“I get up and I feed the dog, I have a girlfriend, a garden and a house. He doesn’t rock back and forth in his chair, froth at the mouth or rant about flying asteroids and impending chaos. CONTRARY TO popular belief, Wayne Coyne is not mad Or on drugs. Tories are calling for a probe into the gift of 12 tickets for Brown’s nightclub that were given to Janet Anderson, the government minister responsible for pop music
For those who grew up going to gigs
And blagging into various ligsThe Minister for Pop’s correctNo case to answer, in effect.There’s really nothing to discussWhy would it come as news to us?What fuels the music business busIs four parts favours/ one part sussNot what you knowBut whom you knowWhose palms you greasedA week ago.What deals you didWhich costs you hidHow high up on the pyramidYou sit to watch the ants belowIs all about portfolio.When DJs spin their self-made hitsAnd teen sensations come in kitsNo use to call them hypocritesIf punters love the songs to bitsOur greatest bands, their finest stuffWas hyped on packaging and puffFreebies, handshakes, bog-floor dealsExtended lunches, nasal meals.What morals might have gone amissIf ministers mucked in with this?Whose ethics would be compromised?Which currency destabilised?It’s nepotism? Golly gee.What? Here? Within our industry?Corruption, yes, but spread aboutSo equally, it cancels out.The Tories claim this sleaze is wrong.Good morning, sir.Been up for long?. As the third repeat begins, the track fades to silence, leaving the hook etched in the memory.There may be nothing more to speak about, but you want him to keep going, and in a way he does, if you know how to whistle.. With its McCartneyesque bass, Redding slides into an inspired four-bar whistled phrase, which he repeats with slight variations. Cropper completed the recording, pushing Redding’s fragile lead to the front in an inspired mix that includes sea and seagull “samples”, brooding horns and an emotional guitar part wrapped around the vocal.And after two-and-a-third minutes we hit the legendary coda, little more than 20 seconds long.
Redding never had the opportunity to add or change anything; he died three days later (on 10 December 1967), when his light aircraft crashed. so he started whistling.” “Dock of the Bay” was one of several songs that Redding had laid down using the newish technology of four-track, which meant that his vocal was recorded cleanly on to a separate track rather than embedded in the backing.
The effortlessly simple line “Watching the ships roll in” sets up the chromatic fall accompanying “And I watch ‘em roll away again.” It’s so simple, it seems as though anyone could have made it (though of course they couldn’t) and this feeling is compounded by the understated vocal performance; he was still recovering from surgery to remove polyps from his throat. “Dock of the Bay” became Redding’s biggest-ever hit, selling nearly 2 million copies in the first part of 1968. Why the whistle? Cropper said: “Otis couldn’t think of anything…
Like the earlier hits “Mr Pitiful” and “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” the song was composed by Redding with the guitarist Steve Cropper from Booker T and the MGs. And it’s the whistling at the end of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” that elevates it to greatness, while giving it a natural, throwaway style, in which the soul legend takes on the role of a dignified loser. When Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry broke into a respectful whistle at the end of “Jealous Guy”, a thousand builders, delivery men and short-order cooks pursed lips in tribute to the late John Lennon. So there will be puzzles.”`Metaforce’ is released on Monday; `The Seduction of Claude Debussy’ is released on 28 June. POP MELODIES are the raw material of whistlers.
Nicholson Baker, in The Mezzanine, devotes a paragraph or two to the way a whistled tune can live “all day in the men’s room, sustained by successive users, or remembered by a previous user as soon as he re-entered the tiled liveliness of the room.” So hit songs with famous whistling bits – from “Big Noise From Winnetka” to “Sweet Pea” – are irresistible. But if that happens it will come after Art of Noise have had their fun.”You can’t just put out music today and hope that people listen to it, because everyone’s used to the palaver,” says Morley. “There will be palaver that in a way parodies the palaver that you have to do when you put out a record these days. The album’s mix of the ambient and the operatic (or what the press publicity calls “drum and Debussy”) means that its destiny is to be played out as the noise/ sound- track for contemporary machines such as Volvo, Audi and BMW.
“It gives the music markers,” argues Morley, “a kind of structure.” Horn suggests that “nowadays we are used to repetition and talking with music – like ads.” Which has a kind of synchronicity Advertising is a fundamental texture of 20th-century life. It gave us our brackets between the operatic voice of the 19th century and the voice of the 20th century.”At times, The Seduction of Claude Debussy overcooks the mix It has an occasional narrative by John Hurt. The presence of Hurt’s authorial voice is surprising, given Morley’s taste for post-structuralist philosophies that emphasise attention to text, rather than external features that attempt to explain it. Their first single with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”, was a celebration of libido. The second single, “Two Tribes”, had a video of world leaders wrestling and lyrics that trailed imminent nuclear apocalypse. If “Relax” and “Two Tribes” staged the unconscious of eros and thanatos, Art of Noise returned to musical first principles by taking the unconscious of music – beat, time and rhythm – and getting it off the couch and on to the dance floor.
