Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

If there had been any any doubt before, the opening of the envelope first thing on the morning of my birthday this year proved how well my wife knows me. Inside were tickets to a screening of Skyfall at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing Thomas Newman’s score in sync with the film. One of my favourite Bond films, with live music, in the majestic setting of one of the world’s greatest performance venues. I couldn’t have asked for a better present.

Shown as part of a series of such screenings celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 007 franchise, the evening was introduced by Sir Sam Mendes, Skyfall’s director, who elaborated on how a director, highly regarded beforehand for his theatre work, came to helm cinema’s longest-running action franchise. Evidently, running into Daniel Craig at a party in New York, the actor suggested that Mendes should direct his third outing as Bond. Mendes agreed, although he later realised it wasn’t in Craig’s gift to offer the job. The next day, sober, Mendes contacted executive producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to see if they’d be interested. Wisely, they said yes, and one of the best films in the-then 50-year history of the series was set in train.

Every Bond fan will have their own favourites, and every Bond fan will have their reasons. Every film will have its memorable moments, every film its great lines, every film its naff bits. It’s why we love Bond, let’s face it. Rugged action with the occasional Carry On element thrown in for larks. Under Mendes, Skyfall added another dimension, developing out some of the darkness in Bond’s backstory (namely how he became an orphan), but played out through a cinemascope the series had rarely delivered with its lively cartoonism of characters, stunts, gadgets and glamour. 

Bond films have always reconfigured Ian Fleming’s original ideas with a more contemporary twist (though the rush to make Moonraker a Bond for the Star Wars era was patently flawed), but with Skyfall, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s story addressed spycraft’s very real transition from Cold War adversariality to cyber threats (“I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pyjamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field,” Ben Whishaw’s newly-appointed Q informs Bond on their first encounter, to which the agent retorts: “So why do you need me?”. “Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled,” comes the reply).

Few at the time would have realised that Skyfall was the apex of an arc that would conclude with No Time To Die, but there was an enrichingly downbeat nature to the film, built around Javier Bardem’s delightfully camp villain Silva seeking revenge on M (Dame Judi Dench) by attacking MI6 itself. Yes, it didn’t veer too far from the established mad superbaddie formula, but - and here’s where the difference was made for me - there was a noticeably different cinematic quality about Skyfall. 

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

Part of that is indebted to Mendes’s use of Sir Roger Deakins as cinematographer. The scenes in Shanghai, especially the tower block fight between Bond and assassin Rapice - are some of the most stunningly-photographed moments I’ve seen this side of a Michael Mann production, capturing the Chinese city’s LED sophistication and BladeRunner-esque futurism. But, equally, are the scenes shot in Scotland, as Bond and M attempt to get ahead of Silva by driving the famous Aston Martin DB5 up to the titular Skyfall ancestral home, amid breathtaking - and cold - moorland scenery.

Growing up watching Bond films on television as Christmas and Easter holiday treats, I absorbed their escapism. Never did I process the body count, or the many moral ambiguities the films presented, not least of which the inherent sexism. To me, Bond was glamour: dressing up in one of my dad’s suit jackets made me Bond, purely for the myopic belief that it looked more like a tuxedo than a school blazer. Skyfall, for me, reset the franchise as a storytelling venture, albeit one with elements of Bond tradition and familiarity. And knowingly so: back to that first encounter between Bond and Q, in which the quartermaster hands over a ticket to Shanghai, a Walther PPK (with a palm-print encoder in the grip) and a tiny little radio device. “A gun and a radio. It’s not exactly Christmas, is it?“, the somewhat entitled secret agent remarks icily. “What, were you expecting an exploding pen?” says Q. “We don't really go in for that anymore.”

While Mendes would next helm the somewhat flawed Spectre, the fourth Daniel Craig outing before his finale in No Time To Die, the knight-director can take pride in making a Bond film that will forever be a high benchmark in the 25-film canon to date. Naturally, a few weren’t too fond of Skyfall, because it was too wrought, or because it suggested an ageing Bond, though this last gripe completely ignores the preposterous sight of Roger Moore at 58 in A View To A Kill (though having read that, having just turned 55, I’m increasingly sympathetic…). 

In Skyfall, Bond bleeds, he gets shot - twice (including once by Miss Moneypenny) - he drinks to excess, fails his physical and psychological tests, and ultimately loses the maternal figure that Dench’s M is portrayed as. For once, or at least the first time since George Lazenby shed a tear at the death of his new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond is made vulnerable amid the existential threat Silva poses to MI6. While he ultimately comes through, as has always been the outcome, Skyfall’s emotional heft - brought to bear by Mendes - combined with its stunning visual complexion. Last night it was a joy to see it again on a big screen.

© Simon Poulter 2022

I shouldn’t ignore, either, the experience of watching it with a live orchestra. Such are the perfect acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall that if there hadn’t been almost a hundred musicians and conductor Anthony Gabriele waving his baton at them below us, you would have thought you were listening to the original recorded score. 

Deservedly, though, the ensemble generated impromptu applause after playing the film’s title song, Adele’s vocal presumably isolated for playback over the live orchestra. But the greatest ripple was reserved for The James Bond Theme, Monty Norman’s twanging guitar riff, which lasered through the 5,000-odd seated punters as a reminder of the most iconic piece of theme music in film history. We weren’t introduced to any of the individual performers, but whoever the job fell to play that riff should know that the reverence in the audience was akin to that reserved for David Gilmour performing the Comfortably Numb solo, or Jimmy Page wigging out on Stairway To Heaven. Hard to remember this was a film we were still watching. But what an experience. 

Still got the blues - Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall

Picture: ericclapton.com

On occasion I am inclined to regale anyone who’ll listen with my affection for and affliction to the area I grew up in, and to where I returned after galavanting around the world for two decades. This stems from the discovery, relatively late in life, that the south-west London suburbs of my origin actually had more going for them than I ever knew or even suspected as a child. I’ll spare you for another post, another time, the myriad musical connections to the area around Kingston-upon-Thames, but the one that always stands out is Eric Clapton.

Time’s mists have increasingly clouded the place Clapton holds in the pantheon of absolute rock legends, and while he is flesh and blood like the rest of us, the famous ‘Clapton is God’ meme, spray-painted onto an Islington wall somewhere in the mid-’60s - which may have been, then, just cheeky hype - was applied to a young man who, arguably, would turn British rock music on its head through sheer virtuosity alone. 

Clapton had barely left Surbiton’s Hollyfield School when he joined The Yardbirds in 1963, signing his contract in a now defunct pub in New Malden (actually, one once located just a mile from the house in which I was born). Having taught himself guitar, sitting alone on the village green of rural Ripley learning blues songs by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, the teenage Clapton, armed with a Hoyer guitar bought from Bell Music in Surbiton, found an outlet in the riverside pubs of nearby Kingston. South-west London was emerging as the home of the English blues, with districts like Ealing and Richmond becoming a Mecca for young white locals channeling the music of America’s impoverished South. Within this realm, Clapton formed one corner of a triangle of Surrey-born guitar legends, being eventually replaced in The Yardbirds by Carshalton’s Jeff Beck, who in turn introduced another prodigy, Epsom’s Jimmy Page.   

By the summer of 1966 the 21-year-old Clapton had already been in two seminal bands (the other being John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) when he joined a third, Cream, providing an excoriating platform for him to expand his God-given talent for blues-based rock guitar, becoming the most feted musician of his peer group, a friendly rival to the equally gifted Jimi Hendrix. Cream would last all of two years - the blink of an eye in musical history terms, but just as The Beatles were only an entity for, effectively, ten years, the legacy would last much longer.

That legacy was in effect last night at the Royal Albert Hall, the Victorian wedding cake that has effectively become Clapton’s spiritual home, having first played there in 1964 with The Yardbirds, and then memorably appearing there for Cream’s farewell concert in 1968. This was the fulfilment of a personal ambition of mine: year in, year out, tickets have gone on sale for Clapton’s May ‘proms’ at the venue only to see them snapped up in seconds, not helped by the old drum’s seating capacity of just over 5,000. And, yet, here is the guitarist that I desperately wanted to emulate, especially once I discovered his local origins. I even bought an Eric Clapton-signature Fender Stratocaster in the hope that it would make me play like him. But, strangely, in all my 54 years I’ve never found myself in the same space as the man himself. I wasn’t disappointed.

Opening with a gentle version of Gary Brooker’s Lead Me To The Water in tribute to the Procol Harum frontman, who died in February, Clapton and his now familiar band of supporting players (including singer and organist Paul Carrack, bassist Nathan East and keyboard player Tim Stainton), got straight into the blues with the Chicago standard Key To The Highway. In fact, this was to be, largely, a parade of Clapton’s best known songs - a funked up I Shot The Sheriff, followed by a personal treat for me, Cream’s White Room and, later, Badge and his signature interpretation of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. 

Indeed, it was quite refreshing for Clapton to use the show - which had, like so many others, been postponed by Covid (and let’s not go near his apparent conservative views on that subject…) - as a run through of what the crowd, which appeared to be largely in the guitarist’s septuagenarian age group, had come for. More contemporary songs, like Pilgrim and River Of Tears provided textured reminders of Clapton’s writing skills (albeit both being co-written with Climie-Fisher’s Simon Climie), as well as his underrated, soulful singing voice, highlighting a point that he isn’t just a raucous blues soloist. Indeed, that became even more apparent with the mid-show acoustic set, drawing on the 1992 MTV Unplugged performance that brought Clapton a new audience (and gave a notable fillip to the acoustic guitar industry), with playful versions of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, accompanied by Andy Fairweather Low, and the old Charlie Chaplin/Nat King Cole chestnut Smile. Then the two highlights of that MTV special, the shuffle-arrangement of Layla and the still poignant Tears In Heaven.

A quick reset of the stage, and we were back to the electric Clapton, with the aforementioned Badge leading into the tender Wonderful Tonight (references to drunken buffoonery not withstanding, this was a timely rendition for my wife and I to enjoy on our one-month wedding anniversary...) and then back on the heavy pedal for Crossroads and another Johnson song, Little Queen Of Spades. Some in the  venerable Albert Hall crowd must have had advanced warning as to what came next, as from our eerie we sensed something of a stage rush (though clearly slowed by hip replacements, arthritis and other advanced-year hindrances) which heralded a second performance of the night for Layla, played out in its full Derek and the Dominos form, replete with its freewheeling coda. With that, and an encore of the Joe Cocker song High Time We Went - voiced by Carrack (a welcome opportunity for him to demonstrate arguably the UK’s finest vocal cords), the 77-year-old Clapton was off. There was little ceremony and, as had been the case for most of the night, no great interaction with the audience.

That appears to have always been his MO. Apart from the occasional brisk “thank you!”, and shoutouts to individuals in the band, Clapton has, from those teenage performances in the pubs of south-west London, through his legend building to now, mostly let his fingers do the talking. Like many of his other peers still going, here was proof that age is, broadly, just a number. I’ll admit that, as the world came to a halt two years ago, I wondered how many of these legends I would ever get to see again live. Clapton himself had suggested as long ago as 2014 that he might retire, as nerve damage to his fingers as well as other age-related ailments started to make performing less enjoyable. There was nothing, however, in last night’s display to suggest that he’s about to pull the plug on his 60-year career. 

In my last blog post (several weeks and a wedding ago) I came to the conclusion that Genesis had, finally, come to the end of the road, with their visibly aged and ailing lead singer. At the Albert Hall was  a guitarist (and Phil Collins’ former mucker) nearing his eighth decade and showing every bit of the fretboard dexterity that first blew the London music scene away in The Roosters, The Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers and then Cream before he’d even turned 21. 56 years on, that God-given talent is still there. Last night we cherished it.

Doves on day release

Picture: Ceri Levi

A flurry of gigs last year - including one at the Royal Albert Hall in April that I was at - gave hope of new material from the mighty Doves, after a 11-year break since their 2009 album Kingdom Of Rust. During that absence, brothers Andy and Jez Williams formed Black Rivers, while bassist and singer Jimi Goodwin released a solo album. But last year's live reformation seemed to galvanise the Oldham trio into getting back together on record, and thus it seemed to be the case in January when a tweet from a studio mixing desk appeared to confirm that new material would be in the offing.

Last month saw the release of the single Carousels, serving a taste of today's announcement of a new album, The Universal Want, to be released on 11 September, which will include the sprightly second single, Prisoners, issued today. "Everything on the album is an echo," Williams, J. said today. "It’s an echo of what we were going through at the time. Getting back together, the Royal Albert Hall and everything else."

Elbow's Guy Garvey - who, along with Doves and I Am Kloot - forms part of a north-west English clique responsible for some of the richest indie rock of the last decade or so - recently gave Q an insight into what he'd heard coming out of the Doves studio: "You don't hear records like they're about to make very often any more," he said, making clear he'd been sworn to secrecy. "The necessary economy of making music means it can be sparse and there's fewer signals per tune and that forced minimalism is turning out some amazing stuff," adding, "but sometimes you want something with the kitchen sink being swung around the head. It's gonna be massive."

Picture: Doves/Jon Shard

Back in June, when the first single was released, Goodwin told the NME of the new direction: "We’re still really excited about trying stuff that we’ve never done and going to places that we as a band have never been to." Carousels, he said, was "a good harbinger of the album and just a great mission statement. Without having any agenda or a backstory as to what the record is, it just shows off our love of sonic weirdness, atmosphere and energy. We unanimously knew that this would be great as the first thing that people hear of us coming out of the gate after all this time. It’s a mission statement."

As for returning after such a long break, Goodwin added: "We find ourselves in the middle of such strange world events. It’s still exciting to be releasing music, because I’m dead proud of what we’ve managed to pull together after 11 years." Speaking about the new album, Goodwin said: "I just know that we’ve made a really good Doves record that represents where we are and where we’ve been for the past 11 years. It’s probably the most organically-made Doves record," adding that it came out of the trio chatting via e-mail. "I was meant to be doing my next solo record and they were supposed to be doing a new Black Rivers album. We started pooling all our material and the material that we couldn’t work into shape on the last record Kingdom Of Rust."

As for the hiatus, Goodwin told the NME: "Time really does fly and I can’t believe it’s been 11 years. We’re friends at the end of the day, and we just clicked back into place like it was yesterday. It’s nice to have had that space between the records. It was starting to feel like punching the clock a little bit before we took a break."

The Universal Want tracklisting:
Carousels
I Will Not Hide
Broken Eyes
For Tomorrow
Cathedrals Of The Mind
Prisoners
Cycle Of Hurt
Mother Silver Lake
Universal Want
Forest House