Get your tickets for a quiet Word with Ben Watt at the Islington

Ben Watt's our special guest when we record another Word podcast at the Islington on Monday, September 22nd.

He'll be talking to me and Mark Ellen about his adventures in the music business as a solo artist, producer, DJ, club owner and independent label head.

He'll also be talking about his current album Hendra and his book Romany and Tom: A Memoir, which I blogged about here. The first has just picked up the Difficult Second Album award from AIM, the second has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for non-fiction.

This is the latest in a series of shows that we've put on at the Islington. The last one featured Simon Napier-Bell. They're available as podcasts, which you can subscribe to here. Tickets to the live event are £10. You can get them here.

Neil Young stops the crowd at Carnegie Hall from clapping and he's got a point

During the first of four shows he's playing at Carnegie Hall this week Neil Young stopped a song because the audience was clapping in the wrong time. According to the New York Times review "Mr Young seemed rattled by the precarious balance of worship and familiarity exhibited by the capacity crowd".

There are times when Neil Young seems a bit up himself, as the young people might say. This doesn't sound like one of them. I know exactly what the writer means by the worship and familiarity. It happens all the time these days when you go and see icons. The audience are so keyed up for the experience that they get ahead of themselves. They're not reacting to what's going on in the hall. They're celebrating the fact that they're in the same room as a legend.

When I went to see Bob Dylan recently I sat near a middle-aged woman who stretched her arms towards him in supplication throughout every song. If this had been a church service you would have moved away from her. At that gig we were close enough for Dylan himself to be able to see her. He must have found it disturbing as well. Then again I'm sure he's used to it by now.

I'm writing this while listening to Live At The Cellar Door, a collection of live recordings of Neil Young made in 1970 when he had just written the songs that made his name. There's no untoward audience reaction here, no cack-handed clapping along to songs that really don't call for any sort of percussion and he can even sing the line in After The Gold Rush about "I felt like getting high" without anyone answering with an approving whoop. It's a relief.

Johann Johannsson and the sound of peace and quiet

Johann Johannsson is an Icelandic composer whose music is approvingly described as "haunting". That's the word critics always reach for when they can't hang their hat on the beat or the lyrics. "Haunting" is what people who've got university degrees use to describe music that's easy to listen to, which I suppose is different from easy listening. I play quite a bit of music in this category. I reach for it when I'm looking for a change from music that has a lot going on in it. If that sounds like a slight, I don't mean it to be.

Fordlandia is a piece inspired by an industrial community Henry Ford tried to establish in the Brazilian Rain forest in the 1920s. He did it in the hope it would supply enough rubber to reduce his company's dependence on the products of Malaya. It didn't work. The local pests killed the rubber plants. The workers didn't like Ford's regime. The Brazilian government didn't cooperate. It's been a ghost town since the thirties. 

Once a composer like Johannsson has chosen to tell us that his music's about Fordlandia then something magic happens in our heads; we can instantly see the boats coming upstream with their crew of sweating, fly-swatting petrol heads. We can smell the decay. We can snigger at this triumph of nature over petty, striving, greedy man. Had he chosen to call it something different we would be seeing something different again. At school Mr Grimshaw used to herd us all into the lecture hall, get out the old wood-panelled record player, some classical recordings and then ask us if we could see the sea or trees moving in the wind or war of whatever it was that the piece of music was supposed to be inspired by. We would nod and say we could. I think what we were mainly enjoying was the peace and quiet.



 Johannsson is in the UK in March. Dates here.

Van Dyke Parks and the lost art of talking between songs

I wouldn't be surprised if Van Dyke Parks has forgotten this record. He made it in 1996. I've only just bought it. These days I'm crazy about Van Dyke Parks. "Moonlighting" is him and a full band with singers and a string section playing - and playing wonderfully - songs from throughout his career, songs like Orange Crate Art, FDR in Trinidad and Sailin' Shoes.

VDP is a man who understands, as 99.9% of performing musicians don't, that since its's deuced hard to get people's attention it's a bloody crime to waste it. (I wasn't there when he came in to do the Word podcast but according to those who were he came in like a whirlwind, talked a blue streak, did everything but kissed the hands of the women and, most tellingly, left this business card.)

On this album, recorded at the Ash Grove in Hollywood, he's similarly busy. He starts talking as the applause fades at the end of the first number, and then introduces the next and the next and the next by way of anecdote, quotation, historical analogy, political rant, geography lesson, Robert Frost poem or reminiscence about the circumstances in which he wrote or heard it. He doesn't say "this next song's called" or "I want to tell you a story". He understands, like Bruce Springsteen understands, that a stage act is a story. There's not a second of deviation, repetition or hesitation in the whole set. It makes the performance seem so full. It says "keep up, keep up".

Obviously most musicians don't have the conversational gifts of a VDP. Nonetheless listening to "Moonlighting" reminds me that if there's one thing I'm consistently disappointed by when watching live rock bands it's their failure to give the impression that they've even thought about what they might say between songs. It's their apparent willingness to build excitement and then just let it fall away as they tune up, swap instruments or wait for another member of the band to say something. It's as if they're just there to play the songs and the person whose job it is to entertain the audience, introduce the songs and just generally play host has unaccountably failed to turn up.

You don't have to talk a lot. I don't think the Ramones ever did. But the people who've bought a ticket are paying for every moment of the experience and if a lot of those moments are filled with nothing but agonising pauses and the shuffling of feet they're entitled to ask why.