The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 45

18! Music The Guardian Friday December 4 1998 Many unhappy returns The White Album is 30 years old but why celebrate? John O'Reilly argues that it amounts to little more than a good cover design and two records that could have been one beautiful muse, except that it was written about a dog. In a way, Sergeant Pepper marked the demise of the Beatles a3 a truly great band. Without the charm and wit of Rubber Soul and Revolver, it was the moment when they got taken seriously, were compared to classical composers, and they began to take themselves seriously. The consequence is The White Album. Inside this mess of a double album there is an OK single album whimpering to get out.

But the one person who might have made a difference and told the band the truth Brian Epstein was by now dead. There are still great tracks, like Dear Prudence, Yer Blues and Heiter Skelter, which remind you why the Beatles were once a great band. Toremind yourself of how the White Album sounds, just call 0891 626828 and use the code 1026. boy theologian, Everyone's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey is a reference to having a monkey on your back, a euphemism for addiction. And, of course, there's Happiness Is A Warm Gun "I need a fix cause I'm going down." Depression doesnt get any bleaker or basic than refrain on Yer Blues: "I'm so lonely I wanna die." Because the band was by now less than the sum of its parts, the painful idiosyncracies of the two main songwriters are exposed.

The Indulgence of Lennon's Revolution 9 doesnt come close to the invention of Revolver's Tomorrow Never Knows. And McCartney writes the exquisitely minimal Blackbird, giving its acoustic-timbre dynamic by tapping out the time, then ruins it with the twittering of a bird in the background. Martha My Dear could have been a paean to a another clue for you all The Walrus was Paul." But the song hits another target and punctures a different myth. It draws attention to Lennonfe fondness for the Edward Lear school of nonsense poetry. At the very moment Lennon was taking the piss out of fans reading too much into their songs, the psychopathic Chares Manson heard, in Piggies and HeKer Skelter, the inspiration for his own madness.

This is not the least of the album's ironies. The only visible feature on the all-white cover was an embossed title, reading simply "The but it is an album that communicates dhrishreness and prefigures the band's demise. So It is no surprise that the dominant feeling of the album is one of self-loathing. If Pepper was an acid album, The White Album is a heroin album. At risk of sounding like the fan- of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the world's most famous band, spekespeople for a generation, went off to study with the Maharishi.

So while the Rolling Stones performed in Jean-Luc Gotland's revolutionary cinematic collage of One Plus One, the Beatles wrote Revolution 1 "We all want to change your head You tell me rfs the institution Well you know You better free your mind Instead." The problem isnf that this demonstrates a lack of politics, but it does show a lack of taste. This is despite the fact that The White Album itself Is a beautiful object. The album cover was conceived by Richard Hamilton, and the whole album was supposed to be an antidote to the whimsicality of Sergeant Pepper. So Glass Onion attempts to debunk the fanboy theologians of Beatles lyrics: "Well here's The Beatles The White Album (EMI) MISGUIDED A special edition of The White tSf Album, (500,000 SsMM with serial KP numbers) has just been mtTSiji released to mark its 30th anniversary. It is an unhappy birthday because The White Album Is an unhappy record.

The Beatles are unhappy, the songs are unhappy, and ultimately, 30 years on, the listener is unhappy. This Is because in our era of iconoclasm-by-numbers, part of you still wants to believe, against the evidence of this double album, that the Beatles remain unimpeachable. The White Album was released in 1 968. This was the year of riots In Paris, the uprising in Prague, and the assassinations THIS WEEK'S POP CD RELEASES Indispensable Excellent Good Mediocre Appalling Pearl Jam Live on Two Legs (Epic) Feeling festive? Here's just the thing to dispel a holiday mood 16 tracks of Pearl Jam doing their angsty post-grunge thing live. The feeling that they're trying to test our endurance is supported by the fact that only a couple of hits (Daughter, Even Flow) appear.

The rest are album tracks, which to the unitiated will sound entirely alike, all cut from the same stade-rock cloth. Eddie Vedder's lyrics tend to bemoan the difficulty of being male when you're, like, sensitive, and he certainly sings as if he's got PMS. He, and this record, are most enjoyable when they wander off down quieter byways, most of which are found toward the end. (CS) Various Artists Across the Bridge of Hope (White) It's for an unimpeachable cause, this Omagh Fund charity album, but its real intent seems to be to emphasise how many of today's bigger bands are Irish. The 14 acts, who come from both sides of the border, include not just charity regulars Sinead O'Connor and Boyzone, but U2, Ash, the Divine Comedy and more.

Each has contributed an appropriately melancholy back-catalogue track Please from U2, Van Morrison's The Healing Game apart from O'Connor, who did a special version of Abba's Chiquitita. As an album it holds together reasonably well, but nobody buys these things for the music. (CS) Sweet Honey in the Rock Twenty-five (Rykodisc) "Ethereal" and "otherworldly" only partially convey the impact of Twenty-five, while "just plain weird" is far too crude. Essentially the creation of Bernice Johnson Reagon, daughter of a Georgia Baptist preacher, the female sextet, who celebrate their quarter-century this.