Chris Price

Existentialism on Main Street: The Rock & Roll Philosophy of Albert Camus

2013-01-02T10:32:37-05:00

On 4 January 1960 Albert Camus, the writer, absurdist philosopher and beloved intellectual pin-up of post-war France, was returning to Paris from his home in Provence after the Christmas holiday. Just short of his destination, the Facel Vega in which he was a passenger skidded off the road and concertinaed into a tree, killing him instantly. In his pocket police found an unused return train ticket for the journey, discarded by Camus when his publisher Michel Gallimard had offered to drive him instead.

Make of vehicle and likely absence of feather boa notwithstanding, the facts of Camus' death are almost identical to Marc Bolan's car-meets-tree demise in London 17 years later. In both, tragedy and romance collide like bumper on bark as two lives - glamorous in their own distinct ways - are prematurely extinguished like half-smoked cigarettes. If anything, Camus trumps Bolan in the automotive expiry stakes; if a single-vehicle collision must be your untimely fate, going out in a blaze of crumpled Facel Vega beats a mangled Mini GT hands down. Even in death Albert Camus proved he was the most rock 'n' roll philosopher who ever lived.

Though the first stirrings of my own infatuation with Camus were entirely platonic, inspired by the warmth and humanism of Dr. Rieux in The Plague, the movie-star good looks and rock 'n' roll exit did nothing to harm his appeal. And while twenty years' reading and re-reading blur the precise details of our first furtive encounter, I can remember almost to the day the incident that fanned the flames of enduring passion.

On a Wednesday evening in February 1992, BBC2's Rapido aired an interview with a new band named Manic Street Preachers. Guitarist and chief lyricist Richey Edwards gazed dolefully into the camera through thickly mascaraed eyelashes and reeled off a list of influences. In amongst the Sex Pistols and Hanoi Rocks were two things I secretly loved more than anything else on the planet: Guns 'N' Roses and Albert Camus.

It's impossible to overstate the epiphany, to this then-nineteen year-old at least, of hearing those names in such close proximity, rattled off like items on a shopping list: "Axl, Slash ... Camus." This motley roll call was leave to love expansively, permission for a kind of cultural promiscuity I imagined somehow inadmissible, in which high and low art were undifferentiated. Promising riffs from Appetite for Destruction and lyrics out of absurdist French philosophy, I bought into the Manics' first album Generation Terrorists sight unseen.

Of course Richey Edwards knew then what The Fall had worked out years before when they named themselves after Camus' 1956 novel La Chute: that Camus was cool as fuck. And plenty of others have been influenced by (or cynically co-opted) the sometimes-bleak existentialism of his fiction and essay writing. The Cure's first single 'Killing An Arab' is a sinister if heavy handed retelling of Mersault's alienation in L'Etranger. Titus Andronicus, a band whose very name suggests a willingness to wear literary references without embarrassment, obligingly entitle their own Camus-inspired song 'Albert Camus' lest you miss the point. Even Gaz Coombes, once a purveyor of breezy indie pop as the singer in Supergrass, seems to have discovered his inner absurdist on his recent solo project Here Come The Bombs.

So what is it precisely that makes Camus the perfect indie poster boy? Why not Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist granddaddy whose more outwardly nihilist pronouncements were tailor-made for a post-punk band like The Fall? (If there's a more passionate advocate for 'Hell is other people' than Mark E. Smith, try asking any of the sixty-six members who have passed through his band over the years.) As for the 'sex' part of the rock 'n' roll triumvirate, Camus and Sartre are even-Stevens; both men were inveterate womanizers - even if bespectacled, pipe-smoking Sartre was more George Formby to Camus' rugged, Gauloises-puffing Humphrey Bogart.

So might Camus' rock 'n' roll appeal have something to do with - whisper it - his philosophy? Unquestionably his early rejection of existentialism in favour of own-brand absurdism makes him a more accessible and rewarding read than Sartre. Yes, existence is absurd, and the universe is devoid of absolutes, but there remains always the possibility of creating meaning for ourselves. In the face of life's absurdity, Camus' protagonists are faced with three choices: suicide (more absurd than existence itself and therefore impossible), a leap of faith (God, or 'philosophical suicide', likewise impossible), or recognition.

This 'acceptance without resignation', as set out by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus and more popularly referred to as 'revolt', is the only means by which the individual can truly be free. "To live without appeal," as he puts it, is to recognise no higher authority than oneself and therefore to define universals subjectively. To reject the afterlife and ironically acknowledge the absurd is to attain freedom by living utterly in the moment. Put another way, imagine there's no heaven - it's easy if you try. No hell below us - above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today.

2013 is Camus' centenary year, a fact likely to inspire a welcome resurgence of interest in his tragically truncated body of work. As with fellow visionary John Lennon, Camus' fans can only guess at where that vision would have taken him. This fan of both continues to take inspiration from one of Camus' more famous passages from Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom and my passion." If that's not the definition of rock 'n' roll then I don't know what is.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.

Less Atheism, More Humanism

2012-12-24T19:00:00-05:00

Atheism is a dirty word. But not as dirty, apparently, as humanism.

Recently published census data shows that the number of non-religious people in England and Wales has risen from 15 to 25% in the past ten years. Never mind that the actual figure is probably a good deal higher than that (the leading question 'What is your religion?' causes many non-believing cultural Anglicans to self-identify as Christian), six million more people ticking the 'no religion' box is still a huge number. If you were one of them, and you're someone who goes about their life trying hard to 'do the right thing', welcome along - you're a humanist.

Humanists are broadly defined as non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. They believe that this life is the only one we have, trust in the scientific method and place human welfare at the heart of their ethical decision-making. Put simply, it's about being 'good without God'. Sounds like something we can all get on board with, right? To judge by the census data, 'humanism' is a word we'll be hearing a lot more in the coming years. But to judge by the frequency with which the so-called New Atheists use it on the book tour and lecture circuit, identifying as a humanist is about as cool as admitting to being a Trekkie.

One of the things I enjoy doing most in my spare time is listening to or attending debates in which rationalists dismantle the arguments of religious apologists. Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens did a particularly fine job on the Catholic Church a few years back; earlier this month Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer gave Dinesh D'Souza and Ian Hutchinson a similar drubbing on the subject of science and God; and on a recent trip to Australia, Richard Dawkins summarily dispensed with the confused and self-contradictory ramblings of the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell. It's compelling viewing, and I must say it's very sporting of the religious to keep jumping into the barrel for Fry and friends to start shooting.

Early in the Q and A session with Cardinal Pell, Dawkins concedes that the word 'atheism' carries negative connotations, especially in parts of the US, where atheism and paedophilia are viewed as being more or less morally equivalent. He goes on to list a number of other labels - non-theist, secularist, non-believer and so on - which might more helpfully describe his position. Sadly 'humanist' wasn't one of them. I really wish it had been.

In some respects I can understand why. Dawkins is a scientist and values semantic precision in public discourse. Atheism and humanism aren't synonymous and can't be used interchangeably. Not unlike being a Catholic, it's just as possible for an atheist to be a paedophile as an aid-worker. Knowing that someone is atheist tells you nothing else about her values, political views, dietary habits or propensity for recidivism. But Dawkins and his Horsemen friends are humanists, and you don't need to check their entries on the distinguished supporters section of the BHA website for proof. I just wish they would say so a little more often.

Renowned faith-baiter Sam Harris famously neglected to use the word 'atheism' once in his book The End of Faith, an excoriating, laser-precise attack on the pernicious effects of religion. Interestingly though, the only instance of the word 'humanism' in the book is in the opening pages instructing booksellers where to file it. Christopher Hitchens, an exemplar of humanism if ever there was one, does slightly better in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (seven mentions of 'humanism' or 'humanist'), and did occasionally profess his own humanism publicly, but being the contrarian lover of language that he was, always preferred his own coinage 'anti-theist'.

Concerns among the non-religious over the utility of the word 'atheism' aren't new. Jonathan Miller holds that, just as he needs no word to describe his non-belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, any word to specifically convey unbelief in a supernatural creator of the universe is similarly redundant. Hitchens rightly retorted that since 'fairyists' do not threaten eternal damnation for children who do not believe in the tooth fairy, or demand equal billing for their fairyist beliefs in school science lessons, 'atheism' was a useful - indeed necessary - flag around which opponents of religious superstition could gather.

But there's another, more pressing reason why humanism must emerge from the fringes as an 'alternative' to atheism. Some of the six million people now identifying as non-religious since 2001 will want a 'flag' to gather around, and if we wish to continue the upward trend we must give them one. Religion has been that flag for thousands of years. It has always done community much better than secularism, and not just because it has had a lot more practice. But atheism is a denial of something, not an affirmation. If we unbelievers - we humanists - want to bring new friends on board, we need to offer people something to gravitate towards, not away from. Put another way, anyone who lists only their dislikes on a dating website isn't going on many dates.

And it's a specifically moral flag, I think, that galvanizes people in this way. As a journalist, outgoing BHA president Polly Toynbee has been a powerful and very natural voice for the positive ethical stance of humanism. Through her writing she has repeatedly stated the case for the 'good' part of 'good without God'. I'm delighted that the renowned science broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili is taking over from her; along with Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris et al, he is doing much to communicate the awe and wonder the universe inspires in us without the need for a supernatural creator. I just hope that, being a scientist, he won't confine himself to scientific concerns - that is, keep the 'good' part squarely on the agenda. He's very qualified to do so.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.

Kim Jong-il & Vaclav Havel: What Would Hitch Think?

2011-12-21T19:00:00-05:00

Am I the only person outside North Korea and China who was saddened to learn of the Dear Leader's passing? At the risk of giving you the wrong idea, I confess a tiny part of me grieved for the death of Kim Jong Il this weekend in precisely equal measure with Vaclav Havel's. It was the part of me that, when important stuff happens in the world, wants to know what Christopher Hitchens thinks about it.

As if losing Hitch on Thursday weren't awful enough, Havel and Kim Jong Il then hammered home the irrefutable fact of his passing by doing likewise, reminding us that Christopher's death means we'll never know precisely what he thinks of theirs. Hitch's words have made me question my own views so often now that revising an opinion in light of reading his has become a slightly tedious inevitability. But even I never imagined myself being as saddened by the death of a nuclear-armed, isolationist dictator as by the father of east European pro-democracy who paved the way for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

What makes it worse is knowing how disconsolate Hitch would be about missing out on all this. Not long after his cancer diagnosis ('so predictable and banal that it bores even me'), he pointed out that the worst part of coming to terms with terminal illness wasn't so much the realisation that the party's over, but that he was going to have to leave the party while it carried on without him. If he had known just how interesting the party was going to get this weekend, I'm willing to bet he would have poured himself another scotch and insisted on staying a while longer.

One of the most striking things about the avalanche of Hitch obituaries the past few days is how unashamedly partisan they are, ranging predictably from hagiography (the Observer) to borderline character assassination (the Times). Of course it's no surprise that a man as complex and contrarian as Hitchens should inspire such a divergence of opinion, and no one would be more delighted than him that some axe-grinding obituarists have abandoned all pretence of journalistic balance especially for him. One thing that all agree on, however, was Hitchens' legendary capacity for turning out impeccable, lavishly referenced commentary on unfolding events at the drop of a hat, usually after a long lunch washed down with strong waters of more than one strain.

As a proud Hitch Bitch I lapped up his every word, drunkenly filed or not. To mention just a couple of recent examples, as a sometime resident of Georgia I followed the Troy Davis death penalty case closely; immediately upon learning of Davis' execution, my first impulse was to know what Christopher thought about it. Barely an hour later he obliged with a dazzling exposition on how the United States' fondness for euthanising its own citizens placed it on a par with Iran, China and Sudan, carefully laying out the historical context for the country's steadfast attachment to the death penalty. Gaddafi's body was similarly warm when Hitchens was demanding to know why the international community had tacitly agreed to the killing, along with an expansive analysis of the diminishing returns derived from the slaying of despots and dictators.

But we can only guess at what he would have written about the passing of his comrade Vaclav Havel on the same weekend as his deadly foe Kim Jong Il. Both would be a golden opportunity - one I'm certain he wouldn't have passed up - to rail against 'the cliché of totalitarianism'. In 1988 Hitchens was in communist Czechoslovakia to attend one of Havel's 'Charter 77' committees, arriving in Prague determined to be the first visiting journalist to avoid any and all references to the Kafka-esque. Midway through the meeting, the secret police burst in wielding rubber truncheons and ferocious dogs, arresting him and his Trotskyite comrades. With his face pressed against the wall, Hitchens demanded to know the charge. "We don't have to tell you that," replied the policemen, to which Hitch responded: "Fuck, I'm going to have to mention Kafka after all."

Likewise he entered North Korea resolute in his determination to avoid mentioning Orwell's 1984. But the fact that the country was founded in the same year the book was published was impossible to resist: 'You almost think somebody gave Kim Il Sung a copy of 1984 in Korean and said "Do you think we can make this fly?"' (Watch him tell both stories here.) Totalitarianism was his sworn enemy, and not just because it precipitated an uncharacteristic descent into cliché.

Of course Hitchens reserved special ire for what he saw as the apotheosis of totalitarianism, famously referring to God in his debate with Tony Blair as a celestial dictatorship - "a kind of divine North Korea". He also noted more than once that in the shape of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, and his dead father Kim Il Sung - the "eternal president" - the celestial dictatorship was 'only one short of a trinity'. It was a nice line to be sure, but I always felt it proved little more than the fact that two is one less than three. Well, with the addition to the hereditary line of Kim Jong Un, North Koreans now have their trinity, and I for one would love to know what Christopher would be making of it all.

And For My Next Midlife Crisis: It's A Shame About Ray

2011-12-11T19:00:00-05:00

"What came first - the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?" High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

I have a pet theory that needs walking, concerning the differing ways in which men and women listen to music. It goes something like this: women enjoy music, but men invest in it emotionally. Female music lovers have an admirable capacity for taking pleasure in a beautiful record and then moving on with their lives, in a way that men - somehow believing themselves to be more participant than consumer - simply cannot. Put another way, women have favourite albums, but only men can have 'formative' ones.

Tonight, the Lemonheads will play their best-loved and most successful album It's A Shame About Ray, front to back in the order it was recorded, to yet another sell-out crowd of 30-something males at London's Shepherd's Bush Empire. I won't be among them myself, but only because I've seen the Ray show on three continents already, and I'm holding out for a royal flush when Asia and Africa get added to the list. The minute the Lemonheads announce a show in Mogadishu, I'm booking a flight.

Last year, It's A Shame About Ray turned 18 years old. The soundtrack to my begrudging accession into adulthood - probably the only record I can convincingly attach that slippery word 'formative' to - reached the same age I was when I fell in love with it in 1992. The idea that the album I came of age to had somehow come of age itself was, I don't mind admitting, more than a little discombobulating. I did what any normal person would do under the circumstances and flew to Sydney to see it performed in the city which gave birth to it. I like to think of it as a kind of premature midlife crisis.

Oh shush, these anniversaries are important to people like me. Some men splash out on fast cars and ill-advised leather jackets as they approach 40. But those of us whose lives revolve at something closer to 33rpm, marked out less by birthdays or car purchases than by album release dates and NME covers, the type of people - let's face it - who have 'formative' albums not favourite ones, navigate according to quite other almanacs. (And besides, I have a wardrobe full of ill-advised leather jackets already.) First girlfriend: Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction. First break-up: Grace by Jeff Buckley. First year at university: It's A Shame About Ray by the Lemonheads.

Socially, my first year at college felt like swimming - actually drowning - in a reluctant tincture of two competing urges: a loud proclamation on the one hand of just how unendurably unique and misunderstood I was, accompanied on the other by a clumsier but no less industrious groping around for a group of souls just like me to fall in with. One of the things people don't seem to understand is just how hard it is finding people as misunderstood as you. It's incredibly tiring. Thank God for pop records.

So Ray came along at the perfect time. Not so much a collection of songs as scenes snatched from a mini-verse you hung out in, Ray's world almost precisely resembled the new one I was fumbling into. It was peopled by likeable college dropouts who did all the same stuff my friends and I did (or wanted to), but with a reckless disregard for tomorrow's 9am philosophy lecture which we didn't possess. They fell in and out of love with each other, cooked badly as a metaphor for their disordered lives, took drugs, stayed up all night and endlessly repeated the same stories. Ray was a perfect slacker soap opera with its own cast of approximately sketched-out characters - Alison and Fiona and Angela and Frank - whose kitchens, couches and front porches formed a convincingly doped-out stage set under the ceiling fans and butterscotch street lamps of some nameless but familiar city. Ray's perfect pop songs were almost wastefully short, some under two minutes in length, the whole album clocking in at less than half an hour, like an Electric Kool-Aid episode of Friends in which the characters are cooler, more confused and take drugs instead of drinking coffee.

Intoxicated and intoxicating, Ray's blink-and-you'll-miss-it impenetrability kept me coming back again and again from the moment I first heard it. And as its quirky little snapshots weren't over-exposed in the way Teen Spirit or Lithium were on Nineties MTV, Ray surprises me even now in a way that Nevermind can't. Arriving at a watershed moment in my life and then just sort of hanging around, Ray is a flatmate who crashed on my couch for a week and then never left.

Opening track Rockin' Stroll is a romper-suited, child's-eye view of this world from a pram. Album centrepiece My Drug Buddy is a Hammond-soaked amble by two junkie friends through Sydney's Newtown district until daylight, startled by cars as they fly up King Street. Alison's Starting to Happen is about noticing a girl 'in that way' for the first time, while Kitchen is the opening scene of an illicit affair between friends. Album closer Frank Mills, a goofy acoustic cover of the song from the musical Hair, is a touching appeal for help finding a lost friend. The eponymous Ray receives only a cameo role on the title track, enigmatic like Virginia Woolf in an Edward Albee play.

But Ray is no concept album, not like Tommy or The Wall. Shades maybe of The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society in its character sketches and story-telling, albeit in an urban setting. Sonically coherent and melodically accessible in a way the Lemonheads never had been previously, its 12 little songs are lyrically opaque, connected only as you might connect overheard conversations walking through a city at night. There's no narrative arc, no recurring plotline, no reprise and no resolution; Ray is a chance and cobbled storyboard, familiar but removed like an armful of Polaroids fanned out on a friend-of-a-friend's living room floor. It has been a firm and faithful companion over the years.

So here I am, a standing refutation of the old cliché that men never remember their anniversaries. Happy anniversary Ray - I love you like a brother.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.

I Hate Myself & I Want To Die: The Deadly Embrace of Rock Music & Suicide

2011-09-20T19:00:00-04:00

"I think self-destruction is honourable. It's an act of great control."

In a strong field these words are the most reckless and idiotic that Morrissey has ever uttered in public. Aired two years ago on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, the interview in which he offered this particular pearl of wrongheadedness is also among the most irresponsible Radio 4 has ever broadcast. But we'll come to that in a minute.

Untold column inches will rightly be expended this week marking the release twenty years ago of Nirvana's epoch-defining and cosmos-transforming album Nevermind. Rather more inches, I'm willing to bet, than were given over to World Suicide Prevention Day last week, which seemed to pass with barely a sidebar to whisper its name. In case you need reminding, one album and three years after Nevermind was unleashed on the world, lead singer Kurt Cobain abruptly departed from it by means of a lethal dose of heroin and a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was survived by his wife Courtney Love and a baby daughter. No doubt Morrissey paid private tribute to this honourable act of great control.

Nirvana's follow-up album In Utero was originally entitled I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, and would have remained so if bass player Krist Novoselic hadn't convinced Cobain to change it. The dreadful irony that Novoselic apparently did so for fear of being sued, presumably in the event of a Nirvana album title turning up in someone's suicide note, hardly needs spelling out. The complex and unholy embrace of rock music and self-destruction, however, probably does.

I've been seduced by this impulse myself. Nick Drake's dark and dismal Black Eyed Dog is infinitely more melancholy for knowing that he almost certainly died by his own hand. Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart hurts that little bit more keenly because Ian Curtis did likewise. Self-destruction - deliberate or otherwise - is a mainstay of the rock and roll canon. I should hold my own hands up to having a book in the market entitled Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America, in which self-destructive (though not suicidal) music icons feature heavily. Would I have found such an attention-grabbing title - would I even have had a book - about rock stars that lived happily and healthily into old age?

So what's the secret of the long marriage between rock music and the appetite for self-destruction? And is the decision to end one's life an intellectual one, as Morrissey appears to think? If you're rich, comfortable in mid-life and adored by millions, then perhaps it is. But if you're addicted, unemployed, debt-ridden, lonely or suffering from a mental health disorder, it most emphatically is not. When your legions of fans include thousands of desperate young men seeking solace in your every word, as surely Morrissey must have realised by now, then perhaps you should think twice before opening your mouth on national radio.

And there's the rub. Rock music isn't so much a magnet for the self-destructive as simply for young men, and young men kill themselves in devastating numbers every year. By taking his own life at 27 Cobain fast-tracked himself into 'that stupid club', as his mother called it, referring to the select group of recording artists - most recent inductee Amy Winehouse - who comprise the '27 Club'. But Kurt belonged to another, much less exclusive group - one which gets a good deal less media attention. Last year 36,000 people died of intentional self-harm in the US, where suicide is the seventh leading cause of death among 25 to 34-year-olds. It's the biggest killer of young men in the UK.

Read that last sentence again, and pause for a moment to reflect on what it means. More men under the age of 35 kill themselves each year than die from road accidents, drugs, disease or violent crime. I was doubly appalled on first hearing this statistic; firstly to know it's a statistic at all, and shocked again that it's not more widely reported. Suicides - successful ones at least - are the almost exclusive preserve of men: of 4,532 deaths from intentional self-harm in England and Wales last year, three-quarters of them were male.

Among the reasons why suicide receives barely a fraction of the media coverage it should is that it's just not a very sexy subject. Unlike, for example, the reporting of statistics relating to eating disorders, in which editors gleefully avail themselves of the opportunity to print yet more photos of stick-thin models on catwalks, suicide comes without any of the accompanying glossy imagery. But there's another reason: research shows that media reporting of suicide - and this is where Desert Island Discs failed its audience in my view - can often lead to emulative behaviour. Responsible journalism follows local and World Health Organization guidelines on how - and indeed whether - to cover suicide cases, in order to minimise the possibility of 'contagion'.

In thanatology circles this phenomenon is known as the 'Werther Effect', after Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose despairing protagonist is believed to have inspired not only a fashion for swallowtail coats, but also the first known examples of copycat suicide. To take a more recent example, Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962 of acute, apparently self-administered barbiturate poisoning led to a ten per cent increase in the US suicide rate that month. So when Kurt Cobain took his life in 1994, the authorities braced themselves for a spate of copycat cases. They never materialised.

A recent Freakonomics Radio podcast, The Suicide Paradox, explains why this might be. A key component in mitigating contagion, according to suicidologists, was the unglamorous media portrayal of Cobain's death, in particular Courtney Love's tearful public reading of his suicide note at a candlelit vigil. In her address, heard around the world in the days after he died, she invited Kurt's fans to join her in proclaiming him an asshole, and witheringly demanded to know why 'you continued being a rock star when you fucking hated it'. This very public display of grief, considered by some to be self-serving melodrama at the time, appears to have prevented a slew of copycat tragedies.

Thankfully a small but significant section of the UK music industry is now waking up to the power it has to do likewise. I co-chair a music committee for CALM, a unique campaign aimed at changing the way men communicate with each other and with healthcare agencies, set up in response to the high suicide rate in young males. Artists from Dizzee Rascal to Mark Ronson have donated their time, music or voice to that effort. Industry execs have given resources - but we always need more. Working with CALM, you hear countless heartbreaking stories about preventable tragedies from parents whose lives have been turned upside down by the suicides of their children. Needless to say none of them describe their experience of self-destruction as honourable.

But as Courtney Love has proven, it is preventable - especially by people in music who have a voice. So Morrissey, I'd like to extend an open and sincerely intended invitation for you to join us at our next meeting. Please do come - I think you could contribute a lot. I can be contacted via Twitter - just holler @chrispricey - or write to us at CALM. I can't wait to hear from you. Really.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.

Australian Idolatry: Evangelical Christians Resurrecting the Music Industry

2011-09-14T19:00:00-04:00

Prime Minister Julia Gillard may be an avowed atheist, but if the Australian music-buying public is anything to go by, she's a tad out of step with her electorate. You might say she's not singing from the same hymn sheet. God Is Able, an album of contemporary Christian music released by the stratospherically successful Hillsong mega-church in Sydney, recently debuted at number three in the Australian chart ahead of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, becoming the tenth album of Christian pop to reach the top ten there since 2002. And Hillsong has broken America without so much as breaking a sweat. Last year its youth ministry house band, Hillsong United, went in at number two on the US iTunes album chart, just behind Eminem. If it's true that the music industry is in its death throes, then nobody told Hillsong.

Hillsong Music is the 'resource arm' of Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal ministry in Sydney which began in 1983 with a congregation of forty-five, and which now boasts a membership of 21,000, an annual conference attracting 28,000 faithful attendees, and a growing international footprint with churches in London, Paris, Cape Town, Stockholm and Kiev. In 2009 Hillsong London celebrated ten years of worship in the capital with a service at the O2 London Arena. More than 14,000 people attended.

Needless to say, any church funded by a 'dynamic music label', as its promotional materials describe it, is foursquare in the realms of 'non-traditional' financing models. But Hillsong is no traditional church. It is ministry with marketing strategies and corporate visions, communion by focus group, where clergy are CEOs and pastors head up 'creative teams'. Services take place in 'state-of-the-art worship centres', in which chancel is jettisoned for multimedia ministry and preaching by PowerPoint. Hillsong London's website, whose front page features a group of smiling twenty-somethings in chic winter wear, bears closer resemblance to a Gap advert than a call for cash and congregation. And possibly taking a leaf out of Scientology's book, Hillsong now looks to the power of celebrity to spread the gospel; it recently hosted an 'Evening with'-style event in which tele-survivalist Bear Grylls talked of Everest expeditions, alligator wrestling and the 'quiet strength' of his Christian faith. Jumble sales and church roof appeals it is not.

Masterminded by founders and senior pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston (no self-respecting mega-church is seen dead these days without an alliterating husband-and-wife team at the helm), Hillsong's brand of 'prosperity theology' found a hungry market in Sydney's affluent, conservative Baulkham Hills district during the 1990s. 'Health and wealth gospel', popularised in sixties America by the repellent Oral Roberts, proved to be an elixir for middle-class Christians in prosperous, suburban Australia, as the success of Brian Houston's book You Need More Money: Discovering God's Amazing Financial Plan For Your Life attests. Spiritual health and material wealth go hand in hand, says Houston; humility and sacrifice are not unimportant, but nor should the faithful be ashamed of material success.

And Brian should know. In the last year for which figures are available, Hillsong's annual earnings were in the region of $60m, roughly half of which came from its congregation. You see, record sales aren't the church's only source of revenue. Tithing - such an archaic-sounding word among all that corporate speak - is still a vital part of Hillsong's income. Houston admits to a personal package of $300,000 a year plus company car (Bobbie's salary is undisclosed), but his company Leadership Ministries Inc. - 'the entity through which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry' - bought two waterfront properties from the couple shortly after the company was set up in 2001.

And it's very much a family business. Joel Houston, Brian and Bobbie's son (and incidentally a spit for Westlife's Brian McFadden), leads the creative team behind Hillsong Music, the multi-million dollar hit machine that powers the operation. He is also the singer in Hillsong United, a 'next generation praise and worship' outfit which has released a new album every year since 1999, making Prince look positively idle. Churning out mostly live albums recorded at services and conferences, the Hillsong Music stable is so prolific that just as one release reaches the end of its chart life, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Evidently the received wisdom in the music industry - that live albums don't sell - doesn't apply to Hillsong either.

They've done their homework, too. If it felt like Snow Patrol were following you around for three years from 2006, it's because radio stations and music television channels the world over were banking on audience research which decisively crowned Chasing Cars as the stickiest song of the noughties by a country mile. Hillsong, if you can imagine this without wincing, sounds like Snow Patrol singing from a prayer book. And in case you're tempted to seek out this music for yourself, be warned. For the purposes of journalistic thoroughness I've listened to more than my fair share of it the past few days; it's marginally less excruciating than chewing tinfoil.

Contemporary Christian music - CCM to its friends - is changing the market in other ways. For All You've Done, the first live worship album to debut at number one in Australia, drew widespread whingeing from disgruntled record labels, upset that almost all its sales rang through the cash registers at Hillsong's annual conference. It's hard to know which is more telling - the pointless display of sour grapes from the mainstream music industry, or the fact that sales at a religious conference can outstrip the buying power of an entire nation.

But it does raise the question of why Hillsong music is routing the secular competition so convincingly. Possibly these conference sales are more 'got the t-shirt' souvenir purchases than high-rotation repeat-players. Or perhaps it's just that piracy is less rampant in Christian circles than in the wider market. Downloading music illegally isn't proscribed by any specific commandment as far as I'm aware, but it does seem a very un-Christian thing to do. In 2007 Hillsong hit the headlines again, amid accusations of 'vote stacking' in the Australian Idol talent quest. Idol issued a formal, on-air statement refuting the allegations, although four of the eight finalists did in fact turn out to be from the Assemblies of God Pentecostal church, of which Hillsong is an affiliate. Idolatry - 1, Idol - nil.

On Christmas morning last year, finding myself with a few hours to kill before barbecued turkey and trimmings with my Sydney hosts, I went to see Hillsong for myself. I should state for the sake of transparency that I'm an atheist humanist, justifying my godless sneering on grounds of journalism (I was researching a book). But as I made my way there on the Hillsong courtesy shuttle, I felt like a freeloading interloper, a joyless gatecrasher en route to a children's party with the sole intention of stealing party bags and calling the birthday boy names. To ease my conscience I resolved I would be the perfect houseguest, making every effort to participate, in as far as I could do so without compromising my principles or seeming to take the piss. If there was singing, I would sing. If there was hugging, I would hug. I drew the line only at praying.

Arriving at the church - sorry, worship centre - I was welcomed into a cavernous modern atrium by a model-pretty hostess bearing glad tidings and armfuls of Christmas candy. Dean Martin's Winter Wonderland crooned from the speaker system. Free lattes and valet parking to all comers. Being slightly behind schedule I pressed on past the crèche and headed straight for the main room. (If 'main room' sounds a tad super-club, it's not so far off the mark.) Five enormous TV screens flanked a wide stage, upon which Hillsong stalwart Robert Fergusson was already in mid-flow, hammering home the prosperity gospel as the gifting envelopes went round. In the audio clip below he urges us to be as 'extravagant' with our money as God is with his love:

Hillsong"s Robert Fergusson on Extravagance (mp3)

Then two very happy but slightly stoned-sounding men appeared and invited all the kids onto the stage to show and tell what they got for Christmas.
"What did Santa bring you, little fella?" beamed Happy Man number 1.
Little boy: "An iPod Touch."
"Whoooo!" clapped the audience.
"And what about you?" said Happy Man 2, turning to another little boy.
"A remote-controlled car."
More whooping.
Happy Man 1: "Well, we've got some great prezzies to give away today, for the big kids as well as well as the little kids. But first we're crossing live to our Hills campus, where our senior pastor Brian Houston is going to say a few words."

I will say this for Christmas at Hillsong: it's an ambitious and tightly choreographed technical feat they're pulling off. All this 'crossing live' felt like Live Aid - it was terrifically exciting. On the TV screens behind, another show-and-tell session was finishing up at the Hills service across town. A third happy man was talking about prezzies for big kids and little kids, and then Houston himself was striding back and forth across the stage in front of foot-high chapter and verse, a bible in his hand and a flesh-coloured Madonna-mike clamped to his cheek. Swap the bible for an iPad and he could have passed for Steve Jobs unveiling his vision for the exciting next phase of the company.

He launched into some impassioned stuff about Emmanuel, punctuated with fists in the air about his GRACE and DIVINITY, which I confess was where I started to tune out. It's not that I wasn't listening, just that a sort of glazing over took place. The same thing happens when I listen to evangelical preachers on the radio, which I do often in America, where late-night preaching is among the most compelling speech radio on the dial. It's a little like the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 - fantastically hypnotic, but utterly incomprehensible unless you're in on the lingo. Very often the welcome end result is blissful slumber.

Hillsong"s Brian Houston on Christmas Day (mp3)

So what did this godless impostor make of Christmas at Hillsong? Was it the riot of divinely sanctioned conspicuous consumption I had feared? Not quite, but it wasn't far off. Did it feel like congregation? Emphatically not - it was spectacle from start to finish. And that's what bothered me, if I was bothered by anything at all. This was a show, with high production values and a competitively priced soundtrack available in the foyer on your way out. If I was going to 'get' any kind of worship, as a music lover it should have been this. But Hillsong was more awards ceremony than gig, more exclusive media event than inclusive musical or spiritual experience. The live link ups were impressive and fabulously next generation, but in the end the action was always happening somewhere else. I needn't have worried about crashing the party, because in more senses than one I wasn't invited.

It struck me that, right now, the lavishness of Hillsong could only work in Australia, seemingly the only economy in the world these days untroubled by debt, deficit or danger of default. Anywhere else - including America, where the mega-church model seems to be crumbling - the extravagant giving, all the showing and the telling, would seem a tad inappropriate. Shuffling out of the auditorium, I made my way by courtesy shuttle to my Christmas lunch engagement, gifting a Transformer toy to my hosts' going-on-three year-old as I arrived. He was thrilled of course, but somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that, to truly enter into the Christmas spirit, I should have rocked up with an iPod Touch.

This blog was first posted on Brisbane-based music website Collapse Board.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.

Soundtracking 9/11

2011-09-11T10:04:35-04:00

If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on. Something terrible has just happened, possibly involving the death of the queen or an untold number of her subjects. If you're a fan of ambient and chill-out music, try watching the rolling news with subtitles on and the radio turned up - you may never hear Chris Moyles play so perfect a selection of Ibiza sunset moments ever again.

Radio stations, especially big ones like the BBC's national pop network Radio 1, are prepared for bad stuff happening: it's called 'obit procedure'. When a catastrophic news story breaks, such as the death of a royal family member, each network has an audience-appropriate mix of obituary music on standby that will 'reflect the mood of the nation', as the internal BBC documentation has it. As Music Producer for six years in the early noughties, my job at Radio 1 involved selecting the station playlist and programming music for the daytime shows - Scott Mills, Sara Cox, Jo Whiley, Mark & Lard and Chris Moyles. In times of crisis this meant finding music that young people like, but which won't be too noisy, upbeat or just plain offensive when something awful happens. It's harder than it sounds.

Chill-out music is failsafe because it tends not to have lyrics to trip up on before you're even out of the blocks. As long as the mood is sombre and vaguely reflective-sounding, you can be confident with an instrumental piece about not offending anyone - for example by failing to consider that line 'catch you when you fall', just as news arrives of Prince Andrew's demise in a horrific helicopter accident. (Every music programmer has a horror story about playing a 'howler' like this. Mine came in 2002 when, scanning artists and titles in the music logs immediately following the Potters Bar rail disaster, I deemed Overload by the Sugababes sufficiently inoffensive to be played out of the news. My forehead hit the desk just as the chorus chimed in: "Train comes, I don't know its destination. It's a one-way ticket to a madman situation.") While the terrace at Pacha might seem like an odd vibe to recreate during times of national tragedy, having a good hour's worth of harmless, lyric-free tunes to hand buys you time while you work out what to do next.

But nothing could have prepared us for 9/11. During advance obit preparations I had scrupulously considered every lyric of every song, rejecting any and all references - literal or metaphorical - to death, crashes, explosions and natural disasters, before settling on the final list. Even the most innocuous lyric takes on a sinister undertone heard in obit mode. Dido's insipid and cheerless pop ballads make her perfect obit fodder, right up to the point when you realize White Flag - "I will go down with this ship" - might sound a tad insensitive in the wake of a ferry disaster. So how exactly do you prepare for the world's worst terrorist atrocity? How, to coin a phrase, do you imagine the unimaginable? You don't.

Shortly after 2pm London time on September 11th 2001, I received an email from a friend - Al Hamer of Sweet Billy Pilgrim - instructing me, and presumably everyone else in his pre-Twitter address book, to "turn the TV on. NOW." I flipped to BBC News 24 as TV sets blinked on in unison around the open-plan office, and watched in dismay as the second plane hit the South Tower. Mark Radcliffe was on air from Manchester at that time - a relief under the circumstances because, though the Mark & Lard staple was toilet humour and unbridled sexual innuendo, Radcliffe was a radio veteran who could switch into serious broadcaster mode at the drop of a hat. In the 2.30 news, an audibly shaken Claire Bradley reported that two airplanes had hit the Twin Towers, with a BBC commentator speculating that it could be a terrorist attack.

The song we played out of that first news bulletin is now lost in the ensuing frenzy; I'm not sure I even want to know. But I can be mercifully certain, since we had not yet received instructions to go into obit procedure, that it wasn't Haunted Dancehall; given what we now know about the martyrdom aspirations of the 9/11 hi-jackers, Sabres of Paradise might be the most inappropriate artist we could possibly have marked the moment with. What became abundantly clear within moments of the story breaking was that our carefully laid obit plans were hopelessly inadequate. This wasn't a national tragedy or royal death; it was bigger and more terrible by several orders of magnitude. The radio response, somewhat perversely given the dreadful scenes already being repeated on television, demanded a lightness of touch, not mawkishness or mourning.

At 3pm, just as the full horror of the atrocities was beginning to unfold, Radio 1's most talkative presenter went into the studio with nothing to say. Chris Moyles, then entertaining millions in the afternoon drivetime slot with a daily repertoire of bum gags and fart jokes, rightly took the view that today called for a different kind of show: "Let's just play music and I'll throw to the news between songs." Under any other circumstances this would literally have been music to my ears; programming for a personality jock like Chris is a kind of tug-of-war: at one end of the rope, a presenter who wants more talk and less music; at the other end, a Music Producer loudly pleading from the production office upstairs that he "play a fucking record" whenever a link (talky bit) entered its eleventh minute. By this process of attrition, the 'clock' for Moyles' show - a kind of template by which all radio programmes structure each hour - had come to contain far fewer songs than those of other presenters.

Generally music logs are delivered to programme teams around 24 to 48 hours in advance of broadcast, allowing producers time to write any relevant editorial content into their scripts. Suddenly, just minutes before he was due on air, Chris needed twice the number of songs he normally played, every one of them screened to account for the sensitivities of the unfolding catastrophe. The first thing was to remove all songs that hit the wrong tone musically. Out went anything too jiggy, too banging, too edgy or too poppy, which didn't leave much to play with - this was Radio 1 after all. Next, lyrics: Let Me Blow Ya Mind by Eve - out. Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl - out. U2's Elevation - out. Within fifteen minutes of going to air, Moyles had played every song in what remained of his first hour.

By now Alex Donelly, my boss and Radio 1's Head of Music, had come down from his upstairs office to manage the music response and lend a hand with the programming. A Dunkirk spirit emerged as the search for suitable music became more frenzied. We would interrogate the database for any 'Mood 1 or 2' songs (all music is graded in this way for radio, from very sad to very happy, in order to create an evenness of sound), feeding minidiscs into two hi-fi stereos in tandem as a final check before they went downstairs. Suddenly that throwaway lyric - 'catch you when you fall' - became menacing and real when people were literally falling out of the New York skyline, and nothing like it could go to air - even if it meant playing Zero 7 for the third time this hour. At one point we were delivering playlists with only one or two songs cued up in the studio, with a lot of air still to fill.

That evening, slightly stunned to find that it was still going ahead, a handful of us attended the Mercury Music Prize, in which PJ Harvey collected the first of her two awards, for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Improbably, she was on tour in Washington DC at the time. Holed up in her hotel room, she accepted the award by telephone; we leaned in close as Zoe Ball presented the award, the better to make out Polly's soft, West Country lilt haunting the dancehall of the Dorchester Hotel: "It's been a very surreal day. We can see the Pentagon from our window." Chillers of free wine and champagne sat untouched on the tables in front of us.

It went on for days. Hitting the right tone was the toughest challenge, as much for presenters and producers as for us, the music team. Even the next morning it was difficult to judge the mood of the nation, as the guidelines demanded we do, so we took our cues from the talent, who had a direct line to the listeners. Just when do you get back to 'normal' after something like this, and what role should Radio 1 play in making that happen? When do phone-ins, competitions and knob gags go back in the script? When is Bootylicious fair game again, and when does Have A Nice Day by Stereophonics not sound just plain wrong? Musically we needed a kind of intermediary stage, one that would gently lift the national mood rather than yank the listener out of the doldrums and demand they feel fine again. We needed uplifting, anthemic guitar songs with shiny production and contemplative but hopeful lyrics that would bridge a gap between chill out and jiggy. We needed Yellow, Trouble and Don't Panic. The days following September 11th 2001 may be the only time I have said this, but thank God for Coldplay.

Chris' book Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America can be purchased from his Amazon page.