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Click
here to listen to 'Glorybound' by The Bible (3.77MB mp3)
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Excerpt
from Chapter 18 of '31 Songs'...
"The
Bible are a now-defunct English band who you probably won't
remember. They got good reviews, and they had a near hit in
'86 or '87 with a song called 'Graceland', and towards the end
of the eighties they were able to fill medium-sized venues in
the UK, but they split after a couple of albums, to the sorrow
of thousands, although possibly not hundreds of thousands; the
absence of a more frenzied and universal grief tells its own
tale. There are countless bands like The Bible, bands with talent,
loyal and discriminating fans and a couple of good albums in
them, but the wrong sort of record label, or manager, or haircut,
or trousers, or simply the wrong sort of luck. My record collection
is full of albums by groups who didn't quite manage the long
haul - Friends Again, and Hot!House, and The Keys, and Danny
Wilson, and Hurrah! (avoid those exclamation marks, kids, if
you want a long career in music - The Bible had one once, and
dropped it, but it was too late) - and all of them, it seems
to me, could have gone on to fame and fortune if... Oh, never
mind. Pop snobs always think that the bands they love have been
trated unfairly, that their failure is evidence of a tasteless,
ignorant and tone-deaf world, but the truth is that invariably
these bands are too quiet, too anonymous, too ugly, too smart
and they've spent too much time listening to Chris Bell or The
Replacements or Bill Evans instead of dressing up, taking drugs,
trying out make-up and picking-up fourteen-year-olds; I may
prize the songwriting craft of Paddy McAloon over the vulgarity
of Eminem, but it would be stupid to pretend that I don't know
why Eminem is the bigger star.
Anyway,
I learned to love The Bible because a couple of the band members
were friends, or at least, friends of friends - Boo Hewerdine,
The Bible's lead singer and songwriter, worked in The Beat Goes
On, a record store in Cambridge, with my friend Derek, so Boo
and I were on nodding terms, when Boo could be bothered to nod.
(Later I found out that that it wasn't rock-star arrogance that
made him look through me when we passed each other in the street,
but chronic short-sightedness. His myopia still serves him well
- on stage he looks as though he's lost in his music, when in
fact he stares straight ahead because he can't wear his glasses
becasuse they get steamed up.) I presumed - well, you do, don't
you? - that he and his band would be embarrassingly talentless,
and that once I'd heard his first record I wouldn't know how
to keep the pity out of my nods; in fact his first record was
intimidatingly good, and I was duly intimidated. I started going
to see the band play a lot, in their various incarnations (before
they were The Bible! or The Bible they were The Great Divide,
and Georgia Peach) and with varying degrees of elbow room: there
were about seven of us watching when they were a support act
at the Marquee in 1984; four years later I couldn't get in when
they played the Town & Country Club, which holds a couple
of thousand. (I did know Boo well enough to get on the guest
list, honest. It's just that I'd forgotten to ask him, and I
didn't think there'd be a problem, and... Oh, believe what you
want.)
It's
only when you know and love a band that you become the kind
of music critic that every magazine and newspaper should employ.
I have been doing some writing about pop for The New Yorker
over the last couple of years, a gig that necessitates having
hundreds of CDs you don't want thrust through your letter box
every morning. (I suspect that the record companies somehow
end up guessing your tastes and cunningly omitting the CDs you
might want from their mail-outs, thus obliging you to buy them
anyway.) My usual response to these unwanted CDs is as follows:
a) I look at the cover. If it has a Parental Advisory sticker,
and the artist in question is pretty, or has big hair, or is
snarling, or has blood coming out of his or her nose, or looks
like he or she has appeared in a teen soap, or looks very old,
or looks very young, or simply vaguely clueless (a complex judgment,
this last one, and possibly not one I can describe coherently
- something to do with the eyebrows, I think, although occasionally
there is a helpful tattoo, or smile, or sneer, or item of headwear),
or records for a label that I don't like. Sometimes - although
admittedly not often - I turn the CD over, to check song titles,
song lengths, occasionally the name of a producer, hoping something
will lead me to conclude that this album is Not For Me - that
it's for teens, or squares, or ravers, or headbangers, or Conservatives,
or anarchists, or just about anyone other than a 44-year-old
who lives in North London and likes Nelly Furtado and Bruce
Springsteen. If I still haven't managed to form an antagonistic
prejudice, then b) I look at the press release. If it uses as
a comparison any of approximately 300,000 names whose music
I don't have time for (and it usually does, because my 300,000
names have been very carefully chosen), well, I don't play it
then, either. So very,very few albums make it as far as step
c), which is where I actually put the fucking thing in the CD
player and listen to it. 'Listening', however, in this context,
means waiting for the first chord change in the first track,
at which point I can breathe a huge sigh of relief and dismiss
the whole thing out of hand as a joke, a talent-free zone, a
cacophonous mess created by know-nothings. It's a pretty impregnable
system.
I
do concede that it's not a fair system, however, and if you
or your record company have, in the last couple of years, sent
me an album that you were hoping I might review in The New Yorker,
I can only apologise, and suggest that next time you don't wear
a stupid hat in the photo shoot for the cover art. (And if you
have a nosebleed, then please wait until it stops and you've
cleaned yourself up.) If, however, you ever worked in a record
store with one of my friends, you can expect entirely different
treatment. I will listen to every song you ever record. The
ones I don't like very much on first hearing, I will play again,
on the assumption that I must have missed something, I will
not allow this rogue composition, this one bad apple, to contaminate
my enjoyment of the next, almost certainly great, track.
'Glorybound',
a pretty, mid-tempo shuffle which begins, promisingly (promisingly,
note, and NOT, in this case, derivatively, as would have been
the case with a song sung by someone who used to work in some
other record shop that I've never been in), with the same two-note
bass riff as 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' (which in turn starts
with the same two-note bass riff as Horace Silver's 'Song For
My Father', so you could argue that The Bible are respectfully
honouring a glorious musical tradition), and which contains
a gorgeous, slinky guitar solo by my other friend in the band,
Neill MacColl, was a B-side, but that of course, didn't stop
me from finding it and playing it and playing it until it became
a part of me, a permanent deposit in my tune bank. And that's
what music needs: this kind of devotion, this assumption that
the artists know what they're doing and that, if you give them
the time and the requisite confidence, they will dliver something
you will end up cherishing. Who knows how many great songs I've
missed (and 'Glorybound' is a great song, that's the whole point
- this is not about how I'm making a silk purse out of the family
sow's ear, but about how I usually end up doing the opposite),
songs written and performed by people who are your friends but
not, unfortunately, mine?"
©
Nick Hornby, 2003
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