Fusion and fission

No alarms and no surprises

It’s one of the most famous openings in cinema history. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are chatting away in a diner, before pulling out their guns to rob the place. At that moment, the scene freezes, the credits start to roll, and a wild guitar instrumental breaks out (parental advisory for language).

But actually, there’s something slightly odd. As everyone who bought the Pulp Fiction soundtrack will know, this is the 1962 performance of Misirlou by “king of the surf guitar” Dick Dale. But if you actually listen, it’s not surf music as you might think of it.

The music of the Beach Boys fits pretty squarely in the Western pop canon. Surfin’ USA was such a direct rip-off of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen that Berry ended up with a writing credit. It fits with a time when the Rolling Stones were trotting out a range of Chuck Berry covers, and were steeped in the Chicago Blues Chess Records songs of musicians like Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. (My favourite version of Surfin’ USA is the absolutely blistering cover on Barbed Wire Kisses by the Jesus and Mary Chain by the way).

But Misirlou isn’t really like that. Thirty years past Pulp Fiction, it’s hard to hear it with fresh ears, but one of the best ways to do that is to listen to the version by the Kronos Quartet:

All of a sudden, you hear the melody for what it is. You’re no longer in California, you’re at the greatest wedding reception of your life, somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. This is not a coincidence: Dale was of Lebanese descent, and consciously echoed the folk music of the region in his performances. In fact, Dale didn’t even write Misirlou: there’s a 1927 version on YouTube where the roots of the song are even clearer, and it presumably goes back even further.

But that’s how music works. A genre like K-Pop can bring in all kinds of influences, put a local twist on them, and send them out into the world again. Like food, music is one of the great shared experiences that makes us human and brings us together.

Except that’s not what really seems to be happening at Glastonbury and elsewhere. I don’t really want to get into arguments about that. Personally I’m somewhere in the vicinity of “artists should be free to say what they like within legal constraints, horrible though it was Bob Vylan probably didn’t breach those, politicians shouldn’t be vetting who performs at festivals, but I don’t see why I should be forced to pay for a weekend of such politically skewed content through the BBC’s (confidential) contract with the Eavis family”.

But my problem is, that doesn’t seem to be the standard that’s being imposed elsewhere. There seems to be a heckler’s veto in the arts, particularly for anything that touches on certain topics (however obliquely). Take another concert in the South West this week: certified musical genius Jonny Greenwood was meant to perform with Dudu Tassa in Bristol on Monday, but that didn’t happen due to “credible threats”. The ironic thing is that, like Misirlou, the album and the concert showcase traditional music from across the Middle East:

The record we are touring features singers from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq. The group’s ancestral and musical roots are centuries old: in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Turkey, and all across the Middle East – each of the members brought together by a shared love of Arabic song, regardless of where exactly they all happened to be born.

By cancelling the concert, people have been denied the chance to learn about this music, and our shared humanity expressed through it. I know Greenwood’s links with Israel are controversial in some quarters, but nobody in the arts world seems to have a problem with Massive Attack having played Moscow in July 2018, post-Crimea, post-Skripal, post-Litvinenko, post-Politkovskaya and so on. It’s hard not to conclude that there’s something of a double standard in terms of which music does and doesn’t get cancelled these days.

So, if the BBC really want to make up for the Glastonbury mess and stand up for free expression like they claim, my suggestion would be that they should film and broadcast Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa’s show, to let us all make our minds up for ourselves and learn something along the way.

Brief update on my Adam Curtis piece: BBC Radio 4 More or Less decided to follow up on my claims this week (13’59” in here). I’m pleased to say that polling guru Sir John Curtice essentially agreed with all my points, which is a pretty high bar of fact-checking to get over.

Dr. Mark Pack

went into more detail on Substack here as well, and again confirmed my view that Curtis’s presentation was misleading - and even gained a quote from the man himself where he acknowledged this. That’s not a bad result.