The other day I remembered an utter shit of a man I used to work for. I was a kind of odd job man for him, even though that wasn’t what I was really employed for, but that’s got nothing to do with this story. He would sit in his “office” which was actually his spare bedroom where there was just enough room for him to sit at his computer due to the piles of utter tat and rubbish he had piled up to the ceiling. He would play music very loudly through some quite decent speakers while I painted his stairwell or cleaned his bathroom or grouted some tiles or took the rubbish out to provide entertainment in between bouts of screaming at me for doing everything wrong.
He would play One Step Beyond by Madness so loudly the windows shook and then suddenly turn the volume down and yell “I FUCKING LOVE MADNESS, ME” before turning it back up to 11. He would do this with most artists’ music. The one which stood out in my mind was when he was playing classical music one day and turned it down to yell “I FUCKING LOVE BEETHOVEN, ME”.
This memory made me think about classical music. When I was at primary school, I heard part of The Planets for the first time and bought it soon after on LP from Woolworth’s. I believe it cost £3.49, which at the time was a few weeks’ pocket money and is at least £100 in today’s money. But it was worth it and I played it over and over again. Perhaps odd behaviour for an eight or nine-year-old.
As with all classical music, the album I bought was a cover version and it was recorded by Berliner Philharmoniker, the One Direction of German orchestras of their day.
Opening track Mars is strong, as all album openers should be, and it’s full of bits everyone has heard before. Even as a kid, I recognised lots of it. As I got older, I was aware that Diamond Head had nicked a large part of it for their track Am I Evil? and this was when I first realised there is a fairly strong link between classical music and heavy metal.
In fact, there are death metal bands, even including gore merchants Cannibal Corpse, whose songs have an almost symphonic sound to them. Sure, it’s all played on heavily distorted guitars that are tuned down to C, but the influence is there. A lot of guitar solos have classical influences too. Tiny little parts of melody in solos by the likes of Kirk Hammett and Gary Holt have a certain familiarity to them and you can sometimes tell that they’ve done a bit of classical cut and shut work.
But the focus of this is really meant to be The Planets. There’s something quite amazing about the way a composer can write all the different parts without hearing them played by the different instruments. It shows they have great vision, but with their ears. I’m sure there’s a name for that.
It has always irked me that the running order goes Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. This is akin to listing Sick Of It All’s studio albums as Scratch the Surface, Just Look Around, Blood Sweat and No Tears, Built to Last, Call to Arms, Yours Truly, Life on the Ropes. And if you’re not a New York Hardcore enthusiast or an astronomer, the problem is that the order is wrong.
Also, it would be far better if rather than Uranus, the Magician, it was Uranus, the Creator of Puerile Jokes and featured a farting solo. And it’s lucky Holst never did a Pluto piece because it would have had to have been deleted from every version when some telescope killjoys decided it wasn’t actually a planet after all. Also, where is Earth? It seems strange that our planet isn’t even acknowledged, despite being the place where it was all written and every version of it was recorded. Although someone I’m no longer friends with once asked “why didn’t he do one about the Sun and the Moon?” thereby demonstrating a lack of planetary understanding which I found unforgiveable. Anyway, there’s plenty of songs about those, notably one where The Beatle’s tell you that the former is coming and one where Dean Martin warns of the latter hitting you in the eye like a pizza, or something.
But yes, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s version has always been the standard by which The Planets has been judged, but in a post-Brexit world, it’s too costly to import German orchestral music and the paperwork is a nightmare, so I decided to see if there was a version from closer to home that could be enjoyed.
Well, there are versions by the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but they aren’t quite as good. They’re a bit like Faith No More’s cover of The Commodores’ Easy. There is a 1985 album called Beyond the Planets where War of the Worlds musician Jeff Wayne and prog rock aficionados Rick Wakeman and Kevin Peek collaborated to interpret the work in a way that makes it sound like it was incidental music from 1980s school learning programme Look and Read, perhaps played in the background of Badger Girl or another of their epic productions. If you didn’t go to a British school in the early part of the 1980s, you’ll have no idea what the hell I’m talking about here. And, forgetting geographical proximity for a moment, for another peculiar interpretation, check out Japanese singer Ayaka Hirahara’s pop version of Jupiter. Or don’t, it’s not worth it. I’ll never see those six minutes again. Jupiter was always my favourite part – I know, I’m just a hanger on who only likes the hits – and this has spoiled it somewhat.
While researching a little bit for this post, I found out that despite his Germanic name, Gustav Holst was in fact British. I also learned that he wrote The Planets initially to be played on two pianos. Interesting. I wondered if anyone had recorded it in this way and found it on YouTube. I shan’t post a link to it because whoever recorded it isn’t credited.
Yes, Mars sounds just as good on piano, or at least the start bit does. It soon takes on the sound of two competing pianists playing completely different pieces of music over the top of each before it’s saved towards the end. And that is sadly how the whole thing sounds throughout. There are moments of brilliance that take the listener’s breath away, there are moments that are almost dirge-like (I know that might sound hypocritical to some of you, given some of the stuff I generally listen to by choice) and moments that sound like Dueling Banjos is being played on pianos by Chas from Chas and Dave and his evil twin.
I’m not sure where I was going with all of this. I suppose a point I could make is that if you hear a song you like that turns out to be a cover, it’s not always rewarding to go back and listen to the original. But it sometimes can be. I’ve actually achieved very little in this post, other than I got to listen to what was quite possibly the first album I ever bought again.
I FUCKING LOVE THE PLANETS, ME.
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