Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.
You Give Me Fever
As a fresher at university I joined two societies: the drama soc, and a group that amounted to a dating service for musicians. Guitarists would pair up with guitarists and form axe-toting gangs, battling over scarce resources, like drummers.
These two interests came together when my friend Simon wrote a play about an Elvis obsessive and decided he wanted a live band to play Elvis songs during the performances.
Turning a play into also a gig was, of course, a smart decision, as anyone who has ever mounted a jukebox musical will tell you. If the play turns out to be terrible, the audience gets to watch a band. If the band sucks, there is always the play. And if both are terrible, there is at least some variety of suckage.
The less smart decision was bringing me in as lead guitarist. I owned a rather nice tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul guitar, it is true; but — given that I am unable to hold a tune or stay in rhythm — it might have been wiser to make me lend it to a musician. I liked punk, which is just about the only genre of music in which a lack of talent is a coveted quality. But in covering Elvis songs, I was essentially being asked to pretend to be Scotty Moore, one of the greatest rock n’ roll guitarists of all time.1
Simon’s smartest decision, however, was the counterintuitive focus on Elvis.
My friend Lucy tells the story of hearing the news of Elvis’s death in 1977 and asking her mother if John Travolta would be the new King of Rock n’ Roll. Travolta was more like one of those medieval pretenders who ended up watching their own intestines being roasted in front of them at Smithfield; but the King was, indeed, dead, and by this point had been so for some time. More terminally, he was unhip.
When we pictured him we saw bloated, spangled Vegas Elvis, all sweat and dyed sideburns, yelling his way through ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ in front of an audience of frantic grannies. The karate kicks and photo ops with Richard Nixon had a certain kitsch appeal, of course. Vegas Elvis embodied a moribund and decadent dark reality, a feverish excess and fatal self-indulgence that ran counter to the neon ‘80s of Madonna and Hollywood teen comedies. It was an image of mainstream pop culture that that mainstream was trying to pretend wasn’t there, like a demented relative in a distant nursing home. This reading was, inevitably, popular with the counter-cultural post-punk bands that Simon and I listened to.
You certainly didn’t hear the music much. Generation X was busy indulging in its own musical inventions, and didn’t have time for those of its parents. This was the era of rave and hip-hop and, for me, industrial punk that sounded like someone slowly demolishing an East German machine tool factory. Even if you were listening to ‘50s rock n’ roll, it was de rigueur to insist you preferred the Carl Perkins’ original of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and to point out that ‘Hound Dog’ had been a Big Mama Thornton song first.
So, when preparations for the play began, I had never heard most of our set list, and spent the first few rehearsals just guessing. Finally Simon sat me down and made me listen to Elvis’s recording of ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, although admittedly this did not make my playing of it any better.
I did know ‘Fever’, though. I knew the Peggy Lee version, but that’s the version that Elvis copies (rather than the Little Willie John original). It is a gloriously strange song, somehow typical of that moment in the ‘50s when the new pop music genres were still trying to decide what they were. The music is stripped back to somewhere between jazz and soul, while the new lyrics that Lee apparently wrote for herself are splendidly hip and slangily erudite.
That image of the over-the-hill Elvis, stuffed full of fast food, drugs and his own ego, missed a (literally) vital element: his vitality, the culturally transformative force of his performance. This was the reason he had been crowned King of Rock n’ Roll in the first place. His performance on ‘Fever’ is blunter than Peggy Lee’s, and lacks her sly wit, but he puts a smouldering desperation into it that is threatening and vulnerable at the same time. Like many of his hits, Elvis’s ‘Fever’ is pure pop in its most sublime form: hooky and surprising, energetic and compulsive, full of sexual angst and a deep joy at being young and alive. More urgently for the purposes of our jukebox musical band, it goes heavy on the bass and drums. This allowed us to give full rein to our terrific rhythm section: Claire, whose upright double bass neck would be slathered in blood at the end of a gig, and Sam, our Charlie Watts, the irresistible, still but propulsive centre that rooted the whole shebang.2
Everybody’s Got The Fever
In a moment when Elvis’s music was deeply unfashionable, this all came together in an unexpectedly brilliant way. Being in a band was probably the closest I ever got to playing team sports. The same physical ineptitude that made me a terrible musician made me an even worse athlete. My experience of being part of a side was being the part everyone picked last (or, if I was lucky, never picked at all). As a consequence, I did not have any team spirit; but then, teams had never had any ‘me’ spirit either.
But I imagine that bands operate in a similar fashion to sports teams. Not only do you get to mess around with your mates, but there is also a purpose to it. You are creating something together, supplementing and integrating your skills to a mutual end. This frequently requires the sacrifice of your own creativity, the misinterpretation or disregarding of your invention as your collaborators ignore or pervert your contributions. But from that sacrifice comes gifts. The diversity of creative impulse is both uncomfortable and uplifting. From the conflict and concert of individual ideas comes a new whole.
One could argue that there is perhaps slightly less of a competitive element to making music than there is to sports, although anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Britpop or hip hop may demur there. But there is, I think, a small but crucial difference in what this does to the performance. Sport has spectators; music, like theatre, has an audience. Spectators play a crucial part in sports, but you can play a match without them. Sport can happen, meaningfully, without spectators. But art without an audience is what we call ‘a rehearsal’.
To play in a covers band is to be an entertainer: the value you are creating lies in the audience’s enjoyment. In some ways you are barely there at all; much of the audience’s pleasure is in the songs. The performance — so long as it is competent — is just a means to an end. You are merely a conduit: a sweaty, sloppy stereo system.
We did try to write our own music as a band, but I got the distinct impression that not even all the band thought this was a good idea. When we played our songs live we did not have an audience so much as witnesses; rubberneckers, simultaneously aghast and confused. We were pleasing ourselves and no one else. What the audience wanted, quite rightly, was the Elvis material. It was as an Elvis covers band that we got hired to play parties on campus, busked during the Edinburgh Festival, and played the last night of the Fringe Club.3
One of the reasons we had (re)discovered Elvis in the first place was because we listened to Nick Cave, not least his song ‘Tupelo’ on The First Born Is Dead (1985; a title that surely references the fact that Elvis was the twin to a stillborn brother). In recent years Cave has talked a lot about how, as a young man, he saw his relationship with his audience as antagonistic, and how he now sees it as one of mutual joy and creation. Playing with a band doesn’t only require you to integrate your individual needs with those of the group; it also requires the band to integrate the needs of the audience.
Like Cave, when I was a young man I did not appreciate the value of the audience response. I wanted to shock and astonish with my own vision. Now, the memories of whole rooms dancing and singing along to the Elvis songs that we were playing is, naturally, deeply satisfying. Art does not exist without an audience, and that goes double for entertainment. Whether it is playing in a band, putting on a play or even writing a pop culture email newsletter, the tempering of one’s own creativity to the enjoyment of an audience is a crucial part of that creativity. The audience is yet another collaborator, pushing us to step beyond our instinctive, comfortable spaces, to meet their desires and so create something wholly new: not just to them, but to us.
I really should have taken Elvis a good deal more seriously.
Being a fan of unfashionable Elvis in the early ‘90s was just one of many defiantly hipster anti-hip choices:
Uneasy listening
At one point in the early ‘90s a friend and I were turned away from a Soho pub for wearing suits. Suits were for management stiffs or trouble-making wideboys, coked up ad execs in Armani or drunk-fighting estate agents in unfortunate shoes and something shiny off a peg at Next. P…
Simon, who was also in the band, was a far better guitarist than I would ever be (and actually went on to be the bassist in a hip art-punk band). So the stage music didn’t suck. And neither did the play. Simon turned out to be an even better playwright than he was guitarist, and now has the Tony and Olivier awards to prove it.
It was Sam, incidentally, who gave us our name ‘The Telopines’. He told us, with his customary straight face, that it meant ‘turnip-like’ and we happily believed him. It was not until much later that he admitted that he had made it up. He had not only invented a word that sounded like it meant ‘turnip-like’, but also persuaded us that that was a good name for a band. Man is a genius.
Supporting, I think, They Might Be Giants, although I might be wrong there. Whoever it was, they never showed up and we had to carry on playing. Unfortunately we had already played our entire set. Fortunately the room was full of inveterate show-offs who were happy to muck in and entertain themselves.