Dead in the boot

You have to be brave and certain of your audience to release an album of  B-sides, and all the numbers that didn't  make the previous ones, or Misses as Joni Mitchell called them in her 'Hits and Misses' albums, giving them a second firing. Elbow have already had trouble explaining the title to American audiences, who don't have boots in cars (trunks?) so don't see the joke that it follows on from their debut, 'Asleep in the Back'.

 At first I thought that Elbow were possibly just slightly scraping the barrel but these songs have now worked their way into the space between my bones and flesh, hardly surprising for a band who recorded 'The Bones of You' on their best known Mercury prize winning The Seldom Seen Kid'. Some tracks are  subtle, and filmic, which has made the album my ideal companion for long journeys on blustery autumn morning drives.

I've loved Elbow since I was first aware of them through hearing 'Newborn', from the first album, didn't know who it was by though, and it took a while after that to realise who they were.  I love that their songs are not easy to decipher, yet are about emotions  and day to day stuff we all encounter.

Guy Garvey's lyrics are the modern  answer to the 'Seven Ages of Men', he writes about friendship, growing on,  love and loss. He somehow gets away with incredibly innocent saccharine-sweet words like 'Does he kiss your eyes', probably because you know the next track will be earthy and full of male camaraderie.

The beautiful 'Lullaby'  ('Rest  Head  Strong  Brother') is a track Eric Whitacre would be proud of, only released on Seldom Seen Kid in Europe, perhaps a later addition or perhaps because they thought it wouldn't suit British rock fans.  'Lay down your cross' seems a melancholy song about an ageing relationship: 'Love let me love,   let me love her again.'   'The Long War Shuffle' has Richard Jupp doing a brilliant pub singer type drum rhythm and Guy complains 'I'm not getting any younger, and I know you feel the same'. 

The fall out from a relationship is explored in 'Love Blown Down' which throbs with a morse code pulse,  which somehow reminds me of the soundtrack of the film 'Atonement' which begins with the percussive sound of typing. The track's atmosphere takes hold of your body, gently rearranging it through the numerous key changes. Listening to this album I realise how Craig Potter's piano and keyboards are the spine of many numbers, very often with deceptively simple melodies running along the musical vertebrae. This music speaks of lone individuals, yet the anthemic quality of many of their songs is of bodies, large groups of people.

The band got their name from 'The Singing Detective', where Philip Marlowe says that 'elbow' is the most sensuous word in the English language, not because of what it means but how it looks, and feels to say it. Garvey follows in Dennis Potter's footsteps by taking the humdrum and making something ethereal, moving, but universal.

It's interesting to ponder over why each track was excluded from the main album lists, and also which ones will feature in their current tour. It'll be the second time I've seen them and there are numbers on 'Dead in the Boot' I hope will be included, but we'll see....

Riley Stripey

RILEY STRIPEY

The Runway at Marc Jacob's recent Spring 2013 show in New York looked like a collection of moving artwork by Bridget Riley, all black and white op-art, long fluid fabrics in monotone stripes. Moschino in Milan took the sixties influence even further, their black and white stripes were a tribute to Jean Shrimpton, more mod-mini than flowing, ready to jump on the pillion of a scooter.

So what were Bridget Riley's influences? In 1960 she visited Italy, where she was impressed not only by the black and white Romanesque buildings of Pisa, but was also interested in the Italian Futurist painters such as Balla and Boccioni. In the same year she developed a style which explored perception and the dynamic potential of optical phenomena, concentrating on shape. Her work seemed to flicker and pulsate.

 

She continued to paint in black and white throughout the sixties, when there was a new perceived need for audience participation in art, with the so called 'Happenings', but at the same time concerns about a scientific future, and fears about a loss of genuine individual experience.

In 1965 her work was shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in an exhibition called 'The Responsive Eye'. Critics dismissed her work as 'trompe l'oeil', but op-art was entering public consciousness, seen as cool, and Riley became Britain's number one art celebrity. This is itself was a new modern phenomena, artist as celebrity, long before Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists.

She began introducing colour into these op-art works in 1966, oddly enough round about the time that people were starting to get colour tvs. The world was turning into colour!

So who has followed in Riley's shoes? Ross Bleckner and Philip Taaffe, to name a couple, admit her influence in their art.

'Wings of a lightest weight'

Recently saw James McCartney performing on tv; it seems that Stella is not the only Macca child in the limelight, although she has been prominent in the news recently with her designs for the Olympic uniforms.
Apparently, Stella's difficult birth inspired the band name Wings, who toured from 1971 to 1980 . During the operation Paul prayed that the baby be born 'on the wings of an angel'. Now James is following Paul's footsteps in more ways than one.  He has recorded a song called 'Wings of a lightest weight', about his mother, and another couple of tracks 'Angel' and 'Fallen Angel'  He was promoting his album, The Complete EP Collection, released late last year , when I saw him on tv. Although very like his dad physically (and he plays several instruments on the LP) his voice is gentler and more subtle.

 

Stella MCartney's Spring 2013 collection

Photo of Helen Mirren by Mary McCartney

So what of Linda and Paul's first child? Mary followed in her mother's footsteps, both in becoming a photographer and in her interest in 'Food' - this year  had  a book of that title published. In 2001 she produced the tv documentary 'Wingspan', documenting her father's career after the Beatles, mainly concerning 'Wings'. Recently she has been collaborating with Smile Train, the charity that provides cleft palate operations for disadvantaged children.

Blues Boy King

When he was only 9 years old, Riley B King was working behind a plough to pay off family debts following the death of his mother then grandmother. As a boy he made a guitar from wire and a broom handle and sang gospel on street corners; on Saturday nights he would join other field workers outside Club Ebony, listening to Charlie Parker and Count Basie.

In 1947 he hitched to Memphis, to the large musical community where every kind of African American music could be heard. His cousin Bukka White tried to teach him slide with a bottleneck, but failing that, B B King devised his 'own technique for producing the tremulo without the slide' which he calls the butterfly, swiveling his wrist from the elbow back and forth, stretching the string, raising and lowering the pitch rhythmically. He later tried to teach it to Bill Wyman, without success.

All his guitars have been 'Lucille', since a performance in Twist, Arkansas, where a fight broke out over a girl named Lucille. The kerosene stove was knocked over causing a fire, but B B King nearly killed himself going back in to save his guitar.

Over the years he has developed one of the most distinctive guitar styles - Eric Clapton reckons he can 'tell BB from one note' in a new film recounting the bluesman's incredible life. 'The Life of Riley' is out on 15th October, a film by John Brewer about the 87 year old  BB King (narrated by Morgan Freeman) tracing his influence on Clapton, John Mayall, George Harrison, Peter Green to name a few. He still performs at over  100 concerts a year, including the Homecoming concert which was originally staged to remember Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist.



 

Scott Matthews, where are you????

So looking forward to seeing my favourite female artist is going to have to buoy me through a year with no  local concert by my favourite male artist, possibly a close male equivalent to Beth Orton, the wonderful Scott Matthews. Wonderful, but no East Anglian gigs this year!

Another brilliant lyric composer, Scott won the Ivor Novella award with 'Elusive' in 2007. Like Beth, he has an interesting voice that best suits his unusual, heartfelt lyrics. At the first concert I saw him in, you could have heard a pin drop in many of the numbers, such is the respect and admiration of his fans, who he rewards with not only a brilliant concert, but chats afterwards. A truly genuine person.

More beautiful - Beth Orton

I've seen Beth Orton twice and hope to see her again soon. Of course, seeing her in Norwich means that they are special 'coming home' concerts, but in any case she's my favourite female artist, especially live. And now after a break of six years in which she's married, had a daughter called Nancy, and a son, Arthur, she has a new album, 'Sugaring Season' out on 2nd October. 

All her recent releases are 'carbon neutral', with trees planted in Mexico off-setting all the paraphernalia of producing cds. In 2007 she joined forces with Annie Lennox and 22 other female artists to release 'Sing', a single to raise awareness of mother-to child transmission of HIV to unborn children in Africa.

Beth's own mother died when she was 19 (her father had died just after leaving her mother when she was 11), and Beth spent a while living with Buddhist nuns in Thailand. 

She became involved in fringe theatre; had collaborations with William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers, and her breakthrough album, in 1996, 'Trailer Park' followed her first, 'SuperPinkyMandy', which contained some originals of songs later re-worked for the second album. She then released 'Central Reservation' in 1999, and 'Daybreaker' in 2002 was a UK top 20 album. In 2000 she was awarded the Best Female Artist in the Brit awards, after several nominations. Her atmospheric music has been used in film  ('Vanilla Sky' for one instance) and tv ('Grey's Anatomy' and others).

'Comfort of Strangers' in 2006 moved away from the electronic sound of previous work: she's been labelled 'folktronica' in the past.

Which brings us to 'Sugaring the Past', which has been called 'autumnal' presumably for its mellow, mature qualites. Her voice is always at once ethereal and yet earthy, and this collection of haunting melodies and folk ballads sees her usual mix of unusual, sombre and sometimes charming lyrics.  The single 'Magpie' has already got under my skin; she says she is obsessed by birds, and  that wherever she lives two jays follow her;  the videos attest to this fascination, with a murmuration of starlings in 'Something More Beautiful', a beautiful video.

Beth Orton will be touring in UK and Ireland in November and December this year. For full list of dates, please see below:
Sunday, November 25 - Leamington Spa - Assembly Rooms
Monday, November 26 - Birmingham - Glee Club
Tuesday, November 27 - Sheffield - Memorial Hall
Thursday, November 29 - Ashford Kent - St. Mary's Church
Friday, November 30 - Brighton - St Georges Church
Sunday, December 2 - Norwich - Arts Centre
Monday, December 3 - Milton Keynes - The Stables
Wednesday, December 5 - London - Union Chapel
Thursday, December 6 - Nottingham - Rescue Rooms
Friday, December 7 - Bristol - Thekla
Sunday, December 9 - Manchester - RHCM
Monday, December 10 - Portsmouth - Wedgewood Rooms
Tuesday, December 11 - Cardiff - Glee Club
Thursday, December 13 - Glasgow - Oran Mor
Friday, December 14 - Dublin (IE) - Pepper Canister Canister Church

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Alice Palmer

Alice Palmer's collection

Do not adjust your twinset. Alice Palmer's wool creations just got even more dazzling. 
Alice set up her business in 2001,making accesories, but lately has said she is influenced by the Op Art of Victor Vasarely, and the architecture of Marrakesh. She won the 'Best Womenswear Designer' award at New York's fashion week for her first collection. She uses unconventional knitting techniques to push the boundaries of production and design.

Op art by Vasarely

Alice Palmer's collection