Month: August 2021

All Things Must Pass (50th Anniversary Edition) by George Harrison

August 7th, 2021

Well, this has been a long time coming. Presumably it was delayed by the pandemic, so here it finally is, a year late (well, nine months), and available in a bewildering range of packages designed to milk money from the vinyl collectors and the completists, of which I am neither.

I do understand the appeal of vinyl, of course I do, I’m not a monster. But I’m also not a person who wants to collect stuff that sits on shelves and takes up space. I got rid of my vinyl over 20 years ago and I’m not a recidivist: I’ve ended up completely embracing the digital download, and I’m quite happy listening to the Hi-Res Apple Lossless version now that Apple Lossless is a thing. I’d even do the Dobly thing (“Has it got a Dobly?”), though I don’t really have the equipment. Does a cheap pair of noise cancelling headphones count?

And the thing about vinyl, as I said on Twitter, is that it doesn’t seem like a real obsession to me unless accompanied by the obsession over stereo cartridges, stylus quality, pre-amps and other hi-fi componentry. Without all that, it’s just a simulacrum of a vinyl habit. If it’s just unboxing videos, include me out. I’m more wifi than hifi, and happy not to be obsessively cleaning vinyl with an anti-static cloth.

So here we are. Let’s talk about the 5-disc Deluxe edition: 70 songs, 4 hours 25 minutes 3.25 gigabytes worth. Yes, your Apple Lossless version of My Sweet Lord is just over 61MB, and we are a long way from the Fraunhofer Society and their compressed audio formats of 1993. We live in extraordinary times.

A word on the 2020 remixes. Do they sound better? Me and my 58 year old ears are not best placed to be able to tell. I’ve tried A-B comparisons to my (2000) 30th anniversary edition CD, and it does sound a bit different. More low end, definitely, and a little less bright, and George’s voice is not quite so buried in the mix. The original album was “produced” by notorious murderer Phil Spector, and it has been de-Spectorised to an extent. It sounds a little less messy than the murder mixes. But it is still a bit messy, because George’s point scoring in 1970 was all about the sheer number of people who wanted to work with him: because a lot of the time one of the four people in George’s previous band couldn’t be arsed to work on his songs. So a lot of the songs are too busy, too murdery, and this is not the non-murdery version of the album you might have been hoping for, of which more below the below.

As to the material, I’m not a fan of dreary George, and the songs that have aged best for me are the ones where he has remembered the lessons of Nashville Skyline and The Band. In other words, the shorter, simpler songs, with a country feel.

So we’ll leave the remixing and sound quality aside with the comment that it sounds a bit better, and probably less wearing on the ears over the 1 hour 45 minutes of the original running time.

My final comment on the original: I understand why the jams are there, I do, but I’m not remotely interested in them. I was more keen to skip to the other discs, which have demos and outtakes. Disc 3 is Day 1 demos: 15 of them, which is an impressive level of productivity. Disc 4 has another 15 demos from Day 2, and Disc 5 has a variety of session outtakes and jams.

All of these are very interesting, and you can’t help hearing something that might have been better than what ended up on the original triple album. For example, one of the songs George wrote with Bob Dylan, “If Not For You” has always sounded a bit clunky to me, especially compared with Dylan’s version on New Morning. But George’s original demo (Disc 4) and his full-band rehearsal (Disc 5) sounds miles better than what he ended up with. It’s pacier, tighter, and sweeter sounding all around.

One of my favourite George songs is “What is Life”, which does sound better in its 2020 mix, but also much much better in the Disc 5 session outtake. For sure, George’s voice sounds a bit strained and off key, but it just sounds better without the horns and you can hear him properly.

There are gems like this throughout, and you might end up with an alternative version of the album as a playlist, which will be fully de-Spectorised. In other words, if you’ve got the patience, you can create a new, non-murdery version of All Things Must Pass.

The last items of interest are his joky Let it Be style play-throughs of old songs (like “Wedding Bells”), which include a snippet of George doing “Get Back“, which makes you wonder. The tape starts half-way through (or does it?), so you don’t know what led up to it.

George’s humour comes through on the other discs, which is great, and overall I feel like this is a very rich collection, containing much more than the usual boxed set play-once-and-forget material. This is a document that reveals what an incredibly fertile and productive set of sessions these were, and how fabulous it is to hear new George material after so long.
Knife Edge by Simon Mayo

August 6th, 2021

Another day, another 99p special. I thought this might be all right, given that this is not Mayo’s first book. I’ve read one of his YA series Itch before (thought it might be okay for the school reading list, though it was too long to teach with), and the thing about this is it feels like a YA novel, but with swears.

Mr Mayo certainly has a distinctive style, which is interesting. If you know him from the radio, you can hear his voice as you read, his slightly forced delivery, which works well when he’s sparring with Kermode or Matt Williams, but keeps throwing you out of the narrative here.

It’s a bold set up: there are seven murders in the first chapter, which then launches into a race against time investigation, as a journalist works with colleagues in the face of a sceptical police force to uncover those responsible. The plot rockets along, quickly enough that you skip over the improbabilities — mostly. But then you keep stumbling face first into the dialogue, which is clunky and awful. People don’t speak like this, even in books, and they certainly don’t tell each other things as straightforwardly as this.

Occasionally, we get a point of view shift to someone who is with the bad guys, and some of the speechifying here is truly terrible.

The plot rockets along, as I said, but then it gets to its action-packed climax, and a final twist which is twisty, but very silly and not at all earned. Robert Harris can just about get away with a silly twist, but not Mayo.

But don’t listen to me, what do I know? This has been a big seller, and it has a quote from Lee Child on the front.
To whom are they listening?

August 5th, 2021

Trying to predict what this (UK) government will do is a bit of a mug’s game, but I did predict that the “amber plus” policy on returns from France would probably change… about the time the first wave of British passport holders started to come back from their holidays.

We gambled, when we set out for France, that by the time we (hope) to come back, the sands will have shifted – probably several times – and hoped the shift would be in our favour.

There has been a certain amount of bet hedging. I have booked two return crossings: one that gives us time to quarantine and test-to-release, and one that gives us a few extra days over here. Last year, we were forced to return early. On the other hand, my recent experience with fit-to-travel tests and what I’d read on Twitter and in the news means that I have no faith whatsoever in the test-to-release scam.

It goes without saying that this is a government of none of the talents. This privately schooled and Oxbridge (*spits*) educated crowd don’t know what they’re doing and they rely on whoever is whispering in their ears or shouting the loudest from the sidelines for their guidance.

Experts aren’t usually convenient, and the problem with them is that they often contradict each other. So it’s no surprise that the “Experts say…” headlines are often in disagreement with the latest policy. There’s a lot of tappety-tap-tap opinion-having about Covid. I have to say, it’s probably been a bit of a secondary pandemic, the opinions-having. Still waiting for those transformations of cities, workplaces, etc. we were promised by the commentariat last year.

And this is the Conservative party, so obviously it’s their donors they listen to, the people with the bags of cash. And this is where it gets hilarious, because the bags of cash are in conflict with each other. On the one hand, the scam-mongering private health testing and chumocratic supply contracts. On the other, the travel and tourism industry. On the one foot, the vaccine producing pharmaceutical industry; on the other, the hospitality sector. They’ve all, to an extent, got an interest in opening up and lowering restrictions. But then there’s the rest of industry, who rely on the National Babysitting Service to provide free childcare for their hard-pressed employees. So if the government opens up and the vaccines don’t stop the hospitals filling up and the schools have to close again… it’s howls of protest all the way down.

As the news came through that France was “amber plus”, we had just boarded the Eurotunnel train.

A quick calculation, and I said, “We’re in the first wave of school holiday travellers: a lot of them will be going home in a couple of weeks, and then the moaning will start.” This became even more obvious when it became clear that the Beta variant of concern wasn’t really such a problem in mainland France, and it was just a question of a face-saving interval of time. Still, all those employees not going back to work right now because of having to quarantine, I’m sure telephone calls were made.

Here we are then, off the amber plus, but this is a bit like England scoring too quickly in the final. Another two weeks and England swings like a pendulum do.

And not in a good way.
Conclave by Robert Harris

August 4th, 2021

It seems odd to be reviewing another Robert Harris novel, so soon after the last one, but the 99p Rule applies, so here we are.

The Papal Conclave is what happens when all the cardinals of the Roman Catholic church get together in order to elect a new pope. Usually, the previous pope has just died; rarely, he’s resigned due to ill-health, like Ratzinger, who resigned in 2013, on his last legs.

And is still alive.

The secretive nature of the Conclave is what makes it interesting, and generates wild conspiracy theories. Did he resign or was he pushed? We’re all tired to the gills of conspiracy theories in 2021, but Robert Harris wasn’t to know that would happen in 2016 when he wrote this—oh.

Now, I’m not a religionist, and I don’t give a shit who the pope is, but I must say that the behind-closed-doors nature of the election is intriguing. The only thing I was aware of, like most people I suppose, was the smoke thing, and the pilgrims turning up in Rome, and the media obsession. At one point, Harris ruefully points out the betting odds in the UK, which hasn’t had to worry about the pope since Catherine of Aragon.

So if you’d asked me, I’d have said, yeah, the cardinals lock themselves away somewhere, and they all vote, and then they send smoke signals. I’d have never guessed black smoke vs. white smoke, but I might have wondered why they didn’t innovate with different colours. Blue for it’s close; red for deadlock, that kind of thing.

And if you’d asked me, I’d have guessed there were about 13 cardinals, like a witches’ coven.

This is all grist for the Harris mill, as this author likes nothing better than a bit of research into a secretive happening. And as with V2, he inevitably wins you over to his side. He’s paid more attention to what happens than the rest of us, and here is a novel.

So it’s the near future and the (fictional) pope has just died unexpectedly. The Cardinals (117 of them!) descend on Rome for the funeral and the Conclave, and then the fun begins. Traditionalists vs Liberals, financial scandals, sexual impropriety, some new cardinal nobody knew anything about (making 118), and then they go to the Sistine Chapel for the voting, and the shit hits the fan etc. Everybody is supposed to be sequestered from the outside world, protesters are chanting on the streets, and the political manoeuvrings are intense, man. Lots of prayers, lots of rituals, and the tension builds.

It’s a natural thriller, really. Front runners emerge, scandals also, and everybody prays a bit more and votes again.

Our protagonist is Lomeli, the Dean of the cardinals, who is in charge of the conclave, and finds himself having to pay attention to things he’s rather ignore. Like women! Yes, this is one of those narratives our culture manages to create that excludes 50% of the population. Except when it doesn’t.

Anyway, I could see the end coming a mile off, and the twist (bit silly), but this is thoroughly entertaining and – as one reviewer said – unputdownable.
The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard

August 3rd, 2021

This was another 99p download, and, hot on the heels of The Honjin Murders, another detective novel with a Japanese connection. One of our protagonists here is Umiko Wada, the general factotum to Kazuto Kodaka, who runs an agency specialising in uncovering corporate espionage.

So far so good. A Tokyo-set thriller, you might think. But then a client comes in who wants her husband’s death in London, decades before, to be investigated, and it falls to Wada to travel to England, posing as the widow.

And it’s in England that we meet our second protagonist, Nick Miller, a private school teacher and artist who is vaguely troubled by the fact that he never knew his father. And now that his late mother is out of the picture and his wife is away with friends, he decides to bite when an old family acquaintance contacts him.

By coincidence, this acquaintance is also Wada’s connection in London, and both she and Nick are thrown into the plot when the connection doesn’t connect.

So this turns out not to be the Tokyo-set story I was anticipating, but a more international, country-hopping, zig-zagging thriller, which takes us from London to Cornwall, then New York, Rekjavik, Rotterdam, Cambridge… with Nick and Wada independently investigating different ends of the same mystery. It’s an entertaining read, though with an oddly light tone, considering the body count herein. This lightness of tone is also picked up in the cover design, with its quirky font, and all-in-all there’s a mismatch between the marketing and the contents, so that you end up feeling the publisher didn’t know how to pitch this.

There’s also a climate crisis angle, which is unexpected, and which also seems to have nothing to do with the novel’s cute title, which in the end doesn’t have much to do with anything. Wada is introduced as the kind of person you don’t notice, but then everybody seems to notice her, so the title really doesn’t work.

All of that mismatching makes this interesting, because it reflects the two narrative strands, with two protagonists, one of them very aware of what the bad guy is capable of, and the other thinking that he’s tidying up some loose family ends. So it works, if you like, because it does not work.
Weak

August 2nd, 2021

Texting her sister: “Dad’s dying”

Oof, but the cycling has been harder than usual this summer. I do not have climbing legs at the best of times, but this year I have really not enjoyed my rides.

I do not get a kick out of suffering on the bike, I hate hills, and I do not have the power to weight ratio to manage big climbs. I don’t even belong in the same company as proper cyclists, which is one reason why I mostly ride solo.

But this year is particularly difficult, and I find myself making more excuses than usual not to ride.

I think there are a number of factors, starting with the wet spring and early summer. On top of everything else, I’m a fair weather cyclist, so when it rains as much as it has this year, I don’t get out. I’ve only commuted to work a handful of times. Towards the end of the summer term, when the weather was okay, I still didn’t cycle to work because circumstances dictated that I needed the extra hour in the morning to get things done.

On top of this, I haven’t ridden my road bike in France for a whole year. Normally, arriving at the end of July, I’d have had Whitsun half-term week and Easter to put some proper hill kilometres into my legs. But when I took the bike out on the first day of this holiday, it had been eleven months since I tackled a serious climb.

The legs are bad, but the lungs are worse. I’d gotten pretty good at keeping my breathing steady and under control when climbing hills, but this year I keep having to cry halt so I can get my heart and lungs under control. A couple of minutes is all it takes, but I’ve lost my faith.

This morning, the kid and I rode up to the St. Antoine forest, which is one of our favourite rides. Instead of climbing up the Planche des Belles Filles, you take a left turn towards the Ballon de Servance and ride up to the Goutte des Saules waterfall at St. Antoine, which is quite enough of an effort for me, thank you very much. But before you get to that left turn, you’re climbing up a false flat of about 11 kilometres – which means you’re travelling steadily uphill even before the road kicks up into the forest. And when we paused after that first 12km or so, I was coughing like a tubercular poet who’d been living on a diet of absinthe and opium. Felt so bad, sick with it. My daughter was texting her sister with her concerns. Please don’t let me conk out on her in the middle of a ride.

After that I rode on for a few hundred metres on wobbly legs before walking up a short steep bit, which rested my legs enough to get me the rest of the way to the waterfall.

And things turned around from there. We sat around for a decent interval, knowing we were stopping at my in-law’s on the way back, and waiting till my wife texted to say she was on her way there in the car. Elodie suggested I stick the bike in the back of the car to avoid the last climb, but I was feeling better.

The pleasure of this particular ride is the 12km all the way back down the valley, on a road that’s mostly not steep but always pointing slightly downhill. It’s fairly smooth, too, so you can get in a high gear and put some speed on. My legs are fine going down like that. I’m not a fan of steep descents, but this is my kind of road.

So we reached the in-laws and stopped for a while, some apple juice, some popcorn (!), and then we rode back up the hill to our place. And it was fine, really. No hyperventilating, knees and hips hurting (as per), but the road never seeming particularly steep. The apple juice got me there.

I choose to think that this mixed bag of a ride is a bit of a turning point. We have ambitions to ride around to Fresse and the Col de la Chevestraye, which is my absolute upper limit when I’m at my fittest. But maybe I’ll wait a couple more weeks to try that.
Latin rhythms

August 1st, 2021

So the Tories want to bring back Latin, another education dead cat distraction to get them through another week, and Mary Beard is on board with this.

I studied Latin myself, got a B at O Level, back in the mists of ’79, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what good it did me. Partly, I was attracted by the promise of a school trip to Pompeii, which never happened (class too small, not enough takers), and partly I didn’t want to do Physics, and partly I suppose I did have an interest in ancient Rome, thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff (probably).

What did we read? Dido and Aeneas, which I barely remember anything of; some Pliny letters (including his account of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius; and the Cambridge Classics series of easy readers about the life of Caecilius and his family, his slaves, his dog, in the last days of Pompeii.

It was a small class, about 8 of us I think, including two of my favourite girls, which was a bonus, and our school boasted, not one, but two teachers, neither of them particularly inspiring. But it does make you think, 40-odd years later, when the government reckons to pilot Latin in 40 state schools (about 1% of state secondary schools in England), that a single school had two teachers capable of teaching the subject way back when.

But did it do me any good? The control version of me in a parallel universe did Physics instead, and scraped a B in that, taking the subject no further. And, er, that’s abut it. I don’t think Latin made me better at other languages (I got a B in French to go with my B in Latin), and I was always good at English anyway. It didn’t really even help in Biology, which made me want to shoot myself in the face whenever we did phyla.

Yes, probably all that Latin gifted me was a vague annoyance whenever someone says “aquariums” or “stadiums”, and the tiniest bit of rage whenever someone who works in the media says “mediums”.

Am I better informed, do I have more general knowledge than most? Probably, but I don’t think Latin is to blame. I read a lot and I’ve got a PhD. Do I think young people should have the opportunity to study Latin in state schools? Sure, whatever, as long as they can also do art and music and film and media studies. But don’t stand in front of me and try to argue that Latin has more value than media studies in this world of misinformation and propaganda and charlatan populists. And please don’t try to argue that a political class with a classical education is at all capable of running the country in a just and equitable way.

If I had to pick three “minority” subjects I’d value more over Latin – especially at A Level – I would pick Art History, Anthropology and Creative Writing. So stick Classics up your arse along with Oxford and Cambridge and let’s make forelock touching as dead as a dead language.