http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ym4GRuGvfw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIig8CqIV4o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XtRnCDTrhM

(The Dutch had a rather convoluted system that year, whereby three songs were each performed by three artists. That don’t sound good to me.)

In the end, the Led Zep-conquering pop giant had to surrender the ticket to glamorous Harrogate to this slice of almost-amazing oompah blandness, complete with an all-female backing group including a Toksvig-esque drummer who can’t wink properly. 8 whole points on the Eurovision scoreboard were the cosmic punishment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdngRL1vZRs

and both these elements were/are clearly there, scrabbling with one another

as i say, i saw this piece and still see it as a counter to an extant review format which no one expected to be dispensed with — the singles column had already dealt with maybe half these songs as they came out and before they performed: so to me this particular format was the opposite of ahistorical: it was a way of taking stock of how meaning arises and changes in collective and semi-uncontrolled contention over time (by which i mean the formal contention of a singles column is one person’s selection, out of the serendipity of the singles box in front of him; but the formal contention of the charts is the consequence of thousands of semi-independent decisions); and had this lasted as format, there’d have been the chance to observe also how the chart itself was changing, narrowing maybe, or opening up because the responses were written down at the time

the potential for revision being a beginning of history: and the acknowledgement of the role of the audience — the idea that quality is NOT just the fiat statement of a small band of self-declared experts, but something that emerges from the clash of one with another, of the surges of mass taste with the trends and fashions of elite taste

it’s true that journalism deals with history (and wider structural viewing) badly: it deals with it badly when it ignores it, and it tends to deal with it just as badly when it pays attention to it — so that while the comparison of pop writing with a particular kind of financial pulp journalism is superficially suggestive (and cheekily funny), this is exactly the point when the deeper structural view would be kicking in to say, well, OK, they do look alike so ARE they alike? How are they the same and how are they DIFFERENT? If superficial instant response is off the table for the moment, what’s really going on here? The object of attention gets to be allowed to interrogate the framework of examination: or all you’re doing — which is what most journalism does as it grabs hold of the non-journalistic disciplines, is flashy comparisons to affirm pre-standing prejudices. If you strip this column out of its context — not a very “historical” thing to do — and scale it up so that all pop writing is imagined as similarly morley-form, well yes, you can conclude all kinds of things. But it arose in and against the context it was actually from…

And as i say, it’s not as if the format on show prospered historically: quite the opposite, this was its one appearance, and insofar as the rock papers did indeed become more niche, to their detriment, it was “mouldy album” syndrome that was increasingly bedding in and causing this: they gradually stopped mixing film and telly and books and politic into the same jostle of discussion, and set about firming up particular readerships more and more in their pre-chosen prejudice of what proper tried-and-tested test-of-timed rock was. Which is why you get all the angry barely literate kids in the comments to old Tanya posts: angrily telling us that Pink Floyd are beyond criticism, and Tanya must be the kind of person (often “chav”) who likes [insert flimsy pop name of the moment] [today it's GaGa, obviously: it's nearly always women]

Certainly I think the glib ahistorical shallowness swanstep perceives and dislikes was more a product of this reinstatement of the belief that ROCK was really about routinely producing these weighty masterpieces of importance, thatall could/must agree were actually what mattered for the music to have purpose, and — as a consequence — the entire rhetoric of criticism year-on-year bent itself to the pseudo-revelation of the new one and the next one, and about pre-fashioning a ready constituency of agreement… and of course it’s a corrosive pressure to produce “work for the ages”, especially when you have internalised this suspicion of the craft of building work for the instant, here-and-gone (this is why a lot of the music that’s merged from this bedding in, let alone the writing about it, is so joyless and unfunny and unself-aware — humour is situational, crafted for the now).

Lastly, yes of course there’s something absurd about pouring so much exegetical attention into a fleeting and flawed column in a rock weekly from 30-odd years ago, especially when also defending its claim that something well-regarded and then only 11 years old is not as important as something flimsy happening right now. (The elephant in the room here all along being that L3 is easily my favourite Zep LP.) But this is how you do actually find what matters and what doesn’t: you play with the boundaries of conventional and recieved assumptions about same, and see where it takes you. Or you cling to them, and make up nice stories about where you’ve been stranded. I’m not the person I was when this column hit me; and it hits me today in all kinds of different ways, obviously. The person I was then was wrong about a lot of stuff — including maybe the role this “type of thing” had in fashioning those elements of my then-future, my current present-and-past that I dislike — but there’s certain elements, about the pleasure in the outcome of the encounter with people not yourselves, and indeed the trust in it, which still speaks to me pretty strongly.

Morley, meanwhile, you might think of as having been like one of those newsletters covering speculative mining companies or Silicon Valley start-ups. He has some stock invested in the subjects of his stories, but you don’t mind because his insider knowledge and understanding are so good, and he shares so much of what he knows so eloquently. Perhaps he should have been more open about that investment, but until music journalism gets regulated by the FSA, I don’t really think you can say he had any obligation to reveal it.

He is far from the only journalist ever to be a part of a scene that he chronicled, of course. And as I understand the career structures of the British music press, there is a huge incentive for every writer to overstate the quality of the bands they are covering. Nobody gets cover stories and four-page features saying: “This new album’s a bit dull, really. Nothing much to see here.”

And, to push the analogy even further, the best writers actually create value in the music they are covering. Firstly, in a cultural capital sense: if Morley writes great pieces about Joy Division, then people you respect are more likely to like them, so being a fan is more worthwhile for you. You might think of him as being like Jim Cramer, or another widely followed stock ramper; it can be worth buying the shares they tip, because they are so they can move the markets. Another vital skill for music writers is being able to spot bands that are going to go on to become big, so you can get in on the ground floor with your investment.

Second – and this is where financial writing and music writing part company – the greatest music writers can add value to their subjects. Morley, Penman, Bangs and a few others have had a huge impact on what I listen to and what I get out of it, because of the perspectives and ideas that they reveal. I am sure, for example, that I would enjoy AR Kane and Teena Marie much less than I do if I had not read Simon Reynolds and Chuck Eddy.

I don’t think you should be beating yourself up over being gullible. If you were caught up in a hype bubble, well it was fun while it lasted, and that is life in the market for ideas: cultural capital can go down as well as up. Certainly in Britain I would say there are lots of people who think that the hype – the overstated claims, the overheated prose – is all part of the fun, even an essential part.

Eleven years from LZ3 to FI: what is our modern equivalent of LZ3? ‘Is This It’? ‘Kid A’?

Apart from the unforced eclecticism of his tastes – as they stood in my teenage years, at any rate – I guess that’s why I’ve felt closer to Paul Morley than any other music writer, since both his kickstart into music writing and his maturation as a music writer – “maturation” here meaning the formation of his stray strands of ideas into a cogent engine of thought and (hopefully) prophecy – were provoked, more or less, by two losses. First, he lost his father at the same age, give or take a year or two, that I lost mine, and both were suicides of a kind (my father did not strictly speaking commit suicide but I cannot deny that he spent many years building up to his death, willing it to happen).

Second; well, I don’t suppose losing Ian Curtis is remotely comparable with losing one’s partner of half a lifetime but IC’s suicide was the key trigger that set New Pop in (im)proper motion; speak to any of its major proponents and they’ll tell you the same story; that death drew a firm, starkly dark line under what had henceforth been building up (but to what?) and it was time to infiltrate the bloodstream of the mainstream with one’s ideas, philosophies or far-from-plain daftness, however one chose to do it.

But in almost all senses PM wouldn’t exist as the writer that he is without Joy Division; imagine if you can the sheer wonder that your mates, the blokes with whom you hung out in the pub, who one moment were a crappy punk band and then somehow SOMEHOW made the quantum leap into WTFness and then that this cheeky bastard of a singer with whom you sometimes played a round of darts suddenly found the key to otherness, to his own stupid immortality, and how the hell did he get there, even if by getting there he was dragging himself to hell, and knew it?

The emotional, bloody ties are too close to disentangle, too firmly (umbilically?) connected for PM ever to become the dreaded spectre of music writer-as-waiter, ticking off what’s good this week and what’s off – when reading a writer I have to be able to get into his or her life, try to understand who or what is driving them, since without the life of the mind, music writing is not worth minding.

It was those losses which catapulted PM into a world and situation where SOMETHING HAD TO CHANGE (or the world might fail?) and so his writing of the New Pop period carries a rare emotional resonance and spiritual ferocity, even when New Pop was clearly thrilling him to bits; witness his delirious singles column in the November 1981 issue of The Face, an oasis of ecstasy marooned within too much premature/imprecise mourning and grumbling (there’s far too much Steve Taylor). Who wouldn’t want to have followed – and maybe, if one had the nerve, even SURPASS – him?

As for “Fantasy Island” and LZ3; at the time the latter was thought very far from “great” or “classic,” an oddity stuck between two Rock Monuments, and the former was pretty much sneered at or disregarded. Yet “Fantasy Island” is, as with “The Land Of Make Believe,” an allegory about Thatcher’s Britain (just as its transatlantic contemporary, Blondie’s “Island Of Lost Souls,” was about Reagan’s America) and producer Tim Friese-Greene suggests angles and spaces – particularly in, but not confined to, the twelve-inch mix – which point both backwards towards the angelic trudge of “That’s The Way” and forwards towards Spirit Of Eden (which he himself produced). So I’ve always taken PM’s words not so much to be the fatal dart poisoning what Reynolds in Monitor called “the petrified doxa of Rockism” but a way of drawing our attention to both records, the subtle undertow highlighting the excitable (and in my view totally justified) urge to get on with NOW, knowing that the tide was with “us” (even if only for another week), that THESE ARE THE DAYS (to complicate the picture further, I thought the 12-inch of Robert Plant’s “Burning Down One Side” better than either at the time, while “Moonlight In Samosa” is exactly what a fusion of LZ3 and “Fantasy Island” would have sounded like).

There is plenty wrong with the piece, and I thought so at the time too; the Pigbag and Junior jibes are unworthy attempts to haggle with RD Cook and NME soulboys, whereas for me one of the most important attributes of New Pop was to get the kind of music back into the charts which “rock” had more or less banished or ousted to the paddocks (pace Mark S on “African Waltz”). Without the expanded horizons which it enabled, New Pop would have been worth nothing. But that is far outweighed by PM’s life-or-death NEED to communicate that now might be all that we have (cf., of all records, Wolfsbane’s Massive Noise Injection) and that we should live in it, inhabit it, but not stay there. Would that there were more of this in music writing now; but the greater challenge may yet still be the one which RDC threw down – to change our views about music, to see that it all connects, even the remotest and cobweb-strewn of corners, and perhaps, if we’re extremely lucky, change the way music is made and – the next step that nobody dared take, I mean, who do these music writers think they are? – change the world. But that gamble, for now, is between you and me.

As Mark says a magazine is a cluster of bits, not a book. Smash Hits – Hepworth’s dull AOR leanings aside – pretty much presented a united take on contemporary pop, and indeed helped evolve New Pop through its presentation and writing style.

Pre ’82, NME was really quite dull and worthy and miles off the track in comparison.

this week’s chart (and this week’s pop magazine)… tell you about the jostle and turmoil of the world we’re in blah blah
Oh, maybe. Mostly though it’s about the present the way financial news is that endlessly comments on micro-/daily, sub-daily changes in stock exchange values (most of which is just random fluctuation and drift). All of that’s irrelevant to non-insider, long-term investors, and has almost nothing to say about the broader economy or its politically proper understanding). The jabber of those people, their mixture of hyperbole and breathless present-centrism and high-velocity name-dropping and brow-beating designed to provoke action ‘Buy!’/'Sell!’ is… familiar.

I dare say that Morley’s enthusiasm appealed to me a lot at the time too (how could it not? year zero proclamations confirm a kid’s default stance in the world). How wonderful it was to have someone tell me that I didn’t need to listen to Led Zep or to decide for myself what I thought about them, I could just cut directly to the chase of the present, and, heh-heh, just know that anyone who listened to them was a moron (or something).

the general argumentative context — including battlelines drawn, and so on — had been being unfolded in its pages for months
Yes there was supporting material spread around. Unfortunately it was tended to be just more of the same hyperbole and in-group-/territory-marking and name-dropping. So, e.g., the next week it would be some Julian Cope B-side > Revolver.

Looking back, I’d paraphrase the appeal of Morley et al. to my young self in a slightly different way than I would have said at the time. Returning to the the original provocation, Morley was saying to me at the time not really that Tight Fit 12″ > LZ3 but something more like the following:
‘Sure LZ3 is great. Everyone knows that. Everyone also knows that this piece of trash single is relatively worthless. Hence everyone knows that Tight Fit 12″ < LZ3. That's easy. But follow me down this very obscure pathway of esoteric knowledge that only I possess, thereby becoming part of an insider-group that most people aren't even mentally capable of joining, and I'll show you a perspective from which the converse of that conventional wisdom is true.'
Something like this was the real source of Morley's appeal to me at 13-14. It and the merry dance though cool stuff it introduced me to was fun and even intoxicating for a few years, but ultimately I was ill-served by stepping into the cocked sling-shot of all of Morley's views and preferences. How exciting to be signed up for the frontlines of a battle and to see the world that way! I would have been better served by listening to more of the past in a fairer way in high school, broadly surveying and making my own mind up about conventional wisdom rather than embracing esoteric views too quickly.

Returning to my financial news comparison. When I saw that long Joy Division documentary a few years ago (around the same time as Control), and got to see how close Morley was to that band, I felt (possibly unfairly) a little irate. From the other side of the world, I had relied on people like Morley for something like objective advice about what to check out etc.. I'd always thought of him as a kind of independent analyst, but I now saw that that was an absurd image to have had. He was completely in the tank for his mates, had what would be called in the financial press, massive conflicts of interest. It made me cringe at how gullible I'd been (and possibly still am to some extent – cringing cuts deep that way).

which is another reason the piece was so exciting, because form follows function: a magazine isn’t a book, it’s not one person’s idea unfolded long-form, it comes in clusters of bits, which wrangle and clash: this week’s chart (and this week’s pop magazine) are more important than some mouldy album, because they tell you about the jostle and turmoil of the world we’re in blah blah

who this appeals to is more a matter of temperament than sort of Logic of the Eternal Verities — certanly it appealed to me enormously then

For reasons that Mark S explains in various comments on his 5 years at NME across Popular, Morley simultaneously succeeds and fails in this venture, simply because the inky music press is approaching a seismic shift, that not only alienates a huge chunk of the inky readership, but also sets the writers on a collision course especially within the NME, ultimately ending in the re-formatting of NME as well as winding-up of MM and Sounds; the Death Of The Inkies. I’m not blaming Morley for this, after all, he’s a crucial character in the saga that is New Pop. On several levels, it was bound to happen.

swanstep’s idea that you can measure something’s value by your own inability to find it is way more bizarre than morley’s claim – which is more or less the claim that living in your own present is better than living in someone else’s past

“If someone makes an utterly bizarre claim…they almost certainly should not be taken seriously.”

I don’t necessarily think we should trust what he says! But outlandish claims like that add to the colour and flow of pop/rock criticism, and I think it’s worthwhile having a couple of people around being contradictory for the sake of it; at best they might be right, at worst they’re amusing. I’m not sure people should be listening to what Paul says here, but I think it’s good that he says it. (Somewhere in the back of my head I want to make a vaguely Millsian justification of this but thankfully the rest of my head is telling me this is ridiculous.)

#90 – I think most of my sense of self-satisfaction from the piece is the result of that giddy delight; I’m not sure why, for me and in that piece of writing, the latter comes across as the former. Possibly because we’re out of the moment he’s talking about and now this reads like nostalgic bludgeoning

Sorry for no Popular this week btw, double column deadline and a lot of work on.

You (Flahr) know chunks of Led Zep 3 if you’ve ever watched things like Almost Famous (which uses Tangerine in its final scene) and Rock School (which uses Immigrant Song as Jack Black’s best driving music).
I don’t know the 12″ mix of Fantasy Island either. It isn’t around in any of the obvious places on-line (whereas most fondly remembered 12″ versions of things are widely available – diehard fans like to share their best rareties), which suggests that it’s nothing special.

(not having heard the 12″ of Fantasy Island nor, indeed, Led Zeppelin III I don’t know which side is which here)

Because clearly someone should say ’2+2 > 75′ ?

Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes, they do Otto, they just don’t understand it.

Was that the first in a series? I can imagine subsequent pieces of writing – after he’s set out his stall, so to speak – being a bit better.

I’ve remembered what I was going to say now anyway, which is that “One for Sorrow” by Steps (not SB embargoed) rips this one off rather shamelessly.

(I will charitably assume it has just dated rather than it was rubbish at the time too)

I know that TWTIA is one heck of a performance by Agnetha, and the mind does boggle at Bjorn and Benny handing this one to her to sing (it’s funny to imagine that in something like the way Jared Diamond has fun imagining an easter islander chopping down the last tree on Easter island!), but finally the song just plods a bit to my ears. Benny’s piano throughout feels a little stock/generic to me, and the whole thing just grinds away turning into a bigger and bigger belting it out piece, but without reaching the heights of the best B/way belters (think Streisand doing Happy days).

A lot of late Abba songs have something a little embarrassing about them, but then there’s also often some delicious melodic twist somewhere that just can’t be denied. ‘One of us’, ‘Super trouper’, ‘Slipping through my fingers’ are three that come to mind that work like that. TWTIA doesn’t (to my ears at least) contain one of those hidden treasures to make the game worth the candle. So, it’s more of a 7 than a 10 from me for this one.

One thing I am reminded of are the fly on the wall films that peer in on the group dynamics in a studio situation. Most of us have seen Let It Be or Some Kind Of Monster which highlight the strain put on band members as the creative process becomes a chore or some cruel and unusual torture.
TWTIA becomes an intriguing case of the latter.
It must have been the fact that Bjorn wrote the lyrics, I assumed that it had been written from his perspective, but it’s actually written for Agnetha so she has to confront her own presumably suppressed anxiety over the divorce. With this in mind, the song becomes a rather uncomfortable listen. We become voyeurs. Which also implies Bjorn’s dignity is sacrificed for some cheap point scoring off the ex-missus. But he’s behind the glass watching her squirm. Dignity is the last thing on his mind. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, right? Only Agnetha takes the ball and runs with it. “Turns their words back upon them”. She pulls it off with style. Agnetha’s greatest vocal performance? Quite possibly. Logic would suggest Bjorn would try to sabotage such a powerful vocal in the mix out of spite, but even he must have realised this would sell like hot cakes.

And so the death of a marriage becomes product. A helluva way to make a living.