Good Evening, Hammersmith!

“It’s great to be here! It’s great to be anywhere!” is Keith Richards' customary wry introduction to Happy, the single song he gets to front at Rolling Stones gigs. It’s the phrase that entered my mind as soon as we exited the Tube station and saw people thronging to the grand old theatre that I still regard as the Hammersmith Odeon, but now goes by the commercial name Eventim Apollo (and, convolutedly, at various times in its 90-year history, the Gaumont Palace, Labatt’s Apollo, Hammersmith Apollo, Carling Apollo Hammersmith and the HMV Hammersmith Apollo). Because it was great to be out, for one, but also great to be at a gig again, my first since...God knows when. Actually, I can tell you: December 2019. Presumably, then, no one outside Wuhan had heard of  “the thing”, as Guy Garvey refers obliquely to it, drawing attention to the fact that, for the vast majority of the three-and-a-half thousand punters assembled for Elbow’s repeatedly-postponed return to the Hammersmith [Insert Name Here], this will be a unique occasion.

“Sorry we’re late,” he quips, once headline proceedings have commenced (as he probably begins every night of a tour already into its final third). He likes to get underway with an audience-softening zinger, and has used this gag before, but tonight there’s an obvious poignancy to it. Like every other UK venue Elbow are appearing at, the audience is tentative, cautiously stepping into the concert experience and its traditions with the added reserve of not fully knowing what the etiquette is - mask on or off? 

It is, for many, a first night out in months, with habitual gig-goers having to juggle suddenly clashing shows, with rescheduled dates appearing on calendars like planes in a holding pattern for Heathrow. Before Elbow take to the stage there is polite observance for the support, the Suzanne Vega-ish American, Jessica Hoop, followed by Peter Alexander Jobson of longstanding Elbow mates and fellow Lancastrians, I Am Kloot. Jobson is as jocular as Hoop is winsome, but it serves the correct purpose of a support set in these times to ease the audience into the gig experience once more. Even then, Elbow’s launching into Dexter + Sinister, from 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes, comes as an assault on the eyes as much as the ears, with bright, white staccato strobes pulsing, piercingly, shocking sensorial systems belonging to human pit ponies that have spent the better part of the last 18 months hunched over laptops and smartphones in the permanent half-light of WFH.

It is the start of a two-hour reminder that Elbow are one of the UK’s best live acts, but while they are clearly comfortable in the grand, but modestly-sized interior of the Apollo (a venue they have appeared at on many occasions), you are, very early, reminded of their appeal - the “soaring” anthems that have become associated with the warmth and wide-open communal singing of outdoor summer festivals, rather than a Depression-era cinema next to the M4 flyover in West London. 

Garvey is the focal point, but he performs with an avuncularity that is a rarity in rock, not consciously trying to outshine his bandmates, but applying his cuddly bear-like frame and warm humour, to immediately bring the crowd onside. He projects an everyman charm, the loveable mate you’d be just as happy in the company of down the pub as in front of you on stage. It’s an engaging nature that comes across regardless of whether he’s addressing a radio audience, guest starring in Peter Kay’s Car Share, or performing before tens of thousands at Pilton Farm. He is, obviously, Elbow’s vocal representation, but more than just its singer and co-songwriter, he maintains the geniality of a band that produces compelling heartfelt songs without the aggravating pretentiousness of Coldplay, a quartet of similar length of service (“We've been going almost 30 years,” Garvey declares to gasps).

There is, too, a distinctive northerness to Elbow’s music. It’s hard to properly describe, but it’s a north-western ambience accentuated by Garvey’s drawling Bury vowels, unsullied by life outside the region. Theirs is also a music that defies definition, which probably puts them in the “prog” category (Garvey is a noted fan of Peter Gabriel, and Elbow’s first album was cut at Gabriel’s Real World Studios), which is fine by me. You do, though, hear strains of other, equally indefinable influences, like Talk Talk and even the Velvet Underground (especially on Kindling, which appears midway through the set). Because, as these two hours in Hammersmith demonstrate, there’s an intricacy and complexity to Elbow’s music and lyrics, but also a hymn-like quality. Barely a song can’t be described as “anthemic”, a cliché I know, but this is why Elbow are so intrinsically suited to the open space of the festival. Here, you also acknowledge just how good Garvey’s voice is, always at the top of expellation without ever sounding strained. Their songs might bear a lyrical intricacy but the instrumentation of guitarist Mark Potter and his keyboard-playing brother Craig, along with bassist Pete Turner and touring drummer Alex Reeves, plus a couple of strings players (and, I should add, a stageside signer for the hearing impaired, Katie Fenwick - a first for me at a gig - who, to her credit, had learned the lyrics of all three acts) spreads economically across the scope of the band’s often emotionally wrought songs.

Alas, Katie was too far from my Row U eyrie to be of any benefit in articulating Garvey’s wonderfully poetic lyrics, but there was so much more going on in a 17-song set drawn from seven of Elbow’s eight albums released to date, plus the ‘bonus’ of the delightful What I Am Without You, a fairground Wurtlitzer joy of a number, reminiscent in places of Clive Dunn’s Grandad (and from the forthcoming ninth album Flying Dream 1), which was sandwiched by one of their earliest, The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, and most recent, White Noise White Heat. There were the obligatory singalongs, an inescapable aspect of an Elbow show, starting early with Mirrorball, along with the arm-sailing Magnificent (She Says) and Grounds For Divorce (with Garvey orchestrating a three-part crowd harmony as warm-up to the song's “wooah-woah” chorus), all leading up to the festival behemoth that is One Day Like This. It is, always has, and forever will be a communal pile-in event in its own right, and even if you don’t know all the words, it’s impossible - even for the most ingrained curmudgeon - not to participate. One Day is one of those songs that other acts must be truly envious of, such is its emphatic closing-number nature, but it provides not only the show’s conclusion, but a final paragraph on the nature of the Elbow canon. The strings, too, made me wonder that it must surely only be a matter of time before Garvey & Co get the nod from the Bond producers to produce a theme.

The term ‘emotional’ when applied to pop music can often mean durge or, at risk of enraging those who feel otherwise, Adele’s first couple of albums, at least. Elbow transcend that with intelligence and music that commands the ear, all wrapped in the pleasing personality that is the easy-going frontman, so lacking in commonly-found rock star traits. As a return to gigging goes, we probably couldn't have done any better.

The rebirth of cool: the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

In my actual timeline, I am a child of the 1960s. In my self-mythology, I’m a child of the rock-pop era. There is some legitimacy to this claim: I was, after all, born in November 1967, three months after the Summer Of Love and two weeks after Hendrix recorded Little Wing. My childhood was spent in the 1970s, which meant attending the Thursday night ritual of Top Of The Pops, and bopping along to Mud, The Rubettes, Smokie, and being ever-so slightly freaked out by Alvin Stardust clad in full leather, pointing at the camera with a gloved hand bearing a large jewelled ring on the index finger.

It was only later on in the 1970s that I discovered what is now referred to as “classic rock”. This meant that my musical upbringing - until I ‘accidentally’ discovered Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album (well, taped it off my brother’s copy) - was shaped by the Top 40 tunes of the decade as a whole, which meant putting up with Peters & Lee’s Welcome Home and ABBA, and becoming mildly interested in the punky chops of Blondie, The Jam and The Police around the time I started secondary school.

By no fault other than the year I was born in, I turned 13 in 1980, which meant that the 80s were my coming of age, music-wise. This was the decade that began with the Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall at No.1 and ended with a Top 10 that included Jason Donovan, Soul II Soul, Jive Bunny, Madonna, De La Soul and New Kids On The Block. Make of that what you will. My read is that you probably can’t generalise any one era: the 50s might have given us rock and roll, the 60s the golden age of pop (or pop-rock if you prefer), the 70s rock, punk and disco, and so on, but really we’re in broad sweeping statements here.

Recent trundles about the South Coast, listening to the type of "classic hit" radio stations Peter Kay captures so brilliantly with 'Forever FM' in Car Share, reminded me that the 80s were no different. Sure, there was plenty of cheese, but no different then than now or, indeed, any era you pick. The difference, though, between the 80s and now is that - and I’m going to go full card-carrying, cardigan-wearing old fart here - there was some musical integrity, then, about Top 40 pop. You know, real instruments and no Autotune, unlike the software-infested durge coming out of the station we had on the car last week on the Isle of Wight.

So, then, a statement of the bleeding obvious: there’s something for everyone in every decade, and no one has the right to call snobbery over anyone else’s. Rant over, the reason this comes to mind is the reissue this week (and rediscovery in my vinyl collection) of an album that, in one particular way, captured a specific aspect of the 80s. Last week I blogged about the demise of Q magazine and my involvement in the launch of a near-rival in 1986, looking to break into the ‘men’s lifestyle’ market, which was being fuelled by Soho, The Face and i-D magazines, and the convergence of style, fashion and music of the early 1980s. So the reappearance of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack album has randomly evoked a phase of my musical education when the 1980s tapped into the 1950s, and jazz made an unexpected appearance. We had, of course, Sade, whose Diamond Life became a period cliché due to its association with ‘yuppie’ wine bars (though it’s true - you couldn’t avoid the record if you visited such establishments). Plus there were pseudo jazz acts like Carmel, Matt Bianco and Swing Out Sister, along with Everything But The Girl’s Eden album and even The Style Council, with their cod-jazz leanings on their debut, Café Bleu. All of it was, though, eminently cool.

Julien Temple’s 1986 screen musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’s 1950s-set, coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners just seemed ripe for the time. It was brash, it was bold, it was colourful, it was invariably overblown - and many critics just didn’t like it - but it was, for all its many faults, relentlessly cool. Not quite the commercial and critical dud it has since been painted to be, Absolute Beginners had a certain charm - in particular, its soundtrack. Temple drafted in jazz great Gil Evans to oversee it, and in between pieces of Evans-arranged incidental music, it captured a eclectic, but jazz-themed mix from the likes of Sade, Ray Davies (in a particularly amusing skit as a put-down dad pleading for a “Quiet Life”), Patsy Kensit (on-the-money 80s casting as the film’s love interest) with her band at the time, Eighth Wonder, and even a stormy instrumental by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to accompany the film’s riot scene (a statement on the 1950s Notting Hill race riots). Paul Weller - who’d already written his own paean to the McInnes book with The Jam’s song of the same name - got on the soundtrack with The Style Council’s bouncy Have You Ever Had It Blue.

The standout contribution (inevitably, given my pronounced leanings), however, came from David Bowie. The Dame was at something of a career plateau when Temple invited him to ham it up as vampiric advertising executive Vendice Partners - himself a skit on Soho’s then-status as 80s London’s adland epicentre, replete with an intentionally fake American accent. When the film was released, Bowie was several months on from his barnstorming appearance at Live Aid, a performance in which he’d appeared with a brand new backing band (including Thomas Dolby), having discarded - as he often did - the group he’d worked with on the Let’s Dance album and its subsequent Serious Moonlight tour. Temple’s Absolute Beginners was already in production when Live Aid came around, and Bowie’s theme song for it was recorded at Abbey Road just a month before the self-style “global jukebox” was staged.

Like Queen and other acts who were given a career lift by the charity concert, Bowie’s appearance in Absolute Beginners, and his musical contribution to it, went further in cementing his legend status, but not in any obvious leap or bound. You could argue that he'd left behind artistically interesting, complex music, and that Let’s Dance had sent him fully commercial (with the mid-80s Tonight and Never Let Me Down albums widely considered creative lows). But with Temple’s film, Bowie looked like he was just having fun. As Partners, he camped it up for England, but it was the title song - all eight minutes of it, in its full version - that stood out as, arguably, one of the great entries in the entire Bowie catalogue, and certainly of that period of his career. When I saw him at Wembley a year after the film ca out, on the much-derided Glass Spider Tour (regrettably, my only experience of Bowie live), it was Absolute Beginners’ energy that made the biggest mark of the night. I could wax on further about Bowie here, but as much as we (well, I) still mourn his loss, it’s memories of his involvement in this film - both the comic acting and the impassioned theme song (not to mention another gem on the soundtrack, his cover of the old Dean Martin standard, Volare), that added another chapter - no, paragraph - to the already expansive Bowie story, and to the magic of why few bend a knee to The Dame as much as I still do.

The Absolute Beginners soundtrack, then, snapshots two eras: the 50s the film portrays, and the mid-80s in pop. Just as Live Aid, it’s near-contemporary, captured the crossover between the generations (those of the classic rock era like Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who, Queen, etc, and those from the more immediate present - Madonna, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, George Michael), Absolute Beginners sliced into a momentary phase of the 1980s, when Soho cappuccinos, Bass Weejun loafers and wearing pastel V-necks over the shoulders - essentially the entire Paul Weller vibe at the time - provided a jazz-infused, politically-minded (anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge et al) interlude to the decade that brought us puffball skirts and red braces-wearing, Bret Easton Ellis-inspired bankers with far too much gel in their hair. But above all, in just the first eight minutes of side one, it brought out a recording by David Bowie that combined so much of his undoubted talent - drama, excitement, luscious chord changes and an impassioned vocal, plus a Bowie trademark that often goes unrecognised: a honking saxophone.