Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
I was putting the finishing touches to this week’s letter when I learned of the sad news of the passing, at 81, of the trailblazing and unique jazz musician Pharoah Sanders. I’ve written about Sanders in this space before, and I will be listening to his music today, tonight, and forever. RIP.
I recently saw Roxy Music play at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where the band’s live line-up included singer Bryan Ferry, guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist Andy McKay, and drummer Paul Thompson, all of whom featured on Roxy’s eponymous 1972 debut LP. It was an enjoyable if slightly curious event—a fiftieth anniversary celebration gig for a band that hadn’t produced a solitary note of new music together in forty years (1982’s “Avalon” was their final LP), in a cavernous but conspicuously underpopulated venue.
Spiffy and bespoke-suited, with the suave, hulking butler-cum-knight Ferry at the helm, the band pushed through a 20-song set studded with a few clear highlights: a pulverizing, light-show enhanced rendition of 1972’s “Ladytron”; a poised version of 1973’s sex doll torch song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” that turns on a dime from creepy calm to psychedelic freakout; and an aching, lovelorn performance of “To Turn You On”, an especially tender cut from “Avalon”—“Is it raining in New York / Down Fifth Avenue?” crooned Ferry, sparking an instant, low moan of adoration from the crowd. (The answer, as it happened, was yes: it was absolutely pissing down as we discovered on our way to the subway at Greeley Square afterwards.)
While it was lovely simply to see these guys in action at long last (it was my first time seeing Roxy or Ferry live), it wasn’t quite the knockout I’d been anticipating in my wildest dreams. For one, my favorite incarnation of Ferry is the strutting drill sergeant with the blaring falsetto and idiosyncratic phrasing (for the absolute pinnacle of this, check out his hysterical, borderline-onomatopoeic meteorological rant in 1975’s “Whirlwind”.) Ferry is now 76, a jauntily diffident performer, and his voice—perfectly understandably—just isn’t what it was. I’ve already written in this very letter about the surprising emotional power of his whispery croak in the correct context, but it was hard not to feel a tang of disappointment when it became clear he that wasn’t going to get near the signature vocal soar of classics like “More Than This”. Much of the heavy lifting was done—beautifully, it must be said—by Ferry’s backing vocalists.
To continue in this slightly churlish vein, I could also have done with a more dynamic setlist. Of course, complaining about a band’s setlist is the subjective errand of a fool, but this one certainly got a little stodgy for my tastes. I can hardly criticize a band of septuagenarians for shorting me on pulsating hard rockers, but I did feel that the set was weighed down by a flabby, mid-tempo middle, and conspicuously light on more esoteric, experimental cuts. There was only one song (relatively straightforward thumper “Out of the Blue”) from Roxy’s most stylistically diverse LP “Country Life” (1974), and no room for personal favorites of mine like “Mother of Pearl”, “Sunset”, “2HB”, or the spectacular, farty-bass goose step of “Manifesto”. How very dare they?
On balance, though—and I’m aware this reads a little like a school book report—I’m extremely glad I went. Roxy are one of a kind, they’ve looked after themselves admirably, and their influence is boundless: no Chic, no David Sylvian and Japan, no Suede, and certainly no Ladytron without them, to name just a few (and remember, they were only active for about a decade; that's 36 years less than U2!) They ran through there with their words of sand. I could nearly understand. In the end, that was the main thing.
Some nice news flashed across my Twitter timeline this week: the announcement of a forthcoming book on the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder by one of my favorite working critics, Ian Penman. (For a good introduction to Penman’s lithe, passionate, contentious prose, I point you to this satisfyingly lengthy 2019 piece on Prince at the LRB.)
It was through a 2014 Penman nugget that I first discovered that Fassbinder—best known for his emotionally piercing, fiercely stylized studies of transactional human relationships—was a football fanatic. Here’s a lovely, brief excerpt from “Fassbinder the Football Fan”:
Last week someone on Twitter sent me a photograph of the late German iconoclast Rainer Werner Fassbinder, decked out in the crisp white livery of FC Bayern Munich. Ach, der einzige Fassbinder! A waxy faced slob who worked harder than anyone alive; a queer and dreamy aesthete who necked Bavarian beer by the steinful and counted German league football an all-consuming passion. (All Fassbinder’s passions were all consuming: this was both his song, and his downfall.) [via LRB]
My favorite Fassbinder film is also the first one I saw: 1974’s heartrending Fear Eats The Soul, a brutal, tender and gloriously shabby portrait of an ill-starred love affair between a sixty year old white German woman, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), and a significantly younger Moroccan migrant worker, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). I wrote about the film at length for the booklet accompanying Arrow Films’ mammoth 2016 Fassbinder box set, and to this day I remain deeply moved by its empathy, and nerveless, ever-resonant prodding at the prejudice that courses through the veins of modern-presenting metropolitan cities.
I’ve got a bit of a Fear Eats the Soul theory, you know. Back in 1994, when I was eight, a character named Samir Rachid (Al Nedjari) appeared on the popular, Manchester-set ITV soap opera Coronation Street, which I used to watch pretty religiously with my family. Samir was a young Moroccan waiter who fell in love with one of the show’s main characters, Deirdre Barlow (Anne Kirkbride), who happened to be eighteen years Samir’s senior.
The pair’s ill-fated subsequent relationship was one of the show’s most explosive and controversial storylines, and it only struck me years after the fact—and some time after I first watched Fear Eats the Soul—that it absolutely must have been inspired by Fassbinder’s film. The intergenerational, interracial affair; the destructive, small minds of a small town; the tragic conclusion. I mean, you tell me!
I can’t turn up any confirmation of this, but if any readers can, I would be delighted. Hell, I’ll even—maybe—buy you a Samir and Deirdre Marriage T-shirt! Until such time, let’s keep on a Moroccan theme and play out with some Nass El Ghiwane, subject of Ahmed El Maanouni’s classic 1981 documentary Trances:
See you next week!
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