Saturday, December 01, 2012
Advent Countdown – Ten Seasonal Songs of Magic, Money and Nuclear War
Waking much too early on the First of December, I’ve spent the morning in seasonal mood for the first day of Advent with a selection of festive songs – and, impossibly, aiming to list a full ten that won’t make me gag! So I racked my brain (nearly a Ringo Starr song, though not a Christmassy one) for the likes of Paul Simon, George Harrison, Kate Bush, Tom Robinson, Gerry Rafferty, the Pet Shop Boys and Timbuk 3 for songs of magic, money worries and total thermonuclear destruction at Christmas. The usual suspects, then. And what else do you spot…?
You might expect Simon and Garfunkel’s famously jolly 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been listening to Paul’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, and while the title track is by far the best on it, I have to admit I enjoyed the stomping beat and sharp, bluesy guitar work of Paul’s song of Christmas worries in modern America that it quite put me in the mood for more Christmas songs. I’ve only found the video this morning, and that’s quite witty, too.
Oh, I love George, and I can only assume this was a comeback at people who grumbled he only wrote deep and meaningful lyrics. Or that he wanted a minor seasonal hit. So why not get your new year in early and, ideally, watch the video, which is a lot of fun and has pirates, silly hats and George naked? What more could you want? Look, it’s better than Paul’s Wonderful Christmastime (though the redoubtable Mr Hickey, who spray-paints his beard white every December, has a brilliant defence of it), or that endlessly replayed dirge from John and Yoko. Has Ringo done one (checks. Oh, Jesus! Is that where Annie Lennox got the idea)?
Oscar Wilde! Dropping down in my parachute! Coming to sparkle the dark up (I’m not doing a good job of covering the muck up)! Hurrah for twinkly Kate! Though the live version I’ve linked to’s OK, it’s worth looking for the proper ethereal studio one with her own backing vocals. All right, I’m strangely enjoying this Christmas lark, as long as it stays batshit-crazy.
Can I give a daytime TV link that Kate had a hit with Peter Gabriel and Tom wrote this (and a couple of minor hits) with Peter? It’s from Tom’s most depressed album, North by Northwest, with lots of early ’80s electronic instrumentation rather than his early punk sound. But don’t worry – this one’s lively and sounds like he’s having much more fun than the rest of it. That’s why I love it, because otherwise the lyrics wouldn’t be so funny. Discovering Tom in my teens, this festive epic of seasonal nuclear devastation was my favourite very ’80s Christmas song.
Another mournfully seasonal song from the ’80s (tears, broken heart) and from my favourite Gerry Rafferty album, the utterly gorgeous North and South. Like most of the album, this is achingly beautiful, with its icy pipes as wintry a sound as you’re likely to hear. And though thinking of Christmas songs that don’t set my teeth on edge is starting to become a bit of a struggle, it’s cheering to see today that Gerry’s just been given a memorial street in his old home (shipyard) town.
Slightly bad timing with this one – though not from the ’80s this time – released as a Christmas single just as the country was buried in blizzards. Oh well. The chorus is jolly and upbeat and the nearest to a Christmas love song I can put up with. And as well as making Bing Crosby! an exclamation, it still finds time to bitch about Christmas never being as good as it should be, so that’s all right. But, Neil… I thought you were a Doctor Who fan?
And back to the ’80s one last time for Timbuk 3, who I liked a lot ever since hearing their rationale for putting a nice piece of ass on the cover of their first album, Greetings From Timbuk 3, to sell more copies (look it up). I can’t say this is really my favourite of theirs – tragically, I still like toys with guns (particularly gun-sticks), and Tom’s similar message was much funnier – but their hearts are in the right place and, if you sing in an American accent, in amidst The Message the first verse closes on a spectacularly terrible pun. And I love those.
All right, I know I promised ten songs, but that’s seven that I actually like and yet I’m already losing the will to live. And it’s still the morning of December 1st. That bodes well, doesn’t it, boys and girls?
I have a terrible feeling I may prefer to listen to some of the more stately old hymns and carols. Richard will be appalled and my Mum delighted – that can’t be right! I shall have to compile a more blasphemous Advent countdown later to restore the balance…
Paul Simon – Getting Ready for Christmas Day
You might expect Simon and Garfunkel’s famously jolly 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been listening to Paul’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, and while the title track is by far the best on it, I have to admit I enjoyed the stomping beat and sharp, bluesy guitar work of Paul’s song of Christmas worries in modern America that it quite put me in the mood for more Christmas songs. I’ve only found the video this morning, and that’s quite witty, too.
From early in November to the last week of December
I got money matters weighing me down
Well the music may be merry but it’s only temporary
I know Santa Claus is coming to town
George Harrison – Ding Dong, Ding Dong
Oh, I love George, and I can only assume this was a comeback at people who grumbled he only wrote deep and meaningful lyrics. Or that he wanted a minor seasonal hit. So why not get your new year in early and, ideally, watch the video, which is a lot of fun and has pirates, silly hats and George naked? What more could you want? Look, it’s better than Paul’s Wonderful Christmastime (though the redoubtable Mr Hickey, who spray-paints his beard white every December, has a brilliant defence of it), or that endlessly replayed dirge from John and Yoko. Has Ringo done one (checks. Oh, Jesus! Is that where Annie Lennox got the idea)?
Ring out the old, ring in the new
Ring out the old, ring in the new
(that’s half the lyrics already)
Kate Bush – December Will Be Magic Again
Oscar Wilde! Dropping down in my parachute! Coming to sparkle the dark up (I’m not doing a good job of covering the muck up)! Hurrah for twinkly Kate! Though the live version I’ve linked to’s OK, it’s worth looking for the proper ethereal studio one with her own backing vocals. All right, I’m strangely enjoying this Christmas lark, as long as it stays batshit-crazy.
December will be magic again
Take a husky to the ice
While Bing Crosby sings White Christmas… He makes you feel nice
December will be magic again
Old Saint Nicholas up the chimney
Just a-popping up in my memory
Tom Robinson – Merrily Up On High
Can I give a daytime TV link that Kate had a hit with Peter Gabriel and Tom wrote this (and a couple of minor hits) with Peter? It’s from Tom’s most depressed album, North by Northwest, with lots of early ’80s electronic instrumentation rather than his early punk sound. But don’t worry – this one’s lively and sounds like he’s having much more fun than the rest of it. That’s why I love it, because otherwise the lyrics wouldn’t be so funny. Discovering Tom in my teens, this festive epic of seasonal nuclear devastation was my favourite very ’80s Christmas song.
Let’s all party –
War has started
Let’s forget about days gone by
We won’t see another year like it
So drink your dinner tonight:
It's no use to face the future
Count to twenty –
Close your eyes
This year, next year
Thermonuclear
Merrily up on high!
Gerry Rafferty – Winter’s Come
Another mournfully seasonal song from the ’80s (tears, broken heart) and from my favourite Gerry Rafferty album, the utterly gorgeous North and South. Like most of the album, this is achingly beautiful, with its icy pipes as wintry a sound as you’re likely to hear. And though thinking of Christmas songs that don’t set my teeth on edge is starting to become a bit of a struggle, it’s cheering to see today that Gerry’s just been given a memorial street in his old home (shipyard) town.
Winter’s come – another year, another season begun
Every day brings a long cold lonely night
Pet Shop Boys – It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas
Slightly bad timing with this one – though not from the ’80s this time – released as a Christmas single just as the country was buried in blizzards. Oh well. The chorus is jolly and upbeat and the nearest to a Christmas love song I can put up with. And as well as making Bing Crosby! an exclamation, it still finds time to bitch about Christmas never being as good as it should be, so that’s all right. But, Neil… I thought you were a Doctor Who fan?
Christmas is not all it’s cracked up to be
Families fighting around a plastic tree
Nothing on the TV that you’d want to see…
Timbuk 3 – All I Want For Christmas (Is World Peace)
And back to the ’80s one last time for Timbuk 3, who I liked a lot ever since hearing their rationale for putting a nice piece of ass on the cover of their first album, Greetings From Timbuk 3, to sell more copies (look it up). I can’t say this is really my favourite of theirs – tragically, I still like toys with guns (particularly gun-sticks), and Tom’s similar message was much funnier – but their hearts are in the right place and, if you sing in an American accent, in amidst The Message the first verse closes on a spectacularly terrible pun. And I love those.
Transformers, superheroes
Thundercats in cast iron clothes
Rocket fingers, laser eyes
Cannon mouths and missile toes
All right, I know I promised ten songs, but that’s seven that I actually like and yet I’m already losing the will to live. And it’s still the morning of December 1st. That bodes well, doesn’t it, boys and girls?
I have a terrible feeling I may prefer to listen to some of the more stately old hymns and carols. Richard will be appalled and my Mum delighted – that can’t be right! I shall have to compile a more blasphemous Advent countdown later to restore the balance…
Labels: Christmas, George Harrison, Gerry Rafferty, Kate Bush, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Tom Robinson, Top Tips
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Gerry Rafferty
Gerry Rafferty, who died yesterday, had been one of my favourite singer-songwriters ever since I rather belatedly got into music in my mid-to-late teens. Of four artists I was particularly devoted to, I eventually managed to see two play live – so it was eerie this morning to be woken by the Today Programme's 6.30 headlines with one of them, Tom Robinson, quoted in a tribute to the other, Gerry Rafferty, as "an inspiration to a generation". You probably know him from Baker Street (the one with the saxophone solo) and Stuck in the Middle (the one without the ear).
It wasn't either of his best-known songs that first sparked my interest in Gerry, oddly enough; friends of mine at school had their own band, and their covers of Gerry's early band Stealers' Wheel got my attention. I think it was probably the slow build-up of different instruments coming in to set off the driving rock and roll of Blind Faith that first made me want to track down the original, and that fixed my taste for Gerry's multi-layered big sound, rock tempered by folk but with a uniquely rich harmony of many instruments and voices. It helped, too, that several of Gerry's album covers were by John "Patrick" Byrne, whose Tutti Frutti I'd loved, and that the utterly bizarre caricatures for the three Stealers Wheel LPs in particular looked so fabulous.
Although Gerry Rafferty's commercial and critical success – such as it was – came in the 1970s, I may still love his three 1980s albums the most… Which is a bit of a drawback if you want to look them up, as they're obviously the ones it's most difficult to get hold of (except intermittently on download). 1988's North and South, if you can find it, is for me the best of all his work. Released just as I was getting into him, it was the first of his LPs I bought, and has perhaps the most distinctive sound: several songs have extended intros before his voice comes in, with most set in a swirl of many different instruments, including the pipes that, with world-weary lyrics of being caught between life down in Kent, working in the big city, and his longing to return to Scotland, make this his most Scottish album since his early folk days in the Humblebums with Billy Connolly (yes, that one). The title song might just be my favourite of all his tracks, when I'm feeling idiosyncratic and don't want to pick Baker Street; the single Shipyard Town (which sank without trace, with me probably being one of just two people in Stockport to buy it) has a hugely infectious thump driving happier memories than his usual tone of regret; the urgent, rolling guitar of A Dangerous Age used to be on my walkman every time I was on a motorway journey; Hearts Run Dry is appropriately heartbreaking; and Moonlight and Gold is simply gorgeous. So look out for that one, if it happens to be on iTunes, or if you spot a CD that isn't going for silly money on eBay.
I have to admit I've listened to Gerry a good deal less in the last decade than in the dozen years before that: in part because I tend to watch DVDs more than I listen to music; in part because I'm more likely to listen to music that Richard likes to, so my consumption of rock and roll or punk has fallen away; but largely, particularly in Gerry's case, because I had all his work on vinyl, but no longer have a record player, and had transferred it all to cassette for ease of listening, but it's several years since our last cassette player gave up the ghost. With so much of his output near-impossible to find on CD, that rather cut down the listening opportunities, though I remember being delighted when one of the first of Doctor Who Confidential's clips montages way back in 2005 was set to the gorgeous hypnotic swirl of Get It Right Next Time.
I'd actually been listening to Gerry rather more often in the last couple of years, aided by at last finding CD reissues of the three Stealers' Wheel albums, the early '70s band with Joe Egan (who turns up intermittently on later Rafferty solo releases) which recorded the massive Stuck in the Middle but never quite took off, with an exciting mix of commercial failure, pretty much every member of the band leaving, coming back or being added by the record company, and eventual legal warfare that I'm sure you can read about on the internet if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Although the eponymous first album Stealers' Wheel is their best-known and includes Stuck in the Middle and the altogether lovely You Put Something Better Inside of Me, its rather sparse production means I much prefer the other two (one of the tracks, Johnny's Song, doesn't do a lot for me here, but becomes fantastic when reworked on Gerry's 1980 solo album). No, the Paisley-titled 'difficult second album' Ferguslie Park is much better, with the caressing regret of Waltz (You Know It Makes Sense) and the thumpingly good rock and roll of Blind Faith and (Everyone's Agreed That) Everything Will Turn Out Fine, while I'm probably the only person in the world whose favourite of the three is the less difficult than near-impossible third album, which wasn't so much released as escaped after several years in lawyers' custody and long after the band had expired, Right Or Wrong. They may all have hated it, but it's the closest to the lush solo sound that came a few years later. I love the title track; the catchy Catholic cynicism of Benediction was right in line with my religious upbringing; even funky chicken Wishbone grabbed me.
If you have a Gerry Rafferty album, it's probably 1978's City to City, which was deservedly a massive success along with its lead single, Baker Street, which mixes melancholic reflections on a singer's street life in London with an uncharacteristic but appealing closing paean of hope and sunrise, an arching guitar solo and, of course, one of the most blissful saxophone solos ever recorded (by Raphael Ravenscroft or, if you prefer your urban legends, Bob Holness. Look, he wasn't a saxophonist – he was James Bond). If you have a copy of the B-side, incidentally, Big Change in the Weather, I don't think that's ever been released on CD, so it's a very long time since I've heard it… Almost the whole album's superb, though – rock Home and Dry and romantic Right Down the Line are both fabulous and reasonably well-known; soaring, reflective Whatever's Written in Your Heart is rather lovely, and Waiting for the Day has another effortless rock bounce to it.
Although his music continued to be great, nothing Gerry Rafferty did after City to City had the same success – perhaps because soft rock was out of fashion, perhaps because of his famous distaste for fame and the music business (a theme that recurs through his work much more even than most singer-songwriters), perhaps because, in a business more about sex appeal than art, he was never much of a looker. His next four albums plotted a sharp downwards sales line – the follow-up, Night Owl, was the least interesting ('like City to City, only less so') but the only one that was a fair-sized hit. I've never really gone much for the title track – a hit single, yet hardly ever played since, and which might as well have been called, 'God, I Hate Touring' – though the swirling Get It Right Next Time is sublime near-perfect pop, Days Gone Down makes longing almost heroic, then Take the Money and Run and The Tourist… Are catchy tunes that hate the music business.
I'd much rather listen to Snakes and Ladders, not that I can at the moment because I'm not paying £60 for the CD on eBay, which was the point where his sales fell off a cliff and, predictably, a particular favourite of mine. All right, so it's not quite as good as the rock sublimity of City to City, but the feel's a great mix of laid-back and sardonic, with a sure musical sensibility. I've already mentioned his compelling bluesy retake on Johnny's Song, while the lush sound and cynically political lyrics of The Garden Of England (complete with sampled Willie Whitelaw, I seem to remember) is one of the most Raffertyish of all his songs. The infectious folk-rock of The Royal Mile (Sweet Darlin') was one I once had on many cassette compilations (and always cheering to walk with Café Le Cabotin, which I'd play next to a Paul McCartney song about a café which, obviously, I can't quite remember and also don't have on CD, though I probably could if I got round to it).
The next album, after which he stopped recording until his masterpiece (yeah, I know, only for me) North and South, was his shortest and his most uncharacteristic. Sleepwalking is starkly synthesiser-based (aside from the more complex shuffle of the title track) and has a fairly anonymous photographic landscape cover, giving the whole a feel of alienation, in severe contrast to the intimacy of most of his albums; while I love synth-pop, it's not something he seems entirely comfortable with, and yet some of the melodies are among his most lovely – The Right Moment, in particular… Wise As A Serpent, another standout track, is hypnotic but cold. And, yes, this is another one it's very difficult to find – but with a haunting desire to hear the guitar and bass opus of Standing at the Gates again, I have to admit I've just shelled out £30 on eBay for it. It had better play…
Like City to City, if considerably less celebrated, you can find On a Wing and a Prayer fairly easily and cheaply; it's rather good, with a big sound this time offered by very distinctive backing vocals – it was at this time that I saw him being terrific on stage in Hackney, and boy, there were a lot of singers, with the biggest voice offered by a very big chap indeed – and some of his most lingering melodies of loss. I'm sure someone once called this 'the divorce album', and it certainly runs through every emotional reaction, from wanting to hang on (the hauntingly regretful single I Could Be Wrong), to remembering the good times (Love and Affection), to the album's most electric and lively if not its most pleasant track, a cover of Allen Toussaint's Get Out Of My Life Woman. The track that most stays in my head, though, is the opening song Time's Caught Up on You, with a breathtaking a cappella introduction (and rather than divorce, this one's about… Oh, see if you can guess).
There weren't that many Gerry Rafferty releases after that one in 1992, save a legion of each-one-very-slightly-different-from-the-last compilations, and what new material there was didn't really live up to his previous work, despite occasional sparks. Over My Head in 1995 was OK, but the first of his albums where – aside from the atypically brisk single The Girl's Got No Confidence, and several songs re-recorded from his early '70s oeuvre – I was hard-pressed to get any of the tunes to sink in, while the last decade's Another World… Wasn't nearly as good as that. I found it a bit of a religious dirge, and aside from Land of the Chosen Few, such memorable tunes as there were tended to be borrowed from his earlier work or, again, simple re-recordings. His final album, Life Goes On from 2009, was a partial return to form, though very little of it was strictly new, with covers, re-recordings, different takes and only the odd new song. The material, though, appropriately stretches from reworkings of his early '70s songs through to his favourites from On a Wing and a Prayer, so it's not a bad elegy for him, and I'm particularly glad it's got a re-recording (if not quite as piquant as the original) of Shipyard Town B-side Heart's Desire, an otherwise difficult-to-find song that's as Rafferty as they came – a lovely melody, and very wry lyrics.
Gerry Rafferty never seemed to enjoy fame very much, but I loved his songs, and very few singer-songwriters have ever matched the sustained quality of his work from the early '70s through to the early '90s, in fair sales and foul. And amid that, there are a handful of songs so outstanding and so lucky as to have caught the public ear (and Quentin Tarantino's) that he'll be widely remembered. And I'll miss him.
The lovely Stephen Glenn has also written about Gerry this morning.
More happily, it was thirty years ago today that the first episode of the TV series The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC2 – for me, the definitive version of the much-written, often-made story. Douglas Adams had honed his scripts to perfection; it's one of the most visually imaginative TV series ever made; and Paddy Kingsland's music is so utterly gorgeous that hearing it to the sunrise can still make me tear up (OK, so it was only pop and rock that I took a while to get into; I always loved TV scores).
I think I'll go out and get myself a new towel. Though Marks and Spencer's in Salisbury is probably a bit of a trek.
It wasn't either of his best-known songs that first sparked my interest in Gerry, oddly enough; friends of mine at school had their own band, and their covers of Gerry's early band Stealers' Wheel got my attention. I think it was probably the slow build-up of different instruments coming in to set off the driving rock and roll of Blind Faith that first made me want to track down the original, and that fixed my taste for Gerry's multi-layered big sound, rock tempered by folk but with a uniquely rich harmony of many instruments and voices. It helped, too, that several of Gerry's album covers were by John "Patrick" Byrne, whose Tutti Frutti I'd loved, and that the utterly bizarre caricatures for the three Stealers Wheel LPs in particular looked so fabulous.
"The voice, redolent of both Lennon's and McCartney's, yet unmistakably his own; the music, a shimmering delta of sound; the songs, romantic yet pushily sardonic – all came to fruition thanks to Gerry's gift of perfect pitch and an obdurate determination to stick to his guns."From Gerry Rafferty's obituary by his former personal manager Michael Gray, in today's Guardian.
North and South
Although Gerry Rafferty's commercial and critical success – such as it was – came in the 1970s, I may still love his three 1980s albums the most… Which is a bit of a drawback if you want to look them up, as they're obviously the ones it's most difficult to get hold of (except intermittently on download). 1988's North and South, if you can find it, is for me the best of all his work. Released just as I was getting into him, it was the first of his LPs I bought, and has perhaps the most distinctive sound: several songs have extended intros before his voice comes in, with most set in a swirl of many different instruments, including the pipes that, with world-weary lyrics of being caught between life down in Kent, working in the big city, and his longing to return to Scotland, make this his most Scottish album since his early folk days in the Humblebums with Billy Connolly (yes, that one). The title song might just be my favourite of all his tracks, when I'm feeling idiosyncratic and don't want to pick Baker Street; the single Shipyard Town (which sank without trace, with me probably being one of just two people in Stockport to buy it) has a hugely infectious thump driving happier memories than his usual tone of regret; the urgent, rolling guitar of A Dangerous Age used to be on my walkman every time I was on a motorway journey; Hearts Run Dry is appropriately heartbreaking; and Moonlight and Gold is simply gorgeous. So look out for that one, if it happens to be on iTunes, or if you spot a CD that isn't going for silly money on eBay.
I have to admit I've listened to Gerry a good deal less in the last decade than in the dozen years before that: in part because I tend to watch DVDs more than I listen to music; in part because I'm more likely to listen to music that Richard likes to, so my consumption of rock and roll or punk has fallen away; but largely, particularly in Gerry's case, because I had all his work on vinyl, but no longer have a record player, and had transferred it all to cassette for ease of listening, but it's several years since our last cassette player gave up the ghost. With so much of his output near-impossible to find on CD, that rather cut down the listening opportunities, though I remember being delighted when one of the first of Doctor Who Confidential's clips montages way back in 2005 was set to the gorgeous hypnotic swirl of Get It Right Next Time.
Stealers' Wheel
I'd actually been listening to Gerry rather more often in the last couple of years, aided by at last finding CD reissues of the three Stealers' Wheel albums, the early '70s band with Joe Egan (who turns up intermittently on later Rafferty solo releases) which recorded the massive Stuck in the Middle but never quite took off, with an exciting mix of commercial failure, pretty much every member of the band leaving, coming back or being added by the record company, and eventual legal warfare that I'm sure you can read about on the internet if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Although the eponymous first album Stealers' Wheel is their best-known and includes Stuck in the Middle and the altogether lovely You Put Something Better Inside of Me, its rather sparse production means I much prefer the other two (one of the tracks, Johnny's Song, doesn't do a lot for me here, but becomes fantastic when reworked on Gerry's 1980 solo album). No, the Paisley-titled 'difficult second album' Ferguslie Park is much better, with the caressing regret of Waltz (You Know It Makes Sense) and the thumpingly good rock and roll of Blind Faith and (Everyone's Agreed That) Everything Will Turn Out Fine, while I'm probably the only person in the world whose favourite of the three is the less difficult than near-impossible third album, which wasn't so much released as escaped after several years in lawyers' custody and long after the band had expired, Right Or Wrong. They may all have hated it, but it's the closest to the lush solo sound that came a few years later. I love the title track; the catchy Catholic cynicism of Benediction was right in line with my religious upbringing; even funky chicken Wishbone grabbed me.
Baker Street and the Rest
If you have a Gerry Rafferty album, it's probably 1978's City to City, which was deservedly a massive success along with its lead single, Baker Street, which mixes melancholic reflections on a singer's street life in London with an uncharacteristic but appealing closing paean of hope and sunrise, an arching guitar solo and, of course, one of the most blissful saxophone solos ever recorded (by Raphael Ravenscroft or, if you prefer your urban legends, Bob Holness. Look, he wasn't a saxophonist – he was James Bond). If you have a copy of the B-side, incidentally, Big Change in the Weather, I don't think that's ever been released on CD, so it's a very long time since I've heard it… Almost the whole album's superb, though – rock Home and Dry and romantic Right Down the Line are both fabulous and reasonably well-known; soaring, reflective Whatever's Written in Your Heart is rather lovely, and Waiting for the Day has another effortless rock bounce to it.
Although his music continued to be great, nothing Gerry Rafferty did after City to City had the same success – perhaps because soft rock was out of fashion, perhaps because of his famous distaste for fame and the music business (a theme that recurs through his work much more even than most singer-songwriters), perhaps because, in a business more about sex appeal than art, he was never much of a looker. His next four albums plotted a sharp downwards sales line – the follow-up, Night Owl, was the least interesting ('like City to City, only less so') but the only one that was a fair-sized hit. I've never really gone much for the title track – a hit single, yet hardly ever played since, and which might as well have been called, 'God, I Hate Touring' – though the swirling Get It Right Next Time is sublime near-perfect pop, Days Gone Down makes longing almost heroic, then Take the Money and Run and The Tourist… Are catchy tunes that hate the music business.
I'd much rather listen to Snakes and Ladders, not that I can at the moment because I'm not paying £60 for the CD on eBay, which was the point where his sales fell off a cliff and, predictably, a particular favourite of mine. All right, so it's not quite as good as the rock sublimity of City to City, but the feel's a great mix of laid-back and sardonic, with a sure musical sensibility. I've already mentioned his compelling bluesy retake on Johnny's Song, while the lush sound and cynically political lyrics of The Garden Of England (complete with sampled Willie Whitelaw, I seem to remember) is one of the most Raffertyish of all his songs. The infectious folk-rock of The Royal Mile (Sweet Darlin') was one I once had on many cassette compilations (and always cheering to walk with Café Le Cabotin, which I'd play next to a Paul McCartney song about a café which, obviously, I can't quite remember and also don't have on CD, though I probably could if I got round to it).
The next album, after which he stopped recording until his masterpiece (yeah, I know, only for me) North and South, was his shortest and his most uncharacteristic. Sleepwalking is starkly synthesiser-based (aside from the more complex shuffle of the title track) and has a fairly anonymous photographic landscape cover, giving the whole a feel of alienation, in severe contrast to the intimacy of most of his albums; while I love synth-pop, it's not something he seems entirely comfortable with, and yet some of the melodies are among his most lovely – The Right Moment, in particular… Wise As A Serpent, another standout track, is hypnotic but cold. And, yes, this is another one it's very difficult to find – but with a haunting desire to hear the guitar and bass opus of Standing at the Gates again, I have to admit I've just shelled out £30 on eBay for it. It had better play…
Like City to City, if considerably less celebrated, you can find On a Wing and a Prayer fairly easily and cheaply; it's rather good, with a big sound this time offered by very distinctive backing vocals – it was at this time that I saw him being terrific on stage in Hackney, and boy, there were a lot of singers, with the biggest voice offered by a very big chap indeed – and some of his most lingering melodies of loss. I'm sure someone once called this 'the divorce album', and it certainly runs through every emotional reaction, from wanting to hang on (the hauntingly regretful single I Could Be Wrong), to remembering the good times (Love and Affection), to the album's most electric and lively if not its most pleasant track, a cover of Allen Toussaint's Get Out Of My Life Woman. The track that most stays in my head, though, is the opening song Time's Caught Up on You, with a breathtaking a cappella introduction (and rather than divorce, this one's about… Oh, see if you can guess).
There weren't that many Gerry Rafferty releases after that one in 1992, save a legion of each-one-very-slightly-different-from-the-last compilations, and what new material there was didn't really live up to his previous work, despite occasional sparks. Over My Head in 1995 was OK, but the first of his albums where – aside from the atypically brisk single The Girl's Got No Confidence, and several songs re-recorded from his early '70s oeuvre – I was hard-pressed to get any of the tunes to sink in, while the last decade's Another World… Wasn't nearly as good as that. I found it a bit of a religious dirge, and aside from Land of the Chosen Few, such memorable tunes as there were tended to be borrowed from his earlier work or, again, simple re-recordings. His final album, Life Goes On from 2009, was a partial return to form, though very little of it was strictly new, with covers, re-recordings, different takes and only the odd new song. The material, though, appropriately stretches from reworkings of his early '70s songs through to his favourites from On a Wing and a Prayer, so it's not a bad elegy for him, and I'm particularly glad it's got a re-recording (if not quite as piquant as the original) of Shipyard Town B-side Heart's Desire, an otherwise difficult-to-find song that's as Rafferty as they came – a lovely melody, and very wry lyrics.
"And now you've got everything you ever wanted,His having returned to them so much in his later years, I'll finish by rounding full circle to some of Gerry Rafferty's earliest recordings. Only having them on LP, it's been a long time since I've listened to Gerry and Billy's folky Humblebums albums, which were all right, or his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back, which is better if not outstanding and shows a lot of his talent being honed (despite rather primitive production, with much more life than the late-period CDs that recapture some of the same songs) and even in the title track of this very early work displays his hatred of the music business – it's worth a listen, though, particularly for the melodic longing of Mary Skeffington (apparently inspired by his mother), Long Way Round (clearly a prototype of his later big numbers, as is the Humblebums' I Can't Stop Now), and Sign on the Dotted Line, the effusive catchiness of which is at odds with, unsurprisingly, its critique of the music industry (and it's also one of the tracks he did with Joe Egan, soon to be the other half of Stealers' Wheel. Which is where I more or less began, above).
But money can't buy you a satisfied mind.
What can you do when a dream comes true
And you can't go any higher?
That's the price you pay for your heart's desire."
Gerry Rafferty never seemed to enjoy fame very much, but I loved his songs, and very few singer-songwriters have ever matched the sustained quality of his work from the early '70s through to the early '90s, in fair sales and foul. And amid that, there are a handful of songs so outstanding and so lucky as to have caught the public ear (and Quentin Tarantino's) that he'll be widely remembered. And I'll miss him.
The lovely Stephen Glenn has also written about Gerry this morning.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy
More happily, it was thirty years ago today that the first episode of the TV series The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC2 – for me, the definitive version of the much-written, often-made story. Douglas Adams had honed his scripts to perfection; it's one of the most visually imaginative TV series ever made; and Paddy Kingsland's music is so utterly gorgeous that hearing it to the sunrise can still make me tear up (OK, so it was only pop and rock that I took a while to get into; I always loved TV scores).
I think I'll go out and get myself a new towel. Though Marks and Spencer's in Salisbury is probably a bit of a trek.
Labels: Douglas Adams, Gerry Rafferty, Music, Obituary, Personal, Reviews, Tom Robinson
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Avengers – The House That Jack Built
Did you celebrate The Avengers’ birthday week by watching it last night? No? Luckily, the same episode’s on again on BBC4 at 11.30, and it’s as good as they get. Normally I’d recommend this series for the dialogue between the leads as they swan about having fun, but this is different: Mrs Peel is alone; it’s more tense psychological drama than amusingly witty; but what’s really outstanding is the visual style. Brilliantly filmed, designed in sharp mod monochrome, Emma trapped in a psychedelic maze like an evil TARDIS may make it just about the most ’60s-looking of all ’60s television.
Prompted by Millennium on Friday 9th February, this review was updated in stages, but was eventually finished in slightly less time than it takes to build most houses…
There’s a sub-genre of Avengers tales with this sort of theme, isolating one of the leads in psychological drama rather than pairing them to amuse us. It’s an idea that seemed a particular favourite of one of the show’s principal creative forces, writer / producer Brian Clemens. They’re not to everyone’s taste; if you’re expecting your futuristic adventure show to supply light, witty eccentricity and instead get something grim and oppressive, you might recoil – yes, young Torchwood, you may very well look shifty at the back there – but while these would be trying every week, their rarity makes their bitterness palatable. It’s a good job, or they’d rapidly become repetitive (Don’t Look Behind You and the rather gorgeous The Joker are all but identical, and both share with this that the female lead is lured to a spooky old house, in which a strange young man is not the real danger to her), but there’s something about putting our heroes to the test once in a while that means the best of them are simply the best of the series for me. I’d put this story up with Pandora and Dead Men Are Dangerous as my very favourite Avengers, and it’s thanks to a superb script, a striking atmosphere and, particularly, an already strong character who wins out against all that’s thrown at them.
Mrs Peel is left a house by her Uncle Jack, and drives off to take a look at it. Well before she reaches it, however, there are signs that not all is as it seems. Automated cameras (more obviously sinister in 1966, as not yet ubiquitous) watch her progress through some lovely driving in the countryside, while Steed finds that the key she’s been sent has strange properties – ruining his photos, stopping his clock, and for her jamming the car radio – and a call to her old lawyer swiftly makes it clear that whoever’s this legacy may be, it isn’t her Uncle’s. You automatically assume that, as in other episodes of this type, her enemy is very much alive, but the script plays rather subtly with different types of legacy.
One of the most disturbing scenes is when, penetrating deeper into the House, she finds “an exhibition dedicated to the late Emma Peel” from her birth to death, narrated by a ghastly glowing death-mask. It turns on how she inherited her father’s company at 21, yet her life story as presented here springs from financial reports of “the amazing Emma Knight” taking control of Knight Industries straight to her obituary – perhaps Mr Clemens knew he was saving up any specific details of her late husband to give himself a free hand for a future episode, but it emphasises both her isolation and the suggestion that she had it easy because of her wealthy family. The embittered villain, then, ‘bequeaths’ her a lonely death in madness, with none of the advantages (or love) that he sneers at her for. And yet, of course, her crime is that rather than just resting on her father’s decisions and retaining his automation expert, she made up her own mind and sacked him, part of her making the company a bigger success than ever (besides, the rest of the series implies she get bored running a big industry and made a name for herself writing on applied sciences instead, then in helping out Steed). Though the House is meant to demonstrate that she’s not superior on her own, in fact it proves the opposite, bringing to the fore not just her past accomplishments but her central strength. With nothing to fall back on but her intelligence and determination, she still wins through. When Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier calls it “rather horrible in the drooling department,” that surely misses the point. Emma barely loses her cool here, and never her dignity. The loveliest scene is at the end, as Steed arrives to escort her out in a beautifully underplayed way, but that’s merely moral support… The ‘damsel in distress’ has already rescued herself.
There’s rather more to this episode than putting Mrs Peel to the test, however. This is a story where I suspect even the heterosexual men watching will find the design as memorable to look at as Emma. In an episode full of remarkable images, the one everyone remembers is ‘the House’ – centrally, the striking Op-art patterns of the corridors in which Mrs Peel finds herself trapped. It’s perhaps the best use of black and white in the whole series, with Mrs Peel well-dressed in white to stand out against the harsh patterns of the maze in a similar concept of contrasting monochrome psychedelia as the same year’s Revolver artwork. And part of the reason this is so memorable is that it’s not (as with Dr Armstrong’s lair in The Cybernauts, the series’ other great parable of automation spiralling out of control) presented as sinister sci-fi as soon as you reach it, but as a twist, springing something shockingly ultra-modern on you by hiding it inside a grand old lodge.
At the heart of The Avengers is a fusion of ‘old and new Britain’ – Steed and Mrs Peel, wit and action, postcard villages and swinging London – and frequently the threat our heroes are sent to investigate is one in which things are going too far into conservatism or too far into modernisation (ex-colonists trying to retake a newly independent African state, say, or building robots to create a cybernetic police state were both definite no-nos in the series’ fourth season, from which The House That Jack Built hails). The eponymous House cleverly looks like one threat from the outside but is actually the other, making it almost as much a mix of old and new as the Avengers themselves. When Mrs Peel drives up to it, we see a stern, grand old house, sheer white with a black tracery foreshadowing the later revelation that it is (literally and metaphorically) a whited sepulchre, while she opens the door to a long corridor lined by suits of armour. Add an old-fashioned phone ringing with nobody there, sinister stuffed birds and the sound of a music box, and it’s all in line to be a ‘spooky old house’ from central casting. Yet there have already been contrasting clues; the sudden appearance of a lion in the House when the escaped prisoner breaks in there, the strange behaviour of the key, the cameras at the roadside triggering an automated switch of the road signs… We’ve just not paid them sufficient attention because of a particularly good use of Mr Clemens’ favourite blind in the more ‘traditional’ lonely old house stories, a sinister youngish man forcing himself into Mrs Peel’s company (I’ll come to him later). Here, instead of distracting attention from the real human villain, he’s distracting us from the nature of the House itself, and it’s appropriate that it’s at the moment he’s as distracting as humanly possible – his dying scream – that Mrs Peel opens the inner door that plunges her into somewhere completely unexpected.
The story’s key moment comes fifteen minutes in, when Mrs Peel steps through a door and finds herself in another world, though one quite the reverse of Narnia. With corridors and ‘control rooms’ patterned in stark monochrome and concentric circles, it’s exactly the sort of ’60s look I’ve always loved. The design is extraordinary, and perhaps the most memorable and self-contained of all the ‘worlds’ The Avengers summons into being (there’s a similarly stark ‘Observation Room’ in My Wildest Dream, but this set is so extensive it makes you forget for a while that there’s anything outside it). The Op art high-tech look is matched by an all-pervasive two-tone electronic hum, while at the centre of what seems like a ‘control room’ is a strange plinth with a dome mounted on top of it that houses a revolving light. I’ve always thought of it as some sort of ‘control console’, even though intellectually I know that it’s meaningless as a ‘device’, with its true meaning not in anything that it ‘does’ but as part of a huge set-up designed to drive Emma to madness. That I still can’t help thinking of it that way shows both how much our brains strive to make sense of even deliberately meaningless objects, and emphasises what’s surely a deliberate reference to the TARDIS. With Doctor Who a couple of years old reached the height of its early ratings success when this was made, for The Avengers to feature a mysterious high-tech environment with a ‘control device’ in the centre (rather than as usual along a wall) topped by an intriguing glass-covered device, surrounded by circular patterns in severe black and white, set to an electronic hum and with the whole thing inside an old-fashioned exterior and apparently bigger on the inside than the outside… Well, I think they knew what images they were playing with, though it wasn’t until 1981 that Doctor Who made a similar recurring nightmare of the ‘real’ TARDIS. The difference between the TARDIS and the House, of course, is that while the interior of the Doctor’s ship is vital to it and disguised to avoid attention, this place is a dazzling mirage created entirely to demand Emma’s attention.
She tries to run from this bizarre creation, but there’s no escape in running. The corridors off the ‘control room’ zig-zag away and end in shadows; these are less strikingly designed than the main room, though they have a peculiar repeated metallic carving that suggests a pattern of broken hearts, going back to the disdain for human emotion underlying the House. Memorable as the architecture is, though, it’s how it ‘acts’ that gives it its real impact. Mrs Peel wanders down a corridor, only to find exactly the same ‘control room’ with its spinning ‘console’ at the far end; marking it with lipstick, the camera tilts giddily as she runs back through the labyrinth, where her own lipstick cross greets her. The sense of claustrophobia as she tries to escape is overpowering, and even when she appears to reach other parts of the insane internal geography, they only add to the disorientation. One window shows stars outside; when she finds her way to another, she seems to be looking out from an impossibly high angle across the road she drove in on, but in broad daylight. Just as it seems the tension of being lost in the same corridor will become unbearable, the ‘control room’ is suddenly replaced by a spiral stair set within the concentric rings that the camera turns down with her, again putting the audience almost in Mrs Peel’s place, all while cruel laughter rings. Suddenly, she’s out of the technological madhouse and back into the ‘old’ house.
The whole episode is a showcase for Mrs Peel’s resourcefulness, and with both story and House all about her, the few other characters who appear are really there less as characters than to create an effect on Emma. For the first half of the story, the key figure to Emma is Withers, a deliberately sinister scoutmaster who steps out in front of her car – also part of the iconography, with her wearing a white jacket in her white car, shot against a white sky – at exactly its stopping distance to demand a lift. His part as the ‘strange young man’ who appears to be the threat is emphasised by his Nazi-tinged round wire glasses (with a uniform), his cold manner, his spiked pole and knife, and the generally unsettling effect of a grown-up boy. Dropped off before she gets to the House, he follows her in, drawing a gun, and naturally she seeks him to blame for her predicament on finding his scouting paraphernalia scattered around those bizarre corridors. Of course, he’s actually a friend, despatched by Steed to watch her back without letting on, and (this being The Avengers) he’s taken that rather to extremes. He doesn’t do her any good, though, as his significance to the plot comes principally in his death. The moment of his actual death and the delayed realisation that he’s been killed bookend that extended ‘maze’ sequence, underlining the real threat behind the surreal visuals. She goes into the labyrinth to investigate his scream, but that only becomes evident later when she sees him spiked with his own pole (how, exactly?) as she emerges back into the ‘old’ house. Finding his body is the turning point, half-way through; with her only ‘suspect’ dead, she stops running and starts thinking. She swiftly spots that the rooms are rotating on rollers, but though this illustrates her using her head it’s the only moment where the drama doesn’t quite hold me. All right, it’s the moment to catch your breath before the tension builds again, but I’m not completely convinced by the stylistic device of hearing Mrs Peel ‘thinking aloud’, and not at all convinced by the explanation of the rooms; as there always is in Scooby Doo, there’s plenty that the ‘explanation’ doesn’t cover. So I’ll just stick to the thought that there was LSD in the sprinkler system.
Though the episode revolves around the Op art maze, there’s not nearly as much of it as most people remember. It’s a little like Gerry Rafferty’s song Baker Street, where everyone remembers the saxophone solo and a great many people will swear blind the whole thing’s an instrumental; like the song’s lyrics, people tend to forget much of the second half of The House That Jack Built where Emma goes on the offensive. Once she’s made up her mind, she’s able to peel away the House’s layers, and though the psychological horror of the story remains, her reaction to each successive discovery – whether her own ‘obituary’ or the grisly secret at the House’s heart – is determination mixed with anxiety, not terror. Counterpointing Mrs Peel is first Withers (not up to the job and swiftly killed), then escaped prisoner Burton, a second ‘red herring’ set up as the villain stalking Emma but soon shown to be just a broken victim of the House. His tangled, child-like repetition of the rhyme “The House That Jack Built” and his oblivious death are quite chilling, as a “Bad, bad man” is left with nothing more than a pathetic desire to go back to prison. When Mrs Peel reaches the heart of the House and sees the camera’s staggered zooms on Keller’s prophecy that “You will be quite – quite – mad!” Burton is crouching to one side as a ‘here’s one it made earlier’ demonstration.
The House’s ‘real’ control room contains two versions of the master mind behind it all, one ‘twist’ rather conventional, one still shocking. It’s all been set up by Professor Keller, the expert Emma sacked for his extreme views on ‘total automation’, to get his revenge and prove his point. The whole House is one giant machine designed to send her mad and get her eventually to kill herself, proving (he claims) the superiority of “Automation to the ultimate degree” over humanity. She will lose her mind and die, while his ‘perfect’ machine will continue to run on solar power “for ever”. Though the hidden computer centre is slightly disappointing – very much the conventional wall-sized computer and dial-covered consoles every other series was picturing the time, as opposed to the insane flair of the Op art ‘control room’ – the voice of the House remains frightening in its implacable calmness as it promises “You will feel no pain. No pain.” Professor Keller himself is considerably more frightening. While Mrs Peel and the audience have already concluded he’s deranged from the whole set-up and his charming little recorded messages, the glowing death-mask that ‘spoke’ to her earlier was the real giveaway. Yes, when she finds her way to the centre, hears Keller’s greeting, and whirls and fires, she’s a little late. “I am dead,” the TV monitor tells her, and though Professor Keller has left her many charming pre-recorded poison pen proclamations, the man himself is sat unmoving in a glass mausoleum. It’s another striking image, the lighting making him appear hollow-cheeked and deathly, and the idea of the villain being dead even before the start of the episode is exceptionally macabre (it’s not uncommon to find “a dead man who isn’t dead” in The Avengers, but the reverse is rarer and rather more creepy). When Mrs Peel succeeds in destroying his creation’s ‘mind’ instead, the ‘storm’ that assails her – howling, buffeting wind, flashes as if of lightning, and Steed tossed about in the entrance hall as if on a stormy sea – make it seem more like his vengeful ghost than a machine, and its passing takes what’s left of him with it. The final horribly memorable tour de force comes when the House’s destruction cracks Keller’s glass case: not in one shower of shattered glass, but in three shots as it first splinters, then becomes at last so crazed with fractures that he can no longer be seen.
The House That Jack Built is a masterpiece of visual style and psychological horror, but it has a few less obvious themes and a life-affirming close. With repetition used to disturbing effect within the story – the revolving rooms, the computer’s words, Burton’s broken mumbling – it’s also been echoed in other stories, and not just in The Avengers. With the House’s most famous feature so clearly inspired by the TARDIS, when Doctor Who came up with ‘Professor Keller’ as the Master’s cover in a 1971 story, it’s easy to fancy that Mrs Peel’s enemy left the Master his identity in return for the evil Time Lord lending him a TARDIS for Emma. Less tenuously, The Dr Who Annual 1975 features a similar story with the heroes trapped in a surreal, hypnotic machine; it’s called The House That Jack Built. I can’t think where they got the idea from! Even last year, the series was doing a wealthy, dying scientist obsessed with the replacement of humanity by his artificial creation, from beyond the grave (though admittedly, Cybermen can be a bit smaller than a house thanks to the 21st Century’s more compact technology).
Though I’ve talked about Avengerland’s distinctive theme of the clash between old and new here, there’s also a strong element of another of the series’ favourite themes – breaking the fourth wall. Here, unusually, it’s to horrific rather than comic effect: the obviously back-projected lion that attacks at the beginning is obviously back-projected not, as in most series, because a real lion would be too expensive or dangerous to use, but because within the story it’s a back-projection (with more fake lions outside the House prefiguring what you’ll find inside – and, reinforcing the new-hiding-inside-the-old theme, the lions without captured in stone, the one within captured by camera). Keller addresses Mrs Peel from a television screen, which means of course that he’s also talking directly to the camera and to all of us at home; and the whole underlying point of the House is that, like the artifice of a horror movie, technology is being used to create the effects that scare you, and it isn’t real.
More soberly, with the thrills coming more from the slowly building tension than the action-packed fight sequences found in most Avengers, although in many ways this story’s more violent than usual it’s also more moralistic about the futility of violence. All three people who venture deep into the House carry guns, which do none of them any good: Withers the secret agent, Burton with his stolen prison guard’s shotgun, and even Mrs Peel, unusually willing to wield her shiny revolver. It is Burton’s last shotgun shell that eventually blows the machine’s ‘mind’, but Emma uses her intelligence to make an improvised bomb rather than just blazing away (though admittedly it still undermines the feel a little – I’d have had her lash up something electronic to give it a brainstorm instead). Keller gloats that Emma’s mind and body will both be extinguished, while the machine carries on; of course, that plan fails, but even if it had succeeded, what would it have been for? The machine has no intelligence or creativity, and with Emma dead, no purpose. Similarly, Keller throwing the last few months of his life into creating this grandiose trap makes his own death meaningless. Mrs Peel’s victory champions determination over determinism and, in an understated and tender way, love over death, hate and emptiness. With all the other men in the House violent (and doomed), when Steed arrives at the end he doesn’t start shooting or punching, just holds Emma’s hand in a moment of human contact that proves her right.
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Steed takes a wrong turning – Emma holds the key to allTune in tonight to see it start with a murderer’s escape from prison – topical, I know, but as it’s fantasy, warders spot him immediately and give chase – and find out just why he ends up wishing he hadn’t eluded his pursuers… I first saw this repeated in around about 1985, and I was completely hooked. I’ll tune in again later, refresh my memory and write more of a review in a few days (and yes, I know that’s really cheating, but it’s so much fun I want to watch it properly. And besides, typing is more than usually awkward at just this moment, as I quite literally have a pain in the neck). In the meantime, you’ll find perhaps the ultimate example of that favourite Avengers juxtaposition of the antique and the ultra-modern within The House That Jack Built. It’s hugely atmospheric, looks terrific, and is as close to a miniature movie as TV ever makes. “You will be quite – quite – mad!” Enjoy.
This House has Finished Construction!
Prompted by Millennium on Friday 9th February, this review was updated in stages, but was eventually finished in slightly less time than it takes to build most houses…
There’s a sub-genre of Avengers tales with this sort of theme, isolating one of the leads in psychological drama rather than pairing them to amuse us. It’s an idea that seemed a particular favourite of one of the show’s principal creative forces, writer / producer Brian Clemens. They’re not to everyone’s taste; if you’re expecting your futuristic adventure show to supply light, witty eccentricity and instead get something grim and oppressive, you might recoil – yes, young Torchwood, you may very well look shifty at the back there – but while these would be trying every week, their rarity makes their bitterness palatable. It’s a good job, or they’d rapidly become repetitive (Don’t Look Behind You and the rather gorgeous The Joker are all but identical, and both share with this that the female lead is lured to a spooky old house, in which a strange young man is not the real danger to her), but there’s something about putting our heroes to the test once in a while that means the best of them are simply the best of the series for me. I’d put this story up with Pandora and Dead Men Are Dangerous as my very favourite Avengers, and it’s thanks to a superb script, a striking atmosphere and, particularly, an already strong character who wins out against all that’s thrown at them.
Mrs Peel is left a house by her Uncle Jack, and drives off to take a look at it. Well before she reaches it, however, there are signs that not all is as it seems. Automated cameras (more obviously sinister in 1966, as not yet ubiquitous) watch her progress through some lovely driving in the countryside, while Steed finds that the key she’s been sent has strange properties – ruining his photos, stopping his clock, and for her jamming the car radio – and a call to her old lawyer swiftly makes it clear that whoever’s this legacy may be, it isn’t her Uncle’s. You automatically assume that, as in other episodes of this type, her enemy is very much alive, but the script plays rather subtly with different types of legacy.
One of the most disturbing scenes is when, penetrating deeper into the House, she finds “an exhibition dedicated to the late Emma Peel” from her birth to death, narrated by a ghastly glowing death-mask. It turns on how she inherited her father’s company at 21, yet her life story as presented here springs from financial reports of “the amazing Emma Knight” taking control of Knight Industries straight to her obituary – perhaps Mr Clemens knew he was saving up any specific details of her late husband to give himself a free hand for a future episode, but it emphasises both her isolation and the suggestion that she had it easy because of her wealthy family. The embittered villain, then, ‘bequeaths’ her a lonely death in madness, with none of the advantages (or love) that he sneers at her for. And yet, of course, her crime is that rather than just resting on her father’s decisions and retaining his automation expert, she made up her own mind and sacked him, part of her making the company a bigger success than ever (besides, the rest of the series implies she get bored running a big industry and made a name for herself writing on applied sciences instead, then in helping out Steed). Though the House is meant to demonstrate that she’s not superior on her own, in fact it proves the opposite, bringing to the fore not just her past accomplishments but her central strength. With nothing to fall back on but her intelligence and determination, she still wins through. When Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier calls it “rather horrible in the drooling department,” that surely misses the point. Emma barely loses her cool here, and never her dignity. The loveliest scene is at the end, as Steed arrives to escort her out in a beautifully underplayed way, but that’s merely moral support… The ‘damsel in distress’ has already rescued herself.
There’s rather more to this episode than putting Mrs Peel to the test, however. This is a story where I suspect even the heterosexual men watching will find the design as memorable to look at as Emma. In an episode full of remarkable images, the one everyone remembers is ‘the House’ – centrally, the striking Op-art patterns of the corridors in which Mrs Peel finds herself trapped. It’s perhaps the best use of black and white in the whole series, with Mrs Peel well-dressed in white to stand out against the harsh patterns of the maze in a similar concept of contrasting monochrome psychedelia as the same year’s Revolver artwork. And part of the reason this is so memorable is that it’s not (as with Dr Armstrong’s lair in The Cybernauts, the series’ other great parable of automation spiralling out of control) presented as sinister sci-fi as soon as you reach it, but as a twist, springing something shockingly ultra-modern on you by hiding it inside a grand old lodge.
At the heart of The Avengers is a fusion of ‘old and new Britain’ – Steed and Mrs Peel, wit and action, postcard villages and swinging London – and frequently the threat our heroes are sent to investigate is one in which things are going too far into conservatism or too far into modernisation (ex-colonists trying to retake a newly independent African state, say, or building robots to create a cybernetic police state were both definite no-nos in the series’ fourth season, from which The House That Jack Built hails). The eponymous House cleverly looks like one threat from the outside but is actually the other, making it almost as much a mix of old and new as the Avengers themselves. When Mrs Peel drives up to it, we see a stern, grand old house, sheer white with a black tracery foreshadowing the later revelation that it is (literally and metaphorically) a whited sepulchre, while she opens the door to a long corridor lined by suits of armour. Add an old-fashioned phone ringing with nobody there, sinister stuffed birds and the sound of a music box, and it’s all in line to be a ‘spooky old house’ from central casting. Yet there have already been contrasting clues; the sudden appearance of a lion in the House when the escaped prisoner breaks in there, the strange behaviour of the key, the cameras at the roadside triggering an automated switch of the road signs… We’ve just not paid them sufficient attention because of a particularly good use of Mr Clemens’ favourite blind in the more ‘traditional’ lonely old house stories, a sinister youngish man forcing himself into Mrs Peel’s company (I’ll come to him later). Here, instead of distracting attention from the real human villain, he’s distracting us from the nature of the House itself, and it’s appropriate that it’s at the moment he’s as distracting as humanly possible – his dying scream – that Mrs Peel opens the inner door that plunges her into somewhere completely unexpected.
Inside the House
The story’s key moment comes fifteen minutes in, when Mrs Peel steps through a door and finds herself in another world, though one quite the reverse of Narnia. With corridors and ‘control rooms’ patterned in stark monochrome and concentric circles, it’s exactly the sort of ’60s look I’ve always loved. The design is extraordinary, and perhaps the most memorable and self-contained of all the ‘worlds’ The Avengers summons into being (there’s a similarly stark ‘Observation Room’ in My Wildest Dream, but this set is so extensive it makes you forget for a while that there’s anything outside it). The Op art high-tech look is matched by an all-pervasive two-tone electronic hum, while at the centre of what seems like a ‘control room’ is a strange plinth with a dome mounted on top of it that houses a revolving light. I’ve always thought of it as some sort of ‘control console’, even though intellectually I know that it’s meaningless as a ‘device’, with its true meaning not in anything that it ‘does’ but as part of a huge set-up designed to drive Emma to madness. That I still can’t help thinking of it that way shows both how much our brains strive to make sense of even deliberately meaningless objects, and emphasises what’s surely a deliberate reference to the TARDIS. With Doctor Who a couple of years old reached the height of its early ratings success when this was made, for The Avengers to feature a mysterious high-tech environment with a ‘control device’ in the centre (rather than as usual along a wall) topped by an intriguing glass-covered device, surrounded by circular patterns in severe black and white, set to an electronic hum and with the whole thing inside an old-fashioned exterior and apparently bigger on the inside than the outside… Well, I think they knew what images they were playing with, though it wasn’t until 1981 that Doctor Who made a similar recurring nightmare of the ‘real’ TARDIS. The difference between the TARDIS and the House, of course, is that while the interior of the Doctor’s ship is vital to it and disguised to avoid attention, this place is a dazzling mirage created entirely to demand Emma’s attention.
She tries to run from this bizarre creation, but there’s no escape in running. The corridors off the ‘control room’ zig-zag away and end in shadows; these are less strikingly designed than the main room, though they have a peculiar repeated metallic carving that suggests a pattern of broken hearts, going back to the disdain for human emotion underlying the House. Memorable as the architecture is, though, it’s how it ‘acts’ that gives it its real impact. Mrs Peel wanders down a corridor, only to find exactly the same ‘control room’ with its spinning ‘console’ at the far end; marking it with lipstick, the camera tilts giddily as she runs back through the labyrinth, where her own lipstick cross greets her. The sense of claustrophobia as she tries to escape is overpowering, and even when she appears to reach other parts of the insane internal geography, they only add to the disorientation. One window shows stars outside; when she finds her way to another, she seems to be looking out from an impossibly high angle across the road she drove in on, but in broad daylight. Just as it seems the tension of being lost in the same corridor will become unbearable, the ‘control room’ is suddenly replaced by a spiral stair set within the concentric rings that the camera turns down with her, again putting the audience almost in Mrs Peel’s place, all while cruel laughter rings. Suddenly, she’s out of the technological madhouse and back into the ‘old’ house.
The whole episode is a showcase for Mrs Peel’s resourcefulness, and with both story and House all about her, the few other characters who appear are really there less as characters than to create an effect on Emma. For the first half of the story, the key figure to Emma is Withers, a deliberately sinister scoutmaster who steps out in front of her car – also part of the iconography, with her wearing a white jacket in her white car, shot against a white sky – at exactly its stopping distance to demand a lift. His part as the ‘strange young man’ who appears to be the threat is emphasised by his Nazi-tinged round wire glasses (with a uniform), his cold manner, his spiked pole and knife, and the generally unsettling effect of a grown-up boy. Dropped off before she gets to the House, he follows her in, drawing a gun, and naturally she seeks him to blame for her predicament on finding his scouting paraphernalia scattered around those bizarre corridors. Of course, he’s actually a friend, despatched by Steed to watch her back without letting on, and (this being The Avengers) he’s taken that rather to extremes. He doesn’t do her any good, though, as his significance to the plot comes principally in his death. The moment of his actual death and the delayed realisation that he’s been killed bookend that extended ‘maze’ sequence, underlining the real threat behind the surreal visuals. She goes into the labyrinth to investigate his scream, but that only becomes evident later when she sees him spiked with his own pole (how, exactly?) as she emerges back into the ‘old’ house. Finding his body is the turning point, half-way through; with her only ‘suspect’ dead, she stops running and starts thinking. She swiftly spots that the rooms are rotating on rollers, but though this illustrates her using her head it’s the only moment where the drama doesn’t quite hold me. All right, it’s the moment to catch your breath before the tension builds again, but I’m not completely convinced by the stylistic device of hearing Mrs Peel ‘thinking aloud’, and not at all convinced by the explanation of the rooms; as there always is in Scooby Doo, there’s plenty that the ‘explanation’ doesn’t cover. So I’ll just stick to the thought that there was LSD in the sprinkler system.
Though the episode revolves around the Op art maze, there’s not nearly as much of it as most people remember. It’s a little like Gerry Rafferty’s song Baker Street, where everyone remembers the saxophone solo and a great many people will swear blind the whole thing’s an instrumental; like the song’s lyrics, people tend to forget much of the second half of The House That Jack Built where Emma goes on the offensive. Once she’s made up her mind, she’s able to peel away the House’s layers, and though the psychological horror of the story remains, her reaction to each successive discovery – whether her own ‘obituary’ or the grisly secret at the House’s heart – is determination mixed with anxiety, not terror. Counterpointing Mrs Peel is first Withers (not up to the job and swiftly killed), then escaped prisoner Burton, a second ‘red herring’ set up as the villain stalking Emma but soon shown to be just a broken victim of the House. His tangled, child-like repetition of the rhyme “The House That Jack Built” and his oblivious death are quite chilling, as a “Bad, bad man” is left with nothing more than a pathetic desire to go back to prison. When Mrs Peel reaches the heart of the House and sees the camera’s staggered zooms on Keller’s prophecy that “You will be quite – quite – mad!” Burton is crouching to one side as a ‘here’s one it made earlier’ demonstration.
Jack in the Box
The House’s ‘real’ control room contains two versions of the master mind behind it all, one ‘twist’ rather conventional, one still shocking. It’s all been set up by Professor Keller, the expert Emma sacked for his extreme views on ‘total automation’, to get his revenge and prove his point. The whole House is one giant machine designed to send her mad and get her eventually to kill herself, proving (he claims) the superiority of “Automation to the ultimate degree” over humanity. She will lose her mind and die, while his ‘perfect’ machine will continue to run on solar power “for ever”. Though the hidden computer centre is slightly disappointing – very much the conventional wall-sized computer and dial-covered consoles every other series was picturing the time, as opposed to the insane flair of the Op art ‘control room’ – the voice of the House remains frightening in its implacable calmness as it promises “You will feel no pain. No pain.” Professor Keller himself is considerably more frightening. While Mrs Peel and the audience have already concluded he’s deranged from the whole set-up and his charming little recorded messages, the glowing death-mask that ‘spoke’ to her earlier was the real giveaway. Yes, when she finds her way to the centre, hears Keller’s greeting, and whirls and fires, she’s a little late. “I am dead,” the TV monitor tells her, and though Professor Keller has left her many charming pre-recorded poison pen proclamations, the man himself is sat unmoving in a glass mausoleum. It’s another striking image, the lighting making him appear hollow-cheeked and deathly, and the idea of the villain being dead even before the start of the episode is exceptionally macabre (it’s not uncommon to find “a dead man who isn’t dead” in The Avengers, but the reverse is rarer and rather more creepy). When Mrs Peel succeeds in destroying his creation’s ‘mind’ instead, the ‘storm’ that assails her – howling, buffeting wind, flashes as if of lightning, and Steed tossed about in the entrance hall as if on a stormy sea – make it seem more like his vengeful ghost than a machine, and its passing takes what’s left of him with it. The final horribly memorable tour de force comes when the House’s destruction cracks Keller’s glass case: not in one shower of shattered glass, but in three shots as it first splinters, then becomes at last so crazed with fractures that he can no longer be seen.
The House That Jack Built is a masterpiece of visual style and psychological horror, but it has a few less obvious themes and a life-affirming close. With repetition used to disturbing effect within the story – the revolving rooms, the computer’s words, Burton’s broken mumbling – it’s also been echoed in other stories, and not just in The Avengers. With the House’s most famous feature so clearly inspired by the TARDIS, when Doctor Who came up with ‘Professor Keller’ as the Master’s cover in a 1971 story, it’s easy to fancy that Mrs Peel’s enemy left the Master his identity in return for the evil Time Lord lending him a TARDIS for Emma. Less tenuously, The Dr Who Annual 1975 features a similar story with the heroes trapped in a surreal, hypnotic machine; it’s called The House That Jack Built. I can’t think where they got the idea from! Even last year, the series was doing a wealthy, dying scientist obsessed with the replacement of humanity by his artificial creation, from beyond the grave (though admittedly, Cybermen can be a bit smaller than a house thanks to the 21st Century’s more compact technology).
Though I’ve talked about Avengerland’s distinctive theme of the clash between old and new here, there’s also a strong element of another of the series’ favourite themes – breaking the fourth wall. Here, unusually, it’s to horrific rather than comic effect: the obviously back-projected lion that attacks at the beginning is obviously back-projected not, as in most series, because a real lion would be too expensive or dangerous to use, but because within the story it’s a back-projection (with more fake lions outside the House prefiguring what you’ll find inside – and, reinforcing the new-hiding-inside-the-old theme, the lions without captured in stone, the one within captured by camera). Keller addresses Mrs Peel from a television screen, which means of course that he’s also talking directly to the camera and to all of us at home; and the whole underlying point of the House is that, like the artifice of a horror movie, technology is being used to create the effects that scare you, and it isn’t real.
More soberly, with the thrills coming more from the slowly building tension than the action-packed fight sequences found in most Avengers, although in many ways this story’s more violent than usual it’s also more moralistic about the futility of violence. All three people who venture deep into the House carry guns, which do none of them any good: Withers the secret agent, Burton with his stolen prison guard’s shotgun, and even Mrs Peel, unusually willing to wield her shiny revolver. It is Burton’s last shotgun shell that eventually blows the machine’s ‘mind’, but Emma uses her intelligence to make an improvised bomb rather than just blazing away (though admittedly it still undermines the feel a little – I’d have had her lash up something electronic to give it a brainstorm instead). Keller gloats that Emma’s mind and body will both be extinguished, while the machine carries on; of course, that plan fails, but even if it had succeeded, what would it have been for? The machine has no intelligence or creativity, and with Emma dead, no purpose. Similarly, Keller throwing the last few months of his life into creating this grandiose trap makes his own death meaningless. Mrs Peel’s victory champions determination over determinism and, in an understated and tender way, love over death, hate and emptiness. With all the other men in the House violent (and doomed), when Steed arrives at the end he doesn’t start shooting or punching, just holds Emma’s hand in a moment of human contact that proves her right.
Labels: Gerry Rafferty, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4
