Vivien Goldman
Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe
Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz
(White Rabbit Books)
As I get older I have begun to question and wonder where I know all that I know, especially the crucial stuff, like why punk was important and the pluses and minuses of Rastafarianism, just how fundamentally stupid and evil nazis are, how the world is weighted against women and that Mick Jones from The Clash wrote Career Opportunities after being employed by the Post Office to look for letter bombs…
Reading Vivien Goldman’s marvellous compilation and compendium reminds me that much of what I learned was from her articles in the UK music press of the mid seventies to early eighties. Always insightful and sympathetic and full of details that meant you could be a clued up suburban kid who’s only other information came from the slim pickings of the yoof telly of the day and guess-work based on records and photos.
Her interview with Robert Wyatt alone could be all the life lesson you need as an artist.
It’s a moral education, without preaching. Goldman has a knack of tickling the person out of the muso and the motivations and confusions out of the person. Her interview with Robert Wyatt alone could be all the life lesson you need as an artist.
Consistently great choices of musicians interviewed include Linton Kwesi Johnson (“It’s a mistake to try and portray me as a political poet. I believe that poetry don’t change fuck all. No art form changes nothing.”), George Clinton (“if you hyperventilate it’s a religious experience of the highest order.”), Talking Heads, including David Byrne (“He looks like the last of the line of a noble Russian family in a nineteenth-century novel with a hereditary disease, just come off a squash court.”), Ornette Coleman (“…most people see equality as something that gives them security in their environment, more than something in their heart that they want everyone to experience.”), The Slits, Raincoats, Neneh Cherry, many, many more and climaxing with 83-year-old calypsonian, The Mighty Sparrow (“We don’t want to be singular, as time goes on. We want to be together.”).
All of them, amazingly, have something useful to say - not just with their songs but as thinkers and artists.
Throughout the book Goldman’s vivid descriptions of London and New York in particular frame the times. It’s brilliant writing. The references will have you searching for and, in my case, revisiting long-lost musical treasure. Easily the best collection of music journalism I’ve read and that includes Jon Savage’s brilliant collections, I’ll leave you with Vivien interviewing a drunk Richard Hell at 4.30AM in 1977.
“We’re sitting directly over the air vents of the 57th Street Subway and it seems like all the pollution of New York City is picketing our Formica-topped nookette. The mini jukebox on the wall is whining, “Hey did you happen to see the most byootiful gurl in the world…”
Book Launch:
Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe
The Social, in Fitzrovia, not far from Oxford Street’s 100 Club and Soho, is a suitable spot for the launch of Vivien Goldman’s book, Rebel Musix. Set up years ago by the venerable scenesters of Heavenly Records the basement venue resembles, from memory, Wardour Street’s The Vortex, for a short while the ‘other’ punk venue after Covent Garden’s Roxy.
Those of us here to see and listen are amazed that, in our decrepitude, we are still alive and look around to see if anyone is there who we (should?) recognise. There are some old friendships renewed, ex-NME editor Neil Spencer and producer-for-hire Youth in particular shake a few hands.
Vivien Goldman takes the stage after being introduced by White Rabbit book’s head geezer, Lee Brackstone and proceeds to read a hilarious story from the book about the benefit show to save Camden’s Country Club that featured a kind of zombie resurrection by Fela Kuti’s personal priest and magician, Professor Hindu.
Then she is joined on stage by fellow music journalist Lucy O’Brien who seems a little in awe. And perhaps rightly so. With some gentle prompting, Lucy gets Vivien to open up a little about her time as a journalist in the 1970s and early 1980s, when there were literally just two female music journalists writing at any time for any of the three major selling music papers.
If there is a sense that Goldman is a little weary of talking about the golden times it might be because she has spent decades not being a music journalist, going on to work in telly, become a singer in her own right for a short period (check the wonderful ‘Launderette’ track recorded on Public Image Ltd’s studio down time) and eventually become the ‘punk professor’ (which is about the most non-punk professor name imaginable) at New York University.
That said, Goldman can put on a show and is charismatic enough to satisfy what is probably a very critical audience of old punks, music heads and, what looks like, some of her American students.
The evening finishes with a huge pile of books sold and signed and some wonderful old reggae rockers and roots dub played from one of the two Slits in attendance, Tessa Pollitt (Palm Olive is also floating around looking remarkably untroubled by age), very loudly to the remaining survivors, creaking gently in time to the bass.
Essential Information
Available from White Rabbit Books and elsewhere, start here
