the long and winding road    |    i should have known better    |    brits do it better
more than words    |    this charming man    |    sing your life    |    lost(?)    |    home

drinking tea with the taste of the Thames/ sullenly on a chair on the pavement/ here you'll find / despair and I... "Come Back to Camden," Morrissey And every book I'd read discussed how hard these four lads from Liverpool had worked, from their back-breaking sessions in Hamburg with nothing to eat and plenty of booze and pills, to how they played the Cavern (a place that health inspectors would have loved shutting down), to how they nearly never had a day off during any of their tours, in England or otherwise. Goodness! If I had been any one of them, I would have packed it in early. And maybe that's why they didn't have a problem in deciding that Candlestick Park would be their last gig in the mid 1960s. Either way... you're saying get to your point, yeah? I guess being an American, it'd be hard for me to appreciate the difficult road a band needs to travel before they can become superstars. Not only do they have to be "the best band in the county, then the best band in Liverpool, then the best band in England, then go over to Scotland and break them in" (John Lennon) - but then they have to break America! It's a wonder I ever hear about some of those smaller bands from England who never really get famous, I probably don't. There's just too much going on in the United States, all these people who are already here, plus everyone from everywhere else who want a piece of the action, no matter how small the piece is. My point is, by the time most English bands have become big enough - and deemed worthy, I suppose (you'd have to ask their record labels or their managers) - to cross the Atlantic, they're already self-sufficient, well-oiled machines. And I'm sure there is something in the way Brits carry themselves - with the glaring exceptions of Oasis (who repeatedly told the media and their supposed heroes, the Beatles, to "sod off") and Morrissey (who I think seems more misunderstood and head and shoulders above the media who've tried to vilify him) - they just seem to have a way to endear themselves to the press, thereby endearing themselves to the people. so to all you Brits I say: keep up the good work. continued...

2004 - mlmchang