BTH
Well-Known Member
On Friday night I spent half an hour of my life nodding off while the Japanese er, composer Aki Onda played the biggest practical joke on a paying audience since John Cage’s 4′33″ premiered in New York in 1952. If playing a random assortment of tape cassettes of equally random and wholly unintelligible gibberish is performance art then good luck to you mate, but it ain’t music! Most people clapped. I didn’t. I don’t know why they clapped. I doubt if they did. Almost 200 years later, The Emperor’s New Clothes is a story that shows no sign of waning.
But still John Paul Jones, eh? “Let’s go and see him,” Josh said, “we might not get the chance again.” Josh holds on to the hope that Led Zeppelin will one day re-form and re-conquer the earth. Ah well, he may be right. About JPJ at least. But he’s getting no younger, even if he makes more than a passable stab at reversing the ageing process. He’s 66 these days, but looks considerably younger.
John Paul Jones was playing bass with what the ‘programme’ (one sheet of paper actually) described as: “The Norwegian ‘deathjazzambientavantrock’ ensemble Supersilent.” Nope. Me neither!
When I say bass, I don’t mean any old bass. He may have gone through his entire Led Zeppelin career with no more than three basses, but these days John Paul Jones plays a Manson 12 String Bass. That’s not a misprint… Twelve! Still the drum kit and keyboards looked orthodox enough.
When the band came on we soon discovered that the drummer also doubled up on random warbling and, rather more impressively, on trumpet! Bizarrely all three musicians had a MacBook and John Paul Jones spent most of the first piece faffing about on his and/or his iPad. Even an orthodox four-string bass would have looked a bit ambitious given the first hour of digi-musical noodling. I know music’s come a long way since Led Zeppelin’s first album but had Apple Macs been around in 1969 it’s doubtful whether they’d have got any further than Good Times, Bad Times. In fact Bad Times might have made a more apt title… and on a one-sided single at that!
The first set could be summed up as the best bits of Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain and Bitches Brew held together with the worst bits of Floyd’s Echoes and King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King.
The second set was mercifully shorter and at times the band even threatened to break out into a bit of music. We knew John Paul Jones was unlikely to give us the famous doom-laden bass notes of Dazed And Confused, the ingenious bass-runs of The Lemon Song or even the bouncing energy of Spaghetti Junction from his own 1985 album, Scream For Help, but apart from a couple of minutes of digital dexterity from the master bass-man it was hard to figure out what was going on beyond a freeform jamming session. Apparently, “Supersilent have just one rules: no rehearsals.” So that’s it then; their shows are rehearsals!
John Paul Jones has got far more money in his bank account (£40m and counting, according to the Sunday Times) than I’ll ever have, he can afford to be self-indulgent and so probably doesn’t need my advice, so maybe he’ll take Frank Zappa’s? Thirty years ago he brought an album out called Shut Up ‘n’ Play Yer Guitar. Take note JPJ… Log Out ‘n’ Play Yer Bass!
