RACHEL JOHNSON
GREEN SHOOTS FROM OLD ROOTS
I know impatient readers of this column will be pining to return to the raw pleasures of muddy music festivals, stadium rock concerts and ‘intimate’ gigs where suave crooners like Johnny Standing and Nicky Haslam sing the silvery songbooks of the greats. Sadly, everything is off. I can’t bring you ‘live’ reports this month, next month, or maybe ever. All there is left on this plague island in perma-lockdown (where is the promised ‘golden age’ of ‘global Britain’? I want my money back!) is this: live-streamed or pre-recorded events and albums. Artists are pumping out albums as if the industry were going out of fashion, which of course it is.
When I cast my eye over new releases for the year – I’ll be honest – I haven’t heard of 90 per cent of the artists. So I will not be reviewing here the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, Product of Hate or even The Weeknd (sic) – and the only reason I’ve heard of him is that he was the half-time act at the Superbowl. Green shoots, anyway. March sees the bruised, sultry vocals of Lana Del Rey’s new offering, Chemtrails Over the
Country Club. And later in the spring, there is ‘new’ work from three Brits everyone – without advanced cognitive decline, anyway – should have heard of: Sting, Ringo Starr and Tom Jones, and there’s space for only the last one here.
Tom Jones is, in theory, touring Europe this year, no doubt with his all-time hits – such as Sex Bomb and It’s Not Unusual – for the loyal knicker-throwers, plus his new album, Surrounded By Time.
At the time of writing, only a couple of tracks by Sir Tom have been released. One is a tub-thumper called No Hole in My Head; I prefer Talking Reality Television Blues, a nine-minute cover of a 2019 anti-trump song by Todd Snider.
It rumbles down the tracks in Sir Tom’s chocolatey tom-tom to the killer payoff: ‘Then a show called The
Apprentice came on and pretty soon/ An old man with a comb-over sold us the moon/ We stayed tuned in, now here we are/ Reality killed by a reality star.’
It’s a cover, though, folks, and these are not his lines. This is not – to coin a phrase – unusual.
Ringo and Sir Tom are both 80 and I’m afraid we may have reached the point in the life cycle of the Golden Oldie where we might be better off marking the anniversary of some classic LP released in the 1970s (we have just all come together in blessed, 50-year-old memory of Carole King’s Tapestry) than reviewing new work.
Still, this column will continue to look forwards, however unpleasant that prospect may be, towards the sunlit uplands, while noting that the only gathering that hasn’t been cancelled so far is the Festival of Brexit.