I want my own revenge! And I want it in the Old Vic!

I went to see Eve Best in The Duchess of Malfi the other evening. Don’t.

Or, at least, if you do, laugh. It is truly terrible. She’s as good as you’d expect, given her CV. But everything else was bad, bad, bad.

As my wife said, you knew it was really bad as soon as the actors came onstage in a kind of choreographed procession. She’s a dancer and movement teacher so she’s knows about these things. But even I . . .

In fact, I should have been tipped the wink even earlier, by the set  — which must have cost a lot but which didn’t really leave much room on the stage for the actors. So they spent all their time in the middle of the stage.

They shouted a lot, too. I know that shouting is one of the prime rules for actors in Shakespearean and Jacobean drama and I wish they’d simply stop it. But this was really shouty. No rhythm to the speeches either — Eve Best aside.

So far, so quite completely awful. My wife left at half-time but I stayed on, as I’d never seen a staged version of the play before, only read it.

I’m glad I did. Not because it improved. It didn’t. It went the other way. But . . .

It gave me a Springtime For Hitler moment. Well, a potential one, anyway. If only I’d had the guts to start laughing out loud and honking the way the first-night audience do in Mel Brooks’ great comedy, The Producers.

What happened was Eve Best died, with extreme slowness. Or rather the Duchess of Malfi did. (Why? I can’t be bothered to remember.) It took minutes of groaning and moaning. Then she revived and did it all again — though making it a little shorter for this second going.

It was like something out of, say, a Morecambe and Wise version of Shakespeare. Ludicrously protracted death played for laughs.

I remember wishing I had laughed and being a little surprised there weren’t more sniggers around me. Particularly when there were several more deaths along the same lines.

It was only today, though, after a suitable break from it that I realised that I’d probably misunderstood. I think Eve Best knew what she was doing — but we the audience had let her down.

She had realised that she was in a real stinker. With her Nurse Jackie experience of how to handle mordant comedy, she’d decided the production’s only possible salvation was to play it for laughs — make it a Jacobean revenge tragedy rival to Brooks’ Nazi musical comedy.

But we the audience just didn’t get it. So, what can I say? Eve, I’m sorry, really sorry, I failed you. Next time, I promise, I’ll laugh and laugh and laugh at your Duchess of Malfi.

Who put the bermp?

An old article of mine, entitled Who Put The Bomp?, has just been published in French. Hence the silly approximation of a Clouseau accent in the heading above.

It’s in a Parisian magazine, Feuilleton — a quarterly, I think, and something like McSweeney’s. This issue, Spring 2012, also includes, among many other things, a piece by Murakami Huraki, with illustrations by Robert Crumb.

It’s one of the best-looking wordy magazines I’ve ever seen. The design for my article/essay, which stretches over eighteen pages, is just gorgeous. The piece appeared twice before in English (The Observer and Mojo magazine) but it’s never looked this good.

Nor has it previously been graced by footnotes — eg explaining that a Geordie is ‘Surnom donné aux habitants de Newcastle’. Nor, dipping into false modesty, have I ever been flattered by a biographical note describing me as a ‘figure parmi les grands noms du journalisme rock anglais’.

So what is the piece about? It’s an attempt to answer the question in the title — which was posed in a minor 1960s pop hit written and sung by Barry Mann. He was the husband half of the Mann-Greenwich partnership — writers of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling etc etc etc etc etc (plus a few more et ceteras).

My answer runs to about seven thousand words and takes in not just Geordies but Manchester City fans, Baltimore, the building at the junction of Gloucester Avenue and Regent’s Park Rd, Elvis Presley and the early 16th version of spaghetti al burro e formaggio.

How did I make these links? You’ll have to read the piece. You’ll find the magazine here. It’s 15 euros.

Don’t read French and want to read it? Well, you could find an old copy of Mojo/The Observer. Or you could wait till I finish the book I’m working on (hard) and read a new version of it there.

How did I come to think of such a mad topic and write such a mad-sounding piece? Ah, you’ll have to wait for the book to find that out, too

Next My Springtime for Hitler moment.
http://www.boutique-feuilleton.fr/vente-au-numero-xsl-351.html

And finally . . . a happy twenty-first

21 Jingle Bells Bing Crosby

More than ten years ago now, I wrote a long piece about Christmas — facts mostly. Facts like the fact that there are 140 towns and cities in the USA that have the word Christmas in their names. And the fact that, back then anyway, Britain’s top five best loved Christmas carols were Silent Night, Away In A Manger, Little Donkey, Good King Wenceslas and . . . Jingle Bells.

Which is kind of odd as it began life as a Thanksgiving song, entitled The One Horse Open Sleigh. Published in 1857, it was written by James Pierpont, uncle of the famous financier JP Morgan, whose business is still around under a similar name. The legend says Pierpont first played Jingle Bells in Simpson’s Tavern, Medford, Massachusetts — an hour or so’s walk up the Mystic River from downtown Boston. There’s a plaque to that effect on the building that’s replaced the ale house.

(I looked up Mystic River, too. It has nothing to do with the supernatural. It’s an Anglicising of its Wampanoag name. It’s also an extremely short river, just seven miles long. The things I’ve learned getting this stuff ready.)
Pierpont’s song became such a favourite at his church that they kept playing it right through till Christmas. The lyrics have changed somewhat since the original version. There are several verses, too, though no one sings them much anymore.

I’ve got a dozen or so versions of it, including a hi-energy instrumental by the Pet Shop Boys — a Christmas gift to their fanclub members. Camp as Christmas? Oh, yes.

I think this is my favourite, though. It has the Andrews Sisters on it — the flip side of the original 78 was Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. It really swings. It has that pause thing when they all stop and stay silent for a beat. They do the same trick on their version of the country murder rocker Pistol Packin Mama. And it reminds me of my childhood. My father was a big, big Bing Crosby fan. And Bing is, after all, Mr White Christmas to Charles Brown’s Mr Black I’ve no idea how many Christmas songs Crosby recorded. I’ve certainly got more than a dozen.

A grammatical (or syntactical, perhaps) point. According to James J Fuld, in The Book of World-Famous Music, the word ‘jingle’ is here being used not as an adjective, as you probably thought — I certainly did. Rather, it is an imperative verb — ie it’s telling sleigh drivers to jingle their bells, as a way of reducing the seasonal sleigh accident rate (and insurance premiums — see Rudolph, above). I’m sure he’s right, too. It makes far better sense of that ‘jingle all the way’ line.

Next Normal non-seasonal service will finally be resumed

The end of the top twenty

20 All I Want To Do Is Shag For Christmas The BellRays feat. Lisa Kekaula, Tony Fate and Bob Vennum

Another repeat visit. I put the the Bellrays’ Poor Old Rudolph on the 2008 compilation, having first heard it and them on the Bob Dylan Christmas show.
The Bellrays — or BellRays, both variants seem to be as common as each other — are from Riverside. There’s another constant for a seasonal compilation — a California sun connection. That’s where White Christmas was written and where its rarely sung opening verse is set.

Oddly, I have only ever heard Christmas songs by the Bellrays. The Rudolph one comes from 1996. This track is on a five track EP from 2005, A BellRays Christmas. I’m not sure I want to risk listening to anything else of theirs. I might not like it.

Nor had I ever seen a picture of them or read anything about them. So I looked them up. Their website has a manifesto which starts, unpromisingly, not to say ungrammatically: ‘Blues is the teacher. Punk is the preacher.’ Which is another reason I’m not risking listening to more of them.

Lisa Kekaula is the female singer. She’s pale black with big hair and wears thin-strapped tops. She’s not young. She looks like she might mean business. Or have several not-small children. Or both. (I now realise that ‘mean business’ could be interpreted in a sexual way. I didn’t mean that, just that she has the air of a woman of purpose.) The other three, all grown-up men, look like being in a band is important to them, too.

PS1 I’ve no idea at all whether the Bellrays have any knowledge of the different meaning that ‘shag’ has on my side side of the Atlantic. Till recently, I would have been certain that they didn’t, that they just thought it was a southern youth dance style of the early 1960s, particularly popular on beaches and among the well-educated but undriven (frat boys etc). The Carolina Shag is now the official state dance of both Carolinas, North and South — and it’s a kind of swing dancing so maybe my history is imagined rather than real.

Anyway, as to possible confusion between English and American shagging, I heard a track from the new album by the Magnetic Fields. Best known for their 99 Love Songs record, they are definitely American. It’s another love song — about a boy in drag who the singer wants to shag. So maybe the BellRays did know the shaggy truth.

PS2 So: shagging at Christmas? Well, it certainly goes on. More than the rest of the year? Yes. How do I know that? Month of birth statistics. The peak for births is late summer/early autumn. In the US and UK, anyway. In mainland Europe, it’s spring — as it was in the UK till a generation or so ago. Researchers have linked this to latitudinal luminosity and the effect of temperature on sperm motility.

That doesn’t make sense of the UK shift, though. There is a Czech study which further complicates the picture, finding a socio-economic effect — only among older, more affluent, well-educated women was there a birth-month differential. Poorer, younger, less educated Czech women had babies at the same rate right the year.

So I stand by my original belief. That Brits and Americans get drunk at Christmas and do more than the usual amount of drunken, forgetful sex. Why the different peak for Europeans? They are more connected to the rhythms of the agricultural year — or more likely to still be living at home. So they wait for warm evenings in the fields to do more than the usual amount of forgetful sex, drunken or not.

Next (and last) Bing dong Bing

Nineteen . . .

19 Jesus was a Dreidel Spinner Jill Sobule

Yet another Jew. Yet another personal story. I think of Jill Sobule as my favourite lesbian. She’s certainly my favourite lesbian singer songwriter.

I saw her play, once, in a club in west London. Despite the fact that she’d had a long career and had written some great songs, the audience was tiny. She could have done the show in my sitting room. Even most of those who were seemed to be A&R men waiting for the next act.

She was the complete trouper, though, performing as if it were the Albert Hall. When she’d finished, I think she had to leave the stage by stepping into the audience. I felt I should go over and tell her how great she’d been and how much I admired her songwriting. But I didn’t, of course.

When I left the club, I tripped over a step, bashed my knee and left myself limping for a month or two.

Next The vexed question of seasonal shagging

Eighteen with a bullet (from Brooklyn)

18 The Chanukah Song Neil Diamond

Written (with others) and first performed by Adam Sandler, in 1994. There were two further parts added, in 1999 and 2002. This version only features the first part — which is, the way things usually are, the best.

Let me pedantic for a moment. Wikipedia tells me that there are factual errors in the original — and, of course, factual accuracy is a prime requisite of pop song writing. Diamond repeats them here, too.

One Rod Carew, a black baseball player and coach, is not Jewish. His first wife was, though.

Two Harrison Ford is not quarter-Jewish but half-Jewish — via his mother, Dora Nidelman.

Three The Three Stooges were not all Jewish. This one’s complicated. Only three of them were — over the years there were five Three Stooges. Plus Iggy, of course. And the rest of his band, too, I guess.

The song’s other writers deserve credit, too. Ian Maxtone-Graham who has long been a big wheel on God’s own TV show, The Simpsons — he’s currently executive producer. Lewis Morton, one of the major writers of Futurama. I’ve no idea if they’re Jewish. Judging by names, though, you’d guess the first was and the second wasn’t, right?

Having written that stuff above about Tom Waits must have put me in a frame of mind to look for personal connections to the performers. And I realised I’m just a kiss and a handshake away from Neil Diamond. But no, I’m not telling you how or who did the kissing and shaking. (There is Jewishness involved, though.)

PS I wonder if this is where the popularity of the phrase ‘not so shabby’ began?

Next More Jews

And so to seventeen . . .

17 Last Christmas Minuteman

The longer this song hangs around, the more it seems to mature into something more and more intriguing and impressive. Which is true of many things about George Michael. I happened to see the Club Tropicana video recently and I can’t imagine anything more, well, more, not just camp, not even gay but, well, homosexual. Bare chests, oiled-up etc etc.

And, with hindsight, Last Christmas seems imbued with the knowledge of loss and simple loneliness that were clearly (now, at least) always there in George but have recently become not just publicly obvious but taken him into a world of tabloid attacks, if not humiliation.

I reckon that his original version of Last Christmas is a harbinger of the dignity and honesty he displayed in the recent press conference in which he talked, movingly, about his near-death from pneumonia and thanked the medical team with simplicity and sweetness. He used his stardom — ie you or I can’t call a press conference and expect anyone to turn up while he can — to affirm a joint humanity. Which accepts the inevitable possibility of having your heart torn apart between one Christmas and the next.

This version is from a 2006 charity album for Shelter, It’s Not Like Christmas. I used another track from it, The Twelve Days of Christmas by Field Music and Kathryn Williams, on my 2007 compilation. This is by Minuteman, the most recent of at least three acts by that name — and nothing to do with the American 1980s punks, the Minutemen. As far as I can tell, Minuteman, was a solo electronic artist who made music for video games. There is a suggestion that he ‘reformed’ to record this track but that’s a joke, I think. He seems to have disappeared again, though.

Next It's Chanukah time, with the Brooklyn Diamond