Seasick Steve and the Machines
It was good to see Seasick Steve up there on the Glastonbury stage last week. Stomping away, twanging on his two strings furiously. All grizzle and earth and ancient wisdom. A funny story came to mind, my friend Dave Rofe was managing him for a short while so he told his mother about the guy. His Mum was in her seventies and Dave was telling her how Seasick Steve was 76. His Mum took one look at a picture of him and said “He’s not 76!”
That was over ten years ago and he doesn’t look 76 now. You can hide behind a scraggly grey beard but your taut skin and eager eyes will give the game away. People are always lying about their age but this is a pretty unique case for the adding years on rather than subtracting them.
In 2016 there was a Guardian article that put paid to Seasick Steve’s myth entitled “How Seasick Steve turned out to be Session Man Steve.” It talked about how he was ten years younger than he said he was, and worse still he wasn’t even a genuine scrubber. Rather than being an aw shucks, boxcar-riding hobo he was actually a session player and a competent disco producer with some success. It’s a funny read, do give it a go.
Needless to say this stuff doesn’t go down well with the public at large. When you’ve been going around telling everybody about this toothless, dungareed good ole boy who couldn’t catch a break till he was 70 and then you get presented with photos of him looking like Leo Sayer and living it up in France it kind of undermines you and your taste. It undermines your sense of who you even are.
We should’ve cottoned on because he’s been headlining festivals for about fifteen years and he still hasn’t put the rest of the stings on his guitar or bought any new clobber. Back in the 60s when European promoters were booking blues legends to come and play they were disappointed when the guys showed up wearing sharp suits. They wanted them to look fresh off a plantation and dripping in misery but if you give a guy a few quid he’ll try and smarten up. He’s got dignity, nobody wants to look a hobo. Except Seasick Steve.
So it’s an act, does it make any difference to how the music sounds if you know the guy isn’t really a boxcar bum? I think he still sounds great and I’m always impressed when people hoodwink the general public with such masterful manipulation. He’s a great player, he writes cool tunes and he’s given himself a set of limitations to work within that have boosted his creativity. Some people genuinely get turned off though, the music isn’t as good once you realise the guy can afford to eat well. It doesn’t sound the same to them anymore. They’re the same people who got pissed off when they realised Lana Del Ray didn’t live in a motel in a David Lynch film and she was actually just a pretty girl who wanted to be famous. The stories we tell ourselves about music are sometimes just as important as the music itself.
I always bring this idea up when Jacob Collier comes up, he’s undoubtedly talented. Infinitely talented perhaps, but his story is completely uninteresting. Collier is a massive Stevie Wonder fan and it’s unfair to compare him to Stevie Wonder but I think you can compare their stories and illustrate the whole point. One story is of a blind child growing up in poverty, with an abusive father who forced his mother into prostitution to pay the bills. The blind child sings on street corners and in church and gets spotted and signed at 11 and becomes one of the greatest and best loved singers of the 20th century. He’s also one of the greatest songwriters ever. He’s also a world-beating multi-instrumentalist, producer, political activist and civil rights campaigner. The other story is of a wealthy, well educated kid who gets showered in money, instruments, time, love and resources and ends up being a great musician who wears crocs. It’s good for Instagram clips but it’s a shit story. We love stories about triumphs over adversity. Mustahpa Mond even says this to Bernard and Helmholz in Brave New World before exiling them both to the Falklands. Helmholz welcomes the whole thing as he figures it’ll be good for his writing. He’s probably right.
Anyway, my point is that you might ridicule the people who find Seasick Steve less authentic now that they know he uses toilet paper but there’s undoubtedly some music that you like that you tell yourself a story about. It might be about the poverty of the artist, their mental illness, their broken relationships or their addictions but there’s often a story and it often enriches your listening experience. These days as AI threatens the musicians from every direction I take great comfort in the stories we tell ourselves about music. Technology was always meant to save us from labour and toil but suddenly here we are in 2024 and a predatory bunch of tech jackals have unleashed programmes that will make our music, prose, poetry, films, scripts and paintings for us. That way presumably we don’t have to sit around wasting time on self-examination and the human condition, we can just get back out and drive an Uber, work for Deliveroo or even just keep scrolling and producing data. Who’d have seen this coming? In Star Trek everyone on earth in the future is playing classical music, doing amateur drama and drinking fine wine whilst the machines do all the agriculture, extraction and heavy industry. We’ve chosen the wrong future, what a colossal fuck up!
It’s alright though because music isn’t just music, it’s the stories that come with the music. Sure there are some people for whom music is a bit like wallpaper, the people who used to buy a CD at Tesco with their weekly shop. The people who just want something on because they’ve got people round. Those people will probably just switch on an AI and say “make three hours of music that reminds me of my holiday in Ayia Napa.” They’ll be happy enough with the turd it knocks out too.
It’ll never work for any of us who are that bit more invested though, those of us who realise that any art that’s worthwhile is a process and not just an end product. We need a journey, a triumph against adversity, a sibling rivalry or just a plain old broken heart to make the whole thing worthwhile. “I asked the computer to do it” isn’t a good enough story.
What’s the story with Seasick Steve? He’s a liar that writes blues tunes. It’s a pretty good story now I think of it, not dissimilar to the Micah P Hinson story.
Happy New Government
We don’t really need to talk about the election here do we? Thank God for First Past the Post etc etc. I stayed up later than I should watching all the coverage on Channel 4 because I love the Rest Is Politics and Rory and Alistair were on there for the night having an occasional barbed exchange with calamitous scouse dimwit Nadine Dorres. Anyway, I nipped out for an emergency bottle of wine at one point and switched to the BBC’s five live coverage when I was pleasantly reminded that the BBC for some bizarre reason still uses Rick Wakeman’s Arthur from The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table for their general election coverage. I bet no fucker in the BBC even knows what they’re listening to at the end of every segment. Hopefully they’ll still use it in the dystopian future we inevitably march towards. Prog endures.
Hail The Ginger Prince
It warmed the heart to see that our own Nathan Sudders stood in for Elbow the other night. It’s not the level of the gig or the stature of the band but the fact that Nathan turned up with 24 hours notice and nailed a seventeen song set in a high profile setting on the most unforgiving instrument. That’s pretty stunning work under pressure, there’s not many people who can do it but most of them are from Lancashire.
*standing ovation*
You make the Jacob Collier story more interesting than it is.