Extracts from The Teenage Diary Of Colin B. Morton
Part 5: Hello 21st Century, Goodbye Melody Maker
On things merging with themselves
Back when I was a wee lad it was trad to have a comic weekly delivered.
Before I had discovered the joys of Lee/Kirby Marvel Comics, I used
to follow the sequentially rendered adventures of (A) bold British
Tommies who were fighting the Hun (B) fabulously gifted footballers
who were beating the Hun at soccer. However, I was not then, as
now, very interested in these pursuits. I would invariably "take"
whatever comic contained the very least in the way of football and
fighting the Hun. I would favour the ones where someone has a mystic
amulet or a steel claw, or ghost-hunts, whatever.
As the football and Hun-fighting was a tried-and-tested formula
(still is, hardly a day goes by without someone English mentioning
winning the World Cup in 1966) whichever comic I subscribed to would
inevitably "merge" with another, more popular comic, which
would have more football and Hun-fighting and less weird adventures
featuring a blokie with a mystic amulet.
This was usually unannounced. One day, the paperboy would suddenly
deliver the Fighting Chums instead of Action Chappies, and my initial
puzzlement would disappear when I would espy the words "and
Action Chappies" written in slightly smaller letters ‘neath
the emblazoned logo of Fighting Chums. Even when I was about eight
I was not dumb enough to believe that Fighting Chums had merged
with Action Chappies due to some altruistic desire on the part of
the publishers. I would invariably cancel Fighting Chums with undue
haste.
At time of writing it has just been announced that the longest-running
UK music paper, The Melody Maker, has "merged" with New
Musical Express. Do they think we’re blinking stupid or something?
I could see through this kind of bullshit when I was but knee high
to a knee! Any fool can see that Melody Maker has gone down the
dumper. I mean why hasn’t the "combined" paper been renamed
"Melody Express" huh? And what, exactly, is all this guff
about "affectionately known as The Maker"? Have you ever
heard anyone call it "the Maker" in conversation? Me neither.
Le Punk Rock, c’est moi..
I always hated the goddam Melody Maker. This has little to do
with the fact that I wrote the Best Pop Cartoon Ever for it’s rival,
New Musical Express (I use the expression "rival" somewhat
loosely, since NME has been outselling Melody Maker by a country
mile for some decades now). I have hated Melody maker for as long
as I remember.
Because it was always so blasted serious.
I believe the Blasted Seriousness Of Melody Maker has done more
harm to young people than the Bible, marijuana, Harry Potter Books
and Communism combined.
It has led to an entire generation of indie-wuss musicians who
had been weaned on this specious crap. We now have folk walking
about the place who are massively deluded by popular music. Melody
Maker killed Kurt Cobain, as surely as they had pulled the trigger
themselves.
The biggest clue to how shit the music press has got lately is
the fact that, a few years back, the UK Labour Government introduced
the notion of Rock Schools and Job Creation Scheme type things,
you can go to college and learn all about how to do rock. Do you
think that if the Sex Pistols, or the Stooges, Beatles, Hendrix,
or any of those dudes had turned up at fucking ROCK SCHOOL in their
day they would have been shown anything but the door? We will be
condemned to eternal mediocrity. No Mr Brown you cannot set your
hair on fire. No Mr Vliet you cannot lock these guys in a house
and make them learn your far out stuff, letting one of them go shopping
once a week but only if he wears a dress. No Mr Jerry Lee Lewis
thou shalt not play thy guitar with thy foot. Had early Manic Street
Preachers shown up, they would have been dismissed as hopelessly
out-of-touch, even though their music nowadays sounds exactly like
what would come top of the class in a rock school. I’ll tell you
who else would have gone down a treat; Phil ‘cheeky cockney inaction-chappie’
Collins.
Perhaps I hated the Melody Maker, instinctively, from birth, but
my earliest recollection of hating "The Maker" was in
the mid-70s. I was reading the letters page, and some silly twerp
had written in complaining about the charts. Why oh why oh why was
a shallow work of ephemeral pop music fluff like "Calling Occupants
Of Interstellar Craft" by the Carpenters higher in the charts
than "Wondrous Stories" by Yes? No shit. Someone actually
wasted a stamp on that. I meantersay apart from the fact that The
Carpenters have stood the test of time and Yes have not, what essentially
is the difference between those two above-mentioned songs? They
are both light rock ballads about vague away-with-the-fairyfolk
concepts. What separates them is nought but the "our music
is serious and yours isn’t" unwarranted airs of cultural superiority
which was endemic to Melody Maker.
It was round about this time as I embarked upon my plan to destroy
the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest. They used to have these
"Folk/Rock Contests" you know, various heats running up
and down the country. Some of my friends (one of whom later became
a famous 80s pop star) were in a band which entered. I tagged along.
What I saw astonished me.
Band after band would troop on and play for 15 minutes in front
of a panel of judges.
The judges were usually:
someone from Melody Maker
someone from the students union (yep, they were always held
in further education establishments, you know what I’m saying?)
someone from the company who made the PA system (!).
The year in question, the Caerphilly Amateur Jimi Hendrix vied
with the Cwmbran Amateur Focus. Dozy, the Neath Amateur Slade, had
the Melody Maker Folk-Rock Contest Welsh Heat all sewn up. The winners
would inevitably be a band who sounded like one which was currently
big-time. The winners of the regional heats would all go on to a
big final held in that London. The eventual winners would never
be heard of again.
Ah, Dozy, what became of ye? Fame is a fickle mistress is it not?
My butty Greil Marcus has stated that punk is not invented, it
is discovered, each time anew in a different form. As I stood and
watched, I thought, "I bet if someone got up onstage and just played
a load of inept shite they would get the most applause, such is
the bogusness and tedium of this event". I was, unbeknownst even
to myself, discovering punk rock for myself.
So myself and some pals decided to destroy the Melody Maker Folk/Rock
Contest as a situationist act, or as it is known in Pontypool, "a
daft laugh". The next year, we got roaring drunk and strapped
on borrowed instruments that we could not play. The drummer read
NME onstage as we were setting up. Hey, rebellion!
Our improvisation consisted of me and Rhino Marsh mouthing alternate
words of the title, O WOT A BEAUTIFUL CUSTARD CREAM TAAAAART, we
were going to do this over the top of some minor "chaos"
for our allotted 15 minutes, but we got carried away and inserted
howling feedback, synth set at random, screamed creamed-cacophony
and mayhem, with a guy I’d just met in the bar that day on bass.
Extracts from: "The Lords Prayer", "Remember You’re
A Womble", "Girl From Ipenima" the Croesyceiliog
School Song and god knows what else…… How fucking DARE you sit
there and judge us, who the fuck do you think you are, no one ever
gets anywhere after winning one of these competitions anyway whiiiinnnnee
crashhhhh splang! Six months before Sex Pistols, at All-Tyr
Yn tech. Honest. We got the most applause. A man asked us, "Were
you trying to do something like Can? Didn’t quite come off until
towards the end did it?" My co-cartoonist Chuck Death, whom
I was not to meet for several years, was in the audience that day.
I like to think we actually destroyed the Melody Maker Folk Rock
Contest, and who knows, perhaps we did. The next year it moved from
Newport to Cardiff, the year after to Swansea, then out of Wales
altogether. We followed it, got roaring drunk, played gross bullshit.
People, who we didn’t know, elsewhere in the UK, began to join in
(I heard tell of "Banana Lopez And The Brazilian Bunch"
in Leeds, who wore sombreros, rattled maracas, and went "yariba
andele andele" for 15 minutes). In a matter of a few years,
the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest was no more.
That whole idea, of having "contests" of being able to
judge on behalf of other people, typified the Melody Maker
attitude. Of course, this type of mentality occurs elsewhere in
the arts, but never has it been more firmly embraced than on the
pages of what nobody called "The Maker".
A year or two after The Bank Clerks (hey we’d even pre-empted the
noowave naming convention of calling yourself after an occupation)
invented/discovered punk at All-Tyr-Yn tech, the Melody Maker thoroughly
missed the boat on the punk rock, despite having been given an advance
warning shot across the bows by the glorious "O Wot A Beautiful
Custard Cream Taaaart". Being the "proper musicians who
can play their instruments really well" music paper, they wanted
no part of an Earth-shattering movement which gave not a quark about
the playing of instruments really well, really badly, or at all.
Consequently, they became a laughing stock, the music paper of mouldy
figs and squares. But what to do? The response of Melody Maker was
to adopt typically myopic blinkered academic approach. Since music
wasn’t about playing your instruments really well any more, it must
instead be about movements. After all, hadn’t punk, which
swept their beloved prog-rock aside with it’s swearing and trousers
with words on, been a movement? Well, yes. So what we must do, reasoned
the Melody Maker, is to try and invent and/or discover another movement!
This they tried to do… for twenty-odd years!
A prime example was BLONDE: In Melody Maker, everything had to
have some kinda raison d’etre, some stupid justification. If they
liked, say, The Darling Buds it couldn’t be just "they are
nice tunes and the singer is a cutie", they had to invent a
"Blonde" movement and offer up pseudy reasons why the
"blonde" movement should exist. Trouble is, once you’d
been roped in to one of their specious movements (which could last
mere weeks and have a mere handful of participants) you were dead
in the water as soon as that decreed movement was over or more often
than not utterly failed to catch on.
NME indulged in this movement-inventing silliness also (anyone
remember "Skunk Rock"?), but with, it must be said, a
higher success rate (not that it’s in any way a thing to brag about).
For some reason, NME has become increasingly like Melody Maker in
recent years. Maybe this is a major tactical error or something
to do with that pesky space-time continuum, I dunno. Today’s young
people have no need for the indie pop wuss music press, for the
Internet has taken over as a forum for them to express how sorry
for themselves they are. Go to any indie-juve message board and
you will find no end of postings saying "I’m bored", "I’m
bored as well". "Why don’t you try surfing the internet?"
"Oh you just don’t understaaaand".
Other great stupid movements invented and/or championed by Melody
Maker include:
ARSEQUAKE; The Butthole Surfers, World Domination Enterprises,
and several other 80s bands. Blasty Firsty sorts who had nothing
in common apart from being very noisy became Arsequake, according
to the, ahem, "Maker". Doomed from the start that one
wasn’t it? What dullard, even an indie dullard, would subject his
or herself to the woeful misunderstandings that would inevitably
follow upon declaring oneself an "Arsequaker" in public.
PROG ROCK made Phil Collins a star. Need I say more?
YOB ROCK. Some buddies (and former housemate) of mine, the 60ft
Dolls, were working class. Of course, this being Melody Maker, they
couldn’t just say "they are working class and quite good"
they had to go calling it something. For kids who had grown up with
middle class indie pop wuss music, it was actually a novelty
that a band be working class. Despite the fact that the vast majority
of 20th Century musical innovation (i.e. jazz, rock,
blues, reggae) was working class. I was asked by a 60ft, who was
irked at being reduced to a shallow cartoon in this manner, to write
in and point this out, and happily did so under a pseudonym which
I have forgotten. It came as no great surprise when some pretentious
6th form twit parried my erudite suggestion with "what
about the Rolling Stones?". Yeah, so what about them? I was
talking about innovators, not Bo Diddley impersonators, you overeducated
shithead.
ROMO; sort of glam-rock for the nineties. At three members it holds
the joint record for world’s smallest youth cult along with the
one formed by my mate Poohbear and his two pals which consisted
of the taking of acid, going to the Horse And Jockey in Pontypool,
drinking orange juice and staring people out all night. Romo’s 3
members were Simon Phillips, Dickon Edwards, and one of Huggy Bear
(see below). Nuff said.
Also there was RIOT GRRL, which was not invented by "The Maker"
but was championed by them. Riot Grrl was started by some Americans
as the inroads made by the women’s liberation movement meant that
women could make indie-wuss, musically unadventurous, joyless, simpering
self-important, self-deluded and just plain sorry for itself music
as well. Some poshos from the South of England called Huggy Bear
were boosted by MM as one of their journos was playing the "understanding
male" card in an attempt to get a shag. I am sure those of
you who have attended liberal arts establishments and/or owned dungarees
are familiar with the phenomenon of "new men" behaving
in such a manner.
As we Welsh do not like posh people from the South of England trying
to boss us around, for obvious historical reasons, their gig at
Newport TJs has passed into legend. Wales took ‘em, of which I shall
write more extensively elsewhere in a projected piece entitled "The
Psychic Assassination Of Huggy Bear" (meanwhile see my
webpage for some exemplary heckling from that evening).
The Melody Maker account of this event, by one Sally Margaret Joy,
was the most anti-Welsh racist piece of shite I have ever read in
a music paper. It could have passed for the work of Goebbels, with
its melodramatic talk of the dead eyes of the women taking their
children swimming. After sorting out an on-stage fracas, John Sicolo,
TJs manager quoth "setting feminism back 20 years tonight"
into the microphone. By the time this had passed thru SM Joys fetid
mind it had become "there’s a lot of benders in here tonight"!
On reflection I don’t hate MM enough, do I?
Melody Maker has often attempted to take the piss out of the Welsh
by stringing lots of LL’s together and saying "boyo".
Just as black people do not say "ahs a comin’ masssa"
and Scots do not say "hoots mon", Welsh people do not
say "boyo". Not even the most dismal TV Sitcom uses it
nowadays so where the Hell did Melody Maker get it from?
So farewell then Melody Maker, they failed to notice punk rock
happening for the first time, even though it was happening right
in front of them.
One theory as to why I never got anywhere in showbiz is that I
have transgressed an unwritten law by destroying the Melody Maker
Folk Rock Contest. That would certainly explain a lot. Be that as
it may, if I‘d only been able to figure out how, I would have destroyed
the Melody Maker itself. But now there is no need. With the 21st
Century only days old as I write, there is no more Melody Maker.
I find this to be very right and proper. Of course there are several
other things that should not exist in the 21st Century,
such as orange cardigans, Margaret Thatcher, and any form of government
other than a Worldwide Socialist Utopia, but hey, it’s a start.