|
The Church Of Me
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
|
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
BEENIE MAN
Prompted by the Belgian lass, I have been playing a lot of Beenie Man’s work of late – his sublime last album, Art and Life (a record which achieves the rare feat of having Wyclef Jean on it and yet still remain interesting), and a fine Best Of compilation. And my head is still recovering from last week’s astonishing dancehall mix which the Man provided on Radio 1. Louis Walsh, to hell with you, coarse varlet; you understand the profits of pop but nothing of its magic. Beenie Man UNDERSTANDS pop.
When talking with Chris Goldfinger he was at pains to emphasise that his branching out into other contemporary dance forms was not a betrayal of “dancehall,” was indeed integral to its nature (“Reggae never progressed or prospered in America – it was taken over to Europe by Marley and developed there,” he observed). And at this late yet early stage there is no room for studium-crammed “purism.” Embrace pop and you embrace the world. And I now instruct you to embrace Tropical Storm, Beenie’s newest and finest album.
Worry not, his trademark “zagga zag” (well, come on, where did you think the Spice Girls got it from?) is all over this record as ever; the difference between this and the forlorn inclusion of TS Eliot quotations in the margins of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man is that this is not gratuitous, does not bestow false notions of merit on work which fundamentally does not deserve it; rather it powers the music and uplifts all ears.
“Party Hard,” which isn’t the Andrew WK song (and wouldn’t it be interesting to hear Beenie tackling that?), is a good start, with the standard “Sleng Teng” rhythm/bass interface stretched out into four dimensions. It is immediately furious but in a strangely amiable way.
What follows, the Neptunes-produced “Feel It Boy,” is a pop record of galvanising glory and as a single of the year contender is up there with “Hot in Herre” (perhaps its late summer equivalent?). A warmly embracing yet never predictable keyboard line links with the stealthy rhythm as Beenie pleads with Janet Jackson to take him back. Her chorus vocal is typically somewhere between naïve and dispassionate, but the song does her more good than her own recent work has done (she was first choice singer for Basement Jaxx’s “Get Me Off”). Endless summer? The High Llamas could labour for centuries and never produce anything this light yet powerful.
Next is a near 2-step raging rant “Bad Girl” wherein Beenie fulminates that the Other “lives in a palace while I sleep in the forest” (!). One of course realises that Beenie is basically a buffoon of the first misogynist order, but the sheer good nature of his delivery and music is enough to make you forgive him. Well, perhaps. So powerful and busily furious is this track musically that it overshadows the Irv Gotti-produced “Real Gangsta,” while “Fresh From Yard” finds him trading lines (and wishing he was trading fluids) with a JA-accented Li’l Kim. She evidently takes no shit.
Then “Miss L.A.P.” a number one if ever I heard one, an absolutely irresistible bubblegum singalong anthem (“Hang On Sloopy”? “Angel of the Morning”? “Baby Don’t Cry” by, erm, INXS?) with an enormously overpowering electronic rhythmic undertow. Stoopid but simultaneously laden with genius. Shaggy, go shag yourself.
This phenomenal punctum-packed pop sequence – which inspires a degree of worship comparable to the first four tracks of the Sugababes’ Angels With Dirty Faces - continues with the awesome “Street Life,” another monument from the Stargate team; it starts out as a ballad, again anthemic, and then in its middle eight suddenly and brutally shifts into an industrial rhythm. The impact is overwhelming and reminds me of the terminally dispossessed brilliance of one of the great singles of the ‘90s – Eternal’s parting shot “Don’t You Want Me.”
Where to go from that climax? Only into something completely silly – “Gangsta Life” which, wait for it, has a straight-faced Monty Python “Lumberjack Song”-style chorus of “We squeeze and make cheese/Cats freeze and beg please/We seize the opportunities/For our families/To make cheese.” It is quite absurd and confirms the existence of Beenie Mentalist. It ends with an ‘80s synth riff which in a different context could almost pass for an early Simple Minds backing track. It has to be heard to be believed.
“Pure Pretty Gal” returns to more familiar midtempo territory, the stop-and-start rhythm being pleasingly punctuated by a rogue augmented keyboard chord. “Bossman” sees the Neptunes back on board, the stock flamenco guitar line being brutally undermined by a sliding fuzz bassline and the trademark high synth punctuations, like inverted commas around Beenie’s gangster fantasia (with vocal support by Sean Paul and a demonic mid-song derailment by Lady Saw). “Yagga Yo” teams Beenie with So Solid Crew (or at least Megaman and AC Burrell of SSC). Over their epileptic track Beenie wisely opts for a legato vocal delivery, a sustained half-tempo lament which sounds like Max Romeo waking up in a spaceship.
Two love songs to end: “More We Want” (with Tanto Metro and Devonte) is superb post-Timbaland R&B, very subtly deranged throughout, while the closing “You Babe” is produced and played by Sly and Robbie. It always threatens to turn into the Miracles’ “Love Machine,” but the female vocal counterpart (Calibe) nicely balances Beenie’s (for once) understated presence, and the whole track is oddly relaxed, synth lines floating like clouds, providing an opacity and a cover for this extremely seductive groove. A great summer pop record which really ought to have come out in the summer. It demands that your life be preserved and enhanced. It is a long and warm hug of a record. It’s a direction to which I am becoming more and more attracted.
. . .
NOT ON YOUR NELLY!
Nellyville, let’s be candid, IS Country Grammar 2 – there’s even a track entitled “CG2” which recycles the original song, albeit with a less interesting backing.
Nellyville, let’s be honest, is misogynist piffle. The linking skits concern a man being nagged by his Other to go out and purchase a copy of, erm, Nellyville immediately (TS Eliot had nothing on hip-hop when it comes to intertextuality). He visits four or five record shops and ends up with the one remaining copy – the “clean” version! Naturally the Other is p*ss*d off about this and walks out on him. He loudly wishes that she trips on her Gucci heels and falls downstairs, and cackles as indeed she does.
Nellyville, let’s be sacrosanct, shouldn’t in most people's views be admitted to the Church of Me. No new lyrical avenues are carved out; the template is that which has faithfully served everyone from LL Cool J to Nore. If you have Country Grammar (and some might say if you have the first Arrested Development album you have Country Grammar anyway) (and others will say if you have the first dC Basehead album you have exceeded Country Grammar in every way) you already have this record.
Nellyville, let’s be brutal, gets played much more here than CG ever did. And no edges are reached. Well, nearly none.
Nellyville, let’s admit it, has “Hot in Herre.” Exceptional even by the Neptunes’ own standards – and enough of an exception to make you regret that Nelly didn’t just give the whole album to them to produce – its punctum is in that extra “r.” Why the extrra “r?” The clue is in the first line, the heavy rolling Southern pronunciation of the word “here,” and indeed Nelly himself has admitted that it’s a phonetic representation of how his folks say it. And yet the production is so New York, so post-No New York even – it has Ze Records written all over it, with those staccato yet subtly echoing electric piano chords, the unobtrusive but unstoppable light rhythm, the echoing percussion (Tom Tom Club?) and those lovely poignant In A Silent Way ascending chords. A “Pull Up To The Bumper” for the 2000s, but with Grace Jones’ deliberate freezeout superseded by Nelly’s bumptious warmth.
Nellyville, let me be, has in its finer rhythms the kind of gorging, fat and very sensual rhythms which stimulate me in many ways. That fat squelchy bass synth which grinds assiduously through tracks like “Pimp Juice” and “Splurge” recalls Cameo at their horniest and finest (Cameo’s The Hits Collection really is a must-have; even dumbo codpiece-sporting Larry Blackmon’s asinine wish to “tie you up a while” on “Single Life” is nullified by the highly pervasive slinky rolls of the music. It’s one of the juiciest records you could ever listen to).
My friend RW says that the reason why Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” hit so big is precisely because the rhythmic thrust which accompanies vegetable-starved Chad’s “yeah! yeah!” exhortations is exactly the same as the optimum rhythm required for hip movements during intercourse. It’s the same story with Nellyville, albeit far more aesthetically justifiable – unlike Nickelback, it stimulates you to begin with! One could have done without the token guitaristics on tracks like “The Gank” and “# 1,” and Justin Timberlake disappointingly does very little on “Work It” (I await his upcoming Justified solo album with interest) but the ballad “Dilemma” is delicious. Driven by a vocal harmony sample (the grasping ghost of Marvin Gaye?) which provides a very purposeful punctum, the song alternates between female vocalist’s Kelly Rowlands’ idolising and yearning, and Nelly’s awareness of himself as an idol worthy of yearning. Arrogant? Maybe. Limited lifespan? Definitely. So what? Grasp it before Nelly is nullified by MTV Unplugged, or gets religion (as I learned today that Michael Ivey has!).
. . .
Monday, September 16, 2002
dC BASEHEAD
And now to another isolated guitar-playing DB – or should that be MI? MI for Michael Ivey, guitarist, singer and songwriter, the frontman and the larger proportion of dC Basehead. Recorded in Rockville, their debut 1992 album Play With Toys more or less invented slacker hip-hop. There is virtually no rapping as such on the album, but plenty of what one might call modified Sprechgesang, essentially speech as song but confined to a few recurring notes within an octave (Nelly, to be discussed above, does more or less the same thing).
Now Beck Hansen can afford expensive lawyers, so it’s not my place to suggest that Ivey/dC Basehead were ripped off something chronic by Beck in the latter’s career per se (Beck was still in his Ribena-Daniel Johnston Stereopathic Soul Manure phase at this stage). But it’s all here, fully two years before Mellow Gold, and without the vague air of corporate smugness which makes Beck’s work impressive but ultimately unlovable.
This album has room to breathe. Seldom have despair and alienation been expressed in such an airy and graceful fashion. It starts with Basehead’s approximation of an awful C&W bar band (Jethro and the Grahamcrackers who “appear courtesy of Countryfunk Records”) plodding through “Sex Machine” in front of a disinterested audience, one of whom asks them to play “Copacabana.” “Can’t you tell it’s a soul night?” says an exasperated “Jethro.”
Musically, the opening Basehead track “2000 BC” (“2000 brain cells ago”) sets the template. The music could be described as a marriage between the Meat Puppets and De La Soul (the spacious vistas of the former’s 1985 masterpiece Up On The Sun are irresistibly recalled). Ivey’s discreetly echo-laden vocals are almost narcoleptic and virtually disembodied, not so much PM Dawn’s Prince Bee but more Arthur Russell circa World of Echo. The scratching (by Paul “DJ Unique” Howard) sounds as though it’s being beamed down from an asteroid. The utter lack of body or centre in this music is bewitching (Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is especially relevant here).
“Brand New Day” has a transcendental floating chord sequence (a direct antecedent of what the Neptunes/N*E*R*D* were to do a decade or so later; see “Bobby James” as especially strong evidence of this). Ivey is pretending to be able to cope with his girl leaving him, varying between pessimism (verse) and forced optimism (the heartbreaking chord change into the chorus). The song is constantly interrupted and analysed upon by his colleague (bassist Bob Dewald) who midway asks for some sample breaks to test out before returning to the song proper. Certainly the conversation/song interface here (and throughout the whole album) is comparable with Kevin Rowland and Billy Adams’ Pinteresque chats which PUNCTUMate Don’t Stand Me Down. Get beer and vodka – “get real drunk ‘til we turn blue!” Optimism revealed as a death wish.
The song then segues straight into “Not Over You” in which Ivey is utterly bereaved and simultaneously inactive/incapable of doing anything about his situation, denying that he is in grief (the reverse lyrical double-bluff to 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”). A piano chord recurs like nails being hammered into his coffin. Dewald again enters the song halfway through, encouraging Ivey to cheer up, flicking through radio stations in search of a cheery song or two. First song up: Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” Despair results. Second song found: Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” The guy’s ready to shoot himself by this stage. The channel flipping continues as the song resumes, and it’s a disturbing moment; Ivey desperately looking across the radio, looking over his life, trying to find something to hang on to, trying to find a justification for continuing to live, painfully trying to make sense of his life, his world, while the narcoleptic vocal continues in front.
(How the relevance of songs change: back in 1992, Laura and I used to laugh ourselves silly at this track, even though we both recognised Ivey’s despair at the time. I’m not laughing now. “Not Over You”)
On “Better Days” Ivey attempts to address the world in general, capitalism, etc. The guitar continues to go to unexpected places, the unresolved chords (the Meat Puppets influence again) confirming his and our restlessness. He eventually gives up and starts to sing an “Ode to My Favorite Beer,” a love song to alcohol. More channel-flipping (this time the TV – “eight-ball junkie!” NWA sample included) follows over the languid Frisell-ish guitar ambience. “Things just wouldn’t be the same without you” cries Ivey quietly.
Some female heavy breathing initiates the song “Hair,” in which Ivey accuses his partner of cheating on him on the basis of the “fucked up” condition of her hair. A dialogue ensues:
Ivey: What have I done to deserve this?
The Other: Well maybe it’s those marks you’ve got on your neck.
Ivey: It’s just an allergic reaction. I’m allergic to cats.
By now Ivey’s vocal is so low and laidback (even as the increasingly hysterical Other has had enough and packs her bags) it sounds almost a dead ringer for Stuart Staples of Tindersticks.
On “Evening News” Ivey again attempts to gaze upon the world and there is more TV channel-hopping, with an evidently lousy sitcom being superseded by a beat which momentarily threatens to turn into “Jack and Diane.” A third voice comes in to implement a critique of the song’s unwillingness to talk about the state of the world. He then gets into an argument with Dewald about the unnecessity for Ivey’s songs to be “relevant” to the state of the world and ends up getting shot. Reality used to be a friend of Ivey’s (“He can’t go on givin’ out all this information and shit and not give us a solution!”).
Ivey is finally left on his own. Running away but still trying to run back. The unbearably poignant tune of “I Try.” “I’m not gonna let the world go and get me down,” he is almost sobbing at this stage, like someone who has been irretrievably crushed by the world. “Everybody keeps talking about a brighter day…Nobody lives in my world.” The double-tracked vocal gradually drifts out of sequence in the chorus. This is someone who has stopped trying to try. At the fadeout his horizons are narrowed to “I’m not gonna let this song go and get me down.”
The echo returns for the closing title track, implying that in his disconnection with the world he has a greater understanding of it than those actively participating in it (“surviving is the crime…don’t play with guns and knives…all you little boys and girls are just playing with toys”). He is ready to “get a bus to anywhere” like the old man sitting at the deserted, disused bus stop in Ghost World (but whose bus eventually comes). There is an astonishing ambient interlude with REM-type guitar/chamberlain chords and indistinct samples of children’s voices which presages Boards of Canada by at least seven years. Drums and guitars move out of phase and into bliss; note the psychedelic-raga guitar line which is played at the end. “Learn your wrongs and rights” Ivey admonishes at the song’s close.
There is nothing more to be said, so we return to Jethro, playing a messy C&W mutation of “Play With Toys.” He then recklessly goes on to dedicate a ballad to a lady in the audience, much to the chagrin of her companion with the “bald head and the big stomach,” and then retracts his sentiments at gunpoint, his voice remaining distended and passive throughout. Comic? Perhaps. But when playing the record in preparation for this piece, I followed it with the Palace Brothers’ There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You, released a year or so afterwards, and a fugitive strand of punctum was identified.
Like the Dream Warriors, there was one further obscure album in 1993, and then silence. Most probably dC Basehead decided not to pursue the trail which they’d opened up. Perhaps they’re still out there, somewhere in the Midwest. Still, as I am reliably informed that the Church of Me now has some influence in places of medium height, if not quite high places as yet, it is incumbent upon me to point out that this masterpiece of a record is not currently available on CD. BMG are advised to resuscitate it immediately.
. . .
COVER VERSIONS: HOW TO MISS THE POINT
Liberty X's "Just A Little" was a great pop single, so it's a shame that their new one, a cover of Mantronix's "Got To Have Your Love," misses the point so badly. The whole punctum of Curtis Mantronik's work lies in the fact that he is (or was) unafraid of silence or space. Thus the original "GTHYL" at one point cuts down to the bassline alone and thus magnifies to titanic levels the singer's urgent need for love. The minimalism and general unresolved melodic procession of the song may owe something to the influence of the then-relevant (1990) Soul II Soul.
The Liberty X cover is fairly faithful, and it's such a good song that it would be difficult to damage. But there are two factors which deter from the record's potential greatness; one is the irritating post-Spice Girls urge to let everyone in the group have a line or verse to sing. The female lead here is up to the task but the male voice isn't - that awful gloopy, haven't swallowed my treacle properly gunge which passes for UK male soul singing at the moment. And having the song shared between one and the Other detracts from the single-minded urgency which powered the original. Secondly, in the key break which on the original was, as I've said, the bassline alone, the producers here have been unable to resist cramming in useless vocal detail (standard "soul" mangling which is unattractively meaningless and just gets in the way). Like everyone these days, they're scared of being quiet, even for a nanosecond, in case the automatic Top Shop party tape comes in and drowns the underlying fear of impermanence. Still, it went in at #2 this week, so the kids obviously don't want "silence" either.
. . .
DEREK BAILEY – “BALLADS”
The song “Laura” is about the futility in trying to pin down or define an elusive and ultimately indefinable spirit. “But she’s only a dream”…as a film theme, it of course relates to a murder victim (or not?) who is ceaselessly alluded to but never really seen. When redefined by Sinatra on 1957’s Where Are You? album he elicited something deeper and perhaps more painful from the song; his reading is a lament (unhistrionic but undeniably foredoomed in its delivery) for someone who not only cannot be caught, but someone whom he once could have touched but is now beyond his reach forever. For obvious reasons I cannot bring myself to listen to this recording at present.
But Derek Bailey must have had in mind the idea of personifying himself as this elusive spirit. Why else would Mr Nowness of Now, Mr Contrarian himself now (re)turn to the sort of standards which he must have played thousands of times over in dancebands and pit bands in his youth, as evidenced in his extraordinary new album Ballads? Well, the difference is of course that he did both play and enjoy these deathless tunes – that phenomenal canon of songs penned to order in the early-mid 20th century for supposedly ephemeral entertainment purposes and yet whose durability looks set to outlive all of us – in his younger days. Crucially he turns 70 this year; his upbringing, as with many of the elders of British avant-jazz/improv, was utterly dependent on the times and, of course, the war. There is a book waiting to be written about the not very divergent paths of creative music-making and the entertainment industry in post-war Britain (through ENSA, the Gang Show, etc.). Grounded in providing backing to order for any number of visiting luminaries, from Gracie Fields to Bob Monkhouse, from Morecambe and Wise to the Supremes, this music, this culture is in the blood of the guitarist from Sheffield.
Ballads appears on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and it was indeed Zorn’s idea to have Bailey come into the studio and improvise on some standards. The cover maintains the seeming artifice – the eyes of a ‘50s diva appear in monochrome on the cover, peering out from behind what appears to be the ears of a cat. The titles are picked out in Women’s Journal pink. Typically, though, Bailey remained contrarian when preparing for the recording. “I bought this guitar which was totally inappropriate for playing standards…the fact that I was going to play a standard did something interesting to the improvising…I’m not interested in Improvised Music with a capital I and a capital M. I’m interested in improvising.”
So we could call this record The Popular Derek Bailey, or perhaps look upon it as a bookend with which to summarise and wrap up his life’s work; except that at 70 Bailey thankfully shows no signs of retiring or expiring.
Ballads is not a series of set performances, but a continuous 41-minute piece in which Bailey freely dips into his memory and plays various standards but simultaneously improvises as he has always done. For those unfamiliar with his “previous” life, the immediate sound of Bailey plucking identifiable harmonic chords on an instantly recognisable tune (“Laura”) may come as a shock greater than that of hearing him tangle with DJ Ninja’s beats on 1995’s Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass. The tune (as with all the tunes here) is played with immeasurable and deep love, but this does not stop him from deploying his usual improvisational techniques in the song’s service. As the song slowly dissipates into abstraction, you feel that Bailey is striving to find the essence of “Laura,” to try to use his positively anti-orthodox style to get nearer to, and perhaps inhabit, the song’s cynosure. You hardly notice the unlikely but logical transition into “What’s New?” (another song also sung definitely by Sinatra, on 1958’s Only The Lonely) – elements of the opening melodic motif of “Laura” continue to pervade the Burke/Haggard standard. This song is of course about meeting up with an old flame and finding that the love (at least on the singer’s part) has neither changed nor diminished in its passion. There is always a sense of something lost in Bailey’s more desolate playing, especially on acoustic (which is what he sticks to on this album). The technique, however, remains astonishing; note how he skilfully strikes the upper notes of the fret in such a way that instant echoing harmonics are produced, to get a kind of acoustic “feedback” effect.
Through “When Your Lover Has Gone,” the guitar becomes more pointillistic and more animated, with dazzling high-speed runs tossed off almost as an afterthought. On the epic seven-minute dissertation on “Stella By Starlight” you might believe that an acoustic guitar can scream. The playing here is jagged and uncomfortable, and the song itself only becomes explicitly apparent in the closing moments. On “My Melancholy Baby” the song is hardly there (though everything that happens, no matter how abstract-sounding, has a pronounced relationship and relevance to the song’s basic structure. Bailey has to be listened to and heard).
Then he relents for a little; Walter Donaldson’s “My Buddy” is played almost straight, and we then go into a section which is bookended by references to the songs “Gone With The Wind” and Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair.” Again, these performances are fairly faithful to the song structures, but note on the first performance of “Rockin’ Chair” how Bailey is accompanying himself with octave runs, the lower register then shooting off on a very different direction to the rest of the guitar. This is almost his equivalent of his former playing partner Evan Parker’s multiphonics. Then to the Mount Sinai tablet of jazz improvising to which all improvisers are one day fated to come: “Body and Soul.” This is a very faithful interpretation and Bailey never loses sight of the tune but is not deterred from utilising his techniques in ways which constantly derail the ears’ expectations of what is to come. Then he returns to the preceding two tunes. On the second “Rockin’ Chair,” note how structural symmetry is achieved by the fact that the octave runs here are high and middle register, and now it is the high register which is going off on a tangent.
Acidity re-enters in the performance’s closing stages: “You Go To My Head” is played with reverence but with extremely askew rhythm (get the violence of these arpeggiated, heavily struck block chords!). “Georgia On My Mind” is dissolved into fragments, ever more fragile, ever more transient. Finally, on a 30-second reading of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” a chilling threnody is struck, the song barely clinging to its side, and an explicit relationship with Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night” (to which Marc Ribot refers in his sleevenotes) is revealed. Krapp’s last will and testament, the tape slowly dwindling to silence and the serrated hiss of its final fadeout before termination.
Notes for interested readers
Bailey as solo acoustic performer is best exemplified by 1982’s definitive album Aida, which irritatingly drifts in and out of print. But for neophytes, a more approachable (not to mention more easily available) starting point might be the recently reissued 2CD set New Sights, Old Sounds, a concert recording made in Japan in 1979 which provides a good overall guide to the range of Bailey’s playing approaches, from pure feedback to the incorporation of his older influences (e.g. Charlie Christian). For light relief 1975’s Domestic and Public Pieces (Emanem) is also highly recommended, featuring as it does several examples of Bailey’s lugubrious Sheffield voice ruminating on everything from the fire at London’s Unity Theatre to middle-aged impotence.
. . .
Friday, September 13, 2002
LET US SALUTE THE ORIGINAL BASTARD (of) POP - DUCK ROCK
Worthiness is not the same thing as worth. To seize a music, take it to pieces, expose it to its aesthetic polar opposite and thereby (hopefully) refresh it is not a task to which the adjective "worthy" should be applied. There are places for reverence and respect as long as you don't let them block your future. I could spend the rest of my life revering Spencer's Resurrection at Cookham but simultaneously realise and adore the pelvis-driven imaginings which give that masterpiece its multiple puncta.
As with World Music. If music is truly to be of the world then it must by definition be exposed to "impure" things, it must be acknowledged that the music itself is probably "impure" to begin with. It cannot be adopted or handled with dainty fingers, nervously examining their adrenalin reserves to ensure that they contain adequate nullifying agents of respect. Thus are Luaka Bop or World Circuit (whatever their considerable merits) not much else than houses of studium, picking the right musicians, the right post-Cooder/Lanoir ambience, picking the right ambience but never picking punctum. It is all middle-distance, respectful, designed never to derange. Mr Byrne really should have taken the lead from Malcolm McLaren and Trevor Horn.
Ironic that, with the Duck Rock project, McLaren set out to combat and nullify what he viewed to be the sterile blandness (though you and I know better, being closer to it at the time) of New Pop. And how better to attack than to employ its chief architect, Trevor Horn, to arrange and produce? McLaren said he wanted Horn to obtain some "bollocks" in his work, get "a bit of the rough, the spontaneous" into his meticulous productions. Doubly ironic, therefore, that Duck Rock is one of the most seamlessly, microscopically put-together things which Horn ever did.
How did they approach this? It was McLaren's ceaseless strivings for a new punk, and his moderately keen ear for developments. He was in America while hip-hop and electro went overground with Flash and Bambaataa, witnessed with amazement kids breakdancing to a modified "Trans-Europe Express," scratching up records like John Cage with a good drummer (a disciple of Karel Appel's COBRA group/philosophy as well as of Debord, McLaren instinctively knew how to insert the art into this sort of thing). His ears wandered vaguely in the direction of Africa, specifically in view of Bambaataa's Zulu Nation and any connections which McLaren could discern (Nigeria's King Sunny Ade and Senegal's Youssou N'Dour had yet to break overground, though the former's Synchro System was, usefully, a minor UK hit at around the time of Duck Rock's release, while the fatally less mischievous Laswell got to N'Dour first). His wits further led him to discern a vague (probably imagined) link between the square dances of the white South and the hip hop culture of the black North - apart from their both being ritual occasions to allow participants to somehow become more "themselves" - the same idea which, of course, prompted Punk into existence. How to marry all of this up?
McLaren and Horn did some field trips to NYC, Tennessee and the South African townships, made some recordings and then returned to London to knock them into shape with what was eventually to become the Art of Noise (indeed, the latter's epoch-beginning Into Battle EP largely originated from Duck Rock outtakes) with some help from Thomas Dolby. Significantly, from NYC, they employed the DJ duo The World's Famous Supreme Team to act as a kind of Greek chorus for the album, turning it into one of their then legendary late night/early morning radio shows.
It's hard to visualise just how radical the first single from the album "Buffalo Gals" seemed when it came right at the death of 1982, right when the careerist ambulance chasers (Wham!, Tears For Fears etc.) seemed determined to strip New Pop of all its mischief and sensuality. And how appropriate that both McLaren and Horn should signify a way out. Radio One played it; the likes of DLT and Steve Wright sounded completely baffled but, to their credit (unlike DLT with punk five years previously), knew that this was something new and correctly predicted that it would be a gigantic hit. True, to those long familiar with things like Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" (a minor UK hit about a year previously), this was not exactly something unprecedented, although one could argue that what McLaren and Horn did with it was unprecedented. Certainly square dance cut-ups were not yet on the Zululand template, although downtown Double D & Steinski were simultaneously busy preparing their likewise groundbreaking "Lessons." For the other big hit off the album, "Double Dutch," McLaren reversed the template, getting Zulu singers to exalt the praises of NYC skipping contests.
The album itself remains eminently playable. Though the Supreme Team's patter is now a stock template for Radio 1/Kiss DJs, it sounded fresh and spontaneous at the time, sounded like an injection of (s)punk into the barrenness in which post-New Pop pop had marooned itself. And McLaren let no stones lie in his "world tour." From the near-holy murmurings of the introduction "Obatala" effortlessly into the welcoming Supreme Team ("leave your guns at home! Tell me Shirl, how do you manage to stay up until four o'clock in the morning to listen to our show??!?") and the killer opening sequence of "Buffalo Gals," "Double Dutch" and "Merengue," this is a grin-inducing record. On the latter, six clear years before the Lambada came to public prominence, McLaren gleefully romps through the salsa-meets-kwela-meets-Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra like a postmodern Bruce Forsyth, excitedly intoning lines like "nice little cemetarios will be waiting for you!" Even the fact that McLaren's delivery (especially on "Double Dutch") recalls no one so much as the late Harry Corbett of Sooty the Bear fame somehow lends even more humanity and mischief to this record.
And what about "Punk It Up"? In his sleevenotes, McLaren recalls the glee and enthusiasm with which the Zulus entertained his stories about the Sex Pistols, and how much more enlivening than Paul Simon's worthy and perhaps necessary but ultimately dull deployments of mischief in the service of his sub-Woody Allen neuroses is the joy of hearing the Zulus singing, "I'm a Sex Pistol man" to top-notch Afrobeat. This seeming disrespect for "other musics" (sics) actually betrays a greater and deeper respect for them than mere Xeroxing and blanding out. The whole thing continues in similar (if slightly more contemplative and ritualistic) mood on side two before bowing out with "Duck For The Oyster," a straightfaced square dance for fiddles and scratch DJs where McLaren manfully fuses both mutually hating though ultimately alike extremes together. Note the parting cry of "Promenade you know where/AND I DON'T CARE" where he performs the final bonding ceremony with Punk and thereby regenerates it.
A shame that no room could be found on the CD for perhaps McLaren and the Supreme Team's greatest moment, "D'Ya Like Scratchin'?" (the B-side of the 12-inch of "Soweto") where the Team's especially demented scratching interacts with proto-Art of Noise beats to almost hysterical levels until McLaren strides in with a straight hoedown version of "Red River Valley" (cf. Scooter's "Fuck the Millenium" to see how this spirit remains propagated to this day).
But this is a joyous record which superficially doesn't give a fuck but deep down its fuck is much more sincerely given than any "worthy" or "respectful" Social Clubs could really offer.
. . .
Thursday, September 12, 2002
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Can I kick it?
OK, so what have you got to say about the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates? Some of us are waiting.
You only ever seem to drop in when there's no one else around.
I didn't fancy a pint and wasn't keen on watching slow motion collapsing buildings with unctuous Robert De Niro voiceovers.
It's taken me a long time to make my mind up about Revolutionary Road. I'm not sure that I still have.
You didn't like it did you?
The texture of it I do like. Some sequences pierce me deeply. I'm unsure of what Yates was intending, however. Is this a pitiless indictment of two lives wasted and destroyed by compromise, or...
Or...
Well why is it always the woman's fault? April Wheeler's the one who has to be sac...
Wait a minute. Not everyone's read this book yet. Start from the beginning.
OK. Revolutionary Road was written in 1961, when Yates was 35. He wrote about eight novels subsequently but none made the same impact. He died in 1992. It's about an unhappily married couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who married too young and too hastily, had a child and have subsequently attempted to live what they perceive to be a "normal" or "interim" life in suburbia until they have the means to live the life they really want.
About Frank Wheeler...
He fought in WW2 and didn't go to college, just like Yates. He says that he nurtures ambitions (literary? poetic?) but has deliberately taken a desk job (in the same firm for which his father worked) which is dull, monotonous and requires minimal mental and physical input. He argues that he will not be there forever, but we know full well that he will be, that really he likes the inertia, he likes not having to think.
Fear that his cover might be blown?
Probably. He can quote from numerous literary and philosophical sources but never demonstrates any evidence of understanding or developing them. He read a lot when he was 19 but doesn't seem to have done so since (in this book they are both about 30). He hates April for imprisoning him with the early child, for not letting him get on with being nothing. I am unsure whether he hates himself even more; my impression is that he doesn't. He is putting on a facade all the time in his social life, with his supposedly bovine neighbours the Campbells, with his secretary Maureen Grube, with whom he inevitably has an affair which equally inevitably ends in tears, with the superficially kind but secretly despairing letting agent, Mrs Givings, and her near-mute husband and psychotic son. Perhaps the only time that he actually is himself is at work. He clearly enjoys playing delay games with the in-tray and "filing cabinet" (bulging bottom drawer of his desk, which he periodically empties into the bin without reading), and when called actually to do some urgent work, manages to deliver the goods and improve his standing in the company (merely by drafting a series of ludicrously cliched manuals). My feeling is that this is what he wants to preserve, this is what he really cares for. Too bad for any other human being who might have the misfortune to care for him.
And what about April?
Same, but the other way round. Driven by a misbegotten need to "fit in" (inevitably the father in her youth is away for long periods of time and hardly ever present, which starts this mental process off) and hating Frank for the same reasons that he hates her, she joins a local amateur dramatics company. In the opening scene of the novel Yates gives us a merciless dissemination of her lacklustre performance in The Petrified Forest, and the possibility that she may count this as a public suicide. Thereafter she is a living ghost. To try to resuscitate her idea of a "good life," she suggests to Frank that they sell up, move to Paris and start a new life. With her secretarial skills, she could earn a good living there, which would leave Frank free to "find" himself and achieve the sort of life which she thinks he wants. Now of course any other young man in his position would probably jump at the idea and start packing straight away, but...
...except of course he is mortified by the proposal.
For two reasons; firstly, this would require him to demonstrate more fully that he loved April, which he doesn't; and secondly, that his cover would be blown and he would eventually be unmasked as a slacker with a nice turn of literary phrase. One imagines that he is completely relieved when April becomes pregnant again...except later on, as the novel progressively darkens, we learn that he doesn't even want this child anyway, although he has made a Herculean effort to persuade her into not aborting it. This proves fatal.
Why?
Because April decides to play along with it. She goes past the last date when she could safely abort the child. But arguments recur, everything comes to a head and uncomfortable truths are learned about both of them; on April's part, from her neighbour Shep Campbell, with whom she has a brief consummation, the result of which is that she doesn't know who she is; and on both their parts, from John Givings, the asylum day release ex-maths teacher, who is, predictably, on the mark about their relationship. On the last night they are together, their relationship explodes and is apparently beyond repair.
But on the next morning everything is miraculously restored. April greets Frank warmly with a splendid breakfast, takes what appears to be genuine interest in his work (the company is about to welcome computerisation, an interesting angle which maybe allows the modern reader a hook on which to hang on this story), is very kind and loving, waves him goodbye as he drives off to work. She is still smiling as she returns to do the washing-up, maintaining her smile until every other facial muscle has cracked, until finally she sobs. Then, suddenly, methodically and apparently dispassionately, she makes preparations to self-abort her child, knowing full well that this could kill her...which of course it does. This is the most frightening sequence in the book, more frightening because of its superficial serenity. Like Poltergeist, it scares you most when everything is quiet.
And of course I suppose Frank doesn't die.
Yes and no. Physically he doesn't. There's a very moving section when he has returned home from the hospital, and cannot believe that someone whose presence is still very strong in their house (down to the smell of her dresses in the wardrobe) is in fact dead. He hears the Campbells enter the house to look for him but hides until they have disappeared. Subsequently the story moves to Shep's perspective, a few months later. He thinks of how Frank disappeared, moved back to the city, and then visited a couple of months after April's death; much thinner, talking with evident fake enthusiasm about work prospects and seeing an analyst, even throwing in the cliche that if his wife hadn't left him a note he would have killed himself. Shep knows that Frank didn't have the nerve to do anything like that, but equally knows that he is, to all intents and purposes, dead, as an inquiring and passionate human being. A living death which may be worse than the actual death which April initiated for herself, because he will spend the next 50 years slowly dying of something internal.
Strong stuff.
It certainly is at times. But...
You haven't said much about the other characters yet.
Because they're all caricatures rather than characters. They're drawn so flimsily that you imagine that every one of them is a projection from Frank or April's own minds. The names - Mrs Givings as the leaseholder. His father's sub-Pickwick boss was one Oat Fields. Maureen Grube - the little "other woman" nothing more than an insect. Shep - the faithful dog (and of course the reverse of Frank; high-class family, rebelled against upbringing, became an engineer, lived a blue-collar life, but then re-rebelled back to the sort of life from which he shouldn't have run away in the beginning).
Some of these scenes with others read uncomfortably like screenplay drafts.
Indeed. Their actions and reactions are largely predictable. And I can't buy into the idea of the mentally ill son who of course knows the Real Truth which is unavailable to Ordinary Humanity. The part of John Givings requires several more dimensions than Yates was prepared to give him.
A part which at its best would have required a Brando at his sentiment-free peak. Instead it reads as though it was written for...Michael Parks, or Tony Franciosa.
And the urban Tennessee Williams deal?
Hmmm. Too much unanalysed slapping of the wife. The underlying suspicion that Yates actually sympathised with Frank and detested April.
It was 1961.
It was already five years past Look Back in Anger, which this novel resembles in several intriguing ways. Frank and April are Jimmy Porter and Alison, except in Revolutionary Road Alison really wants to be Helen, if that makes any sense.
I'll have to go and refresh my memory. Speaking of dramatic parallels...
You read my mind. I doubt that my doubts about Revolutionary Road would be quite as concrete without knowing Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? from a few years later. Here everything is garrotted down to brutal essentials. Failings are out in the open, wounds are gladly chewed over.
That's not really the point of Revolutionary Road, though. Here it's to do with what happens when emotions are kept from coming out in the open and emotional wounds left untreated.
Indeed. The book has too much power in it to be dismissed. That closing section cut me to the quick the first time I read it. What Frank turned into after April's death seemed to me to be so much like what I turned into, or thought I had turned into. Hiding from grief.
You wouldn't have had the guts to kill yourself either.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. September-November last year was a difficult time in lots of ways, as have the last 12 months in general. It's a last resort when every other coping mechanism has failed.
Is The Church of Me a coping mechanism?
One's life has to be justified somehow.
. . .
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
AMM WITH CHRISTIAN WOLFF
Conway Hall, London, 10 September 2002
Viewed from below, one could almost be looking at a 17th-century alchemist's laboratory. One reading lamp, placed back at the far left of the stage, though not directed at anything in particular - from Titian onwards, always the attribute of guidance, of Godhood. The light positioning in Citizen Kane is always staged in exactly the same way.
To the right of the stage, a Bosendorfer grand piano with two stools. Centre stage there is a drum kit, a huge gong and a large African drum, along with various small percussive devices. To the left of the stage, but with the light facing away from it, there is a table set out like a workbench. It is unclear from my viewpoint what is atop it, but there is certainly an electric guitar, positioned flat and horizontally, with sundry electronic devices, wires and plugs. Onto the stage come four middle-aged gentleman who could pass for off-duty philosophy lecturers. Their collective age is somewhere in the region of 250 years. One of them, the percussionist Eddie Prevost, greets the audience and explains that the musicians will start once the lighting has been sorted out. Keith Rowe, the guitarist/electronics operator, smiles affably at the audience and apologises for the delay. The two other gentlemen, John Tilbury and Christian Wolff, endeavour to squeeze themselves behind the piano. They start as they usually start - some static hiccups from the speakers, some light brushing of the cymbals; you still think that they're warming up but, no, they have started. Started to transport you, started to realign your attitudes to music, noise and silence, as they always succeed in doing.
They are tonight's incarnation of the group AMM, which has been in existence for almost as long as I have, which in its earliest days recorded their debut album AMMMusic for Elektra Records, shared management with Barrett-era Pink Floyd (for immediate confirmation of the effect that the former had on the latter, just listen to "Interstellar Overdrive") and had Cornelius Cardew in their line-up. There's a famous photo of the group in action from early 1968 - in terms of gestures and set-up, hardly different from tonight - with young Cardew, Rowe and Prevost looking the spitting images of, respectively, Joe Strummer, Arto Lindsay and Keith Moon. And they have stayed with it, where the Floyd didn't, where Can couldn't; possibly they manage to be both the most conservative and the most radical music group on the planet.
Wolff has been a floating "satellite" member of AMM since the Cardew days (originally on electric bass) and shares with Cardew a Cagean musical upbringing (he was a student of Cage's in the early '50s) which progressed into Year Zero musical radicalism ("all music is propaganda music") which somehow managed still to align itself with populism in a distant way (folk songs were regularly utllised in Wolff's '60s works; AMM, on the other hand, famously used to tape loops of then-current hits like "Lightning Strikes" and "Barbara Ann" 20 or 30 times in a row, and then attempt to drown them out with noise). Also in common with Cardew is his interest in making his music accessible to non-professional musicians - Carla Bley is on record as saying Wolff was a major influence on her approach when making Escalator Over The Hill. Unlike Cardew, though, he never let his art be submerged in misguided ideas of "what the people want," as, like Cage, he figured that if the people could find his music, they would want it. Tilbury has been associated with AMM for nearly 30 years, and is in himself a distinguished interpreter of Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman et al.
To begin with it was difficult from my viewpoint to work out exactly how Wolff and Tilbury divided their piano duties. It seemed to me as though Wolff was at one point working the pedals and leaving the keys to Tilbury; at other times he would dampen the strings which Tilbury was hitting, while contributing an occasional meaningful low chord or cluster. They were both evidently good listeners, which in AMM you have to be - no room in this egoless music for grandstanding. Seldom do you see musicians being so quiet and unobtrusive in trying to make sounds and noises, and this is why improvised music can never successfully translate directly to record; you need to see the interaction between musicians, you need to see how they are responding, how they react to the environment in which they are playing, where, in moments of near-silence, even the creaking of a chair leg in the audience can carry considerable significance. In this sense AMM are the Harold Pinter of improv.
Prevost stared intently at his percussive assemblage, striking notes and sounding tones with great deliberation and caution. Frequently he will use a violin bow across cymbals, the sides of his snare drum and/or against the African drum itself, to engineer tonalities and drones. This is a similar approach to that of Tony Oxley, but unlike Oxley he doesn't use electronics; the acoustics are sufficient in themselves. He and Rowe are the two remaining founder members still in AMM, and their empathy was very apparent.
If you hear Rowe's guitar work on record without knowing anything about the group's approach you might assume considerable physicality, Thurston Moore-type scraping of the fretboard across the speakers. Well, no - the noises which he produces on stage are, in sonic terms, infinitely more radical than anything that anyone else could produce (even Hendrix), but he merely sits there, deep in concentration, purposely moving the screwdrivers up and down the frets, deploying odd little electric contraptions (was that a shaver I saw/heard at one point?), adjusting the sounds as needs be to integrate with what the other musicians are doing. Aural violence is usually indicated by some deft and rapid movement of his left arm, nothing more. Speaker static and crackle are also harnessed creatively, as are what must have been sampling trigger key pads. The legendary shortwave radio made just one brief but significant appearance.
The quartet only actually played for about the first 20 minutes of the 80-minute (CD length!) performance. Deceptively tentative textures, which reminded me of nothing more than George Crumb's Makrokosmos works for prepared pianos and percussion; plangent Debussy chords appearing as though they were the most natural thing on Earth. Unlike the AMM of even 20 years ago, tonality is never far away.
After that, Wolff left the stage for a break, leaving Tilbury in sole charge of the piano. This frequently beautiful sequence was a strong reminder of how, in a sense, AMM have "come back" to the listener over the last 15 years or so (a process best documented on 1987's The Inexhaustible Document) allowing perhaps a more subtle and lyrical approach to become prominent. The interplay between Tilbury's yearning chordality and the careful suspension of gravity by Prevost and Rowe was spellbinding to witness. Not that it couldn't get animated when it needed, as demonstrated by brief but punctum-filled sequences where Rowe cranks up the volume and makes his table howl while Prevost attacks the kit with his phenomenal offhand rhythmic technique. But the noise is never allowed to spill over into undefined chaos; these people, crucially, know what they are doing. And the calm returns.
Then Tilbury exits to make way for Wolff again, who assumes sole piano duties for the remainder of the performance. This section starts in a noticeably more muscular and dynamic fashion; Wolff's clusters are still a world away from Cecil Taylor, but that kind of ultra-rhythmic propulsion isn't really required in AMM's music. Even in their densest moments, they always somehow remain light.
And then, eventually, a long and transcendental closing section which unavoidably reminded me of Morton Feldman (who dedicated one of his last pieces to Wolff), specifically his final, considered, meditative microtonal pieces, above all Coptic Light (imagine the final chords of Ornette Coleman's Skies of America stretched into mathematical infinity, all numeric combinations worked out as precisely and as unhurriedly as Coltrane). To watch this tonal centre with its ever more gentle sonic abrasions slowly reach a compromise with silence was an experience which I will not easily forget - particularly right at the end, where phantom piano chords (straight out of Crumb's Makrokosmos III, final movement) materialised which were not being played by Wolff and could only have been triggered off by Rowe's sampling key pads. A graceful adherence to life and acknowledgement of whatever lies beyond it. It was the most quietly powerful music I have heard this year. They remain universes ahead of everybody else.
The concert was recorded and will no doubt be released on CD in due course. I'm not sure how much, if any, of the irreducible ambience of the physical performance will transfer onto record - this is something you needed to witness and ultimately be part of.
I don't know what "real" music is, am unsure whether such a thing could ever exist. But, beyond even the sort of music which was "real" because the pleasure derived from it was engendered by more than one person, there exists another remote territory - of music which I want to nestle close to me, music in which I can wander and hide myself when necessary. Music which belongs only to me. AMM come very near that territory, but they manage to do it for every individual listener who has ears with which to hear them. That is their great triumph and their deathless divinity.
. . .
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
SCOOTER
You know what we need right now? Less Beatles/Stones/Roses tribute bands…and more KLF tribute bands! If one is to venerate the past then try to venerate a part of it which isn’t already overcrowded with chasers of a long-gone ambulance. And because I can only assess through my own perspective, I am justified in saying that Push The Beat For This Jam: The Singles ‘94-’02, a compilation of hits by German stadium house operatives Scooter, is a far worthier, far more stimulating, ultimately far more compassionate companion than the collected works of Bob Dylan. For me. To me. It sings to me because it sings to too few others. Or other lovers of music and movement who are sufficiently wise not to analyse and know that movement counts above all else.
Their formula has scarcely changed in the last eight years; they are reliable but always fresh because no one else is doing it. There is no ZZ Top to nullify their Status Quo. Roaring crowd sounds, blissfully obvious fast beats, and a German toastmaster/ringmaster who can sound almost like Shaun Ryder if you squint your ear enough.
The opening track “Hyper Hyper” would coincide with Mike Skinner’s epiphany of the lazily swaying cornfields, except this is visceral rather than soothing (although the latter can never be ruled out; poignancy, intended or otherwise, is essential to all great Europop). A galaxy of DJs is saluted, out of whom only Carl Cox and Laurent Garnier appear still to be prospering.
The introduction to “Move Your Ass” is sublime – “Get off your shirts and wait for further instructions!…I’ve got one message for the next decade – MOVE! YOUR! ASS!!” A “Kick Out The Jams” for the generation succeeding me, suitably apolitical, yet in its wider implications paradoxically much more political. A 2 Unlimited-style stomp without the distracting cheese – and can we trace the history of the stomp in European pop through Joe Meek via Glam and Moroder, finally emerging into what we hear here? “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice!” The MC (commonly known as “Dave from Sheffield”), who fittingly looks uncannily like Heinz, outlines his utopia.
After that it is predictable, true, but a predictability which entices rather than a predictability which simply bores or frustrates (the B Gillespie Academy of Proper Music). “Friends” marks the first appearance of another of their trademarks: the speeded-up vocal, determinedly asexual – sex has no real place in this music, celebration (of what?) is all. “Friends – we’ll be friends” the echo repeats to an impossibly jubilant major chord change suddenly dipping into warped mid-line synth bass and re-emerging triumphantly.
It is the MC’s job to uplift. “Party people! The sky has changed! Can you smell the sun? It’s time for the most exciting season – an ENDLESS SUMMER!!” the next track begins. It is relentlessly euphoric, and here there are indeed rising piano tones looping over and over and a yearning diva (another legacy from Meek?). The polar opposite to Fennesz’ idea of an Endless Summer, though the latter would sound great at 6:30 in the morning as you’re winding down and getting back into the car. “Feel the energy – rough and tough and dangerous!” he exclaims, after emitting an unearthly scream. The speeded up vocal here sounds, however, uncannily like it’s singing “I walk alone” – a comment on the transience of the “generation of the future” so smartly nailed by Pulp and the Streets? Certainly the crowd fadeout could well be a football chant. The sublimely absurd, just the right side of the cheese fence, central riff of “Back In The UK” – somewhere between Kraftwerk’s “Radio-Activity” and Cannon and Ball’s Casino. “I wanna check the birds, the trees, the cows and the seas!” Beat that, Dickie Ashcroft. The distended, shattered choir which kicks off “Let Me Be Your Valentine” – a love scenario which would be, I suspect, unreproduceable outside of a Russ Meyer film or a Larry Clark photojournal. “Listen to the voice of Valentine – MU MU MU!” The first of several overt tributes to Drummond and Cauty. Clearly these men have studied the How to Have a Number One Manual in loving detail. Well, someone had to. “This is a Valentine’s party!” “Heil! Heil! Heil!” the crowd may or may not reply.
Alas, as is common with this genre, they lose the knack when they make the mistake of letting other music(s) invade their territory. The cover of “Rebel Yell” is ill-advised and far too reverent, showing the joins. “I’m Raving” works better – this starts off as a straight cover of Shut Up and Dance’s original Cohn-sampling “Raving I’m Raving,” but instead of going proto-junglist, the track quite remarkably segues into synthesised bagpipes playing “Scotland the Brave” FOR NO LOGICAL REASON AT ALL (hey it’s the Illogical Song!). Quite remarkable in its unabashed genius.
The next track “How Much Is The Fish?” might reasonably lead to expect sampling of Stump (“does the fish have chips” et al), but no – this begins “the chase is better than the catch” followed by what may or may not may be “transforming the Jews – we need your support!” if you’re not listening properly. The titular question appears to have little to do with the general urge to movement proclaimed in this song, though the synthesised folk song seems here to be modified klezmer (or possibly a mutation of the Jeux Sans Frontieres theme tune, voiced by the Red Army Choir at this song’s climax). Isn’t this a truer resurrection than “Bitter Sweet Symphony”? Even “Fire” which is a fairly unremarkable attempt to do the Prodigy, is redeemed by the “hey-hey-HEY” chant remembered from Geordie’s great forgotten plumber-glam stomper “All Because Of You.” “The Age of Love” promotes “love, peace and unity” and in the next breath claims this purity to be “rough and ready.”
With “No Fate” an air of melancholy begins to infiltrate Scooter’s anthems. This is low-key (their equivalent of a ballad) and although it talks about saying “goodbye to the past, hello to the future,” Dave warns that “the struggle continues.” It’s the first minor key song on the album.
But next, out of chronological sequence, but still a stroke of genius, comes a compromise with doubt and a consequent dismissal of angst, so brilliantly evoked in the best single of 2002 so far, their visionary rereading of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” What a work of art this record is. Starting with the first four lines of the original, with the speeded up voice returning, but sounding more wistful and perhaps more hurt than ever. A recollection of a golden youth which may only have happened in one’s imagination. Wisely the song sticks with the first four lines, not bothering to list the causes of the singer’s subsequent descent into deathly cynicism. No song since the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” has managed to evoke the past so poignantly, and yet still sound utterly futuristic.
The angst is dispelled by Dave’s over-eager voice intoning “Good morning” like Fenella Fielding over the tannoy in The Prisoner. Like Hendrix, rising out of the ashes of Woodstock at 10 am on Monday to blast out “The Star Spangled Banner.” Life returns despite repeated attempts of the Supertramp excerpt to negate and demolish it. Yes it was beautiful and magical, the MC is saying, but it can be AGAIN. It will be DIFFERENT, she will be DIFFERENT, but it will HAPPEN AGAIN. What better way of reaffirming life than to blow a raspberry in the face of despair. Dave’s climactic proclamation of “Love, peace and unity – SIBERIA IS THE PLACE TO BE! The K, the L, the F and the Ology…HALLELUJAH!” may well be one of the most sublime moments in love ever perpetuated by pop music.
The KLF intonation initiates a full-blown homage. “Posse (I Need You On The Floor)” IS (at least in its first half) “What Time Is Love?” The delivery becomes more unhinged. “Materialski!” “I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher” he samples. “In other words sucker, I’VE GOT NO BROTHER!” (negating the community again) “Check your watch! We’ll never stop!” Subliminal drum segments recalling the Dave Clark Five, immediately succeeded by synth burps evoking Cabaret Voltaire. “Haile Kylie!” he may or may not be yelling. The synthesised Russian choir and tympani which drive “Call Me Manana” and which would be worthy of ZTT at its peak, and which unaccountably mutates into a fairground organ at its fadeout.
Were that not enough, we now get “Fuck the Millennium,” though this is not quite the KLF tune. Instead of sturdy trawlermen at sea, we get “I’m the candyman. Also known as Dave. Dave from Sheffield. Furthermore known as the Screaming Lord (Sutch? Another Meek reminder). But you can call me Ice…Ice Ice Baby – THIS IS THE LIBERATION! I wanna fuck!” now sounding like Iggy Pop. A synth siren wavers. The song suddenly grinds to a halt. “Staying on the edge” smirks “Dave.” Inexplicably we now go into a Eurocheese version of “Wheels Cha Cha.” McLaren could never have conceived this. This is completely devoid of self-consciousness, and all the better for it.
“Coming at ya like Cleopatra!” says Dave, quickly drowned by a cinematic choir on “AIII Shot The DJ.” Morrissey talked, “Dave” acts. “All I want to do is chasin’ the punani” he, however, adds as a qualification.
The Scooter musical heritage appears to be a remembrance and recycling of all pop music of the last ten years remembered and recycled by no one else (electroclash hasn’t quite got to that stage yet). “Faster Harder Scooter,” for instance, shamelessly recycles the verse riff from the currently deeply unfashionable Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain.” Somehow this is much more palatable than, say, the Coral’s gruel-dominant, worthy diet of the Bunnymen, Madness and Morricone (misunderstanding all three, naturally).
Finally we hear the upcoming single “Nessaja,” another anthem of genius. “Always lived my life alone/Been searching for that place called home” says the speeded-up asexual voice with even more poignancy than before. “3 AM!” says the eternal Dave as the rhythm lurches once more into a race for immortality. “I AM THE JUNGLIST SOLDIER! It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it must be Dave who’s on the train! Wanna wanna get drunk! Am I gonna get dry?”
The alternating pelvis-driven beats and the inner voice telling Dorothy to come back. Back to life. It ends with a plaintive affirmation “I know that it’s not too late.” It is heartbreaking. It is the only climax imaginable for this divine pop record, which, being deadly serious about its deliberate facileness, presents a truer picture of what pop music meant to people over the last decade than virtually any Britpop back catalogue.
And it’s a message to Paul Morley, to Simon Reynolds, to Paul Lester, to all the acolytes of 1982 who never stopped believing; for ecstatic, shiny and wonderful pop music, you KNOW that it’s never too late.
. . .
DREAM WARRIORS: THE 13TH SIDE OF THE DICE
Spare a thought for Canada’s forgotten hip hop visionaries the Dream Warriors. I have recently rediscovered their 1991 debut And Now The Legacy Begins, and contrary to many of the artists/records I have lauded elsewhere on CoM, the trails they laid do seem to have been followed, albeit belatedly.
Unjustly dismissed as an Acid Jazz novelty act following their two hits “Wash Your Face In My Sink” and “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style,” these tracks in fact manage to be mischievous as well as aesthetically astute. Borrowed from Gilles Peterson’s bottomless collection the samples may have been, but they still signpost a way forward from the original De La Soul template with their ingenuity (hear how the “Sink” sample – from Count Basie’s cover version of “Hang On Sloopy” (?!) – is artfully deconstructed into a ska rhythm in the intro and middle eight, thereby opening up another avenue of influence). The lyrics are playful and perhaps not very meaningful – gleeful gallimaufry as opposed to DLS’ primary-coloured surrealism. Indeed, the album as a whole gives an idea of what De La Soul Is Dead might have sounded like, had not sample clearance difficulties scuppered that particular record’s aesthetic (the original mix have gone down in history as the Smile of hip hop).
While some of the record is light – the deliberately warped skank of “Ludi” for example – other parts of it are determinedly adventurous. Try the near-industrial clanking of “Follow Me Out” with its refrain “who is the fool? The fool or the fool that follows the fool?” – ominous in its undertow; the title track with its subliminal minor-keying of “Genius of Love”; the astonishing “Tunes From The Missing Channel” which anticipates both trip hop and glitch in its stumbling, cut-up beats; and indeed the whole of the second side, which, with its skewered sci-fi lyrics and its sonic middle range concentration, makes them precursors to the likes of Deltron 3000, Mike Ladd and, ultimately, Dif Jux. This is an adventure which, perhaps predictably, was not satisfactorily followed up by its own creators; to my knowledge, there was one more album a couple of years later which failed to stimulate anybody, and then nothing. But it’s an important record which shouldn’t be overlooked.
. . .
Monday, September 09, 2002
THE “DON’T STOP ‘TILL YOU GET ENOUGH” TRILOGY
The song is of course about sex. Three different versions underline three different societal and aesthetic responses to the same “force.”
Michael Jackson, the song’s author, had probably not expressed as much gleeful joy on a record since “I Want You Back” a decade previously, and certainly has done anything but in the subsequent near-quarter century. There is no need for his recording to be included in the Church’s occasional Greatest Single Ever Made As Of Today column as its greatness is so evident that there is no need to point readers towards it, particularly since the spatiality of its arranger and producer, Quincy Jones – he really is the de Chirico of pop, if Boris Blank isn’t already – has only recently been worshipped here (6 Sept).
In MJ’s hands, it is probably the most selfless let’s-get-it-on record since…well, “Let’s Get It On.” Listen to the way in which the 14-piece band (not counting the string section) manage to sound both intimate and vast…from MJ’s nervous opening ad lib, as the guitars and percussion limber up on the starting blocks: “Uh…I don’t know ‘cos…you know, the force…and, er, I was thinkin’…” - almost a parody of a high school chat-up line, though there might be a subliminal reference to the then current Star Wars with all the talk about “the force” - and eventually when the tension gets too much, “…OOOHH!” and the record sets off. Significantly it is sung in his virtually asexual falsetto (all three versions under consideration here stay in the falsetto range). He wants the Other to take as much from him as she needs; he will do his best to satisfy her needs. The rhythm manages to be both restless and encouraging. And hear how, in the instrumental break, the synth suddenly starts running away, the horns take up the gauntlet, every musician in the studio suddenly striving towards orgasm THEY GET THERE
and there’s a second-long, immaculately timed pause for breath
and then it starts off again. The song does not climax again but the rhythm continues, the enthusiasm and love are still there. Finally, the song discreetly fades with just the Brothers Johnson’s almost high-life juju guitar lines maintaining the pulse. MJ would like the song to go on forever.
Compare this with the extraordinary version recorded by James Chance and the Contortions, live in Rotterdam in 1980, for the album Soul Exorcism. This is similarly active rhythmically, but here the jerks are virtually epileptic in their near-demonic need for sexual congress. There is no set-up intro; the band dive straight into the belly of the song. Chance gulps out the words in his strangulated alto voice, supported in the chorus by Frenchman Patrick Geoffrois, whose slide guitar was an inspired addition to the band and whose constant derailings of grooves are a delight throughout the album. The slide crazily weaves Dadaist patterns around Chance’s frenzy, bassist Al McDowell (on loan from Ornette’s Prime Time – I’m continually driven to thinking that Dancing In Your Head was the real Year Zero starting point of postpunk) constantly inventive, trumpeter Lorenzo Wyche holding the identifiable hook of the song practically all on his own. Chance’s improvised rap mid-song is largely indecipherable, but perhaps genuinely inarticulate in trying to express desire amidst the squashed together brickwork of the Lower East Side at high temperature. There are three climaxes during this version; in each, the band simply takes off for the planet Venus, and in the final closing climax Chance’s almost reluctant alto sax does its own squealing equivalent of MJ’s opening nervous salvo (albeit placed at the other end of the song) before he, Wyche and Geoffrois come together for a final ascension, and then end. The desire and enthusiasm are still there, but the urgency is far greater. This is an urban version of the song.
For the third version, we have to travel to Kingston, Jamaica, for some space. On Hustle! Reggae Disco, a lovely new compilation from Soul Jazz Records which contains reggae “Discomixes” of well-known ‘70s/early ‘80s disco hits (and incidentally, on One Blood’s rereading of “Be Thankful For What You’ve Got,” one realises where Massive Attack got their take from), there’s a superb reading of “Don’t Stop…” by Derrick Laro and Trinity. At seven minutes or so – significantly the longest of the three versions, and equally significantly not feeling as though it’s long – this reading decides to take its time with expression, and with love. There are no “climaxes” as such; simply a languid, steady but always stimulating rhythm and Laro’s falsetto almost pleading his offer of selfless congress.
(Slight digression: Commentators on the ‘60s free jazz scene always point to geography as a crucial difference in approaches to music-making; the thrown-together, high-rise, congested, claustrophobic infrastructure of New York led itself to the frenzied, do-it-all-now approach of Ayler, Sanders, Shepp et al (again, see Ornette’s New York Is Now album from the late ‘60s as a good example of freeform expression within overpowering geography – and of course the whole No Wave/No New York scene of which Chance was an integral part), while the open spaces of Chicago allowed the more leisurely, picturesque, contemplative approach of the Art Ensemble, Braxton & co.
Actually, a very good example of the two differences would be the career of Arto Lindsay, from the percussive guitar-beater of his DNA days to the Tropicana avant-balladry in which he now specialises)
In the same way, the open spaces of Jamaica lead themselves to a more understated but still persuasive approach (yes I know about the guns, the corruption, but they hardly figure in this analysis – try the unreservedly recommended recent Rebel Music compilation on Trojan Records for the other side of the story). So this is certainly the friendliest of the three recordings. Trinity comes in for the final section; he doesn’t talk about very much except “going to the disco,” “making you move,” and “skanking,” but he doesn’t really need to talk about much else. This is affable and approachable, and a rural version of the song. Absolutely lovely.
. . .
SUGABABES – DON’T LET ALBUM TITLES GET YOU!
It’s an unpromising title for the second Sugababes album, Angels with Dirty Faces. The same title, coincidentally, which was used by Tricky for his underperforming third album from 1998. The labyrinth forms when you consider that the first Sugababes album was largely overseen by Cameron McVey, husband of Neneh Cherry, all of whom have at some stage been associated with Massive Attack. No sign of the Booga Bear on AWDF, and only one brief glimpse of one Massive Attack associate. And when you further ponder that Tricky’s AWDF was a rather brave yet unheralded attempt to form a new music – using his paranoia to try to fuse post-Cypress Hill hip hop noir with the rhythmic dualities of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time – you would realise not to let cliched album titles defer you from attending to them.
And, out of a seeming career ruination – dropped by their previous label, one member going AWOL to be replaced by an AWOL ex-member of Atomic Kitten – the Sugababes have by some miracle pulled off the second great British girl-pop album of 2002 (the first being Mis-Teeq’s Lickin’ On Both Sides – specifically the “Special Edition” with the 2-step single remixes). And, as with all of the extraordinary post-hip hop/swingbeat pop music of the last decade, it manages to be simultaneously avant garde (sonically) and still manage to be danced to and sung with on buses and in shops all over South London (or wherever). There are no theorems in this music; any innovation happens naturally, without having to be signposted, implanted or fought over, because it has evolved naturally from the pop which preceded it. Certainly this album will be a sober reminder to Andy McCluskey just how Atomic Kitten could have turned out, had he had just that tiny little bit more nerve.
The first four tracks on AWDF are as strong an opening to a pop album as I can recall since The Lexicon Of Love 20 years ago (the last time pop in general was this good). It of course begins with “Freak Like Me,” the album mix of which sounds slightly tougher than the single. I must rescind previous comments made elsewhere regarding this track’s perceived inferiority to the Girls On Top bootleg "original.” The dynamics demanded of mainstream entryism are different from those of informal bootleg clubs, and here producer Richard X meets them fully. Utilising and subtly resculpting Numan’s original backing track, this record could not have happened in 1979 – and yet Joe Meek would have felt entirely at home with the aesthetics of desire and the electronic whizzbangs; this is the sort of thing he would have ended up producing had he lived. The static which threatens to overwhelm the singers and the song at the fadeout is really of the same kin as that which gloriously drowns Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag.”
Whereas Destiny’s Child seem to be about girl(s) wanting to impose themselves (herself) on the world, the Sugababes are lyrically more concerned about just getting on in the world – so there is a lifeline there with which listeners can identify, as opposed to idolising a cold monolith (although pop music would be unworkable without enough examples of the latter). So where DC are determinedly unlovable, the Sugababes really do want to be loved – albeit on their own terms; the uselessness and general scrubness of the male is ceaselessly returned to on this record, though balanced by simple expressions of love and companionship, or the desire for them.
The second track “Blue” definitely falls into the former category; attacking a male ambulance chaser, the refrain very negatively goes “The colour that suits you is blue” (of course there might be a hidden political subtext here – cf. Fine Young Cannibals’ song “Blue,” though interestingly Siobhan, the Sugababe who jumped ship, was a Tory supporter). Musically it demonstrates that Timbaland’s lessons continue to be learned. The co-producer here is Howard Jones – surely not THE Howard Jones? If so, it’s the best thing he’s been involved with since the title track of Human’s Lib. Hear how the clenched beats suddenly break into a cantering acoustic guitar riff in the chorus which is strangely close to Electronic’s “Tighten Up” – an exhilarating adrenal rush. Overall, though, the track echoes, both musically and lyrically, Neneh Cherry’s “Buddy X” from a decade ago (and thanks to the Belgian lass for reminding me of how good an album Homebrew was!), though with two crucial differences – the vocal vulnerability of the Sugababes is the exact reverse of the nice-but-don’t-fuck-with-me utter assurance of Neneh; and, conversely, the bitterness in the lyric goes further (“don’t fuck with me! – you’re lame, you’re broke!!”), its spleen fully directed at the freeloading man, though one suspects that the singer’s hatred and fear will eventually turn towards herself.
“Round Round,” their deserved second number one, with a rhythm/string sample angular intro which again calls Cabaret Voltaire to mind, before going straight into what they used to call a classic pop hook, superficially lively yet sung very solemnly against a nagging compressed grunge guitar line and purposeful percussion (Bananarama meets the Velvets) which becomes sinister by the ease in which “love” is being rejected in this song – “I don’t need no man/Get my kicks for free.” There is no exultation at liberation here; it’s a chant being used as self-defence against inflicted pain. Note how it slows down to the classic 6/8 soul ballad form in the middle eight, as the vocal meaningfully pronounces the question “Does it hurt when you see how I’ve done without you?” There is no smirk in her voice when she sings this, implying that she needs to know herself how she’s done without you. The very title is of course the seed of doubt – “round and round and round and round…” – one routine replaced by another. As with all great pop, this works on innumerable levels.
The fourth track is the big ballad “Stronger.” Co-composer is Marius de Vries (the aforementioned Massive Attack associate) and the trademark static but deep string section is very much in evidence, speaking the inarticulable yearning of the song. Right from the musical and lyrical parallel in its first line to the first line of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” this song talks about surmounting pain and entering a new phase in one’s life. The lyrics are not very original but the way in which the music expresses them is – the augmented minor-to-major chord change in the chorus underlines that she has not yet made it through the rain, as confirmed by the lines “I’m not the type of girl that will let them see me cry/It’s not my style/I get by/See I’m gonna do this for me.” Again, see how the beats suddenly magnify in the middle eight and start to swirl around the speakers, paralleling the confusion in the singer’s soul.
It is not belittling to say that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this stunning opening quartet, as it’s still (mostly) very fine. “Supernatural” is a fantasma of decisive, stern vocals, orgasm-inducing synth bass and subtle “French Kiss”-style rhythm. The title track doesn’t let the record down, either; the “angels with dirty faces” is wisely qualified by “in the morning” and the refrain “you don’t know where we go.” We’d still like to know, though. “Virgin Sexy” moves the record towards more conventional R&B territory, but the semitone descent of the second half of the chorus is thrilling, even if the lyric “’Cos I’m virgin, virgin sexy/If you want me, jus’ text me” isn’t.
Even the dreaded Sting-sampling let’s-get-a-hit-in-America appearance of the track “Shape” (i.e. sampling “Shape Of My Heart” fairly heavily, to karaoke level really) works for me. It is the necessary balance to the sampling of “Are “Friends” Electric” in “Freak Like Me,” the contemplation after the thrill. “I live my life in chains…In this man’s land I can understand/Why I’m taking command” nicely subverts Sumner’s insufferable solipsism. The uncertainty is not tempered by arrogance. And I like the tune anyway if not the man har har.
Similarly, “Just Don’t Need This” is the ballad which bookends “Stronger.” This is noticeably darker but not, I think, as impressive. Lines in the line of “The way I’m feeling now is mental/The problem first starts in your dental” would frankly shame even Bernard Sumner at his Prozac-less worst!
Invoking Bob Marley is usually the signpost for the rest of the album tailing off, and sadly there’s no exception here. “No Man No Cry” is rather pedestrian, depending upon a hoary old reliable R&B melodic/rhythmic line (I can’t place the origin, but J-Lo has also been using it recently – hear it and you’ll see what I mean). “Switch” competently adopts Timbaland’s methods but doesn’t do much else. “More Than A Million Miles” revisits and reverses the career-or-love theme of Luther Vandross’ “Stop To Love” but one has to say NO to the ‘babes’ attempts at rapping. In this sense at least, Mis-Teeq they ain’t.
(Speaking of Mis-Teeq, which I shamefully haven’t on CoM very much to date, Alesha Dixon is truly a one-woman punctum – listen to the way she suddenly erupts 2:16 into “B With Me (Bump & Flex Radio Edit)” and fast-thrusts the entire song into another galaxy!)
The album gently winds down with an “acoustic jam” version of “Breathe Easy” which in its original (and better) form appears on the “Freak Like Me” single – in which manifestation, with the crowd sounds and crucial rhythm, it’s like Paul Weller doing “Whole Again.” But hell, I could never get through “4 Ever 2 Gether” on Lexicon of Love either.
People really oughtn’t to complain. For what Morley called “shiny yellow new pop,” this now has to be the best time since 1982. From LCD Soundsystem to Scooter, from Rob Dougan to Tweet, it’s finally looking as though the options are opening up again. And the Sugababes are up there with the best of them. This record will inspire in you open-mouthed astonishment and real love. You need this record.
. . .
Friday, September 06, 2002
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
"Strawberry Letter 23" by The Brothers Johnson (1977)
I know you all want me to talk about "Work It" in this column but the latter has been so widely exalted elsewhere that there is no need for me to repeat the obvious here. So instead, a hagiography of the usage of space and echo in the productions of Quincy Jones. It's always been there in his work, right from things like "Soul Bossa Nova" (sampled by the Dream Warriors for "My Definition...") through Off The Wall and The Dude, but perhaps best exemplified on this unplaceable and therefore indispensable pop record.
I know the Shuggie Otis original is back in circulation and that every schoolboy should be familiar with it, but for me the Brothers Johnson's rendering takes the song away from an obvious "psychedelic" realm to something closer to the listener (because more populist) and yet much more strange and fantastic. From the maternal outpourings of the harpsichord at the intro we dive into a free blue world of suggested beats, fragments of guitar lines, meaningful bass, all united by a distant vocal which does not overly strive to convey feelings but makes them profounder simply by their very suggestion. The absence of any "soul" in the male lead or female backing vocals forces us to construct our own mental landscape and respond only in accordance with our own perspectives.
Watch how the entire record converges on the eddying/edifying whirlpool of the central middle-eight guitar riff which multiplies in its own mirrors and disappears within its own reflection (it is COME). The record is perfectly symmetrical. The suggested minor lift underneath the major fall of the languid and unhurried fade-out, back into the circuitous carnival calliope which began the record. It arrives, kisses you and departs.
It was the summer of 1977. In that "depersonalised" year for pop - and outside of punk, and perhaps Bowie's abrupt vocal entry on "Sound and Vision" which sounds as though it's emanating from the inside of your head - few records came closer to the listener than this. The echoes are its very justification.
. . .
Thursday, September 05, 2002
MISERY MUSIC
Yes I know, the Church should be more cheerful. But in a solitary life, this is what one is driven to.
What to make of My Computer? They are two chaps from Manchester with a past history on Creation Records as a guitar band - I think they were called One Lady Owner, or possibly Ten Days Off. But what matters is what they are now.
Their first album is called Vulnerabilia (this really should have been the title of the first Soft Cell album) and I cannot quite figure out where I stand on it yet, which usually turns out to be a good thing. Certainly the first track "All I Ever Wanted Was A Good Time" takes almost ten minutes to explore the various corridors which My Computer have placed within their remit. Within it you will hear bitter, hateful and sorrowful lyrics, mostly amiably crooned in and buried under a vocoder, against a soft Air/Royskopp backdrop with some beats haflway through. This is quite astonishing to listen to, at least until the final 60 seconds when the voice is suddenly stripped of the vocoder and we hear - well, another Jeff Buckley wannabe with a guitar of Convenience. Is someone finally taking up the challenge of Tiger Bay?
Well I would love to have told you that. The problem is that they spend the rest of the album wandering the same corridors. For much of the time the music sounds like Muse with beats and string lines mixed in rather randomly. At other times you feel that they might be developing something new - the way in which the Underworld-style rave-up of "Majic Flat" suddenly decelerates into an acoustic lament, the way in which an Altern 8-type old skool barndance wanders into the midst of "For Something Else" apropos of not much at all. The way in which "I Don't Care How You Treat Me" mixes drum-and-bass with John Barry harpsichordal poignancy and doesn't make it sound the dull cliche it reads like (did you SEE that Observer review of Barry Adamson's King of Nothing Hill last Sunday where the reviewer wheels out the comparison "a combination of John Barry, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone" as if he still felt that this was anything but a complete turn-off?).
Lyrically it occupies the cynosure of a triangle bordered by Rob Dougan, Ms Dynamite and the Polyphonic Spree. Or, "I can't go on. I go on" (for the lyrics, go to www.vulnerabilia.com/lyrics_frame.html).
So it's a bit of a mess. But I keep playing it. And I'm rather moved by it. Isn't that what matters? Not where it came from, not how many other people have done it in the past - what does THIS piece of art do to YOU right NOW? And does that negate criticism?
The end of Vulnerabilia sounds like death.
Mortes, the new album by Fernando Corona, aka Murcof, is the music which might be heard after death. 51 stately minutes which I used to soundtrack HBO's In Memoriam 9/11 documentary last night. Unhurried yet deeply lamenting; odd violin drones, one single instance of a human voice, glitches and seraphic edits which might recall Akufen's radio snippets wound back and replayed at 16 rpm. It is essentially one long track divided into eight, with some animation from track five onwards, but strangely calming.
Yes, it's summer. Yes I should be out there grooving on down to Hustle! Reggae Disco. I would be a better person if I could. Does anyone out there wish to join me?
. . .
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
"Say You Don't Mind" by Denny Laine's Electric String Band (1967)
Is this the most wasted career in pop music? McCartney's glorified teaboy for a decade followed by 20 years croaking round the German pub circuit? Now Denny Laine produced an awful lot of good work in between the Moody Blues and Wings, not least of which was the still extraordinary "Catherine Wheel" with his demented intervallic leaps (like a slow-motion yodel).
But today I am spotlighting this beautiful record which might have changed Laine's life entirely had its sales been as plentiful as its airplay. Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne dug it enough to become inspired to form ELO.
The song is a plea for the Other to take him back following sundry fuck-ups on his part. It is a humble apology. Light at the treble end with twiddling oboe (is she twiddling her thumbs?) and strings offset by foursquare bass and a strong drum track with its 1-2-3-4 hammering after each chorus exposing the "LET ME BACK IN" subtext of despair below Laine's apparently meek delivery.
Unlike Brian Wilson's self-humbling "You Still Believe In Me," there is no guarantee that the Other will take him back. So Laine also humbles himself with fantastic lyrics such as, "Stupid fish, I drank the pool" and "a doormat has seen better times" (followed by his sardonic ad lib "that's BAD!") but betrays himself at the end: "I've been doing some growing/'Cos I'm scared of you going." Note how his voice trembles at, and pauses immediately after, the word "scared." And then the chorus payoff: "Say you don't mind...you'll let me off this time" - implying that this might not be the last time. Psychedelic geezerdom.
Of course the song was eventually covered, stripped down to strings only, by Colin Blunstone on his 1971 album One Year (a gorgeous lament of a record which you MUST have) and as a single finally became a hit in '72. Impossible to imagine Blunstone even being on the same planet as geezerdom. His vocal and the strings-only, rhythmless backing track strips the song of any irony and turns it into a hymn of penitence.
. . .
TEE-HEE!
OK, so Ms Dynamite may one day blow up, but I have to be the Nit Nurse to start off with and pick nits – an introduction to an album is NOT an “interlude,” it is a PRELUDE. It betrays laxity rather than laterality. Particularly when you start off your debut album with a public health announcement.
“Fuck coke fuck ecstasy/fuck powder fuck pills see me” she proclaims in yet another variation of the dispassionate R&B voice in “Natural High,” the PRELUDE to A Little Deeper, her first album. The sleeve is dark – bleaker than that of Original Pirate Material; at least on the latter there is urban life in evidence. On this sleeve, however, Ms D is pictured in a variety of poses wandering round what looks like a deserted set of docks, far further East than anyone would dare to venture – Iain Sinclair’s idea of the East End, where erstwhile gangsters sans rottweilers go to meet their inevitable execution. It looks like the end of the earth, making Roots Manuva’s New Cross/Lewisham interface seem like Hampton Wick in comparison.
And yet – out of the darkness bursts LIGHT! The first song proper, “Dy-na-mit-tee” is fused and explodes with a truly exuberant high voice, fizzing like a newly-opened can of ice-cold Coke (so don’t “fuck coke” with a capital C?), maybe the most enthusiastic, love-me vocal to bless a debut single since Michael J on “I Want You Back.” Even more impressive considering that it is musically set against a minor key, vibes-driven trip hop template – never has trip hop sounded so positive, so un-itself! And upon this Ms D illuminates every corner of potential darkness with her will to live, to BE. Listen to that chorus vocal of “I stay blowin’ up ur stereo/Hear me bussin’ on da radio,” a folk memory of 2-Tone (Specials “Stereotypes Part 2” and Selecter “On My Radio” specifically), a common memory of something which existed just before she did. Yet it is already in her blood. It transposes the wicked playfulness of the original movement and dazzles you with its renewed wonder. That sextuple-stop intro – everyone to order now! What miserable wretches like Nelly Furtado would sell all of their ceilings to achieve! The punctum – the extra “hee” at the end of “Dy-na-mit-tee” and its amiable vibrato wobble. She is LAUGHING and PLAYING with you.
But don’t forget, she has only started, so really she is still at the One In A Million stage, as painfully evidenced by “Anyway U Want It” an utter treadmill of an R&B canal boat with one Keon Bryce on dullard male voice. Ms D runs circles around him and graffitis his torso while she’s at it, cheating the bar lines, snaking her way around the cliches like Aaliyah’s asp. The Art of Noise style human bass line is the only other thing of interest here.
Now it’s time to go fla-blooming-menco again, but the pointillistic pinpricks which punctuate “Put Him Out,” seems to revive Ms D. The voice really slashes its way (even through the AARGH rock guitar, leave it ALONE or get Keith Rowe to play guitar over your beats) through the song. It’s fantastic. You are carried by it, public health announcement # 2 though it may be. She IS the punctum, stretching over the studium with which she has been furnished.
Although sometimes she doesn’t exceed it. Witness the would-be weepie ballad “Brother” which is essentially a cut-price replica of Pink’s “Family Portrait” and wherein, alas, Ms D can only but turn into Ms Flipping Furtado. She talks about depression and wanting to end it all, but unlike Tweet, she cannot make you believe her or emphasise with her. More pranks needed. So we get the hit single “It Takes More” which is the best accordion-sample driven would-be hip hop track since Siouxsie’s “Peek-A-Boo.” Hear how she mangles the final syllables of “ur just a racist man’s PUSSY.” As with the rest of the record, too much of the Peckham Community Centre is in situ, but the “righteousness” is spiced by the restless rhythm and completely compelling groove, even stretching the fact-recycling to the surreal: “Tell me how many Africans died for the baguettes on ur Rolex.” ????!!!??? The sensuality of the repeated “avoiding, adding” mantra.
She once recorded with So Solid Crew but doesn’t subscribe. The inverted Dr Dre groove (“Everything But The G String?”) which powers “Sick ‘n’ Tired,” a fuck off to the other woman song (AGAIN that “take my kindness for weakness” tidemarker). The loving way in which she licks the man between her lips when singing “kitty kitty” is remarkable.
Next is my favourite track on the album, “Afraid 2 Fly.” Sampled waves crash and puncture, sounding like gunfire. Harps and strings dart about her head from all directions, like vultures swooping in for the kill Published by the Art of Noise! Music by one Hernst Bellevue (why isn’t the lead singer of Interpol called Hernst Bellevue, and that’s the most original thing that will EVER be written about them!). “I ain’t ready 2 die/but I ain’t afraid 2 fly” – a revival of the Utopian ideal engineering ‘70s soul at its peak (Mayfield’s “We’ve Got To Have Peace,” Rotary Connection’s “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun” etc.). Should be listened to while reading the associated (unsung) sleevenote, which includes the words “Never give them the satisfaction of being the reason that you wouldn’t.” It’s the antidote to Rob Dougan’s “Speed Me Towards Death.” In the latter Dougan says you cannot fly until you die. Ms D says if you don’t fly you cannot live. She almost makes you believe it. Time for a wake-up call? “Watch Over Them” is a brief acappella gospel intonation, asking God to look over and protect even the gangsters. In her lower range she can be very dispassionate, centring on one note. It doesn’t make you cry. Similarly “Seed Will Grow” has Kynani Marley sounding remarkably like another Marley but sadly not far enough from worthy.
All albums by law should be obliged to have a song called “Krazy Krush” and this one is an electroclash delight, synths (ever so slightly atonal) flitting from channel to channel in the best Martin Rushent fashion, albeit with a bass line which could only have emanated from 2-step. A song more likely to start revolutions than any amount of by rote Southwark Council lecturing. “Now U Want My Love” is more average but lifted again by the ragga undertow of her vocal delivery: “said u wouldn’t mind getting up between my legs” spat out with genuine venom. “Too Experienced” is a terrific “Sleng Teng”-type romp with discreet occasional dubby piano wandering in and out of the lovely (because underused) electro construct. It is better than all UB40 and Spice Girls records, especially when Barrington Levy’s vocal enters, and the music immediately slows down almost to a standstill, as if in respect. “Too experienced to rock and roll” – the exultation with which Levy ascends to that final “roll” is unearthly. And only 2:56 long, like, ahem, proper singles should be. Number 1 for 18 weeks, would that it were.
Alas, as is also the law of all R&B albums, we have to grind to a dreary halt with the open-the-fridge-door-light-the-candles ballad sequence. Even so, the guitar/bass angles (both played by Van Gibbs) which decorate the verses of the track “All I Know” keep your interest. Actually I like this track a lot; I’m a sucker for seductive Marcus Miller chord changes and it just falls on the right side of the enticing/bland fence, even when the Ronnie Hazlehurst horns and flute come in shortly before the end, just before the two main elements of the song come together and provide a satisfying end. Reminds me a bit of “Flies In The Buttermilk,” which despite its title brought Justin Warfield’s My Field Trip To Planet 8 album to such a succulent close.
We finish with the acoustic ballad title track. The lyrics are pure sub-Halliwell do it for yerself positive thinking garbo (that’s really going to wash down the Sumner Road at 11:30 on a Saturday night) but there’s still enough self-doubt evident in her voice to keep you hooked. Lost love, living her life behind the curtain. “Get a little deeper…if you know what I mean.” No, leave that sort of secondary analysis to smarter folk than me, e.g. Deleuze and Guattari.
. . .
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
It's easier to tell your secrets to someone that you can't see...
...especially when you are not fully conscious. You have no time to put your thoughts into order so you have to speak your soul, have to articulate your heart. A late night/early morning conversation which I am likely to remember for the rest of my life. Three days ago I didn't want to live. I was staring my past life in the face. I felt alone, divorced from music, people, the world, life. And yet I walked back to life. Because I want to get in touch with life again. Because music has to touch you, whatever the artist's original intention, however it was displayed before a public audience; it has to penetrate you in a completely individual way which only you can understand. Is that tautology? Hang me, then. It's what I feel.
I worry when I imagine in my silly paranoia that people for whom I care and who care for me are slipping away - but of course they're not, they have to cope with their lives as best they can, too. My friends are the most important thing to me in my life. My friends keep me alive. And true friends will always find their highway back to me, and me to them.
. . .
EARTHLING
I really have to remind you what a brilliant record Earthling’s sole (soul?) album, 1995’s Radar, is…even though, as with too many other records discussed in CoM, it is currently unavailable, doubtless cursed by the completely misplaced “trip hop also rans” banner, especially with Geoff Barrow guesting on “cuts” throughout. This music is radically spacious in a way which is not necessarily lacking today, but is merely better hidden.
Listening to the stately, submerged grind of track 1 “1st Transmission,” its introductory vibraphone tolling the Dies Placidae, I was reminded of nothing so much as “An Even Whiter Car,” the 16 rpm instrumental revisit of the Associates’ “White Car In Germany” from 1981 which more or less templated trip hop. Deliberately pedestrian beats, slowed down and gaining in depth, as though the pedestrian were walking in a dream with an anvil attached to its shins. “I know who I am, I’m not who you think I am” intones vocalist Mau in a Peter Lorre drone (echoes of Mongezi Feza’s “You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me”) before launching into a typical freeform word association rap about identity. He’s Nat King Cole, Shostakovich drowning in a goldfish bowl, the ghost of the dog chasing Edie Brickell, McLaren (“indeed I killed sid”). Gosh gosh he’s Juliette Binoche. He is a visionary tethered to a banal world (“Jesus Christ Superstar driving around in an old yellow car”) and perhaps tired of the world (“driver take me to the other side”) but not enough to exit it (“I jumped off the balcony/landed on a bigger man”). He is simultaneously alone but has a girlfriend who’s “a simple schizophrenic/but we get along fine.” He bridges two cultures – “Michelangelo working on a totem pole.” The track eventually stutters to a halt (Nabucco’s anvil chorus?), Mau having giggled “It ain’t easy” – or is he crying?
The same vibraphone, now playing a lugubrious refrain, powers track 2 “Ananda’s Theme,” a context-drained reshaping of the pointless ambition of Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler.” Here Mau simply “pretend(s) to be a misfit” and he’s “a plastic thief with no belief in what I steal.” Again the track strolls to a pregnant halt as if unsure where to go next, as if having reached a dead end, as if dreading beyond comprehension what it is about to give birth to.
Next it’s “Nefisa.” “Franz Fanon – yeah yeah I get it!” versus “prostitutes in Ilford Lane.” Mau has written books in 710 and 1969. “If you find ‘em you can burn ‘em/if you burn ‘em you can keep warm.” Geoff Barrow is very much in evidence on this track, but the performance uncannily anticipates Roots Manuva – that same nervy-meets-confident baritone voice, those wavering synth minor chords (which surely owed more than a little to MBV’s Loveless) charting precisely the vertiginous descent into despair which one can view from the top of Chingford Hill – the City a mere blue haze, the Lea reservoir its custom post; the wordplay which would not be unworthy of Basil Bunting (“Bearing in mind my mind’s Aquarian/Bearing in mind m y mind’s mine”). He has Panasonic headphones “but nothin’s on ‘em.”
“I Still Love Albert Einstein” is the nearest this album gets to Portishead-land. Inspired by a barely recognisable Athletico Spizz 80 (!) sample, the curves make this a real Jeanne Moreau of a backing track. Alas it is spoiled by the same dessicated sub-Gibbons vocal (here by someone called Moni) which has ruined so much otherwise visionary post-whatever music this last decade.
Following the brief Birtwistle-goes-Bollywood interlude of “Accident at Injured Strings,” there follows a prepared piano (melodic yet pointillistically distended – midway between John Cage and Keith Tippett) which takes us into “Soup or No Soup,” a reproachful Curtis Mayfield sample reproducing very quietly in the background. “Soup or no soup/Sing your own Hallelujah!” There’s a girl telling him “how real life could be” “spinning at 45.” He has “dived out the window/I couldn’t take no more.” This is bookended by the minute-long “God’s Interlude,” credited appropriately to “god.”
Then to the most extraordinary and visionary piece on the album, a trope which has as yet been unrepeated and not taken up – “Echo On My Mind.” Driven by the astonishing simultaneous dual vocals by one Segun (a performance matched only in “pop” by Marc Almond’s similar schizophrenic vocals on Soft Cell’s “Soul Inside”) and a completely unexpected bitonal brass chart, quite reminiscent of that used on Jan Garbarek’s Dis, but with Barrow’s near-demonic turntable screeching always threatening to mutate the music into Peter Maxwell Davies’ Songs For A Mad King (there is a periodic secondary – root - bass line which sounds like a tuba, though none is credited. Another Curtis Mayfield connection here – listen to late ‘60s Impressions tracks such as “We Must Be In Love” where the bass line actually is played by a tuba). Segun’s vocals sound like Johnny Mathis having been pressganged into appearing on Escalator Over The Hill – and indeed, after a pause, the track concludes with a mournful, unresolved brass lament which could have come straight out of Carla Bley’s “Slow Dance (Transductory Music).” To my knowledge, no one (except for Spring Heel Jack in a different context) has EVER followed up or developed this aesthetic strand.
“Infinite M.” is a relatively lighthearted canter – generally Mau reminds me of where somebody like Justin Warfield could have gone had he not decided that rickety prototype nu-metal was the place to be, or even that completely unacknowledged visionary dC Basehead had he kept it up. Though even this is subverted by a sad guitar sample (Bill Frisell?) – credit due to the hitherto unacknowledged other half of Earthling, T Saul, whose programming and arranging throughout are entirely creditable.
“You said it’s easier to tell your secrets to someone that you can’t see” Mau’s alter ego says to him halfway through. A brief Bontempi organ appears then rebounds into nothingness before merging into the album’s one concession to “social realism” “Planet of the Apes” (as in the female protagonist “only wants to watch Planet of the Apes” which one supposes is an advance from Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero”). “The name Ergo makes ‘er go crazy.” A story of someone leaving home and descending into prostitution, and perhaps over-literal, but the necessary anchor for the flights (imagined or otherwise) embarked upon elsewhere in the album (cf., again, “Stay Positive”). The sudden judder into a heartbeat-wrecking bassline at 4:11 articulates the horror which was only previously hinted at.
Moni returns for “By Means Of Beams.” Again the vocal performance is rather ruinous – lyrically this is a UFO romance which vaguely presages the Beta Band’s “Gone,” another song I find too painful to listen to at the present time for personal reasons. The mutated muted trumpet riff – Lorca’s horseman, again, resignedly approaching death in Corboda – would have been enough. But “will you be there in 100 years? Will you be there to tell me that you don’t care?” Couldn’t they have got Beth Gibbons, or even Kristin Hersh, to sing this?
“Freak Freak” is again another socially friendly, Fender Rhodes-driven romp: “Lee Perry-onically driven.” The Spider-Man theme song makes an appearance, only to be concluded by the warning “you can’t see the flies!” (King Lear? – “as flies are to wanton boys” etc. &c.). The groove eventually converges onto one note (the heartbeat on an ECG machine stopping?) and moves into the finale “I Could Just Die,” a return to the graveyard shift of the opening track, a dope-fuelled procession to the grave, a pretence of ecstasy which hides the real nihilism. A Johnny “Guitar” Watson sample tries to lend some humanity but this is denied. “I want to move my head/but I’m too relaxed to try.” At the advice “please control your daughter” the drum track doubles up and Barrow decorates Mau’s suicidal ideations with cumulo-curlicues of scratches. As life, and the album, end, this doesn’t have the shocking immediacy of the ending of Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die, though the crematorium organ takes us out of the front door, so that we don’t have to smell the burning flesh.
. . .
Monday, September 02, 2002
THE CORTEGE: AN AALIYAH TRILOGY
Part 1: Birth
It is, of course, retrospectively one of the most frightening beginnings to a record ever. Out of an atonal electronic fog, a bell tolls. A voice calls: “Aaliyah, Aaliyah! Wake up! Heh heh (she smirks – Mingus: “there were flames a’blazin’ – I saw the Devil with his grin”). You’ve just now entered into the next level –” continues Missy Elliott in her only lead vocal in the intro on One In A Million, the second album by Aaliyah. Of course, what she means is (as she climaxes) “-into the new world of FUNK!” a quantum leap from her 1994 debut Age Ain’t Nothin’ But A Number (an adequate if average slice of by-the-rote mid-‘90s R&B; exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a juvenile paramour of R Kelly). What we now selfishly interpret it as being is an augur of what actually did happen five years hence, rather than the crudely signposted transition from youth to young woman that it actually was.
And Timbaland is now on board (albeit only for 8 of the album’s 17 tracks). If One In A Million is to be deemed the most influential record of the’90s, the justification lies in three of the first four songs on the album, all Timbaland/Elliott-written/produced/arranged. “Hot Like Fire” burns slowly but sensuously as no other mainstream black pop was doing at the time, with the exceptional male exception of D’Angelo. But if the latter is the Picasso of nu-soul, then Timbaland is the Rothko; endless spaces of differing degrees of colour, heat expressed as coolness. You can be simultaneously turned on and refreshed. A keyboard fragment which on its own could have been lifted from that unrecognised template for all subsequent pop music, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2, is blended exquisitely with the undemonstrative yet clearly offbeat beat. The Fairlight-mangled squeals of the 17-year-old which take the track out.
Then, above all, the title track “One In A Million,” the track which made possible all pop architecture which came after it, from Britney to Beyonce; and yet what seduction its successors have lacked. “Your love goes on and on and on…” (a refutal of Lydon’s “on and on and ON!” suicide note in PiL’s “Theme”). There is humility in Aaliyah’s voice, an eagerness, a curiosity which is yet to be overwhelmed by recognition of one’s real role in society. A blissful ignorance of what waits in her future to harm or uplift her (those subliminal squiggles which surface, almost naively, right at the end of the fadeout).
But not for long. Others have commented on her completely dispassionate and almost a-emotional vocal delivery on “If Your Girl Only Knew.” She certainly views the subject with indifference verging on hate (or is this all hiding an essential love?). The possibilities of the man being “left alone” and the other woman “cursing him out” although she is “crazy to put up with you” do not seem to work up any passion in her at all. He’s another option, I depend on me – but listen to that angular Portishead organ chord which surfaces at 2:34. Doubt!
Or maybe she’s just playing with options. It’s difficult to assess because, unfortunately, the album then descends into an exceptionally grim and dull succession of identikit and utterly conventional ballads; all too typical of the absurd formatting into which most R&B albums still fall. The only animation comes in a “Billie Jean”-drum track driven reworking of Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” – in that tortured and incomplete man’s original version, another addition to the strange “depersonalisation” of 1977 pop. Gaye is scarcely on his own record, almost reluctant to make himself known above the party noises (as opposed to his very evident need to be heard on “What’s Going On?”). When he swoons “this is such a groovy party” over the almost unbearably poignant chord changes in the middle eight, he seems ready, like Camus, to vanish into the text and reappear only if you (or Anna Gordy’s lawyers) will him to do so. Aaliyah (with Slick Rick’s additional pep) spices it up and makes herself the cynosure of the whole song, thereby altering its emotional state entirely. Apart from that, though, it’s R Kelly-land by the numbers, even with the Timbaland-produced ballads, the latter of which are distinguishable only by the strange little details which Timbaland and Elliott put into them – listen to the unexpected backing vocal harmonic notes halfway through “4 Page Letter” or the first appearance of the four-drum “falling down the stairs” effect on “Ladies In Da House,” echoed by Aaliyah’s brilliant “p-p-p-playa” vocal aside, with Timbaland’s salivating Greek chorus (sonically, almost a B-boy Orson Welles!), the off-kilter guitar chordings, the strange mid-synth wobbling, Elliott’s closing rap a hall of mirrors in itself.
She had a lot to learn. So she went away for five years. Well, why not, she’s in for the long haul…
Part 2: Death
…except of course she wasn’t.
No it wasn’t intended as a memorial album. The damn thing had already been out two months before the plane crashed. And now it’s hard to look at it as anything other than a death album, because that is how we, as simple-minded consumers, assimilate works of art without the untidy business of actually caring about the people who created it.
The sleeve is blood red, for a start. Well, OK, more orange if you look at it in the daylight. The way she raises her sunglasses on the rear booklet shot to look as though blood is coming out of her forehead. The pose on the satin sheets whilst cradling a snake. Anyone can make five out of two plus two if they’ve a mind to do so. I will stay with the unutterable sadness of looking at pictures of a growing woman, still maturing, but with no more maturation to come. Cut short. That’s all you get. Don’t tell me how sad that is. No need to tell me. None at all.
And I will stay with the sheer frustration at knowing that the eponymously-titled third album by Aaliyah has grown to be a very, very great album indeed. Timbaland largely absents himself this time round, responsible for just 4 of its 15 tracks (one of which, “Try Again,” had already been around for a year apropos the Romeo Must Die soundtrack). Concerns that Missy was getting most of his innovations are immediately tempered by the jaw-dropping first track and first single, “We Need A Resolution.” Ostensibly vaguely Middle Eastern in its general ambience, the escalating keyboard staircase is more reminiscent of the ghost of Bach pounding the aisles in the capricious caverns of Koln Cathedral. Representing something that is no longer there…even if it’s only an affair. “I’m tired of arguing, girl” smirks Timbaland. But this is a galaxy leap from anything on One In A Million. Conflicting arguments rumbling around in her head; self-doubt as well as accusation of the other: “You’ve got issues/I’ve got issues (background ad lib: “ha, YOU’VE got issues?”).” The crisis of the self: “Am I supposed to change/Are you supposed to change/Who should be hurt?/Who should be blamed?” The almost backward incantations of “where-were-you?” Rather crassly adopted as a harbinger of 9/11 (again, after the event), possibly due to the similarly warped lyric “What-was-in-your-head” which some misheard as being “World wars in your head.” Well, if that’s what you choose to want. It is a skeleton rattling around in a song. It redefined the parameters of pop, and we’re only just realising it. “Revolutionary Road” set to music. Note, incidentally, how Timbaland’s “cut the crying, cut the coughing, cut the wheezing…” is echoed and counterpointed by Aaliyah’s “no more”s on “I Refuse” at the other end of the album.
“More Than A Woman.” How desolate and forlorn can an apparently upbeat pop song be? The squirt bass (and you need to brush up on your Miami Bass history to understand where that originates from – try Dave Tompkins’ superb Primer in this month’s Wire) set against deliberately tinny, early-‘80s synths; the Scandinavian sadness of Spears at her finest (after all, what are Max Martin’s songs if not the logical fruit of the essential despair underlying Abba?). She’ll be more than a lover. All the promise which cannot possibly be fulfilled. Even if the singer hadn’t been killed, you just KNOW that something is going to go wrong from the contours of the song alone. It can make you feel more alone than any other piece of music.
Producers Bud’da and Rapture take care of the rest of the album. “Never No More” would in less pliable hands be an utterly routine ballad to go with the half-dozen ones on One In A Million, but the punctum here is provided by an unusually close and impacting drum track; like little emotions exploding from each side of your head (this is definitely an album which requires headphones).
The astonishing “I Care 4 U,” another Timbaland work. The self-obsessed dispassion noted in “If Only Your Girl Knew” has disappeared. Now the voice caresses. The man has been hurt – she is offering him her life, her love, his salvation. Truly the word “baby” in the lyrics points to the sort of love she wants to give him, the maternal care he needs now, more than ever, and I am driven to thinking of
Sam Taylor-Wood
“It’s just that there are a lot of highly distressed, lonely and anxious people in your work. There’s not much happiness.”
specifically her 2001 video piece Pieta, in which she is seated on a set of steps. She is cradling an apparently dying and nearly lifeless Robert Downey Jr in her arms. On closer inspection she is in fact carrying him, suspending him in mid-air. The physical difficulties of doing this are obvious, but she is intent on doing it, and her face betrays no tiredness, pain or effort – just limitless compassion. I stood in the Hayward Gallery in April 2002 with my sometime lover, watching this, and realising that this was fundamentally what I wanted – salvation, care, compassion, the deepest and most selfless love imaginable. With the pain of the last twelve months I have the desire to be the carried rather than the carrier.
because it is a hymn of compassion.
That having been said, it would be wrong to take the lady for granted. In the next track “Extra Smooth,” powered by an almost vaudevillian descending melodic segment, as if Fagin’s about to pick a pocket or two. “He’s got big brown eyes/so he built lies/comin’ on strong/six pack showin’/he’s too cool for his own shoes.” Or to put it another way, that don’t impress her much, but the lack of impression is more impressive than that of Shania.
An increasing scepticism makes itself apparent in the bossa nova hoedown of “Read Between The Lines.” Interesting to note how more sophisticated the adoption of bossa nova is than, but how unchanged the sentiments from, something like James Chance and the Contortions’ “Disposable You” from 21 years previously. By the time of “U Got Nerve” the turnaround is complete. “You took my kindness for some kind of weakness” (an exact echo of Isaac Hayes’ “Phoenix”). “Who do you think you are now?” exclaims the chorus. “Your qualities are less than pleasing,” Aaliyah opines, dangerously close to Beyonce-land. “Get your skeletons out of my closet!” The rhythm track punches like a demon (that crematorium organ is still there, though, buried in the furnace of the mix) and this would in itself count as a superlative electroclash track.
Next comes the self-consciously epic “I Refuse,” lyrically more or less a parallel to Blige’s “No More Dramas” and a “November Rain”-type epic, starting with thunderclaps, quiet synthesised flute and piano. Slightly too smug in its own recognition as a “major” piece, this builds up rather predictably and is only saved by J Dub’s asymmetrical rhythm patterns (horses’ hooves?). When the squealing guitar makes itself dimly apparent on the horizon. The synth orchestral crescendo is slightly reminiscent of a House track without the rhythm…obviously striving for “I Will Survive”-type immortality, but it just tries too hard and ends up with a bump next to Enrique Iglesias.
The subsequent ballad “It’s Whatever” is relieved only by the carrot-crunching rhythm – yes, we’re essentially back in ballad hell. “I Can Be” picks up a little, but again the guitar crunches grate – you really want this song to, er, beat it. With the regretful piano chords, this actually might have worked better as a straight ballad. But the Neptunes really have negated this whole thing. “Caught Out There” this isn’t. Now she is happy to be the girl who “if she only knew.” “I can be the other lover in your life” she now pleads. Guitar and bass undulate accordingly over a looped “all right” though this suddenly ceases. So she’s not convinced.
“Those Were The Days” is a goodbye song with what is now back to a dispassionate vocal; it actually sounds as though it were punched in syllable by syllable. Note, however, the “those were the day-ay-ay-ays” hiccup which parallels and reflects “p-p-p-playa” in “Ladies In Da House.”
And then, an extraordinary finale which actually justifies the use of the guitar on this album. Out of some Oval-style electronic burping comes what is, it has to be said, a Killing Joke guitar chord (“Change” I think), emerges the climactic song (and original album closer) “What If.” Here J Dub and Rockstar wipe out the memory of “I Refuse.” The words here are scarcely audible under the stammering thrash (piccolo synthesiser mimicking the upward guitar scrawls) though they seem to constitute another “Caught Out There”-type scenario. Looking at possibilities of love, of life, searching increasingly frantically for some kind of order – and then Aaliyah suddenly exclaims, with audible relish, “We’ll burn you! We’ll gut you!” It isn’t quite “You’re Holding Me Down” but as an exit to a record it is despairing and undeniably nihilistic, beyond revenge or redemption. Her voice finally merges with the guitars and synths, one identifiable howl. Brief Morse code synth at the fade out again. The end?
“New friends were often invited to pause at the National Gallery, to inspect Guercino’s “The Incredulity of Thomas,” a painting whose fascination he found inexhaustible. He had no time for the church and its orders of service, still less for the history of religious schism, which merely exasperated him; he preferred to argue out his need for faith in private. Most religious imagery he found too sentimental; yet this single pictorial moment seemed to satisfy him. As he admitted, a believably strong Christ was one of its attractions. For Williams, visions of personal redemption, whether religious or emotional, involved his being gathered up and made safe in someone’s arms. It seems never to have happened to him in life.”
(Russell Davies, from the Introduction to The Kenneth Williams Diaries)
There is a trapdoor, though sadly not for Aaliyah, in track 15: “Try Again,” added on to the album as an extra. It does the song no disservice to say that this was one of the greatest singles of 1982; if the Human League or Depeche Mode had indeed come out with this in 1982, it would have caused a sensation. Bookended by a reminder of one of the most etiolated pop records of the last 20 years, Eric B and Rakim’s “Follow The Leader,” Aaliyah is urging her potential lover to keep his options open. If she doesn’t want to be kissed or fucked at their first date, just keep on trying. Let things develop. You’ve got a chance. Don’t rush me. Don’t be fooled by my apparent lack of passion. It’s there; it just needs the right key to unlock it.
Strange how she should have died after shooting a video for possibly the least distinguished song on the album, the very routine “Rock The Boat.” Her suitcases bulging with jewellery were too heavy and brought the craft down; the ‘plane was substandard but cheap; there are any theories but no resurrection.
Or was there?
The 38-year-old widower sits, quietly sobbing, in a deserted churchyard in Oxford on a balmy late summer evening. It is getting dark. He has been there for some hours. He has returned out of choice, to try to clear his head of the demons to which he has now been tethered for a full 12 months. He wants to be under the soil, not necessarily under her soil, but just under some soil, some solace. Or water if no soil is forthcoming. Music is as distant to him at this moment as London, or love, or life. However, he slowly makes his way back to the main road at Headington and embarks on the first coach back to London. It was his choice. It was his bravery or cowardice. How does resurrection make itself apparent to eyes still blinded by grief?
But just suppose. After one had gone, another came. Someone who almost chose to exit this world voluntarily, rather than, as Aaliyah had done, accidentally or neglectfully. Someone whose first public statement tells you exactly this.
Part 3: Resurrection?
It starts with a blissful sighing vocal/electric piano/running water reverie, and the voice rises out to speak freely, as though to enter into a new world:
“What to say? I remember when it started – and the exact time it ended. My life was in shambles – so much commotion and no place to mend it. A handful of pills and a Plan B. I wanted nothing to do with life or what was to become of me. I loved no more. Every door shut, I felt, I heard. I just wanted to sail away, float away…to the sounds of a Southern hummingbird.”
This is the voice of Charlene Keys, otherwise known as Tweet, and this is how her debut album Southern Hummingbird, produced by Timbaland and Missy Elliott, begins. Edging her way nervously out of the abyss, she settles into the surrender of the first song proper “My Place.” A ballad but with distant guitars and closer rhythm chewing away at its roots, waiting for love, welcoming love, pleading for love to come her way, to give her an excuse not to devour these pills.
“Smoking Cigarettes” continues the mood of languidity, though it is rudely subverted by Timbaland-style squelch bass, punctuming the lament like gigantic commas. He is gone and she needs him back to stop her committing suicide by means of lung cancer. A pack a night. But this is the opposite (i.e. interesting) extreme of balladry; this comes from a seductive deep soul as opposed to pleasing the scrubs with convention. Unhurried but always compelling. Al Green explores your punctum. Never screeching. Whispers can be so much louder sometimes. This is what a good slow soul record should be like; its meanings much more elusive to tease out, and therefore more rewarding (and it is about more than just using recognised signifiers; consider her namesake Alicia – I don’t think they are related, but correct me if they are – who certainly has assembled all the signifiers in her music, but there is no signified. Therefore, by definition, it is less than worthless).
“Best Friend”? Now HERE’S a song. A best friend of the opposite sex, always there – “we can talk about anything, that’s why I love you.” A male voice (one Bilal) steps in and concurs. They want to take it further. Their combined falsettos express what words cannot. Oh this is ecstatic in its peace. A point which Aaliyah, for whatever reason(s), never quite reached. “Let me LAA-HAY-HAY with you!” “You give me REEE-A-SON!” Stretching notes out to poeticise emotions. Deep soul and free jazz were never that far apart.
(Does this song have relevance to my personal life? Well, how can it not?)
Next track is “Always Will,” the theme of which seems to be love surviving at a distance, even though (although never explicitly stated) this is the same love affair about which she lamented in “Smoking Cigarettes.” But can the open-minded listener not interpret their own lives in such words. “We can be on separate planets, Mars and Venus/Heart to heart, no space is between us.” I suspect that Ms Keys is engaging in an exercise of self-denial, desperately trying to convince herself that they have the chance of a future.
(But of course it means something completely different to me…long distance friendships, thinking the same thing even though seas and situations may keep us physically separate, spiritually and emotionally we inhabit the same Winter Gardens photograph).
It’s time to go uptempo – “Boogie 2Nite.” She is looking for a party and is looking to pull a partner. That desperation is still evident beneath the superficially lively surface. “Are you READY?” she repeats with increasing intensity. Who knows where this could lead? “Ten Cents A Dance”? (The Hawking-like mechanical intonation “move your hips side to side.” Keys says the word “dance” as if it were to be followed by the words “on my grave”).
But she doesn’t manage to grab a partner – she gets back at quarter to three in the morning and is so desirous of stimulation that she manages to stimulate herself on the single “Oops (My My)” on which Missy cameos as her Other; appropriate as musically this is a decaffeinated “Get Ur Freak On” with sample muezzins oddly reminiscent of prime Art of Noise. She gets pleasure wherever and however she can. Certainly this knocks the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” into a cocked hat.
“Certainly he seems to have treated masturbation as a considerable play-acting performance, and often a lengthy one (he provides occasional timings). In the imaginative passion of the moment he evn caused himself superficial injuries on more than one occasion. His moments of extreme narcissism, too, will surprise and enlighten those who have always found difficulty in understanding why a synonym for masturbation should be “self-love.” In Williams we see someone who – and this in middle-age – is capable of being so captivated by his own image in the mirror that he must resort at once to “the barclays.” This is self-regard of a rare order…”
(Russell Davies, from the Introduction to The Kenneth Williams Diaries)
There is a strangely retro, minimalist early-‘80s feel (Sharon Redd?) to the track “Make Ur Move” in which Keys is still trying to attract a man. “Tell me what your name is/Damn you should be famous.” But it is still to no avail. She is left alone with her acoustic guitar for the bitter song “Motel” where she witnesses what we assume is her ex going into a motel and enjoying sexual relations with another. Keys shuts the door on the past. “Go to hell baby,” she purrs. “And furthermore, you dummy, the proof was laying in your pants.” A sardonic reference to “Rappers’ Delight” passes in the breeze; more reminiscences of times irretrievable.
Then, in the piano-driven ballad “Beautiful” she appears to have found someone, “I have received a love that’s so divine/So innocent and so pure.” But again it’s not made clear whether this is a reality or merely her wishes projected onto the studium of everyday existence. From the next track “Complain” it would appear that the latter remains the case. “I can sing about love lost – but what if there’s no love to lose?” But then again, she still wants the man back, regardless of everything. “If I had you back, I wouldn’t complain at all.” “If my friends were dead and gone, leaving me here alone/Could I depend on some spirit to ease me when my soul’s on its own?” As with the beginning of this album, her life remains at stake.
But no no no (and not Destiny’s Child’s “No, No, No” either). A heartbeat starts. The song is “Heaven.” An ECG machine ticks. An enormous trade wind of steel guitar slides. “Loving me means more than losing you,” she declares. The previous song talked of the relationship’s good points; this song reminds us (her) of the bad points which outweigh it. It’s a sunny day, but the music belies the apparent “freedom,” full of glitches, lining her path like emotional landmines. “Definitely heaven!” she urges us, but can she convince even herself?
If we are to treat this record as a concept album – and there’s no indication why we shouldn’t – I would deduce from the harpsichord-powered song “Call Me” which reanimates some trademark Timbaland tricks (“Get Ur Freak Out” meets “Strawberry Letter 23”) she is sleeping with “her man” but conducting an affair with another, who can give her what the first man cannot. It is unclear which of these is her ex, but from the promise to do some “reminiscing” we can deduce that she has shacked up with a new man but still seeing her ex on the quiet. The sexual promise seems so bloody joyless.
(Alternative explanation: this is a flashback and the real reason for their break-up – her cheating on him?)
And so it proves joyless. A great gulf of strings plunges us into the distended finale “Drunk” which seems like an end to a self-deemed unworthy life. Backward voices sweep in and out like vultures, waiting for the “broke and alone” deserted woman to expire. The exact reverse of the intoxicated bliss of something like Earthling’s “I Could Just Die.” Everything gently drifts out of focus. Marvin Gaye wandering along the beach at Ostend, utterly alone. “This loneliness is killing me…The road’s all lopsided/I only drove a small way.” Reality used to be a friend of hers. “Now my air’s being pumped/And I’m drenched in my tears.”
Then the credits roll. Suddenly joyful, she takes a bow and does her Academy Award thanks over a reprise of the opening theme. But it doesn’t erase what may well be the bleakest end to an album since “Box For Black Paul” helped Cave’s From Her To Eternity stumble to its self-appointed close.
(There are two bonus tracks, “Sexual Healing (Oops Pt 2)” and Elliott’s own “Big Spender,” but they are scarcely relevant to the emotional tenor of the rest of the album, although the former may be a belated reassertion of her faith in love and life. Both excellent in themselves; just out of place, like adding “Wrote For Luck” as a bonus track to Closer).
Envoi
Be patient. You are asking, apart from the involvement of Timbaland and Elliott, what exactly does Tweet have to do with Aaliyah? I am merely asking for an extension of your belief in a good story. I am asking you to believe that a less dispassionate but perhaps more damaged woman arose in the space previously occupied by a far more confident woman and that the song “Drunk” is a belated Kyrie to both their lives, still arising out of the most fundamental vessel for the expression of human grief and suffering – the 12-bar blues – but removing it from its casing of aspic, rather than venerating the casing and blocking out any vision of the actual heart. Or perhaps it’s that life carries on under any circumstances. Perhaps I am yet again merely trying to extend my own experiences to make these works of art fit my perspective. For ultimately our own perspective is the only one which we can properly acknowledge – and why we get so incensed and defensive when other perspectives from other people come to question or overturn our own perspective.
“The Hegelian dialectic was a full-blooded affair. If you started with any partial concept and meditated on it, it would presently turn into its opposite; it and its opposite would combine into a synthesis, which would, in turn, becoming the starting point of a similar movement, and so on until you reached the Absolute Idea, on which you could reflect as long as you liked without discovering any new contradictions. The historical development of the world in time was merely an objectification of this process of thought.”
(Bertrand Russell on Dialectical Materialism, from Freedom and Organisation 1814-1914, chapter 18).
. . .
Friday, August 30, 2002
Currently playing: "Mafia" by Kelis.
Kaleidoscope - or at least its first eight tracks, before disastrously tailing off as per most R&B albums - is one of the more remarkable pop records of recent times, and one of these days I will write fully about it.
But this song. Sumptuous yet simple, almost medieval - the music could have come straight from Treasure by the Cocteau Twins - but what is she singing about? Decomposing bodies. I'd testify for you. I would FRY for you, she says emphatically. The tragedy buried beneath.
There is certain music about which I will not yet write on CoM. I do not feel comfortable writing about Joy Division, or the Cocteau Twins, or the Jam, or Kitchens of Distinction, or 14th century medieval music, or Hector Villa Lobos, or Pulp, or Mogwai, or the Who, or Northern soul. This music is at present beyond my criticism for it is not my music - it was OUR music, with all that implies. Laura's music as much as mine. And I won't sing of them while I'm still crying.
. . .
IN WHICH SOMEONE'S FAVOURITE "ENGLISHMAN" IS WILD ABOUT THE WIRE AND WORRIED ABOUT MIKE WESTBROOK BUT ENDS UP RIPPING OFF PAPA HEMINGWAY
And while I’m ranting on about The Wire – what about that “Epiphanies” piece on Westbrook’s Marching Song? Where was the blasted epiphany? Drear, dour DESCRIPTION (and mostly inaccurate description at that) accompanied by an alleged photo of Westbrook’s late ‘60s Concert Band in concert which was clearly the Brass Band performing Mama Chicago – by the personnel and look, I’d guess about 1983. When you think that they could have had a ready-made definitive piece on Marching Song (see my entry for 5 February 2002), it makes you want to…
..write for them?
Beg pardon?
Look you’re straining at the leash, gagging to write for The Wire. That’s why you’re annoyed, isn’t it?
And who the hell are you?
Hemingway’s Old Lady, I’m afraid.
Christ my inspiration really is at rock bottom at the moment isn’t it? Reduced to ripping off Death In The Afternoon.
And I expect you expect me to go and listen to all Westbrook records ever made before reading the next chapter?
More than that, I expect you already to have done it without prompting.
And I expect you’re wondering why I’m here?
Banal reasons, of course. Alter ego, internal dialogue…
The approach lacks chetif.
Well no one else seems to want to chat with me at the moment.
And whose fault is that?
With regard to Mike Westbrook…
Crap of course. Self-righteous jazz Benny Britten with shades of dank Dankworth.
He has tended to surround himself with unworthy people these last 30 years. But before that he could have been…well, a great facilitator.
Unworthy people? You mean compliant sidemen who won’t answer him back, like Keith Rowe and Lou Gare did back in the day. Or like…
…Yes I’ll come to him in a moment. But consider the chasm between Marching Song and everything else he has done. Or indeed his work pre- and post-…
…yes…
…John Surman.
He was the real genius in the band, no?
Oh yes. Him and Mike Osborne. Listen to the dull Ellington/Evans/Mingus block plags which litter Westbrook’s ’67 debut Celebration. They in themselves are worthless. It is only the extraordinary commitment and passion PUNCTUMING the façade which Surman and Osborne’s saxophones provide. Anyone could see it. Without it – well, a track like “Echoes and Heroics” echoes too closely the heroics of Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
Paul Rutherford and George Khan are very noticeably not on Celebration. Was he deliberately freezing them out to please the tentative punter?
Rutherford missed the session as he was on tour with the SME at the time. Khan was spending a year in New York, taking saxophone lessons from Sam Rivers and hanging out with Archie Shepp. Their absence was useful for the imagined listener’s foothold to be gained without obstruction.
And look at the musicians on the sleeve! All kitted out in regulation studio suits and ties, largely looking uncomfortable. Surman in particular looks as though he’s fit to burst!
Appropriate.
And then – a release: ‘68’s Release!
Yes. Posing defiantly with a kid in front of a Churchill tank in the Imperial War Museum. Suits and ties are out, as are the french horn and tuba. Rutherford and Khan are defiantly in. The band audibly loosens up.
Chris McGregor’s influence?
Incalculable. Any surviving musician of the period will say so. The South Africans, with some prior assistance from the West Indians, injected the punctum into British jazz. Without them, it would have been too polite for consumption. But of course you can hear it all through Release. Jo’burg’s Harry Miller on bass – the umbilical link between the two operatives.
And it sounds so much more fun too!
Probably the nearest approximation you could get of how the band would have sounded live. It’s a shame they never made a live album.
That piece in the Wire – I would have loved to have seen even a photo of the band in action, never mind a film of them!
Or is it nearer the truth that we exult the Concert Band’s greatness, as with that of their mirror images and braver cousins the People Band, on the grounds that their history is so poorly documented? It exists as a glorious memory – the theatrical elements which were integral to Westbrook’s ideas. What would you think if you could obtain archive footage of them? Wouldn’t you be disappointed to find a token juggler and half a dozen naff slides? Isn’t it perfect because it is unrecorded?
I have heard the People Band album. As with most improv records, it lacks a dimension. You feel you are only getting half the story. What are they getting so excited about? You needed to be in the same studio as them, breathe the same oxygen as them, maybe even BE them.
Which was the concept of the People Band, anyway – the erosion of division between artists and audience; the exact reverse of the self-reverent AMM. Anyway, as far as Westbrook’s Release is concerned, it certainly sows the seeds of everything he went on to do thereafter; a scratch mix of free improv, jazz standards, pop tunes and impassioned instrumental soliloquies.
But here he had musicians capable of taking his vision elsewhere, and perhaps improving it.
No argument there. Surman and Osborne are again crucial throughout, Khan is the postmodern jester who nearly steals the record with his excoriating tenor assault on “Flying Home”…
One of the pieces of music which started you off on this trail, I believe.
I’ll never forget Ken Sykora on Radio Clyde in the late ‘70s playing this track and hastily fading it, commenting that “the saxophone noises on that track were bleated by Nisar Ahmad Khan…” It was the aesthetic equivalent of not throwing stones at this notice.
Philip Larkin liked it, but described it as “tarted up Debroy Somers.”
You have to remember that Larkin, towards the end of his jazz reviewing tenure at the Telegraph, tended to be diplomatic about then contemporary jazz instead of slagging it off outright. Nevertheless he seems genuinely to have liked Westbrook’s stuff.
And this is a bad thing?
Possibly. In any event…Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Rutherford are present, one of the great Britjazz trombone tag teams (the other being Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti in the Brotherhood of Breath throughout the ‘70s), and Rutherford is first on record with his multiphonics on “Folk Song,” a full six months before Mangelsdorff, as he never fails to remind me whenever I see him.
Namedropping will cut no ice with Mr Young.
Harry Miller and Alan Jackson; an indelible rhythm section. Unsung heroes like trumpeter Dave Holdsworth and mentalist Kiwi altoist Bernie Living. The latter’s tempestuous demolition of “Girl From Ipanema” still has the power to shock.
Khan and Living, of course, are better known for their work in the rock field. Westbrook seemed to struggle without that direct input.
Chris Spedding played guitar in the Concert Band whenever a guitar was required. But Westbrook’s rapproachment with rock never really came across as…
Go on, say it…
I wasn’t going to say “hard won.” It just didn’t seem felt. Older friends of mine recall having seen the Concert Band in the ‘60s (with Rowe and Gare on board) and confirm that at that stage it was essentially an Ellington tribute band.
And he can’t let go here, can he? Yes there are free excursions, but at the bottom of it all…”Sugar.” “Lover Man.” “Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You.”
The music he really liked.
Solid Gold Cadillac?
That memorably failed enterprise of pop entryism has been documented so well elsewhere that there is no need to repeat the obvious here.
Oh no, you’re not getting away with that one. You’ve used that for Interpol and the Rapture!
Well, that’s how the late Ralph J Gleason got round it, and he was syndicated across hundreds of American newspapers, so it must be an OK technique. Anyway I have sat through both Solid Gold Cadillac albums on enough occasions and they are simply unconvincing. Phil Minton squealing about the machines taking over! You really do NOT need to know.
And then… Marching Song.
Which I have already discussed in detail.
And then…Surman leaves and Westbrook essentially falls apart.
There were arguments and Surman did not part from Westbrook on good terms. It took six years to mend the split and for Surman to return triumphantly for Citadel/Room 315. But you can tell the great divide between the first three albums and what came afterwards…Love Songs, and especially Metropolis. The latter using the same instrumentation (double rhythm section, etc.) as Marching Song, and which admittedly blows your mind for its first ten minutes and last ten minutes, and I would never get rid of it, but – the production’s all over the place. The band is sloppy and sounds uncoordinated. There is no central linchpin to hold the disparate elements together.
Surman was more or less the de facto day to day coordinator of the band, was he not?
Kind of. And he contributed to the writing on both Celebration and Marching Song. And there is a great hole in Metropolis where, frankly, he should be. Then again, listen to what Surman was doing at the time – the early Trio albums, Where Fortune Smiles with John McLaughlin and Karl Berger – he was continents ahead of Westbrook, who has to this day never quite managed to shed the persona of an eager but naff youth club organiser desperately trying to be hip with the kids. And of course the Brotherhood of Breath were steamrolling all this miserable politesse into the ground, with the notable assistance of a lot of frustrated Westbrookians – Surman, Osborne, Griffiths, Miller were all key members at that stage.
I expect you are going to talk about the Brotherhood of Breath and the Blue Notes now.
Steady on…I have to save something for The Wire. Rob, let me write that Primer!
. . .
Thursday, August 29, 2002
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
The Glamorous Life by Sheila E (1984)
"She wears a long fur coat of mink
Even in the summertime
Everybody knows from the coy little wink
The girl's got a lot on her mind
She's got big thoughts, big dreams
And a big brown Mercedes sedan
What I think this girl,
She really wants is to be in love with a man
CHORUS
She wants to lead the Glamorous Life
She don't need a man's touch
She wants to lead the Glamorous Life
But without love it ain't much
She saw him standing in the section marked
'If you have to ask you can't afford it' lingerie
She threw him bread and said make me scream
In the dark what could he say
Boys with small talk and small minds
Really don't impress me in bed
She said I need a man's man baby
Diamonds and furs
Love would only conquer my head
repeat CHORUS
They made haste in the brown sedan
They drove to 55 Secret Street
They made love and by the seventh wave
She knew she had a problem
She thought real love is real scary
Money only pays the rent
Love is forever that's all your life
Love is heaven sent it's glamorous
repeat CHORUS"
A cautionary tale (Madonna's "Material Girl" with added humility) set against, and perhaps negated by, the continuous punctum of the music, which drives the seventh wave like a chariot through the inner wreckage of the heroine's thoughts.
Crucially there is no bassline for most of the song, a signifier for the lack of love in her life; the bass (synth?) eventually enters midrange during the final verse, undulating and undeniably sex-inducing. It is made for movement but (as with her "glamorous" life) too fast for real love (physicail and spiritual) to happen.
The tremulous onset of massed percussion overdubs ("Blue Monday" Linn drum hammering undrummable rhythms against the timbales) accentuates her keenness mixed with dread; David Coleman's 'cello moves a crucial shade slower, imploring the heroine to slow the illusion down and let reality in. The "Starr Company"'s crucial midriff is there throughout - the strangely regretful chorus-verse bridge and the defiant escalating minor thirds which augment the final declarations of the chorus. Synths squirt as you would expect; Larry Williams' amazing alto sax squirts as you wouldn't expect - could almost be John Tchicai, squealing freely (and clearly metaphorically).
Of course, the latter provides the crucial key to the bridge between the Ze Records legacy and what Prince then went on to do with it; the sax itself reminds us of James Chance, the lyric matter is very Cristina circa 1980 (and when oh when is Mutant Disco, or No New York for that matter, going to be re-released on CD?) but the drive is that of 1984, en route to its 1990 logical Vogue-ing conclusion.
In some ways "The Glamorous Life" scarcely exists as a song at all. It's an impression of a song. But its punctum is transparently apparent.
. . .
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND WEBLOGS
Weblogs, and by extension theorising about music (unless you are doing it professionally or your life depends on it - not the same thing), exist principally to fill a gap in the writer's life. Once that gap is filled, by someone and/or something, the personal importance/relevance of weblogs/theory becomes minimal.
A web persona can protect you from danger but also obstruct you from the future.
Establishing closer relationships with others via the internet is often a good excuse for not meeting people in real life.
On the other hand you could look at it as a good lesson in what precisely you want from, or look for in, other people that makes you HAPPY.
There is no need to continue posting on a weblog because you feel under some obscure obligation to do so. If your life has become full and active, then that is what you should be concentrating on. The "obligation" factor becomes very evident in one's writing if this is the case.
Real friendship is based on HONESTY. Web personas must under no circumstances be extended to the "real world." You will otherwise come a cropper. It will kill any potential relationship or friendship stone dead.
To actually ACHIEVE anything you HAVE to face the real world, enter it and negotiate with it. Church of Me exists as my passport. But every passport needs a carrier who is willing to go through Customs and into a better life. That is my responsibility.
(with apologies to my good friend RW, whose wisdom I have gratuitously plagiarised here)
. . .
WIRE-LESS
Only a rank sucker would take any notice of The Wire these days. Bereft of life and about as clued up as Clouseau, it prattles on like some wizened old Empire loyalist, so blinded by its own reputation and former glories that it can't see how drab, jaded and out of touch it's become.
And yet, with music media squeezed almost to a point of strangulation, the one thing no music magazine can do right now is stand still or regress. Unless you move with the times, whilst still keeping a firm hold on your principles, the next generation of readers/musicians will go out of their way to avoid you, just as they would give the body swerve to any toothless old soak blethering on about the good old dayssshhhhhh.
A decade ago it looked as though the barriers were about to be smashed down. MBV were given parity with MEV, post rock was invented and de-invented, the d&b jungle was explored. New ways of looking at, and expressing one's love for, music which the mainstream (MM until about 1995/6 excepted) was unwilling to embrace.
But no, it would appear that the Wire's current editor, Rob Young, would like the barriers to be re-erected. For proof of this I refer you to his editorial on page 4 of the current issue (223), a veritable bloodletting of uncurdled rage against...what? Well, now that you come to mention it, he's annoyed about a genre which he's just invented, entitled IRE (It's Really Experimental ha ha). Apparently this species of music is personified as "the burned mark of the dilettante, the tattoo of the genre traitor, the last refuge of the terminally inane" (the italics are mine). And the work which is a "summation of all that's twisted and wrong in the current music climate"? Even if you think that the adjectives "twisted" and "wrong" would be more properly applicable to Dick Cheney or the killer(s) of Holly Wells or Jessica Chapman - you know, save your real spleen for things which DESERVE them - you must be curious as to what exactly has gotten Mr Young's goat.
Why, it's the new Flaming Lips elpee, Yoshimi Vs The Pink Robots (briefly discussed below)! Mr Young concedes that the production is "ravishing and sensuous." And what about the songs? Well, the "songwriting would appeal to anyone, myself included..." Er, so what exactly is the problem?
Well, you see, evil Warner Brothers (the same fascists who inflicted Atlantic and Stax on innocent ears in the past) have spent MONEY "on making a serviceable set of songs (people who use the adjective "serviceable" really ought to slash their wrists) into a pack of creaking, wobbling, stuttering Frankenstein's monsters." So the production, which just one paragraph above was rapturously described as "ravishing" is now raping.
But you see, don't get me wrong, Mr Young says, some of my best friends are gay, "complexity and studio trickery form the backbone of some of the finest musics (AARGH - we stopped pluralising "music" in 1985, do try and keep up) of the past (sic) century." For example? "'70s Jamaican dub...Sun Ra...Harry Partch...Messiaen...Birtwistle...Autechre...Evan Parker...Tony Oxley..." In other words, readers, all the gang. Those whom we ALLOW to be experimental. Those against whom The Wire now defends its rickety palace, just as Jazz Journal co-opted Panama Francis and Soprano Summit 20 years previously. They are the REAL THING. They are PURE. Hail our new artistic Freemason's Lodge! Only those who pass our self-imposed test will be exulted in our pages. All other miscreants will be impaled and branded with the burned mark of the dilettante.
And poor old Yoshimi? "The Lips' sound is impressive, but somehow it doesn't seem hard won." Yes, they don't sweat! The songs might make you cry, but there has been no effort! Wayne Coyne has failed to die, has failed to inject himself into a comatose martyr. He has not been given a thousand lashes. He has not been forcefully starved or bombed. He therefore forgoes any right to aesthetic ambitions. There are no...whisper it...ROOTS?
What did this month's cover stars the Boredoms once proclaim? "Kill All Roots" if I'm not mistaken?
Oh no, let us all instead proceed in a stately fashion towards Mr Young's brave new paradise. Let us all burn our burned mix CDs and instead prostrate ourselves on the Merzbow 50-CD box set. Let us offer the collected works of Timbaland to the pyre as a sacrifice to our martyr, Cornelius Cardew. Let us all solemnly weep and never be caught laughing at the sun. Let us never cry other than in accordance with the tri-chordal template imposed by our guru Albert Ayler.
Let us be completely ignorant of Zaireeka.
Let us equally listen inadequately and improperly to Todd Rundgren. "A Wizard, A True Star" (sic) sounds neither clunky nor dated but is amongst the lightest pop confections ever created.
Let us set standards which we ourselves could never hope to meet. Browning his tongue upon the collective ani of the Boredoms, he declares that they "worship the very best qualities of music, no matter what the genre: irreverence, noise, speed." In the Wire as it stands I see no evidence of any of these. Just sourness and bitter pomposity. "Their in-the-round group dynamic is supported by some intriguing theories of harnessed energies" is a sentence which sums up the magazine's current crisis nicely; it manages not only to be tautological but also guaranteed to put anyone off from ever listening to the group in question.
Let us re-erect our customs post, opening the barrier only to those whom we deem have suffered enough. Like this reader.
. . .
"life is not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis."
(ee cummings)
. . .
GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
Love Story by Layo and Bushwacka! (2002)
"Written compositions are fired off into the future; even if never performed, the writing remains as a point of reference. Improvisation is in the present, its effect may live on in the souls of the participants, both active and passive (i.e. audience) but in its concrete form it is gone for ever from the moment that it occurs, nor did it have any previous existence before the moment that it occurred, so neither is there any historical reference available."
(Cornelius Cardew, from Towards an Ethic of Improvisation)
Which is precisely why those written elements of the past, if they are to be regenerated and relive, have to be configurated in similarly durable forms (although with improvisation, elements and approaches of musicians/groups can be recalled, re-strategised).
Devo and Nina Simone have to my knowledge never had any face to face dealings, yet their individual pleas for love (or its absence) fuse with an envious inevitability. The bassline from "Mongoloid" is instantly recognisable, but misfoots the listener expecting an entirely uncalled for Big Beat revival. Instead, it settles down a gear, the augmented fifths of Simone's piano evolving the rhythm into a different arena altogether. Synthesisers caress, their slight chordal delays rebounding in the manner of the Cocteau Twins circa Echoes in a Shallow Bay. It is warm, it is Crantock in 1985 again. When Simone's voice enters at 2:41, lamenting her loved one's metaphorical purchases of "rags and old iron," it is a remorseful reproach. It asks the listener to reconsider, to flow with patient understanding. It embraces difference and allows for love to re-present itself.
. . .
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
THE CHURCH OF ME IS GOING ON HOLIDAY
As of tomorrow I will be away for a much-required break at home in Glasgow, and also away from computers, so Church of Me will be taking a week's holiday, returning on Wednesday 28 August.
I have to give my heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the astonishing number of positive responses which CoM has received following its recent regeneration. Special love must be given to my dearest friends, Nathalie and Mark S, who have both done so much for me in recent months - I'll never be able to repay the debt I owe both of you :-)
Next Sunday marks the first anniversary of the passing of the one person I wish more than anything could read these words - my other half, my beloved Laura. I can't believe it's a year already. As I said when I started this weblog in the New Year, part of its aim is to try in some way to keep Laura's spirit alive. Of course, in a way it keeps both of our spirits going. And I intend to keep going with this - and everything else - for as long as possible.
Thanks again to all of you. I'll be back next week.
. . .
UTOPIA - ME PUNCTUM
Back in '77 I was obsessed, not with dole queues, but with dehumanisation and artistic expressions of same. Fired up by apocalyptic sci-fi epics like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (tension, apprehension and dissension have begun) and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, justified by Ian MacDonald's still cataclysmic NME review of Bowie's Low, wherein "humanity" gradually vanishes from the music and is replaced by imperfect replications of humanity, it seemed radical, frightening and enticing. The absence of "real" instruments, the gradual vanishing of the "voice" from music. One big club hit from that year was "Welcome To Our World Of Merry Music" by Mass Production. It could have been the Last Trump, broadcast live from Daventry. Legalised by Brian Eno's paraphrasing of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, popularised by Giorgio Moroder.
As every schoolboy knows, Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" came out the same week as the Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," and yes I bought them both that Saturday from Listen Records in Renfield Street, and yes I thought the Summer disc was by far the more radical. Hard to describe just how shocking Summer's mid-song fadeout was at the time, to be superseded by impassive yet strangely sexual sequencers, throbbing strobe-like splinters of little deaths throughout the machine.
A few months later, Moroder put out his own single and album, both entitled From Here To Eternity, articulating the response of the receiver of (or listener to?) Summer's engineered passions. An era, remember, where Space's "Magic Fly" and even "Oxygene Part IV" might have sounded like nothing on earth to the average 13-year-old. An autumn where every record in the charts seemed to want to redefine the boundaries and perspectives of the "pop song" - Abba's "The Name of the Game," the Clash's "Complete Control," the complete loss of control at the climax of the Pistols' "Holidays In The Sun," Dury's "Sex & Drugs," Costello's "Detectives," even the inexplicably reissued "Virginia Plain" to underline the point.
Side one of Moroder's From Here To Eternity is a sensuous, sexier parallel to Kraftwerk's contemporaneous Trans-Europe Express - a continuous 15-minute journey. Ostensibly about the Joy of Sex but with more of a subtext beyond that - what exactly does "Baby...leaves me needing nothing/Nothing next to me" mean? Or, for that matter, "she makes me/Love me once again?" Is this a "Pictures of Lily"-type fantastical reverie? Whatever, the deadpan vocal (a clear precursor to Neil Tennant) is ideal for the passionate impassiveness of this music. After the initial song statement, the synths take off on a minimalist "Journey at the Speed of Love," adding female backing vocals to jack up the desire in the brilliantly titled "Lost Angeles," finally culminating in the glorious irreducible seductibility of "Utopia - Me Giorgio" where a seraphic chorus rises with the inevitability of Moon Safari 21 years hence.
The single "From Here To Eternity" even cuts surreally from part one (the mix emphasising the chorus riff a little more) to "Utopia" making the listener even more gloriously disorientated.
A shame about side two, over which (including the ill-advised Presley cover, "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone") it is perhaps best to pass over in silence. But Moroder redeemed himself the following year with the unimpeachable sequenced come-on of Summer's divine Once Upon A Time album, as well as definitively closing the trapdoor on "Macarthur Park."
. . .
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
BRIGHT EYES
You know, maybe I should have made that American Trilogy a quartet, because here's a new perspective on soul searching and self emotional examination.
Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is the seventh album from Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes (don't ask me about the other six). And it may initially appear to be yet more tequila-soaked, tormented and tormenting navel unravelling. Except it isn't. It's a brutally honest exercise in self-evaluation, which frequently draws attention to its effectiveness in the context of a song and an album, and brilliantly performed.
Vocally, imagine Oberst as a kind of hopped-up Mike Scott minus all the cod mysticism. Instrumentally, it's the same strings/horn/vibes blend as Lambchop or the Polyphonic Spree, though notably more feral (and perhaps more alive) than either.
The album's presented in the form of a car tape (bookended by the appropriate sound effects and chatter). It opens with a stark guitar/voice solo "The Big Picture" in which Oberst tries to outline and justify reasons for not giving up on life, obsessed with the truth about truth and love. Stop being "wrapped up in your blanket," and don't "lose yourself in liquor" for "there is nothing I know except that this lifetime is one moment and wishing will just leave me empty." And "you can struggle in the water and be too stubborn to die or you could just let go and be lifted to the sky." He is, of course, singing to himself, as he makes abundantly clear at album's end.
"Method Acting" keeps the mood constant, addressing the conflict between going on stage or on record and expressing these emotions, and the actual reality ("Please keep the tape rolling...we need a record of our failures"). However, he clearly feels like giving up: "Oh, how I truly wish I could keep hanging around here but my joy is covering me. Soon, I will disappear." Musically the record is sublime, just on the right side of muscular without being overpowering, and reminiscent somewhat of Tindersticks minus the archness and with some added passion.
"False Advertising" continues the art/life debate (with some mock vinyl crackles to underline the "difference") though even this is deliberately contrived (the bum notes after the lyric "Now all that anyone is listening for are the mistakes"). It ends with an anthemic rush and the sounds of partying friends, though at the end Oberst exits anyway, shuts the door and goes up to his study to contemplate.
On the Faces-like stomp "You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will," Oberst turns his attentions to love, or to be more precise tries to recapture the elation of his first childhood love, while realising all along that she who is loved is not an option. "You say that I treat you like a book on a shelf" the song begins, and the metaphor continues throughout (rather less contrived than Costello's "Everyday I Write The Book"). It ends with the title refrain over a joyous rockout, after which Oberst proclaims "Because if you don't, then this book is all lies...then my plans would all be ruined...I'll start drinking like the way I drank before/And I won't have a future anymore." Sung as though all his Christmases have come at once.
Next track "Lover I Don't Have To Love" is an exercise in self-excoriation worthy of Jarvis Cocker, outlining Oberst's reluctance to jump in and get involved for fear of being hurt. Any excuse not to theorise himself out of bed. And yet in the following song "Bowl of Oranges" over an amiable Van Morrison-type canter, he happily sings of his commitment to commitment. He is trying to leave his nightmares behind and enter into a proper relationship which will take account of "Love's uneven remainders" yet not be defeated by them.
Out of this uptempo mood, however, emerges a piano refrain which bridges into the finest track on the album, the astonishing "Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come" wherein Oberst acknowledges but is powerless to address his inertia. Thinks about his father, about a "lovely girl" he fancied but who "up and died, in a fit of vanity," about his drinking buddies without whose friendship he cannot live, about the son of God, ultimately about the need for explanation. The tune gradually works itself up to an explosion, over which he screams "Could you please start explaining? You know, I need some understanding." This is powerful music.
The theme continues in the graceful perambulation of "Nothing Gets Crossed Out," again all about the fatality of keeping your options open; every possible escape route shut off with a qualifying "but."
Then, considerations of love return to prominence, and it's "Make War" which lyrically is the negative of "Make It Easy On Yourself." In both songs, the former lover encourages the girl to hurry to her new partner, but Oberst knows that her new lover will be killed by "all that has spoiled in your heart." Sung as a C&W ballad, and worthy of Wynette were she still alive to sing it.
Back to human analysis in "Waste of Paint" where Oberst examines the downfall of various people he knows who are reluctant to face the realities of life, talk themselves into destruction, and yet realising his own grave deficiencies. He talks about living with a couple but can only lament his own lack of luck in love: "Like Love is some kind of lottery, where you scratch and see what is underneath. It's "Sorry," just one cherry, "Play Again." Get lucky" he snarls in genuine wounded rage. Yes, Conor, you're nice and intelligent and need help, but there's someone else just that little bit better than you, and it's him I'm fucking, not you, so tough shit and buona sera you bastard. But Conor is intelligent enough to know that the reality is beyond this. He looks at people disembarking from a train, starts to rail against their robot-like lives but realises that "it is not them but me, who has lost my self-identity...And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me" (again, referring back to the imperfect surroundings of talking about this in an album). The closing howl of "I have no Faith but it is all I want, to be loved and believe in my soul" (shades of Kevin Rowland?) is wrenching to witness. "From A Balance Beam" offers no respite either; he sings about discovering the realities of existence, but feels that even these will offer scant succour. "Laura Laurent" is a lament for a loved and lost girl whom he doesn't have the nerve to contact.
And finally, a resolution of sorts: "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And Be Loved)." Musically, this is a genuinely ecstatic variant on "Fisherman's Blues" jacked up to the power of a billion, where Oberst talks about a failed suicide attempt, retraces his life thus far in outlines, and decides to keep on going, with the lack of feasible alternatives. "How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery, to love and be loved," he concludes. "Let's just hope that is enough." And you know in yourself that he will carry on, still uncertain and wracked with fear, but not enough to justify the ultimate surrender. As the rest of us have to do.
A female voice comments at the end, as the tape runs out, "I wouldn't worry about him."
Nor do we have to. This is Eminem with less real self-hatred (and, concurrently, more real self-doubt). This is something approaching a masterpiece. Please investigate immediately.
. . .
CURSOR MINER
Don't trust comparisons. I know nought about the man behind Cursor Miner but even before listening to his debut album Explosive Piece Of Mind know that he is NOT Syd Barrett with a laptop instead of a guitar. Facile and nowhere near a "truth." He is undoubtedly an entertaining and vaguely purposeful musician but there's nothing on here that will make you cry like "Golden Hair" does.
But you're nowhere without some sort of comparison so I would say that Cursor Miner is digging at the same seam as Thomas Leer once did; that purple area between pop and out there. "Never Been Seen," the first song here, is a great guitar-driven electrostomp, despite lyrics of the fifth form surrealism calibre of "your cobalt camper van is women/fears like mean time on top of team" etc.
The album alternates between Fad Gadget/Leer-style twisted electropop and more abstract glitch-ups. The latter in themselves are almost '80s revivalist in a different way; tracks like "Eezerk One" could have been taken straight from Christian Marclay's Record Without a Cover, one of the key records of the '80s. Sometimes, as on "U Want To Want," the pop falls just on the right side of cheesy, reminding one of the very thin line which divided Tovey and Leer from Wang Chung or Alphaville. On track ten, "Salt Solution," he unfortunately tries to do Beck, but otherwise this is fine music for travelling up the M6 on a placid summer afternoon. The epic instrumental "Propaganda" is kind of reminiscent of, erm, Propaganda. It's good to have around.
. . .
Sunday, August 18, 2002
JOE MEEK
The poor magnificent bastard. He wasn't to know there wasn't supposed to be any pop between 1959 and 1963. We were in unofficial mourning. British showbusiness remained dependent upon a matrix of subterranean, grey networks, controlled by laundered money dirtied by unclean capitalists straight out of the pages of Derek Raymond or Alexander Baron. British pop music was then still supposed to be on the point of strangulation by the umbilical cord with the 1950s which it hadn't quite worked out yet how to untie. It's strange how nearly all of the leading operatives of that Camay-cleansed era - Alma Cogan, Dickie Valentine, Michael Holliday, David Whitfield - vanished and obligingly died off before their time, even though the limits of their time had already been decided by external factors. Cancer, 150 mph Ballard-inspiring car crash, suicide, heart attack in Australia - it is as though we willed these people never to have existed, to forgive ourselves for, as Glenda Collins would put it, not being worthy.
And Joe Meek was there. Was he the Ed Wood of Britpop, a shoestring coordinator out of a grimy flat in Holloway with a small, unpaid but loyal retinue of colleagues, but with sufficient capabilities to realise his aesthetics (im)properly?
It's time to re-evaluate, for Sequel Records have now issued a long-required 2CD 56-track compilation, Joe Meek - The Alchemist Of Pop: Home Made Hits And Rarities 1959-66. Previously his productions have been available on CD, but dispersed over an unappetising number of not altogether satisfactory niche compilations. Now we have everything he was known for, and almost everything for which he should have been known, all together in one package. It is simultaneously the most lighthearted and harrowing sequence of pop music to which you may ever listen, optimistic and pessimistic, sometimes in the space of the same song.
He started out as an engineer under Denis Preston at Lansdowne in the '50s, tweaking some echos, turning up the treble on various hits of the time, including Humphrey Lyttelton's "Lady Madonna"-anticipating "Badpenny Blues" and several of Lonnie Donegan's finest, including the still adrenalising and radical "Cumberland Gap" - surely the first punk number one? Eventually he branched out on his own, set up his own Triumph record label but soon afterwards opted to license out his productions to the various major labels of the time (principally Pye, Decca and Columbia).
This compilation starts out with Emile Ford and the Checkmates' "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?" both the last #1 of the '50s and the first #1 of the '60s. I had no idea that Meek had anything to do with this record, but as with most discs of the period heard in digital close-up - as opposed to the medium wave crackle of Jimmy Savile's Double Top Ten Sunday lunchtime show in the '70s - it has an awful lot more power than you might have thought, particularly the sudden rush of the rhythm section in the "well that's all right" lead up to the climactic finale. Some of this stuff is gossamer light; Lance Fortune's "Be Mine," a #4 hit a couple of months later, is essentially Adam Faith (with John Barry-orchestrated strings) but "due to technical problems" came out after "What Do You Want?" and was therefore dismissed.
The superb sleevenotes indicate a clear and depressing pattern in Meek's career; time and again we are told of records which "could have gone all the way to the top" but for distribution problems, or were banned by the BBC, or came out in the middle of the Beat boom, or whose promotions were hindered by Equity strikes. In his lifetime he received no monies from "Telstar" due to a long-standing copyright court case which was only resolved posthumously. It was an uphill struggle with not much evident joy; thus the fatalistic and downbeat mood of many of his lyrics.
But there was excitement too; listen to the Fabulous Flee-Rekkers' gleeful demolition of "Greensleeves" (retitled "Green Jeans") which in its own way almost outdoes Coltrane's deconstruction on the contemporaneous Africa/Brass or the Outlaws' extraordinary "Ambush" where the band is virtually obliterated by multiple overlays of Western sound-effects, apparently taped off the TV. And an odd yearning for otherness, articulated by Charles Blackwell's orchestrations; listen to Peter Jay's "Paradise Garden," which sounds almost like a relic from 1955, with its compressed strings, hovering wordless female vocal (Adelaide Hall's "Creole Love Call" meets Caterina Valente's "The Breeze and I") - a gateway to the next world, some three decades before Deserter's Songs. Or, like Michael Cox's "Angela Jones," strangely asexual ("we can be man and DO DO DO DO").
Much of Meek's work was outright necrophilia; witness the Moontrekkers' "Night of the Vampire," Mike Berry's "Tribute to Buddy Holly" (which really does sound like a seance), Heinz' "Just Like Eddie," the slightly too knowing for his own good Screaming Lord Sutch (represented here by "'Til the Following Night" and "Jack the Ripper"), and most famously, John Leyton's "Johnny Remember Me." Driven by a galloping guitar/rhythm onslaught which almost sounds as if it is being played backwards, this is superficially a Frankie Laine-style cowboy ballad, but uniquely British - the cold wind howls "across the moor" in realisation of a terrible event which cannot be properly comprehended (the heartbreaking way in which the female vocal remains in the unresolved minor key at the fade out magnifies this). With the possible exception of the Specials' "Ghost Town," the bleakest British #1 single ever? Yet by his follow-up "Wild Wind" he has become positively hormonal. Listen to how the whole band suddenly jacks up a gear for the chorus and the treble suddenly imposes itself upon us (cf. Alternative TV as per piece below) with the speed variance apparently random (especially Geoff Goddard's piano). Sometimes the ingredients would mutate and work themselves into an ethereal ecstasy (the anticipation floating behind Don Charles' "Walk With Me My Angel"); sometimes reverberate back into unexpected quarters (Michael Cox's terrific "Stand Up" - Sweden's Xmas #1 for 1962! - is a rocker about signing on the dole, and the wordless soprano makes a totally inexplicable and genuinely surreal appearance towards the end). Sometimes death is enough - Houston Wells' "North Wind" where the singer first kills his "baby" and then himself while pleading to be forgiven and not have his soul burn in hell. Sometimes a rave-up is enough - Peter Jay (a different one; neither has anything to do with the economist)'s canter through "Can Can '62," with an enjoyable moment when the band momentarily loses it after the drum solo. Notice also the alterations between group riffs and instrumental solos - surely a subliminal influence on Roxy's "Re-Make/Re-Model."
And then there is "Telstar."
Poor misbegotten bastards, the Tornados. Yes it's Thatcher's favourite pop record (which would have no doubt horrified Meek), yes it's been played to death, but ERASE all of that. Imagine you are listening to this for the first time. It is heartbreaking. The audacious intro (20 seconds of electronic crackle, interference and bleeps) which leads into a rapid ascent of a strange processed organ/guitar line (over the same "Johnny Remember Me" galloping rhythm) which sounded like nothing else which had ever made the charts, or indeed like nothing anyone had ever heard (Sun Ra's records didn't start becoming available in the UK until 1965/6, and even then only as expensive imports). It imparts some awesome idea of hope, welcomes the future yet simultaneously realises its own redundancy. It is a future desired but transitory and unlikely to happen, underlined by the strange processed vocal which adds itself to the final refrain, and its ultimate disappearance into the electronic void (another 20-second fade-out). It was, as the sleevenotes state, already Joe Meek's epitaph. It was simultaneously #1 in Britain and America in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and could quite easily have been the last song you ever heard. Think about that when you listen to this for the first time.
It was as if, having staked his own precarious territory, Meek was suddenly unsure what to do with it. On the compilation there ensues a rather dull and long patch with failed Tornados follow-up attempts, the completely uninteresting Heinz (ultimately reduced, in "Questions I Can't Answer," to ripping off "Louie Louie"), dullards like Pamela Blue and Mike Berry, appalling, over-speeded up covers of "Surf's Up" and "All My Loving" by no-hopers - Meek really looked as though he had no answer to the Liverpudlians. Just as ZTT could never have signed the Smiths, so RGM could have had nothing to do with the Beatles; George Martin read their minds and placated and encouraged them. Meek would have sulked in his converted kitchen. Only Glenda Collins' "I Lost My Heart At The Fairground" really stands out amongst this bunch, and possibly Geoff Goddard's beyond peculiar "Sky Men" with his vocal again speeded up to 55 rpm, and Dalek-style voiceovers alternating with Goddard's trademark pub piano. Why did Meek speed up his tracks in this way? Was it to attain a certain kind of asexual or even "feminine" voice? Compare with the very purposeful and playful way in which Prince uses the same device (as "Camille") in "If I Was Your Girlfriend" - assured and confident in its lack of confidence. Whereas Meek's voices sound - well, other-worldly, perhaps the way in which they were intended to sound ("I Hear A New World," unrepresented here, for example).
And then, at the end of this long dry spell, comes a wake-up call - "Have I The Right" by the Honeycombs. Astonishing to hear how this sounds, properly remastered - it is positively feral in its attack. Sexuality, never much of a component of Meek's work previously, now becomes apparent. Honey Lantree's drums lock with the rhythm in a fixed and ecstatic conduit of aesthetic semen. The four on the floor (actually more like 12 on the bathroom floor) stomp also foresees Slade's use of the same device seven or eight years later.
(Diversion: what a radical #'1 "Coz I Luv You" was when you think about it. That keening minimalist violin, always threatening to go over the brink - the Honeycombs meet John Cale)
The follow-up "I Can't Stop" almost outdoes it in frantic activity, but then someone ran scared and they didn't get near it again. They did produce a near-Northern Soul record in a fine reading of Ray Davies' "Something Better Beginning" but by the time of "That's The Way" had turned into the Seekers.
And yet something must have prompted Meek into his astonishing, final phase of creativity - almost luminescent, like the sudden extra brilliance in a light bulb just before it is extinguished forever. Pre-shadowed by the Blue Rondo's "Little Baby," where 17-year-old Mickey Stubbs sounds uncannily like Chris Isaak, and "Diggin' For Gold" by David John and the Mood, which indeed indicates something, an emotion, about to go on the boil.
And boil over it does, into the mindblowing "Crawdaddy Simone" by the Syndicate, to emerge as prototype freakbeat. Suddenly it is as if all the pent-up emotions implied in Meek's previous work now have to be expressed, honestly and wholly, and by God does it happen here. Guitars out of synch, atonality, phasing - for 1965, this very nearly parallels what the Who were producing at the time, and to some extent went further. This is pop epiphany. "He's so alone! He's a loner!" Meek screams through their mouths.
And now that he senses that the end is coming, the money is running out and the rope is getting thinner, Joe Meek unleashes his final testament to the world through his records. Observe Glenda Collins' "Something I've Got To Tell You," almost prostate in its apology. "I'm sorry I'm not worthy," sobs Collins. Sorry I'm not EMI. Sorry I'm not Lennon and McCartney. Sorry I'm not my bigger and smarter (if unemotional) cousin Phil Spector - whereas Spector's work is about maximising his resources, Meek's are about make do and mend, by necessity - cramming everyone into as little a corner as he could find, yet still making a giant sound.
The almost apostolic prayer of the Cryin' Shames' "Please Stay" - only #26 on the national chart but certainly a #1 in the Scottish charts for a long time, and still in demand as a last dancer in Glasgow clubs in the '80s - again, that weirdly asexual, speed-variated voice, but now sounding slowed down, as if he were coming to the end of a long and struggle-filled road. He is trying to talk himself out of committing suicide. The Riot Squad's "I Take It That We're Through" tells the same story, but via a proto-raga groove and a dessicated sax line which sounds like a desaturated Flee-Rekkers, exhumed in 1966 and bereft of joy. Jason Eddy and the Centermen's atonal restaging of "Singin' The Blues," the Tommy Steele recording of which Meek had engineered a decade earlier, now forcibly smeared with Barry Tomlinson's almost random scrapings and Leslie cabinet filtered guitar - again, like Xinlisupreme's "Amaryllis" discussed below, almost heard through a semi-conscious haze. Glenda Collins' farewell note in "It's Hard To Believe It" wherein she proposes going to the moon, only to realise that "they'll be sending them back soon [mice and men]" before disappearing into a final, funereal fog of electronica.
And the suicide note, though not the last track on this compilation, I have saved for last - "You're Holding Me Down" by the Buzz, where Meek more or less trashes everything he has ever done. It sounds as though the studio was burning down while the band were recording this. Tam White's unparalleled, near-psychopathic vocal whimpers, snarls and hisses through a rejection of life. "GO BACK! GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM!!" the band howls. The singer, the artist, is truly alone in the centre of this maelstrom. And of course, at the end the umbilical cord is finally cut, the pump shotgun fired into his landlady and then into his mouth, having just heard Brian Wilson make the definitive "Joe Meek" record in "Good Vibrations" (think about it and listen to it again), and everything dissolves/erupts into a freeform echo of despair, a mind collapsing, a humanity exploding. "I DON'T LIVE TODAY" 12 months before Are You Experienced? No life
nowhere
terminate
Meek was 38 years old when he committed suicide.
THE POLYPHONIC SPREE AND THE ARMENIAN NAVY BAND
Don't try to contrive too much. It doesn't work.
So what about the Polyphonic Spree then? They look and sound very much like an unironic Mormon redemption choir; all dressed in white robes in Coke-ad sunshine. The front man appears to be one Tim DeLaughter. He appears rather smug.
Their debut album The Beginning Stages Of... will brook no materialistic tendencies such as song titles; no, there are Sections 1-10. Nor is there much in the way of songs. The first "section" begins with the 14 musicians and 15 choir members singing "Holiday! Celebrate!" over and over to the tune of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight." Most of the lyrics are non-specific homilies about following your heart and looking up to the sun. Essentially we are talking alt. rock S Club 7, except that the latter are occasionally capable of some pretty good tunes. Things pick up rhythmically in "section" 4 but after about two minutes lapse into contemplative quiet with some desultory trumpet/flute freeforming. About a minute into "section" 7 Mr De Laughter sings "God only knows what you're missing!" and he's right - "God Only Knows" is what this record is missing, indeed any Brian Wilson-style architecture, emotion or purpose. All the signifiers without anything signified.
And indeed, Mr De Laughter's exceptionally irritating sub-sub-Donahue/Coyne whine. One urges to make it federal law that Deserter's Songs and The Soft Bulletin not be gazed upon and slavishly emulated as though they were the Sermon on the Mount - or at least to hire James Ingram or Michael McDonald to get someone who can actually sing.
"Section" eight I know as the single "Soldier Girl," yet, as with so much else on this record, one gets the feeling of scraps of songs waiting for an actual song to be written - lots of things which would be perfectly usable as middle-eights or fadeouts, but do not in themselves constitute a song.
After about half-an-hour - and knowing that the playing time of the CD is some 68 minutes - one apprehensively approaches "section" ten, and yes, it's an exceptionally dreary 36-minute minimalist trudge which every American band seems obliged to paste on to their otherwise well under running order albums - a long, "evolving" voice/electronica gradual loop/overlay/modify/bury me now. Suffice to say that Stockhausen's Stimmung it ain't. If you want adventurous electronic/voice interplay, please go forth and seek out Alvin Lucier's 32-year-old I Am Sitting In A Room, which will make you dream and your mind blossom.
If you want to listen to a genuinely different large-scale collective of musicians - not one which wishes to make ironic appropriations of the last two years' Spin front covers - then I would suggest that you bag yourself a copy of New Apricot by the 11-piece collective, the Armenian Navy Band. Unlike the Spree, Arto Tuncboyaciyan's ensemble actually are driven to play, work well together, and are not self-crucified on the cross of what is acceptable to listen to. It springs from their own culture and dives into other cultures because it is inquisitive, not ironic, because it wants to do something new.
Some of it is raucous jazz-rock-funk, somewhere between an unironic (i.e. interesting) Mothers of Invention and a slightly more reined-in Willem Brueker Kollektief (superb sax work from Armen Husmounts throughout). Having been subjected to an album of "Sections 1-10" it is rather refreshing to be faced with an album whose titles include "You Love Me From 15 Feet Away" and "My Aunt Mari Doesn't Care About My Jacket." There is good humour, but also great musical profundity; the latter-named track is in fact a slow money/image doesn't matter meditation with an unbearingly poignant melody and the fantastic voice of Tuncboyaciyan himself, one of the finest living on this planet. He bills his genre as "avant garde folk music" but states that he simply means openness to everyone. The band name, of course, is a metaphor for this; Armenia is entirely surrounded by land and therefore has no navy, so it's the human cooperation and effort required to steer a boat across land.
For me the slow ones cut deepest at the moment - "Love, Respects, Truth" where Tuncboyaciyan does some phenomenal multiphonic singing/fluting, ululating over a synth drone (cf. Jeff Buckley's "You and I") and above all "Don't Go Far Away From Yourself," which uses the same piano line as Dido's "Breathe" - yet instead of destroying music, this tries to rebuild it. A beautiful, unhurried performance with a devastating vocal worthy of Milton Nascimiento. Played on R3's world music show on the afternoon of Saturday 25 August 2001, some nine months ahead of its release, it was the last song that she heard. Please make this the first song that you hear after reading this article.
. . .
|
. . .
|
|
