Pop music
Losing it
Marcus Berkmann
Ifs sad to relate, but all pop stars lose it in the end. They may not know what they have lost, and in some cases it may merely have been mislaid, but in a pop career of even modest substance, losing it is as inevitable as tomorrow morning. Where once they had ideas and tunes and the right people to work with, one day they just have expectations they can no longer fulfil. A good example is David Bowie, who has been struggling for years to regain the creative high ground, and failing over and over again. Less widely acknowledged is the case of R.E.M., whose each new album is rapturously greeted as a return to form, but never is. And even their keenest fans now acknowledge that Oasis have irretrievably lost it — asked by a magazine to choose their favourite Oasis tracks, none of them voted for anything after 1995. My own record collection is full of not very good records by people who used to be good, but you keep on buying them in the hope that, having lost it, they might find it again. And it almost never happens. Almost.
A month or two ago in this space I wrote about the new Bryan Ferry album, Frantic (Virgin). Ferry, by general agreement, lost it years ago with a series of increasingly overproduced and soulless albums. The 1980s caught many people that way, seducing the unwary with ever more powerful synthesisers and gloppita-gloppita machines. Fashions have long since changed, but in the mid-1990s Ferry was still overdubbing expensive lead guitarists over washes of synthesiser drowning out expensive drummers playing songs that weren't much cop in the first place. Not every bad album costs a fortune but it's amazing how many seem to. Clearly, some waking up and smelling the coffee was called for.
Ferry's last album, As Time Goes By, gave us a dozen torch songs performed in very traditional arrangements with a small band: refreshing after what had gone before, but hardly groundbreaking. Frantic, though, was a total surprise. On the basis of three fast listens I raved about it, after raving even more fulsomely about the new Pet Shop Boys album. Which I have barely played since. But Frantic I have almost worn out. It's a wonderful album, as good as anything Ferry has ever done, I'd say. A dozen wonderful memorable songs that hang together as an album, that constantly reveal new pleasures, that stick in your brain longer than any song should, that feel alive, in a way that Ferry's music hasn't done for ages. He lost it, and now he has found it again.
You start to look for patterns in these things. Some people, you realise, lose it and find it and lose it and find it and lose it and find it ... but they tend to be prolific compulsive-obsessive types like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, who will go on recording albums until they drop, and possibly after that if they can swing it. The Rolling Stones, by contrast, lost it years ago, and don't care. Van Morrison may have lost it longer ago than we like to think. Some people who have lost it try to regain it by recording an album that sounds very much like their best albums, only it doesn't smell as fresh: U2 are a perfect example, as is Elvis Costello. Paul Simon lost it in the early 1980s, found it again with Graceland and then lost it again. John Lennon lost it several years before he died, although no one was ever allowed to say this. Paul McCartney hasn't had it for years, as everyone says over and over again. A few sensible bands, like Pink Floyd, acknowledge that they have lost it and stop recording altogether. Leonard Cohen found it again in a Buddhist monastery, but that's not necessarily recommended for everyone.
And what of David Bowie? His new album Heathen (ISO/Columbia) has been given the reddest of red carpets, and in truth it's not bad at all, which is an advance on anything he has done since 1980. But to hear his croaky old voice straining for significance is to realise that something is missing, something has been lost. I don't think he'll ever get it back, and neither do the millions of his fans who haven't quite got round to buying the album yet, having been stung too many times before. Fans, of course, can lose it too, Where's mine? I'm sure I put it around here somewhere .
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