Forget C86, The Pastels' Slow Summits Is Like The Soundtrack To A Haruki Marakami Film Starring James Garner

Blurred vision: Stephen & Katrina of the Pastels

With five albums over a 31 year career, the Pastels could never be accused of being prolific. But even by their standards, a 16 year gap between LPs seems a little excessive.

“It doesn’t feel that it took so long to us,” says Stephen McRobbie (nee Pastel). “Although in some ways it does, in that the studio we started recording it in isn’t there anymore; it’s flats, and that happened a while ago. We made the record over concentrated bursts, but these bursts took place over several years. But we weren’t working for days aspiring to get a Steely Dan snare sound.”

In truth, the Pastels never really went away. There was a well-received 2009 collaboration with Japanese duo Tenniscoats, and a soundtrack to David Mackenzie’s film The Last Great Wilderness in 2003. Plus, thanks to his involvement in Glasgow’s Monorail Music, McRobbie has helped shape the tastes of Glasgow’s independent record buyers. Before that, as Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love attests, McRobbie’s stint in the record department of the West End bookseller’s, John Smith, had a significant influence on the city’s musical education.

“That’s a parallel influence,” says Love.  “It influences people who are not maybe influenced in guitar music, there may be people who are into electronic music who are tipping their hat to Stephen because of the way he has stocked his shops over the years. But the Pastels represented different thing to different people. People like Norman (Blake of Teenage Fanclub) or maybe Duglas (Stewart, of BMX Bandits) would see the more melodic side of the Pastels, but also in their early days there was a kind of rock scuzziness. So in Glasgow you’d get a group like Yummy Fur who were more art rock than Teenage Fanclub; they were maybe influenced by the more droning, arty side of the Pastels. Mk 1 Pastels has a rock and roll element, plus they had a more melodic side, and then it became a different band when it became Stephen and Aggi and Katrina – it became more artistic – it wasn’t as robust. They had a real DIY approach, and even their covers started to change.”

When the Pastels formed in 1982, few would have predicted that it was they, and not more hyped, commercially-oriented bands, who would endure. “We started in a void, to an extent,” says McRobbie. “It was a strange time in Glasgow. The Orange Juice moment had passed. There were a lot of people trying to make quite aspirational music. We were aspirational but not in the same way at all. And we were absolutely rudimentary. Very soon after that, we met groups like the Jesus and Marychain and Primal Scream and Shop Assistants that we felt a certain kinship with, but when we started there wasn’t anything like us.

“The group we were closest to in terms of friendship was Strawberry Switchblade. The Orange Juice thing was really brief. Postcard didn’t really root down to any extent. It was a bright spark, and it was much later the city became a place where there was an informal network of musicians, and people started helping each other and there were places to play that weren’t run by gangsters, and good rehearsal rooms. When we started there was Davy Henderson’s [not of the Fire Engines] Hellfire Club, we practiced there, and that was a good place. It was later, probably around 1985-6 that we were meeting Bobby (Gillespie, of Primal Scream) and Norman and Eugene and Frances (Kelly and McKee, of the Vaselines) and we started to think we had more in common.”

The Pastels aesthetic was strong enough to attract the support of several independent labels (including Rough Trade, Creation, and their current home Domino). “We were part of the fanzine network, and we sent a tape to Rough Trade and Geoff Travis asked us if we would make a single for him.  It was so exciting. Rough Trade was the label I really loved. I sent a tape to Dan Treacy of the TV Personalities, he really liked it and we did a single on his label, Whaam! We didn’t have a sense of entitlement or anything – we just thought that was perfectly normal. We weren’t arrogant, but we thought it was incredibly easy, and that probably had a negative impact on a lot of the records we made in the 1980s. It took us a long time to realise that you need to put a bit of work in.”

That said, their artfully shambolic approach had an international appeal, not least in Japan, which the group visited three times in the 1990s. McRobbie confesses he still doesn’t understand their appeal to the Japanese. “It was a very intense experience, because people were so excited that we had gone. It was like a micro-moment, a kind of realisation of what one second in the Beatles’ lives would have been in 1963 or 1964.”

The Pastels progress has been slowed by line-up changes, notably the departure of Annabel (Aggi) Wright in 2000 to concentrate on her work as an illustrator. For a time, McRobbie and drummer Katrina Mitchell put their efforts into their label, Geographic, before the offer of soundtrack work redirected their energies. The recruitment of Gerard Love as an occasional Pastel also brought stability to the group.  “Gerard’s a very strong person,” says McRobbie, “and he’s good at problem solving with music.”

Even so, the maturity of Slow Summits may surprise those who continue to associate the group with the fey pop of the C86 movement (named after an NME mixtape). “The earlier NME cassette, C81, had the sense of ambition about it,” says McRobbie. “All these different styles of music. But C86 was incredibly narrow. I don’t think I’ve ever played C86 all the way through and I don’t think I ever will!

“I don’t think indie music means anything at all. ‘Independent minded’ is my notion of it. You’re operating in a certain way with smaller budgets but a more adventurous spirit to try to be chance-taking.”

Slow Summits includes a sumptuous string arrangement by composer Craig Armstrong (on “Kicking Leaves”), while the core band is augmented by flautist Tom Crossley (also heard on Love’s fine solo project, Lightships). “Maybe the earlier records had a slight trashiness to them, a popness, and maybe through time that diminished,” says McRobbie. “But with this record we tried to be a bit bolder.”

The album was clearly informed by the group’s soundtrack work, as McRobbie became obsessed with Krzysztof Komeda and Ennio Morricone. “We’ve learned to leave more space and not feel that you have to have action all the time.”

“I think it’s quite a varied record, almost like a mixtape,” says Love.  “But the Pastels’ sound has changed over the years. They've become more impressionistic.”

“We made the record in concentrated bursts,” says McRobbie, sounding freshly bewildered at the record’s lengthy gestation. (In truth, he has made an art of sounding bewildered). “We ended up with lots of songs,” he says. “We left off a track that we thought was a masterpiece.”

It would, of course, be a very Pastels thing to record a masterpiece, then fail to release it.

“It would be a very Pastels thing to say you weren’t releasing your masterpiece,” laughs McRobbie. “Then it would turn up and people would say: ‘Was that what you thought was your masterpiece?”

Hiss Golden Messenger's Haw: A Question of Faith, Laughing In The Face of Death

MC Taylor’s 2011 album as Hiss Golden Messenger, Poor Moon, blended folk, soul and gospel, revealing Taylor as a writer inside his own lyrical universe; hewn from Biblical imagery and folk mores. The beautiful sequel, Haw, is the same, but moreso. The arrangements are bigger, the language more dense, the symbolism darker.

Hat act: HGM's MC Taylor

“We didn’t set out to make a record that was more complex,” says Taylor. “There’s a weird dynamic at work with Hiss Golden Messenger. As I continue to make records, they feel like they’re becoming more personal, not less. The more records I make, the more solitary they become, emotionally speaking. I, of course, hope that people connect to them. But in the case of HGM the reason the small group of people that connect to them connect to them is because of the rawness of spirit that is in them. It took me a long time before I felt safe enough to put that stuff to record, to tape. It makes me feel very vulnerable, but the thing that gives me hope is that these are personal feelings, but they’re also universal. I think everybody has questions of faith and who they’re supposed to be and what their responsibility is to the world and to the community.”

Taylor also suggests that Haw is an attempt to understand his spiritual life, a recurring theme in his work. Emotionally, it’s tough, swinging between Christmas (I’ve Got A Name For The Newborn Child) and rebirth (the gorgeous Cheerwine Easter).

“It’s a seasonal record in a way. It has a blustery and bright Spring quality to it. There is some light, and there is a lot of darkness too, which you referred to as density. Maybe density would be a better way to describe it. It’s certainly a more emotionally complex record than Poor Moon is. If Poor Moon was setting the stage for these questions of faith then Haw really tries to puzzle them out a little more. If Poor Moon opened up the possibility to me that I could be a spiritual person, then Haw interrogates these questions of: what does that mean and why, what use is faith? And what are the problems with faith? There are many.”

There’s a solution of sorts on Devotion, but Taylor is serious enough to understand that deliverance and pain are eternally intertwined.

“There is a through line on Haw that has to do with a reckoning with death, and understanding that death is the end result of life. To recognise that and to understand that on a daily basis has the potential to make life and our experience of being in the world more profound, I think. This is a hard concept for me to wrap my head around because I’m a person that thinks about the past a lot, or I think about the future – it’s hard for me to live in the moment.

“I was reading an interview with author George Saunders. He’s a very profound writer because of the way he addresses life questions. His latest book, 10th of December, is a funny book, but it’s also really deep. But in this interview he did with the New York Times he says something to the effect of: when death is in the room, things become very interesting. What he meant was, when you are aware of the imminence of death, not as something bleak or dark, but as something which can serve to make life richer because you have to value each moment, then things become a lot more interesting. I just thought that was so incredible. It’s such a simple statement, and kind of obvious, but it also summed up a lot of what I was feeling and thinking during the making of Haw. Death is on the way, how do we celebrate these days?” 

Ed Bankston's Red Rippers: Viet-Boogie Recollections Of A Hell-For-Leather Military Man

The latest piece of archaeology by the Paradise of Bachelors label is an extraordinary album of Viet Vet country boogie. First released in 1983, and sold through a small ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine, it’s the work of Vietnam veteran Edwin Bankston, who wrote the songs in the decade following his service aboard the aircraft carrier Kittyhawk. The ad read: “For a lot less than a box of ammo to sharpen your eye, you get an album that will nourish your heart and mind for years.”

“I started playing in bars when I was 15,” Bankston recalls. “I lived in a rural area, and we’d play Friday and Saturday nights for five dollars a night. I always thought that would be my life, playing music, but then I got in the service. When I got out, I still thought of myself as a musician but music’s a tough business, and if you’re gonna have success you’re gonna have to give up a lot as far as family goes. I had three kids, and I got to a point where I had to make a choice – either I’m gonna keep doing this, or just become a square and raise the kids. I chose the kids.”

Much of the record is Waylon Jennings-style country boogie – “I’m a soldier of fortune, a hell for leather mercenary man” he sings on “Soldier of Fortune” - but there are occasional 1980s’ period flourishes; on “Firefight”, Bankston embellishes the chorus “here you are, and death is all around you” with a Chicory Tip-style riff.  “I grew up with Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton, an old rockabilly type guy. I liked Creedence Clearwater … I always thought of myself as a country guy, but Waylon led us country guys away from straight country – he opened the doors for a lot of musicians, to say that you don’t have to sound like Hank Williams anymore. You can sound like whoever you want.”

Bankston viewed the war as “a perfect storm of psychic wackiness”, and if Vietnam Blues sounds like a Ry Cooder character piece, the song gains poignancy from the singer’s investment in the subject and, perhaps, his awareness of his potential audience. When he sings about being “a hell-for-leather mercenary man” the line “if you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time” packs a heavy punch.

“I started writing these songs because I felt kind of estranged from what we call now popular culture. I was playing round different places, and a funny thing happened. Several times I’d take a break from the set, and a guy would come up to me and say, who did such and such a song? I’d say, well, that’s one of my songs. He’d say, ‘Really?’ and we’d get to talking and he’d say, ‘Well you should write a song about this,’ and he’d start telling me about some particular experience that he’d had. You’re always looking for an idea for a song, and I’d go back and forth with these guys, and generally they’d say, ‘Yeah, you kind of got it there’. One song that made it on the album was called Firefight, about a firefight in the jungle, which i never did, but an old marine suggested that to me. I said, ‘Tell me about it’. So his remembrances are what’s in that song.

“As veterans, we all felt pretty rejected. Our fathers were the World War II generation, and they all came back and were hailed and feted. But then we would come back, and we got the opposite reactions. Some people were openly hostile, but even amongst people that weren’t, there was an attitude of: we don’t want to hear about it, just pretend it never happened. They were just ready to put it all out of their minds, which kind of left us hanging. 

“The album was less about that than how unhappy we veterans were with how the whole thing turned out looking back. We were just doing what veterans have always done. We didn’t start the war – we weren’t making any policy or anything, we were just there doing the dirty work, just like soldiers have for thousands of years. I understand the American public was just tired of the whole thing, they wanted it to go away.”

http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/products-page/cd/pob-05

Chris Boot: Magnum, photojournalism, and the flawed reality of great photography

Thomas Hoepker: View From Brooklyn, New York City,
USA, 11 September, 2001, in Magnum Stories

During the course of researching his book about the photography of John Hinde, documenter of the Butlins holiday camp empire, Chris Boot came across a quote from Fellini. “All great photographs,” the great director said, “have something wrong with them.”

In the case of Hinde, whose propaganda for Billy Butlin’s camp was anthologised in the book Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight, the flaw was reality. The pictures were lavish, beautifully lit affairs, in which real holidaymakers did their best to make a visit to Butlins resemble a weekend in Paradise. “What is fascinating,” says Boot, “is that the holidaymakers are not quite playing their roles adequately. Those photographs are like plays.”

Boot was appointed Executive Director of the Aperture Foundation in New York in 2011. Prior to that, his London-based company published idiosyncratic photography books, such as Bliss, Martin Parr’s collection of impossibly romantic European postcards. “We treat postcards, and their view of the world, as somehow inevitable,” says Boot. “Yes, it’s cheesy, but we have to remember that people invented these ways of looking at things.”

Boot’s interest in photography was honed during his lengthy stint as director of the Magnum agency, in both its London and New York offices. “That doesn’t really constitute running it, because it’s the sort of anarchic thing that nobody runs. It’s a place of freedom, in the sense that photographers want to be part of it and at the same time have a context in which to distribute work and collaborate with like-minded photographers.”

The history of the agency is related in Magnum Stories (Phaidon), which Boot edited. As well as offering handsome portfolios by Magnum founders Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the book offers a subtle reinterpretation of the history of photography. Magnum is often viewed as a bastion of photojournalism: in fact, according to Boot, it was established in opposition to photojournalism, a form established by LIFE magazine in which editors, not photographers, controlled the context of the pictures.

“Robert Capa was very smart, and he saw the possibility for non-photojournalists working in the context of magazine picture stories, and the potential for Magnum to achieve its goals by not being a group of photojournalists. He recruited Cartier-Bresson to that idea, and that made the idea stronger. Even at that stage, in 1947, you would have described Cartier-Bresson as an artist who was using photography. He certainly wasn’t a photojournalist. And that was the dominant tradition of Magnum – Robert Capa was the exception. The majority of its photographers were interested in what they were interested in, and for them, this was a way of earning a living.”

The changing magazine market has limited the opportunities for photographic essays, partly as a result of the power of television. “You can’t account for it entirely in terms of technological change, or other media. You just have to look at Britain in the early 1990s, when you suddenly got a mass of magazines emerging: The Sunday Correspondent and the Independent. I don’t think there has been a point in Britain when more photo stories were being published than then. Those magazines didn’t work, so maybe that tells us something.”

Digital cameras and the spread of camera phones have also shaped our expectations. The most immediate photos of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the torture pictures of Abu Ghraib, were taken by amateurs, with little regard for composition or artistry. “Photography is as ubiquitous as the opportunities that present themselves,” says Boot, “and it’s no longer exclusively in the hands of the photojournalist, the way it once was.”

Boot’s championing of postcards, and his publication of Martin Parr’s pictures of commemorative Saddam Hussein wrist-watches, show that he isn’t precious about his subject. “People’s current visual literacy is incomparable even to when I was a child. You just have to look at the story of colour – how many colour photographs did we see when we were children? And now we live in a world that offers colour photography as wallpaper. The audience is much more sophisticated, but a photograph will still excite you for the same reason that it always did; it shows you something that you hadn’t seen before, it shows you something in a way that is appealing, it engages you with the subject. Or it is just plain beautiful.

“Photography does quite clearly influence the world. The way people now see Britain has been influenced by Martin Parr. Think about Little Britain, that vision has been informed by a photographer’s view of the world. And that’s one of the things that photographers do. They explore ways of seeing things which, when they take hold as ideas, do affect the ways we relate to the visual environment.”

Now that everyone is a photographer, Boot has some encouraging advice. “Instead of seeing your holiday pictures as failing, put them away for a few years. Let them mature. Photographs do mature, they do change over time. And that is what’s scary, when you start to think about the billions of photographs that have been taken. They are all interesting. They are all revealing.”

RIP Reg Presley, Trogg, hod-carrier, maverick genius, Wild Thing

Reg Presley of The Troggs died yesterday. As a tribute to his raw brilliance, here's an interview I did with him about recording The Troggs' greatest hit, Wild Thing.  

My influences were Louisiana Red and Lightnin’ Hopkins and the blues from America were sort of kicking us. But we also realised that it wasn’t quite the same in England. So you heard those influences, heard those sounds, and heard the differences. And every time we heard a song and said, ‘Oh that’s a good number, let’s do that,’ the Stones had already beaten us to it. It was a bastard trying to get something.

I’d started to write songs. I don’t think Larry Page, the Troggs manager, would have known, other than me saying ‘Oh I’ve got a song’, you know what I mean?  I didn’t have a telephone in those days. I had to go to a phone box. But he sent down, Did You Ever Have to Make Me Decide? by the Loving Spoonful for us to do. And also what was sent with it was the old demo of Wild Thing, which Denis Berger, who worked in the office, had got out of a whole heap of demos. He saw it and thought, ‘Ooh, that’d be good for the Troggs’. He sent it with the one Larry wanted us to do. At that time I really wasn’t into music, like Did You ever Have to Make Me Decide. And when I finally got hold of Larry he said ‘How did you get on with the harmonies?’ I thought for a minute, because I thought Wild Thing was the one that suited us best. So I said, ‘Harmonies? On Wild Thing?’ and he said, ‘You haven’t done the other one?’

Well, I had A Girl Like You – I’d just finished that one. And we sat in an old Bedford truck, outside the studio, cos Larry told us that he was doing his orchestra, and if there was any time left on the end of that session, we could have it. We waited and waited. We knew what time the end of the session was supposed to be, and they came out about three quarters of an hour before the end. We looked at out watches and we said: ‘We’ve got three quarters of an hour to do this, then.’ They were coming out with their violins underneath their arms and what have you, so we dived in there, and said ‘Are we still going for this?’ Larry said, ‘Yeah, come on’. So we got our amps and that in there, and we ran through about eight bars of Wild Thing, and did it, and about eight bars of With A Girl Like You, and did it. They were both number ones. We couldn’t believe it.

We had been in other little studios, but this was our first time professionally, where everything was so, so, and dead right. Larry would speak though the mike and say 'Right we’ll try it' after he’d heard a few bars. 'OK from the top, go on.' So we’d do 8 bars, and he said 'OK, do it'. So we thought, OK, we’ve got to go for it, do it,' and that’s how it was done. We had to get out the studio cos somebody else was coming in. Our first album took two and a quarter hours – it’s stupid but that’s how it was.

It was all so fast. I was working on a building, doing a gable end, when I first heard Wild Thing on the radio. There was a painter, and he was working on the scaffolding behind me, and when Wild Thing came on his transistor radio, he shouted over to me, not knowing who I was. He said, have you heard this one? I said, ‘Yeah, yeah’. He said, ‘If that ain’t number one next week I’ll eat my brush.’ I thought: that bastard could be right. I threw my trowel down, there was a tea break starting, and I looked round the shed and said ‘Share out me tools, I’m off’.

The sound was raw. Music was starting at that time to go towards flower power. A lot of people say we’re the first punk rock. Well when you look back and see how the punks started, they’re probably bloody right, because they were rebels and they cut across the scene as it was in ‘77, and I think we did the same thing in ‘66. The strange thing about Wild Thing – it helps youngsters who just pick up the guitar, because to do that they’ve only got to learn three chords. It’s the first song they can play.

I still love it. It’s done some mileage. I went up to London one night. Chip Taylor, who wrote Wild Thing, was playing this little club, and I thought, he’s bound to ask me up onstage, I’ll take the ocarina just in case. Sure enough he did. And he does it so slow – you know when a 45’s on, and you put your finger on it to slow it down – it felt like that to me. It was weird.

After Hendrix had done Wild Thing. Chas Chandler, his manager, took me round to his apartment, but he wasn’t there. Chas opened the door, went in, he showed me round the place. And he went into the bedroom, and I couldn’t believe it. If he’d have been lying in bed, you’d never have seen him, cos the whole room was black. The walls were entirely black all the way round, sheets everything, everything was black.  If there’s any other way Wild Thing should have been done, he chose it. He saw the wildness of it.

Teenage Girls! Timpani! The Strange Cult Of The Cults Percussion Ensemble

Dame Evelyn Glennie provided one of the highlights of the London Olympics opening ceremony, leading 1000 drummers through a re-enactment of the industrial revolution in a thundering collaboration with Underworld. For Glennie, it was a moment of triumph in an extraordinary career.

Now, thanks to a remarkable story of vinyl archaeology, the roots of that success have been exposed, with the re-release of a record Dame Evelyn appeared on in her early teens, while at school in Aberdeenshire. More surprisingly, this disc – of which fewer than 500 copies were originally pressed – has been hailed by Tom Hodgkinson in The Times as “an avant-garde masterpiece”.

The group’s name seems to offer a clue to its future success, but the Cults Percussion Ensemble was just that: an Aberdeenshire schools group, tutored by Ron Forbes, who moved to the North East after a stint in the London Jazz Four, having earned his musical spurs in the Coldstream Guards. The album was made to sell at concerts, and had gone unnoticed by the wider world until it was spotted by Jonny Trunk, whose label, Trunk Records, specialises in library music and TV and film soundtracks (including porn – the label motto is “Music – Nostalgia – Sex”).He found the record at Spitalfields Market in London, and was immediately enthralled.

“It had the word ‘Cults’ on the front, and I didn’t know it was a place,” says Trunk. “I just thought it was some spooky thing. Then when I heard it I thought it was absolutely magical. From the second it starts, it’s just enchanting. And it’s so beautifully played. It’s amazing what a well-tuned group of 14 year-olds can do.”

Dame Evelyn admits to being “delighted” by the album’s reappearance, and readily concedes to the importance of the Ensemble in her development. It was under Forbes’s tutelage that she first explored percussion, and the success of the Ensemble – it won several inter-schools competitions – led to European dates, and an “unbelievable” appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. “I remember all the parents gathering to see us off on what seemed like the endless bus journey to London,” Dame Evelyn recalls. “It was quite an experience.”

She also recalls going shopping with her mother to buy the material for the full-length kilt that was the Ensemble’s uniform.  “She had to make the kilt. We got to choose the tartan; I think it was Mackintosh. I still have it somewhere, but it’s probably too big now. I was a chubby little girl!”

Forbes, now retired and living in Crete, is surprised by the album’s re-emergence, but has fond memories of working with Glennie. “It inspired Evelyn. Playing at the Albert Hall as a kid is quite an experience. I think she saw that what she wanted in life was going to happen. She was very single-minded and she went for it full time.”

When Glennie first auditioned for the Ensemble, she wasn’t completely deaf, recalls Forbes. “She tried to play the clarinet, but because her hearing was so bad she used to blow so loud she nearly blew the keys off, poor kid, because she wanted to hear what she was doing. So the music teacher at her school, Ellon Academy, said to me, ‘I don’t think she’ll be any good.’ But when I tested her, I knew she was a fine musician. She had perfect pitch.”

Forbes adapted his teaching to cope with Glennie’s deteriorating hearing, allowing her to “hear” the tuning by sensing the vibrations in the instruments. “She didn’t like listening to music so much then, because she was getting a lot of distorted sounds. When her hearing went, it was better for her, because she had a clear mind, and if she saw the notes she knew what they sounded like. So when I wrote the nine parts for the different players, she would learn them all, so she could hear the overall sound.”

At 13, Glennie is the youngest musician on the record, and she can be heard playing timpani and xylophone. “She was in the learning process then,” says Forbes. “It was the first chance she’d had to play something, and to make progress, to know that she was developing. 

“But she eventually became the principal player. A year later, she played all the hard bits.”

From these humble beginnings, Glennie has developed into a musician of international standing, but she acknowledges the importance of her time with the Ensemble, and the day Forbes gave her a snare drum and no sticks, and told her to create the sound of a storm, and then a whisper. “It’s not about the instruments,” she says. “It’s about the teaching, and using your imagination.”

As to the record being an “avant-garde masterpiece”, Forbes is modestly dismissive. “I don’t know how I feel about that. You guys do that – you classify it.” Suffice to say, the Percussion Ensemble isn’t the only cult record Forbes has been associated with. The London Jazz Four’s 1967 LP, Take A New Look At The Beatles has a growing reputation, with some critics – those who appreciate good vibes - suggesting that its arrangements surpass the Lennon/McCartney originals.

George Best: El Beatle on Drinking, Shagging, Gambling, and the Perils of Living One Day At A Time

Tina Turner echoes around the Glasgow Pavilion, past the grey-haired men in trench coats the snuggling couples, the ex-boxers and the men with dates tattooed on their hands. The sound bounces off the empty seats, spins around the gods, then booms back down to the stage.

Two middle-aged men appear in matching shell suits; black with a red flash. They sit on tall stools under the spotlights, looking like a Batchelors’ reunion. #

The grey-haired one seems slightly nervous and wears his top zipped to the Adam’s apple. 

The dark one with the grey beard wears white trainers which have never seen dirt. To his left there is an ice bucket containing  an uncorked bottle of Champagne. He is happy. He is onstage, doing what he does, telling tales about himself. He is being George Best, footballing legend. Simply the Best, better than all the rest. Later, he will be asked if there is real champagne in the bottle. “I promise you it’s real,” he will say.

This is a show called A Sporting Night To Remember, a Scottish version of the chat and comedy tour George Best takes round England with his football friend Rodney Marsh, another football maverick. For this one, Marsh has been replaced by ex-Ranger ‘Slim’ Jim Baxter, who is said to be planning a tour of his own with ex-Celtic winger Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone. It is a nostalgic evening in which the most frequent complaint from the stage and the stalls is the absence of characters in today’s football. “How do you compare the football when you played with today?” Baxter is asked. “No comparison,” he replies. “Ask the punters.”

The pictures of Best tell their own story. The first clip is the one Terry Wogan used to introduce the player in his now infamous television interview. The game is a big moment in the Best legend, an FA Cup tie between Manchester United and Northampton from 1970. Best returned to the team after a long suspension and scored six goals. He was beardless then, and wore number 11 as he danced through a muddy penalty box leaving the defence stranded in slow motion. “Imagine,” the commentator mused, “what he might have done had he been match fit.”

“But,” said Terry Wogan, “at 26, tragically early, he finished with top class football. So what happened to the man Pele himself called the greatest footballer?” 

So what happened? George Best is sitting on stage and a comedian is pumping him for some scandal. “What happened on the Wogan show?” he is asking, and everyone is laughing, because in Best’s career, Wogan is the public fall from grace, bigger than suspensions, divorces, bankruptcy, jail (and he has done all of those). It is Best’s Chappaquiddick, the night when the high times demanded payback.

What happened on Wogan was that Best turned up to plug something – it could have been his video Genius, or perhaps his autobiography, The Good, The Bad, and The Bubbly – and the unfortunate host crushed the legend in a tortuous nine minutes. The centrepiece of the drama, before Omar Sharif was wheeled on to mop up, was a non-interview in which Wogan did a lot of nervous smiling and Best echoed his questions back at him. “What is important in life?” Wogan asked, timidly.

“Friends,” said Best.

“Football?”

“Football. Yeah. Still. Yeah.”

“The ladies?”

“The ladies are still important, yeah.”

Wogan smirked. Maybe he saw his career flashing before his eyes. All those nights at Eurovision rattled in the back of his head. From the audience came a few stifled laughs like the murmur of a distant underground train. The mood was half embarrassed sympathy, half devilment. The audience smelled blood, though they weren’t sure whose.

Vultures hovered over Best’s head. Wogan saw two doors marked “Exit”, but chose the wrong one.

“What about the booze?” he fumbled. “Is that important to you?”

“The booze is still important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

The train drew closer. Towards the end of those nine minutes – an eternity in the life of Terry Wogan – the conversation turned back to women. There is an anecdote about Best and his success at bedding Miss Worlds, and it may have been this that the host was trying to prompt.

George mumbled. “I like screwing, all right.”

“So what do you do with your time these days?”

“Screw.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, George Best.”

So what happened that night? George Best is talking about Wogan. Everybody saw it. It was one of those television moments. Best is laughing now. “A couple of lovely things happened. Omar Sharif and I got engaged. And I did get a lovely phone call from a couple of nice friends of ours, Oliver Reed and Alex Higgins. And they both said ‘Bestie, you fuckin’ looked alright to us, pal.”

Friends, football, ladies and booze. Put those together and you have the basis of the George Best story. The trouble is that the man sitting quietly in his dressing room waiting to go onstage is a smarter prospect entirely than the flip character of legend. The champagne is uncorked, but he does not drink. He talks quietly and carefully. The life of this George Best is beautifully simple. The word that peppers his sentences is “lovely”.

Friends: “Everything got out of hand until about seven years ago. And I decided to change it. I got hold of a terrific lawyer, who was recommended to me, and this man, who has become a real close friend, sorted it out for me, he cleaned it up. I paid off all my debts, particularly to the Inland Revenue, and he now looks after me, and if anybody gives me a hard time he turns around and does what he thinks is necessary.”

The other vital element in the Best revival was his girlfriend, Mary Shatila, who runs his diary. “I worked it out with Mary that in the last two years I’ve made something  like 1000 appearances. And two I haven’t turned up for. One other one, I turned up where I’d had too much to drink – obviously you take a chance with that. So, I figure, the amount I do, it’s like football, if you play a hundred games and you’re still ahead, you’re all right.”

Best’s long-standing relationship has surprised many, not least those who took a vicarious pleasure in his playboy lifestyle. “We all make mistakes when we’re kids,” he says. “I don’t make too many anymore. And the ones that I do make, I rectify very quickly.”

A few years ago, he was quoted as saying he was incapable of fidelity. “That was years ago. When we’re kids, ships in the night and all that rubbish, but I’ve found a lady I’m happy with so it doesn’t even cross my mind. I still have the opportunities, but I wouldn’t let her down. For eight years now I’ve been very happy.”

He is, however, level-headed about these things. Yes, it gives him a sense of balance knowing someone is on his side, but who knows? “Things can change. She can meet somebody else, I can meet somebody, but at least we’re mature enough to know that. We don’t drive ourselves nuts wondering if it will happen or not.”

Football? People are always asking George Best about football. He hosts football shows on Radio 5 and LBC, and his view is that the coaching of children in the British game is a disgrace, and that the overall standard is far below what it was when he played. He tells people what they want to hear – that there are no characters in the game anymore, by which he means players who entertained, broke the rules.

“I quit because the game was changing and it wasn’t fun anymore. They were talking about systems and fitness and stamina. They stopped talking about flair and charisma. And I was just a little bit disillusioned with it so I disappeared. I opened a club in Manchester for a while and then I went off to America.”

The stories about Best’s excesses are legion, and he plays up to them in his act. The Wogan humiliation has added a bitter twist to his public image, making his less sober outbursts more newsworthy than they ought to be. He has spent much of the last week retracting a remark he made about the quality of the current Manchester United team. “I did a dinner a couple of weeks ago and some guy asked me a silly question about Man United and how I felt about them. It was like asking me if I thought Muhammad Ali was a great fighter. It’s a stupid question, isn’t it? So I said flippantly that I thought they were crap, trying to be funny. And the press printed ‘Best Says United Are Crap’.”

An apology to Bobby Charlton is less successful. “They asked me what I thought about Bobby Charlton and I said he was a miserable bastard. The thing is, Bobby and I are quite good pals. We didn’t mix socially, but when we finished training Bobby went home to his wife and kids and the rest of us went out gambling, shagging and drinking. So all this crap that you read is a load of rubbish. But he still is a miserable bastard, yes.”

Offstage, Best is less excitable, though still resentful of press distortions. He intends to sue over a recent report about the cancellation of a This Is Your Life programme in which he was to be the star.
“They (the newspaper) said they cancelled it because I was unreliable or they weren’t sure I would turn up, which is totally untrue and false. They cancelled it because they couldn’t get certain people that were supposed to be there. When I think that I haven’t played for over 20 years in this country, that national newspapers would still want to print rubbish like that… It freaks me out when you think what’s going on in the world.”

And yet, his attitude to the press is complicated. Since he no longer plays, it is such stories, true or not, which fan the flames of the legend. Where the real Best can be found in this is anyone’s guess. He suggests this has been the case throughout his career.

“You see; all the stories, I let them  get on with it, because it helps me. I work around them. In all honesty, you can’t do what I did on a pitch and be out till 3, 4, or 5 on the morning. I never ever went out after a Tuesday.” He chuckles. “I did all my wining and dining on a Saturday night after the game. Sunday, Monday, maybe Tuesday, but after that, that was it. I was like a monk. You can’t do it as an athlete and be the best.” When he talks to young kids about football, he warns them that it is a very short life, that if they are lucky it will last until they are 35, and that’s when the real pressure will start.

“All of a sudden, you’re finished, and what do you do after that? You have to find something to give you the buzz that football gave you. And most of them find it very difficult, so they turn to whatever – whether it’s gambling or drugs or drink. And I almost fell into that. Well, I did for a long time. But I’m lucky, I found something that gives me a buzz. I love television work, I love radio, I love the theatres because it gives you a buzz when you do a good show. I love travelling. I love the good life. I’m still getting paid 20 years after I finished playing. I see friends of mine, people I played with, who are out cleaning windows or sweeping the roads. It’s terrible to see them. I consider myself very lucky that I’ve got through all that and survived.”

Which leads neatly to the booze. Best has tried many methods to give it up, but has now decided that the simplest thing to do is to have a drink when he wants one.

“If people buy me drinks I don’t drink them. If I feel like a drink, I do, if I don’t, I don’t. Look at my schedule – if I was as bad as people say I am, I couldn’t do it.

“Everyone who’s been through the problems knows that the rule in the AA is one day at a time – and even before I heard of the AA or had an alcohol problem I always lived my life that way. But at the moment, things are just unbelievable. I’m just trying to tidy up a few loose ends to make sure that if I disappear in a couple of weeks from now I know my son’s taken care of, I know my girlfriend’s taken care of, and my friends and family.” He adds that he is not planning to disappear.

“Oh no. I’ll be around for a long time. They told me I wouldn’t make 30, and it’s coming up to 50. I don’t want to go anywhere, I’m enjoying it too much.”

In A Sporting Night To Remember, says George Best, “they are all true stories, maybe spiced up a little bit.” Which means he will tell the audience that he reason he left Britain for North America in the 1970s was because he saw an advert which read “Drink Canada Dry” and he thought it would be a good idea to start at the top and work his way down. He will tell the Miss Worlds story (he only bedded three: it should have been seven, but he didn’t turn up for four). And he will say that he thinks Paul Gascoigne is a good player, buy may never be a great one. “You know that number 10 on his back? It’s not his position, it’s his IQ.”

The answers are routines in which Best plays up to his image, though there does not seem to be a script for questions about his son Calum, who lives in the US with his ex-wife. “Does Calum have your talent?” the host Peter Brackley asks. 

“Well, he likes shagging, I know that!”

“He’s only seven!” Brackley suggests.

“Did we do Tommy Docherty?” Best snaps, changing the subject. In fact, Calum is 12, but Best deflects further questioning, preferring to expound black thoughts about what he is going to do to his former agent, Bill McMurdo.

Mostly, though, Best has no need to step over the questions. He has heard most of them before, and many of them are cues to embark on a seasoned anecdote. “It’s like Sinatra,” he says. “People want to hear the old stories.”

He ends with his answer to a question no one has asked, about whether he has regrets. It is a story about the night he went to the casino in Birmingham with his then-girlfriend, Mary Stavin (one of the Miss Worlds) and won £25,000. Returning to the hotel at 4am, he is greeted by an Irish porter who professes delight at finally meeting his hero, and subsequently arrives in his hotel room with a bottle of champagne and three glasses. Best badly wants rid of the porter, and slips him some money to leave. “He’s backing out the door, and he’s had another look at Mary in the see-through negligee, and the 25 grand, and the bottle of Dom Perignon, and he says: ‘Mr Best, can I ask you something that’s been bothering me for 20 years.’

“I said, ‘What’s that, Paddy?’

“He said, ‘Where the fuck did it all go wrong?’”

And here, in the less mythic present, George Best takes another swig of champagne, and the men in the trenchcoats and the couples and the boys with the dates stamped on their knuckles file into an orderly queue for autographs. Best signs them patiently, and poses for photographs with strangers at £5 a throw. The man with the Polaroid camera runs out of film. 
[First published in 1993]

Carl Perkins on Elvis, Rockabilly, and the Haunting Sound of 706 Union Avenue

In Memphis, everyone has an Elvis ghost story. If Mystery Train, the Jim Jarmusch film, is to be believed, he appears most often on the outskirts of town, hitching a ride to Graceland. The boy Presley is never far from the action in the movie; providing a nickname for Joe Strummer, making a friendly visitation to a lonely hotel room, and prompting a bone of contention between two Japanese tourists.

Having made a pilgrimage to Memphis, the young couple must establish the identity of the king of rock’n’roll before their sightseeing itinerary can be finalised. “Elvis,” says one. “Carl Perkins,” says the other.
Fifty-seven years old, and still wearing blue suede shoes, Carl Perkins himself has an eerie story to tell. It happened in 1986 when, along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, he visited the partially-restored Sun recording studio at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee.

An 18-wheel mobile recording truck stood outside the tiny studio, while inside, the four rock’n’roll greats recreated the Million Dollar Quartet of some three decades before, with Orbison filling the slot vacated by Elvis Presley in that most celebrated of jam sessions.

Even today, the memory makes Carl Perkins shudder. “I don’t know much about ghosts,” he notes cautiously. “I can’t say I do or don’t believe in them. I believe in spirits. I know that I have felt my brother Jay, who was killed in 1956. And I do feel my dad around me sometimes, I have my own little private talks with him when I’m out alone fishin’.

“But there was a feel that Presley was there. We talked about it. The piano that we all used was sittin’ there, 30 years later. I said: ‘Right here is where I was standing scared to death when I was singing my first song.’ And John said, ‘Well, he had the mike right close up to that corner when I walked in.’ And Jerry Lee, he came out with comments like, ‘Hell, I don’t know where I was at. I was drunk then, and I still am!’

“There was a song on that album called We Remember The King, and when we finished singing that song [producer] Chips Moman called us out to the truck. We listened, four old rockers standing there with our heads down. Nothing was said, not one word, till that song was finished and it was silent. I seized the moment. I said, ‘Guys, I want you to know, and I’m not ashamed to tell you, I love you.’ We all hugged each other, and it was a very touching time.’”

The thought of Elvis has not always generated such benevolence in Carl Perkins. In March, 1956, en route to the Perry Como Show to promote his song Blue Suede Shoes, Perkins’ eight-seater Chrysler Imperial smashed into a pick-up truck, fracturing Carl’s skull and leaving his brother Tony in intensive care.

“I was 85 miles away from being the first rockabilly ever to be on national television,” he recalls, with little trace of bitterness. Instead, from his hospital bed, Perkins heard increasingly heated reports of how Elvis was making the song his own. “I had a lot of questions to ask the good Lord, and I did. I was laying in a cast; being flat on your back, you’re forced to look up. During my long days and nights of laying there I wondered and questioned: ‘Why did this happen to me when I was so close?’”

Today, Perkins is philosophical about it all. “I could never have been in Elvis’s class. The accident and those alcohol bouts … I don’t know how much stardom it might have took away from me, but it wouldn’t have hurt Elvis at all had I not had them. He just had that magic of being the total entertainer. He had the most unique look. He was a handsome dude. He had moves that they will try to copy for the rest of eternity. I see a lot of Elvis moves in people like Michael Jackson, but Elvis – those hipshakin’. Kneeknockin’ moves he made – he didn’t go to school to learn how to do that, that was how he felt about his music. His soul made him  move like that.

“There has never been another star like Presley. I haven’t known anyone come close to him, even the Beatles, the Stones, Tom Jones. Elvis never came down off that ladder. When he went to number one, he stayed there.”
For Perkins, the road to these truths was long and winding. At first, tormented by the biggest ‘what if?’ of them all, he sought answers in the bottle.

“I turned to alcohol very heavy after that,” he sighs. “There’s no question that it had a big effect on my songwriting. I got to the point where I drank every day and it almost destroyed my family life. My personal physical condition was getting very bad until I started counting my blessings.”

A true musical innovator, Perkins started out working the cotton fields of Tennessee. His first guitar was made of a cigar box and a length of baling wire, and he was one of the first players to add rhythm to country music, creating what became known as rockabilly. The power of the result, as heard in countless Sun recordings, stands as pure and inarguable as it did back in the 1950s. Yet by the early 1960s, Perkins was unknown in his homeland.

Then, in 1964, he hit Britain with  Chuck Berry, and reaped the rewards of his influence on the Beatles. George Harrison has virtually learned his guitar style from a Carl Perkins LP. “A lot of the kids liked me, and I got a renewed feeling about myself.”

Cash and Perkins (right)

The drinking didn’t stop, and in 1965, Perkins became guitarist on the Johnny Cash Show. “He and I put our habits together. John had a very bad drug habit and I was an alcoholic. But the two of us straightened our lives out.”

Today, having come to terms with his past, Perkins is in fine shape. Like Cash, he has found solace in the Lord, and also come to recognise his musical strengths. Born to Rock, his latest set, is a creditable return to first principles, balancing sprightly rockabilly with sad old country laments. The album was recorded in the old-fashioned way, with all but backing singers The Jordanaires playing together in the studio, recording the song as a complete entity, rather than as the sum of multi-tracked parts. “You get an incentive to really try to play licks when you’re looking at a player sitting across from you, and you get those smiles and eye contacts.”

It’s also the way it used to be on the Sun recordings. And, though the studio building has been mythologised by musicians and actors from U2 to Dennis Quaid, Perkins locates the secret of the Sun sound in the people. “Every artist that walked in there was thrilled to death to get on a record,” he says. “Plus the fact that Sam Phillips made you reach down there and give it everything you had. And he’d take mistakes with it. I’d tell him a lot of times, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Phillips, I made a terrible mistake on that guitar.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, but listen, I’ll show you where you made up for it.’ So overall, the man might just have been a recording genius and nobody realised it.

“There wasn’t a clock on the wall in Sun studio. If you took all night, he didn’t care. You go into Nashville and the players are sitting looking at their watches, and they know that after three hours they’re gonna start getting time and a half.”

Having rediscovered his strengths, Perkins is concentrating on staying fit and enjoying being number one in his home. He’s been happily married for 37 years, and counts his pro-family anthem Daddy Sang Bass (a hit for Johnny Cash) as his best piece of work.

“You know, when all this is over,” he reflects, “and Carl Perkins is being laid to rest, I’d just like for anyone that walks by to say, ‘Well, when he did get his life together, and realised that he had more left than he lost by not getting to be a big superstar, the old dude really tried, and he left us a song that I really want to listen to again.”

Interview October 1989

The Jam, The Modern World, and Paul Weller's Jumper

I wrote a piece about The Jam's This Is The Modern World in the new Uncut special edition about Paul Weller. Along the way, I asked the sleeve designer Bill Smith a few questions, and he was good enough to send me this.

I was responsible for all the Jam covers – singles and albums, from In the City through to Absolute Beginners. For the cover of This Is the Modern World I wanted to produce a very Post-Modern image, with some small nod to Situationism. The photographer was Gered Mankowitz, a photographer who was working with the Stones and Hendrix in the ‘60’s and many other pop stars from then through to the ‘90’s. I wanted an urban/modern setting for the band that firmly rooted them into London culture, so we found the location for the shoot under the Westway near North Kensington. The Mod influence was very much down to Paul, he had seen Pete Townshend wearing a jacket or something with arrows on, so we put the arrows using gaffer tape onto his jumper. Having used the suits for the first In the City shoot, we quickly moved into the more Mod/Carnaby Street look from then on. The shoot was done using daylight and then added flash to give heavy shadowing and emphasise the concrete monoliths of the Westway support columns and the feeling of claustrophobia from the road above. We were all pleased with the resulting images.

Swamp-Psych Gardening: The Organic Strangeness Of Plant And See

Plant And See: Forris Fulford(left),
 Willie Lowery (2nd left)

Plant and See, a Southern swamp-rock group with psychedelic fringes, were never going to be easy to categorise. They were led by Willie French Lowery, a Lumbee Indian from Robeson County, North Carolina, who devoted his life to his people’s culture. Previously, he worked in a carnival, and as bandleader for Clyde McPhatter (of the Drifters). He wrote a deodorant commercial, and fronted the psychedelic also-rans Corporate Image.
Plant And See offered an escape, though the group’s line-up was remarkable enough in the still segregated South. African-American New Yorker Forris Fulford played drums, and was joined by Latino bassist Ronald Seiger and Scottish-Irish singer Carol Fitzgerald. “All of us had history of playing with soul groups,” recalls Fulford. “It was pretty popular in that area at the time, and Willie knew Carol, she was into Janis Joplin and stuff like that. We had good chemistry. I was really laid back, and Willie was laid back; even though we were in the South in the Sixties, and actually it was kinda rough around there. When they said ‘living across the tracks’, they really meant that. When I went to do the soul gigs, I would play across the tracks, at Big Joe’s Plantation or something like that.
“Our music pulled everything together. In the South, it was really separated. We used to do the college circuit, and there would be a lot of tension with the rednecks. We were a mixed group. The cats had long hair, and I had a ’fro. And we had this white redhead as a singer. We’d go into some places after the gig and we’d get some really hard stares!”
Though the group’s background was in soul, their ambitions lay in jazz. “We would try,” says Fulford, “but when you start playing you can’t play jazz, you just think you’re playing jazz! I really came from a jazz-influenced background and started playing soul, and I always liked the rock groups, especially Led Zeppelin and Hendrix. As a group we went to see Grand Funk Railroad live at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and we saw Edgar Winter, then the Allman Brothers came to town and we were the warm-up group, so we got to know them pretty well – the original group with Duane Allman and Berry Oakley.”
Musically, Plant and See were diverse. Personally, they were unassuming. “Willie was very talented, but very laid back,” recalls drummer Forris Fulford. “He’d go into a place, and you wouldn’t even know he was there. He wasn’t the one to get up front and go ‘see me’. Actually, nobody in the group was – we were a shy band!”
Their only record came out in 1969 on the foundering White Whale label (home of Jim Ford and The Turtles). “Willie knew these agents in North Carolina. There was two of them – one, he was a crook, a Costa Rican. And there was another guy who was like the local agent, so they got together, and so when we came over with our material, they said ‘Well, let’s see if we can get you guys into the mix’. So we had an audition to go to New York and play for this firm – we were just glad to go and play. They liked the group, they bought us equipment, and they sent us to California to record with White Whale Records. We had a chance to work with some big producers like Al Schmitt who did a whole lot of Elvis Presley recordings [and engineered Moon River]. We stayed out there long enough to record and then we headed back to the East Coast.”
The album suffered because it was impossible to pigeonhole, though that is its strength too. The sound is built on Lowery’s swampy guitar, but flits between the sultry rock stylings of “Put Out My Fire” (like a jittery Hendrix, channelling tribal rhythms) and the sweet soul of “Henrietta”, with Lowery’s pained vocal floating over lush harmonies.
“In those days everything was psychedelic,” says Fulford. “The way you dressed, and kaleidoscopes, and incense, and tie-dye. The parents of the children coming to the gigs were more rigid than the kids going to college, even in the South, so when we played the colleges, they didn’t have any problems with race – it was just outside the college, dealing with the folks in town. Willie understood what it was like growing up like that – I understood – even though I grew up in New York, just travelling to the South my parents.”
Plant and See evolved into Lumbee, recording another album, before Lowery retreated into community-oriented songwriting. He died in May, just missing the change to see his music being re-issued and appreciated afresh. MC Taylor of Paradise of Bachelors label-mates Hiss Golden Messenger offers this tribute.
“Willie Lowery ran the gauntlet of the music industry for nearly 50 years and never played a dishonest note, in the process becoming an inspiration for, and hero to, the native Lumbee community, as well as South-Eastern red dirt musicians who decide to tell the truth, consigning themselves to the long road. He was the real thing.”
Fulford, who now plays residencies in a Tokyo hotel, is happy that Plant and See are being given another outing. “Racial tension was pretty heavy, but we were able to get by because of our music. I think we did some playing that was fresh and raw and spontaneous.”
Buy Plant And See on limited edition virgin vinyl from Paradise of Bachelors

Mistaken Identity? Another Side of Bob Dylan (With A Soupcon Of Biographical Masquerade)

How do you solve a problem like Bob? There is, hidden within the 588 pages of this gnarly, splenetic biography, a simple solution, proposed by the subject himself. It occurs at a press conference held to promote Dylan’s 1969 appearance on the Isle of Wight. “What is your position on politics and music?” the singer is asked. “My job is to play music,” Dylan replies. “I think I’ve answered enough questions.” In that answer lies the riddle. Dylan plays music. He raises more questions than he answers. His autobiography, Chronicles, though beautifully written, was a bit magical realist with the verité. No Direction Home, the Scorsese documentary made with the approval of Dylan’s management, was celebratory, not penetrating. The less he talks, the more Dylan disappears beneath the pondweed of his reputation. The longer he plays, the more the algae multiply. These days, Dylanology is a swamp of intrigue, with Bob as its frog king. But even as a croak-voiced deity, Dylan presents a problem, as Bell notes, wearily. “The famous mystique, like the abhorrence of interpretation, is founded on an implacable reticence.” Which leaves us where? Well, this is not a biography of revelation. Those hoping to discover what really happened when Dylan crashed his motorcycle will be disappointed. (“There was an accident. Or rather, there was an accident.”) The gory details of his heroin use (or non-use) are not contained within. At times, Bell derides the notion of biography itself, referring dismissively to “biographical stalkers”, a class of writer he puts on the rack of contempt next to rock hacks. There is, perhaps, a problem of method. Bell shows every sign of being the best kind of Dylan fan, with a questioning spirit and an abiding fascination with the music. He has inhaled the songs, examined the run-out grooves of countless bootlegs, and scoured the library for clues to Dylan’s motivations. But if he has done any first-hand research, he’s not boasting about it. It’s a given, of course, that Dylan himself wouldn’t help. And it’s true that there exists among Dylan collaborators a polite omerta. But it wouldn’t have done any harm to seek out the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or Pete Seeger to probe their memories of the Greenwich Village scene; Dylan’s reverence for Woody Guthrie; or the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan (apparently, allegedly) offended the folkies by making an electric rock racket. Part of this can be credited to Bell’s clinical distaste for gossip, but he does borrow from existing interviews and books. Suze Rotolo’s 2008 biography, for instance, helps establish her as an important figure in Dylan’s creative development. (That other famous girlfriend, Joan Baez, is cast less sympathetically). The book’s insights are elsewhere. At its heart, Once Upon A Time is a literary biography, centred on a fictional character named “Bob Dylan”. (The inverted commas are part of the deal). So “Dylan”, for Dylan (nee Zimmerman), is a continuing act of reinvention. Bell writes: “His ‘Dylan’ … was cast in line of descent from Huck Finn, John Ford, Steinbeck and Woody [Guthrie]. He was, even in 1961, a recognised American type, a ghost from the back roads. And Bobby Zimmerman wished he had been that type. It was the only way he could make sense of himself.” Viewing Dylan as a set of characters is not unusual, as evidenced by Todd Haynes’s baffling film, I’m Not There, in which six actors competed to misunderstand the Myth of Bob. But Bell’s literary bent is his book’s strength. He brings fresh insight into the poetic qualities of Dylan’s verse, examining the rhyme scheme in Subterranean Homesick Blues, and detecting hitherto unknown value in his book, Tarantula (its verbal experiments led, Bell argues, to the triumph of Like A Rolling Stone.) Bell is also interesting on the writers who influenced Dylan (notably Kenneth Patchen), and as a one-line summary, his quote from Hunter S Thompson’s 1961 essay on the “fraudulent farmers” of Greenwich Village is hard to beat: “Dylan is a goddamn phenomenon,” frothed Thompson, “pure gold, and as mean as a snake.” Bell is a muscular critic, too. “That unaccountably popular dirge,” Masters of War, he says, has “one of the dullest melodies Dylan ever stole.” If his dismissal of Dylan’s country-influenced 1969 LP, Nashville Skyline, as “a symptom of artistic paralysis” is too cruel, it prompts him to reveal his view that “ultimate seriousness lies in the blues and the ancient wisdom of folk music.” Likewise, his hostility towards DA Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back is overstated; though it does trigger a defence of TIME interviewer Horace Judson, who is subjected to a patronising assault in the film by the cool, cruel Dylan. “An ignorant journalist was treating him as a pop-culture mystery,” Bell writes. “That wasn’t exactly unreasonable.” Not exactly. In truth, Judson was a patsy, and Bob, hopped up on something, was in no mood to explain. He rarely is. Bell’s book, by unpeeling the masks, goes a long way to proving something that should be obvious, but isn’t always: Dylan’s most compelling fictions were songs. ONCE UPON A TIME: THE LIVES OF BOB DYLAN By Ian Bell, (Mainstream, £20)

Artist, Singer, Cyclist, Herky-Jerky Intellectual: The Endless Curiosity of Shy Talking Head David Byrne

David Byrne was never going to write a conventional autobiography. As lead singer of Talking Heads, and as a solo performer, artist, cyclist and herky-jerky intellectual, he has always displayed a restless curiosity; a rare quality in rock music. But then, Byrne has only ever had one foot in rock. Though emanating from the same New York scene which produced the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith and Television, who all got their start in Hilly Kristal’s club CBGB, Talking Heads borrowed heavily from disco, even though they couldn’t quite play it, and as Byrne’s confidence increased, they inhaled funk and gospel, with the singer exploring musical styles which favoured ecstatic abandon over intellect; though, obviously, he pursued this path with relentless intelligence. In his solo career, he has explored Brazilian music, opera, and film soundtracks, without ever abandoning the pop song. In a personal sense, he is more concerned with questions of creativity and – a difficult idea, but not a contradiction – the sincerity of performance. In what is perhaps his most celebrated incarnation, as the centrepiece of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, Byrne offers a parody of a musical frontman, disappearing inside a giant suit, as if to demonstrate visually that the role of the performer, the clothes he inhabits, are more important than the singer himself. Hence, the pressures and pleasures of his own life appear only fleetingly here. When recording his eponymous 1994 album, the music became more spare, “possibly… in response to a recent death in the family.” Around the time of his 2004 solo LP, Grown Backwards, he notes, “there was love, anger, sadness and frustration in my life”. For his 2008 collaboration with Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, he explains: “I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical, to have some faith, even when nothing seemed to justify it. Writing and singing seemed to be an attempt at a kind of musical self-healing.” Actually, the Big Suit has a broader significance for Byrne, because it signals his acceptance of theatricality. There had been costumes before, of course, including a checked polyester suit which shrunk to absurdity in the wash. Prior to that, Byrne had been an art student and a busker, with an “old world immigrant beard”. He had toiled in the folk scene, playing Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran songs on the ukulele (“it was an oddball mish-mash, but it wasn’t boring”). Then, on tour in Japan with Talking Heads, he encountered traditional theatre – Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku. These forms, Byrne noted, were highly stylised, unlike the more naturalistic Western tradition. So, when fashion designer Jurgen Lehl suggested to him that “everything on stage needs to be bigger”, he took the remark too literally. You can get lost trying to locate the irony in the symbolism of that outfit. On one level, at least, it symbolises Byrne’s view of himself as an art worker (he’s not big on the notion of musicians as creative geniuses). “Sometimes,” he writes, “it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting  groceries or doing the laundry – banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up, and songwriting might be viewed similarly, as the response to specific and even pedestrian needs.” Nor is he keen to explain the meaning of his songs, because he believes it changes with the context in which the song is heard, and in many cases his lyrics begin as gibberish and evolve to fit the music. Or, the songs change shape as other players join in: Psycho Killer was originally envisaged as a ballad, but Byrne’s bandmates pulled it in a different direction. Byrne applies the same dry logic to his chosen career. He really does try to explore how music works, right down to the neurons, without ever quite letting go of the sense that its beauty is located in its mystery. At times, the book resembles a business manual, exploring the influence of technology (not always benign, he suggests, but mostly irresistible), and the death of the music industry. There is much surprising detail – perhaps too much – on the economics of recording and releasing music. The choices, these days, are a) being Madonna and selling your soul to a concert promoter or b) doing it yourself. It’s not impossible to pay the rent by following the second route, but generally speaking, money is made by touring, not recording.  Byrne does OK, but not without careful arithmetic. If he seems detached and almost clinically logical in his prose, it may be because his brain is wired that way.  He suggests he had, or has, a form of Asperger’s syndrome (“very mild, I think”) in which “leaping up in public to do something wildly expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me.” He adds: “Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify.” No irony there either; just a sincere appreciation of the power of song. How Music Works is published by Canongate, £22

Mike Scott's Adventures Of A Waterboy: (Or, How To Misread A Book In One Easy Lesson)

Some years ago – towards the end of the period covered by this autobiography – I interviewed Mike Scott. The Waterboys’ frontman had a reputation for being difficult, though “taciturn” might have been a better way of putting it. To break the ice, I took a copy of Jungleland, the fanzine he published while living in Edinburgh in the late 1970s. It was a passionate document, all punk fury and sputum, tempered by a poetic sensibility. Yet he observed this relic with dispassion. His past, it seemed, was a foreign country.

Happily – and this may be a question of happiness – Scott now seems reconciled to the value of looking back, albeit in a way which desaturates the torment. Possibly he was encouraged by the memoirs of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, artists who shaped his aesthetic vision, though Scott’s story is more rooted in detail than the sketchy poetics of Dylan’s Chronicles or Smith’s Just Kids.

Jungleland, Scott's fanzine.

Scott has always been self-aware. As a soundtrack to reading this book, I’ve been listening to a tape of a solo concert Scott did at the Hackney Empire in 1995. The tape itself is a fascinating biographical document, intimate and eerie – made eerier by virtue of being recorded direct from the desk, so there’s no applause. All you hear is Scott, emboldened but vulnerable, as he emerges from career hibernation. The details of his journey are evident in the songs, most specifically Long Way To The Light, which follows the singer to New York, where he aims to get back to what he does best: “Plug in an electric guitar, lead a rock’n’roll band.”

At the time, there was some talk among Waterboys’ fans about his relocation from the West Coast of Ireland. Scott, it was said, had journeyed West, full of visions of Jimi Hendrix, abandoning the music that had made his name – a fusion of Celtic folk and rock’n’roll swagger. (This, to be fair, is mere hearsay – but it wouldn’t be the first time Scott’s freewheeling spirit had caused him to up sticks in search of fresh inspiration.) But it didn't work out. Instead, he learned how to meditate, and to live “one step at a time”. So, instead of recharging his cosmic batteries in Electric Ladyland, he came back to Scotland, to the Findhorn community.
On the Hackney tape, he calls Findhorn a “mystery school”, which sounds better than a religious retreat, and is probably closer to Scott’s sensibility. His God doesn’t have a beard and a set of Commandments, and he might just as easily be called Pan.

This, by any measure, is heady stuff, and Scott’s openness about his quest for spiritual succour is commendable. (Rock’n’roll, which appears to celebrate freedom of thought and behaviour, is actually a conservative church).
He does seem to have learned about humility along the way. The book details Scott’s first gig in the Findhorn community, where he was vain enough to imagine that the residents might be grateful to hear a performance by a professional musician. Instead, he was received politely, before being upstaged by “a motley parade of men in drag, G-strings and feather strewn crash helmets”. (Which sounds a lot like Top of the Pops).

As with all autobiographies, the narrative is shaped by the author’s current priorities. I could have read more about his truncated university career in Edinburgh, and his time with Another Pretty Face, a great live band who fused the energies of The Clash and Springsteen and briefly won the favour of Julie Burchill with the Sapphic anthem All The Boys Love Carrie.
But APF are briskly despatched (just as they were by Virgin Records). There is, though, a succinct description of his Edinburgh contemporaries, The Rezillos, “a shrieking gang of rubber-faced pop-art terrorists with great choruses and sheet metal guitars”. He also mentions the thrill of seeing Johnny Thunders up close at the Hope and Anchor in London, and the disappointment of witnessing Thunders being unable to perform due to his addictions. And, speaking of the destructive side effects of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, there’s a delightful image of the journalist Nick Kent, at home in London. “I’d often see him standing in his garden, watching the world pass him by like a horse looking over a hedge”.

There is also a sweet, incredible story from that period, in which Scott, as editor of Jungleland, manages to blag his way into the entourage of Patti Smith when she plays a 1978 show at the Rainbow in North London. Smith even pays for his hotel room, expecting in return nothing more than the possibility that Scott will enjoy the show and take the word back to Edinburgh. Scott gets more than he bargains for, witnessing the sound check, and insinuating his way into Smith’s chauffeur driven car for the after-show party, where he gorges on free sandwiches. But this is a parable, and what Scott witnesses is chastening. In the car, he observes that Smith’s voice had taken on “a subtle, yet pointed, warning tone.” It was, he says, “dominating, aggressive and scary. I was witnessing what happens when a star performer, the centre of attention, high on the residual energy of the show, lets that energy overflow into their offstage life.” No longer talking about Patti Smith, he notes the danger of an unchecked ego: “encouraged by the fawning and lying of sycophants, this process turns sane, talented loving people into vile monsters. ”
That's how he sees it now. But consider this paean to Patti, from that 1980 edition of Jungleland. “The girl w/ the big eyes is a heroine of mine, who connects not just w/ my eyes + ears, but somewhere deep inside. this communication is not from the beat of the music, the thrash of guitars or the words of the song. It's somewhere else - an inexplicable thread which twists + pumps, like the music, almost parallel if you like, but never touching. the girl with the big eyes says a lot to me that can't be found in lyric sheets + the further in I get, the harder it is to get out. ”
What else? Well, Scott is a fan first, so there’s a nice story about waving at Bob Dylan through the windows of his tour bus at Earl’s Court in 1977, and then following him to his hotel in Kensington, only to be expelled by promoter Harvey Goldsmith. Later, Scott will jam with Dylan at Dave Stewart’s studio in Crouch End, North London. He also punctures a Waterboys’ myth – that he missed an appearance on Top of the Pops because he was strumming with Dylan. He didn’t. But it is the kind of thing he might have done.

Musically, things are sketchier, possibly because Scott doesn’t want to fray the inexplicable thread by offering an autopsy of his inspirations. One of his first musical epiphanies came when he first heard the psychedelic outro to The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever. “Surely everybody knew the outro … represented a procession of brightly clothed Beatles jigging in and out of traffic during rush hour in an Asian city, pursued by water buffaloes and snake charmers?” But the young Scott is surprised to discover that not everyone shared this perception. An appendix in the book includes other interpretations of Strawberry Fields, as if to prove that we all march to different drums.

But there are valuable glimpses into the creative process, including an explanation of how he wrote his anthem, The Whole of the Moon. (The piano sounds that way because Scott taught himself to play on a piano with broken strings). He also details his gradual immersion in Celtic folk, and the growing realisation that some of its rhythms were in his blood: “In the bloom of their youth on the Isle of Mull my great-grandparents themselves might well have shaken a leg to The Fiddler’s Frolic.” In Ireland, too, he learns to laugh at himself, and let himself go creatively: “Polishing off Bang on the Ear with tragi-comic lines such as ‘It started off in Fife, it ended up in tears’ was something of a breakthrough for me, and it felt good.”

The book ends with Rock In A Weary Land, in 2000. Since then, of course, Scott has re-energised and retooled the Waterboys more than once, and departed Findhorn to return to Ireland. 

What’s he like? Well, on this evidence, Scott is a restless soul, a wanderer seeking stimulation as much as peace of mind. He frames his life’s journey as a mystical quest, oscillating between something spiritual and something poetic, with the author being happiest when these two forces are entwined.

I think, I guess, that Scott’s journey was more painful, and more destructive than the one he describes in Adventures of a Waterboy. Only he will know for sure. But consider the story of his reunion with his estranged father, Allan. They had lost touch after Scott’s parents broke up, though Allan did drop round on Scott’s 10^th birthday with a gift of an acoustic guitar and a Rolling Stones album. Thirty years later, Scott tracks him down to an address near Birmingham, and knocks on the door, unannounced. They get on, but Scott’s dad is not as he imagined he would be. “All those years I’d believed I was cast in the image of my father, I’d actually been casting him in the image of me. The free spirit shifting from scene to scene was myself...”
POSTSCRIPT: Mike has been in touch to point out that I have misinterpreted his reaction to seeing Jungleland - he was, and is, proud of it. The rest of the review, he suggests, is amateur psychology, based on that misconception.

Cosmic Ceiling Tiles, Elvis Presley, And The Abiding Genius Of Sam Phillips: What Made Sun The Crucible of Rock'n'Roll?

Inside Sun at 706 Union

The Sun studio, at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, has many special qualities, some of which remain mysterious. It is possible to analyse them in terms of engineering, and the way that the sound bounces around the room. You might also consider history and coincidence, and the fact that an extraordinary array of talent dropped into Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service between 1950 and 1960. Not just the now-fabled, Broadway-celebrated, Million Dollar Quartet of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. Roy Orbison got his start there, as did Howlin’ Wolf and Charlie Rich. Ike Turner may even have invented rock’n’roll within the walls of this fabled space.

But T Bone Burnett, whose affection for Sun is such that he plans to build a replica in Los Angeles, believes that Sun’s success may also be a matter of geography; specifically, the meanderings of the Mississippi.  “That river system is the lifeblood of this country,” Burnett says. “Most things that come in and out of this country go up and down the Mississippi and through that river system. The river starts right where Bob Dylan was born, up in Minnesota, and it gets big by about St Paul, Minneapolis. I find it very interesting that Dylan was up at the top of it, and Louis Armstrong was down at the bottom (in New Orleans). That is the axis, definitely, and Memphis was right in the middle.”

The first record on the Sun label was released exactly 60 years ago. Johnny London’s “Drivin’ Slow” had a rolling blues piano, and a haunting saxophone sound. It was recorded on 1 March, 1952, and delivered on acetate to DJ Dewey Phillips on the same day. The 78rpm record was pressed on 27 March, with a rooster label designed by a commercial artist on Beale Street.

As beginnings go, “Drivin’ Slow” was decidedly low-key. But listen closely to the way the sax seems to exist in its own hollow space, and you may detect the first inkling of what has become known as the Sun sound.

Sam Phillips’ studio was a no-frills affair, housed in a building first built as a bakery, and latterly-used as a radiator repair shop. “I hadn’t been to many studios, so my first impression was great,” says Roland Janes, who played guitar in the Sun band, accompanying Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as being a member of Billy Lee Riley’s Little Green Men. “I didn’t know what a studio was supposed to look like, really. I thought it was a small building, and I was amazed at the sound that we got out of it, but I didn’t think anything but good thoughts.

“The first part of the building, there was a small office. You’d go through a door, directly into the studio, and you’d go through the studio up to the control room. So the entire building was not real big.”

“Man, the office in Sun, that’s about 10’ x 10’, and they had two or three desks, so you could get a crowd in there real quick” says house drummer JM Van Eaton. “Most people hung out at Sun because it was the premier local label, plus it had a nice little restaurant right next door to it, Taylor’s Café. That’s where all the musicians would come and hang out, because Sun was so small. They’d sit around there and drink coffee, talk about their gigs and write songs.”

“Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins (the Tennessee Two) worked right across the street at a garage,” says rockabilly bandleader Sonny Burgess, “and they’d walk over there to that café and eat lunch every day. Marshall told me: ‘We didn’t even know there was a music studio there until (Johnny) Cash took us in there to record.’”

Commercially, Sun’s breakthrough came in March 1953, with Rufus Thomas’s “Bear Cat”; a novelty response to Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog”.

“It was mainly blues bands at first,” says musician and Memphis cultural historian Tav Falco. “They didn’t have the term rock’n’roll at the time. They had rhythm and blues, but that encompassed jump blues, jazz blues, r’n’b sounding bands. Ike Turner was pretty important. Who knows what Sam would have recorded without Ike? Who knows if those people would have come in like they did?”

Ike Turner had showed up on 3 March, 1951 to record the supercharged, fuzzy “Rocket 88”, with singer Jackie Brenston. To some, the distorted guitar on the record marked the birth of rock’n’roll. But in those early, pre-Sun years, Phillips also made some extraordinary blues recordings. “The first major breakthrough Sam made was with Howlin’ Wolf,” argues T Bone Burnett. “That’s when he started bringing the bass and drums up loud. Back in those days the bass and drums were background instruments; it was all about the horns and the piano, the melody instruments, and Sam brought the rhythm section right up front, and that became rock’n’roll. That was a big shift.

“In some ways “How Many More Years” by Wolf would be the first rock’n’roll song because that has the guitar lick that became the central guitar lick in rock’n’roll, and that’s the first time we heard that played on a distorted guitar. It was an old big band lick, turned into something completely fresh.”

But Sun’s reputation rests largely on what happened when happened when Phillips managed to fuse hillbilly music with the energy of rhythm and blues. Famously, Phillips’s grand ambition was to find a white singer who could replicate the energy found in black r’n’b. That singer was Elvis Presley, who also added a dash of gospel.

The 18 year-old Presley first entered the studio in July 1953, to record two songs - “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Began”. “You could pay a few dollars and they let you cut two acetate dubs, one song on each side,” recalls Van Eaton, who did the same thing. “The first time I went in there, Sam was doing the engineering.”

Phillips wasn’t present on 18 July, 1953, when Presley first visited, but the singer made enough of an impression on his assistant Marion Keisker for their brief conversation to become part of Elvis lore. “Who do you sound like?” Keisker asked. More out of humility than boastfulness, Presley replied: “I don’t sound like nobody.” The truth of this statement was evident when Phillips finally got round to recording Elvis, along with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. Their version of “Blue Moon,” says Burnett, “is psychedelic for sure. Elvis was being Bing Crosby, right? And the Inkspots. He was synthesising all this stuff.”

“The recordings that Elvis and Scotty and Bill made are out of another world,” says Chris Isaak, whose current album was recorded at 706 Union. “That voice and that echo and that guitar… and Bill Black: even his bass doesn’t sound like it’s a bass. It’s like a click and a clack, like some guy walking in the background. It’s an otherworldly sound. Carl Perkins told me, he could listen to a record and if it was cut at Sun, he could hear the room.

“Sam Phillips was Thomas Edison with music. He was light years ahead of the rest of us.”

Presley’s first single, “That’s All Right” was issued on 19 July, 1954. JM Van Eaton is in no doubt about the importance of the moment. “When Elvis came out,” he says, “man, it changed everything.”

Certainly, after Elvis, it became possible to talk of a Sun sound. Presley’s Sun recordings – around 20 songs in just over a year – crystallised a musical revolution. It started with the untutored energy of what became known as rockabilly, and matured into rock’n’roll. “What was going on at Sun records was outside of the mainstream,” says Falco. “Nobody was touching this stuff with a 30 foot pole except for race records and blues labels. Sam said: ‘People didn’t know what to call this music, they didn’t know whether it was fish or fowl.’”

It’s tempting to imagine that Phillips was a man who was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. But such an analysis ignores the technical brilliance of his work.

“Sam looks like a lucky hillbilly who started a little studio and all this talent was just here, and all he did was turn the lights on,” says Sun’s current engineer, Matt Ross-Spang. “But Sam had his electrical engineering license, and that’s a tough test. He came into this room, he put in a hardwood floor and he designed the tile for certain frequencies. That’s not hit or miss – acoustics is one of the hardest things in the world. He always talked about how he had this sound in his head that no one else was recording.”

“His greatest talent was in being able to spot unusual talent and get the most out of them,” says Janes. “He was a great engineer. He had a great ear, a great imagination. He was smart enough to let people do what they did best and then he kind of loaded it.”

“When we were in that studio, playing that first session, Sam was our audience,” says Burgess. “Only one person – it didn’t matter, as long as somebody wanted to hear us play. So we were playing like we were in front of a huge crowd. That’s why it’s so wild.”

“He didn’t have a lot of equipment,” says Janes, “but he put it together wisely, and he was one of the first people that I knew of that used slapback echo. He had three tape recorders in the control room. He had one, the main recorder that he cut the sound on, and he had another one that he used to transfer tapes from. Then he had a third machine that was rack-mounted. He fed a portion of the signal, as it came into the room, into that machine, then he played that back through the board, and added it to the original recording machine; by increasing or decreasing the volume, he was able to get, and control, the slapback echo.”

Phillips was also a master of microphone placement. “Even during a session,” Janes continues, “he might move the microphone further or closer, but once he got it to where it was sounding good to him he left it alone. And he came up with a brilliant thing with Johnny Cash – he took thin paper, and put it over one string and under the next one, over the next string, under the next one, on his guitar, and then he had that little bit of slapback on that, and that’s how he got that boom-chicka sound, along with Luther’s guitar playing to have sort of a snare drum sound. They were recording with just three instruments. He got a big sound.”

For all that rock’n’roll was decried as the devil’s work, there was a spiritual side to the revolution which took place at Sun. “Gospel and rock and roll were cut from the same cloth,” says Falco, “even though one is considered by some the devil’s music, and the other sanctified music. It was played by the same people, and appealed to the same audience.”

Sun even pitched to the same marketplace. Sam’s brother Jud Phillips – who pioneered record promotion - was a former gospel performer, and he hawked the records to the DJs he knew in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee.

“It gets to a point where musically it’s not so easy to distinguish,” says Falco. “The lyrics, yeah, and the content, but if you listen to Roebuck Staples playing the guitar in sanctified music, you hear hill-country blues coming out of the guitar.”

If this conflict could be located in the body of one individual, that person was Jerry Lee Lewis. JM Van Eaton vividly recalls his first meeting with the piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana. “The first time I ever saw him he had a goatee, and JW, his uncle, was with him, and he had his arm in a cast. And I’m thinking, ‘Man, they called me in to do this with this crazy looking piano player and a guy with his arm in a cast trying to make music? Man, this is strange.’ But I’m going to tell you, man, Jerry Lee was awesome. He could make any record his own.”

Lewis’s ability to synthesise faith and devilment in the same phrase was evident in the ferocity of his recordings, which were delivered with the untamed passion of a hellfire preacher. And it wasn’t an act. As luck would have it, the tapes were rolling in 1957 when Phillips tried to coax Jerry Lee into recording “Great Balls of Fire”. What ensued was a furious spat, in which Lewis wrestled with the notion of sin, and Phillips tried to counter with the suggestion that a rock’n’roll singer might, in some way, be able to save souls.

“I had experienced it before, so it wasn’t a total shock to me,” says Van Eaton. “I thought it was kinda funny because I could see both of them: Sam’s as serious as he could be, and Jerry’s as heated as he could be.”

“It’s an argument that went on for almost 50 years,” says Burnett. “I think it’s finally been resolved: music is a good thing, it doesn’t need any particular name put on it to make it good; like writing ‘Jesus’ on a flower doesn’t make it more beautiful.”

“I think Sun was a God thing,” concludes Van Eaton. “Certain things happen, man, in life, and that was one of them. Sam Phillips being there and opening that studio at the right time, and the people came to him. It wasn’t like he was out discovering these people. It wasn’t like a record producer going to a venue and saying ‘Hey, I’d like to sign that band.’ These people came knocking on his door. How strange is that, that you’ve got Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Billy Riley – all of these guys coming in asking you to make records on them? That’s phenomenal, you know? There is something more to it – that just doesn’t happen every day.  To me, that’s amazing.”