In the blink of an eye

In the Blink of an Eye

Isn’t it funny how history repeats itself? The death of Michael Jackson, on June 25, 2009, will have, if what I fear took place actually did take place, many parallels with the death of his hero and one-time father-in-law, Elvis Presley. Firstly, it was a shock but not a surprise. It came out of the blue all right, as Presley’s death did in 1977, but, if we’re honest, how many of us didn’t actually see it coming? Second, the singer’s family tried to go into immediate damage limitation, with a press announcement stating that he ‘probably’ died from ‘cardiac arrest.’ Third, there is the involvement of a ‘dodgy’ doctor, who, after Jackson’s death at which he was allegedly present, went on the run, and it took the LAPD over 24 hours to track him down. Fourth, it seems that the police seized bagfuls of prescription medication from Jackson’s rented mansion. Sound familiar, Elvis fans? Granted, in Presley’s case, it wasn’t the police; his friends and family got to Graceland and cleared the place from top to bottom before the police even got there. But you get the picture. Fifth, you have the concept that Jackson was so much larger than life that even his own family couldn’t believe that he could die. Family members were heard to shout at the hospital ‘You’ve got to save him!’

Here’s basically what I think happened, and we need to back-track a little here. Michael Jackson, showing prodigious talent from the age of five, was groomed for stardom by a bullying and greedy father, who forgot to instil in him the value of money or the consequences of one’s own actions. Cue many years of profligate and irresponsible spending, coupled with lawsuits filed by parents of children that he slept with, and Jackson finds himself some four hundred million dollars (!) in dept with no hope of repaying it, because of the wasteful dogshit that passes for a recorded output over the last fourteen years – a grand total, by the way, of just two studio albums that cost an estimated fifty million dollars to make. Enter some dodgy fly-by-night concert promoter who convinces him to perform 50 shows in London having been out of the limelight for almost eight years. Jackson, being the sort of guy that he was, must have jumped at the chance to reclaim some of the love that he craved from his fans; and will no doubt have worked his can off to try and get himself in mental and physical shape for this extraordinary run of concerts.

Allow me to digress a little here, but it is at least partially relevant. Much has been made of the possible mental and physical strain that Jackson may have endured as a result of the upcoming concerts. I don’t believe a word of it. Indeed, since I am inviting comparisons between the death of Elvis Presley to that of Jackson, allow me to throw in a few contrasts between the careers of the two men. Jackson’s run of 50 shows was to take place over a massive eight-month period, and yet Elvis Presley, between 1969 and 1973, performed 57 shows in four weeks in Las Vegas, twice a year. That’s 104 shows in two months. In fact, in 1972 that total went up to 110 shows and, on September 2, 1973, Presley performed 3 1-hour shows on the same night. At the time, Presley was 38 years old, and nowhere near as fit as Michael Jackson. He [Presley] was one month away from his first two-week hospital stay in a series of ultimately futile attempts by those close to him to detox his system of drugs. So, despite Jackson having hit the half-century last August, I don’t believe he was physically incapable of completing the run. Just ask Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Mick Jagger about the pains of performing in one’s advanced years.

But it is all too easy to come to rely on medication to see oneself through even the slightest of pain and stiffness. It is a reliance upon which I can speak from personal experience. If I take my painkillers even an hour late, the pain throughout my whole body is intolerable. For someone like Michael Jackson, who was surrounded by people whose sole purpose is to grant his every whim, the temptation to get hold of the most serious painkillers known to man must have been to hard to resist. Enter the unscrupulous doctor with the BMW, and you have a recipe for disaster. Give me that shot of Demerol or I’ll find someone who will. ‘OK,’ says the doctor, ‘but…’ and before you can say ‘Bubbles!’ Michael Joseph Jackson has been blasted into the middle of next week. The doctor panics, does a runner and that brings us right up to where we are now. Sadly, nothing about Michael Jackson’s life was ever simple, and his sad and tawdry death will have been no different.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is the fact that, between approximately 1970 and 1988, Michael Jackson, as an artist, was unstoppable, with every single thing that he did, except The Wiz, a lesson from a master on how it should be done. What a gut-wrenching shame that he spent the next twenty years pissing all of that up the wall. You’re a long time dead, someone so rightly said, and now that Jackson is himself in that state of eternal nothingness, he might as well have lived for five seconds as fifty years because it has all passed by in the blink of an eye.

This One's For the (Music) Lovers!

Hello, dear reader:

In a break from my traditional rantings, I would like to begin by bringing to your attention a small vignette concerning my musical activities of the last twenty years or so. Back in January, 1990, I was given the opportunity by a lecturer at my University (it was a plain old 'college' then) to make use of a recording studio that was sitting idle in the back arse end of the Music Department. I was utterly overjoyed. I unlocked the door (I have by-passed the fact that I was first given the key), to discover a whole new world which, at the time, seemed like a paradise to me but that I now look back upon with amusement as the equipment list in this 'studio' was basic, to say the least. In addition to an upright piano and monophonic synthesiser, there were 2 Otari 2-track reel-to-reel tape recorders, a cassette deck and quite a bit of fungal growth around the skirting boards.

Over the next two months, I proceeded to spend as much time as was humanly possible recording what was to become my first proper 'album.' In a way it proved to be the perfect statement of everything that's good and bad about being left to run riot entire on your own in a recording studio.

First, I had no knowledge or experience of anything at all to do with music recording. I didn't know how to work a synthesiser, and I sure as hell had no clue about the tape machines. I had to supply my own acoustic guitar, and a cheap microphone, plug it directly into the tape machine, and go. Nobody showed me how to work anything. I don't think anyone else knew, to be honest, which is why the studio had lain idle for so long. The first song I recorded was a song that my friend Michael and I had written several years before, entitled 'Whatever Happens.' It seemed appropriate, somehow. I recorded a basic rhythm guitar track on one of the tape machines. But wait - I had no bass, so I used the acoustic and thumbed out a bass line on the lower strings and hoped for the best, whilst simultaneously playing the acoustic guitar track from one tape machine to the other I 'laid down' the bass line.

Anyone familiar with recording techniques, especially in the dark pre-computer days, will know that as soon as you record from one cassette to another you're going to create a certain amount of 'hiss' on the second recording. Then, if you want to record further, as I did, you need to record back to the first machine the two tracks you have already done, whilst at the same time playing a third. This new transfer effectively doubles the amount of 'hiss' you already had. Ultimately, during an afternoon's recording I managed to record 2 chord tracks, a 'bass', a 'lead' piano, synth and voice (with overdubs). The amount of hiss on this final recording sounded like I was singing and playing from the inside of a snake-charmer's basket, and factoring in that I had no drums or any kind of metronome meant that the final recording was a completely out of time, out of tune mess with more hiss than there was music. But I was completely besotted by this recording that I took it home to Jane and played it to her, and took her total indifference to it as a sign that she loved it.

And so it went on for another five songs, which brings me to another down-side of self-producing one's music: there's no-one else to tell you to stop. I was completely and utterly alone during those sessions, a practice I have continued to this day, but none of the six song set finished up under five minutes long and three of them ended up being over eight. And all because of the dreaded popular music device known as the 'playout.' This little passage of music, at the end of a song, can be maybe four or eight bars in length and precedes either a swift fade or a proper end to the song. Some of my 'playouts' went on for four and a half minutes! It wouldn't be so bad, I guess, if a song had so many words it had to go on for six minutes, like 'Tangled Up in Blue' by Bob Dylan, but if the song itself is actually only three minutes or so but you want to keep it going and going and going so you just play the same thing over and over and over and....oh, you get the point.

Trouble is, I still do it. I can't stop myself. Not only that, but I still have that early album, which I aptly titled 'Whatever Happened...?', on my iPod. One of these days I'm going to find some dark corner of the internet willing to take my back catalogue and shove it out there as an abject lesson to you all - don't do it, kids!

MPs' Expenses Published Online

It appears that Parliament has at last published, on its own web site, the 'details' of the expenses claimed by each and every MP that we voted to represent us in the House of Commons. However, some details have been withheld, such as those MPs who 'flipped' homes - alternating between their first & second homes - for the purposes of claiming mortgage benefits and other payments. Although the dust appears to be settling in terms of the media furore over this story, I still call for a General Election. It is the only way that this can be solved.

But Gordon Brown has survived this and clings on to his determination that we wait until the very last minute - i.e. Spring 2010 - before he calls this election. It's extraordinary how he can sit at 10 Downing Street and effectively say to the country that he will run the country whether we like it or not. It's also extraordinary that Labour, having polled its lowest in any major election since the First World War, can still remain in power today. It just goes to show that their motives are for their own gain rather than for the good of the country, in spite of their rhetoric.

It also goes to show that there is one man in all of this who is the most dangerous in the whole of the political spectrum - Peter Mandelson. That man is greasier than a chip shop on a Friday night. In one of the most insane moves seen in British politics ever (certainly in my lifetime), Gordon Brown brings him back into Government, unelected, makes him a 'Lord' and he then proceeds to dictate to his own Prime Minister who should be in the Cabinet. So to add to my list of demands from an earlier blog, may I respectfully suggest that Peter Mandelson be kicked on his arse, very publicly, on the doorstep of No.10 and shown on his way. Out of respect, and because I'm not all bad, I would certainly not begrudge Brown giving him his bus fare home and perhaps an extra couple of quid to buy a sandwich at a petrol station.

And don't think I'm anti-Labour, because I'm not. I'm anti-them all. I forget exactly how many MPs there are - some say 635, some say 646, but frankly it doesn't matter - every last one of them should do the decent thing and stand down at the earliest opportunity and force an election. But of course, they won't do that, because they value their own jobs over the needs and issues affecting their constituents, which of course stands against every rhetorical statement that any MP, regardless of their party or political standpoint, that we should focus on the issues affecting hard-working families of this country. That's exactly what is happening, if only they would take off their blinkers and see for themselves. Hard-working families of this country are completely cheesed off that they cannot exercise 100% faith in their elected representatives (and Peter Mandelson) who are flipping homes for profit, making the taxpayer pay for home repairs, cleaning, meals and God knows what, while they fight to keep their jobs, houses, and families; and they are forced to watch while the NHS goes down the pan, the schools fail their children, bankers swan off with hundreds of thousands of pounds of their customers' money, half of Europe dashes in through this country's wide open back door and take any jobs going right from under their noses, as well as child care, health care and other Government benefits.

But, as citizens of this country, I firmly believe that we should shoulder our share of the blame for this mess. The cause can be summed up in one word: apathy. Where are the protests? There are none. Why? Because what's the point? Cast your mind back, if you will, to March, 2003 when Tony Blair sent our soldiers in to Iraq because George Bush told him to. At that time, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on London to protest. It was an open secret that the toppling of Saddam Hussein was not the primary motive for this invasion. Some say it was for oil, some say Bush simply rode on a tidal wave of 9/11 and got many 'Western' governments on his side to help him settle some of his old man's scores. But whatever the reason, a fair proportion of the British public said No thanks, old chap, we'd rather you didn't put the lives of our troops at risk in some Middle-Eastern foreign land, we'd rather you focused on putting our own house in order. But Blair ignored these protests and went ahead anyway. This was a turning point, in which Blair realised he could actually do anything he wanted. Sure, people might protest for a while, but it'll soon go away, so let's just do it anyway.

And Brown now faces the same carte blanche. Not only that, but the voters (for that's what we are, primarily, to our MPs), can't even be bothered to protest any more. Environmental protestors, once regularly chaining themselves to trees to stop motorways being built through our beautiful countryside, were simply removed and thrown in jail for a night and the road got built anyway. When the price of petrol shot up to over £1 per litre, we saw lorry drivers take to our motorways and protest. Now, we find petrol once again well over the £1-a-litre threshold, and there is not a soul protesting.

Am I the only one who wants this country to be run by its people? Who cares what political 'party' is in power, just so long as they listen to the people and actively do as those who voted for them ask? And don't be fooled next time you hear your 'elected' representative (and Peter Mandelson) tell you that they are listening. They are not. The only thing they hear is the sound of smug laughter and the silence of millions like you and me as we sit back and let it happen.