BILLY JOEL IS NO BRITNEY SPEARS

 

 

Rockism was a joke. A one-liner. Race Against Rockism. Pete Wylie having a laugh with fellow scouser Paul du Noyer nearly forty-five years ago. Two seconds in the pub. Probably neither man thought anything more about it thereafter.

 

Not that an amusing bit of banter was ever intended to become the foundation of a manifesto. But there was no telling that to Stockport’s Paul Morley, who in May 2006 wrote in The Guardian or possibly The Observer Music Monthly (it’s over nineteen years ago; I had other things to think about) that: “Suddenly, you had a word that you could use to swiftly (sic) and (sic) yet fairly dismiss (sic) Phil Collins, a word you could use to explain why Wire were better than Yes. If the idea of rockism confused you, and you lazily thought Pink Floyd were automatically better than Gang of Four, and that good music had stopped with punk, you were a rockist and you were wrong.” The standard sort of thing that frustrated twenty-three-year-old men come out with, without first thinking it through because the latter is for dreadful old people, one of whom I, Paul Morley, will never become if I can help it.

 

I mean, why waste valuable Ant time considering exactly why or if “Wire were better than Yes” (the former did Document And Eyewitness, the latter gave us “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”), let alone what magic former Yes roadie Keith Levene managed to weave by recontextualising a few old Steve Howe riffs on Metal Box (as opposed to recycling an entire Steve Howe solo concept album about getting lost in a computer, much of which turned up on Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome)? The thirteen-year-old me of October 1977 loved “Wondrous Stories” just as devoutly and fully as he did “From Here To Eternity,” “Holidays In The Sun,” “The Name Of The Game,” “Complete Control,” “No More Heroes,” “’Heroes,’“ “2-4-6-8 Motorway,” “Turn To Stone,” “Black Betty,” “She’s Not There,” “Best Of My Love,” the reissued “Virginia Plain” and whatever else was in or surrounding the pop charts of that month (see my forthcoming Young Punctum blog entry for contemporaneous words on all of those). He didn’t realise that this wasn’t “allowed.”

 

Oh, and lazily thinking that Pink Floyd are automatically better than fellow EMI recording artists Gang Of Four is in itself lazy thinking. In 1983 The Final Cut was certainly better than Hard, and Pink Floyd did their best to look after Syd, making sure he got all his royalties, etc., as opposed to Hugo Burnham being summarily dismissed from Gang Of Four with a “golden handshake” because they wanted to look “good” and have hits. Comparing the two, however, is like squaring the Beatles up against the John Coltrane Quartet. They’re…different. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Entertainment – and why does it always end up being “either/or,” this tired old tribal game most people should leave behind in the school playground and may yet end up killing us all?

 

I certainly didn’t think “good music” (which really is nothing more than “music I like”) stopped with punk – consider that wording, because many people did indeed think it. Dance and soul music in particular were in great shape but since most of their practitioners were Black they were excluded from the “discourse,” which only seemed to focus on pale white males.

 

Somehow New Pop was deemed to have emerged from this morass, although the starting pistol had inadvertently been fired by Ian Curtis in May 1980. Many “post-punk” practitioners wondered aloud what the point was in carrying on preaching to the converted when that’s how you ended up. Moreover, the pop charts of mid-1980 (and indeed for another year afterwards) seemed stuck in 1974. Hence the need to go overground became a pressing one – if we musicians were serious about wanting to change people’s minds and magnifying the greatness and adventure of pop music, then we had to get ourselves into the main market square and show people how we could do it bigger, smarter, sexier and better than any of those miserable cowards clogging up daytime music radio.

 

It didn’t help that most observers conflated, and continue to conflate, New Pop with New Romanticism. These were two parallel but separate movements which sometimes overlapped but were on very decisive courses of their own. Not that it initially mattered because up to the summer of 1981 the Top 40 was essentially marooned between 2-Tone and Stars On 45.

 

But when New Pop really began to filter into the aorta of mainstream pop, things became better, more attractive and more exciting. For proof, look at the charts between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. We lived through that period, bought the records as they came out, heard them being played on the radio, saw them being performed on peak time television, bought the magazines (Smash Hits was colourful and smart, while the NME was thorough, persuasive and, in the adjective’s least hackneyed sense, eclectic).

 

We genuinely thought that we had never had it better. And we, as individuals born in the sixties but too young to participate directly in them, felt we were right to think that. I’m sure that if you were seventeen or eighteen in, say, 1966, you’d feel the same, and with hindsight you’d probably be right in thinking so. Our 1982 selves, though, were far too busy with the indomitable wonder of Trevor Horn’s remix of Spandau Ballet’s “Instinction” to spend any time on dozy old student favourites like Led Zeppelin or even Jimi Hendrix (didn’t stop me from buying Robert Plant’s Pictures At Eleven or The Jimi Hendrix Concerts later on in the year, though). That was considered “yesterday’s music.”

 

It was “our moment” which is essentially what pop music comes down to – that moment, when you’re still in your teens and learning about the world and other human beings, when everything absolutely and solidly clicks. The feeling wasn’t as strong as that when you were a child, and the strength steadily recedes as you “progress” into adulthood and other people and things begin to take precedence in your life – so you have to grab, grasp and celebrate the moment as and when it happens. Not twenty or forty years later as a repackaged and airbrushed memory, or memorial.

 

Nevertheless, you could tell when the New Pop anaesthetic block was beginning to wear off – especially as its cheerleaders decided, as all tribes do, to erect fences and barriers. That Quick Before They Vanish May 1982 top ten review by Morley in the NME was highly, if superficially, amusing at the time, but the gates were already being locked. In that piece Morley had an extended go at his colleague Richard Cook under the guise of a commentary on “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag.” Hadn’t the gigantic success of the latter been part of the whole point of New Pop – that uncompromising free jazz could be played by DLT on lunchtime Radio 1 and make the top three (at least for those who didn’t recall “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” at number one three-and-a-quarter years earlier)? Wasn’t that as great and decisive a clarion of intent as “O Superman” only being kept off number one by, essentially, Hatfield and the North?

 

The music press, as was their wont, fucked up. In the NME of early 1983 Pigbag spoke bitterly of Richard Cook, saying he was never interested in them as a group and viewed them only as a conduit through which Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago could get into the charts. On one hand, that was never going to happen; on the other, David Bowie.

 

But no, Pigbag – and Junior Giscombe (to piss off whom? Paul Weller? Paolo Hewitt?) – were to be excluded from the New Pop Bastille stormtroopers, in favour of wan, slender Scottish or northern English fellows. The NME and specifically Morley never forgave Gary Numan for topping the charts and not being Howard Devoto, and not in that order. A man who spoke little – because nobody realised at the time, least of all the man himself, that he was on the spectrum – versus a loud-mouthed Anthony Blanche-style blowhard. One serviced the needs of the music press far better than the other; never mind that the other proved, in the longer term, the more influential and “important.”

 

Still, not everybody was going to be invited, and therefore the point of New Pop became muddled and vague. The pages of the early eighties music press are filled with sneering dismissals of anyone who didn’t fit in firmly with any of the tribes mooted at the time as fashionable. Those who were adjacent to New Pop, as opposed to being New Pop fundamentalists, got especially short shrift from the movement’s champions (although there may only have been one), whether they were Duran Duran or the Birthday Party, A Flock Of Seagulls or Kate Bush. Meanwhile, those of us who hadn’t lost touch with our feelings mostly shrugged our shoulders and got back to enjoying the best pop music of the period, regardless of who made it or why they made it.

 

I never put rock on a plane above pop, or vice versa. My schoolmates, if they remember me from almost half a century ago, will recall me as a vocal cheerleader for everyone who was worth cheers. When poptimism came stumbling into view almost a quarter of a century ago, I wasn’t particularly charmed or convinced by it, and that feeling intensified when certain North American commentators began systematically stripping the notion of any residual charm or conviction.

 

Poptimism arose a year or two before its reactionary cousin “guilty pleasures” and as a first-hand witness I confess that it was a puzzle to work out what it actually meant or represented. Over time it became apparent, in practice as opposed to theory, that what poptimism meant to its London and Oxford-based originators equated with pop music that they liked at the time – who remembers Sunshine Anderson now without prompting? – and which tallied with their hardwired notions of guitar-based indie music; hence the lionisation of Busted and McFly, because they appealed to what was basically a Belle and Sebastian fan club mentality - I was there (hello, James Murphy) at Club Poptimism nights when the dancefloor immediately filled with Morrissey-type routines to the strains of “Where’s Me Jumper?” and “I’m A Cuckoo”; the writhing of overgrown indie fans in acute denial.

 

By the end of the noughties it had all curdled off, as had its parallel, the overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged inhabitants of Dissensus and similar who pretended to like grime but, as Greil Marcus had already done in the seventies – read his essay and notes on Sly Stone and Staggerlee in Mystery Train if you doubt me – were disgruntled at Black musicians going “bourgeois” (i.e. making records that people liked) as opposed to remaining “edgy” and obediently “other.” I clearly recall commenting on the Poptimists’ LiveJournal page in 2009 about how the incoming tide of new country music, including the band now known as Lady A and, by name, Taylor Swift, was going to come in and re-atomise pop. The wearied response would have shamed the Garrick Club in 1953. The poptimists had adamantly refused to move on from their moment.

 

“Guilty pleasures” was reactionary precisely because its central aim was to recast music of the recent past and “rehabilitate” those musicians and records which at the time were ridiculed, principally for the benefit of the streamlining music industry. Hence ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees were elevated to gods, whereas punk was this nasty and inconveniently adolescent stain on the wall, a remnant of youthful aberrance that we were encouraged not to think about.

 

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with the music of ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac or the Bee Gees, writes one who loved and spoke up for their music at the time. Their best music is some of the best music there is. But the logical conclusion of this brand of thinking has been to elevate corny MoR tripe over art, to prize trash over value. This is reflected in so many places today and not just in certain internet radio stations. Always Chas and Dave, never the Associates. Always Frank Sidebottom, never AR Kane. Always “We Built This City,” never “New Day Rising.” Always Scott 3, never Tilt. Always “Raspberry Beret,” never “Condition Of The Heart.” Always the matey laugh, never the cold revelation. Always the Wonder Stuff, never My Bloody Valentine (Hup finished just one place below Loveless in the NME’s 1991 critics’ album poll). Always clinging on desperately to the residue of “your moment” in your mind to hide the fear that you are going to die in not too long a while. Always being a child, never wanting to grow up.

 

Over the last decade, poptimism seems to have been positively downgraded, and much of this is the fault of poptimists. The author of what was considered by many to be the manifesto of poptimism in October 2004 was most recently glimpsed in the whimpering pages of The New Yorker defending supporters of Hitler. In May 2017 Michael Hann wrote complaining that the movement had become what it beheld, i.e. reverse rockism. It may well be of course that readers of broadsheet newspapers have little interest in the brand of post-Americana puritanical nothingness that only music critics seem to like (“why all this fuss about the Beatles when you should be writing about…Mick Softley?”). But Saul Austerlitz of the New York Times Magazine had already gone further in October 2015, when he proclaimed, in a tone redolent of Lord Reith a century before, "Should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?"

 

Well…yes. Because that’s who pop music is actually for. Young people. Children and teenagers. And I note that, in 1982, Paul Morley, who was then twenty-five, stopped writing full-time about music for the NME. He possibly should not have written anything about pop music after 1982 – there he is, in BLITZ magazine in late 1984, the time of Zen Arcade, Double Nickels On The Dime and the first RUN-DMC album – all out in the same week! – moaning about young ‘uns not being interested in the new Pete Shelley record or an Australian T Rex box set. Where did I put those Bix Beiderbecke 78s?

 

 

 

So there’s a really strong case for arguing that adults, gainfully employed or otherwise, shouldn’t be writing about pop music at all, or at least stopping writing about it when they reach a certain age because then they inevitably and invariably curdle into pub bores cackling about not “getting” Charli xcx (you wish, is all I can say to them). Or perhaps just go into writing about films and books like you always really wanted to do. No sin in that; I myself have reached the age when books are immeasurably more important to me than music (although I haven’t stopped listening). But just be honest with yourself – if you don’t get one of those new pop records (in small case) it’s probably your fault yet not even strictly your fault; humans age and that’s what happens. But the pop that’s happening now constitutes somebody else’s moment, not yours, and you have to acknowledge that.

 

Otherwise, simply accept that pop music is what it is – a biologically developmental form of music intended for developing young minds (“developing” as adjective, not transitive verb) and, mainly, fun. Possibly the worst way to approach pop is to regard it in the same manner as a book or film; witness the regularly depressing and I’d argue life-denying writing one sees in The Singles Jukebox, where various anxious observers with an overinflated sense of their own importance mark down pop songs like schoolbook exercises, complete with 3/10 and “see me” written in red ink, with writing so pompous, self-righteous, laborious and indigestible it would be enough to drive anybody off to classical music by just looking at it. It’s like having your records reviewed by your parents. Isn’t that what pop music, new or old, was never about?

REFLECTIONS ON NEW POP

 

 

It is impossible to convey adequately the continuous excitement that I felt about music between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. That was, in my view at the time and for a long time afterwards, the best year for pop; from the moment when this chimera that some called New Pop began to be regarded as serious currency, to the point where it was audibly and visibly drying up.

All such evaluations are by definition subjective, and I cannot flee from the fact that this period was at one end bookended by the death of my father, and principally consisted of my first bona fide year at university, uprooted and away from home. But it is commonly agreed that New Pop started to be considered an option after Ian Curtis died.

The consensus amongst "post-punk" musicians at the time was: why continue experimenting to the converted when this is where it gets you? Not that it was the music that got Curtis, an adulterous far-Right Conservative voter and diagnosed epileptic who felt profoundly guilty, as the father of a young daughter, about his duplicitous behaviour, where he ended up. But enough of his peers quietly agreed "enough" - we need to become known and successful, and the only way of doing that it to smuggle our art beneath the superficial veneer of commerciality. To prove that "we" can do pop music better, more spectacularly and more comprehensively than the big established people.

Hence the gradual shift towards the mainstream, pulling outliers like Adam Ant, who formed a new band with a new approach to seek his revenge on Malcolm McLaren, into its orbit. The Human League, critically approved but commercially invisible, more or less agreed to split into two complementary factions. The story adds to itself.

All of this made pop music between the summers of 1981 and 1982 a spellbinding place to witness and absorb. Adventure returned to the top forty; minimalist performance art ("O Superman") and free jazz ("Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag") alike easily found their way to the top three. The Associates, nobody's idea of a pop group in 1981, became especially luminescent pop stars in 1982. Everything became exciting, sunny, thrilling and, most importantly, present tense.

Not a week passed without several proposals for new directions in pop materialising. We late-period teenagers had no time for the Beatles, Zeppelin or even Hendrix - all that old, failed music. We were sufficiently occupied being dazzled by the endless inventiveness of 1981-2's notion of "now."

Perhaps we were so dazzled by the shiny yellow New Popness of things that we allowed ourselves to be blinded. All those mock-corporations spearheaded by B.E.F., which were of course intended to be ironic - the public took them straight, as a welcome, colourful relief to the grey drabness of - whisper it - socialism. Pop groups as patented, marketable brands. The Human League pastiching Vogue on the cover of Dare - did we imagine they neither meant nor wanted that status? We liked to think so at the time, in order to cover other, deeper, more dubious concerns.

In 2013 I composed a lengthy blog post concerning ABC's The Lexicon Of Love. This was a major undertaking - I took a week off work to write it and even sought the views of Martin Fry himself. I absolutely meant it when I thought Lexicon the greatest of number one albums, the peak towards which its predecessors had been working.

Today, I'm not at all sure. It remains a subjective truth that the best New Pop albums - Penthouse And Pavement, Dare, Architecture And Morality, Tin Drum, Sulk, Lexicon, New Gold Dream - are "great" records. But I scarcely reach to listen to any of them now. A big part of why that is the case is because I hear so much music from a period when music was more important to me than at any other time in my life...and find it wanting, lacking.

That's the fundamental paradox of nostalgia; when you reach back to certain songs and records to rekindle a memory, it isn't so much the music you want to experience again - what you actually want to retrieve is the feeling that you had at the time when that music was current, and of course that can never be accomplished because the person you were back then no longer exists. You can't unlearn or unlive anyything you've done and been in the subsequent four-and-a-bit decades.

This fruitless craving is also at the root of what is wrong with so much of the world today - a ravenous desire to return to The Good Old Days (a.k.a. the womb) when morality was clearcut and...cough...you knew where you were. And I wonder how much New Pop has done to hasten that process. In Andy Beckett's history of eighties Britain, Promised You A Miracle, Martin Fry admits that, actually, gulp, he did pretty damn well under the Thatcher government.

So much of what occurred now seems so obviously and blatantly Thatcherite that it's a marvel (not in a good way) that we didn't recognise it then. The downsizing and streamlining of pop group personnel, the careful ironing out of awkward figures and facets, the exceptionally dodgy record deals, the systematic filtering out of session musicians in favour of Yamaha DX7 "horn section" buttons, the non-ironic cheerleading for profit, proliferation and material fulfilment. Several key figures in New Pop didn't even bother pretending to be socialists - "Two Tribes" was an exploration of the fascination inherent in the spectre of technocratic warfare, and media's response to same, rather than an anti-World War III howl of protest. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was studiously and determinedly apolitical. I could go on.

Where do we find ourselves, forty-three years later? In a place for which New Pop had maybe been preparing us all along. Winning is everything. Cult is failure. No more sweaty, soulful, passionate human beings doing messy work and making mistakes; it's all been transferred over to sleek, gleaming, perfect, cold machines, seamless and human-free. The concept that superficial, transient trivia carries more weight than deeply-rooted wisdom. That lies are more fun and get you further in life than the truth. How else do you explain this new First World dictator who revels in his truth alone?

What I now increasingly see in New Pop is a gigantic bill of goods, a way to acclimatise the music-loving public into the ways of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, where fascination is everything - as a kitten is fascinated by a ball of multicoloured string - and meaning means nothing. And it has, as I suggested above, played a major part in making today's world rotten. These are MTV dictators that we have now, people we were invited to giggle at in the eighties, possibly with a view to softening us up, and who, through their systematic and violent rubbishing of "authenticity" and "emotion" in favour of lethal dayglo beads, have rendered life more or less unlivable. It would be easy to claim that New Pop was, in hindsight, a disgrace, but really we have all disgraced ourselves.

Pop has continued, and new things continuously compete in steadily crampier spaces. The audience has been filtered away and any sense of history or perspective has now eroded - they think Freddie Mercury and Fleetwood Mac are still present tense - and the early eighties have been retooled as a jolly era of primary-coloured tinsel when singers wore daft clothes and had daft names. Taylor Swift is perhaps the most important pop star there has ever been, but the world continues to prefer to keep mourning Elvis; these days it's equivalent to calling Jonah Barrington the King of Squash. Why? Because we are not "us" any more, and because, deep down, humanity has always valued obliteration over consolidation. Perhaps we should have just drawn a line after "Ghost Town" and taken up books or cinema instead. It was a fatal mistake to hide where life was "beautiful" and thereby avoiding fighting back.

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.