News, Views and Music Issue 6 (Intro)

September 29:   

♫ It’s been another week of watching things slowly travel towards fruition, here at the AAA. After having studied even more web hosts than there are classic psychedelic albums for the best part of two weeks, we’re still not totally convinced about where best to place our site. It’s been a bit like that in other AAA areas too: the new Oasis album ’Dig Out Your Soul’ is out soon but not quite yet, as are a new as-yet-to-be-titled Kinks box-set and the much-delayed CSNY tour-come-Bush-baiting documentary Déjà vu Revisited. There’s only one new AAA release to tell you about this week: yet another paving slab-sized John Lennon biography, ’The Life’. Good news: its by Phillip Norman, the ‘first’ Beatle biographer whose book ’Shout!’ is said by many to have kick-started the whole rock journalism movement and even when heavily censored by Brian Epstein and full of interviews of notably bored and jet-lagged Beatles was always engaging. Bad news: this longer, less censored, better researched book simply isn’t as good, as least to judge by the three scathing reviews of it I’ve seen.

There isn’t much to find out about Lennon and despite the promises on the back cover Norman’s only uncovered snippets rather than view-changing material. Oh and while I’m busy ranting please, biographers, if you do write about ex-Beatles, make it a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, like all good comprehensive biographies should be. The only books I’ve seen about the Beatles this century nearly all want to make the Beatles out to be either saints or devils incarnate, depending on their view. The truth, surely, is somewhere in-between—but since an impressive run in the late 1990s, all books about the Beatles seem to want to make them or break them. Odd.      

♫ Pink Floyd news: By far the highlight of the week was David Gilmour’s appearance on ‘Later with Jools Holland’. The band, with sorely missed member Rick Wright, had been booked on the show eons ago to promote Gilmour’s new live CD/ DVD ‘live at Gdnask’, with the Poland city the last farewell stop on Gilmour’s mighty world(ish) tour of 2006-07.  But after Rick’s unexpected death a fortnight back, Gilmour surprised us all by performing a tribute to his old friend, Wright’s rare ‘Remember A Day’ from the ‘Saucerful Of Secrets’ album, a track which hardly anyone seems to know and as far as I recall has never graced the live-set of any Floyd line-up and/or spin-off. But the song has always been one of my Floyd favourites—we’d already plugged it mercilessly on this site before Rick’s death and its at #3 in our Rick Wright song tribute above—so to see Gilmour’s sensitive arrangement and interpretation of a song recorded before Dave had even joined the Floyd was marvelous indeed.

♫ Anniversaries this week: Phil Oakey (frontman for the Human League) turns 53 on October 2nd.  Events of the week: The Beatles’ first single ’Love Me Do’ entered the charts on October 5th, 1962 and the first CSN LP, released in June 1969, turned gold on September 30th that year.