Don’t forget to Breathe.

Only ever two songs from the sea.

In this weekly blog, I share two tracks from my drive to and from the sea I swim in. For those who’d rather just dive into the full immersion playlist, you’ll find it here.

300. **Gypsies Tramps & Thieves**

The queen of camp cabaret and showbiz doyen of the pink pound. God love Cher for her master stroke of reinvention as regent of all things poppy draggy disco, with a slug of Mamma Mia cameo glory and some Oscar work just for good measure.

It was a long road from tip-toeing through the strewn flowers and kaleidoscopes of the late 60s and early 70s on the west coast with Sonny at her side.

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When you watch her performance of this immersion track, bedecked in the most outrageous piece of yellow kitsch and exuding a smoky sensuality, her magnetism is palpable; visceral. The performance is 100% Cher. There aren’t enough Ss to spell out her version of sass.

From this end of the telescope it’s easy to dismiss Sonny as an early irrelevance in the Cher story. Her star has rocketed across the popular culture of music and film for 50 years: a remarkable achievement.

But a small rummage in the history files make it immediately obvious that her ascent to cultural icon was initially undertaken arm in arm with him, with the shadow of one Phil Spector lurking at their beginning [the good version that is].

When Sonny & Cher broke on to the scene, they seemed to carry with them the late afternoon of a 1960s LA summer filled with every kind of love imaginable.

It’s like it was piped into their veins. ‘I got you babe’ is possibly one of the most joyous pieces of hippy dippy sun-drenched music ever made. It contains everything: the whole folksy, waltzy, naïve, psychedelic dance of it all.

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Note: If you needed to find the single reference point for the art director on Austin Powers, this just might be it.

Behind all of this sunny bonhomie lay something quite different of course — an almost cliched story of control, lovelessness, deceits and betrayals. Cher referred to her time with Sonny as “treacherous yet foundational.” They eventually found a post-divorce, post-love peace [helped along by Sonny’s post-divorce apology I’m sure]. And Sonny came to fill a different role in her life, as a mentor and friend. She was to eventually to describe him as so much more than a husband. High praise from the high queen.

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Speaking of which, The Blunt Post put Cher down as the greatest Gay Icon of all time. One look at Believe and how could you argue, even given the ever-presence of Dorothy and those red shoes.

And then there are the Oscar-worthy performances she slid into the deck, just because she could. Moonstruck is one of the most wonderful films, and I cannot imagine anyone else in the role.

And Tea with Mussolini, well, who else could pull off the chiaroscuro of that character: brash, vulgar, emotionally clumsy, narcissistic, yet profoundly kind and generous and caring.

Take a bow Cheryl Sarkisian.

In fact take many, and often.

**301. Wont get fooled again**

OK.

I admit it.

It’s all about Keith

Yes, it’s a remarkable piece of youth culture anthem-ing. Yes, its computed electronica intro was wildly innovative. Yes, Daltrey’s opening scream is show stopping. Yes, Entwistle is like an ancient monolith with Voodoo fingers. Yes, Townshend is on fire. But Keith Keith Keith.

That they had to gaffer tape your headphones to your head, so they stayed on says it all.

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Watching Keith in the background of this performance at Shepperton Studios is a small revelation.

Before his part kicks in, Keith can be seen playing various drum parts in his head, sticks hovering over the skins: his own silent internal gig already running before the first stick strike lands. If there was ever a beacon of ‘lead drummer’ energy, it was Moon. Won’t get fooled Again is the last song Moon played live with the band. A fitting epitaph.

As to the composition and provenance of the immersion song itself, most everything pivots on one central lyric line:

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Won’t get fooled Again was Townshend’s riposte, a visceral reaction, to the revolutionary voices at the time. The particular incident that ignited his ire is traceable to the stage invasion and mic grab by Abbie Hoffman, a member of the Chicago Seven and also a leading proponent of the Flower Power movement, while the Who were playing at Woodstock.

In an article for Cream magazine Townshend said

“Leave me out of it: I don’t think your lot would be any better than the other lot!’ All those hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, and shaking them and trying to make them realise that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.”

A cynical English arsehole, indeed. But let’s not forget the Mod world of his musical youth.

Townshend was a working-class lad, so there is a great possibility that he viewed the idealistic ideology of the hippy era from the vantage point of his upbringing: just a load of privileged naval-gazing by a bunch of naïve, over-intellectualised student slackers with the luxury of conscience. It is also possible that he viewed those who fermented revolution as those least likely to pay the bill for the horrors they bring. That task was reserved exclusively for the workers.

Townshend’s turbulence fuelled a lot of the angers that drove their earlier song making — hardly surprising given his up-bringing. His parents were not exactly the stable kind, as the oracle of wiki tells us:

Both drank heavily and had fiery tempers. Cliff Townshend was often away from his family touring with his band while Betty carried on affairs with other men. The two split when Townshend was a toddler and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother Emma Dennis, whom Pete later described as “clinically insane”, later citing this experience as having unknowingly influenced the plot of *Tommy*.

But Keith Keith Keith, who’s drumming was described by Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Chad Smith less as drumming and more as a ‘sonic assault.’

A remarkable human being. Never has a drummer’s character flowed through his hands, feet and face more than it did with Moon. I wont go into the layers of his playing style, if you want more of that dive in to this youtube exploration.

It’s enough to say that Moon was both spiritual anchor and turbine hall of the Who’s music. That required a dark and light, a taste for extremes, but also an intuitive felt understanding both of what the music was capable of containing and also his role in filling it to brimming. Moon was the convex miniscus on the surface of the music — a divine tension that defied the physics of their music’s construction.

Moon was easily tagged as many things: genius, sloppy, lunatic, drunk, unpredictable, explosive [literally], deranged, damaged. These are all lazy pieces of language. He was a cat’s cradle of all of them and a whole other meta tier above them.

For all of Townshend’s disdain for revolutionaries, one of the truest, purest ones was sitting on a stool behind him making extraordinary things happen.

So if we choose to ask the question of who was Keith Moon — what better way to close than to allow him to answer it.

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RIP Keith

The Author: Julian Borra is a creative writer and strategist, living in Lewes in the UK, with a life-long love of music. A sometime drummer, and percussionist in various bands, music is the sea he swims in when confined to dry land.

Julian’s commercial works can be found at thinairfactory.com or he can be found at linkedin.com/in/julianborra