Drooling Danoraks
Marcus Berkmann
The last time Steely Dan had a new album out, the new Oasis one came out the same day. This time Radiohead unleashed their latest grim-faced masterpiece of drivelly bleeps, but who cares? Until a few years ago, we didn't think there would ever be another new Steely Dan album. Now there are two, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are so obviously enjoying making music there may yet be several more. For a tiny proportion of the listening public, which for the purpose of this piece we shall call ‘Danoraks', scarcely anything could be more exciting. No one makes music like Steely Dan, which is good news for everyone who hates them, but a tough call for us Danoraks. In the 1980s and 1990s we had to endure long silences from our heroes as they grappled with writer's block, drug problems, girlfriends dying in unfortunate circumstances and, possibly most cruel of all, indifferent solo albums. For even these we fell on like ravening wolves. When 1 think of the drooling enthusiasm with which I greeted Donald Fagen's Kamakiriad in these pages in 1993, I shudder. 'Hold on a second, it wasn't that bad,' one of my Danorak friends said on the phone the other day as we were discussing this and other vitally important matters. But it wasn't that good either, and I must have played it 50 times over the years just to make sure.
Then, in the mid-1990s, the duo reformed Steely Dan and recorded Two Against Nature, which I queued for on day of release in a crowd of troglodyte Oasis fans who kept scratching their armpits. (This is the broad church of pop music — full of lots of little narrow churches which hate each other's guts.) Two Against Nature was a fairly astounding return to form — I say 'fairly' because only Danoraks actually noticed, but fortunately there were enough of them in America to generate a couple of million sales and a clutch of Grammy awards. Becker and Fagen's coolly precise and utterly distinctive jazz-inflected pop had somehow survived everything, and a nasty new saxophonist called Chris Potter played evilly unlistenable solos over several tracks, just to make it harder to get into than ever. 'Cousin Dupree', by contrast, was one of the catchiest pop songs they had ever written. We expect everything from these men: to be humming along to tunes on the second listen, and still to be discovering hidden delights on the 102nd. Like all fans we are hard taskmasters, in a pathetically craven kind of way.
For Everything Must Go (Reprise) I queued with a load of round-shouldered Radiohead fans. Most of them were students with weak chins and prominent Adam's apples. Several of them would surely top themselves before nightfall. They should have bought Everything Must Go instead. On first hearing. I have to admit, I thought it tinny and feeble, but as ever with Becker and Fagen, it grows and it grows and it grows and it starts to take up ever larger areas in your head. Now I have to play it first thing in the morning every morning just to clear out the cobwebs, and then again later in the day to listen to it properly. Their lyrics seem to get nastier and funnier with the years. Their tunes are amazingly robust: this is almost Becker and Fagen's pop album, so direct are the songs. The unstoppable 'Blues Beach' is the single, although somehow I don't think Radio One will have been playing it much. Danoraks will also have noticed little echoes of past wonders: there's a piano fill somewhere that sounds exactly like ... but go to the website for that sort of thing, if you can bear it. I have managed to stop myself so far. As my Danorak friend Alice says, I don't want to know whether the bloke in 'Things I Miss The Most' is in jail or not. I'd rather sit around speculating fruitlessly about it.
This is turning into a good year for pop music. As well as the Fleetwood Mac album, which 1 raved about here last month (it's very close to their best work), there's a terrific second album from Goldfrapp, Black Cherry (Mute), which builds on the quirky film-music textures of their debut and adds an early 1980s synth-pop oomph to create something wholly of itself, as all the best pop music must be. And Alison Goldfrapp's voice is a marvel, whooping and warbling and frequently doing things you feel voices weren't designed to do. Wonderful, adventurous stuff.
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