Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. Now a solo artist, he is currently recording a new album. Rod is proud to have worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, and he continues to collaborate with various other musical kindred spirits including Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington and Rab Noakes. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s regular musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE The Coen brothers’ recent film Inside Llewyn Davis has been acclaimed as a worthy successor to their previous music-themed slice of Americana, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The current movie depicts a week in the life of a struggling folk-singer as he traipses round the coffee-houses and crash-pads of Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961. It’s like Dylan’s Freewheelin’ LP cover brought to life, perfectly capturing the slushy streets, seedy offices and shabby apartments, and entertainingly evoking the potent mix of sleaze, gimmickry and idealism that characterised the embryonic folk scene just before Dylan arrived to show a new way ahead. The music is spot-on, benefitting immensely from the authenticity of the live performances, especially those of Oscar Isaac in the title role. (The various cat-actors who played Llewyn’s feline companion did a great job too.) I caught the film at a crowded Saturday afternoon screening at the Tyneside Cinema, with quite a few familiar faces from the local music world also in attendance, and witnessed something I’d never experienced before: people actually singing along with the film’s more familiar folk standards. Not loudly or showing off, but politely, as if discreetly signalling to their kindred spirits that they knew this one, too. (Mind you, I’ve never attended a screening of The Sound Of Music or The Rocky Horror Show, or any other of those films where the audience apparently dress up as the characters and join in with all the songs. Maybe one day people will dress up in woolly jumpers, plaid shirts and Levis to go and see Inside Llewyn Davis. Come to think of it, they already have.) One thing I don’t quite get is that a lot of the film’s attendant press coverage (not the film itself) makes the title character out to be (a) a failure and (b) dislikeable. I beg to differ on both counts. Sure, Davis spends a lot of the time banging on doors that remain firmly closed, and upsetting people who are trying to be nice to him, but he wouldn’t be the first artist – real or fictitious – that you could say that about (including a few I’ve met). Also, as a performer, Davis – as portrayed by Oscar (who deserves one, by the way) – stands head and shoulders above his peers and comes across as an attractive, if maddening misfit. I also take issue with the endless comparisons with the late Dave Van Ronk, on whom the Llewyn Davis character is allegedly based. It’s true that the very real, highly regarded Van Ronk was working the circuit depicted in the film, and that he never made the big time. He may have lost out to Dylan when the latter pinched a couple of his songs (he wasn’t the only one), and he may not have had the charismatic presence with which the young upstart transfixed his audiences, but he is fondly remembered as a well-respected elder statesman of the scene. True, Oscar performs a very creditable version of Van Ronk’s classic ‘Green Rocky Road’ (and the original is played over the closing credits), but a few too many reviewers have lazily confused the (in their view) surly loser Davis with the (by all accounts) generous and likeable Van Ronk. Dave Van Ronk may never have become a global superstar – he wasn’t cut out for it and probably didn’t want it anyway. I left the cinema pondering over a line sung a couple of years later by the cheeky young pretender portrayed fleetingly at the end of the film: “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all”.