Read Til You Drop: December 2009

No, reading isn't the new rock and roll.

It isn't even the old rock and roll.

But it sure as hell passes the time . . . .

With that daring thought in mind, here's the first in what may become a series of book reviews for RTYD - depending on how many snide comments are made about my grasp of music history or even music per se. I'm very sensitive, you know. Incredibly so, my bandmates tell me. But then what would they know? Gits.

Let's start with Madness. Perhaps you know (of) Terry Edwards - multi-instrumentalist, Londoner, sometime player with Robyn Hitchcock, Tindersticks and his own band The Higsons in the 1980s. (All together now: "Who stole my bongos? Did you steal my bongos?") Now he's written a book, in Continuum's 33-and-a-1/3 series, about Madness's album One Step Beyond . . . from 1979.

It's only 169 pages long, and they're quite small pages. But Mr Edwards is good company in print. The idea is to run briskly through the album track by track, "One Step Beyond" to "Chipmunks Are Go!", introducing its makers, their influences, their stories about ripping off Prince Buster, the pub rock scene, etc, as opportunity arises.

This works well, as it mainly requires Suggs and co to speak for themselves, as interviewed by Edwards in the past couple of years. The author has reminiscences and opinions of his own, too, beginning with his assessment of OSB . . . as not the best album in the world or even in Madness's back catalogue - but certainly the "blueprint" for the band's later work: "All the fun, pathos, quirky bits of timing, key changes and even an early string arrangement are already in place in their debut album".

It probably helped that the album was produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. Apparently, they know what they're doing.

Madness, a band once labelled as strictly ska for skinheads, are still going, still gigging. The Liberty of Norton Folgate shows that they can still surprise the critics. Apparently, in the 80s, they spent over 200 weeks in the singles charts - more than anybody else.

That's not bad going, is it? Impressive, even if you're not a fan of their music - but one thing this book makes clear is that they had eclectic roots and worked together superbly to create their own sound. Ian Dury, Alex Harvey, Prince Buster, the Faces, Elvis Costello, even Santana are cited here for one reason or another (the last being one of the drummer Dan "Woody" Woodgate's old favourites).

Thanks to Terry Edwards, I also know now that Madness, which includes several songwriters, split the royalties cunningly: 50 per cent to the named songwriter, the other 50 split between all seven bandmembers. "Razor Blade Alley" is about sexual transmitted diseases. The brother of Mike Barson (the keyboard player) played in Bazooka Joe with John Ellis, who went on to form The Vibrators - so there's a marvellously tenuous Rock-Til-You-Drop connection, since Phil Ram of The Great Outdoor Experience played with The Vibrators, they tell me . . . .

Enough Madness. There's one other book to mention for now, another first effort by a musician. From CBGB to the Roundhouse: Music venues through the years by Tim Burrows is badly copy-edited, with no index (which wouldn't be a completely unhelpful thing in a book that works through the entire post-war history of music venues on both sides of the Atlantic). There's been a great deal of raiding of newspaper and magazine pieces, but also a fair amount of original interviewing. In a sense, it's more about music scenes than music venues. And it's deftly done, as you'd expect from a contributor to thequietus.com.

Burrows covers everything from West Indian sound-systems blasting the xenophobes out of Notting Hill, to the Twist, to the MC5 going crazy in Detroit, to the Armadillo, the former National Guard armoury in Austin, Texas, to - well, the rest is fairly obvious. If you've seen that big hole in the middle of London recently, where the Astoria used to be, you'll know where the story is going as well. (And if you were a fan of the Astoria, check out this . . .)

There aren't any grand surprises, but it's a Not Uninteresting account. A concise chapter takes you from Woodstock to the 450 music festivals held in the UK a couple of years ago. And like the unexpected influences that came together to form One Step Beyond . . ., there's something striking about the sheer ad hoc-ness of many of the most exciting music venues Burrows discusses, their emergence from unlikely or unpromising situations (it wasn't "Country, BlueGrass and Blues" making waves at CBGB in New York, can you believe it, but Patti Smith, Television et al).

In that way, despite its scale and conservatism, the O2 ("the British government's monumental white elephant") is just following in a fine, old tradition . . . .

OK. Enough already. I only meant to write a couple of hundred words on this nonsense. Now look what I've gone and done.