Valley of the Trolley Dollies

Grace Jones is a legend. It’s that simple, if not that pure. And like all legends, she is surrounded by gossip, myth, apocryphal stories. For instance, there’s the one about her rider consisting of first class air fares for her and her band from New York to London (when both her and her band actually lived London already; the tickets were cashed in, and the money pocketed, it’s said). Or the demand for Cases of Krug or Kilos of Coke to be delivered backstage or else the lady would not appear.

There’s the story that, in September 1998, Jones was banned from all Disney properties worldwide after baring her breasts in a concert at Walt Disney World.

I’ve seen her perform twice before. Once was a charity bash where she came on, did one song, and blew the whole of Wembley away. The first time was a concert at Brixton academy. Let’s just say it wasn’t one of her best performances.

Shambolic, quite frankly, was the word used at the time. She was three hours late, sang the songs and made little or no attempt to build any rapport with the audience, and spent much of the show lounging in an office chair being pushed around by two muscle Marys.

So I didn’t approach last night’s South Bank Centre show with a great deal of optimism. It was part of Meltdown, an annual season curated by various luminaries of the musical world. This years, being curated by the Bristolian Trip Hop Duo, was referred to all over the shop as Massive Attack’s Meltdown, prompting me to wonder whether we’d ever get something similar hosted by, say, Britney Spears, and D to respond that, surely, we’d already seen Britney Spears’ Meltdown. And her vagina. Frankly, I thought, if Grace Jones turns up, it’ll be a miracle.

I was so wrong. It was fanfuckingtstic. In D’s opinion (and believe me he’s (a) a huge concert goer, and (b) not one for hyperbole) it could very well be the best concert of the year. The Year. And it’s only June.

Miss Jones - Jones the Rhythm as she was once famously referred to - appeared half an hour later than scheduled. The show was due to run 80 minutes. It ran almost 240. With nary a pause between songs (although each song ended - and began - with long instrumental breaks, allowing Ms J time for the multitide of costume changes, and the audience time to appreciate one of the tightest bands I’ve heard in a long time).

She seemed invigorated. Her voice was infintiely better than I remembered it (one can forget, listening to the classic recordings nowadays, that what you’re hearing, by and large, is what was recorded. And in a world of pro-tools and auto tunes, that just increases the shock of hearing a live performance as good as - if not better than - the recording. Hello Mrs Ritchie, I’m talking about you). Her sense of the absurd was as sharp as ever (an opening number dress so tight that, although she appeared at the top of a huge flight of steps, she was incapable of actually walking down them, resorting, at the end of the song, to a practice my brother and I used to refer to as ‘bumming’ down them (or, as she said “This…… is how I descend (visible shudder) stairs. It’s called …. (Pintersque pause as she bums down two more steps) …. The Craaawl.”)

Lighting was a little odd. D asked, at one point, whether she always performs in a blacked out stage, as there seemed to be more lights on the audience. Not sure whether this was a deliberate ploy to pull the audience in, a theatrical manoeuver to highlight the anitcipation (possible, since as the show progressed, the lighting, by and large, improved drastically), or just a cack-handed lighting director (also possible as Grace’s disembodied voice, at one point, is heard calling “Hellooo. I’m over here,” before the follow spot slides stage right to find her).

Her sense of theatre is amazing. Four songs in, and “Not enough of you motherfuckers are up,” she decides, as the band loop into a funky groove - all pounding baselines and scratchy guitars. Sixteen bars in, and still unhappy with the level of ‘upness’ in the audience, she, quite literally stage dives into the crowd. Grace Jones is sixty. She has buns she can bounce a roll of quarters off, legs that go on forever and ever, a voice that has improved with age, she is wearing fishnet tights, nine inch heels, and a corset with a gusset consisting of dental floss. And she’s fucking crowd surfing. She’s a prettier Iggy, baby. And it works. Because, of course, when the act on stage leaves the stage, the only way for anyone in the audience beyond the first five rows to follow the action is by standing up and craning ones neck. Job done. The house is up, and, largely, remains that way for the rest of the night.

There was old stuff. New Stuff (surprisingly good; much better than some of her mid ’90’s product, and with a fantastic, hook ladedn, funky single “Keeping up with the Joneses” thats promising a whole new lease of live when the much awaited - in our house, at least - album comes out later this year). And banter with the audience, as when she announces, at the start of a new song, that she can’t actually remember the lyrics. Three minutes of the band grooving are punctuated with her increasingly paniced demands “Bring me my goddam lyrics! Why are you doing this to me, you motherfuckers?! I need a drink!!! Fuck it, I’ll have to improvise.” Before she blasts into some of the most lyrically complicated verses of her canon - part rapid rap, part languid Jamaican Grace, all in a song called ‘Life’. It’s obvious, by the end, that she not only knew the lyrics all along; she’s got them engraved on her heart.

“I was only fuckin’ with you,” she smiles at her adoring crowd.

And, as the penultimate song “Pull up to the Bumper” blasts out, she calls the crowd up on stage with her - a freak show of fats, femmes, muscle marys with ancient heads, arty gays, housewives, all grinding and bumping and, for a moment, it’s the mid seventies, it’s studio 54, everyone’s on something other than this planet, and there’s hope for a world where we can all get along, where talent doesn’t need to be packaged in glossy blonde smiley packages, talent show desperadoes  or misogynistic gnagsta rap, where 60 year olds can flash their tits at Mickey Mouse and crowd surf, and where hats, my dear, are a vital statement.

“I was only fuckin’ with you,” she said. Long may she fuck.

ABC are back with the album “Traffic.” A package filled with layered strings and their trademark rich arrangements. This is an album that sounds like it cost money to make. A lot. It feels like glass-walled studios overlooking bays in the Cap or the Cape were used, as though the team retired to glittering shimmering dancefloors in exclusive Ibiza clubs post recording, as though, in fact, nothing has changed.

Oh yes, ABC are back; they sound like they’ve never been away; and, once more, that puts them so far ahead of the herd that only their dust can be seen.

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America - the United States, that is - has, I think it’s safe to say, won the culture wars.

America is, of course, a Nation founded by Puritans who were considered too extreme even for the Mad Mullahs of Cromwellian England, and formalised by a group of humanist-leaning revolutionaries. The dichotomy - strict puritanism battling with freewheeling acceptance of new ideas - is what kept the US so vital for so long.

And in this, the first decade of the twenty-first century, the face of Western (and much Eastern) mass culture, not to mention a large part of the face of high brow culture (the forehead, perhaps, and the left cheek. Maybe a bit of the chin too) has been remodelled - in, at times, a Bride of Wildenstein way - by a culture obsessed with Novelty value.

Because, to the Humanist, sensation based side of American culture, novelty is, in and of itself, A Very Good Thing. If the gilt flakes away and what’s left is lead, the offending novelty is unceremoniously dumped, and life carries on as though nothing had ever happened. Viz the hula hoop, Tiffany (the serenader of Shopping Malls; not the purveyor of Sterling Silver) and, of course, Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, however, there’s that Puritan Work Ethic demanding that the novelty - as long as it lasts - be wrapped in the tissue paper of import. Everything, put simply, must have a deeper reason for existing. To be otherwise makes a thing worthless frippery. A hula hoop is not simply a ring of plastic designed to provide meaningless fun; it’s a revolutionary exercise tool.

Movie Stars too: try retyping the last sentence, replacing the words “Hula” and “Hoop” with “Jane” and “Fonda.”

But sometimes - even after the gilding has blown away like gossamer - the remains are shown to be of immense and permanent value.

Jazz. Motion Pictures. Hip Hop. Journalism-as-Literature. Beat Poetry. Rock ‘n’ Roll. Disco. The Blues.T.V. Soap operas. The works of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald.

All of these came from America (having often, admittedly, been sourced elsewhere - usually Europe or Africa) but America can lay claim to taking base lead and, if not actually transmuting it, certainly of regilding it.

But not pop. Oh no. To see an American do Rockanrawl is a joy, a Hip Hop crew - love or loath the genre - is, in full force (I.E. On a good day, not a specific reference to the purveyors of “Alice (I want you just for me)”) a pleasure to behold.

But, when Americans try to do pop, they invariably end up with Lite - Rock Lite, or R+B Lite - and it’s often not bad at all. The Thriller album, or the first Britney Spears, for example.

Then there’s the afore-mentioned Tiffany (the serenader of Shopping Malls; not the purveyor of Sterling Silver), Debbie Gibson, or the entire oeuvre of Les Soeurs Simpson.

Not Pop. Because Americans can’t do pop. Because Pop - like Champagne, Philosophy, Opera, Ballet, Farce and Surrealism is a peculiarly European concept, and, in the Eurovision Song Contest - a TV spectacle stretching, this year, over three nights and attracting an audience of 150 million people - Europe takes back Television (a mass culture product invented in the Old World but fully realised, popularised and proliferated via the New) and uses the medium to proclaim it’s biggest contribution to modern Popular Culture.

We are Europe. And we invented Pop.

And the first Euro Pop Star? W. A. Mozart. Listen to Die Zauberflote, the highlights, and you’ll see what I mean: One after another after another. All Killer, no filler, pop sensations. Glorious, hummable, joyously nonsensical and beautifully crafted songs sung by men dressed as vagabond bird catchers, or drag queen castrati done up as the Queen of the Night. Lyrics that make little or no sense, and choruses that are little more than ‘La La La,’ but tunes and tempii that burrow into your head like audio ringworm, and don’t let go. Listen, and tell me you can’t see a direct line on to the “Happy Ever After” album by Donna Summer (an American, but an album largely factored by Europeans in Europe), and on to ABBA’s melancholy meisterwerk “The Visitors,” A-Ha’s “East of the Sun,” and even Bananarama’s “Wow.”

Because - and here’s where distinct difference – when it comes to popular culture, Europeans have no shame.

We’ve seen Empires rise and fall, survived Genocide and Futurist Haircuts, and acknowledge - happily - that a loud, catchy dance tune performed by a bunch of fancy dress Latvian Pirate Kings and Queens might, in fact, be nothing more than it seems - a joyously fizzily camp entertainment designed to make the audience smile, tap its feet, and hum along.

Pop, in other words. And with this years Eurovision selection promising the afore mentioned Pirates,a Spanish Reggaeton Pastiche with obscene lyrics, and a Polish woman with the whitest teeth, tannest tan and closest resemblance to a post-op Tranny since Dana International, the proof is incontrovertable:

You can keep your Britneys, your Justin Timberlakes and your XTinas - all of whom take themselves waaaaay too seriously anyway. Because, for this one week - and this weekend in particular - Pop rules the world.

We are Eurovision. And we, as I believe I may have mentioned, invented pop.