Fanning the Flames: Slavery, "Misery" and Chris Cornell
Current mood: awake
Category: Music

When the musician Prince wrote the word "slave" on his face back in 1993, he made a powerfully iconic gesture. Not only was he pointing up his own frustration with his record company and the terms of their contract - he was also invoking his own country's history at a time when a civilised society felt able to buy, sell and enslave a human being. Although liberators from Abraham Lincoln to William Wilberforce put an end to slavery across much of the world, elements of serfdom still held sway within the music business. Artists felt they were being bought and sold by corporate entities, prevented from owning the master tapes of their own work while being forced to dance to the tunes of their masters.

The pressures of digital piracy and easy music downloads have since forced the record companies onto the back foot. Although much remains that is restrictive, most artists - whatever their level of success within the industry - now make much of their living by touring. Music is increasingly seen as a kind of loss leader, a free inducement to tempt in those in the market for mobile phones, designer clothing or social networking. The focus for experiencing music has moved back to perhaps where it should have been all along - the live stage. And whether you're a squillion-selling country or R&B singer, an arena rocker or a folkie slogging round the DIY circuit, that's where you'll be plying your real trade.

Sadly though, the idea of ownership of art has been harder to shift. Painters and sculptors have long had to accept the fact that the things they made could be bought and owned by others, and have had to adjust to the loss of original artefacts on which they have lavished care, passion and love. Those whose work was able to be copied and reproduced, like musicians, writers and photographers, have maybe had an easier time of it. When J.K. Rowling sold her Harry Potter books to Bloomsbury, the manuscripts stayed in her study along with the bound and published evidence of her success. And unlike yesterday's composers who needed an omnipresent orchestra to charm their imagination off of the printed page and into reality, today's musicians can rediscover their own fully-realised work at the touch of an iPod button.

But even today's artists experience one last powerful barrier to artistic freedom - and from an unexpected source. Sometimes, the most powerful constraints can be placed not by a publisher, a gallery owner or a record company, but by those who buy into and consume the artist's vision. The fans.

In his 1987 novel "Misery", Stephen King writes about an author kidnapped and imprisoned by one of his readers. Obsessed with controlling his output to suit her own requirements, Nurse Annie Wilkes shackles him to a bed and cripples his body to stop him escaping. Then she treats and cares for him, force-feeding him painkillers and saving his life only as long as he dedicates it to her vision rather than his own.

Reputedly inspired by the murder of John Lennon by crazed fan Mark Chapman, it's probably the ultimate nightmare for any artist - and a powerful metaphor for all those who become the victims of their own success. Actors who become typecast in a role or musicians who are not permitted to overstep genre expectations are primary examples of this kind of mindset as it operates in the marketplace. Although they may not be moved to direct action of the type King imagines, fans do become invested in the product they are buying, identifying with its familiar associations and demanding that it does not change. Just as confectioners get angry letters if they change the packaging of a chocolate bar or a breakfast snack, music fans rebel if a favourite artist experiments by wrapping his art up in something new.

Bob Dylan was famously called a "Judas" when he went electric in 1965; his work was developing but many felt betrayed. Arguably, some were invested more in the idea of an acoustic troubadour in the Woody Guthrie mould than they were in the man and his continuing musical vision. Alt-rock darlings Radiohead were reviled in some quarters for dropping the guitars and resorting to electroblippery on 2000's "Kid A". Even celebrated changelings like David Bowie suffer from reinvention anxiety. Despite having moved through modernism, hippie folk, heavy metal, glam, retro, art-rock and soul over a decade and a half, his multi-platinum "Let's Dance" encountered more prejudice from fans than ever before. Conceived as a deliberate mainstream breakthrough, this 1983 collaboration with Nile Rodgers of Chic outraged those who had seen him as an alternative, if changeable messiah.

That situation may be about to repeat itself with grunge icon Chris Cornell's new alliance with urban music's own King Midas, Timbaland. Cornell spent much of the 1990s making edgy art-rock with his band Soundgarden, picking up a cultish audience who bought into his dark and often depressive emotional landscape. When their hero later kicked the booze and the pills and re-emerged as a family man with a couple of cute kids and new line in sensuous love songs, many of his older fans experienced abandonment issues. Sounding reminiscent of Stephen King's anti-heroine, they wrote blogs and forum posts urging him back into the emotional shackles from which he had escaped.

For many of them, his Bowie-like aspirations towards mainstream success with forthcoming album "Scream" are the very last straw. The grunge voodoo dolly they bought back in '94 has changed and developed, as real living things will, and the changes have robbed some fans of their original emotional investment. And that's where the flames kick in. For the last few weeks, music forums have been full of the kind of seething rage and recrimination Bowie was lucky enough to escape in those far-off, pre-internet days. Fans furious at the Timbaland collaboration have demanded statements, explanations, even apologies: many have insisted, without irony, that Cornell has become an industry puppet whilst volunteering to hold the strings themselves.

Plainly, an "alternative" artist owes it to his fans not to explore too many alternatives. One fan even declared that Cornell would be better off dead than left alive to dishonour his own myth. Or, perhaps, merely crippled and shackled by the pre-existent expectations of his audience? Maybe Stephen King's gothic fantasy wasn't quite so paranoid after all. Or perhaps the concept of slavery has as much currency in 21st century art as it ever did in 19th century commerce.

In the end, those writers, musicians or thinkers who seek to explore and experiment will stand or fall by the extent of their own courage. Some may be cowed, dropping wearily back into the shackles of Nurse Wilkes and her real-life counterparts, grateful for her deadly care. Others will persist, knowing that keeping their nerve and their will intact is the way through and the way forward. No-one now thinks of Bob Dylan as merely an acoustic troubadour. Radiohead's reviled "Kid A" is now an integral part of their oeuvre. Hopefully, Cornell's new album will follow the same healthy trajectory.

Such eruptions will continue as long as people feel. Because the need for slaves, or enemies, or scapegoats is in the end driven by our own fears, jealousies and longings. We forbid artists to change because we are jealous of their freedom: we have to go to work every day and allow someone to tell us what to do, so we resentfully try to bind those who write our books and make our music with the very same ties. What we forget is that it was their very freedom that drew us to them in the first place; their liberty to express whatever they wanted, whoever they were, whatever they felt. Their ability to move, redeem or simply or communicate with complete strangers, anyway, anyhow, anywhere they choose. The ultimate irony is that in enslaving them to our own selfish needs, we deny our own most basic link with the art they make.

Currently reading : Black Dogs: A Novel By Ian McEwan Release date: 1998-12-29

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Songs For A Boy Who Drowned
Current mood: indescribable
Category: Music

Eleven years today since Jeff Buckley died. I can't believe it's that long. I used to drop flowers into water every year on this day, streams, rivers, the sea, wherever I was...I figured that all water in the world joins up somewhere in the end. And then one year I was in Spain on 29th and I couldn't, and after that the continuum seemed broken. But a long time ago I wrote a set of poems for Jeff - called Selkie - and in 2006 they were published in a poetry magazine called "Northwords Now". Anyway, now they're being set to music and will be performed here in this corner of Scotland as a choral work sometime later this year.

So....maybe the line isn't broken after all. Sleep well, Jeff.

Currently listening : Live at L'Olympia By Jeff Buckley Release date: 2001-08-14

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"I don't mean to be rude, but …"
Current mood: blustery
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

....maybe it's time for Simon Cowell to power down the motormouth and stop pretending he knows anything about public tastes.

On Wednesday night in LA (results show screened Friday on ITV2 in the UK), Cowell had to eat humble pie after backing the wrong horse in the final of American Idol. He'd dubbed David Archeluta's overwrought rendering of John Lennon's Imagine "a knockout", but the great American public didn't agree. They chose the workmanlike David Cook, who'd wooed them throughout the contest with a series of famous covers-of-covers. Offering just the right amount of reassuring brand awareness with a frisson of borrowed imagination and carefully toned-down rock "attitude", Cook walked away with the crown on a 12 million vote margin.

He may be a successful businessman, but Cowell – a former A&R man and longtime talent show judge - has become famous for his extreme reactions to artists. Despite having inflicted Westlife, Robson & Jerome and Teletubbies novelty songs on the world, he sees nothing wrong with calling a contestant a bushbaby or reducing a singer to tears.

Or with failing to give creative credit where it's due. Cook made some canny song choices, xeroxing Doxology's makeover of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby and then  Chris Cornell's reinvention of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean as a dark, bluesy ballad. When the American Idol judges mistakenly gave Cook the credit for Cornell's arrangement, Cowell said "David, that was brave. It could have either been insane or amazing and I've got to tell you, it was amazing." Unsurprisingly, fans of the cover's originator Chris Cornell were up in arms.

What did Cowell do when the error was pointed out? Apologise? Nope. He got testy. "I know where he got the arrangement of the song from, but that doesn't really matter," he insisted to Entertainment Weekly. Cowell plainly had his take on it all worked out, and wasn't gonna be swayed by the facts.

Contrast that performance with Cowell's reaction a few weeks earlier to contestant Jason Castro's version of the late Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. "The Jeff Buckley version of that song is one of my favourite songs of all time", he gushed – despite the fact that even Jeff admitted that he'd lifted the arrangement from Welsh maverick John Cale. Funny, Buckley's recording didn't appear in Cowell's choice of Desert Island Discs for the BBC back in 2006 – that was full of MOR ballads by Bobby Darin and Herb Alpert.

Cowell's comments are looking less and less like genuine insight and more like attention-seeking. He may have made a career out of being the man you love to hate – but his pantomime villain act is beginning to pall. Soon, no-one will even bother to hiss.

Audience figures for American Idol are in decline both in the US and here in the UK, and in August last year Cowell told UK tabloid The Daily Mirror that he'd step down from the show after completing his last three contracted seasons. "The public will be sick to death of me," he admitted. "It will be time to go."

Carry on like this, Simon, and that day may come sooner than you think.

Currently reading : Nureyev: The Life By Julie Kavanagh Release date: 2007-10-02

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What do you do when you’re branded?
Current mood: groggy

Branded!

Marked with a coward's shame.

What do you do when you're branded,

Will you fight for your name?

Currently reading : Letters of Ted Hughes By Ted Hughes Release date: 01 November, 2007

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Home is where the heart is
Current mood: savage
Category: Blogging

I've always felt vaguely displaced. Despite never having been homeless, I've never really felt I really came from anywhere.

There was the faceless London suburb I grew up in - a wasteland of lamp-posts and gutters, tarmac streets and forlorn scraps of woodland on the edge of what had once been green. Endless vistas of interwar "semis" with cars tucked away in back-lane garages, railway embankments where ox-eye daisies danced through the chain-net fences.

Then there was Norfolk, where I escaped to university and afterwards to dream in a haunted farmhouse, plotting escape from a marriage that was suffocating me even as the vast skies mocked me with freedom.

There was London, where my parents were born,where I slaved in offices like killing machines, got sacked for being "too ginger" or for writing poetry when there was no work to do. Once, even because my boss discovered I played in a band. In London there was the river, one or two bridges, alleyways and churches...sometimes, a night in a theatre or a concert hall. But that was all.

And there was Cambridge, where I looked after choirboys and tried to fit in to something which was too old and set in its ways. I had two babies with my new husband and tried to be a good middle-class mother, but the other women knew I wasn't a true believer.

None of these places were home.

In 1999 I moved to Scotland because it gave me a sense of exile from everything I'd learned to loathe. To an edge where land and sea met under the mountains and the changing skies and I could breathe without the world breathing down my neck. My half-Scottish children soaked up the speech of their fathers, said "aye" and learned Gaelic at school. I grew vegetables and walked for hours. I wrote. I left only when I had to. I loved the place and everything in it, but something still wasn't quite right. I'd never felt English, my blood being a migrant mixture; I still didn't feel Scottish as my husband and sons did.

And then, in the last few days, two things happened.

I lost a major English freelance client. I'd worked for them as a weekend writer/editor for years, producing international business news on the tourist/hospitality industry. Suddenly - and what a shock it must have been to them after so many years - they realised I couldn't do the job from Scotland. They needed a Londoner, because of course only Londoners can report on the things that Londoners want to read. Scotland, of course, doesn't have a tourist industry. So they put their foot down, and I lost £500 a month. Just like that, and just before Christmas. God bless us every one.

The other thing was perhaps a random incident, perhaps just the accidental coincidence of a Scottish flag, an American musician and a Melbourne stage. But even before I got my marching orders from corporate London, the sight of Chris Cornell wrapped in the Saltire suddenly meant the world to me. It made my heart swell with pride and love and it made me feel that maybe I'd been getting steadily more Scottish all this time, without anyone (least of all myself) ever really noticing. That was my flag. This was my country. And looking at those pictures, I felt that I was looking at a magical defence against all the bullshittery of the world. And I felt that finally, somehow, inside my head, I had come home.






With thanks to Soph and Ami for their photos. And I'll add this one of mine...

Currently listening : White Chalk By PJ Harvey Release date: 02 October, 2007

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Clubbing a few more...(part 2)
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Writing and Poetry

Just a few more things of mine that have got into print recently.

Here's my interview with Chris Cornell guitarist Yogi in Subba-Cultcha - you can also find it on my Chris Cornell Fan Page.

A couple of interesting album reviews - punk survivor Siouxsie's Mantarayand cello-wielding Finnish band Apocalyptica's Worlds Collide.

On the classical side of things, here's a review of film composer Helen Jane Long's new album Porcelain, and a profile of acclaimed British opera singer Kate Royal - both from HMV's customer magazine HMV Choice.

Currently listening : Mantaray By Siouxsie Release date: 02 October, 2007

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You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Jack London said that.

Here are a few of the things I've clubbed down in recent weeks, with varying levels of success:

Reviews of two shows on the recent European leg of Chris Cornell's tour - here's The Roundhouse, London - and here's The Academy, Birmingham.

Here's an interview with Cally Calloman, who runs the estate of late singer-songwriter Nick Drake. He's promoting the release of new retrospective Family Tree, but he was an interesting guy in his own right - an ex-colleague of Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell and a talented designer and band manager.

Finally, here's a light-hearted piece on songs about telephones from UK print magazine The Libertine:





More to follow.....

Currently reading : The Thames: Sacred River By Peter Ackroyd Release date: 23 October, 2007

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Death in the afternoon
Current mood: blank
Category: Life

Two small deaths. Neither of any great account in the world, really, but worth recording.

On Wednesday last, on of our cocks killed the other. Flyboy was a splendid Welsummer purebred - multicoloured, proud, slightly mad. My son Callum had hand-raised him after his mother tried to peck him to death soon after he hatched. He'd always been a little strange - he would pursue you in the mornings and try to bite your bootlaces - and after the death of his dad had for a while co-ruled the roost with his half-brother, a Rhode Island Red hybrid the boys had named Pope Gregory The Ninth. (Don't ask).

Then, one day sexual maturity had kicked in sufficiently to make them fight, and we'd separated them just in time and kept them in separate areas. On Wednesday Flyboy muscled out of his run and some time in the afternoon while we weren't even there to witness it, the two of them met and fought to the death. We found Flyboy stiff and dead on the ground, his bright button eyes closed and his plumage matted with mud and blood. Pope Gregory the Ninth was crowing fit to bust on top of the woodpile. RIP Flyboy. To the victor, the spoils.



The other death was even smaller: a small, everyday friendship between one family and another, barely begun, suddenly withdrawn without notice or explanation. There was no fight, no blood, no crowing. I do not know the reason and when I ask I receive no reply. Rural villages can harbour strange currents.

Currently reading : Be Near Me By Andrew O’Hagan Release date: 04 June, 2007

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Heroes and Villains
Current mood: busy
Category: Writing and Poetry

Last month I did what people say you should never, ever, do.  I met one of my heroes. 

Chris Cornell - his voice, his music, his lyrics, everything - have been an inspiration and a joy to me since I discovered him in the mid-90s.  I've been what you might call active in the fanbase for some time - working as part of Audioslave's fan club team and, more recently running A Chris Cornell Fan Page.  And as I mentioned in my last entry, through a combination of great good luck and kindness, I found myself invited to interview him before his show last month in London. 

He was honest, open, courteous and genuine - pretty much the man I'd always felt he was.  The conversation covered a range of topics from his music and lyrics to his recovery from addiction and  his sense of himself as an artist and a performer - and although he must have been busy he repelled numerous attempted interruptions at the door so we could finish the interview undisturbed.  His demeanour and attitude were matched in the people around him - his wife, his band, his employees were all bright, funny, friendly and generous to a fault.

That night at London's Astoria I also blundered into a hero from my childhood, the magical (in every sense) Jimmy Page...now white-haired and tiny, a Gandalf-The-Grey disguise for some of the most dangerous musical power I ever watched being unleashed on a stage.  As I was talking to Chris Cornell, Jimmy Page was waiting for him outside the door. Even a month later I am having trouble filing that fact away in my head. 

I've no idea how unusual an experience mine was: I've heard horror stories from people who've found out their heroes were fools or worse, who wished they'd left their  illusions intact. 

On the basis of what happened to me, though - I'd say go for it.  Trust your instincts. What you feel about someone in your gut is more likely than not to be the truth.

You can read the full and unabridged text of the interview here.

And just to prove that I wasn't dreaming, here's a picture of me with Chris, taken by his wife Vicky after the show.




As for villains - well, we're being bombarded with news media right now about the last week of the reign of King Tony.  If I didn't think what's to follow might very well be worse, I'd be dancing in the streets, or at least I would if there were any streets where I live. 

The best comment of all on his so-called legacy?  This woodcut from Stanley Donwood, who does Radiohead's cover art.  It's subtitled: RIP Dr David Kelly.  And it says all there is to say about the triumph of lies, spin and disinformation in the world.  Sometimes it kills.  And the responsibility lies - good word, that - with Tony Blair.

Currently listening : Hey Eugene! By Pink Martini Release date: 15 May, 2007

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New company, bad company...
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Writing and Poetry

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.   - Gaston Bachelard

Here is some of the wandering my words have been doing over the last month or so.

A song:  Can You Cry Under Water? Hear it here.  It was commissioned by AQA, a research service which answers questions that people text in on their mobile phones. Each of the ten bands who feature on this promotional album wrote a song around a popular or interesting question received by AQA....we turned ours into a sort of sideways look at some of what global warming might do. Lyrics and backing vocals by me, music by my husband Alasdair.

Next......an interview with Chris Cornell.  More of that later. But I also met another kind and graceful man the same night - producer Steve Lillywhite, who also agreed to give me an interview.  A week or two later I phoned him at home in New York and had a friendly chat about the making of Chris's album, Carry On.  Read all about that here.

I've also had the chance recently to review some terrific music.  Wunderkind Martin Grech's dream of isolation, The March Of The Lonely....and I got a chance to interview him, too.   Car mechanic-turned-tenor Alfie Boe's sublime set of songs, Onward. And on a similar theme,  I suppose...Chris Cornell's new statement of intent, the diverse and lovely Carry On.

Next?  A fairy tale about a serious little boy and a box and a magic prince.  A haunted tale of bog bodies and forgotten embraces.  A story about a lost boy and a halfway house which comes and goes, like the girl who lives in it.  A song about size and scale and what makes a witch. Because....it really is time I caught up with some of these wandering words.

Clare xx

Currently listening : Carry On By Chris Cornell Release date: 05 June, 2007

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