THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY ”I, Bloodbrother Be” by The Shockheaded Peters (él Records, 1984) “I want to walk through Sodom with a boy on my arm Who’s so damn pretty I don’t know where I am When he looks so like a girl, it’s easy to swallow And it’s one notch on my arm towards a brighter tomorrow And if the future’s looking grim I can just take hold of him AND SAY Nothing out of our loins, sweetie, Will ever see the light of day.” This is what we wanted tAtU to perform at Eurovision last night, or at least something like it, as opposed to whispering very quietly to themselves in dark alleys, which is what they appeared to be doing. An exuberant bulldozer of a pop song which in 1984 ploughed right past the tentative fumblings of Frankie and Soft Cell so assuredly that most consumers didn’t notice it, Shockheaded Peters was a brief alliance of ex-Lemon Kittens drummer/polemicist Karl Blake and ex-Five Or Six guitarist Ashley Wales who produced nothing else of note apart from this singular 6:40 ejaculation. Unashamedly celebratory of the Power of Love (much more so than Johnson, Lewis or Rush, because it acknowledges the Shower of Sex) as the age of Aids dawned, “I, Bloodbrother Be” with its mashed-up noir jazz sample mocks the Blancmanges and OMDs of that world for their cowardly politesse, dares to go even further than Morrissey did in “Reel Around The Fountain” because it is entirely free of angst. That battering ram of a drum sample which bookends the song is more redolent of golden showers than machine-gun fire – though the difference between the two remains narrow – and then, after the song proper, Wales’ guitar suddenly slashes and trashes the track with what can only be described as an orgasm – atonal yet rocking, like the Stray Cats colliding with an irked Fred Frith, and all accomplished within 16 deadly to-the-point bars, although it continues its commentary throughout the remainder of the record, seductive and scraping (Andy Gill and Keith Levene in Billy Fury’s backing band). As an expression of fresh and unalloyed joy at being initiated into an adult and sexual world, it has few peers in pop except perhaps for the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back.” It has to be heard in its unabridged 12-inch form, and I am pleased to say is being reissued as such on the imminent Rough Trade Shops: Post Punk 01 2CD compilation. Ashley Wales, of course, met up with John Coxon later that decade, and together they helped to produce Betty Boo’s Boomania (including the hit “Doin’ The Do”) before mutating into Spring Heel Jack. So the bulldozer steered right through 1984, but carved the path which has led us to Girls Aloud. THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF THREE DAYS AGO ”Sugar Baby Love” by The Rubettes (Polydor, 1974) In common with Paul Gambaccini (as expressed in his NME “Quick Before They Vanish” weekly singles chart commentary at the time) I was rather annoyed when “Sugar Baby Love” got to number one, principally because it kept Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us” off the top. Yet again, The Man kept The Kids down (and, of course, observe how the situation is currently the exact reverse vis-à-vis “Ignition” and “No Good Advice”) – though I kept coming back to it and deriving things from the record which clearly had not been intended to be put there, thus cutting the tarmac for my own road to ruin. Yet what is unavoidably true about “Sugar Baby Love” was that it was a hit record made in precise accordance with the instructions in the KLF’s Manual a full fourteen years before the latter had even been written. Legend has it that writers/producers Wayne Bickerton and Tony Waddington sat down and undertook a detailed scientific/mathematical analysis of the singles charts of the previous ten years to establish which combination of words was likely to get them a hit. The three words which most commonly came up were, apparently, “sugar,” “baby” and “love.” The rest of the lyrics were constructed similarly painstakingly, and noting which way the American Graffiti wind was blowing, they set it to a precisely designed combination of the Four Seasons and Phil Spector with just that crucial tiny touch of Roy Wood. Thus “Sugar Baby Love” is the “perfect” pop record of 1974; not a note or word of it is “meant.” It is entirely artificial; a bunch of underemployed session musicians were assigned to the record and thereafter press-ganged into forming a “group” - with the exception of lead vocalist Paul Da Vinci who opted out, and whose lead vocal was mimed by replacement singer Alan Williams on TOTP - dressed in white caps and jackets with aircraft-carrier lapels and red tinsel piping (the Osmonds meet the Glitter Band?). Astonishingly, they prospered – or at least Bickerton and Waddington did – and continued to have hits for the next three years, none of which was memorable, with the possible exception of 1976’s politesse-ridden gay love song “Under One Roof,” a hit the same time as Rod Stewart’s “Killing Of Georgie,” the subtext of course being that gays in 1976 pop were only allowed to be miserable and/or dead. Never mind what Summer, Moroder and Darnell were cooking up…so we are reminded again just how necessary records like “Relax” and “I, Bloodbrother Be” were, and are. Nonetheless, I am drifting away from “Sugar Baby Love,” which, as I’ve said, is a pop record in suspended animation. But even the most tightly constructed, constricted formats of pop music and pop records do not necessarily impede the musicians from putting something of themselves into it. And it is the undoubted emotion of Da Vinci’s vocal performance – even, or especially, if it’s just acting – which takes the record (as opposed to the song) somewhere else entirely. That falsetto is unusually strident and despairing even by Frankie Valli standards. Compare Da Vinci’s “I didn’t mean to hurt you” with Robert Wyatt’s equally stranded plea of “So why did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to hurt you” in “Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” on Rock Bottom, a record released in the same month as “Sugar Baby Love.” And hear above all the pained transition from the voiceover “If you love someone, don’t think twice” to the desperately sung “Love your baby love…love her every way, love her every day” as if he isn’t going to get another chance, as if it’s too late. As an expression of hurt it ranks with Mary Weiss’ “Mama!” in the Shangri-Las’ “You Can Never Go Home Anymore” (so much more potent than Lennon’s “Mother”). That is what makes “Sugar Baby Love” such a great pop record (as though Ron and Russell Mael, gods though they be, were any less artificial! – ha, they exulted in it!!) – not the elements which led to its creation. It is of course inevitable that Rubettes drummer Tony Thorpe eventually took the plunge into dance music, forming the Moody Boyz and ultimately becoming “Groove Consultant” to the KLF for their singles from “What Time Is Love?” onwards. You think they didn’t already know? THE AMERICAN SONG-POEM ANTHOLOGY And that principle applies to any music. “Some of the song-poem performers, were frustrated, down-on-their-luck, or has-been artistes; they often couldn’t help putting just a little bit of themselves into their work. At the very least, they were professional about conveying, with either actor-like emotion or noble stoicism, the lyrics they were handed.” That comes from the sleevenote to The American Song-Poem Anthology, a new compilation which comes from the same semi-backwoods which brought us the Langley Schools Music Project. But, unlike the latter, there is no sense of community; this is an anthology of honesty against cynicism, of expression against impassive formula – and we are never sure which side is which. Readers familiar with American magazines and comic books between the late ‘50s and mid-‘70s may remember those classified advertisements which offered to set anyone’s lyrics to music for a fee – send them off with a cheque for anything between $75 and $400, and provided it didn’t bounce you would be sent a not very picturesque 7” single with YOUR NAME HERE on the label and your “lyric” immortalised in whichever off-the-peg style you preferred; country, pop, rock, soul. In other words, a musical vanity press – don’t expect any “follow-up” or “marketing”; we’ve been paid, NEXT! Now some might argue that this sort of thing is no more or less cynical than conveyor-belt singers being ushered into the Holland/Dozier/Holland or Stock/Aitken/Waterman studios and given a readymade song to provide them with their rent for the next six months. Well, that last is the key difference – however nakedly capitalist record companies may be, they do have at least a token interest in the artist’s welfare (as long as the stockholders don’t protest). Or indeed the inhabitants of the Pop Idol/Fame Academy gulags, reared and trained to sing 30-year-old songs (imagine Dusty or Sandie in the ’60s having to sing Al Jolson) by bored old-timers. A more interesting question is: which gives the artist, or the composer, greater freedom of expression? Again it must be remembered that the input of a composer or performer cannot be entirely free from elements of themselves. No composer or performer can be neutered – they can be killed if deemed dangerous/subversive enough (Victor Jara) or be absorbed benignly into the mainstream as a signifier of subversion, but their selves cannot be denied or suppressed, even unwittingly. Thus there is a “truth” in these vanity press lyrics and an equivalent and compatible “truth” in how they are adapted to music and how the resulting song is sung. But what sort of sucker would be gullible enough actually to give these faceless Nashville/NYC backrooms their money and their soul? Was it thought that any of the 28 songs included on this compilation – a tip of an immense iceberg – could actually become a hit? Or was it more important that the lyricist make the world aware of his/her feelings, even if to only a few of its inhabitants? In short, was the “song-poem” any less valid a means of expression than the weblog? The subtitle of the anthology is “Do You Know The Difference Between Big Wood And Brush,” which is also the title of the opening song. Performed by Gary Roberts and the Satellites, it is a queasily prosaic explanation of said difference, set to an almost jaunty mid-tempo beat which exists parallel to, but is not and will never be, pop. It resembles it, but examine it more closely and any hook is avoided with almost sadistic precision. Naturally, making a hit was the last thing on any of the composers’ minds; they quickly set the lyric to stock music and it was recorded just as quickly, the session musicians keen to get rid of as many of them in as short a time as possible. None of your chimerical “we wrote “She Loves You” in half an hour” stuff here. Even from a quick glance at the tracklisting, it’s clear that the sort of people who would send in their lyrics are of the same kind who populate radio ‘phone-ins; troubled and uncertain souls quick to blame the largest and nearest scapegoat to mask their innate self-loathing. Consider not just the solemn odes here to “Richard Nixon” and “Jimmy Carter Says ‘Yes’” but also indigestible sermons like “Human Breakdown Of Absurdity” – the “I wish to raise six key issues which have been thus far criminally omitted from the debate” religion made semi-musical – or the purulent racism of “Song Of The Burmese Land,” or indeed the seemingly heartfelt songs to the colour yellow (“I Like Yellow Things” by Bobbi Blake) and carpet bugs (“Little Rug Bug”) which certainly appear heartfelt. Morality raises its head again in the Jerrymanders’ “Listen Mister Hat” (with vocal by “Wm H Arpaia” – certainly no less preposterous than anything that PF Sloan was serving to order at the time) and most astonishingly in Gene Marshall’s anti-pornography and pro-masturbation manifesto “All You Need Is A Fertile Mind.” There are even some attempts at a musical diary, or at least a cry for help; consider Teri Summer’s rather soulful “City’s Hospital Patients” or Randy Rudolph’s “No, I Got To Find You Baby” which certainly wouldn’t be out of place on the average Goldmine Lost Nebraska Soul Stompers August-October 1966 (Masters Only) compilation. Of course, there were several contributors who aimed to subvert the formula, to test the faceless companies and see whether they would be prepared to set anything to music, provided that they received some money. This appears to have been the way; the most famous example, which concludes the anthology, is John Trubee’s “Blind Man’s Penis,” sung absolutely straight-faced by one Ramsey Kearney. But – as with the multiple failed attempts at irony by the comperes of yesterday’s Eurovision – the effect is less when you know that someone is kidding. Thus something like “Green Fingernails” (“Green fingernails I love you…Green fingernails, you make me sick”) seems too cute by half, while Bill Joy’s “How Long Are You Staying” is quite brilliant in its own way but too obviously knowing – set to a pallid disco backing track seemingly recorded in a different continent (The Love Boat stranded in Antarctica?) the lyric rhymes “disco” with “Frisco,” “Cisco” and even “I’m going to jail-sco.” Generally we are talking ultra lo-fi attempts at pop, rather like an American Joe Meek gone to seed (see John Muir’s “The Moon Men,” and then refer back to Geoff Goddard’s “Sky Men” to realise just how thin the line was). But by far the most interesting person involved in these enterprises – variously as lyricist, composer and performer – was one Rodd Keith. He it is who supplies the two songs here which would not have disgraced Nuggets or Pebbles - the Wilsonian acid-folk-pop of “Ecstasy To Frenzy” and the genuinely touching “How Can A Man Overcome His Heartbroken Pain” which was later covered by Yo La Tengo. And yet there was a pain and perhaps a madness which make themselves especially evident on more distended tracks – for example, the notorious “I’m Just The Other Woman” whose lead vocal is sung by Keith in a strangulated falsetto against an asthmatic tenor sax obbligato (indeed, this was a re-recording requested by the original lyricist who was unhappy with the original’s backward piano tracks!), and above all, on the extraordinary “Beat Of The Traps” where the music progressively disintegrates into freeform chaos as he shrieks and yells above it, producing an effect weirdly prophetic of the Birthday Party of Junkyard. (“I don’t have much time for feelings, to be honest. I think they’re overrated – they get in the way of things” – Nick Cave) Not surprisingly, Keith came to a premature and tragic, drug-induced end, falling or jumping to his death from a freeway overpass in southern California. He was the father of the improv saxophonist Ellery Eskelin (though Eskelin never knew him) and it is to be expected that the likes of Zorn and Chadbourne have hailed Keith as something of a savant. But is the Anthology actually any good? I don’t know whether it withstands repeated, or even casual, listening; it may be less a collection of music than an assemblage of seemingly random data to be pressed into historical order by a future Henry Mayhew or Alan Lomax. It tests theories rather than making your day or bringing wisdom to you. There’s nothing on it which brushes with the same accidental genius as the Langley Schools reassembly of “Desperado” (what if that nine-year-old girl grew up and ended up consoling Don Henley in the Sunset Grill a decade and a half later?). THE GATHERING A truer heir to Langley Schools - at least in the palpable sense of community – may be Maggie Nicols’ ad hoc assemblage of improvisers The Gathering. This company has for the last dozen years apparently met in the Betsey Trotwood pub in Clerkenwell every Monday evening to improvise for 90-120 minutes, and anyone, even (or especially) if they’re not a “musician,” is welcome to come along and join in. It is unclear whether an audience is ever involved, or whether this exists purely for, and is only heard by, the participants. Whatever the set-up, I find its existence quite touching and reassuring. A CD has now emerged which features a 25-strong line-up of members of The Gathering recorded in the studio in July of last year. The CD (on Emanem Records) is subtitled For John Stevens, and indeed many of the precepts which inspire The Gathering stem directly from Stevens’ pioneering workshops, with which Nicols had been involved since the late ‘60s – most notably, the idea that skilled, experienced improvisers can share a common language with non-musical neophytes, and that everyone can work towards a musically profitable result. The emotion is more important than technical ability. Most of the 25 participants are relatively little-known. There are a few familiar names like saxophonist Tom Chant, pianist Veryan Weston and indeed Nicols herself, but they are largely outweighed by what we might term foot-soldiers of the London improv scene; some, like trumpeter Paul Shearsmith, violinist Susanna Ferrar and saxophonists Richard Leigh and Dave de Cobain, have been stalwartly beavering away on the scene with little recognition or reward since the early ‘70s, but they remain able to be heard. There might be suspicions of the good ole days of Oval House multimedia capers in that the personnel also involves a painter, a silent dancer and, from the sleeve photos, a performance artist (one Hugo Danino). But the music is far too striking to settle into comfortable Community Centre carpet slippers. In particular, the centrepiece “For John Stevens” directly and explicitly links their endeavours with the outside world – this is no improv Masonic order. Two old staples of Stevens’ workshop – the “Click Piece” and “Sustained Piece” – are utilised here (and remember that Nicols participated in the SME’s 1968 Oliv album – will somebody please talk to Giorgio Gomelsky and reissue it on CD? – with its “sustained” side and “click” side; the latter, involving a quartet of Nicols, Stevens, Trevor Watts and Johnny Dyani, remains one of the recorded wonders of British improv, especially its shattering – because so quiet - final three minutes). In the “Click Piece” we hear an ode to the then recently deceased Spike Milligan (with Chuck Jones in parenthesis) composed and recited by cornetist Frank Charlton. Its playfulness and underlay of sorrow are starkly balanced by the bleak reading of the polemical poem “A Trumpet Short Of Victory” which forms the hub of the “Sustained Piece”; the quiet rage of Nicols’ delivery floating above the mournful sustenati of the rest of the ensemble (a sustained peace?). But the astonishing two-parter “Released/Beauty And The Beast” demonstrates just how adroitly cosiness and grandeur, laughter and screams, are made to cohabit The Gathering’s improvising. Starting with some Am Dram chatter (“I can’t help you! I can’t even help myself!”) the music swells and becalms with greater intensity and fury at every climax. Beats and basslines are subtly suggested; Charlton and Shearsmith’s horns are particularly spiky “section leaders,” and there is a genuine sense of catharsis and release in the mechanics of what they are doing as well as the music itself. The atmosphere was plainly extraordinary. Therapy? Postponement of death? Both and much more. One is very tempted to go along and participate in one of their sessions. I know the Betsey Trotwood from a radically different and rather painful perspective. It might do me some good. Is improv for doing rather than listening to? You need to do both. CLOSING DISASSOCIATED MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS The Four Seasons’ “Silver Star” – especially its ten-minute album version – is surely the starting point of House music. That beat. “Ecstasy on their faces…” The importance of Knut Aufemann to the London Improvisers’ Orchestra. Especially on the previously mentioned “Ruthless” where the ghost of Joe Meek seems to hover in his whirligig oscillations, observing the noise occurring around and perhaps below it. Again with reference to the new London Improvisers’ Orchestra CD: it’s a pity they couldn’t find room for Caroline Kraabel’s phenomenal conduction for orchestra and cassette recorders/players. Perhaps the most striking note of that evening was when the orchestra stopped, a ghostly melee of multiple recordings of their performance echoed around the auditorium, and Harry Beckett climbed the stairs to the balcony and blew a beautiful Milesian lament. Listen to his solo on Westbrook’s “Metropolis Part IX” and remind yourself just how good he is at doing that. Bearing in mind the crucial X factor of Terry Day, isn’t it about time the LIO recruited Mike Figgis to play trumpet and conduct? Orchestra and projection screens. The troubling line at the core of “I, Bloodbrother Be” – “we’ll never feel the pain of being a mother.” Wasn’t it the case that tAtU at Eurovision were full of fear and didn’t ask or question anything? Would they have won if they’d been honest enough to kiss? Would Dollar singing the same song have won it for the UK? The lift from “Are You Experienced?” which introduces the original Scooby-Doo theme. Portishead Live At Roseland - Gibbons mutates into Janis Joplin at the climax of “Sour Times”; now I’ve mutated into the subject of the same song. “Watched the ‘Panorama’ programme about Iraq and it was the usual pious rubbish about Saddam Hussein being a tyrant & a torturer. When such a leader is removed, the ensuing chaos is deplored by the same censurers.” (Kenneth Williams, diary entry, 27 July 1981) “I am what they have made me. I do not deny there are extraordinary noises in my cell, but they can best account for them. I am assailed by whispers close to my bed-side: It seems these whispers reach the ears of the brethren, for they burst into my cell, and take advantage of the terror with which I am overwhelmed, to put the most incredible constructions on it.” (Charles Maturin, Melmoth The Wanderer, Archibald Constable, London, 1820: volume II, chapter VI) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
GIRLS ALOUD Is Julie Burchill correct when she says that Girls Aloud are the most important pop group since the Sex Pistols? She may well be, if for no other reason that Girls Aloud have hit upon an uncomfortable truth about pop which only the Pistols have previously managed to express so bluntly. We ought to have known, of course, from the real “underground” of discomfiture which underpinned their debut single “Sound Of The Underground” (“Crank the bass, I’ve gotta get some more/Water’s running in the wrong direction”) which describes an addiction to music which is more clinical than celebratory. And it is now confirmed on their second single “No Good Advice.” Ostensibly another post-Shangri Las anthem in favour of not paying attention to your parents, there is something considerably more disturbing going on in this record. It is the parallel to the clenched teeth irony of Bill Fay’s “Some Good Advice” (the final line of which advises, “But don’t listen to anything that anyone tells you”), but its “My Sharona”-gone-wrong groove points to someone who is actually past the point of help, the dying screams of an incurable addict. Ms Dynamite’s “stereo” motif is echoed, but this is not a lifeforce but a needle which will eventually kill the consumer. “I don’t need no special fix to anaesthetise me” howl the singers unconvincingly. “Shut your mouth!” snarls one of them (Cheryl? Kimberley? Sarah? Nicola? Nadine? Can anyone truly tell them apart? And what would be achieved if we could?). “I’m already wasted” they go on to proclaim; and finally there’s the astonishing anonymous soliloquy at the song’s close, which culminates – in a direct echo of “Pretty Vacant” – in a malevolently grinning “’Cos frankly, I don’t even care.” It is supposed to be a euphoric blast of teen liberation, but in fact it’s one of the most terrifying moments in pop since “Death Disco” – that point where Lydon/Girls Aloud suddenly turn to face the camera and sneer murderously at the consumer, as if to laugh, “You think that pop is supposed to matter?” It is terrifying precisely because the consumer is expected to applaud it as a masterstroke of subtextual subversion, though it is really an undisguised truth. (Consider the closing sequence of the “Dance Of The Dead” episode of The Prisoner wherein Mary Morris, a last-minute substitute for an unwell Trevor Howard as Number 2, laughs through Patrick McGoohan, through the camera, through our screens, directly at us, as behind her the disconnected teleprinter continues to print indecipherable data. The real terror here lies in the possibility that McGoohan, off screen, is participating in, or even initiating, this laughter. As systematic and lethal as the knife which proceeds to bisect Waldo, the geek progenitor of the Velvets’ “The Gift”) On the cover of the debut album by Girls Aloud, also entitled Sound Of The Underground, there is a pink sticker which proclaims “YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS CAN BE THE VOICES OF GIRLS ALOUD!” This turns out to be a device whereby if you plug a microphone into your PC and programme the CD correctly, you can sing into the microphone – significantly over a section of “No Good Advice” – and depending on whose name you click, your singing will be reproduced as a recreation of one of the five band members’ voices. That’s how much they matter, of course. They are pictured on the cover, lined up, straight-backed, clutching microphones, wearing silver foil outfits – a touch I can’t resist; I remember what the silver foil-clad Suzi Quatro on the cover of her 1974 single “Too Big” awakened in me as a ten-year-old – but they are unsmiling, their eyes almost entirely obscured by liner and mascara. They might as well be drawings, or puppets – they have been curiously de-sexed. On the reverse of the cover there are simply the five abandoned microphones against a pitch black background. Yes, it’s true enough, you, your friends, anyone really, could be the voices of Girls Aloud. But does it matter? As a pop record it’s great, of course. The gilded emptiness at the core of “No Good Advice” is not sustained – could not possibly be sustained for the value of anyone’s life or sanity – but as pop it gleams immaculate and is forceful in expressing its modest pleasures. The two singles come first, of course; when we arrive at “Some Kind Of Miracle” and its opening line of “Baby baby won’t you give me a chance” alarm bells momentarily ring, but it is superb post-1981 pop (think Ultravox’s Rage In Eden if Trevor Horn had been available to produce/mould it out of its essential naffness) with a heartbreaking Brian Wilson-via-Kim Wilde descending minor chord vocal harmony sequence 2/3 into the song which both confirms and justifies the song’s worth. The brilliantly-titled “All I Need (All I Don’t)” is determinable electro, better than the similarly-titled Basement Jaxx track on the latter’s last album, if only for the necessary parenthesis in the title. “Mars Attack” and “Boogie Down Love” both essentially rejig the components of “Sound Of The Underground” in entertainingly minutely different ways. “Stop” expands from its opening staccato pulse to another sunset of a descending minor chorus, somewhere between Kim Wilde’s “Stay Awhile” and All Saints’ “Black Coffee,” while “Girls Allowed” (heheh!) revisits the always welcome world of Now! Dance 1988 with a terrific old-school pop-house groove (and how quickly or slowly did that particular avant-garde become a tradition). One notes the presence of the Beatmasters and Betty Boo among the writers and producers, and indeed “Girls Allowed” is worthy to sit alongside masterpieces like “Numero Uno” and “Don’t Make Me Wait” (especially when aligned with its rapid-fire lyric which shreds Shania’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” to a twain). There are the obligatory naff ballads – “Forever And A Night” and the vaguely unsettling “Life Got Cold” with the latter’s world-gone-wrong lyric (“We smoke as we choke and snatch another Coke”) which disturbingly suggests that, as women barely out of their teens, life fled long ago (“summer slipped away”). And the chorus only just avoids being the bridge of “Wonderwall” – as well as the equally obligatory naff shot at R&B (“White Lies”) but even a comparatively run-of-the-mill track like “Don’t Want You Back” is rendered interesting by what’s going on behind it (those oscillating squiggles sound queerly like Evan Parker’s soprano – indeed John Coxon of Springheel Jack is apparently playing guitar on some of this record, though the sleeve indicates one “Shawn Lee”). “Love Bomb” is great, though, and though the rapper here sounds very much like Ms Boo herself rather than any of the group, it’s a cheerily cheesy mash-up of Kid Creole and Man Parrish. The album is generally a welcome addition to the tradition of intelligent girl-group pop last exemplified by All Saints (though, as I mentioned in Uncut, the Appletons’ surprisingly good debut album should not escape your attention either). Like all great girl-group pop, however, there’s a cancer at its centre; but the malignancy identified and diagnosed so accurately in “No Good Advice” would be hard for anyone to treat. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
MONKEY HOUSE IN A TANK After Girls Aloud’s assured destruction (“dancing ‘til the sound hurts”) it’s almost a relief to be confronted with an honest egotist like Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. I mean, Courtney Taylor-Taylor for heaven’s sake! Did he worship the Taylor triptych in Duran Duran that fervently? And how exactly did we get to the point where Rio, universally laughed at two decades ago and equally universally bought, is now the 70th greatest album ever made? Is that all we learned from New Pop? To settle for the easy option every time? Needless to say, the new Warhols record, Welcome To The Monkey House (with its faintly dubious cover of a peeled banana against a black background), despite being largely produced by Nick Rhodes (with some contributions from Tony Visconti), is better than any Duran record could ever have hoped to be, and certainly far more fun to listen to than that boring new Blur record (the best that can be said about Think Tank is that it spends too much time looking over its shoulder to ensure that it’s patting its own back hard and long enough to be coherent or interesting. “Moroccan People’s Revolutionary Bowls Club” is very thin gruel when set against the genuine adventure and emotional irreverence of the Armenian Navy Band. “Brothers And Sisters” proves yet again that Malcolm McLaren had the right idea; stop respecting African music so much and start taking it to bits. It’s the only way it can be “rediscovered”). I suspect that nothing goes on in Taylor-Taylor’s head except Taylor-Taylor, but we make the same assumption for Jay-Z, and that doesn’t necessarily preclude their making good, if not radical, music. Interesting that in this month’s Mojo, Taylor-Taylor describes the assembly of “Bohemian Like You” in a manner akin to that outlined in the KLF Manual - he is very keen to point out that the Warhols were NOT ripping off the Stones, but ripping off Kiss ripping off the Stones (the distinction is what differentiates it) together with patented Pavement drum sounds, etc. It still took a Vodafone advert to make it a hit, though. Monkey House is as free of guitars as Think Tank, and the Warhols do seem to have taken all their luggage back to 1982 before filtering it back through, oh, 1995. One could be fooled into thinking that this is a Blur record by listening to the introductory brief title track, which begins: “Wire is coming back again/Elastica got sued by them.” A plea to forget the ‘90s? “When Michael Jackson dies we’re covering ‘Blackbird’” – presumably to avoid paying MJ any royalties. “We Used To Be Friends” is a splendid romp, although more reminiscent, melodically and rhythmically, of Big Audio Dynamite than Duran or Blur. “Plan A” (we’re starting what Kevin Rowland finished) features Simon Le Bon among the backing vocalists, and one could be fooled into thinking that it’s his falsetto we hear in the chorus rather than that of Taylor-Taylor. In fact the latter’s falsetto is quite affecting, even when lyrically, as here, he’s asking you, the consumer, to impart the song with some meaning (“There must be some kind of message/Simple but somehow impressive/Anyone who can think of something...come on now/Just express it”). “The Dope (Wonderful You)” is powered by a fine Noo Wave/electroclash rhythm (“Pump It Up” as re-tooled by Felix Da Housecat) and is the most danceable thing here. “I Am A Scientist” and “I Am Over It” drag and sag somewhat, before “The Dandy Warhols Love Almost Everyone” reveals itself as the Warhols’ “Song 2,” a short but insanely catchy hook, though less propulsive than “Song 2” – again Taylor-Taylor’s falsetto forestalls any danger of laddism infiltrating his divine jacuzzi. “Insincere Because I” is the album’s slow-burning ballad, the Warhols’ “Save A Prayer,” and equally as sincere a song. “You Were The Last High” is an irresistibly arrogant song (how can it not be with opening lines of the calibre of: “Now I am alone/But adored by a hundred thousand more”?) which could easily have fitted on Now 10. “Heavenly” deploys the old Surfer Rosa quiet/loud trick with more subtlety than is usual; “I Am Sound” canters along like Albarn refusing to prevent Coxon slipping on the sleeve’s banana skin. “Hit Rock Bottom” asks us to despair for the wretched and meek Taylor-Taylor by means of one of Visconti’s trademark T Rex stomper templates. Finally we have, as we must, “You Come In Burned,” a long slow burn of a song, going nowhere less than genially – the record’s “Chauffeur.” This review might sound grudging in tone, but actually Monkey House is a hugely entertaining pop record – it doesn’t scale the same heights of sublime absurdity as the Junior Senior album (because Taylor-Taylor’s ambitions are higher) but certainly doesn’t take itself as seriously as, say, the new Goldfrapp record – imagine Chinnichap stripped of their indispensable mischief; pseudo-propulsive and ultimately leaden and sexless (that hat of Alison Goldfrapp on the cover was enough to put me off the record even before listening to it – as with Kathryn Flett’s raised left eyebrow in her Observer byline photo, it’s a clear warning to avoid undue irritation). posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
IS THIS THE MOST IMPORTANT RECORD MADE SINCE THE FIRST FOUR SEX PISTOLS SINGLES, THEN? To understand fully the enormity of Girls Aloud’s achievements, you will need to listen to “No Good Advice” in tandem with “Ruthless” by the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, recorded live at the Freedom of the City 2002 festival in Conway Hall, London, about a year ago, and now released on their similarly titled Freedom Of The City 2002 CD, available now on Emanem Records. The latter is the most singularly powerful piece of music I have heard both last year and this year, as I was in attendance at the concert in question. As with most improv gigs, I was sceptical about how well the phenomenal sonics of that evening would translate to audio; in fact, the multiple puncta of the gig become considerably more apparent upon listening. Seven of the eleven “conductions” performed on the evening are included on the CD. Certainly the subtleties of some of the performances, and the sonic totality of others, are now more easily detectable. For instance, Simon H Fell’s tribute to John Stevens (whose spirit dominates practically all improvised music in London today), “Too Busy,” gains far greater depth when heard here, including the processed tapes of Stevens’ voice and a prior performance by the LIO, neither of which was particularly evident at the actual concert. The piece is very touching indeed. Elsewhere, Paul Rutherford’s concerto for orchestra and massed mobile phone ringtones “Phone In” is almost Balinese in its construction, and Phil Wachsmann’s “Fanfare For L.I.O.,” which involved cued contributions from the audience, is considerably more striking, and the interaction between orchestra and audience sounds more overwhelming than was the actual experience itself; virtual tsunami waves sweeping all around one’s ears. The indisputable highlight, however, is the aforementioned “Ruthless,” composed and conducted by Terry Day – contemporary and friend of Charlie Watts, founder member of the People Band, sometime Crass Collective associate, one of the strongest of the invisible threads which link all the pieces in the jigsaw of post-war British music. Someone, again, who has lived. “Ruthless,” the poem which Day recites, was composed at around the time of the onset of punk, and decries both meaningless celebrity and pointless obscurity. Day has been unwell in recent years, and on the evening of this performance, looked as though he were about to expire but sounded extraordinary resonant and mischievous. From the opening frantic mantra of “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me” (Orphy Robinson’s vibes tolling their own death knell) one is instantly drawn to Day’s astonishing vocal resemblance to John Lydon. The same sardonic-cum-celebratory delivery, the real ancestor to the Pistols – Louis Moholo and Tony Marsh (drums) and John Edwards, David Leahy and Fell (basses) pounding away behind him. The call-and-response of “Ruthless! Ruthless! Another kind of ruthless shame” sounds like Capital Gold with Patrick Keillor as the playlist manager. “Passé prima donnas!” howls Day. “Poverty! Poverty! A pile of fucking shit!” he continues. And then…”Everybody – a great big racket!” before all 33 musicians start to scream and/or thrash as though a Gatling gun were trained at their heads; a phenomenal outpouring comparable with the equally cathartic finale of Westbrook’s Marching Song (though much briefer). And then Day calls a sudden halt. He turns to face the audience directly. “What did it achieve? FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! WHAT! DID! IT! ACHIEVE????” It was the sound and vision of a man delivering his own funeral oration and then ripping it up, not being dead yet. It should have been filmed and compulsorily shown to every pretender – there is no need to name any names here – who attempts to convince us that some recycled Minor Threat riffs with some sub-Bolan attitude constitutes “newness” or “rebellion.” An authentic madman? No…Terry Day is a bitterly sane man. No other sort of person could focus so intensely upon chaos. And he will not stare into that telescope for fear of the certainty that the uncaring Cheryl Tweedy will be staring right back at him. They both know exactly what “it” did achieve. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
QUIET NOISE I live in one of those slightly forlorn, tube-free outposts of South London which only manages to be part of London as a result of its postcode, an area which began life as a coaching stop between London proper and Croydon, and which today is making valiant attempts not to be swallowed up by, and become part of, the Croydon tentacles. As a result, journeys to Proper London can sometimes be as long and insufferable as commuting from Oxford to London used to be, but unlike Oxford, this part of South London isn’t the sort of place where one feels comfortable staying. It of course remains a coaching stop for me, halfway between my former life and whatever form my future life may take. When it’s a Bank Holiday, however, I can get from my front door to Holborn in about 40 minutes, as I did last Monday; a rather bleakly sunny and windy afternoon found me at the Conway Hall for the afternoon concert of the final day of the Freedom Of The City 2003 improvised music series. I was glad to meet some of the other attendees and musicians there, but musically the afternoon, with one dramatic exception, went by without anything much happening, much like this article thus far. Does that make the music worse than useless? Does it amplify my long-held belief that improvised music performances are the equivalent of multidisciplinary team meetings held in hospitals, wherein a procession of consultants stand before their peers, with notes, films and OHP, to elaborate on and discuss a series of “interesting cases”? The value of this work is inarguable, but it is clearly work in progress, a series of mechanics designed with an aim which is not within the remit of the meeting itself. Treating and perhaps saving lives does not occur in the meeting, but would be considerably more difficult without it. It’s much the same with improv performances; by their nature, a procession of musical gestures and relationships – some well established, others comparatively new – are reworked, refined and developed with each succeeding event of interaction, until some kind of an aesthetic plateau is reached. And what happens to improvising groups after that happens? Do their discoveries go on to nourish the treatment and development of music in general? Or does the punter, having paid his £10, lament doing so for what is in essence a series of staged experiments; or does he swallow his prejudice and realise that his reaction has to become an indispensable part of whatever is improvised before him? Much of the most striking sounds of the afternoon came – not entirely inadvertently – from a baby and from two dogs, who were part of the audience and who contributed seemingly randomly; but were these reactions generated by what they were listening to, and if so, which party influenced the other – improviser or audience? It certainly isn’t a question of Any Old Noise Will Do. This is where Nick Hornby falls down. By dismissing “noise” (and by doing so, therefore fails to understand its definition, which certainly existed pre-Attali) as a transient, puerile pseudo-stimulant to middle-class foppish young boys – who by extension clearly don’t Have A Real Job, i.e. Bloody Students – he is merely trying to impose his own life history as a model for all other music listeners to follow. It may well be that, having been divorced and bringing up an adopted autistic child – though it is typical of Hornby that the former seems to trouble him to a far greater extent than the latter - he doesn’t have any time or patience for “Frankie Teardrop” or equivalent in his life; but there is an arrogance in his outlook which is not confined to 31 Songs; consider of course the final three pages of High Fidelity, where, in the attempt to impose a happy ending on the not especially cheerful or reassuring story, Barry, the hardcore, out-there, Noise Is Everything record shop assistant, comes onstage with “Sonic Death Monkey” (that name!) and immediately launches into a note-perfect “Twist And Shout,” thereafter signing the pledge and swearing off these childish things, i.e. sex, death, noise and adventure, even though significantly at the novel’s end he is the only main character not romantically spoken for. The casual message to all those 35-year-old lapsed Clash fans reading the book is of course “Don’t bother with all that horrid new music which is so difficult to listen to.” Imagine Hornby saying that in 1976 – though, come to think of it, it’s easily imaginable. David Toop’s approach is much more realistic and embracing. He doesn’t particularly want to listen to much music at home any more, would much rather listen to and watch it being performed, doesn’t trust the increasing corporate 24/7 imposition of music as a necessary part of a Proper and Balanced Life. This is not the same thing as dismissing all new music as noisy rubbish. He crucially acknowledges that new music continues to be new, minute by minute, but has arrived at his own reaction to it independently of any supposed societal concept of What Real People Listen To. So it’s a compromise, but a carefully measured one. The near concurrent deaths of his wife and father in 1994 colour virtually every page of Ocean Of Sound - even though they are mentioned only fleetingly throughout, the book resonates with the same kind of semi-inadvertent emotion which the Oxford A-Z can inspire in me (the huge blank spaces which surround the area in which we lived. They were of course anything but blank spaces, but I only know that because of what they were when we lived there. For all I know, they might well have reverted to blank spaces, as neither of us is now there). Sometimes I want noise; more often than not I want a disturbed quiet. Too much of last Monday afternoon’s improvising was quietude without any disturbance – lots of tiptoeing when a bit more trespassing was called for. The 35-year-old lapsed Clash fan may relish the irony of a group containing two former auxiliary members of the Damned being overly polite, but that was certainly the case with Lol Coxhill, Lu Edmonds and Knut Aufemann. Edmonds played something called an “electric bass banjo” which served both as bass and as sub-Bailey “guitar.” Aufemann contributed little with his electronics beyond a few tentative crackles. Coxhill’s soprano became increasingly more crabby as the performance went on; always a sign that the music’s in trouble. The only memorable moment was when Edmonds retreated into simple “Dark Is The Night”/Paris, Texas bluesy lamentation, over which Coxhill played very plaintively. However, instead of ending there, the performance staggered on for a further few minutes. It was significant, though, that the language of signpost familiarity had to be deployed. A group with Milo Fine (piano/clarinet/drums), Hugh Davies (sundry homemade gizmos), Tony Wren (bass) and Paul Shearsmith (pocket cornet) followed, and it was very much a case of Fine trying to kickstart everyone else. The Moby of improv is a naturally hyperactive player (though what I heard of his piano seemed to be inversely proportional in harmonic/rhythmic adventure to the effort he was putting into it) but the other three were playing very much for themselves and towards themselves. Davies’ contributions looked interesting, as they usually do, but were largely inaudible, and I ended up wishing for a duo performance. Some fire was desperately required by, and on, this stage, and thankfully Free Base – a trio of Alan Wilkinson (alto and baritone saxes), Marcio Mattos (bass) and Steve Noble (drums) – strode on, intent on lighting the fuse. One of the two reasons for my attending – the other of course being Lunge, giving their first performance for some considerable time – they more or less obliterated all other music made that afternoon from the moment when Noble’s waves of cymbals splashed across the speakers, like a darkened Blackpool suddenly dynamited into colour, and Wilkinson’s baritone declaimed memories of John Surman circa ’69; fearless, overblowing, rhythmically acute as fuck. Meanwhile Mattos held it all together with his effortlessly overlapping bass harmonics. It’s always a delight to see Mattos back behind the bass – for a while it looked as though it was definitely playing second fiddle (yes, crap pun intended) to his ‘cello playing, but few bassists can drive this music as well as he can. No chance of Coxhill-style snarls to get the music going again with him around. Free Bass were brave and emotional, and when Wilkinson swapped the baritone for the alto, the music incredibly climbed even higher in intensity. Wilkinson remains sorely undervalued as an altoist, but he seems to me to summarise and encapsulate every atom of that extraordinarily luminous intensity which seems peculiar to British jazz/improv – the rhythmic attack of Mike Osborne, the naked emotion of Trevor Watts, the acidity of Elton Dean and the sour sweetness of Dudu Pukwana all seem to converge in his playing. Admittedly one could do without his spells of sub-Minton vocalese in between blowing (at one point his “Never never!” put me in mind of an avant-garde Sting) but as the music built to the point of emotional overspill, it was impossible not to be subsumed by the music’s spell. It ended with several fortissimo power chords – the exact antithesis of the repeated pointillistic chords which conclude the SME’s quartet version of “Oliv.” The audience rightly went berserk. The performance was recorded for the BBC’s Jazz On 3, and if given a proper issue I suspect will be fit to stand beside masterpieces like Amalgam’s Prayer For Peace and Osborne’s Border Crossing. Noble told me later that “I didn’t have a clue what Marcio was doing – I just went with it!” It was an exhilarating punctum of a performance. Nothing could really have followed it, much as I yearned for Brötzmann, Bailey, Jah Wobble and Charles Hayward to come onstage straight afterwards. A contrast was required, and one was duly supplied by the not-very-mysteriously acronymised IST (Improvising String Trio). The aim here was to locate the other extreme of noise while trying to stay and play as quiet as possible; bassist Simon H Fell, ‘cellist Mark Wastell and harpist Rhodri Davies seemed determined to be indeterminable. In the early stages of their performance the studied nothingness of their carefully selected tones did convey something of the immensity of Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band (especially when the aforementioned baby joined in) but lacked the life which is evident in AMM even at their most inaudible. Then polntillistic pizzicato kicked in, Hungarian cartoon soundtrack-style, and they lost me. Davies in particular is a problematic player. Seemingly determined to be the anti-Alice Coltrane, his harp sounds are abrupt and harsh, almost as if he were trying to do Derek Bailey on the harp. But he thus far lacks the genuine involvement which Anne Le Baron displayed behind Bailey in Company Week ’82 (for evidence of how good the latter was, see Company’s Epiphany, now reissued as a 2CD set on Incus). Lunge were last on, top of the bill (if we can de-democratise free music to that extent). Regular Churchgoers already know my feelings about their shatteringly brilliant Strong Language album – and check also their 1999 Acta debut Braced & Framed, more lo-fi but equally as sharp; “One Good Solid Punch” would have been a hit single in a world truer to 1982 – but last week their performance seemed a little subdued and, though well received, didn’t quite manage to land a solid punch. Interesting, however, to witness how they present themselves on stage – they virtually came across as a central duo, Gail Brand and Mark Sanders, flanked by two seated electro-operatives, Pat Thomas very hyperactive at stage left, Phil Durrant immobile and studious at his laptop, looking more and more like Tom Baker every day, at stage right, although his sounds appeared to be the more disruptive of the two. One great moment came when Brand stood up, turned to Sanders and did a little dance to the latter’s rhythm before returning to blowing. But it didn’t quite reach Free Base’s level of assured intensity. It did not transcend the laboratory. But it did provoke me to think, on the way home: why should I need noise, and can noise still be noise if it’s quietly sounded? A world which seems daily to exclude forcibly even greater numbers of people who do not meet the precise geometrical requirements for “society,” where fun and happy endings become mandatory, punishable by ignoble death in a health service which now exists for the sole purpose of legalising euthanasia. Sometimes you need to draw further into yourself before you can reach outwards. At home I’ve been listening exclusively to Leonard Cohen’s records for the last couple of weeks; partly because I’ve been listening to the new M Ward record, Transfiguration Of Vincent (about which, and whom, I will be writing more on CoM shortly; suffice it to say that you should go out and buy it, together with its predecessor End Of Amnesia, forthwith), which has reminded me of other, more subtle uses to which noise(s) can be deployed. Or, to be less precise, what would it bring Cohen to sound musically like Trent Reznor? Indeed, Cohen could superficially be thought the antithesis of everything interesting and irrational in music; the words, the voice, are in the foreground; the music as quiet and unobtrusive as is possible for the words not to be obscured. Drums drum quietly; if he uses Michael Sembello’s old keyboards, there’s a reason; it cannot get in the way of the subversive grain of the voice. If you’re having trouble getting into Dylan, think of that voice, as alien as Ayler in 1965. Unlike Dylan, however, there is no good-ole-boys backing in Cohen’s songs. It is purposely minimal and still – lurking yet immaculate. Ready for death but not giving a fuck. “The question of the missing figure has been raised in relation to the metaphor of the nineteenth-century sublime landscape. Sartre’s writings on Giacometti show that it was also being formulated within Rothko’s generation in reference to a spatial ‘infinity’ that occupies no more room than an artist’s studio.” (Jeffrey Weiss, “Rothko’s Unknown Space,” from the monograph/exhibition catalogue Mark Rothko, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1998) And yet there is infinite compassion in Cohen’s cruelty. This is neither the time nor the place for a full-scale piece on Cohen (as a poet first and a musician second, he requires either a more complex, fully-annotated approach, or a list of pornographic graffiti derived from bus shelters in Lewisham and New Cross), but, if nothing else, consider this: how can a figure be absent when he’s all you can see or hear? And why does Cohen put such emphasis on the importance of his female backing singers? They are all over his later work, singing behind him, singing for him – or is he singing for them? The Greek chorus of muses – Cohen’s own Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece (Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson)? The keyboards could come from an abandoned ECM studio (except from when it comes from the Pet Shop Boys – that bloodied glee of his voice on “First We Take Manhattan”). The rudimentary Casiotone soloing on “Tower Of Song” as if he’s just discovered how to love music again (never for the first time, of course – “Remember me, I used to live for music?” from “Manhattan” again). Ultimately it’s that prematurely exhausted and exultant voice which has to cut through every time. Linked settlements: “Waiting For The Miracle” (1992) dwells on the implausiblity of Perfect Love ever transmuting into reality, and the wasted life which is the inevitable consequence of setting your expectations too high. “I know you really loved me (if it is the past tense)…but you see, my hands were tied.” Thus I build my own prison and remain there forever, despite the Other having to “stand beneath my window, with your bugle and your drum” (shades of the “Arabian drums” on Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”?). And of course the Other is caught in the same trap. Cohen eventually suggests marriage as a not-too-desirable alternative to death (“Let’s do something crazy/Something absolutely wrong…while we’re waiting for the miracle to come”). Hear how his voice almost sobs in its modulation from the implied potential major of “absolutely” to the decided minor of “wrong.” (But then again he is never bereft of passion: consider his 1979 song “The Guests” whose descriptions of a stolid dinner party are punctuated by ever more desperate cries of “I need you, I need you, I need you now” – the yuppie equivalent to “Wichita Lineman”?) (And was he ever unadventurous musically? That odd accelerated upstroke, as if the guitar’s spontaneously playing backwards, which we hear on “The Partisans” or “Avalanche” – a technique which VERY significantly only the supposedly untutored Blixa Bargeld was able to reproduce on Nick Cave’s 1984 cover of the latter) And then its sequel – linked by that two-note police siren keyboard line – “A Thousand Kisses Deep” (2001). The album from which the latter comes, Ten New Songs, is an extremely moving record; only “peaceful” or “musically conservative” because its creator has earned the right to be. A life has been lived, the artist comes to an uneasy but slightly laconic peace. There’s none of the Rick Rubin-imposed let’s make decline and death hip schtick which impairs Johnny Cash’s “American” series of records. But Cohen has no intention of dying, not just yet; he’s hushed but still at work, daring you to anticipate the reshaping of stock lovesong clichés on “In My Secret Life”; and yet he can still look back at a life which now has no one Other than himself. regret ever so slightly the lack of control and the obligation to reality necessary for any survivable life. Were he 40 years younger he would perhaps combust in rage as Aidan Moffat does on Arab Strap’s astonishing “Fucking Little Bastards”; but “A Thousand Kisses Deep” has an authentic sadness about it, a resignation from one’s “invincible defeat,” a sharper “It Was A Very Good Year.” Consider the nod to Robert Frost in the lyric: “And maybe I had miles to drive, and promises to keep…you’d ditch it all to stay alive, a thousand kisses deep.” Chris Rea’s “On The Beach” with everyone drowned, the garden wall unshadowed. It has reduced this writer to tears every time he has listened to it. “The ponies run, the girls are young, The odds are there to beat. You win awhile And then it’s done – Your little winning streak. And, summoned to deal with Your invincible defeat, You live your life as if it’s real, A thousand kisses deep.” “In the top left corner of the picture [Christ Preaching At Cookham Regatta], drawn but not yet painted, is a replica of one of the earlier paintings. The original is called Listening from Punts. In it a young woman wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet of flowers is being gripped by those around her on her punt. Stanley told his daughters that she is so overwhelmed at Christ’s preaching that she needs to be supported or she would faint with joy. Look at her closely. Surely she is being presented to the message of Christ. She is a metaphorical bride of Christ on the day of her coming into understanding. Stanley has given her the tricorned hat his Hilda wore at their wedding, shaped now into a heart. At her feet, discarded, lies the coat she wore that day. She is opening herself to her Stanley-Christ. Her white dress is her baptismal gown, her bouquet of flowers the gift of love. Stanley’s Hilda-God-image has at last become his Hilda-Cookham-image. All are one in that message which has so long possessed him, and still holds him. “In these closing paintings the fugal themes of Stanley’s personified feelings once more rise and fall, harmonise and counterpoint. The details are personal but in their transmutation through his understanding of the Holy Spirit they become universal and exalt his meaning. Only through true comprehension of the transcendence of love – redemption – can we know, as joy, that compassion in the discord of experience for which all humanity searches and in the existence of which we must believe or else we perish.” (Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer, William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, London, 1991: chapter 47 “Christ Preaching At Cookham Regatta”) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
THE KLF – WERE THEY JUSTIFIED? “If Steffie had learned about déjà vu on the radio but then missed the subsequent upgrading to more deadly conditions, it could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility.” (Don De Lillo, White Noise, Viking Penguin Inc., 1984, chapter 21) “When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable…Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation – that is, alteration in sense as well as language.” (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1949, Appendix – though in reality a disguised happy ending – “The Principles of Newspeak”) “The misrepresentation succeeds to the point of making possible the appearance of the progenitor.” (Lou Reed, from his sleevenotes to Metal Machine Music, RCA, 1975) What would Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond make of The Church of Me if it were sold to them as a website about music? Probably less than nothing; it would, to minds concerned more with means than ends, to gestures rather than achievements, be indistinguishable from the millions of other music websites available. Better by far for them to assimilate it as the continued justification of an obsession which also doubles as a justification for prolonging the writer’s existence, or an attempt to construct a beautiful world for someone who can no longer live in it. Therein lies the reason for calling this website “The Church of Me” rather than “Amor Liberis” or “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” or “Lock Me In The Garage For All The Difference It Would Make.” What is the writer really saying; and never exclude the possibility that beneath the veneer, there may exist only a ghastly, unviewable sub-nothingness. If popular music has broken down systematically into its individual components or compartments, then the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front)/JAMMs (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) may well have fired the starting pistol, more so than the inventor of the CD, or MTV, or even Foucault. But the shot was not fired in ire; the primary function of the KLF appears to have been the examination of, not just what comprises the elements of music and our responses to it, but the exact points where pop can coincide/cross over into people’s lives; and from there it is only a short step to asking oneself what exactly comprises “life.” Look at/listen to that song; is it still “your song” when reprocessed in a different, alien(ating) environment? Were Cauty and Drummond just mucking about? The possibility is never to be occluded. They were never more than funny, never less than serious. For a good many years they were regarded as a momentary possible pop pulse which rapidly descended into sub-post-Debordian prankery. Ageing music biz ambulance chasers on the skids. One-joke wonders. Actually it was all preparatory work for when they decided to turn the theories into populist practice. Should they have dared to come back from the popstar precipice unscathed – or would they have done better to hang in there rather than in Tate Britain? Neophytes to the KLF will have to make an effort to collect their music; in 1992, already at that time the biggest-selling UK single chart artists of the decade thus far, they suddenly declared the pop experiment over and deleted their entire back catalogue, prior to the alleged burning of a million pounds on the Isle of Jura. None of it appears on compilations; a few albums remain available as expensive and unsatisfactorily packaged US imports; a box set is surely long overdue. Consider, however, that the starting point needs to be Fried, Julian Cope’s bitterly sane second solo album from 1984, and his gleeful paean “Bill Drummond Said.” Drummond released his response in a 1986 album on Creation, Bill Drummond: The Man, which essentially comprises Drummond ranting in splenetic Lowlands spittle against the world in general and Cope in particular. Both had been part of post-punk Liverpool; Drummond in Big In Japan, alongside other future pop stars Holly Johnson and Ian Broudie; Cope in the Teardrop Explodes. By 1986 Drummond had handed in his notice as A&R man at WEA Records, and was looking for something scampier and scanter to do. Teaming up with Jimmy Cauty, who had been associated with WEA recording artists Brilliant – the band of the future for about five minutes in the autumn of 1985 – and with an ear cocked to what was coming out of Rick Rubin’s student dorm at the time, and an eye cocked at Channel 4 News, they decided to deconstruct the reconstructive art that is hip hop. A 12-inch single “All You Need Is Love,” with generous use of samples from the Beatles, MC5 (“kick out the jams motherfuckers”), Samantha Fox (“Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”) and the ludicrous Government Aids public information advertisement, with its phallic iceberg, portentous voiceover and DX7 sounding the “Dies Irae” (a further indication of the darkness which engulfed much of 1986, along with the British Gas privatisation campaign, Test Dept’s Unacceptable Face Of Freedom, Janet Jackson, Diamanda Galas’ Divine Punishment, Mel and Kim’s “Showing Out” 12-inch, burning lorries at Newport Pagnell service station), and a cover photo showing the Today newspaper billboard ad having a jibe at “Son of God” Greater Manchester Police supremo James Anderton, it slipped rather too idiotically (through no fault of Cauty or Drummond) into the then-popular non-genre of “sonic theft merchants,” a kind of desperate attempt to regain the British nowness of punk a decade earlier, as if M/A/R/R/S sampling James Brown for three seconds were an aesthetic gesture equivalent of the Chippenham/Maida Vale squat/graffiti existence in 1975 which acted as progenitor for the Clash. While much of this was asinine and dated very quickly (the Age of Chance? Nasty Rox Inc?) – and pretty well set the template for the recent and shortlived bootleg craze - the KLF/JAMMs don’t, I think, quite deserve to be categorised in the same way. “All You Need Is Love” is of course a song about Aids, and specifically about how media attitudes towards/attempts to sell sexuality might eventually kill us. More of an impromptu Speakers’ Corner of a record than a song, really; but beneath all the superficial japery and DIY breakbeats/samples is the female chorus which, over and over, sings “My child is dying and there’s nothing I can do/Just wait and watch and pray to God for a miracle to break through.” On the seven-inch version, there appears only an adaptation of a Vietnamese folk song “Me Ru Con,” sung by Zuy Thien over a sinister, if slightly distant, drone which anticipates Jeff Buckley’s “You & I” musically, and Fleetwood Mac’s “You & Me 2” philosophically (the jaunty children’s TV theme tune of the latter, set against “hoping tomorrow will never come for you and I”). Deadly serious, and thankfully never competent. (Brief digression #1: Morley’s essay about “thickness” in the October 1985 issue of Blitz rightly damns “competence” as an ultimate aim in music or indeed in any art. Eulogising “Running Up That Hill” he observes that there is no qualitative difference between the melodies of Nik Kershaw and those of Rolf Harris; but did not “Sun Arise” lead directly to “The Dreaming,” and equally did not Miles see what was salvageable from “Wouldn’t It Be Good” and distil it into Tutu? One has to remember that, in The Language of Morals, Hare says “It should be pointed out that even judgements about to past choices do not refer merely to the past” and also “When we commend an object, our judgement is not solely about that particular object, but is inescapably about objects like it”) An album, 1987: What The Fuck’s Going On?, quickly followed and was generally given a muted reception in the music press, essentially for not being Proper Hip Hop (by that summer, the clock had already moved on to Paid In Full and Yo! Bum Rush The Show) or Proper Anti-Capitalist Pop Deconstruction (as opposed to the ill-begotten Ciccone Youth or the rather more substantial Culturcide, whose contemporaneous Tacky Souvenirs Of Pre-Revolutionary America, with its blend of AOR cut-ups – especially “We’re Not The World” – and improv guitar/trombone blasts – Gail, did you ever hear this? – remains a highly listenable album and the exact US counterpart to what the JAMMs were doing at the time). I think this a rather unfair assessment; forget, perhaps, that both Cauty and Drummond were already well into their thirties by the time the KLF was started (I mean it never hindered Alex Harvey, did it?) and you can discover an extremely simple and childlike joy at pulling music apart and reassembling their components in a more amusing or more profound order. Audibly it’s like two kids playing with their stereo in the bedroom, but with a crucial eagerness to find out more about the music/about life. “Rockman Rock” mashes together an assemblage of vintage rock guitar riffs with hilarious incompetence, throwing in Hamilton Bohannon and Fiddler On The Roof for no good reason, which as I have said on many occasions is more often than not the best reason. In fact all the elements for the KLF template as we know it – indeed, all the songs – are in place. The “we’re justified and we’re ancient” leitmotif will echo right through their career. Side two is demonstrably better than side one: opening with the aforementioned “Me Ru Con,” just to remind you that there’s more to this music than just mucking about, we dive into “The Queen And I” where, over a Donald Duck backdrop of Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” Drummond muses about taking control of the country (“What about Charles?” queries Cauty. “No, I like Charles!” replies Drummond). Inevitably the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” enters the fray at the song’s conclusion. Abba of course took umbrage at this and their lawyers compelled the album’s quick deletion. The KLF requested that all purchasers of the album return their copies so that they could be ceremonially burned in Sweden (or at least in Hemel Hempstead). No one of course did. A substitute version was released with meticulous instructions on how to replicate the samples yourself. Power to the people; inflated £145 price tags on second-hand copies of the original). The quality of silence is important to this album; there are long stretches where the breakbeats are simply allowed to proceed unhindered, as if recorded live; Cauty and Drummond musing over what to put in/say next. Following “The Queen And I” we get an extraordinary long sequence which consists of edited highlights from an edition of Top Of The Pops (the Top 40 w/e 27 March 1987, by the sound of it) which nowadays serves to remind us of what a barren wasteland the UK singles chart, shortly to be rejuvenated by hip hop and house, had become by that time (“Over 25% of the chart consists of old songs for the first time ever” comments co-presenter Mike Smith, including the top four, “Look! A new song! Billy Idol’s “Don’t Need A Gun” is a chart entry at 38”). Occasionally interrupted by channel changeovers (ITV adverts – “Headaches/Can turn a four-hour tape into an eight-hour tape" - , Channel 4 News, BBC2 golf) Smith and Steve Wright move the passive listener into thoughts of homicide with their studied banalities – introducing the Beasties’ “Fight For Your Right To Party,” they comment with public schoolboy chuckles “This video is not a BBC Board of Governors meeting” – Boy George is eventually revealed as number one, at which juncture Drummond screams “Fuck that, let’s have the JAMMs!” before launching into “All You Need Is Love” (did he know, or did he plan, that they would indeed be top of the pops one year hence?). Yet there are, as I say, long stretches where nothing much happens; the closing “Next” welds together The Sound Of Music, Scott Walker, the Fall, Wild Man Fischer and Stevie Wonder before petering out into tepid Kenny G-type jazz-funk. The question of where to go from here is very palpable. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going out and paying a ton for this record in second-hand shops, but would note in passing that I have recently seen pristine vinyl copies for a couple of quid apiece in the Upper Tooting Road Oxfam Shop and in the Scope charity shop in West Croydon… Indeed, it’s questionable whether Cauty and Drummond knew what they wanted to do next. Subsequent singles attempted to continue the “sonic theft” schtick to no great effect: “Whitney Joins The JAMMs” yanks together “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” to “Theme From Shaft” – yes? and? - whereas “Downtown” mucks about with Petula Clark and the London Community Gospel Choir, this time genuinely for no good or useful reason. A second album, Who Killed The JAMMs?, is wittering without any wit. In 1988 they lucked upon a number one, as the Timelords, with an ancient Ford Galaxy police car as their leitmotif, performing an ungainly weld of Gary Glitter, the Sweet, Harry Enfield, Steve Walsh, Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire entitled “Doctorin’ The Tardis.” No more than a novelty record (one mix, and one TOTP appearance, involved Glitter himself), Drummond nevertheless wrote a book after the event – The Manual: Or, How To Have A Number One Hit, Delia Smith meets Lacan – though one suspects that his “plan” was all written with the benefit of hindsight. The only act to adopt his advice, to my knowledge, were Austrian one-hit-wonders Edelweiss who scored a top five hit in early 1989 with “Call Me Edelweiss,” this time marrying New Order, Lynn Anderson and Abba. Otherwise…well, Stock Aitken & Waterman, Tennant & Lowe, and New Order themselves, were dominating the charts of the time without any notion of a “plan,” and it was difficult for Cauty and Drummond even to retain this slender foothold, as evinced by their 1989 flop “Kylie Said To Jason” which simply sounds like bad, lo-fi SAW divested of any “pop” content or context. Time, obviously, for the next plan…the ascent of stadium house. For once they dropped the Situationist/COBRA Group prankery and concentrated on making straight house/techno/trance records. The original mixes of “What Time Is Love?” and “3AM Eternal” were great, propulsive and danceable records – influenced more than somewhat by Belgian New Beat, but with a desolation only hitherto hinted at. A more cynical observer might comment that at this point Cauty took over control of the KLF’s music from Drummond; a realistic commentator would observe that this was when their music began to become great. The key record in the whole KLF canon is the 1990 album Chill Out. By default one of the most important and influential records of the last 15 years – it led to Moby, to Groove Armada, maybe even to Dido, and lots of other operatives who similarly could not grasp what Cauty had achieved here. It’s structured almost as a parody of vacuous Windham Hill-style New Age muzak with its references to travelling in the Deep South – track titles include “Brownsville Turnaround On The Tex-Mex Border,” “Six Hours To Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold” and “The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By” – but look again at the cover; a photograph of a flock of sheep relaxing in a field which is emphatically British, and specifically Northern (is that Hadrian Wall running behind them?), such as might be seen on the M62 going through the Pennines. The sublime pedal steel guitar commentary throughout is provided by an Australian – Graham Lee of the Triffids, whose 1986 masterpiece Born Sandy Devotional remains one of the great sticky, sweltering summer soundtrack records – but the track title “Dream Time In Lake Jackson” gives it all away; this is a British fantasy of Deep South travel (compare with Chris Rea’s “Texas” on the previous year’s Road To Hell, a sorely underrated record which is very nearly Chill Out’s blood brother), a Northern Britain fantasy about America (without which, of course, no British pop music). The frog chorus on the aforementioned “Dream Time” only sound like frogs if you don’t listen to them at close range; the slowed-down human/synthesised voices they actually are turn sinister on headphones, very much like those in the opening section of Escalator Over The Hill (“Bullfrogs are having their throat cut”). In the album’s centrepiece, the much-sampled “Madrugada Eterna” (we remember that Tyndale was burned at the stake), an excitable Deep South DJ preaches and hollers at us through the radio over the Brian Wilson organ drones, but eventually gives way to a news report about a fatal car crash. Everything exists at the surface. Memories of somebody’s past begin to filter through (“In The Ghetto” floats like a cloud over “Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul”). Side two is more or less a disguised preview of the KLF’s future repertoire; “3AM Eternal” with its submarine/life support machine bleeps, appears here, beatless, as “3AM Somewhere Out Of Beaumont” – but listen to those samples of the Fleetwood Mac of Peter Green which come into reception; first and last “Albatross,” and, in the middle, the middle of Green’s nervous breakdown “Oh Well”; and compare with the way in which Oldfield remembers Green in the centre of side one of Tubular Bells. Remember also that the first, and by far the best, record by the Orb was one in which Cauty was directly involved – “An Ever-Pulsating Brain…,” the first 22 minutes after Tubular Bells dies. Similarly, “Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard” turns out to be a long and languid prototype of “Last Train To Transcentral.” By the time “The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By” beats make themselves explicitly known for the first time on the album: “Pacific State” appears briefly – but see how the music is becoming weirdly submerged, filtered, not quite on station. And look how it all converges on “A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back” where the unmistakable tones of Acker Bilk’s “Stranger On The Shore” enter distantly (“Minnow On The Say”!). But the clarinet is warbling more than it should. Pulling me back from what? From drowning, clearly (“The Water Babies”!!). Now the music becomes subtly more agitated, subtly less and less clear, as if Kate Bush/Tennyson’s “Ninth Wave” is irrevocably pulling the listener/musician under; as oblivion looms, the idea of America vanishes and is replaced by the distinctly British tones of Tommy Vance: “Rock Radio Into The Nineties And Beyond.” Finally, we are “Alone Again With The Dawn Coming Up,” back in the reality which the skidding tyres and motors have been telling us all the way through the album; an illusion – you are actually on the M62, in the rain, might have crashed. The music refuses to settle and mutates into a jagged 16/16, amelodic, guitar-sample-heavy minimalism, which oddly enough (or not) segues very comfortably into METAL MACHINE MUSIC: A SHORT CONSIDERATION, OR AN ARTICLE WITHIN AN ARTICLE Jonathan Ross is underrated. On his Radio 2 show yesterday morning his special guest was Lou Reed. I fully expected sneers and jibes, or perhaps no mention whatsoever, of anything apart from Transformer - but no, he asked Reed with genuine interest and enthusiasm about Ornette Coleman (and even played some Ornette, for the first time on Radio 2 with the exception of Humphrey Lyttelton) and Metal Machine Music. It would be very wrong to lump Ross in with the Hornbyised lad culture with which we are still sadly encumbered; while undeniably connected to it, and even more undeniably a Ziggy Stardust fan to his boots, he is honest, open-minded and actually enthusiastic about what is happening and has happened in music, even if he does regard it as an oddity or curio. What caught my ear was when Reed started talking about the “masculine” aspects of traditional rock or heavy metal and the “feminine” aspects which he introduced into MMM. Recall the instruction on the sleeve: “Rock orientation, melodically disguised, i.e. drag.” New listeners may listen to MMM and, like Ornette for the previous generation, will probably wonder what all the fuss was about. Those expecting four sides of undifferentiated feedback expect in vain; in fact, it is, as it always has been, an eminently listenable record which should present no difficulties to those familiar with the intervening quarter-century of No Wave or dronerock. It is also, of course, the missing link between Mike Oldfield and Glenn Branca – and thanks to Mark Sinker for pointing that out apropos my CoM piece last week – maximalist/minimalist guitar music which squares the melodic and rhythmic contradictions. As with Welles, Reed tends to adapt his opinions/views to whichever journalist he’s talking to; you take his word for gospel at your peril. As such I am not sure whether Lester Bangs’ over-exuberant championing of MMM didn’t do the record more harm than good (“it’s so unlistenable only kooky old Lester/Creem magazine can get into it hyuk hyuk!”), magnifying its unjustified reputation as a cynical contract filler. In keeping with this particular aesthetic road map, Reed was eager to lead Bangs up a blind alley (the two, of course, made a lifelong sport of it; the same superficial emnity which really disguises the deepest of friendships – see Ahab and Starbuck) and was keen to state that the symbols and lists on the rear of the album sleeve were gibberish (which they aren’t), that there were quotations from multiple and very obvious classical pieces – Bangs was sceptical about this, but the fact is that Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony are easily recognised on sides one and three respectively. A superficial (and superfluous) facileness to disguise the underlying seriousness of the work? Certainly that rear sleeve starts rather like a Queen album (“No synthesisers! No Arp! No instruments?”). But the “drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities” are undoubtedly inspired by LaMonte Young’s Dream Music. Though it’s not quite true that there is “avoidance of any type of atonality” this doesn’t come apparent until very near the end of the album. In fact, the album itself, cut not quite strictly into four roughly equal sides (16 minutes apiece, with abrupt cut-offs at the beginning and end of each side), is largely harmonically and rhythmically anchored. Essentially it’s a more propulsive variant on what Fripp and Eno were doing on No Pussyfooting - guitars drone on each channel (and there is indeed “strict stereo separation” though channels are faded in and out almost randomly at times) though they are supporting highly complex melodic lines, all related to the same basic drone chord. Rhythmically an agitated 16/16 pulse remains constant throughout the work. The first two sides are the more approachable and accommodating, though side one is more flowing in its pulse and side two more pointillistic, with greater emphasis on the interplay between left and right channels. On sides three and four the music becomes more troubled and disturbed, and the textures become more varied; guitars are echo-delayed to sound like pianos, or are speeded up to reproduce the saxophone overblowing of Ayler or Sanders. In the second half of side four atonality begins to make itself known (though on the previous three sides there is much bitonality evident) and the music palpably begins to scream and plead. It finally cuts off with standard abruptness as the feedback reaches a climax, the massed guitars start to rise like the golden pylons with which Bangs compared the closing moments of the Stooges’ “L.A. Blues” and the whole thing is about to boil over. It could not be played in any other order, and has to be listened to from start to finish. Morton Feldman would have been proud of its matrix; one could even say that from here are beget the Ramones with their Barnett Newman art minimalism (and thence to Wire, and thence back to the ambient Eno to square the circle). Of ambience, it’s now time to go back… TO THE BEAT, TO THE BEAT, TO THE BEAT YEAH! THE KLF’S NON-STUDIUM HOUSE – A PEAK IS REACHED Cauty did a similar, but less impressive, exercise in 1990 with the album Space, but this was all preparation for the KLF’s immaculate series of Stadium House 12” singles; the greatest unbroken sequence of pop singles in the 1990s. “What Time Is Love?” as it appears in its Top Five-conquering form, is almost like a rebirth for the KLF; the same “kick out the jams” intro, but now the ideas have turned into colour, can now breathe; and when they appeared on TOTP, both Cauty and Drummond appeared far more relaxed and far more sublimely insolent than they did as the Timelords. They were still questioning how we were responding to pop, but crucially this was now of secondary importance; the magic of the unforced pop punctum overcame any theory. And how much more glorious was their second, and this time deserved, number one: “3AM Eternal” with its cover shot of a blurred, drunken Ford Galaxy careering through Westminster at midnight, its “This is Radio Freedom”/gunfire intro, its canny adaptation of the same structural formula as Snap’s “The Power,” Zuy Thien’s E-flat clarinet returning to cement the bonds with “Me Ru Con.” There was no stopping the KLF now unless they wanted to stop themselves. Simon Mayo screamed at the TOTP camera: “This is the most SPECTACULAR performance we have ever seen on Top Of The Pops!” as the massed monks, divas, drummers and fire-eaters prepared to launch into “Last Train To Transcentral.” And now, instead of Whitney just being sampled by the JAMMs, Tammy Wynette came and stood by the JAMMs for the ludicrous but great for precisely that reason “Justified And Ancient,” as if to stamp the approval of Pop Music on what they had started four years previously, to legitimise it, to celebrate its madness. It was her biggest UK hit since “Stand By Your Man” and very nearly the last thing she did of any consequence. There are worse ways to go. This time, the Deep South came straight to the M62. “They drive an ice cream van” sang Wynette, entirely straight of face, said van now having superseded the Ford Galaxy. But there was also the true sequel to Chill Out: “It’s Grim Up North,” the reverse of the sunlit dream, credited pointedly to the JAMMs rather than the KLF, and dressed in a plain grey sleeve with morbid Iain Sinclair sleevenotes wherein sodden sheep coexisted with decomposing cigarettes, and there is “a dirty sun setting over where Liverpool used to be.” A constant thud is heard which could be either an old Victorian mill/factory, or a distant techno rave in a wet field, where someone is attempting to construct a future. This track is perhaps the most unsettling in the KLF’s discography; the beats are as hard as they ever got, rain, grease and decay are all around them, as if the ice cream van were touting for customers in a cemetery in mid-Winter. A heavily-echoed, bass-voiced Drummond intones unemotionally the names of Northern English towns in the same way that Tom Clay intones the lists of war casualties in “The Victors.” The music eventually collapses into chaos; techno beats clash at the crossroads with a synthesised orchestra and choir ironically (or not?) playing “Jerusalem” before giving way to an emotion-filled, windy, peopleless landscape as poignant as that which concludes Flux of Pink Indians’ “Tube Disasters.” It may well be that the KLF decided to call a halt here for purely aesthetic reasons. An album, The White Room, was released and went platinum, but it’s a curiously and disappointingly flat affair; the album versions of the singles are extremely pale and uninvolving. At the same time a parallel album entitled The Black Room was supposedly recorded with the aid of Extreme Noise Terror, but the only fruit of this was the 7” single thrash version of “3AM Eternal” which both the KLF and ENT memorably performed at the 1992 Brits, though they were dissuaded from climaxing their performance by cutting open a sheep and drenching the audience in its blood (the black flipside to the cover of Chill Out?). A Black Room CD briefly appeared in record shop racks, but was entirely blank – as was doubtless the intent. Elements of “art” were now making themselves known and their pop was beginning to suffer as a result. Furthermore, following the success of “Justified And Ancient,” they were beginning to field calls from other veteran acts hoping for an easy ticket to a comeback. There were allegedly talks with Neil Sedaka and Brian Connolly, among others. But this wasn’t what Cauty or Drummond had desired or intended. Almost their last word was also perhaps their finest – “America: What Time Is Love?” This was a self-explanatory “rock” take on the now venerable WTIL riff, with “Ace of Spades” guitar and Glenn Hughes, formerly of Deep Purple, then freshly out of rehab, billed to his delight as “The Voice Of Rock.” Conceived to satirise the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery, the orchestra and choir are ZTT-esque in their pronounced irony (though some critics, including John Lydon, observed that they were getting a little too close to Frankie Goes To Hollywood-second-album overkill for their own good), but the record is amazingly punchy and propulsive; certainly their best “rock” record. At the end, Melissa of Voice of the Beehive deflates the balloon: “I mean, what’s with all this Justified Ancients of Mu Mu shit?” But it’s impossible to appreciate the track fully without listening to the B-side which echoes, and indeed justifies, it: the KLF’s finest moment – “America No More,” an astonishing piece of unironic anti-war protest fit to stand beside Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. Gunfire and explosions are generated by “Rockman Rock” playing “Atari,” and these are accompanied by cut-ups of voices and action, initially from Vietnam; but there’s no disguising the genuine terror which seeps through the track as the voice of Bush Senior comes into the left channel, detailing his plans for Iraq, Kuwait and the Gulf, while a bagpipe chorale starts up on the right. A Scots Guards battle hymn is played while American voices prepare to kill (think Peter Watkins’ Culloden, think Pontecorvo’s Battle Of Algiers), sometimes barely making itself heard above the gunfire. Then the hymn dies out and we are left counting down (the same countdown heard on Space and on “What Time Is Love?”) until the world ends. US cavalry bugles jostle for space with Eastern strings; and finally the same drone we heard underlining “Me Ru Con.” Above it, a less sympathetic voice: “If Jesus Christ were here tonight, he would not dare drop another bomb.” There is no more music. Nothing to say or add. Except gunfire. And whatever hell is left thereafter. Is it a cliché to say that the track sounds as though it was recorded two months ago? Or less of a cliché to say that it examines and finally deflates Baudrillard’s tired theory of “it’s all a TV illusion?” It may well ask you to decide what the point of pop music is; whether you can believe anything that it says, or whether you choose to do so. “No known cure.” In any event, it certainly qualifies as far greater art than anything else the KLF were subsequently to produce. Was their attempt to be artists a deliberate walking away from a pop treatise which they had no further need or wish to expand or modify? They set up their alternative £40,000 Turner Prize in 1993 for the worst British artist and foisted the money (or that amount which had not been snaffled by journalists) upon Rachel Whiteread. As Sinclair notes in Lights Out For The Territory, Whiteread’s “House” and Drummond’s unsolicited £40,000 gift were compatible mirror images, though they probably hated each other’s guts. The whiteness and involuntary impermanence of Whiteread’s house speak with as much repressed emotion as the closing synthesised crows in “It’s Grim Up North.” Thereafter, there were some pointless books and portfolios. There was the burning of a million quid in a shed on Jura, though the real figure was probably nearer £40,000. That would still have left Cauty and Drummond with £960,000, and one cannot imagine that that was all the money the KLF made. Coupled with their near non-existent work rate in the intervening decade, we can safely assume that they are not financially wanting. Yet would the KLF catalogue speak so forcibly to us were it still available like any common or garden Greatest Rave Album Ever package? We have to ask whether the deliberately limited timescale of the music’s availability, and the philosophy behind it, did more to destabilise the charts, and perhaps pop music itself, than any number of limited edition Wedding Present monthly 7-inchers? Was it that easy to get into the charts, to become popular? Was it enough just to exist? That dilemma of course makes everyone from Madonna to Jade Goody possible, gives them a reason to continue existing. Was it the greatest triumph of the KLF to tell us what pop music could be capable of, and then demolish the entire structure? After that, with all best intentions, British pop music went back to 1978, then to 1966, ultimately doubling back to 1982 where it still remains. Even the Prodigy retreated to a virtual 1971 (all those “real” guitars!). Or was it the final triumph of the KLF to give music back to the consumer? The fallacy that anyone can do it means that everyone does, even though the same 45-year-old puppetmasters are found in Pop Idol and Fame Academy. Nevertheless there is a vaguely admirable, less vaguely repulsive notion that it’s now enough just to exist, not even having to turn up. Get a number one? Release the single for one day only. Get your grandma to buy an extra copy and you might be there for two weeks. Cauty and Drummond perhaps finished what punk started; yes, we’ve exposed the wires, now what? I prefer to think of the KLF as a not necessarily disinterested, and more often than not, camera turned upon us with a determination to make us decide what we are, who we are, how we relate to life, how we listen to music, how we consume music – but could we turn to them for advice on how to live? As it turned out, their decision to quit pop was a wise one. A reunion was attempted in 1997 at the Barbican; for 20 minutes Cauty and Drummond, dressed in pyjamas as grumpy old men in wheelchairs, accompanied by Jeremy Deller’s Acid House Brass Band and sundry striking Liverpool dockers, revamped “What Time Is Love?” yet again as “Fuck The Millennium.” The idea was apparently to start a scrap on stage which would end up with the entire audience fighting; but the execution was vague and despirited, and the audience did not rise to the bait. Released as a single, it crawled to #28 (by that time, too low even to get them on TOTP) and disappeared without fanfare or regret. Compared to Scooter’s immeasurably smarter “Fuck The Millennium” (also composed in accordance with The Manual, yes?) it seemed flabby and self-satisfied. The last time they were in public, Drummond and Cauty appeared separately as part of Iain Sinclair’s M25/London Orbital event at the Barbican. Drummond came on looking very old, and rather like Michael Palin, to deliver an unremarkable homage to KLF roadie Gimpo (and, in his section of the London Orbital book, he is essentially a slightly less grumpy Victor Meldrew); whereas Cauty strolled on with guitar, band and deafening motorway tapes to deliver a “Battle Hymn Of The Republic”–goes-Hard House tribute to Gimpo which caused half the audience to rise to their feet and yell for more (“KLF – the real Britpop!” someone exclaimed). In his Wire review of the event, Ben Watson commented that it was Cauty’s “Keith Moon-style ruthlessness” which “made Chill Out and The White Room such abiding classics.” But even if we cast Drummond as a can’t-be-arsed variant on Pete Townshend, it has to be recognised that, in order to be(at) pop, each needed the other. Theirs may well be the pivotal career in pop music, the one which swung the pendulum back towards an unknown extreme. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
SAY YOU WILL BUY IT They lie sprawled and apparently lifeless on the sleeve over a wooden floor, or strung up on a meat rack, or nailed to a cross of their own making. How appropriate it should be that Buckingham and Nicks take pride of place on the cover; lying next to each other, but in opposing positions and facing away from each other – Nicks’ eyes closed, Buckingham’s eyes wide open and perhaps petrified. This is where the journey of a life gets you. And how appropriate they should take pride at being placed on the cover, because both the Fleetwood and the Mac know that the band without Buckingham-Nicks, or without Peter Green, isn’t worth this level of attention. Sixteen years ago Lindsey Buckingham had to drag the rest of the semi-comatose Mac on a lead to keep up with him on Tango In The Night, so much so that you mostly heard a virtual Stevie on that record. Now they’ve sharpened up. Christine McVie has realised her redundancy and left. Now it’s just us four to cope with, to conjure up magic, to summon up pain. Is Say You Will the best Fleetwood Mac album? To come up with a feasible answer to that question you need to have listened to Rumours first; it is abundantly clear that the unresolved issues from that quarter-century-old mutual confessional remain unresolved, and painfully so. And this time there’s no blissful AOR carpet on which to lay your head. Buckingham’s made quite sure of that. On last year’s CoM Mac retrospective I fantasised about the possibility of Buckingham engaging the services of the Neptunes. As brilliant as that may or may not have been, you wonder from the opening, frightening snare crack of “What’s The World Coming To” whether they were actually needed. It’s enough for Buckingham to know of them. And he knows about N*E*R*D* has listened to the Flaming Lips and much else besides, perhaps in order to stop listening to himself. Superficially – and oh how necessary the superficiality on this record is – “What’s The World” is a Victor Meldrew moan about Bloody Life Today, but listen closer to that fearful quaver in Buckingham’s voice, the way the drums don’t quite let you sink into AOR jolliness. “Every night, every day/In this house filled with shame/I can say I care/But there’s no one there.” We recall as he sings “Everyone’s gone to the moon” how the late Nina Simone scared the shit out of the listener with her demented but highly meaningful cackle through that Jonathan King song in 1970. She cut through the Dylanisms and found the diseased patient underneath. And here we go with how the world is today (significantly, the lyric “and the band played on” appears on the track “Come”) on “Murrow Turning Over In His Grave.” Starting off as an avant-folk roundelay of voices (buried deep amongst them, Christine McVie, as much of a ghost as the shadow of Joseph Cotten in the projection room after “News On The March”), the voices keep coming at you from odd angles, like wasps trying to stem an aneurysm in your head (and this is a record which demands headphones). Fleetwood’s drums blast in and Buckingham takes a guitar solo infinitely more ferocious and splintered than anything he’s ever played before. Drum tracks blast around your ears as though all these Kleenex tissue boxes were filled with landmines. As though a war were about to start. As it does in “Illume,” Stevie’s first song on the album – ostensibly about 9/11, but the way in which she sings words such as “What I saw on this journey/I saw history go down/I cannot pretend/That the heartache falls away” provokes one to wonder what war she’s really singing about. “I am a cliff dweller/From the old school,” she sings near the beginning, and age has given a harsher rasp to her voice, proving more firmly that Stevie’s what you get when you flip the Patti Smith coin hard enough. “Thrown Down” is a regretful postscript to “Dreams” where the attempt at rekindling a long-since broken down relationship is always doomed to failure. If Stevie provides the emotional adventure, Lindsey provides the sonics. “Miranda” starts off with a variant on the “Big Love” riff and moves into a brilliant Paisley Park psychedelic groove (has Fleetwood’s crucial drumming ever been better recorded?) to overwhelm its standard lyric about a tortured celebrity (Madonna?). Better still is “Red Rover” which puts the likes of Mercury Rev to bed with its unforced sense of adventure. Starting off with a furious but clipped acoustic guitar line which conjures up the spectacle of 1972 Roy Wood attempting Steve Reich (check the gleefully sadistic whoop which Buckingham throws into the line “Whisper murder in your ear”) it builds up into an ominous tribal beat with the demented choral line “We’ve come we’ve come we’ve come we’ve come to take you over” like bailiffs coming for Syd Barrett’s last guitar. The title track, “Say You Will,” is probably the nearest the album comes to having a hit single. Steviepop at her most bountiful, it’s a plea to the Other (we know which Other) to reconsider life (“If I can, get you to dance”) with a heartbreaking chord change in the latter half of the chorus. A request to go back to childhood, perhaps; that children’s choir which suddenly materialises at the end – or is it Stevie and Sheryl Crow? “Peacekeeper” is the first single proper, and significantly the only occasion on the album where Buckingham and Nicks sing together. Again we think of oblique references to The War (“This is not a test/It’s not a drill/Take no prisoners/Only kill”) but it’s still sex pistols at dawn. Even this isn’t enough to prepare you for the astonishing “Come” wherein Lindsey Buckingham appears to offload 25 years of grief, jibes and betrayal in an excoriating exorcism. He sneers, snarls, cajoles: “Think of me sweet darling every time you don’t come…can you feel the fever?” against Industrial percussion/guitar bashing – Nick Cave meets Nine Inch Nails. With an even more deranged and agonised guitar solo, closer to Sharrock than to Hendrix, “Come” achieves exactly what the White Stripes so conspicuously fail to do in terms of “rock” and “soul.” It’s all very well to use no equipment made after 1963, but sometimes you have to have been alive in 1963 to make a difference (never forget for a second that this is music being made by people in their fifties). It’s astonishing. That final question mark of a guitar curlicue. Whaddya say to that, Stevie? How can Stevie answer that? For the first of two such occasions on this album, she does so with a song she wrote a quarter of a century ago which didn’t make it on to either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours - “Smile At You.” But she couldn’t have sung this song in 1975 with the same careful mixture of calm and resentment that she does here. “Go on save yourself,” she growls. “I shouldn’t be here.” Over a bucolic minor chord background she carefully rebuts Buckingham’s loathing (“I can’t accept her/So be true to me”). You can feel the hate trying to overpower the underlying love. It’s a battle she has to win first. Stevie muses further on the next two tracks. “Running Through The Garden” only just avoids being early ‘80s Noo Wave AOR, with its Huey Lewis-style keyboards and chopping guitar, but yet again notice close up how these elements do not quite cohere; they are always slightly askance, and once more the terrible increasing certainty of Nicks’ 2003 voice gives lines such as “There are too many flowers to cut down/For the love I have for your life” unclassifiable depth. It’s hard to think that she’s not singing about her years of addiction here. And then, peace of a sort. “Silver Girl” with its exquisite Prefab Sprout guitar/synth descending chords. “A shadow moves across her face/You cannot see her soul.” Stevie sings Stevie, of course. A requiem which even lyrics like “She was a girlie girl” cannot dispel. She sounds as if she’s singing her own obituary. Sheryl Crow turns up somewhere on this track as well; another ghost, another could-have-been-me. Back to Buckingham for the next two, relatively conventional, tracks. It’s all relative. “Steal Your Heart Away” has him cheerfully singing “All alone we go all day after day/All alone we suffer,” while drums and guitar peals cut in at you from ever more unexpected perspectives; ditto “Bleed To Love Her.” See? I can do good old singsongs like in the old days. Just like “Go Your Own Way.” Of course that was punk rock. Too right that should have been number one in ’77. “Everybody Finds Out” has Buckingham playing Trevor Horn to Nicks’ Thereza Bazar. Under his influence Stevie (sometimes with processed ZTT vocals) seems to recant on the sentiments of “Smile At You,” now denying that any other Other is possible in Lindsey’s life. “You can’t love him! You can’t have him! I DO have him…Most of the time! (she almost laughs here) Anywhere we can!….Get AWAY!” It’s an extraordinary performance made all the more astonishing by what one realises Lindsey is doing with the music; that naggily familiar jagged guitar/bass line throughout, and then it all becomes clear with the string synth/cascading drums fadeout; Fleetwood Mac have turned into the Associates! The finale, and most of the song, is pure “Club Country.” Did Lindsey listen to much New Pop 21 years ago? The Associates never made it across to America, but it’s a fact that Buckingham, performing his solo hit “Trouble,” appeared on the same edition of TOTP in February 1982 as the Associates, making their debut appearance with “Party Fears Two.” Did he listen and quietly assimilate? And then, Nicks suddenly returns to a becalmed reality. “Sometimes I walk by/And I look up to your balcony/Just to make sure that you were real….When I see you again/As I always do…” The song is “Destiny Rules” and the long shadow of autumn turning into winter casts itself over the album. There’s now a very palpable sense of mortality. And listen, just listen, to that guitar fadeout – Lindsey turns Fleetwood Mac into the Smiths. You could sing “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” over the fadeout. And how appropriate that is. And see how the album turns back onto itself – a verse from “Illume” about “I like the coastal cities/I like the lights” returns in this song. A life resolving. It’s now time for Buckingham and Nicks to say their goodbyes. Lindsey goes first with the bizarre “Say Goodbye,” performed with faux-jubilation over a similar askew folk/minimalist waltz guitar to that of “Red Rover.” “Once you said goodbye to me” he sings with a strange and frankly disturbing elation, or rather hiccups it like Buddy Holly, “now I say goodbye to you.” Cheerio, buona sera and fuck off. Ha. Ha. Bloody ha. Answer that Stevie. Well she did. “Once you said goodbye to me.” And now she says it again, in a song written nearly 30 years ago, “Goodbye Baby.” She was dying then (“And I who never, never said goodbye/As I slipped away…You were with me all the time/I’ll be with you one day”). Sung over the simplest of guitar melodies and once you have listened to this you will weep for what you didn’t understand, even through listening to Rumours alone. That’s what she had to say. And he knows it. “Don’t take me to the tower/And take my child away…Yes I was outspoken.” I’ll tell you a Nina Simone performance which means a lot to me; “That’s All I Want From You,” from her 1978 album Baltimore. These were the lyrics; she declaims them, firmly but fairly. “A little love that grows and grows – not one that comes and goes. That’s all I want from you. “A sunny day with hopes piled up to the sky – not one that comes and dies. That’s all I want from you. “Don’t let me down. Just show me that you care. Remember - when you give, you also get your share. Don’t let me down. I have no time to wait. TOMORROW MAY NEVER COME. AND DREAMERS DREAM TOO LATE.” And all this time Lindsey Buckingham has been singing to a ghost. The reverie of a dying man. Could he now sing “Man Of The World” and mean it? He should have known of course from the opening section of “Running Through The Garden” with its reference to “the deadliest poison” and its guitar line and vocal which remind me so much of Stevie’s true descendent; Kristin Hersh on “Delicate Cutters.” But it’s not what Fleetwood Mac should have known 30 or 25 or 16 years ago which matters; it’s what they now know, the means by which they learned it and the means by which they are able to express it. Pop album of the year? What else is on offer? The cynical satisfaction in self-pity called Think Tank? The arrogant “it’s enough for me to exist” assumptions which make up American Life? The belief in nothing that constitutes Black Cherry? Ladies and gentlemen, you cheat me. Say You Will belongs in a different ballpark altogether. I would say that it is the best Fleetwood Mac album, and that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are more than ever the most important pop musicians alive today. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
TWO APPROACHES TO MAXIMALIST MINIMALISM: MIKE OLDFIELD AND GLENN BRANCA Over Easter I received two rather welcome CDs; one a complete re-recording of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the work's original release; the other the absurdly overdue CD remastering/reissue of Glenn Branca's The Ascension. Both extended exercises in conjuring the maximum sonic and emotional effects from minimalist guitar-based raw material; both serving entirely different audiences and purposes. It's sometimes said that Tubular Bells was the legitimisation/final triumph of minimalism as the Riley, Glass and Reich of 1973 would have known the term; moreover, it is the culmination of a certain strain of prog/folk-rock, just as The Ascension is the culmination of No Wave and the bridge towards what followed it. Tubular Bells would of course have been unthinkable without the then 19-year-old Oldfield's grounding, firstly in featherlite folk-rock with his sister Sally in Sallyangie, and secondly his tenure as bassist in Kevin Ayers' finest incarnation of The Whole World - listen to Ayers' Shooting At The Moon, a record as much responsible for Sonic Youth as The Ascension, and observe how firmly Oldfield anchors the divulgent wanderings of Ayers, Lol Coxhill and David Bedford. The beginning of Tubular Bells - the bit which everyone knows, the section used in The Exorcist - superficially seems like minimalism with its glitteringly sinister piano and harpsichord overlapping motif, but this is not the deliberately static melodicism of Glass or the percussion-based ruminations of Reich; as the bass guitar and then the harmonic structure enter, we realise that this is essentially a folk refrain in true Dorian mode; there are roots to this music which cannot be reproduced in a Juillard laboratory. Observe also how the repeated organ stabs punctuate the uncertain placidity of the music, before two electric guitars suddenly proclaim a transition; but instead of the expected metallic overload, we are ushered into the work's second theme; a glorious major key mandolin-driven melody. But this is as elusive a utopia as the unrepeatable opening chord of Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia; the first theme reasserts itself to a degree before giving way to a simple, distant piano/glockenspiel pattern. Then the agitation begins; pianos overlap (the nearest the work comes stylistically to Glass) and an electric guitar angrily snaps its way back in before culminating in a monstrous Sabbath riff for several fuzzed basses and (synthesised?) low male chorus. A Latinate melody and rhythm then make themselves known, rather inexplicably, before it again briefly leads us towards the major mandolin theme. Following this we have what could well be a digested history of the previous ten years of Brit blues-rock guitar; specifically a tribute to the then-just-lost Peter Green. A low heartbeat of tom-toms and guitars immediately recalls "Albatross" before the music steps up a gear, pausing to immerse itself in a pub piano and male voice choir, before launching into a brutal mass guitar riff overhung with a sinister organ drone. A prophecy of Branca? Not quite; the music then mutates into jazz-rock (inadvertently inventing Pat Metheny along the way) before an abrupt terminus and the tolling of "ghost bells." Lost, as the sleeve makes quite clear, at sea. A reluctant acoustic guitar plucks another folk melody (and this whole sequence is very reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well") and just as the strumming is about to turn angry... ...rebirth and regeneration. A nearly palpable nautical melody ("Drunken Sailor"?) is mutated by guitar and distant reed organ before launching into the finale of Side One. A bass line slowly builds in intensity - impossibly slowly for 1973 - echoed by the same distant organ. With guitars added, the drone becomes hypnotic, almost electronic in nature; one can see why Orbital think this the acoustic equivalent of Kraftwerk's Autobahn of a year later - the two are frighteningly compatible. The fugue continues to build up, and...enter Vivian Stanshall; the reason why I bought this album as a nine-year-old Bonzos fan. He announces the entrance of each instrument in exactly the same mode used on "The Intro And The Outro" but here it becomes more absurd with the lack of joke credits. "Double speed guitar," he says, slightly bewildered. "Two slightly distorted guitars" he announces, completely bemused but absolutely straight-faced. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. Finally he proclaims "PLUS...TUBULAR BELLS!" and said bells slam into the headphones with immense force. Female voices lend a chorus; the agitated groove settles into a comfortable, embracing wave. Life has begun again, and all there is left to say is said by a simple acoustic guitar which ends the piece, unaccompanied yet unobtrusive. This was pretty much all that Oldfield needed to say but there was another album side to be filled, and this he does with extended but inessential musings on the material already suggested on Side One. The opening "Harmonica" and "Peace" sections are more overtly folk-based, and in places quite poignant, but the build-up to the bagpipe guitar/timpani theme seems somewhat contrived, and the "Caveman" section even more so. After that he settles for some limpid ambient drones to conclude the album (a possible influence on the Durutti Column?) before closing with the theme on which the entire album may or may not be based - "The Sailor's Hornpipe" (Was that all there was? Try and find the quadrophonic version on the Boxed compilation, where the finale includes a brilliant "upstairs and downstairs" commentary from Stanshall). There are many noticeable bum notes on the original TB, and apparently it has long been Oldfield's ambition to re-record the entire work with Proper Technology and No Mistakes. I don't know. The facilities used to produce a record aren't as important as the imagination which is completely necessary to make a profound record. Thus "Interstellar Overdrive" or Escalator Over The Hill had to be rattled out on tinpot instruments and recorded in studios with the capacity of today's average Walkman, but their imagination still manages to blow and expand minds today. And I always thought that TB in the commercial/chart world worked best as the anti-Dark Side Of The Moon - its constant companion in the album charts for most of the '70s - determinedly lo-fi, pieced together piecemeal, the whole point being that it wasn't stereo sensurround numbness/numbifier. So Tubular Bells 2003 isn't quite played as it was in 1973, and the music deteriorates as a result. Unwanted Enya synthesisers now clog up the spaces which were essential in the original, a grand piano replaces the pub piano, and worst of all, John Cleese now does the voiceover in his best Basil Fawlty voice and manages to (a) be completely unfunny; and (b) detonate the point of Stanshall's original urban faux-urbanity. Beautifully played and produced, but it's the sort of beauty which banishes beauty (or even humanity). As prominent and pointless as Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (can one imagine Cleese doing the voiceover, even in 1973?). Branca banishes sentimentality and sailors in his work, but crucially not euphoria. The Ascension, recorded by his "core" six-piece band and originally released in late 1981, is one of the key records of the last quarter-century, a record in its way as influential on what followed it as "Planet Rock." This was an attempt to formalise, if not legitimise, the practices of No Wave (just as TB sought to order the distended flakes of prog, minimalism, folk-rock and even improv). Branca spoke of symphonies almost from the off, yet the performances of his various groups were usually faux-formal, always quick to break into heads-down, frets-up passion. On The Ascension, the core sextet consists of four guitarists (Branca himself, Ned Sublette, David Rosenbloom and, most importantly, the young Lee Ranaldo), Jeffrey Glenn on bass and Stephan Wischerth on drums. The existence of this group forces a live interaction which is of course not possible on TB, the latter virtually played entirely by a multi-tracked Oldfield, so the music has to face out into the world rather than into one individual's mind. As with its inescapable namesake and soulmate, Coltrane's Ascension, this music begins where most other music peaks. Immediately on the opening "Lesson No 2" we are led into what sounds like a mutated Joy Division riff, all anxious guitars, off-step drums and oscillating bass. After a couple of minutes the structure slowly atomises and takes itself apart, before it fades to a brief silence which is brutally terminated by a beyond-immense series of crashing, glass-breaking chords which are far more powerful than Oldfield's bells (though they serve the same purpose). As with Ayler at his most concentrated, there's no sense here of yearning to achieve nirvana; this is the terrible sound of something already achieved. "The Spectacular Commodity" has of course to be listened to with fresh ears, knowing the intervening two decades of Sonic Youth activity; indeed this piece now seems like a blueprint for SY's entire career (Thurston Moore succeeded Ranaldo in later Branca line-ups) with a procession of riffs/free interludes out of which other lesser groups would have craved to build an album. The effects here and elsewhere in Branca's music were achieved by tuning each guitar to the same note and separating them by register (soprano/alto/tenor/baritone). This gives an immensity and textural resonance which cannot be met by overdubbing or studio trickery. From the howling spectres which open the piece, the music gradually moves through ever more approachable phases before, at about nine minutes in, it launches itself into a glorious, climactic major-key riff/anthem which one does not wish to end. The final decisive drum crash is, again, an enormous YES to life. (and while we're on the subject of Petula Clark, I had forgotten the importance of "Downtown" in the film Girl, Interrupted; indeed it seems to me that the song and performance make the entire film redundant) The relatively brief "Structure" deconstructs a piledriving metal riff into its components, achieving a stasis arguably more imposing than that found in Glass. "Light Field (In Consonance)" again returns to exultant, major-key melodies and riffs; hear the ecstatic guitar glissandi which punctuate the piece (perhaps echoed in the instrumental mix of Propaganda's "Jewel" four years later?), realise also that this music is a millimetre away from being Big Country (which is not to criticise poor old Stuart Adamson; merely to point out the infinitesimal but crucial differences which can separate one school of music from another). Last and by all means most, we have the title piece: "The Ascension." This is the piece least easy to assimilate, but it is the most overwhelming. In the slow build-up of guitars over the first 3-4 minutes of the work, we hear immensity without much discernible effort - the same echoes in a shallow bay which we would later hear in the Cocteau Twins. Then the music climaxes over and over, higher and higher; plectrums become indiscernible, individuals mutate into a single organism/entity, and there is again a terrible and awesome certainty to this music's natural grandeur. Here Branca has actually achieved the Wall of Sound which Spector strived for so long to build (and one's mind can only boggle at what might have ensued had Spector been brought in to produce The Ascension) and in the charring, fusing elements of "The Ascension"'s climax one gets very, very close to whatever the "truth" may be in music. Perhaps only Kevin Shields/MBV understood how to take this music even further (I refer you, if you can find it, to the cataclysmic version of "You Made Me Realise" recorded at London's Town and Country Club on 15 November 1991; it is available as a bootleg), though of all the music which it influenced in subsequent years, the Swans at their peak were certainly capable of equalling its intensity (at least superficially) and Husker Du and Sonic Youth at their most purposeful weren't far off it either. I first heard it in early 1982, at a time where, perhaps in a pronounced reaction/counterpart to New Pop, rock did seem to be reaching a peak of near-unbearable intensity (think of Junkyard or Revelations or Hex Enduction Hour). The music has been remastered for CD; the spread seems slightly wider but the intensity remains. The reissue carries a very poignant sleevenote from Ranaldo (it begins "The album that you hold in your hand - the city in which this music was made no longer exists on the face of the Earth" and though 9/11 is not mentioned, you can't help but think of it) who also acknowledges the compromises necessary to make the music stereo-friendly (it was recorded in the hi-tech Power Station in NYC, as used by Springsteen, the Stones, etc.). As one who was fortunate enough to see Branca's group in person - at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, just over 20 years ago - I can testify that the music was far bloodier and more physical than is apparent on what is already an uncommonly intense record. It is reissued on 16 June; get it, even if you have to skip lunch for a fortnight to do it. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
QUICK NOTE BEFORE I COME BACK PROPERLY Just returned from Glasgow, and still getting my breath back, but until the hitherto announced articles are posted here later this week, for Gawd's sake go right now to Ian Penman's LONG OVERDUE blog. C'mon Paul M, start one as well... ;-) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
