Boss Radio

Whatever his faults (And I've got a list of several of them somewhere...) James Brown was a fairly rare example of a smart businessman and an excellent entertainer, and if he could have picked it himself he couldn't have chosen a better day to go. No one's going to forget what day James Brown died.

But...

As you may have noticed I get really rather annoyed when people start writing bright purple tributes to the recently deceased. Lady Di was not one of the world's most beautiful women, even after the nose job, John Lennon was not writing some of the best material of his career when he was murdered, and Mrs. Thatcher wasn't the saviour... Oh wait a minute, she's not dead. Oh well, I can dream. Where was I? Oh yeah, James Brown. Apparently he was the man who invented funk.

Augh!

Firstly, no he wasn't, and secondly in the latter part of his life, including his autobiography and his recent interview with Channel 4 TV, Brown himself had tried to set the record straight and said so. What he did was what he'd been doing all his life, spotting trends and selling them better than anyone else. Of course, part of the problem is that not everyone agrees what funk actually is. There are people out there who believe that Brown's rock'n'roll years were funky, but in that case Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and some guy called Elvis Presley were even funkier. Brown attributes his funk years, including the world's most sampled song 'Funky Drummer', to seeing Fela Kuti and his band in Africa and telling his drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, to write down the rhythm that Kuti's drummer, Tony Allen (Now performing with 'The Good, The Bad, and The Queen') was playing. Once again the story's in Brown's autobiography, it's also in Kuti's, Stubblefield has recounted the tale in the odd interview or two, and Allen has gone from being mildy amused and rather proud to really pissed off in various album sleevenotes over the intervening years.

Let's put it simply, speaking as someone who personally never really liked much of Brown's output, he wrote or co-wrote several classic songs, and sang several others in a way that no one else could. He was a major influence upon music for most of the second half of the last century, and also a role model for a lot of others working their way up from the ghetto. On the other hand he was a hard taskmaster, verging upon the impossible, to any musician unfortunate enough to be in his band, he was vicious, particularly towards women, and dishonest.

Which come to think of it is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from someone who was a brilliant entertainer and a brilliant businessman.

Except the violence to women bit...

It used to be that they'd never let idiots like the people who drive cars behind the controls of an aeroplane, then they gave John Denver a licence...

Actually I'm thinking at the moment of the return of real London fog and the problems with getting 'planes off the ground at Heathrow because of it. Apparently the answer is to give it another runway or two. Pardon my French, but cobblers to that. No, I'm sorry but the bounders have really got my dander up now (We talk like that at the wrong end on the wrong side of the Mersey. No really, would I lie to you?).

Britain's roads are constantly getting clogged up. If you try to drive sensibly down most of Britain's major arteries you wind up going backwards. You leave a 2 second gap between you and the car in front and you'll have a car in there in no time, so you back off a bit and there's another, so you back off a bit... Eventually you give up and drive too close, just praying that if there's a problem ahead you'll see it at the same time as the guy in front of the guy in front of you.

You can't do that with aeroplanes. In an aeroplane you have people on the ground watching you and telling you to back off, and if the radio is to be believed the absolute minimum you can be behind the 'plane in front as it comes in to land is 3 miles. Get any closer and you'll get a right telling off afterwards, I can tell you.

Now I can't say that the idea that the 'plane I'm on is flying right on the edge of the safety barrier as it takes off or lands at Heathrow is particularly encouraging in the first place, but I really don't see how adding a runway would make any difference. Back to the roads for a minute. For years governments have tried to solve Britain's traffic problems by building new roads, and the effect has always been the same. More traffic. It's becoming painfully obvious that the answer isn't to give people new ways of getting somewhere, because if you do more people will find reasons for going there. These afore-mentioned governments, and their 'oppos in the councils and planning offices are responsible for us becoming a society in which the car is no longer a luxury. You need one to get to work, you need one to get out of town, quite often you even need one to get in to town. You even need one to do your shopping in half the burgs in Britain. Now they're doing the same with the aeroplane.

Heathrow's supporters have been arguing for another runway for years, not so they can allow the pilots a greater margin of safety but because of the demands for more 'planes, so if they get their new runway 'planes will still be taking off and landing with the minimum safe gap between them, but there'll be a whole lot more of them. To be honest, that wouldn't make me feel any safer either. And the next time we get a fog there will still be delays as the gap between the 'planes is doubled, just like we should do on the roads, but we're a bunch of aresholes so by and large we don't. I once slowed down after hitting fog and seconds later got blasted by a big rig that nearly hit me up the backside, but I digress... The point is that at Heathrow there would now be even more people sleeping on chairs and complaining to the news people that the airline/information desks/airport/holiday reps/somebody somewhere couldn't run a party in a pub.

I know I'm just an old peacenik, but I reckon it's about time we simply accepted that weather happens, traffic jams happen, stuff happens, and what we do is live with it. Britain has about one fifth of the population of the USA, yet it's smaller than every one of the mainland states of the USA. Roughly translated that means we're getting mighty crowded.

We can't afford to keep building our way out of our problems when all we do is to create new ones. Let the airlines get crowed and maybe ships will make a comeback, let the roads get jammed and maybe lorries will get shifted onto the railways. We're supposed to be the most ingenious nation on the planet, let's try to prove it for once.

Sorry for the flowery language that's been slipping in. I've been listening to Bonzo Dog.

Spiffing, chaps!

Time for my annual 'How old are your kids?' call to my brother in the vain hope of getting a clue as to what to buy for them this Christmas, and as usual we have a moan about eBay and how easy it is to spot a con once you've fallen for it. Then we move on to music, which used to be how both of us earned enough to live on (Not so easy these days unfortunately), and from there on to the subject of Where It All Began.

Music, that is.

You see, he says (And I don't actually disagree with him on this) that you can trace the origins of any style of music back to before it supposedly began, whereas I maintain that you can pinpoint when various fashions in music occured. Well, OK, not pinpoint exactly, but I do have a rule that places everything into a window of maybe two to... erm...five years. It's my two stages of music theory, each stage of which takes 5 years.

It seems to me that real exitement in music must have started in the mid 50s when Rock'n'roll errupted. My brother can point to numberous other artists who were recording r'n'r-alikes way before that, and I don't deny it. Howlin' Wolf was recording architypical rock'n'roll way before then, and Hank Williams recorded a song called 'Move it on over' which was 'Rock around the clock', but that's not the point. Even though I was just a kid, I knew that something was happening when rock'n'roll was 'born'. One day music was boring, the next day some of it wasn't, and the newspapers were all trying to tell me not to listen to the exciting stuff. You don't have to be grown up to know that you're onto something here when that happens...

Of course, since then I've seen film of how it was when jazz broke out, and it obviously was just as pleasurable to that audience as rock'n'roll was to me, but I didn't know that then, and in any case rock'n'roll was the first 'Teenage' music. No one had ever created music for the below-adult-above-child-status audience before, because it didn't have any money then, now it did.

For around 5 years rock'n'roll drove the establishment crazy. Religiously inspired record burnings were organised by Church leaders who interpreted the Bible in such a way as to prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that rock'n'roll was the devil's music. Apart from anything else it was causing ordinary white kids to dance just like... well, nowadays we'd say 'Black kids', back then if you were one of the dancers you'd call them 'Negroes', which was way better than what these Holy-men were calling them. Then, as if by magic, the guys with the money realised that they were missing out on a profit opportunity and started marketing rock'n'roll properly. For about 5 years after that the music started to stagnate as everyone tried to find the lowest-common-denominator between teenage-wild and family-friendly.

Then along came the Beatles. In fact all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll. 4 long haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. Plus the girls loved them. Once again the industry was taken by surprise, and for about 5 years music flourished, but by the end of the next five years it was stagnating again.

Then along came punk. A lot has been said and written about punk. In truth all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll again. You remember my post about the roackabilly buskers? There's a bit I didn't mention. Not everyone liked them. Two small kids walked past with their hands over their ears. As I said before, the music wasn't loud, you could talk over it, the hands over the ears thing was a critical opinion, but hey, they were just kids. About quarter of an hour later a young mum walked past with her hands over her ears, now she was old enough to know better, expecially since her kid was looking at her in that way that kids look when their parents are doing something really really embarrassing. I looked at the guy next to me with a knowing look. "Ah, she's alright," he said. "Let's face it, music really started in the 70s." I was standing there thinking "Don't say it, don't say it."

But he did.

"Punk." He said. "It all started with The Clash".

That what's they always say. What is it about the punk generation? They all know that The Pistols were supposed the punk band, but they also know that they were largely manufactured by Mr. M. McLaren, and that's not cool. So The Clash have become the band that started music in the 70s, and what were they really? They were a bunch of shaggy haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. In fact most of their material would be filed under 'Protest songs' which was pretty much a staple diet of the 60s music scene. A lot of bands cashed in on the punk scene, including The Clash and The Stranglers, but the sad truth is that most punk hits were by the previous generation simply jumping on the bandwagon (Can I mention The Stranglers again?...).

Who, of the real punks (If there ever was such a thing) actually had more than one hit single? Toyah maybe, but she was just Lulu for a new generation, Siouxsie And The Banshees fared pretty well although they had to enlist a little help from The Beatles to maintain it. Not that any of this mattered anyway because the punk ethic quickly gave birth to UK Bluebeat on the one hand, and a new breed of boys dressed as girls on the other, and so it goes...

In other words my theory is that somewhere around the middle of each decade something happens to give music a kick up the bum, and for around five years it thrives, and for another 5 it dies, then someone else comes along and gives the scene another boot up the backside. I just wish there was some way of making money out of this theory. Even if it never works again it would've made me filthy rich by now.

On the other hand, the smoking in public ban comes into force in slightly over half a year, at which point I might just dust off my guitar and take to the stage again, all ready to reinvent rock'n'roll.

Maybe no one'll notice that I'm not a hairy kid any more...

The tornado that took out part of London was apparently an "Act of God", so the insurance companies don't see why they should pay out.

I'd love to know how they worked that one out. Did God tell them it was Him or something? Personally I reckon it's just that insurance companies don't want to insure anyone against anything that might actually happen. I just had a word with God, asked him to shut down my computer before I had a chance to post this if He really did do it deliberately. Looks like He's denying it. I don't know about you, but I believe Him.

So will one of you tell the insurance companies, or shall I?

OK, sorry to any of you who similarly suffer from dyselexia and thought I was going to write about 'Blues guys', I bow to no one in my admiration for Howlin' Wolf, but right now there's a far more important subject for me to rant about.

Blue skies.

We had them today, and with hardly a cloud in the sky and almost 2 hours to sunset some motorists were putting their lights on. Why? Am I alone in thinking that if you can't see other cars on the road on a perfect day like today without putting your lights on then you shouldn't be driving?

Thing is, about a decade ago I had a little 'satellite' in the corner of my eye and I went to the Eye Hospital to get it diagnosed. Suffice to say they'd never seen anything like it, I eventually had 3 doctors, a nurse/receptionist, and a senior doc all crowded around the machine that was shining 7 megazillion watts of laser beam into my eye discussing what it might be. They eventually decided that by virtue of its position in my eye it was nothing to worry about. To this day I think they knew dang well what it was and they were just taking the p!ss.

I do have lovely blue eyes though...

Anywaaaaay.... Whilst I was in the doctor's office I commented on how nice and relaxing it was to be in a room illuminated only by the sun and he launched into a tirade of the type I can only hope to achieve one day. He said that we've nearly all developed 'electric eyes', which are eyes that have got used to too much light due to over-exposure to electric light. He pointed out that our earliest ancestors could see in the dark, more recent ancestors could see by the light of a camp fire, only a few years ago (As the crow flies) we could all see by gas light, and let's not forget those guys living in castles who could feast and dance by the light of torches stuck on the wall while their pet monks were sitting in a darkened room transcribing the Bible by candlelight.

So I just tried an experiment and I've discovered something. If I turn off the light and the monitor and sit here listening to Internet radio with my eyes closed for a couple of songs, when I open my eyes I can just about see by the light of the LEDs glowing aorund the room. Suddenly I realise that my sister actually was reading books by moonlight all those years ago. I thought she'd gone to all the trouble of memorising them just to annoy me (You may be noticing how my world circulates around me. And why not? For all I know I may only be imagining the rest of you). So if you're one of those people who feels the need to put your headlights on in broad daylight, please, do one of two things. Either take your sunglasses off or get some lower powered bulbs for your home.

You'll be out there hunting mastodon before you know it.