2008 matters because... Part 1

I've not posted much recently but that is not because music has been far from my mind. Rather the opposite in fact; it is just that I have been listening to it and thinking about it rather than writing about it. Several people have asked about lyrics to some albums I have mentioned recently, particularly 'Jill Jackson' - Jill Jackson and 'Love Tattoo' - Imelda May and I hope to have these on-line this coming weekend at the latest.

Some say, and it has been the case for decades, that the latest year is just more proof of the end of the world as we know it. I am quite willing to believe that the global economy in 2008 has suffered vicissitudes unknown in the lifetimes of most of us but does that therefore mean the end of music as we know it? I'd wager that the answer is no for that never really happens, new layers are simply added and, while some genres fade in popularity and prominence (not always the same thing) they rarely disappear completely and have a tendency to return, revisited and reinvented, when least suspected. I have only one reservation and that is: Do you get the feeling that things are undergoing a subtle, but perhaps profound, change?

Think back over the last year and there are some surprises, the most surprising often not being the most immediately obvious. A good and fairly easy place to start is the continuing ascent of apparently unlikely, but often very successful, cover versions.

Who, say three years ago, would have predicted the likes of Adele covering Bob Dylan's Make You Feel My Love?
It's the only cover on her 2008 début album '19' but what a dangerous choice - he has rarely played it live, hinting that it it is too difficult to perform under pressure - but when she performed it live on 'Later... with Jules Holland' as a piano ballad it went stellar and is now to be a single.
Leona Lewis has just released an updated version of her #1 2007 album 'Spirit', which went straight to the top spot again this week; of the two new tracks on it one is actually a cover version of Run from the 2003 Snow Patrol album 'Final Straw' which she first revealed, by performing it live, on BBC Radio 1's 'Live Lounge' in 2007 and again on X-Factor a couple of weeks ago.

I've heard this cover of Willie Nelson's Angel Too Close To The Ground (from the soundtrack to the 1980 drama Honeysuckle Rose), performed live by Beth Rowley twice now and it is amazing:

If you had not have fallen then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the ground.

I patched up your broken wings and hung around a while
Kept your spirits up and your fever down.
I knew some day that you would fly away
For love's the greatest healer to be found

So leave me, if you need to, but I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground.

It is included, as a duet, on her 2008 début album 'Little Dreamer', which also includes a fine cover of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released and also some very good new songs. In my opinion So Sublime is the best of them, and amongst the best on the album, but it is all a close call.

I'll expand on what I mean by this generalisation in the coming weeks, but this is my premise:
Could the diversity that we have seen this year be the start of a new era of popular music we can hardly yet even imagine?

Spirit

I have quite a cautious approach to 'reality TV' music talent searches, although I must admit that there have already been some genuine artists therefrom. That said, I really wonder if even those in control really thought this could actually happen. Début single at #1 in the UK was a pushover and that the album did the same on its week of release was, in the event, and following the success of the single, not very surprising either. The real test would certainly be in America...

When her first single 'Bleeding Heart' went to the top of the 'Billboard 100 Singles' it was an incredible feat for a new UK artist, the first by any solo UK female artist to do so since 1987.

The "last one to do it" aspect now matters no longer!

Spirit has just become the first début album by a UK solo artist, male or female, ever to reach #1 in the US chart on the week of release - a record that belongs to Leona Lewis in perpetuity - and she did it in style. Spirit sold 205,000 copies against her nearest chart rival, George Strait, whose album Troubadour sold 59,000 copies. It is however not a patch on the first-week UK sales of Spirit, for which it currently holds the all time record of 375,000 copies in the week of release, a record not just for a début album but for any artist studio album.

If you think I may have fallen into some kind of idolatry here please see the 'I've just listened to...' list on the side-bar. I'm now trying to include links in it, particularly within this blog, and also now have increased the entries displayed from ten to fifteen. It these have fallen off the bottom by the time you read this, I suggest Passionoia - Black Box Recorder and Heavy Horses - Jethro Tull as two apparently very different albums that embody many of my thoughts on music that is quintissentially British and, in the case of Black Box Recorder, specifically a certain kind of English.

This is the week this is...

'That Was the Week That Was' was a BBC radio production featuring many of the great names of radio in its time, which was about that when The Beatles were heading for domination of the music world in a way previously unimaginable but, some 46 years later, this is the week that has created some, admittedly 'red-top', newspaper headlines that echo through the decades:

• Sir Paul McCartney (a certified "National Treasure", as several of the cast of the BBC radio show were, or later became) was finally divorced from Heather Mills.

• Carla Bruni-Sarkozy made a state trip to Britain and she was of course accompanied by her husband Nicolas, who just happens to be the President of France. Truth to tell they both played their parts brilliantly: Gordon Brown talked about a new political entente formidable and the next morning, while on a boat trip down the Thames, the newly-weds played the UK media thing to perfection with an entente à deux as they shrugged off the fact that one UK tabloid paper had reprised an old picture of Mme. Bruni-Sarkozy, sans vêtements and taken on a modelling shoot in the early 1990s, by sharing a snog in front of the media cameras. She has also recorded two albums (one in French and one in English) that have had some critical acclaim. French politics has had its fair share of scandal but never has it been quite so honest, transparent and legal!

• This week UK music has done a remarkable thing. To paraphrase the 1988 single by Sting (and without any mercy on my part) West Londoner in New York, Estelle, displaced Duffy at the top of the UK single chart with the single 'American Boy', sung with Kanye West. That is not very remarkable but simultaneously East Londoner, and winner of X-Factor 2006, Leona Lewis is at #1 in the US singles chart with the single 'Bleeding Love' - and she only the third UK solo female artist to take a début single to #1 in the US.