ROCK ’n’ ROLL
RELOCATIONS
HOW THREE CLASSIC ACTS WERE
INSPIRED BY THEIR TRAVELS
Blur in MARRAKECH
Minus guitarist Graham Coxon, who had temporarily
left the group, it was a three-piece Blur who travelled
to Morocco to record their final album,
Think Tank,
in 2002. The use of local musicians and instruments
is apparent on lead single
Out of Time
and in the
titles of some tracks, including
Moroccan People’s
Revolutionary Bowls Club
, and contribute to what
many consider the band’s most imaginative album.
David Bowie in BERLIN
Holing up with Iggy Pop and with a soundtrack of
Kraftwerk acting as his inspiration, Bowie’s late 70s
stint living in West Berlin resulted in three of his most
critically and commercially successful albums in the
form of
Low
,
Heroes
and
Lodger
. Bowie referred to his
German home as “the greatest cultural extravaganza
that one could imagine”.
The Beatles in HAMBURG
George Harrison called it their “apprenticeship”.
Arriving in Hamburg in 1960, the original line-up of
Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, plus bassist Stuart
Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best, spent most of
1961 bedding down in various dives and playing an
estimated 1,500 hours of gigs, honing the on-stage
chemistry that would soon make them the world’s
most famous foursome.
have been the wilderness years for him but, if he hadn’t
come here, he never would have made
Midnight Love
.”
The surviving film footage shows Marvin running
along the beach in a red Adidas tracksuit and rehearsing
for a concert at the casino that now houses his statue.
“Marvin noticed that there were a lot of dog walkers
in the town,” Hens tells me. “He thought that if he put on
a free show for dog owners, then he’d sell more tickets,
but the truth is that he didn’t sell out his show here in
1982. His profile had fallen so low before
Sexual Healing
that the demand just wasn’t there.”
THE NEW ALBUM,
with
Sexual Healing
as an
obvious choice for the first single, slowly came together
over the winter of 1981 and the spring of the following
year. Eschewing the kind of political and social
messages that had succeeded to such triumphal effect in
What’s Goin’ On?
,
Midnight Love
was a simple,
straightforward attempt to lay down Gaye’s more carnal
urges on disc.
It was this foregoing of his more spiritual side which,
according to his brother Frankie Gaye, sowed the seeds
of his destruction. “The force behind the industry said to
him, ‘Marvin, you cannot sing religious songs. You’ve
got to sing sexy songs, because that’s where the money is
– that’s what people expect from you’. He was torn.”
Regardless of this inner conflict,
Sexual Healing
became
a colossal success, finally winning Gaye his long
yearned-for Grammy. That, in turn, hastened his
departure fromOstend, speeding up a return to Los
Angeles and, ultimately, his demise.
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