Saturday, September 10, 2016

"Just let me hear some of that rock and Bowl music..."



"The next song we're gonna sing is an oldie, some of you older people might remember - it's from last year, and it's called She Loves You..."

If John Lennon's tongue was not necessarily always embedded in his cheek then his speaking-voice could invariably give the impression it was at least jabbing towards that general direction.

His She Loves You intro, approaching the end of the melded set making up The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl - newly-reinvigorated at Abbey Road and given a first CD/digital release - is not quite up there with that "and the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewellery" crack at the Palladium.

In fact, it may be that to hear more of his habitually sarky drawl in this is to underestimate even the most cynical Beatle's authentic wonder: look at just how much had been done in those few months between '63 Beatlemania erupting and '64 Beatlemania not so much consolidating as surging even further.

Few can have imagined packing, let alone actually go on to cram, just so many careers into mere years as the Fab Four had already done and would continue. Count 'em: singles, albums, films, gig-a-day tours, TV and radio factory lines, and the little matter of prolifically, inventively not-so-simply songwriting throughout.

This "new" album might well prompt mere shrugs from many outside that (hefty enough) Beatle-obsessive demographic.

And yet after the Anthology bootleg rounds-ups of the Nineties, the sweeping Mono and Stereo remasters of the past decade along with the mixed pleasures of Let It Be Naked, Love and Yellow Submarine Songtrack, the too-much-unloved live album sneaked out in 1977 now gets its belated turn.

Friday, September 02, 2016

Humanity remains washed ashore, for all too many more...

A year ago today: an emotive photo of one tragic child among so many, yet special in being the one to prompt a horrified world to act - or, at least, piously promise so.
Yet 12 gruelling months since three-year-old Alan Kurdi died, drowned - and those harrowing images emerged of the poor boy, face-forward on a Turkish beach - that same world stands accused of letting him down. And many thousands, potentially millions, more.
Gasping politicians' vows to better protect those fleeing Daesh and Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war have not been met with sufficient help in the region nor safe havens elsewhere, exasperated aid workers say.