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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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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
TLC - AND WHY GRIEVING PEOPLE SHOULDN'T MAKE RECORDS
OK, it wasn't their choice. The Other Two didn't ask for Lisa Left-Eye Lopez to be killed in a car crash. They had already started an album, though no doubt LaFace Records were busily counting the remaining beans on their corporate abacus. Finish it. Put it out. The new album is called 3D (the cover, unlike that of its predecessor Fanmail, is not in 3D). It stands for "three deep." On the cover the three are pictured in black shrouds; already in mourning. Left-Eye peers out from the left as though she was already a ghost.
What must it have been like in the studio? Surely not a case of stopwatches on, let's get on with it. The Man Who Was There - when we see Thornton sitting utterly alone, completely immobile, in his house after McDormand has been executed, surrounded by things which serve only to remind his already nullified soul of what he has lost. It actually doesn't matter if he goes to the chair; his "life" was long since over anyway. I want to believe that the recording studio was like that. It certainly sounds it on at least half of the record.
I don't generally believe that it's a good thing for bereaved, grieving musicians to immediately go into the studio and start recording. Not unless you are the Blue Notes, with such a common depth of experiences, tunes, creeds to call up, who went straight into the studio after Mongezi Feza's funeral in December 1975, blew their hearts out for two-and-a-half hours, edited it down slightly and released it as the double album Blue Notes For Mongezi - one of the most genuinely harrowing records ever made, almost unlistenable in its intensity and yet finally elevating in its hope. Kwela songs, chants, riffs, flow in and out of the firestorm as if they were inseparable from the bodies and souls of the musicians.
With 3D, however, TC (as they should really now be called) sound gutted but also sound as though they've had to punch the clock and get those hits out. I'm not sure how many will emanate from here.
The insoluble problem is, of course, that Left Eye was the entire punctum of TLC, the detail, the factor which lifted them from just being a slightly more switched-on SWV, or a brownstone equivalent of En Vogue. Always, the more Left Eye on a TLC album, the better the album. She immediately explodes all over their 1992 debut Ooooooohhh...On The TLC Tip - which I still consider to be far and away their best record. Directly after we hear a clip of some dumbass guy dissing their image ("maybe it's a black thing...but they're kinda cute"), Left Eye shatters the complacency with sirens, beats going every which way, sneering and hollering gleefully at us for "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," the most assertive and mischievous debut pop single of the '90s - everything we pretended that "Wannabe" was. Half a dozen samples criss-cross each other into an astonishingly avant-garde soundscape which yet does not lose the essential song. The lyric talks of sexual desperation - a very belated response to David Ruffin 27 years previously - but her delivery tells you that really she's the one in control. And she continually, gloriously derails everything else on the record, incluiding the near Cabaret Voltaire electroscape of "Das Da Way We Like 'Em" and the ode to masturbation "Bad To Myself" - even down to the obligatory social comment song "His Story" (whose chorus chord sequence is the same as that of ABC's "The Look Of Love" but whose lyrics reflect a reality as opposed to a deconstruction) in which she cackles "before we become his-story!" And like "The Look Of Love," the chorus repeats itself instrumentally at the end of the album, over which Left Eye issues a Public Information Announcement about the Importance of Safe Sex. She sounds as though she is ejaculating while declaiming. The delivery subverts the message and imposes one of greater dimensions in its place.
On their next album, 1995's CrazySexyCool, they were clearly advised to "mature." It's a considerably quieter album, but not necessarily without menace; the song "Creep," which remains the best song written entitledf "Creep," is a shadowplay of two two-timing partners manoeuvering to avoid each other, and perhaps cancel each other out. Generally, though, the record is far too well-behaved; there is the usual R&B album Achilles' heel of too many damn ballads, and this album's essay on social commentary, the big hit "Waterfalls," is a little too polite, though its warily stealthy girl-group approach interestingly foreshadows what All Saints would get up to a few years later. For every artfully dirty seduction like "Diggin' On You" (with its pleading/enticing slide guitar refrain) there is a pointless karaoke stroll through Prince's holy "If I Was Your Girlfriend." Significantly, Left Eye only really makes herself known towards the album's end, after an uproarious "interlude" with Busta Rhymes, and driving some much-needed nails into the track "Switch."
Eventually it was inevitable that TLC would have to face their audience. This they did in 1999's Fanmail, where they work so hard on self-belief that it turns into a fortress which imprisons them, cutting off all external feeds. Presumably this was the idea behind the fourth "virtual" member, Vic-E, symbolising what you want them to be, concealing what they actually are. They decry passion (the ironic title track, which could easily have fitted on Kid A), reject received ideas of the Other ("Silly Ho" with its insane and brilliant doorbell hook), reject those who fail to live up to the expectations imposed on them ("No Scrubs"), laugh at the possibility of the existence of "love" - "I'm Good At Being Bad," where each verse opens with a facsimile of a gloopy ballad which Left-Eye then proceeds to detonate with a terrible chuckle. No, all I want is a 20-inch dick. That's all THAT MATTERS. The rest is BULLSHIEEET.
You know what the consequences are. "I Miss You So Much" for one. "Unpretty" for an unavoidable two; perhaps the most disturbing song in the TLC canon. Consider - just who is the "you" who is/are making TLC feel so unpretty and insecure with your pressures upon them? Is it the "audience" who put them there? Is it the listener, smugly waiting for some more dick jokes? Is it a Dworkin-style assault on men in general? We play for you and you turn us into dots on a VDU screen. Despite more attempts at defiance in "My Life" and more mischief in "Shout," the desperation doesn't really retreat, and we are finally left in un-ironic ballad land with distraught bullets of self-hatred like "Dear Lie" ("Dear Lie, you suck"), and, the last humiliation, now reduced to pleading with the Other in their own terms ("Don't Pull Out On Me Yet"). Frankly it's difficult to see exactly TLC could have gone from there.
The heartbreaking thing about the four tracks on the new 13-track CD which involve Left Eye is that they seem to be so much more playful. "Quickie" for instance is one of their finest and funniest deconstructions of male flaccidity. "Girl Talk" and "Over Me" are dynamic, attacking pop. Even the closing ballad "Give It To Me While It's Hot" has enough spikes in its wheels to engage your interest. And some of this spreads over to a couple of the other post-Left Eye tracks here. The opening title track, for instance, runs on a surprisingly bouncy 2-step beat, and "So So Dumb" might well be their most pointed attack on Stupid Men on record.
But for all of this, the rest of the album does not engage. "In Your Arms Tonight" is the obligatory Neptunes track, but this is very drearily workaday by their standards. "Dirty Dirty" is the equally obligatory Timbaland track, and while terrific in itself it is simply on the wrong album; it should have been on Missy E's Under Construction, as it is an Elliott track in all but name (perhaps do a swap with the TLC track on the latter). The rest is forgettable ballad fodder; the tribute to Left Eye "Turntable," however hearffelt, does not even begin to touch me; worse, the album's other big ballad "Damage" takes its general structure from Air Supply's "All Out Of Love."
Perhaps I'm too harsh. Objectively, just over half of this album does contain music worth hearing, which even more objectively makes the album worth buying, or at least downloading. But it seems symptomatic of a mind, a group, in pieces, as if this album was something they were forced to make to meet the end-of-year seasonal quotas. It might have been a better idea to release a Greatest Hits album and add the four Left-Eye tracks on at the end, rather than just going through the record company motions. Sadly, it is through her memory that TLC as a whole will be remembered.
. . .
Monday, November 11, 2002
MISS E UNDER DECONSTRUCTION
When exalting Finisterre a few Mondays ago I mentioned that generally I was in favour of narration on albums. I should have made one exception; where narration is used to hector and/or lecture the listener. This happens particularly on hip hop and R&B albums. Why is this? Is it because, despite all the shootings, all the dodgy deals, hip hop/R&B are the last remaining mainstream music genres with any real sense of community? Certainly, listening as I have done to the new Missy Elliott, Jay-Z and TLC albums over the weekend, there is a distinct connectivity which you wouldn't get with, say, Richard Ashcroft, the Coral and Doves. The latter exist in their own universes, self-sufficient apart from a common over-reverence of the Camden Town Good Music Society.
But, like Daniel Bedingfield says, you can sometimes have too much information. The new Miss E album Under Construction befuddles me, insofar as its tracks are punctuated (studiumised?) by long, rambling discourses from Elliott about the State of Things, the need for hip hop/R&B to "reconstruct" itself, to jettison gun culture, playaz/hataz culture, after not just 9/11 but also the deaths of Aaliyah, Left-Eye, Big Pun, BIG, etc. I don't know. If I had sufficient confidence in my music I wouldn't have dragged an otherwise eminently listenable record down with aural footnotes. Imagine the Beatles interrupting Sgt Pepper with earnest two-minute lectures on how radical this record was ("and look out for the weird orchestral noises on A Day In The Life - it's supposed to resemble an acid trip! No one's ever done this before, eh Paul?" "Oh no John, we're right radical, like..."). Not to mention ruining the introduction to every track with the Chinese water torture motif of "This is a Missy Elliott exclusive." Really, Missy? Am I the only mug who bought this "special" edition of the album? Am I blind or illterate? Uh, wouldn't the name "Missy Elliott" emblazoned across the cover tell me that this was a Missy Elliott record? Or do you have such a low opinion of the intelligence of your assumed listener demographic? Missy, shut da fuck up and let the music speak for itself.
And how is the music? Like her three previous albums, it's no classic. A Missy Greatest Hits compilation will be an awesome pop thing indeed, but too much of this record simply reaffirms what we already know. Despite all the talk of an old school vibe to this record - and despite El-P having already nailed the aesthetic and mental impossibility of going back to '86 on "Squeegee Man Shooting" - there is nothing here which could have been made in '86. It is deceptive in its revivalism. Timbaland has a semi-new trick, the menacing fuzzy bass synth line (well it was Altern-8's trick a decade ago, but enough about that), which he uses here on "Go To The Floor" and "Ain't That Funny" - although it works to much better effect on Jay-Z's "Nigga Please." His other motif is the undulating undertow, like Moby on valium - the dessicated blues wail on "Bring The Pain," the similarly pitched guitar on "Slide." All very entertaining, of course, but unlike the Neptunes there is no sense either of new or old here.
By old school, one assumes that we need to refer to things like "Gossip Folks" and "Back In The Day." The former has some especially entertaining Elliott invective ("squat chested cow stumps") while the latter's thoroughly amiable faux-nostalgia about the good old peaceful fun-loving days of da '80z (tell that to Scott La Rock. Or Schoolly-D, for that matter) has punctum blasted into it by Jay-Z, whose rap pointedly ignores the '80s full stop ("nineteen ninety ought three!") and fires the track up with a real passion. Even the go-go-esque rhythms seem to double in intensity (full review of "Blueprint 2" later this week). But listen to early Salt 'n' Pepa cuts like "I'll Take Your Man" and remember that this sort of perspective was not even possible "back in the day," unless you count Sugarhill '79 as back in the day. "Funky Fresh Dressed" reverts to the Beasties' "Paul Revere" backwards track halfway through, but this is three-dimensional, as impossible in 1986 as the Pet Shop Boys' "Being Boring" would have been in 1973. "Play That Beat" and "Hot" do, I suppose, attempt to rekindle some kind of '80s feeling, but neither is sufficiently remarkable to kindle any such interest.
"Pussyfoot" and "Nothing Out There For Me" are fairly straightforward R&B; the former in particular is a luscious lubricant of a song, worthy of TLC at their most sweetly dirtiest ("Diggin' On You"). The latter plays po-mo games with guest singer Beyonce Where's My Career Gone God Only Knowles, the latter desperately trying to convince Elliott of the worthiness of her man and her life, as Elliott on the telephone unsuccessfully tries to persuade her to come to the club, that her happiness is a fake, a construct to mask incipient misery. But it's Miss E who sounds like the really desperate one here. Nothing out THERE. Nothing at all.
"Work It" has unfortunately been so worked to death by over-analysis elsewhere that even at this early stage it would not especially bother me if I never heard it again in my life. If it hadn't been so hyped I could enthuse about the total dispersion of sense and continuity in Missy as a person and as a lyricist. It is as if unrestricted passion and intensity have removed the need for interpretation or meaning; it is a Baudrillardian fascination with the signifiers. The delivery is ecstatically nonsensical; passion cannot be sculpted into words to fit an arbitrary metre - listen to those quivering vibratos at the end of each line. It's about the fuck superseding the function. It is displaced delirium. It is Grace Jones with the central heating on. And the most SUBTLE references to "the old school" on the whole album come here - not just in the naggingly familiar '80s drum sample which begins the track, but the turntable FX which help bring it to a close.
The TLC/Aaliyah/etc tribute "Can You Hear Me" (with the two surviving members of TLC on backing vocals) is doubtless heartfelt and even more doubtlessly serves "the community" but to me it's greater evidence that you really shouldn't make records when you're gutted. See my TLC overview tomorrow for further confirmation of the latter.
. . .
Friday, November 08, 2002
TRINA! TRINA! TRINA!
Trina! She's a bad muthafucka! She knows what she wants! And she knows how to get it! She don't not take not no shit from no one nohow! She got SASS! She got CLASS! So does Missy! So has Eve! And they're both on her second album! Diamond Princess! It's a MUTHAFUCKA of an album! You should have gone out and bought it by now! It's FEMALE! But not written by MALES! Not even Trick Daddy! Even though it's on Slip 'N' Slide! It tells you nothing! You've not heard a thousand times before! But hearing something a thousand times before! Doesn't invalidate it! On the contrary! We need it to be said a thousand times MORE! The alternative! Vanessa Creaming-Myself Carlton! india.oprah.arie.ronankeating.singmeout.ofmy.coma! Norah Jones! She's sensitive! But not really!
Listen to "Hustling"! Chat show format! Deconstructed! "Tell us a little about yourself - WHAM BAM!" Socked in the jaw! "No more fuckin' questions!" This track drives! Like "Revolutionary Generation" with 20 basslines! All swirling and undercutting! Hear "Told Y'All!" Military orders! "Get back down on your ass"! Orchestral/tympani backing! Approaching menace! Rick Ross! Not Rikrok! It wasn't him! He can't do nuthin' about it! He is a slave to subtext! And loving it!
Missy E! On "Rewind That Back"! No it's not a dress rehearsal for "Work It"! She has a weird, wobbly Parkinsonian tremor of a vibrato! She is reeling in her self-induced drunken euphoria! The two ladies swoon around and beyond each other! Courtly love!
"B R Right!" With Ludacris! OPEN THE MUTHAFUCKIN' DOOR TO HEAR THIS TUNE! It is Eastern! Another one! But different in its addictiveness! The violin refrain is more lugubrious! Sadder! Lends a poignancy to the outrageous assertions of Ludacris! It ROCKS and TREADS ASTRIDE BONES!
But "U & Me"! This MF KILLS ME! It takes the The Blueprint blueprint! The O'Jays at 81 rpm! She swears devotion! To the other! It is cathartic! Goddamit listen to the way she slides with apparent rhythmic nonchalance straight into a percussively and aesthetically bang on target emotional punctum when she proclaims "you and me" as a climax directly in tandem with the sample! The backing is immense! It swirls around you! Like Blackpool Illuminations designed by Bruce Nauman!
"Nasty Bitch" whacks a couple of thousand bees on the head with its woozy but skull-piercing attack! Money Mark is on this one! Not that Money Mark! That would have versed him well in compression! Another one! "No Panties"! ARE COMING OFF! With Tweet! The artful bemusement of Tweet's innocence coupled with the KNOWING and WINKING catapult which Trina fires across scrubs' line of fire! This is another Missy production! Oh my GOD I cannot wait for the Missy album! Out on Monday! I'm having the fucker BIKED to me! I will EAT it! DIGEST it! CELEBRATE it! 'Cos man! This ain't but a warm-up! Not a substitute!
"I Wanna Holla" goes all salsa on my butt! Why the fuck salsa classes in the winter! Who be wanting to tread through sodden primary school leaves ready to trip you up and break your muthafuckin' rubber-soled ass! But this is FINE! It is GREAT POP! Don't forget that! Most pop has! "How We Do" is BRUTAL! ELECTRO! But POIGNANT too! Listen to those echoed minor chord changes! Like Inner City! Back to Detroit! "All My People"! Damn! Freestyling! Digressing! Video for "Good Life"! Paris Grey curling herself around London autumnal landmarks! Celebrating the good life! With Kevin Saunderson's ineffably sad keyboard lines and harmonies telling us that really it ISN'T! Back to the album! OK! "Kandi"! "Candy Girl" in other words! An Arthur Baker production originally! New Edition! Pretty damn avant-garde number one when you think about it! This trots along agreeably! But runs out of its idea halfway through! Damn shame! Should have got the Smart-Es to punctumise it a bit! If they can get the afternoon off at Burger King in Lewisham! Or Deutsche Bank at London Wall! What do you reckon!
"Ladies" has Eve! It's more FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE Human League electro! Major chords this time! A stroll through the park! No darkness! Miss Otis does NOT regret! She had no cheating fucker to shoot! Thank God for that! Sondheim's "Ladies Who Lunch" recasted by John Singleton!
"Get This Money" is more BRUTTTTTTTAL Phuture electro! It be about getting this money! The last three songs on this album tell us that THIS is what matters! Of course it damn does! If you want to live in Trina's mouth! Check out "100%"! The memory of Gwen Guthrie is honoured! You still GOT to have a J! O! B! And the fucker doesn't even sound desperate! The Other as lifestyle option! The music says poignant! But you are wanting to make love! She just wants to fuck! Or fly to Paris just to have breakfast! Just as the last song "Do You Want Me?" with the coolly confident confidante/sucker Bathgate on hand! No not that Bathgate! No disused car factories on the M8! No Dustin Hoffman characterisations! She wants, he is offering, but they are aware that really it's all a game! So they play with each other! Their voices tremble! They want to get on with it! It's genuine ecstasy! There's no metre, no barline! They swoon conversely towards each other! And of course BECOME each other as a result! She swallows him! Man, how she loves it!
Don't be misled into thinking this is just a stopgap until the Missy album! It's more than that! You need them both! I need as MUCH of this SHINY YELLOW NEW RAP as I can find! Because it speaks to me! Get out of the stockroom! Breathe the gloriously unpurified air of the world! And GET this joint of joints!
. . .
Thursday, November 07, 2002
"I OFTEN FIND MYSELF SWEPT DOWNSTREAM BY THE SONG'S AWE-FUL POWER HUMMING ALONG TO ITS PREVAILING TOPLINE: PAIN"
The above is part of Daniel Bedingfield's sleevenote to his debut album Gotta Get Thru This. Like all pop albums worth a damn these days, the album is about the desperation of the singer for you, the adorer, to love him, to let him in; but what is expressed here is of a different order to Justin Timberlake's appeal for us to let him grow up (and nearly everyone else who has reviewed Justified has, typically, missed the point, in other words that he "can't sing" because his voice is still breaking, he is still trying - the emotional sweep of the album would be meaningless if he sang like D'Angelo). Gotta Get Thru This - as the sleevenote's multiple dedications to God make clear - is about a crisis of faith. Superficially the theme is extrapolated from that of Sinatra's "The One I Love Belongs To Somebody Else." The Other already has another Other - perhaps even another idol (Gates? Young?). It's a marketplace, and Bedingfield wants you to spend your money on him, devote your spare time to him, rather than on Will or Gareth.
Do looks matter? Daniel's are more rough-hewn, "realer" than Justin's. On one of the sleeve photos he is eyeing himself up in what looks like a bedsit wardrobe mirror - eyes deep set, carefully nurtured stubble. You have to work at this guy; he isn't just a bit of rough.
The pop music enclosed within, however, could only be British, could only have come from 21st-century London. The song cycle starts with admirable awkwardness - the Other is leaving him. "Blown It Again" is the song. He frets over his faults, he laments his shortcomings against a skeletal hip hop backdrop with sudden crashing piano chords which seem to be falling all around him like demented debris. Space cannot be taken for granted. He has "gone and lost his one true friend" through not trusting her, because of course he cannot trust himself. Guest rapper Solid Rock invokes South Park...like Mike Skinner said, it's too late.
"You can't live a life if you don't ask why/Such a thing as too much information/Trapped under this condemnation."
"Either life is a series of significant discoveries or it is not worth having" (Max Harrison in The Wire, Christmas 1986, regarding Larkin's All What Jazz)
He's on his own now. Back in his zone. Flashback to the beginning?
"James Dean (I Wanna Know)" might be the year's best, certainly its most determined, pop single. "I could be the James Dean of the music scene" (echoing Coati Mundi in "Me No Pop I") and then, strangely. "I could be a big star/Like that man Queen." McQueen? Mercury? The Stranger? Its post-Cameo beats are brutally efficient, like sticks of celery being slapped against a pantechnicon; his vocals are exemplary, pointillistic, growling when he needs to; he's putting on an act. So much space in this song, just like its ancestor, "Rock On" by David Essex (and the latter's extraordinarily warped series of pop singles between 1973-76 needs to be re-evaluated urgently). Hear his uncertain vibrato on the word "Queen." Observe how the whole track steps up a gear when he makes his desperation apparent in the chorus: "I wanna KNOW!" with an intermittent three-note bass synth Dies Irae punctuating his sweats - because the punctum was at the end of each verse: "if she can't seem make it worth my while/then WHAT'S THE POINT NOW?"
("oh what's the bloody point?" - final words of Kenneth Williams Diaries)
It's the record George Michael should have made six months ago. No, scratch that, he could never have sung this. Because Daniel has a choice, and he opts to "make music till my brain is fried." No love on the horizon, need to do something or else die. He is facing up to the possibility of music being a substitute.
("from deep soul to symphonies, they're all substitutes" - Momus "Closer To You")
"Gotta Get Thru This" demands that we tell Daniel who he is. Beyond even the multi-mirrored narcissism of Jackson's "Who Is It?," we observe how Bedingfield's vocal is tweaked up to resemble a female, to resemble a pan-sexual satyr, just like "Camille" in Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend," amongst the most holy of music ever made. It's a prayer to see him through until tomorrow when he will . . .see her again. He won't be able to do anything except "pretend that you're already mine," or is he planning to lay his cards on the table to her, to present himself as an alternative and better option?
The next two songs "If You're Not The One" and "He Don't Love You, I Love You" (note the significant absence of the word "Like" as a bridge between the two parts of the latter title) are musically the most mainstream things here, but their intelligence (and indeed inclusion of discernible melody) elevates them high above the Blues and Abs's of this world. The former finds him clawing at his brain, trying to delude himself that he's not in love with you ("why am I crying on my bed?" "why do I dream of you as my wife?"). The faith expressed in this song is absolute; he is committing his entire life to her care ("I wish that you could be the one I die with" - his vulnerability and rapid breathing circling "die" are enough to inspire a little death in themselves). "Is there any way I can stay in your arms?" he asks politely, plaintively, like Oliver asking for some more, please sir. Or, as My Computer might have phrased it, "I don't care how you treat me." Just don't ignore me.
In "He Don't Love You, I Love You" he opens himself up to you, tells you that he doesn't want to build his world around you, doesn't want to have your children - Gareth Gates is a false prophet, I am the way, the truth and the life. But at the same time he's asking the Other to deny his feelings (though really he wants them confirmed) - "Tell me you're not what I know you are." Prove me wrong. It's unproveable.
The silence which follows "Tell me to silence my heart."
Then, surprisingly, we segue into a pair (everything on this album comes in pairs) of purposeful guitar-driven, almost New Wave, tunes, albeit still with a 2-step rhythm supporting both. In fact they both sound astonishingly like the Police (an unexplored link between Stewart Copeland's polyrhythms => speed garage?) and "I Can't Hear You" is essentially a pun-free, smugness-free rewrite of "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da." He is trying to communicate with the Other but is far too nervous; words, emotions come out as a jumble, and her heart is protecting and defending her against all of it. "I wish that you could see/The other, BETTER parts of me" - but of course he's not sure whether he DOES have any better parts of himself, or whether that in fact is all that there is.
"Friday" is an exhilarating cartwheel of a song whose unstoppable impetus - like the cork stopping Sting's bottle getting ready to spurt out - is worthy of the Police at their best. "She's coming back on Friday" goes the chorus. He destabilises himself with his own expectant ecstasy ("the clock says it's half past five/but the sun is still in the sky").
Then we get the big ballad, "Honest Questions (Plains Of Asia)." Now Bedingfield wants you and I to justify his own life for him. "The lives I've lived/The deaths I've died/You died them too/And all for me." The diminishing returns in direct proportion to the volume and certainty of his voice when he sings:
"Do you see a brighter day for me?
Another day?
A day?"
He wants you to protect him against his own "eternal blindness," "the whispers in my heart against your kindness." What he wants from you is made clear in the chorus: "I will pour my water down/Upon a thirsty barren land/And streams will flow from the dust of/Your bruised and broken soul...you will grow, you will grow." On the sleeve this chorus is printed in inverted commas. It's what he needs you to say to him. Turn my tears into life. Consummation = holiness. I must cling to you. Do I love you?
"Girlfriend" is ostensibly perky, upbeat post-Jacko pop where he seems to have won the Other over...but even here there is darkness. "You gotta be the one for me or else life makes no sense/So wrap your arms around me/Kiss me till I'm dead." I actually don't want to live. Can I stay and be nothing at all? I depend on you. I am a parasite. I cannot exist independently.
"WIthout The Girl" repeats the 2-step of "James Dean" but this song is much more straightforward - the one he loves does indeed belong to somebody else, and he is content for now to wait and see whether she will one day come to him as more than a friend. It looks as though he has reached a comfortable compromise with reality.
But wait...
Twist the mirrors round. See the distortion which has suddenly arisen. See the real, inedible underbelly of what Bedingfield has been saying all along.
"INFLATE MY EGO" is the title of the climactic song where he trashes all illusions and faces up to whom he really loves - himself. "There's no way I can feel about it/'Cause I don't even know how much I love her." One fatal step beyond "Just My Imagination," it has ALL been happening in his head. "I consider you so expendable," he cackles in the chorus, "I don't need you/My whole world revolves around me/INFLATE MY EGO!" A brutal candour rarely encountered in pop, bolstered up by the backing track being a beefed-up version of the Peter Gunn Theme, played with an awful euphoria. Indeed it reminds us of the genuine ecstasy of the opening section of Soulwax's 2 Many DJs, which opens with a wedding being ELP's version of "Peter Gunn" and Basement Jaxx's - well, it's appropriate for Bedingfield here - "Where's Your Head At?" - but here it's drained of all joy; you are faced with hard facts. Hear his "thank yous" to an imagined audience which sounds more like the wrong end of a wind tunnel.
(The whole song of course, from his vocal downwards, could also easily be a parody of Robbie Williams)
After the apocalyse, the reckoning: just Bedingfield, his acoustic guitar, and a restating of "Gotta Get Thru This," re-presented to us as a humble prayer to God to endeavour to help him to understand exactly how fucked up his mind is.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to take him on.
. . .
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
CLOCKWORK DERANGE
Of course Kubrick knew damn well about the final chapter, and he was right to ignore it (or spread its contents subliminally throughout his screenplay). Perhaps he should have ignored the narration, as well; Burgess' extended High Tory moan of a novel reads like bad Christopher Marlowe. Burgess was always the sort of person who gave the impression of being a great writer without actually having written anything great.
It's all very 1971, of course. The balletic tropes of the rape and murder scenes come across like a Pete and Dud sketch for which the punchline had been lost. The business with Miss Weatherby the Catwoman is straight out of Benny Hill. All very mild, all a rather laboured set-up for remaining 90 minutes of the film which concern themselves with the question of revolt.
And Kubrick films link to other Kubrick films in his own Arcades. With Clockwork Orange it seems to me that the film with which it naturally pairs is Spartacus, that other extended dissemination of a violent rebel and how "society" tames and neutralises him. Unlike Spartacus, Alex has no specific political or social reason for what he does; he does it because he cannot achieve otherness in any other way. But the repeated references to crucifixion - indeed, the line "I'd rather be crucified than crucify!" is a direct lift from the Spartacus screenplay - not to mention the final imagined graveside scene, which queerly preludes Kubrick's next work, Barry Lyndon - would suggest that we are meant to view his random violence (with its accompanying misogyny) as a greater and noble thing than that perpetuated by the State.
It of course suggests something else. As with Spartacus (famously exemplified by Olivier double-entendring away with Curtis in Hearst's old swimming pool) there is a homoerotic subtext a continent wide in this film. The Droogs fancy him, in particular Dim (Warren Clarke) - and the latter's subsequent transformation into a proto-buggery police officer indicates a degree of Iago-like estrangement and betrayal. Note the evident hard-on enthusiasm he displays when dunking Alex in the horse trough - the equivalent of Olivier's brewing rage when he finds that Curtis has vacated his life, subsequently forcing Kirk Douglas to slay him.
And throughout the film, in contrast to Alex's problems with women, nearly every manifestation of male authority makes a play for him. There's Aubrey Morris' Post-Corrective Adviser - a role which should quietly chill but which Morris, as is his wont, camps up beyond credibility. The part reads as though it was written for Kenneth Williams. The prison chaplain, the Home Secretary (a pity that Eric Portman was by that time no longer around to give that latter role its definitive performance) - and, most notoriously, Mr Alexander, the writer whose wife was raped by the Droogs and who himself was crippled in their attack.
When we first encounter them in their overly spacious house (a nod to 2001 and also an alternative fate for the two protagonists of The Shining?) they enact a strange Pinteresque, deliberately banal dialogic exchange ("Well I suppose we'd better let them in"). Slowness, stiffness - there is no love or sex in this house to begin with. His wife in her womb-like pod could be a thousand miles away from him. The distance says it all; the shelves of largely unread books confirm it. It's significant that the most uninhibited act of violence in the Droogs' rampage is when Alex gleefully tips over the writer's desk and typewriter, followed by one of his bookcases; the denial of sex itself, in a very literal sense, brought to book.
(The rape scene itself is not very explicit and deliberately shot at a distance, and only in its early stages. A much more explicit refraction of the cravings of the passive viewer can be found in the genuinely brutal extended rape scene which forms the centrepiece of the 1992 Belgian flim Man Bites Dog. In the latter, the serial killer is simply going about his daily business as though it were a job; the punctum in this scene is that the camera assistants who are making a documentary about the man enthusiastically join in with the rape and murder as though they were simply adjusting cables or designing a set. Changing Rooms as hijacked by de Sade and Francis Bacon. Worse is the reaction of the audience, including this writer and his partner when they first saw it in the cinema - I regret to report that we were rolling about in laughter at the blackly comedic incongruity of the whole thing)
Even more significant is the later sequence where a reformed but societally-disowned Alex seeks refuge in the writer's house. The dialogic sequence plays itself through again, word for word. The desk, typewriter and books are all in their original place as if no damage had been done, as if the wife had never existed, for - when the camera does the same long pan from him to the spherical chair - we find reclined in the latter, not his wife (who apparently died of pneumonia some months after her rape), but an extremely camp David Prowse as his "bodyguard" - in other words, his real desire, a shapely hunk. He welcomes Alex in, as he is now apparently engaged in writing "subversive literature" (a jibe by Burgess at "liberalism") and is seemingly on his side - that is, until he overhears Alex in the bath gleefully singing "Singin' In The Rain" - the same song the Droogs sang as the rape and attack took place. Knowing who he now is, the writer sets about nullifying him, but society first nullifies the writer to save Alex and the ruling party's wafer-thin parliamentary majority.
(Alas, Patrick Magee, a distinguished Beckettian who plays the writer, also falls into the ham/camp trap. In his latter appearances you could almost be watching Kenneth Griffith!)
Alex's final courting by the Home Secretary does not of course lead to his renouncing violence - the conspiratorial closing whisper of "Oh, yes, I was cured all right!" put paid to that, not to mention keeping the sequel options open (although no sequel was made); his "rebel" self is reborn, Spartacus lives through his baby son - "he will grow up to be a Roman!" exclaims Jean Simmons, nearly as chillingly.
In truth, Clockwork Orange is a rather ropey film. The device of anti-violence propagandising/indoctrinating film footage was used to much starker and far more frightening effect in Pakula's The Parallax View three years later; the acting is generally far too camp; the jocular tone far too jocular to act as any kind of an ironic Greek chorus - and its signifiers far too easily assumed (without any understanding of the signified) by two generations' worth of dumb pop groups and denser designers.
. . .
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
LONNIE DONEGAN
Two giants gone in one week. Jam Master Jay, the effective founding father of what we now perceive as hip hop, last week; and now Lonnie Donegan, the architect - or at least the conduit - of Britpop. The man without whom, it can safely be said, virtually none of what you are listening to now from this country could have been produced, from Cliff through the Beatles right down to the Streets. And if that's a cliche, fuck it - cliches become cliches because they had meaning and impact to begin with.
It might still be hard for younger readers to visualise how seismic an impact Donegan had on popular music in this country in the '50s. When I was a youngster in the '70s, he had largely been dismissed as a joke, a London Palladium comedy MOR turn, the "Dustman" man, and in other quarters as a sell-out, a traitor (ha! the insistence of "purity" on what was a bastardisation - albeit a benign bastardisation - to begin with!). More recently, though - certainly in the last 3-4 years - he seemed determined to return to whatever the original punctum was which drove him, as if he knew that five heart bypasses was pushing it, that his remaining lifespan might not be that long, to set everything in his order.
And, as with all real innovators, he did not sit down and carefully plot out his subversion on a bar graph. In fact "Rock Island Line" was recorded under the banner of Chris Barber's band, with whom Donegan was at the time the resident banjo player, as a filler album track. Oh he knew about Leadbelly though, all right - Donegan was from Glasgow; like Liverpool, a port facing west, and therefore the first point of contact for jazz and blues records from the USA (the legacy of the 18th-centiry Tobacco Lords). OK, he might just have pointed out to the virgin listener the existence of Leadbelly, of Skip James and Woody Guthrie, but his own aural and visual impact in 1955-57 (particularly) was overwhelming.
You have to understand that this was still the era of Dickie Valentine and Alma Cogan - clean-cut, unthreatening, smiling, compromising entertainers crooning cliched songs composed and chosen by committee. The boat it was not within their job description to rock. Keep smiling. Hide the torment. Camouflage the greyness. Sound familiar? Gloop-laden love songs or novelty numbers which made you want to construct your own Columbine.
And yes, OK, nothing could have happened without Presley, without Holly, no one's denying that, but Donegan was here and had the most immediate and shattering impact. View some of his TV performances of the time and contrast his restless on-the-spot franticity and near-psychotic screwing up of the face, his band assaulting their instruments in exactly the same way that the Clash would do a generation hence - put that up against bowties and "Pickin' A Chicken For Christmas" and you might get the idea. Skiffle was Britain's punk of the '50s; also its indie. No more expensive instruments - a makeshift double bass constructed out of a tea chest, a washboard rather than a drum kit. No need even for musical expertise; three basic chords were your passport. It was how you delivered them.
My nomination for the most sonically extreme UK #1 single ever (despite competition from "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," "Respectable," "Firestarter" and "Flat Beat") would have to be 1957's "Cumberland Gap." Lasting barely 90 seconds, taken at a minimum pace of 200 mph, words yelped and barked out which had no obvious literal or other sense, HEAR Donegan's untranscibable yell as Denny Wright launches into his equally demented monotonal guitar solo - this was the first punk number one, the equivalent of "White Riot" getting to #1 in '77 (which it didn't). And engineered, as with most of his hits, by the 29-year-old Joe Meek.
And then people say he lost it, sold out. "Chewing Gum" and "Dustman" - though Donegan argued at the time that he was simply extending the folk concepts into a British perspective, and it is possible to argue that that particular strand of Britpop (the Ray Davies to Jarvis Cocker one) could be traced from here (although Lionel Bart's work, in particular "Oliver!" and "Things Ain't What They Used To Be," the latter done for that great anti-purist Joan Littlewood, need also to be counted as crucial baptismal fonts). But most people just saw it as compromise. It is significant that his last hit single (appropriately enough, "The Party's Over") dropped out of the charts just one week before "Love Me Do" made its debut. He had done his work; it was time for the next lot to take over.
And then - writing hits for Tom Jones, living quietly in Spain (or not so quietly - three wives and a 14-year-old girffriend at various different times), serious heart trouble, a 1978 comeback album with McCartney and others which sank unnoticed beneath the New Wave. Until, in 1999, he suddenly toughened up again and unleashed Muleskinner Blues. Involving Van Morrison and others, this was a remarkable record. "Rock Island Line" was taken apart, slowed down to 16 rpm, and given a blacker, more menacing undertow. Donegan's spoken intro out-Caves Nick Cave in its dark terror. Unlike Tom Jones, there were no late-period embarrassments; no team-ups with Wyclef Jean, no sordid attempts to sex himself up; equally, unlike Johnny Cash's series of "American" recordings, there was no indication that a past-hip producer had shoehorned him into doing some of these pesky modern songs. Like Mark E Smith, he stayed to plough his own furrow determinedly; no wonder John Peel idolised him. His energy in recent concerts was apparenttly unabated ("playing with the energy of someone a quarter of his age," someone wrote to Peel just a couple of weeks ago).
Whatever British pop music you're listening to (perhaps with the exceptions of Gates, Young et al, who take us back to the days of Valentine and Cogan), this man was the founding father of all of it. Venerate and treasure his memory.
Records to listen to
Donegan's discography is a bit of a mess at the moment, but the compilation Skiffle Sensation (£6.99 from HMV) is absolutely crucial; weeding out "Chewing Gum" and "Dustman," this concentrates on the music which caused the rumpus. And to get an idea of how this came across live, Live! 1957 - The Complete Conway Hall Concert (Zircon Records) is also essential. The lengthy, ecstatic rendition of "Glory" in particular is hypnotically compelling in its power. And for evidence of how ahead of and apart from everyone else he was, check out the abovementioned Muleskinner Blues.
. . .
Monday, November 04, 2002
HE’S JUSTIFIED – I’M ANCIENT
“Justified” by Justin Timberlake
How do you progress into adulthood, into maturity, when everyone around you wants you to stay a child? Do you fight against it? Not everyone does. But a living still has to be made. You either opt simply to get old only in a biological sense, otherwise staying as you are, like Jagger, kept on the treadmill by the fear of being found out, of not having finished that degree – or you try to reconnect with the world as you mature, if of course you are allowed to mature.
This is clearly a problem with Justin Timberlake. Everyone knows from “Pop” and “Girlfriend” that he had doubts even 18 months ago. That “Pop” and “Girlfriend” were the records Michael Jackson should have made, instead of crying pantomime tears over underprivileged people whom he’d have shot if they ever strayed onto Nevermind-land.
It has already become a cliché to argue that Justified, Timberlake’s debut solo album, is the album Jacko should maybe have made right after Off The Wall. And Timberlake has that vulnerable, audibly not quite mature contralto of a voice still – the same voice Jackson had in 1975, when he was singing castoffs like “One Day In Your Life” (the sentiments of the latter song are recast in a very different and more disturbing way on the current album’s “Take It From Here,” but more of that in a moment). So this is someone who wants to become an adult but doesn’t sound quite ready yet.
Of course Timberlake has enlisted the aid of both Timbaland and the Neptunes to help him out; it has to be said that the latter pull it off far more convincingly than the former – as with Quincy Jones on Off The Wall, the Neptunes understand the importance of space and silence in pop as so few others these days do.
Justified opens with “Senorita,” an easy-going start with that “Quiz Show” electric piano again and the general aura of goofing around in the studio. He’s warming up, fretting over why his intended has not received her “prize.” He even goes as far as to initiate a studio singalong (“guys sing this part, girls that…”) with which everyone joins in enthusiastically. Timberlake signs off with a wink: “Gentleman, good night. Ladies….good morning!”
But can he see it through, or has he just gotta get through this?
“Like I Love You,” the first single, is this album’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” down to the nervous fumbling with words in the intro before the acoustic guitar and beats stealthily kick in. It’s like the belated antithesis to George Michael’s “Faith.” As with that (acoustically-driven) song, the singer’s intended passions are not directed towards a specific Other, but towards his audience, or whom he would like to be his audience. “If it were up to me, your face will change,” he remarks early on. In the chorus he sings, very meaningfully, “Late at night I talk to you…But you will know the difference when I touch you.” It’s a plea not to take him off your stereo, not to cast him from your life but rather recast him in his intended new shape. Ultimately, as the Belgian lass has already remarked elsewhere, this is a song directed towards himself – hence the album title of course – we have to justify him, as does he, to continue as a receptacle for dreams and a projector of interpretable passions. We have to think of him as a blank sheet upon which we can write what we choose – be mad and discursive, but for God’s sake don’t let him in on your agenda; even though he DEMANDS that you reinterpret him, let him punctu(M)re you rather than just please you.
His plea halfway through: “if you give me just the chance TO BE A MAN” erupting through the record like a rising iceberg.
The way in which at the fadeout, everything suddenly drops back to a plaintive synth line, sounding very close to “Trans-Europe Express.” Timberlake muses that “I used to dream about this when I was a boy…never thought it would end up this way…everybody dance,” he instructs, solemnly, uncertainly.
“(Oh No) What You Got” is agreeable enough, but demonstrates that Timbaland is still stuck in his Eastern rut – he really seems to have saved 18 months’ worth of punctum for the imminent Missy Elliott album, which is anything but a rut – and it’s left to the Neptunes to take up the theme of uncertainty/the Other again on the hymn “Take It From Here.” Here, against a warm bath of strings which could have come straight off The Lexicon Of Love, Timberlake offers himself as guardian angel/protector – but goes beyond benificence almost to the point of obsessive ownership. “I wanna be your lake…any problems that you have, I wanna wash them away.” He wants to be her sky, her air “so when you feel that you can’t breathe, I’ll be there,” her answer “all the time – when you see how I put your life before mine, with no question.” Actually there’s one hell of a question; it sounds as though he wants to suffocate the Other and obliterate her life with his. He goes on to say how much he wants “to review all your plans.” Playing God? Or is HE the one needing protection?
“I wanna be your mother…” Pause.
Right at the end: “I’ll be there MOMMY…”
You guessed it. It’s Kristeva again. He wants to escape and dominate the maternal body but cannot escape his fundamental attachment to it. He cannot reach, or become, the Stranger.
And this offer is NOT unconditional, as evinced by the following track, “Cry Me A River” – not the Julie London standard, but the same subject matter. I’ll be true to you as long as you’re true to me, but if NOT – you’re on your own, cry ME a river, dare to need me and I’ll condemn you to nothingness. Timbaland is in charge again here, and it’s a slower rewrite of “We Need A Resolution” with an unearthly vocal threnody at its intro, but with Timberlake refusing even to entertain the need of being supposed to change. He now pours out contempt, even though he hates no one more than himself. It’s a static vocal performance; as with Aaliyah at her most distant, almost inhuman in its lack of (com)passion.
A light shines again with “Rock Your Body,” the best song Chic never wrote (indeed, much of this album seems to revisit and reconstruct a selectively imagined pop 1979/80). An irreducible summer stroll of a groove wherein Timberlake tries to pull – more or less – but with hesitance (“Why are you so quick to walk away?”) and realisation of the exercise’s futility – hear the desperation underlying the assumed bravado of “I’ll have you naked before the end of this song.” There’s no evidence that he in fact succeeds.
Similarly, “Nothin’ Else” might be the best song that Stevie Wonder never wrote. It hardly raises its voice above a whisper. He imagines an ideal scenario: “I was just walking that day aimlessly/you picked a perfect day to bump into me.” He considers the options of starting a relationship but the doubts escalate as the song continues: he ends up muttering about “health regimes” and “ultimatums being no fun” and the music comes to a dead stop – only for the song to start again at the beginning; this time he is just walking aimlessly. Nil else. Like the Temptations, he may have imagined the whole thing. He is wondering whether to love himself and, if so, if he is any kind of substitute for anything.
You only notice later on that the chord sequence of the verse is identical to that of “Paint It Black.”
On “Last Night” he continues to bemoan complications which, in his perspective, ruin any love affair. “In your eyes I see a second chance” he sings (but for whom? Himself more than her?) and ends by him reminiscing about just being hand in hand, in love, and exclaiming “Can’t we just go back to being like that again?” – pause – and then he SNEERS “baby!” and sniggers. The most sardonic use of the word “baby” since the DJ/alien dialogue which begins the Carpenters’ “Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft.”
Back to Timbaland for the next three tunes: “Still On My Brain” which is as dull as any Timbaland ballad tends to be; “(And She Said) Take Me Now” which features guest Janet Jackson, though the latter is used to surprisingly little effect (the Neptunes did far better with her on Beenie’s “Feel It Boy”). The sparse DAF-type minimalist electro fadeout is quite good, though. “Right For Me” reduces the backing to fuzz synth and clattering percussion, with a cameo from Bubba Sparxxx, but again any of the mixes of “Grindin’” by the Clipse outdo it.
Thankfully the Neptunes come back on board for what should have been the closing track (let’s leave the dismal MOR ballad “Never Again” out of this – despite the fact that it may or may not be about Britney, and will probably be #1 for 85 weeks), or indeed the bonus track “Worthy Of” which continues and reinforces his self-doubt, but musically the latter seems to be based on a “Float On” sample) – “Let’s Take A Ride.” Here the Other whom he is addressing has just been laid off from her job and is feeling down. He implores her to come for a ride with him, out into the countryside, even spend a night with him, but y’know it’s not an obligation. Again the music is summery and unhurried. But is he addressing a potential partner or is he addressing YOU? Go for a spin for an hour with this CD in your car stereo; forget the world for awhile but don’t LEAVE it. Or rather, don’t leave ME. Does this make me a better human being, he is saying – does this mean that I’m an adult, that I can cross over to you? He is almost begging us to make up our own minds and form our own perspectives. Be careful you don’t tell him your answer too soon though – the next chapter might not be as interesting if we knew exactly where Justin Timberlake was going to go. Wherever it is, though, it might be worth your going with him.
. . .
Friday, November 01, 2002
IF I WERE A CARPENTER
Richard Carpenter, at his peak, was one of the few musicians to understand properly, and develop upon, the innovations of Brian Wilson. The fact that he achieved this within what was essentially MOR (though I prefer to think of it as avant-MOR; some of the Carpenters' things are decidedly uneasy listening) has of course always been held against him, even though, in his sister, singer and drummer Karen Carpenter, he had the perfect instrument through which his concept could be distilled.
The really early Carpenters work (1966-70) will be a complete revelation to you if you're unfamiliar with it. Here you will find elements taken from Pet Sounds and Smile - not to mention, very obliquely, elements from the Mothers of Invention - and taken in new, if un-rock-like, directions. Songs like "The Parting Of Our Ways" (1966) and "All I Can Do" (1968) are phantasms of pop; godlike chord changes, divine harmonies which overlayer each other as though they were the Tenth Dimension, never mind the Fifth. If "Don't Be Afraid" had been a Rotary Connection recording, or an Axelrod recording, Gilles Peterson would be wetting himself silly over it - it's that good.
Gradually, we hear how Karen's voice gradually settles down from its immediate Mama Cass-type timbre (I will not go into the multiple attendant ironies of that comparison) into a more comfortable and fuller contralto range. The arrangements become less trebly, more expansive. Songs like "All Of My Life" have a sophistication in their arrangements and production which belies the recording date of 1969. Unexpected "protest" songs like "Your Wonderful Parade" (1967) and "Mr Guder" (1970) wander off into all kinds of obscure musical territory, with lyrics (courtesy of John Bettis) which could have come straight off We're Only In It For The Money. "Eve" (1968) is a shattering deconstruction of a lonely and unfulfilled life gradually winding its way down to termination, comparable with anything off Walker's contemporaneous Scott 3 (especially "Rosemary"). And their first hit single, a version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" decelerated to a funereal tempo, turns Lennon's aggrieved doubts into a plaintive acceptance of solitary desperation. The production here is almost 3D in its scope. Still 1969, don't forget.
"Close To You" - the response song to "This Guy's In Love" which Bacharach and David surely always intended it to be (see the sneaky reference to the former in the trumpet solo). Here, Karen is near-apostolic in her compassion and offers selfless love to the Other. It is a divine pop record because it knows how to open up its internal spaces and stand in awe before them, rather than filling them with clutter. The song, close to fadeout, reduces to a single ticking beat (the heart) before the choir (as you knew it would) sweeps hack in again. The harmonic density here is almost Ligeti-like in its intensity and surely must have been an influence on 10cc's "I'm Not In Love."
Was any female singer ever as compassionate as Karen Carpenter? Herb Alpert once remarked that listening to Karen sing was "almost like she had her head in your lap"; it was that close and personal. Certainly no one brought more out of Leon Russell's songs than the Carpenters did; the holy trilogy of "Superstar" (idolation turning to unconditional love, irrespective of whether the Other actually deserves it), "A Song For You" (only Sylvester's scandalously unfeted reading of this song compares in intensity) and the quiet desperation and buried loathing of "This Masquerade."
Yes, desperation. If Karen could be compassionate, she could also be vulnerable and doubting in what she communicated to the listener. "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "Hurting Each Other," obviously; less superficially evident is the Carpenters' gradual trend towards bleaker songs. For every jaunty, benificent singalong like "Top Of The World" there are half-a-dozen things like "I Won't Last A Day Without You," ostensibly a love song but really despairing at dependency. "Goodbye To Love" most obviously; though even here Karen doesn't entirely close the door - she refuses not to countenance some kind of a future, so Tony Peluso's guitar solo (which like Milt Bernhardt's trombone orgasm on Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" expresses the singer's real desires which the singer is too circumscribed (self or otherwise) to articulate) represents an optimism, represents an opening of the curtain.
The saddest and most disturbing song in the whole Carpenters canon is, for me, "Yesterday Once More" from 1973 - significantly, their biggest-selling single in the UK - which has to be heard in its original context of side two of their Now And Then album. Supposedly just a nice little ballad reminiscing about the good old days, and how nice it was to see the kids getting into the old songs again (with the unasked question: is that because there are no new ones? or that there are but I'm too old to understand?), this actually scrapes a much more painful nerve. 1973, remember - the OPEC crisis, the Yom Kippur war, Watergate, the Vietnam war staggering drunkenly to a close, economic markets in freefall - was nearly another 1962, a time when it seemed that everything was going to be destroyed, maybe even the world. Everything "we" knew, that is - the "we" being the middle-market baby boomers who gave up on the Beatles between Rubber Soul and Abbey Road, who just wanted easy parameters to make themselves identifiable. A prayer for the potentially dying, that's what "Yesterday Once More" was - an extremely political song when you think about it. "Every sha-la-la-la..." as if they are desperately clutching at signifiers like a lifebelt. This all still means something, DOESN'T IT? TELL ME IT DOES!
(The Buzz! GO BACK! GO BACK! GO BACKGOBBAAAAAACCCCCKKKKKK)
(Hendrix! I DON'T LIVE TODAY - EXISTING! NOTHING BUT EXISSSSTTTTINNGGGG!!!!!!)
"When it comes to the part where he's breaking her heart, IT CAN EVEN MAKE ME CRY - JUST LIKE BEFORE." Yes but it's a different intensity of crying now, isn't it? You're crying for something else.
And then on the album it segues into a whole side of songs - "Fun Fun Fun," "Our Day Will Come," "One Fine Day" (remember the placid reading of "We Shall Overcome" which follows the tumult of "Circus '68-'69" on Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, itself an attempt to portray the '68 Democratic Convention riots), flashing past like a suicide whose life flashes past their eyes as they descend towards the pavement to find the concrete beach beneath - but at the end, it's back to the song, Karen's voice now sepulchral and sinister against a static piano chord - "when I was young, I listened to the radio"
(Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. "Anybody there?" "The charred body of Carl Phillips..." Unglamorous rebuild)
They couldn't go anywhere after that. Most of their songs from 1974 onwards were off-the-peg MOR cuts, written by hacks. Karen's voice retained the compassion and vulnerability but the context was lost. By the time of the nice-try-but-no-thanks "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" everybody sounds alien(ated).
. . .
Thursday, October 31, 2002
STEVIE FIXED
I had to write something about Fleetwood Mac - or to be exact, the two Fleetwood Macs which have been predominant at different times, or at opposite ends of the same stretch of time.
Peter Green's Mac were responsible for perhaps the most nihilistic sequence of pop singles ever with the (distantly) possible exception of Nine Inch Nails (and without the showbiz). And yet the hits were rarely, if ever, loud - the desperation was evident with barely suppressed rawness of hurt. On "Need Your Love So Bad" Green relocates Little Willie John's hard-on to the hard concrete of Cross Deep. He is pleading for the Other. If she doesn't respond he may destroy himself. That overdubbed string refrain, curling upwards like a giant raised eyebrow (the equivalent of LL Cool J's repeated "why?" on "Born To Love You" or Van Dyke Parks' forest of question marks punctumising U2's "All I Want Is You"). Without the strings there would almost be no music.
"Albatross" was an albatross for the group, but was there ever a quieter number one? At the opposite end of the decade to the sinister idyll of its equivalent, Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore," it's a quiet repose, a reminiscence sparked off by Santo and Johnny's "Sleep Walk," but as redolent of suppressed emotion as Eno's "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960." The musicians here are trynig to playing as quietly as possible, as if not to awaken the neighbours (think also "Pink Frost" by the Chills, of which Mark Sinker once remarked that they sounded as though they had mufflers on their amplifiers). So much space; so much unsaid; Mick Fleetwood's tom-tom refrain about as un-tribal as you could get (compare with its exact contemporary, Gaye's "Grapevine").
"Man Of The World" rents the cover open for a few seconds only. Green has already mused for two verses about his much-travelled but little-learned life ("there's no one I'd rather be") when, at the last line of the second verse, he suddenly slashes his guitar as though he has just slashed his wrists and screams in unfathomable grief "BUT I JUST WISH THAT I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN!" And then, suddenly it's quiet again. Like Poltergeist, it's most frightening when it's quiet, because you're waiting for Green to erupt again. But he doesn't; he leaves you in no doubt that he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He just delves back into himself and grieves more deeply ("I wish I was in love" - beyond loneness). Talking to his own mirror, waiting for the blood on the glass to dry up into a makeshift mural.
"Oh Well (Part 1)" is more animated, but Green's problems are as evident and explicit as those of Richey Edwards on The Holy Bible. He pities himself ("I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin") but repels any outside attempts to reach him ("Don't ask me what I think of you/I might not give the answer that you want me to"). The guitars are about to reach some sort of climax when suddenly they disappear, and we dissolve into Part 2; a single strummed acoustic, a medieval recorder (let's go back to your CHILDHOOD) - unresolved to fadeout.
And "The Green Manalishi," a top ten hit in 1970 (the equivalent - imagine the Manics' "4st 7lbs" being a top ten hit in 1994) is one long, lost fadeout. What is the two-pronged crown? It's his own demons which have come to devour him. The riff endlessly repeats; there's hardly a song, just an indistinct scream deep within. He is saying help me, I'm trapped, I trapped mysefl. As with "You're Holding Me Down" by the Buzz or (more literally) the closing moments of Notorious BIG's Ready To Die, it's the sound of someone committing suicide on a pop record. The band couldn't disentangle them; as with Floyd/Barrett, they weren't particularly inclined to do so either.
The second predominant Mac was that driven by Buckingham and Nicks - the polar opposite; in this group's work there is candid, exquisite neurosis. Lives, relationships collapse within them and around them as they make themselves bankable again with Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Even in something like the former's "Landslide," Stevie nixes any notion of her own permanence ("If you see my reflection on the snow-covered hills/A landslide will bring it down"). Less overtly melodramatic than "Gold Dust Woman" but a statement of determined invulnerability set against internal collapse worthy to stand against its descendent - "Delicate Cutters" by Throwing Muses.
Oh "Dreams." To hell with the Corrs. You can't compress the emotions in this song into one chord. The whole punctum of this Nicks song is that it's unresolved. The way Stevie trembles the word "go" over six syllables in the final chorus of "women, they will come and they will go" is as unreproducable as Sinatra's ascending "IIIIIIII would sacrifice anything..." with which he charges back into "I've Got You Under My Skin." And is there a more heartbreaking or poignant final chord in any pop record than that which ends "Dreams"? You could never notate that.
In "Sara" from the Tusk album, Stevie of course elects to drown, to surrender to emotions engendered by the Other. She never quite resurfaced; her work thereafter leans more towards the studium. Maybe she was just happier. A full and unsurpassable discussion of this song can be found in the old Melody Maker booklet Unknown Pleasures, in which Simon Reynolds dissects Tusk in detail (memo to Simon: please post this on Blissout. It's a work of art).
But we mustn't forget Buckingham either. Even by 1979's advanced standards, "Tusk" the song is a queer piece of work, with its marching bands, its never-quite-a-chorus, its quiescent paranoia ("why don't you tell me who's on the 'phone?"), its climactic repeated scream of "DON'T TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME!" - the other end of "Oh Well"'s prism? - the freeform multiple drums which stand in for a middle-eight (as though the UCLA marching band had inadvertently walked into a John Stevens/SME workshop). In the UK this was their biggest hit single since "Oh Well."
And fifteen years of hindsight lead me to think that 1987's Tango In The Night is, sonically, rather more of an avant-garde work than it was given credit for at the time. Here Buckingham's production echoes in all kinds of strange places, like a mentholated Lee Perry. "Big Love" is a sort of sequel to "Tusk" but equally paranoid; the collective grunts which climax it sound as far away from orgasm as could be imagined. The weird varispeeded voices which lurk out of every orifice on "Family Man." The post-ZTT bliss of "Little Lies" which occupies the exact middle ground between Prefab Sprout and Bucks Fizz (and this in a Christine McVie song; very much the rational straight player in Mac, and consequently the least interesting).
Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood and McVie are currently recording a new album - their first as a unit since TOIN - to be released next year. Glitch input? Neptunes input? Don't rule out either.
. . .
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
LL COOL J’S BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
or: Is There Anything The Neptunes Can Do Which Isn’t Visionary?
There’s a new LL Cool J album just out. It’s called 10, because it’s his tenth album, to which he makes numerous references over the course of the record. By my count, it’s the fifth essential LL album, and the first essential one since 18 Shots To The Dome nine years ago. By temporal, if not thematic, standards (no lamenting over divorces here), this is his Blood On The Tracks.
Facile, perhaps, to say that the involvement of the Neptunes in five of the album’s 14 tracks has urged him to raise his game for this album, but it’s hard to over-emphasise just how revitalised LL sounds here. His tenth album sounds so fresh that it might as well be his first. And it’s as well that we remember how extraordinary a break with what even was then the “tradition” of rap that his actual first album Radio was back in 1985; instead of freestyle and therefore inconsistent jams (see the first Sugarhill Gang album for evidence of how turgid this could get sonically), here were sharp, punchy, to the point, song-like constructions, meticulous in their architecture but stripped of middlebrow aspirations to recapture the directness redolent in original rock and roll (Rick Rubin confirmed this in so many words). And the utterly convincing conviction of 1987’s sequel Bigger And Deffer cemented this power; hear the sheer reconstructive joy of “Go Cut Creator Go” as they uncover the original demons and reclaim them – even though, in the hit ballad “I Need Love,” there were already signs of compromise (for an astonishing whiteboy counterpart to the latter, hear Momus’ contemporaneous “Closer To You”). And the single of the same year, “Goin’ Back To Cali,” suggested new harmolodic paths down which rap could travel.
And here, on 10, LL recaptures everything. You could say that he needed to reinstate himself with this album, particularly in view of the supremely confident gauntlet laid down by Jay-Z on The Blueprint (the finest mainstream hip hop album ever?). Here he comes across as Jay-Z’s older but no less powerful brother.
We need to deal with the Neptunes tracks first. “Luv U Better,” already a top ten single, is another in their seemingly endless line of visionary masterpieces (like Trevor Horn in 1981-85, they seem to ooze punctum with everything they do). Remembering the Acieed-anticipating varispeed bells which sounded so radical on 1985’s “Rock The Bells” and distorted and readjusted all our perceptions of what hip hop could do, here the woozy psychedelic guitar wow and flutter of the Neptunes’ backing is worthy to stand beside MBV – indeed, this track could be hip hop’s “To Here Knows When.” “Niggy Nuts” is a haze of a stumble utilising a chirping cricket drone as percussion. “Clockin’ G’s” is a blissfully unresolved shuffle over which LL drunkenly enthuses about “monopoly” and “property.” The vocal refrain of “if you’ve got the time, then I’ve got the time” could almost have come off the second Talking Heads album. “U Should” is a ballad floating over burst rhythmic tyres; “Amazin’” could potentially be the most avant garde summer hit ever; guest singer Kandice Love with her repeated “baby”s is intent on driving the observer orgasmic.
(And there’s another thesis to be written; the importance of “baby” as a term of endearment for and to the Other. I’m with Julia K on this one; it all goes back to a yearning for the maternal body from which we can never fully escape)
But the invention doesn’t stop with the Neptunes. “Paradise” is a Mary Jane Girls-derived pop-soul utopia; the Shangri-Las coming at you from the other side of the River Styx. “Born To Love You” PUNCTUres the Myth of complete absorption into the Other (the uncredited female singer repeatedly attempts to give herself to LL, only to receive the repeated question: “Why?” Which could be interpreted as: what’s so hot about you, or how worthy am I really?).
There are forward thrusts which place LL back on a par with Jay-Z; the near garage punk drive of “Fa Ha,” beats echoing his boasts like hammers on anvils, and in the glorious “10 Million Stars” LL exults in his self-generated euphoria over a sampled mass choir, finding salvation in sensuality. “Throw Ya L’s Up” is old-school R&B twisted into a trellis of Gothic spindles.
And there are other aspects of love to be addressed here. “Lollipop” manages to outweird the Neptunes; over an atonal sonic carpet, LL giggles his way through his sexual fantasies, right through to an adjacent galaxy. The extraordinary “Mirror Mirror” is claustrophobic in its close-up paranoia, LL’s whispered tones conveying uncertainty and fuelled paranoia about his sexuality. Your body carries traces of the track, so closely miked are the beats.
He ends with a tribute to his grandmother “Big Mama (Unconditional Love)” backed by Dru Hill. Necessary tradition and (at)tributes, perhaps, but far easier to swallow than the perverse piety of india.arie, because of course the rest of this remarkable record sets it up as a logical payoff.
. . .
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
MARC ACARDIPANE, PCP AND THE GLOOMCORE CANON
It would be difficult to follow Simon Reynolds’ definitive article on this most elusive of microgenres in issue 173 of The Wire; indeed it was that article which alerted me to the very existence of operatives like Marc Acardipane, the Mover, Reign/Miro, and others. Almost impossible to get in the UK, where there never has been that great a market for gabba to begin with, let alone this particular sub-stratum – and yet it must be rescued from obscurity.
The 2CD compilation The Best of Marc Acardipane (1989-1997), which appeared on the ID&T Music label in 1997, is the ideal place to start. Chronologically it is best to start with disc 2, as this contains all Acardipane’s early work. Basically this music develops on the template of post-Acieed disorientation most popularly heard on things like “Dominator” by Human Resource and turned into pop by the Prodigy on “Charly.” Something like Turbulence’s 1990 “Disaster Area” creates queasy chord sequences out of tape varispeeding, drifting in and out of focus, in and out of bliss, over a pitiless beat. It is particularly interesting how rap samples/vocals are ripped out of their original macho context and thrust into an asexual limbo; hear especially the tracks by Ace The Space: “9 Is A Classic” (i.e. gun, turntable and dick) and “Go Voodo” where the unstoppable rush cancels out the boasts, turning them into simply another layer, another set of signifiers minus the signified. Masters of Rave’s “Are You With Me” brutally roughs up what could almost be “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.” Nasty Django’s “King Of FFM” (Frankfurt) and Rave Creator’s “Immortal” have the same aesthetic directness that one finds in Rocket From The Tombs or Gang of Four; this music knows exactly where it’s going.
By the time we get to tracks like Nasty Django’s “SGE” and Tilt!’s “Sound Of Emergency” the staccato Gothic choral cut-ups which we find in brutalist rave hits of the time such as T99’s “Anaesthesia” or Quadrophonia’s “Quadrophonia” have become another essential ingredient. This particular approach reaches its climax in PCP’s phenomenal “The Phuture” recorded live in January 1994, which sounds like Hieronymus Bosch pulling down the world into his amoral pit.
Even here, the variety of approaches is remarkable; pointers to the more considered, grandiose Gloomcore such as Marshall Masters’ “Stereo Murder” and The Mover’s “The Emperor Takes Place” are solemn in their spaciousness, like 2 Unlimited drained of their primary colours and re-scored by Laibach. And at the other extreme you can find the still flattening likes of “World’s Hardest MF” by Program 1, and what can only be described as punk – “At War” by the Leathernecks, with its rapid-fire “fuck you, fuck them, fuck the muthafuckas” refrain; so much harder-hitting, even nine years after its recording, than any of the pitiful politesse which passes for “the spirit of punk” today. It is exactly what the likes of the Vines should be aiming to reproduce and develop, were they not so damned reverent of all the wrong things.
Disc 1 concentrates on more recent (1997) stuff, but with a few earlier pieces still thrown in. Certainly I find it remarkable that “I Like It Loud” by Marshall Masters (just two letters away from his successor!) with the Ultimate MC was never considered a hit; even dotted with fucks, this is a cooler DJ Otzi, or a more hardcore Scooter (“If you think it’s too loud, go listen to yr fuckin’ Walkman!”). “Hustler For Life” which finds Nasty Django guesting with Herr Masters “at Club X” is almost as admirably bullish in its approach; the latter rants as the track stops halfway through, commanding the DJ to put the fucker back on ‘COS I NEVER STOP. Generally, though, this CD contains more considered, architectural gabba; Rave Creator’s “A New Mind” slowly dismembers its female “something for your mind” sample into new patterns, although for the real punctum try and find the “Rave Creator’s Original De2001 Raveremix” which initially turns the track into pop and subsequently slows it down to the depths of avant-incomprehensibility. Nasty Django’s “Hardcore Muthafucka” is based on a sample of a young kid intoning the title; Turbulence’s “6 Million Ways To Die” starts off with the entire, unadulterated intro to Sid Vicious’ “My Way” before turning it into a jackhammer rave-down. But the stand-out track for me here is “Slaves To The Rave” by Inferno Bros. Hear how it begins with splashes of water and a distant humming choir (which could almost be “Rivers Of Babylon” by Boney M). The latter is quickly dehumanised into a beelike drone and a beat which seems to rebound from inside your skull. Eventually the whole track slows down into a watery grave, as though slipping into an aesthetic swamp.
What were others up to? Certainly a greater ethereality and sense of doom and foreboding became gradually evident; hear the near-delicacy within aggression of something like “Astral Dreams ’94 (Cold Planet Remix)” by The Mover and Rave Creator, or Trip Commando’s “3rd Trip Phase,” the latter of which could almost pass for a psychedelic lament straight outta Easter Everywhere. Also necessary to hear is Renegade Legion’s “Torsion” which may well be the one track which balances perfectly all the approaches described above; propulsive yet melodically reflective.
Above all you must hear the work of Reign (also known as Miro and various other pseudonyms) for what delicately avoids being Goth but instead introduces a terrible grandeur to Gloomcore; listen to the regretful lamenting melodies of “Light And Dark (The Next Dimension)” and “Skeletons’ March.” And his greatest achievement may well be the track “Hall,” specifically the Maximum Mix, which refracts the poignant chord changes through a screen of water (and water seems to be a recurring factor or leitmotif in a lot of these tracks), reminding one of a drowned cathedral, or a ruined 16th-century mansion, its grand debris floating in the depths, undiscovered for 400 years. A meditation on the transience of people and things. “Hall” is one of the great singles of the ‘90s.
The Mover covers much the same territory in tracks like “Final Sickness.” Other operatives to be noted include Mescalinum United, whose 1989 track “We Have Arrived,” which kicks off the second Acardipane disc, set the tone for everything which followed, but whose masterpiece is the shattering “Symphonies Of Steel (Part 1)” – the choirs of Bayreuth continuing to sing as both the roof and the floor cave in. Like much of what is being celebrated here, this is 170+ bpm (in some cases, e.g. “Symphonies Of Steel,” 200+ bpm) and not immediately danceable to those who have not understood, or at least ingested, which probably explains its micro-share of the dance market. Architecturally, however, the music is, at its best, literally awesome – with “Hall” you actually have to stand back from the speakers in vertiginous disbelief. Superpower’s “Move: Don’t Stop” takes the surface off dance cliches to find the brutal yet stunning lack of pity beneath. The camp commandant barking at you to dance for your life.
And, amongst all of this, emerges a pearl of a group (if it is a group) – The Horrorist. Would it be fair to categorise him/them as Gloomcore? In fact the seven tracks I have by them seem to indicate proto-Electroclash – but better because it takes No Wave into account as well as shiny yellow New Pop. Certainly “Wet and Shiny” with its Devo-meets-Numan filtered vocals (check that flittery “ohhhh”) and measured pauses is an Electroclash classic waiting to be discovered. Better still is “Mission Extacy” which could best be described as a cross between a psychotic Jonathan Richman and a destabilised Underworld. The deliberately juvenile vocal (ah, Supergrass, to think – you could have been capable of this had you the nerve!) narrates the story of cadging lifts and money with the ultimate aim of getting some Es “’cos I like fucking drugs,” its assumed menace contrasting nicely with the faux-naif leitmotif of “my school project.” Actually this is a very funny record as well as a powerful one – aurally it foresees the likes of LCD Soundsystem, amongst other things – and the musical gear-change ascent when they have ingested their Es into gabba heaven is particularly inspired.
Tracks like “Run For Your Life” and “Flesh Is The Fever” are very strongly reminiscent, in their hypermanic, epileptic rhythmic/vocal onslaught, of the hecticity underpinning the best of the No Wave operatives (especially James Chance and the Contortions at their best – go and buy Buy now!) (if you can find it) – the rush of drug adrenalin failing to dispel the confusion and fear beneath. And I still can’t imagine the likes of Interpol or Ladytron (given their respective merits) coming up with something as mindblowing as “One Night In NYC” which sets a tale of sordid urban seduction against a feather-light lullaby glockenspiel-led backing and within a fairy tale scenario with a deeply unsettling result, its power perhaps rivalled only in contemporary hip hop (Eminem’s “Kim” most obviously, but also Raekwon’s “Rainy Days,” the Coup’s “Me And Jesus The Pimp In A ’79 Granada Last Night,” etc.). Discover him/them now, any way you can.
(Profound thanks must go out to my good friend Simon Reynolds for his invaluable work and extremely generous assistance, without which this article would not have been possible. To get hold of at least some of this music, there’s a PCP Mailorder Worldwide telephone number listed on the sleeve of the Acardipane compilation - #49 (0) 69 440022. Bear in mind that this release is now five years old, so I’ve no idea whether this number is still valid, but it’s worth trying)
. . .
Monday, October 28, 2002
IAIN SINCLAIR’S M25 LONDON ORBITAL
Barbican, London, 25 October 2002
“A parallelist performance in three-lane theatre” we were promised. Three blue projection screens at stage right, centre and left, each showing excerpts from Chris Petit’s filmed journeys around the M25; not the same film which will be shown on C4 on Tuesday 29 October, but three ways of hypnotising the viewer into acceptance. Sequences were sometimes swift, clear; others peered out from behind a shroud of grey rain, scarcely moving. We see what we choose to see, except that if you are attentive enough the same images will recur, at different stages, at different speeds, on all the screens.
Petit had the easy part of the job; driving around the ring. Iain Sinclair walked around its perimeters, starting from the Millennium Dome (“an urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes”), in an attempt to find an end destination in its unending circle, to find what London was protecting itself from by setting up this metaphorical barbed wire, and how those on the outside refused to see it as a barrier, but rather as an easier gate to penetrate the city fortress (more and newer targets for burglars). The absence of the city, celebrated in the epicentre of the City.
Sinclair acted as compere/Greek chorus for the evening, reading key extracts from his book London Orbital (the event sells the book, the book is a passport to the event). Dressed in carefully rumpled black, looking like how I will look in ten years’ time, undisturbed by Bruce Gilbert’s possibly non-random electronic eruptions punctuating his opening perorations, he welcomed us to this arena for his repertory company of misfits; Ed Wood as Boswell, Joe Meek as Ackroyd. He is careful to abandon.
After ten minutes or so he made way for Bill Drummond, who cheerfully ambled on stage with a painting which he’d finished at 3:00 that morning – trisectional; GIMPO black on white; below that GIMPO black on white again; at the bottom GIMPO white on black. Gimpo being the visionary who on each spring equinox weekend (except for the last one, having been detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure) started off at South Mimms service station and spent 24 hours driving ceaselessly around the M25, celebrating its implied paganism (albeit borne out of capitalism at its most market-driven). Drummond, looking more like Michael Palin every time I see him, announced that the painting on stage would be given to the estate of the first member of the audience who succeeded in committing suicide by means of a motor accident on the M25. Someday, sooner than I think, this painting will be claimed.
Then came Ken Campbell, who quite correctly ignored the entire subject matter of the evening and delivered a stirring lecture on the history of ventriloquism (classes in which he has recently been organising) stretching from its origins in ferrets (one would clamp their jaws on the first piece of meat found and imitate the voice of another ferret in the group to dissuade it from nicking said meat) and the first human vent (ancient Egyptian pygmy Bisu) to its decline in the Victorian era, succinctly described by Henry Mayhew (whom Campbell described as a Sinclair of the 19th century, though I think that Cobbett might be nearer the truth) in terms of questionable functions of the middle organs of the body. Well, you like to believe Welles’ bullfighting stories, don’t you? (except this was in Mayhew; I checked London Labour and the London Poor afterwards).
Then more Sinclair, by now edging out into the western perimeters of the M25 (the Colne Valley, Harefield Hospital, what have you). Dotted by old dopeheads uprooted from Notting Hill when the money came in; tarot cards, rituals, canal barges – displaced hangovers, in this writer’s experience all the way up the A40 to Oxford (climb up the hill populated by electronic gates and local television news presenters, make your way across the bridge, the Didcot cooling towers winking their reliable confirmation of orientation behind your left shoulder, and trawl to the only pub in Cumnor; they’re still in purple, still extolling the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, Van Morrison’s Remington nose clippings reconstructed as post-CAMRA beermats). After some brief ambience from Scanner, Sinclair announced the arrival of Britain’s greatest poet (his perspective) Bill Griffiths, on his way down from Cowley, seeking relief from his Bartok piano runs. A matter for another book as to how many of London’s keenest and most detail-obsessed observers – Patrick Keillor, Brian Cowling – actually pitch their tents in Oxford. Like Sinclair, I too see it as an umbilical extension of London, the Thames linking the twin towers of capitalism and skullduggery, and thinking and contemplation. You couldn’t have Oxford without London; the latter breathes its kiss subtly all the way up to Witney and beyond, whispering “why aren’t you with me? you WANT to be with me.” But would we take the trouble to decamp to the cynosure? In some ways, Streatham is much further from London than Oxford will ever be.
Griffiths strolled on stage, played some slowly mutating block piano chords (to mirror the gridlock occurring on the screens at that stage) like Bill Evans trying to avoid breaking into Satie’s “Vexations,” then recited one of his poems “Rabbit Hunt,” a boyhood canal Arcady played out in the shadow of the old K-Tel building. At one point I imagined that he referred to “the Botley pass,” my former local point of entry. Perhaps I meant to imagine it; his delivery was indistinct (and maybe that’s how he likes it; his writing is endlessly revised and reissued; no edition is definitive; everything subject to alterations). He finally returned to the piano to pick out a few Oriental curlicues and wandered off.
Kevin Jackson of the Independent, who had joined Sinclair for part of his walk (the western end; he lives in Shepherd’s Bush) only to find himself trapped into 24 hours of walking and consequent foot ruination, wandered over-familiarly onstage and detonated some unamusing journalistic ramblings. It was Miles Kington wry. Jackson looked as though he’d missed the news about John Bonham. He was out of place here. But then who wasn’t?
Wire certainly weren’t; the musical highlight of the evening was their methodical yet punctum-driven reworking of “Dot Dash” as “Dim Flash,” the Krafty-werkers’ “Autobahn” restaged to symbolise the English non-movement. They stood in line. A mightily sad hymnal chord descension rebarbed again and again. Newman and Lewis intoned as they have always done. The rhythm started to pummel as they reached the familiar but recontextualised chorus. It was a motion threnody; like the M25 the members ran on the spot or decided not to move at all – the machines did all the movement we needed. A notion – 25 years on and they sound like the English Suicide; the entire audience consisting mainly of the usual mix of Dalston-residing students and middle-aged, bescarved Fulham Road tourists moved enthusiastically to the same electro that in 1977 they would have decried noisily for the more luxuriant options of Deaf School or Elkie Brooks.
Sadly, the evening’s intended star turn J G Ballard had come down with a stomach bug which had mutated into ‘flu and so wasn’t able to attend. Sinclair and Petit, undeterred, sat in the chat-show section of the stage with a cardboard cutout of Ballard in between them. Sinclair remarked that Ballard didn’t even know where the Barbican was, had probably never been west of Shepherds Bush in his life, but spoke warmly of him, even though he subtly underlined that he had been banging on about the same things since the ‘60s. Like Kraftwerk, the world has caught up with Ballard, but he doesn’t seem to mind; his poem “What I Believe” was rendered with great solemnity by Sinclair and Petit. Ballard remarked that England had always had a problem getting into the 20th century; Kensington (Cotswolds) and Dagenham, in their own ways, were as quaint as Stanley Spencer’s Cookham.
(except of course Spencer was never quaint; his particular bonding with sex and death in HIS Church of Me is never far away from Ballard’s meticulous car wrecks)
After the intermission, time to wrap things up by destabilising expectations even further. Scanner reappeared with his usual morphing of mobile ‘phone conversations (“you forgot the BRUSH!”) which quickly became subsumed by a bass arsequake. Nothing on the screens appeared to be moving; a slow-motion lorry (“BULKHAUL”) was focused upon stage right, the driver seemingly reluctant to look the camera in the eye; in the centre, a series of cones which became artworks in themselves; roadworks, or an accident (what were those odd bodies lying in the road?).
Aaron Williamson – a Ranter poet of some repute from Brighton who uttered not a word this evening, simply crawled onstage buckled under the obligation of supporting a silver chair and a large silver wheel (he himself was clad in glamrock silver Bacofoil). A reverse phallus of a saw protruding from his rear stops him from sitting down; he methodically takes the saw to the chair, and then sits on it, splitting it into two perfect halves. He then re-burdens himself with the twin chairs and wheel and crawls offstage again. “It’s the only way to travel,” remarked Sinclair at his departing rear; possibly all a reference to the Oxford Tube. His perseverance was admirable.
Jimmy Cauty was billed to come on next with his “M25 Symphony” but of course Drummond came on with him to massed cheers. Clad in full orange motorway maintenance clothing to the strains of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the reconstituted KLF, clearly not fucked by the millennium, roared into a hammering punk-rave roar (“Who’s got the power?” appeared to be the chant; correct me if it wasn’t) somewhere in between the Extreme Noise Terror version of “3AM Eternal” and “America: What Time Is Love?” and which still managed singlehandedly to show the absolute abyss of faux-rock and roll currently perpetrated by bands with five letters in their name. The biggest reception of the evening (“MORE MORE! KLF are the Real Britpop!”) – the singles compilation/box set surely cannot be that far away; this work DEMANDS to be put back into circulation.
And then to where Sinclair had chosen to place his ending: the site of the old Carfax Abbey at Purfleet, now accessible across the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, where Stoker decided to situate Dracula’s London base, with its easy access to the sea, and supplies. Now occupied by the Proctor and Gamble headquarters/factory; blood continuing to be sucked in by dodgy fuckers, reprobates, making the invisible London possible. Brian Catling (“on day release from the University of Oxford”) strode onstage, proceeded to appear to tear out his heart and eat it (and later on another one) to massed “yeucchs,” and murmured a largely inaudible poetic lament in what one assumes was a Transylvanian accent. The delivery was what mattered; bluff, rapid, throwaway, like humanity as the M25 sees it.
Earlier on Sinclair had talked about the asylums which had turned into hospitals (the Horton triad at the Surrey end), surrogate communities for troublemaking lower orders. How Lydia Jackson 100 years ago tried to escape by walking out and failed; how Reggie Kray succeeded in escaping by driving out. Now Bluewater had replaced the old asylums; America on your doorstep without all the post-9/11 hassle. There to satisfy, to kill imagination. The perfect purpose of the M25 as Bruce Gilbert’s drone snaked underneath Sinclair’s and Petit’s voices. All the while, on the screen stage right, a slow crossing over the QEII Bridge brought us to Purfleet, the camera in the slowest of motions, relishing the forbidding towers and shadows of the Proctor and Gamble compound, lingering on them, waiting for the immortal vampire to re-emerge.
Purfleet is the same distance from central London as Hampton Court.
. . .
Thursday, October 24, 2002
THE LAST GREAT ZTT RECORD?
“Heart of Darkness” by Hoodlum Priest (1990)
That is, if you could still count it as “ZTT” as we once knew it – the ZTT of Horn and Morley, neither of whom were on board at the time of Heart of Darkness’ release; and it is telling.
But goodness me did Hoodlum Priest (aka Derek Thompson, aided by lyricist/rapper Sevier, a curious individual with an apparent background of voodoo and witchcraft worship who vanished after this record) try hard to find the “art” in tHe art of Darkness. A number of photographs tastefully decorate the sleeve, including three by the vaguely S&M-inclined ‘30s photographer George Hoyningen Huene, and one of Epstein’s Rock Drill Torso, which is resident in Leeds City Art Gallery. Also a photo of Dali, but we’ll forgive that lapse.
But no words. No manifesto – it existed, but needed Morley’s blissful bullets to bite. Nevertheless, the record in itself remains strangely magnificent and still unclassifiable.
After a lengthy, atmospheric introduction we are thrust into the attack of “Rock Drill.” Utilising many elements which in 1990 had been overused beyond the point of cliches by the well-meaning but ultimately useless likes of Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself (Schwarzenegger, Blade Runner et somnola), this still has a punch which eluded most of its contemporaries, despite even the straight outta the Pennines rapping of Sevier. However, this latter is mixed down, is but one further element in the aural jigsaw.
Dynamics are further whittled down in the long and winding “Tyrell.” Bookended by a whispering sampled diva and the benign voice which softly intones “time to die,” this track manages, against all the odds, to use a “Carmina Burana” sample in an original and purposeful way, to emphasise the perceived wretchedness of existence. It embraces, stands up and screams, and then settles back down into its doomed self-embrace. It is followed by the almost shockingly pop-like “C Horse” with its R&B harmonies slowly undermined by Sevier’s growl until it is a shredded remnant of itself.
“Caucasian” was the obvious single; again using a blindingly obvious sample (“Voodoo Chile” by Hendrix), and while Sevier is no LL, he serves the song’s purpose well enough; the rant is all that is needed to ice the ragingly vibrant cake underneath. Next is the closest that Heart of Darkness gets to pop; the phenomenal “Sex Spirit,” a Clapham Junction of a song (as painted by Wyndham Lewis) wherein a Gainsbourg-esque French narration collides with New Order synth curlicues, a Propaganda-ish coaxing female vocal and fuzzed-up guitar from the depths of purple hell which inevitably overwhelms the track at its exhausting but exhilarating climax.
After this we get the clattering M25 (as painted by John Martin) inferno of “Talk Dirty,” with its refrains of “let it happen” and “the pleasures of heaven or hell, I didn’t care which.” Astonishing how fresh these beats still sound. One last nod to guitars and Sevier follows in “Deep Dance” with its chorus of “time to rock,” though goodness knows how big a cradle would be required – in fact, much of this record takes on what was suggested in 1988’s still shamefully overlooked Jack the Tab “compilation” by Richard Norris and Genesis P-Orridge and attempts to move it into a larger arena, as so few others did or have done since.
The finale “Rebel Angel” once more demonstrates how good Hoodlum Priest were at assimilating cliches and turning them into what they originally may have been. In this instrumental, every obvious sample you could think of – that Satie piano motif, Les Voix Bulgares, Gregorian chants, tolling bells – is tossed into the pot, with the Hammer voiceover of “Goodbye, happy fields, where joy forever reigns – better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” And yes, to an extent it is corny, and yes, to a considerably greater extent we may be listening to Goth (that Leeds connection!), but the refraction of darkness still manages to puncture the listener pretty sharply.
Thompson has continued alone since this record, and occasionally releases others, but invariably into a void – the same void to where so many of the artists and records which The Church Of Me has extolled seem to have disappeared. Was there great, visionary music in the ‘90s? Of course there was – but visit your local music emporium today, and there’s scant evidence of it. It all seems to have subtly been written out of the picture, and if it is a central duty of this Church to excavate treasures and visions and help to bring them back into public focus, then I can only but continue to dig.
In reality Heart of Darkness is about digging one’s own grave. It is, in a very literal sense (and musically foreshadows) a trans-global underground; instead of looking upwards towards the light, defeated in one’s continued battles to lead a purposeful life, one tires and decides that embracing nothingness in darkness is better than embracing no one in the light.
. . .
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
MEL AND KIM – WATERMAN’S FINEST?
Stock, Aitken and Waterman always seemed to reserve their hardest-hitting stuff for Mel and Kim. Even in the context of what else they were doing in the latter half of the ‘80s, be it Astley or Bananarama or Kylie, M&K seemed to come from a different planet. Certainly as far as their singles were concerned.
“FLM (Fun, Love and Money)” may have been the title of their sole album (Mel Appleby contracted cancer soon afterwards and died in 1989) and on the surface they may simply have been marketed as two sassy London girls who Know What They Want and How To Get It, but there was always an undertow of melancholy, an awareness that this was an illusion. Thus, the vox pop samples in the middle of the song “FLM” may say “boyfriends are boring…wait ‘till the right one comes along…independence,” but this is far more Ms Dynamite than Destiny’s Child. “Sitting on the sidelines…just want to be free…I can see blue skies where others see grey.” It’s a dream which they know is unlikely to be fulfilled.
See also their debut single, “Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend)” which is about getting dressed and made up to go out and find the Other, though the latter’s function is spelled out in the middle-eight “If it’s the man’s hand that pays the price/Then he’ll belong to me” (beautifully harmonised, incidentally, bringing back memories of Linx half a decade previously). No other reason; it’s the same desperation which underlies Gwen Guthrie’s contemporaneous “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent.” “Independence” is almost the last thing on their minds here. It is also a British companion piece to Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life,” but instead of the latter’s luxuriant swooning embraces of sensuality, “Showing Out” is pitiless, remorseless, realistic.
But musically it is the reverse. Hard as hell, with an obvious ear to Chicago House but a less obvious one to Euro-industrial. The involvement of mixmasters Phil Harding and Pete Hammond are crucial here; 16 years later, this production remains astonishingly brutal, percussion ramming into every corner as if to block every route of escape for the girls. Somehow it comes closer to Test Dept (see especially the latter’s “Fuckhead”) than Marshall Jefferson.
If that was hard, then “Respectable,” a number one in the spring of 1987, managed even to outdo it. Quite possibly the most sonically extreme record ever to get to #1, certainly the most avant-garde record in which Waterman was ever involved (unless you count the planned avantness of “Plug Myself In” by DOSE and Mark E Smith). “We can look after ourselves all right!” sneer the Applebys over a thunderous roar. They barely manage to hold on to the pre-chorus rollercoaster of “tay tay tay tay, taytaytaytaytay tay tay” (the train careering off the Tay Bridge?). It is ecstatically asympathetic; it is the ‘80s encapsulated; it has to be listened to in tandem with Nitzer Ebb’s “Join In The Chant” recorded in the same studios at the same time and mixed by Harding and Hammond.
. . .
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
DENIM
We know now – or perhaps some of you don’t – that “Britpop” in the ‘90s could have come to mean a different thing entirely. Ending up not in collective tugging of forelocks to One Concept of History but rather in a knowing riot of colour and genuine mischief. The real spirit of ’82, were that not in itself revivalism, were it not that most of the people involved in this “alternative” were active in ’82 anyway. Still, it was better than what actually turned out to happen. World of Twist, Saint Etienne, Pulp (who were briefly granted an access-all-areas pass to Britpop but who both superseded it and were rejected by it) and Denim. A shadowy world with scant documentary evidence of the impact it could have made, had you been different.
Denim was essentially Lawrence Hayward, formerly of the rather loved but underselling ’80s operatives Felt, which wound up in 1989. Frustrated, Lawrence opted to change tack completely and provide a radically different pop for the ‘90s. With this in mind he travelled to New York and spent two rather tortuous years assembling Back In Denim, the 1992 debut album by, as it were, Denim. Opting to leave both the 1980s and indie behind, he assembled a backing group of experts, including at least two of the Glitter Band (on “chants” and “heys”), to resuscitate the then never less hip musical movement of 1970s glam.
Younger readers accustomed to Saturday nights of Stuart Maconie may balk at the idea of glam being unhip, but in 1992, pre-Britpop “proper,” right in the middle of Cobainia, some kind of “truth” was fruitlessly sought in pop. Lawrence’s was a different kind of truth – one which he felt had been suppressed and illegalised, yet one which, as a teenager growing up in Birmingham in the ‘70s, formed him as surely as Cyril Connolly did Larkin.
Musically, the aim was to recapture the cliches which glam originally sought to neutralise – rock and roll itself, Hendrix guitars – to signify something which was the lyrical or visual opposite of what the music was saying, or better still to signify nothing. Sound in itself; sex in itself; for the taking. And thus does Back In Denim begin with the stomp of the title track – noticeably borrowed from “I Love Rock And Roll” (the American Graffiti concepts of RAK timelocked in a space capsule – indeed, some of this album was recorded at the original RAK studios) and with a deliberate chorus of “Denim put the soul in your rock and roll.” This song seems to suggest a return to purism – away from “the Mayfair chic/Get a penthouse ready” and berating “my generation” who are “slow” and “throw away cash on new 45s/They’re trash/Who’s selling pure gold?” DENIM? If you want to think of it as a faux-sophisticate/aphrodisiac Faberge after shave, or just an ironic tilt at his own comeback, the targets in this song are slowly subverted throughout the rest of the album.
The musical template for most of what we hear on this album come, not directly from Slade or Bolan, but more from the ground-level operatives – the chug of things like Chris Spedding’s “Motor Bikin’,” the barely updated Dave Clark Five-isms which are echoed on the next track “Fish and Chips” (which is about wanting to go to a club, to observe unnaturalness if not be part of it; just to be the antithesis of the song’s title) where we hear the “hey, hey, hey” chant which drives Geordie’s bizarre 1973 (really 1964 meets 1994) top tenner “All Because Of You” (rasped by future AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson, then still wearing his cap). “Bubblehead” is a fairly vicious putdown in the “Positively 4th Street”/”Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow” mode, but catchy enough that you don’t casually detect it (“you’re just another girl/You’re nothing without me/HEY! HEY!”).
Then comes “Middle Of The Road” wherein Lawrence outlines his manifesto a la “Let’s Make This Precious” (another Brummie contrarian) over a “Roadrunner” backing track with ITV sitcom Moog squelches. He then lists his hates, which pretty much cover the Accepted Rock Canon (he says that he hates soul and rock and roll, despite having applauded them three songs earlier) – Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Spector, Gaye, Aretha; not so much them, but the IDEA of them, the MISREPRESENTATION of them, their hagiographic OSSIFICATION which now stands in the way. It is of note (apart from the fact that at least three Chuck Berry riffs are referred to during the course of the song) that he only hates “early” Dylan; the middle period’s influence being audibly unshakeable. Still, his manifesto itself is unambiguous – “I’m forcefed your so-called heroes/Don’t be told who to like/It’s your choice, it’s your RIGHT/to choose who you listen to.” The immensely danceable song (check out those 100 mph Swingle Singers on acid backing vocals) ends with a quote from, appropriately, Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” Make your own history. Make your own sense. Readjust your perspectives. Find out for yourself.
And then, the centre of the whole album, the slow and delicate eight-minute “homage” to the ‘70s, “The Osmonds.” During this impossibly sad lament, Lawrence cites a string of signifiers from (significantly) the early ‘70s; starting with rock cliches (prayer mats, crushed velvet flares), moving on to the still hip (Natty Dread, Kung Fu, Lee Perry), all the time punctuated by the chorus of “there were lots of little Osmonds everywhere,” sung wistfully instead of sardonically. Still looking at what was “good” about that time.
And then the song abruptly darkens with the entry of sometime AMM member John Barker’s low-scored strings, as Lawrence sings about the 1974 IRA Birmingham pub bombings with a barely suppressed anger that has nothing to do with irony and which the Maconies of this world could never hope to understand. “They blew my hometown up/And lots of people were killed on the news/The relatives cried/Everyone knew someone who’d died/…We asked for justice/But it never came in the ‘70s.” And then, with almost equal brutality, he goes on to namedrop intentionally naff references (Hughie Green, Lieutenant Pigeon, “Billy Don’t Be A Hero”), attacking us for thinking that the trivia can overcome the horror and grief. It wasn’t all a laugh, he reminds us as he intersperses the murder of Lesley Whittle and the jailing of the Black Panther with the Rollers and Cassidy. Finally, he confesses to his own inadequacies: “I soaked it in/Now it’s all dripping out,” like a replicant programmed with selected memories of the ‘70s – except he was actually there. There is of course no mention of the second half of the ‘70s. He’s nailing our collective amnesia right on the head.
Following that, as if to underline the emphasis on “early” Dylan being dissed on “Middle Of The Road,” the song “I Saw The Glitter On Your Face,” is a wistful but stinging ballad sung in a determinedly Dylanesque tone, and could well have come off Blood On The Tracks (something else apart from, but still part of, what he mentions in “The Osmonds”). “American Rock” starts off as a benign-sounding, straightforward “who’s that girl on our block” Springsteen-style pop ode, but soon darkens as he sets about knifing to death his rival for her love on the other side of town. The tarnished reality behind the superficial feel-alright bonhomie of the music; straight out of S E Hinton, of course.
“Livin’ On The Streets” is an attack on an unnamed operative (Thatcher? Heseltine?) who drives around luxuriating in the misery of others. “I’ll watch your cities burn down!” Taxi Driver reimagined by the Adam Smith Foundation. “Here Is My Song For Europe” seems to be a broadside against a manager/a pop star/former colleague at whom the singer cannot bear to look any longer. “While you’re riding in your chauffeured limo/Spare a thought for me” – the previous song staged from the opposite angle.
The record finishes with a final attack on “standards,” “I’m Against The Eighties” which seems to be a highly entertaining moan about how no one bought Felt’s records (“I made a new sound and they put it underground”). There is also a jibe at unnamed personas out of Duran Duran (Le Bon? Duffy?) – “I knew you when you were at school/You were nothing then/And when you left the band you were nothing again” – before we get to the closing Rowlandesque rant: against “bands that couldn’t play” and “singers with nothing to say.” However, this concludes optimistically as he declares his love for the ‘90s (“We’re into Ravesignal III ‘cos ‘we’re in love with the modern world’ – another reference to “Roadrunner” of course) as well as the ‘70s. A song, then, which could easily have been sung, albeit from different perspectives, by Roy Wood or by Jarvis Cocker.
How do we assess Lawrence’s final assertion that “I’ve made a new sound/This ain’t going underground” a decade later? Only to say of course that, in that aspect, Denim failed; perhaps something to do with the almost anti-pop vocal style of Lawrence (nearer to Devoto but at the same time not sufficiently far away from Devoto to become pop), perhaps (as Jeff Lynne’s dad commented about early ELO) “the trouble is your tunes have no tunes.” It wasn’t “true” enough to be Britpop, and probably still wouldn’t have been, even three years later. Indeed this latter was proved by the equal commercial failure of his follow-up, Denim On Ice (could he ever have recovered from Francis Rossi giving the thumbs up to “Novelty Rock” as “a great little pop tune” on GLR at the time?), which foresaw Britpop’s abject failure in songs like “The Great British Pub Rock Revival.” Ironically, when he moved on to form Go-Kart Mozart, he came very near to a hit with “Selfish and Greedy and Lazy” without even trying, just as “Primitive Painters” had so nearly done a decade and a half previously. It’s enough to make you wonder whether he didn’t really disappear into the whirlpool of echoes on Felt’s “Trails of Colour Dissolve.”
. . .
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)
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