Nothing is real, p.1
Nothing is Real, page 1
ABOUT THE BOOK
Pop music’s a simple pleasure. Is it catchy? Can you dance to it? Do you fancy the singer?
What’s fascinating about pop is our relationship with it. This relationship gets more complicated the longer it goes on. It’s been going on now for fifty years.
David Hepworth is interested in the human side of pop. He’s interested in how people make the stuff and, more importantly, what it means to us.
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, he shows how it is possible to take music seriously and, at the same time, not drain the life out of it. With characteristic insight and humour, he explores the highways and byways of this vast multiverse where Nothing Is Real and yet it is, emphatically and intrinsically so. Along the way, he asks some essential questions about music and life: is it all about the drummer; are band managers misunderstood; and is it appropriate to play ‘Angels’ at funerals?
As Pope John Paul II said, ‘Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.’ David Hepworth believes the same to be true of music, and this selection of his best writing, covering the music of the last fifty years, shows you precisely why.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: The Long Shadow of the Fabs
The Beatles Were Underrated (2008)
It’s All About the Drummer (2016)
Managers Are the Real Victims (2004)
A Hard Day’s Night Fifty Years On (2014)
Rubber Soul Fifty Years On (2015)
2: Pop’s Greatest Decade?
The Summer the Sixties Began (2012)
The Secret of ‘Satisfaction’ (2015)
The Greatest Hot Streak in Pop (2014)
Catching Up with Bob Dylan (2013)
Why Sixties Rock Stars Never Give Up (2016)
The Other Side of the Sixties (2018)
3: Credibility Gaps – the Radio 3 Essays (2017)
Nothing Is Real … Least of All Rock
Why Does Pop Need So Many Names?
Loudness Is the Point
What Use Are DJs?
Angels at Funerals
4: Tap Dancing About Architecture
The Question I Dread the Most (2011)
Everything I Know About the Blues (2004)
Everything I Know About Rock TV (2018)
Why Some Acts Don’t Make It (2014)
Memo to Our Old Favourites: It’s Not You, It’s Us (2012)
When Novelists Write About Rock (2012)
In Praise of Wimps (2006)
Why Must Everything Be Dark and Edgy? (2005)
The Profound Joy of Getting Rid of Stuff (2013)
5: For the Love of Records
I Have Measured Out My Life in Record Shops (2013)
Rearranging the Deckchairs on the SS Record Shop (2007)
The Last Megastore (2013)
Nobody Ever Asked a Girl Back to Listen to Their iTunes (2009)
6: Hepworth’s Rock Lists
Ten Great Accidental Trilogies (2012)
Twelve Great Songs (2010)
Fifteen Memorable Gigs (2018)
Seven Things I Would Tell a Young Band (2015)
Twenty Songs About Americans on the Move (2016)
Five Records That Always Work at Weddings (2018)
Index
About the Author
Also by David Hepworth
Copyright
For Poppy and Alice
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Mark Ellen, who edited some of these pieces in their original form in The Word; and to Trevor Dann, who produced the series of Nothing Is Real essays, and Matthew Dodd, who commissioned them for BBC Radio 3.
Thanks also to my agent Charlie Viney of the Viney Shaw Agency, and Bill Scott-Kerr, Darcy Nicholson, Richard Shailer and Sally Wray of Transworld.
website www.davidhepworth.com
blog whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.co.uk
Twitter @davidhepworth
INTRODUCTION
WE CALLED HIM Uncle Stan. He wasn’t really our uncle but that’s what we called him. He would come and visit us at Christmas. Uncle Stan came from the other side of the Pennines, wore a cardigan with suede facings, worked as a salesman and was, by the standards of our house anyway, smooth. He smoked filter-tipped cigarettes, had his own smart hi-fi at home and believed that Frank Sinatra had said all there was to be said in popular music.
Uncle Stan singled me out because he liked to tease me about my gauche enthusiasm for music. At Christmas 1963 he visited as usual and said to me, as usual, ‘What record have you got for Christmas this year?’ I proudly showed him my treasured copy of With The Beatles, which had come out a few weeks earlier. This was the Christmas of Beatlemania.
To the adults of the day Beatlemania seemed no more likely to be remembered in the future than the Christmas of the Mutant Ninja Turtles would seem to me when I had my own children to tease. Uncle Stan couldn’t resist what seemed like an open goal. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he said, reaching into the pocket of his Dean Martin cardigan for his Ronson lighter. ‘When I come next year and I ask you the same question you’ll have forgotten all about the Beatles.’
Of course Uncle Stan came the following year. And of course when I met him I was brandishing my new copy of Beatles For Sale. He returned in 1965 and I was able to greet him with Rubber Soul. At Christmas 1966 I brightly proffered my copy of Revolver.
By 1967 the poor man had given in and ruefully conceded that if only he had chosen to illustrate his point about the ephemeral nature of pop music with the example of the Dave Clark Five or Gerry and the Pacemakers he might have hit the bullseye. Instead through sheer ill luck he had landed on the act who were to the era of pop what Frank Sinatra had been to the era of the big bands – the exception that proves the rule.
At the time even the idea of a career writing about pop music was a distant fantasy I didn’t dare entertain. When it came to pass, in the mid-seventies when I was fulfilling my slightly less distant dream, that of working in a record shop, it was mainly exciting because it gave me access to the odd free album, which was the way I interpreted all questions of worldly wealth at the time. When that led eventually to a full-time job title containing the word ‘editor’ I still didn’t think it could last, any more than Ringo thought that his moment in the spotlight would last.
That was in 1979. I’ve spent the almost forty years since then writing about, editing magazines about, broadcasting about and pontificating about pop music. Some of those pieces are reprinted here. In some cases I’ve rewritten or added to them. Some were composed off the top of my head, as the best blog entries invariably are, while others were arrived at after prolonged chin-stroking, as befits essays to be broadcast by the most august wing of the BBC.
Quite a few of them touch upon the group that caused Uncle Stan such embarrassment back in the mid-sixties. Since then the Beatles have been the fixed point of my musical universe. I was one of the generation shaped by them. It wasn’t just their music. It was the way they did everything. I can remember the thrill of first seeing them on TV. I can remember the pride I felt when they stormed the citadels of the adult world – the London Palladium, Buckingham Palace, even the United States of America. I can remember the inevitability of their break-up. I can remember long periods in the seventies when nobody thought about them much. Then I remember the second Beatlemania that followed the death of John Lennon and their subsequent taking up by generations who weren’t born in that six-year window when they did the things they did.
With groups like the Beatles – not that there are any groups like the Beatles – there’s a danger of the weight of their story distracting us from the piercing joy of their music. You could say something similar of someone like Frank Sinatra – not that there was anyone like Frank Sinatra. In the case of both, the difference is all still in the records for those with ears to hear. That’s where this book begins. Half a century on from those Christmases with Uncle Stan the Beatles burn as brightly as ever.
London, 2018
1
THE LONG SHADOW OF THE FABS
THE BEATLES WERE UNDERRATED
IN THE COURSE of our forty-five-year love affair with the Beatles, something important was lost. Their craft became obscured by their artistry, their artistry disappeared into their significance and their significance was eventually folded inside their legend. The result is that they are underrated for the work they did and overrated, if anything, for what it all meant.
Louis Menand’s Iron Law of Stardom holds that no show-business career can be sustained for longer than three years. After that time creativity is exhausted and public affection begins to flag. Menand defends his theory against Beatles exceptionalists by pointing out that they actually had a six-year career divided into two: three years as cheery moptops immediately followed by three years as psychedelic adventurers.
It’s this second period that tends to impress us most these days. That’s the one focused on by critics in the rock magazines or people of Noel Gallagher’s generation. It’s not a complete surprise. There’s a perceptible stylistic link between the White Album and, say, Paul Weller. This is immediately evident to the contemporary eye and ear. A few years ago an Oasis-loving friend of mine decided to buy a Beatles record to see what the fuss was about. He bought Let It Be and was disappointed. He admitted later that he’d actually bought that one because it
While that second three-year career is not without its delights, the first period was actually when the Beatles’ collective genius was operating at full tilt. To fully appreciate it from the vantage point of today we have to shrug off our infatuation with fashionable gloom and shed the illusion that true artists are all complex and impenetrable. We must accept the fact that the greatest pop group of them all didn’t consider it beneath them to make their records for fourteen-year-old girls. When they made their classic records the false opposition between rock and pop hadn’t yet been invented. The wall between the two has been the refuge of scoundrels and snobs ever since. To appreciate why we still underrate the Beatles you have to shrug off that prejudice and travel back to 1963, when they were far from a done deal.
For a start, there were things the Beatles did first. They took the previously discrete skills of singing, songwriting, arrangement, A&R, backing instruments and production and conflated all into the one skill – creating great records. Nobody had done that before.
The records they made were often better than the songs deserved. The Beatles weren’t great songwriters, at least not like Cole Porter was a great songwriter. Many of their lyrics are banal in the extreme. They were only interested in writing the songs insofar as they knew songs were a vital ingredient of great records.
They combined the qualities of a good vocal group with the skills of a capable instrumental group. The fusing of two previously separate competences created a new musical shorthand and explains why they sometimes seemed to be putting more into the record than there was room for.
When their time came they were ready. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book Outliers, they had ten thousand hours of live experience behind them before they saw the inside of a recording studio.
They were the epitome of a group. ‘Groupness’ is not about having the people best qualified to discharge a certain role in a group. It resides in how well these people make up that group. The jibe attributed to Lennon about Ringo not even being the best drummer in the Beatles was off the point. Even if Ringo was not the best drummer in the Beatles, he was certainly the best drummer for the Beatles.
Then there was Lennon and McCartney: two lost boys who somehow transformed their differences into the greatest creative dividend of all. Unlike most partnerships where creative tension is allegedly at work, they managed to avoid discouraging each other. While clearly capable of loathing from time to time, it was the contributions each made to the other’s ideas that struck the sparks. At their best they were like magnets in balance, holding the iron filings of the Beatles’ music in perfect suspension.
Then there’s the stylistic stuff. They were clever without suffering from education – often a handicap for a pop musician. They were from the English provinces in an age when that seemed to be a barrier you could never surmount without a Pygmalion transformation. In his 1964 book Love Me Do!, the American journalist Michael Braun even suggested that to the media and the London-based establishment they were actually a new kind of people.
None of this accounts for the fact that well over forty years later I’m writing this. There’s something else – above, beyond and beneath all this ballyhoo. At the heart of the Beatles saga is the key ingredient of popular music success, the element that people spill bitter sweat to achieve, rarely credit when it’s present or fully note when it’s absent, and certainly never give enough weight to in critical histories. This element accounts for the waxing and waning of every career in popular music. It is, as far as pop musicians are concerned, the spark of life at the end of God’s outstretched finger, without which all their greatest efforts are naught. It is the simple but devilishly elusive quality we can only apologize for calling catchiness.
Traditionally, catchiness is a measure of how memorable a tune is, particularly the first time on the ear. When it comes to making records rather than songs, this is an inadequate definition. Lennon and McCartney could noodle their way to a good tune. But they didn’t stop there. Some compulsion or restlessness or fear made them come up with another tune, hook or melodic idea complementary to the original one, something they could build into their song. Their records are strewn with details that anyone else would have been happy to base a complete record on. The coda of ‘Hello Goodbye’ is one such. The prequel to ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ points to another ballad altogether. Their early albums are full of wonderful songs they never put out as singles because they didn’t think they were quite number one material. It’s been said before but it bears regular repetition: ‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever’, which is on many people’s lists of the best singles ever, was left off Sgt. Pepper, which is on many people’s lists of the best albums ever, because they had more good tunes than they knew what to do with.
The richness of their golden period has never been equalled. I can remember hearing the first radio play of ‘We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper’ in the winter of 1965. Many acts can devise a tune that’s catchy. What really hooks the listener is the promise of further layers of catchiness to come. I knew there was enough on the glistening surface of ‘We Can Work It Out’ to be going on with but I was also aware of something in that deliberately ungainly middle section that would tug away at me for a longer time. Because they had such flair for arrangement, such ears for the telling junction, their records were full of neat, thrilling transitions that became hooks in themselves. The listener would ricochet from one hook to another like a metal ball in one of Bally’s machines.
I had the same feeling in the summer of 1967 when I first heard Kenny Everett play tracks from Sgt. Pepper on the radio. There was more than enough in ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ to enchant on first hearing but there was also a promise that the enchantment wasn’t going to wear itself out easily. Nothing in pop music is more powerful than a thrill containing the promise of further thrills. Between ‘All My Loving’ and ‘Penny Lane’ the Beatles made at least twenty records that managed that rare trick. In doing so they redefined catchiness.
This serial approach to catchiness provided its own unique rush of joy. All their mid-sixties chart-toppers gathered intensity as they went along. Even when the song was supposed to be the heartfelt plea of a broken man, as in ‘Help!’, they delivered it with bracing glee. Even when they started leafing through the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1966 they were still taking ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ at a rare clip. They never idled away their efforts on long instrumental intros. There was no foreplay. Listen to ‘All My Loving’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Eight Days A Week’ or ‘No Reply’. ‘Help!’ begins like a leap from a high cliff which immediately goes into a steep climb. It was as if they knew the secret of a good speech – start in the middle and finish soon afterwards. They began every number as if the shepherd’s crook of time was about to hoick them off stage and deposit them back at the dole office in Liverpool.
While writing this I got my record deck out and played their original 45s and mono LPs. The whole house was energized by the sounds, teenagers and all. This is music aimed at simply making people happy. Sadly for rock critics, it’s not complicated. In the early cover versions the headlong dash to delirium was signalled by the yowl of joy announcing every guitar break. In their own songs it was achieved by more sophisticated means, such as the climbing middle eight in ‘No Reply’. All their middle eights, such as Lennon’s ‘when I was a boy’ in ‘She Said She Said’ or Paul’s ‘me I’m just the lucky kind’ in ‘Things We Said Today’, offer renewed injections of the quality they managed to exude naturally or synthesize so well you couldn’t tell the difference: optimism. Cheer was what pop music was traditionally supposed to offer, just as the movies today are meant to provide a thrill ride. I recall a radio jingle that used to describe ‘the happy sounds of Radio 1’. They wouldn’t be allowed to say that today even from within a thicket of inverted commas. Nowadays happiness makes people uneasy.
The Beatles were war babies, born into times a good deal harder than ours, even right now. The music their parents danced to was intended to make them forget their daily troubles, whether that meant the food they didn’t have or the bombers overhead. The music the Beatles played as young men was about providing ecstasy in three-minute hits. But it was still accepted that daily life was dull and full of care. As standards of living have inexorably risen and peace has continued in the near half-century since they broke through, as the undemanding excitement of the sixties and seventies has given way to the anxious torpor of our connected society, it’s probably inevitable that we’ve become more blasé. Because we never grow out of pop music we have to somehow invest it with adult qualities in order to justify it to our adult selves. Nobody uses the word ‘happy’ in connection with pop nowadays unless it’s to sneer.
