SUBJECTIVE GUIDE TO THE BLUES - THE DELTA

Here we go, guide to the blues part two. We’ll be kicking off with a snapshot of the region that is most associated with blues music: The Mississippi Delta.

The Delta is actually a little too associated with blues music. One of my pet blues hates (of which I have plenty) is the label ‘Delta’ that gets stuck on to any old blues release. It’s a mark of authenticity that doesn’t really have much to do with any historical Mississippi Delta style.It just gets used to mean blues that’s authentic, rather than blues that’s made by Stevie Ray Vaughan. If you look in the blues section of any record store you’ll see plenty of supposedly Delta compilations, filled with artists like Muddy Waters (who at least was born in Mississippi) and Lightnin’ Hopkins (who had no relation to that state at all). Sorry. I’m sounding like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World now.

There’s a reason though. When the blues revival hit, it hit way back in nineteen sixties Britain. At the time, part of the attraction of blues music was how obscure it was. Blues records had to be imported from the US by collectors who had no real context for the music. As a result, the stuff that got over was pretty random. Of all the bluesmen whose records did make it across the Atlantic, Robert Johnson was the oldest available. If you ever listen to people from the time talk about blues, he’s the name that'll keeps on popping up, especially on the lips of English blues revivalists like Clapton. It's maths really: Robert Johnson came from the Mississippi Delta. He played the oldest type of blues on record. The oldest blues must be the most authentic blues. Ergo Delta blues must be the most authentic blues. Add to the equation the fact that Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II and their Chicago blues pals were all born in Mississippi. So, in the revivalists' minds, the Mississippi Delta equals the blues. Bam! Compilations of ‘Delta Blues’ flood the shelves of 1960s England. The British Invasion then spreads this interpretation of the blues across America with the end result that, since the 70s, the blues really has become semi-synonymous with the Delta .

It’s interesting that this Delta monomania was until this point only a British thing. If you look at American musicians who were into the blues before bands like the Stones or Led Zeppelin came preaching its gospel, you’ll find a far wider understanding of what blues music means. Musicians like Bob Dylan or John Fahey had a better rounded understanding of the blues than English artists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page. It’s just that the ones making all the fuss were the Brits. End result is that Robert Johnson’s a household name, while Blind Willie McTell, Frank Hutchison or Frank Stokes are all unknowns.

What’s funny is that even the revivalists’ idea of what constitutes Delta blues was skewed. It’s really based on Muddy Waters and the Chicago bluesmen, who played simple electric blues indebted to the urban bluesmen of the 30s, like Roosevelt Sykes, Kokomo Arnold and Lonnie Johnson. There’s not much that’s Delta in style about the Chicago musicians: they lived in the northern states and played blues from the northern states. Even though many of them were born in Mississippi, they weren’t interested in sounding like a buncha hicks from the provinces. They wanted to look cool. This had actually been the case since way back even before Robert Johnson’s time. Generally, if blues music sounds like ‘blues’ should sound, with 12 bars and an AAB verse structure, chances are whatever you’re listening to is derived from urban forms of blues music. Delta blues doesn’t really sound like this sort of thing music at all.

The authentic Mississippi blues sound is pretty special. If you’re looking for that Blind Lemon Jefferson kick that I described to you before, Mississippi's the place. Blues from Mississippi is also the direct ancestor of the urban blues that I mentioned before, largely through the influence of Tommy Johnson. But it’s still in a place apart from anything as sophisticated as Depression-era urban blues. In fact, I’m going to stick my head out and say that it was the least sophisticated style of them all. That’s a good thing for audiences in the twenties, when the most popular national pastime was smoking imported cigars in bathtubs filled with money and people felt secure enough to embrace their inbred side, but it would spell death to the style when the Depression rolled along, and people were desperate for a bit of glamour and sophistication in their lives. Unlike Piedmont blues, which soldiered desperately on, Mississippi blues was commercially dead from 1930, although it continued to act as an incubator for future musicians who’d play in other styles.

I’ve been talking about Mississippi blues here. In actual fact, there’s no single Mississippi style. Mississippi, the state, has such a rich blues heritage that it actually gave birth to no less than three regional sub-styles. Just like that. Delta blues is most recognisable to us now, but at the time, music from the hills country in the south of the state was as big a presence. We’ll call this Mississippi Hill Country blues, because the style deserves a name and I like that one. The third style is the Bentonia school blues, which is less a regional style than a type of blues made by a few individuals in the town of Bentonia, Yazoo county.

We’ll kick off with a run-through of Delta blues, because you’ve heard of that one.

Delta blues is weird and alien - it’s got almost no influences from pop music. It really is a type of folk, and you can tell. Folk blues. Remember that 12 bar blues has very little to do with blues from this period, dismiss it from your mind. Unlike its blues cousins from Atlanta or Memphis, Delta blues also has no truck with pop influences like jazz & ragtime. By the way, when I say folk blues, I don’t mean like Nick Drake-style acoustic pop music with a blues-ey edge, I mean the sort of folk where there’s not so much as a time signature to be seen, and the music barely approaches tonality. Old music, from a time before music was proper. The way the performers go about their work is pretty similar to the folk ballad tradition. If you listen to white ballad singers like Dillard Chandler or the Paddy Tunney (an Irishman) you’d get a similar musical approach: the song has a set tune and set speed, but if the singer gets excited or the crowd looks bored, the musicians will just go faster, or change the tune, or shout, or whatever.

Delta blues music also commonly uses a slide. People talk all kinds of nonsense about how using a slide is a residue of slave music, but it’s really a borrowing from Hawaiian music, which was very popular around the turn of the century and which had an even more powerful influence on early country music. There are two main benefits of using a slide. The first is musical: a slide can give a strong rhythmic kick when needed. The second is that it sounded really exotic to the ears of people at the time – if you want proof that exoticism was one of the main pulls, there are plenty of black and white photos from the time of totally non-Hawaiian Hawaiian bands dressed in grass skirts staring witlessly at the camera. There’s occasionally an influence from work songs and chain-gang songs that pops up too, especially in Charlie Patton’s music. Basically, be prepared for rawness. One thing that the Delta didn’t really give to blues is flashy technique, with the obvious exception of Robert Johnson, who’s all technique. Georgian blues is a feast for guitar nerds. Mississippi blues just isn’t.

Why is Delta blues like this? Basically, Delta blues is music made by hicks in a state that’s a proverbial backwater even among other laughably backwards states. It’s more rural than rural. Other regional centres of rural blues were actually provincial cities, like Atlanta or Memphis. The Delta is different. When Tommy Johnson sings “Who’s that yonder, coming down the road?” in ‘Maggie Campbell Blues’, he’s talking about something that’s an event. His listeners live in homes so isolated and miserable that you can see a visitor for twenty minutes before they arrive, and when they do, it’s exciting. That’s why the blues from the Delta has such pronounced folk culture elements, it’s because, in its own flat, miserable and impoverished way, the Mississippi Delta is every bit as inaccessible and cut off from the world of culture as folk centres like the Appalachians or the Scottish Highlands. We tend to think of this backwardsness as being what the blues is about, but it isn’t - it’s specific to the Delta. In fact, almost all of what passes for the mythology of the blues is Delta-specific: cotton plantations, levees breaking, juke joints, poverty, chain gangs, devils at crossroads. None of this is anything to do with the blues, only the blues as it was formed in the Delta.

Enough generalisations already. If you want a crash course in the Delta blues, there’s three individuals who;ll need introducing. They’re the pure unpolluted source of Delta style: Charley Patton, Son House and Tommy Johnson. But what’s good about the Delta is that it produced literally hundreds of strong bluesmen. We’ll go through a couple of them too, especially the ones who might pop up on your radar somehow. But first, the big three.

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BODYMORE MURDERLATTE

Dominic West, AKA Jimmy McNulty, is currently promoting a brand of unremarkable mid-market coffee by reading a book. Spurious. The tagline is "For a more seductive coffe break" - evidence that Kraft Food are aiming this one right between the tiny, piggy eyes of menopausal, book-clubbing laydeez everywhere. Hunky Dominic with his clean shirt and Etonian vowels is seranading our womenfolk.

Watching the ad is hard for me on two fronts. Firstly, as a man, I feel simultaneously threatened by West's smoldering masculinity and sickened by his smarmy, kickable face. Secondly, as a fan of The Wire, this as is akin to walking in on your best friend fellating a Labrador. As soon as I pressed 'play' on the video I felt like I should have been backing out of that tastefully lit, oak wood study as quietly as possible.

Jimmy's reading a book called The Wake. It's just been published so really this is an advert for two products. I hate that Jimmy was complicit in this. If he was back on Westside, Rawls would have his ass for something like this. However, if we are going to be forced to watch actors reading extracts from books to sell products here are a few that I could get behind:



The actor Steven Seagal
Reads from Shoot to Kill: Cops Who Have Used Deadly Force
To flog Rolex watches
Seagal would make a good reader. He has a pleasant squint and in his old age he has become quite the gentleman-scholar. I chose Shoot To Kill because, as an acting officer in the New Orleans Police Department (true) Seagal knows a thing or two about deadly force. Also, Seagal's limited acting skills would not be a problem as, according to the most positive review on Amazon, "most of the stories are not very exciting".

The product link is an obvious one. Watches are worn on the wrist, and who knows more about wrists than Seagal? The print ad could say something like "The last thing Steven sees before he breaks your arm in five places is your watch. Give him something nice to look at."

The actor Chris Latta
Reads from Living the Dream: My Story by Chantelle Houghton
To flog Sheba cat food
If you don't know who Chris Latta is don't panic - you're probably a normal person. Latta, who died a while ago, was the greatest children's cartoon voice-over artist of his generation and the mere invocation of his name is enough to send certain corners of the internet into a paroxysm of orgasmic abandon. Remember how every cartoon in the 80s had at least one character who sounded out of their fucking mind? That was Latta. Lord Darkstorm from Visionaries, Starscream from Transformers, Cobra Commander from GI Joe. The list goes on. Listen to him turn it up to 11 at about the one-minute mark in this.

Just to make his CV even more bullet-proof, Latta chose to make his big-screen debut in what is perhaps the 20th century's most well-regarded film; Roadhouse. He has just one line - but it's a great line, about "touching my girlfriend's tits". If Latta hadn't died in mysterious circumstances in 1994 I think it's safe to say he would be sitting on top of Oscar Mountain at this point.

I've got Latta reading from the only text that can match the violence of the man's voice pound-for-pound. Chantelle Houghton's autobiography as it stands is a completely extraneous blip in the stagnant waters of 21st century pop culture. Read by a man alternating between five different kinds of "evil voice" however, it becomes genre-defining. If it's advertising cat food then it's even better.

The actors Kevin Bacon and Dylan Baker
Reading from Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
To flog Zovirax coldsore cream

Two of modern cinema's most accomplished on-screen paedophiles join forces to read Nabokov's earth-shaking treatise on sexy children. If you've winced your way through Todd Solondz's Happiness you'll know that Baker has significant "peder-acting" ability. Bacon too, has shown in The Woodsman, that he knows how to kiddie-fiddle it up on film.

Ideally Kevin Bacon would be sitting on Baker's lap, playing with his friend's hair as they take turns reading from a tatty, yellowed paperback. Then occasionally they break off from the text to whisper in each others ears and giggle nervously. As the advert is for cold sore medication both men would have to be clearly suffering from severe oral herpes. When not reading one could apply cream to the others' blisters and open sores.

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GREAT SONGS ON FORGETTABLE ALBUMS #2

Canibus | Second Round KO
A fantastic song from a truly horrible album. Before his debut record the underground buzz that surrounded Germaine 'Canibus' Williams was considerable. In lieu of actual, professionally recorded music, hip hop nerds had spent years trading cassette tapes featuring Canibus' fleeting appearances on radio stations. His flow sounded natural like Rakim or Nas, yet it had a violent, abrasive edge like Ghostface. Surely there was a list of competent producers who would have given anything to help deliver rap music's most anticipated baby into the world?

In their extremely finite wisdom record execs decided that Canibus needed none other than Wyclef Jean at the controls. The album was ruined faster than you could say Fugee-la-leprosy. Where there should have been a jagged vortex of rap brutality there were beats so tepid that LL fucking Cool J would dismiss them as gay. This one track is the album's only redeeming feature. It's a stark, relentless battle rap on which Canibus mentions that he wants to "shine", and boasts about running in the sand and "eating a nigga's ass". But somehow it's actually scary! All the while a disembodied choir are warming up over a simple but menacing three-note bass line. Canibus may not have lived up to being the Third Coming of Rakim, but this track makes a great case for what the First Coming of Canabis might have sounded like with the right guidance.

Great songs on forgettable albums #1

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HOW I ORGANISED MY RECORD COLLECTION (AND FINALLY BROUGHT ORDER TO THE GALAXY)

There’s a point in the film Hi Fidelity where John Cusack’s character sinks into a depressive slump and tries to get out of it by comprehensively recategorising his entire record collection. That one little scene made me a laughing stock for years, despite the fact that I’ve always been record collecting small fry, with a mere 943 alphabetically arranged compact discs in my active collection. Luckily, now that record collections have ceased to be normal, I’ve gone from laughing stock to charming anachronistic crank overnight. It’s finally safe to max it up a gear.

Actually, I’ve been feeling my love for music has been getting a bit stale over the years. I think that the reason is that my music taste’s a little too diverse. I’d always been proud to have George Clinton, John Coltrane, Company Flow, Comus, Conflict and the Congos all next to each other on my creaking shelves. It certainly had its advantages. Just imagine you’re an attractive girl and you come home with me to find P funk next to avant-garde jazz next to hip hop next to acid folk next to awful crusty punk next to roots reggae. You’d be pretty wet right? Sorry, of course you wouldn’t – you’d be ridiculously wet. I’m feeling pretty sexy just writing this stuff.

But aside from its powerful and occasionally deadly aphrodisiac effect, my collection was getting to be a pain in the arse. How do you pick what you want to listen to when your collection is that size and that jumbled? I ended up just listening to the Kinks all the time. Just copping out. Browsing was just an effort. So I took a step back and had a long look at my life and how it had all turned out wrong. There I was, 25 years old, weighed down by 943 CDs which just sit there, taking up a ridiculous amount of space; I barely listen to half of them and, with mp3s nowadays, who the hell needs CDs anyway? The answer was obvious; change was needed. I had to recategorise my collection.

In Hi Fidelity, Cusack is really pushing the boundary by reclassifying his records autobiographically. That’s the ‘wow’ system apparently. Bullshit. The truth is that different systems work for different collections. Cusack’s is all pop and classic rock. All of it. What a walk in the fucking park. What a fucking loser. For a rock based collection, alphabetical classification actually works. Better than that, you could use chronological. Autobiographical is only tough if all your music’s from the sixties. But for a collection like mine, which covers genres, autobiographical is just a cop-out. I got into hip hop in Winter 2002, so all my hip hop CDs are from the 02-05 period. By then I’d bought all the classics and it was just a matter of coasting. And it goes on: reggae – Summer 2003, black metal – 2000. I get into a genre, I stage a takeover, then I move on. That’s how it is. Deal with it. For my collection, autobiographical categorisation would just be genre-based, but lame. Plus, this wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about the music.

Chronological is a pretty good system. Like alphabetical it’s objective and it’s quantifiable. But it doesn’t work at all for collections. Chronological's nice because you can see the progression: rock'n'roll flows into British invasion, which grows into the psychedelic era, which then matures into prog before the punk backlash hits. The downside is that the pop chronology gets pretty laboured once you're into the 80s, when rock counter-culture unity breaks down for good. Once the 'Disco Sucks' movement had split rock down the middle into its first two camps: dancey and rocking, chronological just gets more and more of a pointless hassle. Imagine a chronological approach to 90s music and you'll see what I mean: you'd have Nirvana, Ice Cube, Aphex Twin and Darkthrone all rubbing shoulders: that's not progression, it's disintergration. That ruled out chronological, for my collection at least.

So I took the plunge. I decided that what my life needed was for me to embark on a comprehensive program of genre-based recategorisation. Genre-based categorisation, or its subjective counterpart mood-based categorisation, is actually pretty good for people with more socially acceptable record collections of say 250 CDs. It’s easy because you’d only really have two genres max. Hey, I used to order it like that myself. But when you’re looking at upwards of ten genres, genre-based becomes tough. Sensible, but tough. That’s why I’d originally moved into the placid waters of alphabetical classification. But alphabetic wasn’t working for me. The recategorisation was all about changing my life by reminding me of the things that I most loved. I needed to return to the font. That’s why my collection had to become genre based again. I couldn’t go into this thing unprepared. So I did what came naturally and drew up a comprehensive excel spread sheet.

So... genres. I started by allocating all my CDs to a ‘class’, to supergenres if you will. The ones that were obvious were classical, rock, jazz, hip hop, dancehall, world, dance/electronic and folk. These classes would be separate from one another. They’d be like sections in a record store. I was on to a good thing. In my most fevered dreams I saw visions of plastic dividers, setting one class off from the other, sheltering the genres within their nestling plastic arms. Ranks and ranks of them, with type-written labels. It was how St Teresa must have felt. I was flying high, but I had to come down sooner or later.

Problems began immediately. To start with, there are a whole lot of liminal genres. Jazz that is avant-garde would obviously in the jazz section. But what about free improv? Where would my John Zorn and Derek Bailey (may he rest in peace) albums go? What about folk music? Is Leonard Cohen folk? No. Is Dylan folk? A bit. What about Donovan? Pentangle? Devendra Banhart? Jesus. I definitely needed some sort of folk section, because an enormous chunk of my collection is smelly pre-war WW2 music made by blind hillbillies, but what would go there and what would go in rock baffled me. That was problem number one. The second problem was just as serious: how to deal with rock, which still occupies the lion’s share of my collection. I decided to take it down a peg by having separate punk, metal and soul/funk classes and by siphoning off all my British folk rock into a newly formed ‘roots’ class covering pre-war folk, post-war stuff made for a specialist audience (the Seeger crowd etc), and British folk revival stuff. My final class list looked like this:

• Classical
• Dance/Electronica
• Hip hop
• Jazz
• Metal
• Punk
• Rock
• Roots
• Soul/Funk
• World

Great. On a roll. The next step, the one I was really looking forward to, was the genre part. I decided to go with several ‘genres’ within each ‘class’, which would be subdivided into further ‘sub-genres’. I’ll lay it out for you, daddy.

Take Destruction’s thrash metal classic Infernal Overkill. Class is clearly metal. Metal is then sub-divided into three genres: heavy metal (incorporating new wave of British heavy metal onwards), extreme metal and doom/stoner/drone. 70s heavy metal bands, like Sabbath, go in a separate genre in the rock class, while metalcore and sludge go in the punk class. Are you following? I’m taking extreme metal to start with Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and the convoluted family tree which that album founds, so extreme metal the genre is divided into the sub-genres of thrash metal, death metal and black metal (all real-life genres instantly recognisable by any metal fan). Within thrash, I further divided the bands into the so-called big four (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax), then the B League thrash bands (Exodus, Testament, Nuclear Assault etc), and finally foreign thrash bands. Now Destruction were part of the Teutonic thrash scene, so the final classification for Infernal Overkill would be:

Metal > Extreme Metal > Thrash > Foreign > Destruction > Infernal Overkill

Here’s Wynton Marsalis’ Black Codes:

Jazz > Be-Bop > Post-Bop > Marsalis > Black Codes

And Biggie Small’s second album:

Hip hop > 90s Gangster > East Coast > Notorious BIG > Life After Death

What a joy. What a fucking joy. And the genres carry a chronological edge to them too: in jazz, say, be-bop follows on from classic jazz, and is then itself followed by fusion, then avant-garde. Within be-bop you can see the progression from be-bop to cool to hard bop and then finally to post-bop. This was it. This was living.

Of course there were problems. There are always problems. The examples I’ve given: metal, jazz and hip hop, anatomise nicely. Other genres weren’t going to play ball. How do you figure out how to convey chronological sweep in punk? 70s UK and New York stuff is fine, but once you’re into the post-punk and hardcore eras you’re struggling. UK and US punk mature at such different points in time that's hard see how to organise it all. Some classes were clearly just miscellaneous (I mentioned folk) and they resented it by resisting classification. I still won in the end. Lo. Like the Holy Spirit bringing form to the void I did settle upon my collection and I did bring order to chaos. And I saw that it was good. Check out these bad boys to see how I whipped my newly renamed ‘roots’ section into shape:

Roots > American Pre-War > Blues > Piedmont Region > Blind Boy Fuller > Get Your Yas Yas Out
Roots > British Folk Rock > Acid Folk > Incredible String Band > Wee Tam and the Big Huge
Roots > American Post-War > Country & Western > Honky-Tonk > Lefty Frizell > Collection

But like God's creation of Earth, this system still left open the possibility of evil. I’m talking about rock here; rock is a shit-eating bastard to categorise. I think I mentioned that a rock-heavy collection will favour a chronological or alphabetical approach. What it won’t favour is genre based. Rock bands stubbornly refuse to fit neatly into categories. Case in point: The Stones. The Rolling Stones started life as a British invasion R&B group, only to mature into a loose rock band. Lots of bands did this too around the seventies. It would be logical to put an album like Exile on Main Street in the company of pals like Toys in the Attic or Funhouse. An obvious name for the genre would be 70s rock, right? But, the problem is that Beggar’s Banquet, the first of the Stones’ loose country rock period, is actually from 1968. Shit. Can’t put it in with Aftermath, because it doesn’t sound similar. Can’t put it in with Exile on Main Street because it’s from the wrong decade. What to do? Create a genre called ‘loose rock and roll’? Ugh. No. Too subjective. This is about genre, not mood. Mood-based is a classifying system for children. And what about those Haight-Ashbury bands like the Grateful Dead that never had a clear changeover period and tumbled gently from 60s pop to 70s drugs music? These are questions that I still can’t answer.

In the end I went for a loosely chronological approach to genres within the general rock class: rock'n'roll, sixties/seventies and then later music, taking new wave to be a changeover point. Within those genres there are rough divisions into sub-genre. For example 60s/70s rock is divided into 60s pop, 70s rock, hard rock/heavy metal (e.g. Led Zeppelin), country/southern rock, prog/krautrock etc. It works okay for the early period, but for later stuff it just falls apart. Past new wave, the divisions are just 80s arena rock, alt/indie (including really divergent stuff like post-rock, nu-metal, anti-folk and madchester stuff) and then contemporary.

Contemporary’s the real problem, the gaping wound. It should be a triumph, but instead it’s the writing on the wall. The writing says that instead of going out and experiencing fun new music, I’ve let my taste ossify while wasting my life playing with dead genres and trying to build the ultimate acid folk or LA hardcore punk collections. I’ve barely got any contemporary rock music in my collection. Now it’s all caught up with me and I’m left sadly trying to find a musical link between Animal Collective and MGMT, wondering how it all went wrong.

I tried going to friends with these problems. For some reason they were all fascinated. I expected them to edge nervously for the door when I brought it up, but they were all amused. I guess there’s something compelling about watching even a train crash. They probably see me as some sort of Sid Vicious character – no point stopping crazy Joe they say to themselves. That probably means that they’re bad friends. Good friends would have staged an intervention by now.

So, classifying the rock section continues to raise more questions than it solves. I still don’t have the answer to any of it. If you read this and have any ideas let me know. They’d be appreciated. I’m still happy with it though. Life’s all about compromises. Obviously, no collection is perfect where Gram Parsons gets to live in the constant eye-level party that is the rock section, while Prince has to toil in the shin-level electro-pop gulags of soul/funk, but hey, life goes on.

The excel sheet was a few months ago. I’ve now put theory into practice. My collection sits proudly on six mighty Ikea shelves, occupying an entire wall of my house. I feel I’ve grown as a person. Browsing CDs is a new-found pleasure. So is cutting up the card dividers – it’s a happy ending.

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SUBJECTIVE GUIDE TO THE BLUES – A MANIFESTO

I’ll put this ridiculous vanity project into context.I’ve always been a huge fan of American roots music – country, folk, blues and all the rest of their weird inbred family, before they got militant and became rock and roll. These pre-war genres feed directly into rock music, without ever being really visible. They’re like some sort of enormous Basilica Cistern, lurking unseen underneath a well-known city. Roots music just sits there, feeding pure water into the polluted system of modern pop music, but without ever really being noticed by anyone other than a couple of crazy-eyed people whose job it is to maintain the system.

It’s probably a good thing that no one pays attention to this music. First of all, the music that’s preserved from the pre-rock and roll era isn’t too welcoming. It’s crackly and alien. The blues doesn’t sound like blues, the country doesn’t sound like country, and it’s best not to talk about the folk music at all. It’s all wrong you see; it’s actual folk music, from olden times. But there’s a second reason why I’m glad old folk etc doesn’t really get name checked: pre-war roots music’s such an unknown musical world, that it’s open to any huckster or snake-oil salesman to talk whatever they want about it, and there’s barely anyone to call them on their nonsense. The worst casualty of all this has been blues music. It’s the richest musical source of all, but unlike country, which was popular enough to be well documented, and folk, which is a bloody academic discipline, information on the blues is always a bit murky. Take this particular gem from the Wikipedia article on Robert Johnson, relating to the well known legend that he gained his musical ability by making a deal at the crossroads with the Devil:

“When African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century told interviewers that they or anyone they knew had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they did not intend to convey thereby that the person in question was an evil, hell-bound anti-Christian. The confusion arises in the eyes of white interpreters who don't understand that the crossroads deity is a survival from polytheistic African religions and that he has been assigned the only name he can be given in a monotheistic religion. There is ample evidence supporting the African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.”

See! If white interpreters were just a little more aware of syncretistic survivals of West African Voudun rituals in American popular music, they’d have realised that the myth about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil was actually about him communing with Legba. Stupid interpreters! They were probably too busy noticing the similarity of the Johnson myth to exactly equivalent myths relating to non blues musicians selling their souls at crossroads (e.g. Paganini) and wondering why the myth wasn’t supported by any folktales at all. They also might have noticed that’s it’s total and utter nonsense. This is a relatively benign bit of nonsense, but there’s worse out there, but that’s all a bit aside from the point. This is still music, and it’s the musical bullshit that’s most damaging, especially to blues.

Blues from poorer backwater areas of the American South hit in the middle of the 1920s. Rural blues is the ancestor of all modern blues, and, through its son jump blues and its nephew country, it’s the grandfather of rock’n’roll. Blues music had first broken ground in 1912 in Tennessee, and then soon became successful in the early twenties as a sort of urban comedy music, sung by big fat ‘comediennes’ like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.It was billed as a type of folk music, so it became popular with Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and the New York communist folk groupies. But it wasn’t taken particularly seriously. At this point blues wasn’t really widespread even in the southern states (ragtime was still in its ascent in the South), but it was growing, especially among younger musicians. In 1923, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s version of the folk-pop song ‘Little Log Cabin’ was recorded and became a hit, kicking off a boom of hillbilly folk music. It occurred to record company execs that there might be money in recording in-bred black musicians too. Somehow they hit on Blind Lemon Jefferson, an enormously overweight blind professional wrestler and musician who specialised in Gospel, Folk and Blues, sounded like he was fucking insane and had a great name. Listen to a blues track like ‘Matchbox Blues’ and you can hear it. It’s him bellerin’ away (can’t hit the notes, doesn’t care), strange modal music, no discernable rhythm at all, just this weird man and his guitar. Listen to his recording of the traditional folk-gospel song ‘Two White Horses’ (his version’s called ‘See that my Grave is Kept Clean’). He’s got this trick where, whenever he gets to the line “have you ever heard that coffin sound”, he really plucks that guitar string, and it goes “boing, boing”. That must have really impressed his audience when he did it live. On record it doesn’t really work, but he does it anyway, because he’s on a level and he doesn’t care. What I’m trying to say is that this man, Blind Lemon, makes music that is so alien to what we consider to be necessary to music that it barely registers as music. It just hits you in the gut. Muddy Water’s records are great – they’re tough and sexy – but they don’t have that effect at all. That’s why I like older blues so much (I get a similar kick from the folk equivalents of the time too).

Jefferson’s records were decent hits, and suddenly the rural blues boom burst into being. It was actually centred in the Piedmont region, and especially Atlanta, Georgia, but there were other big regional scenes like Tennessee, the Appalachians, Texas, and of course Mississippi. This is before radio, so all these different types of blues sound noticeably different to each other. Piedmont blues is particularly different to other types of blues; it’s all complex and ragtimey. Piedmont’s my favourite. Appalachian blues was a funny mostly white outgrowth that eventually matured into Country music. Blues from Tennessee tends to have a simple, quite standardised jazzier side (in the sense of classic jazz, dismiss Charlie Parker from your head right now), and was famous for its jug-band music. Mississippi blues is pretty heavy.

Here it is then, coming to the Great Atomic Power: my one man crusade to rescue blues from the bullshit that everyone else writes about it and instead cover it with my own unique layer of bullshit. A subjective guide to the great blues styles. Stay put for a tour of the various regional styles of the blues as it grows and evolves. First stop, the Mississippi Delta.

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BOOKER 2009: THIS TIME IT'S FICTIONAL

Man. Booker. Prize. Booker. Prize. Man. Man. Prize-prize. Man. Any way you say it the Man Booker Prize is big news. Old people, English teachers and autistic teenagers the world over are at this very minute engaged in fevered debate over who takes this year's award. The judges are priming themselves - soon they will gather round the winner to shower them in a literary bukkakalypse.

But what if - like most people - you believe that books without pictures are simply heretical, pointless devilment? What then? Don't worry. Simply read this handy synopsis-guide to some of Booker 2009's front-running titles. It'll set you straight.

Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall
Mantel's chilling re-telling of Jane Eyre, in which all the principle characters are recast as wolves, has been described as "lively". Although the plot stays close to the original, the decision to translate all the dialogue into howls, snorts and barks casts Jane and Mr Rochester's relationship in a whole new light.

Ed O’Loughlin | Not Untrue & Not Unkind
Who would have thought that a long list of statements which are "not untrue and not unkind" would make such fascinating and compelling reading? Choice excerpts include "an ocean is a large body of water", and "the Chinese are - in general - a hard working people".

Adam Foulds | The Quickening Maze
What's scarier than a maze? How about a maze which somehow speeds up the aging process of all those who enter into its leafy realm? The film rights for Fould's psychological-romance (in a maze) were sold to Universal this year. Ben Affleck is in talks to direct and star as the titular maze.

Sarah Hall | How to Paint a Dead Man
Controversial martial arts-decorator Sarah Hall spills the beans on exactly how much gloss paint needs to be applied to a man's skin before his pores clog up and he suffocates. It turns out it's not much at all.



J M Coetzee | Summertime
Two-time Booker-winner Coetzee's explosive, and entirely unwarranted, racist tirade against "thieving Turks". Over the course of 1,540 pages Coetzee tears apart Turkish people, culture and history with scant regard for decency or truth. Contains a truly mesmerising final chapter in which Coetzee imagines that you, the reader, are in fact Turkish.

Sarah Water | The Little Stranger
An oversight at the printing press meant that Waters' book was published with one letter missing from its title. Her gruesome, unflinching autobiography of Ernie "The Vile Dwarf" Gower (aka The Little Strangler) is not for the faint-hearted.

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GREAT SONGS ON FORGETTABLE ALBUMS #1

Welcome to this wonderful, new feature in which we delve into thoroughly unremarkable albums to fish out a redeeming track. These songs are valuable. Surrounded by dross they run the risk of being lost forever - obscured by the desperate filler material they are forced to rub up against. The band in question may not have even realised they created the stand-out track. The song may have snuck out without anyone noticing. Luckily, we the experts at The Great Atomic Power, are here to prevent these lost classics from being overlooked.

Neil Young | Computer Age

From the widely-despised Trans album, on which Neil "went techno". For reasons known only to himself Old Shakey decided that his debut recording for Geffen should sound like Flock of Seagulls by way of Nashville. As far as I can tell Neil made it clear he was "serious" by cutting his hair into a terrifying bowl and donning a regulation new-wave black shirt/white pencil tie combo.

As you would expect the album doesn't stand up too well. That is except for Computer Age, an enjoyably daft, vocoder-driven cyber-song about waiting at the traffic lights. But they're traffic lights in the year 2030! The greatest thing about this song (apart from having one of the greatest middle-eights I've ever heard) is that it really sounds like a booze-addled country-rock musician from the 70s trying desperately to conjure up "the future". In my mind this is no dumber than indie rock musicians of today desperately trying to conjure up the 70s. If you want to know what this song sounds like look at the front cover of the album. It sounds exactly like that.

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FILM NOIR MARATHON

At Great Atomic Power we’re nothing if not towering, titan-like specimens of bronzed, human perfection. We shirk no sporting achievement, no matter how exhausting, debilitating or supposedly impossible to anyone with a less than suicidal appetite for physical pain. As the ultimate test of bodily and mental endurance we have designed a whole new sporting concept; a bold new way to expand the limits of human athleticism. Simply put, the concept is this: two laptops, two grown men, one couch and a series of films from times long past. Join us as, like two modern day Pindars, we test modern man’s ability to assimilate the depths of the culture industry’s subconscious.

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A more normal film marathon to start things off. The theme is a pretty simple one: Classic film[s] noir[s] from the heyday of such things. No self-referential neo-noir attempts to reconnect with Hollywood past. Just pure fucking film noir from the time our grandfathers were young. These are all films from a generation of people who woke up to the sound of their own hacking lungs, chain-smoked their way through their first four cups of coffee and then spent the rest of their day abusing their livers, lungs, and minds with scotch, nicotine and raw repressed self-loathing. Films from Hollywood’s artistic peak.

I have a pretty big library of this sort of film. Big enough that I sometimes lie awake at night, wondering how I can justify having spent so much money on DVDs when right now, somewhere, there are children starving. But that’s the cross that I have to bear. This marathon is designed to mop up films that the other Joe hasn’t seen yet. We’re kicking off with two stone-cold classics – Out of the Past, The Asphalt Jungle, Murder My Sweet, finishing up with A Touch of Evil. But it’s not enough just to watch them. In order to understand these films better, it’s necessary to get into the minds of the scriptwriters, actors and men who made them - it’s necessary to become our grandfathers. To this end, for the duration of the marathon, we’ll be on a strict regimen of as much black coffee, nicotine and corn liquor as our bodies can stand. In order to compare our efforts, we’ll be keeping a strict tally of the number of cigarettes smoked in each film.



OUT OF THE PAST

The marathon is kicking off with a favourite from 1947. Out of the Past is as classic as classics come. It’s got the lighting. It’s got the lines. It’s got the doom. It’s got a leading lady who defined femme fatale before it was ever a cliché. It’s got the world-weary voice-overs. Most of all, it’s got Robert Mitchum. It’s a good film with which to kick off, because it benefits a razor-sharp mind. If I remember, it also has a vaguely Mexican-ey bit, so I decided to deploy some chilli I had made earlier.

19:10 Film starts and credits roll, most of which I miss in the kitchen setting fire to things. No big loss.

19:11 Joe seems too excited by all this. I'm here for the chilli.

19:12 The film kicks off in the colourless town to end all colourless towns. Something about colourless small towns has an almost mystical significance to Americans which as a Londoner I can’t even begin to fathom. The idea of a world-weary hero retiring to open a petrol station in Bletchley or Grantham wouldn't inspire anyone.

The film kicks off with the main bad guy’s henchman, a Joe Stephanos, coming into town and noticing the petrol station that Mitchum’s character owns. Mitchum’s left it in the hands of an actor playing a young deaf boy. I’m not a pederast or nothing, but the kid’s hot. Unfortunately he not a skilled actor. Joe eventually meets up with Mitchum, who’s not pleased to see him.

19:12 He already asked if I’m picking up on the symbolism. I say yes but little does he know I have no intention on picking up on the symbolism. Or even the plot. Why? Well, as Think Lizzy would say... I'M A ROCKER!

19:17 Robert goes to a lake with his ladyfriend. Technically she’s a ‘sweetheart’ though, rather than a ladyfriend. I don’t think they’re having sex. It just doesn’t seem likely. She’s pretty colourless too. Maybe it’s not her fault, maybe she’s only colourless and boring because the town she comes from is colourless and boring. I forgot that this film starts slow.

Luckily Robert’s on-screen and is busy drawling away. I could listen to the man drawl forever. He manages to make even throw-away lines carry a worldview that is doom-laden yet somehow laughing through the tears. Not that there are many throw-away lines in this film.

19:19 Robert and sweetheart are in the car, going to meet the bad guy, Kirk Douglas Jnr. I’m pretty certain that Robert lit one cigarette after another without bothering to smoke the first.

The film proper kicks off here, to my relief. Basically, Mitchum’s character Jeff Bailey and his deadbeat partner are PIs in San Francisco. They’re hired by gangster Kirk Douglas and his gunsel Joe to track down Jane Greer, Kirk’s ex, who had shot him and run away with his money. Robert sets to work.

19:27 Robert goes to an African-American bar. This scene alone probably sets some sort of record for number of black people in a pre-seventies Hollywood film. Plus barely any of them are musicians. Through some rather improbable questioning, Mitchum finds out that Jane Greer’s character Kathy Moffet is hiding out in Mexico.

19:28 The first hard-boiled v/o. “And then I saw her…” he says. This is all so noir I might shit myself.

19:29 The film moves to Acapulco. The film mines Mexico for exotica so hard that you can practically hear Martin Denny plinking away. Being in Mexico, Robert immediately finds Kathy. Greer’s not so hot at first, but she’s a grower. The bourbon is starting to work its magic.

19:31 Mitchum is doing something or other in Mexico. He’s dressed in a frankly ridiculous pair of trousers (waistline at teeth) and a tie that is so short you would have thought he would have noticed.

19:33 Bailey and Moffet are drinking bourbon in some authentic Mexican bar that looks like a shit unpainted-brick bar from New York or something.

This scene reminds me of a theory that I’ve always had about bourbon. The theory is that it’s actually a close cousin of tequila, and that it resembles that drink more than other whiskeys. Unlike whiskey or scotch, it works really well in a hot climate and has herbaceous undertones much like the Mexican drink. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with me, because Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer do, and so do their broken faces and soulful eyes.

19:35 Nothing to report. Robert Mitchum looks like the missing Baldwin brother. But a good Baldwin brother - somewhere between Alec and Stephen in value.

19:36 Kathy and Jeff have fallen in love. They kiss on a beach to the accompaniment of the ridiculous Mahler-esque strings that infest this sort of film. Kathy claims that she never took Kirk Douglas’ money.

19:37 Mitchum’s profile is giving me indigestion. At what point does his forehead end and his nose begin?

19:49 The first 1940s clunking visual metaphor. A door swings open in a storm. You should be aroused right now because it symbolises DIRTY INTERCOURSE!

19:40 Kathy and Jeff are having sex. They are both now going to die later in the film. That’s what the 1930 Hays Code requires happen to people unmarried folk who fornicate. Good riddance. If only people still had basic family values nowadays perhaps my children would still agree to talk to me. Anyway, we now know that they are going to die.

19:44 Mitchum is now in love with Greer and has decided to double-cross Kirk Douglas, when suddenly Kirk and buddy Joe turn up in Mexico. Joe, who’s supposed to be Italian-American, has Jewish nerd hair and looks like my dad when he was young.

19:45 Straining eyes. Many of these shots are so damned noir that the only light sources on screen are Jane Greer’s eyes and Mitchum’s brylcream.

19:46 Mitchum’s ass is huge. That would be a hindrance to his career in this day and age. It's hard to work CGI around a huge ass. My brother's an animator.

19:47: The gangsters move on, suspecting nothing, and Mitchum and Greer relocate to LA, where they continue happily living in sin. Up to the point that Mitchum’s old partner spots them and decides to shop them in.

19:48 Kirk Douglas is onscreen calling everyone’s bluff.

Uncanny right?

19:50 “Why don’t you break his head Jeff?” Greer wonders aloud. Mitchum could do it too. He looks and sounds a lot like Clive Owen. That wasn’t meant to sound as cruel as it did.

19:51 Mitch and his old partner get into fisticuffs. Kathy shoots the partner dead and splits. Mitchum does lights a cigarette, checks his old friend is dead and then notices that Kathy has left her pocket book (or whatever the fuck it is) behind and realises that she has actually stolen Kirk Douglas’ money. She’s a bad sort.

19:53 We’re back in 1947 now. Flashback over. Mitchum has now gone to meet his old employer.

19:54 “Cigarette?”

“Smoking.”

19:57 Kirk Douglas’s character Whit wants Mitchum to go and meet some lawyer in San Fran. It’s a blatant double-cross. Robert can smell it but is trapped by his own sense of doom.

20:00 In SF, Jeff Bailey meets the lawyer’s super hot secretary:

“Do you want a gin and tonic?”

“That’d be nice.”

“You could have a whiskey.”

“That’d be nicer.”

I’m not really sure why this exchange tickles me so much.

20:04 Smoking hot secretary with added boobs saunters in. Mitchum impresses her by snubbing gin for bourbon.

20:07 Mitchum has a good line in grabbing women roughly by the upper arm. There must have been a lot of bruising on set.

20:11 At this point, the plot ceases making any sense at all. The lawyer has been shot by Joe. Mitchum’s being blamed for it for some reason. Jane Greer is clearly on Kirk’s side. Robert gets some document that Kirk Douglas doesn’t want him to have. It all seems convincing though.

20:15 Mitchum busts out his uncompromising “make me breakfast” Tongan death grip again – this time on Greer. Like a regular Casanova he goes on to tell her he “hates” her and, as an afterthought, mentions he "might kill" her in the future. This prompts her to say she loves him. Romantic times.

20:20 Jeff Bailey bursts into some dude’s room, knocks him out and then lights a cigar. That’s how they used to roll.

20:29 Back in Grantham/Bletchley equivalent. Robert’s on the run from the run. Everyone blames him for killing the lawyer except for his deaf and dumb catamite.

20:30 A man is fished to death .Too hard, (and implausible) to explain.

20:31 Joe finds Mitchum in a canyon. He’s trying to shoot him when the deaf and dumb kid notices him and fishing rods him to death by catching him by the sleeve and pulling him to his death, real nasty-like.

20:44 Line of the film. Her: “You’ve only got me to make deals with now.” Him: “I build my gallows high baby.”

20:45 Greer just called Mitchum a “clumsy flirt”. What kind of standards does she have? He talks solely in tangy one-liners and has enough raw masculinity to make Doris Lessing start ovulating wildly. Sorry that was disgusting.

20:46 Its all moving pretty fast now. Kathy double-crosses and kills Kirk to be with Mitchum, but Mitchum no longer trusts her and so calls the po-lice to tell them about her two murders. The strings start up again, and start to get pretty insistent. They drive off when they run into a police barricade arranged by Mitchum. Kathy realises and gut-shoots him before getting mowed down by machine-gun fire.

CLOSING CREDITS SWEEPINESS 5/10 (not bad, starting well but falling to a whimper before halfway through the credits).
TOBACCO TALLY 37 cigarettes smoked on screen.
NEGRO NUMBER A huge 23 black people. They were all in a single scene though.


THE ASPHALT JUNGLE

The second film of the night is the The Asphalt Jungle from 1950. We’re on a roll here. Out of all noirs, it’s probably the best heist movie, full of great characters going about their business under a general sense of doom. A lot of the French film noirs like Le Doulos and Rififi crib from it a bit, although the French films are generally a bit more macho, a bit more pretentious and generally a bit less good than this one. For a film from 1950, the acting is pretty top notch, with barely any hamming in sight. The whiskey’s being doing its evil work so I’m already far gone at this stage. I really thought that I’d last longer then this, but I’m a puny limp-wristed weakling. My grandfather would be ashamed if he could see me now. Luckily he can’t, because he’s in South Africa and has been dead for twenty years. On a side note, this film gave the world Marilyn Monroe’s first film role as a married man’s bit of jailbait on the side. She’s not in it that long, but you wouldn’t know it if you look at the DVD case, which is about 85% Monroe’s face.

21:02 This one is all New Yawk up in my ass. I’m going to start trying to let the whiskey speak for me.

21.03 Kick-off. The film starts with a great shot of a man running from the police through an industrial cityscape filled with huge pillars. It’s Sterling Hayden as Dix, a yokel gunman from Kentucky marooned and alone in the megalopolis. We’re armed with more whiskey, another pot of coffee and some slightly stale prawn crackers.

21:04 Joe is banging on about some guy called Sterling. He’s trying to convince me he’s famous. Sterling, not Joe. I know for a fact Joe's not famous. AT ALL.

21:05 Everything’s stronger now. This coffee is stronger. The whiskey’s stronger. There’s a guy that looks like an uglier Tony Sporano sweating on screen. Even his palpable man-stench is stronger.

21:12 The quintessential film heavy just lumbered on screen. He’s about eight foot tall and clearly is, or should have been, a professional wrestler.

21.13 The German sex fiend criminal mastermind behind the whole heist, Doktor Riedenschneider, has shown up and arrived in a dimly lit gambling house run by Cobby, a jumpy man with truly horrific acne. He’s come up with a plan to steal, wait for it, half a million dollars. Dr Riedenschneider is presumably German for Dr Evil.

21:15 Joe still banging on about Sterling.

21:18 This Dix character is a Robert Redford/Pierce Brosnan hybrid. Let’s hope he has Redford’s acting talent, charm and screen presence and Brosnan’s uh… can-do attitude.

21.20 Dix is hiding out at home from the cops after a hold-up. His moll Doll shows up. Classic moll. She looks a bit like the butch but strangely arousing woman from Third Rock from the Sun. I remember now that she’s the one person in this film who can’t act for shit.

21.22 Doc and Cobby pitch the idea for the heist to Emmerich, who’s basically an evil lawyer. He’s going to bankroll the job and then arrange to fence the jewels later because he’s the successful one. Only problem is Emmerich pretends to be successful, but isn’t. That is, at least not in degraded earthly terms. Inside though, he is a man possessed of untold spiritual riches due to the inner nobility of his mind, his calm stoic demeanour and the fact that he’s banging a young Marilyn Monroe.

21.25 Jesus shit, Marilyn Monroe is hot. She’s 24 at this point (I think), but she’s playing someone younger. She’s like a weird slightly retarded sex child who Emmerich keeps holed up in a love nest. She keeps calling Emmerich "Uncle Lon". I’m not sure if this is meant literally or just meant to be creepy.

21:26 Marilyn Marilyn. So sexy. When she says “breakfast” it’s sexier than 10 Scarlett Johansonns saying “felch”.

21:27 Old man Emmerich holding Marilyn’s high heel. Why isn’t he smelling it?

21.29 Dix is chatting to Doll about KY and his preference for horses. You couldn’t make it up.

21:30 Subtle homo subtext. “Dix” talking about “riding a big, black colt back in Kansas”.

21.32 Dix’ home country apparently makes the best bourbon in all Kentucky. "It’s the water that makes the whiskey fit to drink", apparently.

It occurs to me that Dix is the only character in this film, apart possibly from Doll, who is a WASP. I think that’s part of his power: he may be a dumb violent hick, but he’s got a weird code of honour, and a connection to his land. The other characters just seem like shady fellaheen in comparison.

21.33 Joe is lagging and I’m having to force him to knock the coffee and whiskey back. I haven’t resorted to violence yet, but I make no promises. This film is a weird mix for the fifties. There aren’t that many good lines, but the script is generally excellent and the acting is really good all round. No hammy nonsense.

21.34 Wow. A big, ugly, corrupt policeman is knocking Cobby around. We’re talking probably the first corrupt policeman on film. Don’t quote me on that though.

21.40 The caper’s coming together now. The team are:

Doc – Mastermind and sex pest. Tiny and German.

Cobby – fast talking heap of Italian American acne, providing organisation and funding

Gus – tough hunchbacked getaway man with a heart of gold. Loves cats. Not a realistic character in the strictest sense.

Ciavelli – safe-cracker who keeps talking about his kids, not realising that in doing so he may as well be gluing a fucking target to his head. Joe insists that he looks like Dan Aykroyd, presumably because he looks absolutely nothing at all like Dan Aykroyd. He’s a dead-ringer for Frank Sinatra though, with just a touch of acne to set him off.

Dix – Hooligan from the sticks who’s been recruited for muscle. Wants to get money so he can open a farm for studs in KY. Everything this man does is a gift from the sniggering gods of innuendo.

Emmerich – lawyer who is supposed to be buying the loot and fencing it. Actually has no money and no idea how to fence the jewels. Probably doesn’t need to care, because he’s schtupping Marilyn Monroe.

Unbelievable!

21:40 OMFG! Dan Aykroyd – the spitting image of – just entered stage left.

21.41 This film has a low cigarette count, disturbingly low. Almost all the tobacco I’ve counted so far has come from Doc’s cigars.

21.42 Dix drawling away about something in his Kentucky drawl. He sounds like a motorcycle revving up.

21.47 We meet Emmerich’s wife. She’s a little old now, and vaguely aware that things aren’t as they used to be. To entice Emmerich back to her she’s wearing a flayed dead rabbit on her back. Uncle Lon’s not feeling up for any yiff tonight though.

21:50 The coffee is getting to me. Joe is acting kind of shifty. Like he’s some kind of big shot. He keeps rubbing his chin and glaring out the window. What’s he planning? He’s eating a lot of the prawn crackers. Really loudly. More prawn crackers. I should kick his damned head in.

21.51 The heist begins. They’re using nitro-glycerine to blow the safe. Ciabelli keeps calling it "the soup".

21.53 Sterling’s probably the only star in this film, and guess there was a clause in his contract that there had to be a set number of shots of his almighty face, brooding in the foreground and taking up a minimum of ½ the screen. Its worthy of classic Phil Collins album covers.

21:54 A man in the 1940s was prescient enough to reference Judas Priest: “Here’s the electric eye…” Protected, detective, electric eye!

21:55 This film does for facial scarification what 2 Fast 2 Furious did for cars. Everyone’s acne-ravaged.

21.57 The heist is over now. It all went smoothly until they meet a security guard who drops his gun, which goes off and gets Ciabelli in the stomach. Bourbon outlook is extremely pessimistic.

21:58 Dan Akroyd, the film’s family man, is gunned down. Serves him right for showing photos of his kids to the rest of the cast. That triggered the death clock. I guess this was pre-Vietnam war movie so the convention had yet to be invented.

21:521 Dammit, all I can think about is Judas Priest.

22.10 Everything’s going wrong. Doc and Dix went to give the jewels to Emmerich, only find that he’d double crossed them, along with a sleazy private eye called Bob. Dix ends up shooting Bob, but getting hurt himself. Doc and Dix are now on the run, sleeping in some doss-house, currently eating a miserable plate of bachelor spaghetti.

22:12 “You’ll have six more kids – fat as pigs with black rings around the eyes and thick hair.” Children in the 40s were judged on how disgusting they looked.

22:13 Film noir staple: Making every expanse of water look like thick tar.

22.15 "Crime is merely a left handed form of human endeavour", says Emmerich, giving us probably the best quote of the night.

22:16 Cause of death? “Plugged in the pump.” You have to pay good money for that in Soho.

22.25 The corrupt cop has tracked Cobby down again. Cobby spills the beans after being kicked around a bit.

22.27 Emmerich’s in for a fall now too. The police know all about his involvement and are trying to break Marilyn Monroe into telling so that Emmerich’s alibi will fall apart. This all gives Marilyn a fair chunk of screen time. Miss Norma Jane’s still pre-acting ability at this point, but it’s all forgiven; Joe’s looking ever so slightly sweaty on my right.

22:28 Marilyn’s back – this time in a shoulderless black number. This may be the bourbon talking but at this point in the evening I would eat the corn out of her faeces.

22:221 Arthur Miller = lucky man.

22:30 Joe DiMaggio = lucky man.

22.33 Everything’s gone to pot now. Ciabelli’s dead, Gus and Cobby are in Prison, Emmerich has blown his brains out and Dix is clearly bleeding to death, slowly. Worse, the bourbon’s all finished. We’re on to scotch now – everything’s changed.

22:35 That’s what I’m going to say the next time someone offers to make me a cup of coffee: “MAKE IT OR SHUT UP ABOUT IT.”

22.36 Doc’s making a bid for escape by getting a taxi to Cleveland. His luck’s in, because the driver is a soft and revolting German from Munich, who looks like he stepped right out of the Beer Hall Putsch and into the New York cab.

22.37 Dix is heading home, with Doll bleating in the background.

22:38 1940s teens acting and dressing like 1950s teens must have been the epitome of cool at the time. They’re probably dead by now those teens. Makes you think. About Judas Priest.

22.41 Doc stops the cab to perv over a suspiciously middle-aged teenage girl dancing to jazz music, allowing the cops to grab him. As Romans says, the wages of sin are death. Just another ordinary person let down by their insatiable lust for fornication. Shame on you Doc, shame on you. The Police won’t even let Reidenschneider smoke one last cigar, the CRUELLEST moment in all cinema.

22.44 Joe looks curious. Probably flushed with bourbon and life.

22:45 I’m not here to judge but here’s what’s lying around in Joe’s bathroom: Books about Nazi occultism, books about obscene monks, empty bottles of whiskey and a diamante sex aid. I made one of those up and it’s NOT the sex aid! (It was the sex aid.)

22.50 Dietrich, the corrupt cop, gets his comeuppance from his superiors. There follows a painfully earnest scene where the chief commissioner or whatever turns on all the police radios in the city (four apparently), which are for some reason linked into his office, then symbolically turns them off, thereby showing us how if there were no police everything would be quiet or something. I don’t know. Its one of those sickeningly moral speeches that infest films of the period (see the "Hate, is like a loaded gun" speech in the otherwise great noir Crossfire if you think I’m lying).

22:51 It seems the measure of a man’s character in the 1940s was how much blood he was capable of hemorrhaging before he lost consciousness. Dix is doing well.

22.52 Dix finally arrives back in ole KY, almost dead from massive internal bleeding. He sees some of his beloved horses grazing in a field, stumbles out of the car and runs at them. They amble over in his direction, at which point Dix collapses and dies. The horses then set to work kissing him or eating him or something. That said, they could be doing anything. I’m from the city and I can’t claim to know horses.

22:53 I’m from the city so I don’t know what horses eat. But horses in Kentucky apparently love eating Dix!

CLOSING CREDIT STRING SWEEPINESS 7/10 – pretty heavy strings, getting even more full on when Dix dies.
TOBACCO TALLY 30 - of which most are really cigars.
NEGRO NUMBER A waxen 0.

MURDER MY SWEET

The marathon was meant to be three films, but flushed with success after The Asphalt Jungle we decided to add another film. Call it hubris, because that’s what it is. Murder my sweet is one of the best Raymond Chandler adaptations, and is the only one where Marlowe comes across like he does in the books – weaselly and grubby, with the wise-cracks coming like a defence mechanism. We’ve powered through our cigarettes already, so before starting we make a quick dash to the newsagents. Back at my flat I make another jug of coffee, despite the fact that I have no desire whatsoever for more coffee, or more cigarettes, or scotch. Really, I feel a little ill.

23.22 Kick off, with Marlowe, played by Dick Powell of all people, temporarily blinded, sitting in a smoky interrogation room. The story’s told in flashback.

23:25 So many Trilbys. I don’t know how much more I can take to be perfectly frank. A man throws down money on a table. The thing about Rob Halford’s voice is that it’s timeless. And you can’t – CAN’T – count him out. Ever.

23.26 Marlowe’s in his office. Chinese characters are reflecting off his window, giving everything a proper noir feel, like in Blade Runner. Suddenly in busts Moose Molloy, an enormous man who looks a bit like a vaguely Native American gorilla in a sharp suit. He’s looking for Velma Valento, his ex, who was "as cute as lace pants".

The actor playing, Mike Mazurki, was actually Ukrainian, and was a real life Beast from X-Men, smashing people up on screen and then quoting poetry at witty dinner parties when off work.

23.27 With a "lets youse and me go up and nibble a few", Moose takes Marlowe to the bar where Velma used to work. In the book it’s now become a ‘shine joint’, but because the film’s from 1944 and having a bar full of African Americans would have been a near avant-garde statement, it’s just an ordinary bar full of white people.

For some reason the police chief from the Asphalt Jungle is the barman. I think - IMDB says I’m wrong, but that could have been hacked into by the CIA or Mossad in a bid to confuse me. They’re getting sneaky like that.

23:30 A wrist lock that would make even Steven Segal smile to himself.

23:31 I may pursue this whole gum shoe thing. I need some extra work. People hand them tens and say things like “Who was it you said you wuz, mister?”

23.32 The bar experience didn’t end well. Marlowe’s now following another lead. He’s at the home of the widow of the man who used to own the bar where Velma worked, a very vaguely mixed race woman who really cannot act. That said, she’s meant to be hiding something and acting shifty, so maybe the bad acting is actually the work of a great actress who’s acting the part of a woman who can’t act. From my position at this point in time it’s just a hall of mirrors, and it’s all going right over my head.

23.32 The acting conundrum is settled when the widow Florian comes out with the least believable stage sneeze ever.

23.35 Back at Marlowe’s now, and we’re leaving the Moose storyline behind. We’re introduced to a stylised forties idea of a homosexual. He’s wearing a cravat and what is apparently a double-breasted dressing gown.

The coffee and the whiskey are acting together now, ganging up on me. The coffee is making me go up and the whiskey is making me go down. The whole experience is really disconcerting and not at all pleasant. It would be okay if it wasn’t so localised, but I really feel like my left hand side, and especially the face, is lifting up towards the ceiling. While my right shoulder pitches to the floor.

23.39 Dick agrees to go with the man to wait in a field to get a necklace from robbers. This sounds like a flimsy euphemism for gay sex to me, but those were more innocent times. It also occurs to me that Dick Plowell would make one of the all time best porn names.

While hanging around, Marlowe gets blackjacked. "I fell into a black pool" he tells us, before the film treats us to some special effects carved out of human poo. Special effects made out of poo are actually a hall-mark of this film: more on them later.

23.44 Marlowe is awakened by Anne Grayle, a girl who wears glasses and is therefore ugly in a clever move that predates a hundred noughties teen comedies. Lindsay Marriot, the gay guy, has been beaten to death for reasons we don’t understand. Marlowe’s in a bad way too: "I felt pretty good. Like an amputated leg".

23:47 Sorry, zoned out for a while there. The quintessential blonde takes a withering glance over her shoulder. She’s no Marilyn, but at this point in the evening she’ll do. This film is harder to follow than one of those parcour guys.

23.48 The jade necklace, it turns out, belonged to Marriot’s friend Mrs Grayle, who was Anne’s trophy-wife stepmother. Marlowe goes to investigate. The Grayle’s are rich, which you can see by the fact that they have knock-off Greek statues in their house, the international sign of rich. Mrs Grayle is a bit of a looker, and her husband is old and slavishly in love with her, despite the fact that she clearly sleeps around.

At this point, way too late, I remember that this film isn’t really a noir, it’s a slightly hokey crime comedy. It doesn’t have the feel of darkness that you need for a noir. Even the lighting is wrong. The whole thing is closer to the screwball comedies of the time. It sits awkwardly, and we’re getting tired as the various conflicting waves of nicotine, corn liquor and caffeine wash us around.

23:49 Joe just made a startling boast about the “billion nymphs” in his family. I talk him down before he lets the cat out the bag. The incest cat.

23:50 Oh wow, this pizza looks sensational. Or to quote Canibus: "suberb... truly superb!"

23.59 Marlowe has arranged to meet Mrs Grayle in a club that was probably designed to look like a degenerates’ hang-out. It’s got Chinese dancing, fez wearing musicians and a general Hawaiian theme. Diocletian would have felt at home. Instead of Mrs Grayle, he meets Miss Grayle, Anne, who sets him on the trail of a doctor who specialises in "the field of psychic treatment".

00.08 The shrink wasn’t so friendly. Marlowe gets pistol-whipped and then injected with heroin, leading him to drift off into a "crazy coked up dream". This is where the special effects really come into their own. Its one of the strangest but curiously also one of the least imaginative sequences in old cinema. Marlowe shouts a bit, then gets chased into a whirlpool by a huge version of Moose, there are lots of doors and needles, and a curious cobweb or mist effect that looks more like the camera lens is broken. Somehow the whole doesn’t come across as clever. It looks a little retarded.

00:09 It was sensational. On screen a large American-Indian man throttles a smaller man.

00.12 Dick Powell comes to, tied to a bed. "They were just a bunch of bananas that looked like fingers". There’s still the mist/cobweb effect. It’s hard to tell whether it’s meant to still be there to show that Marlowe’s still groggy or whether they just forgot to take the filter off, but didn’t have time to film the scene again. both seem plausible.

00:13 This shit’s getting psychedelic in the extremis. Multiple doors, cobwebs, syringes. Some other stuff. When we come back our hero has stubble and he’s sweating something serious. “The doors… are too small,” he says. I know how he feels. Then again I hand drew the plans for my own home and explicitly told the contractors that I wanted doors the size of cereal boxes. It's hard moving around the house but I tell you what - if ever you want to push a cereal box into the next room it's absolutely perfect.

00:14 Joe burned himself badly taking the pizza out the oven. I didn’t say anything but secretly I think it’s great! It really took him down a notch. Someone on screen falls down a flight of dramatically-lit stairs. That’s like a metaphor for my life. Only in my life I fall UP the stairs. On purpose!

00.17 Stumbling around what turns out to be a mental institute, Marlowe meets another shrink. This is a film is more loudly anti-psychiatry than a thousand scientologists all trying to justify why society persecutes scientology.

00:17 Joe thinks I’m writing about the overlay effect they’re using on the cameras. I’m not! I’m writing about Duck Tales (Woo-oo!)

00.21 Marlowe’s out of the clinic. He calls Anne to pick him up and drive him through a drearily awful looking version of California.

00:23 The main squeeze in this film has no ass. No ham! Or hams, or whatever they said in the 40s.

00.27 They go back to Anne’s house. She thinks she’s strong and doesn’t need a man, but still needs to get Marlowe, who’s been brutally beaten and injected with opiates for a number of days running, to open a jar for her. It’s lucky for her that there was a man around because otherwise she’d have probably starved to death. That’s the forties. Its fast becoming clear that Anne’s going to be the film’s tacked on love interest.

00:28 This is one overlit film. Everyone looks like they’re about to be beamed into heaven.

00:35 Raymond Chandler got high writing this scene. “I hate the blondes, all babes and bubble baths and blue moons.” Wut?

00.39 I’ve lost track of the story now, good and proper. It turns out that Mrs Grayle was Velma all along. She kills Moose, then Mr Grayle kills her, then he kills himself. Marlowe gets blinded by the flash when trying to stop it all. Anne survives the bloodbath.

00:40 Don’t make a short man walk up a steep hill. No one comes out of it a winner. Not even the hill.

00.47 Back to the present. Convinced by this rather fabulous story, the policemen let Marlowe go. But who’s that behind him? It’s Anne, and she’s not wearing her glasses. Oh my god. He can’t see of course, but you can imagine the realms of physical comedy that are opened up by a blind man being followed through a police station by a girl? Can you?

I’d basically happily do away with the whole ending bit, because it’s a little bit shit and because it doesn’t make any sense, what with Anne being recently bereaved and there having been no chemistry between her and Marlowe at all up to this point. Oh well.

CLOSING CREDIT STRING SWEEPINESS 3/10 – quite sweepy, but not the sweepiest.
TABACCO TALLY A political-correctness-gone-mad 21.
NEGRO NUMBER ½.

A TOUCH OF EVIL

That’s it. We made it. Almost. Only one more film to go. And it’s a good’un. A Touch of Evil from 1958 is generally considered the last true Film Noir. It’s also the last good film that Orson Welles made and, unlike other film noirs by Welles, it’s not just two hours of chubby navel gazing. If that’s what you want I direct you to The Lady from Shanghai, which stars Orson Welles as a working class Irish rover, loved by women, feared by men, armed only with quick fists, a heart of gold and a stubborn refusal to give Rita Hayworth the screen time she deserves. The finale is a shootout in a hall of mirrors that doesn’t make any sense.

A Touch of Evil is nothing like as stupidly pretentious as that film, even though it does star Charlton Heston in blackface pretending to be a Mexican. Actually, for once, Orson’s acting is the best thing about it. He plays the role of an enormous bloated and corrupt American policeman as a counter-part to the slightly bland Senor Heston. I remember really admiring it, rather than loving it. If I remember, the whole thing is beautifully shot and plotted, but that’s all liable to go over head at this point in time.

01:05 It’s the big famous tracking shot. This is the shit. It’s like my face is in Orson Welles’ mind. Or nestling under his jowl. The coffee machine is hacking away in the kitchen. It could all be too much, this coffee. I’m feeling greasy and twitchy. The Scotch is now being poured and somewhere a dame is crying out for a guy with ten knuckles and no future. A guy like me.

01.05 The film opens in Mexico with a famous tracking shot. Its one of the longest shots in film history, following a car through a Mexican town to the US border. It’s all wasted on me at this point in time. I feel tired. And old.

01:09 Mexicans? Rapists!

Principled! Mexican!

01.10 Charlton makes his first appearance as principled Mexican police chief Vargas, newly married to his American wife. Watch him stride. So purposeful. He’s blacked up to give him that authentic Mexican boot-polish look and, as a result, looks like Charlton Heston having blacked up. His way of walking always reminds me of this neo-fascist alcoholic ‘intellectual’ I knew back at university who used to hang around me and my friends despite the fact that we hated him. He’s got the same arrogant stride that the fascist dude had.

Trad jazz is playing in the background, to give the town a degenerate feel. There are also some shots of goats, presumably to contrast with the ultra-sophisticated jazz music. Unfortunately at this point I’m seized by a sneezing fit for a few minutes and miss the car exploding just past the border. I get these fits sometimes when my body wants to tell me that I’ve reached my calorie limit and should stop eating, but my body’s not too smart and is easily confused by a half a bottle of bourbon into thinking that I’ve had a full meal.

01:11 Joe won’t stop FUCKING SNEEZING. Snuff? QUAALUDES? Oh Lord, don't let it be Quaaludes. I can't lose another friend.

01:15 Orson Welles looks about 115 years old and he’s as fat as Karl Rove gone to seed to the power of ten.

01.17 Orson Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, is a massive chunk of blubber and has a really bizarre way of speaking. It being Welles, he’s also quick with the old meta-references, accusing someone of having "seen too many gangster movies". Hoo hoo.

01:18 Welles: “Whaddya mbn THE D.A.! Until… mbnb T-man wi’ a bonfire. Some kind of Mexican. Bhjdsa… a blonde. OW MY LEG!”

01.19 Vargas’ wife has an amazing bosom. It’s powerful and comforting, yet somehow scary at the same time. It makes me feel like more of a man, yet simultaneously a tiny child.

01.22 Some Mexican street punk hurls acid at Vargas, leading him to chase them into a cabaret, and eventually meet Uncle Joe Grandi, the local crime boss and owner of a magnificent toupee. Somewhere along the way, with all our emphasis on technology and self-expression, my generation has lost the secret of a good toupee. Men of Grandi’s generation have a lot to teach us. A whole lot.

01:25 Newspaper blowing across alleyway = film noir tumbleweed.

01:26 Gypsy! (Like how Dio sings it!)

01.28 Some good shots of massive oil donkeys ploughing away at the landscape. They play a big role later if I remember. The scotch isn’t going down so well after the smoothness of the bourbon.

01:29 Welles has given up acting and instead he just maintains a vowel sound, occasionally adding a noun: “Aaooouuugh… chilli… Eeeeooooar.”

01:34 Charlton Heston isn’t Mexican! I won’t buy it Welles. Not even if you cover him in Marmite.

01:38 Every incidental character looks like a rapist.

01.39 Things are hotting up back in Mexico, so Vargas has decided to hide his wife in an isolated motel on the US side of the border, intelligently. The only person there is Dale, a mentally retarded hillbilly who is always preceded by the sound of old time fiddle music. Vargas leaves his wife alone in middle of nowhere protected only by the simpleton comedy character so that she’s not in danger.

01:42 As Heston busts out the aviators Joe pours yet more filter coffee. Please, no more. I think he’s lost his mind. What’s he writing about? Let’s see if I can guess. If it turns out I was right I’ll buy everyone that reads this a DVD of their choice. I think he’s writing about... Vin Diesel! Fingers crossed…

01:46 Cheesecake alert. Sultry blonde lying across a bed in her lingerie. To be honest it’s quarter to two and I could do with a lot more of this.

01:47 Charlton Heston is morphing into Matt Dillon. Orson Welles’ mouth is… a trapezoid?

01.49 We’re into a masturbation minefield here. The shot keeps swinging between Charlton’s wife in a sexy fifties basque and then contrasting it with Heston and some hideous blind inbred.

01.51 Charlton has a way with aviators.

01.56 Hank Quinlan is convinced that the car was blown up by some generic Mexican guy and plants evidence on him to prove it. Charlton’s having none of it. Schwarz, a DA who looks a bit like Burt Lancaster with glasses is vaguely convinced and comes onside.

01.59 Back at the motel, some Mexican street punks with a connection to Grandi have taken over and are listening to some serious rocked out jump blues.

02:00 I wish I could drive that fast down alleyways while having conversations. I wish I could drive.

02:04 Mexican greasers are a bad sort.

02:06 Tarantino-esque use of music throughout this film. Tarantastic!

02.07 Oh yeah. This film has weirdo drug dykes. They’re one of the least appealing parts of the film. More on them later.

02:08 “They take it... in the vein!” Drug talk courtesy of some pretty tough lesbians. I dread to think the kind of the damage they could do with their fists.

When they're punching, I mean.

02.10 There’s some meaningless pigeon killing going on at 2.10am. Oh yeah.

02:11 Welles fingering egg yolk is an image that will, and should, stay with me.

02.13 Orson’s pissed off at Vargas for sticking his blacked up nose into Orson’s business, and so is trying to frame him as a dope fiend: "He’s a drug addict!"

02:15 Trilbies, shadows, jowls, more shadows, sweat, darkness I CAN’T TAKE IT NO MORE!

02:16 I could iron my shirts on Marlena Dietrich’s cheekbones. And not my small shirts either.

02.17 The Grandi’s street punks and the bull dykes bust into Mrs Vargas’ room and inject her with something that we assume is heroin. It’s all very rapey and unappetising and the lesbians are enjoying it too much.

02.25 Quinlan now has to get rid of Grandi who, it turns out, arranged the drugs stuff on his orders to make Mrs Vargas, and thus Vargas, look like he’s on drugs. Cue OTT lights cutting out and Orson Welles directing himself going psycho. This film’s plot is nowhere near as complicated as Out of the Past or Murder My Sweet, but it still makes precious little sense.

02:28 I’m fading fast. Orson Welles is killing Joe the Mexican. He loves to strangle. Crazy freak out trad-jazz with added bongo-exotica complimented by hyperactive light bulbs.

02.33 Hank left his walking stick behind when he murdered Grandi, which is pretty shoddy for an experienced corrupt policeman.

02:35 Welles backshot by mounted moose head on wall. Refreshing lack of vanity from the director.

02.36 It turns out that Mrs Vargas was only injected with "that truth stuff" – sodium pentothal, which always seems to turn up in crime stories and films from the period.

02.38 Quinlan, drunk for the first time in years, is rampaging through a house owned by Marlene Dietrich. Its not really clear what Marlene Dietrich does or why she has a pianola and a bar in her otherwise empty house. She’s supposed to be some kind of gypsy, so maybe that explains it.

02.42 We’re almost at the end. Charlton’s running around on oil donkeys trying to get a recording of Orson admitting that he framed the Mexican. This film is donkey-tastic. Screw There will be Blood. It’s amazingly directed and choreographed. This is one of the reasons why Orson Welles was so well loved, rather than the other crap he shat out.

02:47 Heavy-ass denouement as Welles staggers around in the sewage, shot from a variety of increasingly oblique angles, while shouting “VARGAAAAS!” He ends up collapsed and defeated, gimlet-eyed and half-drowned, forced to listen to his own confessions played out into the night air.

02.51 It’s all over now. Quinlan gets shot, as does some other police hack. Vargas gets his tape. It turns out that Quinlan was right in his racist framing of the Mexican kid all along, because it turns out the Mexican done it. Best not to dwell on the conclusion.

CLOSING CREDIT STRING SWEEPINESS 1/10 – useless. But then it was 1958 and sweepiness was getting old.
TABACCO TALLY 21 - pretty respectable.
NEGRO NUMBER One blacked up Charlton Heston.

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