Monolith Cocktail Blog

COMMENT/REVIEW BY DAN SHEA

Back in the Monolith Cocktail fold again, the impassioned and adroit musician/writer Dan Shea passes comment on The Beatles supposed swansong. Roped into his family’s lo fi cult music business, The Bordellos, from a young age, the candid but humble maverick has gone onto instigate the chthonian Vukovar (now unfortunately on the funeral pyre of dead projects, here) and, with one part of that ever-shambling post-punk troupe, musical foil Buddy Preston, the seedy bedsit synth romantics Beauty Stab (another fleeting project that has sadly disbanded, here).

An exceptional talent (steady…this is becoming increasingly gushing) both in composing and songwriting, the multi-instrumentalist and singer is also a dab hand at writing. For his debut contribution to the MC, Dan shared a grand personal ‘fangirl’ purview of major crush, the late Rowland S. Howard (which can be found here), on the eve of Mute Records appraisal style celebration reissue of his highly influential cult albums ‘Teenage Snuff Film’ and ‘Pop Crimes’ a number of years back. This was followed by an often difficult, unsettling, potted with dark comedy, read on Dan’s friend and foil Simon Morris (of the Ceramic Hobs infamy; the piece can be read here), who took his own life. Dan also started up a series of Lockdown Jukebox musings (here).

Firstly I don’t believe this is the “last Beatles song”. There’s got to be other Lennon solo recordings and maybe some of George‘s songs lying around. Even though we’re talking about the band who changed the face of popular music and Western popular culture, this much fanfare and this much work doesn’t go into a single song. Expect more to follow.

Despite the fact that this is a much vaunted digital Beatles reunion, many of the things that made the Beatles great are thrown out of the window in favour of the digital. It’s like the Paul Is Dead myth happened but in a way we never expected: all of The Beatles have been replaced, but by Paul. Ringo, arguably the best rock drummer and definitely one of my favourites, here sounds like he’s been subject to so much Pro Tools drum replacement and quantising that it may as well be me or you or your cousin drumming on it. McCartney’s voice reflects the ravages of age but with Botox and fillers from Antares, which hide nothing. And nor should they, but why bother in the first place?

There’s a lot to be said for crossing the boundaries of time in music, making time non linear and past and future rubbing noses in a practice room nervously trying to make an idea work. There’s a lot to be said for the mixture of audio fidelities, and it could be interesting if we’d had more of that. The roughly recorded original Lennon demo gradually blossoming into a full band arrangement. But they’re not nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball anymore. When the entire selling point is that two of you are dead and you’re not all in the same room anymore with your egos and your splintered alliances, you’re doing yourselves a disservice to release a product (that’s what it is: it’s a product, it’s content) that sounds like a Beady Eye album track. Is it poignant to hear old McCartney’s voice harmonise with Lennon half his age and half his lifetime ago? Yes. Does it sound good? No. I find it intensely moving and I was close to tears on second listening. But it feels like something I shouldn’t be hearing. It feels like I’m eavesdropping on an old timer sat at the bar in The Ship and Mitre, in the lead-up to Christmas, who’s drunk 8 pints and is reminiscing out loud to one of his dead friends. Yeah it’s touching but should the world really be hearing this.