CHEAP AND EASY SHORTCUTS

10 JUNE 2006

‘Can you fucking shut up? I’m trying to talk here.’
‘Well you’re talking bollocks.’
‘Just fuck off, I’m on stage now. You wait your turn’.

I’m on stage at the Lynton and Lynmouth festival. It’s a free and voluntarily run small-scale music festival held on the village green of the beautiful twin villages of Lynton and Lynmouth on the north Devon coast. The audience is made up of a few hundred folk, sitting around in family groups enjoying the sunshine, eating ice creams and accepting, even enjoying, whatever music that has been put on for them. All is good vibes, my two youngest children are running around and having fun.

A friend of mine, Tom Hodgkinson, who lives locally and is now on the festival committee had asked me to come down and do The17 thing at the festival. His offer was accepted. The introduction to The17 would be held at the village youth club hall that evening at 7.00, to be announced from the main stage by the MC for the festival. Another one of the festival committee. I was introduced to some of the committee members, all men of my age or thereabouts. Men into their music. Men who wanted to bring some of it down here. Not big names but people who meant what they did. Bert Jansch was going to be the headlining act this afternoon but the two bands that I had already seen had driven me up the wall. Both were playing a form of British jazz that was totally irrelevant by the time that Ian Carr’s Nucleus had formed sometime in the early 1970s. Jazz is a dead art form and no amount of learning your scales and blowing your horn is going to change that. As soon as any art form has stopped being done by those who do it for real and becomes something done in academia it is dead. That is why Wynton Marsalia is shit no matter how good he is at playing or how worthy his activities. Black kids in the States with something to say use hip hop and r&b, not jazz. As for these white middle-aged, middle-class jazzers this afternoon they are as meaningless as a brass band on a bandstand, even if some of them are women. And even if I secretly still love listening to free jazz in the privacy of my own home. I even have tickets to see John Zorn at the Barbican later in the month. What, you don’t know who John Zorn is?

Anyway, I suggest to the committee about an hour ago that I will make my own announcement from the stage. They agreed. They wanted to know if I would do it before or after the next band sound checked. I said before. So I went on stage with one of my framed posters. The one about all known music having run its course, been consumed, traded and found wanting. Time to dispense with all previous music making etc. I read this as aggressively as I could. Then I started to tell the crowd about the ‘Introduction to The17’ that evening at the youth club hall, that there would be 17 tickets available and if they wanted one I would be over at the festival office tent in a couple of minutes. But I didn’t get all this out of my mouth before the next band on the bill were up on stage banging drums and twanging guitars and attempting to sound-check.

 That’s when I told him to shut the fuck up. Our onstage spat was being picked up by the stage microphones and broadcast to the audience. Then my microphone got pulled. So I used another one to finish my message off. Some sections of the audience booed me. Others cheered. When I came off the committee, who only a couple minutes earlier were all smiles and handshakes, were trying to ignore me. Over at the festival office tent a large throng of people were gathering around, wanting to enlist and know more about The17.

On stage Ian Siegal and his band were playing the worst sort of white men singing the blues that you could imagine. It was all fake 1950s’ Chicago black bluesmen vocals. Tight slick arrangements with more attention to detail than Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Woolf could ever have done, but ultimately completely pointless.

I don’t think that the way I behaved is particularly big, brave or clever, but if I mean what I say I have to be able to stand up in public and say my stuff and maybe in confrontational circumstances like this. The trouble is, I know and you know and even your mother knows that there is nothing like a bit of public confrontation to get the media interested. It is the cheapest and easiest shortcut to infamy. And that is one very good reason why I don’t want to be using it.

So it’s today the Lynton and Lynmouth music festival, tomorrow the main stage at Glastonbury.

What would you do?