Michael Chabon Interview

Michael Chabon: 'Two years into writing this I felt like it was an utter flop'

The Pulitzer prize winner on the struggle to write his latest novel and how his wife persuaded him to persevere

Killian Fox

The Observer

Sunday 9 September 2012

Michael Chabon, 49, is the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys, which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas. His eighth novel, Telegraph Avenue, centres on a used-record shop in Berkeley, California, where Chabon lives with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, and their four children.

How long did you spend working on this book?
Actually writing the novel took almost five years, but the original idea came much earlier. It began as a proposed pilot for a television series for the PNT network, around 1999. Nothing ever came of it so I put it aside. But because the story was set in my neighbourhood, I kept coming into contact with all kinds of things I wanted to put into it.

So what happened?
I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop. I wanted to put it aside but my wife talked me out of it. She said she cared too much about these characters and wanted to find out what became of them. I had to start all over again, keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element with the exception of the birth that goes wrong – that was the only significant element that I preserved.

You've had this experience before…
It happens with every book now, I hate to say. I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing Kavalier & Clay, I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I'm obviously just not very good at this.

But you persevere.
Usually thanks to my wife: her role is often to lash me to the tiller and keep me there long enough to get through the bad patches. The lesson I've learned is that you do come out the other side with a clear understanding of what you're doing.

Did you do much research for this book, given that it was set in your neighbourhood?
In some ways, this was the most easily researched book I've ever done. Just walking out my front door, I was doing research. My other books, with the exception of Wonder Boys, have been set in the past or in some alternate version of the present. Even something like how do you communicate with another person had to be researched. That whole element of it was taken off the table here. The research that I did need to do was primarily centred around music… I say "research": what I was really doing was buying records and listening to them.

What's your average writing day?
I work at night, starting at around 10 o'clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime. It's always been my tendency: working at night just seems quieter and I can focus more easily and the words tends to come more readily.

What's the last really great book you've read?
I recently discovered the Edward St Aubyn novels, the series of five books beginning with Never Mind. I sat down and read them as one book and I loved them so much. It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.

Do you have to be careful with what you read in case you fall under another author's influence?
No, I don't worry about that too much. If, say, I spend the whole day reading Moby-Dick and then sit down and start writing, I might notice little echoes of Ishmael creeping in here or there. It's not like: "Oh my God, there are weeds growing in my garden. I must eradicate them." If a little blossom of Melvillean prose pops out in the middle of one of my paragraphs, I like to stand back and admire it.

Do ideas come easily to you?
Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.

You've done some work for Hollywood over the years, most recently as a writer on the movie John Carter. Does that kind of work suit you?
I'm taking a break from screenwriting right now, although I'm developing a TV project with my wife for HBO, a second world war spy series called Hobgoblins, about a bunch of magicians and con-artists who are hired by British intelligence to perpetrate cons and scams against the Germans. We completed the pilot script for that and it was liked enough for them to request a second script, so that's what we're working on now. That's been a very positive experience. I was disappointed by what happened with John Carter. I thought we'd made a good movie and it didn't get treated at all fairly – it had already been condemned to death before it had been seen by anyone. I think the audiences who did see it generally really enjoyed it.

Any more novels brewing?
I definitely have some possible novel ideas and one that I've already started tinkering with. They always seem like they're going to be very slim, elegant novels when the idea first sells itself to me, but that almost never turns out to be the case.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/09/michael-chabon-telegraph-avenue-interview?INTCMP=SRCH

Last night's songs

At the Waggon & Horses, York included: -

Too Far Gone
You Better Move On
Colours
My Hometown
Tennessee Flattop Box
Act Naturally
Human Highway
Wild Horses
Me and Bobby McGee
Heart Of Gold
Baby What You Want Me To Do
Falling
Sweet Virginia
Mind Your Own Business
I'll See You In My Dreams
Till There Was You
Here, There & Everywhere

Plus some original folk songs from local poet & songwriter Tony Mccormack.

Shock of the night - Da consumed NO alcohol - only orange juice!! That's because he drove for once.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #169

Donald Fagen - I'm Not The Same Without You

Listen to it here: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/song-premiere-donald-fagen-im-not-the-same-without-you-20120917

Available now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-The-Same-Without-You/dp/B0095RJAC8

Aahhh here it is:

Tintin meets H. P. Lovecraft III

Artist Murray Groat: http://muzski.darkfolio.com/

The Philip Larkin Trail

Poet's corner: on the Philip Larkin trail in Hull

Larkin felt at home in Hull, a city 'on the edge of things'. Now, the Larkin Trail offers a tour around this unlikely literary locale

David Mark

guardian.co.uk

Friday 7 September 2012

I like Hull. That's why I set my books there. I may have plans to kill off half the fictional population, but that's because it's such a fascinating and colourful place. Admittedly, most of the colours are a bit mucky, but for a port city that got battered by the Luftwaffe and then lost its main source of income when the fishing industry went under, it has got a sense of self and a talent for survival that remains both touching and admirable.

Hull is indeed painted as bleak and forbidding in my debut novel, The Dark Winter. I've lived in and around the city for 12 years. It's not the prettiest of places, and the wind that tumbles in from the sea can eat through to your bones, turning the citizens into gargoyles as they wince into the gales. But I'm a writer of fiction, a miserable git. And I don't work for the bloody tourism office.

Even so, on the day I visit as a tourist, it's a bright day, and the sky is cornflour blue. To see Hull the way a first-time visitor would is a curious thing. And it seems the number of these first-time visitors is on the rise. Subtly, Hull has become a destination of choice for people keen to experience a Yorkshire beyond Last of the Summer Wine and brass bands.

A big attraction is the new Larkin Trail (thelarkintrail.co.uk), a walk around 25 locations, marked by wall plaques, in the footsteps of the poet, known in Hull as a grumpy bugger who looked like Eric Morecambe. Larkin was, of course, one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, his career beginning in 1945 and spanning 40 years. He won the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, declined the job of Poet Laureate, and was celebrated for his "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent". He was named by the Times in 2008 as Britain's greatest post-war writer, but was also librarian at Hull University from 1955 until his death 30 years later.

It would be interesting to know what Larkin would make of Hull today. In my debut novel (and to the displeasure of many) I called it "a city on its arse", and anybody driving down once-proud Beverley Road would be hard-pushed to disagree, unless they are particular fans of chipboard or steel shutters.

Still, close one eye, and the trip to Hull is worth it. I begin my journey at his statue, in Paragon Station. The memorial, cast in bronze, is a warts-and-all likeness of the great man, looking a little stressed, hurrying to catch a train in what looks like more than a gentle breeze. Nobody else is stopping to look at it; they probably think it's Eric Morecambe. On the plinth is engraved: "That Whitsun, I was late getting away," from his famed poem The Whitsun Weddings.

I head out of the station, with the new shopping centre, St Stephen's, to my back and the bustle of Ferensway in front of me. Nobody could call Hull a ghost town on this evidence. It's packed with shoppers and office workers. I turn right and duck into the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel, referenced in Larkin's Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel as a place where "silence laid like carpet".

That's not the case today, and I enjoy my pint in the mahogany-panelled open space, quickly finding the framed photograph of Larkin with fellow poet John Betjeman, taken in 1973 at Hull City Hall – my next stop. Another customer tells me that 30 years ago there was a fire here, and the manager arranged for the boss of Marks and Spencer to open up in the middle of the night so his shivering patrons, who had fled the flames and left their clothes behind, could get themselves something nice on the company's account. I hope this is true.

Leaving the bar, I walk to nearby Queen Victoria Square and City Hall. I make my way to Whitefriargate and from here towards the Old Town where, in other cities, artsy shops would no doubt have sprung up, flogging oddments and curiosities. But the sort of people who buy oddments and curiosities don't really live in Hull. Locals come into town to pop to Primark for some leggings or to get their bairns some new school shoes. Still, halfway up is Marks & Spencer, which Larkin immortalised in The Large Cool Store. He wrote of "cheap clothes/Set out in simple sizes plainly". A plaque by the lift bears lines from the poem.

Trinity Square is a wide, quiet piazza over which looms majestic Holy Trinity Church. Here stands a statue of Hull's other famous poet, Andrew Marvell (1621-78), after whom Marvell Press, which first published Larkin's poetry, was named. In a shop window, another Larkin Trail plaque quotes the poet's foreword to an anthology of local poetry: "For Hull has its own sudden elegancies."

The trail gets less elegant after that. The A63 is congested and noisy and bars the way to the marina, with its pleasure crafts and the beautifully regenerated old Fruit Market. This was once Hull Corporation Pier, from which, in pre-Humber Bridge days, you could catch a ferry across the river. People are taking photographs of The Deep, the multimillion-pound submarium which has been a hit since it opened a decade back. All glass and blue panels, it sits on Sammy's Point, where the river Hull flows into the Humber, like the prow of a ship.

Back in the Old Town, the street splendidly named Land of Green Ginger was the cornerstone of Hull's drinking scene, and Larkin enjoyed many an evening in the atmospheric George Hotel, Ye Olde Black Boy (yeoldeblackboy.weebly.com) and Ye Olde White Hart (yeoldewhiteharte.com). This last one is worth popping into, if only to hear locals tell of its plotting parlour, where the city's leaders decided not to open the gates to the King during the civil war, and to look at the bones and skulls found in the walls and mysterious, darkened back rooms over the years.

The last stop in the core of the city is Hull History Centre on Worship Street (hullhistorycentre.org.uk), with its archive of Larkin's workbooks, letters, postcards, tapes and photographs.

I get a taxi to the next stop, a mile away, at 32 Pearson Park, where Larkin lived from 1956 to 1974. From his attic flat the poet had a clear view of the 22-acre Victorian park and its visitors, immortalised in the bleak poem Toads Revisited, with its "Palsied old step-takers, hare-eyed clerks." There's not much of that today, but there are lots of people playing football, and I'm reliably informed that the weekly Saturday kickabout here has helped solve some of the problems that blew up when a wave of asylum seekers arrived in the city a decade ago.

The Larkin Trail has its gloomy side, with Spring Bank cemetery ("The most beautiful spot in Hull," Larkin apparently told Betjeman) and two hospitals. Neither could be called attractions but they were important to him. His poem The Building is about Hull Royal Infirmary, whose "lucent comb shows up for miles", and he died at a former private hospital near to Pearson Park. The trail ends, like Larkin did, at the cemetery in nearby Cottingham, where he is buried. The headstone simply calls him "writer". I think he'd have liked that more than the brass statue. He was never much of a publicity fan, and those with long memories say he was never the most cheerful of souls. But he's bringing people to Hull, and that can only be a good thing.

But there's more to the city than Larkin. Hull's museums are all worth a visit (hullcc.gov.uk). The unimaginatively titled Hull and East Riding Museum (26 High Street) covers the area's archaeology and geology. My daughter calls it "the one with the mammoth", as it's hard to miss the colossal hairy beast in the doorway. Up the road (no 26) the Streetlife Museum brings more than 200 years of transport to life. I felt a bit of a prat sitting in the old-fashioned carriage listening to piped-in clip-clop, but if I'd had the kids with me, it would have been a blast . I've never visited without hearing kids tell their parents "this is ace".

In Queen Victoria Square is the Maritime Museum. Its darkened glass windows mean that from inside it always looks stormy outside, but that just gives you more reason to stay. Follow Hull's rich association with the sea – its docklands and the evolution of trawling – and inspect ornately carved whalebones and fearsome harpoons.

I finish my Larkin tour on studenty Newland Avenue (number 16 on the trail) at Larkin's Bar. It doesn't shout about the poet, but its logo is a toad (Larkin's metaphor for work). The man himself never drank here, of course – it's been open only a couple of years – but he is known to have shrugged off his ill-humour over nights of drinking in several pubs close by. I'm not feeling grumpy at all after my Larkin day, but I'll raise another pint to him anyway.

• Stay at the Mercure Hull Royal (01482 325087, hotels-hull.co.uk, doubles from £65) next to the station, or The Old Grey Mare (01482 448193, goodnightinns.co.uk, doubles from £42) opposite the university, with views of the library. Pick up the free Larkin Trail guide at East Yorkshire Tourist Information Centres (01482 223 559, visithullandeastyorkshire.com) or download it from thelarkintrail.co.uk.

National Rail
(08457 484 950) run trains to Hull's Paragon station. The main links are on Northern Rail from York, and on Hull Trains and East Coast from London King's Cross via Doncaster.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/sep/07/poet-philip-larkin-trail-hull?INTCMP=SRCH

You can tell it's Mattel...

Bobfest rehersals - enjoy

Brian's Back

Brian Wilson Recovering From Back Surgery
'Hereditary' condition prompted second operation last week

By Rolling Stone

September 14, 2012 

Brian Wilson has posted a message on Tumblr revealing that he had surgery to correct a problem in his lower back before the Beach Boys' 50th anniversary tour, and that he underwent the "cutting-edge" procedure again last week after his back issues resurfaced. Full text of the letter follows below.

Hi all,
I’ve been reading the posts where some of you are concerned about my health in general.
I want to let you know that before the Beach Boys 50th tour started I was having some lower back issues right around the time we performed on the Grammys in February. This is the same type of problem that Carl used to suffer from, it's hereditary. But being able to tour with the Boys again meant so much to me that I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Luckily, I was able to get this new cutting edge procedure that totally worked. But after this last run in Australia it came back and I had the procedure redone this week.

I feel so much better already and can't wait to get back to my second home, London!!

See you soon
Love & Mercy
Brian Wilson

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/brian-wilson-recovering-from-back-surgery-20120914

Donald Fagen's Sunken Condos - on clear vinyl

Track List:
1. Slinky Thing
2. I'm Not the Same Without You
3. Memorabilia
4. Weather in My Head
5. The New Breed
6. Out of the Ghetto (Isaac Hayes cover)
7. Miss Marlene
8. Good Stuff
9. Planet D'Rhonda

http://donaldfagen.shop.musictoday.com/Product.aspx?cp=1134_58181&pc=6DLP02

Wonder what's on side four of the vinyl?

David Bowie: Ch-Ch-Changes

David Bowie: the godfather of ch-ch-change

His talent for transforming himself is to be marked by a major V&A retrospective, yet he has constantly embodied the essence of pop. Pity we couldn't see him at the Olympic closing party

Dorian Lynskey

The Observer

Sunday 9 September 2012

For any David Bowie fans eagerly hoping that the V&A's just-announced major 2013 retrospective might draw their hero out of his long period of media seclusion, the answer came two weeks ago: yes and no. Yes, he was moved to post a droll statement on his Facebook page, but only in order to rebut rumours that he had any hand in curating the exhibition. Having made his private collection available to the V&A's curators, who confess they haven't even met him, he clearly felt he had done enough.

It is not the only time this year that Bowie-lovers have thrown him a party only for the guest of honour's chair to remain empty. Although he hasn't toured for eight years, or appeared on stage in any capacity for six, it still seemed possible that he might make an exception for the closing ceremony of the Olympics to perform his yearning 1977 hit Heroes, the unofficial Games anthem.

On the night, a video montage of his singles ramped up the excitement before the arrival of… some supermodels on trucks. Such a conspicuous absence seemed to confirm what Bowie-watchers have suspected for years: that he has in fact retired but simply neglected to tell anybody.

Out of sight he may be, but never out of mind. A book about a single Top of the Pops appearance, Bowie's groundbreakingly homoerotic performance of Starman in 1972, has just been published. A new plaque in London's Heddon Street marks the 40th anniversary of Starman's mothership album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Rock critics Paul Trynka and Peter Doggett have both written chunky studies of his life and work. His influence continues to be felt in the work of legions of younger artists, from LCD Soundsystem to Lady Gaga. In fact, Bowie love is at such a pitch that were he to announce a new tour tomorrow, he could set up camp at the O₂ for weeks.

One reason for this undying fascination is that at a time when many feel that pop's past is a great deal more compelling than its future, Bowie's 70s career represents the white-hot thrill of innovation. The Beatles may have shown that it was possible to reinvent your music with every album but Bowie went one better by reinventing the whole package.

In the early 60s, the teenage David Jones spent a year as a "visualiser" at a Bond Street advertising agency and learned the dark arts of brand communication. His first album, David Bowie, was derivative, theatrical and easily ignored; even the chart-topping success of 1969's Apollo 11 cash-in Space Oddity made him look like an opportunistic one-hit wonder.

So, frustrated by the failure of even 1971's brilliant Hunky Dory to give him the stardom he craved, he remade himself as Ziggy Stardust, described by Peter Doggett as "the perfect rock'n'roll star… male and female, king and queen, alien and human, transcendental and sublime". While many rock musicians were sprouting beards and moving to the country in search of something "real", he was fabulously other: a physical realisation of his audience's most outre pop fantasies.

Most artists would have considered this a job well done and kept on going, but Bowie soon believed that Ziggy had mutated from liberator into jailer and killed him off after just 18 months. With each subsequent album, he became someone new: "cracked actor" (Aladdin Sane), apocalyptic seer (Diamond Dogs), "plastic soul" star (Young Americans), frozen-hearted Thin White Duke (Station to Station) and, on his trilogy of albums recorded in Berlin with producer Tony Visconti and new pal Brian Eno, the pale grandmaster of art-pop alienation. The philosophy is right there in many of the song titles: Changes, Station to Station, Move On.

His restless hunger made him one of the few 70s stars whom the insurgents of punk admired rather than mocked, while the sounds and themes of his Berlin period inspired every synth-pop act worth its salt. More broadly, his self-refashioning and magpie eye define pop stardom to this day. For each new concept, he hoovered up raw material from cinema, theatre, fashion, literature and visual art; the V&A exhibition takes in everything from kabuki to German expressionism to the Theatre of Cruelty.

Crucially, his shrewd pilfering was rooted in ceaselessly great songwriting. Tony Visconti recently talked about Bowie's unnerving habit of coming into the studio with mere sketches for songs and finishing them on the hoof. "It's a scary situation," the producer said. "I was never comfortable with it but I didn't have a choice. If this is the process, you go with the flow. Bowie remains to this day the most extraordinary person I've ever worked with in the studio, on many levels. He's always full of surprises. You can never predict what he's going to do."

Of course, this kind of creative velocity doesn't stem from contentment. Bowie could be anybody except, it seemed, himself. "Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all," he confessed in 1972. "I'm just a collection of other people's ideas." In 1997 he told Q magazine: "I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing… I was driven to get through life very quickly… I really felt so utterly inadequate. I thought the work was the only thing of value."

In some ways, he was a weathervane for a decade in which many people were fearfully searching for answers – he was far from the only confused soul in the 70s to acquire an interest in the occult or an ambivalent fascination (later regretted) with fascism. But in his recent book The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s, Peter Doggett suggests that Bowie was driven by a terror of losing his mind, as his older brother, Terry, had done.

In 1993, Bowie told the BBC: "I felt that I was the lucky one because I was an artist and it would never happen to me. As long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work, I could always be throwing it off."

He came closest to unravelling himself in Los Angeles in 1975 while making Station to Station, an experience he claims he can't (or chooses not to) remember in any detail, although he has admitted to living on a diet of cocaine, Gitanes, peppers and milk. This is a cherished bit of trivia because fans generally prefer self-destructive genius to well-adjusted mediocrity: never mind the life, give us the work.

The fitter and happier Bowie became during the 80s, the worse his music, leading to such fan-scarring horrors as the 1987 Glass Spider tour, the humdrum hard rock band Tin Machine and his mystique-annihilating duet with Mick Jagger on Dancing in the Street. It says something about his waning powers that his most worthwhile 80s creation after Let's Dance was the goblin king Jareth in the film Labyrinth.

More unjustly, boldly experimental 90s albums such as 1. Outside and Earthling were overlooked and only with Heathen, his 2002 reunion with Visconti, did he win back some of the warmth and acclaim that used to be his for the asking.

You wonder if this born neophiliac (he was an early champion of the internet and has long been a generous supporter of new bands) grew tired of living in the shadow of his youthful achievements and had no interest in the lucrative but repetitive hits tours embraced by so many of his peers. It has also been suggested, given that his 2004 world tour was curtailed by an emergency angioplasty, that his health would not permit a return to live performance. Or perhaps the reason for his apparent retirement is simple: perhaps he is just happy.

He lives in New York with his wife of 20 years, cosmetics entrepreneur and former model Iman, and their daughter, Alexandria. He is on good terms with his son, once known as Zowie Bowie, now as gifted film director Duncan Jones. He enjoys attending gigs and dining with old friends such as Visconti and Lou Reed. It's a fallacy to assume that any celebrity who chooses to retreat from the public eye must be a frail recluse, but by all accounts Bowie is comfortable and contented, so why not view his creative silence as a dignified victory rather than a form of defeat?

Much as his admirers may want him back belting out the likes of Heroes and Starman in the world's arenas, it might be fairer to accept that the man whose youthful genius was nourished by so much loneliness and self-doubt deserves the quieter, happier life he has built for himself. David Bowie has done as much as anyone to shape our understanding of what pop music can be. Surely that is more than enough.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/sep/09/observer-profile-david-bowie?INTCMP=SRCH

Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon – review

Michael Chabon's new novel skilfully challenges America's attitudes to race. 

Attica Locke

guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 5 September 2012

A little over 100 pages into Michael Chabon's magnificent new novel, a young, road-weary state senator by the name of Barack Obama makes an unexpected appearance. Just weeks after his historic speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which announced his vision of an America unified against the divisions of race and class and thrust him on to the national stage, the future president is campaigning in California, making his first run at higher office. At a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser, Obama ducks through the back door of a posh house in northern California to steal a quiet moment to himself, passing time by listening to the hired jazz band as they warm up. It's a relatively short scene, but Obama's presence – and his most famous catchphrase, "change" – seems to linger at the outer corners of this novel's soul.

In many ways, Telegraph Avenue feels like Chabon's first book of the new millennium, his first to speak so adroitly to the anxieties and emotional challenges of our time. There is something deeply current about this wise and soulful novel, even as its main characters are so deeply mired in the past.

The story begins inside the walls of Brokeland Records. This is Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe's secondhand record shop on Telegraph Avenue, the main drag of the eponymous neighbourhood and a live wire that serves as a connector between Berkeley – land of artisanal cheese, tantric yoga and conflict-free coffee, a place brimming with new and former hippies who have turned righteousness into competition – and Oakland, a working-class, predominantly black city that even before the economic collapse of 2008 was already struggling with the threat of economic flatline. Archy and Nat have been friends for over a decade when the novel opens. Together, they are professional collectors and curators, acolytes at the altar of jazz, blues and funk – black music that is the main artery running through American pop culture. (Part of the charm of this book is the breadth of the author's knowledge of black music from, say, 1940 until the late 1970s. If this novel wins Chabon another Pulitzer, I feel certain it will be the first in history to make a reference to Peabo Bryson.)

Though Nat and Archy are passionate lovers of vinyl, they are less than gifted businessmen, deep in debt, and each keeping an eye scanning the horizon for trouble. It arrives in the form of a whale-sized zeppelin creeping across the sky, boldly advertising Gibson "G-Bad" Goode's entrepreneurial designs on the neighbourhood: plans to build a super-entertainment centre with movie theatres, restaurants and, yes, a music shop, just a few blocks from Brokeland Records. Goode, a former NFL player turned businessman, has revitalised struggling working-class neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, but his plans to do the same in Oakland will surely put Nat and Archy out of business. This kind of "Wal-Mart effect" is a familiar theme in America – large-scale businesses obliterating the character of neighbourhoods. Chabon's twist is that the "big capital" villain here is a black man, a local hero offering hundreds of jobs and uplift for the community, and thereby complicating notions of what "progress" is.

Archy, who is black, and Nat, who is white, find their friendship strained by the gulf between their differing reactions to the outside threat. Further adding to the tension is the relationship between Archy's wife, Gwen, and Nat's wife, Aviva, who are likewise in business together (and also under attack when their midwife practice faces legal threat after a home birth goes horribly wrong). Throw into the mix Archy's long-lost, previously unacknowledged teenage son, Titus, who embarks on a friendship, fraught with romantic complications, with Nat's son, Julius; Archy's estranged father, a former drug addict and Blaxploitation film star, who is on the lam; a crooked undertaker; a jazz legend with a talking parrot on his shoulder; and the ghosts of the Black Panther Party – and what you get is a big, serious, probing American novel, a page-turner that, like Chabon himself, seems to walk the line between high and low culture, between the erudition and intellectual precociousness of jazz and the dark humour and truth-telling of the blues.

Almost nothing Chabon has written previously could have prepared me for this book, though there are elements of his other work here: themes of fatherhood, abandonment, diaspora and complex questions of identity, not to mention gorgeous prose and a dose of humour. What's striking is the number of times I forgot I was reading a Michael Chabon novel. With the front cover flipped back, I could, for a moment, imagine I was holding Colson Whitehead in my hands, Percival Everett or Victor LaValle. But this kind of racial shortcut and lazy thinking about art and its ability to bridge our differences are the very things that the novel's existence argues against. By writing so convincingly from behind the veil of black culture, Chabon has allowed the form of his novel to follow its function, making a powerful statement about the pulse of humanity that runs deeper than our skin colour. Telegraph Avenue finds its heart in the friendships of Archy and Nat, Gwen and Aviva, Titus and Julius – relationships that Chabon allows to be frustrated by race, but never defined by it. The book quietly makes the point that in this millennium of sweeping "change", we have arrived at a place that, if it's not exactly "post-racial", certainly demands that we lay down some of our old ideas about race and the level of communion that's possible between so-called disparate groups. This is the Chabon I most recognise: writer as humanitarian.

Late in the novel, Nat, a man who typically finds expression easier in music than in words, makes a beautiful statement about the dream he and Archy cherished for Brokeland Records at its inception: a "creole" mix of music genres and peoples from all over the world. Chabon's book seems to reaffirm America's promise of its own "Brokeland Creole" dream. Like the characters in the novel, America is still growing up, a nation that often has to be dragged kicking and screaming into its own future. The book is ultimately about the inevitability of change, but it suggests, in the surrender to it, the possibility of grace on the other side.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/05/telegraph-avenue-michael-chabon-review?INTCMP=SRCH

On the cover of Rolling Stone

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

The Price Of Love
Love Hurts
Bring It On Home To Me
Sloop John B
Chains

An enjoyable evening of musical fun - enough for any music lover. Was amazzzzed when a young lad called Andy played Falling (he asked for a CD some time ago). Awe shucks.

The punters sang along to Love Hurts, Bring It On Home To Me (a debut for the Elderly Brothers) and Sloop John B - crackin' stuff.

Uncut review of Psychedelic Pill

OK I’m going to try and be relatively brief with this – or at least as brief as one can hope to be when dealing with the longest studio album that Neil Young’s ever made. I’ve written what I hope is an exhaustive review of “Psychedelic Pill” for the next issue of Uncut, and don’t really want to repeat myself too much.

First up; it’s great, though I’m conscious of being someone with an enormously high tolerance of Neil Young’s self-indulgences, especially when he has the bedraggled might of Crazy Horse in tow. Trying to place “Psychedelic Pill”’s excellence into some canonical ranking doesn’t make a whole deal of sense to me, in much the same way as it feels a bit pointless trying to measure up “Tempest” against “Blonde On Blonde”. Young’s 35th studio set is best understood as the next chapter in what has been an eccentric and compelling last decade of music-making, with this time (unlike on “Americana”, blogged about here) a lot of extended jams to satisfy my favourite NY cravings.
If you’ve seen the revealed data about “Psychedelic Pill”, you’ll know about how extended those jams are: two over 15 minutes, and one – the extraordinary opener “Driftin’ Back” – stretching out to nearly half an hour by itself. You’ll have seen the sleeve, too and, in conjunction with the title, wondered exactly how psychedelic this record might be.
The simple answer is not a great deal more than, say, “Broken Arrow”, the Young album which it most superficially resembles (“Driftin’ Back”, if it has an obvious antecedent, is possibly related to that album’s “Slip Away”). There is a fleeting reference to the Grateful Dead in “Twisted Road”, and one version of the title track (which appears in two different mixes) is crudely phased throughout to give some rough psychedelic disorientation. It doesn’t really add much to the live version some of you may have heard in the past month or so; by some distance the weakest song here.
The pill, really, is a metaphor for flashbacks. “Driftin’ Back”, in particular, is concerned with what may be the substance of Young’s forthcoming “Waging Heavy Peace”, and the writing of that autobiography. It begins with a brilliant trick – which I won’t spoil just yet – and soon locks into a languorous and beautiful series of solos, erratically punctuated by random Young pensées on the subjects of MP3s, hip-hop haircuts, Picasso wallpaper and so on. It’s not related to the “Horse Back” jam (more about that here), but it has that same deep-pile pleasure. If you believe, not unreasonably, that Young simply playing the shit out of an electric guitar is about as good as music gets, I think you’ll like it.
The two other big ones, “Ramada Inn” and “Walk Like A Giant”, are more conventionally formed songs, and feel like new classics, too – as you may have divined from the live versions that have been kicking around, especially the Red Rocks bootleg (I wrote about that here). Again, they’re very similar to the live takes: the whistling refrain in “Walk Like A Giant” hasn’t been replaced by, say, a keyboard line, and there’s still a clanking feedback coda, even if it’s somewhat shorter than the Red Rocks version, at least. “She’s Always Dancing” is terrific, too, appearing to start mid-stream and having a “Like A Hurricane”-style lyricism to the playing as it rolls on for eight minutes or so.
What else? “Twisted Road” is a band performance rather than the acoustic version that Young’s been playing live, and sounds better for it, while “Born In Ontario” (a little like “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, maybe), with its evocations of roots, family and the consolations of writing, works as a kind of conceptual heart of “Psychedelic Pill”. Much of Young’s latterday work has been preoccupied with organising and recontextualising his past, and this extraordinary record is part of that process; maybe even a culmination of it, viewed in tandem with the book. But I’ve already written more than I intended to…

John Mulvey
12th September 2012

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #168

Last night's songs

At the Waggon & Horses, York, included: -

C C Rider
Get It On
The Midnight Special
Copperhead Road
Hot Love
Down By The Riverside
My Hometown
20th Century Boy
I've Just Seen A Face
Sweet Virginia
Waterloo Sunset
Blackbird
Too Far Gone
Wild Horses
Harvest Moon
A Day In The Life
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion
I Don't Need A Photograph*
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight

* a brand new 'Da' song written about 4:20am yesterday.

A few more players than usual (including a T Rex fan) which made for a more varied set of songs!



The Drowning Pool - Ross Macdonald

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald – review

Into these mean LA mansions private eye Lew Archer goes, in the best tradition of Chandler and Hammett

Lucian Robinson

The Observer

Sunday 2 September 2012

Few private eye novels would open, as The Drowning Pool does, with a poison-pen letter quoting from Shakespeare's sonnet 94 ("Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds"), but in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series urbane literary allusion is par for the course. Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, published his first Archer novel in 1949, after completing a PhD on Coleridge at the University of Michigan. The Drowning Pool, set in California and first published in 1950, is Archer's second outing and the most formally assured of the series.

After investigating an anonymous note accusing the wealthy Maude Slocum of adultery, Archer dives deep into a case that turns murderous when Maude's domineering mother-in-law, Olivia ("She had enough ego to equip a dictator and leave enough over for a couple of gauleiters"), is found dead in her swimming pool. Is oil magnate Walter Kilbourne, desirous to drill for black gold on the Slocum estate, responsible or is the killing merely a domestic spat gone wrong?

Macdonald unfurls his plot with the unforced majesty of an incoming Pacific tide, though it is in his laconic descriptive prose that he equals Chandler or Hammett. His evocation of Kilbourne's shadowy fiefdom – "The place was as noisy as a funeral parlour at midnight, and I liked it just as well" – in the LA hills testifies to a prescient postwar cynicism about American corporatism, while his description of a club's faded grandeur echoes with chiastic irony: "The photographs that lined the panelled walls were signed by all the big names and the names that had once been big."

A noirish, centrifugal amorality pervades Archer's world and The Drowning Pool does not conclude nicely or neatly. Yet this narrative ambiguity affirms the complexity of Macdonald's fiction, for as Archer observes bitterly at the denouement: "The happy endings and the biggest oranges were the ones that California saved for export."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/02/drowning-pool-ross-macdonald-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Good book, though I can't agree that it's the 'most formally assured of the series'; it tries too hard to be Chandleresque. Some of the later novels are much better: The Far Side of the Dollar, The Chill and The Goodbye Look, for example; however, I much prefer the movie version to Newman's first outing as Lew Archer (Harper, on screen) in Harper, based on Macdonald's The Moving Target, largely because his performance is less stylised. There were rumours of a new Archer film starring Hugh Laurie (ulp!) a couple of years back, but nothing seems to have come of them.

Newcastle Metro Tramp Alive. Maybe.

According to someone at the BBC who did a little digging, the police and the coroner have had NO reports of a dead tramp. Hope he's okay, but Jim and I haven't seen him for over a month, about the time these stories of his death started appearing...

Photo by Anthony Dorman, as was yesterday's: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16059306@N08/7354914508/
http://www.anthonydormanphotography.blogspot.co.uk/

If you scroll down here, however, things don't look too good:
http://www.anthonydormanphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/homeless-man-newcastle-dies.html

Metro Tramp RIP?

Metro Tramp; alias Town Tramp; alias Homeless Jimmy; alias Homeless Tony; alias Arthur the Tramp; alias Albert Dodds; alias Dave; alias Harry the Hairy Hobo.

Rumour has it that he was a doctor at the Freeman (or the RVI) who had a breakdown after his marriage fell apart - or after his father committed suicide.  You choose.

Jim and I rode the rails with him on many a night.

Allegedly found dead in Asda car park in Benton, one of the places he used to bed down for the night, in late July or early August.  He also favoured  the Rising Sun Countryside Park, which is where I suspect he was headed, via Palmersville Metro, when Jim and I used to see him on Friday evenings.

I haven't seen anything in the Evening Chronicle, but - providing it's true - that's probably no surprise to anyone who's read it lately...

Tintin meets H. P. Lovecraft II

Artist Murray Groat: http://muzski.darkfolio.com/

Failure to communicate II...

Failure to communicate...

Joe South RIP

Joe South, Singer and Writer of Hit Songs, Dies at 72

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: September 5, 2012

Joe South, a singer-songwriter who wove confrontational lyrics into bouncy pop hits of the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Games People Play,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” died on Wednesday at home in Flowery Branch, Ga., north of Atlanta. He was 72.

The cause was apparently a heart attack, said Judy Thompson, a longtime friend.

Mr. South’s best-known song became a hit when it was recorded by someone else. “Rose Garden,” sung by Lynn Anderson, reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in 1971, four years after Mr. South wrote it. The chorus — “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden/Along with the sunshine there’s gotta be a little rain sometime” — reflected a world-weariness characteristic of his writing.

In 1969 he targeted religion and insincerity in “Games People Play,” which thrust him toward stardom:

People walking up to you

Singing glory hallelujah,

And they’re tryin’ to sock it to you

In the name of the Lord.

It won a Grammy for song of the year in 1970.

Joseph Alfred Souter was born Feb. 28, 1940, in Atlanta. He changed his name years later after going into music.

Mr. South loved music and technology from an early age. His father gave him a guitar when he was 11, and he was performing on local radio by the age of 12. He built small radio stations of his own with limited signal range, partly so he could play his songs.

“He would even put it in his car and ride around so that the F.C.C. and anybody else couldn’t track him down,” said Butch Lowery, referring to the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Lowery’s father, Bill, ran a radio station and eventually became Mr. South’s publisher and manager.

In 1958 Mr. South had a modest novelty hit, “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor.” He played guitar for recording sessions in Nashville, Muscle Shoals, Ala., and elsewhere with a range of artists, including Bob Dylan (on his album “Blonde on Blonde”) and Aretha Franklin. Billy Joe Royal recorded several of his songs in the 1960s, including “Down in the Boondocks” and “I Knew You When,” before Mr. South established himself as a performer with some of the same songs. Elvis Presley played “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” in concert.

Mr. South is survived by a son, Craig, and a granddaughter. His first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife died in the late 1990s.

Mr. South largely disappeared from public view after his brother, Tommy, a drummer with whom he often recorded, committed suicide in 1971. In 2009 he released a new song for the first time in many years, “Oprah Cried.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/arts/music/joe-south-singer-and-songwriter-dies-at-72.html

Spike Milligan - The Irish O'lympics

David Bowie at the V&A

David Bowie: the mannequin who fell to earth

The V&A plans to use David Bowie's exotic costumes to chart his life and times in an exhibition next year

David Alberge

guardian.co.uk

Saturday 18 August 2012

David Bowie is to part-curate an exhibition of his life and work told primarily through his extravagant costumes at the Victoria and Albert museum next year.

The show will chart his rise to cult rock star status from his early years in Brixton, south London, using his collection of outfits to illustrate his constantly changing identity.

Details about the clothes are being kept under wraps until next month's official announcement of the show, but the V&A's director confirmed to the Observer that Bowie is involved in selecting exhibits. Many of the flamboyant outfits worn by Bowie in his years as a pioneer of rock style will come from his own collection.
The exhibition is expected to draw large numbers of visitors. However, some critics lament what they see as a further descent of a serious museum into the cult of celebrity.

Bowie's look was inseparable from his sound. The 65-year-old singer and actor, who merged rock and theatre with his androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, is synonymous with futuristic costumes and outlandish makeup, from space-samurai outfits to white satin kimonos, flame-red hair to eye-liner.

He achieved wide popularity with his psychedelic rock single Space Oddity, coinciding with the first moon landing, and became an international star with albums such as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His films include The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Speaking to the Observer, Bowie's biographer Paul Trynka said that Bowie was at the forefront of fashion, recreating his own image with the aid of cutting-edge designers.

Seeing the costumes close-up would be amazing, he said. "Although he's an artist who… doesn't tend to revisit his own past, there's a kind of contradiction in that he's collected his pieces for over two decades, lots of them historic and iconic, not just for Bowie fans but for popular fashion… He's always had a public presentation in mind." Costumes that Trynka expects to be included in the exhibition at the V&A include the "bunny leotard" created by Kansai Yamamoto, one of the avant-garde designers whose potential was spotted by Bowie.

"That was quite groundbreaking because Yamamoto wasn't known in the UK," Trynka said. "Although other pop stars had flirted with high fashion, [Bowie] was the first one to use it as an integral part of his look. He then went on to even more outrageous Yamamoto designs. There's a fantastic one with hugely-inflated legs … and I suspect that will be there … [It] is engagingly ludicrous. Nobody had that effrontery to wear those kinds of outfits before."

Among other likely highlights, he said, are homemade catsuits created by the late Freddi Buretti, a designer who described himself as a "seamstress".

Martin Roth, the V&A's director, said: "Bowie is incomparable. No one has inspired the whole world not only in terms of music but also arts, fashion and style. He created a vision of individualism for an entire generation."

Others are less impressed, particularly following the V&A's 2007 exhibition dedicated to Kylie Minogue, which included her dungarees from the Australian soap Neighbours. Critics felt that it was unworthy of a museum dedicated to showcasing the finest arts and crafts.

The Bowie show has been condemned by Michael Daley, director of ArtWatch UK, the museums watchdog: "The museum world is losing the plot. They're just crazed about numbers at any cost… Obviously you could fill the V&A every day of the week if you had a pop concert or a bunch of celebs."

Noting that the V&A also covers fashion, he added: "Fashion is a bigger thing… than the cult of one man. If Bowie, why not Liberace? It's about the cult of celebrity, particularly youth." Bowie, he added, did not fit the museum's remit for recording significant fashion.

The V&A is of course tapping into a demand, but whether a cultural museum should be meeting it is another matter. The Kylie Minogue exhibition attracted 271,000 visitors and was one of the museum's most popular shows.

Trynka, who wrote the Bowie biography Starman, said: "Bowie epitomises Britain's influence on fashion and textiles. He represents the best of it. Kylie is a wonderful pop icon, but she hasn't had a lasting effect on popular culture outside of her fanbase."

Today Bowie himself remains elusive. He has not toured since 2006, and turns down requests to appear in public – most recently, the Olympic Games closing ceremony, although his song Fashion was used.
There have been reports of ill-health. Roth said: "[People] try to build a story around him. There's a lot of gossip."

Bowie's spokesman declined to comment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/18/david-bowie-victoria-albert-museum-costumes?INTCMP=SRCH

Fill yer boots

Fill your boots . . . .

Bob Dylan - Tempest review in The Guardian

Bob Dylan: Tempest – review

Dylan's latest is angry, growling and mostly great fun. But comparing it to his best work is way over the top

****

Alexis Petridis

guardian.co.uk

Thursday 6 Sepetember 2012

Bob Dylan's new album arrives and – as has become traditional – you can hardly hear the old boy for the clank of five-star reviews hitting the table. Connoisseurs of the latterday Dylan review will be pleased to learn that 2012 brings a fine vintage, with many old friends present and correct. There's been a strong showing from the How Did He Do That? faction, marvelling at the superhuman leaps of imaginative daring that have led Dylan not only to mention Leonardo DiCaprio in a song about the Titanic, but also to use the line "I read the news today, oh boy" in a song about John Lennon's murder.

One of their number has claimed Tempest to be among Dylan's "weirdest albums ever", a pretty bold claim given that it follows Christmas in the Heart, which came with a free set of Christmas cards and featured Dylan rasping his way through Here Comes Santa Claus. It seems a bolder claim still when you actually listen to Tempest. The music is the same stew of beautifully played blues, rockabilly, folk and country as every Dylan album for the last 12 years: styles you might call pre-rock or, perhaps more pertinently, pre-him. Bob Dylan, it seems, is determined to see out his days playing pop music from the era before Bob Dylan changed pop music for good, as if he'd rather forget that he ever did so. The weirdest thing about Tempest might be its cover, which looks unaccountably like a perfume ad in a Sunday supplement.

Hot on their heels come the Hilarious Lyrics massive, rock criticism's answer to those people who claim to spend every morning in hysterics at the latest installment of Doonesbury. They keep telling you how incredibly funny Dylan lyrics that aren't remotely funny are. This time around, they've been killing themselves at the side-splitting one-liner: "I'm not dead yet, my bell still rings".

On one hand, this stuff is baffling. You look at the guy approvingly comparing Tempest's 14-minute, 45-verse title track to 1965's Desolation Row and think: what are you talking about? Doesn't it diminish one of Dylan's masterpieces – a song that drags the listener through a phantasmagoria of imagery so vivid you barely notice its length – to compare it with this, which offers flashes of brilliance and occasional great lines, but ultimately goes on a bit? On the other, perhaps the response tells you something about Dylan's career, full of riddles and contradictions, the artist never exactly reticent in letting people know they'd called it wrong. As said career reaches its home straight, nobody wants to be clueless old Mr Jones, of Ballad of a Thin Man fame: better to insist you know what's happening here even when not much actually is.

The problem is that a decade of blanket praise writes white and might discourage people from bothering with Tempest, which would be a pity. It has failings, not least Roll On John, a tribute to the slain Beatle that certainly makes you miss him: were he around to hear it, you suspect his face would be quite a picture. Given that Dylan's now had 32 years to ruminate on his friend's life and death, you might hope he'd come up with something a little more incisive than "come together right now over me … Lord, you know how hard it can be", which, frankly, is like something Noel Gallagher would write.

But equally, there are incredible moments. No one has ever articulated furious contempt more vividly than Dylan at his peak, an emotion that's been noticeably lacking from his recent albums. But now someone or something has clearly riled him. Perhaps it's the bankers: it certainly sounds like them getting it in the neck on the viscerally thrilling Early Roman Kings.

Whatever the cause, his mood often sounds murderous. The first intimation of terrible violence arrives one minute in: a little incongruously, during the perky Western swing of Duquesne Whistle. Narrow Way welds a bracing Chicago blues riff to a series of withering put-downs: "Your father left, your mother too/ Even death has washed his hands of you." Anger always suited Dylan's voice: he spent most of the 60s and 70s sounding like he was sneering even when he wasn't. It still suits him. On Pay in Blood, fury and his ruined larynx combine to remarkable effect. The opening line comes out as a terrifying, incomprehensible growl that sounds like one of those death-metal vocalists in full flight. There's something potent about hearing a singer-songwriter famed for his articulacy rendered incoherent with rage. "Another politician pumping out the piss," he sings later, the microphone audibly struggling to cope with the ferocity of his delivery. "You bastard, I'm supposed to respect you? I'll give you justice."

To praise Tempest you don't need to suggest, as the august rock critic on the BBC's Newsnight Review did, that it is "up there with Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks", which would make it one of the important albums ever made. Anyone who hears that and raises their expectations accordingly may be disappointed. That wouldn't be the right response to Tempest at all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/06/bob-dylan-tempest-review

Pat's pocket rocket envy...

Tomorrow night's conversation

Bob Dylan - Tempest review in Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan - Tempest

"""""

By Will Hermes

August 30, 2012

Bob Dylan's 35th album begins with a train whistle exploding in his mind. He sees an old oak tree he used to climb and imagines a woman smiling through a fence. He hears the voice of "the mother of our Lord" – and still, that whistle, screaming "like the sky's gonna blow apart." It's astonishing, " Duquesne Whistle" suggests, how much can be channeled through a simple sound.

That notion defines Dylan's career, and especially his output of the past decade – music built from traditional forms and drawing on eternal themes: love, struggle, death. With its jazzy, pre-rock groove, "Duquesne Whistle" could be from any of Dylan's last three albums, 2001's Love and Theft, 2006's Modern Times or 2009's Together Through Life. But then the song ends, Dylan gets off the train and soon one of his weirdest albums ever truly starts. Tempest is musically varied and full of curveballs. It may also be the single darkest record in Dylan's catalog.

The body count alone distinguishes it, with songs about the Titanic disaster ("Tempest"), a three-way murder-suicide ("Tin Angel") and the assassination of his old acquaintance John Lennon ("Roll On, John"). "Pay in Blood" is a portrait of raging evil delivered in snarling vocals – Dylan is so close-miked you can practically hear the phlegm rattle. "Early Roman Kings," with David Hidalgo's cantina-blues accordion, conjures "lecherous and treacherous" despots "in their sharkskin suits."

Lyrically, Dylan is at the top of his game, joking around, dropping wordplay and allegories that evade pat readings and quoting other folks' words like a freestyle rapper on fire. "Narrow Way" is one of Dylan's most potent rockers in years, and it borrows a chorus from the Mississippi Sheiks' 1934 blues "You'll Work Down to Me Someday." "Scarlet Town" draws on verses by 19th-century Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier; and allusions to Louis Armstrong and the Isley Brothers pop up elsewhere.

The two most powerful cuts here are rooted in fact. At nearly 14 minutes, "Tempest" is epic – 45 verses (with no chorus) about the sinking of the Titanic, set to an Irish melody with accordion and fiddle. Historical accuracy is beyond the point; the reference to Leonardo DiCaprio feels truer to folk tradition than his absence would be. Meanwhile, the scenes are horrifying: passengers plunging into icy waters; "Dead bodies already floating/In the double-bottomed hull"; some men turning murderous; another offering his lifeboat seat to a crippled child. The metaphor is inescapable: a seemingly unsinkable behemoth going down amid small acts of bravery that change little, rich and poor doomed equally.

"Roll On, John," the closing song, was written for a man who wrestled with the oppressiveness of fame and deification as much as Dylan has. "I heard the news today, oh, boy," he sings, referencing Lennon's murder and a Beatles lyric in a voice that throbs with survivor's guilt. It's a prayer from one great artist to another, and a reminder that Dylan now stands virtually alone among his 1960s peers. His own final act, meanwhile, rolls on. It's a thing to behold.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/tempest-20120830

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

To Know You Is To Love You
Wild Horses
Let It Be Me
Bye Bye love

After tasting the York 800 Whisky and a couple of pints before heading to The Habit, the experience of playing choons to the punters was quite bizzare - but enjoyable all the same. Another night of musical fun & games.

Come down from your Grassy Knoll...