Lou Reed’s latest DVD, Spanish Fly: Live in Spain is released tomorrow on Sanctuary
E from Eels
Katherine Kennedy Everett
Eels’ front man Mark Oliver Everett — better known as E — emerged as one of the great modern songwriters with his band’s 1998 album Electro-Shock Blues. As with much of E’s work, the songs are deeply personal and concern his family. The album was written after his mother died of cancer and his sister committed suicide. Similar themes are explored again on his latest album, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, which received a five-star review in The Sunday Times when it was released.
E’s family — its dysfunction and tragedies — doesn’t just provide him with subject matter, it also gives him poetic inspiration. “After my mother died and I went to clear out the family house in Virginia, I discovered one of my grandmother’s books of poetry, Music of Morning. I had heard stories about my crazy grandmother who wrote poems. But I didn’t realise until then just how good she was.”
E printed one of his grandmother Katherine Kennedy Everett’s poems, Prelude, on the sleeve of Electro-Shock Blues: “Let me lie on your heart like snow/Cool and apart/for a moment, so/Before the flames start/and the snows melt/and the waters flow.”
“I love that, it’s really beautiful,” he says. It was also important for E to find another family member who could express emotions. “Maybe it skips a generation,” he says. “My grandmother’s work is passionate, full of life and longing. That was an influence on me — that vibrancy is something that I strive to achieve.” Indeed, the final line of the album is “Maybe it’s time to live”.
The lyrics of title track of Electro-Shock Blues derive from writing that E’s sister Elizabeth did in a psychiatric hospital. “They had given her an exercise,” he explains. “She was told to write out ‘I am okay’ 100 times. She managed it a few times, and then she started writing ‘I am not okay’.
“Elizabeth had the family curse, but she didn’t have the family gifts. Without doubt, the thing that has kept me from the dark end of the family street is that I’ve been able to write these songs. The thing that ultimately killed Elizabeth is that she couldn’t do anything like that. By creating a song from her words, I wanted to give her that — the gift of being a poet.”
Eels perform at QEH, SE1, on June 12
Marianne Faithfull
Allen Ginsberg “I had this fantastic English teacher at my convent school, Mrs Simpson. She got me studying Milton, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth,” says Marianne Faithfull. Halfway through her A-levels, however, she was discovered by the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and became a pop star. “When I should have been doing A-levels, I was on tour with the Hollies.”
Pigeonholed as a 1960s pop chick and a member of the Stones entourage, Faithfull emerged only slowly as an artist in her own right. The struggle began early, though. Back in 1965, she was fighting her producers to record a setting of the Yeats poem Down by the Salley Gardens on her second album. “I don’t know how I got away with it,” she laughs. The incongruities continued. While she was busy racking up Top 10 hits, she was hanging out with the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Through Ginsberg, she met Bob Dylan. “At that time, the poets and songwriters were realising that there was a lot of common ground,” she says. “There was also the realisation that the blues were poetry, too. It was no coincidence that the songwriters who were rediscovering folk music and the blues — Dylan, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — were the ones who were making the great leaps in songwriting.”
It took a while for Faithfull to absorb all these influences, but by the early 1970s, she was writing lyrics. “My first real song was Sister Morphine,” she says. In the late 1980s, when Faithfull had established her own voice with albums such as Broken English, Ginsberg invited her to be a visiting professor at his summer school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she taught lyric-writing. Her association with the beat poets continued when she co-produced the final album of Corso performing his poetry only days before his death.
Marianne Faithfull is appearing at Shepherds Bush Empire, W12, tonight, and at the Salisbury festival on Saturday, as well as at Meltdown
Michael Stipe
Edith Sitwell
The 19th-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine have been namechecked in songs and interviews by Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison and many others. Thus, generations of curious music fans have been turned on to these poets via rock music. REM’s Michael Stipe was among them. “I read a lot of Rimbaud’s poetry as a teenager, because Patti Smith used to talk about him in interviews,” he says. “Actually, I read a lot of Rimbord’s poetry, because I didn’t know how to pronounce his name.”
The connection between the tempestuous, drug-experimenting, society-defying French duo and today’s rock stars may be understandable, but Stipe’s other great poetic influence is less obvious. “A poet I read a great deal of when I was young was Edith Sitwell,” he says. “She was an English eccentric, or played the role of an English eccentric. Back in the 1920s, she performed her poetry with a band playing behind her — orchestrated music with trash cans used for percussion. I heard a recording of this, and her voice was so timid, she used a megaphone. It was extremely strange and extremely beautiful.”
The idea of a timid voice almost hidden by a loud band will seem familiar to those who know REM’s early albums, but Stipe believes Sitwell’s influence on him lies elsewhere: “A vivid imagination, a discipline that I admire, and a great deal of humour. There is a humour in her work, and there’s also a humour in my work that’s often missed.”
A remark of Sitwell’s — “The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of a moment of their other lives, a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world” — could easily be used to describe an experiment carried out by Stipe and six friends, who agreed to write haiku for each other every day for a year (the results were then published in book form as The Haiku Year). “Writing a haiku puts you in the moment; it makes you notice something really small, where you are, right now,” says Stipe.
REM tour the UK later this month, starting at Old Trafford, Manchester, on June 17
