OK COMPUTER BLOG ENTRY: THE ALT-TEXT

This blog entry adheres pretty closely to the song order and the lyrics to those songs on the album; rather than laboriously cross-reference each picture in that respect, it's probably quicker and easier to check the lyrics directly as you're listening/reading along - this is the best place to do so.

 

Much of the piece also references a bad road accident that I sustained at 12:30 pm on Saturday 24 October 1998. "But we're only in the summer of 1997!" I hear you tut; see Ken Bruce reference towards piece's end. Thematically it fits.

 

Anyway, the pictures:

1. Trevor Square in Knightsbridge SW1, just behind the spot of pavement where I walked off into the road and sustained that accident.

2. Didcot Power Station; much of OK Computer was recorded in Didcot, and it's also a train stop between Oxford and London.

3. Oxford railway station, where I went on the morning of 24 October 1998 to board a train.

4. Paddington station, where I got off that train.

5. Harrods, where I went after I got my haircut (which at the time was regularly in Knightsbridge - where I got my haircut, that is; Harrods hasn't moved anywhere else, except the duty-free sections of certain international airports).

6. Michael Holroyd's magisterial biography of Lytton Strachey, which I bought in the book section of Harrods - yes, back then they had one (it was really Waterstones, but better than nothing) - on 24 October. On my copy you can still see the bump where the bus hit it.

7. Old edition of what was then still called Vox magazine; Laura was getting into Placebo and asked me to try to find a copy of this issue in London (why wasn't Laura with me? Back then she worked on Saturdays). The only place that might have stocked it was in Denmark Street, which was why I had to cross the road and get a bus into town.

8. Denmark Street, at the bottom of which (on the right as you're looking at this picture) was a specialist music shop which sold only music books, music papers and magazines (new and old) and fanzines. Unfortunately I can't remember its name nearly twenty-eight years on and it closed in the early 2000s anyway.

9. Knightsbridge Barracks, on the other side of the road which I impatiently and impetuously crossed to board the number 10 bus which was loading up at the stop just to its right.

10. The westbound number 52 bus which I didn't see coming and which hit me as I was attempting to cross that road.

11. Self-explanatory consequence.

12. The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, 369 Fulham Road, where the ambulance took me. I was on a life support machine for five days.

13. The Kidlington Roundabout in Oxford, where Thom Yorke's 1987 car accident happened.

14. Airbags.

15. Tried to find one without him in it.

16. *image deleted but it was a born again reference*

17. John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, where I was eventually transferred.

18. Frankie Vaughan, who was on the same ward at me at the Radcliffe, undergoing treatment for cancer.

19. The copy of that month's MOJO magazine which included that Bill Fay review (written by Jim Irvin).

20. Hadn't heard of BF before. After my discharge from hospital I went to HMV on Cornmarket Street and they had one copy of this, as if they had been waiting for me to get better and go in and buy it. 

21. "superhero"

22. Number one in the UK singles chart on the day of my accident was a terrible Hot Hits budget-level cover of "Gym Tonic" which itself couldn't come out as a single in Britain because the Jane Fonda sample was cleared for use in France only. Actually I had my Walkman on at the time of the accident - which I guess didn't help - and was listening to Thurston Moore's Root. Funnily enough, both Discman and Root survived unscathed, unlike my poor raincoat. I forgot to put that in and should have done; sorry.

23. Lot of people compared OK Computer (unfavourably) to this at the time... 

24. ...but Pop was already on sale in HMV for £3.99.

25. LAZY COMPARISONS TO PINK FLOYD (Waters doing his Taylor Swift impression there).

26. Self-explanatory.

27. Self-explanatory.

28. Street party to celebrate rebirth/second coming.

29. Drum pedal over which Jonny G scrawls his stuff at the end of "Airbag."

30. Keith Rowe of AMM, some of whose unorthodox guitar techniques Jonny G also utilised.

31. The old Ford car plant in Cowley, adjacent to the Shotover industrial estate, on which the album's cover design was based. 

32. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Peter Jones)...

33. ...after which Level 42 were named (as was OK Computer). 

34. Sad robot (to whom Mark King's voice has also been compared).

35. John Peel, primary inspiration for Marvin the Paranoid Android.

36. Self-explanatory.

37. West Hollywood, where the incident that inspired "Paranoid Android" took place.

38. White Gucci jeans.

39. When the woman in the bar freaked out, Yorke looked at her eyes and saw the Devil.

40. Self-explanatory.

41. Rock out section of "Paranoid Android" inspired some young fellows in Teignmouth to do likewise (Muse on that for a while).

42. The article Lennon read which inspired the song that influenced about half of "PA."

43. The Breeders, who also covered "Happiness Is A Warm Gun."

44. "PA" sounds to me much closer stylistically to this than "Bo Rhap."

45. Rain down, come on rain down on me.

46. The Mellotron.

47. Yorke was originally going to sing "God kills His children" but the record company panicked so he changed it to "loves" but added a super-sarcastic "yeah" at the end.

48-49. The yuppies networking.

50. Self-explanatory.

51. What Yorke yelps at the end of "PA," and the book's subtitle served as general guidance for this piece.

52. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" was Radiohead's "let's do a Jeff Buckley song" song.

53. Bill Heine's roof shark sculpture, Headington, Oxford; intended as a metaphor for Hiroshima.

54. Kylepark, Uddingston - I grew up in Uddingston but not in that "aspirational" bit.

55. Fish restaurant in Beckenham where Lena and I went once; never again. Talk about getting funny looks.

56. "I can take you to the sun, but you don't want to go."

57. What happens when you tell people The Secret To Living.

58. "But you just try being free, my friends - everyone will hate your guts."

59. Howard Jones was born John Howard and John Howard was born Howard Jones.

60. "funny looks"

61. Perrin screaming.

62. It's too suffocating, suburbia, you've got to get away from it ("Smalltown Boy" video).

63. That shark's not going anywhere, unless it's burrowing into your soul.

64. "Exit Music" composed for and used in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet film. 

65. Self-explanatory.

66. Montagues versus Capulets. 

67. The Parallax View test scene (key words).

68-69. Lyrics.

70. "EM" makes brilliant use of the Picardy third.

71. Sung by Ute Lemper, written and directed by Scott Walker, all about the last moments in the Dignitas clinic.

72. "it brings on many changes"

73. Juliet and Romeo.

74. "Let Down"; the album's most overt song about what a drag it is being on the road.

75. Alanis Morissette, whom Radiohead had recently and unhappily supported on her North American tour.

76. Audience of robots (band complaint about Pavlovian reactions to "Creep" etc.).

77. Travis.

78. Keane.

79. Coldplay (all three of these bands clearly followed in Radiohead's mellower wake).

80. Witty "skeet" as I believe they're called these days.

81. Insincere laughter.

82. Chris Martin accidentally falls through hole on stage.

83. "Karma Police" - a Beatles song, but not the way you think. Deliberately lumpen drums emulating Jeff Lynne's suffocating production of "FAAB."

84. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, subject of Lennon's "Sexy Sadie" as referenced in "this is what you get."

85. "he isn't me, kill him"/recent Observer column on why waste time with difficult Rushdie books, read accessible, honest Dan Brown instead.

86. Unbeatable response.

87. "They."

88. don't like books.

89. really don't like books. 

90. Communist subversive Stephen Hawking, whose books are currently in the process of being withdrawn from the library systems of several North American states.

91. Self-explanatory.

92. "The girl with the Hitler hairdo"; Yorke later admitted he was thinking of Justine F.

93. "I lost myself"

94. Ending of "Karma Police."

95. Kampuchea - humanity being ground to a halt. 

96. End Of Part One.

The "Fitter Happier" section:

91. Warren Beatty, The Parallax View test scene. 

92. The Prisoner, "Free For All" episode ("we mustn't damage the tissue").

93. Neil and Jennifer in The Office, "Charity" episode - he's dressed for Comic Relief; they're about to make David Brent redundant. 

94. Douglas Adams, creator of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, in the gym, where he suffered a fatal heart attack while on the treadmill, aged forty-nine.

95. Glengarry Glen Ross: "Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries."

96. Where untrammelled spiv-accommodating capitalism gets us.

97.  "no more microwave dinners and unsaturated fats"

98. "A patient, better driver" (gory UK public information film from 1971)

99. "Baby smiling in back seat"

100. "No bad dreams"; Gray Ward, St George's Hospital, to which I was admitted in 2018.

101. "Careful to all animals"

102. "Keep in contact with old friends" 

103. "Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)"; Botley Roundabout, Oxford, whose cash machines I know only too well.

104. St Francis of Assisi: "fond but not in love"

105. "Charity standing orders"

106. "On Sundays ring road supermarket" - East Dulwich Sainsbury's, my local in the second half of 1997 and where I bought entry #576.

107. "No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows"; still from The Parallax View test scene.

108. "Car wash (also on Sundays)"; London Colney, not actually in London.

109. Hospital scene, Werckmeister Harmonies.

110. "Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate"; The Parallax View test scene. 

111. "An empowered and informed member of society."

112. "Pragmatism not idealism."

113. "no chance of escape"

114. "Shot of baby strapped in back seat"

115. "Tyres that grip in the wet"; Shepperton...

116. ...home of JG Ballard, whose novel Crash inspired elements of OK Computer... 

117. ...and whose near-neighbour Dickie Valentine was killed on Glangrwyney Bridge, near Abergavenny, in May 1971; his death was apparently the chief inspiration for Crash.

118. Memorial to Marc Bolan, Barnes Common, London SW13.

119. "No longer empty and frantic" - the voice realises he's been used and begins to turn the tables.

120. Narcissus erasing his own reflection.

121, "Frozen winter shit" in Oxford, which is what Laura and I used to say a lot of the time - that one was ours.

122. The ducking stool.

123. "the ability to laugh at weakness"

124. Boxer on his way to the abbatoir in the cartoon film of Animal Farm: "Fitter, healthier and more productive." 

125. In the transition between "Fitter Happier" and "Electioneering" you may consider Phil Selway's restless cymbal as symbolising the pig on antibiotics rattling the bars of its cage.

126. "Electioneering" was worked up by the band while they supported R.E.M. on tour in 1996 hence is naturally their "R.E.M." song.

127. Great use of the cowbell in "Electioneering."

128. "I trust I can rely on your vote"; Conservative Party election rally, Wembley, June 1987.

129. The song is more about the machinations of the music industry than politics; "When I go forwards, you go backwards/And somewhere we will meet" (JADE and Not Simon Cowell For Legal Reasons at the BRIT Awards, 1 March 2025)

130. In essence "Electioneering" is another life on the road lament.

131. The late Gene Hackman in the closing scene of 1974's The Conversation, a major inspiration for "Climbing Up The Walls." 

132-3. You are always your own worst enemy.

134. "Such a pretty house and such a pretty garden"; Morrell Crescent, Rose Hill, Oxford, where Thom Yorke once lived.

135. "A job that slowly kills you."

136. The real killer.

137. Capitalism can only ever eat itself; the semi-derelict Sunshine Desserts sign (The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin).

138. "Bring down the government; they don't, they don't speak for us"; the Bastille, Paris, 14 July 1789.

139. Too scared to change anything.

140. "I'll take the quiet life"; Britain five springs ago. 

141-2. Lyrically self-explanatory.

143-5. Symbols of benign containment; Roehampton ASDA, Strictly, Kitchen Disco/bake cakes.

146. Sheridan Smith from the Inside No 9 episode "The 12 Days Of Christine" (memory of unused airbag).

147. Self-explanatory.

148. St George's Hospital, Tooting, London SW17, to which I have now been admitted on three separate occasions; "it's gonna be a glorious day."

149. Landing on the Hudson River, 15 January 2009: "Pull me out of the air crash, pull me out of the lake." 

150. Self-explanatory.

151. "I'm your superhero...": Burt Lancaster and young trainee, The Swimmer, 1968. 

152. Peter Sellers circa 1980, still just about believing he could be immortal.

153. Jonny Greenwood.

154. Peter Green - there's something very Fleetwood Mac about the instrumental break in the middle of "Lucky."

155. "We are standing on the edge" of the Grand Canyon.

156. "The Tourist" was based on an experience the band had while in Paris, witnessing tourists rushing around the city and not really seeing any of it.

157. "It barks at no one else/But me/Like it's seen/A ghost."

158. In Held, a woman is berated by her boyfriend for watching movies on her smartphone while they are on a train travelling along the coast of Nice. 

159. "Sometimes I get overcharged/That's when you see sparks"; Thornhill Park and Ride, Oxford.

160. "HE THOUGHT OF CARS" - the traffic edging out of the West London of work, towards the Oxford of repose.

161-2. Blur if Brett Anderson had been their lead singer, Suede if Graham Coxon had been their guitarist - that's what "The Tourist" sounds like to me.

163. Self-explanatory.

164. Malin Head, Ireland, as mentioned by Damon Albarn on "This Is A Low."

165-6. Self-explanatory.

167. I'm still seeking the answer to that conundrum.

168. ping

169. toll

170-1. Song cycles.

172. cage but no antibiotics.

173. ping

174. The last trump.

175. Microwave oven bell.

176. Heart monitor.

177. Triangle.

178. He crashes the car - that's what the last sound represents, and we go back to the beginning.

179. It's still 1997.

180. "It's time...Christine." "I'm sorry, I just stepped off the pavement, I wasn't looking where I was going..."

181-2. Self-explanatory. Fly easy, Bill.

183. Obligatory RAYE/"Genesis." reference.

184. Self-explanatory.

185. Cornelius Cardew.

186. Thomas Paine.

187. Olive Morris (all three are genuine superpeople).

188. The playing fields of Botley Park, Oxford, near where Laura and I lived.

189. Back to the beginning...

190. Not so fast!

191. Self-explanatory.

UNCORRECTED BOUND PROOF BOOK PROPOSAL: THE EMOTIONAL REMIX

Marcello Carlin is a lifelong NHS worker who writes about music in his spare time. In fact he has written several million words about music in various blogs, books and publications over the last quarter-century. It is extremely likely that you have not read any of them.

I was briefly famous in the late summer of 1967 for being able to read and write fluently at an exceptionally early age. At the time I was assumed to be a child prodigy. Because my parents could not afford specialist tutors for me, however, I had no alternative but to go to school like any other normal child. That was the second mistake.

The first mistake was that my status as a child prodigy was a misdiagnosis. As soon as I started school, which in retrospect was somewhere I shouldn't have been left anywhere near, I viewed life and especially other people through a peculiar gauze screen. I could see my peers but couldn't understand the unspoken body language and therefore had an extremely difficult time trying to communicate with them.

That tendency has stayed with me throughout college, university, work and semi-attempted social life. I am tolerated rather than liked. The gauze screen in front of me has also acted as a barrier between me and other people. This proved to be entirely down to a mental condition with which I had been born. Knows his Livy's Early History Of Rome aged five but can't tie his shoelaces aged fifteen. The signs were obvious but nobody, least of all myself or my parents, even tried to recognise them.

It wasn't until I was formally diagnosed with that condition - ASD Level One, since you asked - in May 1995 that everything finally became explicable. I ticked box after box, and this ball and chain which I have been compelled to drag around with me my whole life has closed off many avenues down which I could otherwise have ventured. It is why I am not a CEO with a six-figure salary and a nice detached house in Dulwich. It is why you have almost certainly never have heard of me. I lack the essential characteristic to make such things happen. Occasionally I miss not having it but most of the time I don't.

I did not start writing about music in public until after my first partner died of cancer in August 2001. I took it up on the advice of a professional psychotherapist, as a tool to cope with my grief. When I set up my first blog, The Church Of Me, at the end of 2001 my long-term task with the writing in it was to dig myself a tunnel out of bereaved hell, and in that I eventually succeeded.

The Church Of Me received huge approval and a remarkably high number of readers at its peak, and got me (via my own prodding) some published work, but that was at a time when music blogs of note could be counted on the fingers of two hands with plenty to spare, before the professionals moved in and turned the term "blog" into a brand. Nevertheless I continued with my writing, sometimes sporadically and at other times with intense frequency.

My other major blog is Then Play Long, which I co-author with my second wife, Lena Friesen - we encountered each other as a direct consequence of what I was doing on CoM - and which takes long and patient looks at all British number one albums from mid-1956 to the present (currently the autumn of 1996). The blog has taken a few extended breaks but at the time of writing is indubitably active).

My third mistake was to start writing about music in public when I was thirty-seven years old, thus instantaneously freezing me out of the closed shop of British music criticism. If I was going to be of any consequence, I should have started a lot sooner. I haven't paid my dues, photocopied the fanzines, written 150 words about the Edgar Broughton Band in a pub just outside Aylesbury on a wet Thursday autumn evening into an even wetter notebook. Hence I am generally viewed as a rather sad dilettante, a groaning ambulance chaser, a never-was (the chant of terminal damnation: "He's just a blogger!").

As a consequence of the above, I have been left out, excluded, seemingly deliberately, from the ocean of critical discourse, even though I feel I have plenty to say and some spectacularly good ways of saying it. And since my ASD Level One - not to mention a fairly brutal childhood upbringing, where any residual confidence and self-belief were literally knocked out of me - has rendered me incapable of selling myself (in terms of music writing, anyway - I've always been quite good at selling myself to the NHS, though, which is good because it's kept me alive these past thirty-nine years), you very likely don't know about my writing.

WHEN ARE YOU GETTING TO THE BLOODY BOOK?

I wrote this 120,000-or-so word book, Uncorrected Bound Proof, between New Year's Day and early August, 2023. The book contains 100 chapters, each inspired by a piece of music, and not just any pieces of music. It is based upon my Your Top Songs 2022 Spotify playlist, and I write about each song, in reverse order, from numbers 100 to 1.

While looking through that 2022 playlist it did occur to me that the sequencing of music would act as a good tool to guide me through the story of my life and all the joys and horrors which I have experienced in life's course. I wrote the chapters in strict ascending numerical order so my story is guided in part by those semi-random factors and is not told chronologically. Which is a major relief, since nothing bores me more about biography than the weary standard processional of "THIS happened, then THAT happened." Nothing important has been omitted but I wouldn't be inclined to reorder the chapters chronologically. The idea is to express life's ups and downs as though on an actual helter-skelter ride.

"Spotify, though..."

Yes, I know. It was supposed to be this great algorithmic liberator - everything instantly available to the listener! Well, everything that the algorithm judges that I ought to be listening to and appreciating. As the book progresses you may note an incrementally-increasing impatience mounting up, as the listener realises that this is not so much liberation, more of a comfier prison cell.

The one hundred songs on that Spotify list do not really reflect my overall listening habits or even my musical tastes. I do not feel the need to listen to my favourite music several times per week. Not that there's anything on that list that I do not like; why would I waste my time listening to music I loathed? But perhaps one of Spotify's subtexts is to make the listener exhausted by music and finally loathing all of it. "Where can I hide from Your love?" as expressed in both Psalm 139 and Frank O'Hagan's song "Another Day."

So there ensue repeated attempts to breach the algorithmic wall. Some of the songs offered me an excuse to revisit some of my previous writing and speak about much, much more than the songs themselves. One song acts as a pretext to describe in gruesome detail the 137 days I spent as an inpatient at St George's Hospital in April-August 2018 following near-fatal surgery. Finally, the wall is broken and the book concludes or climaxes with an exhilarating rush of prose about songs which do not appear in the list at all, as though throwing the algorithm out with the bathwater.

The book finishes on the side of life.

MUSIC, AND WRITING ABOUT IT

In the early stages of attempting to get people interested in Uncorrected Bound Proof, I played up the notion that it was NOT "a music book." This was disingenuous - of course it's a bloody music book! - but I was rather reluctant to submerge the book beneath the waves of what is accepted as music criticism today.

I was worried that the book was going to be read wrongly, or assessed or damned for the wrong reasons. Since in a perfect world there is no such entity as wrongness, that worry was a bit unfounded.

But I am obliged to point out a few factors (I'm not going to call them "caveats"). This is not a gigantic encylopaedia of music history. You are unlikely to learn much about the "big" stories or the logistics and mechanics which made them occur. When I watched Bowie performing "Starman" on Top Of The Pops in the summer of 1972 I did so on a wonky black-and-white portable television in a boarding house in a rainy Blackpool. In addition I was eight years old in 1972, so it didn't change my life one atom. Yet Bowie makes an extended posthumous cameo appearance in UBP, in the course of my discussion of Daphne Guinness' "Revelations," which I have constructed as a word-for-word rewrite of the Book of Revelations but with Bowie as the instrument of the Second Coming (remember how the world seemed to start going to pot directly after he died?).

This list of a hundred songs does not include many of the standard items you would expect to see in any of those all-time best songs charts. No law is being laid down. But its cast list includes Mark Ronson, the Weeknd, Giorgio Moroder, Charles Mingus, Mickey Newbury, Riverdance, Curve, "Taste The Biscuit," Al Martino, Public Enemy, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Anne-Marie David, Underworld, Stereolab, Hot Chip, Nirvana, the Boo Radleys, Adriano Celentano, Aphex Twin, the orchestras of Tony Hatch and Johnny Pearson, Mike Oldfield (the entire first side of Ommadawn, no less), Samantha Mumba, World Of Twist, Conchita Wurst, Future Islands, "Gangnam Style" and of COURSE the Associates and Radiohead.

OXFORD

The two Radiohead chapters were the hardest to write, not simply because I lived in Oxford for many years and was, ahem, there when certain things happened, but also because they amplified the doubts which had steadily been accumulating in my mind following the death of my first partner. Doubts as in, looking back, and with plenty of time in which to look back, there was something very, very wrong about the way we lived in the nineties. So these chapters, particularly the one on "Pyramid Song," constitute my closest and rawest attempts to seize my past and come to terms with it. Some readers may find this content upsetting. But if I don't say it while I'm still alive, who will ever be said to have said it?

"Don't feel sorry for Punctum Boy; you know he wants the world to love him, and then goes and spoils it all..."

There are many, many stories to be told in parallel to or in supersession of mine. So why would you want to read this particular story, told by somebody whom in all likeliness you have never heard of?

I think it's because the story is being told by a person to whom music has had an especially umbilical connection. This is the tale of a grown man who as a boy was routinely beaten up by his father for buying records and ended up having to hide them in the attic, and thereafter vowed that NOBODY was ever going to tell him again not to buy records or care for music. It is the story of a person who has thought more deeply and thoroughly about music than most people but has no real means of advertising that thought.

Perhaps above all else the book represents a cry, a calling to attention, to demonstrate exactly what music writing can do and where it can take listener, reader or writer alike. Uncorrected Bound Proof is not an anthology of matey anecdotes with an ending so pat that music lover Pat Nevin would be offended. Nor does it retell the same old stories which mainly didn't happen in the first place, or not in the way you've been economically persuaded to believe they happened. To criticise the book for missing out artist XYZ really is missing the point. Indeed it "misses out" nearly all artists. In conclusion, the book states that I want music writing to live, breathe and matter again, just as I have done with my life, which I have nearly lost perhaps five or six times in the last quarter-century, but instead decided to let music help save it. The book could save your life too.

NO MORE AGAIN - CARLA BLEY

 

It was the afternoon of Saturday, 16 February 1980, a day I'll remember for the rest of my life, when I travelled to the old Bridge Street Library in the heart of the old Gorbals, in Glasgow, to listen to Escalator Over The Hill. The work had intermittently crossed my radar but I had not actually listened to it and knew of Carla Bley largely by reputation only. Because I lived in Uddingston at the time I was only allowed to borrow books and music from Lanarkshire county libraries, but because my father worked in Glasgow I managed to get a pass to read books and listen to music in Glasgow libraries, even though I couldn't take them out.

So it was that I listened, on library headphones, to all six sides of Escalator. Shortly beforehand I had dreamed the entire record and was now naturally very keen to listen to the thing itself. I was utterly transported, and transformed. I left that library in a daze, wandered around various, mostly disused areas of Clydeside. It was as if the entire world had been opened up for me to explore. The record was like nothing I had ever heard before. I searched for it, venturing as far as Virgin Records in Edinburgh on a sunnier Saturday afternoon not long afterwards, only to be told that it had been deleted just a few months beforehand, in October 1979.

I eventually contacted Honest Jon's Records on the Portobello Road, who did have a copy in stock for £4.50 and duly posted it to me. I lived within that record for at least a year and predictably felt the urge to find as much else of Carla Bley's music as possible. For the best part of 1980 I listened to little else.

There was a route to Escalator; it did not emerge from nowhere. Lovella May Borg, as she was born in Oakland in May 1936, was taught music at an early age by her father Emil, who worked as a church choirmaster and piano teacher. Her mother died when she was just eight. At seventeen she moved to New York and found work as a cigarette girl at Birdland. There she also met her first husband, the Montreal pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to compose music.

Her works initially appeared in dots and flashes, which was a fair way of summing up her quixotic and elusive rhythmic and harmonic approach. George Russell's sextet recorded "Bent Eagle" for their 1960 album Stratusphunk, while the Jimmy Giuffre 3, whose line-up also included Paul Bley and, crucially, the young bassist Steve Swallow, interpreted "Ictus" for their Thesis album one year later. Paul Bley himself recorded an entire, fiery album of her compositions entitled Barrage in 1965.

Carla, in tandem with the Austrian composer and trumpeter Michael Mantler, joined up with the Jazz Composers Guild in 1964. Despite residual misogyny from some other members of that organisation - notably Sun Ra, who regarded having a woman on board as a sign that the ship would sink - she and Mantler prevailed, and not long afterwards married. Many of Bley's early recordings were shared enterprises between the rather austere Mantler and her brighter, more mischievous self. "Roast," which she composed and directed for (though does not play on - Paul Bley was the pianist on that session) the first Jazz Composer's Orchestra album Communication in 1965, is a rhythmically intriguing puzzle which draws committed improvising from soloists Milford Graves, Steve Lacy and Archie Shepp. Thereafter the 1966 Jazz Realities quintet album, which gives equal space to Bley and Mantler's compositions, suggested a freer approach, although an exhausting European tour with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann in the line-up told Bley that perhaps she didn't need to get that free. In the meantime, remembering her church beginnings, she contributed to the book anthology A Wreath Of Carols, edited by one Betty M Owen, in 1966.

Carla already knew the poet Paul Haines - you can clearly hear the two converse between numbers in the very sparse audience on Albert Ayler's 1964 Prophecy album - and by 1967 Haines had moved to India to work as a teacher. He sent Carla some of his work, and by that time Carla's head had been turned around by exposure to the Beatles' Sgt Pepper. Ideas for an even more extensive concept album sprung to both minds.

In this context, A Genuine Tong Funeral, a work Bley wrote (with a written but unsung libretto by Haines) for the Gary Burton Quartet and a five-piece horn section drawn from the Jazz Composer's Orchestra repertory company, acts as a kind of prelude to Escalator; elements of the latter's themes subtly pop up in the former. Despite some good playing, however, the quartet and horns seem to exist in separate universes and coincide only very rarely, and sometimes haphazardly. The experiment was still being fermented.

Work on composing Escalator began in earnest - Bley came up with a total of twelve separate themes which she had to weave into a coherent framework - and some recording work on it was undertaken in November 1968. The process was long drawn-out, however, because the work proved very costly indeed, driving Bley and Mantler into six-figure debt and not a little discomfort; the record was only completed in the summer of 1971. During that period she also appeared on half of Mantler's historic The Jazz Composer's Orchestra double album (1968), providing a raised eyebrow of a piano solo on "Communications #8," though was somewhat obscured by the other half of the record being dominated by Cecil Taylor.

More profitably, she did many of the arrangements for, and was the de facto co-leader on, the eponymous first album by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, one of 1970's rawest and most explosive protest records. I first heard "Circus '68;'69" on Peter Clayton's Jazz Record Requests show on Radio 3 in November 1976 and was completely blown away by it, not knowing at the time about Bley's involvement (it is her organ which mightily and solemnly begins to play "We Shall Overcome" in the midst of orchestrated chaos). I caught up with the record itself - again, via Honest Jon's (this was a major factor behind my eventual decision to move to London) - not long after my first listen to Escalator, and there was an air of elegiac slapstick about Bley's voicings and, in some cases, compositions, which adhered to my heart.

When Escalator finally appeared in Britain, in March 1972, Richard Williams in Melody Maker declared it one of the greatest records ever made, if not the greatest. I cannot disagree with that declaration over half a century later. It represents the emancipation of all types of music - classical, free (and not so free) jazz, pop, rock, country, abstract electronics, incipient World Music - in a form which nobody has bettered before or since. Haines' words are askew in their obliqueness, but as with his unlikely spiritual cousins The Bee Gees, one is intended to feel the words before (or perhaps even instead of) understanding them. If you look at the booklet accompanying the album, there are unsung lyrics scored to accompany instrumental passages. You were trusted to be able to keep up with, and accept, what was going on.

The plot of Escalator, as such, is obscure. Much of it appears to take place in a decrepit establishment called Cecil Clark's Hotel - commonly supposed to represent the Chelsea Hotel in New York (indeed the Warhol superstar Viva acts as the work's narrator) - but some of it happens in India, some in a field which may or may not exist, and all of it happens pretty exclusively in the listener's mind. I had no idea, for instance, that the almighty rupture we hear at the beginning of side two signified the Los Angeles earthquake of 1971, but my wife Lena, who was present in Los Angeles when that happened, confirms that this was indeed the case.

Overall, however, amid all the humour and fourth-walling, there is an air of profound melancholy about Escalator. It would not, of course, had worked without the contributions of the fifty-four people who perform on it (at least; contractual issues suggest that even more musicians, including some extremely famous ones, appear on the record anonymously) - above all Jack Bruce, the conscience which holds the entire work together, but also Roswell Rudd, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin (sounding the most committed he had sounded on record to date), Charlie Haden, Linda Ronstadt, Jeanne Lee, Sheila Jordan, Paul Jones, Leroy Jenkins, Paul Motian (the work's unsung hero, called upon to drum in a vast variety of styles throughout) and many, many others, especially Don Cherry, whose Desert Band sequences (which do not appear on the record until very late in the day) escort an already spellbinding record into something approaching holiness. One could spend a lifetime immersed in the greatness of this work which, as the elongated fadeout confirms - on the original album it is a locked groove - could theoretically last forever.

I doubt that Escalator could ever have been bettered, and suspect that Bley knew it. 1974's Tropic Appetites, also composed with Haines, was supposed to act as a whimsical footnote to Escalator, but doesn't really sound anything like it - only eight musicians essentially appear on it, but via multi-tracking sound like a lot more - though has its own, extremely strong moments; I wonder if the young Elvis Costello had heard "Caucasian Bird Riffles," beautifully sung by Julie Tippetts with plaintive trumpet from Mantler, and remembered it when he recorded his own version of "Shipbuilding," featuring Chet Baker, nine years later (the two songs are structurally not alike in any way, but the arrangement and delivery of one may have influenced the other).

Bley continued to skirt around the borders of what Escalator had implied. She was her own featured soloist on 1975's magnificent classical piece "3/4 For Piano And Orchestra" and in the same year briefly entered the arena of rock when she joined Jack Bruce's band, together with recent Stones guitarist Mick Taylor - an experiment possibly better in theory than in practice. In 1976 she contributed to the John Cage/Jan Steele Voices And Instruments anthology on Brian Eno's Obscure Records and in the following year to John Greaves' Kew.Rhone. During the same period she also maintained a supportive role with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra (and the shortlived New Music Distribution Service), contributing piano to Don Cherry's Relativity Suite, Grachan Moncur III's Echoes Of Prayer and Clifford Thornton's The Gardens Of Harlem. She was obviously also key to Michael Mantler's works of the period - superb with just Jack Bruce and (occasionally) Don Cherry on the Beckett adaptation No Answer (1974), submitting icily Futurist Korg string synthesiser on the Edward Gorey anthology The Hapless Child (1975), less convincing on the Pinter setting Silence (1976), and in a refreshingly good mood on the two jazz-rock albums Movies (1977) and More Movies (1978).

As far as her own music was concerned, Bley seemed slightly directionless in the mid-late seventies. Dinner Music (1976) attempted to marry boisterous horns to smooth fusion (Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Eric Gale and Cornell Dupree were among the players involved) with only limited conceptual success, and probably contributed to the need to organise and tour her own band. In 1977 that involved several key British players, including Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Gary Windo, and their European Tour 1977 album, though a studio recording, sounded the most vital Bley's music had done in some time.

So impressed was Bley by Gary Windo's saxophone playing in particular, and so appalled was she by the fact that he had to work as a car mechanic to pay the bills, that she kept him in her band and took him over to the United States. His unapologetic approach - somewhere between Junior Walker and Pharaoh Sanders - contributes greatly to the impact of the otherwise irritatingly jokey Musique Mecanique (1978), as do guests Eugene Chadbourne and (gleefully sending up his own Liberation Music Orchestra approach) Charlie Haden.

This in turn led to the remarkable Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports album, recorded in 1979 but not released until 1981, bankrolled by the Pink Floyd drummer and long-term Bley fan and featuring Robert Wyatt doing most of the vocals; critically misunderstood at the time, it is a patchy but sometimes very profound art-pop record. But Bley largely turned away from pop after that - apart from appearing on a couple of records by The Golden Palominos, that really was it with her and pop - and back towards jazz, developing a slow-burning but enveloping dynamic around her music and the musicians she chose to play it. There are twenty-four albums still to go, most of which were strongly affected by her estrangement from Mantler and ultimate happiness and companionship with Steve Swallow, and those are just under her own name; four other albums by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, at least two of which (1983's The Ballad Of The Fallen and 2005's Not In Our Name) are indispensable, as well as striking contributions to several anthologies by Hal Willner, some involving unlikely but compatible players such as Phil Woods and Johnny Griffin.

Of those remaining twenty-four named Bley albums, I have always had a soft spot for 1986's Night-Glo, routinely dismissed at the time as cocktail muzak but which gradually and magnificently undermines its own premise with increasing discordancy. The big band albums are consolidatory and relatively unadventurous but the live Fleur Carnivore (1989) best captures its essence. Songs With Legs (1994), a trio date with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, features perhaps her most committed piano improvising. The Lost Chords (2004) and its sequel, The Lost Chords find Paolo Fresu (2007), were unexpected late and very profound masterpieces. Finally there was a trilogy of records by the Bley/Swallow/Sheppard trio - Trios, a revisiting of earlier compositions (2013), Andando el Tiempo (2015), perhaps the bleakest and most moving of Bley records, and the comparatively playful Life Goes On (2020) provided a richly satisfactory coda.

I would propose that Carla Bley, and Escalator Over The Hill in particular, was (or were? are?) instrumental in shaping the way in which I have approached music these past forty-three years. Its implications remain insufficiently realised, but it - and she - certainly altered this person, and the church in which he has chosen to dwell. No more "again," perhaps, but at the same time there is always again. That was her work's primary lesson.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

I have written a 117,156-word book entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof. I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it today. The book consists of 100 chapters, each based on a song in my personal Your Top Songs 2022 algorithmic Spotify playlist, in ascending order from numbers 100-1. The book’s purpose is to tell the story of my not uneventful life, but I have done so in accordance with the strict numbering order of the playlist. This means that the events of my life are told out of sequence; however, I have ensured that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.

 

While this is a book dictated by music, and which in large part consists of musical criticism, it is, however, not a book about music. It ventures with moderate violence against the grain of what is normally perceived as music writing. It mixes autobiography, criticism and semi-abstract thinking in ways which have not previously been attempted in this field. Its influences would include the likes of Alasdair Gray, Simon Barnes, Nicola Barker, Lucy Ellmann, Michael Bywater, Percival Everett, David Thomson and Roger Lewis, rather than Greil Marcus, Nick Kent, Nik Cohn and so forth.

 

I was very briefly a celebrity in the mid-late 1960s due to being a misdiagnosed child prodigy. Since then, however, I have been an anonymous being with a solid NHS professional career but seemingly little to show as a writer. I am not a famous musician or even one with a cult following from several decades ago. I have written about music online, and sometimes in print, since the autumn of 2001 after I became prematurely widowed and had to do something in order to find a reason to remain alive. The few who do know my writing consider it among the best music writing there is, including several very well-known musicians, some of whom are no longer with us. So influential was my early blog writing that it directly inspired the late Mark Fisher to begin k-punk.

 

In the course of my own life, however, I have faced death on at least four occasions, most recently in 2018 when I underwent major and potentially life-threatening surgery. I talk about the lucid nightmares which I experienced in my 137 days as a hospital inpatient at that time in frank detail in this book. I also discuss my extremely personal relationship to music and regularly, and sometimes angrily, interrupt my own musings.

 

The 100 songs which form the basic structure of this book are, by and large, not well-worn “classics.” This is not the same, predictable list of songs that you will see in any other comparable book. They are simply, and mathematically, the 100 songs to which I listened most on Spotify over the course of one year and the list might best be described as a horizontal one – i.e. number 22 is three ALONG from number 25, not three ABOVE. There is no great climax to a classic, although that cannot be said for the writing. Many of these songs will be entirely unfamiliar to many readers, or at the very least unexpected.

 

Given the intended nature of this book, I could not avoid using material from blogs I have written in the past, but I have tried to be sparing and not obvious with those. There are no more than five extracts from Then Play Long, but these have all been revised for the purpose of this book, as have a number of pieces from former blogs, most of which have remained out of print for some while, or have never been publicly published at all. The reason for using this material will be obvious to those who read the book and are able to follow its emotional journey, and I have reprinted nothing that is not thoroughly relevant to the book’s underlying theme.

 

The book, as I said, is written. Now all that awaits is for somebody willing to publish it. While I would like to avoid pursuing the route of self-publishing if at all possible, this may well prove a chimerical dead end. Publishers only publish things which they think will make a profit; that is their nature as a business.

 

However, the primary purpose of Uncorrected Bound Proof is not to make money, but to prove to the world of tomorrow, should such a thing come to pass, that once upon a time I existed on this planet and this is what I was about. Since this is a book which I have written in a very deliberate and methodical way, I am adamant that it must be published as it stands, with no editing beyond that which I myself have undertaken. Otherwise it becomes somebody else’s idea of a book rather than my book. To paraphrase another celebrated blogger of a generation ago, other writers write what they think people will like, whereas I write me.

 

If any publisher or agent would like to email me at marcellocarlin@yahoo.co.uk I will be happy to send them a copy of the manuscript to read. Obviously with something based on a list compiled in 2022 I wouldn’t like to leave it until 2025 until it got published.

 

Thank you for your time.

FY 'PON THEE, SPOT!

Since September of last year I have been using Spotify as my primary means of listening to music. For years I didn't go near the programme because for obscure technical reasons it was not on speaking terms with Microsoft. But that contretemps got sorted out and I caved in.

The experience was glorious, like all Christmases coming at once. That album you've been fruitlessly trying to find on CD with online auction prices guaranteed to send a chill down the back of your bank manager? Why, it's here! Records or songs which you weren't quite sufficiently sure enough to want to purchase? Ones you read about in the papers, or in magazines, or online, from critics or peers? Albums available on download only? A simple matter to go to Spotify, give the records a listen and make up your own mind about whether you want to explore or invest that music further.

It set off a stream of liberation through my arteries, the likes of which I haven't quite felt since my teenage days 40-45 years ago when I would tape things off the radio, and the surrounding DJ chatter didn't disturb or vex me at all; quite the reverse! It was an internal gasp of: wow, I can actually endeavour to listen to everything! A modest ambition.

Now I have as many albums on Spotify as I do actual albums in my house, and no doubt the actuality element will shortly be surpassed. And, possibly uniquely, I listen to everything I add to my library, as an accompaniment to work, at quiet times over the weekend. I absorb what is happening and react to it accordingly. It is as though somebody opened the curtains and windows and let the sunshine peal into what was hitherto concealed gloom.

It has fundamentally altered the way I listen to music, has Spotify. And yes, I know not absolutely everything is there, which is why I also use YouTube Music, Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and to a degree Bandcamp as backups to find those elusive items not available on Spotify. However, the overall impact has been phenomenal.

Don't get me wrong. If I like something fervently enough to want to get it on physical, I buy it; I haven't stopped doing that, but I'm doing a lot less of it, which is essential for my wellbeing (apologies for the banal corporate terminology). I used to spend entire days in record shops, or circulating around gigantic clouds of record shops. That was when they were exciting and colourful. Now, going into a record shop is like entering a morgue; grey, lifeless, a purposeless appendage to real (i.e. online) business. These days I get most of my CDs online. It's so much less bother, so infinitely better for my incrementally failing health.

Furthermore I make a point of buying CDs from musicians who would benefit from it; those in the distant outlays of jazz, improv, indie, electronica or wherever whose music I like so much that I pay them money to listen to it. That way, you see, the musicians would be able to make more music that I might like in the future.

So I am trying my best. Which is why I am irked by the increasing hostility shown by several bodies of musicians, and music writers, who really should know better directed, not at the executives of Spotify but at its users. I am fully aware of Spotify's damaged business model, its highly questionable politics and investments, and the pitiful rate afforded to the people actually responsible for that music. I can understand why Neil Young and Joni Mitchell would wish to vacate the premises (at least for now). It is absurd that a band as imaginative and powerful as Field Music, for example, should, as I understand things, be subsisting on a slender £5,000 per year.

I know that people like Tom Gray are fighting - and absolutely justifiably doing so - for a far better deal for musicians whose work appears on Spotify for so little personal reward. I completely empathise with those musicians who simply go on Bandcamp, get far better compensated financially there and actually find an audience. I don't blame them at all.

However, I do not think that some folk are appreciating just how radically the world has changed in the past few years. The unendurable truth is that an awful lot of people in the alleged developed world of 2022 - I would go so far as to say the majority of them - cannot currently afford even to feed or heat themselves properly. They are struggling to remain alive. And I have to say, with the heaviest of hearts, that if people don't have disposable income - which really is the case now - they aren't going to have any money to spend on music beyond a monthly subscription to somewhere like Spotify.

I would venture further and attest that it is fundamentally wrongheaded to be attacking, scolding and bullying ordinary people who literally cannot afford to buy music. For a lot of desperate folk, Spotify is all they have. It's the only affordable and practical means of listening to music available to them now (I would certainly emphasise the "practical" element; finding a song or track online is so much quicker, easier and less fussier than ploughing through endless piles and shelves of records to find the one you want. When you come home from a tiring day's work you want not to have to do more work when you get there).

What I would like to know is why these figures in the music business - I could name and shame every one of them here, but the argument is bigger than that - direct their ire at us; the people whom Spotify leads and encourages to discover and find out about new names for themselves, without the need for any "gatekeeper" (which is why some music critics and broadcasters are up in arms about Spotify, lest it might make them redundant). I'll remind you of one of the fundamental rules of capitalism - if producers of product scold and tell off potential consumers, they are essentially inviting consumers to take their custom - and their money - elsewhere.

Note that none of these people dares to attack any of the Spotify executive board members and their seven-figure salaries. Oh no, they think to themselves, we can't do that because if we did, Spotify might throw our music off their website, and then how would people find out about us? So it's the classic cocktail of canting and cowardice. Far, far easier for them to rage at the people they're supposed to be attracting. At people who can't fight back.

It is in truth akin to the likes of Lord Sugar berating working-from-home types for not returning to the office. Sorry, but it's better at home; we've found that out the hard way since March 2020. Your bluff has been called and your property portfolio (which is what you're really fretting about) is quivering like the metaphorical house of cards.

You would almost think that the Spotify user-berators are in league with the rest of the far Right when it comes to what the late ITN newcaster Sir Alastair Burnet used to describe as "plain people." Wagging their fingers at us like a classroom teacher who considers us all to be naughty schoolchildren. What are people supposed to do? Not listen to music? Do you actually want to ban poor people from listening to music, say "you're not allowed" in the same way that the disadvantaged, beaten and dispossessed are to be prevented from having a television, or a computer, or good food, or anything that will lend pleasure and meaning to lives which would otherwise consist of bare survival only?

The solution is: if you're going to attack - and I reiterate that plenty of musicians are rightfully and justifiably angry about the current state of things - then attack the nature of the beast; the industry itself. Battle for a better deal with Spotify, threaten to withdraw your labour if you have to. There's no reason why a basic, affordable, universally-applied monthly Spotify subscription fee - £20 perhaps? - wouldn't help solve matters if properly addressed. But do not, by any means or under any pressure, misdirect your anger at ordinary people who are doing no more than trying to stay alive and live as much of "life" as they can manage. If you do, then you reinforce the possibly bogus notion of the music business being a self-serving cartel of "friends" who only really make music for each other (see also the London literary scene) and you run the exceptionally serious risk of alienating everybody who would otherwise be interested enough in the music you make to want to invest in it. Then how are you going to make a living?