Musical Miscellanea

Some sounds to put in your ears

Okay, even for me this is a rambling and yet very specific post, rounding up a few random bits of stuff about music you may find interesting... or which may finally cause you to angrily unsubscribe. I think it’s also about rock stars and self-confidence and authenticity. There’s a lot of videos, but hey, it’s Sunday — so go make a coffee and come back.

When cruising around YouTube the other day — not out of pure procrastination, I often dip out of writing to go either there or Twitter to clear my head, like eating one of those pieces of thin, pink ginger between pieces of sushi, to reset the palette — I came once again upon the following video of Robbie Williams.

It’s not like I’m a massive fan — I like three of his songs and that’s it (much as with The Killers) but performance-wise, when he was in his arrogant prime, dude was a fucking monster. Take Live 8. For those of you who watched it on the day, you’ll recall that up to this point it had faint damp squib vibes. The first Live Aid was such a big deal and a great gig — at least after Freddie Mercury came on — and this follow-up had felt fine and there were a bunch of big names and it was all definitely a thing, but nonetheless just a little... meh. It hadn’t truly caught fire.

And then, after an introduction by David Beckham... on sauntered Robbie Williams. In 2005 the guy was at his swaggering peak and his stage presence and charisma utterly undeniable. He came on and gave it the full “I am a fucking rock star, and you’re going to do whatever I tell you”, and had the confidence to go full pantomime if that’s what it took to get 70,000 people’s hearts pumping as one. By the end of Let me Entertain You eight minutes later — and you felt this watching at home, too — suddenly this thing was on.

I remember later seeing a quote from some major band who’d done a festival with him, and who resignedly admitted: “If you come on stage after Robbie, you’re basically getting a second-hand audience”.

The only other person I’ve seen do this is Eminem, of whom it’s been said: “If you bring him on for a guest slot, it’s not your show any more”. The classic example being when he appeared at a Rhianna show at the Staples Center in 2010, after which she effectively became another member of the audience, wandering around until it was time to do her bit again:

And more recently, last year in Detroit with Ed Sheeran...

Microphones

Back to Robbie. Check this from a couple of years before:

Now go back and look at 2:54 — where only on a recent watch did I notice (if you blink, you’ll miss it) that he twizzles (I’m sure that’s not the right word but I can’t think of another) the mic in his hand, like a gunslinger, between lines. In front of Christ knows how many people, when he’s going to need it again within a second. What happens if he fumbles the twizzle and it slips out of his hand to bounce yards away? What level of insane confidence in your twizzling do you have to have, how much chutzpah, how brazenly confident in the moment must you be of the existence of a benign God, to risk doing that that? And no, it’s not looped around his wrist. It’s mental. It gives me an anxiety attack just watching it.

Still on microphones, it reminded me of this video of Rock It For Me — from excellent French electro-swing band Caravan Palace… and I’ll invite you to enjoy not just the song, or the fact Zoé Colotis can go straight from dancing like that to singing, without apparently being out of breath, but also the legendary mic pass at 3:28.

I don’t have any more world-class mic-wrangling to beguile you with, so will swerve unpredictably into Beethoven. Via…

… Succession, again

Couple weeks back I listed my five favorite TV themes of all time. I’m not re-opening that whole debate (there was a point where I felt I might be better off entering the Witness Protection Program) but one correspondent did point out an interesting… congruence, shall we say, between the theme and Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata:

And another correspondent pointed out the rather close similarity between the opening titles for the show and those for the (great) movie The Game…

Both of which are true, but I still love the Succession titles, so there. Anyway, so —

Beethoven

All that reminded just how much I loved Beethoven growing up, and so I’ve lately been spending more time with his stuff after far too long away. Many of the things I remember best are the slow movements of the piano sonatas, partly because they’re beautiful, but also because they were the bits I had the greatest chance of actually being able to play. Here’s the second movement of the Pathétique, written when Beethoven was 27… God I spent forever trying to learn this properly.

But then… well, I’ve seen a bunch of live music. But if I had to pick just one “greatest live music experience of all time”, it’d be this:

One night I was taken up to the Royal Festival Hall in London by my parents to see Yehudi Menuhin and Wilhelm Kempff (unquestionably two of the greatest classical musicians of all time) play the Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas. I was in my early teens, and thus not at an age when everybody can sit and watch a whole classical gig with enthusiasm... but to this day I remember how utterly transfixed I was throughout the entire performance. I even actually wanted an encore, rather than sitting there fidgeting and thinking “Can we please go now”.

My dad soon after bought a recording of the same two performing, and it got heavy rotation in our house for years, and on long drives... to the point where every note of this feels like an old friend, and dear God it reminds me of my dad, and mum.

(Sweetly, one of the first comments under this video on YouTube comes from someone who was evidently at the same performance, and had the same experience).

Rock and Roll Over Beethoven

Don’t worry, I’m not going to deep dive as I did with Bach. But I will in closing share one bizarre thing I only learned this week. Beethoven basically invented — or certainly pre-figured — swing and ragtime, in 1822, while already almost deaf.

Don’t believe me? Check out his 32nd (and last) Piano Sonata: start at about 13:58 in for the swing, and listen for the boogie beginning at around 15:58...

... or there’s a not-bad video here digging into the whole thing...

If Beethoven had just stuck with a I-IV-V chord sequence he could have invented rock and roll right there. A 47th Sonata might basically have been Stairway to Heaven.

Maybe if there is a vague underlying theme to this post, it’s this: rock stars, and what marks them out. That confidence. That swagger. That “I’m doing this now and you have no choice but to listen”. I kind of think Beethoven’s music had that too — and maybe Beethoven himself, with the grumpiness and all the drinking and the hair.

Speaking of hair…

All this (partly because of the first video at Live8) reminded me of David Beckham’s hair: and the point in his celebrity where he seemed to be deliberately doing more and more bizarre things with it and it still somehow looked cool because it was David fucking Beckham and that’s all you needed to know (and bear in mind I’m not a football fan and cared little about him).

It’s not merely celebrity, though. It’s confidence. It is an absolute unwavering belief (or the ability and willingness, in the moment, to feign it) that you — and perhaps only you — have the absolute right to take up your space on the planet, to be doing whatever it is you’re doing, in front of whichever audience is witnessing it. Comedy provides another good example: when you see a stand-up you know in thirty seconds whether you’re about to have a good time, and that’s not down to the first couple of gags. It’s something intangible in performance that says: “Don’t worry — I’m funny. You’re going to enjoy this. Bed in."

And I wonder if this is something to try to take out into real life. So many of us creep backwards onto stages, however small — be it the zoom meeting, the drink in a bar, standing in line to order a Starbucks. We’re unsure of our place. We are plagued by imposter syndrome and insecurity but I don’t think it’s even that which is operating: it’s more of an unwillingness or inability or fear of doing out to simply stand there, and stand straight, feeling confident in our skins and owning our space.

Diffidence. Fear of being called out. Basic lack of confidence. What might happen in our lives if we choose not to listen to those voices?

If instead we accepted that we’re the only one of us on the planet, and thus the best one of us, and the world should jolly well take notice?

Finally

Okay so, finally finally, check out the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (the famous “Ode to Joy”) — here sung by ten thousand Japanese people, for some reason.

That ending has total mosh-pit vibes. And it’s not just because rock borrows from classical music — it’s because it’s the same thing, and always has been. I’m pretty sure if he was alive now then Beethoven would be all over AC/DC. Example provided. Same energy, even has a “slow movement” in the middle. Case closed.