The fast approaching world cup means requisite singing of the national anthems and crass displays of nationalism are just around the corner. This prompted me to check out this site. http://www.national-anthems.net/ It’s been said many times by many people before but I don’t mind reiterating; the British national anthem is such an embarrassing piece of crap. All national anthems are inherently ridiculous but ours really takes the biscuit on a number of levels. How I wish I were Russian or German! Such wonderful pieces of music. That our miserable little excuse of a tune is supposed to be rousing is a joke and the lyrics are just shameful.
What ever your views regarding the royal family, (personally I would get rid of them all in an instant) I think its high time we had some sort of sustained campaign to get rid of the anthem and replace it with, well, pretty much anything else would be better. This is a matter of aesthetics as much as anything else. When the current monarch finally pops her clogs in ooh I don’t know 2031 or something, is anyone going to give a toss about a by then octogenarian Charles the dissident water-colour enthusiast? Is anyone going to want to sing ‘God save our gracious King’ about that befuddled old git?
A good start for the campaign would be the axing of the nightly rendition of the anthem after the Shipping forecast on radio 4. This is of particular annoyance, you know how it is; you’re just drifting off to sleep having been transported afloat through the shipping lanes of the northern hemisphere when all of a sudden you’re rudely awakened by that drum roll of doom, your semi-conscious arm stretches out to switch off the radio knocking over a glass of water in the process, but by now its too late, it’s already entered your consciousness and a whole day is ruined. Perhaps we can build on the momentum gathered by the recent cutting of the UK theme at the beginning of the day on radio 4, though by the responses on some of the forums radio 4 listeners aren’t exactly the most progressive bunch. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/misc/uktheme_20052401.shtml Well sod the lot of them! The revolution starts here.
I’m thinking of starting a website with a petition devoted to this very cause – radio 4 would be a much better place without this shit at the end of every evening. If I achieve this one thing my life will have been worth it. At the very least it’ll annoy a lot of people. A casual look on google doesn’t reveal anything quite like it yet. There seems quite a well organised movement to replace ‘God Save the Queen’ with something specifically for England and ‘the English’, though this seems equally abhorrent to me. http://anthem4england.co.uk/ And then there is the, er, Australian republican movement… and I remember Billy Bragg expressing a similar sentiment recently. At any rate I believe the writing is on the wall. Who’s with me?
In other news I’ve completed my MA. Well the end of the taught classes anyway. Hooray! I would like to be able to say with some style and aplomb but towards the end I was just hanging on in really. It seems it’s not enough to just turn up to each seminar with a modicum of enthusiasm every week, eventually some actual work is involved. I’m looking forward to doing my dissertation now as it allows for more freedom in what I want to talk about and will hopefully represent a summation of everything I’ve learned in terms of theory and methodology. I may write about it on here a little as I think some of its themes may be of interest to the non-specialist. Something to look forward to eh?
I watched the Flaming Lips last night last night at the Apollo theatre in Manchester. The show was a continuation of the spectacular antics that have characterised their live outings in the last few years. The set opener, the incomparably brilliant ‘Race for the prize’, was accompanied by a barrage of giant orange balloons that fell on to the audience. The stage was beset with ‘Flaming Lips freaks’ dressed in Santa Claus and alien outfits. Such energy and love in one place I have rarely encountered. The noise of the crowd seemed to be much greater than that of a four thousand seat arena. There was a tremendous sense of really being part of something.
The show however, started before the first note was played. Wayne wondered around the stage with roadies making sure everything was just right, at one point setting up the miniature camera attached to his microphone. He also shone a hand held spotlight into the audience to check everyone out. I think that this display was supposed to demonstrate a procedural transparency and the Lips ethos of dialogue and respect for the fans. On their website Wayne discusses his distaste for bands that just play for themselves and seem contemptuous of their audience. They played a varied set with a couple of oldies thrown in. The new songs, especially ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ song, stood up well beside the classics as if they’d been written with live performances in mind.
In the end though they probably only played ten songs, which didn’t really matter when they were of the sort of calibre as ‘Do You Realize?’ and ‘She don’t use Jelly’, but this was due in part to the amount of talking Wayne Coyne did in between songs. The man’s always been slightly unhinged but maybe this development needs to be nipped in the bud. Perhaps someone needs to lead him to speaker’s corner to get it all out of his system. These little episodes included philosophical meanderings about the corrosive nature of organized religion (see also the lyrics on the new album), how wonderful and discerning flaming lips fans are, and the evil war pigs of the Bush administration. Now I agree with the sentiments, it’s just it seemed that he was stating the obvious at times. But this is a minor quibble with what was ultimately a triumph. Are the flaming Lips the best live act there is? The most brilliant I’ve seen certainly.
Posted @ 16:28:25 on 26 April 2006 back to top
On Friday I arrived back in Devon for the Easter break. On leaving Manchester I reflected on how the next time I leave that city it may be for good. I have to say that it is a prospect I am not exactly relishing – it really feels like home now. Anyway it was in such a contemplative mood that, whilst idly channel hopping in front of the box late on Good Friday, I stumbled across a broadcast of the Manchester Passion, an event which had taken place in the city earlier that evening. The BBC website described it as a “contemporary retelling of the last few hours of Jesus’ life using popular music from the cream of Manchester bands from Joy Division to The Smiths and Oasis”. Having been somewhat dubious about this idea when I first heard about it a few weeks back, and despite my lack of religious conviction or what is often nowadays characterised as “spirituality”, I was surprised to find myself deeply moved by the spectacle. Against the odds this production of the story of the passion story centring on Keith Allen’s breezy narration, and featuring stripped down string arrangements of classic manc pop, worked a treat.
Cynics may accuse Manchester City Council of trading on the city’s illustrious pop past whilst ignoring the cloying homogenisation of its very fabric that has happened at break neck speed under this government. There are those that have misgivings about the manner in which the city has developed in the last ten years or so. I have to ask myself at times, when people are visiting for example, and also out of some sense of civic pride, what is so special about Manchester anymore? All these towns look the same these days do they not? But this event, in its presentation and sheer verve, served to underline just what made the city great in the first place – its indefatigability and bravado spirit, or at least it served to reinforce that particular myth. But one can say with some certainty that the endurance of this myth rest on the power of all the superlative music that has its origins in the city.
It is as though the music somehow reflects on the city as a whole. The spirit of the music, in this case, came through the limitations of the production. So the actor playing Jesus who sang Blue Monday, despite the rather hosh posh nature of the accompaniment, brought out something in the music that is constant – it’s essence if you like, it had a nobility and poise, and in this context it worked really very well. Similarly there was something quite marvellous about James’s sit down also which lent itself very well to this kind of re-rendering. It brought a lump to my throat (though the Gin and Tonics may have had something to do with that). Tim Booth played Judas incidentally and his hairdo and beard arrangement was very similar to the Judas type character in the first and only good Matrix film. Perhaps the most brilliant moment was Jesus singing form the very top the Manchester town hall – I am the resurrection by the Stone Roses though by this time the drink had really got to me, but nevertheless a really powerful moment.
Incumbent upon my present circumstances is a concern about which of my experiences of the city I will bring with me into the future, in short what will endure when all else is faded. And I now realise that it is music that has always been so central, my point of departure and arrival so to speak. Manchester Passion reaffirmed this idea. It has been a great pleasure and privilege to dance in the middle of the night to Blue Monday and the in the very city from which it originated – to buy into my own little piece of the myth.
Just listened the first of this years Reith lectures given by Daniel Barenboim. The general theme or idea is ‘In the beginning there was sound’. Barenboim has a refreshing take on the role that music plays in society and he managed to sidestep, despite repeated questions from the audience afterwards, the usual issues that plague discussions about music and democracy in a public forum. At one cringe-worthy moment, referring to the conductor as Maestro, the cellist Julien Loyd Webber (offspring of that bloody awful composer), asked a question about inclusion in musical education in inner city schools – whether ‘educationalists’ lost their nerve with regard to introducing children to more challenging music. Though dressed up as neutral this seemed rather loaded to me, and what’s more, it really missed the point of the lecture. In Barenboim’s view music is in fact “nothing until it comes into contact with a human being”. There is no universality of meaning or understanding. His favorite definition of music by composer Ferruccio Busoni reflects this view “music is sonorous air”. It is therefore a mistake to attach to music some inherent moral value or impose a hierarchical structure. Classical music is to some extent a closed bubble. It relies on traditions and structures for its survival and can be a bit stuffy to say the least. So it was nice to here one of its great luminaries talk about it in a more open and post modern sense.
Barenboim also talked about the way in which the visual, in terms of the way in which we perceive the world has become dominant. It is certainly true that a whole new generation are growing up with a different way of understanding the world – one that privileges visual culture and that entails new skills and a different kind of intelligence. Whether this development is as alarming as Barenboim claims I am not so sure. People of his generation can tend to be a bit doom and gloom about the future. I was watching an interview with Jan Morris (older still) last night on the television, she seemed particularly pessimistic about the post 9/ 11 landscape.
I am looking forward to the other lectures to see if my understanding thus far is consistent with what else he has to say or whether I’ve got him all wrong.