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The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
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Monday, October 21, 2002
I CAN TRY, I CAN TRY, I CAN TRY THINGS
And you must try My House In Montmartre. Already recommended by Ronan Fitzgerald over at ILM, this is a fantastic compilation of – as you might expect – French house. Featuring just about everyone who matters, from Daft Punk, Air, Dimitri, de Crecy, Phoenix and Cassius, to relative unknowns like We In Music, I Cube and DJ Mehdi, it is an ecstatic piece of work to which the only relevant reaction is to dance and be transported.
Beginning with “Music Sounds Better With You,” it continues in much the same vein, going into the brilliant Buffalo Bunch remix of Phoenix’s “If I Ever Feel Better,” Daft Punk’s “High Life,” We in Music’s “Grandlife,” and on and ever escalating on. The most extraordinary moment, however, is the devastating sequence which begins with the Cosmo Vitelli remix of Benjamin Diamond’s “Little Scare.” Into the euphoria there now come intimations of mortality and impermanence as Diamond – Stardust’s vocalist – begins to wonder what music would sound like without you. Then we move into the unbearably poignant “Intro” by Alan Braxe and Fred Falke. Here is used the vocal middle section of the Jets’ near-forgotten 1987 hit “Crush On You” (which also turns up, in a different context, early on in Soulwax’s 2 Many DJs). In isolation, the child vocal harmonies are ethereal and strangely spiritual – the whole effect of this track is like a hopped-up Boards Of Canada. “You Are My High” by Demon vs Heartbreaker (what a punctum of a name!) takes this further; using a Gap Band sample (all these ghosts of ‘80s soul-pop being resuscitated!) over a swelling organ, this is a hymn to life, to ecstasy; and we are now ready for the indefinable joy of the closing sequence of Superfunk’s “Lucky Star” (with its nicely subtle Chris Rea sample), DJ Mehdi’s “Breakaway” and Alex Gopher’s “Party People,” the latter of which again proves that where Gary “Mudbone” Cooper is on vocals, there is by definition a great record. Out now on Virgin France.
. . .
ROY WOOD
Roy Wood was the British Todd Rundgren…an almost unhealthily profligate sonic architect who at his early-mid ‘70s peak straddled pop and avant with love and disdain, but who subsequently has become undervalued. Time for some re-evaluations.
Were Wizzard the anti-ELO or simply a Bizarro version of ELO? The strangely yearning psychosis of the unmatched debut single by ELO “10538 Overture,” in which both Wood and Jeff Lynne were involved, indicates a future reluctance to be embraced. Indeed, though credited to ELO, only four musicians participated on this recording; Jeff Lynne on vocals and guitar, the inexplicable Bev Bevan on drums, Rick Price on bass, and Wood on everything else (including all string and horn parts). He says that he started mucking about with a cheap Chinese ‘cello he had bought, playing Hendrix riffs on it and thinking that this was damn good heavy metal. At the song’s climax, the increasingly wayward strings threaten to overwhelm the riff (later purloined by Weller for “The Changing Man”) altogether. The first ELO album delved into even murkier waters with various improv players amongst the string section, sounding rather like King Crimson’s Lizard in dub conference with Penderecki.
It didn’t last, of course; Lynne and Wood argued, Lynne decided to give his tunes some tunes, while Wood walked off to set up Wizzard and initially had the greater success with his primary-coloured assault on good old rock and roll, Spectorising its elements to such a magnitude that you could gladly bathe in them. Wood played a lot of the instruments on the Wizzard hits himself, and despite the epic surface of their hits, there was always that home-made, peculiarly British element lurking underneath the whole enterprise – the perfect meeting point, in other words, between Spector and Meek – coupled with a very theatrical pre-postmodern grandiosity which foresees both Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the KLF.
Listen to things like “Ball Park Incident” and “Angel Fingers.” Their sound is intensified to such an extent that you wonder whether these aren’t photocopies of, or blueprints for, “classic” rock and roll songs rather than songs per se. Above all, luxuriate in the five glorious minutes of “See My Baby Jive” which predates and outdoes “Born To Run.” The ornamentation here is so top-heavy that the whole cake threatens to collapse on the flimsiest of bases. No battalion of saxophones is too undermanned; no backing vocalists too propulsive. It is a celebration, an attempt at resuscitation of a dead spirit, a Doppler simulation of “rock and roll history” hurtling past you almost too quickly for you to absorb it. It is amongst the greatest of number one singles.
This was only half the story of Wizzard, however, as anyone who has listened to their albums will testify; elsewhere on tracks like the ELO-baiting “Bend Over Beethoven” we could almost be listening to the Zappa of Grand Wazoo; there is even proto-Ambient to be found in pieces like “Dream of Unwin” and “Nixture.” It didn’t last, of course; their last album, Introducing Eddy and The Falcons, despite siring a final top 10 single in “Are You Ready To Rock,” is essentially back to basics R&R with odd tangents here and there (hear how “Rattlesnake Roll” suddenly devolves into bebop).
(And of course there may even be another half; note the crucial influence of Wood’s Wizzard arrangements and productions on the record which confirmed pop’s renewed supremacy over rock, “Waterloo” by Abba).
But the real genius of Wood is to be found in his solo work of the same period. This latter has now been made available again on the 2CD set Exotic Mixture, though one CD would have more than sufficed – the first, which in itself may well represent, if not the British Smile, then the British Wizard/True Star. Certainly songs like “Wake Up” achieve what Beck can’t quite manage to reach, with its paddling in the water rhythm and the graceful yet surreal backwards sonorities at its close; similarly the astute queasiness of “Nancy Sing Me A Song.” “Dear Elaine” – a post-psychedelic folk ballad - is like Syd Barrett attempting to emulate the Incredible String Band; the lo-fi sung “brass” backing vocals echo into each other disturbingly and in the middle section threaten to drown out the song altogether – it eerily predicts what Robert Wyatt would do on “Sea Song” just a year later. Incredibly, this was a top 20 hit.
The songs then ricochet gleefully between styles – the immaculate Wilson pastiche of “Forever,” the Barry Adamson-outdoing “Premium Bond Theme,” the completely mentalist “Going Down The Road” (subtitled, appropriately, “A Scottish Reggae Song,” and yet another unlikely top 20 hit, with its queasy saxophones, pipe bands and police sirens). “Music To Commit Suicide By” is an MoR waltz which could pass as a sitcom theme tune, were it not for the rasping saxophones and ‘cellos which arrive to cast some darkness in the middle. “Mustard” is a recreation of ‘40s danceband radio.
At this stage, with the hits more or less over, Wood burrowed further into adventure. The 1976 single “Indiana Rainbow”/”The Thing Is This” was credited to Roy Wood’s Wizzard, but represented a quantum step away from Eddy and the Falcons. “Indiana Rainbow” in particular is a racing breeze of Tropicalia; with its knowing female backing vocals, danceband saxophones and determined percussion, it sounds remarkably like a foretaste of what August Darnell would later get up to with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. “The Thing Is This,” meanwhile, is an indescribable melange of Gershwin, Zappa, Varese, King Crimson and Autechre – Wood’s own “George Fell Into His French Horn.”
Which leaves us with Wood’s “Surf’s Up” – “The Rain Came Down On Everything,” the greatest and most moving song Wood ever wrote. Vocals and piano refracted through an icy, fuzzy screen (as though he’s already drowned), MBV meets George Crumb’s “Vox Balaenae” meets Dennis Wilson’s “Thoughts Of You,” it sounds as though Wood is bringing down the curtain on his whole life.
Where could he go from there? The second CD illustrates with great sadness where he actually did go – initially to forming the Wizzo Band, with its 13-piece horn section (though certainly no Arkestra – more like Wood’s Utopia). This specialised in generally mundane and studium-filled jazz-rock, though occasional flashes of his former genius still shone through occasionally; hear the 1977 single “Dancing At The Rainbow’s End,” divine, seductive and knowing AOR which Gregg Alexander would kill to have written, and its B-side “Waiting At The Door,” with its vacillations between AOR and metal culminating in a bizarre C&W fadeout. But after that came desperation, a settling into routine, the ‘80s, occasional cynical attempts to get another hit by deploying children’s choirs (“Green Glass Windows”), horrors like “We Are The Boys (Who Make All The Noise),” a Stars On 45-type R&R medley performed by Wood, Phil Lynott and Chas out of Chas and Dave, and the final humiliation – despite the backwards intro to 1985’s “Under Fire,” Wood had ended up sounding exactly like ELO.
. . .
Friday, October 18, 2002
TRANS-GLOBAL UNDERGROUND
Why were Trans-Global Underground never massive; why are they now largely forgotten? Were they too worthy, too Charlie Gillett/Jools Holland, for the masses or the credible few? Or did they represent, along with Fun’Da’Mental and early Cornershop, a route for British pop music which the white boys quickly came to clear out?
Perhaps it was just bad timing, but their 1993 debut album Dream Of 100 Nations seems to contain within it the seeds of many future developments and has never been properly celebrated. In 1993 it was, along with A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnite Marauders, the most frequent occupant of my Walkman on the daily Oxford Tube commute. It put one in a good mood on a Monday morning, cleared away one’s mental cobwebs, ready for the week’s challenges.
Bad timing? Their debut single and Annie Nightingale-championed anthem, “Temple Head,” which also opens this album, came out in 1992, two years too late to become the supra-baggy hit it would otherwise have surely been. Certainly on a par with anything on Screamadelica (and that’s a compliment, incidentally), it is instantaneously uplifting, the opening of a curtain on the world. Samples of singing Polynesian women are deployed throughout the album to provide the hooks under and over which the multiple rhythms undulate most pleasingly. Note the first of a series of sci-fi film samples, “Watch the skies! Keep looking!” The subtext? Aliens are coming. Oh yes. Remember that this music was contemporaneous with the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Absorb what they were actually saying.
And Big Beat? Do me a favour – here are its seeds in the impossibly propulsive “Shimmer” (with a joyous rasping rap from TUUP) and dense “Sirius B,” both dense, danceable pounders of which the Chemical Brothers should still be envious. Fatboy Slim, incidentally, is invented on the latter. After nine years, both are remarkably undated. “Slowfinger” casts an eye back to ’88 acieed – a house groove with a joyfully descending bassline, answered by an ecstatic chant.
Things slow down for the sensuous “I, Voyager.” Sparse piano echoes over a spacious groove. An unknown colonist (Laurens van der Post? Gerald Durrell?) is sampled: “The wind blows warm from Africa, and we are happy.” And enter, for the first time on the album, Trans-Global Underground’s real star, the great Natacha Atlas, who bestows her ghazal vocals with great grace, answered by the deep, lascivious voice of the mysterious Neil Sparkes (some at the time said Chas Smash).
“La Voix Du Sang” decorates a (Hebrew?) lamenting contralto with a “White Lines” bassline; again the cumulative effect is irresistible. “El Hedudd” is the most conventionally constructed song on the album – indeed it perpetually threatens to break into Seal’s “Crazy” – and its main point seems to be to showcase Atlas’ warmly transfixing vocals to fine effect.
Next comes a measured lament, “This Is The Army Of Forgotten Souls.” The title (spoken by Charles Middleton) is sampled from Laurel and Hardy’s 1931 short Beau Chumps and is undoubtedly the second best L&H sample used in popular music. A desert choral lament is sensitively policed by a cautious rhythm and is periodically broken into by a No Wave orgasmic female voice/distended guitar sample (Karen Finley?).
“Earth Tribe” reintroduces the sci-fi samples to underline the political point of this record (“Another world is watching us at this moment”). Space is momentarily cleared before the massed chorus joyously barge their way in, shadowed by Atlas’ own ecstasy. This sounded especially elevating when passing Park Royal of a morning; a glimpse of greatness to come. “Zombie’ites” is spikier; TUUP, Atlas and Sparkes all vie for dominance on this track, all tonal registers covered.
And if initiating Big Beat weren’t enough, hear the amazing “Tutto Grando Discordia.” Over a pleading Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sample, the tonalities gradually shift out of focus and harmony as narrator Zahrema tells of his cosmic visions, straddling the edge of the cosmos and his living room. Atlas again articulates what words cannot. The woozy distension of this track foreshadows the full-scale exploration of this emotional arena by Earthling on their Radar album two years hence. Still disturbing.
After that, it’s time for the big climax, and what a finish – “Hymn To Us,” which contains the best Laurel and Hardy samplke ever used in popular music. Even now I defy anyone not to be moved and shaken and elated if they play this at full volume while coming over the Westway at six o’clock on a spring morning, the sun rising, seeing London spread out before you as Oliver Hardy proclaims, “Now I see it all,” and the orgasmic massed voices burst into a mantra of pure celebration over an unending 6/8 groove which realigns your heartbeat. In the right circumstances it can still stop your heart.
It’s a magnificent record. Inevitably they never really followed it up. Their next album, 1994’s International Times, featured noticeably less Atlas (by then concentrating on her excellent solo work; see her albums Diaspora and Halim) and rather too much of the wearisome-over-a-long-stretch Sparkes. And of course it wasn’t really pop; wouldn’t have gone down well in the Good Mixer in 1994, even though if Albarn came across it now he’d be down on it like one of Alfred Lambert’s customised squirrel traps.
. . .
Thursday, October 17, 2002
BETH GIBBONS AND RUSTIN' MAN
Shepherds Bush Empire, London, 16 October 2002
DJ sets. I like DJ sets as support acts. I can't remember who the two DJs were last night (let's for the sake of convenient tropism call them Leverkuhn and Famulus) but their selections were restrained, dying inside, forever 1971 as can only be viewed from a 21st-century perspective. A balm of underheard whispers from the sort of '70s about which BBC2 on a Saturday evening will disclose absolutely nothing - Nyro, Riperton, Callier, Lucien, Axelrod, Nancy and Lee, even Bread ("It Don't Matter To Me" which further suggests that rehabilitation for David Gates is long overdue). A nod to the comparable late '60s - "Alone Again Or," Gainsbourg/Birkin's Pulp template "Jane B" - and then, out of nowhere, Donna Summer's oceanic ovary of a record, "Down Deep Inside," which never appears on any of her compilations (John Barry-related copyright reasons, apparently; it does appear on a few of the latter's compilations) - Barry, literally, meets Moroder, the greatest Bond theme there never was; the central section where it all dissolves into aqueous dub before the strings re-emerge like the Titanic's bow port. Then the waves started to roar...
...and Beth came on stage with her six-piece band. "It's been a bloody long time since I've been up here," she said, grinning nervously at the audience, but she hadn't changed. Still half-crouching over her microphone, protecting it like a child, or trying to hide from it - the anti-Gallagher - she launched quietly into "Mysteries." The voice stopped everyone dead, as it should do; not forward in nature, but systematically radiating to every part of the theatre, every atom of your heart.
This was the live premiere of Out Of Season (see album review on 27 Sep 02). All the songs were heard, albeit out of sequence. No Portishead songs were performed, but the influence was far more palpable than is sometimes evident on the album, the sonorities more forceful when required. "Romance" illustrated her great ability to handle dramatic silences - no one dared to breathe in the pauses before she whispered "but that's not me."
For "Tom The Model" the theatre was bathed in blood-red light and the performance was much closer to Portishead than the R&B arrangement on the album - this song took on new colours, expanded its existing emotions. Conversely, the searing lament of "Funny Time Of Year," which closed the main part of the performance, was propelled by the band into a hammering kaddish. And there was no need for Gibbons to sing anything further on top of it; her starkly clear emotional turmoil was already evident, her voice emphatic and shattering without the need for Whitney-style arpeggio aerobics. During the instrumental climax she went for a brief walkabout among the adoring audience, getting a light for her fag, signing some autographs, and then ambled back on stage as if to say, "well that's how I cope - how about you?"
There was one more song to come, though, saved for the encore - "Show," for which the stage was appropriately illuminated by Blue light. A devastating last rite for something which is now out of reach. "The words that we'll never know." Piano, violin and double bass, all trying to play as quietly as possible, all turning in upon themselves. There was more than one person crying.
"I hope that was OK!" beamed an unsure Beth. It was more than that. It destroyed me.
. . .
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
THE COUP – WELL, STEAL IT THEN!
It is, literally, a bit rich for Boots Riley, mastermind behind The Coup, to release a record entitled Steal This Album, and then barely four years later (seems more like two, but the label says 1998) reissue it, retitle it Steal This Double Album, throw in a second live CD and two extra tracks to the original, and double the retail price. For what is otherwise one of rap’s most unabashed attacks on trickle-down capitalism, one is certainly tempted to steal the record. Indeed, the copy which HMV in the Piccadilly Trocadero did have already had its “Security Protected” strip half torn off and the shrinkwrap unwrapped, so it would have been relatively easy for me to steal it.
For those familiar with the original, you needn’t trade your copy in for the new one; the two additional tracks (“What The Po-Pos Hate” and “Swervin’”) are perfectly serviceable but aesthetically and thematically redundant to the album as originally conceived, while the one-track 73-minute live CD illustrates, for all Riley’s belief in “live band” contributions, that The Coup really need the studio in order to function meaningfully. If you don’t have the original, however, then you will need to go out and get this (by whatever means) – it’s one of the monoliths of recent non-mainstream hip-hop.
Paramount among its many merits is the album’s crowning masterpiece, “Me And Jesus The Pimp In A ’79 Granada Last Night,” which also happens to be one of the great and most harrowing death discs. Over a regretful keyboard/harp background, Riley relates the story of meeting up with his father (who is Jesus the Pimp) upon the latter’s release from prison. The Pimp is in a bad way, with his “plastic prosthesis”; now 50, “his belly hangs lower than his dick” and he is unrepentant about smacking Riley’s woman “in the dental just for asking silly questions,” meaning that the son has never found his Other. There is clearly something unresolved here; Riley remarks to the listener, “Don’t be Microsoft, be a MacIntosh hard drive.” The sampled soul revue refrain comes in: “Do you wanna ride?” over a hysterical Apollo audience, as if we are mocking him for his fate. Riley then moves on to remembering his mother and how, after marrying the Pimp, “she went from beautiful to battleaxe.” Then there comes a heartbreaking glimpse of Utopia; the beat stops, and harp cascades embrace Lady Blue’s tender but despair-ridden voice singing “You’re just too beautiful for words,” a lullaby to the child. We shift back into reality and Riley relates how his father killed his mother when he was nine with his “plastic hand stuck in (her) face” and how he watches his mother die with words of love spluttering out from her wrecked body. Three years later the Pimp goes to the penitentiary for another murder, and Riley has to admit that the letters his dad sends him from prison were the “only friend I had in my youth.” This, however, does not now deter him from doing what he feels he has to do. He turns a pistol on his father, explaining that “Microsoft motherfuckers let bygones be bygones/But since I’m a MacIntosh I’m gonna double click your icon” before shooting him dead. Its seven minutes are amongst the bleakest which hip hop has ever thrown up; even Eminem at his most nihilist (“Bonnie and Clyde ’97,” “Kim”) hasn’t yet managed to sound as traumatising as this.
The sound of the album is primary coloured and in your face. “Busteriesmology” is a diatribe against jobsworth middle managers with the refrain “When we start the revolution, all they’ll probably do is snitch” set against a thrilling “Whole Lotta Love” guitar thrash and an electrifying band dynamic. This album, whatever else it is, is most definitely made in Technicolor. It is tremendously exciting.
About halfway through the album, the personal/political focus becomes sharpened and the record becomes a very effective, bleakly black comedy of protest. In “Breathing Apparatus,” an attack on Medicare-dependent health, there is a scarifying moment where Toni Braxton’s “I shall never breathe again” motif is introduced quietly, to be followed by comments from the “doctors” – “he’s lost his will to pay” and must therefore die. In the following “U.C.P.A.S.” Riley angrily exclaims “We don’t make no damn Mickey Mouse music!” before we settle into an “I Shot The Sheriff” backdrop.
Things, as they do, come to a head in the apocalyptic and brutal “The Repo Man Sings For You,” a blistering assault on the capitalist culture which calls in repayments, wrecks lives and destroys futures, all done by jobsworths who are paid to be blank and uncaring. The systematic destruction of the family with “debts outstanding” who have fallen behind on their “repayments” is itemised in stark detail and balanced by the sadistic sing-song of the repo men (note that this motif sounds suspiciously like Jewish klezmer; you’re surely not saying what I hope you’re not saying, Riley?). The hysterical screams of “I can’t take this shit no more” from the “repo victim” (Kamilah Bolling) which end the track are hard to take, as they should be. This is in fact the start of the mini-suite which concludes the album; the screams segue into the next track, the claustrophobic ballad “Underdogs” where Riley examines the minutiae of an unfulfilled life, about how they would get into such situations in the first place, and the rotten system which feeds off their naivety and encourages them to suck out their own blood. With no money, Riley sets off to try to find some kind of a life (there are parallels here with Mr Lif’s recent I Phantom) and tries to sample the good life of clubs by “Sneakin’ In.” When this fails, he and his accomplice (Dawud Allah) are reduced to gatecrashing a funeral to find something to eat. In the skit “Do My Thang” he pretends to be the paralysed organist whose wheelchair has broken, getting his “assistant” to carry him into the church and threatening to sue if they are not let in. They discover that this is the funeral of a “Filthy Rich Banks,” precisely the sort of capitalist leech who has suckered people into financing his life by hiring them at six dollars an hour. When solemnly seated at the organ, they then pay tribute by urinating on his coffin. Which leads us into the climactic “Piss On Your Grave” an ironically celebratory rockout in which they exult at their payback. On discovering that George Washington is buried in the same church, they then proceed to similarly piss on his grave. America, you failed us. That’s what you were built for. It’s a great, liberating climax to this fantastic album, and certainly their masterpiece; last year’s Party Music is more electro-focused, and although it has great tracks like “Ghetto Manifesto,” the storming “Pork And Beef,” the hyperreal hiphopdelia of “Nowalaters” and Funkadelic-style guitar overloads like “Thought About It 2” (where Riley almost seems to dissolve underneath the guitar ocean) and “Lazy Muthafucka,” it lacks its predecessor’s extra dimension.
. . .
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
HOLLY VALANCE
Is it stretching things to say that Footprints, the debut album by Holly Valance, is exactly the album which All Saints would have gone on to make if they still existed? The crucial involvement of Nellee Hooper on several key tracks would certainly confirm this (are Massive Attack the most important British musicians since the Beatles? Their influence permeates everywhere), but also the general feeling of closure; for a debut album there is much doubt and uncertainty, and one cannot help but think that a lot of the evident frustration on Saints And Sinners has somehow seeped into this record.
It might not be what you expected. The dynamic opening trilogy of tracks suggests a far more playful Valance – considerably more playful than either Minogue or Imbruglia – with the already noted Eastern influences which sadly don’t seem to be investigated further from track four onwards.
The first track, and chart-topping debut single, “Kiss Kiss,” is an open invitation to consummate, though given the album’s subsequent development, the teasing element is paramount – aural kisses, not touching skin, are used as a motif for the title in the chorus. It is of course borrowed from a Turkish hit and is irresistible. The momentum continues on “Tuck Your Shirt In” (song title of the year?) which gives a palpable nod to “Get Yr Freak On” as well as Eminem (“My name is…Holly”), but already she is stipulating that sex is not necessarily on her agenda. Then we move into the more compressed raga of “Down Boy” which may be interpreted either as an instruction to back off or to, ahem, go down and satisfy her thus. The distantly echoed chorus vocal of “if you want me to love you” suggests some vulnerability.
Valance works best with this upbeat ambiguity. The track “Whoop” is tremendous and emphasises that her priority is to love herself. Hear the formidable repeated stabs of sound which are almost aural self-relief. Similarly, in “All In The Mind” she instructs the Other to be no more than the take-off point for her flight of imagination, in which he is to play no active part. The sensuality in this track, with its “French Kiss”-style slow organic liquid grind, is purely self-referential.
These are musically the boldest tracks here. The others are more conventional and not always satisfying. “City Ain’t Big Enough” (“…for both of us”) starts off promisingly as a possible “Don’t You Want Me” from the viewpoint of the waitress, but quickly sinks into a quicksand of cliché. “Cocktails And Parties” essentially is “Pure Shores” with a standard “you’ll never see the real me” lyric hardly merited this early in her career. “Hush Now” is standard R&B, though again we see the Other as a passive object who is instructed to dance, move, turn her on but not get involved. “Harder They Come” utilises a familiar R&B harp motif (a tone away from “Twenty Four Seven” by the Artful Dodger and Melanie Blatt!) and yes the title is meant that way. It is as if she is erecting her own emotional barbed-wire fence which no man can cross. In “Help Me Help You” there is the possibility of her opening up to the Other if he remains willing, but the balladry here is uninspired, and the next, similarly lumpen song “Naughty Girl” is a disappointingly flat “please forgive me, I’m not a saint” atonement which is completely out of place with the rest of the album.
In “Connect” she outlines her requirements for a proper relationship, but realises that by existing the former deny the possibility of the latter (“Can’t we just learn to like each other?”), and by the time of the rhythmically stumbling closing requiem “Send My Best,” she does not stop the Other from trying but warns him of likely disappointment (“I’ll always be an unknown part of your equation…you’ll be a slave to my frustration”). She concludes by intoning “If I’m on my way to your heart/Send my best to your heart…and heaven help you.” For a debut album it is truly a chilling end.
. . .
Monday, October 14, 2002
SAINT ETIENNE: A SLIGHT RETURN
“No, daylight was not the time to do this deed. He must wait for the night. Then, he could steal down to the landing-stage and, with only the moon for witness, send the Minnow to the bottom of the river. She would settle into the mud and be invisible before morning. She would have disappeared as inexplicably as she had come.”
(Philippa Pearce, Minnow on the Say, chapter 24: “Heigh-Ho!”)
We thought there was nowhere left for them to go. They had reached their terminus. The dying notes of “A Place At Dawn” suggested a place which would have no need for them come the dawn.
And yet…
“I had no idea we were so close to London.”
(Gabriel Syme in G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday)
…you drift, you have to drift somewhere. Drift away from the sea as the wind directs you. Drift upriver, back to the place which you celebrated with such fearless playfulness a decade ago. But it’s not the same place, is it? It doesn’t mean you are dead, but you can’t get away from it…it’s different. It’s isolated. It’s the last beacon in the world. But you always thought that.
“He rises spluttering, the shirt sticking and rasping on his skin. Laughing with rage he pulls it off and wades out against the sea shouting, “You can’t get rid of me!”
(Alasdair Gray, Lanark, book 2, chapter 30: “Surrender”)
Although it was almost certainly not the intention, Julian Opie’s drawings on the sleeve of Sound Of Water reminded me of the A40 journey from London to Oxford. The deserted airport could be RAF Northolt. The distant hill, telegraph poles and isolated houses depicted on page 6 of the booklet brings so strongly to my mind the Lewknor turn-off. A life now spent. Only one way to go to escape the ghosts; back to London.
Back to a supposed brutality. Sleevenote by Mark Perry. Brutalist collages by Jakob Kolding: “HAVE THERE BEEN ANY ATTEMPTS, THROUGH PLANNING, TO EITHER DISCOURAGE OR PROMOTE CERTAIN PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOUR IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD? [WHICH/HOW?]
Finisterre, the album title. A referral to a possibly obsolete shipping outpost. Literally, of course, it means land’s end, or the end of the Earth.
“But actually its artificiality is in its favour, for it induces in the composer a certain degree of stylisation that is often to be preferred to the verism of the nationalist composer.”
(Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, 1934, Part 3 (c), “The Cult of the Exotic”)
Lambert of course narrated the original 78 recordings of Walton’s Façade. I like narrations on records. Unwin on Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake; Viva on Escalator Over The Hill; the World’s Famous Supreme Team on Duck Rock. And here on Finisterre is a former Greek chorus of London; Michael Jayston. You will know the voice immediately. Veteran of a thousand commercial voiceovers, including some on Spitting Image, and the former voice on the ID jingles of pre-Top 40 Capital Radio. Something very precious to anyone who moved to London before about 1988 – the knowledge that we, and only we Londoners, had privy to this aspect of his activity, that this was ours, like the Evening Standard, dismal though the latter was even then. Now he is resurrected.
It begins with some crowd noises. Jayston asks, politely: “Have you ever been to a Harvester?” (waiting obviously for Jamie Fry’s plea to “take me to your Harvester” of six years previously). And then into the first song proper, “Action.” What a graceful return to life this song symbolises. This isn’t going back, it’s going deeper, more than A Little Deeper. An effortless grace of which only this group is capable; seductive but also looking for life. The link with Sound Of Water is explicit: “Drift along…What’ll I find there?” asks Cracknell. “I’m searching for all the people I used to chatter with.” Trying to claw her way back from Tankerville. It’s a cautious negotiation for re-entry into some sort of world. Note the ambient pauses just before the chorus.
“Back, further back…” urges Jayston. Back then it is to 1981 for the electro-chatter of “Amateur,” except that no electropop in 1981 could have sounded as full as this. A snapshot of various under-fulfilled lives, from poor Janine, finished off by a pyramid scheme (“…so who gives a hey?” breathes Cracknell with quiet insouciance), to punters who buy records purely on the strength of five-star reviews (hah!). “Tolerate all the people you hate…wear the pink and blue,” thereby paraphrasing both Super Furry Animals and Dollar, the latter’s doomed ballad sounding very similar in nature to this.
Next we have an instrumental, ironically titled “Language Lab” and prefaced by Jayston musing about “the perverse possibilities of the Barbican – you could be invisible here. You can get a notion of floating across the city.” Psychogeography, then, as Tradescant and Ashmole would have understood it. A curiously American-sounding instrumental, this, somewhere between Axelrod and Roy Budd, soundtracked by a poignant theme played by acoustic guitar, harmonica, synth bass and, eventually, strings. The tourists keeping the Museum of London afloat, its entrance floating surreally in midair. The elevated walkway offers colourful views of the Roman Wall on a clear May afternoon. You could float from the guillotine site at Tower Hill to the war memorial straddling Chancery Lane and never once notice the police discreetly tailing you because it’s May Day on Monday and you’ve been taking photos of the Nat West Tower and Leadenhall Market. The tune disappears amidst some whistling and Wren’s organ. Trying to find a reason not to throw oneself headfirst from the Whispering Gallery.
If Lucas Howard were to tunnel his weathervanes through the basement of the wrecked boat shed which Ms Dynamite inhabits on her sleeve, the results might sound like “Soft Like Me.” A pointed, south London rap by Wildflower, mulling over pretty much what Ms D mulls over on her own record, but countered here by Cracknell’s tempting/taunting calls of “Don’t you want to be soft like me?” The polar opposite to their previous excursion in this territory: “Filthy” with future Love City Groove rapper Q-Tee. Secretaries on the 39th floor of the Stock Exchange waving their Pret A Manger sandwiches at the unmarried mothers visualised distantly in the scrag ends of Shoreditch, in their shadow. On “Summerisle” we “return to the river again” – this most English of performances but with a considerably harder hip-hop beat than that used to back Wildflower. An acoustic guitar returns at the end, however, to lead us gently into a different backwater.
A piano chord which in itself could have been drawn straight from Joni’s “Blue” is quickly sublimated in a purposeful organ-driven rhythm in the song “Stop And Think It Over.” Here Cracknell is indeed back where she was, but the idealised fantasies of “London Belongs To Me” have faded with experience. The joy, if there is any left, will need to be hard won. She has returned to a former Other, or perhaps a new potential Other. “Could he be a lover?/Could he be a friend? (I want MORE)/Could I find another?” She needs a week to think things through. Maybe “if this night could last forever.” But how real is her enthusiasm for re-entering London? “There’s a ship on the ocean – feel I could float away.” That ECG bleeping ends the song, decisively, as if to say; there’s no life here. Or if there is, you bloody well find it this time.
“…But what really disturbed people was the package selling of things constituting their fundamental sense of identity. What a poor substitute nationalism is for that. It’s a brutalising process, similar to what happened to slaves taken from their own countries who become dumb and dazed because they have no future. Then the slave-owners point to them saying ‘Look, they’re little better than cattle. They have no initiative. They have no ambition. They are barely articulate. What good are they?’ It was not a problem, she reflected, one experienced in the Land of Dreams.
“Madame Pearl spiritualist Tarot card reader palm and psychic reader healer and advisor superior falling phoenix voices in the city Jane up the Cally call it amoeba aesthetics”
(Michael Moorcock, Mother London, Part 6, Chapter 2)
“Shower Scene.” Yes I thought they would get around to naming a song after Felix da Housecat’s reaffirmation of 1982. But this is Scott Walker instead of Miss Kittin – “In the rain, call my name.” Over and over, over a sad, restrained electro refrain.
“I don’t know I don’t know where’s the girl I love is she dead is she alive”
(Suicide)
You may have expected “The Way We Live Now” to be an equally lengthy response to Sound Of Water’s “How We Used To Live.” Not so – less needs to be said here. A Robert Wyatt-esque organ melody with a subtly discordant bassline eases into a chord sequence and rhythm of heartbreaking intimate grandiosity worthy of the Pet Shop Boys. Only at three minutes DEAD does a joyless and slightly sinister Cracknell come in to admonish you: “This time I’m going to say what’s been building up for days – WALK AWAY.” And then she does. You heard her. This time. More than any other time.
A plea from Jayston over the same organ which terminated “Language Lab”: “Our Father, who art in Heaven…please stay there.” Immediately we are into the “Sexy Boy”-type groove of “New Thing” which with admirable consistency segues into a classic Northern Soul chord sequence (“you think it’s such a new thing?” sneers Cracknell).
“Rock could be so good,” announces Jayston, “but we make it so rubbishy.”
Perhaps there are bigger issues at stake.
“But sit in London at the day’s decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence – then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight….”
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh, 1856)
“B92.” “Hate and fear are taking over the city,” sings Cracknell. What’s the solution? “We’re swimming against the tide” (in the next verse we’re “salmon against the tide”) – “The Boys Are Back In Town and Nothing Can Stop Us Now. This is our Wall of Sound.” Music is our only weapon, then. Even if we have to quote from our own resources. There is a distinct defiance making itself known here. Manning tells Gladstone to go easy on General Gordon; Florence dies happy, a war is spared. A culture under siege – no, all cultures under siege. Hear the twirling of the radio dial at the song’s climax – Choral Evensong, ragga, AoR, hip-hop – this is what we are fighting for. It’s us or their water.
“They’ll use up what we used to be.”
(Peter Gabriel, “Here Comes The Flood,” 1978)
“The More You Know” may well be the most disturbing thing SAINT ETIENNE have ever done. Over a fuzzed-up Joy Division bassline, balanced by a delierately atonal high-pitch synth note (genders), Cracknell whispers as though she’s about to crack your skull with her turntable. “This is how it’s all destroyed…when you give a damn,” she hisses, meaning not really because you must GIVE A DAMN or else you drown like Virginia in 1941 or me if I didn’t care.
“We ask ourselves about our identity only when we have nothing better to do.”
(Baudrillard)
Perhaps there is nothing better we could do than defend ourselves. Thus are we drawn to the astonishing conclusion of this record, the title track “Finisterre.” It largely consists of a spoken narrative, not by Jayston (apart from his final aphorism: “Use a bank? I’d rather die”), but by Sarah Churchill. Here we have a love letter to London which is fully the equal of what Tony Marchant makes Phil Daniel’s journalist say at the coda of Holding On, as well as paying explicit tribute to Sinclair and Ackroyd, and indirectly to those of us who daily followed the trail of Ashmole’s funereal cortege, going from Lambeth to Oxford, before the wind changed and we had to bring all the spoils back. “I love the lack of logic,” says Churchill. “I love the feeling of being slightly lost.” “Finisterre to Terradawn” sings Cracknell, “and start again.” As we must. Re-pave the landscape, redraw the city, redraw art from the perspective which suits it best, which is your own, by definition always your own. “Just suppose the 19th century never happened – just a straight line from Beau Brummell to Bauhaus.” And wasn’t Beau Brummell the subject of Virginia’s greatest essay? She will take Donovan over Dylan (I’d take Dr Dre over either, personally, but you have to admire her for expressing it). Note also the extremely subtle attack on the Countryside Alliance and everything others would wish “England” to stand for (which may well be the real motive powering this record; London is the future; “England” the gnarled and destructive distortion of the past) in her comments: “Five miles north there’s a town with silver birches, 27 churches, a look of horror if you drop an aitch…Round here it’s hoods up, heads down. They got it the wrong way round.” Inevitably she is bound to meet Mike Skinner wandering from the other direction and they will instantly recognise each other and embrace. AND ALMOST AT THE ALBUM’S DEATH SHE EXPRESSES THE DESIRED PUNCTUM OF MY LIFE: “I want to know the whole of the city WITH YOU.” You the listener, you the potential Other.
I said almost. Right at the end comes the punctum of the whole record. Emerging as though dredged up from the fathomless depths of water, gurgling its way back into life, is an old song. “This time, more than any other time, this time – we’ll find a way, this time…we’ll get it right.” We start again. It’s the England World Cup Squad song from 1982. Shiny yellow New Pop 1982. So let us, you and I, get it right.
“Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort – sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.
“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
“The waves broke on the shore.”
(Virginia Woolf, conclusion of The Waves, 1931)
. . .
Friday, October 11, 2002
LAURYN HILL - OR, THE RE-EDUCATION OF MARCELLO CARLIN
I bought The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill four years ago after it was ceaselessly recommended to me by my erstwhile sister-in-law. I gave it a couple of very cursory listens, then filed it away but never got rid of it, figuring that I might get the point of it at some future stage. Why was I sub-enthusiastic about it? Many reasons, few of which were to do with the actual music. It annoyed me that Lauryn Hill seemed to have become the hip-hop equivalent of the Police. Senior readers may recall in the late '70s how every mottled rock dinosaur - McCartney, Jagger, Ted Nugent etc. - when asked what their favourite new wave group was, they invariably replied the Police. The safe option. The veneer of fashionability without the need to get one's nails dirty. And again, largely with the same suspects, Lauryn Hill was the hip-hop business. The Fugees never really crossed my radar - true, their extremely freeform take on "Killing Me Softly" on TOTP was one of that programme's highlights, but the records never cut my wires. And of course, the legions of lame Lauryn wannabes who have followed in her wake. Readers, if you want to know the other, tormented side of being a paid music critic, you need think no further than the prospect of sitting attentively through an hour of the new india.arie album Voyage To India (it's a journey into herself! D'you get it??!!). After 59 minutes of remorseless remonstrating I had to clear my ears with Oxide and Neutrino for the remainder of the evening, just to un-cleanse myself.
But life is a series of re-evaluations of your own opinions, as well as new discoveries, else it is not worth having. So, having listened to it afresh, I am here to tell you that The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill is a pretty awesome record.
It is structured loosely around a classroom scenario where the "pupils" attempt to pin down and extrapolate on the meaning of "love." So the approach is the equivalent of that used by ABC on Lexicon Of Love (all secondary to A Lover's Discourse, natCh), and as with that monolith there is supine beauty and sumputousness in the arrangements and production here. As well as hard hits. "Funny how money changes the situation!" Hill sneers for her opening gambit on "Lost Ones." A dub canyon of echoes amplifies her delivery, reminding me laterally of Alan Vega. It is a call for redemption of the self: "You might win some but you just lost ONE."
The brilliant ballad "Ex-Factor" takes its cue from the same askew glance at "The Way We Were" which underlines Wu-Tang's "Can It Be All So Simple." A marching rhythm sounds like mourners trampling on gravel, followed by dirt being thrown onto the coffin. This is an admonition/plea to the Other to live life as opposed to platitudes, forcing him to retract cliches and manifest some kind of reality instead. The verse parallels confirm this: "No one loves you more than me, and no one ever will" followed in the next verse by "No one hurt me more than you, and no one ever will." Then a sonic duality (hers and his) of chirping birds and sudden tympani opens up the prospect of Hill "letting you back in" while she simultaneously demolishes him demolishing her: "You hurt yourself to make me stay." And then the extraordinary double-time climax, where she climbs to a crescendo of desperation - "You said you'd die for me - WHY DON'T YOU LIVE FOR ME?"
I'm surprised that the next song "To Zion" hasn't been press-ganged into that nitwit Republican's list of conservative Top 40 hits; as with Paul Anka's "You're Having My Baby," it's an ode to not aborting a child (which, however, does not make it anti-abortion) - hear Hill singing about how "I touch my belly, overwhelmed by what I haven't chosen to perform." She is waiting for a "manchild" to be born (Neneh Cherry!!!!) and is willing to put her career on hold for this to happen. That marching rhythm appears again, with her repeated scream of "MY CHOICE!" echoing through your soul.
After this release, burdens are lifted. "Doo Wop (That Thing)" was a GREAT summer single, with its reggae horn lines and its jibes at feckless men - it's like a JA "No Scrubs" though stops short of epics like Lady Saw's "Life Without Dick" (truly the latter is the Millie Jackson of dancehall).
The next song "Superstar," which may or may not be a jibe at other Fugees, is wrapped in a cocoon of blissful harpsichords and cascading harps and flutes, as is much of the second half of this album. The atmosphere very strongly recalls the utopian soul of the early '70s - think Curtis Mayfield''s "We've Got To Have Peace," Gaye's "Wholly Holy," think the Stylistics' "People Make The World Go Round." The lyric, though, is astringent and subverts "Light My Fire" - "Come on baby light my fire/Everything you drop is so tired/How come we ain't gettin' no higher?" This tirade against thoughtless celebrity again culminates in a double-tracked, out-of-synch rap climax wherein she ends up storming over "10,000 chariots." The same blissful orchestration winds its way through the regretful "Final Hour" (with the guitar line sampled from No Doubt's "Don't Speak"?). She goes on to explore the bipolar emotions felt in relation to the Other in "When It Hurts So Bad" (the payoff being "why does it feel so good?") over a tremulous Chris Isaak-type guitar lick.
The whole album then climaxes, emotionally, with the shattering "I Used To Love Him" (the payoff here being the throwaway "now I don't"). "He was the ocean and I was the sand." Is she exultant in her rejection of him, or in crossing over "to Zion" is she mourning the death of desire? Backing harmonies remind the listener of a hopped-up Andrews Sisters, while the punctum is provided by the repeated 1-2-3-4 hammering of a discordant note (steel drum? plucked harp?) throughout the track, showing us the real despair.
The JA feel comes back into "Forgive Them Father" where Hill chuckles her way through the Lord's Prayer, particularly in terms of "trespassing." This is quickly followed by her "how-I-came-to-be-here" autobiographical song "Every Ghetto, Every City" delivered with relish over a storming clavinet-driven funk track with some immense beats (the punctum here is where she reminisces about "Saturday morning cartoons and Kung Fu" and this is followed by a little, almost indiscernable David Carradine-style whoop - pure joy). With "That Thing" this is the most straightforward feelgood track on the album.
Then D'Angelo comes on board for the song "Nothing Even Matters" and it's as if we've been transported onto a different planet. Listen to the genius of the man's arrangements on this song - those finger snaps which are not regular and whose accents constantly appear in unexpected niches, always unbalancing the listener deliriously). That right-angled bass squelch. When D'Angelo pleads, "I sometimes have a tendency to look at you religiously," in his best, most expectant Al Green falsetto, sex becomes holy, passion pantheistic. Unlike outgoing, hysterical soul duets exemplified by Bobby Womack and Patti Labelle's "Love Has Finally Come At Last," this expression of passion is almost being drawn inwards by Lauryn and D'Angelo, they are contracting the space in which their intimacy must thrive, they are drawing the whole world, sex, love, you, into their corner. It is breathtaking.
The album then tails off slightly; there's the too obvious "Que Sera Sera"-type catch-all approach of "Everything Is Everything" (though the monolithic synth chords allied to the stomp sound almost like prototype-Britney/Stargate!) while the title track (and there is a slightly irritating tendency for Hill to refer to herself intermittently in the third person throughout) floats on a cushion of piano and strings. Despite below-par lyrics in the order of "I look at my environment and wonder where the fire went" and the overly pat conclusion that the point of her existence is to "define her own destiny," note how the strings are slightly acerbic and non-vibrato, that non-tempered semi-Asian tonal feel which you find on records like Archie Shepp's Attica Blues and Don (father of Neneh!) Cherry's Relativity Suite. There's always something there to entangle you.
CAN'T TAKE MY EYES OFF YOU
There are a couple of strictly not too necessary hidden tracks on The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill; a pleasant but unexceptional ballad called "Tell Him" and an interesting but rhythmically thwarted attempt at "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Must admit I find it hard to choose between the Frankie Valli and Andy Williams "originals." Valli had the hit in the US, Williams in the UK thanks to his TV show of the time; and the two versions are almost polar opposites in their approach. Though both white, Valli's version (also used to good effect in the opening bar sequence of The Deer Hunter) seems to me the "black" version (rhythm far harder, horns far punchier, the "I love you baby" climaxes more keenly felt) whereas Williams' is the "white" version (everything laid back, in the middle distance, effortless seduction). I love them both, though.
. . .
Thursday, October 10, 2002
EARL BRUTUS
Supergrass? Life On Other Planets? Don't make me laugh. No that's not a request; it's a sad statement of fact. Life On Other Planets by Supergrass doesn't make me laugh. Look at them, pathetically reverent as only musicians born after 1977 can be. Look at our Bolan riffs! No I'd rather look at Bolan's Bolan riffs. I'd rather have you seven years ago singing songs about being made to sit up straight at the back of the bus. This is a lineage which reveres Bolan as a logical aesthetic development from Howlin' Berry, not as a one-man punctum of sex. They do not wish to smash their records up and rearrange them in more interesting shapes; no they want their riffs in aspic, sickly, pallid and worthy.
Do you want to listen to Glam riffs being distended, fed through a Situationist cheese grater and erupting with only its own innate logic as fuel? If so, you must avail yourselves of Your Majesty, We Are Here, the 1996 (another one!!) debut album by thirtysomething lactating Karel Appel disciples Earl Brutus. And, what's even better, it's no longer available - so I would recommend that you try and find a copy in an Oxfam or Trinity Hospice charity shop, preferably one with a massive great cheesy shop sticker on its front. It is fitting.
Earl Brutus evolved from the real punctum in the Madchester barrel, World Of Twist, whose Quality Street album and astonishing one-two 45 punches "The Storm" and "Sons Of The Stage" should have constructed the future of Britpop.. In particular, Nick Sanderson and Gordon King are paid-up members of Earl Brutus, but all of them (including Tony Ogden) contribute in one way or another to their debut. The credits are minimal, perfectly lined up. "Thanks not applicable." Surnames only. The singer, Jamie Fry, is the younger brother of ABC's Martin Fry.
Now think what sort of an impact "Navyhead," the opening track, would have had had it been ABC's comeback record. It may even have been the record with which they needed to follow up Lexicon 13 years earlier. A grinding glam stomp with multiple drum machines competing to drown out the "School's Out" riff, this somehow gets closer to the puce formica reality of 1973 than anything that, say, Denim have done (much as I love the latter). It smells of situationist leather jackets. "I like James Brown/I like boys!" Fry exclaims. However did they avoid getting sued? "I'm never never never gonna see (or "going to sea"?) again" goes the joyfully morbid chorus as the three-note synth loop carries on forever and the song drowns in its own fake bravado.
Much of the album continues in the same fashion. "I'm New" achieves the fusion of old muck and new muck which Jesus Jones tried so hard to pin down; Glam meets drum-and-bass with a squealing car alarm leitmotif. "On Me Not In Me" changes tack for a hushed homage to Kraftwerk, though here it's the back of Keighley bus station rather than Neu Koln. "Take me to your Harvester," Fry whispers before the band suddenly explodes into multiple "Seven Seas Of Rhye" guitar fanfares before abruptly dying out to leave the "Neon Lights" blinking again.
"Don't Leave Me Behind Mate" ("what about our little band?") is a you're-my-pal-hic celebratory lament which Robbie Williams really ought to cover. In between limpid synth passages which, in their unstated subtexts, are strangely reminiscent of a revved-up Passage (hear "Taboos," one of the greatest singles of the '80s, to see what I mean), we get plenty more chunky boot rubbers like "Black Speedway," "Shrunken Head" and the near-boy band limpidity-meets-a-good-kicking of "Blind Date" (how the Dead End Kids' cover of "Have I The Right" should have sounded) before the closing anthem "Life's Too Long," which in its "on and on and on" refrain explicily calls up PiL's "Theme," together with its dual drum machines providing a rhythm which could either be Glam or disco but which finally collapse in free-form havoc. After the smoke has cleared there's not much left to express other than the Grange Hill theme produced by Alternative TV of "Earl Brutus" itself.
Stage performances have involved cheese throwing, AMM-type walls of feedback to drown out the radio, and a revolving petrol station forecourt sign saying "PISS" and "OFF." The subtext: how can we old lags be more radical than these mealy-mouthed 22-year-old JJ Cale devotees? What happened? Here is another suggestion. Which of course nobody took up, least of all themselves. The follow-up Tonight You Are The Special One appeared on Island and was rank. Since then, they continue to gig but little else has been heard from them. We need a better future, and unfinished business needs to be resolved. So rediscover them, if you would be kind enough.
. . .
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
ALL SAINTS: GETTING OFF ON THE CONFLICT?
That's all you can think of when listening to their All Hits collection. Oh, of course there was so much more punctum in Melanie Blatt's earlobe than the entire body weight of the Spice Girls, but it's the tensions which draw you back to their music now; the fact that the sleeve design for this compilation was clearly thrown together in about 90 seconds, the fact that Blatt/Lewis and Appleton/Appleton are very pointedly photographed in two separate pairs, the unabashed misery which oozed through the latter's assumed glee on last night's Frank Skinner Show, the knowledge that they probably have shot their bolt. Liam Gallagher off with a Nicole lookalike? How more purposely demeaning can you get?
The fact is, of course, that the Appletons were taken on as hired hands, never considered as anything more, hardly ever given a lead vocal. Blatt and Lewis as a duo All Saints were signed to ZTT originally, and when they doubled in size and moved to London Records, it is significant that yet again Cameron McVey was involved - surely the lynchpin of all post-Madonna girl pop, from Neneh Cherry onwards?
Their first single, "I Know Where It's At" is the considered, long-shot Robert Altman to "Wannabe"'s hyperactive Scorsese. Yes, they want to have a good time, but they do not want to leave the ground either; it's all a "good-time" live band approach, which of course is in itself a construct (the Naturals, the Anti-Corporate Spices), but simultaneously undermined by Lewis' 78 rpm rap. But this was just a warm up for their extraordinarily bleak succession of singles to follow.
"Never Ever" is six minutes of punctum. The almost reluctant Shangri-Las spoken word opening, as if whichever Appleton it is was a nine-year-old made to read a poem at an end-of-term school concert. The delivery is hesitant, strangely humble, almost drained of any real feeling or passion. I was retrospectively reminded of the Langley Schools Music Project. Then carnality sneaks into the song as Lewis and Blatt begin to trade verses. Their "indecision" is far more decided; they need something physical and see the argument with the Other as merely a routine obstacle to overcome so that they can indulge. The alternations between "A to Zee" and "A to Z" depending on rhyming convenience; the inordinately sexual way in which the words "complications" and "hesitations" are played off half a beat behind the rhythm, the palpably liquid flow of the chorus - redoubled by their lovely Woody Allen-style "shrugging the shoulders in combat trousers" dance routine when performing it on TV. It gradually works itself up into some sort of a catharsis, and at fadeout makes the transition into undisguised desire, over the fractured D'Angelo guitar and beats: "You can tell me to my face..." They can hardly wait.
A strange double A-side of cover versions followed: "Lady Marmalade" (better, because more contained and less overdone, than the all-star Moulin Rouge version) and "Under The Bridge" produced by Nellee Hooper, which I am inclined to think is infinitely more disturbing than the Peppers' original. Here there is no easy children's choir cathartic climax, merely a woozy uncertainty; the Red Hot guitar intro sample wanders in and out of view, like the Royal Festival Hall observed across the river with bleary, nocturnal, stoned eyes; the Mu-Ziq-style vibes motif; the complete disregard for the original song's chord sequence. This is despair which is not easily resolvable, if at all.
"Bootie Call" and "All Hooked Up" constitute a mirrored pair of songs pretending to welcome, yet ulitmately rejecting, the assumed Other. The former calls, as Neneh Cherry declared a decade previously, "I'll give you love baby, not romance," except here it's sex above even love. Don't exceed the boundaries which I have set for you, lad, and we'll get on fine. We will please you in your confinement. The answering machine ending; the machine without even a ghost in it. On "All Hooked Up," a precursor of sorts to the Sugababes' "Round Round," you transgressed my boundaries and so you're not getting me in any way, sucker! Radical stuff.
In "Pure Shores" and "Black Coffee" they float to the Other's side. Thanks presumably to William Orbit, there is now an airiness to their work but a strange, suspended sort of air, as if they have moved to the next world; an ethereality just outside our grasp. "Pure Shores" with its "I'm calling you" refrain, may well be the answer record to Joy Division's "Dead Souls" (don't forget that New Order were also on The Beach's soundtrack). And as for the extraordinary "Black Coffee" - a picture of idyllic love, idyllic routines, perfection which still seems so fragile as if it will topple over at any second. Hear the alternations between the heavenly chorus and the ominous minor chords/bassline of the verses. The pause in the middle as they decide whether to opt for life or death. The shattering conclusion which should be heard while reading the first chapter of Jim Crace's Being Dead.
The compilation ends with two "hidden" tracks: "I Feel You" and "Dreams." Both remain distended and ethereal; the first celebrates the Other ending the singer's loneliness; the second suggests that it might all be illusory. Was there really anywhere left for All Saints to go? The album feels "cut off" in a way; a record of unfulfilled lives.
. . .
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
CLIPSE
I suspect that the Neptunes were looking for their own Bubba Sparxx. They may do just one thing, but they still do it well enough to merit my indulgence. From Virginia they present the collapsed Clipse, the duo of Pusha T and Malice, who set to work in their rural destruction factory on their debut album Lord Willin'.
While they narrate a perhaps over-familiar tale, the Neptunes dutifully run through their haversack of tricks. We get the honking baritone sax of Beenie Man's "Ola" making a return on "Young Boy," the slide-whistle from the now three-year-old "Caught Right Out" on "Ma, I Don't Love Her" (i.e. "I buy her whips and shit" with Faith Evans as Kelis), the psychedelic wooze of "Bobby James" on "Gangsta Lean." They grew up, drugs were manufactured, they continue to "deal herb in front of your house" yet still insist that they are not rappers ("I'm Not You") against the dying Seal of an '80s synth. What are they and why are they? You may not have the patience to ascertain for yourself. "Let's Talk About It" featuring Jermaine Dupri, is the bastard cousin of N*Sync's "Girlfriend." "Virginia" does do some nice things with its post-Loveless guitar swoons, but the real standout on this record is "Grindin'" - so much of a standout, in fact, that we get three versions of it here with various celebrity cameos from NORE to Sean Paul. Certainly the percussive car-door slams (think Test Dept stranded in a barrio without water) bring a welcome edge to the proceedings. The three versions evoke a picture of the kids stamping on the car until it is spent; the final Selection Remix pushes the synth blips to the fore, reminding us of Rammellzee vs K Rob's "Beat Bop" paid for with food stamps rather than a National Endowment grant.
. . .
Monday, October 07, 2002
AN AGE OLD QUESTION
Just what do you do about the fact that you enjoy listening to dynamic, propulsive music which lyrically is right-wing beyond Celine, beyond Rand, beyond any form of redemption? There are a number of approaches. One is to view it dispassionately as the end result of a free-market society, of what unrestrained capitalism does to a society and an individual. This is the stance which I chose to take on the first, eponymously-titled mini-album by Schoolly-D back in 1986. Unlike any other rap of the time, and unlike most rap subsequently (at least until the onset of Def Jux), this music defied you to dance to it. Beats were mixed back amidst swathes of dub echo, and the vocals weren't particularly upfront either; everything was heard from a distance, or from the bottom of a deep, radiation-filled crater. Amongst other things, Schoolly-D comments on this record on how funny it is watching someone you've just shot squirming in their dying throes. Women are unequivocally "bitches." And yet musically it was phenomenal and innovative - the flipside to Michael Gira's founded paranoia; a dilemma never to be encountered with the likes of Skrewdriver.
In recent times, innovation in mainstream rap has continued with a proportional increase in dumb attitudes. Sitting - or even dancing - through the collective smirks of Ludacris, Ja Rule, Mystikal and others on the Westwood Presents Vol 3 album is, ultimately, a guilty pleasure. You recognise the dumbness of the thoughts expressed but don't let that overpower the astonishing escalations of the music.
Two more cases now come to mind. The first is 2 Stepz Ahead, the second album from So Solid satellites Oxide and Neutrino. The ethical dilemma involved in enjoying this record has already been articulated - albeit, typically, not very well - by Alexis Petridis in the Guardian. Why, Petridis asks, should Neutrino's lousy, sexist doggerel fuck up the genuinely innovative sonic landscape which Oxide has produced? The problem with this argument is that, having listened to the album, I'm not convinced that Oxide's approach, though highly enjoyable, is in any way innovative - his approach would appear to be a marriage of the synth brutality of recent electroclash with a slightly more refined rhythmical variation on the 2-step template. It reminds me of a somewhat beefed-up version of the harder-edged d&b of the mid-'90s - Skykicker, Dirtdevils, the No U Turn crew - which is no bad thing.
Secondly, is there by any stretch of the imagination any reason why we should take Neutrino's words seriously? As a general point, I think albums need to get rid of "intros" - after all, you don't get Brian Wilson coming on at the beginning of Pet Sounds to explain to us several dozen times over what an innovative album this is. We'll be the judges of that. Nonetheless, Neutrino's approach is such that you can only really laugh at it - he's actually rather funny. This is perhaps most apparent on the first of the album's two takes on "Rap Dis" where he has a jibe at S Club 7, does a schoolboy chant of "Don't Stop Movin'," and goes on to diss "lame MCs" who "sound like Mr Blobby." Now, Petridis would have us regard that as a mark of the immaturity which lets the album down, but in actual fact I rather enjoy someone jeering about Mr Blobby over adventurous music; it's the childishness which would kill pop music if it ever let go of it (compare to the abundantly worthy, can't argue with a syllable of what he's saying, how many times have you played it in the last ten years BE HONEST, Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury). The rest of the album continues in a similar vein, and on "Rap Dis 2" and "Hard 2 Get," Kaish and The Twins respectively undermine Neutrino's dumb-assed come-ons. The really bizarre track here is "Amsterdam," an Irvine Welsh-style recollection of a drug-induced one-man crimewave ("I pushed a policeman in the water to see if pigs float") which ends with him trying to hijack a tram, having all his limbs broken, and finally (somehow) jumping to his death, set against a bizarre martial background. Helpfully, my copy came with a bonus instrumental CD, so Oxide himself probably realised how Neutrino's mouthwash wouldn't necessarily wash down, and the instrumental adventures can be enjoyed on their own (though for me the vocals are a necessary juncture to it).
More serious problems present themselves with My Crew, My Dawgs, the debut album by the dancehall vocal quartet TOK. This is an instantly aggressive record, but musically it is mostly compelling; the Four Tops relocated in a shanty town. "Man Ah Bad Man" with Bounty Killer rocks, "Gimmi Da Muzik" manages to make even Shabba Ranks sonically useful, "Eagles Cry" approaches Prince's "When Doves Cry" from, it's safe to say, the opposite angle to Patti Smith's recent reading. "Money 2 Burn" uses the same backing track as Beenie Man's "Miss L.A.P." to nearly as good, if less epic, effect, while astonishingly, on "On The Radio" we hear the exact same refrain ("TOK is on the radio...mashing up your stereo" etc.) which subsequently materialised on Ms Dynamite's "Dynami-tee." An instance of the reformer borrowing from the reactionaries?
But where TOK and I part company is on the track "Chi Chi Man." Yes it's another "Boom Bye Bye," more pseudo-Biblical homophobia - to the tune of a naggingly familiar Christmas carol (the "do you see what I see?" one - answers by email please) the four lads joyously chant "Make me a fire for to burn them!" over and over. OK, so we can't turn our heads and pretend that these viewpoints don't exist or should not necessarily be heard...and while this is already one step too far, they go another fatal step further in the "interlude" "Ghetto Youths Anthem" wherein we hear a bunch of young children chanting the same chorus. So it is obviously central to their philosophy. Why would they go back to it? Why would they make such an issue out of it? And it needless to say fucks up and negates everything else they might have to say. Even Skrewdriver were never reduced to having a gang of kids on their albums chanting "Burn the Jews," but TOK are. And you can argue all you like about it, but this is the reverse of Neutrino's ultimately harmless "childishness"; it is evil indocrination, it is anti-human, and I say to hell with it. And then I go and play the album again. Go figure.
. . .
Friday, October 04, 2002
SMOKEY'S A MIRACLE
Wasn't Smokey Robinson's the most asexual voice in all of Motown? Marvin Gaye aspired to a similar satyred unification with the Other ("it's too late for 'you and me'"?) but his visions were always firmly and unambiguously emanating from a very specific male viewpoint - whereas Smokey at his most ethereal could be every man, every woman, every faun if he so wished.
And yet Smokey's was also the most varied voice in all of Motown - capable of compassion, hurt, irony, selflessness and ecstasy. All underscored by one of the most expressive and astute marriages of words and music in the last half-century, so important that the Beatles would have been lesser without his example (and exactly how pissed off would Smokey have been to read William Mann in the Times praising "Not A Second Time" for its Beethovenian harmonies, when all John and Paul had done was to appropriate one of Smokey's trademark chord changes?). Prince couldn't have happened without him; nor could D'Angelo (as the latter's cover of "Cruisin'" on Brown Sugar reminds us).
A new 2CD, 52-track compilation, Ooh Baby Baby: The Anthology, by Smokey and the Miracles, has just come my way. It covers the years from the Miracles' doo-wop beginnings in 1958, through to their Motown heyday, and leaves the story in 1972, when Smokey left to go to LA and launch what remains a woefully undervalued solo career. As with Hot Chocolate in the UK, it remains a scandal that the Miracles are remembered for maybe half-a-dozen hits which every schoolboy knows, while the rest of their astonishing back catalogue stays relatively neglected.
The early doo-wop sides are divine. "(You Can) Depend On Me" is sung by Smokey with such an apostolic grace; this is the reverse of Levi Stubbs' more overly passionate, but no less felt, declaration of faith in "Reach Out I'll Be There." Smokey will stand by you, will protect and embrace you; listening to him, you feel that nothing can ever harm you, that pain will never penetrate you. It is an aural Pieta. It is a holy incantation worthy to stand beside the Impressions' ""I'm So Proud" or the extraordinary pre-dub aura of the Flamingoes' "I Only Have Eyes For You." Yet on the next track "Who's Lovin' You" Smokey, without altering any of his tone or approach, suddenly sounds lost, bereaved, bemused that the Other has not reciprocated his offer of protection. It is as desolate in its search as Alan Vega on the astonishing post-9/11 finale of Suicide's forthcoming masterpiece American Supreme.
And yet, just as life seems on the verge of slipping away, along comes a reassertion of the Self, a demotion of the importance of the exclusivity of "the Other," in "Shop Around." And the music instantly becomes ecstatic in its expectations; similarly songs like "You Can't Let The Boy (Overpower) The Man In You." But when an actual "Other" materialises, we become more meditative and also more carnal - "You Really Got A Hold On Me," "A Love She Can Count On," "Would I Love You." Sometimes Smokey is satisfied to lose himself in the potency of music alone: "Mickey's Monkey," the extraordinary forward propulsion of "Goin' To A Go-Go" (Gaye on drums, with that same slightly ominous beat heard on "Dancing In The Street" and finally becoming unambiguously ominous on "Grapevine"). And yet there's doubt, too: hear Smokey's rarely unleashed, and therefore far more potent when it arrives, squeals and yells on the live workout "I've Been Good To You," as well as the unspoken dread in "Baby Don't You Go," where he simply imagines what would happen if the Other left him, but with such intensity you wonder whether there's an "if" involved at all. Finally, of course, the split happens, but here there's still no overt bitterness; in "My Girl Has Gone" Smokey continues to wish her all the best, loves her enough to want her to remain happy with someone else - a display of selflessness to stand beside "Make It Easy On Yourself" (either firm as in Jerry Butler, or resigned but accepting as in Scott Walker).
Smokey keeps coming back to the theme of pretence; most obviously in "Tracks Of My Tears" and its rewrite "Tears Of A Clown." Of either there is nothing to add to the millions of words already existing in relation to them, except to note the half-tempo, slightly out-of-synch horn lines which shadow the chorus in "Tracks Of My Tears" (see also "You Are My Sunshine" by Russell and Jordan, discussed below); the reality behind the facade.
The lazy thing to do is generally to write off the Miracles hence, and pay no attention to their subsequent work. In fact, the only problem with this new Anthology is that their extraordinary 1967 album Make It Happen seems under-represented. Good to see "More Love" - perhaps the most heartfelt of all Smokey's "positive" songs - here as well as the proto-raga "The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage." But the phenomenal six-song sequence which closes MIH as an emotional descent really has to be heard in sequence - we need to have "After You Have Put Back The Pieces (I'll Still Have A Broken Heart)" and "It's A Good Feeling." The sequence ends with "Tears Of A Clown" and in this context, as a terminal threnody, it destroys the listener. Happily MIH is available as a twofer with the almost as good Special Occasiona lbum. Hear the woozy Sgt Pepper brass on the latter's title track (so much less contrived than, say, Shakira's "Underneath Your Clothes") and travel further to its excoriating triple whammy of an ending ("Your Mother's Only Daughter," "Much Better Off" and "You Only Build Me Up To Tear Me Down"), none of which sadly appears on here. But we do have the ominous, stop-start "Yester Love," the irresistible "Choosy Beggar" (a jibe at "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"/David Ruffin?) and "(Come Round Here) I'm The One You Need" where Smokey tries to do a Four Tops, but ends up sounding even more childlike.
And there's also now a cynicism in his work. Listen to "Baby Baby Don't Cry" where he pretends to commiserate with the Other after an unsuitable romance, but really is ecstatic that it hasn't worked out, that ergo he has another chance, and is subtly tearing the Other to bits with his words. And sonically this was in its own undemonstrative way every bit the parallel of what Whitfield was doing with the Temptations at the time. Hear the sudden aggressiveness of Marv Tarplin's guitar on "Doggone Right," hear the oddly mixed percussion asides on "Point It Out" which sound as though Smokey is stealthily trepanning your skull. Hear above all the fantastic, why-wasn't-it-a-single "Here I Go Again," with its weird chordal slides, its askew strings, the totally unexplained mandolins which enter midway. It is what "Just My Imagination" would have sounded like had its drink been fully spiked.
Hear also "Who's Gonna Take The Blame" (30 years before "We Need A Resolution"), a lament for/admonishment to a childhood friend now turned prostitute which is nevertheless evidently more meant than Diana Ross' "Love Child" and consequently knocks it out of the moral ballpark. The deceleratijng plea of the guitar on the seductive "When Sundown Comes." The bizarre uptempo interpretation of "Abraham, Martin and John" which attempts to reclaim the sentiments of the song from sentimentality and tries to use them to forge a way forward. Notably, when Tom Clay did his landmark 1971 proto-sampling "What The World Needs Now/AM&J" single, he treated the latter song as the Miracles had done.
Right. Now we need an equally exhaustive survey of Smokey's solo work - and the Miracles, who with Billy Griffin as lead singer certainly did not evaporate after "Love Machine." Now then, a Smokey solo track listing - "Just My Soul Responding" (has "Happy Birthday To You" ever sounded more menacing?), "Cruisin'," "Just To See Her," "Tell Me Tomorrow," "...And I Don't Love You"...
. . .
Thursday, October 03, 2002
ANOTHER DEVASTATING POP RECORD MADE BY SOMEONE CALLED ROB
Today, readers, I am going to recommend to you a French concept album about a half-man, half-faun and his doomed love affair. No this isn't the spirit of '76 (thank the Lord!) - Sid would never have died for it, but you might. The record in question is Satyred Love by a Frenchman known simply as Rob.
What is it like? Imagine if you can a French Neil Hannon sans irony and aware of these delicious little crevices of late '70s/'80s pop which few others have dared to explore. Think of a conference between '80s shiny yellow electropop in general, divine AOR chord changes (think 10cc, think Hall and Oates) and more than a smattering of A-Ha's neurotic Nordic uncertainty - indeed, this could well be the sequel to that trio's tormented Scoundrel Days masterpiece.
It starts, appropriately enough, with the birth - "Introducing A Satyred Love." Here we have a solemn Gainsbourg-style voiceover atop a punchy Hammond organ riff - what you wish the Charlatans would try a little harder to sound like - "Silk comes out of his mouth when he echoes the songs of nature/People watch him rise upon the moon and in the depths of eternity."
Having been born, the satyr now looks for guidance. "Godspeed" is a hymnal plea ("Oh my God, protect me") set against an Air-style ambient shimmer. Note the repeated stretching out and involuntary vibrato of the vocoder against the word "protect."
We now move from the sacred to the carnal: "You & I & My Song" is a splendid Numanesque electo-stomper, where his desire is most audible ("Look at my hands/See how they shake for you/Look at my heart/See how he jumps for you"). But alongside the sensual, there is already a portent of doubt: "Watch out young girl/You know I could leave you first."
Love, when found, has to be consolidated, and Rob does this on the following two tracks, both immaculately seductive pop: "King Lover" and "Never Enough." In the latter, the satyr's doubt becomes more explicit: "You say I never call you/But the phone's always ringing/When I get to think of you/So why keep asking me?...You say I'm a selfish bastard/But I'm not a worried mind/When I get to think of us/It's me I think about." Is this brutality or just honesty? All set against chord changes worthy of Andrew Gold at his finest.
Then comes the crux of the whole symmetrical aesthetic arc of this record: "The Wedding Day." Primarily a solemn, organ-led instrumental, it sounds more like a funeral march. Its sustained, heartbreaking minor chords are worthy of Badalamenti or Wilson. At the end, he whispers "Shall I know if I love you on the wedding day?"
I personally found this piece very painful to listen to, because (and it's nothing to do with the intent of this album) I didn't want to be reminded of weddings which end in death. It brought everything back, and like My Computer's Vulnerabilia, which I now recognise to be a potentially very important record indeed, it made me think about leaving this world (as I cannot help but do periodically). Happily, I have plenty of things to keep me busy in this world for the time being.
The mood of the record, however, now becomes distinctly more melancholic (although Rob himself thinks that the German word Schadenfreude sums the concept up better). In the Morten Harket sings Robert Wyatt lament "Mermaid Deluxe," the satyr admits that he has not outgrown his temptations: "I can hear girls/Calling and coming/While I'm going/In and out" accompanied by an appropriately ironic "doo wop" female backing chorus. The achingly poignant instrumental "Love Bizarre" invites us to ponder his difficulty in reconciling the physical with the mental. By the time we reach "Do You Mind If I Keep On Watching You" he has effectively ceased to play any active role in love-making with the Other; his soul has separated from the body and he is now merely spectating. This reverses the viewpoints set out in "You & I & My Song."
And when we reach the inevitable break-up song "Unilarme" strings arrive to underline the satyr's self-induced grief. The thoughts were better than the realities. Now, instead of wanting protection, he pleads to the Other: "Oh please, let me survive...Would I be afraid/With a love with no waves/I was hoping/You were less/Than what you are...Only drugs understand me/Better than you'll ever...No I'm not one/One of your kind." In other words, the faun gets in the way of the man and makes any sort of consummation impossible. Joy/sorrow - this record charts the emotional rollercoaster which is a key component of any relationship. The closing "Godspeed Reprise" leaves the satyr to ponder the consequences of Schadenfreude.
These words hardly scratch the surface of how deeply moving this record is. Apparently he fell in love at the time when he started to write this album - and happily remains so. It's a brutal look at the conflicts which exist within the mind of every human being seeking love/an equal. As a masterpiece of bleak pop it stands beside the aforementioned Vulnerabilia. It is released in the UK next Monday (7). It will emotionally destroy you.
. . .
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
THE GREATEST FEMALE VOCAL PERFORMANCE ON RECORD EVER
"You Are My Sunshine" by the George Russell Jazz Workshop featuring Sheila Jordan (1962)
It immediately starts with a duality. In the foreground, there are some bluesy piano riffs, steadily stalked by martial drums and solid bass. In the background, three horns play at 3/4 of the rhythm section's tempo, sharing between them a series of six-note bitonal chords. The rhythm section is improvising conventionally on the tune in question. When they get to the end of the first "chorus" the horns sound an anxious, still bitonal fanfare.
Steve Swallow's bass ostinato leads us into the main body of the first section of this piece; the horns, now at half the speed of a more active rhythm section, solemnly play the tune you've heard a million times. But George Russell has given the melody a new minor key harmonisation. What could have been celebratory is now regretful and poignant. The ambience is very Kind Of Blue (in itself, a record hardly imaginable without Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation to precede and influence it). Again, after one chorus, the band again wind down to a halt.
Now, Russell's piano slowly and delicately plays the melody with augmented fifths. The horns now sound low bitonal moans, the clouds reluctantly parting to admit the sunrise which Russell's piano represents. There are three different tempi here but the overall effect is arrhythmic. Nothing sounds resolved.
Then the band move into a brighter tempo, but with the horns now improvising on the modality of the same minor key reharmonisation. There are quickfire, waste-no-time solos from Don Ellis (trumpet), Garnett Brown (trombone), Paul Plummer (tenor sax) and finally Ellis again before the rhythm section briefly doubling the tempo, Russell's piano chords sounding increasingly agitated, while the five-syllable title melody is stated at funereal tempo by the horns above.
Then the whole band shuts up.
Enter the voice of Sheila Jordan.
She sings the first verse, avoiding any easy melodic or temporal references, completely out of tempo and against a backdrop of complete silence. She starts almost with a whimper. It is like the recorded voice of a murdered child - so innocent and yet so doomed. She steadily increases her volume when she encounters desire: "You'll never know dear...How much!...I (confident)...want (not so confident)...you (the battle is lost)." The "please" starts as a passionate wail but quickly subsides into the concluding and parallel whimper of "don't take my sunshine...away."
And similarly the second verse, at least to begin with. Is Russell going to let her sing the whole song acappella? No - after the opening, newly refuelled with desire, "The other night dear..." the opening six-note bitonal horn figures reappear behind her, with the same martial drums (Pete La Roca). Adulthood is now upon her, confirmed by the entry of the bass on the final line of the second verse, the quickening up of the drums, and the emergence of a reluctant major key mid-tempo swing as she now ecstatically declaims "You are my Sunshine! My ONLY sunshine!" and the band settle easily into a blues workout. But not for long - again, after the almost orgasmic "PLEASE" the ecstasy now turns into agony "Don't take my sunshine - AWAY!", the "away" stretched over 12 bar lines as the horns resettle into tonal uncertainty.
And finally, destruction. An impossibly fast bebop tempo ensues with discordant Taylorish piano hammerings, over which the horns, still at half tempo, now SNEER the melody in an apocalyptic atonal disharmony. Constant Lambert once remarked that the unfamiliar reharmonisation of the National Anthem would be far more profoundly disturbing to the listener than anything by Berg or Webern in their sternest 12-tone mood, and indeed this is frightening. Spat out in a Celine black comedic style, the horns tell us that death is indeed the end. And as they end their fanfare of death, the rhythm section speeds to a terminal halt and the piano beats itself against the wreckage. The final chord sounds like the last coffin nail being hammered in.
(In fact, the original intention of the piece was to present an aural picture of the mining community in Jordan's native Western Pennsylvania, which had seen better days even by 1962. Russell and Jordan paid a visit there, toured the region and sang in working men's clubs of an evening, including a straight reading of "You Are My Sunshine." The aim was to convey the feeling of pride which still remained in an economically almost devastated community)
. . .
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
DAVID AXELROD
Anthology II
Is Axelrod really an avatar? The first Anthology compilation on Stateside suggested not; from the Electric Prunes' "Holy Are You" to Lou Rawls' punctum-filled firing up of "For What It's Worth," this was clearly NOT a routine clock-puncher unjustifiably resurrected by Gilles Bloody Peterson and James Flipping Lavelle. Now there is a second one available, Anthology II, which if anything is both lighter and darker.
There are certainly few more purposeful starts to an album - even a compilation - than Cannonball Adderley's "Tensity." Scored in 1970 for a large ensemble at the urgent behest of Adderley, who saw it as vital therapy for Axelrod following the then recent drug-related death of his son, the immense waves of brass and rhythm signify rebirth, and a not-too-hidden ecstasy which is very reminiscent of "Family Joy Oh Boy," the equally determined opening track of Michael Gibbs' contemporaneous and eponymous debut album. Indeed Axelrod and Gibbs seem to have been travelling on parallel orchestral lines; the voicings are direct without being over-simple, and the rhythm can go from concrete to diffuse and back within the space of a few seconds. One might also point out a certain similarity in theme and approach to 23 Skidoo's "Coup" of 14 years later. In any case, this dynamic framework compels Adderley to blast out possibly his most passionate and committed alto solo on record; joyfully leaping intervals, moving into Dolphy-esque clusters, sounding very much like Mike Osborne at his most intense. Brother Nat follows on cornet (with partial voice-through-the-valves multiphonics), then Joe Zawinul on an oddly distantly-mixed set of keyboards; this seemingly abstruse yet deeply felt solo is, according to the sleevenotes, representative of what Zawinul felt about Axelrod's son's death. Yet grief is never allowed to overwhelm the positive intensity of this remarkable performance.
The rest of this compilation veers between the mid-'60s and now (but last year's rather scrappy self-titled comeback/remix album on Mo'Wax is not represented). Mostly his orchestral pieces are so rhythmically propulsive that you understand why Shadow and followers venerate him; astonishingly punchy by 1968/9 standards (even though remastered). The Blake adaptations - from his two late '60s albums Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - all seem to focus on cumuli of orchestral chords which float in the middleground and are either directed in a positive ("Song of Innocence") or virulently ominous negative ("The Sick Rose") direction, in the latter case without resorting to hysteria but simply reharmonising whole-tone chords and sustaining them at right angles to the rhythm to create unease. Though considerably less prosaic than Mike Westbrook's many series of Blake adaptations (best sampled on 1980's Bright As Fire: The Westbrook Blake), these understated minatures still have a lot of impact, possibly betraying the influence of some Third Stream composers such as Duane Tatro and John Carisi (for especial relevance, hear the latter's "Angkor Wat" on Gil Evans' 1961 Into The Hot album)
On this compilation you will also find a couple of tracks "conducted" by Man From U*N*C*L*E* star David McCallum, though musically they are Axelrod through and through. The more notable piece is "The Edge" which turns out to be the musical basis of Dr Dre's "The Next Episode." Perhaps mercifully, McCallum's Axelrod-produced Top 40 vocal hit "Communication" is not included. There are also a couple of fine pop-soul workouts from Lou Rawls, from whom Axelrod always seems to extract the most committed of his performances (see his astonishing vocal on "Loved One" from the aforementined Mo'Wax album); particularly noteworthy is "Dead End Street," which starts with a Rawls state-of-the-nation (well Chicago) narrative (apparently inspired after he'd been laid up in bed with mumps for three weeks in '68 and watching TV) and which is noticeably similar in approach to his performance on "Let's Clean Up The Ghetto" by the Philly All-Stars some nine years later.
Also included here is a lengthy excerpt from his 1993 orchestral work Holocaust. While one doesn't doubt Axelrod's deep commitment to this piece, I have to say it doesn't quite work; soprano vocals overegg the pudding somewhat, and the whole section ("Kristallnacht") comes across as sub-Bartok/Richard Strauss melodrama (specifically Bluebeard's Castle/Electra), lacking the killer final blow of Schoenberg's A Survivor From Warsaw or the far more direct and harrowing Kristallnacht of John Zorn in 1991. And when Ernie Watts' sax floats in over the massed orchestra, one is indelibly reminded of Mingus' "The Chill Of Death" and driven straight back to Let My Children Hear Music.
Nonetheless, this album also showcases Axelrod's take on warped pop. One is a beyond bizarre rendition of the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" by one Ray Brown - not the bassist, but an Australian pop idol of the late '60s (who evidently never crossed over). The song begins with a Copland-style brass fanfare and is continually detoured by silences, slowing down, etc. Preposterous yet perplexing.
Perhaps the most bizarre track of all here is the most recent one: a taster for his forthcoming C&W (?!) album, "I Fall To Pieces." Here, the straight-faced vocal (by one Marinette) is gradually subverted by increasingly ominous string lines, magnifying her little death into a global catastrophe. One is extremely keen to hear more from this enterprise.
. . .
Monday, September 30, 2002
D’ANGELO
It would be wrong to think of D’Angelo as a musical conservative, a nu-soul Wynton Marsalis. Well, semi-wrong anyway. He looks back at what has preceded him with a great deal of reverence, but utilises their elements and pushes the spirits of their perpetrators forward. This is made abundantly clear on the sleevenote to his second (and to date most recent) album, 2000’s Voodoo, where the author (which I suspect is D’Angelo, referring to himself in the third person) states: “…most of my peers seem to idolise Donald Trump more than Sly Stone…they don’t seem to realise that Jimi Hendrix was and is a sonic Bill Gates. Oh shit, don’t make me call no names.” In fact he does such a pretty thorough analysis of himself, anticipating how other people are going to receive his work/vocal expression, quoting the expected antecedents (Prince, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, the aforementioned Hendrix), pre-empting criticisms, that it would seem to leave little else for this writer to evaluate.
The first thing which struck me on his 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar, was the bells which serve as additional percussion/punctum on the opening title track. The ringing undertow evokes memories of Pharaoh Sanders’ epic workouts such as “Upper and Lower Egypt” or “Prince of Peace,” an inheritance from the ‘60s New Thing. This gives a spiritual layer to the extremely carnal emotions which D’Angelo is expressing in the song itself. Musically, as with most of his work, it is restrained yet simmering, the passion sonically muted but perceptible. It’s as if the musicians are trying to play as quietly as possible. D’Angelo himself has a smoothly persuasive voice which can still hover deliciously on the verge of ecstatic breakthrough when that point is reached; rather like Prince, but without the gender-playing. The studio chatter at the beginning immediately reminds us of Marvin Gaye, but more “Got To Give It Up” than “What’s Going On?” – this is a voice in search of someone to connect with.
There frankly isn’t much to say about D’Angelo’s lyrics alone; set down in print, they can look pretty well like anyone’s stock repartee of soul parlance. The magic is how the contours and U-bends of his voice and the already surrendered music negotiate the words and enable feelings to be expressed which the words in themselves could not hope to contain. So the title track outlines his desire; “Alright” admits that “we may have an understanding, but that’s okay,” arguments will always be overcome by our deeper love; “Jonz In My Bonez” has a slightly less malleable rhythm and gives D’Angelo the opportunity to soliloquise on his fundamental uncertainty about his role in the world and in life; “Me And Those Dreamin’ Eyes Of Mine” expresses passion for a love which is as yet unrequited; while “Shit Damn Motherfucker” manages even to make adultery and murder sound strangely seductive. Here D’Angelo finds his wife in bed with his best friend, is more bewildered than angry; when he shoots both of them, he continues to sound confused, as though he had to do it to conform to the soul ballad template. Even as the police lead him away to the fadeout, you still feel that when he whimpers, “Why am I wearin’ handcuffs?” he’s in the middle of S&/orM congress with his wife.
The second side is of a much more straightforwardly positive frame of mind; here D’Angelo is content simply to celebrate love. “Smooth” is a selfless song where he has doubts about his own sexual capabilities and is overwhelmed by the Other’s patience and receptiveness (“How can you stand to take things so slow?”). The cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” is leisurely and blissful; hear how those backing vocals lope half a beat behind the rhythm to emphasise the feeling. “When We Get By” has an ineffable swing (and the vaguest of psychedelic references in “chocolate lemonade” unless that’s meant to be a double entendre) with a laconic lyric (“You scratch mine/And I’ll scratch your back sugar”). “Lady” is a sumptuous burner which celebrates unequivocal love, while the final “Higher” sees he and the Other ascending “higher than the sky above” and is almost gospel sex (“Please give us strength Lord to fight our battles/and we can walk on the streets of gold”) which for the first time on this album acknowledges the outside world. In summary, it is a fairly comprehensive musical analysis of the various stages of the positive aspects of love; not ignoring the existence of negative ones, but with enough faith to know that these can always be overcome if the positive is strong enough.
It was necessary to caress the brake a little; compared to the primary-coloured garish in-your-faceness of contemporaneous R&B in the mid-‘90s, this suggested a different, possibly slower but more colourful and varied route for soul music to take. If Prince were the Coltrane of nu-soul, D’Angelo would be the Wayne Shorter; simultaneously more oblique yet in a strange way also more direct.
It took some while for D’Angelo to follow this up; his next album, Voodoo, did not appear for another five years. Right from its opening, the grooves are audibly much harder, much more assertive. As with Brown Sugar, the first track “Playa Playa” opens with studio chatter, but here it is less amiable and more ambitious, perhaps more ominous. Here, for the first time, D’Angelo feels that he has to throw down a gauntlet. “I see right through your riddle…dirt’s our secret weapon…we came here 2 rip shit/strip U of your clout.” No seduction going on here. No perceptible Other, either, apart from The World In General. That is emphasised by the brutal psychedelic groove of “Devil’s Pie,” all stuttering, pointillistic beats and swooning guitar and synth fragments. With the opening line “Fuck the slice we want the pie” this is indeed D’Angelo against the World. “Demons screaming in my ear/All my anger all my fear/If I holler let them here/In this spinning sphere.” It is his Declaration of Principles for which he is evidently prepared to die: “With eighty five dumb and blind/There can be no compromise.” And there is no shelter in love here.
Love, or a variant of it, enters on “Left & Right,” but this is equally brutal and uncompromising. “So what U want?” D’Angelo asks. “Smack your ass, pull your hair/And I’ll even kiss U way down there/U know that I will/Think I won’t?” The rap by guests Method Man and Redman seem to undermine everything that D’Angelo has built up previously (“I’ll fuck you, brown sugar, in front of that fibreglass window”).
Suddenly, it stops, as though D’Angelo realises that he has gone too far, and we return to the grooves familiar from Brown Sugar with the next two tracks. However, on “The Line” his love is still confused, equating orgasm with revolution (“I’m gonna put my finger on the trigger/I’m gonna pull it and we gon’ see what the deal…the pressure is on/From every angle political 2 personal/Will I hang or be left hangin’, will I fall off/Or will it be bangin’?/I say it’s up 2 the man upstairs”). And on “Send It On” there is no ambiguity at all: “Send it up/send it through/sent it right back 2 U.” The music is seductive but the lyrics almost anti-sexual in their expressed desire.
On “Chicken Grease” an electronic fog smothers his voice as he goes through a bizarre dance routine which may or may not be a sociological metaphor. Back to musically familiar ground on “One Mo’Gin” with a sideways rhythm which seesaws between, and can be interpreted as either, a slow 6/8 ballad and 85 bpm midtempo hip hop propulsion, where D’Angelo sees a former flame and, although now with another, misses what they had and wants to renew it. On “The Root” he is on his own and not liking it: “I need someone 2 hold me/Bring me back 2 life, B4 I’m dead…from the alpha of creation/2 the end of all time” over a stealthy, stalking rhythm with odd guitar tangents shooting off from it, and a vocal which floats in complete disregard of metre or bar lines. Some things are more important. This in turn is rejected and his refreshed self is reflected on the livelier (and played by a live band) “Spanish Joint.”
The cover version on this album is of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” and it is cut from exactly the same cloth as his version of “Cruisin’” – benign and welcoming. The bebop horn lines which close the track signify an increasing warmth in the music.
“Greatdayndamornin’/Booty” is luscious and perhaps of everything discussed here closest to Marvin Gaye; lots of echo-laden vocal lines interweaving a web of comfort and solace (the introductions to “Alright” and “Lady” from Brown Sugar have the same effect). Then the album climaxes with “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a soul-delic surfeit of emotion which is worthy to stand beside the Prince who was capable of “Condition of the Heart” and “Adore” – here a fully reborn D’Angelo pleads, prays to the Other, asks for understanding, for love without conditions. And in the final 90 seconds of the song the ambience escalates dramatically as a chorus and his lead voice suddenly swing into magnified focus and proclaim his love and worship of the Other in torrents of ecstatic rain…a more straightforward equivalent of Lewis Taylor’s “Damn,” and as with that masterpiece, this ends with an abrupt cut-off.
But the album ends, not with resolution, but with a move forward; the track “Africa” wherein D’Angelo suddenly turns to face the World, this time with the intent of engaging with it. And it is the most avant-garde thing he’s done to date; separate lines of percussion, guitars and vocals which are never quite in synch with each other and are therefore dislocating and disturbing. The track is bookended by rootless ambient keyboard/electronic lines; yet again, back to the swirling waters, back underground to search for the maternal body as all children end up doing. The view of life as an ongoing loop is underlined by the final, brief sequence where the whole album appears to be winding backwards at high speed; an old life flashing before the eyes of a new one.
. . .
Friday, September 27, 2002
BETH GIBBONS
One tends to forget the impact that a voice can have when one has not heard it anew for some while. In the case of Beth Gibbons, it's now five years since we last heard her singing something new - on the second, self-titled album by Portishead (four years if you count the Live At Roseland NYC orchestral reworkings in 1998) - and from the disappointing evidence of the latter, you could be forgiven for not expecting very much from her return. It's not that Portishead was in itself a bad album, but the title was symbolic of the aesthetic cul-de-sac into which Barrow, Gibbons and Utley appeared to have reversed into; essentially more of the same, and sometimes bordering on self-parody to such a degree that it's unsurprising that Simon Williams in NME unironically hailed it as "a great Goth album"! You wondered whether this project could go anywhere. Nor did Roseland really resolve the dilemma, merely adding to existing songs rather than opening up a new direction, apart from Gibbons' Janis Joplin-style epiphanic wailing on "Sour Times." It wasn't perhaps their fault; three years after the consolidation of a revolution that was Dummy, Portishead, as with Kraftwerk before them and the Aphex Twin after them, had found themselves in the unenviable position of music having caught up with them, instead of their still being ahead.
But I am still interested in Beth Gibbons' soul. She never does interviews, and the lyrical hints dropped on confessionals like "Biscuit" suggest some great gulf of otherwise unexpressed pain. So it is important that we know what she is thinking now.
While Portishead have not disbanded, Gibbons has been at work on a one-off project with ex-Talk Talk bassist and O'Rang frontman Paul Webb, the latter using the pseudonym of Rustin' Man. The resulting album, Out Of Season, is due for release at the end of October; but having listened to an advance copy I can tell you now that this is a record which will quietly devastate you.
As Dummy started with a song called "Mysterons," so Out Of Season starts with a song called "Mysteries." A new start? Vague foghorns and waves can be heard distantly; and then a choir, like the nymphs in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, or simply there to comfort. An acoustic guitar enters, and above it the voice of Beth Gibbons; very quiet, palpably trembling, palpably singing a folk song. There is the same sort of tiny but irreducible unease which you get from the songs in The Wicker Man, but amongst other things it's a surprise to hear Gibbons' West Country burr come through her singing much more strongly than it does in Portishead. The words are no less decipherable, and my copy didn't come with a set of lyrics, so like the Cocteau Twins you have to listen hard and try to hear the voice as an instrument.
What I do know is that Gibbons on this album muses on isolation, growing old and mortality. Much is made of the beauty of nature and also the grief which it can bring. Listen to the song "Sand River" where she alternately celebrates and laments autumn. It immediately calls to mind that especially bright but poignantly shadowed shade of yellow/orange which comes with autumnal sunlight; acknowledgement of things past, but readiness for things to come.
The only time on the album when the volume is really turned up is on the comparatively straightforward R&B tune "Tom The Model" which doubtless will appear as the single. Fine of its sort, but really too Jools Holland/real ale for my tastes, and something of a compromise in the context of the rest of the album.
The song "Snow" with just voice and piano, is special, however, and is fit to stand alongside the Joni Mitchell of Blue. A lament for things she'll never have, a foreboding of the coming winter. Like Joni, she can plead and seduce and yet still sound in control of herself. This beautifully dangles above the abyss of pure silence.
On "Romance" we enter what initially seems to be a Billie Holiday pastiche, complete with a Nelson Riddle-style orchestration (Webb comments that "any of these arrangements could have been done in the '40s," which isn't quite the case, but we'll come to that). Halfway through, however, it dovetails into Beth singing "That's not me" over a very Portishead-esque unresolved minor chord sequence which could never have been dreamt of in 1956. Distant electronic and guitar noises shimmer in the far distance to remind us what century this is (see, I told you we'd come to it). Webb on this album always seems ready to derail our aural expectations with unexpected touches.
On the next three tracks, we return to quiet meditations over folk guitars. "Resolve" is a sober reflection on ageing in the "May You Never" direct-speaking style, but the off-kilter effects on "Spyder" (a Richard Thompson influence?) reminds us of the psychosis which lurks beneath the best of British folk-rock. You could be put on your guard by a song called "Drake" - I mean, this week we've already had Beck, ahem, paying tribute to "River Man" on Sea Changes - but again this doesn't quite go where you'd expect, and again harmonically and emotionally isn't really that far away from Portishead. The increasingly familiar environment becomes more shocking when you see it in full, like a giant creature rising from the waves seen close up.
(and, incidentally, if you want a real radical reworking of "River Man" hear Norma Waterstone's to say the least startling version on her last album)
The environment becomes even more apparent with the lengthy "Funny Time Of Year." Everything around Beth which was previously familiar - musically - now becomes gradually alienating again. Electronics creep in subtly. The vocal is subliminally subverted. A union is achieved, finally, between what Talk Talk achieved on Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock and what "trip hop" is still, in my view, capable of achieving.
Finally, on the song "Rustin' Man," we find ourselves back in the world of Dummy. Gibbons' soul having been naked and intimate for the rest of the album; she now decides it's too painful and retreats behind her cover of electronic fog. A distended post-blues soliloquy which wouldn't have been out of place on Walker's Tilt. The only end possible to this deeply touching but profoundly unsettling record.
. . .
Thursday, September 26, 2002
SCOTT WALKER - THE ROAD TO "TILT"
Part 1: Sometimes You Have To Start In The Middle
"The Electrician" in 1978 was the first I learned about the OTHER Scott Walker. I was prompted to investigate it by Chris Bohn's review of the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights album in MM, wherein he proclaimed that the four Scott songs contained on this album "make Bowie's Low sound High." I did not think that one could get any more alienated than Low, so had to listen.
Of these four songs, "Shutout" and "Nite Flights" still seem to me to have achieved that neurotic disco/pop interface which Magazine were perhaps too foreknowing to do (even though the guitar solos are the equivalent of Dave Formula's sometimes overstated and underfilled keyboard playing). "NIte Flights" in particular is the New Romantic blueprint, and the likes of Ure's Ultravox, pre-Sakamoto Japan, Simple Minds and A Flock of Seagulls constructed entire careers on the back of it (the "be my love" swooning vocal in the chorus IS Ure's Ultravox).
The other two songs are of a far more disturbing bent. Compare the use of Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" in Walker's "Shutout" and Magazine's "The Light Pours Out Of Me" from the latter's contemporaneous Real Life. Magazine use the central guitar riff but elongate it over bar lines, as if they are trying to make it unpop; Walker takes the rhythm track, amplifies and distorts it to hell, overlays an out-of-synch, bitonal vocal harmony on top, and at the bottom adds and underscores the whole performance with a vast, terrible bass echo, as if a Bosendorfer piano had just crashed down from the top floor of the WTC. "Deaf, dumb, blind/Deaf, dumb, blind!" goes the anti-pop chorus chant - an indirect recalling of Pharaoh Sanders which is immediately brought to mind as the track suddenly but briefly opens up for a dense sustained string chord over which Alan Skidmore's bad-tempered atonal tenor sax rants through the flames caused by the sudden sunlight before being buried again.
Then there's "The Electrician." Just over six minutes long, and even in 1978 sounding like nothing else on the planet at that time, be it Pere Ubu or Sham 69. A sopranino-register atonal but shimmering string sustenato, echoed by a synthesiser, hovers like the remnants of a burst cloud over the ears of the listener, punctuated by a regular one-note, immense bass pulse. Scott and John's voices enter almost reluctantly: "Baby it's slow/When lights go low/There's no help/No." Then the drums start up, the strings become stately; it's turning into another Walker Brothers ballad - but what are they singing? "Screaming oh you mambos kill me and kill me and kill me. When I jerk the handle, you'll die in your dreams...you'll thrill me and thrill me and thrill me." A political prisoner somewhere in South America (Chile? Argentina?) strapped to the chair and about to be executed. The allegorical interface between sex and death. It stops again, with the same bass pulse, a brief shake of castanets - you have died, it is over, you are free.
And Dave MacRae's strings suddenly escalate into a lavish, harmonious major chord of release, harp cascading, Big Jim Sullivan's 12-string in the foreground. He can now fly. The song then comes to what would seem its logical close, the pain forgotten, freedom now resolved, as Sullivan's flamenco arpeggios reach concord with the orchestra and come to a final harmony.
No it doesn't. As soon as that disappears, the opening discord re-emerges, this time with distant percussive thumps (from the next cell?). The voices return with the "Baby it's slow" refrain, this time at three-quarters of its original speed. The jailers remaining prisoners? Or the equivalent of the closing sequence of Gilliam's Brazil, where Jonathan Pryce's Everyman appears to have gained his freedom, only to find that he is in reality still strapped to a chair, and will probably remain so forever. Did someone say something about a cloak of loneliness?
It's perhaps understandable that Walker elected to hand over the rest of the album to the other two "Brothers" (and it's perhaps symbolic that on every track no more than two of them appear together; there is no track featuring all three); what was in these four songs would have been enough to exhaust anyone.
Part 2: As With Lanark, We Now Have To Return To The Beginning
I didn't seek out any of Walker's back catalogue at the time; it was mostly unavailable apart from extremely naff-looking MoR cover version albums. There were other things I had to sort out then. Only when, as a Teardrop Explodes fan, I read Julian Cope in the NME in early 1981 telling Morley about how brilliant Walker's solo work was and announcing his intention of releasing a compilation called Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker, did the man come into my orbit again.
The compilation, in its slate-grey cover with green lettering, deliberately devoid of "persona," eventually came out in August of that year. I had been bereaved a month previously and was about to start university a month hence. At the bridge, therefore, between my previous life and the next one. I bought it but for various non-musical reasons didn't get around to playing it until I actually was at university. It hit me like a thunderbolt, right from the opening track "Such A Small Love," which begins with another unresolved string drone from which Walker's voice emerges like a foghorn. "Mist falls," he says, decisively and unpushingly. I was hooked right from there, as was everyone else to whom I played it.
In the fullness of time the four albums which he recorded for Philips in 1967-9, Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and Scott 4 (the determined minimalism is a hallmark of Walker's approach) did become available on CD. Listening to them in sequence is a fascinating exercise, if only to assess how quickly and with how much determination Walker developed the sort of aesthetic which he wanted to project to the world in lieu of himself (or even to the inside of his own soul). Scott 1 contains perhaps the most tortured songs he came up with at that time, "Such A Small Love" and "Always Coming Back To You," both laments for dead love affairs (or, in the latter, perhaps a dead lover?) in which he constantly questions whether, even in his ruin, it was worth lamenting. The other aspect of his work at the time - and doubtless a consequence of his fascination with Jacques Brel, two or three of whose songs appear on each of the first three albums - was illuminating and sculpturing a luxurious vision of redemption from the world of lowlife. Consider "Montague Terrace In Blue," a touching hymn to belief in the strength of a relationship having to be lived in a dump of a bedsit. "But we know, don't we?" Or do we?
Scott 2 moves away from this angle slightly, to project a more cinematic, perhaps less immediately personal but no less passionate picture of the subjects of his songs. Consider the harassed Perrin-like businessman of "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg" who, after slipping on his kitchen's "newly-waxed floor," appears to fracture his skull and die, in the course of which he has visions of the afterlife, of "dying in nine angels' arms," of his relief in leaving the world behind, of not quite having left it yet but on his way to the next, better one ("Doreen of the candles"). Or the lament for a balloon in "Plastic Palace People," which doubles as an allegory for the corruption of innocence, as though something unspeakable has happened to the child who is supposed to hold the balloon. As in Bucks Fizz's "The Land Of Make Believe," an avowedly anti-Thatcherite song sung unknowingly by Tory voters, the reality behind the sugar-coated facade will ultimately kill the child (listen to that girl reciting the poem at the end of "LOMB": "He came today, but had to go...to visit you? You'll never know" as though she has already been murdered).
Scott 3 fuses these two aspects of his music and provides some closure to his work thus far, and is of the three the most satisfying of them, largely because, apart from three Brel covers at the album's close, he avoids the cover versions (from Tim Hardin to Tony Bennett) which take up a good half of the first two albums, and which, though fine in themselves, divert one's attention from the main thrust of his work; even with the Brel stuff, you want to hear what Scott himself has to say. Scott 3 started out as a vague concept album about individual lives in a block of flats, and this is still largely apparent in the album. Nothing startled me, though, as much as the shock of hearing, at the beginning of the opening track, "It's Raining Today," the exact same sustained string discord which opens "The Electrician," but here incorporated into a post-Sinatra ballad musing on the impermanence of relationships and even of people ("The street corner girl's a trembling leaf").
Scott 3 is where Walker found a conduit to connect the emotions of Sinatra's unassailable Capitol ballad albums of the '50s with Gordon Jenkins (particularly 1959's shattering No One Cares, which, though marketed as another Sinatra saloon song album, should have had a cover of Sinatra weeping at a gravestone; it really should have been called Songs For Dead Lovers, a Kaddish for the bereaved) with the bedsit fixations of those who were to follow him. Walker's portraits of losers here are sharp but never mocking, always compassionate; the sad old maid of "Rosemary" ("That's what I want - a new shot at life! But my coat's too thin, and my feet won't fly") or the transvestite of "Big Louise" ("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way"), ultimately the Other ("Winter Night," the closest he comes to a homage to Sinatra/Jenkins) and beyond that himself, in "Two Weeks Since You've Gone" ("and if I close my eyes long enough, will you happen to me again?"). With the final performance of "If You Go Away" it is as if Walker has done his work here and is ready to move on.
Scott 4 is where he starts to become, in one sense more abstract ("Boy Child" and "Angel of Ashes"), in another sense more overtly political, for the first time ("The Old Man's Back Again"), in a third sense more carnal ("Duchess," or what happens to the previous album's Rosemary from the Other's perspective should her dreams come true). And for the first time he leans more in a "rock" direction.
Part 3: By Necessity, An Intermission
No need here to go into the wreckage of Walker's subsequent career in depth: it would be unkind and unhelpful. No real compulsion to stay and observe the unfocused reruns of tracks 1-10 of 1970's 'Till The Band Comes In, most of which sound like rejected outtakes from Scott 4; nor the nice but purpose-free MoR cover version ventures like The Moviegoer (unlike Sinatra, he could never really lose himself in other people's songs, he was in some ways too imposing); nor the attempts at C&W-goes-existential on records like Stretch and We Had It All (GPand Grievous Angel, in a nutshell, they weren't); nor even the momentarily successful MoR comeback with the Brothers in the mid-'70s with "No Regrets" and which, as detailed above, terminated with Nite Flights.
The next brief stop has to be in 1984, hot on the heels of an unexpected cameo in a Britvic TV advert (exactly the sort of second-guessing thing you'd expect him to do), when a new solo album, Climate of Hunter, finally emerged on Virgin. Appropriately the cover shot makes him look like a startled rabbit.
And, while naturally applauding an album which can leash together Mark Knopfler, Evan Parker and Billy Ocean under the same roof, Climate has never seemed to me an entirely satisfying record, and perhaps even a step back from Nite Flights to explore the implications of Scott 4 further. Now it seems like a transitional record, a dry run for the astonishing one which was to come 11 years hence. The lurid close-up imagery of the opening "Rawhide" is certainly powerful, and the succeeding "Dealer," albeit a more measured-out rerun of "It's Raining Today" (musically if not lyrically), works largely due to what goes on behind Walker's voice, notably Evan Parker's surprisingly lyrical soprano solo (sounding more like Steve Lacy than Parker) and the Riley-esque minimalist double-tempo horn fanfares which appear towards the track's end. "Track Three," which incredibly was released as a single (as was, even more incredibly, "The Electrician"), does indeed feature quick-fire pointillistic backing vocals from Billy Ocean, shortly before he enjoyed his second career wind with "Caribbean Queen" et al, but sadly this makes the song sound like Joan Armatrading. And there are far too many dreary steppes of rock guitar on this album to climb over (mostly from Ray Russell - a pity Walker couldn't have worked with the incendiary Ray Russell who recorded Live At The ICA 1975 with Gary Windo, Harry Beckett et al), too much '80s flanged bass and treble-heavy drums. The record makes most impact when at its quietest: the ominous hum of "Track Six" which Parker's multiple saxes ignite with punctum, and the deadlier quiet of the closing reading of Tennessee Williams' "Blanket Roll Blues," where Walker is accompanied only by Knopfler's acoustic guitar. "And I took nobody with me/Not a soul" he concludes, meaningfully. Much as I'd like to believe Steve Lake's comments in MM at the time of this album being "a shotgun marriage between Scriabin and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer" - and how I wish this record was - it sadly isn't. Not quite.
The next one was, though.
Part 4: Tilt
Another 11 years we had to wait for this, following aborted sessions with Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Daniel Lanois and others. Sometimes it can take a quarter of a century for a butterfly truly to develop its specks.
It begins as undemonstrably as a record could begin, with a distant hum of 'celli, a plain minor chord and Walker's distant voice slowly approaching us: "Do I hear 21, 21, 21? I'll give you 21, 21,21." A farmer's market or just a meat rack? Remember how much Henchard sells his wife for at the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Something else - or more accurately someone else - is being bought here.
It is a slow lament for the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a nighttime pick-up of a would-be lover. He may be driving to his death (as happened to the tormented homosexual Pasolini, beaten to death at hands still unknown in 1975). He seems to be surveying the talent on offer: "Don't go by a man (the sleeve says, though you could just as well substitute "buy" for "by") in this shirt/Go by (buy?) a man in that shirt." "Paolo (Walker sobs) take me with you...it was the journey of a life" even though the narrator "knew nothing of the horses/nothing of the threshers." Signified is piled upon signified in Walker's words now; there are no easy lonely-bedsit scenarios for the casual listener to grasp. He has gone beyond that. As with Beckett or Calvino, once you summon the nerve to climb that one extra step to understanding, you will be as one with the author's soul. This song is the nearest thing to a Scott Walker you might previously have known.
Doubters bail out at the next track, the uncompromising "The Cockfighter." Starting with Walker howling indistinctly at the moon, like the tramp in Scott 3's "Two Weeks Since You've Gone" who's "picking dustbins in the alley." But the careful intrusion of a celeste brings to mind another antecedent - Skip James, and his none-more-desolate blues laments of the early-mid '30s (never has anyone sung the words "I'm So Glad" with less uncertainty). Then a near-silent but sinister instruction "click...click
AND THE WHOLE FUCKING THING EXPLODES INTO AN INDUSTRIAL HOLOCAUST EVERYONE SAYS NINE INCH NAILS BUT THIS IS MORE TEST DEPT SPECIFICALLY THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF FREEDOM BRITAIN BEING DEMOLISHED IN 1986 SNOW BUT
OH YES
it's a beautiful niIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTT yeah! Walker suddenly leers in your face.
It's the sex/death interface again. Excerpts from the transcripts of the trials of Queen Catherine and Adolf Eichmann are interspersed, linked: "Do you swear the breastbone was there? I saw it and made my escape." The song violently vacillates between studied quiet and howling torment, immense articulacy and inarticulate horror spectation.
As yet again the strings seem to indicate that the song will resolve into a major key to end, Walker says "she opened the tent to take a morsel of air" - the "breathe again" string harmony reappears - "before the sun came out..."
AND IT SMASHES ITS WAY TO OBLIVION ANDREW CROWSHAW'S WIND INSTRUMENTS SQUEAKING HOWLING HOARSELY BEHIND THE GRIND OF BODIES BEING COMPRESSED BETWEEN TWIN AXES
* * * *
"Bouncer See Bouncer" is punctuated by a booming yet distant percussion refrain (McGoohan's Rover preventing escape). "Spared - I've been spared," celebrates Walker's voice, "all the nickels and dimes...the trumpet Gabriel" with sudden violent exclamations of "DON'T PLAY THAT SONG FOR ME! (echoes of Aretha Franklin?) You WON'T play that song for me." What's important in this track (as with, in another dimension, Prince) is what Walker leaves out of the music. Listened to organically and joining the invisible dots, this could almost be a straight slow blues; the meter and vocal delivery fit exactly. But there is nothing in between other than a gaping space where humanity presumably once lurked.
Then, again, that string harmony suggests another brief respite; the narrator, rising above his circumstances, croons, beaming, "I love the season...right foot crossed to the left, left foot crossed over to the right." A prisoner, then, in bondage, strangely glad that he doesn't have to worry about earthly things any more, but equally glad that he hasn't been killed. The bouncing balloon motif returns. This song could go on forever.
"Manhattan" remains unclear to me. No doubt, with its references to "chief of police" and "white shirt, arms (or arm's?) in there somewhere (or even military "arms" in there somewhere)" one could envelop it with a lot of spurious post-9/11 relevance. The music arches grandly, however, the resonant organ of Westminster's Central Methodist Church sounding immense canyons before again disappearing into harmonic uncertainty.
"Face On Breast" is unequivocally about uncertainty of the Other. Casual sex or something else? Like everything else on this remarkable record, it achieves the feat of being sonically vast (Peter Walsh's production really does sound as if the music is occurring all around you) whilst being concerned about tiny actions in small, cramped spaces (Kafka!), the smallness conversely being amplified by the musical immensity. "You know how to whistle don't you/You just put your lips together and blow...THAT'S WHAT IT SAYS!" Walker's idea of a love song clearly being to drag himself beyonf cliche, a different angle from Scritti's "The 'Sweetest Girl'," but with the same intent. "What if I'm only pledging my love?" Walker paraphrases the doomed bastard Johnny Ace in the chorus. Pounding tribal drumming which could almost fit in with then-relevant drum 'n' bass; the askew whistling three-quarters of the way through the track underlines the fact that this is what Peter Gabriel COULD sound like if he were really serious about experimentation.
Things go deathly quiet for "Bolivia '95," a Greene/Lowry-like portrait of a ruined dictator, waiting for the world to close in on him. "Lemon bloody cola," he grumpily moans in the chorus (although sometimes seductively so, very like Prince on some of the choruses) while asking his "doc" to "sponge you down."
This is followed by "Patriot" which is subtitled "A Single" but never was (was he being ironic?). Over a shimmering Blue Nile major-teetering-on-minor sunrise-or-is-it? chord, carefully policed by John Gibling's bass (superb playijng from Gibling throughout the album, incidentally). Walker declaims at his own Customs gate "I brought nylons from New York...some had butterflies, some had specks." The song is of course about what the "patriot" is smuggling in beneath the nylons as the "chorus" makes abundantly clear. Again with a superb grasp of dynamics, the chorus roars in with John Barclay's undulating atonal trumpets, conjuring up memories both of Mongezi Feza on Wyatt's "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" and Parker on Climate's "Track Six," Walker exclaims, "he'll sell his arms to anyone." Arms to Irag? It was 1995, so this could have been on his mind. Once again the grandeur dissipates into small, whispered, snatched, atonal gestures patrolled by a piccolo and military drum, in which Walker repeatedly insists (reviving the drunkard from the beginning of "The Cockfighter") that he "never sold out." The tripartite structure is then repeated, but this time Walker reflects on "crippled fingers - some had clinging vines, some had specks" - the result of his arms-dealing. And for the final goodbye, the horror found on a "back road" with hordes of butterflies flying around what we daren't look at.
The most obviously "rock" track here is the title track "Tilt." Hard not to think, when listening to the unresolved guitar chordings and near-identical rhythmic approach, of what Jeff Buckley could have achieved had he not been so damned reserved. Here Walker laments a man who "when they made him, he broke the mould," to whom, again, something unutterable has happened (not Pasolini?). His mother stands in the green grass from "Farmer In The City," waiting for him and betraying nothing with her face. Guitars scream to fadeout something that Walker cannot.
And the logical conclusion of the whole quarter-century is that Walker is finally on his own. The epilogue "Rotary" is him and his guitar alone, though the latter sounds almost as if it is being hammered, like a dulcimer. A quiet, near-medieval lament - John Dowland waking up in Ground Zero - Walker will "string along" but will simultaneously "bite holes in the bullets." Where has all this got him? How many lives have been saved? Can we stop "it" from "bristling" or "pimpling"? All Walker knows is, "I've gotta quit." And, with those words, he does.
Envoi: Get You Back Home
My impression is that the logical thing for Walker to do next would be an entirely solo album, just him and his guitar, his own Oar. Perhaps if we are worthy enough to hear it, he will let us have it.
For how something positive can be drawn out of nihilistic environments, you will need to listen to how Walker produced Pulp's We Love Life, in many ways the transverse and yet the ultimate affirmation of Tilt. My review of this can be found on:
www.freakytrigger.co.uk/pulplovelife.html
. . .
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
ROBERT WYATT'S ROCK BOTTOM: THE SECOND GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE
It was his fault, of course. He was pissed. Trying to get out of a party via the kitchen window, forgetting that he was four floors up. The end result: paralysis, unable to play his beloved drumkit. He mused for a long time, listened for a longer time. Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, a long-standing mate of his, visited regularly, helped him out financially and urged him to go in the studio and record his thoughts when he was well enough. After long months, he was ready to marshal his thoughts in both lyrical and musical terms, and went into the studio with Mason as producer to make the 1974 album Rock Bottom.
On the original Virgin Records sleeve the cover illustration, by his wife the artist Alfreda Benge, shows a rear view of what is clearly meant to be Wyatt, his back to us, holding up a balloon in his right hand. Above the water you cannot see below the waist - he could be waving or drowning. Below the water you see, not a pair of legs, but a mass of octopus-like tentacles drifting widely into the ocean. So the inability to function "normally" in the world is replaced by the urge to return to the maternal waters. Or the urge to fly (the balloon) is frustrated by his earthly anchor (the tentacles/wheelchair).
Why, after nearly 30 years of familiarity with this barely 30-minute long record, does it still speak to me and cut me like no other record, with one exception (and you can read about that one exception in Stylus Magazine later this year), has ever managed to do? Even as a child, even if I had known nothing of his Soft Machine history or what he would later go on to do, I would have immediately known Wyatt to be a person of genius.
Perhaps it's because the subject matter of the record manages the extraordinary feat of being almost intolerably harrowing and yet hysterically whimsical at the same time. Perhaps it's because the record is a dissection of Wyatt's soul following his accident, and yet there is not one nanosecond of self-pity on it. He is reaching out to you and you cannot help but cling to him.
On a more prosaic level, it succeeds in uniting a pop framework with avant/improv elements as no other record (again, with the same one exception) has managed to do.
The opener "Sea Song" is literally an oceanic torch song. Wyatt expresses his thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness style, the music having to flow around where he wants the words to be. "Joking apart, when you're drunk you're terrific; when you're drunk I like you mostly late at night - you're quite all right. But I can't understand the different you in the morning, when it's time to play at being human for awhile. Please smile." The music then eddies into an unresolved sequence of whole tones; Wyatt's piano solo, and indeed his piano style, were unforgettably described by Steve Lake as "Cecil Taylor meets Monk at 16 rpm," here expressing the quiet fury fermenting beneath the waves, before Wyatt's voice placidly re-enters and says with resignation: "You'll be different in the spring, I know - you're a seasonal beast...your lunacy fits neatly with my own," answered by an Escalator-type choir before sailing off into the phenomenal finale where Wyatt finds words insufficient and breaks into his unreproduceable slow-motion vocal scatting (as he called it, "the theory of the longer line," the diametric opposite to the quick-fire syllabic pointillism employed by most "jazz" singers, Torme etc.) which touches upon Asian quarter-tones and at one powerful moment rises to a wailing crescendo which sounds like a newborn baby as the synthesisers swell up behind and around him.
(The make-do-and-mend choice of instrumentation throughout Rock Bottom is crucial to its overall impact. Wyatt mainly sticks to vocals and keyboards, and of the latter the most prominent is an odd Italian organ which he apparently bought dirt cheap and which I have never heard anywhere else, although some have tried to copy the sound. Unable to play his drumkit, he resorts to using whatever odds and ends he can find in the studio - on the sleeve, he is credited with playing, amongst other things, "Delfina's wineglass," "James' tray" and "a small battery." And largely he prefers to stick to this - a full drumkit, played by Laurie Allan, appears on two of the six tracks only)
The second song, "A Last Straw," is a more animated continuation of the same lost-at-sea theme. Here, as with elsewhere on the album, instead of indulging in lyrical cliches in order to obtain cheap poignancy, Wyatt sticks to his Lear-esque wordplay and can still manage to strike your heart with punctum - "reminds me of your rocky bottom/please don't wait for the paperweight" followed by "into the water we'll go head over heels" over a heartbreaking minor chord change to remind you that, physically, he can't do this any more. A rudimentary guitar appears (also played by Wyatt); he slides the notes to replicate the waves about to embrace or engulf him.
The track then goes straight into the deeply harrowing "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" punctUMed and powered by the multiple, hall-of-mirrors trumpets of Mongezi Feza. Poor Mongs, his soul already splitting into pieces, who was, barely 18 months after this record was made, to end up in Horton Hospital and die, unattended, of double pneumonia after wandering around the grounds in his pyjamas at night in the dead of winter. After smashing up a taxi with hallucinations that he was back in SA and the car was taking him back to be shot. Whose death hit Wyatt so hard that he barely did anything for the next five years. Here his trumpets explode, chuckle, caress and harass from all directions while the rhythm gathers and the lament begins "Don't say...oh gawd don't tell me...oh dear me...heavens above...oh no...I can't stand it STOP ME oh dearie me..." Wyatt working his way through banal, cliched expressions of pain, the face we put on to hide our real suffering. Finally it is all too much: "OH STOP IT STOP IT!" he screams
and then the track immediately starts going backwards with a new melody automatically created. This runs uninterrupted for a while and then Wyatt's voice creeps back in, improvising on the new melody:
"You see sometimes I know, I know. So why did I hurt you? I didn't mean to hurt you. But I'll keep trying, and I'm sure you will too."
This record's eye of the hurricane, what it actually must have felt like right at the moment of impact which paralysed him. At the song's death (with a new bassline added), Ivor Cutler surreally comes in with a mock-backwards recitation of part of the Wyatt poem which will be used to bring the album to an end.
After the storm, comes the contemplation. "Alife" (a life? Alfie? dedicated to his wife of course). Performed by Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, as well as a guitarist who isn't identified (is it a speeded up keyboard, or Hopper's bass speeded up? It actually sounds a lot like Mike Oldfield, who does make an unexpected appearance later in the album). After the soft billowing unhurried major-chord instrumental prelude, the song inevitably and smoothly evolves into a minor-key lament: "Na nip nop/Nip na noop/Nip nip folly balolley" he sings and continues in the same vein: "I can't forsake you or forsqueak you/Confiscate or maculate you you." How can someone sing what sounds like outtakes from Jabberwocky and make you weep uncontrollably? It is as if he's singing a lullaby to his Other in their own private language. In its superficial nonsensical veneer, this music comes awfully close to "the truth."
And if this is bliss, then it has to be subverted or negated; enter "Alifib" and first the bass clarinet, then the tenor sax, of another doomed bastard and future Carla Bley/Todd Rundgren right-hand man Gary Windo. The song starts boiling into a sardonic rage, Wyatt now spitting out and snarling the same words, mocking them as Windo squeaks behind him and finally emerges with a chaotic, screaming, howling tenor solo which acts as the point of release for the real grief. As the saxophone vanishes into high-register thin air, enter, suddenly, the Other (Alfreda Benge) arrives to sardonically but amiably deflate Wyatt's paradisical ideal: "I'm not your larder, or Alife your guarder...I'm your dear little dolly." The music resettles into brief repose, Windo's sax now purring with post-orgasmic satisfaction.
Then we go into the grand finale, "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road," where Wyatt solemnly sings of an unspecified disaster "in the garden of England," while here Mike Oldfield's guitar acts as his alter ego. Unsettlingly, as Oldfield comes to centre stage, the record momentarily does turn into Tubular Bells, but any cosiness is quickly seen off by Allan's restless drumming and Wyatt's closing fading lament of "can't you see them, can't you see them? Bridge can't hold them, rats control them." A children's nursery rhyme of experience - Hilaire Belloc rescripted by Edward Gorey (a similar sepulchral feel is conveyed by Wyatt's vocal work on Michael Mantler's album of Gorey adaptations, The Hapless Child and Other Stories, a couple of years later). The pain fades, the chaos fades, we see the crash now only from a distance as we are left with a John Cale-esque viola drone (actually Fred Frith). And for the final closing punch, enter Ivor Cutler and his "baritone concertina" to declaim an unremittingly silly poem by Wyatt, which still manages to end with him smashing up both the 'phone and the telly. As the multiple violas howl atonal pain, Cutler lets out a bloodcurdling "HA HA HA HA HAA!" laugh and the music stops dead.
Coda
A few weeks after finishing the recording sessions for Rock Bottom, Wyatt and Mason returned to the studio to record a single. Wyatt fancied doing "I'm A Believer." The ecstasy of regenerated faith expressed on the Monkees' original is subtly subverted, and you do feel a very deep vein of irony running through Wyatt's vocal. And yet the single proved to be a hit, and Wyatt and band were invited on TOTP, but unforgiveably tried to persuade Wyatt not to appear on stage in his wheelchair as "this might upset viewers." A furious Wyatt stood his ground (metaphorically) with the end result that the entire band appeared in wheelchairs, and Wyatt spat out the lyrics with barely concealed venom and even more naked irony. The performance has never been shown anywhere since.
And a mention too for the B-side, Hopper's song "Memories." With Frith's viola crying in the background, Wyatt contemplates what his life is now and where he is going to end up, while knowing that he must end up somewhere. It was later covered by Laswell's Material on their 1982 One Down album with Archie Shepp the featured sax soloist. The singer was a teenager called Whitney Houston.
. . .
SOME THINGS DON'T NEED TO BE SPOILED BY WRITING ABOUT THEM
For instance: Westwood Presents Volume 3 - as with 2 Many DJs, this has to be DANCED to, celebrated PHYSICALLY. The punctum here is all around you and does not need to be drawn out; in fact, multiple puncta draw in upon you and embrace you. 47 tracks; apart from Truth Hurts, the unhurtful truth is that this represents pop as it should be known today on buses all over the land. And - at the moment and for the moment - I would much rather have Westwood Presents Volume 3 than Sea Changes in my world.
SOME THINGS CANNOT BE WRITTEN ABOUT FURTHER
"Golden Boy" by Res has been definitively assessed by the Belgian lass and the Australian skykicker, so there is little for me to add, except perhaps that the vocal reminds me somewhat of Carole Bayer Sager, whatever that may imply. But what exactly do "the girls" know about this "prince," and will they grieve or exult at his downfall?
The album How I Do - maybe Ronan "I Love It When We Do" Keating is the "Golden Boy," though probably not - is a puzzle to sort out. It's what Pink would sound like had she paid more attention to Sam Phillips (that's the Cruel Inventions/wife of T-Bone Burnett Sam Phillips, not the Sun Records one) than to 4 Non Blondes; lots of odd guitar twinges over what is essentially another AOR analysis of who I am/do I/don't I need love which frankly has been done more purposely and/or deliriously elsewhere. Her backdrop will sometimes be an un-guitar drone which brings to mind MBV rehearsing Reich's Electric Counterpoint five rooms away, but sadly not for long enough. Good in its first half, extraordinary when it comes to "Golden Boy," but finally settling for the safest way in. Still I would rather have this in the house than Vanessa Please Please HIT ME Carlton, were I of a combative nature, which happily I am not.
. . .
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
KIM WILDE
Gardening. There’s a good way for a pop star to – well, not to end, but to, shall we say, develop. There are far worse ways to end. That is what Kim Wilde now essentially does for a living. She continues to participate in ‘80s revival tours, sadly, and really should not need to do so. One needs to justify one’s existence continuously. I would expect that a 52-year-old Peter Laughner would be more than content with gardening. Or a 53-year-old Lester Bangs while he’s at it.
Her eponymously-titled first album from 1981 was certainly needed – at least by RAK Records. Having more or less sleepwalked through punk with the dubious assets of Smokie and Racey at its helm, and more or less being kept afloat by Hot Chocolate, Mickie Most needed to justify RAK anew. And to do it, he turned to the family Wilde.
Marty Wilde, when you think about it, was smartly on the case, much more so in many ways than his contemporary Cliff. He had first attempted to kickstart the next Wilde generation with son Ricky, who had a single out on RAK in 1974 – “Teen Wave,” a glorious noise of a record on which Andrew WK appears to have based his entire career. Alas, despite being a Radio Luxembourg PowerPlay, it failed to trouble the scorers; that, coupled with Ricky’s sadly premature thinning out at the top, put a stop to that. Not to be defeated, Ricky retreated to the backroom, and he and his dad waited patiently for daughter Kim to come of age.
She did so in 1981, with almost over-impeccable timing; with Blondie’s Autoamerican demonstrating them to be on the descent, the gap was there to be filled, yet (as is often the case with Brits) a new gap was inadvertently created instead. Her debut single, “Kids in America,” was punctum-packed throughout; commencing with Eno-esque atonal synth stabs from which Wilde’s voice emerges, almost reluctantly, “looking out a dirty old window.” The vocal range, though not great, was exactly malleable enough to deal with the sublime pop which her folks provided for her. A great piece of power pop, with the double advantage of not having to labour under a banner of “power pop,” it deservedly shot up to #2 in the charts, prevented from reaching the top only by Shakin’ Stevens’ “This Old House” (and before we start sneering at poor old Shaky, by the way, he was still hip at the time; the NME applauded him getting to the top, after a decade of hard gigging, Communist party benefit gigs, and so on. Unimaginable now).
A superb start, then, but amazingly excelled by her follow-up and greatest single, the immortal “Chequered Love,” in which she achieved the sort of magic of which the likes of the Photos could only dream about enviously; the song moves with determined decisiveness, the guitar thrash competing with the excitable string synth to get to the end of the song first. And note the mid-section with its ascending line suspiciously reminiscent of Magazine’s “Shot By Both Sides” (and a more or less identical rhythm track) – indeed, Wilde, surprisingly (or perhaps not) a Devoto devotee, cheerfully admitted as much to Paul Morley in an NME interview at the time. The ecstatic doubling up of the riff by glockenspiel and guitar at the song’s climax is near-orgasmic.
And her debut album, black cover with spaced-out white lettering, Kim and the band dressed likewise, is full of exceptionally smart power pop, cheerful yet knowingly propulsive – “Water on Glass” and “Boys” for two, and even an element of angst creeping in on the song “Our Town” in which Kim defiantly swears to stay in the town she knows, even as her house is torn down in front of her and billboards erected in their place. One could perhaps do without the attempt at ska, “2-6-5-8-0,” or the can-we-be-the-Police adult oriented dubby dubbings of “Everything is Wrong,” but there’s a fantastic reading of “You’ll Never Be So Wrong” (Hot Chocolate had recently released their version as a single) – Kim trying to reassure the hurt girl that break-up doesn’t mean the end of love or life, but can’t quite convince her; the tangible frustration mounting up in the chorus, all set against a regretful guitar backing which recalls nothing so much as a prototype for 10,000 Maniacs (though Ms Merchant never got anywhere near to pop).
After this, Kim’s singles over the following year became increasingly remote and disturbed, and they remain profoundly uneasy listening. First, “Cambodia,” a #12 hit in that disturbed winter of 1981; I always assumed this to be a song about a wracked war veteran coming back to his home and family and unable to recognise or connect with either, but the vocal is slightly detached as if she is only singing to herself, almost engulfed by the now wholly electro backing.
And what about “View From A Bridge” from the shiny yellow spring of ’82? A song about suicide, in which she ends by jumping off the bridge “into space.” One would have been forgiven to be concerned about exactly what kind of stuff her dad and brother were giving her to sing. Amazingly, it still managed to climb to #16 (a lot harder to do 20 years ago, let us not forget, than it is now). Near Nordic in its angst, it precedes the much more overt anxieties of A-Ha three years hence.
Were that not enough, she then followed this death wish up with the most disturbing record she ever made, “Child Come Away.” Essentially about the aftermath of life for a rape victim, the song is sung almost dispassionately, the vocal mixed well back, almost as though the singer has already died and is communicating through a mechanical fog. Gary Barnacle’s alto sax floats in and out of the mix, at one brief point exploding in your face with Evan Parker-type tempestuous squawking. The song grinds mechanically to a halt, as if that is all Kim Wilde will ever have to say, before starting up again to accommodate Barnacle’s closing, inarticulable screams. This was finally a bridge too far for her fans, and the song managed a peak of only #43 in the autumn of 1982; her first single to miss the top 20. No wonder the Wildes back-pedalled after that, played safe with corny pastiches like “Love Blonde,” and that Kim eventually fled to MCA for a further, probably more commercially successful but artistically nondescript, series of hits throughout the latter part of the ‘80s. There is, however, one further track worth salvaging from her later RAK period; “Stay Awhile” is a heartbreaking plea to the Other to “tell me who you are,” to provide some degree (if not illusion) of permanence to her life, set against a canyon of poignant chord changes and synth lines which were later to resurface unexpectedly in the realms of the Aphex Twin’s SAW2 and I Care Because You Do albums. It destroys the listener and should have been a single.
. . .
Monday, September 23, 2002
WHAT IS TRUTH – AND WHY SHOULD IT HURT?
One could be very cynical about Truth Hurts. The fact that her debut album Truthfully Speaking is executive produced by Dr Dre would inspire the cynical thought that Dre was looking for his own means of filling the gap left by Aaliyah. Certainly the sleeve would appear to confirm that to the cynic – note the inside cover pose against a blood red/orange background, exactly like the last Aaliyah album. On the inside back cover we see the Truth Hurts symbol emerge from a painted-on tear falling from the left eye of Shari Watson, the singer/songwriter who is to all intents and purposes Truth Hurts. But the “truth” isn’t quite what you’d expect. Thankfully, more Baudrillard than Locke.
From both the pouting photos and the single “Addictive,” we are ready to expect another in the long line of post-Aaliyah dispassionate, impartial, uncaring “soul” voices. Functional and giving absolutely nothing away.
The introduction “Push Play” would seem to confirm this still further. It begins with her declaring that she has to “get my shit together” over a gospel electric piano and backing vox. She is desperate for “the truth” to “be told.” At 1:07 the rhythm suddenly comes in, distant string synth climbing and fluttering down like MBV. A sample of KRS-1 from “I’m Still #1” (“niggers can’t handle the truth – in fact, they scared of it”) is introduced and subverted (“to all your R&B bitches” – replies Watson, “yes I AM”). “I’ll drop. Your shit. Put mine. On top,” Watson sings in stiletto staccato reply.
“Addictive” follows, about which you already know. Set against an irritatingly familiar but uncredited Bollywood sample (see ILM for an extended discussion on what it is), Watson sets out her idea of passion and the perfection of the Other necessary to fulfil it. It is unclear whether this is an actual man or simply an imagined desire. Enter Rakim, still thinking of a master plan, and employed of course to evoke the “Paid In Full”-Ofra Haza interface of 15 years ago. He sounds as though he has just been cryogenically defrosted. The relentless minor key undertow of the Indian song implies that this ideal isn’t going to be fulfilled.
Next, the seduction, or need for it: “Next To Me.” “It’s not just sex to me…It’s something like a drug for me/If you’re not next to me, I need Ecstasy,” Watson pleads against a vibraphone/acoustic guitar-dominated ethereal jazzfunk groove, her voice ceaselessly floating over bar lines; the passion taking precedence over measured rationality. Is she quite as strong as she makes out, or only as strong as she wants to be made? This track is the equivalent of the opening chord of Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia; a perfection which can be glimpsed once but never quite recaptured.
A shaft of reality then blunts her dream; “Jimmy” reveals that her Other was a scrub masquerading as a saviour and is now in prison. It also reminds us that all songs with telephone calls in the middle are automatically brilliant. She starts by lamenting his absence and missing him, but then realises that there is doubt (though there are still hidden tears – hear how she weeps a dozen syllables out of the word “go”). And it’s a doubt which is explored in some depth over the succeeding three songs, “Grown,” “This Feeling” and “Tired,” which really constitute a single track; an extended dissertation on what sort of a person she is, what she wants set against what she isn’t given, how she views herself and how she wants herself to be reflected, what role love has to play in her life. Stylistically this again shows a debt to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, which is clearly a much more influential record than was generally assumed at the time of its release. “Grown” reflects her emotional obstacle course by the fact that the drums seem to be limping reluctantly behind the bass. “If I feel disrespected, that should be respected.” In “That Feeling,” she is practically berating her Other for being so much – “are you trying to make it harder for the next man?” and then rails against “that same old regular bullshit – ‘cos it’s something when a man knows how to be unselfish/He can make a woman feel free.” She then rhapsodises in praise of the Other. This is what Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” SHOULD have said. This is where founded uncertainty triumphs over unfounded arrogance. An extraordinary performance. “That’s real,” she reveals the “truth” at its signoff, almost as a cast-off afterthought. In “Truth” she is no longer sure who she is except as a reflection of other people’s reflections, be it “the man I love who thinks we gotta compete” or “the prejudiced sales lady thinkin’ I’m a thief.” “Somebody tell me who the hell I’m supposed to be.”
(Welch again – “I’ll send a letter/don’t know who I am”)
A piano tinkles this sequence to an end before we segue into the Gaye-style funk of “I’m Not Really Lookin’” where she is searching more for herself (or convinces herself that she is) than for another Other. The attempt to make her time good founders, inevitably – DJ Quik guest-raps as a man getting away from his wife and the “nappies” - and she ends with a muttered, “Oh fuck it, where’s my drink?”, more alienated than ever.
From the crowd noises into the isolated rain (“does it hurt yet?”) which underscores the devastating “BS,” a soul ballad for which Alicia Keys could excavate her innards for the next half-century and still be incapable of imagining. “Bullshit pours down like rain,” says the chorus. “I don’t care what they say/’cos the TRUTH won’t change,” she replies in a scream. She is still some distance away from finding it. Big Rube guest-raps a conscience warning about being dressed to impress and being unloved, as one backing vocal wanders into disordered atonality behind him. When he growls “bitch nigger,” she is of course growling to herself.
In “Queen of the Ghetto” she turns her attention to the mechanics of even exposing this sort of soul searching on this kind of a record. One “Cita” from “Black Entertainment Television” starts deconstructing concepts of truth over the post-trip hop backing – “this industry is based on the ultimate bullshit and real life ain’t far behind,” going on to attack albums in general – “only one song is worth listenin’ to, and even that is shit Dre did six years ago!” The punchline of course being that the character of “Cita” is as unreal as anything else which exists (in fact is “virtual”), which she herself acknowledges by concluding that “truth is as real as they come, baby, it’s the fuckin’ truth, and it hurts!” All signifiers with no signified.
Appropriate, then, perhaps, that the song on this album which is actually entitled “The Truth,” is masterminded by R Kelly, who on the intro Watson hears knocking, but will not let in. There is no need to comment on the attendant irony of using R Kelly as a scapegoat for the failings of man. Her “truth” is that the Other is, to her, unattainable, and there is no satisfactory compromise. KRS-1’s original comment that “niggers can’t handle truth” is recycled and turned around at this song’s climax.
The next two tracks, alas, are surplus to requirement. Timbaland is on hand for the track “Real,” but disappointingly lets the side down with a barely concealed recycling of “We Need A Resolution” and “Get Ur Freak On.” A good job that “Work It” has confirmed that he still has some new ideas. Similarly, “Hollywood” is a rather redundant rant against the biz, with Dre unleashing a standard moan against everyone who is not he.
The ballad setting of the finale “Do Me” might suggest a conventional wind-down ending for this album, but in many ways it’s the most disturbing, and yet the most logical, song on the record. Bereft of the touch of the Other (either asleep, or tired, or more likely absent) she has no alternative but to satisfy herself. In contrast to the playfulness of Tweet’s “Oops,” Watson here realises the “reality” to which the journey of this record has led her; the most hurtful truth of all, that to subscribe to the R&B template of “loving me,” of “depending on me,” you are finally left with no one to love you except yourself. Thus does masturbation become a lament, a substitute, rather than emancipation. Self-satisfaction can have no other ending. Grief can sometimes afford no other recompense.
It ends: “I’m alone.”
April Wheeler, about to terminate three lives, arrives at the same conclusion, albeit in a far bloodier fashion:
“But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
(Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)
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