The Rolling Stones have released several live albums, and the recording from their peak period, 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, has recently undergone a deluxe re-release. In the original review for Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said that “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” He might have been right at the time, but just a few years later, the Stones went one better with the release now known as The Brussels Affair. For some reason, it’s only available as a bootleg, but it’s absolutely worth downloading.

It was recorded in 1973, following Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St, so the setlist is terrific. You get Brown Sugar, Angie, Honky Tonk Woman, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man and Tumbling Dice. It’s the version of You Can’t Always Get What You Want which stands out though; it’s 10 minutes long, so, yes, it’s indulgent, but then melancholy is. It features guitar-work that puts the studio version in the shade, backing the verses with sad-but-bright descending notes. If you’re a guitarist, or just a fan of rock guitar playing, the whole gig is packed with highlights, and listening to it, I can almost convince myself that that evening Keith Richards and Mick Taylor played practically every sound you’d ever want to hear an electric guitar make.

The Brussels Affair is convincingly involving and completely silly. It’s all summed up in the second track, Happy, which Jagger introduces with a ludicrous lawks-a-lummee cocker-nee accent:

Mick: Keith’s gonna sing a song for yer called ‘Appy…

Keith then proceeds to start singing with a voice that sounds like the Cookie Monster singing the blues having gargled TCP, while the music rolls along brilliantly; despite seeming to contain a hundred guitar solos and campfire chorsuses, the song is over in at just over three minutes.

Afterwards Jagger says, sounding camp and drunk:

“Merci Keef, that was a good one. Woo hoo. Shake-amonay. God a mama.”

It’s rock n’ roll.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in London, so this seems like just the right thing to listen to: Pet Sounds, a capella. Despite the fact that it’s a YouTube link, sound quality is terrific. This is probably the first time I’ve really understood just how spine-tingling what music writers refer to as a singer’s ‘phrasing’ can be - check out God Only Knows. Particularly stunning is when the harmonies simply ends, and one of the group says in a very normal voice, ‘how was that?’

Apparently, the original source is a box set called The Pet Sounds Sessions.

Wikipedia’s entry on a capella singing is interesting, relating ”a cappella music originally was, and still often is, used in religious music” and that the use of instruments was a matter of debate in the early Christian church.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched. The real world would simply be a home for the VR equipment: Star Trek imagines it holodeck as a big empty room, for instance. Moreover, since VR ran inside the computer, it only worked when you turned it on – and in movies such as The Lawnmower Man, the nightmare scenario was not being able to get out.

Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.

I’ve written before about why it’s important for The Beatles to sort out making their music available digitally, but it seems like what’s next is a videogame from the the makers of Rock Band and… some new CDs. The original albums, plus a new version of Past Masters will be remastered and released on the same day as the new game (9th September). According to the press release:

“Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album… The albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the catalogue has seen since its original release.”

If they’re telling the truth about a four year long process, then that means it predates Love. As noted previously, it sounded, in terms of raw audio, fantastic – and it therefore seems a sensible guess that Love is essentially an early preview of these upcoming remasters. Can’t wait.

Was the last song stuck in my head. Yes, it’s a terrible name for a band. Although they had no problem grabbing the domain name. And it’s a great song, with that whole 80s chiming guitar thing going on, and floaty-light vocals. They’re offering it as a free download, which is just as well as the album isn’t on Spotify.

There’s a few bands around at the moment with a similar, shimmery sound – this eMusic article does a good job of neatly anthologising them, tracing their roots back to NME’s C86 tape, once dubbed ‘the most indie thing that ever existed.’

Other bands joining The Pains of Being Pure At Heart in excavating C86 are Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts. In a sign of how times have changed, all have been championed not by the NME, but by Pitchfork.

‘I would like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition’ – John Lennon,  after the Beatles’ final gig, which took place on the roof of the HQ of Apple Corps, just over 38 years ago. What’s surprising is considering all the fights that had come before they sound excellent and look like they’re having a lot of fun.

Yes, what if? Well, wonder no more – this very odd picture (which may or may not be photoshopped) was used by the Guardian to illustrate a story about how there’s apparently an inverse correlation between the stability of the stock markets and the regularity of beats in pop songs:

“Beyoncé’s worldwide hit, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), is not just catchy – it may spell doom for international finance.

According to findings by Phil Maymin, professor of finance and risk engineering at New York University, the more regular the beat on Billboard’s top singles, the more volatile the American markets. After studying decades of Billboard’s Hot 100 hits, Maymin found that songs with low “beat variance” had an inverse correlation with market turbulence. Which is to say, the more regular the song, the crazier the stock market.

And Single Ladies is very regular.”

Cue dramatic music. The meme of a link between turmoil and culture is old of course – why else would a researcher even be looking at this field – and is expressed in a well known speech by Harry Lime in The Third Man:

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The Wikipedia entry reveals the line wasn’t in Graham Greene’s speech, but was added by Orson Welles:

Greene wrote in a letter (Oct. 13, 1977) “What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence.” Welles apparently said the lines came from “an old Hungarian play”; the painter Whistler, in a lecture on art from 1885… said, “The Swiss in their mountains … What more worthy people! … yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box!”

Part 2: New Bon Iver

Fine, his album, For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t the album of the year (wrong OMM! PFork got it right – Fleet Foxes), but his new track, Blood Bank is great. You can stream it from Pitchfork; looks like he’s taken the Iron & Wine route and added cheerier instruments while heaping on the dread and spookiness.

Part 3: A pop star from Blackpool

Being as it’s where much of my immediate family come from, Blackpool is close to my heart,  it’s good to hear one of this year’s most tipped pop acts, Little Boots, is a native of that strange, cold and fascinating place. There’s an interview with her in the Guardian, and you can listen to a few tracks on her MySpace. For those interested in the economic ramifications of her music, it’s electronic and quite regular.

I’m a big Beatles fan, and had a post cooked up all about those reports that, thanks to Norweigan Broadcasting (NRK), you could download Beatles MP3s for free, legally. NRK’s site said:

“Some weeks ago, NRK – Norwegian Braodcasting – signed a deal with music rights holder organisation TONO in Norway. The new deal gives NRK right to publish podcasts of all previously broadcasted radio- and tv-programs that contains less then 70% music.

One result of this deal, is that we now can publish “Vår daglige Beatles” – “Our Daily Beatles” in English – as a podcast.

In this series from 2001, journalists Finn Tokvam og Bård Ose tells the story of every single Beatles tracks ever made, chronologically. Each episode contains a 3 minute story about each track (sadly for our international visitors – in Norwegian) and the actual Beatles tune.”

The agreement only covered recent shows, and the Beatles ones were from 2007. So, the feed was pulled pretty quickly.

Part 1: The songs

NRK had put up 28 songs by this afternoon before the feed was taken down, sort of sorted in the order they appeared on the LP. They’d got through all of the Beatles’ first two albums, Please Please Me (1963) and With the Beatles (later in 1963). While skipping past some earnest Norwegian chat, humming and excited mutterings of “Ringo Starr!” to get to the songs was a little inconvenient, it was great to listen to the early songs again – I only have from Rubber Soul onwards on CD.

‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist n’ Shout’ (complete with great scouse accents, and a throat shredding vocal that meant George Martin got them to save recording it until the end of the session in case it wrecked Lennon’s voice) were obvious highlights, but I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed their covers of ‘Rollover Beethoven’ (Chuck Berry) and ‘Baby It’s You’ (Burt Bacharach).

You also get a sense of how eager they were to try things, so while ‘Please Please Me’ is relatively basic, just months later they opened With the Beatles with the terrific It Won’t Be Long, which is just as immediate, but adds the yeah-yeah-yeah harmonies, a desceding guitar bit that sounds like early R.E.M. and lyrices that conflate “be long” and “belong”, much like Smells Like Teen Spirit did¹ years later with “Hello, Hello” and “How Low.” Even on the now largely forgotten Don’t Bother Me, George Harrison’s first Beatles song (one he later called crap), it’s amazing how many ideas they cram in; with 13, 14 seconds to go, the song finds the energy to drop its guitars and vocals and shake down into a shuffling, rhythm driven outro.²

Part 2: In which we get to the point

It all reminded me just how odd it is what they’ve done to The Beatles’ music in the last few years. In the mid-to-late nineties, the emergence of the Anthology project, the frequent praise of The Beatles in interviews by popular bands of the day combined with the launch of retro music magazines (Mojo etc) and Paul McCartney’s own increasing willingness to be a pop legend rather than going concern meant that the Beatles went from old to classic. They’d always been above the cheap compilations which recycled 60s hits (Best 60s Album in the World… Ever etc) but they became deified. Problem is, when Napster, iTunes, Guitar Hero etc opened up all the locks and the music started to go free – onto MP3, into remixes, inside videogames, onto podcasts and blogs – the Beatles stayed home, pipe and slippers.

And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left of the other Apple has done well to build them up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.  Sure, you can buy them on CD, but those releses are over 20 years old now and when it comes to packaging, presentation, convenience and most importantly sound, they’re just not good enough.³

The Beatles are admired, not loved, and that’s not right; one thing you get from their music – and that the fabulous Revolution in the Head gets absolutely dead right – is what made them great was that they were part of so many things. They weren’t about crystalline artistic genius, they were about connections between things – Delta blues and Blackpool music hall, LSD madness and genuine lovestruck giddyness, smutty jokes and conceptual high-art.

I’ve recently enjoyed watching the early 60s-set Mad Men; series 1 ended beautifully, with anti-hero Don Draper sitting lonely on the stairs as the caustic strains of Bob Dylan. Series 2 hurtled forward and all the time I keep wondering when we’ll hear the Beatles, despite knowing the restrictive licensing means we probably won’t. Kudos to the Norweigans; two guys talking about the Beatles on a podcast is just what we need. It’s off air now, but here’s hoping 2009 is the year they get the Beatles stuff online, in a decent way. There’s always the game, too.

¹ Kurt was a huge Beatles fan – in particular John Lennon. Whenever Burch Vig talks about recording Nevermind he mentions how he’d convince Kurt to double-track his vocals because that’s what George Martin did with John Lennon’s. There’s also a good anecdote in Michael Azzerard’s ‘Come As You Are’ Nirvana bio that mentions Kurt wrote ‘About A Girl’ after spending a whole day repeatedly listening to Meet The Beatles, the US album featuring many of the songs from With The Beatles.

² That said, modern pop songs are no less inventive – Rihanna’s Umbrella easily has enough detail to withstand nine spot-on points of Guardian music critique, for instance:

“[8th reason it's great is because of] the way she pronounces Umbrella with four syllables, which makes it seem implausibly exotic. One of pop’s gifts is the ability to make humdrum words sound deliciously strange. Also, when she riffs on “ella” she sounds half like a playful kid and half like a malfunctioning robot.”

³ As Pitchfork noted, it’s almost worth buying the remixy Love for the fact the material on it is all remastered, and particularly through headphones, it sounds frighteningly fantastic. The opening harmonies of Because are worth the price of admission alone.

Previously on the Wired Jester:

* Barry Miles on counter-cultural London in the 60s
* Links to old soul covers of the Beatles
* Links to a 70s Lennon/McCartney/Stevie Wonder bootleg
* Beatles x Pac Man T-shirt

At some point, I will launch a blog entirely devoted to cover songs – they’re a great way to hear musicians taking on melodies and choruses they’d never normally write, and there’s great pleasure to be had in the way a cover puts the stresses in other places: different lyrics, different parts of the melody. (Biffy Clyro’s cover of Rihanna’s Umbrella is a fantastic example of this, turning her robo-sung version’s futuristic, chromed power-chords into something earnest, shivering and down-to-earth.) In these DRM-clad times, there’s also something powerful in the way a cover says no-one owns a song, only a version of it. Most of all, covers affirm that there are times when other people’s words and feelings do better – or are more accurate, more precise, more powerful and timely – than your own.

Hypeful put up a list of the best cover songs of 2008, and while there’s a fair amount of crap on there¹, and a couple degraded by dubious bootleg quality² there are two fantastic covers well worth a download. The first is the Last Shadow Puppets’ cover of Rihanna’s SOS, done in their own creepy Ennio Morricone/Mad Men style. Best of the list though, is actually its number one – Vampire Weekend covering Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere. Their vocals aren’t as smooth as the originals, but they’ve amped up the rhythm, stripped the sugary synths and it all fits beautifully.

The Vampire Weekend album was one of my favourites from last year, and is well worth picking up – plus, if you use this the link to get it from Amazon’s MP3 store I’ll get a couple of digital shekels.

¹ Gnarls Barkley, who cover Radiohead’s ‘Reckoner’ using the medium of interpretive gurning.
² Spoon, doing Panic! Should have been great, but the recording is very murky.

Noel Gallagher’s blog¹. Don’t worry, it’s funnier than Be Here Now. Now, Noel might not have written a decent tune since back when Tony Blair was popular, but if you’ve ever seen him in an interview (or the excellent documentary, Live Forever²) you’ll know that he’s very funny and pretty savvy. Oasis have a new album coming out before Christmas and instead of/in addition to the usual pre-release campaign of slagging off other bands and punching photographers, they’ve got a website with some community features, a YouTube video campaign etc etc – but best of all is Tales From The Middle of Nowhere, Noel’s blog. You have to register to read it, but it’s well worth it. The posts are short, sharp and mock pretty much everything about being in a big rock band, while never forgetting that it’s one of the best jobs in the world and as such, should be relished:

“Did a couple of interviews yesterday. One with a guy who looked EXACTLY like Woody Harrelson. And one with some guitar magazine. They’re funny those guitar mags, unless you’re into discussing the science of guitar sound. The questions are always ludicrous. Example:

Q: “Describe to me the guitars you used on this new record.”
A: “Erm..one was red and one was blonde!? Are you gonna ask me what my favourite string is too?”
Q: “You have a favourite STRING!?”
A: “Yep..the ‘e’ string”
Q: “Why?”
A: “Cos there’s 2 of ‘em!”
Q: “Really!?”

OH, FUCK OFF!!!”

¹ Although the big N denies it’s a blog, sagely noting that “I never heard of hearing such a thing!! This isn’t a blog. A blog is for someone who’s got no mates (I’ve got more than a dozen, and that’s a fact) or who’s in a band that no one can remember hearing of.”

² You can actually watch the whole thing on YouTube – part 1 is here.