et prononça ce mot: almería

The pure energy and excitement of this song affected me when I first uncovered it in a secondhand record shop in London's Soho in 1982. It made me want to live in Paris. How many songs make you want to relocate ? In my case, several. The classical strings, the brass and the chorus. Bir Hakeim: the overground metro thundering over the Seine. He wrote it for Brigitte Bardot after their affair had ended. It was recorded in a studio in around 1968 when, amidst the student protests that sent volleys of Molotov cocktails up the Champs Élysées, Charles de Gaulle sought refuge at a German air base and watched as metropolitan France gradually moved from a conservative tradition to a more liberal morality by force of its young populace. Across La Manche, the Swinging Sixties were well under way, dazzling the world with dramatically raised hemlines, rediscovered Mondrianism and an overdose of Vanessa Redgrave. France was not particularly fashionable in the late 1960s. But I like this video because, even in its monochromatic and crude visual effect typical of the time; its attempt at startling diversion - nevertheless it captures the message of the singer through stillness. Stillness. The Gauloise fogged inertia of a smoking, poet protangonist who wears very nice shoes and does not give a fuck. That is a lost art. He does not perform before the camera - the camera performs for him. Serge Gainsbourg.

A chaque mouvement
On entendait
Les clochettes d'argent
De ses poignets
Agitant ses grelots
Elle avança
Et prononça ce mot :
Alméria

avant garde alliance: party political broadcast

marianne faithfull

 

"Do me a favour, don't put me in the dark" sings Marianne Faithfull in her best Dickens good-time girl. Ex-resident of Ormskirk, habitué of so many rehab clinics and now Baroness Sacher-Masoch courtesy of her paternal great-great grandfather is infamous as much for her drug dependency and her relationship with Mick Jagger in the mid-1960s as for her music and acting career. Now aged 62, I believe she is never more at her best. Two years living on the streets of Soho in the early 1970s - she slept on a wall (I would like to visit this wall) - and an addiction to heroin and cocaine caused a severe laryngitis that altered the pitch and the timbre of her voice forever. An indignant Sunday Times newspaper journalist once wrote that she had "permanently vulgarised her voice."

As if this were a bad thing.

Nobody wants to hear the convent-educated Marianne of "This Little Bird" - we want the raw expression and emotionality of someone who has track-marked themselves out of the possibility of continuing addiction, who has lived without telephone, electric light and  curling tongs, and whom has recorded this song.

It is taken from the Broken English album released in 1979, although I didn't hear it until the summer of 1982 while in Paris. Adapted from a poem written by the poet and playwright Heathcote Williams and set to a 4/4 tango rhythm it is a mistresspiece of sexual jealousy and poisonously barbed spite. It caused a certain controversy. A female using the word cunt, let alone in popular song, is an act of transgression and it simply isn't on, don't you know. 
I cannot imagine any another artist being able to deliver this song with such conviction and unsentimentality. Of course, Ms Faithfull has lived it. Some of the lyrics are explicit - this is quite possibly the very first rap song - yet when expressed with such cracked candour, authenticity and glorious weltschmerz, 'profanity' is not profanity at all. It is poetry.

madrid

Last weekend I went to Madrid. It was my 49th birthday and I was determined not to spend it sat in an orthopaedic armchair looking out of the window, smiling benevolently at children. So I went to the travel agency to book train tickets with RENFE. I waited 30 minutes while someone who'd come into town on his tractor was trying to negotiate a refund on a Mediterranean cruise because his entire party came down with food poisoning while the boat was still actually docked at Barcelona. But cruises aren't really about travelling. Cruises are monumental all-day buffets with Naples slipping past, unnoticed, in the background. Eventually, when I was served, the assistant - a brittle young woman, a Nazi in a company cravat - responded to my request for train tickets as if I were asking her to arrange a fully inclusive, smoking holiday to the Moon.

"We can book the tickets, but we can't print them out. They have to be posted from Valencia", she explained, as if I were seven.

"Then why am I standing here?"

In other words, I can book them on the internet and print out the tickets on A4 paper -- but she can't, and she's a travel agent.

Madrid is a different animal to Barcelona. It's resolutely continental: sat on an high plain with slate in place of terracotta and not a palm tree in sight. An inferno in summer, Siberian in winter. It is a northern city. The outskirts reminded me of The Bronx. Blocks of austere, functional social housing retreating to the horizon; six-lane avenues criss-crossed by motorways and overground train lines; smog. I think that when Madrid rapidly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s they must have looked to America for the model of how it should be done. It does not look European, or even particularly Spanish. The centre of the city is Beaux Arts and Art Deco splendour; its streets teeming with Castilian and South American faces; its metro evokes Hispanic colonialism: Buenos Aires, Tetuán, Cuzco, Colombia, Guzmán El Bueno. If you have seen his films, it's almost impossible not to think of Pedro Almodóvar when one is there because he has immortalised, and satirised, Madrid perfectly.

My stay was brief and I decided to visit the contemporary art museum, Museo Reina Sofía, which had an interesting exhibition of the British architect Richard Rogers, complete with scale models of his past and future projects. I can understand why people get excited about scale model architecture because it always appears so utopian and fantastic. Far better than real life. Saturday evening I had an excellent, three-course meal with half-a-bottle of Rioja for only 8 euros at an unpretentious, small yet welcoming restaurant in the Chueca called El Comunista. It was packed with Madrileños and I believe I was the only non-native Spaniard in the place. The women on the adjacent table looked at me with bald curiosity to see what I was going to do with my bread basket before the first course arrived. I pour equal amounts of olive oil and vinegar onto the side-plate, then sprinkle it liberally with pepper. I then break the bread apart and use this as a dip. I think it's an Andalucian custom, because they don't do it in Valencia nor in Castille. It is a ritual of the lone diner, because you can't pretend to reorder the contacts list on your mobile phone forever while waiting for an adequate flan.

On Sunday I visited the Jardín Botánico and afterwards went to the Retiro park and drank coffee while reading the colour supplement of El País. My neighbours - an English couple in their fifties who evidently worked in Madrid - were lunching with visiting friends. In Spain there are two lunches: the first one between 10am and 11am (almuerzo) and the second one between 2pm and 4pm (la comida). He droned on from arsehole to breakfast time about some tedious aspect of middle management strategy while his partner, a confection of low-lighted streaks and a top that was far too décolleté for her particular station, chirped away about shopping possibilities. Anyway, she was careless with her coleslaw and they were dive-bombed from every direction - in two seconds flat - by an army of urban sparrows, consequently deserting their table in a Thames Estuary panic. 

It was Tippi Hedren.
It was Almodóvar.

Madrid did not fail me.