Ten Ways To Greet The Summer

Ten Ways To Greet The Summer

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Simon Frith

1. We didn't have spring this year, just a long wet winter. But we did for the first time have a May Day bank holiday like the rest of Europe's workers. And we did have a May Day weekend, 80,000 people marching through London to make public their contempt for racism and fascism. Speeches and reggae bands on trucks and it didn't rain and afterwards a cheery gathering in the park to hear Patrick Fitzgerald (left under a trickle of beer cans) , X-Ray Spex (didn't hear because I was still walking), the Clash (didn't hear because the PA fucked up), Steel Pulse (elegance over half a mile of heads), and the Tom Robinson Band (good crowd-warming stuff and some politics, too). One of the Carnival organisers was Rock Against Racism, whose concern is to bring together black and white teenage hoodlums to bop. They were there alright, scattered somewhat cynically about, but as we all secretly knew, the event was really a grand nostalgic gathering: the biggest demo since Grosvenor Square in '68, the most enjoyable rock festival since...

I don't know, I'd never been to an enjoyable rock festival before. And all the same people: I kept bumping into forgotten familiar faces: "LSE '69?" Oh well. If, as it turns out, Tom Robinson is an oldies favourite, who can blame him or us?

2. Saturday Night Fever has got to us now too. A trashy movie in the rock 'n' roll tradition: Catch Us If You Can with dirty words and a bigger budget. Its major impact here (besides on Robert Stigwood's bank balance) has been intellectual. For a while, a personal disco theory was necessary for pub and party conversation. The film didn't seem to me to have anything to do with disco at all. But welcome all the same: a rare opportunity to indulge in the Bee Gees publicly and without shame. The people I went with didn't even realise it was, the Bee Gees. Thought it was women singing.

3. Unusual event 1: two old Arista eccentrics making good in the same month. Patti Smith in the Top Ten is a wonderful thing for an AM addict like me (though I still can't read the sexual significance of the album photo of her in an inside-out slip and thin gold chains). But if Patti Smith can walk on water, Lou Reed, more remarkably, can walk under it. And make his best ever record down there too. Gonna have to change my theories of rock boredom.

4. I didn't go to the Wembley Country Festival this year but I did go to see Merle Haggard play the Brighton Conference Centre, which was something like the passenger terminal at Heathrow when the flight controllers were on strike. Clumps of self-conscious, smart couples sat looking as if they'd been waiting years to see Merle (they had) and having saved for so long weren't going to budge whatever he did. In the event, he did them proud. Coolest performer I've ever seen. "Any requests?" he asked, and rejected every one. Supporting him was Joe Ely, who's made my third favourite album of the year, but whose bar room professionalism never quite made sense of this staid English audience. Not supporting was Moe Bandy (though he was at Wembley), another of my favourites even if no one else here has ever heard of him.

5. Best track there is: "It Makes No Difference" from the Band's Last Waltz, which is altogether a much better record than I'd expected even if it does confirm that Dylan can't sing anymore. Dylan and the Band are, I guess, something like Marx and Engels —the former more important, can't help that, but the latter much nicer, much more fun to be with.

6. A lot of people seem to be fed up that punk is now just another part of the biz. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, the NME's spiky duo, are even now at work on the official obituary. Dead it may be, but also much more easily available which is fine by me. All punks have got albums out now, even the little leaguers. My favourites from the second division so far are the Adverts, the Boys, 999, and Sham 69. Wire are instant first division.

7. Unusual event 2: two calc'ulatedly oddball American versions of "Satisfaction" in the shops and selling (a few). Devo's "Satisfaction" is a mathematical exercise: take it to pieces and put it together again. The basic riff gets left out altogether and the result is the year's funniest record so far. The Residents' "Satisfaction" is a political exercise: the original fetishised commodity heard through an alienating filter. The result is the year's most astute record.

8. The new Kraftwerk album, The Man Machine, is worth having for the cover, an eerie and unpleasant tribute to El Lissitzky. Inside the music is more banal than anything Donna Summer or Boney M hav^ ever managed. Electronic euro-pop and I like it very much.

9. Best show in town was Manhattan Transfer's illustrated lecture on the history of American popular music. Their star was their lighting person and their thesis was that all pop, from 30's Tin Pan Alley to 70's disco, works by translating the mundane into the melodramatic. I was convinced.

10. Finally (and at long last) there's an old-fashioned, hard-driving British r'n'b band that I like (Dr. Feelgood have' always bored me stupid). The Pirates' Skull Wars is basic but refreshing, mostly because Mick Green, the group's guitarist, has such an unusually concise imagination. The Motors, meanwhile, who I thought were a similar sort of band (didn't like their first offering at all) have gone totally pop. Approved By The Motors is approved by me. First sound of summer. \ ¶||?