Paul Orwell

First It arrived in lovely blush pink vinyl. Then in red. There have been a raft of releases from Paul Orwell and his “side project” The Shoots that have been essential listening over recent months and years.

Blowing Your Mind Away and Organised Blues

Paul Orwell’s music first came to my attention a few years ago with some limited edition forty-fives on Heavy Soul, which were snapped up after only a few hours following their on-line release. Then came an album, Blowing Your Mind Away, in 2015. It was initially only available on vinyl, was limited to 500 copies, and, like the singles that preceded it, was sold out within hours. That album was packed with instantly memorable tunes, harmonies and the sort of guitar refrains you might have encountered at Haight Ashbury, or the Kings Road, in 1966. The monochrome video for one of the most memorable tunes, You’re Nothing Special, was trailed on the Fred Perry Subculture website in the weeks before release, complete with models and authentic Blow Up references. The reverse of the sleeve proclaimed that “this music should be played loud”, a piece of advice that was followed on many occasions.

It was followed, the following year, by Organised Blues, an album of Hammond organ instrumentals, designed to get you grooving round the dancefloor - or the kitchen - as effectively as the debut. I remember reading an interview Paul did with Merc where he described this new record as "an album that kids would take to a party in the 1960's". You couldn’t argue with that as a rationale for the album. Don’t Do As I Do (Just Do As I Say), Coke Without The Cola, Red Telephone and the rest were equally infectious and full of pent up mod energy that fired up the soul shoes on your feet. You had to admire the attitude that led to the recording of Organised Blues. It was the record Paul wanted to make so he went off and did it, eschewing any consideration of making a "sensible" follow up to Blowing Your Mind Away. Then there was the Hard Shakes ep, a four track forty-five, which came out at a similar time, covered similar ground and did so with panache.

Smut

More singles followed. Then, last year, The album Smut arrived and was rammed with a selection of full-on garage rock anthems that blast the cobwebs away. This is the one in the blush pink vinyl.  Its more 1969 than 1966, dirtier, naughtier than its predecessors, the tougher edges of Let It Bleed compared with Revolver, perhaps.

Stick on Smut and, two drumbeats later, we’re in. The opener, Use Me, comes through fast and furious, with its straight ahead attack to the senses, complete with the immortal line “Juliet is in the sewer, Romeo is in the gutter”, and a wonderfully trashy edge that sets the tone for the album. Its followed by Son Of A Loaded Gun which has always struck me as possessing more than a little bit of a Bolanesque vibe. This tune and others, particularly, Out Of Here, make me wonder if this is how T Rex would have sounded if they had started today. The whole thing comes at you full on, a delicious mixture of hot guitar hooks, organ and piano refrains. Hear them in the guitar motif on Hot Bitch, the piano introduction on Hot Air – Loud Noise, I’ll Be Your Murderer, Hey Hey Junkie and the rest. Then there’s the dirty bass and guitar introduction on Out Of Love. And the whole thing concludes with slightly more laid back Hello Apollo.

Then, just when you thought this particular seam had been exhausted, along came Use Me the ep. It’s the one in red vinyl, a lovely deep red. Its a complete package, the design and music complementing each other perfectly.  The new tunes were recorded at the same sessions as Smut. Along with the title track, there are three more new tunes on here: the classic garage rock of Running Scared, all hard guitar chords mixed with full-on keyboards, the down and dirty groove and “sex, drugs and rock and roll” of Lose Control and the more heartfelt vibe of Live A Little Die A Little, a tune that hints at Orwell’s work with The Shoots.

The Shoots

Then there's that side project. For most, The Shoots would be a full-on career. They are a collaboration between Orwell and Kevin "Lord" Essien, who is It described as "vocal extraordinaire" on the tin and you wouldn't argue with that sentiment one iota.

They released an album of classic R&B anthems last year, full of garage beats, up front guitars and pure soulful vibes. Add in a strong northern soul element and the whole thing quickly gets deep inside. The vocals are tinged with emotion, touched by a mood immersed in the black plastic that would be spun every weekend at Wigan Casino and elsewhere. The straight ahead feel of the opener, Black Widow, takes you quickly into the action and gets the adrenalin going. The heartfelt vibe on tunes like Two Steps, On The Sunnyside Uptown, Lay Some Hurt On You, Mr Rain and Wash it Down With Whiskey is interspersed with a vibe that makes you want to put on your soul shoes and head for the dancefloor. And the hundred mile an hour northern soul pace of Forget Me, in particular, makes it worthy of frequent plays.

Then, they too, release an ep – Mr Doom & Gloom - to follow it, again comprising tunes that got away that were recorded at the original album sessions. The ep features songs that encapsulate the harder, more British R&B flavoured feel than the soulful vibe of the album. Catch My Breath, Mr Doom & Gloom, The Wild Walk and Taste all contain those hard-edged guitar riffs, strong, screaming, bluesy vocals add keyboard refrains that come in and out, augmenting the overall sound perfectly. There are the “aaah aaah” Mony Mony reminiscences of The Wild Walk - “we’ll do the jive and monkey too, the mash potato and the boogaloo, we’ve got a new dance and it goes like this”, the swampy guitar introduction and keyboards on Taste, along with hard, bluesy guitar on the introduction to Catch My Breath that wouldn't have been out of place at the Ricky Tick club (think The Yardbirds in Blow Up) or elsewhere around '65. All in all, a welcome addition to R&Beat.

Paul Orwell is reputedly working on a new project, intriguingly entitled Acid Goth. I’m looking forward to its release, to see what direction he’d going in next. But, if you can’t wait until then, or if you’re looking some full on garage rock tunes, this little package is perfect.  If you can find them, of course.  All brought to you, like so many great records of late, by Heavy Soul.

“Lord can you save my soul, Lord can you save my rock and roll”, he sings on Save My Soul on Smut. On this evidence that thing called rock and roll is saved.

Out Of Our Heads

Been digging through the Stones back catalogue. It's taken me back to this gem. Out Of Our Heads was released in 1965, at the heart of the first incarnation of the band, featuring founder member and multi instrumentalist Brian Jones (or Elmore Lewis if you'd prefer). The record mainly comprises their staple repertoire of the period, covers of soul, blues and r&b classics, by the likes of Sam Cooke, Sonny Bono and Don Covey, amongst many more, along with a handful of tunes by the burgeoning Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership.

What jumps out immediately is how hard it is. How in your face. How they've taken a tune and added their unmistakeable style and panache. The opener She Said Yeah is a full on call to arms, blasting out of the speakers and into the senses. The guitars are hard and the tempo is fast and Jagger sounds like a young punk starting out on his road to rock and roll domination, setting the template for generations to come. For all those rock and roll troubadours destined to bash guitars, basses and drums in garages and bedrooms across the planet.

The tunes that follow are of the same quality. Mercy Mercy has a tougher feel than other versions I've heard and the melody is so infectious you'll wake up with it buzzing around your head. The same goes for Hitch Hike, Sam Cooke's Good Times (a Mad Men outro if ever I heard one), Oh Baby (We Got A Good Thing Going) and the rest. Then there's the Nanker Phelge (the pseudonym they used in the mid sixties for a band composition) tune The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man, a dig at the attempt to chaperone the Stones on an early tour of the States, and three Jagger/Richards tunes Gotta Get Away, Heart Of Stone and the finale, a prime example of an early Glimmer Twins classic.

I'm Free promotes the sentiment that defined the decade and, for free spirits everywhere, those that came afterwards as well. It was covered admirably by The Soup Dragons in the early nineties. But the original's still the greatest in my view.

A great set of tunes. Indicates where they came from, capturing them perfectly as they were in this early developmental stage of their career. Strongly recommended if you want to dig into the archives. Put the needle on the record and listen to the sound of 65.

Great social isolators of history - Stephen Tennant

So here were are, stuck in lockdown, and it’s a moment to reflect on the great social isolators of history. You have to give recluses credit. Maybe its what we should all do when the time has passed and we've partied and grooved our lives away. Perhaps, just then, its time to retire. Let the next generation take over.

Lets take one example of a party boy who did just that, who was at his peak around a hundred years ago and then, once the good times had started to fade, decided to leave the stage. You could see it as the application of pure modernist principles, if you wished to do so.

Stephen James Napier Tennant (1906 – 87) was described as “the brightest” of the group that became known as the “bright young things” in 1920s Britain. Other members of this group included Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Rex Whistler, the Mitford sisters, Noel Coward, Clive Bell, and Anthony Powell, amongst a cast of many more. They were what might be described as original party animals, throwing fancy dress parties and other bashes, carousing across night time London on wild treasure hunts, acting outrageously, indulging in substances that might be more linked in public perception with the swinging sixties than the decade in which they were most active, the one following world war one. With their hedonist excesses, along with the desire to dress up with abandon, they wouldn’t have been out of place in swinging London, or even at the Blitz or Studio 54 in the eighties.

The group was never far from literature. Nancy Mitford’s Love In A Cold Climate, Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time and Evelyn Waugh’s satirical Vile Bodies (later made into the film “Bright Young Things” by Stephen Fry in 2003) portrayed the scene. Stephen Tennant was regarded as the model for Cedric Hampton in Love In A Cold Climate, Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and was reputedly an influence for Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. His later life is depicted as a landlord by V S Naipaul in The Enigma Of Arrival (he was Naipaul’s real life landlord). Tennant also had a celebrated relationship with war poet, Siegfried Sassoon and reputedly spent much of his life trying to start and finish a novel – Lascar: A Story You Must Forget.

They became the celebrities of the day, appearing regularly in magazines like The Tatler. They were, of course, ridiculously privileged. Tennant was the son of a Scottish peer and there were plenty of other connections to aristocracy; their lifestyle was not one open to the majority. As the roaring twenties slipped discourteously into the recession-blighted thirties, their antics were increasingly out of step with the mood of the times. In any case, time inevitably moves on. The party days couldn’t last forever.

So what happened next? The rest of the group went on to be Royal photographers, best-selling authors, art-critics of note. What did Stephen Tennant do? He returned to his ancestral manor at Wilsford cum Lake in Wiltshire and went to bed. It is rumoured that he spent the last seventeen years of his life there. Who knows if this is true or not. But, in a sense that doesn’t matter. It cements his reputation as a recluse and social isolator of note.

Stephen Tennant was an IT boy before the phrase was invented. He was an incorrigible louche, party boy, idler. He got himself talked about, to the extent that three, perhaps four, literary characters were based on him. Not bad for someone who spent the last seventeen years of his life in bed.

On The Road - The Original Scroll

I’ve recently been reading “On The Road - The Original Scroll”. For Kerouac afficionados, its publication of in 2007 was an moment off some importance. For the first time, it was possible to read the uncorrected manuscript, as Kerouac first wrote it, on a single scroll, in those three mad weeks over half a century ago.

When you first open the book, the first thing that hits you is that the manuscript is a single paragraph, with very little conventional punctuation. More importantly from the perspective of the history of the novel, the characters are there with their real names. So, instead of Dean Moriarty, we have Neal Cassidy, and rather than Carlo Marx, there is Allen Ginsberg.

There are also significant differences in the text. Contrary to legend surrounding the non-editing of spontaneous prose poetry, Kerouac clearly made changes (such as adding paragraphs) to ensure publication. As an example of textual alterations, compare the first lines. In the traditionally published version, this reads:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split up and my feeling that everything was dead”.

The original scroll, on the other hand, reads:

“I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and the awful feeling that everything was dead”.

I also love editor, Howard Cunnell’s, description, in the “Note On The Text“, of the opening line suggesting the “sound of a car misfiring before starting up for a long journey”.

I find “On The Road - The Original Scroll” to be fresher, more immediate and having a greater clarity than the traditional published version. As the New York Times put it (quoted in the blurb on the back cover) “the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time”. I cannot recommend it more highly. It is available in paperback at the usual places.

The French New Wave - an introduction

Gauloises cigarettes, stylish girls in cafes on the Champs Elysees, three friends running through the Louvre, or over a bridge. These are images that embody a genre of filmmaking that made a considerable impact half a century ago. Its influence continues to resonate today.

The roots of the French new wave - or nouvelle vague - can be found in Paris in the early fifties. A group of young film connoisseurs came together to work on the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema. At the heart of this group were figures such as Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Louis Malle.

The group developed their own philosophy of cinema, rejecting the conventional “cinema de qualite“, which they cited as old fashioned “cinema de papa“, and substituting a concentration on the modern. Costume drama was replaced with social realism and contemporary attitudes and settings. Of equal importance was the role of the director. They promoted the concept of the "auteur", where the director was the creator of the film, which bore his vision and trademark style.

The first new wave films were shorts. Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1957) and Rohmer’s The Girl At The Monceau Bakery (1963) are typical. Filmed in grainy black and white, these are the equivalent of cinematic short stories, with clearly defined characters, neatly devised plots and of course, stylised settings.

Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958) is often cited as the first full length nouvelle vague film. Starring Jean-Claude Brialy and Gerard Blain, it was influenced by Hitchcock and covers themes such as guilt and redemption. Shortly after this came Alan Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), starring Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, which focuses on the lives of two lovers over a 36 hour period and is revolutionary for how it addresses the passage of time.

Then came Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, its theme is the life of the eleven year old Antoine Doinel, which draws heavily from Truffaut’s own experiences in Paris. It won the Palme d‘Or at Cannes in 1959 and was the first of a sequence of films directed by Truffaut and starring Leaud, in which he played the character of Doinel, taking his story up to adulthood. Others in the series include Antoine And Colette (made for the 1962 anthology Love At Twenty), Stolen Kisses (1968) Bed and Board (1970) and Love On The Run (1979).

Perhaps the film that is most identified with the nouvelle vague is Godard’s A Bout De Souffle (or Breathless). Starring Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it follows a chancer and his on-off lover on the run from the police. The settings in Paris are exquisite, the Miles Davis theme is magnificent and the words “New York Herald Tribune” are unforgettable. Why? It is worth watching the film to find out.

There is not room here to chronicle every nouvelle vague film. But there are some that deserve special mention. Godard's output was spectacular. Bande A Part (1964) tells the story of three outsiders. It stars Godard’s wife Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur. The race through the Louvre is a celebrated cinematic moment, as is The Madison Scene - a dance routine in a café. Masculin Feminine (1966) is a semi-documentary, starring Chantal Goya and Jean-Pierre Leaud and exploring the attitudes of what Godard called "the generation of Marx and Coca Cola“. It is interesting to reflect that this was made two years before the May 1968 uprising. Alphaville (1965), starring Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina, follows detective Lemmy Caution and his investigation in a distant space city. It was typical of the nouvelle vague that Godard used contemporary Paris for the setting rather than create a new city.

Truffaut’s Jules Et Jim (1962) may, at first sight, seem an unlikely nouvelle vague film, since its timeframe is not contemporary but the early part of the twentieth century. But the themes of the film tell another story. Truffaut was inspired to make it when he came across, by accident, a book written by Henri-Pierre Roche which recounts a menage a trois involving the author, writer Frank Hessel and his wife Helen Grund. Truffaut made a film of this relationship - with the main characters depicted as Jules (Oskar Werner), Jim (Henri Serre) and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) - with the approval of the book’s author. Its themes of free love and open relationships were ahead of their time. And it includes that scene on the bridge.

Other notable new wave films include Malle’s thriller Lift To The Scaffold (1958), starring Jeanne Moreau and with another memorable theme from Miles Davis, Rivette’s Paris Nous Apartment (1958), Alan Resnais’ dreamlike Last Year At Marienbad (1961) and Godard’s Made In The USA (1966). But there are so many great films I am bound to have missed many out.

Of crucial importance to the nouvelle vague was technique. These directors use hand held cameras, with impromptu locations on Paris streets. Jump cuts were used most notably in A Bout De Souffle, which one scene cutting instantly to another, which gave an instantaneous, dramatic effect. Tracking shots - long single takes - were introduced, perhaps the most well-known being in Godard‘s later work, Weekend (1967), which includes a seven minute take of a traffic jam.

Strictly speaking, the nouvelle vague lasted from 1958 to 1964. But many of the films made by these directors stem from after this period. Godard’s work with The Rolling Stones produced the excellent Sympathy For The Devil (1968) documentary. Pierrot Le Fou (1965) is considered one of his greatest works and, as described above, films such as Weekend and Masculin Feminin are from later.

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series (which includes early shorts) and Comedies And Proverbs are particularly worthy of mention, tastefully analysing the internal workings of romantic relationships and attracting a devoted, cult fanbase. My personal favourites include My Night At Maud’s (1969), Pauline At The Beach (1983) and La Collectionuse (1967) (look out for a shot of the cover of The Stones’ Aftermath album in the latter). Claire’s Knee (1970) was widely admired and was described by American film critic Vincent Canby as “something close to a perfect film“.

The influence of the nouvelle vague was widespread, almost immediately. Early modernists would watch A Bout De Souffle with the aim of studying how to walk like Jean Paul Belmondo, or copying Jean Seberg’s haircut. Filmmakers have ever since been inspired by the concepts and techniques. For example, The Devil Probably (1977), a later film by new wave fellow traveller Robert Bresson, incorporates the themes of the movement. And the nouvelle vague directly influenced the German new wave of filmmakers such as Wim Wenders.

More recent examples of nouvelle vague influence can be found in Quentin Tarantino‘s dance scene with Uma Therman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, which is a direct interpretation of the scene in Bande A Part. Set in the student uprising of May 1968, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Dreamers (2003) (with a screenplay by Gilbert Adair and starring Michael Pitt, Eva Green and Louis Garrel) is, in part, a tribute to the new wave, with a cameo appearance from Jean-Pierre Doinel and a recreation of the run through the Louvre in Bande A Part. Christophe Honore‘s Dans Paris (2006), also starring Garrel, references the new wave and Michael Haneke‘s masterpiece Hidden (2005) starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, makes use of long takes throughout the whole work.

Overall, the nouvelle vague is all around us, in style, attitude and filmmaking. The auteurs were creators of short stories, which they brought to life on film. There is no better way of getting to the heart of what the movement was all about than going back to the originals. For a start, why not get hold of a copy of A Bout De Souffle and spend an evening in the company Godard, Belmondo and Seberg. It will be an evening that you will not quickly forget.