This week Martpol looks at some musical approaches to religion…
It’s been quite a while since I considered spiritual matters on a Sunday. Or perhaps I mean since I made a point of doing so on a Sunday rather than simply, say, slipping into a semi-contemplative blur after a nice roast dinner and a draft of Bordeaux. But I’m a sceptical specimen, so this column isn’t about me rediscovering my sacred zeal. Instead, I’d like to share with you four songs from artists – some Christian, some atheist, some, who knows? – who I think have put a particularly interesting spin on religious matters.
First we go to some proper world-famous semi-Catholics, side-stepping on the way (if you please) any wish to sarcastically compare their frontman to God. Like all of these songs, it’s sort of about religion, sort of about love and humanity and the world at large. Look, you can tell Bono’s being serious, he’s taken his sunglasses off.
Next, as yet more evidence that David Bowie is one of our greatest musical treasures, I draw your attention a song which he managed to wring from a state of cocaine paranoia and “24 hour” hallucinations. The call to a God who may or may not be listening sounds completely earnest. But would he rather be God himself? An epic puzzler. There’s a live version out there but the studio original is miles better.
Whenever I can, I like to slip into conversation that James are one of Britain’s great underrated bands. Along they go, turning out classic after classic, with that absurdly unfashionable combination of good melodies and lyrics (“I’ve been looking through microscopes to see how our life begins / I’ve been training my lens on the stars to see where it ends / But it’s this living in between that’s bringing me down”, this one goes). They don’t get much thanks for it, but I’ll tell you one thing: Tim Booth still dances like a rabid shaman.
Finally, Nick Cave is perhaps rock’s most intriguing believer – former junkie, novelist, Biblical scholar (and disbeliever in an interventionist God, as he notes here), his attitude to faith is ambivalent to say the least. Cave’s career has seen him torn between feral punk horseman of the apocalypse and stabbingly sincere balladeer. The latter doesn’t always make for easy listening (have a listen to Oh My Lord from the album No More Shall We Part) but this song has a tender, simple beauty.
Thanks for Nick Cave, Martpol.
Always (wrongly) had him down as a sort-of Aussie version of Bono, a preacher-man better off when keeping it simple. Here he does. Nice vid too.
Enjoyed the Nick Cave too, Martpol, though the tears and trauma proved something of an endurance test.
Any Bowie welcome around the fire in the Malty teepee Martpol, Ziggy puts the definitive bookmark in those pages marked ‘the naff, badly dressed early seventies’, didn’t dare show the photographs in case the kids saw them. His music was probably the best part.
The Bono / guy in the godsuit begs a caption…………………
‘c visits holy see’
One of my favourites, Into My Arms. And Station to Station is bettered only by Ziggy and Hunky Dory. Can’t understand the point of James, but then few ever agree with me when I argue that Supergrass are one of the finest pop bands these shores have produced – we all have our soft spots.
It’s true that Nick Cave is often at his best when he keeps it simple. Much of the album where Into My Arms resides, The Boatman’s Call, is stripped to the bone. Actually, there’s no such thing as a bad Nick Cave album, though the Gothic soon of his early stuff isn’t to everyone’s taste.
Brit – I think Station to Station is Bowie’s best, and I find Ziggy just slightly overrated. I’m yet to find anyo sewho agrees on either poinhy, though.
Sorry, that was supposed to say Gothic doom, and “anyone who agrees with me on either point”. Damn smartphones.