Thom Beckett

Apologies for the lack of a newsletter last week. I had a very busy weekend and just hadn’t found enough through the week to warrant sending anything out. We should be back to normal from now on.

Hope you’ve been surviving the heat. I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t keep turning up the thermostat on this planet.

As ever, if you want something to read as the planet burns, you can subscribe here.

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Listening

Anyone who's read more than a couple of these knows that I've fallen very deep into a Beatles rabbit-hole of late and as such, found a wonderful story this week that I'd never heard before.

Back in 1970, Phil Collins was a jobbing session drummer. He was in his band Flaming Youth, and wouldn't join Genesis until later in the year. One day, Ringo Starr's chauffeur called saying they needed a percussionist for Harrison's solo project, an album that would become All Things Must Pass.

Collins, being a huge Beatles fan, jumped at the chance, arrived at Abbey Road, and saw Harrison and Starr there as well as Klaus Voormann, Billy Preston and Phil Spector. Collins was given congas to play, and sat with Starr, cadging cigarettes through nervousness and playing when asked. He wasn't an experienced conga player, adding to the anxiety, and at the end suddenly everyone disappeared and he was left in the studio alone. He was told they'd all gone off to watch TV or something and he wasn't needed any further and could leave. Still, he'd recorded his parts, and he headed home wondering how his life would change after appearing on a solo Beatles record.

When All Things Must Pass came out, Collins was understandably excited, but checking through the credits, his name wasn't there, and listening through the track in question, they'd clearly used a different take. Collins was disappointed and for some years, reached out to Harrison to see if he could get a tape of his contribution.

This continued for many years and Harrison wouldn't send him what he asked. However, eventually Collins happened to buy F1 driver Jackie Stewart's house. When Collins and Stewart were chatting, Stewart mentioned that his friend Harrison was remixing All Things Must Pass and Collins told the story and asked again whether he could receive the tape.

This time, though, he was successful and a couple of days' later a tape arrived with a note from Harrison saying "Could this be you?" Collins's put the tape on, one can imagine rather eagerly, to see how his youthful self sounded playing with his heroes.

So there he is, one can imagine him with his headphones on, listening to this cut, wondering if the new remixed version would contain this fascinating moment from his history. Maybe this take is the better one and people would realise when they heard? Obviously I'm guessing a bit here, but I assume those are the sort of thoughts running though his head. Instead, though, he heard the congas come in and they were loud, out of time and just generally terrible. To add to the ignominy at the end of the take you can hear Harrison in the recording booth saying to Spector "Hey, Phil, can we try another without the conga player?"

Suddenly, everything became clear. Collins wasn't left alone while the others watched TV, he was politely fired without him even realising it. And Harrison hadn't been keeping the tape from him because he was busy, or was just ignoring him. He'd kept it from him because the tape was awful and he didn't want Collins to know.

These thoughts float around in Collins's head, until he gets a call from Jackie Stewart. "I've got someone here to speak to you" he said and puts George onto the line. "Did you get the tape?"

"I now realise I was fired by a Beatle" said Collins.

I imagine here that there's a few moments of silence, perhaps a little muffled giggling, before Harrison said "Don't worry, it was a piss-take. I got Ray Cooper to play really badly and we dubbed it on. Thought you'd like it!"

So not only had Harrison kept a joke running with Phil Collins for many, many years, he finished off the prank by paying for a whole band to spend time in the studio with him just so he could make the joke. If this doesn't make you love George Harrison more than ever, I really don't know what will.

Story in Far Out magazine that I used for a lot of the quotes
My original source for the story, the wonderful Nothing Is Real podcast

Reading

Yet more Beatles in my reading list this week I'm afraid, because I'm currently reading Many Years from Now which is a biography written by Barry Miles and published in 1998. It's effectively an official biography since Miles (a friend of McCartney for many years) had unparalleled access to his source. As such, it's a very one-sided picture, and McCartney says as much towards the beginning of the book.

However, once you read it knowing that that's the case, it colours in many parts of McCartney's life I was either unaware of or didn't quite understand. His time living in Jane Asher's parents's house in Wimple Street is described in the most detail I've come across, as is McCartney's involvement with the setting up of the Indica gallery where, later, John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono.

It also contains one of my favourite stories that says an awful lot about McCartney. One day, he decided he'd go and speak to philosopher and, at the time, famed war protestor Bertrand Russell. So that's what he did - he just turned up to his house, knocked on the door, was kept in a waiting room for a while before being introduced to one of the greatest British philosophers and chatting with him for an hour or two.

Basically, McCartney lived the fantasy 1960s that all fans of the 1960s really wanted to live, bumping into William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, checking with Alma Cogan whether Yesterday was his own composition. In summary, it's both a fascinating picture of a great life and some wonderful wish fulfilment.

Watching

I rewatched Cloud Atlas this week. I realise this is a film that splits people. I think it's a classic, perhaps the second best film the Wachowskis ever made. However, I can see why people would watch it and find the plot baffling and the actors playing multiple characters of varying races and genders either actively offensive or at the very least confusing and annoying.

However, for me, it's an outstanding and sympathetic solution to filming a book that to most would have seemed entirely unfilmable. The problem with adapting David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is that it's a book about words. About how words are passed through the ages, and can affect us in hugely different ways depending on our context. However, running through it too is the fact that humanity does not change that much. Problems that appear to be "solved" in the earlier parts of the story (e.g. slavery) come back in the later stories in various ways.

To see, then, these characters being played by the same actors throughout the film ties all of the stories together, reinforcing that we are who we are by the chance of when we were born, and how we were raised. We're reminded of this fact over and over when actors play entirely different roles, we know underneath they're the same person. It's a brave, creative, and sympathetic approach.

The film is a gamble from end to end. It's two creators pushing themselves as far as they possibly can. You can argue that some of it doesn't work, but to me it's one of the most innovative and interesting films of the 21st century.

Quote

"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that"
Samuel Beckett

Links

Helen Lewis’s piece on abortion laws in the US and the differences with the UK is well-worth reading as a very clearly argued introduction to what's gone wrong, basically "this is what you get when you can’t pass new primary legislation: endless judicial chicanery and sleight of hand"
Patrick Willems on RRR, the 13th biggest film of the year (so far) based on box office that there's a good chance you've never heard of. It looks amazing.
The short version of this article could be "mushrooms are dangerous" but I didn't know the details of how they killed you. If you, like me, are interested in this gloomy science, then this for you!
Amit Chaudhuri on arriving in London in the 1980s and studying TS Eliot's Burnt Norton. Eliot is extremely problematic, but still manages to be my favourite poet. The Four Quartets (of which Burnt Norton is one) is my favourite piece of poetry as well, and Chaudhuri does a great job of exposing Eliot’s fascination with the Bhagavad Gita.
TikTok of an Amazon Echo connected to a series of singing wall-mounted fish singing the Spice Girls.
The music industry is a messed up place to work. This review on Ian Winwood's Bodies draws attention to its exploitation of, and total disregard for, the artists it lives off. Added to that, once it's done with you it spits you out into the real world. This is a great article on how hard it is to make that adjustment.
I've been enjoying the spring magnolia flowers and this is a love song to those wonderful plants.
After Sam Freeman last week debunked the vast majority of "dead cat" strategies, this week, his father Lawrence Freedman points out that most false flags are normally false too.
The Umoza Music Project are an Indonesian hip hop group. Their most recent single, Home has Paul McCartney playing on bass (and, unsurprisingly, he and they are great). If that's not enough, you can listen to all of Paul's bass tracks on Abbey Road isolated. They sound amazing.

Listening

March and April have both passed without me doing an updated playlist, so there’s one below, but first, my favourite albums from this month. Not all were released in April, but all were released in 2022.

Chloë and the Next 20th Century - Father John Misty - If Harry Nilsson had spent the last 10 years making sardonic comments on Tumblr reshares. (Spotify,  Music)
Topical Dancer - Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul - The best sarcastic Belgian pop-dance album you’ll hear this year (Spotify,  Music)
Classic Objects - Jenny Hval - Experimental pop from the Norwegian songwriter (Spotify,  Music)
Wet Leg - We don’t get many indie darlings nowadays, so it’s nice that undeniable indie darlings have at last got their album out, and it doesn’t disappoint (Spotify,  Music)
Kaina - It Was A Home - Summery R&B from the Chicago singer’s second album (Spotify,  Music)
On Early Music - Francesco Tristano - A mixture of early music alongside the pianist’s own compositions as though they make up an alternative past of piano pieces. Beautiful (Spotify,  Music)
Next Stop EP - Portico Quartet - A short, but uniformly excellent EP from London-based jazz group with ambient and electronica influences (Spotify,  Music)
Daniel Rossen - You Belong There - Grizzly Bear’s frontman produces a delicate and beautiful album that feels like his band’s work turned up to eleven (Spotify,  Music)
The Dream - Alt J - A charming alt-rock-pop album (Spotify,  Music)
Syphon - Wojciech Rusin - Experimental and hard-going classicaltronic music but fascinating throughout (Spotify,  Music)

And as promised, I’ve made a list of my favourite tracks from March and April that you can enjoy on Spotify or  Music.

Reading

You may end up a little sick of my working through Agatha Christie books, but my most recent one, Death Comes As The End, is particularly unusual as it’s set in Ancient Egypt. Christie’s second husband was an archeologist and she regularly went on digs with him. As such, the book is based on pretty good research and makes for a great plot. No Poirot or Marple though.

Watching

I finished watching The Dropout this week (Disney+ in the UK, Hulu in the US). It’s a fascinating story that shows that multiple, smart, rich people can be fooled when they want something to be true. It also should make us wonder if having twenty-somethings winging it in charge of multi-billion dollar companies is a good idea. Amanda Seyfried is excellent as Holmes and I was impressed at how good a job Naveen Andrews did of making Sunny Balwani somewhat sympathetic.

Quote

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch