It always looked like it would be fun to be in Supergrass. Like they enjoyed it, like they never took it too seriously. They made derivative dadrock music, sure, but it was also, generally, joyous and fun. You felt that they believed in its validity, and that gave it a truth that more original and innovative bands can miss. And, crucially, they had scope and range - they rocked when they wanted to, but they could swing a bit, throw in a ballad and some folk. Over time I think they were the (unlikely) survivors of the Britpop era: Oasis grew rotten and pathetic, Blur imploded, Pulp fell away and only Gaz Coombes and his cheeky-chappy mateys were left, all growned up and serious. Still releasing great - or at least very good - records. Until last week, when they announced their split after 17 years.
Of course, they had good record collections. Thats obvious from what their music sounds like. The Beach Boys, the Stooges, the Beatles, CSNY, T-Rex, Bowie, Dylan - they listened to classic rock and they filtered it through their own songwriting to good effect. I love their second and third albums in particular, but all of the others contain sublime moments, too. Here are five such moments, and some thoughts about them, in memorium, I suppose:
Richard III
A friend of mine always insists that this riff - one of the best of an era admittedly light on great riffs - is a rip-off of one of Black Sabbath's. He may be right, but I doubt that the Sabbath song has the same energy that Richard III has, the same combination of belligerent rock and unabashed pop, the same surfeit of hookiness.
Taken off their second album, In It For The Money, where Supergrass easily surpassed their debut, broadening their scope emotionally and musically without losing sight of why they were popular in teh first place, this was a single. At first, it seems like a newly serious band, those opening bars of riff so deadpan and determined, so grimly fixed on something unseen, something adult, perhaps. Then Gaz goes "Woooo!" to kick it all off, and it gets louder, but its still Supergrass, willing to compromise the hardman rock (Made plain by the menacing lyric: "I know you wanna try and get away/But it's the hardest thing you'll ever know/Tryna get at you, tryna get at you") of such a song to include some lovely falsetto backing vocals.
So while its as heavy and driving a rock song as any they ever did, its always a pop single, too. Which makes it Supergrass, and makes it fantastic.
St Petersberg
Road to Rouen, the fifth album, marked a real and decisive change of style for the band. If their third, Supergrass, had messed with their formula and been a commercial and critical disappointment, they pacified their record company with the more predictable Life On Other Planets. But even that didn't halt their commercial slide. Britpop was over and even something of an embarrassment in the eclectic mp3 era, and its survivors were all in trouble.
So Supergrass changed tack entirely. The new record was folkier, largely acoustic, ruminative, mellow. Its also frequently beautiful and the band's songwriting has clearly benefitted from their new direction. Where Life on Other Planets sounded tired and almost self-parodic, Road to Rouen is fresh and dynamic, the product of a band re-energised and excited by their music.
"St. Petersberg" was the lead-off single for the album. But it doesn't sound remotely like a single. Its subtle and gentle, slowly strummed guitars over tinkling piano and hushed, muted, gorgeous strings towing the melody along. The lyrics are impressionistic, with no obvious narrative or meaning, just some phrases emerging from the mix. The opening lines are "Before the time of the morning sandman/I can find my way around" and it continues in that vein for three minutes or so, going nowhere in particular. This could not be by those lovable scamps who recorded "Alright", could it? Well yes it could, not that anybody wanted to know anymore.
Eon
Supergrass, the band's third album, is probably their most "Rock" record. It is jammy, and musically their most complex and interesting release. There are fewer of the numbers that most people would think of back then if asked to think of a typical Supergrass song, and more where they expand and stretch out and let a big, muscular groove build. In that vein, as well as the superb "Eon", there are the equally impressive "Born Again" and "Faraway". But there are also two of their greatest pop singles, in the exhilarating "Moving" and the sleazy stomp of "Mary", and the lovely doodle of "Mama & Papa" to end the album. In short, if In It For The Money is their most obviously accessible, crowd-pleasing record, Supergrass is their best.
This song builds up patiently on long winding lines of electric guitar and a rhythm section that seeps in like cloud, and after it all breaks up into a wash of chiming arpeggios, its almost two minutes before the vocal starts. Then its a blissed out nursery rhyme concerned with astral bodies (I know you're out there/We saw a shooting star/We don't know what you done/You're nearer for a star") composed of three verses and no choruses. It is casually epic and feels longer than it actually is, some sort of tribute to the mastery of dynamics the band display here. The moment at 1:24 when the tempo changes is just breathtaking.
Lenny
I Should Coco came out in 1995, when Gaz Coombes was 19 years old, Danny Goffey was 21 and Mick Quinn was a prehistoric 26. The chirpy pop single "Alright" - the song the band will be remembered for - was a massive smash, but the album sold 900,000 copies too, making Supergrass one of the biggest bands in the UK just a few months after they had released their first single. "Lenny" was another single off that record. Its a punk-pop gem, cocky and breathless and insistently catchy. I love the first 25 seconds or so - that simple, hesitant drum pattern, then the guitar hammering a dumb one note riff, and then the way Goffey definitively kicks in on the offbeat, his drum fill jumpstarting that elastic bass and the song is suddenly rolling forward. Its a young man's song, all forward momentum, full of the thrill of being alive and young and in a band, the lyrics disposable and so meaningless they're run through three times and you barely notice: "I've been around and around/But I've got nowhere to go now/But the funny thing is/That when I'm gone, I'll kill you/When I tell you/I don't want you-hoo-hoo". And thats it.
In a way, it perfectly encapsulated what Supergrass were then. All energy, brio, and a cocksure stupidity that made them seem invincible. Musically too, with its fuzzy guitar, its simple rhythm, its big harmonies, its soaring vocals on the middle eight, its commitment to being a pop single.
It still sounds great.
The Evening of the Day
This sounds like one of those odds and ends songs the Beatles used to do, combining bits of three separate scraps masterfully into one coherent whole. It comes from Life On Other Planets, a comeback album of sorts which is my least favourite of their records apart from Diamond Hoo Ha, their uninspired final outing. This album is a bit too Supergrass-by-numbers for my liking, but it does contain a handful of great songs, like "Za" and "Brecon Beacons". This is better though. Sung in the main by Quinn, who had handled lead vocals on several numbers on Supergrass, its first section is a folksy shuffle, all energetic strummed acoustics and drawled vocal. Around the one minute mark it shifts gears, electric guitars and organ cut in, and a chorus from a different song emerges, complete with a lyrical reference to Spinal Tap's "All the Way Home" ("If shes not on that 3:15/ Then I'm gonna know what sorrow means"). It reverts for the rest of the verses, accumulating instrumentation as it progresses - horns, piano, more guitars - while the chorus remains shouty and raucous, before a final collapse and a delicate little coda, complete with bongos, lounge piano and whistling.
I saw Big Star live on their 2001 European Tour in Dublin. By Big Star, I mean the reconstituted modern version featuring two of the original members, Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, alongside the two frontmen from modern power-pop underachievers the Posies, Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer . I was pumped for the gig. Big Star had long been one of my favourite bands. In fact, when I rank the bands I like, the only one I love more than Big Star are the Beatles. So, as you can imagine, I was excited. The crowd was a strange mix of Dublin hipsters and musos, but there was a good atmosphere, eager and enthusiastic. The gig was alright. You could tell Chilton’s heart wasn’t really in it. He did what he had to do, but without any great enthusiasm. He was this little, slightly grumpy middle-aged guy in denim, singing these songs his voice couldn’t quite reach anymore, playing guitar. He came most alive during a cover of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. It was enough for most people there to hear those great Big Star songs sung by the man who had written them, played by a good, tight band. I was happy to have been there but somewhat disappointed, too. I’d read it in enough interviews, but seeing him live made me finally believe it – Alex Chilton hated Big Star. Go figure.
In the pre-download world of the early 90s, I started off with the wrong Big Star album. I’d read plenty about what kind of band they were, who they sounded like, who they had influenced etc. I found “3rd/Sister Lovers” in a second hand shop and bought it. On that first listen I was instantly surprised by the opening track (different editions feature different sequencing), in this case “Stroke It Noel”. It seemed improvised, with no evident structure, for all the beauty of its melodies and arrangements and the pin sharp crunch of the production. After that the remainder of the record was a long line of surprises – from the bizarre “Downs” to the instantly awesome “Thank You Friends”, “Big Black Car” and “For You” to the desolation of “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo”. I wasn’t as blown away as I had expected to be. I knew “Kanga Roo” from Jeff Buckley’s cover version, but that version was cleaner and straighter (its rock out riffathon apart) than this tormented, fractured, even slightly disturbing rendition. But I stuck with it – I knew the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” and a part of me reckoned that if it was alright for Paul Westerberg, then it was alright for me - and soon I loved the record in all its twisted, strange glory. Its moments of beauty, I could see, were incredible and hinted at another side to this band than the chaos much of the record seemed to have captured. A little later, after a conversation about the band, a friend played me a few standout tracks off his copy of the twofer cd containing the other two Big Star albums – “Number 1 Record” and “Radio City”.
The songs he played were “The Ballad of El Goodo”, “Thirteen”, “September Gurls” and “I’m In Love With a Girl”. Right then, I was in love. Its one of the great musical memories of my life, being hit by the perfection and majesty of those songs in that little living room, knowing I had to have this cd as soon as possible. I bought it, consumed it, and became a Big Star evangelist. Every compilation tape or cd I made after that had to feature a Big Star song. Because nobody seemed to know this band. Nobody I knew, at any rate. I got the Chris Bell solo stuff, and a couple of Alex Chilton solo records. I got the ecords Chilton had made with the Box Tops before he and Bell had formed Big Star. I bought the two live cds, “Big Star Live” and “Nobody Can Dance” purely for the cover versions they contained (Loudon Wainwright’s “Motel Blues” and T-Rex’s “Baby Strange”). I was a fan of power-pop, the subgenre Big Star had helped to create and define, and I got into Badfinger and the Raspberries and Todd Rundgren and more modern acolytes like Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish, all in an effort to recreate that thrilling feeling I got when I first heard that Big Star sound.
But heres what made Big Star and Alex Chilton special. For all that they were undeniably power-pop, with those Beatlesque melodies, and the Byrdsian harmonies and the punch of the Kinks all colliding in each song, they had an x factor. Badfinger, for all that they wrote and played some amazing songs, aren’t a patch on Big Star. There is a darkness floating somewhere under the surface in the music of Big Star, an ineffable quality that lifts it, enables it to transcend genre. Its almost queasy, this feeling, an edge to the bright and shining beauty of the songs. Maybe it is the anger in Chilton - the anger that made his solo career such a quixotic ramble of challenging records and self-destructive tendencies. Maybe it was Bell's struggle with his faith and his sexuality. I don't know, I just know its there, I can hear it in the music, and it is a big part of what makes Big Star a special band.
And they really are a special band. For my money, "Radio City" is their best record, and indeed one of the great rock albums, containing not a single weak song, brilliantly played and sequenced. From the surprisingly funky opener, "O My Soul", with its fluid structure, through the greatest Number One that never was, "September Gurls" to the moving simplicity of the closing "I'm In Love With a Girl", it covers a wide variety of moods and tempos but always sounds like this unique, distinctive band. They could play tough rock when it suited them, they could do soulful balladry, bright pop and - since they came from Memphis - a little bit of r'n'b is suggested, too. But Chilton always sounds like himself, like the young man he was, who had been a star in his teens but rejected it and gone to New York alone to be a singer-songwriter, sorta failed and retreated to Memphis where he had finally begun a band with a Beatles-obsessive that made music America wasn't quite ready for at that time. His later material is interesting, and sometimes even inspired, but its never great in the pure way Big Star was.
When I read that Alex Chilton had died a few nights ago - on Twitter, where I seem to hear all news these days -I felt a sharp sense of loss not really felt about a Musician since Elliott Smith died. But then I listened to some Big Star, and as usual, all I could feel was joy.
ALEX CHILTON 1950 - 2010
All three original records are must buys, as is the box set from last year, "Keep An Eye on the Sky", full of demos and covers and alternate takes and live numbers, and for a Big Star fan, absolutely orgasmic. Rob Jovanovic's book "Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop" is a great read for fans, too.
Below, "Daisy Glaze", my favourite Big Star song, with such a euphoric guitar moment at 1:54 it still catches my breath:
One particular idea of French Cinema owes a great deal to the sublime work of Eric Rohmer: the pretentious bourgeois drama, filled with beautiful women and endless talk. Only such a limiting description does not begin to do Rohmer justice, for here was one of Cinema's great humanists, one of Cinema's great writers of dialogue, and most importantly one of Cinema's most consistent and intelligent Directors.
His films are generally bourgeois dramas (altough there are some excellent period excursions in his oeuvre, too), but there is not an ounce of pretension to the films themselves. Rohmer tells simple stories centred resolutely around people, and he loves his people and feels endless curiosity about them. They might be pretentious, shallow, facile or selfish but Rohmer's investigations into them never are. Instead he is sympathetic, and often amused by them and their romantic entanglements, the way they justify themselves, their moral and philosophical struggles. All of this portrayed with perfect and unostentatious elegance; Rohmer's camera never intrusive as it observes his characters flirting and debating and consoling. And yet, like Ozu and Howard Hawks, even, his camera placement always feels just right - he puts it in the perfect place. His editing is equally faultless. All of this done on consistently modest budgets and never reaping any great popular success. Rohmer has been an inspiration to individual artistic filmmakers the world over because he showed a viable model. He made his deeply personal, totally distinctive films for five decades without ever selling his soul, without ever doing "one for them", to borrow Graham Greene's phrase.
He is also one of the great Feminists in modern Cinema. Considering that one of his key and repeated themes is the urge to wander felt by men in long-term relationships, Rohmer has created some stunningly well-rounded women in his work. His women are real people, with quirks, complexities and flaws - always individuals, always utterly believable. From Delphine in The Green Ray (1986) who refuses to allow her awkward habits and beliefs to halt her bid to end her solitude but also refuses to play by the conventional rules, to Laura, sister of the title character in Claire's Knee (1970), battered by her love for an older man yet articulate and funny and blazingly passionate about that love. Rohmer's men, meanwhile, are often deluded and self-serving, searching for easy ways out, for permission to cheat on their wives, for instance.
The best example of this in Rohmer's Cinema, and my favourite of his films, is Love In the Afternoon (1972). Perhaps Rohmer's funniest film, it is also moving and clear-eyed in its view of relationships as it tells the story of Frederic, a happily married young Executive who obsesses over his desire for other women until the reappearance of an old flame, the beautiful, slightly unbalanced Chloe, in his life gives him an opportunity to act upon his desire. Alongside the traditional pleasures associated with Rohmer - that great dialogue, fine performances - this is the Rohmer film to show to anyone who questions how "cinematic" his work is. The lovely cinematography is courtesy of the legendary Nestor Almendros, and this is a fine and fluid portrait of Paris and its vivacity, especially in its long passage of Frederic's wandering among the beautiful women he sees everywhere in the boulevards of the city. He was, quite simply, irreplaceable. RIP.
"I'm gonna get to the bottom of this ASAFP, but first I'd like to butter your muffin"
I grew up in the 1980s. John Hughes movies were part of the fabric of my childhood and early adolescence. Some of the qualities for which they are most fondly remembered - the way they didn't talk down to teenagers, the understanding of the pressures of High School and conformity and clique culture - I wasn't really conscious of. But I could see even then that a film with John Hughes' name on it was liable to be a classier, more enjoyable and rewarding work than one of the many films that tried to imitate his success. I got that he gave great parts to his young casts, and that he had an amazing ear for dialogue. and most importantly that he was funny.
So the more serious films he made were never the ones I loved. Pretty In Pink (1986) (which was directed by Howard Deutch from a Hughes script), 16 Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) - I liked them, but never the way I liked Weird Science (1985) or Ferris Buellers Day Off (1986). The amazing fact that all these films were made within three years reveals just how influential Hughes was at one point, and how his sensibility and worldview set the tone for the way Hollywood treated teens in a way that persists in the modern teen comedy.
Hughes grew older and after a couple of more "adult" comedies - Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), which may in fact be his masterpiece, and Shes Having a Baby (1989) - he seemed to regress, and for the rest of his career made and wrote films almost exclusively for children. But I will always remember him for the anarchic geek-triumph moments in Ferris Bueller and Weird Science, probably two of the most quotable and quoted films of the 80s. Weird Science in particular was my favourite, less eager to please than Bueller, with Kelly LeBrock, an Oingo Boingo theme song, Bill Paxton's funniest appearance ever and mutant bikers all part of the bizarre package.
