Sunday, December 15, 2024

Garry Bushell - The Clash - London Calling - Sounds - December 15 1979






































Resuming the series of reviews in which a critic is wrong-footed in real-time, with Garry Bushell giving a measly two-stars to the record that Rolling Stone would later anoint as Best Rock Album of the Eighties (even though technically it came out in the 1970s, at least in the band's native land, and at the very end of the decade, the last weeks of '79).

But, thinking about it, I don't even like London Calling. And all the reasons why Rolling Stone would rate it so high are exactly the reasons why Gazza finds it so boring - the relapse into Presley-Stones-etc rock's rich tapestry-ism. 

And within five years Strummer himself would be in resounding agreement with Gazza and would attempt to restage The Clash debut with Cut the Crap

Yes, despite various attempts over the years, I've never clicked with London Calling, apart from the title track single, and "Lost In the Supermarket," which I find affecting. 

The rest bypasses me....  it's like the Clash submitting belated candidacy to be part of the Last Waltz line-up....   a truce between New Wave and Old Wave.  (Getting Guy Stevens to produce - the man who more or less created Mott the Hoople - is totally the Old Wave into New Wave truce move).

I prefer Sandinista...  on points....  but also because they sound confused and dispirited...

The spiritedness of the Clash is one of the things I find least appealing about them - probably why I never clicked with the debut either. 

(That's why I'm endeared towards "Lost in the Supermarket" - a Strummer song, and Strummer sentiment-admission of frailty - even though it's Jones who sings it, with trademark wetness).

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Pop musicians review the singles, 1 of ?? : Morrissey - Smash Hits - October 1984

 

Some surprises here - warm words for Duran Duran.


Bonus bits


Morrissey on the U.K. weekly music press.


“The British music press is an art form”

- Morrissey, Sounds, June 1983


"I grew up a chanting believer in the New Musical Express.... deep in the magazine's empirical history, the New Musical Express was a propelling force that answered to no one. It led the way by the quality of its writers - Paul Morley, Julie Burchill, Paul du Noyer, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Ian Penman, Miles - who would write more words than the articles demanded, and whose views saved some of us, and who pulled us all away from the electrifying boredom of everything and anything that represented the industry. As a consequence the chanting believers of the NME could not bear to miss a single issue; the torrential fluency of its writers left almost no space between words, and the NME became a culture in itself, whereas Melody Maker or Sounds just didn't.

"The wit imitated by the 90s understudies of Morley and Burchill assumed nastiness to be greatness, and were thus rewarded. But nastiness isn't wit and no writers from the 90s NME survive. Even with sarcasm, irony and innuendo there is an art, of sorts.

"It is on the backs of writers such as Morley, Burchill, Kent and Shaar Murray that the 'new' NME hitches its mule-cart"

- Morrissey, not so long ago


Morrissey's own music journalism

I had read that he contributed to Record Mirror under the nom de plume Sheridan Whitehead, but here are some reviews under his own name. He also "contributed" by writing to the letters page of NME incessantly, mostly about New York Dolls. (About whom he also penned a fan bio published as a short book).