A.I. AND HEART & SOUL

There have been some interesting discussions this week on LinkedIn and elsewhere about emerging generative AI music software. I have had thought-provoking exchanges with the likes of Sam Barcroft and Dr Alex Connock. Sam wrote “nobody wants to watch or read derivative content built by robots” and “AI music is derivative and lacks that special something that truly original content sparks inside”. Reflecting on music is helpful because it just has the audio dimension, simpler than the audio-visual nature of my chosen medium of film/video.

Alex flagged up Udio music-generating AI and said: “I’m not saying it’s desirable to have our creativity done by AI; just that it’s perhaps a little naive to think it won’t happen!”

I’ve been reflecting on music and what role heart, soul, humanity and authenticity play in its creation. If we break it down, AI can generate the tunes pretty efficiently, especially at the functional end of the spectrum such as Electronic Dance Music, ambient music like in gyms and malls, and TV library music (that’s a moribund business if ever there was one). EDM is arguably already maths (apologies to its fans out there).

The words can be generated fairly well given the right training material. Even highly emotive songs. If you gave an AI, say, all of John Martyn’s material, it could probably come up with a decent simulacrum which all but hardcore followers would be hard-pushed to distinguish from the real thing.

“The army and the navy they never will agree
Till all the men and all the boys
Are gone from our country“

It’s not really poetry. It’s quite simple.

Then there’s the third component – the voice. Feed all of John Martyn into the machine and even though his voice is pretty distinctive, it can already be effectively reproduced. Which is, indeed, useful from one perspective as he’s gone to the Great Gig in the sky.

But the final component – how the artist sings/performs the lyrics – is arguably where the magic is, the heart & soul. Listen to the first minute of the song above, ‘Don’t You Go‘. It’s illuminating what the poster has written: “I could try and explain how wonderful John Martyn’s music is, but my words could never do his art justice.” How Martyn delivers the simple tune and the simple lyrics I would contend is beyond the abilities of AI, certainly AI without consciousness. AI has no experiences, never lost a child, never had its heart broken, never felt pain, fear or anything else, and therefore can never communicate real feeling, only a copy of feelings. Humans have highly tuned abilities to detect genuine emotion and empathise with it. So, for now at least, there is some corner of the music field that is forever human – a small space where AI can’t really go. But it is a very small space.

Heart & soul do play a vital role in the best of art and culture but in music at least the field is wide open for AI. It is important and instructive that we keep a close eye and ear on where the heart & soul are, and never forget why they matter.

Don’t You Go is from the Glorious Fool LP

Coincidences No.s 367 & 368

Sydney Levinson – Creative Accountant

No. 367 

4.V.22

I get a message via Facebook from an old colleague/friend, an artist/photographer, I met through Channel 4:

“Morning Adam, how are you? May I call – some sad news I’m afraid – Though you may know already – through Sarah T”

I don’t know already, no idea what it might be. We speak later. It turns out my old friend Sydney Levinson is dead. I haven’t seen him since before Lockdown. I last saw him when he invited me to tea in Mayfair at a place he really liked, lots of red velvet as I recall. 

This is the last time we were in contact:

a typical Sydney message

3.V.22

I am out with my older son, having a chat. He tells me that we need to be more verb than noun. He is quoting Stephen Fry. (Fry was paraphrasing Oscar Wilde whom he memorably portrayed in the 1997 film ‘Wilde’.)

“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

My son uses as an example a person he has met only twice – a person who DJed at my 50th birthday party and who the two of us bumped into at ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, a person with whom he has exchanged but a few words – Sydney Levinson. “Like your friend,” he says, “the one who is an accountant and a DJ.” This of all people is the person he choses to illustrate transcending being a noun, being defined by a role. 

This, it turns out, is the day Sydney went to the big DJ booth in the sky. My gut feeling is it is spoken the moment Sydney took off.

Sydney Levinson was an extraordinary individual. He worked as an accountant but specialised in applying his know-how to arts businesses and artists who needed help with money. He was on the board of many prominent arts organisations, sharing vitally needed financial know-how. He also loved to DJ on weekends in West London and any time any place the opportunity arose. We first met as business mentors on an ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) scheme providing mentors for creative businesses, during Ekow Eshun’s regime at Herbert Read’s quirky institution. 

Here’s where I first wrote about Sydney in this blog in 2007. And here’s an account of Sydney’s typically open and generous connecting of people. And here’s the last coincidence Sydney featured in.

Sydney, I know you are hanging out with Joey, Johnny, DeeDee, Tommy and all the other forever young punks.

 

Sydney’s teatime companions

No. 368 

5.VI.22

I am reading Ali Smith’s latest novel ‘Companion Piece’. It seems to revolve around two words that come to one of the two protagonists in an auditory hallucination: “curfew” and “curlew”. I read a passage where a curlew, that strangest of birds, appears in a hallucinatory or imaginative or psychotic or magical scene, on her bed beside her dog, brought in apparently by a housebreaking waif.

27.V.22

I go to see a long-delayed (by Covid) gig (Ali Smith’s novel is about the Covid period in Britain). The gig is David Gray, performing his brilliant ‘White Ladder’ LP on its 40th anniversary. The gig is two years late. Before the show begins, at the Millennium Dome in North Greenwich (aka the O2) – I have been following him since the early days of his career with gigs at small places like Dingwalls in Camden Town and The Forum 2 in the Holloway Road, this time he is playing to the best part of 20,000 – a video plays on the big screens above the stage. It is David Gray talking about saving the curlew on behalf of a charity called Curlew Action – he talks about the bird’s “most haunting and unforgettable song” and concludes: “It would mean the world to me if you could help one singer try to help another.”

Openings – first lines of songs

In most creations with a time dimension (film, music, etc.), the opening is very important. This is particularly true of Short Form Video where the drop-off rates in the first minute on almost all platforms is very high (75%+). It’s all about grabbing attention and retaining interest. While it’s critical in this most modern of art forms, it’s pretty much as true of the positively ancient art of song writing.

Here are some favourites from a lively thread on our Facebook account…

God said to Abraham…

God said to Abraham “Kill me a son”

Abe said “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”

[Bob Dylan, Highway 61]

 

I don’t believe in an interventionist god

But I know, darling, that you do

[Nick Cave, Into My Arms]

 

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine

[Patti Smith, Gloria]

 

I wanted to change the world

But I could not even change my underwear

[Sinead O’Connor, written by John Grant – Queen of Denmark]

 

Some of us live like princes; some of us live like queens;

Some of us live just like you and me and don’t know what it means…

To take our place in one world; to make our peace in one world; to make our love in one world…

[John Martyn, One World]

 

If you kissed the sun right out of the sky for me

If you told me all the lies I might deserve

If you lay right down and you died for me

I could not love you more

[John Martyn, Couldn’t Love You More] perhaps the greatest in his simplicity

 

You curl around me, like a fern in the spring.

[John Martyn, Go Down Easy]

 

I can hear her heart beat for a thousand miles

And the heavens open every time she smiles

And when I come to her that’s where I belong

Yet I’m running to her like a river’s song

[Van Morrison, Crazy Love]

 

I am a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm

[Iggy and the Stooges,  Search and Destroy]

 

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey

[Beck]

 

Jeremiah was a bullfrog

Was a good friend of mine

[Three Dog Night, Joy to the World]

 

I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce.

[Elbow]

 

When me and Pam are hand in hand, we make a lovely pair.

But when we fight her awful spite is more than I can bear.

[Ian Dury, Pam’s Moods]

 

I guess I should’ve known

By the way you parked your car sideways

That it wouldn’t last

[Prince, Little Red Corvette]

 

Tumble out of bed stumble to the kitchen,

Pour myself a cup of ambition

[Dolly Parton, 9 to 5]

 

I may not always love you

But as long as there are stars above you

You never need to doubt it

[Beach Boys, God Only Knows] one of the most beautiful of songs

 

An old man turned 98…He won the lottery and died the next day

[Alanis Morissette, Ironic]

 

Son I am 30

I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty

[Happy Mondays, Kinky Afro]

 

I never thought it would happen

With me and the girl from Clapham

[squeeze, Up the Junction] a top rhyme

 

Abra Abra Cadabra

I wanna reach out and grab ya

[Steve Miller Band]

 

A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, A-lop-bam-boom

[Little Richard, Tutti Frutti]

 

I did you wrong my heart went out to play

But in the game I lost you

What a price to pay, hey I’m crying

[Smokey Robinson, Ooh Ooh Baby]

 

Oh, my land is like a wild goose

Wanders all around everywhere

Trembles and it shakes till every tree’s loose

It rolls the meadows and it rolls the nails

[Gram Parsons, A Song for You]

 

Hey Charlie I’m pregnant and living on 9th Street

Right above a dirty bookstore off Euclid Avenue

And I stopped takin dope and I quit drinkin whiskey

And my old man plays the trombone and works out at the track

[Tom Waits, Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis]

 

It’s four in the morning, the end of December

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better

New York is cold, but I like where I’m living

There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert

You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

[Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat]

 

No regrets Coyote

We just come from such different sets of circumstance

I’m up all night in the studios

And you’re up early on your ranch

You’ll be brushing out a brood mare’s tail

While the sun is ascending

And I’ll just be getting home with my reel to reel

There’s no comprehending

Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes

And the lips you can get

And still feel so alone

And still feel related

Like stations in some relay

You’re not a hit and run driver

No no

Racing away

[Joni Mitchell, Coyote]

 

They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot

[Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi]

 

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand

Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain

He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s

Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein

[Warren Zevon, Werewolves of London]

 

I met her in a club down in old Soho

Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca Cola

C-O-L-A, Cola

[The Kinks, Lola]

 

I’ve been loving you a long time

Down all the years, down all the days

And I’ve cried for all your troubles

Smiled at your funny little ways.

[The Pogues, a Rainy Night in Soho]

 

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs

Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know

And the people that come and go

Stop and say hello.

[The Beatles, Penny Lane]

 

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way,

[The Beatles, Help!]

 

I can feel the earth begin to move

I hear my needle hit the groove

And spiral through another day

I hear my song begin to say

Kiss me where the sun don’t shine

The past was yours

But the future’s mine

You’re all out of time.

[The Stone Roses, She Bangs the Drums]

 

Well you tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks.

But now you’ve found out that it’s a habit that sticks.

[Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict]

 

I’m a glum one, it’s explainable, I met someone unattainable

[Frank Sinatra, I Can’t Get Started]

 

Someone’s got it in for me they’re planting stories in the press.

[Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind]

 

Bless my cotton socks I’m in the news

[Teardrop Explodes, Reward]

 

Look out, mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river

With a big red beacon, and a flag, and a man on the rail

[Neil Young, Powderfinger]

 

Last week I attended a family affair,

and a few remarked upon my recent growth of facial hair

[Loudon Wainright III, Surviving Twin]

 

Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street

[Joe Jackson, Is she really going out with him?] 

 

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
But I say…
Oh Bondage! Up yours!

[X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage! Up yours!]

 

Some people might say my life is in a rut
But I’m quite happy with what I got

[The Jam, Going Underground]

 

It’s a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling, “No”
And her daddy has told her to go

[David Bowie, Life on Mars?]

 

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy

[Nature Boy]

 

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to Heaven. 

[Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven]

 

If you are the dealer

I’m out of the game

If you are the healer it means

I’m broken and lame

[Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker]

 

Me and Mrs. Jones

We got a thing, goin’ on

[Billy Paul, Me & Mrs Jones]

 

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.

Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.

[Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road]

 

I’ve got six things on my mind, you’re no longer one of them.

[Paddy McAloon, Desire As]

 

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

[Nina Simone, I wish I knew how it would feel to be free]

 

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste.

[Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil]

 

I am an antichrist

[Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK]

 

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days
Since you took your love away

[Nothing Compares 2U]

 

Hey ho, let’s go.

[Ramones, Blitzkrieg Bop]

 

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days
Since you took your love away

Best Music of 2019

Just taking a moment to record for posterity/reference the highlights of 2019’s music from a London point of view in the form of the playlist of Robert Elms’ annual New Year’s Eve episode of his Radio London show before it drops off BBC Sounds (Audio on Demand app) in a couple of weeks. (The bolding is my recommendations.)

Celeste

The recorded music and live sessions from his show played by Robert Elms on 31/12/19.

1. Bob James Trio
 – Ain’t Misbehavin’
2. Hiss Golden Messenger – 
I Need A Teacher
3. 
Jack Savoretti
 – Catapult (Radio London Session, 15 Jan 2019)
4. Monkey House
 – 10,000 Hours [shades of Steely Dan – in a pleasing way]
5. Danny Toeman – 
She’s Got Something About Her (Radio London Session, 8 Aug 2019)








 [shades of 70s soul – in a groovy way]
6. Emily King – 
Look At Me Now
7. 
HAIM
 – Summer Girl
8. Celeste
 – Lately (Radio London Session, 4 Apr 2019)
9. Nick Lowe
 – Love Starvation [can still teach the young’uns a thing or two]
10. Natty Rebel
 – Copper And Lead [fresh roots reggae]
11. 
Jo Harman – 
Cloudy (Radio London Session, 1 Mar 2019)
12. Michael Kiwanuka
 – You Ain’t The Problem [contender for LP of the year]
13. Ralph McTell
 – West 4th Street & Jones (Radio London Session, 27 Nov 2019) [lovely reflection on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – a cover I own the original contact sheet from by photographer Don Hunstein]
14. Paul Weller
 – You Do Something To Me (Live At Royal Festival Hall, 2018) [just a great song]
15. Kat Eaton – 
Barricade
16. Monks Road Social
 – If It Was All Down To Me
17. Bruce Springsteen
 – There Goes My Miracle [his singing is impeccable on this]
18. Kelly Finnigan
 – I Called You Back Baby [shades of Aretha – in a funky way]
19. 
Khruangbin & Leon Bridges – 
Texas Sun
20. 
The Divine Comedy – 
Norma And Norman (Radio London Session, 7 Jun 2019)








 [quirkiness at its best]
21. Teskey Brothers
 – Pain And Misery (Radio London Session, 11 Feb 2019)








 [shades of Otis – in a surprising way]
22. 
The James L’Estraunge Orchestra – 
Closer [shades of Aztec Camera – a lone Scot in his bedroom making an astonishingly big sound, playing everything himself]
23. Durand Jones & the Indications
 – Morning In America [shades of Gil-Scott Heron – in a respectful way]
24. Greentea Peng
 – Risin’ (Radio London Session, 24 Oct 2019)
25. 
Gabriella Cilmi
 – Ruins
26. 
Lissie
 – Dreams
27. The Delines
 – Eddie & Polly (Radio London Session, 4 Nov 2019)
28. Roseanne Reid
 – Amy [offspring on a Proclaimer]
29. The Brand New Heavies & N’Dea Davenport
 – These Walls
30. Maisie Peters – 
Favourite Ex (Radio London Session, 2 Aug 2019)
31. 
Leif Vollebekk
 – The Way That You Feel
32. Richard Hawley
 – My Little Treasures
33. 
Judi Jackson
 – Better In The Fall (Radio London Session, 20 Mar 2019)
34. Geraint Watkins
 – Heaven Only Knows
35. Ady Suleiman
 – Strange Roses (Radio London Session, 7 Mar 2019)
36. Jamie Cullum
 – Drink (Radio London Session, 10 Jun 2019)
37. Yola
 – Faraway Look

    The original programme [3 hours] is here  but will disappear at the end of January 2020.

Greentea Peng
 – more proof that young music is alive & kicking in London

Quote of the Day: Going Gaga

Today the Internet Association (UK), as led by my former Channel 4 colleague Daniel Dyball who spoke for them on BBC Radio news this morning, is presenting to the UK Parliament their suggestions for regulation of social media from the big tech firms including Facebook and Twitter.

On Sunday night Lady Gaga performed an intense version of what proved to be the Oscar-winning original song, Shallow from A Star is Born, with Bradley Cooper.

 

Lady Gaga said of online rumours of a love affair between herself and her co-star based on the performance:

social media, quite frankly, is the toilet of the Internet

Nice, concise turn of phrase.

In full: “…social media, quite frankly, is the toilet of the Internet. I mean, what it has done to pop culture is abysmal.”

 

Join Hands 11.11.1918-11.11.2018

In 1979 I went to see Siouxsie & The Banshees playing at Hammersmith Odeon – it remains one of the best gigs of my life. Just before the tour half the band had gone AWOL so new musicians had to be drafted in including Budgie on drums (formerly the token man in The Slits, one of my favourite drummers – Stewart Copeland considers him one of the most interesting drummers for his “very economical and offbeat” playing, that offbeat being what I most like about him) and John McGeoch on guitar (formerly of Magazine). That tour marked the release of the LP ‘Join Hands’. The hands joining are those of four bronze WW1 Tommies on the war memorial between Horseguards Parade and St James’s Park (the Guards Memorial) – I passed it regularly when I was working at Channel 4 and it always brought me back to that music and excitement. The LP opens with the tolling bells of a 2-minute track called Poppy Day.

In the same way that Punk (especially The Clash) introduced me to reggae, through this track it introduced me to the First World War poetry of John McCrae, a typical example of the less known poets who emerged in the Great War, the one-hit wonders and offbeats. McCrae was a high-ranking Canadian army doctor serving on the Western front. In Poppy Day the resonant bells give way to the distinctive driving guitar wailing of The Banshees and then just a few short lines, delivered in a distorted Siouxsie voice:

In Flanders fields
The poppies grow
Between the crosses
Row on row
That mark our place
We are the dead…

I don’t think McCrae is credited for the lyrics which are very close to the opening of his In Flanders Fields, in fact every word is derived from the poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Siouxsie & The Banshees filtered out the patriotic and the warmongering/cheerleading to open their record with the zombie or heroic or haunting dead, we don’t know which. What we do know, two years after the Silver Jubilee and the Pistols’ God Save the Queen (the Fascist regime), with rubbish piling up in the streets of strike-bound London, is that these dead were neither glorious nor patriotic in the establishment way.

The band were inspired not only by the chaos and crapitude of the late 70s Home Front but also by conflict witnessed on their suburban Kent TVs, particularly in Iran. (Plus ça change).

The LP cover was extracted from this shot – L to R Steve Severin (bass), John McKay (guitar), Siouxsie Sioux (vocals), Kenny Morris (drums) – before McKay and Morris went AWOL

Banshee stalwart, bassist Steven Severin in the wake of watching the two minutes of silence in memory of the war dead on TV on Sunday 12th November 1978 explained about Poppy Day: “We wanted to write a song that would fittingly fill that gap”. On the inner sleeve of the record (which sits still in the room just below me, alongside its vinyl sisters The Scream, Kaleidoscope, Juju and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse) beside the lyrics of the song is specified (with echoes of John Cage): “2 minutes of silence”.

So here we are on Sunday 11th November 2018, 40 years after Severin watched that broadcast, 100 years after the world watched that bloodbath, that futile wiping out of a generation, and we are still all struggling to join hands. The irony of The Banshees brooding in the studio while recording this masterpiece of an LP and splitting up in its aftermath is as nothing to the irony that we mark this centenary at a time when the world’s international institutions are being deliberately dismantled, Europe re-fracturing and the zombie voices of patriotism, nationalism and fascism wailing more discordantly than John McKay’s guitar. We are the Dead. We are turning in our graves row on row between the poppies.

Reinforcements arrive: L to R John McGeoch (guitar), Budgie (drums), Siouxsie & Steve – Paris (1980) where 70 world leaders are arriving this morning to mark the centenary of the Armistice including Macron (accordion), Merkel (tuba), Trump (mouth organ) and Putin (triangle)

 

Something Is Happening

Highway 61 Revisited photo session (New York 1965)

Just listened to a music podcast called ‘Is It Rolling, Bob? (talking Dylan)’ in which two actor blokes (Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare) talk to a journo bloke (David Hepworth) about a song & dance man, Bob Dylan.

It is a lot better than ‘Stalking Time for the Moon Boys’ in which two TV blokes (David Baddiel and Tim Hincks) talk to various other blokes and each other about a song & dance man, David Bowie. But it’s still not great. Entertaining enough if you’re keen on your Dylan.

One interesting fact I picked up was that Dylan named himself not after Welsh poet D. Thomas (which I’d believed) but after Marshall Dillon in some TV cowboy show (‘Gunsmoke’). Dylan as lifelong cowboy makes a lot of sense.

A question they asked David was how did you first come across Dylan. Got me thinking.

As a six year-old, just allowed to go by myself across one road to the newsagent (Eric & Mavis’s or perhaps it was the previous incarnation), I bought myself a fold-out poster magazine. I got it home expecting it to fold out to reveal a hippy rabbit (Dylan of ‘Magic Roundabout’ fame). Instead it was an unprepossessing bearded bloke with a guitar. A disappointing first encounter.

When I first fell under Dylan’s spell was having one of those Moments listening to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. I’d heard bits & pieces of Dylan during my childhood, listened to him a bit at uni through friends who were advocates (but I still had my Punk head on). But it was listening to this track on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ when the light went on. It was the Surrealism of the lyrics that really grabbed me – I’m not really a lyrics man but the words made their impact, above all the non-rational, dream-like nature of them. I was in.

This moment lead directly to my ending up with a son called Dylan (who looks at times a little like the Big Man of this vintage).

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Sometimes it’s really good not to know what it is – just let it sink in and brew up.

Anthem for the Age of Brexit & Trump

Plus ca change. Better to laugh than cry…

There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner
(by Noel Coward)

They’re out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They’re dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent,

They’re nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They’re filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,

In Dublin they’re depressed, lads,
Maybe because they’re Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.

Hurray, hurray, hurray!
Misery’s here to stay.
There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it’s no good whining
About a silver lining
For we know from experience that they won’t roll by,
With a scowl and a frown
We’ll keep our peckers down
And prepare for depression and doom and dread,
We’re going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.

From Portland Bill to Scarborough
They’re querulous and subdued
And Shropshire lads
Have behaved like cads
From Berwick-on-Tweed to Bude,

They’re mad at Market Harborough
And livid at Leigh-on-Sea,
In Tunbridge Wells
You can hear the yells
Of woe-begone bourgeoisie.

We all get bitched about, lads,
Whoever our vote elects,
We know we’re up the spout, lads.
And that’s what England expects.

Hurray, hurray, hurray!
Trouble is on the way.
There are bad times just around the corner,
The horizon’s gloomy as can be,
There are black birds over
The grayish cliffs of Dover
And the rats are preparing to leave the BBC
We’re an unhappy breed
And very bored indeed
When reminded of something that Nelson said.
While the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We’ll wait until we drop down dead.

From Colwyn Bay to Kettering
They’re sobbing themselves to sleep,
The shrieks and wails
In the Yorkshire dales
Have even depressed the sheep.

In rather vulgar lettering
A very disgruntled group
Have posted bills
On the Cotswold Hills
To prove that we’re in the soup.

While begging Kipling’s pardon
There’s one thing we know for sure
If England is a garden
We ought to have more manure.

Hurray, hurray, hurray!
Suffering and dismay.
There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook’s absolutely vile,
There are Home Fires smoking
From Windermere to Woking
And we’re not going to tighten our belts and smile, smile, smile,
At the sound of a shot
We’d just as soon as not
Take a hot water bottle and go to bed,
We’re going to un-tense our muscles till they sag sag sag
And wait until we drop down dead.

There are bad times just around the corner,
We can all look forward to despair,
It’s as clear as crystal
From Bridlington to Bristol
That we can’t save democracy and we don’t much care
If the Reds and the Pinks
Believe that England stinks
And that world revolution is bound to spread,
We’d better all learn the lyrics of the old ‘Red Flag’
And wait until we drop down dead.

A likely story
Land of Hope and Glory,
Wait until we drop down dead.

Nature Boy

This is my favourite couplet from any song – and how come my philosophy on life is derived from George Benson.

I first came across the song ‘Nature Boy’ on the record ‘In Flight’ by jazz guitarist Benson. In time it emerged that it was a cover of Nat King Cole. In more time I became aware that it was written by someone called Eden Ahbez (who I’d never heard of). He turned out to be a proto-hippy and a very interesting character whose extraordinary story gave rise to this fascinating photo:

The dapper Cole and the Jesus-like Ahbez came to coincide in the wake of Ahbez pushing a dirty, rolled-up manuscript onto Mort Ruby, Cole’s manager, backstage at the Lincoln Theater, LA. On it was a tune and these words:

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day
A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return

Beautiful simplicity – as has that fantastic closing couplet.

This happened shortly after World War Two, in 1947. Ahbez at the time was of no fixed abode and unemployed. Cole liked the song and began playing it live to audiences. In 1948 he recorded it but before the recording could be released Ruby needed to track down its writer to secure the rights.

Ahbez was eventually discovered living just below the first L of the Hollywood sign with his family. They slept under the night sky. Ahbez ate vegetables, fruits and nuts. He had shoulder-length hair and a beard, wore sandals and white robes. He studied Eastern mysticism and claimed to live on $3 a week.

‘Nature Boy’ became a No. 1 hit in the US Billboard charts for eight consecutive weeks during the summer of 1948. That same year RKO Radio Pictures paid Ahbez $10,000 for the rights to the song to use it as the theme tune for the movie ‘The Boy With Green Hair’.

Meanwhile he lived a proto-hippy life under the big L of Hollywood. Letters were significant for him. He actually called himself eden ahbez rather than Eden Ahbez as he reckoned only the words “God” and “Infinity” merited capitalisation.

During the 30s he lived in Kansas City and worked as a pianist and dance band leader. In 1941 he moved to LA where he got a gig playing piano in Eutropheon, a health food shop and raw food cafe on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, owned by John and Vera Richter. The Richters lived by a philosophy based on ‘Lebensreform’ (Life Reform) and the notion of the ‘Naturmensch’ (Nature Man) which was derived from the ‘Wandervogel’ (Wandering Bird) back-to-nature movement in Germany.

ahbez became part of a California-based group known as the ‘Nature Boys’, prominent among whom was Gypsy Boots (Robert Bootzin). Bootzin is another fascinating character, a hippy decades ahead of the 60s counterculture, with shared elements of ahbez’s background.

Bootzin was born in San Francisco to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. His father was a broom salesman. His mother brought him and his four siblings up as vegetarian. She led the family on hikes in the Californian hills and fed the homeless with her black bread. In the wake of his older brother’s premature death from TB, Bootzin resolved to pursue a healthy, natural lifestyle. He grew his hair long. By 1933 he had dropped out of high school and left home to wander the wilds of California with a group of fellow vagabonds. In the 40s he lived off the land with a dozen other Nature Boys in Tahquitz Canyon near Palm Springs, CA. They slept in caves and trees, and bathed in waterfalls. Long hair and beards were the order of the day.

Hence ahbez’s Jesus hair and beard, and diet of raw fruits and vegetables. It was at this juncture that he adopted the name ‘eden ahbez’ (ahbe to his friends). He was actually born George Alexander Aberle on 15th April 1908. On subsequent adoption (1917) he became George McGrew. Then George became eden.

ahbez was originally of the East Coast not West. He was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish father and a Scottish-English mother but spent his early years in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was then adopted at the age of 9 by the McGrew family of Chanute, Kansas.

How much of the life of eden ahbez is self-mythologising is difficult to gauge. He claimed to have crossed the U.S.A. on foot eight times by the time he was 35. He settled in L.A., married Anna Jacobsen, with whom he slept in a sleeping bag in Griffith Park. They had a son, Tatha. The family continued living out under the stars, with just a pushbike, sleeping bags and a juicer. ahbez was to be seen on Hollywood  street corners sharing gems of Eastern mysticism.

eden anna tatha/zoma – January 1948

Having been handed the scruffy  ‘Nature Boy’ manuscript via Ruby, Cole recognised the underlying melody in the song as Yiddish. He decided to add it to his repertoire because he wanted a Jewish song for his act (presumably good for capturing that particular constituency). Cole recorded ‘Nature Boy’ on 22nd August 1947 with an arrangement by Frank DeVol and a piano part written by Cole played by Buddy Cole (Edwin LeMar Cole, no relation).

Despite Capitol releasing ‘Nature Boy’ as a B side, its quality overcame record company cluelessness to quickly hit the #1 spot. Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and others rushed out cover versions and it remains a much covered song, from David Bowie to John Coltrane, from Ella Fitzgerald to Bobby Darin.

Frank and eden

ahbez’s relationship to the greenback seems to have been an awkward one. Once ‘Nature Boy’ became a hit, the publishers and composer (Herman Yablokoff) of the Yiddish song ‘Schwieg Mein Hertz’ (‘Shvayg Mayn Harts’/ ‘Be Still My Heart’) claimed that the melody of ‘Nature Boy’ came from their song and sued, subsequently settling out of court with ahbez for a whopping $25,000. ahbez said he had “heard the tune in the mist of the California mountains.” Prior to this, when Ruby and Cole had eventually tracked him down under the L, it turned out that ahbez had given various people different shares of the publishing rights so he ended up with pretty much big fat zero. The happy ending though is that after Nat ‘King’ Cole died in 1965, his wife eventually gave all the rights back to its creator ahbez.

ahbe anna zoma 1961

In the  wake of ‘Nature Boy’ ahbez continued to write songs for  Cole, including ‘Land of Love’ (covered by Doris Day and The Ink Spots). In the mid 50s he supplied songs to Eartha Kitt, Frankie Laine and others. His composition ‘Lonely Island’ was recorded by Sam Cooke in 1957, his second and final tune to make the Top 40.

He collaborated with jazz singer-songwriter Herb Jeffries, in 1954 releasing the LP ‘The Singing Prophet’ including ahbez’s 4-part ‘Nature Boy Suite’.  In 1959 he started recording his own distinctive brand of instrumental music. He could be seen in beatnik coffeehouses around LA performing on bongos and flute as accompaniment to beat poetry.

outside Health Hut, LA

In 1960 (thanks to the prompting of Bob Keane, boss of Del-Fi Records) he cut his only solo record, ‘Eden’s Island’ – “the first ever psychedelic pop classic” according to my pal Doug, and he knows his shit. It combines beat poetry with off-beat jungle exotica arrangements. ahbez promoted the LP by making personal appearances on a coast-to-coast walking tour. (He recorded another similar album, ‘Echoes from Nature Boy’, again containing his poems set to music, which was released posthumously.)

He pops up in various places during the actual Hippy era. Grace Slick, later of Jefferson Airplane, then of The Great Society, covered ‘Nature Boy’ in 1966. Early the next year ahbez was photographed in the studio with Brian Wilson during one of the ‘Smile’ sessions. Later in ’67 Britain’s very own psychedelic pioneer Donovan tracked down ahbez in Palm Springs and the two like-minds communed.

ahbez had his fair share of personal tragedy. His wife Anna died relatively young (47)  of leukemia (in 1963). His son, Zoma (originally named tatha om ahbez) drowned as a 22 year old (in 1971). He himself met an ironically unnatural death at the sharp metallic end of an automobile, succumbing to the injuries sustained in the accident in LA on 4th March 1995. He was 86. The fruit and veg had agreed with him.

On the subject of fruit, ahbez said he once told a cop who was hassling him for his shaggy appearance:  “I look crazy but I’m not. And the funny thing is that other people don’t look crazy but they are.”

April 1948

 

Coincidence No. 402

I’m sitting listening to Let the Record Show (the Dexys LP of 2016, their versions of Irish standards) whilst doing my 2015-16 accounts (close to the wire as usual). I get to the last track, Carrickfergus, and the lyrics

…as black as ink

just as I’m signing the cover letter to my accountant, switching from the red Pilot fountain pen I’ve been using to tick off the enclosures to a black biro because it’s just plain odd to sign stuff in blood red.

***

I saw Dexy’s play Carrickfergus in 2016 at the Festival Hall at Imagining Ireland, the London celebration of the Easter Rising centenary.

Now in Kilkenny it is reported
On marble stone there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I’ll sing no more now til I get a drink
Cause I’m drunk today and I’m seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I’m sick now my days are numbered
Come all me young men and lay me down
Come all me young men and lay me down

I got to know this song through Van Morrison’s version. During 2016 Robert Elms took Kevin Rowland, lead singer of Dexys, to see Van play at Nell’s in West Kensington. I happen to know this because Robert mentioned it in his excellent, traditional annual music round-up. Which neatly rounds up today’s circle of connection and coincidence.