Now what was I saying last week? Never trust a beaten Australian... And do we listen? Do we ‘eck as like? All this talk of an Australian cricket team in disarray, of an England team performing like an Australian team of yesteryear. Our media, commentators and assorted ex-cricketers never learn. Don’t they realise that any British team’s position of strength comes from being cast as the underdogs?
But no. We have to go ‘bigging up’ our boys. (Is there anyone else out there who hates such perversion of the English language? What’s wrong with the purpose-built verb ‘to aggrandize’? Yes, I know that you’d never hear it from the mouths of X-Factor judges – as in, ‘Danii, you’ve been aggrandizing Matt all night; it’s got to stop’. Where does it come from? I reckon there’s only two species of human being congenitally capable of turning nouns into verbs: Americans or… Strylians.)
Yes, so we go aggrandizing or inflating our boys Down Under in just the same way as we’ve done our inept national football teams over the last three decades or so – and look at the result. We revert immediately to type. Our batsmen collapse. Spurred on no doubt by some inspirational team talks from Richard ‘Ricky’ Ponting (‘Listen mites; we’re supposed to be flamin’ Strylians and we’re performing like a load of Pommie pooftas out there. Remember who you are, mites. Remember your Strylian heritage. Why do you think God blessed with us so much sun and so little between the ears? Now go out there and thrash those limp-wristed bastards!’), the men in the baggy caps have re-gained the initiative. Momentum has swung and I fear the worst.
Anyway. That’s my problem. On this freezing cold day on the other side of the world from the shenanigans with bat and ball, I was very saddened to read of the death of Captain Beefheart. Don Van Vliet, singer, painter and, one of anendangered species of unique artists. A mere 69. This was a man who could pen lyrics like ‘Tropical hot dog night/Like two flamingos in a fruit fight…’ and sing them like a progeny of Howling Wolf.As an adolescent wannabe hippy, I had a picture of the Captain’s occasional collaborator, Frank Zappa, on my bedroom wall. But the Captain was just too weird. It was only with the coming of manhood that I came to appreciate his mad gumbo of jazz, blues and anything avant-garde he cared to throw into the mix. It was a type of music that tended to go down better with men than women. I once bought a copy of The Spotlight Kid for a girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, the relationship didn’t last very long. Thankfully, performances like ‘Upon The My O My’ upon the Old Grey Whistle Test will be preserved for posterity on You Tube.
And finally… Me and the Missus have been really enjoying Channel Four’s Any Human Heart. The jury was out after Episode 1, but we’re hooked now after three episodes. Matthew McFadyen has morphed disquietingly into Jim Broadbent now, which is a little disquieting. But once you get over the shock, it doesn’t half bring home the poignancy of passing time.
Only another eight days till Christmas. Another Christmas. Whither goest the time so quickly?
Christmas 1969. My father had died on the previous New Year's Eve. By the spring of that year, I had impressed my love of pop music on my mother to the extent that she had somehow managed to gift me with Fleetwood Mac's first LP for my 14th birthday. Months of callous, selfish, scornful calculating thereafter succeeded in producing my first Christmas present in the form of cash, which I promptly went out and converted into Frank Zappa's Hot Rats. I had heard the whole LP on John Peel's show on Radio One, and the track I wanted to own and listen to again and again was WIllie The Pimp, on which Captain Beefheart sang his demented lyrics before giving way to a majestic, extended guitar solo by Mr. Z. Over the next few days, I wrote a poem inspired by Van Vliet, and then another, and showed them to my English teacher when the next term started, and he advised that there might be an avenue of creativity to explore there if I reined the elements of prurience and scatology that arose so naturally from my immediate adolescent reaction to the electric madness of the desert Californians I had been listening to. But before I got back to school, I used the last of my Christmas cash to purchase Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk. It was a 99 pence reissue of the 1967 classic, and when I lay down on my bedroom floor to listen to it blasting out of my Dansette Severn record player on New Year's Day 40 years ago today, it had the most scintillating, disconcerting, inspiring effect on my psyche of any record before or since. Don Van Vliet in his guise as the Captain has remained one of the most intimately moving of all influences on my life ever since. He's gone now, and it's "So sad baby" - a line from the sublime pastiche soul ballad "I'm Glad" on Safe As Milk, which I put on and listened to the day he died. So many wonderful, poetically gifted people have lighted up our paths these last 50 years, and so many of them are gone now - John Martyn, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Dennis Wilson, River Phoenix - it's sad beyond any maudlin phraseology can express. But the departure of Don Van Vliet is an especial loss. In closing, Mark, can I say that I did have a girlfriend in the 1970s who loved Beefheart's Bluejeans and Moonbeams, but I have not yet met a lover who is comfortable within the scorchingl romanticism of "My Head Is My Only Home Unless It Rains." Perhaps that's only a matter of statistics. I will miss Don nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteOne last observation about the Captain and gender studies: the majority of his lyrical output is about his love for women.
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