Has Tony Blair Finally Gone Too Far?

Our glorious leader lists Free and King Crimson as his favourite bands. I think I just became a Brownite.

Matthew



Portrait: Rock on, Tony: 'I listen to what the kids play,' says the PM. So why is he still mad about a heavy rock track from 34 years ago, asks Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian
Wednesday May 07, 2003

Gone are the bad old days when we had rubbish prime ministers like Margaret Thatcher who, in all seriousness, chose the Beverley Sisters' version of How Much is That Doggie in the Window as her favourite song. Instead, we are fortunate enough to have a prime minister who is both sexy and cool. Sexy? "He is every woman's favourite shape, 6ft tall, good shoulders, lean hips, weighing just under 13 stone, less than he did 10 years ago," drools Valerie Grove this week in an exclusive interview with Tony Blair for Saga magazine to celebrate his 50th birthday. Cool? "Every so often, I feel I should graduate to classical music, properly," the PM tells doe-eyed Valerie. "But the truth is, I'm more likely to listen to rock music. I listen to what the kids play."

But what exactly does the snake-hipped sexpot dig, rock music-wise? Mark Ellen, who 33 years ago played with the prime minister in the Oxford student band Ugly Rumours, disclosed on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday that Blair still loves Free and King Crimson. Free, you may recall, were a bunch of snake-hipped rockers responsible for such unapologetic stompers as All Right Now. King Crimson were of a different stamp. Their lead guitarist Robert Fripp often used to play live sitting down. Their lyricist Pete Sinfield had Wagnerian pretensions and deployed in verse an analysis of the human psyche that drew heavily on the work of Melanie Klein.


And yet it is one of King Crimson's songs that still weighs heavily on the prime minster. "I saw him not long ago and we spent about 20 minutes talking about the music we listened to at college," said Ellen. "We were talking about 21st Century Schizoid Man, which had an incredible guitar solo in the middle of it."


The track 21st Century Schizoid Man is the first on the 1969 album In the Court of the Crimson King, a record that bears responsibility for launching the progressive rock movement in all its misguided pomp, Tolkienesque noodling and sonata-form mellotron solos.


Sinfield's lyric for 21st Century Schizoid Man has a prophetic tenor that will be familiar to students of Blake and Orwell:


"Cat's foot iron claw/ Neuro-surgeons scream for more/ At paranoia's poison door./ 21st century schizoid man.


Blood rack barbed wire/ Politicians' funeral pyre/ Innocents raped with napalm fire/ 21st century schizoid man.


Death seed blind man's greed/ Poets' starving children bleed/ Nothing he's got he really needs/ 21st century schizoid man.


You can't tell me that the second verse isn't a prophetic critique of war in Iraq, nor that the third isn't a similarly insightful prediction of the paranoid-schizoid politician of the current century who has adopted, just as Klein envisaged, patterns of thought and experience characterised by blame, scapegoating, idealisation, persecution and other distorted perceptions. This much is suggested on Sinfield's website (www.songsouponsea.com/Promenade/).
Yesterday, Sinfield could not be contacted to provide support for these interpretations, but it should be noted that he is a lyricist who likes to make gnomic political pronouncements. For instance, Sinfield wrote the words to Bucks Fizz's early 80s hit The Land of Make Believe, and recently claimed that the line "Something nasty in your garden, waiting, till it can steal your heart . . ." should be taken as having an anti-Thatcherite message.


But it's the guitar solo in the song that is more important to Blair. It is howling, angular, eerie, and lots of other words that one wouldn't have thought applied to the prime minister. It is also very difficult to play. In a rewarding discussion of the solo in the May 1974 edition of Total Guitar magazine, Robert Fripp was asked how he played the very fast bits. "It's all picked down-up. The basis of the picking technique is to strike down on the on-beat and up on the off-beat. Then one must learn to reverse that. I'll generally use a downstroke on the down-beat except where I wish to accent a phrase in a particular way or create a certain kind of tension by confusing accents, in which case I might begin a run on the upstroke." Right.


Sadly, we couldn't contact Fripp yesterday to get more playing tips to pass on to the premier.


No matter. We can still imagine the Blairs of an evening keeping the flame of progressive rock burning. Euan holds down the chops (rock slang for playing drums). Cherie bawls emotively: "Death seed blind man's greed/ Poets' starving children bleed". Then Tony, tie loosened, legs as wide as his suit trousers will allow, an orgasmic look on his face, makes an appalling hash of the solo to 21st Century Schizoid Man. Cool? Sexy? Perhaps not.