Garry Potter And The Same Old Nonsense, David Backhim [the mitten read aloud txt] 📗

Love’. Yet for the Rolling Stones, 1967 was a year that they might prefer to forget.
Even as early as January, the omens of increasing notoriety were not good. Appearing on both the American Ed Sullivan show and ITV’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium in order to plug their latest single, the five bad boys of British pop were warned not to sing ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’. In those unenlightened, pre-permissive times, Mick Jagger was required to mumble instead ‘let’s spend some time together’. In protest, the group refused to appear on the carousel of smiling, waving artists at the conclusion of the ITV show. A storm in a teacup, I think that you will all agree, but in those slightly dark ages, such an issue provoked a considerable controversy. Worse was to follow for the Stones….. much worse.
Apparently, wayward genius Brian Jones had let slip in a London night-club to an unscrupulous journalist drinking partner about his group’s fondness for unprescribed pharmaceuticals. However, all hell broke loose when the News Of the World mistakenly revealed that Mick Jagger had confessed the band’s drug habits. Jagger understandably threatened libel action for the falsehood only for the Sunday newspaper to retaliate by allegedly conspiring with the police to have the troublesome Stones arrested for possession of drugs on the following Sunday. Even forty years later, that infamous drugs bust at Keith Richard’s Redlands home on the evening of Sunday 12th of February remains one of the most remarkable episodes in British cultural history – ever. The police had been tipped off (by journalists?); George Harrison of the still wholesome Beatles had only just left; Brian Jones wasn’t even there; and then there was the presence of Miss X, naked but for a fur rug, subsequently revealed to be Jagger’s girlfriend and pop singer Marianne Faithfull. With a cast of celebrities and a huge portion of intrigue, I am surprised that this Redlands bust which was basically Celebrity Big Brother ahead of its time has never been re-enacted on film.
Consequently, Jagger and Richard were charged and convicted, and their briefest of incarcerations was overturned on appeal. Their co-defendant and art dealer, friend Robert Fraser wasn’t so fortunate, but then he wasn’t a celebrity. Indeed, the apparent prosecution or persecution of the ‘Glimmer Twins’ prompted a public reaction of sympathy. The Times’ editorial, of all sources, joined ranks with the underground press and rallied to their defence by asking ‘Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel?’ The Who also lent their support to the poor little butterfly by releasing Stones cover versions in honour of Mick and Keef.
Meanwhile back in May, Brian Jones also fell foul of the law on drugs possession. His gig in court was scheduled for October. Against this background of upheaval, the Rolling Stones soldiered on with a new project, which was a poorly-disguised attempt to compete with Pepper and to climb on board the psychedelic bandwagon. The result was ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’, a release that didn’t surface until December, partially on account of record company apprehension at the album title. I choose to depart from conventional wisdom on this Stones’ collaboration, believing that ‘their satanic majesties’ produced an excellent long-player. I furthermore find it disappointing, though not entirely surprising, that in the recently-published ‘Rough Guide To The Rolling Stones’, neither ‘She’s A Rainbow’ nor the marvellous ‘2,000 Light Years From Home’ are listed among the group’s fifty greatest tracks. ‘Light Years’ was all the more poignant as Mick Jagger wrote it as a reminder of what life behind high walls and locked doors felt like.
One other musical offering of note from that tempestuous summer was the single, ‘We Love You’. Its eventual chart peak position of No.8 represented something of a commercial failure for the high-flying Stones, but mercifully ‘The Rough Guide’ has recognised this song’s undoubted place among the group’s fifty finest. John and Paul were summoned to provide harmonies, returning the compliment for Jagger appearing on ‘All You Need Is Love’ and Jones blowing a saxophone on its flip-side, ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man’. This historic record therefore represented the nearest that the friendly rivals of the Fab Four and the infamous five came to a musical collaboration. Assisted by the rattle of chains, a clanging cell door, and a remarkable promo film that ‘replayed’ the trial (and persecution) of Oscar Wilde, ‘We Love You’ occupies a special place in not only the history of the Rolling Stones but in the story of popular music as a whole. It was an oasis in an otherwise unrelenting year of misfortune and bad vibes for the Stones. Perhaps it was no coincidence that between 1964 and 1969, this was the only year that Mick Jagger and his associates didn’t create a chart-topping single in Britain.
Brian Jones meanwhile, like his ‘friends’ before him, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, but while Mick and Keith could rely on their powers of recovery, Brian Jones was on the slippery slope to an early grave. The footage of the blond bombshell in the ‘We Love You’ promo film was reason enough to doubt his future. Not even a VIP guest appearance at the Monterey pop festival in June could lift Brian’s spirits, because back in March another dark episode had cast a shadow over his relations with the band.
In an attempt to escape from the ‘heavy’ ramifications of the Redlands debacle, the Stones sought a temporary refuge in Morocco. However what was intended as a welcome break culminated in a holiday nightmare, as Keith Richard persuaded Anita Pallenberg to defect to him as a consequence of Jones’s unfaithfulness, unreliability, and violence. Jones and Richard, the group’s twin guitarists, were not on speaking terms for some time thereafter. My sympathy is with Keith on this one. Brian ruined his love affair and spent the remainder of his short life embittered by the apparent treachery.
With the burden of drug convictions and increasing group tension, touring commitments were kept to a minimum. Collectively, it represents a depressing chapter in the development of the Rolling Stones. With the law firmly on their backs, the Stones faced an uncertain future. For one protagonist that future was brief, but for the others their survival instincts helped them away from the abyss of 1967 and fortified the Strolling Ruins for the self-constructed pitfalls that lay ahead.

A TRIBUTE TO MADNESS
No this is not a bizarre commercial, endorsing the merits of insanity. Instead I recently watched my Complete Madness video compilation. It’s forty minutes well spent. I remain a little disappointed that the hugely popular septet from north London never received the critical acclaim that they perhaps deserved. After all, ask anyone on the street or in the music business about Madness and nobody it seems has a bad word to say about Camden Town’s finest. Yet for all the string of hit singles that began with ‘The Prince’ in the autumn of 1979, one will struggle to find a solitary music critic who recognises the impact that Madness had on British pop music in the 1980s and beyond.
It is probable that the group’s eye-catching, wacky videos perhaps deflected the fact that the group created outstanding records. ‘Baggy Trousers’ spent a remarkable twenty weeks in the singles charts and is a terrific social commentary on comprehensive education, while the group’s only number one, ‘House Of Fun’, is a light-hearted look at the coming of age. ‘Embarrassment’, ‘Cardiac Arrest’, and ‘Grey Day’ were also superbly crafted pop songs which nevertheless explored a darker side to the group’s collective songwriting formula, not forgetting the delights of ‘Wings Of A Dove’, ‘Uncle Sam’, and ‘Waiting For The Ghost Train’ which each covered politics without preaching or getting too inaccessibly intellectual.
Only Graham McPherson, under the alias of Suggs, has increased his profile since Madness became more sane in the mid-1980s, courtesy of a television show, followed by an excellent residency at Virgin Radio, not to mention a ‘This Is Your Life’ profile and a fish fingers advertisement. What a pity that the group as a whole never quite garnered the critical esteem that their musical exploits merited. Their influence almost certainly re-surfaced in such Britpop anthems as ‘Common People’ and ‘Parklife’, yet Madness probably suffer for the image they cultivated: fast-paced anthems performed by an unpretentious, down-to-earth bunch of lads, who didn’t take themselves too seriously. However, to ignore their music and its legacy, well that would be absolutely madness.

PECULIAR FLOYD
I’ve just been reading my fourth Pink Floyd book, entitled ‘The Rough Guide To Pink Floyd’ by Toby Manning, following on from Nicholas Schaffner’s ‘Saucerful Of Secrets’, Nick Mason’s ‘Inside Out’, and John Harris’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’. Gosh the enigmatic Floyd are hard work. The group’s Dark Side Of The Moon album occupied a place on the American charts for an earth-shattering total approaching eight hundred weeks. It is widely suggested that somebody somewhere in the world is playing this record at each minute of the day. Far from being one-hit wonders, Pink Floyd’s output included Meddle, Obscured By Clouds, The Final Cut, The Wall, and Wish You Were Here, and many other albums and even singles which collectively turned on to varying degrees numerous music listeners and even critics alike.
Yet for all their unquestioned global success, Pink Floyd remained a miserable, some might argue thoroughly unlikeable bunch. On the credit side, the Floyd refreshingly side-stepped the standard, tedious histrionics of most other rock groups that indulged in heavy drugs, instrument thrashing, hotel wrecking, and high jinks at high altitudes on aeroplanes. Though largely avoiding whatever groupies dared to cross their path, the Floyd were not one woman men, yet by contrast to most other annoying rock musicians, they were gentlemen by comparison. For some immature observers who buy into the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of rock Babylon, the aloof Pink Floyd were boring and a group that needed to let their long hair down.
What I find remarkable about the Floyd is how ungenerous they have been to one another. For two decades, the group were a relatively closed book that commendably gave a wide berth to chat show appearances and magazine interviews designed to ascertain their favourite food and their most embarrassing moments. Yet by the mid-Eighties when bassist and principal songwriter Roger Waters chose to dissolve the group in the firm belief that the others couldn’t assemble without him, all hell broke loose as his estranged musical partner David Gilmour proceeded to re-convene the band for the Momentary Lapse Of Reason project in 1986. As a consequence, the Floyd’s warring factions began washing their dirty linen in public in a media brawl that made the McLaren versus Rotten, Lennon versus McCartney, and Jagger versus Richards spats seem like a storm in a teacup.
For the best part of two decades, Waters on the one hand and