Monthly Archives: April 2024

Swedish Death Cleaning, Wacky Baccy & Forgotten Cousins – Week 18 : 2024

Journal

Well it seems a lifetime since I was cycling in Australia. The heat is definitely a distant memory. One reason for the February/ March antipodean jaunt was to escape the wet and cold with the plan to return to a promising spring. That went well as a plan didn’t it!

So finding tasks indoors was a priority and hence the essential activity of Swedish Death Cleaning. This is not a Scandinavian metal rock band but a delightfully named task where you sort through accumulated possessions (lurking, in my case, in the garage) to dispose of them thus eliminating a chore for your children when you depart this mortal coil. My stuff was mainly paper based and included my father’s 1980s photograph albums of his trips to The Far East and South America. The tough reality is that these badly photographed streets, buildings and monuments taken with a mediocre instamatic camera are of no interest other than to himself and he’s not been around for 35 years.

When not in the garage I commissioned a new iMac. The old one was operational but was no longer supported by Apple and couldn’t accommodate various Apps. Sadly IT has a built in obsolescence that I had to acknowledge after 13 years. I got the new machine up and running and, importantly, talking to the external hard drives, optical disk reader and printer. Some ‘help chat lines’ were used and I ‘got there’ in the end with a minimum of foul language and tears. which in my case was an unexpected and pleasant development for the other resident of the property. One amusing anecdote was my attempting to resolve a software problem with Microsoft Office. My helpful contact, Abimbola, was very attentive and we spent nearly three hours going backward and forward on a chat line attempting to eliminate this glitch. Given all the dead time that such a dialogue entails I Google’d his name to discover it was Nigerian. When he asked for permission to ‘enter’ my iMac to scroll through the screens I did have a vision of this developing into a surprise scenario where he actually was a Prince and I could become the lucky recipient of an inheritance of $3million should I simply make a small administration fee payment!

Time for a visit to Duxford Air Museum

The presents Mrs Ives has been industrious in compiling family trees using Ancestry.com from both sides of the lineage. The further you go back the more surprising it is and some of the stories are worthy of a boxset. One relative did prison time after being involved with organised crime involving drugs in Australia. I remember him and suspected there was more to his career than met the eye but to find documents on the internet outlining the whole dodgy structure and his rôle within it was a shock. On Ancestry.com you can have your DNA analysed. Under instruction from the females of the Ives family I duly spat into a tube and awaited for its return. I have written about this earlier. However, one facility on the website is for others, via the DNA profile to see if there are any other matches out there…. we received an email.

This Leeds lady had a suspicion that her mother had had a dalliance during WW2 when her husband was away defeating Hitler. She was the result. The dalliance was with one of my uncles. Needless to say I remember him as a dutiful father with two daughters, which may have been as this birth came about when he was single although his paramour wasn’t! If all this wasn’t enough excitement for Anna then she’s now following up some of these discoveries and I’m meeting cousins. Some I haven’t seen for 50 years and another who I have no recollection of having ever met!

My mother was the youngest of six children; the second youngest was Jack. He had two children, Jonathan and Alison. We met them in deepest Essex and it was wonderful. In fact most of my memories of aunts and uncles are ancient or virtually non existent but I well remember Jack and his wife Barbara. There was a lot to catch up on. Worryingly Anna has other appointments in the diary…

Anna was similarly unhappy at the weather (and even more unhappy that I’d escaped it for a month Down Under) so a few days was organised in Madeira: my first visit. It was certainly a cut above the Canary Islands albeit more congested and literally mountainous anywhere away from the promenade in Funchal. The island is beautifully maintained and there is a great selection of restaurants, bars and sights. We had a splendid time including a night watching Leeds United at an Irish bar where the full set of emotions were experienced. I truly can’t wait for the football season to finish so that the torture is over until August.

Lastly, on our fairly upmarket housing estate the Police have raided a house that was a cannabis farm! The only drug problem in our sleepy retirement village, I thought, is whether the local surgery can process all the prescriptions for the pensioners who abound here. Apparently the house, at the far end of our estate I hasten to add, was rented out. Reports are that the house was adapted inside for the cultivation with all sorts of vents and hoses installed to facilitate the growing of the popular weed. Apparently the renters/farmers had departed by the time the local constabulary visited (quelle surprise.) The house was let through a (useless) Letting Agent, who obviously took their monthly 10% but never visited the property during the occupancy. The owner will have to spend thousands to restore the house to something habitable and pick up an enormous unpaid electricity bill.

Record Of The Week # 154

Music

William Alexander – The Singing Stockman

Country music fantasises about rural America: church, family, John Deere, small towns and endless dirt roads. The irony is that many of those who proselytize are often winners of TV talent shows that took them away from graphic design or tele sales jobs. So up steps, Aussie, William Alexander and believe me he’s walked the talk and has the blisters on his hands as an itinerant stockman working in the wide-open spaces of New South Wales to sing about a rural life.

Here there are sun baked, self-sufficient folk, living in settlements maybe a hundred miles from the next, temperatures settling for months above 35°C and a no nonsense focus on feeding the world. If you visit the countryside in NSW you’ll find it hard to discern the difference between here and, say, Kansas as the lonely 18-wheel Macks and Kenworths rumble up and down the highway.

In between tending his cattle Alexander picks up his acoustic guitar and plays Western songs about these communities and their histories. On this magnificent album he wrote six of the ten songs; the remainder all originate from Australia. The unofficial shearer’s trade union song Castlereagh composed by “Banjo’ Paterson is a tour de force. Paterson is famous for writing the nation’s unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda. Here, our shearer and general station hand is sick of working for low pay and has disdain for the ‘scabs’ who do. The endless roaming for work and scenery painting in the lyrics is a cinematic history lesson in its own right.

All You Need To Do starts with a wonderful low yodel followed by some pedal steel and then Alexander’s very special, irresistible, tenor arrives with a lullaby ballad that reminded me of Elvis‘ Love Me Tender in its arrangement and poignancy. Away from the sonorous ballads and social history he can cut a rug and Blackwood Town is a lively two-step where Tommy Brooks’ pedal steel lights things up as he speculates about hitching a ride for a night out in town. Of a similar pace is the Happy Singing Bushman, a melodic highlight with its gentle paced playing. Again, it’s the voice that captures you.

When I could message Alexander, after all he’s a busy man and hardly sat at a desk, he cited his musical influences to be Slim Dusty, Tex Morton, Buddy Williams and Colter Wall. In fact, Wall, the most prominent and successful of recent Western players, comes to mind when the proverbial needle hits the groove on this release. If you think that Wall had the help of Dave Cobb and RCA Studio A to record and release his collections then here, without all that resource, the song curation and excellent production are similarly as sympathetic and true to the original genre. Truly fabulous.

Record Of The Week # 153

Music

Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter

Beyoncé’s latest release has made mainstream news headlines. The album has been promoted and accepted by many critics as her moving her tanks onto the lawns of the country music industry seeking acknowledgement of black artists’ contribution and the freeze out nature of Nashville. I think the narrative gains traction because critics see country music as a Southern pre-occupation and, frankly, the politics down there probably aren’t theirs. However, before we get to the music she was clear before its’ release: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” True and in many ways I could finish the review here.

During Covid she decided to write a trilogy of albums of which Renaissance, in 2022, was the first, a dancefloor album. Here the lyrical themes were about black and gay tribulations. The second in the series, Cowboy Carter, moves on to replicate the format of a collage of songs, talk and samples with icons of the genre but this time addressing black artists, their marginalisation in the genre and how this and other heritage white music played a role in her own musical education.

American Requiem presents her credentials to be considered ‘country’ because of the activities of her forbears, her, maybe, modest upbringing and striving (more of this in 16 Carriages). It seems clear that Nashville’s hostile reaction to her 2016 CMA’s appearance with The (Dixie) Chicks still stings.  On the record she’s worked with some lesser-known black country music artists and Dolly and Willie have walk on parts either introducing songs or pretending to be a country music DJ (how could they resist the royalties!) 

However, apart from the smash hit line dancer Texas Fold ‘Em and the Jolene cover there’s no discernible country music over the 78 minutes. There are references in several lyrics to country tropes such as ‘Marlborough Man’ but the accompanying music could be hip-hop or some such. Throughout she has used a number of country music artists to play or sing and whilst most are not discernible there are some snatches such as Tyrant that recycles Cam’s Diane. 

I’ve mentioned the country moments above but there’s a deep dive into Beyoncé’s white music influences with samples of the Beach Boys, Nancy Sinatra and a faithful cover of Paul McCartney’s Blackbird, the latter having a lyric about a Civil Rights event that seems in keeping with themes raised here. Similarly, if you listen closely you’ll hear a fraction of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry and Son House making the point that they’re black but have influenced country. On most of the songs she uses traditional instruments, which nicely distances this from her R&B output, including acoustic. There are sumptuous harmonies throughout that give many melodies allure.  

One critic on BBC Radio Four did concede that whilst most of it sounded nothing like country then the storylines were pure country! Tenuous would be a kind summary of their attempt to bolt it onto the genre. Like me you may have hoped that this was her Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (Ray Charles) or even a brilliant covers album like Almost Blue (Elvis Costello). Instead, there are a lot of genres briefly covered and discussed with several spoken interludes.

For all that, it’s an excellent pop/soulful album bursting with melodies, interesting arrangements, intriguing samples and complex yet fresh production. I liked it and it went a long way to explaining how she’s amassed $1.16 billion with her husband, Jay-Z, and scooped up 32 Grammys along the way. She’s had a hand in all the original song compositions, arrangements and production. She’s a formidable talent not least for the curation worthy of a musicologist.

She puts in the words of Linda Martell a lecture about genres, and more to the point that they shouldn’t exclude. This is a clumsy message directed at the industry. Genres are a retail tool to categorise certain sounds to enable their promotion and sale. When’s the last time you turned your back on a good song because it wasn’t country? 

So, stand by for it being lauded in the Grammys. Texas Hold ‘Em has probably done enough to earn a gong but I shall be dismayed, and even more detached from the Big Label music corporates, if they dare put the album near a country music category.