Brian does the singles! (Including one by the other Bryan...)

 

Here's what Brian says about Bryan Ferry's "You Go To My Head"

And here's another occasion on which he reviews the singles, for Sounds

proto-Titanic and post-Titanic

I've posted here before about Mick Farren's famous "The Titanic Sails At Dawn" polemic. Appearing in the NME's June 19 1976 issue, the piece is legendarily claimed to have played a precipitative role in the punk uprising. It identified a malaise in rock: the loss of its connection to "the streets" and "the kids" that traverse them;  the recline and fall of a rebel sound into mere showbiz.  And in the process it birthed a mini-genre of explicitly or implicitly Titanic-themed jeremiads, which cropped up in the pages of the NME over the next decade (as well as the pages of zines populated by NME-wannabes).

I've also noted here that six months earlier Mick Farren had written a very similar - and to my mind, sharper - argument in the first NME issue of 1976.  A piece that no one seems to remember, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem to have any precipitative effect.  Timing is everything. 

Talking about timing... Well, here's a funny thing: turns out Mick Farren wrote yet another similar piece almost a year before the first of those 1976 pieces. The complaint is the same: the Seventies so far is a wash-out and rock's new superstar aristocracy - aka the Uncle Toms of Teendom -  have "taken Rock off the streets and into the penthouse". 

And here's another funny thing - four years after "The Titanic Sails At Dawn", Farren rocks up yet again in the page of NME with a polemic about the music's aesthetic bankruptcy and directionlessness.

I suppose four handwringing thinkpieces across five or six years isn't that excessive.

At Monitor, I must have written two or three with that vibe in just two years / six issues.

David Stubbs wrote a piece on that theme in virtually every issue of Monitor -  hilariously vivid evocations of impending entropy.

And then at the end of '86 we co-wrote a rather gloomy overview for Melody Maker (the editor complained it was a bummer way to wrap up the year).  Not one of our most coherent efforts, but maybe I should dredge it up as a period curio.

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Not forgetting Mick Farren's entire book on this approximate subject.... from a few years prior to the 1975 piece "The Kids Are Not Necessarily Alright".   With the word "Kids" in the title. 

At that point - most likely writing the book in 1971 -  Farren still retained some optimism about the radical potential of rock and youth culture. The tone of Watch Out Kids is defiant - the gathering decadence can be turned around. 

The story of "how Elvis gave birth to the Angry Brigade" promises the jacket copy.

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This is a genre of rock essay - the dispirited measuring of Rock's vital signs. 

A classic example is this piece by Greil Marcus.

Some of Lester Bangs's most famous pieces are in that mode, albeit always pointing to green shoots of vitalizing vulgarity that defy the overall atrophy. 

No surprises here, but I personally love the "The Death of ________" essay. 

Every art form has its examples.  E.g. "The Literature of Exhaustion". 

Charles Shaar Murray - Ohio Players (live in 1975) - NME - December 24 1983

This review made an impression when I read it in the Christmas 1983 issue of NME. The concept of this page "The Ghost of Live Past" is reviews not of concerts from the preceding week but from years ago - writers revisiting  gigs that had a profound impact on them. 

In this case, NME legend Charles Shaar Murray remembers a 1975 concert by Ohio Players he saw in Detroit. The first part of it is simply a well-observed live review (I should imagine that unless he has phenomenal powers of recall, CSM had been there to do a feature on the band and consequently had some old notes that he could draw on). 

Where it gets interesting is when he gets into meta-talk about how black music works for its audience - an Ohio Players performance as the performing of a community service, the sound and the stage show  communicating with the band's primary fans on a vibrational level that necessarily bypasses even the most informed and sensitive white listener.  

Earlier in the 1970s, CSM did a round-up review of a bunch of soul and R&B records, criticizing some (Isaac Hayes for instance) in a fairly standard for the time white rock critic way: too slick, too over-produced / too over-arranged, too close to showbiz.  As a fan of blues (later to write books about John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix), he would have had that preference for the gritty, the raw, the raspy - and an antipathy for the mellifluous and the polished. Here, though, just a few years later,  he grasps the power of slickness and tightness, the sheer commitment to entertainment manifested by Ohio Players. 

There's a phrase in this review - "their murderous and militant elegance" - that I assimilated so deeply I must have come to believe I'd thought it up all by myself, reusing it sometimes almost word for word and other times in adapted form (e.g. "lethal panache") many times over the years.

A few years later, I would have a similar revelatory experience to Charlie Murray's when I went to review Zapp for Melody Maker. A show so militantly - no, militarily - tight and professional I went to see the band perform it again at the same venue the very next night.