Luke Haines has an attractively nasty little song on his album Off My School At The Art School Bop. It’s called Heritage Rock Revolution:

It’s an effortless skewering of the rock heritage industry, and includes the lines I love rock ‘n’ roll, I hope it never dies, Put it in a time capsule, And bury it alive.

Now, young Luke is a year younger than me. So he was approaching forty when he wrote those lines. I wonder if that was relevant? I wonder if he was raging at his own musical tastes, like a homophobe enraged by his own sexuality? Because since I turned forty, my attitude to heritage rock has done the equivalent of a handbrake turn in a Ford Granada estate, drifting gently in a huge semi-circle to face the opposite direction.

These days, I can’t get enough of the stuff.

Last night I experienced the purest form of this particularly insidious narcotic: more than two hours of The Who at the O2. In the company of my son, who is experiencing a lot of this stuff the first time around. Backed by a ridiculously good band, the two remaining Whovians banged out a passionate, committed and epic version of Quadrophenia, and then finished the set off with as perfect a set of stadium rock standards as there is in existence: Who Are You, Pinball Wizard, You Better You Bet, Baba O’Riley, Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Two weeks ago, I went to see the Specials at the Brixton Academy. Same thing with a better beat and sexier dancing. Heritage Rock. A shared memory of something magnificent.

I once did some work with Grazia magazine, and in the editorial meeting one week I pointed out how so many of the fashions were essentially facsimiles of stuff from twenty years before. ‘It all comes round again, doesn’t it?’ I said. To which one very bright young thing replied: ‘Yes, it does. But there’s a rule: you can only wear it once.’ This is the exact opposite of music.

Over a beer ten years ago, a friend once asked me ‘if you had to choose between listening only to music recorded up until now, or only to music recorded from now on, which would you choose?’ I adopted a Luke Haines sneer and said the latter, of course. The future was all about possibility! Something truly great might come along! Why would you turn your back on that?

Ten years later, I’d like to change my answer, please.

This is a tale of two gigs which took place last night. One I went to and one I didn’t.

The gig I didn’t go to was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine at the Brixton Academy last night. I’ve seen Carter half-a-dozen times now, and have even met Jim Bob himself (who turns out to be as nice a person as you’d expect from his lyrics and his tweets and now his very funny novels). Carter gigs involve a lot of jumping up and down and shouting and singing and generally throwing beer around. They are, needless to say, enormous fun, as this fan will attest:

@booksellercrow @jennycolgan Oof. Am ruined this morning. Awesome night. Hit full on by cup of piss, and didn’t even mind.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) November 11, 2012

The reason I didn’t go this time was because the opportunity came up to see someone I’d never seen play live, who’s rarely on these shores and whose concerts are famed for their intensity: Lucinda Williams.

That’s right: Lucinda Bloody Williams. The High Priest of Heartbreak herself. She played the first of two nights at the Royal Festival Hall, and she was everything I’d been led to believe. Her voice was as clear as glass and as knowing as a New Orleans madam. Her band was tighter than Ginger Baker’s drum skins. And her audience….

Well.

We sat there in our serried ranks, not making a squeak during the songs. As she moved the set on – from low-pitched, sad ballads to the enormous boogying footstompers of the encore – we sat. We clapped between songs. We were glared at if we whooped. We stroked our chins and hugged our wives and generally behaved as if we were watching Kramer vs. Kramer and not one of the most potent live acts in the world.

And heaven forbid if any one of us should get up and dance.

At the end, a few of us braver souls stood and applauded and even whooped a little. I looked behind me when I stood, and there was a row of people: quiet, still, not even clapping. Just watching.

I suppose some of this is inevitable. People get older, and now more than ever those people want to watch the same music they enjoyed in their 20s. Big acts like Lucinda Williams aren’t going to tour England’s smaller venues, where it’s still possible to have a whisky and a bit of a boogie.

But I think there’s something else going on here. During the gig, Lucinda spoke about how wonderful the sound was in the Festival Hall. And it was, because the Hall’s built for symphonic music; when you shove the harsher and simpler acoustics of a rock band in there, they’re bound to sound amazing.

But the downside is that audiences then sit and watch music that was meant to be stood up and danced to. And they do it with this ponderous attentiveness which has as much in common with a traditional rock gig as ELO’s Rockaria has with Monteverdi.

So please, Lucinda. Next time you come to England, pick a big hall with a bar at the back and a sticky floor. Make it smelly and draughty, with toilets your mother would weep at. Pile up big cabinets on either side of the stage to make up for the awful echoing sound. And then play. And watch us dance.

That way, I won’t go home with one thought in my head: Should have gone to Carter.

Last night with my good mate Dan to see the Unthanks at the Tabernacle in West London. It was a very different gig to the normal moshy raucous things we attend; if you’ve never heard the Unthanks, there’s some links at the bottom of this post, but in their “raw” state they are two Geordie lasses, Rachel and Becky Unthank, with raw-but-pure voice backed by a pianist, a fiddle player and a guitarist, and they sing their own arrangements of found and modern folk songs. For me, they provide the most genuine route back into some of the ordinary voices of the last 200 years; for instance, their song The Testimony of Patience Kershaw was written from official testimony by a woman miner in 1842. Lost, abandoned and desperate women are the most common voices; see Here’s The Tender Coming, in which women describe their painful separation from men pressed into naval service.

It was a beautiful concert, in a beautiful setting, the Tabernacle old and creaking with the movement of those on the balcony. During one song, which the two lasses sang without a microphone, the place sounded like an old ship making its way through heavy waters. My highlight of the evening was when all five of them sang, without amplification, a rendering of Kipling’s The Heavy Steamers, which got me thinking again about trade and empire and the ordinary people back home, themes which ran through my book The English Monster. Here’s the poem:

“OH, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,

With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas? ”

“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,

Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese.”

 

“And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers,

And where shall I write you when you are away? ”

“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver.

Address us at Hobart, Hong-kong, and Bombay.”

 

“But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,

And suppose you were wrecked up and down the salt sea?”

“Why, you’d have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,

And you’d have no muffins or toast for your tea.”

 

“Then I’ll pray for fine weather for all you Big Steamers

For little blue billows and breezes so soft.”

“Oh, billows and breezes don’t bother Big Steamers:

We’re iron below and steel-rigging aloft.”

 

“Then I’ll build a new lighthouse for all you Big Steamers,

With plenty wise pilots to pilot you through.”

“Oh, the Channel’s as bright as a ball-room already,

And pilots are thicker than pilchards at Looe.”

 

“Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,

Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?”

“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,

That no one may stop us from bringing you food.”

 

For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,

The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,

They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers

And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!”

I can’t find an example of The Unthanks doing this online, which is probably as it should be. Go and see them do it in the real flesh. All I’ll say is they replace Kipling’s assertiveness with a real sense of longing and obligation. It’ll stay with me a long, long time.

The Unthanks home page

The Testimony of Patience Kershaw (MySpace)

I just read this very funny piece about what indie bands need to do to improve, by Jeff Balke:

Whenever I see a band on a stage filled with every resident of their Brooklyn co-op, the first thing I think is, “How the hell are they getting paid?” The second thing I think is, “Couldn’t any of them take up sound engineering instead of the zither?”

via Hipster Lessons: 5 Ways to Make Indie Bands Less Annoying – Houston Music – Rocks Off.

And here, for no reason at all, honest, is a picture of Zach Condon of Beirut.

There’s so much brilliant stuff in this Aretha Sills piece on Townes van Zandt, who I liked when I first heard him and who I like more and more the older I get. I fully expect him to be the one singing when I die. And he said this:

There’s so many good young people and old people, I can’t listen to it all. I end up listening to Muddy Waters and Mozart, Muddy Waters and Mozart. Hank Williams every so often, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I mean, I listen quite a bit, but mostly I’m playing. Traveling and playing. And when I’m in a car, somebody gives you a tape, you listen to it. That’s one of the best places, but eventually it comes down to the hum of the wheels.

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Muddy Waters and Mozart.