Category: News and Views

I bet you are wondering who this is with the blue hair and boating jacket. In fact he’s a well known rock musician called Jack White, a man famous and loved for his quirky creativity with bands such as The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. He doesn’t usually look like this.

Jack, like David Bowie, seems to morph now and then. He started out as a lover of early blues and country, playing a lot of acoustic, wearing denim and looking scruffy, became quite punk, did some suave crooning for a while and then… went to sleep after his last album came out in 2018.

I had quite forgotten about him when suddenly I stumbled upon this amazing new video while researching material on You Tube. I didn’t recognise Jack in it to begin with, the dominant color being blue rather than Jack’s traditional red (and white).

But this is far more than a change of image and color scheme. While guitar is still his weapon of choice, Jack is going more techno musically and it is wonderful to see. We had a glimpse of what was to come perhaps with his song Sunday Driver, released in 2018. And Jack hasn’t been idle the last four years. He has two new albums out soon, Fear of the Dawn on April 8th and Entering Heaven Alive on July 22nd, and he is soon on tour again. I can’t wait!

Thank God…if there is one. You see, people are always saying that Rock is dead or at least dying as a musical genre. They say it’s all been done before. The contemporary band Airborne sounds just like AC/DC and Greta Van Fleet just like Led Zeppelin. Here in Phuket we keep hearing the same old tired songs from 40 years ago. I cringe now every time I hear the opening chords of Smoke on the Water or Zombie. Jack does things not done before.

The fact is, Rock will die without bold, imaginative and perhaps quirky songwriters like Jack White who will take a risk and try something different, saying “Damn the crowd!”.

Love him or hate him, laugh at him or take him seriously, Rock needs people like him to survive.

And if you love Rock and are concerned for its future, you do too.

My Thai friend Jack runs the Pastel bar in Phuket Town. He named the bar after the word for a mix of colours – pastel. But why? Because he wanted his bar to be a meeting place for musicians of different races and nationalities. I recall playing in a jam there during an open mic night I’d organised and the five of us were all from different countries, so Jack had succeeded in his aim.

Modern popular music has a long, proud tradition of inclusivity and hospitality. Bob Dylan’s idol Woody Guthrie and black early bluesman Leadbelly were great friends in 1930s USA, which was highly unusual there at that time. Other early bluesmen such as Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and Son House were surprised to be shown great respect and kindness when they visited Europe in the 60s. Likewise, visiting British bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were treated like royalty in the USA . Finally, the Aussie band AC/DC went down a storm after they arrived in the UK in 1977 to make a name for themselves, an event I have fond memories of!

I also recall a time post-punk in the UK when the Two-Tone craze took off, led by bands such as The Specials, The Selecter and The Beat, with bands featuring a mix of black and white musicians. The Bhundu Boys were to receive a rapturous welcome in the UK in 1986 when they arrived from Zimbabwe. Bob Marley too was contributing to an overall feeling of human unity and togetherness through the positive “One Love” message of his songs.

I hope you can see from all this that musicians have helped achieve something truly wonderful quite unthinkingly – race and nationality have long been irrelevant and meaningless when it comes to popular music. And it should always of course be so!

There is no more visible way such unity can be seen than a bunch of musicians of different races having fun together on stage. Musos have gently helped in this way to break down the mental walls of racism and xenophobia that divide our societies. They should be applauded for this as much as for their music.

So Musos of Phuket – hold your heads high! If politics etc divides people, music can unite them! You too have done great things in bringing people of different races and nationalities closer together, whether you realise it or not. I hope you can see yourselves as part of the long and noble tradition I have just described that continues to this day and which will surely continue long into the future.

So stand proud and take a bow guys and gals. You’re all stars!

Andy Tong Dee

It’s about this time of year that music magazines come up with the “best” rock/blues guitarist of the year. Music Radar had Angus Young in 2020 (John Mayer 2^nd), but Jake Kiszka wins in 2021 (Steve Vai 2^nd). I wondered what suddenly happened to propel Mr Kiszka (above left) of Greta Van Fleet to the top, especially as he plays very like Jimmy Page, who is still alive (above right).

Then there is the “best” of all time. I recall some years ago Rolling Stone magazine did a huge consultation with leading guitarists and came up with Jimi Hendrix (Jimmy Page 2^nd). More recently, Guitar World has Jimi and Jimmy 2^nd and 3^rd with Brian May surging to the lead. So what on earth is going on? Are the stars of yesterday fading and had their day? If so, why?

The problem, as any anal grammar school boy like me knows, is language. Just what does “best” mean? Most popular? Technically proficient? Best tone? Is it about stage presence? Without any kind of guide, or if voters ignore one, one can end up arbitrarily comparing apples to oranges, which is a pointless exercise.

So what happens if we say “best” = most innovative or influential? For there are (and were in his day) plenty of guitarists technically better than Hendrix, such as Jeff Beck, SRV, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. Angus Young is still THE star guitarist on stage without the need to destroy guitars (sorry Jimi, Pete Townsend beat you to that.)

The reality is that Hendrix was not as innovative as people like to believe. He wasn’t the first to popularize distorted guitars (Chuck Berry/Muddy Waters); he didn’t play slide (Page/Clapton/Dwayne Allman); he wasn’t good at playing or integrating acoustic guitar (Page/Steven Stills); he didn’t use open tunings or finger pick (Page/Stills/Jansch); and Richie Blackmore and Page both developed a similar explosive guitar style quite independently (via Clapton probably).

It has to be said that Hendrix was a very one dimensional guitarist, an all too brief “flash-in-the-pan” who was hugely influenced by Cream and early Delta Bluesmen (just listen to both Jimi’s versions of Voodoo Child, JLH’s Hobo Blues and Muddy’s Mannish Boy and you’ll get the idea). Today Jimi’s four often rambling albums have to compete with masterpieces such as Led Zeppelin IV, The Joshua Tree (U2) , Back in Black (AC/DC) and A Night at the Opera (Queen). It’s no easy task.

So who is the best (= most innovative and influential) guitarist of all time?

I look forward to your feedback, but for me, sorry Jimi, yes you were terrific, but it’s always going to be that other Jimmy! (Muddy Waters 2^nd)

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Andy Tong Dee

I really enjoy getting out and mixing with musos here so I can tell you their story, for that’s what Phuket Music Scene is all about – raising the profile of live music here. One thing that surprises me is how many of them – shock horror! – are Christians.

Religions get a bad press these days. The trouble is that Christianity gets an unfair and undeserving share of any blame. The American philosopher and atheist Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was worried that Christian-promoted values of humility, honesty, compassion and forgiveness were being lost from society, causing increasing social division and other problems. You only need an hour on Twitter to see how badly social media is blighted now with the nasty, negative vindictiveness of the emotionally-damaged and jealous. There is to be no forgiveness or redemption with these people.

UK Comedian Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr Bean!) once described cancel culture as the “digital equivalent of the medieval mob, roaming the streets, looking for someone to burn”. New psychologically-damaged puritans and zealots are seeking new witches and heretics to crush to prove their goodness. It feels sometimes as if we are back in 16th Century Europe all over again, and I’m worried…very worried.

For no one seems safe. Not even Jesus, for his teachings about love for enemies and the need to forgive one another’s wrongs are a strong challenge to the Twitter mobs. He must make them feel uneasy, but he has proved a very difficult man for them to cancel so far, I’m glad to say.

So let’s hear it for Phuket’s Christian musicians! They deserve our respect and support at this time of year in a modern society with so many problems. Christian values are a solution, not a problem.

Happy Christmas and peace and goodwill to you all!

Andy Tong Dee

They say the music you like when a teenager sticks with you for the rest of your life; it influences your musical choices later in life whether you realise it or not. It makes sense to me.

When I was young I loved bands which were… well, different. They didn’t fit in with what was popular at the time. John Peel would play them on BBC radio late at night, but no one else did. Van der Graaf Generator was darker than a coal mine with the lights out. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was just plain weird. Then there came the Sex Pistols which most dismissed as not musical at all. I loved them all, and I still do. Today, only the Black Keys gives me hope, their songs sounding as raw as red meat hanging in a Detroit garage.

For nothing seems available to shock us these days musically. Anything that comes out of the radio or Spotify is over-produced and conforms to some mystical industry standard. Maybe we cannot define it, but we know what doesn’t conform to it. Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues wouldn’t stand a chance these days.

If this is commercial music, amateur efforts in the community are much the same here. Even ‘original’ songs sound hauntingly all too similar to something else we have heard before, with love as a theme done to death.

Andy Greenlay’s excellent post on Phuket Musicians (9 October) said it all via a video of Frank Zappa who would never get a recording contract today. (Click here.) Neither would his schoolmate Captain Beefheart.

It takes courage to take a risk, to pick up an instrument and try something really different. People will laugh at you, even physically attack you (as they did with the Pistols). But someone has to have the guts to do it if music is not to stagnate and be emotionally unstimulating.

Music is much less creative today, and we are all the poorer for it. We need to be challenged; we need that shock of the new.

Someone has to do it. Someone has to try.