Three recent Martin Gordon CDs as well as a look back on Sparks, Jet and Radio Stars.
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| Martin Gordon |
In reference to the Minneapolis ICE incidents, Joe Boyd, who’s been to the city last spring promoting And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, writes in his recent newsletter: “It’s hard to digest the brutality we see on those frigid streets while recalling the warm bonhomie of a wonderful restaurant filled with Minnesotans of all backgrounds. We were dining with old friends whose names it would be imprudent to mention since they are now helping feed immigrant families who are at risk if they leave home to work or to shop; one friend also acts as a scout, following ICE-identified license plates and alerting the resistance to their whereabouts.” That’s what has become of the USA. Masked thugs harass people by order of the President. Obviously with a license to kill. And socially active people have to remain in cover and hide themselves.
But don’t just look at the USA, there are fascists, dictators, right wing populists governing many countries worldwide - one is tempted to say, the majority of countries. It is absolutely frightening because it seems that rightwing radicalism is also closing in on us in what we thought was democratic Europe. Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Alice Weigel, Heinz Christian Strache, Andrej Babiš, Tom van Grieken, Giorgia Meloni – the list is terrifying (and incomplete), and we all thought it could never be in Europe!
Martin Gordon is from Hitchin, Hertfordshire. He is a musician, composer and lecturer. I’ve followed his career from Sparks and Jet via Radio Stars and the re-born John’s Children. I think I interpret Martin Gordon’s attitude correctly that fascists and despots should have no place in the world. Full stop. I agree 100%.
Okay, this is a music blog, and I’d like to mention that Martin Gordon has recently issued three albums of highly political content. That’s great and hopefully many people will go and order. Radiant Future has been his label for many years.
ANOTHER WORDS (Radiant Future RF029CD, 2021) is Martin Gordon, bass, vocals and everything else, due to the COVID lockdown.
In January 2021 Resident Chump made a strange and unhinged phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State in Georgia, in order to try and command him to find 11.779 additional votes that would allow the Chump to overturn the Presidential Election. Gordon has set snippets of Resident Chump’s phonecall to music. The pieces are short, mostly very short, from 16 seconds to just over a minute. In its tone the music reminds of a positively tuned Frank Zappa, who, by the way, was also absolutely fascinated by the 7/8 metre. Resident Chump about stealing the votes: “We watched it, and they watched it, certified in slow motion, instant replay, if you can believe it, but slow motion. And it was magnified many times over.” Now imagine this put down to music in the most elegant manner, and the contrast between idiocy and brilliancy could not be larger.
Martin Gordon: This one looked at the possible use of speech as the basis for compositions. Due to COVID, I did it all myself, and due to my recent work with the Ensemble Modern, I was not averse to using orchestral voices, with the notion in the back of my mind that perhaps an MG-EM collaboration would be a fun thing. This was not to be, but no matter.
GREATEST SH!TS (Radiant Future RF035CD, 2023) These are full length songs recorded with a band, as the COVID lockdown was no longer. And the album rocks! The music is complex, intellectual yet again with the general Rock Pop overtone of somebody who has been a major partaker in Rock music in the 70s and thereafter. This album really swings, jives and rolls with songs that remind us of those that Underground Rock at its best gave us – just listen to “An Extended Phonecall” (again the Chump’s call to Raffensberger) and how it smoothly slides into “Dumber Than A Rock” – it reminds us of Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come.
And enjoy the jolly tune (absolutely British in its bedrock) that makes “A True Totalitarian” a cross between the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Sparks. “Superior Jeans” rocks like Dave Edmunds at his best. And the vintage Radio Stars song “The Beast Of Barnsley” has been resurrected once again as “The Beast Of Ankara” (you guess, who it refers to). But it also exemplifies what a great band Radio Stars were, their songwriting really has stood the test of time. Fantastic.
I’ve played this album many times now, and if it wasn’t for the disturbing lyrical background, it would be the album I could relax to in my armchair, turn the volume up and be completely with myself. And the reference to “Sympathy For The Devil” with the “Hoo Hoo” background vocals in “All The Rage” are just a logical asset.
His excellency Martin Gordon who can hide his anger behind a beauty of tone, the perfect wolf in a sheep’s clothing. He unveils the terror of the world’s finest tyrants - Ruhollah Musawi Chomeini, Wladimir Putin, Kim-Jong Un and the incomparable Resident Chump. Gordon’s satire is also aimed at dumbs like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the man who can’t sweat, or the shit-talking Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson who babbled about Pepper Pig World in a speech, while he was sifting through his manuscript that obviously had come into complete disorder – a great show of incompetence. Mark that this clown was paid for his speeches. The lyrics are decapitating a line of populist fascists while the music is soothing away the blood.
Martin Gordon: This one took the same compositional principle as “Another Words” but used the more-or-less traditional pop music sound palette, i.e. guitars/keys/drums/bass, and long-form formats. It widened its view to include a selection of global sh!ts, but our old pal the Resident Chump was of course still front and centre.
Martin’s latest offering is HIS MOTHER WAS A WOMAN (Radiant Future RF040CD, 2025), a collection of quotations from His Royalty Resident Chump set to music. The quotes are like “I convinced five people to go that were hard no’s, but we want to speak to speak to the President. And the beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive. Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate. That’s a lot of years.“ That’s Dada at its finest. We all know that His Royalty Resident Chump is involved in uncountable lawsuits, we are now familiar with his erratic behaviour and incoherent speeches, but Chump’s confused utterances set to music? ‘It won’t work’, I thought when I looked at the lyric sheet.
But after “Another Words” we knew about Martin Gordon’s ability and we could expect that the musical outcome was complex, perfectly elegant, achieved by means of repetition and intelligent composition. So it is. The pieces smoothly merge and are held together by a consistency of sound, a tight little symphony. “Knock Out The Middleman”! Frank Zappa couldn’t have done it better, and, I presume, he certainly also would have held something against Resident Chump.
Gordon’s combination of lyrics and sounds is dense, tight, yet light, and more coherent than any of Chump’s ramblings, and as a whole it is taken to an elevated musical level. The album rates high as a satire, and as such it is the weapon of the artist. May Martin Gordon be successful, though I assume that he will be appreciated mostly by like-minded people. And, listen! The album closes with a bang.
Martin Gordon: “His Mother…” focused on one single Chump speech, like “Another Words”, and used the pop sound palette like “Greatest Sh!ts”, but was not constrained by pop formats, so here you get 24 very short pieces of music. In fact they were composed as one single composition and later split up into manageable chunks for the benefit of teenagers with no patience.
All three releases are digipacks in attractive cardboard sleeves, ecologically friendly without plastic jewel cases. And the artwork is up to scratch as well, yet I certainly would like to know who did the amazing caricature of Resident Chump for the “His Mother Was A Woman” CD. Martin, please tell us!
Martin Gordon: It was by Claude, a close but virtual friend of mine, under my strict instruction.
Why did you choose political subjects although they won’t certainly promote sales? By the way I’m quite pleased that you made a political statement as a musician/composer.
Martin Gordon: I don’t think it is possible to be apolitical as an artist, even though some declare that this is their goal. As George Orwell noted, the decision to be apolitical is in itself a political decision. I believe that if an artist declares that he/she is ‘outside’ politics, then I say that they are not in fact ‘artists’ but ‘entertainers’, and should not be seen in any other way. There’s (probably) nothing wrong with entertainment per se – although the current state of the USA, which has elected entertainers as leaders, may indicate otherwise – but entertainers should not be revered as soothsayers, in my humble opinion, certainly not employed as politicians.
Explain your compositional approach, please.
Martin Gordon: Well, it has varied over time. In JET, it was originally driven by writing lyrics about anything at all that I thought might be amusing, and then setting them to music. The process became somewhat refined in Radio Stars as I began to write lyrics about specific things, rather than merely (but still including) amusing rhymes. In both cases the words would eventually be structured to fit the music, even though they usually came first. Lyrics were nonetheless subservient to the music.
In more recent times, I have managed to break free from the restrictions of symmetrical, modular music structures, and have begun to use extemporised speech to imply meter and overall structure. So far, this extemporised speech has been based on other people’s speech – maybe soon I will spiral into insanity and begin recording my own extemporised speech as the blueprint for future compositions. I will have to bug my own dinner parties, or record my solitary drunken evenings...
Tell us about your lecturing and the Babelsberg Film University.
Martin Gordon: This grew out of my engagement with music technology and the impact which it having on contemporary pop composition. As we know, the Spotify effect is that largely new compositions have no intros, go directly to the chorus and last no longer than a couple of minutes, and in some cases much less. Plus all my students use Digital Audio Workstations, which power up at 120BPM in 4/4. They were comfortable with tweaking the tempo but not the time signature, and invariably delivered stuff in 4/4. So, as is historically the case, technology is having a direct effect on the nature of the music which it delivers. So I suppose I am trying to address this in some way.
When I fell into the clutches of the Film University, I was encouraged to disseminate my musical perspectives about symmetry, the use of technology in music creation and how to best avoid common time to a wider audience.
You wrote: “The teaching at the Film Uni Babelsberg revolves around avoidance of the common time ('Trapped in the Tarpit of Common-Time'), the interface between technology and composition and, most recently, the creation of metric maps from extemporised speech as the basis for composition ('His Mother Was a Woman').” Could you briefly explain this?
Martin Gordon: I find 4/4 as fascinating a meter as anybody else, but there are other meters which are equally fascinating. I encouraged my students to embrace other, non-common time meters, but they didn’t manage it, finding that the exercise was rather removed from their daily experience. So I figured that one thing they were surrounded by is speech. I then stumbled inadvertently across a quote from Frank Zappa in which he said that ‘nobody talks in 4/4’ and, equally importantly, that ‘you can divide time any way you want to’. So I thought I would do exactly that, and explored the possibility of taking some speech or other and undermining it by setting it music.
There was a plethora of ludicrous speeches to choose from, and I initially chose the now-arrested former-Prince Andrew, than whom there is nobody more ludicrous, the Resident Chump and the Booster, among others. I propose that there is an underlying metric plan to an extemporised speech, and I attempt, whether in good faith or not, to uncover it. Some examples where I feel I have had some success (and here I mean artistically, rather than commercially, of course) might be ‘Dumber Than a Rock’ and ‘Booster’, as well as all the things on ‘His Mother…’.
The Martin Gordon Questions and Answers Part
Sparks were Ron and Russell Mael from Los Angeles, California, who had previously released two not very consistent albums on Bearsville, USA (one as Halfnelson, the other as Sparks “A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing”) before they emigrated to the UK and released a great album “Kimono My House” accompanied by three British musicians: Dinky Diamond (dr), Adrian Fisher (gtr) and Martin Gordon (b). For a short time, the Mael brothers had lived with John Hewlett, ex-John’s Children (a legendary band featuring Andy Ellison and, at a time, Marc Bolan), who helped finding suitable musicians for a Sparks re-start in England and be their manager.
Big Beat and Power Pop: Martin, what was your musical career before you appeared out of the blue (for me) with Sparks?
MARTIN GORDON: It was non-existent, as I was a technical author for a maritime engineering company while I was waiting for the irresistible world of showbiz to beckon me to its copious bosom. When it finally did, I left inert gas systems behind me for ever.
Did you really have no previous musical record before joining Sparks? Why and how did you become a member of Sparks then?
MG: I began playing bass about the age of 14, and had some rehearsal bands at school. Later I studied with Jeff Clyne and did some summer schools. And then it was downhill all the way until the Californians appeared on the horizon.
(PS: And he was auditioned after replying to a Melody Maker ad.)
The American version of Sparks is quite different from the UK version. How much impact did you or the other English band members have on the band’s music?
MG: Well, it seems to me that we had quite an impact, if you compare the previous version of the rockin’ combo and the Brit-version, or indeed compare the acoustic version of some of the songs which ended up on Kimono with the final product. We were not keen on being fey or feeble, for a start, and we tried to butch things up as much as possible. We had quite a lot of imagination plus a similar amount of musical skill so, where it survived the winnowing process, the input was quite effective. Some of the imagination was headed off at the pass, so to speak, but some of it made it through.
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| Kimono My House sleeve |
How high was your personal input to Kimono My House?
MG: I had a bunch of ideas, ranging from arrangements to structures to complete songs and, as we know, some of this was acceptable and some not. I suggested one tune of mine might well fit the proceedings, but this was a suggestion too far.
I’ve read that you reading a newspaper during rehearsals was the reason for being fired from the band – I assume there was more to it!
MG: Here I will point you at the interview (https://martingordon.de/sparks/hewlett/) with the band manager of the time (John Hewlett), who has developed his own conspiracy theory about it. However, I was an avid consumer of the news even back in those distant days of three-day-weeks, cheerful chimney sweeps, pearly queens and guttering candles, so perhaps my desire to be constantly on top of new developments got in the way of going through ‘Equator’ yet again...
Martin reappeared with JET in 1975, a band labelled as Glam Rock, but there was exceedingly more to them. The other Jet members were vocalist Andy Ellison (ex-The Silence, ex-John’s Children, ex-solo), guitarist David O’List (ex-The Attack, ex-The Nice, ex-Brian Ferry’s backing band), drummer Chris Townson (ex-The Silence, ex-John’s Children) and keyboard player Sir Peter Oxendale. They released a great 10-track album simply titled “JET” in 1975, and eight and a half of the songs were written by Martin Gordon. The Glam Rock tag maybe was due to the extravagant outfits of O’List and Oxendale.
Sir Peter Oxendale, he’s a bit of a blank to me. Can you tell more about him?
MG: He is something of a blank to me also, to be frank. I know very little about him, other than that his hair turned prematurely green. Plus it was not my idea that he join Jet, it was basically his. Having intercepted my phone messages, he turned up in the pub where I had arranged to meeting O’List, and I was too polite to tell him to piss off. Well, that state of affairs didn’t last long. I believe that today he is some sort of private detective.
“Nothing To Do With Us” was the second single after the somehow ill-fitting “My River” (written by O’List) and it was a great song. Why didn’t it put Jet on the map?
MG: Actually, we did put it on the map, but it fell off and broke into a thousand pieces, and we couldn’t find them all. Roy Thomas Baker did his best, we even chopped a whole chunk out of it for the single, but no – the Great British Public remained unmoved. I was never convinced that a song about losing a river was the best choice for a first single (“My River” – how could you possible lose a whole river?) and I said so at the time. Did CBS listen? They did not, and so “Nothing To Do With Us” was the second single, by which time it was too late. We recorded it initially as a full band, then without the guitar, then without the keyboards and finally without the vocals – we were struggling to get through it without people making disastrous cock-ups that put everybody else off. We finally found the rhythm-section-only formula, and maintained it for most of the recording of that album.
I never understood why CBS chose “My River” as the band’s first single, as other tracks on the album (“Fax N’ Info”, “Tittle-Tattle” or “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”) were tunes with chart potential.
What’s your opinion of the Jet LP sleeve? I think it is far from being attractive (to say the least).
MG: It was, to coin a phrase, ‘Nothing to Do With Us’. We had a perfectly good cover proposal (see pic). It cost a fortune, having been shot at Mick Jagger’s country house Stargroves and the cover was designed by Hipgnosis of Pink Floyd fame. It was however rejected by CBS and they employed their own bubonic-plagiarist to rip off Marvel Comics and Mister Miracle, for which I believe they later had to pay, both literally and morally. I can’t remember what I thought of the sleeve at the time, but I know what I think of it today, which is not much.
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| rejected Hipgnosis sleeve design |
Jim Toomey (pre-The Tourists) (dr) and Ian MacLeod (gtr) have played with the latter stage JET also.
After JET petered to a halt, two of the band’s members (Martin Gordon and Andy Ellison) would continue Jet’s philosophy and with Ian MacLeod (gtr) and Steve Parry (dr) establish RADIO STARS, a band that played numberless live gigs and radio sessions of outstanding quality and released about a dozen singles and two excellent albums (“Songs For Swinging Lovers” and “Holiday Album”). Many of the lyrics were done with a tongue in their cheek. And, not surprisingly, 90% of their output was composed by Martin Gordon.
RADIO STARS were labelled as a Punk band. Would you agree that this is complete nonsense?
MG: Well, yes and no. We were associated with a punk label, some of us (OK, me) had a punk haircut, we played loud and fast, with distortion and Marshalls, and as the writer I addressed (mostly) issues of the day. However, on the other hand, we were quite funny, one of us had a Shakespearean hairdo, another had begun his career in an earlier decade, and also had a dodgy hairdo, and we did not appreciate being spat at. All of these attributes would disqualify you from being a ‘real’ punk. So it’s probably about 50:50 on the nonsense scale.
Great songs, cool albums, but low key promotion. Do you agree? Was Chiswick simply the wrong label, despite all the enthusiasm they showed?
MG: Again, it’s the curate’s egg here – the promo was quite OK in parts. I mean, we had 6” singles, 12” singles, clear plastic sleeves, some kind of tour support (for which I am still 35K GBP in debt), TV slots on ‘Top of the Pops’ and ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test', a ton of adverts in the music press, rave reviews and (generally) cool people at the record company.
However, one issue was that we had a matching-offer clause, which came into effect when we approached the second album – the initial Chiswick contract was only for one album. At this point, Chrysalis Records stepped up, bribed us with a huge backdrop and drum riser and offered quite a lot of cash for our services. Contractually, Chiswick had to either match this offer or hand us over to Chrysalis. If I understood things correctly, Chiswick borrowed a large sum of money and were able to hang on to their golden musical goose. However, they then had no cash left over for such trifles as promotion, which was a bit contra-productive.
(PS: The Radio Stars also appeared on ‘The Marc Show’, hosted by Marc Bolan.)
Tell us about Snat Records, which is a completely unknown label which only released two 7” records.
MG: Ah, this was an early forerunner of my label Radiant Future Records (https://radiantfuture.eu/). The word ‘Snat!’ is said by a character on the back of ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’, and I developed a ‘Snat Principle’. Well, it all helped, in the future, I guess, as I finally made my way towards creating Radiant Future. Snat released two singles, the second of these being by (Curved Air) violinist Darryl Way. When a French record company turned up and said they loved it and wanted to release it, in a fit of overwhelming fairness and transparency, I agreed with Daryl that he should handle all negotiations. And that was the end of that. It was not released by the French record company.
Live Radio Stars sounded much more powerful, was it deliberate that you opted for a more poppish sound on record?
MG: Not really, but we always had trouble capturing the sound in the studio. It was always rather quiet-sounding – I feel that it was probably the drums that were at the root of this. What we should have done was, what Jet did at our CBS audition – perform the entire thing in front of an audience in a studio, and then take it away and fiddle with it. But hindsight is a thing which we did not at that point possess.
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Why did Radio Stars fold?
MG: I had my wisdom teeth removed, and the singer informed the manager, exactly at the point at which my convalescence began, that he wanted to restart the recently-finished tour, and was roping in another former Sparks person on bass. On his part, this was a strategic act aimed at finally getting his third-rate material performed by (some version of) the band. I had the choice of either legally preventing the commercial use of my songs, or not. Capitalism won out.
And why was it resurrected?
MG: A good question, and one to which I am afraid I do not, even at this late stage, have the answer. We made a couple of nice recordings in the later version, but the Radio Stars train had already left the station.
Anything you would like to add is highly welcome:
Having resigned myself to being a footnote in the annals of rock history, I would encourage people to visit my website (https://martingordon.de/), where stuff like this is documented, along with an exhaustive (and exhausting) discography. Plus your reader may be amused by my latest creation, a version of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic updated for our current time, “When I Was a Chump“.
By the way, did you have any experiences with Simon Napier-Bell (infamous manager of John’s Children and author of some controversial books on music business)?
RG: I did, actually. Andy Ellison invited him down to TW Studios in London’s Fulham Road, where Jet were recording some demos. Chris Townson, our drummer, had also been part of John’s Children, of course, and Simon was probably keen to see what his proteges were up to. He arrived just as guitarist David O’List was doing a solo. O’List had shortly beforehand taken a large amount of elephant tranquilliser (true story!) which kicked in just as Simon appeared in the control room. O’List collapsed to the floor in the middle of his solo, but continued making his patented wobbly noises, both with his guitar and his voice. I suggested via the talkback that he might care to stand up, and enquired whether he needed any help. He replied, after a brief pause, that everything was fine and he would prefer to stay lying down. So he did. Simon left fairly quickly, apparently saying later that he wanted nothing to do with it. This was understandable, I think. In later years, I helped out his protégé George Michael with some programming, but Simon didn’t appear.
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