Pop music
The waiting game
Marcus Berlanann
These are anxious weeks for Steely Dan fans — those of us, that is, who haven't died of old age. Nineteen years we have been waiting for the new album: 19 long and arduous years, during which we have played the old LPs to death, replaced them with CDs and decided the LPs sounded better in the first place. Nineteen years of keeping the faith, of arguing about our favourite tracks, of maintaining our equi- librium when radio stations only ever played 'Haitian Divorce', of wondering why Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were so lazy, or even whether they were still alive. We bought the solo albums (one superb, two adequate); we saw the comeback live shows in 1996 (very disappointing); we looked forward to the new album they said they were recording. We waited. We waited a little longer. We continued to wait. Then, several months ago, an autumn release date was announced. Names of tracks were leaked. (This wasn't terribly exciting in itself, but if they were naming tracks at least this meant they had written some.) We held our breath. We are still holding our breath. Nothing more has been heard. I have been meaning to ring up the record company to find out whether it has been put back in the schedule. I haven't done so in case it has. Or perhaps Donald and Wal- ter don't think 19 years is quite long enough. Perhaps they'd prefer to make it a nice round 20.
In a way you have to admire them. Treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen, as serial monogamists and leaders of one-party states would say. Fagen and Becker release records only when they want or feel able to. They pay no attention to public demand (what little is left). When inspiration deserts them, they simply stop working. Why not? They can afford to. And to carry on recording when you're just recycling the same old ideas makes no sense at all. Even though it's what everybody else does.
Among the current batch of oldsters still striving for our attention are Iggy Pop (aged 52), whose Avenue B (Virgin) is a grumbling appendix of a record, a gloomy paean to lost youth and the onset of middle age, when even chasing young lovelies loses its appeal. 'It was in the winter of my fifti- eth year that it hit me: I was really alone,' he groans, on a track appealingly titled 'No Shit'. But he isn't really alone. Everyone over 50 has a record out at the moment. Tom Jones (59) has taken the duets option with Reload (Gut), in which a coachload of youthful luminaries are comprehensively outbawled by the most powerful lungs ever to emerge from Pontypridd. An album like this will always attract the curious, but it's hard to imagine listening to it many times, or even twice. And Bryan Ferry (54), bereft of inspiration for longer than anyone can remember, has returned to the ancient art of popular song for inspiration on As Time Goes By (Virgin), a belated sequel to his celebrated 1973 collection, These Foolish Things. Again, it's pleasant enough, but was it really begging to be recorded?
Not that you have to be middle-aged to be going through the motions. Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl are only in their late thirties, but on Temperamental (Virgin) their late discovery of dance music leaves them sounding like Fred Wedlock, the oldest swinger in town. Even Simply Red's Mick Hucknall seems to be past it. Love And The Russian Winter (East West) — an odd choice of title for someone who likes to spend the colder months of the year in Milan — is more an exercise in pastiche than anything else. Bored with his usual style (as most of the rest of us are), Hucknall can only ape 1970s disco, reggae and late 1980s house music on this, his seventh album, and his voice sounds worn out. He's not even 40 yet.
Pop music, of course, was traditionally the most precarious of careers; success was hard to come by and frighteningly easy to fritter away. That, however, was in an age of full employment and jobs for life. Now everyone is on short-term contracts and no one has a job for life, except for pop stars, who can go on churning out records and playing the nostalgia circuit until they drop. Indeed, because pop stars start early, and go on selling records long after they die, even the most cautious parents must now be encouraging their wayward offspring towards careers in music. Such men as Becker and Fagen, who limit their output, are the rarities, which may be why we esteem them so highly. New album in the spring, then, although which spring remains open to question.
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