A beautiful comment from Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips in today's Observer: "Music is amazing. There's some metaphysical comfort where it allows you to be isolated and alone while telling you that you are not alone...truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else. Which is why music, movies, books are so important. Without art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed." And that's the truth. For Simon, Joy, Kieran, David, Matthew, Susan, Kodwo and everyone else who was there yesterday... posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
CLEAR SPOT 2: TRANSCRIPT OF RESONANCE FM BROADCAST – 27 JUNE 2003 Hello, hello, come in. I wasn’t that difficult to find, was I? This is Marcello Carlin, regular writer for Uncut, increasingly irregular writer for The Wire, and overseer of the supposedly authoritative website The Church Of Me. Time, I feel, to dance and jerk with joy. The reason? The unsurprisingly surprisingly great label Ze Records – originally formed by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban in 1979, a label intentionally as much about fashion as music - has lately been disinterred, and the back catalogue is slowly seeping out again to remind our generation that we did not learn the lesson first time around. Although this programme has been billed as devoting itself exclusively to the adventures of Ze, I also want to widen the net by including several tracks representative of the shortlived No Wave movement, particularly from a compilation which bizarrely has yet to be reissued legitimately on CD. Nevertheless, the idea for this programme was precipitated by two Ze reissues which have recently come my way. Firstly, we have a dramatically expanded and revised version of the 1981 six-track 12” compilation Mutant Disco (A Subtle Discolation Of The Norm). Originally consisting of six tracks, this now resurfaces as a 25-track 2CD package. Were punk and disco really looking in the same mirror? Well, here’s a track which proves what happened when the glass dissolved. Originally the closing track, and now the opening track, on Mutant Disco, here is Was (Not Was) and “Wheel Me Out.” Was (Not Was) – Wheel Me Out (7:08) Ah, that unequalled cement mix of Carla Bley psychosexual angst, hard-bop trumpet and MC5 guitar – actually played by Wayne Kramer. And those Oriental minimalist strings hijacked from Chic. The other Ze compilation to be reissued is entitled NY No Wave: The Ultimate East Village 80s Soundtrack. A bit of a misnomer, as most of its 22 tracks were recorded in ‘78/’79. First of all, however, the musical apogee of No Wave, which is taken from a 1979 Brian Eno-produced compilation which inexplicably is yet to resurface – No New York. I note with the mildest of amusement the appearance of a new compilation entitled Yes New York, with a cover of identical design to the original (though with the lime green and black colour scheme reversed). Track one? The Strokes – live. Ah, ash, ash, all is ash. Here’s what the original story told. Two tracks from the group Mars – firstly “Helen Fordsdale” from No New York, followed by “3E” from NY No Wave. Of course, were we to trace the development of No Wave properly (as opposed to just the American version of post-punk), we would have to acknowledge Ornette Coleman’s “Dancing In Your Head,” one of the key records in any genre of the last 30 years. However, that album’s main track “Theme From A Symphony” lasts for over half an hour; so instead, here are two of its most spellbinding offshoots. Mars – Helen Fordsdale (2:27) Mars – 3E (2:55) Mars, with Mark Cunningham, Connie Burg (later Lucy Hamilton) and the recently departed Sumner Crane. Now here’s what I suppose must count as the nearest thing to a No Wave anthem – “Contort Yourself” by what sometimes constituted James Chance and the Contortions, but here is James White and the Blacks, with Robert Quine on guitar, and at the production console, one Tommy Browder, better known as August Darnell, even better known as Kid Creole. This is going to get used in a fast food commercial before too long… James White & the Blacks – Contort Yourself (6:18) Prior to his Contortions, James Chance was part of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, alongside Lydia Lunch. Their finest moment “The Closet” appears in an early version on NY No Wave, but here is the better version as heard on No New York. Teenage Jesus & the Jerks – The Closet (3:45) More of Chance in a bit, but for now let’s concentrate on Lydia Lunch. Instead of being boring and calling her the missing link between Patti Smith and Diamanda Galas – how much more elusive to term her the missing link between Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las and Linda Sharrock – let’s listen to the two sides of Ms Lunch as heard on her 1979 Ze album Queen Of Siam. Firstly the horn-drenched sleaze “Lady Scarface” – arranged, incidentally, by Fred Van Planck, the same man who arranged the music for The Flintstones – and then what is possibly the most disturbing song you’ll hear in this programme - “Mechanical Flattery” which pre-empts Buffy by two decades in its gruesomely gossamer tale of a dead soul rising and trying to reconstitute itself and reconnect with the world. Lydia Lunch – Lady Scarface (3:14) Lydia Lunch – Mechanical Flattery (2:47) Back now to sample Mutant Disco again. Here are the truly amazing Aural Exciters – effectively the Ze Allstars, with Darnell, Coati Mundi, Chance, Taana Gardner, Pat Place Et Al – with their No Disco updates of the John Martyn Live At Leeds template (i.e. start a song and have no idea where/how it’s going to end, but making art out of the muddle of a middle). Why isn’t anyone today capable of doing something as playful in its radicalism as “Emile (Night Rate)”? I mean, the Matthew Herbert Big Band? Gentlemen – you might have Arto Lindsay – of whom, again, more in a moment – but do you have live tapdancers? Aural Exciters – Emile (Night Rate) (6:48) Interestingly, there are two major changes to the original Mutant Disco release. Kid Creole’s “Maladie D’Amour” from the original compilation has been dropped and replaced by “(I’m A) Wonderful Thing (Baby)” and “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy,” thus reminding us that what was once the future is now a summation, a sort of Greatest Hits. The other major change is that Ian Penman’s vital sleevenote to the original does not appear to have been retained (but that was why I bought it! That, and other reasons, such as the aforementioned Dancing In Your Head, Uncle Jam Wants You, Escalator Over The Hill and Songs For Swinging Lovers, without which none of the record/Ze Records would have been possible). It’s a rueful reappearance, therefore, to remind us that we failed. Now we’ll let you have/hear this stuff again, but we’re leaving it to our kids to pick up on it and NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES – not to play safe and opt for Annie Lennox and George Michael as the future of pop. However, we must celebrate the gallons of genius which continue to pour out of Coati Mundi’s “Que Pasa/Me No Pop I” with its lyrics, acidic enough to make James Chance seem like James Taylor, and its call-and-response from the Coconuts which almost cross the bridge from the Shangri-Las to Ligeti in their intensity – and a Top 40 hit, too, when such things were still possible. Chart music on Resonance FM. Whatever next? Coati Mundi – Que Pasa/Me No Pop I (6:23) Coati Mundi, as played to death in 1981 by, of all people, Dave Lee Travis, who was also responsible for getting “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag” into the charts after playing it for a solid year. We underestimate the Hairy Cornflake at our peril. One major omission from NY No Wave is the lack of any tracks by DNA. Indeed, the recorded legacy of this band is patchy – there are four tracks by them on No New York, but I think they are better heard on another track which, by no coincidence whatsoever, has now reappeared on the Rough Trade Post-Punk 2CD compilation – “You And You.” Arto Lindsay may not have played chords on his guitar, but boy did he know about rhythm. I will follow this with a track which does appear on NY No Wave – actually one of two tracks credited to Arto/Neto. This one’s entitled “Pini, Pini” – and hear its splendidly hypnotic harmonic acumen. But first, “You And You.” DNA – You And You (2:05) Arto/Neto – Pini, Pini (2:30) Back to Mutant Disco Reloaded now. Were I Nick Hornby, I would doubtless lament loudly about how nearly everything on this album is brilliant enough to make us ashamed. As I am not, I shall instead gently remind you now of the glory which was Cristina, and her seductive demolition job on the Beatles’ “Drive My Car.” This will be followed by a James Chance and Pill Factory cover version – a tirade against troilism which used to be “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” – and this also appears on NY No Wave. Cristina – Drive My Car (3:21) James Chance & Pill Factory – That’s When Your Heartaches Begin (3:24) I purposely haven’t really gone into much historical or sociological detail about No Wave or Mutant Disco – the history of both is well documented – but where did either lead? Well, in order to avoid answering that question altogether, here’s a record which could only have risen out of a shotgun wedding of No Wave and Mutant Disco. In fact it came out as a 12-inch single on Lust Records in 1980, and demonstrates quite alarmingly brilliantly just what inspired heights of fusion could be achieved. Looking forward to both Einsturzende Neubauten and LCD Soundsystem, this record was underground even at the time, but it’s time now to disinter it. The group were called impLOG – that’s small “imp,” capital “LOG” – and the single was entitled “Holland Tunnel Dive.” impLOG – Holland Tunnel Drive (7:35) But that still doesn’t answer the question – where did the influence go? All over the place, to be candidly semi-honest, and I would need another programme to document how, from Sonic Youth through the John Zorn/Knitting Factory/Bill Laswell axis, to current operatives such as the Rapture and !!! – not to mention the person who arguably did least in No Wave or Mutant Disco yet profited the most, the erstwhile drummer of the Breakfast Club, Madonna. Still, the only way in which I can conclude this brief overview would be to play the climax of what in many ways is the post-punk Tubular Bells – the major large-scale work which justified the movement from which it arose – the title track from Glenn Branca’s epochal 1981 album The Ascension, which, conveniently, has also just been given its first full-scale CD reissue, remastered and with new sleevenotes by one of the band’s guitarists, Lee Ranaldo. Emotionally and aesthetically the work starts off where Coltrane’s Ascension finishes – but hear how, over 13 minutes, the former Theoretical Girl stretches and plays with the stop-start, deliberately unemotional, bullshit-free aura of No Wave, and demands that it begins to acknowledge the existence of emotion, encompassing as it does the absolute rhythmic determination of Steve Reich’s systems music and the seamless flow of post-Ornette improvisation. That’s all from the tip of the tip of a deceptively enormous iceberg. This has been Marcello Carlin from The Church Of Me; if you’d like to read more of my story, visit my website at [you’re here already]. For now, however, goodbye. Glenn Branca – The Ascension (13:10) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
RICHARD X One notes the attendant irony of Virgin Records’ copy protection warning notice attached to promo copies of the debut album of an artist who owes his reputation to bootlegging. But Richard X Presents His X-Factor Volume One is considerably more than the mere belated legitimisation of a long-expired momentary trend. Yes, many of its 15 tracks adhere to the backing track from one record/vocal from another format popularised by Richard X in his former guise of Girls On Top; but, as with all interesting records, there’s a profounder story to be told. Despite the mischief promised in its title and track listing, this is in fact an extremely melancholy record about a person who is clearly lost, or destroyed, and tries to negotiate a route back into life. This extends from the first main track, “Being Nobody” billed as by “Richard X vs Liberty X,” and already a hit single. It is of course a shotgun wedding of “Being Boiled” (backing track) and “Ain’t Nobody” (vocal), and yet it amplifies the sadness at the heart of the Rufus/Chaka Khan original of the latter. Superficially “Ain’t Nobody” appears to be a celebratory song about love finally found and won, but note the minor key out of which the song never climbs, and especially the second verse with lines such as “I wait for nighttime to come/To bring you to me/Can’t believe I’m the one/I must be dreaming/I want this dream to be real” – it’s a fantasy which hasn’t, as yet, been fulfilled. It was Rufus’ swansong, and what a turnaround and descent from the gleeful sexuality of “Tell Me Something Good” a decade earlier. It’s quite conceivable that the lovely singers of Liberty X have no idea of the real meaning of this song, as they sing it with great glee, but the impassive musical accompaniment (originally for a song about silkworm culling) repositions the aspirations of the lyric in a more hostile, harsher lit environment. “Let’s go back to the ‘80s!” is the sampled shout which kicks off “Rock Jacket,” a poignant but extremely danceable mix of the guitar intro to Spandau’s “Chant No 1” and goodness knows how many other ‘80s mullet air guitar anthems. A return to recapture what Richard X understands to be a desirable and preferable pop universe; bookended roughly by 1979 and 1984, he articulates the need for all of this to matter again. Hence the sad, low-key restyling of Thelma Houston’s Jam and Lewis-directed masterpiece “You Used To Hold Me So Tight,” here sung by Girls Aloud reject Javine – significantly missing Houston’s demented cackle halfway through the original, and with its title equally significantly reduced to “You Used To.” An irretrievable memory. The electronic lament in the background sounds muted, defeated. It’s the difference between the exuberant rebellion of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 and the exhausted resignation of its sequel The Ballad Of The Fallen 13 years later, recognising that the battle had in fact been lost. Throughout this album I am reminded of another album wherein grieving and angst were gradually exorcised throughout its course, and the process disguised by electrodisco beats – Donna Summer’s 1977 masterpiece Once Upon A Time, wherein the bereaved subject tries to restart her life, to stake her claim for continued existence. There are stops, starts and setbacks but she gets there in the end – remembering, of course, that we are listening to a fairytale. The ineffable poignancy of “Say Something Nice” still cuts deeply, and Moroder’s epic thuds overpowering Summer’s fight for solvency in “Working The Midnight Shift” calls to mind the Welfare-To-Work employees of Dick Clark restaurants whose sub-life is examined in Bowling For Columbine. The difference here is that the entire album is bpm sequenced; musically it is never allowed to drift into introspection – you have to dance your way through the subtext to find the Summer weeping in its still, broken centre. On “Just Friends” there is the answerphone message of a sad girl placing a personal ad, but warning any potential responders that she will not allow anything to go any further than friendship (“Don’t try to touch me” – “Past, Present And Future” by The Shangri-Las). Following this we hear the voice of the long-lost Caron Wheeler on “Lonely,” a far more desolate song than anything she did with Soul II Soul (what do you expect from a collective whose first album principally comprised product placements/adverts for Jazzie B’s clothes shop and club nights? How different was/is Club Classics Vol 1 from the Fast Food Rockers? And isn’t the latter the logical consequence of the “ironic” corporate pranksterism of PiL, Scritti and BEF, the result of a gradual process where any irony is systematically eroded by time to leave us with a de-ironicised worship of unrestrained capitalism?). “Away From Life” would be a useful alternate title for this song. If you’re tempted to yawn loudly and lengthily at the prospect of yet another version of “Walk On By” it should be noted that the vocalist here is the long-lost Flying Lizards frontwoman Deborah Evans-Stickland. Apparently in the studio she insisted that she have the sheet music in front of her, in spite of the fact that she cannot read music. Here she delivers her trademark post-Grenfell dispassionate deadpan delivery, but in this context it sounds more like someone numbed by desertion, someone from whom all emotion has absconded. Note the sound effects of seagulls and slot machines in the background; walking, defeated, down Brighton promenade, alone, arguing oneself out of walking into the English Channel and having done with any desire for a new life. Deborah stays around for the next track, the brilliant “Lemon/Lime,” wherein she intersperses a roll-call of clichéd job application advertisements (all these adverts!) – “Are you willing to work fl----exible hours?” with a daft succession of rhyming non-sequiturs – or perhaps not: “Armageddon/David Sneddon.” Are we going to get a happy ending? Kelis appears for the fabulous “Finest Dreams” which makes even more ingenious use of a Human League backing track set against an SOS Band lyric. “If I had the choice, I’d choose love,” it begins, and although it is again ostensibly celebrating the discovery and consolidation of love, remember the title – “Finest Dreams” (from the League’s “Things That Dreams Are Made Of”). The subtle echo on the chorus chords which make them sound more ominous than welcoming. It is terrific pop, of course, but we are not yet out of the cemetery. Eventually, the resolve snaps, and on strides Tiga to demand that love become the centre of his life again – like Michael Moore returning to K-Mart with cameramen in tow – in the phenomenal “You Better Let Me Love You Tonight,” a terrific old school hi-NRG stomper with artful dynamics designed to explode in the right corners. But there’s that threat implicit in the whole song – what if she refuses to love or be loved? “I’m the type of boy who always gets what I want.” Desperate to the point of ….? Were Federico and Jon from Big Brother to essay their own reading of this song, it would probably pay Virgin employees’ mortgages for the next year (the alternate sung/spoken/echoed lines). After a quick “Best Album In The World…Ever!” ID from Mark Goodier (you mean it all, don’t you, Mark?) the record climaxes, as it only could have done, with the Sugababes’ chart-topping alignment of Numan and Adina Howard “Freak Like Me,” thankfully here in the superior “We Don’t Give A Damn Mix” (though the Girls On Top original still, I think, remains the best effort) – curiously making more sense here than it did on the Sugababes’ own album, because here the urge to live has finally triumphed, and the record’s subject is relaunched into the world. And how moving an epilogue is “Into You” sung in one of his best recorded vocal performances by Jarvis Cocker. Marrying the melody line of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” with what sounds like Vangelis (or is it Yes’ “Wondrous Stories”?) Cocker finds redemption, grace and peace, duetting with the ghost of Hope Sandoval, and almost weeping lines such as “For the first time in my life…I’m lying [with you].” But you have to take into account the sudden vertigo of the middle eight, with its baritone booming “No time, no time.” It could still all be an illusion, but perhaps we could consent to be content with that. A minor-key fragment “End” takes this very moving album to its uncertain but moderately brighter conclusion. Unlike the upcoming I, Monster album neveroddoreven - a potentially stunning and disturbing record which is fatally wounded by its insistence upon camp, whereas its songs like “Heaven” and “Who Is She?” deserve to be taken seriously and traumatically, like the ghost of Joe Meek trying to communicate through the CD as medium – Richard X’s album recreates and restructures pop chimeras, but never forgets its heartfelt reasons for doing so. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
IMMORALITY VS. IMMORTALITY Dizzee Rascal and Peter Wyngarde We spend most of our lives being hypocrites. We pretend to love and be committed to the work which we do for no other reason than to provide the means to live and to postpone death. As consumers of art, we are likewise “a trifle hypocritical” insofar as we profess to believe in and adhere to some remotely-defined sense of “standards” yet in reality prefer to consume art which defies every single one of these set standards. We understand instinctively that presenting the world with our unadorned, real selves will more than likely condemn ourselves to death or anti-existence. Thus it is that I am this week recommending to you two records which in many key ways express beliefs and ideas which could be construed as repulsive and repugnant. Then again, what happens if we choose to ban any art from our lives which dares not to agree with what we think? A glorified Thumperland, I would venture, and a far more dangerous and ultimately life-denying self-suppression which reins us in and will eventually cause a slow, internal death in ourselves. Or, to put it in a blunter, back-to-basics way, we nod our heads at and agree with Billy Bragg and fall asleep. There’s a queer sort of convenient symmetry in the fact that Dizzee Rascal’s real name is Dylan Mills. The tongue liberator coexisting with the industrial oppressor. A graduate of the Roll Deep Crew who propels garage beyond comfortable aspirational notionalities, back into a post-punk/post-New Pop basement where souls combust. I once had a dream where I was standing outside an obscure and uninviting tube station – Trinity Station it was called, non-existent on the real Underground – somewhere in a perpetually half-lit and cold, undefined inner/outer London sidings (perhaps it was the eerily purple-skied, architecturally askew “SE29” immortalised in the recently discontinued ITV would-be avant-garde soap opera Night And Day). The entire inside of the station then proceeded to burst and explode outwards, casting ill-defined pieces of human beings out towards a well-defined destiny. If Boy In Da Corner, Dizzee Rascal’s debut album, were to be set anywhere it would be here, in this dreamed tube station, just before “the cupboard explodes.” There is a greyness in this record which almost outdoes the Cabaret Voltaire of 1981, but the architecture of the landscape is presented perfectly – pizzicato synth strings, riding a rollercoaster sans brakes, wot-u-lookin-at beats snapping at your heels and ears. And also the distinct sense that Rascal’s been listening, funnily enough (because this album demonstrates no humour whatsoever or wheresoever), to Sylvian and Sakamoto. We know that there are precedents for this in ‘90s jungle, never more so than in the use of a sample from Sakamoto’s theme from The Last Emperor in Shut Up And Dance’s “The Green Man” (one of the greatest anti-drug songs ever, more so because it is entirely instrumental). In fact Boy In Da Corner is very much a sequel to and redefinition of SUAD’s flawed masterpiece Death Is Not The End, except here there isn’t even Kevin Rowland’s rehab acoustic guitar to comfort you. Certainly this Dylan’s vocal delivery might prove as unsettling and radical as the Dylan after which he was (presumably) named: 5000 wpm delivery speed, like the rapid fire of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” convulsing/combusting in an electric chair. And a perpetually hyper-epileptic, neurotic voice, verging throughout on tears; a laboratory rat taken out of its natural environment and struggling to cope with its incomprehension of the “real world.” Because the Rascal is 17 and has just left school. Indeed, much of this record could be considered as poignant a lament for expired childhood as the staggering final chapter of The House At Pooh Corner. But there is no luscious middle England green woodland to facilitate Rascal’s passage into adulthood. “I Don’t Want To Grow Up” could be this record’s alternate title – but no, Boy In Da Corner, where he’s always been (“Dylan go and stand in the corner for the next twelve years. That’ll teach you not to sniff your armpits in class.”) – no title could be more appropriate than that. He realises the existence of something called death, another thing called guns, and yet another “thing” called the female of the species, which latter he seems to find particularly problematic. Could the opening track “Sittin’ Here” have been Original Pirate Material had it been recorded five years earlier? The latter is of course the more “lived” record, a product of someone with experience of how much shit the world contains and has acclimatised himself to it. On “Sittin’ Here,” however, the fish has been compulsorily yanked out of its water and is wriggling to stay alive. Key perhaps that the first words we hear are “Lay back” (in the mortuary sense?), rapidly followed by “Get it right/Don’t be polite.” He has trapped himself in his room (“I’m looking into space while my CD plays…/I think too deep and I think too long/I think I’m getting weak ‘cos my thoughts are too strong”). The delicately disjointed Sylvian/Sakamoto melody/rhythm plays while outside we hear, distantly, police sirens and gunshots. He knows that sooner rather than later he will be compelled to take Tin Drum out of the CD player and enter the latter world, and it’s filling him with life-denying dread. He reflects on the childhood which has been lately taken away from him – “Only yesterday, life was a touch more sweet.” He cannot comprehend why he now has to exist “here.” Karen Carpenter isn’t that far away from him, aesthetically speaking – that unspoken but terrible dread which runs through the entire subtext of side two of the Carpenters’ Here And Now. He concludes “I keep getting vexed ‘til I think – what’s it worth?” before proceeding to spend the remainder of the record getting vexed. Suddenly he is strapped into the chair of adulthood and away he careers, confused in his assumed confidence, on “Stop Dat,” wherein his tears jerk in (2) step with the extraordinary hyperbolic momentum of the music, a step further even than the suddenly tentative-sounding So Solid Crew. He strides through his estate, never letting his fear be smelt. He meditates on the meanings of his “screw face” (Skinner’s “bad day frown”) – “Screw face means I’ve underachieved…Screw face means LET ME BREATHE!” before suddenly veering into the Turkey Trot from hell. “Do the butterfly!” Rarely has the command to get up and dance been so utterly denuded of fun and life. The single “I Luv U” you will already know. I still do not know the identity of the astonishing lady rapper on this track, but her presence is absolutely crucial insofar as it questions how much of Rascal’s rant is rooted in reality. She is, supposedly, 15, and has just had what she claims is Rascal’s kid – Rascal denies it vehemently and splenetically, refuses to acknowledge life-changing responsibilities, blames her for everything, accuses her of pestering him. She on the other hand complains (far less vehemently) that she “can’t go nowhere…these days” because he’s “following me here, following me there.” Is it all imagined? The parentage is of course admitted in the secret centre of the song; their exchanged refrains of “Oh well” as they both see life fading away from them. Her first “oh well” is a particular punctum, uttered just as the synth goes into an alienating minor key behind her. This won’t be the last occasion on the record where Rascal blames the woman for everything. “Brand New Day” returns musically to the Sylvian/Sakamoto template, but now filtered and varispeeded to take the track into Boards of Canada territory. Rascal expresses disbelief that other rappers don’t “chat about what’s happening.” He warns, chillingly, that “it’s gonna be a hot summer…and an even hotter winter…and I ain’t talkin’ about the weather.” Has a “brand new day” ever sounded more unwanted, more dreaded? This is an anthem of anti-positivity, for it carries with it the far-from-remote possibility that a new day will mean death (remote comparisons – Tony Christie’s “I Did What I Did For Maria,” Roger Whittaker’s “Morning Please Don’t Come”). It’s one of the record’s standout tracks. So naked, so fearful. And yet, at the end, the track shuts off and Rascal says cheerfully “OK, next one…” (Again fuelling my belief that the music which now matters has become localised, impromptu, speaking from the inside of their creators with no mediator to prevent/alter them from reaching your insides. The record as a record, a weblog entry, the importance of the unfinished, that all records should cease only with the cessation of life) The “next one” is “2 For” and involves Roll Deep’s Wiley on production duties. Yes, it starts and finishes with a 78 rpm argument, again with a woman, and the initial thrust of attack is “I’m no female beater, but…[I’ll] slap that girl if she hates me” but this goes on to be an assault on all easy targets. “I don’t obey no policeman ‘cos they forget they’re human.” About the Queen: “I live street and she lives neat.” Still, this is beginning to leave an uneasy taste in the mouth. “Fix Up, Look Sharp,” however, is terrific pop (the nearest the album comes to “pop”). Driven by a superlative (Bonham?) drum loop and an exuberant girl-group “Wooo!” (“Love Shack”?) this is exactly the sort of joint which Jay-Z should be cutting, even though lyrically it doesn’t venture much beyond “Flushing MCs down the loo.” What an image, though! But this blip of confidence is soon overwhelmed by genuine confusion. The next three tracks are worthy of Tricky at his trickiest. “Cut ‘Em Off” seems to float around without any definable anchor. He doesn’t (momentarily?) seem to know who he is. Signifiers – “Review the situation,” “Socialise/Negotiate,” “Take part/Take over” – rattle around like some Pop Will Eat Itself lyrical leftovers, before Rascal exclaims over and over that you shouldn’t attack him because, like the halo in the benefit fraud ad, he knows where you live and knows where to find you (“I’m not a ratchet but I bang a lot”). Except, here’s the rub: “Just remember this – I AM YOU! If you think you’re real, do what you’ve gotta do.” An astonishing admission that he is more probably than not ranting to a mirror. “Hold Ya Mouf” doesn’t seem to be about much at all, apart from stating that “I’m a problem for Anthony Blair” – and how Rascal relishes that “Anthony” – and the abandoned signifiers of rifle clicks. Better still, however, is “Round We Go.” Propelled by what sounds like the decaying skeleton of The Magic Roundabout, Rascal muses tearfully that “it’s just one big circle here” and meditates on the multiple meanings of the word “friend” (this song is to the word “friend” what Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” is to the word “baby”). A shame that he had to follow that verse with more undigested spleen against Women Who Betray (His Perspective Only) – still, it’s the answer record to the Sugababes’ “Round Round.” What happens to those left behind, barred from participation. Then we move slightly into Tim Westwood territory. “Jus’ A Rascal” has an incongruous amateur operatic chorus of “he’s just a rascal, Dizzee Rascal” which not only calls to mind Busta Rhymes’ “Branded” but also Gilbert and Sullivan. Roots can be found in the most remote of British places. But then we move more decisively into Taliban territory. “Wot U On” and “Jezebel” are the problem tracks here. The former begins with the refrain “Love talks to everyone, but money talks more” and is powered by a sneering female chorus – the “I Luv U” lady returning, by the sound of it – of “Where’s yer cash, where’s yer dong?” and similar. On a bubblegum level it’s compulsive and rather amusing listening, but taken in tandem with sentiments expressed elsewhere on the record one is driven to wonder whether frustration and fear can find a better outlet than the demolition of easy targets. Doesn’t he like Mis-Teeq or something? Then comes this track called “Jezebel” which is “I Luv U” from a different and less compelling perspective; an uncompromising attack on a 16-year-old girl who chooses to fuck indiscriminately, spreads VD and ends up a single mother. It’s bad enough that lyrically and politically this could have been the work of Paul Dacre, but near the end this line comes: “She’s the mother of two/Worse than that, two little girls, two more of her/Two more little Jezzies…” Straight away he then moves onto the track “Seems 2 Be” where he boasts of his impeccable sexual prowess. And one has to say an emphatic no to all of this. It’s odious and misguided, and indirectly colours everything else that he says on the record. And then I remember things like Trouble Funk’s “Woman Of Principle” and sigh inwardly at the undemolishable barrier between goodness of human nature and goodness of music. Because the unpalatable aesthetic truth is that one cc of Rascal’s sperm rocks more than the worthy massed bodies familiar to readers of the NME circa 1985-87. Thus with complete and unfettered hypocrisy I can dive back into the terrific post-PiL rumble of “Live O” (not an idle comparison; listen to Rascal’s hugely Lydonesque cries of “Live O!” which sound more like “Libel!”) with more distended ghost dancing (“Skank out and jump about!” the camp commandant orders – or so it sounds). Finally we reach “Do It,” the album’s closer and the album’s “Stay Positive” where, if I hear it aright, Rascal is trying to explain/atone for what he has been saying for the previous 53 minutes. That Sylvian/Sakamoto Camus-meets-bamboo motif returns and the sentiments of the opening track return also. “Everyone’s growing up too fast…No one understands us!” We are, as usual, encouraged to keep going – “Sleep tight, everything will be alright” – but if anything this quest sounds even more fruitless and hopeless than that of Skinner. “I don’t really ask much, so I don’t own much,” Rascal confesses. The track totters uncertainly to its end. Some studio chatter concludes the album – “I need to talk more.” Selectively? Wisely? It all reminds me of an equivalent ghost from the past. ”It wasn’t that difficult to find, was it?” For the best part of 30 years, the solitary album recorded by the actor Peter Wyngarde was extremely difficult to find. Withdrawn by RCA after less than a week on release in 1970 – it was a tax loss – it was remastered for CD reissue on Rev-Ola by Joe Foster, only to be vetoed by Alan McGee on moral grounds (!). The masters passed to RPM Records, who recently provided us with the definitive Joe Meek anthology, and they reissued it on CD in 1998. Originally eponymously titled, with a front cover of the moustachioed Wyngarde looking moody and sultry in a check suit, it was reissued under the title When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. Presumably this was the title originally intended for the album, or maybe RPM were trying to hook the Austin Powers audience. But the album is anything but camp, whilst simultaneously being nothing but camp. It is tongue-in-cheek, but seriously so; it is naturally very actorly, in the line of the Richard Harris/Jimmy Webb collaborations, but the mixture of mischief and anxiety doesn’t always seem acted. Wyngarde was, in 1970, one of the highest-paid actors on British television, thanks to his starring rôle in the ITC biscuit-cutter spy melodrama Department S and its subsequent eponymous spinoff Jason King. He played an articulate, lecherous fop who somehow always managed to nail villainy as and where necessary. He was a distinguished stage actor with previous film/TV form; very good in Aldrich’s The Haunting, as camp as required in the notorious “Hellfire Club” episode of The Avengers, and a superb, if underused, Number 2 in the “Checkmate” episode of The Prisoner, meditating and practising karate in pre-moustache mode, looking and sounding astonishingly like Alan Rickman. On the CD reissue sleeve there is a priceless photo of Wyngarde, in Jason King mode, looking like a kinkier Charles Bronson; meticulously unruly shoulder-length hair, moustache with love pumps for handlebars, a knotted scarf, chest with hair and medallion, open leather suit and a belt which carried, on his left, a purse, on the right a pair of screwdrivers, and at the front, a pair of pliers. He wasn’t your husband, which explains much of his popularity at the time. Naturally, in the light of “Macarthur Park” et al, record companies were keen to approach him for a quick-buck moneyspinning record – EMI suggested an album of Sinatra and Frankie Laine covers. Wyngarde, who readily admits to not being able to sing for toffee (despite having done Brecht and Eisler), instead took up the offer from RCA, who indicated that he could do whatever he liked. He took the invitation literally and took the whole project, if not himself, very seriously indeed. Enlisting the aid of musical director Hubert Valverde and producer Vic Smith, Wyngarde, in his words, “sat on the loo and put some words to tunes I’d got from the Valverde brothers.” They are lyric-poems rather than songs as such; Wyngarde sings only intermittently throughout the album. And yet virtually the first we hear of him is his voice singing, to himself. After a quick cackling sample (moral: don’t take the record seriously), a brutal breakbeat storms in and a John Barry-esque brass fanfare enters, accompanied by a bassline which sounds as though it keeps getting kicked downstairs. But this dramatic opening then fades into the background, while in the foreground Wyngarde is singing a French song to himself, lighting a candle, preparing to welcome us into the album. An unheard doorbell rings and he walks across the stereo to usher us in. He immediately starts chatting us up, though becomes noticeably irked when he says, “No the lights haven’t fused, it’s candlelight” before returning unconvincingly to an intimate tone. Something is clearly not right here. “No, no, come over here. It’s closer to everything.” Everything here being equated with “my life.” “I’ve started on the champagne” he points out. Already pissed before “she” has even arrived at his house. But, as the album subsequently makes clear, there is no “she” – this is as much of a pantomime act as Judith Evelyn’s Miss Lonely Hearts in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, welcoming in an imaginary suitor, setting the table for two before realising that there is no one there and dissolving into tears, her head invisible in her hands. The only audience here is the listener Be seduced by the champagne and the chat and you won’t notice the rope he’s subtly winding around you. Or indeed the fulsome sleevenote penned by “Jason King” – “I can think of no other album that has brought me such continuous pleasure than this outrageously funny, original and versatile one.” And this intent was intended – Wyngarde again: “…having a victim forced to sit down and listen to it for 40 (actually 35) minutes.” To listen to him, to hear him expound his woes; there was no need for Elton John to commission a musical about Michael Fagin at the foot of the Queen’s bed, for this is the equivalent soundtrack. (Remember, he’s supposed to be wooing the lady, but the frantic Bond-esque music is what’s playing on the stereo in the background, hardly music for candlelit dinners) Now terrified, the “victim” is first led into a utopia of harp cascades as Wyngarde muses about the relationship between love and the month of April (never mentioning, but never forgetting, that it is the cruellest month). His picture book portrait of innocent, courtly love is curiously distended by a comparison with “the stinging taste of mint.” And he then, sinister in his sweetness, asks: “It is April…before a rainfall.” The opening brass/rhythm motif then returns, now more forcibly, for the inevitable consequence of all of this. “Rape rape rape rape!” barks Wyngarde like an undersexed Alsatian, as a curiously familiar-sounding trumpet issues freeform screams behind him. This is the track “Rape,” the track which doubtless prompted RCA’s quick withdrawal (so to speak), the track which upped the value of the original album to £400, the track which dissuaded McGee from reissuing it on Creation, the track which (even though, or because, it comes so early on in the album) is the absolute cynosure of the album. If we doubt this, we only have to remind ourselves of the back cover of the original album – the complete antithesis of the front cover, showing Wyngarde, back to camera, seemingly pissing against a wall strewn with graffiti – all to do with rape: “Behind the newspaper I could see a copy of the Kama Sutra,” “He said he was a dentist, but I knew he wasn’t when he took his teeth out,” “She told me she was a vegetarian” etc. What bothers nearly every casual listener about this song is that it appears to be a comedy song about rape. Essentially an excuse for Wyngarde to show off his ability at multiple accents (look how big mine is), this song purports to demonstrate the different forms of rape carried out in different countries. And it clearly is not just about bodily rape; for America, we are told “We’ll never be late – except for that date with impatient Black Power,” while for Russia, Wyngarde states “Czechoslovakia is far more suitable.” The rape of countries and civilisations. And with Germany, he inevitably evokes Nazism: “…which all makes it comparatively kinky/With gas thrown in to get rid of the stinky.” So is the seeming amorality of this song “Rape” more excusable than Dizzee Rascal’s lambasting of teenage single mothers? In the light especially of Throbbing Gristle’s subsequent examination of the unexaminable and unspeakable, it doesn’t seem so out of place or inexplicable as it might have done in 1970, and I also wonder whether Jerry Dammers didn’t cop an ear to the arrangements before cutting “The Boiler” with Rhoda Dakar (the inevitable answer record, of course). Now, as every schoolboy knows, irony and projected images are dangerous things to play with in the arena of music or art in general, and usually are taken literally with the subtext being ignored entirely. My view is that Wyngarde is clearly playing a caricature and at least attempting to use the comedy to draw out the far more serious subtext. But then one could say as much of Life Is Beautiful… The immediate lapse into drunken French balladeering – “La Ronde De L’Amour,” the same song we heard him singing at the beginning of the album – reminds us of course that the album would have been unimaginable without the precedent of Serge Gainsbourg; and indeed the album as a whole comes across as a sort of proto-blog Brit equivalent of Melody Nelson. It’s also important insofar as it presages what is happening now with everyone from D Rascal to M Ward – albums which have the licence to wander freely from song to song, for songs to disintegrate or mutate, for the artist to turn in on himself – in short, an expression of an as yet unconcluded life; what may all along have been the original intention of music on record, and its ultimate justification for its independence from, and its lack of inferiority to, the printed word (as with weblogs, these are all expressions and emotions which can’t neatly fit into the concept of a book. The data, however, is all there). So, as I say, Wyngarde uses this record’s 35 minutes as any blogger would use a session at the PC terminal; to construct an impromptu world, to stop the pretence of “songs” wherever necessary, to insist that anything can indeed go. Thus we get another quick bucolic (if regretful) interlude in “Jenny Kissed Me” before the ballad “The Way I Cry Over You.” Can you believe that Wyngarde can cry? Valverde constructs the most graceful of arrangements behind him – an arrangement worthy of Scott Walker. Can you act tears? Will this record tear itself apart? Or does it mean the end of life? We now have Wyngarde, in an Churchillian “old man” voice, reciting Auden’s heavily ironic and bitter paean to a mediocre and wasted life “Unknown Citizen” – wandering from channel to channel as though even bureaucracy can’t be sure of itself. “It’s When I Touch You” revisits the orchestral hush of “The Way I Cry Over You” but now there is gritted-teeth carnality in Wyngarde’s repeated whispers of “when I…when I…” Remember that the victim remains bound (and perhaps gagged?). Wyngarde then decides to read out a letter from the Sunday Times of 28 September 1969 written by two teenage female skinheads from Great Bookham. You can almost see him creaming himself as he salivates over the details of how they dress. “Great…Bookham” he muses. How on earth did skinheadery reach there? Without warning, we are then plunged into a bizarre C&W soundtrack - “The Hippie And The Skinhead” over which Wyngarde intones (part-phased) the saga of “Billy the Queer, Pilly Sexy Hippie” as though this were an outtake from the American Song-Poem Anthology. Where the hell is he going? Back to seduction. “Try To Remember To Forget (Riviera Cowboy)” is an eerie presage of George Sanders’ suicide note – the last thoughts of a bored superficial man who has suddenly discovered that inside there is nothing but burnt-out, long-spent emotion. “It wasn’t you,” Wyngarde reveals. Then “Jenny Kissed Me” returns, implausibly. “And it was…” before everything shifts into backward drum tracks, funereal piano and Hendrix guitar. This is what she’s like. Until the Mike Sammes Singers from the afterlife try to sing us out of this one with “Widdecombe Fair.” We now come to Wyngarde’s take on late ‘60s freakbeat – “Neville Thumbcatch,” originally written by Vic Smith for his former band The Attack. Alternating between horn-driven Pro-Plus pop and dreamy verse interludes (the harp and voices on the latter are straight out of P P Arnold’s “First Cut Is The Deepest”), Wyngarde tells the story of a mediocre Everyman who prefers his allotment to his wife, and ends up with neither. Worthy of Blur at their sharpest, as I’m sure many others have commented, this provokes the question: what if this whole album is a reverie by Mr Thumbcatch of a life he fancies but will never have, wherein seeps the real grief of his wife’s departure? Or, what if this whole album is a reverie of a rapist and murderer? What is he doing to the victim? Nothing, it would seem. As proved by “Once Again (Flight Number 10)” Wyngarde/King/Thumbcatch is indeed alone, his Other long since departed. But…”flight number 10…from where?” “Why is waiting so bare?” “My life wasted and gone.” “I know I’ve been waiting too long.” Would this album be as powerful if we hadn’t known about Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting For The Miracle” 22 years later? “I am alone in this world.” Even the victim is a fantasy. A real one would long since have given him the slip. Given the fate of Melody Nelson, perhaps he was in love with her too. The utopian harp returns for “Pay No Attention” though the tone is markedly less sunny. And lastly, perhaps the most sinister track on the album – in many ways more sinister than “Rape” – is heralded in by a bucolic, medieval woodwind refrain. It’s called “April” (or is “she” called April?) and for the first time on the album Wyngarde’s voice is entirely devoid of warmth or love. His teeth are now bared and his mask has been discarded. He cackles, almost, at us for being taken in. “Think not I own my shame – it is yours, my lady,” he sneers. “My singing was meant to hurt.” He concludes, as though it’s the last thing you’ll hear before he plunges the knife in: “Why is April more than less a month of love…and all the rest a restless wander of my soul?” It is a terrifying moment in pop – he is asking us to connive in his lying, and persuading us to admit that it’s all our fault. We asked for the veneer. And of course it proved to be a veneer. Caught out cottaging in the gents at Leicester Bus Station in 1975 (a quarter of a century before George Michael turned the same situation to his advantage), Wyngarde’s career is assumed never to have recovered, though on recent evidence he is fit, well, well off and working still. Sorry to disappoint you, as Jason King never said. POSTSCRIPT: THE WISDOM OF GIACOMETTI “The curiosity to see something is reduced, because a glass on a table astonishes me much more than before. If the glass there in front of me astonishes me more than all the glasses I’ve seen in paintings, and if I think that even the greatest marvel of architecture couldn’t impress me more than this glass, there’s really no need for me to go all the way to India to see this or that temple, when I have so many of them in front of me. But if this glass becomes the marvel of marvels, all the glasses on earth become marvel of marvels, too. And other objects, too. So, in limiting yourself to a single glass, you have a much better notion of all the other objects than if you had wanted to do everything. In having a quarter of an inch of something, you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you had pretended to be doing the whole sky.” (Alberto Giacometti interviewed by David Sylvester in 1965, translated by Paul Auster: for the full interview see the current issue of Modern Painters) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
LET’S RISE UP AGAIN Radiohead and David Sylvian: After The Afterlife PART I ”Don’t try to make sense of it,” she says Saturday 9 June 2001 The greatest music critic I ever knew sat with me in our front room, scrutinising the performance of Radiohead on Later With Jools Holland. After some consideration she pronounced, in relation to Thom Yorke, “The John Malkovich of rock.” I reminded myself of what David Thomson said about Malkovich: “There is no hiding his strangeness – gangling frame, thick legs, receding hair, buttony eyes, blank look, hallucinated voice…to all of which Malkovich brings a deliberate, nearly insolent, affectlessness. He does not seem quite normal or wholesome – he can easily take on the aura of disturbance or unqualified nastiness.” Later he added, “In a single gesture or drawled word, Malkovich can go from high camp to rare delicacy. It leaves him as maybe the most mannered and riveting of modern players.” And why does Yorke always screw his eyes up as tightly as possible, without ever actually closing them, while in performance? It’s not the self-induced trance of Van Morrison’s similar gestures (Yorke also plays guitar, so doesn’t have any fists free to clench) in an effort to shut out all extraneous distractions to get to the centre of Cypress Avenue, or Coney Island, or John Donne. It is as if Yorke desperately wants to be free of his body, is sanely struggling to loosen himself from it. In interview, too, he will typically start a response to a question reluctantly, and then, as if his mind is his own internal blotting paper, he will run out of words, none of which is adequate to answer his far more pressing questions to himself. The most mannered and riveting of modern players? I think this might be the case, and also the key to why and how Radiohead progressed as they did after OK Computer. To provide a facile answer to a complex question: it was then when Yorke took over the group properly, when it became for all practical purposes The Thom Yorke Quintet. What would the other four be doing if he weren’t there? He is the group’s absolute cynosure, and my feeling is that without him they would be marooned. Consider the embarrassing disclaimers issued by Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway in recent Yorke-less interviews – “We’re not interested in making unlistenable minority music,” etc. – as though they were Khachaturian forced at Politburo bayonet point in 1948 to proclaim that true music could only be of and for The People. As if the international success, commercially and critically, of Kid A and Amnesiac hadn’t negated the need for such nonsense to even be considered, let alone uttered. It could be that the considerable degree of resentment felt towards Radiohead in certain British quarters is of the Graham Norton variety. Norton recently commented that the general feeling about his success in Ireland was in the order of: “Well it’s great that one of our own has made it – but why did it have to be him?” Similarly music critics of a certain vintage doubtless feel: “Why did it have to be bloody Radiohead? It was supposed to be Lush! Or Swervedriver! You know…one of our own! All Good Mixer/Captain Nemo’s Fish Bar mates together. Not these Jonny-shoegaze-lately office boys from Abingdon.” Because of course, a decade ago, before The Bends, Radiohead were generally regarded as a washed-up joke – one-hit wonders, second-rank shoegazers at best. And it is debatable whether the band, at the time, felt the same way – that really they should still be On A Friday, still hustling for support slots at the Bullingdon Arms or Jericho Tavern. Angst? Who needed it in 1994 when Kurt C and Richey E were doing it 4 REAL? When Liam and Damon and Justine and the boys were getting ready to CHEER US ALL UP AGAIN? They looked stranded, but luckily remembered Stranded and produced The Bends. It holds up pretty well today, though I hardly ever play it. You can see where they’ve come from and where they’re going. Yorke’s voice hasn’t yet quite broken free of generic post-Bolan/Bono quasi-yodelling, but there is straining and (in “My Iron Lung”) blood, and finally (“Fake Plastic Trees,” “Street Spirit”) architecture – as well as a comfy neurotic AOR paradigm (“High And Dry”) from which a large number of British bands continue to scavenge and make a good living doing so. She coughed. She couldn’t stop coughing. If OK Computer caught Radiohead just at the point where Yorke was taking over, and Kid A (“Songs Of Innocence”) and Amnesiac (“Songs Of Experience”) showed the regime settling in, trying on new slippers, Hail To The Thief consolid Oh, ENOUGH! OK Computer is suggesting that the world is ending at a point where, for Laura and I, a new one was just beginning (the summer of ’97). Kid A is up to its neck in hock to Walker’s Tilt - but what a sublime hock, what a divine debt. Amnesiac cannot disencumber the pain of the summer of 2001. They must have understood that the receding mirages which conclude “Spinning Plates” were the last vestiges, the last sight, of Oxford, of LIFE, vanishing for ever. Amnesiac was packaged as a library book. She was a librarian. DO YOU SEE? (one, moreover, which was damaged and withdrawn for several years, only to be put back into circulation when healthy. HAVEN’T YOU GOT IT YET?) (the numerous people who still imagine this to be a website about music!) The fact is, there’s the envelope, and Radiohead are pushing it in an unhurried and entirely logical and emotional way, and I doubt whether any other operatives in music can/are do/ing the same thing, and we need to understand and accept that. So much newness in the shadows but only Radiohead/Yorke can bring it to the window, where the light is strong. Now, just to demonstrate that they STILL know, Hail To The Thief is packaged as an AA foldout map. Stanley Donwood I find over-literal…the skyscraping landfills of “DANGER/YOURSELF/COPIES/TV/ARMED” are very Peter Kennard circa 1981…but look closely at the interior map. Is that Magdalen Bridge there in the middle? Am I seeing only what I choose to see? (The vast quantity of blank space in the Oxford A-Z. Especially around where we lived. As if she won’t let anyone else fill it in) Feedback fills the room. A cheery exchange: “’Ello!” “That’s a nice way to start, Jonny.” Like the “1-2-3-4” which starts off Revolver. Starting again…and straight into another one of those precariously elegant medieval-sounding minor key guitar-bordering-on-lute lines (Guillaume de Machaut resurfaces in Ocean Way, Hollywood). The song is entitled “2 + 2 = 5.” Get used to it is the subtitle not used (“The Lukewarm” is the subtitle actually used). “Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights?” inquires Yorke. “I’ll stay home forever where two & two always makes up five.” “…I was telling her that all those ultraliberals were doubtless perfectly respectable through their high-minded virtue, but in other respects incapable of understanding that two and two make four.” (Stendhal, Memoirs Of An Egotist) …except that this is of course an attack on Dubya, rather than Napoleon. No Hazlitt will come through now to speak up for Bush, so Yorke will shout instead, changing the song’s gear with immaculate discipline into a fast-track splenetic rage: “YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.” “Don’t question my authority or put me in the dock.” The balance of dynamic control – knowing exactly when to turn the volume up and recede again – combined with an ability to nail a hyperactive rhythm and keep to it interestingly are what makes Radiohead a profitable meeting point for prog-rock and post-punk. Paul Morley compared them to “Yes meets Oval” but one could just as easily say Van Der Graaf Generator meets DNA (perhaps I ought to insist that before delving further into Radiohead, all Churchgoers should (re)familiarise themselves with Peter Hammill’s The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage. Just so that you know where this was all going). Or Joy Division refracts upon King Crimson. “Sit Down. Stand Up” (that period!) begins again as an ominous kyrie. “Walk into the jaws of hell. Anytime. Anytime. We can wipe you out.” So bloody in its mourning – aware, perhaps, of how post-punk marketing techniques have been stripped of their punctum and are now used to remind us that we can be crushed at any time. The DVLA Chitty Chitty Bang Bang road tax campaign. Don’t you fucking dare to fly away. We’ll tie you to the cross. Benefit fraud. Our misappropriated halo will TRACK YOUR EVERY MOVE and DESTROY YOU AT ANY FUCKING TIME unless you finance our obese pleasures. Peter Saville usurped by the Borgias but, like Gillian Welch (and how like Gillian Welch they are), Radiohead are gonna do it anyway, and take off into the best drum ‘n’ bass/rock crossover sequence there’s ever been, ten years late. “THE RAINDROPS THE RAINDROPS” Yorke intones, entranced, over what is clearly Roni Size meets the Groundhogs. Oh, keep providing life… THE SCANS SHOWED NOTHING …”Sail To The Moon.” A beautiful Cocteau Twins guitar reverie to remind us of when everything was to be looked forward to. How graceful, how profoundly regretful, is the slide from major to minor as Yorke begins to sing his lament. Those isolated returns to the major key, always scuppered, hope always defeated, an end in sight. Stay for the flood and you’ll be drowned, sail to the moon and you’ll suffocate. there is always that ending “Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off the museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guidebook in hand.” (George Steiner) “Backdrifts” keeps quiet: the Warp-ed meditations of “Kid A” the song blossoming into a maturer contemplation. Tones and beats drift around like indecisive molecules, unsure whether to form a flower or a bomb (“All evidence has been buried/All tapes have been erased/But your footprints give you away – so you’re backtracking”). But also: “You fell into our arms/We tried/But there was nothing/We could do.” (I fall outside of her) Then we have something which approximately approximates rock; a Byrds guitar curlicue and a drum track which would not be out of place on Cooking Vinyl soundtrack Yorke’s ode to oblivion “Go To Sleep.” “Something for the rag and bone man/Over my dead body.” (Remember, though, how Nicolas de Stael opted to resolve matters. Those mouettes flying away from us, from you, from life) “Where I End And You Begin” considers the possibility that there might be a gap between the two. Driven by a frantic rhythm track, underscored by a pitch-shifting tenor synthesiser motif, this is reminiscent of Simple Minds at their most kinetic (“Theme For Great Cities”), but as Yorke warns “I will eat you all alive” along come some No Pussyfooting Frippertronics, as though the “you” were being forced to re-enter, and thus rejuvenate, the “me.” Rock’s own backdrift. “We Suck Young Blood” is a chain-gang kaddish, careful handclaps breaking rocks in the artificial sun; the corollary to “Fitter Happier.” “Are you hungry? Are you sick? Are you begging for a break? Are you sweet? Are you fresh? Are you strung up by the wrists?” The “job that slowly kills you” as we all face our prison sentences for the crime of being dependent. See how the music suddenly flares up midway into a freeform scream – sledgehammer the desks – before sinking back into resigned acceptance as we ALWAYS do. The dead tones of virtually anyone you hear in the street. Lobotomise yourself now. The carefully paced midtempo maunder of “The Gloaming” suggests what “life” might then become. “Life’s easy when you’re a robot.” (Coulter reflecting on his first day job in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark) So OK Computer gained us entry into this world, Kid A and Amnesiac suggested and debated what we might fill it with, and now Hail To The Thief provides us with a working blueprint. That’s why “There There” was such a necessary choice as the first single – “Just because you feel it/Doesn’t mean it’s there.” The tribal beat turned sideways – worthy of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, and yet more evidence of how the Mac tend to seep their way subliminally into most intelligent rock – reintroduces the carnality which has been dormant in Radiohead since The Bends. Note how, halfway through, there’s a sublime if transient shift into what could pass for a Keith Richards riff; and then, how Yorke’s wail suddenly becomes impassioned to such a degree that you realise – they’ve been listening to Theatre of Hate! “Why so green and lonely?” is very Kirk Brandon (I could suggest that you should stop here and rediscover Westworld before carrying on – just to remind us of how it was unexpectedly carried on). Finally, the inhuman wail to which the rest of the album has hitherto been building. It, as some people still say, rocks. What else to say? Only the most important thing – the 1:40 of “I Will” (and testament?). Over Greenwood’s tremulous guitar, Yorke quietly expresses anger. "I won’t let this happen to my children.” “Little babies’ eyes.” The placid eye of this record’s hurricane, a desentimentalised “No Surprises,” an unluckier but far more decided “Lucky.” Don’t complain unless you have good reason. “A Punchup At A Wedding” – reminiscent musically of the last track of the first album by those other reluctant Oxonians, Supergrass (“I Dropped Ecstasy Down The Back Of My Sofa” or whatever it was called) – reminds us of the massed gallows which will be a consequence of our not hanging together. Meanwhile, “Myxomatosis” manages to show dullards like Goldfrapp how to reignite ‘70s glam motifs – the synth bass is twisted out of shape and married to a rhythm which is so much more relevant to Led Zeppelin than all those live DVDs; because this is what can still be done with/to it/them. The lyrical exchange “Now no one likes a smartarse/But we all like stars” is as pointed and polished as anything by any Sitwell (“Your voice is rapping on my window sill” from the next track “Scatterbrain.” How did they know?) Finally, the unbottled rage but no destruction in “A Wolf At The Door.” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as restaged by the Bleasdale of 1982: rapid-fire phlegm over what could be the last piece of rock music every played. Consider how well, in a dumber world, this would sum up the artificially imposed Big Brother ethos, or, in a more understanding world, would sum up the lives which some of us are currently compelled to live: “Drag him out the window/Dragging out your dead/Singing I MISS YOU …/Steel toecaps take all your credit cards/Step up! Get the gunge!/Get the eggs! Get the flan in the face!…/DANCE YOU FUCKER DANCE YOU FUCKER DON’T YOU DARE…/Let me back let me back I promise to be good/Don’t look in the mirror at the face you don’t recognise…/Help me, call the doctor, put me inside…/Stepford wives, who are we to complain?…” (or be called “vinegar tits” and “sour”) Sometimes one just has to acknowledge that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH and that moreover one can WALK AWAY FROM IT AT ANY TIME. Right now in fact. “Someone else is gonna come and clean it up/Born and raised for the job…” as the song reaches its climax. (“I myself don’t talk about a new world in the morning” – Roger Whittaker) “Someone always does.” “I wish you’d get up, go over, get up, go over (cf. “sit down/stand up”) and turn this tape off.” (“Nearby he’s still crying. I won’t sing while he’s there” – Kevin Rowland) And to help you turn the tape off, that Cocteau Twins guitar refrain returns from “Sail To The Moon.” All you have to do is walk towards it. Stand up first; then you will have the luxury of being able to sit down. “One day we shall no longer understand anything about anything, but there won’t be anything to understand – the entire universe will have become information. An immaterial involution. Aphanisis. The end of the show.” (Jean Baudrillard, from Cool Memories IV) “Mrs Thatcher’s great virtue, Larkin told a journalist, ‘is saying that two and two makes four, which is an unpopular nowadays as it always has been.’ What Larkin did not see was that it was only by banking on two and two making five that institutions like the Brynmor Jones Library could survive. He lived long enough to see much of his work at the library dismantled; one of the meetings he was putting off before his death was with the Vice-Chancellor designate, who was seeking ways of saving a quarter of a million pounds and wanted to shrink the library by hiving off some of its rooms. That was two and two making four.” (Alan Bennett, “Alas! Deceived,” review of Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion, London Review of Books, 1993) Because it’s never quite the end and it is always best to leave one exit door open. Are the politics on Hail To The Thief its McGuffin? As I said, there’s always a way out BUT NOT THAT ONE NOT WHEN YOU CANNOT FUCKING BREATHE PART II No no no no no no no no no Sunday 26 August 2001 I am sitting in a room. Suddenly all I have is a random collection of sonic data. None of it makes sense anymore, but as yet I do not have the sense to realise this. I am numb. I feel ungrounded, as though I could move in any direction, transport myself to any place. One either wields the handily situated can of paraffin – and as it is a flat, and others could be harmed, the option is unfeasible – or attempts to make a new sense of these sounds. Not that I want to approach any of them. I want never to listen to them again. I desire as complete a silence as she now has. Now there is a guitar in the room, the hum of equipment; is this a good start? Eventually, a familiar voice from a happier time, unheeded since 1984, but now considerably older – and the vibrato control is not the only thing which has changed. And what is he singing? “I fall outside of her. She doesn’t notice. Mine is an empty bed. I think she’s forgotten.” Passive rather than active, that last verb. What is this song about? A love affair ended, either by choice or involuntarily by unwanted death? But this isn’t the day after. In fact it’s today, nearly two years later. Already. “Put the brakes on, ‘cos I’m fading fast. Can’t find the link between me and her. He who was first coming in last. Don’t tell me that love is all there is – I know, don’t I?” It takes the best part of four minutes for David Sylvian to sing these lines. The opening title track of his new album Blemish lasts for almost 14 minutes in total. It starts almost exactly where “Brilliant Trees” ended, but instead of the alliance of East and West which that song represented (Hassell, Czukay, Sakamoto and Sylvian become one), Sylvian has now indeed become one. Thoughtful electronically-delayed guitar, with sudden shrieks erupting in the background (compare with John Tilbury and Keith Rowe’s extended threnodies on Duos For Doris) – pain and rage are there, but Sylvian keeps his countenance. The cover illustration (by Atsushi Fukui) has him resembling a younger and wiser Badly Drawn Boy, smiling in his woolly hat and reluctant beard growth. On “Blemish” the song, the grief continues to accumulate. “There’s no talking to her. I’ll keep my thoughts to myself. Life’s for the taking, so they say – take it away. At 9:15 there is a sudden terrible explosion as Sylvian intones: “All is bloated and far from truth! Let’s secure that reputation.” And then the quiet returns and the meaning of the cover is made starkly relevant – “Just pull the wool down on his eyes one more time.” It is an excoriating piece of music to listen to; no succour, just an unresolvable uncertainty. As with everything else on this record, Sylvian gives each song as much time as it needs, because asking someone to stick to three minutes or 200 words is, in some circumstances, like asking them to breathe only once an hour. But Sylvian is not entirely alone for all of this record. Startlingly not so, for the second song “The Good Son” opens with the familiar guitar and vocal aside (“Vocals? OK!”) which one would never have expected to hear on a Sylvian record – Derek Bailey. They are admittedly not together in the same room – Bailey recorded his contributions in Hackney and mailed them over to Sylvian in New York. Sylvian inspected the playing and selected those sections which he felt would be best adaptable to his song forms – even though the entire emotional and melodic content of their three collaborations here was based upon what Bailey played. And it’s a relevant title, too, for Bailey begins with motifs which have been heard before – specifically on his introduction to “The Good Doctor” from Song For Someone (Incus 10) the 1974 big band album by another regular Sylvian collaborator, Kenny Wheeler. But this represents the first occasion when another musician has tried to mould Bailey’s vision into a recognisable song form. And despite the sly humour in Sylvian’s lyric (“He loves a good tune, so whistle one he knows – LISTEN CLOSELY NOW – Don’t try to make sense of it, she says”) the intent is deadly serious. It’s a marvel to hear Sylvian’s voice and emotions rising and ebbing entirely naturally with Bailey’s occasional animated activity. It seems to be a genuine collaboration, rather than a convenient look-at-my-hip-record-collection label. If Scott Walker were ever to get around to recording a record entirely solo, it might not sound dissimilar from Blemish; the same clipped words, the remote emotions, the genuine inquisitive musical adventure. Sylvian is back on his own for track three “The Only Daughter” which may be the most unsettling piece of music I’ve heard this year, in its quietude as disturbing as early Throbbing Gristle. “She was a friend of mine. Do us a favour – your one and only warning – please be gone by morning.” What has occurred? Possibly something very horrific – “She won’t even see it coming…the Vaseline…Roll them over…The penny’s dropped. The room’s in order. I masked the spot. Me, the only daughter.” And then everything swirls into confused cut-ups: (“I came to hate her” before the disinformation occurs, and more forcibly, “IT’S MY HOME NOW”). Codes scrambled; the memory is decomposing and can only be recalled incompletely, in incomprehensible fragments. Trying to make “sense.” Running through the entire history, reading through the now-completed file, trying to remember what they forgot to do. It is terrifying to hear. And there’s more in track four “The Heart Knows Better” where for the first time a distinct rhythmic structure becomes noticeable, the closest Sylvian is now prepared to come to “pop”; “I don’t know how long she’s been here with me, but it’s been a long time coming. Make it last forever. Call me by my true name and I’ll call you back.” Then the memory becomes distended again: “And every night is wedding night in my bed (an empty bed, let us not forget)/My eyes are closed but I can see the sky…oh, but nothing really matters in the end – and if everything still matters, what then?…I’m absent from the place I ought to be.” The Other is but the faintest of chimeras here – “the driver’s much too drunk to see, and she’s sitting in my place – devastating beauty in my place” (Princess Diana?). The almost throwaway “ha ha ha” with which Sylvian signs off is in its own undemonstrable way as chilling as Ivor Cutler’s cackle at the end of Rock Bottom. “She Is Not” gives us 43 more seconds in the company of Derek Bailey. “There she is…among her children, full of paintings….there she is not.” Yet another reminder of a future lost. “Late Night Shopping” demonstrates just how far Sylvian has travelled. With such a title, anyone else would still be (and most still are) posing around the suburban mall which Sylvian left behind in 1981. But remember the alternate meaning of “shopping” and consider the second illustration on the cover, which pictures Sylvian wheeling a shopping trolley through a deserted snow-filled forest. The trees may or may not be of human form. Information to be conveyed, people to be betrayed. “We can lose ourselves.” “We don’t need to need a thing.” Those same handclaps which we heard on “We Suck Young Blood.” Then the sound effect of the trolley being wheeled, followed by what sounds like a coffin lid creaking open, and Sylvian’s voice, now a ghost, reiterating what amounts to this song’s chorus (and the chorus is the song). The last of the Bailey collaborations “How Little We Need To Be Happy” tries to find a point of reconnection. As Bailey’s guitar becomes simultaneously never more songlike and never more aggressive, Sylvian’s voice suddenly gains an extra degree of confidence – truly we realise here how, contrary to the popular belief of Sylvian vocally being a Bryan Ferry wannabe, he is in fact the missing link between Ferry and Yorke. Either could still end up in this place. “They removed his voice and the silence overwhelmed him…There’s a universe of disappointment to be lost…” Catharsis, as far as it can be reached in such an environment. “You brimming with life and with joy and curiosity. And the lights won’t go out, the stars refuse to dim. And everything goes on, but not as before…” There is some rhythm. And then the payoff. “What have they done to you? Cry all your tears, the sorrow that threatens to overwhelm you.” It has to be done. And finally: “Let’s rise up again.” So let us try to turn an imagined endless summer into reality, as we reach the coda of this, Sylvian’s finest and truest record, “A Fire In The Forest,” which involves another traveller, Christian Fennesz, on sundry electronica. “There is always sunshine above the grey sky. I will try to find it. Yes, I will try.” And the most heartbreaking and heartfelt statement is left until last: “I would like to see you. It’s lovely to see you. Come and take me somewhere. Come take me out.” With that, the bereaved man, blinded by his own grief, cautiously finds his way back into the world. Would such a man need to continue expressing himself musically, or writing a weblog? “This has another ending.” (Throwing Muses, “Walking In The Dark”) What will be the last thing I will ever see? What would be the last thing I would like to see? My ineptitude with graphics prevents me from ending this properly. Ideally the last thing you should see here would be a picture, a vista. Perhaps a panorama of Port Meadow, to remind you what (or, more accurately, who) this website is actually about. Or maybe the pastel-coloured cottage further downstream, at Osney Island, the one which we had planned to buy for the purpose of raising a family. If only to remind us how big and unstoppable the world truly is, and how small and stoppable humanity really is. Is that the end then? What about those 3000 words on M Ward doing D Bowie? It’s not quite the end of the story, although the end may come soon. There are other things to record before that happens. The Dizzee Rascal album, for example, which is the third and perhaps truest member of the trilogy which encompasses Radiohead and Sylvian. Oh come on, tell us whether Dizzee Rascal is worth investing in. It’s been a long and hot day. There are many things to be put in order, or in a different order. All I will say for now is: how appropriate that the Rascal’s real name is Dylan Mills, and his album is problematic but brilliant, or brilliant because it is problematic. It must be heard. And then there’s the Richard X album and the Beyonce Knowles album to be taken into consideration. Music goes on to startle and seduce, in that order. Not to mention another radio show to do. Indeed. Resonance FM have asked me back to do Clear Spot again. I will be appearing on Friday 27 June between 7:00-8:30 pm (BST) to talk about and play examples of the genius of Ze Records and No Wave. It can be found on 104.4 FM in London; outside London, you can hear it by visiting their website at http://www.resonancefm.com and clicking on “Listen.” I will, among other things, be playing tracks from the criminally long unavailable No New York and making impassioned pleas for a legit reissue (as opposed to the Japanese bootleg which sometimes surfaces in the more knowledgeable of record shops). And the other ending? Brighton Beach. I will be in Brighton next weekend, so the next chapter of this story may have to wait a fortnight. Is this your future? I’d like it to be. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Their name is !!!, you can pronounce it Chk Chk Chk or however you like, and they’ve made the greatest single ever made as of today: “Me & Giuliani Down By The School Yard” newly available on Touch & Go/Warp Records, and the record which sooner or later had to be made about 9/11. Superseding both Springsteen’s sentimentality and Suicide’s severed solace, this deeply subversive record dares to command our alleged leaders to acknowledge that there is a future which does not involve the use of black armbands as blindfolds; one in which we can smile and, most importantly, dance again. The record would of course have been rendered useless if it had not been danceable, but at long last here’s a piece of music – and indeed a group – worthy to stand beside the recently resurrected ghosts of No Wave, post-punk and Ze. Vocalist Nic has the same pissed-off tenor as James Chance, but crucially laced with a dash of Mick Jones’ daft optimism. The song starts out with him grumbling over a steadily ascending beat (and few beats have been so crisp since the unacknowledged days of ’81), “But I do believe that there must come a moment/When even the piggiest pig must get on up and move it.” And then at 2:24, one of several transcendent, genius-laden structural/emotional shifts as early Simple Minds guitars come barging in to DEMAND rejuvenation. These slowly ebb away but suddenly DOUBLE in power again at 4:20 as Nic proclaims: “People always ask me – what’s so fucking great about dancing?/How the fuck should I know? Yeah, even I can barely understand it/But when the music takes over, the music takes control/Here’s a message 2 U Rudy (YES! Heartless Crew imminent!) and U sir, Mr Bloomberg, and the rest of U ties2tight dudes – Y’ALL COULD LEARN A LESSON BY LOSING INHIBITIONS, YEAH/Losing yourself in the music, losing yourself in the moment/’Cos we have nothing more than this very second…So forget about it, we live here & now dude, here & now here&nowhereinnow…so get on DOWN DOWN down downdown” before the track sublimely descends into temporary Underworld techno, and then settles back in its groove. King Sunny Adé guitars duel with sudden lightning thrashes before we all clap hands at the end. It reminds us that “Into The Groove” was 20 million times more subversive and arrest-worthy than “Born In The USA” because it opens up the option of doing NOTHING or SOMETHING to make yourself HAPPY and BREAK THE DICTATORIAL CODE WHICH WOULD HAVE US SAY/BECOME NOTHING AT ALL (does Hanif Kureishi know of !!!? – qv. article on “word power” in today’s Guardian Review: “The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like”). This is not “dance, don’t riot,” but DANCE AS RIOT, THE GESTURE ITS OWN SPEAR, but its destiny entirely yours. And it’s “Into The Groove” rehabilitated and renewed as both consolation and spur to dying people so that they may dance in order to live. (cf. the continuing absurdity of C4 trying to impose showbiz on Big Brother - LET’S KICK NUSH OUT BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T SMILE, BECAUSE SHE DARES NOT TO PRETEND TO BE INTERESTED IN THE SAME SPURIOUS GARBAGE AS “ALL OTHER PEOPLE” – “all other people” of course acting as shorthand for “in concordance with the views of the dictator.” The number of times one walks down a street or into an office and resists the urge to ask: “Why are you pretending to be happy?”) The tremendous kick of “Giuliani” is balanced by the explicit invitation to lose yourself which is the dance remix of “Intensity” from their eponymous debut album. This latter climaxes in a startling sequence of strobe-light rhythmic chop-ups – Oval with boiled rather than poached eggs – which is as exciting and new as anything I’ve heard this year. And the album is an astonishing piece of work, too. 1981 to its fingernails, but better, less inclined to wrap itself up in a raincoat. For the first !!! album, think what ACR’s To Each would have sounded like if played and produced by Haircut 100 – in other words, the philosophy (Lacan out of Eldridge Cleaver and Guy Debord) is secure but the chops are immeasurably stronger – what Maximum Joy should have gone on to do after the imperishable Disco/”Rap” Mix of “Stretch” (but then again they did at least in part go on to the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack so they got there anyway). They understand arcane processes like constructing their songs, knowing exactly where to peak and trough (guitarist Mario would have been much better for Miles than Meatloaf Stern) – the percussive avalanche which concludes “Hammerhead” is genuinely overwhelming, the triple horn section peaks on “The Step” inspired. “Storm The Legion” begins in a quiet series of Factory perambulations, night watches (“LSD taught me a lot about me”) before its ascension is gradually revealed (“No they never think of changing things/They just order up another drink”). Best of all perhaps is “There’s No Fuckin’ Rules, Dude” which utilises dub in an imaginative and pointed way that should be a lesson to every indie nitwit who believes that one £3.99 Blood and Fire sampler teaches them everything they need to know. Like Beckett, great dub practitioners/scavengers know that a lot of the time you need to be QUIET in order that the LOUDNESS can be more keenly felt. And the album’s central point of explosion comes 5:15 into this track, when the car alarms start to squeal a Hallelujah chorus (remember how East 17 employed the same device halfway through “House Of Love”; of course they ended by detonating the house altogether. The Zabriskie Point of boy band pop – another under-acknowledged masterpiece of explosive production from Phil Harding). Is there nihilism/self-hatred here? (from “KooKooKaFukU”: “If you’re looking for a friend you should try being one first”). Or merely disappointed remonstration? Either way, this remarkable record is a possible escape route in a music environment where there remain far too many TRAPdoors. MUTANT DISCO Ze Records has lately been disinterred, and the back catalogue is slowly seeping out again to remind our generation that we did not learn the lesson first time around. Summarised and encapsulated by the 1981 six-track 12” compilation Mutant Disco (A Subtle Discolation Of The Norm), we were offered a gleaming and mischievous future, and opted for Annie Lennox and George Michael instead. Well, Mutant Disco has been expanded, revised and reissued as a 25-track 2CD package. Rather pointedly, Kid Creole’s “Maladie D’Amour” from the original compilation has been dropped and replaced by “(I’m A) Wonderful Thing (Baby)” and “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy,” thus reminding us that what was once the future is now a summation, a sort of Greatest Hits. Ian Penman’s vital sleevenote to the original does not appear to have been retained (but that was why I bought it! That, and other reasons, such as Dancing In Your Head, Uncle Jam Wants You, Escalator Over The Hill and Songs For Swinging Lovers, without which none of the record/Ze Records would have been possible). It’s a rueful reappearance, therefore, to remind us that we failed. Now we’ll let you have/hear this stuff again, but we’re leaving it to your kids to pick up on and NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES. Where once the record ended with Was (Not Was)’ “Wheel Me Out,” now it opens the record – so the story continues in a semi-loop way, with its unequalled cement mix of Carla Bley psychosexual angst, hard-bop trumpet and MC5 (Wayne Kramer) guitar. Those Oriental minimalist strings hijacked from Chic. Here it’s joined by “Out Come The Freaks” and “Tell Me That I’m Dreaming” which hopefully means that the parent album will become available again soon. We still get delicious concoctions like Don Armando’s 2nd Ave. Rhumba Band’s “Deputy Of Love,” the metal Moroder of Material’s “Bustin’ Out” and the gallons of genius which continue to pour out of Coati Mundi’s “Que Pasa/Me No Pop I” with its lyrics, acidic enough to make James Chance seem like James Taylor, and its call-and-response from the Coconuts which almost cross the bridge from the Shangri-Las to Ligeti in their intensity – and a Top 40 hit, too, when such things were still possible. Nearly everything on Mutant Disco Reloaded is brilliant enough to make us ashamed. Shut me up if I’m starting to sound like Hornby (my REASONS are different), but, really, the glory which was Cristina, and her seductive demolition jobs on “Blame It On Disco” and “Disco Queen” (though sadly her Carla Bley/Alfred Jarry repositioning of “Is That All There Is?” remains legally absent from the record), Chance himself (Darnell-produced “Contort Yourself”) calling over to the Waitresses (“I Know What Boys Like”), the AMAZING Aural Exciters – effectively the Ze Allstars, with Darnell, Coati Mundi, Chance, Tania Gardner, Pat Place Et Al – with their No Disco updates of the John Martyn Live At Leeds template (i.e. start a song and have no idea where/how it’s going to end, but making art out of the muddle of a middle). Why isn’t anyone today capable of doing something as playful in its radicalism as “Emile (Night Rate)” or “Spooks In Space”? I mean, the Matthew Herbert Big Band? No, keep it serious, chaps, got to keep the Wire sweet. Most obscure yet perhaps most revelatory of all are the Garçons, who on “French Boy” (and especially its Disco Edit) provide us with the starting point for both Junior Senior and Daft Punk. NO WAVE Did I say No New York? I note with the mildest of amusement the appearance of a new compilation entitled Yes New York, with a cover of identical design to the original (though with the lime green and black colour scheme reversed). Track one? The Strokes – live. Ash, ash, all is ash. (One of the many things which differentiate !!! is that they bypass the apoplectic clenched-fist rhythms of the Liars and Rapture in favour of a warmer, more rhythmically fluid feel) I received with considerably greater interest another Ze compilation, this one entitled N.Y No Wave: The Ultimate East Village 80s Soundtrack. A slightly misleading misnomer, as most of its 22 tracks were recorded in ‘78/9, and furthermore there are two tracks by Suicide (from their second album) who were strictly speaking pre-No Wave. This doesn’t displace NNY as a definitive document – and someone needs to inveigle Island Records/Brian Eno/Chance/Lunch/whoever long and hard to get that legitimately reissued – but it’s a useful footnote/sidenote. Lots of James Chance, inevitably – bizarre how, six months ago, there was no Chance material readily available on CD; now he seems to be in danger of becoming over-anthologised. Wait 20 years and six albums come at once – and the debut EP by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks (with both Chance and Lydia Lunch on board) is represented here in full. The performances are less powerful than those on NNY, but then “The Closet” is the only track which the two compilations share; and compared to almost anything equivalent now (is there anything equivalent now?) the adventure which these songs show remain pertinent. We also get Chance’s immortal assassination of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” which he transmutes into a warning against troilism. There are two tracks by Mars – “3E” and “11 000 Volts” – which just predate their great leap into the harmolodic void (“Helen Fordsdale” etc.) but let you know what’s coming. DNA are sadly absent, though Arto Lindsay does contribute a couple of typically extraordinary pieces with the long-lost “Arto/Neto” 7” “Pini, Pini” and “Malu” which suggest a hypnotic rhythmic acumen coexisting with gleeful noise. There’s also one track from each side of Lunch’s brilliant Queen Of Siam album – the horn-drenched sleaze of “Lady Scarface” and the most disturbing song here “Mechanical Flattery” which pre-empts Buffy by two decades in its gruesomely gossamer tale of a dead soul rising and trying to reconstitute itself and reconnect with the world. Does that last sound familiar? GILLIAN WELCH: “SOUL JOURNEY” “You go to blank-blank And I’ll go to mine But we’ll all blank along To-geth-ther” (Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”) “Understand We go hand in hand But we’ll walk alone in fear” (“Where Do We Go From Here?” from Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling) “I’ll send a letter, don’t know who I am” (Gillian Welch, “I Dream A Highway”) “Such a long, long time to be gone/Such a short time to be dead” (Grateful Dead, “Box Of Rain”) “I was a little Deadhead” (Gillian Welch, “Wrecking Ball”) “Anger in pop music is often stereotypical. It’s the stamping of the foot, the childlike response to that emotion. But to be able to allude to these frustrations, anger and more destructive emotions that one feels in a far more suppressed manner in the work, as in life, was fascinating to me.” (David Sylvian, Wire 232: is the closing past tense relevant?) It may well be that “records” are returning to being just that – journals, diaries, evidence of the existence of the people who make them. Stripped of the burden of having to be an “event” by the internet, have sex and glamour also been stripped from music? It now simply exists in a way in which it perhaps hasn’t done for a century. And it is changing (regressing?) the manner in which records are made. Perhaps it’s just a case of “pop” falling into line with the Archive of Statements and Documents which improvisers have been maintaining for decades. Increasingly, with such disparate recent entries as Hail To The Thief, David Sylvian’s Blemish, John Tilbury and Keith Rowe’s Duos For Doris and the Postal Service’s Give Up - not to mention Cody Chesnutt or M Ward – we observe the mechanics of the record being put together, of the artist’s thoughts forming spontaneous aesthetic patterns in the course of the record. As though it were being made up on the spot. Balanced against this, it’s an unavoidable truth that the common factor of all the records with which this writer would choose to be buried - Escalator Over The Hill, Rock Bottom, Metal Box, Starsailor, Closer, Treasure, Maxinquaye, Tilt, Selected Ambient Works Volume 2, to name the first nine – is that at some point in the record, the artist disappears into her/himself, vanishes within the parameters of the record’s aesthetics as far as they parallel the artist’s own life. Does that suggest an aversion on my part to artists expressing themselves too clearly and making things too plain? Or does that suggest that a greater degree of consideration is required for the artist, who is, after all, only documenting their life as best they can – to understand that records are not discrete capsules devoid of any human input, that investing in an artist means absorbing all of their work, regardless of quality? It’s like turning one’s back on one’s best friend because they had a bad cold one morning. It doesn’t correspond with life. The tenth of these records is Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, which was discussed in detail here in April 2002. On “I Dream A Highway” she didn’t quite disappear into herself but was embarking upon the final stages of a journey which may have been either progressive or circulatory. She couldn’t have stayed like that, of course, otherwise there would ensue blank CDs recorded by, or in, a black hole. If one is to reconnect with the world, one has to attract other humans, starting with oneself. But no fanfare is necessarily required with artists of a certain reluctant disposition; sometimes it’s enough for a new communiqué simply to materialise. Thus is the case with Soul Journey, Welch’s follow up to Revelator - last week I turned around and there it was with its black and white elementary illustrations on a turquoise background. On Warner Music now as well. Has Welch been ordered to lighten up, in every sense? But look more closely at these drawings. Hardly any faces. Significantly, what looks like a two-headed horse marooned, unable to go in either direction. In the centre foreground someone who may well be being burned on a bonfire. Cut-out-and-paste individual “parts” on the back cover. In the inner sleeve, Welch photographed in black and white, hat on head and head firmly and decidedly turned away from the camera. I am anybody. Once again there are ten songs on the album, and once again they are arranged symmetrically. One facile reading could be that this album explains “I Dream A Highway.” Did we want it “explained”? Remember that we’re talking about someone’s life; that means not cursing or damning them for not cutting themselves up for your aesthetic benefit. Do we still wish to listen if the artist is happy? Then again Soul Journey is not an especially happy album. On most of the tracks Welch is accompanied by a small band, while on the remaining three she is on her own. Her Boswell, David Rawlings, only plays in the context of the band. At the beginning of track one, “Look At Miss Ohio,” one could be forgiven for thinking that she is singing “Look at me so high-oh!” “I want to do right, but not right now” she continues as the band (almost The Band) make their entry, with drums (Rawlings?) patiently measuring out her lifespan with the same aesthetic judge’s gavel as Levon Helm. The voice excitedly curls around itself as it didn’t do on Revelator. But melancholy returns as Welch is left on her own to sing the traditional “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” requesting salvation/deliverance from a failed love affair/life; less obviously isolated-sounding than she was on Revelator, but perhaps more deeply so. And sure enough, on “Wayside/Back In Time” she pines again for The Golden Mean of The Past, namechecking and discarding Nashville and Clear Channel and still wanting out of the system, maybe out of this record. “I Had A Real Good Mother And Father” is another solo traditional rending, and her delivery is very heartfelt, though clearly imbued with the foreknowledge which she is yet to disclose to us. It certainly doesn’t prepare us for the hugely bitter minimalism of this record’s centerpiece, “One Monkey.” Welch has never sounded more furious, never more controlled in her fury. The lyric is elemental – she could almost be scooping the words out of the earth – “One monkey don’t stop no show – so get on board.” Other commentators have picked up on the link with Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” though that is in many ways the converse of “One Monkey” – Mayfield offers the listener as much comfort as he can, knowing that the apocalypse is imminent and that everyone will shortly cease to exist; it is a benign gateway out of life – whereas Welch is clearly raging inside, refusing to accept death as an inevitability. The music slowly builds up but crucially never explodes – it is enough for the drums to suggest implicit rage in their unflinching, steady medium pace, for Ketcham Secor’s violin to linger on, but never cross, the boundaries of John Cale/Fred Frith territory. Having made her point, she recedes into contemplation again, but is clearly capable of destruction if she so wishes. Where the album converges – as Revelator did on “I Want To Sing That Rock ‘N’ Roll” – is on the deceptively jolly hoedown “No One Knows My Name” wherein Welch reveals that her mother had her at the age of seventeen, that her father “did his thing, as your man would do,” and that, being adopted and uncertain of her father’s true identity, “no one in this whole world knows my name.” It’s the most bruising and explicit lyric on the record – indeed, the lyric which explains not just the whole album but the previous one as well – and is hidden beneath a bluff, hearty exterior of pseudo-jollity. From there, it is a steadily quiet descent to rising despair. “Lowlands” chronicles her depression (“I’ve been in the lowlands too long”). One cannot admit light without first knowing the totality of darkness at its darkest. And then there is “One Little Song.” List songs are usually problematic unless your life is honest enough to provide a justification for whatever you consider worthy of inclusion. That’s why the turgid 15 minutes and 40 seconds of Nick Cave’s “Babe I’m On Fire” fail; there is nothing at stake apart from the payoff “I’m in love” – well, we guessed that. However genuine a madman Cave may have been two decades ago, he cannot really pass himself off as one now; he is a successful middle-aged businessman who lives in Brighton and is fundamentally satisfied with his life. I am not crass enough to demand that he return to a squat in Blenheim Gardens to rekindle his muse – indeed, the prospect of moving to Brighton to escape a painful past is a very good idea, given the right circumstances – merely realise that he is better off singing ballads about relative contentment. What “Babe I’m On Fire” lacks is any genuine fire; that was buried in Black Paul’s box back in 1984, or burned in the Mercy Seat in 1988. There is neither the rage, nor the need for rage – which is, in human terms, a good thing, if not aesthetically. And which is more important? It can never be denied. In “One Little Song” Welch asks, politely but passionately, for reasons to continue to exist. “One last rug that hasn’t been wrung dry – ‘til there’s nothing left.” The immensity with which she leaves that last “nothing” hanging in the air. It is the humblest and most moving of songs. The subsequent “I Made A Lover’s Prayer” needs even fewer words – it is a plea for redemption, for her past to be incorporated into her present without sacrificing her future. But there’s that underlying tension; throughout the whole record it hasn’t stopped quietly building up. And all of a sudden, and quite unexpectedly, it explodes (as far as Welch’s music can explode – after all, she is not Peter Brötzmann) in the closing “Wrecking Ball.” Worlds away from the dream aura of Emmylou Harris’ similarly titled 1995 album, here Welch sneers as she has never done before on record – extremely Dylanesque – as she finally opens herself up to the world, describes her life and missed chances as Rawlings’ cranked-up electric thrashes behind her and Secor’s violin once again threatens to spill over the cracks. There is a terrible euphoria about Welch’s delivery, as though she is trashing her entire “construct,” as though this were the equivalent of Cohen on the cover of I’m Your Man, wearing shades, nonchalantly munching a banana in what looks like a stripped loft apartment (those lyrics within: “And I feel so close to everything that we’ve lost/We’ll never have to lose it again”), or maybe even Welles in F For Fake - or perhaps just Welch fantasising about being one of those five bands on the bill of the unattended gig described in “April the 14th, Part 1.” What is undeniable is that the record does not sound like a casual, lightweight exercise in whimsy, but a renewed (though more kindly worded) request that you acknowledge that this is how she lives, that the music cannot be divorced from the life, and that on this day, in this year, this is how her things are. And that is perhaps now the renewed rôle of music. Hail To The Thief (full review of which is forthcoming) has been described in many quarters as the latest chapter in a diary; a new way of consuming music which requires active participation in the lives of the artists, in which the artist’s website (i.e. you) can directly contribute to how a piece of music is made and expressed; ultimately, perhaps, aiming towards an ideal in which weblog, record, book and film finally fuse into a thankfully far from definitive explanation of how and why we live. It prevents the danger of Radiohead, for example, being chewed up into an “acceptable” Jools Holland flavourless bouillabaisse of music where they unhappily but conveniently coexist with Steve Wright, Pat Metheny, Ibrahim Ferrer and Billy Corgan AS THOUGH THERE WERE NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OR IN ANY OF THEM. An ideal in which one accidentally can hear Brôtzmann playing as softly and tenderly as he has ever dared to play – on alto sax, quietly but passionately playing the melody of “For Peter Kowald” – as I did late on Friday night while an uncensored Willow unsuccessfully attempted to destroy the world on my screen. Finally, they all embrace; the saxophonist of Deutschland finally tells us what these 35 years of hard blowing actually meant; and on an adjacent channel the BB tenants settle down to a contemplative rest. As indeed is this writer, as anyone must before embarking upon major corrective surgery to wrecked but salvageable lives. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
BIG BROTHER “It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, it’s yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, wearing no uniform, and you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman…He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him slowly in, turning the lights down from someplace, narrowing the focus, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them. She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.” (Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A Californian Gothic, HarperCollins, NYC, 1997: section “Sept 21-23, 1990”) So, 18 months into this story, one is finally compelled to invoke Warhol, having postponed him for so long. Big Brother does of course owe its entire existence and justification to Warhol – and by that I do not mean the fifteen most tedious minutes outside of Dire Straits’ “Telegraph Road,” but the Warhol responsible for Empire and Flesh and Trash, the body of work which, more than any other, gave the lie to the easy division between cinema, reality and humanity; by creating an artifice whose point was to ban all artifice, thereby compelling the audience to question how they themselves choose (if they choose at all) to view other human beings, and how far those people on the screen (and, therefore, by extension, ourselves) need to undertake any activity to justify their existence. There’s no point or wisdom in grousing about BB; it is as manifest a child of Warhol as its reluctant step-siblings like A Woman Under The Influence and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer - and who’s to say it’s any less valid? Make no mistake; when I speak about Big Brother I am not talking about the snippets broadcast on Channel 4 in order to make it a simulacrum of showbiz; 30-60 minute anti-variety shows with gratuitous presenters, with the “tasks,” usually comprising elementary team-building exercises with which most children would have been familiar while still in primary school – imposing any kind of structure bar the anti-structure which makes the “real” BB so compelling detracts from the experience, apart of course from the weekly elimination of one inhabitant/contestant – Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel in reverse (would Bunuel have been proud of BB? Answer: for chicken, read goats) – which leaves, by necessity, the blankest person in the eventual aura of total blankness. That’s why any “personality” has to be the first to be ejected; Anouska, kicking sensually and screamingly against every manifestation of blandness and blankness (and of course the blackest contestant by a continental mile) – she had to go. Impose yourself too strongly upon the blankness and you undermine it, and the public’s Rover balloon will crush any life out of you, leaving those non-sex stories for the tabloids. Back to the Peak District nurseries with your static saliva. Because blankness blesses Big Brother. I speak of the live, unedited simulcasts from the “house” which fill up practically all of E4’s output. How the quite extensive stillness makes a difference of the world which you thought you could ridicule. When having trouble sleeping, eyes flicking open to it at irregular intervals, ears lagging a dimension behind, BB can become as disturbing and displacing as Blue Jam at four in the morning. Or if, like me, you spent all of Sunday cooped up in bed, laid low by a particularly nasty stomach bug – and this is why this article’s two days late, it needed to happen to me before I could complete it properly – BB on E4 can be quite magical, akin to the disorientation one experiences after coming out a deep coma with brain injury; what’s this gibberish I’m spouting except I don’t think it’s gibberish – it’s daylight outside yet my head tells me it’s three in the morning and everybody’s up (October-November 1998, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Intensive Care Unit, in case you’re wondering). Wake up to it at your elected three in the morning and you could be witnessing Jools Holland’s studio dismantled and dismembered. Except there’s a disco going on! They are dancing! But there is no music! They are singing! They are having to create remembrances of “music.” Such could BB be considered post-humanity (and hear what they are singing – “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” a hit for Andy Williams before any of them were born, and surely they can’t have been unaware of the first third of The Deer Hunter - did they spot the bullseye reference, unconscious though it surely was?). Several ideas to be taken into safekeeping: 1. The perpetual sunlight in the BB house and garden. It never rains. Even though the South-East was indisputably hot and sunny last week it remains just beyond believability. As though the inhabitants were protected. 2. Remember where they actually are; just outside Borehamwood. On the exterior of the M25, where all the misfits and lunatics are safely housed away from a collapsed centre (so Sinclair argues throughout London Orbital). And why that light is so alluring; it’s that subtle change in light when you leave the hills of the North, cross the boundary between Cheshire and Staffordshire on the M6 and realise that you are approaching the South, and how the young pulse quickens as you race through Milton Keynes and Luton – you’re getting nearer to London. Remember how Chesterton makes Gabriel Syme say at the climax of The Man Who Was Thursday; “I never dreamed that we were so close to London.” It’s the London light which lures you. 3. The light of course is radiation. They are the last 12 people alive on Earth, having destroyed the rest of the planet; and one will continue to die off each week, slowly being consumed and irradiated to blissful bone. They do not talk about current affairs because they are fully aware that there are no further current affairs to talk about. There is nothing and no one beyond these discreetly positioned electrified fences. 4. The light of course is radiation. They are the only 12 dead people on Earth, the rest of the planet having destroyed them; and they are being confined until their bodies can be safely disposed of at a rate of one a week. 5. Think of how inverted the world would become if central London were indeed a collapsed centre; a sham, full of useless pseudo-historical Nissen huts, a simulacrum for tourists only, never truly seen by Londoners. The congestion charge accelerates the inner blankness which counterpoints the outer ring of blankness in the BB house so aptly. In other words: this is as far as you go. 6. Remember how close to Borehamwood they are: close to the Elstree studios where McGoohan shot most of The Prisoner. 7. And what if they were free? Everyone has lawyers; nobody likes bad publicity; C4 would never let them starve or have them chewed up by alsatians or shot by over-zealous guards. They in fact are free to go at any time. But do they want to be free? Back to the grey world from which they are trying so desperately to escape? Remember again the closing moments of the “Free For All” episode of The Prisoner where McGoohan, fooled into thinking that he is the new Number 2, starts screaming over the tannoy “You are free to go! Free to go!” to the complete indifference of the citizens of the Village. Sometimes “real” life is so horrific and complicated that most, if given the option of settling for a blank, featureless life, would do so without hesitation. Cumnor Hill over Denmark Hill. Unless of course you’re lucky enough to live in, and therefore know, both, sufficiently to be able to walk between both worlds with the greatest of naturalness. 8. There are no CDs, no books, no TV, no radio. Like in the old days. They are being forced to fall back upon their own meagre resources – to create life out of forming relationships between themselves and other human beings. They talk about what they need to talk about. Who says they should be debating the finer points of Clare Short? And what difference would it make if they did? The world’s already over, they’re telling us, smilingly. So the people living in this house have to be as blank as possible. The camp Italian-Glaswegian waiter (tell me about it, huh? And I don’t mean Alan Cumming either), the interchangeable albinos, the Sonia lookalike/soundalike who escapes by rechristening herself Sissy (and we all know what happens to Carrie), the hearty Orkney fisherman at the edge of the world like a retrieved fragment of Michael Powell driftwood – who wants us to reinhabit 1904, who thinks it can still be done – the chain-smoking Chessex girl; they’re there because we wanted them to be, they knew their function was to be “made.” But those silences. Or just watching them sleeping. Or talking in the Diary Room (Lytton Strachey ahoy!) amiably and heartbreakingly trying to formulate their views – their meanings - of life. Souvenirs d’Egotisme it isn’t – no Henri Beyles they! – but then Strachey and Stendhal would have been the first two contestants on here if they’d had the chance. 9. And then there is Steph. The blankest and most beautiful of them all, someone for whom a beaming smile and friendly eyes can mean everything in their nothing. She alone understands the desperate poignancy in leaving a world which may already have begun to cease to exist - those barely concealed tears as she looked at the video birthday message from her dog. She is certainly the only one of these 12 with whom this writer would gladly have a drink, or more – she understands the nonsense but also comprehends that she can never quite hide the enormous viaduct of grief which props the smile up. The divorce is coming through. She doesn’t like egos. She will not cry. Not until you can’t see her. And then we will cry together and as separately as James Stewart and Kim Novak do towards the end of Vertigo. I could watch Steph forever. Because I think that all the silent dancing, that unending exercise bike treadmill (they looked as though they were seated in the Earth’s core, generating the power enabling it to turn), the beyond-Bunuel prancing about on bikes, the midnight swims, the random group hugs – all this speaks more “truth” about how we would like the world to be. Where we didn’t have to concern ourselves with politics, or debts, or death. Teletubbyland made flesh (there are few more heartbreaking moments in the history of television than Po singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”). That sunny Sunday winter afternoon in Hampton Court. Somewhere where you would actually want to live and die. Not underneath a 52 bus. Not on a cancer ward. I’m on the outside again, looking through the window. Will I ever talk my way back in there? Especially when they’re sleeping. They’re not Joe Dallesandro, but they don’t need to be. You understand anyway. Especially when they’re dancing to silence. It reminds me that, yes I do have 3000 words to write about M Ward’s reconstitution of D Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” but that by definition it would have to be the final chapter of this story which is The Church Of Me. And we haven’t quite reached the end. Not just yet. “And above all, it is your civilisation, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.” (George Orwell, The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism And The English Genius, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, 1941: part 1 “England Your England,” chapter I) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
