Jeremy Clarkson has revealed his short-lived and unsuccessful stint as lead singer of a punk band called Bacon Sandwich, where he mixed up the songs during performances.
“Not a single person in the audience noticed that I'd sung the lyrics to one song while the band played something else,” he said. “Even I didn't notice until they finished before I did.”
Modern music is 'easy'
Clarkson said modern music was ‘easy’ and performed by artists who ‘made some noises on a computer in their bedroom’ and went on ‘cheap’ solo tours. He argued there must be modern geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven or prog rockers Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Van der Graaf Generator, but unless someone funds their work, ‘we'll be stuck with Taylor Swift and Adele’ — who he said were ‘very talented pop singers’ but ‘mostly they are cheap’.
The 66-year-old Clarkson's Farm star called on billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates to dip their hands in their pockets and ‘get the musical superstars back’. He cited George Harrison's funding of Monty Python's Life of Brian as an example: “None of the usual companies would touch it. It was too risky. But he came along and as a result of his largesse the world now has something to treasure.”
Prog rock vs solo artists
Clarkson noted that the UK top 40 now often contains no bands, only solo artists or bedroom producers, because it's cheaper to tour alone. “On the road one woman with a microphone is profitable. A six-piece band with a full range of keyboards, five thousand lasers and a drum kit the size of Harrogate isn't.” He recalled that in 1977, Emerson, Lake & Palmer toured America with a 70-piece orchestra but had to send it home halfway through because of cost. “Today they wouldn't even be able to do that.”
He said governments cannot be trusted to fund music because they would demand worthy songs about ‘social mobility in the community’, whereas what is needed is ‘utterly magnificent, towering gibberish’ — citing lyrics from a prog rock song: “Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are, shining, flying, purple wolfhound, show me where you are, lost in summer, morning, winter, travel very far, lost in losing circumstances, that's just where you are.”
Complexity over simplicity
Clarkson said prog rock classics had a ‘pretentious title, meaningless lyrics’ and were ‘complicated’ and ‘so long that there was a very real risk that some people in the audience would die before it was over’. But you had to be an ‘accomplished musician to play it and something of a scholar to write it’. He said he likes complexity, citing the time signature on Solsbury Hill. He added that ‘none of the people’ who write modern hits ‘will be remembered a hundred years from now in the way Beethoven, Bach and Mozart are’ — “And as Peter Hammill from Van der Graaf Generator will be.”
