Mutt Lange

In returning to posting, I thought I should dedicate my comeback post to the musical genius, rock producer Mutt Lange. Actually not so much to recount his bio and achievements, as to give a hint of why I seek out his work and appreciate it so much.

I first came across Lange's name before I had any idea of what a producer did, on the back of Def Leppard albums Hysteria (1987) and Adrenalize (1992), among the first rock records I'd ever listened to, back in April-May 1992. The name was distinctive enough for me to recall it a few months later when I came across Bryan Adams's Waking Up The Neighbours (1991). I still remember how striking it was that Adams in this album sounded so much more similar to Leppard than, say, his own previous records or the Bon Jovi, Alice Cooper, Scorpions, Phil Collins, whatever other records I was otherwise listening to then. The similarity in sound, not just in relatively throwaway tracks like All I Want Is You or Touch The Hand but even in important sections of the more pivotal Thought I'd Died And Gone To Heaven and the cloyingly ubiquitous (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.

The common element was Lange, and here was something I could seek out. Sure enough, I soon picked up Leppard's Pyromania (1983) and here were all the familiar Lange elements, the big backing vocals, the distinctive guitar and bass tones, that curiously huge snare drum sound that would have seemed intrusive in a lesser producer's hands. I also picked the very first Leppard album On Through The Night (1980) - the only album of theirs at that point Lange had not been involved with - and the clash in sounds, styles, songwriting was violent to say the least. Clearly, as with Adams, Lange had had a major influence on the sound of the band, as if this needed any further confirmation.

I was already an AC/DC fan from their latter-day records and before long, I was thrilled to discover Highway To Hell (1979) and Back In Black (1980), two monster-sounding records that Lange had produced. What to me, then and now, distinguished the sound here from that on other AC/DC records was the obviously superior production, the innovative use of space in Hells Bells or Back In Black or Touch Too Much, the crisper drum sounds, the throbbing bass that so characterises a song like Shoot To Thrill. Lange hadn't gone so far with AC/DC as to make them sound like another band, but he did get them to pace their songs better, and to boost the power of the more energetic sections of their songs by emphasising contrast with the quiet better.

By now I was hooked: a few months later, I picked up the first Leppard record Lange had produced, High 'N' Dry (1981). The AC/DC influence that runs through the heaviest album is clearest from the opening track Let It Go and the title track. Lange's role here, as with AC/DC, was solely as producer, but the sonic links with future big-sounding Leppard records are also there, these all form one progression.

So far, so unremarkable. Records produced by the same producer tend to sound alike. Yawn.

But what then marked Lange out for me was that I'd be listening to all sorts of other unrelated songs and I'd just know he's produced or worked on them. Sometimes it would strike me randomly.. hang on, was that a Mutt Lange production by any chance? ...back in 1994-95 it was harder to check these details, especially in India, than it is today. Two songs I clearly remember realising this independently for were Drive by the Cars (1984), and Waiting For A Girl Like You by Foreigner (1981), in each case it was the rhythm tracks coupled with just how the keyboard sounds shimmered in layers that gave the game away. A further interesting case where my intuition ended up letting me down was Heart's All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You (1990) which Lange had not produced. No. All he had done was write the song!

The ultimate case where this worked was one evening late in 1995, when I was watching a countdown show of US music videos and up popped this country music video featuring a most attractive female singer gyrating in jeans and a denim vest, belly-button prominently on display. Of course it was Shania Twain, the song was Any Man Of Mine. I just knew it was Mutt Lange's work, the song was essentially an updated Pour Some Sugar On Me with fiddles, but no less brilliant for being that. The song certainly made far more of an impression than any other video I saw by an attractive female singer that year! Twain's music was not on sale in India at that point, and it took me until the following year to make the connection, if I remember right from a Grammy Awards compilation cassette.

All just goes to show.. keep your ears open, watch out for similarities and patterns in the music you listen to, and before you know it you find gems in the unlikeliest of spots.

One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back!

Yes, the "Men What Do Rock" are back purveying "Rock-Based Music of Exceptional Quality". But how good is their second effort? The artefactory investigates.

First, the reviews.

Kerrang say it's the most massive sounding rock album since Def Leppard's "Hysteria", giving it a KKKKK rating.

Classic Rock say it makes Def Leppard's "Hysteria" look like a four-track demo and call it album of the year.

Rolling Stone say that, on the title track, the bravado is unmistakable -- a chorus with the sold-out-arena kick of Def Leppard's "Rock Rock ('Til You Drop)" - the words of David Fricke who wrote the Leppard biography, Animal Instinct.

As with Hysteria, this album was a bit of a long struggle. The Darkness were trying to follow up their previous enormously success, Permission to Land.

And as Leppard did, The Darkness seem to have done some shopping around for a producer. Leppard first went with Jim Steinman (Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler) as producer before returning to the legendary Mutt Lange. The Darkness couldn't agree terms with Lange and went with Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, Foreigner, The Cars).

The new album... the sound is much better than before, sacrificing the hard edged crunch from the first record for a more rounded sound. Some of it is overblown with strings and bagpipes and sitars and pan-pipes. The harmonies, swirling strings etc are all generally very Queen-like.

Bald is easily the most interesting track here, who the heck thinks of rhyming "follicle" with "diabolical"! The song opens with a sort ofdoom-laden intro with church bells, but then goes off into the sort ofZeppelin-esque epic that powered Pyromania. It's never so dark as to be serious so they get away with it.

One Way Ticket lifts both form and riff from AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" but then AC/DC would regard cowbells, harmonies, sitars, and the coke-snorting that opens the song as incredibly effete. Only a master producer like RTB could make this sort of mess sound good, and his Queen-like flourishes make this an instant classic. Not sure if the coke-snorting intro is lifted from Rammstein's Kokain.

Dinner Lady Arms the most Leppardesque song here, with a beautifulintro that reminds me of Animal and Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion). The chorus is all Queen for variation. I wish Mutt Lange had produced this but it's very good anyway.B

Is It Just Me to me sounds lifted from AC/DC's Big Gun (riff) and Shoot to Thrill (form) but then takes on a life of its own. Very catchy.

Knockers as juvenile as the title suggests. Intro sounds like Leppard-lite. Insanely catchy.

Blind Man Queen-influenced dreamy-sounding closing track, very well done.

English Country Garden Perfect Queen pastiche with a Meat Loaf piano intro. Very English, very silly.

Hazel Eyes more English whimsy. Pretty silly too but will probably be a mass singalong with everyone jigging about when they do it live with all the bagpipes and marching-beat drums.

Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time starts out as a crap ballad laden with strings but then gets Queen-like and more interesting. Rips off their own Love Is Only A Feeling.

Girlfriend Status Quo with some very camp disco flourishes, almost sound Abba-esque.

So the verdict? Some misses but enough hit to make it all well worth it.It's short at 35 minutes so the bad bits pass by quickly.

History tells us that two of RTB's later bands, namely Foreigner and the Cars, went on to do great work with Mutt Lange. With Foreigner we got Waiting For A Girl Like You, Urgent, Juke Box Hero. With the Cars, it was Drive, Magic, You Might Think... so who knows?

Interestingly, other reviewers seem to have seen every band in here from Aerosmith to Bachman-Turner Overdrive to everybody I have mentioned up above. It's almost as if every rock fan listener is reading into this record their own favourites, whatever it is they are most familiar with. Perhaps we ought to see this as an indicator of just how well the Darkness have been able to distill and incorporate all these pretty disparate influences.

Top effort!

Zero

The concept of zero was absolutely crucial in the development of mathematics, enabling the development of algebra and latterly, calculus.

It was in India that the notion of zero as representing nothingness first took root.

The Indians were not the first to employ a place value system like the decimal number system we use today. The Babylonians employed such a system and the Mayans independently used one too, and each realised that a marker of some sort needs to be used in such a system to prevent errors. So in a crude sense, you had an idea of a zero as a marker of an empty place, with a very definite and resticted technical meaning. But this would not be the result of, say, subtracting 1 from 1. That result, i.e "nothing", was something the Babylonians and the Greeks who followed them had great trouble with.

The key leap in thought that occurred to ancient Indian mathematicians here was to recognise that this zero could also be used to represent "nothingness". Brahmagupta was the first to hit upon a deep - and unique - insight, that the arithmetical number line could be extended to yield zero and negative integers.

It's only abstractly that one can conceive of speaking of "one apple", "two apples" and consider "no apples" as inhabiting the same thought-space. We take this for granted now but at the time, this was a revolutionary achievement.

Mathematics: what India contributed to the ancient world

My previous post touched on the knowledge ancient Indian astronomers gleaned from the ancients.

Here, however, I'd like to highlight what they contributed to mathematicians at large. I exclude techniques they uncovered which were either independently used elsewhere or which generally never came into use, there being alternatives.

India's big contribution was in the development of techniques and tools.

A major practical trigonometric contribution the Indians made was the development of sines. This was to replace the tables of "chords" of angles first used for calculations by Hipparchus: the half-chord of double an angle corresponds to its sine, the chord of an angle being 120 times the sine of half the angle. Aryabhatta, in particular, seems to have realised that this value came up more frequently in trigonometric calculations than the more unwieldy chord. He even detailed the construction of the first sine table: for angles from 0 to 90 degrees in steps of 3.75 (i.e pi/48 radians).

Brahmagupta developed a numerical interpolation technique which we now know as the method of second-order differences.

And of course, the decimal place value number system as we know it, and the use of zero are Indian in origin. More on this in a later post.

Incidentally, the calculation of the sine of pi/48 is reasonably straigjtforward if you know basic trig identities. pi/24 = pi/6 - pi/8. pi/6 has standard sine and cosine values that can be read off an equilateral triangle. Those for pi/8 can be worked out using the half-angle formulae for pi/4, corresponding to an isosceles right triangle. Then use the difference formula to obtain the values for pi/24, and the half-angle formulae again to get the desired answer.

Aryabhatta might have missed a trick, though: calculating these values in steps of 3 or 1.5 degrees (pi/60 or pi/120) would have been a bit more effort but could still have been managed with the techniques of his day.

The trick is to obtain trig values for pi/5: this can be done from similar triangles obtained by drawing diagonals in a regular pentagon, making use of the golden ratio to obtain these values in terms of the square root of 5. One you have this, use pi/30 = pi/5 - pi/6, and the half-angle formulae then for pi/60 and again for pi/120.

Why not at intervals of 1 degree (pi/180) then? Well, the issue here is that you would need to solve a cubic equation to obtain this value from that of pi/60. The techniques for solving these analytically were not available until Cardano came along centuries later, they certainly cannot be solved geometrically. Moreover, attempting to solve the cubic for this case leads to an answer in terms of complex numbers, though the value is demonstrably real! The way out is to use approximations, but that theory would be more fully developed much later.

Astronomy: what Indians picked up from the ancients

One thing Indians quickly come to realise is how central astrology is to how many people choose to order their lives.

Astrology is of course for the most part bunkum. But the ancient Indians included among their number some decent world-class astronomers whose contributions were significant, and had a major impact on how modern mathematics and physics developed in the West.

This is sometimes taken much too far. Some ill-informed Indians occasionally speak as if ancient Indian knowledge has informed this native tradition all along. In their reading, the absence of any firm historical records means nothing and Indians independently discovered all the glories the ancient world had to offer.

The reality is different.

Indian astronomers must have been in contact with Babylonians (before 500 BC). We know this since Babylonian astronomers are known to have calculated various numerical time periods, e.g to do with the period of the moon's revolution round the earth, and the methods they used have survived. The Indians later developed their own mathematical models of moon behaviour and other phenomena but made use of these exact same figures.

Other data from Babylonian observations would prove to be crucial for the later development of Greek astronomy. The concept of the zodiac was theirs, the division of the circle into 360 degrees (for days of the year) too.

We also know that Indian astronomers must have been in contact with the Greeks.

Celestial bodies could, according to the Platonic dictates of Greek aesthetics, not move in anything other than circular paths. Yet there is no way the orbits of the planets as observed from earth can be made to fit circular paths with the earth at their centre. The particular problem lay in the need to explain the apparent retrograde motion of planets, where they appear to double back on themselves in the sky

Hipparchus (2nc entury BC) proposed an ingenious explanations for this, with more complex orbits composed of epicycles. The idea was that here you would have the planet in question travelling in a circlular orbit, still, except that the centre of this circle would itself travel along a circle centred at the earth.

Aryabhatta (5th century) is known to have used such a model, so it is fair to say he and Indian astronomers picked up this idea from the Greeks and were bound by such thinking, at least in this matter.

Ptolemy (2nd century) would go on to refine this model further, introducing epicycles of epicycles and so on. This complicated approach held sway across the Arab and Western worlds until Copernicus and Kepler came along.

However, Aryabhatta and his immediate successors had no inclination of this model, which would only reach India via Arab influences much later.

Interestingly, only in this century was it finally realised that Ptolemy might have been onto something. Apparently the circle and epicycle form the first and second approximations respectively, if you were to consider Fourier series expansiona of the mathematical expressions for the orbits.

It's not clear if Ptolemy had the mathematical nous or tools to take the calculations those extra steps further, though!

My source for all this is the fabulous From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy by C M Linton, an outstanding volume. This fabulous book covers many of the gaps popular-science books have when it comes to explaining just how and why particular theories of the celestial skies were developed.

Hindus so tolerant

This one's a classic.

A Christmas stamp the Royal Mail put out really got to a stack of Hindu activists in Britain and abroad, including as usual the quick-to-get-offended VHP.

This story from the Telegraph, has the background and the stamp in question. The problem for the protesters is that an Indian-looking couple with various markings are depicting as venerating or perhaps praying to an infant baby Jesus Christ.

Some of the objections people have raised to this (online and in person) have been quite imaginative:

• The stamp is of a 68p denomination which is used for overseas postings, particularly to India. This is true, but this is the postage rate for the world outside Europe. More mail flows from Britain to the US, Australia, Canada, etc than to India.
• The markings clearly identify the participants as Hindu. The markings, at the very least, have Hindu origins. Many Christians in India, particularly women, use such markings habitually. Moreover, Hindu groups have always alleged that Christian missionary groups have used high-caste converts - with visible signs - to go out and spread the word. As for Hindu origins, well, prominent Christian festivals such as Easter have pagan origins so this would not be new.
• The couple are showing to be praying to Jesus. This actually isn't clear. They are shown holding the baby lovingly, and they may or may not be actually worshipping or venerating him. That said, many Hindus do worship Jesus, many orthodox Hindus keep a picture of Jesus in their home prayer areas. Organised groups of Hindus are also known to visit popular Catholic pilgrimage sites in India and abroad for worship.
• Other religious groups would object strenuously to anything approaching such a depiction. Hindus ought to adopt such practice from their peers to maintain a healthy sense of identity. Would Muslims be depicted similarly? This one is perhaps the strongest-held objection. However it is mostly irrelevant. Hindu practice ought to be governed by how Hindus feel alone, and not by how proponents of any other religion behave. Anything else smacks simply of masochism. It is true that Muslim community leaders are enjoying a high profile in the media and politically in general, but this is no reason for Hindu leaders to seek to emulate their reactions and behaviour.
• The Brits should understand that good intentions mean little, and should not regard offended Hindus as insecure and unduly sensitive. Their openmindedness is only going one way. But that's fine. The portrayal here is not of the couple eating shit or anything. Good luck convincing any neutral observer that the reaction from Hindu groups is justified on logical or objective grounds. It comes down to mostly absurd blind belief.
• Why aren't the British issuing Diwali stamps if they are so interested in depicting Hindus? Britain is still officially a Christian country.
  

"Other countries have rocky harbours, so we must block our coastlines.": As Paul Krugman writes, advocates of free trade in the US have long characterised protectionists who were wary of lifting trade barriers thus. But it applies perfectly well here, this is exactly how the Hindu groups have reacted.

Hindus are famously tolerant as even the most right-wing nationalist religious group in India will admit. Yet this need not extend to being tolerant of the Hindu intolerant themselves, they can go hang.

Man Push Cart

I recently had the privilege of catching the beautiful independent film Man Push Cart at the London Film Festival.

It's a poignant film about the struggles of an immigrant bagel-cart vendor in New York, buffeted about by life. A great snapshot of street life in one of the world's greatest cities.

Man Push Cart is inspired by Camus's retelling of the myth of Sisyphus. Its translation to the world of the push cart vendor forced to a life of dragging his cart about for what must seem like eternity, all the while boxed into his cart by circumstances represents an extremely strong concept with universal appeal.

And new director Ramin Bahrani pulls it off magnificently with the aid of brooding Pakistani actor and former pusher of a cart, Ahmad Razvi.

Fittingly, Man Push Cart won the prestigious International Critics' award from FIPRESCI at the LFF too.

Corporal Punishment

Punishment is an issue I feel very strongly about. While I do agree with the general reward-punishment reinforcement theory of human behaviour governing motivation and expectation, I believe something is lost when the issue is one of punishment of children.

Here's the background: corporal punishment is generally understood to be that use of physical force, typically violent, for the purpose of chastisement. This includes beating, smacking, slapping, spanking, etc. Now in the west, using this on children is generally a no-no and is often taken for child abuse. It's rarely used by parents or teachers on grown adults, they would never get away with it.

This I have no argument with, it is child abuse, fair and square. And is wrong. But what those driving out physical punishment are neglectful of is the mental side of chastisement.

I know tough teenagers who have been reduced to tears by verbal abuse from adults they respected and trusted. I also know of parents who would never use physical punishment who are happy to exploit emotional blackmail as a means of getting their kids to learn or realise whatever. And often the punishment is for something stupid, unfair and wrong.

Now I'm no parent, but to me these seem worse and grosser forms of abuse than a flick of a belt or switch or even the use of the heated metal serving-spoon to inflict a light burn.

Think about it, tough kids can exhibit sullen defiance in the form of a high-minded and superior silence in the face of unthinking physical violence provided it doesn't go too far. They lose this defence if it's their emotions and mental state being played with in the name of correction.

School of Rock

The film School of Rock was on tv again tonight, starring Jack Black with a bunch of precocious kids. Just reminded me of the classic line he utters to a massed set of wary parents:

Your kids have all really touched me, and I'm pretty sure that I've touched them.

And to think my mate and I were wondering beforehand if such a line would turn up, what form it might take and how could it be funny without getting seriously offensive. I haven't laughed so much at the movies since!

artefactory commences production

• oh my god it's the artefactory.

• i'm a god how i wish.

• arm a god for it needs arms.

• armour god for protection from evil. maybe from Jackie Chan fans.

• armageddon it ... cos the best is yet to come. har megiddo too.