THE WILD WOOD OF BILL FAY

The theme of this month's Mojo magazine is Great British Musical Eccentrics. While it is obviously preferable that artists such as Vashti Bunyan and Robin Gibb (as a soloist) are written about in any capacity than not at all, there's something faintly odious about the way in which Mojo seeks to pigeonhole people like Jarvis Cocker, Richard D James, Ray Davies and Andy Partridge, none of whom could fairly be described as "eccentrics." Worse still is a perfectly fine list of British albums which are labelled as having been produced by "eccentrics." In the case of records such as Rock Bottom, this is a vacuous and virulent insult; in the case of others such as Maxinquaye it is quite inexplicable. The received subtext would appear to be Records Made By People Who Fail To Adhere To The Tenets Of The Camden Town Good Music Society. People who are not normal. Musicians whose music is somehow far less real than REAL MEN like the increasingly hapless Solomon Burke.

Among this list is included the eponymous 1970 debut album by the singer, pianist and songwriter Bill Fay, the sleeve of which portrays him walking across the Serpentine. Well, OK. And your point is?

One point is that this album was released on CD in the autumn of 1998, combined with his far less (ostensibly) cosy 1971 sequel, Time Of The Last Persecution. Having just painfully left hospital, I seemed to require quietly disturbing, yet fundamentally pastoral, music to ease my various manifestations of pain; and this CD left a mark on me, much more so than, say, Dylan Live At The "Royal Albert Hall" which came out at the same time, which I listened to once, was knocked out by (at least the electric second half) and which I duly filed away, never to be listened to again.

English music, as much as or more than any other, demands of its appreciation its relationship (real or imagined) to the environment in which you listen to it. And I cannot listen to Bill Fay's exquisitely tortured music without thinking of Oxford in that transitional, queerly sunny winter of 1998-9. How can it make sense in South London?

On the CD there is also included both sides of his solitary single from 1967. The B-side "Scream in the Ears" is a surprisingly volatile take on electric Dylan, but the A-side "Some Good Advice," painfully perfect in its two minutes and 18 seconds, is, I am convinced, one of the most punctuating singles I have ever heard. And it is so fragile; a repeated descending minor key piano chordal range with melodramatic drumrolls every eighth beat and a mellotron floating above the music like Banquo's ghost. Lyrically it is what the title suggests; advice to a young child, more probably advice to himself. "If you want to build a shed/Then go ahead/And bulid your shed...And if you want/To paint a gate/It's not too late/To paint your gate." Sounds like a Junior Choice reject? No...it's so frail and hopeless a scenario, so shattering in its humility. Hear how the guitar suddenly shreds halfway through the track before disappearing again. The final lines, sung with evident relish, are: "Don't listen to/Anything anyone tries to tell you." Except he doesn't. It's one of the greatest singles of its year, or indeed any year. You may cry at it if your mind is framed in a certain way.

Then nothing for three years, until he emerged, clean-shaven atop the Serpentine, for his 1970 debut. The sonic palette was magnified immeasurably (though not everyone agrees) by the involvement of Michael Gibbs as arranger. On the sleeve there is a telling commentary by Fay wherein he states that as a boy he spent five years constructing a small wooden box. When completed, he took it to his woodwork teacher, who proclaimed it the worst piece of woodwork he'd ever seen and smashed it with a mallet. This album, he stated, was the first creative thing he'd done since then. He would do what he needed to do, and then go away again to dodge any further mallets.

So this is what he needed to say, and he needed to say it all at once. Critics complain that Gibbs' orchestrations compete with and drown out Fay's songs, but here the large sonorities are to me as apposite as those Gibbs was later to devise for Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. One only has to hear how the strings and brass rise and fall with terrible suddenness behind Fay's vocal on "The Sun Is Bored." The record is much more explicitly bleak than anything Nick Drake did, but not terminally so. The brief but biting "The Room" is the nearest the record comes to the atmosphere of "Some Good Advice," but here Fay presents us with a black and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction which again and again finds no respite in the unresolved graveyard of its minor chords battling against his fatalistic, semi-croaked "forever." "We Want You To Stay" is pretty unambiguous in its message, too, though Gibbs lifts us out of the despair with his radiant sunlit chords, as well as an uncredited but instantly recognisable John Surman on soprano sax. The desperate faux-Cockney of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May" is reminiscent of the John Cale of Helen of Troy tackling "Yesterday Once More" - who the hell am I? But there is hope and light until the end, with the mildly rebuking but essentially positive message of "Be Not So Fearful."

The record didn't sell - was hardly promoted - but Fay still had some more things to say, and say them he did, albeit ten million times more brutally, on his second album, Time Of The Last Persecution. This record was scarcely even reviewed, let alone promoted, and its cover depicted a now long-haired, bearded and very weary-looking "Billy Fay." Out went Gibbs' lushness; in came what was essentially the working band of improv guitarist Ray Russell, who had appeared, albeit relatively restrained, on the first album, but who was now given licence to do whatever was needed. And certainly in that strange period between 1970-76, bookended by comparatively conventional careers, Russell was as near as this country ever got to producing a guitarist as proficiently fiery as Sonny Sharrock.

How worst to describe Persecution? The name of Syd Barrett immediately springs to mind, but more pertinently, imagine a Syd Barrett who, in a rare moment of utter clarity and lucidity, saw his situation, saw the world and for 30 or so minutes was able to make complete and articulate sense of it. Not so far from Roger Waters? Perhaps not - and there's certainly an element of Waters' later misanthropy in songs like "Let All The Other Teddies Know." But there is a severely scarifying assuredness to the brutality into which this record more often travels, especially on its second side. The songs on side one, including bruised ballads with divine Beatles chord progressions like "I Hear Your Calling" or "Don't Let My Marigolds Die," give us an idea of the suppressed immense rage at which Russell's guitar intermittently and immaculately scratches. The focus on the very Barrett-esque "Laughing Man" is as sharp as last Thursday afternoon's snow. A horn section appears on "'Til The Christ Come Back" but its repeated fanfares become increasingly higher-pitched and more discordant. The track fades out just as it's about to explode.

And detonate the music does on side two, most pronounced on the devastating title track over which Fay's Cale-like croon (and even Bryan Ferry in a sour mood-anticipating croon) over stately Sunday school piano chords is increasingly subverted and finally drowned in a freeform whirlpool, Russell taking off for atonal space; trombonist Nick Evans and tenorman Tony Roberts not far behind him. "Come A Day" is the equivalent of the previous album's "Be Not So Fearful," but no easy salvation is to be found here as again the track disintegrates into shards of improv noise causality, the piano continuing sternly underneath the apocalypse. The album, and Fay's career, ends with the still terrifying lullaby "Let All The Other Teddies Know" (with its sinister aside "be ready when the cupboard explodes"). This song is relatively peaceful, but Russell cannot resist adding some more Sharrockian runs towards the end, just to let you know that the demon, and death, still exist.

And that was it. Fay released nothing more and until the 1998 CD reissue (and in its sleevenotes) had been assumed to have vanished without trace, into some sort of Drake/Barrett type of self-imposed hell; another casualty of causality. But stories are not always so facile. With the renewed interest, Fay bemusedly re-emerged to say that actually he had been holding down a perfectly good day job for the last quarter-century, and yes he did still write songs but didn't feel any great need to put them out on record; because (he didn't say it, but we knew it anyway) everything he had, was driven, to say had been said, definitively and finitely. The malletphobia out of his system, he could then resume his life. Art, music, as catharsis. He didn't die, didn't go mad, didn't do drugs. He lived, and lives, as you or I do. Still...listening to it again in Oxford in January 2002, I still smell death in the notes of this music. But that's wholly my fault, and not at all his, that his music can make me cry and terrify me like that of Dylan never has done or could ever do. And that's not Dylan's fault, either. But it's nothing to do with "eccentricity" - it's simply people trying to make aesthetic sense of their existence. How else do we create?

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

MARVIN GAYE – I CAN’T GO ON. I GO ON

The Beckett analogy is not out of place with Marvin Gaye. Let us be clear on a key point – What’s Going On, the album, is not Noam Chomsky set to music, is not an exhaustive yet pertinent blueprint for a perfect society, is not Socialist Worker editorials set to music, sets no agenda, does not pretend to speak for anyone except the man who was responsible for it, and – crucially – those who cannot speak for themselves. It is routinely voted into all-time top ten album lists for the wrong reasons. It was not recorded to justify the existence of Neil Kinnock or Paul Weller, or come to think of it Jamiroquai. It is an intricate (more often than not painfully intricate) examination of the assumed disintegration and disordering of a man’s mind.

In many ways What’s Going On was, implicitly and explicitly, an anti-Motown record; explicitly because Gaye wanted to do things his way, wanted the title track released as a single and refused to record or release anything else until Berry Gordy wearily agreed. Why introduce reality into the fluffy kitten of a world that was Motown in 1970? We’ve got along fine doing it our way…don’t spoil our fun (or, more importantly, our profits). Arguably, though, Norman Whitfield, who had done such a subversive job arranging and producing “Grapevine,” had already ventured (albeit comparatively shallowly) into political waters with the Temptations of “Cloud Nine” and beyond, and the Undisputed Truth’s “Smiling Faces Sometimes” wasn’t far away. But What’s Going On the record? Gaye knew exactly what he wanted, and Gordy eventually conceded and requested that he record an album around the concept of the song. This Gaye did in March 1971 with most of the Motown regulars on hand, including strings arranged by David Van DePitte (credited the “Fastest Pen Alive” on the sleeve) and major musical and lyrical input from Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops.

And there are personal reasons why What’s Going On? might be considered anti-Motown; Tammi Terrell, Gaye’s preferred female singing partner, had died in 1970 of a brain tumour, having collapsed in Gaye’s arms onstage some months previously. It was said that the onset of her tumour was a direct result of an injury sustained to her head by her then partner, ex-Temptation David Ruffin, at the time still the epitome of full-on “maleness” in Motown music. So it was made in the light of bereavement, both personal (Terrell) and symbolic – his younger brother Frankie was away fighting in Vietnam.

The first thing we have to consider about What’s Going On? is the duality expressed by the presence of the two saxophone soloists, Eli Fountain on alto, and Wild Bill Moore on tenor. Both were given the master tapes and asked more or less to solo throughout all the tracks; their contributions were then edited and faded into the foreground when aesthetically required. Fountain represents the female or “mother” side of Gaye’s personality, his graceful, kind and warm tone very reminiscent of the then recently deceased Johnny Hodges (and his playing is significantly predominantly featured); while Moore’s tenor is the male and (sinisterly?) the “father/he-man” side of Gaye, hard-toned and thrusting forwards, explicitly under direction to do a Pharaoh Sanders or Archie Shepp – indeed, both Sanders and Shepp were approached to solo on the album, but were contractually bound to ABC/Impulse Records at the time (this in itself lends an interesting perspective to Shepp’s curious near-miss of an album, 1972’s Attica Blues, which quite openly is his attempt to do a What’s Going On?). Moore’s playing suddenly comes into the spotlight when a particularly emphatic point (or anger) has to be made (or expressed).

The utopia to which ‘70s soul music repeatedly returns was primarily constructed out of the title track of What’s Going On? In the album mix, Gaye parties with members of the local football team (stoned or not stoned?) in the background, while the (apparently accidental) duality of his various vocals is made more prominent – the voice singing, the mind thinking something else. The duality comes back again and again throughout the album. And there is never any “soul” singing as Brown or Pickett would have recognised it – the approach of Gaye’s light tenor we now can appreciate more fully in light of his expressed admiration for Jimmy Scott; and indeed it is virtually asexual, as though he is looking down with great reproach at the world to which he remains umbilically attached.

The album is essentially a half-hour extrapolation on the title song. The same main musical motif introduces the second track (and the rest of side one segues continuously) “What’s Happening Brother.” Constructed as an imagined dialogue between Gaye and his Vietnam-based brother, the viewpoint alternates freely between either; Gaye’s own personal day-to-day agonies (“Can’t find no work, can’t find no job my friend”) set against Frankie’s heartbreaking attempts to hang onto some sort of recognisable reality (“Are they still gettin’ down where we used to go and dance/Will our ball club win the pennant, do you think they have a chance?”). The climactic final lines “What’s been shakin’ up and down the line/I want to know ‘cause I’m slightly behind the time” could be said by either. At that point the music decelerates, goes into momentary dissonance under Gaye’s anguished falsetto croon before mutating into “Flyin’ High (In The Friendly Sky).” Here the “utopia” becomes a woozy anaesthetic, James Jamerson’s inverted bassline (compare with John Cale at the close of the Velvets’ “I’m Waiting For The Man”) commenting ironically on Gaye’s mental destabilisation as he attempts to seek refuge in drugs, always aware (“so stupid minded”) that there is “self-destruction in my hand” and that he has become “hooked…to the boy who makes slaves out of men.” In the background one of his alter egos muses “Nobody really understands.”

But he can’t destroy himself when others are set to be destroyed through no fault of their own. So the music re-focuses into the orchestra and chorus waltz of “Save The Children” where Gaye’s song is echoed deliberately by his far less certain spoken voice. Can he believe what he is singing about the end of the world? The music stealthily builds in tension and both Gaye’s singing and speaking voices rise – perhaps tearfully, perhaps orgasmically. As both of their voices decide to “save the babies,” the pent-up tension of the music suddenly breaks free into an ecstatic rhythmic 3/4 groove over which Fountain’s alto floats in a heartbreakingly brief expression of freedom. But Gaye the realist quickly stops it all with an extended “But…” before the “What’s Going On?” music starts again and he modifies it into “But who really cares?” He still has to care, so it’s a return to ecstasy for the glorious “God Is Love” where for the first time on the record the music is in an unambiguously major key, trumpets (of the Angel Gabriel?) joyfully blaring as Gaye reasserts his own faith. The attendant irony of “love your father” is of course only detectable retrospectively (and hear the whisper behind “Don’t go and talk about my Father (i.e. God)” which warns “Don’t talk ‘bout spiritual lust (i.e. his own father)”) but the grievous punctum comes when he reaches the line “Love your brother” and his alter ego suddenly screams “MY BROTHER!” and briefly overwhelms the entire track.

The vision is there, its articulation as yet incomplete. We now move into the climax of side one, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” where a bewildered Gaye asks “Where did all the blue skies go?” before musing on the “poison in the wind that blows from the north and south and east.” Moore’s outraged tenor rips through the musing for a moment or two, before the opening “What’s Going On?” motif yet again returns and remains unresolved, culminating in what is still one of the most frightening endings in all popular music – the sudden and completely unexpected appearance of the Moog synthesiser, not quite for the first time on a Motown record but certainly the most pronounced, as the song/sequence grinds to a halt, giving way to the terrible horror of the closing inhuman “voice,” Gaye’s piano issuing a repeated, crashing, dissonant toll as though he is smashing his own right hand. Another Dies Irae for the world’s end.

Side two is where Gaye tries to find some answers. “Right On” begins as a typical early ‘70s soul-funk workout, very much in the Isaac Hayes/Curtis Mayfield mode, Danya Hartwick’s flute well to the fore. Eventually Gaye’s voice enters. He begins what you eventually realise is a prayer of salvation, a list of those who will survive:

“For those of us who simply like to socialise.
For those of us who tend the sick…
For those of us who got drowned in the sea of happiness.
For the soul that takes pride in his God and himself and everything else.”

Fountain’s mothering alto watches over him from above. Because it is love that will save us. Yes it’s that simple, yes it’s that unattainable. The tempo briefly quickens up as though it is to COME

and the music metamorphosises into Sinatra (with one further blast from Moore’s tenor). Apostolic strings, Gaye’s voice pleading just as it’s coming on: “PURE love can conquer hate every time” – he finds as many variations on expressing the word “love” as Van Morrison did in “Madame George” – and, inevitably, the need for personal love becomes evident and finally predominant. Listen to him inviting you: “And my darling, one more thing/If you let me, I will take you/To where Love is King/Ah, ah, baby” – the final line is wept. PLEASE KEEP ME ALIVE.

and then the groove restarts, briefly, then the percussion and alto clip-clop in unison, and then it is time for the epiphany – “Wholy Holy” where Gaye now pleads for the entire world, all humanity, to become his Other. “We can (and how close to “can’t” his voice seems to sound) conquer hate forever…we can rock the world’s foundations” – if only you’ll let me. So peaceful, yet so confident a prayer (the graceful if ever so slightly regretful descending chords – proto-Badalamenti), he asks us to believe in Jesus and almost uniquely in popular music you want to believe it too. He very nearly persuades you.

Except of course that it’s a dream, a utopia, which cannot yet – if ever – be converted into reality. And even Marvin Gaye has to wake up to what is the most tangible and most perceptible “reality” – the world, America, as it stood in 1971. “Inner City Blues” is where, having reminded us of how high we could reach if we wished, we have to have our faces rubbed in how things actually are. We have to confront the shit in which, if we look at the sky for too long, we may end up buried. Another list, this time of things which will kill; the inability to pay one’s taxes, the banality of one’s own “hang-ups, let downs” set against moonshots (don’t be flying high, give your love and money to the have-nots), capitalism (for years I thought he was singing “Inflation, no chance/Too many creeps finance” though actually it’s “to increase finance”), and finally (could it ever be firstly?) apocalypse (“Crime is increasing/Trigger happy policing/Panic is spreading/God knows where we’re heading”). Is my alternative really so woolly, he is asking. The music is low cast, Bob Babbitt’s bass flowing like cynical blood through the aorta of the strings and the death march piano chords. The piano finally takes us back to a reprise of the key lines from the song “What’s Going On?” to complete the cycle:

“Mother, mother (my God, how he emphasises the “mother,” how right it’s Eli Fountain’s alto which should take us out of the album)/Everybody thinks we’re wrong/Who are they to judge us/Simply ‘cause we wear our hair long?”

Sung by someone who would never be seen dead in long hair, who appears on the sleeve wandering around a children’s playground in the rain, dressed in a smart black raincoat, black suit and a wide gold tie, smiling benignly.

And we do not quite return to a loop – just Gaye’s wordless vocals, Fountain’s alto and percussion. God knows where they’re headed…except that eventually Gaye would move from his dissertation of big deaths into a microscopic examination of the little death. More about that shortly.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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THE FUTURE IS AS GOOD AS THE PAST: JUST A DIFFERENT SORT OF "GOOD"

Is 2003 by definition better than 1981, musically? There is music being produced now which reminds us irresistibly of 1981, yet the remembrance is irresistible precisely because we know full well that the music of now could never have been made in 1981. It is the awareness of the prior existence of 1981 which differentiates it - no more so than with Do You Party?, the debut album by The Soft Pink Truth.

The Soft Pink Truth is, in truth, Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, who about this time last year produced an engrossing and not too distant album constructed from the sounds of actual surgical operations - A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. As with that oddly engaging record, Do You Party? is almost entirely constructed from cut-ups, some of sound effects of uncertain industrial origin, others from naggingly just-beyond-familiar records, films and broadcasts. In terms of sonic spaciousness, SPT can be imagined as a logical extension from the benevolent revisitations of early '80s disco by Metro Area, and from the other extreme a logical reduction of the refractions between different sound sources harnessed to rhythm so expertly sculpted by Horsepower Productions. Of course SPT can occupy one point of an entirely different "cut-up" triangle, the other two points being Kid 606 and Cassetteboy. But on Do You Party?, the aim is neither polemic nor parodic, but purely pleasure. Much of this record adds up to the most sheerly danceable and enjoyable album since "side one" of Daft Punk's Discovery.

The introductory track "Everybody's Soft" starts with a strobe-lite/glitch voice cut-up which immediately puts one in mind of Arthur Russell - not a bad start - and the rhythm track skilfully builds up pace while the synths create space. Sonically the record is almost 3D in its approach; sounds hurl out at you like - yes - puncta, and there's a transcendent moment two-thirds of the way through the track where a massive orchestral-synth glow suddenly becomes visible, as though you are riding the first rise of the Westway, suddenly seeing the city in all its garish glory spread before you (Amon Tobin did something similar, though for entirely different ends, in last year's "El Wraith"). It's not long before you forget how the music's been constructed.

"Gender Studies" is a dancefloor smash in any sane person's book; again conscious of the architectural need for build-up, there's an enticingly squelchy bass throb which builds up through the snippets of half-forgotten disco classics and indeed creates something that perhaps could have been imagined in 1981 (a sharper DAF? a de-ironicised Heaven 17?) but could never have been produced. "Promofunk" continues the unbelievable roll with a glorious, tremulous thump of a tune; and hear how it suddenly descends into a canyon of aleatoric ambience at the end. This record dares you to guess what it's going to do next.

And I'm sure it would have been difficult to guess that SPT would then segue into the album's true killer track; a cover version of "Make Up" by Vanity6, one of the many satellite operatives of Paisley Park (as with Sheila E, Jill Jones, the Family et al; take my word for it, if you're looking for sublime '80s dance-pop, pick up anything by any of these people that you might see in your local second-hand emporium - it's all terrific) and in its original form something of a prototype for Destiny's "Bootylicious." Here, though, it's sung with winning semi-amateurish charm by Blevin Blechdom and successfully converted into an ode of joy at discovering the wonders of womanhood; cynicism replaced by awe.

It's hard to think of any routine techno operatives who would have a thousandth of the ingenuity of SPT in constructing a track like "Soft On Crime." Here is a path down which Basement Jaxx would do well to tread for their next album; the track starts with an exultant chant (MC Hammer meets Cossack dancers) before eventually decelerating into a Spaghetti Junction of crazily interviewing (a)tonalities and gradually distending beats.

After that, the ambience becomes slightly more downbeat, ever so slightly more solemn. "For Satie" is based on one chord of one of Erik's Gymnopedies which has a considered debate with a sinister bass rumble. This decelerates further into "Soft Pink Missy" (which appeared as a 12" last year), a thoughftul, unhurried romp with mid-range voices floating round your head like missiles which have failed to convert into satellites. Then the pace picks up again with "Big Booty Bitches" which cannily deconstructs macho rap howls with the aid of what I agree with The Wire's Peter Shapiro is indeed a rearrangement of the synth riff to J-Lo's "Play" - doing anything but keeping it real (thank God). "Over You (No Love)" is where Wigan Casino awakens in Skylab; several different "pasts" of music blissfully combine to throw you around your bedroom in essemplastic elation.

The closing salutation "I Want To Thank You" must surely be a sideways salute at the flexidisc included in the Human League's Dignity of Labour EP; as with the latter, it takes the opportunity to include the credits as part of the album. The acknowledgements are done in cut-up style, incorporating everything from the Encarta talking dictionary to "Stephen Hawking" via Desert Island Discs. It is amiable and approachable, as with all of the rest of this wonderful record. It's a generation down the line from Mutant Disco but just as entertaining and as avant-garde - crucially, at the same time. One could call it electroclash, and if one is going to call it electroclash, then this constitutes the best 53 minutes which have yet come out of it. It works because it reminds you of how great 1981 was, as opposed to how far downhill everything went from 1981 (which it didn't), and tells you that things can be, in fact are, as great again. That's the secret of utilising your influences creatively; don't use them as an anchor, but as a compass. That way, a future is created out of the past; thus do you continue to live.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

GAIL BRAND IS GOD

We're so used to the seemingly inbuilt inadequacy of Improv records. The recital is familiar: "you needed to be there...the space between musicians, between musicians and audience...the impermanence of Improv...every Improv record is 70 random minutes and another 70 could have done the job just as well...Statements...Documents." Sometimes you wonder whether you're expected to be the improviser in order to understand the music s/he's playing. You have to breathe their oxygen, drink their coffee, exist within their lives.

But every so often a record comes along and reminds us exactly why we cannot dispense with recording Improv. There is always, albeit infrequently, a performance which, miraculously or otherwise, will work as a record, will be aware of its own emotional and aesthetic peaks, will understand the solidity of structure which comes from intimate knowledge of your music and the improvisers with whom you choose to work. Such a record is Strong Language, the second album by the London-based quartet Lunge - led to all intents and purposes by the trombonist Gail Brand (she will doubtless deny it until her mute's blue in its face, but hers is, even if by default, the predominant voice here) and also including Pat Thomas (keyboards/electronics), Phil Durrant (violin/electronics) and Mark Sanders (drums/percussion). On the cover is a picture of peeling wallpaper. Punched out or struggled against? Lunge was one of many Improv units formed out of the debris of Butch Morris' "Skyscraper" tour in 1997. I think they might be the best.

The main body of the CD was recorded live in Amsterdam in June of last year and comprises four distinct "tracks." It's been a while since I've heard any piece of recorded Improv with the immense and immediate impact of the brilliantly-titled opener "Planarchy." Here Brand sets out her aesthetic stall - she is a musician of great purpose and power, but also of great discipline. Aware of Rudd (the low-register smears) and Rutherford (bell and mouthpiece manipulation, but with only very sparing use of multiphonics) but equally aware not to fall into laddism as so many notable European free trombonists have done. Brand's playing is one elongated punctum; it/she jumps out of the matrix/fabric and focuses your attention immediately.

But that is to belittle the contributions of Thomas, Durrant and Sanders, all of whom do more than keep up with Brand. Indeed, the duologues between Durrant's excited, pointillistic violin and electronic manipulations and Brand's purely acoustic trombone sometimes leave it difficult to decide who's playing what. And of course, it doesn't matter, because the collective structure is more important. There's a fantastic moment about nine minutes into "Planarchy" where Sanders almost imperceptibly, but entirely naturally, sets a drum 'n' bass tempo for a minute or so - this is fabulously exciting to listen to repeatedly - and then, with sublime architectural grace, the piece then naturally subsides into an atrium of quiet concentration and close-up, meditative interaction. The sustenatos achieved here give the piece a hymnal aspect, and it concludes entirely logically.

"Rough With The Smooth" emphasises what a wonderful "ballad" tone Brand achieves on her trombone - her high notes and tonality are very affecting indeed and remind me, strangely enough, of Jimmy Knepper's ballad playing (cf. Gil Evans' "Where Flamingos Fly"). There's a moving slow section about six minutes into the piece, mournful and contemplative, before the temperature gradually gets turned up again; and at the end, the musicians do seem to "lunge" at each other, or at least breathe with each other - dare I say that the music at this point takes on a distinctly carnal quality? Durrant signs off with a long, satisfied exhalation of electronic breath, presumably just about to light up a cigarette.

"White Writeable Areas" absorbs elements from both of these pieces for another fascinating journey. Brand here manages to be both affecting and decisive. Thomas' piano is patient, satisfied with its cautious chordality before later breaking free into joyful runs. At times, if not quite the "full industrial onslaught" cited in the sleevenotes, this music can be exuberant and propulsive (drum 'n' bass meets Ambient), at other times hover beautifully on the edge of extinction.

The final four-minute rave-up "No Filters" is the wildest thing here, but crucially the musicians (unlike certain participants in the good ole days of FMP) never lose control or poise; you realise instinctively that they know exactly what they're doing. Thomas' samples and electronics are ceaselessly inventive behind Brand's full-throated attack; indeed, towards the end you sense the ghost of Radiohead's "Kid A" seeping through the background.

There are two further tracks from a studio session in December 2000 which are fine in themselves - in particular I repeatedly return to the poignant "Rothko" - but were clearly made before the quantum leap which enabled Strong Language to be alchemised. But this album needs to be heard and listened to repeatedly. It has blood and humanity flowing through it in so strong a manner as I have rarely seen in a British free/Improv issue since Isipingo's Family Affair a quarter of a century ago. It's that good, that powerful, that beautiful. Gail Brand is a visionary.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

"you don't even know I'm here, do you?"

There are few places on this planet more frightening to me than that blank space between Oxford and Headington, when walked, on foot, in the dark. The parks and their postcard views annulled by the night, all that's left is a Sisyphus of an ascending pathway, finally yielding to a highway, houses set well back on either side, patrolled by unblinking lights. It looks so much larger and more immense in the dark. To my right will eventually materialise the library where she worked. To my left, the school which she attended. About a quarter of a mile further away on my right is where she now lies. The highway back to her becomes dreamed; but the dream is not idyllic. I am reminded of an enormous intensive care unit; the low-cast lighting, the low-ceilinged claustrophobia. A depot, a clearing house, a mortuary. And later on I will spend the evening in a pub just 200 yards from Laura's grave, subsequently walking back through Old Headington to the Oxford Tube stop as though it were an abandoned film set; the walls of the houses merely props.

It was a cold but very pleasant day in Oxford. The bum with a bruised face squatting outside the meadows, his radio loudly blaring Dale Winton's 1963 Pick of the Pops. The girls passing by who voice their repulsion, not so much of the man, but of the music he is playing. The bizarre peace of the Westgate Library. Being reminded of the unmatchable brilliance of the Carfax Chippy. The saddest birthday anyone could have spent; knowing that, had things been different, I would have spent my birthday here, but not alone or alienated.

I last listened to Nick Drake's works on an extended Friday evening journey from Victoria to Gloucester Green on the Oxford Tube, back in the winter of 1999. A slow and pressurising trip, as Friday evening ones tend to be, including the inevitable pile-up at the Lewknor turnoff and the consequent crawl down the barely perceptible forest that is/was the "old" A40. Peace and repose in the midst of chaos. The famous shot on the sleeve of Bryter Layter wherein Drake stands in the street and bemusedly views a commuter frantically rushing past him.

Yet Drake was no talisman or avatar. After 30 years of trying to work him out, the task remains as hard as ever. No one tried as hard not to talk or sing to anyone except himself. His music is some of the most inward-looking outside of the more featureless plains of free improvisation. How did it happen? The teenage Drake was apparently perfectly sociable and up for it - from the days of his school band, whose line-up briefly included a young Chris De Burgh, he was good-looking, keen on the ladies, a fine athlete and not a bad musician. From there to Cambridge, where he barely lasted through his first year - out of the womb into another; why would he feel so alienated? Thence to London, in various states of dis/repair, and finally back to the family home. Just a few live performances in 1968; then nothing - only one music press interview, no promotion; a reluctance to live?

If Scott Walker was the Dirk Bogarde of Brit (or honorary Brit) introspective troubadours - grandiloquent, immense, avant-garde - then Drake would be the James Fox; always apologising for breathing, so reticent that you feel that he perhaps would have been happier within a gated religious cult (as Fox later briefly was). But it's not quite accurate to assume that Drake's world is a blissful, asexual, even pre-sexual garden; in fact, if we take Barthes' identification of the "grain" of a voice corresponding with its "diction" - how the singer has assimilated the "pheno-song" and "geno-song" components, and how the singer renders them to the not necessarily passive listener - then Drake's voice is sometimes as carnal as hell. This is obviously more apparent on early things like his reading of Robin Frederick's "Been Smoking Too Long" where his voice is surprisingly earthy, almost Hoagy Carmichael-ish; but take a real listen to his 1968 debut album, Five Leaves Left - hear particularly his Sinatra-derived habit of extending the final consonants/syllable of key words in his lyrics, sometimes with a barely suppressed growl; the "love" in "Time Has Told Me"; the "time" in "River Man"; even the "slave" in "Three Hours." His natural baritone voice confirms that everything here is suggested/suggestive - Drake's voice is, more often than you might think, very sexy.

Most of the songs on Five Leaves Left concern Drake's wish to enter the world and maybe enter the Other. It's an album of negotiations and occasional bewilderment - the plea for the rich girl to come and share his metaphorical "rotted" shed in "Man With A Shed" ("Please stop my world from raining through my head...you'll find that sheds are nicer than you thought") - touched with the realisation that some Others will forever remain unreachable ("Thoughts Of Mary Jane," "Cello Song" - the latter using the same rhythm as "Sympathy For The Devil" and yet its polar opposite, its negative). And of course - and this is where legends of prematurely stilled talents come into blossom - he muses on death; generally in "Fruit Tree," specifically in "River Man" wherein the protagonist, Betty, is dying (this is confirmed by the excised verse subsequently discovered in one of Drake's notebooks). Robert Kirby's near-static but ominously progressing string lines indicate clouds about to blot out the sun; the pain which lies under no idyll. It's the natural counterpart to PiL's "Death Disco" but with ten years' less wisdom. The album concludes with the go-down-easy vibes (literally) of "Saturday Sun" - and even this sunny vision is punctumised by the recognition of "Sunday's rain." It's a remote cousin to Lennon's "In My Life" - a rueful nostalgia realising its own selectiveness and redundancy; the same sort of feeling for which Jon McGregor tries in his novel If No One Speaks Of Remarkable Things, with the same foreknowledge of impermanence and tragedy.

It would be facile but no less true to say that, if Five Leaves Left was Drake's rural album, 1970's Bryter Layter is a noticeably more urban one, with a full band on most tracks, but is it any more outgoing? There's a strange ecstasy in Drake's cascading, descending lines which he tries hard not to let spill out of the conflicting rhythms of "Hazey Jane II" ("Andwhatwillhappeninthemorningwhentheworlditgetssocrowdedthatyoucan'tlookoutyourwindowinthe morning?" - all sung in that one breath, and with a strange ecstasy) but there are also suburban-meets-pastoral instrumental interludes; idealised visions of a forever sunny Muswell Hill on a Sunday morning. Don't be fooled, however, by the title of "At The Chime Of A City Clock" which foresees Weller's urban alienation nine years later in the Jam's "Strange Town." Again and again we return to the motif of an ideal lost, or unable to be regained or even reached.

"Fly" has Drake importuning for "second grace" but the sentiment is knowingly defeated by the conflicting lyrical themes of "now I just sit on the ground, in your way" (cf. "Standing" from Buffy: The Musical) and "for it's really too hard for to fly" (cf. Walker's "Rosemary"). Unlike Walker or even Al Stewart (the Terence Stamp of bedsit Brit bards?) - and very pointedly, unlike his more confident, objective and aware mirror images, Richard Thompson and especially John Martyn - he's unlikely ever to "get it on" (no "Duchess" or "Love Chronicles" from him). Instead we get a not entirely satirical stab at self-deprecation in "Poor Boy" which is the one instance in Drake's recorded works where he does show the barest hint of self-consciousness. Harder men would have made a career out of that one element. Not that it suited him; "Poor Boy" is only lent punctum by the involvement of the great Chris McGregor, leader of the Brotherhood of Breath (the link is Joe Boyd, who produced both), whose deadpan Protestant-kwela piano block chords and always intelligent chordal and melodic runs work healthily against the lyric, as does the acidic alto sax of Ray Warleigh, sounding very like McGregor's right-hand man Dudu Pukwana (who was first choice for the session but at the time was across town recording with the Incredible String Band).

Then we get "Northern Sky"; a song which doubtless will be extracted for a commercial or a Hugh Grant film and get to number one before long. Nathalie says this song is like "one big tear" but it's a tear of happiness; the one song in Drake's career where he is actually and unequivocally happy. John Cale's celeste chimes in the background as though Drake's Christmas had indeed come. He has found his Other. Too much emphasis has been placed on the line "would you love me 'til I'm dead?" because of what happened to him; but this is an expression of unalloyed bliss. The instrumental "Sunday" which closes the album expresses the same foreseen regrets as "Saturday Sun," Lyn Dobson's flute sounding as though it is crying (cf the unbearable poignancy of Leila's "Young Ones"). As though it were an exit from the world - which is what it turned out to be.

Pink Moon, Drake's third album, appeared in 1972, and only because the receptionist at Island Records noticed a package which Drake got the courier to take in. In the package was the master tape of the 28 minutes of Pink Moon; no band, no producer, Drake, now completely disillusioned, now completely on his own - just him and his guitar with the occasional piano overdub. One of the most self-referential records ever made, Pink Moon ceaselessly refers back to previous Drake songs, it is also one of the most pitying/pitiless records ever made. His lyrics here are sometimes reduced to bleak haikus (the title track, the genuinely frightening deadness of "Know"), dealing with the reductions of his ambitions ("You can take the road that takes you to the stars now/I can take a road that'll see me through" - "Road") and the fatal fallacy of all other humanity (the musically achingly beautiful "Things Behind The Sun"). "Free Ride" shares a lyrical theme with "Man In A Shed" but here there's not even the pretence of humility and uncertainty; he just wants saving. This is made yet starker in the numbing "Parasite" ("for I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt") which cleverly inverts the themes of "City Clock."

And then there was no more in Drake's lifetime; not that there was much within it. These albums sold minimally while Drake was alive, were hardly ever reviewed. It's always easier to build a cult out of a stopped genius than it is to pay him while he's alive and capable of creation. An example to no one? Hard to see how he could be. Patrick Humphries has written a full and minutely detailed biography; Drake's Cambridge contemporary Ian MacDonald has written movingly about the man and authoritatively about his radical approach to guitar tuning and chording; his lyrics have been analysed to atoms.

The voice? By the time of Pink Moon it had gradually become more slurred and more "horn-like" in its delivery, noticeably very much like John Martyn. Except, as suggested above, Martyn is a tougher and perhaps more adventurous character who was able to connect with the world - even if only obliquely - and Martyn of course acknowledged this failure in Drake's chemistry as the theme to his song "Soild Air" in which Martyn does indeed stretch out vowels and consonants almost beyond the point of comprehension. Could Drake ever have made an album like Solid Air (the line-up of musicians being nearly identical to that of Five Leaves Left)? I don't think he could have - the musical adventure in Drake lay entirely in his delivery, indeed his "diction." I doubt that any avant-garde or New Wave would have interested him even slightly. And - and here is the barrier which still prevents me from surrendering completely to his music - his music is ultimately so insular, so of him, so insistent that you have to be Nick Drake to understand him, that you wonder whether he had much thought for anyone or anything else in the world. He would never have been capable of something like Blue. Much has been made of 1974's admittedly bruising "Black Eyed Dog" but if there's any dread or helplessness here, it is audibly unreachable. He sings it as if he's waving you away with your fist even though you're trying to help him.

He died, as you probably know, in November 1974 aged 26, of what appears to have been an accidental overdose. Thus was the cult initiated; no middle-age to let everyone down, no Phil Collins-produced AoR records, no duets with David Gray on Later With Jools Holland, no Daniel Lanois/Mitchell Froom "avantings" to deal with. It's a world I can examine with morbid curiosity, and even frequently be moved by, but I would never wish to live in it - perhaps because it echoes my own so closely and so sinisterly.

* * * *

But still it stays with me, just as Oxford does, because I can't get rid of it, indeed cannot think of living without constantly being drawn back to it. That great cut which divides Oxfordshire from the rest of the world (note how the London radio stations immediately cut off once you enter the cavernous "tunnel") suggests a bountiful utopia when you reach the immense view on the other side. And I cannot live without Oxford, I cannot deny it. This particular umbilical cord will take a lifetime to cut. Not that I wish to cut it. Not until, at the very least, I have grieved properly.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

LAST NIGHT'S AUDIO SERMON - TRANSCRIPT AND PLAYLIST

By special request, here is the full original script of my broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM last night. Many thanks for all the kind comments I've already received. It was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life but I loved doing it thoroughly.

Sadly because of lack of time I had to omit a couple of the tracks listed below from the actual programme, namely Don King and Bikini Kill, and some of the script was edited or minor amendments made.


CLEAR SPOT: THE FEMINISATION OF NOISE
Resonance 104.4 FM - Tuesday 21 January 2003

Good evening. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM. This is Marcello Carlin, proprietor of the Church of Me website and writer for the Wire and Uncut magazines, presenting this evening’s edition of Clear Spot.

We know you want to go back. So let’s return. Let yourself swim in the aqueous lactations you so clearly desire. Return to the place of origin. Realise its selfless, compassionate comfort. You are aware of the noises, seemingly random but already organising themselves. The purposeful organisation of noise is not the exclusive by-product of testosterone; indeed, when feminised, its theoretical cul-de-sac transmutates into a dreamed highway.

But to go back to the beginning, you have to be aware of the circuitousness of life. You have to be aware of how it will end; because the first noise you will hear in your comfort is also the last noise you will hear…but played backwards.

Track 1: Carla Bley/Paul Haines: This Is Here… (5:56)

That was the opening proper of the greatest, because the most infinitely meaningless, record ever made, Escalator Over The Hill by that supreme feminist of noise Carla Bley. Among the musicians and voices which flashed inside your ears were Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Don Preston and Jeanne Lee. Everybody exists within her world; her totality is dependent upon your readiness to accept the world as she has remade it.

There are many ways in which to assemble the elements of noise in order to feminise them. Let us not be naïve: by noise I signify all the unregulated, random sonics produced, or already extant, in the world. For now we concentrate on the voice, the most elemental instrument, yet also the one most capable of timbral and emotional variety. The prologue to Escalator Over The Hill can imply either a new dawn, or the dawning awareness of an apocalypse. At this time I prefer to interpret and absorb concepts of a new dawn. For an example, we turn now to the voice of a woman who can be whatever you prefer her to be. Liberated Inca princess or Welsh coal miner’s daughter? Amy Camus – note the ineffable infinity of that surname – or Yma Sumac? It’s up to you to decide what she makes of it.

Track 2: Yma Sumac – Xtabay (3:19)

The title of that song “Xtabay” is irresistibly associated with ecstasy. There is certainly awe in Amy or Yma’s ecstasy; but imagine a longer road, a highway dotted every ten seconds by 44 different emotions, all of which the woman must go through, experience and express – shorn of decoration, of ornamentation. The voice must speak for and to itself and be its own therapist. In this recording of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for Female Voice, the voice of Cathy Berberian is obliged to undertake the journey of a life. There is nothing random about this seemingly spontaneous articulation of these 44 emotions; each is a stage, a post of a slalom, around and through which Berberian must deftly travel in order to reach – well, what or where does she reach? Fulfilment or compromise?

Track 3: Luciano Berio/Cathy Berberian – Sequenza III for Female Voice (6:48)

But what purpose, should a purpose be necessary, exists for such a virtuosic odyssey? Personal purposes, certainly, if not social ones. But what if the same elements, the not dissimilar organisation of noise, were to be applied to a specific social or emotional need? Adjust the concave mirror and listen now to the voice of Abbey Lincoln, in duet with the drummer Max Roach, from Roach’s 1960 We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. This excoriating piece of music is entitled Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace. The delineation between the three sections will be obvious. What you need to focus on, however, is why she is doing what she is doing. Birth/awareness – anger/violence – satisfaction/death. The sexual, to pilfer Lacanian theory, is the subtext of the political.

Track 4:Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln – Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace (8:02)

Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing the Triptych from Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. It is clearly time to take stock. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you are listening to this evening’s edition of Clear Spot. This is Marcello Carlin spinning some askew theories around the notional theme of “The Feminisation Of Noise.” Two unsentimental love songs now, both recorded by temporarily expatriate American musicians in Paris at the turn of the ‘60s and ‘70s; both utilising but ultimately subverting accepted male patterns of noise making into a decidedly feminist perspective. Firstly, Archie Shepp’s group of 1969, featuring the unutterably sexual but utterly untouchable vocal stylings of Jeanne Lee, performing the title track of Shepp’s album Blasé. It is one of the greatest feminisations of noise ever attempted within the confines of the popular song. Listen for the still astonishing punctum which suddenly makes itself known about seven minutes into the piece.

Track 5: Archie Shepp/Jeanne Lee – Blasé (11:22)

Why those determinedly out-of-tune harmonicas? These were played by two comparatively obscure Chicago bluesmen, Julio Finn and Chicago Beauchamp, entirely in their own key and seemingly wholly oblivious to the timbre and tonal centre of the piece. It’s almost as if they have been satirically cut and pasted onto the song, as a signifier of extinct male potency which has long since lost its signified. It is a terrifying moment. The bassist on that piece, Malachi Favors, also appears on the next track, Theme De Yoyo, recorded by the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1970 as the theme to a seemingly unreleased French avant-garde film Les Stances Á Sophie. The crucial element here is the singer, Fontella Bass, the then wife of the Art Ensemble’s trumpeter Lester Bowie and clearly long since rescued. Hear her exultation in demolishing the attributes of the film’s supposed “heroine.” Hear what I can achieve, girl, the repeated freeform explosions signify; I can do it every 30 seconds. Observe also how drummer Don Moye invents drum ‘n’ bass.

Track 6: Art Ensemble of Chicago/Fontella Bass – Theme De Yoyo (8:00)

Now take those rhythms and subvert them from below. Apply them to a pre-post modern song of social commentary which was released more or less as New York City was about to declare bankruptcy. The primeval makes its own way back in, one way or another; but if feminised, it will always be diverted up far more interesting avenues.

Track 7: Joni Mitchell – The Jungle Line (4:20)

Joni Mitchell, from 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, with assistance from sundry Burundi drummers, and “The Jungle Line.” In order to maintain a meaningful balance in this recital, we need to derail chronology, if only temporarily, for a linked foresight into how the most male-driven of musical forms ended up thoroughly feminised – and for the same reasons. Even if for as crass a reason as song titles.

Track 8: Sonic Youth – Hey Joni (4:22)

Sonic Youth and, hey, “Hey Joni” from 1988’s Daydream Nation, a presage of the aqueous deluge to come. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you are listening to Clear Spot, presented by Marcello Carlin of the Church of Me, considering the question of “The Feminisation Of Noise.” But how did we get here? Time to return to the none-more-feminised arena of No Wave, in which dwelt the none-more-manly James Chance, some say White. On his “White” album of 1979, “Off White,” credited to James White and the Blacks, we can hear how Chance tries to be a man but is beaten by the very act of adopting the musical template of the man who did more than any other man to feminise noise: Ornette Coleman. Ornette deserves his own programme, indeed a week of his own programmes. His importance here, however, is how he altered the perspectives of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. In his playing there is no Chuck Yeager-style attempts to break the sound or barline barriers; no cries of look how many sheets of sound I can generate in ten seconds, look how big mine is. Instead his playing is literally selfless; it exists for the sake of the surrounding music, is frequently subsumed in the surrounding music. On this James White track “Stained Sheets” the askance avant-funk music, clearly derived from Ornette’s contemporaneous Prime Time group, subverts White’s claims to manhood, which are later dealt a fatal blow when he surrenders to his never-more-assertive telephone sex “partner” Stella Rico, portrayed by Lydia Lunch.

Track 9: James White & the Blacks/Lydia Lunch – Stained Sheets (5:51)

For an equally selfless but more thoughtful take on the same elements, listen now to this performance by the trio Don King, which evolved out of the undeniably extreme No Wave group Mars. Lucy Hamilton is most evident on bass clarinet, Mark Cunningham patrols the borders on guitar, Duncan Lindsay holds the fabric together on drums. This piece is entitled “Marajó.”

Track 10: Don King – Marajó (3:40)

You see now how organisation of noise does not necessarily equate with volume, but more with perspective. Listen to this completely subversive but equally persuasive performance by Portobello’s finest, the Raincoats. The title of the piece “Dancing In My Head” is a clear reference to Ornette’s 1977 album – one of the half-dozen or so most important records of the last 40 years – but its approach is that of blissful, and yes, aqueous, dub. Selfless and beautiful.

Track 11: Raincoats – Dancing In My Head (6:20)

The Raincoats, and “Dancing In My Head” from their 1981 album Odyshape. There are so many artists which I have unforgivably been unable to include in this programme – amongst innumerable others, the Shaggs, the Slits, Diamanda Galas, and, if you’ve an alert mind, Christian Wolff, Chet Baker, Jimmy Scott, Lester Young, Andy Williams and Karen Carpenter. One group which we cannot exclude, however, is My Bloody Valentine. Their 1991 album Loveless represents perhaps the most extreme process yet recorded of male guitar noise being feminised, being detached from its bass-driven bearings, ethereal in its all-encompassing embrace, its very speed being deliberately fluctuated, in tune with, shall we say, more important rhythms. Who’s doing what on this track “Only Shallow”? And yes, it does matter.

Track 12: My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow (4:45)

My Bloody Valentine, from the Loveless album, and “Only Shallow.” And I haven’t even considered the Cocteau Twins. There is a very strong case for saying that we haven’t necessarily progressed from what is still a frontier.

Still, we can’t leave out Bikini Kill. A more obviously driven assault on male rock, but a more palpable and joyful one. This is what I suppose remains their anthem, “Rebel Girl.”

Track 13: Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (2:30)

Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill, with “Rebel Girl.” And I haven’t even considered Suzi Quatro. A further incursion into male domains – this time into bedroom/laptop avant-techno – has been achieved by the American duo Blechdom from Blechtum. Their performance at the ICA last year was one of the most exhilarating I’d seen in some time, vacillating between sublime trash-pop and explosive laptop atonal outbursts. The best compromise on record between the two approaches so far can be found on the solo EP by Kevin Blechdom – the name is Kevin, but she is a she – I Love Presets, and in particular in this song, a number one single in a better and fairer world, “Mr Miguel.”

Track 14: Kevin Blechdom – Mr Miguel (3:08)

And now, it’s time for the reckoning. A conclusion? A hyperreal utopia where noise can only exist if it is feminised. As with Escalator Over The Hill, with which we opened this programme, we return to an idea, some say an ideal, of the popular song. A song which begins by describing an ideal life, then the reasons why the singer is excluded from that life, a frustration which becomes first poignant, and then batters itself to a preliminary death against a brick wall of noise. Then there is quiet. The male progenitor has to plead with her not to reject life, not to co-exist with unfulfilled silence. That the female is necessary for any noise to have even the most elemental of meanings. From the soundtrack to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Musical: Once More With Feeling, the rejection of the simulacrum and the embrace of unironic humanity that is “Something To Sing About.”

Track 15: Sarah Michelle Gellar – Something To Sing About (4:40)

And yes, the words of the quiet verses have personal significance. For all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be. To make this short story long, please click on http://cookham.blogspot.com to access The Church Of Me. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you have been listening to Clear Spot. This is Marcello Carlin speaking. Thank you for listening.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

JIMMY SCOTT

Feelings of unease make themselves apparent over the CD reissue of Jimmy Scott's Falling In Love Is Wonderful. Nothing to do with the record itself, which is sublime and angelic, but with the words and (in)actions surrounding it. It is certainly wonderful that Scott, at 77, now has the career he always wanted, the career which was more or less denied to him for over three decades, and that his finest 38 minutes are now available again for the first time since the original issue was hurriedly withdrawn from the market 40 years ago. But I remain uneasy about his re-emergence via his cameo in the muddled final episode of Twin Peaks, via Lou Reed and Elvis Costello, via the curators. It is undeniable that it is a million times better that Scott should have his career back than continue to slave away in McJob obscurity, but the Twin Peaks appearance struck me as condescending and patronising on Lynch's part; Scott to be added as yet another post-modern curio to be ridiculed or appreciated ironically. And have our Good Music Society curators written for him, or written at him?

He should of course have had his career when he was artistically at his peak. Not his fault that he signed a rip-off contract with Herman Lubinsky at Savoy; he hadn't followed up his 1950 hit "Everybodys Somebody's Fool" with further hits, and his need to sing and be recorded was greater than his need to have a career. Still, the Savoy sides are the equivalent of Sinatra on Columbia in the '40s; perfectly adequate in themselves, but the voice clearly requires a greater and more inventive dimension in which to wander.

Enter Ray Charles. Having just crossed over big-time with Modern Sounds in Country and Western, he was more or less in a position to do what he liked. And what he wanted was to set up his own record label (Tangerine). Among the first projects for the label was to be an album of "seduction" ballads, performed by Scott with string-accented arrangements by Marty Paich and Gerald Wilson, both more or less following the template established by Gordon Jenkins on Sinatra's '50s Capitol torch song albums Where Are You? and No One Cares, and produced by Charles, who would also accompany Scott on piano (Erroll Garner, basically, with a touch of Tatum).

The record, Falling In Love Is Wonderful, was duly released in 1963. On US radio it took off like a bomb and was set to become a significant best-seller, as big a jazz-pop crossover as Getz/Gilberto. But just as the album was getting into the shops, it was abruptly pulled. Lubinsky asserted, or more accurately bluffed, that Scott was still under contract to Savoy and threatened to sue Charles/Tangerine if the album were not withdrawn. Charles fell for the bluff and conceded. The album disappeared, as did Scott's career. Another album six years later, The Source, met the same fate. Then 20 or so years of scuffling and McJobs ensued until his assisted re-emergence.

Now, the thing is that Lubinsky died in 1983. Thus Scott was finally free of him, as indeed was Ray Charles. Why, then, did the album not immediately reappear? There's a sinister subtext which runs through David Ritz's sleevenotes to the reissue which implies that Charles was not exactly tripping over himself to ensure Scott's welfare. Why did Charles, who had immense clout in 1963, meekly accede to Lubinsky's bullshit? Did he simply not want the fuss of a lawsuit hampering his new label? Why did Charles not put Scott's picture on the sleeve, instead opting for a fireside seduction scene where a middle-aged chap is bending over what looks like a semi-conscious woman who appears to have been drugged by Rohypnol sneaked into the wine glass (with some recent Charles albums helpfully scattered on the rug)? Why did it take 20 years after Lubinsky's death for this record to be reissued? It was clearly not urgent and key for Ray Charles. There are comments in the sleevenotes about a failure on the part of "Ray's men" to come to terms with Mosaic Records for a reissue, so Rhino were ultimately approached. Surely not jealousy? Hatred?

Scott was always doomed anyway. A victim of Kallman's syndrome, which arrests hormonal growth, he looked like a youth and sang in a clearly androgynous register (Nancy Wilson or Johnnie Ray, either would suffice). While preparing my broadcast on the "feminisation of noise" I had a notion to include a section which addressed the "feminisation of masculinity" - the androgynous, almost hermaphrodite delivery favoured by many post-Lester Young singers, but soon realised that there was enough material there for a whole other programme. There's also something in Scott's delivery which very clearly anticipates the singing of Karen Carpenter at her peak - that same selfless, near apostolic compassion.

Bruised also by the early death of his mother and other family issues, as well as his own lack of commercial success, Scott had every right to submit to self-pity in songs like "Why Try To Change Me Now?" or "If I Should Lose You." It is a measure of his artistry that he doesn't. When Sinatra sang "Why Try To Change Me Now?" it was a wounded cry from a former cynic who had lived long enough to venture beyond resignation. Scott sings it as an innocent expression of bewilderment - why should anyone "stare" or "frown?"

What Scott offers in this album is, indeed, selfless compassion and boundless wonder. It's a fine and still unhackneyed selection of songs. Hear his voice trembling with joy following his discovery of the existence of rapture in Irving Berlin's little-sung "They Say It's Wonderful." In terms of love, he clearly sings as an outsider, someone who is excluded from joining in with life. But he does not betray any bitterness or angst; he, more interestingly, is curious, and has love of his own to offer. He views love as stout Cortez viewed the Pacific for the first time, filled with naive wonderment. The album is like being hugged for the longest time, and you can be moved to tears by Scott's embrace.

I've heard few other, if any, American singers capable of invoking the vertiginous giddiness of "I Wish I Didn't Love You So Much" or capable of constructing a devotional hymn out of "How Deep Is The Ocean." But Scott manages it. On the latter, there are clear echoes of Charlie Parker's interpretation on his Verve string sides; the same, almost hyperreal humanity which emerges out of the mere performance of a sequence of notes and makes it into art. Even "Someone To Watch Over Me," usually performed with at least a soupcon of self-pity, conveys the impression of a humble child asking politely for more. I won't slash my wrists if no Other comes, he is saying, but I'd quite like someone. It would be nice. As a Christmas present, maybe. The complete lack of artifice in his performance will reduce you to a wreck.

For an unalloyed expression of fulfilled, reciprocated love, there's little in post-war popular song to match the barely containable ecstasy of Scott's performance of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." Here he turns the song into a Madison Avenue "Amazing Grace." The holy is brought to the foreground. The closer, a comparatively obscure but lovely Burke/Van Heusen song "Sunday, Monday And Always," reveals to us the umbilical link which leads to Marvin Gaye, to Lewis Taylor and to Prince; love spins at 69 rpm, the voice yearns and becomes the Other in its own obsessionality. Gaye in particular did manage to obtain a copy of the album when first out and used it as his template - investigate his Romantically Yours compilation of ballads for proof that he was far closer to Scott than to, say, Nat "King" Cole.

Again, Falling In Love Is Wonderful is a glimpse, perhaps too late, of an angelic Utopia, of a compassion which could have altered at least part of the course of popular music had it been allowed its proper due. Listening to it now, we understand, a lifetime away, that perfection once existed.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

AUDIO SERMON FROM THE CHURCH OF ME

Apologies for the current paucity of posts, but I am busy preparing for my broadcasting debut, which can be heard on Resonance 104.4 FM
on Tuesday 21 January as part of the Clear Spot series between 7:00-8:30 pm. Music and commentary will centre around theories relating to my work in progress, The Feminisation Of Noise. This is my first time in a radio studio, so be kind with your comments ;-)

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

WE CANNOT BE GOD BUT CAN ONLY DO OUR BEST

The film Truly, Madly, Deeply is a truly wretched affair. Juliet Stevenson - so remote and sexual in Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers - plays the kind of insufferable, scatterbrained, unpunctual ditherer which no publishing house would have tolerated, even in 1994. Her 'cellist husband Alan Rickman dies but his ghost continues to inhabit their Highgate house (see what I mean already?). Stevenson in this film achieves the remarkable feat of turning into Julie Andrews. It is supposedly as real an examination of unresolved bereavement as has ever been witnessed in cinema. As one who for nigh on 17 months has continued to suffer from unresolved bereavement I say: bullshit. It is significant that the cause of death of Rickman's character is never specified. So there's no record of a life slowly or rapidly ebbing away from the Other; nothing about the humiliation of an enthusiastic gourmet and cook reduced to sipping Complan; nothing about scavenger families waiting to strip your house like benevolent bailiffs; nothing about the emotional and financial wreckage which is a consequence of forced relocation. There are no packets of paracetamol in Juliet Stevenson's bedside cupboard, and she does not have to argue herself out of taking all of him when she wakes up every morning. No, she doesn't have to worry about any of that.

But the significant factor here is Rickman - alone in the film, he is so evidently full of life, so evidently sexy. It is that which Stevenson has lost. Michael Maloney's limp lettuce leaf of a New Man doesn't even begin to replace him, and she knows it. He is so obviously a compromise, so defiantly anti-sexy, that it leads us to a belief that her "life" is in fact over - the best she can look forward to now is a substitute for a life. Or as Buffy would have it, "I live in Hell, 'cos I've been expelled from Heaven."

A life in Hell is made even less bearable when you have had a glimpse of Heaven, saw perfection, if only for a split second. How does anyone continue to exist? This is the answerable question which Vaughan Williams poses in his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The major orchestral chord which fades up at the beginning of the piece - like sunrise - represents the ideal, perfection, Godhood. Yet it is abruptly eclipsed, and most of the rest of the work's 15 minutes describes attempts to regain it. The theme was the third of nine psalm settings which Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker's Whole Psalter of 1567; significantly, it sets to music the psalm which begins "Why fumeth with fight" - in other words, why try to regain something which you can never have? It sets the boundaries. Variations on the chord surface briefly here and there, but it's never quite the same chord, not quite the same magic we heard at the beginning, and the piece, after the solemn opening statement of pure Tallis melody, becomes increasingly agitated in its efforts. The theme is varied, every type of diatonic counterpoint is attempted with the theme like an imperfect jigsaw puzzle. Eventually, in what sounds more like frustration than catharsis, the first violins declare the melodic line fortissimo in sopranino register. It's a cry of rage, but soon recedes. We still have to clear up the mess. The orchestra subsides into what appears to be a mood of resignation. At the end, one violin plays an ascending five-note augmented minor scale which sounds like unbearable weeping, and a chord returns to end the piece - not the original chord, but as good as we're going to get, as near to God as man can be. In order to continue living, we have to accept the reality of this.

It is strange how the entirety of Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question (sometimes subtitled "Contemplation of a Serious Matter") is based on the exact same opening "perfect" chord. But here Ives does not worship it; quite the reverse. He is amused by it and merely tries to augment his own "imperfect" musical visions upon God-made perfection. Thus the bitonal trumpet motif - so anticipatory of Miles Davis, so strangely cognisant of the "rudimentary" notes which Vaughan Williams makes the lead trumpeter play in the second movement of his Symphony No 3 (the Pastoral) as a recollection of a bugler in the French trenches in WWI. Ives is curious, and the other agitated and sometimes atonal orchestral flurries and motifs which he periodically introduces into the work can be directed and introduced by the conductor in any order - written in 1910 (the same year as Fantasia), this is prototype aleatory music-making which anticipates Cage by a good 30 years. I can appreciate Michael Gibbs' comment that the trumpet on The Unanswered Question "comes from another planet" - but really, it is we, humanity, who are on another planet from that in which "perfection" exists, and this might be God's way of analysing us - perhaps remove the indefinite article from the subtitle and consider it as contemplation of serious matter. Ives doesn't strive; he just observes and indicates. It is up to us to make what he will of it.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

SEMI-METAPHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF STOCKHAUSEN

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen formally renounced the Catholic Church in the ‘60s, he never really abandoned its fundamental tenets; or more properly applied them to how he viewed his ideals of sonic alchemisation. A very pertinent question might be: given his love of Stravinsky and Milhaud co-existing with his adoration of Webern and Bartok, and given his apprenticeship as a danceband and nightclub pianist in post-war Cologne, why does he continue to have such a problem with rhythm or repetition? A latent fear, perhaps, of the inhuman treadmill of the concentration camps? He was orphaned during WWII, but never came near the camps; after the war he studied at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik under the Swiss composer Frank Martin, who had lately begun to incorporate 12-tone concepts into his works (e.g. 1944’s Passacaille for orchestra) with philosophy as his secondary subject. Aware of, and a fervent student of, the Second Viennese School – Schoenberg in particular – his key moment of transition appears to have been the 1951 contemporary music study programme at Darmstadt. There the Composition Seminar was due to be given by Schoenberg, but the 77-year-old was gravely ill. His place was taken by none other than Theodor Adorno, not only the Frankfurt School’s leading philosopher but also a former student of Alban Berg, who frowned somewhat upon new developments. In particular that summer the Sonata for Two Pianos, composed by the Dutchman Karel Goeyvaerts and performed by the composer and Stockhausen, excited Adorno’s bile no end. In the first of Stockhausen’s five-volume Texte series, there is a hilarious account of how Adorno pleaded and yelled at the two newbies to tell him what this music meant. A detailed description by Goeyvaerts of the exceptionally precise musical design behind the Sonata – fundamentally, successive registral note/tone placements converge from each end of the piano keyboard towards middle C, and then spread out again (a horizontal structure which, for example, Gorecki adapted, albeit tonally, to a vertical structure for his Symphony No 3) – failed to quell the ire of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Having recently acted as musical director for an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the Marxist industrialist had to content himself by angrily dismissing Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen as “Leverkühn and his famulus” – a precise echo of the mode of attack which the reformed Maoist Cornelius Cardew deployed a quarter of a century later in his sidesplitting book/polemic Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.

A more important consequence of Stockhausen’s attendance at Darmstadt ’51 was his exposure to the more robustly Catholic Messiaen’s Quatre Etudes de Rythme, in particular to the second of the four sections “Mode de Valeurs et d’Intensités.” The latter is based on a set of 36 notes subdivided into three 12-tone subsets. Each subset has a specific duration, intensity of attack and dynamic level associated with each of its pitches. The unification and seeming solidity of this structure attracted Stockhausen, and influenced his essential concept of a piece of music acting as a metaphysical divine creation whose components are consistent but whose individual approaches are always variable.

This was nothing like the aleatorics and complete openness of the Buddhist John Cage; Stockhausen allows freedom within his structures, but never for a nanosecond denies that there must be structure, or relinquish his hold upon the structure. He continued to study under Messiaen, simultaneously doing fieldwork at the electronic music studios of, first French, and then West German, radio. Communications theory and phonetics were also studied; and while early works like Kreuzspiel show how he methodically worked towards this end, his first indisputably major work is the 1956 composition for processed boy’s voice, electronics and five loudspeakers, Gesang der Jünglinge.

The presence and positioning of the five loudspeakers in this piece are crucial, for the processed sounds move and communicate between the speakers in a very precise fashion. Superficially it sounds like a battle; on one side, the boy’s voice cut up, manipulated, modified, his message deconstructed into seemingly arbitrary successions of vowels and consonants. Amongst other things, this is the birthplace of sampling and cut-up in music (hear Bobby Byrd’s voice being cut up into its elements in a very similar fashion on Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul”), but there is a subtext. Towards the climax of the piece, the boy’s voice is multiplied a hundredfold (Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart”) and the electronics become more frenetic and forceful, almost threatening to drown the “humanity” completely. Then the voice suddenly becomes comprehensible and we realise that we are hearing a hymn of praise out of the Book of Daniel (the Men in the Fiery Furnace). Thus is humanity reaffirmed in this most seemingly inhuman music – what Houllebecq tries but fails to grasp in Atomised.

For someone so inimical to rhythm, Stockhausen’s late ‘50s/early ‘60s works are as percussion-orientated as he got without ever submitting to the concept of rhythm itself – 1960’s Kontakte being the most famous example, but mention should also be made of 1959’s Zyklux; 17 pages of score for a solo percussionist which can be read and played in any order (but Terry Riley it isn’t); and the various Klavierstücke for piano which, again, can be performed in no set order.

In orchestral terms – and here Stockhausen is revealed as being as artful and emotional an organiser of large ensembles as Stravinsky or Mingus, here is where I feel his art reaches a peak – he adopts the very Mingusian progress of breaking down the orchestra into smaller, self-reliant groups with their own “position in space” but who continue to interact with the other subgroups. An immediately drastic example of this approach can be found in 1964’s Mixtur for five sections of orchestra and a ring modulator to process and recycle the sounds produced by the instruments, thereby creating a larger structure, much of which was not actually being “played.” There are 20 “moments” (Stockhausen’s nomenclature for what he terms as “slices of musical time”) in the piece, and, again, though the order in which they occur is not of primary importance, the inner musical logic of the piece is apparent throughout. This approach is taken to greater and larger extremes by pieces such as Gruppen (1957, for three orchestras), Carré (1960, for four orchestras and four choirs) for which Stockhausen provides the structure and overall outline of the piece but, as with Renaissance painters, leaves the mechanics and “composition” to the performers (and in jazz, Gil Evans used the same approach for pieces like 1960’s “La Nevada” and 1975’s very Stockhausen-esque “There Comes A Time”) and 1964’s shattering electronic coming of age Momente (redesigned and expanded to even more stunning effect in 1972).

His best-known work was trailed by 1966’s Telemusik, in which he fuses various types of folksong and what would later be cheapened by calling “world music” – but there is respect here instead of mere politesse, and the desired “song of the Earth” is almost attainable. But 1967’s Hymnen is likely to remain his key to the kingdom; what may be the most important and influential, and also the least listened to and least understood, piece of music of the last 50 years. Dictating, amongst other things, the groundwork for the next thirty years of pop music (via the Beatles through to sampling), this two-hour work assembles and reshapes a series of national anthems, though the emotion remains tempered by Stockhausen’s insistence upon the priority of process (“how”) over material (“what”). The tenor of the piece develops slowly but steadily over its duration and the sonorities are never less than compelling. Listening, we do not feel that a laboratory tutorial is being conducted; rather, like Jonson’s reformed Alchemist, we see a determined groping in the dark towards a gloriously illuminated result; and indeed its climax is amongst the most overwhelming and orgasmic of musical climaxes, wherein an avalanche of slowly descending electronic glissandi engulfs the listener (imagine the end of “A Day In The Life” played backwards and multiplied by a million). It is a moment of catharsis rarely achieved in music and may well represent the ideal towards which so many Ambient, or indeed Rock, wannabes foolishly stumble.

in 1967, Prozession followed; more or less a compact Greatest Hits, with samples taken from all of his previous works. Since then it is not quite right to say that Stockhausen has retrenched – 1970’s Mantra for two pianists and processed electronics is a violently arresting study, a Munch to the Cezanne of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III; 1968’s Stimmung for rapidly stuttering choir is probably more fun to participate in than to listen to – but that his Catholicism remains undimmed in a corner of his work which resists opening up to the wider world. 1976’s Sirius was released and marketed as a pop record, complete with soft-focus close-up cover photo, in an attempt to capture the Mike Oldfield/Vangelis audience, but to no avail. And since 1977 he has dedicated himself, foolhardily, to his seven-opera concept Licht (one for each day of the week). At the time of writing Stockhausen is 74 and has produced only four of the seven operas, all of which contain interesting and sometimes beautiful individual moments, but none of which hangs together as more than a quasi-New Age curio.

But none of this should deter from the undeniable magnificence and inescapable importance of Stockhausen’s finest work – he is as deft and large-minded an organiser of sounds and musicians as Phil Spector, but unlike Spector there is a warmth to Stockhausen’s grandeur; you can embrace the music rather than simply admire it. Is it “anti-rave”? Only if you subtract the originator of rave – Stravinsky – from the equation. Stockhausen subtracted the rhythm, but only to provide space to create his own.

Postscript
Collecting Stockhausen on record is an expensive business these days. Stockhausen has retrieved the rights to all his music and released them in elaborately-designed packages, the price of which is likely to send a severe chill through your bank balance. And the Deutsche Grammophon vinyl originals – unless you are old enough to have bought them at the time of their original release, or lucky enough to have a parent who did so – now go for similarly absurd prices on ebay and elsewhere. If you have to go for one, then get Hymnen; the DG 2-LP original remains a masterpiece, and I have seen it second-hand for about £50. The 4CD update is also compelling, but doesn’t really tell you anything you didn’t already know – and, as bought new, will cost you more than twice the second-hand vinyl price. In truth, as with free improvisation, there is no substitute for hearing the music performed live; to hear how the acoustics and musicians interact, what part the audience has to play in experiencing the sounds in the multi-directional form in which they were intended. Stockhausen’s Texte writings (DeMont Schauberg, 5 vols, 1963-85) are required reading for a full understanding of how his music works; but for a good one-volume guide you could do worse than 1975’s The Works Of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Robin Maconie (father of Stuart). Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, if you can find it, is inadvertently uproarious misanthropy worthy of Celine.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

Reality always overtakes even the farthest absurdities of fiction. In the epilogue of his 1999 novel Les Particules Élémentaires, the title rather misleadingly being translated into the English Atomised, Michel Houllebecq pinpoints 2029 as the date when the first cloned human is produced. But the Raelians (should any proof be forthcoming) have already beaten him to it – complete with the aid of aliens. The news in itself demonstrates an unintentional (or is it intended?) humour which is entirely absent from Atomised.

Let us not be mistaken; Atomised at least attempts to be a state-of-humanity novel, such as was entirely commonplace in the 19th century and, with a very few exceptions (although the bulwark of science fiction) absent from 20th century literature. Indeed, though the story is supposedly told by an evolved humanoid – thus the apparent dispassion and meticulous itemising of the biological and sociological realities of humanity untouched by the needs for belief or worship – stylistically it is extremely 19th-century in construction and outlook. Houllebecq’s writing reads like a not altogether satisfactory cohabitation between Thomas Carlyle and Nicholson Baker. But it is clearly intended to be an epic, perhaps even a stab at prophecy; and in terms of rubbing the readers’ faces in the horrific banality of biological existence and non-existence, in terms of steadily coercing us into considering who we are and where the hell we are going, in terms of guiding us towards “the truth,” it dwarfs everything ever written by anybody on the current Granta “Young British Novelist” list, and most things written by anybody on previous Granta lists. Compare it, for instance, with the deliberately leaden and stultifying examination of the real and imagined lives of unsympathetic and eminently hittable people delineated in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. So many over-tangible sleights of hand make our minimal care for these unlovable people even more minimal. One ends up not caring who lived or died; the pre-empting technique of having “Cyril Connolly” criticise the novel’s first third as bad Virginia Woolf (specifically The Waves) doesn’t mean that it ain’t so.

Then again, possessing a big canvas doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to produce a Guernica or a Kane, let alone a Bleak House. As with Phil Spector’s productions, which simultaneously manage to contain everything and yet contain nothing, Atomised can be stared at in a vague approximation of minor awe but never entered.

The two central protagonists are stepbrothers, Michel and Bruno, both conceived by a libertine mother but with different fathers who more or less absent themselves from their sons’ lives. They are both brought up by their grandmothers. Michel early on shows little or no interest in “life” or “the outside world” apart from those details which he can pin down and analyse in test-tubes. He becomes a molecular biologist, and eventually the unwitting John the Baptist of humanity’s evolution/redundancy. In contrast, Bruno is sent to an unhappy, bullying public school, is overweight, has no confidence with the opposite sex, and proceeds thereafter (an unsatisfactory marriage and son notwithstanding, and how notwithstanding are these two characters in this book) to a series of unfulfilling “adventures” in nudist camps, one-night stands, sex clubs and so on. In truth he is a libertine far more in theory than in practice; he wishes fervently to be able to “join in” sexual abandon/life, but can never do so. He works as a teacher, but following an unfortunate loss of control whereby he flashes his five-inch cock at a no-more-than-amused 15-year-old Arab pupil in his class, he goes for psychiatric treatment and thereafter is given a desk job.

As per Strangers On A Train, Michel and Bruno are so obviously one person split into two conflicting sets of beliefs and viewpoints on how life should be lived that it’s difficult to care for them as discrete human beings. Houllebecq proceeds, determinedly matter-of-fact, to indicate how the gradual replacement of religion by the continuing onset of materialism; how in fact the Manson murders were the logical conclusion of hippiedom; without faith or true belief, humans turn to methods of instant gratification – first consumerism, then casual sex, and finally mutilation/destruction – and how all this determines the courses which their lives will take. All with a (n un) healthy dollop of biological and physical theoretics/history, with some Auguste Comte philosophy on the side (“positivism” replacing God and thus the only attribute retainable in “science”). Perhaps Houllebecq wishes to modify/revive these beliefs, though there is more than a touch of the John Henry Newman about his deliberate avoidance of the idea that humans might wish to sustain themselves on more than an animal level by things other than common belief (e.g. relationships with other human beings). But what stops Atomised from becoming even a 21st-century Apologia Pro Vita Sua - the evangelist calling out against the established high-priesthood of free market economics – is what I think as being a complete indifference on the author’s part with regard to humanity. Though the sub-Asimov (specifically the short story “Breeds There A Man…”) ending of the book states that “This book is dedicated to mankind,” no love for mankind is particularly evident; even less for love itself.

The female characters in this book (and no one here advances beyond the level of “character”), as tends to be the case in Houllebecq’s work, get a raw deal. Both Michel and Bruno end up briefly in a simulacrum of “living” with their respective Others, but so roughly sketched are Annabelle and Christiane (the attendant irony in the latter name is heavily emphasised), so clearly foredoomed are they, that the reader is left with little doubt that Michel and Bruno are in fact in love with each other (i.e. with the view in their mirror). Annabelle wants Michel from childhood, but Michel isn’t interested, and anyway the dumb problem pages of teenage magazines dictate that she should not make the first move. They vanish from each other’s life for 25 years; she returns, they conceive without much enthusiasm on Michel’s part, but of course it’s too late – she is found to have ovarian cancer which hysterectomy cannot prevent from spreading, and accordingly commits suicide. Similarly, Bruno meets Christiane at a nudist camp-cum-New Age shyster palace; they get it on, decide to cohabit, but one night at a sex club she collapses and then becomes wheelchair-bound. She too has cancer, and returns to her slum flat. She throws herself downstairs to exit the world. Bruno immediately realises his uselessness and obligingly returns to the psychiatric clinic, this time for good, ensuring a contented, loveless existence. What’s left for Michel to do but help lay the groundwork for getting rid of humanity? And when that work is eventually done, in 2009, he vanishes off the coast of Ireland, to become another particle in the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” or perhaps to disappear to Tibet, as his father had done 45 years previously.

The fact that Houllebecq talks in detail about the Stones but can’t spell Snoop Doggy Dogg’s name correctly might lead you to be dubious about everything else he delineates in this book; if he can’t even get that right, how can we trust him on anything else? – although this may be the consequence of Frank Wynne’s unsatisfactory translation, which persists with solecisms such as “in general, without exception…”

The outlook of this book is bleak and gives me the creeps, though for all the wrong reasons. It is made unambiguously clear that if we strip ourselves of religious beliefs, if we refuse to countenance or at least incorporate ideas such as the afterlife – in short, if we face up to what we really are as human beings – we are left with base, banal biology; mothers and lovers becoming nothing more than steadily decaying piles of bones. Christiane, in her younger days, observes the cult leader of the nudist camp, having just died, being given a funeral pyre, and is in fact forced to stare close-up at the skeleton which he had become. 20 years later she will suffer the same fate, albeit in a crematorium; and Bruno cannot resist having a sidelong peek at the red flashes in the grille at the side of the furnace. Without religion we are also stripped of art, music and love. But there’s something about Houllebecq – a “quality” beyond even fatalism – which leads me to think that that’s kind of how he prefers things to be. There is the vaguest suspicion that he ejaculates excitedly at the prospect of death and decay. Peter Greenaway approached the same territory in his 1985 film A Zed And Two Noughts, and like Greenaway, and decidedly unlike Vermeer, there is an almost supernatural fascination with the processes of decay which may well count as being anti-human. One concurs entirely with Geoffrey Palmer’s anguished roar of “What good do all these decaying bodies do?”

So, while this is a book which does need to be read, if only once, it cannot inspire me to reject what Houllebecq is rejecting. It’s the obvious ultimate consequence of Baudrillardism of course – everything’s a mirror, a fake, a simulacrum – and if taken in itself as gospel as a life belief it will lead to the loss of home, job, money, lovers, friends, ultimately life. It is a terrible burden to understand that nothing means anything. Harder to come to terms with the possibility that there must be more than this, that there must be a “soul,” that people must survive in some way or another, even after they biologically die; and maybe that’s what Houllebecq intends to say. Lazily dismissed by most British critics as a right-wing anti-permissive society tract masquerading as a novel, Atomised seems to me much more like a lament by a disgruntled man of the Left; he noticeably soft pedals on Communism and is violently (if not coherently) against unregulated capitalism. The 19th-century roots of this increased doubt in religion and renewed belief in science and reason, and its consequences upon Western society, are usefully and exhaustively described in A N Wilson’s book God’s Funeral; one imagines that Houllebecq would have been perfectly content sweeping up the heads of unbelievers from beneath the guillotine in 1794.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE HOUR BEFORE THE FUTURE – EARLY HUMAN LEAGUE

Of the newish wave of electronic/industrial operatives who emerged from the North of England in the wake of punk, the Human League were always the closest to pop. Whereas Throbbing Gristle made the mechanics of the marketing of pop into a grim parallel procession, and Cabaret Voltaire (at least initially) held pop at arm’s length but engaged in some cautious dialogue with it, the Human League were keen to talk to us but also eager to please. This was proved fairly conclusively by the fact that, out of the canon of electropop/industrial singles – “TVOD,” “Nag Nag Nag,” “United” – the only one to become a hit was the first Human League single “Being Boiled.” Rush-rereleased by EMI in the wake of their triumphant 1981 Xmas #1 “Don’t You Want Me,” it ascended rapidly into the top ten, possibly the only song about the ritual slaughter of children ever to do so. It is not inaccurate to say that for those few months spanning 1981/2, the League more or less had the charts at their disposal; their former other half, Heaven 17, were selling bucketloads of their Penthouse and Pavement debut album; Kraftwerk’s four-year-old “The Model” unexpectedly succeeded the League at #1, mostly due to Phil Oakey’s endless championing of them as a crucial influence; nearly all of the League’s back catalogue taking up residence in both the single and album charts (even the Dignity of Labour EP briefly surfaced in the top 100) – and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first singles compilation, Once Upon A Time, was selling unexpectedly well, again, it was said, as a result of being thanked on the Dare sleeve.

The story of Dare and its attendant singles, and how they facilitated the greatest and most drastic reinvention of a pop group since Tyrannosaurus Rex became T Rex, is well known, and I won’t reiterate it here. Instead I will concentrate on the work which led them up to this point. Neither do I need to repeat Simon Reynolds’ fine Blissblog summary of their very early work, recently collated on the compilation The Golden Hour of the Future (the Future being their original name – yet another inexplicable omission from my end-of-year compilation list).

The aforementioned Dignity of Labour EP was (apart from the postmodern prank of including the sleevenotes in the form of a mock-conversation on an unannounced flexidisc which came with the 12”) entirely instrumental (performed by the two synth operators, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware). The first two parts engage with the same Sheffield autobahns as the Cabs, but far less sinisterly. Part 3 is the brightest and most rhythmically purposeful of the tracks (a replication of the mindless happiness of working and living without having to think?) and one may be surprised to hear emerging halfway through a synth riff which would a decade later become the backbone of Frankie Knuckles’ House classic “Your Love.” But the picture of happy Stakhanovite labouring is of course only an illusion, as summed up by the lovely crystalline snowflakes of Part 4, which in its lo-fi poignancy surely must have been a major influence on the likes of Aphex and -zik.

A debut album, Reproduction, followed in 1979. As purposely free of guitars as Queen’s pre-1979 albums were proudly free of synthesisers (and indeed in true early Roxy style, employing a non-musician, Adrian Wright, to provide the slides and light shows), it embodies a distinct and quite deliberate contradiction in that, while the music brightly embraced the future, the lyrics were singularly bleak and backward-looking – to an old (pre-electronic?) social idyll which had just been dealt its fatal blow by the election of Thatcher the spring before this album’s release.

As a listening experience, the album stands up remarkably well; the beats are propulsive and sparky, the ‘70s synths very powerful. Indeed, the opening track “Almost Medieval” kicks off with a brutal breakbeat which would scarcely be out of place behind Britney. The lyric, though, was 1979-par dissatisfaction with the modern world (“There’s less of me now and more of me then/I’m moving back to the age of men”) and in its chorus almost approaches TG-type horror (“Jump off the tarmac, there’s no stagecoach speed limit/Outside the office swings the man on the gibbet”).

Some commentators have chosen to interpret the song “Circus of Death” (which also appeared in its original form on the B-side of “Being Boiled” complete with introductory explanation of the lyrics by Oakey) as being an anti-Communist tirade, mainly due to the line “Its pathway is painted in red,” though this is clearly a reference to blood. The song seems to be about the expansion of the drug trade and the deaths it leaves in its wake – or it could just as easily be about capitalism, the League being decidedly Left of centre; the track “The Word Before Last” is essentially a requiem for Callaghan/Labour, about to be extinguished by Thatcher (though still retaining an element of camp via the references to Steve McGarrett from Hawaii Five-O). In my view “Circus of Death” works better and cuts deeper in the greater eeriness of its original lo-fi version; big budgets didn’t necessarily suit the League well all of the time.

The early League were in close touch with pop but hadn’t as yet become it. The only song on Reproduction which could conceivably have been a hit (and it was desperately unlucky, when released as a single, not to be) was the still fantastic “Empire State Human,” a sort of electropop update of the Bonzo’s “Mr Apollo,” where Oakey is clearly aware of the futile silliness of wanting to grow 14 stories high (“at least”) but goes for it anyway because the alternative (“I avoid the crowds and traffic jams/They just remind me of how small I am”) is so much worse. Surely a number one were anyone to reissue/cover it now?

The problematics of their relationship with pop at that time were evident whenever they tried cover versions. The lengthy segue “Morale/You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” which occupies the first half of side two is a valiant try to approach pop directly, but – and this is a foretaste of why Marsh and Ware’s 1982 BEF album of celebrity cover versions Music Of Quality And Distinction Vol 1 never really caught on; despite typically epic contributions from Billy McKenzie and Tina Turner (incidentally kick-starting the latter’s career revival) and less distinguished contributions from Paula Yates and Gary Glitter - nowhere in its ten minutes do you get the feeling that any of it is pop, rather than just commenting on it. The “Morale” part is a Beckettian fantasy of an aged man “stuck here in this poor little room with a view of the corner,” Krapp waiting for death, while his tape recorder plays a memory of a life now spent. “Loving Feeling” here is approached as though the old man were absently singing along with it; Oakey’s delivery is deliberately deadpan and the synths deathly in their mid-range growls. A bereaved man waiting for rebirth while realising that he has left it too late; I wish this track worked as well as it sounds – it so nearly, nearly gets there, but…perhaps they should have brought in Robert Wyatt on vocals; Oakey’s Sheffield baritone is slightly too full to suggest vulnerability. The other song on side two which deserves a mention is the closer “Zero As A Limit” which depicts someone driving to their Ballardesque suburban death; it ticks along minimally for about 90 seconds, and then a Prince-type cascade of utopian synths comes in and elevates the music, all the while preparing for the end, a frantic “Day In The Life” crescendo (though played at a thousand times the speed) compressing itself into a sudden but definite close.

The Holiday ’80 EP got them onto TOTP for the first time by means of its medley of Glitter’s “Rock & Roll Part 1” and Iggy’s “Nightclubbing,” though this remains clumsily assembled and illustrated there still to be a reluctance to embrace pop full-on. “Marianne” is better, a great curve of electro-thrash; a big budget reworking of “Being Boiled” was overstuffed with unnecessary detail and proved again that less was more; but “Dancevision” was a nugget of proto-idylltronica from 1977. And yet at the same time, under the guise of “The Men” they put out a fantastic single, “I Don’t Depend On You” (originally intended for the Hot Gossip dance troupe) which uses a full band and female backing vocals. It’s terrific in the way that Talking Heads’ “Cities” is terrific and clearly paves the way ahead for the wonderful electrofunk marriage that was side one of Penthouse And Pavement.

Their second album, Travelogue, also appeared in 1980. To these ears it hasn’t aged quite as well as Reproduction, but when it’s loud it gets exceptionally brutal. Hear, for instance, the now more prescient than ever opening track “The Black Hit Of Space” a quite savage assault, 20 years ahead of its time, on the increasing commodification of pop and the charts (“As the song climbed the charts/The others disappeared/’Til there was nothing but it left to buy”) – the same charts with which, barely a year later, at least half of the Human League would be engaging directly, and briefly taking over. It is clearly a transitional record, and one which showed that the different approaches of Oakey and Marsh/Ware were growing steadily apart. There are two curious cover versions – one of Mick Ronson’s “Only After Dark,” the other a straight runthrough of Jeff Wayne’s “Gordon’s Gin” ad jingle. “Dreams Of Leaving” is the doubtless intended big epic, a two-parter in which a refuge flees from the East to the West to find “freedom,” only to find that nobody wants him here either, and ending with him moving North. The music is unremarkable, but the theme pops up strangely elsewhere in the League’s canon; much later on in 1984’s “Louise” where Oakey’s protagonist has indeed moved up North; and earlier in the abovementioned “Morale” where he slowly freezes to death, realising that he can never “be just like someone’s neighbour.”

There are a couple of tracks which presage what the League of Dare would achieve; “Crow And A Baby” has an obscure sexual metaphor at the core of its confused lyric, but musically sounds like a dummy run for “The Sound of the Crowd” despite the descending off-key synths still lending some avant-garde kudos at the fadeout. And in “The Touchables” we hear very distinctly the chords of the chorus of 1982’s “Mirror Man.” Perhaps the most affecting track on the album is the closer “W.K.J.L. Tonight” where, against a hallucinatory orchestra of distant electronica, Oakey portrays a fading DJ, pleading for his listeners not to desert him for the better music mix of automatic stations, but in the very precisely cutting lyric realises how redundant the “DJ” was anyway (“The DJ’s role was only there/To fill in space between the songs/That talk of love and other things/As if they don’t matter”). It stands beside Harry Chapin’s “W.O.L.D.” (which is subtly referred to in the closing backing vocals). A plea for humanity not to be extinguished?

Whatever the reasons, the League then imploded. Marsh recently opined that the departure of himself and Ware was a direct result of Virgin putting pressure on Oakey to become a solo artist, but as stated above, I feel they would have split anyway. The deliberately undistinguished (almost inhuman) voice of Glenn Gregory suited the harsh metallics of Heaven 17’s metapop far better, while the initial BEF umbrella gave them the opportunity to develop their electronica – 1981’s pioneering cassette-only Music For Stowaways is the real sequel to The Dignity Of Labour (a very Heaven 17 cover, the latter; the press photo of a solitary Yuri Gagarin marching before, but at a very considerable distance from, a massive crowd).

What was to happen with the remnants of the Human League – the singer and the guy who did the slides? The two did release one tentative single in early 1981 – “Boys And Girls,” which was quickly forgotten and remains a rather curious record, the lyrics of which appear positively anti-pop (the chorus goes “Boys and girls, I love you dearly, but I hate to have you need me”). There is also a beyond-bizarre melange of church bells and, er, sounds of the crowd in the instrumental break. I see that in the sleevenotes to last year’s 21st anniversary CD reissue of Dare, Oakey comments that, far from embracing pop, “I had a pretty clear idea of the instrumental palette we should stick to. The idea was that although pure synthesiser records weren’t popular they had a fanatical following and there wasn’t much competition. And I loved them.” Nevertheless producer Martin Rushent prevailed upon him to become pop, and indeed “used his hard-won pop skills to fill and warm the sound, taking it away from my icy vision” – although the quite brilliant recruitments of ex-Rezillo Jo Callis, not to mention the dual puncta of Susanne and Joanne from the local Sheffield disco, certainly helped to melt the ice. In the end, the Human League won, briefly but brilliantly.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

Too much hecticity today for any new posts, but there will be some new writing tomorrow, I promise...

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

METAL BOX

What do I have to say about the Clash? For now, merely two things. Firstly, Laura loved them. Secondly, the Clash was co-founded by Mick Jones and Keith Levene. Levene says that he was instrumental in recruiting Strummer, but was "voted" out of the band following conflicts with Jones, who wanted the group to adhere to rock and roll rebellion in the tradition, and Levene, who wanted them to go out and justify those Pollock-esque splashes musically. And without Lydon/Rotten, the Pistols were Queen. By 1978, both Lydon and Levene were severely pissed off with "punk rock" and what they perceived to be a smelly, beer-stained dead end. Already conformist; already assimilated into the tapestry. Time for a blast of what 1976 should have been like - Public Image Ltd.

Well, eventually, but there was a debut album to get out of the way first - 1978's First Issue was more a calling card, an advertisement, rather than an album per se. "Public Image" the single was an immediate top ten hit, and the nearest that this configuration of PiL ever got to "tradition;" the clear, anthemic, ringing guitar line, the I'm-now-gonna-do-it-my-way manifesto of a lyric; this is the superficial veneer of PiL which the witless likes of U2 licked up straight away.

The album itself? It was largely received as a self-aware con, though the excoriating nine minutes of the opening "Theme" sounded anything but; Levene's guitar and Jim Walker's drums thrash against each other slowly like beached whales, Jah Wobble's bass mixed right to the foreground to carry the riff/melody, Lydon screaming "I wish I could DIE" over and over; "On and on and ON" on and on - but at the song's death he appears to shrug his shoulder and grunts "terminal boredom." The album as a whole seems like a dry run for Metal Box; "Low Life" and "Attack" bring the dub/Can influences forward, "Annalisa" has an elasticity to its rock attack which the lumpen rhythm of the Pistols could never manage, "Fodderstompf" is ostensibly extended mucking about to fill the remainder of the album, but again there are clear elements of what was to come in 1979.

1979 was, for many of us who were around at the time, our real 1976, the year when the radicalism of the music began to match the radicalism of the manifestos. True, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Alternative TV, the Slits and the Banshees were already in existence, not to mention the Buzzcocks and Magazine, or Warsaw on the point of mutating into Joy Division, or indeed early stirrings from the Pop Group, Human League and Gang of Four. But 1979 was the miracle of a year in which nearly all these groups determinedly took off into outer space, burned their "roots" and actually started to make "new" music; things, approaches which you had never heard before. And the one record of 1979 which even more miraculously managed to pull all these strands together (dub, polemics, No Wave noise, dance, ennui) was Metal Box, the second album by PiL, released almost at the close of the year, as if to sum everything up.

It was originally released, at a cost of some £66,000, as three 12" 45 rpm singles encased within a matt grey film can. No gatefolds; not even any sleevenotes or pictures; just one curt sheet in red type containing the minimum necessary information, and no more. This was about dissecting and dissembling the way in which the listener or consumer approached music, and specifically "records." JA dub and disco were both quoted as templates; the 12" format was necessary for sound enhancement - particularly to highlight and emphasise the absolute key role of Wobble's bass. However you did it, this music was meant, at least in part, to be danced to. The JA influence was aesthetic as well; records to act as utilitarian containers rather than be Statements or Documents - all those 7" dubplates in the '70s, many of which were unlabelled; the point being you danced to them, got what you could out of them and then disposed of them. It was against the whole concept of an "archive," the antithesis of a "living" music. You can see that again now with the plethora of 12" garage/gabba garage white labels; this music is not meant to be compiled but consumed as you would, say, food. Use it up and wear it out. It's the same with mp3 downloads; why spend £4.99 on a single when you can simply download it, enjoy it for a few weeks and then delete?

The downside was that, in practice, the 12" singles were so tightly packed into the film can that it was nigh impossible to take them out without warping or scratching them, or at least turning the whole package upside down and letting the record fall out. But again this was deliberate; you want to hear this music, you're going to have to work at it. And it remains, for all these reasons, the ideal format in which to hear Metal Box.

The near 11-minute opener "Albatross" was certainly no easy point of entry. The opening words we hear are "slow motion" and indeed the vocal track was Lydon slowed down to 25 rpm, although many people assumed that it was Wobble on vocals. The song was apparently "composed" on the spot, but its theme is clearly renunciation of their history, of McLaren, of "punk." Later in the song we hear "death to the spirit of '68" and, even less ambiguously, "fuck the Pistols." It is significant that in Levene's interview in last month's Wire he mentions James "Blood" Ulmer as a key influence in constructing the music for this album. Although musically Levene's contributions are bitonal rather than harmolodic (and in "Albatross" there's more than a passing reference to Beefheart's reconstructed guitar lines on pieces like "Dali's Car"), the Ulmer/Ornette influence is more philosophical than musical - the concept that, if you make any mistakes, you keep them and incorporate them to advance and develop on what you are playing (an idea which also owes much to Christian Wolff). And indeed, if you listen to Ornette Coleman's 1977 Dancing In Your Head album - one of the half-dozen or so most important records of the last 40 years - in tandem with Ulmer's own Tales Of Captain Black (Artists House, 1979) - you can hear clearly how this process works with "harmonic" instruments (i.e. the guitars). Harmolodics is a difficult concept to explain at the best of the time, but Don Cherry once summed it up neatly when he explained to me that essentially you improvise on the melody rather than the chordal structure, and that you solo pretty well all of the time but keep out of everyone else's way. "I ran away" intones Wobble. "Sowing the seeds of discontent." On this album, Walker is replaced on drums by the far more sympathetic Richard Dudanski; he and Wobble as a rhythm section are a strong counterpart to Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson in Chic, and Dudanski has no trouble in taking the beat into more adventurous waters. And hear how Wobble's bass bends like a reluctant hedgehog as the lyric's emotions rise and fall back again. Lydon's voice, at normal speed, now veers into view right at its close, shrieking "Only the lonely!"

"Memories" is an extraordinary construction of a song. Lester Bangs, in his review at the time, assumed that what was being attacked here was the whitewashed nostalgia of Grease, Happy Days etc., but its sentiments are still painfully applicable in today's empty "I Love Ten Minutes Ago" culture. "You make me feel ashamed/By acting attitudes/Remember ridicule?" howls Lydon. "Someone has used you well." And then the song suddenly shifts into close-up view, as though a separate band has started to play the same tune - obviously two different takes were spliced together, but the effect, though simple, is still astonishing. It symbolises Lydon's own doubt about the diagnosis. "I could be wrong/It could be hate/As far as I can see/Clinging desperately/Imagining, pretending/No personality/Dragging on and on and on and on...." (that "on and on" leitmotif again, clearly the enemy of "life"). "I think you're slightly late" (late as in "dead"). "It's not the movies...and you're old." This is followed by "Swanlake" a.k.a. "Death Disco," perhaps the most unlikely single ever to make the UK Top 20 - and it's the Stones' "Miss You" introduced to the ghosts of Woolf's "To The Lighthouse." Do I really have to underline to you what this song is about?

"Seen it in your eyes/Never no more, hope away/Final in a fade/Watch her slowly die/Saw it in her eyes/Choking on a bed/Flowers rotting DEAD.../Ending in a day/Silence was a way." Levene's Prophet 5 synthesiser wanders in and out of the track like consciousness. Finally Lydon sends the track into a loop: "Words cannot explain" as the synthesiser repeatly shrieks, coming back at you again and again. Don't talk to me about Achtung Baby.

Next it's "Poptones." For all the avant-garde talk about Levene's guitar playing, it's actually very accessible throughout. Much of what he plays here could, in a lesser and dumber context, be stadium rock - indeed he quotes Steve Howe's soloing on Yes' "Starship Troopers" as a key influence on "Poptones." There is a terrible certainty about the complete confidence of PiL's playing as a group on this track; nothing settles but everything fits in, and its waves engulf you. Lyrically it appears to be about someone being taken out into the countryside to be shot and executed. "Standing naked in the back of these woods...You left a hole in the back of my head/I don't like hiding in this foliage and peat...The cassette playing poptones." Music to drown out the pain, to hide the truth, the stench. Another sardonic payoff line: "Praise picnicking in the British countryside." The IRA comes to mind, as they do on "Careering." Here Wobble and Dudanski play a strong backbeat which could almost be a Northern Soul backing track, but it is delineated by the quasi-atonal blades of Levene's Prophet 5, queasily destabilising the rhythm and underlining Lydon's narration - lyrically this would not be out of place on Scott Walker's Tilt (terrorism - "across the border/Trigger machinery/Mangle the military"). It is coldly compelling and the assuredness of its alienation is overwhelming.

Two instrumentals (or backing tracks for which Lydon never got around to providing lyrics/vocals?) follow: "Socialist" which sets up a typical New Wave jerky rhythm that is punctumised by Levene's cautious percussive guitar/synth(?) stabs. It's rather like Miles Davis' percussive organ essays (On The Corner) jamming with the Knack. "Graveyard" has some determined guitar playing on it but really needed Lydon on top of it. "The Suit" is carried on a drunken stumble of a jazzy rhythm upon which Lydon again disseminates the pretentiousness and pointlessness of social climbing ("Society boy/on Social Security/It is your nature/Tennis on Tuesday/Sipping champagne...Girl from Totteridge Park/Said you were nice/So was my suit"). "Bad Baby" vaguely revisits the terrain of the first album's "Religion" though really it's about humanity's indifference to other humanity: "Someone left a baby in the car park/Never any reason...Someone is calling/Don't you listen" - a muted anti-lullaby.

Finally we come to the astonishing 13-minute closing sequence which surely represents PiL at their peak. "No Birds," in Levene's opinion PiL's finest moment, elevates the already high dynamics even further. The rhythm here is unbelievable; Dudanski sounds as though he's playing the drums inside your head. Lydon declaims his assassination of Daily Mail middle England in a stentorian baritone - "Bland planned idle luxury/A caviar of silent dignity/Life in lovely allotted slots...Lawful order, standard views/This could be heaven" sounding as though he has been condemned to hell, though one cannot clearly tell whether he is cackling quietly. Lydon's piano strikes its own discordant Dies Irae as the track fades.

Then it's "Chant" (the chant being "mob, war, kill, hate"). Yet again we realise that nearly every element on this album could easily be profitably and commercially appropriated, in isolation, by Radiohead or Coldplay or whoever, with misplaced solipsism, sentimentality and bluster failing to mask their utter lack of understanding of PiL's message or dynamics. Here Lydon realises that all Metal Box might really amount to is a "voice moaning in a speaker...Don't know why I bother/There's nothing in it for me...The likes of you and me are an embarrassment/It's not important/It's not worth a mention in the Guardian." The music, though, belies the apparent indifference; Wobble and Dudanski appear ready to blast off past boiling point into another galaxy; Levene never letting up in his ceaseless guitar commentary, repeating and mutating riffs with a strange ecstasy. Eventually, just as the whole thing is about to explode, Levene's synthesiser nudges cautiously back in and the track suddenly segues into the closing instrumental "Radio 4." An ironic goodbye a la Throbbing Gristle? A farewell to life? An idealistic utopian string synth waltz is played, against which Wobble graciously plays what could in another context pass for a Motown bassline. At the end of the album two potential paths appear; on one side, what sound like sleigh bells (the album did come out just in time for Christmas) and on the other, a sudden and disturbing discordancy in the synth line. It is up to you, the listener, to decide which path to take from here onwards. Not many subsequent musicians, least of all the later, lesser, Wobble-less, then Levene-less, then just sourly corporate, manifestations of PiL, followed either path.

So where does Metal Box stand, even in relation to what else we have inherited from 1979? That it stands up musically is beyond question. Joy Division were perhaps the nearest that anyone else got to what PiL achieved, but Ian Curtis' obsessions were more manifestly personal, and Martin Hannett chose to have the band float sonically in the middle ground. Nothing is mixed upfront; the music comes at you as a subtly, rather than explicitly, differentiated entity. Throbbing Gristle were arguably already taking some of these implications further, but they remained at a decided distance from "pop." It might, for the present, be correct to point out that there is as much "anthemic" guitar here as there was on London Calling, released just a couple of weeks before Metal Box; but the former was a double album with Elvis Presley lettering and Pete Townshend-derived imagery on the cover. This is not to disparage London Calling or the Clash, merely to point out the divergent paths down which the streams of punk had flowed - though there is much reason to disparage all the ambulance chasers who over the holiday season decided to use poor old Strummer as a stick with which to beat today's pop kids over the head. "No more passion they're all manufactured he was soul he was rock and roll punk make a difference the last great rock and roll star..."

What did Lydon have to say nearly quarter of a century ago?

"Whatever past/Could never last/All in your mind/Where it all began/You're doing wrong/It's not the movies/And you're old."

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

ANOTHER AMERICAN TRILOGY
Compromises between identity and reality

1. FIGHT CLUB

Edward Norton plays a yuppie who hates himself for what he perceives to be a falsity of a life. Self-misled into thinking that he has been granted immunity from death, only to be reciprocated with the scarcely more attractive option of a living death, he has to confront death in order to regain life. He attends testicular cancer self-awareness groups, indulging in bonding with, amongst others, Meat Loaf giving the finest and most selfless performance of his career, and every other self-help/bonding group he can find. Eventually he notices that there is another “tourist” attending all these meetings – a parody of a slut (some say a parody of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan) portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter. He attempts to break the ice by issuing portentous metaphors about their emotional tourism, but really he wants to get off with her. She is astute enough to realise this and also to know that in no way will he get off with her until he unlocks his own cage.

Thus does his suitcase sit so neatly next to the identical briefcase of the gentleman sitting next to him on the ‘plane, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Like the smug newlyweds who try to snatch at their desired “real” reflections in the "Haunted Mirror" section of 1945’s Dead Of Night, Norton is looking into a desired mirror – himself as he would like to talk, as he would like to look, as he would like to fuck. The split identity metaphor is established straightaway; his own briefcase disappears, his apartment mysteriously blows up, his “life” effectively devolves into a better, preferable existence. There is also a clear parallel with the toes of Robert Walker and Farley Granger’s shoes bumping into each other, forming the umbilical cord, in Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train – again, a study of one person split into two conflicting halves, the “bad” half irrevocably affecting the “good” half regardless of whether or not it is killed off (and, as with Hitchcock and Farley Granger, David Fincher doesn't quite know what to do with the "good" guy, the "bad" guy being so obviously preferable).

Norton/Pitt indulge in an apex of male bonding – the Fight Club (the S&M Club, the Gay Fuck Club). Blows rain upon joyous faces like cum. Only through pain can they achieve orgasm. Only then can Norton understand what an orgasm feels like, but he has not quite untied all the bonds from his previous life – no wonder Bonham Carter gets pissed off with him when he asks what she’s doing in his house, having just spent the whole night screwing her. It is not quite enough.

The standard criticism of Fight Club is that the first half builds up expectations of a grandly black comedy, only to be let down by absurd plot twists and machinations in the second half. I would argue that the first half, in spite of the above description and the graphic violence inflicted, constitutes a film in which a young Jack Lemmon would have felt entirely comfortable (The Apartment without Billy Wilder’s grandiloquent indifference, perhaps – Lemmon, Fred MacMurray (the apogee of fake niceness) and Shirley MacLaine could all have fitted in here with no trouble). Despite the vertiginous camera swings which open the film so exultantly, we know exactly where it is going to go. In the second half, elevation to absurdity is essential in order for the film to have any pretences towards radicalism. So the rapid metamorphosis of the Fight Club into an anti-capitalist terrorist organisation is essential, because it denies us a comfortable reality and therefore forces us to focus on the question of identity. As the remnants of the plot unfurl, we slowly realise that Norton has in fact sacrificed and thrown away nothing. The organisation is as efficient as the motor insurance multinational whom he has just quit, having blackmailed his boss into keeping him on the payroll, not just by threatening to divulge unsavoury company secrets, but also by the extraordinary feat of beating himself up and throwing himself around the boss’ office to form the basis for an alleged assault. In this latter sequence, Norton is wooden and physically graceless; the only way to play this sort of thing is to play it as slapstick, and there is certainly nothing to laugh at in his performance here – it is determinedly cold, and reminded me of nothing less than Viz’s Biffa Bacon, who in an early strip enters a chip shop, itching to pick a fight. “Who you fuckin’ lookin’ at?” he demands, then swivels round to find that he is the only customer in the shop. He cannot afford to back off, and thus has no alternative but to beat himself up. It is a remarkable sequence which punctures the superficial humour to find a deeper psychological truth – and it’s not something that Fight Club can match.

In any case, as I said, the terrorist organisation is precisely an organisation, as smoothly run as SPECTRE, with efficient minions and administrators. Buildings are blown up, no one is hurt, but still Norton cannot quite understand how this can be interpreted as liberation. Tyler Durden now obligingly disappears, leaving Norton to search for himself, so to speak. The film ends with Norton and Bonham Carter reunited, gazing lovingly at the skyscrapers outside their window which have all been wired up to explode simultaneously, and with Norton having just shot himself in the mouth but relatively and miraculously unscathed. The moral is straightforward and rather banal; in order to establish our own identity beyond question, one has to question and reinvent reality continuously – one has to repeatedly “shoot oneself.”

The problem here is, as with Fincher’s other work, that the film is caught in a limbo – afraid to be truly radical, but without the unadorned carefreeness to allow itself to become a truly fantastical and playful fable. At some stage, he always seems to cop out at a crucial point – the artificially imposed “seriousness” of the second half of The Game, even all of Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en. In an odd way, it might have been preferable to give the key role of the latter murderer to a proven expert in neurotic hamming like John Malkovich (see how much more playfulness there is in the latter’s cat and mouse game with Eastwood in the roughly contemporaneous In The Line Of Fire). Similarly, in Fight Club, identity is never really lost; Norton will always end up with the same result, will always climax by shooting his mouth off. Nothing is at stake and no answers can be provided because the questions have not even been asked.

Where, then, can we find the right questions? Why not try the unlikely blood relative – the smarter older cousin of Fight Club?

2. MARY POPPINS

David Tomlinson plays George Banks, an Edwardian proto-yuppie who hates himself for what he perceives to be a falsity of a life. Self-deluded into thinking that he has been granted immunity from death, only to be reciprocated with the scarcely more attractive option of a living death in the form of the family which he is slowly and steadily strangling, he has to abandon an “identity” in order to regain life.

It is purportedly set in London, adapted from a popular series of children’s books by a British writer who acted as a consultant to Disney on the film, but it is an American film through and through. Disney’s London is as intangible, as unreal and as impermanent as the Scotland of Gene Kelly’s Brigadoon – so it’s only appropriate that Dick van Dyke’s Cockney accent is so inadequate; it is an American appropriation of a never-existent idea of Englishness, as much of a phantasm as Welles’ idea of England in the contemporaneous Chimes At Midnight; it is a prerequisite of this film’s palpable illusion. When not seen, it will vanish. Both Banks and his children stroll over from what, geographically, would approximate Belgravia to the City in a few minutes; a suspension of London time comparable (but inferior) to that of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

Mary Poppins the film is, of course, all about sex, in the most literal sense; sex is the absent centre around which all the other characters and factors rotate. Everything – both Banks’ obsession with his bank job and, more damagingly, his wife’s insincere dalliance with the Suffragettes (early on there’s a jolly song which observes that the Suffragettes “as a group, are rather stupid;” it’s unclear whether this is meant ironically, as an exemplar of Mrs Banks’ dilettantism or, worse, feminism as a substitute for not getting any) – revolves around an essentially joyless and grey existence. Even the children have already had any ambition drummed out of their heads; here they are as meekly compliant and lifeless as any children in the sorry later days of Ealing Studios, representing no real future. Their outgoing nanny (a nicely self-aware cameo by Elsa Lanchester) resigns as they keep running away – but they have nowhere to run to. It is as dead a city as could be imagined outside of The Omega Man.

Thus is Mary Poppins herself spiritually summoned – the children’s pleading letter, their last hope of connecting with the outside world on their own terms, literally goes up in smoke; but Poppins is there to catch the fumes and breathe life back into them. It is a remarkable measure of this film’s asexuality that it manages to make even Julie Andrews appear sexy and enticing (alas, thereafter she became overly aware of this, and in her later films she over-compensates with decidedly unsexy results). She is the absent parent figure; Banks is aware of her power and understands that he is powerless to stop her – because of course she is he as he would like himself to be.

One very pronounced moment of punctum comes very early on in the picture when Andrews is trying to get the children to sleep by means of singing what is ostensibly a lullaby, “Stay Awake” – but the unmistakable trace of despair as her voice rides the poignant minor key change in the chorus’ second half betrays a deeper wish; stay awake, don’t go to sleep, help me make it through the night. It is a subliminal wish for sexual fulfilment and, in this context, extremely sinister and unnerving; and a few years later the fear will become explicit in Carla Bley’s “Stay Awake” from Escalator Over The Hill.

The split-identity theme is sustained here, but Disney goes one better by splitting the “better” half of George Banks into two quarters; the virgin Mary, and Bert the jack of all trades (van Dyke). The latter is an energetic mockery who helps the children to escape – but they can only escape into unreality, a Song of the South cartoon world transposed to Newmarket. In the animated sequence, one should take especial note of the foxhunting sequence; the humans save the fox from the hounds, and the fox furthermore speaks in an Irish accent, albeit a beyond-cliched “begorrah wouldn’t it I be telling you that it’s Oirish that I am, to be sure sir” variety. Still, it bears a faint comparison with that other odyssey between real and unreal worlds, A Matter Of Life And Death, with the IRA man in the afterworld acting as a prosecution witness against the British, and Raymond Massey’s subsequent meaning glance at a visibly contrite Roger Livesey. Also the fact that “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is loosely based on a traditional klezmer tune, as indeed is “Chim Chim Cheree” (so there was a further subversion when Coltrane tackled the latter tune and introduced it to Eastern tonalities). It’s an idyll, but a fundamentally precarious one; one shower of rain will wipe the world out forever. The comparison with the Banks’ lifestyle is obvious; Mr Banks is desperate to hang on to it for fear of losing his job, his home, his “identity,” even though it is so precariously balanced and he is, as the phrase goes, only two paychecks away from being homeless.

The epic “Step In Time” dance sequence climaxes with the massed chimney sweeps invading the Banks’ home, dirtying it up and generally introducing it to “life;” benign weasels revitalising a decrepit mini-Toad Hall. But nothing will change. True, Banks makes the fatal error of taking his children to the bank and trying to persuade them to invest their tuppence there instead of feeding the birds with it. He almost comes with excitement when singing about all the good things that his bank can do, such as funding empirical invasion of other lands (“foreclosures! bankruptcies!” he exclaims delightedly – his own potential bankruptcy being foremost in his mind). Needless to say, the birds prevail, Banks is humiliated and summoned later that night to be summarily stripped of his hat, carnation, umbrella and, of course, manhood. He is faced with the grotesque creation of the bank president, Mr Dawes Snr (van Dyke again in what seems to be a parody of Ernest Thesiger’s senile industrial baron in The Man In The White Suit). With nothing now to lose, he attempts to essay a joke, with little or no immediate reaction. He leaves. Will he jump off Southwark Bridge?

No possibility of escape even here. Dawes belatedly gets the joke and dies laughing; the bankers therefore return the next morning, offering Banks a partnership for learning to laugh (never mind that the father killed their father). He now devotes himself to his children and flying kites; Mary realises her work is done and vanishes back to her Woolf-like tower of loneliness. But the status quo is reasserted. Identity is as fragile as any reality.

One other sequence deserves a mention: Ed Wynn, as “eccentric” Uncle Albert, does a turn halfway through the film in the resolutely unfunny song “I Love To Laugh.” But the subtext! Uncle Albert is seated at his dinner table, but floating high above the ground, practically on the ceiling. To reach him, Mary, Bert and the children have to laugh, and as they do they…get high. There’s no getting away from it. Stoned laughs, stoned dialogue; did director Robert Stevenson realise what he was getting away with? This film was made both in the then recent light of the JFK assassination and the rise to prominence of the Beatles. Make of that any ambiguity that you will.

3. AMERICAN BEAUTY

Yes, Sam Mendes knows how to let film float (and I don’t just mean that plastic bag either), but this is Kevin Spacey’s film, his exhibit. One could imagine what a heartless meal Peter Sellers would have made of the role of Lester Burnham, but even though this is directed by a Brit, we encounter the same, peculiarly American avoidance of adventure. Again it is arguable whether Burnham really loses anything; as with Norton, he blackmails his employers to giving him a year’s salary and sundry office equipment, and Annette Bening’s neurotic estate agent wife will keep the dollars rolling in. There is here, as in Fight Club, no real sense of life having to be held onto or fought for. One major mistake was the sub-Sunset Boulevard narration at the beginning (“In less than a year, I’ll be dead”) which immediately puts the viewer on guard and unnecessarily diverts them into thinking this is a murder mystery and wasting too much time wondering who will kill him (the answer, when it comes, is so banal that it hardly matters).

And there is no sense of ensemble playing here, either. Everyone looks as though they’ve strolled in from a different film; Bening from a screwball comedy, Wes Bentley and Thora Birch from some sub-Egoyan exploration of the mind, Chris Cooper from Dysfunctional TV Movie Of The Week. No, this is Spacey’s show, and the film sags badly whenever he’s offscreen. Wes Bentley’s camcorder-wielding, unblinking, existentialist drug dealer teenager is so annoying in his pseudo-mystical, nothing is everything, please hit me, sub-sub-Michael Rennie persona, that one is nearly driven to applause when Cooper’s dad storms into his room to beat him up. Only Birch shows any signs of life outside of Spacey; and even she seems to be treating the film as a dry run for the subsequent and far superior Ghost World. Only she, at the film’s climax, realises her own inherited conservatism and manages to escape – but hopefully managing to dump drippy Wes into a convenient trashcan on her way. She is the only player here who doesn’t suddenly start acting out of character to facilitate a convenient ending for the film. It’s a fairly meaningless fable – one second of the gravitas of Welles’ narration in The Magnificent Ambersons beats all of it – and on close examination becomes as fragile, both in terms of identity and reality, as to dissipate when breathed upon; just like the London of Mary Poppins, the Oxford of Endeavour Morse, the ghosts who circulate at the climax of Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s second real masterpiece which makes mincemeat out of all three of these films, because unlike any of them it impels you, the viewer, to work out exactly what, and who, you’re looking at, and why you’re even there. It goes that one identifiable step further. I will return to this theme shortly to examine how Britain’s cinema and television approached the same, fundamentally anti-naturalist dichotomy.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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PREFACE TO THE 2003 EDITION

“Historicism stresses the importance of change. Now in every change, the historicist might argue, there must be something that changes. Even if nothing remains unchanged, we must be able to identify what has changed in order to speak of change at all.”
(Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, chapter I, subsection 9: “Essentialism vs Nominalism,” Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

Or does everything end up as a loop? I write this, having returned from spending two weeks in the house in which I lived for the first 17 years of my life, and feeling exceptionally enthusiastic about where music is going. In fact it is safe to say that I have not felt as enthusiastic and as directly involved in, and passionate about, music for 20 years; and this disturbs me greatly.

My chronological contributions to the “RFI: 1982” thread on ILM were significant in that 1982 was distinctly the last time when I felt this way about music. In the intervening 20 years, of course, lies a defunct period of my life which now feels like a vaguely surreal mirage; a fantasy, a dream of a life which may not actually have been lived. Have I, in essence, moved on from 1982 at all? And if not, is “not moving on” necessarily a bad thing? And if not, is my view of 2002 as a peak year for music in itself a fantasy?

One could certainly derive such a conclusion from the end-of-year round-ups and “best of” lists throughout the printed media; almost without exception we were subjected to none too profound commentary on the same few spent operatives – lots of Robbie, Kylie, Madge, Mick and Keef, little if anything about 2002 being a year of particular distinction. Business as usual; another ticking-over year, another 1974 or 1986 or 1993. Most “best of” lists were packed to the brim with the usual mediocrities and timeservers, with everything of real value either ignored or dismissed curtly and inaccurately; no change there, then. The inexplicable popularity with critics of records such as Murray Street seems to reinforce Andre Hodeir’s “grey-bearded Milt Jackson” theory that musicians only achieve popular and critical acclaim when they have run out of things to say. Or that I, in my supposed delusion, am missing a very big point and am mistaking my own involuntarily renewed passion for music for an upturn in standards – but needless to say I do not think that the latter holds much water.

Nor do we need to pay much attention to the “Hollandisation” of music being attempted by old folk who mistook High Fidelity for the Sermon on the Mount (and will similarly mistake 31 Songs for the Feeding of the Five Thousand). One glance at Jools Holland’s beyond-ghastly New Year’s Hootenanny by those not in the know would have been enough to turn anyone off music for life – a programme which might just have well been made in 1972; Tom Jones, Jimmy Cliff, Robert Plant, Jeff Beck still doing his bargain basement Sonny Sharrock impressions. Stanley Baxter’s Christmas Box 1976 had more to offer to under-40s than this did. “Youth” was represented by the officially sanctioned Ms Dynamite, the far from youthful Doves, who revealed themselves as the Big Country de nos jours I always thought them to be, and an almost dead on their feet Pulp, presumably frogmarched onto the programme by Island Records in a last-ditch attempt to flog that greatest hits album. Jarvis Cocker looked completely bewildered; “Sorted For Es & Whizz” now coming across like a rather tattered mid-‘90s cultural relic whose relevance had long since vanished. Worse by a long stretch was the attempted rehabilitation of Chas and Dave (complete with Pearly Kings) as the voices of “authentic London music”; to see the dead likes of Ben Elton and Hugh Laurie raving over them was almost unwatchable. Perhaps saddest of all was the largely chairbound Solomon Burke, brought back to be patronised and patted on the head; and from the ubiquity of his comeback album in the end of year polls we can deduce yet again that black music is only acceptable when its practitioners are too old and infirm to be sexy, radical or threatening, and especially when rich white people are hired to write the songs. The finale saw him systematically humiliated by having to sing that 36-year-old piece of dreck “Hi Ho Silver Lining” with the rest of the cast. Side by side with Tom Jones, Rowland Rivron and Chas and Dave; Burke must have felt that he had descended into Hell.

Other random observations over the season:

Yes, Will and Gareth have fine and potentially interesting voices, but they desperately need a Joe Meek or Trevor Horn-type visionary to deliver them into better musical waters.

The desperate attempt by Popstars to regress entertainment by at least 30 years; one moment we have the blissful nowness of “Sound of the Underground,” the next, both boys and girls are forced at bayonet point to render the 69-year-old “Winter Wonderland” to an MoR orchestral backing which might as well have been the Black and White Minstrels. Why is necrophilia constantly practised on this long-deceased song? What relevance can “Parson Brown” possibly have to any 19-year-old kid? Still, worth watching for Waterman’s barely concealed grimace as he said “I told you that the Cheeky Girls song would go top five!” – at the time of writing, three places above One True Voice (who also deserve much better, a Thom Bell or a Norman Whitfield at the very least) in the singles chart.

The “Hollandisation” effect which ruined the Christmas Day episodes of EastEnders; the injection of the gospel choir and Hornby-approved songs like "Stand By Me” into the wedding ceremony (and intercut with Jamie Mitchell’s death scene) was completely gratuitous. In reality Little Mo and Billy would probably have been content with a tape of Martine McCutcheon’s “Moment” or even Aaliyah’s “One In A Million,” but there you are again – the theory (only ever held by middle-class whites) that black pop music between 1959-68 is somehow “pure” and “sacred” and that all subsequent pop music has been a cheap bastardisation of “truth.” Elephant Man and/or Dizzy Rascal would have been a far braver and more adventurous choice for a soundtrack – but this is the same bunch of Tristrams who always cast the likes of Liza Tarbuck and Fay Ripley as “jazz singers”; usually Marian Montgomery-style MoR “jazz” singers, music which is spuriously applauded but which is never listened to by anyone sentient, there only to lend a smear of “class” to proceedings.

The line from the final Morse: “I would rather be ill and treated by you, than be well and never see you again.”

Two records (out of many) of whose genius I was reminded over the season:

“Getting A Drag,” the second of Lynsey de Paul’s great trilogy of 1972-73 singles – virtually the blueprint for Elastica, further distinguished by a harp gliding insanely throughout for no good reason (which of course in itself is a good reason). Appropriate that at that stage she should be on MAM Records; a very pertinent female counterpart to Gilbert O’Sullivan, one of the most nihilistic minds active in the charts of the ‘70s – it’s significant that O’Sullivan’s chart career effectively ended just as Elvis Costello’s was getting started.

And Gladys Knight’s knowingly desperate, but never theatrical, reading of “Help Me Make It Through The Night” – yet again, a plea to be allowed to remain alive, so much more touching because it is underplayed so precisely. Producer and arranger Johnny Bristol understood.

Oh, and a reissue and a compilation which I unforgivably left out of my “old music” top 50 – Amalgam’s Prayer For Peace (I listened to my father’s old vinyl copy while at home) and Lol Coxhill’s Spectral Soprano, a superb 2CD retrospective of the great English visionary saxophonist stretching from 1954 until now.

As a link, we must not overlook the soundtrack album from Buffy The Musical; the songs, isolated from the visuals, become even more striking, powerful and pertinent – a sort of post-Douglas Coupland Escalator Over The Hill, if you will; it’s that good. And Anthony Head, on “Standing,” does Elliot Smith better than Elliot Smith.

As a public duty, I must warn you about the imminent massacre of “Big Yellow Taxi.” You thought the Amy Grant cover was bad? Be very afraid of Vanessa Carlton AND Counting Crows.

But we must not be lax about nowness, so it is my duty to alert you to the first great record of 2003, namely:

TATU – 200 K/MH IN THE WRONG LANE

A Russian lesbian duo; imagine what you would like the Cheeky Girls to be like, and moreover with Trevor Horn producing at least part of their debut album. The imminent first single (at least it’s imminent in the UK; it’s already #1 in Switzerland and in the Billboard Hot 100) “All The Things She Said” (most assuredly NOT the Simple Minds song) is produced by Horn. It’s not premature to assert that this is his best production since “Slave To The Rhythm.” On this and what I assume will be the follow-up single “Not Gonna Get Us,” Horn sounds reborn, re-enlivened, with a sparkle that has long since been dormant in his work. Hear the intro of “Not Gonna Get Us” which sounds like a hyped-up Art of Noise (not the nice-try-but-still-a-mockery that was the Art of Noise of Seduction Of Claude Debussy) and which roars unequivocally into the twin-pronged vocal attack of Lena Katina and Julia Volkova. If you wondered what Thereza Bazar and Claudia Brücken might have sounded like together, here is the answer; I’ve no idea which one’s which, but Bazaresque soft embrace is countered by Brückenesque knowing stridency. Lyrically it’s a far more urgent and relevant (because less clumsily allegorical) “Born To Run” – a declaration of undying love between two women. The sudden screaming of the lyric “Lights from the airfield shining upon you” will pierce you. “All The Things She Said,” which must surely be a number one record, is a brilliantly relentless pop assault; powered by Abbaesque harmonic poignancy – this really is Dollar reborn with a vengeance (“I’m feeling for her what she’s feeling for me”). The song’s punctum occurs at 1:13 with the scream “THIS IS NOT ENOUGH!” with another near-punctum at 2:40 as the music suddenly subsides and the voice plaintively intones “Mother looking at me/Tell me what do you see/Yes, I’ve lost my mind.” Few producers are as skilled with dynamics and the use of silence as Horn; fewer producers have passed up the chance to use these skills as Horn has done in recent years. He only produces one other track on the album – “Clowns (Can You See Me Now?),” a terrific (because still despairing) post-House stomper.

Elsewhere production duties are assigned to Martin Kierszenbaum and Robert Orton, but the good news is that it hardly matters; they adhere pretty strictly to the Horn template, if they don’t quite have the same sure grasp of dynamics. “Show Me Love” is a brutal lament for a barely expressible pain, the nature of which we only learn with the sinister whisper at the song’s close “Fucked by Mum and Papa.” “30 Minutes” is an semi-acoustic ballad about uncertainty (though the “That Black” dance remix also included on the album doesn’t really add anything to its quiet power). The love is, of course, fulfilled, and in the closing pair of songs “Malchik Gay” and “Stars” the girls surrender to each other; still with some fear, but certain that they have taken the correct road.

But the absolute stroke of genius occurs midway through the album; their recasting of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” – a redefinition as brilliant and visionary as Propaganda’s warped reading of “Sorry For Laughing” (indeed, most of this album could accurately be described as Dollar singing over Propaganda). Here Marr’s backward-reverb guitar motif is assigned to the synths; it comes at you and through you like a serrated blade through the head; a pain and frustration which will not stop recurring. The vocal here is far more assertive, but just as troubled and precarious, as Morrissey’s on the original; the ‘80s indie disco transposed to the equally loveless 21st-century clubland. In some ways this track serves as a payback; in the original “How Soon Is Now?” there is a stealth to the song’s progression and structure (explicitly so in the secondary guitar motif which Marr introduces halfway through) which is highly reminiscent of early Simple Minds (think especially “Seeing Out The Angels”).

Let’s see the angels back in, however. This entirely unexpected masterstroke/rebirth bodes well for the year.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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