WE NEED A RESOLUTION I’ll be honest; this story would have been meaningless if I weren’t. The story which The Church Of Me was set up to tell has been told. The Church is built, its existence undeniable, its permanence assured. An ending has been reached, and thus anything which is added further to its structure are for decoration only, to clarify some of its darker corners; as Arthur Miller says, “I’d put it that I feel there’s something I haven’t yet said, rather than I have something to say.” A new life requires a new story, and that will be forthcoming. In the meantime, however, there are still things, innumerable things actually, which I have not yet said, and it’s more than simply pointing out that the treading-water percussion of Andre 3000’s “Prototype” is the missing link between Roy Wood’s “Wake Up” and Badly Drawn Boy’s “Camping Next To Water” giving us a final equation of Robert Sabini’s piano closure of Chic’s “At Last I Am Free,” or indeed that the detuning synth and Ayler-ish tenor appear at the end of “She Lives In My Lap” rather than “Prototype” because that in turns leads us to Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure which last appeared in circulation 20 years ago, just at the point when a previous new life was beginning, and now returns on CD for the first time to perform the same rôle at the inauguration of a newer life. It’s uncanny and astonishingly touching as far as I am concerned; absent from my thoughts for a generation, but never out of my heart, it now reminds me that these 38 minutes of music continue to exist. 38 minutes which deserve so much more than damning with the label proto-Ambient or proto-New Age. Windham Hill’s corporate asininity was already on the rise in 1983; it is hard to think of another record which in its peacefulness went so violently against the grain of 1983 music. Astley is the daughter of TV theme composer Edwin Astley (“Danger Man,” “Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)” and, if you will, “Up Pompeii”) and in the early ‘80s was part of the diseased chamber group The Ravishing Beauties. From Gardens is ostensibly an extended impressionistic piece depicting a paradisical summer’s day in the privileged countryside. Performed largely by Astley herself, on piano, woodwinds, occasional bass guitar, vocals and electronics – and utilising field recordings of birdsong, boats on the river, children playing, done in various close parts of Oxfordshire (Moulsford, South Stoke) – it’s subtly and gradually clear that this record isn’t quite what it pretends to be, if pretend is what it does; for titles such as “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming” and “A Summer Long Since Passed” indicate that this is a blurred daydream distanced from reality. The plaintive and pleasing waltz-time major chords and gradually multiplying flutes are quietly underscored by strange backward loops, as if the dreamer were resisting being prodded awake. “Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed” exemplifies the absolute antithesis of the go-for-it, in-your-face ethic of 1983 (if “the past” were to be evoked in 1983 pop, it would only serve as irony, as in the medieval video for Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance”), though of course it can now also conjure up visions of Frank Bruno nestling insecurely in the boxing ring in his back garden; for the day is wearing on, the shades are gradually becoming more apparent. Hear how on “Out On The Lawn” the sound of a sampled swing-gate hinge serves as the song’s rhythm and can also sound as though it’s crying. Thereafter harmonic dissonance makes itself known, the backward rhythm loops become more prominent until, on the climactic “When The Fields Were On Fire,” they overwhelm and finally become the music’s structure. There is no reassurance here and a lot of palpable pain, a refusal to wake up – in other words, “It’s Too Hot To Sleep,” the closing piece which leads us into night-time with its hooting barn owls and finally comes to rest on the same piano chord which closes “A Day In The Life.” The only sound left is that of a clock ticking – an alarm clock, perhaps, or a warning; a bomb set to explode. And, even though it only originally existed as a one-off print run of a few thousand copies, and is almost never seen in second-hand stores, Feel Secure has proved quietly influential – not just in what the KLF of Chill Out and the Orb in general did with its constitutional elements, not only in the immense underlying sexuality in the music subsequently uncoiled to stunning effect by the swooning voice of Mimi Goese in Hugo Largo songs like "Turtle Song" and "Hot Day," but in the ambient Aphex Twin, the first two Ultramarine albums, the more quiescent Global Communications, King of Woolworths (very heavily so), the meditative elements of Saint Etienne, and onwards to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor! – and did I have to mention that Astley has worked with Sylv**n and S*k*m*t*? And of course, despite seeming to be as back to the land as Billy Bragg, Astley was, and is, as futuristic as the Art of Noise. But it has returned to welcome me back into the world for the second time in both our lives. It is as if Laura has given her blessing. Other accounts to take in What there is left to say in The Church Of Me is inevitably going to be less in quantity than before. I say this from the viewpoint of someone typing into a laptop sitting in front of Clarence’s Tower in York, which is where I currently am, as opposed to my usual front room in Streatham, precariously trying to balance it with the Sunday papers and looking forward to a hearty Sunday dinner at Betty’s up the road. There will be more writing, but new stories need new places and new perspectives from which to tell them. And I’m not sure if music is going to play much of a part in it. Increasingly I want to return to listening to music for the pleasure of doing so, and other things need to be written about. There wouldn’t be much point, for example, in my saying anything about the new Bubba Sparxxx record, because I don’t have much to say about it apart from utilising words like “Buffalo,” “Gals” and “21 years ago.” Perhaps Timbaland has clicked on something genuinely new in his fusion of his Eastern sway with Western swing on “Comin’ Round” and the Ryan Tedder-assisted “She Tried,” and maybe the quarterflash windscreen wipers of crisp cymbals which slash across “Warrant” (R Dean Taylor reborn!) raise the proceedings above bog-metal, but really this architecture is so timid, so unfelt in comparison with something like the IPen-recommended 28-year-old Red Haired Stranger by Willie Nelson – nothing slaughters the soul like the bass harmonica which creeps in to underscore the “panther” on Nelson’s “he screamed like a panther in the night,” the strings which quietly sneak under the curtains to weep with Willie on “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain,” the noble subliminal sublimeness of how, on side two, words are increasingly felt superficial and the most painful words are those unsung over the long instrumental passages, which make the five inordinately moving minutes of “Remember Me (When The Candle Lights Are Gleaming)” (cut to Wyngarde: “no the lights haven’t fused, it’s candlelight”) all the more shattering. And of course, with “Hands On The Wheel,” the betrayed murdering preacher redeems himself by dreaming a highway back to…an ideal someone. Compared to this generous openness and real musical subversion, you just know that the knife which Sparxxx threatens to plunge into his right thigh on the sleeve is made of rubber through and through. Nothing here as startlingly fused as the Missy E-meets-Ali Farka Touré Kenwood mix of “Bubba Talk” from Dark Days, Bright Nights. And next to anything by Johnny Cash…weeeelllll, or is that something which Nick Hornby, or Ian MacDonald, or Dr David Kelly, would too easily have said? Best to confine oneself to pointing out that, as with Speakerboxxx the triple X does not generally lead to enlightenment or entertaining bafflement (or even The Darkness – and for pity’s sake don’t turn them into The Future; they are fine for a laugh, but more hype and magnification will end up making everyone cry). Not much to say about the new Peaches record either - Fatherfucker it is called, on the narrow spine at least, if nowhere else – except that it’s smart electrorap minimalism, slightly more mainlined than Teaches, nothing really that Salt-n-Pepa didn’t achieve with Hot Cool N’ Vicious 16 years ago, but there there again, that’s something Hornby or Dale Winton or David Aaronovitch might say. They certainly wouldn’t see how the opening “I Don’t Give A…” (those dots; into such timidity does the art school disco eventually peter) takes a bite out of Joan Jett (“Bad Reputation”) but has the same paroxysmal glee in its screams of not giving anything about nothing in particular as if, say, Caroline Kraabel had discovered a third pane of glass. “I’m The Kinda” has the nice post-Poltergeist ominous children’s music box lullaby strolling against the inflexible strut of the rhythm – “Der Rauber Und Der Prinz” immediately comes into my mind. “I U She” talks about you-know-what, but not as stunningly as David Crosby did it on “Triad” or as sexily as Lynsey de Paul denied it on “Sugar Me” (those whipcrack rhythm tracks! Fred Frith on viola!). “Kick It” sees her trading amicable blows with Iggy Pop, though it would be more pleasingly unsettling to see the Ig do his act with someone who wasn’t quite expecting him – Robbie Williams, say, or Ward 21. Still, note the musical paraphrasing of “Trans-Europe Express” with the line “make your way to Berlin.” And it would be churlish to deny that “Operate” affirms life with its repeated “He’s not dead! He’s gonna live!” though it will be seldom bought. “Rock ‘N’ Roll” with Gonzales on drums, is of course truer to “rock ‘n’ roll” than any bands in custom-built garages with names beginning “The” (The The! Note the electro chord changes in Andre 3000’s “Hey Ya” which could have come straight off Soul Mining!) (Gossip, of whom more another time, are the exception, and how toweringly so. So glad must they be not to be crippled by a “The”!) and naturally there is a lyric of the year (don’t know which year yet) in “Shake Yer Dix” wherein she claims “You make my panties go ping!” Does it matter? It’s there, there are about 3000 albums you need to buy ahead of it if you don’t have any albums, but if you know and if you want then she exists for you. YOU PROMISED WORDS ON M WARD’S “LET’S DANCE”! Are they still needed, though? I ought to have put a codicil to that promise; the piece, as it stood, would have been written as an epitaph, and I have rarely felt less like writing an epitaph than I do now. Life is changing rather than ending, so I might need to find a couple of thousand different words – or even a couple of words – for it. Certainly Transfiguration Of Vincent is the most important record of the year which has not been spoken about in depth here; but terms like “important” end up working against, and maybe even nullifying, the quietude which this record offers, how it deals with loss and the path to a new life at an emotional and aesthetic level which is exactly equivalent to that of Red Haired Stranger. And yet there is other music to be taken into account, the sort of account which leaves no room for accounting – I cannot simply list the records and musicians about whom I could have written, but as yet haven’t. Priorities are different now, and life has rightly and beautifully taken me over again. Think of this, then, as a bridge from the Church to the Coulds. The Church stands, and will continue to do so; meanwhile, the new story will begin writing itself soon. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
ELTON JOHN’S WAY OUT When originally released, “Are You Ready For Love?” was the follow-up to “Song For Guy;” though not officially designed as such, there was a strange appropriateness to the choice. “Song For Guy” was Elton’s temporary resignation letter to pop; at the time of the road accident which claimed the life of the Rocket Records bike messenger to whom “Song For Guy” was dedicated, Elton was weary of work, tired of Taupin, pummelled by punk more than he cared to admit – for confirmation of this very real desperation, see his earlier 1978 single, the extraordinarily neurotic “Ego,” which pointedly has never appeared on any of his Greatest Hits compilations, even though it is the finest single of his career (if you want it, it’s included as an extra track on the CD version of A Single Man). So “Song For Guy” was a requiem for himself as much as for Guy. Such a quiet, unassertive tune, and almost entirely in the major key apart from half of the middle eight, Elton was alone here, with his piano, synths and a strange drum machine which sounds like a sampled tennis ball being struck. The whirls and hums from the synthesisers foresee the complete embrace that would be Joy Division’s “Atmosphere,” lay the ground for the blanket of snow which would obscure the cover of the latter. Anyone still labouring under the delusion of jolly speccy showbizzy Elton should take a good listen to the 16 tunes which comprise CD1 of the recent 3-CD Greatest Hits 1970-2002 compilation; only Gilbert O’Sullivan rivalled Elton in the ‘70s charts for bleakness and darkness. “Your Song” is an apology for writing said song, “Rocket Man” might as well be about a drug trip, and on it goes – “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (and hear the album from which the latter comes – “Funeral For A Friend,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” and of course the original “Candle In The Wind”), the last-minute about-turn from suicide which is “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” the pre-Blue original of “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word,” the tip of the colossal iceberg that was the Blue Moves double album, a 1976 record as nihilistic as Station To Station. Even the uptempo rockers are resigned: “Crocodile Rock” is a eulogy to an age now spent (“Susie went off with another guy”); “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” is the precursor to Sham 69’s “Hersham Boys” with a dash of John Martyn’s necessary cynicism. The feeling “Nick Drake gone pop” applies very strongly to the ‘70s Elton – especially if you listen to his extremely Drake-ian first three or four albums. “Song For Guy” is left until the end of the second CD, which indicates that he still regards this tune as a sort of last will and testament. As a method of grieving it’s as poignant and devastating as King of Woolworth’s “Delia Derbyshire.” The voice only enters in the final minute or so, and even then it is purposely mixed down, slightly off-mike: “Life isn’t everything…isn’t everything…isn’t everything” he repeats thrice (you might want to envisage the last “isn’t everything?” as a question), trying to persuade himself that he is singing the truth, before confessing defeat and intoning “Life…life…life…life…” lower and lower, as though his own life is draining out of him. Thus “Are You Ready To Love?” A Thom Bell production and co-composition, on which Elton only appears as virtually the hired vocalist, originally recorded in 1977 but issued in 1979 in the absence of anything better to put out at the time, it did indifferent business saleswise. But in the context of “Song For Guy” – and particularly in the context of its recent reactivation and being added on at the last minute to the end of the third CD of the current compilation – it comes across as a way back into life. “Sing a song to yourself, think of someone listening,” advises Elton, singing more or less to himself, before the orchestra and percussion sweep him up into their current. “Are you ready for love? Yes I am! Oh yes!” he exclaims. The high-pitched flutes and slightly boxed-in production actually give the impression of a British studio production – early ‘70s British white soul-pop jewels like Junior Campbell’s “Hallulejah Freedom” spring to mind – and the climactic climbing semitone modulations seem to scream/plead: “Look! I’m still alive!” And although this climbed no further in the charts than #42 in 1979, it’s appropriate that the next Elton single to climb as high as “Song For Guy” was 1983’s great, if ever-so-slightly-smug “I’m Still Standing.” BIG BOI OUTKLASSED BY ANDRE SHOCK HORROR There’s a new double album by OutKast – or at least under the “OutKast” imprimatur – which is clearly the most reluctant double album in the history of double albums. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below does not constitute a one-album-too-many diarrhoea of a double album, like Use Your Illusion, nor a collection of songs made in isolation under a convenient banner by a group whose members detested each other, like The White Album, but two entirely separate and distinct albums which nestle next to each other most uncomfortably by the two separate halves of OutKast, who seem to have come to a mutual agreement not to bother each other, for whatever resentful reasons. Speakerboxxx is, therefore, a Big Boi album, and The Love Below an Andre 3000 album, and the CD booklet emphasises the division, with separate sections, upside down from each other, and separate credits. The difference in the two approaches can be summarised in the fact that Big Boi advertises pit bulls in his section, while Andre 3000 advertises rather lurid paintings, or perhaps they are just posters (“Lady Lava,” 21” x 39”, limited edition, $65.00). In any case, Speakerboxxx, Big Boi’s half of the package, need not detain us long. The fact that the opening “Ghetto Musick,” the only instance on either album when the two actually collaborate on a song, stands so conspicuously above the rest of this album is embarrassing. Nonetheless its electroclash/d&b collision/collusion is superb, even if the new Basement Jaxx record makes it sound a little cumbersome, and the schizophrenic split between the speed rush (“Turn me up! Don’t turn me down!/Cut me up! Don’t let me down!/Climbing out this hole/With a frown on my face!”) and the Patti Labelle ballad sample (Andre 3000’s deeply sardonic exclamations of “Feeling good! Feeling great!”) is pleasantly disorientating. “Unhappy” isn’t too bad either; almost a hip hop follow-up to Heaven 17’s “We’re Going To Live For A Very Long Time” with its refrain of “Might as well have fun ‘cause your happiness is done and your goose is cooked!” Thereafter, however, we are effectively presented with a George Clinton album, and an indifferent George Clinton album (The Pinocchio Theory?) at that. “The Way You Move” is quite affecting in its hip hop salsa mode, but both Lemon Jelly and Girls Aloud have long since outdone this sort of thing. “War” is perhaps the least effective post-9/11 song since whatever that Paul McCartney one was called (its platitudinal ineptitude made to seem even more inept when I followed it with Phil Ochs’ unparalleled 1969 meditation on the JFK assassination “Crucifixion” – possibly Van Dyke Parks’ greatest arrangement and production: Elliott Carter strings methodically eating away at the song’s vanquished idealism). “Church” ponders the metaphysics of Why Am I Here (“What about you eating dinner in the devil’s kitchen?”) to no remotely eerie or profound effect. Worse is “Bamboo (Interlude)” wherein Big Boi takes great pleasure in provoking his infant son to say “motherfucker.” That’s the way to bring kids up, eh? By the time we get to “Knowing” Big Boi has been reduced to copping the “Unfinished Sympathy” rhythm. Things pick up a little with “Hip Hop Rock” which, with its plaintive piano intro/outro and irritatingly familiar surf guitar lick, cruises a wobbly bridge between Buggles and Dick Dale, though guest Jay-Z sounds like the Barron Knights doing Jay-Z. “Reset” works better than any of these tracks because the volume and braggadocio are turned down in order to make uncertainty and fragility audible; the kind of pause for thought at which OutKast, at their best, are untouchable (see the closing 15 minutes or so of AqueMini) and “Last Call” is musically sufficiently ghostly and askew to override its tired pimp fantasy lyric. Overall, however, Speakerboxxx is a disappointingly flat and restrictive listening experience. It’s as if Big Boi had not listened to any Def Jux or Anticon, hadn’t realised how high they have raised the bar these last three years; nor indeed the effortless hypnotism which Clinton at his best (the 15 absurdly ecstatic minutes of “Not Just Knee Deep”) can induce. But on the other hand… …you need to purchase this record, even if to consider Speakerboxxx the bonus free CD (like that absolutely unnecessary hour of The Coup “live” tacked onto the reissue of Steal This Album). Oh yes you do. Because Andre 3000’s half of the bargain, The Love Below, is a ridiculous and profound work of genius which comprises the most sublime pop-and-beyond music to be heard on record this year, which not only out-stanks Stankonia (compare any five seconds of this record with Big Boi’s cynical “Beginning to feel like Ms Jackson got cloned!” on Speakerboxxx’s “The Rooster”) but puts, say, someone like Cody ChesnuTT into proper perspective – much as I love The Headphone Masterpiece, even I am compelled to admit that, great as he is, and greater as he will be, Cody C offers us a book of rough sketches when set next to the assured mastery and mischief of The Love Below. D’Angelo spiked by Spike Jones, Dalek brought closer to everything via Peter Wyngarde. How to start? Well, let me not bore you even deeper with the standard spiel about orchestral utopia and unresolved feelings about the Other and is it real of course it’s not real except it is because the rhetorical repetition of such devices have long since climaxed so actually I could dive right to the other end and just say for fuck’s sake buy the thing and it starts with an orchestra and it starts with the family picnic pictured on the inner sleeve of Andre’s half of the booklet and my goodness is that a sunrise or a sunset well it could be either OF COURSE. Andre croons tremulously over lush/lusting strings and then this guitar straight out of Dalek just comes slashing in (even with the same 6/8 grind of “Forever Close My Eyes”) before slashing straight out again, and then suddenly we’re at the cabaret with “Love Hater,” Andre serenading us over a steady swing like Al Jarreau trying not to morph back into Leon Thomas. “Everybody needs a glass of water today to chase the hate away/You know you’ve got company coming over (Wyngarde parallel again – “Come In”)/…Everybody needs someone to rub their shoulders, scratch their dandruff.” The Sharrock guitar briefly bursts back in after Andre’s first “too late” but otherwise he is left to croon to our better selves. Already this is so much more fun than boring old Speakerboxxx and also much more profound. And the skits are actually funny. Over a plaintive acoustic guitar, Andre talks to “God”…”Damn, you’re a girl!” before pleading for the Perfect Other, not forgetting to stipulate that she should not have a “fat ol’ ass.” He strolls off, happy, praying “Amen…sorry, A-lady!” And it’s straight into the fabulous-yes-it’s-Prince-like-yet-again “Happy Valentine’s Day” wherein Andre cheerfully lays into the spuriousness of said commercial event (“I don’t get myself caught in the Jello gelatin and pudding pops/That others opt to call falling in love”), fantasising about meeting his ideal in a club, then realising the futility of such an exercise (“And if you don’t know me then how could you be my friend?”) before fading out with whoops of “Fuck Valentine’s Day!” But then “Spread” begins cautiously to demolish Andre’s cynicism; he can’t help it, he’s falling for her. And beautifully it is expressed, too – lo-fi drum ‘n’ bass patterns meet elegiac Robert Wyatt keyboards and chord changes, though watch out for that elephant blast at 1:34. A trumpet bop chart emerges from the studied calm, and towards the end Kevin Kendricks’ piano starts to creep into Paul Bley-ish polytonality. The skit “Where Are My Panties?” starts out like a standard morning-after scenario. “What time is it? 7:48? Oh my God!” the woman exclaims, though in fact nothing is articulated; the two of them are thinking their separate thoughts. Yes it was fun (“I wanna lay in her hair”) - “but what if she is the one?” This segues straight into the most starkly beautiful track on the album, the desperately gorgeous “Prototype.” Guitars shimmer in a pool peopled variously by Johnny Marr and Style Council era Weller. It’s like Bedingfield’s “If You’re Not The One” taken to unthinkable spiritual peaks; hear how the supplementary “come here” vocals near the end recall a gentler, less worried Justin Timberlake. The words “I wanna say stank you very much/For picking me up/And bringing me back to this world” might sound banal in print. When listening to them sung, it’s as if these are the only words I want to hear, to express, because someone has brought me back to the world…the good-humoured ad libs at the song’s fadeout are almost tear-jerking, insofar as we already know that this state of bliss is not going to be permanent – the gradually detuning synth which emerges out of the “At Last I Am Free” ambience at the end, giving way to an unexpected blast of Ayler-ish free tenor blowing from Andre (“play baby play”). And indeed doubts are already being forcibly expressed in “She Lives In My Lap” and the woman (Rosario Dawson) is already feeling exasperated. This is made more tangible in “Hey Ya!” which is, of all unlikely things, Jason Falkner-style power pop. Buried deep within the song’s superficial exuberance are the words: “But got it, just don’t get it until there’s nothing at all.” He’s already looking for a way out. In “Roses” Andre seems to have decided in his mind that he’s dealing with a golddigger (“I said, ‘Darling, you sound like a prostitute pursing’”) but is it all still in his mind? The lovely little bass earthquake at 4:09 would seem to indicate that it might be. Following the bizarre skit “Good Day, Good Sir” in which Andre plays at being Jeeves (“The fiddler on the fuckin’ roof,” however) we move into “Behold A Lady” which starts as blank electro but proceeds into something more fluid. “You’re the anchor that holds me down,” he sings, but adds sadly at the end, “…but one day our kids will have to visit museums to see what a lady looks like. So if you find one, good sir, hold her tight. If you spot one, treat her right.” Current biological theory holds that the opposite may come true – that ultimately there will be no further need for men – but nevertheless it’s a coded warning to live and love. “Pink & Blue” has nothing to do with the similarly-titled Dollar song, but is pretty transfixing; starting with a mangled sample of Aaliyah’s “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But A Number,” the song moves into a bleak electronic procession which briefly threatens to become Throbbing Gristle’s “United” before Andre starts to sing the praises of “Miss Lady.” Eventually, and with the greatest of stealth and subtlety, the song is taken to its successful conclusion by a full string section. Bewitched by love as art. “Love In War” acts as a kind of codicil to the song (“Cliché the end is near…Why can’t the story end like fairy tales often do?”), Andre still dazzled into believing that his newly found love is so fantastical as to be beyond belief. But none of this is any preparation for the jaw-dropping damaged beauty of “She’s Alive,” which, readers, is, frankly, Radiohead. Observe Andre’s Yorke-esque falsetto set against carefully funereal, minimalist piano, but then observe what and who he’s singing about – his mother, who, deserted by his father, goes ahead and raises him anyway; soundtracked by taped speech from both. Moving in its intangible non-timidity is this song. As far as either album is concerned, this is its (their) heart. But, having found love, he still can’t quite commit, partly out of continuing disbelief but mostly out of self-engendered fear. “Dracula’s Wedding” has him fretting the seat out of his trousers – “I wait my whole life to bite the right one/Then you come along and that freaks me out.” Standing beneath Andre’s window, with her bugle and her drum, is Kelis, who contributes hilarious asides (“And I can count, plus I make great peanut butter…and jelly sandwiches”) which only make one’s mouth water even more slavishly for her own imminent new album (“Milkshake” – everything that “Work It” should have been. “Their lives are better than yours!” Ha ha!). We can skip over the next (unlisted on the sleeve) track, a drum ‘n’ bass crack at “My Favourite Things” in the Coltrane manner which is efficient enough but doesn’t even begin to approach the besotted mania of Big Brovaz’ berserk reworking of same (the catastrophic horror of the final verse – “shop ‘til you vomit” – which turns the entire performance onto and against itself). On the short and quietly acoustic “Take Off Your Cool” Andre bills and coos at an almost absent, near-ghostly Norah Jones, with some warning soprano sax squalls indistinctly in the background. Andre now begins to sign off with the purring, stabbing “Vibrate” which sets maniacal drum tracks against a quiescent Fender Rhodes as Andre ponders on what may well have been an extended dream. Now left alone again (as he may always have been) he has to satisfy “the love below” by alternative means (“The circumcision has already begun…Muthafuck the wagon, come join the band!”). Towards fadeout he expands the picture (“Because Mother Earth is dying and we continue to fuck her to death”) before quickly constricting it back into the palm of his own hand (“Play with your own score sheet…and yes, God is watching you, but no need to be embarrassed”). Think not that he owns his shame – it is ours, his listeners, underlined by the song’s terrible assurance. With the concluding “A Life In The Day Of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete),” he sends the whole thing into a backwards loop, starting from his meeting in the bar, and retreating back through his life as far as record company deadlines would allow. Backward drum tracks swamp him, light up the life now flashing before his eyes, while a queasy Thomas Leer synth line blinks incautiously in the middleground. It is not finished you have to finish it and you have to buy it…if only for Lady Lava’s sake. INTERMISSION: PUBLIC INFORMATION ANNOUNCEMENT Following queries from several Churchgoers, and as the information is not yet posted anywhere on the Internet, here for your dissemination is the full tracklisting for the forthcoming 5-CD Scott Walker box set, which is currently set for November release. As you will note, each CD has been compiled in terms of separate themes which run through Walker’s work. And even with 93 tracks to spare, I am obliged to point out the ones which the compiler inexplicably missed out (Scott 4 in particular seems to have been given a raw deal). CD 1: In My Room “The complete bedsit dramas” 1. Prologue/Little Things 2. I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore 3. In My Room 4. After The Lights Go Out 5. Archangel 6. Orpheus 7. Mrs Murphy 8. Montague Terrace (In Blue) 9. Such A Small Love 10. The Amorous Humphrey Plugg 11. It’s Raining Today 12. Rosemary 13. Big Louise 14. Angels Of Ashes 15. Hero Of The War 16. Time Operator 17. Joe 18. The War Is Over (Track which should have been there: Two Ragged Soldiers) CD 2: Where’s The Girl? “Songs for, about or by females” 1. Where’s The Girl? 2. You’re All Around Me 3. Just Say Goodbye 4. Hurting Each Other 5. Genevieve 6. Once Upon A Summertime 7. When Johanna Loved Me 8. Joanna 9. Angelica 10. Always Coming Back To You 11. The Bridge 12. Best Of Both Worlds 13. Two Weeks Since You’ve Gone 14. On Your Own Again 15. Someone Who Cared 16. Long About Now (with Esther Ofarim) 17. Scope (Ute Lemper sings Scott) 18. Lullaby (ditto: nice, but leaves no space for crucial tracks such as: Get Behind Me, Duchess, Winter Night, The Lady Came From Baltimore) CD 3: An American In London Scott sings Europe (i.e. Brel), Scott sings about America 1. Jackie 2. Mathilde 3. The Girls And The Dogs 4. Amsterdam 5. Next 6. The Girls From The Streets 7. My Death 8. Sons Of 9. If You Go Away 10. Copenhagen 11. We Came Through 12. Thirtieth Century Man 13. Rhymes Of Goodbye 14. Thanks For Chicago 15. Cowbells Shakin’ 16. My Way Home 17. Lines 18. Rawhide 19. Blanket Roll Blues 20. Tilt 21. Patriot (Completely inexplicable omissions: The Old Man’s Back Again, Funeral Tango, “lemon…bloody cola”) CD 4: This Is How You Disappear An alternative “greatest hits;” 15 shots of the hard(core) Scott. 1. The Plague 2. Plastic Palace People 3. Boy Child 4. The Shut Out 5. Fat Mama Kick 6. Nite Flights 7. The Electrician 8. Dealer 9. Track 3 (Delayed) 10. Sleepwalker’s Woman 11. Track 5 (It’s A Starving) 12. Farmer In The City 13. The Cockfighter 14. Bouncer See Bouncer 15. Face On Breast (but no “Track 6” so Climate Of Hunter still requires a proper reissue) CD 5: Scott On Screen Compilation of film-related songs/film scores, rounding up stuff from The Moviegoer, Any Day Now, and pretty well all of Pola X 1. Light 2. Deadlier Than The Male 3. The Rope And The Coil 4. Meadow 5. The Seventh Seal 6. The Darkest Forest 7. The Ballad Of Sacco And Vanzetti 8. The Summer Knows 9. Glory Road 10. Isabel 11. Man From Reno (prototype of “Farmer In The City”) 12. The Church Of The Apostles 13. Indecent Sacrifice 14. Bombupper 15. I Threw It All Away 16. River Of Blood 17. Only Myself To Blame (from The World Is Not Enough!) 18. Running 19. The Time Is Out Of Joint 20. Never Again 21. Closing (would have been nice to have included “This Way Mary”) Now then… ”My arms are too short to box with God” “The only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground” (Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor) “The whole point about the suicide speech is to sustain a vocal note right up to the choosing of the gun, pointing to the temple, and then it has to change with a total vocal volte face, on the line ‘No! I haven’t got the energy.’” (Kenneth Williams on Chekhov’s Platonov) The original version of the Trent Reznor song “Hurt” appeared as the finale, or more accurately the coda, to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, one of the key records of the ‘90s. On the record it follows straight on from the beyond-claustrophobic title track, where the music appears to want to cram itself into the smallest box in existence and suffocate (“The deepest shade of mushroom blue/All fuzzy/Spilling out of my head”) as Reznor fantasises about shooting himself. As the track ends there is an uncertain electronic hum, out of which Reznor quietly re-emerges to analyse his inbuilt failings as a human being. In his reading, “Hurt” steadily builds in sustained intensity until the catharsis can no longer be contained; at the song’s conclusion drums suddenly detonate as Reznor howls “If I could start again/A million miles away/I would keep myself/I would find a way” as a guitar screams its unqualified assertion. It is of course a great big enormous YES to life, a turning away from the NOness of death. It demonstrates that the entire point of The Downward Spiral is that the spiral can turn upwards as well as down. It doesn’t really resolve anything, but it’s better than the irreversible finality of the alternative. Trent Reznor, of course, has the option. Johnny Cash, at the end, didn’t. So this year’s America IV: The Man Comes Around collection cannot now be viewed as anything other than a final reckoning. Although Cash planned more songs, and indeed had gone on to record some spirituals, accompanied only by his own guitar, which will be released at the end of this year, The Man Comes Around very consciously rounded everything up in his musical mind. It’s a mixture of generally restrained readings of old standards, from the traditional “Danny Boy” and “Streets Of Laredo” through things like “In My Life,” “Desperado,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and even “Personal Jesus,” and a few of Cash’s own compositions. Cash is aware that his voice isn’t what it was, but still retains enough power to raise it to its former heights when absolutely necessary (hear the venom in his “Well, damn your eyes!” in his reading of the old gunslinger ballad “Sam Hall,” or the barely concealed vitriol of “Suddenly the music was gone, and this man and woman got cut off in the middle of our song” in “Tear Stained Letter”). The covers are usually simplified harmonically; nothing is allowed to embellish or obscure Cash’s delivery. There would be no point in his trying to emulate Art Garfunkel or Roberta Flack (or even Dave Gahan); he has the wisdom to bring himself into the environment of the song, so much so that the occasional guest co-vocalist (e.g. Nick Cave on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”) seems completely unnecessary. Much of the record can only now be viewed with the hindsight of knowledge that June Carter predeceased her husband; thus “I’m So Lonesome” and “Tear Stained Letter” take on especial poignancy, and the closing parlour piano singalong “We’ll Meet Again” (on which her voice is heard in the chorus) a particularly cruel irony. So Cash is left to come to terms with his own myth, his own life, and the uncertain space where the two overlap. Thus he can even make a Sting song sound powerful and relevant, as he does with “I Hung My Head” which is the anti-“Folsom Prison Blues” insofar as he now grapples with the consequences of shooting a man just to watch him die. But Cash’s reading of “Hurt” is the epicentre of the record, all the more powerful as it emerges out of the exuberant train-to-hell swing of the opening title track, which sees Cash’s cheerful precis of the Book of Revelations. It is now inseparable from Mark Romack’s video, which thankfully is included as a CD-ROM on the album. In the video Cash, looking old and ill, sits at the table in his front parlour, surrounded by pictures and mementoes of his life, weighing everything up and asking himself how true and worthwhile everything was. It is a cross between Krapp’s Last Tape and Major Amberson’s deathbed speech; it is of course the inadvertent deathbed speech for both Cash and June, who unforgettably and shatteringly appears on the staircase behind her husband as the performance nears its tremendous climax, looking at him with infinite worry and even more infinite love, willing him to repent while he still has a chance. The song’s chord structure is simplified, and pointedly Cash substitutes “I wear my crown of thorns” for Reznor’s original “I wear my crown of shit” – a relevant change too, as it links directly to the “thorn tree in a whirlwind” Biblical reference in “The Man Comes Around.” “Everyone I know goes away in the end” – and June will go away before he can. The piano continues to pound louder and louder, Cash tearing at the tent pegs which held his life together, threatening to overwhelm and drown the song just as Cash’s deliberately spilled wine will drown his sorrows. But when Cash gets to the same final two lines, he intones them (“sings” seems too small a verb to apply to him) with absolute intense certainty that I WILL NOT DIE YET. Though no one can know how strong that thought lingered in his mind after June died. In an interview shortly before his death he asserted that religious faith had given him the strength to carry on for the four months by which he survived his wife (which he bore with a pain “so severe I don’t have the words to even start to describe it”) but that it was also important to him to continue devoting his remaining time to his music. So if we are looking for proof that “life isn’t everything” then the answer to the question “what’s the rest of everything” is not only what evidence of life we leave behind us when our lives are spent, but the things which make life, not just possible, not just desirable, but which might actually save someone’s life. As music appears to have saved mine. “To think that I am not going To think of you any more Is still thinking of you. Let me then try not to think That I am not going to think of you.” (Diane Arbus, from her 1959 notebook) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
This week: Basement Jaxx, The Rapture, John Cale and Robert Wyatt, but much more importantly: YES TO LIFE – BECAUSE LIFE’S TOO SHORT For the first time, this week’s Church Of Me was written in the open air – in the Saturday sunshine of Norwood Park, from which there is a glorious view of London, lying on the grass, in what can fairly be described as a contented and happy mood. I would go further and describe it as a quietly ecstatic and joyful mood. It is the feeling that one has finally been able to reconnect with the world. A corner has been turned, and I no longer feel as though I am a ghost – instead I am, not so much turning back into a human being, but rather recognising the human being I was all along. Not perhaps the same human being who lived with and loved Laura for 16 years, but a different and no less worthwhile one. When we choose to be depressed in isolation, we do forget that we are not the only people on Earth who feel that way, that some of our closest friends have the same, or similar, problems. And as a consequence we sometimes tend to idolise, or even worship, people we love, forgetting that fundamentally we are all awkward, contrarian human beings who change our minds every five minutes, fart too loudly in the bathroom and miss the bus. And we all need help. Ian Penman is, of course, right…we cannot exist without others, and certainly not without love or friendship, and definitely not without clearing the cobwebs away from the portholes of our self-constructed windows and walking out into the world. And, of course, life is too damn short. Too short not to tell someone how great and wonderful a person they are (tell them every day in fact), too short not to smile or laugh, and too short to cut it even shorter, because…and this is the painfully obvious truth about it all…thinking it’s all over and wanting out of this world is like throwing away a book when you’ve only read half of it. Isn’t it so much more interesting and exciting to go on to the next chapter and see what happens? I feel that now more than ever. Laura, if she’d had the choice, would have gone on living. Well, I do have the choice and I’m not going to waste it or throw it away. And I choose to embrace life. THE SOUNDTRACK FOR THIS ALTERED AND IMPROVED STATE OF MIND AND BEING 1. ATHLETE - Vehicles and Animals Mostly because of Mercury, I’m now becoming enamoured with this perfectly amiable yet quietly adventurous record. I will write properly and fully about it in a future sermon, but for now will simply note that the point at 1:33 in “Westside” where the band shout “Chorus!” and the entire song shifts into a different and hotter gear is pure punctum, as is the deadpan, spaced-out refrain of “Oh…oh, oh…oh,” swiftly answered by a rude bass synth belch, in “You Got The Style.” The perfect soundtrack for a sunny Friday morning when you haven’t really slept and are a little hungover but as happy with the world, and in the world, as one could possibly be. 2. EDISON LIGHTHOUSE – “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” Don’t ask me how this got into my head. Efficient 1970 bubblegum, of course, but musically the performance and production are a lot livelier and more muscular than you might recall. The contrast between Tony Burrows’ eager vocals and Big Jim Sullivan’s almost Chilton-esque guitar is the axis of the whole record. 3. JOHNNIE ALLAN – “Promised Land” Currently available for nowt as part of this month’s Uncut free CD, this is a near-euphoric and partially surreal performance of Chuck Berry’s spiritual/sexual travelogue. Allan rolls his tongue and libido as he slows down and spaces out the words “Slow down chariot, come down eeeeasy.” The drummer (as with Cliff Gallup in the Bluecats) is hyperactive, can barely wait for the breaks before he excitedly does triple-rolls, can hardly wait to live. And the completely unexpected entrance of Belton Richard’s Cajun accordion is the musical equivalent of Spencer painting himself in three different places, being reborn thrice, in Resurrection: Cookham - you can’t quite work out how he achieved it, or why he’s there, but physically and metaphysically it’s entirely in place. 4. BASEMENT JAXX - Kish Kash When I got home on Friday morning the new Basement Jaxx album was in my mailbox, as was the upcoming 5CD Scott Walker box set. Yes, it did rather feel like Christmas came three months early, and not just because of the contents of my mailbox. And as impressive as the Scott set looked, and as much as I adore Scott, it’s the Jaxx I’ve been playing in rotation. Their previous record, 2001’s uneven but unearthly in its brilliance when brilliant Rooty, helped me get through and cope with that most difficult of summers; and now they’ve done it again, with another album which screams the importance and brilliance of life. It starts with a gigantic fuck you to the negatives of anti-life, the exuberant “Good Luck.” Beginning with a careful strings ‘n’ vibes ballad intro, one briefly wonders whether they’re going to wander into dreaded UNKLE faux-angst territory (that ghastly new UNKLE record is the personification of anti-life), but in fact they take an excursion into Timbaland (complete with “chicka-chicka” inserts) land. Then, all of a sudden, the singer – Lisa Kekaula of grey Detroit garagers The Bellrays – appears, demanding “Tell me! Tell me!” and at 0:47 the lights are abruptly turned on, the orchestra storms in and the song starts proper. And what a song, what a Northern-Soul-that-never-was stomper, as Kekaula gleefully gets shot of her useless ex and the chorus rises, the bass doubling with the ascending orchestra, like a holy alliance of Heaven 17’s “Temptation” and Yvonne Baker’s “You Didn’t Say A Word.” “Good luck in your new bed,” sings Kekaula – and what a soul voice she has, and how much better an environment for it than the boring Bellrays. The Jaxx are aware of the importance of the unexpected – thus the multiple alarm clocks and drum barrages which answer Kekaula’s “But wake up baby” at 1:35, the later trilogy of quadruple hammering bass/string lines, the subtle suggestion in the string lines of ELO’s “Showdown” and how the bass starts to rattle as the song reaches its tumultuous climax. The machinery malfunctions appropriately at the close of this extraordinary performance. “Right Here’s The Spot” (and how often do they hit it) features Me’Shell Ndegeocello, her voice blissfully dislocated, swooning and sloping over the post-Prince grind, saturated by sex. The “all my people” aside is a better monument to the influence of Missy Elliott than those Gap adverts. “Lucky Star” features the newly wealthy Dizzee Rascal. If it sounds slightly conservative it’s only in comparison to the yardstick which the Rascal himself has set; next to anything else it’s bewildering, bewitching and colourful. DR – whose voice I increasingly feel may be that of the most individual and instantly identifiable vocalist in any sphere of British music since Morrissey – reflects on his journey from the Old Bill to the “house on the hill” as the Jaxx’ bizarre Bollywood/hoedown fusion (or fission) rages behind him. Again, hear how the backing vocals varispeed in ecstasy (the 33-99 rpm sweep of “lucky starrrrrrrrr” is a better monument to Madonna than those Gap adverts) – the delirium of “I’m too far gone/I’ve gone too far” set against one of this year’s defining puncta – Rascal exclaiming “Jackpot! Jackpot!” as if Alan Partridge had just signed up with Roll Deep. “Supersonic” is everything that Rooty’s “Do Your Thing” should have been – whereas the latter was a disappointingly straightforward gospel thing which only conjured up the spectre of Kenny Everett’s preacher waving his gigantic hands, “Supersonic” in fact marries the “rooty” elements of that track with the album’s much more disorientating “I Want U.” It’s multilayered but with no discernible centre, so that Totlyn Jackson’s ecstatic vocals, particularly her 1000 mph vibrato on the word “supersonic,” conjure up the vision of Betty Boop on a vibrator. The track itself builds and builds steadily, like Betty Boo’s “Doin’ The Do” as Spring Heel Jack might restructure it today, with a dash of Arnold Dreyblatt’s maximalism. Elements methodically pile up - Old Grey Whistle Test harmonica, Hendrix-esque guitar, the theme from “Rawhide” (Frankie Laine rather than Scott Walker), an odd quavering synth which seems to have wandered in from Ultravox’s “Mr X” – to make the entire edifice quite spellbinding. “Tell me you’re a man!” sneers Jackson at the track’s climax, and the applause which follows is more than justified. “Plug It In” decides to rescue one of the other members of N*Sync, J C Chasez. No need of course to comment on the attendant irony (because there is none; he actually means it) of “Ever tried to live without the photographs and money?” (the emptiness of the back cover of Celebrity; what happens when the crowd moves on?). Musically he’s clearly aiming for Justin replication, but typically the Jaxx’ musical response is much more aggressive and thuggish than we would expect from the Neptunes or Timbaland; so much so in fact that Chasez actually disappears halfway through the song, only to resurface briefly as a vocoder. “Ever tried to live without the make-up?” as he desperately tries to escape. He sounds as swallowed up as the radio which swallows up John Cale at the end of Music For A New Society. The rather ploddy ballad “If I Ever Recover” with its half-tempo stately strings and breezily concerned late-‘60s vocals (somewhere between the Association and Jon Anderson) sounds like an excuse for the Jaxx to get their breath back (though note that “find a shoulder, find a friend”). They were right to do so because swiftly comes the album’s peak, the virtual title track “Cish Cash.” The natural sequel to “Where’s Your Head At?”, this sweeps along ruthlessly like an electroclash rebirth of PiL’s “Annalisa.” And yes, that sometimes scarcely recognisable voice is that of Siouxsie Sioux, sounding more mischievous, alive and threatening than anything she’s done since “Peek-A-Boo.” Against the cascading bass (one might say, the “Careering “ bass) Siouxsie has happily gone mad. “Yum yum yum yum.” “Splish splash.” “You want it? You take it!” “Not enough, must have more, baby,” she teases and caresses and chortles through what would otherwise be beyond-humdrum reflections on Money Making The World Go Round. Though she is actually singing Boo Hiss To Boredom. That little harp/piano motif which peers round the doorway at 2:44, only to be repelled by synthesised dog barking. The importance of the word “spin” in the lyric “They say it makes the world spin round” because Siouxsie sings it as though she herself is spinning, is clinging on to the world as it tries to throw her off. She’s never sounded better or happier. As is sadly typical with Jaxx albums, however, the record tails off disappointingly as their previous two did. “Tonight” is “Rendez-Vu” on valium. “Hot ‘N Cold” doesn’t know whether it wants to be “It’s Not Unusual” or “Get Ur Freak On” (“I hear you talking some nonsense…it makes no sense at all”). “Living Room” is a curious fragment which sounds like Terry Hall just before hitching onto the World Music ambulance, but instead of the intended colour we get, uh, the Monochrome Set. But “Feels Like Home” is a troubling conclusion in itself, completely unexpected from Basement Jaxx and perhaps the most radical and disturbing thing they’ve done. Me’Shell returns for some quiet words of prayer as the electronic creaking and humming slowly disintegrate. “Hold my hand when you sleep/So when you dream I’m there with you.” A sotto voce plea to live. It isn’t quite the complete breakdown of Tweet’s “Drunk.” For seven minutes it clings on, she clings on, they cling on until the song either falls asleep, or dies. But does it dream? 5. THE RAPTURE - Echoes If it does, it might dream of a muted House beat with spaced piano commentary – Larry Heard meets Arab Strap. The burping synth bass which follows might dissuade you from thinking that there’s a funeral to follow. Not a bit of it. “I called you up on the telephone ‘cause I was lonely.” It is “Olio,” the opening track on the first album proper by The Rapture, Echoes, and it is the best and most natural wedding of House and post-Joy Division angst since The Beloved’s “The Sun Rising.” Lyrically, it does not condemn the world or the individual to death; it is a meditation on getting old, on the difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that it’s not 1969 or 1988 any more (“We don’t fit any more/Not the same/Not the same”), on how hard it is to amass the strength and patience needed to keep you in this world after what you perceive as your heyday – as your “life” – has seemingly vanished. I hear words like “Looking and not wanting to come up to date/Like a broken clock/The hand is still,” “The times pelting me,” and most painfully close to the bone, “Ripped up in the shadows/Over and over again” and can perhaps nudge a tiny bit closer to understanding how someone like Ian MacDonald must have felt. It is a deeply moving song which – and naturally every moron who pointed at this album, at this group, and cackled “revivalist!” missed it completely because they weren’t actually listening - shows us the stark, slow death which waits for anyone who decides to shut themselves up in the past and fence themselves off from the future. How do The Rapture feel about it? Their answer is LIVE. Hear how “Olio” segues seamlessly into the opening chant “1-2-3-4-5-6-7/I’m floating in a constant heaven” of the song “Heaven,” and how the guitars suddenly, and shockingly, dynamite their way through your wall and bring you back into the world. The fresh air hits you like a punch in the face. Yes, forget the lot, forget the bloody lot, get back to life, get back to living. And on that level of levels – are they any good as a group? – you will have to accept that The Rapture are a very fine rock group indeed, maybe the best we now have, in terms of dynamics, in terms of relationships between the music and the vocals. “I can’t believe that you came here today/And took me away” sings Luke Jenner. Ecstasy of what kind? I like to interpret it as romantic ecstasy. The track then shifts into the 3/4 of Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” as if to remind us that that’s not a desirable option (“It’s driving me sane!”) while Gabriel Andruzzi’s fine alto adds some Caroline Kraabel-ish skronk commentary on the sidelines at the song’s close. The whole album is segued; comparable in a way to Donna Summer’s Once Upon A Time - another examination of how happiness can be extracted from the jaws of terminal despair. Note how the 3/4 which ended “Heaven” now gives way so naturally to the 6/8 of “Open Up Your Heart.” Indeed the lyric could have come from Summer’s record: “When you’re sad and lonely/And your mind sees you only/Take a chance – you can fight it/Open up your heart.” It’s a beautiful (because imperfect, because Luke Jenner tries to be more James Carr than Thom Yorke) soul song. It’s a song which I find exceptionally pertinent to my life as it is (“Fight the urge to say no/Bring your friends, then you’ll know/Come inside, step away/Kill your fears today”) and I’m moved to tears by it. Jenner’s “imperfect” voice has more “soul” in the tiniest of its atoms than…well, whoever. In the corners of the song, electronica whirrs away, and there’s a beautiful moment at the song’s close when a descending sax/voice unison line dovetails with a one-note minimalist saxophone refrain. The atmosphere gets very close to the holy aura (Tara/ta-ra) of Roxy Music’s “For Your Pleasure.” Finally, the song itself gives way to the sound of people, the sound of a tolling bell…as the singer re-enters the world. If there’s any more moving performance on a record this year not by Lunge or Cat Power, then I’ve yet to hear it. “I Need Your Love” is frankly pop-house in its structure, Jellybean Benitez Jaxxed up by the Basement. Jenner’s vocals are near-ecstatic in their desperation to be loved (“Feeling less desperate to hold in my fear”). But hear the whirring saxes deep in the background (rather like Evan Parker hovering ominously underneath Scott Walker at the beginning of the latter’s “Track 6”). At its close the song detours into JAMC-ish feedback squeals, but soon clarifies again to segue into “The Coming Of Spring” whose onward drive is extremely reminiscent of Theatre of Hate’s “Westworld” enticed into the 21st century (not to mention Jenner’s “mah-ma ma-ma, ma-ma-ma mine” which also slyly nods at Adam Ant’s “Apollo 9”). The high spirits and laughter lead us straight into the bring-the-boys-home anthem “House Of Jealous Lovers” (just as, on the Bonzos’ Tadpoles, “Monster Mash” goes straight into “Urban Spaceman”). Forget the C**e, forget G**g of F**r, forget J***s Ch**ce, this is a dynamic and brilliant pop record which would have been eminently desirable in 1979 or 1982 but which could only have been made now. The ecstatic slashing of the tripartite guitar riff (very K*ll*ng J*k* actually) demands movement and, indeed, “shakedown.” The minimalist scenario (“One hand ties the other”) is Luomo’s “Visitor” refracted and spiced up. And anyone who doesn’t scream joyously at the moment when, at 2:48, Jenner’s vibrato on “shakedown” escalates into Phil Minton abstract territory and is immediately answered by his own coruscating guitar solo, frankly does not understand pop. (Then again I would, and do, say the same of something like the fab new Rachel Stevens single – Cilla Black and Felix da Housekatt do “Empire State Human”) Spirits remain elevated with the title track “Echoes” which comes on like Adam Ant doing PiL’s “Memories” with Jenner’s three-chord Hallelujah Chorus riff in the foreground and its bass descending down Jah Wobble’s staircase, but then evolves via its Del Shannon middle-eight until it suddenly accelerates to double-speed, culminating in alternating triplets from the drums and bass, leading inevitably to, uh, drum ‘n’ bass. “Killing” appropriates a bassline which, in another connected universe, would be that of the intro to Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day,” and there is some good high-pitched vocal duelling between Jenner and bassist Mattie Bafer. The fadeout is unexpectedly resigned electronica, seemingly about to merge into Global Communications but which does in fact segue, via a guitar fanfare, into the “Fade To Grey” synth bass which underpins the sardonic “Sister Saviour” (“Why’d you leave me/For the good life?/At least our bad times were ours”). If the latter title suggests the Stones, the climactic track “Love Is All” certainly does with its unapologetically Keef guitar riffs and on-the-beat 4/4 stomp, drummer Vito Roccoforte being very busy and emphatic with his cymbals. “Love is all my crippled soul will ever need/It’s OK to feel this way/It doesn’t matter anyway,” sings Jenner, with only the merest tinge of sadness on the last line, but it’s really an exultant song, the realisation that, if nothing matters, then nothing is in fact everything. Is this the most positive record to be released this year? Jenner signs off with the simplest of pop pledges and profoundest of moral pledges: “I dig love and just having you around.” Because that’s why we’re here, that’s why we stick around. At the end of the song, and effectively the album (there is an extra track on the UK edition, “Infatuation,” which is a bit morose, the only thing here which is really reminiscent of the Cure and a little out of place, but it can be programmed out), a virtual choir of guitars materialises, Jenner ascends to his heaven, and his guitar FX give out cyber-applause. And it is well deserved. And right at the end, as the music, as The Rapture, disappears, at 4:10, almost imperceptible within hearing range, Jenner, from the left speaker, softly says: “I love you.” 6. LEMON JELLY – “Nice Weather For Ducks” Say what you like about the Mercury Music Prize, but it does serve a very important function for me, that is to remind me not to overlook records which I might have overlooked or underrated. So it happened with Athlete (although, as I said, G had more to do with that), and also with Lost Horizons by Lemon Jelly. I’d lazily written LJ off as an Ealing Studios-directed-by-Nick Hornby dilution of Boards of Canada, but actually…now I think, what’s wrong with wanting to be approachable, with music that wants to be friends with you? And music which still, at its core, has a troubled heart, which does make all the difference. I was moved beyond words by a couple of tracks on their KY debut; the lovely 1971 children’s TV idyll of “His Majesty King Rham,” and the staggering “Page One” which starts off with a prelude to a lecture on how the world began. “Imagine a world where there was nothing at all.” The lazy, piano/double bass-driven groove quietly proceeds to build up, until we get to the crucial pause where the narrator says: “And then…nothing.” At which point the track explodes into a celestial House anthem, piano cascading ecstatically. A point at which it is realised that, again, nothing is nothing and is thus everything. Emotionally it is stunning. And so I’ve extracted Lost Horizons from the backroads of my less-travelled shelves and I’m rather taken by it, especially by the crucial interaction between the music and Fred Deakin’s not quite 3D artwork, the flowing of the country into the city and vice versa; how darkness and light coexist, and particularly by its top 20 hit single “Nice Weather For Ducks” which, with the minimum of fuss and maximum of ingenuity, evolves naturally from Enn Reitel’s endearingly daft nursery rhyme refrain – Ivor Cutler meets Brian Cant – to sensual salsa house (a bit like Girls Aloud/Betty Boo’s “Lovebomb”) and then, via Steve Sidwell’s extraordinary multiple trumpets, to what is nothing less than an update and rebirth of what Mongezi Feza did on Robert Wyatt’s “Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” – another urge to live. 7. JOHN CALE - HoboSapiens And I doubt that I could have appreciated the new John Cale album quite as strongly had I not first heard Lemon Jelly – crucially so, for LJ’s Nick Franglen is the co-producer. Cale – with one startling exception – does not “go dance” on this record, but with characteristic ingenuity brings out the dark heart at LJ’s centre; as with Lindsey Buckingham, he understands new technology; he has listened to the Beta Band (but not forgotten about the Alpha Band), he has listened even to Beck, but knows that technology has to be put at the service of whatever visions the artist wishes to create. Even inadvertently, as with “Blue Monday” – essentially a test track to see what a new drum machine could do – the emotion will seep through anyway, inevitable and ineradicable. We know from this spring’s 5 Songs that Cale was ready to stun us again; but not even that document prepared us fully for the onslaught of this genuinely new music. With its askew view of geopolitics, benighted dictators and Armageddon, HoboSapiens could be described as Scott Walker’s Tilt tilted slightly more towards the mainstream. And nothing is as it seems on this record. The first sounds you hear are those of a repeated unresolved synth chord, like a tolling bell (or ESG!), followed by breakbeats. When Cale’s unmistakable Welsh baritone looms into view, you might idly think you’re listening to The Blue Nile; but listen to what he’s singing: “Heroes turning on a spit/The lovers unable to resolve a prehistoric bitch.” It’s about The War, of course, and there’s even a sideswipe at Blair (“Stating the obvious/A monkey and his grinder/But on a different plane”). The near whisper of “We’re losing control of the night.” And The Blue Nile could never have conceived of the Cecil Taylor-ish freeform piano which destabilises the song at its fade. The next couple of tracks are quite jolly by Cale’s standards and are splendid pop-rock songs: the Ballard-meets-Italian Job sex-drive (“Driving my motor/Couldn’t see the sings”) of “Reading My Mind” – whose Italian driving test samples bring Lemon Jelly brilliantly into the world of rock - and the first of two versions of his song “Things,” almost David Byrne in its seeming goodnaturedness, though note should be made of the latter’s Warren Zevon-paraphrasing refrain “Thing(s) to do in Denver when you’re dead” and lyrics such as “With the passion of a thoroughbred and the sensitivity of a moose.” We will meet this song again, in radically changed circumstances, before the album closes. Things now gradually darken. “Look Horizon” opens with a jazz-drumming sample and mournful electronic background, and sees Cale “on the beach in Zanzibar” awaiting extinction (“The bears are in the forest/And the Pope is in Rome”) and musing on the imperfections of humanity (“What a shame we carry with us/The residue of fools/Instead of better wisdom/And advanced tools [cue ProTools demonstration]”); at 1.46, a guitar careers in as Cale exclaims with great terror “And I close my eyes” as he watches the “land of the Pharaoh” being decimated (“The broken amulets of history strewn in the pits"). Throughout, an askew, bitonal synth line (Numan-is-Prince-is-Foxx-is-Portishead-is-OMD), always a prophet of the apocalypse in pop, hovers in distant threat. “Magritte” is a becalmed but deeply passionate expression of wonder and awe at the canvases of the Belgian painter, and includes a divine moment at 2:22 when Cale sings “Pinned to the edges of vision” and switches to falsetto. It is as if he had come up with the idea of “Radiohead” independently of Radiohead, in the way that Joe Harriott, never having listened to Ornette Coleman, came up with his “Ornette.” But the sinister also lurks here – “Somebody’s coming that hates us/Better watch the art,” which statement could of course be taken in two ways; protect the art or turn your back on the hater. “Archimedes” is another contemplative song (“Keep me away from a naked flame/I am made of vapour and I will explode”) but in fact believes in the same ethics as The Rapture do on “Olio.” “Archimedes and me/Both married in our own ways/To old ideas in new clothes.” To acknowledge the past but not live there. “Caravan” is one of the album’s two great setpieces, wherein Cale is “slipping away from Planet Earth” and suddenly views and traverses the whole of the burning planet, from the Norfolk Broads to Niagara Falls; a more grievous echo of the journey from Reykjavik to Phnom Penn made by the protagonist of 1982’s “Santies,” and on a level with Massive Attack’s worldview in this year’s “Antistar.” Note the subtle relationship of Cale’s voice singing “shaking all over” and the violas which recreate the appropriate guitar riff. This is an older but wiser “Venus In Furs” – the musical trajectory is practically identical – but again wait for that awful moment of clarity when Cale intones, “You’re sitting alone at the traffic light/The pain is real/You’re ghostly white” and then immediately gives way to a Beach Boys chorale before subsiding again. Travelling the world but able to home in on the tiniest of deaths. “Mustn’t be late for the caravan/Mustn’t be early for the garbageman.” Isley Brothers or Black Flag. Then we are presented with what might well give Cale his first hit single, the aforementioned dance track “Bicycle.” This is the most obviously Lemon Jelly of tracks here, but their modus operandi is subverted even more here, not merely by Cale’s breathless “do do do do” refrain (as if he’s about to keel over with an asthma attack), but also by the fact that the track is eventually submerged within a cacophony of sheep noises, giggling women (“ponce!”) and Cale’s trademark Rottweiler guitar. When listening or dancing to this track it may be worth recalling how Nico met her end. There is no easy humour in the avalanche which now awaits us. Without warning a crashing piano chord shoves us into “Twilight Zone,” where Cale plays the role of the doomed tyrant, holed up in his South of France bunker, demanding the destruction of everything, rather like Pacino at the climax of Scarface or the Michael Stipe of “World Leader Pretend,” but arguably more barbed than either (“The milk of human kindness has curdled in your cup/You see me staring at it and tell me ‘shut up’”). Eventually, over a choir of demented Beach Boys vocal harmonies, Cale starts to scream orders – “Give up the ghost! Bring out your dead! Get on with your work! Kick out the jams!” This is Cale at his most nihilistic, but even this song pales in intensity besides the near-demonic “Letter From Abroad.” Inspired by Beneath The Veil, Saira Shah’s TV documentary about the Taliban’s occupation of Afghanistan, and written before 9/11 but obviously gaining extra relevance as a result, this finds Cale reaching new peaks of rage. Powered by a groove reminiscent of the Beta Band covering “No Diggity,” Cale bloodily narrates the countdown to Year Zero (“In a few hours the heat will hang over town/As the north-east monsoon comes rolling in”). Screaming violas and guitars now take over as Cale continues to intone: “They’re cutting their heads off in the soccer fields/Stretching their necks in the goal.” A distant voice of doom (intoning a Catholic benediction) booms out over a Ligeti choir. The second version of “Things (X)” emerges from the wreckage; the stench of decay evident everywhere. No more singalong pop as Cale slurs and sneers “Keep your gun in your pocket and your tongue in your mouth” over ugly guitar and piano death throes. The track fades to the sound of a marching band playing “Land Of Hope And Glory.” Britain surrenders. The record ends with a love song, of sorts: “Over Her Head,” though few love songs begin with the words “She sees flames in the kitchen/It’s a vision of hell” or conclude “She loves everybody/She’ll even love me.” The boat is rocking, and perhaps sinking. The grandiose piano gives way to an apocalyptic guitar and drums onslaught. By the time of its closing viola squall, hope seems unattainable, but even the recognition of that possibility is in itself a reaffirmation that hope exists. HoboSapiens isn’t quite Cale’s masterpiece; that title still belongs securely to Music For A New Society, but it is certainly the best and most radical thing he has done since that outpouring of grief, rage and torment which is unparalleled in popular music. But in this year of exceptional musical timidity (people like the Kings of Leon virtually apologising for being born 25 years too late), Cale’s unapologetic anger and adventure are more needed than ever. 8. ROBERT WYATT - Cuckooland Or “Mad World” of course. Or “Cloud Cuckoo Land” obviously. 1997’s wonderful Shleep - the grief and torment of Rock Bottom finally having resolved and achieved closure – saw Robert Wyatt happy, if cautiously so. With his first album in six years, Cuckooland, he is less ostensibly happy. The world has changed again, or changed back, in those six years. Wyatt’s rage may be far harder to gauge than Cale’s, but it is anger – at The War, at the West – which drives this new collection of songs, as well as, more profoundly, regret. And his means of coming to terms with it musically may be much quieter than Cale’s, but are certainly no less radical. As the world burns using religion as an excuse, Wyatt uses the first track “Just A Bit,” to examine whether the amount of faith and religious belief he still has in his heart is excusable in the world of Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene, to whom the song is dedicated) and whether he feels guilty that what is in his heart does not equate with what is in his head (“I’m as mad as a hatter/I feel safer touching wood”). He knows what, uncontrolled, this sort of thinking can lead to (“as wailing walls induce psychosis”) but reminds us that without religion, there would be no art and no music (“Transcendental art’s religion/Thinking you’ll improve your mind/When all it does (if you’re in luck)/Is camouflage the daily grind” he sings ironically, knowing full well that music can in many cases – and you know this in your heart, G – save people’s lives. Including ours). Musically it’s as gorgeous as anything Wyatt’s ever done – the trademark melancholy melody (Monk via Carla Bley), the forlorn synthesisers, and now also the forlorn trumpet/cornet of Wyatt himself, returning to his first instrument. Much more prominent and assured than it was on Shleep, the rough-and-ready wistfulness of Wyatt’s trumpet is very Chet Baker, although the soul is that of Mongezi Feza (whose death was the prime catalyst in Wyatt’s retreat from music in the late ‘70s). (though G reminded me on Thursday that, yes, the Brotherhood/Blue Notes were musically phenomenal, but that as human beings “they were all music, they were only music, they didn’t live, these people were really fucked up as humans…most musicians are like that.” Still, their music even now helps me live, though sadly it didn’t help them to live. Says a lot about the egotistical/one-sided nature of music consumer vs. musician, doesn’t it?) “Just A Bit,” however, is gorgeously sad (I dare you not to crumble at the way in which Wyatt sings “wood” at the end of the first verse). The next track, “Old Europe,” is a lovely reverie based on the brief liaison between Juliette Greco and the young Miles in Paris in 1949. Wyatt’s drumming is perhaps more noticeable on this record than it has been for a long time; extremely active and propulsive – a remarkable achievement; his cymbal technique is almost on a par with that of Billy Higgins. Gilad Atzmon’s one-man sax section career around the song like Montmartre traffic (“the ghosts of two people in love”) and Wyatt again is honest about the love for the past which is such an integral part of him (“I’ll be dreaming again/Always dreams of yesterdays/Those days live on/Safe here in my heart”) but canny enough to know that the future still has to be faced. And the subsidiary, or main, significance of these lines lie in the fact that “Old Europe” was the pejorative recently employed by Donald Rumsfeld in reference to France’s refusal to participate in the Gulf War; although not mentioned in Wyatt’s notes, this surely must have been the song’s trigger point. “Tom Hay’s Fox” in contrast is sepulchral, disturbing, edge-of-the-world electronica. Wyatt materialises out of the fog halfway through to intone a grim verse (“What light there is/Is too different/To indicate any direction/What light there is/Tells us nothing”). Brian Eno is credited with “the last note” if not the Last Trump. Then we have the album’s epic, “Forest,” a moving tribute to the gypsies exterminated in WWII and who are still being exterminated today, and musically the nearest thing here to the anthemic Wyatt of “Sea Song” and “Shipbuilding.” Over its immensely patient eight minutes, Dave Gilmour contributes pertinent guitar, a chorus (including Eno) turns the song into a kind of after-hours “Hey Jude” singalong; it’s very low-key but could not be more profound. Another important contributor to this album is Karen Mantler, the daughter of Carla Bley and Michael M, who has written and co-sings/plays three of its songs. “Beware” is a heavily ironic series of aphorisms which tell us “don’t trust anyone/they might be your enemy/if you’re not careful/you might get hurt one last time/it’s just a warning/beware.” Withdraw from life (i.e. don’t) set to a characteristically circuitous melody (very Carla B) nicely offset by Michael Evans’ hyperactive drum loop. “Cuckoo Madame” is slightly obscure in its intent (“Yellow fingers clinging to the chain link fence/Bombers above you/Bombers behind you” – so actually not that obscure). Seemingly about a “mad woman” who abandoned her baby at birth (“[you] had to fly before you saw another mother feed your chick”) the song then blossoms out to damn those who would damn her (“You’re Greta Garbo/You’re the witch of Salem/You’re anti-social…and/YOU ARE TOO BLOODY LONELY FOR THE LIKES OF US.” Wyatt doesn’t shout that last line of course, but you know immediately where the emphasis lies). The sneering at “not joining in” which naturally provokes the people Leonard Cohen described as “the wretched and the meek” to opt out even further. And then we have a simple instrumental piano reading by Wyatt of the old Buddy Holly hit “Raining In My Heart.” Although deceptively light and upbeat-sounding, the gulf of emotion exists in the words which appear on the sleeve but not in the song itself. Grief cuts so much deeper when it is suggested rather than expressed. To close the first half of the record (Wyatt has included a 30-second break to allow the listener to “take a break, go and make a cup of tea”) he sings “Lullaby For Hamza,” a song about a child who was born at the outset of the 1991 Gulf War and who now dreads the thought of war reoccurring. A plaintive lullaby, the accordion of Jennifer Maidman and the trombone of Annie Whitehead weep along with the voice of Wyatt. The 30-second pause, naturally, is as emotional as anything else on this record. And in the same way that a similar pause in Rob Dougan’s Furious Angels delineated the line between wanting to die and deciding to live, Cuckooland now roars back into life with the terrific “Trickle Down.” “Open your window/Lend an ear,” sings Wyatt benignly as the horns (Whitehead, Atzmon and Wyatt himself on trumpet) and rhythm make like an Ogun recording date of old (Harry Miller’s “Touch Hungry” specifically springs to mind). Of course, though, Wyatt is also credited with “Eno’s toys” which he uses to stretch out, filter, re-sample the musicians’ playing, such that in the end it becomes a kind of lo-fi “Third Stone From The Sun.” I especially love the bit at 2:43 when Annie Whitehead lets out a lovely low-register smear; throughout this album in general she again proves that she is one of the world’s finest trombonists. The song concludes “Press on your window/Feel the pane” to which standard of pun one’s instinctive reaction is “Aargh!” but Wyatt, as he always does, gets away with it. Things cool down again with Wyatt and Mantler duetting on a subdued reading of Jobim’s “Insensatez” (a.k.a. “How Insensitive”), though note how Wyatt doesn’t change the song’s gender (“How insensitive I must have seemed/When he told me that he loved me”) which may indicate a greater note of betrayal. (Although Wyatt doesn’t mention it on the sleeve, his 1985 album Old Rottenhat begins with a deceptively bitter song called “Alliance,” essentially an attack on his former Matching Mole colleague and former fellow CP member, bassist Bill McCormick, for crossing over to the SDP. “It’s hard to talk to enemies/And we are enemies/What we had in common/Makes it even worse.” One wonders if this still rankles with him. McCormick is also, incidentally, the brother of the late Ian MacDonald) “Mister E” and “Life Is Sheep” are the other two Karen Mantler compositions; both seemingly simplistic but actually extremely haunting – especially the lines in “Mister E” which say “When will I learn to trust myself, embrace mystery, not be afraid?” To which I reply: Thursday last in Hampstead. But you get the point. Wyatt sardonically signs off by saying “God knows. I haven’t got a clue.” Meanwhile “Life Is Sheep” is a belated postscript to Wyatt’s eerie 1982 minimalist essay “Pigs” (“The animals all have numbers/So you won’t get too attached”). Between the two songs we have some welcome humour, with “Lullaloop.” Written by his missus Alfreda Benge, this sees Wyatt in classic Victor Meldrew mode, until you realise that of course it’s Alfreda having a friendly go at him for driving his wheelchair too fast or staying up all night listening to loud bebop (“Slow down/Night’s for lying down”). Guest guitarist Paul Weller contributes some of his most adventurous playing for some time, interacting very well indeed with Annie’s amusingly irascible ‘bone. And there are few more heartwarming moments on record this year than the point when Alfreda’s voice emerges quietly from the undertow and tells Wyatt, “Sweet dreams, old chap, sweet dreams.” The amused exasperation you sometimes get from people who love and cherish you more than anything. “Foreign Accents” is a minimalist exercise which uses only a handful of words to express several lifetimes of emotion; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mordechai Vanunu (the scientist imprisoned for revealing Israel’s secret stock of nuclear weapons) and Mohammad Mossadegh (the Iranian prime minister deposed in a CIA-engineered coup in the ‘50s in order to let in the Shah and denationalise Iranian oil). How everything leads to something else, and ultimately, of course, The War. So things end in a melancholy way. “Brian The Fox” is more uncertain ambience with just four words in its lyrics (“Overnight/Upstream/Downwind/Overland”). The horns of Wyatt and Whitehead are overwhelming in this context; it sounds as though they actually are weeping. And to close, a sensitive instrumental reading, led by the never more emotional clarinet of Gilad Atzmon (himself of course an Israeli exile, as is the excellent bassist Yaron Stavi) of the Baghdad bombing lament “La Ahada Yalam (No-One Knows).” To paraphrase Mingus on Mariano (in Black Saint And The Sinner Lady) no words or examples are needed to show the tears which must be expressed. Deeply human, full of grief and yet full of hope. A beautiful and still hopeful record. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY ”If I Lost You (Scuba Mix)” by King Britt vs Michelle Shaprow (Fivesixmedia 12” promo, circa 2001) Something about the combination of modestly echoplexed electric piano, spaciousness and West London just does it for me. How appropriate that these eight minutes and 45 seconds of something approaching an afterlife should find its debut CD release as part of the lovely new compilation Joey & Norman Jay MBE Present: Good Times 3. Lovely Music is the label on which the definitive recording of I Am Sitting In A Room is released, but the 30 tracks assembled on these two CDs can only be generically described as lovely, because the times which they echoed were lovely, because our lives then were lovely, and because the music exudes loveliness, especially near-forgotten jewels such as Skipworth and Turner’s immaculately ecstatic 1985 Top 30 hit “Thinking About Your Love” – Stevie Wonder does Scritti Politti – as well as simple Northern Soul and ska gems. And Dr Buzzard’s “Sunshower” and Tammi and Marvin’s “California Soul,” not to mention the best Jacksons impersonation ever in Heaven and Earth’s “I Really Love You.” On the sleeve of this compilation, Norman Jay makes quite a big deal of his recent MBE, and is absolutely bloody right to do so. It’s an unpronounced but palpable FUCK YOU to the dole office, to the “purists” who sniggered at his playing “Are You Ready For Love?” at Carnival back in 1988 (1) (1) And he did. We were at the Good Times stall when we heard it. “Bloody hell” rapidly followed by “tee hee hee” (a) (a) And a different article from this is required to investigate fully the implications of the fact that, in 1979, “Are You Ready For Love?” struggled to #42 while “Death Disco” comfortably made the Top 20, whereas now the former is suddenly worshipped and the latter wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of penetrating even the Top 100 (b) (b) Which isn’t necessarily to denounce “Are You Ready For Love?” I quite like it. But not for that reason. Not because of shame (c) (c) Not because of some forlorn belief that “life was better then” (d) (d) Even though half the point of The Church Of Me was that life was better then (e) (e) But the other half of the point is to assume that life will be better again (f) (f) Which is what impresses me about Paul Auster’s The Book Of Illusions. The first 100 pages or so comprise some of the most searching and accurate descriptions of what happens to a prematurely bereaved person. First the grief, then the disbelief, then self-destruction by closing the doors on everyone else before finally shutting the door on oneself. Except that in this case a potential new Other is brought into his universe by dint of some cultural writing which he did in order to delay suicide. At this point the story briefly lurches into sub-Spillane melodrama, but further reading proves how catalytic this moment is. She forces him to live again at gunpoint. He seizes her gun, points it at his own head and almost kills himself before he realises that it’s better to try to resume the act of living. The story of Hector Mann runs in a clear parallel – the centrality of the gun in this book is emphasised. When he goes through the worst period of his life, he calls himself Herman Loesser – which sounds like “loser.” He has to march back to potential death in the bank robbery when he suddenly and finally realises that he has forgotten who he is. Loesser imposes severe penitence upon himself for his crime of letting her die. He makes himself as uncomfortable as he can because he feels that he deserves nothing less, yet at the same time he never feels more alive (g) (1) and to “the Establishment.” Note the more subtle subtext in the sleeve photos. Norman Jay, immaculately dressed in top hat and three-piece suit, receives his MBE from the Queen. Norman Jay, immaculately dressed in straw hat, sensible T-shirt and shades, hangs out in W10/11, in Honest Jon’s, in front of the Trellick Tower. In the Buck Palace photos, SW1 is grey, dark and wet. A few miles up the road, the Ladbroke Grove/Golborne Road interface is sunny, bright and welcoming. To understand this writer’s love of “If I Lost You” it is necessary to note the poignancy of the fact that the song’s title is never mentioned or sung in the course of the record. It indicates that the singer is spellbound, or perhaps captured, by the object of her affections. Michelle Shaprow sounds dazed, cautiously ecstatic. The hard Human League beats and synth drone of the intro quickly settle, at the entry of Shaprow’s voice, into the aforementioned irresistible Fender Rhodes/skeletal beat compound. “I’m crazy ‘bout you baby/Can’t you see it in my eyes/That’s why I ne-VER-mind/When you tell me all those lies.” Hear how her voice falters when she attempts to scale the octave which separates the “VER” from the “ne” before coming back down to the “mind.” It’s faintly vulnerable and exceptionally touching – it’s the same trick which Shania Twain deploys, although Twain generally extends her momentary octave-induced loss of actual “voice” for about double the interval. It’s the touch which separates her from ordinary pop, though. As the song progresses it’s evident that Shaprow is worshipping/idolising its object, from the same perspective as Kelly views Nelly in “Dilemma.” “It makes no difference what you do/They always find you/Watch as they fall at your feet/Oh if you only knew/All the little things that they do for you/You know you drive them crazy, baby, but you never see…You look in their face and they weren’t there.” The lyrical axis of the song is Shaprow’s semi-resigned pronouncement “As I recall, I’d never fall for you.” She then goes to describe her own worship of him, how she has been lured into the same speculative trap. “I feel a high everytimeIlookatyouGETOUTOFMYBRAIN (all sung in one breath and over four accented beats)…because you drive me insane…I begin watching you, calling you, hangingupI’LLDIALAGAIN…” The drug seizes hold of her rationality: “Oh what a fallen star (her or him?)/I really like the way that you drive your car” (note how within three minutes this song has made direct reference to two separate Yello songs) The “do do do do” which trails off itself at 2:50 initiates Shaprow’s final decline: “Oh won’t you watch me as I bleed/Because I’m in so desperate need/Look what you made me do…FOR YOU…Take what you want to take/They’ll even let you break what you want to break/But they’re not upset…Do what you want, they’ll just forget (here a distant thunder rumble is simulated in the rhythm).” Ultimately, at 6:00, Shaprow’s voice splits into several shards and goes beyond language, echoing out of synch (“walking fast” she murmurs non-linearly, “rushing through the moment…fast”). The echoes and spaces in the music become more widely distanced, and from the background a string synthesiser adds its sopranino commentary. As her voice surrenders and breaks up its own fragments (finally settling for a repeated, arrhythmic “for you”), a poignant three-chord descending minor sequence which could have come off the new Robert Wyatt album ends the song officially, though Shaprow, now a ghost, continues to echo upon itself for a few seconds more (2) (2) I haven’t mentioned Air here, but I ought to, because this record exhibits the same lovely-verging-on-dying spaciousness as Air do at their deepest; which is to say, in order to understand why I feel as I do about this song, I have to explain the twilight loveliness of listening to Moon Safari while travelling in the Oxford Tube in February 1998; at about 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, leaving work early to return to Oxford in good time for the weekend, having just descended from the Westway and preparing to ascend, less dramatically, the span of Western Avenue, the eastern backwoods of Acton. The sun begins to set with generous colours, the sort of orange/sepia shades which one only really gets at that stage of the year when winter is reluctantly morphing into spring when it really wants to go back to being autumn. The forlorn primary colour cheeriness (pink lettering on yellow background) of the sign for the “Cheery Chums” café (looking inside at the disgruntled Asian clientele – I would cry if I saw it now), past the car showrooms, towards the partially dismantled landscape which leads one to Park Royal. How good did the electric piano and subtle Roland bleeps in “All I Need” sound in such an environment; how warm and cosy it was. The high string synth, again, coming in towards the end to form a blissful kind of stasis. Life could have frozen at that point, and given that I was at that time eight months away from my allotted date of death, and further given what came (or went away) afterwards, I can’t say that I would have been too disappointed if it had (3) (3) Flash back to early summer Friday afternoons in 1993, passing the old row of shops (“A40 Stores”) across the highway from the Hoover Building at Perivale. The goodness and bucolicity of listening to things like Justin Warfield’s “Flies In The Buttermilk,” and a well-played contemporary compilation tape which somehow threaded its way from Blood Sausage to Diblo Dibala. Out to Port Meadow on Saturday morning. See visions of heaven (Port Meadow was my Peckham Rye) and get back home in time for The Chart Show. Freeze me there please (4) (4) But there are two more roads leading away from “If I Lost You” which have to be taken into consideration (5) (5)THE SENSUOUS, QUIET ROAD - LUOMO: “THE PRESENT LOVER” It’s not about what you call it. Does Luomo qualify as “microhouse”? Where does this, Luomo’s second album, stand within the post-Carl Craig/Jeff Mills developmental matrix? This writer is more concerned about what it conveys to him emotionally and physically and the means which the music uses to achieve this; with specific reference to The Pre-Sent Lover, where does listening end and movement begin (both emotional and physical, in that order, for you have to be moved before you can move), and how dependent is each upon the other? More important is the fact that The Present Lover appears to be a record which concerns itself with the difficulties of communication and how these get in the way of one’s ability to love. It’s apposite that the two vocalists – one female (a rather more seductive version of Dani Siciliano) and one male (Prince at prep school) sing in English as a second language. Their declarations are never entirely clear. The opening track “Visitor” begins with a 4AD electronic drone, from which mist emerges the whispered echo: “miss you.” The song is a dislocated meditation on the slow death of a relationship (“I’m boiling in your cold”). The vocal is never quite sequential, sentences never quite emerging from the assemblage of words. Behind the female vocalist, the electronics shift dubiously; a bassline occasionally makes itself known but the beat never actually gets going. It’s all about feelings being kept in, restrained to the point of suffocation. The song sounds as though it wants to move but can’t provoke itself sufficiently to be able to do so. The end effect is rather like Biosphere covering Stockhausen’s Stimmung (the clipped vocal segments, the repetition of vowels taking precedence over their collective received meaning). Towards the end a drum machine suddenly crashes – a saucepan being thrown across the room? “Talk In Danger” sees the woman engaging in a fevered internal dialogue. The male contributes the very Prince-like refrain “I ain’t here to disappoint you…girl” while she tortures her own soul in unwarranted penance (“I expect you [i.e. myself] to come up with better features”), The track, as with the album in full, requires exceptionally attentive listening in order to assess its emotional capacity fully. Note particularly how at 5:09 a small but vital minor chord is added. Finally, the imagined male ends with the decided verdict: “I ain’t here.” The title track “The Present Lover” is really where the Luomo beat methodology starts to make itself apparent, and it is the same thrusting, endlessly confident, just half-a-crucial-beat-behind-the-beat beat which listeners will know from “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.” It’s no less danceable for being more subtle in its approach. Indeed, over the title track one could sing the tunes of both “CGYOOMH” and “In A Lonely Place,” and here the male vocalist cuts up his own musings on the words “perfect” and “lover” to minimal but bruising effect. At 3:20 a dubscape comes into view and a woozy post-Vangelis synth careers a lonely solo path over the track, before (at 6:38) the song starts to become mournful. “Body Speaking” continues the theme over a Larry Heard-esque landscape, all suspended flattened fifth synth chords – but what’s that calliope organ doing there? “Can you feel my body speaking?” gradually mutates over the course of the song into the less certain “Can you hear somebody (some body?) speaking?” At 3:03 (at the word “stare”) the song modulates up an octave, powered by a warped “oh oh oh oh oh” chant (Laurie Anderson!) before the track eventually folds back upon itself, and ends with the calliope (fairground of death?) being switched off. With the track “To You,” the album’s emotional palette becomes more intense. The music develops from sepulchral murmurs worthy of Aphex at his most ambient and elusive into grandly lamenting Inner City chords as the woman asks: “Do I want too much?” She continues to consider where she stands in relation to anything, but eventually – and this is very close to Lucier territory – her words disconnect themselves, echo back on themselves, become more distant and less detectable. The contrast with the unstoppable motorik rhythm is rather startling, and the whole finally extremely poignant in what it leaves unsaid. “Could You Be The One” sees the male vocalist return to meditate on the meanings and twistings of the words “to love.” The music is busy but also remote – at least until 3:45, when, with unexpected euphoria, the track audibly ascends in intensity and major chords, indicating the existence of some kind of hope. “Cold Lately” returns thematically to the dying relationship referred to in “Visitor” (“Put some clothes on”) but here the woman tries to seduce in order for both of them to live (“We will turn our black tattoos into white”). It’s numbing in its hopeless hope. “Tessio” acknowledges that she may have a better relationship with the Other if the Other is not actually within her range of vision (“I guess you turn me on when you’re gone”). Driven initially by acoustic guitar and Bootsy-esque wavering bass, the beat doesn’t kick in until 2:01. And another extraordinary architectural sleight of hand occurs when, at 5:51, choirs of electronica suddenly come into mass view (stout Cortez viewing the Pacific Ocean for the first time) and convert the song to ethereality, against the singer’s repeated reassurance: “It’s OK.” This is deeply moving. “What Good” is probably the nearest thing to a conventional dance track here, but the dialogue is palpably painful. The male vocalist stammers through the track (“I can’t get enough…and it goes…I ought to know…what is good…when anything goes?”). Yet again, however, the track doesn’t develop as you would expect it to; take especial notice here of a blissful minute or so when, at 2:59, triggered by an immense sigh, the song suddenly shifts into major-key ‘70s disco nirvana, although the female sings throughout: “What good is it to talk to you?” before the original beat returns at 3:59. The man becomes more desperate in his delivery; by 5:34 he’s demanding to know “Is it just a game you play?” The major key returns at 6:42 but his uncertainty becomes no less intense, and there’s a curious parallel with Timberlake’s similar uncertainty on “Like I Love You” – towards the end he complains, “You make me fade away.” However, the most moving song on this record is the closing “Shelter” wherein the woman repeats, with Donna Summer-esque vulnerability, “I will try to stand with you together” (the stutter is still faintly audible). Rarely has the entry of the standard “Love Hangover” Honda bassline (at 1:53) struck as poignant a chord, soon to be joined by life-reaffirming organ blasts. Ultimately everything returns to the same drone which commenced the album; she is back at the shore, as per The French Lieutenant’s Woman, whispering the mantra “to shelter.” Heard at low volume she could be chanting “shantih shantih shantih.” Music for this most uncertain of autumns. (Much thanks and gratitude to Nick Kilroy) (5)THE SCREAMING, GRIEVOUS ANGELIC PATH: DALEK – “FROM FILTHY TONGUES OF GODS AND GRIOTS CHRISTMAS STAGGERING ALONG THE STREET LIFE BLEEDING OUT OF ME THE GIRL IN FRONT OF ME IN THE QUEUE IS BUYING THE DALEK ALBUM SHE IS (A) GORGEOUS AND (B) INTERESTING BUT I’M HOLDING THE GIRLS ALOUD SINGLE SHE WILL THINK AS LITTLE OF ME AS POSSIBLE STILL SHE’S PAYING FULL PRICE FOR IT I CROSS THE ROAD FIND IT IN RECKLESS FOR HALF THE PRICE BUT N0T SAME THING POOR SUBSTITUTE SAME FUCKING RECORD BUT MEANS OF ACQUISITION DIFFERENT AND INNATELY INFERIOR SO I CAN’T LISTEN DON’T LISTEN UNTIL NOW I HEAR BUT CANNOT LISTEN I THINK IT’S THE COVER REMINDS ME OF CHARLY PUBLIC INFORMATION ADS BUT MUSICALLY BLOW BLOW BLOW THE NEWEST BIGGEST LINK IN THE CHAIN WHICH WE BUILT BUT LOST SOMEWHERE EARTHLING NEW KINGDOM ESPECIALLY NEW KINGDOM “UNICORNS WERE HORSES” DAMN WE WERE DOING THIS SHIT IN ’96 PiL REFRACTED VIA RUTHLESS RAP ASSASSINS BUT NOW DALEK FINISH THE BLEEDING JOB / “SPIRITUAL HEALING” MARVIN GAYE MEETS ALBERT AYLER BEGINS WITH PIANO WHOLE TONES ROBERT WYATT AGAIN A FRAGMENT OF DEBUSSY COULD EXTEND FROM RACHMANINOV ENDING TO CALE “NEW SOCIETY” (TO BE DISTINGUISHED FROM NEW KINGDOM) WHERE HE LOSES HIMSELF IN THE RADIO BUT THEN SMASHES IN WITH BENDING ELECTRO-GUITARS BROWN GOD WHITE GOD BLACK GOD YOU CAN’T MAKE HIM OUT DISTINCTLY THAT DOES NOT MEAN NON-DISTINCTIVE / BLACK ROCK WONDER WHY JOOLS HOLLAND WON’T ASK THEM ON HIS SHOW NO I DON’T FUCKING OBVIOUS WHY NOT “SPEAK VOLUMES” KILLING JOKE GUITARS PRELUDE DEMOLITION OF ALL RAPPERS WHO ARE NOT DALEK/ALL DJs WHO ARE NOT STILL/ALL PRODUCERS WHO ARE NOT OKTOPUS BLEED BLEED EVERYTHING GOES PINK IT STOPS: NOW JOY DIVISION GHOST PIANOS, FLOATING IN BEATLESS HAPPILY ROOTLESS OCEAN INTERLUDE LIKE END OF SYLVIAN’S “BRILLIANT TREES” THEN RETURN “33RD DEGREE NEW CONTINENTS I’M MAPPING/…MY CULTURE, WHAT HAPPENED?” AND THEN A KEENING SLIDE GUITAR TO END THE SONG CF. BILL FRISELL AT END OF ZORN’S “SPILLANE” ANOTHER LIFE ENDING THEN / TWISTED, DRAGGING GO-GO BEAT MUTATIONS DETONATE “…FROM MOLE HILLS” THIS IS A SLUDGE MOUNTAIN EXHUMING CHUCK BROWN DO WE CORRELATE “WE NEED MORE MONEY” TO THE CITIZENS’ PLEAS FOR BREAD IN “BORIS GOUDONOV” STARTS OFF LIKE MISSY E-STYLE LET’S GO BACK “REMEMBER WHEN UZIS WEIGHED A TON/NOW EVERY KID’S GOT ONE” NOW THE ELECTRONIC GUITAR IS BEING DRAGGED INTO THE MORASS TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE IN THIS STREET ALMOST HENDRIX BUT THAT TWO-NOTE SOLO AT THE CLIMAX FUCK IT’S SHELLEY’S “BOREDOM” REBORN ONLY TO BE SHOT SHATTERED WITHIN SHARDS OF BREAKING FEEDBACK WISH THAT SHOP ASSISTANT WOULD STOP PICKING HER NOSE / A STRANGELY BECALMED PIANO INTERLUDE THEN 16 RPM SPANISH VOICES ARE HEARD “L’ULTIMA HORO” ANNOUNCING THE APOCALYPSE DIFFERENT IN BUDGET BUT IDENTICAL IN NATURE TO EL-P BUT SLIGHTLY MORE GENEROUS IN MIND / “HOLD TIGHT” CAN’T GRASP THE BUS RAIL BLOOD BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE RED ROUTEMASTER SURFACE MESSAIEN ORGAN BLEEDS INTO JOE MEEK ELECTRONICA THEN ROCK BLASTS IN AGAIN FUCK THOSE WORDS THAT MANIFESTO “PITBULLS AS PETS AND BOOTLEG MIX CASSETTES/I VENT MY ANGER ON AL ANGLES/I WOULD STRANGLE ANGELS IF THEY’D LET ME” ETHNIC SAMPLES SLIDE INTO VIEW (3:03) BUT INCREASINGLY THIS IS THE ANTI-TRANSGLOBAL UNDERGROUND THAT IS NO UTOPIAN UNIFORM WORLD FUTURE BUT DIVISION RIGHT DOWN TO THE ATOMS OF THE ATOMS “I SYMPATHISE WITH ALL OF YOU WHO DESPISE ME” AND DECIDE TO DISPLAY THIS NOTICE IN MY OFFICE THAT IS IF I SURVIVE FOR LONG ENOUGH TO GET BACK THERE AH FUCK FUCK FUCK OFF there at the end there merest hint of exotica BUT IT’S SWEPT AWAY AGAIN AND DID SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT FLUSHING MCS DOWN THE LOO / “HEADS” THIS STARTS WITH MASS TOILET FLUSHING WHAT IS THAT HE IS SAYING “DIAL IT!” “DIALECT!” “DALEK!” AH YES I SEE THOUGH I CANNOT CURRENTLY SEE THE SKY WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT MY PRIORITIES AND THEN THE FUCKING DRUMS EXPLODE FIRSTLY 6/8 THEN FREE RAMPAGE 58 MILLION SHANNON JACKSONS ALL AT ONCE and straight into the twelve never-on-any-hip-hop-album-ever minutes of “black snake rises” and you realise from the careful layered semitonal drones and the deepest of voices which arises from them that this is the ghost of hendrix “black smoke rises to a heaven i do not know/slowly gaze to take in our sorrow” and then “i only want to recapture what was once mine” and “shall i be brought upon the same crossroads as robert johnson (answer: “only if you believe in myth”) but this is unprecedented on any hip hop album twelve straight minutes of amm and sonic youth i mean let’s face it those drones cautiously orbiting and all the time they’re ascending “why question a life only borrowed?” “i am just a distant memory” and all the time those close-miked breaths out of revolution #9 and all there is left to do is scream AND REAPPEAR AS SITARS AND TABLAS AND SLOWED DOWN ORATIONS “TRAMPLED BRETHREN” REMEMBER THE HISTORY / “VOICES OF THE ETHER” IT’S DAVID BLOODY SYLVIAN AGAIN EVERYTHING THAT’S JAPANESE WHAT ABOUT PURPLE TRAP OR COMPANY ’82 (6) THEN RUN ME OVER THEN I FUCKING DARE YOU RUNNING OUT NOW / “FOREVER CLOSE MY EYES” THE GREATEST RAP-ROCK CROSSOVER EVER 8 MINUTES OF 6/8 TIME THE VERVE ARE SWALLOWED UP BY THE COCTEAU TWINS AND THESE ARE COCTEAU’S TEARS DALEK IS CRYING THERE IS A BODY HIS FRIEND IS NO LONGER THERE IS HE THE MURDERER OR THE WITNESS BUT HE DECIDES TO BLEED AND BECOME A CORPSE TOO “YESTERDAYS DON’T MATTER NOW THEY’RE GONE” THAT HALL OF MIRRORS OF DULCIMERS ALL ASSEMBLING AT MY BEDSIDE TO LULLABY ME AWAY FROM THIS WORLD THERE WILL BE NO PAIN THAT GUITAR EVEN IF IT’S ELECTRONICALLY REPROCESSED HE SOUNDS LIKE CRYING I FEEL LIKE CRYING / BUT ONE LAST ROCK “CLASSICAL HOMICIDE” DIDN’T “MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY” END THE SAME WAY CALE SCREAMING “ALL HER FRIENDS ARE DEEEEEEAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDD-AAAAHHHHHH!” BEFORE BEING SWALLOWED UP BY THE RADIO RISE CALE AT THE CORONER’S INQUEST NEVERTHELESS HENDRIX IS UNLEASHED GOES QUIET AND THEN ROARS BACK WHY QUESTION MY ART? WHY ARE YOU FUCKING ASKING? (6)THE THIRD WAY: REBIRTH, OR PERHAPS THE ORIGINAL BIRTH – COMPANY WEEK, SATURDAY 3 JULY 1982 It was the exact moment when what is still conveniently known as “improvised music” finally broke free of American models. Even AMM acknowledged the importance of Cage and Wolff (so much so that the latter became a floating member). It occurred at the ICA on the final day of the 1982 Company week, on Saturday 3 July 1982, the first week of release of The Lexicon Of Love. The occasion was recorded and can be found on the Epiphany/Epiphanies set (now finally reissued on CD, on Incus 42/43). Unhealthily curious readers may find the sleeve of some minimal historical interest as it is the only album sleeve on which the present writer appears, as a strikingly handsome 18-year-old gamine youth (That’s enough wishful thinking, you sad Ken Stott lookalike – Ed.) Indeed I was in the audience for those three days. The personnel which Company director Derek Bailey assembled for that year was a predominantly contemplative assemblage of musicians – thoughtful and inward-looking types including trombonist George Lewis, pianists Keith Tippett and Ursula Oppens (the latter making her improv debut, although she contributed “orchestral piano” to Carla Bley’s 1975 recording of 3/4 For Piano And Orchestra, Bley herself taking the rôle of solo pianist in lieu of an on-tour Keith Jarrett), Julie Tippetts on vocals and occasional guitar and flute, violinist Phil Wachsmann and harpist Anne LeBaron. The predicted X factor was the inclusion of the considerably noisier guitarist Fred Frith, then making atonal waves with the more extreme manifestations of Laswell’s Material; but the unpredicted X factor came in the form of the two Japanese musicians participating; bassist Moto Yoshizawa and the unclassifiable instrument-maker Akio Suzuki. And although the music was certainly the best heard from any Company line-up since that of Company Week 1978, it was visually and aurally evident that the real disturbances and transitions were being effected by Suzuki and Yoshizawa. The quintet featuring those two, along with Bailey, Frith and Lewis, was a gigantic but still loosely conventional roar. Jazz roots could still be glimpsed, however dimly under the surface franticity. But, in the final evening’s final improvisation, a trio of Bailey, Suzuki and Yoshizawa, which fittingly concludes the second CD, I witnessed a new form of music being born, first cautiously, and then with flattening confidence. Lasting just over 18 minutes, the improvisation began with the usual cautious introductory pluckings and scrapings, though obviously more Eastern in texture and approach than standard. I’ve never quite worked out whether the “analapos” or the “kikkokikiriki” was the row of drums (slightly smaller and rounder than the average tom-tom) or the higher tower of seemingly differently tuned, and occasionally remote-controlled, spinning plate lookalikes. Early in the performance, however, it was down to Bailey to initiate some rhythm (on the CD, this occurs at 4:47 and again at 6:02), although behind him there was a high, ululating drone, Yoshizawa having moved closer to the bridge of his bass. From 8:00-8:56 the music comes as near as could be imagined to the Standard Jazz Trio (Suzuki skittling lightly on his pots), although visually it seemed as though this were the one thing the trio were keen to avoid. Nonetheless, soon afterwards (9:44), Bailey (playing acoustic) rolled out some Eddie Lang chords, as though to wave farewell to The Old Life. His solo masterpiece, Aida, recorded not long before this performance, indicates just how much brutal power he could put into even acoustic guitaristics (and, as I’ve said previously, there’s certainly more than a hint of Bailey’s lateral and at times anti-tonal aggression in some of David Rawlings’ more extreme work behind/with Gillian Welch). These chunky chords seemed to be the signal for the trio to raise the ante, and at 11:23 they prepared for the big push. The music visibly rose in intensity and temperature, Suzuki now alternatively scrabbling at his percussion and blowing through his enormous “glass harmonica,” Yoshizawa’s high-register abruptly bowed bass now sounding like Evan Parker at his squalliest; yet the music continued to ascend to near-demonic heights of noise and passion. As the performance climaxed, there was suddenly a terrible certainty about what the musicians were producing; unearthly howls and screams threatened to demolish the polite ICA theatre space entirely. But this was not the ecstasy of Ayler, nor the gleeful thuggery of Brötzmann; rather a new and as yet undefined means of expression. And at the absolute apex of the performance (14:20) Suzuki started screaming vocally through his glass harmonica. The cries of the newborn child. It was like watching music being invented, its atoms being snatched from the exploding universe and reordered. Something was born on that evening; and from Acid Mothers Temple to Merzbow, we’re still coming to terms with its existence and growth. The music then receded naturally, with the vaguest of suggestions of Lang and Venuti from Bailey and Yoshizawa; the quietude belied the complete satisfaction of the musicians, the spirit sated, the new life making its way towards the incubator, and ultimately the nursery. (g) because I love life more than death. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
KYRIE Well? Not too bad, thanks. Better than expected. How did you get on with Morris and Bellamy? I found both frustrating. Which is probably how they wanted it. On a literary level, Morris was clearly far ahead of Bellamy. But Bellamy got it right, didn’t he? Classical music played over the telephone while you wait to be connected! Paintings and sculptures projected on the front of skyscrapers! Benign corporate control! Bellamy was of course speculating about Boston in the year 2000. Responses depend upon whether one prefers astrology to literature. Or life to either. I did a bit of supplementary reading and viewing as well – the first episode of “The Prisoner,” the chapters describing the protagonists’ journey from London to Oxford in Iain Sinclair’s “Radon Daughters.” I expected that you would have expected it of me. Madam, you are the kind of reader I adore above all others. Don’t give it away! You’re right. We haven’t got to M Ward yet. But about News From Nowhere - you have to remember it was a dream rather than a prediction, a fantasy spelt out in the very title; “Nowhere” being the literal Latin translation of More’s mongrel word “Utopia.” So fragile, so touching, ultimately so sad. Why sad? Well none of it came true, did it? His fantasy of industry and capitalism being overthrown semi-benignly, cities of green foliage, hills and woods, and happy artisans working only for art’s sake… My friend, you have fallen into the classic trap. In which timescale is this dream set? Well, the protagonist – William Guest (i.e. William Morris) wakes up about two hundred years in the future. Old Hammond tells him that the great revolution occurred about one hundred and fifty years ago. And he fell asleep in the late 19th century. Which means… Of course. It’s very nearly the 22nd century. One hundred years from now, more or less. So it is still too early to predict. Exactly. Contemporary readers are always tripped up by such references as Hammersmith Bridge being rebuilt and re-opened in 2003. It makes them think that this is supposed to be happening now. Bit hard on Bazalgette’s bridge, wasn’t he? Morris was a bit hard on everything. The green Hammersmith-Barnes span has always been one of my favourite London bridges; reassuring and reliable. And rather grand, though I understand how vulgar it may have seemed to an over-sensitive late Victorian thinker. Although of course had the IRA succeeded in blowing it up, a new Hammersmith Bridge could well have been opened this year. There’s so much poignancy before the fact. How Guest falls asleep in the bleak dead of winter and awakens in summer sunshine. Wake up on brilliant days. Was that why “Someone Somewhere In Summertime” had to be released as a single in November 1982? Yes! The fluidity of Guest’s movements through the “new London” has a remarkable quality. Even when travelling in a horse and cart we still feel that the characters are floating through London. Movements are very rapid here – note how quickly they manage to get from Hammersmith to Piccadilly and beyond. The elasticity of time reminded me somewhat of “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Chesterton wrote that as a partial parody of News From Nowhere. Saffron Park – a.k.a. Bedford Park in Morris’ old North Chiswick stamping ground – is populated by fops pretending to be artisans. Gabriel Syme effectively functions as a moral bucket of cold water, but he is as spellbound by the illusion as anyone else. And of course Chesterton took the time travel to deliberately absurdist levels – note how, at the novel’s climax, the characters seem to travel from Dover to Earl’s Court in about five minutes. London as a giant trampoline, around whose corners they keep bouncing. It appears paradisical, but the key word there is “appears.” We never quite get rid of the feeling that this isn’t quite the perfect future which Guest professes to desire. And anyway…wouldn’t industry’s march have been inexorable? Doesn’t anyone use the Tube? How do they live if they “sell” their wares for free? Where’s the economic matrix? Where are the immigrants? One black child in Piccadilly Market, and that’s it. What about… You are forgetting that this is a dream and not Das Kapital rewritten by John Ruskin. You also discount the notion that this might all still come true a century hence. True, few, if any, of us will be around then, but it might still happen, but for very different reasons, all of which blind us with their obviousness in the world of the early 21st century. The revolution happens after a General Strike and a battle in Trafalgar Square in 1952. Well he couldn’t have known about the two world wars. Or the Depression. The Wall Street crash did more damage to capitalism than any Committee for Public Safety could have mustered. We still haven’t recovered properly from it. That having been said, Morris is painfully on the mark when he talks about the downside of unregulated capitalism. His rightly furious remarks about wage-slaves, useless consumer goods and nationalistic expansion into “foreign territories” could have come straight out of Naomi Klein. Or Klein out of Morris. Naturally. Indeed. Neither is keen on anarchy; they still insist on the joys of work (when the job is not unpleasant and the output is not pointless), on the absolute importance of permanence of some notion of “collective society.” In which, incidentally, a woman’s place is still a woman’s place. Yes, I noticed that. But then is it? Morris certainly doesn’t believe in the “family” matrix. Partners should be free to drift off with others, then back if they so wish. And what about the character of Ellen? Won’t she blow all of this apart? If the society of 2090 doesn’t manage to do it themselves, that is. But you are skipping to the end of the book. We need to journey to Oxford first. Morris seems to be in something of a rush to get out of London. Once Guest gets into the boat and starts the journey to Oxfordshire the pace of the story immediately slows down and becomes more reflective, less in a hurry. Morris’ London of 2090 is still a city, of course. Long Acre is chock-full of buildings; Hampstead remains a “town.” It certainly isn’t the London of half a century before Morris, when Dickens could take a stroll in the country to Camden. It is only when Morris/Guest gets out of the city that he encounters people with even a semblance of awareness of the history which preceded them. Oh come now, the centrepiece of the novel is Guest’s lengthy histo-sociological discussion with (or obtuse questions directed at) Old Hammond. Who lives in the British Museum. Detached from “London.” Oh, very good. Ageing is one of the many things of which this not-quite-brave new society seems to be straining to avoid getting into its mind. The “young” couple – Dick and Clara – are so bland and colourless. They remind me of a stereotypical couple in the later, lesser Ealing Studios dramas. Look, for example, at John Fraser and June Thorburn in 1955’s dreary Touch And Go. It would be difficult for ameobas to assume more colour than this already dead couple. The father, Jack Hawkins, is scarcely more alive. The film is about the efforts of the latter – a supposedly adventurous interior designer – to emigrate to Australia. But there are too many ties, which is the same thing as saying that there are only as many ties as one wishes to have draped around one’s neck. How tight would you like that noose to be wound? One presumes he doesn’t go to Australia after all. Of course not. That would be tantamount to saying that the entire philosophy on which the “Ealing film” was based was a destructive fallacy. Much better to be Alexander Mackendrick. Send the whole bloody structure tumbling. The Ladykillers is the bleakest of Ealing films, isn’t it? All about the utter impossibility of abolishing The System. Danny Green’s violin case catching in the front door of Katie Johnson’s boarding house sums up precisely why Morris’ utopia could not happen. The attraction to the old order – to any tangible form of order, no matter how repressive or suffocating – is too strong. So the robbers kill each other off and leave the Old Lady with all the money and a pleasant daydream which may just have been a reality. The film demonstrates how the cosy community is simply a better-disguised prison. Once filming had been completed, Mackendrick took off for America as fast as his feet could carry him. The prison which, a decade later, Patrick McGoohan – with the aid of many familiar faces from Ealing – will attempt to demolish. He too legged it for America. But Morris has a touching faith in the communality of the upper/middle and working classes. After the General Strike, Trafalgar Square battles and civil war of attrition, the two sides come to a reluctant agreement into which they gradually settle with succeeding generations. We know from the Restoration, never mind the actual General Strike of 1926, how improbable this state of affairs will be. Every decadent monarch has to be replaced by a Cromwell, or similar. Back to the boat trip. Back also to the character of Ellen. She explodes with colour and passion, does she not? Such a contrast to everyone else in the book. Morris’ idealised woman. But yes, her appearance is a severe jolt to the complacency of the society in which Guest has found himself. And the arguments with the old “grumbler” of a grandfather! The arguments about the merits of literature! Sound familiar, do they not? They are crucial arguments, too; do we want an ordered society with no literature, or the Mayhew-documented squalor of Victorian Britain with its Brontës, Dickenses, Hardys and Thackerays? Or to put it another way, a perfect world with a David Gray soundtrack, or a mess of a world with a soundtrack provided by El-P, Girls Aloud and DJ Scud? Orson Welles in “The Third Man.” The Borgias and the cuckoo clocks. But think of what else he makes Harry Lime say. “Free of income tax, old man.” Ten thousand dots. He didn’t have a high opinion of the general public. Nor, I think, did Morris. Everything in this utopia is paternalistic in its beneficence. Again and again Morris rants against “vulgarity,” about everything being “cockneyfied.” Clearly if plain people were to exist in this new society, they had to do so like obedient pupils, and therefore lesser beings. So much for equality. And I think Morris knew this deep down. Repeated reminders are spread throughout the book that this state of affairs may not be permanent, may yet undo itself. When in Oxford, Guest asks the archivist Henry Morsom, “What is to come after this?” Morsom replies with a hearty laugh, “I don’t know…we will meet it when it comes.” It’s very sinister. But not half as sinister as the artificial gaiety of Dick and Clara. Both are noticeably affronted, though retain their benign façade, when Guest questions them about concepts such as money, crime and punishment, love and death. With Clara’s character, particularly, there’s a very distinct air of “don’t spoil our fun.” ”Questions are a burden to others. Answers a prison for oneself.” Quite. Perhaps the most sinister chapter is chapter 24, when passing through the Berkshire countryside, one Walter Allen appears to recount the story of a rejected would-be lover who murders his rival. Dick and Clara are entirely bemused by ideas such as grief. “He should just get over it,” speaks the cheery voice of the cure-all therapist a century too soon. You end up wanting to shake them and ask them what they are afraid of. They have dim knowledge of the blood and pain in the eras which preceded them and an inbuilt determination never to go back there again. So their defence mechanisms automatically rise up. It is as though they are constantly fighting to suppress these thoughts. So they are not really free. Merely in the most deviously disguised of prisons. To be fooled into thinking that their world is perfection whereas it is in fact strangling them, slowly. And Ellen knows this. Oh yes, she wouldn’t be in this book if she didn’t. She knows full well how Guest got here; she may well be a fellow time-traveller herself, but it’s never explicitly spelled out. She is cynical about the new world, but reluctant to resume existence in the old one. There are few more heartbreaking statements in English literature than Ellen’s “I love life better than death,” which she uses to settle the books-versus-life argument. I love life better than death. The cloud comes at the end, swallows him up and takes him back to 1890. That’s sad, too. You could never film that ending. The look which Ellen gives him at the dinner party just before he disappears. Don’t talk to me, we cannot acknowledge each other, you must return to your proper… …station in life? Just go back and do your best to make this happen, she’s saying. We are all your descendents. Mess it up and we won’t exist. It’s up to you. But what about… Bellamy has hardly come into this discussion. It’s the dullest of books. All that happens is that the protagonist awakens in Boston in 2000. The society is one of state capitalism – Morris’ is explicitly one of communism – and the protagonist merely comes to terms with it and decides that it’s not the worst of states to be in. Bellamy loves his technology, but not necessarily his characters. If one wanted to extend the concept of time travel, one could propose that “News From Nowhere” is in fact the sequel to “Nineteen Eighty Four.” Oh, very clever. Orwell’s final chapter. The society which has replaced Big Brother? Yes! Morris’ proof that communism doesn’t necessarily have to be involuntarily converted into state capitalism, perhaps. How tragic would it be if the utopia described by Morris turned out to be, not the unobtainable future, but an irreversible… Steady on. We haven’t quite got that far yet. Time to do some more reading. What do you make of this? Selected excerpts from Song From Somewhere, my forthcoming book on British jazz “…Joe Harriott’s position in British jazz was exactly analogous to that of Alexander Mackendrick in British cinema; by nature part of the mainstream, yet quietly curious about what might lie just beyond the banks visible to his eye. Just as Mackendrick politely demolished Ealing’s politesse with The Ladykillers, so did Harriott quietly set out making British jazz veer off its overly respectful towpath. Harriott always claimed that his experiments with free jazz on records like Free Form and Abstract were completely independent of those of Ornette Coleman, and that in fact at the time of recording these albums he was unfamiliar with Coleman’s music. Listening to them again 40 years later, what is puzzling is why Coleman’s name should be used as a reference at all. Harriott’s music is far more indebted to the careful methodology of George Russell or Don Ellis; harmonic and rhythmic patterns are all present, and his alto sax seems more interested in exploring the harmonic implications of the music, as opposed to Coleman’s approach of improvising directly on the melody without recourse to harmony at all. Coleman preferred not to use a pianist, and even in Prime Time the guitars of Ulmer, Nix and Ellerbee have far more rhythmic than harmonic implications. Harriott used intelligent, thoughtful improvisers such as Shake Keane, Coleridge Goode and Pat Smythe, though Bobby Orr seemed to understand the rhythmic implications of Harriott’s music better as a drummer than Phil Seamen. These records were clearly experiments; Harriott continued to record and perform standards, and never had anything to do with the Little Theatre Club/Ronnie Scott’s Old Place developments in the mid-1960s. Were he alive now he would probably be musical director emeritus of the Jazz Warriors…” “…British jazz has never been good at innovating, but matchless at toying with, stretching and imploding existing innovations (the innovations of British improvised music do not altogether, or even particularly, stem from roots in jazz). In Perspectives, the 1972 album by the Stan Tracey Trio, quite remarkable results are achieved by extending the implications of Monk’s innovations, being careful to layer them with a veneer of approachable Horace Silver, and then stretching them out in an entirely different manner. Tracey’s piano is more obviously aggressive and percussive in its deliberately discursive approach, and helps us to understand exactly how major an influence Silver was on Cecil Taylor’s music. Unlike the typical Monk rhythm section, too, bassist Dave Green and drummer Bryan Spring are not content to lay out and keep their heads down; they both, especially Spring, keep prodding actively at Tracey and only drop out when they know that Tracey has absorbed their propulsion…compare with The Howard Riley Trio’s 1973 Incus album Synopsis. Although the latter involves a more obviously improv-centred rhythm section – Barry Guy and Tony Oxley, stretching so narrowly that they scarcely qualify as a rhythm section at all – the spatiality offered here is palpably that of Bill Evans and Paul Bley; notes are careful, considered, never superfluous. The exaggerated formality of Riley’s approach contrasts dramatically and efficiently with the strumming and thunder thrashing raging and purring behind, in other words with, him…” “…Derek Bailey continues to make his reckoning, to continue summing things up, except he’s never satisfied with a summary in and of itself. With the eponymously-titled debut album by his new group Limescale he approaches the History of Music, or even the History of Himself, as benignly as he did The Song on Ballads. In some ways the instrumentation of this quintet harks back to the earliest (and perhaps most adventurous) days of jazz – guitar, bass saxophone and clarinet, and also a dictaphone and a pile of bricks (we have to remember our Duchamp, remember it’s 1918). Tony Bevan treats the bass saxophone as a virtual bass, occasionally raising his head to make more obviously saxophonic comments, and at many points on this record holds everything together, introducing what we can loosely approximate as “rhythm.” Whereas Manchester’s THF Drenching and Sonic Pleasure (on dictaphone and bricks respectively) are far more compatible, quiet and violent than you might imagine. The bricks are the group’s “drums.” Ms Pleasure addresses them with a chisel, or simply beats them together or hammers at them. The result is a surprising percussive lightness; uncannily like Sunny Murray, to be vaguely honest, free but crucially light, to balance the sometimes unexpected onslaughts from the other musicians. The Drenching dictaphone is the most freely mobile and versatile of these five voices. As far as improvising on the dictaphone is concerned, I can only think of Holger Czukay as a precedent; but Drenching is rhythmically very astute and sonically effective – lightning-fast rewinds, repeats and speed variations sometimes provide a piano-like harmonic framework, at other times can squawk and slap as freely as the freest of saxophonists. “But the real revelation here is clarinettist Alex Ward, whom I had previously regarded as a slightly more animated Braxton disciple. Sometimes he can sound rather constricted in the wrong environment, but here his attack is positively feral, even coming near to Br?tzmann territory on occasion (on the track “French Archive” he is positively Ayler-ish in his passion). Meanwhile, Bailey’s guitar carefully polices the premises, unafraid to reintroduce rhythm if required. His wistfulness on “Academy Now!” could almost have you wondering if Ralph Towner had wandered in on the session. “The instrumentation, and free approach to same, remind us not only of early jazz but also the adventures of the likes of the Bonzo Dog Band, who in their many looser moments were quite prepared to go “out,” with Roger Ruskin Spear’s bass sax bleating and rampaging as required, but who preserved, via Neil Innes, an innate and irreducible melancholy. The centrepiece of the Limescale album is the 17-minute “Charity Singles Ball” where Bailey’s guitar prompts can conjure up Charlie Christian or, at one exceptionally startling moment, threatens to turn into U2’s “New Year’s Day.” There are moments of deeply mournful brooding, but eventually the musicians work themselves up towards a fabulous and tremulous climax of collective screams threatening to demolish one’s speakers. Balance this with the sad Bechet/Mezzrow trudge of the closing “Titles By Drenching” – a woozy but very old and instantly recognisable lament. But again the material is poked at, prodded, and the musicians heat up for one final orgasmic screech as if to say: don’t bury us yet.” HYMIE’S BASEMENT The male Cat Power? Hymie’s Basement are a duo comprising DJ/musician Andrew Broder (a.k.a. Fog) and cLOUDDEAD vocalist Jonathan Wolf (a.k.a. Why?) with input from Dose One. Yet another Anticon spinoff then, yet, for those who feel that Anticon might sometimes be Sub Pop with turntables, their eponymously-titled debut album, which is due for release on Lex Records at the end of October, is one of the year’s quietest and finest. The post-hip hop My Computer? There’s a similar pulling down of the shutters upon the world, though they can still see outside; thus the splenetic opener “21st Century Pop Song” – one of only three songs here to utilise guitars – which sneers an American apocalypse into existence (“Shout at the TV just like your dad”). Similarly, the frenetic thrashing and polytonal harmonising which begin “All Them Boys” brings to mind a slacker Proclaimers – no, let us not mention They Might Be Giants – before the song suddenly decelerates and detours into a wasteland of indistinct synth tones and solemn, stately piano. Suddenly it is nightfall. But whereas Chan Marshall’s similarly stately piano is used to try to shed, and maybe to donate, some more light upon, or to, the world as a whole, Hymie’s Basement are trying to get as far within themselves as their molecules will allow. So there’s the strange narrative of “Ghost Dream” which describes a driver who has driven his truck into the river on the way to a gig and elects to drown because he cannot bear to throw away the bass guitar which is weighing the vehicle down (“Meet your new angel monster”). In “Moonhead” Wolf is struck by a “crater exactly the size of a human head” and his head therefore becomes the Moon* *which reminds me; no sooner had I written about Slim Gaillard’s “How High The Moon” than it finally comes out on CD, as part of the Verve reissue Slim Gaillard Rides Again!. Gaillard’s glee at the prospect of the planets meeting, colliding and exploding, and his tossing and slurring around of concepts like “moon,” “stars” and “sun” can be as poignant as the final moments of Major Amberson. We will all go together when we go…except some of us won’t…** **The heartbreaking “The Pump” (with its central, almost sotto voce lament of “When she’s not there, there’s only air”) reminds us that had this album been released by Simon and Garfunkel in 1966 under the title The Sound Of Silence, it might have changed everything. “Parrots” starts out bouncingly, with the synth bassline from Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” but that soon slows down towards stasis. Most frightening of all is the baritone robot of a voice, chanting in lieu of a heartbeat, on “Pretty Colors (Smile Your Brains Out).” The “real” voice of Wolf comes in for awhile, musing about what children should really know, but soon gives up the ghost, while the ghost continues its preprogrammed damnation. The logical extension of “Fitter, Happier”? The apocalyptic duo/duel of voices which arise out of the graveyard piano of “America Won/America Too,” which then suddenly cease and leave the piano to cope on its own. Is there a more final final line than “If you’re lonely, have a lobotomy”? The centerpiece? “Lightning Bolts And Man Hands,” a very careful six minutes where we return to an acoustic guitar. Wolf ponders on the assumed inferiority of the left hand to the right, has clearly lost everything and as a consequence tries to disappear within his own self, to be eaten by his own body; nothing left to think about or consider than what he knows for sure exists. The song is immeasurably moving, almost on a par with Smog’s “Prince Alone In The Studio.” And of course Hymie’s Basement is finally swallowed up in the closing “You Die” which could almost be Coldplay, except the vocals are undecided and the drum machine keeps hiccuping and throwing the track off balance. At the end, a high-pitched drone, waiting for you to switch the life support machine off. To die or to live again? Of course it is a very male thing to want to vanish into yourself. Kimya Dawson sings about trying to raise her child. Chan Marshall sings about the world. But this Jonathan Wolf just seems to want…not to be. You were saying about Morris’ utopia… Yes. It’s sad that Guest has to leave, but hope remains…he has to return in order for what he has just seen to exist. To complete his work as he is best able – in his own time and age. The door is not firmly closed on the future; in fact he has to return in order to open it. But how tragic would it be if we were to view what Guest has seen, not as a symbol of a benevolent (if still uncertain) future, but as a vision of something he did know, somewhere he did live, but has now gone, vanished forever? Wouldn’t you just want to… Stop. IAN MacDONALD “…A melancholy song, it’s also the final working-out of the dilemma central to On The Beach: how to regain and maintain authenticity when the pressure is on to present a false façade and when life itself is almost too awfully real to allow any space for creativity.” (From Ian MacDonald’s review of Neil Young’s On The Beach, Uncut, August 2003) I no longer have any idea about what constitutes the “best piece of music writing” but I know what my favourite piece of music writing is, the piece which did most to lead me here, and that was Ian MacDonald’s two-page NME review of David Bowie’s Low in January 1977. Citing everything from Rhinehart’s The Dice Man to the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” in service of a close examination of the gradual and systematic dehumanisation of music, art and the world, of how any attempt at chance and spontaneity is instantly nullified, this piece told me how record reviewing and music writing could amount to infinitely more than the maitre d’ wine list which most music criticism emulates (“The new Coral is slightly off but the Thrills are warmly recommended” etc.). This was writing aware of its history, writing which actually instructed the reader to take pop music seriously, writing which stayed with the open-minded reader for decades even as it described the closing of minds. Did we know that even then MacDonald was writing his own obituary? Two years to the day and I was surrounded by reminders of suicide. Roy Cropper clumsily attempting it in Coronation Street, and then, for real, the obituaries in that day’s broadsheets for MacDonald, who had taken his own life that weekend at the age of 54. To cap it all, Kodwo Eshun remarks in this month’s Wire how he briefly assumed me to be “a younger, more generous-minded Ian MacDonald.” Signifiers outweighing the signified. MacDonald had apparently grown very depressed over the state of the world over the last two years. It would be easy for me to make facile comments of the nature of: well, perhaps he would have liked to swap his last two years for this writer’s last two years. Or perhaps not. Harder yet to realise that his depression extended back some 30 years; there had been two suicide attempts in the late ‘70s. Dick and Clara would no doubt have told him, exasperated, to get over “it,” as people with clinical depression rarely do. Am I staring into a mirror when I read about what happened to MacDonald? Could I have helped him in any way? I had his email address but never used it; I didn’t think we, as we were in 2003, had much to talk about or even that much in common. It wouldn’t have stopped anything, anyway. I didn’t even know. How to sum him up? His best popular music writing was indisputably that which he did for the NME in the ‘70s (I sometimes think that my second favourite piece of music writing is MacDonald’s two-page demolition of Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge in August 1974, fast following his fulsome praise of Tubular Bells a year earlier). Typically the broadsheet obituaries gave prominence to his Shostakovich biography, coming even above Revolution In The Head; the antiquated snobbery which continues to drive millions into the arms of The Sun. Revolution In The Head is among the most problematic of music books. Brilliantly conceived and indisputably authoritative, yet fundamentally wrong-headed; at least, that’s what one would assume without knowing much of MacDonald’s personal life and beliefs, even though they make themselves increasingly visible and indivisible as the book progresses to its rather tragic end. There is more than a touch of the Max Harrisons about MacDonald’s systematic analysis of every Beatles recording; ostensibly hard and unsentimental in its criticism (the early stuff might have been better, McCartney might have been more adventurous than Lennon, “Helter Skelter” is just bad metal) but never completely objective. Again and again MacDonald conjures up the sunshine and wonder of Britain in 1966/7 (his heartfelt comment on how anyone who wasn’t between the ages of 14-30 in 1966 could understand what a beautiful time it was, or the real cultural significance of something like “Penny Lane”), again and again he underlines to us how things can never be as good as they were then, be it music or life; and his ill-informed comments on contemporary pop (as well as contemporary classical and jazz) indicate that this world is now beyond his reach. There is a great, intractable sadness about this which distances him from the “I-don’t-like-it-therefore-it’s-no-good” school of red-nosed clowning in which too many writers still indulge. He is aware of his self-imposed limitations. As a cultural signifier I did not think that Revolution In The Head was very helpful, playing as it did the rôle of an inadvertent midwife to the stifling canonical tendencies of ‘90s Britpop. And MacDonald’s later writing, as anthologised in the recent collection The People’s Music, indicates that a ghost was already doing the writing, the spirit having fled, except for one incandescent final moment – his Nick Drake piece for Mojo, which worked so brilliantly because MacDonald summoned up for the last time the spirits which had originally driven him. His recollections of sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, watching Drake premiere Five Leaves Left, are heartbreaking in their suddenly recaptured evocation of unalloyed happiness, with full hindsight of how that particular story was to end. Was MacDonald staring at a mirror even then when he looked at Drake? He attended (but did not graduate from) King’s College, Cambridge, an idealistic, Left-leaning institution which tends to leave the idea in the minds of its students that they can somehow transcend the world, or at least give them a strong cocoon within which they can safely view the world. From a 1970s NME viewpoint – an entirely different creature to the NME of today – the re-entry of MacDonald into the harsh, capsule review, ticksheet world of the monthlies in the ‘90s and beyond must have been barely bearable. Everyone’s writing in Uncut comes across as “cramped and awkward.” In the current edition there are capsule reviews by MacDonald of things like a live Animals album, a Ron Wood solo anthology and a Searchers anthology. He must have wondered why he bothered. Was this all that was left of his world? How can one describe the magnitude of the horror which descends upon a human being when, in one lucid second of despair, they catch a sideways glance of themselves in the mirror and realise that they are just one near-invisible speck in an obscure corner of the universe? To spend their lives searching for perspective and recoiling in pain and horror when they finally find it. The realisation that the world they knew and loved has gone, is of the past, exists only in their memory, and that nothing lies ahead except further struggle and pain. Why bother to preserve such a life? The pills are to hand. There is, of course, a more difficult option, which is to try to continue living, to try to find new worlds to inhabit – they won’t be the same as the old one, but at their best they will make you glad that you stayed alive long enough to find them and to live in them. I am not sure that Ian MacDonald had that kind of strength left in him, nor can I condemn him for not having it; for I am acutely aware that I too am staring into a potential mirror when I read his obituaries, that this too is how I might end if I’m not careful. If I come to the conclusion that music is finished. If I cannot disengage myself from the prison of my memories. If I cannot understand that William Morris’ utopia is to come and not something which has passed away into the past. So I continue, Laura. I expected that you would have expected it of me. “As a document of a despairing personal low, On The Beach would be a kind of masterpiece by any standard. Yet it’s the album’s inner strength, its refusal to die or evade the issue, its ultimate squaring up to a regenerated future which make it such a moving experience.” (MacDonald, ibid. Emphasis added by the present author) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
