Trouble In Paradise

Too often the assumption remains that seriousness, that angst, comprises the central ingredient in great songwriting. There are either important statements (capitals if you prefer) or trivia – the old lyrics don’t matter anyway because you can’t hear ‘em syndrome.

That’s understandable given that there are very few contemporary songwriters capable of effectively combining both wit and wisdom. Even those who are regularly voted top of the polls – Elvis Costello, Paul Weller, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and in the Irish context Bono and U2, Paul Cleary, Van Morrison and Philip Lynott – are notable for a distinct lack of penetrating humour. Costello has his puns, Lynott his throwaway one-liners and Morrison his odd song (‘Cleaning Windows’, for example, is very funny in parts) but none of these major songwriting figures are renowned for sustained or incisive wit.

Which is why Tom Waits and Ian Dury will always rank among my front line of songwriting greats. The problem is that humour on record wears thin very quickly – just try listening to a Billy Connolly album for the twentieth time – so that the line the successful humorist rides is a very fine one. Randy Newman does it to perfection.

Specifically because he is a perfectionist. Slapdash satire is pointless. When Randy Newman sets his beady eye on a target, he first goes about finding out precisely what makes the object of his poisoned arrow tick before firing off his intended salvo. It’s called taking careful aim before going for the bullseye. One lethal shot is better than spraying less well directed efforts all over the shop.

In Newman’s case the fine tuning goes a notch further. So total is his grasp of the LA hard-rock idiom that ‘I Love LA’ the opening track Trouble In Paradise is not only loaded with sly humour, it’s also a perfect piece of hard-rock in itself. That is the ultimate satirists balancing act; to redeem the very idiom that’s being used as a satirical vehicle.

Newman works the same trick with ‘The Blues’, in this instance bringing in Paul Simon to trade lead vocals on a number which could be a parody of Simon’s own songwriting idiosyncrasies. It’s a track to which Philip Lynott and Bagatelle will both listen with a mixture of self-satisfaction and trepidation: are the similarities entirely accidental, could Randy Newman be parodying me or has he just pinpointed someone I’ve been influenced by all these years? Again Newman’s acerbity is tempered by the intrinsic appeal of the tune and its nuance-perfect arrangement.

But despite the general air of benign tolerance, and underlying thread of malaise runs through Trouble In Paradise. "Look at that mountain, look at those trees" Newman exhorts in ‘I Love LA’, before sticking the knife in , "Look at the bum over there, he’s down on his knees". Even where wealth flows as if it was on tap, the fault lines are beginning to show dangerous in man’s management of global affairs. The silken sophisticated Steely Dan-esque perfection of ‘Miami’ ("Miami/Blue day/Best dope in the world/and it’s free!") is by way of cloaking the nasty reality of the big time crime syndicates that run the whole show.

The final seal of Newman’s status is derived from his ability to be utterly serious. The humour of ‘Christmas In Capetown’ is ultimately subordinate to the theme: that racism exists like a running sore in South Africa, mocking, those in the democratic world and the United States in particular who fail so miserably to exert the kind of pressure on the white supremacists there which would pave the way towards change. The sense of foreboding felt by the whites, desperately striving to shore up their system of oppression against the inevitable encroaching revolution is brilliantly etched in a terrifyingly poignant depiction by one of them of the black workers waiting to begin a day down in the diamond mines. "The niggers were waitin’ in a big long line", he recalls. "You know those big old lunch pails they carry, man/With a picture of Star Wars painted on the side/They were starin’ at us real hard with their big ugly yellow eyes/You could feel it/You could feel it".

‘Song For The Dead’ is equally explicit. About the futility of war, for Newman it’s time to eschew humour. The image of a lone US soldier in Vietnam, with mud on his boots and blood on his hands, left behind to bury his dead colleagues, trying to explain to their mute and mutilated corpses. "Why you fine young men had to be blown apart to defend this mud hole", evokes the stench of brutality and degradation, of the insanity of war and the greater insanity of those who orchestrate it, with an apallingly moving simplicity.

Randy Newman’s Trouble In Paradise isn’t always as heavy, isn’t always as lucidly articulated. But it never falters to the level of inconsequentiality: even its lighter moments have something to say. And when a writer can combine the potent universal statements of ‘Song For The Dead’ and ‘Christmas In Capetown’ with the genre perfect mastery and humour of ‘I Love LA’ and ‘The Blues’, it’s the testament to a unique vision, both sensitive and urbane.

Those in doubt need only check it out. ‘Trouble In Paradise’ is one hell of an album.