Hello there you in your denim shorts and wellies uniform - how's the festival season for you this year? Ours has been limited to Cropedy, thanks for asking. The Hop Farm is no more; there was no one worth shelling out for at Lounge on the Farm; V and Reading simply too much like a war zone for the more mature festival goer; failed once again to get tickets for Glastonbury. On this last point, what's the secret here? Our boy and many of his friends got them as did a number of people one reads about who claim to go every year. But for us, despite being welded to the Internet and phone with military precision from 5 minutes before the allotted time for Glasto ticket sales - nowt. Not a sausage. Again. Is there some cunning filter in the ticket sales process which, via cutting edge artificial intelligence, determines that you're too old/fat/boring for Glasto? Or perhaps our rural telephone wires, having been nibbled by badgers and entangled with the roots of various crops, are just not up to competing with those equipped with this super-mega-speed fibre optic whatnot.
So anyway, we made do with Cropredy last weekend. The weather was great (again) which was just as well as the musical line-up was thin in places: Romeo's Daughter anyone? How about Martin Barre, the Dunwells or Brooks Williams? Thought not. The reason for this may be that they blew the budget on Alice Cooper. A spectacular coup and the old snake charmer didn't disappoint. And I must mention 10cc. Despite having only Graham Gouldman left from the original line-up they are just wonderful; do not write them off as washed-up has-beens - go and see them if you have the chance. But the act I really wanted to bring to your attention was Nik Kershaw.
"Little" Nik Kershaw goes large at Cropredy
I guess you've got to be the wrong side of 40 to remember little Nik's heyday which was in the early '80s when he had a decently long string of hits. He was marketed as a spiky-haired pretty boy Duran-a-like which may have done the trick for his chart success but didn't do much for his long term credibility rating. Consequently, those of us who were snobbishly into more weightier sounds took little notice. Until, that is, I heard the song Human Racing on the radio. My first thought was that it was Stevie Wonder, partly because of the sound of his voice (and maybe the sonic limitations of my radio) but also because of the strength of the melody which was, and remains, absolutely beautiful.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered it wasn't penned by Little Stevie Wonder but by Little Nicky Kershaw (and he is little). This was about the same time that I used to bore anyone in earshot with my prediction that George Michael, then famous as a prancing spray tan disco boy with a shuttlecock down his shorts, would come to be known as a major talent. This was on the basis of a series of sensational melodies under the Wham brand. (Here's a conundrum for you: if Andrew Ridgley contributed nothing to Wham, how come that's when Georgie M made all his best records?) So on this basis, the same surely applied to Nik K who would one day shake off the shackles of the record company marketing boys and bestride Tin Pan Alley like a colossus, Ivor Novello and Grammy awards tumbling from his overburdened arms.
But it didn't quite work out like that (a big hit for Chesney Hawks aside). I wonder why not? I bet Nik does too. Funny old world, this pop music lark. How can you be demonstrably such a good songwriter and not clean up? Let me just bore you with a bit of detail on Human Racing. I've always liked to knock out the first few lines on the keyboard but only now have I sat down and worked out the whole thing. This in itself is saying something because, as anyone with a decent ear for music will attest, it normally takes about as long to work out how to play a song as it does to listen to it. But not in the case of Human Racing. It starts in A minor (but resolving on A major), moves swiftly to D before, after a brief dalliance with A minor again, moving into the key of F, which is where the verse ends up. But not content with that, Nik modulates abruptly into Ab for the chorus and contrives to end it on a kind of Bb 9th chord, thereby giving him the basis for that semitone drop at the end of the chorus back down to the A, which is of course where we came in.
Yes alright, I know a series of tricky chords and unusual key changes does not of itself a good song make but believe me, all this stuff helps to explain just why Human Racing sounds so good. If you haven't heard it for a while (or ever), I urge you to head straight for Spotify. And if you play an instrument, get it out and work your way through it using the above scribblings as your guide (that weird chord at the end of the second line in the verse is F augmented by the way). I guarantee your life will be enhanced as a result!
So back to Cropredy. Nik's show was excellent, although this year he was tout seul (the Alice Copper budget issue again?), which was inevitably a bit limiting. But he made a valiant attempt at all his hits, except, guess what? He didn't play Human Racing.
"Do Human Racing Nik!"
"With all those tricky key changes mate? You're joking!"
No comments:
Post a Comment