Paolo Nutini - what's your op OP?

[CG Pinkmel]

I have been listening to his debut album for a while - since it came out. It was immediately appealing - and seems to have stood the test of my time - I like the boy - he sounds delicious - can string a lyric together - and looks ok too.

If you are not keen, what does the troubled teen think?

[Daz Madrigal]

I'll try and recall the name, Mel.

I suppose mine and Piccys stuff isn't quite good enough eh?

[oldpunketteloggedinasguest]

he is a Paisley boy you know, where my Mum came from.

Troubled teen likes him, but he is too bland for uberteen (who wants me to take her to Reading Festival this year !!!!!)

[CG readingmum NOT]

Oh you are a brave woman if you are even considering it!

My eldest went a couple of years ago - i get the feeling that they had a blast but might not bother with a repeat! However now that her uncle has moved near Glastonbury....

for myself, i have always enjoyed watching Glastonbury at a remove....with a clean loo and a well sprung mattress!

[oldpunkette]

CG said:

Oh you are a brave woman if you are even considering it!

My eldest went a couple of years ago - i get the feeling that they had a blast but might not bother with a repeat! However now that her uncle has moved near Glastonbury....

for myself, i have always enjoyed watching Glastonbury at a remove....with a clean loo and a well sprung mattress!

Have enjoyed many a T i n the Park myself . . sober (but not necessarily straight.) It's best not to drink at these things, as the toilets are revolting. One year my cuz and I took up an old basin (of the sort you put in the sink to wash dishes) to keep in our tent to avoid the need for the toilets.

Washing also a problem, but cuz was a clever girl and brought baby wet wipes.

On a sunny weekend, there was nothing better. When it rained it was hell. I also used to go up for the day and just get the bus home to avoid the tent/toilet thing. I also used to sometimes get on the guest list when I worked for a magazine and when I was pally with an English band.

I haven't been since I bet gothboy, as he refuses the rock-pig experience in favour of smaller, darker and more purist musical experiences.

I don't know who's at Reading this year. It's not out the question that we go . . . . Poor Uberteen is a much neglected child as the wheel that squeaks loudest gets most grease. Last year we went to Give It A Name in Manchester to re-bond, and had a fine time. Night out in Manchester the night before and we went to Chinatown and a wee walk up Canal Street.

Going to see My Chemical Romance next . . which I do a lot, to keep in touch with my inner 14 year old emo. Then I think gothboy has got us on the guest list for Patti Smith, but that could be dreadful. I'm expecting more poetry than 'Because the Night' . . .

[Daz Madrigal]

He is hero-worshipped by Eric Clapton, Bert Jansch, Paul Simon and Led Zeppelin. So why is Davy Graham reduced to giving lessons at £10 a time? Will Hodgkinson tracks down an eccentric living legend

Friday July 15, 2005
The Guardian

'Dylan? I'm not familiar with his work' ... Davy Graham


"Davy isn't feeling very well today." That phrase has struck fear into the hearts of musicians, concert promoters, record companies and journalists for more than 40 years. Davy Graham is the original guitar hero, a man who revolutionised the way the instrument is played back in the early 1960s and paved the way for a generation of guitar gods: Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch and Eric Clapton among them. But his relative obscurity may have something to do with the fact that he can never be guaranteed to turn up to his own gigs, let alone interviews. And I've just got the message that he's refusing to open the door to his flat in London's Camden Town, putting our interview in considerable jeopardy.

Born to a Guyanan mother and a Scottish father, Graham picked up the guitar at the age of 12 and has based his life around a total mastery of the instrument ever since. In 1960, when he was 19, he wrote an instrumental tune for his then girlfriend, Anji, which remains the rite of passage for every budding guitarist. In 1962, he invented a system of tuning called DADGAD, which is now used by musicians all over the world. Elizabeth Taylor spotted him busking in the Paris Metro in the early 1960s and invited him to play at parties on the French Riviera, from where he took off to Tangiers to discover north African music and heroin. In the late 1960s, at the height of his fame, he was booked for a tour of Australia. The plane stopped for an hour in Bombay. He never arrived in Australia, and instead spent the next six months wandering through India.

"He's always been off the wall," says Bert Jansch, who has known Graham since both were teenagers. "He's completely unpredictable and the audience will be treated to wherever his mind is at that moment, which means that he might decide to turn up with an oud and play that all night. But I've never been less than blown away by his playing, which is incredibly sophisticated. He's the single most influential person on everything I've done."

Jansch is not the only one that Graham has influenced. According to the folk player Ralph McTell, "we owe it all to this wonderful musician". Paul Simon asked Graham to form a duet with him in the early 1960s; he declined the offer but showed Simon a few chords to get him going. The American guitarist was clearly paying attention: a cover of Anji appeared on Simon & Garfunkel's 1965 album Sounds of Silence. One listen to Graham's Indian-influenced Blue Raga will reveal some of the inspiration for Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven; and while both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have held up Graham as an early hero, it is possible that he does not hold them in such high regard. At a recent awards ceremony in London, Graham went up to Page and said: "Hello, Robert."

Right now, my main concern is that Graham can be convinced to step beyond his front door and make it over to the flat in Camberwell, on the other side of London, where I'm meant to be talking to him - and that he remembers to put in his teeth so I can understand what he's saying.

I have met Graham once before, at the Camden flat at the end of 2004, after months of trying to track him down. Still handsome and elegant at 64, he was gracious if rather eccentric. Asked about Bob Dylan, who came to see him play on an early trip to England, he replied politely: "I'm not familiar with his work." A trip to a nearby pub ended in disaster, when hearing Roll With It by Oasis on the pub stereo induced a panic attack in Graham. We returned to his flat, and for the rest of the evening he stood in the middle of his bedroom and played the mandolin with his eyes closed, smiling in beatific concentration.

This time, after a tense two-hour wait, Graham arrives, immaculately dressed, bristling with nervous energy and accompanied by a young singer-songwriter called Mark Pavey who has become something of a manager for Graham, getting him to turn up to concerts and ensuring that he receives some of the royalties owed to him that he has never bothered to ask for. Graham hands me a book on Oriental rugs and a collection by the Greek poet Dionysios Solomos, which represent, in a way I cannot pretend to understand, his philosophy of the guitar. He goes on to recall taking a bottle of LSD with him on a ship from Barcelona and shooting up opium in Istanbul, before describing the 10,000 ladybirds he saw on his window that morning.

Over the course of the afternoon, Graham holds court on how to talk to the wealthy ("only ever mention the weather and servants"), the south Indian language of Tamil ("Have you ever heard it spoken? It's like a thousand drums playing at once") and Yehudi Menuhin ("he had a very soft handshake").

Any attempts to steer the conversation in a more conventional direction prove futile. I ask Graham about the first time he went to India. "That's not the next question, Will," he replies firmly. "The next question is, 'Why is the sitar a feminine instrument and the sarod a masculine instrument?'" (It's all to do with the position they're played in, apparently.)

Through the chaotic barrage of information, some facts emerge: that he can learn any instrument or style of music entirely by ear; that he has travelled all over the world in search of answers to musical questions only he understands; and that, despite his myriad achievements, he has remained poor all his life. In recent years, he has relied on giving guitar lessons to bring in some money. These are rumoured to consist of playing his pupils the first side of an album by the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar, going to the pub, coming back half an hour later to turn the record over, going to the pub again and then asking for £10.

"Davy's always been too wayward for commercial success," says Jansch. "A lot of people in the folk world don't rate him because of that lack of professional discipline. He said to me once, 'As long as you have a good start and a good ending to a concert, the middle doesn't really matter.' I remember thinking, 'But it does help if you turn up in the first place, Davy.'"

Graham's unpredictability has meant that his flashes of brilliance have been sporadic. In 1965, he released the two best albums of his career in the same week: Folk Routes, New Routes is a duet with the folk singer Shirley Collins; and Folk, Blues and Beyond is a mostly instrumental album that combines American blues and jazz with Moroccan, Indian and east European styles. His live playing is best captured on an album called After Hours, which was recorded in 1967 in a student's bedroom on the campus of Hull University. Graham played majestically in front of an audience of about eight people, segueing the traditional Irish tune She Moved Through the Fair into his own Blue Raga with such mastery and depth that it is hard to believe the music is coming from a single acoustic guitar. His playing can also be wooden and lacking in feeling. Jansch says: "You can sit through the first half of a concert with no feeling at all - then suddenly it will click and Davy's playing will be absolutely incredible."

One of Graham's primary influences was a guitar player called Steve Benbow, who learned how to play Moroccan music after being stationed there during a stint in the army in the mid-1950s. Graham and Benbow are, with any luck, playing together tonight at Bush Hall in London. "I never seemed to get much homework done because I was always in the West End watching Steve Benbow," says Graham. "What he taught me was that you should never get stuck in one mode or style." Then he moves into a social history of the blues. "Of course, most of the old blues players were in prisons where they were allowed to make love to their wives. That strikes me as a civilised approach to incarceration." He starts singing raucous a capella versions of a handful of blues songs by way of celebration, banging on the table as he does so.

Graham has so far been cheerful and courteous, but singing the blues ignites his passions. He launches into expletive-littered tirades against the British treatment of the Scots, white people's ignorance of black history, and young people's attempts to grab attention through outlandish dress. This last subject sends him into a total frenzy. "They dress to be the centre of attention, and then they can't tell you a story, can't tell a joke, can't sing you a song! Absolute monsters!" he shouts, stamping around the room.

While Graham rages at the follies of youth to nobody in particular, I slip out of the room quietly, wondering where the division between genius and madness lies. Perhaps such beautiful songs as Anji and Blue Raga could only ever come from a man who exists in a world far, far beyond the mundane.

[Daz Madrigal]

The Proclaimers at No. 1!?!

Its a good song mind!

[oldpunkette]

madrigalman said:

The Proclaimers at No. 1!?!

Its a good song mind!

It's mince. It was mince when it first came out, it's mince now. It makes Scotland a laughing stock as usual. (Sigh).

(I met them once you know at a party in Edinburgh, but was v. v. drunk and made a bit of a fool of myself. I was only about 22 at the time)

Daz, I'm off to see My Chemical Romance tonight. PM me your Moby number and I'll hold it up for you when they play good songs so that you can hear good music for a change.

[Daz Madrigal]

Its mint!

..or its mince..

Its a great song though, even better if it makes Scotland into a laughing stock!

[oldpunkette]

Well, yeah, I suppose Mancs have got Oasis to do that job for them!

[Daz Madrigal]

There was a modern band with a song out called 'I'm in Trouble' but I can't find who its by. Produced by the singer out of the Killers...which is odd because its better than any of his songs.

[Daz Madrigal]

Noels a smart guy..he's unlucky enough to have an idiot brother thats all.

[oldpunkette]

Fail to see why Scotland should ever be a laughing stock.

[oldpunkette]

madrigalman said:

There was a modern band with a song out called 'I'm in Trouble' but I can't find who its by. Produced by the singer out of the Killers...which is odd because its better than any of his songs.

The Replacements? (Although I think they pre-date the Killers)

I gotta hide, I gotta run
Try suicide, well that ain't no fun
Oh you won't ever say that it's so
You're in love and I'm in trouble

Spend my cash, waste my time
Take out the trash, not this time
Well you won't never say that it's so
You're in love and I'm in trouble