What a load of fookin' nonsense

I can't be the only person born the wrong side of Birmingham to find the Northener, the Guardian's weekly roundup of 'the best of the Northern press', to be routinely offensive. This week's issue, posted 12th March, leads with this hilarious little pile of human interest:

A Salford-based academic claimed this week he had found the funniest whoopee cushion noise after more than 30,000 people voted in an online poll.

Are we seriously expected to believe that - one week after the 25th anniversary of the miners' strikes and days before two of British football's most decorated (and most Northern) teams, meet at Old Trafford in a top-of-the-table clash - this story is the most pressing issue on the Northern news agenda? Or is it simply another embarrassing misjudgement on the part of a publication keen to maintain superficial contact with its socialist origins?

As Raymond Williams pointed out, the British press is highly unusual in that it is one of the most metropolitan in the developed world. The giants of the mainstream American media, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, do not even attempt to disguise their own regional provenance, or bias. At the same time at least one emerging media power, India, provides a healthy counter-example in that the country's three largest newspapers - The Times of India, The Hindu and the Telegraph - are published 1000 miles apart in New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata respectively.

Britain's newspapers have ignored both of these devolutionary possibilities. No mainstream daily beside the Scotsman has operated outside the capital since 1964 when the Manchester Guardian moved south. At the same time, no plan to regionalise any title - to call the Times, for instance, the Times of London, as it is known abroad - is ever seriously mooted.

The implications of this run far deeper than you might imagine, and are at the same time far cruder. 'Oirish' imitations are out but the Gallaghers labour under routine stereotyping. Do they really say 'fookin' instead of fucking, when large portions of the population utter vowels in different ways? Isn't the very concept of a caricaturing a regional dialect logically at fault in a national publication, written in theory by people from all over the country, for people all over the country? Or, at least, shouldn't all accents be technically as imitable? The covert, and therefore dangerous, assumption at work here is that a home counties accent is normative - that old chestnut. A regional point of view is dressed up and passed off as a national one, made to represent the population at large.

The BBC - so long guilty of confusing 'England' with 'London' - is attempting to remedy this by relocating to Manchester. But the print media big-hitters will never follow the Corporation beyond the M25. Newspapers rely increasingly on advertising to survive, and as they move onto the web within the next decade, advertising will become the sole source of income for what, for many, is the sole source of information. In order to compete in financial terms, a media heavyweight needs to be operating in the national centre of consumption, leisure, banking, advertising ... in the capital of capital. It needs to target the most affluent of the population, the biggest spendthrifts, the biggest savers.

Just one other reason why the Guardian's tokenistic namechecking of its regional socialist roots - see, in addition to the Northener, the 'Comment is free' piffle and culture of C. P. Scott memorabilia - is so offensive. The Guardian has not, for a long time, been a newspaper which caters particularly well for the demands of the non-metropolitan news consumer. At the same time, it is no longer aimed at the committed anti-capitalist. True socialist newspapers, as Williams again points out, are now impossible - because who wants to advertise to those opposed to consumerism? As the excellent MediaLens blog has it:

We did not expect the Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist Party, so why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power?

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Bland

Hope you enjoy this one as much as Tim Jonze didn't.



2009 marks the 40th anniversary of rock's weirdest record. So how has it aged?

Come on, admit it. It’s still on the to-do list, right? Everybody knows that, deep in the late 60s, a lunatic called Captain Beefheart locked himself in a country mansion with four friends and came out with a fish on his head. Or something. Cue whoops of wonder from those in the know, subsiding over forty years into a quiet kind of respect. At parties you nod sagely. Trout Mask Replica? Mindblowing. Great album, great man.

Now don't get me wrong. I will listen to other Beefheart releases until my girlfriend is blue in the face. The Magic Band’s thumping debut, Safe as Milk, is my soundtrack to 2003, and my very own summer of love between high school and university - no other collection of songs I know is as good for staggering red-eyed around a smoke-filled bedroom. But I’m going to come right out and say it: has anyone ever actually listened to the whale that is Trout Mask Replica in its entirety? No you haven’t. No you haven’t because it’s impossible. Beefheart’s monstrous masterpiece is assured its place in the rock and roll Hall of Fame because nobody, not even the janitor, dares to go near it, for fear of losing their hand.

That is where I come in. I have braved this swill of tepid hippie vomit on the shore of Don Van Vliet's engorged psyche, and I have done so purely in the name of journalistic curiosity and money. Plus I needed to give the Hall of Fame the once over. The Man wants to find a plinth for Leo Sayer.

So to my task. Within the first minute of pressing play, I’m hunting for facts on the web to quell my rising panic. (Did you know it was billed on its release as ‘music from Venus’?) The album's opener, Frownland, is barely music. Jagged, atonal riffs march all over the Captain’s chunnering surrealisms. The drummer sounds like he learned to play immediately prior to recording on a whack-a-mole machine. The guitarist … is there a guitarist? A human one? Oh. The only thing that maintains my interest is Van Vliet’s remarkable voice, but even that quickly deteriorates into repetitiveness and inaudibility. Try as I might, I can’t keep my hand away from the ‘skip’ button.

Perhaps I simply lack an imaginative connection with the past.

Let’s try and historicise this record. 1969 was a grim year for the hippie ideal, with Hendrix arrested narcotics and Brian Jones found dead in his pool one month after Jagger forced him out of the Stones being too ‘free’ with his rehearsal attendance. Over at Apple, the world’s greatest band was tearing itself apart a row over business management. The Altamont stabbing that December is, to those in their pop anecdotage, the moment which marks the end of it all. ‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths,’ croaks Danny in Bruce Robinson’s classic period piece Withnail & I, indicating just the kind of retail savvy the store could have used 40 years on. ‘The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over … and we have failed to paint it black.'

Against this backdrop, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (‘Zoot Horn Rollo’, ‘Rockette Morton’, ‘Drumbo’ and ‘Antennae Jimmy Semens’) retreated to Van Vliet’s LA house and practised fourteen hours a day for eight months. That’s 3,400 hours playing time - astronomical whatever planet you're on. By the time they reached the studio, the band knew Beefheart’s space-jazz set so well that they cut the record more or less live. What at first, then, seems to be random self-indulgence, the kind of rambling jam that should never have been committed to vinyl, is in fact a scrupulously choreographed opera, designed to be heard in its sprawling, headache-prompting entirety.

Is this the greatest antidote to the three-minute pop song ever set down? I hastened again to my CD player, hovering over song nine (Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish): the furthest I’d managed to get without skipping. I pressed play and waited. That song spent itself noisily in a flurry of word-associations (‘…Squirmin' serum 'n semen 'n syrup 'n semen 'n serum/ Stirrupped in syrup…’) and still I waited, until, out of nowhere, came a sort-of riff and a set of lyrics of which I could make both head and tail. China Pig begins:

A man's gotta live
A man's gotta eat
A man's gotta have shoes to walk out on the street
I don't wanna kill my china pig.

And suddenly things are starting to make sense.

Is China Pig an anti-capitalist parable using the motif of a piggy bank? I haven’t a fucking clue. But that, I think, is what’s important. What I may have figured out is that, amid the death throes of the longhair dream, Don Van Vliet attempted a one-man crusade against accessibility, against the consolidation of music and commercialism, and thus against a future world where, thumbs poised above the iPod ‘skip’ button, listeners would manifest their dwindling attention spans daily in a million Nick and Norah’s infinite playlists. After all, 1969 was also the year in which Brotherhood of Man, chirping madly, took their first in-sync steps towards Eurovision stardom.

Jean Cocteau once wrote that ‘Critics judge the artwork and are not aware that the artwork judges them’. Rather than Trout Mask Replica seeming dated, I think it’s me who is showing my age – an age, that is, in which albums have become singles collections - a shorter, snappier and easier litter of songs destined to be wrenched apart forever in cyberspace. Well, I won’t get fooled again. Don Van Vliet, you're weird - your velvet jacket is covered in dust, and the fish on your head smells like Satan's flip-flop - but you might just have a point. The Man won’t like it, but you continue to remind us that there’s far more to life, and to music, than accessibility.

Sorry, Leo.