Sprezzatura

god save riffs and jams, in all the different varieties!  It's that sentence that has made everyone mad since Buddy and Ritchie and the other bloke passed on and Elvis joined the army: rock is dead. At the risk of completely embarrassing myself I think it's true this time. Genres only really get five or six decades to be truly Relevant before they become heritage concerns to be maintained and not innovated within. The blues went from the delta c. 1900 to Chicago clubs in the Fifties before it entered its preservation era in the 60s. "How can you say that when people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix considered themselves bluesmen?" A of all, you cannot ask artists where they would place themselves critically, because assuming they don't get it wildly wrong like Clapton or Hendrix they will all uniformly say "A bit of everything, really. We just make music , man." Even I, normally the exact kind of nerd you can count on to delineate things properly, fall...

When I was a kid we would drive from north Mitcham to Bellenden Road in Peckham, near my mum's old house, to buy Jamaican patties, hard dough bread, and guava jelly. There was a mural at Goose Green in East Dulwich, near journey's end - not that weird, there's obviously plenty of graffiti in London - that always gave me the creeps. It seemed to be a depiction of a normal village green, much like the one it stood upon, but there was something distinctly Wrong with it. The simple, bright colours read as completely unnatural, almost sickly, and for some reason an explosion of light emanated from the tree at the centre. It didn't help that the mural was scarcely visible from Adys Road as we drove to the bakery, partially shrouded by a couple real trees, bathed in amber from the old sodium streetlights you used to get (because by the time we got to Peckham it was always night). It made the mural feel like something I had imagined or fever-dreamed, half-asleep and up past my ...