Madonnaquake

Pop seismologists have been having an uneasy time of it lately, for there have been clear and ominous signs that Madonna is about to become active once more – dark tremors in the bowels of the earth, venting of hot gases, plumes of ash and the launch of a handbag and perfume lifestyle brand called “Truth or Dare”. Yup, it’s the Big One. We must be prepared.

Christ only knows how though. When your favourite pop star has spent more time in the last few years making orphanages than she has good records it’s a bit hard to work out what to expect. The problem is – and feel free to disagree – is that Madonna is entering uncharted pop territory. Like Elizabeth I towards the end of her reign (only with whiter teeth), she has nothing left to prove – her contemporaries lie defeated on the battlefield and her court is a simpering crowd of cowering sycophants too afraid to voice their concerns that opening a chain of gyms in Brazil might not be a good idea. The only thing she can pick a fight with these days is a hydrangea.

So, by continuing to make albums is she extending her legacy or diminishing it? 2008’s “Hard Candy” would support the latter viewpoint, but it’s not so long since the career-high of “Confessions on a Dancefloor” either. Another problem – the more time goes on, the less historical goodwill there is to fall back on. People my age, who still think of “Like a Prayer” as late-era Madonna, are no longer the tastemakers of today. 2011’s in-crowd, whose earliest memory of Madge is likely to be something from “Bedtime Stories” (eek) are probably wondering what all the fuss was about, and that’s if they think of her at all.

There’s still hope, though it is barely a glimmer. The wisest thing Madonna’s done in the last few years is to sit out the GaGa era entirely. I just hope it was a conscious decision. It must have been seat-of-your-hot-pants entertaining to watch this particular rise and fall – for a while it looked like she was the Anointed One – the thief in the temple of pop who would finally steal the crown and slay the regnant Queen of Pop. And it might have happened, but for two factors – one, she made a crap second album, and, two, by anointing us as her little monsters and deciding to become the saviour of the gays, she crowned herself – something that was not her decision to make. This makes Lady GaGa the Richard III of pop music. He only lasted two years too.

Madonna is therefore perfectly positioned to return in gleaming fashion, having skilfully avoided a head on collision. Full marks – but only if the record’s good. And what, then, do we know about this record? Well, we know that the first single is called “Give Me All Your Love”. We know that it features flavour of the moment Nicki Minaj and flavour of 2007 M.I.A. OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD. As my friend Sam so rightly put it, “when has sharing the limelight ever worked for you before?” NEVER, that’s when. In 2008 Justin Timberlake mumbled at the start of “Dance 2Night” that he was going to take Madge to “the club”, a pronouncement that I had a major issue with. Madonna is not TAKEN anywhere, Madonna TAKES people places. The only image this particular lyric succeeded in bringing to mind was that of Justin pushing his ageing ward in an NHS-issue wheelchair, gamely attempting to hoist her up a fire exit in order to avoid the bouncers. Yes, Madonna works best when the spotlight is solely upon her – none of us need reminding that other, younger pop stars are available. They end up looking like what they essentially are: carers.

I’ve just had a scour of the internet and have apparently scared up the lyrics to “Give Me All Your Love” – and if they prove to be genuine, it would appear we have vacuous, fun-loving Madonna on our hands:

Don’t play the stupid game
Cause I’m a different kind of girl
Every record sounds the same
You’ve got to step into my world
Give me all your love and give me your love
Give me all your love today
Give me all your love and give me your love
Let’s forget about time
And dance our lives away

If you ask me it’s getting towards the time that Madonna stopped singing about dancing and started singing about hedge funds and stain removal, but I’ll allow it one last time. But these lyrics do highlight the difficulty inherent in loving a pop star who’s been relevant for nearly thirty years and is now getting on a bit. The carefree girl who showed up dancing to “Holiday” on Top of the Pops is long gone, but we want her back. Yet when she tries to do just that we’re all “shut it, grandma. Act your age”.

Ultimately though, this is our problem, not hers. Madonna doesn’t care. Madonna doesn’t give a fuck – and maybe that’s why so many of us have loved her the most for the longest. But if Madonna is the last one to leave the party does that make her brilliant or tragic? Maybe 2012 will finally tell.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Kate Bush Fan

Imagine if you will, the existence of a counselling service for pop stars and their fans. There you are, in a comfortably yet sparsely appointed office, perched nervously on a slightly-too-small sofa, with your idol, Kate Bush. You’ve spent an hour, maybe two, explaining the highs and lows of your relationship. For the most part, Kate has remained silent, offering only the occasional shrug of a shoulder and an intermittent girlish giggle. Eventually, having listened patiently and without comment, the counsellor asks Kate to step out of the room for a moment. At this point, said counsellor hurriedly grabs you, shoves a pile of Suzanne Vega CDs into your hands and points you towards the fire escape.

“Run! Run!” they cry. “There is no happy ending here. Get out while you can. Leave your coat, THERE’S NO TIME.”

You don’t run. You can’t run. Even when you leave by the front door and discover that the lady you’ve been sitting with for the last hour is in fact a highly dubious Kate impersonator, because the real Kate would never, ever agree to a musical reconciliation service. To be fair, not many would. Maybe Sinitta. Maybe Alannah Myles.

This, though, is the plight of the Kate Bush fan. It is the dysfunctional relationship to end all dysfunctional relationships. For most of us, our slavish devotion was established the moment we first heard Wuthering Heights and it has endured some thirty-three years, weathering all the hardships that most marriages encounter – bad hair days (ours, not Kate’s), protracted periods of silence and flirtations with infidelity (in this case, Tori Amos.) But it is worth it, even though we get almost nothing in return.

In the down time between releases, Kate Bush fans become Kate Bush defenders, keeping the legend alive and grooming unsuspecting Florence and the Machine fans with vinyl copies of The Kick Inside. Nothing riles us like the generalised public view of Kate as the Miss Havisham of pop, rattling around a cobwebbed mansion waving to the sky through holes in the roof. Kate, we maintain, is thoroughly down to earth, a busy mother and beacon of normalcy. Her absence from the spotlight is evidence of just that. The immense gaps between albums merely a sign of an artist who says something only when she has something to say. Even when that something happens to be about washing machines.

Musically, she’s pretty much faultless. Director’s Cut is certainly odd, but it’s good odd. Alright, sometimes good odd. Alright, it’s terrible. But as fans we can put it to one side because it’s not a proper album, more of a tidying up exercise. Even the worst album proper (The Red Shoes) is, by and large, great. Yes, one might question the wisdom of putting Prince and Lenny Henry together on the same track, but for all we know Prince thought it was a great idea. I’m fairly sure Lenny did. But then we have the masterpieces – The Dreaming, Hounds of Love and the inexpressibly sublime Aerial. Aerial, possibly the greatest album ever recorded. And one which had to suffer the indignity of being outperformed in the charts by a Westlife release.

It’s all the other stuff that gives us so much to put up with. Not least the famous Bush funny bone. I’m going to quote directly from Moments of Pleasure (a song, which although loved by many, was quite accurately described by Q Magazine as being “so personal as to be impenetrable.”)

“This sense of humour of mine…it isn’t funny at all.”

No shit, sister. It REALLY isn’t. One only has to visit http://www.katebush.com to see that. I defy anyone who cares even a little about Kate Bush not to watch open-mouthed in horror. Some fright-wigged balloon-wrangler (I am not kidding) welcomes you with an over-enunciated speech about how great it is to have you there. I’m almost certain Kate was behind the camera and was wetting herself with laughter all the way. Well, Kate – IT ISN’T FUNNY AT ALL. It may have seemed so in your kitchen, but as first point of contact for thousands and thousands of people it just screams “madwoman.” When Kate tries to be funny it’s just that – trying. But, you know, we all have faults.

General naffness, it has to be said, is an issue. To wit, the – and I don’t use the word lightly – horrendous video for her remake of Deeper Understanding. Utilising the very oldest computer graphics imaginable and a visibly-regretting-it Robbie Coltrane, it is the work of someone who has a) no concept of what constitutes “utter bobbins” and b) nobody around her brave enough to say “this is shit. No really Kate, it’s just AWFUL. Let’s go for a cup of tea while I explain how not to interpret things quite so literally.” One would think she’d learned her lesson after The Line, the Cross and the Curve, a short film made to accompany The Red Shoes and which is so stultifyingly bad that it allegedly prompted Kate to pen a letter of apology to it’s star, Miranda Richardson. (“Dear Miranda. I am sorry I gave you a mono-brow, made you look like the lost Corr sister and destroyed your career. Love, Kate.”) But it appears not.

What worries me most is that after years and years of carefully maintained radio silence, Kate seems ready to engage with the world again. She’s done more interviews in the last six months than in the last sixteen years. She’s got her own label, Fish People (I bet thinking that one up made her laugh. It makes me want to weep a little.) Her website, for so long little more than a holding page, is a flurry of badly designed activity. And this week, we hear rumours that a brand new album is on the schedules for November. As seasoned veterans of this kind of rumour, we take this news with an arched eyebrow and a “we’ll see” mentality. But I have a feeling it will turn out to be true. I can’t remember a time when Kate seemed so willing to put herself out there, and it is a little terrifying. Truth is, we love the silence. We love being ignored. We love our unappointed, unofficial roles as Kate’s mouthpieces to the world. The last thing we want is some half-crazed, witchy woman with a fish fixation coming along and spoiling it all.

We will see what November brings. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for another masterpiece and the almost total invisibility of the person responsible.

Whole Lotta History

Of course when I wasn’t doing my pop column I was actually running the newspaper side of things. Here are a few highlights.

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The PopScorn Archives, part one.

A while back I used to have a monthly pop column in long-defunct gay mag 3Sixty, and it was quite my favourite thing I’ve ever done. Every month, Torsten, the editor, would very politely peer over my Mac in our tiny office and ask if I had any time to do this month’s page. I always had time, because if you can’t make time for pop you can’t make time for life.

Here then, is a selection of some of those columns, reviews and thinly veiled insults.

Niall McMurray gets the London look

There are certain things I don’t do. For example, I don’t do empathy very well, but we’ve covered that particular patch of ground before. Nor do I eat much in the way of salad (and not much harm has it done me).  I don’t put “.com” at the end of Facebook updates about how tired/drunk/fabulous I am because it’s cretinous. And until very recently, I didn’t do London.

The very idea of London has always terrified me beyond all reasonable comprehension, much of the blame for which we can lay squarely at my mother’s door. Her sole visit to the capital in 1968 (a trip, I think, designed to broaden horizons but which instead had the effect of narrowing them considerably) resulted in a lifelong conviction that London was only tolerable if one had a natural predeliction for being robbed, raped or murdered. None of which I particularly fancied.

The occasional foray notwithstanding (such as a disastrous 1988 school trip to see Jill Gascoigne in “42nd Street” during which half the boys in my class were chased down Charing Cross Road by a group of angry Italians enraged by some national stereotyping ripped straight from the script of “‘Allo ‘Allo”), I’ve therefore spent much of my adult life actively avoiding London, preferring to live in medium sized cities such as Glasgow and Bristol; places where not everybody knows your name but quite a few people do. As such I’d managed to retain both a spotless visage and the certain knowledge that within five minutes of my fresh faced arrival in London, my wallet and all practical means of identification, including teeth, would have been stolen.

This, it turns out, was something of a mistake on my part. I’ve been here a month now, and so far no foul play has befallen me, nor is it, I think, especially likely to. Being tall here helps – it seems that my sheer size reduces the amount of natural predators (the same can not be said of Glasgow, where above average height is, in itself, often taken as a) a challenge and b) a natural act of aggression) and the advantage of having a comparatively aerial view means that it’s quite easy to spot trouble coming and avoid it. It’s less useful when I’m crammed by the train doors on the Victoria line, giving me no choice but to read exactly what the fifty-something woman with the week-per-page Cliff Richard diary is up to (it’s Jan’s engagement party this Thursday and the Cotswolds for the weekend), but it’s certainly more useful than not.

What I came to realise quite quickly was that to survive, I needed to find my “London face” – a means by which I could seamlessly blend in with millions of other people whilst still serving the twin ambitions of deflecting unwanted attention and encouraging desirable attention. To achieve this, I’ve fallen back on a lesson that has served me well over the years -that affecting a stance is nearly always as good as actually having one. So in my head, I had the faint notion that were I ever to become a Londoner, I’d be the sort that had the wireless tuned into Radio 4 for most of the day. The sort that reads vaguely challenging novels on the tube, deftly turning the pages with one hand and occasionally catching the eye of someone whose glance says “good choice. I approve”.

Therefore, I listen to Radio 4 now. I am a Radio 4 listener. And I’m not entirely certain quite how I got through life up to this point without “Woman’s Hour”. I whip out my Will Self as I trundle to Shepherd’s Bush every day and enjoy the occasional looks of consternation I get as the lady opposite me thinks to herself “is that a penis on the cover of his book?”. Yes, it is madam. And while in truth I am not particularly enjoying this novel, filled as it is with far too many unpleasant similes and astonishing bitterness, I am enjoying the stance that it gives me – I may only have a vague notion of what that stance is (possibly one of being a gigantic knob), but it is my London one, and it’s helping me to adjust. Let’s see what happens, shall we?