glam

The Wizard of Oz

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 22:22:55 +0000

The Wizard of Oz Robert Cochrane November 10, 2023 - 17:22

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JEFF DUFF: Being Jeff Duff

To release your thirtieth album is no mean feat. An act of sublime defiance and longevity. Such is so with the genuinely remarkable Australian man of other worlds, Jeff Duff, a rock and roll survivor, a maverick, and an entity worthy of greater note. His has been a fantastical sojourn along the highways and alleyways of musical existence. To have completed such an achievement and sound fresh, challenging, and relevant is to be applauded and an act few can validate.

Having surfed the fashions and foibles of fame, this remarkable elfin figure with a cresting, soaring voice of great poignancy, part Iggy Pop, a dash of Bowie, a twist of Lou Reed, is a cocktail that is entirely his own. He even can sport a quote from the silver-wigged art world wonder Andy Warhol, "Sinatra, Presley, Jagger, Popeye, and now... Duffo!," got to Number One in Argentina with a salient cover of Reed's hymn to Low-life life "Walk On the Wild Side," hung out with the Thin White Duke, and generally coasted against the grain of Australian conventions. He was almost beaten to death in a homophobic attack which means his skinny frame is these days held together by screws and pieces of metal. However, not gay Duffo was sufficiently different to upset the natives, an act that almost saw his permanent demise. In a publicity-hungry stunt in the late seventies during his relocation to the UK, he chained himself to the gates of No 10 Downing Street, an impossible feat these days and one that would find one shot with the questions being asked later.

"Being" begins with an almost Arabic vibrancy in the guise of the epic soundscape that is "Romancing Paris 1895," a perfect shimmering sands confection, eloquent, poised, and enchanting, it has true verve as a paean to the downfall of Wilde with elements of Lodger-era Bowie. "Falling in love meant falling from grace" neatly encapsulates the ethos of this telling tale. "If You Go Away," dedicated to the memory of Scott Walker, is given a fresh air of modernity and echoes vocally the subject of the tribute. In another world, Jeff Duff could have been a crooner of considerable panache, but he has a rock 'n' roll heart. With "And So it Rains In Venice," we have a brooding significant production number, all swagger and sway with an impassioned vocal cresting above a bed of strings and sparkly piano motifs; this is a song that twists and coils like the craziness of snakes.

"Paradise Lost" allows a heartbeat sensuality to pervade as it swells into a simmering "cry in your gin" Glam-lament. All pathos and arch melancholy, this is a swaggering anthem for an era of lost and grieved over glories. "Don't bring on your chaos, and don't bring on the night." Moving and exceptionally haunting, it grabs the listener by the ears of his soul. "What Was I Thinking" is a nightscape ballad of neon sensibilities, crisscrossing the two divine Davids, Sylvian and Bowie. It is exquisite, mannered, and a brooding masterpiece with beautiful guitar licks as it leaves. "Manchild" has a Jobriath-like piano-drenched sadness, a sorrowful sorrow that builds and cascades, a lament to the indifference of being different and disappointed.

There is a jaunty Anthony Newley-like music hall conceit to 'Brain Dancing' about Einstein's near-mythical meeting with Marilyn Monroe, which even pillages "E equals Mc squared" into the lyric, a witty and playful diversion and confection. "King Of Yesterday" is self-revelatory and Peter Gabriel-like, an anthem of choral hugeness that explains "the road that leads nowhere is the road I choose to follow." "Tawny" exhibits aspects of Bowie's "Young Americans" with a blue-eyed black sleekness. Smooth with an eloquent edge that smolders with refined sophistication, a neat exercise of contrivance and restraint with saxophone embellishments towards the end. The closer is "Willow," a wavering perfection of light funk at play that bows out with majestic grace.

The bonus track, Duff's 1989 take on "MacArthur Park," in no way jars or seems out of place, a perfect second ending that shows what an ageless instrument Duff's voice remains. This is pure bombast with class and a gracious gift that nods and winks to a stellar past and a future that simmers with sublime anticipation.

Jeff Duff has delivered a gilt-edged calling card of professionalism, inspiration, and panache.

Proof perfect that life begins at thirty.

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A Fabulous Wind

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:42:09 +0000

A Fabulous Wind Robert Cochrane August 12, 2008 - 17:42

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glam

Clive Kennedy: Clive Kennedy (UK)

Glam was a peculiar time in popular music. It allowed the genuinely weird to posture, albeit briefly, whilst forcing the sadly mundane to look like trainee drag queens. The New York Dolls got it genuinely and alarmingly right, as did Marc Bolan. Bowie claimed the era as his pilfered kingdom, but the sad buffoonery of the Glitters and Stardusts were hot on his heels as also-ran competitors.

Early Roxy Music were divine Glam at its most arch. Eno, all feathers, finery and ambient soundtracks; Ferry like the decadent space-age spiv, a routine that would finally entomb him as a lounge lizard fossil. The scandalously pubescent Brett Smiley would have scandalized had the right level of management and indecent exposure fallen his way, whilst the sadly reviled Jobriath paid dearly for his faggy audacity. Freddie Mercury was far more interesting as a killer queen than a Castro Street Clone, and Elton John had yet to become the Queen Mother of rock and pop. The list of the wantonly perverse and deluded seems endless, but there is one odd absence, and there is always room for another spaced-out oddity.

Step forward Clive Kennedy, not a name one would necessarily know, or expect to find in such glittering company. So obscure that he could be the patron saint of the category, here is a man beyond the reaches of Google. Certainly his one album is a last gasp of effeteness from an era already in marked decline, but with the passage of time it is a venerable object. That it got made at all is a strange enough proposition.

When former Lush guitarist Phil King discovered a copy of the 1976 album sans sleeve in what remained of the offices of Jonathan King's UK Records, he realized he'd stumbled upon an artifact of significance from his favorite genre.

Garnering the interest of reissue specialists RPM, he learned that Kennedy had moved to New York in the late Seventies, where he fell victim to AIDS. King then found the sleeve, but instead of a swaggering Tim Curry or an elfin dandy, he discovered a bearded man with a piercing gaze, the kind that inhabited English country houses from the 1890s till the early 1950s. It struck down the chance of any Kennedy revival. With no charismatic freak at the vinyl rainbow's end with which to decorate a feature, the ordinariness of Kennedy's demeanor clashed with the Pandora's Box his vinyl undoubtedly contained.

Unlike the dandy in retirement that had been discovered in John Howard, Kennedy was plainly a difficult proposition. It had the same affect as the iceberg had on the Titanic, which is a massive shame as it is a work of quality which deserves wider attention. It is also a near perfect surmising of the Glam ethos, where artifice was all. Like John Howard's knowingly louche and worldly elder sibling, you can tell Kennedy has been around the decadent block numerous times, and been somewhere near the wild side.

Lyrically wise and witty, he kicks off the proceedings with "The Fabulous Invalid": It wouldn't be fair to blame Times Square For showing a pair of tits. We all enjoyed the celluloid And we're all to blame a bit... The flame goes out And Broadway goes dark. A meandering epic concerning the vulnerabilities of stardom, it sounds like early Queen with Noel Coward on vocals, but it also has echoes of Supertramp.

Kennedy exuded a deliciously fay and fruity delivery, part Tiny Tim meets Sparks, and his world is a walk along the seamier side, that sometimes can be terribly wild. "International Gypsy," a trawl through expensive decadence, smacks of an insider's knowledge and crosses "Where Do You Go to My Lovely" with "Killer Queen" and more than a dash of "You're So Vain": In the Bois de Boulogne in the back of a car Sipping champagne from a shoe. You International Gypsy You... Swing upside down from a chandelier In a private Venetian Galleon Which you hired for a month at the best time of year... And your caravan is a Pan Am flight for two... And your name has been linked to the Shah...' The wonderfully touching and tender "I Think I'm Falling in Love With You" is a palm court love song; released as a single, it failed to set the world aflame. There are also lines with a caustic flavor. On "The Demon Is a Liar," a wonderful piece of near evangelical Glam, he snaps in sarcastic sacrilege And tonight sweet Jesus takes a bride And another little virgin angel's crucified... Keep on reading the Good Book and praying "The Late, Late Show," also a single, is a fabulous, creeping song which extols the ghostly afterlife of movie stars on obscure channels, cribbing lines from Mae West and W.C. Fields; affectionate and caustic in equal measure, it has a neat and lingering nostalgia. "Solomon Gold" is the kind of pseudo-vaudevillian song Paul Williams made his own, except Kennedy mixes it with an answering machine message, which sounds rather menacing. "New York City Pretty" deals with lofty aspirations that generally crash and burn, and how the finery a city bestows seems absurd to those who live beyond the city limits.

"We were New York City Pretty

To all our many red-necked friends

Who had never seen a Bleecker Street

With such a bitter end

And we got no broken dreams to mend"

The album signs off in bonkers fashion with "The Great Red Rusty Robot in the Sky," which sounds like elements of Sparky's Magic Piano in tandem with Bowie's "Space Oddity" plus an array of homemade instruments Kennedy unveils on the back of the album, such as The Magic Mouth Machine, which look like Heath Robinson confections.

Authentic, arch, eccentric, and diverting, Clive Kennedy's sole album deserves another airing, even though he looks more at home in a weekend shooting party than in the company of Glam stars. A total one-off, it remains a befitting legacy for a forgotten man, and is a tremendously English affair.

Maybe one day we'll be able to listen without feeling that the image of the creator negates his right to a second chance. The strength of his personality arises from the ghostly grooves, and even though he resembles a naughty uncle from the country, you know he'd be fun, charmingly indiscreet, with the strange scent of scandal, and the suggestive noise of skeletons rattling around in a rickety closet.