Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

April is the cruellest month - always has been, and always will be, just like tuesdays never come out right; but there is hope at the end of the tunnel, glimpsed briefly through the showers. In those long northern winters, when you’re cooped up, it seems natural to think ahead, to dream - more often than not about getting things that will make you happy, a new laptop, i-phone, gadget bullshit. But you know, really, that the heat of the sun on your face is what you need/want.

Get yourself ready, then, for that first moment when you can sit in the gaze of the returned sun. And there’s no better companion (or presager of the moment) than this song by one-time Man-at-Work Colin Hay. A simple guitar, strumming purposefully and naturally as a wave, and a voice that’s like warmth itself.

“My, my, my it’s a beautiful world, I like swimming in the sea” - banal, beautiful, and perfectly structured. It doesn’t mess about, and with authority lets you know that cynicism, irony, and smart-arsed back-watching have no-place in this particular three-minutes. This is a song where you can check thousands of years of evolutionary defence mechanisms at the door, and relax in the moment.

There’s no need for me to single out the lines that made me smile, that made me sing-along - they’re all clear to the ear, out in the open. All you have to do is listen, and be grateful that Hay is brave / wise enough to have brought these sentiments out into the open. Sit back and relax. “Perhaps this is as good as it gets”.

Why do we sing? Why do we force air out of our lungs, crafted by muscles along the way in to song? The prime evolutionary argument tells us that it’s something to do with getting it on -  most people’s vocal range diminishes with age, as they pass their sexual peak. But equally important is the fact that from our earliest moments we use our vocal capacity to draw people to us, to aid us, to communicate.

And during  the darkest moments, when we grieve, it seems natural to turn to song - the noise produced proving to us how alive we are.

That primal grieving defiant voice is, surprisingly, at the heart of this song by flavour-of-the-month band the Fleet Foxes. Surprising because their record is almost the antithesis of primal, based as it is on crafted melodies, thoughtful lyrics, and gentle sounds. And yet it’s perfectly in place on the album - which is as good as everybody is saying. 

The song opens with light guitar, before stripping back to the essentials of Robin Pecknold’s sweet and strangely anachronistic voice. As he sings the first verse, a hand taps a rythm on the guitar body, the only concession to accompaniement. This voice is called to testify, and all - including his fellow musicians - remain silent in respect, until he builds to the crux of the song:

“Oliver James washed in the rain no longer”

What worlds and mysteries are held in this simple song and statement. Is it a song about death? A trembling elegy to a drowned friend? A song about birth? About purification? All that’s clear is that water and washing are involved - the rest is for you to make your mind up.

What will remain with you, though, is how right that voice sounds singing that line.

It could hardly be more rock n’roll - the frontman dies, and the group disbands with one member going off on a crazed visionary tangent. St. John, beloved disciple  - the only one, according to the gospel, to stay awake in Gethsemane while Jesus swept blood - according to tradition ended his days on the Greek Island of Patmos, holed up in a cave writing what would become the New Testament’s White Album, the book of revelations.

In all its blood-soaked ambiguity, John the revelator’s testament has captured artists through the ages, with its symbolism shrugging on and off interpretations as epochs change. His famous beast has been seen as Nero, Napoleon, and - according to my mate Clinton, down the pub - Simon Cowell.  It’s apocalyptic numerology and epic sweep seeled its success.

Let’s skip from early-Christian Greece to 1930’s America, and the bluesey recording of a traditional spiritual, John the Revelator, by  Blind Willie Johnson. There’s something almost comical about the opening verse, with it’s ‘who’s that writing - john the revelator’ call and response culminating with ‘writing the book of the seven seals’, translating a venerable figure into one sitting casually in the corner, writing freaky shit. Almost, though, as nothing could be less comical than Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel-loaded, melodious but tortured vocals.

His voice is agony and ecstasy in equal measure - not  surprisingly, for the man who sought solace in Jesus and the blues after apparently being blinded in his youth during a domestic incident between his Mother and Stepfather (she, it seems, threw some caustic soda at her violent partner during a fierce row, but caught her hapless son instead, blinding him).  Vision, loss, and the seeing of things beyond the veil - these are all of revelations, so little wonder that of all the artists who have sung this spiritual (including Son Ra and Taj Mahal) Blind Willie Johnson seems to be the one to have made it his own (that his is the earliest widely-known recording helps).

There’s an urgency and certainty to the song, precisely because of that haunting call-and-response technique so favoured by teachers and preachers everywhere - throw out a question to which you have the answer, and all the world seems to be certain. The guitar, the voices, the tempo all make it mesmerising and fearful. Listen to it and, just for a moment, you may get a glimpse into what those rapturous headbangers worldwide feel when contemplating the supposedly imminent second coming.

Skip from the depression through to the terror-laden 2000’s and a slick electro packaging of the age-old theme. Depeche Mode’s John the Revelator is like a younger brother to Johnson’s blues - it shares some family traits, like the call and response, and some melody lines, but it’s got a voice of its own. If Johnson’s song was a soulful support, Dave Gahan’s is a nihilistic charge down on the revelator. Johnson’s blues is a submission, while Martin Gore’s lyrics are a denunciation: “Well who’s that shouting? John the Revelator! All he ever gives us is pain”. 

Blind Willie Johnson - John the Revelator

Depeche Mode - John the Revelator

There’s an embarassing moment that happens to nearly all students of a foreign language,
when they over-eagerly grasp to a similar sounding word to that of their own native tongue, only to find out that it’s a ‘false friend’ with a completely different meaning. Approaching Kate Rusby’s fragile and beautiful No Names, from the album could initially pose a similar problem. You could be fooled by the first line, where she sings liltingly ‘Take my hand’ for all the world as if simply translating the classic George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore song Can’t help falling in love into yet one more alternative version (at last count over thirty artists had officially covered the tune).You’d be wrong though, and would end up missing a fragile yet steadfast song with the added bonus that it features a guest vocal from the massively overlooked Roddy Womoble from Idlewild.

The song, rightly nominated for a Mercury Music Prize in 2006, has a simple guitar throughout allowing Rusby and Woomble’s delivery of an enigmatic text to provide all the tension. This is folk music, but not of the ‘finger-in-the-ear-and-pint-in-hand’ variety conservatively churning out respectful standards. Rusby, with a voice that sounds as old as the hills (in a good way) - though she’s only in her early thirties - has based her career on melody and pushing boundaries, not in an ostentatious way but concrete nonetheless.

No Names is, in a sense, a perfect duet, as it centres completely on the relationship between the two voices. They join together with a pleasing symmetry, female/male - english/scottish (both Rusby and Woomble sing in their own accents), and yet there’s a fault line between them.

The song’s key line is ‘how it came to this it’s not clear’, and like the all the best songs it’s open to interpretation. One thing is for certain, it’s a song of parting - of bravely acknowledging love and its loss. Is it the song of a couple that, with all the will in the world, can’t go on together - or is it the song of two people facing the imposed separation of death? The song shifts and slides to accomodate as needs must.

One thing is for certain, sometimes in the dying days of the year we all need to take stock and face sadness, and this song is a perfect hand to hold whilst doing so.

The only version I could find online accompanies this Johnny Depp film clip - I’d recommend clicking on play, and then closing your eyes. It’s a song that needs no super-imposed visuals.

A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.

Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.

R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.

Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.

Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide

“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.

O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]

O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave

And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.

In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet - Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.  The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception.

Simon and Garfunkel were at the height of their career, recording their fifth studio album and tensions were rife. The duo argued during the sessions and, despite being vocal politically at various points of their career, as a result opted not to include the only overtly political song of the recordings Cuba si Nixon no. They were repaid with an album that spawned (though I balk at its use, it seems to me that ’spawned’ is more than appropriate here) a number of huge hit singles that meant everything and nothing to millions of people.

Gil Scott Heron, on the other hand was recording his first album - a live recording in a nightclub with the small group of David Barnes on percussion and vocals, Charlie Suanders and Eddie Knowles on percussion, and Scott Heron himself singing and playing guitar and piano. It’s as intimate as S&G’s album was polished and spacious. It’s also about as political as you’re ever going to get, while still staying on the side of art as opposed to preaching or propoganda.

The album’s most famous track is, justifiably,  The Revolution will not be televised - a template for Scott Heron’s socio-political raps that would influence so heavily african-american music later. I want, though, to recommend to you a different track. One that’s  more traditional in terms of its structure -which probably accounts for its relative obscurity - but one that packs no less powerful a punch.

The song opens with Scott Heron introduction “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”, his voice rich and questioning. Thereafter it’s as taut, angry, and beautifully melodic as any protest song can be. The guitar and percussion start off at breakneck speed (for an acoustic song, let’s be clear) and Scott Heron and Barnes singing push and pull each other  through America’s troubled history, chiming together repeatedly ‘but who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’.

Scott Heron has been criminally neglected, and criminally targeted in the intervening years, going in and out of jail on drug possesion charges (and apparently becoming H.I.V. positive in the process) most recently being paroled in 2007.  It would seem that there’s a clear answer to the song for him personally - the only person picking up the tab for Scott Heron has been himself. He is, according to sources on Wikipedia, back recording and writing now - something we should all be grateful for.

On a wider scale, the song remains as relevant, angry, and unanswered as ever - as we head in to an election campaign where Barak Obama’s race is something that needs to be discussed.

“What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing;
Always had to have the most.
And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old? 
Tell me,
Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”