Tag: Music

Let’s Do It- Bob Stanley (2022)

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This is the second non-fiction work with this title I’ve read this year.  First up was a five star biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees, this second “Let’s Do It”  also merits my highest rating.  Subtitled “The Birth Of Pop” by music writer, DJ, film producer and founding member of classy pop act Saint Etienne, Bob Stanley.

I read Bob’s work in “Record Collector” and even when I have no connection with what he is writing about (just a glance at my 100 Essential CD Countdown will show I’m pretty much on the margins for what “Record Collector” considers significant) I always enjoy his column and when I heard about this book decided that this author would probably be up to the gargantuan task he has set himself.

Over nearly 600 pages in the hardback edition Bob Stanley illuminates the history, the chronology and the connections of popular music, giving pretty much equal weight to the US and UK- a parallel history which had points of convergence and divergence over the decades but one in which the UK, until the British Invasion of the 1960s pretty much took the supporting role. 

This is very much the story before the British Invasion.  I haven’t read his critically acclaimed “Yeah Yeah Yeah” (2013) which is a chronicle of modern pop and for which this is a much needed prequel of what went on before and I would say this history, maybe because of its further distance from us could be the more fascinating.

Is there a starting point in the development of popular music?  It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to cite Ragtime and Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” from 1899, the sheet music of which was the first to sell a million copies and  from this point the author is able to track the separation of “serious” classical music to what came to be considered “popular” and its huge significance to our world.  He succinctly sums up the appeal and influence of the major players along the way including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra as well as shining lights on people whose positions attained in the pop hierarchy may not have been as stellar, for one reason or another.

Bob Stanley is a brilliant guide because you do believe he has absorbed all this music from decades before any of us were born and his love of popular music, in all its forms, shine through.  He can be great when he’s not buying it (Al Jolson, Rice/Lloyd Webber, much of Tom Jones) but in a book where the scope is so huge and there’s so many names to be mentioned that half a page suggests an artist who has really made an impact his writing can be outstanding. 

On Nat King Cole;

“Gradually his style became sleeker, soft and comforting, but slightly rough, like corduroy.  His delivery, like his piano playing, was relaxed, economical and emphatic.  When he sang you felt like you could trust him completely, and when he told a story, it sounded as if he was making it up off the top of his head.”

On the (still) under-rated British singer Matt Monro, who Stanley acknowledges “there was never anything but kindness and warmth in his singing”;

“He still looked like the bus conductor he had been before turning pro, like he’d just given the school bully a clip round the ear and chucked him off the 68 to Chalk Farm.  No matter what the exotic setting on his album covers, you could cut the shot of Monro and place him on a Watney’s pub backdrop and it would fit just as well.  A pint of bitter at his side, a fag in his hand.  Never a cigar.  Part of his classiness was that he never looked down on his own.  Monro was a working man’s hero.  In this respect certainly, he was Sinatra’s equal.”

On Shirley Bassey;

“When she sang Sweet Charity’s “Big Spender” in 1967 (wouldn’t you like to have fun, fun, fun?) it was like the hardest girl in school had taken a shine to you and was repeatedly slamming you against her locker door.”

If you had never heard of these three artists Stanley’s interpretation of what made them fit into the pop canon would be enough.

Is there a central character in the way that I suspect (but don’t know) that The Beatles would dominate “Yeah Yeah Yeah”?  Answer- not really because the fickle nature of pop suggests there’s always something else around the corner, those who survive were able to reinvent themselves or their timing was just right to take them onto the next big thing and judging by index references that would be Frank Sinatra (who Bob Stanley really wishes had stuck to his original retirement plan of 1971), Duke Ellington (so influential and who moved back and forth from “serious” to “pop”) and Bing Crosby (who was so popular).  Also hugely significant is the body of songs now known as The Great American Songbook from the greatest songwriters of all time and whose influence can be felt throughout the 500+ pages (and played a very important part in the careers of those I’ve mentioned above).

Reading books about music nowadays is a treat because with Spotify you can be seconds away from listening to performers whose work you would probably never have accessed.  Here are some of the artists I added to playlists whilst reading this book who I feel need to be discovered/rediscovered by me: –

Reginald Foresythe, Henry Hall, Art Tatum, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson, Dick Haymes, Frankie Laine, The Andrews Sisters, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Roy Hamilton, The Tokens, Caterina Valente, Chris Connor, Nat King Cole, Earl Bostic, Sammy Davis Jnr

Reading this book has been a joy and I feel there is more to come in discovering some of the music I read about.  Highly recommended for all music fans and I will very soon be purchasing “Yeah Yeah Yeah” for the next part of the story.

Let’s Do It was published in hardback by Faber in May 2022.

A Little Devil in America – Hanif Abdurraqib (2021)

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Ohio resident Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and music critic and is both critically acclaimed and a good commercial proposition in his homeland.  This non-fiction work is something we’ve been seeing a fair bit of recently- a mash-up of memoir and analysis.  At times it feels like a collection of essays but I don’t think it is.  Linking the pieces together is the theme of the black performer in America and coming from that is the significance of dance.  Saying it like this, however, is very much simplifying matters.  Abdurraqib, being a poet sees things in terms of metaphor and the notion of dance and performance is used to touch on many aspects of the American experience, and especially the African-American experience.

Also, being a poet Abdurraqib does not see things the way many of us do, he has the ability to zoom in on a detail and expand out from that.  It’s often a moment in a life he finds fascinating and what it tells us about that particular life and the environment in which it was lived and that in itself is intriguing.  In terms of the performers examined there is a very good range and I find much of his writing illuminating.  With Aretha Franklin, he examines her funeral, and what the “sending home” of the ritual says of a life and then moves backwards to the filmed version of her live gospel recording “Amazing Grace”- the biggest selling gospel live album of all time.  With Whitney Houston he focuses on the response of the black audience and how that changed.  There’s a lively section about the antagonism between two demonstrative performers, Joe Tex and James Brown.  The issue of “blackface” is dealt with through William Lane known as Master Juba who Charles Dickens saw perform and how casual racism caused a latter day TV tribute by Ben Vereen to this black minstrel who performed in blackface to become meaningless because his performance was cut inappropriately. 

People who have not fitted in to what was expected of them are examined including Sammy Davis Jnr, Michael Jackson and the always amazing to read about Josephine Baker.

This is where this book is the strongest for me, a white British reader, I can see the common threads and follow the arguments.  When the author veers away from this central theme I miss the tightness of the structure although I am still impressed by the writing.

And the writing is impassioned, creative, energetic and very often enthralling.  Culturally, very few will get all the references initially because of the broad timescale Abdurraqib employs in this work.  If this looseness of structure and digressive style which I have mentioned before (most recently in “Gay Bar” by Jeremy Atherton Lin) is going to become commonplace I’m just going to have to get used to it because to ignore it would mean missing out on impressive, quality writing.

A Little Devil in America was published in the UK by Allen Lane on 30th March 2021.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Dreamgirl – My Life As A Supreme – Mary Wilson (1987)

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I woke up this morning with the very sad news of the passing of former Supreme, Mary Wilson, at the age of 76. This weekend I finished re-reading the first of her two autobiographies and weirdly had a review scheduled to post this morning. I’m posting this today in tribute to one of the Great Ladies Of Motown.

Mary Wilson 1944-2021

I love this book. I think I’ve read it twice before but not for the last 30 years so it was time to revisit my now orangey-paged paperback edition.  (It now only seems to be in print in an omnibus 2000 edition together with its follow-up “Supreme Faith, also highly recommended, available from Cooper Square Press.)  It is one of the great showbusiness memoirs.

Mary Wilson was one of four girls from The Brewster Projects in Detroit who formed a sister group to male R&B combo The Primes (the nucleus of the Temptations).  Mary, together with Flo Ballard, Betty McGlown and Diane Ross became The Primettes in 1959 and spent the next five years attempting to realise their dream of musical stardom building up a local reputation and hanging around the local studios of Motown Records until label boss, Berry Gordy, relented and signed them up as The Supremes.  Betty had been replaced by Barbara Martin who also left in 1962 leaving the girls as a trio.  They became known as “The No-Hit Supremes” by other artists whose careers at Motown soared until for their 9th single for the label songwriters/producers Holland, Dozier and Holland wanted to try them on a song already rejected by The Marvelettes.  “Where Did Our Love Go?” topped the US pop charts and started a career which made the trio three of the most famous faces of the 1960s.

So far, so much like a fairy story.  Yet this book, alongside J.Randy Taraborrelli’s “Call Her Miss Ross”, published a year after this and “The Dreamgirls” Broadway hit musical (which has never said it was based on The Supremes although Mary was overawed by the parallels when she saw it) has changed the perception of this fairy tale and put serious doubt on any “happy ever after” ending.

Mary saw it all.  Diane metamorphosing into Diana moving from background singer to lead vocalist to solo ambitions fuelled by a relationship with Gordy to becoming one of the most successful female artists of all time and Florence, from lead vocals to being undermined and eventually jostled out of the group with tragic consequences.  Mary knew what was going on and was unable to speak up.

She took it all in though and there is excellent detail in the recall in this book ghosted by Patricia Romanowski and Ahrgus Juilliard.  There’s the perfect balance between the personal and the career (there is an extraordinary appendix of an itinerary which exists only because Mary was a keen diarist which shows how hard these girls were worked).  Alongside this you get the changing dynamics of the group which is just fascinating together with Mary’s ill-fated relationship with Tom Jones.

It is this balance which makes this book such a great read.  Mary’s voice comes through strongly (certainly more strongly than on a lot of the later Diana Ross & The Supremes single releases).  There is just something about tarnish in the glitter which just so appeals.

Dreamgirl: My Life As A Supreme was published in the UK in 1987.  I read the 1988 Arrow paperback edition.

100 Unhip Albums That We Should Learn To Love – Ian Moss (2019)

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I was seduced by the cover.  Taken in by the 70’s glamour girl posturing which adorned many a budget sound-alike album bearing titles such as “Top Of The Pops” and “Hot Hits” which provided a cheap facsimile of a hit record collection for the cash strapped youngster.  I was both fascinated and appalled by these albums and owned quite a few which got binned quickly once I started to get into record buying.

These albums, although featuring talented session musicians and singers, were the ultimate in unhip and I must admit to feeling slightly misled by Ian Moss’ publishers using this format for the albums on show here which tend to be more undervalued than unhip.  Musical tastes very much align with age, as anyone who can remember watching BBC TV’s “Top Of The Pops” with parents will testify and Moss is a few years older than me and so naturally our tastes differ with him having a bit of a penchant for blues influenced British rockers which have never done anything for me.  However, he is certainly eclectic with his choices here taking in both the obscure and the mainstream and encompassing many musical styles (Rock n’ Roll, Jazz, Soul, Punk, Disco, Northern Soul, Reggae, Folk are amongst the genres represented here).  It’s all written with a great deal of respect (although he really doesn’t like Oasis) as each of the 110 albums (where did the 100 in the title come from?) are valued and re-assessed.

Ian Moss is a Manchester man who says his Top 5 Manchester acts are Roy Harper, 10CC, Buzzcocks, The Fall and The Prick Jaggers (me neither on the last one but Moss is a huge fan) with a collection as described in the foreword  as being in a home which is “a living museum to the music of the last 75 years.” The driving force  behind this book “celebrates musical diversity and encourages wider listening.” Our musical purchases as represented here only match a handful of times (great to see him describe the much under-rated Imagination’s debut as “a near flawless album that owed nothing to the rule book and all to inspiration and imagination.” I wore my vinyl copy of that album out.) One of the joys of reading this sort of book nowadays is (and I know I’ve said this before) that you can instantly go to Spotify and start listening.  Not everything here is available, some is just too obscure but I have highlighted three of his recommendations (David Essex, ELO and Bim Sherman, the last of whom I have never heard of) for future listening.  I enjoyed being allowed a glimpse into Ian Moss’ record collection even though this was not the cheese-fest I imagined (and hoped for) when I saw the book’s cover.

100 Unhip Albums was published by Empire Publications in 2019. I read the Kindle edition.

Broken Greek- Pete Paphides (2020) – A Real Life Review

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Music Journalist Pete Paphides has taken me off into a time machine with this memoir of his childhood.  It felt like I was back in the 70’s and early 80’s as he recreates the Acocks Green area of Birmingham so vividly and with excellent recall.  Running alongside his memories (and no doubt enhancing them greatly as there is nothing like music to recreate past times) is what is amounts to a soundtrack of his young life.

Paphides was the second son of Greek-Cypriot parents who had come over to Birmingham and soon found themselves running chip shops.  His father never lost the intense yearning to go back to Cyprus and only listened to music from his homeland which the young Takis found intense and mournful.  (His father shifted a little when Abba and Boney M came along).  His son attempted to make sense of his position in a culture different to his parents but struggled and became an elective mute speaking only to parents, his brothers and the occasional teacher when no other children were around.  His brother introduced him to the telephone Dial-A-Disc service which became a bit of an early obsession with him not quite able to process the magic of hearing The Rubettes’ “Sugar Baby Love” through the phone line.  Lack of self-esteem led him to think his parents didn’t want him and that they would return to Cyprus without him leading him to select Eurovision winners The Brotherhood Of Man as his substitute family.

Eventually Takis starts speaking, calls himself Peter in order to feel more of a part of school life and thus begins his struggle to be accepted by a father too busy with the demands of his business and also by those at school. He used music constantly as his crutch becoming obsessed with Top Of The Pops, chart positions (I can identify with this) and Abba and eventually seeing the gang of outsiders who were Dexy’s Midnight Runners as possible salvation.

I really enjoyed this.  It is enhanced by Paphides’ almost total recall of the era which gets so detailed (I don’t know if this is just memory, heaps of research or a bit of embroidering but it feels totally authentic). A lot of it will resonate to anyone growing up at the time but the author’s cultural and racial background gives it a fascinating slant.  Like all the best memoirs it feels both tragic and funny and oh so honest.  Many works of this era feel like wannabe memoirs, adopting what are now with hindsight seen as highlights of the culture.  You can’t get better than the young Pete’s obsession with pop comedy group The Barron Knights (until he gets to see them live) a section which is so realistic and so touchingly written and says volumes about the times in which we were living.  I have talked to people more about this book whilst reading it than I would usually do which is a good sign of the impression it has made upon me.  Definitely recommended.

four-star

Broken Greek was published in hardback by Quercus in March 2020.

The Rough Guide To Soul And R&B – Peter Shapiro (2006) – A Real Lives Review

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shapiro

I’ve read this before back in 2008 when I thought it was okay but this is a book which cranks up to another level in this music streaming era. An alphabetical listing of key figures in Soul and R&B over a span of approximately 50 years with recommended albums and playlists of their best work. Back when this was written it meant downloading tracks onto I-Pods or splashing out on CDs which would have turned out to be prohibitively expensive. Nowadays, it’s risk-free with streaming services. That is why after reading this a second time I now have placed the massive total of 101 albums into my Spotify playlists to see if I agree with the author’s judgements.

I wasn’t really intending to re-read this. First time round it was a library copy but I spotted it pre-lockdown in a charity shop and thought it would be a useful book to have as research (I do use another of Shapiro’s books“Soul: 100 CDs” quite a lot) . I just pulled it off my shelves this week to browse and found myself reading from cover to cover.

I have read Peter Shapiro before and he does come across as quite grumpy for a music fan. There’s loads of opinions here- very few artists seem to come away with unqualified praise, he is often dismissive of their bigger commercial hits, he’s certainly not a huge fan of much of 90’s R&B especially anything resembling “piercing whining” or excessive melisma or histrionics (Boyz II Men get a rough deal here and actually I have no issue with this). He can be sniffy about the type of soul music favoured in the UK and Disco can be love it or hate it (surprisingly as he wrote one of the seminal works in this genre in his study of the Disco Era “Turn The Beat Around” (2005) I actually felt that his individual style was to the detriment of this book. I said of it “He praises and snipes in the same sections. It’s obviously the journalist in him which is leading him to be controversial and overstate matters.”. Here, because his brief is wider and he cannot be expected to like everything from Aaliyah to Zapp it didn’t grate as much and I occasionally laughed out loud at his viewpoint. He is good with adjectives, which certainly gives his work his personal slant. Take Diana Ross, after acknowledging her star power and “unquenchable force” we get “wretched”; “surprisingly acceptable”, “mediocre”, “uptight”’ “disastrous”, “ generic, “rather hideous”, pointless” and “shockingly awful” all for an artist he acknowledges as significant and even can form a recommended playlist for. (True, it is only 8 tracks when he normally gives 10). Slightly more disturbing are textual inconsistencies, an example of this is Stevie Wonder and his 1972 album “Music Of My Mind” which was the first time he was given more control and independence by Motown. In the Wonder entry it is described thus ; “It was no masterpiece, it didn’t have the songs to back up his mercurial wanderings across the boundaries of texture, timbre and taste.”. Underneath the entry it is highlighted as one of his greatest recordings saying “he unleashed a set of songs that demanded attention, incorporating soul and gospel, melody and funk, every track is a smash.” Now we can all change our minds, but on the same page?

I do like the format of these musical Rough Guides but I think that this is the only topic that I would be interested about in reading all the way through. Shapiro also authors “Drum N’Bass” although it does seem that the company has abandoned its music titles in favour of the obviously more lucrative travel guides with none of them (on the back cover Jazz and Hip-Hop are advertised) being readily available. I would certainly pick up other copies if I came across them. I’ve enjoyed this more as a re-read than I did first time round and expect it will be staying quite a bit longer in my collection.

four-star

The Rough Guide To Soul And R&B was published as a Rough Guides paperback (distributed by Penguin) in 2006.

Me – Elton John (2019) – A Real Life Review

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One of my should have read in2019 choices  was this long-awaited autobiography which appeared in many Christmas stockings over the festive period. It also appeared on lots of “best of” year lists with both The Guardian and The Daily Mail heralding it as the celebrity memoir of the decade.

None of this is surprising given Elton John’s stature and celebrity. The focus of many biographies over the years 2019 also saw the well-received “Rocketman” film so this book from Elton’s perspective is very timely. I wickedly cannot resist the observation that the title is short of a few words and that “Me Me Me Me” might have been more fitting!

In the dedication Elton thanks Alexis Petridis, rock music journalist, who has obviously ghost-written the work. I don’t know what the share of the work was between them but Elton must have done enough to be acknowledged as the sole author on the cover and for copyright purposes.

We all know quite a bit about Elton John although the worldwide level of success he has enjoyed makes for staggering reading. I like that he is a chart nerd who knows the positions his records have achieved and lots of statistics about his career. But, also, with Elton it is the things we don’t know that appeals. This, together with his celebrated frankness and fondness for gossip is what made this such a tantalising prospect. I was a bit disappointed that since publication so much of this has been shared within the media and in his TV interview with Graham Norton that it has lost a lot of its power to surprise. I wasn’t quite able to hold with The Telegraph’s opinion that it was “as eye-popping as his wardrobe.”

Where I do agree with The Telegraph’s verdict is how “self-aware” it is and that is pretty amazing for someone who has lived in a mad celebrity world for close to 50 years where you would imagine all sense of reality would be strained. Perhaps much of this sensitive reflection has come about through therapy and treatment for his much reported-on addictions. The great appeal is that Elton knows everyone and has done everything someone in his world can do and luckily he is able to convey much of this to his readers.

The only area of his life he purposely plays down is his inexplicable first marriage to Renate which seems so out of character. Here he respects his ex-wife’s continued determination never to publicly discuss matters to do the same. Other relationships are more thoroughly explored, the “open secret” of his relationship with manager John Reid, at a time when an admission of homosexuality could have damaged his career, with husband David Furnish and their children and perhaps most fascinatingly with his mother who famously hired an Elton John tribute act for her 90th birthday party because she knew the real thing would not turn up. Now, here is a complex, difficult woman who Elton himself could never fathom. Both she and his father were prone to the same explosive temperament as the singer which has made Elton something of a figure of fun in the past as tales of his petulancy became commonplace. Another complex relationship is the one with lyricist Bernie Taupin. I never knew they were as close as they were, at one point, before fame kicked in sharing bunk beds in a bedroom in Elton’s mum’s house. I did know about the long-distance writing partnership this evolved into. This was for me, most memorably lampooned by Matt Lucas and David Walliams in one of their “Rock Profiles” where Matt as Elton turns lyrics Taupin has just faxed over into a song incorporating the “PS: Can you tape “Lovejoy” for me tonight?” That, joking aside, is pretty close as to how this legendary partnership came to function.

I’m no huge Elton John fan, if I was I think I would find this book pretty amazing. For the general music/celebrity bio fan it is a highly memorable, rich, entertaining read and it  livened the early days of the New Year.

fourstars

Me was published in hardback by Macmillan in October 2019

Donna Summer: The Thrill Goes On – Nik A Ramli (2012) – A Real Life Review

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What is the right thing to do when just as your biography is going to press the subject dies? Do you hold back publication and revise its contents? I think I would probably say yes to this. Do you carry on and publish anyway after all, knowing that not many readers will know when a book actually came out, that’s a possibility. What Nik A Ramli does in his first piece of biographical non-fiction is acknowledge the passing in an author’s note at the start of the book, use the dates of the life (1948-2012) prominently on the cover but does not change the main text one iota. I’m not sure whether that’s appropriate.

That decision leads to a slightly off taste as Ramli focuses on the legendary disco star’s past, present and future in later chapters such as “Still Going Strong: A New Departure” and “Into The Future” when he makes it clear elsewhere that he knows that there isn’t going to be any future.

Now I, like Ramli, who is better known as a Malaysian Interior Designer who specialises in “laid back glamour” am a big Donna Summer fan. I have included four of her albums in my Essential CD listings. I feel that up to now she has not been served well by the printed word. I read an early 80’s unauthorised biography which said little and even “Ordinary Girl” her 2003 autobiography written with Marc Eliot was a disappointment which just skimmed the surface. There is room for a definitive examination of the life and career of one of the most successful female artists of all time whose record sales reputedly exceed 130 million. I’d always hoped that someone like J. Randy Taraborrelli would apply his thorough, analytical eye to her and produce something very entertaining but this hasn’t happened.

Ramli has produced what is very much a fan’s viewpoint which borders on hagiography. I have no problems with that, the whole work comes across as a labour of love and I always admire these. He’s done tons of research and seemingly watched and read everything and has carried out interviews with people qualified to comment on Donna’s career including DJ Paul Gambaccini, fellow disco-diva Gloria Gaynor and her one-time producer and great supporter Pete Waterman. Unfortunately, what he hasn’t done is put this research all together very well. This is a first-time writer in need of support to structure a convincing narrative and that support (and editing) obviously wasn’t there. The style is breathless throughout, which becomes a little overwhelming, there is so much repetition, an over-reliance on listing the same statistics and song titles to illustrate laboured points, a cheesy use of song titles within the text of the she certainly “works hard for the money” type, factual errors even I’ve spotted, non-sequiturs a-plenty and a tendency to go off on odd tangents, but mainly it’s the repetition that wearies.

He rattles through her whole career in the first few chapters and with a considerable amount of the book to go a clearer structure would have helped matters. He’s read Taraborrelli’s superior music biogs according to the bibliography, it is disappointing that from these he didn’t get a clearer idea of how to put together his work.

What Ramili does well, however, is to get a global perspective. He’s more obsessed about listing chart positions than I am, we get to know how Donna Summer’s work performed in many markets together with listings of weeks spent in both US and UK charts. I also like how he has got contributions from Malaysian performers about the influence of this American girl from Boston who found fame initially in Germany.

The issue that affected the performer was how much “Donna Summer” was a creation of her producers and then her record label. She was created to fit in with the hedonism of mid 70’s disco, with an aura of soft-porn chic which captured the zeitgeist of the time. This image was different to how Donna Summer wanted to be seen both in terms of her beliefs and her need not to be pigeonholed as an act of a moment. Her disco days were glorious with some superb tracks, brilliantly performed, but she wanted to see and she had the talent to see beyond that, sensing that disco might not last forever. When it did end in the US with that notorious record burning in a Chicago sportsfield which I’ve mentioned a number of times before (see “Turn The Beat Around” by Peter Shapiro), Donna was ready to move on and embrace rock, new wave and more mainstream pop. Over time chart positions dwindled and an alleged comment about AIDS alienated a large gay fanbase. That disco ball would never entirely go away, however, and the demand for the back catalogue of the Disco Donna Summer, like the Disco Gloria Gaynor, would keep re-appearing over the decades. In latter years Donna began once again to fully embrace this and saw a career revival and a demand for new material in the years up to her sudden and shocking death from lung cancer aged 64.

She should be seen as one of the greatest performers of her era, alongside Barbra Streisand (with whom she famously vocally duelled with on “No More Tears”), Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and Diana Ross. The fact that she does not always share a pedestal with these artists critically means she is still due for reappraisal. Ramli’s work provided a welcome opportunity for this but he doesn’t quite pull it off.

twostarsDonna Summer; The Thrill Goes On was published by Book Guild Publishing in 2012.

Becoming Beyonce – J. Randy Taraborrelli (2015) – A Real Life Review

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beyonce

J. Randy Taraborrelli is a real guilty pleasure of mine. His biographies seem meticulously researched and are very thorough. There is often a slight tension between his fan worship of his subjects and his need to get as much scandal as he can on them and this tension I enjoy. He tells a story well and I’ve yet to read anything by him which has been approved by his subject- his work tends to be “unauthorised”. He is best known for really changing the public perception of Diana Ross from Motown sweetheart to the Ultimate Diva in his “Call Her Miss Ross” (1989), my favourite of his books although I have enjoyed others on Madonna and Michael Jackson and have a so-far unread one on Elizabeth Taylor on my bookshelves. He also has an interest in powerful American families such as The Kennedys and The Hiltons. The family aspect is also very strong in this book as in the process of “becoming Beyoncé”, the Knowles family were extremely involved.

His works generally focus on larger-than-life characters, those who were no strangers to scandal thus producing a lot of copy Taraborrelli could pore over but here there has to be a slightly different emphasis, as scandal on Beyonce Knowles herself is decidedly limited. What we have instead is the just as fascinating question of how a little girl who participated in talent contests and pageant shows became one of the most celebrated and influential women on the planet. Well, the answer to that, you may be disappointed to know is through sheer determination and hard work. Going from a child in an all- girl musical review, to unsuccessful singing act Girls’ Tyme (which brought family members and investors close to bankruptcy), to stardom with Destiny’s Child, a solo career, marriage to one of the most successful all-time rappers, Jay-Z, to motherhood were all achieved by extraordinary single-minded dedication which meant that there has been really little life outside of the business in her attainment of her goals.

Subtitling this “The Untold Story” might get readers searching for juicy titbits but the perennially image conscious and brand aware Beyonce has rarely ever let her guard down long enough for scandal to occur. Her father, however, is a different matter and Mathew Knowles certainly comes under the microscope. As single-minded as his daughter in pursuance of fame, he gave up a profitable job and sunk a small fortune into drilling the group of young girls, shedding those along the way who couldn’t toe the line, there were extra-marital dalliances and the central event in the book comes from 2009 when Beyonce blows the whole thing apart by having her father audited for potential mismanagement of funds. Another incident which generated much media attention was the extraordinary situation in a lift where her sister attacked Beyonce’s husband behind closed doors and all parties emerged as if nothing had happened. Beyonce’s role in this was strangely detached which stimulated much speculation as to what was going on, the incident suggesting a metaphor for public image versus personal life but under analysis there’s not very much that can be actually deducted from this.

There seems little doubt that the development of a public image has caused difficulties for Beyonce’s own identity. This led to a creation of a dauntless confident alter-ego Sasha Fierce to hide the insecurities. Beyonce’s songs feature “independent women” and “survivors” and even though father Mathew was seen to be positioned at the centre of her existence the book gives attention to a group of very strong women who allowed Beyonce to become Beyonce, including early managers and her mother, Tina and sister Solange.

Compared to some of Taraborrelli’s subjects this is a much more low-key affair but I really enjoyed it. It’s impossible not to be swept up by such professional self-belief, determination and on-stage charisma.

fourstars

Becoming Beyonce was published in 2015. I read the Pan paperback edition. Yes I know there should be an acute accent on Beyonce’s name, but the keyboard is not co-operating with that!

Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache – Martin Aston (2016) – A Rainbow Read

On By philshanklinIn Rainbow ReadsLeave a comment

rainbow

breaking

Treading similar ground to Darryl W Bullock’s “David Bowie Made Me Gay” (2017) this was published first and is subtitled “How Music Came Out”.  It’s an exhaustive study of LGBTQ+ music and musicians from the 1920s to the present day.  Martin Aston, who was written books on Pulp and Bjork is a celebrated music journalist and has certainly carried out his research here.  I chose to read it to give an alternative viewpoint to Bullock’s study and it does feel more global in its outlook as we move to the present day where you can sense Aston’s greater enthusiasm for the subject matter and an attempt not to leave anyone out which can make it feel, at times, sketchy.

 Although in this work there are probably far more names and the scope is wider I did prefer the Bullock book which feels more of a celebration.  There’s more of the author  within that work right from the title onwards, Aston’s feels more objective throughout and makes little comment on the quality of the music- good or bad.  Whereas I finished the first publication with a strong sense of wanting to discover some of these trail-blazing artists I finished this one with a sense of being overwhelmed and being bombarded with too many names.  Also oddly, Aston’s title references a Northern Soul favourite by Johnny Johnson and The Bandwagon who have no part to play within the text.  I’m sure there could have been more relevant song titles to use.

 But, and as the more academic work, this has a significant part to play in the recording of LGBTQ+ history.  Aston seems stronger on trans artists and in unearthing the obscure from a 50s lesbian Rockabilly Group the Roc-A-Jets who barely made it out of Baltimore, to 60s Brit-pop singer Polly Perkins, touted as a rival to the Dusty/Cilla/Sandie triumvirate but now best remembered for her role in ill-fated BBC soap El Dorado.  I may be wrong but I don’t recall these artists getting as much focus in Bullock’s book and there are many others like this.

Thinking about the two books I considered which would be the one I would most likely read again for pleasure and the Bullock work has the edge.  I think some kind of playlist suggestions or select discography from what really excited Aston or what he thought most significant would have made this seem more personal, especially as in this age of Spotify it would be so easy for readers to rediscover the obscure.  This is, however, a valuable examination of the development of an important aspect of LGBTQ+ culture.

threestars

  Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache was published by Constable in 2016.