Status Quo...Whenever You Like

Really it's the Glastonbury 2008 edition on YouTube I should post here but the single has the penguin in suspenders. Status Quo represent, absolutely, the status quo. It's quite brilliant that they do that, have done that, still do it, to hardly a critical murmur at all. Nobody gives a damn for Status Quo records. Bring on  Zizek then? It's not difficult, the penguin's in suspenders and even on a red carpet. No the critics are not there.  In all the bombast of the Olympics, I keep thinking of Mrs Parfit and Rossi, doing exactly what they do best, what they have perfected over many many years, and have got down to about forty seconds at the beginning of this record. The intro here is really quite sublime, the point of it, the rest is just dogma. Weaving? Well it's more like synchronicity, those two guitars just doing the same thing, those heads dipping, that's rock right? And they realise that the real point is, how you start it; one waits, there is a little melodic overture as the other starts,  the other still waits, pointedly, then he shifts to join in, they are together, and then, eventually, anonymously, the drums and the bass, and there you have it, eventual total communality, and the audience is there completely, they have anticipated the whole thing to every second and are doing the same thing and everything and they can't fucking help it! And when you start it, once it's started it just runs till you've had enough of it, we are not talking Mozart here. Any girl can understand that and everybody does, but nobody notices because it's Status Quo. ACDC have the same downright skill at it, and they can't get away from being Australian, but somehow The Quo are Britain to the core.
Whatever You Want is unmistakable rock, it is quintessential and if you wanted to be a cultural critic on it (Thatchers Britain and so on, the awfulness of 'In the Army Now', Live Aid!!) you could have a field day.
Look out for the girl in the Glastonbury crowd up on somebodies shoulders holding a home made placard in the air saying 'Whatever you Want' with arrows down to her! Just too good.
But actually no, my single sounds shit, but of course it doesn't matter because what we have here is an idea. We really should think some more about the meaning of Status Quo.

Yo Mama 1979

You need a shed or a garage or something to listen to Sheik YerBouti in peace, but lacking such facilities I just wait for Julie to have a night out. To start, I Have Been in You is the worlds most droll sex song. Modernism should always draw you to the obvious. The second, Flakes, is an equally droll exposition on our crappiness. Later there is Dancin' Fool and Jewish Princess ('I'd like a brazen little jewish princess, with titanic tits and sand blasted zits....she can even be poor!!..) It's kinda Randy Newman with power chords. Its so good its beyond listening. BUT, right at the end, comes Yo Mama.
Most of Sheik is recorded live (+ overdubs lots) in London, and Yo Mama is a kind of fuck the neighbours and everybody else sort of blowout of excruciating loveliness. 'Architecture is not a martini' Mies said, 'Art serves understanding, not entertainment!' said his painter friend Max Beckmann. Both would have loved Zappa if they were of another generation or two.
Back at Simon Smith and Michael Brooke Architects in Clapham c1990  we used to play this in the afternoons, Nazar and I drawing extensions for locals with nice bay windows and ambitions to Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.
I listen to this as loud as I possibly can, the Olympics silent on screen. I can't stand the Olympics, just like I couldn't stand those clients, but Simon and Michael were remarkable gods to free spirit. I mean, what other architectural office might start the day to Caravan's Land of Grey and Pink?

Black and Blue 1976

Probably the laziest album ever made demands probably, in the fullness of  time, the laziest of reviews. That's a challenge. Clearly the drugs do work, they mean you get everybody else to do the work. The only Stones who seem to exist on Black and Blue are those not in the band, Carl Perkins, Ron Wood, and Billy Preston, and they are all hopeful of graduation to another line or two. Such bare arsed coke snorting delusion is sometimes refreshing to hear. It starts with unredeamingly awful disco (Hot Stuff), bad, unlistenable reggae (Cherry Oh Baby) and moves to Memory Motel, which is good C&W, if you can cope with Keef's worst vocal line of all time 'She gotta mind of her own.....and she wears it well....urrrgh...she's a one of a kind....bla bla mighty fine rubbish'. Fucking dreadful Keef (and I don't say that often) lets thank your son Marlon for driving you all the way to the studio with his head barely peering above the steering wheel across international borders for that. It doesn't get any better; Ronnie does 'Hey Nagrita' which has limited balls, Billy Preston does Melody that left them in the bathroom. If you are not coked out of your mind by this stage you will simply find it amusing, otherwise you will think it's ground breaking the Stones can be so experimental and see the potential for Some Girls. Flash will be sincere with Fool to Cry, and then they will all rock together with Crazy Mama which is at best unmentionable shit.
Of course I have left out 'Hand of Fate' the great harbinger of things to come, the big cloud on the horizon, and a girl called Emma, I think she was a girl called Emma, we were on a camping holiday in Benodet, she lent against the jukebox of the clubhouse, it played 'Hand of Fate'. She was something else. I said I'd walk to Scotland to see her. I've loved that song ever since, and that's also why I think David Lee Roth's lyrics to 'Jump' are so marvelous, it's just she was up against the record machine, not me.

Wishing Well 1972

Lots of problems with this record, but at least you can hear them loud and clear, I mean, this is not a post modern record, those I can hear on any visit to the White Horse, and one thing you don't hear on post modern records is problems, that is almost by definition.
I'll hear this track fucked over, sampled, whatever, many times, but it will never be as evocative and painful as the original. The problem here is a band problem, Paul Rogers writes a thinly disguised song about his mate, his guitarist, Paul Kossoff. He will do it again when Paul Kossoff dies, with 'Shooting Star'. Both are a bad idea. Clearly 'Koss' has many problems with the world, and worse, he wants to drench you in them via the sound of his guitar. He does it very well here, to consistent lyrics rather berating him for having his feet in the wishing well like some hippie, but him answering with a consistent squeal and wail of discomfort. This is highly original in a rock record, something that Kurt Colbain would perfect. After this album Kossoff will of course leave the band and take solace, rather inappropriately you might say, with John Martyn in Hastings, who attempted to keep him 'clean' (but then again who else, one dangerous romantic clings to another) and he'd die mid Atlantic. Afterwards his father, as a famous actor (what a surprise) and most inappropriately but typically in my view, will demonstrate most of Koss's problems in the first place by going on the BBC on Sunday evening for the god spot to say what a terrible world we live in, weirdly not sensing that he was part of it. This is something I well remember.
To hear Martyn talk of Koss on the live album he never put him on (Live at Leeds), but now of course re-issued in deluxe to include the Koss material, is very sweet. You can hear the paternal instinct within a shitty little rock and roll world.
I personally don't think Koss was great, but I remember hearing this record around Donald Wilson's house when I was fifteen or so. Donald was a cool architect who'd been on TV with the first eco house in Macclesfield (1975) and in his converted cottage hung seats, they hung like bulbs from the exposed rafters, and there were bean bags, and later I discovered the speakers were made by him in his workshop where his son and I  tried to resuscitate a dead C50, and he'd also made his own kitchen. All you did there as a fifteen year old was was put this record on surreptitiously and imagine the drug fuelled parties Donald's daughters apparently entertained with our PE teacher.

Start Me Up 1981

It seemed obvious to me that you'd start the Olympics with this. Of course the big story took over, the propaganda, but if you could have just got the Stones to play flash, street fighting man, brown sugar, honky tonk and this, you would have the quintet of greatest late twentieth century rock tunes in open tuning (whatever that is) and you would have 'the set' always good to have the set like in maths (OK you might include 'All Down The Line' but that would be just for air guitar aficionados) and you would have the thing perfectly done and dusted.
I have a 7" of this little baby and it is the most perfect thing I play. Partly I love the fact it's a single and it has bags of room in the sound and there is no rumble at all, the band sound like they are in the room, and there is terrific thing going on inside the band, something I hear very rarely indeed, Keef calls it weaving I believe. For those who haven't a clue what that might mean, another example is found very briefly during the latter stages of Aerosmith's Love in an Elevator, but only just. It something to do with everybody doing different things but sounding absolutely together. I'm no musician, but it sounds bloody marvellous (and very difficult) to me. This record is just something else, and I don't have to worry about the rest of the crap on Tattoo You with just the single to hand, and I just love the sleeve. Bought it for a couple of quid on e-bay only a month ago.
It took at least six years to record, starting out as reggae track around Black and Blue '74/5, but finally saw the final cut on the same day/night/whatever as Miss You, and then was saved for Tattoo You. Good things take a while, clearly, but I cannot imagine a day that puts down both Miss You and Start Me Up. Must have just about the finest day/night/whatever any band could have. It is still talked about with the same reverence as flash and so on in the great chronologies. The last great attempt to follow it is probably 'Between a Rock and a Hard Place' (1999).

Takin' it to the Streets 1976

Seeing as it's so quiet I think I shall begin a short series of short meditations on some great records. They must not be confused with just great records, they are my great records. It will give me something to do in the afternoons. This is strictly drift off on the day-bed material with memories of this and that.

So if I say whilst this is a record I bought on tape when I was sixteen and has long since disintegrated, but actually it wasn't until Seattle twenty years later that it paid off knowing it, that sets the tone. Hells Angels are very fond of the Doobies, and if you want a ride on the back of a Harley, make sure an angel is riding it, and riding it out of some bar in the middle of nowhere late in the balmy evening near where they filmed Twin Peaks.
This may also have been a very early encouragement to wear Ray Ban aviators, but of course, I realize now those are not Ray Ban aviators.
The Captain and Me and Stampede are the commonly favourite Doobie Brothers albums. Takin' it is mine, made when the Doobies appeared to leave their cowbay hats and lassos behind and mosey down to Miami and dip their noses in some funky bass lines and a much cooler sound, not that I'm sure they actually did that, more metaphorically speaking, perhaps LA was tiring of cowboy chic. The guitars get  not a lot more than a gentle strum and artful pick, maybe somebody was listening to Steely Dan (Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter was playing with both) or Hall and Oates and all the time Michael McDonald swims lusciously over the top. Lie back for side two, tracks 2&3 'For Someone Special' and the sublimely catchy 'It Keeps You Running' and think of palm trees, ocean breezes and the girl who did corporate plants twenty years after you'd first thought this sounded pretty good.

A Bit Quiet

To be honest London seems rather deserted, perhaps Londoners are just doing what they always do, and ignoring BB, Blistering Boris, and running away on holiday. We slunk out to Somerset House yesterday, and were delighted to find it mostly empty, despite being (a very congenial I imagine) home to all things Brazilian for the duration. You can sit in the courtyard and think you are on holiday, a rarity here. Meanwhile there is a very well produced and free show of photographs of the Rolling Stones there, mostly culled from the tabloids, but very well hung. Funny what a bunch of herberts they really look like in the original. If I was worth $100m and was the subject of a show like that, I'd be up till five in the morning celebrating for sure, you'd feel it was kind of miraculous. Considering I last saw the Stones thirty years ago and they were old then, it probably is.
Today I popped my nose in to The White Horse in expectation of hoards of Olympic bunkers off. Not at all, quiet as a mouse in there. On the tv there was Roger Federer looking just about as disinterested as he could get, then getting rained off, so there were shots of nice old couples tucking in to packets of Werthers Originals under umbrellas and of young girls scratching their arses. You can't blame those legions of cameramen really.
Fears of avalanches of human traffic down the Roman Rd (predicted by the council) have not materialized. What a surprise. I'm glad the fish stall didn't invest in extra tables and chairs.