Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the critically acclaimed Plastic Jewels in 1995 and Street Noise Invades the House in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’s short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and Man Booker-winner D. B. C. Pierre. James has written about music for the Guardian and Litro magazine among others. He lives in London.
With special thanks to
Yvonne Enright
Ian Tuton
Simon Williams
To Mum and Dad, with love and thanks
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Intro
PART ONE: The Satellite Town
1 The Two Bs – ‘You Only Live Twice’
2 The Real Stairway – ‘Ten Years Gone’
3 Bowie’s Nose – ‘The Jean Genie’
4 The Idea of Autumn – ‘This Is The Sea’
5 Born Sandy Devotional – ‘Stolen Property’
6 In Every Dream Home a Headache – ‘If There Is Something’
PART TWO: The City
7 The Long Hot Summer of the Clash – ‘Train In Vain’
8 Nobody Does It Better – ‘The Drowners’
9 The Other Britpop – ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’
10 Disco 1995 – ‘Common People’
11 The Last Great Honest Song – ‘All Apologies’
Outro
Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Supporters’ names
Copyright
Memoria
Memoria
Memoria
‘Come As You Are’, Nirvana
In the autumn of 1992 I was a twenty-four-year-old unemployed musician living in a damp Muswell Hill bedsit. Under stringent conditions – a seven-day working week – I had been writing songs with my twin brother, Jude. So far, 250 tunes had been amassed. We’d been in the Smoke for over four years, and still hadn’t ‘made it’ yet. The prognosis wasn’t good.
Demos had been recorded, dismally empty gigs endured, plans ripped up and Year Zeros declared a number of times. Several record labels had taken an interest; none had offered a deal. We were sans manager and making the kind of daily either/or decisions every penniless musician knows only too well: food versus cigarettes; amp repair versus electricity bill; proper job versus an insane artistic project that has become increasingly indefensible to friends, girlfriends and every member of your family.
Ever since writing my first callow lyrics aged fourteen, I’d been striving to develop as a songwriter, learning different instruments, mastering the studio (we recorded and rehearsed day and night at a place called La Rocka – our very own Paisley Park, only in Tottenham Hale). But up to this point there was very little to show for it. I don’t mean fame. The mission was never to be famous, in some kind of X Factor-ish way, but to escape a Hertfordshire small town and make great records. That was the mantra. To experience those moments of glory from having created a work of art – an album – that my twin was fond of talking about. (How close the language of earnest young men who form rock groups is to that of radical fundamentalism.) ‘Why don’t you both just start a boy band, and get it over with?’ a former girlfriend suggested, my brother and I being passably presentable. Maybe she meant something similar to Bros. But Bros wasn’t what I had in mind when I first picked up a guitar. Oh, no. John Lennon and Jimmy Page were the role models, and I laboured every day to produce music that even touched the hems of their Carnaby Street garments. Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach, too – serious songwriters. Songwriters’ songwriters.
Yet by the end of 1992, weary and recycling each teabag a dozen times, I was beginning to question my purpose – and sanity. Four penurious years in the city had left me with a dangerously warped mind. As Kurt Cobain sang, something was in the way.
But I still liked to watch television, every now and again.
One bleak Thursday night in September, after a fully balanced evening meal of spaghetti, two fish fingers and half an onion fried in economy marge, I repaired to the sitting room to watch Top of the Pops. (Not a long walk: it was conveniently located only a few inches from the kitchen.) I was anxiously awaiting the debut performance of a group that had special significance for me, ‘the best new band in Britain’, Suede.
There was a chance, however, that my precious television – ailing for months – wouldn’t survive to the end of the transmission. This was troubling: if it broke, there was no money to buy a new one. And, anyway, the shops were closed.
Suddenly, they were on. My chest tightened. Despite, or because of, the tiny white portable set with a coat hanger for an aerial, they sounded pretty good. Vital, feral, alive. Eschewing caution, I turned the volume up to ten, the noise threatening to split the cheap plastic sound-hole. The picture quality was so poor it appeared as if they were playing inside a carwash.
Through the televisual froth, the singer, Brett Anderson, sashayed in a fair impersonation of Morrissey; flicked his fringe as if he was Bryan Ferry. In profile, he revealed an impressively aquiline, almost Bowie-ish nose. He sang the words to the verses (I could only make out ‘lover-ly’ and ‘glitter’) with a Johnny Rotten snarl on his lips. The sheer ardour of his performance was entrancing. The song Suede were playing, ‘Metal Mickey’, lacked the regal beauty of their first single, ‘The Drowners’, but compensated for this with a sort of unreserved self-assurance. The kind of swagger a song can only gain when its writers have come into contact with adulation for the first time: the difference between ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’. This was a group that had been given permission to surpass themselves. Oh Dad, she’s driving me mad, went the chorus. It could have been a line from Carry on Matron, spoken by Kenneth Connor. Yet they didn’t seem like they were joking, especially the guitarist, a slight, bolshie looking young man (who went by the mild-mannered name of Bernard). He thrashed and writhed, and sometimes punched the top of his Les Paul.
Hang on a minute, a Gibson Les Paul?
No ‘indie’ musician had ever dared to play that guitar in this way – using distortion, bending notes – while wearing a wide-collared shirt. It was a flagrant allusion to the 1970s: Mick Ronson, Marc Bolan, Jimmy Page. And he was doing it on national television. This, I thought, could have serious implications for the country’s youth. The drummer was pretty cool, too. Loose-limbed, smiling; at home behind his kit, like the captain of a new yacht. His name was Simon Gilbert. I had a special interest in Simon, because, only eighteen months before, he had played drums in my band. Let me explain …
The group my brother and I formed with Simon, the Shade, had been a power trio with an emphasis on tight songs rather than the long Dinosaur Jr.-esque dirges then in vogue. We’d rehearsed industriously for over six months, playing original material alongside tunes by T. Rex and the Clash. Gigs had been sporadic, yet the band seemed to have a sense of common purpose, and, more importantly, mutual reference points. McCartney’s high-flown bass on ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man’; Mick Jones’s prominent backing vocal on ‘Spanish Bombs’; Woody Woodmansy’s restrained drumming on ‘Five Years’. At some point during the previous January, Simon – a lovely man with a quiet smile – had sheepishly admitted he was moonlighting with an outfit based in east London, named Suede. One day he’d told me he might have to ‘choose between us’. The end had come after a gig at ULU where Brett Anderson, bassist Mat Osman, and their manager – a bloke in a sparkly Ben Elton suit named Ricky Gervais (yes, that one) – had been ominously present. When Simon eventually left the group I recall my brother saying: ‘It’s OK. We’ll be so big next year he’ll have to throw his TV away.’ A grisly irony. Now here he was on my telly, part of the best new band in Britain.
By this point in the performance I wasn’t crying with self-pity, I was laughing. They’d done it! They’d breached the citadel that had proved inviolable for four years. At that moment, I felt a curious mix of envy and pride for Simon.
As the song ended, and the show cut back to the baffled presenter, a random memory assailed me. In 1991, at a lamentably unattended Shade gig at Islington’s Lady Owen Arms, during a sound-system breakdown, we’d all shared cigarettes like soldiers in the trenches. (Simon, a generous guy, had always been happy to flash his 10 Benson. But then he had a proper job, selling tickets at ULU.) Yes, we’d been Brothers in Rock. Now he’d gone beyond me and made a life for himself.
Full of new plans and dreams, I braved the forbidding, tenebrous hallway where the payphone was located, and pumped in a ten pence piece. It was the last one, intended for the electricity meter. Far across London, in La Rocka’s cramped office, Jude had been watching the same performance. I waited for him to pick up.
‘The bastard!’ a thin voice said, before I had a chance to say anything. ‘He’s done it.’
‘I know.’
‘I expect he still has his television.’
It was obvious to us both we would have to rip it up and start again. Not a single one of the 250 songs we’d written so far was as good as ‘Metal Mickey’. And how cunning Suede had been in managing their influences! They had successfully repackaged the seventies for the nineties. It was ‘glam’, but refracted through an indie sensibility. We would have to embark on one last campaign. Yet this rupture with the past was necessary. It was what I’d been waiting for. Now that it had happened it was exhilarating, emancipating. Over the last two grim years of baggy, shoegazing and – worst of all – grunge, I’d found myself almost apologising for loving Bowie and Bolan. It had taken a number of years to realise that I naturally gravitated to British art, rather than American culture, or, to use a word not really in currency back then, Americana. Maybe it was the sense of reserve, the irony, the stylish clean lines, but from John Barry to Bryan Ferry it was mostly English artists about whom I felt an aesthetic excitement. And Bolan and Bowie, despite co-opting American cool, were unashamedly English. I quickly saw that from now on it would be possible to succeed on my own terms. All I would have to do was write some new songs with my brother. And maybe steal a new television.
The following week, a crisis meeting was called. In a moment of recklessness, we agreed to abandon all the old material and the band name. Goodbye the Shade, hello Flamingoes.
Year Zero. Again.
But I’m jumping ahead. Perhaps it’s best I share how I got into this mess in the first place. For that I must rewind many years before Year Zero, to the early 1980s to be exact; deep into the Memory Songs that resonate there.
‘You Only Live Twice’: Growing up in a satellite town, with John Barry and the Beatles
On the morning of 9 December 1980, I was in the Hertfordshire back bedroom I shared with my twin brother, getting ready for another school day; and listening, as usual, to Revolver by the Beatles. At some time after 8 a.m., my mother ran upstairs crying, ‘John Lennon’s been shot! John Lennon’s been shot!’ She was wearing a yellow quilted dressing gown and waving a piece of burnt toast. She was also actually crying. In the kitchen, where she had been making breakfast, the news had just been broadcast on the radio. Mum’s announcement was so horrifying and unexpected that I set off for school in a state of shocked excitement, not knowing if the gates would be locked, the country in national mourning.
I was twelve years old. Despite having owned the album for a few months, I knew little about the individuals who wrote the songs on Revolver. John was the leader; that was about it. Yet it had been long enough to side with the general consensus that the Beatles were The Best Band In The World.
I say ‘owned’, but in fact I had borrowed the record from my father’s house (my parents were in the process of getting divorced; I spent the week at my mother’s and the weekends at my father’s). One Sunday at Dad’s, during the handover, I asked if I could listen to Revolver, the only pop album in his otherwise entirely classical collection. It was in there by accident. At my parents’ wedding reception in 1966, someone had pointed out that the Brahms playing on the Dansette was perhaps a little, well … fucking boring. A guest had been sent to buy a pop record – any pop record – and had returned with Revolver. I often marvel at the serendipity of this. What if they’d picked up an Engelbert Humperdinck LP rather than one of the greatest albums of the twentieth century? It’s a bit like going into a bookshop looking for a novel and randomly choosing Ulysses.
I had always been curious about the four austere faces on the cover. They recalled the American presidents on Mount Rushmore. The sleeve seemed to be trying to communicate an air of importance, yet a second element of the design – a collage of the group mucking about and throwing camp shapes – deliberately undermined this. The cover stood out among the countless Rhine scenes and Alfred Brendel portraits (the pianist glowering satanically in his thick-rimmed spectacles, yet always looking strangely like Roy Hudd).
Dad didn’t care for pop – it was the enemy of ‘serious’ music – but, for some reason, that afternoon he allowed me to play Revolver. As the first bars of ‘Taxman’ emerged from the speakers, something unusual happened. At the gaunt chop of the guitarist’s bluesy chord, a peculiar feeling arose in my stomach. The only equivalent experience was when the local marching band had trooped around the market square of the town. Each thud of the bass drum had delivered a delicious blow to the solar plexus.
This, however, was subtly different. I sensed that the blues had something to do with the mysterious realm of sex, and to a twelve-year-old boy this was of urgent interest. It seemed wondrous to me that music – something you couldn’t see – was able to provoke a physical reaction as well as an emotional one, and that sometimes the two appeared to overlap. I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but knew I wanted to hear more. As the record progressed it became increasingly puzzling. Why did it have ‘Indian restaurant’ music on it? Why were there so many different musical styles? I recognised the laborious ‘Yellow Submarine’ from school, but the next track, ‘She Said She Said’, mentioned death over a tumult of distorted guitars. There were inexplicable developments in the songs: the funny chord in ‘I Want To Tell You’ sounded like the wrong notes were being played; as if someone had made a mistake and hadn’t bothered to correct it.
My parents, who had been talking over one wonderful song after another, decided it was home time. I asked to hear one more tune. A brass fanfare blared from the speakers; then a space of a few seconds, leaving the listener suspended in anticipation. A Beatle began singing (I wasn’t sure which one): he was alone; he took a ride; he didn’t know what he would find there. Curiouser and curiouser. There was something new in the mix: romantic melancholy, a yearning sadness. The verse flowed into the bridge – a descending bassline – the figure that, many years later, Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, would observe ‘has represented sorrow [in music] for at least a thousand years’.1 The sequence ended in an explosive vocal release on almost only one note. It also happened to be the title of the tune: ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’.
That was enough.
The car was waiting. I didn’t hear the last song, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (probably a blessing; that would have completely blown my mind). I wanted to seize Revolver, confiscate it for further investigation. Perhaps it would be useful, a road map for the perilous teenage years ahead. My father agreed to let me take the record, and, in doing so, passed me into the hands of the enemy.
The day John Lennon died was marked by an uncommon display of public grief. Even the teachers at school seemed upset. Returning home at teatime, I switched on the telly to watch Newsround. George Martin was being interviewed; he looked ashen and angry. Before bed, I was allowed to stay up and watch the endless commentary and analysis. Then, after News at Ten, they showed Help! And there was John, as a vigorous young man, skiing, gurning to the camera, telling us you had to hide your love away. Alive.
During the following weeks there was a predictably intense renewal of interest in the Beatles, but, disappointingly, not a great deal of actual ‘stuff’ available. There were the usual books, and maybe the odd story about Paul’s alleged love child in the Daily Mail, but you couldn’t, as you can now, gorge yourself night and day on YouTube and fan sites. The best resource was The Beatles: An Illustrated Record by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler. A sort of proto-Revolution in the Head, it dealt with all the albums in chronological order. Jude and I devoured their wry observations and cryptic jokes; we could quote from it verbatim (a favourite was the final piano chord of ‘A Day In The Life’ described as having ‘all the morbid majesty of a slamming sarcophagus lid’).2 There was also Radio Luxembourg. Every week they broadcast a Beatles Hour that played listeners’ requests. Here, after lights out, we could tune in on our chunky silver Amstrad hi-fi to obscure cuts from The White Album: ‘Piggies’, ‘Honey Pie’, ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’ … The Fab Four’s world was stranger than I had ever imagined.
That Christmas, there were Beatles albums under the tree.
Rock ’n’ Roll Music: Volumes 1 and 2, on the MFP label, instantly became the Holy Bible, Old and New Testament. I think mine was Volume 1: Genesis. The Illustrated Record rightly states that the songs ‘fit together with the appositeness of a well-chosen menu’. The authors conclude, cautiously, that it is ‘perhaps the best ever Beatles compilation’.3 Here, the sex wasn’t suggested, as on Revolver, but overt. Every tune was awash with it – ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. The first track was ‘Twist And Shout’. Although I couldn’t have put it into words, something in me responded powerfully to Lennon’s unhinged vocal. It perfectly expressed the hormonal agitation of boys about to become teenagers; drooling over the girls they saw gyrating unattainably on the dance floor. From here on in, I was a devout, born-again Beatle-maniac.
My brother and I received two very different presents that day: a pair of lavishly illustrated James Bond books. This was our other unlikely mania. For the past few years, we had been obsessive 007 fans, collecting everything from bubble-gum cards to wall-sized posters.
At the end of Christmas Day, I pondered how the two interests could co-exist. Bond and the Beatles. The two Bs. The old and the new. They were both part of a preoccupation with the sixties, true, but one represented square, ‘straight’ culture, the Establishment; the other exemplified the swinging sixties, the counterculture. However, I knew by then that the Beatles, in the 1960s, had watched each Bond film as it was released, just like the rest of the country, and Paul McCartney had owned an Aston Martin. Yet the Fabs had managed to render old, sexist colonial heroes like 007 obsolete almost overnight. Bond mocks the Beatles in Goldfinger, famously suggesting that it’s only possible to listen to them wearing ear muffs. But screenwriter Richard Maibaum’s line is telling. It betrays an uneasiness: the old guard were threatened by the Beatles. The younger generation had the upper hand, and the Establishment knew it.
What, I wondered, could reconcile the two worlds? The answer was the composer of the James Bond music. The other B wasn’t Bond, it was Barry.
*
The Hertfordshire town I grew up in was Hitchin, thirty-eight miles north of London. With its market square, long-established shops, tea rooms, and a Woolworth’s it was just beginning to experience the homogenisation of the high street that is now complete in Britain. (There was great consternation when KFC arrived.) The older parts were appealing, I suppose, if you weren’t a bored kid on the verge of becoming a teenager, but that was what I was, and most days the town possessed a stifling, almost mesmerising ordinariness. Like Hanif Kureishi’s Bromley, Hitchin felt like ‘a leaving place’.4 After meeting and marrying, my parents had settled there. Father, reserved by nature – medium build, dark hair, middle class – was a computer programmer from west London. Mother, outgoing, small, fair, working class, was a nurse from South Yorkshire. After they separated, my mum moved to a semi-detached Wimpey home on an estate, where I spent the weeks listening to Radio One, riding my bike, and watching Grange Hill at teatime. A fish-finger childhood familiar to many. My dad lived in a two-bedroom house on the other side of town, where I stayed at the weekends, among his books and classical records. Their only sons were two slight, shy twins, obsessed by fossils until Bond, and, finally, music came along. We were bright, and, so we were told, on the way to being good-looking. Cheekbones were not something you would want to bring to an all boys’ school playground, but a good qualification for a certain job later in life perhaps … It was said that Jude had a rounder face; mine was longer, but, being twins, there was always an unmistakable consanguinity. People were always interested in us (although we were never ‘popular’). In 1980, I had just started secondary school, a comprehensive that was experiencing a similar culture shock to the one the town was undergoing. Once a grammar in the 1960s, it still clung to its quad, its house system, its masters in gowns. On cold, clamorous mornings it had that daunting, inevitable school-smell of carbolic soap, Sellotaped-up textbooks, chalk dust, actual dust, hormones, rugby socks, and farts. In class I was already staring out at the playing field, with its fence of tall poplars, watching the never-ending white line being painted, dreaming of music – and escape.
One day in the New Year, our English teacher, Mr Wood – a sprightly Leavisite with a Jacobean beard – asked the class, ‘Who or what makes the most important contribution to a film?’ There was a show of hands. To our surprise, our answers were rejected one by one. According to him, it wasn’t the director, the star or the location. Nor was it the costumes or the special effects. We were stumped. My hand was in the air more than most, possibly just to show off my extensive but pointless film knowledge, much of it gleaned from Michael Rodd’s Screen Test. It wasn’t the second unit director or even the third unit location scout. We were becoming desperate. What could it be? In the end, no one got the answer: the music.
The incident illustrates something fascinating about the effectiveness of soundtracks. A director can make the most powerful, well-shot, perfectly cast film in all movie history, but if the music is wrong it’s dead. To test this hypothesis, imagine a scene from a classic film with a different score. The opening of Taxi Driver, perhaps – Travis Bickle’s cab emerging monolithically from the mist – but instead of Bernard Herrmann’s menacing brass swells, Keystone Kops music. Or the start of The Odd Couple: Jack Lemmon preparing to commit suicide, but in place of Neal Hefti’s jaunty score (which tells us it’s a comedy and Lemmon will be all right), Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In this way, it is impossible to imagine an early James Bond film without a thrilling, urbane John Barry score.
The term ‘Barryesque’ is now shorthand for a number of distinct musical styles: sweeping, mournful strings; raucous, sexy brass; and icy, Cold War minimalism played on obscure Russian-sounding instruments, often all in the same piece. Everyone knows this music – Bond skiing down a mountain, Bond kissing a girl, Bond walking decisively through an airport; and there it is, behind his back. Simon Winder, in his book, The Man Who Saved Britain, suggests that John Barry’s music may have been the reason for the Bond films’ success. This is a contentious, even fanciful notion, but one which is perhaps valid. Terence Young, director of Dr No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball, was once asked what he thought were the principal ingredients of the first 007 films. He answered, ‘Connery, Connery, Connery.’ Agreed, but with one caveat – replace that last ‘Connery’ with ‘Barry’.
If John Barry was important, vital, even, to the Bond series, he was essential listening for a certain type of music-obsessed, Generation X kid growing up in Britain in the early eighties. Barry’s work should have been difficult to find – just as there was a paucity of Beatles stuff, so there was a dearth of anything Bond-related. Before discovering the James Bond Fan Club, I had to work hard for my 007 fix. Today, one can click on thunderballobsessional.com and binge on images of rare brochures, press-books, lobby cards and artwork. Back then, the films appeared twice a year on television (it took seven years from release for ITV to show Live and Let Die), or there were the Ian Fleming paperbacks, with their fusty smell and yellowing, dog-eared pages, costing ten or fifteen pence each. And that was it. But one of the few things available – in Woolworth’s, or Boots even – were the 007 soundtracks. I listened to them incessantly; and, along with the Fab Four, John Barry became a gateway drug into the wider world of popular music.
The two Bs had an interesting, almost contrapuntal relationship in the 1960s. Their paths crossed many times. Barry often seemed like a one-man Beatles; his creativity possessed a similar effortless energy. Their artistic and commercial trajectories matched exactly: a breakthrough period from 1962 to 1964, succeeded by an imperial phase: 1965 to 1968, followed by an apotheosis, 1969 to 1970. Barry’s run of late-sixties soundtracks mirrored the Beatles’ albums in the sense that each one was palpably different from the last. Just as when the Fabs found a formula they would immediately break it, Barry – by nature a contrarian – never turned out standard scores. Each soundtrack was a bespoke creation for the film in which it was to be used. And, like the Beatles, he could write quickly under pressure. The theme tune for Thunderball was written in four days, when the film’s producers wanted the name of the movie in the song. ‘Midnight Cowboy’ was apparently written in twenty minutes. ‘Born Free’, which won him an Oscar, in ten.
It would be stretching credulity to suggest Barry’s music had the same cultural impact as the Beatles’, yet ‘The James Bond Theme’ must be one of the most recognisable melodies in the Western world. Indeed, in the 1960s, one could argue that the only serious songwriting competitor the Beatles had – in terms of actual exposure to listeners – was John Barry. By 1969, almost a billion people had watched a James Bond film: all would have been familiar with Barry’s vivid, soaring melodies. The competition wasn’t Elvis or the Rolling Stones, but a self-assured, softly spoken man from York.
As with Lennon, it would take me a while to form an idea of the man who’d created the music. After many hours in the bedroom, poring over liner notes and biographical snippets found in books on the Bond series, a picture began to emerge. John Barry Prendergast (he wisely dropped his last name in the 1950s) appeared to have possessed a somewhat contradictory nature. On the one hand quiet and considered, a composer of sweeping romantic scores; on the other a gloriously bluff Yorkshireman who would take part in Q and A at Bond conventions with a pint of Boddingtons at his elbow. He often dismissed his 007 scores as ‘million dollar Mickey Mouse music’.5 He called the unbreakable tenet that music in a film should always go unnoticed ‘an old wives tale’.6 Although directors liked working with him for his professionalism, he had a reputation in the industry as an intractable taskmaster, a perfectionist.
By 1966, John Barry was living like a Beatle. The success of Bond and ‘Born Free’ meant, as Newsweek put it, he was able to live ‘his E-type life with his E-type wife’ in a desirable part of London. There is a well-known photograph of Barry, a slight, handsome man, sitting on a Charles Eames chair in his Cadogan Square flat. Rows of LPs and a piano stand in one corner; a copy of Cashbox magazine lies open on the coffee table. A black Bakelite phone nestles on a white rug. He’s sporting a mod button-down shirt, the sort George Harrison could be seen wearing in 1966. He looks vaguely stroppy. His expression says: get on with it. We feel like we’re distracting him from his work, but want to linger. Is that a framed Goya print on the wall? Or even an original Picasso sketch of Françoise Gilot over the piano? There’s an air of intellectual curiosity. A bookcase filled with hardbacks is visible above Barry’s head. Paul McCartney – another ‘northern upstart’, in the offensive parlance of the Establishment – staying at the Ashers’, across town in Wimpole Street, might have been breathing in the same cultivated atmosphere. Plays, films, books, art: all would inform the Beatles’ and Barry’s key work from the mid-sixties onwards.
Long before the epiphany of Revolver, the first James Bond film I remember watching on television was You Only Live Twice, on a Sunday evening in 1977. Sitting on scatter cushions, wearing loud pyjamas, a melting choc ice in hand, I recall those two hours as an episode of dissipation; an almost total sensual immersion. Not just because of the obviously risqué content, but the surface elements: the music, the set design, and, especially, the colours. Every Bond film after Moonraker ignores the importance of this last aspect to its detriment. Simon Winder notes the sheer ‘muted tastiness’ of the film stock used in From Russia with Love. (He dismisses the ‘lurid and grainy’7 tones of The Man with the Golden Gun, but he’s mistaken. To my eyes, at the ABC St Albans, where I first saw it, Golden Gun was as glam as a weekend in Tokyo.) Barry’s music seemed to intensify, amplify these colours. His limpid, Debussy-influenced score for Thunderball perfectly suits a film that is floodlit from below in pale swimming-pool blues and malachite greens. Goldfinger’s percussion-heavy soundtrack suggests the clinking of coins, adding immeasurably to the burnished glow that pervades almost every scene in the movie. Similarly, the odd cymbalom and Moog combinations in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are somehow of a piece with the futuristic, late-sixties orange used in that film. This is why Bond is perfect for children, or early adolescents: it’s all surfaces. The plots didn’t matter as much: I didn’t fully understand them, and, anyway, to a twelve-year-old they were always the same.
Moreover, it’s hard to believe it was an accident the films were often shown on a Sunday. I like to think that ITV was aware of the crushing banality of a 1970s Sunday, with school or work looming the next day, and felt the nation needed some escapism. A glance through the 19–25 November 1977 edition of the TV Times (yes, of course I still own it) reveals a stifling consumerism at odds with any young music-obsessed mind. It’s the advertisements rather than the listings that are most revealing. Hoseasons boating holidays, Lulu’s Freemans catalogue, home organs (‘incredible value!’), Kathie Webber’s cookery cards, Birds in Autumn and Winter by Yootha Joyce, John Player cigarettes, hi-fis, tellies, Townsend Thoresen ferries, Pontins, Butlin’s, Germolene, margarine … In among this litany, it is revealed that on Sunday 20 November, after 100 Best Hymns and Family Fortunes, You Only Live Twice was shown.
It was impossible to go back to normal life on Monday morning.
David Arnold, composer of many of the later 007 scores, suggests that You Only Live Twice is the perfect introduction to Barry’s music. In the first five minutes, all the stirring trademarks are present: the rambunctious ‘James Bond Theme’, the solemn, menacing ‘Space March’; the soaring, deliquescent theme tune. However, at the time, the music, always accessible – invariably memorable – seemed somehow otherworldly. Like the Beatles’ music, it didn’t always go where you expected it to. It’s now clear that Barry scored brass instruments higher than most composers would dare; used odd harmonies and voicings, employed calculated dissonances. In my mind, the boundary between the two Bs started to blur. Helpfully, George Harrison had been investigating Indian music systems at around the same time Barry had been using Eastern European scales, on Hungarian or Egyptian instruments such as the cymbalom or the kantele. This peculiar music was like nothing I’d ever heard before. At least, it was certainly nothing like the Boomtown Rats.
But perhaps the chief link between the two Bs – and one that I unconsciously knew, aged twelve – was Barry’s distinction as a songwriter. This was remarkable in his line of work. Apart from Ennio Morricone, few film composers possessed such a melodic gift, or if they did they were unwilling to use it. Barry’s mastery of classic song structure from the twenties – two eights, a middle eight or bridge, and a last eight – was equal to Lennon–McCartney. And knowing the rules, he would gleefully break them. One of the first hybrid tunes the British public would have heard, five years before ‘A Day In The Life’ was ‘The James Bond Theme’. An instrumental that changed style halfway through (shifting from a menacing minor key guitar riff to a big-band middle eight) just wasn’t done in 1962.
By 1967, the two Bs were at the very top of their respective games. In that year, Barry wrote ‘You Only Live Twice’, arguably the pinnacle of his career as a songwriter. Much admired and covered by other artists, it is, along with ‘We Have All the Time in the World’, one of a handful of songs that Lennon and McCartney might have been happy to have written themselves. The Beatles were instinctive composers; some of the more advanced chords they used often suggested by the shape their fingers made on their guitar necks. (Take the sixth chord that closes many of their early songs. An A-shaped C at the third fret can easily be transmuted to a C6 with a little accidental overlapping of the pinkie. It’s possible to imagine Lennon achieving this with his fleshy digits, and deciding that he liked the sound.) Barry, with his ‘music by maths’ correspondence courses in composition, was almost the opposite: a cerebral songwriter. But his mournful, elegant melodies also derive from his unusual chord choices. On first listen, ‘You Only Live Twice’ seems to be merely F, B-flat, C. I-IV-V – the ‘three chord trick’, the first thing a novice guitar player learns. ‘Wild Thing’. ‘Louie Louie’. (Most pop music is based on the three-chord trick, which derives from twelve-bar blues structure. Using the Roman numeral system for any particular key: the I is the home chord, the IV moves it on, then back to the I, then finally, to complete the sequence, the V. Sometimes known as ‘the turnaround’. And then back once again to the I: resolution. Repeat ad nauseam.) On closer scrutiny, ‘You Only Live Twice’ is revealed as a meticulous construction. The substitutions – the juxtaposition of majors and minors within the I-IV-V framework – conspire to create a harmony that is freighted with yearning: the archetypal haunting melody, and the perfect bed for Leslie Bricusse’s existential lyric. Much of this is achieved through languid non-chord notes or ‘tensions’ – augmented fifths deliberately used on key words: ‘pay’, or the ‘live’ of ‘live twice’. Sophisticated songwriting of this type – employing subtle devices to manipulate the listener emotionally – was not all that common in the hit parade of 1967. Once again, the competition wasn’t the Rolling Stones.
For me, ‘You Only Live Twice’ is a Memory Song. A piece of music so bound up with my past it is almost a physical part of it, like an old school book. I only have to hear those unwinding strings (high on haunt factor), those first few seconds of cello, to know that in moments I will be transported magically back to another life.
In this way, perhaps most of our favourite songs become Memory Songs. On hearing a much-loved piece of music we are aware of a hierarchy of associations, beginning with the initial connection – the time in which we first heard it – and then successive ones, until the piece is like an Old Master canvas, painted over and over. Sometimes we have to work hard to bring back the first association. When a song we are very familiar with appears on the radio it can take an immense effort of will to conjure up that school term, or that particular summer. But it always seems to be there somewhere inside the song, a connection that cannot be undone, no matter how many other periods of our lives have been accompanied by the tune. (Paradoxically, hated songs are often most effective at precipitating the ‘first’ memory. This is unfortunate, and another reason never to listen to Magic FM.)
It is often the texture or timbre, the grain of the music, that brings us back mysteriously, deliciously, to that first association. The Beatles’ songs are especially rich in this respect as, post-1966, they treated almost everything they recorded with studio effects. How potent a madeleine is the phased backing vocal on ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ (Roll up!)? Or the picked, chorus-infused acoustic guitar parts in ‘Dear Prudence’? Or Lennon’s slurred vari-speed vowels on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’?
In terms of Proustian transportation back to the past, I never have to work too hard with ‘You Only Live Twice’. Just a second or two of Barry’s strings, or Nancy Sinatra’s sweet double-tracked voice, and I’m there: sitting on those scatter cushions, melting choc ice in hand, watching an ‘oriental’ Sean Connery – bathed in a ghostly purplish light – toss a stone into a volcano’s lake … which then opens unbelievably onto the villain’s empire below.
*
If one had to say which Beatle John Barry most resembled it would be John Lennon: tough, spiky, no-nonsense. But in many ways he was closer to McCartney – hard-working, professional, inquisitive; the same neatness as a composer. On the other hand, perhaps he had more in common with George Harrison: a saturnine disposition and an interest in world music. Or maybe he was more like Ringo, who returned to England when the Beatles were in India because he missed baked beans. Down to earth; a Boddingtons man. In fact, he was all four, a one-man Beatles – a beguiling set of contradictions and, in the sixties at least, an equal as a creative force.
Ultimately, by the end of that decade, a deep personal sadness seemed to be informing the work of the two Bs. Barry, who is on record as hating ‘happy music’,8 had so far been able to mask what Norman Mailer called ‘the wound’9 – the unhappy childhood that shapes the artist. Lennon and McCartney both lost their mothers at an early age; Barry was, in his own words, ‘a fucked-up Catholic’.10 By 1968 the wound was beginning to show. The Beatles produced ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be’; Barry wrote ‘Midnight Cowboy’. These affecting, elegiac songs were an apt soundtrack for the times. As the sixties drew to a close, America simmered with racial tension and anti-Vietnam sentiments; in Britain, Enoch Powell gave his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Demonstrations in leafy London squares erupted into violence. Peace and love was giving way to hate and war.
And none of it had the slightest impact on me. Looking up into the blue skies of 1968–9 from the double pram I shared with my twin, I was unaware that butchery and torture on an unimaginable scale was taking place. Outside, in the wider world, on the radio and in the cinemas, the harmonica theme from Midnight Cowboy played. Its four descending notes – a variation on the lament figure; the ancient signifier for melancholy (with which I would later become mildly obsessed) became a fitting musical backdrop to the end of the dream.
Six months after Lennon’s death, in 1981, I found myself at a convention held by the James Bond Fan Club in a west London conference hotel. At these events, members of the 007 cast and crew would participate in Q and A sessions. It was unbearably exciting for a schoolboy to have Desmond Llewelyn – Q! – a man almost certainly born in a tweed suit, sitting a few feet away, demonstrating gadgets. The same thick fingers had shown Sean Connery how to use the attaché case in From Russia with Love. At this particular convention, unnoticed at the back of the room, was a young, bearded Pierce Brosnan. He was accompanying his wife, Cassandra Harris, soon to be in the new James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only.
That June, the Royal charity premiere of For Your Eyes OnlyArthur