Philip J Etheridge

Two songs and a whole album had such an emotional impact on me in the last 10 years that tears rolled down my cheeks. Music from three different decades, totally different genres and definitely favourites from these three artists.

One of Bono’s best songs, “One”, showed up on the 1991 U2 album “Achtung Baby”, but the song reached a whole new emotional level when Mary J. Blige lent her voice to U2’s backing track fifteen years later. I was totally stunned when I heard it for the first time on the radio, though it wasn’t played much at all in Sweden it seems. I loved U2’s version too, but Mary’s singing transcended Bono’s and gave it a whole new dimension. I’ve bought many U2 albums, including “Boy”, the day after they played live on Swedish TV for the first time in 1980, but I’ve never seen them live. Bono preaching from the stage is not something I’ve ever longed for, however sincere he is, but if the opportunity to see them comes along again, I’ll go for it. I won’t hold my breath for an appearance from Mary, though.

I have a pretty big garden which demands a lot of lawn-mowing and with that I have no problem at all. When I’m not immersed in my own thoughts I like to listen to an album while I’m mowing. A few years ago I reached out for the Kate Bush album “Hounds of Love” on Spotify and listened to the whole of it in my mowing bubble. I bought the vinyl album when it came out in 1985, but had never listened so intensely to the whole album on earphones as I did on that day, with the resulting flood of emotions. The intimacy you get from the lack of distractions! “Hounds of Love” is a genuine masterpiece from beginning to end from a true artist. Kate forever!

Last up, a bunch of men so utterly removed from life as we know it in Europe, that even I have difficulty understanding my connection to them: Eagles. I watched a video of a concert recorded in Melbourne from their first farewell tour and when Don Henley stepped up to the microphone to sing “Wasted Time”, something hit me right between the eyes and I was done again. Gone again. I was something of an Eagles fan in the early 70’s and bought both “Desperado” (1973) and “Hotel California” (1976) and my friends had all the others, but then along came punk/new wave and I lost all interest in the band. And never regained it, though naturally that didn’t stop me watching the video concert. So what was that about? Nostalgia? Mourning lost youth? Who knows. But what I do know is that the song is great, Henley sang it very well and I’ve always loved the timbre in his voice. And I can still listen to “Hotel California”.

What’s really weird is the vast number of songs that I’ve loved and which have affected me greatly or been an inspiration over the years, but which haven’t provoked this sort of emotional response, or anything close to it. What about all the Beatle’s stuff? Nope. This could be an interesting subject to discuss with my psychoanalyst. If I had one.

Who will be the next Bob Geldof? That’s like saying who will be the next Beatles. Or the next Abba. And the answer is: nobody. Geldof was (and is) smart, opinionated, big-mouthed, scary, sweary, self-confident and most of the big stars in 1985 could not say no to him when he popped the question; “Live Aid – are you in or out?”. But that was then. Geldof was known to most people in the UK, partly because he had been a pop-star and partly because he was living with a very popular TV-presenter; Paula Yates. They were celebrities and fodder for the tabloids. In fact, Paula was better known and more popular than Bob.

The BBC have put together two film-length documentaries about Live Aid which I can warmly recommend,  and both are available on YouTube (Live Aid – Against All Odds). It starts out with Band Aid, “Do they know it’s Christmas”, written by Geldof and Midge Ure from Ultravox and produced by Ure. The song became a huge hit, generated cash for Ethiopia and is of course still played every Christmas. But just a few months later Geldof got the idea to follow up Band Aid with Live Aid, a concert to be shared between London and an arena in the USA, and to be broadcast over the whole world. This they managed to put together in an amazingly short period of time, including booking many of the biggest artists of the day. And it generated even more cash for aid to Africa.

The whole world didn’t stand still for Live Aid, but in fact a good portion of it did. Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia hosted together about 160 000 people on the day and  more than 1.5 billion people watched it live on TV in 100 countries. The numbers probably don’t mean much to people used to seeing those numbers on Spotify or YouTube every day, but the whole thing was organized and promoted in just a few months. It was an incredible feat and an event of that size would probably take a year or more today.

Live Aid would be technically much easier today but culturally impossible. Thirty-three years after Live Aid, the world is a different place and there’s no longer a music community around which everybody could gather. There’s no one forum which attracts everybody, like TV and radio did before the internet took over. We have YouTube of course, but we all watch different things – there’s no concensus. All the artists that appeared on Live Aid were very much aware of each other, many of them had met previously and the audience knew them all too, no matter what the genre. Today, a Spotify or YouTube star with a couple of million listeners globally can be completely unknown to the general public, whereas back then the artists had all had hits and the public knew them all.

Even worse is that the event that triggered both Band Aid and Live Aid, famine in Ethiopia, is happening again, this time in Yemen. And it’s hardly the responsibility of a bunch of pop stars to fix it. Put simply, we’re all responsible and the world is once again standing still. Governments don’t seem to care much and some care less than others. And who puts the governments in place? We do, in democratic countries, by voting for politician’s policies. It would have been good to see demonstrations against famine and children dying rather than for equality which took place last weekend, but that was the right priority. If women had already been equal in every way and if the world wasn’t led mostly by men, the famine in Yemen probably wouldn’t even exist.

When I was nineteen I saw Hawkwind at the Rainbow Theatre in London. Lemmy was in the band on bass and vocals at the time and they’d just had a big hit with Silver Machine, which was the main reason I was there. But what I remember most about the concert was the volume – and the topless dancer – but mostly the volume. It was so loud that at one point I hid behind the seats, on my knees, crouched on the floor with my fingers in my ears. An unforgettable experience. I’ve had a ringing tone in my ears ever since that evening and for years after that I couldn’t stand to be anywhere which was too quiet. I couldn’t imagine myself ever living anywhere except a big, noisy city which would block out that ringing, but it seems you can get used to anything. Incidentally Lemmy’s Motorhead are number 6 on the list of loudest bands ever and Hawkwind are not on the list at all.

Famously, The Beatles played massive arenas in the USA in the mid-60s, with specially-built 100 watt Vox amplifiers (wow!). At Shea Stadium in New York, the 55,600 fans there could hear nothing apart from each other screaming and some buzzing and squeaking in the background which would have been the Beatles. They had no listening system onstage and couldn’t hear each other playing, which must have been a nightmare. Simply put, the sound was terrible and they were nowhere near loud enough. But when bigger and better sound rigs were developed in the late 60s, many bands squeezed every decibel out of them that they could. It was a badge of honour to be loud and the louder you were, the bigger you were. Some of the old megabands were famous for being terrifyingly loud and even bragged about it. Bands like The Who (Pete Townsend has had problems with tinnitus for many years), Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, and AC/DC, to name a few, broke records for loudness. I used to think that outrageous volume was a thing of the past, but that’s not the case.

My Morning Jacket at Munchenbryggeriet in Stockholm in 2011 were painfully loud. I’d bought earplugs from a seller outside the venue, just in case, but I forgot them in my evening jacket in the cloakroom. I felt like an idiot standing there with my fingers in my ears and no seat to hide behind. It’s a pity though, because they were actually very good. Even locally there’s been some of that. Hogan’s Heroes (who? what?) in Högbo Bruk, with one of my old guitarist heroes Albert Lee, were also deafening.  I was near the front when the show started, drifted towards the back after a couple of songs, but after about 20 minutes I gave it up, slipped out to the carpark and drove home. I just couldn’t listen to it, which also made me pretty pissed off. I had paid to see the band, but couldn’t stand being in the same room as them. So is that my fault or the band’s? Or Högbo Bruk’s? Or is it just the deaf guy behind the mixing desk that’s at fault? Morrisey wrote a song in which he sang critically about DJs many years ago (Panic), for which he also got a lot of criticism. Maybe he should have written one about a mixing engineer instead? Whatever, I should have been given a refund.

Written by Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, two of the smartest songwriters I know, “Old Wild Men” is a song from an album, Sheet Music, by one of my old favourites, 10cc. Godley and Creme were both in their twenties when they wrote the song and envisioned life as old rock and rollers. A totally different take on Pete Townsend’s “My generation”, 9 years earlier.

“Old men of rock and roll, Came bearing music
Where are they now? They are over the hill and far away
But they’re still gonna play guitars, On dead strings, and old drums
They’ll play and play to pass the time, The old wild men
Old wild men, Old wild men, waiting for miracles”

The other half of 10cc were Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman. Stewart was a bit of a star in the 60s as frontman with the Mindbenders, which even included Gouldman just before they called it a day. Gouldman wrote career-building hits for the Hollies, Hermans Hermits, the Yardbirds (who later morphed into Led Zeppelin) and others. In 10cc, Godley and Creme usually contributed the arty, more complex songs and Stewart and Gouldman, the smart pop songs, but that varied and Godley and Creme came up with their share of hits. It was a team effort. The only other band I can think of which had four successful songwriters is Queen.

Stewart was keen to produce so they built their own studio in Manchester: Strawberry Studios. The studio was even involved in recording notes for the Mellotron, an instrument which played prerecorded notes from tape loops. Orchestral musicians would painstakingly be recorded one note at a time. By 1972 they had become a proper band and released their first album. The band was different: clever, funny – check out “Rubber bullets” from the first album – and a huge hit of course.

The two 10cc songwriting teams created a satisfying balance of pop and art music on their first four albums until Godley and Creme made a whole album of their own music in 1976/77, “Consequences”. The consequence of that was, they left 10cc. Godley and Creme didn’t like the new songs, didn’t like the set-up for the coming album and decided they didn’t want to make any more albums with 10cc. A decision which they all regretted to some extent. Stewart and Gouldman carried on anyway and had more hits (“Dreadlock holiday” for instance), but the albums were less fun without the arty input from Godley and Creme.

I also bought Deceptive Bends (without Godley and Creme), but it was too lightweight for me and after that I’d also had enough of 10cc. At the same time, Godley and Creme’s albums were hard to listen to as the pop which provided that magical balance and which had worked so well earlier, was mostly not there. But they also began making music videos just as MTV was taking off and became groundbreaking masters of that instead. “Cry”, from 1985 is a good example of their writing skills and video innovation. Clever guys and good at whatever they put their hands to, in other words. I know quite a few old men of roll and roll, being one of them myself. But we don’t play on dead strings and old drums and don’t consider ourselves particularly over the hill and far away. On the other hand, we’re not waiting for miracles either.

I get to Stockholm every now and again, maybe five or six times a year. This year I’ve seen a few very good bands in Stockholm and several of the musicians I saw were pensioners, in their seventies. I don’t go out of my way to see pensioners, it just sometimes turns out that way.

First up were The Pretty Things in May at Slaktkyrkan. Singer Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor are both in their mid-seventies but have still very much got it together. I was a bit doubtful about going when Göran asked me if I was interested, but I’m very glad I went, and I had a grin like the Cheshire Cat on my face for the whole concert. Most of their set I wasn’t familiar with, though that made no difference at all. About midway they played a few songs from their masterpiece album S. F. Sorrow, which came out in 1968 and which I completely missed at the time. Nobody I knew listened to The Pretty Things back then, which is a great shame as I know I would have loved that album in ‘68 if I’d heard it. So it was completely unknown to me until about five years ago, but I’ve since made up for that in a big way on Spotify. There’s a good story behind that album that might be worth telling someday. This was to be their last tour according to Phil May. A pity, but they’re not getting any younger.

Next up was The The, real name Matt Johnson and I don’t think anybody calls him The. That was at Münchenbryggeriet in June and I was quite a fan of The The during the 80s – meaning I bought the albums, which was how fandom used to be defined. If you wanted to listen to an artist, you had to buy the album. Matt was good at Münchenbryggeriet, but in some way the concert felt slightly chilly. On the way to the gig he was informed that his father had died, so if he wasn’t on top form, nobody could blame him for that. I ended up seeing very little of the concert because a very tall guy pushed his way past me and stood in front of me. When he moved his arms, I could just see Matt through his armpit. Matt is not a pensioner of course, just a youngster of 57.

At the beginning of September Nick Mason, Pink Floyd’s drummer, took to the stage at Cirkus in Stockholm with his band of gypsies, Saucerful of Secrets. Again, I was a bit doubtful about going and again I made the right decision and went. Nick is a young buck of 74 and his band are all his juniors, around 60, so not quite pensioners. They played very early Pink Floyd stuff, which was anyway when I liked them best, and they did it with panache. So again, I had a big grin on my face for the entire concert. Panache is not a loaf of bread by the way – you’re thinking of baguette. Just to round this off, I saw Jeff Lynne’s ELO at The Globe in mid-September. Jeff is also into his eighth decade, but he can still do it well. The band was pretty much perfect, the sound was perfect too and I counted 13 musicians onstage. Best was Mr. Blue Sky which was first released in the middle of the new wave era in 1978 but was irresistible anyway. Funnily enough, pal Lennart and I had to move seats because we mistakenly sat in Jenny and Niklas Strömstedt’s and Anders Glenmark’s seats. In front of us was Robert Wells, and somewhere behind us, Tomas Ledin (all Swedish celebs). I tried to take a discrete photo of Jenny and Lennart while he checked our tickets with her, but I failed miserably.