vinyl – Richard Smith

It’s only words – or is it?

These are the words from a song by popular modern beat combo, The 1975.

I despair!

Did nobody point out to at least one of the three writers of this song, George Daniel, Matty Healy and Jack Antonoff, that ‘times’ does not rhyme with ‘Caroline’? I know it’s a small point and grammar has never been a strong point in popular music (I always correct Paul Simon – great song-writer that he is – to ‘I wish I were homeward bound’, not ‘was homeward bound’ when I sing along) but to state so positively that ‘Caroline’ is the only rhyme to ‘times’ is positively shameful. Why could they not have spent a moment considering adjusting the lyrics to find a word that did rhyme?

Yet that has led me to consider the lyrics of many of the songs that populate the best-sellers of today. In my 1960’s youth, I was virtually weaned on the top twenty, buying all the hits and singing along to ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Wah wah wah wah why, she ran away’. Simple and catchy. And while not at the pinnacle of English language construction, easy and harmless. True, quite a few songs might have had my parents shaking their heads in despair about declining standards. ‘If you gotta go, go now, or else you gotta stay all night’ might have had the tensing for me as a small boy asking what it meant. Or ‘I’m afraid we’ll go too far’ (in ‘Young Girl’). Or ‘She was too young to fall in love and I was too young to know’ (‘Only Sixteen). But there was nothing so overt that it made me snigger in my bedroom.

Of course, it would be naïve to assume that all sixties’ music was pure and above board – there were too many drugs around to guarantee that. And anyone who has listened to the Beatles’ ‘Girl’ will know that those cheeky chaps, Paul and George, were singing what was considered at the time to be rude words in the background. But who noticed? Anything naughty and not wholesome for tender ears was disguised, almost an in-joke for the performers. For me, as a pre-teen, I suspected nothing, just singing along with the words and enjoying the sound. And my parents could feel safe that I was not being exposed to the adult world too early.

By the time I was a parent, such niceties were history. Songs now went full f-word, although radio remixes saved innocent ears and record covers carried stickers with the message, ‘Parent Advisory’.

Did that help? I always feared it might make young people more curious. But it gave adults a chance to protect their children. Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ – that I’d bought and my daughter liked to dance to – starts with, ‘I thought that music mattered. Does it? Bollocks’, so I knew I had to cough at the appropriate moment and hope she wouldn’t notice. Then I felt safe to let the rest play. (I should say that, only now while writing this, do I realise the chorus is ‘Pissin’ the night away, pissin’ the night away.’ I don’t know what I thought it was, but it wasn’t ‘pissin’’! Did she know or care? Still, I expect she was familiar with the word already. So I exonerate myself!)

Fortunately, the most explicit sexual content tended to remain as innuendo, and it could be interpreted in a wholesome way. ‘Milkshake’ (Kelis), ‘When Two Become One’ (Spice Girls), ‘Genie In A Bottle’ (Christine Aguella) can all be explained away if you’re not looking for sexual content or don’t understand it. And while in ‘Oh Carolina’, the singer (Shaggy) was ‘banging on the bathroom floor’, it could always have been thumping the tiles while jumping around. And research suggests most young people did take it all at face value.

That’s not to say all artists were ambiguous about sex in their songs. I’m thinking of the likes of Liz Phair. ‘Liz Phair who?’ I hear you cry – luckily such performers tended to be ‘alternative’ or difficult, so not popular with the young. She performed explicit lyrics to catchy tunes, but the arrangements and minimalist accompaniment weren’t commercial and therefore off the main music radar, and out of aural reach of the young. But don’t go playing her albums to your little ones before checking out her titles or lyrics first.

Which brings us to today. Things have taken a lurch for the worse. It’s all quite different. Some of the most catchy, singable popular songs are the most profane, intimate and explicit. Who would expect that the most potty-mouthed would be radio-friendly Sabrina Carpenter? Or Lana Del Ray? Even Taylor Swift. Yet their lyrics invariably leave nothing to alternative interpretations. I would quote some here, but it would involve too many asterisks! And as they’re streamed, there can be no control or parental warning.

There are moves to protect young people from explicit visual material (the jury’s out on how effective they’ll be), but music escapes all control. It was a joy of my childhood, and sung in all innocence because, by and large, it was innocent. Things only got bawdy when you were old enough to know better. Now it’s in your face. The occasional Anglo-Saxon word in a song can shock and have a relevance (I’m thinking of the anger in Alanis Morrisette’s ‘You Oughta Know’ as an example) and you can steer innocent ears away if necessary.

But in recent pop tunes and number one hits like, ‘Manchild’ by Sabrina Carpenter, it’s simply gratuitous. Without losing anything, she could have recorded, ‘Why you always come a-running to me? Mess my life’, substituting ‘mess’ for the four-letter f-word she actually uses. And there are many, many other examples in hit songs today.

Are today’s performers adult and responsible enough to think of who’s listening when they write and record? Or don’t they care, or simply looking to get credit for being streetwise?

I have loved popular music in all its forms since I was eight or nine. Now, I fear for parents who’d like their children to share and enjoy that same love without having to shield or censor.

Richard Smith’s novels, Homeward Bound and I’m Still Standing are available from Amazon and bookshops.

THE VIDEOS

I’m Still Standing was launched with a series of videos. They were uploaded to TikTok, where the range of music is vast and free of copyright, so were set to big songs. It’s different here, so courtesy of Pixabay Music, here they are again, for non-TikTokers and with different (copyright free) music.

Sometimes it’s tough getting started!

Sometimes a good thing is too good to have to wait for…

And at last, it’s out! #ImStillStanding #NetGalley

Homeward Bound on tour!

All these reviewers will be feasting their eyes (or sharpening their pens!) on my novel Homeward Bound in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post their comments here.

As they say on the BBC News before Match Of The Day, ‘If you don’t want to know the results, look away now!’

Performance of perfection?

Looks great, can you make out what they’re playing?

When was the last time you went to a music gig? What was it like? What as the music like? I went to one recently, half decent position, standing to one side. The sound was poor – loud, unclear and unbalanced – the vocals lost in the bass. At not much change from a £100 a ticket. What’s more, they didn’t play the songs I wanted and quite a few I didn’t. At home, I have them all on records and CD – and in unsurpassed quality. In the comfort of my own living room.

That’s why I don’t go to a live gig for the music. The recorded version is the real deal, perfected for listening by the artists and producers after many hours in a studio, only signed off when everyone is satisfied with it. And it can be listened to again and again. And listen is what I do, invariably with my eyes closed, putting pictures to the sound. A gig’s not about what you hear. It’s about being there – the ambiance, the excitement, the energy. The performance is unique but the music’s rarely memorable. They offer you alcohol and then pump up the volume to lift your spirits and create an experience. What’s on stage? Forget it!

Bands must know this. Otherwise, when they put out a ‘live’ album, why do they spend hours in the studio, perfecting the performance before it’s released? In the studio, the microphones are positioned to maximum effect, multiple tracks overlaid in the mix, final masters completed in front of top of the range studio monitors. At the gig, they know they can’t reproduce the studio sounds. What counts is setting the mood and blasting the audience away.

So let’s get this straight. Gigs are good if you want a lift and an experience – at least, so long as you’re in a decent spot, preferably near the front, where the atmosphere can envelop you and the people next to you aren’t discussing the trouble they had getting to the venue. But studios are where real music is created. I don’t care if it involves trickery in production, with auto-tuning, multiple layers and double-tracking. This ‘perfection’ is what most performers are aiming for.

Of course, I couldn’t live off, ‘I saw Jimi Hendrix live’ for the next forty years if I’d not been to one of his gigs, but my memory is from watching him play. That’s not music. It’s a different kind of craft. If you want performance, go to a gig. If it’s musical perfection, stay at home.

Richard’s novel, ‘Homeward Bound’, telling the story of a seventy-nine year-old wannabe musician and his eighteen-year-old granddaughter is available now from bookshops and online. To find out more, click https://richardsmithwrites.com/blog-feed/

In praise of the album

I want to praise the album. Not the digital download or even the CD offering outtakes and extra tracks. I mean the humble vinyl long player (LP). And not because I’m just being retro and nostalgic.

A traditional LP was a single disc with twelve tracks, six on each side. It varied, of course but what didn’t was the playing time, usually totalling about 15 minutes each side, 30 minutes in total. (Cliff Richard made one titles 32 Minutes and 17 Seconds, while rock’n’roller Del Shannon brought one out titled ‘1661 Seconds,’ though I never actually timed it.) The duration was originally set for technical and quality reasons, but it was an ideal length to sit and listen. Without standing up to skip tracks, the listener followed through each side in its entirety. It was planned by the producers to a pattern. Tracks would alternate from fast to slow, starting and ending with a bang. In between, there would be different styles, pacing the listener through the selections. In later years, artists became more adventurous and programmed the tracks to tell a story, sometimes joining tracks so they melded into one, and the concept album was born.

At first hearing of an album, the listener might not like every track. The variations and changes of style didn’t suit everyone – perhaps track two was a ballad from a singer more associated with rock, or track five was a solo by a band member you didn’t like – and it’s true that the strongest material was always saved for the singles and pole positions at the start of each side. But what it meant, as you listened through all 15 minutes each time is you gradually got used to the differences, growing to like the new, different or unexpected. For me, many became ‘growers’ that, over time, have become some of my absolute favourites. And it gave the artist latitude to create a package, set moods and deliberately lift and drop the listener, not just a series of songs that could be played in any order. There are so many examples to illustrate, but suffice it to say that Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys are two brilliant albums that used the programming that an LP offered.

Then along came CDs and now streaming. CDs did the initial damage. You could skip the tracks you didn’t like and the neat LP package of 15-20 minutes listening time became continuous through 60 minutes or more with added tracks and outtakes. Any planned sequencing the artists had created became irrelevant. Then came streaming, where the concept of an album was destroyed forever. Each track available singly, skip it after two seconds if you don’t like it instantly . . . what chance for something a bit different?

The consequence is, more choice has led to less. Less chance for artists to innovate and less excitement for listeners at discovering different music and building a love of something new. Music is now compartmentalised into types and we choose the ones we know and are familiar with. Specialist radio stations and channels offer oldies or rap or hits, but where’s the mix, the opportunity to expose listeners to something they weren’t expecting? There’s BBC Six and – ironically, given its history – BBC Radio 2 but people the age I was when music first really excited me are not listening. I’d duck my head under the bed covers and listen to the new releases on Radio Luxembourg, the sole station to play records. It was only on in the evening and the sound was poor, and it was simply record companies plugging their music, (they used to fade records after about 90 seconds so they could play more in the time they had), but it exposed me to things I’d not heard before. Then came the offshore pirates, and they played what the DJs liked – and as they were such a motley crew, you could hear almost anything.

Today, we choose what we think we want and shut ourselves away from anything we don’t think we like or that might take time to appreciate. Why wouldn’t we? That’s what choice allows us to do. But I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

Richard Smith’s novel Homeward Bound is published next week and already available on Amazon and Waterstones online.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Homeward-Bound-Richard-Smith/dp/1838591591/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=homeward+bound+richard+smith&qid=1575589475&sr=8-1

https://www.waterstones.com/book/homeward-bound/richard-smith/9781838591595

Hi-fi or low expectations?

I listened to music as a teenager on a tiny record player which crunched the sound and where a drum roll sounded like damaged vinyl. Yet it gave me hours of listening pleasure. And in the evenings I went down to the local and put my 10p in the jukebox. That gave the music a completely different dynamic. My ambition was to treat myself to a proper hifi system – record deck, amplifier, speakers. I achieved it during a summer holiday where I worked days and nights. Forty-five years on and I’ve continued to upgrade, lucky enough to have the space to accommodate a reasonably sophisticated set up and thick enough walls not to disturb the neighbours. But there are no set rules and I’m no snob when it comes to how people choose to listen to music. Yet all is not well.

Some songs are just meant to be heard on a jukebox…

‘Alexa, play music.’ The words that strike fear into me. Convenient, very clever and with an almost infinite supply of songs, the music invariably squawks out of a speaker that would have made my tiny record player sound like the organ at the Royal Albert Hall at full tilt. Tinny hardly covers it. And often twittering away in the background. Or the ear buds playing over the sound of a rattling tube train. And everywhere you go, playing away almost inaudibly in the background in shops, hotels and restaurants. Yet the musicians will have spent maybe hundreds of hours perfecting the sound, mixing and completing it with the best loudspeakers money can buy. For what?

Sound has been downgraded in almost every walk of life. Televisions have been flattened at the expense of any kind or respectable audio system. Streamed and downloaded music is compressed to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed. And the trend towards miniaturisation deprives good quality sound of the one thing it needs most – space to breath.

What’s most worrying is that this is now the norm. Fewer people aspire to decent audio systems as I did, and when they do it’s invariably to rattle the walls with home cinema systems.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. I just hope producers and artists continue to believe in quality and keep production standards up. Or my listening pleasure’s done for!

Richard’s new novel ‘Homeward Bound’ – about dreams, choices and rock’n’roll – is available from local bookshops, Waterstones and Amazon online.

Hi-fi or low expectations?

What’s most worrying is that this is now the norm. Fewer people aspire to decent audio systems as I did, and when they do it’s invariably to rattle the walls with home cinema systems.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. I just hope producers and artists continue to believe in quality and keep production standards up. Or my listening pleasure’s done for!

Richard’s new novel ‘Homeward Bound’ – about dreams, choices and rock’n’roll – is available from local bookshops, Waterstones and Amazon online.