream holding my head as if it were a full spittoon, thinking I would never go to the pictures again. Today was an important date with fate for the medium-sized bald man, then.

One of the most succinct film reviews ever was given by my mother (b.1933). On being persuaded with great reluctance one Christmas, about a decade ago, to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with her family, she was asked by her first-born (that would be me) for her first thoughts on the film: “Oh, I suppose it was all right,” she huffed. “But I’d have liked it more if it hadn’t been so American.”

It is into the context of this complex view of the intertextuality of language that my own first and perhaps most important observation falls. For I was brought up on Peter Hall’s dicta about how to speak Classical (ie Ancient Greek but in English), both in single spies and chorally. Aeschylus? Euripides (Trousers)? These dramaturgs require technique, timing, sense, sensibility etc. Likewise Shakespeare. There is of course no ‘right’ way to speak these difficult texts, but there is certainly a wrong way. And let me tell you that top of the list of ‘wrong ways’ is the style universally recognised by me as Nolanese.

“But you are supposed to be deaf as a post, Bald Man,” I hear you cry, somehow. Well, here is the remarkably wrong thing about Nolanese (also known rather ponderously as ‘Epic-Heroic American (Nolanist))’: you can SEE the actors doing it, for it is a speaking style entirely dedicated to getting a look across. The meaning or point of the language is immaterial; what is important is that the line should be spoken as an accompaniment and perhaps even stimulus to the correct disposition of the features: an evenly pursuant whisper that hisses meaninglessly like a hearth and which remains contourless, cadencing into a narrow-eyed cheekbone-firstness with a slightly open mouth (not slack-jawed, which is not Epic-Heroic) either showing resolution, terror, awe or menace but, more importantly, keeps the cheekbone first.

I heard and understood no more than three words in the entire production, which is an indication of just how good a performance in the Nolanese style this was. The only blot was the English actress Samantha Morton, who insisted on doing “proper acting” and consequently broke the stylistic membrane which holds the film together like a haggis.

Those three words I heard accidently? Menelaus says “the Gaaaards”, Agamemnon says “the Gaaaaaaaaaards”, and Penelope says “fuck”.

Unlike Nolan, I know when to shut the heck up, though, so you will have to wait for part 2 of this analysis: ‘Sub-bass: how low can you go?’

Wrestle with what I have on

Brian, trying to snake it all together.

Tie him up. Bring him in. But I have to suck it

Up: this is really skinny-minus. Only thing that

Holds it all is Stanley Turrentine, whooping

Like a sultan in my block with Shirley at the

Hammond — not sure that Turrentine is right though.

Not hard enough, not bop.

Brian is always sideways on in

My recall, eyes slotted, ready for what

Comes through the door. But in the room?

Yeah man, very much so. Always in the room,

You dig? Fag downwards, elbows in,

No glam, no fig, just grit — as if some cluck pressed pause

… As his move was made, the gun halfway in or halfway out —

Could be either, might be both.

It is what it is. Brian is not the cause

Or the outcome. But he is all over the

Moment. All over it, like steam. Like vapour.

Like the saxophonist’s breath, the out subvisible

In the room, notepad of the horn-bright night

Blooting lemurs from the hip — not a bum note in the

Rip, which comes for you like squalling cats.

Brian gave me the kindest beating I ever took.

He did it by the coffee machine, two sharp jabs and then

Downstairs for a short right to the slats. Fnnnffff! It was Monk

I’d dissed, and if it’s Monk you’re going to do, then don’t be …

Callow. And as he was Brian, every jab and hook had

Landed like the hippest music. And then, to celebrate,

We had lunch.

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press

WHAT ARE ELECTRIC GUITARS for, if you don’t mind me asking?

As we have seen in the first part of this three-part essay (Distortimento), electric guitars are partly for dressing up: a Danelectro Longhorn Baritone, for instance, adds a tusky Nordic flourish to a carefully assembled Baltic look, for street or evening wear, with runes. Guitars in general make for slightly cumbersome jewellery, especially the denser Gibsons, but visually they get you where you want to go, and some.

We have also heard that electric guitars are to the individual unconscious mind as a dark pool is to the all-seeing eye: they can be a way in, for player and listener alike.

And of course there remains the instrument’s abiding covert identity, the one everyone smart bought into back then when it was first articulated properly by the Feminist intelligentsia as a critique of patriarchal masculinity in the mid-1970s: the six-string wonderwand as projection from the murky cloister of the guitarist’s unconscious: a rock-hard ‘phallus’, which the narcissistic instrumentalist is compelled to manipulate grossly in public spaces to enact “the sin of Onan”, in order to satisfy his need to demonstrate sexual puissance (and, by inference, conceal its lack). Well, we’ve all seen it going on, haven’t we?

As you’d expect, this hard-to-argue-with proposition was met with sneering disdain by the haughtier kind of phallocrat of the day, such as Jimmy Page, plus the rather less distinguished regiment of non-metropolitan heavy metal guitarists who protested that they were not familiar with the term ‘phallus’.

“Woss ’at when it’s at ’ome?” remarked Andy Goggins sceptically. He was one of the twin lead guitarists in the groundbreaking Ipswich HM five-piece, Tracktaters. “We don’t speak Latin. We speak only the language of metal.” This assumed ignorance was betrayed somewhat by two songs on The Rusting Coulter, their second album in 1981: the rousingly climactic “Grumio (in Culina Pavonem Coquit)” and the melancholy road-boogie “Sick Transit Van”. In addition it is worth noting the title of their spectacular debut Under the Influence of Ludwig W (1980).

Nonetheless, the sin of Onan is the cudgel with which rock guitarists have been clobbered in ‘sophisticated’ circles for more than half a century. One can imagine dear old Hank Marvin and his shiny red Strat and even shinier suit literally gulping at the news as it reached him from the distant first chapter of the Old Testament, and then bridling…

“Hang on, hang ON”, he gasps, smiting the formica tabletop in the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho with the flat of his palm. “Who are you calling a wanker, like? And who’s calling me it?” He takes his glasses off in readiness, as he has always done, for he is a Geordie.

It’s not so easy to conceive of other members of the lead-guitar confraternity taking it quite so equably, some of their number perhaps even reacting with the threat of retaliatory violence. But we know that won’t happen. Mick Ronson you can kind of imagine throwing up one hand and saying “Oh, don’t be so silly” and walking off. Were he around. Robert Fripp? I rather think the unfortunate messenger would be the beneficiary of one of his stoniest stares and a very few words spoken firmly but quietly: “We do not have masturbation in Wimborne, nor have we ever. We do not believe in the need of it. Not in Wimborne.”

But most of the rest of them, nothing like as collected. It’s all too easy to picture petulance, isn’t it?

But I have good news for the surviving seed-spilling Onanists in every department of the long-serving rock instrumental front line. Deep research has discovered to me that the standard Anglican interpretation of the sin of Onan is fundamentally misconceived and was probably done so deliberately to serve the interests of Empire and evangelical Christianity, which have always experienced difficulty with the human body and its needs.

The standard Christian interpretation of the story of Onan is as follows.

Onan, in the first Book of the Old Testament, Genesis 38.9, was the second son of Judah and his Canaanite wife, Shuah. Onan had an older brother, Er, and a younger one, Shelah. And it happened that Yahweh slew Er and so Onan was commanded by Judah to fulfil his duties as a brother-in-law in levirate marriage and, er (you might want to pretend that you haven’t read the next bit), to slip one to Er’s widow. And then several more after that. Yes, reader, that is levirate marriage and we must respect its traditions. So there you have it. Er’s relict, Tamar, was required under the law to give it up to Onan, his kid brother, in order that she might deliver herself of offspring — which is as classical indication as any that exists that the Old Testament inclines to the view that a woman’s body is not her own.

I like to think that Onan was an adumbration of we modern men in one respect at least: that he was quite prepared to “spill his seed upon the ground” rather than enter in to Tamar, whether out of respect for Tamar or indeed his dead brother, Er. Whatever the truth of it, it was the act of spilling that made Onan famous and endeared him to 1970s feminism. Casting aside ethics, empathy and curiosity as was his wont, Yahweh, as usual, saw it only one way and promptly slew Onan on account of Onan’s spillage, which had displeased him in the sight of himself.

Well, here is the rub. Anglican scholars have always tended to interpret the story as if Onan’s sin were his masturbation, so that he was physically rendered incapable of entering in to poor Tamar. That’s because the British Empire was dead set against its young men lying around all day playing with themselves, because how then in the face of such torpor would you build an Empire? Modern Bible scholarship takes a different view: non-British scholars of the Old Testament tell us that masturbation is not the issue. In fact, the sin of Onan was not related to masturbation at all but, rather, Onan’s determination to enter into his sister-in-law and then withdraw judiciously and with apt timing, so as then to spill his seed upon the ground … and annoy Yahweh to the point where Yahweh slew Onan, which had an awful ring of inevitability to it. Which also means ipso facto that modern lead guitarists are emphatically not an inadequate bunch of roué exhibitionist tossers — and never have been.

So I am glad that we have cleared that up, and with proper academic rigour.

ALSO SUBJECT TO DISCUSSION earlier in this meticulously researched paper was the suggestion, perhaps expressed a little obliquely, that the electric guitar had two gifts to offer to the suffering postwar world. One was the gift of ‘guitarchitecture’ and the myriad ways an electrified, harmonically complex instrument of immense tonal flexibility was better equipped than any other form of musical tool to enable new ways of building songs. The second gift was of course ‘the guitar solo’, which previous generations of guitars and guitarists had been unable to explore even as an idea, such were the limitations placed on the instrument by its diabolical quietness. There was no established vocabulary for the guitar to solo with either. Not one that would be heard anyway.

So it was entirely good news that the mass-market electric guitar quickly evolved an extraordinary technical and musical adaptability that might be applied at any time in any situation, and would result in a rapidly evolving new solo vocabulary to go with the instrument’s established virtues as a chordal rhythm-maker. The vocabularly duly raced from Elvis’s Scotty Moore to Jimi Hendrix in just twelve years — twelve! — and pretty soon after that it endured an extensive plateau in creative-development terms, (Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen took about twelve years too: compare and contrast etc) which somehow allowed Western Culture to both revere and despise the instrument simultaneously to no great end. Besides, a mere ten years on from the Hendrix sun-burst, the guitar solo’s degradation was sealed and banishment to the abyss of heavy metal assured, by punk.

And then as the more Stalinist of punk strictures began to soften, daft conversations between young men in pubs were overheard. I retain the memory of becoming awfully enamoured of The Only Ones’ John Perry’s brief solo in a song on their first album called “No Peace For the Wicked” — a beautifully turned velvet chain of simple phrases that tilts itself as the solo rolls to impart fresh momentum every time you think impetus has been lost to the strangely metered 4/4 (I have tried counting it, because it sounds like 5/4 or even 7/4, but fours are the only numbers that seem to work) and then seals itself off with an absolutely gorgeous short bend-and-flip. played somewhere close to the nut for tension. I cannot express how much I loved this little solo at the time and I duly tried to express as much to a chum while down the pub one night, and ye gods, it was as if I’d asked to eat his firstborn — that fifteen-minute harangue may have been the seminal moment for this very piece, in 1979.

Once upon a time guitar solos had been everywhere and they were valued highly as a musical figuration bringing delicacy and power, shape, structure and tonal weight to music of every kind. In the extraordinary case of the sophisticatedly bi-Coastal smartarse non-band, Steely Dan, indeed, the freelance guitarists who provided that most recessed of non-groups with high levels of sophisticated energy and even lyric intensity, created something akin to a critical nostalgia for the well-played and properly felt six-string umherstreifend.

Really good guitar solos can make and even uplift an entire album’s worth of so-so songwriting. I hope I don’t denigrate Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon excessively when I suggest that the two ardent Stratocaster solos played by David Gilmour, on “Money” and “Time”, elevate the entire album as a whole to a different altitude altogether, as a tonal, narrative and emotional experience. Similarly, but also very differently, the slightly detached but murderous tonal warping of Earl Slick, heavily overdriven atop the ramparts of David Bowie’s mighty rock-funk “Stay”, on Station to Station, is effectively the broken glass cemented to the tops of the song’s outer walls, as if to defend whatever form of alienation it is that cowers naked and vulnerable within its enclosures.

But it is also useful to understand soloing guitars in more conventional psycho-musical terms as well, as gestures of musicianly self-expression — as small steps taken in the direction of jazz-style improvisation, yet without sounding like jazz. It is instinctual with some players.

I have never held much of a brief for the playing (or the personality) of that early standard-setter of British blues-wailing, Eric Clapton. If ever a man was all guitar solo and not much else, it was Clapton. He has made some sensationally dull music over the decades. Nevertheless, one of my absolute stone-cold knock-out formative experiences as a young and goggling music neo-fan was entirely the work of the White Carshalton Blues Man — and, guess what: he was also playing a Fender Stratocaster at the time, which he called Brownie.

I heard it first a year or two after its release in November 1970. I can remember where I was too. Harpenden. The song was “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?”, a straight extended twelve-bar blues tune popularised by one of Clapton’s heroes, Freddie King, and rather compellingly hammered out on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor) by Derek & the Dominos, Clapton’s mask band as the decade turned following the collapse of his previous so-called supergroup, Blind Faith. “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” is a seething slow-to-mid-paced blues, clipped and perfunctory at first yet quickly gathering to itself a hint of pitch and yaw. The drummer Jim Gordon’s hi-hat flutters the vessel along like a breeze on the starboard quarter, while the rhythm section behaves altogether in an oddly boat-like fashion, floating and tugging and feeling the tide, as boats do. There is suction too in the way the groove works its passage, a resistant pull on a different compass-setting to the one you want.

But that could just be you resisting the pull of Clapton’s ferocious introductory solo — because, yoiks, someone really did get out of bed on the wrong side that morning. The music scowls, although Clapton’s guitar tone is electric honey, the illusion being that you can hear the string vibrate through the guitar’s tone. That instrument has got to be plugged into something small and Tweedy, and the Tweedy thing’s original valves have still to be in place and are now really ready to sing. And, tally-ho etc, Clapton’s singing… For a man who was then not thought to have any kind of singing voice at all, he sings this song exceptionally well, as if he’s really inhabiting it, been there, got the expensive suits hanging in the wardrobe with all their crotches cut out — and now we’re going to hear all about that too. So go with the vibe. It’s pretty good. Meant, if you know what I mean.

The solos arrive, just as your gut tells you they will, after two verses, the two guitarists each taking a couple of long choruses to stretch right out, the first of them to go being the flaxen, furry giant of Southern Rock, Duane Allman, with a bottleneck of some sort turning his left hand into a slide, his body into a highly sensitive sounding board. He’s as elegant as he always is, as stately, as soulful, as in control. But heard again quite some time ago as an adult, it did actually cross my mind that he might be acting. Thinking about it now for the first time since then, I still wonder: did Clapton ask Allman to, as it were, enact a role, using his instrument to ‘play’ a woman’s voice?

Women in general? Or a specific one? Allman’s slide guitar does sometimes sound a little female in its movement and phrasing, becoming increasingly high-pitched with indignation and anger and hurt as she is shut down by her interlocutor — then really giving him what-for… And does Clapton stay out of Allman’s face? Well, no, he doesn’t — he can’t stay out of the picture at all, at any point. At the conclusion of the second sung verse, just as Allman begins his first chorus, you hear Carshalton White Man pull away from the microphone and then hammer straight back into the space he had just vacated with ferocious rhythmic crunches on his bottom strings, like drums, smacking them out as a giddy-up to Allman who is doing his best, bless him, not to yell. Eric Clapton as Keith Richards. Whatever next?

We discover soon enough what happens next. Having acted as Keith to Duane’s Mick Taylor for almost the entire length of Allman’s solo, Clapton then switches back from rhythm to a sort of contrapuntal back-lead, or so it always sounded to me in the album’s rather murky mix played on my cruddy stereo of yore, and he does it before Allman has even reached the exit ramp for his solo, the Englishman pretty much barging the American out of his own lane, with high, needling stuff around the dominant-seventh chord before the cadence has even arrived. To his credit, Allman doesn’t budge, but you sense his surprise and, having sized up his options, he stays calm and clears the path in his own terms. It’s all you can do, really, when your host (who also happens to be your boss) sidles up to you at his house party, while you’re having a really rather nice chat to a very attractive person, and hisses, “Get the fuck out of my lane, motherfucker!”

Or, alternatively, when your lover starts yelling at you, because he cannot organise the chaos undoing his own attempts to soothe his inner world.

The first four bars of legitimate solo space taken by Clapton are hair-raising the first time you hear them, and that effect is not diminished by time, even beyond that point in life where there is no hair left to raise. It is a passage, albeit a brief one, which can have few rivals for entry-impact anywhere in the history of the soloing blues guitar. Or for cogency. It says, Sit up and listen, you Godawful people!

And you do.

“I have fucking had it with this, Pattie. This is what I have to say, okay? You ready for it? Are you ready?” is what I imagine this aggressively imperious sequence of phrases is actually barking into her blenching visage. A little context might not hurt, then — context that I didn’t benefit from myself when I was twelve.

Clapton was at the time secretly, now famously, infatuated with the woman who was married to his Grate Frend, George Harrison, Pattie Boyd. Boyd is Layla and “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” is a raw exposure of the disorganised and deeply agonised feelings that crawled inside Clapton like lizards: rage mixed with lust, despair, jealousy, romantic delusion, resentment, self-hatred and utter frustration at the impossibility of meaningful connection given the vastness of the psychological (and moral) mountain range that gave them footing, but which also divided all three of them. The music we’re listening to when we listen to this song is not gracious or richly deep, nor does it feel as if it is presenting an audacious technical challenge somehow made to look easy. It is borderline psychotic, I’d say, in places. Highly aggressive. Right on the forward edge of control. A man making the voices in his head become real in the room.

The essence of what we’re hearing here is a description of unsane feeling expressed through the wiring of a Fender Stratocaster, pushed by close-to-violent string-striking against the radiance of the instrument’s natural tone as it emerges from a minuscule vintage valve amp (I did some research: it was a tiny Fender Champ), fingered, I should imagine, right up high on the neck on a middle-ish (the G?) string, so that string-length is equal, from pick-stroke to anchor-point, on either side of the functioning pickup, engendering a tone that is very pure indeed, yet is savagely — and I mean savagely — attacked by the distortion imparted by the storm in Clapton’s fingering. It is one note that he rides in on. Just the one, yet I have always registered it as two somehow; two, gradually closing on each other chromatically across a bar’s length, one note bearing in on the other yet held in absolute tension, one bending in to the other to produce a delicious, livid discord, which is then resolved by Clapton’s execution of a rapid and perfectly formed syncopation on a single repeated note followed by a whipped and looping fret-slide down half the length of the neck and back up again to occupy the duration of a grammatical beat, then half-opening the Fender’s throat again to offer up a bar of gulping, desperately chromatic sea-lion barks on two strings and finally, with immaculate resolution, clarity and command of himself, the execution of a beautiful curlicue-and-out figure to finesse the phrase, like a gymnast dismounting from high bars. He lands it perfectly. We mop our brows. But it is the last time in that long, long, hating solo that he feels fully in command of himself. And it was not two notes at the start. It was just the one. Just the one.

It starts at 4mins 14secs and is pretty much over the important part of it by 4m 30s — sixteen seconds give or take, four bars of music — four! — in which a man actually gets to express what he is incapable of consciously knowing of himself.

Since I was a kid I’ve felt that this surely is the most idiomatic, exquisitely turned and perfectly achieved piece of electric guitar soloing that has ever snaked out of a sink of thwarted adolescent woe (although obviously I was not using that kind of language then). It is exquisitely turned because in the flash of the moment its author had the musical instinct and guitar-playing gumption to find its form in himself, ready-made in all its simplicity; it is perfectly nailed because he nails it perfectly in time, fractionally ahead of the beat, yet also, counterintuitively, perfectly relaxed within the playing of it — the timing of it really is beyond exquisite: listen to that very first phrase of the solo, the one where he tippy-taps around the tonic note (or is it the mediant? My ears can’t do that anymore), and I promise you that everything that is musical in you will scream with pleasure and possibly pump tears to your eyes when you hear it; and finally it is the most idiomatic parcel of electric guitar soloing ever played (well, that I’d ever heard when I made this judgment hundreds of years ago), in that it perfectly expresses what it has to express in a language that belongs to the electric guitar and no other instrument, all of it pirouetting around one note with impossibly sweet timing. And it could not be thus expressed by any other musical instrument, nor algorithm. It is the electric guitar in apotheosis. And I wonder if it is mere coincidence that it is also an electric guitar expressing perfectly the feelings — or something like the feelings — of a man who has no real access to real emotion, about women principally, but also about identity; a child who was brought up negligently and deprived of a sense of real love and connection and who, four years on from this startlingly angry moment in the recording studio — for so it is, intensely angry — would drunkenly utter to a hall full of real people some of the most foully racist effluent ever disgorged onto a British stage. If you ever feel inclined to search out the recording of that event, prepare yourself. It is hideous. It was in truth the lowest Clapton ever got — far lower than the deep trench of the blues he sank into as a recorded expression of his misbegotten desire for Pattie Boyd. Or the booze. Or even the heroin. This was the level of the dogshit on the welts of his shoes. No higher than that.

IT SEEMS TO ME that the electric guitar has somehow come to have — broadly speaking, culturally speaking — a masculine voice. As if by some strange default. It is pretty easy to see why that might be.

The instrument has been dying something of a cultural death over the past forty-odd years, something Peter Bevington and I intuited out of sheer ingenuous enthusiasm in 1977, and very likely read in the NME too. Of course people still play electric guitars, of course they do. People swoon over them, and some folk even collect them, and assemble vast collections and do so without the ability to play a decent phrase or chord progression on any of them, let alone on one of their untouchable “crown jewels”, as they like to call the most valuable items, stored below stairs in the specially built sub-vault under the house, breathlessly fumbling with shaking hands the catch that will reveal to his friends his most darkly held secret possession: the 1959 Sunburst Gibson Les Paul once owned by Garry Holepunch of the Amazing Rhythm Stationery Cupboards.

But the electric guitar is finished as an agent of social change, as a weapon and as the most modern-looking and cool-sounding thing you will ever see and hear. Of course it is, if people who can’t play them collect them. Collecting is neurotic. It is a compensation for some deficiency.

What kind of people collect things?

Men do.

And when they collect things like guitars they are doing so partly because the fetish in their possession connects them in a very real way, or so they imagine, with the music that was once played on the instrument and is now contained so silently and safely in his vault, and by simple, syllogistic extension of that connection, he can claim attachment to the musician who made music with it. These instruments are nails from the True Cross. Given half a chance the collector would probably have Jimmy Page down there in the vault as well, restrained by velvet-lined titanium ankle gyves, so that every day Jimmy is available to play the solo from “Since I’ve Been Loving You” on demand, like a human jukebox with only one punch-button, installed in the shallow cleft in Page’s chin. This would not be kidnap and enslavement in the collector’s mind. It would be validation, at last.

Guitar solos are so peculiar, aren’t they? So freighted with uncomfortable, half-felt anxiety and fully felt feelings of domination and control. Yet sometimes — no, often — a guitar solo feels like the reflex processing not of any particular content but is just a guitar solo because it’s time for a guitar solo and someone’s got to play the guitar solo and since I’m the one with a guitar in my hand — then I suppose it might as well be me. The object of the guitar solo, in this model, is to be a Guitar Solo, with all that entails in the way of making yourself feel BIG. And so once again we sense that weird feeling of reinflation as you start pumping yourself up under the pressure of your own high-gain excitement, the passion, the indiscretion, the presumptuousness, the shining brilliance, plentiful guts and, to put it mildly, your ballooning sense of your own majesty (for which you may also read the words “narcissistic masculinity”). And with every guitar solo of that nature you also get, as a bonus, a very high-pitched whistling sound. For even that kind of guitar solo is not entirely empty.

Can you hear the whistle, boys?

I imagine that if you have been around long enough you’ll remember ”Free Bird”, the epic mid-1970s chorale by the occasionally very fine Southern Rock group, Lynyrd Skynyrd, which clocked in at nine minutes in the studio but would stretch, live, to anything up to a quarter of an hour in length, depending on the number of guitarists involved.

“Free Bird” was an insubstantial dirge-like hymn to personal freedom which became, in performance, a monument hewn in Time, no less, to a collective Romanticism of the Southern Selfhood, a mutant confederacy in which a long-haired, tie-dyed ol’ country boy of that early-1970s era declares over and over and over again his absolute existential resistance to all those things that are felt to restrict, tie down, impose upon, shackle and keep that good ’ol boy from movin’ on to the many places he’s gotta see. And he’s not messin’. He is not, you know. A man and his boon companion, his soul, may not be detained against his will. And so it’s toodle-oo to the girl he’s in the process of ditchin’ with this very song. The song then accelerates hard from its funereal exposition and reaches climax after climax over the length of an enormous coda, as each of the (usually three) guitarists do their twiddly bits along the front edge of the stage apron, legs spread, heads tossed back, mouths open in ecstasies of self-affirmation, not “cutting” each other as in the jazz improv tradition, but rolling out minuscule variations on the solos that each of them always plays, has always played and will always do in “Free Bird”, nigh unto death. It is music as dead as road kill. Which is perhaps why the effect is less hypnotic than plain hysterical, perhaps a little like a peal of bells which don’t toll but squeal like piglets.

Actually, transpose each and every one of those ready-made guitar phrases into a sound source less concretised than Skynyrd’s endless man-flourishes and there’s only one thing you’ll hear. A dog-whistle.

I saw Lynyrd Skynyrd play once, in 1976 at Knebworth, in a monstrous crowd composed mostly of hippies standing around on their last legs, and it was then that the penny dropped. It was vogue-ish of me, I know — and possibly a little disingenuous in the way that I chiselled out the articulation of the thought for repetition afterwards — but the thought bloomed in my sixteen-year-old head, like the lilies of the field:

“Gosh, I don’t really like guitar solos, do I. Blimey!”

And it’s true, I don’t.

Although that would not include individual guitar solos by Jerry Garcia, Bill Frisell, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Taylor, Mick Ronson, James Williamson, Earl Slick, Charlie Christian, Billy Gibbons, Larry Carlton, Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, John Perry, Jimmy Page, Bonnie Raitt, Kenny Burrell, Richard Thompson, Steve Cropper, Johnny Guitar Watson, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, Grant Green, Elliott Randall, Marc Ribot, Steve Howe, David Lindley and, on one occasion, Eric Clapton. Otherwise — mostly, I reckon — guitar solos are pretty free of content and therefore of no value at all to me. It might as well be the existential void, humming.

ELECTRIC GUITARS ALWAYS had it coming.

The cultural fetor that settled around and about the guitar as punk gave way to the age of the synth in the early 1980s was not excessively foul and was perfectly warranted by the slippage of rock, the traditional training pool of the electric guitarist, into the ocean of dross that rinsed the 1980s of its grit. The new non-pop, non-stop dance music was both hard and often extremely edgy and it did almost entirely without guitars (if it had a guitar on it, then it was probably R&B, anyway). Yes, the electric guitar enjoyed a late and in part retrogressive blooming in the softer compost of the Smiths and their spoor of pale indie rockers, who at least troubled themselves with the important question, “If you don’t have guitar solos, what do you have for the guitarist(s) to do?” The answer: “Do fancy guitar arrangements, weaponize the curt guitar hook as a vital new arrow in your quiver or, if you’re in the Jesus and Mary Chain line of business, just turn the amps up as far they’ll go and sit around moping while the harmonic distortion and feedback does cold sarabandes around the room — maybe one day they’ll say you were early movers on rock’s last stand in the following decade and were quicker/slower off the mark than Pixies and My Bloody Valentine to recognise in the purification of the cooked guitar amp the melting down of rock’s grossest vanities.

If you were a hulking great stadium band, like U2, you simply issued your guitarist with a Homebase multipack of textural effects, tacks and a hammer on a “rack” and got him to lay some carpet, wall to wall. Really the 1980s felt as if it was the decade in which the electric guitar was laid to rest with a nice underfelt.

But it wasn’t. That was the Nineties’ job. Grunge supercharged the guitar into a killing machine stomping out the death fantasies of the children of the post-Reagan era and when, back in the rapidly shrinking UK, the Gallagher brothers brought new boorishness to rock and Union Jack-bejewelled Gibson semi-acoustics to the High Street, rock guitar seemed profoundly shameful, while rock guitarists, possibly for the first time ever, looked like they were trying way, way, way too hard. Then, if you wanted to look cool following the dissolution of Brit Pop, in the latter stages of that decade, and throughout the protracted celebratory hoo-hah of the Millennium and into the new century, you either wore a Telecaster Custom / De Luxe (posh, expensive Telecaster which doesn’t sound like a Tele or even feel like a Fender) or a pair of Technics turntables, or nothing at all. British rock and pop music went around pretty much unclothed for the first time since the 1950s. The “lead guitarist” had gone to the pop-cultural knacker’s yard and was now only to be found looking gloomy, overweight and somewhat bilious at the bar of certain pubs in Camden, along with his barely recognisable older brother, “Geoff, the rhythm guitarist”, who’d been propping up the same bar since the end of the 1960s (all specialist rhythm guitarists disappeared overnight on 31 December 1969, a phenomenon that has never been properly explained by the authorities).

Behold. It is an indissoluble truth that it was we old people who were the ones excited by the look and the sound of electric guitars, and made assumptions about them and had dreams, quite a lot of them erotic, and wished we could play one and bring them thick-end first down, crack!, upon the heads of our sneering enemies — although we’d be obliged to spare, I suppose, the smirking children, who don’t even know what kind of cultural reference “Smoke on the Water” actually is, who look up from the sociology essay they’re writing on Lacanian Transference in the Erotic Beyond Pleasure and say…

“Ah, the electric guitar! I’m right in thinking, aren’t I, Dad, that when you were a young person, the electric guitar was, like … your generation’s mobile phone… yeh?”

Don’t even think it.

And now, the nub.

What distinguished the lead guitarist in every group, band or ensemble of pretty much every era was of course his appetite for playing solos loudly and theatrically and at any length he might get away with, accompanied by a supporting array of his own visual vocabulary of gurns and postures that was really the province of the commedia dell ’arte. You know the cliché. You’ve seen This is Spinal Tap. And yes, it was nearly always a “him”, with surprisingly few exceptions, even back then. If you were, as I was, a neophyte rock fan in 1972/3, then there was June Millington in the reasonably excellent Fanny, and that was it. Hard to believe now, I know.

Well, it is for someone of my age. The electric guitar was, for us, an Alpha Object identifying and symbolising the times we lived in and our own youth in relation to those times, and our distance from our elders, an object on a par with the Lunar Module and … and, actually, precious little else. And in fact better than a Lunar Module because, no matter how tightly you strapped yourself into one, you couldn’t do rebellion in a space craft designed by NASA. There is nothing I can think of that does rebellion as classily or authentically, and that’s just because the electric guitar, like the Lunar Module, is classless. (Are you listening, Noel? Guitars don’t do class war by nature. You might just as well weaponize a Goblin Teasmade or, I don’t know… a Lunar Module, and set their aftermarket-installed phasers to ‘kill’ in the unending war against southern wankery — and see how well that works as ‘real rock an’ roll’).

I now realise that my schoolfriend Adrian’s Gran was right too, in a sense, when she registered shock and dismay at the sound of her grandson blundering his way around the guitar figure that commences “Smoke on the Water”. “I thought the whole point of electric guitars,” she Lady Bracknelled from her accustomed seat, “was that you plugged them in and they played themselves!” I would qualify that observation by suggesting that electric guitars perhaps did their most important work when they weren’t actually being played and were just being held, slung, touted, brandished by some heartful youth and his gang of mates for a photographic session in the rubble on the edge of town. And… an electric guitar, is it? Really? Or is it a wand, or a sword, or a baton, or a penis?

On a good day it can be all five. But most importantly, always, always, always… it is an electric guitar.

For John M, who was the first fast-fingered Freddie to widdle on my patch, fifty years ago, and Tom C, who was certainly the last.

NEXT TIME, IN #3(iii): Four women, two guitar solos — and what happened next

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

It was a sunny but cool September lunchtime in 1977, bright and dry in the lee of the Gogs, but nippy: an indication that autumn’s mantle was soon to settle itself on our small world. Its approach was as stealthy as ever, but would not be stopped now.

I, however, did not concern myself with such trifles as I cycled head down against the breeze through the gates of the sixth form college I attended with, for me, surprising enthusiasm. I dismounted, parked and tethered my bike, entered the building without any stealth at all, bounded up the handsome stairway that connected the Lower Crush Hall to the Upper Crush Hall, then puffed up the adjacent flight of narrow concrete steps to the Sixth Form Common Room in the tower. I was seventeen, and very happy to be.

The Common Room was thick with sixth-form students hard at work, performing themselves; and because of the slight chill in the air outside, the one other point of egress from this dark and windowless 1930s modernist turret — the door onto the creaking iron fire escape that led down to the roof of the school hall — was firmly closed. The usual pall of smoke hung in the air.

Bevington was hovering by the Dansette, poised to take possession of the tatty but still viable 1960s musical box shoved up against the breezeblock partition on a low tin filing cabinet in the kitchen area.

“Did you get it?”

“Ungh.” I was short of breath.

Bevington was not a garrulous individual. He was tall, thin, pallid, bequiffed, always cool, especially at college where he gave off the indescribable perfume of (Way-too-cool-for) This Shit. He waited without further expression while I flipped open my bag and produced the goods.

SUCH WAS THE slight air of frenzy that attended the ritual activity of record-buying, close to the ceiling of punk’s trajectory in the second half of 1977. Buzzing like flies around a light fitting in a hot country, we were. By then, almost a year after its first irruption as a commercial concern in the UK, it was apparent that ‘punk’ had established some real cultural traction at last, some sort of bridgehead into the world that also contained autumn. It had certainly built a measure of hard substance onto the early outbreaks of rumour and war-like woofing which had so excited the teenage mind months before the appearance of English punk’s first proper issue — The Damned’s skiddy “New Rose” — and the early output of the Sex Pistols, who had been second out of the traps in November ’76, with “Anarchy in the UK”. That momentous release had been a grievous disappointment to me, its slamming power chords driving a walking barrage that was all too reminiscent of the ‘heavy’ production values of the Led Zeppelin records I had compliantly started dispensing with earlier that year. It had seemed a small sacrifice at the time, ditching the Zeppelins. It rankled now. Never mind. The important thing was the readiness, the readiness for the storm of brilliant bright jags and slashes that would soon displace all the smug decadence and pumped-up self-regard of rock music as it had been constituted for too long in the sagging belly of the decade’s middle years.

Nor should it be forgotten that punk began in the UK not with the marketing of recorded music but with short, shambolic live performances in small venues in London and Manchester plus a lot of dressing up and posing for the camera, mostly in the King’s Road in Fulham or in the tributaries of Ladbroke Grove, the noble artery that connected Holland Park to the choking lungs of North Ken and the Westway which flew over it; all of it breathlessly reported by some but by no means all sections of the music press — an institution which carried (and punched with) an awful lot more cultural weight then than it does now. To begin with, punk was just as much a contrivance as everything else seemed to be.

It should be said in fairness that, at this very early stage, the Sex Pistols did trouble themselves to embark on a proper-ish UK tour, which only enhanced their growing mystique. It was crap, what they actually did; deliberately bad but also, it was felt, admirable somehow. Some even claimed that it wasn’t crap. But however you sliced it critically, it seemed consummate: their presence was minatory, their music hideous, the playing of it often barely competent. I knew this, as did a lot of other people who never saw them play. We just knew. And anyway, the thick end of a whole year was to pass before The Damned’s “New Rose” emerged as the first concrete demonstration that punk really could be a thing. I needed them to do it too, because nearly all the way up to spring 1977, the idea and sound of “punk rock” were entirely defined for me by New York City’s Ramones, whom I had suddenly loved uncontrollably in the summer of ’76 and, rather more sophisticatedly, Television (Marquee Moon, February ’77), whom I grew to love even more. British punk was, for the duration of the phoney “punk explosion”, almost entirely a theoretical proposition. And as the broiling year of 1976 rolled over into the year in which, in the words of Culture’s Joseph Hill, the “two sevens clash”, while the jolly old Queen celebrated her Jubilee obliviously, the music industry proper at last galvanised itself and started mining the seam of hard product that would determine whether the rhetorical “no future” declared by punk was going to be a future that ran and ran, commercially speaking.

By the summer of 1977 British punk was just beginning to be described as a “movement”, and it also at last had a referenceable sound, a sound that bestowed legitimacy and what appeared to be a full set of teeth upon the gusty prose and frantic posturing that flapped the inky pages of the music press every week.

The Clash’s first long-player had appeared in late spring on the major international label CBS (Columbia in the US), a protracted angry bark of a record that settled my mind somewhat, to the extent that I was able to decide that, if the group had made a moral error in signing for CBS and were slow to deliver the goods, the virtue of having big-money backing would at least result in music that expressed something and did so with style, purpose and an indicated direction of travel. A way forward into the future — the future that was generally agreed in punky circles not to exist.

Up in the Common Room of the state sixth form college on the edge of town that bright September afternoon, my classmate Bevington flapped his hand in frustration at my failure to hand over the goods, which were making lunchtime this day into an important lunchtime. I ignored him. For I was transfixed by the cover artwork printed onto the thin cardboard containing the wafer of black vinyl, seven inches across, for which I had just given up my lunch: raw Xerox pink edging a monochrome photo of a four-horn speaker cabinet, which bore in its navel a mocked-up stencil of the group’s name: The Clash. On the reverse: more pink, fragments of lyric and prose, a mono snap of the group out and about belligerently not posing, as their posture required…

“Hand it over! Come on…”

… And at last the slap of the record as it was clamped into position on the Dansette’s changer spindle, prior to smacking down onto the turntable, the lurch of the automatic tone arm, the thump-CRACKLE! And … a wormish blat of electric guitar, cheaply distorted, soon joined by a throaty vocal roar, the beginning of an indignant complaint… “They said…!” The big corporate record company they’d signed for, CBS, evidently wanted to do with the group something that “we” didn’t want them to, and then the bastards did it anyway! ZZZhhuungm-zzzzhhhuungg… As the whole pullulating lot of it seemed to multiply its force, thickening and thickening before collapsing like a building onto the listener, a clown’s solo guitar squeeeee-e-e-e-’d out of the falling masonry, a ‘solo’ which seemed to be entirely the product of the guitarist, Mick Jones, swiping whole-bar bends up and away from the tonic and the dominant without any indication of knowledge as to where they should go next.

“You’re my guitar hero-o-o-o!” yelled Joe Strummer through the din, sarcastic spittle going everywhere.

I looked at Bevington and Bevington looked at me. There was a recognition of something mutually understood in that glance, even though he was much cooler than me and therefore felt things at a higher level. He said nothing of course. I of course said something. I said, “Peter, I think we have just borne witness to the death of the guitar solo.”

“I should fucking coco,” Bevington said, which was a lot for him.

THE GUITAR SOLO will never die, just as its instrument of making, the electric guitar, won’t either. We know the reasons why it will not succumb. It does not require particularly mature insight to understand that the simple glamour of the guitar is ward enough against its extinction. Electric guitars look and feel good to use, as well as being inimitable musically — you simply cannot synthesize electronically a guitar played with feeling, except in the most limited, merely imitatively textural terms. No aspect of AI can go where a really talented guitarist can, and there’s a reason why not.

All guitars are endowed in their design with subtly moving parts (the experts call them “strings”) which are joined in minutely nuanced negotiations on a tooled fretboard with the moving, sensate parts of the individual playing the instrument (these parts are usually called “fingers”), in a linear relationship through time; and they do that while subject to the emotional vulnerability of the guitarist in a real environment mediated, always, by a human nervous system. It is, literally, a matter of touch and feel. Music depends on those subtle correspondences, the shifts of nuance and affect, the shiver of involvement, for it to be music, even at high or dirty volume. Wherever those expressive features are not present then it is simply not music you’re listening to; it is sonic pattern. So, yes, it may well be the case that the voice of a guitar — that is to say its electronically modulated sound — might be subject to facile imitation by the increasingly clever technology which governs 21^st-century music production; but the way an electric guitar actually speaks — and the things it has to say — can never be constituted by mere algorithm. Not convincingly. What I mean by this, I suppose, is that I have no doubt that AI is thoroughly capable of making a line of music that sounds perfectly like an electric guitar. What I do not believe is that it can contrive a guitar simulacrum that can say what an electric guitar can say when in the hands of someone who can really play and has got something to express with that ability. I am reminded by this of the great psychoanalyst / paediatrician Donald Winnicott, whose regularly misquoted (by me) aphorism on ‘doing’ and ‘being’ was delivered to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association in 1967: “From being comes doing, but there can be no do before be.”

I think Winnicott out-hips both Sinatra and Hamlet on this one.

THE ELECTRIC GUITAR IS usually said to have been ‘invented’ in 1931 by Messrs Beauchamp and Rickenbacker (what an illustrious name that is in guitar lore: Rickenbacker) but it seems unlikely to me to have had only one point of origin. Other devices involving not dissimilar, thoroughly undeveloped technology very possibly existed too, I would suggest, in a world then dominated by trumpets, trombones and saxophones, a world in which even a piano might crush an acoustic guitar like an autumn leaf. Tech was called upon either to enhance the reach of a pre-existing instrument or to create an entirely new machine that would, eventually, allow Charlie Christian to do this in 1941: the sound of the Gibson ES-250 archtop.

The solid-bodied instrument with wound-wire pickup(s) mounted flat ’twixt neck and bridge, the one that we all know, is a quintessential product of the postwar American economy: the joint blooms of both industry and creativity at work in happy apposition: the basic hardware required both doing and being of anyone who aspired to play it. Leo Fender’s Broadcaster / Esquire (forebear of the barely since-evolved Telecaster) was the first such object to be manufactured at scale in 1950, in the Broadcaster / Esquire’s case with a single pickup mounted close to the bridge. The functionality of its design is the only aesthetic feature it possesses. It certainly functions. It is tempting then to consider the electric guitar pragmatically, as a sort of all-terrain military vehicle of the musical instrument world. Armour plating by Vox, then later, with heavier spec, by Marshall. Ordnance by Gibson, Fender, Gretsch, Epiphone, Rickenbacker and so on. As long as the leccy’s on, the guitar can get around all kinds of musical topography while under duress. It can fight hand to hand. It can put up a structure and then knock another one down just as easily from range. And yet it can work close up too, surprisingly tenderly. Even intimately.

Jimi Hendrix was a great musician not only because of his innovations and his vision, his projected drama and his otherworldly intensity; he was also great because he could make a Fender Stratocaster speak low, and with as much articulacy as it used to utter the terrible, destroying fire of “Machine Gun”. Hendrix understood his instrument as well as any great musician of any era understood theirs. He breathed through it, as Heifetz, Casals, Coltrane, Parker, Davis, Du Pré, The Prez, Perlman and Pepper breathed through theirs. They breathed through it automatically to live and, when the time came, the breath became music.

The sound an electric guitar makes has to be found, if you’re going to be proper player. ‘Discovered’ if you prefer to think a little more magically. Contrary to what you might suppose, the instrument is not a plug-in-and-play thing; you have to find your sound(s) in league with the right amplification, some sort of grasp of what the onboard circuitry is there for (and how to use it) and, these days, if you have suitable corporate backing, you are also obliged to lug around a computerised ‘rack’ of devices and foot pedals and “stomp boxes” (ugh), so that you can sound like an acoustic guitar if you want. Proper players know the sort of sound they want and they hunt it down ruthlessly, using the available tech that seems likely, and lots of old analogue gear, if they can get their mitts on it, the Tweedy look of it being all to the good — dodgy wiring, of course, inevitable. There’s an aesthetic to that stuff, as you’d expect. But there is also a desire to master the new, and to not let it have the faintest sniff of mastery of you. It’s certainly hard to imagine the late Allan Holdsworth starting his day’s work by saying to himself, “Right. Today, Allan, I’m going to press the blue button _— and let’s see what comes out. Shall we? I do like blue when it’s not too denim-y.” Proper players do not put the cart in front of the horse. Or at least you’d hope not.

It seems more than likely that Hendrix would have enjoyed the technology we have now but not been terribly interested in using it, unless it did exactly what he wanted it to do. Only equipment that enabled him to speak his mind via the circuitry of his guitar and amps was admissible (has there ever been a guitar player who spoke his mind more eloquently in the quacking folded-signal vernacular of Cry Baby Wah-Wah, for instance? Frank Zappa, maybe? Obviously Melvin ‘Wah-Wah’ Ragin aka Wah Wah Watson had his work cut out for him from the get-go, in a case of nominative determinism so good they named him twice). And in view of that need for true authorial grip, it would be interesting to know how much of all that discovering is arrived at by accident, trial and hours and hours of error. Keith Richards would certainly be more than happy to keep you informed on that one.

I have committed the sin of guitar geekery only once in my life, that I am aware of, prior to this hour, and I am possibly going to disappoint you by revealing that it’s a Keith Richards story. You see, since the age of fourteen in 1974, when I handed over the monstrous wedge that Exile on Main St cost (“that would be four pounds and twenty-nine pence, sir”), I’d wanted to know the secret recipe that gave him the ‘rolling boulders’ sound he arrived at, by hook or by crook, for the intro and prominent rhythm guitar part that challenges Jagger’s voice for the role of narrator in chief of that marvel of louche groove and swing, “Tumbling Dice”. It’s a truly beautiful sound, I think — or used to think, when I could hear sounds. It is somehow nonabrasive but also very hard and impermeable (a good shale, I would suggest) with a creamy quality to add sweetness to its substantial body. Lovely. In the song it just boulders its way along (over the steppe of Charlie’s swing) and everything else follows in its path.

I first interviewed Keith in 1990, when I was but a stick of a lad, and I was determined that I would discover the secret of this particular sliver of guitarchemy. We met in Madrid, we got on quite well despite my considerable nervousness, and after ten minutes or so had passed he’d already favoured me with one goblin face-scrunch and a brief burst of machine-gun boiler-ese, “h-h-h-hehehehehehe-e-eh…”, and it seemed to me that the time was right. “Keith,” I said, bold as brass farthings. “The intro and rhythm part that are so prominent on ‘Tumbling Dice’ … uh, er … there’s something particular … about …”

“Yeah, you’re right there, man,” he said, as if to a real mate, helping me out. “‘Tumbling’? It’s an interesting piece of music, I agree-he-hee, and more complex than you might think…”

I had a split second in which to decide whether or not to interrupt his best thoughts on one of his greatest creations — and present myself not as I intended as one of the deeper thinkers of contemporary Western Culture but as a slutty guitar geek … and the rest isn’t really history either. Reader, I bottled it. I did not ask la question de toutes les questions. And then a couple of years later I did him again and … I bottled it again. The fear of being thought a guitar geek by Keith Richards got in the way of one of the great spiritual enquiries of this or any age.

The public, to a man and a woman, are still crying out for answers in a broken world, as you are well aware.

So let me compensate you at least with this. What follows will one day be taken as definitive, I believe, because informed research and a rather greater proportion of very high quality supposition and guesswork has led me to a pretty firm conclusion on the question of where and how Keith Richards copped his sound on “Tumbling Dice”. I am willing to bet the farm on what follows.

The rhythm guitar sound deployed as both the driver of “Tumbling Dice” and its ballast is full-bodied and dense without a lot of top or bite — but plenty of ‘creamy’ tone in the middle. Floating slightly airily above that thickness, Mick Taylor (presumably) plays a weightless overflying descant with his most bell-like unadorned tone, as he did so much of his time with the Stones. Equally, if you were to tell me that Taylor isn’t on it at all and it’s all overdubbed Keiths, multiplying and swaying together like tropical fronds then I’d believe you. Certainly, Richards carries and distributes the weight.

Like many of the target sounds Mr Richards aimed at during that most aesthetically pleasing era of the Rolling Stones’ overlong career, it is a sound, in my belief, that was engendered by the use of the neck pickup only, the biting ‘treble’ sound of the bridge pickup being switched off to enable Mr Richards to achieve maximum ‘spread’ relative to ‘poke’ with his consequently edgeless but at the same time throaty guitar harmonics — yet without any resulting loss of presence. Tight but also light tube distortion is therefore called for, thickening the sound to a suitably Stonesy consistency. The signal (normally so thin and incisive in an unadulterated Telecaster) is slightly bulked in a 50watt Fender Twin amp or equivalent, adjusted to sit nicely at the point at which valve distortion takes possession of the signal, allowing Mr Richards to roll on or off the gain decisively with small adjustments of the rotary knobs on the body of the guitar itself which, I put it to you, jury of the entire world, is more than likely, given the evidence, to have been Mr Richards’ studio workhorse, the black-guard / honey Telecaster, which is notable in particular for the importation into the neck-pickup position of an alien so-called ‘humbucking’ double-coil pickup in place of the standard single-coil factory-fitted Fender original. This the key factor. Double-wound ‘humbucker’ pickups, conventionally associated with Gibson, give you more thickness, less bite.

Ladies and gentlemen geeks of the global jury, I put it to you that the guitar which brought so much shape, heft and girth to ‘Tumbling Dice’ was none other than Mr Richards’ “beloved” ker-knackered Tele, named, for abstruse reasons known only to the guitarist himself, as ‘Micawber’.

I must, at some point in the far-distant past, have actually thought about this shit. No, I must have. You can’t just ‘know’ stuff like that. But then it is in Man’s nature to search, however fruitlessly, for the things that challenge the limits of his imagination.

We must never mistake, for instance, the guitar for the man or the woman. Or the language for the sound. A guitar can of course be a teeming forest as well as a tower-block in Paddington, but it is as well to remember when you make these observations — or take these soundings — that your reader or listener may well be thinking, as a result of them, of a forest full of busy animals or a tower-block in Paddington, rather than Steve Howe and Mick Jones, for whom those environmental images stand as a kind of musical heraldry. I suppose it’s no more misleading than naming your guitar after a character in Dickens.

It is in this somewhat fundamental grapple for the “language” associated with this curiously significant piece of musical technology, that I find a grounding simplicity in the approach of one guitarist in particular: a player who, it seems to me is capable of playing anything, in any musical genre, but who seems also to be committed to playing music that enables the guitar he plays the music on to be his creative equal.

I am hugely fond of the endlessly flexing music of Bill Frisell, partly because of the wide dynamic and textural ranges he likes to explore (usually with a Telecaster, an unusual instrument for a virtuoso in our era to choose, because the Tele is traditionally a plank you spank or twang) but mainly because his guitar-playing is highly idiomatic. As a musician he is uncategorisable yet I love the way Frisell’s instrument always, always speaks guitar. More than anyone since Hendrix, he demonstrates that the electric instrument, in speaking in its own unnotateable (is that even a word?), sometimes indescribable, sometimes completely abstract language, can insinuate itself into the idioms of the unconscious mind. And from that lodgement it can re-enter the world we all live in with a freight of goods that has more to say for itself — and to all of us — than all but the very greatest poets.

And its language is bright and does not by any means always take the side of darkness. Think of the creative prospectus offered by the lexicon of guitar, even if some of it is mere jargon: the lingo of block chords, barre, licks, headstock, sustain, gain, volume, riffs, frets, feedback, nuts, breaks, pick-ups, humbuckers, whammy bars, B-benders, hammer-ons, pinch-harmonics, twiddly bits and drifting, draping arpeggio’d harmony spread lush over the bones of a chordal landscape as a canopy. From power-chord to tinkly triad, the electric guitar is a brilliant tool for constructing songs, like houses, from the foundation up. Postwar blues / country / pop-into-rock music was all about what I will call (so that you don’t have to) guitarchitecture. And it often still is called that, by me, before I blush and think better of it.

NEXT TIME, IN #3(ii): The Guitar Solo — and what Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Noel Gallagher were really saying…

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

THE GUITAR SOLO will never die, just as its instrument of making, the electric guitar, won’t either. We know the reasons why it will not succumb. It does not require particularly mature insight to understand that the simple glamour of the guitar is ward enough against its extinction. Electric guitars look and feel good to use, as well as being inimitable musically — you simply cannot synthesize electronically a guitar played with feeling, except in the most limited, merely imitatively textural terms. No aspect of AI can go where a really talented guitarist can, and there’s a reason why not.

All guitars are endowed in their design with subtly moving parts (the experts call them “strings”) which are joined in minutely nuanced negotiations on a tooled fretboard with the moving, sensate parts of the individual playing the instrument (these parts are usually called “fingers”), in a linear relationship through time; and they do that while subject to the emotional vulnerability of the guitarist in a real environment mediated, always, by a human nervous system. It is, literally, a matter of touch and feel. Music depends on those subtle correspondences, the shifts of nuance and affect, the shiver of involvement, for it to be music, even at high or dirty volume. Wherever those expressive features are not present then it is simply not music you’re listening to; it is sonic pattern. So, yes, it may well be the case that the voice of a guitar — that is to say its electrically modulated sound — might be subject to facile imitation by the increasingly clever technology which governs 21^st-century music production; but the way an electric guitar actually speaks — and the things it has to say — can never be constituted by mere algorithm. Not convincingly. What I mean by this, I suppose, is that I have no doubt that AI is thoroughly capable of making a line of music that sounds perfectly like an electric guitar. What I do not believe is that it can contrive a guitar simulacrum that can say what an electric guitar can say when in the hands of someone who can really play and has got something to express with that ability. I am reminded by this of the great psychoanalyst / paediatrician Donald Winnicott, whose regularly misquoted (by me) aphorism on ‘doing’ and ‘being’ was delivered to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association in 1967: “From being comes doing, but there can be no do before be.”

I think Winnicott out-hips both Sinatra and Hamlet on this one.

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WHEN THE FIRST swimmers arrived at the beach that morning, some time before seven, they saw that they were not the first. Down at the water’s edge, just at the line where lazy shingle allowed itself to get wet, a silhouette in a pork pie hat was dancing.

The swimmers, two of them, undressed and pushed out a good twenty yards south of the dancing man. They were accustomed to regarding the beach as theirs at that hour — and today it was not. One of them, the girl, swam across his bows, where he danced, barely moving now but still shifting, like wreckage at the edge of the tide. She feigned indifference but copped a good look, on the quiet.

There were curly wires attaching his ears to one pocket of his bomber and he wore shades beneath the pork pie hat. His knees, feet and hips were doing the dancing for him, though one arm swung slowly back and round, back and round, on the three. She gave him a little wave as she crossed his bows, one hand, she knew, sticking cutely out of the flat water. He waved a little wave back.

She could not see at her respectful distance that, beneath the sunglasses, the man’s face was wet with tears.

“Wa-a-ar in a Babylon, tri-bal war in a Babylon, it sipple out de-e-eh…”

CONSIDER, IF YOU WOULD, JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, just for a moment.

You know the picture. It is a major possession of the National Gallery and may be counted among the great works of the English 19^th century. Summon it, if you can, to your mind’s eye: a great railway bridge spans half the canvas, from middle top to bottom right. The bottle nose of an 1840s railway engine can be seen huffing across the bridge in the middle distance towards the viewer’s right shoulder in a spectacular brume of golden light and spun vapour, the light dancing, shimmering and thickening in response to the energies of the space and of the moment. It’s a picture telling us that the churning blur of modernity is humanity’s natural seat and that feats of engineering, such as Brunel’s great railway bridge, conveying a nation of passengers rapidly through the elements into the West, are a sort of English Manifest Destiny for an industriously expanding British Empire.

It is a great painting. The thing (qua thing) is in itself a glory well-fitted to the painting’s colossal subject matter. Both subject and object matter — that is, the wooden frame, canvas, oil — collude with the viewing mind to lift the spirit and drive the heart to an ecstasy of new propulsion. Unbraked. Unstoppable. Going, going… ahead.

Compare it in your mind’s eye to the photograph (top) I wickedly took of Joan Vernon Connew’s Blackout last week, where it hung modestly on a wall in a gallery of the Imperial War Museum. Blackout (1942) was created very close to exactly a century after Rain, Steam and Speed. It shows a very different Britain immobilised in a state of profound darkness, in which nothing can be seen at all except the small sticks of downlight which are permitted for people (and vehicles) to deploy against the murk, following regulation to the point at which light might as well not be there at all, for all the use it is. The painting presents every shade of dark you can think of. Nothing shimmers. Humanity is no longer blazing forward, as if riding the very rays of the sun, but stumbling around helplessly in the pluming black, unsure of where to put its feet, endangered by the very paltriness of the light that it carries in uncertain hands. The city of London is a cave in which nothing is illuminated and people are no more substantial than shadows.

The two pictures express two very differing ideas of our country, ideas which proceed from the importance of movement to life. As painted surfaces, they are the product of not entirely dissimilar techniques (though one is clearly superior to the other — at least more refined) and they are both good paintings. Yet one of them moves me far more than the other. Far more.

You can probably guess which one it is too. Yes. It’s the one painted by a not very well-known woman artist; thr one you are unlikely to find in ‘national’ galleries as a rule. The other one is a truly great work of art, by any standard. But I know which I’d hang on the wall of our front room.

I am going to try to explain to myself why. You are very welcome to listen.

THERE IS A HUGELY touching exhibition running currently at the Imperial War Museum in south London. It is sticking around till autumn, which feels right. And I am not exaggerating (nor in the pay of the IWM) when I say that I found it the most gripping, perhaps even attaching art show I’ve seen in a long while. It has both haunted and chafed me for more than a week now and I expect it to continue to do so for a while yet. I will certainly visit it again before the leaves start throwing themselves from the trees.

It is wee: three rooms. It goes under the title Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art. Admission is free. Its themes are established matter-of-factly on celluloid in the ante-chamber to the third-floor gallery it lives in behind a set of plate glass doors, out of the cold shadow of the military hardware parked up to the threshold of virtually every gallery in the building. Those themes tug at the loom of wiring that we all have within us, to a greater or lesser extent: the wiring that connects us as individuals to the Second World War, if not through ‘lived experience’, then as the terminal links in a chain sustaining a very particular oral narrative repeated indefatigably by our Grans and Grandpas and their children (our parents), as we ourselves were growing up over the Sunday lunches and days out and holidays of the post-war and post-post-war periods. That oral narrative is perhaps the stickiest and most lasting of all the emotional resins that have bound us over the past seventy years: the collusion of personal memory and family culture in the manufacture of a very particular kind of sentimental ‘history’.

And it is startling, when it lands, the realisation that the youngest individuals to whom this exhibition will speak in this very particular register — and for whom I suppose I am writing by reflex — will now be in the region of sixty years old plus. Sixty. That is the minimum age you have to be, now, to have been “too young for the War” yet also shaped by it; to have only encountered and then been implicated in those narratives at second- and third-hand, sustaining the common realities of the war as they were soaked up, stored and fermented by the family elders, then piped through your parents, with plenty of filter and tumble added by them, to arrive at the threshold of your less-than receptive Sixties-kid ears in the form of some stoic tale of suffering according to the specifications of Duty, or Privation, or Courage. From which we may learn. All of us.

WHEN I WAS JUST about old enough — let’s say eleven or twelve — I figured out how to switch myself out of the circuit that charged senior elements of the extended family with a current positively churning with their collectivised knowledge of the sacrifices of the all-too-recent past. That current seemed to bring on in these older people a sort of heightened, rather performative pragmatism in all their responses to the world, and a maniacal distaste for whatever seemed to excite the young — which trivialities were often met with a dismissive “not strictly necessary, is it, Mary, dear?” Mary, her daughter, was my mother, and still is (and to be fair, she did on occasion tell Gran to get off my case). And it became plain that there was no comfortable place for me in that circuit, useless wiffly-waffly dreaming boy that I was. So I did precisely as I had learned to do at school, which was to switch myself out of the current and think about the things I really did care about, such as pop music and girls and cricket (or football, if it was the football season), while outwardly maintaining a convincing interest in Grandpa’s latest on-going denunciation.

Grandpa had been a very junior gunner with the Royal Artillery in the “Great War” (he was “at Gallipoli”) and he had also been a pitiless father to his son up to and including and even after the “second lot” in 1939-45; while his son — my dad — being then roughly my age as it was in 1970 (ten), was evacuated from his south-east London home to live alone with a strange woman in Tunbridge Wells, beneath the persistent chatter of the Battle of Britain, and then, soon after that battle had been won, under armadas of Heinkels, Junkers and Dorniers rumbling over to deliver the Blitz to the street in which Dad’s ma and pa lived, close to the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. That’s what I imagined anyway. In my mind, my dad endured the war alone in a featureless bedroom in Tunbridge Wells, gibbering with anxiety and afraid to descend into shared living space for fear that if he did so, the news would be broken to him that his adored mother lay entombed in rubble, while his father resentfully boarded the train to Kent to retrieve his son — without a scratch on him.

It is an obvious and ineluctable fact that we boomers and post-boomers have no memory of the war at all, none based on actual experience — which is why I imagine there isn’t a single soul among the members of that sub-generation, now aged (let’s say for the sake of tidiness) between sixty and seventy-five who has ever felt inclined to bang on about the vital contribution to the “war effort” made by their mums and dads, aunts, uncles and grandparents. We were the end of it because we actually wanted it to stop and go no further. We were, in one sense, a buffer generation, too young to fully enjoy the Sixties, most of us, and not too old to have escaped Sunday lunch with Hitler. Everything we ever learned about the “second lot”, we were obliged to gloze second-hand, out of politeness and respect; we did it by attending with great seriousness to someone else’s story, which was almost always about an individual made of rather sterner stuff than us; a person who had suffered to live and, in doing so, gave us the privilege of a life without suffering — not their kind of suffering anyway. So we do in a way have memories of the war; in fact we are full of them. They are just not ours.

It came at you from everywhere, the war and its lessons. There was the comic book version of ‘WW2’ that proliferated in the 1960s — and, Gott in Himmel!, the less said about that the better. Also, the serious matter contained within the proper history books, as they gradually found their way into the general readership, their research supported by the slew of government-sponsored national surveys that followed the war and its attendant decade of formal Austerity. Those remarkable surveys were our Domesday book. And most preciously — as an embodiment of the peace in legislation, and in enlightened and fellow feeling — that great postwar effort gave rise to the delicate but ever hopeful NHS.

And to service this incubating postwar consensus, there was no shortage of culture provided: films and TV dramas of one sort or another (romantic ones, dramatic ones, earnest ones, rote ones — all of them patriotic to a fault) each vying for your attention on the growing mass medium of black and white TV rented from DER — and they were all about the war that had recently finished in atomic slaughter and the uncovering of the machinery of the Final Solution. Yet you’d be forgiven for assuming that neither of those two atrocities had actually taken place; for this was, for a lengthy period, a sanitised war, and a war that no one ever needed to name because it was always ‘on’, always there, churning away, entertaining you as it compelled you to experience your inadequacies and deficits; a war that stood as the apparatus of a moral framework that required that no one actually talk about its deeply hideous aspects, while, at the same time, encouraging them to burble on more or less continuously about its value as a calibrator and fount of virtue and maker of men.

Later on, the films lodged themselves in my psyche in… oh, I don’t know… in much the same way, surely, that Hellenic culture found its way into the Renaissance mind — the doomsday premise of an archaic yet perfected society resisting engulfment by darkness, not with phalanxed hoplites this time, nor a fleet of fast triremes and the cut of logic-based, strategic thinking; but this time, in our time, cheerfully, with the Tilley lamp of British pluck and the gravy boat of Duty, flanked on either side by the moral supremacy of the cut-glass vowel, sharpened and then plunged like a stake into our sopping native soil, as the Wehrmacht massed across the Channel behind their fast boats. “Get beck, I say, you dreadful Hun, get beck to wherever you came frum — end take thet with you for your pains!” was the real title of every one of those films I used to watch on wet Sunday afternoons with a strange ache inside that was almost enjoyable. They were given different titles on release— In Which We Serve, Mrs Miniver, The Cruel Sea etc — supposedly to differentiate them one from another, but I knew, even at the age of eleven, that they were all the same film. They were possibly what Gran was channelling when she ticked me off for holding my knife the wrong way or for scratching my elbow at the table. I really was a dreadful Hun. All the good work done by the English middle class in defeating Nazism, with unbending personal discipline and by defending the little woman and the children, preciously confined within the walls and garden of sun-drenched ‘Rose Cottage’ somewhere in the Home Counties, would have been as naught, a wasted effort, if our own little Huns were allowed to get away with burping at the dinner table.

Yes, but then we did chuck it away, anyway, we post-boomer might-as-well-be-Huns in all our feckless self-absorption and collective need to dismantle — or so it was said — what had been fought for, only fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years before. Here was the “generation gap” rendered as unbridgeable gulf (”generation gap” being a term only used officially for the first time in 1967, of all years). We wanted to hear the beat of drums for dancing, not the ring of spoon upon forehead, the fffwitch! of cane on exposed backside, let alone whatever sound a bullet makes as it barges through flesh at high velocity. Neither did we feel, at any philosophical or moral or ethical level, that we had to conform to the model of duty, or whatever it was the headmaster was whanging on about in school assembly on this particular day, which had also once been quite another day of the exact same date, thirty-odd years before, on which soldiers fell, women wept and the tide began to turn at last against the barbarous Hun or Jap. A day given over to the formal reaffirmation of the 1960s schoolboy’s own inadequacy and the repudiation of his paltry gratitude.

Nor did we wish to support the continued usage of such language as ‘Hun’ and ‘Jap’, or ‘Dago’ and ‘Coon’, for that matter, to the utter contempt of many of those who’d survived the prisoner-of-war camps. Prigs, we were in the eyes of those who’d suffered for our freedom; ungrateful, uncouth prigs. And new bloodless wars were fought over language in particular but also over representation and the entitlements of the human as an autonomous organism in a society subject to law: just look at those highly civilised Ancient Greeks! Not a stitch to sew between them, once chitons had been shed… and hard at it, hammer and tongs, both indoors and out. Sex became all too apparent as the 1950s peeled themselves off to reveal the 1960s, where it had certainly not been apparent before. “Yes, sex exists, of course it does, we all know that — but why do we have to see it all the time? And hear it, which is sometimes worse. And drugs, also indoors and out — not so apparent, but that only made them more hazardous. Which also gave rise to… hair! Hair, for heaven’s sake. Hair here, hair there, hair everybloomin’where. ‘Hair? Fuck, yeah!’ as they would say with their potty mouths permanently set to the mouthing of words with four letters in them. And there were fucks in the theatre! And then it spread to television. Inevitably. It seems hardly necessary to point out now that foul mouths became normal, even cultural, an essential adjunct to shopping and going on buses and… well, everything. Basically, objectively, how many fucks amount to enough Anglo-Saxon, would you say? Go on, how many?”

Fuck the Empire! That was the big fat subtext though. Or so the old wingcos thought, in disbelief. And they were right. We did think that, the scurvy knaves of my rough generation; and we still do, even if we do now admit that we swear far too much and our hair has now all gone, like the Empire. Fuck knows where.

But if I might speak personally, and politely, for a moment…

It was the rubble. It has always been the rubble.

THERE WAS RUBBLE everywhere when I was a kid, twenty, twenty-five years after the war ended.

Rubble disfigured the nation, like a disease of the tissue itself. Or perhaps more like an unpleasant medical condition: rubble didn’t usually kill you but it was unattractive, intractable and not comfy at all, a rash on the surface betraying the likely presence of deeper disorder — and it was just about the only thing residual from the war that was left to its own devices, to do its worst and the Devil take the hindmost etc. It sank slowly into the topography, assuming permanently embedded status as the years and decades of economic expansion and recession ticked by. Having said that, of course, rubble did not, for us, present quite the same problem as it did for Berliners and those who remained in Dresden.

Rubble is basically harmless after all; the only real danger with it lies, ironically enough, in its apparent inertia, which can be transformed in an instant into lethal instability, tipping, pitching, trapping, snapping the unwary limb. But give rubble a wide berth and its threat is nullified. In some parts of London and the industrial North, rubble was just left to be what it is, quietly monumental, sometimes fenced off and neutered, but not all of it, leaving only the ghost of a latent threat, its only meaning lying exhausted in its abstraction of something that was once whole. Rubble not only symbolises disintegration; it is disintegration. And if everywhere you look, everything that you see is disintegrated, then … well, it is hard to feel wholesome when everything around you is in bits.

But Nature intervenes in the world of rubble as it does everywhere else, given half an opportunity.

Shrubs and small trees grew out of bombsite rubble with quite unusual energy during the Second World War, at great speed and with apparent intent. They billowed, the weeds, like the green sails of an armada filling the horizon, its precise intent unknown beyond the menace of its relentless convergence. Weeds the like of which you’d never seen in your own back garden proliferated everywhere there was rubble, each crater of broken stones a petri dish for what appeared to be new species, or old species at new scale, fierce new life pushing aside the hardcore piled up in the gaps in our architecture.

Liverpool Street Station was my favourite rubble for years.

It was mostly debris, scaffolding and plastic sheeting for the duration of my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps I exaggerate, but only by a little. Liverpool Street was the north-eastern gateway from my home city in East Anglia to the glamour of the capital. A darkly thrilling knot in the fabric. …Then the concertina gates which regulated access to the platforms with mighty crashes that shook your teeth — all was hustle, bustle and the minding of one’s business in the old station’s parchment-yellow light, shadowed by tonne upon tonne of filthy overhead ironwork. Most alluring of all, Liverpool Street’s platforms emitted a polished chocolatey gleam — a texture and silken shimmer not dissimilar to the stuff underfoot in the aisles of cathedrals, the glow-traces of unending passage, the gentle glossing by passing feet, to and from, feet both large and small, shod and barely shod. In one very important and nuanced way, the station came to symbolise a lost attribute of our nation: it is strange, in present circumstances, to think that once upon a time the British had a reputation for extending a genuine welcome to those seeking asylum from persecution and war, and that we were proud of it: Liverpool Street Station was the portal through which the Jewish children of the kindertransport passed to safety and the hope of new life.

And what a light and airy toilet of a place it has become: naff white ‘Carrara marble’ everywhere; a superabundance of tatty retail outlets marking the rim of a shapeless concourse; more ways to buy a croissant than you can shake a baguette at. The noisy claque of concertina gates has given way to the barely audible bleep of digital readers at the ticket barriers — the station has very much more in common with a shopping mall than with a cathedral of the steam age. I limp through its gaping chambers almost every week and I make a deliberate effort to remember it as it was, a place in which great journeys began and ended in sooty darkness.

Beauty and Destruction is not an exhibition about war at the sharp end, nor does it trouble itself to enter the engine rooms of war’s machinery. Nothing so dull or exciting. Nowadays we’d perhaps use that cold, techy euphemism “collateral damage” to describe what so many of these paintings are describing. But this show isn’t about “collateral damage”. It is about the impacts of war upon its softer targets and their hard enclosures, and the human effort made to meet those impacts in the domestic, industrial and civil realms, all of which require different responses depending on context and location and available human resources. It’s a description of a different kind of fight. In a sense, it is an account of war’s secondary events, its knock-ons and knock-downs away from the battlefield, and how, in a new perversion made possible by new technology, from 1941 onwards, the battle was brought down from the skies to set a fire in London’s fields.

THE PAINTINGS THE Imperial War Museum has chosen to exhibit so movingly are all the work of government-commissioned war artists (by the War Artists Advisory Committee). Some of them, such as Ardizzone, Sutherland, (Eliot, cousin of Howard) Hodgkin, Minton, Moore (Henry) are established, even famous up to a point. Their work is remarkable, humanistic, even loving, as you’d expect it to be — but also earnestly dispassionate. And some of it looks awfully poised stylistically, as if to say suavely to the viewer, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. You better believe it: I am by Henry Moore!”

But they are still terrific. Edward Ardizzone’s civilians, asleep in a deep shelter, loll together with convincing sausagey weight and convey the volume and presence of real people, joined by a shared skin of fear and boredom, still clinging together, limp as real sausages. (Clive King’s Stig of the Dump, one of literature’s great rubble-dwellers, would not emerge from his cave for another twenty years, drawn by the great Ardizzone.) Graham Sutherland’s The City: a Fallen Liftshaft 8 May 1945 is ascetic and reptilian-mechanical — and dislocated — which is rather as you’d expect a Sutherland depiction of a lift shaft to be, whether it’s a high-functioning lift shaft or one that’s had its joists twisted like pipe cleaners by high explosive. The destroyed buildings penned meticulously by John Minton, and seen strangely from above as if from a time-travelling drone’s-eye view, are neurotically empty. The anxiety is palpable in them.

The poster image, chosen by the Museum to articulate and ultimately to sell the show as a prospect, is Eliot Hodgkin’s ghostly beautiful tempera on panel, Haberdasher’s Hall, 8 May 1945, which distils the ideas and feelings expressed by the exhibition’s title into an elegant not-quite-allegorical rubblefest. The bomb-smashed Hall is a hulking Alp of broken masonry and brickwork, but we observers, who cower, half hidden, on the Alp’s lowest slopes, are distracted by the triffid-like appearance into the forelight of rampaging stems of Rosebay Willow herb — aka ‘bomb-weed’ — the presence of which is so in your face as to be both threatening and a joyously uncomplicated testament to Nature’s self-renewability.

Rubble is everywhere but it does not constitute the real core of this show, despite its proliferation as both scenery and prop and menace. That core you will find in the dynamism of a fiercely resisting population going about its business despite the chaos, the darkness, the fire and flood, the dislocation and the piles of crap all over the place. And why is it not surprising that, where the male painters are predominantly interested in stuff — in buildings, conflagration, machinery, menacing shadows, secret installations, dying barrage balloons, huge vessels under construction, a fire-service boat in the lee of Hungerford Bridge as fingers of searchlight quarter the night sky — the objects that so enslave the objective view — the female artists in the War Artists Advisory Committee’s employ were observing compassionately: looking after, tidying up, caring, queuing, tending, feeding, going about their business. The objective view that expresses the possibility of empathy.

Connew’s Blackout is my favourite picture in the show but it is not even slightly meaningful to say it is the best. The moment you say that, and you turn the exhibition into a beauty contest, then you lose connection with both its motives and its greater objective, which is to present the destruction of war not as an aesthetic outcome but as a vicious process with a strange beauty to be found inhering in whatever remains. That is because war, like painting, is a human process.

Only Frances Macdonald, of the women artists engaged by the WAAC, seems particularly interested in the objects of war. But then she was set up by the government with a shack built in an advantageous position next to London Docks so that she was able to record the secret manufacture of the huge caissons that were essential to the floating Mulberry Harbours that enabled the D-Day landings.

Otherwise, the labours of the women artists of the WAAC seem to have been concerned, whether by commission or by personal artistic choice, with what befell the softest tissue in the fabric of war. Bodies and souls — the things that really matter.

The prolific Evelyn Dunbar made a formal arrangements of the white aprons of the nurses’ in St Thomas’s Hospital in Evacuation Quarters. Uniformed nurses were similarly put to the service of the expression of human pathos by pattern — and by broken pattern — by Powell and Pressburger in The Life and Death of Col. Blimp. Just what is it, doctor, about a uniform?

Grace Golden goes into an Emergency Food Office and finds not only pattern but all of humanity gurning and mumbling in discrete, acquiescent queues about the floorspace of a Church Hall. The high stage area, the sacred station of the local Am-Dram Soc, is curtained and redundant at the top of Golden’s rectangle.

Louisa Puller’s delicate watercolour and ink tracings of the bomb damage around St Paul’s and Holborn Viaduct contain rubble in abundance but feel more like gaping wounds, sutured by cranes, bacterial humanity attendant but not visible to the naked eye. She is not at all interested in the human form, Puller — but then again it is likely you have never seen rubble quite so ripped and tenderised as this, a metaphor perhaps, or maybe just a simile of human pain.

The youngest of all the artists engaged by the WAAC was the excellently named Mabel Hutchinson. I had an Auntie Mabel and so, very probably, did you — and she was probably no more your real aunt than mine was. I can’t recall what my Mabel did in the Great War or the Second Lot, for that matter, but I am going to pretend that Mabel Hutchinson was my Auntie Mabel, aged 22, about to commence her studies at the Slade but now, suddenly, deputed to a Rest Centre in Bermondsey. And here she is, drawing quickly and directly on to canvas with an oil-loaded brush, catching what’s in front of her. A yellow room of dark, silent, waiting shapes and in the centre of the 40x60cm canvas is a tiny interaction you might not notice at all if you were in a hurry.

A weary matron, standing as straight-backed as her sore feet will permit, hands buried in her voluminous pockets, unable to bend at all to attend properly to the small voice of the small boy in front her, perhaps ten years old, maybe less, standing up and looking at her, bravely, and quite unaware of the tracks of tears visible in the filth on his face, of which he would no doubt be ashamed were he made aware of them … and what’s he saying? It’s hard to tell even in the relatively gentle hubbub of the Rest Centre.

She thinks he’s just told her that he’d somehow mislaid his dad — and his mum… His mum… well, he’d come up on the train from Kent on his own, to find his mum. And he just can’t seem to find her. He can’t find even find their house. Everything …

Well, everything’s just rubble.

Happy birthday, Angus. This is for you.

‘Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art’ is at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 1 November

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press

I SAW IAN McKELLEN’S famous Richard the Second in 1969, when I was nine, and though I had no idea why, I thought it was pretty great. I’d gone with my dad on my mum’s ticket because she was indisposed. It was agreed, as I understood it, that I had shown good enough form in my prior reactions to both filmed and staged Shakespeare — and not just the stabbing and the arrow storm either — that I was mature enough at nine to cope with the very particular challenges presented by that most subtly tonal of speech-y late-Elizabethan plays. Challenges? In reverse order of awkwardness, they are: the language, then the language and above all, the language.

The play is of course among other things a portrait of vanity, entitlement, delusion, self-pity, presumption, brutish self-interest, sudden insight and awful cruelty. It’s also a reasonable diagram of the metaphysics of late-medieval Governance and, floating glamorously above that, Kingship, Shakespeare’s favourite subject. (One of mine too — it’s one of mine because of Shakespeare.)

But I was nine and I was hardly likely to be getting to grips with themes. Come on, just how precocious do you think I was? Or do you suspect me of making this up?

I hadn’t a clue as to what the pissy king in the gold floor-length tabard was doing, coming down the grand flight of steps in slow motion holding up his hand behind his ear (holding a mirror? Can’t remember now), booming pissily in what was obviously his special voice. “Down, down I come…” I did not get why he, supposedly a king, sat down on the stage in his rather unconvincing armour — actually, he didn’t sit down so much as arrange the armour artfully, with him still in it — and then go on and on about how people do so often treat kings badly. And I am still chuffed, decades later, that I was not traumatised by the ending, where Richard goes mad and is murdered in a dungeon by the employees of the snake Bolingbroke. I really enjoyed it, I really did; much as I’d enjoyed Olivier’s films of Hamlet, Richard III and, especially, Henry V, which I still think, even at the age of sixty-six, is not only a fabulous piece of big-budget propaganda film-making but also a top play. Come on, people: the Duke of Burgundy! The Hostess! The Duke of Exeter, on behalf of Henry, inviting the Dauphin to come on, then, if he thinks he’s hard enough:

“Scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, / And any thing that may not misbecome / The mighty sender, doth he prize you at.”

I mean, come on. How can you not want to say that? Think of the drag you can apply to “prize”, “you” and “at”.

Above all, I really enjoyed the unending river of words, as it flowed differently from different people’s mouths, with hills and valleys and a topography of meaning within their contours that you might guess at while swimming in the river. Or just float on your back and listen to the sound of it. I hadn’t a clue what most of them meant — of course I hadn’t — but I have always known a good groove when I’m in one, and Shakey’s grooves know some deep, deep pockets.

I liked Shakespeare so much that I studied Drama as an academic subject at university. I got in on the basis of an interview in which I made a stretchy comparison between the performance aesthetic of the then-maturing punk group the Clash and the Russian film director Kosintsev’s Hamlet. It was 1979 and you had to do that sort of thing. And then on the course you had to do some acting (obvs) to understand how to release the life in the text, make the music in the language really sing (as the middle-brows say — you’ll never hear me say that). So I tentatively tried acting for the first time and after half a dozen goes, began to get a grip and enjoyed it. I even thought immodestly that I was quite good as an aged Peer Gynt.

Ibsen though.

A sort of inadequate fulfilment was found in the final examinations in 1982 with a do-it-off-the-premises paper always referred to as ‘The Shakespeare Takeaway’. I took it away, did mine in the daytime and then sat up all night helping my girlfriend do hers. People get so fried by Shakespeare.

The last knockings were my role in a play called The Dog in the Manger by the Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, never before performed in English. Terrific, it was, and it won the National Student Drama Festival, the prize being a week’s run in London’s glittering Euston Road at the Shaw Theatre. I’d been a spooky major-domo in the first production but was recast in London as a dorky lovelorn servant-fool called, I think, Fabio — though he might have as easily been named Franco Spencero. I wasn’t great. But to my amazement— and no doubt also to that of the rest of the cast, and director — The Times thought I was rather good. One of the two best performances in it, in fact.

I literally gasped when I read this and I must confess that my head was turned. It did a full owlish 360-degree rotation, and then another one, stopping half way. When the brain inside eventually ceased spinning, I considered at length the once-unthinkable: yes, I could launch myself into London’s thespian hive. I would become an actor.

Maybe then some fucker would cast me in a Shakespeare play.

I DIDN’T DO IT. I stood on the brink, quivering, for a summer and an autumn, turning things over with great solemnity. And in due course I turned away and didn’t do it. Because I knew that were I to engage in a year or two’s stiff training at a decent drama school, I’d come out the other end better equipped as an actor, but not a better actor. I knew I was pretty ordinary. I saw myself in regional rep doing an excellently punctilious Fortinbras and perhaps even a decent and quite unusual Polonius (I was always quite good at old blokes). Caliban? Yuzz. I can do squalid, feral, smelly. Prospero? Probably not. Falstaff? Not a gnat’s chance in a kiln. At my absolute peak I might cop a Bardolph in a Henriad somewhere, but much more likely Justice Shallow, probably in Gloucestershire. I had the knobbly knees at least.

It was the correct decision.

I did not want to be an actor, even though I did want to be an actor. I did not want to traipse the length and breadth of the Kingdom knowing that it would never be mine, as it is Judi Dench’s. I even had a passion that exceeded my appetite for Shakespeare (now there’s an interesting thing: I just went to write “my love of Shakespeare”, and I couldn’t: I could not write that balls-achingly awful phrase that people use when they’re on Radio Four and they lightly touch their sternum with their fingertips and plunge into a whole new register of sincerity: “of course, I cannot ever ignore my love of the Bard.” Never, never, never will I write those five words, not in that order.)

So, here’s me, in 1983, on the brink of my life, doing the maths.

Shakespeare? I am a crap actor and I must learn for the good of my faith in life to suppress my love of the Bard. The Bill would have always been my level really. And if you are gifted, as I am, with the talent for lying very, very still, then you can always be The Body. Furthermore, such are the virtues of modern make-up, wigs, prosthetics, clever lighting etc that you don’t always have to be the same one. It has a harsh lesson to teach, though, that unstill body which is also you: stillness goes to the very heart of the job. And acting has a lot to do with finding that stillness inside yourself.

Cricketer? Who are you kidding. Play for England? Get outta here. You dealt with that one when you were fifteen. NO!

Pirate radio DJ? Well, that was fun and meaningful for a while, but it wasn’t called pirate radio because of the salaries it paid. Ever heard the expression “spinning your wheels”? No pun intended of course.

Anyway, after two or three years of fiddling about and doing proper work, I began to write about music and not quite overnight I became a music journalist. And then not quite overnight again I got fed up with that and became a newspaper journalist and was stuck with that for years and years, until rather too late for my good health another almost-overnight situation occurred and I found myself writing books and training to be a psychotherapist. Which is what I am now.

OR AM I? Well, there is a question that old Wm Shakespeare would have explored with some acuity, not to say relish. Appearance and Reality. They are not always the same thing, you see. I hold up my hand flat behind my ear as I descend the staircase of my life, and it is a mirror.

And it is my hand.

And it is a mirror.

Do you see? It is both. Both a hand and a mirror. My hand, your mirror.

Your hand, my mirror! Do you see?

For the simple truth is that I am both. I am an actor, I am a writer, I am a psychotherapist. I am, er, all three of those things and I always have been.

I do have a special voice which comes out on apt occasion — I am using it now. Can you tell? I love to tell stories. My greatest joy is to entertain as it is also my privilege to inform and hold stuff up to scrutiny — and with fell purpose when needs must. But to help others to see for themselves? That has been all of my life. To listen. To see. And to show off just a little. Not too much. Just the right amount.

Do you see?

This piece was first published at Not Another Cycling Forum at NOTANOTHERCYCLINGFORUM.NET

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press

“SO, YOUNG MAN, what do you think you’d like to be when you grow up?”

In the old days, when nervous uncles attempted to curry favour with their nephew’s parents, they always asked this question of the boy. They seemed to think it was a duty congruent with their status, as uncle.

I would always dread the moment. You could see it in-coming like a missile from several miles out, scudding low over cresting breakers, then dunes, hedge-tops and finally the garden gate — and yet there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. You stood your ground and awaited the moment of impact, braced, hoping that even if the hostile enquiry did find its target, then it would merely land at your feet with a feeble plop.

In response to which I would then say something not entirely plausible that I knew would cause the uncle to writhe within himself, like a snake in a sock. I would tell him that I wanted to commit myself to bettering the lives of others, or play cricket for England.

“So you want to play cricket for England, eh?” The torsions of the moment were beginning to put Uncle Edwin out of his humour. “It’s a fine ambition, er… Nicholas. Yes, it is. The … uh, the exquisite cover drive, the pull to leg. The in-swinging length ball that clips the top of off-peg. Length and line, length and line!”

Some uncles can blither on for hours with this sort of shit. They slip into it, without any apparent change of action, and start droning on about their own cricketing career, which ended almost as soon as it had begun in the school Third XI. What they are trying to say, of course, is “Shouldn’t you be setting your sights a little lower, Nicholas? I mean, the impression I get is that you’re neither sporty nor particularly bright. And sometimes the thing within reach is just what you need, like a sensible job at Barclay’s, say, or the Midland? You can be too proud, you know. Have you considered following in your father’s footsteps?”

He has now blundered into a minefield and is already un canard assis au coup de grace. This coup requires a hushed conspiratorial tone loud enough that everyone in the room can hear…

“Actually, strictly entre nous,” I say, conspiratorially, giving it a bit of eyebrow. “My future is already decided. I am to become an actor — and a fine one to boot.”

A sudden and general hush descends upon the room. Mon Oncle flicks his weaselly eyes in the direction of my parents. This has taken him totally by surprise, like a broadside out of thick fog. His foremast has gone, the foc’sle a mash of splintered oak. Open declarations of homosexuality like this are not commonplace among twelve year-old boys in 1972. Uncle Edwin does not know where to put himself, so he mumbles about all sorts of things for a very short period and then fucks off.

I LIKE HYBRIDS. They seem to be a good thing, by and large — indeed, hybridisation is actually how the world works optimally for quite a lot of the time, although of course some will disagree. But let’s not get into that now.

Hybridity was certainly a key dynamic feature, even a driver, of the postwar industrialisation of music production, which saw, at different stages over that sixty- to seventy-year period, different species of music getting into bed with one another and then, having been encouraged, briefly, in the mutually enthralling activity of what John Lydon once called “squelching”, they returned unabashed to the home comforts of their original maisons d’être.

There is very little evidence of the squelching having adverse effects on the lives of the individual musics involved; “hybridisation” really does not imply that the two (or more) participants in the squelch lose a mote or particle of their essential identity as a direct consequence of their exciting new adventure — not in the musical sense anyway. On the contrary, it is entirely possible to observe that many faded, failing or even thoroughly worn-out musical styles actually experience rejuvenation from all that “creative exchange of fluences”. I dare say we all might, in equivalent circumstances.

Hybrids in music — the good ones — nearly always seem to be so much fun. And it is stating the obvious, I suppose, to make a correlation between pleasure in the attempt and joy in the outcome (calm down, Lacanians, there’s nothing for you here). Why would anyone ever bother to hybridise if it weren’t going to give everyone concerned a bump?

Here’s a handful of raw hybrids I’ve enjoyed over the years. More to follow.

Taj Mahal and the Hula Blues Band: Sacred Island (Private Music) In which the venerable bluesman éclectique attempts to elide the music of the cotton fields with the tranquil lyricism of Hawaii, where Taj had fetched up for some peace and quiet in later life. It works. It’s a gently enjoyable if somewhat heftless delight.

Funkadelic: Maggot Brain (Westbound) The emergent theatrical funk of George Clinton reverse-engineered (or is it the other way round — or indeed both?) into the holed consciousness of the psychedelic rock monster, which was pretty much braindead by 1971. Hybrids are not always a tissue of fun, then. This one is at least interesting and very expositional— as an album, it unfolds somehow like a stage musical soundtrack, perhaps shadowing Hair! with menaces— but is not enormously funky. Eddie Hazel’s guitar is what everyone talks about anyway.

Rod Stewart: Every Picture Tells a Story (Mercury) Gather round, Young People, and heed your Uncle Nickerty: he wasn’t always ghastly, Rod. You know that, don’t you? Trust me. In fact, he made four great hybrid albums at the turn of the 1960/70s, in which the glaringly distinct elements of British folk and English Early Music, American folk and American blues were not so much cross-pollinated as posied up most attractively to form a bunch we might reasonably describe admiringly as Anglo-Scottish Soul. There’s a monster for you.

SOMETIMES THERE IS really no stopping them. There have on occasion been marvellous stand-alone hybrids which evolved rapidly to become genre music for the ages, for the music’s elegance of both purpose and outcome, and also for the clarity of expression of its own living composition. You can see the brushstrokes, even when you’re not looking for them — and yet they take nothing away from the big picture. We’re talking Western Swing here and contemplating the strictures of country music as they cop a deep massage in the essential oils of jazz: swing and improv, stomp and shuffle. Actually, to hoist myself with my own petard of lazy generalisation, Western Swing was by no means a “postwar” phenomenon. Bob Wills and Milton Brown’s Light Crust Doughboys tripped the country-goes-jazz switch in the early 1930s and stiff old country, in its supple new Swing shoe leather, has swung like a kicking mule’s back leg ever since. Well, no, it hasn’t, obviously not — only the bits of country where they do that. But they do do that, don’t they? It’s dance music. I am no authority on these matters, but I am awfully tempted to consider Western Swing to be the First Great Hybrid?

Whatever.

No doubt Bob Wills will forever be the King of Western Swing but his descendants from Asleep at the Wheel and Dan Hicks’ Hot Licks to the rather more contemporary Hot Club of Cowtown, whose Django Reinhardt vibe is not confined to their name, are or were all happy subjects.

More hybrids…

Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto: Getz/Gilberto (Verve) Creed Taylor was the whip-smart record company exec who first spotted the glint of potential in the cow eyes of the early-1960s North American market for soft, melodic, “sensuous” jazz in an “exotic” cocktail-drenched domestic atmos. With savage dispatch, he authorised the ever-so-chill-and-mellifluous West Coast tenor saxophonist Stan Getz to go ahead and milk that udderness with whatever he was able to fashion from the intertwined limbs of cool jazz and bossa nova (for bossa was currently all the rage in the more sophisticated kind of American milking parlour) and a banana daiquiri. Smart fellow, Creed Taylor. Soon a very rich fellow. And much of the music is very lovely indeed.

Earth Wind & Fire: All ‘n’ All (Columbia) Literary America expends a lot of time rummaging in search of the defining Great American Novel of their era. African American music has likewise enjoyed the hunt for the New Ellington, a large ensemble of near-mystical powers under the direction of a charismatic leader that lights out for the territory in its effort to meet the black American appetite for glory in music, at all points of the compass. Surely it must exist somewhere, mustn’t it? The Duke liked it big, but comprehensive too. For a while in the late-’70s Maurice White’s nine-piece EW&F looked good for the Mod-Ellingtonian gong, but fell away under the weight of their collective aspiration and their vast collection of self-help manuals. But still: funk, soul, jazz, pop, Afro-Brazilian rhythms in all their teeming multitudes, the thwocking of kalimba, a bit of rock guitar, R&B in all its plenitude of faces, all delivered with orchestral weight and nutty precision — and the best horn section on the planet, or so it was said. For four or five years Mo had his mitts on the Grail. Almost.

Ah, but hang on a minute… Can it really be said that EW&F were a hybrid? Weren’t they just doing what everyone else does — nicking stuff — and then being better at what they did with the stuff they nicked than everyone else was at doing it with the stuff they’d nicked? That’s what Grammys are for: rewarding stuff that’s been nicked artfully! EW&F were never a true hybrid, were they? They were just elastically eclectic, and then promiscuous in their recognition of the need to diversify. Otherwise… toujours, c’est la même chose!

Okay. Time to get heavy.

THE MOST OBVIOUSLY successful and profitable hybrid of the postwar era arose from the very public coition of country music with the blues/R&B. “The blues had a baby and they named it rock ‘n’ roll,” in the thunderous scansion of Muddy Waters on Hard Again in 1977. As the widely acknowledged daddy of the blues, Waters might be excused for having taken a gendered view of the process, and it is obviously charming that he did ascribe a sexual identity to the music — because it is the blues that “get pregnant” and afford us all the opportunity to “get soul”. It’s the blues that always get real. The blues that understand your unspoken heart. Your hidden guilt, even. Well, look, there’s certainly no room for Original Sin in this union. In Muddy’s conception (so to speak), the blues’ offspring go straight from engenderment to soulfulness — it is born into them, by nature. Indeed it is clear that the Hoochie-Coochie Man imputes no special guilt to humankind whatsoever for having concupiscent sex, or for being like they are, generally speaking, and his blues surely stand as one of the great repudiations of St Augustine of Hippo.

As I say, hybrids are good. They tend to breed out the more fervid idiocies.

I think I have a Sunday favourite too, to go along with its sin-soaked siblings: a marriage very much made in the earthly paradise of the Caribbean: the glorious union of reggae and African American Gospel. In fact there are not as many examples of this sometimes elegant and often intense alliance as you might expect, given the robustness of religious conviction in and around the Christian tradition across the Caribbean islands, plus the stylistic solidity of the preeminent local musical form, reggae, all throughout its evolution from badly copied imported US R&B in the 1950s, via Ska and Rocksteady to Roots-Rockers to Lover’s Rock, Dancehall and onward into its slacker latter days — slack to the extent that I have rather lost touch (Messrs Yellowman and Eek-a-Mouse were the gentleman bouncers in Adidas manning my exit portal, as long ago as 1985). No, Jamaican reggae is by no means the only player in the region, but it is predominant, it has sustained a small cohort of international stars going back to the 1970s, and the music does ranking export business too, of course.

Historically, good old Sgt Jackie Edwards and a small platoon of semi-recognisable others kept reggae’s Gospel end up throughout the Sixties and Seventies, even as the younger and rather less deferential generation of Jamaican spiritual militants embraced the opportunities for creativity presented by Rastafari. I came in with the rush behind Marley in the middle 1970s and spent my latter teens and early twenties not exactly appropriating Jamaican culture but certainly digging it bigly. I did not go in for the white man’s dreadlock, and I did not conceive of my basic sociological standing as either Babylonian or Baldhead (unfortunately there was no arguing with the second charge by the time I was 23) but I did spend quantities of money I’d barely earned on reggae records and, to a much lesser extent, its associated herbal intoxicant. I became awed by a new sense of beauty, a metric one, conceived around the weighting of the so-called “one-drop” — the third beat in the bar landed on, in every single reggae tune without fail, by a meticulously recorded kick-drum — which defined and separated reggae rhythm from all other beauties in the world and lent it its moving asymmetry.

I remain in love still with the Jamaican music of the 1960s and ’70s, and it will never leave me now, not least because it is the form of music I feel best despite my failed auditory function. It is so orderly and respectful of the space we need in which to be, and it discovers yet more levels of beauty to itself when it turns itself upside down and shakes its contents out all over the floor. Dub reggae connoisseurs will tell you rightly, and fiercely, that dub is not all about lashings of repeat-echo, doorbells, running bathwater, chickens and car horns dropped in amongst bass and drum randomly like so much junk from the hold of a passing aeroplane, hoping to elicit the giggles associated with novelty and cheap titillation. Dub reggae when it is good is all about the simple, generous act of taking stuff away: the removal of that which is inessential, so as to reveal what is essential. It is all dark secrecy and the void, good dub. Sorcery too. Mmmm-chigg’-CLUNK-chigga / Mmm-chigga… No, dub is not striptease music for the soul. It’s not that at all.

Anyway, it was in the very early stages of my great passion for this music that I found out that I was strangely moved by the way traditional American Gospel melody fitted itself so easily to reggae’s deceptively simple but far from unsophisticated structural apparatus. I had two prime examples. One was entitled “This Train” and the other was called “This Train” as well. In fact it was the same traditional Gospel holler, pretty much as it had been formalised chordally by the American Gospel diva Sister Rosetta Tharpe, in, I believe, the 1930s. Now it was being done by two great Jamaican singers in two completely different ways.

The first was on Blackheart Man the 1976 debut solo album by Bunny Wailer (born Neville Livingston), a mysteriously dark yet tender work by the founding member of the Wailers and arguably the most interesting singer of the three as well as the most learned mystic; the high tenor of their harmonised trio recordings: always a bird in flight above the tempest raging below in the realm of men. Vocally, he was to the early Wailers as Curtis Mayfield was to the Impressions, the Chicagoan proto-soul group in which the beginnings of soul can be heard as audible componentry: doo-wop, R&B and Gospel. Wailer loved Mayfield and it is inconceivable that his extraordinary cover of the Gospel standard “This Train” was not in some way made in homage to the Gospel-derived, socially engaged train song composed so elegantly by Mayfield as a carriage for the dignity of all humankind. “People get ready / There’s a train a’ coming… Don’t need no ticket / You just get on board.”

Bunny’s train is a more complex affair and reverses out of its shed on a strange, shapeless hooting of synth and melodica / harmonica, as Wailer gathers to himself a rubble of hand-drums, nyabinghi style, and leads off into the wilderness.

Over the next almost-nine minutes this quiet aggregation of rumbles and organ moans acquire a bluesy acoustic guitar, a small choir of overdubbed Bunnies, possibly an augmenting Peter Tosh and the lead Bunny himself as they tumble slowly but always together down a dried-up river bed of sound that threatens in virtually every verse to throw its travellers off but never quite releases itself from its ancient groove until the last minute or so when the lead Bunny invites the company to hitch up their loins and at last … they dance. “Let me hear the choir sing…” You just about find the reggae in this final passage, underneath the boings of clavinet (or is it Bunny’s “jaws harp”? One may only aspire to know) which shapes an exquisite Jamaican echo of a Gospel choir swaying and clapping in the play-out coda to a great anthem. But this “This Train” is really speaking the language of the tiny, telling, relayed gesture and the intimate connection, so we do not follow them. We pass on to our own roads ahead, somehow enlightened. It is not a preachment; it is a whisper to your soul.

By contrast the Jamaican harmony group Culture, who owed more than a little to the Wailers and were claimed somewhat narcissistically by British punks in 1977 as prophets of their own uprising, entered the field with the Two Sevens Clash album, a ferocious thing produced flat and brash and splashy by Joe Gibbs (and engineer Erroll Thompson), as if to inject raw amphetamine into reggae’s muscle-fibre… well, let it just be observed that in extreme contrast to Bunny Wailer’s “Train”, Culture were hopped like punks and when they preached it was not in a whisper.

They made, to my knowledge, four different versions of “This Train” (or perhaps three and a remixed, extended one), and they clearly loved to do it. The group’s mainspring, the soi disant Rasta visionary Joseph Hill, tore it up every single time. Even on the more relaxed, warm and rocksteady-ish version on Africa Stand Alone, Hill attacks the song’s uncomplicated harmony with a vehemence you won’t find in any Church of England chancel that I know of, the three simple chords (tonic, subdominant, dominant-7) lifting every successive verse as a step up to a yet higher platform of intensity, as if the last one had been no more than a travesty of spiritual commitment — now rejected. Move on up … up … UP!

Hill has one of those Jamaican voices, that cannot be from anywhere else: the sour raw roots of being, dug out of himself as if delving for hope of rescue in some tree bole of the soul, all head and throat, trajectory and muzzle velocity, a blowtorch concentration of heat in the breech, burning the air close to. Heat and presence. The two harmony guys opening their throats to carve naked parallel fourths and fifths out of the air, almost but not actually like English folk geezers harmonising those same bare chords. “Awoooah-awah woooah-wah woooah…!”

“This train don’t carry no unholy / this train carry only the children of Jah.” I can’t remember which of the four versions that line is in (it is equally likely to be Bunny’s, now I think hard about it — but it doesn’t actually matter which). No, this really is not an ecumenical treatment of such a Traditional song of unification: it is very far from Curtis Mayfield’s idea of what a train is for; nor is Joseph Hill performing in front of evensong in rural England. This is Jamaica, and God can be found only if you sing it right, right up to the grille: harder than the rest.

But for Bunny Wailer that is really not the case. He is not about to find God and he knows it, because finding God is not really the point. The point is the journey to God, which is undertaken in good faith by those quiet enough to hear ahead, around the next corner in the rocky river bed; to hear what may be waiting for them there a few steps further on this impossible road, waiting just out of sight.

Let’s go and look, shall we?

IN THE END I suppose I am inclined to think that hybrids don’t exist, not in music. Not really. There are only curious people coming together and doing their thing in such a way as to accommodate the things the others present in the room do, as they accommodate yours. There doesn’t even have to be squelching, if you don’t want to do it. But equally you can if you want and there is full agreement among those you want to squelch with. If Muddy says it’s OK, then it is.

No, the point of a good hybrid, if hybrids do exist, is not to see round the next corner but to hope that there is a corner to go round in the road ahead. Just by moving forward purposefully. Finding out. Not in a state of conviction either, but with fierce curiosity. So come on, everyone. Let’s go and look.

Now, where’s Bunny?

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

WEST COAST JAZZ is sunny. You can feel the vitamin D in it as well as the cheap heroin. Sometimes you can close your eyes while listening and sense through imagined fingertips the nap of the preppie, button-down menswear the music’s arch-protagonists used to swank around in, looking clean and polished. The candy-striped, short-sleeve shirts. The funkily flecked box jackets. The pegged trousers or chinos. The barbered finial of flat-top and buzz cut, faintly military but properly finessed for jazz use. The scent of narcissus that ever clings to the self-consciously stylish. The loafers.

The white guys always look straight and clean, even if they are not (and they are not). And sometimes the black guys get themselves up in West Coast smart-casual rig too, but mostly not. You do come to know that the tie-pins worn by the early West Coast boppers Sonny Criss and Wardell Gray, when in smart mode, are really in fealty to Lester Young, and the pork pie hats are just jazz style that goes with any sort of jazz on any old coast. Essential jazz style. But of course Lester too, who can wear his at angles that are beyond mathematical calculation.

Leroy Vinnegar? You can’t tell which is his coast of habitude just by looking at him, but Gerry Mulligan’s you can. He’s a walking advertisement for California ultra-style, tailored and coiffed smart-casual aspiration in shades. And then when you listen to Mulligan’s music… it’s sunny, West Coast contrapuntal bop, stylish and soft and compositional. Delightful. Overflowing with impishness and romantic hope and studied poise, whether he’s shaping a whole new modern jazz aesthetic with Chet Baker and their pianoless quartet (so definingly cool), or simply larking around with a bunch of tunes while swapping instruments with Stan Getz in the studio for the fun and the cock of it. A pair of jackanapeses they might well be, but you can’t deny a talented fellow his fun in the sun.

But for all their puppyish delight in themselves, it is important to understand that they are not Brubeckian. Mulligan’s West Coast jazz never aspires, not even obliquely or cleverly, as Brubeck’s often does, to the condition of modernist pop-jazz. Pop-jazz for young moderns. Pop-jazz music in five-time, with no singing, but lots of thick piano chord-voicings ribboned together by Paul Desmond, a balding white alto saxophone player who looks as soft as an accountant and punchable as a sack of feathers yet can go places with his satin horn lines that Brubeck, the expressionless leader at the keyboard, sometimes cannot follow.

Brubeck himself … A name but also a brand. What a strange figure he cuts (and will always cut) in the modern-jazz bestiary: indeterminate ethnicity — though mostly white, you’d guess — maybe; professorially (or nerdily) impassive behind modish specs, a vibe intensified by all those records he cuts live with his quartet in front of preppie West Coast college audiences, who themselves think they are right on the cutting edge of young, white America’s new cultural frontier (what does the young loverboy in Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier” say? “I hear you’re mad about Brubeck / I like your eyes, I like him too”). Brubeck, the unabashed populist with clumpy technique and an ear for a grabby riff, who gets his music onto jukeboxes off-campus everywhere, by making sure his music never outstays its welcome at 45rpm. Brubeck the crypto-intellectual, would-be synthesist of all musics — classical, pop, jazz, latin, Stan Kenton… — shaping an avant-la-lettre crossover to seduce the unwary on the wide-open frontier of consumer-American living, with music that doesn’t really swing but does declare its affinity with modern abstract art and architecture and the cool-to-the-touch, wipeable wonder of plastics.

Dave Brubeck the Despised: ostensibly for his limited improvisational chops and heavy touch, but in most versions of reality he’s despised by heel-down hipsters everywhere for his ability to coin it. I disliked the Brubeck brand too, when I was a jazzbo, a quarter-century on from his hits, forty years before now-time: an early-Eighties post-punk jazz hipster, I was. Caught facing both ways — and not for the first time either. I thought Brubeck was dull, calculating, pandering and, Paul Desmond notwithstanding, essentially inessential. Oh, and call that swing? This was in 1983.

What is particularly peculiar about Brubeck’s version of ‘West Coast jazz’ as a phenomenon is that it was so narrowly despised at the very time of its greatest popularity, when it was a thing — broadly consumed as a product, back then in the 1950s and early ‘60s. Brubeck sold records by the crate, yet was steadfastly held in contempt by a demographic that could hardly do otherwise. There was something fundamentally tribal about the whole business, as would soon be all too readable in the new sociology of the assembling Sixties pop culture.

Brubeck was sniffed at by all hip civilians and critics, perhaps predictably enough, but also, perhaps a little more unexpectedly, by brother musicians: the self-anointed harder-edged East Coast musicians of that era, who deemed themselves to be on a much more serious trip, to go with their presumed tougher post-bopping chops and greater creative integrity (in other words, they enjoyed a fraction of Dave’s sales) — but also for socio-geographical reasons, back there in the Apple where the serious players congregate at the most serious jazz clubs and record in serious studios for serious labels, taking more serious drugs as they do so, thereby enduring serious hardship and privation as an integral part of the serious business of being a serious artist at a time of great seriousness for jazz people everywhere. It is intensely cold in New York too, which is cooler.

“THE QUESTION IS, I think, whether distortion feedback is communicative because it has tonal colour or because it projects shape. Or whether there’s something else going on in there as well…?”

We are in the kitchen and I am holding forth, as I am sometimes compelled to do, when goosy. I have an audience of two. One of them seems interested.

“We know that distortion feedback can express a sense of massive, cloaking presence — and at the same time a sort of buoyancy — you can almost see the hum as it rises from the overdriven tubes at the back, like the shimmer of hot air above a toaster.” This is good, this is good. “I am of the view, actually, that it is because of all of these presentations — that very sense of presence, mass, colour, shape, lift, plus the abiding feeling of wild uncontrollability … the sense that harmonic feedback has the virulent properties of wild fire — well, that’s what makes it so exciting … And then, when you do begin to sense that a hint of control is being exerted over this burning barn of acoustic-electrical noise — that its interior shapes as well as its ceiling are being modified by that controlling input — then you begin to realise that somehow you are being spoken to. And, well, it borders on the erotic sometimes, that articulacy. It’s like the totally Abstract pulling right up to the bumper of the Figurative, and persuading the Figurative to see things its way — and the Figurative hopping into the Abstract’s jump seat for what it knows instinctively is going to be a dangerous and exciting ride. There is no choice, then: they just have to find connection. It’s Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock …”

“Right, boys, I’ll leave you to it.” My beloved wife stands up. She all but frisbees her dinner plate into the dishwasher and makes for the kitchen door with a familiar expression playing across her features. The one she gets when I am goosy.

“Sorry, beloved,” I say, quickly. “Don’t be driven out — it’ll be over in a minute…”

“Whose definition of a minute are we going by?” she says, one hip already out the door. “Mine or yours? Come on, Nick, you know this will take hours.”

My friend D, at the other end of the table, looks hunted for a moment.

“J,” he says, “please don’t feel you…”

“It’s all right, really it is.” Her soul is large where guests are concerned. “Honestly, it is. You two bang on for a couple of hours about distorting harmony in tubes, or whatever — and it’ll do him good.” This is accompanied by a thumb jabbed in the direction of my end of the table. “Bring it on. The more the funkier. He hasn’t been able to talk about this stuff, not without getting upset, for so long he’s probably forgotten how to. So…”

A flap of hand and she is gone.

D looks at me.

“Right, professor,” I say. Prof D is a fine guitarist whose talent is supplemented by a large Philosophy-disciplined brain. I need to stiffen things up a little.

“Now, regarding the particular articulacy of ordinary harmonic feedback when a signal is overdriven and distorted in valve amps, yet controlled…”

D leans forward and places his hands flat on the table in front of him. He is no longer looking hunted.

WE HAVE TO BE careful how we go about this. In particular, I must be wary of overinterpretation and projection. Harmonic feedback is no more the thoughtful electric guitarist’s ‘ghost in the machine’ than the smell of petrol is the cognitive bit of a lawnmower. Nevertheless, it is all too tempting to think like that about it, semi-frivolously, for the simple reason that the singing, soaring harmonics that are the true fruit of distortion feedback, heard as flying incidentals in music to which they may or may not be invited guests, are so abstract in form and infernally difficult to nail descriptively that they do almost warrant metaphysical talk. One really shouldn’t do it though. Better I think to speak in plain Philosophical.

Let us consider first Gilbert Ryle. It seems entirely likely that this notable English philosopher, the sternly professorial Oxford academic who coined the ‘ghost in the machine’ phrase in his famous critique of Cartesian dualism, seldom if ever let down his thin sanding of pale hair. Furthermore, I am willing to bet somebody else’s farm on my conviction that Ryle never played an electric guitar in all his puff, or ever even fingered one sceptically with his lean soldier’s hands; yet it isn’t too much of a stretch to bring to mind a thought-Gilbert, a conjured philosopher holding the alien instrument out in front of him, not as he would a captured weapon or a soggy book that has fallen in his bath, but as if it were a new-born baby, nervously, awkwardly, while its pots and switches are adjusted by a hovering acolyte, the instrument’s sturdy box amplifier solidly planted on a chair at the other end of a 1970s curly lead, warming itself to that crunch-point at which it is possible to feel the entire apparatus giving itself over to Distorto, the realm of ‘max gain’.

It seems unlikely that Ryle would not be at least stimulated by such an acute experience, the tingles zizzing his fingers, wrists, arms, legs, teeth, scalp and above all, as that other great but unfashionable English philosopher Keith Richards would insist, his rectum. We can even imagine the acolyte showing Ryle how to shape with his left hand the instrument’s easiest and most idiomatic chord, open E-major, and then, with confidence and curiosity growing in him, the noted philosopher giving in to the temptation to swipe the strings with his right hand … and then we’d watch him recoil like a snake as the shockingly big chord resonates within the chambers of his body and then shoots down his trouser legs, out the door, descending the staircase from his college rooms to traverse the immaculate grass of the quad, blasting straight through the porter’s lodge and out into the rain-slicked street beyond the main gate, where a couple of passersby in plastic macs remark long-sufferingly on the appalling immaturity of the modern undergraduate — it is surely a metaphor for something.

In fact Gilbert Ryle died in 1976, so he just missed out on the opportunities presented by punk.

And it is true, what J said. I had not been able to talk about this stuff for three and a half years, since I had fallen completely deaf to music for the third time, in 2022, and indeed deaf to most things that weren’t some kind of explosion. As deaf as pitch is black; the comfort and joy of music meeting, within me, an unnatural end. I had wanted someone to kill.

But recently — as recently as three months prior to this semi-spontaneous meal with D in our kitchen — after more than three years of torment, there had emerged in my auditory brain the merest hint of a change for the slightly better, and for no apparent reason. Something tiny had stirred in the woodshed — and I had been shocked almost as much as uplifted.

It was a passive experience. I had certainly done nothing to make it happen, knowing better than that. One evening I simply heard tonality in the room, just like that, just a trace of it, like the faintest colouration of light seen dimly before dawn. The sort of thin harmony you usually encounter via a plastic television transducer. And as it happened, I happened at that moment to be sitting in the curtained back half of the room while J watched telly in the front half a few feet away. I was contemplating with deep gloom the mountain range of music stored there, plus the mains-powered instruments of its reproduction, wondering whether I shouldn’t just bite the bullet and dispose of it all for whatever it would fetch. The lot. That would go some way to defraying the therapy bills … And yet, there it also was in the room suddenly — this alien bloom, a tight note-cluster that was pinkish-greyish in hue and seemed to be in the business of spreading unease. But also, of course, it was the thing I wanted to experience again above all other things in life, the auditory colour-pop to out-pop them all within the labyrinth of the human ear. Music that sounded like music, not a crackling pyre. I do not assign huge significance to the fact that it was pinkish-greyish in my ear, but it is true to say that for a tiny moment the air that I breathed tasted of raspberry and concrete.

Anyway… Now, three months on from that occasion, I brought distortion up at the dinner table for the reason that D is a talented guitarist and, more importantly, a guitarist of unusual intellectual curiosity, and I wanted to hear his noblest thoughts on the matter of feedback’s relationship with human feeling, given that sometimes feedback seems almost to speak our emotions — and sometimes we (well, I) can comprehend no other tongue, such is our (my) distress — and I am not exactly unaware, either, that harmonic feedback also belongs to a category of sound we think of as noise.

So what then do we get out of the world when feedback is making the very stuff we breathe hum? Harmonic feedback is a different fish to microphone feedback, although it arises for effectively the same physical reasons — essentially, the completion of a frequency loop in closely adjacent items of amplifying / monitoring electronic hardware (especially when the amps are valved). When harmonic feedback is deliberately coaxed into being and then controlled by a guitarist who knows what he or she is doing, then feedback’s remarkable capacity for enlarging the scope of what is being expressed by that player makes it a unique musical tool, one that surely requires philosophy to address it properly; because feedback, wouldn’t you just know, is not subject to the analytical wiles of musicology, even though it brings its share of pitch, duration and dynamics — all those musical values, though not much rhythm. You feel it, you hear it, it enters your body, yet it cannot be notated. Players of oboes and cors anglais really don’t know what they’re missing.

Where to start though?

Well, I am inclined to start where I once did, when I was a little chap, with the simple, adorable fact of guitar signal distortion — feedback’s near room, a colourising and shaping effect amid the clanking simplicities of mid-’60s pop. Good old Keith Richards, he of the zizzing bum area and the Rolling Stones, was an early adopter of what came to be known as a fuzzbox, and everyone old enough knows when that was. 1965. Pop’s greatest year.

Richards’ chief concern on that occasion was to find a way to imitate the sound and weight of a Stax-style horn section riffing thick, low and chromatically off the perfect fifth in, yes, the key of E-major (B, C#, D, bluesy pentatonic feel), against the bopping Al Jackson-style on-beat of Charlie Watts. BOP-bop BOP-bop! It engendered a feeling all right. Leaving aside the fact that in the UK in 1965 the engineers in lab-coats who policed recording studios with clipboards and frowns would endure a personal crisis every time a needle went anywhere near the red, it was close to unheard of for feedback or distortion of any kind to contaminate the quarter-inch tapes that rotated solemnly on their fat spindles. Feedback, distortion, farting when the red light was on — these were terrible sins and all absolutely inexcusable in a properly conducted and orderly studio environment, for fear of the wasteful offcuts you’d end up throwing to the flea-bitten dogs that loiter in the sun outside the abattoir of the senses. So it was altogether likely that Richards had to smuggle his brand-new Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone past the studio guards before explaining to the men in lab-coats that this wedge-shaped tin-pot gadget, this thing, this alien vessel of corruption was merely a link to be inserted into the chain that joined his guitar to his hitherto undefiled amp and really was not going to overload the system because it was actually designed to distort the signal input before it reached the amp. It was an effect. You can imagine the technicians’ suspicion and the unease with which they scratched furrows in the dandruff that strewed their postwar partings. Oh, very well. Richards then plugged the thing in, between guitar and amplifier, cranked out the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with a now-familiar slouching swagger and little boys up and down the country stopped in their tracks and listened like spaniels with their tongues out. And their shivers were only multiplied when the microphones picked up the electro-mechanical squinch just about audible in the music when Richards’ Cuban heel turned up a tiny fraction of a second late for one of its scheduled meetings with the switch that opened up the crude fuzzbox circuitry — sskkkrrkk! — and the spaniels were utterly awed with themselves for spotting such a thing. They were so up for this.

Of course distortion doesn’t begin in 1965 with naughty Keith and his Maestro FZ1. In fact, it had already been marking the outer boundaries of American blues and rock ‘n’ roll for more than a decade in some cases. In the tough Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, red-line-bothering studio distortion was deemed to be acceptable up to a point, and both of those two giants of the twelve-bar form were prepared in the middle-1950s to transgress the line of technical propriety in order that they might explore further and more deeply into the potentialities of their sound. The Wolf had guitarist Hubert Sumlin torching norms as a matter of habit, a player unafraid to abrade the ear with the effects of finger-distortion on a genuinely stinging tone eked out principally on two guitars which would garland the Wolf’s often terrifying moon-bark of a voice with different kinds of savagery (a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top and a juiced Fender Stratocaster, since you ask: very different sounding instruments, mostly due to the different wiring of their pick-ups and the significantly different density and weight of their bodies); while Waters granted special hoochie-coochie latitude to his harmonica player, Little Walter Jacobs, who rigged his harp to an amp and distorted the crap out of his already monstrous tone. Of Little Walter’s own sides, “Sad Hours” is the one you have to hear, right now: a lugubrious shuffle that Jacobs drifts around and about like an angry, excluded ghost, using every cubic millimetre of his life’s breath to drive the amplifier to a number of places it had likely never been before, distortion bringing both chill and heat to a ripe bruise of a record. Effect as affect. How many tone-hungry guitarists down the years must have gasped, “Where da fuh’ do I get a piece of that? Someone, show me!”

On the other hand there was also Link Wray, who must only have dreamed of making a record as magnificent as “Sad Hours”, and that’s assuming he was actually capable of dreaming such a dream. Still, the Wray legend rests comfortably enough on his own almost uniquely terrible but vivid instrumental, “Rumble”, which cast the Danelectro Longhorn-toting punk as that pivotal figure who dared to bring distortion, mechanised vibrato and the latent threat of feedback to rock ‘n’ roll, as if to define rock ‘n’ roll’s essential Nature. This was in 1958. He also brought the technique of a schoolboy who has just learned a fourth chord but not had time to practice it much and is further blessed with the endowments of a tin ear and thick skin.

Thus was inaugurated rock ‘n’ roll’s long aesthetic affinity with primitivism / ineptitude. Amazingly, “Rumble” was a sizeable hit in America. It’s difficult to hear now how it must once have been heard, let alone how it landed on the average American psyche. The ‘song’ starts very much on the slow side for rock ‘n’ roll (in E-major, but of course), slows down without meaning to in the middle and, instead of ending in torrid cadential drama, simply grinds on until it is sucked into silence by a relieved universe less than two and a half minutes after it began — “Rumble” doesn’t feel like an uplifting burst of visionary creativity because it isn’t one; it’s a Rubicon crossed slowly and with great effort of will and finger placing, in which the technology, and humanity’s historical struggle with technology’s perceived inherent unsafety, had somehow become an integral part of the music’s identity and subject matter. Electricity made rock ‘n’ roll exciting. Rock ‘n’ roll actually was electricity.

“Rumble” laid down a marker for aspirant rockers of the grungy kind at least, which allowed that rock ‘n’ roll, in its unrestrained, tasteless, simple-minded, overbearing but fundamentally life-giving way could go anywhere it liked on its rubber-soled brothel creepers, so long as it was prepared to take care of the leccy. The dangerous spit and fizz of the live current — a barely containable energy so intimidating to my gran that she kept all her plugs in their sockets at all times, to keep the stuff from escaping through the socket holes into her living space — was, to the rocking spirit, confirmation they were doing something right. Rock ‘n’ roll jittered and zizzed like that because it was literally charged up. Electricity was a superpower, if properly harnessed. But of course it was also death in waiting. The implacable squealing of microphone feedback, the constant malevolent hum and weird bangs in speaker units, the unexpected jolt from a cable, the evil blue crackle that would dance around a socket laden with too many extensions… Man, oh man, rocking was a hairy business.

When I was no more than twelve, I was horrified to read of the accidental electrocution of the guitarist in a band called Stone the Crows, in a civic space in front of a paying live audience. He was called Les Harvey and he was unfortunate enough to put his hand to an improperly earthed microphone while the fingers of his other hand rested on his guitar strings. A roadie fought to yank the plug out, but whether he couldn’t find the right one or the right one simply wouldn’t budge, it made no difference to the man completing the circuit on the stage apron and poor Les Harvey did not even make it to hospital. I mean, what are the chances?

Extremely high, I’d have said back then. When I reflect upon the loose wiring looms and the coils of battered black cable that strewed the floor of every squalid gig I attended in my teens, I am minded to consider it a high achievement that so many of the early rockers ever made it to do the rolling part of the job, let alone full adulthood. But they did, they really did. And they took their audience with them. They pulled it off, the Johnnies-on-the-spot with their quiffs and their strange trousers; they plugged themselves into the mains, took the jolt and then made the rest of us feel the jolt too, but safely. And by heaven, that was a sacrament, was it not? Scotty Moore, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Vince Gallup, Duane Eddy, Dick Dale, Hank Marvin… Pioneers, the lot of them. Great men. Electric cowboys at least the equal of those brave men who conquered space.

No, I am not joking.

The Beatles of course claimed authorship of the first deliberately recorded feedback, for the start of their late-1964 hit “I Feel Fine”. Although the feedback was considered by Paul McCartney at the time to be a “found object”, which did sound rather good in the context of the irresistible bouncing R&B that followed, he was in no position to claim it as essential to the fabric of the song as it stood, nor that it added anything substantive to what the song was actually expressing. But it did announce “I Feel Fine” with a loud-ish waaannnng! that anticipated the approaching song’s key centre and then butted out of the picture, politely, to allow the music to fire its engines and get moving. It’s a fanfare, that waaannnng! A heads-up. An indicative flash of tuned noise sufficient to the task of seizing your attention: Beatles in the area!

Noise was of course of great interest to rockers everywhere later in the 1960s, especially the cross ones also partial to a concept: The Who in Shepherd’s Bush, then, or the Velvet Underground in New York. The MC5 and Stooges in Detroit. Noise was chaos and chaos meant overthrow and anarchy, electricity loosed like wild dogs among the common fold. Unless you were John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman and all the company of the unelectrified avant garde. Yes, they brought noise and adversarial weather, very like the old gods in some respects. But really they were Free-jazzmen and they blew saxophones as if they were haunted by the question of how the individual spirit was voiced by the Human in its relationship with its own inner noise. They stood for revolution, some of them, but anarchy was not their brief. They stood apart from the mob and shrieked and squealed down vented conical tubes. It was hardly plugging yourself into the mains.

Nevertheless, Jimi Hendrix cleaved much more closely, musically, to the Free-jazzers than to the rock conceptualists. He may or may not have deliberately set out to steal Pete Townshend’s thunder at the Monterey Pop festival with his earsplitting attack on his own mountain range of amplification, but there is one idea we have to grasp roundly when tackling the 1960s’ appetite for hullabaloo. It’s that there is considerable daylight between smashing everything up so that it makes a terrifying noise, like some vast machine tearing itself apart, and playing noise as if it were music.

Jimi Hendrix was a phenomenal guitar player in the technical sense. He could play anything and he usually did, his vast tarantula hands crawling like great hairy legs all over the throat of whichever Stratocaster had earned his favour that day. His hands were nimble but his mind shifted faster than bullets. Within the tiniest temporal spaces he was able to conduct wild ravishments of the pentatonic blues, shake the funk-fruit down from the limbs of the funky trees, while the thinly psychedelic grew fat bags under his velvet lee, a soft, enclosing place sheltered by the vast asymmetrical joists of electric riffage required to bridge the harmonic abyss left to gape by the Experience’s total lack of chordal heft (not by nature a boogier, Hendrix’s big thematic riffs always have a slightly unstable, threatening lurch to them, and they are never less than ambiguous in their gait and in what they might be carrying out of sight in their pockets — just imagine how “Purple Haze” must have sounded to respectable passers-by in 1967, leaping out at them at massive volume from doorways and open summer windows), the music somehow weightless and massive, textured, transparent, fleet, always on the brink of leaving the busy diatonic world waaay behind, as if this had been the most pathetic planet yet visited… Sometimes you fancy that you can see the lemurs in his music, dancing in the arms of the funky trees, but, actually, when you get close they are … not really there at all. They’re ghost lemurs. Hendrix’s music, at its best, has voluminous presence and almost no solidity at all. Electric Ladyland. Try listening to it. It’s not all that easy. It’s there, quite obviously it’s there, the music, the feel, the tonality — but also it has the consistency and materiality of clouds, as if it were composed chiefly of an unusual kind of electrified vapour. Very loud vapour. Hendrix was clearly some sort of electric cloud eel.

I suspect this was the quality that appealed so much to Gil Evans, Miles Davis’s longest serving collaborator. There was certainly something about Hendrix’s inclination to drift that kept Evans in tasty ensemble arrangements of Hendrix ‘tunes’ for the latter part of a long and laidback life on the cloudier edges of modern jazz. I interviewed him once very briefly, getting on for forty years ago not long before he died, and he said something very interesting about Hendrix’s music that I was unable to quote because my tape-recorder failed to pick it up (Evans’ voice was cloudily insubstantial too and we were not the only ones talking in the room), so I did not feel entitled to write it down for publication. But what he said — or I thought he said — has stayed with me, and I’m not surprised. I am pretty sure that Evans muttered that Jimi Hendrix’s music was profoundly appealing to him because it was “almost not there”. I took this to mean that the essential Hendrix musical gesture was a sound-feeling snatched out of the ether, rather than a solid-sounding structure composed as a product of the labours of his inner world, with words — wisps of almost nothing that had to be snared while they passed within reach. Afterwards, I wondered if he’d meant that Hendrix’s whole being was a musicalisation of consciousness as it tiptoes along the boundaries dividing itself from the Unconscious, or even Death. And no, I can’t attribute that to Gil either because I am certain that he did not say any of those words, not to me, anyway. But it did not stop me from making the inference later on, when I’d let “almost not there” sink in. I know I have seen the lemurs.

I FIRST HEARD “Machine Gun”, on the Band of Gypsys live album of 1970, at a friend’s house when I was eleven or twelve. My friend had older brothers, and older brothers and sisters in my hometown in 1972 always had at least one Hendrix album, to go with the statutory issue of Santana, Carole King, Dylan, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones. Band of Gypsys was playing in the room in which we mingled, the young and the even younger. Probably five or six of us. I have no memory whatsoever of any context for the music beyond that. I certainly don’t remember the music that preceded and followed “Machine Gun” and I have no recollection of anything that was said about it either… but I sometimes think that I have never fully returned from the experience of being there, hearing it while surrounded by other people.

Until that sorry moment when my hearing finally went west in 2022, I’d dig the album out every now and then when on my own, perhaps every couple of years or so when in the mood for a thorough scourging, and I’d tell myself with great sternness that I should really listen to the rest of the record too and show a little more respect for Jimi’s huge array of accomplishments. But I never did. I just listened to “Machine Gun” and it sufficed. I could not even tell you what the other songs are, even though I’ve owned the thing in various formats since I first bought a severely chewed-up copy of the LP second-hand a year or two after my original encounter with it.

“Machine Gun” cannot be met with language. Well, not mine anyway. It’s not that I think I am not clever enough or I am insufficiently soulful. It really isn’t that. Nor that I think “no words” (as in that feeble faux-deferential grief-cliché that meets with far too much lazy acceptance in the third decade of the twenty-first century). The truth is that I can actually think of thousands of words to say about it, but when I try to lay them out in the right sort of order, they all just read back to me as feeble too. Inadequate, wanky. I might just as well write “no words” and hope that readers will take that in token of my deep sincerity and humble sensitivity and reward me for it with a punch in the face.

Not so long ago a box set was released of the four performances delivered over two two-show evenings that constituted the entirety of Hendrix’s appearance at the Fillmore East in New York over New Year 1969 and ’70, from which the original Band of Gypsys album had been pieced together (merely as a means to fulfil an outstanding contract). Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s studio engineer, executed the final mix. He did a fabulous job too, especially in finding ways to allow the new, post-Experience rhythm section of Billy Cox (bass, vox) and Buddy Miles (drums, vox) to breathe in the airless heat generated by Hendrix’s overwhelmingly powerful Marshalls plus an extensive array of effects pedals and switches — very much more so than in 1967. There are moments when Cox, Miles and their employer lock fully, all three barrels shot, and you are able to hear, then, just how brilliant the light Hendrix might have shone over the coming world of the heavier sort of funk. Miles and Cox simply lay back in the pocket and ensure that space is available.

There are four versions of “Machine Gun” on it, placed in the right spots in the running orders. And, as I understand it, unedited. They are all beyond brilliant and convey more of the mutually resistant emotions of ‘disgust’ and ‘pity’ than I care to attempt to articulate. And yes, I do consider the originally released one on the Band of Gypsys album, from the first show on New Year’s day 1970, to be objectively the best of the four, although my criteria for thinking so are themselves compromised by subjectivity. But I could not disavow it now, after all these years of knowing it to be what I know it to be.

But it is the longest of the four “Machine Guns” — recorded not quite so cleanly and. assertively the night before, during which Hendrix conducted the New Year’s midnight ritual and hacked out an impromptu “Auld Lang Syne” — it’s that one I am struggling hard to stay alongside today, as my residual hearing distorts and breaks up this most brutal yet clear-sighted of repudiations. Nevertheless, I know I can go the full distance with it. I have done it before many times and I am neither intimidated nor shrivelled by the experience, as I listen to it alone, as I have always listened to every version of “Machine Gun” with full commitment to Hendrix’s moment. I simply cannot have even people I love anywhere near me while this goes on.

I am now about six minutes in and Jimi is slugging this one out. It is the most insistently funky of the four but also the most chordal and thick with the whirr and churn of killing technology. There are people dying, mechanically slain like animals in stalls at an abattoir, and I am already wondering how it will be when, towards the end, a perfect column of shimmering harmonic feedback rises out of the filth and sings the signature arpeggio of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a voice you might think was composed of pure light and beauty.

In fact both the mechanised killing and the beautiful pure light were achieved with the aid of a Vox wah-wah, an Arbiter Fuzzface, a Shi-ei Uni-Vibe and an Octavia octave-divider wired upstream or downline, one way or another, from Jimi Hendrix’s nervous system to connect him directly to vast wattages of amplification, made exclusively by Marshall, and then sent out into the world to change it.

PROF D AND I have not been discussing “Machine Gun” in the kitchen. I do not bring it up because I can’t. We’d have to listen to it together and I simply cannot permit that to happen. But we have been talking about feedback and distortion at a reasonably elevated level, and D has brought up the important subject of pinch-harmonics and how expressive this particular micro-technique of electric guitar playing is and how so few players can do it well. My old favourite Texan twanger Billy Gibbons is a master too and there have been examples played and slightly inebriate goggling in the kitchen this evening, not only at his way with a pinch-harmonic (Gibbons is such a master of the technique that he has played entire multi-chorus solos on harmonics alone, without his feet touching the ground) but also his wrangling with straightforward harmonic distortion as a sort of environmental condition, to the extent that he is able to describe landscapes and tectonic shifts and Mexican food and hats with pure harmonic distortion and without apparent difficulty. A shifting field of lush brown noise teased out straight-armed on slackened bottom strings at hip level. Harmonics are surely limitless in their potential and of course their reach: for this is what was meant by the ancients when they discussed ‘the harmony of the spheres’? Anything that vibrates is capable of harmony, you know.

But enough of this.

“Prof,” I say, “can you please tell me why it is that harmonic feedback is so profoundly expressive and why we — well, I — find it so intoxicatingly beautiful — and … and I sometimes think that it is the bit you can’t hear, the bits of music that are almost not there that make your heart sing?”

D looks hunted again and then puts his hands flat on the table once more and brings a resolute glint to his eye.

“Tell you what, Nick,” he says, not quite achieving, I suspect, the narrowed gunfighter gaze he’s after. “I’m not sure I can express what you want to hear, sitting here in your charming kitchen, slightly pissed… But I tell you what. I can write you a paper… A short one…”

Objects and fields: a brief rumination on guitar feedback

By Dom J Dawes

One of the many clear but mystifyingly overlooked conclusions to be drawn from modern science is that what we call a ‘thing’ — at the most basic level, what we call a ‘particle’ — is more accurately to be perceived not as an ‘object’ at all (those little solid round marbles of reality we normally assume), but as the local excitation of a field. This idea, simple but radical, suggests there is a field of possibilities, of whose nature we know almost nothing, out of which literally everything in the world emerges.

Music, the world’s greatest teacher on a wide range of subjects, is a huge help with this otherwise rather abstract insight.

Appropriately treated, a musical object — say, the note ‘A’ — can be treated in ways that literally, audibly reveal the formal vibrations of the field that produces it. The great gift of certain forms of spectral analysis, to an extent of the piano, and most particularly of the overdriven electric guitar, is that they allow us to perform a revealing philosophical operation: a live, real, non-theoretical, non-destructive deconstruction of an object into its constitutive vibrations. We can straightforwardly perceive (we can actually hear) the relationship between the ‘object’ — the note ‘A’ — and the network of vibrations, connected by mathematically precise ratios, in the field from which it has astoundingly emerged.

Crucially, the metaphor moves outwards too, away from the hermetic formalism of ratios and proportions, through the medium of music itself, into the world of feelings. The world of interior life, of experience. Thus, the sound of an electric guitar, heavily distorted by the analogue overdriving of the amplifier’s valves, is rather like a vision, or a moment of understanding, such as when you look at a person you love and see, almost transparently through them, wave after wave of the constituent parts that make them exactly who they are: a unique history of relationships, ancestors and ideas, a network of consonances and dissonances, proportions and positions, all of which finally arrive at the here and now, the singular person in time and space — the ‘local excitation of an infinite field’ — who stands before you.

It’s something like this that I’m trying to get at. It’s more than a metaphor (I think). More like a part of fundamental ontology, in which musical notes, particles and people (as well as fish, trees, concepts, tennis matches, fictional characters, rocks, strawberry doughnuts, dreams, jazz albums, mythical heroes and lamp posts) are all, in some fundamental sense, constituted in precisely the same way.

Audacious (and perhaps hubristic), I know, but that’s my intuition and I think I’m going to stick with it. I believe that the sound of the electric guitar points towards this intuition, and I think this is why we all love that sound so very much.

SO THERE IT IS. Thank you, Dom. Very much.

There you have it. You have your homework assignments for the weekend as well, people. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. “Sad Hours” by Little Walter Jacobs. “Rumble” by Link Wray and the Wraymen (optional). “Smokestack Lightnin’” by Howlin’ Wolf. “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles. “Little Wing” by the Gil Evans Orchestra. “La Grange” (second solo) by ZZ Top. “Ghosts” by Albert Ayler. “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix. Please listen and inwardly digest. Sometimes it is very hard work hearing what’s in there, but if you do the work and are brave enough to take it seriously, then you will hear it.

There is no greater privilege.

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

‘PERFECT’ IS AN AWFUL WORD, in music as in life. Perfect incentivises trying too hard. It engenders anxiety and neurosis. It encourages the idea that ‘less than perfect’ is devoid of value. Most disturbing of all, perfect inclines to a system of value that extends beyond the human. It’s one thing for an apple to be perfect, quite another to apply the word in the same way to something that aspires to the condition of art. Apples are really not the same thing as humans or their art — but I’m guessing you knew that.

I am not quite old enough to have known Plato personally but I imagine he’d also have a thing or two to say about all of this. And given that he isn’t here to argue the toss — and while I humbly acknowledge that my understanding of the Platonic Ideal and the tricky work done by its perfect shadow Forms may well be less than, er, optimal — I do feel inclined to make the point that very little successful creative work proceeds from aspiring to some sort of cooked-up anti-shadow of the Platonic model, in which a meticulously worked-out plan results in the delivery of perfect shapes from the loading bay round the back of the hyperuranion (the hyperuranion being the B&Q of the heavens in which the entire stock of objects held in storage on the premises are ideal in their form) for later assembly through the labours of great mortals and the slaves under their meticulous direction, and so on. It is entirely true to say, I think, that in the creative acts made every day by even the most talented individuals, things very seldom come out the way they were planned to; or that they are anywhere close to ‘ideal’ in form.

Very seldom? How about ‘never’?

Because that isn’t how artistic creativity works. With all its little dependencies on contingency, accident, serendipity and even staged spontaneity, art is actually anathematic to that kind of planned exactitude. That shit is what designers do. In music, the most collaborative and abstract of all arts, this is even more the case than it is in literature or architecture or dance or visual art or even theatre, and in the related realm of TV and cinema and now the production of video games. In music, it is not expected that everything will go to plan, so musicians sometimes don’t bother with making one, beyond agreeing to turn up and play. Certainly, musical outcomes rarely match their blueprints in every detail — unless it’s classical music. And that is why it’s called ‘classical’ music, perhaps: because it is music defined by its characteristic of having been ‘designed’ and ‘perfected’ as an authored work first, before any actual playing takes place; it is a form of music in which the outcome is envisaged in every tiny detail ahead of the moment of making, the piece only proceeding as it emerges from a pre-drawn blueprint: the score. You have a conductor who interprets the score and then coaxes the sections of the orchestra through the stages of familiarisation with parts and then assembly of parts. And boing! There it is: the blueprint-score manifest exactly as it says it should be in the composer’s original dots and squiggles; just as Bach, Schubert, Webern, Gershwin, Lloyd Webber and their peers pictured it. Perfect. A carefully nuanced and finished rendering of the Ideal.

I sense that you sense a big ‘But…’ coming down the tunnel. There isn’t one.

However — and it is a big ‘however’ — it is plainly ignorant to think of an orchestra labouring together with a conductor to assemble a classical piece as if they were a regiment of head-scratchers struggling to construct an item of flatpacked furniture, by following the score’s instructions very, very closely, swearing occasionally, squinching thumbs with the allen key provided and then standing back to admire their handiwork when the object is complete, because it is freestanding and doesn’t wobble — it is ridiculous to imagine that this is how classical music gets made (even if it is a bit). And it is equally, if not even more absurd to insist that in the no-less-authored but usually much less pre-scripted world of ‘popular’ music, the end product never comes out the way it was originally conceived to be. Well, that’s not true either. Because in the digital world we all now inhabit it is possible to envisage and then reproduce the exact same thing you just envisaged, should you choose to, by banging instructions into an ordinary laptop keyboard and waiting for the processors (and of course AI, should you elect to be so disgraceful) to go to work on the delightful moment’s thought you had that morning with your eggy bread. Upshot? Music that sounds as sterile and mechanical as music that has been cooked up with half a mind over breakfast. An ideation of music. We all know what that sounds like.

Yet still, still you hear the awful p-word being used to evaluate music, as if the point of music were to achieve a state of perfection, and if not perfection then a state of perfectedness at some pinnacle point of objective aesthetic attainment. Perfect? Perfect is not for this world. Perhaps in another one the facilities exist where music can also be a materially reified thing, an object you might hold up to the light in the presence of others and invite them to look closely and touch it, in the full knowledge that the thing they’re touching feels exactly the same way to them as it does to you. And is objectively without blemish. Perfect.

Sorry, but in this world we cannot know how music is experienced by others, because music goes on inside other people as well as you and you are not living the lives of those others. Music in this world, above all its other attributes, is resistant to objectification, even at its most ‘seeable’ and in its greatest tactility; even then it is sternly abstract and will ultimately always slide out of your sticky fingers as the Falstaffian realisation dawns that music, like Honour, is but… a sound. It is air.

The last time I heard a record described as “perfect” was a few weeks ago, and it was the usual one. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Yawn. Pass the spittoon etc. Kind of Blue is a completely marvellous work, one of the pinnacles of 20^th-century artistic achievement, but it is absurd to describe it as ‘perfect’, not least because there really isn’t very much else you can compare it to, precisely, to ascertain what it perfects — other than Miles Davis’s other efforts from around that time. So, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain: each of them was made within 12 or 13 months of Kind of Blue, before or after: one contains the toughest hard-bop going, although it is hard-bop with an audible ‘modalism’ in the soloists’ approach — ie linear playing relating to scales rather than to harmony — that smooths out a little of the pointy astringency of that group when bopping hard, yet it is still patently hectic music from a very different neuro-sensory place to Kind of Blue; the second, Porgy, is a sort of concerto based on an opera (with passages of obviously modal playing by the solo trumpet / flügel); the third is primarily an orchestrated concerto based on a concerto, which has never quite come off for me as a musical project, except as an advertisement for Davis’s attractive sense of taste. None of them are really like the ruminative, modalized, reverberant, paced modern jazz that serves to float Kind of Blue away from its hard-standing — by which I mean that the sound-pool Davis and producer Irving Townsend settled on for the instruments to be borne up in at Columbia studios in New York in April 1959 is huge, dark and possessed of a really rather delicious natural reverb. You can say that the recording is an ’object’ of exquisite taste, technically superb, deeply authentic and a brilliantly conceived and realised innovation which never fails to evoke a reflective mood in its listeners. But you can’t say it is perfect. The only object you might say it perfects is its own idea of itself, and that is just a silly thing to say.

‘PERFECT’ IS OFTEN applied to pop music too but in a slightly different way. ‘Perfect pop’ is a sort of Platonic ideal that can be realised (contrary to what Plato’s rules say about perfect forms) in the service of a nostalgic longing for simplicity and ingenuousness and the return of youth. In this sense, ‘perfect’ is adjectival by association with an idea about music rather than of a musical form, and it addresses not only the deliciousness of the music itself but also the way it captures a feeling and sensibility belonging to the past, or perhaps the realm of the ‘ideal’, always with melody and sometimes with cheek. The great girl groups of the 1960s are often cited as examples of perfect pop, music that frequently expresses an inclination to embody itself according to the feminine principle, rather more than its opposite. The Marvelettes’ “Please, Mr Postman” is to me the soup and the nuts.

But guess what, blokes get more than their fair share of ‘perfect’. Of course they do. Not least because the masculine sensibility is always partial to an absolute. The summa cum laude of all 1970s high-end American recordings is widely considered to be the “perfection” represented by Steely Dan’s ultra-buffed Aja album (1977), which is notable in my mind for some great drumming, some fairly classy songwriting — yet far from their best — and saturating levels of incredibly refined studio-production technique. All intensely masculine. But not perfection.

Come on. Is the argument now that perfection resides in the lacquered, even quite featureless technical quality of this production style in its swanking LA sonic suiting? Or is it that the songs wearing the suits are ‘perfect’ manifestations of the suit-wearing songwriter’s art? Foof, I don’t know. Actually, yes I do. Perhaps if Aja is perfect then perfection is the account we give of Steely Dan’s only boring record, the one where you find yourself listening to the hifi, because the hifi is what’s doing the talking here.

The Beatles? Well, yes, they were an early summation of all that pop music can be — but not quite everything, not if you think about it. Still, the Beatles were and always will be the best, and though they do not rank among my favourite examples of postwar popular music to actually listen to, that doesn’t mean they weren’t the topmost. Of course they were. Weren’t they? I mean, Revolver — if ever there was a perfect expression of what pop music could be, as it crossed the threshold into its next evolutionary form, rock, then Revolver is it. It is melodic, it rocks, it challenges, it has style and panache and mystery and meaning and it kicks the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in the behind in just about every respect other than elaborate multi-instrumental arrangements played by people sitting down, and self-pity. Okay, and “God Only Knows”. Pet Sounds is nigh-on unbeatable in those first two respects and maybe the third as well. In fact it’s perfect. The Platonic Ideal, you might say, if you were really asking for it.

And that has just reminded me of a conversation I once had with a man who, though admirably resistant to the genteel perfections of Pet Sounds, insisted, no, really, he demanded that I listen to him and if not share then certainly respect his view, and he would go down hewing on his last available hill in his defence of the only perfect rock long-player ever made, The Stooges’ Fun House. And it is when we arrive at this dreary, bibulous drooling that we awaken ourselves fully to the obvious truth that the word ‘perfect’ only has a real-world context and application to music when you are three sheets to the wind down the pub.

Except when I nearly said the word to my wife last week, when we were agreeably intoxicated in a Christmassy kind of a way and were winding down at the end of a long day and were looking for some music to play not too loudly in the front room in continuation of my effort these past three or four years to overcome my terrible inflicted deafness to music (it comes and goes but mostly it goes).

“Darling,” I said. “I’ve just thought of some music that I think might be just about listenable, if we don’t have it on too loud. I don’t think it would kill me…

“Go ahead,” said J, who is ever accommodating when it comes to my struggle with my brain. “What though?”

“I don’t know why I suddenly thought of it, but it popped into my head when I was thinking about something else.” And I went on to explain that this music has lots of space around its constituent instrumental parts, it is dark and slow in tempo, it has vast depths of field — the artificial reverb in which the music is suspended is of the wettest, saturating kind; the singing voice at the centre of all that slosh, sometimes self-harmonising, is as dry, clipped and structural as you imagine a singing voice ever being — and the songs are fabulous. “It’s Horace Andy, from 1982, I think. You know Horace … I think it might be just the job for right now. I really don’t know why I hadn’t thought of trying this before, because it’s a fantastic thing…”

Indeed J does know Horace, because he was the most striking guest of all the voices on what has long been declared as J’s favourite album, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines. But it isn’t Blue Lines I’m thinking of, or Protection which followed it. It is Horace’s own masterpiece from the previous decade, an album of such dowdy outward complexion — the cover photo looks like a Xerox, the typography on the back appears to have been put together with a John Bull printing set — and yet such exhilaratingly hollowed out depths in its internal cave system that it has over the years become a cult object among reggae fans in the UK, helped in part by its very limited and periodic availability in this country.

It’s called Dance Hall Style and it dates from that very specific moment in Jamaican music history when electronics began to accelerate their dominion over production method but, critically, hadn’t entirely taken command of the reggae palette. Dance Hall Style is part-electronica, part-analogue instrumentation and mixdown tech. And here’s the curious thing: it isn’t a Jamaican record at all, it’s American; an American reggae album that drills deeper and more privily into what the language of reggae can express than just about any Jamaican reggae you can think of, other than the extraordinary music that made up the life’s work of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

Dance Hall Style was created in and distributed from White Plains Road in the Bronx NYC on the Bullwackies label, Bullwackie being the nom du dub of the label’s venerable proprietor Lloyd Barnes, an expat Jamaican endowed with phenomenal gifts at a mixing desk. Andy (real name Horace Hinds) was an inveterate nomad, having spent significant time as a young man in the UK and the US and recording prolifically for Bunny Lee and before him Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd, the imperious owner of Studio One.

But last week nothing of a historical or biographical nature was said as we sat in our own silence and Horace hiccupped and burped his extraordinarily mannered, light, even juvenile, tenor in and around the caverns of the Wackie’s sound, riding brand new versions of seven old songs, some his own (oddly, John Bull only lists six of them on the sleeve) — and I heard it all, every attenuated hi-hat skim, every guitar chop, every ripple of organ and spit of drum machine … and the vast spaces in between them: super-compressed, ultra-bright top end, subbed-out bottom, only Horace in the middle frequency range reeling out his familiar tunes with apparent new relish, while Lloyd Barnes, Bullwackie himself, carefully dug out new forms in time and space. They seemed ideal.

We got all the way through it without uttering a word, J’s eyelids lolling at half mast, mine going the other way. And there was more silence after the echoes faded, every loop of which my brain, compliant for once, had allowed me to enter without undue distortion tearing at the walls, sullying tone and tonality, blackening my mood. It was me that broke the silence.

“Fucking hell,” I said, eloquent as ever. “Fuc-king hell, that is a … brilliant, brilliant record. I heard every note of it, the whole thing. Every note. Sounded great. Huge, huge… Oh my goodness … It really is the perf- … the …uh, the puh- … um, the … an absolutely … uh, my favourite reggae record.”

“Really?” said J, hauling her eyelids up half a millimetre. “You really liked it that much?”

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

To follow soon: Music I used to like #16: ten ‘perfect’ records, that really are not

“Looking up quotations about ‘talent’ requires effort and a certain dull commitment of spirit; whereas making quotes up about talent calls upon raw, unmanaged, wholly innate genius” — Claes Charbonnier, Belgian ‘post-intellectual’ and art fraudster

CLAES CHARBONNIER WAS, and still may be, a dreadful old fraud. His death has never been reported, not to the knowledge of anyone I know who has retained any sort of interest in this strangest of thinkers; nor has anyone who actually knew him twenty-five years ago seen or heard from him since the dying embers of the last millennium actually died and went black. Not a twinkle. Certainly not l’homme lui-même, as he would no doubt say in his fairly idiomatic schoolboy Franglais. En vérité, mes amis, l’homme a disparu!

Yet there does exist reasonably sound evidence, accessible to anyone who can use a laptop, suggesting that he may still be alive, somewhere, and working hard in that location, albeit to no fixed purpose. That’s what he does and always has done, in parallel with his official career as Europe’s most inept art fraudster. Charbonnier has a remarkable talent for simply being, without appearing to live much of a life at all. Were he still here among us, it is a racing certainty that he’d still be doing the things he has always done in search of the broken edge of meaning’s outer rim, such as his gestes invisibles sans réelle conséquence (invisible gestures of no real consequence). They are strangely, emptily magnificent, his gestes. Take for example these three: the addition of more water to the water supply; the uprooting of shrubs in public parks and then their replanting in the exact same spot a week later; throttling chickens which are already dead. “Being, without living” was always his principal object in life. It kept him out of the steely grip of the Feds for one thing. For another, it afforded him the self-ascribed title of ‘The Only Functional Nihilistentialist in the World’.

Charbonnier’s Le Dictionnaire des Citations Fausses (Dictionary of False Quotations, Livres Oblic, 2002) rivals the better known and rather funnier Les Rêves des Autres (The Dreams of Others, 1999) as his greatest gift to his small constituency of devotees, and it is this supposed last work of his that I am inclined to treasure above all others — although I am not entirely sure why. It certainly isn’t for the cover design, which is perhaps the most repulsive I have ever seen, self-published or otherwise (and this certainly was). Since the book’s supposedly posthumous publication, only a couple of so-called ‘slender fictions’ bearing his name have emerged and then circulated on the collectors’ market for a while, but I was never convinced by either the authority of the writing, or the slightly laboured feeling of predatory wonderment behind the text. I suspect the hand of a breathless acolyte. ‘Fan fiction,’ as you or I would say if we were in the pub.

No one is doubting the authenticity of Le Dictionnaire though. It is Charbonnier through and through, a thoroughly pointless, unfunny yet oddly charming disquisition on the curatorial art of the quotation, harvesting his basic raw material from other dictionaries of quotation (I should imagine) which is then leant together in rather awkward stooks, without comment. Indeed it is very like a conventional dictionary of quotations, with added essays and “insights” of the author’s own divining scattered throughout its economical 265 pages. Except that, this being Charbonnier, the extensive and thoroughly ‘normal’-looking quotes sections of the text come with a twist built in to their apparatus, which he neither declares nor accounts for in a lengthy introduction. You have only the title to go on. The twist? Some of the quotations are entirely confected by the author-curator himself and then falsely attributed to suitable cultural figures of some degree of fame, who are not in a position to correct him, either because they’re dead or, possibly, because they like being ‘quoted’ too much. Most likely is that they are entirely unaware of this actionable deed, as most people are. A hefty majority of the quotations, however, are real and are correctly ascribed to a properly cited individual — and there is no way of telling them from the bogus ones, unless you actually check and cross-reference everything. Or just know everything. That’s partly because Charbonnier presents each and every bon mot, every lofty pronouncement or thunderous epigram with equal weighting and identical typography. The upshot? Some of the best off-the-cuff thought of the past half-millennium is embalmed in ho-hum, subsumed by meh, suffocated by the sort of banality that translates delightfully into the multiple formats of social media, listicles, memes and so on. The effect is strange. At last, the reader gasps inwardly, it is now possible to conceive of Wittgenstein having a natter with Wendy Richard (they actually do sit next to one another on page 113 in the chapter entitled ‘Animals’). Or Thomas Traherne discussing his irksome feet with Susan Sontag (‘Illness’). It’s as if these fabricated verbal collisions exist only to negate the accumulated value of the real thing, to undermine the cultural heft of the loftily spoken “mighty line” (Marlowe does not actually make it into this edition but it’s nice to think that there is still time…). All thought is reduced to patterned chatter. Ever the reflex anti-snob, it is precisely this idea of conferred “heft” that has always got right up Charbonnier’s nose. He once sneered in the face of a self-admiring London literary editor at a party, that “If I ever found it necessary to quote ‘Timon of Athens’ to support something smart I was trying to say, then I’d know in that instant that what I was trying to say was cobblers” — itself not a bad ‘quote’. For “to quote the Greats is to salt your argumentation with preening gravitas or specious wit”, and therefore phoney — especially when you address someone walking in the shoes of a socially insecure plebian. That was Charbonnier’s contention and his felt identity. He asks us to consider the possibility that the things said by Cultural Greats are of no greater intrinsic value than the utterances of the cartoon Great-substitutes of the Age of Celebrity —such as the late soap actress Wendy Richard or the multipurpose footballer / actor / straight-to-DVD pantomime thug Vinny Jones. He contends that those citizens who routinely bellow ready-mades such as “Oi, get a room, why don’t you!” at public displays of affection are doing much the same thing as literary editors who quote Shakespeare loudly at parties. It’s an unconscious and fortifying reflex attesting to the abiding vulnerability in crowds of even the most confident and sophisticated orator. A performed defence against agoraphobia. Nevertheless the Roundhead who abides in Charbonnier insists that those who flourish quotations showily are essentially “captioning yourself with another form of gallerist art-wank, self-aggrandising yet also empty: hung about meaninglessly with the appearance of meaning”. And who are we to argue?

Consider the following extract, from what I suspect is, to the author, the key section of Le Dictionnaire entitled, with familiar economy, ‘Talent’. It constitutes a typical array of splendid quotes, some of them elevated, at least a couple of them confident in their low dive, but all of them displayed on the page even-handedly and apparently arbitrarily, as if they were a dull collection of objects for retail. Equals all. It falls to the reader to consider whether or not to play the game of Spot the Fake, and then to contemplate the meaning / meaninglessness of that activity. We do not observe the retailer’s smirk behind the counter in the Ye Olde Thought-Gifte Shoppe. What are we to understand by this?

But first of all, what do we understand by these?

“TALENT HITS A TARGET no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.” ― Erica Jong, novelist

“Hide not your talents, they for use were made / What’s a sundial in the shade?” ― Benjamin Franklin

“You can come at me with fancy stepovers or with sawn-off artillery — don’t make no difference … it’s all the same to me. It’s just showing off — and you can watch while I tear your so-called talent out by the fucking roots.” — Vincent Jones, ex-footballer, actor, would-be gangster

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ― Stephen King, novelist

“It is my view that talent sees opportunity at precisely that point at which mere ability becomes distracted by its own limitations.” ― Graham Greene, novelist

“…because talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.”
― Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women

“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” ― Kevin Durant, joueur de basket’

DID YOU SPOT THEM, the fake ones? Yes, there are more than one. And it really doesn’t matter one way or the other whether you did spot one or two or six — no prizes are to be issued on this occasion and any preening that might arise from having correctly winnowed out the authentic from the fake is to be done in your own bathroom, please.

As it turns out, the blizzard of quotations that flutter and swirl, like snow flurrying in the chambers of an empty winter barn, do actually have a place to settle. They settle and then thicken on gusty windward surfaces and even accumulate on occasion into deep drifts of irrelevancy which are almost worth reading for their stolid refusal to comply with the usual regulatory disciplines of intellectual process. Charbonnier’s passion, the thing he lives for (if he can be said to ‘live for’ anything), is digression; digression, evasion and — and there really is no other word for it — wamble. It’s here that he most reveals his ‘post-intellectualism’’, as he insisted on calling it.

A classic example of a post-intellectualist ‘wamble’ (a wamble is a waffle / ramble hybrid, a term Charbonnier devised himself to indicate proud ownership of such a devolved rhetorical style — and of course to make plain his distaste for other more sophisticated ones) is the long withdrawing sigh with which he enables us first to get to grips with his preoccupation with ‘talent’ — its provision or lack within him and the pain visited on his mind by this same question throughout the length of a fairly troubled existence. By the time we reach the meat of this particular wamble (the opening paragraphs of it follow shortly), Charbonnier has already confessed to the psoriasis that pits and irritates every cleft in his body and leaves dandruffy deposits in the turn-ups of his trousers (he likes to call these deposits his ‘manna’, bizarrely) and expounded on the inverted vanity he experiences every time he passes a mirror or a reflecting surface of any kind, whatever the context. Then, he is compelled to stop and examine his features in the tiniest detail and at great length for confirmation of his physical hideousness. He can spend up to forty minutes at a stretch studying himself in the convex mirrors rural people affix to posts in dangerous blind-spots on their properties where egress is required, with no clear visibility available, into what can be fast-moving traffic during the busier passages of the farming day. I am prepared to stick my neck out here and suggest that there is no melancholy quite like it anywhere else in the Western canon.

A note for those readers not entirely au fait with Charbonnier’s back story. Yes, he is / was a Belgian national, but his first seventeen years were endured as the only child of the Belgian Ambassador to the Court of St James. He was both cossetted and neglected as a small boy and, unusually for his social type, lived with an obliging aunt in England between the ages of four and eleven, at which point he was summarily extracted from the aunt’s bosom and thrown, sub-optimally equipped with experience of the world, into the shadowed, socially cultivated cloister of English private education, in his case an ‘independent grammar school’ where the majority paid fees and a rump of ‘direct grant’ scholarships were given on the basis of the child’s performance in a one-off examination called the Eleven Plus, a now discredited aspect of so much that was founded in the well-intentioned egalitarian liberalism of the middle passage of the English 20^th century. Rather typically, Claes found an “ugly metaphor” in the politics of the direct grant model, the stated intention of which (“stated only by political mandarins and self-celebrating experts / arseholes”) was to bring “elite education within realistic reach of the lower orders”.

Charbonnier was not a good pupil, nor a popular one. He loathed the school and despite the absence of any kind of foreign accent in his speaking voice, nor inclination to slovenly practice in his deeds, he was viciously mocked for his perceived otherness, which was manifest only in his name and the remote affectations of manner imbued by his odd upbringing. We would now define this treatment as bullying. It was certainly relentless and ultimately damaging, by his own resolutely unself-pitying account. His first school nickname was ‘Euroscum’ but that was duly superseded by ‘Chox’ following a dust-up outside the Chem labs with an older boy who called into question his national identity. “Belgian? Belgian!?!” sneered Flashman, spitting out his words as if it hurt to have them in his mouth even temporarily. “You’re about as Belgian as a box of fucking Thornton’s!” At which Euroscum went for him like a snake and was Chox ever after.

Still, despite this rebirth into brief glory, his stock never rose at the school, neither with the student body, nor its masters, and he grew into his alienation like an etiolated plant, as so many boys had done before him and will always do for as long as children are educated in this way, a system modelled on the outer regulatory codes and hierarchies of the English public school. The only activity into which he put his whole heart was cricket, and he wasn’t very good at that either. He also failed to secure a place at either Oxford or Cambridge and worked in the bindery at Cambridge University Press for a year after graduating with an acceptable degree in Liberal Arts from Bournemouth. Born into great privilege, he had ‘failed’ in just about every aspect of the churning world of privilege that you can possibly be a success in, including the bits where you don’t even have to try.

His first volume of “savage” poetry was published (not by himself this time — someone else liked it!) to no acclaim whatsoever and is very hard to find indeed now. I possess a tatty copy and it is both brief and dreadful. Its title is Inarticulacies.

I often re-read the following passage from ‘Talent’ in Le Dictionnaire, not because it is good, but because I believe you can really feel him in it. I think they are the most affecting sentences Charbonnier ever wrote.

‘WHY DOES SADNESS HANG in me like drizzle? What is the name of the grift I have missed? Do I really have no talent?

‘I ask these questions not out of narcissistic want but out of sheer bafflement. I have been a kind man and a hardworking one, so surely I am due some reciprocation from the world, even if they, the gifts in return, are curling at the edges and redolent of old men’s underwear drawers. Something small would be nice, like a sugar mouse, or better, something large like a living woman who might find it in herself to love me. I am not a bad man; I am sure of it. And though I look like an otter and swim in society as easily as a codfish goes shopping in Hampstead High Street, I have an inner self that can be warm and dry, especially when kindly treated.

‘I know it is the lacked-for talent that renders me so unhappy. Talent is the nihilistentialist shortfall that kills — and I have none. Nothing. Nothing worth having. I possess charm in sufficient bulk that you might polish it with the sticky side of a postage stamp, and barely an eye that might twinkle after dark, when in fact it bores (like a drill, not like the eye of a self-satisfied man). I am fascinated by my repulsiveness and can be hypnotised in seconds by passing reflections of my blank Mustelidaean features. “Stop looking at me like that!” a not particularly attractive young woman once screeched, as we pantingly closed on the consummating deed, when I was at the height of my pint-sized fame. “Like what?” I laughed, pushing twinkles like all the blazes into my beady black peepers. “Like you’re a fucking weasel and I am a vole or something,” she continued, extricating herself without any great exhibition of physical grace from my embrace.

‘“But otters are lovely,” I said.

‘“I didn’t say otter, you creep,” she snapped. “I said weasel!”

‘That was in 1987 and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I even remember her name.’

WHAT A WELL-CHOSEN career that was. We should all be so apt. For surely, no one has ever worn his name with greater nominative determinacy than Steve Cropper. Not even some Charlie in Dickens. Steve Cropper was his real name; it was how he went about in Memphis, Tennessee, the blues city that raised him. He cropped till he dropped.

Cropper, Steven Lee. Born 1941. Soul man. Cutter of musical cloth to suit and to taste. In the flowering of his lanky youth he resembled nothing so much as a bunch of sharp edges lashed together with wire. Long beak, thin mouth, sharp brow, all the conventional properties of a medieval killer-prince. Add to those the narrow sharpness of his lapels, the razored edge of his surf of wetted hair, the cheekbones on which, in emergency, you might land a helicopter … Cropper was all edge and plane, whichever path you took into his airspace. Big lad too. Looked as if he might be able to handle himself.

The obits I’ve read (Cropper died, aged 84, a week or so ago) say very little about his nature. He seems to have known who he was and was not all that fussed about telling anyone else about who he might be, bang in line with the traditions of the contained, even recessed Southern gentleman. He seems to have been courtly enough. Always in work. And if you were minded to think of him as just some jumped-up studio hack who got lucky, then perhaps you need to remind yourself as you pass that he collaborated in the composition of some of the greatest R&B songs of his era, for Stax/Atlantic: “Soul Man”, “Knock on Wood”, “In the Midnight Hour”, “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”. These were really good songs and while one must accept that they are not that different in structure and colouring to the rest of their kind — this is definitive genre music, the songs as idiomatic as trees in a wood — yet these particular ones are the taller stems, the ones that can always be seen from afar, the songs that extend above the canopy. The archetypes. They are part of what we think of first when we think of Southern Soul, and Memphis soul in particular.

Cropper cropped up not so long ago in a documentary film about the Stax label, the creative base that did much to power up Southern Soul in the 1960s, not as a regional franchise of a music phenomenon centred elsewhere but as a free-acting centre of its own. Cropper was, by the time of that film shoot, a bearded, less aquiline figure, softly but rapidly spoken, human, affable enough, the sweptback hair now thin, lank and tied. He looked slightly unwell yet also seemed content to play ball for the film people, after a lifetime of conspicuous reserve and head-down concentration on the stuff that really matters. The casual viewer might struggle on the basis of that interview alone to imagine how Cropper and his guitar once sounded. What was his thing? The Sixties sharp-dressed man was now quite gone. But anyone watching who did go far enough back to recall the curt savagery of his playing in its own time will have felt his guitar spike in their listening minds, even as Cropper uttered his smiling benedictions. The sound we all heard in our minds was edgy, honed, angular, pointed. Abrupt. But also highly structural, grafting an exoskeleton of bone-hard rhythmic melody on to the rubbery flesh of Booker T Jones’ Hammond M3 organ, metered by the rifle crack of Al Jackson Jr’s famous backbeat.

Essentially, the MGs were an old-fashioned R&B organ combo, that might well have been hoicked off the so-called ’chitlin circuit’ (the rural music bars, kitchens and dancehalls at every crossroads in the South) and put to the service of the punchy, unelaborate ‘soul’ singers emerging in the South just as the 1960s gathered both loins and wits for the struggle ahead. But the MGs were no such thing, not really.

Booker T Jones was a highly educated student of music from the Booker T Washington School in Memphis, a multi-instrumentalist, who could get a decent toot out of most horns and woodwinds and played worthy guitar as a side-hustle, if not quite like a ringing bell. But the organ was and is his “default” instrument, the one everyone expects him to play. He certainly knew what he was doing.

Booker T was no Jimmy Smith and he didn’t pretend to be. As traditional chitlin-circuit organ combos go, the MGs made an awfully good modernist R&B/soul rhythm section, Jones virtually never soloing like a virtuoso yet invariably ‘comping’ like a modernist with the shape of the song he’s playing held critically in mind, and how it might be modified for the better. Spongy, dissonant, both full of holes and solid, often stabby, consistently oblique — it is hardly surprising he made such an instant connection with Steve Cropper, whose natural inclination when not having anything useful to play (or exoskeleton to graft), was to lay out completely. They were both self-croppers by instinct, always trimming their music to the essential. How in the world would they not leave holes when Duck Dunn (bass) and Al Jackson (drums) were locked and bolted in to the pulse. Holes were the stuff the music was made of, in significant part. The MGs were an architecture of holes.

Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn did not actually contribute to any of the group’s first few singles, not joining until 1965 to replace the original bass player, Lewie Steinberg. By then the MGs were oiling the moving parts within the engine of Memphis soul, as integrated members of the larger Stax house band, the Mar-Keys. They had been doing it for three years, in fact, since they’d achieved their solitary national hit, “Green Onions”, which might never have been a hit at all if a studio engineer hadn’t left the tape running on a typically pressing MGs’ bluesy studio jam, which eventually emerged sore-eyed into the sodium light of the small hours, swivelling on its patent leather tippy-toes: one of the great dancefloor killers. A massive international hit.

You’ll be doing the numbers already.

Subtract three from 1965 and that leaves … good Lord! … it leaves 1962. 1962! “Green Onions” came out and was a hit of real significance in the summer of … 1962! That’s actually before the Sixties had even begun, according to most sound judges, including Philip Larkin; before the Beatles had made their swaggering return from Hamburg to do their first album; before the assassination of JFK; it was before the Beach Boys’ first LP came out and the greater British public had not yet the faintest conception of what a Mod was. 1962 was beehives and coffee bars and Variety at the London Palladium. Walter Winterbottom was still the manager of an English national football team entirely made up of baggy shorts held up by strings of sausages, each pair containing a knobbly footballer who appeared to be at least 46 years old. Their tactic of having fag breaks after every incursion into their opponents’ final third proved to be hopelessly outmoded against those sides which didn’t take fag breaks at all and they eventually ‘crashed’ out of the World Cup at the quarter-final stage, humbled by the eventual winners, Brazil. It seems impossible now that 1962 had room in it for a record as tough, seething and unsmiling as “Green Onions”, especially one that was obviously created for dancing yet with no reference made at any stage to either the Quickstep or the Cha-Cha-Cha. But more disturbing yet, the music was dominated by the highly irregular and barely recognisable juxtaposition of an electric organ and a distorted electric guitar.

THIS ESSAY WAS FIRST begun several weeks ago as an investigation into the varying existential voyages of the electric guitar, as it moved from first life towards its coming death by cultural neglect, the great Falling Off, as might be felt and expressed in the vectors that took the instrument from BB King via Paul Kossoff to Prince, from Roger McGuinn via the Blue Oyster Cult to Johnny Marr and, most stimulatingly for me, from Steve Cropper to Billy Gibbons to … Well, I hadn’t yet decided who would complete that little six-string triad when I abruptly reached the conclusion that the piece was a non-starter, even if I did ever manage to drum up the self-belief required to make it work; and that such an undertaking would in all likelihood bore non-guitarists almost as much as it would inflame guitarists, and the game was not worth the candle — not even if I did successfully make the case for Jimi Hendrix—Robin Trower—Joey Santiago.

What?

See? It really is a dangerous road to travel.

And then Cropper died and it dawned on me that he actually meant more to me than any of the other ten guitarists thus far nominated — more even than Jimi Hendrix, who was of course in a different league to Cropper as a technician and visionary. Actually, no, not league: galaxy. And that in turn led me to think further as to why that might be and then to consider how anyone else would give a tu’penny trump about what I think about it anyway.

Well, it isn’t what I think about the subject, is it, so much as that I do. If I write something down in a form that is in some way stimulating to the reader’s thoughts and feelings about the subject in hand (and supports its arguments with a modicum of conviction) and then the reader finds that what s/he has read carries over into further thoughts and feelings of their own, after the reading is done, then I think the exercise has been worth the price of the candle. The writer about music can have no greater ambition than to help you discover another point of access to your own inner world. It’s free, you know. It’s actually yours, that place. You can go there any time you like.

STEVE CROPPER TO Billy Gibbons though? What can I have been thinking? The imagined vector that conjoins the two of them is dubious enough. Steve Cropper, late of the MGs, and Billy Gibbons, not late of anywhere, not even ZZ Top, to which grizzled institution he can at least claim honest and abiding tenure.

Well, I’d been whittling sticks on the stoop for about a week out there in the fen, chewing over this tumbledown hovel of a question, and I can tell you this much at least. Steve Cropper and Billy Gibbons do have something in common: raw musicality, an artistic inclination or susceptibility to the least said the better. They both like shapes. Familiar ones, strange ones, shapes you had no idea were even a shape. The pair of them see shapes everywhere they look, as do we all, but how many of the rest of us are prepared to do something exciting with them. Regular, predictable, chunky, influential, architectural shapes. Their musicianship is, like the human brain itself, a towering act of attentiveness to pattern, to repetition, to geometry. Gestalt. Shape.

I like this quality in them both.

When Cropper plugged in his Fender Esquire, with its single pick-up angled diagonally inside the nickel tray of his instrument’s unsophisticated bridge apparatus, and the jack crackle-popped in the socket of the smallish Fender Tweed combo amplifier he always used back then, so that a lick of hum skated around the walls of the studio as the valves began to warm … well, he’d get something bigger and better when he could afford it, just as he’d definitely get his hands on a Telecaster, with two pick-ups, one day real soon — yes indeed, sir, with a little more tonal range to differentiate between solo and rhythm and maybe all points between but no loss of bite and of course the switching which’d let him go from back teeth to front teeth in the split of a second, instead of the frankly embarrassing rolling off and rolling on he has to do with his old entry-level Esquire to get it to moderate its use of sharpened incisors. Really, officer, it’s like some mad old dog…

By this time his young leader, Booker, the clever boy in a hat and no facial expression at all, has found a blues groove on the Hammond nothing quite like anything Cropper’s ever heard before. A sort of introvert syncopation, a stroll with a hitch in it, and a twist. He just eases it out. It eases out of him — three or four notes grouped tightly in a chord with a bellyache, and then threatening to slip out of attachment again with the hitch, harmony voiced like a vocal harmony group, real close, but flexing with the kind of fantastic muscle that no vocal harmony group has ever had, or could have, not unless they plugged themselves directly into the mains…

Mmm-blat! Aarh-ha’hah-mmm-BLAT!

Jesu, joy of man’s desirin’, no one, but no one hits a snare like Al Junior, crack! right there in the sweet spot … not in front, not behind, no back swing, no muscle, just totally relaxed and in the pocket like he lives in it, making tea and what have you…

Cropper makes his move. The Esquire’s a little loud in the room, it’s not entirely in tune, it is sounding as bright and bitey as it has ever done, real ugly bright, gnashing … the little Tweed is pretty much busting its toobs — distorting like its chewing the hair in the air. They won’t keep this in, that’s a damn racing certainty…

Better do some shapes.

“Green Onions” was a jam, a slightly hectic blues jam recorded and developed in no time at all from a sardonic walking groove with a hitch in its gait by the weird, engine-like collective genius of Booker T and the MGs — and it became a huge international hit very quickly in 1962, setting dance floors to their purpose, full and dynamic with deadpan, drop-dead dance shapes which mostly required feet, while the rest of your frame just hung off your shoulders like a good suit, like you were a killer-prince and you didn’t give a shit about anything.

1962!

And later on, when the session was officially done and they’d counter-sunk everything down tight into the right holes, the men in charge still hadn’t made Cropper turn it down or tune it up or hit it less hard.

His shapes were just too good for that.

BILLY GIBBONS LIKES art. He likes American art, he likes African art — he collects it, feels as if he might eat it sometimes, so nourishing is it to his soul. He’s not sure that he isn’t feeling just a little bit hungry at this very minute, as a matter of fact — though it is not art he wants to eat, not at this precise moment. He is experiencing the slightly disarming sensation of wanting to eat himself.

And why not? He thinks he may have just recorded his masterpiece, his own Rothko ear ghost hovering outside the veinous streaking drip-trail blood-soak of a Texas borderline cantina, a dirty haunt hot with swollen lumps that merge with nalgas fina — parrot-free but over-anted, yes, stiff-ass hints of the surreal … a swilling surfeit of Abstract American Express-ism and its vast coverage of nothing, the backbeat racking one more screaming inch of stretched-out time, now thin as thin as thin, and still his cockly puissance drives the cones to thicker skeins of howling feedback to get inside the room inside you in the room you’re in.

He snickers. He listens in his cans to this, his finest disembowelled blues, as the noise-pigment spreads a tide of filth across the canvas he knows is Time, the switching in his vintage Gold Top jetting plumes of yellow noise which scream across America’s plains — and then fold and stutter to an end, face-broken in the stye of life, like pigs that lived in Houston once, but now prefer Hoboken. He is pleased with the pigmentation’s grunt, cos?…Oink? Well, in all the swill of noise and hell a harmonic pig is like a bell.

He says, as if to a companion that even he suspects is not really standing next to him: “Yes. I think it may well be my masterpiece, my triumph of return, after the delightful cheap sunglasses and sharp-dressed men of my money-making sexist years. I shall call it ‘Vincent Price Blues’ — and no one will understand why. Nor why it is so brilliant and thrilling and indescribable, yet also the most real art there is. Coarseness redefined as beauty. Here, now, and only in our broken future world of 1996!”

His companion says nothing. Gibbons half turns, perhaps exasperated, perhaps sensing the onset of his enemy: doubt.

“You know why it is so brilliant, don’t you?”

Silence.

“It is because of the shapes, hombre. The shapes.”

THE ELECTRIC GUITAR is one of the great objects of the century. An object but also a vessel of powerful symbolic meaning, a tool but also the focus of keen and even cultish aesthetic admiration. I like an electric guitar as much as the next modern musical person, especially when it is played in the way I like (always in a shapely, chunky, architectural style rather than in the virtuosic widdly linear), and I have been known to swoon lightly at the sight of certain items from the catalogue — my category of type in the cultic realm is ‘Tele man’. But it is apparent to me too that there were Anglo-Saxon chieftains in the Sixth Century less attached to their exquisite kingly swords than one or two guitar players I can think of, who have found themselves utterly in thrall to their ‘signature’ Fenders, as symbolic regalia forged especially for them as of right (and rite), objects not of veneration in themselves perhaps, but still things felt to be imbued with a greater value than is expressed by the niceties of their function (never mind mere footling social prestige). Like Saxon swords, electric guitars were fetishes. They were brought to phallic hardness in the furnace of obsession. Hammered and hammered and hammered, over and again. They were given individual names. For every Aethelkeif and his deadly “Headhewer”, there’s a Keith Richards’ cleaving to his reliable, always up-for-it, indefatigably optimistic “Micawber”.

You may have noticed that I have been writing for the last few paragraphs in the past tense. That’s because the electric guitar’s time is passing now as rapidly as it arrived, in the rush of industrial activity that first introduced its manufacture in the middle years of the 20^th century — one of the few industrially produced objects that grows in value the older and more battered a specimen is. Yes, the electric guitar was indeed one of the objects of the century, but it’s important to get the right century. It wasn’t this one.

And sadly it is true that the historical destiny some saw for this most oddly glamorous of musical instruments did not come to pass. The electric guitar never really made it across the line as a check on illegitimate power, a slayer of tyrants or an uprooter of unacceptable social systems. But I still think you have to go a long, long way to eclipse Jimi Hendrix at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, to discover a better or more impactful example of political feeling of the most pressing kind in the moment of its commitment to action in art. There is literally no other means, no method, no machine, no power on earth that could get across even a dull fraction of what Hendrix achieved on that soggy stage at dawn. It was an utterance of unsurpassable clarity and eloquence, huge in its sorrow, and it was as if the language used was an unheard alien tongue that everyone present found they could speak as fluently as a native for the duration of that extraordinary long moment. Loud? Violent? Valiant? Screaming? It was the electric guitar in apotheosis.

The only thunderous ‘moment’ in postwar music history that I can claim to have witnessed ‘live’ and ‘as it happened’ took place the same year as Woodstock. I was nine, and I was a lot more comfortable in my situation than every single member of that illustrious heap of sodden hippies. Nice comfy sofa for me, thank you. My mum was there too, and we were sitting in our living room at home. You wouldn’t catch my mum in a field full of hippies under any circumstances, with or without folding chairs.

But somehow we did contrive to watch the episode of The Lulu Show onto which the Jimi Hendrix Experience descended in 1969 like a war party; a slightly dopy, hairy and not actually very hostile war party, but one certainly equipped to play havoc with rigid TV schedules and the seething anxiety of TV executives.

Famously, a grinning, obviously perky Hendrix ceased trifling through “Hey Joe”, his first hit, and announced that “we’re going to stop playing this rubbish” and do something else instead by the British supergroup Cream, who had just declared that they were splitting up that same day. I had neither heard of Cream nor “Sunshine of Your Love”, which was the song they played in tribute. Hendrix knew what he was doing but sadly I do not possess the foggiest recollection of what befell our hero as he and his giggling henchmen shuffled off the stage at the end. I imagine this was because the man with the chopper at Television Centre brought it down with pointed violence on the dot of the show’s scheduled termination. I have since seen scraps of footage from the same occasion and it shows the Experience launching like naughty schoolboys who know exactly how naughty they’re being into a tumultuous “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” — I suppose it must be the rump of what remains of the shoot, after the man with the chopper had turned out the lights.

So what do I retain of this remarkable cultural skirmish, other than that I saw it?

Well, not a lot, to be entirely honest. I recall the music having a kind of edgeless heft to it, an all-consuming out-barge, as if all it would take for the envelopment of London would be a reckless studio runner to open one of the studio doors and then all hell would break loose, thus visiting anarchy upon the entire capital city, for ever and ever — a flood to soak up Noah’s as if it were a puddle on the pavement. And I also remember very vividly indeed Hendrix’s guitar, which seemed all wrong, as if he were playing it upside down by mistake and maybe this was why the noise in the studio was so excessive and out of control — once you let an electric guitar get away from you, by holding it upside down and not concentrating properly on what you’re doing, then you can only pray that the damage done is not held to your account. I suspect my mother felt much the same because when I looked up at her face to see what was going on for her, I saw an expression riding across her features that I had never seen before.

The music? Well, basically, it was a huge edgeless thundercloud, as I suggested before, but inside the cloud I could hear triangles, loads and loads of them, and they were not behaving themselves.

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

GRINDING THROUGH THE last few hours of Get Back — still in the basement studio, not yet on the roof — the Beatles are larking around with some song, instead of doing it properly. It is all subtext and no song.

“So,” says J, looking up from her phone, “which one would you have round to Sunday lunch? Not including Yoko.”

I knew this was coming. It always does.

“Well, the thing is,” I say carefully, “and don’t tell anyone I said this — but I’ve never really liked any of the Beatles much, not as people. I know. Awful. You’re not supposed to not like them, I know, but there it is. I really don’t think I’d want any of them round for Sunday lunch — though Billy Preston’s probably a nice enough chap…”

“Not even Ringo?”

“No. Especially not Ringo.”

“Oh.”

J considers the larking on the TV screen with a jaundiced eye. “So how about your lot then? Bet you’d have all of the Stones round for Sunday lunch, if they’d come…”

“Well, not necessarily.”

“C’mon, you’d have Keith like a shot — except he’d be four hours late and you’d be outraged and then sulk and ignore him…”

“Probably true.”

“Mick? No, he’d be sniffy about your chicken and then get bored and not hide it…”

“I’d have Charlie.”

“Actually, yeah, that’s true. Charlie’d be great. YES! Charlie. I can see him on the doorstep in a nice suit with a bottle of Pinot Noir in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. Maybe some chocs. On time as well…”

“He’d be good fun and he’d ask the kids questions too — and he wouldn’t have to be the most important person in the room. We’d actually have to boot him out in the end, cos he’d been so much fun…”

“That’s true. Let’s have Charlie.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s just one problem…”

“Yeah, that’s true… I’d forgotten that.”

“Mmm.”

And we slope off to bed feeling ineffably sad again.

MUCH AS THERE ARE thought to be several ways to skin a cat (I wouldn’t actually know about that: I never got round to doing mine), there is more than one way of going deaf — and more than a few kinds of deafness. Deafness, as I have come to understand it from my own experience, is not wholly defined by the degree to which hearing is absent — as is typically revealed by a conventional hearing test — but by the proportion of dysfunctional hearing relative to those aspects of hearing that remain viable. You can hear quite a lot and still be very deaf indeed, as I am.

You might describe my deafness as a negative admixture, compounded of no hearing at all (my right-side hearing went west, lock, stock and barrel, in 2007) and, on the other side, considerable but not total hearing loss, of which the residual auditory function is subject to an unstable range of distortions. This kind of deafness will admit sound, up to a point; in fact up to the chambers of the inner ear and its micro-steppe of subtle grasses, where any kind of aggressive arrival will meet only with devastation, soon or gradual. For it is within the buried, snail-like cochlea that the most remarkable of all electro-biological phenomena are to be found: minuscule hair cells called cilia which convert acoustic sound waves into code that is read electronically by the brain, either as beautiful music, say, or as the not-so-appealing sound of a cat being peeled — and all points in between too, obviously. I quite obviously have lost large numbers of cilia, perhaps damaged by fluctuating levels of the endolymphatic fluid that fills the vestibular system and “might” have given rise to an incidence of the non-Ménières endolymphatic hydrops of the inner ear revealed as a possibility by a recent MRI (no, me neither, but you’re welcome to look it up if you like).

So whereas my right ear is a flapping great white elephant stuck on the starboard side of my head, the other one on the port side is a bare, ruined choir. The sound goes in, to be met safely enough with the good old tympanum and the apparatus of the conductive passages, which duly usher the soundwave on its way, perhaps with a Checkpoint Charlie-style wave-through, sending the soundwave on blind to its destiny: gross distortion. What I get in my head now when I hear music, instead of music, is a broken noise parody of music, which is persistently ruthless in its destruction of tone, tonality, timbre, melody, rhythm, harmony. It never stops. It goes on and on, twisting and breaking, shattering and sheering away, as if the design of its existence were dedicated only to bringing me to pain and music to cruelty. I cannot bear it.

Except that sometimes I can.

HERBIE HANCOCK HAS always struck me as a nice man, but a nice man one should not underestimate. He is naturally endowed with a lanky, slightly boffinesque air, which he has carried through his life I suspect partly as an amiable, all-purpose front that puts others at ease — but also as a way of disguising something of himself. Those wire-rimmed glasses are the very stuff of the steadfast IT bloke whose entire life has been switch-off-and-on-able, his dignity inviolable, his temper held. Hancock’s time spent with Miles Davis will have alerted him to the perils as well as the virtues of assumed coolth.

His time spent with me, over an hour or so in 1986, in a posh hotel room and on its balcony overlooking Knightsbridge, may not have had the same impact on him.

I can’t now remember what the peg was for the interview. It was done for The Wire magazine and is now a part of the fog in my mind — but I do remember enjoying Hancock’s company as well as the bottle of Bordeaux he’d acquired at customs on his way over from France the night before, which he shared with me in the toothmugs provided in his ensuite bathroom (actually, there had only been one toothmug in his single-occupancy room and so, with great gallantry, he’d ordered up another one on room service — and that, in my view, is stylishness that goes beyond cool). He then insisted that we sit on the floor and do the job there because it felt more easeful to him than perching on the hotel’s grimly over-styled period furniture.

The point of all this mellow reminiscence is not to persuade you that I am firm friends with Herbie Hancock (I am assuredly not) but to demonstrate how you should never lose touch with any music that really gets you off. Because I blush and warm to remember the one bit of the interview when everything went bendy and I wished that the hotel’s deep carpet might swallow me into its pile.

Dear reader, I tried to tell Herbie Hancock what, regarding the middle-passage of his 1970s recording career at Columbia (CBS), when he recorded three albums of electronic funk-jazz so dazzling in both conception and execution that no one has ever got close to matching them in terms of both musicianly chutzpah and carefully organised abstract design. And funk. Certainly not Miles Davis, who preceded them with the uncomfortable if super-influential Bitches Brew and On the Corner, before heading towards the planet’s core in search of its inner woosnum, the Agharta and Pangaea brought to slamming tectonic life by the overdriven guitars of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, plus the host of imitators and derivatives that always followed in the wake of Davis’s high-seas yacht like flocks of yawking seagulls.

Hancock’s Head Hunters, Thrust and Man-Child contain more enjoyable, tougher-minded electro-instrumental music than anything else smart and technically advanced taking up space on funk’s forecourt between 1973 and 1975; certainly the first two do. Man-Child is a softer, more commercially ambitious, less jazz and less demanding effort that points to Hancock’s future ear for a hit pop/R&B single in the coming electronic age. It is still a very good record, whether or not you’re disquieted by the somewhat “orchestral” production gloss and the addition of star turns such as Stevie Wonder and his chromatic harmonica.

But the first of the three, which materialised in late 1973, was Head Hunters and it retains its status as one of the biggest selling “jazz” albums of all time — a kaleido-funky flow of auditory pixelations that seems to engender in both Time and Space a sort of Brownian motion of tonality, tethered only by the thick hawser of Hancock’s one-finger bassline on the justly famous “Chameleon” and the tight syncopations of drummer Harvey Mason and bassist Paul Jackson. Head Hunters may well have insinuated its way, crab-like, archly swinging, into your consciousness before now, but if it hasn’t, then seize the day, for all that pixelated Time is now running out, like grains of ghosts in a holographic hourglass.

Then came Thrust, a record that has cleaved close to both my heart and my endocrine system since the middle of the 1980s, and is surely worthy to be the outright best-selling “jazz” record of all time, purely on the grounds that I think it’s even better than Head Hunters. In particular because of the opening cut, the filthy “Palm Grease”, which is so granular, so atomised in its blizzard of harmonic spot-squits, all actually played rather than programmed by the pianist on his battery of ARP hardware, that it has always suggested to me that music still has yet to fully explore every nook, cranny and journeying asteroid in its formal multiverse. Come on now. Why have we heard so little of la musique pointilliste?

Herbie Hancock makes an excellent jazz Seurat: the primum mobile of a music that concerns itself principally with its own hyper-precise placing in time and space, within a harmonic structure so dotty that we begin to think less about chordal harmony and more about colour modalities and the formation of clouds (“Uh, thangewverymuch, London! This next piece we have for you tonight is in Sirrus-minor, the greyest and fluffiest of all keys”); music that has become less and less linear in its drive to move its poles away from the banalities of chord “progression” and become more and more concerned with articulations of the endless moment, the unceasing now, the rubber-thewed not-yet. The poetics of utter stillness. But funkily of course.

“Palm Grease” has the secret to eternal life, I thought once, when excessively hammered one evening, feeling my own molecular structure being subsumed into Hancock’s wireless mainframe, a fuzzy cloud of electronic dots but also a funky beast in all but his physical motions. Lying there flat on my back. How do you do that? I mean, really, though?

That afternoon in 1986, comfortably cross-legged on his hotel-room carpet and working his way — but slowly — into a brimming toothmug of overpriced not-bad Bordeaux, Herbie Hancock sat and listened patiently while the passionate young journalist with fire in his eyes and the hint of a slur in his words (having knocked back his own toothmug of fairly fine wine in two or three nervous glugs), explained to him, Herbie Hancock, why “Palm Grease” was definitely the high point of a terrific solo career, following on so soon after the sustained Alpine pinnacles, no, the peaks, no, the elevated mountain region and high pastureland of the half-decade he spent with Miles Davis.

“I see. So tell me, Nick,” says Herbie Hancock, who has accepted the role-reversal with customary grace and only the tiniest imaginable adjustment of his IT bloke’s spectacles. “Tell me what you attribute this, as you say, remarkable peak of achievement to, exactly. How did I pull it off, this, uh, coup artistique? What were my moves? How did this vision become, uh … manifest?”

Nick pauses for a moment and considers the question put to him so eloquently by Herbie Hancock.

“Well, it’s got to be the drummers, hasn’ it, Herbie,” says the young Londoner, the pride of his nation, ducking his chin in, in an effort to intercept a burp. “It’s got to be the drummers, hasn’ it, swapping out Harvey Mason for Mike Clark-ark…?”

The burp had arrived.

Herbie just smiled.

“Well,” he said gently. “We can’t discount the possibility, can we?”

THERE IS NO DOUBT in my mind that something of this nature passed between Herbie Hancock and me in Knightsbridge that warm summer’s afternoon in 1986 — but sadly it is lost to the world now, along with the tape I transcribed the interview from with mounting horror the next day. But that isn’t the reason I’m writing this piece now and in this way, much as I love Herbie Hancock and so very many of his works from down the decades and into the new century — a century that isn’t that new anymore — while Herbie grooves on lankily like life itself, or so I am given to believe.

No, the reason I have written all this in a state of mounting and desperately suppressed excitement is because I have just listened to all ten minutes of “Palm Grease” through for the third time and on each occasion all those dots and squeaks and beeps and the extraordinary drumming and the weirdly cloudy way in which harmony is expressed, not in a linear way… well, it sounded like music to me, holding its own in my brain and its tuning and dotty tonality not breaking apart and all those crazy gaps left by the drummer, Mike Clark-ark … why, by the third repeat of the whole thing I was, I was dancing … dancing.

This is what happens when you lose your musical hearing for three and a half years and you are sure, no certain, that there’s no chance you are ever going to get music back. And you’ve been told that by the hospital too. And then one day you stuff in some new earbuds and listen to a peculiar piece of music you rather like but haven’t heard for a while, just to see how weird it is now — and it goes straight in, maps itself directly onto what your brain is offering so forlornly in the way of viable signal input receptors, and you discover over a very intense and possibly even slightly deranged thirty minutes that the music that brought you to this pass is almost certainly the greatest piece of music Herbie Hancock ever … well… he ever he did. I mean, really though.

Vive l’Age de la Musique Pointilliste!

Vive “Palm Grease”!

Here’s to you, Monsieur H!

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027.

BACK IN THE PLACE where I grew up, the local punks danced to disco. They danced to reggae as well, but that was not as surprising as disco; punks enjoyed their affinity with the bredren. The bredren radiated a certain purposefulness. But disco…?

Disco in 1977, and certainly by the middle of 1978, had pretty much settled as a musical sub-form to a few main identifying structural features: an inflexible four-on-the-floor metrical scheme — ‘four-on-the-floor’ is drummer’s jargon for four on-beat thumps per bar in 4/4 time on the kick- or bass-drum, executed ‘on the floor’ with a pedal — the least complex rhythmic pattern known to humankind. Heartbeats in Discoland go thump-thump-thump-thump. In Discoland, clocks go tock-tock-tock-tock. The tocks are canopied with arrangements that might be as simple or elaborate as your sense of good taste and budget will allow, driven by octave-leaping bass mixed front and centre — and usually nothing at all going on between the ears other than the relentless advocacy of a good time in as curt language as can be chiselled out of language’s resistant stuff. In our town, disco was embraced with barely a sniff or twinkle of irony by punky-type people and I counted myself among their number.

Disco was disco: it did not say (or mean) anything one might hang the ghost of a diverting idea on, but it had its function, which it served admirably. This may or may not tell you something about the young rebels in my town. I have decided, therefore, that perhaps I should relate a few useful factoids, that will enable you to build a credible mental picture of these people and how they lived in their environment. My environment too, or so I wanted to believe.

Here’s an intriguing one: the disco-dancing punks did not dance to the disco beat as punks were supposed to dance. They would de-punk for the duration. Whether it was KC and the Sunshine Band stomping out of the speakers, or A Taste of Honey pulsating, the punks neither pogo’d, nor did they spin, nor indeed did they do the one sanctioned punk ‘dance’ alternative to pogoing, which was to shamble around, affecting dire intoxication by crashing into things and people, most of it accidentally on purpose. This was a terpsichorean mode also favoured by the Young Farmers in village hall discos, with the prime objective being to crash into ‘something’ accidentally on purpose, the something in question now being morally obliged, according to the Young Farmer Ethical Handbook, to compensate the young farmer with something nice outside in the car park in the back of his Land Rover or Escort.

It is important to observe that punks did not disco-dance to disco either. I can’t say that I ever saw a male punk attempting to configure a spiky variation on the John Travolta method, in either style or content. Nor did the girls we knew — mostly younger sisters and younger sisters’ friends — do the subordinate yet athletic girl-dancing you see in the film Saturday Night Fever, which had provided disco with what expressive visual language it possessed at that stage. Punks did not assimilate. But they did really dance when the disco was on.

What would they have been assimilating with, anyway? Assimilation was not even an issue, because the disco records we punks danced to were played at goings-on primarily conceived as ‘punky’ events, and with complete confidence that this was an okay thing to do. Gigs, pubs, college halls, college basements and canteens, boat houses, scout huts, house parties; basically, wherever the soi disant hip middle-class youth of both town and gown might assemble of a weekend to compete for sex and other intoxicants, then there would be dancing; dancing that required, on the whole, the bounce of Shirley & Co. (“Shame, shame, shame on you / If you can’t dance too”) over the savage, bold blazon of The Ruts (“Babylon’s burning, Babylon’s bur-ning / With anxie-teee-ah!”). The dancing in general was unclassifiable and, if my recollection is to be trusted at all, it was faintly expressive, but not very. In my own case, dancing consisted in making my spindly legs make funny shapes in time to the beat.

I have recollections of those happy days of half-cocked nihilism and confected insolence because I was there, close to the palpitating heart of everything, as it was supposed to be — or so I thought. The small number of age-appropriate, sort-of-punks (aged 14-20) in my hometown were inclined to the punk-ish rather than to the full-bodied. Punk was only a matter of style for us, and though we bought the records, ripped our jeans and talked up the occasional storm of ideological bollocks in the substantial townhouses owned by the parents of the alpha punky types in town, not everyone was wholly comfortable in these rangy palaces. I was a village boy from beyond the green belt — outer darkness, in other words; I had to cycle five miles into town or get the bus — and that by no means guaranteed traction in the social cosmology of the urban-academic centre of town. But on the upside, it did spare me the agony of having to entertain punkish folk in my family’s house, which was irredeemably middle class and on the far side of the green belt. Worse, it was village middle class.

So no, I did not stick safety pins in my nose nor leer at old ladies intimidatingly. If that had been required of me in this new world of ripping and tearing, hawking and not actually spitting, then I wouldn’t have gone punk; I’d have stayed fairly hairy, I expect, and carried on wearing a cheesecloth shirt. Punk, as I recall it in my home town in its early manifestation at least, was about choosing to be on the right side of history and of rejecting things that expressed the power of the elite, not forgetting prog rock. I suppose it meant — as has always been the way as youth movements dilute — that teen-intelligible ideology and ‘edgy’ clobber were the real-world upshot, rather than a raging subcult street movement of the dispossessed and the rejected. We certainly looked like a rabble of fake serfs as we slummed from pub to pub, sometimes stoned, often barely even woozy. Meanwhile, the über-styled street punk we all came to know of in the King’s Road, Chelsea, touting for the cameras of tourists, was conspicuous for his real-world non-existence in the gilded centre of our town in 1977 and ’78. It has to be said that those hairsprayed sunfish guys did not materialise till long after punk was manifestly over. Rotten Johnny Come-Latelys.

My interest was mainly in the music anyway. I had dutifully cut my hair short and narrowed my flared jeans, bought a cheap leather jacket and some Docs (later on, brothel creepers, which dragged less pendulously on my pipe-cleaner legs), but the only thing I cared about with earnest punky passion was how the music went. Was it good? Was it bad? How do you tell the difference? What next? What is precious and what of no worth? It was the music, as far as I was concerned, that told the story, not NME and Sounds. Absolutely everything else that was held to be ‘punk’ was met by me with suspicion and irony and an unreadable, perhaps even studied diffidence, which was handy for me in other ways because I often felt shy and overwhelmed in the townhouses, which were way more sophisticated as engines for sitting and jabbering and weeing in than I was accustomed to and did not contain the same objects as the village houses I’d haunted comfortably enough till I was fourteen. They were nice people though, the children of the townhouses — so nice, indeed, that I am still friendly with some of them.

So you will see that, in my hometown, ‘punk’ was a relative term, when used either in its adjectival form or as a noun; a warrant for a way of thinking and a mode of dressing rather than an angry expression of being. As far as I can recall, we all went to grammar schools, or the grammar streams of the local “village colleges”. We were entirely privileged.

What a shower, eh? What a load of dirty rotten fuckers, as we’d have doubtless not said if and when invited onto the local TV network to talk about the “worrying spread of punk-rock” in the more rural areas of the country and to perhaps offer a few salient thoughts about where this was all heading. (“Back to where you came from,” was the view of my gran, by which she meant back to within the corralling certainties afforded by our class backgrounds.) Thank heavens I’d stopped singing in the church choir a couple of years or so before, sometime after my voice had broken. Imagine if one of the Look East reporters had found out that I still sang in the choir and then insisted on interviewing me about my imagined politics of rebellion in my creaky old stall in the choir at St Vigor’s, vamping my creaky new Lewis leather, dropping my consonants and … Christ on a bike, suppose they’d tried to trick me into using ‘punky’ language right there in the chancel, the dirty rotten, uh, tricksters.

And we all danced to disco.

IT WAS BOXING DAY 2004 that a huge tsunami obliterated what seemed like most of south-east Asia. It was concerning to say the least. We, the comfortable of north London, did not have to feign our concern. Jane, my wife, and Jo, a local friend, were admirably proactive. While I was still carefully not feigning concern but wondering just what one might do, other than send money, these two doughty women had hatched a plan and by New Year it had already grown stubby wings.

On Newington Green, a hop, a skip and an extremely long jump away from where we live, there’s an old 19^th-century working men’s club, imposing in outward appearance and dully preserved inside under the resentful eyes of its residual committee, who squinted suspiciously at the cadre of thirty- and forty-something media professionals standing humbly in their vast snooker bar that Christmas holiday, caps in hand, asking for them to cut us a deal with the costs of hire so that we might mount a night of hardcore funk and disco dancing, with a view to ensuring that every penny raised might be disposed in favour of UNICEF’s effort in the aftermath of the destruction.

Eventually agreement was reached and the Mildmay Club’s excellent sprung dancefloor, high stage, glittery backdrop, lighting grid with mechanised mirror ball and the DJ rig we’d hired from elsewhere were united as one. It sounded great the morning of the get-in with no one about apart from the two families, five small kids scrabbling about on the floor among the heavy, varnished chairs that hunched around tables on small but immaculately laid promontories of carpet.

I was appointed music man. They had no other choice, the womenfolk. Adrian the other dad had excellent taste in Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry but nothing else to keep a floorful of 200 or so thirty-five-to-fifty year-olds really rocking. Indeed, to be strictly honest, a couple of heavy Scratch dubs were likely to empty the floor as quickly as “Stairway to Heaven” would. So Adrian’s role was to keep early arrivals curious with Scratch in modicum, while I was to wheel out the heavy guns with my old school chum Bill, to reach a roiling pitch of intensity at 10pm, sustained for fifty minutes or an hour, then gradually withdrawn, like Matthew Arnold’s sea of faith, allowing all the young-to-middling mums and dads to slowly bring themselves back into the room from whatever hot night of frenzied clubbing in the 1980s had been switched back on as a live signal in their happy minds, leaving them with just enough juice in the can to stagger home to bark their shins on the pram in the hallway, relieve the babysitter (bang on time, for once) and before Lygia can bark at Sid, who is already drunkenly trying to insert a Supertramp CD into the rarely used stereo in the front room — oh for heaven’s sake, she certainly had not spent the night dancing her pins down to stumps, like Tina Charles or, I dunno, Sherrelle or whoever, for him to tail her home like a sulking dog nobody wants and then do the ultimate buzz-killer with fucking Supertramp, when one of them ought to look in on the kids upstairs while she pours herself a bedtime snifter before sloping upstairs again to the bathroom, the trailing high notes of that brilliant Marvin Gaye one cranking around her mind and weary muscles still like a… like a sort of …

“Sid, what was the name of that Marvin Gaye one … the one that went on for ages — I thought that was fantastic. Sid? Sidney, answer me, please. The really long Marvin Gaye one that wasn’t really disco?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“I think it was just before ‘Boogie Wonderland’…”

“So? I wouldn’t know ‘Boogie Wonderland’ from … ‘Boogie-Oogie on Your Baby Face’, not even if they were both sitting on my face.”

“Sid!”

“Lyge, I know you don’t like me saying this but… but, well, disco sucks.”

IT HAD BEEN a great night. A fantastic night.

We sat in our kitchen, the four of us, and looked at one another. It had been something and no mistake. We’d got started on time. We’d finished on the dot of midnight. People — the young middle-aged of our patch of north London, mostly but not entirely white, nor entirely middle class — had shown up in heroic numbers: they’d put their hands in their pockets to pay for tickets that were ultra-affordable (a fiver) and then in addition for raffle tickets on the night. We’d covered our costs and still there was a big wad for UNICEF. There had been no disasters, no fights, no one had fallen down the concrete stairs under the stage that would in later years lead to the outside smoking area; the committee members who’d kept an eye on events seemed grudgingly pleased — they’d got their discounted fee plus a hefty wedge of the bar. Everyone had got home around about midnight to relieve the babysitting fourteen year-olds of the borough. But best of all, people had danced. They really had.

If there was a more contented quartet of thirty-seven to forty-four year olds carousing till two that Saturday night anywhere in the country, I’d like to have seen them — in which case I would have certainly challenged them to show their working. I was buzzed to the point of the overexcited. I thought I’d done rather well, for an old-skool dude, and an amateur at that; and so had Bill, who could at least call on a past littered with DJ gigs in fairly impressive locations. I’d done a bit of pirate radio and a short-lived jazz club, both now events belonging to twenty years in the past. I was a complete novice in a world in which novice DJs were thin on the ground — everyone was doing it now; everyone and their dog — and they had twin decks at home. This I did not get — I mean, you can only listen to one record at a time, can’t you? Perhaps the twin-decks shoved in the living room recess were the unmastered electric guitars of the 21^st century. But I have long had a theory … no, let’s call it a conjecture — which I shall call the Coleman Disco Conjecture (CDC). The CDC says, it doesn’t matter what age-group you have in front of you: this is how you make them move their bodies around to the music in an expressive fashion, even if it bears only a tangential relationship with dancing. You want them to really dance? You play them one song that was some sort of hit during their adolescence (any song with a danceable beat, obviously) and then you play them disco records back to back to back to back, and Robert’s your father’s brother. They dance their behinds off.

But what happens if the demographic in front of you is of an age to have been coeval with disco music? Fourteen in ’74? Sixteen in ’76? Well, that’s so easy it feels like cheating.

But you’ve still got to play the right records, in the right order, and if your poster says “Seventies Disco, Funk, Reggae and Soul”, then you can’t drop the high style even for a moment — one blot, one misjudgement, one arrogant display of snobby personal preference over solid objective knowledge of what is needed and you’re tomorrow morning’s toast. The floor will empty. DJ nightmare #1.

You have to get it right. You have to tell the people you want to dance, you have to tell both their bodies and their unconscious minds a story that both bodies and minds want to hear and for the same reason, more or less. You’ve got to show them themselves. Surely?

Here is a typical sequence from the post-10pm hot hour, when every aging sinew has to stop straining against the body’s conviction of its own failure — and just find the flow. This is how you make old punks dance.

Ken Boothe: ‘Everything I Own’— Essential to use an original early-’70s 7-inch cut on Trojan, which is an absolutely thunderous thing — one of the great reggae rhythms — and not the twee remix which came out after it was a hit, with tinkly xylophone further besmirching a horrible ‘pop’ mix, now the standard issue. Do not touch the twinkly version. Use only the original. Everyone in the room knows the tune — now they have to get with the rhythm. No xylophones.

Duffy: ‘Have Mercy’ — In any given room packed with 230 souls of more than forty years of age sweating up under the weight of the personal crisis that is dancing, there are always at least thirty-seven dancers who were once Mods of some description. They will dance to this record without fail. And Mods dance well. By doing so, they will make you look good.

Booker T & the MGs: ‘Jelly Bread’ — Not, you will have noticed, ‘Green Onions’. ‘Jelly Bread’ is a close cousin of ‘Green Onions’ and was in 1962 the group’s second single in the US. But it did not hit, possibly because of the savagery of Steve Cropper’s guitar sound and dynamic attack. It will keep the ex-Mods on the floor and you will go up in their estimation.

Edwin Starr: ‘SOS (Stop her On Sight)’ — The Mods are now putty in your hands. They simply cannot believe that the balding middle-aged hipster in a hat doing the music can possibly have such good taste as to know this, one of the great but lesser Motown floor-fillers. The Mods are now trapped, like wasps in resin.

Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes: ‘The Love I Lost’ — A Philly masterstroke. But it’s important you play the right version: the six-minute extended mix is the one you want, not the interminable and very dull Tom Moulton protracted mix, which will clear the floor for quarter of an hour. ‘The Love I Lost’ is a great, great proto-disco record and you should indulge everyone with the full introduction teased out on Fender Rhodes, guitar and eventually insurgent, pressing kick-drum — not only a gorgeous twist in the texture of the music but a luxurious lacuna in which the ageing Mods are granted a minute to catch their breath and loosen the beginnings of a story into their unconscious minds, the minds that were there at the time, in 1974. The apotheosis of Philadelphia soul’s lean into disco form — this is Ur-disco and also the greatest of all Teddy Pendergrass’s uptempo soul shouts.

Earth Wind & Fire: ‘September’ — taking it higher, the monster, monster sound of Maurice White’s EW&F horns, trumpets so bright and bass napped in so tight to the drums that even the crinkliest Mod in the house will have an “oh fuggit” moment of abandonment and, casting aside his own hat, will plunge back out into the maelstrom like the last Spartan at Thermopylae.

A Taste of Honey: ‘Boogie-Oogie-Oogie’ — disco in its highest state of generic grace, both mechanistic in its carefully engineered linkages and flow-rich in its resistance to outcome: you pulsate with it through and through its linear course right up to and including its bitter fade. Whaddya mean, “Boogie-oogie-oogie” doesn’t actually mean anything? What do you think those people are doing out there? Philosophy?

Marvin Gaye: ‘Got to Give it Up’ —The greatest dance record ever made. And strangely it is not a disco record. It’s close to one — it is absolutely determined to make you shake your bottled-up booty and is endlessly repetitive in the way it re-circulates its main theme: ‘dancing will make you potent’ — but sorry, no disco shoes. That’s because it is the greatest funk record ever made. Four are not on the floor. Just the one is. And the entire 12-minute masterpiece (you have to use the 12-minute version) constitutes a massive, syncopated doodle created by two men, with ancillary help as and when it’s called for. The two men are the extraordinary Texan drummer Bugsy Wilcox, who bounces his kit around your brain like a rubber superball for the entire twelve minutes, literally without missing a beat, while his boss, Marvin, fingers out a bass part on something called an RMI synth bass, rubbing up against Wilcox’s joyful swing like some low animal. In addition tenor sax, guitar and percussion come and go and enjoy romping together in the deepest pocket there has ever been. The vocal harmonies, mostly dabbed in, are on their own a work of art. It is truly one of the wonders of the world.

Trammps: ‘Disco Inferno’ — The introduction is an avalanche, the rest of it a mad tumble of cliché and hammered fours, constituting possibly the most hysterically jubilant disco masterpiece in the canon.

Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers: ‘Bustin’ Loose’ — Joy pulled back a notch and slotted back into its tight little fissure in the funk, the heavily syncopated triple thumps coming down at you from every angle, splang! on the bass and “Gimmethebridgenow!” The heavy heavy trouser-shaker of the DC Go-Go sound. Big horns.

Sylvester: ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ — the second great electronic masterpiece of the High Disco era (after Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), which whips a quite stupendous level of excitement from a more or less standing start, with what one presumes is an early plug-in sequencer which, intriguingly, seems to speed up as it goes along as Sylvester soars higher than high. As always, avail yourself of the long version on a 12inch slab of vinyl if you can afford it or even find it, and then do fancy DJ tricks with it, if you must. Me? I just press ‘play’ on the turntable and watch what happens.

Shirley and Co.: ‘Shame Shame Shame’ — …and as I always say, if you’ve lodged awhile in the technology-stuffed house of novel artifice, where old men scream like girls as they toss their wives around as if they’re girls too, where else can you go next but back to the woodshed in which one of the lives of disco was birthed, again in 1974. “Shame Shame Shame” is early disco travelling on a Bo Diddley beat and that is not on the disco piste, no way, not often. Incidentally, talking of pistes, Shirley is also Shirley Goodman, who contributed some of the spectacular Gospel haunts on Exile on Main St. Yes, that Shirley.

Lipps Inc: ‘Funkytown’ — And finally, the 1980 record that sealed electronica’s hold on the future, as was entirely proper of course. The energy that crackles around the periphery of this hideous but brilliant cold assemblage of micro-hooks was the future and the end of disco in a blizzard of stiffly repetitive squits — and my God, people dance to it. The first time I stuck this on at the Mildmay, which I did with no little trepidation, ordinarily sensible people were literally running away from their drinks at the side-tables where they’d been coddling their bunions on the varnished chairs and … and … they started doing robot dancing. And if you’ve never witnessed from a high angle 230 middle-aged north London media professionals, yoga practitioners, charity workers, novelists. plumbers, cake shop owners, homemakers, sportsmen, professional dancers, postmen, teachers, filmmakers, academics, landlords, photo agency owners, electricians, nurses, GPs, florists, butchers, social workers, IT people and a bloke who’s something in the City, all of them frugging in a dark ocean of human-robot herky-jerks … if you have never seen that ocean from a lofty perch with a twinkly backdrop and a pair of Technics decks to keep you frowning, then you can keep your attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

THE GENIUS BEHIND it was not my mine. It was Jo’s. She’d come up with the brilliant name that encapsulated the appeal of a three-hour dance party for special occasions, pitched directly at the aging disco generation as they forged a path into their forties and beyond and no longer had time to go out dancing or were too knackered or bunioned to do it anyway … but hey, if it’s partly for charity and it finishes at midnight so we can get a babysitter and everyone’ll be there and old baldy plays that Marvin Gaye one and “Funkytown” then … why not?

Rarely Groove she called it and it was a great name. I am convinced that was the reason it lasted for nine years and never really dipped. Come on, who wouldn’t want to go Rarely Grooving? I know the old punks in my home town would and a couple of them even did and they had a ball in their no-longer-quite-so-edgy clobber.

But there is always one who doesn’t get it and is determined to show you to yourself as you really are, and this is how DJs drunk on power and self-love, merely because they know how to play records one after another, all learn how to suck ants from their ant-holes to take the taste of their own possible failure away.

She came from stage left and even in the low light I knew she was trouble.

“Hey Mister DJ,” she bawled at me from no range at all. “Hey, you!”

She was Scottish.

“Hang on a minute.” I held up a hand. “I’m busy, cuing up music so people can dance to it. It’s my job.”

“Hey, Mister DJ!”

“What?”

“When are ye going to start playing seventies music?”

“Whaddya mean? I am playing seventies music! This is McFadden and Whitehead…”

“Thass not seventies music, Mister DJ big man… so fuckin’ big up here on your stage wi’ your lights and tinsel and that. Seventies music, not fuckin’ old disco shit. Seventies music, you know… T. Rex, Bowie, The Sweet, Slade… It says on the poster you play seventies music…”

“I am playing seventies music. The last three were from the seventies, and the next one will be too. All seventies… and by the way, I’m five foot ten…”

“Oh fuck yer shite, yuh big ponce.” She turned to go and I sighed inwardly, reaching for a record released in the seventies. Chic or something like that. And then she turned, turned on her heel and marched straight back at me. Her mouth already open..

“And by the way, Mister DJ,” she yelled through the music, “you have a face like a fart.”

Happy birthday, Jo!

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027.