One of my first ever interactions with another music journalist occurred after a Paul Simon concert in 1991 that I attended. I think it was in the Daily Telegraph that the review appeared and, having loved the gig from start to finish, I was rather disappointed with a write up focusing on Simon’s spontaneity zapping over-rehearsed presentation that, in the writers opinion, sucked any sense of occasion and personable interaction out of the show. Over three decades later I can see he probably had a point, I seem to recall that during that tour Paul would play ‘You Can Call Me Al’ then word for word, every night, repeat a scripted ad-lib about “this is a party” and play the whole song again. Anyway, aggravated that the quality of the music has not been properly reflected, I wrote a reprimanding letter to the journalist advising him of his factual inaccuracies and highlighting the concert material I felt had not been fairly represented. You see, at the time, I felt that Paul Simon was almost the only artist from the sixties who could hold his head high with present-day releases that still felt relevant whilst pushing his own musical journey forward. Time has kind of held my opinion to be true; in 1991 acts like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney had done little to turn around their late 80s doldrums although I would now admit my knowledge of people like Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Lou Reed was not as deep as it would become after I lived through my twenties later that decade. I should also note that the journalist in question went to the trouble of replying to my letter duly noting my comments, a classy touch that ensured I never wrote a similar missive again simply because I disagreed with someone else’s opinion.

I mention this because during the past month I delighted in a three-and-a-half-hour cinema experience watching the newly released Paul Simon documentary ‘In Restless Dreams; The Music Of Paul Simon’. It is a deep dive into the mans career giving it the time and scope that one of the twentieth centuries greatest songwriters warrants. The archive footage is plentiful and as a long-time fan I was thrilled to witness many clips that were new to me, especially from Paul’s frequent late seventies appearances on Saturday Night Live where he sought to extinguish an over-earnest reputation by gamely sending himself up in comedy skits. Many of the music clips were played long enough to really bathe in and new perspectives burst forth on many key moments from the man’s history. Art Garfunkel may feel a little aggrieved as much as he was fairly represented in the Simon & Garfunkel years, I do think the implication that he would not take a bullet for Paul when a stage invader approached the singer during the 1981 reunion concert in Central Park is unfair. That incident happened in a split second, Artie did not have a moment to think and to suggest he was unwilling to step in had an actual physical assault taken place seems unnecessarily harsh. Maybe the film could have focused less on the creation of last years ‘Seven Psalms’ album, as fascinating as that story is thanks to the seed of the idea coming to Paul in a dream and the trauma of hearing loss impacting him during recording, and not ignored all of the music Paul released over the next thirty years after 1990, that back catalogue has some under appreciated gold dust in there too. Ultimately, the film prompted me to enjoy an extremely rewarding revisit to the Paul Simon back catalogue during October. I am a rock! However, the monthly playlist, as always, features seventy-four other acts in addition to a little nugget from the man himself…

Apologies for the slightly later in the month posting of the playlist this time around. Life has got in the way a bit but not to the extent that the music exploration has stopped. In fact, alongside the usual record/song hunting the past month has seen me dive into some bumper fun archive box set packages from some of my favourite artists. Amongst these was the impossibly expanded John Lennon ‘Mind Games’ set; a release that received a surprising amount of positive critical reaction but there was little about it’s six discs to convince me that this was ever more than a middling Lennon album. As fascinating as the evolutions of the tracks is, you cannot escape the fact that half the material was John on auto-pilot in order to hit the requisite track numbers to justify an album release. It goes without saying though that when he hit the mark, Lennon was a master and his voice remained one of the all time great rock ‘n’ roll sounds.

With a new Neil Young Archives volume on the shelves I thought it high time I actually caught up with the previous Volume II. It is the live material that brings the gold for the most part and the whole chronological structure leads you to wonder why other legendary acts do not adopt a similar approach. The answer is that in most cases it would not be that interesting, repetition and over familiarity would become an issue but this is never the case with Neil Young. Standing still for more than a couple of months was impossible for him it seems with new songs, re-imagined old songs, unexpected cover versions and bold audience baiting experiments ever present in his live experience. I found similar satisfaction in the second volume of the Joni Mitchell Archive series. Here too there are complete concert recordings alongside other buried treasure like hotel room chatter and a superb radio session for John Peel that retains the DJ’s effusive introductions and spoken segues.

Peel featured heavily on my favourite box set from the last month, a rollicking eight disc set chronicling The Faces in session and in concert for the BBC in the early seventies. It is easy to hear why the DJ, who only a few years later would go it alone on Radio One in getting behind the Punk movement, found so much to love in this band. It was an affection that found him gushing during one live ‘in concert’ session how he would like to apply for the job to be The Faces roadie. Other than being a red-hot soulful British bluesy rock band, they just seemed so switched on to the overriding joy this music could provide and squeezed every last drop of juice out of the experience. They did not take themselves too seriously either, something that Peel always had a tendency to fall for, and on more than one occasion can be heard joking how they want to get the performance over with speedily so they do not miss last orders. Each of these sets have a track featured in this months playlist alongside a heady mix of Psych, Folk, Blues, Rock, Pop, Jazz, Soul and beyond…

There is light at the end of the tunnel

Out of all my long term favourite bands who could still reunite with original members, REM are the ones who would prompt the most excitement. I write this because a reunion, of sorts, has taken place over the past month when all four were inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame. To mark the occasion, they sat down together for an in depth interview and at the ceremony itself, reunited for a performance of ‘Losing My Religion’. That however, is almost certainly going to be that. When asked during the questioning about the possibility of any future reunion tour they all seemed resolute in their position, this is not something that is ever going to happen, no matter how much money is on the table.

They forever were a band acutely aware of the pitfalls that befall big rock bands in the 80s and 90s. Music fans first and foremost, I always thought this the one facet that gave them an edge over the competition, REM were pointedly vigilant in not becoming a U2 or such-like and only releasing new music around a five year tour cycle or stagnating as a live band with a punched in identikit set list. They rigorously pushed back these lazier trappings of the elite, especially when they themselves became part of that same club, always seizing initiatives like live rehearsal shows of new material or albums worked into shape during soundchecks. And so it seems to this day, the no-no of a lucrative reformation remains beyond the pale, you cannot expect a second opportunity to leave your legacy in a healthy place.

Michael Stipe referred in that interview to his reluctance to attend a reformed Velvet Underground back in 1993, but also acknowledged he probably regrets that decision now. I saw them too that year and definitely have no shame in taking that one-off opportunity while it was there. But it is true, they did rough ride with their own legacy a bit, no way did the Velvets do anything to enhance it with that reunion tour. It’s saving grace was arguably that it imploded before it even reached the US, but how can a band like the Velvet Underground open for U2, honestly? By refusing to go down the reformation route REM are also respecting another too often ignored universal truth, that when something has reached the end of its life span there is never a turning back. Everything has its time, a brief or, with luck, an extended period in the light when your actions and deeds are received and experienced to maximum effect, but it never lasts forever. And, when the finishing line is crossed, there is no going back. That which is gone can never return and all we can do hence forth is honour the memory and dive into the legacy with a sense of appreciation. I have been doing that very thing lately.

Enjoy the playlist… doesn’t feature any REM or Velvet Underground actually but there you go… others do…

The world of record collecting always has the capacity to throw up a wonderful surprise but if you want those moments of euphoria you must put in the hard yards. Unless you are very lucky, the occasions of uncovering buried treasure will not come about unless you have spent hours looking through boxes, shelves, attics and sheds containing titles by James Last, Jim Reeves, Ken Dodd, Val Doonican, Engelbert Humperdinck all sitting alongside a tasteless mélange of budget compilations on labels like Readers Digest, K-Tel, Music For Pleasure or indeed any outlet that put out releases with words like Hits or Chart or Pops in the titles. There are so many repeat offenders, so many mass-produced releases put out by blood-sucking music business mercenaries, the Simon Cowell’s of their day, which show up all the time in record collections of people who were purchasing vinyl between the sixties and the eighties. If you think Cowell later mastered the art of selling shit music to people who don’t give a shit about music, a glance through all too many 40–60-year-old record collections will prove that it was not a financial masterstroke of his making. And the thing is, even if in some cases an argument could be made for merit in the music, there is simply no demand for these albums on the collector’s market at all.

Val, James, Jim and Ken were selling in huge quantities because they had a massive audience among the older generation; those who had no desire to tune in and drop out in the sixties; the folks who didn’t mind the Beatles in the mop top years but had no tolerance when they started going a bit funny with drugs; the people whose only reaction to the punk racket was to express a wish to see national service brought back and the casualties in the eighties who yearned for the days when people played real instruments. Still, no two personal album libraries are the same and I was fortunate enough this month to find a box of albums in an auction with something rather special in it. At first it appeared to consist of nothing more than pristine copies of all the middle-of-the-road acts mentioned above and similar but then I chanced upon equally immaculate original copies of the first three Beatles albums. Two were regulation Mono issues (although still incredible in such ‘like new’ condition) but the third was actually a very rare Stereo pressing of their debut Please Please Me album (Stereo equipment was very much a specialist interest in 1963, almost everyone bought Mono). The first thing you look for is the label because the ultra-scarce first editions briefly came out with the old Parlophone label design with gold lettering. This was not, it had the more familiar yellow lettering seen on all Beatles Parlophone releases for the remainder of the decade. But in every other sense it was clearly a 1963 original and crucially, the sleeve was the exact same sleeve configuration seen on the original gold lettering release. Put simply, it is very rare, something of a holy grail item to some Beatle fanatics and there it was sat in the middle of an unremarkable box of bang average album titles underneath a table at an auction.

So, I put my bids in online for the following days sale (I could not attend in person) and hoped for the best, keeping my fingers crossed that no one else had seen what I’d seen. Well, I guess someone had because, even though I won the box, it still cost me over £200 and there is no way anybody was paying that sort of money for the Vince Hill albums also included. Still, an unwelcome drama almost happened when I went to pay and collect because I was close to falling foul of a dirty trick some unscrupulous traders pull at auctions. Because there are often several boxes of records being sold it is easy, during the viewing day, to maybe slip a tasty platter from one box into another on the morning of the sale so absent bidders like myself are unaware that the box they are bidding heavily on for just one collectable title no longer has that album in it. I have the auction porter to thank for that not happening to me because as I was carrying my box out (having checked Please Please Me was still in there, I’ve been stung before) he came and said “I assume you wanted that for the Beatles albums? They’re still there but they nearly weren’t. They’d been swapped into the box next door, but I spotted them and put them back.” Obviously, I thanked him effervescently, but it is a lesson worth remembering if you buy from auctions. There are so many people at these places with such a lively bustle of activity that this little sleight-of-hand can so easily occur. All is rarely fair and honest in any form of collectables trading, when money’s involved people are ruthless.

My Please Please Me with original Stereo sleeve has sold already I’m afraid pop pickers. Because of its rarity and, I won’t deny it, wanting to get as much money for it as possible I auctioned it on eBay. I was extremely happy with the price too but remember, whilst I accept the happy slice of good fortune involved, the number of Jim Reeves records I have flicked past over the years are the dues I’ve paid in full. Enjoy this month’s playlist…