POP AND JAZZ Light fantastic Summer CDs


it’s worthy checking first. Arctic Monkeys, a punky, swaggery, good-natured group from Sheffield, have long been media darlings, win- ning Mercury Prizes (they gave the prize money away to charity) and building a fol- lowing that made their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not the fastest-selling debut ever from a UK band, an achievement built on a passionate fan base rather than an industry pyramid scheme. Truth is, behind all the headlines and puffery, the Arctic Monkeys are very good indeed, and frontman Alex Turner is probably the most interesting – certainly the wittiest – British songwriter since Morrissey. After an industrial-strength follow-up


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album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, the group went experimental with 2009’s Humbug, whose shapeless sound and general senten- tiousness reflected Turner’s growing interest in side projects. They’ve come back to full delightful form with Suck It and See (Domino), which is undoubtedly the pop/rock album of the summer. Qmagazine famously described the 12 songs as “the sound of a band drawing back the curtains and letting the sunshine


TELEVISION Blood on your hands


Dispatches: The Real Price of Gold CHANNEL 4


y the time you read this, the British retail jewellery sector should have been hit by a tsunami of revulsion. It won’t have hap- pened, of course, because Dispatches: The Real Price of Gold (27 June) was on Channel 4, where it glittered like a prospector’s nugget in a pan full of muddy water. The programme, a brilliant piece of inves- tigative consumer journalism, showed us where much of the shiny new gold in Argos, H. Samuel, Ernest Jones and the rest actually comes from. It comes from the blood of chil- dren. In Britain, if you drop a long-life light bulb, you are supposed to step away and ventilate the room for 15 minutes, because of the tiny amount of mercury it contains. In Senegal, children take the deadly metal in their bare hands and use it to wash gold ore, which they or their friends have hewn out of rock in ver- tical shafts less than a metre wide, for £3 a day. Does it harm them? Of course it does. Similar mines supply between 10 and 30 per cent of the world’s gold. Deirdre Bounds,


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an ethical businesswoman who made a trenchant consumer journalist, traced it from its source to the high street, stopping along the way to look at the environmental conse- quences of mining: sores, burns, headaches, aching bones, liver and kidney damage, early death. There is, though a solution, and it’s an easy one. Stop asking for new gold, and recycle our old gold. Gold is a classic example of the scientific principle of conservation of matter. There is enough gold in the world already, at least for jewellery purposes. People just have to dig it out of their dressing table drawers and have it melted down. But they need a fair price for it, which they won’t get from all those


veryone professes to despise hype, but there is baby and there is bathwater, and


in”, which isn’t going to be bettered as a sum- ming up. “Brick by Brick” and “Don’t Sit Down, ’Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair” are classic British pop songs, not so much obser- vational as conversational, sustained with clever wordplay and tight arrangements. Nothing weighty or profound; nothing about global warming, Aung San Suu Kyi or the Arab Spring. Just youngsters having fun, which is what pop music is all about. Oldsters don’t quite get something about contemporary pop, which is meant to be heard on iPods, the sound compressed thinner than a poppadom and almost as brittle. Pop fans don’t want lush, layered sound. They also don’t really want albums any more. Arctic Monkeys allowed their loyalists to listen to the whole of Suck It and See on the website before deciding whether to buy. The rise of downloading has meant the music industry has returned to something closer to a pre-LP state where individual songs are bought rather than whole albums, which is potentially good news for those artists who don’t really have a full album in them. Good news for Sophie Ellis-Bextor, one-time Queen of British dance music. She hasn’t made a record for four years (motherhood, career break) since Trip the Light Fantastic in 2007 and the new one Make a Scene(Universal) isn’t as good, but is redeemed utterly by the title track which you’ll be hearing out of cars, clubs and open win- dows all summer if there is any justice. For anyone who still values big sound, big songs and virtuoso guitar playing, the legend - ary Michael Chapman has recently turned


70, an epoch marked by the reissue of his classic 1970 album Fully Qualified Survivor (Light in the Attic) and release of a further set of archive tracks and rarities called Growing Pains 3(Market Square). Chapman’s guitar playing has a hypnotic quality, drone- based and often reminiscent of Indian raga or the long-form improvisations of John Fahey. In recent years he has concentrated largely on instrumental recordings, so it’s good to hear the rough, earthy voice again. You can’t dance to “A Scholarly Man” or “Youth is Wasted on the Young” but they lift the spirit in other, equally valid ways. At 83, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz is an


even more fully qualified survivor than Chapman. Still a musical gypsy, he maintains an extraordinary touring and recording sched- ule, mostly at small venues and for small labels. His latest release, though, is Live at Birdland (ECM), a wonderfully vivid docu- ment from the New York club named after Charlie Parker and featuring Konitz with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian. Though Konitz has long been pigeonholed as a “cool” player who developed aside from Parker’s frantic bebop, his playing has grown more detailed and adventurous over the years and the Birdland music is profoundly influenced by Parker’s style and ideas, especially the opening “Lover Man”, the tune Parker was recording when he suffered his catastrophic breakdown in 1946. Konitz had just turned professional the year before that, at the age of 18. He’s been playing ever since. Brian Morton


Abou Keita, approximately five years old, pans for gold at the Djikouloumba mine, near the Kankan region, in Guinea


highly advertised gold-into- cash websites and high street gold shops. The retail jewellers, mean- while, insist that there is no demand for recycled gold, or even fair trade, ethically mined gold. Even the delightful Frenchman


who runs


GoldByGold, a gold recycling company in Paris, had his


doubts. “It is difficult to sell the word ‘Love’, and emotion, with the word ‘recycled’,” he mused. “Can you say to your fiancée, here is gold, it’s made from recycled gold?” Yes, you can. A street survey by Bounds, found that many people like the idea that their “precious”, whether jewellery-shaped or as pure metal, has previously been precious to someone else. And when they stepped into Bounds’ battle-bus, and saw her videos of where new gold comes from, they were even more convinced. Human beings love gold with a mystical passion – the whole of civil- isation is arguably based on the desire for it – but they love children more. John Morrish


2 July 2011 | THE TABLET | 27


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