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IDLE WORSHIP
HOW POP EMPOWERS THE WEAK, REWARDS THE FAITHFUL, AND SUCCOURS THE NEEDY
Edited by
Chris Roberts
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Originally published in paperback 1994
Copyright in introduction, compilation and editorial matter
Copyright © Chris Roberts 1994
Chris Roberts asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work
‘You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights’ © Bono 1994
‘Sparing the Rod’ © Nick Hornby 1994
‘Led Zeppelin and the Pixies’ © Martin Millar 1994
‘Vedder as Merton: 2001’ © Stephen J. Malkmus 1994
‘Suede or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hype’ © Caitlin Moran 1994
‘In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader’ © Thurston Moore 1994
(All songs © Sonic Tooth adm. by Zomba Songs inc BMI)
‘Stations of the Crass’ © Robert Newman 1994
‘Walking Around Being a Woman’ © Kristin Hersh 1994
‘Tonight, Your Hair Is Beautiful’ © Chris Roberts 1994
‘Musical Influence in Great Britain on Big-Head Here’ © Mark E. Smith 1994
‘Banana Republic: Memories of a Suburban Irish Childhood’ © Joseph O’Connor 1994
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006382669
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008191641
Version: 2016-05-23
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
‘You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights’ Bono
‘Sparing the Rod’ Nick Hornby
‘Led Zeppelin and the Pixies’ Martin Millar
‘Vedder as Merton: 2001’ Stephen J. Malkmus
‘Suede or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hype’ Caitlin Moran
‘In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader’ Thurston Moore
‘Stations of the Crass’ Robert Newman
‘Walking Around Being a Woman’ Kristin Hersh
‘Tonight, Your Hair Is Beautiful’ Chris Roberts
‘Musical Influence in Great Britain on Big-Head Here’ Mark E. Smith
‘Banana Republic: Memories of a Suburban Irish Childhood’ Joseph O’Connor
About the Author
About the Publisher
Introduction
SO I’VE JUST GOT UP THE STAIRS with my piping hot fish and chips and the phone’s ringing. I put my fish and chips on top of the stove, which hasn’t worked for eighteen months, and think: this better be quick. ‘Yeah?’ I snarl with all the hostility I can muster.
‘Hello, Chris?’
‘Yeah.’ (A sort of three-quarters snarl, jockeying for position.)
‘Hi, it’s Bono here.’
I don’t say: Bono Who?? Neither do I ask him to ring back after I’ve had my chips. I switch into what I consider to be sweetness-and-light mode and thank him for phoning, and we talk about Frank Sinatra. ‘Have you got five minutes? I’ll read it out to you,’ he says. Oh, I think so. The chips can go hang. Because no matter how jaded you are by working around the music industry, or for that matter how jaded you are by Life Itself (big themes! already! yeah!), when one of the world’s most famous rock stars phones you up it is still, frankly, quite exciting. It is more exciting than chips, say.
The absurdity of the situation does not escape me; neither does the thought that he’d be perfectly within his rights to have a moan about one or two of my U2 reviews over the years. Yet he seems to want to talk about his enthusiasm for Frank, and stress the point that however many fans you’re perceived to have acquired yourself, you don’t stop being one, it doesn’t go away, you can still be starstruck.
While some of the contributors to Idle Worship remain rather gloriously starstruck, others remember when they were, with affection or disbelief. Some admit to hideous embarrassment, while others eulogise the inspiration and motivation drawn from leading pop lights. Others go off on berserk ‘irrelevant’ tangents, which is fine by me.
Some time ago I was approached by Philip Gwyn Jones at HarperCollins with a view to compiling a book that ran against the grain of ‘hagiographical, pompous, inane’ writing on modern music. I was very impressed by the word ‘hagiographical’, and, after looking it up, and demanding a rider of Last-Days-of-Pompeii proportions, set myself to the task. This involved innumerable letters and phone calls and becoming The Nag from Hell. Then saying, ‘Yeah, whatever. Sounds good to me,’ whenever a writer or musician got out of bed long enough to call me back and proffer a synopsis. We wanted an eclectic mix of story-tellers and I think I can safely say the diversity herein, by accident or design, is both luscious and arousing. Many PRs were very helpful over the course of this book’s protracted birth. And some were entirely bloody useless. Thanks to the former.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the more established ‘writers’ who delivered the goods most promptly, increasing the literary merit of my letterbox before I could say Smokey Robinson. I am baffled as to how they found the time when they should be doing proper joiny-up writing, but hey, in the world of rock’n’roll there’s no sleep till the typewriter ribbon gets all snaggled. Dreams of Sex and Stagediving author Martin Millar compares and contrasts his experiences attending noisy hairy gigs seventeen years apart, discovering in the process that the Pixies pummel the sweat glands as ferociously as Led Zeppelin fired the awe. After sending me this he rang to see if I could get him on the guest list for Smashing Pumpkins, which proves his reborn zeal knows no bounds. Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby’s secret admiration for the very great Rod Stewart is long overdue for exposure, especially since he once made a veiled reference in a popular magazine to my owning a Genesis album. Still, no-one twigged except me. Any jibes about the Johnny Cougar debut album will however be matched by a ruthless description of the neo-Rod haircut sported in his days as midfield dynamo for the college Third XI. Ah, the joys of the old school tie set-up. When I first discussed this book with Desperadoes author Joseph O’Connor, whose sister is no stranger to the slings and arrows of pop fortune, I was myopic enough to mumble, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if Bob Geldof’s very topical.’ Reading his masterful evocation of a troubled Dublin childhood and adolescence amid a traumatised family I can only humbly admire his sangfroid.
Then strange things arrived from the land that God is asked to bless rather frequently. The golden words of Stephen J. Malkmus, of the intriguing Californian band Pavement, narrate a futuristic fantasy wherein Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is a visionary monk, while lampooning most living artists in any medium. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth gives us a thoroughly uplifting tale of sex and drugs (and possibly some rock’n’roll too) in New York City. ‘It’s fiction,’ he informs me. ‘I suspect you may have to censor the “dirty” language by using asterisks but hopefully this won’t be the case.’ The first time I read this frank take on Breakfast at Tiffany’s filtered through Charles Bukowski, I thought: shame we can’t use it. Then good taste prevailed. The lyrics that close the story come from the Experimental Jet-Set, Trash and No Star LP. Kristin Hersh of Boston’s Throwing Muses recalls how a chronic fear of her father’s Patti Smith records gave way to a fascination with armpits and fingers …
Caitlin Moran has been described as ‘precocious’ more times than she’s been described as ‘an orgasm octopus’, allegedly. The presenter of Channel 4’s ‘Naked City’ testifies to the quivering, jutting, throbbing joys of Suede, as so many young people today are wont to do. What with comedy being the new rock’n’roll (at least at the time of writing, 11.56pm), Robert Newman’s teenage recollection of a chance meeting with the mothers of proto-punk band Crass works on about nine levels, by my reckoning. Cosmic link: the first words Robert ever spoke to me (come to think of it, the only words he’s ever spoken to me) were: ‘You get mentioned in Fever Pitch, don’t you?’ See, it’s all coming together. Which is exactly what I thought when the final part of a serial rant from the inimitable Mark E. Smith of evergreen Manchester mavericks The Fall reached my filing cabinet, the aforementioned dysfunctional stove.
The side-splitting pun of the title Idle Worship attempts to raise the question of whether the growing pains involved in venerating rock gods and goddesses are worth the bother. Should we adore or abhor? Is what we see in our early pop role models a mirror, a mirage or a miracle? There is a war between romance and cynicism in this book, between faith and disillusionment. So it’s just like Tender Is the Night really, okay?
It may have been André Breton who wrote ‘Beauty will be convulsive or not at all,’ but it was Patti Smith who put it on an album cover. It may have been Blondie who sang ‘Dreaming is free,’ but it was me who decided it would be a resonant end to this introduction. Go on, inspire yourself.
CHRIS ROBERTS, April 1994
You Gotta Have Lost a Couple o’ Fights
Bono
im still starstruck, it doesn’t wear off … frank sinatra gave me a solid gold cartier pasha watch with sapphires and an inscription … to bono with thanks FRANCIS A SINATRA … WATER RESISTANT … im not gonna get over this … Frank likes me … hell ive hung out with him, drunk at his bar, eaten at his table, watched a movie at his place … in his own screening room … dig that asshole … i usually drink j.d. straight up without ice, its a tennessee sipping whiskey, so why did i go and blow it by ordering ginger ale … ‘jack and ginger’ a girls drink’ … FRANK looks at me and my two earrings and for the first time in my life i felt effeminate … i drank quickly to compensate and worse i mixed my drinks … over dinner (mexican not italian) we drank tequila in huge fishbowl glasses, never drink anything bigger than your head i thought as FRANK pushed his nose up against the glass like it was a hall of mirrors …
later asleep on the snowwhite of FRANK and BARBARA’S screening room sofa i had a real fright i woke up to wetness, a damp sensation between my legs … hmm … dreams of dean martin gave way to panic … first thought: ive pissed myself. second: don’t tell anyone. third: dont move theyll see the stain … yellow on white. fourth: make a plan … and so i sat in my shame for twenty minutes, mute, waiting for the movie to end, wondering as to how i would explain this … this … irish defeat to italy … this sign that what was once just verbal incontinence has matured … and grown to conclusive proof that i didn’t belong there/here. i am a jerk. i am a tourist, i am back in my cot age 4 … before i knew how to fail – mama – ive pissed myself … again.
well i hadnt, id spilt my drink. i was drunk, high on him, a shrinking shadow boxing dwarf following in his footsteps … badly … STARSTRUCK … “what now my love? now that its over?” i went back to the hotel … (turn left on frank sinatra boulevard), i would never drink in the company of the great man again … i would never be asked to. wrong, twice.
NOTE: IF YOU’RE GONNA DROP ONE, DROP A BIG ONE … A NAME … A NAME TO HANG ON YOUR WALL. EPISODE NO. 1. december 93, u2 had just got back from TOKYO, the capitol of zoo tv, it was all over … i felt wonderful. i felt like shit. my TV had been turned off … it was christmas … there was a parcel from FRANK a large parcel … i opened it … a PAINTING, a painting by FRANK SINATRA and a note … ‘you mentioned the jazz vibes in this piece well its called JAZZ and we’d like you to have it. yours Frank and Barbara’ this is getting silly … there is a SANTA CLAUS and hes Italian … (opera, Fellini, food, wine, Positano, the sexy end of religion, football, now grace and generosity?) … heroes are supposed to let you down … but here i am blown away by this 78 year-old saloon singer and his royal family … starstruck … a skunk on the outskirts of las vegas with my very own Frank Sinatra, last seen in his very own living room, on the edge of his very own desert, in palm springs … THE PAINTING, a luminous piece as complex as its title, as its author … circles closed yet interlocking, like glass stains on a beermat … circles with the diameter of a horn … Miles Davis … Buddy Rich … rhythm … the desert … theyre all in there … on yellow … to keep it mad … fly yourself to the moon!
EPISODE NO. 2 MARCH 1. im not an alcoholic im irish, i dont drink to get drunk do i? i drink because i like the taste dont i? so why am i drunk? im drunk because Frank has just fixed me another stiffy thats why! jack daniels this time straight up and in a pint glass.
its the ‘Grammys’ and ive been asked to present the boss of bosses with a life achievement award … a speech … i know im not match fit but of course i say yes.
and now im in NEW YORK CITY and so nervous i am deaf and cannot speak … two choices; BLUFF or concentrate on the job at hand, i do both and end up with a rambling wordy tribute with no fullstops or commas … that might explain how i felt about the man who invented pop music … and puncture the schmaltz … a little …
anyway we’re in FS’S dressing room (the manager’s suite) where the small talk is never small, im talking to Susan Reynolds, Franks p. a. and patron saint and Ali (my wife and mine). Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) asks Frank about the pin on his lapel … ‘its the legion of honor … highest civilian award … given by the president …’ which one? enquires paul … ‘oh i dont know … some old guy … i think it was lincoln …’ cool … do you have to be american to get one? i think to myself … already feeling my legs go …
next up the award for best alternative album u2 are nominated for this … better get ready … whats the point … we’re never gonna win that … that belongs to the smashing pumpkins one of the few noisy bands to transcend the turgid old-fashioned format theyve chosen … you have to go downstairs … you might win … whats there to be embarrassed about … youve been no. 1 on alternative/college radio for 10 years now … its the most important thing to you … tell them … its your job to use your position … abuse it even … tell them … you’re not mainstream you’re slipstream … tell them … you’ll make it more fun … that you’ll try to be better than the last lot … tell them you’re mainstream but not of it and that you’ll do your best to fuck it up … TELL THEM YOU KNOW FRANK … tell the children … so i did.
the speechifying below wasn’t heard in the uk so loud is the word fuck over there but Frank heard it and Frank liked it … so here it is:
Frank never did like rock ’n’ roll. And he’s not crazy about guys wearing earrings either, but hey, he doesn’t hold it against me and anyway, the feeling’s not mutual.
rock ’n’ roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank Sinatra has got what we want … swagger and ATTITUDE … HE’S BIG ON ATTITUDE … SERIOUS ATTITUDE … BAD ATTITUDE … Franks THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BAD.
rock ’n’ roll plays at being tough, but this guy’s … well, he’s the boss of bosses. The Man. The Big Bang of Pop. I’M NOT GONNA MESS WITH HIM; ARE YOU?
who is this guy that every swingin city in america wants to claim as their own?. this painter who lives in the desert, this first-rate first-take actor, this singer who makes other men poets, boxing clever with every word, talking like america … Fast … straight up … in headlines … comin’ thru with the big schtick, the aside, the quiet compliment … good cop/bad cop in the same breath.
you know his story because it’s your story … Frank walks like America, COCKSURE …
Its 1945 … the us cavalry are trying to get out of Europe, but they never really do. They are part of another kind of invasion, A.F.R. American Forces Radio, broadcasting a music that will curl the stiff upper lip of England and the rest of the world paving the way for Rock N’ Roll – with jazz, Duke Ellington, the big band, Tommy Dorsey, and right out in front, FRANK SINATRA … his voice tight as a fist, opening at the end of a bar not on the beat, over it … playing with it, splitting it … like a jazz man, like miles davis … turning on the right phrase in the right song, which is where he lives, where he lets go, and where he reveals himself … his songs are his home and he lets you in … but you know … to sing like that, you gotta have lost a couple o’ fights … to know tenderness and romance like that … you have to have had your heart broken.
people say Frank hasn’t talked to the press … they want to know how he is, whats on his mind … but y’know, Sinatra is out there more nights than most punk bands … selling his story through the songs, telling and articulate in the choice of those songs … private thoughts on a public address system … generous … this is the conundrum of frank sinatra left and right brain hardly talking, boxer and painter, actor and singer, lover and father … troubleshooter and troublemaker, bandman and loner, the champ who would rather show you his scars than his medals … he may be putty in barbaras hands but I’m not gonna mess with him are you?
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ABE YOU READY TO WELCOME A MAN HEAVIER THAN THE EMPIRE STATE, MORE CONNECTED THAN THE TWIN TOWERS, AS RECOGNISABLE AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY … and LIVING PROOF THAT GOD IS A CATHOLIC … will you welcome THE KING OF NEW YORK CITY … FRANCIS … ALBERT … SINATRA.
Sparing the Rod
Nick Hornby
YOU WANT CLASSIC EARLY SEVENTIES ALBUMS, I got ’em. The entire Al Green back catalogue, Let’s Get It On, There’s No Place Like America Today, Grievous Angel, After the Goldrush, Blood on the Tracks . . . Unimpeachable classics, every one, and while others may have to bury their Cat Stevens and James Taylor albums away when fashionable friends come round to borrow a cup of balsamic vinegar, I have nothing to hide. Those pre-Ramones years were difficult to pick your way through, but I seem to have managed it quite brilliantly. If there was a smarter, more forward-thinking, more retrospectively modish young teenager around than me between 1971 and 1975, I have yet to meet him.
Sadly, however, I am that commonplace phenomenon, Reinvented Man. Most of the Al Green back catalogue I bought in the early Eighties, the Gram Parsons at university in the late seventies, the Curtis Mayfield from a car boot sale a few years ago, and so on. I didn’t buy any of them at the time of their release. I thought that soul music was for wide-boys, country was for old people, and Bob Dylan was for girls.
These are a few of the albums I bought back then: McCartney; Led Zeppelin II; a Humble Pie live double, the title of which escapes me; the Curved Air record which had painting on the vinyl; Anyway by Family; Deep Purple in Rock; Tubular Bells; a Van der Graaf Generator album, purchased after I read a review in Melody Maker, and if I ever meet the journalist who wrote the review he can either refund me my £2.19 or get biffed on the nose; Rory Gallagher; and Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart.
Every Picture Tells a Story is the only one of those that I still possess. All of the others have disappeared, stolen or flogged (although the Van der Graaf Generator album was certainly not stolen, and I can’t imagine who would have bought it off me); some of them were flogged because I needed the money, others because they had absolutely no place in the ineffably cool collection I was in the process of assembling.
So how come Rod Stewart has survived? ‘Now there was someone who never let you down,’ a friend remarked sardonically when I owned up to my tragic affliction, and he has a point. Rod’s track record is not without its blemishes. There was Britt Ekland, for a start. And tartan. And ‘Ole Ola’, his 1978 Scotland World Cup Song (the chorus – and I may be misquoting, but not by much – went something like ‘Ole Ole, Ole Ola/We’re going to bring the World Cup back from over thar’). And ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’. And the Faces live album Overture and Beginners, which the NME commemorated with its annual ‘Rod Stewart and the Faces Thanks-For-the-Live-Album-Lads-But-You-Really-Shouldn’t-Have-Bothered Award’. (The record ends with Stewart thanking the audience ‘for your time … and your money’, and you really have to hear the lascivious drawl in his voice to appreciate the full horror of the moment.) And the haircut. And his obsession with LA. And the champagne and straw boaters on album sleeves. And ‘Sailing’, which made a pretty decent football song but an interminable single. And several other blonde women who weren’t Britt Ekland but might as well have been. And the couplet from the song ‘Italian Girls’ (on Never a Dull Moment) that goes: ‘I was feeling kind of silly/When I stepped in some Caerphilly’. And the cover of the record Ooh La La, a pathetically cheap arrangement which allowed the purchaser to jiggle a tab and make a man’s eyes go up and down in a supposedly hilarious manner. And the record itself, arguably the worst collection of songs ever released by anybody. And the all-purpose session-musician sub-Stones rock’n’roll plod-raunch that can be found on any of his post-Faces work, ‘Hot Legs’ being the template. And the Faces live shows, which were apt to end with the entire band lying in a drunken heap on the stage. He’s hardly put a foot wrong, really.
I bought Every Picture Tells a Story in the Virgin shop in Oxford Street: there was only one Virgin shop then, situated right where the Megastore is now, except you had to walk through a shoe shop (or rather, a cowboy boot shop) and up some stairs to get to it. I lived thirty miles from Oxford Street, but this was still my nearest discount record store, and though the train fare cancelled out any savings I made, it was much more fun buying records there. There were headphones, and beanbags (although the beanbags were frequently occupied by dossers) and bootlegs, which I had never seen before.
And in any case, the length of the journey lent a proper gravity to the serious business of record-buying. Now, I indulge myself whenever I feel like it, even in times when I have had no money at all; there are occasions over the last fifteen or so years when I have come back home yet again with a square-shaped carrier bag and felt sick with guilt and over-consumption. (‘I haven’t even played side two of the album I bought after work on Tuesday, so how come I’ve bought another one today?’) In those Virgin days, I thought and read and talked for weeks before committing myself to something I would have to live with and listen to for months. (Mistakes, like the Van der Graaf Generator record, had to be paid for by the self-flagellation of listening to the wretched thing and kidding myself that I liked it.)