There was a piece in the Telegraph the other day about rock star insults, though only a few were real gems worth remembering.
Such as when Peter Grant turned up at a Dylan gig and introduced himself: “Hi Bob, I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin”. To which His Bobness replied drily: “I don’t come to you with my problems, do I?”.
The other good one in the Telegraph was from Slash about his nemesis: “I once asked Axl why he had left off the “e” in his name and he started crying because he thought he’d spelt it right”.
Lester Bangs wrote clever insults, such as his description of Barry White “nineteen hundred pounds of pure lumbering animal, makes Leslie West look like Steven Tyler”.
Any others spring to mind?
The Slash story doesn’t ring true. Axl Rose is an anagram of Oral Sex (tch! Youngsters). Unless of course Slash thought it should be spelled Orale Sex and that the lead singer had really left out an E.
“Even with all that money, he has hair like a dinner lady” – Boy George on Sir Elton
“I thought I told you to wait in the car!” Paul Simon, reacting to the surprise appearance of Art Garfunkel at an awards ceremony.
Funnily enough I saw that on YouTube for the first time today. Can’t say any of them look happy to be there.
That was beyond awkward. And Lennon was channeling the future Captain Sensible.
Lennon: “A hannnd-baaaaaaag??”
Heppo’s description of Mark Smith as ‘a man shouting in a bus station’ is exquisite. It sums up an entire career and personality in a memorably pithy phrase.
“I’ve met the man in the street, and he’s a cunt”. True 40 years ago when Sid said it, true now.
I’ve always liked Freddie Mercury’s “Ah, Mr Ferocious” comment when the Sex Pistols and Queen were sharing the same recording studio.
As was Sid’s original question if Freddie “was still taking opera to the masses”.
ballet
“Still taking opera to the ballet”…? Why, he must have been on drugs!
George Melly on Sir Mick’s “laughter lines” – “Nothing’s that funny”
Julie Burchill (who I normally can’t stick) on Cindy Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – “Girls!? The last time she saw 30 was when she measured her waist”
What Burchill’s quote lacks in wit it certainly makes up for in unpleasantness, don’t you think?
Didn’t someone from a newspaper ring her up once and, when she answered, the journo said ‘hi, is your mummy in?’
Burchill on sex with Tony Parsons: ‘Nasty, brutish and short (but not short enough)’.
Noel Gallagher on Liam: “He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
I see now that this is one of those listed by the Telegraph. Ah well. Noel is often great in interviews of course. Better in that field than in his music nowadays. IMO. He is also still popular with many as a singer.
Alice Cooper after seeing Kiss for the first time: “What those guys need is a gimmick”.
I rather like this from Nick Cave
“I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’
And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
I think it was Danny Baker who reviewed The Power Station’s lumbering approximation of T.Rex’s “Get it on” in the NME. All he wrote was “Get it off”….
And, along the same lines, Charles Shaar Murray’s response to Lee Hazlewood’s “Poet, Fool or Bum” was simply: “Bum”.
And someone must have reviewed Yes’s eponymous album with “No”.
Frank Zappa:
“Most of the people who come to our shows wouldn’t know good music if it came up and bit them in the ass.”
Louis Armstrong.
“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”
Chorales Shaar Murray on reviewing a Yes album…the whole review read:
“Yes? Maybe…”.
I thought it just read “No”.
Lester Bangs’ finest kiss-off:
“I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.”
“A musician is someone who’ll load $5000-worth of equipment into a $1000 car and drive 500 miles to play a $50 gig.” – unknown
“Harpists spend 90% of their time tuning their harps and 10% of their time playing out of tune.” – Igor Stravinsky
Oh god, that first one is true. The contents of my car on a gig night have a replacement value of A LOT more than the car.
Cute that anyone thinks anyone’s making 50 quid though 😉
Well. My bass-player friend Martin gets £60 a gig with the 4-piece ’60s-’70s covers band he’s in. All their gigs are at weekends and within 20 miles of home too, so they don’t impact his day job.
The other band he’s in, a NWOBHM trio, loses him money every gig as he has to take time out from his job to do them. Nearly all of their very infrequent gigs are in Germany, Belgium etc.
I was thinking about equipment costs at the jazz gig I saw on Sunday. The keyboard player’s Korg Kronos sells for well over £3000 I discovered, after some quick googling.
I bet your personal setup must have cost a tidy sum.
We don’t play live much but when we do, we always lose money (or break even at best). If you’re playing originals, it’s basically guaranteed I think, unless you’re actually capable of pulling in 50+ people to every show, which is a task that would make Sisyphus blanch.
My current setup is all synths. One main “hub”, which is a big Nord, plus a Roland TR-8 drum machine, a Korg Monologue, a MeeBlip triode (gorgeously nasty little bass monosynth), a Novation MiniNova, a Roland JU-06 and a sequencer. So yeah, there’s some money tied up in it but it’s better than when I had a laptop-based setup and still played guitar live. Amp+laptop+guitar+pedals was a worrying amount of vulnerable cash to be lugging about.
Sisyphus Blanch – TMFTL
That’s an upcoming BBC detective series, isn’t it?
Mervyn Peake, Shirley?
Lead character on a prog rock concept album, a thinly disguised hatchet job on a former promoter who had them third on the bill beneath Blodwyn Pig and Bobby Crush.
The fiend!!
I saw this printed out and stuck on the wall of an Edwin Shirley Trucking trailer. It’s by Henry Rollins.
Listen to the stage manager and get on stage when they tell you to. No one has time for your rock star bullshit. None of the techs backstage care if you’re David Bowie or the milkman. When you act like a jerk, they are completely unimpressed with the infantile display that you might think comes with your dubious status. They were there hours before you building the stage, and they will be there hours after you leave tearing it down. They should get your salary, and you should get theirs.
Such a jolly, lighthearted guy!
I had a book years ago called Bitch Bitch Bitch , which was a hilarious collection of nasty comments on and by musicians. I think my favourite was by some NME journalist reviewing the first 5 Star album who described it as ” the sound of Wood Green shopping centre caught on vinyl.”
Zappa…
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
I can’t find the exact quote on Google, but PJ O’Rourke described hip-hop as something like “being shouted at by a drunk while someone throws some old drum machines downstairs…”
I always had a soft spot for Julian Cope’s “It used to be enough to know that U2 were crap, nowadays you have to know why they’re crap…”
And I’m not sure of the original context (album review?), but David Quantick’s “O Sting, where is thy death” is pretty spectacular…
Although it was completely lacking in wit and poise, I laughed like a drain at the NME review of Robbie Williams’s ‘Rock DJ’ which said, quite plainly ‘Rock DJ is f***ing shit’.
Shit Sandwich.
That’s just nit picking
Here’s one for the teenagers:
When Pete Murphy released his first post-Bauhaus single, he went by the name of “Peter J. Murphy”, leading one reviewer to comment “Oh, so it’s *Peter* now is it, Mr Lah-De-Dah Gunner Graham?”.
I recall a great quip years back by James Dean Bradfield of The Manic Street Preachers when asked if he rated Bobby Gillespie and Primal Scream. Bradfield said something like “we’re all big football fans in the Manics, and it’s said about Terry Venables that ‘he talks a good game’ – meaning he’ll talk impressively and knowledgeably before a match about play and tactics, but rarely ends up delivering the results promised. Well, we think Bobby Gillespie talks a good song.” Ouch!
Someone, I can’t remember who, brilliantly described the Manic Street Preachers as ‘a school play version of The Clash’.
Bradfield has some nerve criticising anyone else, considering how appalling his own band is. Mind, he’s right about Primal Scream.
A talented singer, guitarist and songwriter. A lot of the things Gillespie isn’t.
Neither is Bradfield. I’ll give him guitarist, but singer, songwriter? A thousand times no.
Boy George again – when Marilyn released the single “Cry and Be Free” – George renamed it “Try and Be Me”.
Boy George, on walking into the Band Aid studio and spotting Marilyn: “Hello Doris”.
Noel Gallagher: “I hear Mick Hucknall said our latest album was average. That really worried me, ‘cos if there’s anyone who’s an expert on average music it’s Mick f**king Hucknall”
Guitar World review of BTO’s ‘Live! Live! Live!’: ‘You coulda fooled Me! Me! Me!’
Noel (again) on Jack White: ‘He looks like a Fat Zorro’.
Keith Richards: “What do Grateful Dead fans say when they run out of drugs? ‘What IS this awful music?'”
The entire review of ‘To the Faithful Departed’ by the Cranberries in, I think, Melody Maker. Pant-wettingly savage.
This one?
THE CRANBERRIES
TO THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED
Reasons to hate The Cranberries.
1) Dolores O’Riordan. Her arrogance. Her petty small-mindedness. Her redneck worldview. Her incessant preaching. The fact you can actually see the mean-spiritedness of her thoughts imprinted on her pinched little face. Those American flag jumpsuits. Her cold love of money. The way she’s Sinead O’Connor for people who can’t confront even elementary contradictions. Her anti-abortion stance. Her absolute lack of self-irony. The way she makes even the most fundamental and wonderful emotions sound trite. The way America loves her cliched, stereotypical take on Ireland. Her reduction of serious political issues to 10-second sound-nibbles. Her dress sense. The obscene way she made legions of students slow-dance to the most crushingly banal political lyric (“And their tanks and their bombs and their tanks and their guns…”) since Paul McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back To The Irish”. That wedding.
2) Dolores O’Riordan. Her smug conceit masquerading as concern for all mankind.
3) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. The fact that no one in her obviously highly technological camp has bothered to buy her anything more than a Second Year rhyming dictionary. The fact that she sees fit to write a song about John Lennon – a bigoted, misogynistic, self-loathing, tantrum-prone **** who also happened to write some great songs – 15 years after the event, and gloss over all his faults. The fact that she does so by writing the infantile lines, “It was a fearful night of December 8th/He was returning home from the studio late/He had perceptively known that it wouldn’t be nice/Because in 1980 he paid the price…With a Smith & Wesson 38/John Lennon’s life was no longer a debate.” The fact that every person in her camp is clearly so in awe of her (temper? Power? Capacity for retribution? Fragile ego?) that they didn’t take her gently to one side and go, “Er, Dolores, perhaps it’d be better if someone else wrote the lyrics…”
4) Dolores O’Riordan. Her videos. You know how much Dolores hates to be typecast as a “thick Paddy”? Has she actually watched any of her own videos? The way they reinforce received notions of Ireland as a backwards country populated entirely by broken-toothed, bowl-headed, crying schoolkids in grey V-neck jumpers dancing around streets lit by the occasional Armalite flare? And the odd horse – y’know.
5) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. Guess whose only contact with “real life” has been MTV news and the occasional venture onto the street outside the Four Seasons? Check “War Child”: “I spent last winter in New York and came upon a man/He was sleeping in the streets and homeless, he said ‘I fought in Vietnam’…” You ****ing patronising, prematurely middle-aged cow.
6) Dolores O’Riordan. Her music. The opening song here (“Hollywood”) starts like Stiltskin. Only not as good. Then we’re onto Foreigner territory. With the odd mandolin thrown in, for “local” colour.
7) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. Check “I’m Still Remembering”: “They say the cream will always rise to the top/They say that good people are always the first to drop/What of Kurt Cobain, will his presence still remain?/Remember JFK, ever saintly in a way….” (Yeah, and an adulterous ego-maniac who started the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, in another way.) Check: “Bosnia” (no, seriously, folks) – “Bosnia was so unkind, Sarajevo changed my mind…Rummmpatitum, rummmpatitum/Traboo, traboo, traboo…” (We’re quoting from the official lyric sheet.) The theremin and musical box used (spookily!) to spice up the music have the unfortunate effect of making the song sound like something from “The Twilight Zone”.
The situation in the former Yugoslavia seems to have particularly troubled Dolores while she was writing the songs for this album (what’s wrong, dearie? Nothing better on TV?). After all, as she helpfully points out in the heady, emotive (all right: we’re lying) “Free To Decide”, “You must have nothing more with your time to do/There’s a war in Russia and Sarajevo too.” This is, incidentally, the most perceptive insight she offers throughout. (Who are the people who take this woman seriously? Where do they live? Where do they go to at night? Please don’t invite us.)
8) Dolores O’Riordan. Her voice. The way she turned what was a dazzling, intoxicating gift into an atonal corncrake skree by infusing it with her personality. Now it emparts no emotion of any kind, save for pettiness, bitterness, self-righteousness. She tries to suggest such broad sweeps of emotion with her songs but, somehow, they always end up sounding so ****ing small.
Not that we’d want to belittle her.
Originally printed in the Melody Maker, April 27, 1996
Mr Agreeable rules!!!
I’m not sure if it was his or not, but I once heard an intro to a cover version of ‘Zombie’ which ran “You can please some of the people all of the time; You can please all of the people some of the time. Or you can be in The Cranberries”.
Jesus christ, I do not miss the Melody Maker.
Me either. I hate to be a prim little clutcher of pearls, and the Cranberries are appalling, but that’s just flat-out horrible, isn’t it? It’s only tangentially about the non-merits of the music and largely viciously personal in the most puerile way. I hate to say it, but the person that’s about is actually a, y’know, person. Imagine reading that about yourself just because you made a crappy record.
My sentiments exactly. It’s a cack-handed Mean Girls slam post about the kid who wore the unfashionable shoes to school this week.
If you’re going to do this sort of stuff, at least do it with some modicum of style and invention.
Quite. That’s really quite demented.
Says quite a lot about the person who wrote it.
Unnecessary cuntishness.
That’s all very well, but did the reviewer like it? How many stars did it get?
Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?
What an awful, nasty review.
I have no feelings one way or the other about the music of Cranberries/Dolores O’Riordan, but that isn’t a review it’s an attempt at character assassination.
Shame on the writer and shame on the editor.
I refer the Hon members to Pitchfork’s review of the second Jet album.
Bobby at The Last Waltz (may be apocryphal, Neil has denied it but print the legend)
Neil Diamond (walking off stage) – “you’re gonna have to go some to follow me, man, I was so great!”
Dylan – “what you want me to do, go out there and fall asleep?”
Lemmy: “Religion is stupid anyway. I mean, a virgin gets pregnant by a ghost! You would never get away with that in a divorce court, would you?”
Lemmy – vodka and orange recipe. Place one orange next to one bottle of vodka. Drink the vodka.
“He was always washing his feet. And he liked The Beatles”
Steve Jones on Glen Matlock after he left the Sex Pistols
(Malcolm McLaren later claimed the credit for that one, as he did with just about everything Pistols related)
Zappa again
I’m not black but there’s plenty of times I wish I could say I’m not white