Pop stars’ philosophies are as entertaining as their music
Rock stars are like lab rats. Quite apart from their own chemical dabblings, they are mercilessly experimented on by the world, which hangs on their every word, never contradicts them and showers them with knickers and money and decades of leisure in which to ponder their specialness. (As Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer once said of playing to a crowd of 600,000: “I’ve never seen that many people together, other than in war.”)
No wonder they start to feel messianic. If you were a scientist trying to devise a foolproof method of relaxing someone’s grip on reality, you’d come up with something very like this.
As a result, rock gods, like kids, say the darndest things, and Steve Punt’s excellent history of this, Archive on 4:
(Radio 4, Saturday), began with the Beatles. Not with John Lennon’s infamous “We’re more popular than Jesus now” edict of 1966, but a parliamentary debate in 1964 that noted “three out of four went to grammar school, and as a group are highly intelligent, and highly articulate”. This, said Punt, was a paradigm shift – “pop stars being reclassified as sentient beings” – and the thin end of the wedge. Its thick end was manifested in King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, who once spoke to the journalist Paul Morley for 12 hours. “I think it’s a prog rock thing,” said Morley, “because their songs are long.”
In small doses, this grandiloquence had its charm. Journalist Kate Mossman remembered Paul O’neill, the founder of the Trans-siberian Orchestra, desperately trying to impress her with his autodidactic brilliance. “Are you happy?” she asked. “As Solon said to Croesus, ‘Don’t judge your life a success or a failure until the very end.’” Are you worried about the record industry? “I’m sure [George] Washington and Alexander Hamilton worried about the future, too.”
Punt made an excellent ferryman, taking us sleekly from clip to clip with affectionate commentary that both camped up the pop stars’ silliness and reminded us that, once, they had been normal people. Some still were, if you probed a bit. Take Dani Filth from Cradle of Filth who when asked “How Satanic are you?” replied, with lovely nasal pedantry, “I’m a Luciferian. I think it’s a bit more traditional.” Does he feel under pressure to be evil? “No! In my opinion, I’m a good guy. And if it came down to ‘Are you going to join Satan’s kingdom on earth or protect your family?’ Nobody wants a world that’s ruined by torment or horror.”
Voices of a more no-nonsense upbeatness were to be found in Still Here: A Polish Odyssey (Radio 4, Monday). These were the Poles who in 1941 struggled south from Siberian labour camps for the rumoured muster of a Polish army, hungry beyond the imagination of any listener used to mere peckishness. One child, Cheska, was “a skeleton”; but her sister was an “extra skeleton”, so a passing Russian doctor chucked her sugar lumps. “I was so jealous,” recalled Cheska. “I dreamed about being ill so I would get this sugar.”
The British boated them across the Caspian to Iran, then sent the noncombatants on to India and Africa. What made it jump into life was the child’s-eye lens, as the Poles recalled their youthful peepings into Indian abattoirs or their bow-and-arrow hunts by Lake Victoria.
After the war, these 120,000 Poles came on steamers to Britain to settle, their bit of Poland having vanished into Ukraine and Belarus. “We all had malaria,” said Cheska. “We were given tiny yellow tablets, but it made you completely yellow! So this yellow people arrived.” And on the gangway at Southampton, after journeying more miles than perhaps anyone else in the war, they whispered, “England, England, England,” which was a gooseflesh moment like Xenophon’s soldiers after their epic march crying “The sea, the sea.”
Another pragmatic voyager on the radio this week was Maya Angelou, whose classic memoir Gather Together in My Name (Radio 4, Monday & Tuesday) has been masterfully compressed by Patricia Cumper, who did the same for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in June. Maya, now 17, reinvents herself as Reet, gets a job in a Creole cafe, masters the garlic to heat ratio, then skips to Los Angeles with her baby.
There, what happens can best be summarised in the unrepentant and wonderfully feline narration of Adjoa Andoh as the older Maya, one eyebrow audibly raised: “An irony struck me. In a successful attempt to thwart a seduction I had ended up with two whores and a whorehouse. And I was just 18.” I feel faint to imagine what she might have achieved by Friday.