Friday, 8 May 2015
Thursday, 7 May 2015
Last night's set list
At The Habit, York: -
Love Letters In The Sand
Out Of The Blue
I Don't Want It All
Everybody's Talkin'
In the absence of Ron Elderly (on holiday) there was no Elderly Brothers music this week. The joint was rockin' from the off with a surfeit of players. Some only got 2 or 3 songs later on. A new trio (unnamed); vocalist, guitar and clarinet, made an impact with their jazz-tinged delivery. There were one or two shouters, but that didn't really detract from a buzzing night, closed out with 3 Bowie numbers: Space Oddity, Ashes To Ashes and The Jean Genie. The after show jam descended into a Beatles/Neil Young/Bonzos music-fest. A most enjoyable evening/morning!
Love Letters In The Sand
Out Of The Blue
I Don't Want It All
Everybody's Talkin'
In the absence of Ron Elderly (on holiday) there was no Elderly Brothers music this week. The joint was rockin' from the off with a surfeit of players. Some only got 2 or 3 songs later on. A new trio (unnamed); vocalist, guitar and clarinet, made an impact with their jazz-tinged delivery. There were one or two shouters, but that didn't really detract from a buzzing night, closed out with 3 Bowie numbers: Space Oddity, Ashes To Ashes and The Jean Genie. The after show jam descended into a Beatles/Neil Young/Bonzos music-fest. A most enjoyable evening/morning!
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Ten great movies about movies...
The 10 best films about films
With Fellini’s flamboyant 8½ back in cinemas this week, here are the 10 best self-referential movies
Jonathan Romney
Friday 1 May 2015
Behind the Screen
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/may/01/the-10-best-films-about-films-fellini-cinema
Hazanavicius' The Artist
With Fellini’s flamboyant 8½ back in cinemas this week, here are the 10 best self-referential movies
Jonathan Romney
Friday 1 May 2015
Behind the Screen
Charlie Chaplin, 1916
It didn’t take cinema long to realise that the art form could be its own juiciest subject. Silent cinema’s most famous musing on itself is Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924), with the star as a projectionist dreaming himself into a movie. But eight years earlier, Charlie Chaplin made this illusion-puncturing short about the humdrum realities of the movie studio. Chaplin’s antics as a stage hand reveal the industrial nature of the silent film business, while a scowling director in dark glasses and cap worn backwards – grimly supervising a pie-throwing scene - is surely the first angst-ridden auteur to be depicted on screen.
The Player
Robert Altman, 1992
Producers are sometimes depicted on screen as monstrous yet magnificent (Kirk Douglas’s character in The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952), sometimes as just monstrous. But movie execs were never as abject as empty-souled, smooth-suited studio apparatchik Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins). Written by Michael Tolkin, this scabrous satire was Robert Altman’s gleeful revenge on the Hollywood system – with hordes of names from both sides of the camera showing solidarity by contributing cameos as themselves (Cher, Bruce Willis, screenwriter Buck Henry pitching a sequel to The Graduate). The opening shot, riffing on Orson Welles’sTouch of Evil, is the most spectacularly mounted movie in-joke ever.
Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, 1960
The film that launched a thousand film studies dissertations on the politics of “the gaze”, Peeping Tom also virtually ended the career of its maker, British pioneer Michael Powell. Written by Leo Marks, this thriller is a rare study of the film-maker as committed (not to say deranged) loner, with Carl Boehm as a duffel-coated voyeur obsessed with capturing the look of terror. Peeping Tom is a rarity because it captures image-making at all levels – from studio fodder, through the science documentaries of the hero’s father (played by Powell himself), to backroom porn. At first reviled, later revered, Peeping Tom is easily as influential as Psycho in opening up the dark mindset of cinema.
8 ½
Federico Fellini, 1963
Re-released this week, Fellini’s hyper-flamboyant autobiographical fantasia is, depending on your tolerance for the mirror gazing of maestros, one of the visionary peaks of cinematic modernism or an exercise in self-aggrandising solipsism that had the disastrous effect of encouraging generations of auteurs to take themselves deadly seriously. Marcello Mastroianni – who made agonised intellectuals look cooler and suaver than they ever do in real life – played Fellini surrogate Guido, a director running short of inspiration and making a movie in his head, out of his own life and loves. Nino Rota’s kaleidoscopic score keeps the whole crazy circus metaphor spinning to rapturous effect.
Le Mépris (Contempt)
Based on an Alberto Moravia novel, Le Mépris finds Jean-Luc Godard ruefully moping over cinema’s lost glories while pushing the art form towards a radical future. The setting is Italy - Rome’s Cinecittà studios, then Capri - where the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself) is trying to film The Odyssey under the aegis of a philistine American producer (a magnificent Jack Palance). With its sublime Georges Delerue score, and a strange prelude featuring Brigitte Bardot’s meta-commentary on her own naked body, Le Mépris is the only Godard film that could make you conceivably cry as much as it makes you furrow your brow.
Singin’ in the Rain
Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952
The most beloved of all screen musicals is also the most scholarly – a mock film-historical piece about the travails of a silent cinema star, Don Lockwood (Kelly), struggling to make the transition into the talkies. Some of the film’s choicest humour is, a little cruelly, at the expense of lofty diva Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, priceless), Lockwood’s co-star in the preposterous The Duelling Cavalier, whose aura is destroyed by her Noo Yawk accent (“I cyan’t stan’im!”). Kelly and Donen’s classic, and the industry crisis it depicted, were paid due homage in Michel Hazanavicius’s brilliantly tricksy silent pastiche The Artist (2011).
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Wes Craven, 1994
Horror buffs’ fascination with genre rules has made terror an unlikely breeding ground for metafiction, notably in The Cabin in the Woods, Wes Craven’s Screamseries and The Human Centipede 2 (featuring a villain morbidly obsessed with The Human Centipede). Before Scream, Craven concluded his A Nightmare on Elm Street series with this paradox-laden contemplation of the perils attendant on trying to kill off his creation Freddy Krueger. Craven, Nightmare stars Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and even studio boss Robert Shaye all play themselves. The ingenuity is compelling, although this fared worse at the box office than any previous Nightmare.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang, 2003
Among cinema’s elegies to the lost wonders of the movie theatre – the most popular being the mawkish Cinema Paradiso – the richest and strangest comes from Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang. The setting is a Taipei cinema about to close; the film showing is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn. But we’re watching the staff and the sparse audience – the lonely cashier wandering the upstairs corridors, the punter idly flicking sunflower husks at the screen, the gay men cruising the toilets. Eerie, stately and glumly comic, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will strike a chord with you even if your own lost beloved fleapit was only a humble ABC.
Hellzapoppin’
HC Potter, 1941
Vaudeville comedians Olsen and Johnson would be forgotten if not for this delirious vehicle, nominally an adaptation of their Broadway stage hit. Ostensibly about an attempt to turn Hellzapoppin’ the show into a backstage musical, this surreal, altogether avant-garde fantasia rings wild changes on the film-within-a-film format, beginning with an exasperated director shouting “Cut!” on an opening sequence set in hell. Later, the stars get stuck between film frames as chaos breaks out in the projection box. Hellzapoppin’ has an animation counterpart in Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953), in which Daffy Duck discovered the existential drawbacks of being a character in a cartoon.
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, 2014
Written by Bruce Wagner, this lurid black comedy about psychosexual excesses in Tinseltown may not be the freshest of its kind. But it proves that there’s always morbid fascination to be had from the simple observation, boldly stated, that movie folks are just plain crazy. The most exalted example remains Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard (1950), in which silent-era legend Gloria Swanson played Norma Desmond, a screen goddess lapsed into cobwebbed ruin. Cronenberg’s film is brazen fun, though, not least because of Julianne Moore, superb as a neurotic, narcissistic star - proof that the ghost of Norma Desmond hasn’t been exorcised from Beverly Hills yet.
It didn’t take cinema long to realise that the art form could be its own juiciest subject. Silent cinema’s most famous musing on itself is Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924), with the star as a projectionist dreaming himself into a movie. But eight years earlier, Charlie Chaplin made this illusion-puncturing short about the humdrum realities of the movie studio. Chaplin’s antics as a stage hand reveal the industrial nature of the silent film business, while a scowling director in dark glasses and cap worn backwards – grimly supervising a pie-throwing scene - is surely the first angst-ridden auteur to be depicted on screen.
The Player
Robert Altman, 1992
Producers are sometimes depicted on screen as monstrous yet magnificent (Kirk Douglas’s character in The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952), sometimes as just monstrous. But movie execs were never as abject as empty-souled, smooth-suited studio apparatchik Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins). Written by Michael Tolkin, this scabrous satire was Robert Altman’s gleeful revenge on the Hollywood system – with hordes of names from both sides of the camera showing solidarity by contributing cameos as themselves (Cher, Bruce Willis, screenwriter Buck Henry pitching a sequel to The Graduate). The opening shot, riffing on Orson Welles’sTouch of Evil, is the most spectacularly mounted movie in-joke ever.
Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, 1960
The film that launched a thousand film studies dissertations on the politics of “the gaze”, Peeping Tom also virtually ended the career of its maker, British pioneer Michael Powell. Written by Leo Marks, this thriller is a rare study of the film-maker as committed (not to say deranged) loner, with Carl Boehm as a duffel-coated voyeur obsessed with capturing the look of terror. Peeping Tom is a rarity because it captures image-making at all levels – from studio fodder, through the science documentaries of the hero’s father (played by Powell himself), to backroom porn. At first reviled, later revered, Peeping Tom is easily as influential as Psycho in opening up the dark mindset of cinema.
8 ½
Federico Fellini, 1963
Re-released this week, Fellini’s hyper-flamboyant autobiographical fantasia is, depending on your tolerance for the mirror gazing of maestros, one of the visionary peaks of cinematic modernism or an exercise in self-aggrandising solipsism that had the disastrous effect of encouraging generations of auteurs to take themselves deadly seriously. Marcello Mastroianni – who made agonised intellectuals look cooler and suaver than they ever do in real life – played Fellini surrogate Guido, a director running short of inspiration and making a movie in his head, out of his own life and loves. Nino Rota’s kaleidoscopic score keeps the whole crazy circus metaphor spinning to rapturous effect.
Le Mépris (Contempt)
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963
Based on an Alberto Moravia novel, Le Mépris finds Jean-Luc Godard ruefully moping over cinema’s lost glories while pushing the art form towards a radical future. The setting is Italy - Rome’s Cinecittà studios, then Capri - where the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself) is trying to film The Odyssey under the aegis of a philistine American producer (a magnificent Jack Palance). With its sublime Georges Delerue score, and a strange prelude featuring Brigitte Bardot’s meta-commentary on her own naked body, Le Mépris is the only Godard film that could make you conceivably cry as much as it makes you furrow your brow.
Singin’ in the Rain
Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952
The most beloved of all screen musicals is also the most scholarly – a mock film-historical piece about the travails of a silent cinema star, Don Lockwood (Kelly), struggling to make the transition into the talkies. Some of the film’s choicest humour is, a little cruelly, at the expense of lofty diva Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, priceless), Lockwood’s co-star in the preposterous The Duelling Cavalier, whose aura is destroyed by her Noo Yawk accent (“I cyan’t stan’im!”). Kelly and Donen’s classic, and the industry crisis it depicted, were paid due homage in Michel Hazanavicius’s brilliantly tricksy silent pastiche The Artist (2011).
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Wes Craven, 1994
Horror buffs’ fascination with genre rules has made terror an unlikely breeding ground for metafiction, notably in The Cabin in the Woods, Wes Craven’s Screamseries and The Human Centipede 2 (featuring a villain morbidly obsessed with The Human Centipede). Before Scream, Craven concluded his A Nightmare on Elm Street series with this paradox-laden contemplation of the perils attendant on trying to kill off his creation Freddy Krueger. Craven, Nightmare stars Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and even studio boss Robert Shaye all play themselves. The ingenuity is compelling, although this fared worse at the box office than any previous Nightmare.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang, 2003
Among cinema’s elegies to the lost wonders of the movie theatre – the most popular being the mawkish Cinema Paradiso – the richest and strangest comes from Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang. The setting is a Taipei cinema about to close; the film showing is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn. But we’re watching the staff and the sparse audience – the lonely cashier wandering the upstairs corridors, the punter idly flicking sunflower husks at the screen, the gay men cruising the toilets. Eerie, stately and glumly comic, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will strike a chord with you even if your own lost beloved fleapit was only a humble ABC.
Hellzapoppin’
HC Potter, 1941
Vaudeville comedians Olsen and Johnson would be forgotten if not for this delirious vehicle, nominally an adaptation of their Broadway stage hit. Ostensibly about an attempt to turn Hellzapoppin’ the show into a backstage musical, this surreal, altogether avant-garde fantasia rings wild changes on the film-within-a-film format, beginning with an exasperated director shouting “Cut!” on an opening sequence set in hell. Later, the stars get stuck between film frames as chaos breaks out in the projection box. Hellzapoppin’ has an animation counterpart in Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953), in which Daffy Duck discovered the existential drawbacks of being a character in a cartoon.
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, 2014
Written by Bruce Wagner, this lurid black comedy about psychosexual excesses in Tinseltown may not be the freshest of its kind. But it proves that there’s always morbid fascination to be had from the simple observation, boldly stated, that movie folks are just plain crazy. The most exalted example remains Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard (1950), in which silent-era legend Gloria Swanson played Norma Desmond, a screen goddess lapsed into cobwebbed ruin. Cronenberg’s film is brazen fun, though, not least because of Julianne Moore, superb as a neurotic, narcissistic star - proof that the ghost of Norma Desmond hasn’t been exorcised from Beverly Hills yet.
And surely...
Truffaut's Day for Night
Sturges' Sullivan's travels
Wilder's Sunset Boulevard
Minnelli's The Bad the Beautful
De Sica's After the Fox
Zieff's Hearts of the West
Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio
Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo
Rush's The Stuntman
And...?
Monday, 4 May 2015
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd - review
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd review – ‘Catholic, controlling and celibate’
The psychology that drove cinema’s master of suspense is unravelled in this insightful biography
Bee Wilson
Wednesday 25 March 2015
December 1943 was a low point in the life of Alfred Hitchcock. “I was alone and I didn’t know what to do,” the director recalled. Despite the pleasure he took in scaring his audiences, Hitchcock himself was “a shuddering, shivering human being”, in Peter Ackroyd’s words. During this unhappy period, at the age of 44, he had returned home to England to discuss making propaganda shorts for the Ministry of Information. His wife and collaborator, Alma, on whom he depended, was not with him; he huddled alone in a hotel room, nervously listening to the bombs drop.
In Hollywood, meanwhile, Hitchcock’s film, Lifeboat, which had taken twice as long as planned to film, was being savaged by the critics. Lifeboat was an anomalous project for the “Master of Suspense”, a largely static film about an ill-assorted group of American survivors who end up unwittingly sharing a boat with the Nazi officer who torpedoed their liner. The script, by John Steinbeck, was botched and needed extensive rewrites. It was an arduous shoot, with many of the cast getting ill from spending so much time drenched by the water tank on which the boat floated. The biggest star, Tallulah Bankhead, caught pneumonia. When it was finally released, at this critical moment of the war, some reviews condemned Hitchcock – unfairly – for not making the Nazi character seem vicious enough. One reviewer gave the movie “10 days to get out of town”.
“Yet,” writes Ackroyd, “Hitchcock did have work at hand.” That is an understatement. As well as creating those propaganda shorts – which ended up being shown in liberated France in 1944 – Hitchcock was in talks with the great Hollywood producer David Selznick about a new “psychological story”. This would end up as Spellbound(1945) starring Gregory Peck as an amnesiac and Ingrid Bergman as the beautiful psychiatrist who unlocks his troubled mind. Although far from being Hitchcock’s finest psychodrama – it lacks the haunting depth of Vertigo –Spellbound was a huge hit and was nominated for seven Oscars. But without drawing breath, Hitchcock was on to his next project, again with Bergman. This was the thriller Notorious, about as perfect a film as he ever made, in which an American agent played by Cary Grant persuades Bergman’s character to marry a Nazi, even though he is really in love with her himself. Notorious is soaringly romantic and impossibly tense, with possibly the best kiss in screen history. Once again, however, Hitchcock did not dwell on his achievement. He moved straight on to The Paradine Case, a courtroom drama. When he didn’t know what to do, what he did was work.
It is a cliche that biographers make their subjects in their own image. But reading this superb, insightful short life, it is hard to resist comparing Hitchcock’s prodigious appetite for work with Ackroyd’s own. The list of Ackroyd’s works includes substantial lives of Dickens and Eliot, numerous shorter lives and other non-fiction such as London: The Biography. By the same token, Hitchcock directed more than 60 films, and though not all were as good as Rear Window or North by Northwest, even the flops had magic in them.
Ackroyd does not seem the most obvious person to write about Hitchcock. His presiding obsessions have been with places (London, Venice, Albion) and writers (Milton, Dickens, Blake, Eliot) rather than film. For film fanatics, Ackroyd’s slim volume will offer no replacement for the more comprehensive treatment by Patrick McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light). Yet Ackroyd’s deft and moving biography proves that there is a fresh story to be told, and that he is the person to do it. Hitchcock grew up in a London that was recognisably still the city of Dickens. The director’s ability to mix “threat with pantomime” was a “cockney vision”, says Ackroyd. His imagination, too, was similar to that of Dickens. “They were both fantasists who insisted upon meticulous detail in the unravelling of their plots; they were both poised between art and commerce, with a keen taste for the making of money.”
Hitchcock was born in the final year of the 19th century above his father’s greengrocer’s shop in Leytonstone, but the family moved to a fishmonger’s in Limehouse when Alfred was six or seven. Ackroyd describes Limehouse at that time as a grimy neighbourhood of “small shops and houses standing a few feet back from the pavement, little plots of impoverished humanity”. As a boy, Hitchcock escaped from his surroundings by fantasising about travel. “He collected maps and timetables, tickets and schedules, and all the other paraphernalia of journeying”. He claimed that when he was eight, he had travelled on every single London Omnibus route.
According to Ackroyd’s account, perhaps the most important aspect of Hitchcock’s working-class upbringing was that his family was deeply Catholic, which instilled in “Alfie” (he became known as “Hitch” as an adult) a squeamishness about bodies and a “tremulous sense of guilt”. His Catholic education gave him a sense of “mystery and miracle”. What, after all, is “suspense”, but a riff on the Catholic sense of awe at the unknown forces of the universe? Hitchcock’s religious sensibility informed films such as Vertigo, which, to Ackroyd, is “a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn”. The final, chilling line is spoken by a nun: “God have mercy.”
The young Hitchcock had a “preternatural fear of authority of every kind” and complicated feelings about sex. After the conception of their daughter, Pat, it is thought that his relationship with Alma was celibate. One of his screenwriters, Arthur Laurents, said “he thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door – except himself”. But his Jesuit schooling at St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill also left him with an extraordinary work ethic. From the silent era to talkies, from England to Hollywood, from black and white to glorious Technicolor, from drama to horror, he was always toiling, and it is this aspect of Hitchcock’s personality that Ackroyd brings out most strongly.
We have been given many previous versions of Hitchcock. For François Truffaut, one of his earliest and most passionate fans, he was an auteur: the consummate artist. For biographer Donald Spoto in The Dark Side of Genius (1983), he was a creepy and deeply troubled man who acted out his inner demons on screen and was abusive towards his leading ladies. Ackroyd, far more convincingly, gives us Hitchcock the industrious craftsman. His work was a solace from his horrors and hang-ups rather than a straightforward depiction of them.
Ackroyd does not deny that the director often behaved controllingly towards the succession of untouchable blondes who starred in his films. Yet for most of his career, this dominating behaviour was a function of the work. On the set of Rebecca, for example, Hitchcock decided that Joan Fontaine’s performance as the nameless wife would be more convincing if he could make her think that the rest of the cast disliked her. On North by Northwest, he told Eva Marie Saint off for drinking coffee from a disposable cup. “You are wearing a $3,000 dress, and I don’t want the extras to see you quaffing from a Styrofoam cup.” It was only while shooting The Birds with Tippi Hedren that these personal demands tipped over from the behaviour of a perfectionist to that of a stalker. “I controlled every movement on her face,” he boasted. As well as making her suffer excessive violence from the birds during filming, he started telling her what she should wear, and even eat, in her spare time.
The psychology that drove cinema’s master of suspense is unravelled in this insightful biography
Bee Wilson
Wednesday 25 March 2015
December 1943 was a low point in the life of Alfred Hitchcock. “I was alone and I didn’t know what to do,” the director recalled. Despite the pleasure he took in scaring his audiences, Hitchcock himself was “a shuddering, shivering human being”, in Peter Ackroyd’s words. During this unhappy period, at the age of 44, he had returned home to England to discuss making propaganda shorts for the Ministry of Information. His wife and collaborator, Alma, on whom he depended, was not with him; he huddled alone in a hotel room, nervously listening to the bombs drop.
In Hollywood, meanwhile, Hitchcock’s film, Lifeboat, which had taken twice as long as planned to film, was being savaged by the critics. Lifeboat was an anomalous project for the “Master of Suspense”, a largely static film about an ill-assorted group of American survivors who end up unwittingly sharing a boat with the Nazi officer who torpedoed their liner. The script, by John Steinbeck, was botched and needed extensive rewrites. It was an arduous shoot, with many of the cast getting ill from spending so much time drenched by the water tank on which the boat floated. The biggest star, Tallulah Bankhead, caught pneumonia. When it was finally released, at this critical moment of the war, some reviews condemned Hitchcock – unfairly – for not making the Nazi character seem vicious enough. One reviewer gave the movie “10 days to get out of town”.
“Yet,” writes Ackroyd, “Hitchcock did have work at hand.” That is an understatement. As well as creating those propaganda shorts – which ended up being shown in liberated France in 1944 – Hitchcock was in talks with the great Hollywood producer David Selznick about a new “psychological story”. This would end up as Spellbound(1945) starring Gregory Peck as an amnesiac and Ingrid Bergman as the beautiful psychiatrist who unlocks his troubled mind. Although far from being Hitchcock’s finest psychodrama – it lacks the haunting depth of Vertigo –Spellbound was a huge hit and was nominated for seven Oscars. But without drawing breath, Hitchcock was on to his next project, again with Bergman. This was the thriller Notorious, about as perfect a film as he ever made, in which an American agent played by Cary Grant persuades Bergman’s character to marry a Nazi, even though he is really in love with her himself. Notorious is soaringly romantic and impossibly tense, with possibly the best kiss in screen history. Once again, however, Hitchcock did not dwell on his achievement. He moved straight on to The Paradine Case, a courtroom drama. When he didn’t know what to do, what he did was work.
It is a cliche that biographers make their subjects in their own image. But reading this superb, insightful short life, it is hard to resist comparing Hitchcock’s prodigious appetite for work with Ackroyd’s own. The list of Ackroyd’s works includes substantial lives of Dickens and Eliot, numerous shorter lives and other non-fiction such as London: The Biography. By the same token, Hitchcock directed more than 60 films, and though not all were as good as Rear Window or North by Northwest, even the flops had magic in them.
Ackroyd does not seem the most obvious person to write about Hitchcock. His presiding obsessions have been with places (London, Venice, Albion) and writers (Milton, Dickens, Blake, Eliot) rather than film. For film fanatics, Ackroyd’s slim volume will offer no replacement for the more comprehensive treatment by Patrick McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light). Yet Ackroyd’s deft and moving biography proves that there is a fresh story to be told, and that he is the person to do it. Hitchcock grew up in a London that was recognisably still the city of Dickens. The director’s ability to mix “threat with pantomime” was a “cockney vision”, says Ackroyd. His imagination, too, was similar to that of Dickens. “They were both fantasists who insisted upon meticulous detail in the unravelling of their plots; they were both poised between art and commerce, with a keen taste for the making of money.”
Hitchcock was born in the final year of the 19th century above his father’s greengrocer’s shop in Leytonstone, but the family moved to a fishmonger’s in Limehouse when Alfred was six or seven. Ackroyd describes Limehouse at that time as a grimy neighbourhood of “small shops and houses standing a few feet back from the pavement, little plots of impoverished humanity”. As a boy, Hitchcock escaped from his surroundings by fantasising about travel. “He collected maps and timetables, tickets and schedules, and all the other paraphernalia of journeying”. He claimed that when he was eight, he had travelled on every single London Omnibus route.
According to Ackroyd’s account, perhaps the most important aspect of Hitchcock’s working-class upbringing was that his family was deeply Catholic, which instilled in “Alfie” (he became known as “Hitch” as an adult) a squeamishness about bodies and a “tremulous sense of guilt”. His Catholic education gave him a sense of “mystery and miracle”. What, after all, is “suspense”, but a riff on the Catholic sense of awe at the unknown forces of the universe? Hitchcock’s religious sensibility informed films such as Vertigo, which, to Ackroyd, is “a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn”. The final, chilling line is spoken by a nun: “God have mercy.”
The young Hitchcock had a “preternatural fear of authority of every kind” and complicated feelings about sex. After the conception of their daughter, Pat, it is thought that his relationship with Alma was celibate. One of his screenwriters, Arthur Laurents, said “he thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door – except himself”. But his Jesuit schooling at St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill also left him with an extraordinary work ethic. From the silent era to talkies, from England to Hollywood, from black and white to glorious Technicolor, from drama to horror, he was always toiling, and it is this aspect of Hitchcock’s personality that Ackroyd brings out most strongly.
We have been given many previous versions of Hitchcock. For François Truffaut, one of his earliest and most passionate fans, he was an auteur: the consummate artist. For biographer Donald Spoto in The Dark Side of Genius (1983), he was a creepy and deeply troubled man who acted out his inner demons on screen and was abusive towards his leading ladies. Ackroyd, far more convincingly, gives us Hitchcock the industrious craftsman. His work was a solace from his horrors and hang-ups rather than a straightforward depiction of them.
Ackroyd does not deny that the director often behaved controllingly towards the succession of untouchable blondes who starred in his films. Yet for most of his career, this dominating behaviour was a function of the work. On the set of Rebecca, for example, Hitchcock decided that Joan Fontaine’s performance as the nameless wife would be more convincing if he could make her think that the rest of the cast disliked her. On North by Northwest, he told Eva Marie Saint off for drinking coffee from a disposable cup. “You are wearing a $3,000 dress, and I don’t want the extras to see you quaffing from a Styrofoam cup.” It was only while shooting The Birds with Tippi Hedren that these personal demands tipped over from the behaviour of a perfectionist to that of a stalker. “I controlled every movement on her face,” he boasted. As well as making her suffer excessive violence from the birds during filming, he started telling her what she should wear, and even eat, in her spare time.
But in Ackroyd’s telling, it was work and not blondes that dominated Hitchcock’s life. “I finished To Catch a Thief one afternoon at 5.30, and by 7.30 [The Trouble with] Harry was under way,” he boasted. The advantage of this relentless schedule was that there was little time for introspection. When actors asked him what their character’s “motivation” should be, he liked to reply “your salary”. The downside was that he was always so much in the thick of his work – cutting, revising – that he could not appreciate what he had achieved. After shooting Psycho, he talked with Bernard Herrmann, who composed the score, including its jabbing music for the shower scene. Herrmann recalled him pacing up and down, saying how bad it was and that he would have to “cut it down for his television show. He was crazy. He didn’t know what he had.”
When Psycho was released in the summer of 1960 to unprecedented success, making Hitchcock the richest film director in the world, he was so shocked that his incessant work urge was momentarily put on hold. “What will you do for an encore?” asked his agent, by telegram. “Hitchcock did not know,” writes Ackroyd.
And then he made The Birds.
When Psycho was released in the summer of 1960 to unprecedented success, making Hitchcock the richest film director in the world, he was so shocked that his incessant work urge was momentarily put on hold. “What will you do for an encore?” asked his agent, by telegram. “Hitchcock did not know,” writes Ackroyd.
And then he made The Birds.
‘Alfred Hitchcock’, by Peter Ackroyd
A new biography of the ‘master of suspense’ that emphasises the film-maker’s Catholic upbringing
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1612ead2-d78e-11e4-849b-00144feab7de.html
Duncan White
6 Apr 2015
The trailer for Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, begins with a life-size dummy of the director floating down the Thames in front of the Houses of Parliament.
The camera cuts to a close-up and Hitch, reclining in the water, tells us that the reason he is “floating around London like this” is that he is investigating “a very horrible murder”. “Rivers,” he warns us, “can be very sinister places.” It is so knowing it is practically pastiche. There is no doubt about who the star of this film is going to be.
By this late stage of his career, Hitchcock had become rather accomplished at playing himself. It was an instantly recognisable performance, honed in the vignettes that opened the hugely popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents: the jowls, the pendulous lower lip, the suits, the unflustered demeanour and the black humour. It is telling that he managed to create a brand out of his own silhouette.
The problem for the biographer is getting beyond this persona he inhabited so thoroughly. He told the same self-mythologising anecdotes in interview after interview and kept his distance from all but a very select few. There is something ultimately unknowable about Hitchcock.
Biographers abhor a vacuum. Most controversial among the extant biographies are Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius (1983) and Spellbound by Beauty (2008), in which Hitch is depicted sexually harassing his leading ladies and using his films to project the creepy desires he could not act on in his own life. It’s a portrait of Hitch as pervy Pygmalion. Patrick McGilligan’s A Life in Darkness and Light (2003), while generally more nuanced than Spoto’s, argued that Hitch was impotent.
So without any fresh revelatory material, Peter Ackroyd’s new biography has to work with what is already known. This can tempt novelist-biographers like Ackroyd to trespass where they are not wanted. In his Dickens biography Ackroyd took a critical kicking for depicting himself having chats with Charlie on the Tube. There is none of that kind of ostentation here. Alfred Hitchcock starts with the birth, ends with the death and works its way briskly through the films in between.
Yet, funnily enough, there is a lot of Ackroyd in this biography, but unobtrusively so, like a Hitchcock cameo. And a good thing it is, too, for the success of the enterprise depends on it. Why? Well, if there is any writer capable of imaginative sympathy with Hitchcock, it is Ackroyd. Both were brought up in strict Catholic households in lower-middle-class London and both were boys in whom there was a contradictory mix of shyness and ambition. Both developed an insatiable appetite for work. Both publicly declared themselves celibate. Hitchcock made some of his finest films late in his life; Ackroyd, at 65, seems to be gaining momentum.
Hitchcock made a great show of not taking his films too seriously – “it’s only a movie” – but was anxious that they were not taken seriously enough. He sought out highbrow collaborators, including Sean O’Casey, Thornton Wilder, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov. The only interviewer to get him to talk earnestly at any length was fellow director François Truffaut – and even then it took three days for him to open up. In this, Ackroyd argues, Hitchcock was like Dickens: both were “poets and visionaries who posed as practical men of the world”.
Ackroyd’s book is strong on the impact of London on Hitchcock. The opening pages draw on Henry James and Thomas De Quincey to evoke Limehouse at the turn of the century.
It was in this environment, Ackroyd argues, that Hitchcock developed his “Cockney vision of the world” in which terror and comedy were intertwined, a vision “adumbrated by Dickens and Chaplin”. While he stopped making explicitly London films when he moved to Hollywood (at least until Frenzy), the city shaped him.
A new biography of the ‘master of suspense’ that emphasises the film-maker’s Catholic upbringing
Ian Thomson
Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899 to devoutly Catholic parents, who reportedly instilled in him a fear of punishment and authority. For a trifling misdemeanour, the story goes, the boy Alfred was locked up at his own father’s request in a police cell. His most distinguished biographer, Donald Spoto, claimed that the “Master of Suspense” rejected religion in the late 1970s as death approached. Nevertheless, in Catholicism Hitchcock had found a sense of melodrama — an atmosphere of good and evil — that served him well as a film-maker.
In this brief biography, Peter Ackroyd highlights Hitchcock’s Jesuitical secondary school education at St Ignatius College in north London. From the Jesuits Hitchcock believed he learnt the virtues of order, control and precision as well as, no doubt, a strong sense of fear. The anxious Catholic priest played by an alcoholic Montgomery Clift in Hitchcock’s noirish masterpiece I Confess (1953), is blackmailed into keeping silent about a murder, yet, as a Catholic, he fears damnation, and Hitchcock establishes our empathy for him. Graham Greene, a fellow Catholic, was asked to write the script for the film, but he turned Hitchcock down.
Greene’s aversion to Hitchcock is well-known, but Ackroyd oddly makes nothing of it. Greene shared with Hitchcock a taste for sinister jeopardy and suspense in dowdy, broken-down locations, as well as a love of espionage thrillers in the John Buchan mould. In 1958, Hitchcock tried to acquire the film rights to Greene’s espionage “entertainment” Our Man in Havana; but, again, he was snubbed.
Hitchcock’s third production, The Lodger, was in many ways his first true film. Released in 1927, it starred the matinee idol Ivor Novello as a Jack the Ripper-like murder suspect and saw Hitchcock in his debut “cameo” role. Hitchcock did not want his audience to think, says Ackroyd, but to “bludgeon” and “titillate” them with suspense. Vital to the film’s success was the director’s future wife Alma Reville, the “doyenne of the cutting room”, and a no-nonsense assistant on set. Hitchcock later said, half-jokingly, that he would have become homosexual had he not met Alma. In the director’s dandified manner and keen interest in women’s couture Ackroyd nevertheless detects an undertow of near-Wildean campery.
As a Londoner and chronicler of London, Ackroyd co-opts Hitchcock into a tradition of metropolitan “cockney visionaries” that stretches back to Charles Dickens. The director’s lugubrious delivery in his hugely popular 1950s and early 1960s television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents suggests a London music hall comedy routine. Hitchcock’s off-colour jokes to camera (“I was once arrested for indecent exposure when I removed a Halloween mask”) have an edge of macabre sauciness. Hitchcock once said that if he made a film out of Cinderella, a corpse would have to roll out of the fairy-tale coach.
Ackroyd reminds us that “Hitch” was often described (not always flatteringly) as an artist of the surface; Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, North By Northwest and other great works of the 1950s radiate a “vivid unreality” and glazed elegance in the image-making that is pure mannered cinema. His leading actresses were all idealised, Madonna-like fantasy constructs; Grace Kelly was perhaps associated in his mind with the Catholic “light of grace” from his Jesuit school days, Ackroyd suggests, while Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) radiates a tremulous if sexually knowing beauty.
For all its insight, Peter Ackroyd’s biography is a deft synthesis of numerous other studies of “Alfred the Great”; it is well written, however, and unusually well attuned to the religious element. Over the half-century of his film-making career, Hitchcock created characters who try to hide their weaknesses from the world and themselves. He was, like Greene, a Catholic excited by human turpitude and evil. Pointedly, his great 1958 film Vertigo ends with words spoken by a nun: “I heard voices. God have mercy.”
Alfred Hitchcock, by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, RRP £12.99, 288 pages
3 April 2015
Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899 to devoutly Catholic parents, who reportedly instilled in him a fear of punishment and authority. For a trifling misdemeanour, the story goes, the boy Alfred was locked up at his own father’s request in a police cell. His most distinguished biographer, Donald Spoto, claimed that the “Master of Suspense” rejected religion in the late 1970s as death approached. Nevertheless, in Catholicism Hitchcock had found a sense of melodrama — an atmosphere of good and evil — that served him well as a film-maker.
In this brief biography, Peter Ackroyd highlights Hitchcock’s Jesuitical secondary school education at St Ignatius College in north London. From the Jesuits Hitchcock believed he learnt the virtues of order, control and precision as well as, no doubt, a strong sense of fear. The anxious Catholic priest played by an alcoholic Montgomery Clift in Hitchcock’s noirish masterpiece I Confess (1953), is blackmailed into keeping silent about a murder, yet, as a Catholic, he fears damnation, and Hitchcock establishes our empathy for him. Graham Greene, a fellow Catholic, was asked to write the script for the film, but he turned Hitchcock down.
Greene’s aversion to Hitchcock is well-known, but Ackroyd oddly makes nothing of it. Greene shared with Hitchcock a taste for sinister jeopardy and suspense in dowdy, broken-down locations, as well as a love of espionage thrillers in the John Buchan mould. In 1958, Hitchcock tried to acquire the film rights to Greene’s espionage “entertainment” Our Man in Havana; but, again, he was snubbed.
Hitchcock’s third production, The Lodger, was in many ways his first true film. Released in 1927, it starred the matinee idol Ivor Novello as a Jack the Ripper-like murder suspect and saw Hitchcock in his debut “cameo” role. Hitchcock did not want his audience to think, says Ackroyd, but to “bludgeon” and “titillate” them with suspense. Vital to the film’s success was the director’s future wife Alma Reville, the “doyenne of the cutting room”, and a no-nonsense assistant on set. Hitchcock later said, half-jokingly, that he would have become homosexual had he not met Alma. In the director’s dandified manner and keen interest in women’s couture Ackroyd nevertheless detects an undertow of near-Wildean campery.
As a Londoner and chronicler of London, Ackroyd co-opts Hitchcock into a tradition of metropolitan “cockney visionaries” that stretches back to Charles Dickens. The director’s lugubrious delivery in his hugely popular 1950s and early 1960s television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents suggests a London music hall comedy routine. Hitchcock’s off-colour jokes to camera (“I was once arrested for indecent exposure when I removed a Halloween mask”) have an edge of macabre sauciness. Hitchcock once said that if he made a film out of Cinderella, a corpse would have to roll out of the fairy-tale coach.
Ackroyd reminds us that “Hitch” was often described (not always flatteringly) as an artist of the surface; Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, North By Northwest and other great works of the 1950s radiate a “vivid unreality” and glazed elegance in the image-making that is pure mannered cinema. His leading actresses were all idealised, Madonna-like fantasy constructs; Grace Kelly was perhaps associated in his mind with the Catholic “light of grace” from his Jesuit school days, Ackroyd suggests, while Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) radiates a tremulous if sexually knowing beauty.
For all its insight, Peter Ackroyd’s biography is a deft synthesis of numerous other studies of “Alfred the Great”; it is well written, however, and unusually well attuned to the religious element. Over the half-century of his film-making career, Hitchcock created characters who try to hide their weaknesses from the world and themselves. He was, like Greene, a Catholic excited by human turpitude and evil. Pointedly, his great 1958 film Vertigo ends with words spoken by a nun: “I heard voices. God have mercy.”
Alfred Hitchcock, by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, RRP £12.99, 288 pages
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd: review
A new biography of the Psycho and The Birds director uncovers the life behind the persona, says Duncan WhiteDuncan White
6 Apr 2015
The trailer for Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, begins with a life-size dummy of the director floating down the Thames in front of the Houses of Parliament.
The camera cuts to a close-up and Hitch, reclining in the water, tells us that the reason he is “floating around London like this” is that he is investigating “a very horrible murder”. “Rivers,” he warns us, “can be very sinister places.” It is so knowing it is practically pastiche. There is no doubt about who the star of this film is going to be.
By this late stage of his career, Hitchcock had become rather accomplished at playing himself. It was an instantly recognisable performance, honed in the vignettes that opened the hugely popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents: the jowls, the pendulous lower lip, the suits, the unflustered demeanour and the black humour. It is telling that he managed to create a brand out of his own silhouette.
The problem for the biographer is getting beyond this persona he inhabited so thoroughly. He told the same self-mythologising anecdotes in interview after interview and kept his distance from all but a very select few. There is something ultimately unknowable about Hitchcock.
Biographers abhor a vacuum. Most controversial among the extant biographies are Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius (1983) and Spellbound by Beauty (2008), in which Hitch is depicted sexually harassing his leading ladies and using his films to project the creepy desires he could not act on in his own life. It’s a portrait of Hitch as pervy Pygmalion. Patrick McGilligan’s A Life in Darkness and Light (2003), while generally more nuanced than Spoto’s, argued that Hitch was impotent.
So without any fresh revelatory material, Peter Ackroyd’s new biography has to work with what is already known. This can tempt novelist-biographers like Ackroyd to trespass where they are not wanted. In his Dickens biography Ackroyd took a critical kicking for depicting himself having chats with Charlie on the Tube. There is none of that kind of ostentation here. Alfred Hitchcock starts with the birth, ends with the death and works its way briskly through the films in between.
Yet, funnily enough, there is a lot of Ackroyd in this biography, but unobtrusively so, like a Hitchcock cameo. And a good thing it is, too, for the success of the enterprise depends on it. Why? Well, if there is any writer capable of imaginative sympathy with Hitchcock, it is Ackroyd. Both were brought up in strict Catholic households in lower-middle-class London and both were boys in whom there was a contradictory mix of shyness and ambition. Both developed an insatiable appetite for work. Both publicly declared themselves celibate. Hitchcock made some of his finest films late in his life; Ackroyd, at 65, seems to be gaining momentum.
Hitchcock made a great show of not taking his films too seriously – “it’s only a movie” – but was anxious that they were not taken seriously enough. He sought out highbrow collaborators, including Sean O’Casey, Thornton Wilder, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov. The only interviewer to get him to talk earnestly at any length was fellow director François Truffaut – and even then it took three days for him to open up. In this, Ackroyd argues, Hitchcock was like Dickens: both were “poets and visionaries who posed as practical men of the world”.
Ackroyd’s book is strong on the impact of London on Hitchcock. The opening pages draw on Henry James and Thomas De Quincey to evoke Limehouse at the turn of the century.
It was in this environment, Ackroyd argues, that Hitchcock developed his “Cockney vision of the world” in which terror and comedy were intertwined, a vision “adumbrated by Dickens and Chaplin”. While he stopped making explicitly London films when he moved to Hollywood (at least until Frenzy), the city shaped him.
As the great films mount up and Hitchcock refines his Hitchcock act, Ackroyd exploits small insights to extrapolate a tangible personality. When his mother died in 1942, followed soon after by his brother, he lost 100lb. He clearly suffered intensely behind his mask. He found himself “uncommonly unattractive” so set himself up for a life of “anger, sorrow, dismay, despair, anxiety and loneliness”.
Ackroyd clearly made the decision not to let the psychosexual stuff determine his portrait. That does not mean he ignores Hitch’s famously obsessive and sadistic treatment of some of his leading ladies, especially Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie, just that he is careful to contextualise it. The closest to outright speculation is in the story of Hitchcock’s claim that, had he not met Alma Reville, his wife and collaborator, he might have become a “poof” (his word). Ackroyd, who is gay, points out that homosexuality is “almost a leitmotif” in Hitchcock’s films.
Ackroyd says the “secret” to Hitchcock’s film-making was not the expression of repressed desires but his ability to project his anxiety on to the screen. He was, Ackroyd writes, “a man filled with constant dread” that he could translate into moving images. He sought to exert absolute control over the creation of a cinematic world in which people lost control in terrifying ways. If he was generating the fear, he could not be subject to it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11513992/Alfred-Hitchcock-by-Peter-Ackroyd-review.htmlAckroyd clearly made the decision not to let the psychosexual stuff determine his portrait. That does not mean he ignores Hitch’s famously obsessive and sadistic treatment of some of his leading ladies, especially Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie, just that he is careful to contextualise it. The closest to outright speculation is in the story of Hitchcock’s claim that, had he not met Alma Reville, his wife and collaborator, he might have become a “poof” (his word). Ackroyd, who is gay, points out that homosexuality is “almost a leitmotif” in Hitchcock’s films.
Ackroyd says the “secret” to Hitchcock’s film-making was not the expression of repressed desires but his ability to project his anxiety on to the screen. He was, Ackroyd writes, “a man filled with constant dread” that he could translate into moving images. He sought to exert absolute control over the creation of a cinematic world in which people lost control in terrifying ways. If he was generating the fear, he could not be subject to it.
Let's be honest, this is an easy read and Ackroyd's at his best when talking about his early life in London. There are many, many better books on Hitchcock, however.
Sunday, 3 May 2015
Ruth Rendell RIP
No one can equal Ruth Rendell's range or accomplishment
Current British crime writing owes much to a writer who consistently showed that the genre can continually reinvent itself
Val McDermid
Saturday 2 May 2015
I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats:
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Ruth Rendell was deservedly the most decorated of British crime writers. Among her many distinctions were a clutch of Daggers (four gold, one silver and the diamond for a lifetime of achievement) and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America who also gave her their Grandmaster Award. She was also garlanded with the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.
None of that happened by accident or luck. Talent played its part but so too did hard graft. A book flowed from her prolific pen approximately every nine months. Her Stakhanovite work rate as a writer and as a working peer made most of us feel like dilettantes. And her reach always exceeded her grasp. Years ago, starstruck and young in my career, I said to her: “I suppose when you’ve written as many books as you have, it gets easier.”
She looked at me with a steely twinkle and said rather sternly: “No. It gets harder.” I didn’t understand that then but 20 years on, I get it.
Ruth was unique. No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners. The broad church that is current British crime writing owes much to a writer who over a 50-year career consistently demonstrated that the genre can continually reinvent itself, moving in new directions, assuming new concerns and exploring new ways of telling stories. And doing it all in a smoothly satisfying prose style.
Along with her contemporaries PD James and Reginald Hill, Ruth transformed what had become a staid and formulaic genre into something that offered scope for a different kind of crime novel. In their separate ways they turned it into a prism for examining the world around them with a critical eye. Their work kicked a door open for subsequent generations of crime writers to storm through and their popularity among readers gave others the confidence to follow in their footsteps, secure in the knowledge that an audience existed for crime fiction that wasn’t pulp.
To lose all three of them in the space of two short years is hard to bear. All those books unwritten, unshared. Because if they’d had more time, there would have been more. All three of them were writing right up to the end. Some writers run out of steam. None of them did.
I first encountered Ruth’s work in the early 70s, when I picked up a copy of her debut novel, From Doon With Death, in the second-hand bookshop in Oxford’s Cowley Road where I bought most of my recreational reading. I devoured crime fiction in all shapes and forms, but I’d never read anything quite like this.
Inspector Reg Wexford wasn’t an aristocrat or a brilliant Oxbridge wit. He didn’t inhabit rarefied social circles or drive a Bentley. He wasn’t the idiot foil to some brilliant amateur. He was a decent bloke with a wife and grown-up daughters who struggled to make sense of the things we do to each other. He was blessed with intelligence and common sense but he was as flawed as the rest of us and he felt like someone you might meet in your local pub.
But it wasn’t simply that Ruth had created a cast of characters who felt rooted in reality. She also wrote about human relationships in a way that no other crime writer was doing then. The hinge on which From Doon With Death turns is lesbian love. Not coyly hinted at, as had been the way previously, but dealt with head-on in the most matter-of-fact manner. It was the first time I’d read a mainstream novel that made me feel fiction could embrace all of who I was without making a big deal of it.
The classic Rendell hallmarks were all there from the beginning – the sense of place, the delicate filleting of the characters’ psyches, the avoidance of the prosaic both in character and in motivation.
Right from the start, Ruth also demonstrated a keen fascination with the collision between society and the individual, particularly where circumstances drive the individual to behaviour that society regards as somehow abnormal. Stable structures had only limited interest to her as a novelist; what set her creativity flowing was the point where things start to fall apart, and that was where Ruth excelled. Never content with mere description, she illuminated the human condition in all its obsessive complexity in a style that was invariably clear and compelling. She took time and trouble with her prose, reading it back to herself out loud, and her meticulousness shows.
Her politics too were a key aspect of her writing. The reason she was a baroness was not simply because she was distinguished in her field. She was a lifelong Labour supporter, committed actively to equality and humanitarian causes. Those political concerns found their way into her work, demonstrating the particular ability of the crime novel to engage with social issues because its cast of characters is drawn from so many strata of society.
But Ruth didn’t deal with politics in a tub-thumping, special pleading sort of way. She was far too subtle a novelist for that. Because she was a political animal, because these were her concerns in her own life, they inevitably emerge in her work, implicated in the darkness.
Perhaps one of the key reasons for the sustained quality of the Wexford novels is Ruth’s habit of variety. From the beginning of her career, she made it plain that she would not be pigeonholed into writing one kind of novel only. Her second novel, To Fear a Painted Devil, was a standalone with its roots in the classic English mystery. However, it bloomed into something very different under her care, giving us the first real hint of her skills as an anatomist of the abnormal human psyche.
As if it wasn’t enough to write a successful series regularly interspersed with non-series novels, in 1986, Ruth reinvented herself as Barbara Vine. These novels of psychological suspense have the recurring theme of the long shadows cast by the past. In the Vine novels, the sense of place is even stronger than in the Rendells, sometimes assuming as much importance as the characters themselves. The Vines are themselves a significant body of work, revealing us to ourselves, negotiating the journey between past and present, between who we really are and who we present to the world.
This variety of outlets for her talent meant Ruth reduced the likelihood of becoming bored with her Kingsmarkham characters, bringing fresh interest to each Wexford chronicle. It also means she was never frustrated by the very real constraints that series writing imposes. When her imagination presented her with a story that clearly couldn’t be forced into the Wexford mould, that needed more scope and depth than the psychological Rendells offered, she gave herself the means to maximise its potential in another form.
If she had written nothing but the Barbara Vine novels, I believe Ruth would be regarded in a different light. She’d have been seen more in the terms offered to the likes of Kate Atkinson and John Banville – serious writers of fiction who can also turn their hands to the stylistic possibilities of genre. She’d have been on the shortlist for the Booker and the Women’s Prize and all those other awards that turn their face against genres other than literary fiction.
But once a crime writer, always a crime writer. There’s no shame in that, of course. We take as much pride in our work as anyone else. Ruth brought both pleasure and insight to millions of readers over the years, after all.
We still have the books, of course. What we’ve lost is the woman at the heart of them. Her shrewd assessments of herself and of others were always refreshing; her company always stimulating. One of the abiding memories I have of her is from the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in the summer of 2013, in Harrogate. We had given her the festival’s award for outstanding contribution to crime writing at the opening ceremony the previous evening, and Ruth had just appeared on stage in conversation with her dear friend Jeanette Winterson.
It had been a remarkable session – revelatory, irreverent, funny, generous and packed with nuggets of information about her practice as a writer. And afterwards, we sat on the lawn in the sun, talking and laughing about books and cats and mutual friends. Ruth wasn’t a sentimental person so I’m not going to say more about it than this: today, in the grey and windy cold, I’m glad I had that morning in the sunshine.
Saturday 2 May 2015
I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats:
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Ruth Rendell was deservedly the most decorated of British crime writers. Among her many distinctions were a clutch of Daggers (four gold, one silver and the diamond for a lifetime of achievement) and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America who also gave her their Grandmaster Award. She was also garlanded with the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.
None of that happened by accident or luck. Talent played its part but so too did hard graft. A book flowed from her prolific pen approximately every nine months. Her Stakhanovite work rate as a writer and as a working peer made most of us feel like dilettantes. And her reach always exceeded her grasp. Years ago, starstruck and young in my career, I said to her: “I suppose when you’ve written as many books as you have, it gets easier.”
She looked at me with a steely twinkle and said rather sternly: “No. It gets harder.” I didn’t understand that then but 20 years on, I get it.
Ruth was unique. No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners. The broad church that is current British crime writing owes much to a writer who over a 50-year career consistently demonstrated that the genre can continually reinvent itself, moving in new directions, assuming new concerns and exploring new ways of telling stories. And doing it all in a smoothly satisfying prose style.
Along with her contemporaries PD James and Reginald Hill, Ruth transformed what had become a staid and formulaic genre into something that offered scope for a different kind of crime novel. In their separate ways they turned it into a prism for examining the world around them with a critical eye. Their work kicked a door open for subsequent generations of crime writers to storm through and their popularity among readers gave others the confidence to follow in their footsteps, secure in the knowledge that an audience existed for crime fiction that wasn’t pulp.
To lose all three of them in the space of two short years is hard to bear. All those books unwritten, unshared. Because if they’d had more time, there would have been more. All three of them were writing right up to the end. Some writers run out of steam. None of them did.
I first encountered Ruth’s work in the early 70s, when I picked up a copy of her debut novel, From Doon With Death, in the second-hand bookshop in Oxford’s Cowley Road where I bought most of my recreational reading. I devoured crime fiction in all shapes and forms, but I’d never read anything quite like this.
Inspector Reg Wexford wasn’t an aristocrat or a brilliant Oxbridge wit. He didn’t inhabit rarefied social circles or drive a Bentley. He wasn’t the idiot foil to some brilliant amateur. He was a decent bloke with a wife and grown-up daughters who struggled to make sense of the things we do to each other. He was blessed with intelligence and common sense but he was as flawed as the rest of us and he felt like someone you might meet in your local pub.
But it wasn’t simply that Ruth had created a cast of characters who felt rooted in reality. She also wrote about human relationships in a way that no other crime writer was doing then. The hinge on which From Doon With Death turns is lesbian love. Not coyly hinted at, as had been the way previously, but dealt with head-on in the most matter-of-fact manner. It was the first time I’d read a mainstream novel that made me feel fiction could embrace all of who I was without making a big deal of it.
The classic Rendell hallmarks were all there from the beginning – the sense of place, the delicate filleting of the characters’ psyches, the avoidance of the prosaic both in character and in motivation.
Right from the start, Ruth also demonstrated a keen fascination with the collision between society and the individual, particularly where circumstances drive the individual to behaviour that society regards as somehow abnormal. Stable structures had only limited interest to her as a novelist; what set her creativity flowing was the point where things start to fall apart, and that was where Ruth excelled. Never content with mere description, she illuminated the human condition in all its obsessive complexity in a style that was invariably clear and compelling. She took time and trouble with her prose, reading it back to herself out loud, and her meticulousness shows.
Her politics too were a key aspect of her writing. The reason she was a baroness was not simply because she was distinguished in her field. She was a lifelong Labour supporter, committed actively to equality and humanitarian causes. Those political concerns found their way into her work, demonstrating the particular ability of the crime novel to engage with social issues because its cast of characters is drawn from so many strata of society.
But Ruth didn’t deal with politics in a tub-thumping, special pleading sort of way. She was far too subtle a novelist for that. Because she was a political animal, because these were her concerns in her own life, they inevitably emerge in her work, implicated in the darkness.
Perhaps one of the key reasons for the sustained quality of the Wexford novels is Ruth’s habit of variety. From the beginning of her career, she made it plain that she would not be pigeonholed into writing one kind of novel only. Her second novel, To Fear a Painted Devil, was a standalone with its roots in the classic English mystery. However, it bloomed into something very different under her care, giving us the first real hint of her skills as an anatomist of the abnormal human psyche.
As if it wasn’t enough to write a successful series regularly interspersed with non-series novels, in 1986, Ruth reinvented herself as Barbara Vine. These novels of psychological suspense have the recurring theme of the long shadows cast by the past. In the Vine novels, the sense of place is even stronger than in the Rendells, sometimes assuming as much importance as the characters themselves. The Vines are themselves a significant body of work, revealing us to ourselves, negotiating the journey between past and present, between who we really are and who we present to the world.
This variety of outlets for her talent meant Ruth reduced the likelihood of becoming bored with her Kingsmarkham characters, bringing fresh interest to each Wexford chronicle. It also means she was never frustrated by the very real constraints that series writing imposes. When her imagination presented her with a story that clearly couldn’t be forced into the Wexford mould, that needed more scope and depth than the psychological Rendells offered, she gave herself the means to maximise its potential in another form.
If she had written nothing but the Barbara Vine novels, I believe Ruth would be regarded in a different light. She’d have been seen more in the terms offered to the likes of Kate Atkinson and John Banville – serious writers of fiction who can also turn their hands to the stylistic possibilities of genre. She’d have been on the shortlist for the Booker and the Women’s Prize and all those other awards that turn their face against genres other than literary fiction.
But once a crime writer, always a crime writer. There’s no shame in that, of course. We take as much pride in our work as anyone else. Ruth brought both pleasure and insight to millions of readers over the years, after all.
We still have the books, of course. What we’ve lost is the woman at the heart of them. Her shrewd assessments of herself and of others were always refreshing; her company always stimulating. One of the abiding memories I have of her is from the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in the summer of 2013, in Harrogate. We had given her the festival’s award for outstanding contribution to crime writing at the opening ceremony the previous evening, and Ruth had just appeared on stage in conversation with her dear friend Jeanette Winterson.
It had been a remarkable session – revelatory, irreverent, funny, generous and packed with nuggets of information about her practice as a writer. And afterwards, we sat on the lawn in the sun, talking and laughing about books and cats and mutual friends. Ruth wasn’t a sentimental person so I’m not going to say more about it than this: today, in the grey and windy cold, I’m glad I had that morning in the sunshine.
Saturday, 2 May 2015
Ben E. King RIP
Ben E King obituary
Soul singer with one of the most distinctive voices of his era
Richard Williams
Friday 1 May 2015
Ben E King appeared at a time when pop music was pausing for breath between the wakeup call sounded by the first generation of American rock’n’rollers and the blast of energy provided from across the water by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. His distinctive voice, shaped by the fervour of black church music but capable of a suavely seductive romanticism, was heard on such hits as Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me.
King, who has died aged 76, first made his name as the lead singer of the Drifters, with a handful of hit singles that embodied the best elements of Brill Building pop, in which the sounds of rhythm and blues and gospel music were brought to bear on custom-made songs with simple, catchy and inventive melodies, swathed in imaginative, often sophisticated arrangements.
His run of hits with the Drifters started in the summer of 1959 with There Goes My Baby, his own composition, which is generally thought of as the first R&B single to feature strings, thereby paving the way for the often elaborate, pop-slanted stylings of soul music. Along with his near-contemporaries Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, James Brown and Solomon Burke, King had a good claim to be considered a member of the first wave of genuine soul singers.
During the next year, his other hits with the Drifters included This Magic Moment, I Count the Tears and Save the Last Dance For Me. The last of those, along with the Shirelles’ Will You Love Me Tomorrow, can be seen as representing the artistic peak of the Brill Building style. Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me were the fruit of his subsequent solo career, along with Don’t Play That Song and I (Who Have Nothing). They were followed almost a decade and a half later by Supernatural Thing, a disco favourite which gave him his last top 10 entry until 1986, when the appearance of Stand By Me in a successful film of the same name prompted a reissue that took the song back to the top of the UK charts, allowing a new generation to enjoy his polished but heartfelt delivery.
He was born Benjamin Earl Nelson in Henderson, North Carolina, and moved to New York with his family at the age of nine, part of the migration of black workers from the southern states to the more prosperous cities of the industrialised north. As a teenager in Harlem, where he helped out in his father’s three restaurants, he sang in church choirs but also joined his school friends in a street-corner vocal group, the Four Bs, imitating the harmonies they heard in recordings by such doo-wop heroes as the Cadillacs, the Five Satins, the Charms, the Moonglows, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. His unusual vocal flexibility, spanning the range from bass to tenor, enabled him to sing virtually all the lead and harmony parts.
At 20, he joined a group called the Five Crowns, singing baritone and bass. His parents had tried to talk him out of a career in show business, but in their second year of existence the group had a sudden and unexpected stroke of luck when they inherited the name and high reputation of an already successful group, the Drifters. Founded in 1953, the Drifters had already enjoyed hits with Money Honey, Ruby Baby and other songs, featuring the lead vocals of Clyde McPhatter and Johnny Moore. In 1959, however, army conscription and arguments over money led their manager, George Treadwell, to fire the group and look for replacements, exercising the rights he had secured when buying McPhatter’s share of the name several years earlier.
Treadwell approached Lover Patterson, manager of the Five Crowns, and reached an agreement which saw Benny Nelson (about to be rechristened Ben E King) and three of his fellow group members – Charlie Thomas, Doc Green and Elsbeary Hobbs – become the new Drifters, with Patterson as their road manager. Legal proceedings were begun by various former Drifters, resulting in a variety of groups touring the world for many years afterwards under names such as the Original Drifters or the Fabulous Drifters.
The recording contract with the Atlantic label, however, was held by Treadwell, and an undisturbed flow of releases ensured that his group was associated with the name in the public mind – particularly when the producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller took There Goes My Baby and surrounded King’s song (for which Treadwell and Patterson were given co-composers’ credits) with a wholly novel arrangement featuring swirling violins, aggressive violas and strangely muffled percussion effects. Its murky aura caught the attention, taking the record to No 2 in the US pop charts and No 1 in the R&B lists.
King was now the undisputed lead singer of the group, and a cleaner, crisper version of the same formula allowed Dance With Me, written by Leiber and Stoller, to perform even better. The approach reached its zenith with Save the Last Dance for Me, an elegant combination of words and music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, set to an orchestration based on the swaying Latin baion rhythm, with which Leiber and Stoller had fallen in love after encountering it on a soundtrack album.
But disputes between Treadwell on one hand and Patterson and King on the other, over a salary increase and a more equitable share of royalties, led to the singer’s departure from the group at the height of their success. Patterson had King under a personal management contract, and refused to allow him to continue touring as a part of Treadwell’s Drifters. His solo career had begun, with the invaluable backing of Atlantic records, on whose Atco subsidiary his releases were to appear.
It was with Spanish Harlem that he stamped his own identity on the airwaves and the pop charts in the early weeks of 1961. Here was an instant pop classic, Leiber’s romantic, evocative lyric perfectly matching a melody, composed by the 21-year-old wunderkind Phil Spector, that artfully heightened the drama by suddenly tightening in the middle couplet of each six-line verse before gently releasing the consequent tension. Accompanied only by a marimba, a double bass, a choked triangle, a bass drum and a discreet backing choir, with those swirling strings and a solo soprano saxophone creating an instrumental interlude, King’s rich, ardent voice was at its most compelling, and the record became his first solo top 10 hit.
With Stand By Me, a few months later, he had his first R&B No 1, and went to No 4 on the pop charts. Credited to Leiber and Stoller (under their regular nom de plume) and King, it was based, like many early soul songs, squarely on an old gospel tune. Again the arrangement was spare but highly effective, inspiring King to respond with a majestic performance in which powerful emotions were typically expressed with a dignified restraint – King wrote the words about his wife-to-be, Betty, whom he would marry in 1964. Taking his birth surname, she was known as Betty Nelson, and survives him, along with a son and two daughters.
There had been a Latin rhythmic undertow to all these records, and Amor made it more explicit, not entirely to King’s benefit. Pomus and Shuman’s Here Comes the Night, his last release of a hectic year, was perhaps too subtle to win great success – it barely crept into the top 100 – but showed the singer at his very best, his phrasing beautifully judged over the melody’s complex, flamenco-inspired syncopations and yet another imaginative orchestration.
The last big hit of this phase of King’s career came in 1962 with Don’t Play That Song (You Lied). Co-written (with Betty Nelson) under a pseudonym by Ahmet Ertegün, a Turkish diplomat’s son who had founded Atlantic Records, its plaintive accusations suited the singer perfectly. Like Spanish Harlem, it would find a second life in the hands of Aretha Franklin, another Atlantic artist, while Stand By Me eventually found another effective interpreter in John Lennon. All three songs have become standards.
King continued to record throughout the 60s, but the uneven quality of albums such as Ben E King Sings for Soulful Lovers and Seven Letters indicate that he, or his producers, was unsure of his direction. Yet cheek by jowl with the likes of Jamaica and Si Senor, where he was unwisely persuaded to croon in the accents of the Caribbean and Central America, came It’s All Over, a classically proportioned ballad written by Bert Berns and Mike Leander, on which his core credentials were triumphantly reaffirmed, enabling him to provide the answer to the question posed by the title of another of his mid-60s singles: What Is Soul?
Further success proved elusive, however, until 1975, when Ertegün encountered him singing in a Miami nightspot and invited him to return to Atlantic. The slinky Supernatural Thing, the first record under the new deal, became part of the overture to the disco boom, its success allowing him to emerge from the world of supper clubs and oldies shows. Later in the decade he collaborated with the Average White Band, and subsequent recordings found him diversifying into jazz alongside Milt Jackson, the vibraphonist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and David “Fathead” Newman, Ray Charles’s longtime tenor saxophone soloist, with a 2003 album recorded live at the Blue Note club in New York. His last album, Heart & Soul, was released in 2010.
King was arguably too urbane and mature a performer, despite his southern roots, to upstage his more unbuttoned rivals at a time when soul music was at its peak. He could nevertheless claim to possess one of the era’s most distinguished voices, his warm tone and polished phrasing indelibly associated with definitive performances of a handful of songs that were written with short-term success in mind but whose appeal now seems ageless.
• Ben E King (Benjamin Earl Nelson), singer and songwriter, born 28 September 1938; died 30 April 2015
Soul singer with one of the most distinctive voices of his era
Richard Williams
Friday 1 May 2015
Ben E King appeared at a time when pop music was pausing for breath between the wakeup call sounded by the first generation of American rock’n’rollers and the blast of energy provided from across the water by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. His distinctive voice, shaped by the fervour of black church music but capable of a suavely seductive romanticism, was heard on such hits as Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me.
King, who has died aged 76, first made his name as the lead singer of the Drifters, with a handful of hit singles that embodied the best elements of Brill Building pop, in which the sounds of rhythm and blues and gospel music were brought to bear on custom-made songs with simple, catchy and inventive melodies, swathed in imaginative, often sophisticated arrangements.
His run of hits with the Drifters started in the summer of 1959 with There Goes My Baby, his own composition, which is generally thought of as the first R&B single to feature strings, thereby paving the way for the often elaborate, pop-slanted stylings of soul music. Along with his near-contemporaries Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, James Brown and Solomon Burke, King had a good claim to be considered a member of the first wave of genuine soul singers.
During the next year, his other hits with the Drifters included This Magic Moment, I Count the Tears and Save the Last Dance For Me. The last of those, along with the Shirelles’ Will You Love Me Tomorrow, can be seen as representing the artistic peak of the Brill Building style. Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me were the fruit of his subsequent solo career, along with Don’t Play That Song and I (Who Have Nothing). They were followed almost a decade and a half later by Supernatural Thing, a disco favourite which gave him his last top 10 entry until 1986, when the appearance of Stand By Me in a successful film of the same name prompted a reissue that took the song back to the top of the UK charts, allowing a new generation to enjoy his polished but heartfelt delivery.
He was born Benjamin Earl Nelson in Henderson, North Carolina, and moved to New York with his family at the age of nine, part of the migration of black workers from the southern states to the more prosperous cities of the industrialised north. As a teenager in Harlem, where he helped out in his father’s three restaurants, he sang in church choirs but also joined his school friends in a street-corner vocal group, the Four Bs, imitating the harmonies they heard in recordings by such doo-wop heroes as the Cadillacs, the Five Satins, the Charms, the Moonglows, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. His unusual vocal flexibility, spanning the range from bass to tenor, enabled him to sing virtually all the lead and harmony parts.
At 20, he joined a group called the Five Crowns, singing baritone and bass. His parents had tried to talk him out of a career in show business, but in their second year of existence the group had a sudden and unexpected stroke of luck when they inherited the name and high reputation of an already successful group, the Drifters. Founded in 1953, the Drifters had already enjoyed hits with Money Honey, Ruby Baby and other songs, featuring the lead vocals of Clyde McPhatter and Johnny Moore. In 1959, however, army conscription and arguments over money led their manager, George Treadwell, to fire the group and look for replacements, exercising the rights he had secured when buying McPhatter’s share of the name several years earlier.
Treadwell approached Lover Patterson, manager of the Five Crowns, and reached an agreement which saw Benny Nelson (about to be rechristened Ben E King) and three of his fellow group members – Charlie Thomas, Doc Green and Elsbeary Hobbs – become the new Drifters, with Patterson as their road manager. Legal proceedings were begun by various former Drifters, resulting in a variety of groups touring the world for many years afterwards under names such as the Original Drifters or the Fabulous Drifters.
The recording contract with the Atlantic label, however, was held by Treadwell, and an undisturbed flow of releases ensured that his group was associated with the name in the public mind – particularly when the producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller took There Goes My Baby and surrounded King’s song (for which Treadwell and Patterson were given co-composers’ credits) with a wholly novel arrangement featuring swirling violins, aggressive violas and strangely muffled percussion effects. Its murky aura caught the attention, taking the record to No 2 in the US pop charts and No 1 in the R&B lists.
King was now the undisputed lead singer of the group, and a cleaner, crisper version of the same formula allowed Dance With Me, written by Leiber and Stoller, to perform even better. The approach reached its zenith with Save the Last Dance for Me, an elegant combination of words and music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, set to an orchestration based on the swaying Latin baion rhythm, with which Leiber and Stoller had fallen in love after encountering it on a soundtrack album.
But disputes between Treadwell on one hand and Patterson and King on the other, over a salary increase and a more equitable share of royalties, led to the singer’s departure from the group at the height of their success. Patterson had King under a personal management contract, and refused to allow him to continue touring as a part of Treadwell’s Drifters. His solo career had begun, with the invaluable backing of Atlantic records, on whose Atco subsidiary his releases were to appear.
It was with Spanish Harlem that he stamped his own identity on the airwaves and the pop charts in the early weeks of 1961. Here was an instant pop classic, Leiber’s romantic, evocative lyric perfectly matching a melody, composed by the 21-year-old wunderkind Phil Spector, that artfully heightened the drama by suddenly tightening in the middle couplet of each six-line verse before gently releasing the consequent tension. Accompanied only by a marimba, a double bass, a choked triangle, a bass drum and a discreet backing choir, with those swirling strings and a solo soprano saxophone creating an instrumental interlude, King’s rich, ardent voice was at its most compelling, and the record became his first solo top 10 hit.
With Stand By Me, a few months later, he had his first R&B No 1, and went to No 4 on the pop charts. Credited to Leiber and Stoller (under their regular nom de plume) and King, it was based, like many early soul songs, squarely on an old gospel tune. Again the arrangement was spare but highly effective, inspiring King to respond with a majestic performance in which powerful emotions were typically expressed with a dignified restraint – King wrote the words about his wife-to-be, Betty, whom he would marry in 1964. Taking his birth surname, she was known as Betty Nelson, and survives him, along with a son and two daughters.
There had been a Latin rhythmic undertow to all these records, and Amor made it more explicit, not entirely to King’s benefit. Pomus and Shuman’s Here Comes the Night, his last release of a hectic year, was perhaps too subtle to win great success – it barely crept into the top 100 – but showed the singer at his very best, his phrasing beautifully judged over the melody’s complex, flamenco-inspired syncopations and yet another imaginative orchestration.
The last big hit of this phase of King’s career came in 1962 with Don’t Play That Song (You Lied). Co-written (with Betty Nelson) under a pseudonym by Ahmet Ertegün, a Turkish diplomat’s son who had founded Atlantic Records, its plaintive accusations suited the singer perfectly. Like Spanish Harlem, it would find a second life in the hands of Aretha Franklin, another Atlantic artist, while Stand By Me eventually found another effective interpreter in John Lennon. All three songs have become standards.
King continued to record throughout the 60s, but the uneven quality of albums such as Ben E King Sings for Soulful Lovers and Seven Letters indicate that he, or his producers, was unsure of his direction. Yet cheek by jowl with the likes of Jamaica and Si Senor, where he was unwisely persuaded to croon in the accents of the Caribbean and Central America, came It’s All Over, a classically proportioned ballad written by Bert Berns and Mike Leander, on which his core credentials were triumphantly reaffirmed, enabling him to provide the answer to the question posed by the title of another of his mid-60s singles: What Is Soul?
Further success proved elusive, however, until 1975, when Ertegün encountered him singing in a Miami nightspot and invited him to return to Atlantic. The slinky Supernatural Thing, the first record under the new deal, became part of the overture to the disco boom, its success allowing him to emerge from the world of supper clubs and oldies shows. Later in the decade he collaborated with the Average White Band, and subsequent recordings found him diversifying into jazz alongside Milt Jackson, the vibraphonist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and David “Fathead” Newman, Ray Charles’s longtime tenor saxophone soloist, with a 2003 album recorded live at the Blue Note club in New York. His last album, Heart & Soul, was released in 2010.
King was arguably too urbane and mature a performer, despite his southern roots, to upstage his more unbuttoned rivals at a time when soul music was at its peak. He could nevertheless claim to possess one of the era’s most distinguished voices, his warm tone and polished phrasing indelibly associated with definitive performances of a handful of songs that were written with short-term success in mind but whose appeal now seems ageless.
• Ben E King (Benjamin Earl Nelson), singer and songwriter, born 28 September 1938; died 30 April 2015
Ben E King’s Stand By Me: a song as enduring as the love that inspired it
Fifty-five years after it was written, the original version still wields the kind of emotional heft that can reduce people to tears
Tim Jonze
Friday 1 May 2015
As is the case with all the great pop songs, you can identify Stand By Me by its opening few notes. Mike Stoller’s simple bassline, built around a 50s doo-wop chord progression, is decorated with little more than the faint ting of a triangle and the scrape of a gourd guiro – yet the effect is instant. King’s gospel-infused vocals followed this approach: the strength of his feelings imparted with no need for histrionics.
Fifty-five years after it was written, King’s original version still wields the kind of emotional heft that can reduce people to tears, and get others on their feet at weddings. Yet not everyone saw its magic at first. King had originally intended the song for his band the Drifters, before he left that group in 1960 – it was only after a songwriting session with Stoller and Jerry Lieber had come to an end, and they asked if he had any other songs in the locker, that he put it forward. “I wasn’t trying to make a hit,” he told the Guardian in 2013. According to King, legendary producer Jerry Wexler was even less aware of its magic: “He hated it because we’d gone into overtime in the studio with an expensive orchestra.”
Such disregard for the budget probably didn’t bother Wexler for long. Stand By Me was a top-five hit in the US, and the list of names who went on to cover it includes not just John Lennon – who delivered an iconic performance of it on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975 – and Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White, but also Muhammad Ali and the writer Stephen King.
King’s novella The Body inspired Rob Reiner’s 1986 film Stand By Me, and the inclusion of the original version of the song on the soundtrack helped make it an even bigger hit in 1987, when it topped the UK singles chart. The renaissance continued shortly afterwards when Stand By Me was one of several soul classics to appear on adverts for Levi’s 501 jeans. Such ongoing success thrilled King, who vowed to keep performing the song “as long as I’m breathing”.
On paper, Stand By Me seems a simple song, and certainly King wrote it with simple intentions: a love song to his partner at the time, Betty Nelson. Pop songs are seldom expected to mirror the lives of the artists who created them, but it certainly adds a sparkle to the song to know that Nelson would go on to celebrate five decades of marriage with the man who sang to her: “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall / All the mountains should crumble to the sea / I won’t cry, I won’t cry / No, I won’t shed a tear / Just as long as you stand, stand by me.”
It’s especially fitting that a song about enduring love – a love able to survive, no matter what trials and traumas it encounters – was built equally strongly to stand the test of time.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/may/01/ben-e-king-stand-by-me
Fifty-five years after it was written, the original version still wields the kind of emotional heft that can reduce people to tears
Tim Jonze
Friday 1 May 2015
As is the case with all the great pop songs, you can identify Stand By Me by its opening few notes. Mike Stoller’s simple bassline, built around a 50s doo-wop chord progression, is decorated with little more than the faint ting of a triangle and the scrape of a gourd guiro – yet the effect is instant. King’s gospel-infused vocals followed this approach: the strength of his feelings imparted with no need for histrionics.
Fifty-five years after it was written, King’s original version still wields the kind of emotional heft that can reduce people to tears, and get others on their feet at weddings. Yet not everyone saw its magic at first. King had originally intended the song for his band the Drifters, before he left that group in 1960 – it was only after a songwriting session with Stoller and Jerry Lieber had come to an end, and they asked if he had any other songs in the locker, that he put it forward. “I wasn’t trying to make a hit,” he told the Guardian in 2013. According to King, legendary producer Jerry Wexler was even less aware of its magic: “He hated it because we’d gone into overtime in the studio with an expensive orchestra.”
Such disregard for the budget probably didn’t bother Wexler for long. Stand By Me was a top-five hit in the US, and the list of names who went on to cover it includes not just John Lennon – who delivered an iconic performance of it on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975 – and Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White, but also Muhammad Ali and the writer Stephen King.
King’s novella The Body inspired Rob Reiner’s 1986 film Stand By Me, and the inclusion of the original version of the song on the soundtrack helped make it an even bigger hit in 1987, when it topped the UK singles chart. The renaissance continued shortly afterwards when Stand By Me was one of several soul classics to appear on adverts for Levi’s 501 jeans. Such ongoing success thrilled King, who vowed to keep performing the song “as long as I’m breathing”.
On paper, Stand By Me seems a simple song, and certainly King wrote it with simple intentions: a love song to his partner at the time, Betty Nelson. Pop songs are seldom expected to mirror the lives of the artists who created them, but it certainly adds a sparkle to the song to know that Nelson would go on to celebrate five decades of marriage with the man who sang to her: “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall / All the mountains should crumble to the sea / I won’t cry, I won’t cry / No, I won’t shed a tear / Just as long as you stand, stand by me.”
It’s especially fitting that a song about enduring love – a love able to survive, no matter what trials and traumas it encounters – was built equally strongly to stand the test of time.
Friday, 1 May 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
