EPILOGUE TO THE CHURCH OF ME 1. After the death of his first wife Hilda Carline, Stanley Spencer continued to write letters to her for the remaining decade of his own life; extended conversations with the afterlife as a means of interpreting and, more importantly, keeping alive the memory of their living relationship. 2. After the death of Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel continued to conceive and write routines for both of them for the remaining eight years of his own life. It kept his creativity alive and stopped him from immolating himself in untold depths of grief. 3. The bad memories towards the end will discolour the good if you are not careful. I might have been unduly unfair to I, Monster recently. In reality I am too scared to listen repeatedly to their song “Sunny Delights” – a summer song which is about dehydrating, melting and dying in an ozone-less torment of a heatwave. The distant trombone sample reminds me of Pete Moore’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Samantha” which ends the David Jacobs Show on Radio 2 every Sunday night. This always marked the end of our weekend and our reluctant return to the world of work. Now it is yet another symbol of a life, an existence, beyond anyone’s reach. I think of the August Bank Holiday Saturday, the hottest day of 2001 in Oxford, and what the heat and the sun did to help finish off someone already too weak to fight anything off. 4. But I also think of what our lives were like in the years before then, summed up well by Roy Harper in his song “Me And My Woman”: “I never know what kind of day it’s been on my battlefield of ideals But the way she touches and the way it feels, must be just how it heals And it’s got a little better since I let her sundance.” 5. David Bedford’s orchestral arrangement on this song – how it comes and goes, listening and interpolating, the personification of the Other. 6. Perhaps it is the painful effort to prolong one’s own life which makes me so hostile towards those who would assert that there is no future, that it was all over by 1969 or 1974. Of Ian MacDonald’s The People’s Music I have little to say except to quote from Harper again: “You tell me that Grandad was a hero That he fought for peace and no more guns But I think he must have changed his name to Nero You see every time he grunts he kills his sons.” (“One Man Rock And Roll Band”) 7. So many reasons why the career of Joy Division/New Order is the greatest career in all of pop music. Laura and I would never have happened without them. What greater example of bereavement counselling is there than the career of New Order? On Movement they are speaking in the tongues of the deceased. But they leave an escape hatch open for themselves with “Everything’s Gone Green.” The laughing heard in the intro to the 12-inch of “Temptation.” “Blue Monday” – we mourn the person, we embrace the monument, we reinvent pop, we move on and live. 8. The sentiment of the Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned” is relevant. One could describe one’s new ambition as finding someone to whom the last line of the song could be sung. PROLOGUE TO THE CHURCH OF ME He awakened, quite naturally, at 5:51 am. It was strange how getting up at six in the morning to go to work was drainingly exhausting for him; yet, having gone to bed at about 1:15 am, he could feel that he had had a full and satisfying night’s sleep. It was a lush morning, warm but not stiflingly so. Even the dreams had divested themselves of the elements of nightmare – always the case when there’s a definite end to be met. After ablutions and breakfast he briefly looked at the contents of his front room. He knew it was unwise for his gaze to linger too long upon them. What would happen to everything? He left a note for his landlady with this month’s rent, saying that he would be away for some time. But after so many months the landlady would run out of patience and dispose of everything in there in lieu of any further rent payments. That is if the bailiffs didn’t get there first; sent by the card company following six months of ignored reminders, final reminders, debt collection notices, county court judgements. Who could possibly sell, or want, all of it? An archive meaningless without the existence of its proprietor, whose existence had not been deemed sufficiently noteworthy for the archive to be preserved and deified. He remembered the equally quick gaze he gave to the empty, echoing flat in Oxford – now just another anonymous, unlovable bolthole of accommodation – before putting the keys back through the letterbox. In fact he was too hot and tired for prolonged gazing and meditating, having just spent two hours shifting everything out of there. Probably just as well. He would otherwise probably never have made it beyond Sandhills Park and Ride. He went out into the comfortable-looking street. He had no need of a newspaper from the 24-hour garage, where already cars were filling up in the forecourt, their drivers beaming at the thought of a long and happy day of travelling. Victoria Coach Station in miniature, but with no set departure times. A bus appeared on cue, and he boarded it. He knew of course that in other circumstances he would now be waking up in Brighton for a bracing stroll along the promenade. But Brighton was no longer an option. He knew from the moment he emerged from the train station that this place held nothing for him, would not delete or assuage his pain, would be too crowded for him to stay sane. The art of walking down an ordinary street was usually enough to defeat him; the debilitating need to assert himself every five or ten paces. So he used public transport whenever he could, though could doubtless have done with more walking, if it didn’t exhaust him so much. The bus approached Streatham Hill station. Not too late to give Brighton another chance. Hop off, hop onto a commuter train, change at Gatwick and away you go. But of course he is having none of it. Can’t go there again. He stayed on the bus until it reached its terminus at Clapham Common. What a lovely day for just lounging about on the Common. Any sane person would; get a paper, a book, switch your Walkman on, spread the towel out and enjoy yourself. Or you could always cross the road and get an 88 to Camden Town (too much like Brighton for his liking), then the 24 to Hampstead Heath and leisure about there for the rest of the day. Maybe come out the Highgate end, go and have a look at Highgate or Crouch End or Muswell Hill, perhaps go as far as Ally Pally; or else venture in the opposite direction, towards Finchley and the surreal farmlands of Mill Hill. You didn’t even need to do that. Look, there’s the tube – get the Northern line to Waterloo, spend a nice morning wandering on the South Bank, looking at the second-hand books. This idea he actually half-considered; it was always one of his favourite ways of spending a morning in London. Then a quick coffee in the NFT café, then go over the bridge and keep going towards Covent Garden and Soho; check out the record and bookshops. He had recently, and briefly, experimented with the idea of doing this in the company of others, but it had been a disaster. Everyone, most of all him, felt uncomfortable. It was a stupid idea. This is the kind of activity which can only be undertaken on one’s own, or in the trusted company of a loved Other. There were too many memories of what it was like when both of them did it. True enough, anyway, that even if he did get the tube he would probably have to change at Kennington and wait for a Charing Cross train. Too much effort. Today he needed to expend the least amount of effort possible. He thought of that strange street, Windmill Row, which comes at you at the junction of Kennington Road and Kennington Lane. It was almost like a miniature Abingdon; the little music shop, the newsagent next to it – the kind of Home Counties oasis you don’t expect to encounter in the unforgiving terrain of south-east London. Home Counties? More than that; he could narrow his eyes and imagine that he was approaching Swaffham, or Stamford. But he will not get the tube for here comes a 137 bus, going all the way to Oxford Circus, and here he is getting on it automatically. The back seat upstairs is free; he makes himself comfortable on it. It’s a holiday so the bus is not too busy. Not too late. Not too late just to stay on it until it gets to the Circus of Oxford, and then you can go through Soho, Covent Garden, South Bank in reverse. Or anywhere for that matter. Not Battersea though. Nothing of value for him in Battersea. He passes the Stepping Stone restaurant and remembers an uncomfortable staff Christmas dinner from a few years ago. Forced smiles, daggers out at appraisal the next afternoon. Except it wasn’t even at the Stepping Stone but at the Café Rouge up the road. Cold turkey and colder pudding. The circuitous industrial estate, the Battersea Park roundabout, and then it’s Chelsea Bridge. The north riverbank on the left side reminded him far too lushly of another now defunct element of his life. In truth there was little left in London which didn’t remind him. Still, you know the deal; come off at Sloane Square, have a gander down the King’s Road, maybe walk down to Kensington Gardens, come out the Notting Hill end and then onwards to Portobello. But he is not taking this option either. The logical and rational thing for him to do would have been to disembark at Lower Sloane Street, cross over and get an 11 or 211 to Victoria Coach Station. See if you can’t get a last-minute return to Glasgow! Go up and see your mum! With no luggage? Glasgow was, more than ever, not an option. Or why even settle for the Coach Station? Stay on the bus until you reach the train station! Then you have one final chance to go to fucking Brighton! The express service! Or Lewes for fuck’s sake if you want that genuine Virginia Woolf feeling. Take a look at the old house. Think what must have gone through the poor bastard’s head as she strained not to turn the selfsame head back towards the house, the life, which she was leaving behind. Nicole Kidman stepping daintily into the Ouse in sumptuous Philip Glass-soundtracked sunlight. In reality it was a windy, freezing March afternoon and the river was flowing so fast that even walking, never mind jumping, into the bastard would have been enough to break your neck and finish you off. Nonetheless, what he had to do could not be accomplished in Lewes. So he stayed on the bus, right the way through Knightsbridge, right up to Hyde Park Corner, and even here he had the option of getting off and getting on a 14 or 19 to Piccadilly and just – well – try to keep going. But of course he is a stupid bastard and he knows exactly where he is going and no one is ever going to be able to talk any sense into him. With crushing inevitability he finally gets off the 137 bus at the approach to Marble Arch and makes his way towards the Oxford Tube stop. Even here there are options, so many options, still open to him – a 10 or a 73 into town, there a 36 heading towards Paddington; get off there, walk down Westbourne Grove into the Grove of the Lad Broke for indeed he is a lad broke so fuck off as regards that unfulfilling option. But no, here is an Oxford Citylink coach, and no way is he getting on it. Why did Oxford Citylink never bother to install toilets in their coaches? It is inexplicable. Well, they say, it’s only 52 miles, not long enough to justify the expenditure – and yet here you have the Oxford Tube with its double deckers and WCs making a killing. If he were to go to Oxford he would do so on a Tube of Oxford coach in bright red in accordance with its indirect sponsors the Central Line. He looked again at the 36 bus peeking out from behind it. Perhaps go to Paddington and get a train? 15 quid, but what does that matter? It is true that on evenings when he was running late or tired he would sometimes opt for the train just to get home at a reasonable time, when he didn’t feel in a mood for the slow jams of the Savoy Circus. But that was not the way he usually did it, and if he’s going to do it this time, he must do it the way he usually did it. And before long the Oxford Tube appeared. There were only a couple of studenty-looking tourists waiting at the stop beside him, and he noted with some relief that the coach itself was relatively sparsely populated. He paid his ten quid, went upstairs and settled in the front seat. Crowded coaches were a terrible and suffocating thing. He had become used to the commuter crush, having done it for so many years, but doubted whether he had any energy left to endure it now. The day, most importantly of all, needed to be free of stress, since in a way that was the purpose of the day. The bus drifted down through Bayswater, Notting Hill (not too late to get off! Make your excuses!) and the Shepherds Bush roundabout (you could still get off here! One last chance! No chance) before heading onto the empty expanses of the A40. Astonishing how quickly one could get from the BBC to Park Royal when there was no commuter traffic. Perhaps, he reflected, he should have done it on a 5:20 pm Friday night jam-packed coach/motorway for the real experience. The Savoy Circus, East Acton (Wormwood Scrubs blending imperceptibly with Hammersmith Hospital), the half-demolished Western Avenue, the Hoover Building (what would it actually be like to live somewhere like Perivale?), Hanger Lane, all flicked by with great rapidity, and before he knew it he had arrived at the terminal desert of Hillingdon. He realised of course that this was yet one more chance for him to get out of the deal; come off here, get the tube back into town (Baker Street in 45 minutes; come on, admit it, you just had a funny morning). He will not be talked to. He thought it odd that Hillingdon station, and what surrounded it, was not strictly speaking Hillingdon, but the unlovely arse-end of Uxbridge. Actually the little he had seen of Hillingdon itself suggested that it tended to do itself down overly. But that hospital. Hospitals in general. So he is staying on this bus and nothing and no one is going to get him off it until he so decides. On through the fake ski-slopes outside Gerrards Cross, the distantly glimpsed Chequers, the non-existence of Borehamwood. The approach to High Wycombe. Truly this is a grand approach; the town brutally cut into the hillside, looking far bigger than it actually is. He thought sadly of past summer evenings, coming back home through this cutting, music on the Walkman. When work was a pleasure. Oh no, it was scarcely five or six years ago that he thought nothing of getting off the coach at Victoria and walking at breakneck pace to Denmark Hill in about 40 minutes, happy and looking forward to the day’s adventures, or even the day’s routines. Now walking to the end of his own street was enough to knacker him. In truth he could have done with a lot more walking, but the right foot would start to ache with the bare minimum of propulsion and the lung damage sustained following the accident meant that he was more easily wont to run out of breath. Then more Wycombe, with the briefest glimpse of Windsor Castle on his far left; onwards through the hollow lands of Stokenchurch, waiting for the Telecom Tower’s upstart little brother to make itself visible – and then, the great cutting, the great boundary, used in a million car adverts, the point where GLR disappeared from reception and was replaced by BBC Radio Oxford, for he was now back in Oxfordshire. The luxuriant panorama of countryside which awaited him at the end of the cutting – Oxford itself not yet visible, but there the Didcot cooling towers, that most reliable of landmarks. And there the Junction 6 turnoff at Lewknor. He had never quite worked out why the coach always stopped here, except that he had once heard a story that it was because the managing director of Oxford Tube lived around here. Oh the joys of compulsory capitalism. And even here it was not too late for him to turn back, to walk under the bridge and get the Tube returning in the opposite direction, back to London, back to life; or if he couldn’t be bothered about London, why not hitch-hike a bit, flag down a passing local bus service and maybe have a look at Thame, with its street of tea shops and its occasional opportunities to meet Robin Gibb or Tim Rice. The options that are open to man in the 21st century are limitless. At Lewknor, needless to say, he did not disembark, and instead he carried on through the anonymous farmland – there the Thame turnoff, and right in front of it, there the turnoff to Oxford. He mused that maybe he could have hitched all the way up to blinking Birmingham if he had so wished. But what was there for him in Birmingham? He thought of someone he had known in Edgbaston, but that was 20 years ago. Come off it. But he would not come off it, not even at the service station. One of the most frightening nights of his life came when, having boarded the National Express from Victoria to Glasgow, it followed the A40 route and stopped off at Oxford Services for refuelling. He shivered. This was no escape. A freezing cold December midnight, and there she was, the whole purpose of his life, freezing just a couple of miles up the road in Headington Cemetery. He would gladly have stepped out, lay down and let the coach squash him. So onwards, past the tower block at Wheatley adjoining the library where she did her apprenticeship, and then there he was, at Sandhills Park & Ride. Even here he could have opted out, crossed over and gone back. It was still early and it was still summer. The day remained in hand. The day remained an option. But he carried on, past the Green Lane roundabout, past Bury Knowle Park. However, he had to get off at Headington shops. He didn’t know whether he had the nerve to visit, but he wasn’t going to be there again, so off he finally came. The plexiglass shark. He thought about what kind of life its owner must have. He had never knowingly seen him in all his years in Oxford and regretted it somewhat; he sounded like the sort of bloke worth having a pint with in the Angel and Greyhound. He had heard stories that the man had at one point stared bankruptcy in the face – his shark-related legal battles having cost so much – but how he had come through it and was now content with his jumble sale jumpers. Was there a lesson there for himself? What’s a shark worth? So across the road, past Somerfield, and up the Old High Street with its impossibly narrow pavement. then left into St Andrew’s Road, past a pub wherein he had recently spent a depressing birthday, then right into Dunstan Road, past Ruskin College, up the hill and finally through the gates of Headington Cemetery. Then after an interval, which need not be described here, he left the cemetery via the John Radcliffe side gate, threaded his way through the hospital grounds – having to stop off in the hospital itself to visit the gents’, invoking more memories of how she was always there to visit him when he was transferred there after the accident, how she brought him home – then out past the Arthur Sanctuary House, round the back of the old football ground, down Cuckoo Lane, down through Sandfield Road and then back onto the road to Oxford proper, past South Park, through St Clements, past Magdalen and on down the High Street. When he reached the Carfax Tower he noticed that it was still too early for the Carfax Chippy to be open. This he decided was probably a good thing. Can’t do what he planned to do on a full stomach. Needed to feel at ease. He was now on the penultimate stretch. He did not especially need to dwell in detail on the city itself. He knew it too well. Down, therefore, through the shops on Queen Street, past the Westgate, the Library, the council, the castle, the nick. Onwards down Park End Street, past the train station (still time to get that train back to Paddington. Never too late you idiot!) and onto the Botley Road. Past the forlorn B&Bs and the Wetgate Hotel whose missing “S” was apparently irreplaceable. The allotments. The community centre. The entrance to Botley Park. And through there he wandered, knowing what he would see at the end of it but driven to see it nonetheless. There was of course nothing for him there anymore. How could he have expected there to be anything there for him? New curtains in the window, new furniture, new decorations; all visible from ground level. New people. He didn’t feel invaded or emptied, just out of place. It was utterly alien to him. He did not understand its purpose. He did not recognise the place. He stared into his past and found only a blank space. Not even indefinable grey matter; just a colour-free, toneless blank space. A nothingness. He realised that his work was done. He never quite understood why people felt the need to berate him with words such as: “How do you think she would have felt to see you like this?” It actually did not matter because she was not here to see him like anything. It was enough to get the words down, as proof that once she existed and this was the difference that she made to the world and this is where, and how, she stays alive. Only one place left to go. He of course no longer had a key to go through the gate and the shortcut into Binsey Lane proper, so he had to do a U-turn up Helen Road, back into Botley Road (there a number 4! Why not pay a visit to Cumnor Hill or Abingdon? No, Cumnor Hill consisted of a pub populated entirely by Mojo readers, and that’s all there is to say about that) and then down the whole length of Binsey Lane, being careful to avoid 90 mph idiot drivers (not that there were any; a few cyclists and that was it, the Perch Inn having only just opened its doors), then turn right at the Perch Inn, down the shaded path, over the stile, and there he was, back in Port Meadow. It was a glorious day, not a doubt about that. He observed the Oxford skyline away off to his right and the cows grazing directly opposite him on the other riverbank. There was no one else around. He walked for a while in the direction of Godstow Lock. Can’t do it there of course; too many people, that pub with its clientele of impatient motorists. Perhaps carry on towards Wolvercote? Or go up over Duke’s Cut and plunge into the Wolvercote Viaduct? Bit too melodramatic; besides which he didn’t fancy being threshed into pieces. No, go for that bend just before Godstow becomes visible – Black Jack Hole. Oddly appropriate. There was never any talking to him. He was given so many chances and discarded all of them. Even at this final moment there is absolutely nothing on earth, except him, to prevent him from crossing over to Wolvercote, getting the bus back down the Woodstock Road into town and getting the next Oxford Tube coach out of Gloucester Green. He takes one final cautious look behind him. No one coming. No swans in the river either to start pecking at him when he goes in, either. Mustn’t overlook that possibility. He is of course severely disappointed that no woman appears to talk him out of it, because if the truth is to be told, the selfish, self-pitying prima donna that he is, that is actually what he wants; not to disappear, but for another Other, a gentle and compassionate female, to come and gather him up in her arms – metaphorically, of course – rescue him and nurse him back to life. It was always fantasy. If that’s what he really wanted he would have done something about it. He would have gone out, gone places, start chatting to people, and as akin as something like that might be to cutting off his right arm, he would somehow have overcome his self-constructed prison and the ideal would have become reality. Except that he’s tried that, and all that happens is that he depresses the fuck out of every potential new Other because he cannot shut up about what has happened, because he cannot block out what has happened, because THIS WAS MY LIFE AND IT HAS NOW ENDED and really what he is about to do now is the best and most painless option. One last long look, then. Not at Brighton Beach, but at the place where they had been happiest. And, almost subliminally, the pain gradually disappeared and there was now in its place a strange sort of contentment. Now that there was no turning back – now that everything had been decided – there was no need to fear anyone or anything. Most importantly, there was no need to fear that her life would be forgotten – the words he has written prove that she was here and that her spirit has found a home wherein the person he knew can never die. He found it in himself to smile a genuine smile for the first time in too many years. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
LIBERALISM HIJACKED BY FEVERED EGO: BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE To whom do we prefer to listen when seeking advice on how to build and exist in a better world? Historically it’s the shouters, the agitators, rarely the reasonable; and it’s beyond dispute that a humanity unblemished by shouters and agitators would never have ascended the scale from existence to life, even though it is their mirror images who propose to demote us back to the former level. Of certain shouters who profess to be on “our” side it is questionable whether they are actually helping us or simply helping themselves, with us as their portfolio, and thereby prolonging the life of whatever sociopolitical system they claim to hate. They shout that they hate The Man yet are quite content to be published/broadcast by The Man – thereby swelling The Man’s coffers and cementing The Man’s power. They may well make themselves pregnant with so much self-love. It’s hard to disagree with Andrew Sullivan in today’s Sunday Times that Michael Moore and Ann Coulter are merely mirror images of each other, and geometrically precise ones at that – Moore on the smash-it-all-up left, Coulter on the smash-you-all-up right, Moore scruffy and unkempt, Coulter the white Beyoncé (and more about the latter later). Both smile upon our ignorant brows and inscribe childishly simple solutions to chronically complex problems, and both are ultimately not just unhelpful but actively destructive to their respective ideals. Both philosophies could be boiled down to “democracy as it suits me.” Both must be warily watched. There is hardly a moment in Stupid White Men when Moore doesn’t feel the need to remind you that he lives in an exclusive Manhattan co-op duplex, as opposed to Flint or Columbine, But Hey I’m Still On Your Side. The privileges of his existence are therefore dependent upon the absence of privileges from the existence of the people whom he pretends to love. And, even with (especially with?) George W Bush’s wife, this writer, for obvious reasons, takes immeasurable exception against other writers wishing cancer upon people. It is Cobbett’s Rural Rides being bulldozed to make way for a (pseudo-) Marxist mall. Moore’s documentary Bowling For Columbine does not resolve any of these issues. Even the most passionate polemic has to be grounded in a minimally consistent logic. As with Esther Rantzen, Moore’s alleged concern for the downtrodden extends only to how high they would make him stand; finally, it drives one to crave the genuine good humour of an honest Republican like P J O’Rourke. It does not seem to occur to Moore that pressuring K-Mart to ban the sale of bullets is the exact equivalent of, say, Wal-Mart being pressurised to ban the sale of Marilyn Manson records or South Park DVDs – because of an unsubstantiated and unquantifiable damage which such things may wreak in the wrong hands. Much of the rest of the documentary is exploitative cliché. The sequence of Saddam/Bin Laden covert arming by the USA, with its distorted statistics and inevitable consequence, soundtracked by “It’s A Wonderful World,” is a mere echo of the similar sequence in the equally misguided Good Morning Vietnam. Neither uses the song to the same, genuinely startling effect as David Lynch did in the climactic episode of Twin Peaks - still one of the most terrifying things ever seen on television. The animated History of Evil Puritan Expatriates section looks like bad Fred Hembeck. There is one sequence which verges on becoming something more than Moore’s self-reflection, about a six-year-old child shot by another six-year-old child, who took a gun from his uncle’s house, where he and his mother were staying because she couldn’t afford any rent, having to travel a round trip of 80 miles per day to work 72 hours a week in one of Dick Clark’s themed restaurants and therefore unable to look after her son properly – and so the loop continues – but Moore retreats, preferring to provoke the children’s headmistress to tears in order to Outrage Us. Perhaps the one moment of truth in the film comes when Moore, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, arranges to interview the NRA’s president, Charlton Heston, at the latter’s home. The NRA had rolled into Columbine shortly after the shootings to hold a gun rally, and Moore intended to berate Heston for doing so, there and elsewhere. Heston at first appears bewildered – no the rally had already been arranged, no he wasn’t told about the shootings until after the rally, no he’s never been threatened but feels safe keeping a gun anyway – and then wanders into some not very coherent comments about “foreign people;” ironically, he is sitting next to a framed poster for Welles’ Touch Of Evil, wherein the Aryan conservative Heston was persuaded to blacken up as a Mexican liberal. But then Heston suddenly snaps into focus. Moore asks Heston to apologise to the people of Columbine for holding the rally. Thunder rolls across Heston’s brow for the briefest of moments, but when he mouths the question “You want me to apologise?” it is not asked with anger but with real astonishment, as if Heston had suddenly spotted, and was looking directly at, something rotten in the centre of Moore’s heart. Heston gets up to leave, giving Moore a genuinely sorrowful and pitying look as he does so. He has realised the contradictions which strangle Moore’s arguments, has lived long enough to know that there are too many things which Moore cannot, or chooses not to, understand – knows that there is no talking to this mind far more closed than his, and walks away. Moore leaves a picture of the murdered six-year-old girl in Heston’s yard – but he is her real exploiter. BEYONC? KNOWS LESS It’s faintly pointless to ask of Beyoncé Knowles why, like too many other pop stars (all of them in the end, except perhaps Kim Fowley), she feels obliged to grow up; because, try as hard as I might, I cannot picture her as a child or a teenager, even though she was the latter when Destiny’s Child began. She is a stern, unbending capitalist – a Religious Right one at that – with the deadest eyes I have ever seen on any pop star. It was said of Kenneth Williams that the reason he could never work as a legitimate actor, or even a stand-up comedian, was because of the essential deadness of, and in, his eyes, which betrayed no wish for his audience to be entertained. He hated his job and made little effort to disguise his immense resentment. One has only to look at something like Channel 4’s An Audience With… to glean the essential truth of this. Williams’ eyes are positively anti-comedic, expressing little beyond the desire for a swift and painless end to his torture (there’s a thesis to be written somewhere about what it is that attracts essentially misanthropic loners to the Conservative or Republican parties). But look at the photos on the sleeve of Beyoncé’s new album Dangerously In Love, and especially look at these eyes. A terrible blacked-out blankness is unavoidably present. And despite the obligatory thanks to her fellow DCers, there is a cut-and-paste picture of three Beyoncés gleefully bumping and grinding. Obviously this is what she would prefer Destiny’s Child to look like. If the album as a whole lived up to its explosive first four tracks, none of this would have particularly mattered. For in these four songs Beyoncé achieves the immaculate blankness of Grace Jones circa 1981 – similarly mistress of and slave to the cornices and curves of the backing tracks. “Crazy In Love” is of course a single of the year, its unstoppable power stemming from the fact that, via its Chi-Lites sample (“Are You My Woman,” appropriately enough), it seems to consist of nothing but build-ups – just as Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” never, as it were, quite comes. Nevertheless it is the only valid use of the exhumed Washington DC Go-Go rhythm in pop since La Grace’s “Slave To The Rhythm” – I’d like to imagine that chant as morphing into “Ho ho, ho ho, ho ho Madonna,” because this is much more interesting than tired cod-philosophising about “the difference between right and wrong.” Does Jay-Z need to be on this record at all? Does Thompson the reporter need to be in Citizen Kane? Only if you assume that they are actually part of the record/film, as opposed to the audience. The ROC’s jerking off over the Lady B just as we are – and it looks like he’ll have to do that from now on, as their affair is apparently, and conveniently, off – he’s deconstructing and admiring the ruthless bliss of the record, just as we do. And yes, there is a climax of sorts – just before the final build-up, Beyoncé exclaims “I’m not myself!” and finally comes at 2:58 with her exultant “BABY I DON’T CARE.” The song ascends to that one peak and then returns for some more climactic build-up. The fuck could go on forever, even if, as Nathalie says, the Fiorucci trumpets suggest that she may be satisfying her own shopfront reflection. It’s right that Beyoncé should invoke Donna Summer in “Naughty Girl.” Both this and the following track “Baby Boy” may be about the last trump with regard to Bollywood-sampling R&B; the last juice which can be squeezed, so to speak. In both she plays with being dominant and submissive, sometimes at once. Sean Paul on “Baby Boy” sounds dislocated, as if Beyoncé is bouncing him around like a ball against the flexible walls of the music. Even if she can never hope to cry or afford to be vulnerable – we’ll never hear a Once Upon A Time from her. “Hip Hop Star,” however, is Beyoncé’s Charlton Heston moment, when she stares her consumer in the face and demands to know what you want from her. It’s also where Beyoncé goes electroclash, and slugs the shit out of the Oldkrapp of Goldfrapp. Glitter/Moroder cliffs of riffs dehumanise behind her as she asks us, “Are you infatuated with me?” her voice as woozy and distended as McGoohan in the stoned party sequence in the “A, B and C” episode of The Prisoner. “I sit and wait for nobody” she adds, but warns “I dare you to undress me…when I blow you away.” Listener, let her know. If not quite playful, these tracks do at least offer us a facsimile of playfulness, as if Beyoncé had shrugged her shoulders and what-the-fucked her way into the studio, and simply exploded. Unfortunately, there then follows an unbroken sequence of ten – that’s ten - soporific slowies. As if the shareholders had shaken her awake and reminded Beyoncé of her job, namely to maximise their profits. She must adhere to what it says on her job description. “Be With You” revisits “Strawberry Letter 23” to markedly less effect than Vic Reeves did on “Born Free,” while with “Me, Myself And I,” despite its belief-suspending Milesian Tutu descending chord in the middle of the fourth line of each verse, we are back in the unlovable land of Survivor - the I-exist-and-that-is-sufficient-pay-me-for-the-shag-and-fuck-off ethic which has proved so successful for American society over the last two years. “From now on, I’m gonna be my own best friend.” Advertisements for capitalism are never attractive on a pop record. “Yes” has a good glitch intro which could have come out of Kid A but the song fails to match its adventure. “Signs” sees Beyoncé discussing astrology with the increasingly irrelevant and embarrassing Missy Elliott, and only served to remind me how sublime a record “Float On” by the Floaters was, and is (“Caaaaancer! And my name is Laaaaarry!”). There is little more to say about the rest of the increasingly coma-inducing record, except that a second Jay-Z duet (“That’s How You Like It”) is even more nauseatingly self-satisfied than “Bonnie & Clyde ‘03” (does anyone else remember Zoë Heller’s terrible Sunday broadsheet column of the mid-‘90s? “Boyfriend boyfriend boyfriend my BOYFRIEND said my boyfriend” x 1000. Useful for wiping up undercooked rice pudding) and that the Luther Vandross duet – a cover of Flack/Hathaway’s “The Closer I Get To You” in the same way that a sheet is used to cover the corpse in a mortuary – sent me to sleep. By the time we reach “Girl From Virgo” and its motif of “Yesterday I tried to paint you/But the colours weren’t beautiful” it might be enough to turn you into Michael Moore. FAR FROM CINEMA Or perhaps Todd Haynes. On watching his current film Far From Heaven - and not being allowed to forget just how startling a film Safe is, and was – 1950s cinema certainly came into my mind, but not that of Douglas Sirk, much as this picture would have benefited from being an unalloyed, straight-up-and-down melodrama. No, the name which sprang to mind was that of Stanley Kramer, he of the suffocating conservative liberal cinema. On one level FFH is all about colour, and how we exist with, and sometimes against, it. You will note how the lavish primary colours which introduce us into the film gradually fade and darken as the film progresses, such that in the final shot, with Julianne Moore’s car driving away from the train station, the screen has been practically drained of colour. Her red coat is perhaps as symbolic in its own way as that of the little girl in Schindler’s List. And, just as there is one (misguided) use of colour in that monochrome film, there is but one swear word in the whole of FFH. As with Beyoncé’s “BABY I DON’T CARE” the arc of the film builds up to the peak of Dennis Quaid exploding, “I just want this FUCKING thing over and done with!” before stately descending again. As with Sirk’s melodramas, FFH attempts to be a study of the slow strangulation of petty bourgeoisie mentality, caused by the equivalent desire to retain the standard of life which this mentality justifies. In extremis this causes Quaid’s closet gay husband and Moore’s dissatisfied wife to live as actors for the entirety of their existence. The seams can only break, of course; yet why is Moore’s the only character in the film who seems to end up with nothing (apart from her two children, who don’t quite trust her and whom she doesn’t quite trust)? Quaid comes out of the closet and begins a benign life with his new partner; Dennis Haysbert’s gardener, driven out of Hartford by prejudice and the consequent need to protect his young daughter’s life, beams affably and knowingly at a near-tearful Moore as he departs in the train for Baltimore (he doesn’t of course know what he’s letting himself in for, as any admirer of Nina Simone’s reading of Newman’s “Baltimore” will retrospectively realise). Haysbert’s character and performance seem to me to be the roots of the problems with this film. One suspects that, had Haynes concentrated on the slow degradation/destruction of the Whittakers’ lives, we could have had an inkling of what Revolutionary Road as filmed by Sirk might have looked like – talents slowly wasting by dint of self-hatred and co-mutual pretence, though the dyes of the waste would be entrancing to observe. But far too much time is wasted on the very clichéd (Kramer does Brief Encounter) non-affair between Moore and Haysbert, and the film turns into another over-obvious, dreary and ultimately patronising anti-racism tract. At its worst it’s as bad as The Defiant Ones or Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, and Haysbert’s character never rises above the standard Driving Miss Daisy Lowly But Omniscient Black Employee stereotype. Nor does Haysbert himself help matters much – his bass voice and overemphatic carriage are like witnessing treacle congeal and he never escapes from the trap of You Are Watching President Palmer. In fact, when Haysbert is on screen one is reminded of the dreary What About Our Family debates which were always the signal in 24 to go and refill the kettle. Yet, as in The Hours, Moore’s gradual, methodical breakdown is always compelling to watch, and Quaid makes a good stab at the Robert Blow-My-Stack persona, with vulnerability always underlying his outward aggression. Even if the unapologetically black-and-white Magnificent Ambersons had perhaps made the definitive Sirk melodrama before Sirk did (because of course with Welles it was never just melodrama); even if there isn’t an atom in the immaculately constructed world of Far From Heaven with the simplest impact of Celia Johnson’s husband at the end of Brief Encounter thanking her for coming back, or the profoundest impact of Richard Bennett musing about the Sun and the Earth before the dying fireplace in Ambersons. A BRIEF WORD ABOUT BARRY WHITE Even if…oh, what’s the use? You’ve seen the obituaries. He Was The Walrus. The same age, unbelievably, as Bryan Ferry – 58. Not a word about, much more so even than Isaac Hayes, he took elements from ‘60s psychedelia – the flutes, the harpsichords, the occasional backward drum tracks, the introduction to “Never, Never Gonna Give You Up” with its atonal, rising string crescendo worthy of Ligeti. How he invented the Art of Noise and the Cocteau Twins (listen to side two of 1974’s Stone Gon’ for irrefutable proof of the latter). Instead, perhaps listen to the quietude of “Love Serenade” or the drowning pool of his one duet with Hayes, 1991’s “Dark And Lonely” and disappear into a blissful emptiness. If he might have been construed as camp, it was only in the strict Susan Sontag sense of the term, insofar as camp can only be achieved when the artist is unaware of its potential existence. But he has finally to be remembered as one of the greatest sonic architects pop music has known. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
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 . . .
