Ashes to Cinder Koala Bears on Ice (it's complicated)

Leafing through a copy of Chris O'Leary's book Rebel Rebel in Foyles in Charing Cross Road a few years ago, I felt a surge of what can only be described as Pooterish dismay.

For those as yet  unaware of it, Rebel Rebel is a song-by-song account of David Bowie's work, developed from posts on Chris's highly recommended blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, and I was gratified to discover that my "Gnome Thoughts ..." series of posts about Bowie had received its promised acknowledgement ... until I looked more closely and saw he'd got my name wrong.

Readers of Diary of a Nobody will remember that among the humiliations heaped upon its lowly hero Charles Pooter is a newspaper's response to his complaints about being omitted from a list of guests in attendance at a social event:

To achieve the full Pooter effect I suppose I'll have to wait for a few more variant misspellings in future editions of Rebel Rebel - but that's unlikely to happen, as my name has been correctly recorded in Chris's sequel, Ashes to Ashes, just out, which picks up the story of Bowie's recording career where the previous volume left off. 

And you don't need to rush to Foyles or its local equivalent to verify this, as the new book (pictured above in the hand of Bob Stanley) has turned out to be such a mammoth tome that its notes have been placed online. You will find the relevant page on the Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog here - and it's worth saying that all the original posts which led to the two books are still available to read on the blog, which seems an eminently sensible thing to do.

The Gnome Thoughts ... series, readable here if you haven't yet come across it, is an exploration of possible influences on the young Bowie. It started out as a single post, prompted by the purchase of a songbook of Bowie's Deram era songs, but over time one connection after another suggested itself and at present it runs to 38 separate pieces, found elsewhere in this blog.

Gnome Thoughts ... - the full name is actually "Gnome Thoughts from a Foreign Country", as in L.P. Hartley's notion of the past - looks at the work of Alan Klein, among others: a significant name because in 1962 he wrote a musical which blended music hall with rock'n'roll, and in 1964 he released an album on Decca, Well At Least Its [sic] British, which may have inspired Bowie's Deram debut. Bowie and Klein are connected through the late Kenneth Pitt, who was Alan Klein's manager/publicist.

My interest in Bowie's work is mainly in the period covered by Rebel Rebel, though I look forward to reading Ashes to Ashes - and what's more, I can even boast of making some small contribution to the understanding of the lesser-known Bowie work Some Are which is featured therein.



My suggestion can be found  among the comments below Chris's original blogpost about that song here, but in that same spirit of leaving one's working for all to see here is an extract from a post I wrote in 2010 (not part of the Gnome Thoughts ... series) which first makes reference to Some Are.

The first part of the post needn't concern us here as it's devoted to an analysis of Ralph McTell's song Barges. There is a Bowie connection, I suppose, in that it's from an album produced by Tony Visconti, but what really matters is what comes afterwards once, unmoored, I drift away to other matters via an associative process which takes in two Bowie songs along the way.

So join me, if you will, at the point in the post which will eventually direct us Davidwards: the memory of an accidental conjunction of sounds (Eno would be so proud) heard during a live concert of Ralph McTell's at the Glasgow Apollo in 1975.

Although I was at the concert the memory derives from its subsequent broadcast on Radio Clyde, and this needs a bit of setting up.

After he had finished at the Apollo McTell hotfooted it down to the Clyde studios to take part in a radio show which would include excerpts from his performance. The situation was a bit like a front cloth comic doing his stuff while, out of view, the next big scene is being busily assembled, because while Ralph was talking to the presenter the sound engineer was frantically trying to arrive at an acceptable mix for the next song in the set.

This is worth noting before you read what follows because if the engineer had had more leisure to polish the recording he might well have removed or minimised the sound which set my train of thought a-rollin' below.

Okay, cue the extract from that earlier post, entitled "Canal ... plus", as it turned out to be about more than Barges:

[There is] an odd moment during the performance of McTell's elegaic Maginot Waltz when, during a lull at the end of one section of the song, a car horn is faintly heard outside.

In fairness to the sound engineer (whose name, according to the jocular Steve Jones, was "Pete 'What're-the-levels-like?' Shipton"), mixing was being done during the broadcast, with no attempt to hide the fact that portions of the chat were being extended if a particular song wasn't quite ready.

That accidentally overheard horn - even if anachronistic (the song tells of a last jaunt before two young men go off to the Great War) - has become part of the song for me: a little bit of aural punctuation - or possibly even a tiny hint of doubt, a single, barely heard, jarring note, like Chekhov's breaking string, amid the misplaced optimism of the times:

I told her we'd be home in a week or two
Me an' Albert and Lord Kitchener, we'd teach the Hun a thing or two

Maybe the mocked Mr Shipton knew exactly what he was about. Or more likely it's about that human (or possibly just male) need to create order and meaning from whatever random conjunctions
come our way, as in this entry in artist Ian Breakwell's diary:

The 18.30 train from London to Plymouth. In the dining car the fat businessman farts loudly and unexpectedly, and simultaneously by the side of the railway track, a racehorse falls down.

I was both pleased and annoyed at the ease with which I located the above on the net, having thought it was my secret discovery, unnoticed by any other reader. Sad to report, it has been pasted in from an obituary; Breakwell died in 2005. I had a book of his diaries but hadn't kept up with his subsequent career, although a 1994 film collaboration with Ron Geesin sounds intriguing:

we are taken to a variety show, but are only allowed to see the audience's reactions; the results are hilarious and touching.

Thinking of further random sounds, I once taped Young Americans over some random recording on my little cassette player; on playback a second or two of a door opening slowly and squeakily segued into the sax intro quite convincingly - for me, ever afterwards, Young Americans just isn't Young Americans without it.

"Ain't there one damn song that can make me - shu-ut that doo-oor!"

And by a perfectly understandable associative process, I now call to mind that my immediate younger brother once had to stop taping a Roxy Music B side when our grandfather came into the room. I don't know whether he had voiced any objection or whether my brother had halted out of politeness anyway - although as this was a man incapable of registering a direct protest when the same grandson once unknowingly occupied "his" chair, instead hovering for the chance to rush over and reclaim it (my brother was about ten at the time), I must, on this occasion at least, grant a sibling the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, because I played that abandoned compilation tape more or less nonstop one night when trying to meet a deadline for art school, the arbitrary cut-off point in Roxy Music's The Numberer became lodged in my head as an artistic decision, like the razoring of I Want You (She's So Heavy) on Abbey Road. And time has probably added its own white noise to that incomplete Roxy track. If I could find the cassette.

I'm aware that this entry may be displaying its own symptoms of degradation after that lit crit-type earlier half [omitted from this extract], but I can't quit without mention of a slight but haunting Bowie/Eno track, Some Are. I first discovered it on a CD edition of Low (produced, like Barges, by Tony Visconti), but it was later included in a Bowie compilation (above) originally given away with the Mail on Sunday (top columnist Mel P threatened to leave unless her image was incorporated into the cover; she was removed from the subsequent EMI issue of the collection).

The piece includes muted sounds of children playing and is not, it would be fair to say, primarily narrative-driven. Until discovering the ease with which the internet answers just about every question - or offers an answer of sorts, anyway - it had never occured to me to question the lyrics, which I heard as a vaguely themed collection of words linked by the Bowiemeister's own associative process, something like:

Sleigh bells in snow,
Cinder coal-a bears on ice

ie from cinder to coal, coal to cola, cola to koala, koala bears, performing bears, on ice ... the effect, at least in the version I heard in my head, was strangely comforting, like listening to someone's half-formed thoughts, on the edge of sleep, the words, loosed from the shackles of coherence, almost purely musical. Like Wind Chimes by the Beach Boys, perhaps, especially with the final, barely heard refrain on that song ("Whispering winds keep my wind chimes a-tingling ...).

Or - to choose another instance at random - the entire canon of Tyrannosaurus Rex (Visconti again).

It never occured to me to check any official sheet music for Some Are - I don't know whether any exists - but looking on the net just now I found a couple of ingenious - alternative hearings, I suppose:

Sailors in snow
Send a callout raising hands

Sleigh bells and snow
Cinder-colour blazing eyes

To aid the understanding and enjoyment of his unlikely target audience Bowie actually wrote his own notes for the freebie compilation, still readable on the Mail's website, here; I must have taken them in at the time and forgotten them - possibly because they are not really written to be retained once the eye has passed over the page. The notes for Some Are would appear to suggest that in this case there are no mishearings or misreadings - only interpretations Messers Jones & Eno haven't chucklingly thunk up yet: 

A quiet little piece Brian Eno and I wrote in the Seventies. The cries of wolves in the background are sounds that you might not pick up on immediately. Unless you're a wolf. They're almost human, both beautiful and creepy.

Images of the failed Napoleonic force stumbling back through Smolensk. Finding the unburied corpses of their comrades left from their original advance on Moscow. Or possibly a snowman with a carrot for a nose; a crumpled Crystal Palace Football Club admission ticket at his feet. A Weltschmerz [world weariness] indeed. Send in your own images, children, and we'll show the best of them next week.

... A case, you might say, of Sound and Vision On.

The full version of the above post can be found here.

Chris O'Leary's original post on Some Are is here.

The relevant page of notes from Ashes to Ashes is here.

A guide to the Gnome Thoughts ... posts can be found here.

Postscript:

Tony Currie, a former DJ on Radio Clyde who has also written a history of the station, writes on the digitalspy forums that:

When Radio Clyde launched, there were quite severe needletime limits. Clyde had its own multitrack recording studio with a full time Balance Engineer (Pete Shipton) and did a fair amount of sessions. Later it also bought and equipped a huge mobile unit which could make multitrack recordings from outside locations.