Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 7 Purple Rain by Prince

One morning, at about 7.30pm, at 45 Milner Road in Kings Heath, Birmingham, in the early 1980s I was woken by my clock radio to a song which grabbed me immediately.

Just as when in that station cafe in Rho I had heard the song Superstition from Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, I distinctly remember thinking: what IS this? Who IS this? Got to find out!

The song was When Doves Cry, and that memory is still as strong and powerful as though it happened yesterday. I can even still see the clock radio to the right of my bed.

The trouble is — as I have just found out while checking up on dates — its complete bollocks. My fond memory of first hearing When Doves Cry is what we bores call — and IF your luck is out will pontificate on at length — ‘a false memory’. It isn’t a memory. It couldn’t have happened. It is something I have made up.

In that memory (though this is not part of it, but what I deduce from my memory and my life at the time) I get up and go to work as usual in Colmore Circus at the Birmingham Evening Mail, no doubt that fabulous song still ringing in my ears, not to be forgotten for the rest of the day.

But it couldn’t have happened: in November 1982 I had left the Evening Mail and landed job (the most boring job in the world) on Power News, the staff newspaper of the then Central Electricity Generating Board.

When Doves Cry wasn’t released for another 20 months in July 1984. And by then I was living at 33, Norlan Drive, Kings Heath, Birmingham, after shacking up with girlfriend in Oxford Road, Moseley, Birmingham for a year. Where I certainly wasn’t — because I could not have been — when When Doves Cry was released was in Milner Road.

The memory is strong, still strong, but you can’t argue with time and the calendar,and quite why I created such a detailed false memory I don’t know and can’t guess.

Ah, the beauty and innocence of totally unnecessary detail. It features a lot in those long-winded, Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces upmarket US magazines are so fond of printing:

‘It was just after 5.45 on a dark and snowy Montana morning. The winged peskies nesting in the pines outside his cabin were still silent. He calmly slid two slugs into the stock of his favourite .85 404 Dietrich-Wurlitzer. He could taste that second Java blend cup of arabica which jacked him up every day. He lit up his third Philip Morris. He had just one thing on his mind: murder.’

You know the kind of thing. No doubt the taps in the bathroom of the Oxford Road bedsit were from the special B&Q Windsor range which even then were hard to find and thus had a certain cachet, but almost 30 years on, there’s no way I can check (and I feel even less inclined to do so than you feel inclined to hear all about it).

Anyhow.

That song was the first Prince song I heard, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It was from the album Purple Rain which features today, but is not the song I’m featuring. As I’ve said before about the other albums, there is not a single week track on Purple Rain, but Darling Nikki stands out and it’s the one you can hear here. Oddly it’s almost a musical hall song (if you get what I mean).

Purple Rain was the first album I bought, except I didn’t buy it as an album but as a cassette. I went on to buy many more Prince albums, although certainly not all of them. Those who don’t know Prince might think that he was just another funk merchant, but he actually produced music in many other genre, or used some of their characteristics.

There’s not much to say about Prince which hasn’t been said a million times before, so I won’t. Not all of his songs grab me as much as others do, but Prince a ‘just average’ is always streets ahead of most other people ‘being good’. He really was a one-off.

One last point I will make, merely because I haven’t yet heard it remarked about Prince pretty much ever, is that he had a great sense of humour. It was quiet an unobtrusive but it was there. And you get the feeling that however seriously he took his work and art — he must have been a perfectionist — you never get the feeling he took himself too seriously. And that is quite rare in folk at his level.

One finally irony of Prince’s life (and death) is that he didn’t ‘do’ drugs like pretty much the rest of the music industry (many of whom make a fetish out of it like that dickhead Lou Reed). ‘What you putting up your nose / is that where all your money goes’ he sings in Pop Life.

Yet he became addicted to the painkiller Vicodin which he had started taking because all the trolloping around on stage in platform soles had done his hips in. And according to a the Minnesota justice system he inadvertently been taking counterfeit Vicodin that was laced with fentanyl.

One of the greats. I like to think he’s now somewhere in the beyond chewing the fat with Mozart. Who knows?

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 6 Innervisions by Stevie Wonder

I’m sure like me everyone reading this can recount several instances in their life which they, for one reason or another, believe they will never forget. These moments don’t necessarily have to involve deep emotion, like the death of a close relative or friend or when you first met the woman or man who became a love like no other for several years. I could tell you about several moments which oddly stick out in my memory for no very good reason at all.

As for turning points in life, well I tend to take those with a pinch of salt. They are more the stuff of novels and cheap films and TV documentaries than anything you and I might be familiar with. But I do have one memory which does not exactly signify ‘a turning point’ but which did set part of me — the ‘musical’ side of me, if you like — on a new and more welcome path.

After graduating in July 1972, I worked at Thames Carpet Cleaners in Henley-on-Thames (though my duties were strictly helping unloading and loading the vans and helping to fold cleaned carpets) for several months before I spotted an ad in the Daily Telegraph for English teachers in Italy. I applied and the following January was off to Milan where I lived for the next five months.

The guy I worked for, a New Zealander called Russell Rob, was something of a shyster. Not directly, mind, but oddly he told lies when lies were just not necessary, though, as I discovered, also when they were. He told me, for example that his ‘language school’ in Italy employed several people, some in Milan, more in Rome. But it wasn’t true: I was his only ’staff’.

More seriously, he also tried to diddle me out of a substantial sum of money my father had lent me (to pay for three months deposit on a flat and three months rent in advance). Because it was almost for me to open a bank account — Italian bureaucracy was a nightmare and, I gather, still is — my father had transferred the money to his bank account. Finally, I found a room in a flat and no longer needed the money and wanted to pay it back to my dad as soon as possible.

But would Russell Robb cough it up? Would he fuck. And he came out with all kinds of excuses and lies to put it off. One lie involved the ‘sudden death’ in a scooter crash of a friend, so we would have to cancel a planned trip to Geneva (where is account was) to get the money. After too much shilly-shallying, I had said I would go with him to Geneva even though he insisted we would have to go by the super-duper bullet train (or something) which only had first class (and so would cost a bomb). Fair enough, I said. The following day ‘his friend died in the scooter crash’.

Actually, there then did come one of those turning points in life about which above I’ve been a bit snooty and dismissive: finally I knew I had to bring matters to a head. So at one meeting I asked him directly (with these exact words): ‘When do I get my father’s fucking money?’

The thing is that up till then, in the 22 years of my life so far, I had thought of myself as essentially rather timid and someone who disliked confrontation. Really? Suddenly — and with pleasure — I realised that just wasn’t true: confrontation? Bring it on! And I did get my — or rather my dad’s money — within days after months of faffing around.

What’s that got to do with Stevie Wonder’s album Innervisions? I’ll be honest: nothing at all. But I so rarely get to tell that tale, a tale, moreover, in which I shine.

Some of the people I taught were Italians who worked for Honeywell in Rho, about 12 miles north-west of Milan, so I took a suburban train out there for the lessons. And one day, on my way back to Milan, I was in the station cafe waiting for my train when a track came on the jukebox (remember them?).

From the very first bar it electrified me. I distinctly remember thinking: THIS is the kind of music I want to listen to from now on, not all that on-the-beat, four/four heads-down rock crap which was then making a comeback. OK, there was other ‘white’ music around but you take my point. The heady days of innovation were past and what with oil crises and industrial unrest it was back to basics in many ways. It was quite noticeable.

The track was Superstition by Stevie Wonder. ‘Little Stevie Wonder’ of the catchy tunes such us Uptight (Everything Is Alright) had grown up.

Now that track is on another album, Talking Book. The album I am featuring here was the first I bought by Stevie Wonder and still my favourite, Innervisions, its follow-up. I didn’t buy it immediately after hearing Superstition, not for another 12 months, in fact, when it was his latest and most talked about. But I loved every track, which, as with all the other albums I am featuring, hit the spot.

Talking Book and the follow-ups to Innervisions, Fulfullingness First Finale (not the cleverest title I’ve come across) and Songs In The Key Of Life, also have many great tracks (though to this day I’m not as enthused by Isn’t She Lovely as most) and I like many just as much as those on Innervisions, but I’d bought Innervisions first and it still has top spot. And of the tracks on Innervisions He’s Misstra Know-It-All, the one you can hear, stands out.

Then what happened to Stevland Hardaway Morris? Well, who knows? I either bought or simple somewhere heard The Secret Life Of Plants and was baffled and unimpressed: the music was so ordinary. And, as the man sings, the thrill had gone.

I just didn’t bother checking out any of the albums that came later and don’t regret it: the fact that those five early 1970s albums (before Talking Book came Music Of My Mind, not brilliant, but good in parts) are now referred to as from the ‘classic period’ and those that came afterward as ‘the commercial period’ should tells us a lot. It was during the ‘commercial period’ that we got the oddly bloodless Boogie On Reggae Woman and that complete shit abomination of a song Ebony And Ivory (which, to be fair, has more of Paul McCartney’s schmaltzy fingerprints on it than Stevie Wonder’s lyricism).

Since then Mr Wonder, Little Stevie Wonder as was seems to have done very little. Oh, well.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 5 Symphonies No 40 and No 41 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

With this entry of my ten albums, and I must admit this is a bit of a rule-breaker (if there are any rules): I don’t know what the album was, and all I know of it is that it had Mozarts’ Symphony No 40 on one side and his Symphony No 41 on the other. There will certainly have been several vinyl LPs with featuring both of these symphonies, and there are certainly many CDs featuring them and others.

I had my copy of an album with both symphonies in my last year at school (1967/68), but yet again I can’t remember why or when I bought it. And I can’t even remember why I bought this particular one.

Like all teenagers I listened to Radio 1 etc and I can’t remember when I first consciously listened to classical music (or ‘serious music’ as some chose to call it, telling us more about themselves than about music).

My mother liked classical music a lot, but I can’t remember many instances of her playing records (except I remember her once playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet when I was about seven or eight.) My father never listened to music, ever. (There is a quotation, variously attributed to Ulysses S Grant, Abraham Lincoln and W S Gilbert, but no one knows where it originated, that ‘he knew only two tunes: Yankee Doodle Dandy and all the tunes that weren’t Yankee Doodle Dandy’. That was my dear old dad. If he were tone deaf I wouldn’t be at all surprised.)

I love all kinds of music and make no distinction between the different kinds. At the end of the day music is just sound, organised and arranged and produced in a million different ways. It can be complex or not, it can be ‘sophisticated’ or not. And there is some I am not as much attracted to as other, but I refuse to accept, for example, that ‘jazz isn’t really as good as classical music’ which just for sheer nonsense — which jazz? which classical music? — is painful, quite apart from the snobbery intrinsic in that statement.

Some music is more complex than other music — Louie, Louie by The Kingsmen compared with a late Beethoven quartet — but it is certainly not ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Is a boiled egg ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than blanquette de veau served with green beans and pommes lyonnaise? Of course not.

Those two symphonies were pretty much the first two pieces of classical music I heard and got to know and — if this doesn’t sound too fey — got to love. In my last year at school I had one of the ‘sleeping studies’, a sparse 6ft by 10ft cell (small but, ah, it was home) where I played those two symphonies over and over again and over again on my Dansette, to the point where, as I said about Aja, that you know a piece so well you anticipate with pleasure what’s coming next and when it comes the pleasure is all the greater.

To adapt the phrase, ‘familiarity breeds content’. When one finished, I played the other. When that finished I played the first again.

The very first piece of classical music I heard, and then only the first few bars, was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Don Ameche had a ‘pop concert’ on AFN (American Forces Radio) at 3pm, and I used to listen to it every afternoon doing my homework. This was in Berlin where school was six days a week from 8.30am to 1pm. But I never got to hear the whole concerto until many years later. And to this day I cannot abide any snobbery about Tchaikovsky as does exist. (There is a great Frasier joke between Niles and Frasier, when Frasier reminds Niles that he once enjoyed listening to Tchiakovsky: ‘Good Lord,’ says Niles, ‘was I really once that young?’)

Those two Mozart symphonies sparked my interest in classical music (which I’m pretty sure would have developed anyway, whether through these two pieces or others) and it has expanded ever since.

Sadly, I know very little about music itself and would love to know far more. I can think up simple — very simple — tunes and, courtesy of Cubase, arrange them. But that is less than zilch compared to what went on in the minds of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Debussy, Ravel blah blah and how they could ‘visualise’ whole pieces (I think — subs please check).

I don’t have a favourite of these two symphonies, but here I’m posting No 41 (known as the Jupiter, although I can’t tell you why) because it was Mozart’s last. The slow second movement is exquisite (it really is, just listen to it and don’t think less of me for daring to be so Radio 3 in public), and the last movement quite extraordinary, grand and at once wistful but at the same time joyful. Again, if you listen to it you might know what I mean.

I have not idea where that vinyl album ended up, but when I came to get a CD of it to add to my then iPod I understood what it folk mean when they distinguish between performances.

I went on Amazon and chose, pretty much at random, a CD with both symphonies on them. But when I played the opening of No 40, I was oddly disappointed. I used to like this? Then I realised what the trouble was: as played on that CD the first movement was (for my tastes at least) far, far too slow and it dragged horribly.

So I bought another version, and that was far more satisfactory and is the one I listen to these days. You learn a little every day. (If you find that interesting, there’s a great Radio 3 programme on Saturday mornings called Building A Library where different recordings of a piece are examined and analysed, and it really is an ear-opener.)

So it really is worth checking out different versions of pieces by different bands and conductors. Now go on You Tube and listen to both symphonies. If you are not familiar with them you won’t regret it, I promise.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 4 Tutu by Miles Davis

I understand there are parts of middle-class, pretentious Britain where it is de rigueur to ‘just love’ Miles Davis, even if you know nothing about jazz and have heard even less. Miles Davis is the jazzer everyone has heard of and feels they should love (and it helps that he has an impeccably middle-class name, Miles — could anyone in Alderley Edge or Esher really warm to Kev Davis?)

Other possible candidates favoured by jazz lovers who never actually listen to jazz (though ‘Miles’ is always streets ahead) are possibly John Coltrane and Charlie Parker (because they’ve seen the Clint Eastwood film. Oh, and if they start referring to Parker as ‘Bird’ move on just as fast as you can).

As for Miles Davis, who doesn’t ‘just love Miles’? Well, I like some, if not most, of the music I have heard (and I most certainly haven’t heard it all). But he doesn’t always get a pass from me. What makes Miles Davis interesting (apart from the music we like) is that he always moved on (like Dylan) and pleased no one but himself (like Dylan). And that didn’t always go down well or, as far as I’m concerned, have happy results.

He was said to have been a difficult character, but I don’t blame him: he was a very gifted and very proud man who just happened to have been born black. And he did not just resent, but hated, how he, as a black man, and other blacks were treated in America.

The real irony of that is — as though there were only one irony — if it weren’t for the descendants of the blacks the country imported and enslaved for centuries, America wouldn’t have a single bloody note of jazz music. It’s young folk would be jigging about to whatever bastardisation of German oompah-pah music and Scandinavian folk songs had evolved in cosy snow-bound taverns. Certainly such music might have been catchy, but I really wouldn’t bank on it. And exactly what drug would they have taken? Hot chocolate? Lemonade (pepped up with a little extra sugar)?

Davis took nothing lying down, so when he objected and stood up for himself, he was ‘being difficult’. (Actually, he could also be a bit of a bugger with fellow black musician but . . .). And he had ideas which he put into action, only to move on when the rest of the jazz herd caught up. That didn’t always make him popular.

The Miles Davis music which does less for me than a bad wank is on Bitches Brew, and other music he produced at the time. He had always listened to all kinds of contemporary music, not just jazz, and decided on an early experiment in what became known as ‘jazz-rock fusion’. And, to my mind it didn’t come off.

Bitches Brew was an album cobbled together from several recorded jam sessions and that’s all it sounds like. To my ears it’s a mess and not at all interesting. Not being a gifted guitar player, I’ve been part of too many loose and noisy jam sessions (usually jamming against recordings of myself) and its rarely of interest to anyone except those who took part and are tone deaf to boot.

Bitches Brew didn’t please the critics and outraged the purists, who were delighted to start another futile round of But Is It Jazz? To that the only sane answer is: who cares?

So fast forward to today’s featured album, Tutu, which for me is the Good Twin to Bitches Brew Evil Twin: they have a few things in common, not least trying something different, but not much else. For one thing, unlike Bitches Brew, Tutu is immensely engaging and interesting. Like Steely Dan’s Aja, there always seems something new and interesting to spot on each track you hear.

Tutu also outraged the purists (who like to be outraged at least twice a week and were again delighted with another round of Is It Jazz?) and they were particularly irritated that much of the drumming was programmed and the prominence of synthesisers used in producing the music. They said it as just a poor imitation of the electronic music increasingly being produced at the time.

Apparently Tutu started life as an intended collaboration with Prince, but that came to nothing, and Davis turned to New York bassist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller who not only played but programmed and produced the album.

They made a follow-up album, Amanda, which is just as good, but I heard Tutu first and its tracks stick in my mind most. Ever suddenly out of the blue remember a melody or tune you decide you want to hear again there and then? Well, for me Tutu is full of them.

I just love it, and that it’s by ‘Miles’ should do my middle-class credentials a much-needed power of good (as they have been flagging a little of late).

The track you can hear is Don’t Lose Your Mind. They’re all as good as each other, but this one always sticks with me just that little bit more, mainly because in my young anguished years (©All teens everywhere) it was something I feared might be happening to me. I don’t suppose the cannabis and LSD helped much.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 3 Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan

In 1968 when I was released from boarding school, I somehow scraped into university. It’s wondrous what two A-level poor Es (in chemistry and biology) and an — in many ways a spurious — A (in German) can achieve, though not quite as wondrous as I once thought: after not even finding a place through the clearing system, I heard somewhere it was worth simply writing to universities asking for a place.

I did just that and almost by return was offered three places (by Liverpool, Bradford and Dundee) with no questions asked, and an interview (Kings College, London, which predictably my 18-year-old self screwed up) who were a little more circumspect. It helped that unfilled places didn’t earn universities government money, so to get the full whack of public gelt all places had to be and were filled, one by me. I accepted Dundee’s offer merely because it was the first to arrive.

Nominally, I was there to study philosophy (which I did eventually, though the first year consisted of studying five subjects). Actually, I was there to — in no particular order — grow my hair as long as possible, smoke dope (which in those days was still cannabis not heroin) and lose my cherry. Did I succeed? I wonder.

Folk of my age will remember that the later years of the 1960s (the fabled ‘Sixties’ didn’t really start until 1964) did have a feel of innovation about them, especially in music, but by 1968, Bob Dylan, one of the early innovations, was already a fixture of the music scene with eight albums under his belt and — quite typically — several changes of direction.

What I like about Dylan (and Miles Davis) is that they never choose (or chose in Davis’s case) to stand still and bask in it all. They please themselves first and foremost, and move on in whatever direction they want to, and if the public comes with them, so much the better.

By 1968 Dylan the ‘folk singer’ and ‘the voice of protest/a generation’ — and, to my mind as honest as they day is long so he was never comfortable with that label and never played up to it — had ditched acoustic folk for electric guitars (which he never played at all well). Then, with Blonde On Blonde again changed direction, and soon once more with John Wesley Harding. His career then slightly went on hold until he brought out the album I am featuring today and his career took off again. That pattern has recurred again and again in his life.

Blood On The Tracks is another of those rare albums which are, in their own way and context, almost perfect. There is, though, an extraordinary bum note on one song: it’s 30 seconds into Meet Me In The Morning, and inexplicably it was left it. I can’t for the life of me think it wasn’t noticed at the time if I noticed it, but as this was still late 1974, recording was all on tape, correcting such mistakes was not easy and Dylan (who acted as his own producer) might have thought ‘what the hell’. Who knows? Who cares?

I can’t for the life of me remember how or when I first heard Blood On The Tracks or when I bought it, but I did buy it and have loved it ever since.

There is something obscurely different about this album, and while ‘researching’ on the net for this short blurb, I read that just before beginning to write the songs for what became Blood On The Tracks, Dylan had been taking art lessons and says his art tutor helped him towards a ‘new understanding of time’ which are reflected in the songs. Well, I don’t quite know how, so I can’t help you out on that score, but on, for example, Tangled Up In Blue, the ‘sequence’ of what happens does stand out. Maybe that’s what he means.

The track I have chosen to highlight is not that one, though (and Tangled Up In Blue is usually the one played on the radio if one is ever played), and it has been difficult to pick one out. But I have plumped for Shelter From The Storm which is a beautiful song (Cassandra Wilson does a lovely version, and Manfred Mann’s Earthbound do a god-awful ponderous version).

Shelter From The Storm reminds me of the woman I’ve always loved but who I’ve never met and of experiences I’ve never had. Odd, but true. But then I suppose that’s what makes a good song.

Dylan might not have had the best voice (but like Ray Davies’s and Donald Fagen’s voices I love it), but here he is right on top of his game, and his voice and singing weren’t to got to pot for many more years. Yet despite of late his voice going to pot, even the past few albums are, if you like Dylan, and I do, better than a lot of what is being put out. OK, if you are into Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, you’ll be thinking ‘the hell they are’, but . . .

Incidentally, my theory about why he took so long to acknowledge and accept the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’ is that he thought being awarded that particular prize was simply ludicrous (as do I). Dylan has never made any bones about the fact that at heart he is ‘a song and dance man’, and there’s bugger all wrong with that. So why the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’? Yes, he does write great lyrics, but dragging ‘literature’ into it is more than bizarre. As a rule lyrics never hold up out of context, even the best.

The Nobel Prize, I believe, is simply another instance of ‘the Establishment’ trying their old trick of neutralising ‘the opposition’ and looking cool into the bargain. And I don’t doubt Dylan thought the same (just listen to Day Of The Locusts from New Morning, all about his discomfort about getting an honorary degree from Princeton and it’s not complimentary). But what was he to do? A hell of a quandary.

Turning it down would look terrible: ‘Dylan thinks he’s too good for Nobel Prize’ the headlines might read and who would want that. Accepting it — and he most probably didn’t want to — also went against the grain. So he bided his time and, on balance, realised accepting it was what he would have to do, like it or not.

He finally did so, but typically in his own sweet time, in a letter written some time later; and he did not attend a bunfight in Stockholm with loads of toffs of every stripe wanting in on the act. That’s why I like Dylan over and above all his music and songs and (his extraordinary gift for turning a horribly banal and corny rhyme into a telling lyric). Truly a one-off.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 2 Aja by Steely Dan

Here is the second album of the ten I’ve been asked to nominate that stands out for me. It will come as no surprise to some of my friends: it’s a Steely Dan album, and it’s Aja.

I was a latecomer to Steely Dan because of an odd, almost inverted, snobbery I suffer from: when Steely Dan were new and all the rage in the mid-1970s, I ignored them because they were new and all the rage. I hate being part of a crowd. But a chance purchase a few years later in the Ebbw Vale, South Wales, branch of the then Forbuoys (whatever the then current chain was called) got me hooked.

This was BCD (before CDs), and like many such stores there was a ‘going cheap’ bin of goods by the counter full of LPs and cassettes they just couldn’t shift for love or money. (It’s only just occurred to me: why would a newsagent chain selling fags, sweets, paper and stationery be selling LPs and cassettes? But they were.) They were being flogged off for just 5op each — 5op! This was in 1977/8 and that 50p is now the equivalent of £2.55, but it was still remarkably cheap.

I sifted through the bin and came across a copy of Aja. I don’t even remember consciously realising it was by Steely Dan — the name doesn’t appear on the sleeve — and thinking ‘ah, Steely Dan, OK, maybe they are worth a listen’. It was the sleeve I liked. It’s a great sleeve.

I took it home over the moor between Gwent and Powys to where I lived in Crickhowell (I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus working out of the Ebbw Vale office and Crickhowell was nicer than Ebbw Vale. Still is) and played it — and played it, and played it, and played it. And then I played it a few more times.

If you know it, and you probably do, it’s one of those rare albums where the featured band hit the top every time with every song. And being Steely Dan, the melodies, orchestration, playing and lyrics are that much more complex, so that every listen seems to reveal little nuggets you somehow previously missed. Then you get to the point where you know the tune so well, you start looking forward with pleasure to ‘where that lead solo comes in’ and ‘where there’s that subtle synth in the background you can hardly hear’.

By then I already liked soul and funk a lot more than boring old on-the-beat four/four rock, and this was a further step towards my appreciation of jazz. But Aja is not jazz and it’s not rock. Some might call it jazz-rock, but even that label is a threadbare description of the music on Aja. And Steely Dan’s music was also far more successful than the many attempts of ‘jazz-rock fusion’ in the 1970s which, to me ears (of what I heard) were usually just a forced marriage of jazz and rock which, like most forced marriages, was not a happy one. Steely Dan’s music, though, was organic: it wasn’t ‘this’ or ‘that’, it was itself and unmistakeable.

On the strength of Aja, I went on to buy, in no particular order, the rest of Steely Dan’s albums, and they are all very good and I listen to them a lot and like them all, but none quite gets to me like Aja. Aja rules supreme.

I particularly liked Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s lyrics and their sardonic take on life and ‘cool’ cynicism. So when a year or so later and by now a reporter working in Newcastle I heard they were to be interviewed on Radio 1, I tuned in. Silly me. It is never pleasant to discover your gods have feet of clay.

All I heard were two smart arse, clever-clever fuckwit Noo Yorkers, being obscure, making in-jokes and generally persuading me they were prime candidates for their own cynical mockery (‘Showbiz kids making movies ’bout themselves / they don’t give a fuck about anybody else’ — well, not quite but Fagen and Becker were getting dangerously close).

But that doesn’t matter. It never matters. The music is the music is the music. Only the music matters. Would the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be any the less glorious if you discovered he habitually picked his nose? Of course not.

So here it is the album Aja, and the track I have chosen to play is the title track, Aja. That’s not because it is any better — all the tracks are equally good — but because it is longer and the arrangement is a little more complex and shows just how Fagen and Becker took care over every last, tiny, tiny detail. Shame they came across in that radio interview as smart arse wankers.

A few years ago I finally got to see Steely Dan live at Wembley Arena and as if to remind me that they weren’t half as cool as I had thought until that radio interview, Walter Becker kicked off with that hoary old cliche ‘Hello, London! We love your fish and chips!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break!

A little later Fagen asked for requests and I — quite prominent in about the fourth row from the stage — shouted back ‘Play Hotel California’. Fagen, oh so cool Noo Yorker Donald Fagen, by then I’m sure a revered darling of the Noo York art scene*, was not amused. Fuckwit.

(*I hope to Christ I never become respectable.)

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 1 A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

As the text below (lifted from my Facebook page) tells you, one of the challenges going the rounds while everyone and her/his dog is locked down is to list ten albums which were somehow significant in your life. This was my post, plus the song I mentioned. Over the following days I shall be posting the other nine . . .

I’ve been asked by my good mate Peter Bailey to nominate ten albums (called LPs when life was still in black and white) which — not exactly changed my life, but stood out. Here they are, in no particular order.

The first is A Hard Day’s Night from The Beatles. Every generation likes to think it’s the first in everything — trying sex and drugs and in music especially (and they’re not) — but ‘Beatlemania’ was nothing new, except that The Beatles were at the centre of it and there was a new young generation.

Ten years earlier Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock had ‘shocked’ the world and caused minor mania, ten years before that it was bobbysoxers screaming for Frank Sinatra (when he still had hair), and just a few years before that it was swing music and the jitterbug. And 200 years ago it was Byron and lasses ‘swooning’, overcome by is poetry (never in private, by the way, and there was always some young chap on hand to revive and tend to them. They weren’t daft).

But I am not 90 or 80 but, - - and for me and millions the world over like me it was The Beatles, and as teen I loved them. Every song on A Hard Day’s Night hit and still hits the spot, but the one featured here, I’ll Be Back, is my favourite. It doesn’t seem to be as well-known as one or two others but there’s something wistful about it.

My love of The Beatles was so strong that I can even remember — no bullshit — my heart beating faster looking forward to the release of their then latest Revolver. But, I have to admit, after that they began to fade in my view: OK, we bought and listened to the LPs, but, for example, The White Album is testament to the illusion they now shared that everything they did was brilliant just because THEY had done it: they began to believe the bullshit. It should never have been a double album and would have been far stronger if half the songs had been cut out.

Having said that, nothing can diminish the glory (for me, at least) of With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Help and Rubber Sole. Beatles For Sale has some classic songs, but also some also-rans, and it is obvious ‘the record company’ were working them hard, hard, hard, for money, money, money — just see how knackered they look on the album sleeve.

Of those four, though, A Hard Day’s Night comes out tops every time, and it is one of those albums which still somehow sounds fresh where others sound horribly dated.

Abbey Road? Magical Mystery Tour? Sergeant Pepper? Yes, I like them but I couldn’t love them. Maybe I was growing up, but they didn’t quite have that special zing of the early albums.

Roll up, roll up and read some short stories. Oh, and beware of shysters who are everywhere (not that I’m one, I haven’t got the nous). And a few more spoof headlines for good measure

About 15 months ago, I came across a website that I’ve found very useful. I think I was scouring the net for outlets for short stories (which is, or was, something of an irony, but more of that later). Times were when short stories were much in demand and were regularly carried by all manner of magazines, which is how F. Scott Fitzgerald made his packet (then boozed it all way and died of heart failure).

The mention of Scott Fitzgerald’s name is something of a giveaway: this was pretty much 100 years ago. At my age (sadly now 70, and that is not a piece of bullshit thrown in for a cheap laugh and count yourselves privileged that I have been honest) ‘the Twenties’ don’t seem that far away. But let’s be blunt: most of the 30-odd people who will eventually get to read this blog entry over the next few months are probably at least 20 to 30 years younger than me, and for them ‘almost 100 years’ is most certainly ’almost 100 years!’ and a long, long bloody time ago. But for us ‘silver surfers’ (other cliches are available) it is not quite that distant.

For example, when I was five (between November 21, 1954, and November 2o, 1955) ‘100 years ago’ was for a five-year-old an extraordinarily long time ago — I could hardly imagine it. It was not just before World War I/the First World War or even the Boer War, but before the Indian Mutiny (and for American readers, before the Civil War). Those were the dark ages for me, and ‘the Twenties’ were in an odd kind of way comparatively recent (my mother was born in 1920 and my father in 1923).

Not only was there no internet in the Twenties and thus no streaming services, there was no television to keep folk amused, and radio and the cinema were only slowly getting their act together. So people liked to read — novels and short stories. And as there was money to be made by the magazines by printing short stories, there was a huge demand for them from writers of all kinds.

Certainly today, in 2020, some magazines still print short stories, but far, far fewer than in the heyday before television and cinema. Women’s magazines include them (‘She wondered whether she would ever recover from the grief of her darling Peter dying’), as do the downmarket rags such as Take A Break (‘There was something odd about the couple who moved in next door’).

At the snooty end of the market there’s The New Yorker and its ilk who will still print short stories, but try getting your foot in there without being on shagging terms with the editor. So out of curiosity, I was googling who might still be wanting writers to submit short stories and came across Deadlines For Writers. As it turns out: not a great deal of publications.

. . .

There is any number of sites publicising ‘short story competitions’ but invariably — at least the ones I have come across — they are just moolah machines in literary drag: they promise ‘prizes’ for the best stories submitted, but crucially it will cost you a pretty penny to submit in the first place.

For example if you want to win the Elizabeth Jolley short story prize for 2020 — not bad at AU$6,000 for the winner, with AU$4,000 for the runner-up and AU$2,500 for bronze — you will have to cough up an AU$25 entry fee. It does get cheaper if you already pay an annual AU$75 for a print subscription to the Australian Book Review, you will only be charged AU$15. But . . .

Now I tend to be a cynical cunt, and for all I know I am being unkind to the Australian Book Review and the many, many other online short story competition organisers. Perhaps. And perhaps not. All I can say is that if — in 12 months, just 500 people cough up their entry fee, the Australian Book Review prizes are well covered. If twice that number cough up, the ABR is AU$12,500 in the clover. And 1,000 would-be writers worldwide sending in their work in 12 months is really not a lot. That’s just under 85 a month. Realistically, the figure would be 2,000 or 3,000 or even more. And for every 500 bods over and above the initial 500 needed to cover the cost of prizes who chance their luck and their AU$25 ‘entrance fee’, ABR is quids in.

It gets a little more obviously stickier with the number of publishers asking for you submissions online. They are keen for ‘new writers’ and will take a look at everything. Quite possibly they will reject some of it but that is unlikely given the nature of their game. But if you are ‘accepted for publication’, watch your wallet.

In just a few minutes I have come across two such publishers, Austin Macauley Publishers and Pegasus Press but there are many more. Austin Macauley must be big — they don’t just operate in London, but in Cambridge, New


York and Sharjah (wherever that it — I’ll look it up in a minute). Pegasus Press on the other hand operates out of Cambridge, but then as Cambridge is a famous university town — one of the world’s more famous if truth be told — they must be good, respectable and decent. Surely? I mean, surely?

Well, not quite. Pegasus Press will consider all submissions, and the chances are your luck will be in and finally becoming a published author — your dream — will soon be real. That’s if you agree — that’s only if you agree — to coughing up around £2,300 to help with costs. I don’t doubt Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and

Sharjah (it’s in the United Arab Emirates) will also want his ‘contribution’, but I can’t yet tell you what it is, but I have sent a brief email saying ‘I should like to submit a manuscript. How much will it cost me’?

There’s nothing wrong with vanity publishing, and people pay to have a novel (or a piece of non-fiction) ‘published’ for a variety of reasons. Quite possibly, in the case of non-fiction, the subject matter is too arcane and a bona-fide commercial publisher — who won’t charge you anything at all if he accepts a manuscript — simply doesn’t think it will sell in sufficient numbers to cover its costs.

As for fiction, well in just this past year I have read two commercially published novels, one of which — Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith — was dire, and the other, The Colour, was — well, so-so.

Yet that second novel, The Colour, is by Rose Tremain, who according to her Wiki page (gasp! she has a Wiki page? She certainly does!) has won a seriously long list of awards. Well, I haven’t read her other work (and for all I know it is very good, but after The Colour I don’t really feel inclined to) but judging by what I made of The Colour that

list says more about ‘awards’ than anything else. (Note to self — if by some odd fluke you are offered a literary award: turn it down!) So even commercially published fiction is not going to ring more bells because some publisher thinks ‘it will sell’.

As for vanity publishing, well Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and Sharjah and Pegasus Press are still lurking in the darker corners of the literary world, but it was once even worse. Out of interest (in knowing quite how big the rip-off would be) in the mid-1980s — only yesterday it seems to me, but probably way, way before you were born — I was quoted a price of £6,000 to ‘help with costs’. Taking inflation into account that sum would now (in 2020) be just under £14,000. So Pegasus’s £2,300 looks modest by comparison. But it’s still a rip-off.

The good news is that even if you can’t get a commercial publisher interested but still want to see your work ‘in print’, thanks to the internet that’s possible — without the bullshit and losing shedloads of money. You can now get any manuscript printed up in any number you want in good quality and all you pay for is the printing. I had the one novel I have so far written (and plugged here till I’m blue in the face but to no avail) printed up by Amazon’s Createspace.

The same novel under a different title was previously printed up by Lulu.com. I only switched because a friend at work suggested Createspace. But with both of them that’s it: no bullshit ‘we will edit and market your book and get it reviewed by the Press.’ You submit your manuscript in the form you want it to appear as a pdf and it is printed. Basta!

NB A few years ago, being one day in the office of the books’ department of the paper I was working for, I asked how many of the books submitted by bona-fide commercial publishers each week were reviewed. They said about four or five large reviews and several more brief reviews from about 60 sent in every week. The rest were given away to anyone who wanted them. (About three or four times a year, a large pile of these books were piled up on the desk on the editorial floor for anyone to take what they wanted.)

So your Pegasus Press and Austin Macauley can go and disappear where the sun don’t shine with their promises.

. . .

The reason started this entry is because I wanted to tell how 15 months ago I came across Deadlines For Writers and why I found it very useful. How? That’s quite simple: the woman who runs it (out of South Africa) posts a monthly ‘prompt’ for a short story and stipulates a pretty strict word count (the smallest was 750 words, the longest 2,500). And that is it.

For a guy who grew up ‘wanting to be a writer’, I produced little. ‘Comparatively little’ would even be an exaggeration. Now over the past nine months — I submitted my first in January 2019, then not again until August 2019 — I have completed 15 short stories. And as the astute among you will be wondering how come that’s six more than ‘one every month’, I must confess that I created a second identity on the site so I could submit more than one story every month.

And to cut to the chase, you can (if you so wish) read them all, or just one or two, here. The site also offers prompts for poems and I have submitted several of those, too. Oh, and remember those 500 ‘entry fees’ the ABR needs every year to break even. By my count the Deadlines For Writers, looking at the number of submissions for January (prompt ‘Coalition’), 286 stories were submitted.

Extrapolating that figure, that’s just over 34,000 a year. ABR would be very happy to get that number. If each of them paid an AU$25 entry fee, ABR would up to a cool AU$837,500. And if they only pay AU$15 to enter, it’s because they have already coughed up AU$75 for subscribing to the ABR. Not bad for running a website.

Beware of shysters. They are everywhere.

NB If you do check out my novel (link above) please remember the old adage never to judge a book by its cover. Please. I’ve got to get someone interested, for Christ’s sake.

. . .

Life as we see it (through the bottom of glass of a treble gin ’n tonic)

This ’n that — Ruskies, Commies, good guys, bad guys, morons like Trump, the Cold War, Jim Crow, lynching blacks, Howard Zinn, Billie Holiday — it’s strange what occurs to you sometimes of an hour

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s - ten years old in 1960 - ‘America’, by which we meant the US, was in an odd sort of way a kind of Nirvana. It was, we were led to believe, where everything worked and worked well, everything was efficient, everyone was well off, everyone was attractive, life was glamorous. America was slick, cool, and, for us in Britain at least, but also in post-World War II Europe and especially then West Germany, somewhere to be envied. It is pertinent that, as I say, when we spoke of ‘America’ we meant, and often still do, the United States. Bugger Canada, Mexico, Central America and the several huge nations to the south, ‘America’ was the United States.

At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.

Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.

That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.

He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.

Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.

Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.

Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.

She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French,  but they rarely get the blame).

Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.

Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.

The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?

On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.

. . .

Several years ago, I read a book which most certainly did not ‘change my life’, but which most certainly did give me a wholly new perspective on the US and, as a result, on the rest of the world. It was Howard Zinn’s admirable A People’s History Of The United States. I have posted about it before and shan’t bother here to repeat myself, but, rather later in life, my eyes were opened to an extent which was long overdue. By that I mean merely that I began fully to understand the complexity of life, humankind and history.

There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.

Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are  the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.



Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.

. . .

All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.

From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?

The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.

Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?