success he craved. The final
defeat snatched from the jaws of
victory just before he died is
almost too much to bear.
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Hugh Fielder
Slowhand: The
Life & Music Of
Eric Clapton
Philip Norman
WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON
Dull title, far from dull tale.
The unblinking
documentary
A Life In 12 Bars and
his similarly frank
autobiography
should have been
the last word on Eric Clapton.
Enter Beatles biographer Philip
Norman, with a fascinating
chief source in Clapton’s muse
Pattie Boyd. Without any startling
revelations beyond Clapton
watching test matches in his
cricket whites, and no great feel
for the music (bizarrely, he claims
Clapton’s ’85 tour as part of
wilderness-era Roger Waters’s
band was of 120,000 seaters),
Norman still manages to get
under Clapton’s skin.
Before the clean living which
finally took hold after he
drunkenly snapped an expensive
fishing rod in front of fellow
anglers, Clapton was a
shambles: spoiled, indulgent,
unfeeling and utterly self-
centred. Detailing Clapton’s
enslavement to heroin (his fear
of needles meant he snorted it
- sometimes off the carpet), and
then the brandy he consumed
by the bottle, Norman paints
a picture that’s rarely pretty,
even before the infamous 1976
racist rant.
Sobriety and the horrific death
of his son Conor in 1991 changed
the man-child who couldn’t
make coffee into a man, but as
prices go it’s hard to imagine
one more steep or more
heartbreaking.
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John Aizlewood
How To Be
Invisible
Kate Bush FABER & FABER
A lifetime’s lyrics display one
aspect of Bush’s work.
In 1989, in Deeper Understanding,
Kate Bush sang of spending her
evenings with her computer ‘like
a friend’. It’s a rare case of this
idiosyncratic writer foreseeing
the future, as generally she
finds inspiration in past icons
- Wuthering Heights, Peter Pan,
Delius, The Red Shoes. The talk of
air-raid shelters and Spitfires in
England My Lionheart brinks on
Brexit-speak now, while the anti-
war message of Army Dreamers
bemoans a young soldier not
living long enough to become
a rock star or politician. For
every naive couplet, though, that
same wide-eyed innocence can
whisk you off into fulsome
fantasies like A Sky Of Honey or
The Ninth Wave.
Caught in this cloth-bound
book, her lyrics undoubtedly
miss their mesmeric music but
still twinkle with charm.
Whereas, say, Leonard Cohen’s
words stand up unaccompanied,
Bush’s pine for the swell of her
aural grandiosity. Yet these
pages provide multiple moments
of pleasure.
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Chris RobertsBand Vs Brand
Dir: Bob Nalbandian MVD
Depressing state-of-the-rock-
nation address.
Band Vs Brand is a feature-length
documentary that examines
various aspects of today’s rock
business and challenges peculiar
to this particular strand of the
music business. While we’re all
aware that all isn’t exactly
perfect in the world of heritage
rock, we choose to take solace in
the positives (the prevalence of
new artists; surviving greats
returning to the road; the
constant buffing and expansion
of timeless product). We tend to
ignore the depressing,
unavoidable inevitabilities that
accompany the passage of time
(bands falling out, squabbling
over names and collective
legacy; estates continuing to
milk the saleability of long-
dead cash cows, whether by
tribute or hologram). Ultimately,
without the actual band, you’ve
only the brand – their residuals- left with which to sustain
your business.
The story’s told by various
industry ‘insiders’, band
members (Nik Turner, Jack
Russell, Dave Lombardo et al),
and taken as a whole it’s all a bit
‘circling the wagons’, ‘Give it to
me straight, Doctor’ and
generally rather depressing.
Ultimately, rock is living through
difficult, internet-diminished,
post-record-sales times, and if
you don’t own your logo, you’d
better invest in a tin cup. What
this film needs more than
anything else is a couple of
inserted clips of a grinning Mick
Box lightening the mood with
a thumbs-aloft ‘Happy days!’
every 10 minutes or so.
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Ian Fortnam