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(#263: 1 May 1982,
1 week)
Track listing:
It’s A Miracle-London/The Old Songs Medley (The Old Songs-I Don’t Wanna Walk
Without You-Let’s Hang On)/Even Now/Stay (featuring Kevin Disimone and James
Jolis)/Beautiful Music (I Made It Through The Rain-Beautiful Music End)/Bermuda
Triangle/Break Down The Door-Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed/Copacabana (At The
Copa)/Could It Be Magic-Mandy/London-We’ll Meet Again/One Voice/It’s A Miracle
I would imagine that nearly all of the eight thousand or
so people who came to see Barry Manilow at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 and/or
12 January 1982 believed that they were partaking in a miracle, and this record
of these performances gives me little cause to doubt them. Why should there be such a difference between
Manilow and Streisand, both good Jewish kids born in forties Brooklyn? Perhaps
it is down to the simple difference or contrast between ambition encouraging
art and ambition getting in art’s way. Listening to Streisand singing anything,
except Broadway songs, with total technical mastery and a near-total absence of
emotional involvement, the listener is never allowed to forget that Streisand
is an actress first and singer second, whereas the only time Manilow has
ventured into acting seems to have been the TV musical version of Copacabana (later a stage musical), in
which he gave himself the lead role of Tony, although he only really has to
play himself.
Moreover, Streisand almost demands that her audience
worship her, gaze upon her and revere her but damn you, don’t even think of ever
touching her. In contrast, Manilow is defined by the bond he has with his
audience, which is umbilical to the point of symbiosis. Streisand sings to people; Manilow sings for and with his people. In that manner he can be compared with
Springsteen; both performers make a point of listening and responding to their
audiences, reacting with lightning speed to alterations in mood or tone, always
looking out for requests, suggestions and, if they’re lucky, entreaties of
love. Both performers do their thing in the knowledge that without their
audience they would have nothing to do, and maybe nothing to live for.
But perhaps the apter comparison as far as Manilow goes
is with that other Jewish kid from forties Brooklyn, Neil Diamond; very
different approaches to their art, but both have the knack of making thousands
of people feel like one person. Streisand’s voice may fill a room, but Diamond
and Manilow know how to work the room. Many fans have commented on Manilow’s
knack of seeming able to focus on one person out of several thousand in the
auditorium and make them feel as though they are singing to them, only to them.
It is a knack which is rarer than you would imagine.
In this sense, it is impossible to look at the cover of Barry Live In Britain and not find it
filled with partially unspoken emotionalism. All these lights, candles,
lighters, being patiently held up by primarily the female component of the
audience – their even more patient husbands, partners or parents watching them
from the side, besuited – contrasted with the pure whiteness of Manilow’s stage
outfit and piano, suggest that Manilow is the opposite of Keith Jarrett. He
wants to draw his audience into his music, not scare them away from it; not for
nothing was a 1989 single entitled “Please Don’t Be Scared.” More than that, I
believe that the cover picture is a depiction of mutual faith; the audience’s
faith in the musician fuelling the musician’s own faith in the power of music
which he then refracts back; the disparate dots of yellow filling a black hole,
increasing in intensity until they converge upon a white light – do not
mistake, or underestimate, this religious imagery.
Provided that they do not harm others, I am moved by
demonstrations of faith, and even if Manilow’s approach to music is not
compatible with yours, it still demands respect, or at least politely requests
it. The inner gatefold sleeve has photographs of Manilow on stage and at large
throughout Britain – with his trademark perm, and particularly when wearing
blue suit and tie, Manilow resembles a benign version of Gene Wilder’s Willy
Wonka (in contrast to the rather scary and devilish Wonka, Manilow is the good
angel). Elsewhere, he is the good sport, sporting a kilt (in Edinburgh), or
inspecting the Beefeaters at the Tower in outsized shades – the outdoor pictures
subtly remind us of what a cold and unforgiving winter 1981/2 was – or singing
along onstage with a disbelieving and clearly ecstatic female fan; he is the not
quite ordinary guy, ready to be whatever you want him to be.
The hour or so of music on the album represents about
half of what was performed at the Albert Hall concerts – a video was also
available at the time, but this does not yet appear to have had a DVD upgrade –
and the songs selected are less than predictable. Absent are such staples of
Manilow’s stage act as “Can’t Smile Without You” – the one where he selects a
random female audience member to come on stage with him and be sung to adoringly
– and “I Write The Songs”; however, he did have a new studio album to promote
(1981’s If I Should Love Again) and
it may well be that Manilow felt that other less exposed songs demanded
attention.
Also absent is most of Manilow’s stage patter; unlike
Elvis, one could make a very feasible and entertaining album of Having Fun With Barry On Stage.
Nonetheless, the record is so superbly sequenced and planned that anything else
would really have been superfluous. From the opening vivacity of “It’s A
Miracle” – a song from 1974 – it is clear that Manilow has his audience on his
side from the first second. You can feel the roars and cheers as he bounds
onstage like an eager Labrador puppy, beaming his greetings and settling down
into superior post-Motown bubblegum. He wants
this audience, and the audience in turn want him. After a chorus or two he
segues into the song “London” and it is an immediate winner; a sentimental musing set to a deceptively
tricky post-Sondheim/Bacharach musical setting. He sings about walking by the
Thames, reading The Times, drinking
tea, shopping at Harrods, enjoying Saturday picnics; and his fans lap it up,
especially when he considers (within the song) whether to stay in London. And
no, this isn’t a set piece ready to change venues wherever he plays; there are
no parallel songs called “Sydney,” “Tokyo” or “Bogota” (in fact the studio
recording of “London” can be found near the end of 1980’s Barry album). You believe
him.
And yet, as outgoing and welcoming as Manilow’s persona
is, it has to be noted that many of his songs concern themselves with loss,
loneliness and betrayal. But as many are about the heart of music itself. “The
Old Songs,” then his most recent single, seems squarely in the tradition of
sixties hits like “The Way It Used To Be” or “My Sentimental Friend”; there she
is, the lost lover, and how to regain her but to remind her of how music used
to sound, and how it could still sound.
Like the quarter-hour “Yesterday Once More” on the
Carpenters’ Now And Then album,
Manilow here uses “The Old Songs” as a framing device for going back into, and
with any luck reclaiming, the past; but there is no desolate post-Watergate
angst evident – no, he sees Jule Styne as part of the same story as Bob Crewe,
and treats both “I Don’t Wanna Walk Without You” and “Let’s Hang On” – both desperate
songs, in their own ways – with equal respect. With the former – significantly,
a big song during World War II – the audience cheers as Barry gets up to some
unspecified bits of stage business (“Is there nothing he won’t do?” he asks
himself). In fact, Manilow has recently broadcast two series on Radio 2,
entitled They Write The Songs, in
which he takes a close look at selected writers of the Great American Songbook,
ranging from Berlin and Gershwin to Holland-Dozier-Holland, and all of the
episodes are worth listening to; with a startling but refreshing (and decidedly
un-British) enthusiasm, he has things both praiseworthy and trenchant to say
about his field, and understands perfectly both the mechanics and the emotions
which go into creating a great popular song. On this record, as elsewhere, he
is intent on putting his knowledge to practical use – see, he is saying, this
is all pop music, from vaudeville to Motown (those “Dancing In The Street”
references in “It’s A Miracle”), and that it all contributes towards a greater
good. Sounds familiar – or prophetic?
His conclusion is that the songs, whether old or new, can
and should still matter. But still there is this rueful restlessness; “Even Now”
sounds triumphant – the closing rhetorical key changes sound much more suitable
to Manilow than to The X-Factor - but he is drowning himself in regret over the
lover – or life? - he left behind on the road to fame. “Stay,” which came out
as a single (both in live and studio form), features two of his backing
singers, who, as a commenter on Amazon has noted, sound, when teamed with
Manilow, like three parts of the same soul saying the same thing.
Side one closes, not with “I Write The Songs,” but with “Beautiful
Music,” the closing track of 1975’s Tryin’
To Get The Feeling, and it is an extremely touching song about what music
can do to a lost person, how it can bring them back to the world (“And when I
heard about hurting and healing/Beautiful words about beautiful feelings/What
lots of believing could do…”); similar in nature to, but different in kind
from, Abba’s numerous songs about the effects of music; this song carries hope
rather than the faint air of despondency. Here he uses the song – and yes, I do
note that “Beautiful Music” and Barry Manilow share the same initials – as a
bookend for “I Made It Through The Rain” (a song co-written by Gerard Kenny,
whom you may recall from Chart Hits ’81);
the effect is rather overwhelming, the feeling one of modernist old-time
revivalism. As Manilow only implies here – though Wolfsbane’s Blaze Bayley and
Bill Hicks both said it out loud, on Massive
Noise Injection and Rant In E-Minor
respectively – the audience are here, if not to be saved as such, but to be
transported, even if only temporarily, from their everyday (and, by
implication, mundane) lives. But the greater challenge would be: could you get
an audience up to this level and keep them there? Manilow seems to think so; “We
dreamers have our ways/Of facing rainy days,” he sings, with no evident intention
on becoming Scott Walker (you might even say that Manilow is the happy
alternative future which Walker steadfastly, or stubbornly, refuses to
contemplate), and yet, as he sings his song about coming through, and surviving
(“And somehow we survive” is the third line, unconsciously echoing Auden), you
can sense that there’s something
happening in this theatre, that lives are being reassessed and transformed, and
perhaps even transcended - especially
when he sings, at the climax and to the audience, “…and so can YOU!” (i.e. “make
it through”). You only have to believe, and this first half will end with you
in a different place than where you were at its beginning.
As side two begins, we are in the “dancing” section; yet
all four songs being sung are about two-timing, or cheating, or worse. “Bermuda
Triangle,” a Top 20 hit from 1981, is a very silly but very amiable shaggy dog
story – Humperdinck might have been able to sing it – with Manilow sighing “Woe
is me!” as his partner runs off with someone else (but he then runs off with
another woman, and are these the same two people viewed from different
angles?). There follows a bit of stage chat – we have already heard repeated
high cries of “WE LOVE YOU BARRY!” from the upper stalls (to one such
exclamation, Manilow reacts with a smiling “All right, already!”) – where he
compares the audience up in the stalls at the back as being “like a little
singing, dancing nose.” Cue much
laughter, and he can’t believe that the British press are writing about “my
nose and the transit strike – in that order.” From this we move into a pretty
funky medley of “Break Down The Door” – from If I Should Love Again, and co-written with Bob Gaudio (hence a
good conceptual parallel with “Let’s Hang On”) – and “Who’s Been Sleeping In My
Bed?,” a song from 1979 later sampled by Daft Punk (“Superheroes”).
After this we’re on to “Copacabana” – Manilow can hardly not sing this – and what a bleak song it
is, with a final verse in particular which is worthy of Lou Reed. Still,
Manilow asks the audience, while they are “in mourning for Lola’s lost love,”
to applaud the musicians who have been working their backsides off all night.
And he is very careful not to be entirely clear about “just who shot who”; when
the song was expanded into a full-length stage show, it turns out that Rico was
the one who was shot…and not by Tony or Lola (moreover, there is a framing device
which has Tony existing only in the mind of a middle-aged songwriter, the actress
who plays Lola is also the songwriter’s wife, etc. – do I even need to point
out that this is yet another step to New Pop?).
The dancing section duly over, it is time for the heavy
duty finale. I wrote about “Could It Be Magic?” in my non-selling book The Blue In The Air and do not propose
to revise my views, namely that it is not just Manilow’s masterpiece but also
one of pop’s true masterpieces; the last piece in the late sixties avant-MoR
jigsaw puzzle (hence “I Made It Through The Rain” can be viewed as a very belated sequel to “MacArthur Park”).
The opening Chopin chords inspire the biggest cheers of the evening and the
song, like the stallion to the sun, rises to meet its opposing number – “Mandy,”
his first hit of consequence, a song which, when called “Brandy” and recorded
by Scott English, was about a dog, but here becomes a Holy Grail symbol of a
love lost, never to be found again (“I sent you away”) – and hence the
thunderous transition back into “Could It Be Magic?” at the end signifies just
how hard-won Manilow’s joy and ecstasy are, how greater, therefore, is the
catharsis.
The concert then ends, as such, though hasn’t really
ended; there is a regretful, low-key bye-bye reprise of “London,” and then
comes the point where the album reaches a new level of transcendence. He goes
straight into “We’ll Meet Again,” a song
this audience has known all their lives, yet very few of them were probably
even alive when it was written, let alone throughout the war which it typifies
and symbolises. And…perhaps without even thinking…the audience starts to sing
along and clap their hands; it is initially just Manilow’s voice and a very
slow-burning acoustic guitar, before the music switches to a careful electric
piano – and the audience comes in, and it is as if the circle has been
completed, that we are back in the days of soundtracks and singalongs, maybe
even back in the music hall.
It is a fairly overwhelming listening experience. It is
not just that Manilow is effectively covering the waterfront of pop history
here – there’s little rock to be heard, but things unobtrusively advance until
the onset of disco (the final verse of “Copacabana”) – but…well, there is
something greater at work here. Or something more accidentally sinister.
Remember that this album was released and made number one in the middle of a
war; how much greater, therefore, the inadvertent poignancy of hearing “We’ll
Meet Again,” perhaps in some cases sung by people who might not have lived to
see that year’s summer.
But Manilow is still not finished – “I ain’t goin’ home
yet!” – and it is time for the major audience participation number, with the
lights shining out of the dark, and the one voice, or eight thousand voices,
singing in the darkness. If nobody has compared Iron Maiden with Manilow
before, then they should, and both are highly relevant in this year of years;
if Maiden were reviving rock, then Manilow’s music plays like a secular
revival. Listen to the communion on “One Voice” – he is patiently, slowly
urging his listeners, his co-conspirators, to understand just how much music
can matter. On “Beautiful Music” he talks to music as though it were a human
being, and with this album we are getting awfully close to “the point” (even if
The Point is New Pop); music, Manilow says, is only worth playing or listening
to if it has something to express, a meaning or a message to offer. “One Voice”
as performed and recorded here makes you feel
something, and perhaps here we are getting to the bottom, or the centre, of
what music means.
What Manilow’s music means is everything that is absent
from, say, Streisand’s music – there’s colour! There’s dancing! There are funny
costumes! – balanced by a very concentrated and, I believe, heartfelt faith,
maybe even a sanctity, which puts me in mind of Bill Fay. “One Voice” ends;
there’s a quick reprise of “It’s A Miracle” and the band play out with an
instrumental reprise of “Could It Be Magic?” which you feel could go on
forever, as the dazed but fulfilled crowd flood out into Kensington Gore, back
to their desks, their counters and their lives. And yet Manilow is rolling out
as elaborate a preparatory rug for The
Lexicon Of Love as anyone. But look closely at the front row on that cover,
the one which seems more lit than any. The man sitting in suit and stripey tie
just in front of Manilow, red handkerchief firmly in breast pocket, and hands
grudgingly placed on his knees – that could be Alan Partridge. Whereas the
woman sitting three seats to his left, the woman who appears to be holding her
candle more fervently than anyone else, bending her head to stare directly at
him – that can’t be Diana. Or can it?
(Some overdubbing and redoing of instrumental parts took
place back in Los Angeles. The musical director was Victor Vanacore. The album
was advertised on TV – catalogue number: ARTV 4. Irish pressings came with a
bonus one-sided 7” flexidisc on which Manilow is interviewed by RTE2 DJ Marty
Whelan. On the back cover he stands
alone, with a grin, hands on his hips, head and foot in white, receiving the
light – and clearly very glad, and redeemed, to do so.)
