While it rarely features in these bile-filled posts, music is still what keeps the old git behind microgroove sort-of alive and nearly kicking.
So it was the collision of an event - going to a book launch at Rough Trade East - and reading a brief post on thebluemoment (the blog of top music writer Richard Williams) that led to this latest stream of words.
The book launched was a sort-of biography of the charismatic Damo Suzuki, the Japanese troubador who was swept to early '70s fame after he was spotted busking in Munich by a member of the German band Can.
Anyone who saw Can perform in the years 1970 - 73 will remember Damo as the sprite-like lead-singer man with a curtain of jet-black hair, almost as long as he was tall. His diminutive form concealed the whiplash, electrical energy of a thunderbolt, once he got off on his vocal improvisations against Can's famously propulsive beats.
Half a decade later, after the punk dust had sort of settled, people who dismissed most British prog-rockers as self-indulgent were still referencing Can in hushed tones.
Mark E Smith (RIP), founder of The Fall, wrote a song called "I Am Damo Suzuki" (after which this book is obviously named). At first I thought the song was a piss-take of a longhair, but then realised it was just as much a love song. Glimpses of affection for the crazy man who blessed the alternative music world with his presence for a few years, then more or less vanished for a decade.
The book fills in these gaps, usually in Damo's own transcribed words.
As we learned at the delightful evening at Rough Trade, where Damo and his author, Paul Woods were gently interviewed by a man from Mojo, the young Suzuki was not really into the heavy "progressive" rock coming out of the UK at that time. Pressed to think of influences, he mentioned his liking for some Kinks songs.
Unlike so many ageing rock star interviewees, Damo was genuinely more interested in his current projects than his few years with Can, and not to be at all excited by the reverence the music he contributed to is now held.
A survivor of two mortal illnesses, Damo regained his amazing energy and for years has circled the globe, seeking out what he calls the "sound carriers" with whom he can work in cities in every continent. Every so often he lands back in London, and has staged many performances at the Windmill in Brixton, and Islington's Lexington. Go to one of these: you never know what to expect, but don't expect Can's greatest hits.
The day after this event, I happened to read a post on thebluemoment called "A thought on 'RockIsland Line'" It was a playful but erudite analysis of Lonnie Donegan's 1957 hit, explaining why it was such an influential recording in the history of British pop music.
It took me a while to hear that heavy "click" as my dull brain registers the connection. What is it about some pieces of music that causes them to go straight to some previously dormant pleasure zone in the deepest fibres of the nervous system?
"The tonic is the note you hear several times as he follows “Well, the Rock Island…” — all sung on the tonic — by rising to the flattened third on the next word, sung with a heavy emphasis: “…Line…”
That particular flattened third, sung by that Glasgow-born, East End-raised boy in his distinctive, breathless deep south style, was for Williams "the first blue note most of my generation ever heard, or at least noticed, and its impact was immense. "
I'm not sure Damo Suzuki ever heard Lonnie Donegan but when he really got going he seemed to toy with the blue notes, circling them provocatively, never quite hitting them but making you know what it was he was not doing....get me? Of course!
I Am Damo Suzuki, by Damo Suzuki and Paul Woods, published by Omnibus Press, 29/03/2019, price £16.99 (paperback)
