Inside Llewyn Davis – Joel and Ethan Coen

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen – USA/France) 105 minutes

‘I don’t hear any money here,’ says a music impresario to Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) upon being played the latter’s work. There is, indeed, very little money in the life of struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis, adrift in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961; impecunious, he struggles between gigs, crashing on the couches of anyone whose hospitality he can abuse. He is the embodiment of that old muso joke: ‘What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless’. For want of a girlfriend, Llewyn sleeps with Jean (Carey Mulligan – as ever, a three-chord performance), the wife of his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) and is then forced to resort to some ‘creative’ birth control when she falls pregnant.

The Coen Brothers’ portrayal of the nascent, ‘pre-Judas’ folk scene, is admirably rich, with Bruno Delbonnel’s photography capturing New York’s wintry scuzziness with aplomb. Llewyn, though a thoroughly dislikable character – selfish, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-pretty-much-everything – is still someone you find yourself rooting for, probably because we have all had a dear friend as imperiously indifferent to the concerns of others as he. He is wayward and feckless, like another Coen character, The Dude, only with added bitterness fermenting away; Isaac’s performance is perfectly calibrated, like an impudent young Martin Scorsese, and the fact he plays and sings on screen makes it all the more impressive. And Llewyn is certainly no worse than most of the others he encounters – the shrill Jean, the careerist Jim, a morosely taciturn beat poet (Garret Hedlund in a rather pointless cross-pollination of Walter Salles’ On the Road adaptation), an obnoxious jazzman (John Goodman), his manager Mel, who never pays him. This raises the first major problem with the film though – its tone is irredeemably sour, rather than melancholic, as many have contended. If it’s meant to be a love-letter to the Greenwich Village scene, well it’s an odd one, as the Coens are clearly not too sympathetic towards anyone in it.

The film also signposts things a bit too crudely, such as the brief appearance of a soldier-on-leave Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) – supposedly based on Tom Paxton – whose upright discipline is going to get him further in the music business than Llewyn. We hear, in passing, a young Bob Dylan soundalike, whose fame, and later capitulation to rock, would sweep folk music further to the margins than it was to begin with. It’s a fair point to make but it’s a bit obvious, as are the successive jokes involving a friend’s cat whom Llewyn gets inadvertently lumbered with. Then again, recourse to obvious gags has been a feature of the Coens throughout their career.

Inside Llewyn Davis is dotted with references to real-life characters – Jean and Jim carry a clear echo of the embryonic Peter, Paul and Mary; there is a wretched acapello version of ‘The Auld Triangle’ by an Irish quartet clearly meant to be The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) the impresario Llewyn so desperately courts, is modelled on Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. Llewyn himself is reportedly based on folk legend Dave Van Ronk, though the similarities are only fleeting – Van Ronk, while he never enjoyed Dylan’s success, can’t be said to have failed in a way Llewyn is destined to and his folk music was far more robust and spirited than Llewyn Davis’ watery brew (it is not a shock to learn that Mr Carey Mulligan, Marcus Mumford, had a hand in the film’s music). Llewyn’s failure, moreover, seems predetermined – the suicide of his former singing partner looms throughout the film but it seems more like a device of convenience than genuine bereavement. Llewyn’s impecunious struggles also appear picturesque and incidental, compared to the vaguely similar Frances Ha, which, for all its limitations, was a far more convincing account of thwarted ambition. Inside Llewyn Davis is a watchable, at times beautiful, film but ultimately suffers from the factitiousness that has been a recurrent problem with the Coens’ work.

Quarter-final playlist

Uruguay

I've put them up before but here's Los Iracundos, one of the better beat combos from the banks of the River Plate in the 1960s. Still going strong:

Ghana

There were many greats from Ghana's Highlife scene but none are bigger than E.T. Mensah:

The Netherlands

I could have gone for Nits, Shocking Blue or even, shudder, Acker Bilk but I'm going to pick a staple of my indie-youth existence, Bettie Serveert, named after the great Bettie Stove:

Brazil

Where do you start with Brazil? Elza Soares on account of her being married to none other than Garrincha? Tom Jobim? Gilberto Gil? Chico Buarque? Bondê do Role? Tetin? CSS? Sepultura? Gal Costa? Marcos Valle? Quarteto em cy? João Gilberto? I'll settle with the godfather of samba himself, Cartola, and his magnificent cover of Candeia's 'Preciso me encontrar'

Argentina

I suppose I should go for some tango but with a nod to Carlos Tevez, who likes this sort of thing, here's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs:

Germany

It can only be Can:

Spain

Los Planetas: presumably the Castillian for Hüsker Dü

Paraguay

I'll admit I had to look hard to dig out some Paraguayan rock. Ska group Ripe Banana Skins were among the pick of the crop.

Working Class Heroes on Film

In an era where any old fool can film something and post it on YouTube, it's a real pleasure to discover this week two hidden pearls from a time when home movies weren't quite so ubiquitous and which, even better, show us glimpses of people from before they became world famous. The short bit of film below shows us Phil Lynott and Brian Downey, later the rhythm section of Thin Lizzy, wandering the streets of Crumlin in 1969, with their band of the time, The Black Eagles. The quality of the film isn't great and neither is the framing and, not surprisingly there's no audio (The Yardbirds' 'Heartful of Soul' provides the soundtrack) but the film is mesmerisingly candid for all the selfconscious posing of the budding rock stars. There's a thrill to seeing any footage of the past in which you recognise things and the old 1940s council houses that flicker into view in the background are familiar to people all over Ireland, we can still see their likes in Limerick, Cork, Sligo, Athlone, Dundalk today, many of them now gentrified out of the price range of the working class that originally inhabited them. But most of all this is about Lynott and his stardom that was to come, the youngster who was to become Dublin's first ever rock star and the first black Irishman of world renown; as Conor McCabe put it in a fine post on Lizzy on Dublin Opinion last year, Lynott

is Dublin. The city seeped from him, from everything he did, from the way he moved and talked and looked. It’s hard to think of Phil Lynott coming from anywhere else but Dublin, and even at that, from anywhere else but a Dublin corporation estate. The city was such a part of him, and him of it.

And this gem of a clip is a great counterpart to the video for 'Old Town' that Philo recorded later in life, before his tragically early death in January 1986. Both remind me of the eerie thrill that befalls the sailor in Kipling's great short story 'Mrs. Bathurst' on his first encounter with the new-fangled thing called the cinematograph.

And the YouTube user MsRiposte, who it seems was a family friend of Phil, has also provided us with footage of Philo playing with Skid Row, including Brush Shiels and Gary Moore, the same year.

A huge thank you to Ms Riposte for sharing these with the world. They are absolute gold. And thanks to Philo's fellow Crumlin man and another great musician, Richie Egan of Jape for spreading word of them on his Twitter feed.

The Rehabilitation of Raymond Domenech, by Catherine Ringer

Raymond Domenech is once again an embattled man forced to put on a brave face as the players under his command mutiny and succeed in undoing the damage he has inflicted on the French national team over the past five years. It happened once before in the 2006 World Cup when Zinedine Zidane, Fabien Barthez and Claude Makelele generated a team spirit and fluidity previously absent under Domenech. And now Thierry Henry has decided to take matters into his own hands and the approach has produced two good performances in recent qualifiers against Romania and Serbia. It will probably allow France to progress to South Africa via the playoffs as they enjoy a resurgence of form and confidence.

Raymond is not the most popular of sports personalities in France, and his penchant for astrology, though not uncommon among the French, hardly serves to boost his credibility. But he now has an admirer from an unlikely quarter, Catherine Ringer, former lead singer of classic 80s band Les Rita Mitsouko. She has just released, free to download on her website, a track entitled 'Je kiffe Raymond' ('I love Raymond' in the slang of the era). It goes as follows: "Je kiffe Raymond !/ Trop beau ce mec/ Ouais, son style, son nom/ Il est impec ce Domenech/ J’aime son image, sa stature de vieux crampon/ De son ramage, ouais je monte à l’action.." (Rather ungainily translated: "I love Raymond!/What a looker/Yeah, his style, his name/He's the tops this Domenenech/I love his image, his clinginess [an untranslatable pun on 'crampon', meaning both football boots and leech]/At his command, I leap into action.")

The mind boggles like never before. One wonders who's going to benefit most from this strange project. But maybe Catherine, who started off as an actress in films that one might diplomatically call 'exotic', detects in Domenech a certain outré raciness from another era. Certainly the moustache he sported during Strasbourg's championship-winning season in 1979 wouldn't be out of place in some of Ms Ringer's early work.



Catherine Ringer - Je kiffe Raymond

We Got It On Tape

AquariumDrinker asks if cassette tapes were the perfect music technology. Not a fashionable opinion by any means and, despite having a pretty hefty collection of cassettes gathering dust in an attic back in Sligo, each one of them was a poor substitute for a vinyl copy, which back home in the late 80s and early 90s, weren't always available. But I do agree with him that cassettes were an underrated technology and the charm of the blank tape/compilation is undeniable. And he also has a pertinent point about the development of CDs being a technological dead end.

Let’s face it, CDs are a regressive technology. They have all the problems of a record — they scratch, break, and warp in the heat — with none of the advantages of holding a big piece of LP art in your hands and experiencing the music in the way the artist intended.  What’s more, before the advent of iTunes and read/write discs, CDs were a locked and essentially inflexible technology.

My guess is that this combination of factors — fragility and the inability to copy and mix — probably made early CD technology the holy grail for the big record companies. In short, we were duped by the record companies into spending millions (billions?) of dollars on what was essentially a flawed technology that would be rapidly replaced by digital downloads.

I agree especially with the latter point; the record industry never liked the flexibility and recordability of cassettes and emblazoned early cassettes with the legend 'Home Taping is Killing Music' (as seen in the picture above). It never did though and filesharing will not kill music either (though it may kill off some incompetent inefficient peddlers of it).

were cassette tapes the perfect music technology? | aquariumdrinker

My Funny Valentine

Keith Ridgway has an amusing anecdote on his blog about an encounter years ago with someone who answered his ad in Hot Press looking for a guitarist. The guitarist, a young lad named Kev, turned out to be intimidatingly better than Keith and his maladroit band-partner. The encounter ended there. Kev went on to form My Bloody Valentine, one of the half-dozen great rock bands Ireland has produced.

MBV have been in the news a lot lately, having reformed last year; one imagines Kev et al have cottoned on to the fact that there's money to be made being My Bloody Valentine. A friend of mine went to see them at the Route du Rock festival in Brittany at the weekend. Apparently it was the loudest gig he's ever been at but great nonetheless. Libération carried a brief review of the concert, which it said could be heard some ten kilometres away in Saint-Malo. There was a curious interview with one Christophe Brault, musicologist and friend of the band who has seen the Valentines live twenty times. Brault bemoans the fact that he couldn't hear the voices on the tracks. 'It's a real waste. I couldn't even make out some of the songs. It something they should look at.' To which one can only respond that, having seen the band twenty times, it's a bit late in the day to be finding that out. Maybe he was listening more to the -ology than to the music.

I have to say I'm finding MBV's newfound popularity a bit of overkill. I should be delighted that they're touring again (and about to record a third LP) but I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when the couple of dozen songs and memories of teenage days were enough to sustain oneself, along with the opportunity to see Kevin Shields line up with Primal Scream on tour. Now I find it all a bit too much. Not that I find the music intolerable though:

My Bloody Valentine - When You SleepTechnorati Tags: music, ireland

Musical Interlude

And now for those who do have Spotify, a bit of music. It's mostly acoustic guitars and stuff and not terribly well thought out, but hey, it's free.

I had wanted to include the late, great John Hartford's 'In Tall Buildings' but it's not on Spotify (a decent cover by The Jones Street Boys will have to do). And, thanks to the copyright-infringement joys of YouTube, here's Hartford himself giving it a go:

Underachievement Country and Folk

Out Damned Spot

Like most people in those countries fortunate to be able to use Spotify, I'm enthusiastic about the Swedish-streaming music service and it looks like it might be a much-needed reaction to illegal downloading from an industry painfully short on ideas. According to an article over at the Guardian, though, the artists are getting shafted. 18% of shares are going to big music companies (for a start-up it's not too unusual, and the majors are at least, for once, showing interest in something that does not guarantee the risk-free return that they see as their birthright) but artists are seeing little of the small profits accruing from it at the moment. Bob Dylan has already withdrawn much of his back catalogue and Swedish veteran Magnus Uggla has followed suit.

On his blog he said that, after six months on the site he'd earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day". Regarding his record label, Sony Music, he says "after suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, they're acting just like them by not paying the artists". When he found out that Sony had 5.8% equity in Spotify he wrote: "I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by (Sony boss) Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service."

Now, it may be that things might improve as advertising revenues increase, which will surely happen as the currently limited service is expanded (particularly to the US). Spotify, after all, is still only nine months old. But after all the bleating by the recording industry regarding artists being swindled by downloading, the situation on Spotify doesn't seem to be that much different.

Behind the music: The real reason why the major labels love Spotify | Music | guardian.co.uk

Et tu, Radiohead?

Radiohead are a band I've always admired more than loved. And it's likely to remain that way. But their stealing a march on entire swathes of a superannuated record industry is something I have to take my hat off to. They're far from the only group or musician to have a sanguine towards attitude filesharing by people who love their music but they are probably the most high-profile and the most consistent. They famously put their 'In Rainbows' album up online to be downloaded on a pay-what-you-want basis, using the rationale that they were reaching more than 175 countries at a distribution cost of a few pence per copy. The band ended up making £8 profit per copy; of course there are not many groups in the position of being able to command such a reach and Radiohead made their name using those old-industry distribution and publicity mechanisms that are now in such disarray. They were also fortunate to crack the US market in 1992 when British breakthroughs were as rare as hen's teeth (they also broke America before they had made much of a dent in Britain).

Now Radiohead have gone and, it seems, stabbed the poor old music industry in the back by making a new track available on the torrent-sharing site, Mininova. The band haven't admitted doing so but on their blog, Johnny Greenwood does offer Mininova as a download link. It's hardly big news nor is it really that surprising but having just read in The Times that Peter Mandelson intends to implement 'Hadopi'-style laws to keep the music industry happy, it's interesting to see the biggest band in Britain going in a direction diametrically opposed to both their former bosses and a government that seems as out of touch as the Macmillan one was when rock 'n' roll first reared its head fifty years ago.

Radiohead Leak Their New Track To BitTorrent | TorrentFreak

The Perfect Vehicle for Racism?

Charles de Gaulle famously attributed his surviving an attempt on his life to the design of his armoured Citroën DS. Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is another French poltician who gets around in a heavily-protected motor and now it's yours to bid for on eBay. The FN is a bit hard for cash at the moment and the sale of Le Pen's 1991 Armoured Peugeot 605 follows on the auctioning of the fascists' headquarters in leafy St-Cloud, just west of Paris. The FN is moving to Nanterre, which as well as being home to ethnic minorities that wouldn't be too attuned to the party's 'message', is also a little bit rougher so perhaps Le Pen might need to beef up on security with an updated model.

The car in question has passed an MOT test as recently as the 4th of July last year, is blue (naturellement), equipped with air conditioning, central locking, anti-lock braking, automatic transmission (curious, that), CD car stereo, and despite its daily use by its very active owner, is reportedly in excellent condition. The bidding currently stands at €18,050, to close on Monday evening next, and the seller considers the car to be a collector's item. 'No timewasters', is also helpfully added.

On a not really related point, here is the latest video from Parisian electro duo Justice, which features a gang of French suburban youth (all of them black) going on a rampage, terrorising and attacking passers-by, police and security guards alike. It has been ignored by French TV, which is not surprisingly nervous of the accusations of racism. It has been racking up the hits on YouTube since; a friend of mine, who directs music videos herself, thinks it's racist and a perfect recruitment video for the FN but I think it's simply provocative, not to mention exploitative. (For those that don't know, the members of Justice, Gaspard Augé and
Xavier de Rosnay, are both white and from rather well-heeled backgrounds.) But the video is hardly any more racist than if they used a gang of marauding white football hooligans. Of course there is an inescapable racial angle and the video will goad a lot of viewers to apply their own prejudices when watching it. If you think that mindless violence is representative of black suburban youth that's what you will think when you watch this; many others won't however. But the fact that the young thugs wear hoodies with the very-recognisable Justice crucifix logo, and they attack a microphone boom operator at one point, and the title of the song is 'Stress' suggests a self-reflexive jokiness; that of course will madden and offend some folk even more. But there you are. Interestingly, the director is Romain Gavras, the 26-year-old son of Costa-Gavras, the lefty Franco-Greek director of such films as Z, Missing and Betrayed.

Laissez-le tranquille...très tranquille

French comic book artist Johann Sfar is to direct a biopic of the great Serge Gainsbourg, starring Eric Elmosnino,entitled Gainsbourg : Une vie héroïque. Le Figaro has a slideshow of the the youngster relooké as old cabbagehead. Elsmosnino is probably a bit too pretty but it should do the job.

Are You en Seine?

Seanachie's most recent absence can be explained by his presence at Rock en Seine, Paris' 'premium rock festival', as David Brent might describe it. It's been going four years now and has finally branched out into a three-day project. And though not the world's most prestigious rock festival, it has its definite advantages. Located in the St-Cloud national park, it is right beside a major city (hence, along with Budapest's Sziget, probably the only such festival) and, if you don't fancy camping, you can take Metros 9 or 10 all the way home. Apart from the luxury of being able to sleep in one's own bed, an extra attraction for the Parisian resident is the wonderful atmosphere engendered by the festival, which fits almost seamlessly into the publicly-spirited enterprises of the Cinéma en pleine air at La Villette and the live Jazz performances at Parc de Vincennes. For someone who grew up going to Irish rock festivals that always seemed hostage to chancers and scumbags, the camaraderie of Rock en Seine is a novelty. An added bonus is the proliferation of bars so no queuing for half an hour to buy a maximum of two beers, as is the case in Ireland, and neither are there cops wasting taxpayers' money checking on what people are smoking. Needless to say, there are no resultant public order problems. To top things off, after six weeks of miserable rain, the sun mercifully shone.

The festival is organised by the regional government of Île de France, the region that encircles the capital, and they put up about 20% of the €3.5 million budget. According to a report in yesterday's Libération, for the fifth year, the festival has once again made an undisclosed loss, in spite of attracting a record 65,000 people. UMP member of parliament Yves Jégo tried to score political points against the Socialist President of Île de France by claiming that the ticket prices were prohibitively expensive. Even UMP Minister for Culture Christine Albanel (who attended Les Rita Mitsouko's set on Saturday) dismissed Jégo's newly-found compassion for the little man, noting that the prices (ranging from €42 for one day to €99 for three days) are reasonable when compared with one-off concerts in Paris. I remember paying £60 back in 1992 for a two-day ticket at Féile; with inflation accounted for, Rock en Seine presents very good value for money.

The biggest draw on the first night was The Arcade Fire, whom I missed on their pre-world-fame appearance two years ago. Though the band have little discernible stage charisma they nonetheless provided an impressive set, with thirteen members on stage, a great light show, and they also brought along a hurdy-gurdy. It's always good to see a hurdy-gurdy. More explosive and arguably more entertaining were The Hives, who are, as my friend Nick noted, like four milkmen fronted by Mick Jagger. When they first came on the scene six years ago, I thought that they would never last, that their admittedly amusing concept masked musical shortcomings but their subsequent albums have been surprisingly fresh and only the hardest-bitten of cynics could have failed to smile at their hilarious set at Rock en Seine. Because of work I missed MIA, The Shins and Dinosaur Jr, the latter two of whom were reportedly great while I heard mixed views about MIA.

The highlight of the weekend went unnoticed by most on Saturday as it took place on the smallest of the festival's three stages. It was 22-year-old Scot Calvin Harris, who has been remixing Kylie Minogue, CSS and Groove Armada and who now has his own LCD-esque six-piece group that provided the weekend's hardest-working bassist and most of the best dancing. As with James Murphy's combo the lyrics are sharp and funny, particularly in the recent single 'Acceptable in the Eighties'. CSS played also and were a big improvement on the last time I saw them - at the Elysée Montmartre in April, when they seemed jaded and going through the motions. This time they provided the perfect festival atmosphere with their girly rock trappings - balloons onstage, streamers and party poppers and bubble kits distributed to the audience. Their forty-minute set was much too brief even if they did surprise us by going out in an impressive hail of feedback.

Speaking of feedback, later in the evening saw the return of the Jesus and Mary Chain. The band are blessed with the greatest moniker in rock history - a name that fascinated me as a nine-year-old with its outrageous blasphemy - and their sound towers over even their own music. The Mary Chain sound is as much a fabric as anything else, and though their music became repetitive after 'Automatic', their third, 1989 album, there was enough material to fill an excellent set. Jim Reid still looks like a sadistic Liam Brady - you wonder how he ever managed to bed Hope Sandoval - and their music still sounds like the Beach Boys reflected in a Glasgow puddle - perfect in other words. Cold War Kids had the thankless task of replacing Amy Winehouse and did tolerably well, while Israeli techno-popstars Terry Poison and French legends Les Rita Mitsouko provided good cheer at the other end of the festival site. Quite why California dirge rockers Tool were called upon to headline Saturday night is beyond me but their light show at least was worth looking at for about fifteen minutes.

Sunday had less of interest for Seanachie and the first band he bothered watching was Kings of Leon, who, despite not being natural showmen, provided a tight set of tunes that showcased well their masterly musical and lyrical virtuosity. My favourite line of the weekend is that one from 'Milk': 'She'll loan you her toothbrush/She'll bartend your party', which is so good that it's really too dangerous to use around most of the women I know. Just Jack also provide a fine line in wordsmithery, though their production is sometimes a little too polished. Live, however, they were unexpectedly sunny and got a large crowd dancing with something that was in short supply all weekend: real basslines. Due to my relative proximity to the main stage I suffered Faithless' utterly inane public-school techno for a couple of hours and then moved closer to catch a glimpse of Björk.

I think it's fair to say that Björk is the anti-Bono; someone who is just so faultlessly cool and admirable it is impossible to take offence at her sometimes quite difficult music. Which is why it pains me so much to admit that I just don't really like the music. Why, I don't know, as, by the looks of those gathered around me, many others do, and my own tastes can sometimes stretch to the realm of the recondite. Like the last time I saw her - back at Féile 94 - I resolved to enjoy the show at least and it didn't disappoint. Backed by an all-female brass orchestra heavily caparisoned with runic banners - which are surely the result of spending far too much time around Matthew Barney - and with programming by former LFO maestro Mark Bell, the wee Icelander toyed with the crowd for a first half of sombre numbers before upping the tempo. Though the audience seemed to be appreciative, there was no indulging them, which is a measure of how confident and challenging an artist Björk is. Shame I could only tap my feet and nod, really.

The Distasteful Experience of Being Exposed to an mp3some

An Irish friend of mine returned from a trip to New York late last year disgusted with a sight he saw in a fashionable bar in Williamsburg: a DJ working exclusively off mp3s on their laptop. Now in Paris it seems that every second 'DJ' is packing nothing heavier than a MacBook when they go out mixing; it took many years for mixing with CDs to get even remotely respectable - and even now it is usually accepted only as a bit of back-up for a well-stocked bag of vinyl - but mixing with equipment that scarcely justifies any of the traditional demands of DJing is alarmingly widespread.

In the Bottle Shop the other night this development reached its nadir when not one but three people turned up with a MacBook each to 'collaborate'. So, gathered around the mixing decks - which may have begun their inexorable slide towards ultimate redundancy, were three youngsters with computers, pretending that they were Richie Hawtin. Of course the music was much the same as played by any other DJ in the Bottle Shop - meaning it was a decent enough selection, if hardly too imaginative - but most of the other DJs do have the quirky habit of bringing old-fashioned black discs with a wee hole in the middle.

I know that I will be accused of being snobbish here but I don't think it is too much to ask that folks with what they take to be a fantastic collection of audio files to confine their broadcasting of them to their homesteads. I listen to mostly mp3s these days (though I still buy CDs), mainly because the cramped quarters of Parisian apartments have discouraged me from bringing my not-exactly-immense collection of vinyl over from Dublin, but I wouldn't dream of turning up to a bar with my laptop to offer to 'spin some tunes'. Not least because I could do it with a few carefully-chosen playlists stocked on my iPod, which has twice the hard-drive space as my old G4. But if a DJ flicks through their iPod to pick the music people will not be too impressed. Some people imagine though that plonking their computer down on a bar table makes them look like Orbital or Paul Oakenfold, while all the time 'programming' tracks by The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. When one realises that one or more DJs are getting paid to play songs using equipment and applications that are already used by the bar to play music at other times of the day, well, that's just cheating. You may as well just sit in the corner, with your Nano hooked up to the PA and shuffle away.

The cheating is more acute still when the effort of putting together a vinyl collection is considered. Most DJing occupies, in my opinion, a place a few rungs below real creative activities but there is still a venerable craft exercised by many DJs as well a strong sense of curiosity and adventure. Good DJs travel hundreds of miles to get hold of that track that they could never find on vinyl (though they might already own it on CD or mp3), they reinvest huge amounts of their DJing pay into their collection, they haul back-breakingly heavy bags from bar to bar to club and they are forever on the look out for new or obscure tracks that might set them apart from their peers. And the best DJs never take themselves too serious. They are part of a music culture that owning 12,000 music files on a hard drive will never qualify you to enter. Now it appears that they might be on the way out because some geek with a shiny iBook wants to play the same tunes they hear on MTV2 in a vain effort to get laid. I'm quite serene about the effect of the file-sharing phenomenon - the music industry had had it coming to them for years, and it has allowed bands to reach new markets that they would never before have had access to - but this is one consequence that is certainly deleterious. A real involvement in music is much further than a click away.

Lee Hazlewood

Lee Hazlewood is the latest legend to go, having died of kidney cancer at the age of 78. Though I doubt his ailment was too bearable in his final years, the man lived the fullest of lives and kept recording until recently enough. May he rest in peace.

'Tis strange

Bizarre news day: Martin McGuinness launches the Derry Gay Pride festival, presumably because his immediate superior, the Reverend Ian Paisley was unavailable to get down with the Foyleside sodomites. And then Kanye West, who has already fiddled about a bit with Swedish indie lads Peter, Björn and John, has asked them to be his backing band at the Gothenburg Way Out West festival next week. Topsy-turvy indeed.

Towards a Loud Rocking Playlist

I went off the drink for a few months last year, more to ultimately reacquaint myself with the pleasures of drinking than for any health reasons. Apart from losing six kilos in weight - the dessert per day I felt compelled to eat to compensate for the lost sugars seemed to have no effect - the most remarkable consequence was that I spent most of my time listening to quiet, acoustic guitar music. The soundtrack to my everyday life was provided by Nick Drake, Devendra Bahart, Sufjan Stevens, Vashti Bunyan, Planxty, early Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and others. I still listen to those but I have unconsciously reverted to loud-music mode; just as US soldiers prime themselves for 'battle' with blasts of Metallica and AC/DC I limber up for a night on the tiles with Death From Above 1979 (pictured) cranked up on my iPod. Here's a preliminary aggressive playlist; feel free to make any further suggestions:

• 'Romantic Rights' - Death From Above 1979. A feral but perfectly danceable slab of metal disco. Best bit: when the sampled bleeps kick in in the second verse to the lines: 'South Carolina kid is heating things up/His wounds are bleeding and we're filling the cup.'

• 'Konnichiba' - Shonen Knife. You could call it bubblegum pop if the main riff wasn't so fearsome. One of Kurt Cobain's favourite bands and underappreciated in their later-80s/early-90s heyday.

• 'Pig' - Sparklehorse. The rest of the album 'Good Morning Spider' is more appropriate listening for the non-drinking Seanachie, and 'Pig' starts off as such, before getting very loud and hard. Best line: 'I want to be a tough-skinned bitch but I don't know how.'

• 'Punch Me Harder' - Superchunk. I have to be honest: I haven't heard this song since I was 18 but I plan to track it down. The title says it all, from North Carolina, like the normally-placid Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse.

• 'Baudelaire' - ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. From the album 'Source, Tags and Codes'. Loud, fast and aggressive. The Trail of Dead often sound a bit too much like a hard-rock Ben Folds Five for my liking but this track is the real deal.

• 'Main Offender' - The Hives. You could have any Hives track on here, but the opening power chords on 'Main Offender' give it extra strength.

• 'Fell in Love With a Girl' - The White Stripes. Again, Meg and Jack White could furnish an entire playlist of this sort on their own. This is merely the first and the fastest that springs to mind.

• 'At 1am' - The Subways. Teeny-rockers The Subways aren't much cop but this early demo (that reappears as a hidden track on their debut album 'Young for Eternity') is a creditable stab at dirty garage.

• 'Deathfall Priest' - The Jimmy Cake. Dublin arty types (and former denizens of Trinity College's JCR) are another band that more often play relaxed music. This cacophonous mix of accordions, brass, banjos and buzzsaw guitars is something different.

• 'Annalisa' - Public Image Ltd. PiL's debut album is one of the great underrated records of all time and was influencing bands long before The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand had even heard of Gang of Four. Jah Wobble's thumping bass, Keith Levene's neighbour-from-hell guitar riff and John Lydon just wails. I'm sure there's melody in there somewhere.

• 'Where Damage Isn't Already Done' - The Radio Dept. Swedish shoegazers get all rocky for once and everything is perfect. Rumbling bass, tin-pot drums, guitar lick the Valentines would be proud of.
  

• 'Sucker' - Peaches. You could also choose 'Rock Show' from the mad Canadian's debut album but it sounds a bit prissy compared to this.

• 'English Civil War' - The Clash. Many people don't like the Sandy Perlman-produced second album 'Give 'em Enough Rope' (it didn't even merit a mention in Julien Temple's Joe Strummer film) but a bit of distance from punk is helpful in recognising it for the impressive straight rock album that is. This cover of the old traditional ballad is damn good.

• 'Gay Bar' - Electric Six. No seriously. It's all very inane but as hilarious as the best of the Farrelly brothers. Let's start a nuclear war...

• 'Loose' - The Stooges. From 'Fun House'. I'm breaking the rules here as it has a bit too much of a bluesy swagger to be eligible. But I can't help smiling when I hear Iggy sings 'I'll stick it deep inside you/Because I'm loose'.

• 'Melo do Vitiligo' - Bonde do Rolê. The Brazilians' Baile funk reworking of AC/DC's 'You Shook Me All Night Long' is not on the debut album 'Bonde do Rolê With Lasers' but is worth looking out for.
  

• 'Everything's on TV - The Hellacopters. The side project of members of Swedish metal groups Entombed and Backyard Babies might be a bit mellow in comparison to their day-job and no less cheesy but sometimes you just crave a good polished, unselfconscious guitar riff. Innocence is bliss.
  

An Extraordinary Joe

Despite having been a fan of The Clash since I was twelve I was wary of Julien Temple's documentary on the late Joe Strummer, mainly because rockumentaries are too often unilluminating elegies that rarely distance their human subjects from the icons that they became. The tendency of rock fans and 'critics' to take popular music a bit too seriously is also irritating. Things did not look too good when a friend of mine, who had seen it a couple of months ago and who is a Clash fan since the first album came out when he was sixteen, said that he hated Temple's film so much that not since Oliver Stone's The Doors did he await the demise of the hero with such relish.

Temple though is a capable director of music films, even if there have been a few duds along the way, such as Absolute Beginners. His two films on the Sex Pistols The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury are riotously enjoyable and the opening hour of the Strummer film is amusingly interspersed - in Michael Moore fashion - with footage from Lindsay Anderson's If..., the animated film version of Animal Farm and the 1950s BBC production of 1984, with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. While Temple's editing is none-too-subtle the choice of Orwell is shrewd as The Clash were a band whose intelligent and quite often pragmatic parsing of political views was very much in the tradition of the independent Left to which Orwell belonged. The Clash were to the forefront of the struggle against the National Front, and as Roland Gift of Fine Young Cannibals points out in the film, they opened punk up to young black British people, with their appropriation of reggae, dub and soul, and later hip-hop, which they did before rap and hip-hop became mainstream. The Clash however also had a clear-sighted view of racial politics and as tracks such as 'White Riot', 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' and 'Safe European Home' attest, they were never naive enough to believe that reality reflected their own admirable ideals.

Testimonies are offered by people that knew Strummer from an early age such as his relatives and his schoolmates, and by collaborators from the Clash years and the long difficult times that followed. There are also a number of celebrity fans on hand. Some of the interviewees are spot-on, such as Zander Schloss, Jim Jarmusch, Don Letts, Bobby Gillespie and Jesús Aría, a Spanish friend of Strummer's. Others are balefully inane, such as John Cusack, Johnny Depp and Bono, all of whom deliver their peroration with the flatulent gravitas of a South Bank Show interview. The tone is naturally respectful but the more difficult sides of Strummer's character, particularly his avowed Stalinist single-mindedness and his tendency to sleep with his friend's girlfriends, are also included. Where the film scores best is its treatment of the barren years in the late 80s and early 90s when Strummer was adrift and wandering in a creative wilderness. The fact that someone as previously successful as Strummer could have suffered from such a lack of confidence is salutary and makes his comeback when he made a number of fine albums with the Mescaleros in the years before his death all the more remarkable.

There are a number of potential interviewees surprisingly missing, especially Paul Simenon, who, with his successful painting career and return to music with The Good, the Bad and the Queen, could not be considered media-shy. Also absent are Alex Cox, with whom Strummer worked a lot in the years after The Clash, and the Pogues, who can be credited with kick-starting Strummer's drive when they hired him to stand in for the sacked Shane McGowan on tour in 1991.

There are many cynics, myself included, that have sneered at the fashionable lefty that the public-school-educated John Mellor became (I used to refer to him as 'Joe Slummer'), but the film refutes this and the ultimate stamp of magnanimous approval is provided by the hard-as-nails working-class Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols who says that there was no bullshit about Strummer. Instead we see a man who devoted absurd amounts of time to his fans, had a heartening appetite for seeking out new music from anywhere in the whole world, and who was sickened to hear that, during the first Gulf War, American bombs dropped on Baghdad were daubed with the slogan 'Rock the Casbah'. The fact that Strummer and Mick Jones reunited for the only time, not for a corporate tour that might have made them millions, but for a benefit for striking London firemen in 2002, says everything about a man who had his priorities right. This is one reverential rockumentary that is worth watching. Here's the trailer:

Apple Lossless

A couple of months back I listed a number of items I have lost over the years, many of them things I have since managed well enough without, the loss of which having occasioned only a temporary frustration. The weekend just passed almost added my iPod to the list, as at the double birthday party of two friends in a bar near Porte de la Villette on Friday night, I returned to pick it up from where a friend was mixing only to find that it had disappeared. Being among friends I didn't suspect it stolen and the presence of a similar apparatus, with a similar cover suggested that it might have been taken by accident. It had in fact been mistakenly given by my friend to a friend of the owner of the other iPod in question. After about twelve hours' worrying and resignation to its loss, its whereabouts were located and I collected it off a personable Mexican filmmaker called Juan on Sunday evening.

There are few things I carry about that I worry about losing - my laptop is obviously one, whenever I have it out and about, as is my wallet, for equally obvious reasons; another is my notebook (or notebooks) and I generally have good luck with them when I do lose them, my mobile phone is another, more to avoid the hassle and expense of replacing it, and since I bought it last November, my iPod is another. These are the only things that I keep on my person whenever I go out, entrusting them to nobody, and when people lose phones and mp3-players that they have left in jackets or bags lying in corners of bars I don't have a huge amount of sympathy. Nor did I have much sympathy for myself after my rare lapse of vigilance the other night. Which makes me feel guilty that I should attach such importance to such a clearly unimportant thing. It is truly dispiriting to evaluate loss in terms of consumer goods, and the fact that it has come back to a stupidly piggish consumer (as I am wont to see myself) induces a sort of consumer's remorse at this level of effeteness that I have allowed myself to attain. I soon got over my angst by putting Icky Thump on the retrieved toy, as well as Richard Hawley's 'Cole Corner', which I have dallied far too long over getting hold of. Thanks once again, Tim.

Supporting Rolê

I've been neglecting the blog again, partly because of being overworked, partly because I've been writing other stuff and partly because I enjoy taking a break from it every so often. At the weekend I went to see Bonde do Rolê play a free gig at Parc André Citroën, which, given that it cost me absolutely nothing, was probably the most rewarding gig I've ever been at, not least because we got to have a very drunken natter with them afterwards. The music, by the by, was great too, as their debut album, 'Bonde do Rolê with Lasers' is.

I also saw a superb French documentary about American political opinion entitled Kings of the World, filmed in the month before the 2004 presidential elections. It is refreshingly lacking in lazy European preconceptions about Americans and it benefits from having an amazing cast of ordinary Joes and Joannas to interview, the pick of whom are a witty, Union-supporting cocktail waitress from Reno, Nevada; a boorish, cantankerous Bush-supporting beef rancher also from Nevada; a cross-dressing performance artist from Salt Lake City, and a multi-racial liberal family from San Francisco, whose dinner party even manages to sound interesting. Filmed on what I can only imagine was a shoestring, it is a gripping piece of incisive reportage that is a fitting successor to those great French studies of American society conducted by Tocqueville, Derrida, Baudrillard and Louis Malle.

Here's the video for Bonde do Rolê's 'Office Boy' for diversion:

Catching Up

A busy few days kept me from here. A brief resumé of the activities: Fête de la Musique was spent in the 11th, hopping between a reggae soundsystem with suburban posses engaging in fearsome rhyme-offs and a brass band set-up around the corner which veered from Afro-Beat to Yiddish folk to Balkan gypsy. Then the Beckett exhibition at the Pompidou, which brought together an impressive collection of multi-media installation with pertinence to Beckett's work and also a display of Beckett's manuscripts, on loan from Reading University Library. These were the highlight, as were a number of Beckett's personal correspondence, which fleshes out the allegedly unplaceable nature of the man's work.

Made in Jamaica, a documentary on Jamaican music by the French director Jérôme Laperrossaz, which was sporadically interesting but overall a missed opportunity. The film focusses on mainly contemporary dancehall and the gun culture that accompanies it; links to the past of reggae are provided by way of Third World, Toots and Gregory Isaacs but the fascinating evolution of Jamaican music, which heavily influenced everything from punk to house, from hiphop to drum 'n' bass, is ignored, and Laperrossaz gives the impression that music on the island began with Bob Marley.

Much better, and surprisingly so, is Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, which is gruesome, inane, funny and as irritating as a film by Tarantino can be expected to be. Kurt Russell is great and the final half-hour makes it all worthwhile. Hardly a return to form after the mess that was Kill Bill but much less annoying. More later.