*Track 13
You Said Something - 10th August 2018
Stuart had long harboured doubts about Damon Albarn, concerned there could be more than a whiff of Branson about him.
The heart of his issue had always lain with Damon’s slightly jarring estuary twang, and the suspicion this might just be an effected front, cynically employed to add some working-class rock star credibility, masking a more privileged (quite possibly toffist) upbringing? As with most prejudices though this had only ever been casually applied, Stuart never researching Albarn’s background to test the truth of his supposition, simply allowing it to take unverified root. First impressions and all that.
He had never let this totally cloud his opinion of Blur though (Graham Coxon after all was clearly the real deal) and during the big Britpop wars of 1995 Stuart had sided with them over Oasis, whose anthemic rock, even at its best, he had always found a little too ‘paint by numbers’. He owned half a dozen Blur albums, and often raved about 1994’s big Ally Pally gig, but those nagging doubts had persisted, his support for the band never able to rise beyond grudging admiration.
In the end it had taken James Blunt, a most unlikely saviour, to provoke Stuart into establishing the truth, correcting his misconceptions. The Old Harrovian singer (the son of a colonel) had lost his temper during a 2014 interview, fed up with his own cossetted background being brought up yet again, and sought to deflect this criticism by going on the offensive, employing Damon as his weapon of choice. Blunt claimed Albarn had, “an orchard full of plums in his mouth and a silver spoon stuck up his arse,” and that he had deliberately, “dirtied up his accent to appear cooler to a mass audience.”
This had proven an allegation too far for Stuart. While he had been content to privately cultivate his own preconceptions, he wasn’t prepared to see them propagated by another. Certainly not by someone responsible for the eternally irritating ‘You’re Beautiful’. Twenty years later than he should have done, prompted by Blunt, Stuart had finally got around to investigating Albarn’s background.
He discovered Damon was the son of a conscientious objecting, artist father and a theatrical set designing mother (who worked for Joan Littlewood’s company at the Theatre Royal). The Albarns had family homes in Leytonstone and Colchester, and Damon attended the local Comprehensive at the latter, where he met Graham Coxon. While the Gallagher brothers, Stuart had reflected, may well regard this as a contemptuously middle-class upbringing, at best a hippy one, there was no way these facts supported Blunt’s scurrilous charges about plums and spoons. Maybe, all this time, Damon’s dodgy accent had just been some form of subconscious Ray Davies tribute!
The absorption of this new evidence had latterly allowed Stuart to remove the ‘qualified’ caveat he had previously felt obligated to apply to his appreciation of the band. He could now listen to his favourite Blur songs, ‘End of a Century’, ‘Tender’, ‘You’re so Great’, ‘Under the Westway’, free from any lingering jaundice.
And then, of course, there were the Gorillaz!
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Stuart, Anne, and Joe were in Budapest for Sziget; and Damon, along with his cartoon chums, had been the previous night’s triumphant headliners.
This regular festival pilgrimage, fast approaching a tradition, was hosted by Stuart’s old friend Spencer, whose mother must clearly have been a huge fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood! Spencer, along with his son Tom and daughter Marie, had clocked up an impressive twelve years of continuous Szitizen attendance since the family had first adopted Budapest as their ex-pat home back in 2007. Always an inveterate collector, Spencer even owned, as prized possessions, a complete set of Sziget festival tee-shirts, though none of the early editions comfortably fitted him any longer!
There was an impressive Sziget turnout this year. Sixteen individual music fans (spread over five families), each with their own firmly held views on which acts were going to be good and, just as importantly, which were likely to prove bad (or, worse still, dull). The endless debates fomented by these staunch opinions, with their associated mockery, formed a significant part of Stuart’s enjoyment of Sziget. There was little he enjoyed as much as a good musical argument.
A lot of these taste disputes were generationally driven, split along fault lines you would expect to find (like Stormzy versus The War on Drugs), but sometimes, and often more vociferously, they cropped up with little relation to age, as had proven the case with this year’s most entertaining bone of contention, Lewis Capaldi.
Lewis’s supporters in the camp, whether young or old, seemed to have been placing the Scot at the top of their scheduling wish lists for days, apparently viewing him as some form of latter-day songwriting genius, and Stuart had been carefully observing Ed suffer this seemingly incessant hero worship in surprisingly frustrated silence. Until yesterday!
Once Ed’s fragile dam of patience had finally been breached, all his pent up Capaldi concerns had come flooding out spectacularly, dismissing the singer in one relentless rant as, “a talentless Jock ginge,” with a set of boring songs, “so mind numbingly dull, I would rather rip off my ears than listen to them.”
While Stuart had a degree of sympathy with this view he still hadn’t been able to resist pointing out, in order to stir the pot a little further, how this, “has to be something of a first. Ed and Noel Gallagher, critical twins, conjoined as one!”
With disputes like this being the Sziget order of the day, collective critical consensus was a far rarer beast. Yet Damon had undoubtedly managed to deliver just that last night. As they had all met up afterwards it had been universally agreed the Gorillaz set had been the highlight of the festival so far.
A healthy discussion still followed over which had been their best song; ‘On Melancholy Hill’, ‘Dirty Harry’, ‘Kids with Guns’ and ‘Clint Eastwood’ (which got Stuart’s vote) each attracting advocates, but, beyond that, unanimity had reigned. The band’s whole had proven even more than the sum of their (many) impressive parts. The set’s staging and lightshow were both spectacular, but the beating heart of the performance had come from Damon himself, conducting his supposedly simian circus troupe in an understated yet extraordinarily showman-like manner.
Anne and Stuart, along with Ed’s daughter Rose, had been late getting back to the main arena, having stayed on to see the end of an entertaining, crowd participatory set from Beans on Toast out on one of Sziget’s farther-flung more bohemian stages. This oddly monikered ensemble was really just a front for folk singer Jay McAllister, a festival veteran with a fiercely loyal band of followers and a whole bunch of cleverly constructed songs about love, politics, drugs, and (with admirable audience awareness) how much fun it can be at festivals. Humour and music have always been a hard square to circle, but Jay/Beans manages to pull off the trick beautifully.
Their tardiness having made it unlikely they would be able to work their way through the huge Gorillaz’ crowd, with little chance of getting near the front (even less of tracking down the others), the three of them considered settling instead for a position on a raised platform beside one of the bars that circled the rear of the arena.
Once Rose had suggested, “the view’s not bad, and it’s easy to get drinks,” her astute observation proved persuasive, with necessity potentially proving the mother of a new convention. Their distant view over the gathered hoards provided a perfect vista for appreciating Gorillaz’ panoramic show, and the extra space and readier alcohol access landed them at the heart of a vibrant, communal party.
“We should do this again,” they had all agreed.
After the last encore had finished, a magnificent rendition of ‘Clint Eastwood’, the trio abandoned their newly found compadres (almost reluctantly) and headed back to the agreed rendezvous point at the ‘bar with the plastic legs’. Only then, having returned armed with their fresh war stories about, “life at the back,” had they uncovered the unprecedented consensus. Irrespective of where Gorillaz had been observed from, their set had been judged an unqualified triumph. Stuart passed on a silent thank-you to James Blunt for allowing him to concur without reservation.
Much later, after gathering back in the city, Stuart, fuelled by a few too many beers (and an inadvisable number of Palinka chasers), had attempted to corral the wider group into debating a new musical topic; one he had dreamt up earlier whilst contemplating a wide-screen Damon.
“Who is the best ever musical chameleon?” he had asked, quickly realising, from the sea of blank looks, that this would require further explanation. The longer form question, once Stuart had clarified it, became, “who has changed their musical style most often, most successfully?”
There had been a few left field suggestions; Charlie expressing unexpectedly enthusiastic support for Prince, Ed championing Fleetwood Mac (banging on for ages about Peter Green), Spencer adding a soul/disco spin with a Nile Rodgers nomination, and a few of the younger delegates making surprisingly strong arguments for Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and, perhaps most convincingly, Kanye West.
By the end of their discussion though, some time around 2am, Stuart felt he had finally managed to mediate a commonly agreed list. Probably, more accurately, everybody else had by then simply lost the will to dispute his own choices any further:
5) Damon Albarn – once Blur had moved beyond Britpop laddishness, Damon had shown an impressive depth and diversity with; The Good, The Bad, & The Queen, Gorillaz, solo albums, soundtracks, and even an opera.
4) Madonna – in morphing from New York disco upstart to fully-fledged pop goddess La Ciccone had somehow managed to singlehandedly invent the modern day mash-up of music, style, and choreography. Equally loved and reviled, but seldom ignored.
3) Johnny Cash – his induction into each of the Halls of Fame for rock’n’roll, country, and gospel surely demonstrated Cash’s rare, genre spanning genius, even before you factored in his final, masterful American Recordings reincarnation.
2) PJ Harvey – Polly’s constant musical reinvention was impressive enough in itself, but simultaneously revising her look and style as well, in order to reflect each album’s unique aesthetic, made her a true chameleon.
1) David Bowie – From folk troubadour to rock god Ziggy, from an alien who fell to earth to a young American soulster, from Berlin chic right up to death as an artistic statement. As Carly had once put it, there really was nobody who did it better!
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Having been the first to surface again, at 9am, Stuart had found everywhere quiet in the apartment they were sharing with Ed and clan, and used this rare Sziget solitude, over a slightly befuddled breakfast, to reevaluate last night’s final late-night musical list order. His review prompted two overriding thoughts:
I really hate people talking about, “not drinking on a school night”, but we clearly shouldn’t have drunk that much on a ‘Challenge’ eve. Thankfully though Budapest time will mean a later 11am start, and
How on earth did I have the nerve to pronounce a consensus outcome on ‘musical chameleons’ when I was the only one with anything good to say about PJ Harvey?
It seemed like you either ‘got’ Polly, and loved her accordingly, or you didn’t and simply ignored her. In order to ‘put straight’ last night’s non-believers (pretty much everybody else present), Stuart decided to celebrate her dubious list inclusion by playing ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’. If he faced any further dissent, as his flatmates began to gather hazily, he could at least argue that this album represented Harvey at her most accessible. It had even won a Mercury Prize.
In practice the record went down better than expected:
“Love her voice on this,” Rose commented, listening to ‘A Place Called Home’, “she’s got an amazing range.”
“Got to admit, I’m enjoying this,” her dad grudgingly conceded a few songs later, “whores hustling, and hustlers whoring, clever line that. This one’s good too.”
“It’s called ‘This Mess We’re In’,” Stuart advised him, “but you do realise who she’s duetting with don’t you? It’s Thom Yorke.”
“Shit! Really. Thom with an unnecessary, pretentious h. Sorry, I take it back about enjoying it.”
“The next song, ‘You Said Something’, is my favourite,” Stuart informed them. “I read recently how David McComb reckoned songs weren’t proper songs without mystery, and this has it in spades. You’re already wondering what the unexplained, “something,” is that she’s, “never forgotten,” when she ups the ante again, at the end, by letting slip that it’s, “really important.” Genius.”
“God, you analyse things to death, don’t you?” Ed sighed. This wasn’t intended as a compliment of course, but Stuart nonetheless chose to take it as one.
“I know this song,” Joe joined in, having finally made an appearance as ‘You Said Something’ begun. It would be a bigger shock if you didn’t, Stuart thought, it has been regularly, subliminally implanted since you were three.
The easy thing, certainly the smart career move, would have been for PJ to build on the Mercury winning accessibility of this album quickly, to release something along similar lines. Instead she had waited four years to follow it with ‘Uh Huh Her’, a record with a perversely unflattering cover photo which simply foreshadows the raw, uncommercial experimentation contained within.
Next came a whole sequence of conceptual, mood piece collections; ‘White Chalk’, ‘Let England Shake’, and ‘The Hope Demolition Project’, although the latter becoming an unexpected UK number one had perhaps shown there might, after all, be some method in her apparent madness.
These had all been great individual albums though, and for Stuart it was exactly this stubborn determination to just make the music she wanted to, with no thought of pandering to commercial expectations, that made PJ Harvey stand out as a true maverick.
‘Stories from the City’s closing track, ‘This Wicked Tongue’, was still playing as they buzzed Charlie up to the apartment, arriving to join them for today’s ‘Challenge’ (an arrangement drunkenly reconfirmed at 2am), and Polly’s distinctive vocals provided him with a near perfect cue for his sarcastic observation, “ah, is that the queen chameleon herself I can hear? How is everybody feeling?”
Not great was the honest answer, but after a few final preparatory hits of caffeine the time arrived for their newly broadened ‘Challenge’ collective to convene.
Ed, who had spent much of the last hour loudly complaining that this was, “a pain in the arse, we’re supposed to be on holiday,” now appeared the keenest to get going. In front of his biggest audience to date, Stuart logged back on to the ‘Challenge 69’ site:
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(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 45’ in the meantime? If you think you have got the answer, then please reply direct to this email post, to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)