# Idle Worship (Text Only Edition)

Chris Roberts

In Idle Worship a hand-picked crop of stars, who should know better (and sometimes do), examine the absurd and auto-erotic world of fan fever – and ponder whether pop promises a path to enlightenment or an endless pageant of tasteless clothing, recycled attitudes and vicious haircuts.Refreshingly witty and weird, often touching and always drenched in teen spirit, this is like no other book about music ever published. Among those taking their chance to chip away at golden pop memories and to do poetic justice to the utterly ephemeral and utterly serious nature of the most popular art-form of our time are …Nick HornbyThurston MooreMartin MillarBono

IDLE WORSHIP

HOW POP EMPOWERS THE WEAK, REWARDS THE FAITHFUL, AND SUCCOURS THE NEEDY

Edited by

Chris Roberts


Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Originally published in paperback 1994

Copyright in introduction, compilation and editorial matter

Copyright © Chris Roberts 1994

Chris Roberts asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work

‘You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights’ © Bono 1994

‘Sparing the Rod’ © Nick Hornby 1994

‘Led Zeppelin and the Pixies’ © Martin Millar 1994

‘Vedder as Merton: 2001’ © Stephen J. Malkmus 1994

‘Suede or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hype’ © Caitlin Moran 1994

‘In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader’ © Thurston Moore 1994

(All songs © Sonic Tooth adm. by Zomba Songs inc BMI)

‘Stations of the Crass’ © Robert Newman 1994

‘Walking Around Being a Woman’ © Kristin Hersh 1994

‘Tonight, Your Hair Is Beautiful’ © Chris Roberts 1994

‘Musical Influence in Great Britain on Big-Head Here’ © Mark E. Smith 1994

‘Banana Republic: Memories of a Suburban Irish Childhood’ © Joseph O’Connor 1994

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006382669

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008191641

Version: 2016-05-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

‘You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights’ Bono

‘Sparing the Rod’ Nick Hornby

‘Led Zeppelin and the Pixies’ Martin Millar

‘Vedder as Merton: 2001’ Stephen J. Malkmus

‘Suede or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hype’ Caitlin Moran

‘In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader’ Thurston Moore

‘Stations of the Crass’ Robert Newman

‘Walking Around Being a Woman’ Kristin Hersh

‘Tonight, Your Hair Is Beautiful’ Chris Roberts

‘Musical Influence in Great Britain on Big-Head Here’ Mark E. Smith

‘Banana Republic: Memories of a Suburban Irish Childhood’ Joseph O’Connor

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

SO I’VE JUST GOT UP THE STAIRS with my piping hot fish and chips and the phone’s ringing. I put my fish and chips on top of the stove, which hasn’t worked for eighteen months, and think: this better be quick. ‘Yeah?’ I snarl with all the hostility I can muster.

‘Hello, Chris?’

‘Yeah.’ (A sort of three-quarters snarl, jockeying for position.)

‘Hi, it’s Bono here.’

I don’t say: Bono Who?? Neither do I ask him to ring back after I’ve had my chips. I switch into what I consider to be sweetness-and-light mode and thank him for phoning, and we talk about Frank Sinatra. ‘Have you got five minutes? I’ll read it out to you,’ he says. Oh, I think so. The chips can go hang. Because no matter how jaded you are by working around the music industry, or for that matter how jaded you are by Life Itself (big themes! already! yeah!), when one of the world’s most famous rock stars phones you up it is still, frankly, quite exciting. It is more exciting than chips, say.

The absurdity of the situation does not escape me; neither does the thought that he’d be perfectly within his rights to have a moan about one or two of my U2 reviews over the years. Yet he seems to want to talk about his enthusiasm for Frank, and stress the point that however many fans you’re perceived to have acquired yourself, you don’t stop being one, it doesn’t go away, you can still be starstruck.

While some of the contributors to Idle Worship remain rather gloriously starstruck, others remember when they were, with affection or disbelief. Some admit to hideous embarrassment, while others eulogise the inspiration and motivation drawn from leading pop lights. Others go off on berserk ‘irrelevant’ tangents, which is fine by me.

Some time ago I was approached by Philip Gwyn Jones at HarperCollins with a view to compiling a book that ran against the grain of ‘hagiographical, pompous, inane’ writing on modern music. I was very impressed by the word ‘hagiographical’, and, after looking it up, and demanding a rider of Last-Days-of-Pompeii proportions, set myself to the task. This involved innumerable letters and phone calls and becoming The Nag from Hell. Then saying, ‘Yeah, whatever. Sounds good to me,’ whenever a writer or musician got out of bed long enough to call me back and proffer a synopsis. We wanted an eclectic mix of story-tellers and I think I can safely say the diversity herein, by accident or design, is both luscious and arousing. Many PRs were very helpful over the course of this book’s protracted birth. And some were entirely bloody useless. Thanks to the former.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the more established ‘writers’ who delivered the goods most promptly, increasing the literary merit of my letterbox before I could say Smokey Robinson. I am baffled as to how they found the time when they should be doing proper joiny-up writing, but hey, in the world of rock’n’roll there’s no sleep till the typewriter ribbon gets all snaggled. Dreams of Sex and Stagediving author Martin Millar compares and contrasts his experiences attending noisy hairy gigs seventeen years apart, discovering in the process that the Pixies pummel the sweat glands as ferociously as Led Zeppelin fired the awe. After sending me this he rang to see if I could get him on the guest list for Smashing Pumpkins, which proves his reborn zeal knows no bounds. Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby’s secret admiration for the very great Rod Stewart is long overdue for exposure, especially since he once made a veiled reference in a popular magazine to my owning a Genesis album. Still, no-one twigged except me. Any jibes about the Johnny Cougar debut album will however be matched by a ruthless description of the neo-Rod haircut sported in his days as midfield dynamo for the college Third XI. Ah, the joys of the old school tie set-up. When I first discussed this book with Desperadoes author Joseph O’Connor, whose sister is no stranger to the slings and arrows of pop fortune, I was myopic enough to mumble, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if Bob Geldof’s very topical.’ Reading his masterful evocation of a troubled Dublin childhood and adolescence amid a traumatised family I can only humbly admire his sangfroid.

Then strange things arrived from the land that God is asked to bless rather frequently. The golden words of Stephen J. Malkmus, of the intriguing Californian band Pavement, narrate a futuristic fantasy wherein Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is a visionary monk, while lampooning most living artists in any medium. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth gives us a thoroughly uplifting tale of sex and drugs (and possibly some rock’n’roll too) in New York City. ‘It’s fiction,’ he informs me. ‘I suspect you may have to censor the “dirty” language by using asterisks but hopefully this won’t be the case.’ The first time I read this frank take on Breakfast at Tiffany’s filtered through Charles Bukowski, I thought: shame we can’t use it. Then good taste prevailed. The lyrics that close the story come from the Experimental Jet-Set, Trash and No Star LP. Kristin Hersh of Boston’s Throwing Muses recalls how a chronic fear of her father’s Patti Smith records gave way to a fascination with armpits and fingers …

Caitlin Moran has been described as ‘precocious’ more times than she’s been described as ‘an orgasm octopus’, allegedly. The presenter of Channel 4’s ‘Naked City’ testifies to the quivering, jutting, throbbing joys of Suede, as so many young people today are wont to do. What with comedy being the new rock’n’roll (at least at the time of writing, 11.56pm), Robert Newman’s teenage recollection of a chance meeting with the mothers of proto-punk band Crass works on about nine levels, by my reckoning. Cosmic link: the first words Robert ever spoke to me (come to think of it, the only words he’s ever spoken to me) were: ‘You get mentioned in Fever Pitch, don’t you?’ See, it’s all coming together. Which is exactly what I thought when the final part of a serial rant from the inimitable Mark E. Smith of evergreen Manchester mavericks The Fall reached my filing cabinet, the aforementioned dysfunctional stove.

The side-splitting pun of the title Idle Worship attempts to raise the question of whether the growing pains involved in venerating rock gods and goddesses are worth the bother. Should we adore or abhor? Is what we see in our early pop role models a mirror, a mirage or a miracle? There is a war between romance and cynicism in this book, between faith and disillusionment. So it’s just like Tender Is the Night really, okay?

It may have been André Breton who wrote ‘Beauty will be convulsive or not at all,’ but it was Patti Smith who put it on an album cover. It may have been Blondie who sang ‘Dreaming is free,’ but it was me who decided it would be a resonant end to this introduction. Go on, inspire yourself.

CHRIS ROBERTS, April 1994

You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights

Bono

im still starstruck, it doesn’t wear off … frank sinatra gave me a solid gold cartier pasha watch with sapphires and an inscription … to bono with thanks FRANCIS A SINATRA … WATER RESISTANT … im not gonna get over this … Frank likes me … hell ive hung out with him, drunk at his bar, eaten at his table, watched a movie at his place … in his own screening room … dig that asshole … i usually drink j.d. straight up without ice, its a tennessee sipping whiskey, so why did i go and blow it by ordering ginger ale … ‘jack and ginger’ a girls drink’ … FRANK looks at me and my two earrings and for the first time in my life i felt effeminate … i drank quickly to compensate and worse i mixed my drinks … over dinner (mexican not italian) we drank tequila in huge fishbowl glasses, never drink anything bigger than your head i thought as FRANK pushed his nose up against the glass like it was a hall of mirrors …

later asleep on the snowwhite of FRANK and BARBARA’S screening room sofa i had a real fright i woke up to wetness, a damp sensation between my legs … hmm … dreams of dean martin gave way to panic … first thought: ive pissed myself. second: don’t tell anyone. third: dont move theyll see the stain … yellow on white. fourth: make a plan … and so i sat in my shame for twenty minutes, mute, waiting for the movie to end, wondering as to how i would explain this … this … irish defeat to italy … this sign that what was once just verbal incontinence has matured … and grown to conclusive proof that i didn’t belong there/here. i am a jerk. i am a tourist, i am back in my cot age 4 … before i knew how to fail – mama – ive pissed myself … again.

well i hadnt, id spilt my drink. i was drunk, high on him, a shrinking shadow boxing dwarf following in his footsteps … badly … STARSTRUCK … “what now my love? now that its over?” i went back to the hotel … (turn left on frank sinatra boulevard), i would never drink in the company of the great man again … i would never be asked to. wrong, twice.

NOTE: IF YOU’RE GONNA DROP ONE, DROP A BIG ONE … A NAME … A NAME TO HANG ON YOUR WALL. EPISODE NO. 1. december 93, u2 had just got back from TOKYO, the capitol of zoo tv, it was all over … i felt wonderful. i felt like shit. my TV had been turned off … it was christmas … there was a parcel from FRANK a large parcel … i opened it … a PAINTING, a painting by FRANK SINATRA and a note … ‘you mentioned the jazz vibes in this piece well its called JAZZ and we’d like you to have it. yours Frank and Barbara’ this is getting silly … there is a SANTA CLAUS and hes Italian … (opera, Fellini, food, wine, Positano, the sexy end of religion, football, now grace and generosity?) … heroes are supposed to let you down … but here i am blown away by this 78 year-old saloon singer and his royal family … starstruck … a skunk on the outskirts of las vegas with my very own Frank Sinatra, last seen in his very own living room, on the edge of his very own desert, in palm springs … THE PAINTING, a luminous piece as complex as its title, as its author … circles closed yet interlocking, like glass stains on a beermat … circles with the diameter of a horn … Miles Davis … Buddy Rich … rhythm … the desert … theyre all in there … on yellow … to keep it mad … fly yourself to the moon!

EPISODE NO. 2 MARCH 1. im not an alcoholic im irish, i dont drink to get drunk do i? i drink because i like the taste dont i? so why am i drunk? im drunk because Frank has just fixed me another stiffy thats why! jack daniels this time straight up and in a pint glass.

its the ‘Grammys’ and ive been asked to present the boss of bosses with a life achievement award … a speech … i know im not match fit but of course i say yes.

and now im in NEW YORK CITY and so nervous i am deaf and cannot speak … two choices; BLUFF or concentrate on the job at hand, i do both and end up with a rambling wordy tribute with no fullstops or commas … that might explain how i felt about the man who invented pop music … and puncture the schmaltz … a little …

anyway we’re in FS’S dressing room (the manager’s suite) where the small talk is never small, im talking to Susan Reynolds, Franks p. a. and patron saint and Ali (my wife and mine). Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) asks Frank about the pin on his lapel … ‘its the legion of honor … highest civilian award … given by the president …’ which one? enquires paul … ‘oh i dont know … some old guy … i think it was lincoln …’ cool … do you have to be american to get one? i think to myself … already feeling my legs go …

next up the award for best alternative album u2 are nominated for this … better get ready … whats the point … we’re never gonna win that … that belongs to the smashing pumpkins one of the few noisy bands to transcend the turgid old-fashioned format theyve chosen … you have to go downstairs … you might win … whats there to be embarrassed about … youve been no. 1 on alternative/college radio for 10 years now … its the most important thing to you … tell them … its your job to use your position … abuse it even … tell them … you’re not mainstream you’re slipstream … tell them … you’ll make it more fun … that you’ll try to be better than the last lot … tell them you’re mainstream but not of it and that you’ll do your best to fuck it up … TELL THEM YOU KNOW FRANK … tell the children … so i did.

the speechifying below wasn’t heard in the uk so loud is the word fuck over there but Frank heard it and Frank liked it … so here it is:

Frank never did like rock ’n’ roll. And he’s not crazy about guys wearing earrings either, but hey, he doesn’t hold it against me and anyway, the feeling’s not mutual.

rock ’n’ roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank Sinatra has got what we want … swagger and ATTITUDE … HE’S BIG ON ATTITUDE … SERIOUS ATTITUDE … BAD ATTITUDE … Franks THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BAD.

rock ’n’ roll plays at being tough, but this guy’s … well, he’s the boss of bosses. The Man. The Big Bang of Pop. I’M NOT GONNA MESS WITH HIM; ARE YOU?

who is this guy that every swingin city in america wants to claim as their own?. this painter who lives in the desert, this first-rate first-take actor, this singer who makes other men poets, boxing clever with every word, talking like america … Fast … straight up … in headlines … comin’ thru with the big schtick, the aside, the quiet compliment … good cop/bad cop in the same breath.

you know his story because it’s your story … Frank walks like America, COCKSURE …

Its 1945 … the us cavalry are trying to get out of Europe, but they never really do. They are part of another kind of invasion, A.F.R. American Forces Radio, broadcasting a music that will curl the stiff upper lip of England and the rest of the world paving the way for Rock N’ Roll – with jazz, Duke Ellington, the big band, Tommy Dorsey, and right out in front, FRANK SINATRA … his voice tight as a fist, opening at the end of a bar not on the beat, over it … playing with it, splitting it … like a jazz man, like miles davis … turning on the right phrase in the right song, which is where he lives, where he lets go, and where he reveals himself … his songs are his home and he lets you in … but you know … to sing like that, you gotta have lost a couple o’ fights … to know tenderness and romance like that … you have to have had your heart broken.

people say Frank hasn’t talked to the press … they want to know how he is, whats on his mind … but y’know, Sinatra is out there more nights than most punk bands … selling his story through the songs, telling and articulate in the choice of those songs … private thoughts on a public address system … generous … this is the conundrum of frank sinatra left and right brain hardly talking, boxer and painter, actor and singer, lover and father … troubleshooter and troublemaker, bandman and loner, the champ who would rather show you his scars than his medals … he may be putty in barbaras hands but I’m not gonna mess with him are you?

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ABE YOU READY TO WELCOME A MAN HEAVIER THAN THE EMPIRE STATE, MORE CONNECTED THAN THE TWIN TOWERS, AS RECOGNISABLE AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY … and LIVING PROOF THAT GOD IS A CATHOLIC … will you welcome THE KING OF NEW YORK CITY … FRANCIS … ALBERT … SINATRA.

Sparing the Rod

Nick Hornby

YOU WANT CLASSIC EARLY SEVENTIES ALBUMS, I got ’em. The entire Al Green back catalogue, Let’s Get It On, There’s No Place Like America Today, Grievous Angel, After the Goldrush, Blood on the Tracks . . . Unimpeachable classics, every one, and while others may have to bury their Cat Stevens and James Taylor albums away when fashionable friends come round to borrow a cup of balsamic vinegar, I have nothing to hide. Those pre-Ramones years were difficult to pick your way through, but I seem to have managed it quite brilliantly. If there was a smarter, more forward-thinking, more retrospectively modish young teenager around than me between 1971 and 1975, I have yet to meet him.

Sadly, however, I am that commonplace phenomenon, Reinvented Man. Most of the Al Green back catalogue I bought in the early Eighties, the Gram Parsons at university in the late seventies, the Curtis Mayfield from a car boot sale a few years ago, and so on. I didn’t buy any of them at the time of their release. I thought that soul music was for wide-boys, country was for old people, and Bob Dylan was for girls.

These are a few of the albums I bought back then: McCartney; Led Zeppelin II; a Humble Pie live double, the title of which escapes me; the Curved Air record which had painting on the vinyl; Anyway by Family; Deep Purple in Rock; Tubular Bells; a Van der Graaf Generator album, purchased after I read a review in Melody Maker, and if I ever meet the journalist who wrote the review he can either refund me my £2.19 or get biffed on the nose; Rory Gallagher; and Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart.

Every Picture Tells a Story is the only one of those that I still possess. All of the others have disappeared, stolen or flogged (although the Van der Graaf Generator album was certainly not stolen, and I can’t imagine who would have bought it off me); some of them were flogged because I needed the money, others because they had absolutely no place in the ineffably cool collection I was in the process of assembling.

So how come Rod Stewart has survived? ‘Now there was someone who never let you down,’ a friend remarked sardonically when I owned up to my tragic affliction, and he has a point. Rod’s track record is not without its blemishes. There was Britt Ekland, for a start. And tartan. And ‘Ole Ola’, his 1978 Scotland World Cup Song (the chorus – and I may be misquoting, but not by much – went something like ‘Ole Ole, Ole Ola/We’re going to bring the World Cup back from over thar’). And ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’. And the Faces live album Overture and Beginners, which the NME commemorated with its annual ‘Rod Stewart and the Faces Thanks-For-the-Live-Album-Lads-But-You-Really-Shouldn’t-Have-Bothered Award’. (The record ends with Stewart thanking the audience ‘for your time … and your money’, and you really have to hear the lascivious drawl in his voice to appreciate the full horror of the moment.) And the haircut. And his obsession with LA. And the champagne and straw boaters on album sleeves. And ‘Sailing’, which made a pretty decent football song but an interminable single. And several other blonde women who weren’t Britt Ekland but might as well have been. And the couplet from the song ‘Italian Girls’ (on Never a Dull Moment) that goes: ‘I was feeling kind of silly/When I stepped in some Caerphilly’. And the cover of the record Ooh La La, a pathetically cheap arrangement which allowed the purchaser to jiggle a tab and make a man’s eyes go up and down in a supposedly hilarious manner. And the record itself, arguably the worst collection of songs ever released by anybody. And the all-purpose session-musician sub-Stones rock’n’roll plod-raunch that can be found on any of his post-Faces work, ‘Hot Legs’ being the template. And the Faces live shows, which were apt to end with the entire band lying in a drunken heap on the stage. He’s hardly put a foot wrong, really.

I bought Every Picture Tells a Story in the Virgin shop in Oxford Street: there was only one Virgin shop then, situated right where the Megastore is now, except you had to walk through a shoe shop (or rather, a cowboy boot shop) and up some stairs to get to it. I lived thirty miles from Oxford Street, but this was still my nearest discount record store, and though the train fare cancelled out any savings I made, it was much more fun buying records there. There were headphones, and beanbags (although the beanbags were frequently occupied by dossers) and bootlegs, which I had never seen before.

And in any case, the length of the journey lent a proper gravity to the serious business of record-buying. Now, I indulge myself whenever I feel like it, even in times when I have had no money at all; there are occasions over the last fifteen or so years when I have come back home yet again with a square-shaped carrier bag and felt sick with guilt and over-consumption. (‘I haven’t even played side two of the album I bought after work on Tuesday, so how come I’ve bought another one today?’) In those Virgin days, I thought and read and talked for weeks before committing myself to something I would have to live with and listen to for months. (Mistakes, like the Van der Graaf Generator record, had to be paid for by the self-flagellation of listening to the wretched thing and kidding myself that I liked it.)

Every Picture Tells a Story seemed a safe bet. I had heard ‘Maggie May’, of course, and knew that any album featuring a song like that would not be actively unpleasant; I could count on songs, and singing, and these seemed like reassuring virtues. And songs and singing was what I got: ‘Maggie May’, ‘Reason to Believe’, a beautiful cover of a Dylan song, ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’, a decent stab at the Temptations’ ‘I Know I’m Losing You’ (I didn’t really approve of Rod singing a song by a Tamla Motown group – Motown was for sisters and people like that – but there were plenty of guitars, so I let it pass) … loads of stuff. There wasn’t anything I didn’t like, really. I played Every Picture Tells a Story to death, and then let it rest in peace.

But, like all the best teen icons, Rod wasn’t a mere recording artiste, he was a lifestyle. You couldn’t just listen to his music, forget about him, and put him away in the little and chronically over-familiar pile of records in your bedroom (I probably had about nine albums by then, and in truth I was pretty sick of all of them). He resonated. For a start, there was this football thing he had. At school, the sight of him kicking balls into the ‘Top of the Pops’ audience excited a great deal of favourable comment; ever since punk, it has been de rigueur for bands to express an interest in the people’s game, but back then, things were different, mostly because of the kind of music I was listening to. Few of the people I watched football with at Arsenal looked as if they knew who Humble Pie were; none of the people I watched Humble Pie with cared how Arsenal had got on. (I remember John Peel attempting to read out the football results at a late-summer Hyde Park concert, and getting booed for doing so.) When I went to see the Who, I saw that rock and football did not have to attract entirely separate audiences, but for the most part, the Afghans at the gigs and the Crombies at the grounds never got to rub against each other; Rod Stewart was a godsend to the countless teenage boys who couldn’t see why Ron Wood and Ron Harris should have to live on different planets.

And it was much easier to be Rod Stewart than it was to be Hendrix or Jagger or Jim Morrison. Tartan scarves were easier to find in Maidenhead than leather trousers, and Rod had never worn a dress, like Jagger had. There was no need to take heroin, or read Rimbaud, or play a guitar with your teeth, or know who Meher Baba was; all you needed to do to acquire Rodness was drink, sing, pick up girls and like football. It was easy. We could all do that without having to go to LA or even Soho. (We weren’t drinking or picking up girls yet, needless to say, or at least not properly, if you catch my drift. But we would, no problem, no need to worry about us, pal.) The photo on the gatefold sleeve of Never a Dull Moment depicted Stewart’s band lined up in a goalmouth; on Smiler, they were all raising pints outside a suitably cor-blimey looking pub. This was transparently shameless stuff and it is impossible to look at these photos now without cringing; we were being conned rotten, but we didn’t know that then, and even if we did we wouldn’t have cared.

I went to see the Faces in 1971, at the Oval, but I cannot remember so much as a bum Ronnie Wood note now. (And the next time I saw them, at the Reading Festival, they left no impression either. This may well have been a result of their liberal pre-gig refreshment policy.) In 1972, when I was fifteen, there was ‘You Wear It Well’, which, reassuringly, sounded exactly the same as ‘Maggie May’, but with its own tune, and the album Never a Dull Moment, and the Faces album A Nod’s as Good as a Wink, and the single ‘Stay With Me’, and the single ‘What’s Made Milwaukee Famous’, which came in a tartan picture sleeve, and the Python Lee Jackson single ‘In A Broken Dream’, which became the traditional bottom-groping finale to every village hall disco I went to. I didn’t need to think about any other pop singers; there was enough Rod Stewart product to soak up all the record-buying money I had. (It was no use being a Stones fan, or a Dylan fan, or a Floyd fan – you had to wait years.) A Nod’s as Good as a Wink was dreadful, the usual admixture of tired Chuck Berryisms, duff lyrics and a chronic fluff-on-the-needle production; I didn’t even like ‘Stay With Me’ that much, although it was OK if you wanted to pretend to share a microphone with a pal (then – as now, as far as I am able to tell from ‘The Chart Show’ – you leaned back, head on one side, with the arm furthest from the mike punching the air).

The solo stuff was different, much more tender, and certainly more wrought. The booze-and-football photos, it is clear now, were intended to compensate for the rampant sissiness of the recordings, the Bob Dylan covers (‘Mama You Been on My Mind’, ‘Girl from the North Country’), the McCartney ballads (‘Mine for Me’), and Stewart’s own sentimental cod-Celtic songs. This was the stuff I preferred; indeed, I would still rather listen to a ballad than anything else, and maybe this is Rod’s legacy to me.

They still sound surprisingly good, those three solo albums (Every Picture … , Never a Dull Moment and Smiler) that created the Hampden-and-bitter Stewart image. The cover versions are immaculate: so good, in fact, that when I sought out the originals (during that purist phase all Music Blokes go through, when we believe that originals must by definition be superior to the copies), I was disappointed by them. Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It on Home to Me’ didn’t have that rollicking string arrangement; Dylan’s ‘Mama You Been on My Mind’ was pretty but plain, and anyway Dylan couldn’t sing.

And Stewart’s voice still sounds great. Why Caucasians used to believe that rock stars with croaky voices – Stewart, Janis Joplin, Frankie Miller, Joe Cocker, Paul Young – are white soul singers remains one of life’s impenetrable mysteries. (During the eighties, thankfully, with the advent of the more honey-toned George Michael and Boy George, this perplexing claim ceased to be made.) Only the overrated Otis Redding sounds as though he is gargling through porridge; neither Al Green nor Marvin Gaye nor Aretha Franklin seems as distressed, as pained, as the Croakies. Surely one of the points of soul singing is its effortlessness? But Stewart pinches other things from black music traditions: his vocal mannerisms, his laughs and spoken asides, and the way he rides the beat and slides under and over the melody line … these are the telltale signs of somebody with a good record collection and a sharp pair of ears, and they set him apart from the opposition. And anyway, Stewart had grown up with folk (hence the Dylan and the Tim Hardin covers) as well as the more ubiquitous R&B. He wasn’t a Jagger or an Elton John, but a straightforward, uncomplicated interpreter of popular songs: fifteen years earlier, he might have been our answer to Dean Martin; fifteen years later, he probably would have been a one-hit wonder for Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Things went downhill fast after Smiler. There was one great last Faces single, ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything’, which swung in a way that most English rock songs do not (mostly, I discovered years later, because Stewart and Wood had liberated a huge chunk of a Bobby Womack song for their fade-out), and then the band split up. Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones, a move which, distressingly, made a lot of sense. And a year or so later Atlantic Crossing was released. There was no football pitch or pub photo on the sleeve of this one: just a monstrous cartoon drawing of Stewart, wearing an improbable silver jump-suit and, well, crossing the Atlantic.

I had left school by this time. And I had also turned my back on the other Rod fans I had knocked around with in the fourth and fifth forms: I was off to university and they weren’t, and I had started to hang around with people who made jokes about Existentialism (admittedly, the jokes consisted mainly of saying the word aloud, but they would not have amused the people with whom I had once shared an imaginary microphone). Had Rod met Britt by then? I don’t remember. And in any case, Britt was not to blame for the self-parody which sucked Rod down and out; if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else – Farrah Fawcett, maybe, or some Seventies equivalent of that woman who knocks around with Michael Winner. Rod was hell-bent on making a berk of himself, and he didn’t need any help from Scandinavian bit-part actresses.

I bought Atlantic Crossing anyway, for its two aching ballads, ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ and It’s Not the Spotlight’, but it was the weakest of his solo work – and therefore of the entire Stewart oeuvre – to date. And then I went to college, and listened to punk and blues and soul and reggae, and it should have stopped there, but it didn’t. My devotion intensified: I wore a Rod Stewart T-shirt that I’d bought for 50p, and I had a Rod Stewart poster on the wall of my college bedroom. It was, I guess, an ironic devotion – Rod had become a post-punk figure of fun by that time, and you would have to have been particularly imbecilic not to get the joke – but there was a glimmer of earnestness there, too: I was frightened by the Athena prints of Renoir and Matisse paintings that hung on my neighbours’ walls, and of the classical music that I occasionally heard coming from their stereos, and used Rod as a kind of talisman to protect me from these evil and alien forces. So I stuck with it for a while, until I felt more comfortable with University and with myself, and then I gave up. I preferred the Tom Waits version of ‘Downtown Train’ – he still listens, you have to give him credit for that – and I haven’t even bothered with the Unplugged album, which seemed aimed straight at me, and those like me.

But these are the records I own because of Rod: His California Album, by Bobby Bland, which is where Stewart first heard ‘It’s Not the Spotlight’ (and though Stewart’s version is flatter and less piquant than Bland’s, Rod wisely didn’t bother with Bland’s unattractive trademark phlegm-clearing whoops), and maybe even ‘If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)’; my entire Bobby Womack collection; my Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade; my Temptations’ Greatest Hits; and my Sam Cooke album. I was introduced to the Isley Brothers (‘This Old Heart of Mine’), Aretha Franklin (‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman/Man’), and Crazy Horse (‘I Don’t Want to Talk about It’). And once I had been introduced to Aretha Franklin and Bobby Bland and the Temptations and Chuck Berry, I got to know B.B. King and the Four Tops and Atlantic Records and Chess Records and … He gave me a good start in life, and as a young man, a pop innocent, one cannot ask for anything more than that. If I had been similarly smitten by Elton John or James Taylor or Jethro Tull or Mike Oldfield, all of whom were competing for attention at around the same time, it is possible that I would have junked my entire record collection a decade or so ago.

The people who stick with pop the longest, it seems to me now, are those who entrust themselves at a tender age to somebody like Stewart, somebody who loves and listens to pop music. Those who fell for the Stones got to hear, if they could be bothered, Arthur Alexander and Solomon Burke and Don Covay (and if they got to hear Don Covay they would find themselves wondering what, precisely, Jagger had brought to the Sixties party). Those who went for Led Zeppelin went on to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Genesis and Pink Floyd led you up a blind alley: there was nowhere to go, and so a good many people I knew stopped dead. Today’s youngsters, eh? Where are they heading for after they’ve chewed up the Sisters of Mercy or the Happy Mondays? (Suede and Teenage Fanclub, on the other hand …) Even after all these years, even after Britt and ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’ and blah blah blah, I’d still like to buy Rod a drink; I’d like to sit him down and talk to him, not about Celtic or Jock Stein or Denis Law or ligaments or real ale, but about music. He knows much more than he’s ever let on.

Led Zeppelin and the Pixies

Martin Millar

IN 1972, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG TEENAGER living in Glasgow, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come to town. I had been going to gigs since I was thirteen and as Glasgow was a popular venue for music I had already seen most of the biggest progressive rock bands of the day – Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart, Mott the Hoople, Alex Harvey, Deep Purple, The Who, and many more. (With great foolishness I declined to go and see T. Rex, deeming them to be too poppy. How silly can you get?) Nonetheless, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come. They were too big, and too serious. I mean, they didn’t release singles or anything.

I had no clear idea of what the daily life of Led Zeppelin might be and assumed vaguely that they lived in some sort of Valhalla, sipping mead, talking to the muses and occasionally making records. Possibly they granted a few divine favours in between times. Whatever they did it would not include touring Scotland because, at least in my school, Led Zeppelin were a class apart, and we were not worthy.

People, including me, used to marvel that anything as good as them could possibly exist. We used to walk around the playground carrying their albums despite the fact that there was nowhere in school to play them. It was just good to have them around, and be seen with them. I spent a fair part of my early youth walking back and forth clutching Led Zeppelin Two, singing the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and conscientiously imitating all the guitar solos. (I bought this record before I had a record player. Really.)

This for me is the stuff of strong memories. For instance, when Led Zeppelin Four was released the first reports were confused. Two separate people who had skipped school for the day reported that they had seen it in shop windows but each of their descriptions of the album sleeve was radically different. This led us to wild and lengthy speculations in class ranging from the likelihood of two Led Zeppelin albums being simultaneously released to one of the sightseers being strongly affected by LSD, which was always a possibility in the early seventies, even among the very young.

Strangely enough, the solution turned out to be that one shop was displaying one side of the sleeve and the other shop was showing the other. It was of course a mighty and complex gatefold sleeve, .the like of which is no longer to be seen in these post-heroic days. Such was our immense Led Zeppelin interest that this sort of thing was fuel for hours and hours of fevered discussion which I still recall though I have no idea what I might have been supposed to be learning in the class at the time.

I think it was shortly after this that we heard that they were coming to play in Glasgow. Now for me, already hurt and disillusioned in life because other boys had girlfriends and I had no idea how to go about this, my main happiness and only spiritual elevation was obtained by lying around in incense-filled rooms, listening to Led Zeppelin. The prospect of seeing them live was therefore overwhelming.

I queued up overnight for my ticket. The police patrolling this queue were particularly and needlessly unpleasant but I will not dwell on this as I do not wish to spoil the memory. The venue was Green’s Playhouse, later to become the Apollo. This had several features which would annoy me now, namely it did not sell alcohol and it was seated but I don’t recall being troubled by this at the time. Everyone generally stood on the seats or rushed to the front when the band played. As to alcohol, this was more of a problem, particularly as we were all too young to buy it legally elsewhere. Much creative thinking was done to obtain a few cans of McEwans and it was necessary to drink them quickly and surreptitiously in the street before the gig. Many junior rock fans, forced to bolt down their beer in the short distance between the bus stop and the venue, paid a heavy price later in terms of illness, disorientation and utterly irate parents.

I have probably never been as excited as when waiting for Led Zeppelin to come onstage. In the weeks since buying the tickets I had talked of little else. Well, probably nothing else. Although everybody had their different preferred bands we were entirely united in regarding Led Zeppelin as by far the best, apart from the out and out pop music fans, of whom I seem to remember there were relatively few, and possibly one or two hard-core West Coast devotees. To this day I completely fail to understand what they saw in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I mean, put ‘Our House’ next to ‘Black Dog’ and what have you got? Precious little if you ask me.

It was not unknown for bands to cancel their trips to Glasgow and this had been a source of great dread. Grimly pessimistic even at an early age, I was more or less convinced that they would not appear. Right up till the moment that Robert Plant, my complete, total and absolute adolescent hero, stepped onstage, I did not actually believe that they would play.

Now the Glasgow audience, while appreciative, usually took some time to warm up. Generally they would spend some suspicious moments sizing up the band before completely accepting them. Even then any heavy rock outfit indulging in too much balladeering and not enough power chords could be given a fairly hard time. On this night this was not the case. As Led Zeppelin appeared onstage like Mighty Heroes From Another Realm the place exploded. Everyone was up over the seats and piling down the front before Jimmy Page had completed his first riff. The bouncers, hardened Glasgow thugs normally hostile to this sort of behaviour, retreated in confusion.

Led Zeppelin played with no support act and, unlike many of the other bands in the fab early seventies, had no stage set and no fancy clothes. They wore plain T-shirts and jeans and their onstage equipment looked fairly modest although Robert Plant did have a sort of metal stick which made funny noises when he put his hands near it, very important for the psychedelic middle section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

They started off with ‘Black Dog’, a song with a dazzlingly good riff, and from then on it just got better. Thundering versions of crunching tunes like ‘The Immigrant Song’, ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Rock and Roll’ flowed into the powerful electric blues of ‘Killing Floor’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Babe’. (I suppose I would now have to grudgingly admit that it was a bad thing for Led Zeppelin not to have immediately acknowledged the original versions of some of these blues. At the time I would not have cared. I mean the original artists played them quietly, with acoustic guitars. Not the same thing at all.)

There were the screaming vocals of Robert Plant and the wailing and fantastical guitar playing of Jimmy Page. Behind them, as we young rock completists were well aware after dutifully sending in our poll forms for ‘Musician of the Year’ in each category to the music papers, were the excellent John Bonham on drums and the equally excellent John Paul Jones playing bass and keyboards. In between the huge chunks of noise were outbreaks of calm as they played a few acoustic numbers and some gentle songs of Misty Mountains and Elvish Warriors, all this being well suited to alleviating the tedium and frustration of my youthful existence. Aware of the status of the band, the audience listened to these in quiet rapture and did not speak, cough or fidget.

I loved every second of it. I was enormously appreciative of John Bonham’s drum solo. When Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow I quite possibly wept for joy. I think it is an accurate recollection, rather than wishful thinking, that Led Zeppelin did do extremely good live versions of their material. As ‘Whole Lotta Love’ climaxed I had reached the sort of state you see in films of early Beatles concerts, that is, more or less hysterical. Seeing Led Zeppelin was probably a more satisfying fulfilment of a dream than any that was to follow.

They ended with ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Wow. What experience could have been better for me and my schoolfriends? None. Nothing would have come close. It was the best song in the world played by the best band in the world and here they were doing it right in front of us. The Archangel Gabriel coming onstage and blowing his trumpet would have had less effect. The concert ended. I was awestruck.

Outside I was completely deafened but still awestruck. That night the deafness gave way to a hideous ringing in my ears and I was still awestruck. Next day at school everyone was awestruck.

‘We are awestruck,’ we said, walking around the playground carrying our Led Zeppelin albums. ‘Completely awestruck.’

And it was true.

Time moves on. A few years later I was no longer awestruck by Led Zeppelin. They released another good album, Physical Graffiti, but were overtaken by time and the Sex Pistols. I went to many punk concerts, and it was still enjoyable but as the eighties crept on I started to lose the habit.

I was, I suppose, a little bored with the whole thing. Music did not seem a great deal of fun. I was aware however that this was a problem with me rather than the music. It is odd how people can dismiss whatever is popular at the time as ‘not as good as it was in my day’ and actually make themselves believe it. There is always something good around, it’s just that you get past the stage of appreciating it properly. Personally I was a little distressed no longer to appreciate it properly. Having passed thirty it always seemed like too much effort to actually go and see a band anywhere, what with London being so difficult to travel around in late at night. It was also too much effort to enter enthusiastically the fantasy land of any group of people whose sole talent was knocking together a reasonable tune and posing onstage. I had probably not been really excited by a live band since The Jesus and Mary Chain some years previously and by 1989 I had ceased going to gigs entirely.

By 1989 of course music listening had entirely changed. Whereas at my school Led Zeppelin were common currency, by now no such common currency existed. In any school there would be devotees of Heavy Metal, Rap, Reggae, Trance, Techno, Thrash, Hardcore, Indie Rock and no doubt various others. Dance music, utterly without credibility in the early seventies, was now popular with all sorts of people. However as this is a piece about two gigs rather than a history of music I shall pass over this, merely pointing out that from my point of view, proper music absolutely requires that there should be someone onstage hitting a loud guitar and the guitar has to be plugged into a fuzzbox. Anything else just won’t do.

So, where was I? Living in London and gone completely off gigs, it would seem. And I must admit that this was somewhat of a disappointment, and made me feel old.

When someone provided me with a spare ticket for the Pixies in 1989 I accepted it fairly doubtfully. I really only agreed to go at all because my pleasant new girlfriend wanted to. Personally I would just as soon have stayed home watching TV, especially as Britain’s late-night viewing had radically improved in recent years and I could now watch all night ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’.

I had no great expectations of the music. For one thing, I had never heard the Pixies. They were American and had been in Britain before but this was their first time as stars. Their first full album, Surfer Rosa, was a big hit and they were receiving a lot of attention. So although I was ignorant of them, among others there was an air of expectation about the gig generated by those hip enough to have bought their first release, Come On Pilgrim, a mini LP, and those still avidly tuning in to John Peel on the radio.

Life for me now was different of course. I had to work for a living, which was bad. On the other hand, I no longer had to make up stories and bribe older people to buy me alcohol, which was good. I was fully entitled to march into any bar in London and demand a pint, and a whisky to follow if I deemed it necessary. I had my own home to go to and would not be censored by anyone even if I crawled through the door and made a mess on the carpet.

Different as well was my attitude to the upcoming event. I did not hang around in my bedroom listening obsessively to Pixies records, as I did in those weeks preceding Led Zeppelin’s show. Nor did I talk about the gig continually, or feverishly worry that it might be cancelled. I probably would not have minded had it been cancelled. This would have saved me the trouble of going out and left me free to watch ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’. How perilous it can be to reach thirty!

The concert was at the Town and Country Club – a very strange name for a music venue I always thought. Unable to come up with any last-minute excuse for staying in, I reluctantly got myself ready and found myself packed in with what seemed like hundreds of people in a Transit van, driving slowly from Brixton to Kentish Town.

As I crawled out of the van, and rubbed the circulation back into my limbs, I saw that there were people everywhere. Hordes of fans were struggling out of the Bull and Gate, pint glasses still in hand, and queueing up for the Town and Country. The pavements were full of couples holding hands, groups of young boys and girls edging their way closer to the doors, serious looking souls selling fanzines, gloomy-faced policemen, hopeful ticket touts, and various smug-looking people slipping in through the door marked Guest Passes. All in all a good atmosphere, and I was already thinking that possibly this was not such a bad thing to be doing.

The Town and Country was a good venue, much better than Green’s Playhouse, with bars in easy access, a huge open space to hang around in and a balcony with seats if you needed a rest. As we arrived the support act was playing. I have never had any interest at all in support acts, regarding them mainly as things that get in the way of the real gig, but tonight it was My Bloody Valentine and they were very fine. Already a fair proportion of the crowd was dancing to their dense sound.